The Joy of Six 1334

Josh Self has some good news - Reform UK’s civil war will be a protracted farce: "[Rupert] Lowe’s substantial online presence will ensure every aspect of this row is played out in public. That means recurrent poor headlines for Reform - as an array of significant political milestones await."

"As of 1900, about 18 per cent, or nearly one in five, American children died before their fifth birthday. The most common causes were infectious diseases - pneumonia, diphtheria, dysentery, measles, and other illnesses ran rampant through households, and children were especially at risk." Anna North reminds us of what life was like before vaccines.

"The four-part docudrama follows a group of mothers in Corby as they fight for justice after 19 of their children were born with birth defects caused by exposure to toxic waste – the result of the botched regeneration of the town’s former steelworks site." Lee Barron, the town's Labour MP, reviews Toxic Town.

Victoria Guida argues that crypto may be its own worse enemy: "Factions within the industry are battling with each other for strategic, commercial and ideological reasons."

"The film’s title is aptly overdetermined. Reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) is obviously one kind of performer. But performer, in British slang, also refers to mobsters like Chas (James Fox). In the film, the worlds that these two men inhabit collide and entwine in fascinating fashion." Bud Wilkins reviews of a new Blu-Ray release of Performance.

Lizza Aiken praises the sequels to Jane Austen's novels that Joan Aiken wrote.

All 19 Ealing Comedies ranked by the Guardian

Andrew Pulver has ranked all 19 Ealing Comedies for the Guardian. In the process, he notices some films that even I have not seen. But I've seen most of them, so here are a few thoughts on his reviews and rankings. 

Following his counting up the list up from 19th and last place, my first comment is that Hue and Cry is ranked far too low at 16th place. The film a celebration of the way boys ruled London and its bombsites - this would never be seen in such a positive light in a British film again - and there are fine performances by Jack Warner and Alastair Sim.

I can't make much of a case for The Magnet, which stars an 11-year-old James Fox, being placed much higher than the 14th place where Pulver has it, but he gets some things about the film wrong. Fox did not go near a drama school until he was 16: the accent he has in the film is that of a prep school boy of the day, and this is just what he is playing here. Parts of  The Wirral were very posh in 1950. 

Barnacle Bill is at 13. Pulver, quite fairly, says Alec Guinness never gets out of third gear in this film, but then Guinness in third is better than most actors in fifth. When you see his walk at the start of the film you believe absolutely that he is a former Naval officer. The film also sees Ealing take the side of teenagers against the stuffy establishment of the seaside resort where it is set. And where else will you see Guinness boogying with Jackie Collins?

Harry Secombe's star vehicle Davy is too high at 10. As Pulver admits, he isn't much of an actor and the film's approval of his character's surrender of his operatic ambitions for the sake of the family variety act is a bit Ealing-by-numbers.

I'm pleased to see the The Maggie (which is rather like a harder-edged Local Hero) in seventh place, which is one above the more celebrated The Titfield Thunderbolt. For me, the latter film's awareness of its own quirkiness is a sign of the studio's decline. The train must be saved because its quaint, not because it helps anyone get to where they want to go.

From now 6 down to 1, Pulver gets it pretty much right:

6. Passport to Pimlico

5. Whisky Galore!

4. The Man in the White Suit

3. The Lavender Hill Mob

2. The Ladykillers

1. Kind Hearts and Coronets

They are all celebrated films, though maybe The Man in the White Suit deserves to be even better known. Its satire hits the spot more accurately than the Boulting Brothers ever managed, perhaps because it doesn't star Ian Carmichael.

It's also worth noting that Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its period setting, is far from being a typical Ealing film. And Pulver gets it right in saying that Dennis Price is its real star.

Tunes of Glory (1960): What happens when a victorious regiment comes home?

This post was written for Terence Towles Canote's 10th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon, where you will find plenty more articles on British cinema.

What is the most successful piece of casting against type in a British film? 

There’s Richard Attenborough’s turn as a bull of a Sergeant Major in Guns at Batasi. There’s James Fox as Chas in Performance, whose hooded eyes and half-smile haunt British gangster films to this day.

And there’s another candidate. How about Alec Guinness playing a hard-drinking officer in a Scottish regiment - red hair and all - who has been promoted from the ranks?

It may sound ridiculous, but you need only watch the trailer above to see that it’s not. In fact, Guinness’s performance as Major Jock Sinclair in Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.

This post contains spoilers, but there's good news. You can watch the film on YouTube first if you wish (just don’t tell them I sent you).

Directed by Ronald Neame, Tunes of Glory is set in the barracks of a Scottish regiment just after the end of the second world war.

Though Jock Sinclair, in his own words, has led the regiment "from Dover to Berlin", he is still just a Major. He holds a brevet rank as Lieutenant Colonel, but as Wikipedia explains, brevet ranks are given as a reward but do not necessarily confer the authority and privileges of that higher rank.

We first see Sinclair holding court at the end of a regimental dinner - there are pipers and oceans of whisky. He has news: the regiment is getting a new colonel and it’s not him. It is to be Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow, who is played by John Mills.

The Wikipedia entry on Tunes of Glory has an admirable plot summary, so I’ll let it take up the tale for a little:

Colonel Barrow arrives a day early and finds the officers dancing rowdily. He declines sharing a whisky with Sinclair, taking a soft drink instead. They exchange histories. Sinclair enlisted as bandsman in Glasgow and rose through the ranks, Barrow came from Oxford University. He served with the battalion in 1933. Assigned to "special duties", he has lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Sinclair humorously notes that he was in Barlinnie Prison's cooler for being drunk and disorderly one night in 1933. 

When Sinclair presses Barrow about his war years, he replies that he, too, was "in jail". Sinclair recalls that Barrow was a prisoner of the Japanese and belittles the experience - "officers' privileges and amateur dramatics". Barrow simply replies that Barlinnie would have been preferable.

At 3 am Sinclair is drinking with Major Scott, played by Dennis Price, and we hear his outburst to him: "I've acted Colonel, I should be Colonel, and by God... I bloody well will be Colonel!"

Barrow proves to be a martinet and is not prepared to cut the battle-weary regiment any slack. He takes particular exception to the rowdy style of Highland dancing they favour, and orders all the officers to take lessons so they dance they way he wants them to when he holds a cocktail party for the local gentry.

This reminds me that, in a recent episode of The Rest of Politics, Alastair Campbell was surprised to learn that Rory Stewart had dancing lessons when he held a gap-year commission in the Black Watch at the start of the 1990s.

Anyway, the dancing after the party gets rowdy despite Barrow’s efforts and, red faced and furious, he breaks up proceedings before fleeing in shame at his own behaviour. He knows that the bulk of his officers feel a loyalty to Sinclair that they do not feel to him, and the evening can only have made things worse. To the modern viewer, it seems obvious from this and from the collection of tics and twitches Mills deploys, that he is suffering post-traumatic stress from his wartime experiences.

I sometimes struggle to understand the esteem in which John Mills was held as an actor in Britain - he had an unfortunate habit of being cast in roles for which he was visibly too old - but he is good in Tunes of Glory. Particularly so, as his character is less immediately appealing than Alec Guinness’s and does not allow for the same bravura acting.

The clash between these two flawed characters has an almost Shakespearian heft. As the retired US Marine Corps infantry officer and historian Reed Bonadonna observes, it’s tempting to say that each has the qualities the other lacks – “Sinclair is a warrior and leader of men, but he’s hopeless as an organiser and disciplinarian.”

He goes on:

Despite their obvious differences, the two leads are similar in the sense that both are essentially lonely and unfulfilled. Both have been married but are now on their own. Sinclair has a grown daughter with whom he has a loving but somewhat distant relationship. Both are burdened by their memories of the war.

Barrow spent years in harsh and unproductive captivity. Sinclair suspects that his best days are over, and even that his wartime success was a fluke. They also share a keen sense of the burden and isolation of command. There is the hint of Othello in Tunes of Glory, with Barrow as the Moor and Sinclair as his Iago.

And it is Sinclair’s relationship with his daughter that brings things to a head. Unknown to Sinclair, but known to many others in the barracks, she has been going out with one of the regiment’s pipers. When he finally comes across them together, he strikes the corporal.

This is a clear court-martial offence and Barrow is first minded to bring charges against him. But he is put under pressure by almost everyone to deal with the matter himself. He goes to see Sinclair, who promises that he will be supportive in future if Barrow shows him leniency.

Against his better judgement, he decides against a court martial, only to find that Sinclair does not change at all. He still gives him no support and continues to drink with his 'babies', as he calls the  officers loyal to him. Humiliated, Barrow leaves them, goes upstairs and shoots himself.

Ironically, it is in his reaction to Barrow’s suicide that we see the best of Sinclair. His command of the situation and concern for the young soldier who found the body make us see why he was a good leader in battle and inspired respect and even affection in the men under him.

To assuage his guilt - "it’s not his body I fear, it’s his ghost," he says to himself at one point - he plans a grandiose funeral for Barrow. As he describes it to the other officers we hear the pipe band playing the 'tunes of glory', but it becomes clear to them that he has lost his reason and the room empties.

"Oh my babies, take me home," Sinclair pleads to Scott and another officer, and as he is driven away, the film ends. With one protagonist dead and the other driven mad, Tunes of Glory, it occurs to me, has unexpected parallels with Performance.

The supporting cast here is uniformly excellent. Dennis Price’s Major Scott is a typically disengaged Price character. We wonder if he is just a sardonic observer of the tragedy, or if he is the real Iago, encouraging Sinclair and Barrow to destroy one another so he can become Colonel amid the wreckage?

Gordon Jackson plays Captain Jimmy Cairns, the other officer who is there with Sinclair at the end. Yet he has also been Barrow’s right-hand man as he struggles to reform the regiment. Jackson always did have the knack of playing good men who were not dull, which is a rare gift. Certainly, the villains in British films of the Fifties are often surprising dark and alluring, whereas the heroes are just wet - compare Dirk Bogarde and Jimmy Hanley in The Blue Lamp.

Many of the other officers are played - and well played - by familiar faces: Gerald Harper, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Allan Cuthbertson (who you will recognise him from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers, if nowhere else). The Pipe Major is Duncan Macrae, who appeared in every film about Scotland made after the war and was always a welcome presence.

Sinclair’s daughter Morag is played by Susannah York in her first film role. Liberal Democrat readers may be interested to know that York was at RADA with our own Flick Rea. Trivia fans will be interested that Flick told me that a young man from Liverpool shared their classes for two terms but did not make the grade. So he returned North to the family business, to re-emerge a few years later as the manager of the Beatles.

Tunes of Glory is an exceptionally good film. As another American military writer, Jim Shufelt, says:

This is not a 'war movie', but Tunes of Glory features an intense portrayal of leadership, discipline and reintegration issues common to soldiers and units of any conflict, army, or time period.

He goes on to suggest that watching it could form part of current-day officers’ professional development.

This is not a surprise: the screenplay is by James Kennaway, adapted from his own novel of the same name. Kennaway himself held a commission in a Scottish regiment while doing his National Service. He was invited by the Colonel to apply for a permanent commission, but declined, in part because of the tensions between his fellow officers.

Tunes of Glory was on a list of 10 British films that should be better known I posted recently. Maybe you’ll find another there to enjoy?

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Robert Buckland, the Conservative MP and former justice minister, makes the case against withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights: "This is a profoundly mistaken view, which misunderstands the true nature of our membership of the Convention and the wider political and legal context, not to mention the UK’s international reputation. In a nutshell, this is not serious politics."

Something must be done about the problem of convicted criminals refusing to attend court for their sentencing hearings, or so everyone suddenly seems agreed. The Secret Barrister sees problems with the idea.

David Edgerton reviews a new global history of sugar: "We could always have done without sugar and today could have all the sweetness we want without it. Yet many of the poorest people in the world depend on it to make a meagre living and to make more bearable the sour realities of everyday life." 

A group of teenage Indian chess players has the potential to dominate the game. Indraneel Das looks at the sacrifices required to become that good that young.

"A taboo-lacerating work, Performance was made more beguiling still by its back-story. A film that so disturbed leading man James Fox that he quit the industry for a decade, Roeg and Cammell’s film also sowed the seeds of discontent between the Rolling Stones. The on-set presence of real-life 'chaps' such as John Bindon and David Litvinoff also lent the picture an authenticity completely at odds with the cockernee swagger of The Italian Job." Richard Luck on the allure of Performance.

Iain Burnside explores how Shakespeare's words have inspired countless musicians and pieces of music.

An A-Z Guide to British and Irish Railways on Film

Here's a discovery: a website that bills itself as An A-Z Guide to British and Irish Railways on Film.

It tells you where the railway scenes in each film were shot, has plenty of screen captures and appears to be reasonably comprehensive.

In effect, it's an online version of Horton's Guide to British Railways in Feature Films, which I keep by me when watching Talking Pictures TV.

The image above (borrowed from another site) comes from the minor Ealing comedy The Magnet (1950). It shows Stephen Murray (the great uncle of Al Murray) and a very young James Fox on the platform of a station on the Liverpool Overhead Railway. The A-Z Guide suggests it is Canada Dock.

Children and bombsites in post-war British films

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.

This post was written for Terence Towles Canote's 9th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

Later. I have also written a post looking at how contemporary newspapers reported on children and bombsites.

Six of the Best 992

"A bill for the compulsory sterilisation of certain categories of 'mental patient' was proposed, with the Labour MP Archibald Church wanting to stop the reproduction of those 'who are in every way a burden to their parents, a misery to themselves and in my opinion a menace to the social life of the community'." Stephen Unwin explores how some of our most civilised and intelligent thinkers have supported eugenics.

Jennifer Quellette uses insights from the study of folklore to reveal how conspiracy theories emerge.

The Antipope of Mar-a-Lago: Michael Kruse on hat a medieval religious schism can teach us about Donald Trump’s unprecedented and radically antagonistic approach to the ex-presidency.

Chris Heather and Andrew Munro look into the accidental death of an aristocrat near Manton Junction in 1902.

Adam Scovell goes in search of locations from the James Fox and Mick Jagger film Performance.

Can you name the author of a first novel, originally published in Britain in September 1965, that became a more or less immediate best seller, and the fans of which included Noël Coward, Daphne du Maurier, John Gielgud, Fay Weldon, David Storey, Margaret Drabble, and Doris Lessing? The answer to this question from Lucy Scholes is "Irene Handl."

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"Seething in private is not enough when lives, jobs and sanity are at stake. MPs must reflect over the coming days on the tumultuous events of 2020, which began with Johnson saying this would be “a fantastic year for Britain” and ends with the sort of headlines about a mutant virus cancelling Christmas that might be found in a science-fiction film." Ian Birrell says it's the duty of Conservative MPs to depose Boris Johnson.

Paul Sorene looks back to the Grunwick dispute of 1976: "Prime minister James Callaghan set up a cabinet committee under Lord Justice Scarman to resolve the dispute. This was music to the ears of TUC general secretary Len Murray, who responded: 'No employer has ever defied a court of enquiry.' Jayaben Desai, unsurprisingly, saw things differently. 'He will defy the court of enquiry', she said."

This first attempt to bore a tunnel under the River Severn ended in disaster and attempted murder, reports Janet Hughes.

William Boyd reviews a new biography of Graham Greene: "He enjoyed entering literary competitions, often parodying his own work. In 1949 he entered a contest held by the New Statesman – where the demand was to write the notional opening of a Graham Greene novel – and didn’t win outright: he shared the six-guinea prize with five others."

The Liverpool Echo has behind-the-scenes shots of the making of the Ealing comedy The Magnet, which starred a very young James Fox.

"Sometimes, a storm or other natural disaster could change the fortunes of coastal towns overnight. New Romney in Kent is one of these places.  Once a thriving and important port, a terrible storm in 1287 cut off the town’s lifeline." Flickering Lamps visits the town today.

The whole of Waking the Dead is on the BBC iPlayer

Perhaps because I have fond memories of watching Trevor Eve in Shoestring, I liked Waking the Dead. And the good news is that for the time being at least every episode of it is on the BBC iPlayer.

Watching them now I find that the first part of each introduces us to an intriguing mystery reawakened by the discovery of a body, while the second spins off incoherently in all directions while Eve shouts at people.

But I am glad they are there and you do find serous actors like David Hemmings and James Fox turning up in the cast.

We were once used to living with infectious diseases

The minor Ealing comedy The Magnet from 1950 is proving to be a mine of social history.

I blogged about its attitude to children playing on bombsites the other day and a couple of years ago I wrote about the way it displayed middle-class distrust of the new National Health Service.

The latter post was illustrated with the clip above. Why is the film's hero, played by an 11-year-old called William Fox who grew up to be the actor James Fox, covering his mouth?

Fox has been sent home from his prep school because of an outbreak of scarlet fever and is under a form of quarantine. He is allowed to wander the genteel streets of The Wirral but is not meant to talk to anyone. When he does, his handkerchief comes out.

This is a reminder that we were once used to living with infectious diseases.

Children who caught scarlet fever, as an article I once included in a Six of the Best made clear, could be sent to an isolation hospital.

Ealing Studios was worried about bombsites by 1950

The Magnet, a minor Ealing comedy, used to be rarity, but it now turns up on Talking Pictures TV fairly regularly.

Last time I watched a bit of it I noticed something relevant to my interest in the treatment of children and bombsites in British films. And by some miracle just that scene can be found on YouTube.

Before we get to the exchange that interested me, let's not that the film's young star is an 11-year-old James Fox, billed under his real name William Fox, and that you can see a train on the Liverpool Overhead Railway at 00:30.

Then, at , 02:40 we get this exchange (if I have transcribed it correctly):

I know, there's that bombed house in Bangkok Street.

No, he wants to keep out of bombed houses. That's how my brother got pinched.

When I first blogged on the subject I gave some examples from other Ealing films:

In Ealing's Hue and Cry (1947), a damaged London belongs to errand boys and the film celebrates their independence and resourcefulness.

In Mandy (1952), the final scene of liberation, where the little deaf girl goes out to play with other children, takes place on a bombsite.

Last night I watched Passport to Pimlico (1949) last night and it proved a little more equivocal.

The local bobby visits a woman whose husband is always making models.

"It's an idea for that dump out there," she tells him, meaning a bombsite. "Give those kids somewhere decent to play."

He looks out at the small boys scuffling in the dirt and replies: "They seem to be doing pretty well as it is."

She replies: "I'd have something to say if I was their mother."

The Magnet was made in 1950 and the screenplay was by T.E.B. Clarke, who also wrote Hue and Cry and Passport to Pimlico.

Clarke seems to have been on a journey. Though the exchange above from The Magnet reads well, as delivered by the young actor it sounds almost like something from a public information film. You sense he was telling the younger member of the audience to stay away from bombsites.

As I noted in my blog post, by the early 1950s bombsites had become places were terrible things befell small boys who played on them.

Were there tragedies that have been forgotten, or, as I suggested, did this anxiety arise from a feeling that the nuclear family needed to be reinforced as the collectivist wartime era receded?

It may be relevant that people in the 1950s did not congratulate themselves on living in an era with low crime rates but worried about juvenile delinquency. And bombsites were places outside adult authority,

One final point: the boys Fox meets do not sound particularly Liverpudlian to modern ears. The one who does is the Chinese boy played by Geoffrey Yin, and the exchange with his mother is still funny after 70 years,

James Fox and Sandy Lieberson on Performance

If there were a world cup of key British films of the Sixties then Performance would meet Blow-Up in the final.

Click on the image above to go to a video on Sotheby's site that features the actor James Fox and producer Sandy Lieberson discussing Performance and Cecil Beaton's arrival on set.

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"It was the thin orange line of Lib Dem Councillors that held the line. Yes Vince and our team did great things in Parliament but it was resolute and bloody stubborn councillors that both held the line and then began slowly to move us forward leading to the great rush in Lib Dem votes and councillors at the beginning of May and what everyone hopes (except our opponents who dread) will be a great advance when the EU votes are declared tonight." Richard Kemp apportions praise where it is due.

Ed Caesar tells the story of the the thwarting of the Fascist plot to murder the Rosie Cooper MP.

Employee-owned companies perform better, but are resisted by banks, lawyers and governments, says Jonathan Michie.

"For nearly thirty years the rebellious outcast Sophie Curly could be found in Nottingham’s city centre pubs. You might remember her, a bag lady with a smiley face furnished with bright pink lipstick and a milky eye, ranting about Thatcher and preaching free love." She was also a literary discovery of Virginia Woolf. Nottingham City of Literature tells her story.

The actor James Fox turned 80 the other day. Adam Scovell chooses 10 essential film appearances by him from The Magnet to Sexy Beast.

Yahoo Over Cow Corner voyages to the Isle of Wight to watch Hampshire play Nottinghamshire.

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"With the local elections, the Lib Dems were finally completely clear in their messaging. “Stop Brexit” – that’s easy to understand. “Bollocks to Brexit” has the added bonus of having a slightly risqué element to it, meaning it will be discussed and thus picked up on." Nick Tyrone says the Bollocks to Brexit slogan is just what the Liberal Democrats need:

Rachel Andrews takes us to the former Bessborough mother and baby home on the outskirts of Cork. Nine hundred children died here, but few graves have been found.

Jonathan Webber introduces us to Simone de Beauvoir's views on parenting.

"Mr Eliot has asked me to tell you how much he personally enjoyed the poems and to pass on to you his congratulations on them." tseliot.com looks at the relations between T.S. Eliot and Ted Hughes.

Ken Andrews watches Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant: "One of the delights of The Servant is marveling in Bogarde's depiction of Barrett’s effortless slides in and out of his Manchester accent and contrasting his 'on the job' fussiness with his louche behavior when 'off the clock'."

"The hill was my playground, school and world." Alan Garner on Alderley Edge,

Michael Brooke: The later career of the first owner of The Magnet

This clip comes from the 1950 Ealing comedy The Magnet, which is of most interest today because its star grew up to be James Fox.

I last posted it when I blogged about the film in the summer.

But who is the other boy in the clip? The younger boy Fox cons into swapping his magnet?

He is Michael Brooke, and his IMDB biography describes his later career:

Bilingual, he was educated at the Lycée Francais in London and read Law at Edinburgh University and was called to the bar in November 1968. He became a distinguished and well-regarded Barrister, and later Judge. 

His greatest achievement, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, was obtaining compensation from the National Health Service for over 1000 hemophiliacs who had been treated with blood contaminated with HIV, and later for those infected with Hepatitis C.

Michael Brooke died in 2014. You can read about his legal career in more detail in his Medico-Legal Journal obituary.

The fifth annual Rule, Britannia blogathon

I have been partying like it's 2009. On Thursday I helped spread a Twitter meme and last night I contributed to a blog carnival.

That carnival was the The Fifth Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon, which you can find on Terence Towles Canote's blog A Shrould of Thoughts.

My contribution was a post on the minor Ealing comedy The Magnet, which I have already posted here.

Terence explains:

The Rule, Britannia Blogathon is meant to celebrate classic, British films. While many think of Hollywood when they think of movies, the fact is that many classic films originated in the United Kingdom. From the Gainsborough melodramas to the Ealing comedies to the Hammer Horrors, the United Kingdom has made many contributions to classic film.

I think we should bring back more things from the glory days of blogging, such as sending me on free trips to New York.

The Magnet (1950): Enjoying the Ealing Apocrypha

This post is part of the Rule, Britannia Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts.

The Ealing Apocrypha

The Ealing comedies are among the most celebrated British films, though only a limited number of them have been admitted to the canon.

That canon consists of Hue and Cry, Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore!, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Ladykillers.

Perhaps that is being kind to Hue and Cry, which is a tremendous film but not as well known as the others. It is certainly kind to The Titfield Thunderbolt, which is well known but shows Ealing straining too hard for the eccentricity that once came naturally to it.

But there is much pleasure to be found in the Ealing Apocrypha – the comedies outside the canon.

The best of these is The Maggie, which feels like a clear-eyed prefiguring of Billy Forsyth’s Local Hero. An American magnate who is moving to the Hebrides entrusts his furniture to a decrepit Clyde ‘puffer’ and just know he is never going to see it again.

I would also put in a word for Barnacle Bill. In attempt at reviving past glories, Alec Guinness play the sea-sickness prone scion of a great naval family who takes charge of a decaying seaside pier and also plays his ancestors.

That is because it shows late Ealing – the film was released in 1957 – on the side of youthful rebellion. The teenagers of the town, led by Jackie Collins, want to use the pier for dances, the councillors disapprove and Guinness takes the teenagers’ side.

And there is Alec Guinness. From his first moment on screen, you entirely believe in him as a naval officer.

How to enjoy The Magnet

The Magnet is hard to love. Charles Barr once accused it of having “an elaborate whimsical plot which resists economical summary and does not merit a full one”.

While George Perry said “the inclusion of jokes about psychiatry and the Labour government give it a middle-class attitude of the kind with which the British cinema was so frequently associated”.

Its immediate point of interest today is its 11-year-old star William Fox. As James Fox he has enjoyed an extraordinary film career and is still acting today 68 years on.

In The Magnet his cut-glass accent will trouble modern viewers, but they will be amused by the way that he closely resembles an elderly Edward Fox (his older brother) when he pulls a face.

The plot which defeated Charles Barr involves Fox’s guilt and attempt to put things right after he has tricked a younger boy out a powerful magnet he covets - see the clip above - but it is not there that the pleasures of The Magnet is to be found.

There is the running joke that Fox’s father, played by Stephen Murray, who is a psychiatrist or psychologist (the script is unsure), is unable to understand is own son. This despite recruiting the boy’s mother, played by Kay Walsh, to observe his behaviour.

As The Magnet is a British film of its era, there are familiar and welcome faces among the supporting cast. You will find Thora Hird, Joan Hickson and Gladys Henson here, while Meredith Edwards does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep that plot on the road.

Meanwhile, a tramp is played by one Seamus Mor Na Feasag, who looks suspiciously like James Robertson Justice. (Some sources say he had to use another name as he was fighting a seat for Labour in the 1950 general election, but I have not heard of that being required of other actors cum politicians.)

Then there are the settings of the film. The Wirral, where Fox’s family lives, is prosperous and the impressive lido at New Brighton is still open and attracting crowds. Across the Mersey – and we see the ferry – Liverpool is yet to undergo post-war reconstruction and the city’s wonderful overhead railway is still running.

The Magnet as social history

Most of all, though, the Magnet is of interest today as a piece of social history – and not just because, it being 1950, Fox’s first pair of long trousers loom large in the film.

That plot centres on attempts to raise funds for the local hospital. Coming upon Meredith Edwards raising funds to pay for an iron lung, Fox asks: “Can’t you get one free from the National Health?”

The adults chuckle – “He’ll go far, this lad will” – before explaining that their hospital is ‘disclaimed’.

Disclaimed hospitals were hospitals with a charitable or religious foundation that had, at the discretion of the health minister, been exempted from the 1946 National Health Service Act. In The Magnet having such a hospital is presented as a reason for civic pride, which may come as a surprise to generations that have been raised on the idea that the introduction of the NHS was the result of a left-wing landslide in the 1945 general election and universally popular.

Across the Mersey, Fox falls in with a group of urchins, whose accents strike the modern listener as Lancashire rather than Scouse. Is this a function of the casting, or did everyone in the city acquire that accent in the 1960s in the way that everyone in Manchester suddenly sounded ‘Madchester in the 1990s’?

It is also notable that one of the boys in the group is Chinese. The funniest moment of the film comes when a boy has a long conversation in Mandarin with his mother and then tells his friends: “Me Ma says I’ve got to go in for me tea.”

But if you want an example of real social change, Fox’s prep school is in Kirkby.

Six of the Best 781

Ruth Bright find the Liberal Democrats still have a long way to go to achieve gender balance: "I was shocked by the ... balance of male and female Lib Dem councillors on the counties."

"Ferenc Takács is a retired professor of English in Budapest, witty, urbane and past-caring enough to go on the record. 'The worst feature is the general fear in the country,' he told me. 'People won’t express views on Facebook. Teachers are afraid to say critical things about their head teacher or the government.' Matthew Engel has been to Viktor Orbán's Hungary.

"How far will the West go in deserting the Syrian Kurds in their struggle against the Turkish Islamic Ogre?" asks Renaud Girard.

Lorraine Boissoneault on Ted Kennedy, Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

A London Inheritance looks back to the Festival of Britain.

"The stories about the making of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance are almost as infamous as the movie itself," says Dangerous Minds.

Six of the Best 780

Nick Barlow is not the first person to observe that the Liberal Democrat policy process is broken.

"Without the clout of the European Union behind us we are isolated and having to swallow the unacceptable to do the deals that are needed if we are not to remain that way." Peter Black on the unravelling of the Leavers' promises on international trade.

Victoria Dilly celebrates the transformative power of the school library.

As a teenager, Saul Chandler was an elite violinist, a rare talent. Then, something happened. Fifty years later, reports Alex Vadukul, he has found a refuge in a New York boatyard.

"Conan Doyle’s ... belief in the Cottingley Fairies is sometimes glossed over or even ignored by biographers. It shouldn’t be; it’s a telling glimpse into the character of a man too often confused with his cold, rational hero." Mary Losure examines a strange episode in the author's career.

Adam Scovell visits The Wirral and the locations of the 1950 Ealing comedy The Magnet, which starred a very young James Fox.

James Fox and Richard Ayoade

As a senior member of a theatrical dynasty, James Fox has an unofficial role as father-in-law to the stars - Billie Piper for a while and Richard Ayoade.

The other day I found this film that Fox and Ayoade made for a development charity. It shows Fox sending himself up admirably.