Wakes Wednesday… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 42, Day Five

Three piers, The Golden Mile, The Big Dipper, trams, a Tower to rival Paris, arcades and donkeys; even in it’s dotage Blackpool still defiantly breaks more hearts than any other UK seaside resort but, as we saw tonight, Llandudno’s subtle charms can compromise even the most careful girl. For, climbing the Great Orme, near the still-extant Victorian pier and staying at the Grand Hotel, where I worked two summer seasons as a student, Fanny Hawthorn risked her future with some posh fella on the lookout for more than fresh air and fun.

 

Maurice Elvey told the BFI in 1949 that Hindle Wakes was “the greatest play ever written” and one of the films he most enjoyed making and, in fact, he was so keen on Stanley Houghton’s play that he made it twice. This is more than just a “Lancashire film for Lancashire people” as the publicity had it, this was a liberating tale for all at a time of increasing class awareness and the growth of unions and the Labour Party. Houghton’s play was written just a year after the Liverpool general transport strike which, apart from causing Home Secretary Winston Churchill to send troops and a battle cruiser up the Mersey, did so much for union membership. My grandfather was a tram driver who withdrew his labour for the strike during which two men were shot dead and hundreds injured by the army.

 

Elvey had produced plays by Chekov, Strindberg, Ibsen and he was a trade unionist who would have identified with the play’s message of working-class independence. He also wanted naturalism in the film and both Estelle Brody and Peggy Carlisle spent time in a mill to learn how to properly look like they were doing the work and to understand the culture, Peggy was from Liverpool and would have known Blackpool well but Estelle was an American: welcome to the real Playground of the World!

 

Watching this new BFI 35mm print – a full restoration is apparently ongoing – the film stands out as one of the major works of British silent cinema because of the expertise with which Elvey controls character and the narrative. It may be a bit slow-paced for modern viewers but everything is there to serve a purpose and every character will have their moments.

 

Fanny and Mary – Peggy’s haircut is so darn sharp! – feel like modern women all the more surprising given the date of their origin, years before they could vote. The fact that Fanny feels confident enough to exert her right to independence against all odds, is one of the great feminist statements of British silent film. I love her strength and sass as she refuses to let the situation of her dalliance with Allan Jeffcote (John Stuart) and the instant respect from mill-owner Nathaniel Jeffcote (a very fine showing from Norman McKinnel) who recognises someone with drive and grit like himself. She may be a bonny lass Mr Jeffcote but she’s far too good for your Alan!

 

Similarly, Fanny’s parents are mini masterpieces of characterisation with Humberston Wright as her intelligent yet timid father and Mary Ault as her firebrand of a mother who eye’s her daughter’s transgression as an opportunity to be exploited and just will not be silenced about it, if only there was an audio recording of her improvisations! Mouth almighty as they’d say in Lanky!

John Stuart, Humberston Wright, Peggy Carlisle and Estelle Brody

The sequences in Blackpool are outstanding especially the footage of the Big Dipper – show the restoration in the BFI IMAX and there’ll be folk passing out at that.

 

It’s a film that strengthens every time I see it and given the politics of 1926-7 as well as 1912, it is simply a remarkable statement about ordinary people’s right to self-determination. Away with the old morality and guilt, time to stand up and play a bigger part.

 

The score was composed and conducted by Maud Nelissen and performed live by Daphne Balvers (soprano & alto sax), Lucio Degani (violin), Francesco Ferrarini (cello), Rombout Stoffers (percussions & accordion) as well Maud Nelissen on piano. In the catalogue she talks of how she researched locations and culture for the film, immersing herself in mill town history and the times of the annual wakes weeks when t’ whole mill shut down and the workers went off together in search of precious joy. On the evidence of this lovely, soulful score she’s now an honorary Lassie from Lancashire.

This morning there was more Harry Piel serving up top-notch entertainment with Der Mann Ohne Nerven (1924) in which der mann himself plays without fear and spends a good portion of the action attempting to rescue the beautiful damsel Aud Egede Christensen (future Mrs Piel, Dary Holm) from a runaway balloon flying high over Paris bumping into church spires and industrial chimneys. All starts with a bundle of meta-confusion with story is about a famous novelist and his new book, Der Mann Ohne Nerven which, it seems to me, suddenly takes to life as characters start to pursue the man without fear or perhaps that’s the book we’re experiencing.

 

Plot, who cares, it’s Harry’s World and we’re just watching it.

 

Mr Neil Brand accompanied as fearlessly as Harry, no safety net and with suspended chords chasing his balloonatic pursuit across the sky.

  

Jaque Catelain modelling the latest in lounge wear

More gorgeous Sonia Delaunay design next with Marcel L’Herbier’s Le Vertige (1926) (also entitled The Living Image but literally Vertigo, with elements of Hitchcock’s later film of the same title as Stephen Horne pointed out) one of his major films I’ve not seen and quite possibly one of Jaque Catelain’s best performances, as a baby-faced Ivan Mosjoukine as someone termed him. He plays two parts, a young Russian army officer who is killed by General Svirsky (Roger Karl) the horrendous husband of his lover Natacha (Emmy Lynn).

 

After the Revolution to couple relocate to Nic and taking a trip to Paris Natacha sees a young man, Henri de Cassel (Jaque Catelain again) who looks exactly like her dead lover. Stranger and stranger with some spectacular design, old jealousies are revived and history begins to repeat itself.

 

Stephen Horne supplied uncannily stylish accompaniment.

 

Eugen Klöpfer tracking Aud Egede-Nissen

I’ve also managed to avoid seeing Die Strasse (1923) another of the canon revisited stream which was a digital restoration with reconstructed titles and a mix of sources. Karl Grune’s film is indeed impressive in terms of cinematic technique as well as its pointedly political take on German life encapsulated on one street.

 

There’s a bored middle-aged man who definitely doesn’t work in the publishing industry (Eugen Klöpfer) who sets out for a walk on the wild side of his street, twirling his umbrella and feigning interest in shop windows* as he approaches the local sex workers. There’s some amusing interplay between one such woman (Aud Egede-Nissen) and this nervy punter, a dance she’s played many times before. As we later find out, she shares a house with a small child and a blind man played by the protean Max Schreck; two vulnerable people who exist in the criminal uncertainties of this low life.

 

The man finally bucks up the courage to follow the woman into a night club where his seduction and exploitation can be controlled, it’s a tense voyage into the underworld, with a dreamlike quality that doesn’t make the realities being dramatized any less pitiful.

 

Partners in crime Günter Buchwald (violin and piano) and Frank Bockius (hitting things) accompanied in fine style with so many hints of contemporary club anthems, Ain’t She Sweet being ironically right on point!

Obligatory banging on about Liverpool... 

*In one of the shop windows he passes by there’s an advert for The White Star Line including Liverpool as one of the destinations. The White Star offices still stands in Liverpool as does The White Star public house just off Mathew Street and The Cavern were fifty years after Fanny and Mary, girls went for a good time increasingly on their terms.

The wifi's decent as well...

Liverpool has some fabulous architecture.

Wake up call… Hindle Wakes (1927)

Estelle Brody

You’ll have to forgive me if sometimes I’m a little behind… as a late-converter to the on-going viability of silent film, I was probably too busy chasing down the latest Pedro Almodóvar movie (or changing nappies)  when Maurice Elvey’s Hindle Wakes was revived by the BFI in 2000.

Well, 12 years on I’ve just staged my own revival and having raved about Asquith and Hitchcock’s silent work I now have a third British silent director to rank alongside them.

John Stuart, Humberston Wright, Peggy Carlisle and Estelle Brody

Based on the controversial 1912 play by Stanley Houghton, this was Elevy’s second go after a 1918 effort which also included some of the same actors.

It’s a disarmingly frank story of sexual freedom amongst working-class Lancastrian factory workers and, most surprisingly, shows one of the girls completely in control of her choices in spite of all around trying to force her to follow social norms. These were our grand-parents and, in my case, my Nan, was so powerfully in favour of her own right to decide she went as far as to take out an injunction to prevent the kind of parental control attempted here. She wasn’t alone.

Dark and satanic

This was the period of accelerated development of the labour movement whilst the Great War had brought women to the commercial fore as they worked the men’s jobs in factories and mills… it became harder to deny their importance and their equality.

This story must still have been a shock in 1927, hard to imagine how the play went down in 1912.

The Wakes were a regular tradition in the North when the mills would close down for a week and the workers had a week-off (unpaid) to enjoy a bit of freedom.

Get your clogs off

For many in Lancashire, then as now, the glittering possibilities of Blackpool were hard to resist. With three piers, dozens of music halls and a tower to rival Paris, it remains the UK’s ultimate seaside resort… if a little brash for some tastes.

But it is here that the younger workers head for their week of “ecstasy and freedom”. There are two young mill girls, Mary Hollins (Peggy Carlisle) – with her short, sharp haircut suggestive of a more earthy nature than her considerate and cautious friend Fanny Hawthorn (Estelle Brody).

Blackpool's Pleasure Beach

They meet up with two of their social betters, Allan Jeffcote (John Stuart) the son of the mill owner, and his mate, George Ramsbottom (John Rowal). It seems George has the better chance as Mary seems all together more forward with Fanny initially refusing to hold hands.

There are some fantastic scenes of the fun to be had on The Golden Mile especially on The Big Dipper (built in 1923 and still going strong) as Elvey’s camera bravely follows the actors up, down and around in a vertiginous display. But the director doesn’t overplay the location and keeps the emphasis firmly on the characters.

I want to see the bright lights tonight...

When it comes to evening’s end Mary goes home alone, repulsing her partner’s advances on the door step and it is Fanny who falls…

The next day she confesses all to Mary and reveals that Allan is to whisk her away to Llandudno. I’ve seen some reviewers be dismissive of this jewel of the Welsh Riviera but, having lived there, I can confirm that it is a cut above most resorts in the North West with a fine Victorian front and some excellent hotels (you can just glimpse the Grand Hotel where PM Macmillan once stayed and where I worked during two university summer breaks a long time ago…). Elvey takes his crew out to Wales and it’s good to see a brief glimpse of the Great Orme (home to the oldest copper mine in Europe) and the elegant bay that stretches around to the Little Orme (see what they did there?).

Llandudno, "Queen of the Welsh Resorts"

It is indeed the kind of place a well-to-do young man might take a working class woman and hope not to be recognised…

But Fanny’s plan to have her tracks covered by a postcard posted from Blackpool goes awry with the untimely drowning of poor Mary. Her friend’s death is almost secondary though, as the full “scandal” of her week with Allan is revealed and their families become concerned about the necessary “consequences”.

Peggy Carlisle and Estelle Brody

Fanny’s mother (played with bitter decisiveness by Marie Ault) want nothing less than marriage. Old man Jeffcote (Norman McKinnel, who also played the part in Elvey’s earlier film) is similarly-minded, even though it means he cannot unify his business with that of the Mayor, Sir Timothy Farrar (Arthur Chesney) who’s daughter Allan was engaged to marry.

Mrs. Jeffcote (Irene Rooke) has an altogether more pragmatic take and doesn’t see why her boy should have to marry beneath himself for this indiscretion. Whilst Fanny’s father  Chris, (Humberston Wright) – a man physically broken by a combination of his dedication to work and timidity – fears most for his daughter’s happiness. Long ago he could have taken shares in his mate’s enterprise but he was too risk averse… he doesn’t want his daughter’s life to be lived with the same compromises and the same regrets.

John Stuart and Gladys Jennings

All have different motivations and overlayed on this moral maze is the confused romance between Allan and Beatrice. It’s hard to take to Allan who, so close to his wedding, was happy enough to indulge in a week with Fanny and then, when faced with the consequences, expects to walk straight back to where he was. Beatrice (Gladys Jennings) does at least have some moral backbone, refusing to forgive Allan and insisting that he should make Fanny an honest woman.

Such sensibilities are not too difficult to relate to even over this distance. Class remains a massive issue in the UK and we still struggle with the idea that women can enjoy sexual freedom in the same way as men. Then as now the “moral” standpoints of various characters can be nothing of the kind, most are out for what they can get and are only trying to use convention to advance their own cause or to ignore the inconvenience.

Estelle Brody and John Stuart

Ultimately you side with Fanny’s father and his old friend Jeffcote: he may be a workaholic business demon but he recognises Fanny’s strength of character just as much as he despairs of his own son’s.
This is no black and white melodrama but a complex tale that defies expectations even over a century after it was written.

I’ll not give away the ending as this film deserves to be watched without preconception. The performances are exceptional especially from Norman McKinnel and Humberston Wright. But Estelle Brody gives a performance “out of its time” with naturalistic subtlety taking the plaudits: honestly, she’s far too good fer the likes o’ ‘im!

 

Elvey’s direction is inventive and sure footed with some sublime moments following the masses slowly whirling around Blackpool Tower Ballroom the spotlights playing across them as confetti falls almost in slow motion from the ceiling. The disorientation of a good night out… you can have your fun but mistakes can be made…

I watched the excellent Milestone DVD which comes with a very effective modern soundtrack from Sheffield band In the Nursery along with a more traditional piano score from Philip Carli. It's curious that this very British production is only available from the United States but they've done us proud.