An Ian Christie lecture about Gothic London on film

This a terrific lecture by Ian Christie, whose writings did much to bring the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger back to prominence.

His Gothic London begins with early Dickens adaptations, made because there was a ready public for them. And Dickens, after all, was a cinematic novelist before cinema was invented.

Then we go though Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the London fog to reach the early Hitchcock. The exoticism of Limehouse, with its opium dens and Chinese population, also figures. 

Next we take in the Blitz and this blog's favourite topic of bombsites, before returning to Dickens in the shape of David Lean's peerless Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Carol Reed's 1970 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, says Christie, was the first colour adaptation of a Dickens novel.

And we end with some modern Gothic takes of London, including Death Line and From Hell.

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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A network of Russian far-right extremists steeped in neo-Nazi antisemitism – created under the umbrella of a sanctioned oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, and now openly promoted by Tommy Robinson – has been driving White Lives Matter propaganda over the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, reports Nafeez Ahmed.

"In a decisive summer for government, you can view the 'doubling' agenda as microcosm of the wider story. Some big decisions have been made and some vital groundwork put in place. Ministers now need to build on this with bolder, faster action if the impact is to be visible by the next election." James Wright on the government's commitment to doubling the size of the co-operative and mutual sector.

Alex Marshall is keeping an eye on the new Green administration in Waltham Forest.

Eli Davies questions a culinary shibboleth: "The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour."

"The police are on the trail throughout. Led by a grimly invigilating inspector they seem an odd bunch, varying from the para-military – pistols and rifles firmly clasped – to the quaintly Victorian, with constables wrapped in immense belted gaberdines and sporting cloche style helmets. A reminder, if any were needed, that Northern Ireland was a decidedly different part of the UK." Simon Matthews celebrates Carol Reed's 1947 film Odd Man Out.

Chris Dyson explores the streets and alleyways of Hull's historic Old Town.

How David Lean's Oliver Twist broke the law

Embed from Getty Images

Here's a remarkable thing. Between 1933 and 1963, it was illegal in Britain for a child under 12 to appear in an entertainment production on stage or on screen. And that explains the following press cuttings.

Here's the Weekly Dispatch, 9 November 1947:

One of the best-kept secrets of the British film industry is revealed at last by producer Ronald Neame’s announcement that John Howard Davies, cast as Oliver Twist Cineguild's screen version of Charles Dickens’s famous novel, has been playing the part at Pinewood Studios for the last four months. [John Howard Davies was nine.] 

the Evening News, 25 February 1948:

I am able to reveal to-day the name of another of those juvenile lawbreakers who act in films under the age of fifteen: Carol Reed, who finishes directing The Lost Illusion” to-day. gives me permission to say that the important part of the small boy who becomes involved in a murder case has been played for the past two months by Bobbie Henrey, an attractive eight-year-old with blond wavy hair. [The Lost Illusion was retitled The Fallen Idol before release.]

and the Birmingham Mail, 16 November 1951:

It is three months since watched a scene being shot on the floor at Pinewood Studios for the new Dirk Bogarde thriller Hunted. The unechoing spaces of a sound stage have their own special atmosphere especially when carpenters and jobbers are silenced for shooting but on this occasion the sense of hush was almost tangible. 

It was in fact hush-hush for through a door at the back of the set – a typical transport drivers' cafe halt – came Dirk Bogarde and small blond child. At my elbow a whisper informed me that no mention could made of the boy: not until the film was finished completely cut and polished ready for screen.

That is the way the law or rather the evasion of the law works in the British film industry Child actors are not supposed to do this work therefore as far as everyone but those intimately involved the making of the film are concerned they do not exist I think 1 am right in saying that the law prohibits the employment of children under 12 years of age. And here was 6½-year-old Jon Whiteley in middle of perhaps the longest screen role a child has ever attempted.

And, come to think of it, though there were popular British child stars in the years before these three productions – Elizabeth Taylor, Freddie Bartholomew, Roddy McDowall – they made their films in Holywood.

In 1948 it had been expected that an amendment to the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 would relax the rules on young performers and remove the need for this subterfuge, but it was unexpectedly ruled out of order by the speaker.

I've even seen it suggested that the very public search for an Oliver Twist was designed to reassure the authorities that the producers were intending to cast an older boy, when they had already chosen John Howard Davies, the son of a well-known scriptwriter. The story goes that one of the production team had seen him when he was invited to dinner by the boy's parents.

There were a few prosecutions for employing child actors, but for the most part the 1933 law was ignored until it was superseded by the 1963 Children and Young Person’s Act. You can read more in article by Richard Farmer.

A Sense of Carol Reed (2006)

A short documentary on the great British film director Carol Reed, focusing on his trilogy of great films of the late 1940s – Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man – and Oliver!, for which he won an Oscar late in his career.

Bobby Henrey, the boy from The Fallen Idol, is still with us and can be heard talking about his experience of making the film on an edition of the Soho Bites podcast.

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Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business – the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies – in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable."

"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.

Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.

Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."

"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).

"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.