Carol Reed (1941)

A very likeable, well-acted adaptation of the H G Wells novel (which I’ve not read).   The film seems not to have been a box-office or critical success at the time and Michael Redgrave was widely thought to be miscast as Kipps.  In fact Redgrave – thanks both to his height and to the effort he is visibly making to get the character and do him justice – gives a distinction and charm (and sometimes a nobility) to Kipps that makes the film a much less uneasy experience than would have resulted from a literal interpretation of Wells’s ‘little man’.     The film was criticised for neutralising the political thrust of the novel.  While it’s true that Cecil Beaton’s costume designs make all the women look so elegant that the important social distinctions are blurred and some of the working-class characters sound too posh, the material works well as intelligent social comedy.  It also works better dramatically than I suspect it would have done as socialist propaganda.

My heart sank when the opening credits showed a copy of the book of Kipps opening to reveal the novel’s subtitle ‘The story of a simple soul’ – but Carol Reed’s apolitical craftsmanship and handling of the cast ensure that the film is never condescending in the way you fear it’s going to be.  The film’s social critique may still have been too sharp for audiences at a time when national unity was so crucial.  The description of the living conditions of the workers at Shalford’s Bazaar, the draper’s store where Kipps is apprenticed before he comes into the money that propels him into Edwardian Folkestone’s bourgeois society, are pretty startling for a modern audience.  At a smart party at which each guest is given an anagram ‘badge’ to wear that the other guests have to decipher, Kipps’s anagram is ‘Sir Bubh’ (‘rubbish’).  The fact that he doesn’t stay around long enough to find this out makes the episode all the more uncomfortable.    Reed builds up an unusual pattern of negotiating the main turning points in the plot – Kipps’s learning of his unexpected inheritance, getting married, finding that his fortune has disappeared – with an anti-climactic lack of stress (that may have contributed to the film’s modest performance at the box office).  In the same way, the film seems remarkably free, for one of its time and type, of emphatic musical accompaniment.

Michael Redgrave’s performance provides the considerable pleasure of watching a greatly talented actor find the heart of a character – working his way in – that doesn’t come easily to him.  Redgrave uses his long limbs to fresh, fine comic effect; his often surprising line readings express convincingly real feelings.  Phyllis Calvert gives a lovely, truly-felt performance as Kipps’s childhood sweetheart.   As the more sophisticated woman with whom he’s smitten, Diana Wynyard is striking but opaque – and Reed’s touch is less sure and consistent in handling her part in the story – but the effect is interesting.  Wynyard’s lack of ease connects with the character’s dissatisfaction:  the performance works well in suggesting how glamorously impermeable she seems to Kipps.    Arthur Riscoe, a leading music hall performer, has terrific comic vigour and rhythm as the actor-playwright Chitterlow, who accidentally makes and amusingly restores Kipps’s fortunes.  Max Adrian gives a vulpine wit to Clement Coote, Kipps’s self-serving guide to the intimidating social world that opens to him.  Good performances too from Edward Rigby, Mackenzie Ward and Hermione Baddeley, as Kipps’s fellow workers at Shalford’s, and from Helen Haye, as Wynyard’s snotty mother.

25 August 2006