Liberal England

Yesterday we saw the first television appearance by Julie Walters. Tonight it's Maggie Smith's first credited film role, which was in 1958.

Being Maggie Smith, she received what we'd today call a BAFTA nomination for it.

Talking Pictures TV showed it a couple of days ago, but it's not found its way to their catch-up channel TPTV Encore.

Nowhere to Go was the penultimate film made by Ealing Studios. With its jazz soundtrack and refusal to spell everything out for the viewer, it looked forward, not back.

You could call it 'Ealing Noir', and that's not a ridiculous concept. One of the best Ealing films, It Always Rains on Sunday, has a claim on the Noir label too.

In this trailer look for a brief glimpse of Andrée Melly, then Harry H. Corbett in the back of the car in his days as the British Brando (again, this is not a joke) and then we see Maggie Smith. Playing a rich girl looking for kicks, she lights up the screen.

You can find Nowhere to Go on a dodgy Russian site if you ask Google Videos, but I didn't tell you that, right?

If you watch it, here are three notes on the locations.

The disused railway platforms at the start are long since demolished. They were on the still operating North to East curve at Kew Bridge station.

When the villain and Maggie Smith arrive in Wales we see, not the Brecon Beacons, but Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. The chimneys do not belong to a steelworks in the valleys but to the old Tunnel Cement works at Pitstone.

And the big house is Gadebridge House, which was in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. It was demolished long ago, and its grounds now form Gadebridge Park in the new town.

I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests that by 1954 these unofficial open spaces were just as dangerous to adults as they were to children.

Talking Pictures TV showed The Eight O'Clock Walk the other day. This was a film born out of concern at the death penalty and reliance upon circumstantial evidence.

As you can see in the clip above, Richard Attenborough has an April Fool trick played on him by a little girl who says she's lost her doll on a bombsite. Being in a happy mood, he tries to help her.

Later, she is found murdered on the same bombsite, And when that woman reports seeing Attenborough shaking his fist and chasing the girl, the police become very interested in him.

The original children-and-bombsites film was Ealing's Hue and Cry from 1947, which portrays the bombsites as an unofficial playground for all the boys of London - and the children shown are all boys, except for Joan Dowling.

But within a few years, British films; view of bombsites had changed completely - terrible things happened to small boys who wandered on to them.

The only substantial exception to this pattern I've found is Innocent Sinners from 1958. This film suggested that bombsites provided working-class children with the space and privacy they lacked in their overcrowded homes. It is also the only children-and-bombsites film with a girl at its centre.

What was so threatening about bombsites? The way Rose Macaulay painted them may give us a clue:

This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven.

The Eight O'clock Walk is not on Talking Pictures catch-up service TPTV Encore, but you can find it on one of those dodgy Russian sites.

And - don't worry - Attenborough escapes the noose, but it takes an absurd, Perry Mason courtroom coup to save him.

Reading a recent London Review of Books, I came across Ruby Hamilton's review of three books by Celia Dale:

The appeal of Dale’s writing is clearly the same fetishisation* of English nastiness that bolstered the interwar 'golden age' of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms."

I like Hamilton's take on the those women crime writers. There is rarely anything cosy about them - least of all about Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, predicated as they are on the theory that you can learn about every form of human depravity simply by observing life in an English village.

But Kind Hearts and Coronets is not a typical Ealing comedy, even if it's the best of them. Because there is little nastiness in these films: the criminals in The Lavender Hill Mob have our sympathy, while those in The Ladykillers are rendered harmless by their incompetence.

What the films tend to celebrate is the common good and its triumphs over individual ambition. This is seen at its clearest in Davy, a failed star vehicle for Harry Secombe, which is the last and probably the worse Ealing Comedy. In it, Secombe gives up his dream of an opera career to remain with his family's struggling variety act.

But then dreams of escape tended to come to nothing at Ealing, whether Alec Guinness's in The Lavender Hill Mob or those of a whole London district in Passport to Pimlico.

So I don't find the nastiness that Ruby Hamilton says she finds in the Ealing comedies. Am I missing something?

* 'Fetishising' would save one syllable and the rarer 'fetishing' would save two.

The great American director Martin Scorsese has curated a series of striking but undervalued British films. It opens at the British Film Institute tomorrow and runs until the end of the month. You can find the programme on the BFI website.

You could argue that Went the Day Well? and It Always Rains on Sunday have now been given their rightful place in the canon, but it's a very good selection. 

Scorsese was interviewed about the season for Sight and Sound by James Bell. He talks about is love of British films in general and, enticingly, of the long list of films he originally chose.

Mark Kermode writes about the season in the Observer too.

"The party’s organizing basis since the first day Trump took office has been to treat him as a civic emergency. This is the basis for demanding donations, volunteering, and sacrifice. If they are not willing to endure the relatively modest discomfort of a contentious intraparty debate to minimize the chance of a second Trump term, they’ll have broken faith with their supporters." Jonathan Chait says the Democrats will be making a terrible mistake if they stick with Jo Biden.

Paul Bernal warns against heeding Tony Blair's call for the introduction of digital ID cards.

"Doing the right thing economically ... meant Labour opened the door to the Conservatives who enthusiastically exploited popular frustration with austerity - as articulated in the famous 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. This allowed the party to appeal especially to middle-class voters who had supported Labour for the first time in 1945." Steven Fielding warns Labour against repeating the mistake made by Clement Attlee.

Humanists UK provides a history of non-religious prime ministers and other politicians.

"As she sings in Backwoods Barbie (2008), 'Don’t judge me by the cover cause I’m a real good book.' When fans dig into Parton’s songs, books, films, and autobiography, they uncover an egalitarian vision of social cooperation." William Irwin examines Dolly Parton's philosophy.

Katya Witney thinks England chose the right time to retire James Anderson: "In the last Ashes series in Australia, Anderson took eight wickets in the three Test matches he played. He hasn’t played more than three Tests in an Ashes since the 2017/18 series, a calf injury limiting his participation in 2019 and being less effective than Mark Wood and Chris Woakes keeping him out of the XI last summer."

"Between 2012 and 2019, austerity was responsible for an estimated 335,000 excess deaths. The rate of prescription of antidepressants in England has doubled since 2011: nearly 20 per cent of adults now take them. The average height of children who grew up under austerity fell relative to European benchmarks." William Davies on 14 years of Conservative rule.

Guy Shrubsole analyses Labour's environmental policies.

Naomi Fisher says we’re in the middle of a cultural clash in the way that we understand mental health: "The way that we understand distress is deeply rooted in our culture and time, but it doesn’t feel like that to us. We tend to think that the way we understand things now is the right way, superior to previous generations and other cultures."

"On the May Bank Holiday weekend, I was walking with a group of refugees. We managed a couple of short strenuous climbs, a gorge scramble and long open stretches along the contours of the hills. The walks were tiring and testing, and the wind, rain and sun took turns to blast us. But they were joyful and exhilarating walks. I saw people stretch out their arms and point their faces up to the sky as I do. Their eyes sparkled and their smiles broadened with the beauty and the expanse of it all." Stella Perrott believes the beauty and health benefits of the countryside must be shared with everyone, regardless of background or financial status

"Went the Day Well has been praised for its stark realism, including hostage-taking, numerous close-ups of shootings, threats to execute children and the murder of an elderly vicar during a church service.  Some critics find this surprising in the context of wartime propaganda.  But this is perhaps to misunderstand the film’s purpose, which was surely instructional as much as it was morale boosting." Jeremy Burchardt watches Went the Day Well?, Cavalcanti's 1942 masterpiece.

Emine Saner talks to Cyndi Lauper: "The song Girls Just Want to Have Fun wasn’t written by Lauper, but she changed the lyrics and the feel of the song and it became a huge hit. Suddenly she was famous, but isolated."

"But the personal consequences for Rafiq have been just as severe. Since the moment he stepped before the digital, culture, media and sport ... committee, he has faced relentless abuse, attacks and death threats. 'My life changed over that hour and 45 minutes,' he says in his soft Barnsley accent. His new memoir, It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism, recounts some of the worst moments: the human excrement left on his parents' lawn, the chain-wielding man who stalked his house in the middle of the night." Azeem Rafiq talks to Emma John about racism, cricket and why he had to leave Britain.

Simon James welcomes the way the Liberal Democrat manifesto puts arts education at the centre of the party's plans for culture.

Liam O'Farrell went to a talk by John Rogers on his new book about London: "Rogers delves into the city’s ancient history following a chance conversation with a Pearly Punk King on the rooftop of the old Foyles building. This encounter takes him through Epping Forest to the prehistory of London in the Upper Lea Valley, unearthing Bronze Age burial mounds and their significance in understanding London’s historical roots and its enduring connection to its past."

"Putting Peter Grimes on stage was not as straightforward as it might have been. Initially, the story, scenario and the characters underwent substantial changes in the early stages of drafting. At first, Britten had Grimes murdering his apprentices rather than being at worst negligent, and Grimes originally goes mad in the marshes and dies there." Georg Predota looks back to 1945 and the Saddler's Wells premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera.

Ian Vince goes in search of ley lines. " What [Alfred] Watkins saw convinced him that there was a grid of secret lines in the Herefordshire countryside; a network of mounds, hummocks and tumps, moats, megaliths and camps that coalesced to form the nodes of a prehistoric track system."

"Hamer’s use of locations throughout the film is distinctive and surprisingly gothic at times. From seemingly innocuous suburbia and Edwardian retreats to country seats, castles and villages, the breadth of locations gives the film a visual strength above its more studio-bound peers." Adam Scovell revisits the locations use in the 1949 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.

When I tweeted my post about the Guardian's ranking of the Ealing comedies, someone replied  that Passport to Pimlico is her favourite among them and that Margaret Rutherford's performance in it is wonderful.

That reminded me of a story from the memoirs of T.E.B. 'Tibby' Clarke, who wrote the screenplay for Passport to Pimlico.

He had written the part of the professor with Alastair Sim in mind, but when the time came to make the film, Sim was not available. The more that alternative actors were suggested, the more strongly the filmmakers felt that Sim was irreplaceable.

Then someone had a brainwave and suggested Margaret Rutherford. The mood brightened. 

"We'll have to rewrite the screenplay, of course," said one. When Clarke sat down with it, he found he had to change only one line.

Andrew Pulver has ranked all 19 Ealing Comedies for the Guardian. In the process, he notices some films that even I have not seen. But I've seen most of them, so here are a few thoughts on his reviews and rankings. 

Following his counting up the list up from 19th and last place, my first comment is that Hue and Cry is ranked far too low at 16th place. The film a celebration of the way boys ruled London and its bombsites - this would never be seen in such a positive light in a British film again - and there are fine performances by Jack Warner and Alastair Sim.

I can't make much of a case for The Magnet, which stars an 11-year-old James Fox, being placed much higher than the 14th place where Pulver has it, but he gets some things about the film wrong. Fox did not go near a drama school until he was 16: the accent he has in the film is that of a prep school boy of the day, and this is just what he is playing here. Parts of  The Wirral were very posh in 1950. 

Barnacle Bill is at 13. Pulver, quite fairly, says Alec Guinness never gets out of third gear in this film, but then Guinness in third is better than most actors in fifth. When you see his walk at the start of the film you believe absolutely that he is a former Naval officer. The film also sees Ealing take the side of teenagers against the stuffy establishment of the seaside resort where it is set. And where else will you see Guinness boogying with Jackie Collins?

Harry Secombe's star vehicle Davy is too high at 10. As Pulver admits, he isn't much of an actor and the film's approval of his character's surrender of his operatic ambitions for the sake of the family variety act is a bit Ealing-by-numbers.

I'm pleased to see the The Maggie (which is rather like a harder-edged Local Hero) in seventh place, which is one above the more celebrated The Titfield Thunderbolt. For me, the latter film's awareness of its own quirkiness is a sign of the studio's decline. The train must be saved because its quaint, not because it helps anyone get to where they want to go.

From now 6 down to 1, Pulver gets it pretty much right:

6. Passport to Pimlico

5. Whisky Galore!

4. The Man in the White Suit

3. The Lavender Hill Mob

2. The Ladykillers

1. Kind Hearts and Coronets

They are all celebrated films, though maybe The Man in the White Suit deserves to be even better known. Its satire hits the spot more accurately than the Boulting Brothers ever managed, perhaps because it doesn't star Ian Carmichael.

It's also worth noting that Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its period setting, is far from being a typical Ealing film. And Pulver gets it right in saying that Dennis Price is its real star.

Search for a list of the 10 best British films and there's a good chance that both Brief Encounter and Kind Hearts and Coronets will feature in it. In the Empire Online list from a couple of months ago, for instance, they figure at 5 and 7 respectively.

So it's good that in recent days I have come across outstanding podcasts about both.

The Cine-Files, like all the best podcasts, has two presenters. And what is so good about their edition on Brief Encounter is that one of them, Steve Morris, is already convinced of its greatness, while the other, John Rocha, very much remains to be convinced.

By the end of it, I think Morris will have convinced every listener that David Lean's direction, Noel Coward's dialogue and Celia Johnson's acting add up to something quite extraordinary. And I, at least, came away wondering if the hero of the film isn't Johnson's husband Fred.

If you want a little more on Brief Encounter, then try the episode of the BBC's Free Thinking on Why we Need Weepies. Like Cine-Files, it entertains the terrible possibility that Johnson may not be the first woman Trevor Howard has picked up at Milford Junction.

The Comfort Blanket podcast bills itself as:

"talking about the films, TV shows, books or music which people go to again and again to feel safe, happy and welcome."

But there's nothing comfortable about the latest edition, where Naomi Alderman brings along Kind Hearts and Coronets for discussion.

This, after all, is a film in which we are invited to take the part of a mass murderer and do so enthusiastically. And we are left wondering whether, after the film closes, Joan Greenwood's Sibella won't prove to be the deadliest character of all.

My only complaint is that no one on the podcast is aware that the journalist who turns up at the end to ask about Louis's memoirs is played by a young Arthur Lowe.

If you want a little more, then try the Soho Bites Podcast episode on the film Monsieur Ripois, which interviews Joan Greenwood's son Jason Morell.