Basil Dearden (1951)

Watching The Maggie and Pool of London in quick succession was the latest reinforcement of my preference for Ealing drama to Ealing comedy.  Basil Dearden’s tense crime thriller has plenty of human substance thanks to his two main characters, whose fates come to matter.  The narrative begins on a Friday afternoon, when the merchant ship Dunbar docks in the Pool of London, and ends on the following Monday morning, when the ship departs for Rotterdam.  The intervening action focuses on two of the crew, what they get up to on shore leave and their consequent moral or emotional journeys over the course of the weekend.

This black-and-white (and plausibly noir) film was shot on location in London.  Dearden and his cinematographer Gordon Dines provide a valuable visual record, including high-altitude panoramas, of the early post-war city.  Dines (DP on The Maggie too) creates strong contrasts between, on the one hand, the splendours of St Paul’s and the Greenwich Observatory and, on the other, the docklands[1] and grimy streets, the smoky pubs, seamy dance halls, dark alleyways.  It’s a time and place where the black market thrives so the Dunbar’s customs officer (Michael Golden) runs a tight ship in anything-to-declare checks of the disembarking crew.  Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron) volunteers his two packets of cigarettes and is waved through.  His good mate Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) has several pairs of nylons concealed about his person, which are confiscated before he steps ashore.  Once in London, he’s soon mixed up in more ambitious law-breaking.

Dan’s crucial role in a jewellery heist, which takes place on the Sunday morning, is to receive stolen gems from one of the gang, Charlie Vernon (Max Adrian), smuggle them on board when he returns to ship that night, and hand them over to new owners once the Dunbar has docked in Rotterdam.  The heist goes wrong.  A security man (Beckett Bould) is assaulted by Vernon and dies of his injuries; although it’s Sunday, the crime is instantly headline news on the radio.  After taking delivery of the gems, during a church service at Southwark Cathedral, Dan visits a girlfriend, Maisie (Moira Lister), who conceals them in a tin of brilliantine.  Dan’s name is given to the police and he becomes prime suspect.  Realising the booty is too hot for him to handle, he asks above-suspicion Johnny to take it on board the Dunbar.  Johnny is always ready to help his friend and consents.  Besides, his mind is on other things.

Pool of London is best known for featuring the ‘first interracial relationship in a British film’ (BFI Screenline).  That phrase needs a bit of unpacking.  West Indian Johnny, planning to return imminently to his native Jamaica, passes much of Saturday and Sunday in the company of Pat (Susan Shaw), who’s English, white and works in a theatre box office.  They enjoy each other’s company in a coffee bar, sightseeing and so on, but the nearest they come to physical contact is travelling on the upper deck of a bus, which jolts and throws them very close.  Pat immediately says sorry; Johnny replies ‘That’s all right’, suggesting he’d like them to be even closer.  Pat, who puts off seeing friends to spend time with Johnny, has tickets for a Variety Bandbox show later on Sunday and invites Johnny along.  Due to set sail that evening, he regretfully declines.  Approaching the docks, he learns from a fellow crewman that the Dunbar’s departure has been delayed until the following morning because the police are on board.  Johnny jumps on a bus to Camberwell and arrives to see Pat waiting outside the theatre there.  Before she catches sight of him, her friends arrive.  She starts chatting happily with them.  Johnny turns sadly away.  This interracial relationship is hardly more than a potential one.

Yet the race aspect of Pool of London is intelligently treated by Basil Dearden, who would go on to make a more thoroughgoing racial drama in Sapphire (1959), and by the scriptwriters, Jack Whittingham and John Eldridge.  Johnny first bumps into Pat while accompanying Dan to the variety theatre where the latter has a meeting with his prospective partners in crime.  Hanging around in the foyer, Johnny explains to Pat that he doesn’t want to buy a ticket – he’s just waiting for his friend.  She tells him that, if he likes, he can get a view of the stage from just beside the box office.  He watches the show only briefly but long enough to convey a sense of how alien it is to Johnny.  When a commissionaire (Laurence Naismith) moves him on, disparaging him in implicitly racist terms, Pat vigorously takes Johnny’s part (as, more aggressively, does Dan when he arrives to discover what’s going on).  During their subsequent time together, Pat is unfailingly nice to Johnny.  His tone with her sharpens only once, when he refutes her assertion that race ‘doesn’t matter’.  Even so, Dearden and his actors always keep you aware of how far Pat is from understanding Johnny’s experience.  Her instant reabsorption into her usual group of white friends outside the Camberwell theatre isn’t over-emphasised but is eloquent.

The film sets up Canadian Dan, a girl-in-every-port sort self-confident in the company of both sexes, as an obvious counterpoint to Johnny.  Things change, though.  Dan gets into deep water with the jewel robbery pari passu with finding himself in a romantic relationship different from usual.  He falls out with pushy, brittle Maisie and gravitates towards demure but humorous Sally (Renée Asherson), a clerk in the Port of London Authority offices.  She starts the weekend thinking she’s in love with the reliably unreliable Harry (Leslie Phillips), another member of the Dunbar crew.   Twenty-four hours later, when the now desperate Dan tells her all, Sally is telling Dan she loves him, urging him to retrieve the gems from Johnny and to hand himself over to the investigating police detective (John Longden).  Dan eventually does just that.

I’d seen Earl Cameron and Bonar Colleano in smaller roles (Cameron in Sapphire and Two Gentlemen Sharing, Colleano in The Way to the Stars and Dance Hall).  Both are a revelation in these more extensive ones.  Cameron’s stranger in a strange land is a persuasive blend of wary, wondering and vulnerable.  His angry distress is powerful when, following his last sight of Pat, Johnny gets drunk and is robbed of the wad of cash Dan passed to him with the tin of brilliantine.  Colleano is even better.   With his big, unusual facial features and bony dynamism, he has real presence; his fast, casual delivery does a lot, especially in the early stages, to give the film momentum.  As Dan heads to Southwark Cathedral, he passes a Salvation Army band and puts something in their collection.  ‘The wages of sin’, he genially explains to the pretty girl taking the collection.  ‘Been working overtime?’ she affably replies.

Colleano is good from the start at showing how easily Dan moves from being a chancer to a criminal.  Even more impressive is how, without false histrionics, he later makes the transition from a man who acts on instinct to one forced to reflect on his actions.  Dan’s and Johnny’s final conversation is another illustration of the film’s alert handling of the racial element.  Early on the Monday morning, Dan recovers the jewels from Johnny and tells him to get back on ship.  When Johnny demurs, Dan yells, ‘Don’t you understand English?’, well aware that the insult will hurt his thin-skinned friend and drive him away, in the direction of the Dunbar.   Dan follows at some distance, to give himself up to the police who are waiting on board.  Johnny sees him approaching.  Their very last exchange is of a friendly wave to each other.  It’s a poignant moment, inevitably inflected, at this distance in time, by knowing how much or little life lay ahead for the two actors.  Bonear Colleano died in a car crash in 1958, aged thirty-four.   Earl Cameron is now in his hundred-and-third year.

Thanks to his nationality and ethnicity, each of Colleano and Cameron fits naturally into his character.  It’s not so easy for the actresses alongside them.  Watching Pool of London made me think, not the first time, that English women in films of this era  are liable to seem more socially artificial than their male counterparts.  (This is an issue in the mostly admirable Dance Hall.)  It’s possible the middle-class actresses concerned just weren’t any good at doing working-class accents.   But it’s almost as if, at least if they were playing sizeable roles, they were encouraged – as ladies – to reassure audiences of their actual social superiority to their screen characters.  This isn’t such a problem if the character is a ‘respectable’ girl – as Pat and Sally are in Pool of London.  Susan Shaw and Renée Asherson are, respectively, adequate and emotionally expressive in these parts.  The results are bizarre, though, in the case of Moira Lister’s hellcat Maisie.  Her younger sister (Joan Dowling), a much smaller part, is convincingly Cockney.  Lister’s Maisie, although she’s certainly a bitch, seems very much from the right side of the tracks, in both demeanour and voice.  Lister’s idea of suggesting otherwise is to say ‘orff’ for ‘off’.  But, then, so do (or did) the Royal Family.

Among the other crew members, Leslie Phillips (also still in the land of the living – he’s ninety-five now) stands out, in a comically good way, as Lothario Harry.  In a bad way, so does the tiresomely unfunny James Robertson Justice – a hyper-Caledonian engine room officer who spends the weekend alone on board ship, getting drunker and drunker.  By Sunday evening, he’s expostulating in usual Justice fashion.  The jewel thieves are standard-issue cons, with the notable exception of Max Adrian, as Charlie Vernon, a music-hall performer.  Vernon’s acrobatic abilities are useful in carrying out the robbery.  The limit to them proves eventually fatal, during an extended nighttime chase and showdown between the felons and the police.  This is one of several exciting sequences that makes good use of the London locations (and is well edited by Peter Tanner).

The moral rightness of the finale is stressed a bit too neatly in Sally’s quiet smile of approval as she hears the news of Dan’s self-sacrifice.  Sally told him a few hours before that she’d always wait for him.  Since he’s wanted for the killing of the security man, you’d think Sally would need to be reassured at least that the police believe everything Dan has told them before she expresses satisfaction.   But this hardly undoes all the good work that Basil Dearden has done in Pool of London.  Along with The League of Gentlemen (1960), it’s the best film of his that I’ve so far seen.

8 May 2020

[1] The film’s IMDb entry includes interesting recollections from ‘Bill K’, who worked as an apprentice electrician on the production.