Evergreen – 1934 | 91 mins | Musical | B&W

Plot Synopsis

In terms of Victor Saville’s work, the most obvious continuity is with the series of big Gaumont-British musicals he went on to direct in the mid-1930s, notably Evergreen. With Ian Dalrymple as editor, its exuberant musical numbers offer extended scope to play with the mathematics of staging and cutting, while in terms of story and psychology it operates as an extraordinary souped-up resume of Saville’s previous melodramas.

Music hall star Harriet Green retires to South Africa, she apparently returns, 25 years older but still youthful. In fact, Harriet has died in obscurity and this is her daughter, whose existence has been a secret; and naturally, as in The Faithful Heart, mother and daughter are played by the same actress (Jessie Matthews). The complication here is that, until the climactic musical number, the public believes her to be the mother, with only a small group of her intimates sharing our knowledge of her real identity. This masquerade becomes the framework for the playing out of a rich and strange variety of romantic emotions, ranging from nostalgia and the fear of ageing to more personal ones. In order to maintain the deception about her identity, the male lead (Barry Mackay) finds himself having to pose, both on and off stage, as her son, though they are of the same generation, and are, predictably enough, failing in love: as he says at the end, ‘I’ve been in love with her for weeks and I’ve had to go about London calling her Mummy.’ Though any ‘dangers’ are all safely recuperated at the end by a standard heterosexual pairing-off, the Freudian undercurrents have been thoroughly exploited along the way. Evergreen has not lacked for critical and contextual attention and has conventionally marked Saville’s first and main claim to serious attention.