The Angry Silence
Guy Green (1960)
The Boulting brothers’ bosses-vs-workers comedy I’m All Right Jack, best remembered for Peter Sellers’s portrait of the Communist shop steward Fred Kite, was one of the most successful British films of 1959. Only a few months after its release, Guy Green’s more solemn industrial relations drama The Angry Silence arrived in cinemas. The two films’ main common feature, other than their contemporary workplace dynamic, is Richard Attenborough. In a supporting role in I’m All Right Jack he was Sydney DeVere Cox, a company owner. (The Boultings’ film was a sequel to their 1956 comedy Private’s Progress and Cox was one of several characters in both.) In The Angry Silence Attenborough, in the lead, plays Tom Curtis, a factory worker sent to Coventry by colleagues when he refuses to join their unofficial strike.
The film is set in the fictional town of Melsham (the location shooting was done in Ipswich) and begins with the arrival at the local railway station of a bespectacled, somewhat sinister-looking man. He is Phil Travers (Alfred Burke), a union activist dispatched from London to stir up trouble at Martindale’s, a Melsham engineering company. In cahoots with shop steward Bert Connolly (Bernard Lee), Travers provokes strike action on the grounds that management has refused to meet demands for improved safety measures in the workplace. (The demands aren’t spurious though it’s suggested the workforce hasn’t previously been exercised by safety concerns.) Tom Curtis has just discovered his Italian wife Anna (Pier Angeli) is expecting their third child. The Curtises are not comfortably off. Having Tom’s work colleague Joe Wallace (Michael Craig) as their lodger helps with the rent but Tom decides, with an extra mouth soon to feed, he can’t afford to go on strike.
At first, he’s one of several workers to cross the picket line: in particular, a principled (strikingly elderly) man called Arkwright (Beckett Bould) speaks out against the wildcat strike. A campaign of intimidation then changes minds – including Tom’s, until a falling out with Connolly, who comes to his home to put pressure on him. Tom then works solo until Travers’s masters in London direct acceptance of a compromise package put forward by the firm’s owner, Martindale (Laurence Naismith), who’s desperate not to jeopardise a lucrative contract. Travers also instructs Connolly how to punish Tom for his insubordination. When the other men return to the factory, none of them – not even Joe – will speak to Tom there. His plight is taken up by the local newspaper, the national press and television. The publicity increases his notoriety. Both Martindale and Connolly, for different reasons of self-interest, urge the works manager Davis (Geoffrey Keen) to sack Tom although Davis digs his heels in. At school Tom’s son Brian (Stephen Lindo) is horribly bullied. In the culminating reprisal against Tom he loses the sight of one eye.
The Angry Silence tells a powerful story with some good social observation and acting but the screenplay (which won a BAFTA equivalent and was Oscar-nominated) is thinly textured. It was written by Bryan Forbes from a screen story by Michael Craig and his brother Richard Gregson (Gregson is Craig’s real surname). Although Forbes’s dialogue is consistently strong and the main characters are a successful balance of representative and individual, the script is intent on taking a type of situation and showing how-one-thing-leads-to-another. It certainly does this but some of the events don’t have enough connection or residue. We don’t, for example, get a sense of whether Tom regrets answering the questions of the local journalist who doorsteps him; or of what any of the other men, except for the sheepish then finally contrite Joe, think of the treatment they’re meting out to Tom. There’s no differentiation in this respect between the workers who immediately obey the strike call and those who take the same position as Tom until finding themselves on the receiving end of intimidation.
The film was understandably controversial for its perceived political attitudes, which go beyond censure of professional agitators like Travers and the unseen trade union power structure that he serves. It’s true that the boss Martindale is also shown as callously self-serving but his machinations are at one remove from the insults and injuries suffered by Tom and his family; besides, Martindale has relatively little screen time. (That’s often an important consideration in a film professing but failing to achieve political impartiality. The people who made Nicholas and Alexandra may not have been fans of Tsarism but they spent the best part of three hours illustrating what a happy, loving family the Romanovs were: the audience could hardly fail to be feel sympathy for them.) Apart from Joe and, to a much lesser extent, Connolly (an old-fashioned union man, nostalgic for the General Strike that his father took part in), the engineering factory workers are barely characterised. Despite the rhubarb-rhubarb noises they make whenever the occasion demands, they’re dumb. Guy Green and Bryan Forbes insultingly present them as herd members with no minds of their own.
The only other employee to make an impression seems to reflect a different conservative prejudice of the time: Eddie (Brian Bedford), as his name might suggest, is a Teddy boy. It’s implied that he and his gormless sidekick ‘Gladys’ (Brian Murray) are entirely responsible for putting bricks through blacklegs’ windows, cutting their wives’ washing lines, even burning their cars. (That the workers own cars is a potential irony lost on, or at least ignored by, the film-makers.) In the climax to the story, the car that knocks down and badly injures Tom has Eddie at the wheel and Gladys in the passenger seat. Connolly is wary of Eddie as a loose cannon yet the film stops short of dissociating his tactics from Travers’s brand of troublemaking.
The montage of intimidatory vandalism is overdone: Guy Green is too eager to seize this chance to make The Angry Silence look edgy and properly ‘cinematic’. In contrast, Green directs the scenes of Tom’s family life acutely and sensitively – qualities shared by Forbes’s writing of them. The details feel right: Tom automatically lathering his spaghetti in ketchup even as Anna tells him there’s sauce in the dish already; the television just out of guarantee and now on the blink; Brian, highly amused as he tells and shocks his parents about a game of ‘sex maniacs’ he’s played with other kids from school. The later attack on Brian is genuinely upsetting. Anna, worried when his younger sister Cathy (Marilyn Green) comes home alone, goes looking for her son and finds him weeping in the deserted school toilets. Some other boys have beaten him and smeared him with dark paint. (Because he’s in the toilets, I feared at first he’d been smeared with something worse than paint.) The episode has a wrenching capper when Tom comes home and tries to comfort Brian, now in bed. The boy tearfully tells his father he wants nothing to do with ‘a dirty scab’.
The early domestic sequences are crucial in conveying normal, pre-strike life for Tom because the screenplay skimps on other aspects of it. The protagonist runs the works football team: it’s meant to be a big moment when team members ask Joe to let Tom know his services are no longer wanted. Since we’ve not seen him interacting with these men in happier times this rejection doesn’t have the impact it should. (The nearest Tom gets to football is filling in his weekly pools coupon albeit that’s another good detail.) Green and Forbes’s determination to press ahead with the story has unintended consequences. The decision to ostracise Tom at first seems bizarre because there’s such a short interval between the other strike-breakers succumbing to union pressure and Tom being made to pay for his unique stand. The narrative ratchets up the level of media interest in Tom – from the Melsham reporter (Ronald Hines) to one from a national (a cameo from Forbes) to Alan Whicker (as himself) interviewing strikers at Martindale’s for the BBC Tonight programme. Press and television then disappear from the film – not, you feel, to make a satirical point that media interest tends to be irresponsibly short-lived but because journalists would get in the way – until the very last minutes. Daniel Farson (as himself) turns up at the factory, to add a bit of colour to the finale.
Although The Angry Silence is unpleasantly tendentious and unsatisfying, Tom Curtis is a well-written character and Richard Attenborough gives a first-rate performance. His ordinary looks are right for the part and he makes Tom very credible – especially in the scenes at home, which Attenborough plays with admirable naturalness: his emotional range is convincing before and during the crisis. It makes sense that Tom’s resistance to the strike is initially pragmatic rather than political, then is sustained by a combination of outrage and stubbornness. Attenborough is excellently partnered by Pier Angeli. A fine blend of fragility and determination, she’s deep inside Anna, whose impassioned outbursts over what’s happening feel thoroughly authentic. The cast includes some dependable actors. Bernard Lee is able to create the illusion that Connolly is a rounded character. Davis, whom the script regards more favourably than anyone outside the Curtis family, is socially a cut below the usual Geoffrey Keen chap but Keen plays him well. Alfred Burke has a thankless task. Travers’s lean-and-hungry, trendy-left-wing-intellectual look ensures that this supposedly undercover agent sticks out like a sore thumb on the shop floor.
After Tom and Anna, Joe Wallace is the best character. In the early stages, motorbiker Joe’s main interest at work is in chasing the firm’s few female staff. When the latest of them, Pat (Penelope Horner), makes it clear she doesn’t want sex with him yet, he accuses her of wasting his time. The film’s politics are less objectionable in the case of Joe because his apathy and inability to think for himself aren’t a given but are persuasively rooted in his personality. His belated enlightenment is somewhat mechanical – and the hint in his last exchange with Pat that Joe may have outgrown his chauvinism too seems like wishful thinking. But Michael Craig makes a good job of Joe’s halting, unaccustomed-as-I-am speech to the rest of the Martindale’s workforce. After admitting feelings of shame about what’s happened to Tom, Joe simply stops speaking. He does so uncertainly yet his words hang in the air and the other men drift off in a way that suggests they share his feelings. It’s an effective, low-key ending to The Angry Silence – or near-ending. Guy Green finally cuts back to the railway station and Travers’s boarding a train. This is in deference to the time-honoured rule that if a film opens with a stranger arriving in town it should end with him (it usually is a him) departing.
26 August 2020