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...

Call of duty… The Small Back Room (1949)

I’ve sat many times on Chesil Beach, a Dorset oddity formed of a bank running parallel with the shore producing a long thin natural lagoon unlike anything else in Britain. The bank consists of pebbles piled deep onto the sand below: it’s hard to walk on and exhausting in the heat – the natural and perfect spot to fish for mackerel or to just surrender to the sun and the stones…

Try those same conditions with only one good foot a raging alcoholic hang-over and a mission to disarm a German mine with enough booby traps to defeat even the most sober two-footed engineer and you have the setting for the extraordinary denouement to this quietly devastating film.

You could never call Powell and Pressburger films unsubtle but The Small Back Room is probably as seemingly understated as anything they ever did during their golden stretch of the forties and early fifties. It tackles issues of disability, extra-marital relationships and alcoholism with delicacy and poise: there was no Hays code in Blighty but there were censors bred in the post-Victorian era who didn’t want to see overt co-habitation of consenting adults, near violence towards women and an heroic man reduced to “dope” and booze to cope with his weakness.

The results feel so much like a silent film with great expressionist moments and a quite superb physical performance from David Farrar as the emotionally-crippled scientist who also happens to have just one foot. He is such a masculine presence and bravely plays out his character’s weakness with sensitivity and an immaculately-remembered limp. He is more than ably supported by Kathleen Byron who plays slightly against type as his sympathetic and steadfast partner… both of them so far away from their roles in Black Narcissus.

Kathleen Byron and David Farrar

Based on a novel by Nigel Balchin with screenplay from Pressburger with the aid of Powell, The Small Back Room followed on from The Red Shoes – perhaps surprisingly but is no less concerned with nurturing love versus natural drive.

Sammy Rice (Farrar) is the brains behind a specialist team working away in the back rooms of a London ministry. He lost his leg before the war and is constantly reminded of its absence by the pain of his artificial foot. He refuses to remove the prosthetic in the company of his lover Susan (Byron) an obvious symbol that he feels like an incomplete man without it. He drinks to numb the loss and the pain of his own inadequacy.

Susan and Sammy on their Wednesday night out

Susan may see through it, but he’s punishing himself for just not being strong enough to cope with either his disability or his over-bearing masters in the ministry. He’s the lead scientist in the unit but can’t leverage this value on superiors who are mostly careerist pen pushers who wield their influence far more effectively than their talents should allow… any resemblance with the Rank Organisation is clearly deliberate: their lack of vision holds Sammy back more than his long-lost right foot…

Key signifiers in the landscape of Sammy's living room: picture, bottle and phone

Powell and Pressbuger make stunningly good use of words in this film. Where others may well show the viewer what has happened they get their characters to “tell” using their notes or third parties. A young bomb disposal expert Captain Dick Stuart (Michael Gough) arrives looking for Sammy and after locating him in his local pub goes back to his flat where he fills us all in on the story over Susan’s coffee. There’s a new German bomb which has taken the lives of a number of children as well as army officers who have failed to disarm it. We could see the deaths and the explosions but this way we are drawn into the story that we know must end in the intimacy of a close encounter, winner takes all, involving Sammy and the bomb.

...and Susan's familiar

Bomb disposal is the closest of encounters and is the battle of minds between the designer and the disposer. Later on one of the officers is killed and, again, rather than show the events, we learn in the most heart-breaking manner of the young man’s death as his Corporal (Renée Asherson who is just perfect) reads out his transcript of his encounter her voice going thick with emotion as she recalls the forensic bravery and fragile jokes of the man she clearly loved attempting and failing to outwit the enemy.

Renée Asherson's moving cameo

The film is almost perfectly paced and we know that Sammy will at some point have to face down the same opponent: whether he’ll be defeated in the same way or succumb to his own failings we genuinely don’t know and it is gripping cinema even when our heads cry out that it’s just an actor and what looks like a thermos flask…  we believe.

Before all of that we witness what Charles Barr in his commentary describes as perhaps the most complex pairing not just in an Archer’s film but in all British cinema of the period. We also see how this forms the backdrop for Sammy’s day-to-day battles as part of the expert but under-valued team that works away trying to “solve” the War in the small back room of the title.

Sammy on Salisbury Plain

Barr talks about the film’s “restrictive narrative”, one that is focused almost entirely on Sammy – hardly anything ever happens when he’s not there and there are almost no point of view shots and no sudden screen changes to other characters: everything happens with Sammy there. This adds to the focus on character all aided by the expert cinematography of  Christopher Challis.

The supporting cast is uniformly superb with Milton Rosmer as Professor Mair who runs the unit and Jack Hawkins as R.B. Waring the salesman responsible for raising their profile and getting them into trouble with the pursuit of certain technologies for convenience and profit, not necessarily effectiveness.

The team present their findings to a Whitehall committee

Such short term-ism and petty politicking is very much the British disease (then as now) and Powell and Pressburger were undoubtedly making comment based on their own experience. R.B. laments that he is tired of people who “know their job”  as if competency smothered commerciality. The director and writers certainly knew their jobs and were craftsmen of integrity in much the same way as the film’s heroes.

Cyril Cusack and Michael Gough

It is not just Sammy who saves the day but the rock-solid perceptions of his partner, the principled professional soldiers such as Stuart, Colonel A.K. Holland (Leslie Banks) and Colonel Strang (Anthony Bushell) who is with Sammy when the going really gets tough as well as the flawed but inspired engineers in his team – the stuttering Corporal Taylor (brilliant Cyril Cusack) and the dedicated Till (Michael Goodliffe). These are people whose steadfast commitment still stirs a race memory of selfless sacrifice in response to the call of unconditional duty.

The moment arrives...

Ultimately the concern is how the individual must rouse themselves to fulfill this sense of duty and not just for any sense of national pride but through personal responsibility to those we love and those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in our name.

Whether this was a message cinema-goers still wanted to hear in 1948 is open to doubt as the film struggled in spite of warm reviews. Now it stands out as another of Powell and Pressburger’s films that is almost perfectly realized. David Farrar could have gone to Hollywood but stayed to work with Powell who he described as knowing how to move the art of the talking picture forward at a time, just a decade and a half after its introduction, when there must have been some doubt.

Two extraordinary people take the tube

Powell delivered arguably more than any other British film-maker of his time and his work retains many rich textures that still unravel at their own pace.

I watched the Criterion DVD which is available either direct or from Amazon.

Sidney James

There’s also a lovely cameo from Sid James as 'Knucksie' Moran, a patient barkeeper who tries to look after Sammy – you’re reminded of just how good an actor Sid was when given the chance.

Patrick Macnee also makes a brief appearance on the committee. RIP Mr Steed