Book review: Andrew Roberts (2020) IDOLS OF THE ODEONS: POST-WAR BRITISH FILM STARDOM

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.

Film review: Tish (2023)

Paul Sng’s documentary about Tish Murtha (1956-2013) is a moving and informative film, shown on BBC4, which gives us an insight into a unique socially rooted and incisive documentarian photographer.

It can be watched here by UK people. I’d say it should be viewed before reading any further, really, as it’s an immersive and moving watch.

Murtha captured the world of West Newcastle upon Tyne: the aimlessness, free play and complexity of the human lives lived in intensely difficult circumstances. A simple, moralising buffoon from the London press like Rod Liddle has it that these places are marked by “anomie”. While Sng’s film makes no attempt to romanticise circumstances which, it is admitted, did lead some individuals in the community to turn to crime as a way out, we see desperation and love and tenderness and the mutual aid provided by people like Tish herself. It is also a counterblast against the simplifying cultural stereotypes of what working class people are like: Tish was into operatic arias and jazz music, not what was No. 1 in the charts, though neither should be denigrated in our long front of common culture.

As with the documentary Mind on the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story (2017) about Hull’s great jazz musician, we starkly get the sense of an intensely creative person being let down by an indifferent “welfare” state, which has become anything but. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron et al just cattle prodding people into work however unsuitable. The YOP, the grotesque appropriation of the “New Deal”, the familiar bleak cruelty of the 2010-15 Coalition era use of the system as seen in I, Daniel Blake: none of this fitted to the individual.

Why don’t we as a society give people enough money to get by and encourage them to do what they are personally best suited to do in life? It’s even more grotesque in the case of Tish, as she gave us a unique portrayal from the inside of a community, and, as is mentioned here, her photographs tell us: these people existed, and were let down on so many levels.

It reminds me of the Boy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when he asks Vladimir: “What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?” To which Vladimir replies: “Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he hesitates) . . . that you saw me.”

Tish Murtha’s photography and text indicates how there wasn’t just malign neglect, but also active harm. The workfare-anticipating YOP, a sop to resentful people a bit higher up in the social pecking order from cynical right-wing ideologues above them, exposed people to insecure, degrading labour simply to get their pittance of dole money. This process, with the metrical motive to get them off the official jobless statistics, also subjected them in some cases, as we learn here, to cruel bullying from the bosses who were basically benefiting from a cheap reserve army of labour.

Notably, the South Shields-born, but Elswick, Newcastle-bred and rooted Tish says that she does not see herself as a ‘community photographer’. This is true, she is simply a great photographer, whose work’s power came from being part of the tribe she was documenting: this specificity and innate empathy ultimately gives her work deep universality and sets it apart from the anthropological, or even touristic, gaze of a Martin Parr. Parr, a fine photographer, is also a here today gone tomorrow Orwellian middle-class figure going into places for a short time and then leaving, having advanced his own reputation.

The documentary sensitively reveals how Tish’s hardness, self-reliance and uncompromising nature in part developed from growing up in a home with a violent father. As a wise comment on Twitter has it, if there was the opposite of a “nepo babies” upbringing, this was it. While sharing a deep bond with many in her family, she had to be a driving force in getting her work done, though it was very work in which her subjects were willing participants, to whom she gave copies of the photographs. But when in need, there wasn’t any paternal or maternal welfare state to provide any nurturing or even a decent enough safety net.

Tish is the sort of left-wing bolshy voice we are sorely in need of today. No, everything’s not great. If things are wrong, we shouldn’t blandly submit, but stand up for what we believe in. Her juvenile jazz band photos are likely to elicit simple nostalgia from many people today, but this film gives us Tish’s urgent words, more powerful for being from within the North East community, castigating the underlying militarism and control being exerted on several levels through this cultural practice. She was so intelligent and passionate that she realised that speaking out and raising hackles is at times entirely necessary to being able to live with yourself and do good. Also, Tish gives a chastening rebuke in a letter to the behaviour of certain people within the Side Gallery milieu, for taking a patronising view of working class culture and for undermining her work.

To relate this film to my specialist subject, Plays for Today which came to mind most include One Bummer New Day (1978), Andy McSmith’s intricate missive on newsroom power and priorities, set in Newcastle and reflecting on poverty in, yes, Elswick. In addition, David Edgar’s Destiny and Jim Allen’s The Spongers, both from earlier in the same year, reveal a similarly forensic lens trained on what the people were thinking. The link is especially clear as Tish did some similarly critical and searing, but also respectful, photography of people’s celebrations of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. This was before Thatcherism proper, but under Callaghan there was still a debilitating – or consoling – underlying patriotism which deeply infused working class communities. Lest it be forgotten, Dennis Potter was pro-monarchy and wrote a highly positive account of the TV coverage of the Jubilee, which gives another perspective beyond the vile racism of certain, understandably unpublished, Philip Larkin poems.

This film includes testimony damning of our societal and capitalist organisation in how simply having an Elswick address meant that people had job applications turned down. This is an equivalent situation that the Irish social realist TV drama A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton (RTE, 1971) observed that affected people from certain housing estates in Dublin; highly relevant given the Murtha family’s Irish ancestry. This film assumes extra emotional power in how it shows Ella, Tish’s daughter, investigating her mother’s life and meeting the people who knew in different places and times.

Important here, above all, is that we do get to hear from a particular Geordie tribe, unfiltered and not “explained” by middle class sociologists or indeed right-wing hacks like Rod Liddle (a bad political actor – and man – who cynically appropriates social democracy). I once heard, in a former workplace, the sort of vapid dismissal and pigeonholing of Northern writing and culture, as clearly identified by Andrew McMillan, when Barry Hines’s From a Kestrel to a Knave (1968) was mockingly put down. There’s a middle-class sneer and duplicity in how certain Arts funding bodies, dispensing subsidies, give to certain types of approved curators and not to others who might just have voices they deem too abrasive, like Tish’s.

Tish, in words, work and actions more than demonstrated that she was a humanist. I don’t think people who see Art works as just fuel for subjective pleasure and as being mere products are remotely humanist. Are there creative industries? Yes, if they foreground the human labour involved. No, if we are simply caring about products, ‘content’, the bottom line and venerating the dogma of “productivity”.

Is this another case of the licence fee being justified by one programme? Well, yes, but this was partially crowdfunded, such is the BBC’s Tory-abetted financial woes, in a time when the Corporation’s news and current affairs output has been largely subject to a (subtler) Orban-esque media capture. Anyone thinking of themselves as progressive, “Labour”, socialist or human might want to watch this and see whether they are happy with our society and politics in the last 45 years.

Will we listen to Tish’s cautionary words from 1980?

There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.

The future of society rests on whether we do. While I’m sure that, with her upbringing, Angela Rayner might get it, recent praise for Thatcher’s ‘meaningful change’ from Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer suggests that it’s unlikely that we’re going to get anything significantly different from the next government than what we’ve had from Thatcher to Sunak.

Tribute: Peter Hutchings

Last Wednesday, I attended a special event to commemorate the life of film and television academic Peter Hutchings at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Tyneside Cinema, alongside many of his former colleagues and students. This was a lovely gathering; it was great to learn more about Peter’s life, beyond my own relatively brief experience of being taught by him for one academic year when I did my MA in Film Studies in 2004/05.

Part of the event was the unveiling of the results of his Northumbria University colleagues’ apt idea of inscribing a whole row of seats in the Tyneside Cinema’s largest Classic screen, with his name and quotations from some of his favourite films, e.g. Chinatown (1974) and Horror Express (1972). Peter Cushing – so neglected for so long – was clearly Peter’s favourite actor, as his characters such as Dr Wells were well represented, quotation wise…

Inspector Mirov: The two of you together. That’s fine. But what if one of you is the monster?
Dr Wells: Monster? We’re British, you know.
Horror Express

The speakers, who included Northumbria’s Johnny Walker and Russ Hunter, were often emotional in paying tribute to a man who had helped shape their academic careers. As RH detailed, he could be unpredictable in class when teaching and his musical taste was varied and included the strange likes of Tiny Tim. Recently, he had taken to attending the horror film festival Abertoir, held annually in November at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre in Ceredigion, and has now had a festival cocktail named after him: the “Hutch”!

I found him personally very helpful; one of those lecturers who was sharp and expert, yet who you also sensed was thoroughly on the side of students trying to formulate their own thoughts on film and television. He steered me down interesting paths, and helped me refine my voice when writing about film and television; as Mark Jancovich has commented:

‘He wasn’t a Gothic villain who attempted to remake the world in his image. he had no interest in churning out replicas of himself or extensions of his will. Instead, he helped people to achieve their potential, to recognize their intellectual insights and have confidence in the value of their contribution to the world.’
Mark Jancovich (2018) ‘Remembering Peter Hutchings’, Horror Studies 9.1, 4

When getting down to work on my MA dissertation on British cinema of the 1970s – then, in 2005, a very neglected area – he strongly recommended I watch a few episodes of LWT’s 1969-74 sitcom On the Buses, to get a flavour of the era and what was popular with British audiences, and was thus especially significant. I learned from him that the first film adaptation was Hammer’s highest grossing film of 1971, exceeding any of the studio’s horror films of that year. It was clear that he felt this was a matter for some cultural sorrow, though he didn’t explicitly say so. I loaned a single VHS tape from Northumbria’s now sadly defunct “slide library” and proceeded to watch 3 or 4 episodes of the sitcom, which conveyed strangely, horribly virulent gender stereotyping and casual sexism, as well as notable class representations.

Johnny Walker (2018: 454) has argued that Hutchings was ‘not merely a scholar of popular British cinema, but its champion’, who, in addition to his work on horror, explored thrillers, disaster movies, science fiction as well as penning outlying essays on film and TV representations of the culturally marginal region of north-east England. Similarly, a major thing I learned from him was the importance of analysing and taking seriously both popular culture and areas within it that get neglected or marginalised by certain cultural gatekeepers – whether horror cinema or ITV comedies of the 1970s. He was also good at recommending excellent books in this area: Leon Hunt’s British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998) being perhaps the most memorable and useful during my MA dissertation.

Prompted by Walker’s tribute which mentions PH’s first published writing in Charles Barr’s ‘pivotal’ edited volume All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (1986), I have read and enjoyed this very piece today. Hutchings’s short essay on Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) closes a book which ambitiously explores institutions, ideology, overlaps between film and television and what Julian Petley defines as ‘the Lost Continent’ of British cinema. Hutchings locates Hitchcock’s film as being around the close of the period of generous US funding of British films, and 9 years before the ‘renaissance’ of Chariots of Fire (1981): a rebirth he regards as questionable as it has excluded ‘broad comedy, horror, melodrama, and ‘bad taste’ in general’. He further argues that ‘a regeneration of British cinema must remain incomplete’ until not just critical attention is paid to neglected popular films but until more such films are made. (Barr, 1986: 374)

He notes that there was derogatory criticism of the Covent Garden-set Frenzy for its Dixon of Dock Green dialogue, highlighting critics’ long-standing snobbery towards television. He conducts sophisticated textual analysis of the film, drawing fascinating links to features as varied as A Canterbury Tale (1944), Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Blue Lamp (1949), The Dambusters (1955), Every Day Except Christmas (1957), Look Back in Anger (1959), Peeping Tom (1960), Hands of the Ripper (1970), Carry On Loving (1970) and Murder by Decree (1978).

Hutchings describes Hitchcock’s first British-based film in over 30 years as a ‘democratic […] compendium’ of post-WW2 British cinematic genres which freely mingle and aren’t part of a ‘static, hierarchical order’. (ibid, 373) The modes of sex comedy, war film, social realism, melodrama and the new X-rated horror are all ripe to be richly exploited by Hitchcock, who saw cinema as artifice and didn’t accept what Hutchings defines as a binary critical paradigm of ‘realist/Good Taste’ (Ealing, British New Wave, Free Cinema) and ‘non-realist/Bad Taste’ (Gainsborough, Hammer, the Carry On series). (ibid, 369) He notes how realism has been critically privileged, with cultural gatekeepers like the Observer film critic George Melly attacking Frenzy for its anachronism. Interestingly, he links Powell and Pressburger with this non-realist tendency, highlighting their critical and commercial decline in fortunes in the 1950s. He places the mass of British war films as somewhere in between the binaries.

In a particularly rich section of textual analysis, Hutchings identifies the film’s exploration of ‘uncontrolled and violent male sexuality’, linking it with the cultural history of Jack the Ripper and Victorian London:

‘It is significant in this light that the first necktie murder in Hitchcock’s film is greeted with the comment that ‘It’s another necktie murder’, a line repeated in newspaper headlines several times throughout the film. One can link this with the reaction to the Glueman in Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale, the news of whose nocturnal activities – pouring glue into young girls’ hair during the blackout – is greeted with the remark ‘The Glueman’s out again‘. Again and another: two signifiers of indefinite repetition, in a situation where repeated acts of psychopathic violence have become an integral part of the British way of life’
Peter Hutchings (in Barr, 1986: 370)

This suggests so much: not just in its situation of Frenzy within the context of the increasingly ‘violence’ preoccupied 1970s, but also about our own times. Any budding film or television scholar should read this piece (and, indeed, its parent book) and aspire to emulate Hutchings’s incisive range of references and strength of argument.

On Wednesday, it was palpable how highly he was thought of and how he positively influenced and helped shape so many lives. As another colleague said, “He was a gentle man”, and there was a sense of loss as the many people gathered processed upstairs to the cafe bar to further toast his life, to the strains of Tiny Tim’s ukulele-led hit ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ (1968). But there was also a sense of celebration, as his was a life that had made a tangible difference.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hutchings, P. (1986) ‘Frenzy: A Return to Britain’, in: Barr, C. (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 368-74
Jancovich, M. (2018) ‘Remembering Peter Hutchings’, Horror Studies, 9.1, 4 January, 3-6
Walker, J. (2018) ‘Hammer and Beyond: Peter Hutchings’s Contribution to the Study of Popular British Cinema and Television’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 15.3, July, 453-9