Tag: Theatre

Break the News (1938)

Break the News is a British film of the end of the interwar period that displays some of the ambition of the film industry at that time. The film is a remake of a 1936 French film called Le Mort en Fuite (Death on the Run). Break the News was directed by Frenchman René Clair who cast his compatriot Maurice Chevalier in one of the lead roles. The other male lead was played by Jack Buchanan, a British actor who enjoyed fame both on stage and on film. The main female role was fulfilled by June Knight, a Hollywood starlet who had come over to Europe. Buchanan also produced the film under his short-lived production vehicle Jack Buchanan Productions.

Although Clair is mostly remembered for his post-war films, he started directing in France in the mid-1920s. Break the News was his second picture in the UK, after he directed Robert Donat in the supernatural comedy The Ghost Goes West in 1936. The casting of Break the News demonstrates the high aspirations Buchanan and Clair had for the film. Buchanan had considerable star power in interwar Britain, and Chevalier was a recognised Hollywood star.[1]

The film’s plot is as internationally mobile as its stars. The action starts on the West End, where Teddy and François, played by Buchanan and Chevalier, are in the chorus of a musical comedy show. The show’s lead star is Grace Gatwick, played by Knight. Teddy and François long to have the same level of fame as Grace, so they come up with a cunning plan. After staging a face argument in their lodgings, they make it appear that François has killed Teddy, and make sure that he conspicuously tries to dump the ‘body’ in the Thames. Teddy goes off to the south of France to enjoy a holiday; the plan is that the ‘murder’ will generate a lot of newspaper publicity; François will get arrested and Teddy will dramatically return from France during the trial to ensure François gets acquitted. Both men will get famous and then they will be able to put on their own stage production.

Unfortunately, and obviously, the plan goes awry. Firstly, the anticipated media storm after the ‘murder’ does not materialise, so whilst François eventually gets arrested, the men do not get famous. Secondly, whilst in France Teddy is mistaken for a revolutionary leader of a (fictional) Balkan country, and gets kidnapped and taken back to this Ruritania. He only very narrowly manages to get out and return to Britain just in time before François is executed. This being a musical comedy, of course all is well at the end, and with the help of Grace the men do get their names in lights on the theatre façade.

The plot of Break the News, and indeed the film’s title, place great importance on the operation of the written press. The newspapers are presented as the only vehicle that can give Teddy and François the fame they long for. Fame is not dependent on talent on stage, but rather on who is able to get and keep the attention of the journalists. Grace’s character functions to demonstrate this; early on in the film she manages to create a media storm by reporting that her little dog has gone missing; and then another one when the dog is found. Once the story breaks of a ‘murder’ within her show’s production, she makes sure to put herself in front of journalists and spin the story in a way that puts herself at the centre of it.

Teddy and François also assume that a murder case will most definitely hit the front pages. Much of the comedy in the first part of the film is derived from the way the men stage the ‘murder’, starting with a phoney argument on stage in front of the whole company; moving on to a loud argument in their lodging; and finishing with François taking a black cab to Limehouse to drop a heavy, corpse-shaped parcel in the river. But what the men do not take into account is that the press are not interested in murder per se. Grace is able to generate publicity on anything because the press consider her to be interesting. François and Teddy are never interesting to journalists, no matter what they do. Whereas the men assume that the press can make someone famous, they find that in order for the press to pay attention to you, you must already be interesting or relevant yourself.

The power of the newspaper press is underscored through the implicit assumption that if the press were to write about the murder story, then Teddy and François would become instantly famous. As is often the case in interwar films, ‘the press’ is treated as a homogenous entity, and it is taken for granted that a story is either covered by all papers, or by none. Break the News shows journalists to be operating in a pack, indistinguishable from one another as they all try to get a quote from Grace. Once a story is covered, the next assumption is that the newspapers’ reach is such that the details of the story would become generally known.

The comedy of Break the News relies in a large part on the audience understanding and accepting these beliefs about how the written press operates. It is funny that the murder gets no attention from the papers, because, like Teddy and François, we assume that it would attract column inches. Whilst Break the News pokes fun at these assumptions, the jokes only work because we share the same underlying beliefs that the film’s plot is built on. In that way, Break the News gives insight in the position of the written press in interwar British society.

[1] Andrew Spicer, ‘Jack Buchanan and British Musical Comedy of the 1930s’ in Ian Concrich and Estella Trincknell (eds), Film’s Musical Moments (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006)

A Cup of Kindness (1934)

A Cup of Kindness (1934)

Following the blog a few weeks ago about British comedy actor Ralph Lynn, today we will look in more detail at one of the Aldwych film comedies, A Cup of Kindness (1934). This film was based on a stage production which was first performed in 1929. The film uses the location of a fictional London suburb to make fun of class aspirations in interwar Britain.

Advert for A Cup of Kindness at the New Gallery Kinema in Regent Street, Daily Sketch, 27 July 1934

A Cup of Kindness is the story of two neighbouring families, the Tutts and the Ramsbottoms. The parents of both families despise one another, but the children, Betty Ramsbottom and Charlie Tutt, are secretly dating and intending to marry. Once they reveal their relationship to their parents, hostilities between the families intensify. Charlie, played by Lynn in his characteristic bumbling way, starts to doubt whether it is such a good idea for him and Betty to marry. After the customary argument between the lovers, they are reconciled at the end of the film, and a truce of sorts develops between both sets of parents.

Although A Cup of Kindness presents itself as a timeless story,[i] both in its opening title and through an odd dream sequence in the second half of the film, where we see the prehistoric Tutt and Ramsbottom ancestors fighting with one another in front of their respective caves, its setting in a suburban development is very specific to the interwar period.

As noted previously on this blog, London’s suburbs expanded rapidly during the interwar period, and along with this stereotypes developed about the aspiring middle classes who lived in the suburbs. A Cup of Kindness, for all its broad comedy, adds further nuance to this stereotype through the subtle signifiers of class difference evident in the Tutts and Ramsbottoms. The modern viewer is required to pay close attention to these signs in order to decode them, but for interwar audiences they were likely much more familiar and easier to interpret.

The film opens with Mr Ramsbottom (Robertson Hare) walking from the train station to his house in the evening. Just before he reaches the family home, he passes the Tutt residence, where Mr Tutt (Tom Walls) is standing outside in the garden. The first signifier of difference is in the men’s dress: Ramsbottom is wearing a regular suit and a bowler hat; Tutt is wearing evening dress. Ramsbottom has clearly come from some sort of clerical job; his dress is the functional uniform of the white-collar worker. Tutt, on the other hand, is dressed for dinner; a custom usually observed by the upper classes. As he is already at home and had time to change, we can infer that he does not need to head the hours of the office worker.

The families’ houses, too, imply difference. The Tutt family home is detached, with a driveway and a portico. The Ramsbottom house on the other hand is semi-detached only, overall smaller in size and with a smaller garden. As the film continues, we find that the Ramsbottoms also have their slightly senile uncle Nicholas living upstairs; and they keep a day-servant as well as a day nurse for Nicholas. The Tutts, on the other hand, have no staff. They have, however, managed to send their son Stanley to Oxford, and are keeping their son Charlie despite him being apparently unable to hold down a job.

The outward signifiers then appear to show that Mr and Mrs Tutt are wealthier and of higher social standing than Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom. There is a line that the latter utters, however, that gives a clue as to what really matters in the social pecking order of suburbia, and it’s not money. During a particularly heated exchange, Mrs Ramsbottom snaps that Mrs Tutt “once was a barmaid.” The implications are clear. Not only are the Tutts not ‘really’ upper class, Mrs Tutt is not even respectably middle class. That one line by Mrs Ramsbottom reveals that in her opinion, its breeding rather than money that determines who comes out on top in the social pecking order.

Yet despite their apparently humble origins, Mr and Mrs Tutt are able to present a wealthy front in the suburban street, by spending their money on just the things that give the impression of riches. This reflects contemporary anxiety about the suburbs, which gave many more people who had previously been unable to enter the housing market, the opportunity to own their own home. This democratisation also facilitated the mixing of people who would previously not have been in each other’s orbit. People moved to the suburbs from all over London and you could end up living next to people were from slightly different socio-economic backgrounds than yourself.

The relationship between Charlie and Betty is an example of this: both sets of parents think that their child can do ‘better’: the Ramsbottoms think Betty should pursue someone more respectable and dependable than Charlie, and the Tutts think Charlie is lowering himself by settling for Betty. Their proximity in the suburban neighbourhood has allowed this pair to get to know one another despite their different family backgrounds. Whereas inner-city areas such as the East End developed an increasingly cohesive common identity between the wars,[ii] the suburbs’ lack of history or character encouraged more prominent attention to the individual or familial identity as opposed to the collective one. A Cup of Kindness demonstrates this tendency towards individual expression through consumer goods and social cues as timeless, when it is in fact specifically rooted in the historical period in which the story was written.

[i] Indeed its writer, Ben Travers, referred to it as ‘Romeo and Juliet (…) of the suburbs’; Ben Travers, A-Sitting on a Gate (London: WH Allen, 1972), p. 108

[ii] Benjamin J Lammers, ‘The Birth of the East Ender: Neighborhood and Local Identity in Interwar East London’, Journal of Social History , Winter, 2005, Vol. 39, No. 2, Kith and Kin: Interpersonal Relationships and Cultural Practices (Winter, 2005), pp. 331-344

Ralph Lynn

Ralph Lynn was born in 1882 in Salford and became one of the most popular comic actors in interwar Britain. Together with Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn formed the heart of a comedy ensemble that put on 10 plays and adapted 9 of those into films. The plays were put on in the Aldwych theatre, which Walls co-owned. During the interwar period, the term ‘Aldwych farce’ signified a very specific type of comedy production.

A version of Lynn’s performances in these shows are still available to us through his film work, which in addition to the nine adaptations of stage productions also include another eight films with Walls, not based on an existing stage production. These seventeen films were all made in the period 1930-1937, during which Lynn was also still acting on stage productions. After this enormously productive period Lynn mostly turned his back on film work, although he continued to appear on the London stage until 1958.[1]

The celebrity power that ‘Lynn and Walls’ had during the interwar period is still evident, for example in A Night Like This (1932), where the song that plays over the opening credits repeatedly reminds the audience “It’s Lynn and Walls.” There is also a newsreel of Ralph Lynn crowning the winner of an international beauty contest in 1935. This shows he was well-known enough to be asked to perform such minor public duties; the clip also gives a flavour of his comic talents:

This British Pathé newsreel of 1927, which shows clips from the stage production of Thark at the Aldwych, quickly dispenses with character names and refers to the characters as “Tom and Ralph”. Coincidentally, the clip also demonstrates why the Aldwych crew waited until 1930, when sound film started to become available, before they made their first film: the plays’ reliance on witty dialogue does not translate to silent film.

Modern audiences, then, can best experience Lynn as an actor through the film work he produced in interwar London. His character is invariably the ‘silly ass’, a foppish, hapless man who never tries to get into problems, but always ends up there. Ben Travers, the Aldwych’s regular script writer, remembers Lynn saying of one of his characters “[he] didn’t try to be funny but just walked rationally and naturally into trouble.”[2]

In A Night Like This (1932) for example, Lynn plays the upper-class, dim Clifford Tope, who decides to visit a nightclub in London. On the same evening, undercover police officer Michael Mahoney, played by Tom Walls, is undertaking an observation of the club because he suspects that the (legal) nightclub is a front for an illegal gambling club. Once inside, Tope gets inadvertently caught up in Mahoney’s investigation, primarily by physically getting in his way. In his apparent incompetence and naivete, Tope keeps unintentionally assisting Mahoney. In the end, of course, the men manage to bust the illegal gambling operation that is running upstairs. Mahoney is rewarded with praise from his superior officer; Tope has made an impression on nightclub dancer Cora (Winnifred Shotter).  

The stage production of A Night Like This, which had been put on in 1930, had benefited from a comfortable budget, which shows in the use of the elaborate nightclub setting. It had even been planned to use a real horse on stage.[3] The film version confidently uses the attractive nightclub setting and uses the cinematic medium to its advantage, for example through the insertion of lengthy sequences of Cora’s dance performances (which was a common trope in interwar films set in nightclubs) and in its focus on action over dialogue.

In other films that were adapted from stage plays, the action is more static and much of the enjoyment derives from the quick dialogue. Take for example this clip from Dirty Work (1934) which had been performed at the Aldwych Theatre in 1932:

Here, Jimmy Milligan (played by Lynn, on the right) and Nettle (played by Gordon Harker, on the left) are trying to convince Clement Peck (Robertson Hare) to don a disguise, in order to stage a fake burglary in the jewellery shop in which Milligan and Peck work. This short description adequately captures the absurdity of the plot, which, like many of the Aldwych farces, hinges on deception, disguise, and misunderstanding.

The pleasure of these films is not in their intricate narratives, well-developed characters or their ability to transport audiences to fantasy worlds. Instead, they provide a constant stream of witty gags, mix-ups and farcical situations right up until the happy resolution of the narrative. Ralph Lynn’s talents were strongly geared towards improvised comedy and wordplay, and in the Aldwych farces he had a perfect medium to display his craft. However, the historic and cultural specificity of comedy, as well as its perceived lower cultural value, has meant that the films have been relegated to relative obscurity. Because Lynn did not work in any other genre, he, too, has been largely forgotten; but his comic instinct and timing still work for twenty-first century audiences.

Most of the Aldwych farces are available on DVD via Network On Air.

[1] Morley, S.  (2020, November 12), ‘Lynn, Ralph Clifford (1882–1962), actor’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37702

[2] Ben Travers, A-Sitting on a Gate (London: WH Allen, 1978), p. 90

[3] Ibid., p. 110

Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion technically originated prior to the Great War, but it continued to appear on the West End throughout the interwar period. Indeed, its impact has lasted throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Shaw’s play continues to be regularly performed in London. The various film adaptations have made the story familiar to generations: the 1964 version My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn is probably the best-known, but more recent films such as She’s All That (1999) and The Duff (2015) have used the same source material to transplant the story into a modern setting.

The story of Pygmalion, in turn, is based on the Greek myth about a sculptor of the same name, who makes a sculpture of a woman so beautiful that he falls in love with it. Aphrodite, goddess of love, is moved by Pygmalion’s devotion and decides to turn the statue into a real woman, so they can live happily ever after.

Shaw’s play dispenses with the mythical elements. In his story, Professor Higgins who has an interest in phonetics, meets the cockney flower girl Eliza. Higgins places a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, that he (Higgins) can change Eliza’s speech so thoroughly that he will be able to introduce her into high society as a duchess. Higgins and Eliza embark on a rigorous training regime, during the course of which affection develops between them. The original play does not end with Higgins and Eliza in a romantic relationship – however, subsequent productions and film adaptations have made changes to increase the story’s appeal.

Pygmalion shows the international nature of British cultural life in this period. Shaw himself was Irish; although Ireland was still part of Britain when the play debuted, he was removed from the core of the Empire. Pygmalion’s first production was in Vienna in 1912; it was also performed in the US before it reached the West End. Consequently, there was a lot of ‘buzz’ around the play when it arrived in His Majesty’s Theatre in 1914. Newspapers covered the first performance extensively with text and pictures, as the play had already built up a reputation. Of particular interest to the tabloids was the line ‘Not bloody likely’ which is uttered by Eliza during the play. That a female actor would say the word ‘bloody’ on stage was considered extremely transgressive; the papers were not even willing to print the word but rather referred to it as ‘b—-‘.

Despite the ostensibly extremely British setting of the story, which for a substantial part hinges on Eliza’s Cockney slang and the peculiarities of class identities in British society, the production continued to have international appeal. This is also evident from the film adaptions. As the story is so dependent on pronunciation, it would have made little sense to attempt to adapt it as a silent film. However, once sound films became the norm in the 1930s, the first country to adapt Pygmalion for the screen was Germany.

Rather incredibly, the second feature length film version was made in the Netherlands in 1937; it moves the plot to Amsterdam and introduces a romantic ending for Higgins and Eliza. The first Dutch sound film was only made in 1934, years after the first sound films were made in Britain, Germany and the US. That Dutch filmmakers were willing to invest into a production of Pygmalion, which included paying a substantial sum for the rights to the story, indicates that the producers were confident the film would be a hit with the domestic audience.

In 1938 the first British film version of Pygmalion appears; co-directed by Anthony Asquith and actor Leslie Howard, the latter also fulfilling the role of Professor Higgins. Wendy Hiller stars as Eliza. This version introduces some of the elements modern audiences are most likely to be familiar with from subsequent adaptations, for example Eliza’s speech exercises ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ and ‘In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.’ The ‘not bloody likely’ line was also retained, but by 1938 it caused notably less controversy than it had done two decades prior.

The casting of Howard, who was mid-forties at the time, as Professor Higgins, changed the dynamic of the story’s central relationship considerably. In the original productions, Higgins was an older man who was primarily interested in Eliza as a research object. When she emancipates herself throughout the story and asserts her rights as an individual, it takes Higgins by surprise as he has not previously considered her as an equal. Howard, who was a successful film star on both sides of the Atlantic, plays Higgins as an absent-minded but romantic hero, who comes to realise he loves Eliza. Although the ending of the film is somewhat open, it can be interpreted that Eliza ends up choosing Higgins over her (other) love interest, Freddie. Shaw hated Howard’s interpretation of the role; he was insistent that Eliza should not end up marrying Higgins.[1]

However, audiences favoured the ending and it was retained for the musical adaptation of the play, My Fair Lady, which was first produced on Broadway in 1956 and then, as noted above, turned into a successful film in 1964. The original story which promoted female emancipation and independence was turned into a more conventional romantic tale, in which the woman stays with the man who has provided for her rather than making her own way. Pygmalion shows both the changing social norms of interwar Britain which allowed the production to thrive despite (or because of) the female lead uttering a swear word; and the enduring attachment to patriarchal values which over time reduced and removed the story’s more radical ideas.

The 1938 film version of Pygmalion is in the public domain and available to view for free via the Internet Archive.

[1] Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: IB Tauris, 2010), p. 237