Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1950)
If you watch it without prior knowledge of the production history you could well be instantly disoriented. You expected a Powell and Pressburger film but the screen introduces ‘A Selznick International Picture’ – only after the bells, the fanfare and the grand house does the equally familiar image of arrows on an archery target appear. That opening juxtaposition of logos makes clear this was a case of strange bedfellows: Michael Powell was later quoted as saying that he and Emeric Pressburger ‘decided to go ahead with David O [Selznick)] the way hedgehogs make love: verrry carefully!’ Not carefully enough, it seems. The lead in the Archers’ adaptation of Mary Webb’s 1917 novel Gone to Earth is Jennifer Jones, not only a big Hollywood name but also, when shooting began in the summer of 1949, the newly-wed Mrs David Selznick. Her husband didn’t like the result and took the Archers production company to court. He lost the case but already had the right to make changes for the American release. According to Wikipedia, ‘Selznick had the film re-edited and some extra scenes shot in Hollywood under director Rouben Mamoulian to make the version known as The Wild Heart’.
Gone to Earth, which ran 110 minutes, was released in Britain in November 1950. The Wild Heart, nearly thirty minutes shorter, arrived in American cinemas in July 1952. The original, which has a high reputation, was fully restored by the BFI’s National Archive in the 1980s but the film I recorded from Talking Pictures TV was the shorter Selznick treatment. A conscientious cineaste would try to get hold of the echt Archers version but I didn’t think highly enough of what I saw to do that. Nevertheless, though I’m writing about The Wild Heart, I’ll refer instead to Gone to Earth through the rest of this note. Mary Webb’s title drew me to the film and it’s how Powell and Pressburger meant it to be known.
The story is set in rural Shropshire in the last years of the nineteenth century. The beautiful, feisty Hazel Woodus (Jennifer Jones) lives with her widowed father, Abel (Esmond Knight), but her chief allegiances are to folkloric charms and spells inherited from mother, and to wildlife in the surrounding countryside. Hazel has tamed a fox cub, which lives in the Wooduses’ cottage, alongside a cat and a crow. This is a primitive cottage and Abel is a brutish fellow, who treats his daughter mostly with contempt (though he’s multi-skilled, too: beekeeper, coffin-maker, harpist). One dark night, as she’s walking home, with fearful thoughts of the legendary ‘black huntsman’ uppermost in her mind, Hazel really does encounter a man on horseback – the local squire, Jack Reddin (David Farrar). He’s instantly taken with her and she spends the night at his manor.
Reddin subsequently rides the hills on the lookout for Hazel but they don’t meet again until after she’s promised to another – the church minister Edward Marston (Cyril Cusack), recently arrived in the area and also besotted with Hazel, though he knows his feelings aren’t reciprocated. The marriage goes ahead but it’s not long before Hazel forsakes the parsonage for the squire’s pile, bringing disgrace on herself and humiliation on her husband. She’s soon unhappy living with cruelly masterful Reddin, however; and Marston, when he discovers where his wife is, hotfoots it to the manor to bring her home. Their reunion is short lived. Hazel’s beloved ‘Foxy’ goes missing while a hunt is taking place nearby; his distraught owner goes in search of the animal. She finds him on the hillside but the hounds by now have got the fox’s scent. Trying to escape the pack, Hazel, clutching Foxy, falls down a disused mineshaft to her death.
The symbolism and oppositions in the story are plain enough. Hazel’s fox represents her own untameable spirit. The red-blooded squire and the sexually anaemic minister are expressions of, respectively, carnal appetite and allure, and numbing moral scruples. More largely, the embattled Marston, who also has a dominating mother (Sybil Thorndike) to contend with, is the frontman for a religious tradition presented as shallowly rooted and puny beside the more ancient, pagan impulses at work in Hazel and with which the physical settings of the story seem charged. Shot on location in and around Much Wenlock and Shrewsbury, the film looks wonderful. The richness and vibrancy of Chris Challis’s Technicolor images animate the landscape powerfully: it more than holds its own against the melodramatic plot.
The Hollywood changes can only be a matter of guesswork, except that Wikipedia draws attention to the addition of a (very creaky) prologue, read by Joseph Cotten, and of the ‘scenes at the end when [Jennifer] Jones is … carrying what is obviously a stuffed toy fox’. I’m ready to believe Gone to Earth was bowdlerised to a scandalous degree yet there are issues with the film (and, if it’s a faithful adaptation, with the source novel) that it may not be fair to blame Selznick for. The model fox certainly makes the climax laughable but the earlier introduction to the open mineshaft isn’t too hot either. Hazel is walking the hills with her father when she’s shocked to find herself suddenly on the very edge of the mineshaft. Abel tells her how a cow and her calf once fell down it. Although the scene signals loud and clear this is where Hazel will meet her own end, it also makes you wonder why, since she knows the landscape like the back of her hand, she’s never come across the mineshaft before. More important, there’s a conflict between the heroine’s uncontrollable child-of-nature aspect and her determination to domesticate a wild animal – which she succeeds in doing: in the cottage, Foxy lives and behaves like a needy pet dog. His final kamikaze dash in the direction of the hunt, though crucial to the plot, makes little sense.
Still, the final ‘Gone to earth!’ call of a huntsman, echoing the same call at the start of the film, makes for an ending you’re unlikely to forget quickly – and a couple of the characters prove to be more interesting than expected: the squire’s manservant (Hugh Griffith) is curiously possessive of his master and Edward Marston develops into a surprisingly determined, assertive personality. Not for the first or last time, Cyril Cusack outshines everyone else in the cast. There’s no doubt Jennifer Jones is a star and some of her physical acting is impressive but she wins hands down a keen competition for the most outlandish dialect accent. Among the other rustics, only Hugh Griffith sounds consistently plausible but Jones stands out: she goes on a vocal tour of the British Isles and ends up in the mid-Atlantic. The RP English voices of Reddin, Marston and his mother are easier on the ear although David Farrar, despite also looking the part, seems uncomfortable playing the rotter Reddin. As Hazel’s father, Esmond Knight is the reverse of Farrar – erratic accent but enjoyably turpitudinous.
25 November 2020
