Old Yorker

  • To Sir, With Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Clavell (1967)

    A big box-office hit, especially in America, where the title song (by Don Black and Mark London) reached number one and, amazingly, ‘was Billboard magazine’s #1 pop single for the year’.  To Sir, With Love is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by E R Braithwaite, about his experiences as a teacher in the East End of London, but the film – although it’s fairly entertaining – has no connection with reality.  Mark Thackeray, born in British Guiana and newly arrived in England via the US, has a degree and wants a career in engineering.  He gets work as a secondary school teacher in the meantime.  The story has the potential for moral uplift x 2 because Mark is black and the schoolkids are from poor families and/or broken homes.  In fact, the racial element is pretty muted.  It climaxes with the funeral of the mother of the (one!) mixed race boy at the school but perhaps climax is the wrong word since there’s no build-up.  Although Sidney Poitier as Mark appears to be the only negro in London, there’s not a hint of tension or prejudice or people staring at him, when he travels to work on the top of a double-decker or goes shopping in the local market.  Just about the only racially abrasive remarks we hear come from one choleric and cynical member of the teaching staff (Geoffrey Bayldon), who likens Mark to a ‘Lamb to the slaughter … or should I say black sheep?’ and mentions black magic, voodoo, etc.  Some of the kids ask Mark about the black women they’ve seen in a television ‘travelogue’ (their word – although it seems an unlikely one for them to use).  That’s about it

    Mark keeps exhorting the kids to behave like adults but who’d want to be an adult if it turned you into someone as humourlessly dignified as he is?   It’s pointless to take issue with the casting of Sidney Poitier, even though he gives off an air of visiting royalty throughout.  The makers of this British film must have been thrilled to get him for the role and the commercial success of To Sir, With Love was no doubt thanks largely to Poitier’s celebrity, at its peak in 1967 (when Guess Who’s Coming  to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night were also released).   Poitier is a lot more likeable on the rare occasions that he loosens up, as when Mark talks excitedly about the food and drink he enjoys – the news that he has an appetite for something other than moral improvement is a real relief.   Apart from Bayldon, who gives his primitive role some depth, and Patricia Routledge, vividly eccentric in one of her few big-screen appearances, the school’s small staff are a dreary lot.  Edward Burnham is inoffensive as the head but Faith Brook is abominably stagy as his deputy and Suzy Kendall vapid as a pretty young teacher who seems too tentative even to decide whether she fancies Mark, let alone do anything about it if she does.   Outside the school itself, Rita Webb is, unsurprisingly, the standout.

    The most amazing piece of information I’ve dug up about this picture is that, according to IMDb, To Sir, With Love earned James Clavell a Directors’ Guild of America nomination.   I can’t remember when I last saw a film made with such flagrant ineptitude.  (That’s not true:  July 2008:  Mamma Mia!)   When Mark takes the kids to a museum, the montage of stills of the outing, accompanied by the title song (which I’ve always liked, and which Lulu sings well, but which doesn’t merit as many reprises as it gets), hardly seems to be direction at all.  When the school kids cross the racial divide and turn out for their classmate’s mother’s funeral, the camera pans across their smiling faces; Clavell keeps it there until the grins have frozen. (Why are they smiling anyway on such an occasion?)   This is only the worst instance of a cut taking forever to happen.   A sequence in the school gym when Mark, who’s taking a boxing class for reasons I’ve forgotten, is provoked into throwing a punch, is ineffably crude.  Clavell also did the screenplay and you get the distinct impression of clumsy abbreviation of the source material.   The school seems meant to be distinctively liberal in its educational approach but there’s no real explanation of what that approach is.  Mark’s class are about to leave school but there’s no mention of what they’re going to do next until Clavell sticks in a bit about careers near the end.  When Mark gets a job as an engineer, he doesn’t appear to have a crisis of conscience about leaving teaching.  That might sound a welcome omission but he then decides to stay where he is and to turn down the engineering job for no other reason, apparently, than that the kids give him a tankard as a thank-you present.

    The young actors playing Mark’s class mostly overact working-class boredom and low educational accomplishments.  No matter how inarticulate the kids are supposed to be, their lines sound elocuted.  They sustain their Cocker-knee ecksintz with considerable effort, except when Clavell forgets who they are socially.  (At the end-of-year social, one girl greets another with a surprising ‘You look marvellous!’)   Lulu was only eighteen or nineteen when the film was made – perhaps it’s because she was already so experienced and groomed as a pop star that she looks about thirty-five, older than exact contemporaries like Adrienne Posta (who makes less impression than I expected) and Judy Geeson (who’s too classy but luminously pretty as the schoolgirl with none of the mousy teacher’s qualms about acting on her feelings for Sir).  The boys are less lively than the girls, although Christian Roberts and Christopher Chittell both give decent performances.  In one of the dreariest exchanges in the film, the kids tell Mark Thackeray they’re rebels because they don’t respect adults, who’ve made a mess of the world.  When you hear this, you suspect that this younger generation does, after all, have the potential for the pompous censoriousness they’ll need to become grown-ups as dreary as Mark is, and wants them to be.  They’re probably Daily Mail readers now.

    3 July 2010

  • Dance Hall

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charles Crichton (1950)

    NFT1 was packed for this matinee screening – no charge for senior citizens.  In her introduction, Jo Botting was characteristically informative and modest.  On this occasion, the modesty extended beyond a personal manner to the claims she made for the film to follow.  Although it was clear she liked Dance Hall, Botting seemed to accept that the lukewarm reviews it received in 1950 were not unjust and that this Ealing picture was interesting now chiefly as a piece of film history – as a record of the social importance of the palais de danse in early post-war Britain and an attempt to make young working women the central characters in a commercial picture.  As part of her introduction, Jo Botting showed a clip from a Channel 4 documentary of the 1980s which featured interviews with Diana Morgan, who co-wrote the screenplay for Dance Hall (with Alexander Mackendrick and the film’s producer, E V H Emmett), and one of its stars, Petula Clark, who disparages her own attempts at a convincing London accent.  I’m aware of my own tendency to watch a British film of this era with an inbuilt condescension – to praise it as not-bad-considering – and I doubt I’m alone.  That tendency was reinforced by what Jo Botting had to say.  A contemporary critic would have needed foresight, of course, to perceive or commend Dance Hall‘s significance as social history in the making; and, although the four young women in the story are factory girls, their working-class credibility isn’t all it might be.  For me, a main pleasure of watching the film was the gradual realisation that I wasn’t only interested in a cinematic curiosity but also gripped by the film’s dramatic qualities.

    Diana Morgan stressed the contrast between the dull grind of the characters’ working lives and the romantic possibility and escape of their evenings at the palais de danse. In fact, this contrast isn’t in itself particularly compelling.  Charles Crichton realises the atmosphere of the factory well enough but the sequences there are very brief and the four actresses concerned – Petula Clark (Georgie), Natasha Parry (Eve), Jane Hylton (Mary) and Diana Dors (Carole) – look as much in (prole) costume when they’re at work as when they put on their glad rags to go dancing.  However, a subplot about Georgie’s outfit for the finals of the dance competition that she reaches with her moon-eyed partner Peter (Douglas Barr) is one of the strongest episodes in Dance Hall.  Georgie’s parents get their daughter the best dress their money can buy.  They’re unaware that the dance hall manager (Sydney Tafler, excellent, as usual) has already supplied her with a much more glamorous costume with which Georgie is thrilled.  Petula Clark is charming throughout and her playing of the girl’s anguished dilemma over the dress is truthful and affecting.  The superb Gladys Henson is quietly, deeply eloquent as Georgie’s mother; she’s also entirely convincing as a working-class woman.  Clark, although too hard on herself in the Channel 4 documentary, is right that the class nuances get rather lost in the persisting poshness of her and the other younger actresses’ voices.  The gendered elements of the plot are fascinating, though.

    At the heart of the story and of the film’s socio-political aspect is Natasha Parry’s Eve, whose marriage means an end both to her paid employment and to her palais de danse visits.  Dance Hall dramatises Eve’s situation less by presenting her point of view explicitly than through the behaviour of her aircraft engineer husband Phil (Donald Houston).  There are two big arguments between the couple.  In the second of these, Eve yells at Phil that she’s ‘bored, bored, bored!’ although she might have felt the same if she’d stayed in the factory.  It’s clear from an early stage that Phil is touchy and possessive – his and Eve’s courtship is interrupted when he thinks she’s falling for an American wide boy, Alec (Bonar Colleano), who hangs around the dance hall.   Donald Houston is first-rate:  he roots Phil’s self-centredness, jealousy and temper in a personality that also includes solid, unassertive charm.  The first row between Eve and Phil is particularly well played by Houston and Natasha Parry, and expertly directed.  I liked especially the way that Charles Crichton used the football results on the wireless:  if Eve wants to make a point, Phil tells her he’s trying to listen to the results but he’s always ready to raise his own voice to drown out the radio.  The couple make up after the row but to uneasy effect.  Eve wakes next morning to find herself alone in bed and her immediate reaction is panic.  She’s reassured when Phil appears with a breakfast tray but his warning to Eve not to get used to breakfast in bed, even though he delivers the warning jokily, leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.   The moment of reconciliation that ends the film is even more emotionally qualified.  As someone in the audience pointed out in the Q&A that followed the screening, you don’t believe for a moment that Eve and Phil will be happy ever after.

    The young Natasha Parry slightly resembles Natalie Wood but without the latter’s over-awareness of the camera (and lewd quality – of which Wood may have been unaware).  You get a sense that the main actresses – as well as the characters – in Dance Hall are constrained by what was expected of and provided for them.  Parry’s acting is not precisely expressive but it seems deeply felt.  A similar quality comes across in Jane Hylton’s portrait of Mary, who’s attracted to Phil but loyal to her friend Eve.  Hylton has a woefulness that’s somehow submerged – except in a key scene with Phil near the end of the film, in which she tells him to go back to Eve.  (The pressure of Hylton’s presence was no doubt increased by her knowing she was originally cast to play the larger part of Eve – something I knew courtesy of Jo Botting’s introduction.)  Diana Dors is amusing, if obvious, as the man-eater Carole and Kay Kendall makes a vivid impression in a cameo that lasts no more than a few seconds.

    There’s a streak of misandry – or, at least, contempt for men – running through the film.  The chap who eventually becomes Carole’s fiancé really is a strong silent type (James Carney):  it’s a non-speaking part.  Georgie’s partner Peter is wet or, at least, Douglas Barr, who plays him, is.  The predatory Alec is a thinly written role too although Bonar Colleano’s uncouth, vulpine edge brings the character to life.  The dance hall sequences (shot at Hammersmith Palais according to IMDB – other suggestions were called out from the NFT1 audience during the Q&A) are well staged by Crichton.  The extras on the margins of the place reinforce the film’s documentary quality; the music is performed by Geraldo and Ted Heath and their bands.  The vocal support for the dance finalists struck me as excessive – and distracting for the competitors – but the climactic New Year celebrations in the palais de danse are highly effective.  They have an oppressive intensity – the worst thing imaginable for someone in Eve’s verging-on-suicidal frame of mind.  The plot twists in Dance Hall may be melodramatic formula requirements but the well-directed actors make them emotionally powerful.

    4 August 2014

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