Fishy kettle tale… Der var engang (1922), with Neil Brand, Danish Film Institute streaming

Back to the endless database of digitalised Danish film for this comic fairy tale from Carl Theodor Dreyer which owes a little to early Lubitsch perhaps but is no surprise after the Dane’s earlier film, the magically real Parsons Widow (1920). If Der var engang (Once Upon a Time) does not match up to the almost perfectly executed Prästänkan, that’s partly because it is a more overt fantasy and because significant sections are still missing even from this 2002 restoration.

 

Around half of the film is lost but here the title cards have been restored and sense is made using stills from the film and additional intertitles. The main source for the intertitles was a title list from the archives of the Swedish film censorship office and the whole piece is now sequenced well enough to still enchant especially with the aid of Neil Brand’s expert score which smooths over the missing segments and the odd uncompleted or fully rehearsed moment.

 

Based on Holger Drachmann's 1883 play, itself drawing from Hans Christian Andersen's Svinedrengen (The Swineherd) and William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, it’s a fable about a Prince and a Princess who need to find the level of their love, one too much a stranger to her real self, confounded by the comforts of her position and lost in her privilege. Yes, indeed, this is very much another Play for Today…

The King of Illyria (Peter Jerndorff)

The story revolves around the Prince of Denmark – no, not that one – and his attempts to woo the especially obstinate Princess of Illyria. Unlike his distant relative, he’s a decisive man of action who, rather more quickly than in three acts and two scenes of dithering, decides that a play’s the thing wherein to prick the conscience of the King’s daughter.  And what a “conscience” it is, certainly more absent than present.

 

I would rather marry a beggar… Be happy I am not having you hanged!

 

As the film starts, we see a succession of hopefuls competing for the hand of the Princess, played by Clara Pontoppidan, here as Clara Wieth, who enjoyed over sixty years in cinema from 1910 to 1972 and featured in Dreyer’s Leaves from the Book of Satan (1920). All of them fail miserably as, bored to tears she dismisses their attempts to entertain and attract; even the rather camp chap who dances. Then it’s the Prince of Denmark’s turn and with handsome Svend Methling in the role surely, she’s going to be impressed but far from it, he only angers his would-be fiancé and the look on the long face of his loyal retainer, Kasper Smokehat (Røghat in Danish, played by Hakon Ahnfelt-Rønne) says it all…

Smokehat and the Prince

The Princess is not for turning and so it’s time for Denmark to go sulk in the woods with his horse. He is greeted by a mystical peddler – or some-such – who offers him a copper kettle that will show him how to “capture happiness” … With magic on his side our brave hero returns with well-trimmed facial hair to try and capture the hardest heart in all of Illyria.

 

The film looks delicious throughout and no more so than the scenes that follow with the Princess and her ladies in waiting frolicking around the well-topiarised royal gardens. They’re a vision of coordinated fashion and expression setting the Princess in a completely different light; warm and summer freed as compared with glacial palatial. She’s intrigued by the handsome new woodsman with his distracting rattle… and then must have his special kettle even if it means exchanging a kiss…

 

Oh well, it is my duty as Princess to support art…

The Princess is on the right (Clara Pontoppidan)

The Princess decides that the rattle is irresistible as indeed maybe the woodsman and make the exchange… but, as Lady Booby said to Joseph Andrews, “kissing is as a prologue to a play” and before long the kettle is irresistible too even as the second kiss is only rewarded with an image of the Princess’ “true love”, the Prince of Denmark she currently loathes. No such disdain for the woodsman though and, away from prying eyes, he is allowed into the royal rooms… as the dealing moves from hearth to heart.

 

But this Prince has a bigger plan - an elaborate "play" - and sailing through the mists comes a boat carrying his emissaries, a knight who asks if the Princess has reconsidered Denmark’s offer. She has not… but meanwhile the noble Smokehat comes to the King disguised as a knight and not only reveals the Princess’ embarrassment but threatens to order Denmark’s gathering soldiers to attack unless “…the Princess be exiled along with the rogue she prefers!”

 

The Prince in disguise with a magic rattle...

Now, it’s all a bit of a long game, but the King feels he has no option and the Princess is sent to live with the woodsman in a humble cottage whilst he maintains the deception of not being a royal. No interviews with Oprah though, just pot making and the attempt to bring his love down to ground. She’s not the only one who needs lessons in humility as they see the Prince’s own men abusing the poor folk, hanging poachers and other wrong doers.

 

It’s a fairy tale and so you may decide that you know what’s going to happen, it could be Grimm or it could be Disney but either way it’s a trajectory that doesn’t disappoint. This is not the best of Dreyer – it’s hard to tell given the missing footage – but it has its moments and is wonderfully bought to life by the restoration and Neil Brand’s playing which leads our emotional imagination through the stills and title cards that complete the picture.

 

The film can be viewed on the Danish Film Institute site and with those engaging leads, stunning cinematography, Neil’s score and the humorous balance of Smokehat, it is yet another Danish delight.

Yes, your majesty. Two kisses...

Wynne’s World… I Start Counting (1970), BFI Flipside Dual Format out on 19th April

 

I Start Counting was a really good piece of work. … David Greene was a director who could focus so much on the drama of the piece, so you don’t get so hung up in period… but it is of its period. Jenny Agutter

 

I must confess that like an American obituarist who knew Emmy-winning director David Greene more for his esteemed TV work, I also expected I Start Counting to be something of a violence-heavy “slasher flick” but it is defies this lazy labelling. Based on Audrey Erskine Lindop’s novel from 1966, it is more Angela Carter than Get Carter, for, as the BFI’s Dr Josephine Botting explains in her excellent essay in the booklet, Greene took the interiority of Lindop’s story and translated it on screen via the extraordinary talents of Jenny Agutter.

 

The actress was just 16 at the time but wise beyond her years in portraying the 14-year-old Wynne Kinch who, almost ever-present, binds together a narrative based on her emotional state. We see the world through her eyes and it’s as close as you get to an internal narrative rendered through facial expression alone. There are no words, just what we read from Wynne’s lived and dreamed experience.

Jenny Agutter

 

This film is one of early-Agutter’s best and you can well understand why, as she says in the twenty-minute interview about the film included in the extras, it’s one she remains fond of. Not many of us can say the same about our 16-year-old output. This film was immediately followed by The Railway Children and then Walkabout but Agutter had been acting since 1964 and her experience shows. Close-up after close-up shows us the story through her eyes and we are left to pick up external cues that may or may not be exaggerated by her point of view.

 

The characters are drawn partially as an extension of Wynne’s perceptions. Is her adopted brother Len (Gregory Phillips) anything more than a weirdly obnoxious, drug-dabbling teen who just happens to be obsessed with the recent spate of murdered girls? There’s a great cameo from a young Michael Feast as Jim his slightly wasted drug buddy who turns up for dinner looking like he’s over-indulged on the Moroccan.

 

Then there’s older stepbrother George (Bryan Marshall) who is both an authority figure and Wynne’s crush; both alluring and unknowable for her as she perches at the top of the stairs to simply watch him get changed, the sexual subtext overridden by her desire simply to be with him. Can it be that the blood on the pullover she knitted for him means something far darker than her worst nightmare? In Wynnes world everything associated with her is an extension of her anxieties and preoccupations; she is learning how to exert a more adult perception on things that happen without and not within her.

 

Seventies breakfast

Mother, played by the eternally suffering Madge Ryan, holds the family together, ever serving, whilst Granddad (Billy Russell) is most usually seen cradling a mouse; to varying degrees both are seen out of the corner of Wynne’s adolescent eye; taken for granted but loved.

 

Whilst she longs to move forward and embrace a romantic future with George, Wynne cannot stop herself revisiting the past in the form of their old house, a ramshackle cottage on the edge of the woods, home to childhood comforts and a dark secret. The film was shot at Bray Studios in Berkshire and on location around Bracknell, one of the early “New Towns” and which features the octagonal tower block where the family have been relocated after their former home was compulsorily purchased. According to Dr Botting this is Point Royal in Bracknell, which is now Grade II listed as ‘one of the most distinctive architectural features in any of the English new towns’.

 

I remember the discussions as a child when my grandparents’ neighbours were moved from Victorian terraces in Liverpool to Everton Valley tower blocks. No one seemed happy about this at the time and, indeed, many of those blocks were gone within a generation.

 

Stevenage, Runcorn, Harlow? Nah, Bracknell.

The set design from Brian Eatwell is eye-catching with so much white in the family’s apartment, all pure and new in contrast to the earthiness and menace of their old house. This is a film about personal and social change and, lest we forget, about sexual development and the men who take an unhealthy interest.

 

Wynne and her best friend Corinne (Clare Sutcliffe) talk about sex a lot, pretending to know more than they do and to have done more than they have done; Corinne shouts jealously after Wynne that’s she’s “done it” seven times as her friend goes off on a supposed date. The bus conductor – Simon Ward in his first film – looks on with concern and, at one point tells Wynne that her dress is too short. The world was changing.

 

Back to the old house...

Charles Lloyd-Pack has a marvellous cameo as a priest talking at the girls’ school about sex education only to be faced with questions he’d really rather not answer. There’s an appearance by one Phil Collins as an uncredited ice-cream vendor – one day mate, one day… whilst Lally Bowers causes a brief stir as Aunt Rene at a family get together. The great Fay Compton, who made her first film in 1914, appears as Mrs Bennett, the family’s old neighbour for whom George is supposed to be putting up shelves.

 

Wynne discovers this deception and finds out that George has been seeing an older woman called Leonie (Lana Morris) … in her mind this all connects to his disposal of the bloodied jumper and she becomes ever more convinced that he is guilty of the murders and she is the only one who can save him…

 

It’s an atmospheric film that enjoys a sparkling score from Basil Kirchin with upbeat sunshine pop like the theme tune – sung by Lindsey Moore – mixed with some folk horror lines that wouldn’t be out of place in the bucolic Arcadia. At family breakfast we also have the pop of the day introduced by DJ Stuart Henry who’d moved on to FAB 208, Radio Luxembourg, in my day.

 

Jenny and Bryan Marshall

David Greene’s direction maintains a very disciplined focus on Wynne’s view and also doesn’t linger too long on the horror aspects thereby avoiding the above “slasher flick” epithet with ease and crafting something a lot more interesting to watch and something his lead actor is more than capable of sustaining.

 

Apart from the excellent booklet, with essays on Greene, Agutter and the now late Claire Sutcliffe from Jon Dear, there’s the usual wealth of BFI extras on the disc including:

 

Chris O’Neill’ video essay on the film Loss of Innocence.

 

Worlds within Worlds: The Musical Mindscapes of Basil Kirchin: an interview by Vic Pratt with Jonny Trunk, founder of cult label Trunk Records about the life and audio art of his friend Basil Kirchin, composer of the I Start Counting! soundtrack.

 

An Apprentice with a Master’s Ticket: Richard Harris on Writing for the Screen: the award-winning screenwriter looks back across the decades as he reflects upon his career, from The Saint and The Avengers to A Touch of Frost.

 

I Start Building – a series of short films from the BFI National Archive reflect the blissful thinking embedded at the heart of the New Town dream.

 

Danger on Dartmoor (1980), a Children’s Film Foundation complement to the main feature directed by David Eady, featuring a young girl and her friends contending with a dangerous villain on the prowl and a ramshackle old house. Includes Patricia Hayes, Barry Foster and Sam Kydd!

 

So, what are you waiting for? Head straight to the BFI online shop and place your order; you will not be disappointed. Another superb addition to the Flipside catalogue: films of their period but infused with timeless British quirk, strangeness and charm.

Clare Sutcliffe has a smoke

Fay Compton!

Confession

All mod cons...

The girls buy an ice cream from Phil Collins!

Lower right is a copy of The Pretty Things SF Sorrow, in this condition it would be worth £1000s now...