Old Yorker

  • It Always Rains on Sunday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Hamer (1947)

    In fact, a single rainy Sunday in Whitechapel – the action takes place in the course of that one day, give or take a couple of flashbacks.  This is an unusual, interesting film.  What makes it so is the unresolved tension between what look to be Robert Hamer’s two main aims.  He tries, with a good deal of success, to convey the ingrained boredom of the lives being described – but, at the same time, how much the characters’ preoccupations matter to them.  Hamer also wants to make a suspenseful crime melodrama.  The split personality of the piece is epitomised by the two types of criminal in the mix:  a trio of petty crooks (Alfie Bass, John Carol, Jimmy Hanley) whose inept efforts to make crime pay are played mostly for laughs; and a tall, handsome escaped criminal called Tom Swann (John McCallum).  His ex-girlfriend Rose (Googie Withers), now the dissatisfied wife of a much older man (Edward Chapman) and the loathed stepmother of his two daughters (Patricia Plunkett and Susan Shaw), hides Tom in the spare bedroom when he comes looking for refuge.  This (central) strand of the story is deadly serious; the climactic sequence, after night has fallen, in which the police chase Tom down through a railway yard, and he and they jump into and out of trains etc is meant to be purely exciting.  It nearly is: the deeply shadowed lighting (by Douglas Slocombe) is impressive and the editing (Michael Truman) no less so.  The chase is well enough staged to make you forget for the moment that the police are bound to succeed, that it’s de rigueur in a commercial British film of the time for crime to be punished.  Yet the sequence is eclipsed by the tragedy of Rose Sandigate’s ennui and unrequited love.  Georges Auric’s score reaches a climax along with the police pursuit of Tom.  It was the music that made me more aware that my thoughts were elsewhere – with Rose, back in the house that she thinks of as a prison and where Tom has abandoned her.

    It’s soon clear that Tom is a heartless user and John McCallum, on the evidence of this film anyway, isn’t much of an actor.  It’s not easy therefore to get interested in the character – but you do, because of what he means to Rose.  Googie Withers deserves most of the credit for this.  She has many fine moments (I especially liked Rose’s expression of relief when her husband George decides to go out to the pub) and she’s extraordinarily good in the last part of the film, when Tom has left Rose behind.  He showed the limits of his feelings for her with a right hook; she now faces prison for harbouring him.  She takes the practical actions needed to end her life – she locks the doors, turns on the gas oven – and Withers’ automatic movements give the scene real power.  (The subsequent shots of Rose recovering consciousness in a hospital bed don’t make emotional sense.   This coda seems tacked on to make the audience feel better; in fact, our identification with Rose is such that you feel rather her distress at having failed to die.)   Googie Withers is less impressive when Hamer showcases her acting:  there are moments when the film around her seems to stop as she prepares to deliver a big dramatic moment.  She’s undoubtedly the heart of the movie, though.   It Always Rains on Sunday, adapted by Hamer, Angus MacPhail and Henry Cornelius from a novel by Arthur La Bern, is well acted within the conventions of British cinema of the 1940s.  Those conventions mean, among other things, that several characters sound too genteel; but the best people break free of the conventions.  They include Gladys Henson and Sydney Tafler (excellent as a philandering store owner-cum-small-time musician) and, more strikingly, Edward Chapman.  He is best remembered, I guess, as a support in Norman Wisdom films but here he creates a sensitive, rounded portrait of George Sandigate, a thoroughly decent and, to his wife, stultifying man.  David Lines is excellent as the young teenager Alfie, the one child of the Sandigates’ marriage.  For someone of my generation, decades of Dixon of Dock Green cast a long shadow over the presence of Jack Warner as the main policeman.

    1 November 2012

  • Intruder in the Dust

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clarence Brown (1949)

    This adaptation, by Ben Maddow, of William Faulkner’s 1948 novel is compelling and concentrated – there’s hardly any subplot but there is a crucial backstory.  As a twelve-year-old, a white Mississippi boy called Chick Mallison is hunting rabbits on land that a black man, Lucas Beauchamp, owns and works.  Chick falls into an icy creek and Lucas takes him back to his house to dry and warm up.  Although technically a landowner, Lucas is poor; the food he gives Chick is the only food he has.  Lucas is also proud:  when Chick offers him money in return for his hospitality, he stonily rejects it.   Four years later, Lucas is arrested for the murder of a white man, Vinson Gowrie.  Chick, convinced that the charge is false and racist, sees an opportunity to repay his debt to Lucas.  Chick’s uncle, a successful lawyer, takes on the case and Lucas is eventually proven innocent.  The victim’s brother, Crawford, leads the lynch mob that gathers at the courthouse where Lucas is held, threatening to mete out ‘justice’ if the law drags its feet in doing so.  It turns out that Crawford is also his brother’s killer.

    Clarence Brown’s intelligent direction maintains a skilful balance between racial drama and whodunit, and the film is very carefully cast for faces and physiques.  The townspeople outside the courthouse express Jim Crow, lynch-mob culture realistically.  This stolid, staring mass is believable and troubling to an extent that actors playing vicious racists in a more dynamic, histrionic style rarely are.  This virtue of Intruder in the Dust also points up one of its shortcomings.  When Lucas Beauchamp is exonerated and the mob disperses, Chick describes them as ‘running away’ and his uncle explains that they were ‘running away from themselves’.  The lines spoken by the liberal lawyer, John Stevens, over the course of the film include plenty of sententious moralising and it’s as well that the acting of David Brian, who plays Stevens, is pretty basic.  The effect might be worse if he declaimed his insights powerfully.  In any case, it’s important to remember how benighted America was, in terms of civil rights and racial justice, when the film was made – and that material of this kind was, for Hollywood, novel and ambitious in 1949.   William Faulkner thought well of the picture.

    Juano Hernandez, with his teak-tough appearance and stiff-legged gait, is impressive – he makes Lucas Beauchamp’s proud rectitude and refusal to ‘play nigger’ admirable and infuriating.  There’s also a humorous light in Hernandez’s eyes whenever Lucas is besting John Stevens (which is quite often).  Claude Jarman Jr gives a strongly felt performance as Chick and there’s fine work in smaller roles from Will Geer (the sheriff), Elizabeth Patterson (the elderly and indomitable spinster who helps to ensure justice is done) and, best of all, Porter Hall as Nub Gowrie, the father of Vinson and Crawford (Charles Kemper).  The film was shot in Faulkner’s home town of Oxford, Mississippi, some of whose citizens appear in the crowd scenes; Porter Hall, no less than any of these actual locals, is convincingly part of the geography and culture.  The episode comprising Chick’s rabbit-hunting expedition and the subsequent scene in Lucas’s kitchen are especially well observed (there’s a resonance between Chick’s re-emergence from the creek and a later sequence, in which Nub Gowrie is rescued from quicksand).  Julia S Marshbanks appears in the kitchen scene as Lucas’s wife Molly:  she has no words but she is a memorable image.

    4 May 2015

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