Memories we choose to forget

Having lived here for over 20 years, for me, Britain continues to be one of the strangest places in the entire world. It's one of the few countries that have never really had a revolution (arguably there was Cromwell but..) yet it retains this anarchic streak tempered with so many checks and balances it almost implodes. The country that founded the welfare state still struggles, often blindly, to support that ideal. Freedom of speech is welcomed here, so long as it doesn't attack the very notion of whether freedom exists at all. The Brits now have an unelected Prime Minister, after all. Andrew Gilligan (he of the Iraq War leak furore) bravely tackled the failings of Gordon Brown's social housing revolution two weeks ago in a Dispatches documentary. Those who have social housing, most particularly in London, find they are the envy of many with the low rents they pay. Those who've bought into the real estate market early on; don't want their new found wealth of the apple cart overturned by rumours of a market slide. I had a conversation with a nice politico from my housing association yesterday who was wanting to put my horrible past with them behind and look towards a New Albion. Could that be because they're guilty and inefficient as, I was going to say hell, but hell is probably run with much more efficacy? Remember the interview I quoted some weeks ago in which the BBC's Philip Dodd said the Brits were amnesiacs when it comes to history and documentarist Molly Dineen thought that "We [the British] pretend we're moving forward by severing ourselves from the past." Oh, and of course there was another verdict on the 'hoping everyone will forget' police killing of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

It's in this context that a wealth of truly wonderful British films hits the screens and DVD's this month. But first a film about Washington politicos. How many people know or remember that the Brit forces burned Washington during their war back in 1814? Directed and written by Hollywood outsider Paul Schrader, The Walker charts Washington society ladies 'walker' or chaperone Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson) as he becomes embroiled in an ambitious District Attorney's attempt to cover-up a murder. (Schrader's Raging Bull (1980) script directed by Scorsese is on re-release this week at the ICA through Park Circus. It's a restored print and unless you've a huge plasma screen you must see this film in the cinema in its glorious black and white.) The Walker needs to be seen in the cinema too for Chris Seager's cinematography (he was a long time collaborator with David Yates -the latest Harry Potter director). The film's existence is also largely thanks to producer Deepak Nayar (Bend It Like Beckham) who is injecting much needed oomph into the Brit film industry and shot most of the film in England and the Isle of Man!. There are so many things to praise and applaud in this film. Harrelson's Carter Page has to be one of his best performances of his career with his dry Southern nonchalance and toupee deflowering mirror moment (echoes of Schrader's American Gigolo and Taxi Driver). Lauren Bacall is magnetic as she tells Carter Page that he only thinks he's the black sheep of the family. His deceased father was a senator and Virginia governor so Carter's 'walking' has been somewhat of a disappointment to Washington's elite. "Don't judge the dead,” he's told. "They judge us each and every day," he replies. "A grown man acting on the fears of a child. There's the mystery," he says in the film's final moments. "All's forgotten," he says with wry cynicism as he confronts powerful conspirator Jack Delorean (Ned Beatty) with the evidence. "Nothing to remember," says Delorean, “You're the wrong side of history. People want a story. An American story." The film is dedicated to Schrader's late brother Leonard (and writing partner) with whom he never really became reconciled. And if I haven't mentioned the rest of the cast it's only because they're as perfect as everything else in the film.

Second Sight are a small UK DVD distribution company that do exactly what their title says on the tin for film, giving us more important Brit films this week from the dusty past, though they're full price mostly with no extras. But many of the excellent prints come from that indispensable New York art house mob Janus Films who celebrated their 50th birthday last year. Major Barbara (1941) is arguably David Lean's first film. He is credited with montage (editing) to producer Gabriel Pascal's directing. The script and adaptation are by the fiery Irish socialist George Bernard Shaw. His plays are often criticised for being over didactic. But the power and skill of his language tend to outway that. Major Barbara's title sequence has the amusing preface (much shorter than the ones to his plays!): "Some of the people in it are real people whom I have met and talked to. One of the others may be YOU. There will be a bit of you in all of them. We are all members of one another."

Major Barbara (Wendy Hiller) is the idealist Salvation Army daughter of a wealthy munitions manufacturer Undershaft (Robert Morley), "I am the government of your country!” She's swept off her feet by fellow idealist and Greek prof Adolphus (Rex Harrison). It's essentially a comedy about wealth and poverty. "You know nothing and you think you know everything," puffs Undershaft as he debates "the secret of right and wrong" with one of his sons, "that points clearly to a political career...and you'll find your right and proper place in the end on the treasury bench." The ending of the film is very much Britain in 2007!

Another Shaw adaptation is Pygmalion(1938) best known as the musical My Fair Lady. But take out the musical numbers and you have exactly the same film scene for scene. The deceptively clever score here is by classical French composer Arthur Honegger (famous for his 1923 Pacific 231 depicting a steam locomotive). Pygmalion was the sculptor who created his ideal woman Galatea and prayed to the gods to give her life. In Shaw's take, phonetics prof Higgins (Leslie Howard who also co-directs) passes off cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) as a high society lady. "I've created this thing out of squalid cabbage leaves in Covent Garden." Director Anthony Asquith also gave us another classic The Browning Version (1951) more recently remade by Mike Figgis or as American film writer Bruce Eder calls him lordly in his informative if slightly dry commentary, Michael Figgis. Based on Terence Rattigan's play, public (private school) teacher Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) has become a figure of fun and distain for his pupils, Rattigan "veiling his [homosexual] sensibilities in a critique of heterosexual norms." Asquith's father was Herbert Henry Asquith who before becoming Prime Minister was the Home Secretary under Gladstone at the turn of the century responsible for signing Oscar Wilde's arrest warrant for being gay. The Browning Version may seem a little dated now but it took another 10 years and the film Victim (1961), which I'll come to later, for gay issues to be openly explored in Brit cinema.

Another Second Sight gem is David Lean's Summertime (1955) with Jack Hildyard's glorious cinematography of Venice and it would be perfect for one of those free outdoor summer screenings. It's hardly original nor taxing, but you just can't help smiling and wiping away a tear as you watch this. Based on Arthur Laurents' play The Time of the Cuckoo it has American spinster Jane Hudson (Katherine Hepburn) defiantly avoiding the tourist hotels in her pensione and caught between spinsterdom and giving in to the amour of Venice and one antiques dealer Rossano Brazzi. His barefooted little Rossellini film escapee kid nephew Mauro (Gaetano Autiero) is adorable, " "Sometimes I think you're very peculiar" "Don't be shy, lady. Venice very different for ladies." "You make many jokes but inside I think you cry," Brazzi says to Hepburn. Lean is famous for his visual epics but his observations of a character's emotional core are always quite heart-breaking. His 1945 Brief Encounter (from Noel Coward's play) just re-released is a case in point. It's best known for its much used Rachmaninov piano concerto score. But watching it again after I don't know how long, I thought how powerful it would be if all the music were just trashed. You'd then have a film that was much more European with just ticking clocks and footsteps.

Compare this to Laurence Olivier's Henry V from the same year, re-released next week, Park Circus again. (BFI Southbank Olivier season) The film owes much to the art direction of Carmen Dillon who also did The Browning Version. It looks stunning in this new digitally re-mastered print. And the way the film sticks to its stage origins whilst still bursting out cinematically is quite a feat. Is the bit where Olivier throws the crown from his head behind the throne in the Shakespeare?

Carmen Dillon, one of the most respected Brit production designers, also did Joseph Losey's Accident(1967) that can be seen in Optimum's Dirk Bogarde set. There isn't a dud film here. And it makes a very interesting comparison with Optimum's James Mason set, that's a bit less impressive as a set but has some fantastic interview and documentary extras on Mason. Both Mason and Bogarde worked for the Rank Organisation which Mason was later very critical of for, "spending a lot of money on trying to capture the international market whereas we'd have a much better chance...by just making comedies and thrillers." Because he was a huge star, Mason's comments and other writings angered a lot of powerful people causing him to try his luck in Hollywood, "I would have had a more interesting career, perhaps, if I'd stayed in England." He tried avoiding the studios to no avail, but the studio system did allow Mason to work on some of the most iconic movies, Cukor's A Star is Born (1954), Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), and Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). So it was swings and roundabouts.

The less raffish more devilishly handsome Bogarde, on the other hand, did one film in Hollywood Song Without End (1960) playing pianist/composer Franz Liszt, but remained in Britain to do some of his finest work here, and in Europe - Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1973) is my favourite, for others it's probably Death in Venice (1971). Mason made probably his greatest Brit success with Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) as Johnnie McQueen, wounded in a heist and wandering the streets until death. Though no reference is made to Belfast or the IRA this is most clearly the film's subject, "a conflict in the hearts of people when they get involved" as the film's title preface states. The incredible cinematography is by Brief Encounter's Robert Krasker and William Alwyn scores. Also on this disc are rushes from a 1972 Mason interview and an absorbing Yorkshire TV documentary from the same year Home James in which Mason returns to his home town of Huddersfield in Northern England. Puts its most famous later arts contribution the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival into fascinating context. "I'm unconventional rather than a rebel," muses Mason. Bogarde was about to make the far less controversial The Blue Lamp in 1949, a somewhat jingoistic take on the London's police tackling the new post-war phenomena of the professional criminal. Director Basil Dearden also helmed the equally less inspiring Mason pic Bells Go Down (1943) about the London fire fighters. Interesting sociologically, though. Dearden would, however, give Bogarde his Odd Man Out with Victim (1961) exploring the blackmailing (the Brit anti-gay law dubbed 'the blackmailer's charter') of gays with Bogarde's lawyer on the brink of a QC (Queen's Counsel) who exposes the plot.

Bogarde's 1961 urbane interview on the Victim disc is intriguing. He seems to be just as outspoken as Mason but much more of a politician. "Hollywood is the only place to do your work...[Cukor's Song Without End] taught me more in six months than I'd learnt in 14 years before...Out of 36 pictures I've enjoyed making six out of all of them." Cukor took over after Charles Vidor died 3 weeks into shooting. He later, though, is careful to praise the Rank Organisation to which he'd been contracted. He squirms when the term 'film star' is used to describe him preferring 'film actor'. "I started running about '47 and I don't think I stopped 'til '53," is how he describes all his beautiful 'on the run' bad boys. Hunted (1952), his 12th film, was his first 'name above the title' film and another 'on the run' flic. Directed by Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob the year before), Bogarde's character is saddled with a kid witness Robbie (Jon Whiteley) and becomes a father figure to the boy. It's a good film reminding one of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes (1945) where Grimes is the village outsider whose boy apprentice drowned as does the next though not intentionally. Bogarde's return having almost escaped by fishing boat; dead (or sick?) boy in arms, with the waiting police on the quayside is deeply moving. Losey's Sleeping Tiger (1954) has Bogarde in a similar bad boy role with a psychologist trying to rehabilitate the lad by allowing him to reside at his home for a while. "In the dark forests of any personality there's a sleeping tiger". Great mooning sax score by classical composer Malcolm Arnold. Losey's pych probing films would prove the re-moulding of Bogarde's career from matinee idol to serious dramatic actor. But before that Bogarde would make The Spanish Gardener (1957) again with the boy Jon Whiteley whose recently separated father, a Brit counsel in Spain (Michael Hordern), becomes increasingly jealous of the bond forming between his son and Bogarde's gardener on their hilltop villa. Bogarde doesn't sound Spanish for one moment, but he certainly looks it here. Great, great performances even if the print's not the best.

Joseph Losey, an American escaping the Hollywood Communist witch-hunt, made some of the most acute cinematic observations of the changing British class system and its repressed, ambiguous sexuality, The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967) both with Harold Pinter's male orientated scripts. The latter disc has a documentary extra featuring cinematographer Gerry Fisher (his first break from camera operator to DP) and film historian Michel Ciment: "[Accident] is built on empty moments..They penetrate the conscious and are able to escape the flat surface of the screen." As I noted before, Carmen Dillon's production design here is crucial, as is Johnny Dankworth's subtle score predominantly for harp. Richard Macdonald is production designer on The Servant and the disc has an excellent examination by Brit critic guru Ian Christie.

And if all that wasn't enough, there's a re-issue of John Schlesinger's Brit new-wave comedy Billy Liar (1963) digitally restored as part of the BBC's Summer of British Film season and the UK Film Council's Digital Screen Network. BBC Two tonight has British Film Forever: social realism

The BFI have also just released Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives on DVD. I reviewed it earlier this year.

And just to depress you, Christian Wolmar has some articles on transport:
Transport Times
Metronet debacle
Rolling stock companies and government