Monthly Archives: June 2025

  • The Ballad of Wallis Island

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Griffiths (2025)

    Famous folk-rock singer-songwriter Herb McGwyer comes to do a gig on remote Wallis Island, off the coast of Wales:  it’s not long before he’s desperate to get away.  Watching The Ballad of Wallis Island, I soon felt the same but, like Herb, stuck it out and, also like him, ended up glad that I did.  It was pleasing afterwards to find online the film’s prototype – a 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.  The three main collaborators on the two projects are the same.  Tom Basden and Tim Key are the scriptwriters; James Griffiths directs; Basden plays Herb McGwyer, whose songs he also composed, and performs; Key is Charles Heath, the awkward eccentric who sets up and hosts Herb’s visit.  Except for the boatman (Alun Blair) who rows Herb to and from the island, The One and Only, which runs twenty-five minutes, is a two-hander.  Basden and Key introduce several new characters into the small cast of the hundred-minute The Ballad of Wallis Island.  These include Nell Mortimer, erstwhile half of the McGwyer Mortimer folk duo.  The film’s casting coup – also its chief salvation – is getting Carey Mulligan for the role.

    The short’s main premise is unchanged in the feature.  Herb has signed up to play Wallis Island for a fee of half a million pounds – in cash, as he soon discovers to his surprise.  When Charles tells him the audience will be less than a hundred, Herb says the more intimate the better:  he’s at pains to present himself as a modest chap (though he’s not).  He changes his mind when Charles admits there’ll be an audience of one – himself.  He’s a passionate devotee of Herb’s music and can afford to book him thanks to the National Lottery.  In fact, Charles has twice won a Lottery jackpot.  First time around, he spent all the winnings; second time lucky he invested in land and a big house on the island, where he lives alone.  In The Ballad of Wallis Island, Charles, unbeknown to Herb, has also invited Nell Mortimer to come out of retirement to perform at his private concert; she and her American husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen) fly over from their home in Portland, Oregon.  Unbeknown to Nell, Charles has offered her substantially less than Herb’s half-million.  Herb and Nell used to be partners in life as well as on stage and the atmosphere in Charles’ house, already tense, gets tenser once Herb learns that Nell is arriving, and she finds out he’ll be paid far more than her.  After a bust-up with his host, his ex and her husband over their evening meal, Herb storms up to his room midway through it and decides to sneak away early the next morning.  He fails spectacularly by slipping on the pudding that Charles leaves outside his bedroom door – crashing to the floor with his luggage, he wakes everyone else up.  Herb couldn’t have escaped instantly anyway:  it turns out to be anyone’s guess when the rowboat that brought him to the island will next be back.

    The dessert collision outside the bedroom door isn’t Herb’s first landing mishap.  As the boat arrives at Wallis Island, he overbalances and topples with his guitar into the sea.  That understandably puts him in a bad mood but it’s not because he’s soaked through that Herb gets cold feet about the gig.  The reason is Charles’ insistent presence and relentless jokey wordplay – the same reason that made this viewer think ‘I can’t stand this’ at an early stage.  I began to feel differently when Nell appeared on the scene and soon so does Herb.  Nell’s husband is chiefly interested in birdwatching and is out of the story for a while in search of puffins.  During his absence, Nell and Herb talk and rehearse some bits of music together.  They go back a long way – Nell knew him as Chris Pinner before he became Herb McGwyer – and rekindled passion looks on the cards until Herb tells Nell that they’re made for each other, musically and romantically, and that she’s now wasting her life, which appears to consist of Michael and making chutney for sale at farmers’ markets.  Nell is reasonably angry, tells Herb she’s pregnant and, once her husband returns, decides they should leave Wallis Island, even though they could certainly have used the money Charles was offering; the unpredictable boatman arrives to take them away.  Carey Mulligan, effortlessly vivid and expressive, isn’t on screen for very long.  It’s long enough for her to enrich the film’s emotional texture in a big way.

    James Griffiths, Tom Basden and Tim Key know they need more characters than Charles and Herb for a film four times the length of their short but Nell is the only worthwhile addition.  It’s hard to disagree with Herb’s disparaging assessment of Michael.  Single-mother Amanda (Sian Clifford), who runs the island’s store, lives above the shop with her son (Luka Downie).  Although Sian Clifford is very likeable in the part, Amanda’s main purpose in the film is to deliver a feeble running joke – each time she’s asked if she stocks a particular item she says no before suggesting a tenuously connected item that she does sell – until, that is, she accepts Charles’ invitation to Herb’s performance on the beach.  After Herb’s eventual departure, Amanda arrives at Charles’ place to play tennis with him and the story ends with the prospect of a goofy romance between them.  Even so, The Ballad of Wallis Island is still essentially a two-hander for the main men.  They’re both talented and I’m glad to have seen their Wallis Island diptych – not least because of the intrinsic fascination of watching two actors now in their forties (Key is forty-eight, Basden four years younger) return to the same roles they played when they were nearly twenty years younger.  Yet the basic set-up is a problem that Basden and Key don’t overcome in the feature-length version of their material.

    The two have often worked together since they first met up as Cambridge Footlights contemporaries.  Without having seen too much of either – relative to their lengthy lists of IMDb credits – I think I’ve seen enough to get an idea of the kind of performers they are (when they’re not doing stand-up anyway), an idea which this film certainly confirms.  On television, Basden, underplaying and rarely smiling, has been a highly effective straight man to leads as different as Ricky Gervais in After Life and Diane Morgan in Mandy.  Key, more extrovert and animated, has recently caught the eye in small film roles in, for example, See How They Run and Wicked Little Letters.  In other words, they’re highly complementary and The Ballad of Wallis Island exploits that dynamic.  The balance seems off, though, because Key’s performance is too dominant.  For sure, it’s the crowd-pleasing one:  nearly all the titters in the Curzon Wimbledon audience were in response to him.  But Basden and Key build Charles up only by multiplying his annoying quips and giving him more backstory.  The quips are so often at Herb’s expense that they have the effect of diluting Charles’ admiration for Herb, which comes through more strongly in the short.  The backstory is a weakness, too.

    In The One and Only misfit Charles’ solitariness isn’t explained – but you easily accept it:  it’s sad but you see why no one has been prepared to share their life with him.  It’s not especially convincing that, as he tells Herb, Charles blew his first lottery winnings on drink, drugs and women – but that doesn’t matter too much in the short’s scheme of things.  In The Ballad of Wallis Island, Charles immediately makes clear that he shared the first jackpot with Marie, his partner or wife, and they travelled the world together.  Marie is now conspicuous by her absence.  In other words, she’s dead and the details of lonesome Charles’ heartbreaking loss are eked out protractedly.  His dream of reuniting Herb and Nell suggests a clumsy attempt to resurrect more than one perfect union.  Herb discovers newspaper cuttings confirming that, like Charles, Marie (Kerrie Thomason, a face in photographs only) was a McGwyer Mortimer superfan.  It transpires that the gig is happening on the fifth anniversary of Marie’s death.  Yet this drip-feed of revelations doesn’t do much to develop Charles’ character – or Tim Key’s performance.

    Herb doesn’t develop that much either but Tom Basden has advantages.  First, he can sing and, though Herb’s kind of music doesn’t do a lot for me, Basden makes it very pleasant to listen to.  Second, Herb is such a grumpy egotist for much of the film that it’s easy for the experience of Charles and Wallis Island to turn him into someone nicer.  It emerges that Herb’s career is now treading water – he’s engaged in ill-judged attempts to become more commercial – but he decides to leave all but fifty quid of his appearance fee with his host.  To show that he’s rediscovered who he really is, Herb also signs his old guitar for Charles – the prize exhibit in the latter’s collection of McGwyer Mortimer memorabilia – ‘Your greatest fan, Chris Pinner’.

    The Ballad of Wallis Island, which premiered at Sundance this year, has been getting mostly good reviews.  As I was setting off for Wimbledon, Sally mentioned that she’d just read about a well-known name lauding it as one of the greatest British films ever made; she wouldn’t say who this was in case it put me off.  The opening credits, introducing a ‘Baby Cow’ production, immediately brought Steve Coogan to mind:  while struggling to stay with the film, I consoled myself with the thought that it would be far worse with Coogan doing his misanthropic snarky thing as Herb McGwyer.  On the train coming home, I tried googling the source of the high praise Sally had mentioned and came up with an Instagram post from Amol Rajan, commending Wallis Island as one of the best British films he’d seen in years.  So I assumed he was the mystery admirer, even if that made Sally’s aside surprising:  I’m not (as she is) a great Rajan fan but I don’t mind him.  When I got in, I Iearned the truth.  It wasn’t Amol Rajan but Richard Curtis.

    It’ll be obvious from the above that I don’t agree with Curtis about the film’s merits although it’s certainly much better than his own work in cinema (as distinct from television).  His words did remind me, though, of resonances between The Ballad of Wallis Island and two pictures that I think are among the best-ever British films.  This one may be set on a Welsh island (finely photographed by G Magni Ágústsson) rather than a Scottish one.  But the big-city protagonist exasperated by the island’s ways – and, especially, by its boat service – calls to mind the plight of Wendy Hiller’s Joan in Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going!  As well as re-evaluating his priorities, Herb McGwyer, in order to stay in touch with the world he’s temporarily left behind, must rely on a phone box (seawater has disabled his mobile).  Those are unmistakable reminders of Peter Riegert’s Mac in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero.

    12 June 2025

  • The Halfway House

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Basil Dearden (1944)

    I’m not embarking on a ‘House’ season but, a few days after I’d seen The Red House, The Halfway House – on my list of to-see films for some time – turned up on Talking Pictures TV …

    In 1942 Ealing Studios made Went the Day Well?, a fine propagandistic drama directed by Alberto Cavalcanti.  In 1945 Cavalcanti directed two episodes of Dead of Night, Ealing’s famous portmanteau horror film, as did Basil Dearden.  In between, came The Halfway House, where both men had a hand in the direction although Dearden received sole credit with Cavalcanti named as ‘associate producer’.  The film is aptly named for more reasons than simple chronology:  it tries to combine moral exhortation of British wartime audiences, as Went the Day Well? had skilfully done, with supernatural elements, on which Dead of Night would depend.  The latter’s five stories, within an overarching narrative, would include one essentially comic piece (‘The Golfer’s Story’, also the weakest element) but not attempt to combine humour and horror in the other four stories.  In contrast, most of The Halfway House occupies an awkward no-man’s-land between Ealing comedy and Ealing drama.  It’s only in the closing stages, when the film becomes entirely straight-faced, that the supernatural and propaganda aspects start to mesh; even then, the relationship between them is uneasy.  Still, The Halfway House is undeniably a curiosity of Ealing cinema history.

    The source material is Denis Ogden’s stage play, The Peaceful Inn, first produced on the London stage in 1940.  One member of the audience then was George Orwell, whose diary entry for 31 May included the following:

    ‘Last night to see Denis Ogden’s play The Peaceful Inn.  The most fearful tripe.  The interesting point was that though the play was cast in 1940, it contained no reference direct or indirect to the war. …[1]‘

    Ogden’s Dartmoor inn is a place where time stands still, thus offering an assortment of guests the chance to look at themselves and change their ways.  The Halfway House’s screenplay, by Angus McPhail and Diana Morgan (with credited contributions from Roland Pertwee and T E B Clarke), moves the main action to rural Wales.  The film grafts wartime propaganda onto Ogden’s original by supplying the travellers who arrive at the Halfway House with highly topical occupations and situations.  Renowned orchestral conductor David Davies (Esmond Knight), in failing health, is due to tour abroad, as part of the British Council’s cultural diplomacy efforts, but is warned by his doctor (John Boxer) to rest if he’s not to kill himself within three months.  Squadron Leader Richard French (Richard Bird) and his wife Jill (Valerie White), also in uniform, irritably discuss divorce with a solicitor (C V France) and within earshot of their young daughter Joanna (Sally Ann Howes), who’s determined to see her parents stay together.  Ex-Captain Fortescue (Guy Middleton) completes the jail sentence that followed the court martial which ended his military career; as soon as he’s released, embittered Fortescue is pleased to meet up with old acquaintance William Oakley (Alfred Drayton), who’s having a good war thanks to his black-market activities.  The marriage of merchant ship’s captain Harry Meadows (Tom Walls) and his French wife Alice (Françoise Rosay) is in a parlous state following the death in action of their only son, lost in a U-boat attack.  Margaret (Philippa Hiatt), another woman in uniform, faces a dilemma:  she’s in love with yet appalled by Terence (Pat McGrath).  A proud Irishman, Terence isn’t just politically neutral.  He’s on the point of accepting a diplomatic posting in Berlin. 

    The filmmakers take an age to assemble these characters in the title location.  Early episodes introducing them take in Cardiff (David Davies), two London locations (the French family, Fortescue and Oakley) and Bristol (Alice and Harry), as well as ‘Parkmoor’ prison; some of the dramatis personae then coincide on the same train heading for the Welsh countryside.  Once they’re guests at The Halfway House, run by Rhys (Mervyn Johns) and his daughter Gwyneth (Glynis Johns), the place’s unaccountable qualities are soon to the fore.  Mine host, materialising before Fortescue’s eyes, explains that ‘quite a lot of people who don’t know where they’re going arrive here’.  It’s mid-June and the grounds in which the inn stands are bathed in sunshine yet Gwyneth casts no shadow.  To Alice’s consternation, after Rhys brings a pot of tea to her room, there’s no sign of his reflection in the mirror she’s looking into as he turns towards the door.  The date is 21 June 1943 but the inn’s calendar shows the same date a year earlier; the same goes for the selection of newspapers available to guests.  At dinner, Rhys explains that The Halfway House was destroyed by a German bomb on 21 June 1942 – the same date on which Axis forces recaptured Tobruk, as a news bulletin on The Halfway House’s wireless confirms.

    It’s soon obvious to the viewer what’s going on.  Even allowing that the visitors to the inn must, for dramatic purposes, take longer to cotton on, the script is unimaginative.  Each new illustration of the time warp is greeted by the characters concerned as if it were the first:  it’s only David Davies, in a privileged position once Gwyneth tells him not to fear death (it’s only a door to the next world), who twigs things and – to convince his fellow guests of the extraordinary opportunity they’ve been given – twiddles a knob on the wireless to move from BBC news to a Canadian station:  it’s broadcasting live a Toronto concert that David had conducted the previous year.  It’s also clear enough, given their various predicaments, how the guests’ hearts and minds are going to be changed.  The trouble is, Basil Dearden spends so long stressing their mutual tensions and animosities or moral deficits that, when the characters eventually see the error of their ways, their conversion is so easily achieved that it feels mechanical.  It’s also upstaged by their escape from The Halfway House as the longest day of 1942 reaches its dreadful climax, the sirens sound, a bomb falls, and the inn goes up in flames.

    Mervyn Johns was in Went the Day Well?  and would return (unforgettably for me) as the architect trapped in a nightmare in Dead of Night, where Sally Ann Howes would also appear again.  Few of The Halfway House‘s cast were Ealing A-listers, though, and it shows – some of the acting is so ropy that the film is sometimes funnier when it isn’t intending to be.  Honourable exceptions include both Johnses (Mervyn and Glynis were real-life father and daughter), Esmond Knight and Tom Walls.  Sally Ann Howes is nothing if not lively.  Françoise Rosay was a well-established star of French cinema – so much so that her name heads the opening credits, which also explain that this is her first British film:  alas, that comes to read like an excuse for Rosay’s strenuous playing.

    Following a premiere several weeks beforehand, The Halfway House opened in London cinemas on what turned out to be the eve of D-Day.  The film’s first audiences would have had no difficulty identifying with issues faced by the characters but may have felt short-changed by the film as entertainment – which ‘The Story of a Ghostly Inn’, promised on its poster, might be thought to imply.  Crucial as it is, the supernatural aspect of the narrative is never dynamic.  When Alice Meadows, who’s turned spiritualist in her grief, organises a séance at the inn to make contact with her drowned son, the proceedings are presented as ridiculous even before her exasperated husband sabotages them.  By the time that Rhys eventually enlightens his guests about the MO and moral import of The Halfway House, the supernaturalism has switched decisively from weird into pious:  Rhys’ lengthy explanation feels like a sermon.

    Words of praise for The Halfway House aren’t hard to find online but Charles Barr’s judgments in his book Ealing Studios (1977) are in all respects sharper.  Bracketing the film with Ealing’s science-fiction drama They Came to a City – based on J B Priestley’s stage play, released in August 1944 and also directed by Basil Dearden – Barr asks why the later film should be ‘the dismal experience that it is – arid, abstract, statuesquely poised and declaimed (all of which applies equally to [The] Halfway House)’.  It can’t, says Barr, all be blamed on Dearden, none of whose ‘other Ealing films are as bad as these two’:

    ‘More plausible is the hypothesis that Ealing’s form of cinema, like its whole mentality, is a profoundly empirical and naturalistic one, at home with people, not ideas, with the solidly realistic, not the abstract or stylised. … I don’t believe that this is merely a platitude, something that is true of the whole ‘concrete’ medium of cinema itself, or of all British culture:  it manifestly does not apply to the films of Michael Powell.’

    I’ve not yet seen They Came to a City.  As far as The Halfway House is concerned, I think Charles Barr, as so often, is spot on.

    5 June 2025

    [1] https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/31-5-40/

     

     

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