Christine Gledhill,
Reframing British Cinema 1919-1928. Between Restraint and Passion.
London: BFI Publishing, 2003.ISBN: 0 85170 889 7 214pp
UK£17.99(pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing)

I anticipate some difficulty reviewing Professor Gledhill’s revisionist study of British cinema. For one thing, much of her raw material is “new”: it consists of 150-odd films, many of which, I take it, have come from archives in Eastern Europe only recently opened to the West. Back in 1995, Episode Five of Kevin Brownlow’s six-part television series, Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood, was devoted to early British cinema, and was called “Opportunity lost”. But now, without explicitly repudiating Brownlow, Gledhill takes a different line, a more positive appraisal that sees British silent films as often meeting real cultural needs. Also, although Rachel Low covered the same period as Gledhill, in The History of the British Film 1918-1929 (London:Allen & Unwin), that book was published in 1971. So I’m going to be dependent on Gledhill’s own findings for much of what I report below! But there are other problems. Frankly, Gledhill is a poor writer. At least, she makes minimal concessions to the reader, and so, repeatedly, you get sentences like this:

Melodrama is inextricably linked to the emergence of a popular mass-mediated sphere organised in different generic kinds, the shifts between which trace changing processes of aesthetic and social perception at work. (124)

Apart from the joylessness of that, note the redundancy of “at work” and how it serves to further slow the reader down! If I add that I happened to read Gledhill’s book in tandem with John Carey’s remarkable The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (London and Boston: Faber, 1992) – I’m afraid to the profound disadvantage of Gledhill’s study – you may sense the reasons for my sometimes impatience with Gledhill. Her “cultural poetics” (4) of 1920s British cinema strikes me as being dryly abstract and wilful. Contra Carey’s book, Gledhill’s never manages anything like an historical appreciation of the period she writes of. She is too busy categorising everything (not the same thing). In particular, I couldn’t help noticing that there’s no mention of either T.S. Eliot or Friedrich Nietzsche in Gledhill – though clearly the German philosopher inspired leading writers and intellectuals of the period, in Britain as elsewhere. The fact is, British cinema sought to adapt works by a raft of middlebrow writers, among whom were Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, A.E.W. Mason, and Marie Corelli (154). Accordingly, says Gledhill, her study “emphasises continuities and the middlebrow mainstream” (5), and among the directors her study valorises is the prolific Maurice Elvey (1887-1967) who “shamelessly mixed what the filmic intelligentsia sought to keep separate – the artistic and experimental with the commercially popular – colonising the cultural no man’s land of the middlebrow” (101).

Here let me interpolate that although fellow director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) obviously followed in the Elvey tradition, a couple of his 1920s films may be seen to already contain a Nietzschean element [1] which would become more overt later: vide such American films as Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948). Recall that the latter film was adapted from a 1929 play by British author Patrick Hamilton that perfectly supports Carey’s thesis about contemporary intellectuals’ disdain for the masses, as well as Gledhill’s observation of the tension in British culture between “restraint and passion” – so that the play, set in a house in Mayfair, literally takes place over a body artfully concealed in a chest. As for Hitchcock’s almost life-long ambivalence towards Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, this reflects his reading and admiration of such writers as Wells, G.K. Chesterton, John Buchan, and Bernard Shaw. I’ll come back to this.

So what is Gledhill’s thesis, exactly? It’s a Janus-faced one. Though the American cinema with its “democratising” star-system, and its increasing resort to “analytic editing” to create the illusion of one seamless fictional world, was hugely popular in Britain, the native British cinema of the 1920s resisted absorption to the American model. National traditions, inherited from painting, literature, and the stage, all had to be accommodated, as did social considerations based on class, gender, ethnicity, region, and age (hence, for example, the importance of British character actors and recognisable “types”). Films could both demarcate and challenge social boundaries, often in an entertaining way (for example, music hall elements in some of the films encouraged “a clash of class- and gender-inflected performance styles between different entertainers” [145]).

Having formulated this taxonomy of the elements of British cinema – which she sees as still largely operational today – Gledhill illustrates it with both contemporary comment and her own analysis of films. Hardly mentioned, though, is something that particularly concerned the literary intellectuals of the time, namely, the influence of the populist press. Gledhill does refer impressionistically to Elvey’s “flicker-book approach” (111). But that’s too easy. As is this from the same page, though it’s a definite improvement (despite dubious syntax):

[I]t seems likely that [screenwriter Eliot Stannard] and Elvey drew from similar nineteenth-century pictorial-narrative practices: episodic theatrical entertainments and the accumulation of graphic detail, combined with switches in spatially located points of view to build character and incident in the popular nineteenth-century novel. (111)

After all, another major figure who worked with Eliot Stannard at this time was, again, Hitchcock: in the 1930s Hitchcock explicitly likened his role as director to that of the editor of a large mass-circulation newspaper. [2] Meanwhile, the first film that he and Stannard made together in Britain was The Lodger (1926) whose opening reel documents the role of the media in publicising the crimes of the serial killer dubbed The Avenger.

But if I seem to be criticising Gledhill for a failure of imagination, I don’t want to give the impression that her study is less than monumental in its use of illustration and citation. (The lengthy Acknowledgments pages refer, inter alia, to “two years of research assistance” by Maggie Womersley, who rooted “through trade, fan and review press in search of clues to the reigning values and assumptions of British film-makers and audiences” [x].) The book’s basic taxonomy may be restricted, and restrictive – even banal – but what attendant riches are here for the specialist film scholar! (The casual film buff will likely withdraw, defeated.) The author has even managed, in passing, to tell me of precedents not mentioned by Carey for the attitudes of the literary intellectuals. In a section called “Picturing the world: from painting to pictures”, I read this:

Walter Scott aligned himself with Coleridge in warning against the ‘demoralizing falsehood of the pictures’ spread by the democratising aesthetic of melodrama, which attributes ‘noble and virtuous sentiments to the persons least qualified by habit or education to entertain them’. (33)

Here Gledhill introduces the heroic figure of painter W.P. Frith (1819-1909) whose Ramsgate Sands, despite having been called “a piece of vulgar Cockney business unworthy of … an illustrated paper”, proved immensely popular:

Frith, who mid-century abandoned literary and historical subjects, [had] found a means of reconciling pictorial qualities with … the new public sites of mass-society: the seaside outing; Derby Day; the railway station. (33)

Later, film-maker Kenelm Foss (1885-1963), himself trained as a painter, happily sided with “the simple-minded public” in their alleged preference for films that featured, above all, “pleasing PICTURES” (33). Meanwhile, someone else valorised by Gledhill’s study, the pioneer director Cecil Hepworth (1874-1953), had blazed the way by his cinematic example. Gledhill calls Hepworth the “pictorial poet of British cinema” and re-evaluates his work by examining such “pastoral” pieces as Tansy (1921) and The Pipes of Pan (1923). Perhaps inevitably, I keep returning to Hitchcock. Gledhill invokes him when she compares Hepworth’s use of pre-planning (“forcing myself to visualise every little scene as it would appear on the screen” [94]) to Hitchcock’s now-legendary use of such a technique. But given the latter director’s own “pastoralism” – seen in comedies or comedy-thrillers like The Farmer’s Wife (1928), Young and Innocent (1937), and the glorious The Trouble with Harry (1955) – I was grateful for several broad remarks by Gledhill. For example: on the way 1920s cinema sometimes looks back to a prelapsarian age (95); on pastoral cinema’s “evocation of a place of origin” or “home” (95); and particularly this, on The Pipes of Pan:

The link between the eyes of the child and classical myth returns the pastoral to an earlier domain where nature is deified, alive with spirits, acknowledging the connections of the human body to the earth. (99)

All of these things are present in exemplary fashion in The Trouble with Harry (a masterpiece, in my view). Its artist-hero, Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), does indeed sing lustily of how he must soon be “homeward bound”. And from the film’s screenplay, here’s a wonderful piece of scene description by John Michael Hayes for the nocturnal exhumation of Harry’s body:

The moon has come up. Between the trees and over the shrubbery lies the faint suspicion of a mist. It brings a thin chill to the air and lends an aspect of fairies and goblins and film sets. [3]

That reflexive note at the end (“film sets”) is apt, given Hayes’s and Hitchcock’s undoubted awareness, in 1955, of how their film belonged to a pastoral tradition. (In a still broader sense, entertainment film is a kind of pastoral anyway.) Further, when a few years ago I analysed Harry in my book on Hitchcock [4] , I gladly made use of an admirable study by Jackie Wullschlager of the Victorian cult of childhood, Inventing Wonderland (London, Methuen, 1995) – which is invoked several times by Gledhill. At one point Gledhill generalises that the cult’s literary tradition seeks not its idealisation but the anarchism of the child’s literal imagination. Innocently taking adulthood at face value, child heroes expose its pretensions and hypocrisy while revealing the child in the supposed grown up. (169)
Quite so! And (still apropos Hitchcock) isn’t that the very conceit underlying Young and innocent and cleverly informing scenes like the one of the children’s party supervised by a puritanical aunt (played to the hilt by Mary Clare)?

In turn, pastoralism is related to a motif that runs through all of Hitchcock’s work, from his first film, The Pleasure Garden (1926), to his last, Family Plot (1976), namely, the motif of a “lost paradise”. It has many embodiments, based on the idea of a corrupted garden. One recurrent embodiment, or setting, is the French Riviera, as seen in Easy Virtue (1927), Rebecca (1940), and To Catch a Thief (1955). Interestingly, then, Gledhill records how in the same year that Betty Balfour (the Squibs girl ) starred in Hitchcock’s Champagne (1928), she also appeared in Denison Clift’s Paradise, “gliding in and out of the magnificent Monte Carlo ballroom set, looking as if she had ‘stepped right out of a Joshua Reynolds painting’.” (35) Earlier, Fred Le Roy Grenville’s The Beloved Vagabond (1923), marking the film debut of a young Jessie Matthews, was a picaresque fantasy that combined references to Milton’s Paradise Lost with a pastoralism that sounds heavily indebted to the Forest of Arden. Not without satire, however. Gledhill notes how the hero Gaston (Carlyle Blackwell) becomes the layabout President of the Lotus Club in London; and it is here, in the club’s kitchens, that Gaston’s protégé, the boy Asticot, eventually discovers (in the words of an inter-title) “Paradise Found” and is seen “surrounded by the tantalising smells and cheerful bustle of cooking” (126)!

Gledhill, I’m saying, is able to confirm hunches and intuitions one had previously held only tentatively. True, she doesn’t appear to have read any John Buchan (1875-1940) – so she can’t directly confirm my suspicion that Buchan’s John McNab (1925), full of a virile kind of pastoral loveliness and chronicling the picaresque adventures attributed to a title character who in fact doesn’t exist, helped to license Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry and North by Northwest (1959). (Nor, therefore, can she illuminate Buchan’s finally disparaging attitude to the Nietzschean Superman – an attitude I take to match Hitchcock’s – seen in an early, pre-The Thirty-Nine Steps novel, The Power House [1912].) On the other hand, the third British director Gledhill valorises, along with Elvey and Hepworth, in her chapter called “Directors’ picture stories”, is Graham Cutts (1885-1958), under whom Hitchcock received his initial film training. On reading how the intensely energetic Cutts would “seek out the incipient sexuality and violence of theatrical spectacle” (113) and go for “the visceral, sensational effects of theatrical performance” (113), emphasising the power of the look (114), I immediately sensed why Michael Balcon gave The Pleasure Garden to Hitchcock as his first solo directorial job. Especially in its early reels set in the Pleasure Garden Theatre, the film would have been perfect material for Cutts (then directing The Rat [1925], of which it was said that “the Follies Bergère, the greatest spectacular show in Paris, had never been so thoroughly filmed” [113]).

Incidentally, and further confirming a link between the “lost paradise” and pastoralism, I have lately noticed that the original novel of The Pleasure Garden, by “Oliver Sandys” (a woman), employs its title in a less literal way than does Hitchcock’s film. There is no theatre of that name in the novel. Instead, the title proves to be a simple metaphor for sexuality. One of the showgirls warns a newcomer about men who “buzz round a stage door like flies on something sweet. … The stage is their pleasure garden, and we girls are the flowers in it. We’re really here for show, but some of the public don’t keep to the paths.” [5] I would say that it’s partly because Gledhill doesn’t seem to have familiarised herself with actual novels and plays of the period (as opposed to several score films plus trade and press reviews of these, and secondary works by fellow scholars) that often what she writes feels over-cerebral. Another instance of her failure of imagination?

But, finally, I have only praise for some of Gledhill’s descriptions of actors and their techniques. From Guy Newall (1885-1937), forever playing outsiders and loners, and considered British cinema’s finest actor of the time, to Moore Marriott (1885-1949), called “our best character actor”, who later featured in the Will Hay comedies of the 1930s, Gledhill’s chiselled prose actually suits exact, nuanced description of these people’s work. There are particularly pleasing short profiles of Ivor Novello (1893-1951) and Betty Balfour (1903-78), two of the most popular British film performers throughout the 1920s. Speaking broadly, Gledhill attributes their success to how they “worked productive variations on British norms” (83). Balfour indeed remained forever identified with her role as the chirpy Cockney flower-girl in George Pearson’s Squibs (1921). Novello, star of The Lodger and The Rat (and its sequels), was something else:

Novello does not provide a socially coded performance – his ambivalent class identity, treating both street urchin and upper-class scion as theatrical disguises, bears no relation to the social graces of Henry Edwards’s [typically British] underplaying … (84)

When he wasn’t indulging in campy, romantic-melodramatic gestures, Novello might retreat to passive self-display, “draping his body across table corners or over sofa backs” (84). Of course, although Gledhill never brings it out (but surely she should have?), Novello’s popularity also flowed from his non-film work as glamorous Welsh matinee idol, playwright, and songwriter.This, then, is an intensely researched book for the specialist film scholar. As such, it will take its due place alongside respected volumes by Low, Andrew Higson, and other authorities on the inexhaustible topic of British cinema.

Ken Mogg,
Melbourne, Australia

Endnotes

(To return to your place in the text, simply click on the endnote number)
[1] John Carey’s point is that Nietzsche’s views about mass society were practically endemic among literary intellectuals by the 1920s, and that this matched the implication of ll. 60-63 of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) that most people are not really alive. As Carey puts it: “Largely through Eliot’s influence, the assumption that most people are dead became, by the 1930s, a standard item in the repertoire of any self-respecting intellectual.” (Carey, 10) Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange (1932), in its treatment of the home-bound commuters on the London Underground, in the film’s opening reel, picks up on that idea; that scene, in turn, provides the basis of the credits sequence of North by Northwest (1959) with its drably-photographed New York commuters, a sequence that I show in my The Alfred Hitchcock Story (London, Titan Books, 1999 – p. 55) to contain a deliberate echo of the same passage from The Waste Land cited by Carey. The clerk Fred in Rich and strange cries out early in the film, “I want more life – life, I tell you!” Accordingly, I infer a couple of things about the Hitchcock of a slightly earlier period, i.e., the 1920s. One is that some of his commented-on behaviour at BIP (e.g., his daily cup-smashing ritual) was an attempt to assert his own “aliveness”. Another inference I draw is that certain passages in films such as Blackmail (1929) were already suggesting a deadness at the heart of society – though with a characteristic ambivalence. Note: Hitchcock’s membership of the London Film Society in the late 1920s, and his friendship with such people as Ivor Montagu (who re-cut The Lodger before release), certainly brought him into direct contact with some of the intellectuals described in Professor Carey’s book.
[2] See Alfred Hitchcock, “Why I make melodramas” (1936), on the Hitchcock Scholars/”MacGuffin” website:
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/melodramas_c.html
[3]My thanks to Richard Franklin who loaned me a copy of the studio screenplay of The Trouble with Harry.
[4] Ken Mogg, The Alfred Hitchcock Story (London: Titan Books, 1999), 134-35. A much lengthier analysis by me of The Trouble with Harry is on the Hitchcock Scholars/”MacGuffin” website:
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/universal_c.html.
[5]Oliver Sandys, The Pleasure Garden (London: Hurst & Blackett, Ltd, 3rd Edition, n.d.), 22.

Created on: Monday, 6 December 2004 | Last Updated: 7-Dec-04