Unfinished empathy? Queen Kelly (1929), BFI with Neil Brand and Pamela Hutchinson

 

A work of barbaric splendour…

LA Times

 

Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum and I don’t just mean Ed Sheeran here. There was a bleak strand of early twentieth century art that contended not just with unprecedented global tragedy but also the loss of faith in Gods and governments: godlessness is next to heartlessness and so it goes. As ever you could escape to fantasy but there were some pointing straight into the heart of darkness even as they did so. This was not so much Victorian gothic as post-war-punk with stories showing that the sun will, in all probability, not come out tomorrow as things brewed in what proved to be merely the long halftime between wars to end all wars.

 

As Pamela Hutchinson suggested in her excellent introduction, Queen Kelly was possibly part of one of these strands, the theatre of the cruelty, certainly in style if not deliberate intent. Erich von Stroheim was developing his cinema whilst, at the same time as in Europe, Antonin Artaud was evolving his Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté. Here Artaud detailed the aims of evoking a visceral reaction from his audience by means of presenting a wordless humiliation for his characters. Empathy would be our weakness as we engage with the basest levels of humanity through the look of degradation. Or, to put it another way, be repulsed by Tully Marshall’s gurning face as the revolting Jan Vryheid, as he licks his lips in anticipation of marrying Gloria Swanson’s help-less Patricia “Kitty” Kelly with whom we couldn’t sympathise more.

 

After a failed romance with a very handsome prince, Kitty is called to Poto-Poto, an area of a town in Tanzania, to visit her dying aunt. Now, such contact, normally signals an unexpected windfall, but this is not Hollywood as we know it, it’s Von’s version and Kitty’s aunt has summoned her with the strangest notion that she should marry her nightmarish protector and Tully surely never worked so hard to be so thoroughly unlovely. Kitty has not just loved and lost, she has been physically abused and driven to the point of attempted suicide. Now, after hope is offered, it is not just pulled away but replaced with a Tully worse than death. Cruel and absurd.

 

How did Kitty end up so far away from the good grace with which she started the film and her promising love match…? Queen Kelly is a confounding film in every respect and so much so that it is not surprising that it was never properly finished let alone released: it was too much for its star and its producer not to mention the looming approbation of the all to easily offended Will H. Hays. Had he had to pass the film after the introduction of the 1934 code he couldn’t as he surely would have fainted in the first few minutes of screentime for an over-exposed Seena Owen as mad Queen Regina V.

 

 

The full story of this film is well beyond the terms of reference established by the “editorial board” of this blog – partially-informed hot-takes won’t cut it and it is also such a complex and un-historied part of cinema history that you’d need a whole book and a mass of library time to do it justice. Luckily esteemed film writer, historian and programmer Pamela Hutchinson has provided just that and it is a page-turning joy with eye-popping revelations that connect three most interesting characters in ways that haven’t been done before. On the Writers on Film podcast, Pamela says that there’s a Netflix biopic of Joe Kennedy due which start in the early thirties. Well, they really ought to revisit the script as this book would itself make a great film. Hollywood has never been that great about filming itself but maybe it’s been short on real stories? Here’s one!

 

 

Pamela was on hand to introduce the film and to explain how her painstaking research was similar to that informing the team from Milestone, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller: Swanson’s extensive archive including von Stroheim’s original script as well as a surprising amount of materials retained (given their general business practice of the time) by Joe Kennedy. A 4k restoration has been produced and was premiered last year in Venice, some parts are still missing – not everything was filmed for a start – and so there are new intertitles and gaps filled by recycling footage and stills which gives the flavour of the full film which now runs at an hour and three quarters. The Great Footage Fetishist (a marvellous pun from Von Stroheim’s nemesis, Irving Thalberg) would have had it at three times that length but you can’t always get what you want Erich… as you well knew by this point. And yet, still you tried…

Gloria Swanson and Walter Byron at the peak of Kiity and the Prince's romance

 

Reviewing the films of Erich or “Von” as he was abbreviated by close friends and enemies, you encounter the rich irony of a man who claimed to be of Austrian noble/military background (opinions vary) and yet who wanted to capture reality on screen like no other. Watching Greed, you feel the lunatic urge to acquire money tipped over the edge until it dooms the main characters in that classic ending. Blind Husbands (1919) in which he starred showed again the unlimited cruelty of humanity whilst Merry-go-Round, a film he was unable to complete due to Thalberg sacking him, still carries his mark as all manner of cruel horrors are inflicted on poor Mary Philbin’s character.

 

That Swanson chose Von for this project showed she wanted his skills if not his budgetary control. She had just had a hit with the then almost unfilmable Sadie Thompson – a story of prostitution which other studios tried to stop for tactical reason* but which allowed her to play a more mature role. It was a success and it’s hard to believe she was still just 28, somewhere between Sadie Sink and Sydney Sweeney in today’s money but a star in ways that have no contemporary equivalent.

 

Kitty is a nun as the film opens, an innocent but playful novice in the mid-European country of Kronberg which is of no fixed period as per the conventions of the time. It is ruled over by the mad Queen Regina V – is there any other kind? – who seethes with clothes-less rage in her boudoir with only her pet do for coverage. She may be the boss but she cannot quite control her intended consort, Prince Wolfram (handsome Leicester-born Walter Byron) who spends his time acting like a bachelor rather than a fiancé.

 

Seena Owen: nothing says "mad Queen" so much as a cat in the bath...

He does at least take his military duties seriously and out leading his troop across the country roads he encounters Kitty who catches his eye when her bloomers fall down. I’m no expert but I wasn’t sure that nuns ever wore bloomers but in Kronberg apparently they do and the results lead to Wolfram putting them in his saddle bag – the sure way to any girl’s heart. It’s a funny sequence and shows how Von was adept at the sweet as well as the sour: military progress halted by the stirrings of the heart. We know he’s setting us up for a fall but the higher fly the hearts of the Prince and his increasingly lapsing nun, the harder they will fall.

 

So, it proves as, after finally finding her clothes, Regina V starts making arrangements, moving the date of her marriage forwards and otherwise closing down Wolfram’s room to manoeuvre. Everything comes to a head with the most sadistic twist as she chases Kitty away with her whip, spittle flying from her face of fury as she shows no mercy. The movements of the film are slow but symphonically structured so that when such twists occur the audience is dragged down with them.

 

Most of the existing film is set in Kronberg and there is proportionately less in Africa partly because Swanson, having realised that her character’s taking over management of her aunt’s “hotel” actually meant brothel and this was so well presented as such by Von that she called him a madman and asked Joe Kennedy to fire him. On budget alone this was justified as with only less than half the film completed – it was supposed to run to five hours – Von was already overbudget for the whole thing.

Here's Tully!!

The new Milestone Film’s “reimagining” improves on their previous efforts with the inclusion of some new materials and new title cards based on Von’s scripts. We see enough of Poto-Poto to really feel Kitty’s fall to the ultimate depths in no small part due to Tully Marshall’s exuberant evil. It is at this point that we’re almost without hope, we are in the Cruelty sweet spot exactly as Von intended and that is the biggest compliment you can pay to the work of Milestones’ Doros and Heller. They also bring out the full flavour of what is an extraordinary and powerful performance from Swanson and the role she fought so hard to see preserved in some way. It’s here Gloria.

 

Neil Brand, so steeped in the musical language of Hollywood composition, was the perfect accompaniment to the grand statement in its need for an emotional anchor as well as expression. How do you add flavour to the intensity on show, how do you not over-play when the going gets Tully and when The Faces are so loud and expressive? Neil knows and this was a masterclass of composed improvisation and quicksilver composition supporting and glorying in Swanson!

 

I want to watch it all over again.

 

*The Curse of Queen Kelly, Pamela Hutchinson Sticking Place Books (2026)

 

You can order the book direct from the publishers here where you’ll also find more information and wonderful reviews, it is sincerely one of the best books on film of recent years.

 

Von directed some very relaxed performances too!

NB These screen grabs are from the new trailer for the restoration which give some idea of how good the results now look! 

Here we gather... Nuts in May (1976), BFI Blu-ray Out Now

 

In my office, packed floor to ceiling with home media – digital, analogue, paper, plastic and vinyl – it’s easy to forget the time when we assigned value to film and television based on a single viewing and memory alone. I was a teenager when Nuts in May was broadcast in 1976 and it not only stayed in my mind but it became a shared memory with my partner, similarly, raised on a diet of Play for Today although not so much of the ITV in her case.

In the 2021 BFI Q&A in the extras the cast recall the in-joke created by Roger Sloman’s character, Keith asking “our larder isn't sticking in you is it?” when a rain-sodden Ray clambers into the back of his Morris Minor. It’s such a daft line – for many reasons – but to this day is repeated by cast and crew whenever they meet. In the same way, I am Keith to my wife’s Candice-Marie, on holiday or on walks when I’m stating the obvious or being boringly precise about unimportant subjects.

Mike Leigh’s film was made on a rain-soaked shoestring in 1975 but it has remained in our minds and collective consciousness ever since: perhaps because of the freshness of performances and the enduring relevance of this most “suburban” of rural dramas – one of the extras is Basil Wright’s documentary The Country Comes to Town (1933) and Nuts is certainly the Town come to the Country and a small camping site that represents the clash between class and culture, freedom and licence and McCartney’s Wings versus homegrown folk songs about going to the zoo.

Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman

It’s interesting to hear Leigh talk about the characters as being something created by the actors and not so much his scripting and it’s clear that his actors prepared thoroughly for their roles by thinking themselves into these characters and then reacting to the situations the loose script put them in. Husband and wife team Sheila Kelley and Stephen Bill who played biker couple as Honky and Finger, travelled down to the filming location in Dorset on a motorbike completely in character although I’m not sure if she was wearing the platform boots seen in the film.

Alison Steadman, who ties with Nigel Hawthorne on nine Plays for Today and is still ubiquitous on our telly’s, and Roger Sloman (surprisingly only three PfTs) create a couple of well-intentioned monsters in Candice-Marie and Keith – both as memorable as Say Beverley in Leigh’s Annabel’s Party (1977) in terms of their being within a gnat’s whisker of believability. The couple are socially conscious, vegetarians and adherents to The Country Code and yet they are not tolerant of people who either do not share their values or are just not aware. In this space is Ray, played with diffident precision by Anthony O'Donnell – another class act with a long career – who just wants to be left alone but who is pulled into the disapproving gravitational whirl of the couple’s dissatisfactions (with each other as well as everyone else).

Ray is a student PE Teacher who is also studying geology and who likes processed milk and “Diddy” David Hamilton’s Radio One show (on which we hear Wing’s Magneto and Titanium Man, a mid-period dip…). Spurred on by Candice-Marie, Keith asks him to turn the transistor down only to have to move their tent when their noisy neighbour ignores him. It’s a foretaste of what’s to come when Honky and Finger arrive but in the meantime the couple form an uneasy truce with Ray, Candice-Marie especially being interested in reaching out much to Keith’s jealous disapproval.

Wings' Titanium Man or The Zoo Song? Your choice...

There’s enough between Candice-Marie and Keith to fill out a marriage counsellor’s big notebook and they are a couple held together by the strangest of power dynamics as well as their self-impose rules. After jealously attempting to intimidate Ray for his choice of syllabus (I know!), Keith has to back down after Candice-Marie says she doesn’t want to go on any further trips with him – it’s the unsubtle blackmail of children and both are undoubtedly immature but hey, let he who is without sin cast the first stick on the bonfire…

Keith takes his wife on a coastal walk – five miles he estimates, before revealing it was 14 after they return. His organised in a disorganised way wanting to take three sets of footwear for a walk involving a clamber, seaside pebbles and Corfe Castle, C-M resists and is glad of it after the rain soaks his plimsoles… their relationship is full of micro-aggressions and petty sniping but they can, at least come together for the formal duties of singing together, he on banjo, she on guitar. The songs featured were written by the actors in character.

The delicate balance is disturbed by the arrival of the very urban Honky and Finger on their motorbike - a couple who just don’t know the “code” that Keith has in his head nor the rules of the campsite. They’re loud but not unreasonable but when Finger wants to start a fire on the campsite, Keith cracks and a confrontation is unavoidable. It is a visceral moment and sympathies are balanced as we can recognise the pressures on both couples of an ungoverned situation that throws them together in ways for which they are not prepared: the reality of the class divide.

And they say culture war is new and that “Woke” – that word really meaning to other – is a “mind virus” of modern design. Imagine Nigel and Kemi pitching their tents next to yours in a wet and sodden west country camping site… shudder.

Stephen Bill, Anothony O'Donnell and Sheila Kelly

There’s a must-have limited edition which includes an illustrated booklet with essays on the film by Mike Leigh, John Wyver and Dr Adam Scovell and writing on the archive films by Ellen Cheshire and Vic Pratt. It may help you decide on whether you’re Team Keith or Team Candice Marie but, as with all things as magically real as Leigh’s work, these rich characters are not all bad and they’re not all good. As he always says, there is no “they” in his work, only us…

 

Special town and country features:

Newly restored by the BBC in 4K and presented in High Definition

Archive commentary by Mike Leigh (2009)

Mike Leigh Remembers… Nuts in May (2026, 14 mins): the director looks back on one of his most influential television plays

Director and Cast Q&A (2021, audio, 43 mins): Mike Leigh, Alison Steadman, Roger Sloman, Anthony O’Donnell, Sheila Kelley and Stephen Bill are reunited on stage at BFI Southbank

BFI London Film Festival 2024 Screen Talk: Mike Leigh (2024, 48 mins): celebrating the 2024 release of his film Hard Truths, Leigh discusses his career with writer and journalist Amy Raphael

The Country Comes to Town (1933, 21 mins): a documentary made to help modernise the image of farming and the British countryside

Spring Comes to England (1934, 16 mins): documentary on the journey produce makes from field to market – including Candice Marie’s favourite, mushrooms

Winter on the Farm (1941, 15 mins): a public information film on Upton Manor Farm in Dorset

The Chiffy Kids: Pot Luck (1976, 19 mins): the Children’s Film Foundation favourites take a holiday under canvas

Play Safe: Camping and Fishing (1978, 2 mins): a safety awareness film showing the dangers lurking in the countryside

You can/must order Nuts in May direct from the BFI from 17^th August and come rain or shine it’s perfect viewing for all of us who wonder why the neighbours are so noisy and the World doesn’t do as it’s told.

There’s a fabulous moment in the BFI Q&A when Alison and Roger click right back into character as if the half-century between had been a lunchbreak, and then lead the audience in a sing-along of the Zoo song. Ultimately this work binds us together with its vitality and memory of a shared entertainment. That’s priceless.

Alison Steadman and Anthony O'Donnel say "Big cheese!"

Midnight at the oasis… On the Beach (1959), BFI Blu-ray out 27th July!

 

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river…

 

TS Eliot, The Hollow Man (1925)

 

In 1959 the Doomsday Clock, established in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to symbolize the threat of nuclear war, stood at seven minutes to midnight. In 2026 it is just 85 seconds… the closest ever. So, any attempt to review this film as a “period piece” is undermined by proliferation and the persistent threat of global conflict involving weapons of mass destruction.

 

 

I hadn't previously seen On the Beach, it sounds like an upbeat Cliff Richard musical with that title, but this is a Stanley Kramer film and it could well be one of the most sobering ever made as the remnants of humanity await the drift of the nuclear radiation down south to Australia. Yet, even in the face of almost certain doom, there are new tales to tell and moments of humanity, and warmth. It’s no longer that hard to place ourselves in the mindset of 1959 when the Cold War was in full freeze and nuclear stockpiles were already big enough for mutually assured destruction. Growing up through the end of the Cold War we had every expectation that The Bomb would slowly be defused… but there you go.

 

Directed by Kramer, sandwiched between The Defiant Ones (1958) and Inherit the Wind (1960) this is another in his string of films addressing topics Hollywood normally avoids. Adapted by John Paxton from the novel of the same name by Australian writer Nevil Shute, it is an unflinchingly clear view of what course human history could take just over a decade after the World war which followed on from the War to End All Wars two decades before. It wasn’t such an unreasoned expectation that conflicts were inevitable even if the costs were to be so great and so universally unavoidable. We never learn.

Gregory Peck

It begins on a submarine, an illusion of safety among the routine, under the auspices of Commander Dwight Lionel Towers played by Gregory Peck, whose Mount Rushmore visage of wisdom and pained humanity opens in concerned close up, scanning the seas for signs of life. They are heading south to Melbourne, the last survivors of the US Navy which, like most of the planet has fallen under a hail of nuclear weapons in a conflagration that is not explained but which is still ongoing. The radiation of the war is mostly in the Northern hemisphere but it is slowly being carried towards them… some months away.

 

The film gives us a scenario of slight hope with the submarine being sent north to investigate the distribution of the radiation cloud, which according to the theory, may be dispersing more quickly than at first thought leaving the possibility of inhabitable land. At the same time, a series of morse code signals are received from San Diego… is it possible that another group has managed to survive?

 

In Melbourne though, life continues almost as normal with the only real difference being the lack of gasoline and the city full of cyclists, electric trams and horses. One of the local naval officers, Lieutenant Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins) is assigned to the Americans. He’s a family man whose wife Mary (Donna Anderson) is in denial about their limited future and who can blame her with a small child to protect.

 

Melbourne after the fall

As Towers arrives he is met at the station by Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner) who instantly catches his eye – as Ava Gardner is apt to do… - although he is living as a man whose wife and children are somehow still alive back in America. There’s also a British scientist, Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire) who drinks too much mourning his involvement in the nuclear programme and knowing exactly what is coming. Both Gardner and Astaire are magnificent and give quite possibly some of their finest performances in the mid/late careers, freed of the lightness of much of the material they had to work with in this time. Both also have important roles to play in showing that there is new life and new love even in the direst of circumstances as Julian rebuilds a Ferrari racing car, winning a race that whilst it has a few too many crashes to be anything other than “a ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines…”, does allow him one last hurrah. Peck is excellent of course as convincing as ever as a man of duty and dignity who will follow his course no matter what the personal cost.

 

He and Ava get to bring new romance to the final laps of humanity as Moira and Towers get close as the reality of his situation finally sets him free. But, for how long. The local authorities have dispensed suicide pills to be used when the options are a slow death by radiation or nothing… Peter and Mary have the hardest journey to take with their child, once the future now requiring a desperate choice. Perkins is at his most sympathetic and young Donna Anderson acquits herself well.

 

As the congregation outside the church starts to dimmish with the coming of the summer winds, the banner reads that “there is still time Brother…”

 

Fred Astaire, Donna Anderson and Anthony Perkins watch a yacht race on the beach

Scott Harrison, in one of two new commentaries, points out the title is taken the verse at the top from TS Elliott’s poem The Hollow Man. These beach is terminal* which presents a desolate landscape and a state of moral destitution “it is not about hope or optimism but about when we chose to give in to the inevitable and how we chose to live under a death sentence. It may even – as the book – be about suicide. Most of all though, it is a warning and one that stands to this day.

 

We still have this capacity to destroy whilst at the same time are plunging the planet into a slow hot death with fossil fuels… this is the science fiction of probabilities, a warning we have still to head and the circumstances of which have only worsened over this new century. In this respect, we are all Mary…

 

 

Anthony and Donna

Special features:

 

Presented in High Definition

Audio commentary written by Dr Philip Davey, author of When Hollywood Came to Melbourne

Newly commissioned audio commentary by Scott Harrison

Making On the Beach (1959, 9 mins): rare 8mm footage shot by amateur filmmaker Richard Goslin

Interview with Donna Anderson (2015, 19 mins): the actor discusses her time working with the cast and crew of On the Beach

Kim Newman on Apocalypse Cinema (2022, 22 mins): the film critic deconstructs On the Beach and discusses the socio-political environment in which the film emerged

Clothes to Die For: The Costumes of Ava Gardner (2022, 16 mins): costume historian Elissa Rose explores Ava Gardner’s impressive wardrobe in the film

A Tribute to Stanley Kramer (2004, 14 mins): a celebration of Stanley Kramer’s life and career, featuring interviews with screenwriter Abby Mann and Karen Sharpe, Kramer’s widow

Operation Hurricane (1952, 33 mins): after the first Soviet atomic weapon was detonated in 1949, the British accelerated the development of their own nuclear deterrent. This haunting film documents the first atom bomb test on the Monte Bello Islands

Original theatrical trailer and galleries

 

Fred on form

For the first pressing only there’s also an illustrated booklet featuring new essays by Dr Christina Brennan and Barry Forshaw and a biography of Stanley Kramer by Jennifer Frost. Also includes writing on Operation Hurricane by the BFI’s Vic Pratt, notes on the special features and film credits

 

In his commentary Scott Harrison reads out the most pertinent and the most well-known closing section of Eliot’s poem, which aptly describes the fate of these last few survivors. At the time one of the reviews has noted that perhaps On the Beach could be the film that “saves the World” … well, it’s getting its second chance now thanks to this excellent release.

 

 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

TS Eliot, The Hollow Man (1925)

 

You can order direct from the BFI Shop in person or online and from all good retailers of home cinema. Poignant, terrifying and sobering.

 

 

*JG Ballard’s Terminal Beach (1964), a short story based on a man’s physical and mental deterioration on a nuclear testing site, may or may not have been inspired by this film. There was something in the air and the World came very close with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962… ever closer to midnight.

The past is another country. Daniel Farson’s Guide to Britain Volume 1, BFI Blu-ray

 

Liverpool, to my mind the strangest of all the cities of the North, not the nicest – hardly a word one can apply to Liverpool, hard drinking, hard living, hard fighting, violent, friendly and fiercely alive… if one had to sum up the so-called Liverpool sound in one word… I chose the word vitality.

 

This BFI Blu-ray collects together over a dozen documentary films from the remarkable Daniel Farson, who after joining Associated-Rediffusion, the first British commercial television company, in the mid-1950s went on to take his art in directions the staid old BBC couldn’t follow even though, to this day, these programmes inform, educate and entertain.

 

For me this set is worth getting for the film Beat City (1963) alone and, of course, I would say that wouldn’t I as it’s all about the music of Liverpool and not just the obvious mop tops.  The Cavern in its pomp, a “cellarful of noise” that, as William Fowler observes, has something of the energy of other joints central to movements such as New York’s CBGB’s and, indeed, Eric’s club which emerged in 1977 across the road in Mathew Street and where a young teenage me saw Magazine, Adam and the Ants, the B52s, John Cooper Clarke, Jilted John, Ed Banger and his Nosebleeds – possibly with a young Stephen Morrisey.

 

The introductory titles feature There’s a Place by The Beatles, such a powerful song from Lennon with wistful harmonica and tight harmonies from Paul, but that’s your lot when it comes to what we now know were the definitive act of the Beat Boom. Then, after some establishing shots of Liverpool, it’s straight to the graveyard of the city’s Anglican Cathedral where Daniel Farson, sat on a bench with a local and his howling dog, tells us “… this is not a film about The Beatles but the place they came from and the people they left behind…”.

 

Down we go to the heat and passion of the old Cavern where’s a roaring start with Faron's Flamingos singing their signature tune Do You Love Me, which Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who they toured with, had the big hit with in 1963. A year earlier Decca executives had famously chosen Poole’s band over The Beatles when both auditioned… ah well. Here Faron’s band are performing live but a studio version is played over them as with most of the others featured.

 

Fifteen-year-old Chick Graham follows with Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow fronting The Coasters whose previous singer was Billy J Kramer. There’s lots of energy and Decca, eager to make up for their Mersey Mistake, signed them up soon after. Finally, we see one of Liverpool’s most established acts, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes performing I Can Tell. The band, whose former drummer was one Richard Starkey, were one of the first to play rock ‘n roll at The Cavern but, impressive though they were, failed to match the success of their sticks man.

 

Chick and the Coasters with the Cavern crowd

The energy remains but the atmosphere shifts as we see glimpses of the city behind the songs with documentary footage showing kids playing with abandoned cars, and in bombed out areas of the city at nowhere near the apex of its post war decline… There are some very interesting glimpses of a multi-ethnic city soundtracked by the Liverpool Lullaby sung folk and not Cilla-style over shots of King Billy graffiti and other reminders of the impact of the first huge wave of immigration after the Irish famine in the 1840…

 

After a trip to the alehouse to hear a couple of pub singers doing damage to Welcome to My World… we get to one of the era’s most successful groups, folk ensemble The Spinners, singing Jenny Get Your Oatcakes Done – absolute filth as Vic Pratt says in the commentary – the band were still touring until 2021 and were one of the mainstays of the British Folk boom. The MacDonald Sisters follow, Liverpool based teachers, originally from the Isle of Lewis who were the first female folk duo of note in Britain who, like the Spinners, had their own folk club.

 

We shift tone to the doo-wop stylings of The Chants, one of the earliest black groups in the UK, and featuring Eddie Amoo who was part of the trailblazing Toxteth band, the Real Thing including his younger brother Chris (my mate Nick lived next door to him just off Lark Lane). Then purer Merseybeat from the charismatic Earl Preston and the TTs and then Cy Tucker and the Friars – see what he did there? So many of these bands did the rounds in Hamburg as well as the ‘pool.

 

Gerry Marsden whose mum was very kind to my friend Irene when she bunked off school in search of George Harrison and/or a Pacemaker!

Talking of which, things reach a peak with Gerry and the Pacemakers, whom Squires thought would be the key act for the documentary, singing I Like It one of their three number ones from their first three releases – a record that lasted until Frankie Goes to Hollywood (I saw Holly Johnson playing bass for Margie Clarke at Eric’s, in the mid-80s. I wiped another tear as Gerry sings You’ll Never Walk Alone – a major song of the era and of continuing importance to Liverpool FC, through the wind and rain… and then a version of Nat King Cole’s Pretend which shows if nothing else, how hot and sweaty things got singing in those shirts, suits and ties.

 

The filmmakers had to contend with Mr Brian Epstein pushing his new act Cilla Black but they were more concerned with grabbing Gerry and the Pacemakers

 

The Blue Angel Club is our penultimate stop where Farson mentions that he met Paul and Ringo, who aren’t featured for Brian reasons, followed by a steel drum band playing at the Jacaranda Club which was owned by Pete Best’s mum if I remember correctly. As the Boys say, it’s almost criminal that this slice of Liverpool life has been so hard to see over the years and, as I said at the top, it is essential viewing for all beat fans and makes this a must-buy with all the stars!

 

Props also to Vic Pratt for mentioning Arthur Askey in talking about Liverpool’s sense of humour, sure there’s Ken Dodd and, some might say, Jimmy Tarbuck and Freddie Starr – who was hilarious live when I saw him as a kid – and who was also a Merseybeat singer and a decent actor in the intriguing Liverpool-based crime drama Violent Playground (1958), but Arthur is class and whilst my Mum disliked him intensely my Dad loved him. I thank you playmates!

 

The Vines aka The Big House: the start of many an evening in town and still serving pints to this day!

Is it wrong to be out of step? Dan Farson goes out to challenge people who hold odd views about life. Are these people just cranks or are they one step ahead of us?

 

Out of Step: Witchcraft (1957) as specialist in fringe beliefs, Mark Pilkington, comments, self-identifying as a witch today is by some margin more acceptable than back in the more ostensibly Christian 1950s. There’s a fascinating interview with Dr Margaret Murray, who was 92 at the time, a former suffragette – marching on Parliament with Emmeline Pankhurst in 1907 – later Egyptologist and anthropologist who branched out to the study of pre-Christian religions, becoming a leading authority in witchcraft which, after her time, underwent a revival in the 1960s. We see Gerald Brousseau Gardner, the Godfather of British Witchcraft and an associate of The Beast, Aleister Crowley, who put into practice much of Murray’s researched practices… Louis Wilkinson a non-believing friend of Crowley’s is last up and it’s interesting to hear a relatively dispassionate account of the Great Mage.

 

We all love a good conspiracy especially the people who run social media companies, and the next episode is full of them. Out of Step: Other Worlds Are Watching Us (1957) features footage from The Day the Earth Stood Still and was made some ten years into the UFO Age as Mark Pilkington points out in his expert Ufologist commentary. Pilkington also remarks how little has changed in the 69 years since this programme was made: “…the only thing that has changed is that UFOs now have the more serious sounding UAPs making them an appropriate topic for discussion in the United States Congress…”.

 

Daniel Farson posing a question...

The freaks are, naturally, far more interesting than those Keeping in Step but The Wedding (1958) and Stock Exchange (1958) give Farson the chance to point out the quirks of normality… which is where his observations really come into their own as “each week, Dan Farson meets a conventional point of view.” Example: “The three most exciting words in the English language are probably ‘I Love You’ and the four most expensive ‘Will You Marry Me’…” he has great fun at his subject’s expense and who could deny this cultural outsider his observations – his autobiography was entitled Never a Normal Man after all and if you popped into The Colony Rooms in the 60s you probably would have seen him with Francis Bacon but not in The French, where he was barred.

 

He's on this home turf for This Week: Soho Striptease (1958) which feels a lot sleazier than it looks as you’d expect given the restrictions of TV but even then it’s shocking. As Vic Pratt says in the commentary, the displays shown were pushing the bounds of decency as public demand drove the censor’s rules further with private membership clubs were decreed in 1957 as not subject to regulations limiting the movement of the performers. Farson was a member of the Gargoyle Club – not to see the shows but to enjoy the after-hours drinking.

 

This Week: Robert Graves (1957) is a fabulous compilation of production materials featuring Farson interviewing of one of the literary heroes of my youth, outsider, poet and writer of an essential memoir of the Great War in Good-bye to All That, I Claudius and a biography of his good friend TE Lawrence.

 

Studio setting for Mixed Marriages... no pressure.

People in Trouble: Mixed Marriages (1958) is a different matter entirely, dealing with a subject that was highly controversial at the time, coming out just before the Notting Hill race riots. James Wentworth-Day is the voice of establishment disdain who not only opposed mixed marriages but also, in an unaired episode on transvestism, voiced the opinion that all gay people should be hung. How representative of contemporary views he is worthy of additional research but here, as there, Farson does not accept his views – “I couldn’t disagree with you more but at least you do say what you really feel…” – and he lets the audience make up their own mind. People in Trouble… it’s sad then and it’s sad now and more so than one would have hoped until relatively recently.

 

I think you’ve got to give your hero worship to someone who deserves it. I’ve met a lot of the London smart set and they’re not very smart…

 

There are three Success Story shorts covering playwright Shelagh Delaney (1959) just 19 at the time and discussing her debut play, A Taste of Honey, and we see a clip featuring Murray Melvyn, Avis Bunnage and Frances Cuka, Shelagh is feisty and bats back all of the categories Farson throws at her, “angry young woman”, writer of a “sordid” play and her “overwhelming success” and so on. She’s something new, eloquent and Salford smart!  Quite a contrast to the next subject, clairvoyant and astrologer Maurice Woodruff (1959), from the sublime to the gorblimey! We start off with Mr Peter Sellars, then filming I’m Alright Jack and a regular customer of Woodruff’s… has to be seen to be believed folks!

Mr Farson in his natural environment

Finally, there’s pulp fiction author Hank Janson (1959) a pseudonym we now know was created by the English author Stephen Daniel Frances. Our Dan interviews Janson’s publisher who was sent down for obscenity and spent four months in prison for works of dubious art that he never read but were selling in their thousands. Sadly, being a “paperback writer”, his publisher says that Janson wasn’t a wealthy man although he wasn’t giving much away about the mystery of who he was. We also get to meet the books’ printer – ah the days of hot metal – who, Digital Kids, was key to the distribution of these works. Farson gets to meet the author in the Panama Club off Piccadilly but, unlike the dancers on stage, the author is overdressed to the extent to which he is wearing a mask.

 

There’s far more candour in an interview with Harry Webb from Cheshunt in Celebrity: Cliff Richard (1959). Cliff was still a teen and only a year after his genuinely classic debut hit, Move It (1958) and after featuring in the film Serious Charge (1959). He had just finished filming Expresso Bongo and comes across as pretty levelheaded and connected with Farson firing questions direct and quickly!

 

Pursuit of Happiness: People Apart (1960) is another slice of life meeting the full and part-time inhabitants of the island of Lundy a few dozen miles off the Southwest coast and a few miles long with no roads and just one hotel with bar and shop attached. Farson talks to a former TV executive who has moved there to find himself away from London and others who find the satisfaction of a simpler life in which everything you do is necessary, outweighs the inconvenience if isolation, lost friends and no broadcast news.

 

Harry from Cheshunt

Farson’s Guide to the British: Cats (1959) features a challenging discussion of the nature of our feline friends as Farson confronts the bizarre humans who find them loveable. Farson’s skills are to make even the seemingly prosaic controversial and at least a source for a good talk. There are some delightful shots of street cats in London where some 30,000 cats were being put down every year. Cats are for life not just for television.

These programmes are completely addictive and I look forward to Volume 2 in this rediscovery of this idiosyncratic tele visual journalist and the characters and sub-cultures of the time which otherwise might be drifting mistily into the past.

 

Special features

Newly remastered in 2K and presented in High Definition and Standard Definition

New audio commentaries on selected programmes by writer and publisher Mark Pilkington and the BFI’s Vic Pratt, Milo Holmes, Chantelle Boyea, Dick Fiddy, Dr Elinor Groom, Lisa Kerrigan and William Fowler

Beat City image gallery

Illustrated booklet - first pressing only - featuring new writing by the BFI’s William Fowler, Vic Pratt, Lisa Kerrigan and Milo Holmes, plus a new essay by Nic Wassell on the creation of the Associated-Rediffusion logo 

  

You can and must order your copy from the usual online sources or pop into the BFI shop now before the first pressing sells out. There is so much here that describes its time perfectly and in the slightly quirky manner of the quicksilver Daniel Farson!

A Liverpool Bobby, a colleague of my Dad's...

As a child I thought that King Billy must have run a gang out of Walton... took me years to work it out!

Going for a song... The Garden of Eden (1928), with Stephen Horne, BFI UK Restoration Premier

Film writer David Thomson has described late period silent film as a medium just bursting to express itself through talk and watching this sparkling romantic comedy you could also add the desire to laugh and sing. Lewis Milestone’s picture is bursting with virtual sound and has an irresistible rhythm that Stephen Horne accompanied quite superbly on piano, accordion, flute and sheets of paper… of which more later!

 

This was the UK restoration of the San Francisco Film Preserve 4k restoration which I had missed in last year’s Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. It’s a revelation not just in terms of wit and Lubitsch-style “coding” – thanks to scriptwriter Hans Kraly a frequent collaborator – but also in the way it allows for the showcasing of the beauty and talent of Corinne Griffith. In her introduction the BFI’s Bryony Dixon called for a show of hands for those who had heard of the actress before and a handful of us raised our hands. Many more will now have her imprinted in their minds for the next few days.

 

She has a spirit all of her own and shows plenty of emotional skills as well as comedic timing in a partnership with baby-faced Charles Ray – looking nothing like his 39 years and one bankruptcy – whose timing and grace had already served him well in a career dating back to 1911 and included Thomas Ince’s The Coward (1915) and The Busher (1919) in which he competes with one Jack (John) Gilbert for the hand of a young Colleen Moore.

 

Corinne Griffith in front of the cameras that loved her so...

Griffith was – also surprisingly – only four years younger and had been in the business since 1916 and starred in films like Black Oxen (1924) with a really young Clara Bow, as well as The Divine Lady (1929) for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. Her reputation has no doubt suffered as so many of her films are now lost, I make it 55 out of 72, but she was a major star and producer who was not only one of the most beautiful actors in Hollywood but also clearly among the most financially astute.

 

Bryony gave a fascinating insight into the actors’ relationship with men and money which culminated in her fourth divorce and an attempt to pass herself off as her own (fictional) sister to avoid paying alimony to her departing husband – points for effort but she could afford it and died a wealthy woman. A life well lived and in this context perhaps an unlikely pastry chef with operatic qualifications which is how her character Toni LeBrun begins the film.

 

It's a midnight flit as she leaves a note for her aunt and uncle and runs away from Vienna to join the “opera” having been encouraged by a letter from the Palais de Paris in Budapest… Sadly the venue is not so fine as its name suggests and is little more than a gentlemen’s dance hall with scantily clad women kicking up the dust for their leery clientele. She arrives with her opera diploma and finds the owner, a super smart Madame Bauer (Maude George – close cropped hair and plenty of "coding"…) more interested in her legs than her voice.

 

Maude George's Madame has a plan!

Toni takes things at face value though and is soon being kitted out by the wardrobe mistress Rosa (the exceptional Louise Dresser of The Goose Woman and more) in the most unoperatic of revealing costumes. She complains leaving Madame Bauer to offer her a seemingly more modest chiffon dress only for her to cue the stage lights during Toni’s performance which causes a mighty uproar amongst the sleazeballs in the stalls. Also watching is predatory nobleman Henri D'Avril (Lowell Sherman) whose boredom is swiftly transformed as Milestone’s camera pulls in to reveal the double image of the up-lit girl in his opera glasses.

 

Things get worse when the amorous aristocrat expects to have his post-theatrical meal in Toni’s company but she is too quick for him with the aid of Rosa, and, as tens to happen in an environment without employment rights and strong HR, both get fired. Rosa extends a helping hand though as she is due her annual leave and takes her new friend with her to Monte Carlo…

 

Now, if you have any remaining disbelief, I suggest you suspend it for it turns out that the humble dresser, Rosa, is, in fact a Baroness who gets just enough pension from her former husband, to live the life she used to in the expensive hotels of the Principality of Monaco and signs Toni in as her daughter, ennobling her and within a few days, adopting her as one later intertitle confirms.

Rosa reveals her nobility.

Now, as they enjoy the luxuries of the Eden Hotel – with its rather fine gardens… the story changes pace as Richard Dupont (Charles Ray), naughty but nice nephew of Colonel Dupont (Edward Martindel), a friend of Rosa’s, spies Toni and soon comes a courting. Griffith and Ray have a very smart interplay and this is a romantic screwball comedy in waiting as the two engage in a courtship based on misunderstandings, cheeky games and good old-fashioned coup de foudre with all of the hurdles to acceptance this usually implies.

 

There’s a lovely bit of business when Richard spots Toni playing the piano and singing, he peers across at this beauty who is naturally annoyed until – after she switches the light off to hide – he imitates and the two engage in something like l’amour de morse code, before the rooms on both sides of the hotel follow suit. Love, and lights, are in the air.

 

Richard is a songwriter when his duties as wealthy playboy permit, and he writes a song for Toni which as he plays to her, causes her to melt in his arms in a sure sign that their musicality is compatible. Later when his uncle decides to make his own proposal he also plays the song only for his phrasing to leave Toni cold. Yes indeed, the two youngsters seem destined to be together and the only tiny thing stopping the inevitable is the sleeping draught they both end up taking during a sequence that asks the question, how interesting is a proposal really?

Griffith and Ray make sweet music

Turns out it’s not quite the only thing though as soon, and what are the chances, Richard’s posh relatives arrive including his Uncle Henri, recently returned from Vienna… can you see where this is going?

 

The Garden of Eden is so smoothly directed by Milestone that it manages to serve the plot complications and keep the ball rolling without annoying even the modern audience. Griffith had fabulous timing and Ray is appealing in the gung-ho way of all noble, would-be songwriters who fall for women out of their class. Audiences now and then knew what to expect from this kind of film and Milestone delivers with emphatic efficiency and purpose aided by swoon-worthy design direction from William Cameron Menzies.

 

The jury of his peers, aunts and uncles...

Of course, whilst this 4k restoration looked gorgeous on screen it was greatly uplifted by Stephen Horne’s timing and invention. There’s one moment which I think may have surprised the audience when the Colonel sits down to play the song and the sheet music has been placed on the strings of the grand piano, Stephen had anticipated this and, diegetically, his playing also included paper on the piano strings. That’s experience! Sadly, the sheet music gave no clues as to what was being playing and so Stephen had to improvise the music that persuades Toni of her love just as he did the rest of the score… it’s a kind of magic. Another outstanding afternoon of live music, informed introduction and classic film at the BFI…

 

There’s more high-quality Corinne on the National Film Preservation Foundation site with a lovely restoration of her 1922 film A Virgin’s Sacrifice – you can screen it right here!

Details of the restoration of The Garden of Eden can be found on the San Francisco Film Preserve website - they also stream films from time-to-time and so it is well worth signing up for their newsletter! It is also to be hoped that they add this to the films they have released on Blu-ray through Flicker Alley such as the splendid new Louise Brooks early film collection... of which more later! But a Corinne Griffith box set would be most welcome too!