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THE JEWEL IN HIS CORONET David
Lancaster For me, one such moment happened on a long ago Saturday afternoon when I was twelve years old and I saw a television screening of a minor Ealing production called Pink String And Sealing Wax (1945). Starring Gordon Jackson and Googie Withers - that bad joke waiting to happen - the story was set in Victorian Brighton and concerned a pub owner's wife who was also a poisoner. What's remained with me, though, isn't the plot but a sensation: of shadows and flickering oil lamps, of a claustrophobia so intense it was like hemp knotted round the throat. I haven't seen the film since, but it's never really left me either. Only recently have I learnt that it's the work of Robert Hamer (1911-1963), the man who co-wrote and directed the much more celebrated black comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949). Hamer has been described, by David Thomson among others, as the great lost hope of British postwar cinema, a star who rose, shone, evaporated and fell during the four short years between 1945 and 1949. His reputation rests on the "Haunted Mirror" sequence in the compendium chiller Dead Of Night (1945); Pink String (1945); It Always Rains On Sunday (1947, another Googie vehicle about an East End convict on the run); The Spider And The Fly (1949, a police/spy thriller set in pre-World War One France and starring Eric Portman) and, finally, triumphantly, Kind Hearts. Unfortunately the later films failed to fulfill the early promise and, as one book rather primly puts it, "he fought and lost a long battle with alcoholism." Still, it was a brave battle in more ways than one. For Hamer didn't just make a masterpiece; he made it by discreetly swimming against the current of the British film industry of his time and, more specifically, against the spirit of Ealing Studios, Michael Balcon's amalgam of creative hothouse and spartan public school which was also the embodiment of a peculiarly English state of mind. Charles Barr has written brilliantly about how Kind Hearts And Coronets doesn't really exist within the company's tradition at all. Watching it again recently, I was struck, too, by what you might call the Aesthete versus Hearty debate which still rumbles away under British life. The mainstream Ealing comedy represented by The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1953) or Hue And Cry (Crichton, 1947) belongs to the hearty English tradition of G.K. Chesterton: beery, effervescent, driven by a firm faith in individuals, communities and the basic common sense of British authority figures. Kind Hearts, on the other hand, is nearer to the aesthete Oscar Wilde (after Reading Gaol, the losing side in this cultural battle). It's all masks and deceptive surfaces, witty ironies slipping and sliding like polar ice caps, its comedy shot through with a profound camp, its mockery of the social conventions sharp and wounding, but never so violent as to undermine the status quo. Above all, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), the dispossessed outsider who rises to a dukedom by knocking off his aristocratic relatives (all played by Alec Guinness), is a man without community, a satin-lined serial killer hot on the trail of his hidden desires. He's also taking a wicked delight in doing it: like The Importance Of Being Earnest, this film makes us a prisoner of its irreverent laughter long before we've cottoned on to the fact that a guerrilla operation is going on. Irreverence and desire, then: not exactly a tendency that postwar Britain would encourage in its films or its film makers. Hamer challenges orthodoxy even further by his audacious use of technique. It's remarkable how much sheer talk goes on in this movie, particularly Louis's extended commentaries, which speak to us with a sceptical urgency, like a voice of doubt tempting us in the one-and-nines. The resulting fusion of words and pictures creates complex patterns; it collapses time, undermines surface meanings. After an hour and a half of this Ealing director, a re-running of Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons reveals a surprising affinity. None of this balancing act lasted, of course: the sclerosis that beset the Fifties industry was just as bad for Hamer as the bottle. Yet what chance had this feline artist in the world of Super-Hearty J. Arthur Rank and his bulldog breed? The director's elasticity of approach and response really belonged elsewhere: in France, say, a country whose language and culture he knew intimately. After 1949, he seems to have taken what he could get. Among the later work, Father Brown (1954, with Guinness again) is a decent try at bringing that oblique detective to the screen; The Long Memory (1952) is a monotone thriller; School For Scoundrels (1960), his last film, could have been done just as well by the Boulting Brothers and, judging by the result on screen, probably was. This drastic falling off isn't a new story; British film is littered with the shards of broken careers. With Hamer, though, the nightmare is compounded by the fact that it's nigh on impossible to relocate the pieces on video or TV. As a result, I'm writing this piece without a knowledge of some of the crucial films of his golden period. This is something more than a crying shame. For what I most responded to when I was twelve was the sense of pain and constriction in the Brighton back rooms of Pink String; it's there in Kind Hearts, too, in Louis's adoration of his mother and in his desire for revenge. It's possible that, in his art, the director wanted to roam round a dangerous emotional territory which the cocktail party inanities of his period preferred to see fenced off. Be that as it may, it's time for a gathering in of the scattered tribes. No doubt some would argue that Robert Hamer is a one hit wonder who's already received his due, but I suspect there's more to him than that lonely jewel in his coronet.
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