Alexander Mackendrick (1952)

I watched it, on television, for the first time in what must have been fifty years.  An ambitious, unusual film in 1952, Mandy has aged well enough to confirm my preference for Ealing drama to Ealing comedy.

A young middle-class couple, Christine and Harry Garland (Phyllis Calvert and Terence Morgan), find out their infant daughter is deaf – news that’s not only shocking but, at least as far as Harry’s concerned, almost shameful.  The family moves into the spacious London home of Harry’s parents (Marjorie Fielding and Godfrey Tearle), where Mandy receives loving care and private speech therapy but doesn’t make a sound, except when she cries in distress.  Christine wins a battle of wills with her husband to enrol Mandy (Mandy Miller), now six years old, in a school for deaf children in northern England where the innovative methods of charismatic teacher Dick Searle (Jack Hawkins) reputedly work wonders.  Not for Mandy, at least at first; things start to change, though, when Christine, at Dick’s suggestion, rents rooms close to the school so that Mandy can attend as a day pupil.  The little girl is able to feel vibrations of sound onto a balloon, and understand that she has made the sound; a while later, she can say, ‘Mama’.  The discord and distance between them puts the Garlands’ marriage under increasing strain.  Once he’s giving Mandy additional help out of school hours, Dick sees more of Christine and they enjoy each other’s company.  Ackland (Edward Chapman), Dick’s bête noire on the school’s governing body, stirs up false allegations of an affair.  Harry, who eventually learns of the allegations, drives north and takes Mandy back to London with him.  After a verbal showdown between Dick and Harry at the latter’s parents’ house, Mandy wanders out from the back garden onto a bomb site where other children are playing. They invite her to join in their game and ask her name.  With her parents watching close by, she says ‘Mandy’ for the first time.

The source material for Mandy is a 1946 novel, The Day is Ours, by Hilda Lewis, inspired by her husband Professor Michael Lewis’s work as a specialist in the education of the deaf at Nottingham University.  The scenes at the school for deaf children were shot at the Royal Schools for the Deaf outside Manchester; I assume most of the children who appear in them were actual pupils there.  (There’s at least one exception, in addition to Mandy Miller:  a little girl called Nina is played by six-year-old Jane Asher.)  The screenplay, by Nigel Balchin and Jack Whittingham, includes some well-written dialogue and strikes a pretty good balance between description of Dick Searle’s teaching methods, governors’ disputes about the school’s priorities, and marital drama – although the last element dominates too much in the film’s climax.  (Harry arrives at Christine’s lodgings on the very evening she and Dick have gone out for dinner together for the first time, leaving Mandy with a babysitter …)  It’s interesting to watch Mandy with 2020s vision.  Harry, much influenced by his mother, is troubled by the stigma of sending his child to an ‘institution’; would the place be deplored now for the rather different reason of marginalising deaf children?   There’s a scene in which Harry, in the heat of an argument with Christine, slaps her face, an uncharacteristic act that shocks them both.  Although this is enough, of course, for him to be written off by plenty of present-day viewers as an abominable wife-beater, a more alarming illustration of contemporary misogyny arrives when Harry discusses the implications of divorce with his solicitors – a father and son duo, the Woollards (W E Holloway and Colin Gordon).  Harry regretfully admits that he struck his wife.  Woollard Jr agrees this could be a problem:  ‘The courts don’t like that kind of thing, even though the woman often deserves it’ (or words to that effect).

Alexander Mackendrick made this film shortly after Whisky Galore! (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951), shortly before The Maggie (1954) and The Ladykillers (1955):  Mandy is the best of them all.  As well as varying pace and mood effectively, Mackendrick shows real visual imagination in trying to create a sense of Mandy’s shut-off world.  It takes a while to adjust to the overpowering middle-classness of the whole thing (and the geographical bias:  even in northern England, the lower orders mostly have London accents).  Still, Phyllis Calvert emerges from what at first sounds like a carbon copy of Celia Johnson’s gallant misery in Brief Encounter (1945) to give a strong, emotionally nuanced performance.  Terence Morgan wasn’t a great actor but I like how he suggests that Harry’s problem is feeling increasingly powerless and surplus to requirements, rather than suspicious or resentful of Christine.  Mackendrick and the scriptwriters make the Garlands’ marriage more complex than you might expect.

Jack Hawkins is better than he often is and engages well with the children; he’d be even better if he conveyed a sense that Dick Searle’s so preoccupied with his work that his growing feelings for Christine (which are unreciprocated) take him by surprise.  Nancy Price is good as Jane Ellis, the founder of the school.  Seven-year-old Mandy Miller is the standout, though:  sensitively directed, she builds a powerful portrait of Mandy Garland’s isolation and frustration.  This is tough to watch (and convincing) because the breakthrough to communication is painfully slow and gradual.  A few years after Mandy, Mandy Miller recorded the great ‘Nellie the Elephant’ (produced by George Martin).  According to Wikipedia, she retired from show business in 1962, at the age of eighteen.

30 May 2024