Many years ago I started to write some notes on the Rank titles I was watching but my enthusiasm ran out. Maybe it was when there was a run of Carry On films and I wilted. But there would be some fine entertainment on offer even if it was always hard to discover any sense of ‘curation’ as the modern phrase for film programming would have it. The library included titles that Rank acquired from other production houses, most notably Gainsborough Pictures. As well Rank invested in, supported or acquired the output of many production companies including Cineguild, which produced a number of David Lean’s films, Two Cities Films and Independent Artists.
Below are five of the notes that I wrote, all of them movies I would happily watch again. I haven’t made any changes to the text from years ago and readers may note a heavy reliance on The Time Out Film Guide and David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema
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| Jessie Mathews (r) |
When Blake Edwards made Victor/Victoria he took as his source an obscure 30s German musical with a score provided by the great Frederick Hollander. Edwards may or may not have taken much notice of this version of the film, the last of a series of British remakes of German originals. The Brit version has the virtue of the presence of the wondrous Jessie Mathews, a star of the first dimension who could sing and dance with the best of them. Nowadays she’s so far under the radar that David Thomson doesn’t even devote an entry to her in his Biographical Dictionary while such alleged luminaries as Madonna and Demi Moore (after only consulting the letter “M”) are included. The market demands it I suppose but that’s a pity. Mathews is mentioned in the entry on the film’s director, Victor Saville who is credited with bringing out her “light prettiness”. Not much of a compliment. First a Girl is indeed light but it’s also quite brilliant, not the least for Mathews in the role of the singer who can only get a job by pretending she’s a female impersonator. The narrative contains all the complications you may expect, or indeed be aware of, but nevertheless it’s a still a very heady piece of nonsense which you can watch over and over again in continuing delight.
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| Herbert Lom, Stanley Baker |
Cy Enfield had an interesting career indeed. In America he directed The Sound of Fury, a brilliant film about a lynch mob, and then, after a Tarzan picture, bolted for England as the McCarthyites closed in. There he made some quite remarkable films and a few lesser works. I watched the DVD of The Limping Man which has quite a bit of narrative oomph for its first 70 or so minutes. (Then it all turns out to be some dream, a shaggy dog story and everyone marches off happily to their anointed lovers. Gimme a break.) But Hell Drivers is the real thing, Endfield’s best British film and as a taut and gripping a narrative as you’ll find. David Thomson summarises perfectly when he calls it an “unexpectedly raw look into the lives of English lorry drivers with much of the flavour and violence of an American thriller.” Following the J. Arthur Rank logo you get the words “A British Film” above the title and yet Endfield’s movie is rather more like an action packed American flick and a primer for today’s industrial relations. Stanley Baker, fresh out of prison for some crime or other which doesn’t get explained, gets work driving a truck. He takes it after being told the terms and conditions by the manager. Those terms are in brief, dog eat dog. If you cant keep up you don’t get your bonus. Don’t worry about helping out the other guy, maintain your truck in your own time and you pay for any breakdowns. Its frighteningly up to date and the workers are told to obey the law only if they must. What they have to do to survive is compete against their fellow workers and bugger solidarity. No union stuff here, no strikes for better conditions. And the boss and the foreman are ripping off the staff bonuses as well! Endfield doesn’t dress this up into any real tirade against the employing class or any clarion call for workers rights.. There are hardly any speeches at all and no threats to take the boys out. The boys actually turn nasty against Baker when he wont join in a free for all at a local dance. They start a campaign of bullying and victimization which is settled sort of in a fist fight. Very raw and unideological despite Endfield’s confessed leftist sympathies which led to his departure from the US during the McCarthy years. Patrick McGoohan makes a very nasty Irish villain/foreman. The Time Out Film Guide makes an interesting point in noting how Endfield and Joseph Losey, both political exiles, did their best work in films featuring Stanley Baker. Quite a fascinating piece of work.
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| Maggie Smith, George Nader |
Just at the time when the so-called British new wave was emerging, and kitchen sink dramas became the rage, one young director, aged 35 made one of the smartest little thrillers of its time. He died at the age of 48 from, according to David Thomson, heart disease and exhaustion. Nowhere to Go was Seth Holt’s first film. He scripted it with Kenneth Tynan and it was produced by Michael Balcon. Tynan was the critic who did much to put Osborne, Pinter, Wesker and others on the map. The American second-rater George Nader was wheeled in to play the lead but the casting triumph was that of Maggie Smith, in her film debut, as the taxi driver who succumbs to his story. It’s a gripping entertainment. Holt only made five films. Thomson is an enthusiast for his blighted career and he says: “Despite the fact that Holt seemed unable to escape flawed, unfinished work, the creator of marvellous sequences within melodramas, he was the most gifted British director working in Britain.” Holt’s five films were made over thirteen years and fashion passed him by. Still somebody, someday, will dig up Station Six Saharaand we’ll again see what made us all more than a little sad at his passing.
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| Eric Portman (l), Guy Rolfe, Nadia Gray |
Robert Hamer is nearly forgotten these days yet for a while it seemed he may have been carrying the hopes of the British cinema on his back. He was not yet forty by the time he had made the best episode in Dead of Night, Pink String and Sealing Wax, It Always Rains on Sunday, Kind Hearts and Coronetsand The Spider and the Fly. With the exception of Kind Hearts, no doubt because of its bit of Alec Guinness eight role bravura, the other films are largely, and undeservedly forgotten. In this one, Guy Rolfe plays a gentleman thief and one of my favorite Brit actors Eric Portman plays the dogged police inspector. It’s one of those stories where the fascination lies in the mutual respect built between the two protagonists, a sort of a ‘civilised’ duel. Their relationship is complicated after both have formed a relationship with Rolfe’s mistress. In the note on the film in The Time Out Film Guide, Tom Milne is glowing when he mentions ‘the look of the film, bleak and penumbral with sets, camerawork and beautifully chosen locations, conspiring to recapture the poetic quality of Feuillade’s Paris, makes it rank with Hamer’s best work. A director ripe for full scale rather than piecemeal rediscovery, especially as TCM has recently unearthed Hamer’s extremely odd later film The Scapegoatin which Alec Guinness plays two roles as a dull Englishman and a ne’er do well Frenchman whom no one, except the Frenchman’s mistress, can tell apart
Terence Fisher made his name as perhaps the best of the regular Hammer Studios directors. His career from the late 50s to the early 70s is littered with any number of Frankenstein, Dracula and other assorted monster titles. At his best his work was regarded as rather superior stuff. Its limitations were that after awhile you’d seen it all and the variations just didn’t have a wallop. Hammer degenerated into soft core sex and so-called thrillers with titles like Maniac. Of course it was sometimes hard to know for sure just how good or bad things were because for quite some time the Australian censors routinely banned them. To the Public Danger was Fisher’s second film and it’s quite something. Two upper (upper-middle maybe) class smarties turn up at a country pub. One is drunk already the other is a smoothie who sets his sights on the only woman in the room, an attractive if shallow young thing from the local chocolate factory who’s there with her dull and somewhat impoverished boyfriend (also from the factory). The girl complains of boredom because the Americans have gone home, the smoothie has a complete contempt for authority. She’s immediately impressed and they drink and drink and drink before all four head off somewhere in his car and trouble ensues. Violence escalates. The class distinctions are a provocative underlying element in driving the male enmity. Very short and very taut, it’s a model of smart, tense film-making and it’s in no way divorced from the circumstances of England at the time.
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