Robert Hamer: Ealing tragedy

[DB7]

Ealing tragedy

by his masterpiece, says Geoffrey MacNab
03 December 2004


"He was engaged in a process of self-destruction," Ealing Studios boss Michael Balcon famously remarked of Robert Hamer, once the brightest star in the Ealing firmament. Hamer had the misfortune to make a masterpiece early in his career and then fail to emulate it. After the peak of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), arguably the greatest Ealing comedy of all, it was a long, slow slide downwards.

Nothing Hamer made in the following 14 years, before alcoholism brought on his untimely death aged only 52 in 1963, came close to matching the subtlety, malice and searing wit of his tale of a young man blithely killing off his relatives in pursuit of an inheritance. "That picture has become a sort of yardstick for everything else I have done," he forlornly acknowledged.

He once confessed that his goal was to "make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to one another", but the British film industry of the 1940s and 1950s looked askance at such obsessions.

It was a small miracle Hamer had been allowed to make Kind Hearts and Coronets. Compared with Whisky Galore! and Passport to Pimlico (both released a few months before), Hamer's project must have seemed decadent and perverse to the studio boss, Michael Balcon, whose self-set goal was to make films "projecting Britain and the British character".

Adapted from Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank, it was a brittle, witty period piece in which a refined young murderer (raffishly played by Dennis Price) assassinated eight of the D'Ascoyne dynasty (Alec Guinness in a variety of disguises). Hamer declared he was trying to make "a picture that paid no regard whatever to established, although not practiced, moral convention".

It would be a mistake to view the young director as a jaded, cynical aesthete. His film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), combines lyricism with downbeat realist family drama. In its more poetic moments, it seems like a British counterpart to Marcel Carne's Le Quai des Brumes, another tale of doomed lovers and petty criminals adrift on rainswept streets. But the director is also alert to the gossiping and backbiting of the Bethnal Green neighbourhood in which the film is set. With its barbed celebration of a close-knit community full of swells and spivs, the film could easily be mistaken for a 1940s episode of EastEnders.

Hamer also had a flair for horror. His imagination and eye for detail are apparent in "The Haunted Mirror", his segment of Ealing's portmanteau film, Dead Of Night (1945). A good-looking couple is about to be married. The girl (Googie Withers) gives the man (Ralph Michael) a mirror as a gift. Whenever he looks in its surface, he has jolting flashbacks. In Kind Hearts and Coronets, Hamer relied on the dialogue. Here, the emphasis is on disorienting camera angles and jarring cuts.

Born in Kidderminster in 1911, educated at public school and Cambridge, Hamer was groomed for a job in the Treasury. "Three factors conspired to deprive the taxpayer of his services - a total inability to grasp Ricardo's theory of rent, the proximity of Cambridge to Newmarket Heath, and five cinemas changing programmes twice weekly," says an Ealing press release from the mid-1940s. In fact, as Philip Kemp reveals in Robert Hamer After Ealing, he was sent down from Cambridge after an affair with a man.

Hamer entered the industry as a clapper boy at Gaumont-British in the mid-1930s. He was hired as an editor at Ealing in 1940. He spent almost a decade there until, after a blazing row with Balcon, he left.

By then, he was drinking heavily and his career soon began to unravel. His friend Alec Guinness remained stubbornly loyal, but financiers were much less forgiving.

Ian Carmichael starred in Hamer's last feature, School for Scoundrels (1959). As Carmichael recalls, it was a difficult shoot. In the film, whimsical comedy of the kind the British made in profusion in the 1950s, he plays Henry Palfrey, a plummy innocent abroad, competing with arch-bounder Terry-Thomas for the hand of the beautiful Janette Scott. Hamer made the film on the hoof. "When I came to do the tennis match with Terry-Thomas in School For Scoundrels, it wasn't scripted at all," says Carmichael. "[Hamer] said just carry on playing and I'll photograph it and I'll cut it up later. That was a bit too loose in style for me."

By then, Hamer's health was shot. "He wasn't a fit man. The producer used to look after him, wrap him in cotton wool, take him home at night and bring him to the studio in the morning," Carmichael recalls. Another director, Cyril Frankel, was brought in to complete the picture uncredited. It was a shabby end to a career that lasted 15 years and yielded only 10 features. Still, Hamer had one masterpiece - and that is one more than almost every other British director before or since.

A retrospective of Robert Hamer's films will be on at the NFT throughout January

[The_Late_Peter_Cook]

Interesting piece, but it seems to tag Hamer as a 'one movie' director, with Kind Hearts overshadowing his other work. It Always Rains On Sunday, for example, is in my opinion every bit as good as Kind Hearts, if being totally different in style.

If you add his contributions to Dead Of Night, Father Brown and even School For Scoundrels (which in its own way is a bit of a masterpiece), then you have a truly great career. :)

[alan gowdy]

School for Scoundrels is superb - whatever the processes and agonies that were involved in its production.

[DB7]

How did he end up destroying himself with drink?

Kevin Jackson
Saturday December 18, 2004
The Guardian

The beginning of the end for Robert Hamer was the day he was followed home by a mutilated lobster. Deep down, in some sober part of his alcohol-ravaged mind, Hamer knew the horrible thing couldn't really be there, but that didn't stop his fear from mounting into panic as it scraped its way along behind him from a pond in Battersea Park and followed him up to his flat in Tite Street, Chelsea. He slammed the lift door on it and heard the crunch and the scream as its exoskeleton shattered.

His partner Pamela Wilcox - no stranger to heavy drinking herself - forced him to look again, and to admit that there was no crustacean corpse there; but the very next day, he was trailed home again by a pair of lame lobsters. The doctors came, passed the inevitable verdict of delirium tremens and trussed Hamer up in a straitjacket, while he howled about the swarms of lobsters that were attacking his genitals.

A grotesque fate for anyone, let alone for a fastidious, urbane, witty and academically brilliant man who, for a short time, was the "fair-haired boy" of British cinema. At a modest estimate, he had been the director or writer-director of at least three first-rate dramatic features and one universally acclaimed masterpiece, Kind Hearts and Coronets - which has often been described as the greatest, if least typical, of all the Ealing comedies.

But alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, will napalm the sturdiest of intellects. Pamela Wilcox estimated that Hamer's typical daily intake of "alc" went something like this: a couple of lagers before breakfast, then on to the white wine at about 11am, which he swilled like water until lunchtime, when he would head for the Screen Writer's Club and proceed to harder stuff; next it was on to the Garrick and a sequence of large brandies until 5pm; then it was time for the evening whisky session, which could last for 12 hours or more.

Despite this prodigious intake, almost nobody recalls having seen him drunk until the very last years of his working life. He used to advance the theory that he had been born several drinks under par, and needed to catch up with everybody else. In the end, it was the booze that caught up with him.

Robert Hamer's name is not terribly well known today except among film historians and Ealing Studios buffs, and even the better reference books don't grant him much space. He was not a prolific director, and completed only 10 features, of which only four can now command much more than curiosity. His swan song, a vehicle for Terry-Thomas and Ian Carmichael loosely based on Stephen Potter's Lifemanship books and called School for Scoundrels (1960), could have been put together by any hack. By this stage of his career, Hamer was regularly falling down drunk on set, and it was largely Terry Thomas's affection and respect for him that saved him from being fired.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is to our national cinema what The Importance of Being Earnest is to our theatre, and its seductive, wickedly amusing power is similarly undiminished by the passage of time. The most unlikely people adore Kind Hearts: Martin Scorsese, for one, who says that he lifted the lengthy, calculatedly amoral narration in Goodfellas directly from Dennis Price's silky voiceover in Hamer's film; John Landis, director of The Blues Brothers and many other coarse farces, rhapsodises about the beautiful fluidity of its play with sound and image; and French director Bertrand Tavernier, who has expressed the desire to make a film about Hamer, is in awe of its bleak, "Marxist" view of Britain's ruling classes.

Hamer had observed his class villains with the intimacy of a man who, if not quite an aristocrat, was no stranger to privilege. He was born into a prosperous Yorkshire family in 1911, and was something of a child prodigy, especially in mathematics. One story has young Robert, aged seven, proudly telling his father that he had invented an entirely new form of representing numbers, and then bursting into tears when his father explained that someone had already invented the decimal system.

He won a scholarship to Cambrige, where he appears (accounts vary) to have studied both economics and mathematics. He had the makings of a don, and sometimes bemoaned having chosen the wrong path.

Hamer began his film career in 1934 as a clapper-boy, then moved to Ealing in 1940 as an editor. Under the encouraging eye of the studio's boss, Michael Balcon, Hamer was rapidly promoted to associate producer and assigned various writing projects, notably the naval yarn San Demetrio, London (1943). His debut as a director was as stunning as it was brief: an episode in Alberto Cavalcanti's portmanteau film of supernatural stories, Dead of Night. Some of the episodes now look fairly silly, and atrociously acted to boot, but Hamer's story of a haunted mirror which gradually takes possession of its owner and drives him homicidally mad can still make hardened rationalists want to sleep with the lights on. Luis Buñuel thought it was marvellous; so did the poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. Hamer has often enjoyed his keenest recognition in other countries.

Hamer's short-lived golden period had begun. He followed the ghost story with Pink String and Sealing Wax , a period melodrama set in Brighton that manages to be both compellingly grim and quirkily funny. Googie Withers stars as a pub landlady who, driven to cold fury by her brutal husband, resolves to kill him. It has its awkward moments, and a regrettably upbeat coda tacked on to a more logically sour end, but its interlocking portraits of a bourgeois household almost totalitarian in its rectitude and a boozy, cheerfully bestial underclass has a pungency worthy of Dickens.

Two years later, Hamer completed the film sometimes called "his other masterpiece", It Always Rains on Sunday. Like Pink String, it alternates between two main narratives - a thriller about an escaped convict who comes to shelter with his ex-lover, now respectably but lovelessly married (Googie Withers, again), and a more diffuse account of the East End milieu in which the hiding and pursuit takes place, complete with no-hope petty criminals, black marketeers and "flash", lascivious entrepreneurs.

The film's hints at passionate extra-marital sex, prostitution and amour fou were among the most blatant of their time, and there is a diffuse eroticism in the drama quite unlike anything else of its date.

And then, the pinnacle - Kind Hearts and Coronets . Insolently clever in execution, it has a simple plot: a vengeful outsider (Dennis Price) murders his way into the aristocracy by bumping off, one by one, every member of the D'Ascoyne family who stands between him and his title (Alec Guinness plays the whole family - beautifully). The film is bitterly delicious, gloriously heartless, and without (no pun premeditated) peer. How could Hamer ever match it?

He couldn't. He went on to make one more very good film, The Spider and the Fly, an intricate yarn of crime and espionage set in France before and during the first world war, and then seems to have lost track of his gift. After his premature death on December 4, 1963, and up to the present day, the critic's superlatives underwent a change: the young man who had directed the greatest British comedy became instead our most self-destructive director, "the most serious miscarriage of talent" (David Thomson) of the postwar years. Fair comment, and yet somehow too pessimistic a view of an artist who burned most brightly when his view of things was at its darkest. Measure him by what he did rather than what he might have done, and Robert Hamer looks better with each passing year.

· Robert Hamer: The Shadow Side is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, from January 1, with an extended run of Dead of Night. Box office: 020-7928 3232.