My Death is a Mockery
Tony Young (1952)
This double-bill of The Tell-Tale Heart and My Death is a Mockery, presented in BFI’s regular ‘Projecting the Archive’ slot, was designed to mark the eightieth birthday of Adelphi Films. A family business founded by Arthur Dent, Adelphi was a production and distribution company whose heyday was in the 1940s and 1950s. With a catalogue dominated by relatively inexpensive crime dramas and musical comedies, Adelphi seems never to have been a major player in the business though it was responsible for John Guillermin’s drama The Crowded Day (1954). To suggest that the company is still going strong at eighty is quite an exaggeration. It turns out to mean that Arthur Dent’s granddaughter maintains a website[1] which advertises Adelphi films available from Amazon, includes a comprehensive list of its output and invites help in recovering lost works. None of this got in the way of BFI’s Adelphi celebration being enjoyable, thanks in no small part to Vic Pratt’s informative and entertaining introduction.
Neither part of the double-bill was long but The Tell-Tale Heart, definitely a short, was the curtain-raiser. J B Williams’s film, a twenty-one-minute dramatised reading by Stanley Baker of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, is a curiosity all right. It’s of some historical interest that it was made and released in British cinemas (in December 1953, according to IMDb) at all. Its recent rediscovery vindicates the Adelphi website’s invitation to ‘Help Us Find Missing Films’ (though it’s unfortunate that, at the time of writing this, The Tell-Tale Heart is still listed there as missing!) Jeff Wells, a 16mm enthusiast, bought a copy secondhand in Brighton in 1984. In 2017 he was clearing out his loft, came across the film and contacted Adelphi.
The narrator of Poe’s short story describes how he murdered an old man, dismembered the corpse and hid it under floorboards. (I say ‘he’ though the text doesn’t actually make clear the narrator’s gender.) Police officers who subsequently interview the murderer don’t seem suspicious but a guilty conscience causes him to hear an ever-louder sound that he takes to be the continued beating of the heart of the man he thought he’d killed. Terrified, the narrator confesses his guilt to the police. In J B Williams’s one man show, Stanley Baker holds attention with his strong presence and fine voice but, excellent screen actor that he is, plays the role almost too discreetly. His character’s living nightmare isn’t frightening. Neither are the rudimentary creepy effects.
As The Tell-Tale Heart nears its end, Baker’s character is revealed to be behind prison bars. The condemned cell is the setting too of the starting point and conclusion of My Death is a Mockery. Tony Young’s film, with a screenplay by Douglas Baber (adapted from his novel of the same name), gets off to a sluggish start. A perfunctory, merely expository conversation between a prison governor (Vincent Holman) and a visiting priest, Father Matthews (Liam Gaffney), precedes a lengthier dialogue between the latter and John Bradley (Donald Houston), the man awaiting execution. A single, hour-long flashback then describes the events leading up to Bradley’s arrest before Young returns to the prison cell in the closing stages. The structure inevitably limits the drama to a matter of how things happened. The film, at seventy-five minutes, is brief for a feature but doesn’t feel brief.
After serving in the Royal Navy in World War II, John Bradley runs a trawler business based in Devon but is struggling to make ends meet. He’s urged by his wife Helen (Kathleen Byron) and against his better judgment to accept a moneymaking proposition put to them by Hansen (Bill Kerr), an Australian opportunist the Bradleys meet by chance. Hansen’s scheme involves using Bradley’s boat to smuggle French brandy from a contact on the French coast. The first few smuggling trips are successful, in spite of Hansen’s flakiness and the two men’s increasing dislike for each other. Things go wrong when a pick-up is interrupted by the French police. Hansen’s contact Le Cambre (Edward Leslie) shoots and kills one of the police and makes his escape on Bradley’s trawler. In a struggle between them, Bradley strikes and accidentally kills the Frenchman, whose body is then thrown overboard, weighted down with crates of contraband. The boat is stopped and directed back to England by customs officers (Christopher Quest and Michael Voysey). Under questioning by a police detective (Kenneth Henry), Hansen loses his nerve again and accuses Bradley of murder. The Englishman is convicted of the killing not of the disappeared Le Cambre but of the French police officer.
En route to Bradley’s cell, Father Matthews exchanges a few words with a warder (Meadows White), who complains that it’s bad for the morale of prison staff when a condemned man is as gloomy as this one is. Donald Houston certainly lives up to this advance billing. In and out of custody, he gives a strong, realistic performance but is too closed off. Even so, the main dramatic interest emerges in the way that the stolid Bradley, when the going gets tough, shows unexpected nerve – in contrast to the plausible but craven Hansen. Bill Kerr is almost the antithesis of Houston. His mobile face takes the camera but his acting is sometimes as wobbly as his character. Kerr was better known for comedy (before and after this film) and the opening credits announce this as his first dramatic screen role. In retrospect, these words read almost as an excuse for the performance we’re in for.
Houston loosens up in the few lighter illustrations of the Bradleys’ married life. It’s no surprise since he’s partnering Kathleen Byron, whose emotional fluidity lifts My Death is a Mockery. It enables Byron to make just about credible Helen’s switch from persuading her husband to break the law to immediate regretful anxiety that he’s doing so. It also elevates Helen’s ambiguous reactions to Hansen’s sexual advances to something more than a crude plot mechanism for reinforcing the bad feeling between the two men. The utterly untrustworthy Le Cambre, a strikingly Francophobic creation, is rendered simply ridiculous by Edward Leslie’s cartoon accent. Kenneth Henry is better as the smiling, steely police detective. The cast also includes a parrot on board Bradley’s trawler, talkative enough to tip the wink to the customs men. The film has a few continuity problems. Not only does Donald Houston’s bushy hair keep changing style in the course of a single conversation; there’s also the matter of the sticking plaster above Bill Kerr’s left eyebrow. This makes its first appearance, without explanation, on the first smuggling trip. It’s only when it reappears on the fateful voyage, and after Bradley has punched Hansen in the face for groping Helen, you realise what’s happened.
Released in August 1952, My Death is a Mockery had within a few months acquired a singular notoriety. This was the film that Christopher Craig watched at his local cinema just before embarking on the warehouse robbery that resulted in the deaths of both PC Sidney Miles and Craig’s accomplice Derek Bentley. (According to IMDb, Peter Medak’s Let Him Have It specifically refers to My Death is a Mockery.) Vic Pratt made mention of this in his introduction, suggesting that the life of crime depicted in the film further fuelled the public controversy about delinquency that the Craig and Bentley case brought to a head. Perhaps this was so, although the kind of crime shown here is so different from typical youth violence of the era that the comparison seems a stretch. Pratt was surely right, anyway, to place My Death is a Mockery in the category of contemporary British pictures which dramatised the peacetime economic struggles of men who’d fought in World War II, and the lengths to which they felt compelled to go. (Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960) is a tonally distinctive, altogether superior example of the sub-genre.) There are startling resonances between Tony Young’s picture and the crime that followed Christopher Craig’s viewing of it. Like Derek Bentley, John Bradley is to be hanged for a homicide that he didn’t commit. Like Craig, Hansen, the prime mover in the lawbreaking that generates a killing, goes to prison but survives. The film takes its title from Bradley’s last words to the priest who fails to comfort him.
21 May 2019