Films
Out of the Bag
By ISABEL QUIGLY
SOMETHING turned up in
British films this year that has taken a long time to come. It wasn't a film to beat all its predecessors, or a new actor or actress or even a brand- new director. It was a cat let picture of ourselves was phony. Everyone in this country knew it, it was one of those big national lies that everyone concurred in. But in other places they believed it, they really thought we were like that: women like Esther McCracken heroines, men like Kenneth More's heroes. (No reflection on Mr. More: only on
the parts.) After all, we said we were, didn't wq Everything about our films seemed to conspire
to keep up the idea: no actress who wasn't like an Esther McCracken heroine ever seemed to he let loose in British films, and very few men (though just a few) who weren't like the parts played by Kenneth More. Occasionally a film about the Lower Orders suggested that life was a jollier business than you might think from watching the middle classes; but almost invariably local colour was laid on so self- consciously that anyone looking at them would feel suspicious.
Oddly, much of our present film phoniness has solid and reputable foundations. The war films of service life and civilian heroism were mostly true to the times they were made in, and acceptable enough in their day, (Doubt :
would they be acceptable now-49th Parallel, In Which we Serve, The Way Ahead, Waterloo Road, The Way to the Stars ?) But they set a
fashion for courage and reticence that soon degenerated into the false heroics of the stiff upper lip. The Ealing comedies were delight- ful in their heyday; but they set a fashion for
'delightfulness' that still lingers as coyness 4nd whimsicality. Even Brief Encounter, one of the
most persuasive film love stories ever made, set a fashion for high minded renunciation that soon sunk into prissiness and a refusal to face the fact that a great many lovers, thwarted by circumstances, however seemingly respect- able, do not renounce each other. Altogether, a complete facade of film-Britishness (some- thing like stage-Irishness) perpetuated the idea of ourselves as we half-mockingly liked to see ourselves, but that even we were growing a little tired of. The effect was rather like watching people talking noisily in a train, conscious that the silent rest of the compart- ment is listening, and somehow acting up to what is expected, caricaturing some pre- conceived notion of themselves. And, of course,
there is more than a grain of truth in film- Britishneas. There are men like Kenneth More characters; just as there may be girls like the heroines played by (say) Muriel Pavlow: the only awful part of it is the implication that they are typical.
The cat I mentioned at the beginning was a recognisable but (in films so far) unadmitted part of life here today; the bag they were let out of, Room at the Top: the class pattern, not as a piece of comic trimming but as the structure of social life ; social ambition; money; sexual ambition as part of the class pattern: all admitted. It is easy to raise a cheer too, at the first effort in a British film to show un- embarrassed sexuality: joy in unsuitable and illicit love, and the fact that love may have no connection at all with suitability or glamour. Yet in its way, fourteen years and a great many films ago, the Brief Encounter attitude (that joy was impossible in unsuitable and illicit love) was as nationally typical and true. Foreign • efforts to improve on the situation showed just how typical, how nationally true. I remember when it was all the rage in France (as much for its almost exotic degree of propriety as anything) a newspaper ran a competition inviting readers to give their views to the heroine. Gallic advice was emphatic: Les femmes disent que Laura a en tort, said the headline, and the winning essay went on to say that what would have solved everything was an affaire—tone toute petite affaire, at that—to get the man out of her system: about as useful a piece of advice to the conscience-ridden Lauras of this country as suggesting to the Joe Lamptons that they drop their preoccupations with class.
The 'local' films of any country, unex- planatory, unannotated, unapologetically typical of a specialised way of life, are (para- doxically) those best understood by foreign audiences ; not those that 'put across' their country (like the loud talkers on the train), but those that seem like overheard conversations, or glimpses from outside of something im- perfectly understood. Of course is is easier, and, with an eye to world markets, looks safer,to keep repeating the familiar, the reassuring, the travel-poster views: Britain all beefeaters and bowler hats; or else Britain all steel works and Calder Hall and New Towns; or else Britain all toughs and teddies; or else Britain all game old characters, jolly eccentrics peddling down Whitehall on tricycles at the age of ninety six (all of which, of course, exist but, like the Kenneth More characters, are not ubiquitous). The time may be coming (we have half-a-dozen directors capable of bringing it, and a more critical public than we used to, spoilt by the best foreign fare) when they can all be used without selfconsciousness, for what they are more than for their effect and oddity—a teddy boy as himself, not as a specimen labelled Teddy Boy; a bowler hat as a plain piece of headgear, no more exportable or comic than a nun's veil or a turban; and so on with a thousand other things, till our films manage to look as if we were talking among ourselves, not shooting sidelong glances to see how other people are taking us.
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