Monthly Archives: May 2026

  • They Came to a City

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1944)

    An unsuccessful film but a fascinating piece of British film history (and unusually short – only seventy-eight minutes – so easy to get through).  ‘Postscripts’, J B Priestley’s regular Sunday evening radio broadcasts in 1940, attracted large audiences and were credited with boosting public morale during the Battle of Britain.  They also looked forward to a socialist – or, at least, a more socially aware and just – post-war Britain.  In 1943, Priestley dramatised that theme in his stage play, They Came to a City, which ran for nearly eight months in London’s West End.  The following year, the play was adapted for cinema by Priestley, Sidney Cole and the film’s director, Basil Dearden.  The stage version of They Came to a City comprises nine characters.  All reappear in the screen version; all nine cast members concerned are the actors reprising their theatre roles.  None of the several additional characters in Dearden’s film was credited but one is highly significant.  An avuncular, self-assured, middle-aged man is played by J B Priestley, appearing, to all intents and purposes, as himself.  He thereby links They Came to a City to the persona he developed and the political outlook he conveyed through those earlier radio broadcasts.

    A young couple, both in military uniform, sit on a hillside overlooking an industrial English town (Priestley’s native Bradford, where the play of They Came to a City premiered before London?).  They debate how different or otherwise the country will be once the war is over.  Jimmy (Ralph Michael), with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, thinks nothing much will change.  His unnamed WAAF companion (Brenda Bruce) vigorously disagrees.  Along comes a pipe-smoking stranger (Priestley), who asks Jimmy for a light, and whether the argument going on between the couple is public or private.  They explain their feelings, and the WAAF asks the older man’s opinion:  does he agree with her that ‘people will insist on being seen differently’?  ‘Some will, some won’t,’ Priestley replies, summarising the story to follow.

    He then starts to outline a motley collection of people, from different walks of life and social classes.  As the stranger talks, Basil Dearden cuts away into a brisk introduction of the nine individuals who’ll play out the scenario that Priestley has begun to describe.  Each of these short scenes ends with a character, or pair of characters, heading out of an environment that they know and into darkness.  All nine next find themselves in wholly alien surroundings – an extensive, otherwise unpeopled, castle-like structure.  As they look down from its heights, they at first can’t see what’s below but, after a time, make out a city there.  Once a door in the castle opens, all of the nine can visit the city and briefly experience how its people live and work – happily with, and for, each other, according to what some of the nine report back.  Each visitor must then decide – before sundown, when the door in the castle will shut – whether to stay in the city or return whence they came.

    For overworked, elderly cleaner Mrs Batley (Ada Reeve), the city is utopia.  For lonely spinster Philippa Loxfield (Frances Rowe), it’s certainly preferable to the world she currently inhabits.  For Philippa’s mother, Lady Loxfield (Mabel Terry-Lewis), who scornfully tyrannises her meek daughter, the ways of the city are beneath contempt – a view shared by the other titled member of the company, baronet and landowner Sir George Gedney (A E Matthews).  The other couple in the group, Malcolm Stritton (Raymond Huntley) and his wife Dorothy (Renee Gadd), like the Loxfields, disagree.  Fearful, querulous Dorothy is anxious to return to normal life, even though she’s evidently miserable in it.  Malcolm, who works in a provincial bank, is dissatisfied with the political status quo, and likes what the city seems to promise.  Another money man, ruthless businessman Cudworth (Norman Shelley), can’t wait to get back to exploiting others in the mercenary world.  The two remaining characters are also the two central figures in They Came to a City.  Alice Foster (Googie Withers) has spent her working life as a barmaid and waitress, and wants better.  So does Joe Dinmore (John Clements), a jack of all trades, currently a seaman, and a self-admitted ‘revolutionary who doesn’t believe in the revolution’.

    Critics at the time of the film’s release – and doubtless plenty of others who bought tickets to see it – reasonably disparaged They Came to a City as all talk, no action:  what action there is, consists almost entirely of characters telling each other what they’ve done.  Besides, the talk is often repetitive.  Theatre audiences would hardly have expected to see the city; on a cinema screen, its invisibility is frustrating.  They Came to a City’s outstanding (just about its only) visual achievement is Michael Relph’s sinister castellar design.  His setting for the characters’ debate suggests both early brutalist (verging on fascist) architecture and de Chirico landscapes.  (The film was shot in black and white by Stanley Pavey.)

    The material also betrays its stage origins in mostly stagy acting, though Raymond Huntley is an honourable exception – and accents are less of a problem than might have been expected.  While Googie Withers and John Clements are too classy for their characters (and she speaks far too quickly in Alice’s bit in the introductory scenes), vocal precision matters less here than it would have in a realistic context.  (It’s a real plus that, in their small roles as the disputant couple on the hillside, Brenda Bruce and Ralph Michael are nicely naturalistic.)  Withers and Clements’ accents are unconvincing but, for the purposes of the story, Alice and Joe need only sound different from their middle-class and upper-class companions, which they do.  And Googie Withers does draw, and hold, the camera.

    They Came to a City is more interesting when Priestley manages to yoke his political message to a more grounded relationship between characters – or even refract the message in revealing what makes a particular individual tick:  it’s a striking moment when Sir George Gedney admits he wants nothing to do with the city because he’s misanthropic (he’d rather be back on his estate shooting game and hunting foxes than mix with people).  Philippa Loxfield, once she’s made up her mind, isn’t to be dissuaded:  she says she would like her mother to come with her to the city but, if her ladyship won’t, then tough – and they part company.  The unhappily married Strittons look set to follow suit, until Malcolm’s compassion for his frightened, narrow wife prevents him from abandoning her.  He resolves to do what he can to achieve social progress in the real world – as, eventually, do Joe Dinmore and Alice Foster, even though both like the city (an afternoon there is enough to restore Joe’s political belief).  The love-hate ups-and-downs between them are mechanical, but Joe and Alice’s final decision to join forces romantically and politically, is quite effective.

    There are untidy elements to the climax and finale, though.  Dearden’s staging of the sequence where Joe, returned from the city, vainly tries to stop the door in the castle from closing, leaves it unclear if he’s motivated by a longing to get back to the city or fear of separation from Alice.  It’s only when they’re reunited on one side of the unyielding door that the pair seem to decide that the real world, rather than utopia, is where they should be – and would rather be.  It’s a bit puzzling that Priestley doesn’t contrive for all the characters attracted to the city to recognise this moral imperative and make the same choice.  Canny Mrs Batley and desperate Philippa Loxfield, who opt for utopia, are forgotten about in the closing stages:  it’s hard to know what their staying in the city signifies in Priestley’s scheme.  The narrative finally returns, of course, to the sergeant, the WAAF and the stranger:  Jimmy is the one whose mind has been changed by the story that’s been told.  Parable delivered and mission accomplished, Priestley, in the film’s closing shot, walks away along the hillside.

    J B Priestley’s title derives from lines in Walt Whitman’s ‘The City’, quoted in voiceover near the end of the film:  ‘I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,/ I dream’d that was the new city of friends …’.   The plentiful music is not an original score but excerpts from Scriabin’s third symphony (‘The Divine Poem’), selected by musical director Ernest Irving.  They Came to a City is perhaps the least typical film ever made by Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios, although Charles Barr’s fine history of Ealing rightly brackets it with the surreal The Halfway House, also directed by Basil Dearden and released earlier in the same year.  The latter film, though similarly homiletic, is mainstream WW2 propaganda:  through the lessons that its characters learn, it exhorts its audience to abandon personal grudges for the sake of the greater good – but specifically in the context of the war being fought.  They Came to a City, though in many respects just as ropy as cinema, is unique:  a British film of the war years that looks ahead to, and promotes a particular political solution for, Britain in the post-war world to come.

    27 May 2026

  • Being John Malkovich

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Jonze (1999)

    US cinema’s annus mirabilis of 1999 was just that – one year.  Unlike the early 1970s, this wasn’t the start or end of a longer period of high achievement:  outstanding American-made films were thin on the ground in 1998, again in 2000.  Yet the intervening year saw the release of American Beauty, Magnolia, Sweet and Lowdown, The Talented Mr Ripley, Three Kings – and Being John Malkovich.  Spike Jonze’s debut feature isn’t quite on the level of the first two in that list but still remarkable.  Like American Beauty and Magnolia, Being John Malkovich was the work of a very young filmmaker:  Sam Mendes was thirty-four at the time; Paul Thomas Anderson hadn’t yet turned thirty; Spike Jonze was thirty-one.  His film was written by a somewhat older cinema debutant, forty-one-year-old Charlie Kaufman.  I’d not seen Being John Malkovich since its original release.  I liked it in 2000 and like it now, even though it’s impossible at this distance in time to recapture the excitement of how inventive Kaufman’s screenplay felt back then.  His screenplay predicts what would become familiar preoccupations and tropes in his later work.  Fear of death.  An obsessive male protagonist who rarely puts a foot right.

    The first hour of Jonze’s film is as sheerly entertaining as it’s thoroughly unpredictable.  Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a puppeteer in present-day New York City – a busker, otherwise out of work.  His adult-themed puppet street performances are risky:  Craig gets thumped by the father of a little boy who rushes up to watch his Abelard and Heloise show.  Craig gazes enviously at a TV news report of a professional rival, who performs The Belle of Amherst, with a sixty-foot Emily Dickinson puppet, to an admiring crowd.  ‘Gimmicky bastard,’ Craig grumbles.  He’s married to Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who works in a pet shop.  It’s debatable as to whether the couple have children.  There’s discussion between them about having a baby, but their cramped apartment is already home to dogs, cats, a parrot, an iguana and Elijah, a highly anthropomorphised chimpanzee.  Lotte is giving Elijah psychotherapy to sort out a ‘suppressed childhood trauma’.

    In response to a newspaper ad that stipulates ‘quick hands’, Craig applies for a temporary job as a filing clerk.  Reporting for interview at the Mertin-Flemmer building, he encounters a receptionist (Mary Kay Place), severely deaf but impatiently oblivious to the fact.  He’s interviewed by Dr Lester (Orson Bean), who believes – thanks to the receptionist – that he’s incomprehensible because of a serious speech impediment, although he speaks perfectly clearly.  Craig passes the interview with flying colours and starts work on floor 7½, where the staff stoop to move around under ceilings less than five feet high.  Craig soon feels a strong attraction to a colleague, Maxine Lund (Catherine Keener), who makes clear the attraction isn’t mutual.  As she explains, Craig’s vocation is the problem:  ‘You’re not someone I could get interested in – you play with dolls’.  At home in the evenings, that’s just what Craig does to indulge his fantasies.  He makes puppets of himself and Maxine and invents conversations between them.  The Craig puppet’s answer to the Maxine puppet’s question as to why he loves puppeteering is, ‘Perhaps it’s the idea of becoming someone else for a little while.  Being inside another skin’.  One day at work, Craig finds a hidden door behind a filing cabinet, opens it and crawls through a tunnel.  He finds himself inside the head of John Malkovich (John Malkovich).  After fifteen minutes there, Craig is ejected and lands roadside on the New Jersey Turnpike.

    There are echoes of Alice in Wonderland, most obviously the rabbit-hole portal to John Malkovich’s mind and body (and floor 7½’s dimensions call to mind oversized Alice in the White Rabbit’s house).  But Jonze and Kaufman have already created a real world so topsy-turvy that the one into which Craig is transported, though impossible, seems more straightforward – at first anyway.  When Craig tells Lotte and Maxine about the portal, they’re respectively sceptical and enthused – Maxine sees its commercial potential:  she and Craig can greatly augment their modest wages by selling tickets to the public to be John Malkovich for fifteen minutes.  Things are complicated by the two women’s own experiences of the portal and the feelings it awakens.  Malkovich is in the shower when Lotte gets inside his head.  Back with Craig, she declares herself sexually fulfilled as a male body and decides she wants to own one.  Like her husband, Lotte develops a passion for Maxine, who reciprocates the passion, though only when Lotte is incarnated as John Malkovich.  Maxine also now has the same feelings about Craig, when he enters Malkovich.   Quite what turns her on isn’t easy to say – maybe being in charge and sensing the craving of whichever of Craig or Lotte happens to be inhabiting Malkovich, with whom Maxine starts an affair.

    The host becomes suspicious and wants to know what’s going on.  Malkovich gets himself into the portal and emerges into a world entirely peopled by John Malkoviches – to be more precise, a busy restaurant where men, women and children all have John Malkovich heads.  There’s a long list of dishes on the menu, each one called Malkovich.  The diners’ vocabulary is similarly restricted.  Meanwhile, when Craig and Lotte visit the house of eccentric Dr Lester, she discovers a room filled with Malkovich memorabilia.  It turns out that Lester is really Captain Mertin, who erected the Mertin-Flemmer building in the late nineteenth century to conceal the portal to a ‘vessel body’ that Mertin had discovered on the spot.  Since then, Mertin has dodged mortality by moving from one host to the next – always on the latter’s forty-fourth birthday, when the host body is ‘ripe’:  one day late and Mertin would be trapped in the body of a newborn.  This time around, Mertin/Lester has invited a group of elderly friends to accompany him on board John Malkovich.

    The story is ingenious but Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, having constructed this comic-metaphysical tangled web, must then devise an exit route.  They do work things out, but Being John Malkovich starts to show the strain.  When Maxine becomes Malkovich’s lover and with Lotte wanting to leave him for Maxine, Craig is forced into desperate measures.  He locks his wife in a cage.  More literally manipulative than Maxine, Craig finds he can, thanks to his puppetry skills, exercise a degree of physical control over Malkovich’s body.  There are some very funny details arising from these events.  Elijah the chimp, in the best tradition of Hollywood psychoanalytic melodrama, has a flashback to the key trauma in his past – when his parents were captured by monkey poachers in the jungle and his mother begged Elijah to untie them.  His failure to do so left profound psychic scars; now that he suddenly understands these, Elijah makes amends by opening the cage of his de facto mother Lotte.  Inside John Malkovich, Craig turns his host into a world-class puppeteer.  Responding to an acting peer’s huge success in this career departure, Sean Penn as-himself acknowledges, in a fine bit of straight-faced faux-documentary, that he and others will probably follow suit.  Yet details are all that these are.  You’re interested to see how Being John Malkovich will conclude, but without enjoying so much its later, somewhat frenetic stages.

    In the three Charlie Kaufman screenplays that followed this one – for Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) – the hapless male lead was allowed a happy or at least spared an unhappy ending.  That stopped once Kaufman begin to direct his own scripts – for Synecdoche, New York (2008), Anomalisa (2015) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020).  Being John Malkovich anticipates that trilogy’s bleakness-is-all outcome for the main man.  A seven-years-later epilogue sees John Malkovich hosting Dr Lester and his group.  The life-extending portal now leads into the mind of Maxine’s seven-year-old daughter, Emily.  Once she realised she became pregnant while Lotte was inside Malkovich, Maxine decided she could love Lotte sans Malkovich.  As for Craig, suffice to say that he mistimed his climactic portral entrance, arriving too late to go back inside Malkovich, too soon to control newborn Emily.  Trapped inside the little girl, doubly cuckolded Craig is condemned to watch her parents, Maxine and Lotte, live happy ever after.

    After making street skateboarding videos in the early 1990s, Spike Jonze soon became an in-demand director of music videos, for big-name clients.  (They included REM and Michael Stipe was a producer of Being John Malkovich.)  Given his film-making background and inexperience in cinema, Jonze shows remarkable self-control in presenting the surreal happenings of Kaufman’s story in quite a realistic style.  (The cinematographer was Lance Acord, who would go on to shoot Adaptation and the next two films by Sofia Coppola, who was married to Jonze between 1999 and 2003.)  Being John Malkovich is very well acted, especially by witty Catherine Keener.  Although Cameron Diaz might seem too glamorous for her role, her casting works out well.  John Cusack never was an actor to impose himself strongly on a narrative, yet you miss him as Craig disappears increasingly from view.  The person with the hardest role is unquestionably John Malkovich, who may be playing himself or a public perception of his personality, or what the characters in Charlie Kaufman’s story need Malkovich to be – or a combination of all these.  I felt when I first saw the film and still feel now that Malkovich ends up with rather too much screen time, but he was brave to agree to the project in the first place and is admirably game for anything.  The puppets – created by Kamela Portuges-Robbins and Images in Motion, animated by Phillip Huber – are extraordinary.

    10 May 2026

     

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