By the time she made her film debut in 1931, 'Our Gracie' was already
a star of the music hall and a major recording star, with an audience
that had followed her progress since 1915 when she left Rochdale and
the Lancashire cotton mills to join musical revue. By 1936 she was the
most popular British film star and remained among the top three until
1940. Though her popularity dipped during the war, when she elected
to remain in Hollywood (where she made three modestly successful films),
it recovered afterwards and she continued into retirement abroad as
a British national institution, created Dame of the British Empire in
1979, the year of her death.
The secret of her popularity can be heard most clearly in the recordings
of her live performances. She plays an audience, goading it into enjoyment,
feeding it the kind of cheek that passes for affection, and appealing
to a shared contempt for pretension. Even her own claims to be taken
seriously as an 'artiste' are constantly undermined by physical and
vocal clowning. In the films, she creates the same solidarity with her
working-class audience but also functions as the bridge to a national
community which crosses class boundaries. Gracie tends not to have a
plot or a romance of her own but facilitates the plots and the romances
of others, her own romantic inclinations only hinted at with a glance
and quickly suppressed with a shrug or a funny face.
In Sing As We Go
(1934), probably her best film, it is she who mediates with management
on behalf of the workers, and when her mediation fails (despite the
benign good intentions of the managers) it is Gracie who leads the redundant
workforce into a rousing chorus of 'Sing As We Go' as they march jauntily
into unemployment, the Depression and the hunger marches. The films
are sentimental and reassuring, but they also tap into real social anxieties,
and the sentiment is sometimes laced with vinegar. As the 1930s progressed,
the national interest asserted itself and the films, while retaining
their class roots, increasingly served the needs of a cheerful patriotic
consensus.
