Sidney Gilliat (1948)

A mixture of elements as absorbing as it’s baffling.  As the story gathers momentum it becomes clear there’s no way of integrating the melodrama of Percy Boon’s unlucky progress to the gallows and the comedy of the spiritualist conman Henry Squales.  The irreconcilable combination of stories and characters is what holds you.  Thanks to Richard Attenborough (Boon) and Alastair Sim (Squales), both stories are highly engaging – I much prefer this kind of Ealing concoction to the unified drollness of Whisky Galore! or Passport to Pimlico.  London Belongs to Me, adapted by Sidney Gilliat and J B Williams from a 1945 novel by Norman Collins, is centred on the tenants of various rooms in a large terraced house in Dulcimer Street, Kennington.  The film echoes the social portraiture of It Always Rains on Sunday but here the threads of the plot are more strangely disparate.  The convergence of countdowns to the execution of Percy and the outbreak of World War II is weird – especially when the character of Uncle Henry, a political eccentric (over)played by Stephen Murray, switches abruptly from invective against the appeasing British government to campaigning for Percy’s reprieve.  This could be meant as a critical comment about relatively personal preoccupations eclipsing larger concerns yet the support of the young man’s neighbours in Dulcimer Street is surely meant to be heartwarming.  There’s no doubt their team spirit is exposed as wasted effort, though.  The petitioners march from Kennington to the Houses of Parliament in the pouring rain, to be greeted on Westminster Bridge by a newspaper placard announcing that the Home Secretary has already decided on a reprieve.

Percy Boon isn’t mentioned again.  Since he presumably stays in a prison cell and so couldn’t contribute to a happy ending you can understand why – but his disappearance from the film’s conclusion is emotionally unsatisfying.  Instead, Gilliat concentrates on the couple who are the heart and soul of 10 Dulcimer Street, Mr and Mrs Josser (Wylie Watson and Fay Compton).  The start of London Belongs to Me sees Mr Josser’s retirement after decades in a menial job in the same firm.  The couple plan to move to a cottage in the country but Mr Josser spends most of their savings on funding a legal team for Percy.   When war breaks out, the Jossers now have no option but to stick it out in Kennington.  A fireside conversation reveals that they feel it’s their duty to do so anyway.  The screenplay feels seriously disjointed but Sidney Gilliat is good at keeping things moving and the depth of empathy of the actors playing salt-of-the-earth older characters – especially Watson, Compton and Gladys Henson (as Percy’s mother) – is moving.  The film contains the more familiar anomaly for one of its time and place that members of the same family sound as if they belong to different social classes without any convincing explanation for this.   (It’s amusing to read on Wikipedia that ‘Patricia Roc was originally cast in the female lead but pulled out because she did not want to keep playing cockney roles and was replaced by Susan Shaw’. Shaw, as the Jossers’ daughter Doris, is much posher than her parents.)  There are excellent cameos from Fabia Drake (an implacable sceptic at one of Squales’s séances), Maurice Denham (a shady car dealer) and Sydney Tafler (a night club receptionist).  Some of the larger roles are caricatures in conception and execution, although the actors are mostly entertaining:  Joyce Carey (as the sour-faced landlady) and Ivy St Helier (a comedy scrounger) come into this category, although Eleanor Summerfield is hard work as the girl whose death Percy accidentally causes.  Hugh Griffith has a winning, ludicrous verve as a leading light, in more ways than one, on the march to Parliament.  As a detective who brings Percy to justice at the same time as he’s trying to win Doris Josser’s heart, Andrew Crawford, with his Harry and Paul inflections, is ludicrous pure and simple.

11 December 2012