Rescued by Rover (1905)
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Would the implied messages and values to be found in Sapphire seem to advocate any one of these outcomes? The diversity of perspectives open to the spectator will always make it impossible to allocate any categorical positioning of audience in relation to text: readers are able to make of texts what they will. However, it remains the case that for a sizeable proportion of the mainstream film-going public at the end of the 1950s this film would be unusual in bringing into question the security of the taken for granted Anglo-centrality (2) of their world. The film industry does deal with the retreat from Empire in various ways in the early 1960s. In Guns at Batasi (John Guillermin, 1964) the quintessential regimental sergeant major, bridging the officer class-ordinary ranks gulf, is given lines such as ‘Our good is as good as their good, and their bad is as bad as our bad’. In Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964) the main Zulu victory occurring at Isandlwana is ignored in order to concentrate on what was merely a sideshow skirmish to the main battle. In general, ethnic groups are denied a voice in films from the period and issues of race are thoroughly ignored. In this context the work of Dearden, screenwriter Janet Green and producer Michael Relph (a further common factor between this film and Pool of London) does seem at the very least laudable. Ethnic minority communities might be said to experience a range of racist attitudes:
Sapphire, particularly in the script, determinedly confronts each of these areas, even attempting to force liberals to question their own perhaps too cosy, self-congratulatory value system at certain points, as well as exposing the imposed poverty and deprivation accompanying such race-based exclusion. This text succeeds in raising issues about the ways in which migrating people experience identity, ethnicity and diasporic-belonging; and, even more importantly, confronts the way individuals within the audience who are members of the white majority experience ‘otherness’ within what they would tend to see as ‘their’ society. Notes
a form of vestigial thinking which permeates and structures contemporary practices and representations even after the formal end of colonialism. Further reading Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds) Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture, Trowbridge, Flick Books, 1997. Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England, London, Faber, 1970. John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963, London, BFI, 1986. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. John White We Are The Lambeth Boys (1959) [Production Company: Graphic Films. Director: Karel Reisz. Cinematographer: Walter Lassally. Music: Johnny Dankworth. Editor: John Fletcher. Commentary: John Rollason.] During the 1950s many of Britain’s younger artists, writers, filmmakers and cultural critics took as their subject matter ‘ordinary’ people and ‘ordinary’ life. This may have reflected in part the increasing post-war importance of democracy – ordinary people had done their bit to defeat fascism, they had voted for the benefits of the Welfare State and now they were being represented in all kinds of cultural practices. It may also have owed something to the now familiar desire of younger generations to sweep away the favoured images and ideas of their predecessors which in 1950s Britain were often unadventurous, middle-aged and middle-class or nostalgically historical. From the mid-1950s, new playwrights like John Osborne and Harold Pinter were characterised somewhat loosely as ‘angry young men’and a group of young artists including John Bratby and Jack Smith were known as the ‘Kitchen Sink Painters’. Two key publications celebrated the culture of ordinary people and pointed the way to the development of British Cultural Studies: one was Culture and Society by Raymond Williams, the second The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. In 1959 Hoggart contributed an article to Sight and Sound on a new British documentary film, We Are the Lambeth Boys, suggesting the questions which the film is bound to raise for anyone interested in the way ‘ordinary life’ is treated in popular art and entertainments nowadays. He identified and generally praised the “subjective approach” of the director Karel Reisz, contrasting it with more cautious documentary work which in seeking ‘comprehensive, objectivity and balance’ sacrifices ‘meaning (and)...the sense of life itself’. By contrast, Hoggart suggested We Are the Lambeth Boys demonstrated ‘characteristics of art’ in setting out ‘to show, not the whole truth, but some aspects of the truth wholly’. The film offers an account of young people in a London youth club on the southern side of the Thames. It was shown for the first time just along the road from its location, at the National Film Theatre in March 1959, having been shot over six weeks during the previous summer. It had been sponsored by the Ford Motor Company as part of a cinema series called ‘Look at Britain’. At its premiere it was one of four documentaries shown together under the title ‘Free Cinema 6’. Christophe Dupin (2006) says Free Cinema was Essentially…the general title given to a series of six programmes of (mainly) short documentaries shown at the National Film Theatre (NFT) in London between February 1956 and March 1959. (Dupin 2006: 1) In February 1956 a group of participating young directors had issued a ‘manifesto’ claiming a common approach in their films. They defined this as including an ‘implicit…belief in freedom’ alongside the ‘importance of people and…the significance of the everyday’. This attitude was very similar to that found in much of the art, drama and critical writing of the time. We Are the Lambeth Boys, was one of the films in the last programme of these short documentaries, after which Reisz and his fellow directors Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson moved into feature films as the leading figures of the short-lived but successful British ‘New Wave’ which again took as its subjects ordinary people in contemporary Britain. So in part, the significance of We Are the Lambeth Boys is as one of a set of films that allowed this group of young directors to develop their skills before moving into fictional feature films. But if this experience were merely an apprenticeship these short films would not warrant inclusion in any list of significant British films. The Free Cinema movement reflected the growing desire for greater democracy in class-conscious Britain but was also tied to the growing recognition of film as a significant artistic, intellectual and cultural practice. The films, produced in the late 1950s, were linked to new publications, specialist screenings, manifestos and the growing study of film in universities and colleges. For example Anderson and Reisz both wrote for the new film journal Sight and Sound. While the films of the Free Cinema had a serious intent they were produced by relatively young directors and a number offered representations of emerging youth cultures. The first programme of the Free Cinema included a film directed by Reisz and Richardson and funded by the British Film Institute. Its subject was a jazz club in Wood Green, north London and it had the title of a jazz song Momma Don’t Allow performed in the film by the Chris Barber Jazz Band – one of Britain’s most popular jazz bands. The shooting budget of £250 was approved at the end of 1954 and the completion budget of £175 in mid-1955, so this film offers a view of British youth culture just months before Elvis Presley’s first British hit and the cinema ‘riots’ that accompanied the first screenings of Rock Around the Clock. At the time jazz and its English off-shoot skiffle were at the hipper end of the popular music spectrum and jazz clubs or coffee bars were the location for the emergence of youth culture. By the time We Are the Lambeth Boys was shot three years later, skiffle was virtually over and jazz had given way to USA pop in the affections of most young people. The soundtrack was provided by Johnny Dankworth who with his vocalist wife Cleo Laine was another key figure of the British jazz scene: but while Barber provided a ‘retro’ jazz soundtrack for Momma Don’t Allow, Dankworth was, albeit tentatively, exploring the modern style. We Are the Lambeth Boys then offers a record of young English people in the summer of 1958 just prior to the emergence of the first Mods but with the Teddy Boys on the wane and popular culture taking an increasingly ubiquitous hold. The Lambeth teenagers are neither in a jazz club nor in the less structured surroundings of a coffee bar but in the organised, secular surroundings of a local council youth club. Through the 1950s and 1960s these clubs provided social spaces for young people to interact in a relatively ‘safe’ environment (all but two of the Lambeth boys and girls have left school and are in employment but we do not see them in pubs, drinking alcohol or mixing with adults). By contrast, just one year later, Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning shows a young rebellious factory worker sharing social spaces with adults, drinking copious quantities of alcohol and pursuing an affair with an older woman. In these respects the Lambeth youngsters anticipate more accurately the social groupings of young people separating themselves by choice from their elders, which would have such an impact in the 1960s and beyond. The most obvious adult presence in We Are the Lambeth Boys is the disembodied commentator (John Rollason) and his role is not straightforward. His authoritative commentary is perhaps too didactic, determined to guide our interpretation of what we see rather than allowing the spectator to interpret more actively what is on offer. The directors of the Free Cinema admired the 1940s documentary films of Humphrey Jennings, yet his major film Listen to Britain offers a more open example of documentation, resisting the didactic tradition of John Grierson and other British documentary-makers. In France in the 1950s, Jean Rouch was exploring a more open approach to documentary and his work was paralleled in the USA by the American innovators Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, DA Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers. Rollason’s commentary seems dated today but it is worth noting that Hoggart too criticised its addition to the images and live speech on offer, not least because it contributed to an over-idealistic depiction of young people. But while Free Cinema pursued new attitudes and We Are the Lambeth Boys records a new youth-oriented world, we can see half-a-century later that much of that world has changed significantly. The film opens with some of the young people walking towards the youth club on a bright summer’s evening. Others join them and we soon see the boys bowling and batting in a cricket net while the ‘Lambeth Girls’ stand around chatting. These young working people in their late teens smoke copiously but don’t drink and there is no hint of the spread of drug-taking which is now a significant part of teenage life. Almost without exception they dress smartly to relax, while Lambeth 1958 appears to be almost wholly white and working class. Halfway through the film we see two girls walking towards the club past three younger boys in short trousers one of whom is black but it is a fleeting moment. They appear to be playing happily together but in that same late summer there were extensive disturbances in the streets of north London, characterised as ‘race riots’. Similar problems occurred in Nottingham and the protagonists were mainly young white working-class hooligans, intent on trouble. Two passages do hint at the possibility of gang violence which the popular press would cover over the following decades in their pursuit of what Stanley Cohen described as ‘folk devils’ and ‘moral panics’ (Cohen 1972). In the opening minutes we see ‘Harry and his gang’ dressed more like Teddy Boys and preferring to smoke and ‘hang about’. Later, during a work-place sequence we overhear a discussion about ‘Smithy’s mob’ who may be threatening trouble locally. We hear that Smithy ‘don’t look hard…he looks a queer’ but he may ‘fuckin’ have about fifty…’ - the only bad language in the film. Subsequently, cultural commentators like Dick Hebdige (1979) noted the creative influence of black taste and style on the young working class subcultural groups. The early stages of this can be discerned in the film’s Saturday night dance sequence where we see the youngsters jiving to a typical twelve-bar rhythm & blues instrumental. Percy, one of the key figures in the film seems older perhaps because of his pencil moustache or his preference for white ties and dark shirts more reminiscent of the gangster look of Brighton Rock (Boulting, 1947). But on this Saturday night, his Brylcreemed quiff has been brushed forward and he sports a silk pocket handkerchief, hinting at the embryonic mod style which would soon invade the south London estates. The boys have already declared their interest in clothes in a discussion in the club where one asserts that he would spend 15 guineas on a suit (£15.75) – probably a week’s wages for a working man. They also discuss the morality of shop-lifting and the case for and against capital punishment which was then still legal. The Lambeth boys and girls have apprenticeships or work as unskilled labour in a variety of places including a butcher’s, a post office, a dress-maker’s, a factory and an office reception. This is a period of full employment and while it is not mentioned, most of these young men will be among the first generation not called up for National Service, enabling them to experience freedoms previously unavailable. Nonetheless we are reminded of the powerful class divide in Britain at the time on the boys’ annual trip to Mill Hill public school for an afternoon of cricket, swimming and socialising. While these educational divisions still exist, young people today share a more common popular culture which in 1958 was hardly widespread and appears not to have touched the public school at all. On the evening of the cricket match back in Lambeth there is more dancing with chips to follow while the commentary reassures us that ‘a good evening for young people is much as it always has been’. Would a contemporary version of the film be able to make the same claim? Further Reading Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1972. Christophe Dupin, ‘Free Cinema’ DVD booklet notes, London, BFI, 2006. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style, London, Routledge, 1979. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy London, Penguin, 1957. ----------- ‘We are the Lambeth Boys’, Sight and Sound, vol 28, nos 3 and 4, 1959. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1958. Dave Allen Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) [Production Company: Woodfall Film Productions. Director: Karel Reisz. Screenwriter: Alan Sillitoe. Cinematographer: Freddie Francis. Editor: Seth Hilton. Cast: Albert Finney (Arthur Seaton), Shirley Anne Field (Doreen), Rachel Roberts (Brenda), Hylda Baker (Aunt Ada), Norman Rossington (Bert).] Released in 1960, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is rooted in the new cinematic and literary movements of its day. Its screenplay, written by so-called ‘angry young man’ Alan Sillitoe, was based on his novel of the same name, and its director Karel Reisz was involved in the Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s. This, Reisz’s first fiction feature, was at the forefront of the short-lived ‘British New Wave’ (1959-1963). With its working-class protagonists, focus on controversial yet ordinary issues, and a commitment to represent working-class life, this ground-breaking movement included films that took a resolutely humanistic, poetic and non-commercial approach to cinema. They were also collectively known as ‘kitchen sink’ films. (1) The 1960s saw the rise of the independent film company as a significant force in British cinema and Woodfall was a prestigious example. Formed by another of the ‘angries’, John Osborne, in partnership with Tony Richardson, it was financed by the proceeds of Osborne’s stage success, Look Back in Anger. Woodfall’s aim, according to Richardson, was ‘to get into British film the same sort of impact and sense of life that the Angry Young Man cult has had in the theatre and literary worlds’ (in Hill 1986: 40). Independent production gave directors the freedom to represent their society in original ways and tackle issues previously considered taboo. They were helped in this by the new ‘X’ certificate, introduced by the BBFC in 1951 and granted to all the ‘new wave’ films apart from Billy Liar (John Schlesinger 1963). This allowed them to be more daring in content, albeit within reason: for example, Arthur (Finney) was allowed the contentious use of the word ‘bloody’, but ‘bugger’ was too much and had to be changed to ‘beggar’; likewise, a reference to the gin and hot bath abortion had to be cut. (2) Nevertheless, the frank presentation of Arthur’s sexual attitudes, Brenda’s (Roberts) adultery, and the unwanted pregnancy seemed adult and contemporary next to Hollywood films still labouring under a draconian Production Code. It is unsurprising therefore that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, like Room at the Top (Jack Clayton 1959) before it, hit a nerve with the cinema audience. Despite a small publicity budget, it was the third most successful film at the box office in 1961, won the BAFTA for Best Film and was the first film to take £100,000 in the three weeks of its London run alone. This film reflected the political and social changes shaping British society at this time. It was released in the middle of the prosperous consumer boom of the 1950s, but before the ‘swinging sixties’. Considered daring on its release for its representation of sexuality and working class youth, its moral values look old-fashioned even compared to Georgy Girl (Silvio Narizzano 1966) and Alfie (Lewis Gilbert 1966), let alone Blow Up (Michelangelo Anonioni, 1966) and Performance (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg 1970). By 1963, gritty realism and working class angst were no longer box office draws. Nevertheless, the fact that radical representations of working class life were at the heart of these new literary and cinematic movements is explained by contemporary changes in society. The economic boom of the 1950s had brought unprecedented prosperity to a class used to defining itself in terms of the battle for a living wage. This led to new tensions around class identity and working class masculinity in particular, defined as it was in its opposition to oppression in the workplace. After the ‘hungry thirties’ and the austerity of the war years, the 1950s were the ‘never had it so good’ Macmillan years. Wages doubled between 1951 and 1959, inflation and bank rates were low. Between 1957 and 1959, television ownership went up by 32%; between 1952 and 59 ownership of cars doubled. Advertising investment increased fourfold between 1947 and 1960. In 1959 alone 200,000 motorbike licences were issued. (Sandbrook 2006: 97) Jack’s (Bryan Pringle) motorbike and sidecar and his promise to buy Brenda a television; Robbo’s (Robert Cawdron) outrage at Arthur’s pay packet of over £14; Doreen’s (Shirley Anne Field) comments about Arthur’s suits – ‘Are all these clothes your’n? They must have cost you a pretty penny.’ – are all precise contemporary details. A class that had previously defined itself as producers now had to redefine itself as consumers. Increased wealth plus access to university education offered greater class mobility than ever before, but also challenged established ideas of what it meant to be working class. From the perspective of 1960, it seemed conceivable that the working class as it had been was an endangered species, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning reflects these feelings of uncertainty, confusion and social paranoia. The seminal text setting the agenda for intellectual debate about working-class identity was Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957). Hoggart contrasts the ‘good’ authentic working-class culture of the past with the ‘shiny barbarism’ of the modern consumer culture he sees as destroying it. Most of the ‘new wave’ films produce representations of working-class life premised on this binary opposition. Sillitoe read Hoggart after writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but agreed that his novel ‘pointed out more or less the same thing’ (in Hill 1986: 203). The opening shot frames Arthur as traditionally working class, shirt sleeves rolled up and working at his lathe, voicing his combative attitude to authority and his determination not to be ground down. Doreen’s new council house, with its modern furnishings, is seen as an unfriendly and repressive place set against the homely welcome of Arthur’s traditional terraced home, reflecting the distrust of middle class aspirations. Arthur’s scathing comment that television produces people who are ‘dead from the neck down’ is a recurring motif found in most of the ‘new wave’ films. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning pushes beyond this fixed ideological model to present a more ambivalent view. Jack, staid on his motorbike, seems more old-fashioned than Arthur on his pushbike; in the club, the younger generation listens to their pop music and the older generation enjoy their sing-song: neither group is held up as more desirable than the other. This is different from the clear privileging of the rich brass band concert over the television quiz show in A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger 1962). Even the final sequence, where Arthur throws a stone at the modern housing development and expresses his preference for an older house, finishes with a resigned acceptance that he and Doreen may live there. Moreover, several times in the film, Arthur himself expresses disdain for ‘the good old days’. While this is framed within an awareness of how hard those times were, there is no nostalgic admiration for the people who lived through them. Most of the ‘new wave’ films sidestep uncomfortable exploration of class identity by projecting all the problems onto the female characters, who become embodiments of the threats posed to traditional working class culture. A stereotype of the new wave is the woman obsessed with consumer goods and middle-class aspirations. This neat containment of the debate lets the men off the hook; demonising the women prevents further uncomfortable debate over class identity. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning shares this misogynistic tendency, but whereas in other new wave films, the male view is privileged, this one is more ambivalent in its audience positioning. Effective examples include the sequence where Arthur deliberately tips a pint of beer over the woman in the club, the sequence where he puts a dead rat on the bench of a female worker and the sequence where he shoots Mrs Bull (Edna Morris). In the first two incidents there is a lack of clear motivation, while in the third we are encouraged to assume it is a payback for Mrs Bull helping to bring about the arrest of the man who threw the brick through the shop window. Reaction shots of Arthur laughing after each incident suggest this is part of Arthur’s rebellious streak, or his addiction to ‘having a good time’, but in neither sequence are Arthur’s values prioritised as superior. The messages regarding class and gender remain quite ambivalent. The extremity of Bert and Arthur’s hatred for Mrs Bull is disturbing. They call her ‘a bitch and a whore’, ‘rat face’, ‘old bag’, and suggest she ‘wants pole-axing’. Because this hatred cannot be masked by the more acceptable guise of class resentment, it can be seen as straightforward antagonism towards women. It is tempting therefore to read the film as emphatically sexist. The sexually attractive ‘good girl’ gets her man, while the transgressive woman is punished for her deviance. Doreen seems to fit this first stereotype, described by some as ‘a smashing bit of stuff’, but ‘first kiss and she’ll expect a ring’. When Arthur does agree to marry Doreen, despite the film’s analogies between marriage and fishing, the film is ambivalent about their relationship. Has Arthur’s rebellious masculinity been tamed like Jack’s before him (as suggested by the shot of the brick throwing man being restrained by a group of threatening women), or does his relationship signal a more adult recognition of who he is? In the final sequence his comment that it will not be the last stone he throws, and the mildness of Doreen’s rebuke, further resist misogynistic readings about the female emasculation of the male. Similarly, while Brenda’s agency in the narrative (adulterous wife who is punished for her transgression) seems unambiguous, the representation of her is more complex. For example, in the ‘Sunday morning’ sequence we see her in three conflicting stereotypical roles: in bed with Arthur confirming her pleasure with their sexual relationship; serving him breakfast in a way which recalls the servile role of Mrs Seaton; and, finally, hugging her child. Her ease and confidence in all these roles of lover, wife and mother constructs a representation at odds with the more misogynistic elements of the film. Her courage in deciding to go ahead with the pregnancy and ‘face whatever comes of it’, her speech about what it means to be a mother, and the final shot we see of her in the film, trapped in the spotlight with a crowd of hostile spectators around her just after she has been publicly slapped by Jack, invite the audience to sympathise with her. Meanwhile, in the penultimate sequence of the film where Arthur consummates his relationship with Doreen after their engagement, the camera privileges Doreen’s unease. This, combined with the sequences involving Brenda, give a complex and empathetic look at the female experience of sexuality and marriage in the late 1950s, before the contraceptive pill and the abortion law started to have a real effect on women’s lives. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is unusual in its implicit criticism of the ways in which challenges to working class male identity manifest themselves. Like the ‘angry young men’ of the time, Arthur’s anger is real but its focus remains unclear. The film gives a real sense of Arthur’s unhappiness with his situation but is less clear about why he feels like this or what the solution may be. Arthur articulates this crisis of identity in juxtaposition with searching shots of his face in the mirror: ‘I’m me and nobody else. Whatever people say I am that’s what I’m not…. God knows what I am. To this extent the film is a more provocative and searching exploration of its time than some of the other ‘kitchen sink’ films which present a more apparently coherent picture of what ‘working class’ might mean. Notes
Further Reading John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, London, BFI, 1986. Richard Hoggart, Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life, London, Chatto & Windus, 1957. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had it So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, Oxford, Abacus, 2006. Jean Welsh Peeping Tom (1960) [Production Company: Michael Powell (Theatre). Director: Michael Powell. Screenwriter: Leo Marks. Cinematographer: Otto Heller. Editor: Noreen Ackland. Music: Brian Easdale. Cast: Carl Boehm (Mark Lewis), Anna Massey (Helen Stephens), Moira Shearer (Vivian).] It is always creepy and fascinating when the cinema screen looks back at you, turning that fundamental element of film – the gaze – back onto the viewer. This is what Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom does to us from the outset. It opens with an extreme close up of a pair of blue eyes, closed at first then wide open and alert, as though suddenly engaged in the activity of looking. We are so close that we cannot judge their expression. Are they peeping at something, captured by the sight of a spectacle they should not be seeing? Or is that fear twitching at the corner of the eye, are they watching some unaccountable horror? The cleverness of this opening, whose ambiguity remains even once the film is over, is that the captivated yet terrified gaze of the horror movie spectator is laid bare. In other words this shot mirrors from the start our own gaze as we watch the film, letting us know in no uncertain terms that the film will, in a sense, be watching us watching. We are the peeping Toms of the title and the film ‘knows’ it too. Peeping Tom is almost as famous for the bad press it received on its release as for its subsequent rehabilitation in the 1970s by British film critics such as Ian Christie, and US filmmakers like Martin Scorsese. In 1960 it was vilified as exploitative, perverse and downright nasty, in spite of the fact that there is very little explicit violence or sex. What could be more disturbing, however, than a film that probes the very mechanisms of cinema itself, revealing our own perversity as obsessive watchers and highlighting our sadistic sense of mastery over the image? As Mark Lewis, the psychopathic protagonist of the film, knows, nothing is more shocking than seeing one’s mirror image looking into the abyss of human terror. The critics’ initial outcry captures this uncomfortable feeling of being caught in the act. Peeping Tom might arguably be situated in relation to the slasher genre, which developed in the wake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960 US), during the 1970s and 80s. Carol Clover describes as follows the essential elements from the Hitchcock film, referenced by numerous later productions: … the killer is the psychotic product of a sick family, but still recognizably human; the victim is a beautiful, sexually active woman; the location is not-home, at a Terrible Place; the weapon is something other than a gun; the attack is registered from the victim’s point of view and comes with shocking suddenness. (1992: 23-4) Peeping Tom was financed, as part of a series of low-budget films, by Anglo-Amalgamated, hoping to emulate the success of British horror production company Hammer in the late 1950s. It is strikingly similar to the slasher model Clover outlines, most notably in the figure of the killer, whose childhood relations with a cold-hearted scientist father and sexually attractive stepmother are shown to have led directly to his psychopathic affliction: the urge to film the death agonies of women whose sexuality is a crucial part of their identity. What is more, Peeping Tom goes further than Psycho towards anticipating the genre by introducing both the series of female victims and the ‘Final Girl’, in the figure of the bright and sympathetic Helen Stephens, who both discovers Mark’s secret and manages to survive the experience. It is true that Peeping Tom may have influenced later practitioners of slasher films, in particular Brian de Palma who was one of the 1970s ‘movie brats’ who rediscovered the films of Powell and former partner Emeric Pressburger (Christie 1994: 95). However, it is clearly Psycho that is most explicitly referenced by subsequent films. What is interesting then about Peeping Tom’s resonance with the slasher genre is the way it appears both to anticipate and deconstruct this particular mode of horror from within. The complex patterns of identification and perspective offered to the viewer are the primary means of this deconstruction. As will become commonplace in slasher films, our gaze is initially aligned with the killer’s, switching towards the end to the perspective of the Final Girl, who takes on the ‘active investigative gaze’ (Clover 1992: 60). However the interplay of narrative and perspective in Peeping Tom complicates this pattern. The ‘killer’s’ point of view is explicitly designated as that of a camera, whether in the process of filming, signalled by the grid of a viewfinder across the screen, or at the moment of replay, in the black and white 16mm films Mark projects in his darkroom after the murders. Not only this but the murder weapon, the sharpened end of the tripod of Mark’s Bell and Howell camera, is itself part of the apparatus, while Viv’s murder is staged by Mark on a studio set under the auspices of a horror movie audition piece. This all conspires to bind the sadistic murders inextricably to the process of making and watching movies, implicating the spectator in Mark’s ‘scoptophilia’, as the caricature psychiatrist calls his ‘morbid urge to gaze’. (1) The Final Girl’s attack sequence also complicates perspective, for it reveals the terrifying device of the mirror showing victims their own fear of death, but not before we have witnessed Helen watching the film of Viv’s murder. Here, rather than registering her point of view, the camera remains fixed on her offering to the spectator precisely the spectacle of terror Mark himself seeks to record. Perhaps even more disturbingly, Mark’s condition supposedly stems from his appalling childhood as guinea-pig for his father’s experimental exploration and filming of the mechanisms of fear, suggesting that the excuses we make for obsessive watching – such as being a scientist or, say, a film critic – are just covers for a morbid and unhealthy subjugation of the desired image to our devouring eye. That there might be something inherently ‘morbid’ about watching films, something that goes beyond curiosity and into the realm of horror, is not only indicated by the success of the horror genre per se. It also connects with the workings of film itself, which as an inherently photographic medium has a particular relation to death. As Roland Barthes has argued, the photographic image, by preserving the image of life in the face of death, creates, as its subjects pass away, a disturbing ‘future anterior’ tense: between the shot being taken and the image being viewed by us in the present, the subject ‘will have’ died: ‘whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.’ (1980: 96) Although Barthes felt that the narrative flow of cinema denied it this uncanny power, Peeping Tom constantly reminds us of the photographic referent at the heart of cinema. Still photography plays an important part in the narrative of the film, in the ironic contrast between Mark’s after-hours job taking erotic snaps and Helen’s plans for a children’s book about a magic camera. More significantly, both still photography and the moving image are referred to as ‘photography’ by characters in the film, highlighting their common element, the capturing and fixing onto film of images. Mark’s collection of female victims, each stabbed through the throat like a pinned butterfly, thereby parallels both his father’s scientific ‘collection’ of his childhood emotions and the elderly gentleman’s collection of pornographic images purchased from the newsagent. The stillness or movement of the image is not at issue, rather the mechanical containment of the image allowing it to be mastered by the viewer. Even the film’s real cinematographer Otto Heller is credited with the words ‘Photographed in Eastman Colour by…’. This blurring of the distinction between photography and cinema foregrounds the secret morbidity of film. Combined with the self-reflexive focus on the voyeurism of cinematic viewing, it means that the spectator of Peeping Tom is not free simply to shift unthinkingly between identificatory positions, but is instead constantly reminded of his or her own position as viewer, steeped in a complicity that goes well beyond mere ‘sympathy’ for the murderer. One of the results of this is that the diegetic space of the film is precisely not as contained as we expect it to be, destabilising the mastery over the filmed image that we, like Mark, conventionally require from cinema. This is set in motion by the eye-opening first image and continued as the credits roll over the play-back of the murder scene we have just witnessed through a viewfinder. The boundaries between events within the film and outside it are blurred. The mise-en-abyme created by the production for which Mark works as focus-puller contributes to this effect, particularly in the scene where, cameras rolling, the female star opens the trunk to find Viv’s dead body. Presumably a horror flick itself given its title, ‘The Walls are Closing in’, this represents the moment where real horror intrudes upon the artificial world of the film set. Another, more critical moment of confusion occurs when Helen, having discovered and watched the film of Viv’s murder in Mark’s darkroom, cries in desperation to Mark, ‘that film is just a film, isn’t it?’ The film’s persistent disturbance of the parameters of fiction adds to the feeling of disquiet it creates in the spectator. Yet ultimately we never question that this is just a film we are watching. For equally persistent are the comic and ironic touches undermining the film’s realism. When glamour model Milly says that Mark ‘might be more fun’ if it wasn’t safe to be alone with him, or the policeman quips ‘we’re going to be stars’ when he catches Mark filming him; when the film director fumes, ‘the silly bitch, she fainted in the wrong scene!’ as his fluffy female star discovers a real dead body, the dramatic irony and humour of such remarks serves to distance us from the events even as the stability of cinema screen as boundary is being disturbed. Likewise, the tight, carefully constructed narrative structure provides a framework to guide us through the complex thematic layering. (2) In the end this perhaps accounts for the strangeness – and brilliance – of the film. It makes us as spectators feel both at home and not at home in the perverse cinematic universe it evokes. Like the Terrible Place described by Clover as the slasher film’s prime location, the film is uncanny because it is a ‘not-home’, both familiar and frightening. This is to follow Freud’s exploration of the uncanny through an analysis of the way the German word unheimlich (uncanny, unhomely) meets heimlich (homely) since the latter word also signals that which is private and therefore concealed, hidden. The uncanny is therefore ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ (1990: 364). Within Peeping Tom’s diegesis, the Terrible Place is Mark’s darkroom, the secret heart of the family home containing the archives of all his father’s cruel experiments on him as a child as well as his own murderous ‘experiments’. It is a site that excites curiosity, not only in Helen but also in her blind, alcoholic mother, who tells Mark she visits it each night through the sounds of his footsteps and the whirring of his projector. For the auditory is not forgotten in the film’s self-reflexive stripping bare of the fascination of cinema: the revelation at the end that every room in the house is wired for sound furnishes the darkroom with aural secrets to match its visual horrors. Helen and her mother are like cinema spectators drawn irresistibly to the hidden spectacle of cruelty. Like them, we are confronted by an uncanny filmic space that uncovers repressed desire, both revealing and undermining our mastery of that which it contains. Notes
Further Reading Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London, Vintage, 1980. Ian Christie, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, London, Faber and Faber, 1994. Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, London, BFI, 1992. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Art and Literature, The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14, London, Penguin, 1990, pp.339-376. Isabelle McNeill The Innocents (1961) [Production Company: Achilles/20th Century Fox. Director: Jack Clayton. Screenwriter: Truman Capote. Cinematographer: Freddie Francis. Editor: Jim Clark. Music: George Auric. Cast: Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens), Martin Stephens (Miles), Pamela Franklin (Flora), Megs Jenkins (Mrs Grose), Michael Redgrave (Uncle), Peter Wyngarde (Peter Quint), Clytie Jessop (Miss Jessel), Isla Cameron (Anna).] For the successful debutant director, the second film is always a tricky prospect. Should it follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, repeating a tried and trusted formula, or should it be completely different, the director taking advantage of a power and freedom in the industry he or she may never again experience? After the international critical and commercial triumph of his first feature, Room at the Top (1959), which is often credited with launching the British New Wave, Jack Clayton was offered several projects in a similar vein of gritty realism: Sons and Lovers, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The L-Shaped Room and Term of Trial. The films were all subsequently made – but not by Clayton. Instead he unexpectedly turned to a famous late-Victorian ghost story by the American master Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), which Clayton had read and been enthralled by as a boy. The rights were owned by Twentieth Century Fox after a successful stage adaptation of it by William Archibald; after initial preparatory work with Archibald in adapting his play for the screen, Clayton reverted back to the novella for his inspiration, bringing in Truman Capote to write the screenplay. (1) Even at that stage of his career, the ghost story was not unfamiliar territory for him. He had been an associate producer on Thorold Dickinson’s stylish adaptation of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades (1949), where a Russian soldier is haunted to the point of madness by the ghost of a wealthy Countess whose death he has caused; and his Oscar-winning short film, The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), was based on a supernatural tale by Gogol. Yet, as close friend and director Karel Reisz was later to reveal, Clayton might also have felt a personal connection with the James story. Not knowing who his father was, and brought up by a succession of nannies in a household full of secrets, Clayton empathises with the situation of the children in the story as they struggle to survive in an adult world that they already perceive to be fearful and duplicitous. At that time the British horror film was a subject of considerable controversy. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) had outraged many with its tortured portrayal of a psychologically wounded, voyeuristic psychopath, and the blood-soaked horror rhapsodies of Hammer had yet to find critical acceptance. The Innocents, however, sidestepped that kind of indignation by skillfully situating itself in two critically respected traditions. Like the Ealing compendium classic, Dead of Night (Robert Hamer et al 1945), its horror was implied rather than overt: here, a shot of a teardrop on a child’s school slate could elicit the requisite shiver of dread. In that sense, it was being absolutely true to the narrative strategy James himself had outlined in his Preface to the tale, where he felt the horror should be suggestive rather than specific: ‘Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself,’ he wrote, ‘and you are released from weak specification.’ (1907: 176) The Innocents could also be seen as one of British cinema’s most distinguished adaptations of a literary classic, being true to the spirit of the story but highly imaginative in its cinematic realisation. James’ ‘little pot-boiler’ of a story (as he put it) has become one of the great literary conundrums. Two ghosts – the former valet, Peter Quint and the former governess, Miss Jessel – haunt the grounds of Bly House, where a new governess and the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, are in charge of two children, Miles and Flora. Are the ghosts demonic presences, trying to possess the souls of the children and, through them, re-kindle their illicit affair? Or are they figments of the new governess’ imagination, symptoms of a sexual repression perhaps breached by her infatuation with the children’s uncle, whom she met (and was carried away by) when interviewed for the post? The tale is a masterclass in literary ambiguity: could the film replicate its richness? From the outset, Clayton recognised that the tale presented formidable filmic challenges. Because the story has a limited number of ingredients – basically, two adults, two children, two ghosts, and a house – he realised it was essential that the tension must never be allowed to sag: each scene must have some point of intensity or disquiet, underlined by a visual detail, say, or an unusual camera angle, or a look. As examples, one might cite the way the governess’ first approach to the house is filmed as if she is being followed; or the look exchanged between Miles and Flora when he enquires whether the governess’ previous home was ‘big enough to have secrets’. The film’s opening is more atmospheric than the story’s, because Clayton felt it essential to establish the mood of apprehension right from the start, and he frames the whole thing as a subjective flashback. Even a tiny verbal slip by Mrs Grose, which is the first allusion to Quint (‘He had the devil’s own eye’) is more pointed in the film than in the story. Unconventionally, the ghosts appear in daylight and had to be presented in a way that communicated their threat to the children but also distinguished between them. We never get a close look at Miss Jessel, though we do pick up the aura of sadness around her, whereas Quint is thrust before us as a figure, in James’s phrase, ‘reeking of evil’, never more so than in a superb sequence of hide-and-seek, when the governess, playfully hiding from the children, becomes suddenly aware of a spectral, malevolent presence behind her staring in at the window. Contractually obliged by Twentieth Century Fox to shoot the film in wide-screen Cinemascope format, Clayton and his cameraman Freddie Francis devised a strategy of putting objects at the corner of the frames slightly out of focus, to give the sense of something unnervingly glimpsed on the fringes of perception. Challenged by the prospect of respecting the story’s ambiguity but needing to give the ghosts a palpable presence, Clayton and his editor Jim Clark hit upon the ingenious solution of reversing cause and effect by invariably showing the governess’s reaction to what she sees before revealing the thing itself, thus suggesting that it is the response that might be producing the visions rather than the other way round. A sequence early in the film exemplifies a number of its themes and strategies. Miles has unexpectedly returned home, expelled from school for reasons as yet unclear. On the night of his return, the governess has paused outside his room and then been surprised when a voice from within invites her to enter: how has he known she was there? Is this evidence of Miles’ supernatural powers or is it simply, as he explains, that this is a very old house and he has heard her footsteps? There is a similar moment at the end of the scene when the candle suddenly goes out at the point when the governess is beginning to press Miles about his school experience: is it the flash of his eyes that causes this, as if warning her not to get too close, or is it, as he suggests, a gust of wind? Clayton makes such incidents eerily ambiguous, offering explanations that are more or less equally plausible. While tantalising us with these ghostly elements, he also has his eye on the human drama. How well he and Deborah Kerr catch the governess’ nervousness here, as she tries to raise the subject of the boy’s expulsion without upsetting him, and also her defensiveness when Miles moves the subject on to the uncle’s indifference. How well he and young Stephens convey Miles’ ostensible man-of-the-house precocity as he calmly describes his uncle’s lack of concern, only to disclose his sensitivity when the governess, professing her own devotion, is surprised to find Miles silently crying. (2) Dissolve to a huge rose in the garden as the governess clips it: a subliminal romantic reminder to her of the uncle perhaps (he has already been associated with roses in the film) and also an image that reminds us of a tendency in her to magnify things. It is a beautiful sunny morning; Flora is singing quietly in the background; everything seems right with the world. The governess spies an opening in the garden but is disconcerted by the sight of a broken Cupid statue that first echoes then fractures her reverie, all the more so when a black beetle drops from its mouth like a tongue. Suddenly the atmosphere of contented drowsiness changes: the sound dips, an electric hum fills the soundtrack as if something unearthly is stirring, and the governess looks up into the sun to see the hazy figure of a man standing at the top of the tower and looking down at her. The shot is held momentarily; a pigeon flutters past in seeming slow-motion; and then the governess drops her scissors in the fountain, the sound resumes as normal, the spell is broken. But what has happened? Finding Miles at the top of the tower tending to some pigeons, she asks if he has seen the person, but Miles denies it. ‘Maybe you imagined it,’ he says. Has it been a hallucination, or is there a suggestion at this early stage of a diabolical complicity between Miles and Quint? This tightrope of possibilities will be grippingly maintained as governess and ghosts do battle. The finale is terrifying, because the governess has herself become a figure of fear, her behaviour veering into self-vindication as much as self-sacrifice. After all, if the children were actually as innocent as they claim, what does that make her? There is a perfect match between Deborah Kerr’s performance and her persona. Appearing in every scene, she develops a characterisation seen so deeply from the inside that she seems to change physically under the pressure of events. As her performances in films such as Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger 1947), Tea and Sympathy (Minnelli 1956) and Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (Huston 1957) demonstrate, she was at her best when suggesting repressed passion beneath a surface of prim respectability. One could even see her performance here as a nuanced neurotic counterpart to her governess in The King and I (Lang 1956). In that film, whenever she feels afraid, she whistles a happy tune. In The Innocents, whenever she feels afraid, she takes it out on the children. Although highly praised at the time, the film was not a box-office success, perhaps being too artily obscure and downbeat for mass appeal. With subsequent films such as The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), Clayton was again to show his facility and compassion in exploring feminine feeling, something first signaled in Simone Signoret’s revelatory performance in Room at the Top. However, as Pauline Kael once remarked of Charles Laughton’s thriller, The Night of the Hunter (1955), truly frightening films become classics of a kind even if unappreciated at the time, and over the years, the reputation of The Innocents has grown. (1968: 397) One particular accolade stands out. Dining in a restaurant in France in the early 1980s, Clayton was handed a message by a waiter from one of the diners sitting opposite. It read simply: ‘The Innocents – the best English film since Hitchcock left for America.’ The signatory was François Truffaut – never the most complimentary commentator on British cinema, but, in this instance, absolutely right. Notes
Further Reading Gordon Gow, 'The Way Things Are: An Interview with Jack Clayton', Films and Filming, April 1974, pp. 10-14. Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907. Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, MA, Little Brown, 1968. Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, London, Methuen, 1997. Neil Sinyard, Jack Clayton, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000. Neil Sinyard A Taste of Honey (1961) [Production Company: Woodfall Film Productions. Director and producer: Tony Richardson. Screenwriters: Shelagh Delaney and Tony Richardson. Cinematographer: Walter Lassally. Music: John Addison. Editor: Anthony Gibbs. Cast: Dora Bryan (Helen), Rita Tushingham (Jo), Robert Stephens (Peter), Murray Melvin (Geoffrey), Paul Danquah (Jimmy).] A Taste of Honey is a central film of the British New Wave. The origins of the New Wave lie, at least partly, outside of the realm of cinema, in developments which occurred in literature and the theatre during the late 1950s. The sources for these films are almost always to be found among the group of young writers (John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, Stan Barstow) whose work changed the face of British fiction and drama in this period and which was dubbed by the popular press as the ‘kitchen sink’ or ‘angry young man’ style. Their adoption of social realism as a form and their depiction of working class frustration broke radically with dominant literary trends, particularly in the theatre where the 1956 production of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was a landmark. For Stephen Lacey, its significance lay in the way it challenged the common perception of 1950s theatre as being ‘dominated by pre-war personnel and reactionary social and aesthetic values’. (Lacey 1995: 22) The first production of Osborne’s play by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre was directed by Tony Richardson, who would go on to helm a number of the New Wave films, including A Taste of Honey. Another source which the New Wave drew upon was the realist tradition within both British and European cinema. Richardson described the experience of seeing the films of the Italian Neo-Realists as ‘like emerging from a house whose windows and rooms have long been boarded over and air and places and people being revealed outside’. (Richardson 1993: 67) The work of the British documentary movement, especially the films of Humphrey Jennings, provided another reference point for the New Wave directors and in part led to the use of the documentary form by all of them at some stage in their careers. Several of these documentaries were shown as part of a series of six programmes at the National Film Theatre (1956-9) under the banner ‘Free Cinema.’ These were organised by Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz who, along with Richardson, formed the nucleus of the New Wave group. All three filmmakers shared a common view of contemporary British cinema, and the wider national culture, which reacted angrily to its middle class timidity and conformism. As chief polemicist, Anderson proclaimed that British films were ‘snobbish, anti-intelligent, emotionally inhibited, wilfully blind to the conditions and problems of the present, dedicated to an out-of-date, exhausted national idea’. (Anderson 2004: 234) Their aim was to revitalise British filmmaking by making it relevant to contemporary audiences. In practice, this meant adopting the techniques of documentary-realism to give their films a sense of authenticity and immediacy. At the same time, they were dedicated to a cinema of personal vision which should strive towards art and reflect the sensibility of the individual filmmaker. This combination of naturalism and auteurism drew heavily on the examples set by Humphrey Jennings and the directors of the Italian Neo-Realist movement such as Roberto Rossellini. The aim was not sociology, but social commitment. This is also reflected in what might otherwise seem to be a wilfully eclectic critical standpoint, whereby Anderson was an acknowledged admirer of both documentarists like Jennings and Hollywood auteurs like John Ford. To further his cinematic ambitions, Richardson founded the production company Woodfall in collaboration with Osborne and the producer Harry Saltzman. Their initial intention was to film versions of Osborne’s plays, but both Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960) were hampered by their theatrical origins, remaining defiantly uncinematic and retaining interest principally as a record of the plays. A more successful model was provided by Jack Clayton’s film of John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1958). The film’s depiction of a working class hero on the rise, along with its frank attitude towards sex, chimed with the mood of the time and the film was a box office success. Woodfall’s commercial breakthrough was to come with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), produced by Richardson, directed by Reisz and adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s novel. Its affectionate, dynamic portrayal of a discontented lathe operator, played with charismatic gusto by Albert Finney, had enormous appeal, particularly to young working class audiences who identified with the central character. The increasing confidence of Woodfall, along with their desire to move away from the staginess of their first films, provided the context for the making of A Taste of Honey. The New Wave films have provoked considerable academic debate as to their merits and deficiencies. Roy Armes was among the first to offer a critique, focusing on what he saw as a lack of emotional engagement on the part of the filmmakers with the subjects they were filming. (Armes 1978: 263-79) Armes attributes this to their middle class backgrounds which, he suggests, prevents them from feeling any personal identification with the characters depicted. A more systematic approach is taken by John Hill who takes issue with many aspects of these films. Expanding on Armes’ position, he argues that the filmmakers’ distance from their subject matter is reflected in their depiction of northern industrial landscapes as little more than a form of visual tourism (Hill 1986: 132-3). He also suggests that the working class male is presented as a figure motivated by ‘an ideology of individualism’, where personal gain is foregrounded over any sense of community or class loyalty and no political solution is offered. (Hill 1983: 110-11) For Hill, this is indicative of the middle class, conformist ideology of the New Wave films. Hill then raises issues relating to gender politics, suggesting ‘there was more than a streak of misogyny running through the films and a failure to acknowledge the changing social and economic role of women in British society’. (Hill 1986: 174) Female characters, therefore, are inevitably associated negatively with the social pressure applied to the male hero to conform via marriage and fatherhood. Considering that these films were supposed to represent a break from the dominant attitudes of the 1950s, Hill concludes that ‘the ‘new’ British cinema, in this respect, was neither as novel nor, certainly, as radical as has sometimes been claimed’. (Hill 1986: 179) A more sympathetic account of the films is offered by Robert Murphy, who accuses Hill of adhering to a rigid form of Marxist analysis: ‘His Marxist Puritanism leads him into dangerously wide generalisations’. (Murphy 1992: 31) As an example of this, he points to the fact that the selfish actions of the male heroes in these films, particularly in relation to the female characters, are always shown to have their consequences. The nature of their relationship with the women in their lives is always both central and complex within the narrative; the dilemmas they face reflect the contingencies of the time. He also argues forcefully for the significance of the roles allowed to women within these allegedly misogynistic texts: ‘These incandescently intense women have a seriousness, an emotional weight, altogether lacking in the pathetically trivial roles women had to play in most 1950s British films’. (Murphy 1992: 33) It is useful to analyse A Taste of Honey in light of these debates. The film certainly doesn’t conform to Hill’s argument regarding the misogynistic nature of the New Wave. The central character, Jo (Rita Tushingham), is female and the audience is openly invited to share her viewpoint. Although her mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), might fall into the category of the female stereotype which Hill describes (she is certainly materialistic and views marriage principally as a means to financial security), her ambiguous relationship with Jo complicates matters considerably. Even the sense that she is stifling Jo’s chances of happiness is undercut by the obvious affection between the two; a sequence near the film’s conclusion shows them fighting, but when Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) tries to intervene Helen shoos him off, saying: ‘Don’t be so silly, we enjoy it’. Although Jo’s lover, Jimmy (Paul Danquah), abandons her, there is no sense of gender antagonism, only of regret. Geoffrey, who is Jo’s closest friend, is a long way from the swaggering braggadocio of the typical New Wave hero, being sensitive, gentle and gay. Although the script deals with his homosexuality in a mainly indirect manner, the character is drawn with considerable sympathy. Hill suggests that the New Wave directors betray their sense of distance from their subjects through an overly pictorial visual style, typified by what Andrew Higson has called ‘That Long Shot Of Our Town From That Hill’. (Higson 1996: 134) Of course, it might be argued that the industrial townscapes of Northern England are as beautiful in their way as more traditional landscapes and that the views of Higson and Hill betray a certain snobbery. There are certainly many examples in A Taste of Honey which conform to this critique. Richardson and his cameraman Walter Lassally frequently linger on shots of the grey Salford backstreets and its misty canals in a dreamy, lyrical manner. However, reading Richardson’s account of the location shooting indicates the degree to which these scenes represented a form of liberation for the director. (Richardson 1993: 120-2). Finally away from the studio and the controlling interference of executives, Richardson uses camera movement, cinematography and music to convey a feeling of spontaneity and freedom, even in these grim settings. The visual lyricism might be read as an indication of the spirit of the characters, rather than a sense of distance in the filmmaker. Higson suggests this is a long way from documentary realism and Richardson certainly appears to be striving to move beyond the limitations of surface naturalism towards a more overtly personal style. Another key criticism of the New Wave films relates to their endorsement of personal self-interest over communal values. Again, a close examination of A Taste of Honey tends to contradict this. It is hard to see Jo as a self-interested character; she tends to be portrayed as confused and vulnerable. Her decision to go ahead with her pregnancy suggests altruism, rather than selfishness, and her relationships with Jimmy, Geoffrey and even her mother are marked by empathy and mutual support. The household she creates with Geoffrey is a form of improvised family unit, with the roles of father and mother open to constant renegotiation. The final image of Jo, clutching a sparkler, seems cautiously optimistic. An earlier sequence of Jo and Geoffrey out walking is full of youthful vigour and energy (‘We’re bloody fantastic’), prefiguring the youth explosion of swinging London. Jo and Geoffrey are contrasted sharply with an older generation who are blatantly materialistic in outlook. In retrospect, the film’s sympathetic depiction of a black man, a young woman and a gay man, mark it as an indicator of changing attitudes and the liberalisation of British culture. Further Reading Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get Out and Push!’ in Paul Ryan, Never Apologise – The Collected Writings: Lindsay Anderson, London, Plexus, 2004. Originally published in Tom Maschler, Declaration, 1957. Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema, London, Secker and Warburg, 1978. Andrew Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film’ in Andrew Higson (ed) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London and New York, Cassell, 1996. Originally published in Screen, Vol.25, Nos. 4 & 5, July & October 1984. John Hill, ‘Working Class Realism and Sexual Reaction: Some Theses on the British ‘New Wave’ in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds) British Cinema History, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963, London, BFI, 1986. Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context 1956-1965, London, Routledge, 1995. Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, London, BFI, 1992. Tony Richardson, Long Distance Runner: A Memoir, London, Faber, 1993. Alexander Walker, Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London, Harrap, 1986. Robert Shail Lawrence of Arabia (1962) [Production Company: Horizon Pictures. Director: David Lean. Screenwriters: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. Cinematographer: Freddie Young. Music: Maurice Jarre. Editor: Anne V. Coates. Cast: Peter O’Toole (T.E. Lawrence), Alec Guiness (Prince Feisal), Anthony Quinn (Auda abu Tayi), Jack Hawkins (General Lord Allenby), Omar Sharif (Sherif Ali).] Academy Award winning Lawrence of Arabia is a film of its time, resplendent in the grandeur of the British Empire and in offering a challenge to orthodoxy to be echoed across the 1960s. An epic, shot in Super Panavision 70mm on location in the deserts of Jordan and Morocco, and in Spain, it is British filmmaking at its best, and in terms of its cinematography and score it offers an evocative, emotional, and profound experience. Beginning with T E Lawrence’s accidental death in the leafy country lanes of the Home Counties, the film adopts a traditional conceit of having newspaper reporters researching background to the story of this remarkable man. Flashing back to a series of World War I exploits, Lawrence of Arabia enables director David Lean to explore issues of ‘Britishness’, duty, personal identity, violence, and sexuality. Casting Peter O’Toole as Lawrence, Lean presented him with an opportunity to show his range on a grand scale. O’Toole exploited this to the full creating a tour de force and what is often cited as his greatest performance. However, O’Toole was not to play the recalcitrant, elusive figure that history suggests was the real Lawrence, but instead a man of contradictions and masochistic tendencies, who was an egotist, and, most contentiously, homosexual. Across the original 221 minutes running time, the screenwriters played out this characterisation against a cinematic backdrop that allowed audiences to see what widescreen could be used to achieve. Cinematographer Freddie Young chose to emphasise the vastness of landscape and de-emphasise individuals within it. This was in line with Lean’s vision of the disconnected Lawrence who seemed to grow more in tune with the nature and rhythms of desert life and more alienated by the regimentation and restriction of ‘civilised’ army life. Indeed this duality and the conflict it caused are central to Lean’s story, and Young reflects this through his composition, camera movement, and lighting. There are many bold aspects of cinematography such as the oasis introduction of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif). The script demanded that Sherif Ali emerge out of a desert mirage, something notoriously difficult to capture on film due to its inherent ‘distant’ nature, but Young solved this through the use of an extremely long lens allowing effectively the production of a ‘close up’ of Sherif Ali through the mirage. The resulting image is of a ‘dot’ on screen slowly being revealed as an Arab riding a camel, and duly coming to prominence over the juxtaposed image of Lawrence and another native at the oasis; a truly cinematic sequence through its outstanding cinematography, the rhythm and tension of its editing, the build of the soundtrack, and an overall boldness in presenting the lengthy arrival in virtually real time. (Of course, the sequence completely fails to have the same effect on television where Sherif Ali remains less than a pixel for much of his journey.) In the shooting of Lawrence’s companion, Lean presents the audience with a divergence of cultures, between the restraint and ‘fair play’ of the young British officer, and the perceived ‘barbarism’ of the Arab (there is irony here in the fact that the gun the Arab companion was running for was given to him by Lawrence – a commentary on the cause of problems in the region that is built upon through the film). Lean however does not simply dismiss Sherif Ali’s actions as barbaric, but allows Lawrence to become influenced by such approaches; and it could be suggested that in not overtly criticising such actions Lean has some sympathy for this clarity and purity of decision and action. He certainly allows his Lawrence to lose his British values and adopt those of the tribesmen, and increasingly depicts Lawrence’s superiors as inept, suffocated and repressed individuals who would prefer to lose than adopt any tactic that seemed somehow un-British. Lawrence’s relationship with his superior General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) is re-visioned for the film and bears little resemblance to historical truth. Of course, a difficult relationship between subordinate and superior is the stuff of conflict, and as such is almost an inevitable path for a screenwriter if given the option, but the choice of such a depiction is more likely to have been fostered in order to structure an anti-war message, whilst retaining the protagonist’s war-focused actions. Co-writer Michael Wilson was blacklisted in the McCarthy Congressional hearings into anti-American behaviour, and his left-leaning sympathies, coupled with an understandably strong anti-authoritarian stance lead to his creating a fictional world where the ‘civilised’ nations were in moral crisis, and where he celebrated the ‘natural’ societal ordering of the tribesmen. The anti-war message can be read as deriding the ‘dishonour’ of modern warfare in favour of the courage and purity in battle presented by the Arab tribesmen. Certainly, in looking at Lawrence leading a band of 50 tribesmen into battle against superior forces with superior weaponry, their ‘honour’ and valour re-contextualises any perceived pacifist views. This honour is placed to the fore in a scene where, to resolve a blood feud that looks set to wreck his plans of uniting the Arab tribes, Lawrence has to execute a killer who is revealed to be Gasim (I.S. Johar), a tribesman he saved from death previously. Lawrence conducts the execution regardless of this fact (and shows little concern in carrying it out) and honour is restored, but he is already now moving away from his British proscribed values and embracing the more emotionally attuned values of the tribesmen. This theme could reflect world events of the time, with the Korean War having ended in a stalemate under a decade earlier and Vietnam entering a wider public consciousness with American involvement moving towards outright war. Both Korea and Vietnam would have held particular parallels with the Middle East at the time of Lawrence, with great empires playing out their political moves over a battlefield that in itself held little value yet offered significant strategic value to a post-war victor. The issue of identity is co-joined inexorably with that of duty and is most clearly explored in O’Toole’s anguished portrayal of Lawrence, torn between his British identity and his emerging Arab identity (with his ‘purer’ loyalty to those fighting beside him). This again is reflected in the use of setting within the film, with Lawrence seemingly most comfortable when isolated and surrounded only by the arid widescreen desert, and at his most uncomfortable when in his pressed uniform and crowded by the military machine and the cityscape. There is a duplicity in the British officers that is not portrayed in the Arab tribesmen who live by strict tribal codes and customs. When with ‘his own people’ Lawrence develops suspicions as to the post–conflict political aspirations of the colonial powers and becomes conscious of the complex web underpinning the relative simplicity of his war. This understanding of political motives marks a turning point in the film and in the character of Lawrence with both film and character becoming darker and more troubled. Lawrence takes to adopting guerrilla warfare tactics and using the natural advantages presented by native knowledge and the landscape to secure victories over an ‘alien’ occupier. This would again resonate with an audience familiar with the Korean War and with the experiences of the French in Vietnam. Lawrence’s approach slowly becomes more aggressive, and to some eyes more barbaric. His shooting of one of his injured men rather than leave him to the Turks is another milestone on his transformation and forces the spectator to confront their own cultural views in deciding whether this was a civilised act or an act of barbarism indicating a decline in values. A further turning point is when Lawrence is rounded up with a number of Arabs whilst scouting the enemy city of Dara. Taken to the Turkish Bey (played with camp decadence by Jose Ferrer) Lawrence is tortured for the Bey’s pleasure, and there is a clear implication that he is raped before being returned to the streets of Dara. Male rape was certainly not a subject for feature films at the time, and was one that the censors would have dealt with quickly and assiduously, and yet Lean evidently believed this was an important sequence for the exploration of Lawrence’s sexuality. O’Toole’s rather effeminate Lawrence is unquestionably traumatised by the event, and suffers a crisis of identity, returning to the safety (and repression) of his British culture. Back in Jerusalem (British Army Headquarters) Lawrence is seen to have undergone a significant transformation through the direct challenge to his sexuality, leading to a change in temperament and morality. The impact of one empire (the Turkish Bey) on another (Lawrence) is to propel one towards ever increasing barbarism, and this is reflected in Lawrence ordering the execution of any potential prisoners in the battle at Tafas, leading to a massacre of fleeing Turkish troops – a massacre that would for the audience at the time have been reminiscent of stories of Nazi or Japanese atrocities during World War II. Lawrence has adopted the culture of the tribesmen, and in doing so has succumbed to the allure of violence. Unsurprising for a war film, Lawrence of Arabia structures much of its narrative progression around violent acts. The violence of the film is particularly visceral (for its time) and is foregrounded within the natural landscape dwarfing the actions of humankind. The truly shocking context of the violence however is that it is largely presented as a matter of fact, often with little or no emotional impact on the characters, and often as casual or even ritualistic. There is a lonely feel to much of the violence, as if it segregates those involved from a wider community, whilst this wider community expects the violence to be carried out as a cultural duty. This loneliness is again reflected in the landscape of the film and emphasised by the widescreen compositions. Lean’s brutal tribesmen are unable to work together constructively to administer Damascus when they drive out the Turks and achieve their victory, and consequently allow the British to take control (symbolically allowing them post-war control of the region). Lawrence, who culturally is now more Arab than British, is also unable to bring the tribesmen together and clearly Lean is celebrating a set of British ‘qualities’ that Lawrence has lost by assuming Arab identity. In ‘going native’ Lawrence is seen to have lost the very thing that allowed him to bring the disparate tribes together in the first place, and so finds himself of use to neither culture. Left in the lonely landscape once more, Lawrence is sent home and fights the loneliness of a different, restrictive landscape by thrill-seeking and riding his motorbike too fast down slow-paced English country lanes. Lean’s story ends where it begins, offering a circular narrative, a symbolically rich device that indicates an inevitability that mirrors some of the philosophy of the Arab world in which fate plays a significant hand (Lawrence indicates the hand of Destiny at several places in the film). Within this circular narrative there is an emptiness that is amplified by the vast scale of the images, which whilst at times heavily populated, still have an uncompromising loneliness at their centre, perhaps suggesting this was at the centre of Lean’s Lawrence as he fought to discover who he was rather than what he was expected to be, or perhaps suggesting that this loneliness, this lack of self-initiated identity, is central to the region’s continuing problems. 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