This is a fine book. It’s not a gadfly’s project undertaken detachedly for a short time; it’s the result of a lifelong passion for British cinema and screen acting. An especially notable moment is Roberts’s closing comment in the chapter on James Robertson Justice where he asserts the value of the affection we may feel for actors. This deeply analytical and emotive book treats a distinct group of British screen performers as if they are a fascinating, varied but oddly cohesive extended family. Roberts analyses a range of careers and performances, drawing on a vast web of idiosyncratic contextual knowledge.
You could quibble with how relatively few women are featured in comparison to men, but that in itself is a reflection of who we got to see on screen in British films of the 1950s, by and large. Plus, the chapters on Diana Dors, Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques are equally tremendous as the rest on Sellers, Finch, Justice, Wisdom, Terry-Thomas et al.
There are occasional copy editing errors, but not so many to detract from what is an absolutely delightful book. I’ve been making a list of key films mentioned in this book, woeful or fascinating sounding, and indeed some of Roberts’s clear personal favourites which cut so deeply: Genevieve (1953), The Fast Lady (1962), Heavens Above (1963), The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and Smokescreen (1964), among others. His chapters have a tendency towards pithy asides in footnote form, and they often end with what he sees as the most immortal, telling and deeply characterful performance from each actor.
This is a book which reminds me of the delights of The Pleasure Garden (1953) and Simon and Laura (1955), wonderful sui generis films, and I didn’t need much reminding of The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). There’s also an often righteous pleasure in his setting the record straight about how certain films or actors’ images have been traduced and simplified. Roberts has watched, and watches, closely, which hopefully makes us all want to do the same.
The conclusion does a fine job of summarising the book’s spirit and what a spirit: crucially, there is both humour and unabashed – sincere and caustic – value judgements concerning many films. But I do feel that such a rich kaleidoscope of actors and films needed somewhat more drawing together: i.e. with more identification of historical trends and patterns. Much of this is embedded implicitly within all chapters, but making a few key findings explicit would have helped seal the book’s achievement even more.
Reading it, I got the sense that Roberts felt there was a particular configuration of people, places, voices and vehicles – vintage cars are a further special interest of his – in British Cinema circa 1953-64 which made that a special era and that there was then a gradual decline, becoming steeper into the 1970s. Evidently, there are exceptions, and he can be scrupulously nuanced. But he makes a persuasive cumulative case that many performers became marooned in changing times, which sadly involved a decline in the quality of screenwriting and the social vision behind the British films being made, alongside increasingly tatty, bathetic production values. This is a far more rigorous and deeply felt way of making the argument about the paucity of British Cinema in the 1970s than the various 1980s tomes by men called Walker.
There is a moving account of the sad career trajectories of Terry-Thomas, Justice and Jacques, being hemmed in and diminished by changing trends in British cinema and culture. I recall just how painful The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978) is to watch, only very briefly alluded to here in the Leslie Phillips and Terry-Thomas chapter. Roberts also rightly asserts that the same year’s Carry On Emmanuelle is a vile film.
Such incontestable judgements are supplemented by use of a plethora of fine scholarly work on stardom and acting by academics like Melanie Williams, Peter Kramer, Alan Lovell, Geoffrey Macnab, Tom Ryall, Richard Dyer and a brace of Sight and Sound articles by Raymond Durgnat and Lawrence Shaffer. There is an attentiveness to how recurring, persona-based star acting differs from shifting, impersonation-based character acting. But also a sense of how certain actors, in their careers, oscillated between these poles.
This book is deeply scholarly, yet humanly opinionated: it lovingly investigates the past, while avoiding roseate nostalgia. Roberts is a fine neurodivergent writer, who knows this patch of cultural history incredibly well. This has a narrower spatial and temporal remit than Molly Haskell’s assessment of women in cinema or David Thomson’s biographical dictionaries, but it has much the same compendious heft, grasp of complexity, and makes compelling subjective judgements.
It makes a more digressive, personal companion piece to Richard Hewett’s book – also for MUP – on British television acting from the 1950s-2010s.
While I can’t really stand the things in real life, I’d love to see his historical analysis of cars in cinema, including Jacques Tati’s remarkable Trafic (1971) and so many others. Also, hopefully, we will get his BFI Film Classics book on Smokescreen or The Pumpkin Eater before too long. Roberts cites Roger Lewis and Jonathan Meades a few times, which is apt: this work is unapologetically knowledgeable and bursts out of the pages with lively wit and cantankerous invective.
If this sort of thing is out of fashion, then it’s a duller world for it. Never conform.
May's Britain... 