The Long Memory
Robert Hamer (1953)
Robert Hamer’s black-and-white crime drama is an unusual, visually powerful concoction. Phillip [sic] Davidson (John Mills), after serving time for a murder he didn’t commit, comes out of prison to track down those who framed him. He hangs out on a disused barge on the North Kent marshes; his pursuit of justice also takes him to London’s docklands. The location filming in Kent is especially impressive. The small, solitary figures in the large, almost deserted landscape, in conjunction with the quality of light that the cinematographer Harry Waxman achieves in these compositions, give them, as well as a bleak beauty, an existential flavour that’s surprising in a British film of the early 1950s. Also effective is the contrasting physical scale of the key locations in the plot – the mud flats, a warren of grimy office buildings by the London docks, the suburban home of Bob Lowther (John McCallum), the police detective keeping Davidson under surveillance. It’s interesting to see a television in the Lowthers’ living-room: The Long Memory was released a few months before the Coronation.
Although the combination of these settings with more conventional features of contemporary British cinema is distinctive, the result is in some respects awkward. The visual atmosphere may be noir but some of the character types are innocuous through their familiarity and William Alwyn’s music still sounds hearty. Elements of Hamer’s and Frank Harvey’s screenplay, adapted from a 1951 novel by Howard Clewes, are blatant contrivances. Davidson has a love affair on the barge with Ilse (Eva Bergh), a war refugee, which gives topicality to the coming together of two traumatised people. One of the witnesses whose perjury sent Davidson down is Lowther’s wife Fay (Elizabeth Sellars); that tightens the plot conveniently but sticks out as a device to do so, not least because Elizabeth Sellars fails to animate her respectable-housewife-with-a-shady-past role. There’d have been no story if Davidson had been hanged but I missed why, since he’s convicted of murder, his sentence was as lenient as only twelve years inside.
A stronger element of the scenario is that not only is Davidson the victim of a miscarriage of justice but Boyd (John Chandos), the man he supposedly killed, didn’t even die. The charred corpse recovered from the scene of the crime was that of a man called Delaney (Julian Somers), whom Boyd had agreed, for a price, to smuggle out of the country. Boyd has survived to continue his nefarious business activities (under an assumed name); the moment when he and Davidson first see each other again, outside Boyd’s dockside office, is a highlight of The Long Memory. For the most part, though, John Mills is unconvincing as the embittered, emotionally unreachable protagonist: he seems to be suppressing his usual screen persona without supplying much to replace it. In the flashbacks to the fateful altercation between Boyd and Delaney, which Davidson witnesses, Mills is wearing what appears to be a cricket sweater – in a bizarre attempt to make his character look younger? John Mills seems slightly less middle-class after doing time but he’s essentially the wrong type for the role.
John McCallum’s athleticism serves him well – not only haring down steps in a dockside chase but even when Bob Lowther dashes to the phone at home. Eva Bergh’s Ilse is less nuanced than Elizabeth Sellars’s Fay, and John Chandos’s suave villainy is wooden. In smaller parts, Geoffrey Keen is miscast as a journalist after a scoop but there are a couple of good eccentric turns – from Michael Martin Harvey, as an elderly hermit on the Kent marshes, and Harold Lang, as Boyd’s seedy, vaguely camp factotum. An eleven-year-old Christopher Beeny, soon to be well known to television audiences in The Grove Family, the BBC’s first soap, is excellent as the Lowthers’ son.
7 December 2017