British movies
Sir: I was saddened by Leslie Halliwell's long review (1 May) of my A Mirror For England. More especially as I was just one of many undergraduates whose mid-'fifties Cambridge education was agreeably broadened by Mr Halliwell's flair for getting all the better middlebrow movies into the cinema %x hich he transformed into a sort of unofficial extension college. .Yet • mass media studies • have
progressed, in fifteen years; even so, Mr Halliwell's rambling whine about the untoward sophistication of the young hardly applies, since the quotations in my book must have reminded him how the lustily Tory E. W. and M. M. Robson, accused British films of com- placency and deathwish all through the 'forties.
But let me look at one or two specific points.
1. Mr Halliwell takes my remarks about Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death and asks, with heavy irony: 'Have you thought of it as an allegory of the British spirit . . . timorously seeking an American alliance ... Durgnat has, of course.'
Yes; Durgnat first outlined that interpretation in Films and Film- ing in 1964 (enjoying a brief res- pite from his supposed preoccupa- tion with sexual symbolism). Early in 1971 (and too late to include in my bibliography) the British Film Institute published an Interview with Michael Powell. The director tells Kevin Gough-Yates: 'The film was actually started by the Ministry of Information sending for us and saying, "Well, the war's nearly over boys, but it's just start- ing from our point of view. We think you should make a film about Anglo-American relations because they are deteriorating ... the tit of . . . wanted it laid down as to why we were all one family. They wanted a debate."' In the same interview, Powell describes A Canterbury Talc as 'a crusade against materialism'; and his collaborator Emeric Press- burger, when asked 'would you say that you were ever trying to in- clude a social statement?' replies 'Certainly! . . . the social feelings of an author must somehow con- tribute.' Mr Powell also gives interesting descriptions of the Ministry of Information's reactions to the script of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and Mr Churchill's reac- tions to the ,finished film. So if I see political and ideological mean- ings in some entertainment films, I'm clearly in good company. 2. Mr Halliwell isn't exactly averse to personal overtones, as .when he says of me that: 'A few years ago his purpose in movie- going seemed to be the discovery of phallic and other sexual sym-
bols . . If, of my eight books on the cinema, only Eros in the Cinema and &WIWI loom so large in Mr Halliwell's mind, that's his problem, and he's welcome to it.
I don't propose to quibble with him about exactly when 'a few years ago' was and how long it lasted, but whatever he means by it, the sentence is, quite simply, absolutely untrue. 3. 'Predictably, he perpetuates the rather tiresome theory of the director as auteur, assigning wholly to him the artistic success or other- wise of what most of us will con- tinue to regard as a team ellort.' Mr Halliwell's concern with my earlier work hasn't, apparently, taken him as far as Films and Feelings, Chapter Four, Auteurs and ,Dream Factories, in which I criticise auteur theory along lines parallel to his. Even in the book under review, I specifically oppose to auteur theory my proposition that 'many of the subtlest mean- ings . . . may be related to the collective vision of a particular tradition, period, background or school' and mention that it would be quite possible to have ex- plored the subject by treating actors as railcars. My book's auleurs include such writers as Bryan Forbes, Ted Willis, Graham Greene and Jack Trevor Story, such actors as Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Charlie Drake and Norman Wisdom, and such producers as John Gricrson, Tan Dalrymple, Raymond Stross and Harry Saltz- man. I even make specific con- trasts between studios as auteurs (Gainsborough v. Ealing, Ealing v. Wessex).
4. `Durgnat judges ... from the viewpoint of the 'seventies, so that Brief Encounter, with its charm, its style, its wellbred emo- tion, disintegrates under his glance.'
The mockery I describe is that of mid-'sixties spectators at the Classic, Baker Street. I defend the film, on the grounds that it's more tragic than it knows (Mr Halliwell's description of it would fit a light comedy). And Mr Halli- well can turn to that well-remem- bered film magazine Sequence, No. 13, p. 46, to see what Lindsay Anderson said about it in 1951.
5. Mr Halliwell is puzzled that I should describe British movies as extremely exasperating while examining them `with loving thoroughness.' There's no puzzle. In some ways, some infuriate me; in other ways, I respond with them; it's the double effect that makes them so interesting to think about in detail.
On this topic Mr Halliwell quotes only half a paragraph, and omits the other half, which begins, 'Nevertheless . . If you only quote an author's concessive clauses, then naturally you will attribute to him views exactly opposite to those he holds. 6. Mr Halliwell gives a one-line synopsis of my theme (a revul- sion from the middle-class vision) and then complains that it's obvious. Of course it is, if you reduce it to that. Many obvious things bear study in more detail —and then they become much less obvious—like Mr Halliwell's naive assumption that `entertainment' is worlds away from the serious matters that concern government departments, or the moral values we live our lives by.
These are the main, though not the only, points. If Mr Halliwell gets so much wrong, it's not entirely the fault of my book, since corroborative material like that quoted in this letter isn't hard to find, while the Robsons, Wolfen- stein and Leites, and other 'forties writers are quoted in the book.
It's a case, I'm afraid, of 'None so blind ..', and Mr Halliwell is vexed that so many people should see more in entertainment films than meets his particular eye. Yet if we accepted the limitations he attempts to impose on us, there'd be no call for criticism or exegesis; but only for reviewing. And I think the SPECTATOR sets its sights a little higher than that . . . doesn't it?
Raymond Durgnat Dept of General Studies, St Mar- tin s School of Art
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