Oh! We Do Like to be Beside the Seaside

Talking of some things not changing...

The Graham Greene novel 'Brighton Rock' is among my favourites - if not my top novel of all time. Quite often, people are hyper-critical of films of their favourite novels, but I have nothing but praise for the 1947 film of the same name.  Perhaps it is because I grew up knowing the film, and it coloured my view of the novel when I came to read it.  But equally it could simply be because it is one heck of a film.  Richard Attenborough is so menacing in the role of Pinky that you wouldn't dare say a word against him!  William Hartnell also needs singling out for his portrayal of Dalloway, and translating this multi faceted personality into a screen character.  Greene himself wrote the screenplay, ensuring that nothing was lost from the story.  It is a film of style and integrity and must rank among the top classic novel to screen translations.

The scenes of the British at leisure are just as much a draw to me as the storyline.  After watching the film you can conclude that in fact, little has changed over the past 60+ years.  A visit to a seaside resort today could still follow a pattern that would be familiar to our ancestors - except of course the method of travel.  The pier, the beach and sitting in the sun are the backbones of the day.  Hale meets his doom on the ghost train, and Pinky follows up the murder by winning a prize at a shooting stall - activities still far from obsolete.  Cafes and pubs still make up a large part of the seafront.  Compare this to, say, George Formby in the 1930s film 'No Limit', and the Carry On team in Brighton in the 1970s 'Carry on at Your Convenience'.  Shooting ranges, the ghost train - they're all there.  It seems that since the seaside resort took off with the invention of paid holidays we've only ever been after one thing - a drink, a sit down and then being scared half to death in the name of fun.

See http://drmattkerry.blogspot.co.uk/ for some more seaside films.

Fair Games

Any film starring Alistair Sim is worth a look and the 1941 'Cottage to Let' is up there with the best of them.  His character, Charles Dimble, is initially an annoying nosy parker, whom the viewer is led into suspecting is up to no good.  One memorable exchange between him and another of the characters concerns his reading of a postcard.  He speaks for us all when he responds to the challenge "Do you always read other people's letters?" with a "No.  But postcards are fair game."

Aside from Alistair and his deft games with the audience (we don't find out his true motives until the very end of the film) there is a delightful performance from a young George Cole as an evacuee.  I also have another, professional interest in the film.  I work as a fundraiser (no, before you go off me, not one of those really annoying people with tabards who try and mug you with a clipboard and their sparkling personality while you're minding your own business.  I hate those chuggers as much as anyone else.  It really goes against the grain to the British charity giver to be approached in this way.  We will give money, but we will choose who to give it to in our own time and we will certainly not be bullied into it by a gap year student with too much character and not enough inhibitions, thank you.)  My job involves writing grant applications to big grant givers such as the Lottery, local authorities and charitable trusts and foundations.  This is just one of many fundraising jobs out there now in a professional and regulated sector.  I have a certificate to prove it!

In the early 20th Century, fundraising was very different.  In many cases it was a past time to keep ladies of leisure occupied and to guarantee their place in heaven. People who were disadvantaged in any way relied on acts of kindness by the richer classes to ensure their survival.  As the current government does its best to erode the welfare state, we would do well to remember that this 'lady bountiful' kind of philanthropy could be all that stood between a disabled person and destitution.  But I digress a little.  In 'Cottage to Let', the Mrs Barrington character showcases the kind of fundraising activities that took place during World War Two. It shows that interestingly, the bread and butter fundraising events activities have remained the same for 70 years or more. An auction of donated goods.  A guess the weight of the cake.  A bric-a-brac stall.  Something to aim missiles at.  All present in both Mrs Barrington's 1941 garden and my daughter's school fete last summer.  But don't get me started on schools needing to raise money...

Love Bombs

I've never been a big fan of war films, of which there were understandably many in the 1940s and 50s. Possibly because it was my grandparents who instilled in me a love of old British cinema - and they may have avoided some films that dug out old memories that were best left unstirred.

Laid up ill one day, with no energy to do anything else, I switched on Film4 to be greeted by a film called 'The Gift Horse'.  If my conjecture about my grandparents is correct, this would definitely have been off the list.  Its subject matter is a British naval ship during WW2, and my Great Uncle Joe, having being torpedoed on the HMS Prince of Wales in 1941, was always much missed.  But as the cast list included favourites such as Dora Bryan, Sid James and Richard Attenborough, I watched on.  The film basically follows the crew of the ship - nicknamed the gift horse as it was a piece of equipment donated by the US navy.  It certainly doesn't pull any punches concerning the fate of many sailors in the war.  The crew either end up dead or captured by the closing titles.  It also brings home the speed at which life had to be lived during those dark days of the early 1940s.

It was interesting to compare life as depicted in the film with a debate that I had been listening to on Radio 4's Today programme a few days previous to watching.  We are now having children much later in life, and various reasons were given as to why this is.  The difficulty in meeting potential partners, the desire to be settled and  to have made headway in a career were all put forward as valid points.  However, in 'The Gift Horse', marriages are made in haste, almost desperation.  Dora Bryan's character is railroaded into marriage and pregnancy (despite her misgivings) by a sailor desperate to leave his mark on the world.  These days there are no bombs aimed at us on a daily basis and fewer diseases to kill us early.  We don't have the same pressure to continue our line.  Life is comfortable and children can be detrimental to this comfort!  Neither Dora or her sailor made it to the end of the film, one being bombed and the other shot.  They were right to grab happiness while they could after all.  I wonder how many people watching the film on its release in 1952 were at that moment repenting their wartime haste?  Judging by the divorce statistics it was quite a few ( see http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_246403.pdf and look for the spike in the chart!). We are perhaps right to take our time.

Murder and the Post Office

"Went the Day Well"  (1942) is a dream of a film.  It is based on a short story by one of my favourite authors, Graham Greene, and features a young Thora Hird.  A tale about the Home Front in World War Two, it shocks with a very sinister turn of events.

That sinister turn of events is the invasion of an idyllic English village by a division of Nazi parachutists.  All trained to sound just like 'one of us' and disguised as a platoon of British engineers, the villagers are at first fooled into accepting them into their homes and village hall.  Their true provenance and motives are soon outed though, and the beastly Hun round up the villagers and hold them hostage.  How frightening this must have been to contemporary audiences in those dark days of the early '40s, when invasion did seem imminent.

If  this film gives us one true insight into the life of a British village in WW2, it is into the role of the Post Office.  This is at the hub of the village and the events that unfold.  It holds the key to the villagers escape from the jackboot poised above their heads.  It is the only means by which people can communicate with those who don't live nearby.  It is the telephone exchange -all calls must be put through there in these days before direct dialling.  It is where the telegrams and post arrive and are despatched.  Our modern Post Office seems to be slowly being wound down, so it is surprising just how crucial it once was.

During the film the jolly plump postmistress is murdered while attempting to make contact with the outside world.  This is where the film really takes a turn for the sinister.  If you weren't taking it seriously up to that point - then you will when the friendly, half familiar figure takes a bayonet for her country.  It is as if Greene is telling us that if you kill off the Post Office, you kill off much more besides - the means to come and go freely, to talk without fear.

It's true that we don't need the Post Office a quarter as much as we once did.  This demise has been brought on by Orwellian rather than Greenian means.

Calling all Formby Fans

I just had to put this link on here because I haven't laughed so much in ages. In fact I laughed till I cried!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EIcmK21_0Q

George and Lemmy team up for an all new Ace of Spades!

Be you Blithe and Bonny

I find the 1945 film ‘Blithe Spirit’ to be a most soothing film.  Like ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ (see Death and the Duke) it could be a peculiar choice of subject matter to be showing people just after a murderous world war – and apparently there were some complaints. But I can understand why there would be increased interest in spiritualism at this time and this is the theme of ‘Blithe Spirit’.

An impeccable cast of Rex Harrison, Kay Hammond and Constance Cummings (Charles Condomine and his two wives) are completely and delightfully upstaged by Margaret Rutherford in her finest role as the eccentric medium Madame Arcati.  She plays this part so well that her appearance on screen surpasses everything else that is excellent about the film; from Noel Coward’s droll story to Kay Hammond’s acerbic ghost to the backdrop of a perfect English summer. This latter point is the main reason why I find the film so soothing – what could possibly be evil or frightening about being haunted in an English country house where the garden is full of flowers and birdsong?  Perhaps the afterlife is nothing to be worried about after all.  Indeed in Coward’s version of heaven, there are endless parties where Merlin does tiresome tricks, and all those we have known are there in their youthful splendour with all their personality traits in tact.  But it is fascinating to be able to observe this idyllic way of life, where the husband and wife dress for dinner, even if they are dining alone, and sit at the properly set dining table, the room decorated with vases of homegrown flowers.  If only we took eating this seriously now.  But is it a historically accurate depiction of a mid 20^th century household?  If it is, then only a small group of people would have been able to afford this kind of lifestyle.  It cannot be taken as representative and could almost be fantasy. 

Really, only two almost inconsequential scenes give us some genuine history. Firstly, a glimpse of how traffic was controlled at road junctions before the widespread adoption of traffic lights and roundabouts.  When ghostly Elvira drives into Folkestone, we see an incredulous RAC patrolman on point duty.  But the other historical aspect that interests me can be seen in the opening scenes.  Ruth is seen instructing the new maid Edith, who is obviously not used to being in service.  This is possibly her first post.  The household staff is small and when the cook later leaves it is disasterous. Where period dramas are concerned, we have perhaps become used to seeing rich households being full of experienced and long serving servants.  Jeeves and Wooster and the like give no indication of how difficult it was to recruit and retain household staff as the 20^th century drew on.  Although most of ‘Blithe Spirit’ is fantasy, Coward neatly captures what many of his friends must have moaned to him about in the Condomines’ servants.

This is a subject that I explored in more detail in my article on Sutton Scarsdale Hall, published in The Historian magazine (No 108, Winter 2010).  But in summary, as industry took hold, jobs in factories became much more attractive to a life in service, where your life was never truly your own.  Factory work may have been hard, but it did not dictate how you spent your time off – unlike many Lords and Ladies.  As the Condomines live in Kent, they would have found it hard to find a maid who wouldn’t rather live in her own home and travel up to London for work.

So full marks to Noel Coward for a play that is at once soothing and hilariously funny, that draws out everything that is marvellous about Margaret – and is also historically instructive.  

It's not Fur

"Carry on Cabby" could be a difficult film for a modern woman to appreciate.  It is a funny film, no doubt about that - I defy anyone not to laugh at Kenneth Connor dressed up as a Glamcab driver - but feminist it most definitely is not.  If you took this film to be an accurate description of society, the only way women can succeed is to be pretty and well endowed.  And the only reason they want to succeed is to get the attention of a man.

On the other hand, all of the male characters are complete idiots one way or another, and are easily outwitted by the women.  When the male cabbies try to stop Esma Cannon's character from taking out her sick husband's cab, their reaction is hilarious.  Scared to death of a woman elbowing into a male dominated workplace, they deny her the chance to help the company out simply because there are 'no facilities'.  In true Carry On style, nobody escapes comedy stereotyping whether they are male or female.  I would like to say that we have now moved on....but there are still familiar elements to all this.

However, for me, there is one small scene that really shows how society has moved on for the better since Cabby was made in 1963.  And that is Sid's gift to Hattie of a fur coat.  She is overwhelmed and delighted, as back then, the fur coat was treasured as a status symbol.  Every woman was meant to desire one.  Look at photos of film stars and listen to songs from the 1950s for proof.  But now, of course, we regard real fur as barbaric and those who wear it to be emotionally incapable.  Even diamonds, which fur coats were on a par with are now only ok if their provenance has been verified.  Your box of chocolates really ought to be Fairtrade too - companies fall over themselves to assure us that no-one has lost out in the manufacture of your treat.  We have finally realised that as consumers, we have responsibilities.  We can laugh at Hattie and her fur coat as something old fashioned and obsolete.  I wonder if we'll ever laugh in the same way at a woman being given a job purely because of her (ahem) long legs?

This post is dedicated to the lady in my profile photograph, who we lost on 27th February.  It all began with her and our cup of tea in front of the fire, ready for the Saturday afternoon matinee on BBC2.  This blog is her legacy to me.