Film review

  • A Run for Your Money

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charles Frend (1949)

    ‘This is the story of how Welsh Wales came to town,’ a voice – a Welsh voice – announces at the start.  The camera then makes the long-distance journey across a railway station sign – HAFODUWCHBENCEUBWLLYMARCHOGCOCH.  It’s the first reminder in this Ealing comedy, and far from the last, that the Welsh, their language and culture are endearingly funny – that’s the idea, anyway.  The Jones brothers Dai (Donald Houston) and Twm (Meredith Williams), coal miners from the place with the marathon name, win a pitmen’s productivity contest organised by the Echo, a London newspaper.  The prize is £100 each plus best seats in the house for the England-Wales rugby international at Twickenham.  No sooner has the good news reached the colliery than Dai and Twm are dashing to catch the overnight train to London for the match next day.

    In the hurry and confusion, Dai and Twm miss their instructions for rendezvousing with the Echo at Paddington, where a journalist called Whimple (Alec Guinness) and a photographer (Mackenzie Ward) are waiting to take the brothers to Fleet Street to collect their cash and tickets.  When the photographer asks how they’ll recognise the prizewinners Whimple assures him, ‘It’s all taken care of – they’ll be wearing leeks’.  Cue the arrival of a trainload of Welsh rugby fans, most of them with said vegetable decorating hats or jackets.  Whimple seeks the help of the station announcer (Desmond Walter-Ellis), who is floored by the name of the brothers’ home town.  He asks ‘Mr Thomas and Mr David Jones from Wales’ to report to the stationmaster’s office.  You get the picture.

    There are plenty of names on the screenplay credit – Charles Frend, Leslie Norman (who also produced, with Michael Balcon) and the novelist Richard Hughes, as well as, more remarkably, two real Welsh people – Clifford Evans, who devised the story, and Diana Morgan, credited with ‘additional dialogue’.  The year after this film, Morgan co-wrote Dance Hall, a much better Ealing picture and, not insignificantly, a drama – free, in other words, of the comedies’ insistence on the humour of regional peculiarity and the near ubiquity in them of bumbling parochialism, regardless of setting.  The latter dilutes a main premise of A Run for Your Money.  Fair enough that Dai and Twm are innocents abroad – on their first visit to England, let alone London – but the Echo personnel don’t belong in the metropolis either.  Miffed that he has to show the Welshmen the sights of the capital and go to a rugby match, Whimple solemnly reminds his photographer colleague, ‘I am a gardening correspondent’.   Why would a Fleet Street newspaper entrust the climax to its nationwide competition to someone like Whimple – vain, clueless and despised by the Echo‘s editor (Clive Morton)?  The set-up smacks, rather, of a little local paper, staffed by a couple of jack-of-all-trades.

    Before Dai leaves Wales, his girlfriend Bronwen (Julie Milton), secretary to the colliery boss Davies (Peter Edwards), warns him about London women.  As they breakfast in a café near Paddington, Dai talks loudly and unguardedly about the money he and Twm have won.  At a nearby table, a young woman (Moira Lister) pricks up her ears.  Her name is Jo, she’s a con artist and, after the brothers are accidentally separated, Dai spends most of the rest of the day as her potential prey.  Twm, meanwhile, bumps into an old acquaintance, Huw (Hugh Griffith).   Ten years ago, they won an eisteddfod musical competition together – Huw is a chief singer and harpist – but it seems they’ve never seen each other since.  I didn’t understand how Huw had become a beggar on the London streets – or how he managed to improve his appearance after his first scene.  When Twm first catches sight of him, Huw’s a grimy vagrant.  When it’s clear he’s in the film for the duration, he remains unruly and eccentric but turns noticeably cleaner.

    Once Huw, with Twm’s help, has retrieved his Welsh harp from the pawn shop where it’s been gathering dust, he doesn’t let it go – not on a pub crawl with Twm, not on a busy Tube train, not in the crowds leaving Twickenham (where the pair arrives too late for the match).  In the film’s closing scene, Dai, Twm, and Huw arrive back at Hafoduwchbenceubwllymarchogcoch station.  The harp is still with them and Dai is still wearing the bowler hat his boss Davies lent him for the trip. The bowler’s against-the-odds survival in London, like that of the musical instrument, makes for plenty of pretty basic visual comedy but the two objects are one of the more expressive details in A Run for Your Money.  Holding on to these comic totems at all costs reflects the Welshmen’s duty and determination to stay true to themselves.

    Dai shows an almost sixth sense for doing the right thing, whether buying Bronwen a diamond ring or getting dragged by Jo into an up-itself gown shop.  Barney (Leslie Perrins), Jo’s partner in crime, tries to sell him a ring with a fake stone but Dai’s instinct secures the genuine article – it takes one to know one.  At the dress shop, Jo looks stunning in an outfit called, according to the manageress Mrs Pargiter (Joyce Grenfell), ‘Desire under the Elms’; Dai decides not to buy because the dress wouldn’t be right for Bronwen ‘at the chapel social’.  Donald Houston captures Dai’s emotional openness very well:  never blind to Jo’s good looks, he always knows where his loyalties lie.   Or nearly always.  The integrity of Houston’s acting makes Dai’s brief capitulation to Jo, when she takes him back to her flat and relieves him of his cash, all the more unconvincing.  But at least the theft triggers an amusing climactic chase – the literal fulfilment of the film’s title – all the way back to Paddington and the night express home.

    Several of the cast are better than the script deserves.  Moira Lister, although she telegraphs Jo’s ulterior motives when she’s buttering Dai up, also gives her an interesting brittleness.  Like Donald Houston, Meredith Edwards makes his character’s guileless enthusiasm genuinely appealing.  It would be hard to enjoy Hugh Griffith’s turn as much as he seems to be doing but he is good value.  Even Alec Guinness can’t do much with Whimple yet you’re always aware things would have been worse with almost anyone else in this role.  Joyce Grenfell’s Mrs Pargiter, whose gruesome attempts to sound casually chic are undermined by her wonky vowels, belongs in a comedy sketch but that’s OK:  she is on screen for only a couple of minutes.  As might be expected, Charles Frend lays on the Welsh male voice choir-singing thick but that’s an upside of the relentless Cymric clichés.  After the big build-up, the rugby match comes and goes very quickly.  But a shot of leeks thrown exultantly into the air lets us know the result.

    26 January 2021

  • MLK/FBI

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sam Pollard (2020)

    This documentary has exactly the right title.  The oblique stroke linking the letters expresses the spine of MLK/FBI – the continuing surveillance of one set of initials by the other, which Sam Pollard uses as a launch pad for mini-biographies of Martin Luther King Jr and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The visual narrative consists almost entirely of film and still photographs, along with occasional shots of recently declassified documents from the US National Archives.  (For the viewer, these documents are a stylistic device rather than a source of information:  the pages appear as hard-to-read white text on black ground and don’t stay on screen for long.)  Until the last few minutes of MLK/FBI, Pollard eschews talking heads to interpret the evidence of the news footage.

    Not talking voices, though – when one starts to speak its owner’s name usually pops up at the bottom of the frame.  With plenty else for the eye to keep up with, this technique could have been distracting and the voices confusing but Pollard sensibly rations the contributors to eight (and a couple of them make only one or two comments).   They include the academics Beverly Gage and Donna Murch, the writer and broadcaster David Garrow, the journalist Marc Perrusquia, and two people who knew or worked closely with Martin Luther King:  Andrew Young, a leading member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and future US Ambassador to the UN in the Carter administration) and Clarence Jones, King’s lawyer, speechwriter and close friend.  The remaining voices belong to former FBI employees, Charles Knox and James Comey.   In the conclusion to MLK/FBI, we briefly see all the contributors except for Perrusquia and Comey.

    The last-named, thanks to his prominence in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and the circumstances of Trump’s firing of him the following spring, is one of the better-known FBI Directors of recent decades.  Comey’s profile doesn’t begin to compare, however, with that of J Edgar Hoover, who has a major role in Pollard’s story.  Hoover’s extraordinary longevity as the man in charge of the FBI – from 1924[1] until his death in 1972 – makes it easy for Pollard to make use of FBI-related material from outside the timespan of its investigation of MLK, and for this still to qualify as a portrait of the contemporary FBI regime.  Two types of filmic material feature in MLK/FBI:  as well as abundant news archive, there are clips from Hollywood dramas, of different vintages, some of them centred on the FBI and heroising its G-men.  The clips have a distinct B-movie flavour but not all these films were made on the cheap.  The period during which the Bureau kept its eyes and ears on King saw the release of, for example, The FBI Story (1959).  A Warner Bros production, running two-and-a-half hours, it was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starred James Stewart.

    The archive footage of MLK starts in the mid-1950s and continues to the end of his life in April 1968.  The FBI’s surveillance of him, which covers the same period, appears to have started in light of the Montgomery Bus Boycott:  ‘We must mark him now as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation,’ according to an internal memo.  At the start, the Bureau was chiefly concerned with connections between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the (white) businessman and lawyer Stanley Levison.  An adviser to and friend of King, Levison himself had been under FBI investigation since the early 1950s thanks to his involvement with the American Communist Party.  The focus on King changed when wire taps on hotel rooms he stayed in revealed his extramarital affairs, offering an opportunity to undermine his moral leadership within the Civil Rights movement.  As one of the contributing voices points out, this shift from the explicitly political to the sexual in the interpretation of African-American threat feels like a reflection of inveterate white fear of the Black man as a figure of carnal menace.  (Pollard accompanies this part of the narrative with an apt excerpt from The Birth of a Nation.)

    In the final summing up, David Garrow describes the FBI as ‘a part of the mainstream political order’.  By this stage, he hardly needs to do so.  The characterisation of King as sexual bogeyman cum moral hypocrite may have been intensified by Hoover’s personal preoccupations and pathology but MLK/FBI convincingly shows that the FBI was no rogue outfit made in the image of its singular, longstanding head.  The film makes clear both that a good deal of the Bureau’s activity wasn’t top secret, and the strength of its popularity.  An opinion poll taken when ill feeling between Hoover and King became public showed 17% support for the latter against 50% for the FBI.  The large cast of The FBI Story included, in a cameo appearance, J Edgar Hoover as Himself.  That film also spawned a comic book and Pollard shows examples of similar publications.  He creates a vivid picture of the sustained promotion of the Bureau in popular media.

    To the frustration of Hoover and his colleagues, evidence of King’s sexual misbehaviour didn’t build up the head of steam they hoped for.  The evidence could still damage his posthumous reputation, though.  Some relevant textual material is already available but, as MLK/BFI makes clear, the tapes won’t follow suit until 2027.  Pollard includes reference to a written report on one of the tapes, according to which King witnessed a female parishioner being raped in a hotel room by a fellow Baptist minister.  Whoever added a manuscript note to the report overplayed his hand by claiming the tape revealed that ‘King looked on and laughed and offered advice’:  how does an audiotape prove that someone ‘looked on’?  Nevertheless, present-day perceptions of male abuses of power in relation to women make it hard to think that, only six years from now, the FBI’s secret recordings will do nothing to detract from MLK’s image.

    It’s arguable Pollard doesn’t give enough attention to how and why the accusations against King didn’t gain traction during his lifetime – that his documentary is consequently able to ignore how appalled  much of King’s churchgoing African-American support base would have been to learn of his maculate private life.  In the main, though, MLK/FBI is fair-minded, as well as instructive and incisive.  It describes MLK’s exceptional gifts but stops short of hagiography.  It gives a detailed account of what more than one contributor terms the most shameful dirty tricks campaign in the FBI’s history (the competition for which superlative must be strong) while acknowledging elements of truth in its original suspicions about Stanley Levison.

    Pollard starts with footage of the March on Washington in August 1963 and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.  He goes on to illustrate the versatility of King’s extraordinary eloquence in less expected contexts – a chat show, for instance.  In a complementary way, the racial benightedness of the era comes through loud and clear not just in explicit abuse and disparagement.  In a TV interview from what seems to be the mid-1960s, a white journalist asks King why he thinks ‘the Negro’ has found it harder than other immigrant groups to assimilate to American life.  MLK keeps his cool in explaining that the other groups didn’t come to the country as slaves.  In the same exchange, he refers to ‘thingification’ of Blacks, a phenomenon Pollard has shown in action in an earlier interview, in 1950s Alabama.  This comprises footage of conversation between King and a (different) white interviewer just before they go on air – though conversation isn’t quite the right word.  King, asking if there’ll be a brief dummy run, is meaningfully addressing his white interlocutor.   The latter, with an off-handed reply, doesn’t even glance in King’s direction.  Thingifying the Black man standing beside him comes naturally.

    24 January 2021

    [1]  The organisation was called the Bureau of Investigation at the time of Hoover’s initial appointment.  It added ‘Federal’ to its name in 1935.

Posts navigation