Bernard Knowles (1949)
The BFI curator Jo Botting gave one of her most enjoyable introductions to this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ screening. Highly informative about the source material for The Lost People, she was also unflinching in quoting examples of the film’s largely negative reception in 1949. The screenplay by Bridget Boland is adapted from her play Cockpit, first staged the previous year. The setting of both play and film is a theatre in Germany, shortly after the end of World War II. The building currently serves as a displaced persons centre, supervised by British soldiers, for refugees and recently released prisoners of war. The 1948 production of Cockpit at the Playhouse Theatre in London was innovative. The displaced person characters – including, among others, Serbs and Croats, Russians and Poles – often spoke in their own language. Throughout the play, actors popped up in various parts of the auditorium to deliver their lines. Cockpit didn’t enjoy a long run but a review in the Times described it as a ‘hazardous but entirely successful experiment in applying the technique of the documentary film to the stage’.
After a short opening sequence outdoors, The Lost People moves inside the theatre and stays there. The plot involves characters wanting to get out of the centre and a suspected outbreak of bubonic plague within it that means no one can – so the single indoor setting retains some of the claustrophobia that must have been a major feature of Cockpit. The lingual complexity of the stage production isn’t retained. Since the bulk of British cinemagoers of the time weren’t used to watching subtitled fare, this might seem an inevitable concession to commercial realism. At any rate, with everyone speaking English the film doesn’t present verbal misunderstanding as a cause of, or analogue to, the tribal tensions at the heart of the story.
As the Wikipedia plot synopsis puts it, ‘the displaced people, after uniting against fascism for five years, begin to disintegrate into their own ancient feuds: Serb against Croat, Pole against Russian, resistance fighter against collaborator and everyone against the Jews’. The suspected outbreak of a deadly disease temporarily restores a common enemy and corps d’esprit. Once the fears of plague have been allayed, internecine hostilities resume and result in the killing of a young Polish woman – in a case of mistaken identity. In the closing speech, Captain Ridley, the British officer in charge of the centre, solemnly reminds its occupants that it’s now ‘up to you’ to decide whether to co-exist peacefully. Delivered to camera, the words are thus addressed to not only the other characters but also the film’s audience. The Lost People is dramatically primitive but decidedly didactic.
Jo Botting said that Dennis Price, who plays Ridley, came in for especially harsh censure from contemporary reviewers because he had some of the script’s ‘direst’ (Botting’s word) lines to speak. The last point is right enough – Ridley represents an essentially complacent chauvinism, a Britain-knows-best mentality – but I thought Price’s acting was good, certainly good enough to prevent the film’s peroration from being laughable. Besides, Ridley is regularly on the receiving end of criticism from certain of the refugees. Marie (Siobhan McKenna), the resistance worker whom he first meets in the outside world when both are en route to the theatre and to whom he’s instantly attracted, is repeatedly too clever for him. Since he speaks in the voice of what was surely, in British WWII-themed films of the time, conventional authority and good sense, it’s interesting that Ridley is cut down to size as often as he is.
Price isn’t nearly as ridiculous as some of the Anglophone actors playing displaced persons. They typically speak in heavy-duty Mittel-European accents. Some wear make-up designed to give them a war-ravaged look but which suggests, rather, that the refugees have been amusing themselves applying Leichner left in the dark theatre. I didn’t think Siobhan McKenna was any great shakes as Marie but she keeps up a passable French accent: it’s both daft and insulting to McKenna that Marie explains that she’s actually Irish but her second husband was French. Richard Attenborough and Mai Zetterling are Jan and Lili, a young couple (from different sides of Europe) wed in the centre by a priest (Harcourt Williams) who was tortured by the Nazis. Attenborough is often sensitive though the poor staging of the final scene defeats him. After Lili has been killed by the French collaborationist farmer (Marcel Poncin) who meant to murder Marie, Jan, though visible on screen, is required to delay any reaction to his new bride’s death until Captain Ridley has finished speaking.
The most comfortable acting comes from William Hartnell as Ridley’s right-hand man, the diligent, straightforward Sergeant Barnes. When Marie makes him coffee ‘in ze French style’ and he takes a first sip, you rather dread the reaction: it’s a small miracle that Hartnell’s delivery of the judgment – ‘very French’ – actually makes you laugh. (He makes it sound as if Barnes is admitting he can’t argue with the fact even if he doesn’t really approve of it.) Although Bernard Knowles receives the sole directing credit, Muriel Box took over the directing reins for the reshooting of certain sequences, some time after the original production had wrapped. (Box receives a credit instead for the writing of ‘additional scenes’.) From what Jo Botting said, it seems not to be known who was behind the camera for which bits of The Lost People – not least, perhaps, because the direction is pretty flat-footed throughout.
7 March 2019
