Bob McNaught (1953)
The Grand National has been an essential part of my year since 1964, when I was eight. For a few years after that, it vied with Christmas as the annual event I most looked forward to, and which produced the strongest sense of anti-climax as soon as it was over. I still sometimes have dreams in which it’s the eve of the National – a time, that is, of nearly unrivalled excited anticipation. This year’s Grand National was one of the earliest Covid-19 sporting casualties, called off a few days before horse racing in the UK was suspended generally. At the time of the announcement, advance notice didn’t seem as bad as the National-that-never-was of 1993 but I felt more deflated after watching this year’s virtual race, shown by ITV on 4 April at just the time the real thing should have been happening. A few days later, I realised my brain didn’t quite accept there was no Grand National 2020. In some part of my mind, I felt it must be taking place somehow, somewhere, maybe in a parallel universe. I’ve recorded eighty-four films from television over the last three or four years that are still unwatched. With cinemas closed, it’s now or never to work through these (though now could go on some time). The prospect is a bit daunting but another kind of National substitute seemed a good place to start.
Grand National Night opens with agreeable shots of horses exercising in the early morning. These are rudely interrupted by a different kind of horse power as a car whizzes past, screeching to a halt outside the house that overlooks the gallops. Out from the passenger seat steps Babs Coates (Moira Lister), arriving home after her latest night on the tiles. Her husband, owner-trainer-breeder Gerald Coates (Nigel Patrick), has high hopes for his runner in the next day’s National but Babs, an alcoholic and a grade A bitch (the film was released in the US as Wicked Wife), instantly upstages the equines that she thinks occupy far too much of Gerry’s attention. After a few scornfully obnoxious remarks to the Coates’s elderly butler Morton (Gibb McLaughlin) and a quick change from décolleté evening gown into jodhpurs and riding boots, Babs demands a horse. The only one not out at exercise is a mare about to foal, which Babs nevertheless insists on taking. She sets off across the gallops, riding the animal with nasty vigour. They fall at the first fence, attempting to clear a hedge. Babs, alas, is unhurt.
Although I didn’t expect sporting action to dominate the thriller Grand National Night, I wasn’t prepared for just how unimportant the great race would prove to be. The following afternoon, Gerry’s horse Star Mist does indeed win the National. (By coincidence, the actual winner in the year of the film’s release was Early Mist.) There are a couple of sequences supposedly at the races, substantiated by inserts of some old Pathé news film of the Grand National (Grand National Night is in black-and-white). But Star Mist never appears and Gerry doesn’t even go to Aintree to watch the race. He’s more concerned with the ill-used mare, which goes into labour after the exertions of the day before. He’s concerned too with the mare’s attractive owner, Joyce Penrose (Beatrice Campbell). It’s immediately clear that Joyce carries a torch for Gerry and he one for her, although they’re both terribly well behaved.
Unlike Babs. She’s carrying on with roué Jack Donovan (Leslie Mitchell), the manic chauffeur in the earlier scene; and she does go to Liverpool for the big race, staying overnight with her sister Pinky (Betty Ann Davies) beforehand. Star Mist’s victory is a good reason for Babs to paint the town red on the Saturday evening but the celebrations come to an abrupt end when she falls out with Donovan, who’s ogling another woman. Babs gets hold of his car and, even though she’s lost her licence after causing death through dangerous driving, careers back home in it that night. There she falls out with Gerry too, goes at him with a knife, they struggle … along with Morton, we see and hear Donovan’s car driving off from the house. The next morning, Babs’s dead body is found in the car in Liverpool. A manhunt for the vehicle’s owner quickly tracks him down but Donovan has an alibi – ‘a red-headed one’. The suspicions of the investigating detective, Inspector Ayling (Michael Hordern), fall instead on Gerry.
As a piece of thriller plotting, Grand National Night is distinctly undernourished. It has a more generous supply of clunky dialogue and coarse acting. But the film, at this distance in time, is startling as an illustration – to some extent, it seems, an unconscious illustration – of contemporary snobbery and parochialism. (It had something of the same effect on me as reading the rampantly conservative Josephine Tey’s mystery novel The Franchise Affair last year.) These social prejudices come through in the monied characters’ attitude to not only their servants but also the police. Ayling is described, disparagingly, as ‘a very ambitious man’. The film-makers – like Gerry, Joyce, Pinky and the Coates’s louche acquaintance Buns Darling [sic] (Colin Gordon) – regard Ayling, in his efforts to nail Gerry for Babs’s death, as a jumped-up spoilsport who needs taking down a peg or two. The film has much more time for Gerry’s creepy butler Morton, who recognises his first duty as loyalty to the master. The local bobby Gibson (Barry MacKay) is altogether a better chap than the Liverpool CID man. Gibson is less interested in helping Ayling solve the riddle of what happened to Babs than in arranging for Gerry and the unseen Star Mist to appear as guests of honour at an upcoming gymkhana.
It’s soon revealed that Babs was dead when Gerry picked up her up from the drawing room floor to which she fell as they fought with the knife – an oriental knife brought home by Gerry as a memento of his two years in a Japanese prison camp. When he mentions this to Ayling, the detective says nothing – his silence tantamount to proof the rotter didn’t even fight for his country in the recent World War. It transpires that Babs had a weak heart and died of natural causes. Gerry did wrong by driving her corpse back to Liverpool in Donovan’s car, abandoning both there and repeatedly lying to the police but Ayling is finally deprived of what he thought was compelling evidence of that nighttime journey. In the film’s closing shot, Gerry and Joyce walk off in the direction of a sunny future together. The director Bob McNaught thus achieves something rather remarkable. When Babs is dispatched, you initially feel Gerry has done everyone a favour: you mourn neither the character nor Moira Lister’s playing of her. By the end of Grand National Night, this viewer felt close to outrage – on behalf of Ayling and that Gerry got the happy ending he didn’t really deserve. Needless to say, the fact that he’s just trained a Grand National winner – a Grand National winner! – couldn’t now be further from the hero’s mind.
I must admit my feelings had something to do with the acting too. Even with this material, Michael Hordern is so much more deft and varied than any of his one-note fellow cast members that it seemed only right that Inspector Ayling should come out on top. Nigel Patrick, although he cuts a plausible figure as a racehorse trainer, doesn’t do much to dramatise Gerry’s predicament. (The dynamics of the piece might have been very different with, say, Trevor Howard in the main role.) The cast also includes Noel Purcell (the go-to man for resounding Oirishness in British cinema of the early post-war years), as a vet. May Hallatt is the maid who discovers Babs’s high-heeled shoes in Morton’s wardrobe. (Don’t go there.)
Grand National Night is adapted from a play by Campbell and Dorothy Christie. There isn’t a screenplay credit as such: by the end, you can’t help wondering if this is a case of no one being prepared to own up although a ‘brought to the screen by’ credit points the finger at George Minter. (He isn’t the producer – that was Phil C Samuels for the Renown Pictures Corporation, UK.) Jack Asher’s camerawork includes occasional, striking zooms in and out, at supposedly key moments. The sharp editing is by the subsequently celebrated Anne V Coates (an Oscar winner for Lawrence of Arabia a decade later).
So: one down, eighty-three to go. Next up – I’m going to try and find a link between each backlog film watched and the succeeding one – will be The Rocking Horse Winner.
15 April 2020
