Tag: Victor Saville

Jessie Matthews

Jessie Matthews

Jessie Matthews was one of the biggest British screen stars of the 1930s. She achieved success not only in Britain, but also in the US, even though she never made a Hollywood film.[1] Matthews starred in a whopping fourteen films between 1931 and 1938; yet most contemporary articles foreground her private life over her film career. The BFI article linked to above references her ‘generally loveless marriages’; many sources refer to the details surrounding her second marriage to co-star and director Sonnie Hale.

Such interest in Matthew’s romantic life, with its undertones of tragedy and disapproval, undermine her considerable professional success. Matthews was not only an actress, but also a singer and dancer; her films showcase her considerable talent and the hard work she put in to master her craft.

Matthews was a commercial success almost from the start of her film career, but her establishment as a real star originated from the beginning of her collaboration with director Victor Saville. Saville and Matthews first worked together on The Good Companions; followed by Friday the Thirteenth (both 1933); Evergreen (1934); First a Girl (1935); and It’s Love Again (1936).

The Good Companions was based on a J. B. Priestley novel[2]; the text, as Lawrence Napper has argued, seeks to “express ‘modernity’ (…) without a retreat either away from the popular audience or into cultural pessimism.”[3] In other words, it seeks to create a balance between literary intellectualism and popular entertainment. By casting Matthews in a prominent role in the film, Saville picked an actor who herself embodied this duality. Matthews was born in a large, working-class family in Soho but much-commented-on elocution lessons allowed her to shape an upper-middle-class star persona.[4]

After The Good Companions, in which Matthews plays an ambitious actress from a humble background, Saville continued to cast Matthews in similar roles. The seemingly upper-class actress repeatedly played aspiring stage stars from common backgrounds:

  • In Friday the Thirteenth, as related in the post about that film, she’s an aspiring stage star caught in a bus crash.
  • In Evergreen Matthews is the daughter of a famous turn-of-the-century music hall star, who decides to impersonate her mother to achieve fame and success.
  • In First a Girl – an adaptation of the German film Viktor und Viktoria (1933) – she is an aspiring stage star who pretends to be a female impersonator to achieve fame and success.
  • In It’s Love Again she’s an aspiring stage star who pretends to be a socialite to achieve fame and success.

It was not unusual for 1930s actors on either side of the Atlantic to have such a defined star persona and to appear in a number of films along the same formula. In fact, in this respect Matthews had much in common with the other big British female star of the time, Gracie Fields. Although one of Fields’ key characteristics was her strong Northern accent, which was diametrically opposed to Matthew’s ‘plummy’ pronunciation, Fields also starred in a number of films in which she is a performer from a humble background who ends up achieving great success. As a female film viewer the message you received remained the same, regardless of whether you identified more with Matthews or Fields: being a stage performer was a desirable and exciting career through which you could find romantic love.

However, whereas Fields’ films were grounded in a very British, very working-class environment, with a strong emphasis on community, collaboration and staying positive in the face of adversity; Matthews’ films on the other hand presented the viewer with a glamourous and consumerist fantasy.[5] The sets are bright and light, with smooth floors that are perfect for impromptu dance performances. In Evergreen, Matthews’ character and her would-be love interest stay in a modern mansion in which she can showcase the latest luxury homeware whilst waltzing across the rooms.

To the modern viewer, the Matthews/Saville musicals feel akin to Hollywood films of the same period. Although the films are (mostly) set in Britain, they express a cosmopolitan outlook. They contain handsome, worldly men; art deco architecture; cocktails; and trips to the French Riviera. Contemporary audiences were already familiar with this fantasy world through the American films also available at the British box office. Matthews’ films brought that glamour to a British setting, suggesting that the same level of sophistication and modernity was also within reach on this side of the Atlantic. Although intellectual circles in interwar Britain retained a stubborn anti-Americanism, the popular success of Matthews as a film star indicates that the mass audience had no such qualms.

Today, however, Gracie Fields has remained relatively prominent in the public imagination, whereas Matthews is largely forgotten. Fields body of work evokes supposedly fundamental British qualities which appear to reflect the ‘good old days’ of community, common sense and national pride. Matthew’s oeuvre, on the other hand, shows only how much 1930s British culture was also about international cultural exchange and a dissolution of national identity. In the current times, which seem to be a near-constant quest of what it means to be ‘British’, it is Field who provides the more appealing answer to most; but the films of Jessie Matthews show that even a hundred years ago, being British was as much about having an international outlook as it was about celebrating local culture.

Jessie Matthew’s films are available on DVD from Network On Air.

[1] Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: IB Tauris, 2010), p. 207

[2] For more on J.B. Priestley see the post on Laburnum Grove (1933)

[3] Lawrence Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), p. 83

[4] Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, pp. 208-209

[5] Sarah Street, ‘‘Got to Dance my Way to Heaven’: Jessie Matthews, art deco and the British musical of the 1930s’, in Studies in European Cinema vol 2. no. 1 (2005), 19-30

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