Something Fishy

‘Britannia of Billingsgate’ (1933) was a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be.  I have felt in the past that the earlier films of the 1930s are a bit too naïve and clunky for my taste, but this one proved me wrong.  This is a very knowing look at the early film industry itself, and I think that it is rather ahead of its time.

It features music hall star Violet Loraine as Bessie Bolton; while Bessie’s husband and children are played by the now better known names of Gordon Harker, John Mills and Kay Hammond.  Bessie runs a fried fish shop while her husband Bert works at nearby Billingsgate Market. Her teenage son and daughter are both top-drawer dreamers.  One wants to be a speedway star and the other wants to marry a heartthrob actor.  When an Italian film director is filming a new picture nearby, he accidentally stumbles across Bessie and her fabulous singing voice. Spurred on by Bert and the pound signs popping out of his eyeballs, Bessie reluctantly agrees to make a picture and the family are suddenly elevated to a new position in life.

Bessie’s character would appear to be based wholly on Gracie Fields – the part could have been written for her (and the surname Bolton adds to my suspicions here, what with the Lancashire connection…) In fact, I would say that the film rather pokes fun at a perhaps already hackneyed concept of the ordinary woman turned into an overnight star. Because, for Bessie, this isn’t a case of dreams coming true. She is fair sick of it all very quickly – and the whole situation shows her husband up as a very silly man. He is easily swayed by money and fame but he is unable to handle himself. Bessie’s daughter’s actions are the most telling. With access to money and the right people, she starts stalking her heartthrob. She gets to meet him, finds out where he lives and sneaks into his bedroom one evening to wait for him.  This results in the very memorable scene of Bessie giving her daughter a thoroughly and deservedly smacked bottom. The filmstar heartthrob himself is aloof and disgusted…and very probably gay.

This is a film which looks at its own industry and seems to declare it as a load of old bunkum. Already the trappings of fame that we associate with modern life are being held up to ridicule.  What with all this and the Hammersmith Odeon and telephone booths complete with underground posters, it is certainly worth a look. It is available free to view on the BFI website here - http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-britannia-of-billingsgate-1933/

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The Level Playing Field

I have started a new Twitter account dedicated to the life and sayings of Joyce Grenfell (@callmesossidge). This is partly to give me some inspiration as I write my next book of short stories, all of which will be inspired by Joyce's work.

One quote that I recently posted went as follows:

"Things will never, can never, musn't ever be the same as they were before the war."

Joyce wrote this in a letter to her mother during the early years of World War Two, as part of an observation about the British class system. She was not far off being a member of the aristocracy herself.  Her aunt was Nancy Astor, MP and chatelaine of Cliveden and therefore a mover in the highest of circles. At the time that she wrote the letter, Joyce lived in a cottage on the Cliveden estate and often partook of her aunt’s hospitality.  She had also been a debutante and name-dropped a lot of titled and high rolling people in her letters and diaries.  So, for her to say this, tells me that there was widespread recognition of a need for change among those with the power as well as those experiencing it for the first time as part of the wartime social levelling.

Coincidentally, a couple of weeks after I had posted and mused about this quote of hers, I watched ‘The Guinea Pig’ – a film which tackles the notion at the very root.

This is a Boulting Brothers film, which was released in 1948 and is based on a 1946 play.  It stars a twenty-something Richard Attenborough as a teenage school boy.  He plays an East End lad who is sent on a scholarship to a private boarding school as part of a wider experiment. We follow his uncomfortable transplantation from one environment to another very different one – and we feel very sorry for him as he endures the snobbery, feudal customs and loneliness. There is a scene where he tries to run away, then pours his heart out to a sympathetic master.  This is deeply heart-wrenching and it is testament (not that one is needed) to Attenborough’s talent.

With the stoicism that you would expect of a 1940s EastEnder, the lad sticks it out and eventually begins to make those who doubted the scheme to see the point of it. A conversation between one of the old fashioned masters and the boy’s father tells us all that we need to know. That this film is about the need for the classes to mix and understand each other. We had so recently triumphed over a common enemy…wasn’t it now time to give ourselves a common goal – to do the best by our children. To not shut them away in compartments.

Attenborough by @aitchteee

I enjoy slipping back into what was a very idealistic period of our history. I also relish finding out what the Boultings made of it all. They took this one more seriously than many other of the subjects that they tackled. Unfortunately, our society remains as class-ridden as ever....shame on us.

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A Foreign Country

‘A French Mistress’ is a Boulting film dating from 1960.  It is not one of their better known ones, yet it is full of familiarity. Cecil Parker, James Robertson Justice, Irene Handl and Thorley Walters fill the screen with their usual personas. The scene is a private boys’ school – and on the subject of familiar names and faces Michael Crawford is listed as being one of the pupils. I have to say that I didn’t actually notice him while I was watching.

Thorley Walters when he was little more than a school boy, thanks to Richard Hope-Hawkins from my Facebook page In Search of Thorley Walters

In some respects, this is a fun film with a fair bit to recommend it – not least Irene as the stressed school cook.  But it is also desperately old fashioned and, in my view, this overrides any sense of nostalgia.  The French Mistress of the title is a 20-something Mademoiselle who takes up the vacant position of French teacher at the school.  The previous incumbents of the post have all been sent galloping back home due to Irene’s cooking, and Mlle Lafarge is consequently the only applicant for a job that has become notorious. This causes all kinds of hoo-ha at the bastion of chauvenism that is the 1950s/60s boys school.  There are only four female characters in total, and I thought that these served to illustrate the four ages of woman as seen by the patriarchy at this time.

1)   Totty. (Agnes Laurent as Mlle Lafarge) The French mistress is 22 years old, is good to look at and responds positively to romantic overtures.

2)   Matron. (Edith Sharpe as just Matron. She doesn’t even get the dignity of a name) The school matron is caring, efficient and good in a domestic crisis. She no longer regards her looks as important and concedes that she is not as good as category 1) anymore.

3)   Widow. (Irene Handl as Sgt Hodges) The cook is a widow who needs to work but finds the whole thing a bit too much at ‘her time of life’.

4)   Bitter old hag. (Athene Seyler as Miss Peake) She has never married and is dependent on her brother.  This makes her interfering and small minded.

Four good reasons to be glad you weren’t around in 1960.

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Mooning About

If you are ever in need of a cinematic example of how the British have a tendency to not take themselves seriously, then ‘Man in the Moon’ is for you. This 1960 film stars Kenneth More and Michael Hordern, among several others whose faces may be more familiar than their names. The landscape too is one that you will recognise, much of it being filmed in the Buckinghamshire villages around Pinewood.  It is gently humorous - all in all very comforting stuff.  Well, to us British, at any rate.  I suspect a native of any other country would be bemused and bewildered by the whole thing.

The premise is that Britain needs an astronaut to enable us to win the space race.  The men from the ministry are on the look-out for a suitable victim to launch up to the moon. Kenneth More turns out to be their perfect man. He has been earning a living selling his body to medical research because he is seemingly incapable of developing a disease. They (and we) first discover him at the common cold research establishment, being all bouncy and chipper while all those around him wallow in mucus-induced misery. He boasts that he survived everything that the School of Tropical Medicine threw at him.  He is lured to the space centre, where he barely notices being thrust into extremes of temperature and G-force.

More’s character is the epitome of the British hero, as viewed from the first half of the 20^th Century.  He all but stands with legs wide apart, pipe sticking out from his jutting chin and his thumbs in his tailored tweed suit. This in itself is probably a bit of gentle mockery of how we used to be.  But then of course it all goes wrong.  When they finally launch him off to the moon, he ends up landing within a short distance from the Australian launch pad.  More goes back to the cold research establishment, where the scientists continue to be generally baffled.  The British, this film yells out, are clever but rubbish at a lot of stuff.

Of course, we know that the main two contenders in the space race were the USA and the USSR.  Two countries that take themselves and their space very seriously indeed.  I suspect that if this film had been made and released in either of those countries, there would have been an enquiry. Let’s face it, if a Russian had so much as even thought up a storyline that mocked their comrades in this way, Siberia would have beckoned. Would there have been demonstrations outside the cinemas of small town America?  Maybe.  But not only did we make the film, we sat and chuckled at it over our Kia-Oras and bars of fruit and nut.

I’m glad. Who wants space hardware when you can have Kenneth More being thrown off an ejector seat at full tilt.  Marvellous.

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Rock On 1940s Style

In terms of its storyline, ‘Interrupted Journey’ (1949) is possibly the worst film I have ever seen. I can’t bring myself to describe it to you, it’s so laborious. It starts off right enough, but towards the end, it really does go to pot.  The film stars Valerie Hobson and Richard Todd.  Valerie is stunningly beautiful throughout, but I’m afraid that this doesn’t rescue the utter shambles.

The one bright moment is an appearance by Dora Bryan. She never puts in a bad performance and I always like to see her. She plays a waitress in the Paddington Station buffet, where she flogs Richard and his mistress a coffee and a rock cake each. This was the end of Dora’s delightfully distracted cameo, and so there was no more to do than to fall into a rock cake reverie. I began to wonder why the rock cake is so ubiquitous in 1940s culture. Were there a plate of them on offer in Joyce Carey’s ‘Brief Encounter’ buffet? I feel sure there must have been.  They certainly appear in my favourite book ‘One Fine Day’ by Mollie Panter-Downes (1947).  Here they are referred to as “rock keeks” by the snooty bakery assistant – and this is how I always pronounce them to myself after reading that (using Joyce Carey’s 1940s voice).

I followed up my viewing of ‘Interrupted Journey’ with a baking session – having found a rock keek recipe in my old 1950s Good Housekeeping cookbook. The recipe was simple:

7 oz Self Raising Flour

3 oz Butter or Marg

3oz Sugar

3oz Dried Mixed Fruit

Small egg

Drop of milk

Sprinkle of nutmeg/mixed spice

Just mix it all up, stick a few splats on a flat baking tray and shove them in a hot oven for 15 minutes.

Bit too much milk, should be a bit rockier shaped, but you get the idea

The verdict was a good one.  My notoriously picky children, who drive me to distraction with their weird food attitudes (I’ve got one that doesn’t like custard and ice cream, for pity’s sake), shovelled them down like there was no tomorrow. I was able to take one to work for my morning snack for a few days after they were baked. They were so easy to make and they were plain but filling. So I suppose that the answer to the question of why the rock cake was a rationing era stalwart is as follows:

·        Quick and easy to do, no matter how long you’ve been awake fire-watching and queueing for dried eggs you won’t go wrong.

·        Low on ingredients – nothing fancy.  These things are mostly flour and you can probably get away with dried egg and water in them with enough flavouring

·        They can be shoved in the oven with something else and then last for quite a few days afterwards (I made another batch that was still fine 3 days later)

I will be baking more rock keeks. They are very suitable for our new modern day frugality.

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Now that we've done baking I'd just like to carry on with the domestic goddess in a headscarf and curlers attitude.  I've done a new book all about sewing with those iconic Sylko bobbins. You can buy it now on Amazon.  Some very nice things have been said about it:

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When the Archers Missed a Target

‘The Small Back Room’ (1949) is a Powell and Pressburger film, made in association with Alexander Korda’s London Films. It has a marvellous pedigree – following on from such Archers’ classics as ‘A Canterbury Tale’ and ‘Black Narcissus’, the latter sharing Kathleen Byron and David Farrar in lead roles.  There is a good solid supporting cast too, including Cyril Cusack, Sid James and Jack Hawkins. A noir atmosphere comfortably envelopes the viewer, the film wraps itself around you like a heavy blanket.  Then there is the Powell and Pressburger attention to detail, the highlighting of sights, sounds or figures of speech that really make their films come to life.  My favourite thing in this film is towards the end, when Farrar’s character has to go and diffuse a bomb on Chesil Bank.  The crunching of pebbles and Farrar’s struggle to walk over them, coupled with the wheeling cries of the gulls.  This is a moment of bliss, this juxtaposition of the mundane and the tension of a bomb that could blow at any second. This is one fantastic film – so why isn’t it up there with ‘A Canterbury Tale’ or ‘…Colonel Blimp’?

Although ‘The Small Back Room’ was critically well received at the time, and the internet is full of appreciative reviews, contemporary audiences didn’t take to it and it flopped at the box office. The reason for this can only be that the subject matter put people off from going to see it. Although filmed in 1949, the story is set in 1943, and the back room in the title references so called “back room boys.”  It looks at the scientists involved in the study and development of weaponry. One sub plot covers the discussions around a new gun, while the main story involves Farrar’s character (Rice) tackling a new, unknown bomb that has been appearing at various locations. The serious tone is enhanced further by Rice suffering with his prosthetic foot and battling with the only thing that really helps him to handle the pain – Whisky. It seems that it is this that put people off – guns, bombs, bravery and personal misery. When you’re only just getting over suffering the same thing yourself, the last thing you want to see at the cinema is more of the same.

It perhaps shows us an anomalous period in cinema. These days we can’t get enough of the 1940s.  We will take any opportunity to commemorate events from this period, and films and books from or covering this era remain popular.  When the war itself raged, many films boosted morale by showing the British at their fighting best, whether this be ‘In Which We Serve’  at sea or ‘Millions Like Us’ in the factories. I think that if ‘The Small Back Room’ had actually been released in 1943 it may well have fared a lot better as a dramatic look at how our brave scientists were cleverer than the Nazi ones. But instead, it was released when the wartime adrenaline had stopped pumping, and we were left with piles of rubble and worse rationing than ever. If film was to reference any of this, it had better be aimed at cheering people up. Another 1949 film was ‘Passport to Pimlico’, a story about rationing that delivered a humorous look at why we should continue to put up with it – focusing on the end result.  It was just time to look forward and not back for a while.

Due to bad timing alone, ‘The Small Back Room’ is a forgotten classic. Please revisit it and give it a little love.

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Stop Press

‘Vote for Huggett’ (1949) picks up where ‘Here Come The Huggetts’ left off. Britain’s favourite post war family are continuing to live happily in their suburban semi.  Mr Huggett (Jack Warner) has a good job.  Mrs Huggett (Kathleen Harrison) continues to muddle her way cheerily through life, taking care and pride in her family. The eldest daughter and the flighty niece (Diana Dors) are married off.  The second daughter is gainfully employed and the baby of the family is still Petula Clark, thank goodness.

Before I go any further, I must say how much I adore Kathleen Harrison in this film. As in ‘Here Come the Huggetts’ I believe that it is her talent rather than Jack’s that carries the film. She is side-splitting, and as with any actress of her calibre it is all done in a deceptively easy looking way. Just an expression at the right moment is enough to set you off.  Just watch the scene with the knickers near the beginning.

Jack by @aitchteee

Kathleen by @aitchteee

‘Vote for Huggett’ charts Mr Huggett’s foray into local politics. The adventure begins with a simple letter. Mr H decides that he wishes to share his opinion that their home town needs a lido (which they all pronounce “lee-doh” throughout – is this an old way of pronounciation or have I been saying it wrong? I always thought it was “lie-doh”) so he writes a letter to the local newspaper. They publish it, and it all kicks off.  The whole town sees it and comments on it – to each member of the family. People are in agreement, and the next thing you know, Mr H is being cajoled to stand for councillor.

If you are into politics, there is probably quite a lot of historical stuff that you could get out of this.  But the stand out thing for me was the power of a letter to the local newspaper, and the numbers of people who see it. Local papers are dying now.  We have seen them lose their grip in this generation. I used to buy them – but I no longer see them as something worth spending so much money on.  Prices have rocketed up and content has shrunk – and we already know much of it anyway through various internet portals. I even baulk at accessing the websites of our local papers – they are so weighed down with the advertising that they need to cover their costs that the pages take about a month to load and then jump all over the place. Local papers are obviously fighting for life- and who would see a letter that was printed in one these days?

In this respect, this film is a hark back to slower times, when information trickled out into the community rather than vomited a technicolour-headache- inducing mix of rumours, gossip and incident.  There is no going back, except in a Huggett induced reverie.

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