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I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests that by 1954 these unofficial open spaces were just as dangerous to adults as they were to children.
Talking Pictures TV showed The Eight O'Clock Walk the other day. This was a film born out of concern at the death penalty and reliance upon circumstantial evidence.
As you can see in the clip above, Richard Attenborough has an April Fool trick played on him by a little girl who says she's lost her doll on a bombsite. Being in a happy mood, he tries to help her.
Later, she is found murdered on the same bombsite, And when that woman reports seeing Attenborough shaking his fist and chasing the girl, the police become very interested in him.
The original children-and-bombsites film was Ealing's Hue and Cry from 1947, which portrays the bombsites as an unofficial playground for all the boys of London - and the children shown are all boys, except for Joan Dowling.
But within a few years, British films; view of bombsites had changed completely - terrible things happened to small boys who wandered on to them.
The only substantial exception to this pattern I've found is Innocent Sinners from 1958. This film suggested that bombsites provided working-class children with the space and privacy they lacked in their overcrowded homes. It is also the only children-and-bombsites film with a girl at its centre.
What was so threatening about bombsites? The way Rose Macaulay painted them may give us a clue:
This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."
It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven.
The Eight O'clock Walk is not on Talking Pictures catch-up service TPTV Encore, but you can find it on one of those dodgy Russian sites.
And - don't worry - Attenborough escapes the noose, but it takes an absurd, Perry Mason courtroom coup to save him.
I've written a post for Lion & Unicorn about the 1948 film No Room at the Inn, which starred this blog's hero Freda Jackson. The poet Dylan Thomas was partly responsible for the screenplay.
No Room at the Inn was based on a 1945 play of the same name by Joan Temple. Like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, that play was inspired by the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire.
Here are some notes on 10 British films that are not as well known as I think they ought to be. It's not a top 10 - they are in chronological order - and I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly from recent years decades, that could fairly be included in such a list.
With those caveats entered, let's go.
No Room at the Inn (1948)
Inspired by the death in Shropshire of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, the same scandal that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap, this had already been a huge success as a stage play. The star of the play was Freda Jackson as the voracious Mrs Voray, who took in war orphans for the money and abused and corrupted them. So hated was she by audiences, the story goes, that she needed a police guard.
Jackson repeats the role in the film, and her skill at playing monsters was so great that she became rather stuck with them later in her career. Before No Room at the Inn, she had played Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V and Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations.
The tragic Joan Dowling, who was to take her own life at the age of 26, is notable among the children. A word too for Dora Bryan who, in her first film appearance, steals both Freda Jackson's date and the scene.
This dark film ticks so many of this blog's boxes that it has its own label.
Gone to Earth (1950)
The Shropshire hills filmed in Technicolor by Powell and Pressburger? There's no way I was going to dislike this one. Gone to Earth was a novel by Mary Webb, who had the misfortune to be deeply obscure in her lifetime and become hugely popular soon after her death. In the 1930s you would see coaches in these hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on the front.
Gone to Earth is melodrama whose plot has similarities with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Jennifer Jones brings Hollywood glamour to the role of the tragic heroine and makes a brave attempt at a Shropshire accent, while David Farrar makes a splendid wicked squire. Look out for George Cole in his first adult role.
The 'Maggie' (1954)
The greatest Ealing comedies are still widely known, but there are some that have been all but forgotten. The Maggie is the best of this second group, and in its dramatisation of an encounter between wily Scots and American big business it looks forward to Bill Forsyth's Local Hero.
An American millionaire makes the mistake of hiring a decrepit Clyde puffer to carry furniture to his holiday home in the Hebrides. He ends less happily than Burt Lancaster in Local Hero.
Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)
The disorganised Yvonne Mitchell considers herself happily married to Anthony Quayle, but discovers that he is having an affair with the stylish Sylvia Syms.
Because this is a British film from the Fifties, the family has to defeat all threats to it. But the scene in Mitchell tries to change her image to compete with Syms, only to find that everything goes wrong, is horribly painful to watch.
Innocent Sinners (1958)
Ignore the title, which makes it sound like a particularly tacky porn film, this is the most interesting of the children and bombsites films I have yet found. Unlike the others, it has a girl at its centre, and the enemies the children encounter are not the murderers they encounter in those other films but snobbish residents and unsympathetic officialdom.
Here, bombsites are not a place of danger but somewhere working-class children can express themselves and find the privacy they lack in their overcrowded homes.
Tunes of Glory (1960)
Alec Guinness playing a red-haired Scottish officer who has been promoted from the ranks in wartime may sound ridiculous, but he is wholly believable here. Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.
The film is about the lethal clash between Guinness and John Mills, who plays the upper-class officer who is appointed over his head now that the war is over. Both are flawed but appealing characters, and their tragic battle takes place in front a remarkable supporting cast: Susannah York, Gordon Jackson Dennis Price, Duncan MacRae, Allan Cuthbertson.
You'll recognised the last-named from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.
West 11 (1963)
Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.
Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?
Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.
Our Mother's House (1967)
A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage.
Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.
If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.
Comfort and Joy (1984)
This is the film Bill Forsyth made after Local Hero and for some reason it appears to have been forgotten. Bill Paterson, who play a local radio DJ, is left by his girlfriend just before Christmas and then finds himself sucked into the Glasgow ice cream wars after witnessing an attack on a van.
I saw this in a cinema when it came out (which is a worryingly long time ago) and have never seen it again, yet I still remember it.
The Last Resort (2000)
Another one I saw in the cinema - the Renoir at Brunswick Square near St Pancras, since you ask. It taught me that Russian is the sexiest accent in the world and that Paddy Considine is a brilliant actor.
Dina Korzun plays a Russian woman who arrives at Heathrow with her young son, expecting to be met by her English fiancé, He doesn't show and, panicking, she asks for political asylum. As a result, she and her son are sent to a rundown resort and forbidden to leave it.
There they meet a bingo caller, played by Paddy Considine, who goes out of his way to help them. He is surely a good man, yet somehow we don't know whether we should wholly trust him. According to the reviews, he and Kozun improvised much of their dialogue.
Eventually Kozun decides she must grow up and return to Russia, a task in which Considine regretfully helps her.
It can be difficult to keep all your rabbit holes in the air, and it's high time we went back to No Room at the Inn.
This is the film that introduced me to the wonderful actress Freda Jackson. The play on which it is based was in part inspired the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, which was the case that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap. (Those first three links are to labels on this blog, so scroll down for plenty of posts each time.)
I recently came across an article on No Room at the Inn by Meredith Taylor, whose chief interests here are Daniel Birt, the film's director, and Dylan Thomas, who co-wrote the screenplay.
After writing about Birt's previous film, The Three Weird Sisters, he turns to No Room:
A sense of the Gothic also infiltrates No Room at the Inn set in the early months of 1940. We witness atmospheric blitzed streets by the railway bridge next to a rundown house that’s definitely on the wrong side of the tracks: all lorded over by Mrs Agatha Voray (Freda Jackson) doing her damn best not to properly look after three young girl evacuees.
The children live in squalor and suffer mental and physical abuse under the care of this coarse woman who invites men (local councillors and shopkeepers) for casual sex and bit of cash to bolster her shopping allowance of ration coupons.
This is good, though Voray is looking after a boy as well as the three girls, and the film is set in motion by her taking in a fourth girl. Indeed, it's Voray's punishment of the boy the precipitates the film's climax.
Taylor continues:
The character of the schoolteacher Judith Drave (Joy Shelton) is remarkable, for we have ... a force for truth-seeking that refuses to be silenced.
A powerfully written and acted moment occurs when Miss Drave, who has complained about Mrs Voray's behaviour, is asked to give evidence at a town councillors’ meeting. They dislike Ms Drave’s assertive manner. When Mrs.Voray has her right to reply she adopts the manner of a humble woman struggling to do her best during wartime restrictions.
The schoolteacher sees right through her performance. But the council members (half of whom have flirted with Voray) believe her account of things over the teacher’s. I love Dylan Thomas’s writing here. His social concern is angrily targeted at bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude.
I don't have a copy of the film - it's easy to buy a copy online, but these are significantly shorter than the version Talking Pictures TV has shown more than once. And that is the copy I would want.
It would be interesting if I had that copy to see how much of Joan Temple's original play survived into the screenplay. Often the original source of a film goes unrecognised - the extraordinary atmosphere of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter is all there in the original novel by Davis Grubb.
Taylor rightly identifies a Dickensian bringing together of different moods as one of the roots of the film's strange power:
Like The Three Weird Sisters there are fascinating if disconcerting alterations of tone – such as the beautifully written bedtime story scene in the room of the young girl evacuees.
Norma Bates (yes, not Norman, though the film has its moments of Hitchcockian darkness) who is played by Joan Dowling, re-interprets the Cinderella story in a ripe, savagely Cockney manner. She comforts the children who are desperate to escape the mean house and its mean housekeeper.
It’s a spellbinding moment of Dylan Thomas poetics: a joyful spin on Cinderella, beautifully shot and executed. And its lyricism is made more poignant by intercutting with Mrs Voray in the pub getting drunk with the sailor father of one of the evacuees.
You can see that bedtime story scene in the video above.
Taylor is critical of the ending of No Room at the Inn, and I would add that the film's prologue, which involves one of the children being caught shoplifting some years later, just isn't strong enough to sit with the darkness of the rest of the film.
This structure of a present-day prologue followed by the rest of the action taking place as a flashback is taken from the play, but that began with the police arriving to find Mrs Voray dead and the play then showing us what had led up to this.
The censors meant that her death in the film had to have been caused by falling downstairs, but in the play she is smothered, more or less accidentally, in a drunken sleep by one of the children. The girls are trying to get her keys off her so they can rescue the boy, who has been locked in the coal store on a freezing night.
I should add that Taylor avoids this big spoiler, but I am not so considerate when a film is 75 years old.
But we can end in agreement as he praises the two best performances in the film:
Freda Jackson brings a full-blooded intensity to the role of the selfish and uncaring Aggie Voray. She was a sensation in the play and that’s why they made a film version which launched her considerable career on stage and in the cinema.
Jackson probably became a role model for actors portraying more authentic working class women. I wonder if Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner) of Coronation Street was influenced by her?
As for all of the child actors in No Room at the Inn well they’re brilliant -especially Joan Dowling who’s street-wise confidence cannot hide her emotional damage. She deserved a prize but unfortunately the BAFTAs didn’t begin until 1954.
Later. It's worth adding that it easy to find a DVD of the film for sale online - it was even on YouTube for a while. That version runs for about 60 minutes, but the one that has been shown more than once by Talking Pictures TV is significantly longer.
Since writing this I have watched Innocent Sinners (1958), which puts a girl at the centre of a bombsite film and portrays the sites as providing its child protagonists with the privacy they lack in their inadequate homes.
As Andrew Ray discovers in The Yellow Balloon, terrible things happened to boys who played on bombsites in 1953.
And his friend’s death is only the start of his troubles. William Sylvester, who makes a beguiling and dangerous villain, blackmails him into stealing from his parents and taking part in robberies and then, because he was present in one that ended in murder, seeks to silence him for good.
So frightening is its finale, in which Sylvester hunts the boy through a bomb-damaged tube station, that The Yellow Balloon became one of the first British films to be awarded an X certificate. Until it was rescinded, this fouled up the distributor’s plans to market the film to families and meant that its young star was unable to attend its premiere.
Before the fall
It hadn’t always been like this.
Hue and Cry (1947), the first of the great Ealing comedies, was filmed in a bomb-damaged London and depicted it as a landscape that belonged to errand boys. Its screenwriter, T.E.B. Clarke, celebrated their independence and resourcefulness, even if they do have to be home for tea.
In truth the film is something of a Boys’ Own fantasy. It allows only one girl on to the bombsites: the wonderfully talented Joan Dowling, who was to marry her fellow cast member Harry Fowler and take her own life at the age of 26. But that was one more than most British films of the post-war era did.
Clarke allowed a more balanced and feminine view on the question of children and bombsites to be expressed two years later in his script for Passport to Pimlico (1949).
The local bobby visits the home of Stanley Holloway, the future prime minister of this urban village that declares its independence from austerity London, and sees a model of a lido he has built.
"It's an idea for that dump out there," Holloway’s wife (played by Barbara Murray) explains, meaning a bombsite. "Give those kids somewhere decent to play."
The constable looks out at the small boys scuffling in the dirt: "They seem to be doing pretty well as it is."
Murray replies: "I'd have something to say if I was their mother."
Danger
And by the time of his 1950 screenplay for The Magnet, a film now chiefly of interest because it stars a very young James Fox, he felt obliged to include what the amateur child actor makes sound very like a public safety warning.
Bombsites could still be made to look benign in 1952, as the final scene of Mandy proves. The little deaf girl’s liberation takes place when other children let them join in with their games on one.
But it was the comic plot of The Magnet pointed the way forward. James Fox (acting under his real name William Fox) thinks he has contributed to the death of another boy and goes on the run, just as Andrew Ray in The Yellow Balloon was to be blackmailed by a false accusation of murder.
Similarly, in The Weapon (1956) Jon Whiteley finds a gun on a bombsite, accidentally shoots a friends and runs away because he thinks he has killed him.
The spokeswoman for mothers now is the neighbour who calls on Andrew Ray’s mother to bring news of his playmate’s death:
Neighbour: That poor Mrs Williams. They can’t do nothing with her. They’ve just found her Ronnie with his back broke.
Mother: Dear God! However did it happen?
Neighbour: In a bombed house in Kendal Street. He must have been playing there and fallen. Dead, of course. It’s a scandal, Emily, that’s what I say. These places ought to be boarded up. Time and again I’ve told my lot to keep out of them. I shan’t ever feel like letting the kids play in the street again.
Infantilisation
Compared with the boys of Hue and Cry, with their jobs and long trousers, Ray and Whiteley seem infantilised. Ray is thrashed by his father when he steals money from the home to give to Sylvester, while Whiteley hides out in London dirty, scared and at the mercy of a villainous George Cole.
By 1953 and The Yellow Balloon an American presence in a middling British film with ambitions was inevitable. Whether this ever produced the hoped-for ticket sales across the Atlantic I rather doubt.
The Yellow Balloon’s William Sylvester makes a believable villain. Sometimes you hardly barely his American accent and it’s easy to imagine him as a wartime deserter who has made a living in London’s underworld ever since.
By contrast, The Weapon’s Steve Cochran is a knight in shining armour who leads the search for the boy, rescues him and catches the villain. To make him even nobler the police, and at first even the boy’s mother, are made to beremarkably relaxed about Whiteley’s disappearance from home.
The Yellow Balloon is a better film than The Weapon in every way, though you do remember one scene in the latter where Jon Whiteley is trying to hide in a street where every surface has been plastered with posters bearing his photograph.
David Hemmings in The Heart Within (1957) is more like the heroes of Hue and Cry in age and independence, but even he narrowly escapes a fatal fall when he goes on to a bombsite to escape his pursuers. His rescuer is Earl Cameron in this early and tentative treatment of race in post-war London.
Redevelopment
By now the bombsites were being redeveloped, and the acres of urban desolation where Jon Whitely shot his friend became the Barbican Centre – you can see this process happening in the video for Unit Four + 2’s Concrete and Clay, which reached the top of the singles chart in 1965.
If you wanted urban desolation in the Sixties, you did better to seek out the streets being lost to the capital’s slum clearance programme – which gave rise to the observation that the planners were doing more damage to London than the Luftwaffe ever did.
And those slum clearance sites were allowed no redeeming features. Both This is My Street (1964) and Poor Cow (1967) have a scene near the end where a very young child is lost on such a site to the terror of their mother. (Don’t worry: both are found.)
The last example comes from 1970 and the redevelopment of St Katherine’s Dock, which you can see as the forerunner of the wholesale redevelopment of the Docklands a decade later.
You can watch a documentary about the project on the British Film Institute website, and in it you will hear a resident complains about there being nowhere for this children to play and about the dangers of an open lift shaft in an old tube station. The neighbour in The Yellow Balloon would have agreed with her.
The meaning of bombsites
So why this change in the way British films treated children and bombsites over the ten years from 1947?
It may be that there really were enough accidents on bombsites to alarm parents. More likely, the growing pace of redevelopment meant that children could no longer wander them as they did immediately after the war.
Or, to try a little armchair sociology, it may be that this fear of unregulated spaces was part of a wider fear about the threat to the family. We now think of the Fifties as stiflingly cosy, but the discourse of the time was full of worries about the increase in juvenile delinquency and the threat to the family.
The Yellow Balloon ends with father, mother and son hugging. The boy has been rescued from the dark forces to be found on the bombsites and brought back to his family.
Even if It is an odd family. His father is played by Kenneth More, who does not convincing as a working-class character and is almost as boyish as his son.
But then I often struggle to understand More’s popularity as an actor - a heretical view for an Englishman. He makes me understand the attraction of the bombsites.
