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Goldfinger (1964)[Production Company: Danjaq and Eon Productions. Director: Guy Hamilton. Screenwriter: Richard Maibaum, Paul Dehn. Cinematographer: Ted Moore. Editor: Peter Hunt. Music: John Barry. Cast: Sean Connery (James Bond), Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore), Gert Frobe (Auric Goldfinger), Shirley Eaton (Jill Masterson), Harold Sakata (Oddjob), Bernard Lee (M).] The erosion of modern commercial cinema – where spectacle takes precedence over narrative logic – began with a stuffed seagull. What may seem like an insolent statement describes an insolent moment in the history of British cinema. After the established trademark Bond-shooting-through-the-gun-barrel motif, Goldfinger opens with a crane shot, pulling away from an industrial refinery to the waterfront beside it, on which the aforementioned seabird is paddling. Only it is not a seagull: it’s a disguise – a disguise on the head of 007. Enter James Bond and what follows in the pre-credits sequence is what can only be described as a ‘mini-adventure’, narratively having no relation to the rest of the film (apart from serving to send Bond to Miami where he will first encounter Goldfinger). So while the pre-credits sequence may have no narrative reason to be there, and does not feature in Ian Fleming’s original novel, it is important for thematic and commercial reasons. James Bond had burst onto British cinema screens in 1962 with Dr. No (Terence Young), presenting a colourful and exotic change from the black and white kitchen-sink dramas of the British New Wave. The following year, James Bond returned in From Russia with Love (Young), which introduced the series’ tradition of a pre-credits sequence. However, unlike Goldfinger, this sequence was important narratively: despite the shock of apparently killing off Bond, it introduced the machinations of SPECTRE and the threat posed by Red Grant (Robert Shaw). While Bond was becoming an established part of the cinematic landscape, the formula of the films was being refined. Dr. No introduced the essential elements: Bond himself, the ‘Bond girl’, the villain and his lair, shooting abroad, humour, and technology verging on science-fiction; whereas From Russia with Love remains the closest in the series to a straight spy-thriller, even with the arrival of Casino Royale (Martin Campbell 2006). But it is Goldfinger which perfects the formula, so much so that many commentators have described it as ‘the archetypal Bond film in terms of its narrative structure and balance of thriller, science-fiction and comedy elements.’ (Chapman 1999: 111) It’s the comedy elements that come to the fore in the opening of Goldfinger. Back to the stuffed seagull – the notion that Britain’s top secret agent would utilise such a gimmick is ridiculous. For the first time in the series, the audience is invited to laugh at James Bond rather than with him; previously, Bond’s humour had taken the form of cruel or sardonic witticisms in one-liners, often after a villain has been violently dispatched (since appropriated by the Hollywood blockbuster). However, the ridiculous nature of the image is mitigated by the persona of Bond, established and embodied by Sean Connery, and is cast aside as soon as Bond discards the disguise. Yet, it sends out a clear signal to the audience: don’t take anything too seriously over the next 109 minutes. As Penelope Houston observed, Goldfinger ‘assumes a mood of good-humoured complicity with the audience.’ (1964-5: 16) Few British films, outside of comedy, had done this before; it went against the perceived national tradition of quality and realism. Back to the stuffed seagull: it isn’t real, it’s a decoy. A recurring theme in Goldfinger is that appearances are deceptive: nothing is quite what it seems. This is nothing new to the spy thriller of course, but taken to extremes here and, once more, insolently going against the British notion of ‘realism’. Apart from the seagull, the pre-credits sequence features silos hiding heroin factories, bananas hiding heroin, the duplicitous belly dancer, Bonita, and Bond’s wetsuit stripped off to reveal an immaculate white tuxedo beneath. The latter is another example of Houston’s ‘good-humoured complicity’, but it goes a bit further. There’s a game going on between the filmmakers and the audience. It’s a playful way of inviting the audience to work out what’s really going on: take in the spectacle and see the truth beneath. The world of spies and espionage is a dangerous game, but in the sphere of Bond it’s a world where cars contain ejector seats and a playroom can be turned into a base of operations at the flick of a few switches. Through it all, the audience’s compass is Bond; the majority of the point-of-view shots belong to 007, and his reactions reflect those of the spectator: ‘An ejector seat? You’ve got to be joking!’ is his reaction to Q’s demonstration of the gadgets contained within the Austin Martin DB5. Game playing is also central to the narrative of the film itself, as it is to the Bond ‘formula’. Analysing the narrative structure of Fleming’s original novels, Umberto Eco used a chess analogy. James Chapman explains that: Eco […] argues that the narrative construction of all the Bond novels is the same and can best be understood as a series of ‘moves’ in which characters play out familiar situations: Bond is given a mission by M (Head of the British Secret Service); Bond gives first check to the villain, or the villain gives first check to Bond; Bond meets the heroine and seduces her; or begins the process of doing so; Bond and the heroine are captured by the villain; the villain tortures Bond; Bond conquers the villain and possesses the heroine; and so on. (1999: 32-3) With some variations, Goldfinger acknowledges this structure and foregrounds the game playing through the situations and dialogue. There’s the ‘customary by-play’ between Bond and Moneypenny to quote M. ‘What’s your game, Mr. Bond?’ asks Goldfinger during their first face-to-face encounter on the golf course. We already know, thanks to Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), that ‘Goldfinger likes to win’. Like all Bond villains, he is a bad loser and what ensues, as in all Bond’s encounters with authority figures, is a game of one-upmanship. The same also applies to his encounters with Oddjob (Harold Sakata) and Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). ‘Now let’s both play!’ says Bond to Pussy during their judo bout prior to the inevitable seduction. It’s here, in the field of sexual politics, that Goldfinger’s theme of game-playing comes somewhat unstuck. Reflecting the hedonistic ethos of Playboy magazine, which frequently published pieces by Fleming, women are there to reinforce Bond’s potency and sexual allure. Those who resist are punished: Bonita is knocked out, Tilly Masterson is killed off. Those who indulge his whims survive: Moneypenny’s teasing domesticity and Dink the masseuse (whose treatment is probably the most sexist moment in a Bond film until the arrival of Roger Moore in the lead role). This reading becomes problematic when applied to Jill Masterson: she succumbs to Bond but dies. Her role is reduced to that of a trophy to be fought over between Bond and Goldfinger. Her death by gold paint results in one of the most fetishised spectacles in British cinema (and a major selling point for the film), a moment of erotic, even necrophiliac, contemplation. This does give Bond the motivation for revenge, but the narrative strand becomes lost with the introduction of Tilly. Finally, there’s Pussy Galore. Her seduction could have been the most reactionary moment in any Bond film. A lesbian in the original novel (as, indeed, was Tilly), censorship restrictions left only the merest hint of this in Goldfinger. She’s certainly butch, wears trousers throughout and tells Bond to ‘Skip the charm, I’m immune.’ But that’s the sum of it. The character owes more to the already established persona of Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale in the television series The Avengers (1961-63); indeed the judo scenes were added once she was cast. Blackman was the first Bond girl to have an established acting background, and the first to be given her own voice (previous leading ladies had been dubbed). By the rules of the Bond formula, such a strong female character had to succumb to Bond to bring her ideologically into line, accepting his values: indeed this is the only act he does during the second half of the film which helps bring about the resolution. As Tony Bennett observes, the seduction has the effect of putting her back in the ‘correct’ place: In thus replacing the girl in a subordinate position in relation to men, Bond simultaneously repositions her within the sphere of ideology in general, detaching her from the service of the villain and recruiting her in support of his own mission. (1982: 13) This reactionary depiction of Bond’s potency does stretch the good-humoured complicity of some members of the audience; something the filmmakers tried to redress in the following film, Thunderball. After a night spent with Bond, the SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) taunts him with the words: ‘James Bond, who only has to make love to a woman and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents and then immediately returns to the side of right and virtue. But not this one!’ Inevitably, she is killed off soon after. While some women remained resistant to Bond’s charms, in the real world there was an important market proving equally resistant. Although Dr. No and From Russia With Love had done well across the world, they had only lukewarm box-office success in America. (1) Part of the problem was that financiers United Artists were unsure how to pitch the product, particularly the British element. With Goldfinger, the producers decided to aim squarely at the US market; something British cinema had tried in the past with only a modicum of success. Hence, most of Goldfinger is set in Kentucky and Miami and the finale is set in the bastion of American wealth, Fort Knox. Whilst retaining their quintessential British values, Bond films had already appropriated Hollywood production values, particularly through the playful and spectacular set designs of Ken Adam. His interior of Fort Knox bears absolutely no relation to the real thing, yet for a British film it’s on an unprecedented scale. But back to the stuffed seagull: the pre-credits mini-adventure serves to introduce a new audience to the character of Bond, encapsulating his persona in a sequence. It worked. Goldfinger received a simultaneous opening in America and Canada of 150 cinemas (small by today’s standards, but big in 1964), where box-office quickly passed the $10 million mark, living up to the promise on the film’s trailer that it was a ‘Bond-Buster!’ Following in its wake was the phenomenon of ‘Bondmania’, a merchandising bonanza ranging from magazine articles, model kits to games and lunch boxes. American cinema responded with their own variations of Bond: Our Man Flint (Daniel Mann 1965) and the Matt Helm series starring Dean Martin (four films, 1966-68), not to mention the television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68). For once, British cinema was showing Hollywood how to make large-scale contemporary action movies. Yet the stuffed seagull also ushers in the age of cinematic excess. A sequence, filled with spectacle, which had no narrative reason to exist, led the way. From this point, the Bond series would feature action spectacles with bigger and better stunts, often with little narrative logic. And where Bond was successful, others would follow, resulting in the hyperbolic action excess of Hollywood cinema from the 1980s onwards; one particular action hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger, even strips off his wetsuit to reveal a tuxedo underneath in James Cameron’s True Lies (1994). As Bond himself exclaims: ‘Shocking! Positively shocking!’ Notes
Further Reading Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, London, Macmillan, 1987. James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, London & New York, I. B. Taurus, 1999. Penelope Houston, “007”, Sight and Sound, 34/1, Winter 1964-65. Adrian Turner, Goldfinger: Bloomsbury Movie Guide No. 2, London, Bloomsbury, 1998. Nigel Herwin
In unvanquishable number – Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep have fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.
(Friedman and Stewart, 1994: 167) Anarchy is a social and political philosophy which puts the highest possible values on responsibility. The film is not about responsibility against irresponsibility. It is about rival notions of responsibility and consequently well within a strong Puritan tradition. (Aldgate and Richards, 2002: 209) Coming from a theatre background, Anderson was interested in exploring the use of Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ (5) within film. This film offered him the opportunity of bringing to a wider commercial audience the sort of challenging material theatre audiences were becoming used to seeing in the 60s. The film is divided into eight chapters much as a novel might be with chapter headings appearing on screen as inter-titles. On the stage Brecht used text in a similar way; in Mother Courage and Her Children, for example, a summary of what is about to happen is displayed before each scene. This is an anti-illusionistic technique designed to prevent the audience becoming passive watchers and encourage them to become actively engaged in thinking about what is being presented on stage or screen. The act of reading breaks the illusion of reality that film (and drama) has conventionally been so interested in attempting to achieve, forcing the reader to see the work as a construct that demands to be thought about in an active way. Theoretically, this enables what is shown to be considered in relation to the way in which the viewer can see society as operating outside of the cinema (or theatre). It was a technique employed in theatre in Britain in the period; for example in John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance directed by Anderson at the Royal Court when it was first staged in 1959. (6) This play which according to Arden does not ‘advocate bloody revolution’ contains a third act in which a group of army deserters train a Gatling gun on a group of townspeople and threaten to open fire. Anderson also uses the device of changing from colour to black and white film stock to further prevent the audience becoming engaged with the film as a realist text. These changes occur between scenes but also within sequences, and indeed as has been noted seem to obey no particular logic. Anderson’s use of colour and black and white seems to obey a not always comprehensible logic. (Murphy, 1992: 158) In Brechtian terms this lack of clear patterning within the choice is part and parcel of the process of disrupting the audience’s viewing of the film. The process of film construction is again foregrounded in such a way that the audience is unable to forget they are watching a film that has been put together or constructed. The aim is again to encourage them to think about what is being presented. Usually mainstream film (certainly prior to 1960) would do everything possible to suggest what was on offer was a realistic slice of life. Anderson works to bring this reality status into question, to make the nature of film and the audience experience of it problematic and open to reflection and intellectual consideration. The supposed and usually taken for granted ‘truth’ of film is brought into question and our position as readers who need to make sense of the text is emphasized. The status of the classic realist narrative (in this particular film but also in all other films claiming that status) is undermined and brought into question. The third key method used by Anderson to disrupt the viewing process is the movement between fantasy and realism, and indeed making the viewer unsure as to whether what he or she is watching is fantasy or realism. In his book on the director John Ford, Anderson quotes the scriptwriter Dudley Nichols saying Hollywood had been half-destroyed by its efforts to achieve ‘realism’: ‘making everything appear exactly as it does to the average man, or to a goat, instead of sifting it through the feelings of an artist’. (Anderson, 1981: 86) Unlike Sillitoe, the author of the original short story and scriptwriter for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Anderson and those involved in writing the script for If… are from the Oxbridge middle classes and their connection with the working class can never be more than that of privileged outsiders. Every Day Except Christmas (1957), one of Anderson’s key contributions to Free Cinema was supposed to make ordinary people ‘feel their dignity and their importance’ (Armes: 266) but in fact comes across as patronizing. With the subject matter of If… Anderson is able to work from material comfortably within his own experience and create a film that can be seen to stand as a metaphor for society as a whole. Notes
Further Reading Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present, London and New York, I.B.Tauris, 2002. Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, London, Plexus, 1981. Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema, London, Secker and Warburg, 1978. Ali Catterall and Simon Wells, Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties, London, Fourth Estate, 2002. Lester Friedman and Scott Stewart ‘The Tradition of Independence: An Interview with Lindsay Anderson’ in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed), Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900-1992, New York, State University of New York, 1994. Jonathan Hacker and David Price, Take 10: Contemporary British Film Directors, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991. Erik Hedling, Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker, London and New York, Cassell, 1998. Gavin Lambert, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, London, Faber, 2000. Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, London, BFI, 1992. John White Carry On Up the Khyber (1968) [Production Company: Rank Film Distributors. Director: Gerald Thomas. Screenwriter: Talbot Rothwell. Cinematographer: Ernest Steward. Music: Eric Rogers. Editor: Alfred Roome. Cast: Sidney James (Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond), Joan Sims (Lady Ruff-Diamond), Kenneth Williams (Randi-Lal), Bernard Bresslaw (Bunghit-Din), Charles Hawtrey (Corporal Widdle), Terry Scott (Sgt-Maj. McNutt), Angela Douglas (Princess Jelhi), Roy Castle (Captain Keen), Peter Butterworth (Brother Belcher).] If one flag deserves to fly over the hot-pot of the sixties, no doubt that it should be the Union Jack. That England which the continentals imagine to be always corseted and controlled by Victorian principles… (1) The Carry On series occupies an almost-unique position in British film. Reviled by academics such as Marion Jordan (2), adored by the public, the thirty-one strong movie franchise negotiated and bridged the socio-sexual-political arena from 1958 to 1992, during a period whereby Britain moved from austerity, through radicalism to end in dislocation. The low budget, ribald comedies expanded upon the British music hall tradition and saucy seaside postcard humour of Donald McGill. Mocking British institutions like the National Health Service in Carry On Nurse (1959) or trade unionism in Carry On At Your Convenience (1971), they also parodied populist genres or offered historical pastiches. Examples are Carry On Spying (1964), which successfully aped the James Bond saga, Carry On Screaming (1966), which surpassed Britain’s ghoulish Hammer Film productions, or Carry On Cleo (1964) which deconstructed the story of Cleopatra, and the media farrago that surrounded the overblown histrionics of Burton and Taylor’s Cleopatra (USA 1963: Joseph Mankiewicz). Importantly, the films are an ensemble effort. The ‘public face’ of the team was fundamental to the franchise’s success; well-known, popular radio, film and television stars, fleshed out archetypal, conservative characters adorning innuendo-laden scripts. Through familiarity and adherence to narrative, and genre conventions, the formulaic representations of characters and plots, whilst arguably reductive and negative, allowed audience engagement with the texts. If Richard Dyer’s notion of the Hollywood star is as a particular ‘type’ (Dyer, 2002: 47-59), the Carry Ons subvert this concept. For example, when Sid James appears audience awareness is of his on-screen persona as a working-class, work-shy, hard drinking, gambling, woman-chasing ‘bloke’; yet here he represents the upper-class Briton abroad. With the conservative nature of stereotyping clear, these constructions are invaluable in relaying textual information to the audience with filmic economy. Andy Medhurst defends this idea of the economy stating that, ‘Attacking a Carry On for using stereotypes is like criticising a musical because it’s unrealistic for people to burst into song like that’. (Medhurst: 18) Therefore the attraction in using stereotypes; the Carry Ons stereotype everybody and criticism against this appears redundant. Frances Gray writes about stereotyping, suggesting that female characters became replaced by the actor’s persona (3), suggesting that the canon subverts dominant ideologies to present new ways of investigating and navigating difficult arenas such as sexuality and race. (4) But if stereotypes are constantly employed and often negative conclusions drawn from them, for example Jordan likens Williams’ effeminacy as ‘sickly, or even mentally deficient’ (5) why should Carry On Up the Khyber be discussed as a key British film? Through adopting a historical approach the value of Khyber as a document that creates an understanding of British attitudes towards social upheavals of the 60s can be appreciated. Engaging with colonial epics like Northwest Frontier (Thompson, 1958) Khyber affectionately critiques that quintessential, naïve trait of British imperialism. As the film’s subtitle states, the story is concerned with the ‘British position in India’, and Britain, in the form of Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond and ‘the mem’, Lady Joan, must survive an onslaught by the Khasi of Khalibar, and his cohort led by Bunghit Din of Jacksey who are attempting ‘to drive the British out of Khalibar!’. Through a barrage of double-entendres and innuendo the film paradigmatically constructs two contextual arguments. Khyber parodies Zulu (Endfield, 1964). The representation of exoticism in both films suggests the use of a foreign location as a means of negotiating British attitudes to the nation state, whereby placing the familiar British cast of both movies into ‘other’ locations suggests a feeling of contextual incongruity for both. For example, the Khyber Pass is a wooden gate with a small sign saying ‘Please shut the gate’ pinned to it is open to ridicule through the sheer chutzpah of it, whilst in Zulu the horrors of the violence yet to come is signposted through a shot of a compound gate swinging open. With locations vital to both film’s battle sequences, there are two scenes from Khyber that warrant attention; the dining-room sequence discussed later in this chapter, and when the escaping British find the Pass’s soldiers massacred in battle. In the latter, a slow panning-shot captures the horrors of war with soldiers lying dead at the Pass until it rests on the escapees - four men in drag (a very British tradition) and two women. The characters discuss the massacre: Lady Ruff-Diamond: Oh, how awful. What can have happened? Captain Keen: I don’t like making guesses but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there hadn’t been a spot of foul play here. Brother Belcher: Foul play? Look at ‘em. Lying around like a load of unwanted cocktail snacks! With Burpars attacking, Captain Keen flees the battleground. Widdle and McNutt defend the Pass. In an outrageous gag the British etiquette of war as ‘fair play’ is ridiculed, as is the expertise of the British forces led by Michael Caine (upper-class Lt. Bromhead) and Stanley Baker (working-class Lt Chard) in Zulu. McNutt cranks the field-gun and rather than bullets spraying out of the end the only thing to emerge is the cacophony of an old 78rpm recording. Attempting to use the cannon, it blows up in their faces due to a barrel-blocking bung. If this is compared to the vivid battle sequences of Zulu the parody becomes obvious. Working-class Brother Belcher offers a comparison with Zulu’s Reverend Otto Witt (Jack Hawkins). Belcher encapsulates Britain’s tradition of the knowledgeable fool (6) Dressed in stark black and white, carrying his umbrella, he assumes paramount importance, representing like Wilt, a British ‘outsider’ within his own society. Although part of the establishment he attempts to resist it. For example, Wilt goes to the regiment to warn of impending attacks but is lambasted for his views; Belcher demystifies British imperialism when asked to keep a stiff-upper lip, saying ‘Well, I’m not standing around here waiting for mine to stiffen!’. This creates two ideas of class-critiquing: effective representation of the working-classes through humour and that the upper-classes are arrogant and out-of-touch with their incumbent situation. With the rise of the cinematic working-class hero most profoundly noticeable in the Sixties, Rothwell is arguably critiquing those outside working-class strictures. With Khyber placed within its historical framework the importance of the film becomes evident. With the independence of India from Britain in 1947 and the Suez Crisis still fresh in the public’s memory the film demolishes notions of imperialism. Whilst the Khasi is an inverted, Gandhi-like figure who says, ‘As a further mark of my respect I shall then exhibit your distinguished, but neatly severed head from the walls of the palace’, Rothwell places the film into both historical (1895) and contextual settings. When the Khasi attacks the residency Rothwell offers a critique of the collapse of the British Empire, attacking Britain’s social/class structure. The final scenes of the film have become arguably the paramount sequence in the entire canon. Whilst the Khasi attacks the residency, the Ruff-Diamonds remain eating their food. Blasé about the cataclysmic destruction around them, they display nonchalance about their eroding imperial power. During the breathtakingly-edited attack the scene cuts between three stratified social representations; the Khasi fights outside, representing an upper-class ruler bound by the constraints of the British – as if he is trying to become independent yet live within British society; the Residency compound becomes a negotiation arena between cultures and classes – the Indian and British soldiers are both ‘foreign’, yet working-class, whilst their rulers are upper-class; the dining room becomes a bastion of upper-class stoicism (Lady Joan, says ‘Oh dear, I seem to have got a little plastered’ when hit by a piece of collapsing ceiling) alongside the working-class cowardice of Belcher, who like Wilt turns to alcohol to combat the attack. As the film is an essay about Empire, so Arthur Marwick argues that in regards to Indian autonomy ‘…the official line was one of self-congratulation that Britain once more was leading the way in granting independence to former colonial peoples’. (7) With the contextual drive for former colonies to simultaneously achieve independence and for native-colonial families to be integrated into British society, Rothwell critiques this ‘official line’ arguing that the white-British must stay inside the residency (Empire) whilst the Khasi (colony), despite his Oxford-education, is considered as ‘other’ and as such must be contained by the British, but outside its social sphere. Khyber critiques a contextual British argument whereby local councils banned Sikh bus drivers from wearing turbans; Rothwell has Din saying: ‘That’ll teach them to ban turbans on the buses’. In the internal context of the film this is meaningless, but contextually it would have been resonant. At the film’s climax Ruff-Diamond tells his troops to face the enemy. On a given command they grab and raise their kilts, revealing…? The answer is never known. The scene ends with the Khasi and his subordinates fleeing at whatever they’ve seen. The final moments sees Ruff-Diamond and the remaining upper-classes retiring to the Residency. Interestingly, Princess Jelhi is to marry Captain Keen showing how contextually tolerant Rothwell’s script is. The final words go to Brother Belcher who, upon seeing a Union flag with the contextual slogan ‘I’m Backing Britain’ emblazoned upon it, looks directly at the camera, and therefore us, saying ‘Of course, they’re all mad you know’. These final moments reveal the extent to which Rothwell has taken (pre)Sixties’ attitudes of class in Britain and subverted them. The upper-classes remain stagnant; Belcher, representing Sixties-working-class-man ends up with the final word on the subject. Therefore, Khyber becomes a celebration of the working-class hero, and Belcher’s satirical ‘edge’ emphasises that the Carry Ons are more than simple comedies. They are traditional. They are subversive. They reflect the pre-occupations of the nation-state. They emphasise the culturally familiar but cipher through them important messages debunking Britain’s rigid social strata. Above all else, they gave their audience the ability to laugh at themselves. As such, Carry On Up The Khyber is a key British film. Notes
Further Reading Richard Dyer, Stars, London, BFI, 2002. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. Andy Medhurst, ‘Carry On Camp’ Sight and Sound, Vol. 2 No. 4, August 1992. Morris Bright and Robert Ross, Mr Carry On, London, BBC Worldwide, 2000. Robert Ross, The Carry On Companion, London, B T Batsford, 1996. Simon Sheridan and Johnny Vegas, Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema, London, Reynolds and Hearn, 2005. Steven Gerrard Kes (1969) [Production Company: Kestrel Films/Woodhall Film Productions. Director: Kenneth Loach. Screenwriters: Barry Hines, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett. Cinematographer: Chris Menges. Editor: Roy Watts. Music: John Cameron. Cast: David Bradley (Billy Casper), Lynne Perrie (Mrs Casper), Freddie Fletcher (Jud Casper), Colin Welland (Mr Farthing), Brian Glover (Mr Sugden), Bob Bowes (Mr Gryce).] Once Kes was completed, its US financiers United Artists found they had a problem on their hands: a new kind of film which didn’t quite fit into the existing market. The subject, style and sentiment of the film were all problematic: the story was a few months in the life of an under-achieving 15-year-old boy in a Yorkshire mining town who finds hope in training a kestrel, only for his aspirations to be thwarted by a combination of the harshness and indifference of school and family life. Subject-wise, was it a Northern working-class drama to be viewed in the same way as British New Wave titles of the early 1960s? It was classified as a ‘U’, but would the naturalistic style mean too much reflection and not enough action for a kids’ movie? Would a wider audience respond to the universality of human aspiration, or had United Artists inadvertently funded a propaganda piece for the art-house? Interested at that time in the commercial return on investing in British films using British locations, United Artists had come on board as funders for Kes at the eleventh hour. Tony Richardson approached them on behalf of producer Tony Garnett and director Ken Loach, whose film was on the point of collapse after their original backers pulled out. Conveniently hands-off during production, United Artists continued to be hands-off getting the film into distribution and over the summer of 1969 it went nowhere. Alexander Mitchell suggested some of what Kes was up against when he reported United Artists’ Sales Director as having explained that, ‘cinemas had been booked with films like The Carry Ons, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Funny Girl and The Battle of Britain. Kes might get a Northern circuit next March…’. (1) Kes was first seen by a public audience in the UK at the London Film Festival in November 1969. It received an enthusiastic response from festival audiences and critics alike for its naturalistic approach to social realism, its poetic qualities and damning critique of the school system. Critic Paul Barker wrote that: ‘All education committees should see it, compulsorily.’ (2) Finally, ABC Cinemas bought the distribution rights and, despite stiff competition, Kes went on to be so popular on its release in five cinemas in Yorkshire in spring 1970 that it opened in the south in May and went on to be a huge commercial success throughout the UK. Why was Kes so popular? Its social comment, new approach to naturalism on screen and the universality of human aspiration can be seen in retrospect within the broader contexts of social realist cinema and the filmography of director Ken Loach. At the time, these three elements had not been seen together in British cinemas in this way, although similar approaches had been seen on TV. The starting point for Kes had been Tony Garnett, one of the producers on the BBC’s Wednesday Play. BBC Drama producers were at that time encouraged to engage with current affairs. The play was programmed directly after the evening news, which not only held a captive audience, but also, in looking deeper into social and political issues, built on the audience’s mindset for impartiality. This approach to filmmaking and programming could have a huge impact: one of Garnett’s previous TV films with Loach as director, Cathy Come Home (transmitted November 1966), prompted government action on homelessness and the setting up of the charity Shelter. It also opened up a new way of constructing reality which was perceived by some right-wing critics as very dangerous indeed: the BBC’s film The War Game (Peter Watkins 1965) presented a view of Kent if hit by Soviet nuclear missiles. Transmission was cancelled for fear of traumatising audiences with its potentially confusing use of newsreel-style footage and hand-held camera to create a look of documentary. Garnett and Loach were ready to break away from the fears and bureaucracy of the BBC. They created their own company to produce issue-based films true to their socialist ideals, in which ordinary people would see themselves reflected on screen, in cinemas. The first, Kes, was based on a novel, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968). Author Barry Hines had contacted Garnett directly from his home in the area of Yorkshire where the story is set. Hines’ father had been a miner and, before becoming a writer, Hines was a teacher in one of the Secondary Moderns that offers Billy so little joy. He wrote of what he knew, using local dialect and recognisable locations, and his message regarding the wasted lives of the youth that he saw around him was unmistakable. The mining industry was a major part of the British economy, reliant on the labour generated by the tight-knit communities. Mines were dug in rural areas away from towns and cities, creating a landscape in which the grime and mechanisation of the colliery was cheek by jowl with unspoilt natural surroundings. For most young people in these towns, school was pointless: although the 1944 Education Act had been established on the socialist ideal of creating parity between social classes via three kinds of secondary education, in practice there were few Technical Colleges and Grammar Schools were selective, so Secondary Moderns took all the rest. Kes follows Billy, a working-class boy, let down by a system not designed to help him grow. The narrative of the film takes place over his last term where, as an ‘Easter leaver’, his education would end without any qualifications. Loach explains his attraction to the novel as follows: I was struck by the simplicity of the story’s metaphor. It was not too political. It was basically a story about one boy and his bird but with plenty to say about working class culture and aspirations of that time. We’d all seen the social realism films of the late 50s and early 60s and we both felt that there must be another way forward from there. (in Ojumu 1999: 6-7) Moreover, choice of subject matter and style were influenced by the respectful approach to the stories of ordinary people made with energy, humour and compassion by filmmaking movements beyond Britain: the Italian Neo-Realists, the French and the Czech New Waves in particular. Loach said of the work of Czech directors like Jiri Menzel and Milos Forman that, ‘They weren’t soft in any way, but had a very sharp, wry wit … They made us feel that they were the kinds of films we wanted to make.’ (in Fuller 1998: 38) The wit in Kes relies in part on creating stereotypical characters, including the bullying PE teacher Mr Sugden’s (Brian Glover) delusions of football heroics on the sports field, the harshness of Billy’s mum’s (Lynne Perrie) indifference to her young son, his brother Jud’s (Freddie Fletcher) aggression. But these are not overplayed or turned into caricature; it feels that this is just the way that people in these situations behave. To this end, casting was also affected by fresh approaches to representing reality: all actors, bar Colin Welland, were non-professionals cast locally in and around Barnsley. (3) For the filmmakers, the cast’s local accents and colloquialisms played a key part in the authentic representation of place. Small, under-fed looking Bradley was the son of a miner and went to the Secondary Modern where Hines had taught, Brian Glover was a teacher friend of Hines’, and Lynne Perrie was a local cabaret star. Kes was played by three birds named after a chain of shoe shops, Freeman, Hardy and Willis and trained by Hines’ brother. Loach drew out naturalistic performances from his cast, his technique including an element of surprise, as recalled by Welland: In the school assembly scene Ken had organised a real member of staff to pick a particular boy who had been coughing and drag him out of the room. At the last minute, Loach told the actor playing the headmaster to pick a completely different teacher who obviously chose the wrong child. So in the finished film, the unlucky boy was really protesting his innocence as he's dragged out into the hallway. There was a tremendous freshness about that scene. (in Ojumu 1999: 6-7) They filmed for eight weeks during the school summer holidays in 1968, shooting on location in the school, the streets of thin-walled post-war housing, the colliery, pubs and surrounding woods and fields. Cinematographer Chris Menges had planned to shoot in black and white, the conventional format then for TV work and social realist films, but funders United Artists demanded audience-attracting colour. Concerned that the rural settings might look too rustic and cosy, the filmmakers pre-exposed the 35mm film stock to de-saturate it and take out some of the colour. In post-production, the soundtrack of largely location sound added another layer to this new approach to expressing reality. John Cameron’s score was barely twenty minutes long, and used only to reveal the childlike innocence and beauty in the secret relationship between Billy and Kes. Led by a simple, delicate flute, it refers to traditional folk music as much as it subtly underlines the different moods of the film. Menges lit the space rather than the action and kept the camera controlled and at an observational distance, rather than using the camera hand-held, as had been another convention of naturalism to that point. This allowed actors to move naturally without fear of stepping out of the camera frame. When there are close ups, particularly on Billy, they are all the more moving for the distance from which most of his story is viewed. In scenes making use of the landscape, such as when Billy sits on the hill reading aloud from a comic, he is tiny in comparison to the huge, black, noisy colliery in the background. It is a moment of happiness for him but a moment of foreboding as well. Would Billy hold on to the sense of freedom which Kes had helped him to understand, or give up and join Jud down the pit? From the inherently critical point of view of the naturalist style which Kes deploys so effectively, we guess probably the latter. As Deborah Knight suggests, ‘the central protagonists of naturalistic narratives are not ‘heroic’. Heroes are capable of great actions. The protagonists or naturalist narratives are seldom able to break free from the constraints of their socio-cultural environments.’ (1997: 67) In 1969, audiences recognised that Kes was an interventionist piece: a call for action to address the social problems young people like Billy were facing. It remains a key work in the filmography of Loach, whose films have covered a huge range of stories of the lives of ordinary people, all told with his now signature naturalist approach and sense of righteous protest. However, Kes stands alone, as a film which finds contemporary audiences anew via the combination of subject, style and sentiment so different when first released, and still unique to this day. Yüklə 1,18 Mb. 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