Ken Annakin (1948)

Miranda was this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ offering at BFI.  As usual in this slot, the screening was introduced by curator Jo Botting; as usual, she was admirably efficient and informative.  Also not for the first time, the British film being celebrated turned out to be no great shakes.  Ken Annakin’s fantastical comedy, adapted by Peter Blackmore from his own recent stage play, may have cheered early post-war audiences in need of escapism but now makes for a rather long eighty minutes.  Temple Abady’s score keeps insisting how amusing Miranda is – after a while, Annakin seems to be using the music to try and convince himself of this.  Some of the performances make the film well worth watching, though.

To be fair, Ken Annakin loses no time setting up the story.  Paul Martin (Griffith Jones), a London doctor, goes on a solo fishing holiday on the Cornish coast:  his wife Clare (Googie Withers) doesn’t fancy sitting in a boat all day.  Cut to Paul, excitedly trying to reel in what feels like a whopper; after a brief struggle, he’s pulled overboard.  Paul, in fact, is the catch – of a mermaid (Glynis Johns), who introduces herself as Miranda.  She keeps him prisoner in her submarine grotto, agreeing to let Paul go only if he’ll take her back to London with him.  Before doing so, he orders from his wife’s couturier (Brian Oulton) some extra-long dresses to conceal Miranda’s fish tail.  He lets Clare know he’ll be bringing back to their Chelsea flat, for an initial three-week stay, an invalid patient who’s unable to walk.  Clare, expecting an elderly lady as her guest, is surprised to find the invalid is no older than she is, and very attractive.

In Chelsea Miranda subsists on a diet of raw fish sandwiches and glasses of salted water, and sleeps in the bath.  When she’s taken out, it’s in a bath chair; in the flat, Paul carries her around.  Her true identity is revealed only to Nurse Carey (Margaret Rutherford), whom Paul asks to look after his guest when he’s not around.  A comedy centred on a newcomer to human society might be expected to point up some of its foibles and absurdities by presenting them through the newcomer’s eyes.  There’s next to none of that in Miranda.  A mild romantic farce, the film confirms only that chaps’ll-make-fools-of-themselves-over-a-pretty-girl; that wives and girlfriends are liable to be suspicious, then angry, as a result.  The chaps in this case are, as well as Paul, the Martins’ chauffeur, Charles (David Tomlinson), and Nigel Hood (John McCallum), the artist fiancé of Isobel Lambert (Sonia Holm) – she owns a hat shop and lives upstairs from Paul and Clare.  When Isobel discovers Nigel is painting a portrait of Miranda, she desecrates the painting by chucking Nigel’s supper over it, and breaks off their engagement.  Betty (Yvonne Owen), Charles’s young lady and the Martins’ maid, becomes distressed by more than the smelly sandwiches she has to make for the invalid.

Chaps is the mot juste for Miranda’s menfolk:  indeed, the film’s main personnel are nearly all resoundingly middle-class, the mermaid included.  David Tomlinson’s chauffeur isn’t much less nicely spoken than Paul or Nigel, and doesn’t give the impression of trying to sound socially better than he is.  Yvonne Owen’s Betty might give that impression if you couldn’t detect the RP vowels beneath her Cockney accent.  The setting is presumably contemporary but there’s not a whiff of austerity in the air:  if ration-book filmgoers were keen to escape reality they certainly came to the right place.  It’s quite funny that Miranda has access in her underwater home to the occasional page or two from Vogue but the extent to which she’s not a fish out of water in well-heeled Chelsea is also an expression of the script’s lack of imagination.  And when it comes to London sight-seeing, she really is half-human, half-sea creature.  ‘I want to go to Buckingham Palace and Billingsgate Market but most of all I want to go to the opera,’ she tells Paul.  On a visit to the zoo, she’s interested only in the seals though she must have seen plenty of them before.

However … Glynis Johns, with natural wit and music in her voice, does a splendid job of blending Miranda’s mask of naivete and flirtatious intent:  best of all, she’s a very matter-of-fact mermaid.  Griffith Jones is a bit stagy as Paul but Googie Withers’s Clare has stylish presence.  As Nigel, Withers’s real-life husband John McCallum (they married the year that Miranda was released) shows some lovely comic finesse.  David Tomlinson, whose screen partnership with Glynis Johns was famously renewed when they played Mr Banks and his suffragette wife in Mary Poppins (1964), is rather more nuanced than his role deserves.  Sonia Holm is standard issue from the Rank Organisation ‘charm school’ and Brian Oulton, as usual, overacts but Margaret Rutherford does something valuable for the film.  This is thanks less to her trademark galumphing eccentricity, though that’s in evidence too, but to her quality of true (light-hearted) innocence.  Rutherford’s nurse is the right person to be privy to the heroine’s secret.  When she first sees Miranda in the bath, she exclaims:  ‘Oh, the pretty thing – it’s a mermaid:  I’ve always believed in them!’  Margaret Rutherford leaves you in no doubt that Nurse Carey means what she says.

Miranda gives to each of Paul, Charles and Nigel a pendant containing a lock of her hair ‘as a token of love which might have been’.  The realisation he’s not the sole recipient eventually brings each man to his senses and a rapid reconciliation with the fully human love of his life.  Shortly before diving into the Thames and heading for the sea, Miranda tells Charles she wants to be with her sisters in Majorca the following May.  Paul and Clare wonder why.  The answer is revealed in the closing shot – of a smiling Miranda, sitting on an undersea rock and holding a mer-baby.  This finale (presumably a main reason why some critics in 1948 considered the film risqué) might be thought a proto-Mamma Mia! (2008) concept were it not that Paul’s the only one of the three men who knows Miranda’s anatomy from top to bottom (unless Nigel or Charles is fibbing).

The supposedly abundant witty dialogue in Miranda is actually pretty sparse.  When one character says, ‘There’s something fishy about that girl’, it may force a good-humoured groan; when, a bit later, a second character says the same thing you sense desperation.  One of the better bad jokes comes last of all; it’s better partly because it chimes with something at the very beginning.  The opening credits are accompanied by a (ropy) title number sung, in English but with a definite French accent, by Jean Sablon.  In a concluding Gallic echo, the screen announces not ‘The End’ but ‘Fin’.  In British cinema, Miranda is a less invisible ‘hidden gem’ than ‘Projecting the Archive’ pictures often are:  it’s certainly one of Glynis Johns’s best-known pictures.  The reason for its selection now was probably on account of a major and imminent anniversary that’s more worth celebrating than the film itself.  According to Jo Botting, Johns nearly drowned early in the shoot:  her heavy fishtail, designed by Dunlop (Tyres), floated better than she did, weighing her down so badly that she struggled to keep her head above water.  She survived in a big way.  On 5th October 2023, Glynis Johns will be a hundred years old.

27 September 2023