Robert Hamer (1945)
The title is striking and ironically apt – a reference to the packaging of items dispensed by a chemist’s shop in Victorian Brighton. The plot of Pink String and Sealing Wax hinges on something stolen from the shop and therefore not packaged in the usual way. The something is strychnine. The thief is the unhappy, adulterous Pearl Bond (Googie Withers), who uses it to kill her drunken, abusive husband Joe (Garry Marsh), the landlord of a local pub. The chemist’s shop is run by Edward Sutton (Mervyn Johns), whose naïvely romantic son David (Gordon Jackson) has a crush on femme fatale-ish Pearl. The feelings are unreciprocated but, after cutting her hand on glass following a clash with Joe, Pearl finds herself in the inner sanctum of the pharmacy: David dresses the wound to guard against tetanus and, eager to impress, explains the contents of a row of jars on a shelf above. He also remarks on the similarity between lockjaw and strychnine poisoning symptoms. Pearl’s eyes light up. While David is briefly out of the room, she gets the jar of strychnine crystals from the shelf and pours some into her handkerchief.
Adapted by Diana Morgan from a stage play of the same name by Roland Pertwee, this was Robert Hamer’s first solo feature. He was the uncredited co-director, with Charles Frend, of San Demetrio London (1943) and had also directed the ‘mirror’ segment of Dead of Night, released a few months before Pink String and Sealing Wax. Googie Withers appeared in ‘The Haunted Mirror’ and she and Hamer went on to work successfully together in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) but this intervening collaboration, although it’s among the better-known Ealing Studios dramas (thanks to that title?), really isn’t very good. Partly because the Pearl strand of the plot is skinny, the film devotes too much time to the conflicts within the Sutton family, headed by the tyrannical patriarch Edward. He and his wife (Mary Merrall) have two daughters, Victoria (Jean Ireland) and Peggy (Sally Ann Howes). Victoria wants to train as a professional singer. Edward emphatically says no. Thanks to the resourceful Peggy, Victoria’s singing comes to the attention of Adelina Patti (Margaret Ritchie), when the world-famous soprano is in Brighton for a concert performance. David Sutton has already incurred his father’s wrath by writing love poems, to Victoria’s friend Mary Truscott, when he’s meant to be studying pharmacy. It’s the dressing-down that he gets from Edward that drives David to the pub and into Pearl Bond’s dangerous orbit.
Googie Withers, although occasionally mechanical, has some strong, wordless moments of crisis. More important, her empathy with Pearl engages audience sympathy for a character who, as an evildoer, must come to a bad end. Withers gets across the depths of Pearl’s frustration with her life. Mervyn Johns’s intelligent underdog quality is wrong for the harsh paterfamilias Edward Sutton. Mary Merrall looks old enough to be his mother, which rather confuses the father vs children scheme. You’re in no doubt, though, that Johns and Merrall are able actors; Sally Ann Howes is competent too, even if she’s annoying with it. There are others in the cast who, not unusually for British films of the period, have to be seen – and, especially, heard – to be believed. You feel sorrier for Victoria when her father tells her she’ll never be a successful singer because it’s obvious that Jean Ireland, who plays her stiffly and uncertainly, could never be a successful actress. Adelina Patti was born in Madrid of Italian parents and raised in New York yet Margaret Ritchie makes her sound like Joyce Carey’s trying-to-be-posh station buffet manageress in the same year’s Brief Encounter. (Actually, both Madame Patti and Victoria sound just as gruesome when they’re coloratura singing but at least that’s not down to technical incompetence.) John Carol is oddly cast as the spiv Dan Powell, supposedly irresistible to women. This isn’t the finest hour of Garry Marsh, Catherine Lacey (an eccentric barfly) or Pauline Letts (Dan’s lady friend).
The most nuanced acting comes from Gordon Jackson but the couple of times when he lapses into a Scottish accent are an example of Robert Hamer’s sometimes indifferent direction. Several scenes just peter out, as if Hamer didn’t know how to shape their ending. One of the minor puzzles of the plot is how David Sutton doesn’t twig to the coincidence of Joe Bond’s death, apparently from lockjaw, so soon after the conversation in the pharmacy with Pearl. Threatened with the true cause of death emerging, Pearl tries to pin the crime on David; his father steps in to save the day and, in doing so, drives Pearl to the only way out for her – suicide. Edward Sutton’s calm, clever intervention is a surprise to the extent that the story is set up to give him his comeuppance. We’re clearly meant to conclude that his children did get the better of Edward – the final scene announces that David has married Mary Truscott and Victoria become a singing star – but we’re more likely to think pull the other one. At the start of Pink String and Sealing Wax, Edward Sutton’s expert evidence to a murder trial sealed the fate of another female killer. At the business end of the film, he shrewdly and nervelessly thwarts the black widow Pearl Bond. It’s true that in his son’s wedding photograph Edward, like the rest of the family group, is, for a change, smiling – but is he a reformed character or feeling vindicated? The moral of the story seems to be that father, although he may be an arch-Victorian nightmare, knows best.
23 March 2018
