Vernon Sewell (1947)
BFI curator Jo Botting seemed a bit below par introducing this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ number. As usual, she supplied plenty of good background information but sandwiched it between suggesting the most interesting thing about The Ghosts of Berkeley Square was its gestation and explaining she’d chosen it for reasons of personal nostalgia. Watching Vernon Sewell’s supernatural comedy again now, she admitted, had proved a rather underwhelming experience. I wondered if Botting was regretting and uneasy about her choice. At any rate, I was soon convinced she was right that its development was more worth hearing about than the film was worth watching. I walked out after half an hour.
With a screenplay by James Seymour, adapted from the comic novel No Nightingales by Caryl Brahms and S J Simon, The Ghosts of Berkeley Square opens at the annual reunion banquet of ‘The Ghost Society’, very like an old boys’ association shindig (the ghosts are all male) and being broadcast on television for the first time. The wonders of modern technology mean that the gathering is also invited by the presiding spectre, General Burlap (Robert Morley), to watch on a big screen above the banquet table the story of his and his pal Colonel Kelsoe (Felix Aylmer)’s ghostly story-so-far. At 50 Berkeley Square, during the reign of Queen Anne, these two old soldiers – known as Jumbo (Morley) and Bulldog (Aylmer) – prepare to play a trick on the preening Duke of Marlborough, whose military success and celebrity they resent, and whose appetite for further warfare they plan to thwart. Just as they’re expecting a visit from the queen, the trick goes wrong and kills the pair. Receiving the news as she arrives in her carriage, the miffed Anne returns to the palace whence she came. The ghosts of Jumbo and Bulldog are condemned to haunt the house until such time as a reigning monarch crosses the threshold.
The film’s narrative comprises a series of sketches, set in various eras from the early eighteenth century down to the present day. Jumbo and Bulldog repeatedly hope to get the curse lifted and repeatedly fail, so remaining confined to Berkeley Square barracks. Their luck finally changes when Queen Mary (still alive when the film was made) makes it through the front door. The sketches include ‘when the Nawab of Bagwash moves in, played by [Robert] Morley in blackface’. The first part of the film at least includes some weedy attempts to show bureaucracy surviving the afterlife – something Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death had done with purpose and imagination only the year before. Jo Botting mentioned that Vernon Sewell had plenty of experience in cinematic special effects but I saw no evidence hat he had any understanding of directing screen action or actors. The pacing is lame. I felt embarrassed for Felix Aylmer to see his talents so wasted. Although Robert Morley is one of those performers whose personality often seems to proof them against the defects of a picture, even he seems to feel the strain here.
It’s an odd thing. Whenever I see a British film drama of the early post-war years, I seem to find things of interest, regardless of the weaknesses: My Death is a Mockery, screened in this May’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ slot, is an obvious recent example. Isn’t-this-a-lark British comedies of the period, more often than not, tend to lack redeeming features. A few weeks ago, a friend passed on to us a DVD of C M Pennington-Richards’ Ladies Who Do (1963): watching it through was so stupefying I couldn’t even manage a note. (By coincidence, Robert Morley was one of the stars of that one too.) The evidence suggests in this particular case that isn’t a reflection of changing tastes: The Ghosts of Berkeley Square fared poorly at the box office seventy-odd years ago, despite ‘its stellar cast of highly respected character actors and its inventive use of special effects’ (Wikipedia). Jo Botting confirmed this, noting that the BFI showing would be only the third public screening of the film since its original release. That’s probably at least two screenings too many.
9 July 2019
