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Individual Pictures; The cinema of Launder and Gilliat continued.

This spy story, set in recent wartime, begins with the mystery of a French town situated on the Isle of Man, is interrupted by an apologetic narrator who explains that we have started at the wrong point in the story, then lurches back in time to a John Ford vision of Ireland in which naïve but feisty colleen Bridie Quilty (Deborah Kerr) is raised believing her uncle’s tall tales of the Irish revolution. Coming of age, she travels to London in hopes of overthrowing British rule by direct action. Recruited as an agent by the Nazis, she finds herself mixed up in a plot to leak the location of the D-Day landings, converting to the right side only when she meets and falls in love with Trevor Howard’s British secret agent.

The movie romps along splendidly, with diversions all over the British Isles, comedy policemen Spanswick and Goodhusband standing in ably for Charters and Caldicott, and comic-thriller set-pieces like an Irish funeral chase and a grand slapstick fight with innumerable Nazi spies in a tiny bathroom. The heroine’s Irish nationalism (undiminished to the end) was potentially censorable at the time, but the light tone and breathless pace kept the film from attracting unwelcome controversy.

As their joint careers progressed, both filmmakers would work with the great pool of talent Britain offered in the forties, and actors who appeared in character parts would sometimes be promoted to leads. Thus it was that Alastair Sim, an unlikely leading man on the face of it, was promoted to starring parts, based on his scene-stealing work in Waterloo Road (1945).

In Green For Danger (1946) he plays Inspector Cockrill, the detective hero of Christianna Brand’s successful whodunits. Gilliat directed, and hoped the film might spark a series, but Sim was reluctant to be tied down to repeating a role, so nothing came of this (the same scruples prevented him from starring in any of the St. Trinian’s sequels, apart from a tiny cameo in Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s in 1957). It’s a great shame, because Sim is marvellous as the detective, delighting in irritating his chief suspects, the staff of a wartime hospital (nobody since Groucho Marx has taken such glee in making stooges of those around him), and the movie has a really daring combination of elements – perhaps this is what put Truffaut off. For instance, the murders are truly frightening, deploying stylish noir shadows and a gliding camera in a way that’s reminiscent of later Italian horror films, while the comedy is, if not broad, at least unmistakeable. And just putting Sim’s arrogantly eccentric Inspector amongst more straight-laced British stalwarts like Trevor Howard and Leo Genn results in a fair bit of genre-bending in itself.

In trying to disassemble the whodunit element, Gilliat found the novel was too well-structured to be exploded like that, so he settled for debunking the clichés of detective films, resulting in one of the few endings where a “master-detective” gets things disastrously wrong. Despite Truffaut’s misgivings, the film balances its moods and styles with great panache, and manages to convert the classic mystery novel from an intellectual puzzle into a crazy, delirious entertainment, part caper, part nightmare.

With The Belles of St. Trinians in 1954, Launder inaugurated a comedy franchise to run alongside the wildly popular Carry On and Doctor films. Unfortunately, the series, from a marvellous start, declines somewhat as it loses its stars, first Sim, then Joyce Grenfell. But the first entry is pretty marvellous, with Sim magnificently grotesque yet oddly sympathetic as the distracted Miss Fitton, as well as her brother, Ne’er-do-well Clarence, and Grenfell is a delight from her very first entrance – she nails her character just by the way she enters a room. And there’s plenty of shameless anarchy from the rambunctious schoolgirls. If the following three sequels lack the coherence and energy of the original, and arguably distracted the filmmakers from worthier pursuits, they nevertheless proved immensely popular with generations of schoolchildren and dirty old men, and a new version, from Ealing Studios, has just been premiered.

During the fifties, many of Britain’s top filmmakers seemed to struggle somewhat: Lean’s fortunes declined slightly when he switched from Noel Coward to Terence Rattigan; Powell and Pressburger fell out with Rank and had difficulty finding a new home; Carol Reed and the Boulting Brothers alternated hits with misfires. The energy that had inspired the great films of the forties seemed to have dissipated.

Launder and Gilliat were occupied on the board of British Lion Films (an unproductive and frustrating experience for both men), as well as producing films for Basil Dearden and others, and turning out mild but usually appealing comedies of their own. Geordie and The Constant Husband (both 1955) are pleasing light commercial fair, and the latter begins with an ambitious subjective camera sequence, but there seems little desire to push the boat out. Fortune is a Woman (1957), A.K.A. She Played with Fire, is another stab at a Hitchcockian thriller, based on a novel by Winston Graham, whose Marnie would be filmed by the Master in 1964. Beginning with another of Gilliat’s stunning dream sequences (a ticking metronome transforms into a windscreen-wiper as we roar down a country lane at night, then continue our forward movement into a smoke-filled mansion…) the film quickly declines into torpor due to miscasting (the excellent Jack Hawkins is no Cary Grant) and too much ordinary stuff between the highlights, although a confession from the rogue arsonist at the end features a startling scene change in mid-shot! As always with the duo’s work, amusing cameos boost the entertainment value and prevent the thing from completely flagging.

This slightly aimless career path continued through the sixties, with fewer and fewer films emerging from the duo. It’s disappointing that when the boom in British film production occurred at this time, while new and exciting talents were discovered and exploited, the older filmmakers were mostly left out, apart from those like Lean who had already gone international. Launder and Gilliat had broken new ground in realism with Millions Like Us, but they were seemingly unable to contribute to the “kitchen sink” realism of the early sixties, and their fondness for anarchic comedy and experimental technique did not translate into the era of swinging comedies.

But there was one great surprise still in store. In 1971, five years after his last film, Gilliat released Endless Night, based on an Agatha Christie mystery-romance. It’s a curiously out-of-time picture: Christie’s mystery-melodrama sits oddly in a seventies setting, with the added nudity expected at the time. But it isn’t in the least embarrassing, unlike other films of the era like Soft Beds, Hard Battles (Roy Boulting, 1974), or Val Guest’s later sex comedies. And what it has going for is an intense cinematic inventiveness, from Bernard Herrmann’s score, mixing bombastic orchestra with shrill Moog synthesiser, to Gilliat’s eccentric use of unexplained flashback imagery, almost reminiscent of Nicholas Roeg’s work from this same period. As if he sensed this was top be his last film, Gilliat throws everything at this one, revelling in the delirious surrealism that had always been hinted at in his work. It’s startling to see an almost unknown film from Britain that has some of the same insanity in it as Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

While it’s a little saddening to see Gilliat, once a leftwing firebrand, calmly adopting Agatha Christie’s usual view of parvenu working class men as a social menace, the political angle isn’t stressed. Instead the film ultimately turns into a psychological descent into the maelstrom, with the narrative coalescing in the best mystery tradition even as the protagonist’s mind collapses in on itself. Gilliat himself admitted that the film is “better the second time around”, but there’s plenty of stylistic tropes to keep a cineaste intrigued and amused, even on first viewing. It’s rare to find a mystery story where plot isn’t the main attraction. If the film has been undervalued and ignored up until now, it’s to be hoped that the DVD release will bring it to a new generation who can appreciate its eccentric virtues, free from the blinkers of film fashion.

Truffaut once notoriously suggested that there was something inherently uncinematic about Britain (and Hitchcock voiced no real disagreement!), and while as a lover of British films, and a maker of them, I feel compelled to disagree, I wonder if there isn’t something in our cultural climate that discourages filmmakers like Launder and Gilliat from showing what they can really do? We need only look at the treatment of Michael Powell, Ken Russell and now Terence Davies to see the dangers that lie in waiting for the filmmaker who is too individual.

Nevertheless, despite these possible pressures, Launder and Gilliat left behind them a series of distinctive, and distinctly British, entertainments which deserve to be discovered by a broader audience than has hitherto had the pleasure of their acquaintance.

David Cairns
Shadowplay film blog

Bibliography:
Launder and Gilliat, by Geoff Brown, BFI, 1977
Hitchcock, by Francois Truffaut, Simon & Schuster, 1985