Ralph Thomas (1950)

IMDb gives the running time as ninety-five minutes.  My DVD runs for only eighty-one:  an online review by Adam Wilson[1] helpfully itemises the material cut from this version.  I’m not sure how much seeing The Clouded Yellow uncut would have changed my thoughts about it but the note below clearly needs this health warning …

The DVD sleeve also describes Ralph Thomas’s mystery film as ‘An edge of the seat thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock’.   Although that’s not really the case, the scenario does echo The 39 Steps in several ways.  The main couple are fugitives as a result of one of them being wrongfully suspected of murder.  They travel from place to place, trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers and uncover the truth of what happened to get them into their predicament.  Solving the mystery depends on unlocking a crucial memory.  There are significant differences from The 39 Steps too.  The principals already know each other, and the mutual attraction between them is clear, by the time they go on the run together.  And in this case, it’s the heroine, not the hero, who’s wanted for murder.

After working in espionage during World War II, David Somers (Trevor Howard) is ‘let go’ by the British secret service.  In need of a job of some kind, he takes on an assignment to catalogue the large butterfly collection of Nicholas Fenton (Barry Jones) at his home in the English countryside.  The household also includes Fenton’s wife Jess (Sonia Dresdel) and her emotionally troubled, orphaned niece Sophie Malraux (Jean Simmons).  Sophie’s psychological problems result from the childhood trauma of discovering her parents’ dead bodies:  her father apparently killed her mother then himself.  The other key figure in the vicinity is Hick (Maxwell Reed), a dodgy gamekeeper with whom Jess has been having a supposedly secret affair.   Hick also taunts and pesters Sophie.  When he’s found stabbed to death, a combination of the girl’s curious behaviour and circumstantial evidence points to her guilt.

The script by Janet Green and Eric Ambler isn’t the best.  Insect cataloguing is an amusing change of tack for an ex-spy and it’s not the writers’ fault that The Collector casts a long shadow for a viewer coming to The Clouded Yellow after seeing William Wyler’s film.  But the lepidopterist isn’t much of a metaphor here – not, at least, beyond the idea of Sophie as, like the title species, rare, beautiful and fragile (and caught in a net).  Nicholas Fenton is eventually revealed as homicidally possessive but only of his serially adulterous wife.  Besides, it’s clear too soon that this apparently benign fellow is the killer of Sophie’s parents and Hick.  Jess is the only other possibility and it would be feebly obvious if she were the culprit since the screenplay sets her up as prime suspect in the viewer’s mind and Sonia Dresdel telegraphs Jess’s sinister side.  There’s a moment, while she and Somers are on the run, when Sophie fearfully imagines that she sees the figure of Jess approaching them.  The vision triggers a memory that her aunt was present when Sophie found her parents dead but this, unless I misunderstood, is merely a red herring[2].

Getting fired by the secret service places David Somers in the company of male screen protagonists of the period who, after ‘a good war’, struggle to adjust to peacetime civvy street.  One of the script’s strengths, further reinforced by Trevor Howard’s excellent characterisation, is in showing how Somers uses the nerve and resource that were his professional stock-in-trade, as well as contacts made during his secret agent years, on a mission increasingly driven by his personal feelings for Sophie.  What’s less clear, at least in this abbreviated version of The Clouded Yellow, is why the secret service chief (André Morell) so readily gets rid of Somers only then to have him tailed by his former colleague Willy Shepley (Kenneth More).  (I get the writers’ motivation for this – it’s integral to the plot – but not the spymaster’s.)

At first, Kenneth More has an indifferent air, as if frustrated to be playing such a reserved character.  This starts to make sense, however, once Shepley’s feelings of kinship with Somers, and consequently mixed feelings about tracking him down, emerge.  In the end, More’s acting is impressive.  With the signal exception of Maxwell Reed (it’s as well Hick gets a letter-opener in the back before Reed can do any more bad acting), the supporting cast is fine  – most notably Lily Kann as a mittel-European whom Somers brought to safety in England during the war and who is now keen to repay her debt to him, and Maire O’Neill, as the keeper of a safe house (which proves to be anything but).

It’s the two leads, though, who elevate The Clouded Yellow and enrich the title’s adjective:  what’s going inside Somers and Sophie – what’s obscured from view – is crucial to the story.  Trevor Howard, admirably understated yet incisive in the early scenes on the Fenton estate, builds a highly persuasive portrait of a man who was good at a difficult job and has known unhappiness:  the discipline required for the former has taught Somers to keep evidence of the latter under wraps.  The age difference between him and Sophie is striking (Trevor Howard was sixteen years older than his co-star) but it makes emotional sense that Somers, accustomed to protecting deserving cases, is drawn to this unstable, unhappy girl.

Jean Simmons is remarkable:  she engages so completely with the character that you accept that the decidedly vulnerable Sophie, in order to escape from the prison of her life with the Fentons, is willing and able to take an extraordinary adventure and ordeal in her stride.  In the closing stages, the film turns into, on the surface at least, a routine action picture – albeit that the climax on rooftops high above a railway line is genuinely exciting.  The ending is almost laughably abrupt yet it feels right.  Simmons and Howard have thoroughly convinced you that Sophie and Somers are made for each other – so that seeing them both survive and walk away from the camera together is all you need.

Ralph Thomas is best remembered for much lighter fare than this – the ‘Doctor’ films, then ‘Carry On’ – but his unobtrusive direction is often astute.  Benjamin Frankel’s score supports the narrative well and Thomas’s use of it is, for the time, unusually rationed and effective:  the film is particularly suspenseful and unnerving when it’s silent.  Almost needless to say, this black-and-white thriller has come to be defined as British noir:  Geoffrey Unsworth’s expressive chiaroscuro lighting certainly helps justify the label.  The cross-country chase allows for some fascinating views, shot on location, of contemporary England:  Newcastle-upon-Tyne (showing the legacy of World War II bomb damage), the Lake District and Liverpool – in order of stops on the principals’ urgent itinerary.

21 December 2019

[1] http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/dvd/c/clouded_yellow_uncut.html

[2] Something (else) I must have got wrong but can’t get right from reading up about the film … I thought Jess told Somers that Sophie’s father, an eminent classical composer, was her brother rather than her brother-in-law.  Yet Fenton killed Malraux because Jess was having an affair with him, as she was with Hick. (Fenton killed Malraux’s wife along with him simply in order to disguise the nature of the crime.)   This suggests either that Jess and her brother were incestuous lovers or that Fenton was demented enough to suspect that they were.