Anarchy in the UK… Nasty Women: A Comic Tribute, BFI with Meg Morley

There was a guy, I’m not sure if you remember him, who once referred to his presidential rival as a “nasty woman” long ago in The Time Before. In response film historians Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak ran a programme of comedy shorts at the 2017 Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone featuring women behaving nastily for comic effect. As that festival is about to run live for the first time on two years and because female silent comedy is as funny as it is often unrecognised, the BFI decided on a re-run with a few old favourites thrown in.

In the ten years or so I’ve been stricken with this silent film bug, there has been much restoration and re-evaluation of women’s role in early film direction with Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Webber, Nell Shipman, Germaine Dulac, Dorothy Davenport Reid and, of course, Mabel Normand amongst those now getting their due. But many of the key players in global comedy still require elevation in modern discourse, these women having faced the double bind of having to battle for recognition at the time and then being overwritten by a history that has favoured the men… we know their names and yet perhaps the greatest of all was directed in his first film by Mabel.

Today we gathered just to watch women being funny in the manner they were appreciated at the time: gender-neutral daftness all perfectly illuminated by Meg Morley’s improvisational excellence and introduced by long-time champion of the comically under-rated nasty women, Bryony Dixon.

The first two films got us warmed up…

The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901) USA

Here Lies the Remains of Bridget McKeen Who Started a Fire with Kerosine

 

This brief comedy outlined the perils of using inflammatory material to start a fire with the titular hero meeting her end after causing an explosion.

 

Mary Jane’s Mishap; Or Don’t Fool with the Paraffin (1903) UK

A couple of years later and this rather more sophisticated British effort told the same tale. Directed by George Albert Smith this film has Bridget/Mary Jane played by his wife Laura Bayley, a former variety performer, who hams it up splendidly with many pleading looks right to camera, busting the fourth wall and still connecting with the disruptive soul onlooking natives.

She rests in pieces...

Léontine s’envole (1911) France

Our lessons in fire safety completed it was off to France for the enigmatic gallic anarchy of the legendary Léontine, also known as “Titine” in France and Betty” in the United States, about whom almost nothing is known. Maggie Hennefeld’s essay on the LA Review of Books¹, shows what is known about this energetic screen presence but all this is entirely based on her surviving celluloid with her life off screen a closed book. She made some 22 episodes of her comic film series for Pathé-Frères from 1910 to 1912 after which she disappears apart from being spotted as an extra in a 1916 comedy.

Here she burns bright as a brat who keeps on begging her parents for one more balloon until, inevitably, she takes off and is carried across the sandy streets of what looks like the south of France pursued by all and sundry attempting to pull her to earth. This includes three acrobats who stand on each other’s shoulders to try and catch her. Everyone falls down and the camerawork is startling, following our brave star as she gamely hangs from balloons dangling from a crane metres above the ground.

Léontine after the balloons go up

Léontine enfant terrible (1911)

I’m not surprised Léontine is so awful in this film as her parents look like creatures from a gothic fairy tale, mother complete with prosthetic nose. Their daughter strikes back and smashes all of their plates and most of the house before spreading her destruction to the outside world. She ties two workmen together so they drop their boxes, sets fireworks off and smashes a man’s head into a pumpkin. There may be a deeper meaning to all this but surely there’s nothing more purely amusing than watching someone break completely with social convention and just let rip. A fanfare for the common woman.

Léontine garde la maison (1912)

Now, there’s one thing you really don’t want to do and that’s leave this woman in charge of the house and the baby… and the dog. Léontine feels put upon and responds in the only way she can, dishes are washed and smashed, kitchens are set alight and bathrooms flooded, then she goes to play with her pal and the dog and child disappear. Advertising for her lost items she gets dozens of children and dogs in return before being told off by mother. At the end she cries only until she’s left alone to fight again.

What is she rebelling against? What have you got?

Butter wouldn't melt: Chrissie White and Alma Taylor

 

Tilly’s Party (1912)

In the Tilly series, Alma Taylor and Chrissie White play merry havoc with social norms by cheeking their way through anarchic adventures which must have made the women in the audience feel just that bit more amused than the men. Here the girls disrupt a gathering at their parent’s house, lead the angry guests on a merry chase sat on the handlebars as their boyfriends cycle away. They manage to get to their “music lesson” just in time to get away with it all.

At the height of the suffrage debate, the women’s movement was so ingrained in society and so many women went to the pictures… perhaps cinema was more subtly supportive than the government may have thought?

Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)

Not only does American actress Florence Turner prove that if the face fits anything is possible, she also demonstrates the comedic special relationship between her home country and the old country. DDD concerns the efforts of Ms Turner and her hubby to win a face-pulling competition. They’re both very adept but Florence's facial flights of fancy end up getting her arrested before she finally wins out with her extraordinarily flexible fizzog².

Flo’, this is great content for Tic-toc, bring back pro-face-pulling, there’s gold in gurning!

The Night Rider (1920) Texas Guinan

Not for nothing was Texas Guinan described as “the female William S Hart” who, as the Kennington Bioscope’s Michelle Facey ³   has said, was very much the real thing, a ranch gal from Waco, who could ride and shoot as good as any man on her father’s farm. Guinan toured as an itinerant rodeo performer before the stage (not the Deadwood one…) called. She featured in vaudeville were her pep and knack for self-promotion stood her in good stead: she once claimed to have accidentally shot herself in the side, but the show still went on, it being just a flesh wound an’ all. She was still a chorus girl in 1917 and as she rode a horse down the runway in the theatre, she was talent spotted by a movie man… probably.

Texas is as charming as she is tough and here she has to choose between two men, one of whom may be rustlin’ her cattle… as is usual, she doesn’t stand on politeness and if any man has wronged her… there ain’t no mercy! Not nasty, just assertive!

Meg Morley accompanied with thematic variety and satisfying melodic invention. No two “scores” were the same and she kept pace with the on-screen anarchy with the acuity of a seasoned jazz player, one used to working as part of an improvisational team.

A splendid afternoon on the Southbank and we drank a toast to the nasty but nice trailblazers who are being remembered anew.

 

Texas

1. Looking for Léontine: My Obsession with a Forgotten Screen Queen, Maggie Hennefeld, Los Angeles Review of Books September 24, 2019

2. Early 19th century: abbreviation of physiognomy.

3. In her introduction for the Kennington Bioscope’s screening of The Girl of the Rancho (1919), Wednesday 2^nd May 2018!

Archers take flight… One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1941), BFI Blu-ray out 4th October

 

It says so much for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - the newly minted Archers – that two of the standout performers in this war film are women. Powell had asked his partner to create meatier roles for women and Pressburger duly delivered with Pamela Brown and Googie Withers having more than enough to enable intelligent and subtle turns that showed that grim purpose and bravery were not the preserve of men.

 

And again, as the Wellington bomber flies towards its target, the Mercedes Benz factory in Stuttgart, the crew talk about the city some have known, old girlfriends, culture… propaganda this may be but not the sort that forgets the humanity of the enemy. You can understand this worrying some of the shallower brains at the War Ministry but as with the earlier 49^th Parallel, this film only has full characters even though there’s barely a speaking part for a German.

Great Godfrey

There’s also a marvellous interplay between the RAF crew and their gunner, an older soldier returned to fight the war… he shares some moments with Googie Withers that prefigure Colonel Blimp as Ian Christie points out in his thoroughly informed and entertaining commentary. This is news to me and it makes Godfrey Tearle’s performance as Sir George Corbett, rear gunner and former army officer, all the more enjoyable; so many back home, like my Granddad Bill, were too old for this war but had fought in the previous one; they had so much to give as wardens and home guard.

 

I also loved Ian’s reminiscences of bonding with Emeric over a mutual love of Arsenal, the all-conquering team of the thirties, with five championships just like Liverpool in the seventies (although we had six titles in that next decade). In terms of consecutive triumphs though, this film is part of an unparalleled run from Powell and Pressburger and even on a shoestring budget and with a tight brief from the powers that be, they make a film that still bears repeat viewings and which delights every time.

 

The film starts with a note about the execution of five Dutch men for aiding and abetting the escape of a British aircrew and, whilst as Christie points out, such adventures were far from common at the time, they were to become more frequent as the war went on. Sponsored by the Netherlands Government in London, the aim of the film was to show the Dutch resistance to German occupation and to send a message to domestic viewers that Europe was still fighting.

Bertie makes his way

The action starts in the most eerie way as an RAF Vickers Wellington bomber, glides across the channel, not a soul on board, before crashing into an electricity pylon. The bomber is identified as B for Bertie and one of the RAF men on watch is played by Michael Powell himself, a rare appearance but he looks just the part.

 

We’re then taken back and introduced to the cast one by one as they check equipment before take-off, before moving back fifteen hours before the crash landing as the lads share some banter over breakfast. Eric Portman is able to use his native Yorkshire accent as Tom Earnshaw, second pilot, as he reviews two agricultural calendars sent as gifts. Next to him is Hugh Burden as John Glyn Haggard, pilot of B for Bertie and Hugh Williams as Frank Shelley, a former actor now turned observer/navigator. Near them footballer Bob Ashley (Emrys Jones) turned wireless operator listens to radio commentary alongside front gunner Geoff Hickman (Bernard Miles) with the old man of the outfit, Sir George completing the set.

 

Soon they’re off to Stuttgart reminiscing about the place before being caught by anti-aircraft fire after the bombs had been dropped on target. Ian Christie points out another disconnection with actuality with the Wellington lacking much of a guiding system, many raids ended up off target. Not that that was the story anyone wanted to hear in 1941.

Spot the aircrew...

The crew abandon ship as both engines fail and as they sail to earth one re-starts and is enough to carry Bertie all the way home to that pylon, but it’s too late to turn back and their adventure is now really to begin. On land, the crew are naturally unsure of how to proceed and the only one with any experience of this kind of combat is Sir George who gently assumes the role of leadership. He is a professional soldier and all the others are conscripts and he is there because he knows the risks and wants to take them.

 

The crew meet some children who take them back to their village where they encounter the locals in a meeting led by schoolteacher Els Meertens (Pamela Brown) who quizzes them intently before accepting that they are who they are. Food is shared and a plan is hatched. The crew can stay with them in disguise but they must move on quickly…

Pamela Brown quizzes Eric Portman and Hugh Williams

There’s a beautifully constructed scene in the local church – actually a set, not the first time Powell was to be refused permission to film in a place of worship with A Canterbury Tale also largely a set – in which a young Peter Ustinov is the priest and the organist is Alec Clunes (yes, father of Martin) who was a highly respected stage actor. His role if small but key though as he cheekily glimpses over to a German officer searching for the Brits and plays the first few notes of the Dutch national anthem…  humour always goes with resistance and if we weren’t quite ready to beat them, we could certainly laugh at them.

 

The team are passed onto the local burger master (Hay Petrie) and attend an engagement party where they see more of the hidden lives of the loyal Dutch who take care to signal their affiliation through hidden pictures of their Queen and discrete displays of orange blossom. They meet a quisling called De Jong played by Robert Helpmann, the Australian dancer and choreographer who was to perform in The Red Shoes. He brings a fierce oddness to this character and it’s one of the film’s key moments of open hostility, guns drawn and hatred exposed. Another pointed cameo.

Ustinov and Clunes add flavour

There’s a trip to a soccer match where the crew find their missing member Bob, playing in what is mainly a light-hearted way of showing how passive Dutch resistance works. The Germans tell them there are too many and some must leave and so the entire crowd starts to depart forcing the soldiers to let them all stay. Also is on the pitch is one Cliff Bastin, who scored more than a few goals for Arsenal Football Club.

 

The final stretch approaches as they hide in a truck carrying supplies to Jo de Vries (Googie Withers) a resistance fighter under the deepest of cover who can arrange for their escape via boat. Withers is a force of nature, blazing across the screen with detached resolution; an expert in playing the game of occupation when the crew are mere amateurs… all except Sir George. He and Jo are drawn to each other, kindred spirits but with a little more… Powell wanted to develop their relationship more but his excellent editor, David Lean, suggested there was meat enough on that idea for a whole film and there was born the idea that became Blimp.

 

Needless to say, whilst all the women arouse respect and admiration from the crew, Jo and the old knight, are the emotional heart of the film.

Hugh Burden and Great Googie

There is so much more… I’m always amazed at just how much meaning Powell and Pressburger smuggle into their films even when tasked with a relatively narrow objective. The camerawork from Ronald Neame is a delight and the soundscapes contribute to a tense, frequently silent, dream-like reality, filled only with the fears and hopes of the characters risking their lives. We score the action with our own response and Powell was right to eschew the artificiality of music for what is a film to relish technically, historically and artistically.

 

The BFI Blu-ray bomb-bay is packed as usual with excellent extras, including: 

Target for Tonight (1941, 50 mins): Harry Watt’s acclaimed documentary reconstruction of a Wellington bomber’s mission over Germany which influenced Powell’s approach to his film, no music and the focus on calm-hearted realism.

An Airman’s Letter to His Mother (1941, 5 mins): Michael Powell’s powerful propaganda short, narrated by John Gielgud

The Volunteer (1944, 44 mins): an entertaining look at the Fleet Air Arm, directed by Powell & Pressburger and starring Ralph Richardson

The Biter Bit (1943, 14 mins): A propaganda short detailing the destructive force of wartime aerial bombardment, produced by Alexander Korda and narrated by Ralph Richardson

Image gallery including a reproduction of the original storybook based on the film by Emeric Pressburger and much more.

 

Michael Powell

It’s worth pre-ordering *immediately* as the first pressing only includes the magnificent Illustrated booklet with essays from Ian Christine and Sarah Street, along with an excerpt from A Life in Movies: An Autobiography by Michael Powell, a selection of original film reviews, notes on the special features and full credits…

 

For Archers fans and cineastes in general it’s a dream so buy it, buy it now! The BFI shop is open 24/7 online and now you can retail in person as well now that we have the Southbank back!

History, man… Bless This House (1972), Network Blu-ray

“… the secret was simple. Sid James became everybody’s ideal next-door neighbour, drinking partner, stationery salesman, husband and father.” William G. Stewart*

 

Here I usually write about silent film and find a sense of association through my grandparents’ and great-grand parents’ generation; cinema as time travel with the ever-presence of some buildings and landscapes providing a more concrete connection. With this film, however, I’ve a direct connection having seen Sid James perform not once but twice in Blackpool, probably in His Favourite Family at the Grand Theatre and then in The Mating Game at the Winter Gardens in 1975. These were my father’s choices as he loved Sid just as much as his father Jim loved Laurel and Hardy; “watch these lad, they’re hilarious!”

 

Both of the plays were written by Northern Irish playwright, Sam Cree who had also contributed to the Carry on series featuring Sidney, as well as writing for the likes of George Formby and a certain Arthur Askey. All good northern fun but the humour wasn’t just of regional appeal and by this stage of his career James was a national treasure to match the two Lancastrians even though, famously, he was South African born and never quite lost his Johannesburg twang moving to the UK in his early twenties after the war.

Programme from Blackpool's Grand Theatre

Bless This House may or may not have been influenced by the success of His Favourite Family but Sid’s stock in trade was almost always being the bored husband, slightly put upon, rebellious, cheeky and constantly on the lookout for some boyish fun, fifty going on fifteen. The TV series ran for six seasons and 65 episodes from 1971 to 1976 as noted by film historian Jade Evans in her excellent essay accompanying this new Network Blu-ray. Evans quotes James’ biographer William G. Stewart in saying that this success was in providing as many “pegs” as possible to hang the actor’s beloved characteristics from. People knew what to expect and they were never disappointed, Sid had honest humour, charm and generosity of spirit and was loved in return. As Evans says, in so many of his parts he was simply called Sid, he was playing a version of himself even as King ‘Enery VIII.

 

The jokes in the series and this film adaptation, come from Sid’s father figure as he contends with his family and their neighbours. There’s generational conflict as his feminist daughter, Sally (Sally Geeson) is obsessed with saving the planet, a member of The Junior Anti-Pollution League, and concerned about their neighbour’s contribution to global warming: "In fifty years' time the Earth will be finished!" This is seen as earnest youthfulness as she tells Dad that he’s not bothered as he won’t be around to see it. Now fifty years’ later some of the older generation still stick their fingers in their ears and Sally wasn’t far off her doomsday schedule.

 

Director Gerald Thomas and writer Dave Freeman, both Carry on alumni, handle things with warmth and largely without the sauce those films were famed for. Yes, Sally spends a lot of time being gazed at in her turquoise bikini but the vibe is sexist not crude.

 

Diana Coupland and Sid James

Sid’s son Mike (Robin Askwith, Anthony Quayle’s only serious rival as Southport’s greatest actor), is a recently graduated engineering student who’s get up and go has seemingly got up and gone. Mike is doomed to disappoint his Dad with nearly every decision he makes and his purchase of a flower-under-powered Morris Minor, dated in all ways by this point, is an emblem of estranged confusion. Sid doesn’t understand Mike’s motivations and his son is still analysing them himself for comic effect.

 

One of my fondest memories of the TV series is the impressive chemistry between Sid and his on-screen wife Jean played by Diana Coupland who manages to be frustrated with her husband’s intransigence without ever losing her cool. She chides her grumpy partner and gently persuades and directs in ways which he can never really object; Sid’s a softie and we can feel the love. Here she’s determined to start an antique stall with their neighbour Betty (Patsy Rowlands) and you just know she’ll get her way despite Sid’s complaints about “women’s lib”.

 

Robin Askwith and Sally Geeson

Betty is married to Trevor who is played by Peter Butterworth whose actual wife, Janet Brown, plays Anne Hobbs, the wife of Tom as played by Julian Orchard, neighbours on the other side. Trevor is Sid’s perfect partner in crime as they decide to convert his shed into a distillery with inevitably comic consequences.

 

There’s a huge amount of slapstick and gags that were already predictable in Laurel and Hardy’s time. Sally, reading a book about the end of the world, in her bikini, transistor radio by the side of her deckchair, decides to put an end to Tom’s bonfire by squirting their hosepipe over the fence. The pipe gets stuck and everyone gets soaked including the couple who are about to buy the Hobbs’ house, Ronald and Vera Baines aka Terry Scott and June Whitfield.

 

Terry and June would go on to their own TV success as a couple trapped in suburbia**, the roots of so much domestic comedy from then till now with Not Going Out a tribute to mainstream sitcoms past. Here Terry is an officious customs and excise man who is bound to rub Sid’s sales executive the wrong way. From Mike’s choice of car to finding the Abbot’s trying to fix a hole in their new wall just as they arrive… everything is against the two men bonding and comic mistrust is there from the start.

Terry and June

 

When the Baines’ daughter Kate (Carol Hawkins, famous for farce and as Fenn Street’s femme fatale) starts seeing Mike, the stage is set for a grand finale involving food fights (more Laurel, more Hardy…) a fire and a familial truce that may of may not last. You can, after all, pick your friends but you’re lumbered with neighbours and family for ever.

 

Bless This House was the opposite of cutting edge but it was perfect popular entertainment at a time when the country was more resigned to its faults than we are now. The performers all captured this and the host of familiar faces in supporting roles reinforces the “consensual comedy” of the time; George A. Cooper, Bill Maynard, Molly Wier, Frank Thornton and Wendy Richard all popping up to play their assigned roles. Riving character players fitting in perfectly whenever an angry café manager, pompous businessman or chippy “dolly bird” was needed.

 

This was "comfort comedy" of the unsurprised and, actually, endlessly forgiving. These people might fall out over their fences but they were always able to find a way forward.

 

Terry, Carol Hawkins and Sidney

The Blu-ray is out now and features a crisp transfer from a 35mm inter-positive along with a couple of trailers and the 12-page booklet with publicity material accompanying Jade’s essay. You can order it direct from Network along with other very fine releases.

 

Bless This House took me back, but it’s also viewable as much as cinematic history as the silent comedies of just fifty years before it being exactly halfway from now to Hardy, Laurel, Chaplin and Keaton. The neighbours may have been joking more in 1972 than in 2021 but then they probably had a lot more in common…

 

 

*William G Stewart writing in The Complete Sid James by Robert Ross (Reynolds and Hearn: Richmond)

**The TV series was precisely located in Howard Street New Malden, but here the exterior shots of the houses were filmed at numbers 7 and 9, Bolton Avenue, Windsor with other locations in Buckinghamshire. A testament to how little England varied in the southeast…

White bread for the Abbots...

Brown bread for the Baines.

and the clock is still ticking...