Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough (1950)
So Long at the Fair – like its close contemporary, Robert Hamer’s The Spider and the Fly (1949) – is a rather intriguing British film set in France. Although the screenplay, by Hugh Mills and Anthony Thorne, is adapted from the latter’s 1947 novel of the same name, the plot derives from an urban legend of the late nineteenth century – one that inspired several stories and dramas in the course of the next few decades. According to the legend, says Wikipedia, ‘during an international exposition in Paris, a daughter who returned after leaving her mother in a hotel room found the woman gone, and the hotel staff professed to have no knowledge of the missing woman’. In So Long at the Fair, an English brother and sister, Johnny and Vicky Barton, arrive for the 1889 Paris Exposition. The day after their arrival, Johnny and the room in which he was staying at the Hotel de Licorne – room 19 – are nowhere to be seen. But the vanishing room, although it’s the central mystery, isn’t the only unexpected or puzzling element of Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough’s film.
At the start, So Long at the Fair looks all set to be constrained by the limits of what normally happens in the sort of picture it appears to be. Horse-drawn carriages move through the Paris streets to the accompaniment of Benjamin Frankel’s agreeable, unsurprising score (complete with, for these equine shots, a musical clip-clop). The Bartons’ early scenes make clear that genial, mildly pompous Johnny (David Tomlinson) considers himself a man of the world; he treats his impetuous younger sister (Jean Simmons) – who’s excited by the prospect of seeing the Paris sights, especially the new Eiffel Tower – with condescending indulgence. In the hotel entrance, Vicky bumps into a young man (Dirk Bogarde): an instant mutual attraction is clear in the looks they exchange. The young man – an English artist called George Hathaway, trying to make his name in Paris as any soi-disant artist should – appears again that evening. He’s in the company of an older and a younger woman when he stops to speak to the Bartons at their table in a Montmartre restaurant. You could say it’s easy for this film to take the viewer by surprise simply because it seems so obvious what’s coming next. Yet it’s not only the turn of events but also the manner of the surprises that confounds expectations.
The first surprise comes when Vicky pleads to go on to the Moulin Rouge after dinner: Johnny says he’s too tired for that, after a day of travelling, and that’s just how he seems. Screen people sickening for something serious (as Johnny very much is) tend to cough repeatedly or rain sweat, certainly in films of this vintage. There’s a slight strain in David Tomlinson’s face and his voice has lost the smug bounce it had at the start; but no more than that. You wouldn’t anticipate this particular actor being so subtle, especially when Tomlinson has such limited screen time. Johnny will soon disappear from the film, though not before relenting: he and his sister do visit the Moulin Rouge – so that the audience, as well as Vicky, can briefly enjoy watching can-can dancers. Next morning Vicky looks out euphorically on the sunlit city, dominated by the Eiffel Tower, before heading for her brother’s room. Its disappearance isn’t announced by a resounding chord or by instant high emotion on Vicky’s part but by a rearview shot of Jean Simmons, standing frozen to the spot – a less than obvious and powerful way of delivering this pivotal moment in the story.
There follows an exasperating exchange with the hotel owner, Madame Hervé (a forceful Cathleen Nesbitt), and her brother, Narcisse (Marcel Poncin): both insist the Licorne has no room 19 and that Mlle Barton arrived alone the previous day, as the hotel register appears to confirm. Desperate but resourceful, Vicky makes her way to the British Consulate and, undeterred by the fussy official (Michael Ward) who tells her the place is now closed because the Consul is leaving for a formal procession to the Exposition, forces her way in. The Consul (Felix Aylmer), remarkably avuncular and sympathetic, suggests that Vicky find as a witness Nina (Zena Marshall), the friendly hotel chambermaid who greeted the Bartons the previous day. When Vicky recalls that Nina was eagerly anticipating a ride with her boyfriend in a hot air balloon at the Exposition, the Consul even gives Vicky a lift there, in his carriage. She alights just in time to catch sight of Nina before the balloon takes flight. In So Long at the Fair‘s most startling moment of all, the balloon bursts into flames and plummets to the ground to the horror of the watching crowd. This is quite realistically staged and again punctures the film’s predictability. Although what happens to the balloon is a dreadful accident, Jean Simmons strongly conveys Vicky’s distraught conviction that people and things are malignly conspiring against her.
So Long at the Fair sometimes baffles through what just seems carelessness. Madame Hervé first tells Vicky there’s no room 19, then says room 19 is the bathroom on Vicky’s floor: the bathroom on the first floor does indeed now have number 19 on the door, whereas the bathroom on the floor above, as Vicky and we later discover, has a numberless salle de bain sign: why didn’t crafty Madame Hervé who, it turns out, wants to remove all evidence of room 19, put up the same bathroom sign on the first floor? Shortly after the Bartons arrive at the Licorne, its owner is chiding workmen redecorating the hotel for their slow progress – an exchange that serves no purpose except to make the overnight programme of works to disappear Johnny’s room all the more incomprehensible. It turns out that Johnny became seriously ill during the night and a doctor diagnosed – on the spot – bubonic plague. Although it’s not implied there’d been any other local cases, Madame Hervé and Narcisse, alarmed by the implications for Exposition tourist trade if the news got out, arranged a high-speed and inaudible refurb – literally a cover-up operation. Johnny meanwhile was whisked away to a small hospital, run by nuns, outside central Paris.
Although the script puts xenophobic remarks in the mouths of characters we’re meant to find humorously outrageous, the film evidently shares their views of foreigners. George’s companions are a young woman, Rhoda O’Donovan (nicely played by Honor Blackman), and her snobbish, plain-speaking mother (Betty Warren), who has disparaging things to say about the French. While the plague rumours element is part of the vanishing hotel room/guest legend, So Long at the Fair appears to have invented the idea of wily, mercenary Parisian hoteliers hushing things up. And the Bartons’ previous port of call on their European travels was Naples – enough said! When Johnny is eventually tracked down in the hospital, the Paris head of police (Austin Trevor) melodramatically informs Vicky that her brother’s condition is hopeless: he has ‘ze Black Death!’ A sensible English doctor (André Morell) – a friend of George Hathaway’s – then examines the patient and expresses cautious optimism that Johnny will pull through.
It’s an amusing coincidence that, twenty years later, Dirk Bogarde would find himself playing a man increasingly convinced that Venice is covering up a cholera outbreak, for commercial reasons similar to Madame Hervé’s. Although Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) and So Long at the Fair are worlds apart in most other respects, their protagonists have a couple of things in common: both have reasons to doubt their sanity and both are very well played. The main character here is Jean Simmons’ gaslit Vicky rather than Bogarde’s George. Only twenty-one at the time, Simmons commands the screen and holds the film together: she’s an instinctive actress, as natural as she is charismatic. Bogarde hasn’t in fact much to do but he does it with grace and wit. On first meeting the Bartons, George regretfully supposes they’re a married couple; in conversation with Johnny, he refers to Vicky as ‘your wife’ and Johnny puts him right. ‘Oh, bad luck’, replies George, hardly able to believe his own luck or suppress a joyful laugh. Bogarde’s delivery of the line made me laugh with him.
George isn’t alone in assuming Johnny and Vicky are a romantic pair and So Long at the Fair‘s culminating surprise is that this assumption isn’t entirely wrong. Once Nina is dead, George is Vicky’s only hope of proving the truth, though she doesn’t know it at first. When he dropped the O’Donovans off at the Hotel de Licorne, George didn’t have change to tip the carriage driver so Johnny offered to lend him fifty francs, giving his name and room number so that George could pay him back. In due course, Vicky finds a note from George, addressed to her brother and enclosing the money: this not only is vital evidence that Johnny was a hotel guest but seems an ideal means of developing her relationship with George. That does happen as he helps her expose the hotel’s jiggery-pokery but the romantic element is minimised. While they’re investigating the layout of hotel rooms on the first versus the second floor, George has Vicky disguise her face with a mask (the kind worn at a masked ball); when Narcisse makes an unwanted appearance, George, in order to obscure Vicky further from view and prevent her being recognised, takes her in his arms and kisses her at length. That, of course, is just what George has been longing to do – but there’s no follow-up to the clinch. In the film’s climax, the emphasis is on Vicky’s being reunited with Johnny. Whereas we didn’t see her reaction to George’s long embrace, the camera now concentrates on Jean Simmons’ face, and Vicky’s unmasked emotion, as she stands at the foot of her brother’s bed. (Johnny remains unseen throughout this closing sequence.) Vicky then turns to leave the room; George escorts her out but almost paternally.
It turns out that Vicky Barton’s sentimental priorities are implicit in the original novel’s and this screen version’s title – never mind that the words of the old rhyme ‘Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be?’ (‘Johnny’s so long at the fair’) are surely those of a jilted sweetheart rather than an anxious sibling. I’d seen part of the film before: I got home from BFI one evening when Sally was halfway through watching it on ITVX, where it’s still available. In its entirety, it’s less bewildering and rather more clumsy than it seemed on this first, partial encounter. But So Long at the Fair is still appealingly unusual.
12 March 2025
