Rescued by Rover (1905)

Further Reading

Bruce Babington, ‘Queen of British Hearts: Margaret Lockwood Revisited’, in Bruce Babington (ed.) British Stars and Stardom, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001.

Pam Cook, ‘Melodrama and the Women’s Picture’, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema, London, Routledge, 2005.

Peter William Evans, ‘James Mason: The Man Between’, in Bruce Babington (ed.) British Stars and Stardom, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001.

Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film, London, BFI, 1994.

Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA, London, Continuum, 2002.

Melanie Williams

The Red Shoes (1948)

[Production Company: The Archers. Directors and screenwriters: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Cinematographer: Jack Cardiff. Editor: Reginald Mills. Music: Brian Easdale. Cast: Moira Shearer (Vicky Page), Anton Walbrook (Boris Lermontov), Marius Goring (Julian Craster), Leonide Massine (Grischa Ljubov).]
The Red Shoes is a significant British film in terms of both its melodramatic aesthetic and its representation of shifting gender roles in a post war economy. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s folk tale, the plot follows the career of Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) who rises to fame to dance the ballet of The Red Shoes. She falls in love with conductor Julian Craster (Marius Goring), but impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), fiercely protective of Vicky’s career, forces Julian to resign. Vicky follows him in loyalty but marriage fails to fulfil her. While holidaying in Monte Carlo, she agrees once more to dance The Red Shoes ballet, but Julian arrives to persuade Vicky not to dance, making her choose between ambition and love. Lermontov dismisses Vicky: ‘Go with him, be a faithful housewife, a crowd of screaming children and finish the dancing forever!’ But as she tells Julian that she does love him, the camera cuts to her red shoes. His realisation that she loves dancing more than him precipitates his departure. Lermontov raises his arms in a gesture of triumph but as Vicky heads towards the stage, the shoes impel her to her death.
While today we may wonder at the extremity of Vicky’s choice, it was very pertinent to British women in the late 1940s who had been mobilised for work for the duration of the Second World War. In the post-war period, official advice for a returning serviceman was that he should resume his rightful place as breadwinner of the household and the Treasury halved its subsidies for nurseries after 1945. However, the baby boom from 1947-1951, the establishment of a National Heath Service and the changes in welfare and education services, created new jobs for women in administration, nursing and teaching which contradicted the official message, reinforced by film-makers, that the real role for women still lay in ‘home-making’. (Braybon & Summerfield 1987: 259-277; Curran and Porter 1995: 291)
The Red Shoes explores these issues in terms of Vicky’s conflict between career and domesticity. Narrative closure offers only death but her strength of will and artistic aspirations are celebrated in the film through an extravagance of spectacle, colour and glamour. J.B. Mayer’s 1948 survey of Forties’ audiences showed that women enjoyed the colour, romance and exoticism of the melodrama films of that time. (1) Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes thus provided the pleasure of a sparkling romance for a strong-willed heroine set for the most part in the sunshine of glamorous Monte Carlo.
Furthermore, as rationing still continued after the war, women began to resist government-imposed utility fashion designs, and there was a hunger for romantic dressing. Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look design of wasp waists and longer, fuller skirts satisfied this war-weary desire for romanticism and in The Red Shoes the modern and stylish costumes designed by French couturier Jacques Fath for Moira Shearer followed this romantic trend. As Powell recalls:
In 1948 England was still on rationing. Austerity was the cry. We had won the war. We had lost the Empire. Now we must tighten our belts and save Europe […] But not the Archers. We thought the best way to save Europe was to make extravagant, romantic British films. (1992: 23)
Powell’s insistence on extravagance may have been influenced by the Rank Organisation’s aspirations since 1945 to emulate Hollywood production values and fund ‘prestige’ rather than ‘quality’ British films, for export to the US market (Murphy in Barr 1986: 60-61). But in 1946, Powell also stated that he was searching for a new form of storytelling. He wanted an aesthetic that required ‘visual wit, movement, pantomime, comedy, eked out with music, songs and dialogue … only when it was needed’ (Baxter, Manvell & Wollenberg 1946: 109). This led him to draw inspiration instead from melodrama and silent cinema and to prioritise image over the dialogue, claiming that: In my films, images are everything; words are used like music to distil emotion.’ (1992: 168)
Powell’s first experiences of silent cinema in the Nice studios of Metro Goldwyn Mayer working on Rex Ingram’s 1925 silent film Mare Nostrum informed this aesthetic: ‘This was pretty heady stuff for a first picture, and looking back I am not surprised that I never had much taste for kitchen-sink drama.’ (1992: 128) As in silent films, Powell wanted music, rather than dialogue, to be the master. He experimented with the composed shot in which acting is choreographed and edited to a previously composed musical score; for Black Narcissus (1947) he produced a five-minute composed sequence and for The Red Shoes, a seventeen-minute composed ballet. ‘For me, film-making was never the same after this experience.’ (1992: 583)
In The Red Shoes’ ballet, Brian Easdale's Oscar-winning soundtrack leads the choreography of movement to music, allowing Powell and Pressburger to explore highly codified gestural language rather than dialogue, for the tension between dancing and love, ambition and domesticity and the expression of female desire. A shoemaker (Leonide Massine) presents a pair of red ballet shoes to a young girl who leaves her lover to dance downstage; in a magical jump-cut the scarlet ribbons wrap around her ankles and she is suddenly dancing in the red shoes. Her lover gradually recedes and from hereon we, like the girl, are caught in a spell of fantastical extravagance as we follow her balletic journey through Bauhaus-trained production designer Hein Heckroth's painterly and expressionist sets and compellingly grotesque masks, heightened by Jack Cardiff's Technicolor lighting. Vicky is driven relentlessly by the red shoes as she exhausts her dancing partners to the lonely heights and depths of fame. Forever lurking in shadows, dancing around her, is Massine as the tireless shoemaker. ‘Intensely musical, a superb mime and a good actor’ is how Powell recalls the great Russian performer. (1992: 642)
Powell acknowledged that the ballet in The Red Shoes was a significant attempt on his part to ‘lift storytelling onto a different level and leave naturalism behind’ (1992: 652), and the theatrical gestural codes of the ballet draw on melodramatic practices to infuse the young woman’s struggle with a poignant dimension of pathos as, in the finale, she gestures to the preacher to remove the shoes and dies exhausted in his arms.
Drawing on exaggerated, mimetic acting codes and music, the subjective realm of dance and inner desire in The Red Shoes articulates the dancer’s aspirations beyond language into a life/death struggle. As Gledhill notes, melodramatic characters do not function in the interests of psychological interiority but as anthropomorphised, emblematic signs of social forces, personifying good, evil, virtue, vice, through exaggerated performance codes (in Gaines 1992: 139).) And the young dancer in The Red Shoes ballet could emblematise Gledhill’s ‘victim of persecuted innocence’ (Gledhill 1987: 32) through the sacred/secular struggle of the demonic shoemaker, the lover, and the preacher outside the church.
In the main narrative we see Vicky Page lured to career heights by the nineteenth-century Svengali-like figure of Lermontov, but prevented by patriarchal domesticity and the love of her husband. We can also identify a virtuous/fallen woman ideology in the mise en scene and camera angles as Vicky's ambition and success are cinematically inscribed in terms of a melodramatic rise and fall. At one point, she climbs the steps to a villa: ‘a simple flight of steps up the mountain, but it has one hundred, two hundred, what do I know, maybe three hundred steps going heavenward, with no villa in sight.’ (Powell 1992: 638) And on reaching the fairy-tale heights of her career, she is told she will be the principal dancer. But this success becomes spatially demonised through her histrionic fall in the film’s closure as her unadulterated artistic pleasure is morally punished.
Once Vicky has chosen dancing over marriage, and the red shoes impel her to her doom, the frame privileges a cast-iron spiral staircase. In extreme close-up the red shoes are followed running down the stairs, delineating the melodramatic fallen woman. Technically, this was a difficult sequence to shoot. In order to keep ahead of her shoes, the film-makers first tried putting the camera on an elevator, but so as to see more of her feet they used a spiral staircase on a turntable which rotated slowly as Moira Shearer ran down. By adjusting its speed to hers they kept her continually in view. They cut two takes of the same shot and edited them together to extend it to five seconds and thus draw out the suspense. (Powell 1992: 652) The fall is further exaggerated as she throws herself over the edge of a balcony, her arms histrionically gesturing towards unspeakable desires which can find no place in her social framework. This image in itself thus becomes suggestive of the price the woman must pay for her deviance from patriarchal norms.
Vicky’s death, as in the dramatic plunging to death of the heroine in both Black Narcissus and Gone to Earth (1950), shows that the dizzying heights that women aspire to in Powell and Pressburger’s films also provide the locus for their fall. Hence, the Archers’ post-war films have been read by some as belonging to a trend of films that aim to bring strong women down to size. (Aspinall in Curran and Porter 1983: 284-5) But the energy and daring of their heroines create an excess of pleasure for female audiences that runs the risk of diminishing the punishing endings, and scholars such as Sue Harper have warned against an overarching feminist analysis: ‘For Powell and Pressburger, females were not passive bearers of tradition but key speakers of it. Nor were they sacrificial victims of it.’ (Higson 1996: 110) In this sense, The Red Shoes conforms more to the spirit of Gainsborough melodramas, such as Madonna of the Seven Moons (Crabtree, 1943) and The Wicked Lady (Arliss, 1945), which ‘were popular with war-time female audiences, not because good triumphs over evil, but because the case for pleasure is made so convincingly.’ (Aspinall in Curran & Porter 1995: 276) Hence, while the all-important tension between Vicky’s career and home life is melodramatically realised through the extremity of the punishing closure that confirms the status quo and the prevailing ideology of femininity as homemaker, the melodramatic conventions of excess offer a more open reading of female resistance which allow us to sympathise with the pleasure of Vicky’s artistic aspirations and the unfairness of her social position indicating a tension very pertinent to post-war British women.
Notes

J.B. Mayer, British Cinemas and Their Audiences: Sociological Studies, London, Dennis Dobson, 1948, p. 107.

Further Reading

Sue Aspinall, ‘Women, Realism and Reality in British Films,1943-53’, in James Curran & Vincent Porter (eds) British Cinema History, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1983, pp. 272-293.

Gail Braybon & Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars, London, Pandora Press,1987.

Christine Gledhill (ed.) Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, London, BFI, 1987.

Christine Gledhill, ‘Between Melodrama and Realism: Anthony Asquith’s Underground and King Vidor’s The Crowd’, in Jane Gaines (ed.) Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, Durham/London, Duke University Press, 1992, pp.129-167.

Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, London, BFI, 1987.

Sue Harper, ’Madonna of the Seven Moons’, History Today, August 1995.

Sue Harper, ‘From Holiday Camp to High Camp’, in Andrew Higson (ed.) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London, Cassell, 1996, pp.94-116.

Robert Murphy, ‘Under the Shadow of Hollywood’, in Charles Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London, BFI, 1986.

Michael Powell, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography, London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1992.

Michael Powell, ‘Your Questions Answered’, in R.K. Nielson Baxter, Roger Manvell & H.H. Wollenberg (eds), The Penguin Film Review, London, Penguin, 1946.

Trish Sheil

Passport to Pimlico (1948)

[Production Company: Ealing Studios. Director: Henry Cornelius. Screenwriter: T.E.B. Clarke. Cinematographer: Lionel Banes. Music: Georges Auric. Editor: Michael Truman. Cast: Stanley Holloway (Arthur Pemberton), Betty Warren (Connie Pemberton), Barbara Murray (Shirley Pemberton), John Slater (Frank Huggins), Jane Hylton (Molly Reed), Raymond Huntley (Mr W.P.J Wix), Paul Dupuis (Duke of Burgundy), Margaret Rutherford (Professor Hatton-Jones).]
In keeping with Aristotle’s definition of comedy Passport to Pimlico deals with ordinary characters in everyday situations in an amusing way. And following a specific strand of the genre the ordinary and everyday is transformed into the brief liberation of a carnivalesque escape. But Passport to Pimlico can also be viewed as a satirical comedy, designed to expose the follies and vices of individuals and/or society (civil servants, bureaucrats and politicians, but also perhaps the self-centred middle class of Pimlico).
Passport to Pimlico does not employ the biting sarcasm used to attack corruption in Juvenalian satire but instead the relatively gentle laughter at people’s vanity and hypocrisy found in Horatian satire. This is comedy that lampoons over-inflated, self-important individuals, and exaggerates perceived weaknesses in society in order to highlight them. There is criticism of social institutions, but these are seen not as corrupt so much as in need of a little reform. Arrogance and insensitivity are defeated by simple good sense and compassion.
Ealing comedies in general involve this gentle social criticism. However, although the criticism is expressed most directly by a kindly character, Arthur Pemberton (played by the well-loved performer, Stanley Holloway), who tells the bureaucrats ‘We’re sick and tired of your voice in this country,’ this actually amounts to a pretty strong attack coming as it does from such a character. Furthermore, there is no disguising the rebellious glee with which the residents of Pimlico symbolically throw off the bureaucratic shackles by tearing up their ration books.
To understand the comedy we need to be alert to the ways in which this film expresses the nature of the historical moment. Ordinary people expected change after the sacrifices of the Second World War. They wanted new freedoms and a new society, and to some extent this was what they got following Labour’s landslide victory of July 1945 with plans for a welfare state, free health service and widespread nationalization. The rigid pre-war class system had disappeared: returning servicemen (and women) were not prepared to revert to being subservient to their ‘betters’ nor to accept 1930s style economic hardships.
It was said that the war had ’eroded practically every traditional social barrier in Britain’. (1) However, from the end of the war through to the time Passport to Pimlico was released three years later, the public was also being urged to show restraint and being forced to accept increased austerity.
We have come through difficult years and we are going to face difficult years and to get through them we will require no less effort, no less unselfishness and no less work than was needed to bring us through the war.

(Clem Atlee, July 1945 in Johnson, 1994: 300)

Rationing actually increased after the war, even bread and potatoes being included on the list of restricted foods. Clothing and furniture was rationed until 1949, food until 1954 and coal until 1958. De-mobilization was felt to be proceeding too slowly contributing to the dissatisfaction: numbers in the armed forces dropped from 2 million in 1946 to 800,000 by 1948, but this was still 300,000 up on pre-war levels. In the winter before Passport to Pimlico was released there was also a fuel crisis with electricity cuts, a shortened working week and factory closures that made rationing and post-war austerity seem all the more oppressive.
It is this frustration that Passport to Pimlico expresses. The question is whether in doing this the film ultimately aims to bring about change or convince people of the necessity of continuing to conform. Although the film focuses upon acts of rebellion in the end it praises restraint and affirms the importance of law and order.
The new consumer society was not yet in place; but a supposed shift from wartime community spirit to selfish individualism (highlighted 11 years later in I’m All Right Jack (Boulting, 1959)) seems already to have been detected by the makers of Passport to Pimlico. Reflecting on their selfish materialism, Arthur tells council members: ‘Don’t you think of anything other than pounds, shillings and pence.’ Burgundian Pimlico is always a fragile alliance of disparate types with their own agendas; as with Britain during the war perhaps, the main thing holding them together it seems is the threat from outside.
The war produced a need for cohesive images of British national identity based upon unity and togetherness, but once the threat was removed filmmakers were able to take part in redefining the image of Britain and ‘Britishness’ for the post-war era. Should they re-assert traditional (pre-war) values or champion a new radicalism? Perhaps they had little choice in this but had their views shaped by the mood of the country. More fundamentally (and unfortunately more difficult to ascertain), when a film does portray a particular view of national identity what is the relationship of that constructed image to the reality on the streets?
In Passport to Pimlico there is nostalgia for the war years. Evidence of the war can still be seen but is beginning to disappear: ‘Pamela’ is supposed to be the last unexploded bomb in London (although another ‘last’ bomb is found later), and Arthur is said to miss ‘that old white hat’, his air-raid warden’s helmet. Wartime films are recalled in the community singing that takes place after the ration books have been torn up, reflecting a longing for the (supposed?) sense of community found during that period. When it opened the film offered audiences the opportunity to re-live wartime experiences of solidarity and celebrate that key supposed aspect of ‘Britishness’, bulldog determination:
If the Nazis couldn’t drive me out of my home with all their bombs and rockets and doodlebugs, you don’t catch me packing up now…. We always have been English and we always will be English, and it’s just because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundian.
[Connie Pemberton’s words also, of course, raise the issue of the relationship between notions of Britishness and Englishness. ‘Englishness’ excludes three further parts of the United Kingdom. And you might consider locating the film so firmly in London potentially operates to further exclude parts of England.]
Passport to Pimlico reflects a longing for continued national unity. As the ‘Siege of Burgundy’ goes ahead spoof newsreel footage shows politicians of all parties uniting:
For the first time since World War Two Britain’s party politics have been forgotten. The nation’s leaders have come together to seek a solution to this unprecedented crisis.
Spivs and characters with an eye to the main chance although offered as characters to laugh at also threaten chaos and disorder in Passport to Pimlico.
Ultimately, Passport to Pimlico aims to reinforce what it sees as positive images within the back catalogue of shared concepts of Britishness. The difficulty is that it wants all the time to hark back to the past which while it may be of momentary comfort within the darkness of the auditorium immediately disappears as the audience emerges from the cinema’s fantasy safety zone. The film attempts to reinforce aspects of the imagined national community existing within the individual (and collective?) imagination. It attempts to shore up that shared stock of images, ideas, norms and values, stories and traditions the filmmakers see as being the essence of Britishness.
National identity affects the way we see ourselves and the way we perceive others who are classified as existing outside of the chosen ‘in-group’. But, the nature of that identity is a site of struggle, so that the identity itself is constantly undergoing a process of either re-affirmation or re-definition. Put simply, national identity does not exist in some singular, uncontested form. Passport to Pimlico works within this arena, expressing disapproval of certain aspects of the perceived state of the nation and positive approval of other potential facets of a contested, shifting national identity.
With the end of the war and (to some extent) the end of the old pre-war hierarchies of class, the nature of social order in Britain is being particularly strongly fought over (or renegotiated). This film reflects the accompanying turmoil and uncertainty as hegemony is being contested. The old certainties that attached to a well-formed sense of class and rank have been severely undermined. Deference to authority is a thing of the past. Younger women like Shirley are showing disturbing tendencies towards redefining social expectations of women. The old order is changing and the concept of British national identity is in a state of flux, ripe for redefinition. (Race may be a significant absence from Passport to Pimlico but this state of affairs won’t last much longer.)
Henri Bergson, in his essay ‘Laughter’ (1900), suggested the usual object of humour was human rigidity, or inflexibility, whether of outlook or belief. The resulting laughter, he pointed out, produced two groups, ‘those who laugh’ and ‘those who are laughed at’. The whole process, he said, operated as social criticism but with the aim of promoting social conformity. It could produce permanent alienation for the ‘laughed at’ group but could also bring about their re-incorporation into a renewed social order. The gentle approach to comedy offered by Passport to Pimlico it could be suggested would encourage ‘laughed at’ groups to more willingly accept implied criticisms.
In his essay ‘The Argument of Comedy’ (1948), Northrop Frye suggested that in ancient Greece there were two periods of comedy, ‘old comedy’ and a later ‘new comedy’. The first, he said, accepted that society was unchangeable and that vice and folly could only be ridiculed in such a way as to enable a brief ‘carnivalesque’ holiday before a return to conformity. The second suggested an alienating social order could be reshaped; it often involved an escape to nature before a return to a regenerated society. How would Passport to Pimlico be seen in relation to this theory?