Leslie Halliwell on British movies
A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence Raymond Durgnat (Faber £3.00) Since that still-recent time when the cinema was reluctantly but irrevocably acknowledged as an art form, there has come forward a school of intense young film critics appar- ently determined to revenge their years in the wilderness by reverently over-analysing, at great length, films and film-makers whose actual merits were no more than professional competence and a desire to please. Book lists threaten us with full-length studies of almost every leading actor or director of the last quarter-century. You could fill a whole shelf, for instance, with books about Alfred Hitch- cock, who takes all the praise and probing with a solemn smile and a pinch of salt, knowing himself to be simply a clever enter- tainer and innovator who understands his audience and enjoys his trade.
Raymond Durgnat is one of those who cannot enjoy a film without imposing upon it some fragile superstructure of Freudian or sociological analysis. A few years ago his purpose in movie-going seemed to be the discovery of phallic and other sexual sym- bols where they were least expected : this aspect of his researches was summed up in a book entitled Eros in the Cinema. Now he has turned his attention to a somewhat arbitrarily-defined period of British cinema, roughly 1946 to 1962, and with loving thor- oughness has examined every relevant movie for elements which will back up his self- imposed thesis of a revulsion from middle- class tradition. I imagine no one will deny that such a revulsion actually did take place : any art must reflect to some extent the pre- vailing moods of its time, and the route from This Happy Breed to Room at the Top is clearly defined for all to see. What one does question is the need for so long and garrulous a book on a theme which is 'not only obvious but restrictive.
Despite his prolixity, Durgnat does not properly set the historical scene, which will be vital to the understanding of anyone coming fresh to the period. It is, after all, simple enough. By the end of the 'thirties, the British film industry had all but given in to American pressure. We still cherish a handful of films made by such producers as Korda, Balcon, Wilcox and Saville, but the vast majority of the thousand-odd features made in the 'thirties were insipid quota quickies, lacking even the technical expertise to dis- guise their own inanities. The war changed all that. Just as it sharpened the perception of everyday life for the whole population, so in the cause of national morale it inspired film-makers to new heights : at last they had something to say. Technical limitations did not prevent a flow of memorable films in which patriotic drive was suffused with imag- ination, honest realism with a new classless kind of humour. For the first time, cinema managers found it useful to display the words 'a British picture' rather than conceal the fact. The war ended in 1945, but the ambi- tion, the observation and the professionalism were maintained; and just as post-war cyni-
cism might have crept- in, Ealing comedy was developed and taught us to laugh at our
national foibles. By the mid-'fifties television was emptying the cinemas and broadening our horizons, encouraging discussion of sub- jects which had previously been taboo. Capi- Jallio&hulks..U.Varer,locin for new backgrounds unknown to the telly, film producers discovered the sexual habits of the provincial working classes. The age of permissiveness was upon us.
That is an absurdly potted account, but a few pages spent in elaborating these basic facts would have been more useful to Dur- gant's readers than the kaleidoscope of assort- ed attitudes which currently serves as an intro- duction. It is crammed with white-hot thoughts which might have been more in- telligible if they had been allowed to cool before being committed to paper. Despite several attempts, I have no idea what he means by 'the spurious and specious exoti- cism of scarcely nuanced emotional and moral primitivism' and I was still reeling from that when I became embedded in this little defence of his own style of 'thematic exegesis': 'Anyone familiar with the difference be- tween rigorous textual criticism and the actual responses of your actual spectators in your actual cinema, and in conversation, and of students in seminar, will prefer to at least entertain the proposition that less sensitised textures may work for less, or otherwise, sensitised audiences and be more subtle and challenging than critical conventions usually allow.'
Once you have worked that out, you may concur with it more readily than with some of Durgnat's attempts to lace the most un- likely films within the corset of his theme. It seems that ideological considerations even penetrated David Lean's supple and sym- pathetic version of Dickens's Great Expecta- tions: according to Durgnat it 'trembles on the brink of being a classic Marxist fable about bourgeois "confusionism".' As for Powell and Pressburger's heavenly fantasy, A Matter of Life and Death, did you (or they) know that it expressed 'perennial Tory criticisms of the Socialist Utopia'? Alterna- tively, have you thought of it as an allegory of the British spirit reeling after Dunkirk, timorously seeking an American alliance but tempted by the death wish of French colla- borationism? Durgnat has, of course.
If the author did not take them so seri- ously, such outlandish interpretations would offer lively amusement to any reader who knows the period well enough to refute them for himself. As it is, they detract from some very apt observations on particular films, and will be hopelessly confusing to younger students; who, incidentally, will not be helped by the profusion of punning sectional sub-titles (Shammateurism, Good Irresolu- tions, The Impotence of Being Earnest) which take more working out than they are worth. So do phrases like 'demi-slump and semi-slum', obscure words like 'edulcorated' and such inventions as 'peplum', which according to the dictionary is a Greek gar- ment but seems to translate into Durgnatese as 'classical epic done into visually elegant pulp fantasy'.
What this laborious exposition lacks is any real sense of enjoyment, and enjoyment is what these old British films chiefly had to offer. They still offer it when sympathetically viewed, but Durgnat judges them from the viewpoint of the 'seventies, so that Brief Encounter, with its style, its charm, and its well-bred emotion, disintegrates under his glance. Even a Hammer horror like The Mummy is not to be taken at face value: when the creature is finally blasted to death in a swamp, Freud has to be consulted.
`Psychoanalytically, the mutilated phallus is turned into, dea4 femininity and .excrement.'
Durgnat has clearly read and thought too much to accept that any film can be intended simply to entertain, to offer escape, or to reflect the pleasures of life as it is. Even when producers officially disclaim any under- tones or pretensions, he knows better : such statements, intended `to reassure the trade and the public', are, for him 'undermined by the film itself'. All directors, he believes. 'put more meaning into their films than spectators ever take out'. Predictably, he perpetuates the rather tiresome theory of the director as auteur, assigning wholly to him the artistic success or otherwise of what most of us will continue to regard as a team effort. No prizes are awarded for guessing that the director with the longest section to himself is Joseph Losey, who among other evidences of genius is credited with making The Gypsy and the Gentleman a fancy dress draft for The Ser- vant, which may surprise Janet Green who wrote the first script and Harold Pinter who wrote the second, both from established novels by different writers.
The book bears every evidence of pains- taking scholarship. Of 336 pages, no fewer than seventy-three are devoted to biblio- graphies, indices and closely-printed film lists. Such diligence is a shade puzzling in view of the author's early statement that 'Taken in bulk, the movies which concern us regularly perpetrated distortions and omissions which proved extremely galling to this writer's critical generation . .
This seems somewhat ungracious from a writer who later eulogises Albert Zugsmith's Evils of Chinatown as 'one of the screen's three classic fantasies'. But Durgnat disarms comment on such wilfulness by one firm ex- planation : 'This book is meant to provoke criticism, not to terminate it.' In this respect he has achieved his aim.
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