Laburnum Grove (1936)

Laburnum Grove was written as a play in 1933, by J.B. Priestley, a prolific writer and dramatist.[1] It was first staged at the Duchess Theatre in London’s West End (which is currently, Covid restrictions permitting, home to the Play That Goes Wrong). Laburnum Grove transferred to Broadway in 1935 and was turned into a feature film a year later by Associated Talking Pictures. The film adaptation was directed by Carol Reed, who had only recently graduated from Assistant Director positions. The play was adapted for the screen by Anthony Kimmins, who later on in the 1930s would repeatedly direct George Formby on screen. The result is one of the few interwar British films that is explicitly situated in London’s suburbs.

In Laburnum Grove, we meet the Radfern family; father, mother, and daughter Elsie. They live in the eponymous street in an unidentified suburban development. The Radferns have got their in-laws staying over, Mr and Mrs Baxley. Elsie has a beau whom she is hoping to marry. Mr Radfern has some vaguely identified clerking job in a company; he appears content with his suburban routine of commuting to work and tending to his vegetable patch in the evening.

Both the Baxley’s and Elsie are keen on more wealth and success, and both ask Mr Radfern to lend them money – as he does not appear to be attached to it. Over dinner, Mr Radfern calmly explains that his suburban life is merely a front and that he is in fact the lynchpin in an international criminal network, through which he makes a fortune. The rest of the film plays on this tension between his identities as unremarkable ‘middle England’ character and his criminal career. Radfern’s family struggle to believe his claims, and the Scotland Yard inspector investigating the criminal network finds it hard to pin anything on the seemingly innocuous Radfern.

Laburnum Grove is effective because it plays on what, by 1936, was already being cemented as stereotype in the British popular imagination: what it means to live in the suburbs. The title of the film refers to the street in which the Radferns live: although it appears to be a specific location, in reality it stands in for any suburban street. A quick Google Maps search suggests that there are numerous Laburnum Grove’s still in London today, for instance in Hounslow, Southall and New Malden – all areas that saw extensive suburban development during the interwar period.

London’s physical environment expanded rapidly during the interwar period; first many soldiers returned from the front which spurred on the (partially successful) Homes Fit For Heroes campaign. Throughout the 1920s the British economy grew, and more Londoners were able to save up disposable income to put towards a house. The economic crisis of the 1930s did not impact the spending power of people in the south-east of England as much as it did the North, but it did make building materials cheaper.[2] Additionally, the replacement of horse-drawn vehicles with motorcars negated the need for growing wheat to feed the horses, which is what most of Middlesex had been taken up with.[3] This created ideal circumstances for private investors to buy up newly available plots of land and fill them up with competitively priced semi-detached houses. Many people were now in a position to buy a sanctuary away from the noise and smoke of the inner city.

With this mass flight to the outskirts of the city also came assumptions and stereotypes about the people who lived in suburbs. Most suburban developments looked very similar to one another, as private investors and contractors wanted to maximise the number of houses for the lowest possible cost. Consequently, the stereotypical suburban worker also became interchangeable in the public’s imagination: an anonymous stream of men all walking to the same train station in the morning, and returning home via the same route at night. So quickly was the notion established that suburbanites were bland and middle-brow that even during the interwar period, some developers started to market their own houses as “away from suburbia” or “non-suburbanised.”[4]

The gardening that Mr Redfern occupies himself with in Laburnum Grove is also stereotypical – as most suburban houses included a garden, gardening became the quintessential leisure pursuit for suburban men in the interwar period.[5] In Laburnum Grove, Redfern uses his gardening activity as a way to covertly meet up with his neighbour, who is also a partner in the criminal enterprise. Because gardening was such a common leisure activity for suburban men, and because it appears unthreatening (or even emasculating), it provides a strong cover for nefarious activities.

Laburnum Grove repeatedly and skilfully plays with the preconceptions audiences have about suburbs and the people who live in them. The perfect ordinariness of Redfern’s life serves to hide the most extraordinary reality, even from his own family. There is an additional meta-textual element to this, also; very few fiction films in interwar Britain were set so explicitly in a suburban environment. The vast majority of films set in London set their action in either the East End or West End, both of which of course had their own stereotypes attached to them. It appears that writers and filmmakers shared the assumption that there was little of interest to be found in suburban life; that it was too ordinary to ask audiences to pay attention to this.

In Laburnum Grove, Priestley masterfully uses and subverts these expectations of suburban life both within the world of the story itself, and between the film text and its audience. Laburnum Grove provides a British counterpart to the more familiar, post-War American depictions of suburbia. Viewing the film in the 21st century highlights how little these depictions and expectations have changed; the film still works and (most of) the jokes still ‘land’. Despite all the changes London has gone through, the notion of what it means to live in a suburb still endures.

[1] Priestley turned Laburnum Grove into a novel as well, co-written by Ruth Holland

[2] Mark Clapson, Suburban century: social change and urban growth in England and the United States (Oxford: Berg, 2003) p. 2; Stephen Halliday, Underground to everywhere: London’s underground railway in the life of the capital, (Stroud: The History Press, 2013), p. 113

[3] Alan A Jackson, Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900-1939 (1st ed 1973; 2nd ed 1991), p. 57

[4] Alan A Jackson, Semi-Detached London, p. 162

[5] Mark Clapson, Suburban Century, p. 68

Friday Night is Amami Night

Friday Night is Amami Night

Let’s talk about the biggest and most famous hair product of interwar Britain: Amami shampoo. It was scarcely possible to read tabloid newspapers for any length of time and not see one of the ubiquitous adverts for this brand, with the strapline ‘Friday Night is Amami Night’ used consistently across the interwar period. The brand targeted young women and encouraged them to cultivate a habit of washing their hair with Amami shampoo on Fridays. By encouraging its users to all use the product on the same day of the week, Amami attempted to build a communal experience for women in the interwar period.

In addition to this persistent print campaign, Amami also released an advertising film in 1936, which is available to watch on the BFI Player for anyone based in the UK. Advertising films such as this one would be shown in cinemas, which tended to screen programmes of around three hours in length that contained a mixture of feature films, news reels, cartoons, and perhaps an ‘interest’ film.[1]

The short film, entitled Crowning Glory, is directed by Andrew Buchanan, a Putney native who directed a small number of non-fiction shorts in the 1930s and 1940s. Crowning Glory is his first known directing credit, but it is none the less ambitious for that. The film stands out for its rather laboured commercial messaging, but also for its unusual formal choices. It also highlights who the ideal Amami customer was; and demonstrates the values with which Amami intended to align itself.

The first tongue-in-cheek device the film employs is in the opening credits; after listing the various actors against their character names, the final entry on the list is ‘The Audience – Yourselves’. This is followed by a shot of a film director walking onto a film set, and looking into the camera to directly address the audience. He invites the viewer to ‘join [him] in the interesting experiment of making’ a film. Immediately the film sets up the pretence of a live interaction between audience and character, in a manner still regularly used by children’s TV programming, today. This device serves to enhance the audience’s emotional investment in what is shown, making them feel complicit even though they do not truly have any agency over it.

The director’s journey to make a film is the framing device for the whole short. He states that the subject is ‘one dear to every woman’s heart: her hair’, thus reaffirming Amami’s central brand message that its shampoo should be used by all women, as all women cared about their hair. However, the film’s subsequent visualisation of ‘every woman’ is, unsurprisingly, rather limited.

The film proceeds to show the audience British women in different environments. In the first section of the film, the director finds a woman going for a walk in the countryside (‘a girl who symbolises the British love of the open air to perfection’); a young woman working in a London office (she ‘symbolises the feminine touch in commerce’); a society girl (‘equally important’ to the working woman); and a young woman swimming in a swimming pool (‘the girl who most truly represents sport’). Throughout these scenes the director comments about the women’s excellent hair, and is reassured that no matter what activity, Amami Shampoo and Wave sets can ensure women’s hair stays in tip-top shape.

In the scenes concerning the first, second and fourth woman, the director is physically present in their environment with his hand-held camera, and we can hear his voice in voice-over as if originating behind the camera. This format wavers slightly when we are introduced to the society girl, as she is getting ready for a party in her boudoir. Although the voice-over makes it clear the director is observing her, he is not physically shown to be in the same room as her, giving the scene a more voyeuristic feel. Crowning Glory then changes track and shows the party this society girl is attending as a more straight-forward fiction film sequence. The voice-over disappears and partygoers talk amongst themselves. The film director, however, is also present at the party and spends a few minutes making gags about the party’s other attendees.

Although the film sets these four examples up as representing a wide range of women, they are of course in truth a very narrow representation of femininity. All four women are young, slender, white, apparently unmarried and childless, and middle-class as a minimum. The cinema audiences to which this film was shown was potentially much more diverse. The assertion at the start of the film that ‘every woman’ cares about her hair, combined with the clear visual messaging that only women of a specific type represent ‘the British woman’, likely lead to some female viewers of this advert feeling excluded from the film’s message.

After showing the swimming woman, the film breaks the fourth wall even more decisively. The director is shown in close-up, addressing the camera directly. He tells the viewer: ‘You are going to provide the climax to this picture’; the shot changes to a circular frame to signify the view through a camera lens. Inside the circle, a cinema audience is visible. A woman gets up from her seat and starts walking up the aisle, closer and closer to the camera until she ‘smashes’ it, which is signified by a cartoon scene transition.

In the subsequent shot we see the woman, later identified as Betty, arrive home and talk to a female friend. The very first shot of this sequence is framed as if it is on a theatre stage, adding a further layer of complexity to the advert’s interlocking layers of fiction. Betty’s friend berates Betty for not looking after her hair properly, and decides that a wash with Amami shampoo is in order to lift both Betty’s hair and spirits. The friend stresses that the shampoo should be used ‘every Friday night’ in keeping with the Amami brand.

Looking after your hair is explicitly stated to be as the key to keep a man’s interest and affections. The shampoo is followed by a wave set treatment which is so successful, Betty barely recognises herself. Her ever-attentive friend reminds her to use the wave set every night, and the shampoo every Friday night. The film concludes with Betty not only successfully winning the affections of Dick, her suitor, but also with her friend’s suitor commenting on how well Betty is looking. The closing shot, naturally, has the shampoo’s slogan emblazoned across the screen.

Amami was producing its setting lotion until 2010 but in its later years it was mainly used by women with a particular interest in vintage hair styling. During the interwar period, however, it was one of the most well-known hair products in Britain. Whilst its advertising film was formally innovative, its messaging was predictably narrow and patriarchal. Crowning Glory is a good example of a popular text that demonstrates pervasive cultural ideas in interwar Britain.

Watch Crowning Glory on BFI Player (UK only).

[1] JH Hutchison, The Complete Kinemanager, (London: Kinematograph Publications, 1937), p. 49

George Formby

George Formby

George Formby (1904-1961) was one of the top-grossing and most popular British film stars of the late 1930s, both in Britain and abroad. Like many other British film stars of the period, he started out as a variety stage performer; he also had a prolific music output. Born in Wigan, Formby’s trademark features were his strong Lancashire accent, his ukulele, and a consistent presentation as an honest, simple, hapless man finding his way through a complicated world.

Formby entertaining the troops in France in 1940. By War Office official photographer Puttnam L A (Lt) – Public Domain photograph

Formby started his career on the regional stage in 1921 and made his West End debut at the Alhambra in 1924.[1] As a variety performer, he would sing songs and perform short skits, usually on a bill with other acts. He recorded many of his stage songs as records; he put out a total of 189 songs during his lifetime.[2] Many of his most famous songs contain liberal sexual innuendo; film historian Jeffrey Richards has pointed out that sex was ‘a subject of fundamental importance which was not allowed to surface (…) in popular culture’ during the 1930s.[3]

Richards builds on connections initially drawn by George Orwell, between working class culture, seaside postcards, music hall, and sex. For example, Formby songs like ‘Delivering the Morning Milk’ and ‘In My Little Snapshot Album’ are narrative songs that could be part of a music hall show; the lyrics of both are brimming with sexual innuendo and references to voyeurism. Songs like this were a key part of Formby’s brand, but when he moved into film production, he had to balance them with the conventions and expectations of a wider audience.

Formby and his wife Beryl, who had been a stage performer in her own right prior to their marriage, decided to dip their toes into the world of cinema in 1934. The resulting film, Boots! Boots! and its successor in 1935, Off the Dole, were low-budget productions which proved successful in the north of England.[4] On the back of that success, Basil Dean at Associated Talking Pictures offered Formby a contract for eleven films at his studio in Ealing.[5]

It is at this point that Formby’s explicit northern brand, so heavily dependent on saucy jokes and working-class culture, needed to be made palatable for a wider audience. Like that other Lancashire star whose popularity had preceded Formby’s – Gracie Fields – the film producers at ATP had to find a way to make Formby appealing to those in London and the Home Counties, who represented a large slice of the domestic cinema market, whilst not alienating his original fanbase.

That the innuendo-heavy content of Formby’s songs was not a comfortable fit for the protectors of good taste is evidenced by the fact that John Reith, the original BBC director-general, banned ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ from being broadcast. This song does, however, appear in Keep Your Seats, Please!, the second film Formby made with ATP, in 1936. As Jeffrey Richards has argued, in the films, ‘the songs, however cheeky, were contained in and by stories whose attitudes to life and work were irreproachable, thus limiting the extent of the rebellion the songs embodied.’[6] As the overall narrative of the film was conventional, it could give occasional space to a daring song without this proving too disruptive.

In the films Formby made for ATP during the second half of the 1930s, he inevitably plays a young, ambitious man who endures a series of adventures and mishaps, but who in the end achieves his goal and gets the girl in the process. Except for Formby’s own instantly recognisable and consistent persona, the films’ plots are generic. Each contains some musical numbers which do not necessarily gel with the narrative; both Formby himself and Michael Balcon (who was head of ATP from 1938) in hindsight agreed that the films would have been stronger, narratively, without the songs, but that they needed to be included to attract Formby’s original fanbase.[7]

None of the films Formby made with ATP are set in the north; most of them are set in a generic urban environment that could be deduced to be London (such as Keep Your Seats, Please!, Feather Your Nest and I See Ice!, made in 1936, 1937 and 1938 respectively). The associations with the working classes were also toned down, with Formby increasingly playing characters that had skilled professions.[8]

The Formby films of the 1930s, then, represent an awkward clash of class cultures. He owed his popularity to his clear northern identity, and his ability to build on working-class cultural traditions such as music hall and seaside entertainments. Formby was careful to maintain this persona, which included keeping the same appearance and the same catchphrases throughout his career. On the other hand, once he was contracted by a London-based, national film studio, his appeal had to be widened without alienating his original audience. This tension even played out in Formby’s personal life; he and Beryl moved to London in 1936 but he continued to regularly visit Lancashire on the weekends.[9]

The films promote Formby in a way that would allow southern and middle-class audiences to make sense of him; in most of them he is a plucky and enterprising young man who manages to overcome obstacles. The fragmented nature of the music hall performance is replaced with a cohesive, 90-minute narrative arc. However, as noted above, the musical interludes still disrupt this narrative and provide a window on the decidedly more recalcitrant potential of popular comedy. In this way, Formby’s film output emblematises the social tensions of interwar Britain, where social upheaval changed class dynamics. Formby was able to provide working-class audiences with a hero they could identify with, but only at the cost of significantly toning down the more impertinent aspects of his output.

George Formby’s films are widely available on DVD; seven of his ATP films are available in Optimum Home Entertainment’s ‘George Formby Collection’. Seven of his films made in the 1940s are available in the ‘George Formby Film Collection’ DVD boxset distributed by Sony. His music is even more easily accessible, for example on the 3 CD ‘The Absolutely Essential Collection – George Formby’ produced by Big 3.

[1] John Fisher, George Formby (London: The Woburn Press, 1975), p. 16

[2] Ibid., p. 23

[3] Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: IB Tauris, 2010), p. 193

[4] David Bret, George Formby: A Troubled Genius (London: Robson Books, 1999), p. 40

[5] Fisher, George Formby, p. 49

[6] Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, p. 196

[7] Alan Rendall and Ray Seaton, George Formby, (London: WH Allen, 1974), pp. 79-80

[8] Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, p. 199

[9] Bret, George Formby, p. 56

1927: More Women Die Young

1927: More Women Die Young

On 22 September 1927 the Daily Mail printed the following article on page 9 of the London edition:

More Women Die Young

Especially When Single

Healthy Married Life

A remarkable fact revealed in a report by the
Government actuary, Sir Alfred W. Watson, on the
expectation of life as shown by statistics, is that the
death rate is increasing for single women between 18 and 27.[i]

The article goes on to note that life expectancy for both men and women has gone up; that both sexes between the ages of 30 and 60 are showing considerably increased levels of ‘vitality’; and that married women between the ages of 18 and 27 are ‘healthier than ever’.

Despite this apparent abundance of good news, the article’s main concern is that for the subset of single women between 18 and 27, a ‘deterioration’ in life expectancy is observed. The article does not only note this trend, but also presents an expert opinion as to what may be the cause of this.

The article’s final paragraph quotes Dr Ethel Browning, an accomplished scientist who was in the process of writing a book on common illnesses and how to prevent them.[ii] Browning is quoted in the Daily Mail as follows:

Probably the increased rates of mortality among
young unmarried women are due to the fact that
so many more of them are now doing really hard work
and closely confined in offices. At night, instead of getting
fresh air, they go to dances or spend their time in cinemas,
with a continuation of the same evil tendencies.[iii]

On the face of it, this article is unremarkable. The article was a one-off, not part of a special series or campaign. It was wedged in on the page between an article about a man who was wrongfully convicted of being drunk and disorderly; and a report on a deadly fire in a school in Winnipeg, Canada. Page 9 of the Daily Mail was reserved for general news items which were not the lead stories of the day. Yet the article is based on a number of tacit underlying assumptions which are highly political. A close reading of a seemingly throwaway article such as this, can demonstrate the agenda of national popular newspapers in the interwar period.

The article makes it clear that the part of the survey that readers should be most interested in is that young, unmarried women appear statistically more likely to die at a younger age, than in previous decades. This implies that the death of a young, unmarried woman deserves more attention and concern than the death of other members of society. The article’s headline explicitly ties marriage to health, underscoring the desirability for women to follow this conventional route.

The report does not actually specify by how much the life expectancy of young single women has declined; it merely states that this is the only group for which a decline has been identified. At the end of the article, Dr Browning is addressed by her title, but no additional information is given about her credentials or area of expertise.[iv] Her title provides her with sufficient authority that her subsequent argument about the detrimental effects of office work, dancing and cinema-going to women’s health are presented as fact. The choice to quote a female scientist sets up a dynamic between a (presumed) older, learned woman criticising the behaviour of younger, more frivolous women.

The Daily Mail editorial team could have chosen to highlight any of the positive aspects of the statistical survey, such as the increased life expectancy for boys and girls. Instead, the article taps into concerns about young women’s behaviour which were amplified regularly through the pages of the Mail and other newspapers in this period. During 1927 and 1928 concerns about ‘flappers’ were particularly fraught as the Representation of the People Act 1928 extended voting rights to women from the age of 21.[v] Articles such as the one under consideration here, helped to subtly reinforce the narrative that young women were irresponsible in their lifestyle choices.

Dr Browning’s comments about office work potentially contributing to earlier deaths for women can be interpreted as a rejection of women’s entrance into the workplace. One could reason that if women were not working in ‘closely confined’ offices but instead spent their time home-making (as they would do when they were married) then women would be healthier. The second part of the quote focuses on leisure activities which, it is implied, women participate in through choice – as they could instead choose to ‘get fresh air’. The supposed ill health of the women therefore becomes their own responsibility; if they chose to have healthier leisure pursuits when single, and endeavoured to get married as soon as possible, they would be healthier and live longer.

This short analysis demonstrates how, through day-to-day reporting, popular newspapers such as the Daily Mail promoted conservative values and stoked concerns that social change was having detrimental effects, in this case implying that fertile young women were dying. Although an article such as this may not seem political, its structure, its language and its cavalier approach providing evidence for statements all work together to reinforce ‘common-sense’ assumptions to its readers. When replicated across hundreds of articles in the daily popular press, these tacit assumptions went a long way to influence how newspaper readers thought about the world around them.

[i] ‘More Women Die Young’, Daily Mail, 22 September 1927, p. 9

[ii] Bartrip, P. W. J. “Browning [née Chadwick], Ethel (1891–1969), toxicologist and factory inspector.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 19 Dec. 2020. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-57854

[iii] ‘More Women Die Young’, Daily Mail, 22 September 1927, p. 9

[iv] Ether Browning is primarily remembered as an industrial toxicologist.

[v] Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 16

Friday the Thirteenth (1933)

Long before the seemingly endless horror franchise of the same name, Gainsborough Pictures made Friday the Thirteenth (1933). This comedy/drama directed by Victor Saville centres on the passengers of a London bus on the eponymous unlucky day. Due to a freakish bad weather event, the bus crashes. We find out that two of the passengers are killed in the crash; which ones pass away is not revealed until the end of the film. First, the film goes back in time and shows the activities of each of the passengers in the day leading up to the crash.

Friday the Thirteenth was one of Saville’s many films for Gainsborough, and one of six in which he directed Jessie Matthews. She appears in this film alongside her then-husband Sonnie Hale; the cast also includes Ralph Richardson, Robertson Hare, Emlyn Williams, Edmund Gwenn and Mary Jerrold.

The film is one of several produced in interwar Britain that foregrounds modern culture’s ability to bring people of all walks of life together. Public transport in London, particularly Underground trains and buses, fostered social mixing. Long-distance railway trains at the time operated three different ticket prices, which in turn ensured that people of different social strata sat in separate carriages. Tubes and buses, on the other hand, operated a flat fare and there were no separate seating arrangements.

According to transport historian Christian Wolmar, during the 1930s London’s public transport network “was probably most crucial as a means of transport to the widest range of social classes”.[1] This was the brief period in which the public transport network had expanded to cover the city and its suburbs; and private car ownership was not yet commonplace, particularly not for travel in the city centre.[2] For almost everyone in London, using public transport was one of the easiest, quickest and cheapest ways to get around.

The characters on the bus in Friday the Thirteenth are a careful mix of familiar stereotypes. There is the aspiring showgirl; the put-upon husband; the East-End crook; the well-to-do City trader; the clerk struggling to make ends meet; the devious blackmailer; and of course the street-wise bus driver and conductor. As we are introduced to these characters throughout the film, we see that each one of them has their problems. Despite their differences, they all end up travelling alongside one another, and get caught up in the same accident. No matter how wealthy or poor, or successful or not, these characters are, the film highlights how the city brings them all together.

A similar trope appears in the 1928 film Underground, directed by Anthony Asquith. That film’s opening title states about the London Tube:

The “Underground” of the Great Metropolis of the British
Empire, with its teeming multitudes of ‘all sorts and
conditions of men’, contributes its share of light and shade,
romance and tragedy and all those things that go to make
up what we call ‘life’.

Both films purport to show a ‘slice of life’; normal people going about their business. For most Londoners in the interwar period, using public transport would have been a very common experience. The city’s suburban expansion (in the 1930s in particular) meant that many people lived so far away from the city’s centre that public transport was imperative to get to their place of work as well as to central places of entertainment such as West End theatres and cinemas. Audiences could recognise the characters and situations the films presented.

It was an appealing message that public transport was a great leveller, and that the modern urban experience eroded class differences and strengthened commonality of experience. Cinema itself, alongside other emergent forms of mass-communication, provided a common cultural ‘language’ for all Britons during the interwar period.[3] For the working- and middle-class members of the audience it was no doubt reassuring to be reminded that wealth and success do not make one immune from being potentially caught up in a deadly bus crash.

However, Friday the Thirteenth deviates from its central tenet that all men (and women) are fundamentally equal, in its resolution. At the end of the film it is revealed which two passengers did not survive the crash. One is the struggling clerk, who was just about to go home and surprise his unhappy wife with tickets to a dream holiday. The other is the blackmailer who was carrying a cheque written by his latest victim; his death releases his target from a lifetime of extortion. All the other characters are shown to have learnt their lesson from the crash; they make amends with their partners or revisit the bad decisions they were about to make.

The two victims of the crash clearly represent the two ends of the scale. The death of the blackmailer not only helps his victim, but also society as a whole: a police officer informs the erstwhile victim that the police had been trying to pin down the blackmailer for a while. The message is clearly that many future crimes are now prevented. The death of the clerk, on the other hand, appears designed to elicit nothing but sympathy from the audience. Whereas most of the other characters were making morally questionable choices (selling stolen goods, cheating on their spouses) the clerk is presented as faithful to his wife and hardworking.

It is in this resolution, then, that Friday the Thirteenth moves away from its apparent principle of demonstrating equality between people, and instead reminds the viewer that death and fate are not always ‘fair’. The viewer is asked to reflect on whether the surviving characters deserve to live. It is precisely the assumption that some people are more deserving than others that drives the narrative tension in Friday the Thirteenth; and it is an assumption that the film ultimately encourages rather than dispels.

Friday the Thirteenth is available on the Internet Archive. Please note the film contains the mention of a racial slur by one of the characters.

[1] Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was built and how it changed the city forever (London: Atlantic, 2005), p. 276

[2] Michael John Law, “‘The car indispensable’: the hidden influence of the car in inter-war suburban London”, in Journal of Historical Geography, 38 (2012), 424-433 (p. 424-425)

[3] D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 59-66