Lewis Gilbert

[Merton Park]

Spotted Lewis Gilbert at lunch on Sunday, nearly 87 and in fine fettle. Couldn't resist telling what a great film maker he is and how much I loved his films way back to Cosh Boy in 1952, that threw him! He seemed a little taken aback, he was with a fellow who is helping him write his book. Should be good.

How is it that nobody's get knighted and people like Bryan Forbes and Lewis Gilbert who have given so much to the British Film Industry get nothing. Now, if only he could have kicked a ball professionally(he did say he was in the entertainment business football team and Sean Connery was centre forward) or flogged a few women's blouses he would have got a K.

Somehow it doesn't seem right to me!!

[Windthrop]

Originally Posted by Merton Park Spotted Lewis Gilbert at lunch on Sunday, nearly 87 and in fine fettle. Couldn't resist telling what a great film maker he is and how much I loved his films way back to Cosh Boy in 1952, that threw him! He seemed a little taken aback, he was with a fellow who is helping him write his book. Should be good. How is it that nobody's get knighted and people like Bryan Forbes and Lewis Gilbert who have given so much to the British Film Industry get nothing. Now, if only he could have kicked a ball professionally(he did say he was in the entertainment business football team and Sean Connery was centre forward) or flogged a few women's blouses he would have got a K. Somehow it doesn't seem right to me!!

Things have changed alot with the honours system - both would have been Knighted in their at the peak of their careers if that had been nowadays. For a long time film was seen as an inferior art form to say theatre where K's were not uncommon.

[Azanti]

Now I have been wanting to write to Lewis Gilbert for sometime now and have tried and failed to find the most direct route.

Can anyone suggest one, or does anyone know the person writing this book, I could send it via them.

[Night Editor]

I blogged a while ago on 'Back Alley Noir' on one of my favorite earlier Louis Gilbert films , 'Cast a Dark Shadow' (the piece is a bit tricky to link to directly, so here's just the bare text):

"A dark and stormy Brit-noir from the late-classic period, ‘Cast a Dark Shadow’ stars Dirk Bogarde, once referred to as the screen’s ‘quintessential gentleman’s pervert’.

Certainly it was well within Bogarde’s range to portray decadents and others morally or intellectually doubtful. He’s often best remembered for his roles as someone in thrall to the possibilities of money, power, or sex in films such as ‘The Servant’, ‘Accident’, ‘The Damned’, ‘Death in Venice’ and ‘The Night Porter’.

In ‘Cast a Dark Shadow’ - based on the play ‘Murder Mistaken’ by Janet Green – it’s easy solvency and the mean assurances of social standing he after.

Bogarde plays the aptly-named Edward or “Teddy” Bare, a handsome but louche charmer married to a wealthy widow, played by Mona Washbourne (a consummate character actress who appeared in vivid supporting roles and cameos in dozens of movies including ‘Billy Liar’, ‘The Collector’ and the ‘Stevie’).

Although Bare appears to dote on his Monica, we don’t believe it for a minute. Beneath the surface solicitousness and affection, there’s only impatience and contempt (working and playing below in the sub-text was what Bogarde did best and why he was so startlingly wonderful an actor).

Believing he is to inherit his wife’s fortunes, Bare’s real intentions are made clear soon enough. He murders her and stages the death to appear as an accident. The family lawyer (Robert Flemyng) suspects foul play but the coroner’s inquest rules otherwise. As it turns out, Monica has willed her loving husband only the house they shared. Other than that, he’s been left skint.

Bare quickly regroups and reverts to form. As he says, “I tripped up that time. But one thing’s for sure, somebody’s going to have pay my passage”.

Bare goes about looking for that somebody in a sea-side resort town and it doesn’t take him long to find her - a Mrs. Jeffries - a brazenly griefless widow played by Margaret Lockwood, once called “the next Joan Bennett”.

Lockwood’s Freda Jeffries is as tough and real as an old steak. She’s a blowsy, ex-barmaid who ‘married the guv’nor’ and is now well-off and ready to get on with it. There had been one or two gents she’d thought about settling down with - until she figured out that “it was just the moneybags, they were after, not the old bag herself”.

She also has Bare almost figured out but is prepared to marry him if he can show her the money and is ready to come to the marriage “pound for pound”. Bare manages to convince her that he has wealth by borrowing from a friend as smarmy and dubious as he is. While he’s is able to keep up the pretense for a while, eventually Bare is forced to come clean and confess to Freda that in fact he doesn’t have ten shillings to rub together.

Despite it all, she decides to stick with him because she knows full well that they’re both as ‘common’ as dirt and she’ll likely do no better.

English class consciousness and social distinctions, as in a number of Brit-noirs, fester near the heart of ‘Cast a Dark Shadow”. It’s apparent that much of lawyer Phillip Mortimer’s dislike of Bare is due to Bare’s obvious lack of breeding. Bare, for his part, deliberately provokes those he resents as his betters by meeting them with slouching insolence.

Washbourne, on the other hand, is resigned to the social strictures but manages to make mock of them. Coming out of the beauty parlour, she says dryly to Bogarde, “I was going to go blonde but I thought that it might make me look common”.

It’s a brilliantly realized and telling moment, both as narrative and as a marker of realism’s ascent in British noir. There’s increasingly less room left for melodrama, anticipating the gritty and unsparing social realism soon to qualify the British New Wave and the so-called ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas.

As one suspects he will, Bare soon begins to plot an untimely demise for Freda. However, complications arise and both the situation and Bare himself start to unravel.

Yet, Bogard’s Bare manages to evoke sympathy and even evince a vindicating dignity nearly up until the end. As criminally venal as he is – unlike ‘Night and the City’s Harry Fabian who is merely pathetic scammer– Bogard is still able to make Bare something more in a quintessentially noir notation.

‘Cast a Dark Shadow’ is a movie layered with sharply-observed characters, filmed by a director who, if nothing else, frequently brought insight in to the lives of ordinary people as lived under extraordinary circumstances.

In a career that has spanned more than six decades and over 40 films, Gilbert (born in 1920 and still working) has transported audiences to more and different dreamlands than almost anyone else in the history of film: from the post-war cycle of stirring WW II dramas ‘The Sea Shall Not Have Them’, ‘Reach for the Sky’, ‘Carve Her Name with Pride’, and Sink the Bismarck’; to ‘Alfie’, a film that helped change censorship laws; to the James Bond trilogy ‘You Only Live Twice’, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, and ‘Moonraker’; and to popular celebrations of female spiritedness, ‘Educating Rita’ and ‘Shirley Valentine’.

Working on low-budget programmers to big international co-productions, Gilbert has long been recognized for his professionalism and efficient craftsmanship. He has done nearly everything and done most of it well (leaving aside the fiasco, "The Adventurers"), accepting that his raison d’etre has been primarily to entertain and also that he is the kind of director who resolutely defies auteurist attention.

With ‘Cast a Dark Shadow,’ however, Gilbert made an estimable contribution to the film noir canon, assisted by cinematographer Jack Asher who also appears in control of the full noir register (Asher would later be lauded for his cinematographic contribution to many of the films of the late ‘50’s/ early ‘60’s British horror cycle).

That said, ‘Cast a Dark Shadow’ remains a woefully underestimated film, receiving less attention and credit than it ought - despite a compelling story, a taut construction broken loose of all theatrical origins, and a mitt-full of memorable performances".


Night Editor

[orpheum]

HBe is a Gooner.Used to chat to him occasionally at Highbury.

[Mr Cosmo]

Now I have been wanting to write to Lewis Gilbert for sometime now and have tried and failed to find the most direct route.

Can anyone suggest one, or does anyone know the person writing this book, I could send it via them.
Azanti - This may sound like a long shot but if you send a lettr to Arsenal they may be able to pass it on. This sounds a bit stupid I know but I managed in a very convuluted way to send something to Dora Bryan and she wrote back to me.
PS - Always enclose a stamped and self addressed envelope - but you probably were going to anyway.