Geoff Mayer,
Roy Ward Baker.
British Film Makers Series, Manchester University Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 7190 6354 X
224pp
£45.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press)

Roy Ward Baker (or Roy Baker, he added the middle name when he returned to directing in 1967), was one of a number of talented directors working in the post-war British film industry who approached each film in a thoughtful, conscientious manner that respected the assembled talents of those involved, the integrity of the script and the ability of audiences to respond to a high-quality product, whether it was the epic recreation of the sinking of the Titanic (A Night to Remember, UK, 1958), or the horror film The Scars of Dracula (UK, 1970). Baker was also an adaptable, versatile film-maker in a sixty-year career that encompassed studio apprentice work at Gainsborough Pictures in the 1930s and making wartime documentary shorts for the Army Kinematograph Unit, before directing for several major companies in Britain and in America, as well as extensive television work on such well-known series as The Saint, The Avengers and Minder.

The work of directors who occupy this ‘middle ground’, neither auteurs nor journeymen, is rarely the object of much interest and it is ironic that Baker is best known (at least in England) as the director of the camp classic The Singer Not the Song (UK, 1960), a film he detested. However, the British Film Makers series, from its inception, has shown a determination to deal with such figures who have, to all intents and purposes, become invisible, and to accord them the rigorous critical attention through which their work can be better appreciated and understood. Geoff Mayer’s painstaking account of Baker’s career is a welcome addition to this series, respecting the guiding nostrum that the film-maker’s work is carefully contextualised. Mayer gives careful attention to the industrial contexts in which Baker worked, whether it was at Rank, Twentieth Century-Fox, Hammer or Amicus, and has a keen eye for the various ways in which he was able to fashion a degree of creative freedom in a system in which the producer was sovereign. In making The Vampire Lovers (UK, 1970), for instance, Baker had to fight hard against the producers’ demands for a ‘soft-core porn film with lashings of female nudity and lesbianism’, in order to create a sense of Le Fanu’s subtle evocation of female desire and so ‘retain the dignity’ of the original (156-57). He even persuaded John Davis, Rank’s ruthless Managing Director, to cast the charismatic Hardy Kruger in The One That Got Away (UK, 1957) as Oberleutnant Franz Von Werra, the only man to escape form British authorities and successfully return to Germany, and thereby challenge the reductive stereotyping of Germans that was the norm in 1950s Second World War films. However, even after the feted success of A Night to Remember, Baker could not persuade Rank to break with its policy of making films ‘for a family audience’ and allow him to direct an adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (UK, 1960); the project went to the independent company Woodfall, a sobering reminder of the limitations of directorial power.

Mayer is also concerned to situate Baker’s films within their discursive and generic contexts. He has an informative discussion of ‘realism’ as a shifting and relative construct in Chapter 2, arguing that Baker’s most characteristic films combine realism with melodrama in ways that engage audience emotions without sacrificing their ability to engage with issues and ideas, as in Morning Departure (UK, 1950), a sombre study of men dying in a submarine. They also contain moments which are genuinely unsettling, as in the ending of Passage Home(UK, 1954), which has a strong sense of pathos and regret rather than the upbeat resolution that might be expected. Indeed, Mayer, like other before him, detects a ‘morbid sensibility’ at work and argues that several of Baker’s best films can be classified as film noir, including the earliest film he directed, The October Man (UK, 1947), and Don’t bother to knock (USA, 1952), the first of his three Hollywood films, with Marilyn Monroe in a challenging role as a psychologically disturbed baby-sitter.

Mayer’s concern to contextualise Baker’s films does not preclude, in fact enormously strengthens, an engagement with the films themselves and one of this study’s major virtues is the quality of its close textual analysis coupled with a refreshing willingness to make aesthetic judgements. This is particular true with films generally considered flawed or uneven – Flame in the Streets (UK, 1961) about attitudes to race – or generic products such as The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (Hong Kong/UK, 1973) with its bizarre combination of kung-fu and gothic horror. Mayer has a subtle and thoughtful analysis of Baker’s bete noire, The Singer Not the Song, which exemplifies the book’s concern to examine Baker’s oeuvre on its merits and not according to a pre-determined agenda.

Mayer’s study is not without its flaws. The concern to situate Baker’s films within their contemporaneous reception by reviewers is sometime overdone, particularly, as in the case of Highly Dangerous (UK, 1950), where it concludes the analysis. And there is a tendency to rely too heavily on anecdote, even if these details come from Baker’s memoirs or the author’s 2000 interview. More seriously, the organisation of the monograph is questionable. The ‘career overview’ is over-long and contains detail that would have been better deployed elsewhere; indeed, there are a number of avoidable repetitions. It was a pity, but this may have been dictated by a series devoted to film-makers, that so little space was given to Baker’s television work. How distinctive, one wonders, were his contributions to The Avengers? However, these faults are heavily outweighed by the study’s obvious strengths. Mayer’s scholarly and clearly written account, alive to critical debates but not burdened with an over elaborate theoretical apparatus, is an impressive addition to this excellent series and should do much to restore Baker to his rightful position as one of the key directors in the immediate post-war period.

Andrew Spicer
University of the West of England.