The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches

The New Film History Sources, Methods, Approaches Edited by James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper The New Film H...

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The New Film History Sources, Methods, Approaches

Edited by

James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper

The New Film History

This page intentionally left blank

The New Film History Sources, Methods, Approaches

Edited by

James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper

Editorial matter © James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper Individual chapters © the contributors All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00169–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–00169–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The new film history : sources, methods, approaches / edited by James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00169–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–00169–6 1. Motion pictures. I. Chapman, James II. Glancy, Mark III. Harper, Sue. PN1994.N483 2007 791.4309—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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This book is dedicated to all our students – past, present and future


Contents

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper

1

Part I History

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1 Gone With the Wind (1939) and the Lost Cause: A Critical View Melvyn Stokes

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2 History and Representation: The Case of 1970s British Cinema Sue Harper

27

3

41

Gallipoli (1981): ‘A Poignant Search for National Identity’ Mark Connelly

4 ‘This Ship is England’: History, Politics and National Identity in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) James Chapman

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Part II Authorship

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5 Art in Context: British Film Design of the 1940s Laurie Ede

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6 The Author as Author: Restoring the Screenwriter to British Film History Andrew Spicer

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7 When ‘Hanoi Jane’ Conquered Hollywood: Jane Fonda’s Films and Activism, 1977–81 Peter Krämer

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Part III Genre

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8 The Politics of the Swashbuckler Jeffrey Richards

119

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viii Contents

9 The Stalinist Musical Richard Taylor 10

Now, Voyager (1942): Melodrama Then and Now Martin Shingler

137 152

11 From Gangsta to Gangster: The Hood Film’s Criminal Allegiance with Hollywood Jonathan Munby

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Part IV Reception

181

12

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Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock and Film Nationalism Mark Glancy

13 British Cinema, American Reception: Black Narcissus (1947) and the Legion of Decency Sarah Street

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14 Studying Cross-Cultural Marketing and Reception: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) Ingrid Stigsdotter and Tim Bergfelder

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15 The Wicker Man (1973) Email Digest: A Case Study in Web Ethnography Justin Smith

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Index

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Notes on Contributors Tim Bergfelder is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Southampton. His publications include International Adventures: Popular German Cinema in the 1960s (2004) and the edited collections The German Cinema Book (2002) and The Titanic in Myth and Memory (2004). James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. His books include Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (1999), Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present (2003) and Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (2005). Mark Connelly is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Kent. He is the author of The Charge of the Light Brigade: A British Film Guide (2003), Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War Two (2001) and We Can Take It!: Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (2004). Laurie Ede is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He has written extensively on film design and is currently completing a book for I. B. Tauris entitled British Film Design: A History. Mark Glancy is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches courses in American and British film history. His publications include When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ Film, 1939–45 (1999) and The 39 Steps: A British Film Guide (2003). He is currently completing a book entitled Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain, from the 1920s to the Present. Sue Harper is Professor of Film History at the University of Portsmouth. She is the author of Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (1994), Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (2000) and, with Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (2003). She is the leader of an AHRC research project on 1970s British cinema. Peter Krämer is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. He has published essays on American film and media history, and on the relationship between Hollywood and Europe, in Screen,

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The Velvet Light Trap, Theatre History Studies, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, History Today, Film Studies, Scope and numerous edited collections. He is the co-editor of Screen Acting (1999) and The Silent Cinema Reader (2004). He also co-wrote a book for children entitled American Film: An A-Z Guide (2003). Jonathan Munby is Senior Lecturer in American Studies, Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University. He is author of Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster Film from ‘Little Caesar’ to ‘Touch of Evil’ (1999) and has published widely on ethnicity, race and exile in American cinema. He is currently completing a new book on African-American criminal self-representation in American popular culture. Jeffrey Richards is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University. He is the author of many books on cinema and popular culture, including The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930–1939 (1984), Films and British National Identity (1997) and A Night To Remember: The Definitive Titanic Film (2003). Martin Shingler is Senior Lecturer in Radio and Film Studies at the University of Sunderland. He has published papers in Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences (ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, 2001), Screen Acting (ed. Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer, 1999), The Journal of American Studies (1996) and Screen (1995). His most recent publication is a textbook co-authored with John Mercer, Melodrama: Genre, Style & Sensibility (2004). Justin Smith is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He has written articles on British cinema in journals such as the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Fashion Theory, and is currently completing a book based on his PhD entitled Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema, 1968–86. Andrew Spicer is Reader in Cultural History in the School of Art, Media and Design, University of the West of England. He has published widely on British cinema, including Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (2001) and Sydney Box (2006). He is also the author of Film Noir (2002), and he is currently completing a collection of essays on European Film Noir. Ingrid Stigsdotter is a Film Studies PhD candidate at the University of Southampton, where she also teaches on the Film Studies degree programme. Her doctoral research examines the reception of contemporary European cinema in Britain, with particular focus on recent French and


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Swedish films, and the impact of cultural and linguistic difference on film interpretation. Melvyn Stokes is Senior Lecturer in History at University College London. He has edited The State of US History (2002) and, with Richard Maltby, he has co-edited a series of books on Hollywood’s audiences: American Movie Audiences (1999), Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences (1999), Hollywood Spectatorship (2001) and Hollywood Abroad (2004). He has recently finished a book on D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Sarah Street is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Bristol. Her publications include British National Cinema (1997), British Cinema in Documents (2000) and Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (2002). Richard Taylor is Research Professor in Politics at the University of Wales, Swansea. The most recent of his numerous books and articles on Russian and Soviet cinema are The Battleship Potemkin (2000) and October (2002).


Introduction James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper

The New Film History is a collection of essays bringing together some of the latest research in American, British and European film history. It is not intended as a comprehensive history of film: there are already enough surveys providing a historical overview of the development of the medium from its origins to the present.1 Our collection is a close up rather than a long shot: it presents the fruits of current research in a series of self-contained case studies that are nevertheless linked by common themes and methods. The intellectual context of this volume, as indicated in its title, is the ‘New Film History’: each contributor is engaged in original research that advances our knowledge of the field. The chapters herein contain the fruits of new and often ground-breaking research that represents the intellectual issues currently at stake in the study of film history. The book’s subtitle – sources, methods, approaches – indicates that it is based on the principle of empirical investigation and inquiry: this is a work of historical scholarship that emphasizes the critical analysis of primary sources relating to the production and reception of feature films. Film history is both like and unlike other types of history. It is similar in so far as it is concerned with historical structures and processes: the film historian focuses on the cultural, aesthetic, technological and institutional contexts of the medium. The sort of questions that the film historian asks – what? when? where? how? and why? – are the same as our colleagues in other branches of the historical profession. Yet film history is also different in so far as the main primary sources, the films themselves, are unique: the film historian requires skills of formal and visual analysis that are specific to the discipline. The aim of The New Film History is to demonstrate, through case studies, how the principles of historical investigation can be applied in practice in order to illuminate the structures and processes that have determined the nature of the 1

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medium of film and its social institutions. It is our hope that The New Film History will be of use for students and teachers of film history who will appreciate work that is methodologically sophisticated yet intellectually accessible.

From ‘old’ to ‘new’ film history In order to establish what is ‘new’ about the New Film History, we first need to outline the characteristics of the ‘old’ film history. All historians work within particular intellectual and cultural contexts that influence the nature of their work, the specific questions they ask and the methods they apply. The nature and extent of historical knowledge is constantly in flux: it expands and changes continuously as new sources come to light, ‘lost’ films are rediscovered and new intellectual developments take shape. Perhaps the most significant development in film history in recent years has been its increasing professionalization. Once the preserve of ‘amateur’ historians such as William K. Everson in America and Leslie Halliwell in Britain (collectors and enthusiasts with a passion for film), film history is now an accepted academic discipline with its own professional organization (IAMHIST: the International Association for Media and History) and several scholarly peer-reviewed journals.2 The majority of scholarly film histories have been published during the last 25 years: indeed, until the early 1980s there were only a handful of major works that mapped the contours of the discipline. There are two paradigms within the old or traditional film history: one focused on the history of film as an art form, the other on the idea of film as a reflection or mirror of society. The former paradigm is concerned primarily with aesthetics and form. This approach – exemplified by pioneering film histories such as Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights (1926) and Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now (1930) and still evident in recent additions such as David Cook’s A History of Narrative Film (1990) – shares many affinities with the history of art.3 It tends to privilege those films accepted as the ‘masterpieces’ of the medium – for example, Battleship Potemkin (1925), La Grande Illusion (1937), Citizen Kane (1941) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) – which have come to form the film studies canon and which feature regularly in ‘best film’ polls. The aesthetic tradition represents a comparatively narrow approach to film history. It is by definition interested in a small core of films which, owing to their ‘masterpiece’ status, are not representative of the vast majority of film production. They tend to be the work of auteurs rather than genre films, or they are situated within the paradigm of

James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper 3

‘art cinema’ rather than mainstream or commercial cinema. Furthermore, the aesthetic approach tends to focus solely on the text – film history as the history of films – at the expense of the institutional and cultural contexts of production. Yet, as the worst excesses of the auteur theory fade, it is now accepted that the content and style of films is determined as much by contextual factors – the mode of production, the economic and cultural strategies of the studios, the intervention of censors – as by the input of the individual film-maker. Or, to put it another way, Citizen Kane was as much a product of what André Bazin called ‘the genius of the system’ as it was of the genius of Orson Welles. Aesthetic film history also tends to be teleological: it takes a particular style (the classical narrative film) as the normative example and assumes that this was the inevitable form into which the medium would evolve, interpreting the history of film as the development towards the perfected classical model. This trend was most evident in the old film history, which saw the emergence of the classical narrative arising from the ‘discoveries’ of pioneers such as Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith. The second paradigm, the idea of film as a reflection or mirror of society, owes much to the work of the German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer who, in his book From Caligari to Hitler (1947), suggested that the cinema of Weimar Germany provided a unique insight into the collective mindset of the German nation after the First World War. Films reflect society more accurately than other cultural practices, Kracauer averred, because they were produced collectively rather than individually and were made to satisfy the desires of a mass audience. ‘What films reflect’, he claimed, ‘are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions – those deep layers of mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness.’4 Kracauer’s argument that the distorted imagery and disturbing themes of expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and Dr Mabuse (1922) reflected the social dislocation of Weimar Germany has been influential on later historians who have similarly interpreted films in relation to the Zeitgeist. However, his suggestion that they also revealed the unconscious inclination of the German people towards dictatorship and thus anticipated the emergence of Nazism has since been criticized for ‘mixing weak history with flimsy psychology’ and for reading ‘too much out of the films through hindsight’.5 Furthermore, Kracauer explicitly rejected box-office data as a quantitative index of popularity and cultural significance. The reflectionist model, shorn of the social psychology and mysticism that characterized Kracauer, has been enormously influential on the subsequent development of film history, exemplified by important

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books during the 1970s such as Raymond Durgnat’s A Mirror for England (1970), Jeffrey Richards’ Visions of Yesterday (1973) and Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made America (1975).6 Again, however, this approach has been criticized for offering too simplistic an understanding of the relationship between film and its social context. Graeme Turner, for example, asserts: ‘Film does not reflect or even record reality; like any other medium of representation it constructs and “re-presents” its pictures of reality by way of the codes, conventions, myths and ideologies of its culture as well as by way of the specific signifying practices of the medium.’7 The more common metaphor now, rather than reflection, is mediation: historians recognize that the relationship between film and society is complex and that films are not straightforward mirrors of social reality. They do, nevertheless, ‘reveal something about the cultural conditions that produced them and attracted audiences to them … More often than not, they reflect back what audiences want to see rather than what is really there.’8 Turner’s reference to ‘signifying practices’ points to an intellectual division that emerged in the discipline during the 1970s. This has conventionally, if rather simplistically, been categorized as the difference between ‘film studies’ on the one hand and ‘film history’ on the other. While the two disciplines shared common ground in their subject matter, they had very different intellectual and methodological assumptions. Film Studies grew principally out of English literature (at university level, film was often taught in English departments) and its agenda was dominated by similar issues (authorship, genre, narrative) and analytical methods (especially linguistic theories of semiotics and structuralism). Film Studies took a theoretical ‘turn’ in the 1970s when its proponents turned to psychoanalytical models (particularly those derived from Freud and Lacan) for explaining the ‘meaning’ of films. In contrast, film history, which grew principally out of the disciplines of social and political history, developed along two lines. The first analysed the use and abuse of history in feature films, assessing the accuracy and errors of historical films. The second was concerned with contextual analysis: exploring the conditions under which films were made and how far they succeeded in reflecting the intentions of those who made them. Yet both historical approaches prized empirical evidence and factual accounts over interpretative models. The institutionalization of the methodological and intellectual differences between the more theoretical interpretative school and the historical school was exemplified by the content of the two leading scholarly film journals. Since the early 1970s the pre-eminent film


studies journal has been Screen, which has been at the vanguard of theoretical developments in the discipline (psychoanalysis in the 1970s, gender studies in the 1980s, reception theory in the 1990s), whereas the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television has, since its foundation in 1981, been the leading forum for historians seeking to place films in their social, political, industrial, economic and cultural contexts. The last two decades have seen the gradual narrowing of the division between these two schools. Film Studies has retreated from the high theory of the 1970s: few scholars today would not accept the importance of historical context to a full understanding of the medium. Film historians, for their part, have taken on board some of the more useful theoretical developments. In the 1980s, for example, the adoption of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony influenced the work of British historians analysing ‘the ideological role of the British cinema in fostering harmony and social integration’ during the 1930s and 1940s.9 In Britain, the end of the cold war between the rival blocs was marked by the conference ‘Cinema, Identity, History: An International Conference on British Cinema’, held at the University of East Anglia in 1998, which was characterized by fruitful and constructive exchanges.10 It was this increasing congruence between the two schools that had already provided the intellectual context for the emergence of the New Film History. Rather like new wave cinemas, the New Film History emerged at a particular moment that can be identified quite precisely. The first recorded use of the term that we have been able to locate is a review article by Thomas Elsaesser in 1985, in which he noted the tendency of recent scholarly works to move beyond film history as just the history of films and to consider how film style and aesthetics were influenced, even determined, by economic, industrial and technological factors. ‘Two types of pressure have produced the New Film History’, Elsaesser asserted: ‘a polemical dissatisfaction with the surveys and overviews, the tales of pioneers and adventurers that for too long passed as film histories; and sober arguments among professionals now that, thanks to preservation and restoration projects by the world’s archives, much more material has become available.’11 The same year saw the publication of two of the most important works of film history. The Classical Hollywood Cinema, by the American scholars David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, was an ambitious, wide-ranging attempt to write a totalizing history of a mode of film practice in its historical context, setting out to explore the relationship between the style of Hollywood films between the late 1910s and c.1960 and the industrial

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and technological determinants of the studio system which produced them.12 It remains a highly influential work, though the relative dearth of studio records elsewhere has meant that there is no comparable equivalent for other national cinemas. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery’s Film History: Theory and Practice was different again: it remains to this day the only thoroughgoing historiographical and methodological study of the discipline.13 Allen and Gomery identify four approaches to film history – aesthetic, technological, economic and social – though most of their case studies arise from the authors’ own research in the history of early American cinema. It remains a valuable work, although, as the discipline has moved on, it inevitably has been overtaken by new intellectual developments, not least the increasing interest in representation and reception. To this extent The New Film History represents the expanding research agenda of film history since 1985.

Defining the New Film History What, then, are the characteristics of the New Film History as opposed to the old? It is our contention that there are three features that distinguish recent and current research. One is a greater level of methodological sophistication. The New Film History has moved beyond reflectionism and is posited on a more complex relationship between films and social context. There is a greater attention to the cultural dynamics of film production and an awareness of the extent to which the style and content of films are determined by the context of production. The buzzwords here are process and agency: films are shaped and determined by a combination of historical processes (including, but not limited to, economic constraints, industrial practices, studio production strategies and relationships with external bodies such as official agencies, funding councils and censors) and individual agency (representing the creative and cultural competences of their art directors, composers, costume designers, directors, editors, producers, stars, writers, etc.). Several of the contributions to this volume examine production contexts of individual films or groups of films: the section on ‘Authorship’, in particular, extends the field to consider the inputs of creative personnel other than the director, including the writer, the star and the art director. The New Film History has also extended the historical analysis of films from the moment of their production to the moment(s) of their reception. In contrast with theoretical models of spectatorship, which assumed that cinema audiences responded monolithically to films, the practice of reception studies seeks out evidence of


actual audience responses and locates these within the context of the audience’s time, place and identity. The contributions to the section on ‘Reception’ demonstrate that there is much more to this complex process than simply quoting a few reviews: sources include publicity materials, audience surveys and online fan communities – the latter, especially, representing research at the cutting edge of film history today. The sections on ‘History’ and ‘Genre’, moreover, also demonstrate the methodological sophistication of current research. Here the authors interpret films not as simple mirrors of social reality, but rather in terms of their representation of, for example, history, national identity, gender and ethnicity. One way of defining the New Film History in relation to the old is that it thinks in terms of representation: what the historical film shows, for example, is not ‘real’ history, but a constructed version of history that accords with the ideological values of its makers and the cultural tastes of its audiences. To this extent the New Film History places the film text at the nexus of a complex and dynamic set of relationships between producers and consumers. The second feature is the central importance of primary sources. The New Film History is source-based: it arises from the critical examination of primary sources, both filmic and non-filmic. It would be disingenuous to suggest that it was not until recent times that film history experienced its archival ‘turn’. Indeed, it was a feature of several of the ‘old’ film histories that they were based on archival research, especially the pioneering studies of film as an instrument of propaganda and persuasion such as Tony Aldgate’s Cinema and History (1979), Richard Taylor’s Film Propaganda (1979) and David Welch’s Propaganda and the German Cinema (1983).14 Histories of the American film industry, in particular, have been informed by the studio archives deposited with US universities.15 A characteristic of the New Film History, however, has been the extent to which it has expanded the range of primary sources available for the researcher. It is revisionist in nature: the new film historian is comparable to an archaeologist who unearths new sources and materials, especially those which have been previously disregarded or overlooked. An important revisionist landmark in this regard was Jeffrey Richards’ The Age of the Dream Palace (1984), a social history of films and cinema-going in 1930s Britain that drew extensively upon a wide range of contemporary sources, including social surveys (such as Mass-Observation), censors’ reports, middle-brow journals and popular fan magazines.16 Among the many sources employed in The New Film History are memoirs, personal papers, production files, scripts, censors’ reports, publicity materials, reviews, fan magazines and Internet discussion groups. What the

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contributors all demonstrate is the range and extent of primary sources and the different ways that historians use them. The third feature is an understanding that films are cultural artefacts with their own formal properties and aesthetics, including visual style and aural qualities. One of the criticisms levelled against the old film history was its tendency to read films solely as narratives (almost as if they were novels). The New Film History recognizes that narrative is only one of the ways in which audiences read films: they also respond to the ‘look’ and ‘sound’ of films. In particular, the film historian should be able to decode the visual style of a film by emphasizing the relationship between the different discourses within it (camerawork, costume, art direction and so on). It is clear that film audiences respond in subliminal ways to both visual and aural qualities. The film historian ought to have a modicum of technological knowledge, in order to make judgements about visual style and aural properties that are historically appropriate. Moreover, the film historian can add a material dimension to the analysis by showing how struggles for creative control can be glimpsed in the visual texture of the film itself. There are fashions in film style – common ways of using composition and light, quotations from other visual arts, and naturalistic and non-naturalistic sound effects – and it is important to pay attention to these fashions, and to recognize changes and innovations. This is not to say, of course, that every piece of work emerging from the New Film History exemplifies all three of these features in equal measure. While all the contributions to this volume are representative of these trends, individual authors emphasize certain approaches. What they all share, however, is a commitment to expanding the boundaries of historical knowledge and a concern to understand films both as texts and in context: this, above all, is what defines the New Film History.

A note on organization The New Film History comprises 15 chapters and is structured in four parts: History, Authorship, Genre and Reception. It is a tendency of many edited volumes that they end up as rag-tag-and-bobtail collections of discrete essays without any thematic or methodological consistency to link them together. While each chapter of The New Film History may be read as a stand-alone piece in its own right, rather like a journal article, the collection is intended as more than just the sum of its parts. It presents the fruits of current research from a group of film historians who share similar intellectual and methodological concerns.17


We have not followed the rather tedious practice of so many edited collections by summarizing the content and arguments of each chapter in our editors’ introduction: it is our view that our contributors are more than capable of speaking for themselves. Instead, we have provided a short introduction to each of the book’s four parts that situates the chapters within the intellectual context of the discipline. In determining the content of the volume, we have been concerned to focus on films and subjects that feature prominently in the teaching curriculum of British and American universities: to this extent The New Film History will serve as a set text for courses on film history. All the chapters, therefore, are case studies that focus either on individual films or on groups of films linked by genre or authorship. The case studies of individual films are particularly valuable in demonstrating the minutiae of historical scholarship, while those surveying a group of films serve to illustrate how film, as a medium, is in a state of constant flux as it responds to changing historical determinants and circumstances. We have chosen the examples carefully based on our experiences as university teachers and our knowledge of the response the films evoke from students. Our intention is not to promote these films as canonical texts. The New Film History does not distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ films. Nor is it our intention to consider only ‘old’ films. This book is designed to demonstrate the usefulness of approaches, methods and sources, and these can be applied to modern films as well as classics. It is our hope that The New Film History will inspire more students to become researchers and, in turn, further broaden the horizons of our discipline.

Notes 1. See, for example, Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema from its Origins to the 1970 (London: Allen Lane, 1976); Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994); Geoffrey NowellSmith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and James Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present (London: Reaktion, 2003). 2. IAMHIST was founded in 1977 and has held biennial conferences, alternating between America, Britain and continental Europe. The range of dedicated journals includes, but is not limited to, Film History, Film & History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Media History. Other film studies journals that regularly publish historically based articles include Cinema Journal, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Screen and The Velvet Light Trap. To this list we may also add journals dedicated to specific national cinemas such as the Journal of British Cinema and Television. A collection of articles originally published in Screen has been published as Annette Kuhn and Jackie Stacey (eds), Screen Histories: A Screen Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

10 The New Film History 3. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926); Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema (London: Spring Books, 1930); David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (London: W. W. Norton, 1990). 4. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 6. 5. Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany During the Twenties (New York: Elsevier, 1976), p. 160. 6. Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Faber & Faber, 1970); Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975). 7. Graeme Turner, Film As Film (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 129. 8. John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p. xxi. 9. Tony Aldgate ‘Ideological Consensus in British Feature Films, 1935–1947’, in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 111. 10. See Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000). 11. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History’, Sight and Sound, 55:4 (Autumn 1986), pp. 246–51. 12. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985). 13. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985). 14. Anthony Aldgate, Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War (London: Scolar Press, 1979); Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1979); David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 15. Examples include, but are not limited to, Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and H. Mark Glancy, When Hollywood loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ film 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). The annotated Warner Brothers screenplay series are an invaluable resource for understanding the cultural dynamics and institutional practices of the studio system. 16. Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1929–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). 17. Several of the contributions to The New Film History have arisen from research papers presented to the ‘Issues in Film History’ seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research, London, though they have been substantially revised for publication.

Part I History

Scholarly interest in the filmic representation of history was long divided into two distinct paradigms. On the one hand there was the ‘film and history’ movement whose interest was in the use of film as a primary source. While much of the early interest was in the use of film as a primary source, focusing especially on newsreel and documentary, there was also much attention devoted to the issue of accuracy and authenticity in the historical feature film. This interest has bred a cycle of both academic and popular publications that persists to this day and has informed debate in journals such as Film and History which continues to fly the flag for the cause of film as a means of bringing history to the wider public. On the other hand the ‘film and history’ movement was challenged by the emergence of a more theoretically-oriented tradition emerging first from the work of the ‘Paris School’ in the late 1970s, including Marc Ferro’s Cinema and History (1977) and Pierre Sorlin’s The Film in History (1980), and taken up, in the 1990s, by American postmodernist historians such as Robert A. Rosenstone, particularly his 1995 collection, Revisioning History. These scholars were concerned less with the question of historical accuracy and focused instead on the structural and ideological features of the historical film. They were interested in the ways in which film constructs its own historical world and in analysing the codes and strategies used to bring the past to life. Taking its intellectual inspiration from Hayden White, the postmodernist school argues that the traditional historian’s source-based approach to their subject is intellectually limited and asserts that film is simply another form of historical narrative with its own codes and conventions. This approach has, in its turn, been criticized for not paying sufficient attention to the historical contexts of production and reception – quite often the films are discussed as if they exist in a vacuum – and for focusing on films that, 11

12 The New Film History

by dint of their avant-garde styles, such as Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) and Walker (1987), are unrepresentative of the genre. The New Film History combines aspects of both these approaches: it moves beyond a narrow concern with historical authenticity and takes on board questions of representation, whilst at the same time paying full attention to the contexts of production and reception. It does not unduly privilege the avant-garde, but at the same time has been prepared to look beyond conventional notions of what a historical film is. In particular the New Film History has collapsed the distinction between the historical film (usually defined as one based, however loosely, on real historical events or people) and the costume or period film (a fiction film set against a recognizable historical background). The historical/ costume film has become a focus for debates around the economic and cultural viability of national cinemas, the use of the past for the dissemination of ideologies and its contested place within ‘taste wars’ between middle-brow critics on the one hand and the popular preferences of cinema audiences on the other. The four chapters in this section exemplify these different concerns. Two of the films, Gone With the Wind and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, both adapted from historical novels, demonstrate how film-makers deploy symbolic and mythic aspects of the past. These films were both popular successes, even though the creative and cultural economies of the film industry that produced them had changed out of all recognition between 1939 and 2003. Melvyn Stokes and James Chapman explore how particular historical periods – the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars – have been interpreted in ways that accord with the cultural and political interests of their producers. Mark Connelly’s study of Gallipoli – a film reconstruction of a historical event – moves from a discussion of the film’s disputed authenticity to consider its place in discourses of Australian nationhood and national identity. And Sue Harper’s overview of historical and costume film production in Britain in the 1970s explores the economic and cultural determinants of the film industry to demonstrate how different and to an extent competing narratives of the past came to be in circulation in the film culture of the time. What all these chapters reveal, in their different ways, is that the historical film is a site for exploring the present as well as for the popular imagining of the past.

1 Gone With the Wind (1939) and the Lost Cause: A Critical View Melvyn Stokes

The American Civil War is best thought of as two conflicts. The first, lasting from 1861 to 1865, was political and military. During this war, 620,000 men died – more than were killed in all other American wars combined, from the War of Independence to the two Iraq wars. The second, beginning almost as soon as the other ended, was cultural and intellectual. It focused on the struggle to define the war itself in terms of collective memory and meaning. The first Civil War ended in the complete victory of the North, an outcome most graphically demonstrated by Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox court-house in April 1865. The second in a number of respects still continues but, for much of the period since 1865, it has just as clearly been ‘won’ by the South.1 Much of the reason for that victory has been the birth, growth and dissemination of the ‘Lost Cause’, a romantic myth revolving around the ‘Old South’ and the way in which it fought the Civil War. One film, in particular, has been widely regarded as responsible for much of the enduring success of the Lost Cause legend: David O. Selznick’s production of Gone With the Wind (1939). Yet, as this chapter will argue, although Gone With the Wind did indeed embody essential ingredients of the Lost Cause, there are shots and scenes in the film that contradict – either subtly or directly – essential ingredients of the Lost Cause. It will suggest, indeed, that it may be time to reappraise the view of Gone With the Wind as a typical ‘moonlight and magnolias’ treatment of the South. The legend of the Lost Cause itself grew up over some decades. It emerged in two stages. First there was the ‘inner’ Lost Cause: the attempt on the part of Confederate politicians such as Jefferson Davis and generals such as Jubal A. Early to justify why they had fought and explain away their defeat. Later came the ‘outer’ Lost Cause – the work of mainly Southern writers who romanticized the South. It was these 13


writers, including John Esten Cook, Sara Pryor and – above all – Thomas Nelson Page, who glamorized an image of the ‘Old South’ that would become dominant between the 1880s and Gone With the Wind.2 The remarkable thing about this second group of writers was that their books and stories appealed not only in the South. They became the favourites of many Northern readers as well. It may be, indeed, that inhabitants of Northern towns and cities – confronting the fast pace of industrialization, urbanization and immigration in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth – were consciously drawn to a society that was simpler, changeless and more rural. In reality, however, there had never really been such a land as the ‘Old South’. The so-called ‘Cotton Kingdom’ had only emerged in the South around 1820. There were few gracious plantations to be found there in the style of Twelve Oaks or Tara (revealingly, Selznick’s scouts failed to identify one that was large enough and gracious enough to act as Tara in the area of northern Georgia in which Margaret Mitchell’s original novel had been set).3 The planter class itself was very small: only 2,300 families across the South as a whole owned a considerable number of slaves.4 And whatever pretensions to gentility and civilization the antebellum South possessed were vitiated by the fact that such white ‘civilization’ as did exist was founded on the brutality of plantation slavery. If Lost Cause mythology was both constructed over time and susceptible to a number of influences, so too was the version that appeared on screen. According to Ed Guerrero, Hollywood’s plantation myth began with D. W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).5 But the home of the slave-owning Cameron family in Birth of a Nation, although it did have white porticos, had been comparatively modest. The road to the magnificent Tara and Twelve Oaks plantations in Gone With the Wind has its origins in Hollywood’s attempts to maintain its profits during the Great Depression. Between 1929 and 1941, the movie industry produced a cycle of more than 75 nostalgic features dealing with the ‘Old South’. Clearly, such films had real box-office appeal (Guerrero comments that ‘the southern plantation film addressed an economically insecure audience’s diverse needs and problems by placing them in the comfortable, opulent milieu of the antebellum past.’)6 As the cycle developed, from Dixiana (1930) through Mississippi (1935) and So Red the Rose (1935) to Jezebel (1938), the Southern mansions shown became progressively larger and grander. This trend reached a peak with ‘Halcyon’, the great Louisiana plantation portrayed in Jezebel. After this, it would have been difficult to depict Tara and Twelve Oaks cinematically on a smaller scale. Consequently, in showing not one but two impressive plantation

Melvyn Stokes 15

mansions in Gone With the Wind, Selznick was responding both to Hollywood tradition and audience expectations. Other factors, both inside and outside Hollywood, also affected the manner in which the Lost Cause was portrayed in Gone With the Wind. Four of these were of especial importance. They may help explain why the treatment of the Lost Cause in the movie was more nuanced – and at times more critical – than that to be found in literature. First, Margaret Mitchell declined any involvement whatever in the making of the film. This gave Selznick and his team of writers and directors far greater autonomy in bringing the novel to the screen. For example, as Selznick himself observed, the film-makers ‘toned down very considerably Miss Mitchell’s portrait of the depredations of the [Yankee] invaders’.7 Second, the film-makers were very aware of the long historical shadow cast by The Birth of a Nation. Knowing of the long and determined campaign by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) against Griffith’s film, Selznick consulted with NAACP leaders such as Walter White during the production of his film. The tactic worked: although there would, indeed, be black criticism of GWTW, it would not involve the NAACP.8 Third, displaying controversial aspects of the Lost Cause – especially those to do with race – was discouraged by the Production Code Administration. Introduced in 1934, the PCA sought to remove many contentious elements from Hollywood films: amongst other things, it cautioned Selznick against using the word ‘nigger’.9 Fourth, the representation of the Lost Cause was influenced by Selznick himself. While his approach to making what – despite three directors and innumerable screenwriters – was unmistakably ‘his’ film was dictated mainly by a commercial imperative (and hence the need to avoid alienating any major section of the potential audience), Selznick also seems to have been affected by the racial and political currents of the time. With Hollywood increasingly conscious of Germany’s racial policies, Selznick was determined that his film not be perceived as ‘an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times’. He insisted on the complete elimination of the Ku Klux Klan from the film’s story-line. But his desire to ensure that blacks ‘come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger’ almost certainly had a broader influence on Gone With the Wind’s representations of race and Southern society.10

The Lost Cause myth The Lost Cause has been anatomized by Alan T. Nolan as a collection of specific beliefs and assumptions. Advocates of the Lost Cause do not


perceive slavery as the essential cause of the dispute between the sections that ended in Civil War. Instead, they blame the role of the abolitionists as provocateurs. The South, they believe, would ultimately have abolished slavery on its own initiative. In the meantime, the slaves themselves were contented with their lot. With slavery set aside as a sectional bone of contention, the Lost Cause emphasized that the differences between North and South were really cultural and nationalistic: Northerners had their (distant) roots in Anglo-Saxon tribes, Southerners in the Norman barons who conquered them. These Norman ‘cavaliers’ were noted for their warrior virtues and their chivalry. Secession, while lawful and legitimate according to the Lost Cause, had become a doomed enterprise once the North had determined to use force. For, despite gallant commanders and heroic Confederate soldiers, the South had ultimately been overwhelmed by the superior manpower and industrial strength of the North. With the victory of the North, the gracious, cultivated way of life associated with the great plantations had disappeared for ever. It would be immortalized, however, in Gone With the Wind – a film that ‘idealized the men and women of the plantation class, suggested the superior valour of Southern manhood, and is strongly peopled with happy slaves and gentle and indulgent masters’.11 Even though Gone With the Wind would become America’s favourite Civil War narrative, by no means everyone approved of it. In 1940, black poet and film critic Melvin B. Tolson attacked it for being more dangerous to the black community than The Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s film told the ‘story’ of sexually aggressive blacks pursuing white women in the aftermath of the Civil War. This threat had ultimately been defeated only by the Ku Klux Klan, who emerged as heroes of the film. The Birth of a Nation, Tolson contended, was such a barefaced lie that a moron could see through it. Gone With the Wind is such a subtle lie that it will be swallowed as the truth by millions of whites and blacks alike. … Since Gone With the Wind didn’t have a big black brute raping a virgin in a flowing white gown, most Negroes went into ecstasies. Poor Sambo!12 Tolson agreed with the view that Gone With the Wind summarized the Lost Cause. It recounted the Civil War from the point of view of the white planter class, ignoring poor whites and Yankees, and it falsified the history of slavery by presenting it as ‘a blessed institution’. Tolson also criticized the film for the ways in which it promoted ‘sympathy for the white South’: Gone With the Wind depicted many dead or dying Confederates (the only dead Yankee is the looter/rapist Scarlett shoots),

Melvyn Stokes 17

Union shells crash through the stained-glass window of a Southern church (the fact that most Southern white churches supported slavery is not mentioned) and Atlanta burns (with no recognition that Confederates actually started the fires).13 What Tolson did not see, however, was that Gone With the Wind offered a more selective – and at times critical – interpretation of the Lost Cause. As the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma argued more than 30 years ago, even films that appear to embody hegemonic myths most accurately may still contain contradictions that serve to undermine those very myths.14 Gone With the Wind was essentially a commentary on – and criticism of – the Lost Cause as well as perhaps its most influential expression.

The causes of the Civil War According to the Lost Cause myth, the Civil War had been brought about by abolitionists – militant characters who had stirred up conflict where none had previously existed. There was some evidence in favour of this proposition: abolitionists had been regarded in many Northern communities as discordant elements.15 Whites in the South and North were often united not so much by their dislike of slavery as by their dislike of black people.16 On the other hand, in the years between 1831 and 1860, a moral consensus had emerged outside the South that slavery should not be allowed to spread – that, in essence, it be confined to the Southern states in which, it was hoped, it would eventually disappear. The abolitionists can be seen as having contributed to the creation of this consensus. Gone With the Wind (unlike The Birth of a Nation) did not feature or refer to abolitionists in any specific way (though Gerald O’Hara mentions that the South has received ‘enough insults from the meddling Yankees’). Indeed, according to Tolson, the film avoided any significant confrontation with the causes of the war. Despite half the film being set against the background of the war itself, the Civil War comes like a spontaneous combustion. … Gone With the Wind shows not a single economic or social or political cause that led to the Civil War. How could a civilization be ‘gone with the wind’ unless there was something to MAKE it go?17 In fact, Tolson was wrong. The film identifies at least three causes of the war. The first of these was slavery. At one point, Gone With the Wind reproduces the Lost Cause notion that, left to its own devices, the South would itself have abolished slavery. Ashley tells Scarlett of his family’s


slaves that ‘I’d have freed them all when father died, if the war hadn’t already freed them.’ But the clearest indications as to the causes of the war become apparent in the sequence in which the menfolk at Twelve Oaks linger, in the aftermath of the barbecue, over their brandy and cigars. Gerald O’Hara states the major issue at stake between the sections when he bluntly insists that ‘It’s time we make them [the Yankees] understand we’ll keep our slaves with or without their approval.’ The same sequence underlines a second cause of the war: the male society of the South and its devotion to codes of ‘honour’.18 The brash Charles Hamilton, Scarlett’s first husband, is a perfect representative of this breed. He tries to challenge Rhett Butler to a duel when Rhett expresses his view that the South does not have the military resources to beat the North. A third cause of the war is also revealed in the film: a resounding clash of values between the agrarian South and the industrial North. Rhett Butler’s point at Twelve Oaks about all the cannon factories being in the North is followed, later in the film, by Scarlett’s expressed desire to out-Yankee the Yankees by succeeding in the Kennedy store and lumber business. Gone With the Wind as a whole, indeed, is almost a commercial for the historical view advanced by Charles and Mary Beard in the 1920s that the Civil War was a product of the struggle for supremacy between the economic interests of an agricultural South and an entrepreneurial, industrialized North.19

Secession and the outbreak of war In dealing with secession, Gone With the Wind endorsed the Southern view of the Civil War as a struggle over state sovereignty. According to the ‘compact’ theory of the Constitution adopted in 1787, the individual states had compacted together to produce a general government, a Federal Union known as the United States. They retained, however, the ultimate right to leave that Union if they believed it to be threatening their own rights and institutions. Gerald O’Hara states this view bluntly at Twelve Oaks: ‘’Tis the right of the sovereign state of Georgia to secede from the Union.’ However, the film offered two views of what could be expected to follow secession. Ashley, loyal to his state, confesses that ‘if Georgia fights, I go with her.’ Yet he hopes ‘like my father that the North will let us leave the union in peace’. Gerald O’Hara, clearly a Southern fire-eater, has a different view. He recognizes the inevitability of war: ‘After we fired on the Yankee rascals at Fort Sumter, we’ve got to fight. There’s no other way.’

Melvyn Stokes 19

Inevitable Southern defeat The inevitability of Southern defeat is prefigured, early in the film, by Rhett’s gloomy assessment that ‘the Yankees are better equipped than we. They’ve got factories, shipyards, coal mines and a fleet to bottle up our harbours and starve us to death. All we’ve got is cotton, and slaves, and – arrogance.’ Clearly, the South loses many men in the conflict: the sequence dealing with the distribution of casualty lists after the battle of Gettysburg ( July 1863) is particularly emphatic on this point. As Scarlett tells Rhett: ‘Just about every family in the county [has lost someone]. The Tarleton boys dead, both of them.’ By the Christmas after Gettysburg, when Ashley is given a furlough to spend three days in Atlanta, things are going very badly. Just before he returns to his unit, Ashley concedes that the Confederacy is effectively doomed because it faces Northern soldiers who are better equipped and increasingly numerous: ‘Oh, Scarlett, my men are barefooted now. And the snow in Virginia is deep. When I see them, I see the Yankees coming and coming, always more and more.’ By the time of the siege of Atlanta (May–September 1864), it is even clearer that the Confederacy – facing overwhelming Union armies – is on the verge of defeat. Gone With the Wind for the most part followed the Lost Cause view of the inevitability of Northern victory. In reality, however, although the Gettysburg campaign has traditionally been perceived as the ‘high tide’ of the Confederacy, it was certainly not clear by December 1863 that the South had lost the war. Ashley’s pessimism was both premature and defeatist. Recent historians have maintained that, although the South certainly had fewer men than the North, it managed to keep its armies supplied with sufficient arms and munitions until the end of the conflict. No Southern army ever lost a battle because of insufficient supplies. The South only had to keep protecting its own territory until the North became tired and, according to some scholars, could have won the war at several points until the late summer of 1864.20 Moreover, one scene from Gone With the Wind inadvertently contradicts the notion of inevitable Northern victory. When Scarlett goes to the railroad yard to attempt to persuade Dr Meade (unsuccessfully) to leave the wounded and attend Melanie’s labour, the camera – in a famous crane shot – pulls back to show thousands of injured men lying on the ground. Margaret Mitchell’s husband, seeing this sequence for the first time, is supposed to have remarked that ‘if we’d have had that many soldiers, we’d have won the war.’21


Slavery as benign Advocates of the Lost Cause disseminated a view of slavery as a necessary and benign system. Far from being the direct cause of war, it had only been an incidental issue in that conflict. Benevolent owners had taken barbarian heathen, Christianized them and transformed them into efficient workers who were highly contented with their lot. This view of happy, faithful slaves was a major part of the defence of the ‘Old South’ launched by its defeated political leaders.22 It was subsequently taken up by white Southern purveyors of fictional rural – and racial – nostalgia.23 Gone With the Wind does present some benign images of slavery. It is the black foreman, Big Sam, who – in an unlikely assertion of racial autonomy – calls ‘quittin’ time’ in the cotton fields of Tara. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammie, although a slave is clearly a considerable social presence in the O’Hara household. Pork has been close enough to Gerald O’Hara to inherit (however reluctantly) the watch of his former master after the latter’s death. Slaves – or at least the house slaves – are made or allowed (it is unclear which) to attend evening prayers at Tara. Ashley later insists that slaves had not been treated as badly as the white convicts Scarlett proposes to hire and nostalgically remembers the ‘high soft negro laughter from the [slave] quarters’ wafting up to the plantation house at Twelve Oaks in ‘[t]he warm still country twilight’. Scarlett herself, confronted with Big Sam and other field hands cheerfully going off to ‘dig trenches for the Confederacy’ – willing participants in their own continuing enslavement – recognizes each of the workers by name. Uncle Peter’s pursuit of the ‘last chicken in Atlanta’ so that the ‘white folks’ will have Christmas lunch as the Confederacy lurches to its doom establishes him as a loyal if feckless servant. Shortly before his death, Gerald O’Hara underlines to Scarlett the mixture of sternness and benevolence that had – at least according to Lost Cause writers – been used to control slaves: ‘You must be firm with inferiors, but you must be gentle with them, especially darkies.’ At the same time, however, there are scenes and shots in the film that challenge the view of slaves as happy, contented and faithful. At such moments, slavery itself is revealed as a brutal system of labour exploitation. The shot of small boys hanging on to the bell that is ringing at the end of the working day at Tara has a certain joyousness and frivolity to it, but is also a reminder of the reality of child labour. This is underlined even more emphatically by the young black girls who are fanning the sleeping white ‘belles’ on the afternoon of the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. Doubtless reflecting the assumption that whites could not work in

Melvyn Stokes 21

the heat, while blacks were used to it, the stereotype is none the less challenged by a close-up of one little black girl tiredly stroking her hair. Scarlett’s treatment of Prissy is also revealing: Prissy is the only slave we see actually subjected to physical violence – Scarlett slaps her face. Scarlett also threatens to ‘whip the hide off’ Prissy if she upsets Melanie while sitting with her. Moreover, in one of the more revealing phrases in the whole film, she threatens to sell Prissy ‘south’. This tapped into the tendency for slave-owners to sell difficult, recalcitrant slaves to the frontier parts of states such as Mississippi, where work was harder and the death-rates were usually much higher than in the coastal plantations of Georgia and the Carolinas. Part of the worst effects of such sales was the fact that they reflected the ultimate reality of slavery: that slaves were property rather than people. Part of the punishment for the slave concerned was that he or she was also separated, probably for good, from his or her family: we know Prissy has family since she tells Rhett her mother would never approve of her entering Belle Watling’s saloon. There is one other oblique reference in the film to selling slaves. Uneasy at the attempt to raise money for the Confederacy by allowing men to bid for their preferred dance partner at a charity ball, Dolly Meriwether asks Mrs Meade: ‘How can you permit your husband to conduct this … slave auction?’ The break-up of slave families is also echoed in another sequence of Gone With the Wind: when Scarlett escapes from Atlanta and finally arrives home at Tara, only the ‘house servants’ – Mammie, Pork and Prissy – remain. All the other slaves have gone. And while they may, like Big Sam and the other field hands, have been conscripted by the Confederacy, the situation at Tara in the film did faithfully reflect the social realities of 1864–65. A high proportion of slaves left the plantations to travel and move around either in search of relatives and friends, or because freedom to them meant escape from their former workplace.

The ‘Old South’ Gone With the Wind reintroduced, through its titles, the sort of history constructed by advocates of Southern independence during the early 1860s. As Richard E. Beringer and colleagues observe, ‘Without its own distinctive past upon which to base its nationality, the Confederacy appropriated history and created a mythic past of exiled cavaliers and chivalrous knights that owed more to Sir Walter Scott than to flesh and blood migrants from the Old World.’24 Curiously, however, the idea that Southerners were descendants of medieval ‘knights’ and cavaliers


was something absent from Margaret Mitchell’s original novel. It was introduced into Selznick’s film by the opening intertitle, famously contributed by screenwriter Ben Hecht: There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind … A later intertitle reverted to the same idea: Home from their lost adventure came the tattered Cavaliers … Grimly they came hobbling back to the desolation that had once been a land of grace and plenty … Despite the fact that the opening credits identified the film itself as ‘Margaret Mitchell’s Story of the Old South’, Mitchell herself was less than pleased with the attempt to reinvent the up-country society of 1860s Georgia she had depicted in her novel as a kind of aristocratic fantasy with medieval roots. She would later remember being ‘somewhat aghast’ when Ben Hecht’s first title appeared on the screen. ‘ “Cavalier” ’, observed her biographer, ‘was not a word she liked associated with the South.’25 To see Gone With the Wind as simply expressing the mythology of the Old South is, however, too simplistic. Certainly, the film focuses its main attention on a very narrow social group: the planter class. But instead of consistently idealizing this class, the film clearly at some points critiques its actions and values. It makes great play with the idea of Southern ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’. Scarlett’s mother, Ellen, is a lady. She maintains the moral standards of her household and community, looks after the poor and sick in her neighbourhood (something that will ultimately lead to her death) and conforms to all the social conventions of her society (including never admitting publicly that she is the real manager of the O’Hara plantation).26 With Ellen’s demise, Melanie Wilkes becomes the dominant lady in the film. Scarlett, although she confesses to Rhett that she has always wanted to be like her mother, is a very different character. Her many sins, according to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, include marriage without love hastily entered into for spiteful reasons, manslaughter, the theft of her sister’s fiancé, flagrant disregard of proper female behaviour to the point of risking the lives of her own

Melvyn Stokes 23

menfolk, … the mindless sacrifice of her husband’s life … dancing while still in mourning, offering herself for cold cash to pay the taxes on Tara, … flaunting a disconcerting talent for business, and otherwise violating all accepted conventions that defined the southern lady.27 Scarlett and Rhett stand outside the traditional plantation society. They question its assumptions and offer an antidote to the romantic evocations of the Old South made by Ashley. Confronted with the casualty lists after the battle of Gettysburg, Rhett comments bitterly: ‘Look at them. All these poor tragic people. The South sinking to its knees. It will never rise again. [All for] the cause. The cause of living in the past is dying right in front of us.’ Both Rhett and Scarlett, moreover, are both very sceptical of the male codes of honour that have led Southern ‘gentlemen’ to want to go to war in the first place. Stuck in a wagon in the middle of a mass of defeated, often wounded, Confederate soldiers fleeing Atlanta, Rhett notes ironically that ‘They were going to lick the Yankees in a month. Poor gallant fools.’ Scarlett is even more critical of Southern men: ‘They make me sick. All of them. Getting us all into this mess [through their] swaggering and boasting.’ The second part of Gone With the Wind emphasized the contrast between the supposed elegance and graciousness of the ‘Old South’ and the materialism and corruption of the Reconstruction period. Cities rather than rural plantations are now the main centres of economic activity: Frank Kennedy’s shop in Atlanta is clearly doing well and, once Scarlett marries him, the Kennedys expand their business to include a lumber mill. Economic power and status have clearly been reversed: Wilkerson, the former overseer with the O’Haras, dismissed for having an affair with ‘white trash’ Emmy Slattery, returns with her as his new wife to make a bid for the Tara plantation itself. Only Rhett, amongst the film’s Southern characters, remains wealthy as a result of his blockade-running activities during the war. Georgia is now being run by ‘carpetbaggers’ – Yankees who have come South in search of fame and fortune. Blacks are shown as politically subservient (a carpetbagger standing under a sign offering ‘Forty Acres and Mule’ advises a group of African-Americans that they should ‘vote for their friends’) and socially aggressive (they dominate the Atlanta sidewalk until Mammie clears a pathway for Scarlett with her umbrella). Yet, apart from the speech of the man promising blacks ‘forty acres and a mule’ and the references to the so-called ‘political meeting’ at which Ashley is wounded and Frank Kennedy killed, there is no direct mention of politics. In Gone With the Wind, politics is something that happens to the protagonists rather than something they engage in or are continually aware of.


Conclusion Critics of the Lost Cause see it as a means of avoiding any confrontation with the racial realities of the Civil War and its aftermath. It consequently helped perpetuate racial injustices in the South. As Alan T. Nolan has commented: ‘the success of the teachings of the Lost Cause led to the nation’s abandoning even its half-hearted effort to protect African Americans and bring them into the United States as equal citizens. Jim Crow, lynch law, and disfranchisement followed.’28 Gone With the Wind supposedly contributed to the growth of the Lost Cause legend by encouraging what Tara Fitzgerald has termed the ‘processes of historical amnesia’. As early as 1944, black sociologist Lawrence Reddick wrote that the film completed the job of wiping out of the public mind the ‘Northern’ view of slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, replacing it with the traditional ‘Southern’ view. Ideologically the South had won the Civil War. The defeat which it suffered on the field of battle was more than repaired by its victory over the minds of the American people through history books, novels, and now the motion pictures.29 In actuality, however, Gone With the Wind is more ambivalent in its representation of the Lost Cause than has often been assumed. It included some tenets of the Lost Cause while contradicting others. It largely followed the Lost Cause interpretation of the South’s inevitable defeat. While broadly endorsing the idea that the Old South was a land of cavaliers and their ladies, it simultaneously undermined it by suggesting that Southern men had been boastful enough and aggressive enough to start a war that would destroy their way of life for good – and by having as its heroine a strong, determined woman who was far from being a typical ‘lady’. Finally, although Gone With the Wind was broadly sympathetic to the notion that slavery had been benign, there were also a number of points at which it seemed to suggest that, in reality, it had been a brutal and exploitative institution.

Notes 1. On the ‘continuing’ Civil War, see David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), pp. 1–2, 9, 299, 302–4. 2. David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 102–3.

Melvyn Stokes 25

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

Also see Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 1–38. Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), pp. 189–90; Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., ‘Gone With the Wind: The Old South as National Epic’, in Richard Harwell (ed.), Gone With the Wind as Book and Film (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), p. 178. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 44. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American in Image and Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 10. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, p. 19. Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), p. 251. L. D. Reddick, ‘Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations: Motion Pictures, Radio, the Press, and Libraries’, The Journal of Negro Education, 13:3 (Summer 1944), p. 377; Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 20–1. Cripps, Making Movies Black, pp. 7, 21. Leonard J. Leff, ‘David Selznick’s Gone With the Wind: “The Negro Problem,” ’ The Georgia Review, 38:1 (Spring 1984), p. 149; David O. Selznick to Sidney Howard, 6 January 1937, in Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 162. Alan T. Nolan, ‘The Anatomy of the Myth’, in Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (eds), The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 17. Melvin B. Tolson, ‘Gone With the Wind Is More Dangerous than Birth of a Nation’, Washington Tribune, 23 March 1940, reprinted in Robert M. Farnsworth (ed.), Caviar and Cabbage: Selected Columns by Melvin B. Tolson from the ‘Washington Tribune,’ 1937–1944 (Columbia, MS, and London: University of Missouri Press, 1982), p. 214. Tolson, Gone With the Wind, pp. 214–16. John-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, ‘Cinema/ideology/criticism (1)’, originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, 216 (October 1969), trans. Susan Bennett, in John Ellis (ed.), Screen Reader I (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1977), p. 7; ‘John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln, a Collective Text by the Editors of Cahiers du Cinéma’, originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, 223 (August 1970), trans. Helen Lackner and Diana Mathias, Screen, 13:3 (Autumn 1972), pp. 5–44. See Leonard L. Richards, ‘Gentlemen of Property and Standing’: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton, Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 130–1. Tolson, Gone With the Wind, p. 215. On the issue of honour, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

26 The New Film History 19. See, in particular, Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1937 [1927]). 20. Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 16; Nolan, ‘The Anatomy of the Myth’, pp. 22–4. 21. Quoted in ‘The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind ’, documentary produced by L. Jeffrey Selznick, directed by David Hinton and written by David Thomson, 1988. 22. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 259–60. 23. Ibid., pp. 222–4, 227, 229. 24. Beringer, Hattaway, Jones and Still, Why the South Lost, p. 76. 25. Anne Edwards, The Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, The Author of ‘Gone With the Wind’ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983), p. 287. 26. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘Scarlett O’Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman’, American Quarterly, 33:4 (Autumn 1981), p. 399. 27. Fox-Genovese, ‘Scarlett O’Hara’, p. 400. 28. Nolan, ‘The Anatomy of the Myth’, p. 29. 29. Fitzgerald, Reconstructing Dixie, p. 5; Reddick, ‘Educational Programs’, p. 376.

2 History and Representation: The Case of 1970s British Cinema Sue Harper

During the 1970s, nearly one in five of the feature films produced in Great Britain was an historical film, in which the story was set at some period before the outbreak of the Second World War.1 This was twice as high a proportion as in the 1960s.2 During the four years following the student demonstrations in Paris, London and California, the proportion rose to one in four. For many film-makers working in Britain at a time of political upheaval and cultural turmoil, the past was not a foreign country, but it was a place where they could do things differently. Some, who based their films on real people or events, were engaging with the discursive conventions of realism. Others, who located their films in the past but who avoided the anchorage of historically verifiable facts, were evoking the social function of popular memory. During the 1930s and 1940s in Britain, costume film (which I shall use as a term for both factually anchored and unanchored films) had played a major role in the audience’s sense of national and gender identity. From 1933, Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII and its successors presented historical figures in an accessible guise, while in the 1940s Gainsborough melodramas such as The Wicked Lady (1945) drew new boundaries between sacred and profane behaviour. In the 1950s, British costume film producers lost their way, and the only coherent use of the past was made by American producers working in Britain.3 By the 1960s, most of the costume films produced in Britain were Hammer horror films, or the occasional ‘serious’ historical film such as Zulu (1964). However, the range of costume films made in Britain in the 1970s displayed an astonishing richness and variety. Some important cultural changes were taking place, and the costume genre was dealing with these in innovatory ways. In the 1960s, the Americans had found the investment and employment conditions in Britain conducive, and as much as two-thirds 27


of British film-making was 100 per cent American-financed.4 The withdrawal of American funding in the late 1960s, which was due to a recession in Hollywood and in America at large, was conducted with unseemly haste, and it destabilized the industry.5 In 1968, the American majors had imported £31.3 million into the United Kingdom; by 1974, they had reduced this to £2.9 million.6 British producers had become dependent on American film capital, and had made no contingency plans to fill the gap. In consequence, the native industry underwent a swift restructuring. British Lion suffered a series of brutal takeover bids by multinationals such as Vavasour.7 The older production/distribution companies, which had served the industry well in the 1950s, lost coherence, and the less efficient organisations which replaced them in the 1970s fared ill. The Rank Organization progressively shifted out of production. EMI’s ill-considered 1968 bid for ABPC failed to consolidate its entertainment holdings.8 This meant that EMI had to intensify its search for profits via the international blockbuster route. Lord Grade’s film-making activities under Associated Communications Corporation (ACC) suffered from the £8 million loss from the ill-conceived Raise the Titanic, and from his failed attempt to enter American distribution networks. There were clear consequences of these corporate shifts; Shepperton and Elstree studios, the biggest production centres, reduced staff in a draconian manner. The independent producer/director, who had been a successful entrepreneur in the 1960s, had been able to attract funding from American companies. In the 1970s, he was adrift on an unpredictable market.9 Many films now relied on mixed funding, and onepicture companies were inaugurated (often by the director) as a means of choreographing their incomes. Directors had to be extremely pragmatic. Ken Russell, for example, talked MGM’s British company into partially funding The Boy Friend (even though he was ‘making it up as I went along’); he worked through United Artists for Women in Love, and mortgaged his own house for Savage Messiah.10 There was, of course, official as well as commercial backing for films in the 1970s. The National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) had always suffered from incoherent government policies on film subsidy, but had been a major player in the 1950s industry, giving front-money to a substantial number of films.11 But by the 1970s, it was short of funding. In 1970, for example, the Corporation received 200 projects for consideration, but was only able to support three.12 Fewer and fewer films were offered to it later in the decade, possibly because of its perceived financial weakness. The NFFC financed quite a few costume films in the 1970s,

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and they were a mixed bunch: Up Pompei; I, Monster; Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter; Lisztomania; Jabberwocky; The Duellists; Riddle of the Sands; Arabian Adventure; Black Jack; The Sailor’s Return; Bugsy Malone and The Shout.13 As the decade progressed, the Corporation backed middlebrow projects. In 1979, in one of its final acts before it was voted out of office, the Labour Government appointed two new members for the Board, one of whom was an art-house exhibitor and the other the Director of the new National Film and Television School. In its Annual Report for 1979, the Corporation noted that its own brief should be to make not only films that appeal to a popular audience, but also films that will feed ideas and invention. To attempt to separate these two aspects completely is to discourage the creation of a truly popular art, and to encourage either a cinema of vacuous distraction for the audience or of self-gratification for the film-maker.14 In that year, the NFFC supported Merchant-Ivory’s The Europeans, the film which inaugurated the heritage cycle in the 1980s, on the grounds that it represented the ‘indigenous character’ of the culture, and was made by a team likely to ‘reflect British life’.15 The expansion of alternative leisure activities and the arrival of colour television led to a decline in cinema admissions, although overall takings were not reduced because of increases in seat prices.16 The mass audience, which had hitherto provided reliable profits, was no longer monolithic in its structure. It was replaced by a range of niche audiences, who had more specialist requirements and whose responses were less predictable. Certainly, the volatile performance of British costume films in the popularity listings would lead us to conclude that the new audiences were discriminating, and tended to select expensive and ambitious films. In the 1970s British popularity listings, hardly any Hollywood costume films appeared, though some American-financed films made in Britain did well in the first third of the decade. In 1970, the Top Five Special Presentations contained four British costume films. Oliver!, Anne of the Thousand Days, Cromwell and The Lion in Winter came second, third, fourth and fifth respectively, and Women in Love and Carry On Up the Jungle came fourth and sixth in Top Ten General Releases.17 The Railway Children and Up Pompei! were featured in the Top Ten Films of 1971.18 The Devils, Nicholas and Alexandra, Ryan’s Daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, Young Winston and The Go-Between also did well in 1972.19 In 1975, Murder on the Orient Express and Monty Python and the Holy Grail performed well, and in 1976 so did Barry Lyndon.20 Death on the Nile and


The Thirty-Nine Steps performed respectably in 1979, but only Monty Python’s Life of Brian appeared in the Top Twenty of 1980.21 We can conclude that 1970s costume films were popular successes, but primarily in the first part of the decade, and that favourite costume films came from two categories: art-house auteur films, and American-financed blockbusters. The most successful films in the latter part of the decade were the Monty Python films, and the safe pre-war thrillers based on Buchan and Christie. Low-status Hammer horrors and radical avant-garde histories were not represented in the listings.

American histories Although the Americans had withdrawn from major investment in British production, they still retained one foothold: in historical film. The official reason was that the historical backgrounds could only be authentically re-created in England.22 The American majors engaged in ‘real life’ biopics, and they always appointed a veteran independent American producer or executive producer. Cromwell (1970) was a Columbia film, produced by Irving Allen. Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) was by them too, but produced by Sam Spiegel. Another of their films was Young Winston (1972), produced by Carl Foreman. Anne of the Thousand Days (1970) and Mary, Queen of Scots (1972) were both produced for Universal by Hal B. Wallis. These biopics – which were aimed at world markets – had much in common. They were all based on successful recent novels or plays; the heavy reliance on the original source meant the films were often ponderous. The American biopics were all glossy vehicles with high status: Anne and Mary were Royal Command Performance films, and Anne and Cromwell won Oscars for their costumes. They were often directed by compliant journeymen (Charles Jarrott, for example) who would certainly not challenge the producer. This was noted by Variety, which realized that ‘there still exists an auteur-producer, though some of the old boys would cringe at that pretentious hyphenate’.23 Several of these producers were resolutely lowbrow. Irving Allen had noted that ‘I make films that appeal to the lowest common denominator. That’s why I’m still in business and the arty-crafty boys are not.’24 This was supported by Sam Spiegel.25 How did the American histories interpret the past? Rather differently from EMI’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1972). The past functioned as an awful but seductive lesson about power. All the films argued that the European past permitted tyrannies because there were insufficient

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checks on inherited power. The film monarchs are prone to whim, inconsequentiality and sheer temper. Richard Burton instinctively interpreted Henry VIII in Anne of a Thousand Days thus: ‘he had his virtues, but they were half outweighed by his weaknesses: his ungovernable temper, terrible arrogance, and dreadful pride.’26 There are two ways of reading films such as this. On the one hand, they can be interpreted as a self-congratulatory America cocking a snook at the corrupt Old World. On the other hand, they can be read as a nervous response to unchecked power in general, and specifically in Nixon’s White House – the so-called ‘Imperial Presidency’. Not for the first time, American filmmakers might have been using British history to comment on American current affairs, and perhaps were criticizing another devious leader who thought he was above the law, was prone to rages, and engaged in foreign wars for dubious reasons. Young Winston is a most interesting, and in some ways exceptional, example of American-backed history. It was Carl Foreman’s pet project, and he had a heavy personal investment in the project; he knew Churchill, acquired the rights to his autobiography, and had Churchill’s encouragement.27 He universalized the tale, which showed: ‘a debilitating problem – lack of affection from his father. I came to believe that the central theme of alienation was in itself one which men and women everywhere could recognise and respond to’.28 Foreman, who was President of the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain, insisted on extremely tight script control, and showed a past in which talented individuals had to waste their energies fighting a deferential family and class system.

British auteur histories A different pattern emerges in those 1970s British costume films made by directors who had control over the production process. A number of major directors began to experiment with the genre in ways they had not done before. There were two determinants on this. First, the director had to be at that delicate stage of maturity when he was balanced on the peak of his powers, before decrepitude or cynicism set in. Also, the financial insecurity in the British industry may well have operated as a sort of stimulant, provoking a devil-may-care mood in directors for whom the genre had hitherto been problematical. Certainly, costume films of astonishing quality were made which bridged the gap between art-house and popular cinema, and which used history in a new way. Richard Lester, for example, who had made the Beatles films in the 1960s, directed the marvellous Royal Flash (1975) in Britain. This film


shows clear continuities in mood and style with the Beatles films. It is a sort of commando raid on history, which seeks out ludicrous images from the past which are clearly intended to provoke: Bismarck (Oliver Reed) indulging his taste for taxidermy by stuffing a fox with straw during discussion of state matters, or the countess on her wedding night clamped into such a rigor of sexual terror that she appears to be made of wood. Or consider John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), based on Kipling and scripted by Huston himself. Huston worked best with men and with masculine issues, and extracted astonishing performances from Sean Connery and Michael Caine. The film is an admirably complex examination of Empire: its absurdities, magnificence, self-delusions and betrayals. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) is arguably the most highly achieved costume film of the decade. Kubrick insisted on control over every aspect of his films, and the relentless irony imposed on Thackeray’s novel must be attributed to him. Barry Lyndon combines visual flair with an emotional rawness which had been absent from the genre hitherto. The candlelit scenes, the finesse of the music, the indirectness of the feelings expressed, the pain presented in ironic counterpoint, all indicate a major innovation in costume film. But although Kubrick’s image of the past is perceived through an ironic filter, and although his film is about a disadvantaged outsider, Barry Lyndon displays little interest in class. That cannot be said of Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1970). Even the advertisements for the film foregrounded the issue: ‘In those days, you fell in love with your own class. Or found a Go-Between.’29 Losey felt that the film was ‘a romantic melodrama, a gentler version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover ’.30 His view of the past was coloured by two principles: a proto-Marxist interpretation of class structure, and an unremitting realism of characterization and mise-en-scene: I did not mean to imply that ‘the Past’ is in any way romanticised, dream-like or otherwise prettied-up. On the contrary, it should have its own reality, and there should be, under the images of these indulged characters, wandering through their great house and vast estate, a sense of malaise and apprehension … the feeling of the house and the feeling round its occupants is one of oppression – almost sinister.31 The film was very painstaking in its use of the sounds of the past – Losey collaborated with the man who had done the research for the record of Akenfield – and for its visual texture. Carmen Dillon was Losey’s art

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director, and performed her task in a less expressionist manner than Losey’s previous designer, Richard MacDonald. The production files for The Go-Between display Losey’s zeal for realism: the right house, the right acres of wheat. But above all the right class sympathies – for the alienated child, the daughter bought and sold, the farmer shot like game. It is gender, rather than class, which operates as the fulcrum of David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970). Lean had worked in costume film before, and had portrayed the past as a grubby and repressive place. His modern films had tended to present females as an unfathomable and dangerous mystery. With Ryan’s Daughter, all that changed. The erring heroine Rosy (Sarah Miles) is presented as innocently sensual, and the costumes (the red petticoat blowing in the wind) and the settings (the woodland bower where the lovers meet) suggest a female sexuality which is expressive without being predatory. Lean’s style of direction differed from his earlier practice: ‘He stood between them and gazed into their eyes, each in turn. Then he took them aside separately, his hand on one shoulder, placed his mouth an inch from the actor’s ear and whispered some private thought.’32 The sheer intimacy of this suggests the real landscape of the film is that of the big feelings – loss, desire, regret – and indeed Lean asked cameraman Freddie Francis to ‘wring the emotions out of the people’.33 Lean had been inspired by Madame Bovary, and given the degree of cinematic empathy with the heroine, might well have exclaimed ‘Rosy, c’est moi’.34 Ryan’s Daughter is not primarily about Irish politics, nor should it be read as a meditation on patriarchy.35 Rather, this critically reviled film marked a turning-point in its genre. The same cannot be said of Ken Russell’s costume films. They were certainly risk-taking, but were undisciplined. History for Russell was a ship on the high seas, weighted down with precious freight and ripe for plunder. Russell’s costume film achievement was uneven: from the sublime Women in Love, which displays a profound understanding of Lawrence (even its awkwardnesses are his), to the appalling The Music Lovers (1970), which makes cholera seem a good thing. Part of Russell’s desire was to recapture the past, as in The Boy Friend (1972) or Valentino (1977), but he could not distinguish between recapturing it and stamping it with his own identity. Russell’s aim was not so much pour epater les bourgeois; rather, his films use the past as a sort of saturnalia: ‘There are certain points in every film I do, where I deliberately want to shock people into awareness – to turn everything upside down.’36 Paramount was the desire to revive Romanticism and abolish realism once and for all.


Russell’s The Devils (1971) was the film where the input of the designer (Derek Jarman) was most crucial. The Devils was a highly structured film. Anne Skinner, who was Production Secretary, kept scrupulous notes of the filming, which show how controlled the images were: one scene contained ‘a crazy clutter of the medieval mind. Horses’ hooves, human bones, the foetus of a whale.’37 Designer Derek Jarman’s influence was everywhere. Russell said that when he bought rights to Huxley’s novel The Devils of Loudon, it was ‘the trippiest version of an historical event it has ever been my good fortune to happen upon’.38 But the visual ‘trips’ came from Jarman’s sets, which were elemental and bare. Rigorously surreal, they carried the main burden of the tale: that Grandier (Oliver Reed) exemplified the new Modernity in his desire for sexual freedom and local autonomy. Jarman’s papers provide evidence of his extensive input. Like Russell, he was ‘not even thinking of it in realistic terms’.39 He intervened in matters of shot sequence and emotional tone, and was consulted throughout.40 So the representation of the historical process – innovation set in motion by individuals who may be sacrificed but must be celebrated – was the result of a dual authorship. It looks as though the seismic change in film finance brought about a radical destabilization in costume film. The crisis encouraged risk-taking (and occasionally desperate) behaviour. In British culture, conditions of seeming emergency often produce a recourse to the past, as a source of stimulus or nurture. But there is more to it than that. It looks as though the really innovatory costume work in the 1970s – those films which transformed what the genre had hitherto been capable of doing – was achieved when the director had sufficient status to challenge his sponsors and orchestrate his resources. Either that, or the producer had to be relatively inexperienced, and in the chaos that ensued, important film texts might be produced by happenstance. The early career of David Puttnam is a case in point, with the vexed but productive relationship with Ken Russell’s Mahler and Lisztomania.41 Smaller outfits like Hammer, with established distribution outlets, were more likely to produce costume films which were residual in their approach, and it is to them that we should now turn.

Low-status costume films In the 1970s, a substantial number of costume films fell into the cheap-and-cheerful category. These were either horror films (primarily from Hammer) or Carry On comedies. Both were predictable programme-fillers aimed at audiences who knew what to expect from

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the production companies. The Carry On films, produced by Peter Rogers and directed by Gerald Thomas, continued their 1960s trajectory of deploying history as a means of encouraging the audience to feel confident about their cultural inheritance.42 Carry On Up the Jungle (1970), Carry On Henry (1970) and Carry On Dick (1974) refer to cinematic (rather than social) history, and they present a residual aristocratic/working-class alliance which displaces or mocks middle-class values. Carry On Dick had scripting and censorship problems.43 In spite of these, the film presents a seamless continuity with the 1930s Gainsborough film Dr Syn, in which the parson is a combination of Dick Turpin and Robin Hood. The Carry On histories celebrate a submerged tradition, in which the life of the body and the culture of the residuum are celebrated. Hammer films of the 1970s performed a different cultural task, but still had a continuity with the studio’s earlier practice in the way class symbolism and sexual taboo were deployed. However, changes in working practices in the studio led to a transformation of the ways in which history was deployed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the studio had operated a rigorous form of production control, and only Terence Fisher had been able to develop a degree of artistic autonomy. His films picked their way with some finesse through a Manichean world of structuring antinomies. In the 1970s, Fisher still exerted directorial control over his films; the First Draft Screenplay of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) shows clear evidence of his deletions and additional script pages.44 But Fisher’s star was on the wane, and the old working methods at Hammer were in decline from the late 1960s. There was no longer such producer control over scripts and visual style. The studio’s films in the 1970s fell into two categories: the workaday and the innovatory. In the first category, journeymen directors used the historical setting in a residual manner, and combined the lubricious with the forensic. Jimmy Sangster’s Horror of Frankenstein (1970) had a camp delivery of Frankenstein’s butchery and patchwork, and the manner of his Lust for a Vampire (1970) smooths over the difference between past and present. The best example of this residual category is Robert Young’s Vampire Circus (1972), which deploys the taboos of vampirism, aristocratic excess, incest, paedophilia and necrophilia in a manner that evokes utter disavowal. The film implies that these are horrors, but that we know them well. These films rely, therefore, on the audience’s recognition of the films’ archaism. Other directors at Hammer developed the costume/horror cycle in new ways. Peter Sasdy constructed films in which the hypocrisy of previous ages was exposed. Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) is a meditation


on the Victorian paterfamilias, and Hands of the Ripper (1971) expresses anxiety about the way tainted father/daughter relations from the past can trickle through to damage the present. Countess Dracula (1970) can be interpreted as a study of the destructive power of the mother; but it can also be read as an expression of anxiety about diseased families. It presents the contradictions which the untrammelled aristocracy can usher in: between mother and daughter, between old and young, between ratified and unratified coupling. In films of this category, such contradictions are presented as destructive. In previous Hammers, they were presented as dynamic and productive. Roy Ward Baker directed The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) which also extended the parameters of the costume genre. The first film showed more nudity than Hammer had done previously. More importantly, it dealt in an intense way with the pains of social exclusion; the lesbian vampire (Ingrid Pitt) is agonizingly set apart. The second film provides a powerfully Freudian rereading of Stevenson’s tale, and argues that the male and female halves of the protagonist must destroy each other. The problem was that Baker had a realist interpretation of character motivation.45 This accorded ill with the expressionist use of sets and costume, and produced a rich but confused texture. There were, of course, other studios in the 1970s which specialized in costume horror. Tigon made Satan’s Skin (aka Blood on Satan’s Claw, 1970) and The Creeping Flesh (1973), Tyburn made Legend of the Werewolf (1975) and The Ghoul (1975) and Amicus made I, Monster (1971). These films were all visceral with an historical gloss, but their makers had neither the resources nor the management arrangements which could challenge Hammer’s confidence in dealing with residual motifs, or its ability to throw up uneven but innovatory views of the past.

Marginal histories In the 1970s, cultural production in all media flourished at the margins of the establishment. In radical feature films, history played an important role. The British Film Institute Production Board financed Winstanley (1976), a film which teaches us much about the cultural capital of the leftist avant-garde. Directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, Winstanley is a bracing experience. Its deals with the Diggers of the seventeenth century, and their struggles for commonalty. The original script begins with a Romantic vision à la Kubla Khan, and a warning

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paean about those women ‘whose beauty … inspires men’s dreams because it is deep enough to contain them’.46 Both these are excised from the final film, probably because they might have a softening effect. Brownlow’s notes insist that Winstanley was based on historical facts presented by Marxist historian Christopher Hill.47 These politics were combined with an extreme commitment to verisimilitude – the actors growing and reaping their own crops. Winstanley’s visual style is stark yet powerful, and it combines libertarian politics with composed images, the whole welded together by Eisensteinian editing (indeed, the opening sequence is intercut with the music from Alexander Nevsky). Winstanley was a high priority with the BFI Production Board, and it did well on non-commercial circuits and at film festivals.48 The Board supported the project unreservedly: ‘despite the mass of admirable English historical films, there are hardly any which give you the sense of having lived through the event. We will try to ensure that this film provides the experience.’49 Sebastiane was released in the same year as Winstanley, and provides a startling contrast, being a florid, sensual and explicitly homosexual film. Based on the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, the film celebrates the hero’s piercings and was an immediate niche success. Jarman and his associates raised funds privately from the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, David Hockney and Lord Kenilworth, among others.50 Winstanley was in production over the course of a year; Sebastiane had three weeks. It was in Latin with subtitles, because Jarman wanted ‘to eliminate the horrors of the normal English historical film – that is epitomised by all English costume dramas’.51 Sebastiane was rigorously researched, and the Jarman Papers contain extensive ‘maps’ of the events and religious cults of the ancient world, drawn by Dom Sylvestre Houedard, a Benedictine monk.52 Jarman had clearly internalized this historical scholarship, but had transformed it in a creative way. He wrote that ‘James [Whale] wants an oil-and-vanilla film full of Steve Reeves muscle-men working out in locker rooms. Paul [Humfress] wants a very serious art film, slow and ponderous. I want a poetic film full of mystery. The debate rages.’53 Jarman clearly won, since the film contains evocations of the wilder shores of mysticism, tender representations of gay love-making, a poignant sense of the tedium of exile, all shot through with a precise lyricism evoking how it felt to be a Roman soldier in Diocletian’s time. But of course, with a modern spin: one of the destructive harpies at the court is ‘Maria Domus Alba’ (Mary Whitehouse).


Conclusion Between the student revolutions of 1968 and the election in 1979 of the Thatcher administration, film-makers working in Britain used the past in different ways. In the early years of the decade, American producers insisted, through the size and production values of their films, that in the past Europe had permitted tyrannical rulers, because there were insufficient checks on inherited power. I have suggested that these films could also be read as critiques of American domestic government. In general, the withdrawal of American capital left the British industry to fall back on its own resources. The National Film Finance Corporation initially backed a rag-bag of costume films; but at the end of the decade, it was responsible for inaugurating the major innovation of what critics have dubbed the ‘heritage film’. The Europeans, which the NFFC sponsored, presented history in the same way as its later kin: a safe place, full of pretty fabrics and inexpressible emotions – hot glances in cold rooms. No doubt this would be a welcome relief to those taxed by the febrile excesses of The Devils and Sebastiane. Of course, not all official funding gave rise to innovations which pleased large audiences. Winstanley tells us a lot about the aesthetics of the radical left, but nothing about popular taste. But very many costume films were made, and some were extremely profitable. Why did film-makers and audiences turn to costume films with such enthusiasm in the 1970s? The social function of popular costume film has always been twofold. Audiences have used history as a means of symbolic displacement from contemporary struggles about class and gender, or they have indulged in nostalgic escapism. But something else was going on in the 1970s. It was a period of profound ideological transformation, in which the innovations of the 1960s were being digested. I suggest that films like Ryan’s Daughter and The Devils were driving through new ideas in a memorable form – notions that female desire might be different but powerful, or that there could be a modernist spirituality without benefit of clergy. Or indeed – most revolutionary of all – that the inhabitants of the past were not like us, but differently constituted. Hence, in a whole range of films, the device of irony functions not as a means of distanciation, but as a means of rapprochement. Through irony’s hesitant, self-doubting tones, in films such as Barry Lyndon, Royal Flash, even Monty Python and the Holy Grail, audiences were invited to recognize that the past was different, but that they could still enter it – that it was dead, and yet still living. It is this profound sense of the fort/da element of history which characterizes British costume films of the 1970s.

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39

Notes This chapter has been supported by a Major Research Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council on British cinema in the 1970s. 1. The proportion of historical films to overall British film output are 25% in 1970: 24% in 1971: 19% in 1972: 12% in 1973: 13% in 1974: 18% in 1975: 20% in 1976: 19% in 1977: 11% in 1978: 16% in 1979: and 13% in 1980. Information compiled from Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue, 1895–1985 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1986). There are some discrepancies when Gifford’s 1970s film figures are compared with Linda Wood, British Films, 1971–81 (London: British Film Institute, 1983), but for reasons of consistency I have stuck to Gifford throughout. 2. The proportion of costume films to overall British film output are 10% in 1960: 6% in 1961: 8% in 1962: 5% in 1963: 10% in 1964: 17% in 1965: 11% in 1966: 9% in 1967: 9% in 1968: and 17% in 1969. Information compiled from Gifford, The British Film Catalogue. 3. Sue Harper, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie Revisited: British Costume Film in the 1950s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1997), pp. 133–43. 4. Bill Ballieu and John Goodchild, The British Film Business (Chichester: John Willey, 2002), p. 90. 5. Ibid., pp. 95–6. 6. Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government, 1927–84 (London: British Film Institute, 1985), pp. 239–40. 7. Ernest Betts, The Film Business: A History of British Cinema, 1986–1972 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), p. 287. 8. Ballieu and Goodchild, The British Film Business, p. 87. 9. See Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London: Harrap, 1985), pp. 113–43. 10. Ken Russell, Directing Films: The Director’s Art from Script to Cutting Room (Virginia: Brassey’s, 2001), pp. 18, 20, 36. 11. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 5–34. 12. NFFC Annual Report for the Year Ending 31 March 1970, p. 6. 13. NFFC Reports for Year Ending 31 March 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978. 14. NFFC Report for Year Ending 31 March 1979, p. 5. 15. Ibid., p. 9. 16. They dropped from 193 million in 1970 to 101 million in 1980, and cinema sites dropped from 1,492 in 1970 to 942 in 1980. See British Cinema and Film Statistics (Screen Digest, 1990), pp. 1, 6. 17. Kinematograph Weekly, 1 December 1970, p. 6. Other British costume moneymakers, according to Kine Weekly on 19 December 1970, p. 7, were Alfred the Great, Scars of Dracula, The Horror of Frankenstein, The Vampire Lovers, The Virgin and the Gypsy and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. 18. Screen Digest, 1971, p. 177. 19. Screen Digest, 1972, p. 187. 20. Screen Digest, 1975, p. 211; and Screen Digest, 1976, p. 220.

40 The New Film History 21. Screen Digest, 1979, p. 247; and Screen Digest, 1980, p. 260. 22. Publicity material for Anne of the Thousand Days, in British Film Institute Library. 23. Variety, 8 April 1970. Irving Allen spent three years on the script of Nicholas before he hired a director (The Guardian, 27 November 1971). 24. Evening Standard, 25 March 1959. 25. In Spiegel’s own publicity material, held on microfiche in the British Film Institute Library. 26. Interview with Burton in Films and Filming, April 1970, p. 22. 27. Carl Foreman Cuttings Collection, Special Collections, British Film Institute Library. 28. Press Book for Young Winston, in British Film Institute Library. 29. Publicity material for The Go-Between, in British Film Institute Library. 30. Losey Papers, Special Collection, British Film Institute, Item 18, Production Information Manual 3. 31. Ibid., Item 18, Character List. 32. Press Book of Ryan’s Daughter, held in British Film Institute Library. 33. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean (London: Faber, 1996), p. 565. 34. Ibid., p. 553. 35. As suggested by Fidelma Farley in ‘Ireland, the Past, the British Cinema: Ryan’s Daughter (1970)’, in Clare Monk and Amy Sergeant (eds), British Historical Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 129–43. 36. Gordon Gow, ‘Shock treatment’, Films and Filming, July 1970, p. 8. 37. Anne Skinner Papers, Special Collections, British Film Institute Library, Box 6. 38. Ken Russell, Directing Films, p. 41. 39. Derek Jarman Papers, Special Collections, British Film Institute Library, Box 25, Item 8. 40. Ibid.; also Box 47, Item 2. 41. Andrew Yule, David Puttnam: The Story So Far (London: Sphere Books, 1988), pp. 66–7, 98–101. 42. See Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Camping on the Borders’, in Monk and Sergeant (eds), British Historical Cinema, pp. 92–109. 43. Gerald Thomas Papers, Special Collections, British Film Institute, Carry On Dick, Boxes 1 and 2. 44. This script, dated March 1972, is located in the Terence Fisher Papers, Special Collections, British Film Institute. 45. Geoff Mayer, Roy Ward Baker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 175. 46. British Film Institute Unpublished Script, S7366. 47. Ian Dawson Papers, Special Collections, British Film Institute Library. 48. British Film Institute Production Board Files, Special Collections, British Film Institute, Winstanley, File N/61. This file also contains returns and overseas reviews. 49. British Film Institute Production Board Files, Box no. 3. 50. Daily Express, 3 February 1976. 51. Jarman Papers, Sebastiane Papers, Item 2b. 52. Ibid., Item 4. 53. Ibid., Box 23, Notebook, February 1975. For a fuller account of the film, see Rowland Wymer, Derek Jarman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 36–48.

3 Gallipoli (1981): ‘A Poignant Search for National Identity’ Mark Connelly

Film plays a crucial role in the formation of national identity, and an equally important part in providing interpretations of history.1 Many people who have no formal knowledge of history will gain an understanding of the past from film and television. Nations often identify themselves by glorifying key moments in their history, and film and television interpretations then bring these events to life in a more immediate way than any other form of communication. Peter Weir’s Gallipoli is a film about an historical event that played a key role in shaping Australia’s perception of itself, and its qualities, as a nation. To Australian and world audiences, the film took on an added significance for it also marked the coming-of-age of the Australian film industry. Few moments of Australian history had ever been put on film before, and so Gallipoli brought to world audiences an Australia shaped by an Australian cast and crew. First, it is necessary to establish a few facts about the historical incident the film portrays, the allied expedition to the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915. On 25 April 1915 troops from Britain, India, Australia, New Zealand and France landed either side of the Dardanelles in Turkey. The landings were undertaken in order to drive Germany’s Turkish ally out of the war. Poor planning plagued the expedition, and the allied forces found themselves trapped close to the beaches. Eventually the allies decided to abandon the campaign, and the Gallipoli peninsula was evacuated in January 1916. These simple facts do not, however, tell the whole story, for a complex cultural phenomenon was created by the campaign which had a deep and lasting effect on Australian society. The Gallipoli landings marked Australia’s debut in the Great War, and placed Australia in an important position in world affairs for the first time. Australian newspaper coverage stressed the intense bravery of the ANZAC (Australia 41


and New Zealand Army Corps) troops, and the terms Gallipoli and Anzac soon took on a hallowed aura. Extremely influential in the shaping of Australian opinion was the journalist, and later Australian official historian, C. E. W. Bean. Bean was deeply moved by his experiences and devoted the rest of his life to the glorification of Australia. Intrinsic to his writings was the idea that Australia had created a society superior to any other in the British Empire, and that a distinctive Australian way of life had created the world’s finest soldiers. By contrast, Bean took an extremely poor view of Britain. He condemned the motherland for its oppressive class system that had created an unimaginative nation, although he was careful never to attack the concept of imperial unity. Bean’s vision of Australia was one of vast expanses peopled by tough, independent, farming families. He conjured up pictures of roving stockmen who rode their horses across great distances as they nurtured their sheep and cattle, tested by the terrain and native wildlife. These experiences created a race that respected nature and understood all the moods of wind and weather. Australian men then took these qualities into the army, making them resourceful soldiers on easy terms with their officers. In complete contrast to the British, bonds of mutual respect united Australian officers and men, and an officer’s commission was given because of ability not because of the right accent and education.2 Bean’s romantic writing set the standard for all popular Australian interpretations of the Great War, and became the essential keystone of Australian national identity. However, as Linda Colley has pointed out, no form of national identity is formed entirely by positive statements as to what it is: a nation also defines itself by carefully stating what it is not.3 And in this particular case the crucial element was not being British. Australia had carefully separated itself from the motherland and, not only that, this young nation took the traumatic experiences of the Great War, and of Gallipoli in particular, as proof of its superiority over the old world. In this complex process of evolving national identity and iconography, Gallipoli became the essential founding myth of the nation. Brave Australian soldiers were martyred by arrogant, inefficient British generals. Every time the Australians managed to wrestle a victory against the odds, it was thrown away by the incompetent British High Command or inferior British troops. Such a vision of the war allowed Australians to find a positive message at a time of emotional upheaval. Every year since 1916, Australia has observed 25 April as a national holiday which is marked by solemn services of remembrance across the whole country.

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Australians are reminded of their proud inheritance, won by the sacrifice of so many of its young. Thus the facts about Gallipoli only tell part of the historical story, for enmeshed in every fact are the branches of a mythological thicket which has had a fundamental impact on the way Australians view their past. Gallipoli can therefore be seen as a link in an iconographic chain going back to Bean and the initial reactions to the campaign. Its iconic significance, then, makes it easier to understand why the director Peter Weir was drawn to the subject. Weir’s ambition and moral bravery are also apparent, for in attempting a cinematic rendition of such a famous event he was taking a great risk. Australian audiences might have regarded the topic as so sacred that no one film could encapsulate it adequately. Any failure to live up to the epic grandeur of the event could be construed as an insult. Placing the Dardanelles expedition into this wider context, then, also serves to create the agenda for analysing the significance of Gallipoli as a historical text. The film can be used not only to assess the historical accuracy of the representation, but what it reveals about Australian perceptions of the campaign and the whole Anzac phenomenon. Peter Weir’s conception of Gallipoli was undoubtedly influenced by his own Australian upbringing and the debate about Australian values which raged in the mid-1970s. In 1965 Australia formally entered the Vietnam War on the side of South Vietnam and the United States. As in the United States, the war sparked enormous controversy.4 With the nation questioning the war, the value and relevance of the Anzac legacy was dragged into the debate. Just as Australia was emerging from this dark period, its cinema was coming of age, and Peter Weir was its fastest emerging talent. His Picnic at Hanging Rock (1977) met with widespread international acclaim. Set in Edwardian Australia, this dark tale about the mysterious disappearance of an adolescent girl revealed Weir’s interest in landscape, and in particular its impact on Australian society.5 As an Australian film-maker Weir’s own personal motivations appear to have been both influenced by, and reflective of, the wider Australian desire to rediscover itself in the aftermath of the traumas of Vietnam. In addition, he was making a definite comment about the emergence of Australian cinema that was shaking off Hollywood domination. In an interview with Cineaste soon after Gallipoli was completed he noted: ‘The films now being made in Australia are giving Australians a view of themselves they’ve never had before, a feeling of context and specialness.’6 Australian ‘specialness’ was certainly a crucial part of the Anzac legend, and Weir’s attraction to the many stories connected with Gallipoli was


long standing. He later noted that he had long sought a satisfactory way of dealing with Gallipoli, but it was not until he found the story of a young soldier who sprinted at the enemy lines that he found his point of entry.7 Weir then began sketches for the story before inviting the screenwriter, David Williamson, to join him. Williamson’s objective was undoubtedly that of reconnecting Australians to the original spirit of Anzac: ‘a country, for its own psychological well-being needs to generate myths, otherwise it doesn’t feel whole.’8 In fact, trying to dissect the myth became counter-productive in creative terms. Weir explained: ‘despite careful research the core of the myth of Anzac eluded us, and draft followed draft. It wasn’t until we stopped trying to penetrate the myth that things began to fall into place.’9 Historical advice was then provided by the Australian historian, Bill Gammage, author of the highly successful book, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (1978). Gammage’s approach was entirely in tune with the political direction of Australia during the 1970s, and the thinking of Williamson and Weir. His work emphasized the special qualities of Australian troops. When Gallipoli is placed against this background, it can be stated that it is not so much a reworking of an agreed history, but the resurrection of a legend that was driven by contemporary preoccupations. Legend and history were never entirely distinguishable elements in the making of Gallipoli. Weir and his team took their understanding of the past to be the history of it, and set about ensuring absolute authenticity in the production. As part of his initial research, Weir visited the long-deserted Gallipoli battlefields and found an old Eno’s Fruit Salts bottle discarded by an Australian soldier. This curious little souvenir was later woven into the story when Frank (Mel Gibson) unwraps a parcel from home and finds this once famous patent digestion aid among the gifts sent to him by well-wishers back home. Unable to film on location at Gallipoli due to financial and logistical reasons, Weir carefully scouted out alternatives and settled on South Australia. He eventually settled for the area around Port Lincoln and Adelaide because he was impressed by their similarity to Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. He then sought to replicate the original photographs of the campaign in the set designs and scenery. By filming entirely within Australia, and by using his camera to create such a sense of continuity between Australia and Turkey, it could be argued that, visually, Weir linked the two nations. Both nations share heat, dust, sand and burning blue skies: and the fate of both nations was to be dragged into wars not of their own making. Unlike Australia, however, the Gallipoli sky can only be seen when a man looks upwards. Weir used close-ups to emphasize the claustrophobic world of

Mark Connelly 45

the trenches and command tents in which men are lit by the oily light of lanterns. Significantly, the only other time close-ups are used consistently is in interiors. The mise-en-scène emphasizes that true Australians are the product of open, natural spaces, and demand it to feel free. Ensuring authenticity of approach from all concerned was the task of Bill Gammage. He worked with the entire cast and crew, ensuring that all were carefully coached and induced into the legend. Revealing that the Anzac myth had indeed slipped a little because of the controversies of recent years, Gammage admitted that few of the extras had much hard knowledge about Gallipoli, but he implied that the spirit of Anzac was not so much lost as dormant, and it was soon brought back to life through his lectures. He later recalled that the men became determined to do homage to their ancestors. ‘They were taking on the mantle of Gallipoli.’10 Significantly, Gammage thought the attitude of the extras was a reflection of their background: they were all local men and not cosmopolitan Sydneysiders. Whether wittingly or not, Gammage was repeating Bean’s identification of true Australian values with the rural population. Weir was equally moved by the veneration of the extras, which he felt was heightened after the many hours spent shooting the landing sequences. Creating this dramatic scene required an arduous schedule that lasted all night. Eventually everyone was exhausted: I said: ‘I’m sorry it’s been five hours, you’re released now and you might go home and get a bit of sleep.’ And one of the extras said indignantly: ‘Don’t be sorry. We only spent five hours, the real Anzacs had to go up to the hills under fire, march an hour and a half, then try to sleep with only a thin blanket over them.’11 For many of those involved in the production of Gallipoli, the film took on a greater significance than that of just another film. It was to be the recreating of a national epic. The film itself reflected the Australian myth of Gallipoli as well as contemporary Australia’s desire to be seen as a great nation at ease with itself. Bean’s histories were given a 1970s gloss, and the dividing line between history and legend was blurred still further. Australia emerges in the film as a country driven by its youthful dynamism and populated by a people determined to come to grips with its dramatic landscapes and natural extremes. This positive enthusiasm is symbolized by the figure of Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee), a naïve farmer’s son from Western Australia. Archy is a child of the frontier who can both ride and run ‘like the wind’. Archy’s Anglo-Saxon ancestry is stressed by his blonde hair


and blue eyes, which is at great variance to the leathery, black skin of his aboriginal friend, Zac. But like Zac, he is at one with nature, and walks confidently across the great salt plains in the burning heat, knowing that at evening the flocks of cockatoos will indicate watering holes. His friends on his father’s farm are all ‘rough diamonds’: hard men who indulge in boisterous games. Les, one of the cowboys, challenges Archy to a race across country; only Les states that he will ride, whereas Archy will have to run barefoot. The audience is already aware of Archy’s running prowess, but such a feat seems almost superhuman. Archy gamely takes on the bet, but on condition that Les rides bareback. The race soon becomes one of grim endurance for Archy as the burning rocks and gorse smash his feet. However, Les is dismounted and so Archy reaches home the victor. He wins his moral victory, but at great physical cost. Naïve, innocent endurance from the likeable farmer’s son acts as the symbolic prefiguring of the national test of character on the shores of Gallipoli half a world away. Emphasizing the rural myth of Australia still further is the fact that Archy enlists in the 10th Light Horse Regiment, joining up with his old friends and acquaintances. It becomes clear that the Light Horse encapsulates the spirit of the nation and, at the end of the film, when the men are ordered to carry out one last, suicidal assault, their commander tells them: ‘I want you to remember who you are. The 10th Light Horse. Men from Western Australia. Don’t forget it!’ Urban men, by contrast, are not explored in as much detail. City life did not figure significantly in Australian identity, according to Bean and many other Australian cultural commentators, and so it appears in Gallipoli. Frank Dunn is a city man, and a great contrast to his friend, Archy. Cocky, fast-talking, dark-haired and olive complexioned, he is less assured of his patriotic and imperial values. He does his duty, but is dragged to it by Archy. Frank’s greatest disappointment and humiliation in the film, aside from his inability to stop the final doomed assault, comes when he fails the ultimate test of Australian manhood – that of being able to master a horse. Wishing to join the Light Horse, he needs to reveal some riding ability, and so is given a few brief lessons by Archy. But when it comes to his riding test the horse fails completely to respond, leaving Frank utterly humiliated. Visually it is a crucial scene in the film, as it marries up with an earlier scene. Just as at the rural athletics meeting where Frank and Archy first meet, Frank is shown to be ill at ease in this world of green fields, with its unbroken horizon gently turning powder blue in the late afternoon light. Queues of men in broad bush hats patiently wait their turn for a horse trial. Their shirts and jackets give them away

Mark Connelly 47

as farm labourers and outback dwellers. Weir’s use of long and medium shots emphasize a world of broad horizons and vast landscapes. This reinforcement of rural stereotypes serves to divert the audience from historical facts. Most Australian soldiers in the Great War were not, in fact, men of the outback but were actually city dwellers, and, significantly, a large number were very recent migrants from Great Britain and therefore had not been exposed to an Australian lifestyle and culture.12 Australian exuberance is also emphasized, and it is made clear that it is forged by rugged self-reliance. This is shown to the audience in the trench scenes where Australian soldiers are seen improvising grenades, and in their desire to turn everything into a sporting contest: Archy’s brief life ends with him sprinting towards the Turkish lines, and as the machine gun bullets rip into his chest, his head flings back and his arms are outstretched, hinting both at the athlete breaking the finishing tape and the martyr crucified for his beliefs. Sporting motifs are important throughout. Training is taken most seriously when it involves an interstate Australian Rules football match; life on the Gallipoli peninsula includes light-hearted marksmanship competitions with the Turks. Such endeavours also serve to underline the outdoor masculinity of Australian life. The legendary spirit of Anzac ‘mateship’ and ‘larrikinism’ (the indomitable spirit of the Anzacs) is brought to cinematic life. Archy and Frank are the firmest of friends, although divided by background and upbringing. Frank’s friends then readily accept Archy, even though they regard the cavalry as a little bit snobbish in one of the film’s rare glances at social differences in Australian society. When the men swim on the beach of Anzac Cove, their perfect physiques blend into the honey-coloured rock of the cliff face and the azure blue of the sea and sky. At this point Weir’s camera seems to be hinting at Classical art and legends, for Gallipoli marked the site of Troy, and the men become the latter-day descendants of Agamemnon’s hoplites. This allusion is quickly shattered by the horror of modern war, as a barrage forces the men to dive. Suddenly their flesh becomes extremely vulnerable as hot shrapnel tears through the water. A shard of metal cuts one of the soldiers, but the scene is not played as tragedy. Instead, it is one of affirmation of Australian male culture, as the injured soldier emerges smiling due to the fact that he can now claim the unofficial ‘insurance’ money provided by all swimmers. Shaped by this culture of masculine camaraderie, which, the film hints, surpasses the love of women, the Australian troops are shown as brave and loyal. Three times the men of the Light Horse charge the Turkish trenches despite the inevitability of disaster. Frank is excluded


from the action as he is serving as battalion runner. He gains this job due to his running ability, and is recommended by Archy who knows that Frank is apprehensive: Major Barton: Is he scared? Archy: No, sir! … Just a bit. Major Barton: Who isn’t son? Barton’s acceptance of Frank’s fears reveals a more complex masculinity. Williamson’s script seems to be implying that Australian masculinity is honourable and intelligent; it is not mindless machismo. The real test of manhood comes in conquering fear. And Frank does just that by taking the most dangerous shortcuts through the trenches in his attempts to deliver the vital messages. The deaths of the Australian soldiers leave the audience with deliberately engineered mixed feelings. Peter Weir wanted viewers of Gallipoli to celebrate the nation that produced such brave men and salute their martial deeds, but he also wanted the audience to be uncomfortable about the causes of the bloodshed, and the very act of bloodshed itself.13 Achieving such a result effectively was a very tricky task, and created contradictory historical judgements. In effect Gallipoli both celebrates and denigrates war and warriors at exactly the same moment, and finds a scapegoat for this moral problem in the British. As noted, Bean was critical of the motherland, but never doubted the glory of the British imperial mission. Gallipoli, by contrast, paints a portrait of a naïve Australia duped into war by misplaced bonds of loyalty, which were then abused by Britain. In an earlier scene Frank is bemused by Archy’s desire to join the army, and tells him, ‘it’s not our war’. As the two men emerge from the burning heat of the desert, they come across an itinerant trader with his wares packed on a camel. The trader, a true denizen of the outback, asks the two men where they are going. Archy explains that he is off to join-up as Australia is at war with Germany. The traveller asks how the war came about, and tells them that he once knew a German. By reducing the war to this level of personal interactions, he implies both the pointlessness of the struggle and Australia’s distance from it. Archy’s knowledge of the war is quite vague but he is sure that the Germans have to be stopped somewhere or they might get here. Looking round at the burning wilderness of the vast desert the traveller says, ‘And they’re welcome to it.’ It is a final, damning indictment of the war’s justification, and one that underlines the phlegmatic, no-nonsense side of the Australian national character.

Mark Connelly 49

Frank’s Irish-born father reminds him that the English executed his grandfather, thus introducing the shadow of British colonial excesses to the story. Frank and his friends share this perception. When they reach the Australian training camp at Cairo, for example, they waste no time in mocking British officers. They hire donkeys and ride behind mounted British officers yelling, ‘I say Carruthers, tally-ho, after the fox!’ The monocled British officers respond by muttering disgustedly at the lack of discipline in the Australian army. Weir’s interpretation thus stresses the idea of Australia’s inherently egalitarian values by contrasting the youthful exuberance of Frank and his friends with the repressive elitism of the British officers. Such anti-British sentiments reach their apogee in the final scenes of the film. In order to assist a British landing at Suvla Bay, the 10th Light Horse are instructed to attack the Turkish trenches as a diversion. The attack goes horribly wrong, and yet one officer, who speaks with an upper-class British accent even if his uniform is Australian, stubbornly insists that the fresh attacks should be mounted even when information comes in confirming that the British are safely ashore and are ‘just sitting around drinking cups of tea’. This emotive connection between British blundering and Australian suffering is another deliberate decision to stray from historical fact: the Australian attack on which this scene is based was actually staged at the behest of the New Zealanders, and was planned, executed and ordered by Australian officers. However, Weir and his collaborators clearly felt that close attention to historical detail would undermine both the drama and the credibility of the story. Gallipoli tells its audience that Australia was born in this betrayal of innocence, but the sacrifice of the best of the infant nation created an immediate heritage for all Australians. Australia’s national innocence is doubted only in the scenes that acknowledge, but do not explore, racism. The film’s early sequences show the abuse of Zac, Archy’s aboriginal friend, and Les pointedly asks Archy whether he ‘prefers the company of blacks’. Yet Zac is not excluded fully and Archy is happy to count him among his friends. More problematic is the treatment of the Egyptians. Gallipoli implies that all Egyptians were cheats, who fleeced the innocent Australians. When one of Frank’s friends confronts a shopkeeper who apparently swindled him, the men comically smash up his shop until he pays them off, while Snowy (David Argue), another racially pure, blonde Australian, says, ‘You’re dealing with Australians here, you know.’ It is only then that Barney suddenly admits, ‘I think it’s the wrong shop.’ Rather than emphasizing Australian racism, however, the scene is played for laughs. Frank and his friends are presented as boisterous young men who have


indulged in some over-enthusiastic horseplay. During the 1980s, white Australians became much more sensitive and aware of the issue of race and colour. Watching Gallipoli reminds us that in 1981 the debate was not quite fully formulated, and white Australia was much more interested in clarifying its position in the wake of the divisive Vietnam War. Gallipoli was a huge box-office success in Australia, which both reflected and reinforced the revival of interest in Anzac history and values. Australian cinema-goers eagerly embraced the film, which quickly became the most successful Australian film ever released in the home market.14 Although it would eventually lose that prime position to Crocodile Dundee (1986) and other subsequent releases, Gallipoli continues to stand as a well-recognized icon of Australian national identity.15 In September 1981, a month after the film’s release, the National War Memorial in Canberra reported 50 per cent more visitors than in the same month the previous year. Enlistment in the army increased, and schools and universities reported more students were taking courses based on Australian military history. In addition, there was a surge of new books, television dramatizations and films. Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years sold in higher numbers in 1981, and a similarly populist work, Patsy Adam-Smith’s The Anzacs, went into a paperback edition of 15,000 copies in August 1981, which required rapid reprinting. Two major television productions followed, 1915 (1985), and Anzacs (1985), to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, and in 1987 the seventieth anniversary of the charge of the Australian cavalry at the Battle of Gaza was marked by a film, The Lighthorsemen.16 None of these cultural products showed much variation from the main themes of Gallipoli. Australia was always presented as a youthful nation, emerging from the war with a common identity and one distinct from the duplicitous British. Australian film critics also embraced the film, and wrote highly favourable reviews, challenging Australians to rediscover the Anzac spirit within themselves The film critic Philip Adams observed that the film’s central theme – the betrayal of youth and idealism by corrupt authority figures – resonated strongly in the present day; he ‘watched the faces of the young audience and saw them yearning for a world in which they could believe in the transcendental power of an abstract idea … where once more people could have the sort of faith in values, institutions and themselves that would give them such a rush of courage and conviction.’17 The Australian film critic Brian McFarlane noted the film’s bleak ending, stating: ‘For a change, a freeze-frame ending means something: the final frame leaves us with a clear sense of lives cut short

Mark Connelly 51

in utter futility.’18 McFarlane summed up the irony at the heart of Gallipoli and the whole Anzac legend: glorious sacrifice born out of innocent, but misguided, motivations. Gallipoli also enjoyed considerable box-office success in the United States and Britain, where it raised the international profile of Australian cinema and quickly accelerated the careers of both Mel Gibson and Peter Weir. Having appeared in Mad Max (1979), Gibson had already established his name in Australia and with aficionados of Australian film, but it was Gallipoli that catapulted him to fame. The role of Frank also set the pattern for much of the rest of his career. Frank’s transformation, from being a disinterested observer to a passionate fighter, was one that many subsequent characters played by Gibson would undergo, and his commoner’s mistrust of patrician authority figures also became a central feature of Gibson’s star persona. Gibson’s next role, playing the rebellious Fletcher Christian to Anthony Hopkins’ imperious Captain Bligh in The Bounty (1984), confirmed this trend, which continued with the series of Lethal Weapon films (1987, 1989, 1992 and 1998) and with Air America (1990), Braveheart (1995) and The Patriot (2000). For the director, Peter Weir, the film was also a springboard to Hollywood fame. Weir’s interest in misplaced causes, power, and enclosed communities and social structures was also apparent in such films as Witness (1985), Mosquito Coast (1986), Dead Poets Society (1989), The Truman Show (1999), and Master and Commander (2003). The task of selling Gallipoli to foreign audiences posed quite a challenge because of the very Australian nature of the tale. Audiences outside Australia were unlikely to be attuned to the significance of the Anzac myth. Indeed, the screen trailer for the film acknowledged this with the catch-phrase, ‘From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget.’19 The American entertainment industry newspaper Variety included a detailed description of the Anzac legend in its notes in order to guide cinema professionals and other interested parties, but then noted the crucial point: ‘However, it must be noted that outside Australia the film will have to stand on its intrinsic merits as sheer dramatic entertainment, and marketing for fullest potential will require more understanding in the adpub [advertising and publicity] department than most product.’20 In Britain, the film buttressed the idea that the Great War was a waste of young men, that was engineered by decrepit upper-class Britons. In the Times, Geoff Brown referred to the loss of so many young men in a ‘brutal battleground’; while another Times critic, David Robinson, deemed the film ‘grand and tragic’.21 At the same time, however, Gallipoli’s portrayal of the noble sacrifice of


youth in wartime solicited concern in a nation going through its own traumas. In 1981 Britain was a nation mired in economic decline. Unemployment was soaring, social discord was evident, the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc was ever more threatening, and the troubles in Northern Ireland sparked questions about the concepts of duty, honour and sacrifice.22 The British author Jill Tweedie wrote to the Melbourne Age stating that: We, here, can no longer afford to admire war games, however heroic they may once have been. We, here, can no longer afford to confuse ignorance and a boyish wish for adventure (clearly depicted in the film) with nobility, patriotism or courage.23 Picking up on this element of patriotic endeavour, Time Out referred to it as ‘Australia’s answer to Chariots of Fire’, another film that mythologized the past in order to provide comfort in the present.24 Others condemned this patriotic element for entirely different reasons. Robert Rhodes James, a Conservative MP and the author of a book on the Gallipoli campaign, was irritated by the Australian chauvinism. He pointed out that the film misinterpreted the British role, and expressed fears that many would accept these inaccuracies as historical facts.25 A different position was adopted by Ivor Davies, an arts reviewer of the Times. He was far more sympathetic about the patriotic element and recognized that it was a deep-felt tribute, and a ‘poignant search for Australian identity’.26 Gallipoli demonstrates the ability of film to focus the thoughts and emotions of an audience when it refashions a myth that stands at the core of a culture. As with many films about history, Gallipoli encouraged contemporary Australians to believe that their forebears were people like themselves, and so it enabled them to empathize with them. The medium of film therefore became a dialogue with the national past, allowing Australians to celebrate their supposedly unique qualities. Through the example of Gallipoli it is therefore possible to see that film is an extremely interesting and complex form of evidence. Investigation of Gallipoli has shown that it was a reworking of an interpretation created at the time of the events it describes. The main instigator of the Anzac legend, C. E. W. Bean, worked as both a journalist and the official historian, which serves to remind us that no form of history, historical document or historian can be considered neutral. Peter Weir’s version served to remind Australians of their roots as a nation at a time when

Mark Connelly 53

national values were contested. Australian audiences brought their cultural maps into the cinema and recognized the landscape displayed before them. The film was regarded as a faithful reproduction of the authentic voice of 1915. In turn, audiences across the world have drawn a similar conclusion, particularly as the film has often been presented as a piece of evidence akin to a genuine, contemporary document in history lessons. Thus, Gallipoli is a film about history in far more ways than one.

Notes 1. See Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 2. For a history of the fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula, see Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915 (Stroud: Tempus, 2001); for the impact of the Anzac legend on Australian society, see Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) and Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 3. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 5–7. 4. For more details on Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, see Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jeffrey Grey and Jeff Doyle (eds), Vietnam: War, Myth and Memory (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992). 5. For a history of modern Australian cinema, see Brian McFarlane, Australian Cinema, 1970–1985 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987). 6. ‘Interview with Peter Weir’, Cineaste, 11:4 (1982), pp. 40–3. 7. Interview with Peter Weir, Gallipoli, DVD VFB 08043. 8. Quoted in Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 192. 9. Bill Gammage, David Williamson and Peter Weir, The Story of Gallipoli. The Film About the Men Who Made a Legend (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1981), p. 6. 10. Ibid., p. 9. 11. Literature and Film Quarterly, 9:4 (1981), pp. 213–17. 12. Peter Simkins, ‘Everyman at War: Recent Interpretations of the Front Line Experience’, in Brian Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 305–7. 13. ‘Interview with Peter Weir’, Cineaste, p. 42. 14. See http://www.afc.gov.au/GTP/mrboxaust.htm Accessed 3 February 2006. 15. See comments from Australian viewers on the Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082432/ Accessed 3 February 2006. 16. See Thomson, Anzac Memories, pp. 192–7. 17. Melbourne Age, 7 August 1981. Quoted in Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 192. 18. Brian McFarlane, ‘Peter Weir’s Gallipoli’, Cinema Papers, 33 (August 1981), pp. 285–6. 19. See trailer on Gallipoli, DVD VFB 08043. 20. Variety, 5 August 1981, p. 18.

54 The New Film History 21. The Times, ‘Preview’, 11 December 1981. 22. See Glyn Williams and John Ramsden, Ruling Britannia: A Political History of British History, 1688–1988 (Harlow: Longman, 1990), pp. 475–96. 23. Melbourne Age, 22 August 1981. Quoted in Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 192. 24. The Time Out Film Guide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 222. 25. The Times, 19 December 1981. 26. The Times, 15 September 1981.

4 ‘This Ship is England’: History, Politics and National Identity in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) James Chapman

A characteristic of the New Film History, as opposed to the old, is that it regards all films, whatever their critical or cultural status, as worthy objects of analysis. One of the significant intellectual developments in the discipline over the last two decades has been the reclamation of popular cinema from the culturally low-brow and ideologically irredeemable terrain into which it had been consigned, first by the Frankfurt School and then by the Screen ascendancy of high theory. Nowhere is the congruence of film history and film theory better exemplified than in the emergence of the historical film at the centre of debates around nationhood and national cinema. While the Old Film History was preoccupied with the issue of authenticity in historical narratives – the extent to which historical films were an accurate representation of the past – the New Film History has focused instead on the political and cultural economy of the genre: the appropriation of the historical film for ideological and propagandist ends, its role in constructing significant moments in a nation’s history, and its representation of the past as a site of pleasure for audiences. This chapter explores these themes through a case study of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), director Peter Weir’s adaptation of the celebrated Napoleonic-era historical novels of Patrick O’Brian. Another feature of the New Film History is that it analyses films not only as texts, but also in their historical contexts of production and reception. Master and Commander is easily situated within the production strategies of the contemporary Hollywood film industry which, 55


more than ever in the early twenty-first century, is locked into the blockbuster mentality: the view that individual films are capable of returning twice to three times their production cost at the box-office and so justify their inflated budgets. There have always been blockbusters of course – super-productions such as Gone With the Wind (1939) and Ben-Hur (1959) – though it was the success of first Jaws (1975) and then Star Wars (1977) that, in the words of veteran screenwriter William Goldman, ‘did business far beyond what anyone dreamed possible’, or, according to film historian Thomas Schatz, ‘recalibrated the profit potential of the Hollywood hit’.1 Jaws was the first film to gross over $100 million in North America alone: such is the nature of price inflation that another 352 films have since passed this mark, which has now come to represent the yardstick for being considered a major box-office success.2 Master and Commander was one of four ‘gigantic epics’ released by the major studios at the end of 2003: the others were the American Civil War drama Cold Mountain, the Tom Cruise adventure The Last Samurai, and the concluding part of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkein’s fantasy saga of Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.3 Of those four films only The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King could be described as a genuine super-blockbuster: it grossed $377 million in North America and a total of $1,129 million worldwide. Master and Commander grossed a respectable $93.9 million in North America and a total $210.3 million worldwide; though, set against a reported production cost of $135 million, this probably represents at best only a small margin of profit.4 Master and Commander was both similar to and different from other blockbuster films. On the one hand it exemplified the increasingly common practice of co-production between studios: a strategy that spreads the risk involved in large-scale production. Thus Master and Commander was a joint venture between Twentieth Century-Fox and Universal Pictures, two of the Hollywood majors, while Miramax Pictures, an independent producer-distributor run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, also ‘got a piece’ of the film.5 The involvement of Miramax, which has a reputation for backing unusual projects, was part of the company’s strategy to establish itself as more than a purveyor of art-house fare: it had also recently invested in Cold Mountain and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The initiative behind Master and Commander came from producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr, who, according to the film’s promotional materials, ‘first saw the cinematic potential of [Patrick] O’Brian’s work’.6 Weir, who since making Gallipoli had moved to Hollywood where he had directed several films that received Academy Award nominations (Witness, Dead

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Poets Society, The Truman Show), was, in his own words, ‘a hired gun’.7 To the extent, therefore, that it was a collaborative project that took the best part of a decade to come to fruition – Goldwyn had first approached the sceptical O’Brian in the 1990s – Master and Commander exemplifies the corporate nature of the contemporary blockbuster. On the other hand, however, Master and Commander was a rather different sort of blockbuster. Most of the leading films at the box-office in 2003 – The Matrix Reloaded, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (released at the end of 2002), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Finding Nemo, Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines, X-Men 2, The Matrix Revolutions – were science fiction or fantasy films heavily dependent on the extensive use of special effects technology. Since the advent of computer generated imaging (CGI) in the early 1990s, the dominant trend in blockbuster film production has been towards visual spectacle, exemplified by such digitally enhanced epics as Titanic (1997) and Gladiator (2000). Critics aver, however, that such films are impoverished in characterization and that contemporary film-makers have lost the craft of what Hollywood professionals used to call the ‘well-made film’.8 The promotional discourse of Master and Commander, in stark contrast to the fantasy epics, downplayed the role of spectacle and special effects and instead emphasized characterization and historical authenticity. Weir wanted ‘to give the audience as accurate a feeling as possible of life aboard a fighting ship of the period. He and his team of historical consultants were relentless in their pursuit of period authenticity.’9 This commitment to authenticity involved basing the sets and some of the visual compositions on paintings held by the Greenwich Naval Museum. Master and Commander did employ CGI technology – it features over 800 special effects shots, including ship miniatures and digital enhancements to the spectacular battle sequences – but these are used in support of narrative rather than as spectacle for its own sake.10 The promotional discourse also asserted the film’s fidelity to its source materials. The Anglo-Irish writer O’Brian – a biographer as well as a novelist, whose works include lives of Picasso and Joseph Banks – has been described as ‘one of the great, if relatively undiscovered authors of the twentieth century’.11 O’Brian’s series of 20 historical novels chronicling the adventures of happy-go-lucky Captain Jack Aubrey and his sardonic friend and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin have been translated into 19 languages and sold over 20 million copies.12 The novels are characterized by their rigorous attention to historical detail, especially in their accounts of life on board a man-of-war in the Royal Navy of the early


nineteenth century, their use of authentic nautical terms and their vivid descriptions of the physical sensations of battles at sea. O’Brian’s prose style is a throwback to the nineteenth-century novel: indeed, his dialogue and the subtleties of his characterizations have been compared to Jane Austen. Yet this style – a deliberate device to establish a sense of period authenticity that differentiates O’Brian’s novels from, say, the Hornblower stories of C. S. Forester – presents considerable difficulties for adaptation. The depth of technical detail (there are constant references to topgallants, staysails, mizzen, spanker and flying jibs) is lost in the translation to film which can only show rather than explain nautical activities. Moreover, Weir and his co-writer John Collee, while remaining true to the spirit, found that ‘none of O’Brian’s novels would quite work as a screenplay’.13 They cannibalized incidents and dialogue from throughout the series, though the film was based largely on the tenth book, The Far Side of the World, which Weir thought lent itself more easily to the structure of a film: ‘I said I didn’t want to do the first book and if anyone was crazy enough to do [a film], he should go into the centre of the series and base the story around a long voyage. To my surprise they said they weren’t against that idea.’14 The film uses two incidents from the first book, Master and Commander – Aubrey’s dinnertable anecdotes about Lord Nelson and Maturin performing brain surgery on a crewman by inserting a coin in his skull – while Aubrey’s eulogy to his ship (‘a bluff bow, lovely lines … a fine seabird’) is taken from the third, HMS Surprise. The narrative of pursuit into distant seas follows The Far Side of the World; though, as we shall see, with some ideologically significant differences. The critical response to Master and Commander, by and large, welcomed it as a fine example of the ‘well-made film’. It was praised for its storytelling and entertainment values: the most frequent description in the reviews was ‘old-fashioned’. Screen International, for example, considered it a ‘good-natured, old-fashioned romp that combines attention to detail, well-acted characterisation, and a fast-paced pursuit story’.15 Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times hailed it as ‘an exuberant sea adventure told with uncommon intelligence; we’re reminded of well-crafted classics before the soulless age of computerized action’.16 Internet magazine Box Office Online similarly thought it ‘an old-fashioned seafaring spectacle of the Errol Flynn-Douglas Fairbanks variety … [that] hearkens back to an era when such films were able to be thoughtful, even artistic’.17 Ty Burr of the Boston Globe thought the first 15 minutes of the film ‘are so well crafted that they restore your faith in commercial cinema. Hollywood has become sloppy at the basics of time, place, and mood, but director

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Peter Weir gives us a refresher course in what it’s all about.’18 In Britain, the respected film critic Philip French of the Observer called it ‘an excellent, strikingly beautiful movie’ that demonstrated ‘a conviction rare in historical movies’.19 Time Out called it simply ‘a fine old-fashioned Boy’s Own yarn’.20 Amongst a minority of dissenters from the consensus, Jason Epstein, in the course of a long review article in the New York Times, professed himself ‘disappointed’ by a film ‘structured around an anticlimactic succession of violent encounters’ and which ‘provides none of the pleasure to be had from the novels’.21 As much as the old-fashioned qualities of Master and Commander were admired by most critics, however, they may also have limited its popular appeal by dint of the film being more intelligent and, to an extent, even cerebral than the usual blockbuster fare. There is an instructive comparison to be made in this regard with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, released a few months before Master and Commander. Pirates of the Caribbean, which also received good reviews, was a fantasy adventure with an irreverent attitude towards period authenticity: with its phantom ships and improbable action sequences it represented the past as a fairground attraction – not inappropriate given that it was based on the Disneyland ride of the same name. Several reviewers compared Master and Commander with Pirates of the Caribbean, not necessarily to the disadvantage of either, though inclining towards the view that the Disney film was the more obvious crowd-pleaser. Indeed, the $651 million worldwide grosses of Pirates of the Caribbean were over three times those of Master and Commander.22 The differences between the films were summarized by one critic thus: Some might have expected that the unexpected success of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean has resulted in a sudden upsurge in interest about high seas derring-do, but anyone expecting a ‘spillover’ effect to generate a box office ripple for Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World will be disappointed. The two films (Pirates and Master and Commander) have little in common except that both involve seafaring ships. One is pure fantasy; the other (although not based on a true story) takes rigors to be historically accurate. One is designed to please popcorn munching crowds of distracted teenagers; the other has been made for adult viewers who are interested in what it might really have been like to live on a tall ship.23 Much the same point was made by Sight and Sound, which pointed out that while Pirates of the Caribbean had none of the ‘intellectualism’ of


Master and Commander, the latter’s ‘consistent use of accurate but baffling naval terms may cost the film a broader audience in the long run’.24 It was partly in response to the more ‘adult’ orientation of Master and Commander in contrast to the teenage-oriented popcorn-movie that the film’s promotional strategy sought to emphasize its qualities as an action-adventure film. It is a characteristic of modern marketing strategies that distributors seek to maximize the potential audiences for films by emphasizing their likely ‘cross-over’ appeal to different groups. Peter Krämer has shown how Titanic, for example, was promoted as both a romantic melodrama (to appeal to the female audience) and as an action movie (for the male cinema-goers used to other films by James Cameron).25 The presence of Russell Crowe, star of the hugely successful Roman epic Gladiator, provided an obvious point of reference for television commercials declaring, ‘It’s Gladiator on the high seas!’ Weir suggested another comparison: ‘I wanted to remind the audience that they were heading largely into the unknown – particularly in the Pacific region – and I wanted them to feel they were in the equivalent of outer space in that era.’26 The science fiction saga has, since Star Wars, been a staple genre of popular film and television: it shares similar terrain to genres such as the western and the seafaring adventure in its use of frontier mythology and its projection of military power.27 Gene Roddenberry, creator of the classic sixties television series Star Trek, is on record to the effect that he conceived the character of Captain Kirk as Horatio Hornblower in outer space.28 And several critics used Star Trek as a reference point for Master and Commander, comparing the relationship of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin to ‘an early-19th-century Kirk and Spock’ or, alternatively, ‘akin to Captain Kirk and Doctor McCoy without a Mr Spock’.29 In fact the character of Maturin combines the scientific rationality of Mr Spock and the moral conscience of Dr McCoy: to this extent both comparisons are appropriate. Star Trek has been interpreted as an allegory of the projection of American military power during the Cold War: its opposing power blocs and binary ideologies of freedom and totalitarianism are easily mapped on to the geopolitical alignments of the Cold War.30 Master and Commander, while less obviously allegorical, did nevertheless lend itself to being read in a geopolitical context. The film is set in April 1805 and concerns the pursuit by the British frigate HMS Surprise of a French privateer, the Acheron – a commerce raider authorized by a letter of marque by the French government – which intends to carry the war into the Pacific. The Acheron’s presence in the Pacific threatens ‘to tip the balance of war in Bonaparte’s favour’. Some commentators made reference to

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the film’s representation of French villainy at a time when France – a representative, with Germany, of what US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld incautiously referred to as ‘old Europe’ – had recently opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq to depose the dictator Saddam Hussein. The French position prompted a brief wave of popular Francophobia in the United States and its ally Britain.31 Reviewing Master and Commander in the New York Times, critic A. O. Scott remarked: ‘It is tempting to read some contemporary geopolitical relevance into this film, which appears at a moment when some of the major English-speaking nations are joined in a military alliance against foes we sometimes need to be reminded do not actually include France.’32 It is instructive to note that Master and Commander was more successful in those countries supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Britain ($11.9 million) and Spain ($12.8 million), than in those that had opposed it, including France ($4.2 million), Germany ($5.4 million) and Russia ($2.9 million), though it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions from these statistics.33 In recent times, for example, France has tended to be more resistant to Hollywood blockbusters than other territories: in this context the lesser box-office performance of Master and Commander was not unusual. It seems highly unlikely, however, that any such contemporary references in Master and Commander were intentional: the film had a long gestation period and, in any event, principal photography had been completed several months before the diplomatic crisis over Iraq in early 2003. The politics of the film, rather than reflecting the modern world, seem like a throwback to the propaganda films of the Second World War which had presented Britain as a defender of democracy and freedom against continental tyrants and dictators. In films such as Lady Hamilton (1941) and The Young Mr Pitt (1942) direct parallels had been drawn between Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. Master and Commander begins with an explanatory caption that could have been lifted from one of the wartime propaganda films: ‘April – 1805. Napoleon is the master of Europe. Only the British Fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields.’ This history represents the dominant popular understanding of the Napoleonic Wars: a world war in which Britain, by dint of its naval power, saved the rest of the world from the territorial ambitions of the dictator Bonaparte. The film conjures up the terrors of revolutionary French politics as Jack makes an impassioned rallying cry to his men: ‘Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? Do you want your children to grow up singing the Marseillaise? Do you want to call that raggedy-arse Bonaparte your king?’ To this extent, Master and Commander draws upon a discursive rhetoric familiar from the popular narrative


of the Napoleonic Wars rather than one specific to the geopolitical circumstances of 2003. That said, however, the politics of Master and Commander are influenced by certain present-day factors, though these have as much to do with the political and cultural economy of the film industry as they do with any tenuous connection to the ‘coalition of the willing’ in the war against Iraq. It is here that the differences between book and film become significant. To some extent the differences are structural: in the novel of The Far Side of the World, for example, there is no decisive battle between HMS Surprise and the enemy ship, which runs aground before Aubrey can engage it. This somewhat anti-climactic ending is not unusual for O’Brian – in the first book, for example, Aubrey and Maturin are observers rather than participants in the climactic engagement off Gibraltar – though it would be unthinkable for a film with aspirations to blockbuster status to cheat audiences of the spectacle of a sea battle. More important, however, are the changes to the historical context between book and film. The novel of The Far Side of the World is set not in 1805 but in 1812 during the war between Great Britain and the United States. The Anglo-American War – caused by strained relations when the British blockaded American ports in order to prevent trading with France – has been largely written out of popular histories (it is not taught in British schools, for example) or at best warrants only a footnote. The war, which lasted until 1814, was characterized by a series of naval engagements which took the form of duels between individual ships: most famous of these was the capture of the USS Chesapeake by HMS Shannon in January 1813. In the book HMS Surprise is in pursuit of an American frigate, USS Norfolk, which has been disrupting the British whaling trade. O’Brian conceded that ‘in the present book the naval historian will detect an echo of HMS Phoebe’s pursuit of the USN Essex’.34 The Far Side of the World, indeed, is one of several of O’Brian’s books set during the War of 1812–14, perhaps because this context offered better scope for the narratives of long voyages to which he had inclined by this point in the series. There was, in contrast, little opportunity for naval actions against the background of the Peninsular War (1809–14) given that French naval power had been all but destroyed and the Royal Navy’s strategy was primarily one of blockade. It is difficult to avoid the impression that this major change to the historical context of the novel was for ideological reasons. Hollywood has been adept at altering history to suit its own ends – U-571 (2000), for example, provoked an uproar in the British press by showing the US Navy, rather than the British, capturing the Enigma code machine

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during the Second World War – and it seems highly unlikely that American audiences would be willing to accept a film in which their country was the villain of the piece. This, at least, is the reason suggested by commentators who knew of the change between book and film. Scott remarked: ‘The spectacle of British imperial self-defense has been made more palatable for American audiences by a discreet emendation of the literary source: the story has been moved back seven years from the War of 1812 when the British were fighting … but never mind. Bygones are bygones.’35 Epstein also suggested that the film-makers ‘could hardly have expected an American audience to cheer a handsome British commander with orders to sink an American warship that had been preying on the British whaling fleet’.36 In so far as the North American market usually accounts for between 40 per cent and 45 per cent of the total box-office gross of a major studio release, it seems almost certain that a commercial imperative lay behind the decision to move the narrative of Master and Commander from 1812 to 1805. At the same time, however, there is good reason to believe that the ideological project of Master and Commander also necessitated the change. The film can be seen as a revival of a tradition of popular film-making that had been dormant for several decades: the projection of a shared Anglo-American world view in which common bonds of culture and politics unite the two nations above and beyond their historic differences. In the late 1930s, for example, Hollywood had produced a cycle of Northwest Frontier adventures, including Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and Gunga Din (1939), which had supported the ideology of imperialism and can be seen in part as propaganda for the British presence in India. Mark Glancy has shown that there was an economic reason for Hollywood’s Anglophilia: the British market accounted for the large majority of the overseas revenues of the US film industry.37 The British Empire film became infra dig during the Second World War, when the Atlantic Charter (a statement of principles signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941 before the US entry into the war) supported the notion of national self-determination. In the 1950s, however, the Hollywood studios backed a cycle of expensively mounted medieval chivalric epics shot in Britain, including Ivanhoe (1952), The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), Knights of the Round Table (1953) and The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955). There were, again, economic factors at work: Britain offered a less expensive production base and, while the cinema audience was declining since its mid-1940s peak, it was not declining at the same rate as in America.38 In recent decades, however,


Hollywood has been less inclined towards favourable projections of British history and has preferred to cast the British as villains rather than as heroes in such travesties of the historical past as Braveheart (1995) or The Patriot (2000).39 The production of Master and Commander represented a combination of British cultural capital and US dollars. The presence of an Australian director based in Hollywood and a New Zealand-born leading actor establishes Master and Commander as what one commentator labelled ‘an all-Anglosphere collaboration’.40 What, then, is the view of the world provided by Master and Commander? Unlike the somewhat simplistic narrative ideologies of films like Braveheart and The Patriot, in which the Scots and American colonists, respectively, are portrayed as classless freedom fighters and the English as aristocratic oppressors, Master and Commander offers a more subtle and nuanced interpretation of the past. This is demonstrated in the complex relationship between the film’s two main protagonists: Jack Aubrey (Crowe) and Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). On one level, of course, they represent different archetypes of masculinity: the bluff, heroic, no-nonsense man-of-action whose courage and inspirational leadership locate him squarely in the Hornblower/Kirk mould and the quiet, incisive, erudite man-of science whose ability as a surgeon (at one point in the film Maturin has to operate on himself to remove a bullet after being accidentally shot) earns him the respect of the crew. There is, however, another dynamic at work in the relationship that exemplifies different historical discourses. Leslie Felperin observed that Master and Commander ‘opens up interesting ideas of paradigmatic shifts at play in the Napoleonic period, with an older order based on great-chain-of-being notions of hierarchy giving way to a more rational, relativist world view’.41 In this reading Aubrey represents an ‘old’ view of the world, the ‘master and commander’ of a ship with its hierarchical structure and strict naval discipline, while Maturin represents a ‘new’ world of scientific rationalism bred by the Enlightenment whose interest in naturalism marks him out as a proto-Darwinian. At one point in the film these competing world views threaten to drive a wedge between the two men: Aubrey is forced to renege on his promise to allow Maturin to explore the Galapagos Islands in order to resume his pursuit of the Acheron. Yet, ultimately, the two discourses are seen as complementary: it is Maturin’s discovery on the Galapagos of a phasmid (a stick-insect that disguises itself as a twig) that gives Aubrey the inspired idea of disguising the Surprise as a whaler in order to lure in the Acheron and take her by surprise.42 The historical period, then, is essential to understanding the cultural politics of Master and Commander. And it is because the film is so intricately rooted in historical discourses that it can legitimately, in my view,

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be described as a historical film, for all that its story is a fiction. In this interpretation Aubrey and Maturin represent different ideas of what history is. Aubrey, whose admiration for Nelson (‘a master tactician and a man of singular vision’) is a prominent motif, stands for history as agency: he represents the possibility of the individual to determine the course of events through his actions at crucial moments. Maturin, in contrast, stands for history as process: his empirical observation of the natural world recognizes that human beings are part of an evolutionary process governed by scientific and structural determinants. These themes – along with the study of masculinity and leadership – are preoccupations of the O’Brian books, of course, to which extent Master and Commander can be seen as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of its source material. The politics of Master and Commander, like so many contemporary blockbusters, are ultimately conservative – both culturally and ideologically. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s representation of the codes of duty and patriotism. Aubrey and his crewmen are bound by an ethic of duty (‘subject to the requirements of the service’) that unites all members of the crew regardless of class or rank. Master and Commander invokes the idea of the ship as a microcosm of nation familiar from naval dramas such as Noël Coward’s patriotic epic In Which We Serve (1942), in which the social structure of wartime Britain was mapped onto the naval hierarchy of rank. HMS Surprise, like Coward’s HMS Torrin before it, represents the national community. This is made explicit when Aubrey makes a patriotic declaration to stir his men before the climactic battle: ‘England is under threat of invasion and though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England.’ It is the expression of sentiments such as these – done entirely straight without any suggestion of irony or spoof – that locate Master and Commander in an ‘old fashioned’ tradition of popular cinema. For all its state of the art special effects and the realism of its battle sequences, the ethos of Master and Commander harks back to the cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. A prominent feature of the New Film History has been its recognition of the extent to which popular cinema contributes to discourses of nationhood and national identity. If, on the one hand, historians no longer accept the old-fashioned idea that national identity is an entirely naturalized phenomenon that is somehow inherent in the air we breathe and the land we walk upon, nor, on the other hand, do they readily accept the view of the intellectual left that national identity is an entirely false or artificial ideology that is promoted by ruling elites to encourage social cohesion and support for the nation state. The trend in recent scholarship, following Benedict Anderson’s notion of


‘imagined communities’, is to regard most forms of identity as being constructed – constructed by history, by politics, by geography, by religion, by institutions, and by culture.43 Films such as Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World exemplify the processes through which popular culture influences, even determines, our knowledge and understanding of history and national identity. Its critical and popular success – and, for all that it was not a super-blockbuster, the box-office revenues of the film do suggest that it was a quantitative as well as a qualitative success – would seem to suggest that the version of history represented by the film accorded with popular tastes. To this extent we can reasonably conclude that the old-fashioned ideologies of duty, service and patriotism, far from being redundant at the beginning of the twenty-first century, remain as important for cinema audiences as they have ever been.

Notes 1. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (London: Futura, 1985), p. 158; Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 17. 2. According to the listings on the Internet Movie Database All-Time Domestic Boxoffice page: http://www.imdb.com/alltimegross/domestic; accessed 12 June 2006. 3. Screen International, 29 August 2003, p. 16. 4. Screen International, 14 November 2003, p. 28. 5. Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty in Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 457. 6. ‘Production Notes’ issued by the 20th Century Fox Online Film Office, 23 October 2003, on the microfiche for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World held by the National Library of the British Film Institute, p. 1. 7. Screen International, 21 November 2003, p. 22. 8. See, for example, David Thomson, ‘Why Dirty Harry Beats Harry Potter’, Observer Review, 22 January 2002, p. 8. For a defence of the blockbuster, see Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). 9. ‘Production Notes’, BFI microfiche, pp. 6–7. 10. Jody Duncan, ‘Victory at Sea’, Cinefex, 96 ( January 2004), p. 17. 11. ‘Production Notes’, BFI microfiche, p. 10. 12. The Aubrey-Maturin novels, all first published in Britain by William Collins & Sons, are Master and Commander (1970), Post Captain (1972), HMS Surprise (1973), The Mauritius Command (1977), Desolation Island (1978), The Fortune of War (1979), The Surgeon’s Mate (1980), The Ionian Mission (1981), Treason’s Harbour (1983), The Far Side of the World (1984), The Reverse of the Medal (1986), The Letter of Marque (1988), The Thirteen-Gun Salute (1989), The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991), Clarissa Oakes (1992), The Wine-Dark Sea (1993),

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

The Commodore (1994), The Yellow Admiral (1997), The Hundred Days (1998) and Blue at the Mizzen (1999). A useful source book is A. E. Cunningham (ed.), Patrick O’Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (London: British Library, 1993). Variety, 5 January 2004, p. A-3. Screen International, 21 November 2003, p. 22. Screen International, 14 November 2003, p. 28. Chicago Sun-Times, 14 November 2003: http://www.rogerebert.suntimes.com/ reviews. Box Office Online Reviews, no date: http://www.boxoffice.com/scripts. Boston Globe, 14 November 2003: http://www.boston.com/movies. The Observer, 23 November 2003, p. 22. Time Out, 19 November 2003: http://www.timeout.com/film. Jason Epstein, ‘Master and Commander: On the Far Side of Credibility’, The New York Times, 16 November 2003: http://select.nytimes.com/search/ restricted/article. Screen International, 17 December 2003, p. 18. ‘ “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World”. A film review by James Berardinelli’: http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies.html. Leslie Felperin, Sight and Sound, New Series 14:1 (January 2004), p. 54. See Peter Krämer, ‘Women First: Titanic (1997), action-adventure films and Hollywood’s female audience’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 18:4 (1998), pp. 599–618. Screen International, 5 January 2004, p. 4. See Jan Johnson-Smith, American Science Fiction TV: Star Trek, Stargate and Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). See G. B. Love, ‘Kirk and Hornblower’, in Walter Irwin and G. B. Love (eds), The Best of ‘Trek’ #2 (New York: New American Library, 1980), pp. 161–5. The Star Trek films make repeated references to nautical imagery: ‘All I need is a tall ship and a star to steer by’, muses Kirk (William Shatner) on resuming command of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). And in Star Trek: First Contact (1996) Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is compared to Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab of Moby Dick due to his obsession with defeating the Borg. Boston Globe, 14 November 2003; Box Office Online Reviews, n.d. Rick Worland, ‘Captain Kirk as Cold Warrior’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 16:3 (1988), pp. 109–17. This outbreak of Francophobia was not unpleasant, as for example had been the campaign against European Union President Jacques Delors in sections of the British tabloid press (‘Up Yours Delors’), but instead made humorous reference to France’s military reputation as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’. A. O. Scott, ‘Master of the Sea (And the French)’, The New York Times, 14 November 2003: http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html. Screen International, 10 February 2004, p. 4. Patrick O’Brian, The Far Side of the World (London: HarperCollins, 2003 edn), p. x. Scott, ‘Master of the Sea (And the French)’. Epstein, ‘Master and Commander: On the Far Side of Credibility’.

68 The New Film History 37. H. Mark Glancy, When Hollywood loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ Film, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 7–37. 38. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 114–36. 39. Mark Glancy, ‘The War of Independence in Feature Films: The Patriot (2000) and the “Special Relationship” between Hollywood and Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25:4 (2005), pp. 523–45. 40. Scott, ‘Master of the Sea (And the French)’. 41. Felperin, Sight and Sound, New Series 14:1 ( January 2004), p. 54. 42. The film does not have space to explore all aspects of the Aubrey–Maturin relationship, which O’Brian develops over the course of 20 books. Maturin’s Irish heritage and his role as a spy for British intelligence is omitted. Weir does, however, maintain both men’s love of music, represented in the scenes of them playing violin (Aubrey) and cello (Maturin) in the captain’s quarters. 43. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

Part II Authorship

The notion of authorship is simply a means of categorizing film texts according to the person deemed to have taken the dominant role in the creative process. The old Film Studies discipline tended to deal rather simply with notions of authorship. The ‘author’ of the film text was indubitably the director. It was, of course, a key aspect of the agenda of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s to set up a hierarchy of favourite directors, and la politique des auteurs became a cornerstone of orthodox film criticism. Following this lead, critics such as Andrew Sarris drew on the Cahiers distinction between those heroic directorial auteurs who could impose their signature on the intractable studio machine, and those compliant metteurs-en-scène who would simply follow their masters’ behest, and ‘shoot as written’, providing work of journeyman quality. Much energy was expended in distinguishing major from minor authors, and auteurist critics found it hard to sketch out the bigger picture. Sarris’ The American Cinema (1968), for example, wrote about directors alone, rather than interrogating the larger issues implied in the topic. The old Film Studies refused to acknowledge two things: the industrial nature of film production, and the input of a range of creative agencies during the film-making process. It is an essential part of the New Film History, on the other hand, to concentrate upon the industrial context, and to use different types of evidence – interviews, production documents, censorship files, marketing materials – to disinter the struggles which took place during a film’s production. Of course, such types of evidence must be used mindfully. Interviewees tend to present themselves in a favourable light and to portray themselves as central to the creative process. Studio records may have been weeded or carelessly curated, and they offer evidence mainly of decisions that were planned and made on paper, as opposed to less documented (and perhaps more 69


spontaneous) moments in a film’s production history. None the less, revisionist methods – those based on archival material – if sensitively used, can help us to establish distinctive voices among the prevailing babble of discourses during a film’s production, and to locate those which were most influential. Directors remain a prime area of interest within Film Studies, but the New Film History has a wider range of interests than the old. To take but one example, Frank Capra continues to be the subject of intense scholarly research, but most recent studies of this director eschew both a straightforward biographical approach and conventional autuerist readings of his films. Joseph McBride’s Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992), for example, examines the myths that have surrounded the director’s work and his own hand in creating them; Robert Sklar and Vita Zagarrio’s collection of essays, Frank Capra, Authorship and the Studio System (1998), assesses the influence of cultural and industrial forces on Capra’s work; and Eric Loren Smoodin’s Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity and American Film Studies, 1930–1960 (2004) considers audiences and their understanding of Capra’s films. Besides reassessing the autonomy of the director in a revisionist manner, the New Film History has shifted academic focus on to other types of film authorship. Nick Roddick’s A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s (1983) and Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (1988) were important for documenting the complexities of collaboration within the studio system, and for considering how the involvement of a producer, scriptwriter or star could be crucial to the creative process. Duncan Petrie’s The British Cinematographer (1996) does not argue that cameramen are authors as such, but through interview and technical material, Petrie repositions them as key creative players. Some of this type of work has a gender spin: Sue Harper’s Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (2000) considers the input of women scriptwriters, editors and art directors and argues that gender was just as important as class when assessing cinematic authorship. The New Film History attempts to locate different discourses within the film text, to relate them to each other and to historicize them in a rigorous way. It is important to separate out the style, experience and origins of (say) the costume designer in order to fully appreciate the complexity of the work they do and the contribution it makes to the overall text. In this section, we have concentrated on three discrete forms of creativity, analysed the constraints on individual practitioners and assessed the degree of autonomy which they were able to gain.

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Laurie Ede’s chapter on British art direction in the 1940s selects design work from the upper and lower ends of the market, and demonstrates that design authors dealt creatively with material constraints. Andrew Spicer’s chapter looks at the sort of power which the scriptwriter can wield in our own period, and he considers the status of a writer working in a middle-brow popular genre. Peter Krämer’s chapter broaches yet another kind of authorship: that of the star. Through a study of Jane Fonda, her politics and her industrial clout, Krämer makes it possible to argue that certain stars exert power both behind the camera and in front of it.


5 Art in Context: British Film Design of the 1940s Laurie Ede

The New Film History should be thought of as more than just a question of method. Certainly, it is characterized by its distrust of abstract methods; it places a strong emphasis on the use of primary materials. But the term also implies a fresh vision concerning the things which are deemed to be worthy of study. I want to think about the applications of the New Film History to the materialist study of creativity. The following survey of British film design of the 1940s demonstrates how the historian can illuminate the creative function of the film technician. In 1981, the British film designer Maurice Carter completed his autobiography, The Darker Side of the Screen. The title was incongruous, suggesting a psychological intensity which was entirely absent within the 800-plus pages of reminiscences. But it said much about Carter’s sense of the lack of appreciation shown to film people other than stars and directors; those film workers, who, as his subtitle suggested, stood ‘behind the bright lights’.1 Many would concur that Carter had a point in respect of his own craft. His own sets made a great contribution to many British films, starting with his assignments for Gainsborough in the 1940s (such as Jassy 1947) and proceeding through to his striking designs for The Spanish Gardener (1957) and Anne of a Thousand Days (1969). More broadly, with a little imagination we can readily discover how our memories of specific British films have been influenced by key sets; such as L. P. Williams’ famous tea room in Brief Encounter (1945) or Richard MacDonald’s meretricious house in The Servant (1963). But such instant analyses don’t come close to revealing the precise historical functioning of the art director (or ‘production designer’). To begin with, we need to locate the designer’s creativity within a specific historical period. This is because circumstances of production change over time. Notwithstanding the pitfalls of technological determinism, 73


it seems obvious that the designer has had to respond to technical innovation (such as the advent of blue-screen technology in the 1930s, Independent Frame technique in the 1940s and computer generated imagery (CGI) in the modern era). Moreover, the British set designer has been compelled by changing financial conditions within the national film industry; for example, some set designers (such as Fred Pusey and David Rawnsley) abandoned films entirely in the wake of the post-war collapse of British production capital, a few to grasp the promise of television. Finally, it is clearly the case that, in creative matters, not all artists are born equal. In evaluating the work of British film designers, one inevitably finds oneself constructing a Sarris-style ‘forest theory’ of design, whereby certain designers stand apart from the mass. This depends upon one’s criteria and it also depends upon one’s understanding of art direction as an industrial practice. Some designers are superlative artists, who have been able to produce beautifully executed original designs; I would list Tom Morahan ( Jamaica Inn 1939, Mr Perrin and Mr Triall 1948) and André Andrejew (Anna Karenina 1948) among the great ‘artists proper’ of British film design history. There again, other art directors (notably Vincent Korda and Alexander Vetchinsky) placed most of their efforts into working in three dimensions on the studio floor and were relatively indifferent to the idea of initial designs as artworks in their own right. There are many other reasons why creativity in films must be historically located. Necessarily, this leads to the historian having to make some important a priori decisions about periodization.

Why British art direction in the 1940s? Three sets of factors render the 1940s a particularly fertile period for analysis of set design; productivity, aesthetic variety and industrial organization. Anyone who is familiar with the history of British films will be acquainted with their routine of economic ‘boom and bust’; periods of expansion (such as the internationalist surge of the 1930s or the emergence of hybrid television-film production in the 1980s) seem eternally fated to be followed by periods of severe contraction. Of course, British films have always been subject to the economic and hegemonic control of Hollywood. American film financiers have long benefited from huge native audiences for Hollywood products. At the same time, the British film industry has been subject to that understanding on the part of audiences that commercial cinema is Hollywood. In this context, the 1940s represented a productive time for the British film

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industry: 539 feature films were produced, providing credits for 64 different art directors. But it is important to know that these films were produced in different ways, on widely varying budgets, for specific markets and audiences. Shortly, I will offer detailed design-led analyses of two entirely divergent production contexts within British cinema of the 1940s; Filippo Del Giudice’s Two Cities concern and Exclusive Films Ltd. These companies exemplified the ‘high’ and ‘low’ cost ends of British film during the 1940s. Over time, Two Cities became embroiled in J. Arthur Rank’s high cost ‘prestige experiment’, with significant effect upon standards of art direction. Conversely, Exclusive Films produced support features on minimal budgets and the sets were correspondingly cheap and modest. In certain respects, the 1930s might be seen as Britain’s golden age of plastic design; films such as LFP’s Things to Come (1936, art director: Vincent Korda)2 and Gaumont-British’s Evergreen (1934, Junge) showcased the work of the art director. But the 1940s offered greater scenic variety. Locations assumed greater significance within the overall design schemes of British films. The greater use of locations owed something to developments in outdoor shooting equipment (such as Ealing’s sophisticated mobile locations studio) but it was motivated by a range of ideological concerns. During the war years, English countryside locations were deployed to construct a reassuring Arcadian mythology; we can see this in operation in films such as Tawny Pipit (1944, Vetchinsky), A Canterbury Tale (1944, Junge) and Great Day (1945, W. C. Andrews). British film aesthetics were also influenced in the 1940s by the intellectual project of the documentary film movement. Certain key figures (among them Pen Tennyson, Alberto Cavalcanti and Sydney Box) migrated from documentaries to feature films with significant effect on feature aesthetics. Ealing’s ‘semi-documentary’ films provided the most conspicuous examples of actuality-led features, but everywhere the ‘hothouse’ (studio-based) film was deemed to be a thing of the past. This meant that British designers increasingly came to regard locations as part of their overall design schemes. In the process, some British designers were able to offer interesting points of contrast between the real and fabricated worlds. John Bryan’s art direction of Gainsborough’s Love Story (1944) worked because of his sensitivity towards the Cornish exteriors; Bryan’s sets never broke the illusion created by the footage recorded in and around the Minack theatre in Porthcurno. Duncan Sutherland made different, but equally compelling use of the London exteriors of Ealing’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). A cul-de-sac in Camden was carefully chosen by Sutherland to signify the sense of entrapment felt by


the female members of the Sandigate family. Sutherland also took pains to maintain the downbeat register of the locations; the Leyton marshalling yard was hosed continuously in order to underscore the mood of precipitous melancholy and coal dust was tipped into puddles to suppress their lustrous glare.3 The 1940s also brought about significant changes to the industrial placement of the film art director, not least in terms of design authorship. In 1939, Vincent Korda became the first British art director to assume the title of ‘production designer’, for London Films’ The Thief of Bagdad. This had important implications for the subsequent development of British film design. The production designer made the initial designs for the film, but did not participate in the construction of the sets; the latter function was the province of his subordinate, the art director. The art director was thereby demoted, as a new class of executive technician emerged. This allowed certain designers – such as Korda, Bryan, Morahan, Hein Heckroth and Alfred Junge – to command higher fees, and exert greater influence over the production. The more assertive technicians relished the opportunity. For example, Morahan believed that the ideal of the production designer counteracted directors who treated designers as ‘glorified construction men’.4 Others, such as Edward Carrick and L. P. Williams, feared that the new title would encourage interlopers from the theatre and visual arts, who had no technical training in films but might be able to bluff their way through as highly paid supervisors. Carrick observed that: ‘Protective measures will have to be taken to safeguard that title [production designer] from being abused by anyone who wishes to enter the industry as a “designer”, without any knowledge of the means by which his work is to be carried out.’5 So far, I have sketched out some of the wider factors which shaped the art director’s role in the 1940s. But this has been design history painted in broad strokes. In order to gain a stronger feeling for the particularities of art direction in the period, we need to consider specific practices in precise production contexts. The time has come for the contextualized analysis of the work of two sets of designers who operated at either ends of British film production in the 1940s; Paul Sheriff and Carmen Dillon at Two Cities, and Denis Wreford and James Marchant at Exclusive Films.

Working for Del: setting Henry V (1944) The Italian Filippo Del Giudice (or ‘Del’ as he called himself ) was one of the great mavericks of British film culture during the 1940s. He was remarkably profligate; he claimed repeatedly to have spent £20 million

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‘making films and enjoying life’. At the same time, Del Giudice was excessively idealistic about the possibilities of films. His production style was essentially laissez-faire – he affirmed his role was to ‘harmonize without interfering’ – but he thought deeply about film aesthetics. Del Giudice recorded his thoughts in a number of magazine interviews and also in a series of personal ‘Technical Testaments’ which he distributed to close friends. These were eccentric documents, but they demonstrated Del Giudice’s heartfelt commitment to British film culture. Unlike Gainsborough or Ealing, Two Cities had no production facilities of its own, so it was not in a position to develop a studio style as such. None the less, two designers became keenly associated with Two Cities product. Paul Sheriff and Carmen Dillon were the company’s most prolific art directors. Altogether, they designed 16 films for Del Giudice. These included many of the flagship Two Cities films, such as Henry V (1944), The Gentle Sex (1942), The Demi-Paradise (1943) and The Way To The Stars (1945). Moreover, they built their careers working for Del Giudice. The two designers benefited from the wartime shortages of art directors. Prior to 1939, Sheriff had been mainly known to his colleagues as an assistant at B&D and Denham, and had achieved no credits in his own right. Dillon had achieved full credits, but these were mainly on quota quickies, made for Fox at Wembley. Sheriff and Dillon’s curriculae vitae were therefore slim before Two Cities, and neither designer would have progressed to the front ranks of British design but for the call-up of more established technicians. The Russian Sheriff had the most glamorous background of any art director in Britain. He was born in Moscow in 1915, and his original name was Count Paul Shouvaloff. Sheriff’s family were at the heart of the Russian aristocracy. His grandfather and great-grandfather had both served as ambassadors to the Tsar. The Shouvaloffs fled Russia after the 1917 revolution, the young Sheriff eventually settling in Britain during his teens. Following architectural studies at Oxford (and a brief spell as a mining engineer), Sheriff found a unique niche in British films, acting as a translator for other white Russians. This brought him into contact first with André Andrejew at Ealing and then Lazare Meerson at Denham. Inspired by their example, Sheriff determined to become a fully fledged art director. To some of his colleagues (Carrick and Williams included) Sheriff appeared to have some airy notions about film design. He maintained, correctly, that art direction was not ‘all art’ or ‘all direction’, but his oil paintings fell short of being definitive designs.6 Sheriff painted in a free


manner which, by his own admission, was meant to convey a general impression rather than offer immediate suggestions about the finished appearance of a set. He implied to Carrick that his broad splashes of colour were also intended to locate art direction within the realms of the wider visual arts; film artists such as himself could help to introduce films into the ‘Junior Society of Arts’. This seemed a noble enough idea, but Sheriff was widely regarded as an interloper. All the talk of art direction as art proper left Sheriff open to accusations that he did not really understand the mechanics of film design. Some British art directors also believed that Sheriff leaned heavily on Dillon. The redoubtable Dillon was someone on whom any production designer could rely. Like Williams, Rawnsley and Pusey, she was trained at the Architectural Association (although she did not complete her studies). Dillon also relished technical challenges. Carrick felt that Dillon ‘could organise a whole production … like a really efficient secretary’ and she was renowned for being able to hold complicated details in her head. Above all, Dillon was attracted to the architectural trials of art direction, which she perceived as tests of mental strength: ‘The great thing is to meet a problem in the sure knowledge that if one goes about the task calmly and in the right way there is a solution to it.’7 Dillon’s major achievement probably lay in her breaching of the male preserve of film design. Dorothy Braham during the 1930s, and Iris Wills, Colleen Brown and Betty Pierce in the 1940s all worked as assistants, but Dillon alone achieved art director status. It is tempting to think of Dillon as a heroine of gender politics, who struggled against an undeniably patriarchal film industry to achieve great gains for female technicians. But Dillon set little store by them. Unlike the bold Braham – who was noted at Beaconsfield for her manly clothing, chain-smoking and dirty humour – Dillon was an unassuming character. She was also extremely reluctant to attach any political significance to her achievements. Dillon recoiled at any mention of women’s rights or of positive discrimination towards women. Characteristically, she became ‘cross’ with producer Muriel Box over her suggestion of all-women crews, arguing: ‘I’m not pro having a lot of women on films necessarily. I like the chaps, so there!’8 Blandly, Dillon felt only a slight sense of ‘smugness’ at being Britain’s sole female art director. Her modesty was all the more remarkable given her personal history. Dillon had suffered many hardships prior to Two Cities. During the 1930s she was paid just £3 a week when she succeeded Ralph Brinton as art director at Wembley. This compared with the £8 a week she had previously achieved working as an architect, and the film job brought few other privileges. She was forbidden to wear trousers.

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Moreover, she was not permitted to give orders to male colleagues or to step on to the studio floor. Dillon often said that she and Sheriff were perfect ‘co-designers’. She was probably right. If Sheriff depended upon her architectural intelligence, she relied on his flamboyant visual sense. It is doubtful whether either designer could have pulled off the sets for Henry V on their own. This was an historical film, but of a complexity which did not sit well with Dillon’s maxim that sets should never be ‘played up for production value’.9 Henry V demanded imaginative treatment because at root it was a fictional account of history. At the same time, it was intended to function as an allegory of the times. The idea to film Henry V came from Dallas Bower, a television producer who was supervisor of film production for the Ministry of Information between 1940 and 1941. The script was subsequently developed by Laurence Olivier and the theatre critic Alan Dent. Like Bower, Dent believed that Shakespeare’s play could have significant value as propaganda. As James Chapman has demonstrated, Dent initially saw parallels between Agincourt and the Battle of Britain (in the summer of 1940). However, the long production period meant that further contemporary influences were eventually woven into the film; the 1944 release date guaranteed that Henry V was understood within the context of D-Day and the Battle of Arnhem.10 The principal creative influence over the production phase of Henry V was Laurence Olivier, who produced, directed and starred in the film. Olivier was given unconditional support by Del Giudice. The producer did not intervene when location expenses in Eire escalated. Moreover, he approached Rank for more money when it became obvious that the film would far exceed the original £300,000 budget. This was a selfless act on Del Giudice’s part, which led to a great loss of personal autonomy. Rank footed the £475,000 bill, on the proviso that Two Cities was fully absorbed into the Rank Organization. So to Del Giudice, Henry V was a do-or-die enterprise, and he trusted Olivier’s judgement implicitly. For his part, Olivier tried to guarantee a watertight production by using most of the key technicians from his previous Two Cities’ project (as an actor) The Demi-Paradise. These included Dillon and Sheriff, who were supplemented by Olivier’s regular theatre designer, Roger Furse. Furse’s main responsibility was for the costumes, although he also offered some suggestions on the sets. Sheriff and Dillon worked closely with Olivier in pre-production. Their technical conversations started whilst The Demi-Paradise was still being shot, sometimes after work and at the weekends, but frequently


between takes. It was clear from the earliest stages that Henry V would make unusual demands of the designers. Olivier felt instinctively that the sets should integrate realistic and impressionistic elements. The problem was that he did not know how this could be achieved. This led to lengthy meetings, where Sheriff, Dillon and Furse were instructed to create spontaneous sketches of Shakespearean worlds. Sheriff initially provided sketches of three key sets. These were conceived of in forced perspective, but were conventional in their evocation of fifteenth-century England. Olivier disliked these because they merely reproduced the convention of ‘tiny men against a big superstructure’.11 Olivier wanted the sets to both depict fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England (the times of Henry V and Shakespeare) and suggest Henry’s motivations. This tall order was partly met by Dillon’s crude sketch, based on her memory of the Bayeux tapestry, of a boat crammed with 12 figures. This led in turn to Olivier’s suggestion of the fifteenth-century Très Riche Heures de Duc de Berry as a major reference. Froissart’s text of 1409 had recently been reprinted in a popular coffee-table edition, and the engravings provided the key, as Dillon said, to sets based not on ‘forced perspective as much as false perspective …’.12 Dillon and Sheriff relished translating these ideas into plastic sets. Dillon felt inspired by Olivier’s ‘genius and wealth of ideas’.13 Her enthusiasm was such that it conquered for a time her growing antipathy towards the Denham bureaucracy (as symptomized by her irreverent cycling along the interminable corridors). Sheriff was no less keen. For Sheriff, Henry V was ‘an art director’s dream’, which explored the relationship between realism and fantasy. He explained that the ‘realism’ side was revealed in his reproduction of The Globe theatre, which he took ‘great pains’ to portray accurately. But this, he emphasized, was a rhetorical device: ‘it was necessary somehow in the background to convey to the cinema audience the feeling that what they were watching was art based on reality’.14 The location sequences for Henry V were shot first. The battle scenes were styled after Uccello’s Rout of San Romano and were filmed – at some expense – from 9 June 1943 on the estate of Lord Powerscourt of Enniskerry. The location scenes cost £50,946 and involved 180 horsemen and 500 footmen. Sheriff and Dillon, who were present at all times, built 58 huts and marquees to house the 100 cast and crew members. These and the other film paraphernalia raised the ire of Lord Powerscourt, who grew to hate the film crews. After a few days he shouted: ‘I hate your cameras and your machines and your railway lines and all your horrible tents and mess.’15

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The studio shooting for Henry V followed from 9 August 1943. It was completed on 3 January 1944. Olivier argued that the long schedule – 112 days – was attributable to personnel and material shortages. But the sets were naturally time consuming. Dillon described the medieval milieux as ‘primitive stuff’. What she meant was that they were naïve, and difficult to translate into three dimensions by conventional means. The draughtsmen had to disregard their architectural training to plan the otherworldly perspectives. Also, the use of fourteenth-century paintings necessitated unusual lighting regimes. Olivier’s insistence on shadowless lighting meant that Dillon and Sheriff had to liaise carefully with the cinematographer Robert Krasker to ensure a consistent effect. Sheriff and Dillon devised many ingenious construction ideas for Henry V. They built the port town of Harfleur on the edge of a large tank. Also they suggested the sunrise at Agincourt by the use of a gauze curtain with cotton-wool diffusers. But the designs were mainly notable for their versatile combinations of built components and other devices. Ernest Lindegaard’s scenic art helped to force unique contrasts between the plastic and two-dimensional sets, and the model work was unparalleled. The opening London scenes were at once authentic and ethereal. This effect was painstakingly achieved. The 50 70 ft London replica (which was based on J. C. Visscher’s early seventeenth-century map) took two to three months to make. As with Carrick’s village of Captain Boycott, Sheriff and Dillon’s efforts came to be appreciated by succeeding film-makers. A number of films went on to recycle the opening footage from Henry V; one can only wonder what Sheriff made of the ridiculous use of his prized model to represent the village of Karnstein in Hammer’s 1957 monster-pic The Curse of Frankenstein. Henry V was a courageous venture which vindicated Del Giudice’s faith in audience taste; its large budget was more than justified by its box-office return, particularly in the United States. In all respects, Henry V represented the fullest flowering both of Rank’s ‘prestige experiment’ (high-cost British production for world audiences) and Del Guidice’s own ideal of the expensive ‘eternal’ production. In terms of design history, Henry V stands alongside Great Expectations (1946, John Bryan), A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Junge) and The Red Shoes (1948, Heckroth) as a highlight of top-tier British design of the 1940s.

Artisanal design at Exclusive Films Just after the war, a number of high-profile designers made serious attempts to regulate their trade. The guild which Carrick, Williams,


Dillon, Bryan and others formed in 1946 – the Society of British Film Art Directors and Designers (SBFAD) – had two major aims. First, it sought to regulate access into the craft. Second, it attempted to maintain a hierarchy within British art direction. Carrick and others wanted to maintain their privileged place within British art direction. The SBFAD’s elitist mission was revealed in Rule 10 of its handbook, which declared that membership was open only to designers who ‘were [by 1 January, 1946] practising art directors in the major British Film Studios’.16 Clearly, the SBFAD couldn’t claim to speak on behalf of every art director, neither did it want to. In the post-war era, a great many designers worked in the technical backwaters of Marylebone, Carlton Hill and Bushey. Two such art directors were Denis Wreford and James Marchant, the two men who performed the meagre design duties for Enrique Carreras’ Exclusive Films. Exclusive was the mother company of Hammer, the quota production concern which Carreras had formed with Will Hinds (a.k.a.‘Hammer’) in 1934. In the immediate post-war years, Exclusive concentrated on reissuing old films, largely from Z-level American concerns. However, circumstances within the industry towards the end of the decade encouraged Carreras to resume production. From 1947, he embarked upon a series of productions aimed squarely at the domestic support features market. Some of the films were financed entirely by Exclusive (towards the end of the decade these started to appear under the Hammer brand), others were co-financed with transient concerns such as Digby Smith’s DS Films and Vernon Sewell’s VS Productions. In every case, the production standards were extraordinarily basic. Carreras claimed in 1945 that he was set to create a new type of quota film ‘that can in no way be called a “quickie” ’, but this was a moot point at best.17 The films that Wreford and Marchant worked on, such as Room to Let (1949, Wreford), Celia (1949, Wreford), The Dark Road (1947, Marchant) and Death in High Heels (1947, Marchant) counted amongst the very worst of British cinema in the 1940s. In most instances, the design was shabby and repetitive. Exclusive could be conceived of as a kind of destitute man’s Independent Producers. Carreras’ distribution links allowed a number of production companies to secure reliable bookings in the cheaper cinemas. They were encouraged by a range of factors in the late 1940s. For one thing, the 1948 Films Act decreed that 25 per cent of ‘B’ features had to be British in origin (helpfully, it also maintained the £7,500 minimum cost clause). Also the National Film Finance Corporation (established in 1949) brought the promise of state subsidy for independent production.

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More than anything, Carreras and his associated producers were emboldened by the continuing demand for support features. Throughout the 1940s, there had been on-going debates within the industry about the possibility of scrapping the support film, for the sake both of cost-cutting and of maintaining customer loyalty (members of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association feared that patrons were turned off by poor quality ‘B’ films). But the evidence suggested continuing support for long programmes. Concanen’s Derrick de Marney conducted a survey in January 1949 that showed that smaller towns still desired full cinema programmes. He and his colleagues at the lower end of British production were also heartened by surveys, such as the one conducted in 1950, which suggested that 96 per cent of cinemas required support films.18 Carreras, in common with other producers of British cinema’s ‘poverty row’, placed his faith in unbroken production. Support features were a risky business; this was proven during the ‘Black Autumn’ of 1947, when Kine Weekly found 14 sound stages to be idle. But the risks could be ameliorated if revenues came in continuously. Clearly, Carreras had a clear advantage over most of his peers (producers such as Ganesh’s Buster Collier or John Argyle) in the sense that he had a ready-made market for his films. Even then, his production ethos depended upon keeping costs down to a minimum. He had a two-part solution to this problem. Some of the films he financed were made at the tiny Marylebone studios, under the auspices of Henry Halstead. Others were made in an innovative and highly influential manner at two country houses. Marylebone Film Studios was registered in April 1946. The studios themselves were located at 27, Elm Tree Road and they were tiny. Marylebone was the smallest film studios in Britain in the late 1940s, employing just 20 people (Marchant included) to run two stages of 50 20 ft. None the less, Halstead maintained that Marylebone was entirely suitable for films which were ‘not in the Rank bracket’. He also claimed that ‘by using a little imagination and improvisation we are able to secure striking effects with little resources’.19 In design terms, Marylebone was James Marchant’s kingdom. Marchant was a product of what Carrick termed the ‘BIP School’ of design. He had worked in films from the age of 19, but his major design experience prior to Marylebone had come via Clarence Elder’s design department at British International Pictures at Elstree. From the late 1920s, Elder ran a famously chaotic art department, which was based upon the exploitation of young design labour. Some notable art directors,


such as Cedric Dawe, Duncan Sutherland and David Rawnsley, came through Elder’s shambolic department and went on to work on major productions for Rank. Others, like Marchant, continued to work within the lower echelons of British films or dropped out altogether. Marchant actually ran the BIP models department for four and a half years, but this had little status value. He subsequently worked in the theatre for Tom Arnold up to his recruitment by Halstead in 1945. Art direction at Marylebone was a matter of cutting one’s coat according to one’s cloth. Halstead’s formula decreed that films should have no more than five characters, little location work and a minimum of sets. Marchant was encouraged to work closely with the cameraman in order to extract the maximum value from the few props that he was allowed. This led to a crude visual style. Marylebone lighting schemes were hurried and unexpressive, and failed to flatter Marchant’s ad hoc sets. Dark Road represented the nadir of British design in the period. Ambitiously, the story took in both American and British environments. Unfortunately, the improvised sets intimated that people on both sides of the Atlantic habituated half-finished homes and offices. Marchant attempted to signify the American newspaper office via a large semi-oval window. This was a practical idea, but it formed an ugly composition with the desk to the foreground (Marchant would often place key props in order to try and impart depth to his scenes). This set, like the others, was poorly finished, with no attention paid to textural qualities. Only the locations, such as the exterior of Dartmoor prison, offered some relief from Dark Road’s bare chipboard universe. On several occasions, Marchant worked at Exclusive’s other production facilities at the country houses at Dial Close, Cookham Dean and Oakley Lodge, Bray, but the artwork here was mainly supervised by Denis Wreford. During the 1930s, Wreford had worked on the other side of the Elstree fence to Marchant, serving as a draughtsman to L. P. Williams at the plusher British and Dominions studios. He subsequently performed the same role for Edward Carrick at Associated Talking Pictures at Ealing. By common consent, Wreford was an excellent draughtsman (he had been a prizeman at RIBA on several occasions between 1929 and 1931), but he struggled to become a fully fledged designer. This was despite his claim that he had ‘revived methods of Caneletta [sic] and painted the first architectural perspective since his time’.20 Wreford was contracted by Carreras in 1948, following some work designing for the theatre (including ENSA shows for Basil Dean). He had his work cut out to make sense of Carreras’ literal ‘house style’ of design. The idea to use houses as studios developed out of expediency.

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Hammer reasoned that filming in such a way would yield massive savings on studio charges. This was not an original idea. A number of companies at the lowest end of British production explored the concept after the war. Vandyke Films’ A Matter of Murder (1949) was filmed in a Kensington house. This cut costs by 25 per cent. A Mill Hill house also became the ad hoc studio for British Animated’s Night Comes Too Soon (1948, G. Haslam). Hammer’s plans were notable because of their intensity. Rather than selecting different non-studio locations for each film, they planned continuous production at one house. This strategy had certain advantages. Lighting and sound equipment would not have to be continually readjusted (as happened on the Vandyke production). Moreover, ownership of a house/studio allowed for a relatively flexible form of production. The company kept aside rooms at both Cookham Dean and at Bray to accomodate technicians during the week. The problem was that all film subjects had to conform to the architectural features of the houses. For example, both Dr Morelle and the Case of the Missing Heiress (1949) and Wreford’s first Hammer project Celia (1949) made extensive use of the attic at Dial Close, with its evocative twisted beams. The houses thus came to dominate the films. This problem was lessened a little when Exclusive moved to Bray Close in the summer of 1949. This second property had distinct architectural advantages, not least in its scores of gargoyles (Film Industry remarked that Bray looked ‘like a caricature from one of Osbert Lancaster’s architectural satires’).21 None the less, Wreford experienced the same problems at both houses: how to achieve scenic variety with limited space and facilities. Inevitably, thorough planning was essential. The directors prepared detailed scripts which indicated every prop and camera set-up. Astute camerawork could help to disguise the repetitive use of architectural elements. Where this failed, Wreford was permitted to undertake minor set building. This happened in the case of Celia, where Wreford achieved a night-club set quickly via a few flats and some drapes (which additionally served to disguise the low-slung lamps). Also, Hammer occasionally took their cameras beyond the studio grounds. For example, a bombed factory building at Acton served as the mental home which burned down in Room to Let (1949). Such ideas failed to lift the visuals of the early post-war Hammer productions and both Wreford and Marchant struggled to impart scenic variety. At the instigation of producer Anthony Hinds a crude kind of symbolist design emerged, whereby key props were used to metonymically connote different environments. For example, in Room to Let an archaic telephone and typewriter were combined with a hat and coat on


the wall to comprise the reporter’s office. (Some velvet curtains were added to disguise the much-seen door beyond.) However, these devices could not obscure the recurrence of this same room throughout the film, as emphasized by the characteristically flat photography.

Evaluating creativity via the New Film History At the start of this chapter, I observed that the New Film History should be thought of as more than a question of method. I hope that this point has been justified. My aim has been to demonstrate how creativity in films can be estimated and (moreover) appreciated all the more if we pay full attention to the material constraints of production. In other words, I’ve tried to show what film designers were up against in the 1940s in order to reveal their actual achievements. Savants of film theory will perceive a pronounced auteurist thrust to this form of analysis. I think that this is entirely appropriate to the project of the New Film History. This point is best illustrated by brief consideration of what has gone before, philosophically speaking. If we consider the history of Film Studies in Britain and elsewhere, then we find that profound changes were instigated during the late 1960s. Specifically, Roland Barthes’ pronouncement in 1968 of the ‘death of the author’ erased any notion of author-intentionality from the Film Studies agenda, in favour of a determinedly text-based approach to cultural studies of all kinds. Many of the abstract methodologies which the New Film Historian opposes today emerged from the French intellectual firmament of the late 1960s, or, at least, an attitude was instilled which insisted that serious academic work was built on rigid theoretical priorities. In the first instance, tools of semiology and psychoanalysis were directed towards the exhumation of concealed textual elements which were deemed to be beyond the gift of the actual creator of the text, filmic or otherwise. Thereafter, post-structuralists introduced wider influences from Marxism and feminism; more recently, proponents of audience and fan studies have brought disciplines of discourse and critical analysis to the fore. All of this seems to indicate great change in the course of Film Studies over the last 50 years, but one is struck rather more by the major point of continuity – that creative people have consistently been ignored. The New Film History maintains that creative people matter. This isn’t designed to signal a fully fledged return to the kind of auteur studies that was proclaimed by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics and Andrew Sarris.

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As this chapter has shown, the New Film History’s take on film authorship is not based upon the pre-eminence of the director (my own film designers would surely be decried by Truffaut as mere metteurs). Neither does this new trend in film history estimate creative endeavour in terms of the mastery of material production constraints. Rather, auteurist analysis is taken as a kind of framing device; one presents the facts of production as a means of evaluating people’s creative endeavours within specific places and times.

Notes 1. M. G. Carter, ‘The Darker Side of the Screen: The Biography of a Film Technician, a view from behind the bright lights’, Unpublished manuscript (1981) held at the British Film Institute Library, London. 2. Hereafter, the names appearing after each film title refer to the art director. 3. Details of the locations for It Always Rains on Sunday may be found in Kinematograph Weekly, 17 April 1947, p. 12. See also J. W. Collier, A Film in the Making: It Always Rains on Sunday (London: World Film Publications, 1947), pp. 87–93. 4. T. Morahan, quoted in Film Industry, 29 July 1948, p. 18. 5. E. Carrick, undated letter to the Guild of Film Art Directors, included in a file of materials from the Society of British Film Art Directors and Designers in the possession of the author. 6. P. Sheriff quoted in L. Mitchell and H. M. Towers, March of the Movies (London: Sampson Low Marston, 1948), p. 21. 7. C. Dillon, in an unmarked item in her British Film Institute microfiche (c.1965). 8. C. Dillon, interview for Fifties Features – The Women Behind the Pictures (Channel 4 documentary series, 1986). 9. C. Dillon in Picturegoer, 16 July 1949, p. 14. 10. See J. Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 120–2. 11. Quoted in F. Barker, The Oliviers: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 212. 12. Quoted in L. Olivier, Confessions of an Actor (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 99. 13. Quoted in Picturegoer, 16 July 1949, p. 14. 14. Quotation taken from Mitchell and Towers, March of the Movies, p. 25. 15. Quote taken from Olivier, Confessions of an Actor, p. 111. 16. Handbook of the Society of British Film Art Directors and Designers (1948), courtesy of E. Carrick. 17. E. Carreras in Kinematograph Weekly, 29 November 1945, p. 38. 18. See de Marney’s comments in Cinema Studio, 19 January 1949, and Political Quarterly, October–December 1950. De Marney had once had major production ambitions. He co-produced The Gentle Sex with Del Giudice in 1942. He was then associated with British National.

88 The New Film History 19. H. Halstead quoted in ‘British Studio Section’, Kinematograph Weekly, 2 October 1947, p. xxiii. 20. Dennis Wreford’s Curriculum Vitae, dated 8 October 1936. Courtesy of Edward Carrick. The recipient, Herbert Wilcox, replied the next day that he had passed the details on to L. P. Williams. Both Wreford and Williams must have been embarrassed by this, since Wreford had already worked at B&D. 21. Film Industry, 25 August 1949, p. 7.

6 The Author as Author: Restoring the Screenwriter to British Film History Andrew Spicer

One of the most deleterious effects of the auteur theory’s cult of the director as the sole creative force within film-making has been to obscure the contribution of others involved in the production process: actors, cinematographers, editors, producers, set designers and, the focus here, screenwriters. There have been attempts to remedy this neglect in studies of Hollywood cinema – notably Richard Corliss’ Talking Pictures (1975) and Richard Fine’s exemplary Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928–1940 (1979) – but a singular absence of any comparable studies of British screenwriters.1 Studies of individual screenwriters in British cinema do exist, but almost all have been of those who have a literary reputation gained outside the cinema, and none of them situate their analyses within an historical overview of the development of screenwriting in the United Kingdom.2 This essay is a contribution towards such a history through a contextual study of Richard Curtis whose reputation has been gained entirely through his screenwriting, whom Variety called ‘Britain’s only billion-dollar screenwriter’, and Philip French ‘unquestionably the true auteur of all the pictures he’s worked on’.3 However, it is not the intention of this chapter to replace the concept of the director as the author of a film with that of the screenwriter, or to argue that the object of study should be the film script, somehow cleansed of ‘interferences’ from others involved in a film’s production, or even a detailed interpretation of the films themselves, the customary focus of auteur studies. On the contrary, this case study of Curtis focuses on the film-making process, from initial idea through to marketing and promotion, emphasizing the essentially collaborative nature of 89


film-making in order to discern which personnel, under what conditions, took the crucial decisions, thus conceptualizing authorship in film as both multiple and mutable. Such an emphasis requires an investigation of the production histories of particular films, but framed within the general economic and cultural conditions in which those films were made. Although Curtis is a contemporary screenwriter, my analysis seeks to demonstrate how his work, or that of any other screenwriter, can be historically contextualized through detailed research that draws on a range of primary sources – the trade press, film journals, newspapers and magazines, interviews, audience profiling and film reviews – as well as secondary material. In particular, I shall concentrate on Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), in every way the pivotal film in Curtis’ career, and one that had a major influence on the subsequent history of British cinema. However, this case study needs to be prefaced by some general observations about the screenwriter’s role, which has been poorly understood or marginalized because of its particular nature, and about the reasons for its low status, which have deep historical roots.

The role and status of the screenwriter In his intelligent study, The Writer and the Screen (1973), Wolf Rilla argues that screenwriting is essentially different from writing novels or plays and that the screenwriter (or ‘screenwright’ – Rilla’s coinage) ‘is not a writer in the normally accepted sense at all, even though the fount of his talents is that of any other writer’ because ‘the screenplay represents the one non-verbal form of writing … its writer is not carrying on a literary activity at all.’ As a ‘non-verbal form’, screenwriting is inseparable from the whole process of making a film (or television programme) and is of its nature a collaboration with others involved in the production process.4 A similar point is made by Robin Estridge, a staff writer for Rank in the 1950s, who contends that the screenwriter is not a creative writer but a creative technician whose job it is to collaborate ‘with other technicians in an industry’. Such collaborations involve ‘learning their language’ and being prepared to rewrite the script numerous times as part of the writer’s intimate involvement in the whole production process.5 Curtis also believes it is essential for the screenwriter to be part of the film-making process because a film: is made at least four times. Once in the writing. Then in the shooting, which is the second film. Then in the editing, which is the third film. Then I think there might be this fourth film, which is stepping right back, being even more ruthless, losing bits that you love because they

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interfere with the flow and energy of what has emerged, and because some scenes are funnier and some performances are better than you thought. The screenplay is only the beginning.6 However, the major problem that British screenwriters have often faced is precisely their exclusion from the production process. The reasons for this exclusion have their roots in British feature films’ formative period when conservative producers were reluctant to commission original screenplays, favouring adaptations of known literary and theatrical successes. It was felt that turning plays or novels into a scenario was a mechanical craft that could be learned, and therefore screenwriters were treated as low-paid hacks who were fortunate to receive any screen credit and whose services were no longer required once the scenario had been produced. Screenwriting rapidly became an unattractive profession to established writers conscious of their status and reputation.7 This in turn accentuated the snobbery that already existed against an ‘upstart’ medium that ‘pandered to the masses’. To write for the screen was to descend into the marketplace, ‘rent and tax jobs’ to be completed before returning to the serious business of literary creation. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat established the Screenwriters Association in 1936 in an attempt to improve the status of the profession.8 However, Launder and Gilliat soon realized that the only real way to gain greater creative control was to produce and direct their films as well as write them. Staff writers, like Estridge, commanded a degree of respect, but their institutional power was limited. The influence of auteurism, which became fashionable from the 1960s onwards, elevated the director often at the expense of the screenwriter. James Park argued that this development only ‘encouraged directors to promise, and their producers to believe, that the real work of the film takes place on the floor’.9 This belief undermined the writer’s status because it suggested that a good script is not an essential precondition for a successful film as its deficiencies could be overcome by the talents of the director. This led to a significant underestimation of the length of time required to produce a good script and left writers uncertain about their role in the process from which they were still routinely excluded.10

Learning a craft: Richard Curtis’s early career and working practices Curtis was fortunate to serve his apprenticeship in television, a medium that has customarily accorded the screenwriter greater authority. Curtis began to learn his craft through a series of shows on the burgeoning


alternative comedy circuit, in which he performed with Rowan Atkinson whom he had met at Oxford; Curtis gradually switched from being Atkinson’s straight man to full-time writer.11 Curtis and Atkinson co-wrote The Atkinson People, broadcast on Radio 3 in Spring 1979, and became part of Not the Nine O’Clock News (BBC 2, 1979–82), a high-velocity series of comic sketches that took a satirical look at contemporary issues. Blackadder (BBC 1983–89), which Curtis largely co-wrote with Ben Elton, followed, an absurdist historical sitcom that constructed an alternative history of England, starring Atkinson as Edmund Blackadder. Even more successful was Mr Bean (ITV, 1990–95), co-written by Curtis and Robin Driscoll, which exploited the rubber-limbed Atkinson’s extraordinary ability as a visual comedian in a series that was closer to silent slapstick comedy than television sitcom. Curtis acknowledged the BBC in particular as non-interventionist once a series had been commissioned and he was given the freedom to develop his craft as a gag and sketch writer, assiduously honing a succession of carefully crafted comic set-pieces, and gradually mastering what he called the ‘specific rhythm’ of the half-hour format.12 By his own admission, Curtis relied on ‘quite a simple technique: having thought of one thing, I just exaggerate and expand and move it around and look at it – a very straight simple line of expansion and repetition’.13 This structural simplicity was allied to a verbal complexity (excepting Mr Bean) which was knowing and allusive, but without losing its framework of reference in popular culture and therefore capable of appealing to a broad audience. Curtis appreciated the value of being involved with the entire development of the production, from original idea through to editing and pre-testing where the bits the studio audience failed to laugh at were cut. Curtis also understood the importance of a good script editor. During his early career this service was provided by his then girlfriend Helen Fielding, whom he also met whilst at Oxford, latterly by his long-term partner Emma Freud. Both have the desired combination of being at once supportive but also sharply critical, insisting that everything is as good as can be achieved, while respecting Curtis’s intentions.14 Ambitious to move into feature film writing, and beginning to resent the constraints of collaborating on television series, Curtis had experienced a miserable period trying to write a film for MGM for which a script only existed in outline.15 When he abandoned the attempt, he resolved always to work from a full script which was the distillation of a long process of reflection: ‘I need to know that a story has haunted me to be able to put up with all the complexity of writing it later.’16 He also

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resolved to write about subjects and themes that were close to him, that he understood from personal experience. Thus his first film, The Tall Guy (1989) – a modestly budgeted production where many of the cast were friends and the director Mel Smith was from Not the Nine O’Clock News – was semi-autobiographical. It featured a straight man performing with a mean, egotistical comedian (Atkinson playing a dark version of himself) and in love with a nurse in Camden Town (the original title was Camden Town Boy), which mirrored Curtis’s own situation at the time. The core elements of Curtis’s later successes are present here: the non-heroic hero searching for true love, but enmeshed in what Curtis has called ‘the comedy of the awkwardness of goodness. For most of us the funny things happen when we try to be nice to people, to accommodate our little fibs and smooth things over in embarrassing situations.’17 However, The Tall Guy was vitiated, as Curtis recognized retrospectively, because he failed to alter the screenplay once an American actor ( Jeff Goldblum) had been cast as the male lead, which makes the character rather inchoate and unconvincing.18 Although relatively unsuccessful at the box-office, The Tall Guy was funded by Working Title (WT), foreshadowing a relationship that had profound consequences for both parties.

The importance of the production context: Working Title and Four Weddings WT, established in 1984, had several modest successes in the 1980s, but its production strategy was reshaped when it was acquired by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment in 1991, part of a multinational media conglomerate that was looking to diversify into film and television from its existing base in the music business.19 PolyGram was the only European company that could rival the Hollywood majors in terms of finance and distribution, with access to the key American market through its co-ownership of Gramercy, an independent US distributor. The guiding force was Michael Kuhn whose strategy was to handle finance, marketing, sales and distribution centrally, but to place production in the hands of independent film-makers who were given a great deal of autonomy in terms of subject matter and treatment, provided that PolyGram judged that the overall package was financially viable; that is, could be sold internationally.20 WT, now under the joint management of Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, fitted neatly into such an arrangement as it mirrored their own way of working. Their policy was to leave the detailed planning and execution of particular films to the production team, provided that WT judged the project had broad potential appeal: ‘stylish, commercial


films aimed at a maturing yuppie audience, and upbeat enough to play on both sides of the Atlantic’, as Bevan phrased it.21 WT stepped in to take on the major financing of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) after FilmFour had experienced problems, because Bevan admired Curtis’s witty and entertaining script and saw its international potential, as did Kuhn, who identified a gap in the international marketplace for a feelgood comedy.22 Even so, such a quirky British film, again based on transmutations of Curtis’s own experiences, was judged to be high risk and was therefore tightly budgeted, the figure finally whittled down from £3.5 to £2.7 million.23 In return for accepting this strict financial discipline – by contrast, the budget for the Bond film GoldenEye (1995) was £17 million24 – Curtis was allowed to have a free hand in choice of director, producer and principal casting, once the American Andie MacDowell had been secured as the female lead. Curtis chose as his producer Duncan Kenworthy, whom he knew socially but had not worked with, because he recognized that he conceived scenes verbally not visually and therefore Kenworthy’s compensating visual acuity would ensure a good-looking film.25 Perhaps even more important was the choice of director, Mike Newell, engaged because of his seriousness, ‘a documentary edge, the sense of real life going on’, which Curtis had admired in his previous films.26 Not only did Newell’s experience enable him to manage the exacting 36-day shooting schedule, but he insisted on extremely rigorous auditioning of even tiny roles, with the actor being asked detailed questions about his or her character in order to create an ‘arc’ to their performance, the sense of capturing a moment in a complex life, rather than a two-dimensional sketch. Curtis judged that Newell’s fleshing out of the characters ‘added a maturity and depth which I’m not sure [was] there in the script’.27 This was instrumental in transforming Four Weddings from a series of sketches into a full-blown romantic comedy in which the characters excite audience sympathy and interest. Structurally, Four Weddings exemplifies Curtis’s nostrum of expansion and repetition through its quartet of weddings, each carefully differentiated, and it allowed him to ‘find a context where you might be able to see pretty well every word that the leading characters say to each other’.28 The other key decision was the casting of Hugh Grant as the male lead, Charles. Though Curtis initially judged Grant to be too posh, too much the public school ‘toff’, he was won over by Grant’s ability to speak his lines with ‘an exuberant naturalism’ that transformed a caricature into a three-dimensional character.29 Curtis felt that Grant understood the part of Charles entirely ‘and he found it easy to be extremely accurate in comic delivery, with the rhythm of the jokes, while having the right

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character’.30 He also had a strong sex appeal for women on both sides of the Atlantic. As Curtis reflected: ‘Whatever your script is like, no matter how much stewing and rewriting – if the punters don’t want to sleep with the star, you may never be asked to write another one.’31 The evolution of Four Weddings was complex and Curtis reworked the script more than 17 times, five times for Emma Freud before it was shown to anyone else. Other rewrites were made to solve logistical problems caused by the abbreviated shoot or the dwindling budget. Some changes were made at the behest of the production companies, FilmFour and WT, and a major one as the result of the casting process with Newell and the first read through, after which Curtis attempted to give the characters more depth and roundedness. Another significant revision was made at Helen Fielding’s suggestion that the comic embarrassments of the weddings should be contrasted with a more serious element.32 Curtis and Freud worked for an entire month on the funeral scene whose function is to demonstrate, through a gay relationship, that there is such a thing as true love. It concludes with a key exchange, in which Charles confides to Tom ( James Fleet) his fears about the difficulties, perhaps impossibility, of meeting a ‘soul mate’, and of impending disillusioned middle age. The maturity of this writing contrasts with some undigested residues of Curtis’s earlier work: Atkinson’s comedy vicar, a well-worked routine dating back to their stage shows, and the scene where Charles is trapped in the washroom of the bridal suite as the couple, Lydia and Bernard, start having noisy sexual congress, a legacy of Mr Bean that has a different tone and texture to the other moments of embarrassment. Nevertheless, Four Weddings creates an absorbing romantic comedy, but one redefined for a knowing 1990s audience, which has a characteristically postmodern playfulness, a knowing mockery of genre conventions that allows traditional expressions of romantic love to be couched within a self-protective irony. Charles can only declare his love hesitantly and parenthetically: ‘In the immortal words of David Cassidy, when he was still with the Partridge family, “I think I love you” ’, a typically knowing and very funny popular cultural allusion. Charles’s final romantic union with Carrie (MacDowell) takes the form of a disavowal of marriage. Even so, when preview audiences judged the scene too serious, and also indicated a wish to know the fate of the other characters, Curtis added a further scene whose conspectus of subsequent weddings and unions also lightly mocks generic conventions.33 If the production of Four Weddings was under Curtis’ control, its distribution and exhibition were not. PolyGram took the decision to release it in America first because if it failed there it still might succeed


in Britain, whereas the reverse was not true, and an American success would enhance its box-office chances in the United Kingdom. However, cautious about this ‘little movie with almost no stars in it’, PolyGram resolved on an inexpensive initial release on only a few screens.34 After a good performance in its first week, Kuhn decided, in what Curtis described as ‘a truly lateral leap of faith’, to spend $15 million (nearly four times the film’s production budget) in order to strike many more prints (so it could show on a thousand screens) and to market and promote Four Weddings like a major Hollywood film.35 This decision transformed Four Weddings from a modest success into a smash hit, one that subsequently could be aggressively marketed in Britain – though, interestingly, the British campaign, unlike the American, emphasized comedy more than romance – and worldwide. It became, at this point, the highest grossing British film ever, earning $350 million globally.36 A statistical breakdown of the British audience profile for Four Weddings revealed that it appealed predominantly to the top band (ABC1) audience (69 per cent) and to older cinemagoers, with over 40 per cent aged over 35.37 This was precisely the ‘maturing’ middle-class audience which was gradually returning to the cinema, and whose proportion of the total audience increased significantly throughout the 1990s.38

The ‘billion dollar’ writer: Bean, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones The scale of Four Weddings’ success reinvigorated a rather moribund British film industry, inspiring a raft of rom-coms and securing the longterm future of WT, which became the most successful British production company of the 1990s, able to survive unscathed when PolyGram was taken over by Universal in 1998. Curtis was a key element in WT’s portfolio, under the heading ‘long-term creative partnerships’, granted more-or-less complete freedom in terms of choice of subject and, despite being a notoriously slow writer, allowed to develop scripts at his own pace. Curtis’ next film, Bean (1997), was a direct development of the television series, and a return to a close collaboration with Atkinson, who had final say over the script and could decide whether the film would go ahead.39 To translate this character to the big screen, Curtis constructed a simple plot in which Mr Bean, masquerading as an art expert, is offloaded by the British National Gallery on to the unsuspecting Grierson Gallery in Los Angeles whose young curator invites Bean to stay with him. This device, while engineering the requisite transatlanticism, also preserved ‘what’s best about Mr Bean – small, intimate, embarrassing

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situations, closely observed’.40 Bean also benefited from adroit marketing, only released in the United States after it had been screened successfully in Britain and the rest of the world because Atkinson, whose stage show had been a notorious flop on Broadway, was little known in America. In part Bean was a profitable way of marking time before the longanticipated follow-up to Four Weddings, Notting Hill, released in May 1999. By this point Curtis could command a massively increased budget, £15 million, which enabled him and Kenworthy to afford expensive stars: Hugh Grant (whose price had risen after his success in Four Weddings had elevated him to international stardom) and Julia Roberts, playing ‘herself’ as Anna Scott, the most successful American female star of the 1990s. Notting Hill displays a greater confidence in its handling of genre, eschewing the sub-plots and complicated contrivances of Four Weddings in favour of a straightforward fairy-tale narrative set in a fashionably chic Notting Hill. As before, Curtis endeavoured to ground his fantasy in the everyday (‘we tried to make it seem as though this sort of thing might actually happen, realistic direction, pretty realistic performances, not too slushy music’), and to remain close to his own experiences.41 It takes place in the area of West London where Curtis actually lived and William Thacker (Grant) is very much Curtis’ original idea for Charles in Four Weddings, an unexceptional ‘ordinary bloke’. Notting Hill retains many elements from Four Weddings – the self-deprecating non-heroic protagonist who again endures a series of embarrassing situations before his ‘impossible’ romance gradually becomes a reality, the confident and enigmatic American heroine, the group of supportive but underachieving friends – but although still knowing and self-mocking, Notting Hill is more overtly sentimental than the earlier film. Indeed, Tim Bevan felt that Curtis had moved a little too far from his core skills as a sketch writer and some comic set pieces – including the very funny scene where William has to pose as a journalist from Horse and Hound in order to get to see Anna – were added to the screenplay.42 Anticipating a major hit, Universal marketed and exhibited Notting Hill like an American blockbuster, and it became even more successful than its predecessor, grossing $363,089,678 worldwide.43 The success of Notting Hill cemented Curtis’ position as the leading British screenwriter, which was further strengthened through his work on Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). Helen Fielding’s creation was in many ways the female equivalent of the Curtis non-heroic hero: lonely, self-doubting, socially inadequate, stumbling through a series of embarrassing situations but ultimately triumphant in her quest to find a soul mate and achieve the dream of romantic love. It was therefore familiar territory for Curtis


when he was called in to assist on the screenplay as a personal favour to his friend Fielding after she had experienced difficulties.44 Working on someone else’s material for the first time, Curtis came to understand why it is ‘famously difficult adapting books’ and admitted that the adaptation was troublesome, ‘because it took us a long time to realise how different the film was going to be, and how much effect it would have on the book actually to see Bridget’.45 Tim Bevan commented that Bridget Jones ‘took a huge leap forward in the cutting room because Richard Curtis was present and he is a ruthless editor’.46 Despite Andrew Davies’ involvement in the screenplay – he had used Pride and Prejudice to structure Fielding’s episodic narrative – Bridget Jones came to be seen as a Richard Curtis film, its verbal wit, succession of excruciating moments and bawdiness all marking Curtis as the dominant influence. A huge success, the film spawned a sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), in which Curtis was also closely involved.47

The writer-director: Love Actually Curtis’ desire to have complete creative control over his films – he had been an executive producer from Bean onwards – meant that it was a logical step to becoming writer-director with Love Actually (2003). Love Actually was an ambitious portmanteau film, inspired by Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), that traces nine interconnected and intersecting stories in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Despite the scale and difficulty of the undertaking, he was supported by WT: ‘There was never a quibble from Eric or Tim or anyone from Universal, telling me not to try. Because I could probably have written something much more commercial – the movie actually contains two or maybe three, easier movies.’48 He was also given a generous budget, £23 million, and assembled a highly talented cast. Alan Rickman joked that it was an obligation to appear in a Curtis film, ‘otherwise you’d have your passport taken away’, a quip that indicated his centrality to the British film industry, to say nothing of his identification with New Labour; Curtis had received a CBE in 2000.49 Indeed one of the central storylines is a Blairite Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) who falls in love with his tea lady. Though non-political – it is evidence that no-one is immune to the power of love – it does give Curtis the opportunity for his most overtly anti-American statements when the PM delivers his paean about the greatness of Britain to the discomfiture of the lecherous American President (Billy Bob Thornton) at a press conference: ‘We may be a small country but we’re a great one too. A country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery,

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Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot – David Beckham’s left foot, come to that. And a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend.’ This collocation, mingling popular sentiment, knowing but widely recognized cultural allusions and self-mockery, is unmistakable Curtis. Love Actually’s stories range from this overt fantasy to the quotidian realism of an acutely observed marriage in peril (Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman), and the breadth of characters, types of relationship and range of emotions is wider than in his previous films; one of the stories, in which a sister’s commitment to her psychologically damaged brother prevents her entering into a relationship with the man of her dreams, is uncharacteristically downbeat. However, they are united by Curtis’ sensibility that mixes comedy and pathos, moments of acute embarrassment that often lead to joy and triumph, and the obsessive search for love. It also contains several instances of the trope deployed in Notting Hill: the sudden, impulsive declaration of love before large, surprised and rather bemused audiences. Philip French comments that this ‘characteristic Curtis ploy’ allows him to have his cake and eat it, ‘by combining English reticence and understatement with American demonstrative exuberance’.50 Love Actually is also Curtis’ most overt and inclusive attempt at articulating his sense of optimism and faith in the inherent goodness of human nature, beginning with the scene at the Arrivals Gate at Heathrow Airport in which miscellaneous unidentified couples embrace as the narrator (Grant) reflects that ‘love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified, or newsworthy – but it’s always there’ and that the horrendous events of 9/11 can be recuperated because the telephone calls from the people on the doomed planes ‘were all messages of love’. Curtis reflected: ‘I do seem to have written a great deal about love. But I mean if you look at the world, there are huge amounts of love and affection, and yet so much of art portrays the darker side of humanity. When I look around the world I notice a lot of things that are rather gorgeous, lots of people with kind hearts.’51 If the comic set pieces – complete with Atkinson as an unctuous shop-assistant – prevent the film sliding into gooey sentimentality, without the presence of a director with a contrasting disposition or independent judgment, Love Actually loses some of the discipline of Curtis’ earlier work. Some weaker material has survived the film-making process and there is a sense that the film was a way of restoring scenes or jokes excised from other films; as one review aptly remarked, Love Actually ‘feels like a greatest hits compendium’. However, he added that it ‘re-affirms [Curtis’] stature as a great populist entertainer’, the ‘master of the


feelgood film’.52 This verdict was endorsed by the public when the film grossed $185 million worldwide.53

Conclusion Curtis returned to the BBC with his latest work, The Girl in the Café, broadcast on BBC1 on 25 June 2005 as part of the Africa Lives at the BBC season. Although this was another rom-com, it is his most overtly political piece, timed to lobby the G8 Summit and containing an impassioned plea to eradicate poverty in Africa, an issue on which Curtis has campaigned for 20 years as co-founder of Comic Relief. Curtis had decided to ‘dedicate my time to a bit of almost activist politics’, what he called ‘consciousness-raising’ rather than fund-raising, using the BBC because he judged that ‘the way to get lots of people quickly and inject something into the bloodstream is to do it on the television.’54 The Girl in the Café may indicate a different direction to Curtis’s future work, but it was a remarkable testament to his power and influence. Through his films and his continued success in television – The Vicar of Dibley (BBC 1994–2005) co-written with Paul Mayhew-Archer was another enormously popular series – Curtis’s name, very unusually for a writer, is used in marketing and promotion and his role is commented on extensively in reviews. He has been able to exercise a remarkable degree of control over every aspect of his work, from first draft to final cut, not forgetting the soundtrack – where he chooses the songs that accompany key emotional moments in the drama – the trailer and the poster, all of which bear his stamp. He is also central to the secondary marketing of his work through publication of the screenplays and the release of the various DVD versions where Curtis is always the leading voice in the commentary. This affords Curtis another opportunity to author his films, guiding his audience through the scenes and providing background information, interpreting characters and justifying the decisions that were taken. However, Curtis’s success has been achieved through the narrow, self-defining parameters of what he has called his ‘very protected career. I’ve worked with people I know very well.’55 Content to operate within a restricted milieu, he has never been tempted to go to Hollywood, accepting his role as a British screenwriter and remaining with WT, ‘working with people who trust me and know me’.56 On one level, this narrowness has been a source of great strength, allowing Curtis to create a particular voice and vision that is individual and remarkably consistent. But it has been at the expense of alienating nearly all the critics in

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the ‘quality’ press and journals. For instance, Mark Lawson, writing in the Guardian, although he astutely recognizes that Curtis’s achievement has been to ‘make the parochial global’, argues that in doing so he has created a cosy, nostalgic England which ‘is recognisably a fantasy of expats’, one that avoids difficult or controversial issues.57 On the other hand, rather surprisingly, Curtis has found a champion in Judith Williamson, who recognized that he had reinvented romantic comedy for a new generation almost single-handedly and has had a decisive influence on popular sentiment. She argued that although these romantic comedies might be intellectually embarrassing – films that are ‘uncool to like’ – they provide for a broad public the framework through which difficult and powerful emotions can be dealt with: ‘failure and insecurity and hesitation: about the pain of emotionally screwing up’.58 Whatever valuation might be placed on Curtis’s artistic achievement, the scale of his success, the extent of his influence and the degree of creative control he is able to exercise make Curtis a highly unusual screenwriter. But he is also typical in that his achievements are based on varying types of collaboration: with production companies (WT), with performers (especially Atkinson and Grant), with directors (notably Mike Newell), with producers (Duncan Kenworthy) and with his script editor, Emma Freud. As this chapter has sought to demonstrate, screenwriting is part of the film-making process, not an entity in itself. This is neatly captured in Curtis’s disarmingly modest valuation of his own initial work: ‘If my screenplays had just been made when I handed them in, I’m not sure any of them would have been good films – so I don’t know that they’re good screenplays. What is good is the process whereby I’ve been able to contribute from the very beginning to the very end.’59 Therefore, to restore the screenwriter to film history has, I suggest, important implications for the student of film, as it should serve to shift attention away from the sovereignty of textual interpretation (the cornerstone of auteurism) towards a detailed analysis of the whole trajectory of a film’s development, from initial idea to marketing and promotion, an analysis based on a range of sources and one that is sensitive to the wider contexts in which that development occurs.

Notes 1. Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters of Hollywood (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1975); Richard Fine, Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928–1940 (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1979). 2. See, for instance, Steven H. Gale, Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artistic Process (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); the exception


3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

is Kevin Macdonald, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (London: Faber & Faber, 1994). Several studies have analysed screenwriters in the course of more general accounts, notably Charles Barr’s comments on Eliot Stannard and Charles Bennett in English Hitchcock (Dumfriesshire: Cameron & Hollis, 1999); and Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 167–90. Adam Dawtrey, ‘Born Romantic’, Variety, 15–21 October 2001, pp. A9–10; Philip French, ‘Keeping up with the Jones’, Observer, 14 November 2004, p. 9. Wolf Rilla, The Writer and the Screen: On Writing for Film and Television (London: W. H. Allen, 1973), pp. ix, 3. Robin Estridge, ‘The Screen Writer’, Films and Filming (March 1957), p. 13. Alistair Owen (ed.), Story and Character: Interviews with British Screenwriters (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 96. Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, 1918–1929 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), pp. 231–42; Christine Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: British Film Institute, 2003), pp. 155–6. Geoff Brown, Launder and Gilliat (London: British Film Institute, 1977), pp. 7–8. James Park, ‘False Starts’, Sight and Sound, 59:3 (1990), p. 154. Ibid., pp. 155–6. Information in this paragraph is largely drawn from Bruce Dessau, Rowan Atkinson (London: Orion, 1999). David Bradbury and Joe McGrath, Now That’s Funny! Conversations with Comedy Writers (London: Methuen, 1998), p. 108. Ibid., p. 100. Owen (ed.), Story and Character, pp. 82–3. Richard Curtis, ‘Introduction’, Four Weddings and a Funeral (London: Corgi, 1994), p. 9. Owen (ed.), Story and Character, p. 69. Quoted in Dessau, Rowan Atkinson, p. 215. Owen (ed.), Story and Character, p. 71. Tim Bevan, ‘Introduction’, Laundrettes and Lovers: From Storyboard to Billboard. Twenty Years of a British Film Company (London: Boxtree, 2003), pp. 11–15. Michael Kuhn, One Hundred Films and a Funeral (London: Thorogood, 2002), pp. 33, 81, 85, 99. Tim Bevan, Observer Magazine, 20 March 1994, p. 14. Kuhn, One Hundred Films, p. 58. Curtis, Four Weddings, p. 10. Terry Ilott (ed.), The British Film and Television Handbook 1995 (London: British Film Institute, 1994), p. 27. Bradbury and McGrath, Now That’s Funny, p. 101. Curtis, Laundrettes and Lovers, pp. 92, 95. Owen (ed.), Story and Character, p. 80. Ibid., p. 76. Bradbury and McGrath, Now That’s Funny, p. 103. Susan Bullington Katz, Conversations with Screenwriters (New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2000), p. 23. Curtis, Four Weddings, p. 10. Ibid.

Andrew Spicer 103 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Kuhn, One Hundred Films, p. 59. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., pp. 60–3; Curtis, Laundrettes and Lovers, p. 95. Nick Roddick, ‘Four Weddings and a Final Reckoning’, Sight and Sound, 5:1 (1995), pp. 13–15. Cinema and Video Audience Research (CAVIAR), survey 14, 1994. Eddie Dyja (ed.), British Film Institute Film and Television Handbook 2003 (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 38. Curtis, in Duncan Petrie (ed.), Inside Stories (London: British Film Institute, 1996), pp. 92–4. Ibid. Curtis, ‘Foreword’, Notting Hill (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), p. 13. Owen (ed.), Story and Character, p. 93. http://www.variety.com/indexasp?layout=filmsearch_exact&dept=Film& movieID=9; accessed 18 June 2006. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 97. Quoted in ‘Tim Bevan, Working Title Films’, http://www.filmfour.com/mm/ mm_AskTheExperts_timbevan.jsp; accessed 24 May 2002. Bridget Jones’s Diary grossed $280,207,792 at the worldwide box-office; see note 44 for the reference; at the time of writing the figures for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason are not as yet available. Curtis, Laundrettes and Lovers, p. 241. Rickman, interviewed at the film’s premiere, 4 November 2003. French, ‘Keeping up with the Jones’, p. 9. Universal Studios’ Production Notes, included on the BFI microfiche for Love Actually. David Gritten, ‘Actually it’s a great film’, Daily Telegraph, 9 September 2003, p. 18. Evening Standard, 19 July 2004, p. 19. HBO Films interview with Curtis, http://www.hbo.com/films/girlinthecafe/ interviews/; accessed 27 June 2005. Bradbury and McGrath, Now That’s Funny, p. 101. Ibid., pp. 102–3. Mark Lawson, ‘It’s magic’, Guardian G2, 13 November 2003, pp. 2–5. Judith Williamson, ‘Essays in Uncool’, Independent on Sunday, 8 April 2001, Culture Section, pp. 1–2. Owen (ed.), Story and Character, p. 95.

7 When ‘Hanoi Jane’ Conquered Hollywood: Jane Fonda’s Films and Activism, 1977–81 Peter Krämer

In 1976, at the age of 38, Jane Fonda re-launched her Hollywood career, which had been in decline ever since she had committed herself to political activism in the early 1970s. Her activism had ranged from support for racial minorities and women’s liberation to radical criticism of the capitalist system and the US government, yet at its centre had been her highly controversial campaigning against the Vietnam War, which culminated in her 1972 trip to North Vietnam that earned her the derogatory nickname ‘Hanoi Jane’.1 When, four years later, Fonda talked to the New York Times about her current and future film projects, the paper declared that she was finally ‘back from the war’ and the soon to be released heist comedy Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) was her ‘homecoming vehicle’. Yet, the paper noted, ‘it is difficult to separate Jane Fonda the actress from Jane Fonda the political activist.’ Her films were intended to address political issues such as the legacy of the Vietnam War and the dangers of nuclear energy. Even Fun with Dick and Jane was described as a ‘socially conscious comedy’, dealing with corporate corruption and people buying into ‘a false American dream’. What is more, Fonda had decidedly feminist concerns: ‘I won’t make pictures that portray women as shallow, passive and manipulated by sex.’2 Finally, she intended to continue her work as a political campaigner in collaboration with her husband Tom Hayden, one of the leading representatives of the previous decade’s political movements. This is an unlikely agenda for a Hollywood star, yet Fonda managed to pursue it with great commercial and critical success as well as considerable political impact until 1981, after which her career took another dramatic turn. Indeed, from 1977 to 1981, Fonda was arguably one of the most 104

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influential American film-makers and, both as a star and as the head of her own production company (IPC Films), one of only a handful of women in a position of power in Hollywood. Such influence and power is outside the usual parameters of discussions of authorship and stardom within Film Studies. Debates about authorship are largely concerned with the thematic and/or stylistic imprints that directors leave on their films, while paying little attention to the actual process of film production.3 Similarly, debates about stars are mostly focused on the meanings their film appearances generate, often in conjunction with publicity about the stars’ private lives, rather than with the work they do.4 In considering Jane Fonda as a film-maker in this chapter, I want to explore her role in the production process, the artistic and political goals she pursued as well as the industrial, cultural and socio-political contexts in which she worked. Rather than evaluating the artistic and political qualities of the resulting films, I am interested in measuring their critical and commercial success. In the first section, therefore, I present several indicators of success for Fonda’s films from 1977 to 1981. The second section identifies thematic similarities among these films, and links them to her political activism. The third section examines the development of Fonda’s Vietnam veteran drama Coming Home (1978) from the project’s inception in the early 1970s to its release in 1978.

Success in a male-dominated industry Even critics of the American film industry may be surprised by the extent of its domination by men. For example, a 1982 study of a representative sample of writers, directors and producers of the 50 top-grossing films made from 1965 to 1982 revealed that 98.9 per cent were male.5 This percentage was higher than it was for elite groups in almost all other important sectors of American society. Equally astonishing is the rarity of women in Hollywood films. A content analysis of a representative sample of hit movies (taken from the annual top ten lists) showed that only 26 per cent of all characters were women in the period 1966–75, and 28 per cent in the period 1976–90.6 The increase from 26 per cent to 28 per cent is indicative of a general, albeit very limited improvement in the position of women in Hollywood, both on and off the screen, during the 1970s and 1980s.7 For example, female membership in the Writers Guild of America (the professional organization of scriptwriters) rose from a historic low of 10 per cent in the early 1970s to over 15 per cent in the 1980s.8 Similarly, in Quigley Publishing’s annual survey of American


movie theatre managers, from 1970 to 1976 only one woman (typically Barbra Streisand) was listed among the top ten box-office attractions for each year, except for 1972 when there were two women.9 From 1977 to 1982, this number increased to an average of three, with Fonda being listed every year except 1977. Thus, Fonda’s commercial success in the late 1970s and early 1980s was part of a minor trend towards increased female involvement in top grossing movies. Eight of the ten films Fonda appeared in from 1977 to 1981 achieved high rankings in the annual charts. Such rankings show how well a film did in comparison to all other films released in the same year. From 1977 to 1981 on average 218 films were released in the United States per year, including 95 releases from the major studios.10 Both Fun with Dick and Jane and the historical drama Julia were among the 30 highest grossing films of 1977.11 The ensemble comedy California Suite and Coming Home were in the top 20 for 1978, while the western themed romantic drama The Electric Horseman and the nuclear thriller The China Syndrome were in the top 20 the following year. Most impressively, the office comedy Nine to Five and the family drama On Golden Pond were the second-highest grossing films of 1980 and 1981, respectively; indeed, both films were among the 20 highest grossing films of all time up to 1982.12 The success of these two films extended into other media. Nine to Five was the third-biggest selling video of 1981, and On Golden Pond was among the ten most rented videos of 1982; Dolly Parton’s ‘Nine to Five’ was among the ten best-selling singles of 1981; and while the spin-off TV series Nine to Five was short-lived, it was among the 20 top-rated shows for the 1982/83 season.13 Out of Fonda’s films during these years only the Second World War era western drama Comes a Horseman (1978) and the conspiracy thriller Rollover (1981) were commercial failures, which, given the abundance of flops in Hollywood, is an outstanding track record. Fonda’s films also received considerable critical recognition within the film industry, most notably from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Fonda herself was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar three years in a row (for Julia, Coming Home and The China Syndrome) and for Best Supporting Actress in 1981 (On Golden Pond ).14 She won her second Best Actress award, after the one for the noir thriller Klute (1971), for her performance in Coming Home. Eight of the ten films she appeared in from 1977 to 1981 were nominated for Oscars, with an emphasis on the script and acting categories. For example, On Golden Pond had ten nominations, including Best Picture and Director, and won for Best Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay. Furthermore, Fonda’s work was

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critically acclaimed. Among many other accolades, the National Board of Review listed Julia as one of the ten Best English-Language Films of 1977, both Coming Home and Comes a Horseman made the list in 1978, and The China Syndrome in 1979.15 The Hollywood Foreign Press Association declared Fonda to be the female ‘World Film Favorite’ in 1978 and 1979.16 Finally, a poll among college students in late 1978 found that she was their third-favourite star (after Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford).17 Fonda’s level of commercial and critical success from 1977 to 1981 was therefore extraordinary, even more so for a woman working in this most male-dominated of industries. While she may have profited from general trends in the film industry giving female stars and female filmmakers a higher profile, she in turn helped this development along. Fonda’s success reassured the film industry that, working on and behind the screen, women were able to attract audiences to movie theatres and to combine popular appeal with critical recognition. Importantly, this recognition from professional organizations and reviewers focused on the quality of the scripts Fonda selected, and on the quality of the performances these scripts permitted. How, then, did Fonda select her scripts, and what was her role in the process of turning them into films?

The activist film-maker From 1977 to 1981, Fonda operated both as a freelance actress and as the head of her own production company. Following the commercial success of Fun with Dick and Jane and Julia, as well as the critical accolades for her performance in the latter in 1977, Fonda was much in demand and thus able to pick from a wide range of scripts and also to ask for specific script revisions.18 As head of IPC Films (which produced Coming Home, The China Syndrome, Nine to Five, On Golden Pond and Rollover), Fonda was able to initiate her own projects and to have overall control of their realization. With the exception of On Golden Pond, all of Fonda’s IPC productions reflected her political concerns; to a lesser extent, this also applied to her non-IPC films during this period. Three of the IPC productions – Coming Home, The China Syndrome and Nine to Five – as well as Julia and, less dramatically, Fun with Dick and Jane and The Electric Horseman, deal with the political awakening or transformation of their female protagonists. Thus, housewives and divorcées learn to go beyond traditional gender roles in Fun with Dick and Jane, Coming Home and Nine to Five, and career women develop a new political consciousness regarding foreign affairs,


the nuclear industry, sexism and lack of equal opportunities in the workplace and/or corporate malfeasance in Julia, The China Syndrome, The Electric Horseman and Nine to Five. Furthermore, The China Syndrome, Nine to Five and Rollover as well as Fun with Dick and Jane, Comes a Horseman and The Electric Horseman have markedly anti-corporate themes (illegal business practices, including corruption, negligence and violence; the exploitation and abuse of workers; the commercialization of all spheres of human activity). Additionally, the anti-corporate stance of The China Syndrome, in which a nuclear accident threatens to release huge amounts of radiation, is closely linked to environmental issues, which, to some extent, also underpin Comes a Horseman and The Electric Horseman; the former deals, albeit only in passing, with the devastating impact of oil prospecting on the western landscape, and the latter with the abusive commercial exploitation of a racehorse (standing in for the exploitation of both humans and nature more generally). This critique of big business in Fonda’s films as well as their feminism arose out of her political activism. Perhaps the clearest outline of Fonda’s goals as an activist and film-maker is contained in David Talbot and Barbara Zheutlin’s 1978 book on ‘dissidents’ in Hollywood. Here Fonda is quoted as saying: It’s now possible for people who represent the politics of the sixties movements to begin to take political power … . We’re talking about running candidates for public office. We’re talking about sponsoring legislation. And we’re talking about making progressive movies, because it’s important to build a progressive culture and to open up people’s minds. Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots … the profit motive that controls our culture.19 In addition to Fonda’s films raising issues for public debate and perhaps helping to change people’s attitudes towards them, her salaries from her non-IPC films as well as IPC’s profits were intended to provide funding for political activities, most of which revolved around the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), an organization her husband Tom Hayden had formed in 1976.20 Talbot and Zheutlin describe CED as ‘a statewide organization which has become a significant force within California’s Democratic Party. CED lobbies in Sacramento for the passage of progressive legislation, while working to build a grassroots network of political activists. The organization’s basic political theme is that corporate domination of U.S. society must be counteracted by extending public control over the nation’s economy.’21

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It is easy to see how the negative portrayals of big business in Fonda’s films tied in with the political objectives of CED. Indeed, two of her IPC productions were tailored to specific points on CED’s agenda. The China Syndrome deals with the dangers of an insufficiently regulated nuclear industry and its potential for environmental catastrophe. Nine to Five addresses the specific problems encountered by women in the workplace, ranging from sexual harassment and the preferential treatment of men to the dual demands of work and family. The film proposes concrete changes such as flexitime, job sharing and daycare facilities provided by employers.22 What is more, in 1979/80 Hayden and Fonda toured the country to talk to newspapers, appear on talk shows and give speeches at rallies, often focusing on nuclear power (an obvious choice after the serious nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island facility which occurred shortly after the release of The China Syndrome in March 1979), and also specifically addressing gatherings of female office workers.23 While Fonda’s integrated approach to film-making and political activism was unusual, her enormous success can partly be explained by the fact that both the Hollywood elite and the hit movies it produced had become quite liberal by the late 1970s. Thus, the 1982 study of successful writers, directors and producers discussed above found that, unlike the people dominating Hollywood before the 1970s, the current Hollywood elite was ‘unquestionably to the left of … the public in a broad range of social and political views’ and, in particular, was ‘quite critical of traditional institutions such as business, organized religion, and the military’; furthermore, two-thirds of the respondents ‘explicitly state that they believe movies should contribute to social reform’.24 Quantitative content analysis of a representative sample of top ten hits found that Hollywood’s output reflected these political attitudes. For example, whereas from 1946 to 1965 about half of all portrayals of business in hit movies had been positive, this percentage dropped to 30 per cent in the decade 1966–75 and to 5 per cent for the period 1976–90; across these 45 years, negative portrayals went up from about 15 per cent to 45 per cent.25 It is also worth noting that while Hollywood was more critical of the business world than the American public, the latter’s confidence in big business had been declining steadily since the 1960s, reaching its nadir in the late 1970s and early 1980s.26 Once again, then, Fonda emerges as a trailblazing figure, showing Hollywood that politically motivated film-making could be commercially viable. Her success was made possible by underlying liberalizing tendencies both within Hollywood itself and in the American public in general. To gain more detailed insights into how Fonda operated as a political film-maker, we can take a closer look at the production of Coming Home.


The making of a Vietnam movie Coming Home is deeply rooted in Fonda’s anti-Vietnam activism, which even today is the subject of tremendous controversy.27 This controversy can easily get in the way of the film historian’s attempt to give an impartial account of the project’s development. This task is further complicated by the fact that, while two archival collections richly document the production of Coming Home, one has to rely for a full account on sometimes contradictory interviews and autobiographical writings.28 These caveats need to be kept in mind when reading the following account. Most sources agree that Fonda first had the idea for a film dealing with the Vietnam War, with a particular focus on soldiers’ wives and disabled veterans, in the winter of 1972/3; the initial emphasis appears to have been on the redemptive transformation of an embittered, disabled veteran (loosely modelled on Ron Kovic of subsequent Born on the Fourth of July fame).29 Fonda’s anti-war activism had started in 1970 with visits to so-called ‘GI coffeehouses’ – meeting places in the vicinity of military bases for enlisted men opposing the Vietnam War – and she had worked closely with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, especially during the so-called ‘Winter Soldier Investigation’ in which veterans publicly discussed their involvement in what they considered to be American war crimes in Vietnam.30 In the autumn of 1972, Fonda had consolidated her varied anti-war activities by helping to set up the Indochina Peace Campaign (also known as IPC), a national organization co-ordinating the operations of anti-war activists and educating the American public about Vietnam.31 In this context, Fonda’s idea for a Vietnam film can be understood as a logical extension of her anti-war activism, and also as an intervention into what she perceived to be Hollywood’s neglect or misleading representation of the Vietnam war, its veterans and the anti-war movement.32 When the United States signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam in January 1973, Fonda’s film project turned into an important contribution to the public struggle over the remembrance of this episode in US history.33 At the same time, Fonda was concerned about her film career. Due to her political activities, since 1970 she had had less time for her acting work; she had received fewer film offers because Hollywood studios and producers had become increasingly concerned about the controversy surrounding her; and she had become more critical of the scripts she read.34 Thus, following the critical and commercial success of the Depression era drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and Klute, Fonda had only appeared in F.T.A. (1972), a film version of the touring

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anti-war stage revue entitled Free the Army that she had organized in 1971, and Steelyard Blues (1972), a countercultural slapstick comedy made with several of her Free the Army collaborators.35 During 1972, she had gone to France to work with radical French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard on Tout Va Bien (to be released in 1973) and to Norway to appear in a mainly British production of Ibsen’s feminist classic A Doll’s House (also 1973).36 By Hollywood standards, these were marginal productions. By contrast, Fonda’s Vietnam film had the potential to serve as a more conventional star vehicle, especially if she could ‘play the antithesis of what I feel – a prowar or apolitical kind of woman existing in a situation most average people live in’.37 The commercial potential of the planned film was enhanced by the fact that Fonda’s activism had generated not only a lot of criticism and anger against her, but also tremendous support. In January 1973 she was listed for the first time in a Gallup poll as one of the most admired women in America, a result replicated in various polls over the next few years.38 Fonda’s Vietnam project, then, was an attempt to extend her political activism into mainstream film-making while also using her popularity as an activist to boost her career. She decided to develop the project together with fellow IPC activist Bruce Gilbert, who, despite his lack of film-making experience, took on the role of producer, and in March 1973 she hired another activist, Nancy Dowd, to write a screenplay which would partly draw on Dowd’s experiences with veterans.39 Fonda gave some guidance to Dowd, based on her own interviews with the wives of Vietnam veterans which generated ideas for the character she was going to play (a woman married to a soldier in Vietnam who is emotionally and politically transformed by her relationship with a disabled veteran back home), yet she generally left Gilbert in charge of the development process.40 Fonda and Gilbert formalized their partnership by setting up a new company named IPC Films in 1974 (with the abbreviation IPC taken from the Indochina Peace Campaign).41 By July 1974, Dowd had submitted an unwieldy 227 page script (90–120 pages being the norm) entitled Buffalo Ghost, which was given to veteran – and formerly blacklisted – scriptwriter Waldo Salt for a major rewrite.42 Salt carefully analysed Dowd’s script, conducted additional research among Vietnam veterans and produced a new 65 page treatment entitled Going Home.43 He also suggested that IPC reassemble the Academy Award-winning team of Midnight Cowboy (1969), as a consequence of which producer Jerome Hellman and director John Schlesinger joined the project.44 Impressed by Salt’s treatment and the strength of the production team, in 1975 United Artists agreed to finance the


development of a new script and, if it turned out to be satisfactory, the production of the film.45 Following a series of story conferences with Gilbert, Hellman and Schlesinger, Salt submitted his script, now entitled Coming Home, in June 1976.46 Soon afterwards, he suffered a heart attack and Schlesinger left the project, but on very short notice IPC was able to hire acclaimed director Hal Ashby and his long-time collaborator Robert C. Jones, who was going to work on further script revisions.47 Another round of story conferences, which for the first time involved Fonda, started in July 1976.48 United Artists was satisfied with the project and in October 1976 gave the green light for the production of the film.49 However, shooting started on 3 January 1977 without a finalized script, and significant changes, especially to the ending, were still being made. Filming ended on 23 April 1977, and the film was released in February 1978.50 In the course of this long drawn-out process, Fonda made crucial contributions at various points. She initiated the project and selected her key collaborators (activists and film-making novices Gilbert and Dowd) whom she then trusted to develop the script. In addition to defining the film’s general themes, early on she made suggestions about the character she was going to play. For the two years from mid-1974 to mid-1976, she appears to have had little involvement in script development. However, as head of IPC Films, she must have been involved in the decision to get an experienced scriptwriter and producer on board. Furthermore, it was her status as a Hollywood figure that enabled IPC to attract top talent like Salt and Ashby, and to offer some assurance to United Artists executives that they were investing in a commercially viable film. Fonda’s most concentrated effort to shape the film lasted from July 1976 to April 1977, when, as discussed below, she came to dominate the film’s production. Her role in post-production was probably limited, although as head of IPC she certainly would have had to approve the cut delivered to United Artists. The first story conference for which Fonda’s presence is documented took place on 29 July 1976; it involved Fonda, Gilbert, Hellman and Ashby, and dealt with Salt’s script from June 1976.51 A comparison of the script with the finished film reveals that the extensive comments Fonda made during this meeting were not only largely taken on board by her fellow film-makers but also substantially reshaped the film’s story, characters and meaning. This, in turn, suggests that other story conferences and discussions on the set, for which no documentation is available, may well have been similarly dominated by Fonda. Judging by her contributions to the July story conference, Fonda was most concerned

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about what she saw as the script’s implication that her character (Sally Hyde) defined herself primarily as a sex object, was uncritically caught up in the hypermasculine world of the military, and particularly enjoyed the violent aspects of the sexual relationship with her husband (Bob Hyde). Responding to all of Fonda’s objections, the film’s Sally is a prim captain’s wife, who inhabits the genteel world of officers’ clubs and wives’ meetings, and does not enjoy the somewhat dispassionate, but by no means violent lovemaking of her husband. Furthermore, Fonda was concerned about Sally’s development across the story. She objected to the job that Sally has at the beginning of the script, because she wanted to emphasize her transformation from a somewhat passive housewife into a woman actively engaging in public affairs (through her volunteer work in a Veterans’ Administration hospital). She also felt that the script’s Sally was too outgoing, earthy and youthful, and thus too similar to the paraplegic Vietnam veteran (Luke Martin) whom she meets in the VA hospital and with whom she has a sexual relationship. In Fonda’s view, Sally initially was to be staid, except for her sense of humour and a latent dissatisfaction with her life, and her encounter with Luke was to be a dramatic clash of cultures, which helps her to change her life, a process she embarks on as soon as her husband leaves for Vietnam. To further emphasize this process, Fonda also rejected the script’s depiction of Sally’s visit to Bob in Hong Kong, during which they are shown to be very close. Instead the visit should, according to Fonda, show that her personal transformation distances her from her husband. Once more, all of Fonda’s suggestions were realized in the film. The story conference notes contain many more examples of Fonda’s reshaping of the script, some of which relate to her anti-war activism and deal specifically with the representation of Vietnam veterans. However, it is important to point out that the examples given above show Fonda operating in a variety of roles in addition to that of former anti-Vietnam activist: an actress wishing to make her character’s transformation more dramatic and thus more challenging; the head of a production company aiming to increase the film’s commercial appeal by ensuring that audiences will find the female protagonist sympathetic; and a feminist objecting to uncritical representations of women as willing participants in a sexist culture.

Conclusion Studying Jane Fonda’s work in the 1970s can serve as a useful reminder of certain aspects of Hollywood’s operations that Film Studies has neglected.


First, film stars are more than ‘images’ or clusters of meaning. They are professionals equipped with a range of skills and driven by a range of motivations, operating in an industrial context over which they usually have little control, although in some instances they can translate their popularity and prestige into significant power. Second, film-making is a complex, collaborative process. Rather than merely serving as the common denominator of an oeuvre, the film director can valuably be understood as one of many decision-making agents, along with producers, writers, stars and many others. Whether the director or any other participant in the production process can be said to exert overall control needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Third, liberal political agendas, both on screen and off, are by no means inimical to Hollywood, especially since the 1970s. It is entirely possible that liberal film-makers can pursue their political agendas with great critical and commercial success. Fourth, and finally, liberal or not, Hollywood is an exceptionally male-dominated industry, which, since the 1970s, has only very gradually opened up for more women to gain significant power and influence. These exceptional women are particularly worthy of study, none more so than Jane Fonda.

Notes Archival research for this chapter in the United States was supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. 1. Mary Hershberger, Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon (New York: The New Press, 2005), pp. 136, 203. 2. John M. Wilson, ‘Jane Fonda’s Happy Heist’, New York Times, 11 April 1976, Section 2, pp. 1 and 19. This article and many others can be found in the clippings files for Jane Fonda and for individual films in the Performing Arts Library of the New York Public Library. 3. For a different approach, see Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005). 4. Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer (eds), Screen Acting (London: Routledge, 1999). 5. Stephen Powers, David J. Rothman and Stanley Rothman, Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), pp. 53, 252–3. This publication is partly based on a survey the authors conducted in 1982. 6. Ibid., pp. 154, 257–71. 7. Rachel Abramowitz, Is that a Gun in Your Pocket? Women’s Experience of Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2000); and Mollie Gregory, Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). 8. Denise D. Bielby and William T. Bielby, ‘Women and Men in Film: Gender Inequality Among Writers in a Culture Industry’, Gender and Society, 10:3 (June 1996), p. 254.

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9. People Magazine, 2001 People Entertainment Almanac (New York: Cader Books, 2000), p. 100. 10. Joel W. Finler, The Hollywood Story (London: Wallflower, 2003), pp. 366–7. 11. For this calculation, I am drawing on unpublished annual charts which Sheldon Hall compiled from the alphabetical film listing in Lawrence Cohn, ‘All-Time Film Rental Champs’, Variety, 10 May 1993, pp. C76–108. Cp. David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (New York: Scribner’s, 2000), pp. 497–503. 12. ‘The 1980s: A Reference Guide to Motion Pictures, Television, VCR, and Cable’, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 27 (Spring 1991), p. 82; ‘All-Time Film Rental Champs’, Variety, 12 January 1983, p. 30. 13. People, pp. 110, 157, 221. 14. Derek Elley (ed.), The Variety Movie Guide 2000 (New York: Perigee, 2000). 15. Cobbett Steinberg, Film Facts (New York: Facts on File, 1980), pp. 284–5. 16. Ibid., pp. 297–8. 17. Ibid., p. 182. 18. Even before her comeback, Fonda was able to get scripts changed. On Fun with Dick and Jane she demanded changes in scenes which ‘she found offensive to women, homosexuals and ethnic groups’. Wilson, ‘Jane Fonda’s Happy Heist’, p. 19. 19. David Talbot and Barbara Zheutlin, Creative Differences: Profiles of Hollywood Dissidents (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1978), p. 138. 20. Ibid., p. 140. 21. Ibid., p. 138. See also John H. Bunzel, New Force on the Left: Tom Hayden and the Campaign Against Corporate America (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983); and Tom Hayden, The American Future: New Visions Beyond Old Frontiers (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980). 22. Hayden, The American Future, pp. 213–5; Bunzel, New Force on the Left, p. 112. 23. ‘Tom and Jane vs. Big Business’, Time, 8 October 1979, p. 18. 24. Powers, Rothman and Rothman, Hollywood’s America, pp. 76–7. 25. Ibid., p. 144. 26. Everett Carll Ladd and Karlyn H. Bowman, What’s Wrong: A Survey of American Satisfaction and Complaint (Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 1998), p. 129. 27. See Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, ‘Aid and Comfort’: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002); Carol Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004), ch. 10; Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Jane Fonda, My Life So Far (New York: Random House, 2005). 28. The two archival collections are the Waldo Salt Papers, Arts Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, and the Hal Ashby Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. 29. Aljean Harmetz, ‘Jane Fonda: She Makes Ideas Pay at Box Office’, New York Times, 25 March 1982, p. C17; Fonda, My Life So Far, pp. 344–5; Christopher Andersen, Citizen Jane: The True Story of Jane Fonda (London: Virgin, 1993), p. 259. 30. Hershberger, Jane Fonda’s War, pp. 7–36. 31. Ibid., pp. 128–36.

116 The New Film History 32. Talbot and Zheutlin, op. cit., pp. 132–3. See also Jason Katzman, ‘From Outcast to Cliche: How Film Shaped, Warped and Developed the Image of the Vietnam Veteran, 1967–1990’, Journal of American Culture, vol. 16 (Spring 1993), pp. 7–24; and Lembcke, The Spitting Image, pp. 148–61. 33. Talbot and Zheutlin, Creative Differences, p. 133. 34. Harmetz, ‘Jane Fonda’, Kirk Honeycutt, ‘The Five-Year Struggle to Make Coming Home’, New York Times, 19 February 1978, p. 13. 35. Hershberger, Jane Fonda’s War, pp. 42–50; Andersen, Citizen Jane, pp. 218–9; Fonda, My Life So Far, pp. 272–5. 36. Andersen, Citizen Jane, pp. 224–5, 238–9; Fonda, My Life So Far, pp. 276–8. 37. Martin Kasindorf, ‘Fonda: A Person of Many Parts’, New York Times Sunday Magazine, 3 February 1974, p. 16, quoted in Lembcke, The Spitting Image, p. 163. 38. Hershberger, Jane Fonda’s War, p. 3; Fonda, My Life So Far, p. 328. 39. See Harmetz, ‘Jane Fonda’; Fonda, My Life So Far, pp. 344–5; Lembcke, The Spitting Image, p. 163; Janet Maslin, ‘Critic’s Notebook: There’s Many a Slip … ’, New York Times, 4 May 1974, p. C17. 40. Fonda, My Life So Far, pp. 348–9; Harmetz, ‘Jane Fonda’. 41. Harmetz, ‘Jane Fonda’. 42. Salt’s first set of ‘Notes on Buffalo Ghost script’ is dated 25 July 1974. Dowd’s script and Salt’s notes are among the Waldo Salt Papers (Box 13, Folder 9, and Box 14, Folder 1). 43. Lembcke, The Spitting Image, pp. 164–71; Honeycutt, ‘The Five-Year Struggle’. 44. Fonda, My Life So Far, p. 360; Honeycutt, ‘The Five-Year Struggle’. 45. Fonda, My Life So Far, p. 361; Honeycutt, ‘The Five-Year Struggle’. 46. Notes on story conferences from April to July 1975 can be found in the Waldo Salt Papers (Box 14, Folder 1), while Salt’s script is contained in the Hal Ashby Collection (Box 15, Folder 135). 47. Fonda, My Life So Far, p. 361, 367. Jones’ revised script can be found in the Hal Ashby Collection (Box 16, Folder 140). 48. Extensive notes on one of these conferences, dated 29 July 1976, are among the Waldo Salt Papers (Box 16, Folder 4). Documents in the Hal Ashby Collection (Box 18, Folder 164) indicate that story conferences continued until March 1977, but apparently these were not minuted. There is, however, an undated memo Fonda sent to her colleagues concerning the interpretation of her character (Box 18, Folder 160). 49. ‘Seek Nicholson as Jane Fonda’s Lead’, Variety, 27 October 1976, p. 5. 50. The film’s shooting schedule is contained in the Hal Ashby Collection (Box 23, Folder 202). 51. ‘Coming Home Story Conference’, 29 July 1976, Waldo Salt Papers (Box 16, Folder 4).

Part III Genre

A significant feature of the New Film History has been its reclamation and rehabilitation of popular genre cinema, which had been marginalized by aesthetic approaches to film history. Genre, of course, is not a new idea. Several of the founding texts of film theory were genre studies; for example Jim Kitses’ Horizons West: Studies of Authorship within the Western (1969) and Colin McArthur’s Underworld USA (1972). These tended to focus on American film genres, and especially on those, such as the western and the gangster film, that had their own particular iconography. In the 1970s this was displaced by a structuralist approach that focused on the ideologies and themes underlying film narratives. The limitations of the structuralist approach, however, are that it tends to regard genres as fixed or static entities and treats each genre film in terms of its variation from a paradigmatic model. More recently, genre criticism has moved towards a view of genres as being perpetually in a state of flux and transition: they rarely remain fixed, but mutate and evolve in response to changing conditions of production and the often volatile nature of popular tastes. While the majority of genre criticism still focuses on American cinema – understandable as American film remains the most visible and popular – there is also a welcome trend in recent scholarship to spread the debate beyond Hollywood. The New Film History argues for a historically based approach to the study of genre, recognizing that genres are not merely ‘patterns’ or ‘structures’ but also arise from particular historical and cultural circumstances. It might even be that we should not think in terms of ‘genre’ but rather, as the film industry itself does, in terms of production cycles or trends. In his case study of Now, Voyager (1942), for example – a seminal film in critical discussion of the Hollywood melodrama – Martin Shingler demonstrates that meanings read into a film by contemporaries are 117


often rather different from those later ascribed to it by film theorists. The other contributors to this section all explore production cycles that were historically specific and determined by the political and social circumstances of the times at which they were produced. Richard Taylor’s analysis of the Stalinist musical – a welcome addition to the scholarly investigation of non-American genres – demonstrates that this most unfamiliar of genres was both like and unlike its Hollywood counterpart. The musical genre’s themes of utopianism and personal fulfilment were subject to a very different ideological orientation in the Soviet cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Taylor considers how the musical comedies of two key proponents of the genre, Grigori Alexandrov and Ivan Pyriev, depicted Soviet life to Soviet audiences as they lived first through the Great Terror and then the Great Patriotic War. In his characteristically erudite analysis of Hollywood swashbucklers between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s, Jeffrey Richards also focuses his attention on the politics of genre, revealing how the swashbuckler form was flexible enough to be employed both as an instrument of anti-Communist propaganda during the early Cold War and, more subtly, as an allegory of the plight of those left-wing and liberal writers blacklisted in Hollywood during the height of Cold War paranoia in the early 1950s. Richards shows that the themes of the swashbuckler were historically and culturally specific: it retained its vitality just as long as its narrative codes of chivalry and noblesse oblige were relevant for cinema audiences and disappeared from popular film culture once those values had ceased to be meaningful. Finally, Jonathan Munby examines the relationship between contemporary Hollywood and other cultural forms and practices, specifically the music industry, in his illuminating study of the ‘gangsta’ or ‘hood’ cycle of the 1990s. Munby shows how these black, urban crime films related to earlier production cycles of American gangster films whilst at the same time transforming the genre in a manner relevant to the social mores of African-American communities in the 1990s. The recurring theme of this chapter, and of all the other contributions to this section, is the importance of placing specific examples of popular film-making in their historical and cultural contexts.

8 The Politics of the Swashbuckler Jeffrey Richards

Genre films were the staple of Hollywood production in the heyday of the studio system. As Thomas Schatz puts it: ‘Simply stated the genre film – whether a western or a musical, a screwball comedy or a gangster film – involves familiar, essentially one-dimensional characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting.’1 Academic studies of genre films have for the most part neglected the swashbuckler and preferred to concentrate on westerns, crime films, musicals, horror films and melodramas. In my 1977 book, Swordsmen of the Screen, I approached the genre from two angles. One was the aesthetic angle, stressing the form and style of the genre with its emphasis on ‘the grace and colour of historical costume, the opulence and splendour of period sets and the spellbinding legerdemain of horseback chases, chandelier swinging and dazzling swordplay’,2 as a genre in which the work of the art director, the costume designer, the fencing master, the stunt arranger and the cinematographer were as important or even more important than the role of the director, that key figure in the auteurist approach to cinema. The other angle was thematic – looking at groups of films about Robin Hood, the Knights of the Round Table, the Three Musketeers or the Pirates of the Caribbean, to chart their evolution over the years and their relationship with the founding myths. But there is yet another angle which could with profit be explored – a chronological approach which examines the politics of the genre. In my previous writings on the subject I have stressed the continuing influence of the chivalric ethos as a binding value system and the generally conservative approach to social structures with support for popular and populist monarchy, opposition to violent revolution and the dominant concept of limited revolt to restore constitutional balance and just law 119


to a system in which overmighty groups, usually self-seeking aristocrats, have sought to undermine the status quo. But I have come to believe after further research that while this remains in general true, the genre has been more diverse than I gave it credit for, and has often responded directly to contemporary political circumstances. This is not a genre in which the director’s individual vision has been the dominant one. No director has worked on the swashbuckler with the consistency with which directors have worked on the western or the crime film. Some of the cinema’s great visual stylists have made forays into the genre – men like Frank Borzage, James Whale, Rouben Mamoulian, Michael Curtiz, Max Ophuls, George Sidney, Jacques Tourneur, John Cromwell, Edgar G. Ulmer and Rowland V. Lee. But theirs were on the whole isolated ventures, only a handful of entries in much more varied filmographies. For the most part, the regular fashioners of swashbucklers were competent journeymen: Richard Thorpe, George Sherman, Sidney Salkow, Henry Levin, Lew Landers, Lesley Selander, directors equally at home in the western as the swashbuckler, indeed prone to handle their swashbucklers like westerns in fancy costume. Lesley Selander actually said of his 1951 swashbuckler The Highwayman: ‘It was like a western. Only we used swords instead of sixguns.’3 These were not directors who were known for injecting personal political messages into their films. This is a genre in which, I would argue, the writers are the ones who control the political messages. The first cycle of sound swashbucklers came in the period 1934–41, a period coinciding with the rise of Fascism in Europe, a subject which preoccupied liberals, radicals and European, often Jewish, émigrés, who had fled from Hitler’s Terror. Censorship forbade all-out explicit attacks on the Fascist regimes. But messages could be inserted in costume dramas, historical distance apparently blinding the authorities to their political significance. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) stressed the idea of limited revolt and the importance of the chivalric code. But with militaristic Normans oppressing another race, the Saxons, in the same country and with repeated contrasts between freedom and dictatorship, the film looks very much like a coded attack on Fascism. In Britain, Alexander Korda’s productions The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel and Fire Over England (both 1937) and in America, Warner Brothers’ The Sea Hawk (1940) and United Artists’ Son of Monte Cristo (1941), the work of either German émigrés or political liberals or both on the script and production sides, draw clear parallels between respectively sixteenth-century Spain, Revolutionary France and the nineteenth-century Balkans and the present-day situation in Europe

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with Nazi Germany threatening world domination. I do not have the space to go into these in detail but the parallels have been recognized and are by now well-known to scholars.4 Once America entered the war, the production of swashbucklers declined markedly and there was an upsurge of westerns expressing the values of Americanism. But after the war, there was a resurgence of the swashbuckling genre. There were a number of new themes, which directly reflected social developments. One was the emergence of female swashbucklers, reflecting the wartime development of the independent woman. Films such as The Wife of Monte Cristo (1946), Anne of the Indies (1951), Sons of the Musketeers (1952), The Golden Hawk (1952), Sword of Monte Cristo (1951) and Against All Flags (1952) all featured sword-wielding, resourceful heroines able to match weapons and wits with the men. Another post-war theme was that of the soldier returning from war and having to deal with adverse post-war political conditions. It featured in The Black Arrow (1948), Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950), Captain Scarlett (1953) and Star of India (1954). The Second World War was followed swiftly by the Cold War against America’s erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. In 1946 Churchill made his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, the Berlin Blockade followed in 1948, Russia acquired the Atomic Bomb in 1949, and in 1950 the Korean War broke out. From 1945 peace became a particular preoccupation of American Communists fearful of the US establishment provoking war with Russia. The domestic by-product of the Cold War was the rise of antiCommunist paranoia in the USA and the McCarthyite witch-hunt against not just Communists but liberals and radicals. This was crystallized in the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which began work in 1947. Hollywood became a primary target of their investigations, vulnerable because all the studios had produced pro-Russian pictures during the war and there had been a major cycle of liberal problem films immediately after the war. The Hollywood producers took fright and agreed not to employ anyone believed to be a Communist. A blacklist was established which was firmly in place by 1950. In 1947 ten Hollywood writers and directors called to give evidence, were deemed unfriendly witnesses, convicted of contempt of Congress and sent to prison. Others fled to Europe. For a decade Hollywood operated in the shadow of the blacklist, which was finally broken in 1960.5 There was, however, covert opposition to McCarthyism and it often took the form of inserting subversive messages into genre films, westerns,


crime films and – as I discovered to my surprise – swashbucklers. Particular bitterness was caused by those witnesses who named names and the despised role of the informer begins to take a prominent place among the tropes of the swashbuckler. We can see in the genre a process by which the parallels with the threat of Fascism in the swashbuckler are gradually replaced by the threat, in conservative films, of Communism and democratic subversion, and in liberal films, of McCarthyism. While swashbuckling heroes (in the person of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Louis Hayward and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) have usually been gentlemen and royalists and many continued in that vein, there was a new development after the Second World War, the rise of the proletarian swashbuckling hero in a series of conspicuously left-wing swashbucklers which directly addressed the agenda of the left. The Gallant Blade (1948) is frankly a Communist swashbuckler. Directed by Henry Levin, it starred Larry Parks, Communist Party member from 1941 to 1945 and later a HUAC friendly witness, and co-written by Morton Grant, named as a Communist by eight HUAC witnesses and blacklisted after 1949 following 31 screen credits between 1937 and 1949. An important supporting role is played by Nedrick Young, a leading Communist actor, later blacklisted. The Gallant Blade opens with the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the opening titles telling us ‘the common people, starving, exhausted and crushed by heavy taxation, are in a desperate plight’. The chief minister of France, Marshal Mordoré, a ruthless militarist, proposes to start a war with Spain. It will distract the people from their plight and fill the empty treasury. Army chief of staff General Cadeau prepares to demobilize the army. He discusses his farewell speech with his aide, Lt. David Picard (Larry Parks). He will enjoin his men to let war be their enemy and return to their farms and homes and till the soil. When Mordoré orders him to lead his army against Spain, Cadeau threatens to urge his troops not to fight. He is arrested and imprisoned. Picard joins forces with army deserters under Brissac (Nedrick Young). Brissac tells him there are groups of deserters all over France, dedicated to the cause of peace. They rescue Cadeau, Mordoré is defeated in a duel by Picard, and Cadeau will now lead his army to Paris to see the Queen, to demand peace and ‘to enforce the will of the people’. The hero, David Picard, is a peasant, pressed into the army and rising through the ranks to be an officer and to become the finest swordsman in the land. He describes to Nanon de Lartigue his impoverished living conditions in a peasant hut (‘a prison made by hunger and poverty’) and he remains bitter about the living conditions of the poor. Nanon, a girl

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from the slums of Paris, who had escaped poverty by becoming the mistress of Mordoré, remains a patriot, falls for David and joins the movement to stop Mordoré. She proves a gallant comrade. There is also topically an informer – Nanon’s aunt who betrays David and his associates to Mordoré. Nanon throws her out. So the Establishment (Mordoré and his associates) back an unjust war against the will of the people, and the peasant hero, his sweetheart from the slums and cells of subversive peace-loving army deserters combine to foil the militarists. Burt Lancaster, whose liberal sympathies were indicated by his support for the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), formed to fight HUAC, starred as the proletarian hero of two post-war swashbucklers, The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952). They were productions of Lancaster’s own company, Norma, and produced by his business partner, Harold Hecht, a Communist and a future friendly witness to HUAC. In both films Lancaster, in contrast to Errol Flynn, is neither an aristocrat nor a swordsman. He is a peasant outlaw in the first and a career pirate in the second. In both he begins as an individualist outsider and ends up discovering commitment to the people. The Flame and the Arrow was scripted by Communist Waldo Salt, one of the 19 unfriendly witnesses called before HUAC, who took the fifth amendment in 1951, was immediately blacklisted and did not get another credit until 1962. It looks back to the Second World War and the anti-Fascist resistance. Twelfth-century Lombardy is under German occupation: Count Ulrich of Hesse rules on behalf of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and exercises ruthless tyrannical power. Like a Second World War Gestapo commander, he takes hostages and threatens to hang them unless the outlaw Dardo Bartoli (Burt Lancaster) surrenders. He takes Dardo’s son as hostage and orders Dardo himself hanged. Dardo initially declares: ‘I’ve no noble purpose. I’m not out to right anyone’s wrongs but my own’ and ‘Each for himself and the Devil take the hindmost’, but later discovers ‘A man can’t live by himself alone’ and leads the popular resistance to Ulrich, culminating in a people’s uprising. Utilizing sets, costumes and many incidents from Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and a basic narrative lifted from the legend of William Tell, it has fundamental differences from the earlier film. The hero is a peasant resistance leader, not an aristocratic royalist like Flynn’s Robin. The aristocrat in the film is Marchese Alessandro de Granezia, who joins the outlaw band but betrays them to Ulrich, turning informer, and is killed by Dardo in a duel. Dardo pairs off with Lady Anne, Ulrich’s niece, after overcoming his vigorously expressed peasant distaste for her upper-class background.


The Crimson Pirate, scripted by former Communist and future friendly witness Roland Kibbee, was directed by Robert Siodmak in England and Italy. Siodmak was never to return to Hollywood and spent the rest of his career in Europe. His departure in 1952 certainly suggests a desire to escape McCarthyism. The film deals with the rebellion of subject people against the Spanish Empire in the eighteenth century with the people of Cobra Island planning to replace the colonial governor with a republic. The hero, Captain Vallo, is literally a ‘red’ hero (the Crimson Pirate). He is initially planning to arm and then sell out the rebels to the royal envoy, Baron Gruda, but he becomes committed to the cause of the freedomloving rebels and falls for the rebel leader’s daughter. Vallo then leads the fight against ‘the outdated Baron Gruda and his outdated world’ showing ‘fighters and workers new ways to get rid of old enemies’, deploying new technology (hot air balloon, gunpowder, submarine and primitive Gatling gun), developed by eccentric inventor Professor Prudence. It all culminates again in a popular uprising against the colonial authorities. Interestingly, Harold Hecht, testifying to HUAC as a friendly witness, named Roland Kibbee (now an ex-Communist) but not Waldo Salt (a current Communist Party member). The use of the swashbuckler as response to the blacklist is epitomized by Captain Scarlett (1953), a Craftsman Production released by United Artists. Although set in the South of France, it was filmed in Mexico with a largely Mexican cast and directed by a journeyman director of westerns, Thomas Carr. But it was written and produced by Communist blacklistee Howard Dimsdale, previously known mainly as a comedy scriptwriter. Apart from the star, Richard Greene, the only other non-Mexican in the cast was the blacklisted Communist actor, Nedrick Young, who subsequently turned to scriptwriting and, under the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas, co-authored Stanley Kramer’s notably liberal films The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind. In a genre in which sympathies were usually with royalists and against revolutionaries, this film is set in the aftermath of the defeat of Napoleon, when as the introductory titles tell us, royalists returned to France to exact vengeance ‘for their real or fancied wrongs. Some turned the situation to their personal advantage – becoming petty tyrants and dictators.’ It has another literally ‘red’ hero, Captain Scarlett, significant at a time when no hero could be seen to be a red. In the same year, the hero of the Warner Brothers remake of The Desert Song was pointedly changed from The Red Shadow to El Khobar. Scarlett is that characteristic post-war hero, the returning serviceman, who finds that his estates have been seized by the Duc de Corlaine and his henchman, Count Villiers. He teams up with highwayman Pierre Ducloux (Nedrick Young), another returned serviceman whose estates have been

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seized. They rescue Spanish Princess Maria from a forced marriage with Villiers and in a significant gesture of female equality, she joins the two of them in their fight against tyranny, riding and fencing with the best of them. But along with the usual swashbuckling elements, the three rebels intervene to protect the peasants from taxes, tolls and expropriation. ‘Other people’s troubles are my troubles too’, says Scarlett, proclaiming his solidarity with the proletariat. The captured royalist guards echo the wartime Nazi soldiers in constantly declaring, ‘I was only following orders’. Another plot-line, echoing contemporary America, has Corlaine’s agent Etienne Dumas infiltrating Scarlett’s band and betraying him to the authorities, in the way FBI agents were said to have done with the Communist organizations in California. Howard Dimsdale had no further film credits after this film. It is a singular fact that in the heyday of Hollywood before 1945 there were only two significant Robin Hood films, Robin Hood (1922) starring Douglas Fairbanks and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) starring Errol Flynn. The only significant Arthurian films were the regular retellings of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, which was filmed in 1921 and 1931 and again in 1948 and which satirized the conventions of chivalry and demonstrated the superiority of modernity to antiquity. But between 1945 and 1970 there were some ten Robin Hood films and six Arthurian epics.6 Both sets of films have to be seen in the context of a major film cycle in the post-war American cinema. A series of expensively mounted medieval chivalric epics was produced by Hollywood companies, many of them shot in the whole or in part in Britain. Almost every studio contributed to the cycle: MGM (Ivanhoe (1952), Knights of the Round Table (1954), The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955)); Warner Brothers (King Richard and the Crusaders (1954)); Universal (The Black Shield of Falworth (1954)); Columbia (The Black Knight (1954)); Twentieth Century-Fox (Prince Valiant (1954)); and Allied Artists (The Warriors (1955)). In addition there was a new version of the Robin Hood myth, The Story of Robin Hood (1952), shot in Britain by Walt Disney. There were three films centred on the idea of the son of Robin Hood (Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946), Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950) and Son of Robin Hood (1958)), there were two negligible low-budget films Prince of Thieves (1948) and Tales of Robin Hood (1952), and there were three films from the British company Hammer (Men of Sherwood Forest (1954), Sword of Sherwood Forest (1961) and A Challenge for Robin Hood (1967)). What all these films had in common was the adherence of their heroes to the code of chivalry. This was an ethic shared by both Britain and America, for in the nineteenth century gallantry, honour and


noblesse oblige became and remained deeply embedded in the national psyche of both countries. As John Fraser has written in his masterly study of this phenomenon: The family of chivalric heroes has been by far the largest and most popular one in twentieth-century American culture, and its members, in whole or in part, have entered into virtually everyone’s consciousness.7 The figures he lists – cowboys, pirates, private eyes, outlaws, gentlemen rankers and imperial officers – were as popular in Britain as in America and helped to maintain the idea of the chivalric gentleman as the dominant masculine ideal in the culture of both those countries. But why the great upsurge of medieval chivalric epics in the 1950s? One reason is economic. The first big chivalric epic, Ivanhoe (1952) was an enormous box-office success, taking nearly 11 million dollars worldwide on its initial release.8 It was MGM’s top grossing film of the year and was nominated for an Oscar for best picture. In the way of Hollywood, every other studio sought to emulate its success and MGM itself re-teamed the star and director of Ivanhoe in two further chivalric epics. Linked to this was the fact that many of the films were shot in Britain because of legislation which prevented Hollywood companies removing their profits from the country. These so-called ‘frozen funds’ were deployed by the companies in making films in Britain and, given the existence of ready-made castles and pastoral landscapes, historical dramas were an appropriate genre. Other reasons for Britain being an attractive production base were the introduction of the Eady Levy, which provided a subsidy for producers of nominally British films collected from a tax on ticket sales, and the devaluation of the pound against the dollar which made production costs more economical. But there is more to it than that. The 1950s was the peak era of the Cold War when the world was divided between the two great superpowers and their spheres of influence. On the one hand there was democratic Christian America and on the other the totalitarian godless Soviet Union. Hollywood responded to this with straightforward antiSoviet propaganda in spy films, but more subtly and allegorically in a series of Biblical and Roman epics (Quo Vadis?, The Robe, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Salome) in which evil totalitarian empires (Rome, Egypt) are defied by devout and democratic Christians or Jews. The chivalric epics and the Robin Hood adventures can be seen fulfilling the same

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function as they played to the prevailing anti-Communist paranoia. A major theme of the Arthurian films is the threat of barbarian invasion from across the seas; and of the Robin Hood films the overthrow of legitimately constituted and genuinely popular authority by subversive cabals in the higher echelons of society. There was another domestic preoccupation in 1950s America – juvenile delinquency. This first surfaced in 1942–43 when rising crime rates among the young were reported and attributed to the dislocation of families by the war. It became a major preoccupation after the war, the Gallup Poll indicating peaks of concern about juvenile delinquency in 1945 and in 1953–58. There was a flood of articles, books and reports on the phenomenon. Hollywood made 60 films dealing with juvenile delinquency, some of which, while moralizing about the subject, actually succeeded in creating identification figures for rebellious youth in the delinquent heroes of films like The Wild One (1953) (with Marlon Brando), East of Eden (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) (both with James Dean). The concern about juvenile crime coincided in the 1950s with the emergence of a distinct teenage culture in the United States, as youngsters with money to spend fashioned a distinctive youth culture around a youth uniform (jeans, T-shirts, DA haircuts), rock music, gang membership, motor bikes and hot rods, all of which featured in the films, which while preaching against the lifestyle also imbued it with glamour. Much blame for this development was attributed to the mass media. A Senate Sub-Committee on Juvenile Delinquency under Senator Estes Kefauver investigated and called for greater responsibility and selfregulation by the media.9 At the same time Dr Frederic Wertham’s enormously influential The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) denounced crime and horror comic books for imbuing the young with false values. Films which re-emphasized the basic values of chivalry could be seen as a useful corrective to a culture of disrespect, hedonism, violence and selfindulgence, promoting and endorsing acceptable male role models. Robin Hood and his Merrie Men and King Arthur and his Knights thus became Cold War warriors, promoting wholesome values at home and abroad and combating at the same time Communist totalitarianism, atheism and juvenile delinquency. Like Douglas Fairbanks in 1922 and Errol Flynn in 1938, the Robin Hood of the Hollywood films of the late 1940s and 1950s was not subversive or radical. He stood for the defence of the crown and the defeat of subversion. The first Robin Hood film after the war, Columbia Pictures’ The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946), directed by George Sherman


and Henry Levin, and scripted by Wilfred Pettit and the Communist Melvin Levy, looked back to the anti-Fascist message of The Adventures of Robin Hood. In Bandit, King John is dead and his young son Henry III is on the throne. But the Regent, William of Pembroke, plans to seize the throne for himself. His first step is to announce to a gathering of nobles that he is abrogating Magna Carta, the fundamental charter of liberties which the nobles had forced King John to accept and which stands in the film as shorthand for the democratic American Constitution. The Earl of Huntingdon (Russell Hicks), who as Robin Hood had opposed the tyranny of King John, retreats to Sherwood Forest where he reassembles his now elderly band and recruits others to resist the tyranny of the Regent. He is joined by his son, Robert (Cornel Wilde), who effectively takes on the mantle of Robin Hood. The actions of the Earl of Huntingdon and his son in this film recall those of the heroes of Second World War resistance movies, many of them scripted by Communists, as they hide in the forest, and launch attacks on the tax collectors and ‘storm troopers’ of the black-clad proto-Fascist Regent. Eventually, the Regent is killed and the boy King and Magna Carta are restored. When Columbia Pictures returned to the theme of Robin Hood Junior in the rousing Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950), directed by Gordon Douglas, and scripted by George Bruce, the political situation had changed. The Cold War was now well under way. The emphasis this time is on the threat to democracy from without and within, and the implicit enemy is Communism. The foreword to the film sets the context: ‘The Bill of Rights and the liberty and justice we enjoy today stem from the Magna Carta, a great charter which the oppressed people of England forced from the tyrannical King John. In the year 1215 King John was secretly planning to crush all who stood in the way of his ruthless ambition.’ Once again Magna Carta represents the American Constitution and its emergence in England links the two NATO allies in a commitment to democracy. This time Robin Hood is dead by the time the film begins and his son, Robin Junior, already Earl of Huntingdon, returns from the Crusades with Little John. This returned soldier finds that King John proposes to impose absolute rule. Robin reassembles his father’s old band and leads the resistance. Eventually the barons, with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, decide to impose a Magna Carta, a charter to ensure ‘the God-given rights to life, freedom and human dignity’. The King is seized and taken to Runnymede where he protests that he rules by divine right. The Archbishop tells him that he

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rules by the consent of his subjects and he reluctantly agrees to accept the Magna Carta which is given with his seal. So Robin, already Earl of Huntingdon, is not subversive but is seeking to restore the democratic conditions that prevailed under Richard the Lionheart. In the context of 1950, the hero returning from the Crusades is the serviceman returning from the Second World War and finding his native land threatened from within by the subversion of the constitution, but also by alien forces from outside. One of the reasons John has increased the taxes is to pay for Flemish mercenaries whom he proposes to import from across the Channel to help enforce his will. The narrative emphasis on the securing for the people of a charter of liberty (ancestor of the American Bill of Rights) is thus a rousing affirmation of American democracy against Communist totalitarianism. Robin is both aristocratic and democratic – the chivalric code being the link between the two. The blessing granted to the opponents by the Church is also novel and reflects the cinema’s deployment of Christianity in Cold War propaganda. The first retelling of the traditional Robin Hood story since the war came in the form of The Story of Robin Hood (1952), a Walt Disney production made in Britain to utilize ‘frozen funds’. Robin Hood (Richard Todd) and his outlaws remain loyal to the true King, who is a democratic and populist monarch and oppose only illegitimate and oppressive authority in the form of Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin’s incorporation into the nobility at the end confirms his constitutional soundness. So the Disney version – as one might expect, given Disney’s right-wing views – has Robin fighting domestic subversion rather than committing it. The chivalric cycle proper began with MGM’s lavish and stirring film of Ivanhoe (1952), shot in rich Technicolor on location in England and featuring one of the great cinematic action set pieces, the intricately detailed and magnificently staged siege of Torquilstone. The background here is the conflict between the Saxons and the Normans but the solution to that divisive conflict is loyalty to the crown, in the person of Richard I, for it is Richard who has inspired the loyalty of the leading character, the Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe (Robert Taylor). As in the Robin Hood films, a central theme is the plan of Prince John and the Norman knights to seize the throne by preventing the payment of the ransom, required by the Archduke Leopold of Austria, who holds Richard captive. Ivanhoe sets about foiling John and raising the ransom. In this he is aided by Robin Hood and his Saxon outlaws. But Ivanhoe is more than just a costume adventure. The product of the regime of the committed liberal Dore Schary at MGM, it is nothing less


than a Civil Rights swashbuckler, for it includes two significant subjects on that theme. Wamba, the jester of Cedric the Saxon, is freed from his serfdom and becomes Ivanhoe’s squire. The iron collar of serfdom is struck from his neck by Ivanhoe. Wamba says that he wishes all England could similarly be free and Ivanhoe says it will be when Richard returns. It is hard in the context of America not to see this as an oblique reference to the abolition of slavery and the struggle for civil rights for the ex-slaves. Even more explicit is the role of the Jewish characters. Isaac of York, the Jewish patriarch, who is despised by the Normans, is rescued by Ivanhoe from attack by men-at-arms and escorted to his home in Sheffield. Isaac’s wife had been killed in Spain and he and his daughter had fled as refugees to England, only to find the Jews also being persecuted there. Ivanhoe asks for the Jews’ help in raising the ransom for the King. Isaac replies that Richard had looted synagogues to pay for his crusade. Ivanhoe promises in Richard’s name to end persecution of the Jews in return for ransom money. Isaac with enormous dignity replies: ‘Let him promise justice for each man, be he Saxon or Norman or Jew’, and Ivanhoe agrees. Throughout Ivanhoe protects and supports the Jews and the Jews back the restoration of Richard in return for civil rights. This sympathy for the Jews and opposition to discrimination was briefly a trend in post-war Hollywood liberal films, such as Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and Crossfire (also 1947), the second of which had been produced under Dore Schary’s regime when he was at RKO Radio Pictures. The plight of the Jews is linked in Ivanhoe with what can only be seen as a bold attack on McCarthyism. The Jewess Rebecca (Elizabeth Taylor) is accused of sorcery and witchcraft. She is put on trial not, as in the book, by the Grand Master of the Templars but by Prince John. It is made clear that this is a political trial. John’s adviser, Waldemar FitzUrse, says that he does not believe in sorcery and witchcraft, but adds, ‘But your people will.’ Prince John makes a speech claiming that witchcraft (i.e., Communism in the contemporary context) is spreading through the land and must be stamped out. Richard has fallen into the hands of its practitioners, the Jews: ‘As the servant of the Jews, who would call Richard English?’ John thus links false charges of subversion with antiSemitism. John demands that Rebecca should be burned and false witnesses give perjured testimony. But Ivanhoe appears to defend her in trial by combat, defeats the Prince’s Champion and saves her life. At this point, the ransomed and released King Richard (Norman Wooland) arrives at the head of his crusaders. John capitulates and Richard delivers the final message to the Saxons and Normans kneeling before him.

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‘Before me kneels a nation divided. Rise as one man and that one man – for England.’ So the King confirms that he stands for a policy of reconciliation and integration. In the context of 1952, Ivanhoe functions as historical allegory. Returned from the Crusades (Second World War), war hero Ivanhoe finds a nation whose racial divisions are exacerbated by anti-Semitism, the oppression of the poor and show trials of alleged subversives. He fights against all these wrongs and ensures the return of a king who will end discrimination and division. Ivanhoe had been in development as a film project at RKO Studios. Aeneas Mackenzie, writing in the wake of the full revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust, had prepared a screen treatment in 1946 which emphasized the theme of anti-Semitism and ended with Ivanhoe marrying the Jewess Rebecca rather than, as in the book, the Saxon Princess Rowena. Waldo Salt was next assigned to the project and he, writing in 1948 as the HUAC hearings got underway, turned Rebecca’s trial into a parody of the HUAC hearings. Salt was later named as one of 19 unfriendly witnesses and blacklisted. But after Dore Schary moved from RKO to MGM as head of production in 1948, Howard Hughes (RKO owner) declared he had no interest in producing it and MGM acquired the Ivanhoe project and the existing script materials. Communist writer Marguerite Roberts was assigned to the screenplay in 1949 but she was called before HUAC, refused to name names and was blacklisted in 1951. The English screenwriter Noel Langley was appointed to prepare the final screenplay and he not only retained Salt’s version of Rebecca’s trial but extended and strengthened it. The final film version of Ivanhoe (1952) was credited only to Langley and Mackenzie, ignoring the contributions of Salt and Roberts. The film version restored the marriage of Ivanhoe to Rowena, but kept the pointed attack on HUAC. No one, however, seems to have noticed at the time that that is what it was.10 But the attack on anti-Semitism was obvious and even before MGM began production, Barney Balaban, president of Paramount, asked Dore Schary not to make the film. Jewish moguls feared that attacks on antiSemitism would only provoke anti-Semitism. They had also tried to dissuade the non-Jewish Darryl F. Zanuck from making Gentleman’s Agreement. But Schary refused to be swayed and the film was a boxoffice hit.11 The success of Ivanhoe was such that MGM immediately re-teamed the star and director in Knights of the Round Table (1954), the first feature film to dramatize the Arthurian epic of Sir Thomas Malory. It was scripted


by Talbot Jennings, Jan Lustig and Noel Langley. This is a version of Malory cleaned up and reinterpreted for the 1950s. The love of Lancelot and Guinevere is pure and honourable; the objective of Arthur and Merlin is to establish constitutional monarchy and an order of chivalry, and Arthur’s enemies seek to overthrow both in favour of dictatorship. The Arthurian vision is blessed at the end by God. But Knights of the Round Table was only one of three Arthurian epics to be released in 1954. Twentieth Century-Fox’s Prince Valiant, directed by Henry Hathaway and based on the comic strip drawn by Harold R. Foster from 1937 to 1979, was almost a direct response to Dr Wertham’s attack on comics. For far from being corrupting and depraving, the Prince Valiant strip was inspiring and instructive. For here was a hero, Prince Valiant (played by Robert Wagner, then 24) who was the perfect chivalric identification figure for American teenagers and a cinematic corrective to the moody rebels played by Marlon Brando and James Dean in films released at the same time. Valiant is devoted to his parents and to the crown, learns and lives by the code of chivalry, and chastely and devotedly loves a beautiful princess. This film contains the twin threats of Cold War 1950s: the external threat from the barbarians and the internal threat from subversion. The context is the conflict of Christianity and paganism. The Christian royal family of the Viking kingdom of Scandia have been overthrown by a pagan traitor Sligon who has occupied the throne. Prince Valiant, son of the exiled King Aguar, swears to restore the cross of Christ to Scandia and is sent to Camelot to train for knighthood. Valiant is eventually captured by the pagan Vikings and taken to Scandia with his family. Sligon plans to crucify all the Christians in his kingdom. But the Christian Vikings loyal to the old royal family rise in revolt. They overthrow Sligon and restore the royal family. Intertwined with this threat to Christianity from paganism is the plotting of Sir Brack, alias the Black Knight, who is in league with Sligon, plans to overthrow Arthur and seize the throne of Britain. He is exposed by Valiant, who kills him in a duel. Valiant is then admitted to ‘the most Christian order of the Knights of the Round Table’. However, liberal scriptwriter Dudley Nichols boldly inserted a direct comment on McCarthyism as a scene in which Prince Valiant resists the demands of Sligon’s seneschal that he name the names of the members of the Christian opposition movement. The Black Knight figured again, but on the side of right this time, in another piece of Arthurian apocrypha, The Black Knight (1954) directed by Tay Garnett from a script by Alec Coppell and Bryan Forbes. It was produced by Warwick Films for Columbia Pictures. Warwick Films, the

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company set up by Americans Irving Allen and Albert R. Broccoli, specialized in British-made action adventure films with American stars in the lead and a transatlantic hard edge often lacking in the native British equivalent. The ethos of the film is once again chivalry but chivalry democratized, an ethos available to all regardless of birth. The hero is John, a humbleborn swordsmith who aspires to marry Lady Linnet, daughter of the Earl of Yeonil. John should really have been played by someone like the youthful Robert Wagner, but in a piece of curious miscasting is played by 41-year old Alan Ladd, tired, ageing, glum-looking and giving the impression he would sooner be anywhere else rather than Arthurian Britain. John is not wealthy or noble born and needs to make his own way to prove himself. He has an older mentor, Sir Ontzlake, who trains and advises him. Ontzlake encourages him to go for knighthood and tells him to fight for it. Sir Ontzlake reveals that he too was of humble origin and won knighthood by his own efforts. The Round Table is thus defined as both democratic and meritocratic. When ‘Viking’ raiders attack and sack Yeonil Castle and kill Lady Yeonil, John adopts the guise of the Black Knight to hunt them down. At the end, having proved himself worthy, John is knighted by King Arthur (Anthony Bushell) and marries Linnet. So one theme of the film is the training and qualification for knighthood of the young humbleborn hero. Even more significant is the threat to King Arthur’s land – anachronistically called England throughout – from without and within. This results in The Black Knight being a prime example of Cold War paranoia. The external threat is represented by Sir Palamedes, the Saracen knight at King Arthur’s court. He is plotting with King Mark of Cornwall to overthrow Arthur and take over England. The so-called Vikings are Mark’s men in disguise. Mark, although baptized as a Christian to allay suspicion, is secretly a pagan (i.e., a Communist) and plots to overthrow Christianity and replace it with the worship of the Sun God. Sir Ontzlake observes darkly in the authentic tones of a Cold War warrior: ‘There is treason all about us and it must be stamped out before all of us, yes, and King Arthur himself are overwhelmed by it.’ The villains are the pagan Celts of Cornwall (Communist subversives) and the Saracens of Palamedes, waiting across the Channel to invade (the Soviet Union). It is made visually clear by the fact that where the Christian knights are clad in conservative blue, the Saracen forces are clad in red and symbolize therefore the Soviet ‘reds’. John kills Palamedes in a duel and the Christians defeat the Saracens in a pitched battle.


While Hollywood was devoting its energies to Arthurian epics, the British company Hammer Films produced three lively low-budget Robin Hood films, The Men of Sherwood Forest (1954), Sword of Sherwood Forest (1961) and A Challenge for Robin Hood (1967). Sword of Sherwood Forest was the feature film culmination of the long-running television series The Adventures of Robin Hood, one of the most significant developments in the Robin Hood saga. Sapphire Films’ The Adventures of Robin Hood was shown on British and American television between 1955 and 1958 and starred Richard Greene. One hundred and forty-three episodes were made, many of them scripted pseudonymously by blacklisted American leftists. This may explain why one of the continuing themes of the series is the overriding concern with social justice and in particular the iniquities of the feudal and manorial systems. It also shows a recurrent preoccupation with informing and ‘naming names’ that can only reflect the experiences of McCarthyism.12 When Greene came to star in and co-produce the feature film, however, he dispensed with his television supporting cast and the blacklistees and returned to a plot closer to Hammer’s previous Robin Hood entry, The Men of Sherwood Forest. In The Men of Sherwood Forest Robin Hood and his men foil a plot by dissident aristocrats to murder King Richard the Lionheart. This time Robin and the outlaws foil a plot by dissident aristocrats to murder Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor of England, representative of the King and champion of the people’s rights. The heyday of the HUAC hearings was 1947 to 1954. During that period Hollywood, anxious to demonstrate its political credentials, made some 33 anti-Communist films. It is precisely the period of the major Arthurian epics and the majority of the Robin Hood films, but in 1954 McCarthy overreached himself and was censured by the Senate after attacking the army and the President, and HUAC’s operations ceased. McCarthy died in 1957 but the blacklist of leftists in Hollywood continued. It was overturned only in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo, one of the imprisoned Hollywood scriptwriters, was once again able to receive screen credits for his work (on Exodus and Spartacus), and thereafter the blacklist was abandoned. In a wider context, the first phase of the Cold War ended in 1965 and from then until it revived in 1973, the United States embarked on a policy of détente. The economies of both the super-powers were in trouble and it was in both their interests to de-escalate conflict. More significantly, America became embroiled in the Vietnam War and hoped to use the Soviet Union to put pressure on Ho Chi Minh. So the propaganda imperatives of the Cold War weakened and the need for Cold War warriors on film lessened.

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During the 1960s wider social and cultural changes in the Western world eclipsed the code of chivalry that was a central ingredient of the Robin Hood and King Arthur films. The old Hollywood studios, already weakened by the court decision which forced them to divest themselves of their cinema chains and further undermined by the rise of television, began to break up and instead a wider range of independent producers emerged. At the same time the nature of the audience changed. Increasingly from the 1960s the core audience for films was perceived to be largely under 30. This had far-reaching ideological consequences. The old studio structure had by and large aimed at a cross-class, mixed gender and all age audience from six to 60 and had demonstrated in its films a commitment to the political, social and cultural status quo, dramatizing what it perceived to be widely held common values and seeking to avoid controversy. The new youthful cinema audience was assumed to be on the whole anti-Establishment and unsympathetic to the values and beliefs of the older generation. In both Britain and America chivalry was rejected: by the left as classbound, by feminists as patriarchal and by individualists as inhibiting. Where chivalry had been based on the subordination of self to concepts of honour, duty and service, the dominant philosophy of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was a hedonistic individualism based on the assertion and fulfilment of the self and the slogan ‘I want it now’. In films, the chivalric hero was eclipsed by a new hero more in tune with the new philosophy of hedonistic individualism. His emergence can be dated precisely to 1958 and the enormous success of Richard Fleischer’s film The Vikings, in which the heroes were hard-fighting, hard-drinking, lusty, pagan Viking warriors, with a code of instant gratification, violence and self-assertion. This can properly be described as a seminal film as it had no precursors and was followed in the 1960s by a host of imitations, then in the 1980s by a cycle of films heroizing barbarian supermen, such as Conan the Barbarian and Mad Max. So the very pagan barbarians whose philosophy was the antithesis of chivalry, and who had been a threat to the civilized Christian values of the Round Table and the knightly commitment of Robin Hood and his outlaws, themselves became the heroes of the next generation of cinemagoers.13 Robin Hood and King Arthur would come back again after the 1960s both to cinema and television, but in guises very different from the ones examined here. There would be a peasant Robin (Robin and Marian), a socialist Robin (Robin of Sherwood) and a politically correct Robin (Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves); while in First Knight, the British King Arthur (Sean Connery) would hand over the Camelot project and Guinevere to


the American Lancelot (Richard Gere). These eternal mythic figures were being refashioned to fit new political and social conditions, new value systems and new role models and gender images, very different from those which had prevailed in the Cold War and which had for some 20 years called on Robin Hood and King Arthur as Cold War warriors.

Notes 1. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 6. 2. Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 4. 3. Harry Sandford, ‘Leslie Selander’, in Jon Tuska (ed.), Close Up: the Contract Director (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1976), p. 241. 4. See, for example, Brian Taves, The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 72; and Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.’s Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 68, 81–2. 5. See in particular Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1980); Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: The Viking Press, 1980); Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); and Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 6. On the full corpus of Arthurian and Robin Hood films, see Kevin J. Harty (ed.), Cinema Arthuriana (New York: Garland, 1991); Kevin J. Harty (ed.), King Arthur on Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); Scott Allen Nollen, Robin Hood: A Cinematic History of the English Outlaw and his Scottish Counterparts ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); Jeffrey Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2:1 (2001), pp. 65–80. 7. John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 12, 16. 8. Ivanhoe cost $3,842,000 to make and took $5,810,000 in the USA and $5,150,000 overseas ($10,960,000 overall). I owe these figures to Mark Glancy. 9. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 10. For a full account of the scripting and filming of Ivanhoe, see John Lenihan, ‘English Classics for Cold War America’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 20 (1992), pp. 42–51. 11. Dore Schary, Heyday (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 246–7. 12. Steve Neale, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: “Un-American” Contributions to Television Costume Adventure Series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23:3 (August 2003), pp. 245–57. 13. For a full discussion of this phenomenon, see Jeffrey Richards, ‘From Christianity to Paganism: The New Middle Ages and the Values of “Medieval” Masculinity’, Cultural Values 3 (1999), pp. 213–34.

9 The Stalinist Musical Richard Taylor

In 1995 Tracy Anderson published an article entitled: ‘Why Stalinist Musicals?’1 The phrasing of the question is itself significant and reflects the particular lens through which both Western and ‘Soviet’ scholars have historically viewed Soviet cinema, even though Anderson’s article did much to re-focus that lens. We nowadays take for granted that audiences in Western countries look for escapist entertainment in times of collective stress. As the British director David Lean once remarked, ‘Films are not real. They are dramatised reality’, and, ‘A shop girl earning three pounds a week doesn’t pay to see an exact replica of herself on the screen – she pays to see what she would like to be, in looks, dress and mode of living.’2 For years we have accepted that musicals were the most popular form of entertainment in the United States and much of Europe during the Great Depression, and even that during the Third Reich German audiences preferred to see musicals like Request Concert (Wunschkonzert, 1940) rather than the more obvious products of Nazi propaganda such as Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935).3 Why should we not accept that, in the midst of the forced industrialization and collectivization programmes of the early Five-Year Plans, in the maelstrom of the massive economic and social dislocation that these caused, in the thick of the purges and the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet peoples might also have wanted something to alleviate their mass suffering and give them hope in a better future? So the question that I want to ask first of all is: why not Stalinist musicals? The distorting lens through which Western and Soviet scholars have viewed the construct known as ‘Soviet cinema’ has been analysed by Ian Christie.4 There is a growing literature on Soviet popular culture, and especially on popular cinema, to which many scholars have contributed, most notably Denise Youngblood, Richard Stites and 137


James von Geldern, to name only those writing in English. This literature emphasizes the continuities in Russian cultural history between the pre- and post-Revolutionary periods on the one hand, and between the 1920s and the 1930s on the other, while acknowledging the very serious discontinuities and ruptures that have traditionally been the focus of research. I have argued elsewhere that a crucial role in the establishment of a Soviet mass cinema was played by Boris Shumyatsky, who in October 1930 was charged with creating ‘a cinema that is intelligible to the millions’.5 He maintained, in his book of the same title, that a ‘cinema for the millions’ required the establishment of new entertainment genres such as the musical comedy: ‘Neither the Revolution nor the defence of the socialist fatherland is a tragedy for the proletariat. We have always gone, and in future we shall still go, into battle singing and laughing.’6 As James von Geldern has argued, ‘In the mid-1930s, Soviet society struck a balance that would carry it through the turmoil of the purges, the Great War and reconstruction. The coercive policies of the Cultural Revolution were replaced or supplemented by the use of inducements.’7 The exclusive cultural policies of the first Five-Year Plan period (1928–32) were replaced by the inducements of inclusive cultural policies following the dissolution of the self-styled proletarian cultural institutions in April 1932 and their replacement by all-embracing Soviet institutions like the new Union of Soviet Writers. The doctrine proclaimed by the latter was Socialist Realism, which Andrei Zhdanov, who was effectively Stalin’s cultural commissar, claimed meant depicting reality ‘not … in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality”, but … as reality in its revolutionary development’.8 Anatoli Lunacharsky, in charge of Soviet cultural policy in the 1920s, tellingly remarked that ‘The Socialist Realist … does not accept reality as it really is. He accepts it as it will be … A Communist who cannot dream is a bad Communist. The Communist dream is not a flight from the earthly but a flight into the future.’9 In official terminology this element was called ‘revolutionary romanticism’. The credibility of revolutionary romanticism, the ‘flight into the future’, was enhanced by the audience’s apparent complicity in the exercise. Political speeches, newspaper articles, poster campaigns, official statistics and above all what Lenin had called ‘the most important of all the arts’10 depicted life not as it actually was, but as they hoped it was becoming. The media furnished what Sheila Fitzpatrick has memorably described as ‘a preview of the coming attractions of socialism’.11 If the Great Terror

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of the 1930s was to become the stick with which to modernize the Soviet Union, entertainment cinema was to provide a giant carrot.

Entertainment and utopia The musical was in many ways the perfect vehicle for the depiction and promulgation of the Socialist Realist utopia, especially if we recall Richard Dyer’s argument that the central thrust of entertainment is utopianism and that, while ‘Entertainment offers the image of “something better” to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide’, it ‘does not, however, present models of utopian worlds … Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies.’12 The Stalinist musical did both: it presented models of utopian worlds (in the case of the kolkhoz musical the cinematic equivalent of the ‘Potemkin village’) whilst also embodying the utopian feelings that stimulated audience identification. The task of Soviet cinema in the 1930s and 1940s was to convince audiences that, whatever their current hardships, life could become as it was depicted on the screen: life not as it is, but as it will be. In this ‘reel’ utopia, if not in everyday reality as then experienced by cinema audiences, the Stalinist slogan ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become happier’13 was made real. The reel realization of utopia was achieved by both representational and non-representational signs. Dyer’s observation that we pay more attention to the former at the expense of the latter is still largely true. The non-representational signification in the Stalinist musical lies primarily in three areas: the use of fairy-tale narrative conventions; the music itself; and the topographical conventions of the image of utopia, all of which weakened audience resistance to the reception of the utopian model depicted on screen. This essay focuses on the work of the two leading directors of ‘musical comedies’, Grigori Alexandrov (1903–84) and Ivan Pyriev (1901–68), while arguing that their films need to be seen in their historical and cultural context. Alexandrov founded the Soviet musical comedy genre with The Happy Guys (Veselye rebiata, 1934) and went on to make The Circus (Tsirk, 1936), Volga-Volga (1938) and The Shining Path (Svetlyi put’, 1940) in the same mould. Pyriev’s first musical comedy was The Rich Bride (Bogataia nevesta, 1938), which established the model for the kolkhoz musical. This was followed by Tractor-Drivers (Traktoristy, 1939), The Swineherdess and the Shepherd (Svinarka i pastukh, 1940) and The Kuban Cossacks (Kubanskie kazaki, 1949), the apotheosis of what Khrushchev was later to call the ‘varnishing of reality’ that characterized Soviet cinema’s depiction of the Stalinist countryside.14


In this respect, as in others, the Stalinist musical both resembled, and differed from, the classical Hollywood musical that will be much more familiar to readers of this book. Only The Kuban Cossacks was made in colour, on Agfacolor stock removed by the Red Army from Germany as war booty in 1945.15 The earlier musicals were all made in black and white largely because, although some colour films had been released, Soviet technology had thus far proved unable to produce a stable colour film stock of its own. Broadly speaking, the Alexandrov films integrated the musical sequences into the narrative development of the plot: the best example of this is the opening sequence to The Happy Guys, which replicates to some extent the Pied Piper tale, sweeping along all the characters, human and animal, in a single all-embracing movement. The integration in the Pyriev musicals is less clear and in some instances, such as ‘The Song of Moscow’ in The Swineherdess and the Shepherd, the ‘number’ might be said to stand, if not exactly ‘alone’, at least somewhat ‘apart’, although even here the musical performances do still advance the development of the plot. The films are universally brightly lit, the characters often filmed slightly from below and offset against a bright summer sky, and smiling rather more often than is perhaps usual in ‘real’ life. All these elements of film-making serve to promote the apparently relentless optimism of socialist realism by ‘varnishing’ reality or at least showing that reality, not necessarily as it was, but as it was supposed to be, or supposed to be becoming.

The path to utopia: the fairy-tale Maya Turovskaya has brilliantly analysed the way in which Pyriev in particular used the conventions of the Russian fairy-tale to project his ‘folklorized’16 vision of the Potemkin village, and Masha Enzensberger has extended this analysis to Alexandrov’s Shining Path.17 The use of these conventions enabled the Soviet musicals to act, in Turovskaya’s own words, ‘not so much as the reflection of their time’s objective reality, but rather as the reflection of the reality of its image of itself’.18 The plots of these films almost invariably centre on what the Russians call a ‘love intrigue’: but it is not ‘tainted’ by sexual or erotic impulses, rather it is a ‘pure’ romantic love based on its object’s labour proficiency. In the conventions of the Soviet musical – as indeed of its Hollywood equivalent – it is clear from the outset when ‘boy meets girl’. But the resolution of this ‘inevitable’ liaison is retarded by a misunderstanding and/or by competition between two male ‘suitors’, one of whom is in terms of his own labour productivity ‘worthy’ of the heroines, one of

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whom is not. The plot develops around the heroine’s journey towards an understanding of which is which. Sometimes, as in Circus, this is obvious from the beginning and the plot therefore revolves around the heroine’s discovery of the true path – the Soviet path – towards that understanding. The exceptions to this rule are the last two films by each director listed above. In Shining Path, based very closely on the Cinderella story, the heroine has to prove to herself that she is worthy of her suitor by successfully emancipating herself through a Party-sponsored training programme. In Kuban Cossacks the hero has no rival in love: his battle is with his own Cossack male chauvinist pride. In almost all these films, and in all the kolkhoz musicals, the central character who eventually resolves the difficulties is a woman.19 There are no fundamentally weak or evil women characters in these films. The only evil characters are foreigners, such as the Hitler look-alike von Kneischitz in Circus,20 or those forces threatening the frontiers of the USSR in TractorDrivers. The weak Soviet characters are either marginalized (the bourgeois women in Happy Guys, or Kuzma and his associates in Swineherdess) or won over to the work ethic (Alexei the book-keeper – a truly bourgeois because ‘unproductive’ profession – in Rich Bride and Nazar the idler in Tractor-Drivers). In utopia, weakness is therefore redeemable: evil is not, but it is externalized. The main characters are de-personalized and universalized as in a fairy-tale: they are symbolic figures, and the frequent use of choral singing helps this process of generalization: in both Rich Bride and Kuban Cossacks, for instance, the ‘battle of the sexes’ is fought out in choral form. The Soviet version of the star system reinforced this: all Alexandrov’s films starred his wife Lyubov Orlova, the ‘prima donna’ of Stalinist cinema,21 and all Pyriev’s starred his wife Marina Ladynina. Their appearance in a series of films with similar plot structures, but different settings in different parts of the Soviet Union and with different casts, helped audiences all over the country to identify with them more directly on the one hand, while broadening the appeal of the films and their message on the other. It must also be said that neither Orlova nor Ladynina conformed to the traditional stereotype of ‘femininity’. While Ladynina in the kolkhoz musicals sometimes appeared in folk costume, both she and Orlova also appeared in ‘masculine’ clothing (Ladynina in Rich Bride and Tractor-Drivers; Orlova in Circus, Volga-Volga and Shining Path) which desexualized them. For Soviet women caught in the ‘double burden’ of housework and motherhood on the one hand and collective labour on the other, this must have represented truly utopian wish fulfilment. The heroine is always depicted in the workplace, be it kolkhoz, circus or


spinning mill, and only in the home as a workplace, like the Cinderella heroine of Shining Path. Some critics have argued that the Soviet musical heroine is a mother figure, but this is not strictly true: domesticity is absent and family is replaced by the collective. The characters are introduced to one another ‘accidentally’, sometimes through the fairy-tale medium of a picture, updated as a photograph (Tractor-Drivers, Swineherdess). The accident of their initial encounter reinforces the inevitability of their romance, as if it has been ordained from ‘on high’. Often this is reinforced by a direct or indirect ‘blessing’ from that same source. In Alexander Medvedkin’s The Miracle Girl (Chudesnitsa, 1936) (set on a kolkhoz but not a musical), the Stakhanovite heroine is summoned to Moscow where she sees and hears Stalin speak, as a reward for her labour achievements. In Circus the heroine ‘understands’ her situation when she joins the May Day parade in Red Square and sees Stalin, here signified as God by the icon-like image carried at the head of the procession in the immediately preceding shot. In Tractor-Drivers the wedding feast finale is accompanied by toasts and oaths of allegiance to Stalin. In Shining Path the heroine is summoned to a fairy-tale Kremlin to receive the Order of Lenin from someone whose aura reflects light upon her face: this must be Stalin, because in a Soviet film in 1940 it could hardly be anybody else. These ‘unforgettable encounters’ (the title of a 1937 painting by Vasilii Efanov)22 occur in numerous other Soviet films, posters, paintings and newspaper articles of the period: they form a central thread in the fairy-tale of Stalin as father of his people, the genius who has time for everyone, who can solve everybody’s problems, even when Stalin’s divinity is mediated through another Party or state official such as the Soviet President Kalinin or the local Party secretary (Shining Path or Kuban Cossacks). Stalin is the omniscient and implicitly omnipresent father of the collective Soviet family, the avuncular patriarch of the peoples.23 Participation in this larger family sublimates the need for the heroines, and indeed the heroes, to participate in nuclear domesticity: sex is absent, and even the kissing is ‘innocent’ (Happy Guys, Volga-Volga). The family is the country itself, in which all are equal, or at least all have equal opportunity.24 A central part of the fairy-tale in Alexandrov’s films, though not in Pyriev’s, is the idea that any Soviet citizen, however humble at the beginning of the film, can make a success of life and rise to the heights that socialist society has to offer. In Volga-Volga the heroine, a local letter carrier, overcomes numerous obstacles to win the All-Union Olympiad of Song. In Shining Path the heroine Tanya receives the Order of Lenin and later becomes a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, a sure sign

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that she has ‘arrived’. These closures are in fact also apertures allowing the audience to participate in the action.25 Shining Path has perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most bizarre, ending of any Stalinist musical. Following the award of the Order of Lenin, the heroine finds herself in a Kremlin ante-room decorated only with chandeliers and mirror. Scarcely able to believe that what is happening to her is real, she checks in the mirror, a familiar fairy-tale device. She sees her reflection and therefore ‘knows’ that it is real. Then she turns her face back to the camera and sings a duet with a mirror image of her former self in overalls. ‘Wait a minute!’, she says, ‘I know what was, but I’d like to know what will be.’ The image in the mirror is then transformed into Tanya as a kind of fairy godmother, complete with tiara, opening the frame of the mirror and inviting present-day Tanya the Stakhanovite into the world of mirror (reel?) reality. She sings, ‘Tanya, Tanya, Tanya, look and see, all roads, all these spaces are open to us.’ The two are seated in a car that then takes off, flying over the Kremlin, then Moscow, then high mountains, and then back to Moscow to the showpiece All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, landing at the foot of the famous statue by Vera Mukhina of ‘The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman’, originally designed to top the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition and subsequently to become the emblem of the Mosfilm studio. The final scene of the film takes place in the Exhibition itself and the one-time Cinderella figure, now crowned with success and encouraged by a choir extolling the limitless possibilities of life in the USSR,26 re-encounters her Prince Charming against a magic background of fountains and other symbols of abundance. Implicitly, now that they have both established their equality in successful careers, they may have time for domesticity, but this is by no means made explicit. Other films use festivals or mass scenes to draw the audience into the action and, above all, the emotional uplift: the ‘storming’ of the Bolshoi Theatre against all obstacles by the hero and heroine of Happy Guys, the Olympiad of Song at the end of Volga-Volga, the wedding feast at the end of Tractor-Drivers, the implied weddings that conclude both Swineherdess and Kuban Cossacks. But the device that really involves the emotions of the audience is the use of popular music in its various forms.

The path to utopia: the music The music for all the Alexandrov and the first and last of the Pyriev musicals was written by the most prolific composer of Soviet popular music, Isaak Dunayevsky (1900–55). He was awarded his first Stalin Prize


in 1941 for the music to Alexandrov’s Circus and Volga-Volga and his second ten years later for the score to Pyriev’s Kuban Cossacks. One of the songs from Circus, the ‘Song of the Motherland’, became the call sign for Moscow Radio and the unofficial state anthem of the Soviet Union until the official anthem was introduced in 1943. The music played a crucial part because it played to the emotions of the audience and helped to weaken any intellectual resistance they may have had to the message of the films.27 As already indicated, the scores made widespread use of choral singing, which helped to universalize the characters and the situations in which they found themselves. Furthermore, the combination of catchy tunes and ideologically loaded texts (mostly by Vasili Lebedev-Kumach, 1898–1949) meant that, when the audience left the cinema humming the tune, it also carried with it the message of reel reality into the real world outside. This helped make audiences feel that they were part of the world depicted on the screen: it elided the actual with the utopian ideal, collapsing the ‘fourth wall’ in the auditorium.28 In Happy Guys the first verse of the theme song extolled the uplifting popularity of song, while the refrain made clear the use to which this uplift was to be put: A song helps us build and live, Like a friend, it calls and leads us forth. And those who stride through life in song Will never ever fall behind. Further verses enjoined the audience; ‘When our country commands that we be heroes,/ Then anyone can become a hero’ and finally warned that any enemy threatening ‘to take away our living joy’ would be resoundingly rejected with ‘a battle song, staunchly defending our Motherland’. The idea of song as a central and necessary part of life is echoed in ‘Three Tank Drivers’, by Boris Laskin and the Pokrass brothers, written for Tractor-Drivers: ‘There they live – and singing guarantees it – As a tight, unbroken family.’ That family was not the nuclear family, but the Motherland: the word rodina – deriving from the Russian verb rodit’, to give birth to – was resurrected to reinforce this metaphor.29 This was the Motherland of ‘Socialism in One Country’, a land whose vast size and variety was constantly extolled (Circus, Volga-Volga, TractorDrivers, Swineherdess), a land that was largely hermetically sealed against apparently hostile outside forces (Circus, Tractor-Drivers).30 Dunayevsky’s music carefully reflected the setting of each film. For Pyriev’s kolkhoz musicals he wrote scores that were heavily influenced

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by folk music, Ukrainian or Russian as appropriate. The Alexandrov musicals, on the other hand, were urban-orientated and the scores drew upon urban musical forms such as jazz, music hall and military marches, however unlikely that combination may appear. All three are evident in Happy Guys and Circus. Volga-Volga centres on a musical civil war between the heroine, who has written the ‘Song of the Volga’, which eventually wins the Olympiad of Song, and the hero, who prefers to rehearse classical music with his brass band. For him the music of Wagner is a sign of culture and civilization: in 1938 this was a clear indication of ‘false consciousness’. In these three musicals popular or ‘low’ culture triumphs over ‘high’ culture. In Happy Guys the respectable buffet party literally becomes a ‘carnival of the animals’ while later on the jazz band ends the film taking the Bolshoi Theatre audience by storm; in Circus the action largely takes place within the confines of a ‘low’ cultural form; in Volga-Volga it is the popular amateur song that triumphs over professional classical music, and a child maestro who out-conducts the adults. Similarly in Shining Path, the least musical of the Stalinist musicals, it is Cinderella who outstrips her ‘ugly sisters’. These films provided confirmation that ‘When our country commands that we be heroes,/ Then anyone can become a hero’ – ‘and singing guarantees it’! The texts of the songs in the Stalinist musicals tell us a great deal about the topography of utopia and clarify some of the confusions and errors committed by those critics and scholars who have ignored them.

On arrival: The topography of utopia The Stalinist utopia is hermetically sealed against the outside world: the only depiction of ‘abroad’ (the lynch mob at the start of Circus) is unflattering, and other references are boldly defensive (Tractor-Drivers). It has been argued that in this utopia gender construction was quite straightforward: the man was identified with the city, with industry, defence, modernity, the rational and therefore progress; the woman, by contrast, was identified with the countryside and the land, with agriculture, nurture, nature, the emotional and therefore also with backwardness. This construction reaches its apotheosis in the Mukhina statue already mentioned in relation to Shining Path, ‘a syntactically symmetrical pair but with the man wielding the mace of modernity: the industrial hammer’.31 This characterization is, however, an oversimplification and each musical explored different parts of the Stalinist utopia. We must therefore construct our topography of that utopia by pulling together those parts into a coherent whole.


Utopia exists in these films at two levels which may be broadly characterized as the periphery and the centre. Alexandrov’s musicals are geographically centripetal, Moscow-orientated, Pyriev’s are not: but they are not, as Evgeni Dobrenko has claimed, centrifugal films in which the movement is away from the capital.32 Pyriev’s films merely explore the periphery and validate it as part of utopia.

Exploring the periphery The Alexandrov musicals begin at the periphery: in Happy Guys it is a resort in the Crimea; in Circus, for once, it is overseas, the United States; in Volga-Volga it is the small provincial town of Melkovodsk (meaning literally ‘little waters’); and in Shining Path it is a small town in the Moscow region. In the course of each film the action moves to Moscow, where it ends: in the Bolshoi Theatre, in Red Square by the Kremlin, in the Olympiad of Song, and in the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition respectively. The ties that link the periphery to the centre vary: the translation of the main characters from the one to the other is the principal one of these links, but boats provide the principal method of interurban transport in Happy Guys (although a train is also mentioned but not seen) and in Volga-Volga, where the postal system is also crucial, as it is in Pyriev’s Tractor-Drivers, where the postman sings a song extolling the variety and breadth of his vast country. In Circus trains offer a means of arrival and departure from and to abroad, but not within the USSR itself. Telegrams act as catalysts in both Volga-Volga and Shining Path, while in the latter the first link between Melkovodsk and the capital occurs when the radio announces ‘Moscow calling’ and the last is effected through the fairy-tale mirror device discussed above. The use of radio is familiar from other films of the period, but the virtual absence of aircraft and trains as means of internal communication and linkage, when they featured so strikingly elsewhere, is curious. It is almost as if the periphery is in some ways ‘living in the past’, which would have been present reality for most audiences of the time. The presence of the bourgeois ladies early in Happy Guys strengthens this interpretation. There is surely a visual reference to the women in October (Oktiabr’, 1927) who stab the Bolshevik workman to death with their parasols when the women in Alexandrov’s film ‘spike’ the ‘wrong’ artiste with theirs. In Shining Path the heroine Tanya is employed as a domestic servant, as is Anyuta in Happy Guys – a most un-Soviet occupation even if still widespread in the 1930s: both liberate themselves from this

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drudgery as the plot develops. Similarly Melkovodsk in Volga-Volga is initially depicted in a very unflattering light: the ferry breaks down, the telephones do not work, the telegram from Moscow ‘slows down’ when it arrives in the provinces, and the population of the town seems to spend its time either petitioning the local bureaucrat Byvalov (meaning ‘nothing new’, hilariously played by the leading comic actor Igor Ilyinsky) or practising their music.33 Yet this is itself depicted as a caricature: whereas Byvalov, who regards his recent posting to Melkovodsk as a mere staging post on his long career track to journey’s end in Moscow, claims that ‘There can be no talent in such a dump’, Strelka (‘little arrow’) the letter carrier insists there is ‘no lack of talented people’ and goes on to prove her point by singing Tchaikovsky and reciting Lermontov. It is, however, the retarded telegram from Moscow announcing the ‘socialist competition’ of the Olympiad of Song that breaks the log-jam of stagnation, and in a deliberate irony, it is through Strelka’s efforts that Byvalov, despite his own efforts to obstruct her, eventually arrives with the entire local musical talent in Moscow. In Pyriev’s films the kolkhoz is largely a self-sufficient microcosm, a closed world of ‘social claustrophobia’, to use Dobrenko’s term.34 In Tractor-Drivers the hero does, it is true, enter from outside, but he comes from the fighting in the Far East, which is therefore no longer peripheral but strategically significant (cf. Dovzhenko’s Aerograd (1935)). Furthermore, while in transit to Moscow, this time by train, he has chosen to travel to the Ukrainian kolkhoz rather than to the capital. In Kuban Cossacks the outside world hardly intrudes either, although it is referred to obliquely, as is the war, fought less than a decade previously on this very terrain. The plot in all three films is characterized by what became known as ‘conflictlessness’ (‘beskonfliktnost’): in other words it is confined to microcosmic personal rivalries expressed in differing personal labour contributions rather than to macrocosmic forces like class conflict or war, which were all too evident in other Soviet films of the period. This underlines both the escapism and utopianism of these films. The leading characters in the periphery are almost invariably women. It is they who organize and produce, they who resolve the love intrigue by recognizing, albeit somewhat belatedly, the production achievements of the hero and therefore his suitability as partner in labour and love. The exceptions are in Alexandrov’s Happy Guys, where it is the hero who effects the resolution through his talent for improvising in the most adverse circumstances; and Pyriev’s Swineherdess, where the heroine weakly accepts her fate at the hands of the deceitful locals while the hero


has to ride like a knight on horseback to rescue her at the eleventh hour. One reason for the privileging of women in the countryside was the need to encourage them to play a greater part in collective, as opposed to domestic, labour in the light of male migration to the cities and the consequent labour shortage in rural areas. Another resulted from the context in which these musicals were made: by male directors to showcase the acting, singing and dancing talents of their wives. Yet another was to emphasize that women were equal and thus to underline the superiority of the Soviet way of life. For these reasons women were never villains: the villainous characters were always men, but they could be cured of their villainy by the intervention of women, unless they were foreigners, like von Kneischitz in Circus.

Exploring the centre: Moscow Moscow constituted the fairyland at the heart of the Stalinist utopia. It was where unusual, even magical, things happened: the triumph of the jazz band in Happy Guys; the journey to understanding of the heroine in Circus; the victory in the singing competition in Volga-Volga; the translation of Cinderella into the Fairy Princess in Shining Path; and the labour of love/love of labour that blossoms in Swineherdess. It was to Moscow that characters went to improve their lives and to be rewarded with recognition for their achievements. Within Moscow, the Kremlin and the newly opened Exhibition of Agricultural Achievements played significant and separate roles. The Kremlin was the seat of government and can be seen as a synonym for Party-state power and thus for Stalin. Sometimes this is explicit (Circus or Shining Path; cf. Miracle Girl), although the general context of contemporary propaganda images rendered such explicitness unnecessary. The role of the Exhibition is more complex: it features prominently in both Swineherdess and Shining Path. Dobrenko argues that in the first of these ‘the Exhibition represents not Moscow but the “Country”.’35 This is an oversimplification. In both films the Exhibition offers a dual representation: to the periphery it represents Moscow, while in Moscow it represents the country in all its diversity. In Swineherdess the hero and heroine sing ‘The Song of Moscow’, which opens: Everything’s fine in spacious Moscow, The Kremlin stars shine against the blue sky, And, just as rivers meet in the sea, So people meet here in Moscow.

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The refrain includes the lines: ‘I shall never forget a friend,/ Whom I have met in Moscow.’ Moscow is therefore special. We must remember that most Soviet citizens had never visited Moscow: internal passport controls and sheer cost made the journey impossible except as a special, officially sponsored reward, as in Shining Path. Most people ‘knew’ Moscow only from screen images, and for propaganda reasons only parts of the ‘great stone city’ (cf. Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934)) were shown: the Kremlin and/or Red Square, because of their historical and political associations; the Exhibition, because it was very much a ‘preview of the coming attractions of socialism’; the new construction projects, such as the Hotel Moskva (Circus), the river station (Volga-Volga) or the showcase metro (Circus). As Oksana Bulgakova has pointed out, ‘Even more frequently real Moscow was replaced by a painted backdrop, a set’:36 this applies to Happy Guys, Circus, Medvedkin’s New Moscow (Novaia Moskva, 1937) and it increased the air of unreality for those familiar with the city. But most of the audience had nothing real to compare to this reel image, and that enhanced its magic power.

Conclusion These films I have characterized as ‘the Stalinist musical’ were popular and the image of the country that they created, while not ‘real’ in any objective sense, became real in the minds of contemporary audiences. The ‘Potemkin village’, the small town, the capital city of this reel reality created a powerful Soviet equivalent of the ‘Russia of the mind’.37 By entertaining the mass audience with glimpses of the ‘coming attractions’ of utopia, the Stalinist musical promoted the illusion encapsulated in popular songs not only that ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become happier’, but further that ‘We were born to make a fairy-tale come true’.38 As Stalin, who as ‘Kremlin censor’ was in a unique position to know, once remarked, ‘Cinema is an illusion, but it dictates its own laws to life itself.’39

Notes I am indebted to Emma Widdis, Cambridge, whose work first alerted me to the literature on this subject, and to Julian Graffy, London, for reading earlier drafts of this essay and for supplying numerous relevant materials. 1. T. Anderson, ‘Why Stalinist Musicals?’, Discourse, 17:3 (1995), pp. 38–48. 2. D. Lean, ‘Brief Encounter’, Penguin Film Review 4 (London: Penguin, 1947).

150 The New Film History 3. R. Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). 4. R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–17. 5. R. Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s’, in R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 193–216. 6. B. Shumiatskii, Kinematografiia millionov (Moscow: Kinofotoizdat, 1935), pp. 239–40. 7. J. von Geldern, ‘The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s’, in S. White (ed.), New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 62. 8. A. A. Zhdanov, speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers, in Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), p. 4. 9. A. V. Lunacharsky, ‘Synopsis of a Report in the Tasks of Dramaturgy (Extract)’, in Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, p. 237. 10. V. I. Lenin, ‘Of All the Arts …’, in Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, p. 57. 11. S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 262. 12. R. Dyer, ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, Movie, 24 (Spring 1977), pp. 2–13. 13. Stalin, in a speech to the All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites, 17 November 1935. 14. N. S. Khrushchev, ‘Speech to the Delegates of the 20th Party Congress in February 1956’, translated in The Secret Speech (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976). 15. Taylor, Film Propaganda, pp. 100–1. 16. Cf. F. J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1990). 17. M. Enzensberger, ‘We Were Born to Turn a Fairy Tale into Reality’, in R. Taylor and D. Spring (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 97–108. 18. M. Turovskaia, ‘I.A. Pyr’ev i ego muzykal’nye komedii. K probleme zhanra’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 1 (1988), pp. 111–46. 19. Pace J. Haynes, New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 20. L. Mamatova, ‘Model’ kinomifov 30-kh godov’, in idem, Kino: politika i liudi (30-e gody), (Moscow: Materik, 1995), pp. 52–78 (p. 65). 21. S. Nikolaevich, ‘Poslednii seans, ili Sud’ba beloi zhenshchiny v SSSR’, Ogonek, 4 (1992), p. 23. 22. S. E. Reid, ‘All Stalin’s Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s’, Slavic Review, 57:1 (1998), pp. 133–73 (p. 155). 23. H. Günther, ‘Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema’, in T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko, Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 178–90. 24. H. Günther, ‘Poiushchaia rodina. Sovetskaia massovaia pesnia kak vyrazhenie arkhetipa materi’, Voprosy literatury, 4 (1997), pp. 46–61. 25. Anderson, ‘Why Stalinist Musicals?’, pp. 38–48.

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26. The words for the ‘March of the Enthusiasts’, which extols ‘A country of heroes, a country of thinkers’ are to be found in J. von Geldern and R. Stites (eds), Mass Culture in Soviet Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 327–8. 27. Anderson, ‘Why Stalinist Musicals?’ 28. Ibid. 29. Günther, ‘Poiushchaia rodina’. 30. E. Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 31. R. Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment & Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 84. 32. E. Dobrenko, ‘ “Iazyk prostranstva, szhatogo do tochki”, ili estetika sotsial’noi klaustrofobii’, Iskusstvo kino, 9 (1996), pp. 108–17 (p. 109). 33. M. Turovskaia, ‘Volga-Volga i ego vremia’, Iskusstvo kino, 3 (1998), pp. 59–64. 34. Dobrenko, ‘ “Iazyk prostranstva” ’. 35. Ibid., p. 112. 36. O. Bulgakova, ‘Prostranstvennye figury sovetskogo kino 30-kh godov’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 29 (1996), pp. 49–62 (p. 57). 37. O. Figes, ‘The Russia of the Mind’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 June 1968, pp. 14–16. 38. This popular song from 1920, the ‘March of the Aviators’, was revived in the 1930s to support the aviation cult as part of the anti-religious campaigns. The words are to be found in von Geldern and R. Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, pp. 257–8. 39. D. Volkogonov, ‘Stalin’, Oktiabr’, 11 (1988).

10 Now, Voyager (1942): Melodrama Then and Now Martin Shingler

In 1993, more than 50 years after its initial release, Now, Voyager (1942) was declared by Jeanine Basinger to be ‘one of the most successful and moving women’s pictures ever made’ and ‘the definitive woman’s film of all time’.1 For other film scholars it is a melodrama. Stanley Cavell designated it a ‘Melodrama of the Unknown Woman’, along with Blonde Venus (1932), Stella Dallas (1937), Gaslight (1944) and Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948).2 Andrew Britton assigned it to a group of ‘Freudian-feminist Melodrama’ including Rebecca (1940), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Undercurrent (1946) and Secret Beyond the Door (1948).3 For Jeanne Allen ‘Now, Voyager fits comfortably within a tradition of melodrama of female suffering and self-sacrifice’, of 1930s and 1940s movies featuring ‘suffering, self-sacrificing, and morally regenerative woman figures in a mode of address specifically aimed at women: the weepy, the sudser, the four-hanky movie’.4 She assigned it to a genre identified by Thomas Elsaesser as the ‘Family Melodrama’, even though his seminal study of melodrama, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, published in 1972, made no direct reference to it.5 Now, Voyager did not come to dominate the debate on melodrama and the woman’s film until the 1980s, when it acquired an iconic status. Indeed, images of the film were chosen to adorn the covers of the most influential books on melodrama, including Christine Gledhill’s Home Is Where the Heart Is (1987), Jeanine Basinger’s A Woman’s View (1993) and Stanley Cavell’s Contesting Tears (1996).6 A brief description of its plot may account for this film’s pre-eminence in studies of melodrama and the woman’s film. Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) is the victim of a domineering mother (Gladys Cooper) and her own neurosis. She is restored to health, sanity and beauty by a psychiatrist (Claude Rains) and a handsome European lover (Paul Henreid). Tragedy and romance dominate this tale of a woman’s journey toward 152

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self-determination and personal fulfilment. Her encounters with her psychiatrist and lover give her hope, strength and confidence, whilst her mother consistently throws her back into neurotic insecurity, illness and despair. Becoming a surrogate mother to her lover’s child Tina ( Janice Wilson) offers Charlotte the best prospect of fulfilment and stability. However, this can only be achieved by renouncing her love affair. In the end Charlotte chooses motherhood over romantic love with one of Hollywood’s most often-quoted and ridiculed lines, ‘Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars!’ Many of the characteristics of melodrama described by film scholars in the 1970s are included here: the victimized central character; the conflict of mother and daughter; the suffocating domestic environment; the extraordinary interventions of chance; and the emotional ups and downs, accompanied by an expressive musical score (by Max Steiner). Having played a key role in the shift from ideological critiques of Hollywood melodrama (such as the 1950s films of Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray) to feminist and psychoanalytic studies of films made for women in the late 1930s and 1940s (e.g., the films of George Cukor, King Vidor and Max Ophuls), Now, Voyager became one of the first films to be explored in terms of its historical reception. In 1985, Maria LaPlace used it to study the ways Hollywood marketed films to women. Her study involved the analysis of a range of historical materials, such as the film’s 1942 press book and a series of publicity articles on Bette Davis from the 1930s.7 Drawing on Charles Eckert’s work on merchandizing, and Richard Dyer’s work on stardom, LaPlace revealed how two dominant strategies for producing and marketing films – consumerism and stardom – came into direct conflict due to the casting of Bette Davis.8 When this study was included in Home is Where the Heart Is two years later, it had been extended and re-titled, and argued that, ‘For feminists interested in how cinema constructs female subjectivity and female desire, it is necessary to move away from a purely formal analysis of the internal workings of a film text to a more historically specific analysis of the relation of text and context, that is, to examine film as an historical process of intertextuality.’ 9 This statement echoed those made by Janet Staiger the previous year in Wide Angle. She had argued that ‘determining historical receptions and changing historical receptions of films can to some degree elucidate the question of film/spectator relation’.10 In the mid to late 1980s, Staiger and LaPlace rejected notions of spectators passively interpolated within the text, in favour of a more active conception of the viewer engaged in the process of reading films in relation to intertexts (i.e., other films and extra-cinematic material, such as publicity) and


context (the conditions of reception: institutional, social and cultural). Staiger recognized that spectators were unable to create their own individual meanings from films, and that their readings were influenced by various institutional mechanisms that privilege certain interpretations over others; for example, the use of posters, previews and trailers to prime audience expectations prior to viewing a film. Staiger’s influence was evident in LaPlace’s revised essay, which added an enquiry into the women’s novels upon which many women’s films were based. She related key incidents in Now, Voyager to the conventions of the woman’s novel from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Observing that Charlotte and Jerry’s relationship adhered closely to the conventions of women’s popular fiction, she provided a compelling interpretation of the final scene. A typical trope of women’s fiction, LaPlace noted, was that in the end the romantic hero must abandon control and dominance to assume a more equal position vis-à-vis the main female character. Accordingly, throughout the second half of Now, Voyager, while Charlotte becomes more confident and controlling, Jerry becomes increasingly passive and hesitant, so that he finally agrees to renounce his romantic claim on her and leave his child permanently in her charge. When read by spectators familiar with women’s fiction of the period, Now, Voyager’s conclusion seems highly conventional, satisfying not only generic convention but also audience expectation. Unlike LaPlace, most film scholars have puzzled over this ending, concluding that it must also have puzzled viewers.11 Now, Voyager’s ending may seem unconventional in that it defies one of the fundamental rules of classical narrative cinema: namely, that films are resolved with a ‘happy ending’ in which a romantic couple is either formed or reunited. The ‘weepy’ was a major exception to this rule and to the pleasure principle in general given its intention of making audiences cry. Weepies aimed at women often end with the sight of a woman alone, bereft of romance and partner: most notably, Queen Christina (1933), Stella Dallas (1937) and Dark Victory (1939). This kind of ending was certainly used frequently in many films starring Bette Davis, not only Dark Victory but also The Old Maid (1939), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), All This and Heaven Too (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941). For audiences familiar with these films, the ending of Now, Voyager must have seemed conventional and may even have been anticipated.

Melodrama revised Since the 1980s many of the early claims regarding melodrama as a Hollywood genre have been challenged as a result of more systematic

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historical investigation.12 The method of reception studies, for instance, has produced enquiries into what the term ‘melodrama’ means as designated in film industry discourses of the studio era, such as reviews, publicity, trade press notices, posters and press books. Analysis of such material has revealed that what the trade press labelled ‘melodrama’ included movies with a lot of action and limited scope for characterization or dialogue. In fact, westerns, gangster films, swashbuckling adventure stories, horror, crime and cop movies were regularly sold as melodrama. Moreover, this was primarily male and adolescent fare. Films designed for mature female audiences dealing with domestic crises, doomed romance and maternal angst were seldom referred to as ‘melodrama’ until the 1970s. From the 1930s through the 1950s, they had been described as drama, emotional drama, romance, historical drama, adult drama and, more pejoratively, ‘weepies’. Steve Neale, investigating the way the terms ‘melodrama’, ‘meller’ and ‘melodramatic’ were used in press releases and publicity sheets between the 1910s and the 1950s, had difficulty finding terms like ‘domestic melodrama’, and found no reference to anything called a ‘family melodrama’, the subject of Elsaesser’s article ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’. Examining the discourses relating to the 1950s melodramatic canon (the films of Sirk, Ray and Minnelli), he found that the term ‘melodrama’ was only used in connection with their sensational themes, such as the fights and speeding cars in Written on the Wind (1956) and Rebel Without A Cause (1955). He also found that when the term ‘romantic melodrama’ was used, it was intended to indicate a hybrid film, one mixing romance with thriller, to suggest a romantic drama with violent episodes.13 When Rick Altman investigated the historical uses of the term ‘melodrama’ in Hollywood publicity of the 1930s and 1940s, he discovered that although film journalists, critics and reviewers used generic terms to label individual films, studio publicists rarely established generic specificity in their press ads and posters, more often citing mixed generic categories. He argued that historically the American film industry had been inconsistent in its use of generic labels, both to the extent that they evolved over time and that, within the same period, the terms were variously used by different sectors of the industry. Thus: Whereas film reviews almost always include generic vocabulary as a convenient and widely understood shorthand, film publicity seldom employs generic terms as such. Indirect references to genre are of course regularly used, but they almost always evoke not a single genre but multiple genres.14


Altman’s analyses of 1930s film posters revealed that ‘Hollywood has no interest … in explicitly identifying a film with a single genre’, the studios having more to gain by suggesting that their films had universal appeal (to both males and females). Altman wrote that, ‘When specific genre terms are used, they are invariably offered in adjective-noun pairs, one term intended to guarantee appeal to each sex: western romance, romantic adventure, epic drama, and the like.’ Thus, he concluded that ‘Hollywood’s stock-in-trade is the romantic combination of genres, not the classical practice of generic purity.’ He discovered, moreover, that studio publicists were reluctant to use industry-wide categories, favouring instead specific designations linking films directly to the studio’s own film cycles. Altman concluded that a genre often emerged from a film cycle, but that studios usually sought to prevent this.15 Once a film cycle became a fully fledged genre (produced throughout the industry) the studio that initiated it was likely to abandon production in favour of a new studio-specific film cycle. This means that genres were inevitably post facto categories used by critics and journalists (and, later, scholars) rather than being studio created and used by publicists and the trade press. As Steve Neale revealed, much confusion has surrounded the use of labels such as ‘melodrama’ and the ‘woman’s film’. However, Altman’s claim that the major Hollywood studios favoured film cycles rather than genre films goes some way to understanding why many of the canonical films discussed as ‘melodrama’ or as ‘women’s films’ were never actually described as such when promoted and reviewed on their original release. Consequently, attempts to authenticate a film’s status as a ‘melodrama’, a ‘woman’s film’, or even a ‘melodramatic woman’s film’ by reference to the materials created by the studios in the 1930s and 1940s are futile. Now, Voyager (1942), for instance, despite being widely considered as one of Hollywood’s finest examples of melodrama, the woman’s film and, indeed, the melodramatic woman’s film, was never described in these terms in any of the publicity materials produced by Warner Brothers in 1942. Variously described as an ‘adult drama’ and ‘emotional drama’, it was mostly presented to its original audiences as a studio-specific film cycle; namely, the ‘Bette Davis film’. When the entertainment industry trade paper Variety previewed Now, Voyager in the summer of 1942 it noted its dramatic and emotional qualities without calling it a ‘melodrama’: ‘Here is drama heavily steeped in the emotional tide that has swept its star, Bette Davis, to her present crest, and it’s the kind of drama that maintains Warners’ pattern for

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box-office success.’ It claimed that the film had ‘almost everything for excellent entertainment and box-office – plenty of romance, stark drama, expert direction and photography, a fine production and a strong supporting cast’, declaring it to be the kind of drama that ‘will win audience reaction by its high-powered emotional impact alone, particularly from the women’, without referring to it as a ‘woman’s film’. It did note that this is a prestige production, pointing out that ‘Hal Wallis hasn’t spared the purse strings on his production … It has all the earmarks of money wisely spent.’16 Similarly, the Hollywood Reporter emphasized the film’s quality and its status as a star vehicle, declaring, ‘All of Bette Davis’s previous screen achievements … are but dress rehearsals in light of her triumph in Now, Voyager.’17 Warner Brothers spent money not only on the film itself but also on a publicity campaign designed to excite film-goers’ expectations, whetting their appetites for the release of Now, Voyager in late October. A series of articles for newspapers and magazines was prepared, along with press ads, posters and merchandizing tie-ins to achieve the greatest exposure. Most of these articles stressed the film’s attractions for female audiences, particularly the romantic appeal of Davis’s co-star Paul Henreid. Mostly the publicity emphasized that this film was a great romance, finely acted. An article entitled ‘Bette Davis Plays Best Role of Her Screen Career’ suggested that Now, Voyager was a departure for the actress: The ‘new’ Bette Davis positively will not lose her eyesight, chop off her lover’s head, be tortured, take a beating, go to jail, betray her husband, be tried for murder, or even sit on a cactus in her forthcoming Warner Brothers picture Now, Voyager.18 This statement teased Davis’s fans and required them to guess or recall these roles: namely, Dark Victory, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Marked Woman (1937), In This Our Life (1942), The Little Foxes, The Letter (1940) and The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941). The article went on to cite her roles in The Man Who Played God (1932), The Dark Horse (1932), The Rich Are Always With Us (1932) and Three on a Match (1933), noting that she had ‘built a reputation for playing what Hollywood calls “the gutty gals”. The change of character in Now, Voyager is sudden, complete and probably healthy … it’s a holiday for Bette Davis.’19 Thus, fans of Davis were enticed to come and see her in a different kind of role, and the studio was playing it both ways, promising audiences a different kind of Bette Davis in Now, Voyager while associating it closely with her previous work.


The Bette Davis film cycle Warner Brothers developed the Bette Davis film cycle in 1938, after the actress had achieved some success and notoriety for her unconventional looks, behaviour and acting style. As a novice contract player she had appeared in many second-rate ‘B’ movies and programme-fillers and, from 1932 to 1937, Warners struggled to find the right vehicle for Davis, their attempts to make her a glamorous star repeatedly failing.20 Although she stole a few scenes opposite Richard Barthelmess in Cabin in the Cotton (1932) and Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage (1934), Davis made slow progress in the American film industry of the early to mid-1930s. However, she attained a higher level of stardom when her performance as the jinxed and alcoholic stage actress in Dangerous (1935) was awarded with an Oscar. Nevertheless, partly due to a series of contractual disputes with her studio, she failed to achieve her full star potential until 1938, when she scored a massive hit (critical and commercial) with Jezebel, winning another Academy Award. This was her most prestigious production, designed by Warner Brothers to compete with Gone With the Wind (1939). It was Davis’s greatest triumph and provided the prototype for the Bette Davis film. Thereafter, some of the finest directors were assigned to work with her, maintaining a steady output of three to four films a year. William Wyler, Anatole Litvak, Edmund Goulding and Michael Curtiz were employed to refine her technique, while Casey Robinson, Howard Koch and Lenore Coffee developed scenarios suited to her persona. Ernest Haller, Tony Gaudio and Sol Polito were hired as cinematographers to enhance her image, along with make-up artist Perc Westmore and costume designer Orry Kelly. With music provided mostly by Max Steiner, this represented an informal yet cohesive production unit at Warners. ‘Bette Davis films’ were usually maternal dramas, crime melodramas and romantic dramas with Davis in one of two kinds of role, either the big bitch or the self-sacrificing victim. At her height, in the early 1940s, she triumphed in bitch roles: The Letter, The Little Foxes and In This Our Life (1942). Here she was vicious, ambitious and capable of anything to get what she wanted, including murder. At the same time Davis’s meek, sensitive and vulnerable heroines were just as successful; The Sisters (1938), Juarez (1938) and All This and Heaven Too (1940), providing the perfect counterpoint to the showier bitch roles and eliciting a greater degree of audience sympathy. Whether she played bitches or victims, Davis’s films were generally heavy fare, designed to make audiences cry. In 1939 and 1940, Warner Brothers repeatedly cast her in ‘weepies’ that

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required her to sob hysterically and to restrain herself in moments of repressed sorrow in order to portray the stoicism of her tragic heroines. Notable examples include Dark Victory, The Old Maid, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, All This and Heaven Too and The Great Lie. Significantly, in 1941 Davis also appeared in two comedies, The Bride Came C.O.D. and The Man Who Came to Dinner. In part this was due to an overall increase in the production of comedies to provide more diverting forms of entertainment to British wartime audiences and to anxious Americans facing the increasing prospect of war. It also signalled a concern on the part of Warner executives that Davis’s fans might begin to tire of seeing their favourite star in one weepy after another. Consequently, she alternated between comedies and ‘weepies’ in 1941 and, after 1942, comedy remained a recurrent feature of the Bette Davis film: most notably, Old Acquaintance (1943), Mr. Skeffington (1944) and June Bride (1948).

Reviewing Now, Voyager Upon its release in New York on 22 October 1942, Now, Voyager received a mixed reception in the press. Although Joseph Pihodna, in New York’s Herald-Tribune, called it ‘a tale of unblushing sentimentality, which is certain to appeal to women of all ages’, it evidently had little appeal for the female critics in New York.21 Wanda Hale, of the New York News, wrote: ‘Dull, heavy and made with the deliberateness of a cat catching, torturing and finally killing a mouse, Now, Voyager cannot be classed as satisfactory entertainment.’22 Louise Levitas, of PM Daily, was even more scathing: A recent poll disclosed that there are more men than women among movie fans. This was revolutionary news to Hollywood, and it will probably be a long time before it’s really accepted by movie studios. Meanwhile we’ll keep getting these movies made for handkerchief matinees, movies like Now, Voyager, filmed from ‘the woman’s angle’. This movie is guaranteed to give susceptible, vaguely frustrated females (and, thinks Hollywood, that’s what most women are) a vicarious fling at high life, a moment of passion, a good cry, and, finally, that satisfying feeling of nobility that comes when in the end Bette Davis renounces Paul Henreid, her married lover, and devotes her life to good works instead.23 Levitas’s review constituted an outright rejection of the film’s formulaic romantic story-line and the studio’s patronizing conception of


female audiences. This critic was clearly one woman who had tired of Hollywood’s persistence in making weepies for women. Male critics were generally more willing than some of their female colleagues to enter into the spirit of the picture. Archer Winsten, for instance, writing in the New York Post, claimed to have been emotionally engaged. He ‘let it be understood at the outset that this reviewer was deeply moved by it’, adding that the ‘picture’s virtues stem from its seriousness of purpose and the performances which embody the emotion’. Whereas Louise Levitas professed to be less interested in the romantic story-line, Winsten wrote that, ‘The second phase of convalescence, an ocean voyage friendship with Paul Henreid, ripening into something more serious, is very satisfying.’ For him, it was the introduction of Tina and the reprise of the ugly-duckling theme that undermined the drama, and he saw the ending as the real stumbling block: The psychiatric cure has proceeded to an insoluble love problem. Picture, characters and actors strain themselves in going through the final wringer of renunciation. The ensuing nobility leads straight to haloes and the Heaven which is just behind the stars the camera looks at in its last glimpse. Thus, in the final analysis, Now, Voyager should be listed as an honorable failure when viewed in a coldly critical light.24 It is clear that both the trade press and review journalism identified Now, Voyager’s chief problem to be its final scene where Charlotte renounces her affair with Jerry. However, as Maria LaPlace argued, many women seeing this film in 1942 may have understood this ending according to the conventions of women’s popular fiction and, consequently, found it satisfying, irrespective of what the critics were telling them. Huge numbers of American women certainly went to the cinema during the final months of 1942 to see this movie. However, historical evidence indicates that some women were dissatisfied with the film’s resolution: namely, Wanda Hale and Louise Levitas of the New York press. The question is, do we accept these published responses as evidence of female film-goers’ reaction to the film or do we regard them as a mechanism with which the industry attempted to influence film-goers’ reactions? For there is a sense in which some parts of the industry were willing Now, Voyager to fail in 1942. This comes through between the lines of The Hollywood Reporter’s published response to the preview of the film some five weeks before its release. Despite trumpeting Now, Voyager as a triumph for all concerned, a word of warning was sounded about the

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continuing economic viability of weepies in wartime. Indeed, the film was seen as a ‘brave venture’ by Warner Brothers, and it was observed that ‘the whole industry’ would monitor the film’s success, to see whether or not wartime audiences would accept ‘serious, intelligent entertainment’.25 Additionally, it was implied that Warner Brothers were taking a considerable gamble by not changing the ending of Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel, turning it into something happier. When it was suggested that producer Hal Wallis deserved high praise for retaining this tragic ending, the statement implied that one of the most senior producers at one of Hollywood’s most powerful studios was behaving recklessly. This may have been the message sent out to reviewers and critics and may to some extent explain why their eventual verdict was so negative. Fortunately, the effect of such negative criticism was negligible, partly because audiences for weepies had grown accustomed to the newspapers’ scathing criticism of such films. The facts speak for themselves, with well above average grosses making Now, Voyager one of 1942’s top box-office hits.26 The reception of Now, Voyager upon its original release demonstrates that when it came to representing the views of the audience for weepies, the newspaper critics were largely out of step. Although they make for fascinating and entertaining reading, they shed little light on how audiences at the time understood and interpreted these films. If the reviews of Now, Voyager reveal anything truly significant it is that professional critics had their own criteria for evaluating films which were different from those of the film-goers who regularly chose to see weepies. The critics’ preoccupation with Now, Voyager ’s ending is particularly telling. As a prestigious Hollywood film, it might be seen to have fallen short of conventional standards of narrative closure, wish-fulfilment and, ultimately, pleasure. As a ‘woman’s weepy’, however, it takes the genre to a new height. The films that Hollywood made for women in the studio era are famous (and in some quarters celebrated) for their weak, incomprehensible and incredible endings: more often provoking incredulity than any other emotion. It is possible that by 1942 most regular female film-goers were aware of this. No one understands this better, or writes about this more eloquently, than Jeanine Basinger: Even as children, we knew how much of what we were seeing was untrue, wishful, escapist. What were we – idiots? I am always astonished at how so much writing about old movies assumes that the audience believed everything in them. Of course we didn’t. We entered into


the joyful conspiracy of moviegoing. We chose what we temporarily wanted to pretend was true, and when real experience didn’t provide a yardstick, we cautiously wondered and questioned.27 Basinger, who grew up watching women’s films from the age of seven in 1944, argues that no one ever took their plots seriously. Although many women’s films are unquestionably demented, I salute their reckless plots, in which well-dressed stars act out the woman’s form of heroism: living outside the rules of correct behavior, which in story terms is realized by living outside the rules of logical narrative construction.28 For those women who, like Basinger as a girl, enjoyed these films, the recklessly contrived and absurd plots were part of the pleasures on offer, along with fabulous costumes and glamorous female stars creating iconic moments of strength and independence. This was something that many of the leading newspaper critics failed to grasp (or, at least, acknowledge) in their bid to appreciate movies in terms of coherent characterization, psychological motivation and logical plot development. Basinger, looking back from her vantage point as a film historian, saw something remarkable in these films, something that enabled them to be unintentionally liberating for their audience: Women in the audience could watch while their favorite female stars wore great clothes, sat on great furniture, loved bad men, had lots of sex, told the world off for restricting them, destroyed their enemies, even gave their children away. … And when the end of the movie came around, the surrogate woman was usually dead, punished, or back in the fold, aware of the error of her ways. Since the stories were so obviously cracked, and since the heroines paid dearly for their unrestrained behavior, it all seemed a perfectly safe form of pseudoliberation for women to enjoy.29 Historical evidence suggests that many American women at the end of 1942 availed themselves of the ‘pseudo-liberation’ on offer at the end of Now, Voyager, and that despite all the negative criticism about it in the papers, they relished the sight of Bette Davis telling Paul Henreid not to ask for the moon while she preserved her new-found independence and took his child for her own.

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Conclusion For most contemporary film critics and historians, Now, Voyager is a ‘melodramatic woman’s film’, irrespective of the fact than on its release it was described as an ‘emotional adult drama’. The term ‘melodrama’ is now commonly used within Film Studies and the film industry to designate emotional dramas aimed at adult (and largely female) audiences, otherwise known as ‘weepies’. It may be advisable for film historians to be clear when classifying such films as Now, Voyager as a ‘melodrama’ or as a ‘family melodrama’, ‘melodrama of the unknown woman’ or even ‘Freudian-feminist melodrama’, that these generic labels have been devised by critics and scholars as part of the process of identifying and creating genres, the process Rick Altman calls ‘genrification’.30 Over the years there has been considerable value in describing Now, Voyager as both a melodrama and a woman’s film, comparing it to other films like Stella Dallas and All That Heaven Allows, recognizing its kinship with such films despite previous attempts by the American film industry to avoid disclosing generic relationships between films originating from different studios. Ultimately, the value of analysing the historical materials that accompanied a film’s release is not that they provide a definitive understanding of a film’s genre, but rather that they shed some light on how the publicists and journalists established a critical framework for audiences to engage with a film at a particular moment within a specific cultural context. For film historians to make critical assessments of the generic relationships between Hollywood films in the studio era, it is necessary that they do not rely on the labels given to them by the studio publicists and reviewers. This is why it is more meaningful today to discuss Now, Voyager as a melodramatic woman’s film than to call it an emotional adult drama. For despite the fact that the studios had little economic incentive to call this film by such a designation, regular movie-goers were able to make the connections for themselves. There can be little doubt that most film-goers in the 1940s knew when to take a handkerchief to the cinema.

Notes 1. Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–60 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 12 and 438–9. 2. Stanley Cavell, ‘Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly’, Critical Inquiry, 16 (1989–90), pp. 213–47.

164 The New Film History 3. Andrew Britton, ‘A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film’, CineAction, 26/27 (1992), pp. 32–59. 4. Jeanne Allen, Now, Voyager, Warner Brothers Screenplay Series (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 37. 5. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, Monogram, 4 (1972); reprinted in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 43–69. 6. Basinger, A Woman’s View; Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is. 7. Maria LaPlace, ‘Bette Davis and the Ideal of Consumption: a Look at Now, Voyager’, Wide Angle, 6:4 (1985), pp. 34–43. 8. Charles Eckert, ‘The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 3:1 (Winter 1978), pp. 1–21; Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979). 9. Maria LaPlace, ‘Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film: Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager ’, in Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is, p. 137. 10. Janet Staiger, ‘ “The Handmaiden of Villainy”: Methods and Problems in Studying the Historical Reception of a Film’, Wide Angle, 8:1 (1986), pp. 19–27. 11. See, for example, Cavell, ‘Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly’, p. 230. 12. See, for example, Russell Merritt, ‘Melodrama: Postmortem for a Phantom Genre’, Wide Angle, 5:3 (1983), pp. 24–31; Steve Neale, ‘Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term “Melodrama” in the American Trade Press’, Velvet Light Trap (Fall 1993), pp. 66–89; Rick Altman, ‘Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process’, in Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Genres (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 1–41; Linda Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’, in Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Genres, pp. 42–88. 13. Steve Neale, ‘Melo Talk’, pp. 66–89. 14. Rick Altman, ‘Reusable Packaging’, p. 7. 15. Ibid., pp. 9–11. 16. Variety, ‘Now, Voyager’, 19 August 1942. 17. Hollywood Reporter, 17 August 1942, p. 3. 18. Pressbook for Now, Voyager; held at the New York Library of Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York City. 19. Ibid. 20. See the discussion of Davis’ career in Cathy Klaprat, ‘The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, revised edn (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 351–76. 21. Joseph Pihodna, ‘Review of Now, Voyager’, New York Herald Tribune, 23 October 1942. 22. Wanda Hale, ‘Review of Now, Voyager ’, New York News, 23 October 1942. 23. Louise Levitas, ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Psychoanalysis!’, PM Daily, 23 October 1942, p. 23. 24. Archer Winsten, ‘Movie Talk: Review of Now, Voyager ’, New York Post, 23 October 1942, p. 40. 25. Hollywood Reporter, 17 August 1942, p. 3.

Martin Shingler 165 26. Now, Voyager grossed $4,177,000 worldwide, making it Warner Brothers’ fourth highest earner in the 1942–43 season and Bette Davis’ highest earning film at that time. See the figures in the appendices to H. Mark Glancy, ‘Warner Brothers Film Grosses, 1924–1951: The William Schaefer Ledger’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 15:1 (1995), pp. 55–74. 27. Basinger, A Woman’s View, p. 4. 28. Ibid., p. 6. 29. Ibid. 30. Altman, ‘Reusable Packaging’, pp. 1–41.

11 From Gangsta to Gangster: The Hood Film’s Criminal Allegiance with Hollywood Jonathan Munby

In the early 1990s, a series of films made by African Americans focusing on the plight of the black inner city provoked mass media attention and an attendant moral panic. Although small in number and short-lived, this cycle of ghetto-centric films tapped into an increasingly volatile climate of racial discontent fuelled most infamously by the televised airing of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers beating up black motorist, Rodney King, in 1991 – an incident which sparked the Los Angeles rebellion one year later following the acquittal of the policemen involved. Collectively categorized as ‘hood’ films, Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), Boyz N the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), Juice (1992) and Menace II Society (1993) brought a sense of hardcore realism about the AfricanAmerican inner-city experience that mainstream feature films had failed to represent adequately. While these films grossed disproportionately large returns at the boxoffice given their low production costs, the terms of such success were controversial. Uncompromisingly violent and oriented around ‘gangsta’ protagonists, these films struggled to provide a positive message about the fate of America’s black urban communities and fomented discord over the responsibility of African-American film-makers. Gang-related violence amongst audiences at premiere screenings of New Jack City and Boyz N the Hood and the fact that these films were cross-over hits among both black and white youth only exacerbated concern about the social, moral and political value of this kind of race representation. Uncannily, the furore surrounding this cycle resembled that which greeted the first generation of Hollywood talking gangster films in the early 1930s.1 However, the links between gangsta and gangster have yet to be given proper treatment. 166

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Understandably, scholars have been drawn to the early 1990s hood cycle because waves of Hollywood black film-making are very rare. Debate has focused primarily on the import of the cycle in terms of the development of a controversial and distinctively black (realist) film aesthetic that worked in tandem with the growth of a larger hip hop culture deeply associated with gangsta rap and music video.2 This framing understanding of gangsta as the symbolization of distinctively black entrepreneurial acumen, however, has fed tendencies in Film Studies to approach the hood cycle as emblematic of a cinema apart. The work of Manthia Diawara and Dan Flory on the generative interrelation between Hollywood film noir and a broader categorization of recent AfricanAmerican crime films (as ‘noir by noirs’) notwithstanding, emphasis in the study of hood films has fallen on the degree to which the cycle is either separate from, or risks complicity with, Hollywood’s constructions of black experience and identity.3 Sympathetic as I am to the argument that Hollywood has done more to perpetuate white racist perceptions of African Americans than challenge them, it behoves us to pay far more attention to the way such films are deeply related and indebted to one of mainstream cinema’s most recognizable genres, the gangster film. More specifically, there has been no interrogation of the link between the black-made hood film and the Hollywood gangster film’s historically special relationship to the concerns and ambitions of ethnic and racial others, and no evaluation of how the gangsta notion of ‘keeping it real’ taps into the realist aesthetic of the mainstream gangster formula. When rap and Boyz N the Hood star Ice Cube states, ‘It’s the American way, cos I’m the G-A-N-G-S-T-A’, he confirms not simply a local ‘real’ identity as a street-savvy young black man from Compton in Los Angeles but an association beyond the hood with the generic gangster of the national imagination, especially as shaped by Hollywood (from James Cagney to Al Pacino – two gangster stars reclaimed as hip hop icons). Connecting gangsta to gangster will open up a more nuanced understanding of what was to be gained by black film-makers in the early 1990s through cross-over allegiance and identification with this particular Hollywood archetype. The period for the cycle is book-ended by two Spike Lee films, Do the Right Thing (1989) and Clockers (1995). Do the Right Thing is significant because its box-office success helped to usher in the era of the hood cycle. The film addressed the problems of racial division in Lee’s native Brooklyn, New York, in the context of the growing racial tension that marked Mayor Ed Koch’s 1980s reign. Opening to much media hype, Do the Right Thing posed an awkward question about the ‘right’ direction


forward for African-American communities in the light of the distance that had grown between the Civil Rights generation of the 1960s and the inner-city black youth of late 1980s USA. It also raised concomitant questions about the responsibilities of black film itself. The violent conclusion – where Lee, playing the role of the film’s main protagonist, pizza delivery man Mookie, finally takes action by hurling a trash can through his Italian employer’s parlour window – only helped to keep debate alive about what ‘doing the right thing’ constituted. Significantly, Do the Right Thing sparked an excited response not just from media journalists but also from a new generation of black filmmakers. Motivated by both a desire to capitalize on the inflammatory power of Do the Right Thing’s subject matter and the ambition to improve on this cinematic vision of the black inner city, directors Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City), Matty Rich (Straight Out of Brooklyn) and John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood ) seized the moment. Both New Jack City and Straight Out of Brooklyn were first shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 1991. Made on an extremely modest budget of $300,000, Straight Out of Brooklyn eventually grossed over $2.7 million – a remarkable return for a film that had only very limited distribution and release. Although independently made, New Jack City had a larger budget and benefited from major studio distribution deals (Warner Brothers) that enabled it to reach over 900 screens nationwide. The film grossed $33 million in its first five weeks alone, eventually making over $47 million. Boyz N the Hood, released in July 1991, returned over $56 million, having cost only $6 million.4 Even if these films sought to produce a harder and less compromising vision of black inner-city realities than Spike Lee, there is still much continuity of representation. New Jack City and Boyz N the Hood, for example, gave more diegetic presence to hardcore rap. Where Lee had given a rap group, (the appropriately named) Public Enemy, powerful aural significance (featuring their agit-rap ‘Fight the Power’ prominently in the opening credits and on a major protagonist’s ghetto blaster), Van Peebles and Singleton gave starring roles to prominent gangsta rappers, Ice T and Ice Cube, respectively. Such casting decisions were a way of upping the ante in the quest to provide more ‘credible’ or putatively ‘authentic’ screen treatments of the black inner city, as well as increasing these films’ box-office appeal by tapping into the music audience market. In the light of these and other attempts to hone the hood formula in a ‘realist’ manner, Lee returned to the inner-city scene with Clockers. This told the tale of a young low-level drug dealer (or ‘clocker’), Strike, trapped by the deterministic logic of a wasted life in the Brooklyn projects.

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Strike’s deep fascination with his model train set and its circular track reflects both the problem of being caught in a loop and the desire to be taken elsewhere. Lee’s optimistic ending – whereby Strike does eventually exchange the model train for a journey out of New York on the real thing – cannot hide the film’s otherwise muted sense of possibility. Lee hoped that Clockers would ‘be the final nail in the coffin’ to what he thought had become an overworked and jaded formula.5 Thus far, I have outlined in very general terms how these films came to constitute a generically distinctive group. This does not mean, however, that their frame of reference and way of generating meaning depended on outright rejection of mainstream conventions or was limited to an exclusively black referent world, filmic or ‘real’. Even as New Jack City, for example, was understood as the product of an African-American film-maker addressing specifically black urban realities, the tagline for the film and its main protagonist gang, the Cash Money Brothers, ran: ‘They’re a new breed of gangster. The new public enemy. The new family of crime.’ In other words, this kind of film was sold to the public as the latest version of an established formula, running approximately from the time of the original Scarface (1932) to its remake in 1983. Clearly, it made marketing sense to pitch the hood film as belonging to a popular generic heritage, albeit a criminal one. To some, however, the hood cycle demonstrates precisely the degree to which the economic viability of black-made film depends on the perpetuation of counterproductive representations of the black experience. Norman K. Denzin exemplifies this point of view: A single thesis … structures my interpretation of this film cycle. These realistic social-problem texts fuelled conservative racist discourse. They helped fearful white Americans blame blacks for the problems of the inner city. They suggested that blacks caused their own problems. The problems of the ghetto were not shared by the larger society.6 To Denzin, the success of these films was predicated on feeding massmedia stereotypical visions of the black inner city and on sanctioning patriarchal and misogynist understandings of both the problems confronting this urban community and their solution. What Michael Eric Dyson terms the ‘foreshortened view of gender relations’ in hood films has been given considerable coverage in the literature to date.7 While such criticism is justified, it tends to further isolate this cycle as the product of pathological conditions unique to the black experience. As a result, the relationship between hip hop gangsta and Hollywood


gangster remains unexplored. The fact that archetypal Hollywood gangsters have also been ethnically marked – from James Cagney’s ‘Irish-ness’ to Al Pacino’s ‘Italian-ness’ (or ‘Cuban-ness’ in the case of his role as Antonio ‘Scarface’ Montana) – has gone without comment in the academic appraisals of the hip hop gangsta’s ‘blackness’.8 For their part, however, African-American film directors have had no hesitation in drawing on and ‘sampling’ the Hollywood gangster film as a prime source of inspiration. Given this fact, it is not enough to make a case for the 1990s hood cycle as a genre to itself – or as a cycle that belongs to a strictly black visual economy representing ontologically black concerns.

Case study: real to reel in Menace II Society As a later entry in the early 1990s hood cycle, Menace II Society offers itself up for analysis in terms of genre consolidation. Costing only $3 million to make, the film grossed $27 million at the box-office, repeating the pattern of low cost/high return that marked the films that preceded it in the cycle.9 Equally, Menace II Society consolidated familiar hood film themes in telling the violent story of conflicting loyalties among black inner-city youths in Watts, Los Angeles. A bleak tale, it focuses on the plight of two young men, Caine (Tyrin Turner) and O-Dog (Larenz Tate), and a young mother, Ronnie ( Jada Pinkett), whose husband is serving life in prison. Caine is a pessimistic young drug dealer (a profession inherited from his long-dead father) who hangs out with O-Dog, an amoral reckless fellow ‘gangbanger’. Ronnie tries to offset Caine’s sense of aimlessness by providing a love interest, moral guidance, and a way out: to Atlanta and a potentially different future away from his gang friends and the self-destructive logic of black-on-black crime. The film concludes fatally with Caine falling victim to a drive-by shooting while trying to protect Ronnie’s son. Ironically, the murderous O-Dog survives. Many aspects of Menace II Society reflect the ambitions of its makers, Allen and Albert Hughes, to produce a ‘real’ hood film; that did not succumb to the sentimentality and upbeat moralistic intentions that they thought compromised earlier entries in the cycle.10 Two key moments in Menace II Society, for example, could be understood as overt ‘riffs’ on conventionalized treatments of hood problems in Do the Right Thing and Boyz N the Hood. The shocking and senseless murder of two Korean grocery store owners by O-Dog, who has taken umbrage at the couple’s suspicious gaze and the suggestion that he is a bad son (the husband’s statement, ‘I feel sorry for your mother’, is enough to provoke armed retaliation), is in many ways a devastating return to the more humourladen altercations between Korean owners and black customers that

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feature in Do the Right Thing. In a similar manner, Menace II Society’s tragic ending, in which Caine is killed and O-Dog survives, inverts the logic of Boyz N the Hood (which the Hughes Brothers ‘dissed’ as ‘an “after-school special” with cussin’ ’11) that had its main moral protagonist, Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), able to survive and escape the ghetto by going to college with his girlfriend, leaving his gangsta friend, Doughboy (Ice Cube) to face an inevitable death. By 1993, the terms of Menace II Society’s success depended on the degree to which it could satisfy audience expectations of an established formula in innovative ways. Yet this film also reveals the way such ‘difference’ is generated in specific relationship not simply to other black films, but to mainstream generic frames for representing ‘others’ as criminal. This works in two ways. First, through the deliberate connection to the previous noteworthy moment of ‘black’ cinematic production in the 1970s, generically termed ‘blaxploitation’ (also low-budget black crime films that made disproportionate box-office profit). Second, through reference to Hollywood’s gangster film tradition. These two reference points are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, any allusion to blaxploitation necessarily invokes a Hollywood tradition at the same time. Major examples in that cycle, such as Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972) and Black Caesar (1973), reworked tropes and conventions associated with Hollywood gangster and detective films. Black Caesar, for example, was clearly a black version of the rise and fall gangster narrative established by films such as Little Caesar (1930) and Scarface and most obviously exploited the contemporaneous success of The Godfather (1972). Menace II Society looks backward to the era of blaxploitation in terms of the time of some of its early scenes and the style with which this period is represented. A flashback sequence narrates Caine’s upbringing in the early 1970s, as the son of a drug pusher (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and junkie mother. Jackson’s character is drawn out of the blaxploitation vault of ‘badass’ hustler types, and his main scene includes dialogue about Ron O’Neal (the actor who played Youngblood Priest, the pusher-man star of Superfly). And, as Massood notes, this 1970s sequence is filmed in ‘over-saturated’ colour, redolent of blaxploitation’s visual style.12 This almost camp homage to the contrivances of blaxploitation exists in tension with the film’s larger attempt at bringing a documentary-realist style to screen treatments of the hood. The Hughes Brothers’ background in hardcore hip hop music video (as makers of gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur’s earliest videos) and in reality crime television (America’s Most Wanted) services an ‘on-location’ or ‘live’ aesthetic that is also bound up with the film’s thematic concern over the hood as object of 24/7 surveillance. The film opens with historical black


and white film footage of cops beating black protesters during the Watts riots of 1965. Interestingly, this clip has been subject to heavy pixilation which both blurs the image into something ‘generic’ and, as an attribute of digital interference, invites comparison between then and now (collapsing the past into the present) in terms of how black struggle has been represented in the media. Superimposed over this image is a news bulletin soundtrack of the 1992 rebellion. This mix of aural and visual ‘times’ also, and most obviously, invokes video footage of the police beating Rodney King. The Hughes Brothers borrow from reality crime television, surveillance photography, news bulletins, documentary footage, and use ‘verité’ camerawork to try and achieve a sense of ‘liveness’ and urgency which is also bound to the sense of being ‘captured’ and ‘framed’. The self-conscious juxtaposition of visual styles emphasizes the degree to which the black inner city’s criminal reality is always something constructed. It highlights how the Menace II Society’s re-release tagline, ‘This is the truth. This is real’, is as much about the reality of problematic media representations as it is about any profilmic black social truth. Such formal concerns over the framing of black urban experience are thematically reinforced through the fact that much of the dramatic action flows from the procurement of the closed circuit television surveillance tape of O-Dog’s gratuitous shooting of the grocery store owner. While this formal concern about the criminal mediation of black identity may seem solipsistic, it actually connects Menace II Society to a Hollywood crime tradition. For this film-within-a-film conceit is a form of mirror act common to other key hood films where gangstas look at gangsters for inspiration. It echoes the obsessive fascination of Juice’s most compelling and violent character, Bishop (played by gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur), with the famous self-immolating conclusion of White Heat (1949), where gangster Cody Jarrett ( James Cagney) pronounces, ‘Made it Ma! Top of the world!’, and goes out with a spectacular gas-work explosion. O-Dog’s self-actualization as a ‘real’ hoodlum through his filmed (‘reel’) image as killer also links back to New Jack City, a film in which the main gangster protagonist, Nino (Wesley Snipes), styles himself after Tony Montana in the 1983 version of Scarface. Moreover, within Menace II Society, the Hughes Brothers double this real-to-reel relation in a scene where Caine, recovering from bullet wounds in hospital, is shown watching a cop-killing scene from a 1948 film noir police procedural, He Walked By Night. Significantly, the identification here is not with a ‘classic’ gangster archetype such as Cagney or Pacino (as in Juice and New Jack City)

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but rather with a more anonymous criminal protagonist in a film that embodied a documentary-realist experiment that used the veneer of verisimilitude to advance pro-police and government agency messages. Made at the height of the period of film noir, He Walked By Night was part of a cycle of films that re-enacted crimes based on ‘actual’ police cases. Alongside He Walked By Night, films such as T-Men, Naked City, The Street With No Name and Call Northside 777 (all 1948) constituted forerunners of today’s investigative crime television shows, such as America’s Most Wanted and CSI. These films made a feature of on-location shooting and proclaimed that their factual reconstructions were representations of everything ‘as it happened’ (‘only the names have been changed’). He Walked By Night was based on a real LAPD case. Indeed, this film was the genesis of the celebrated television series, Dragnet. It featured a young Jack Webb (in a minor role as a forensic cop, Lee) who went on to be the star (as the LAPD’s top moral crusader, Sergeant Joe ‘just the facts’ Friday), writer, director and producer of Dragnet. As film-makers who honed their skills in making documentary video, the Hughes Brothers’ decision to include a clip from He Walked By Night as a Los Angeles-based film policier makes sense. It situates Menace II Society in relationship to a history of cinema’s mapping of the dangerous city. He Walked By Night starts out with a police map of Los Angeles and a stentorian voice-over inviting us into the interior life of the nation’s biggest and toughest police beat. The city is introduced as, among other things, ‘the target of gangsters’. By contrast, Menace II Society shifts the procedural perspective on the scene of criminal action, inviting interrogation of the manipulating gaze rooted in the authority of a long-running popular show like Dragnet. Not insignificantly, both He Walked By Night and Dragnet were vehicles designed to valorize the LAPD. Dragnet in particular was designed to operate as law-enforcement propaganda and its content was approved by the LAPD. In this sense, the history of Hollywood’s ‘factual’ gaze (or application of verisimilitude) is deeply linked to policing and its legitimation. Menace II Society revisits this history in the light of the footage that captured officers of the LAPD beating up Rodney King. The Hughes Brothers’ visual strategies return the policing gaze, as it were, by looking at things from the perspective of those ‘criminalized’ as objects of surveillance. The overt interplay between Hollywood gangster archetypes and hood film protagonists is something shared with gangsta rap. Today’s hardcore rappers are self-styled ‘gangstas’ who have frequently appropriated the monikers and attitude of earlier mobster icons. And this reverence is


cinematically engendered. Scarface with a braggadocio performance from Pacino in the lead role, exerted a signal influence on this part of the hip hop music scene. As the documentary, Def Jam Presents: Origins of a Hip Hop Classic (2003), made to accompany the twentieth anniversary special edition of the film reveals, gangsta rappers appropriated the film as their ‘bible’, seeing their own story of making it against the odds reflected most powerfully in Tony Montana’s ‘come up’ (rise out of nothing). ‘I took the Scarface name because that was me’, pronounces the eponymous gangsta rapper, while Fat Joe sees him as ‘the ultimate ghetto superhero’. Significantly, Snoop Dogg identifies with Tony not just as someone who ‘comes from nothing’ but as someone who ‘struggles to even just get his citizenship’. According to Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, the fact that the gangster amalgamates the double problem of being both economically and ethnically marginalized is critical to his appeal among black male youth: Tony, he was like a lot of us, was backed up against the wall. He had to fight to try and make it in the world. That’s one of the reasons why minorities relate to it so much, especially black inner-city minorities. Moreover, the conspicuous identification of gangsta rappers with capitalist excess (with Tony’s mantras such as ‘Get money, get money, get money’ and ‘I want the world … and everything in it’) provides an ironic vision not of the ambition of black outsiders but of the hegemonic values they aspire to. As Nas articulates, ‘We are all savages in pursuit of the American Dream. Rappers relate to that because that’s how we come up.’ Or as Method Man puts it, Scarface shows you ‘the glamour and the glitz but also the downside which is the murder and the mayhem’. Just as New Jack City, Boyz N the Hood and Juice employed the talents of gangsta rappers, Menace II Society gave roles to MC Eiht and MC Pooh (Pooh Man) as important members of Caine and O-Dog’s homeboy community. While the integration of the gangsta rapper’s street voice into hood film narratives enhanced the cycle’s claim to authenticity, this should not be understood as a definitively black thing. Rather, it is the latest version of the realist vernacular argot that has been part of gangster films since the early 1930s. The impact of the early 1930s Hollywood gangster rested in large part on the way the actors most associated with the genre, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni, enjoyed biographical proximity to the urban ethnic hoodlum

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types that brought them to national prominence. As Lower East Side New York progeny themselves, they brought a new and powerful sense of street realism to the roles they played. At the dawn of sound cinema, they spoke with distinctive non-Anglo ethnic accents and were the first to conventionalize and popularize the way screen gangsters speak. Gangstas have inherited the mantle. Not surprisingly, given the reverence expressed by gangstas for gangsters, the Hughes Brothers admit to being heavily influenced by Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, two directors deeply associated with mainstream gangster films. In their early days of experimenting with video, for instance, they spent time re-enacting scenes from De Palma’s Scarface, graduating from this to making a public access cable television short, ‘The Drive By’, which garnered them their first agent.13 This background further emphasizes the degree to which the black-made hood film of the 1990s has generic provenance that cuts across the colour line linking its concerns with those of other urban lower-class groups who have been disadvantaged by their non-Anglo ethnic identities in different historical periods. As the inter-title, ‘Watts 1993’, and subsequent aerial surveillance shot replete with police bulletin soundtrack declare, Menace II Society, in the gangster film tradition, locates its dramatic action in the real time and space of an ethnically and racially segregated urban community. This reality shot gives way, however, to conventional scenes drawn not so much ‘Straight Outta Watts’, as it were, but out of the storehouse of gangster film conventions. We are introduced to Caine’s gang of African-American homeboys, replete with monikers such as ‘O-Dog’, ‘Doc’, and ‘A-Wax’. This is a scene redolent of Rico’s introduction to Sam Vettori’s gang of Italian-American mobster types such as ‘Bat’ Carillo, ‘Killer’ Pepi, ‘Kid’ Bean and ‘Scabby’ in Little Caesar. Thus, although such elements seem to be drawn from the reality of the street, it is also clear that the street stylizes itself after hyperbolic media images. Thematically central to the hood film are issues of loyalty. Menace II Society recycles a typical fraternal configuration to help play out the contradictory sense of responsibility that is a source of both strength and destruction in many gangster films. The Caine/O-Dog relation reworks the classic convention of the gangster/sidekick duo (Little Caesar/Joe Massara in Little Caesar, Tommy Powers/Matt Doyle in The Public Enemy, Tony Camonte/Guino Rinaldo in the original Scarface). This Cain and Abel loyalty motif is most obviously doubled in Menace II Society through Caine’s name. And like many gangster films, homo-social bonding is revealed to be critical to survival and success among those


stuck on the wrong side of the economic and ethnic tracks. Yet the terms of success inevitably depend on rising out of the crowd, on individualist and egotistical action, and on becoming notorious. Robert Warshow highlighted this as the most compelling aspect of the gangster film: No convention of the gangster film is more strongly established than this: it is dangerous to be alone. And yet the very conditions of success make it impossible not to be alone, for success is always the establishment of individual preeminence that must be imposed on others, in whom it automatically arouses hatred … the gangster’s whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual … and he always dies because he is an individual.14 In common with other hood films, Menace II Society sets up filial organization against the alternative of heterosexual loyalty. In gangster films, romantic love interferes with and threatens the coherence of the gang. Rico’s need for Joe as a loyal sidekick in Little Caesar is undermined by Joe’s love of Olga. Similarly, and more intensely, Guino’s love of Tony’s sister, Cesca, constitutes a major act of betrayal in Scarface (a story repeated with equal effect in the 1983 version). In Menace II Society, Caine’s father-figure, Pernell, is serving life in prison. He takes on a fraternal mission to look after Pernell’s wife, Ronnie. This act of brotherly loyalty, however, eventually turns into romantic love and betrayal of one responsibility in the name of taking on another. As we can see, while such themes are particularly pertinent to the black experience, they are not unique to it. This even extends to the dramatization of the gap between 1990s black youth and their parents and grandparents, a defining feature of the hood film. The lack of respect and communication between generations symbolizes the distance between the ideals of the protest generation and the stark conditions confronting the disenfranchised youth of the Reagan/Bush years. Menace II Society features altercations between Caine and his God-fearing grandparents who embody certain aspects of the Martin Luther King Jr. legacy. Caine’s school teacher, Mr Butler, a figure whom one might expect to deliver uplifting and pedagogically sound messages to the younger generation, instead provides a dark and candid statement about their future: ‘Being a black man in America isn’t easy. The hunt is on and you’re the prey. All I say is … survive.’ Menace II Society continues the discourse on the generation gap in black culture that started with Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The fact that Da Mayor is played by Ossie Davis, a prominent 1960s black activist

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and actor, only amplified the film’s more general concern about whether the protest doctrines of King and Malcolm X had any relevance to the late 1980s. Boyz N the Hood places the issue of paternal responsibility at the centre of its thematic interest. Tre’s Dad, Furious Styles, is full of the rhetoric of Black Nationalism but cuts a lonely figure in an environment of disaffected youths. Menace II Society clearly inherits and replays this problem of disenchantment with politically meaningful collective organization and the ideology of race advancement. Black male youth are left with little other than a narcissistic and ambivalent agenda, that of indulging their image as American nightmare. If this theme seems to help define the hood film as a distinctive cycle – it also constitutes a new twist on an older gangster trope. In the 1930s, Tommy Powers, Tony Camonte and Rico all had problems with the older generation. A prime concern then was the distance between immigrant parents and their modernizing and Americanizing progeny. The gangster film played out the violent cost of acculturation. It revealed that the costs of ‘making it’ as an ethnic outsider involved divorce from the moral world of their parents. The hood film of the 1990s does something similar in linking the shrinking relevance of racial uplift and protest rhetoric with the declining authority of parents.

Conclusion: life imitates art In sum, then, even in a film that set itself up against the supposed contrivances of previous hood films in the name of telling ‘the truth’, recourse to convention is inescapable, and indeed desirable. The Hollywood gangster film has functioned as a rule book for gangsta behaviour and self-styling. Furthermore, gangster emulation constitutes a means to achieving the status of the mythic celluloid mobster heroes on which gangstas model themselves (a case best and most infamously dramatized through the killing and hagiographical afterlife of gangsta rap’s biggest icon, Tupac Shakur).15 Perhaps the fate of the two West Coast gangsta rappers, MC Eiht and MC Pooh (Pooh Man), associated with Menace II Society, illustrates the contradictory power of the gangster simulacrum most appropriately. MC Pooh had provided a significant rap, ‘Sex, Money & Murder’, to Juice. The Hughes Brothers gave him an acting break as ‘Doc’, the ‘playa’ with the best ‘crib’ in Menace II Society. In the early 1990s, MC Pooh had released a couple of rap albums full of typical gangsta swagger; Life of a Criminal gaining him a particularly strong reputation as one of the most explicit West Coast rappers. He has gone on to truly keep it real by doing


time in a Modesto penitentiary for a series of armed robberies in Oakland; the result of trying to finance a heroin addiction.16 The gangsta way of making real on reel investments, however, is not limited to self-destructive outcomes. Menace II Society’s most savvy homeboy, A-Wax, was played by a member of gangsta rap group, Compton’s Most Wanted, MC Eiht, who also contributed a hood anthem, ‘Streiht Up Menace’, for the end credits. In a different manner than MC Pooh, MC Eiht has maintained his credibility and entrepreneurial credentials by featuring as a key star of PlayStation’s internationally best-selling Grand Theft Auto video game. In providing the voice of one of Grand Theft Auto’s main gangland characters, Ryder, and contributing to the soundtrack with ‘Hood Took Me Down’, MC Eiht facilitated the crossing over of gangsta into the gaming market. Significantly, the particular claim to ‘keeping it real’ that comes with this branch of hip hop has made it attractive to those developing 3-D games whose appeal depends on immersion into a believable experience of a ‘virtual’ reality.

Notes 1. See Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 2. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th edn (New York: Continuum, 2003); Manthia Diawara (ed.), Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996); Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African-American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 3. See Manthia Diawara, ‘Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema’, in Joan Copcek (ed.), Shades of Noir: A Reader (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 261–78; and Dan Flory, ‘Black on White: Film Noir and the Epistemology of Race in Recent African-American Cinema’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 31:1 (2000), pp. 82–116. 4. Figures drawn from Watkins, Representing, pp.190–1. 5. Jonathan Bernstein, ‘Spike Lee’, The Face (December, 1997), p. 202. 6. Norman K. Denzin, Reading Race (London: Sage, 2002), p. 112. 7. Dyson, Reflecting Black, p. 95. 8. Massood, Black City Cinema, pp. 7 and 145–74. 9. IMDb, ‘Business Data for Menace II Society’: http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0107554/business; accessed 30 July 2006. 10. Amy Taubin, ‘Girlz N the Hood’, Sight & Sound, 3:8 (1993).

Jonathan Munby 179 11. Susan Wloszczyna, ‘The Brothers Hughes’, USA Today, 18 October 2001: http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/2001-10-18-hughes-brothers.htm. 12. Massood, Black City Cinema, p. 164. 13. Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘Blood Brothers: Albert and Allen Hughes in the Belly of the Hollywood Beast’, Transition, 63 (1994), p. 171. 14. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 132–3. 15. See Randall Sullivan, LAbyrinth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), for a full account of the fatal terms of living up to the gangsta image. 16. Hip Hop News FNV Newsletter, ‘Oakland’s Pooh Man Arrested for Bank Robbery’, 2 August 1999: http://daveyd.com/fnvaug2html.


Part IV Reception

The rise of reception studies in the 1990s marked a fundamental shift in Film Studies. In previous decades, film analysis was geared to investigating meanings that resided within the text. This could involve revealing the intended meaning of an auteur, or elaborating the meaning generated by a film’s ideological underpinnings or its formal systems. Nevertheless, the purpose of textual analysis was to seek out a film’s immanent meaning and to illuminate this for an inquisitive readership. Scholars or critics therefore worked to convince readers that their reading of a film was the definitive reading, and the reading which an ideal audience would perceive. Notions of spectatorship in the cinema, meanwhile, were largely informed by the concepts of psychoanalysis and its interest in the workings of the unconscious mind. This emphasis on the unconscious, and its relation to film form and aesthetics, led to a conception of a passive and undifferentiated audience, responding to film in uniform ways that were prefigured by the texts themselves. These various assumptions were held by diverse groups of scholars; those interested in auteurist accounts, for example, shared little common ground with those interested in psychoanalysis as an interpretive method. On the whole, however, they did share the fundamental precepts of privileged readings and audience passivity. Reception studies broke with both notions. Influenced largely by developments in the fields of literary and cultural studies, film scholars increasingly rejected the idea that meaning was fixed within the text and instead investigated how meanings were generated by audiences within specific historical and cultural settings. Two influential works in this field were Janet Staiger’s Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (1992) and Barbara Klinger’s Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk (1994). Both emphasize the 181


need to recreate the ‘discursive surround’ of a film by examining a wide range of film reviews, publicity materials and other contemporaneous documents. These are analysed to determine how a text was interpreted within a specific social, cultural and political context. Thus, reception studies do not offer their own interpretation of a film, and they do not comment on the value of any one interpretation. Rather, reception studies investigate how an interpretation or various interpretations of a single film have arisen. So, for example, Klinger’s study of Douglas Sirk revealed how Written on the Wind (1956) could be perceived as an adult melodrama in the 1950s, as a critique of American capitalism in the 1970s and as a camp classic in the 1990s. The interest in actual rather than theorized spectators was also apparent in ethnographic research into film audiences. Studies such as Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (1993) and Annette Kuhn’s An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002) were not primarily concerned with the reception of individual films, but instead explored film fan culture and the experiences and pleasures that cinema-going held for audiences. In order to investigate female spectatorship in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, Stacey utilized questionnaires, which asked women to recall their cinema-going habits, preferences and opinions in those decades. For Kuhn’s study, interviews were conducted with cinema-goers of the 1930s to determine the meaning and influence that cinema had in their lives. Both authors recognize that the ethnographic approach poses a distinct set of issues for the researcher, and not least because the information gathered is in the form of memories filtered through decades of later experiences. Yet a key challenge in reception studies is locating evidence that may shed light on audiences; there are surprisingly few sources, even for more recent decades. In this section, each chapter focuses on a film now regarded as a classic, and demonstrates how a single text – and even those that are well known and seemingly familiar – has been interpreted differently across distinct exhibition contexts. Mark Glancy focuses on Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), drawing upon film reviews as well as letters printed in film fan magazines, in order to contrast the film’s initial reputation with its later standing as a key work by the ‘master of suspense’. Sarah Street examines the reception of Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) in the United States, using censorship records to reveal why a film passed by censors in its native Britain was condemned when it crossed the Atlantic. Like Street, Ingrid Stigsdotter and Tim Bergfelder engage in a transnational study, contrasting the reception of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) in Sweden and in Britain through a wide range

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of reviews and publicity materials. Finally, Justin Smith analyses messages contained within an email digest centred on the cult film The Wicker Man (1973), considering how recent discussion of the film was governed by the website’s format and also by the structures of conversing within a virtual community. Smith’s chapter demonstrates that while the Internet may offer extensive evidence for the study of film reception, the nature of the evidence poses new challenges for researchers.


12 Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock and Film Nationalism Mark Glancy

By any reckoning, Blackmail is now considered to be a ‘classic’ film. There are several criteria on which this may be judged. First, Blackmail has continued to draw the attention and interest of modern audiences, as witnessed in frequent revivals in specialist cinemas, screenings on television, and re-releases on video and DVD. Second, it stands as a landmark in film history because it was long assumed to be Britain’s first feature film with dialogue. Although film historians latterly have shown that there were other contenders for this title, Blackmail retained its status due to the sheer originality with which the new technology was deployed.1 It demonstrated that sound could be used with imaginative flair, and at a time when many talkies aspired only to reproduce dialogue, this was a landmark in itself. Third, Blackmail had a remarkable (and complicated) production history that has become one of film history’s legends. Originally produced as a silent feature, it was only when filming was nearly completed that the studio, British International Pictures (BIP), decided that a talking version should be made as well. This brought a host of challenges, and not least because the leading actress, Anny Ondra, was Czechoslovakian and therefore unsuited to her English-speaking role. None the less, both a silent and a sound version were released in 1929, and comparisons between the two have captivated cineastes for decades.2 Fourth, and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, from the time of its release until the present day, Blackmail has inspired extensive critical and scholarly attention. Initially, Blackmail was deemed to be worthy of critical attention on the basis of its inventive use of sound. Soon after its release, for example, the intellectual film journal Close Up and Paul Rotha’s weighty survey of world cinema, The Film Till Now (1930) considered the film as an exception to the artless din of most talkies. Blackmail gave hope that sound 185


could make a progressive contribution to film form.3 Subsequently, the enduring interest in Blackmail has rested primarily in its reputation as one of the key films of cinema’s most celebrated and admired auteurs, Alfred Hitchcock. In this context, it is seen as an early but nevertheless quintessentially ‘Hitchcockian’ film, and not least because of the story’s focus on a tormented blonde heroine (Anny Ondra’s role). This approach to the film was apparent in the very first book-length study of Hitchcock’s work, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol’s Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (1957), which positioned Blackmail as an early work that ‘prefigures’ Hitchcock’s important later films.4 It has also drawn considerable attention from feminist critics, including Tania Modleski, who devoted a chapter to the film in her highly regarded study The Women Who Knew Too Much (1988).5 More recently, Patrick McGilligan’s biography of the director, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and in Light (2003), has placed Blackmail at the very heart of the director’s oeuvre. As McGilligan states, ‘if there is one film, one character, one actress at the heart of Hitchcock’s work, it is Anny Ondra in Blackmail.’6 Like other classic films, then, Blackmail has endured because it has suited the interests and preoccupations of successive waves of critics and audiences. This chapter is not concerned with demonstrating that any one interpretation or approach to the film is superior to another. Rather, the concern here is to explore the extent to which the significance and meanings attached to the film have shifted over time, and to consider how and why different meanings have arisen. Initially, this will entail considering the modern and most familiar conception of the film; that is, the readings of Blackmail that understand it first and foremost as a Hitchcock thriller. The primary concern of this chapter, however, will be to investigate what attractions and meanings Blackmail had for audiences who saw it on its initial release in 1929 and 1930. These were audiences who did not know Alfred Hitchcock as the ‘master of suspense’ or even associate him with the thriller genre. There could be no awareness at this point that Blackmail prefigured films to come or that it was ‘Hitchcockian’ in the sense that is now so familiar. The audiences of this period were also distinctive for being situated at the juncture between silent and talking films. Yet the evidence remaining from this period suggests that they do not fit with the stereotype of film fans who eagerly embraced the talkies for their novelty. Blackmail was welcomed by popular audiences on quite different grounds. Gauging popular film tastes in this period is not a straightforward task. While the avant-garde thinking of the period (exemplified by Close Up and Rotha) forms a fairly prominent part of the historical record,

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the tastes and opinions of the majority of cinema-goers are more difficult to locate. There are few audience surveys or polls from this period, and box-office data was seldom made public. This means that popular opinions must be recovered by piecing together material from a variety of sources and carefully interpreting their content. For example, a film’s original advertising and promotional materials are likely to indicate what was considered most appealing about the film. Similarly, reviews in the film industry’s trade papers often indicate the type of audience that a film was thought to appeal to and the ‘selling angles’ that might be used to attract them. Reviews in the mainstream press, including national and local newspapers, were likely to be geared to each paper’s own readership (in class, gender and regional terms), and therefore may demonstrate some interesting delineations of tastes. Film fan magazines offer reviews and articles that were aimed at the most ardent cinemagoers, while their letters pages printed the readers’ own responses and opinions. All of these sources must be treated circumspectly rather than accepted as straightforward (or unproblematical) evidence, but they nevertheless provide materials from which a widely representative range of opinions may be drawn and interpreted.

The ‘Hitchcockian’ Blackmail Alfred Hitchcock now stands as the world’s most studied director and his films are the most discussed, debated and scrutinized within Film Studies. At last count there were over 200 books relating to his work and life, as well as innumerable articles. It can therefore be surprising to revisit some of the earliest books on Hitchcock and observe the extent to which the authors felt obliged to justify their choice of study. Fifty years ago, when Rohmer and Chabrol wrote Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, the dominant and long-standing critical aesthetic was based on the ideals of social realism, and the thriller genre was widely considered to be the cinematic equivalent of pulp fiction: at times entertaining, but of little merit or consequence.7 Throughout the Rohmer and Chabrol study, then, there is a sense that the authors are striving to convince a reluctant readership that Hitchcock was not merely an excellent craftsman but also an artist in a very traditional sense. They are alert to matters of cinematic technique and form, but they emphasize the literary qualities of story, characterization and theme in making the case for Hitchcock as a genius, and one whose personality is recognizable in the unity and consistency apparent across his body of work. Their survey of his films therefore highlights patterns and similarities: the use of


Christian iconography, a preoccupation with the looming threat of punishment, and recurring character types such as the tormented heroine and the innocent protagonist who has been wrongly accused of a crime. Throughout Hitchcock’s films, they argue, there is a motif of ‘exchanges’, and at the heart of the films there is an exchange or ‘transfer’ of guilt, wherein it becomes apparent that the innocent protagonist possesses some of the darker traits or motivations of the villain. Rohmer and Chabrol thus reveal the ‘Hitchcockian universe’ to be shaped by the director’s own Catholic upbringing and his subsequent fascination with matters of morality, guilt and punishment.8 Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films is now a landmark of auteurist criticism, and the book forms a foundation for much of the subsequent literature on Hitchcock. One aspect of this influence is the attention paid to the later thrillers at the expense of a more diverse range of films, particularly those made in the 1920s and early 1930s. Rohmer and Chabrol speed through their discussion of Hitchcock’s first ten films (up to and including Blackmail) in a mere 24 pages, while Robin Wood’s seminal study Hitchcock’s Films (1965) excludes them altogether and focuses entirely on the thrillers of the 1950s and early 1960s.9 This approach inevitably results in a narrow view of Hitchcock’s work, and one that considers his entire career only in relation to his later incarnation as ‘the master of suspense’. Another aspect of Rohmer and Chabrol’s influence is the attention paid to Hitchcock’s own life and personality. Of course, this is an integral aspect of the auteurist approach, but with Hitchcock it assumed an unusual significance. Hitchcock himself conspired in this by offering interviewers carefully prepared tales of his formative experiences. For example, he frequently told a story about his youth in which his father punished him for a minor offence by sending him to the local police station, where he was locked in a cell for a terrifying few minutes.10 In this anecdote, many have located the original spark for several ‘Hitchcockian’ motifs: the fear of punishment and the police, the distrust of authority more generally, and the innocent man wrongly accused.11 This intensely personal perspective was initiated by critics who were laudatory towards the director, but it was eventually taken up by critics and biographers eager to probe the more disturbing psycho-sexual dimension of horror-thrillers such as Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and Frenzy (1972). Donald Spoto’s popular biography, The Dark Side of Genius (1983), highlights episodes of sadism and evidence of misogyny in the director’s personal life and in his films, suggesting that his ‘dark side’ and his ‘genius’ were inextricably linked.12 Essentially, it views Hitchcock’s

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life and his entire body of work through the lens of these later films. Many feminist critics took a similar view and, although less concerned with Hitchcock’s personal psychology, cast him as the cinema’s ultimate misogynist: a director whose films routinely foreground male voyeurism and portray women only as the objects of sadistic male fantasies. Tania Modleski’s study, The Women Who Knew Too Much, therefore represented a significant development in this field. Although Modleski makes it clear that she is not interested in ‘saving Hitchcock for feminism’, she convincingly argues that the male perspective in Hitchcock’s films is far less assured than other critics have allowed, and that the portrayal of violence against women is more complex and challenging than the complaints of ‘misogyny’ suggest.13 It is not difficult to see how these various approaches to Hitchcock’s work can be applied fruitfully to Blackmail. For Rohmer and Chabrol, the film constitutes a prime example of Hitchcock’s fascination with morality, guilt and punishment. The tormented heroine, Alice White (Anny Ondra), is initially flirtatious and light-hearted, but when she quarrels with her fiancé, the police detective Frank Webber ( John Longden), she goes home with another man, the artist Crewe (Cyril Ritchard), who attempts to rape her. In self-defence, Alice stabs Crewe with a bread knife and kills him. She attempts to conceal her involvement, but her remorse is magnified when she hears her parents discussing the ‘murder’ with a neighbour, and magnified even further when a blackmailer, Tracy (Donald Calthorp), arrives with evidence of her involvement. Frank, meanwhile, has been assigned to the case but, rather than upholding justice, he conceals Alice’s involvement and allows his fellow policemen to believe that Tracy is the murderer. Each of the four principal characters thus shares a measure of guilt but, according to Rohmer and Chabrol, the ‘transfer of guilt’ is most apparent in the film’s climax. In this scene, parallel editing shows Tracy being pursued by the police through the streets of London and into the British Museum, while Alice is at home, wracked with guilt and contemplating a confession. At the moment that Tracy falls to his death from the museum’s glass dome, the light falling through Alice’s window casts a noose-like shadow around her neck. Alice is later prevented from confessing, but Rohmer and Chabrol nevertheless see this as a very moral ending, because Frank and Alice will have to live with a crime ‘which cannot be washed away’.14 Modleski’s critique, by contrast, pays closer attention to Alice and to the film’s treatment of gender relations. On the one hand, she argues, the project of the narrative would appear to be a familiar one: the reestablishment of patriarchal authority over a woman who has defied it.


Alice defies Frank by quarrelling with him on their date and then choosing to spend the evening with another man, but the rape and the subsequent investigation puts her back at Frank’s side and under his control. On the other hand, Modleski argues that the film is more complex than that simple narrative trajectory suggests. In her view, Blackmail emphasizes Alice’s predicament so strongly, and with such sympathetic force, that it could also be seen as a critique of the very narrative structure that it employs. For example, Modleski observes that in the ending, Frank and Alice are indeed together, but Frank is sharing a joke with a male colleague, laughing at the notion that women could ever join the police, while another policeman walks past carrying one of Crewe’s paintings. This painting, which shows a robust court jester laughing and pointing menacingly, had startled Alice when she was at Crewe’s flat. As the film’s final shot, the painting may seem to point an ugly finger at Alice herself, and indicate that the joke has been on her. However, the finger could also be pointed at Frank and the police, who have been shown to be inept throughout the film. Or, as Modleski observes, the butt of the joke could be the male cinema spectator, who has just seen a film in which a ‘female outlaw’ is portrayed sympathetically while patriarchal authority has been undermined.15 It is this ‘thoroughgoing ambivalence about femininity’, she argues, that characterizes Hitchcock’s films.16 While interpretations of Blackmail’s plot have varied, most accounts concur on the use of sound. Among modern critics, a common complaint is that the dialogue seems stilted and slow. This, it is explained, is because Anny Ondra had to have a voice double, the English actress Joan Barry, and because dubbing was not available at this time, Barry and Ondra had to perform in unison. Ondra mouthed the words on camera while Barry – just out of view of the camera – spoke them. The result, according to Spoto (and others who take a similar view), is a series of ‘awkward pauses’ and the ‘sense [that] the actors are obeying off-camera cues’.17 Apart from that perceived flaw, however, the use of sound is more often noted for its imaginative qualities. One frequently cited scene takes place after Alice has left Crewe’s flat and as she wanders the streets of London in a state of shock. Everywhere around her, she sees images that remind her of Crewe’s dead body and the stabbing, but one – the sight of a tramp asleep with his arm outstretched in the same position as Crewe’s – causes her to scream aloud. Yet on the soundtrack we do not hear Alice’s scream but the scream of Crewe’s landlady, back at his flat and as she discovers his dead body. The sound of the scream therefore acts as a continuity device, linking the two locales while simultaneously

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moving the story forward. It also serves as a highly effective way of conveying Alice’s guilt: whether the landlady’s scream exists only in Alice’s mind, or is indeed happening at the very same moment, the connection between the two shots strongly suggests Alice’s remorse and her fear of being implicated in the ‘murder’. The film’s most frequently discussed scene is set at the breakfast table the next day. As Alice and her parents sit down to eat, a gossiping neighbour hovers nearby, talking incessantly about the crime and repeatedly referring to the knife that was used. Alice’s father asks her to cut a piece of bread for him, and as she handles the bread knife the neighbour’s speech becomes muffled and indistinct except for the word ‘knife’, which grows ever more prominent on the soundtrack. At its crescendo (‘knife!’), it sounds distorted and unreal, but it clearly conveys Alice’s disturbed state of mind. As such, it remains to this day a prime example of the expressionist use of sound, and perhaps the one aspect of the film that all modern critics admire and highlight.18

Blackmail and film nationalism The release of Blackmail in 1929 was a major cinematic event in Britain. BIP rushed to show the talking version to the industry and the press, in a screening held on 21 June, just weeks after filming had been completed. By comparison, there was no rush for the silent version, which although completed first, made its debut in August. The talking version was advertised as ‘The first full length all talkie film made in Great Britain’ and critics at the time accepted that this was accurate.19 Prominent reviews appeared in virtually every newspaper, and, as the Daily Mail commented a few days afterward, there was an ‘amazing unanimity’ among critics: ‘each and every one of them has praised Blackmail’.20 While the comments made by the critics of 1929 were markedly different from those made in later decades, one aspect that they have in common is the centrality of Alfred Hitchcock. In 1929, Blackmail was not seen as an expression of the director’s personality, and in fact several critics reminded their readers that the film was based on a play by Charles Bennett that had been staged in the West End a year earlier. Nevertheless, the film’s strengths were attributed to Hitchcock’s design, and he was consistently identified as a great asset to the British film industry. In fact, Hitchcock had been a source of national pride – in cinematic terms at least – since he made his directorial debut with The Pleasure Garden (1926). At the time, the British film industry was in the midst of a severe slump. American films had long predominated on


British screens, but in the mid-1920s they threatened to drive British films to extinction. In a decade in which ‘Americanization’ became the source of both cultural anxieties and resentment, Hollywood’s dominance and the decline of British cinema were troubling. The rise of Hitchcock, however, demonstrated that while the industry was undoubtedly down, it was not out. He was dubbed ‘Alfred the Great’ by the fan magazine Picturegoer even before The Pleasure Garden had been shown, and on the basis of mere rumours about its ‘technical and artistic perfection’.21 It was his third film, The Lodger (1926), that confirmed such claims for most film critics. In newspapers across the country The Lodger was heralded as a ‘masterpiece’ and its quality was repeatedly said to be as good as, if not better than, the best American films.22 Britain’s growing sense of film nationalism eventually led to the establishment of a film ‘quota’ (under the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927) that required distributors and exhibitors to handle at least some British films. In the discussion and debate that surrounded this legislation, the American film industry was cast as the villain, which was holding back the British film industry through its corrupt business methods and rank commercialism. The ‘quota’ was designed to redress this, and many of its advocates envisaged a British cinema that was more culturally authentic and artistically ambitious than Hollywood and yet still popular with mainstream audiences. Hitchcock continued to give hope on all three counts. As London’s Evening Standard put it in 1927, ‘Mr Hitchcock has done more for British pictures than a dozen Acts of Parliament.’23 Films such as The Ring (1927), Easy Virtue (1927) and The Farmer’s Wife (1928) were not thrillers, but they enhanced Hitchcock’s reputation as a director who could demonstrate great flair while still working within the bounds of popular entertainment. Critics spoke of ‘the Hitchcock touch’ when referring to the most visually inventive moments in his films. The films were praised, too, for capturing the flavour of their locales, whether that was the sinister, foggy London of The Lodger or the West Country idyll of The Farmer’s Wife.24 Thus, when Blackmail was released, there were already firm expectations of what a ‘Hitchcock film’ would offer, but they were very different from those we know today. One of the most admired aspects of Blackmail in 1929 was its first segment, an eight-minute sequence which has no dialogue. The first shot of the film, a spinning car wheel, sets the tone. The shots that follow portray the police racing through the streets of central London, apprehending an armed criminal, and interrogating and charging him at Scotland Yard. All of this is conveyed in a montage of images that

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eschews characterization and focuses instead on the dynamic methods of the ‘flying squad’ and the procedural workings of Scotland Yard. Many modern critics are impatient with this segment. Rohmer and Chabrol, for example, complain that the scenes ‘do not appear to advance the action’ of the film.25 Modleski refers to them as ‘lengthy’ and suggests that they merely ‘postpone’ the more integral story of Alice White.26 Other critics, including Spoto, are much more eager to discuss the film’s talking elements and overlook the sequence altogether. In 1929, however, the scenes met with far more approval. The loftier critics assumed that, by opening the film with these fast-paced scenes, Hitchcock was making a point about the power of silent cinema; as the Times put it, the scenes showed that ‘the story is quite able to express itself [without dialogue]’.27 The trade paper Kinematograph Weekly and fan magazine Picturegoer were more attuned to the wider appeal of these scenes. As both observed, it was the focus on the vaunted ‘flying squad’, a special unit of the police set up ten years earlier, together with the behind-the-scenes look at Scotland Yard, that made the scenes ‘thrilling’ for contemporary audiences.28 The scenes of London life were another of the film’s most admired qualities. Of course, there was nothing new about films set in London or centred on Scotland Yard. They were commonplace even among Hollywood films, but the advent of talkies had temporarily altered Hollywood’s ability to film British stories convincingly. One of the first talkies to reach Britain, The Terror, was based on a story by the prolific British author Edgar Wallace, but it was made in Hollywood by Warner Brothers and featured the American actor Joseph Girard as a Scotland Yard inspector. When it was released in London in October 1928, British critics ridiculed The Terror for its Americanisms and anachronisms, and many used their reviews of the film as an opportunity to denounce all talkies.29 It is likely, then, that Blackmail refers back to this contretemps when Frank and Alice discuss going to see the latest film about Scotland Yard, ‘Fingerprints’. Alice scornfully declines, saying, ‘Scotland Yard! If it weren’t for Edgar Wallace no one would have heard of it!’ The line belittles Frank, but it also draws a distinction between Hollywood’s artificiality and Blackmail’s authenticity. The latter delighted critics, who praised the film’s use of location shooting (in and around Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, the British Museum, the Embankment and a Lyons Corner House), as well as its depiction of an everyday London world of the newsagents and the tea shop. Among the daily and Sunday newspapers, the Daily Mail declared that it offered ‘the first credible picture of London life’, the Times admired the ‘freshness’ of its portrait of London, and the Sunday Pictorial enthused that the film was ‘a symphony of


London life’.30 The provincial newspapers agreed too; the ‘London scenes that everybody knows’ and the ‘excellent London street scenes’ were welcomed by the Newcastle Chronicle and the Glasgow Bulletin, respectively.31 The national Morning Post added that these sights were ‘good for the eyes that are tired of the Great White Way’.32 This reference to New York’s Broadway was particularly pointed at a time when so many of Hollywood’s early talkies were backstage musicals, and it indicates that Blackmail appealed to a sense of film nationalism not only as a talkie but also for its visual qualities. If Blackmail reclaimed London and Scotland Yard for British cinema, it also reclaimed the English language. At least, that was the view of the majority of critics. Only a few commented on the ‘artistic’ or ‘intelligent’ use of sound. A review in the Daily Mail, for example, anticipated the many comments in later years about the ‘knife!’ scene: The director, Mr Alfred Hitchcock, has been known always as a master of expressive technique. He has succeeded in translating into vocal terms the doctrines of expressionism which the great Germans like Pabst and Lubitsch have exploited in pictorial values.33 The majority of critics, however, were not concerned with Germany or expressionism. It was the dialogue that they found most noteworthy. BIP anticipated this by advertising Blackmail with the command, ‘See and hear our mother tongue as it should be spoken.’34 Every critic concurred. Not one referred to the dialogue as slow or stilted, and although some noted that Joan Barry voiced Anny Ondra’s lines, this was a source of little interest.35 Instead, it was the accents, diction and colloquial speech that enthralled critics. In review after review, praise was heaped upon ‘the charm and softness of the voices’ (Morning Post), ‘the voices and phrases that fall sweetly on English ears’ (Morning Advertiser) and the ‘purity of speech’ (The Cinema).36 ‘Even our criminals talk excellent English!’, the Sunday Express enthused.37 The point of comparison was of course the American accents that had been heard in Hollywood’s talkies ever since The Jazz Singer made its London debut nine months earlier, in September 1928. As the Daily Mirror observed, in Blackmail it was ‘a treat to hear the dear old Cockney accent and a few typically English “cheerios” and “rightos” instead of Bowery slang’.38 The Newcastle Chronicle welcomed the ‘English voices that do not sound like foghorns’.39 And the Daily Chronicle commented that ‘after the nasal voices imported from America, the English voices in Blackmail are like music’.40 Indeed, several critics were so enamoured with the sound of English voices that

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they predicted a revival of British cinema generally, as audiences would naturally prefer ‘the mother tongue’ to the American alternative. ‘I assert that Britain’s film chance is now’, the Sunday Dispatch declared, ‘Alfred Hitchcock has proved it.’41 Many British critics may have loathed them, but early Hollywood talkies such as The Jazz Singer, The Terror, The Singing Fool and The Broadway Melody (all released in Britain between September 1928 and May 1929) proved to be strong attractions at cinemas up and down the country.42 This raises a key issue regarding the use of film criticism in reception studies: to what extent can the critics’ views be taken as representative? The fan magazines may offer a wider range of views, but their editorial policies can be obstructive. For example, while Film Weekly covered both American and British cinema, it was a tireless supporter of the latter. Its annual poll of the ‘best film of the year’ was limited to British films, and so, while it is apparent that its readers thought that Blackmail was the best British film of 1929, there is no indication of how it ranked in relation to Hollywood films.43 Picturegoer published many readers’ letters on the subject of talkies, but in 1929 the editors initially took a strong line against the talkies, and if this did not influence readers, it is likely that the cash prizes that were offered for the ‘best’ letters did. Certainly, the majority of letters in 1929 expressed displeasure with American accents, which were characterized with epithets such as ‘nasal twang’ and ‘foghorn-like’.44 This much, at least, suggests that the critics reflected (or influenced) wider opinions about the earliest talkies. There was also a marked frustration with British producers for not making talkies sooner (‘wake up, Britain!’, one demanded).45 There can be little doubt that Blackmail rode a wave of film nationalism that had begun years earlier with the discussions around the Films Act and then experienced a resurgence with the arrival of the talkies. After nine months of Hollywood talkies, critics and audiences were so pleased to hear British accents that most were willing to overlook the fact that Blackmail was a thriller, or at least not to dwell upon it. Instead, the film was greeted as the harbinger of a great revival for British cinema. Numerous letters in Picturegoer confirm that the film was appreciated on patriotic terms. A letter from a reader in Brighton, for example, refers to it as ‘the best talkie I have seen’, commenting, ‘How soothing it was to listen to a beautiful educated voice (that doubled for Anny Ondra) instead of that ghastly nasal brogue of the Americans, which grinds on you until your ears buzz for hours after you have seen the film.’46 A letter from Preston heralded it as the ‘ideal talkie’ and insisted that ‘we want more and more of such stories and considerably less Melody this and


Singing that.’47 And a letter from Peckham recommended Blackmail as part of what the writer referred to as a ‘buy British’ campaign that would ‘help towards the establishment of Britain as a leader in the film world’.48 The few letters that commented less than enthusiastically did so carefully; it appeared unpatriotic not to like Blackmail. So, for example, one admitted ‘with a sense of guilt’ to liking The Broadway Melody better than Blackmail and framed this as a ‘confession’, while another insisted that ‘the accents in Blackmail were beautiful’ even if ‘I did not like the film itself’.49 Yet national pride could be unstable ground on which to situate a film’s reputation. The critic for the Glasgow Herald, a ‘quality’ broadsheet, showed some discomfort with the idea that a mere thriller should be taken so seriously. The story of a ‘silly little shop girl’ was of little interest to this critic, who felt that Hitchcock should decide whether he was making films ‘for the intellectual or the lover of blood and thunder’.50 Similarly, four weeks after the initial screening of Blackmail, the critic for the Sunday Express reflected on the critical accolades it had received and decided that it had been ‘over praised’. Britain could not be ‘wholly proud’ of Blackmail, he reflected, because: It does not contain one great thought or one uplifting idea. The story is sordid and soulless, and the plot turns on a seduction episode of a particularly repellent kind. It is not calculated in the smallest degree to improve any foreigner’s opinion of England.51 As these comments suggest, the idea of the Hitchcockian thriller was completely unknown at this point, and the thriller genre was thought of as a lowly form, unworthy of a film that represented the nation. In fact, the review in Kinematograph Weekly was one of the few to comment favourably on the film’s qualities as a thriller (‘it is sensational enough to satisfy the most enthusiastic thrill seeker’), and even here a note of condescension is apparent.52 Over the long run, the appeal of British accents and speech also proved to be shaky ground. This is abundantly clear in both articles and letters that appeared in Picturegoer over the course of 1930 and 1931, which indicate that the initial dismay which greeted Hollywood’s talkies quickly faded, and a large section of the audience gradually came to accept American accents. Over the same period, a backlash against British talkies developed as more were released. The chief complaint – expressed most forcefully in letters from readers in Scotland, the north of England and the East End of London – was that too many British

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film actors were drawn from the West End stage, and that they brought with them a speaking style that was described as ‘ultra-English’, ‘too – too – frightfully propah’ and ‘intolerably artificial’.53 English actresses, in particular, annoyed audiences with voices that were mocked in Picturegoer as ‘fawncy’ or ‘refaned’.54 The American accent, by comparison, became a neutral one, or at least one free of the regional and class characteristics that divided British accents. Thus, it seems likely that if Blackmail had been released just one year later, its voices would have been subjected to more scrutiny than celebration. Certainly, Joan Barry’s elegant accent – an odd choice for the role of a Cockney newsagent’s daughter – would have drawn jibes rather than compliments. In 1929, however, Blackmail represented a long-awaited triumph for the upstart British film industry.

Conclusion In 1930, Paul Rotha commented that ‘Blackmail will be forgotten in a few months by those who have seen it.’55 At first glance, this comment now seems to be wildly inaccurate, given the weight of critical attention that the film has attracted over the decades. Yet Rotha meant that it would be forgotten by those who had seen it on its initial release, and in this respect he may have been partly correct. Blackmail would not have been admired long for the novelty of its English accents, and in fact complaints about refined English accents continued to plague British cinema even in the late 1930s. It is unclear, too, whether the film’s story resonated with the its earliest audiences. The public discourse on the film largely precluded discussion of its thriller elements (not to mention the meaning of its final scene and its sexual politics). It was a British film above all else, and in that context few fans or critics were eager to discuss the film’s ‘dark side’, and none engaged in a discussion about the rape scene. The rape simply does not figure as an important aspect of the film in reviews, letters or publicity materials. This does not mean that it was unimportant to audiences. It may only mean that propriety prevented the discussion. Yet it does demonstrate that even with a wide array of reception documents, audiences of the past may remain to some extent inaccessible and unknowable. The Blackmail that has been forgotten is the film that is manifested in these earliest reception documents. It has been lost to successive waves of film criticism. Over the past few decades at least, such criticism has been enhanced by repeated viewings – and closer viewings served by freeze-frame and rewind buttons – that were previously impossible.


Modern criticism of Blackmail has also been informed by the everincreasing frames of reference about Hitchcock and his work. It is little wonder, then, that the modern readings can seem richer, more detailed and complex, than the original criticism of the film, and of course it is a testament to Blackmail that it can bear this scrutiny and continue to inspire or provoke new insights and reactions. Nevertheless, there is also something lost in this process of reinterpretation. Considering Blackmail from the perspective of 1929 reveals a film that is less immediately recognizable and accessible. It makes a familiar classic seem unfamiliar again by highlighting qualities and pleasures that have been obscured over time. Equally, it reveals a popular film culture that had a strong sense of national pride and consequently a firm desire to see (and hear) Britain take part in the talkie revolution. It was not just intellectuals who found comfort in Blackmail’s use of sound. For a wider section of the audience, Blackmail offered reassurance that Britain’s place in the film world had not been lost, and that the talkies would not belong to Hollywood alone.

Notes 1. See the discussion in Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, 1918–29 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), p. 205; and in Tom Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 94–5. 2. For an authoritative comparison of the two versions, see the chapter in Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Dumfriesshire: Cameron & Hollis, 1999), pp. 81–97. 3. Kenneth MacPherson, ‘As Is’, Close Up, 5:4 (October 1929), pp. 257–63; and Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), p. 321. 4. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (Oxford: Roundhouse, 1979 (1957)), p. 23. 5. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 17–30. 6. Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and in Light (New York: Regan, 2003), p. 122. 7. The critical standing of the thriller was particularly low in the 1930s. See James Chapman, ‘Celluloid Shockers’, in Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–39 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), pp. 75–97. 8. Rohmer and Chabrol, The First Forty-Four Films, p. ix. 9. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (London: Faber & Faber, 1989 (1965)). 10. Hitchcock and Truffaut discuss this story in François Truffaut, Hitchcock: The Definitive Study (London: Paladin, 1986 (1968)), p. 20. 11. John Russell Taylor, Hitch: The Authorised Biography of Alfred Hitchcock (London: Abacus, 1981 (1978)), p. 6.

Mark Glancy 199 12. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Ballantine, 1993 (1983)). 13. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 3. 14. Rohmer and Chabrol, The First Forty-Four Films, p. 23. 15. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 30. 16. Ibid., p. 3. 17. Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius, p. 132. 18. For a discussion of the film’s sound qualities, see Elisabeth Weis, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Soundtrack (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1982), pp. 28–33. 19. Most of the newspaper reviews cited in this essay were drawn from the Blackmail Clippings Scrapbook, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Hitchcock Collection also holds scrapbooks on 13 other Hitchcock films (all are hereafter referred to as HC/AMPAS). 20. Daily Mail, 27 June 1929, HC/AMPAS. 21. Cedric Belfrage, ‘Alfred the Great’, Picturegoer, March 1926, p. 60. 22. See, for example, the reviews in the Daily Telegraph, 19 January 1927, and the Sunday Pictorial, 19 September 1926. Both are held within The Lodger, HC/AMPAS. 23. Evening Standard, 1 October 1927, The Ring, HC/AMPAS. 24. The Farmer’s Wife, HC/AMPAS. 25. Rohmer and Chabrol, The First Forty-Four Films, p. 22. 26. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 18. 27. Times, 24 June 1929, HC/AMPAS. 28. Kinematograph Weekly, 27 June 1929, p. 43; Picturegoer, August 1929, pp. 14–15. 29. Alexander Walker, The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay (London: Elm Tree, 1978), pp. 87–9. 30. Times; Daily Mail; Sunday Pictorial, 23 June 1929; all HC/AMPAS. 31. Newcastle Chronicle, 24 June 1929; and Glasgow Bulletin, 29 June 1929; both HC/AMPAS. 32. Morning Post, 24 June 1929, HC/AMPAS. 33. Daily Mail, 24 June 1929, HC/AMPAS. 34. Tom Ryall, Blackmail: BFI Film Classics (London: British Film Institute, 1992), p. ii. 35. The Times, for example, noted that ‘someone has clearly improved, if not stolen, her voice’. Times, HC/AMPAS. 36. Morning Post; Morning Advertiser, 24 June 1929; The Cinema, 26 June 1929; all HC/AMPAS. 37. Sunday Express, 23 June 1929, p. 4. 38. Daily Mirror, 24 June 1929, HC/AMPAS. 39. Newcastle Chronicle, HC/AMPAS. 40. Daily Chronicle, 24 June 1929; HC/AMPAS. 41. Sunday Dispatch, 23 June 1929; HC/AMPAS. 42. Box-office reports are generally few and far between in the British trade weeklies. In February and March of 1929, however, Kinematograph Weekly took note of the talkies’ success in brief articles that refer to record-breaking and sell-out crowds in several cities. See, for example, ‘Talkie News’, Kinematograph Weekly, 14 March 1929, p. 48.

200 The New Film History 43. Film Weekly, 16 May 1931, p. 6. 44. Picturegoer letters from E.R.S., Scarborough, June 1929, p. 60; H.H., July 1929, p. 60. 45. Letter from L. D. Sanders, Picturegoer, July 1929, p. 61. 46. Letter from M.K.R., Brighton, Picturegoer, November 1929, p. 80. 47. Letter from L. Ritchie, Preston, Picturegoer, March 1930, p. 71. 48. Letter from M.W., London SW17, Picturegoer, March 1930, p. 71. 49. Picturegoer letters from Miss Molly Lambert, Sheffield, November 1929, p. 76; and E.K., Bournemouth, January 1930, p. 71. 50. Glasgow Herald, 24 June 1929, p. 15. 51. Sunday Express, 28 July 1929, p. 4. 52. Kinematograph Weekly, 27 June 1929, p. 43. 53. Picturegoer letters from Mabel Bell, Glasgow, 7 November 1931, p. 29; David Jolly, Angus, 28 November 1931, p. 30; Miss J. Fisher, London E2, 7 November 1931, p. 30; A. E. Gorman, Cleveland, 7 November 1931, p. 29. 54. See ‘The Stars Talk’, Picturegoer, 20 June 1931, p. 26. 55. Rotha, The Film Till Now, pp. 405–6.

13 British Cinema, American Reception: Black Narcissus (1947) and the Legion of Decency Sarah Street

For the historian researching British cinema, there can often appear to be a paucity of archival source material. However, it is important to recognize that much excellent primary material resides in American archives. While the British Film Institute’s Special Collections has extended its holdings over the past decades, including key acquisitions such as the Michael Powell papers, Joseph Losey collection and Michael Balcon papers, it is often difficult to find primary sources on particular film companies. To research even the most dominant companies sends one on an extensive trail: the Rank Organization, for example, has not made its papers publicly available, leaving an important gap in our knowledge about its day-to-day operation. While excellent research has been done on Rank, of necessity this depends on combining a plethora of sources emanating from different locations, often lacking the precise details about internal operations, structure, personnel and statistics pertaining to a major film company that can, for example, be found in the archives of the major Hollywood studios. As is the case with any historical research, an investigative approach is required as the scholar turns detective in the search for key sources relating to British film history. This can yield surprising results when one asks questions about the location of material, or which archives might hold papers that unexpectedly turn out to be significant. Staying with the Rank Organization for a moment, one discovers that the extent of the operation brought it into contact with the government, hence the location of papers in the National Archives, also with American companies with which it was linked, and censorship organizations in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, that influenced film content. This produces 201


the somewhat ironic situation of much excellent primary source material on British cinema residing in American archives. The New Film History is based very much on using such archival material to explore themes and contexts that have emerged as crucial for understanding the way in which British cinema functioned as an industry (production); how it was disseminated (distribution) and how it was received by a range of different audiences (reception). These three can only be thoroughly explored by devising appropriate methods with which to analyse primary documents. For my own research, in addition to consulting sources in the United Kingdom, I have always looked overseas to locate material on British cinema. My earliest researches into the relations between the government and the film industry for several years were focused on the National Archives, in particular the papers of the Board of Trade, the department responsible for film. Yet when it became clear that for much of the 1930s debates about film were concentrated on the nature and extent of American competition and the strategic importance of the British market for Hollywood, it then seemed appropriate to consider which US archives might hold relevant material. The fact that discussions about film were part of the wider context of Anglo-American relations between the wars, in particular issues of isolationism and international trade, meant that the US Departments of State and Commerce discussed film issues with the British film trade, the Foreign Office, Treasury and Board of Trade. In fact, some of the most interesting information on the progress of the British film industry is contained in reports compiled for the US Department of Commerce which contained data, for example, on film popularity, the numbers of new companies and on the growth of cinemas in Britain during the 1930s. This information finds no counterpart in the UK’s Board of Trade files. As with the analysis of all ‘official’ sources, it is important to locate them within their primary contexts, in this case Anglo-American diplomacy and international conflicts within the film trade. While this might appear to deflect attention away from the films themselves, it provides an important stimulus for scholars to appreciate the complex way films of this period negotiated ‘indigenous’ and ‘exportable’ identities. Many of them were aimed at overseas markets, involving ‘star trading’ of British and American actors and technical personnel. Indeed, if the meta-narrative of British cinema in this period is American competition and a broad range of transnational stylistic influences, then a grasp of these broader economic issues is important. The context of censorship is one of those areas that challenges the film historian to appreciate the consequences of institutional intervention.

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The nature of that intervention is often rooted in specific political regimes that impacted on the way in which audiences first saw particular films. Analysis of the process of censorship can therefore help us to understand the historical conditions of reception and the extent to which films were planned and produced with the constraints of censorship in mind. Documents relating to film can be scrutinized by asking basic methodological questions.1 In the first instance, it is essential to establish what type of document you are dealing with, identifying the kind of language that has been used in order to understand any likely prejudices it might conceal. All documents have a particular status, according to who is the author and, indeed, who is the recipient. If a document is a personal letter, its ‘private’ relevance might be limited to both writer and recipient. If, however, a document has been written by a civil servant or company employee its significance might well be far more extensive, relating to a number of different contexts that could be public (national or international), institutional or even relate to private spheres as well. It is always a key step to establish why a document was written; its purpose will be manifest in obvious and sometimes subtextual ways to which the historian must always be alert. As well as completing detailed work on the text of a letter, report, diary, an important consideration is its likely circulation. When working in an archive, a key factor is to locate the document in relation to other papers being examined, as well as its possible connection to documents which have been studied in other related collections. Eventually, in an overview of all of the archival material that has been examined, cross-reference to a range of collections is necessary, establishing a chronological or thematic record in order to fully ascertain a chronology of events, as was essential in unravelling the Black Narcissus controversy detailed below. Finally, the researcher needs to think carefully about how a document, or set of documents, relates to their overall argument. It is tempting to apportion particular significance to a document too early in the research process, and this should be avoided until reconsideration is possible in the light of further evidence. When analysing the impact of any censorship system, the historian will be faced with many documents that reveal aspects of the process. By looking at the collection of documents pertaining to a film, it is possible to see how key decisions were made, as well as to gain a sense of the ideological imperatives that exercised control over content. British films not only had to negotiate the British censorship system but those that operated in other countries. Similarly to the British system, censorship in the United States was conducted in collusion with the film industry, as a non-statutory method of screening out what was deemed to be


undesirable content by an industry that was willing to act in this capacity. While the British system has been extensively analysed, far less work has been published on how British films fared with American censors.2 What was deemed to be a sensitive issue in one country was not necessarily so in another. The result was that different audiences often saw different versions, or slightly amended versions, of a particular film. When considering a film’s contemporary impact, then, it is important to understand that audiences might not have seen the same film. Generalizations cannot be made about the historic context of reception until it has been ascertained which version of a film was being screened. In many cases the changes were minimal and could not be said to have influenced the overall impact of a film in a profound manner. It is important not to fixate on cuts that might not have made much of a difference to the overall impact of a film. This was the case with the Gainsborough melodrama The Wicked Lady (1945), a film that had to have some scenes re-shot in order to satisfy the strictures of the American censors who objected to the exposure of Margaret Lockwood’s cleavage in several shots, as well as to some of the notorious double entendres that littered the script. At that time Universal International, distributor of The Wicked Lady in the United States, did not want to alienate the Rank Organization at a particularly delicate period of AngloAmerican film relations. In the end, even after scenes were re-shot and a few minutes cut, the film was not fundamentally altered for US release and in any case the spirit of its thrilling sentiments regarding the rebellious heroine remained fully ‘intact’.3 Comments in the press and in publicity about the film’s experience with the censors ironically heightened its reputation as risqué which might have increased its popularity. This case reveals how the censors negotiated a path between perceived ‘standards’ of morality and the demands of the film industry to maximize profits. Rather than being heavy-handed, Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration (PCA) arguably handled a difficult situation well, satisfying the tacit understanding the industry had reached that censorship was necessary, while at the same time allowing some leeway in particular cases. From many perspectives the American censorship system was ridiculous and riddled with inconsistencies, but the PCA’s papers, housed in the Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, nevertheless contain information that reveals exactly how those contradictions were worked through, often with significant consequences for particular films. All British films had to be considered by the PCA. In the 1930s these were viewed by the office headed by Joseph Breen as completed films, often ones that had already been released in the United Kingdom.

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By the 1940s scripts had to be submitted prior to shooting, making the possibility of significant intervention much more likely, since they were not dealing with productions that were already completed. The PCA had been established in 1934 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the most dominant film trade association. As in the United Kingdom, local boards continued to censor films, but the PCA became the major body responsible for censorship, a situation with which the industry colluded so that no major studio would release a film unless it had been given a PCA ‘seal’. This situation held sway until the mid-1950s when the system started to break down, after a few ‘test case’ films released without seals did good business, largely because of their controversial status as ‘banned’ films. The PCA was an integral aspect of the American film industry’s hegemonic position in its home market as well as abroad. As Ruth Vasey has argued, its impact was significant for producing in its own films, as well as in foreign films that were intended for US release, a ‘world according to Hollywood’ that steered clear of controversy.4 By examining the PCA files it is therefore possible to find out how films were altered for the US market, as well as to gain a sense of which sensibilities were considered to be delicate in a different context of release. The case of Black Narcissus (1947) produced one of the most interesting cases of US censorship of a British film. It not only reveals the operations of the PCA vis-à-vis British films, but also the power of the Catholic Legion of Decency (LOD), a second organization that had considerable influence over films released in the United States. While most censorship systems were sensitive to particular issues, including sex, politics, religion and race, there were emphases within specific contexts. In this case religious issues were uppermost, issues that had passed more or less without comment in other countries.5 Based on the popular novel by Rumer Godden published in 1939, Black Narcissus is about an order of nuns who attempt to establish a dispensary and school in the Himalayas. It is located in a former harem in the mountains, which they call ‘the Convent of St Faith’. The nuns try to treat and educate the local peoples, but are defeated by forces outside their control: they are reminded of their pasts before they joined the Order, a situation they find disturbing; its atmosphere defeats their purpose. In the end their mission fails and they leave after Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) rebels, becomes mentally unbalanced and falls to her death after struggling with Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) in a dramatic scene at the bell-tower. Of crucial importance for the censorship case was how the leading female character, Sister Clodagh, who is in charge of the mission, is reminded by the place


of her former life in Ireland, and of a failed love affair which took place before she joined the Order. The film accords Clodagh flashback scenes which show her former life, and these contrast with her present predicament as the nun charged with the great responsibility of the mission. Released in the same year as the achievement of Indian Independence, the film serves as an apposite comment on the British withdrawal from India, of the decline of the British Empire and of the futility of ‘civilizing missions’. The combination of this comment on both contemporary religion and politics proved to be an explosive one which Mr Breen’s office had to negotiate with the LOD.6 While Breen was prepared to give Black Narcissus a seal without cuts. The LOD overturned this decision and made sure that only a cut version was released. The case shows how a powerful pressure group such as the LOD organized an effective campaign, and this demonstrates the influence of Catholicism in the film industry and in politics more generally at that time; in the late 1940s the LOD was at the height of its power. Formed in 1934, the LOD worked in close collaboration with the PCA, an organization that frequently sided with its judgements. If it did not, the Legion could boycott a film’s release or even prevent its release. The longevity of the Legion’s influence reflected the power of Catholicism in the United States, particularly in many metropolitan centres where British films were shown.7 This group was a powerful lobby for its views, particularly relating to representations of religion and sex, and found favour with the Catholic-dominated PCA, as well as with the film industry in general until the mid-1950s when the entire censorship system was breaking down. But in the period 1934–55, distributors who ignored the rulings of the PCA and LOD could be met with a boycott of their films by exhibitors who, as part of the vertically integrated studio system, agreed to comply with the strictures of censorship. Black Narcissus is valuable as a case study about censorship because a remarkable amount of primary source documentation has been preserved. While the PCA files cover the cases of many British films, because of the controversy with the LOD there is also documentation relating to their involvement in the cuts that were made to Black Narcissus for its US release. The case presents the researcher with two sets of documents that sometimes interconnect, while being distinct on other occasions. We learn from the PCA file that in April 1945, William Burnside of Eagle-Lion8 sent a ‘very rough draft’ of the script to Breen; his reaction was that caution should be taken about the representation of the nuns. He wrote: ‘We are apprehensive that any motion picture in which there would be even the slightest implication of sex sin or sexual

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longings or desires on the part of the women consecrated to religion, would give great offence to religious-minded folk in this country and might well call forth very vigorous and, possibly, violent protest from them.’9 It seems that at this early stage Breen (a Catholic) was sensitive to how religious groups might react to the film, and that he did indeed anticipate protests. This document is therefore important in explaining the general contours of the PCA’s early thinking: religion was clearly an explosive issue that had to be handled very carefully on screen. There is even, at this stage, anticipation of how particular scenes or situations might offend. Breen observed: ‘We also think it highly questionable to suggest that one of the nuns is moved to consecrate her life to religion only after the failure to materialise of her romantic love with a young man in Ireland.’10 Breen is basically articulating the position later advanced by the LOD. The document is therefore important as establishing the framing ideological context from an early stage, one that shifted in emphasis as events unfolded. The warning being given, the next documents are dated nearly a year later, in the spring of 1946, after Powell and Pressburger had worked on the script. Breen received a copy that was accompanied by a proviso: they would make it clear that the nuns were not Roman Catholics but ‘Anglo-Catholic Orders of nuns, which have no connection with either the RC or with the English Dissenting or Established Church. They are literally service organisations of devoted and practical women, teachers, doctors and missionaries, serving voluntarily and taking yearly vows.’11 It appears that this disassociation from Roman Catholicism placated Breen since in June, after discussions about sexually suggestive dialogue, he congratulated Powell and Pressburger on the revised script as ‘superb’, but recommended the addition of a foreword that explained the status of the nuns as Anglo-Catholics.12 The film was thus passed by the PCA in June 1947 with no substantial alterations. In the meantime, however, the LOD had heard about the film and their campaign began. News of the film’s production reached Calcutta in April 1946 and the Archbishop there contacted the Catholic press. The news spread to the LOD in the United States and members discussed the film, which was released in Britain in May, in a flurry of communications. Father Patrick J. Masterson, a powerful figure in the LOD of New York, contacted Rev. Mother Leticia Gallardon in Kansas, urging her to take legal action against the film because the name of their Order – the Servants of Mary – was the same as that used in the film.13 This correspondence was sent to John O’Connor, Vice-President of Universal-International, the film’s US distributor, to warn the company of the trouble that lay ahead


for them with Black Narcissus. A damning review was then published in The Tidings, an influential Roman Catholic newspaper, accusing the film of being ‘a perverted specimen of bad taste’, objecting to Sister Clodagh’s flashbacks and details of her love affair. It also objected to the rebellion of Sister Ruth, the nun who gives up the Order and exchanges her habit for a red dress which she wears when she escapes. It disliked the depiction of nuns as ‘frustrated, neurotic, love-starved and worldly’.14 It was feared that this image of the vocation would deter young people from joining religious orders, a facet of the controversy that becomes clear in a key document, known as the ‘Notre Dame’ letter.15 This appears in both the PCA and LOD files, indicating its importance at a key point in the LOD’s fast-developing campaign against the film. It was written on 20 July 1947 and signed by a number of key figures from the Catholic community in the United States who constituted a committee appointed by the Sisters’ Vocation Institute held at the University of Notre Dame to discuss means of fostering vocations to the various sisterhoods. The letter was sent to J. Arthur Rank with copies to Nate Blumberg, President of Universal-International, the film’s US distributor and to Eric Johnston, President of the MPPDA. While the letter was sent to Rank and copied to Blumberg and Johnston, its impact was intensified since it was also released to the press. It is therefore a private and public document, which argued the LOD’s case that the film was irresponsibly ‘ridiculing all of religion’. The placatory foreword that made it clear that the nuns were not Roman Catholics was not considered to be sufficient, since ‘the average cinemagoer won’t distinguish between Anglican and RC nuns’. The language is clear, appealing to Rank’s religious leanings by saying that they, ‘will pray for you that God may forgive this conscious or unconscious attack’. It is adversarial in tone, strident and seeking to draw attention to the film’s impact on attitudes towards religion as a whole. The collective nature of the authorship gives the document considerable weight in its context of publication. Also, the connection with the special committee that had been investigating recruitment to the sisterhood carried particular force in terms of argument that the film would further discourage the vocational commitment of young people. While it was sent to Rank, the public nature of its subsequent dissemination ensured that its status and importance grew, especially when sent to targeted members of the film industry. Universal, as Rank’s distributor, was an important company for British films, representing a strong push in the American market for foreign product. The MPPDA was an influential organization that was extremely powerful and the cornerstone of the successful operation of the censorship system in the United States.

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The historian also needs to consider the issue of agency. The letter was intended to cause panic amongst the industry about the film. Crucially, it spread the debate about religion outside Catholic circles and in so doing drew attention to the influence of the LOD. Without being overtly threatening, it nevertheless demonstrated a knowledge of which strategies might work best in halting the film’s release. While the language was strong, there was at that stage no overt threat of boycotting cinemas that showed the film or of organizing protests. Perhaps they knew they did not need to issue outright threats since the power of the LOD was well known, particularly in the immediate context of their successful insistence on cuts to Selznick’s Duel in the Sun (1946).16 It is crucial, in documents like this, to place it in the correct context. There are several that can be identified for this document. The religious one has already been mentioned. Also significant is the delicate state of Anglo-American film relations, since it was written as the ‘Dalton Duty’ crisis was escalating in the United Kingdom. The adverse balance of payments situation there created pressure to reduce the amount of dollars that were remitted to the United States in respect of films shown in British cinemas. In response to a public ‘Bogart or Bacon’ campaign led by politician Robert Boothby, Chancellor Hugh Dalton showed his favour for bacon by imposing a 75 per cent ad valorem duty on American films from 6 August 1947; the American industry retaliated by boycotting the British market from 29 August.17 When the ‘Notre Dame’ letter was written, its authors would have known that Rank wanted to tread very carefully in his dealings with American companies, especially since he wanted to get as many Rank films released in the United States as possible. In view of the LOD’s power within the film industry, it is likely that the letter might have persuaded Rank to halt the film’s US release. We later learn, however, that Rank felt an obligation to Powell and Pressburger and to Universal, the film’s US distributor, to release the film if possible, since Universal were bound by contract to do so.18 There are therefore crucial international contexts that can be identified that exceed the document’s status as simply a communication by a religious lobby in respect of a single film that had caused offence. The impact of the letter was considerable. Its circulation has already been mentioned. It was the inciting incident that prompted the LOD to arrange a special screening of Black Narcissus in August, after which it was proclaimed ‘Condemned’, the damning rating reserved by the LOD for films that were considered to be most offensive.19 This action forced Rank, Powell and Pressburger to push for a compromise whereby the film was cut, in particular excising Sister Clodagh’s controversial flashback sequences. In the wake of this document as well as the film being given


the ‘Condemned’ label, the LOD escalated its campaign to persuade exhibitors not to show the film. It finally took the action that was unstated in the ‘Notre Dame’ letter, but was implicit in its logic. Protests were organized at screenings, for example, when Black Narcissus was shown in Fox West Coast Theatres in Los Angeles.20 The LOD lifted the ban when the cuts were agreed, the result being that the release print in the United States was 900 feet shorter than the UK version, with ten cuts suggested by film industry press baron Martin Quigley, a Catholic who had been the co-author of the original PCA code.21 American audiences therefore saw a different version of the film than the one released in Britain and elsewhere. Some documents assume a status of key importance for reasons that become apparent once their place in a series of events is known. In this case the letter signals very clearly that the LOD was an organization that was extremely aware of its political clout; it expressed a collective spirit that knew how to target the most influential sources of power. Above all, it was serious in its marshalling of support in opposition to the film’s release. In addition, the document’s close relationship (in timing and in sentiment) to the film being labelled ‘Condemned’ marks it as an extremely significant document. In terms of detailing a particular controversy, this set of interrelated documents allows the film historian to piece together the chronology of events, to gauge their significance, in a manner that is not particularly different from what historians do in research that does not involve cultural products. Unravelling the causes of the First World War, for example, similarly involves detailed examination of a range of different primary source material, relating documents to each other and arriving at an assessment of their significance. While no historian can hope to deliver ‘the truth’, it is clear that interpretations are based on evidence, and that evidence can be interpreted differently. So, while the account I offer of the censorship of Black Narcissus is based as fully as possible on available documents, there are still gaps that would have answered more of my questions. For example, there is nothing on Rank’s personal reaction to the crisis. As we have seen, his religious beliefs would probably have made his dilemma very difficult. The LOD sent the ‘Notre Dame’ letter to him as the head of the studio but also as a Christian who would probably sympathize with their arguments. Also, while we know exactly which cuts were made to the film, it has not been possible to trace a ‘censored’ version, to assess what their precise impact might have been. Nor do we know the precise reaction of Powell and Pressburger to the cutting of their film. John O’Connor of Universal-International claimed that

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Pressburger had supervised the cuts and considered them to be ‘fair, reasonable and just’, but it is likely that O’Connor sought to minimize any adverse impact the cuts might have had when the film was eventually released by emphasizing Pressburger’s compliance.22 Michael Powell’s papers, held at the British Film Institute’s Special Collections, contain a telegram dated November 1947 in which he indicates that he was not happy with the cuts. He wrote: ‘Censor has okayed new version of Narcissus. Please clarify which version will be acceptable in Latin America. Hope not USA version.’23 When the film was re-released and restored in the United States in the 1980s, as part of the Powell and Pressburger revival heralded by admirers such as Martin Scorsese, it was the British version that was shown. The main excisions were Clodagh’s flashbacks in Ireland, and it is fairly easy to judge how the film plays without them. This exercise shows that cutting the flashbacks has profound consequences. Without them there is no sense of collapsing time and space, or of hard distinctions between East and West. Each flashback is placed at a key point in the narrative, particularly the first flashback where we see Clodagh in the chapel, remembering her time with her fiancé Con in Ireland. We then move to the chapel, where Clodagh is praying, with the shadow of the cross over her face in a striking shot that communicates her dilemma. Choral sounds resonate on the soundtrack as she is clearly distracted from her prayer by the bright sky and foliage outside. Powell uses a dissolve to begin the flashback as we hear the words from the past, ‘Isn’t it a grand day, Con?’ Thus begins an associative memory, triggered by the present. The beautiful scenery of a lake in Ireland where Con and Clodagh are fishing then becomes the main focus, a shimmering, glittering, landscape. It is surprising to see Clodagh, with her vivid red hair, looking relaxed as she stands up in the water fishing. She is no longer the proud nun with her hair covered by a wimple. Her appearance in the flashback renders her exotic in comparison; in this regard East and West are similar. This collapsing of time and space in the film invites a reading that emphasizes its hybridity, its ambivalent status as a ‘document’ in itself that related to the time of its making. Turning to the larger political context of 1947, it seems possible to argue that Black Narcissus should be viewed as end-of-empire fiction, rather than simply a story about nuns losing control in the East. It was especially interesting to find that some of the LOD’s reviewers, present at the special screening of Black Narcissus that was arranged in August 1947 so that they could judge which rating it deserved, were worried about the depiction of the East being very attractive and seductive.


The nuns are defeated by the environment, the beauty of the place and by their inability to make their mark by influencing the local people. While that might appear to create an Orientalist dichotomy between East and West, I want to argue that the blurring of such boundaries on many occasions, such as the flashback considered above, leads to a sophisticated construction of both place and identity that challenges such an obvious oppositional positioning.24 Thus text and context come together in a more complex way than my original investigation suggested. Without the flashbacks, US audiences were deprived of these intriguing facets. While the reason for their excision was religious objection to the idea that a nun had a romantic past and that a failed love affair might explain her choice of becoming a nun, an additional effect is that the blurring of boundaries between East and West disappears. It was their visual representation that caused most concern, since we learn from uncut dialogue in a scene with the character Mr Dean that she had a romantic past. In terms of the general political scene at the time, the United States was adopting an increasingly dominant role in the East at a time when the British influence was on the decline. The terms of colonial power were shifting which explains why American commentators were sensitive about representations of the East. In turn, this invites a theoretically informed perspective that draws on the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Said.25 For the relationship between historical research and theory to work productively, the detailed contextual work has to be achieved first, and then appropriate theoretical models can be fruitfully adduced. But it has to be in that order, otherwise the work runs the risk of being inductive and theoreticist. In this case the contextual study of Black Narcissus suggests an understanding of how, for example, the film’s ambivalence about colonialism (in the sense that the mission fails and the certainties the nuns arrive with in terms of westernization are confounded), can be linked to Bhabha’s idea of the ‘third space’, of the anticipation of a postcolonial perspective created out of the inherent ambivalences of colonial discourse in many similar novels and films produced as the British Empire was on the wane. In this theorization, colonial binaries are blurred due to the inherently ‘hybrid’ nature of imperial relations, creating possibilities of a ‘third’ position whereby cultural meanings and representations are open to a greater appreciation of transgression and subversion. Similarly, Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ is useful in discussing the film’s depiction of the East that ironically was created entirely in the United Kingdom. Even though strict boundaries between East and West are complicated in the film, the design of many of the sequences can be related to the

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construction of the east as Orientalist ‘other’, an exotic environment that is beguiling, troubling and seductive. So, what lessons can the new film historian learn from this case study? To what extent is its complex and suggestive documentation typical of the hinterland of censorship, and how crucial is it for an understanding of censorship’s operation? The New Film History is based on an enhanced awareness of the importance of contexts of production, distribution and reception. As we have seen, censorship had a direct impact on the film, making broad generalizations about its reception impossible. In any case, the reception of a film in a different country will not be the same as in its ‘home’ market. Advertising and ‘showmanship’ will be different, catering to local markets that make press books, posters and local reviews very important sources in assessing how a particular film was ‘pitched’ to specific audiences. In order to fully understand the working of popular culture in any period, it is therefore crucial to assess the material surrounding the film text. Censorship acted as a constraint on many producers, since once a system was in place its rulings were often observed at an unconscious level so that films in the making anticipated the censors’ objections by avoiding controversial subjects. Black Narcissus was interesting because it confronted an issue that needed to be handled very carefully, as Breen pointed out as early as 1945. The fact of censorship did not always result in an avoidance of risqué content, but it is bound to have had an impact nevertheless. The 1940s and 1950s produced many test cases that pushed at the boundaries of the system, Black Narcissus being one of them that did so in a particularly controversial way.

Notes 1. See the discussion in Sarah Street, British Cinema in Documents (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 6–9. 2. See, for example, Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930–39 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–25 (London: Routledge, 1988); and James C. Robertson, The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–75 (London: Routledge, 1989). How British films were censored in the United States has been written about by Anthony Slide, Banned in the USA: British Films in the United States and their Censorship, 1933–60 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); and Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 119–39. 3. Street, Transatlantic Crossings, pp. 120–3. 4. Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–39 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997).

214 The New Film History 5. While the Irish censor had criticisms of the film’s handling of religious subject-matter, it was passed with undetermined cuts in June 1947. 6. For a full discussion of the details of this case, see Sarah Street, Black Narcissus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 62–74. 7. For a more extended discussion of this issue, see Street, Transatlantic Crossings, p. 125. 8. Eagle-Lion distributed some of Rank’s films in the United States in 1945. When the Black Narcissus controversy developed in 1946–47 its US distribution had become the responsibility of Universal-International. 9. All references to subsequent documents can be located in the PCA and LOD files on Black Narcissus in the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy Foundation, Los Angeles. Joseph Breen, 26 April 1945, PCA. 10. Joseph Breen, 26 April 1945, PCA. 11. Powell and Pressburger to Breen, 28 March 1946, PCA. 12. Breen to Powell and Pressburger, 5 June 1947, PCA. 13. Father Masterson to Mother Leticia Gallardon, 8 July 1947, LOD. 14. Virginia S. Tomlinson’s review in The Tidings, 11 July 1947, LOD. 15. The ‘Notre Dame’ letter, 20 July 1947; there are copies in both the PCA and LOD files. 16. See Gregory Black, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, 1940–75 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 17. For an account of the crisis, see Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 14–15. 18. Memo by Cardinal Spellman to Masterson reporting Jock Lawrence’s comments about Rank not being able to withdraw the film because of commitments to Powell and Pressburger and Universal International, 11 August 1947, LOD. 19. Notes of screening, 5 August 1947, LOD. 20. Memo by Masterson on boycott, 26 September 1947, LOD. 21. A detailed list of the cuts, and of Quigley’s involvement, can be found in the LOD files, n.d. In November John O’Connor of Universal, wrote to Masterson, ‘you can rest assured all prints will be cut exactly in form approved by you and the Legion’, 24 November 1947, LOD. 22. See report in the New York Times, 21 March 1948, giving details of the cuts and reporting Pressburger’s approval. 23. Michael Powell Special Collection, British Film Institute Library, Box 6, item 10 (G). 24. Street, Black Narcissus, p. 74. 25. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

14 Studying Cross-Cultural Marketing and Reception: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) Ingrid Stigsdotter and Tim Bergfelder

Internationally, Ingmar Bergman epitomizes the classic European auteur – even though he reached the peak of his career over 30 years ago, and withdrew from active film-making in the early 1980s. When two of his most famous films, Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1957) and Persona (1966), were re-released following a retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London in 2003, one critic noted that Bergman ‘has become a byword for bleakness … the cinematic equivalent of the daunting literary genius that everyone admires, but few take the time to read or understand’.1 Non-specialists who have never seen a film by the director might still recognize the famous scene from The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet, 1957) where a knight plays chess with Death; the image has become emblematic of subtitled art cinema and has been endlessly spoofed and parodied.2 At the 2003 retrospective many screenings were sold out, and since most of Bergman’s work is available on DVD, it is evident that his films are still being seen. Yet what are the attractions of Persona today for film viewers from different cultures? And to what extent are viewers’ responses, today and in the 1960s, guided by the audio-visual properties of the film text itself as opposed to external factors, such as marketing and reviews? In analysing the reception of Persona in Britain and Sweden at selected historical moments, this chapter will chart variations in how different audiences have read and understood this film. As we shall argue, the crucial factors that determine Persona’s shifting meanings are the relationship between art cinema and dominant moral values (especially regarding the question of sexual permissiveness); Bergman’s status in Sweden and internationally as a distinctive auteur; and problems of film translation. 215


Our subsequent discussion emphasizes the inescapably international dimension of film as a medium, the limitations of purely national perspectives in film analysis, and the transience or mutability of meanings across time. Beyond these primary objectives, our chapter aims to break down methodological dichotomies that characterize current approaches towards art and popular cinema. While the study of the latter has increasingly embraced the impact of social and historical contexts on filmic texts, the study of the former is still largely dedicated to uncovering an elusive singular meaning that has its origins in the creative imagination of a genial individual, seemingly untouched by any outside influence. By placing emphasis on the reception of Persona rather than on its production, and by considering the director Bergman only in so far as his auteur status affects audience expectations, we aim to avoid such essentialist trappings of traditional auteur criticism. We contend that the empirical research methods championed by the New Film History can be productively used to illuminate those workings and functions of art cinema that auteur criticism cannot or does not cover. In this respect we hope that our case study can serve as a template for future research into other directors and instances of cross-national reception. Let us begin by briefly sketching Persona’s plot. The film is a chamberpiece focusing on the relationship between two women, the actress Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) and the nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson). After the otherwise healthy Elisabet refuses to speak, Alma is asked to take care of her, accompanying the actress to a remote island cottage. There the two women become increasingly interdependent, and in sequences that may be the fruit of Alma’s imagination, their identities are blurred. The minimalist plot is framed by an enigmatic opening sequence featuring a film projector, a montage of images that includes references to several earlier Bergman films, and a young boy, who is looking at and touching a large screen where the faces of the film’s protagonists are blown up in a double portrait. The image of the boy returns in the brief closing sequence, and the film ends with the carbons of the arc lamp fading out. The screenplay was published to coincide with the film’s Swedish release, and in the introduction Bergman wrote that ‘art is kept alive for sentimental reasons, as a conventional act of courtesy towards the past, benevolently caring for the increasingly nervous citizens of leisure’,3 encouraging an interpretation of the film where Elisabet’s muteness is connected to the failure of art to make a meaningful contribution to society. Already during production, Persona was singled out for international promotion. Through some of the extant promotional literature it is

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possible to reconstruct marketing strategies for the film, both for domestic distribution and for foreign export. A useful source in this respect is the periodical Film in Sweden, published by the Swedish Film Institute (SFI). Apart from any editorial content, Film in Sweden was an extremely stylish publication, produced with a remarkable level of attention to design in terms of typography, quality of paper and photographic illustrations, thus suggesting by analogy that Swedish film was equally modern, sophisticated, artistic and cool, with ‘public appeal’ as well as artistic credibility.4 Both in its production values and in its content the periodical reflects the optimism surrounding the exportability of Swedish film during this period. Two issues of this multilingual publication (in German, English and French) featured stills from the production of Persona on their cover.5 The 1965 issue provided background information on the making of the film, including the casting of Ullmann and Andersson, accompanied by stills of the lead actresses and the director on location on the island of Fårö.6 A later issue contained translations of the Stockholm press reaction to Persona, and in an editorial Harry Schein, the founder of SFI, discussed Bergman’s ‘Swedishness’: ‘Ingmar Bergman certainly is Swedish, more Swedish than most when you consider his choice of themes, his characters, his stubbornness in rejecting lavish foreign offers in order to be able to continue to work in Sweden on his own terms and with his own instruments.’7 Persona premiered at the Stockholm cinema Spegeln on 18 October 1966, and the following day the evening newspaper Aftonbladet published the views of eight cinemagoers leaving the premiere. The interviewees consisted of six men: a 32-year old cinema usher, a 19-year old student, a 36-year old teacher, a company director, a press attaché, an artist; and two women – a 23-year old teacher and a housewife. Only four of the eight respondents revealed their age, but from the photographs that accompanied the article it is fair to estimate that the remaining respondents were in their forties or fifties. Using the comments by these viewers does not offer us an unmediated access to the film’s historical audience. Both the viewers and their comments were specifically selected by the newspaper. In any case, the chosen respondents are not necessarily representative of the opening night audience, and certainly do not represent the Swedish audience for the film more generally. Nevertheless, the short interviews do provide us with a fascinating insight into original audience reactions, as well as into a range of prevalent opinions at the time. Bibi Andersson’s performance was mentioned by most of the interviewees, and particularly telling here are the comments of the 19-year old male student. His general verdict of the film is that it was ‘hard to


understand’ and ‘not for a younger generation’, but he stated that ‘Bibi Andersson is of course fantastic, she reaches every age and level of education’. The critical establishment in Sweden also unanimously praised Andersson’s performance, but the student’s response indicates that Andersson’s established public persona significantly informed his understanding of the film. Andersson had previously appeared in Bergman films such as Smultronstället and Det Sjunde Inseglet, and was widely known to have a private relationship with the director. But within the context of the student’s reference to her, it is equally relevant that Andersson was also appearing in other films, many of which dealt with sexual issues in a fairly explicit manner.8 Several of Aftonbladet’s interviewees made reference to the film’s style, its formal asceticism and the quality of the photography. The two female interviewees singled out the film’s introductory sequence as being particularly powerful, and this was a perception shared by professional critics at the time. In his review of the film appearing in the same issue of Aftonbladet as the interviews, Jurgen Schildt compared the effect of Persona’s opening with the famous razorblade eye slicing in Un Chien Andalou (1929), intended to open up the receptive facilities of the viewer for what follows.9 Critics have often described Persona as wilfully obscure,10 but this assessment seems to be contradicted by some of the comments made by the Swedish premiere attendees. The company director stated that the film had ‘a warmth and humanity’ that he found lacking in recent Bergman films. Another respondent, the cinema usher, explained that he used to work at Röda Kvarn, the Stockholm cinema that had been the host for most of Ingmar Bergman’s previous film premieres, and he claimed that Persona’s premiere audience left the cinema looking ‘generally more happy and satisfied’ than had been the norm in the case of other Bergman films. The only really negative comment published in the newspaper article came from the artist Carl Gyllenberg.11 Dismissing the film as ‘radio theatre with inserted filmic effects’, he complained that it was a film à thèse on ‘the female face as mirror of the soul’. Demonstrating his knowledge of film history and aesthetics and articulating his own personal tastes, Gyllenberg declared Persona to be simple, derivative and old-fashioned. Among Swedish mainstream critics, the film was proclaimed a masterpiece; the only dissenting voice was Carl-Eric Nordberg in I Veckan, who criticized Bergman’s resigned acceptance of artists’ inability to engage usefully with contemporary society. Nordberg acknowledged the beauty of the film, but claimed that ‘silence is the language of defeat’.12


This attitude towards Bergman’s perceived apolitical existentialism was widespread in the leftist climate of 1960s Sweden.13 But, as Birgitta Steene has pointed out, Persona was perceived as less problematic from this perspective than the rest of Bergman’s output during the decade, and could be endorsed without too many reservations, which added to the film’s status as an instant classic.14 One element that was to play a significant part in Persona’s international reception, but which was practically absent from the original Swedish press reaction, was the film’s sexual explicitness. While one critic mentioned in passing that ‘the so called “sex monologue” ’ had been much referred to before the film’s release, it did not engender any extensive discussion in the Swedish press.15 This should be compared with the uproar surrounding two Bergman films released earlier in the decade, The Virgin Spring ( Jungfrukällan, 1960) and The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963). Scenes of sexual violence in the former and promiscuity and autoeroticism in the latter led to accusations that Swedish censors were biased in Bergman’s favour, allowing the inclusion of material that would have been cut if appearing in a film by a lesser-known director.16 In the case of Tystnaden, the publicity associated with the censorship debate boosted the film’s box-office results, making it the most successful Swedish film of 1963.17 However, cinemagoers’ reactions indicate that many viewers found the film ‘offensive’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘outrageous’.18 Swedish censorship regulations had gone through a series of liberalizing reforms in the early 1960s, a tendency reinforced when in 1963 Tage Erlander’s Social Democrat government replaced the existing committee of the Film Examination Board (Filmgranskningsrådet) with a new group of delegates consisting largely of writers and cultural personalities with progressive ideas.19 There were close connections between radical filmmakers and politicians on the left in this period, and the cultural climate turned in favour of films that challenged established norms of what could be shown on screen; shortly after the Tystnaden debate, the government rebuked the Film Examination Board’s ban on Vilgot Sjöman’s controversial 491 (1964) about a group of youth offenders, the only alteration deemed necessary being the insertion of music on the soundtrack of one scene to drown out a series of expletives considered particularly offensive. The absence of references to Persona’s sexual content in the film’s Swedish reception is thus partly to be understood in relation to the general relaxation of censorship in this period. It also indicates a tendency, at least among middle- and high-brow critics, to accept that sexual explicitness in a Bergman film forms part of the integrity of the artwork,


a notion tested in the censorship cases against Tystnaden and Jungfrukällan. Sexual content in a Bergman film thus constituted something qualitatively quite different from similar material in low-brow exploitation films, and it was the director’s auteur status and reputation, as well as the perceived difficulty and seriousness of his films that elevated them not only to a culturally but also a morally higher level. When Bergman’s work began to circulate outside of Sweden, however, these distinctions between morality and cultural status became blurred. Internationally, in the mid-1960s, the term ‘Swedish cinema’ did not only engender connotations with serious artistic endeavour, but could also entail associations with pornography. Although the public exhibition of pornographic film was illegal in Sweden until 1971, hard-core material was produced prior to the liberalization, some of which was exported.20 Furthermore, as the tolerance of nudity on screen among Swedish censors was higher than among their counterparts in, for example, Britain, even mainstream productions gained a reputation for sexual frankness, with certain films verging towards soft-core pornography. Already in 1950, Gerd Osten had described Swedish cinema as ‘notorious’ for its sexual explicitness, and in the following decades, many films were censored before they could be released in other countries.21 For example, a suggestive nude-bathing sequence in One Summer of Happiness (Hon dansade en sommar, dir. Arne Mattson, 1951) was partly cut when the film was released in Britain and the United States.22 Promoters of Swedish art cinema were acutely aware of its ambiguous international standing, and SFI founder Harry Schein addressed the topic in Film in Sweden,23 drawing attention to the fact that in West Germany the term ‘Schwedenfilm’ had become a synonym for sexually explicit films, regardless of actual nationality.24 In some cases, Swedish films were moreover modified to fit particular national expectations of home-grown soft-porn genres. The use of sex to attract audiences to Persona in the 1960s can be deduced, for example, from the Brazilian title for the film, Quando as mulheres pecam (‘When Women Sin’), suggesting to Brazilian audiences the domestic genre of ‘pornochanchadas’ rather than the connotations of drama, psychoanalysis and philosophy that can be found in the original title.25 Clearly at pains to set the record straight, Schein countered that foreign perceptions of the relationship between Swedish cinema and sex ‘reveal less about Swedish films than they do about the moral (pre)conceptions of our foreign friends’.26 Persona’s British premiere took place almost a year after the film went on general release in Sweden, and trade-press reviews in Britain offer some insights into expectations of audience responses at the time.


Kine Weekly’s booking guide described Persona to potential exhibitors as follows: ‘Symbolic analysis of a relationship between nurse and patient. Camerawork superb, theme baffling, acting haunting. Attractive proposition for highly specialised halls.’27 A more detailed description stated that ‘this strange, cold, difficult film evokes atmosphere and provokes thought, but it is far too obscure for wide distribution. Attractive for Bergman fans.’28 Suggesting what aspects of the film might be used by exhibitors in promoting the film, the review listed ‘visual qualities, acting, attraction of baffling theme, name of director’.29 The Daily Cinema described Persona as an ‘avant-garde psychological allegory in Black and White’, and rated the film as: … a masterpiece; but, like all masterpieces, not to be fully understood or appreciated at first sight. It demands concentration, receptivity and a mind not clouded by physical or mental weariness. It will bring joy to all devotees of the director’s work; but anyone who (like a schoolboy with the Bible) goes in search of ‘the dirty bits’ only, will have a long and boring wait.30 As in Kine Weekly, Bergman’s auteur status plays a significant part in promoting the film’s appeal in this review, while placing the film itself firmly in the category of an ‘art house masterpiece’. At the same time the author acknowledges a less refined attraction the film might hold for certain viewers, in other words the association of Swedish cinema with sex that Harry Schein was addressing in his article in Film in Sweden. It is particularly interesting to see how two stereotypes of film spectators are invoked: an infantilized viewer eager for titillation, but bored by everything else, contrasted with the Bergman aficionado, equipped with the necessary intellectual capacity, who comes to contemplate the difficult work of a master, suggesting cinema-going as intellectual work rather than leisure. The 1967 British trade reviews of Persona included several references to the effect of subtitles on the viewing process. In Kine Weekly, subtitles are described as ‘a handicap in a film that discusses the limitations of language’,31 and Daily Cinema’s reviewer reports that the effect of ‘white on white’ caused restlessness among the general audience.32 This reminds us that in Anglophone film markets in particular, the use of subtitles has traditionally contributed to the differentiation between popular and art cinema. Whereas the latter is associated with educated audiences, literary qualities, and ‘active’ interpretation, the former tends to be bracketed with a more ‘passive’ enjoyment of images, and less


refined patrons. It should be remembered in this context that in the 1960s, popular European films were still shown in Britain in dubbed format, and Persona’s subtitles therefore signalled its status as art cinema in different manner than they do today, when more or less all nonEnglish language films are subtitled, and Anglophone audiences tend to associate popular cinema almost exclusively with Hollywood. British trade reviews in 1967 were generally positive towards Persona, but also cautious about its mass appeal, while specialist film magazines such as Films and Filming, Movie and Sight & Sound devoted long and detailed reviews to the film.33 These focused on the problematic relationship between art and artist, reality and fantasy, potential avenues for viewer identification, the self-reflexive aspect of the film, and its use of Brechtian or Godardian elements. Among these articles, only Raymond Durgnat and Susan Sontag commented upon the film’s sexual elements. Durgnat discussed the relationship between Elisabet’s husband and Alma, and interpreted the change in costume from white to black after the scene showing Elisabet entering Alma’s bedroom as a hint of a lesbian relationship.34 Sontag described the film as moving ‘beyond eroticism’, arguing that the only sexually charged scene was Alma’s monologue, and she emphasized the fact that the sexual atmosphere here is created through words, rather than flashback images.35 Comparing these responses across a range of different constituencies, it becomes evident that in an Anglophone context in the 1960s Persona rather awkwardly straddled two film categories – its status as a ‘Swedish film’ meant that a liberal attitude towards sexually explicit images was expected, but the film’s complex formal structure and bleakness meant that trade magazines cautioned exhibitors from marketing the film in this way. Similarly, Bergman’s status as a serious auteur seems to have led film critics to downplay the sexual elements of the film. This focus on the intellectually rather than sexually challenging aspects of the film was perhaps reinforced through censorship; the shot of an erect penis in the opening montage was removed from the prints shown in Anglophone countries, and the dialogue was also censored in the original Englishlanguage subtitles. How have attitudes changed towards Persona since the late 1960s? According to Birgitta Steene’s fascinating audience research, carried out at the Stockholm cinema Fågel Blå during a Bergman season in the early 1990s, Persona appears high up in the list of films cited as ‘favourite Bergman films’,36 but interestingly, the film divided male and female viewers. It was more popular among men, who appeared to like its formal qualities, but it was criticized as too angst-ridden by female


respondents.37 Although interviewees mentioned the aesthetics of the film and its complexity as reasons for liking Persona, none of them cited its self-reflexive dimension, which is often what appears to have drawn critics and scholars to the film. Steene notes that it is primarily the psychological dimension and the relationship between the two women that appears to be of interest to the Fågel Blå audience.38 There is a tendency among Steene’s respondents to contrast their own enjoyment of Bergman’s films with what they perceive to be the disapproving reception the director faced by previous generations,39 and they stress their distance from what they see as an indifferent or negative attitude towards Bergman in Swedish society as a whole.40 In the view of contemporary Swedish Bergman fans, the director has been misunderstood by both his leftist and bourgeois detractors. Fans mention the 1960s radical critique of Bergman’s bourgeois worldview and individualistic concerns,41 but they also argue that his films contain an emotional excess not deemed acceptable in mainstream Swedish society – respondents refer to memories of relatives dismissing Bergman as a ‘disgusting’, ‘dreary’ and ‘horrid’ maker of ‘sexually fixated’ and ‘hysterical’ films.42 References to such responses from an older generation indicate that while the official Swedish Bergman reception in the 1960s may have exhibited, as we have seen, an urbane liberalism in sexual matters, such enlightened attitudes may not necessarily have extended to general audiences. In the 1990s, meanwhile, the respondents in Steene’s study prefer to portray themselves as a minority (or to put it from a different perspective, as a sub-cultural elite, stressing its exclusivity), reporting that their viewing of Bergman films is perceived as ‘strange’, and that it elicits hostile reactions where the films are described as ‘heavy’, ‘depressing’ and ‘dreary’.43 In a defiant gesture, Steene’s respondents are keen to emphasize their appreciation of Bergman’s sense of humour, thereby contradicting the stereotypical image of him as the director of gloom par excellence.44 In Britain, ‘Bergman’ and ‘humour’ are certainly not concepts that go together very often, except in an ironic sense. A good example for the latter can be provided by an anecdote from the previously mentioned 2003 Bergman retrospective at the National Film Theatre (NFT). During the screening of the trailer used to market the American release of Persona in 1967, the dramatic voice-over caused audible amusement in the auditorium, and one of the critical quotations appearing at the end of the trailer generated loud outbursts of laughter: ‘Haunting. Intense. A Monologue describes a bizarre sexual encounter with two boys on a beach. It is verbal stimulation (New York Times)’. In its juxtaposition of


analogies to both high art and sexually explicit representation, this quotation is, as we have demonstrated earlier, a perfect illustration of the paradoxical position Persona occupied within British and American expectations of Swedish cinema. For a cinephile London audience in the twenty-first century, on the other hand, the combination of a portentous voice-over and references to sex on the beach, dubiously placed within the boundaries of high art rather than low culture, strikes a note of incongruity, and appears to be recognized as a stereotype of 1960s European art cinema marketing. The collective amusement at the trailer suggests that the NFT audience certainly did not see itself as being there in order to be titillated by strange orgies on beaches. If the NFT audience’s reaction to the 1967 trailer can be seen as postmodern and ironic, then the British press coverage of the 2003 Bergman retrospective was dominated by a more nostalgic and reflective tenor. Critics reminisced about a bygone era when the release of a new Bergman film was a major event, while Bergman’s status as an auteur was cemented through his influence on other film-makers, such as Woody Allen, the French New Wave, Tarkovsky, Robert Altman, Anthony Minghella and François Ozon.45 When it came to the reception of Persona’s theatrical re-release (and subsequent release on video/DVD), there was a consensus on the film’s status as an iconic piece of modernism, but individual responses varied greatly: according to The Times the narrative was ‘as obvious and logical as a child’s fable’,46 while the Observer’s reviewer found the film ‘even more puzzling’ than when it first came out.47 A number of critics mentioned that the re-release included previously censored footage, but it was not until the release of the DVD, which includes the original trailer and a comparison between old and new subtitles, that critics really paid any attention to the film’s sexually explicit material.48 The subtitling of Persona is of particular interest when considering the 2003 re-release in Britain, because the new print came with updated English-language subtitles. In the monologue sequence where Alma tells Elisabet about her sexual adventure on a beach, the updated translation provides a much more detailed description of what occurs, and the choice of words or decision to leave something untranslated reveals how the level of sexual frankness was censored in the original subtitles.49 For example, the old subtitles use the expression ‘finish’ rather than ‘come’; although it is still clear from the context that Alma is referring to male and female orgasms, the translation reduces the vividness of the image. Similarly, the new subtitles make explicit what is meant when Alma’s friend ‘helped him in’ and ‘he pulled out of her’, while in the 1967


translation ‘she showed him how’ and ‘he left her’ are more vague in their allusions. In some cases the new translation is even slightly more graphic than the original dialogue. For example, although it can be grasped from the context that ‘she helped him in’ is an appropriate expression, ‘she showed him how’ actually comes closer to a direct translation of Alma’s words. This shows a change of attitudes going beyond the requirements of British censorship, indicating that the translators have opted to avoid euphemisms even when they are actually present in the original. What was considered too explicit in 1967 is perhaps not frank enough for a twenty-first century art cinema audience, and considering the way in which sexual taboos within art cinema have disappeared in recent years (for example in the films by directors such as Cathérine Breillat, Gaspar Noé or Patrice Chereau), Persona seems positively tame in comparison. Another important difference between the 1960s and the present is that film viewing now takes place in many disparate, and increasingly individual contexts. In a review of the release of Persona on video, Filmwaves paradoxically states that Persona ought to be seen in the cinema ‘with its darkness, and its noiseless environment’.50 But the review then goes on to state that the film ‘does require uncompromised attention from the audience … If you watch this film at home make sure the answering machine is on.’51 It is interesting to compare this with Daily Cinema’s 1967 caution that Persona ‘demands concentration, receptivity and a mind not clouded by physical or mental weariness’.52 Technology and attitudes to sex may have changed, but while in Sweden Bergman’s status remains as ambivalent today as it was in the 1960s, in a British context, Persona still demands a film viewer willing to shut the world out and concentrate. Beyond the specific reception history we have mapped over the previous pages, it is worth concluding on the wider implications emerging from our research. As we have argued, the study of art cinema, or indeed of most other non-English-language modes of film-making, appears to have been bypassed by the methodology of the New Film History, and remains dominated by approaches intent on identifying a determinate meaning that can be traced back either to the director’s artistic intentions, or alternatively to the perceived national characteristics of the country the film comes from.53 Conversely, with a few exceptions,54 most of the New Film History published since the late 1980s has focused on popular cinema (in many instances specifically Hollywood) and the industrial contexts and audiences it engenders. This has led to a remarkable reversal of previous distinctions between formulaic mass entertainment and


modernist art cinema. It is thus now the latter that has become a ‘closed text’ in contemporary film studies, while the former is celebrated for its ‘openness’ and polysemy. As our case study demonstrates, such dichotomies are ultimately simplistic. In our view, instead of undermining the institution, history and legacy of art cinema, reception-centred approaches actually help restore the polysemy and relevance of this mode of film practice, albeit according to new theoretical parameters.

Notes 1. Allan Hunter, ‘Height of Raw Emotion Laid Bare’, Scotland on Sunday, 9 March 2003, p. 8. 2. Already in 1968, a short film was made, consisting entirely of parodies of Bergman films called De Düva/The Dove (dir. George Coe and Anthony Lover, USA). The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) lists Swedish, British, Taiwanese, Polish and American films and TV programmes that spoof The Seventh Seal. Among the more prominent ones are Love and Death (dir. Woody Allen, USA, 1975) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (dir. Peter Hewitt, USA, 1991). 3. ‘Konsten hålls vid liv av sentimental skäl, som en konventionell hövlighet mot the förflutna, en välvillig omsorg om fritidens allt nervösare medborgare.’ Ingmar Bergman, Persona (Stockholm: P. A. Nordstedts & Söners förlag, 1966), p. 11. 4. For more information on this publication, see Harry Schein’s introduction to the first issue: Film in Sweden, 1 (1965), pp. 1–2. 5. Film in Sweden, 3 (1965), (front cover); and Film in Sweden, 3 (1966/67), (front cover). 6. Film in Sweden, 3 (1965), pp. 2, 7–8. 7. Film in Sweden, 3 (1966/67), p. 1. It is worth noting here that while Persona was produced by SFI in Sweden, many of Ingmar Bergman’s films have in fact been co-productions. 8. For example Älskarinnan (The Mistress, AKA The Swedish Mistress, dir. Vilgot Sjöman, 1962) and Juninatt ( June Night, dir. Lars-Erik Liedholm, 1965). 9. Jurgen Schildt, ‘Människan maskerna och mästerskapet’, Aftonbladet (19 October 1966), p. 4. 10. Susan Sontag, ‘Persona’, Sight & Sound, 36:4 (Autumn 1967), p. 186. 11. Gyllenberg directed one film in the 1950s (Som i Drömmar/As in Dreams, 1954). 12. Carl-Eric Nordberg, ‘Ingmar Bergman och det gåtfulla ansiktet’, I Veckan (22 November 1966) (SFI press cuttings – n.p.). 13. A detailed discussion of the ideological shift in Swedish film criticism in relation to Ingmar Bergman can be found in Birgitta Steene, Måndagar med Bergman (Stockholm: Symposion, 1996), pp. 109–14. 14. Steene, Måndagar med Bergman, p. 110. 15. Gunnar Tannefors, ‘Virtuost I’, SE (20 October 1966) (SFI press cuttings – n.p.) 16. In both cases, complaints led the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Judiciary and Civil Administration to investigate and eventually clear the


17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

censors. Cf. Erik Skoglund, Filmcensuren (Stockholm: PAN/Nordstedts, 1971), pp. 161–6. Steene, Måndagar med Bergman, pp. 30–1. Skoglund, Filmcensuren, p. 165. Ibid., pp. 106–15. See also Anders Åberg, ‘7 70 1 skandal’, HumaNetten, 9 (Autumn 2001) online at: http://www.vxu.se/hum/publ/humanetten/ nummer9/ index.html Skoglund, Filmcensuren, pp. 186–9. Gerd Osten, ‘Svensk ensamhet’, in Gerd Osten and Artur Lundkvist, Erotiken i filmen (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1950), p. 21. Skoglund, Filmcensuren, pp. 155–6. Harry Schein, ‘The Swedish Knack’, Film in Sweden, 1 (1966), pp. 3–4. Schein, ‘The Swedish Knack’, p. 3. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, ‘The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference, Power’, Screen, 26:3/4 (May–August 1985), p. 44. Harry Schein, ‘The Swedish Knack’, p. 3. Kinematograph Weekly, 30 September 1967, p. 20. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid. M.B., ‘Persona’, The Daily Cinema, 4 October 1967, pp. 6 and 16. Kinematograph Weekly, 30 September 1967, p. 21. M.B., ‘Persona’, The Daily Cinema, p. 16. Robin Wood, Movie, 15 (1968), pp. 22–4; Raymond Durgnat, Films and Filming, 14.3 (December 1967), pp. 20–1; Susan Sontag, Sight & Sound, 36:4 (Autumn 1967), pp. 186–91, 212. Durgnat, Films and Filming, 14:3 (December 1967), p. 20. Sontag, Sight & Sound, 36:4 (Autumn 1967), p. 188. After Det Sjunde Inseglet, Smultronstället and Fanny och Alexander. Steene, Måndagar med Bergman, pp. 143–4. Ibid., pp. 149–50. This ‘older generation’ includes in fact several different generations, since the age of respondents in Steene’s study range between 20–67. Steene, Måndagar med Bergman, pp. 90–1 and 119. Ibid., pp. 113–14. Ibid., pp. 92–3. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., pp. 146–7. See, for example, Ryan Gilbey, ‘The Final Cut’, Guardian Review, 20 December 2002, p. 2; David Thomson, ‘Once, the films of the great Swedish director were a matter of life’, Independent on Sunday (5 January 2003), Nigel Andrews, ‘A Beautiful Duty’, Financial Times, 11 January 2003, p. 6. Stephen Dalton, ‘Persona’, The Times, 1 February 2003, p. 4. Philip French, ‘Other releases’, Observer Review, 2 February 2003, p. 7. See, for example, Peter Aspden, ‘Persona’, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, Critics Choice, 3 May 2003, p. 42; Philip Horne, ‘Persona’, Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2003, p. 15. The Tartan DVD release allows viewers to compare this section of the film with new and old subtitles.

228 The New Film History 50. 51. 52. 53.

MZJ, ‘Persona’, Filmwaves, 21 (Spring 2003), p. 54. Ibid. M.B., ‘Persona’, The Daily Cinema, p. 16. For a more detailed debate of these issues, see Tim Bergfelder, ‘National, Transnational, or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies’, Media, Culture and Society, 27:3 (2005), pp. 315–31. 54. Cf. the chapter ‘With the Compliments of the Auteur: Art Cinema and the Complexities of its Reading Strategies’, in Janet Staiger, Interpreting Film: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 178–95.

15 The Wicker Man (1973) Email Digest: A Case Study in Web Ethnography Justin Smith

Studies of film reception have, thus far, fallen into two distinctive methodological categories. A broadly text-centred approach emerged in so-called Screen studies, which developed a range of psychoanalytically informed, universalist theories of spectatorship. More recently, sociologically and historically derived investigations have considered audiences empirically and, latterly, ethnographically. However, what this second branch of enquiry gains in its culturally grounded specificity, it tends to lose in generalist accounts of cinema-going as a social phenomenon from which the nature of audience response and textual affect is, crucially, often missing. Since the well-documented decline of cinema-going as a mass recreation and the technological diffusion of the film text across a number of different platforms and spaces, niche taste-communities have emerged with their own distinctive, committed and frequently eloquent attitudes to film consumption. Some of these offer the scholar a potentially productive new approach to bridging the divide between audiences and spectatorship. One of the key attributes of what have come to be considered cult films is the network of committed enthusiasts who share their private passions with like-minded fans. Indeed, cult status of a film is dependent upon audience response. In recent years the Internet has largely eclipsed print fanzines as the essential medium for such clans. This chapter will draw on recent developments in fan studies to examine a web-based newsgroup about the British cult classic The Wicker Man (1973). Focusing on a selective trawl from a total of over 2000 contributions since 1999, this survey highlights some key theoretical issues in web ethnography and offers insights into the politics and rituals of cult film fandom. 229


Web ethnography Matt Hills sounds a note of caution about the embarrassment of riches which newsgroups provide for virtual ethnographers.1 We must be aware at the outset that we are engaging here with texts which are not ‘windows’ into fandom itself, but are structured performances of fandom across a semantic field. For sure, the Internet presents its own challenges for the ‘conventional’ ethnographer. First, it lacks a concrete setting and therefore cannot be face to face. It follows from this that it is not a ‘real’ place and it does not have ‘real’ communities. Therefore, second, it presents problems of identity and authenticity. For Christine Hine, ‘The Internet is an active process of meaning-making.’2 It is impossible to achieve a holistic ethnography of Internet activity, because online environments restrict the opportunity for genuine interactivity. These limitations are not reasons in themselves not to participate or ‘play the game’, but they are significant preconditions of engagement. There are also further features of newsgroups in particular to take into account. Email communities are not interactive forums based on presence (like chatrooms), but correspondence systems based on absence. What we are presented with are not ‘live’ interactions, but texts. Therefore, ethnography on the Internet becomes a process of reading and writing texts, and the ethnographer’s job is to develop an understanding of the meanings which underlie and are enacted through these textual practices. There is a need to interpret not only the text, however, but the situation, the context. As Hine has it: ‘In this portrayal, the ethnography is a physically located one which renders the Internet as a repository of texts rather than a site for social interaction.’3 In newsgroups: ‘A textual focus places emphasis on the ways in which contributions are justified and rendered authoritative, and on the identities which authors construct and perform through their postings.’4 I have been registered with The Wicker Man Digest for four years, though have never posted myself.5 This strategy has been deliberate. My approach here is what sociologists call non-participant, or covert, observation. In newsgroup parlance, I am a ‘lurker’. The principle behind my non-participant stance in the account of the group which follows is that genuine participation might have made members (and the moderator) wary about my ulterior (research) motives. On the other hand an entirely fictitious persona as ‘just another fan’ would have been disingenuous and unethical. Furthermore, on a personal note, I do not feel the need to participate in order to understand or express my own

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fandom, and am able to treat the material as it stands with a certain detached (and critical) equanimity. This said, I can envisage counterarguments for the additional benefits of active participation. Hine reminds us that discourse analysis which is concerned primarily with utterance-as-text, has the tendency to produce unverifiable interpretations.6 However, it has the advantage of the ethnographer being able to make texts available to the reader too – a sort of democratic principle. Though this is impossible to sustain across large amounts of material where (as in this case) selection of relevant evidence is unavoidable, at least the interpretations I place upon such findings can be measured against the passages of text upon which I comment. In this sense at least, the reliance of discourse analysis upon textual strategies is observable. My pragmatism here rests upon two principles. First that we attend to cumulative structures of feeling across strings of messages as well as dissecting individual utterances in the context of the communicative flow. And, second, the divination of such meanings must be related back to an empirical analysis of postings data. Finally, if virtual ethnography seems fraught with inaccuracy and dogged by supposition, we may derive some comfort from the knowledge that web ‘performances’ over time tend towards patterns of consistency which are more rather than less reliable than this world of fake identities and manufactured falsehoods might at first suggest. I shall approach this material across three categories: discourses, debates and identities. But first, I shall introduce the specific field of enquiry.

The Wicker Man Digest Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man is set on the eve of May Day 1973 in a remote (fictitious) Scottish island ruled by Christopher Lee’s totemic laird, Lord Summerisle, where the ‘old religion’ has been reinvoked to sustain a community dependent upon the faltering success of local fruit and vegetable harvests. News of a missing girl reaches devout Christian police sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) on the mainland. He flies out to Summerisle to investigate the disappearance and is inveigled into a web of Pagan mystery which leads to his horrific sacrificial death. Celebrated for its charismatic central performances and beguiling amalgam of generic tropes (part detective story, part folk musical, part horror), the film became as notorious for the unusual circumstances of its hasty production, post-production butchering and distribution débâcles.7 Resurrected in the United States by a couple of enthusiastic cinéastes, it


gradually gained a transatlantic cult following generated partly by college campus screenings, and partly through cable tv, video and DVD re-releases.8 Since the 1980s an active and dedicated fan culture has emerged, initially around print fanzines such as Summerisle News and Nuada, location tourism and television documentaries, and latterly on the Internet with newsgroups debating releases of soundtrack and DVD, literature, memorabilia, merchandise and collectables.9 Such evidence demonstrates the entry of the film into a range of critical and commercial discourses where it is really transformed into something else: the raw material of a discursive site for creative and critical activity. The question remains, however, as to what critics (be they fans, journalists, broadcasters or academics) derive from such activity. To employ Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, what kind of ‘cultural capital’ does cult fandom produce? The newsgroup is an extended many-to-many email correspondence, usually moderated by one individual who sorts and (potentially at least) edits messages before posting them to the group. So this is a kind of prerecorded broadcast, in contrast to the chatroom which is a live broadcast of many-to-many ‘conversations’. While these forums lack the visual style and technical sophistication of websites, they construct a palpable sense of community. Additionally, some Internet service providers (such as Yahoo) have created their own directory structures for the organization of, and access to, newsgroups. So, for example, the string leading to the Wicker Man Digest is http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/ group/wickerman/. Yahoo’s formatted introductory page to the Wicker Man Digest informs the casual browser that this was founded on 24 September 1999 and has 406 members (i.e., individuals who have registered in order to access the newsgroup and its mailings). The page also gives a calendar of recent postings and a summary of numbers of messages posted and new members joined within the last seven days (presumably as an indicator of a group’s level of activity). Should one choose to join the group (requiring the submission only of a name or alias and an email address), access is then provided to additional features which include: the entire message list history and the ability to send postings to it; together with Chat, Files, Photos, Links, Database, Polls, Members, Calendar. The nature of the information provided under these standard headings is at the discretion of the group’s originator and administrator (or ‘moderator’). Members are invited (though not obliged) to supply at registration their name, location, age and gender. A note is made of when they joined and

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whether or not they are currently online. Since it was established this newsgroup has posted some 2049 messages.

Cult discourses Much may be adduced from attention to particular modes of address and self-presentation within the group. At its inception the moderator initiated the following opening gambit: OK, since the message on alt.cult-movies just over 12 hours ago, this list has grown to … ahem … 4 members. All male so far (surprise, surprise). So, let’s start off with an easy point for discussion. When did you first experience the film? Who has seen the full 102 minute version? What WM merchandise have you managed to pick up? OK, I first saw it in late 1997, I think (maybe 1996). It was Children in Need night (for at least one member who isn’t in the UK, Children in Need is a fundraising night on the BBC), and I needed to escape from the tedium. So I flicked around, and saw the scene between Howie and the Murtle, the girl who is supposed to be Rowan’s sister, when they are painting hares. Intrigued, I watched for the rest of the night, thinking that it was a great film. When it got to the ending, I was amazed. I bought the video the next day, and it took some time until I got on the net to find out about the ‘missing’ scenes. I have the 102 m print on the Media label, plus the Moviedrome 95 m version and 2 copies of the 87 m version. Also, the CD (which isn’t rare, despite what people claim!). FYI, there are at least 2 books being written about the film. Allan Brown, the Sunday Times journalist, has written one, as has another. I have some more info, about some other exciting events next year. I’ll just check that they’re OK to reproduce. The thing that I’m looking for is the Cinefantastique article on the film. Anyone got it, and would care to share a scan of it with us all? Come on, contributions from you all please … oh, I think that we have another subscriber. BTW, can anyone think of anywhere else to publicise the list? The moderator quickly sets out his stall, offering a lot of routes into debate in this opening salvo, relying on a base of only four members. Yet with his hands-on approach to moderation, the group rapidly becomes


established and extends its bank of regular contributors. Yet the way in which new members or ‘newbies’ present themselves and are received is instructive in itself. We might usefully compare two sets of introductions here. First, here are female newcomers M1 and Q: Hi everyone! Happy to be here. I first saw the Wicker Man when the uncut version came to Boston in 1973 – I was eight. It was at the Nickelodeon Theatre (an Art House) which my parents never went to, but Mom was hooked on satanism movies and read about WM and thought, somehow, it qualified. I loved the film and remembered parts of it vividly. When I finally saw it again (when I was nearly 20) it was the cut version and I was shocked that a lot of the parts I remembered weren’t there. I used to corner people and harangue them about it, which led to confusing exchanges, such as: Me: Did you see ‘Wicker Man’? Victim: Yeah, it was great! Me: But where was the snail sex? Victim: Huh? Me: I saw it when I was a kid! There was definitely snail sex! Victim: (backing away slowly) Whatever you say. Needless to say, I was totally vindicated by the restored version. *smug grin* My fiance and I adore the film and watch it frequently AND we just got the soundtrack! It’s just marvellous and if you haven’t heard it is definitely worth the money. It was 16.00 dollars US at Newbury Comics (Boston) and it’s just beautiful. The packaging, the booklet (which is stunning and loaded with fascinating info) even the cd itself is perfect and all in keeping with the film. Obviously, as much attention and love went into this as went into the original film. Sorry if I’m waxing enthusiastic; you all have probably talked this to death by now, but I am excited. My love and I even talked about going on a Wicker Man pilgrimage to Scotland when we can afford it. Anyway, new member, blah, blah, blah. Not much interesting to say about me. I’m an eclectic solitary witch, I live in Greater Boston and I’m a 37 year old female. Anything else will probably come out in the normal course of events. Looking forward to chatting about the best film ever! M1

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Whilst this has the air of a confessional testimony – a kind of vindication of fandom – it is a candid, unashamed account. Its helter-skelter pace and flitting scope, coupled with humorous anecdotes and self-mockery hint at the emotional freedom fandom accords the participant to indulge a range of personal feelings. Note the use of the rather quaint turns of phrase: ‘My fiancé and I’ and later, ‘My love and I’. Also the comedy of ‘where’s the snail sex’ and the beautifully oxymoronic: ‘Not much interesting to say about me … I’m an eclectic solitary witch’. Eclecticism is especially important. For such outpourings allow for an almost undifferentiated stream of emotional consciousness to range across diverse matters both profound and inconsequential, without the attribution of value or distinction. In this way the virtual anonymity of the web is liberating; it enables throwing caution to cyberspace. In some ways, this is evident in the case of Q also: Permission to land on Summerisle!!! My husband Andy was always raving on about the film The Wicker Man. Sounded dull and a ‘boys film’ to me. I taped the film off TV on New Years Eve (2001)!!! Andy kept saying how much I would love it and we would sit down and watch it together … eventually. Last week, I was looking for a blank tape and decided that it was time to tape over it. Something made me put the thing on and by the time I got to the part of the coppers driving at night, I was hooked! I was not expecting it to be funny :) The rest is, as they say, History! Now I’m hooked!!!! I have read everything I can on the Internet and I am going to town this week to get the DVD set and books. A question then. In the boxed set, is the soundtrack in there as a separate CD and if so, is it the old one with noises over it, or the newer ‘proper’ music? Yours, Q (female!) 36 There is something here about the comedy of accidental discovery in this self-consciously gendered introduction. In fact this initiation confession follows the lines of a seduction scenario. It ‘sounded dull and a “boys film” ’; Andy ‘was always raving on’ and ‘kept saying how much I would love it’; then by chance on the point of destroying it she becomes ‘hooked’. The message is prefaced with the wonderfully risqué salutation ‘Permission to land on Summerisle!!!’ and signs off with the totally gratuitous reminder that Q is ‘female!’.


There is I think a candour and erotic charge about such female confessions which is very much at odds with male responses to this film. The following exchange between a female novice and a male initiate illustrates the point: I saw Wicker Man for the first time last weekend and I’ve never been so fascinated by any motion picture. The mystery and eroticism, combined with the locale, make for something unique. In the scene when Sgt. Howie returns to Lord Summerisle’s home with the hare he’s found in Rowan’s grave, there’s a shot of the pipe organ and its keyboard. Just for a moment we see three of the stops above the keys. Can anyone make out what’s written on them? Somehow I’m sure the names of the organ stops play into the overall theme of the movie. M2 (female) The cautiousness of M2’s introduction doesn’t prevent her from divining the erotic charge in the ‘mystery’ of this ‘unique’ film. Unsurprisingly she then jumps from that general introduction to a very specific question about an odd detail: the close-up shot of the organ stops. The manner in which she poses this leading question is coy in the extreme. One fancies she can make out exactly what’s written on the organ stops and has a fair idea how they ‘play into the overall theme of the movie’. None the less, the trap is set and regular contributor J (whose minute dissection of the film text is obsessively thorough) comes to the rescue: Hi, I too was fascinated by the close up of the organ stops and thought this must be a visual joke. I asked the same question you did earlier and several people piped in, pun intended. One even led me to a website that explained the musical meaning of each organ stop but not their double entendres. Here is what I know: There are six organ stops that we can see (l-r): sub bass (16 ft), salicional (8 ft), flute d’amour (4 ft), lieblich gedact (4 ft), voix celeste (8 ft), and one more I can’t read (probably a 16 ft pipe). To me they are visual puns about sex: salaciousness (the pipe is labelled salicional but one would assume it’s double entendre would be salacious-something), flute d amor (penis), voix celeste (celestial voice, during orgasm?) I don’t know about the lieblich gedact but i have my suspicions. These are all legitimate organ stops, not contrived. I too love the little

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details like that and have looked into many of them. You’ll find more in the archives. We haven’t talked about the eroticism too much though. That has been one of the appeals for me too. Glad you enjoy it. We all do. Cheers, J (male) The thoroughness of J’s deliberations in tracking down the double entendres is matched by the careful structure of his writing. When compared with M1 or Q (above), J represents control and restraint: ‘These are all legitimate organ stops, not contrived.’ His attribution of sexual associations is executed with almost medical precision. However, in his concluding paragraph two other qualities emerge: a sort of paternalistic encouragement (‘I too’, ‘you’ll find more in the archives’, ‘glad you enjoy it, we all do’), coupled with a slight hesitation (‘we haven’t talked about the eroticism too much though’) which implies the need for caution in this area. As before, there is here a need to weigh what is said and how, against what is implied in passing or glossed over. Here is the known and secure (the archives) against the unknown and uncontrolled (eroticism). The terra firma of the film text (its incontrovertible substance) provides the known grounding for emotional forays and explorations. Paradoxically, I believe, the mysteries and discoveries are not really being made in the text at all, but in the fans themselves in their testing of emotional boundaries. As proposed above, the film text (which is actually insubstantial and absent) is made, through fan discourse, concrete and present. In some respects it is the only thing of which they are all certain, and certainly the thing these virtual strangers have in common. The rest is play. In order to explore the nature of this play in more depth, let us now turn to some key areas of debate between cult fans.

Cult debates A persistent caricature of cult fandom is based upon images of anally retentive, white, male students dressing up to attend screenings and conventions, or endlessly replaying key scenes from cult films until dialogue is memorized for impromptu performance, or collecting and documenting merchandise and memorabilia with the fastidiousness of a museum curator. In fact, my own research into other communities has shown that many more cult films attract mixed, and sometimes predominantly female, fan bases. Notwithstanding this evidence, contributors


to The Wicker Man Digest are predominantly male. But it is interesting that amongst this group gender divisions have manifested themselves in specific issues, as the next sequence of postings shows. A lengthy debate began initially about the aspect ratio of the restored ‘Director’s Cut’ issued on DVD in 2002. The debate about aspect ratios was conducted between 23 and 26 April 2002. The 22 separate contributions to the discussion involve 8 individuals, listed in Table 15.1 in order of appearance. The conversation begins with questions from S1 (who has not yet bought the DVD) about the appearance of the two versions: the format and picture quality. His tone is friendly (‘Hi folks’), inquisitive (3 questions), and apologetic (‘I just wondered …’). The reply comes from P1 whose technical vocabulary (‘Both versions are in 1:85:1 widescreen i.e. cropped from the 4:3 full screen image …’) is matched by his superiority of address: ‘… we’re all familiar with …’, ‘… being derived from …’. This is the authoritative expert. S1’s responses to P1 continue his pally, apologetic tone: ‘Many thanks for that information mate!’ and later ‘Hmmn, interesting, thanks …’ and ‘Lordy, that’s a little hard to follow, but I think I get your meaning, cheers for explaining it mate!’ This is all in response to P1’s increasing technical mastery: especially his explanation of ‘anamorphic’, by which S1 is so bedazzled he asks ‘Are you a film-maker or something?’. P1 responds coolly: ‘No, just a film fan. It is difficult to follow, I know’, he adds sympathetically before another long technical explanation. If these are the two initiators of the debate who adopt (and maintain) dominant and submissive roles, there are then interjections from several others not content to let P1 have it all his own way.

Table 15.1 Name S1 (male) P1 (male) A (male) S2 (male) Moderator S3 (male) P2 (female) G (male) J2 (male) W (male) TOTAL

Contributions to the debate on aspect ratios No. of contributions to the discussion 6 9 3 4 3 1 3 2 1 1 22

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A questions where P1 got the idea they were ‘cropped’ (rather than ‘anamorphic wide screen’). P1 doesn’t like this at all: ‘From popping it into my dvd player and looking at the bloody thing!’, he replies, and goes on to illustrate the effect of a cropped image: ‘A good friend of mine was very indignant about the disappearance of Britt Ekland’s left nipple when she’s on the bed at the start of Willow’s song’. A is quick to pick up on the juxtaposition of P1’s technical superiority with the male erotic interest: ‘Funny – her nipples are both in evidence when watching on my setup’, he proudly boasts, and adds for good measure: ‘– perhaps you should check your system set up (and for goodness sake calm down)’. P1: Nothing wrong with my system set up. I suggest you check yours (and I’m perfectly calm thank you). I’m referring to the initial shot of Britt lying on the bed and banging on the wall. One nipple in the widescreen version, two in the full screen. It’s beyond dispute. At this point S1 (to calm things down, one senses) interjects for some clarification from P1 about the definition of anamorphic (which he’s only too happy to provide). After this lengthy explanation (more than satisfying S1), A interjects again to question P1: ‘Sorry P, but you’re completely wrong …’. Here A indulges in his own technical exegesis of the ‘anamorphic process’ to which P responds: ‘None of this contradicts what I said …’. S2 weighs in: ‘there is simply NO WAY on earth this film would have been shown 4:3 when released theatrically either here or in the US …’ earning approval from P1: ‘I tend to agree … I think that’s obvious and self evident although some around here seem to disagree …’. Then the Moderator pulls rank himself, rather wearily one feels: ‘I went through this whole ratio business when the R1 DVD came out …’. S3 comes out in praise of 4:3’s authenticity simply ‘because (a) this is the version most people are more familiar with, and the one 99% of us will have seen first; and (b) I feel that the composition is much better in 4:3 than in widescreen.’ Across the trajectory of the argument this contribution is crucial because it escapes the seemingly interminable loop about rather abstract technical distinctions (involving personality clashes) and returns to ‘our’ experience of the film. However, this is a nuance perhaps not appreciated by P2 (the only female contributor on this theme) who admonishes them all for being ‘off-topic’ and frankly tedious: Perhaps this rather technical and (at this point) off-topic discussion could be taken off the list? It is very densely worded, takes up a lot


of room, and I daresay only the three people participating in the conversation are the only ones truly interested? thanks … P2 G then defends the importance of the argument: ‘… it’s worth bearing in mind that at the heart of the discussion are concerns that we have lost 1/3rd of the pictorial footage we have grown to love’. This is a line which nicely marries the dry and technical with the communal and emotional. Appropriately enough, perhaps, it falls to P1 to reassert himself (in answer to P2) with the final word: ‘Off topic? I should coco! Three people? I counted six. Anyway we’ve stopped now. Happy?’ In many ways, illuminating though it is, this argument is atypical of the digest as a whole. First, it is a rather focused debate which starts and finishes within the space of a few days. Generally, conversations tend to be either simple question and response(s), perhaps over 3 or 4 messages, or topics are open-ended and on-going, returned to several times over the course of the year. Second, it is a fairly impassioned confrontation with a finer range of dramatic frequency than most. And third, this example mainly features male participants whereas in general males and females interact rather than conduct exclusive debates (though this is perhaps due to the subject-matter discussed). It is more obviously characteristic of the community in the repeated articulation of ‘us’ and ‘we’ and in the manner in which participants clearly achieve self-satisfaction by asserting their individuality within this impersonal (virtual) social environment. But the ways in which gender divisions are articulated across the themes of the technical and the spiritual is revealing of different kinds of gendered use to which the community is put and how protective contributors are of their particular investment in the digest. Such divisions also reveal different kinds of gendered emotional competences at work. Finally, I shall consider the implications of these disclosures for the nature of cult identities.

Cult identities What are cult film fans like? How different are they from other fans? Or from other film fans? Or other users of the Internet? What is it that makes them distinctive? One can see that the drawing of parameters is a fraught enterprise here. Yet it is necessary if we are to agree that cult film fandom is a distinctive kind of fan consumption practice which addresses

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particular kinds of pleasures and needs. Some comfort in this task may be drawn from the methodological stance of interpreting discourse. This is not in the service of identifying some spurious psychological type, but of analysing expressive patterns, flows and ellipses. One of the problems of web ethnography raised by Christine Hine was the lack of the concrete setting that face-to-face encounters enable. She concluded that newsgroup ethnography needs must be limited, relying ‘on the identities which authors construct and perform through their postings’.10 But I would suggest that, paradoxically, the Internet might offer to cult fans just the kind of anonymity that allows not for disguise and invention, but rather for openness and candour. In fact, its dynamics and discourses might reveal more about cult fans than face-to-face encounters. It is perhaps worth comparing some material evidence in the light of this claim. In this sequence, K, a 20-year-old student poses a question to members of the Wicker Man newsgroup. The responses are all from longestablished (male) contributors to the list. 1. Hello people, i’m doing my dissertation on The Wicker Man and i just have one question for you all. … as many people as possible need to answer (if thats okay?!) … oh, and i might quote you in my essay if thats ok too … 1) What interests you most about The Wicker Man? Thank You K 2. K, my answer is complex – in part it was the inspiration for a whole love of folklore and folk music. It was the original inspiration behind my site (which includes a WM section) at http://www.theunbrokencircle.co.uk. It was a product of its era but brought together a number of concepts around the land, music, community, alternative thinking that I thought could be turned to practical use to help bring together and help develop a related musical style. cheers M3 3. For me it was to see an admittedly contrived (a little bit of this, a little bit of that) contemporary pagan society. I was just getting into Morris dancing at the time and many of the elements were shared: the hobby horse, the sword dance, the singing and drinking, May Day festivities. The ‘loose’ sexuality had a great appeal no doubt as


well (in both Morris and the Wicker Man). As an ideal of a lifestyle it was pretty tempting. The murder mystery side of it was a total red herring for me. I couldn’t care less about that. The ending is clever but if that was shocking for most, it wasn’t for me. I don’t consider it a ‘horror’ movie. The film is like a catalog of all these intriguing customs. Seeing these people going about their daily lives, living a ‘pagan’ life was the main appeal for me. Still is though I don’t participate in any real pagan activities and am not on my local Morris team anymore. I still ritualistically look forward to seeing the Wicker Man on May Day or May Day Eve though. Another hook was that the picture of Rowan looked surprisingly like an old girlfriend who I had a very intense relationship with. Seeing her pic in the movie was almost an omen … Cheers, J 4. What J said, apart from the bit about having a girlfriend who looked like Rowan, and I do still participate in pagan activities. I’m not on my local morris side anymore either. A2 5. Having Christopher Lee in the movie was enough for me. The man is a thespian God. What I didn’t expect was a film so rich in great camera angles and exceptional mood music. The film and soundtrack are a perfect marriage. I just like it for its upfront view of a belief system many would shudder to think about. J3 6. Well many things. The wicker man came at a time when I was doing Eng Lit A level. with the waste land as a set text, which introduced me to the Golden Bough. Apart from that I had been brought up with the legends of Norse and Greek mythology so had a keen interest in these things. Folk music was also part of my upbringing so I recognized so much in the Wicker man. Then there was Britt Ekland of course :) Anyway it stands out amongst the horror flicks of the time as being on a deeper level, and I liked the way it was filmed as a sort of mockumentary. So it is a horror flick, detective mystery, musical entertainment and erotic fantasy. It can even be viewed as a Christian allegory as we know that the apples will not flourish next year, and Sgt Howie has gone to join the saints. L

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This sequence is interesting because, unusually, it demands a level of self-conscious reflection on the part of the respondents. Notwithstanding the air of condescension in the tone of some, these brief efforts to explain their attraction to The Wicker Man are united by certain common themes. Sub-cultural interests (Paganism, folk music, alternative lifestyles) are a shared ground. The hybrid nature of the film’s technique and symbolic resources are also reported. Third, for this male audience erotic interest was an additional factor. This last point, and the star-billing of Christopher Lee, shouldn’t be supposed to be an exclusively male response to the film however. Elsewhere, Q reveals: Looking through the pics from websites, I see the one of Lord Summerisle in his kilt! I really love this picture of him and find him increadably attractive for his age;) Something about his authority over the islanders too perhaps. Lucky Miss Rose …

Conclusion If the Internet is a forum for allowing such frank (and frankly trivial) disclosures without restraint, it also provides the ritualistic framework and structure which complement fans’ attachment to the text itself perfectly. In short, this constitutes a balance of free expression and stimulation with the group dynamics and the subjective rituals of belonging. In this way, cult fandom is rather like forms of religious practice: textual iconography, contextual debate and ritual observance constitute the focus of a shared emotional landscape. Like religious worship, this represents a communion wherein the open expression of feelings which would to outsiders seem strange, is not only given credence by likeminded souls, but is given particular form and meaning by the discursive framework of the environment itself. This is why, in the case of The Wicker Man especially, the theme of alternative religion is such a powerful explanatory system. Evidence suggests that members of the Wicker Man newsgroup are acutely aware of this. Moreover, they use their ritual practice not only as a resource of self-expression but, as the islanders did, as a way of defining their essential difference. Through this discursive framework, they engage with the film’s alternative explanatory system to emphasize their ‘otherness’. In this way, they are akin to the secret society. Reflecting on its cult status not long before his death in 2001, Anthony Shaffer himself commented: It’s logical that The Wicker Man became a cult movie because it’s a movie about a cult. I wonder if these fans are bright enough to realise


they’re doing to the movie what the islanders did to the Old Religion. They’re taking the same comfort and sustenance from it.11 On the basis of this body of evidence, clearly they are.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

M. Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 177. C. Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000), p. 37. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid. See http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/wickerman/. All quotations from this website are verbatim. C. Hine, Virtual Ethnography, p. 53. See J. Smith, ‘Things that go Clunk in the Cult Film Text: Nodes and Interstices in The Wicker Man’, in J. Murray, L. Stevenson, S. Harper and B. Franks (eds), Constructing ‘The Wicker Man’: Film and Cultural Studies Perspectives (Dumfries: University of Glasgow Crichton Publications, 2005), pp. 123–38. The film has been broadcast on British terrestrial television no fewer than 13 times since 1980. It received its BBC cult accolade as the very first film featured in the ‘Moviedrome’ seasons between 1988 and 2000. It has been re-released three times on video since 1990 and the ‘Director’s Cut’ DVD was issued in 2002. See A. Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’: The Morbid Ingenuities (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000), pp. 169–71. C. Hine, Virtual Ethnography, p. 53. Quoted in A. Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, p. 166.

Index Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 106 Adam-Smith, Patsy, 50 Adams, Philip, 50 Adventures of Quentin Durward, The, 63, 125 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (film), 119, 125, 128 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (tv series), 134 Aerograd, 147 aesthetics, 2–3, 119 see also visual style Aftonbladet, 217–18 Against All Flags, 121 Age of the Dream Palace, The, 7 Agfacolor, 140 Air America, 51 Aldgate, Anthony, 7 Alexander Nevsky, 37 Alexandrov, Grigori, 118, 139, 140–7 Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, 186 All That Heaven Allows, 163 All This and Heaven Too, 154, 158 Allen, Irving, 30, 133 Allen, Jean, 152 Allen, Robert C., 6 Allen, Woody, 224 Allied Artists, 125 Altman, Rick, 155–6 Altman, Robert, 98, 224 America’s Most Wanted, 171 American Cinema, The, 69 Amicus, 36 Anderson, Tracy, 137 Andersson, Bibi, 216, 217, 218 Andrejew, André, 74, 77 Andrews, W.C., 75 Anne of the Indies, 121 Anne of the Thousand Days, 29, 30, 31, 73 Anzacs, 50

Arabian Adventure, 29 Argyle, John, 83 Arnold, Tom, 84 art cinema, 225–6 art direction, 73–87 Ashby, Hal, 112 Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), 28 Associated Communications Corporation (ACC), 28 Associated Talking Pictures (ATP), 84 Atkinson People, The, 92 Atkinson, Rowan, 92, 93, 96–7, 99 auteur theory, 2–3, 69, 86, 101, 188, 216, 222 see also authorship authorship, 69–71, 105 see also auteur theory Baker, Roy Ward, 36 Balaban, Barney, 131 Balcon, Michael, 201 Bandit of Sherwood Forest, The, 125, 127–8 Barry Lyndon, 32, 38 Barry, Joan, 190, 197 Barthelmess, Richard, 158 Barthes, Roland, 86 Basinger, Jeanine, 152, 161–2 Battleship Potemkin, 2 Bazin, André, 3 Bean, 96–7 Bean, C.E.W., 42, 52 Beard, Charles, 18 Beard, Mary, 18 Ben-Hur, 56 Bennett, Charles, 191 Bergfelder, Tim, 182–3, 215–27 Bergman, Ingmar, 182, 215–28 Bettany, Paul, 64 Bevan, Tim, 93–4, 97, 98 Bhaba, Homi, 212 Bicycle Thieves, 2 245

246 Index Birds, The, 188 Birth of a Nation, The, 14, 15, 16 Black Arrow, The, 121 Black Caesar, 171 Black Knight, The, 125, 132–3 Black Jack, 29 Black Narcissus, 182, 203, 205–13 Black Shield of Falworth, The, 125 Blackadder, 92 Blackmail, 182, 185–200 ‘blaxpoitation’ films, 171 ‘blockbuster’ film, 56 Blonde Venus, 152 Blood on Satan’s Claw, 36 Board of Trade, 202 Bogataia nevesta: see Rich Bride, The Bordwell, David, 5 Born on the Fourth of July, 110 Borzage, Frank, 120 Bounty, The, 51 Bourdieu, Pierre, 232 Bower, Dallas, 79 Box Office Online, 58 Box, Muriel, 78 Box, Sydney, 75 Boy Friend, The, 28, 33 Boyz N the Hood, 166, 167, 168, 174 Braham, Dorothy, 78 Brando, Marlon, 127, 132 Braveheart, 51, 64 Breen, Joseph, 204, 206, 207 Bride Came C.O.D., The, 157 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, 97 Bridget Jones’s Diary, 97–8 Brief Encounter, 73 Brinton, Ralph, 78 British Cinematographer, The, 70 British & Dominions (B&D) Studios, 77, 84 British Animated Films, 85 British Film Institute Production Board, 36 British International Pictures (BIP), 83, 185, 191, 194 British Lion Film Corporation, 28 Britton, Andrew, 152 Broadway Melody, The, 195, 196 Broccoli, Albert R., 133 Brown, Colleen, 78

Brown, Geoff, 51 Brownlow, Kevin, 36–7 Bruce, George, 128 Bryan, John, 75, 76, 81 Bugsy Malone, 29 Bulgakova, Oksana, 149 Burnside, William, 206 Burr, Ty, 58 Burton, Richard, 31 Byron, Kathleen, 205 Cabin in the Cotton, 158 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The, 3 Cagney, James, 167, 170, 172, 174 Cahiers du Cinéma, 17, 69, 86 Caine, Michael, 32 California Suite, 106 Call Northside 777, 173 Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), 108–9 Canterbury Tale, A, 75 Capra, Frank, 70 Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, 29 Captain Scarlett, 121, 124 Carr, Thomas, 124 Carreras, Enrique, 82, 83, 84 Carrick, Edward, 76, 81, 84 Carry On Dick, 35 Carry On Henry, 35 Carry On Up the Jungle, 29, 35 Carter, Maurice, 73 Cash Money Brothers, 169 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 75 Cavell, Stanley, 152 Celia, 82, 85 Chabrol, Claude, 186, 187–8 Challenge for Robin Hood, A, 125, 134 Chapman, James, 12, 55–68, 79 Charge of the Light Brigade, The, 63 Chien Andalou, Un, 218 China Syndrome, The, 106, 107, 108, 109 Christie, Ian, 137 Chudesnitsa: see Miracle Girl, The Churchill, (Sir) Winston, 31, 121 Cineaste, 43 Cinema and History (Anthony Aldgate), 7 Cinema and History (Marc Ferro), 11

Index ‘Cinema, History, Identity: An International Conference on British Cinema’ (UEA), 5 Cinematograph Exhibitors Association, 83 Cinematograph Films Act (1927), 192 Circus, The (Tsirk), 139, 144, 145, 148 Citizen Kane, 2, 3 Classical Hollywood Cinema, The, 5–6 Clockers, 167, 168–9 Close Up, 185 Coffee, Lenore, 158 Cold Mountain, 56 Cold War, 118, 121, 126, 128 Collee, John, 58 Colley, Linda, 42 Collier, Buster, 83 Columbia Pictures, 30 125, 127, 128, 132 Combs, Sean, 174 Comes A Horseman, 106, 107, 108 Coming Home, 105, 106, 107, 110–13 Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), 123 Compton’s Most Wanted, 178 computer generated imagining (CGI), 57, 74 Concanen, 83 Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, A, 125 Connelly, Mark, 12, 41–54 Connery, Sean, 32, 135 Contesting Tears, 152 Cook, David, 2 Cook, John Esten, 14 Cooper, Gladys, 152 Coppell, Alec, 132 Corliss, Richard, 89 costume film, 12, 27–38 Countess Dracula, 36 Coward, Noël, 65 Creeping Flesh, The, 36 Crimson Pirate, The, 123, 124 Crocodile Dundee, 50 Cromwell, 29 Cromwell, John, 119 Crossfire, 130 Crowe, Russell, 60, 64 Cruise, Tom, 56

247

Cukor, George, 153 cult fandom, 240–1 cult films, 229 Curse of Frankenstein, The, 81 Curtis, Richard, 89–101 Curtiz, Michael, 120, 158 Dalton, Hugh, 209 Dangerous, 158 Dark Horse, The, 157 Dark Road, The, 82, 84 Dark Side of Genius, The, 188–9 Dark Victory, 154 Davies, Andrew, 98 Davies, Ivor, 52 Davis, Bette, 152, 154, 156, 158–9 Davis, Ossie, 176 Dawe, Cedric, 84 de Marney, Derrick, 83 De Palma, Brian, 175 Dead Poets Society, 51, 56 Dean, James, 127, 132 Death in High Heels, 82 Death on the Nile, 29 Dean, Basil, 84 Defiant Ones, The, 124 Del Giudice, Filippo, 75–81 Demi-Paradise, The, 77, 79 Denham Studios, 77 Dent, Alan, 79 Denzin, Norman K., 169 Department of Commerce, 202 Desert Song, The, 124–5 Devils, The, 29, 34, 38 Diawara, Manthia, 167 Dillon, Carmen, 32–3, 76, 78–81 Dimsdale, Howard, 124, 125 Disney Pictures, 59, 125, 129 Dixiana, 14 Do the Right Thing, 167–8, 176 Dobrenko, Evgeni, 146, 147 Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, 36 Dr Mabuse, 3 Dr Morelle and the Case of the Missing Heiress, 85 Dr Syn, 35 Doll’s House, A, 111 Douglas, Gordon, 128 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 147

248 Index Dowd, Nancy, 111 Dragnet, 173 Driscoll, Robin, 92 Duel in the Sun, 209 Duellists, The, 29 Dunayevsky, Isaak, 143–5 Durgnat, Raymond, 4, 222 Dyer, Richard, 139, 153 Dyson, Michael Eric, 169 Eady Levy, 126 Eagle-Lion, 206 Ealing Studios, 75, 77 East of Eden, 127 Easy Virtue, 192 Ebert, Roger, 58 Eckert, Charles, 153 Ede, Laurie, 71, 73–88 Efanov, Vasilii, 142 Ekland, Britt, 239, 242 Elder, Clarence, 83–4 Electric Horseman, The, 106, 107, 108 Elsaesser, Thomas, 5, 152, 155 Elstree Studios, 28, 83 EMI (Electrical Musical Industries), 28, 30 Enzensberger, Masha, 140 Epstein, Jason, 59 Estridge, Robin, 90 Europeans, The, 29, 38 Evergreen, 75 Everson, William K., 2 Everyday Magic, An, 182 Exclusive Films, 75, 81–6 Fairbanks, Douglas Jr, 122 Fairbanks, Douglas Sr, 127 Farmer’s Wife, The, 192 Fellner, Eric, 93 feminism, 189 Ferro, Marc, 11 Fielding, Helen, 92, 95, 97 Film and History, 11 Film History: Theory and Practice, 6 Film in History, The, 11 Film in Sweden, 217, 220, 221 Film Propaganda, 7 film noir, 167, 173 Film Till Now, The, 2, 185

Films and Filming, 222 Filmwaves, 225 Finding Nemo, 57 Fine, Richard, 89 Fire Over England, 120 First Knight, 135–6 Fisher, Terence, 35 Fitzgerald, Tara, 24 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 138 Flame and the Arrow, The, 123 Fleet, James, 95 Flory, Dan, 167 Flynn, Errol, 122, 127 Fonda, Jane, 104–14 Foster, Harold R., 132 Forbes, Bryan, 132 Foreman, Carl, 30, 31 Forester, C.S., 58 491, 219 Four Weddings And A Funeral, 90, 93–6, 97 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 22 Francis, Freddie, 33 Frank Capra, Authorship and the Studio System, 70 Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, 70 Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, 35 Frankfurt School, 55 Fraser, John, 126 French, Philip, 59, 89, 99 Frenzy, 188 Freud, Emma, 92, 95, 101 From Caligari to Hitler, 3 F.T.A., 110–11 Fun with Dick and Jane, 104, 106, 107, 108 Furse, Roger, 79–80 Gainsborough costume melodramas, 27, 35, 75 Gallant Blade, The, 122–3 Gallardon, Rev. Mother Leticia, 207 Gallipoli, 12, 41–54 Gammage, Bill, 44, 45, 50 ‘gangsta’, 167 gangster film, 166–78 Garnett, Tay, 132

Index Gaslight, 152 Gaudio, Tony, 158 Gaumont-British Picture Corporation (GBPC), 75 gender studies, 5 Genius of the System, The, 70 genre, 7, 117–18, 119 see also under individual genres: costume film; gangster film; historical film; horror film; melodrama; musical; swashbuckler etc. Gentle Sex, The, 77 Gentleman’s Agreement, 130, 131 Gere, Richard, 136 Ghoul, The, 36 Gibson, Mel, 44, 51 Gilbert, Bruce, 111 Gilliat, Sidney, 91 Girard, Joseph, 193 Girl in the Café, The, 100 Gladiator, 57, 60 Glancy, Mark, 182, 185–200 Gledhill, Christine, 152 Go-Between, The, 29, 32–3 Godard, Jean-Luc, 111 Godden, Rumer, 205 Godfather, The, 171 Goldblum, Jeff, 93 Golden Hawk, The, 121 GoldenEye, 94 Goldman, William, 56 Goldwyn, Samuel Jr, 56–7 Gomery, Douglas, 6 Gone With the Wind, 12, 13–26, 56, 158 Goulding, Edmund, 158 Grade, Lord (Lew), 28 Grand Theft Auto, 178 Grande Illusion, La, 2 Grant, Hugh, 94–5, 97, 98 Grant, Morton, 122 Great Day, 75 Great Expectations, 81 Great Lie, The, 159 Greene, Richard, 124, 134 Griffith, D.W., 3, 14 Guerro, Ed, 14 Gunga Din, 63 Gyllenberg, Carl, 218

249

Hale, Wanda, 159, 160 Haller, Ernest, 158 Halliwell, Leslie, 2 Halstead, Henry, 83, 84 Hammer Films, 27, 35–6, 81, 125, 134 Hammer, Will: see Hinds, Will Happy Guys, The (Veselye rebiata), 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149 Harper, Sue, 12, 27–40, 70 Hathaway, Henry, 132 Hayden, Tom, 104, 108, 109 Hayward, Louis, 122 He Walked By Night, 172–3 Hecht, Harold, 123 Heckroth, Hein, 76, 81 hegemony theory, 5 Hellman, John, 111 Henreid, Paul, 152, 157, 160 Henry V, 76–81 ‘heritage’ film, 38 Highwayman, The, 120 Hill, Christopher, 37 Hills, Matt, 230 Hinds, Anthony, 85 Hinds, Will, 82 Hine, Christine, 230, 231, 241 Hiroshima, mon amour, 12 historical film, 11–12 Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 5 History of Narrative Film, A, 2 Hitchcock, Alfred, 182, 185–200 Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, 186, 187–8 Hitchcock’s Films, 188 Hitler: A Film from Germany, 12 Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 89 Hollywood Foreign Press Association, 107 Hollywood Reporter, 157, 160 Holocaust, 131 Home Is Where the Heart Is, 152, 153 Hon dansade en sommar: see One Summer of Happiness ‘hood’ film, 166–74 Hopkins, Anthony, 51

250 Index Horizons West, 117 horror film, 35–6 Horror of Frankenstein, 35 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 121, 122, 123, 124, 131, 134 Howard, Leslie, 158 Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert, 170–2, 175 Hughes, Howard, 131 Huston, John, 32 Huxley, Aldous, 34 I, Monster, 29, 36 I Walked With a Zombie, 152 Ice Cube, 167, 168 Ice T, 168 Ilyinsky, Igor, 147 In This Our Life, 157 In Which We Serve, 65 Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC), 110 Inherit the Wind, 124 International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST), 2 Internet, as a source, 230–1 Interpreting Films, 181 IPC Films, 107, 108, 111–13 It Always Rains on Sunday, 75 Ivanhoe, 63, 125, 129–31 Ivory, James, 29 Jabberwocky, 29 Jackson, Peter, 56 Jackson, Samuel L., 171 Jarman, Derek, 34, 37 Jarrott, Charles, 30 Jassy, 73 Jaws, 56 Jazz Singer, The, 194, 195 Jennings, Talbot, 132 Jezebel, 14 Johnston, Eric, 208 Jones, Robert C., 112 Juarez, 158 Juice, 166, 174 Julia, 106, 107, 108 June Bride, 159 Junge, Alfred, 75, 76, 81 Junfrukällan: see Virgin Spring, The

Kefauver, Estes, 127 Kelly, Orry, 158 Kenworthy, Duncan, 94, 97 Kerr, Deborah, 205 Khrushchev, Nikita, 139 Kibbee, Roland, 124 Kinematograph Weekly, 193, 196, 221 King Richard and the Crusaders, 125 King, Martin Luther Jr, 176 King, Rodney, 166, 172, 173 Kitses, Jim, 117 Klinger, Barbara, 181–2 Klute, 106, 110 Knights of the Round Table, 63, 125, 131–2 Koch, Ed, 167 Koch, Howard, 158 Korda, Alexander, 27, 120 Korda, Vincent, 74, 75, 76 Korean War, 121 Krämer, Peter, 60, 71, 104–16 Kramer, Stanley, 124 Kracauer, Siegfried, 3 Krasker, Robert, 81 Kuban Cossacks, The (Kubanskie kazaki), 139, 141, 143, 144 Kubanskie kazaki: see Kuban Cossacks, The Kubrick, Stanley, 32 Kuhn, Annette, 182 Kuhn, Michael, 93, 96 Ladd, Alan, 133 Lady Hamilton, 61 Ladynina, Marina, 141 Lancaster, Burt, 123–4 Landers, Lew, 120 Langley, Noel, 131,132 LaPlace, Maria, 153–4, 160 Laskin, Boris, 144 Last Samurai, The, 56 Launder, Frank, 91 Lawson, Mark, 101 Lean, David, 33, 137 Lebedev-Kumach, Vasili, 144 Lee, Christopher, 231, 242 Lee, Mark, 45 Lee, Rowland V., 120 Lee, Spike, 167–9, 176

Index Legend of the Werewolf, 36 Legion of Decency (LOD), 205–12 Lester, Richard, 31–2 Lethal Weapon, 51 Letter, The, 157, 158 Letter From an Unknown Woman, 152 Levin, Henry, 120, 128 Levitas, Louise, 159–60 Levy, Melvin, 128 Lighthorsemen, The, 50 Lindegaard, Ernest, 81 Lion in Winter, The, 29 Lisztomania, 29, 34 Little Caesar, 171, 176 Little Foxes, The, 154, 157, 158 Litvak, Anatole, 158 Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 63 Lockwood, Margaret, 204 Lodger, The, 192 London Film Productions, 75, 76 Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The, 56 Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The, 56, 57 Losey, Joseph, 32–3, 201 Love Actually, 98–100 Love Story, 75 Lunacharsky, Anatoli, 138 Lust for a Vampire, 35 Lustig, Jan, 132 MacDonald, Richard, 33, 73 MacDowell, Andie, 94 Mackenzie, Aeneas, 131 McArthur, Colin, 117 McBride, Joseph, 70 McCarthyism, 121–2, 132, 134 McCarthy, Joseph, 134 McDaniel, Hattie, 20 McFarlane, Brian, 50–1 McGilligan, Patrick, 186 Mahler, 34 Malcolm X, 177 Mamoulian, Rouben, 120 Man Who Came to Dinner, The, 159 Man Who Played God, The, 157 Man Who Would Be King, The, 32 Marchant, James, 76, 82–5 Margaret Herrick Library, 204

251

Marked Woman, 157 Mary, Queen of Scots, 29, 30 Marylebone Studios, 83 Mass-Observation, 7 Massood, Paula J., 171 Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, 12, 51, 55–68 Masterson, Father Patrick J., 207 Mattson, Arne, 220 Matrix Reloaded, The, 57 Matrix Revolutions, The, 57 Matter of Life and Death, A, 81 Matter of Murder, A, 85 Mayhew-Archer, Paul, 100 MC Eiht, 174, 177–8 MC Pooh, 174, 177–8 Medvedkin, Alexander, 142, 149 Meerson, Lazare, 77 melodrama, 117–18, 152–63 Melodrama and Meaning, 181 Men of Sherwood Forest, 125, 134 Menace II Society, 166, 170–8 Merchant, Ismail, 29 methodology, 4–7 MGM, 28, 92, 125, 126, 129, 131 Midnight Cowboy, 111 Miles, Sarah, 33 Million and One Nights, A , 2 Minghella, Anthony, 224 Ministry of Information (MOI), 79 Minnelli, Vincente, 153, 155 Miracle Girl, The (Chudesnitsa), 142 Miramax Pictures, 56 Mirror for England, A, 4 Mitchell, Margaret, 14, 15, 19, 22 Mr Bean, 92 Mr Skeffington, 159 Modleski, Tania, 186, 189–90, 193 Mollo, Andrew, 36 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 29, 38 Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 30 Morahan, Tom, 74, 76 Mosquito Coast, The, 51 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 205, 208 Movie, 222 Movie-Made America, 4 Munby, Jonathan, 118, 166–79

252 Index Muni, Paul, 174 Murder on the Orient Express, 29 Music Lovers, The, 33 musical, 118, 137–49 Naked City, The, 173 Nashville, 98 National Archives, 202 National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), 15 National Film and Television School, 29 National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC), 28–9, 38, 82 National Film Theatre, 215, 223 Neale, Steve, 156 New Deal in Entertainment, A, 70 New Film History, 1–9, 12, 55, 69–70, 73, 86–7, 202, 213, 216, 225 definition of, 6–8 New Jack City, 166, 168, 169, 172, 174 New Moscow, 149 New York Times, 61, 104 Newell, Mike, 94, 95 Nicholas and Alexandra, 29, 30 Nichols, Dudley, 132 Night Comes Too Soon, 85 Nine to Five, 106, 109 1915, 50 Nolan, Alan T., 15 Nordberg, Carl-Eric, 218 Not the Nine O’Clock News, 92, 93 ‘Notre Dame’ letter, 208–10 Notting Hill, 97 Novaia Moskva: see New Moscow Now, Voyager, 117–18, 152–65 O’Brian, Patrick, 55, 56, 57–8 O’Connor, John, 207, 210 O’Neal, Ron, 171 October (Oktiabr), 146 Old Acquaintance, 159 Old Maid, The, 154 Oliver!, 29 Olivier, Laurence, 79–81 On Golden Pond, 106, 107 Ondra, Anny, 185, 186, 190

One Summer of Happiness (Hon dansade en sommar), 220 Ophuls, Max, 120, 153 ‘Orientalism’, 212 Osten, Gerd, 220 Ozon, Françoi, 224 ‘P. Diddy’: see Combs, Sean Pacino, Al, 167, 170, 172 Page, Thomas Nelson, 14 Park, James, 91 Parks, Larry, 122 Parton, Dolly, 106 Patriot, The, 51, 64 period film: see costume film Persona, 182, 215–28 Petrie, Duncan, 70 Pettit, Wilfred, 128 Picnic at Hanging Rock, 43 Picturegoer, 192, 193, 195, 196 Pierce, Betty, 78 Pihodna, Joseph, 159 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 57, 59–60 Pitt, Ingrid, 36 Pleasure Garden, The, 191, 192 politique des auteurs, 69 Polito, Sol, 158 PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 93, 95–6 Pooh Man: see MC Pooh Porter, Edwin S., 3 postmodernist film history, 11 Powell, Michael, 182, 201, 211 Power, Tyrone, 122 Powerscourt, Lord, 80 Pressburger, Emeric, 182, 211 Pride and Prejudice, 98 Prince of Thieves, 125 Prince Valiant, 125, 132 Private Life of Henry VIII, The, 27 Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The, 154 Production Code Administration (PCA), 15, 204–7 Propaganda and the German Cinema, 7 Pryot, Sarah, 14 Psycho, 188 psychoanalytical film theory, 4, 189

Index Public Enemy, 168 Public Enemy, The, 175 Pusey, Fred, 74 Puttnam, David, 34 Pyriev, Ivan, 118, 139, 140–7 Queen Christina, 154 Quigley, Martin, 210 Railway Children, The, 29 Raines, Claude, 152 Raise the Titanic, 28 Ramsaye, Terry, 1 Rank, J. Arthur, 75, 208, 209 Rank Organization, 28, 79, 90, 201, 204 Rawnsley, David, 74 Ray, Nicholas, 153, 155 Rebecca, 152 Rebel Without A Cause, 127, 155 reception studies, 5, 67, 181–3 Red Shoes, The, 81 Reddick, Lawrence, 24 Reed, Oliver, 32, 34 ‘reflectionism’, 3–4 Regarding Frank Capra, 70 Request Concert,137 Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The, 120 Revisioning History, 11 Rhodes James, Robert, 52 Rich Are Always With Us, The, 157 Rich Bride, The (Bogataia nevesta), 139, 141 Rich, Matty, 168 Richards, Jeffrey, 4, 7, 118, 119–35 Rickman, Alan, 98, 99 Riddle of the Sands, The, 29 Rilla, Wolf, 90 Ring, The, 192 RKO Radio Pictures, 130, 131 Roberts, Julia, 97 Roberts, Marguerite, 131 Robin Hood, 125 Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves, 135 Robin and Marian, 135 Robin of Sherwood, 135 Robinson, Casey, 158 Robinson, David, 51 Robinson, Edward G., 174

253

Roddenberry, Gene, 60 Roddick, Nick, 70 Rogers, Peter, 35 Rogues of Sherwood Forest, 121,125, 127, 128–9 Rohmer, Eric, 186, 187–8 Rollover, 106, 108 Room to Let, 82, 85–6 Rosenstone, Robert A., 11 Rotha, Paul, 2, 185, 197 Royal Flash, 31–2, 38 Russell, Ken, 33–4 Ryan’s Daughter, 29, 33, 38 Said, Edward, 212 Sailor’s Return, The, 29 Salkow, Sidney, 120 Salt, Waldo, 111–12, 123, 124, 131 Sapphire Films, 134 Sarris, Andrew, 69, 74, 86 Sasdy, Peter, 35–6 Satan’s Skin, 36 Savage Messiah, 28 Scarface (1932), 169, 171, 175 Scarface (1983), 169, 172, 175 Schary, Dore, 129–31 Schatz, Thomas, 56, 70, 119 Schein, Harry, 217, 220 Schildt, Jurgen, 218 Schlesinger, John, 111–12 ‘Schwedenfilm’, 220 Scorsese, Martin, 175, 211 Scott, A.O., 61 Screen, 5, 55, 229 Screen International, 58 Screenwriters Association, 91 Sea Hawk, The, 120 Sebastiene, 37, 38, 39 Secret Beyond the Door, 152 Seduction of the Innocent, The, 127 Selander, Leslie, 120 Selznick, David O., 13, 15, 22, 209 Servant, The, 73 Seventh Seal, The (Det Sjunde Inseglet), 215, 218 Sewell, Vernon, 82 Shaffer, Anthony, 231, 243 Shaft, 171 Shakur, Tupac, 171

254 Index Shepperton Studios, 28 Sheriff, Paul, 76, 77–81 Sherman, George, 120, 127 Shingler, Martin, 117–18, 152–65 Shining Path, The (Svetlyi put’), 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148 Shout, The, 29 Shumyatsky, Boris, 138 Sidney, George, 120 Sight & Sound, 222 Silence, The (Tystnaden), 219 Singing Fool, 195 Singleton, John, 168 Siodmak, Robert, 124 Sirk, Douglas, 153, 155, 181 Sisters, The, 158 Six Wives of Henry VIII, The, 30 Sjöman, Victor, 219 Sjunde Inseglet, Det: see Seventh Seal, The Sklar, Robert, 4, 70 Smith, Digby, 82 Smith, Justin, 183, 229–44 Smith, Mel, 93 Smultronstället: see Wild Strawberries So the Red Rose, 14 Society of British Film Art Directors and Designers (SBFAD), 82 Son of Monte Cristo, 120 Son of Robin Hood, 125 Sons of the Musketeers, 121 Sontag, Susan, 222 Sorlin, Pierre, 11 sources, 7, 187, 201–3 Spanish Gardner, The, 73 spectatorship, 6 Spicer, Andrew, 71, 89–103 Spiegel, Sam, 30 Spoto, Donald, 188, 193 Stacey, Jackie, 182 Staiger, Janet, 5, 153–4, 181 Stalin, Joseph, 149 Star of India, 121 Star Trek, 60 Star Wars, 56 stardom, 105, 114 Stargazing (Jackie Stacey), 182 Steelyard Blues, 111 Steene, Birgitta, 219, 222–3

Stella Dallas, 152, 154, 163 Steiner, Max, 158 Stigsdotter, Ingrid, 182–3, 215–27 Stites, Richard, 137 Stokes, Melvyn, 12, 13–26 Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, The, 63, 125, 129 Straight Out of Brooklyn, 166, 168 Street With No Name, The, 173 Street, Sarah, 182, 201–13 Sundance Film Festival, 168 Superfly, 171 Sutherland, Duncan, 75 swashbuckler, 118, 119–35 Svetlyi put’: see Shing Star, The Svinarka I pastukh: see Swineherdess and the Shepherd, The Swedish Film Institute, 217 Swineherdess and the Shepherd, The (Svinarka I pastukh), 139, 140, 143, 147, 148–9 Sword of Monte Cristo, 121 Sword of Sherwood Forest, 125, 134 Swordsmen of the Screen, 119 T-Men, 173 Talbot, David, 108 Talking Pictures, 89 Tall Guy, The, 93 Tarvosky, Andrei, 224 Taste the Blood of Dracula, 35–6 Taylor, Elizabeth, 130 Taylor, Richard, 7, 137–51 Taylor, Robert, 129 Tennyson, Pen, 75 Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines, 57 Terror, The, 193, 195 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, 110 Thief of Bagdad, The, 76 Thirty-Nine Steps, The, 30 Thomas, Gerald, 35 Thompson, Emma, 99 Thompson, Kristin, 5 Thornton, Billy Bob, 98 Thorpe, Richard, 120 Three on a Match, 157 Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine), 149 Tigon, 36

Index Time Out, 52, 59 Times, The, 193, 224 Titanic, 57 Todd, Richard, 129 Tolkein, J.R.R., 56 Tolson, Melvyn B., 16–17 Tourneur, Jacques, 120 Tout va bien, 111 Tractor Drivers (Traktoristy), 139, 143, 144, 146 Traktoritsky: see Tractor Drivers Tri pesni o Lenine: see Three Songs of Lenin Triumph des Willens: see Triumph of the Will Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), 137 Truman Show, The, 51, 57 Trumbo, Dalton, 134 Tsirk: see Circus, The Turner, Graeme, 4 Turovskaya, Maya, 140 Twain, Mark, 125 Tweedie, Jill, 52 Twentieth-Century Fox, 56, 77, 125, 132 Two Cities Films, 75, 77, 79 Tyburn, 36 Tystnaden: see Silence, The U-571, 62 Ullman, Liv, 216, 217 Ulmer, Edgar G., 120 Undercurrent, 152 Underworld USA, 117 United Artists, 28, 111–12, 120, 124 Universal Pictures, 56, 125 Universal-International, 207, 210 Up Pompei!, 29 Valentino, 33 Vampire Circus, 35 Vampire Lovers, The, 36 Van Peebles, Mario, 168 Vandyke Films, 85 Variety, 30, 51, 89, 156 Vasey, Ruth, 205 Vertov, Dziga, 149 Vetchinsky, Alexander, 74 Vicar of Dibley, The, 100 Vidor, King, 153

255

Vietnam War, 43, 104, 110–13 Vikings, The, 135 Virgin Spring, The (Jungfrukällan), 219 Visions of Yesterday, 4 visual style, 8 Volga-Volga, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 von Geldern, James, 138 Vselye rebiata: see Happy Guys, The Wagner, Robert, 132 Walker, 12 Wallace, Edgar, 193 Wallis, Hal B., 30, 157, 161 Warner Bros., 120, 124, 125, 156, 158–9, 168, 193 Warshow, Robert, 176 Warwick Films, 132 Way to the Stars, The, 77 web ethnography, 230–1 Webb, Jack, 173 Wee Willie Winkie, 63 ‘weepies’, 158–9 Weinstein, Bob, 56 Weinstein, Harvey, 56 Weir, Peter, 41, 43, 44, 48, 56–7 Welch, David, 7 Welles, Orson, 3 Wembley Studios, 77, 78 Wertham, Frederic, 127, 132 Wicked Lady, The, 27, 204 Wicker Man, The, 183, 229–44 Wife of Monte Cristo, The, 121 Wild One, The, 127 Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället), 215, 218 Wilde, Cornel, 128 Williams, L.P., 73, 76, 81, 84 Williamson, David, 44 Williamson, Judith, 101 Willis, Iris, 78 Winstanley, 36–7, 38 Winsten, Archer, 160 Witness, 51, 56 Woman’s View, A, 152 Women in British Cinema, 70 Women in Love, 28, 29

256 Index Women Who Knew Too Much, The, 186, 189 Wood, Robin, 188 Woodward, Edward, 231 Working Title Films, 93–6 Wreford, Denis, 76, 82–5 Writer and the Screen, The, 90 Writer’s Guild of Great Britain, 31 Written on the Wind, 155, 182 Wunschkonzert: see Request Concert Wyler, William, 158

X-Men 2, 57 Young Mr Pitt, 61 Young Winston, 29, 31 Young, Nedrick, 122, 124 Young, Robert, 35 Youngblood, Denise, 137 Zagarrio, Vita, 70 Zanuck, Darryl F., 131 Zhdanov, Andrei, 138 Zheutlin, Barbara, 108 Zulu, 27

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