Anthony Pelissier (1949)

Two British films released in consecutive years, each based on a short story by a celebrated English novelist, share as a plot catalyst the friendly relations between an upper-middle-class boy and a servant.  Whereas Graham Greene wrote the screenplay for Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), an adaptation of Greene’s story The Basement Room, D H Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner reached the screen nearly two decades after the author’s death:  first published in 1926, the story is updated to the late 1940s in Anthony Pelissier’s screenplay.  The Fallen Idol is perhaps the better film (it’s certainly the better known) but The Rocking Horse Winner runs it a close second.

In The Fallen Idol a diplomat’s young son moves from hero worship of the embassy butler to suspecting him of murder.  In The Rocking Horse Winner young Paul Grahame (John Howard Davies) and his parents’ newly recruited odd-job man Bassett (John Mills) hit it off immediately.  Paul, unlike the diplomat’s son, doesn’t become disillusioned with his much older companion but the two stories do have something else in common:  a child takes what he sees or hears from adults at face value, with traumatic results.   In The Rocking Horse Winner, Paul is misled not by Bassett but by his mother, Hester (Valerie Hobson).

Hester and her husband Richard (Hugh Sinclair) have three children – Paul is the eldest – and a nice house.  They employ, as well as Bassett, a nanny (Susan Richards) and a cook but they live well beyond their means.  The family is continually in debt thanks to Richard’s failure to keep a decent job and gambling at cards, and Hester’s lavish spending.  The Grahames are repeatedly bailed out by Hester’s elder brother Oscar (Ronald Squire), whose batman Bassett was during the recent war.  Before that, he worked as a stable lad and occasionally rode as a jockey – Bassett shows Paul a photograph of him winning a race.  The boy is taken with it and with the rocking horse his parents get him for Christmas.  Bassett shows Paul how to sit on the toy horse as if it were a racehorse, assuring  the boy that ‘if you speak nicely to him and whisper in his ear, there’s not a race he wouldn’t win for you’.  When Uncle Oscar makes him a present of a whip, Paul is able to ride the rocking horse all the more vigorously.

Paul realises his parents don’t have the money they need, and discovers from a crucial conversation with his mother why they don’t:  it’s all a matter of luck.

Hester: Your father has no luck. …

Paul: Are you lucky, Mummy?

Hester: I thought I was before I was married.  Now I think I’m very unlucky.  …

Paul: I’m lucky. … If you’re lucky, you keep on getting more money, don’t you?

Hester: I suppose so.

Paul: That’s what you said.  And I have money in my money box. And I keep on getting it. So I must be lucky, mustn’t I?  I’ll give it to you if you like, Mummy.  All of it.   You can have it all!

All is twenty-two shillings and seven pence at the last count.  Even though Hester doesn’t take up his offer, Paul is determined to continue getting richer, to help his mother, whom he loves very much.  He finds an extraordinary way of doing so:  he develops a mysterious knack for picking horse racing winners.  He goes into ‘partnership’ with Bassett, who puts their bets on.  In time, Paul lets Uncle Oscar in on the secret.  The contents of a cash box, kept under lock and key in Bassett’s quarters, increase to several hundred pounds, and keep growing.

The Rocking Horse Winner depends significantly on supernatural elements but there’s nothing fey about these:  they’re rooted in real psychological anxiety and need.  Paul hears the house ‘whispering’ to him – the insistent susurration ‘There must be more money, more money, more money…’ plays on the soundtrack.  What might have been a merely conventional eerie effect is transformed by our knowing that Paul isn’t just sensitive to domestic atmosphere but has picked up the house’s message from remarks he’s overheard his parents making.  His conviction that a particular racehorse will win comes through energetically riding the rocking horse – the result, in other words, of considerable physical effort and mental concentration.  It feels like an act of will rather than a piece of magic.  (Whenever Paul’s unsure about his choice of horse, it loses.)  And there’s no sentimentalisation of the animal in the nursery – quite the opposite.  Paul doesn’t give his toy horse a name.  (It is, rather, a means of eliciting other equine names.)  The exposed teeth in the rocking horse’s mouth give it an increasingly sinister grin.  The postscript to the story’s tragic climax sees Bassett, on Hester’s instruction, set fire to the rocking horse.  In the film’s final shot, the toy looks unnervingly resistant to the enveloping flames.

Anthony Pelissier had an unusual career as a cinema director.  The Rocking Horse Winner was the second of six features he made within only four years, sandwiched between The History of Mr Polly (also starring John Mills) and Night Without Stars.  Pelissier also directed a segment of the anthology film Encore during this short time before moving into television.  In the late 1960s, he made a few documentary shorts but never directed a feature film after Meet Mr Lucifer (1953).  (He died in 1988.)  The Rocking Horse Winner suggests this was a real loss to British cinema.  Pelissier’s storytelling is clear, economical and sometimes imaginative – as in an episode cross-cutting between Paul’s exciting, enjoyable afternoon with Oscar at Goodwood races (and it really is Goodwood) and Hester’s concurrent, humiliating visit to a pawnbroker (Charles Goldner) – to raise the cash she needs to get rid of the bailiff (Cyril Smith) who has arrived at the Grahames’ home.

As usual in a British film of the era, it takes a while to adjust to aspects of the acting style.  John Mills’s working-man accent, at the start, veers uncertainly between London and the West Country.   While Ronald Squire is agreeably relaxed and understated throughout, Valerie Hobson and Hugh Sinclair sometimes seem wooden.  Pelissier handles the cast skilfully, though:  in the end, all the performances are effective.  (This includes the smaller roles, notably Susan Richards’s nanny and Charles Goldner’s intent, observant pawnbroker.)   Leading players from David Lean’s famous Dickens films join forces here:  Mills and Hobson were the adult Pip and Estella in Great Expectations (1946), John Howard Davies the title character in Oliver Twist (1948).  It’s arguable that all three, under Pelissier’s direction, surpass what they achieved with Lean.

In fact, this is unarguable in Valerie Hobson’s case.  It wasn’t a great loss to British cinema when, in 1954, she retired from acting to become Mrs John Profumo but what she does in The Rocking Horse Winner is in a different league from Hobson’s work in Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets.  What comes across at first as shallow acting somehow develops into a remarkably unsentimental portrait of a woman trapped in the social prejudices and compulsions of her time and class, whose determined materialism limits her capacity for maternal love.  Hobson’s speech rhythms reinforce Hester’s impatience – convey that she never quite has time to bother with Paul.  Hobson is especially good in the pawn shop sequence, where Hester, desperate and offended, repeatedly struggles to subdue her distaste for the man she’s forced to do business with.  Although he’s much stronger than Hobson in Great Expectations, John Mills’s presence here reminds you that he was on the old side to play Pip; in his late thirties at the time, Mills got by thanks largely to his lack of height and weight.  He’s effortlessly middle-aged in The Rocking Horse Winner, which he also produced.  He plays Bassett with humour, warmth and empathy, without salt-of-the-earth condescension.

John Howard Davies (the future producer of Fawlty Towers) is so memorable in Oliver Twist that it’s harder to say that he’s better in The Rocking Horse Winner but his Paul is emotionally richer than his Oliver.  Here’s another similarity between this picture and The Fallen Idol: both feature outstanding performances from (fair-haired) boy actors.  Davies, who was ten when the film was made, manages to seem both older and younger than that:  he’s willowy, not much shorter than John Mills; he combines eager innocence with utter seriousness of purpose.  Paul is doing what he knows his mother needs but she doesn’t know he’s doing it – and he doesn’t understand the implications of her incorrigible extravagance (or his father’s financial irresponsibility).  John Howard Davies makes the predicament poignant.

Although it might seem far from typical D H Lawrence material, The Rocking Horse Winner sometimes reminded me of Sons and Lovers, and not just because the protagonists have the same first name.   It’s a matter of resonances rather than direct similarities.  The bonds between Gertrude Morel and her sons are much more complex than the relationship between Paul Grahame and his mother; besides, Hester doesn’t come close to reciprocating the strength of her son’s feelings for her.  However, she, like Gertrude, thinks she deserved a better husband than the one she got.  There’s no antagonism between Paul and Richard Grahame, as there is between Paul and Walter Morel – yet both fathers are excluded from the salient dynamic within the family.  Richard (at least as Hugh Sinclair plays him) is such a weak presence he’s hardly there at all and his interaction with Paul is negligible.  (He’s also conspicuously absent from the final scene between Hester and Bassett.)  Richard nevertheless makes an interesting remark in response to Hester’s concern that Paul is ‘such a strange boy – so easily upset’.  ‘He ought to be at school’ is her husband’s brisk reply.

That’s a thought the viewer may have been having throughout the film.  Paul is as short of other children’s company as the diplomat’s son in The Fallen Idol but the latter’s isolation, in the much shorter timeframe of the story, is no mystery:  the boy is left in the care of the butler and his wife while his parents are briefly away from their embassy home.  Paul Grahame has two younger sisters but, apart from the early scenes in the nursery and round the Christmas tree, they’re barely seen together.  The boy has no friends; when he first meets Bassett, Paul enthuses that ‘It’s great having someone new’.  Despite that, you don’t get the impression that Paul is bored or lonely but the set-up is skewed so as to stress how a young child lives in his own world and the primacy of his mother in that world.  It makes Freudian sense that Richard Grahame, shiftless as he is, speaks up briefly for the reality principle.

The intensity of Paul’s mission is expressed both in the alarming effort that he puts into finding winners and in the size of the fortune he makes doing so.  After an especially lucrative run, Oscar arranges for five thousand pounds of the money Paul and Bassett have accrued to be paid to Hester, in five annual instalments, under cover of a story from the family lawyer that she’s inherited the money from a long-lost relative.  The immediate consequences make clear why Paul’s quest is doomed to failure:  when Hester resumes her former shopping sprees, her son’s ‘luck’ deserts him.  The losing bets mount up and the cash-box contents dwindle.  As the Epsom Derby approaches, Paul is already ill, showing signs of nervous exhaustion.  He’s nonetheless determined to find the Derby winner and, on the eve of the race, embarks on a marathon rocking-horse ride that ends with him calling out the name ‘Malabar’ and collapsing unconscious.  That night, he keeps calling out the horse’s name; Oscar and Bassett place a sizeable bet on Malabar.  The following evening, Bassett comes to Paul’s bedside to tell him the horse has won the Derby.  The boy comes to briefly, receives the news happily and dies.

In a letter to Edward Garnett, D H Lawrence summarised the psychosomatic resolution of Sons and Lovers as follows:

‘The battle goes on between the mother and [the women with whom Paul Morel is romantically involved], with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the ties of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die.’

The death that climaxes The Rocking Horse Winner also feels emotionally necessary – though it’s more upsetting than Gertrude Morel’s:  John Howard Davies’s radiant benevolence makes matters worse in that respect.  There’s no consolation in the film’s ending, except for Bassett’s refusal to obey the anguished Hester’s order to burn, along with the rocking horse, the contents of the cash box (£70,000 – a staggering sum, equivalent to around £2.4m today).

This gripping and powerful film often looks good.  Desmond Dickinson did the black-and-white cinematography: he and Anthony Pelissier combine mainly realistic visuals with eccentrically angled camerawork and heightened lighting for Paul’s rocking horse rides.  William Alwyn’s score supports the action without, for the most part, over-interpreting it.  Even allowing for the grim conclusion, it’s hard to understand why The Rocking Horse Winner seems to have been so overlooked at the time of its release.  Perhaps spending money on a cinema ticket to watch a spendthrift in action just didn’t appeal to potential audiences in post-war austerity Britain.

21 April 2020