Alexander Mackendrick, Tony Hancock and Rhinoceros

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One of the many unmade Alexander Mackendrick film projects detailed in Philip Kemp's biography Lethal Innocence is an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros.

An international success, the play was set in a French provincial town where, one by one, the inhabitants were turning into rhinos. It was a political allegory, based on the Romanian writer's pre-war memories of the way his friends gradually joined the fascist Iron Guard.

And the person who Mackendrick wanted to play the hero Bérenger, the only character who doesn't become a rhino, was Tony Hancock.

According to Kemp, Mackendrick said: 

"He was so right. He had this hunted look of a person who knew that everybody was turning into a rhinoceros."

As David Cairns says on his Shadowplay blog, that's "a very precise trait, not easy to find".

But then Mackendrick had a weakness for actors who looked hunted. Remember his slightly worrying comment on the casting of Fergus McClelland to play the lead in Sammy Going South:

He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting.

Anyway, Tony Hancock eventually pulled out of the possible film, just as Peter Sellers did the second time it came close to being made.

But if Mackendrick was so keen to film a rhino, he could have shot this scene from W.H. Canaway's original novel Sammy Going South:

Sammy heard a whiffling of breath behind him, and turned to confront a rhinoceros, which had been waiting behind the thorns before returning to scatter its dung.

Up till that moment the thought of danger from animals had scarcely entered Sammy's mind; he had spent the previous night in his tree because of some atavistic instinct, and not because of any conscious desire to safeguard himself against predatory creatures. Now, he stared at the rhino with sick horror, giving a low moan of fear. He had never realized that a rhino was so big. This one was a huge shape of dirty grey, almost six feet tall at the shoulder and almost twelve feet long; its horn was five feet of polished murderous fibre. The rhino was downwind of Sammy, and had picked up his scent at once.

There were birds sitting on its back, Sammy noticed.

The rhino was perhaps a hundred feet away, at the far left-hand end of the thorns. It snorted again, shook its head once, and then lowered it, charging; the birds flapped on its body. It moved with surprising speed, picking up and setting down its feet with delicate precision, while Sammy turned and began to run, hopelessly.

I do like the placing of that adverb.

Whether Sammy Going South was ever a set text for the examination boards I don't know, but it would have made a change from Lord of the bloody Flies.

Alexander Mackendrick and Sweet Smell of Success

At Ealing Studios, Alexander Mackendrick directed one masterpiece, The Ladykillers, and four more of the best films made there: Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy and The 'Maggie'.

When Ealing folded he went to Hollywood, where his first film was the noir Sweet Smell of Success. Though it failed in America on its release in 1957, it is now recognised as another masterpiece and is the subject of this superior video masterclass.

Mackendrick then suffered the indignity of being taken off two consecutive films and so did not complete another until 1963, when he made Sammy Going South for his old Ealing boss Michael Balcon.

Realising that he was no Hollywood hustler, Mackendrick turned, as you will see in the video, to academia. He became the founding dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts (now the CalArts School of Film/Video), giving up that position in 1978 to become a professor there.

A collection of his hand outs and lectures was published as On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director in 2005, with an introduction by Martin Scorsese.

When I mentioned another Ealing film, Hue and Cry, in a piece for Lion & Unicorn, I suggested that it "feels more Roberto Rosselini than Ealing." What I didn't know when I wrote that was that the wartime British official who gave Rosselini permission to shoot Rome, Open City was Alexander Mackendrick.

Why stage plays need a character that screenplays don't

Alexander Mackendrick didn't just direct The Man in the White Suit: he wrote the first draft of the screenplay.

In his book Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, Philip Kemp quotes Mackendrick on the genesis of that screenplay. It began life as an unperformed theatre play by his cousin Roger MacDougall:

"I did something really wicked: I took Roger's hero and gave him a minor role, and pivoted the whole story around a secondary character, the one played in the film by Alec Guinness, to make a new story entirely. And Balcon liked it, and approved it. When I showed it to Roger he got very indignant, and said, 'My God, you might as well have cut the hero out altogether!', and I said, 'Yes, well, I did actually think of doing that.'"

Having got over his initial pique, MacDougall went along with the further disruption of his play, and with the total elimination of his hero. "Something I discovered then," he recalls, "is that there's a character you need in a play, but you don't need in a film, because the camera takes over from him. It's Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, it's Horatio in Hamlet. The camera becomes that character who holds it all together – the viewpoint character, if you like. You don't need a person to do it for you."

Next time I watch an old British film that's too obviously been adapted from a stage play, I shall try to work out which character should have been left out.

"Ahaarrrr!" A voiceover session from hell

One of my favourite podcasts is the Chelsea Fancast, which has kept me informed and entertained through my club's recent travails. Its two regular presenters are Stamford Chidge and JK.

Stamford Chidge, I worked out eventually after putting the clues together, is David Chidgey. He's a former television producer, a psychotherapist and the son of the late David Chidgey, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh from 1994 to 2005, and the pilot of the Liberal Democrat spacecraft Bird of Liberty in the early years of Lord Bonkers' Diary.

JK is not such a mystery. He is Jonathan Kydd, son of the once-ubiquitous British film actor Sam Kydd and an actor, writer and voiceover artist in his own right.

In this short film, which has won many festival awards, he plays both the actor and the director in a voiceover session from hell.

And to prove that all rabbit holes join up eventually, he writes on his website that, when he was a boy, Alexander Mackendrick saw him several times for the title role in Sammy Going South.

The Joy of Six 1544

"The plunder of children’s services by business is one of the big scandals of our time. Children’s homes, special schools and foster care services are increasingly run for profit. Almost every time a child is removed from their family, somebody, somewhere cashes a cheque." Martin Barrow looks at one company that received £500m from local councils last year for the care and support of children and young people.

Rory Jones finds that "England is beginning to develop a cooling divide, one in which access to protection from extreme heat increasingly depends on where people live, how much they earn and the type of home they occupy."

Does becoming a parent lead politicians to focus more on the future? Research by Chris Hanretty and Sarah Childs questions the assumption that it does: "There is no single effect of parenthood upon future focus: rather, parenthood affects men and women differently. Fatherhood causes a small increase in future focus sustained across a range of topics. ... Motherhood, by contrast, causes a decline in future focus.

"The exhibition showcased Freud’s lifelong fascination with human faces and figures, covering several different types of drawings – from pencil, pen, and ink portraits to charcoal works and etchings. In addition, several paintings were also included in the exhibition to illustrate the relationship between Freud’s works on paper and those on canvas." JacquiWine went to the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Sean Burns on Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, which bombed at the box office on release but is now recognised as a classic: "I was struck by how relevant Sweet Smell of Success seems today, when we’re seeing people who know better grovel and prostrate themselves for proximity to power on a daily basis, submitting to humiliation rituals live on cable news the way Sidney dutifully jumps to light Hunsecker's cigarettes."

Quentin Shaw on the miracle of glow worms and the threat to them from artificial light at night: "It is something of a mystery that glow worms came to be so widespread. Surveyors have noticed that the places where the beetles survive today are often sites of ancient human habitation. Perhaps people deliberately introduced them, to brighten their lives and to chase away the dark."

Fergus McClelland was the last illegal major British child actor

Before Section 37 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963 was enacted it was illegal for a child under 13 to appear in a film made in Britain. As I pointed out in an earlier post, this law was widely ignored. 

And I could have added Mandy Miller to the examples given there. She was six when she made a brief appearance in The Man in the White Suit and seven when she played the title role in Mandy.

The director of both those Ealing films was Alexander Mackendrick, and he was still breaking the law when he shot Sammy Going South, because his young lead Fergus McClelland was only 11.

Though you'd think that a completed feature film would make pretty good evidence in court, producers generally avoided legal trouble by keeping their use of such a young actor secret until the film was released.

So a short article about the boy in the Daily Herald (10 January 1963) says that his three-month absence from school while he was filming on location in Africa was explained by telling his classmates that he was on an educational tour.

The article concludes by saying:

The company who made the film, Bryanston Seven Arts, could be prosecuted for employing anyone as young as Fergus in a film studio. But the maximum penalty would be only a £5 fine. And the film cost £500,000 to make.

Richard Farmer has written about this illegal employment of child actors, and he shows that companies could be fined rather more than that:

In 1949, 12-year-old Bobby Driscoll, who had already appeared in films such as Song of the South (1946) and The Window (1949), arrived in Britain to make Treasure Island for Disney at Denham. Disney did not seek to obtain the necessary employment permit for Driscoll, in large part because of his age meant that he could not legally be allowed to work in Britain.

Driscoll, his father, and Disney were each fined £100. Treasure Island’s producers reworked their schedule, at a reported cost of $84,000, to allow the young star to complete shooting as quickly as possible, claiming to have "too much money involved" in the film to replace Driscoll and concerned that he might at some point be prohibited from returning to the studio.

Farmer says the Disney company felt it was being singled out for special treatment, and you can see why. The year before, David Lean's Oliver Twist, complete with nine-year-old John Howard Davies in the title role, had been chosen for the Royal Film Performance – Davies later described being presented to Queen Mary as most terrifying experience of his life. Sammy Going South received the same accolade in 1963.

The 1963 Act allowed the employment of actors under 13, but made local authorities responsible for ensuring their welfare. This regularised what had often been happening in practice:

Some local authorities found it easier to ensure child safety in studios by coming to extra-statutory agreements with producers that permitted filmmakers to employ children on the understanding that council officers were able to ensure that a child’s welfare and education was being appropriately attended to.

And if you were working for Alexander Mackendrick, you needed protection. Fergus McClelland remembered in his 2020 interview with Matthew Sweet:

There was one point when I worked solid for 17 days from six in the morning till nine at night, and I was 11 and a half. The unit doctor said to Sandy Mackendrick, who was a fantastic director but very driven: "Look, you can either have a dead star or a live little boy. Which do you want?"

What was his answer?

What can we do to make him healthy and get him filming more?

McClelland survived the experience, acting for another 10 years before disappearing from view. He re-emerged later in life as a trainer in public speaking and business presentation, in which guise you can find him all over YouTube.

Other child stars were not so lucky. Bobby Driscoll died from drug addiction at 30 and was buried anonymously burial in a pauper's grave.

Sammy Going South and the morality of employing child actors

The director of Trouble at Townsend wasn't the only one to have problems with a child star being too well fed. I've read accounts of both Carol Reed and Andrei Tarkovsky making the same complaint.

But Alexander Mackendrick's account (from Wikpedia, with no source given) of the making of Sammy Going South suggests that Fergus McClelland didn't just get too well fed but too happy.

"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting. 

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

McClelland talked about his experience of making the film in an interview with Matthew Sweet for BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme in 2010 – it begins at 24:14 – confirming much of what Mackendrick said. 

Fascinating as child actors can be, it's hard to escape the feeling that there's something inherently exploitative about their employment.

Mackendrick made the film for Michael Balcon's Bryanston Film's – Balcon had been his boss at Ealing Studios. Mark Duguid has suggested:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

Mackendrick's attempt to satisfy these two interpretations is probably the reason the film doesn't quite succeed.

A motif Mackendrick's was innocent characters who caused chaos and destruction – think of Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers – so it's no surprise he was attracted to W.T. Canaway's original novel. Ironically, you could say the book managed to strike the balance between his and Balcon's ambitions that the film failed to find.

The original cut produced by Mackendrick was severely trimmed before release, and cut again for the US market. There it was given the ludicrous title A Boy Ten Feet Tall, apparently because it was feared white audiences would assume a film called Sammy Going South was about a black boy and stay away.

Sammy Going South is worth watching for its rare reference to the Suez Crisis in British films or novels and for about the last treatment in a film of British colonial Africa. Sammy's parents are killed in a British raid on Port Said, and he sets out to walk to the only other relative he knows, who lives in Durban in South Africa.

And Fergus McClelland's Sammy makes a credible and winning protagonist, even if Mackendrick was right to despair that he looks healthier and happier as his trek goes on.

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James Ball argues that Labour's social media ban for teenagers is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces: "The UK government has lots of powers to govern the internet that it simply isn’t using. Hosting images of child abuse is a strict liability offence, one that Elon Musk’s X platform blatantly breached with its Grok chatbot. The government gave itself extensive powers to regulate social platforms under the Online Safety Act, which it has never even made an attempt to enforce."

"This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security – one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead." Ian Dunt says Keir Starmer's inertia threatens national security.

Anja Krstic and Ivona Hideg find that men's careers benefit when they take parental leave but women’s do not.

"Ten years on from the referendum, the tired stereotype of the 'Northern Brexit voter' is one we should retire." J.P. Spencer has the figures that explode a widespread myth.

"Undoubtedly the most important members of the audience were a group of families from formerly occupied territories affected by the abductions: mothers with teenagers they had recovered from Crimea or elsewhere; families who were still trying to get their children back." Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk on the Kyiv premiere of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers.

Kenneth George Godwin finds innocence and corruption in the films of Alexander Mackendrick: "The clearest expression of Mackendrick’s worldview is perhaps apparent in the three films he made which centred on children: Mandy (1952), Sammy Going South (1963), and A High Wind In Jamaica (1965). Unsentimental, unafraid of the darkness kids face in a harsh world, unafraid to see the potential for darkness in the kids themselves … these are three of the most adult films about children ever made."

Brechtian television: Leo McKern in Galileo (1964)

"Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?" I asked when writing about The Exorcism.

To an extent, they have. Because here are the first eight minutes of a 1964 television production of Brecht's play Galileo, and it begins with a shot of the cast arriving with a microphone boom and its operator purposely in shot.

This production was shown on BBC1 on Wednesday 29 April 1964 and the translation of the play is by Charles Laughton.

It's a shame that only this short section of this production is to be found online, because Leo McKern's performance looks very promising.

The boy is Fergus McClelland, who had starred in Alexander Mackendrick's film Sammy Going South the year before.

The Man in the White Suit

I always feared that if Simon Hughes became leader we would wake up one day, turn on the Today programme and find that he had committed the party to something crazy. Not out of ideology, but because there is something a little unworldly about him. Think Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit.

He was on the radio this morning for a very different reason. It is hard not to have sympathy for Simon. He was elected to Westminster at a time when it was thought impossible for a gay politician to be open about his politics. He is standing for the leadership in an era when it is possible even in the Tory party.

It would have been better if he had told the world somewhere along the line, before the Sun forced him to. But that is easy to say.

Yes, he has lied to the public, but the public may be forgiving. Many will believe that they have no right to know about the politician's sexuality in the first place. He has not been a hypocrite or damaged his own family, which are what led to Mark Oaten's downfall. It is possible, though, that he will find it is more socially acceptable to be gay than to be bisexual.

The other question this affair has reopened is the Bermondsey by-election. Did Hughes really benefit from what we would now call a homophobic campaign?

That election took place just before I moved down to London, so I cannot speak from personal experience. But if this leaflet is the best the critics can do, I do not think he has much of a case to answer. Did Liberal canvassers really wear "I've been kissed by Peter Tatchell badges"?

The nastiness of the Bermondsey campaign has always been blamed by Liberals on John O'Grady, the "Real Bermondsey Labour" candidate endorsed by Bob Mellish. (Mellish was a former Labour chief whip who despaired of the left-wing takeover of the party and resigned to cause Michael Foot as much trouble as possible.) O'Grady was certainly publicly offensive about Tatchell's sexuality.

Yet I recall being told once that O'Grady received considerable help in his campaign from certain Young Liberals. Does anyone know the truth of this?

So Simon will not become Lib Dem leader, but then I don't think he was ever going to win the election. But in the long run I do not believe his career will suffer too much.