Tag: Noël Coward

Cavalcade (1933)

The Marryots and the Bridges face a world in motion in Cavalcade

Director: Frank Lloyd

Cast: Diana Wynyard (Jane Marryot), Clive Brook (Robert Marryot), Una O’Connor (Ellen Bridges), Herbert Mundin (Albert Bridges), Beryl Mercer (Cook), Irene Brown (Margaret Harris), Frank Lawton (Joe Marryot), Ursula Jean (Fanny Bridges), Margaret Lindsay (Edith Harris), John Warburton (Edward Marryot)

Before Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbeythere was Cavalcade. Winning the Best Picture of 1933 (beating out more highly regarded films today – and King Kong wasn’t even nominated!), Cavalcade shows a romantic weakness for dramas about the struggles of the British Upper classes and their servants is nothing new. Based on Noel Coward’s play, it’s a grand, soapy drama that’s been done better since (not least by those two shows) but makes an entertaining genre template.

Carefully ticking off historical events between 1899 and 1933, the film follows the Marryot family – father Robert (Clive Brook), mother Jane (Diana Wynyard) and their two sons Joe (Frank Lawton) and John (Edward Marryot) – and their servants turned pub owners the Bridges – Albert (Herbert Mundin), Ellen (Una O’Connor) and their daughter Fanny (Ursula Jean). From the Boer War via the death of Queen Victoria, the first flight across the Channel, two characters taking an unfortunate honeymoon trip on the Titanic to the First World War, we see how events affect both families (invariably with tragic consequences) as Britain slowly changes.

You can look at Cavalcade and find it hilariously old-fashioned. The accents are so sharply clipped they could be cut-glass, while the working-class characters speak with “evenin’ guv’ner” ‘umbleness. In preparation for the film, the Studio flew a camera team over to film the London production (then hired several of the actors to repeat their roles, including O’Connor) and the film sometimes feels like a slightly stuffy stage production bought to the screen.

This is most noticeable in Diana Wynyard’s performance. She clearly has no idea to act for the camera – and Lloyd didn’t correct her. ‘Asides’ see her frequently turn towards the camera and stare into the middle distance. For the innumerable times she is called onto to weep, she throws herself to the floor dramatically. With her declamatory style, she’s constantly playing to an imaginary back row. It sticks out particularly badly when watching the far more experienced Brook relatively underplay each scene without physically telegraphing every emotion. Surprisingly Wynyard landed an Oscar nomination – but soon left Hollywood and returned to the stage.

The rest of the cast are split between the two approaches, all while balancing the stiff-upper-lipped demands of the script, with its “I must go the war/Don’t go darling/I must they won’t start without me” exchanges (to paraphrase Eddie Izzard). The younger actors – John Warburton and Margaret Lindsay as the young couple booking a berth on the Titanic – offer performances so restrained they feel strait-jacketed. The working-class characters cut lose a little. Una O’Connor is a little broad, but quite engaging while Herbert Mundin gives possibly the best performance as a landlord too fond of his own product. Ursula Jeans makes a fine romantic lead as their daughter, delivering decent renditions of several songs in particular “Twentieth Century Blues”.

Those blues are nominally what the film is about, as the world leaves the Marryots behind. It’s bookended by two New Years –in 1899 and 1933 – during which time the world has changed completely. War has shattered the cosy Victorian status quo, leaving millions dead and the Marryots struggle to recognise this new England. Cavalcade only lightly engages with themes of societal upheaval – probably because it is simultaneously wallowing in so much nostalgia, that Coward’s more sombre ideas would bring the party crashing down.

Instead, Cavalcade luxuriates in nostalgia, loving the idea of a hierarchical, old-fashioned, English world where everyone knows their place (even after leaving their employ, the Bridges treat the Marryots with deference, while the Marryots look at them with a paternal indulgence). But its soapy stories – predictable as they seem to us now – are actually rather effective, and the flashes of genuine emotion (best of all, when Brook’s Robert says farewell to his son as he heads out on “one last patrol” in the last days before the Armistice) are surprisingly effective.

Lloyd’s direction of the larger set-pieces also show an impressive flair. The domestic scenes may seem stagey, but when the camera films a crowd it feels ambitious and dynamic. A huge pier scene with hundreds of men heading to the Boer War is handled very well. Bustling street scenes feel real. Wynyard’s finest moment comes in a crowd scene as she tries to merge into a crowd celebrating the Armistice, while caught up in a personal grief. A montage covering 1918 to 1933 is effective in showing the march of change.

Best of all is a wonderful montage communicating the horrific cost of the First World War. Lloyd presents the war as a never ending stream of soldiers marching into a tunnel. Initially the backdrop around is an English town, with smoking chimneys. This morphs into No Man’s Land, with the chimney smoke becoming explosions. Super-imposed over this are images of soldiers in close-up, at first marching in smiles, then dying at an accelerated rate. Nostalgia turns into Danteish circle of hell, innumerable bodies piling up. It stands out as a moment of expressionist inspiration (and must have had a strong impact on the audience).

It’s the finest moment in Cavalcade, your enjoyment of which will be directly related to how much patience you have with Downton Abbey. Find that an enjoyable diversion (as I do), and you will certainly find something to enjoy in Cavalcade. If Downton’s rose-tinted view of Edwardian social structures puts you on edge, you will struggle. I was pleasantly surprised by how charmed I was by it. And that World War One sequence is worth the price of admission alone.

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

Carol Lynley’s daughter ‘Bunny’ goes missing – but is the girl real or not? Classic noir mystery Bunny Lake is Missing

Director: Otto Preminger

Cast: Laurence Olivier (Superintendent Newhouse), Carol Lynley (Ann Lake), Kier Dullea (Steven Lake), Martita Hunt (Ada Ford), Anna Massey (Elvira Smollett), Clive Revill (Sergeant Andrews), Finlay Currie (The Doll Maker), Lucia Mannheim (The Cook), Noël Coward (Horatio Wilson)

Otto Preminger’s career was an interesting mixture of high-brow, noirish thrillers and pulpish adaptations. Bunny Lake Is Missing is a mixture of these, a restructuring of a hit novel. Transplanting the novel from New York to London, the film covers a single day and the investigation into a missing child ‘Bunny’ Lake. Her American mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) drops her at her new school, and returns at the end of the day to find no one has seen her daughter or any record of her existence. While her protective brother Steven (Kier Dullea) rants and rages, Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) leads the investigation. As Newhouse fails to find any evidence for the child’s existence at all, the question is asked: is she a figment of Ann’s fragile imagination?

Preminger plays this delicate game of “guess who” with the audience for a skilled and enjoyable 90 minutes before giving us any form of answer. The film throws us straight into the mystery of whether Bunny is real or not from the off, as our first shot of Ann is her alone in the school after dropping her daughter off. We see as little evidence of Bunny’s existence as the cast does. From there it’s a careful balance between giving us enough reasons to both trust Ann’s conviction her daughter is real and also give us enough reasons to suspect that Ann may be as unbalanced as Newhouse is concerned she might be. 

It’s quite the game the film plays, and Preminger does it very well, the film never tipping the hand too much one way or the other. Shot in luscious black and white, it’s a film of noirish shadows and imposing blackness where everything feels a little bit out of kilter and untrustworthy. Preminger throws us into Ann’s perspective by using a number of clever tracking shots that allow us to follow her through the events of each scenes. These shots are sustained, subtle and also give us a further subconscious reason to trust her – we are effectively seeing the events of the film side-by-side with her. It makes for a rather empathetic film, and one you find yourself investing into.

Not least because it completely understands the twin horrors of both losing a child and not being believed by anyone no matter how desperate you plead that you are telling the truth (no matter how generous people are while doing so). Preminger acutely understands we all deep down worry that we are going to be let down by those we need to believe in – and this feeling of concern, mixed with frustration and pity for Ann is what draws us to her. Even while we think there is more behind Bunny’s existence than meets the eye.

The screenplay by John and Penelope Mortimer also throws plenty of potential suspects at us. These are largely a series of delicious cameos for vintage British actors. These extreme odd-balls also make the two Americans in London (Ann in particular) seem even more like fishes out of water. Martita Hunt is excellent value as a retired school headmistress, seemingly confined to a bedroom in the attic of the school (!) whose hobby is recording children talking about their nightmares. Anna Massey is equally good as a harassed matron more concerned about the negative impact on the school’s reputation than child’s safety. Pick of the bunch of this rogues gallery is Noël Coward (having a whale of a time) as Ann’s drunken landlord, a faded actor and sexually ambiguous seductress who in one priceless scene gleefully shows a group of police detectives some of his favourite whips (“I find the sensation [of being whipped] rather titillating…[this was] reputed to belong to the great one himself. The Marquis de Sade”) from his collection of bizarre sex toys.

These perverts, oddballs and weirdos are all investigated with a cool professionalism by Laurence Olivier’s Superintendent Newhouse. Olivier gives possibly one of his most humane, restrained and engaging performances: he’s the epitome of caring, dedicated professionalism and a superbly humane detective. Carrying much of the burden of conveying the films narrative, Olivier is superb here – and he manages to make Newhouse exactly the sort of man you would long to investigate your child’s disappearance, even as he starts to doubt the child even exists. Olivier is in fact so strong, that the parts of the film where he disappears suffer noticeably from his absence – no one else among the principles can match him for presence.

Saying that, Carol Lynley does an excellent job as a character we invest in and sympathise with, but can never quite bring ourselves to be sure is reliable. It’s a difficult line she walks between being believably distraught and simultaneously slightly off kilter, enough to make you worry that she be (knowingly or not) making the whole thing up. The feeling may be more than helped by the exceptionally weird relationship between herself and her brother, one of an incestuously unsettling intensity (their relationship as brother and sister isn’t divulged until almost 15 minutes into the film and it’s as much a surprise to the audience as it is to the characters).

Kier Dullea as her brother gives a decent, if rather strained performance, as Steven. Dullea’s slight emptiness in the role can perhaps be partly attributed to his terrible relationship with Preminger, later claiming making the film was the worst experience of his life. (Olivier was also unimpressed calling Preminger a bully). 

It’s a shame as Dullea is crucial to the final sections of the film. I won’t give away the reveal and solution, but Preminger overplays his hand here, stretching the final sequence of the film out to a full 15 minutes which rather overstays its welcome. Maybe the sort of psychological complexity it’s aiming for is a bit more familiar to use today, than it was in 1965, but it certainly feels like a scene overstretched. But that’s a blemish on a very solid mystery before then that brings more than enough pulpish pleasure, fine performances and interesting film making to reward rewatching.

In Which We Serve (1942)


Noel Coward takes command in stirring British wartime drama In Which We Serve

Director: Noël Coward, David Lean

Cast: Noël Coward (Captain E.V. Kinross), Bernard Miles (CPO Walter Hardy), John Mills (Shorty Blake), Celia Johnson (Alix Kinross), Joyce Carey (Kath Hardy), Kay Walsh (Freda Lewis), Michael Wilding (Flags), Leslie Dwyer (Parkinson), James Donald (Doc), Philip Friend (Torps), Frederick Piper (Edgecombe), Richard Attenborough (Young Stoker)

Only the British would make a wartime propaganda film about a sunk ship where over half the crew gets killed (the Navy nicknamed the film In Which We Sink). It says something about this endearingly muddle-headed country that the stories that appeal most to us are those that celebrate our struggles against adversity. It was filmed in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain but before the Battle of El Alamein – the British considered themselves safe from invasion, but still saw victory was a long way off. In that climate, the film’s attitude of knuckling down and doing your duty to achieve a distant dream must have resounded profoundly with millions of people.

Based on the early war career of Louis Mountbatten, this “story of a ship” revolves around the Torin, a destroyer captained by E.V Kinross (Noël Coward). The ship is dive bombed and sunk by the Luftwaffe, and the captain and survivors cling to a lifeboat, waiting for rescue. While they wait, the crew remember their lives back home in flashback – in particular the captain, CPO Hardy (Bernard Miles), and able seaman ‘Shorty’ Blake (John Mills). Can you imagine an American propaganda film with a plot like that?

It’s easy to mock a film like In Which We Serve today. Its stiff-upper-lipped, duty-led, hierarchical world has been lampooned countless times since Peter Cook’s pitch-perfect Bernard Miles impersonation in Beyond the Fringe. (Early in the film, watching Kinross at home, I remembered Eddie Izzard’s spoof: “Don’t go to the war Daddy / I must they won’t start without me…”). The first 30 minutes, with its clipped dialogue, fast-paced delivery and stiff-backed, formal playing style takes a while to tune into. But it’s worth it, as the establishment of this carefully controlled exterior is what makes the later sections, with strong emotions just below the surface, so moving.

Coward was of course primarily a man of the theatre, and this was his only original film script. His collaboration with experienced film-makers produced a stirring, skilfully crafted epic that reflects on several levels of British rank and society, and not only shows us “why we fight” but also “why we should fight”. Coward is credited as the principal director, but much of the direction (and the film’s skilfully constructed structure in the editing suite) comes from his co-director David Lean, here making his directing debut.

Lean’s expressive hand is clear in the brilliantly composed sequences on board the ship itself, both in action and at ease. An example of the fluid editing, is where the camera follows the progression of a missile through the ship, passed from crew member to crew member, each given some brief moments to show their quiet determination and resolve. Similarly, the sequences on the drifting lifeboat have a claustrophobic intensity about them. The flashbacks are carefully placed to allow our understanding of the characters and their backgrounds to grow each time.

The scenes back home are remarkable for their dramatic simplicity. Coward understood the stories that move are those of normal people. The sailors’ home lives – from the captain down – are domestic, calm, happy and above all normal. Very little happens: one sailor gets married, the captain plays with his children, the Petty Officer teases his wife. This regularity makes their courage under fire all the more stirring: truly ordinary people doing the extraordinary. Some critics have called Coward’s attitude to the working classes snobbish, but there is no disdain at all here – instead there’s a paternal admiration with genuine warmth.

This warmth extends even to a stoker who cuts and runs during action. It would be easy to use this moment to amplify the braveness of the others. Instead, in a moving speech to the men, the captain takes the blame onto himself for not supporting the young man earlier. The mortified stoker, in a wonderful little scene, struggles to express his shame to a barmaid, not in anger but in a quiet, confused guilt. The film never condemns or judges him – he is quietly shown returning to his duties. There is no explicit moment of redemption, just a sense of a man who has let himself down, resolving quietly to do better.

The opening sequence covers the lifespan of the ship – from its construction and commissioning, to its launch, early actions and sinking, with the implication of a nation coming together. Later scenes mix theatrical touches with documentary realism. A marvellous sequence covers Dunkirk, which feels incredibly real but also showcases a few wonderful flourishes, from Kinross’ speech praising the soldiers’ bravery to Shorty’s affectionately wry remark on the rivalry between soldiers and sailors. The final sequence brings us full circle, with the construction and launch of another battleship under Kinross’ command. We may lose a battle, but we are never beaten.

Coward takes on the lead role. To be honest, it’s a striking piece of miscasting that somehow works out – Noël Coward is no-one’s idea of a hard-nosed naval veteran. He lacks the range in particular for his scenes of domestic life, coming across as too detached and distant – particularly noticeable since his wife is played brilliantly by the radiant Celia Johnson, conveying layers of emotion under a controlled exterior. But, his quiet, buttoned-up professionalism and clipped Englishness work perfectly for the quietly emotional speeches he delivers. These he nails perfectly, his voice just giving the hint of cracking. It’s a curiously stagy, and in no way naturalistic, performance – but as a representation of a particular type of Britishness it’s perfect.

And Kinross is just the sort of man you would follow to the end – distant and authoritarian, but just and warm. Rescued from the ocean, he goes immediately to his men, moving quietly from wounded man to wounded man, collecting addresses, issuing quiet words of unexpressive comfort (“I’ll tell her you did your duty”). His closing speech (heavily based on Mountbatten’s own address to his crew) throbs with emotion just below the surface as he thanks his men – and it’s hard not to feel it as he shakes the hand of each man and is overcome with emotion, he can only nod a brief acknowledgement to his officers. Lean trains the camera on his back, as we see his shoulders seem to swell to support the pride, respect and love for his men. It’s peculiarly British, but this unspoken affection is hugely powerful.

The more naturalistic performances from the rest of the cast help to anchor the film – and also allow Coward’s more stylised acting to work effectively. John Mills is wonderful as Gunner “Shorty” Blake, a plucky, kind and witty man. He’s just the sort of unexpressive hero we’d all like to be, and his homespun love story with Kay Walsh is genuinely engaging and moving for its everyday normality. Mills also carries much of the film’s humour.

It’s the final sections of the film that really, really work. I can’t get through the scenes of the surviving crew being saved, the quiet courage of the dying men and the austere warmth of the captain, the speeches that burst with pride and respect under a reserved veneer, without feeling a lump in the throat. It’s a masterful piece of quietly powerful film-making, that pays off precisely because so much of what has gone before has been so normal. The fact that we’ve seen the lives of these people – and can see what, in their quiet way, they are fighting for – I found increasingly moving.

In Which We Serve is a wonderful piece of film-making, very well written by Coward and strongly directed (largely) by Lean. Coward himself, in the lead role, is far better at the speeches than as either a captain or husband, but the rest of the cast is excellent with Mills and Johnson both outstanding. It’s truly the stuff of spoofery in many ways today, but tune yourself up to the accents and the repressed Britishness and this is a heartfelt and deeply moving film. Perhaps one of the finest propaganda films you’ll ever see – and still so very British.