Costume Drama. These suggestive words headline the description on the BBC website of the final climactic episode of their 2008 version of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, as though the wearing of period clothes was the most important and interesting thing about it.
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It’s a strange way to categorise drama. After all, the phrase could encompass anything from Nosferatu to Pride and Prejudice and is often deployed colloquially as a pejorative, as if the sight of a pair of knee-breeches or a leg o’mutton sleeve self-evidently makes a film inferior to ‘modern’ films. If it means anything, it’s probably an approximation of the mid-20th century Women’s Picture label, the opposite of the action movie.
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A couple of decades before the BBC took on Dickens’ Little Dorrit, a 1987 version from Sands Films, written and directed by Christine Edzard, famously treated the costuming aspect so reverentially that all three hundred costumes were sewn and embroidered by hand in a labour of love, and possibly of eyestrain, lasting two years and occupying around twenty-five people. One of the most prestigious casts of British actors it would have been possible to assemble in the late 1980s were engaged, including Alec Guiness as William Dorrit, long-term inmate of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, and Derek Jacobi as the diffident anti-hero Arthur Clennam. The story was presented in two parts with a total duration very close to six hours.

The first part, Nobody’s Fault, introduces Amy ‘Little’ Dorrit and the rest of the Dorrit family headed by William Dorrit, as well as Arthur Clennam and the stern recluse Mrs Clennam, who Arthur believes is his mother, and other major characters. This part foregrounds Arthur Clennam’s perspective and covers the main plot developments up to a point where, although old William Dorrit has since encountered good fortune and been freed, Clennam in turn finds himself financially ruined and confined to the Marshalsea Prison.

The second part, Little Dorrit’s Story, brings Amy to the foreground, partially retelling some of the ground covered in part one from her perspective, and bringing the story to its climax and conclusion.  
Critical reception was largely favourable and enthusiastic. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby highly praised the look of the film, the acting, and the casting of Sarah Pickering as Amy but didn’t like the repetitious structure: ‘[T]he movie does a disservice to itself in the cause of a scheme that’s of more interest in theory than in fact. It’s exhausting.’ *

Such flickering reservations about the two-part structure and the excision (in spite of the long running time) of some of Dickens’ key characters were unwittingly fanned into a medium-sized dumpster fire by the socialist historian Raphael Samuel when he published a highly critical essay about the film entitled Docklands Dickens. Among several objections, he compared Edzard’s film unfavourably with David Lean’s 1940s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. These he regarded as embodying exactly the sort of gothic expressionism and optical chiaroscuro that a Dickens adaptation demands and which he found Edzard’s film to lack. For this comparison he was attacked on the extraordinary grounds that Lean was a conservative figure whom no one of the left should be endorsing. Welcome to the future, where binary judgements, cancel culture and the death of nuance have supplanted sensible discourse.

In a later piece addressing film and stage adaptations of Dickens in general, Samuel returns to his misgivings about Sands Films’ Little Dorrit in particular. Although he somewhat revises his rosy recollections of the David Lean films, he repeats his core reservations and recounts that his Docklands Dickens article cost him one friendship of twenty-five years standing and provoked admonishment by the eminent film critic Derek Malcolm as well as outraged letters from a posse of Guardian readers.
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You can’t but feel for Samuel who, in rigorously critically analysing the film so soon after its rapturous reception, was considered as being impertinent towards a whole raft of actual or potential national treasures with Guiness at their head and figures such as Jacobi, Max Wall, Alan Bennett, Joan Greenwood and Miriam Margolyes conspicuous in the roster, along with luminaries such as John Carey, who had furnished a scholarly defence of the film’s rationale in the pressbook, and Lord Snowdon (no stranger to class contradictions) who supplied high quality studio photographs of the main cast in costume which to this day can be purchased as souvenir postcards.

Samuel is so enthused by his case that he perhaps overstates it, and in some matters of fact he is just mistaken. He objects to Amy’s poke bonnet on the grounds that it constantly obscures her features, when in fact it is mainly deployed in exteriors and, far from hiding her features, is judiciously used to focus the gaze on her expression while also serving symbolically as a shell from which she must eventually emerge.

Pointing to the resounding final sentence of the novel that delivers the newly married Amy and Arthur down into the great throng of London’s humanity – ‘the usual uproar’ – Samuel states that Edzard’s film overlooks it, concluding with the signing of the marriage register. In fact, after the wedding tableau there is a two-and-a-half minute montage of shots of a bustling street that is clearly intended to translate Dickens’ final words into cinematic action. It could be argued that what we see falls short of conveying the majesty and scope of the source text and is anyway overshadowed by its non-diegetic function as a background to the end credits, but it is undoubtedly there.

Such early critical misgivings about the trade-offs between structure, character excision and narrative fidelity are echoed by Grahame Smith in his chapter on Edzards’s film in Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (2003). He argues that the structure, although ‘interesting in itself’, ‘ becomes wearisome’ and ‘is not daring enough to be truly revisionist.’

Here, perhaps, is the nub of things. Is this Little Dorrit adaptation trying to have it both ways? Is it a deconstructive feminist retelling for the turbulent Thatcher era of the essential core of Dickens’ labyrinthine plot, or is it a heritage industry COSTUME DRAMA constructed to solicit our admiration that a reproduction set of Sèvres dinner plates was meticulously produced by an in-house pottery in the cause of authenticity? If the former, would this not have been better achieved by paring down the text and character tally even further and making a much more formally radical film of standard duration, perhaps, for example, with ironic touches of anachronism as deployed a year or two later in Derek Jarman’s Edward the Second?

An essay by Sergei Eisenstein, Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today (1944)* analyses some passages from Oliver Twist in meticulous detail to identify Dickens’ style as proto-cinematic — featuring optical elements such as montage and cross cutting, expressionist lighting, and close-up, as well as equivalent techniques of character development. Eisenstein is not concerned here with speculating how film might in turn remediate Dickens, but with demonstrating that film art was nor born fully formed in the wake of the invention of new apparatus but emerged organically from nineteenth century literature and popular culture such as melodrama.

If Eisenstein is right, though, it might be expected that film adaptations of Dickens work would embed, as Raphael Samuel says David Lean does, a broad and dynamic use of the available range of film techniques. Samuel argues that Edzard and her collaborators do not do this, but use a mainly static camera, conventional framing and continuity editing, naturalistic sound effects and a softening of Dickens’ characters, producing a soothing and lyrical effect instead of a disruptive one and draining the story of its terrors.

How might a different approach play out? Take, for example, the scene where Mr Casby, the rack renting capitalist, has his patriarch’s long mane of white hair cut off by his put-upon rent collector Mr Panks.
Mr Casby presents a benevolent face to his impoverished Bleeding Heart Yard tenants who, in a spectacular collective display of false consciousness, have hitherto regarded him as a kindly and benevolent protector whilst fearing his fundamentally decent operative, Mr Panks. Casby is constantly pressing Panks in private to be more ruthless in extracting the rents, deaf to Panks’ entreaties that the tenants have no money. Eventually Panks turns on Casby and, in front of the assembled tenants, knocks off Casby’s identifying signifier of status, his broad brimmed hat, and then cuts off the distinguished silver locks whilst educating the tenants about who their real oppressor is.

On the page, Dickens account of this works tolerably well. Panks has to get a monologue almost three pages long off his chest during which Casby apparently offers no resistance or inclination to escape but appears to be trying to meditate his way out of his difficulty. But transposed into mimetic action and filmed conventionally it feels jarringly odd and interminably long. Casby has nothing to say and is given nothing to do except stand still and make disapproving faces. Apart from the snipping of Panks’s shears it is a verbal event, a naturalistic telling where it could be a surrealist showing.

Imagine instead a treatment that could be more to Raphael Samuel’s liking (or even Eisenstein’s). Panks’s revelatory verbal tirade and the tenant’s reactions are heard on the soundtrack but what we see is a visual montage of extreme close-ups, from Casby’s point of view, of the shears whirling around his head at 4X speed overlaid with slow-motion shots of severed curls of white hair floating majestically to earth and rapid single frame inserts of the changing facial reactions of the astonished tenants. This would dramatize the incident economically while placing the viewer in the conflicted position of simultaneously participating in the deserved unmasking and ritual humiliation of Casby and experiencing his paralysing fear of physical harm from the shears whirling about his face and neck.

There are, though, some striking stylistic coups in Edzard’s film. At the conclusion of part one, when Arthur Clennam has been ill in his prison room for an indeterminate time, he sits sweating and barely conscious in a chair. We are positioned in his point of view as he painfully raises his head and opens his fevered eyes to see a small vase carrying a modest but delightful bunch of fresh country flowers. A heartstring-tugging Verdi melody swells on the soundtrack and we understand that it is Amy who has put the flowers there. The flowers briefly confirm Amy’s presence metonymically until the camera at last finds her face looking down at Arthur, Sarah Pickering’s gentle expression sufficiently ambiguous for any Kuleshovian response you care to fit to it.
When the same incident is repeated in part two, we first follow Amy as she hurries through the streets to the prison. We see her pause to buy the flowers from a street seller, so alerting us to the transactional origin of the flowers that we have already seen fulfilling their romantic function. This time, there is no Verdi to lubricate our sympathies, just the sound of buzzing insects to remind us that the room probably smells absolutely foul.

Advocates for the two film structure would probably contend that the cumulative effect of such ingenious manifestations of Arthur and Amy’s contrasting perspectives (whether received at the level of conscious awareness or below it) inform the viewer’s reception and justify the repetitions, the character and plot excisions, and the overall running time. But here again, if a key aim of the project was to transform Amy Dorrit from her received status of saintly little carer to assertive womanhood, why not just do so in a single less unwieldy film?

Raphael Samuel also objects that there should be more gloomy weather in the film and that when a thunderstorm finally arrives it quickly clears. He must here be referring to the scene in part two where Amy, her aspirational sister Fanny and Fanny’s recently acquired husband, the large and passably decorative but sensationally dim Mr Sparkler, are sitting in an upper room on a stiflingly hot summer evening immediately after the death of William Dorrit. The windows are open and bright evening sun streams in, but thunder is beginning to rumble in the background. Fanny, having not yet succeeded in going ‘into society’, is as usual bored with everything and irritated by her husband.

The approaching thunder and the tension in the room inevitably signal that something very bad is going to occur shortly. And it does. The speculator Mr Merdle, on whose speculations everyone’s solvency depends, calls in at the house. Mr Merdle is Mr Sparkler’s stepfather and therefore Fanny’s father-in-law, but he is ‘not a calling man’ so the visit is unexpected. He seems distracted and has come to borrow a penknife, having mislaid his own. To a nineteenth century reader of the novel this request would not necessarily be ominous, penknives were common objects in daily use to sharpen quill pens. And Mr Merdle does indeed have a letter to write that evening — his suicide note.

Fanny scolds her husband for having nothing to say, and then for saying something, for standing up and then for sitting down. The thunder grows nearer and we hear the downpour begin, continuing as the scene cuts to the room in which William died, where Amy is lovingly packing away his nightshirt. Her brother Edward (‘Tip’) arrives, drunk and agitated, briefly sprawls thoughtlessly on the vacant bed where his father died, then announces the news of the collapse of Merdle’s financial house of cards and Merdle’s suicide using Fanny’s penknife.
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The visual and aural use of weather here, the bright sunshine we see streaming through the window juxtaposed with the thunderstorm we hear coming, but aren’t shown, is subtle and judicious but nonetheless powerful. The scenes are a key pivot point in the film, sowing the seeds of the eventual happy resolution while signalling the imminent crop of incidental catastrophes and underlining the destructive corruption represented by Mr Merdle and, by association, by the ‘society’ which Fanny is so determined to enter.
Raphael Samuel’s objection that the symbolic underpinning of weather conditions should have figured more generally in the film’s narrative is perhaps a reflection that the film’s studio-based visual logic entailed limitations on the range of effects possible within the project’s spatial and budgetary constraints. It’s certainly the case that the opening out of horizons, both geographically and aspirationally, that takes place in the novel when the Dorrits become rich and undertake the Grand Tour of Europe, feels under-communicated in the optical and aural landscape of the film.

With Charles Dickens you are never far away from a haunting. While actual ghosts may not be ubiquitous, spectre-like figures and creaking resonances of past wrongs that require retribution or restitution are the stuff of his fiction. In Little Dorrit these are multiple, emanating around the haunted pocket watch that carries the Hamlet-like injunction issued by Arthur’s long dead father — Do Not Forget. It's the power of this gothic edge of shadows and optical disturbances that Raphael Samuel charges Sands Films with draining from Little Dorrit in favour of sunshine and fixed camera positions.

Dickens’ novels usually contain some secondary characters who carry a frisson of transcendence, some faculty of perception or action that others do not, whether for good or evil. In Little Dorrit we have Maggy, the perpetually ten-year-old holy fool. Maggy is splendidly invoked in the Danish 1925 silent film, Lille Dorrit, where Karen Caspersen’s astonishingly timeless appearance and physical performance seem to cut through the film’s stylistic anachronisms and narrative simplifications.

Another such character is the novel’s Miss Wade, excised entirely in Edzard’s film along with the object of her discomforting manipulation, the ‘dark eyed’ foundling Tattycoram. In the novel, the orderly and contented rural homestead of the benevolent Mr and Mrs Meagles is disrupted by Tattycoram with the unpredictability and fury of a poltergeist. Her very name suggests the reduction to tatters of decorum. The excision of Miss Wade and Tattycoram in Sands Film’s Little Dorrit is not trivial, it impoverishes the richness of the story by removing at a stroke two of the plot’s significant carriers of troubling otherness. John Carey justifies the exclusion of Miss Wade (without mentioning Tattycoram) on the grounds that she ‘belongs to another story’ which Dickens wouldn’t have been permitted to write because of the prurience of his times*. If so, then all the more reason, in 1987 when such constraints had long disappeared, to include or indeed amplify the presence of Miss Wade.

The BBC TV 2008 Little Dorrit subtly acknowledges the aspect of Miss Wade that goes beyond creepiness and into the realm of the uncanny. She appears suddenly and inexplicably in rooms or church porches when required by Tattycoram’s narrative strand – logical explanations as to how or why she got there neither forthcoming nor necessary – and Maxine Peake plays her sotto voce and mostly with an almost somnambulant poker-face, along with the occasional intimation of an imminent smirk, until her final bitter confessional revelations to Arthur.

Carey also believes that Edzard was wise to remove the moustachioed villain Blandois because he has ‘nothing whatsoever to do with the story’ and was anyway a stereotypical villain based on Napoleon III. Blandois only has nothing to do with the story if you have already decided that the story is primarily a love story about Amy and Arthur set in an à-la-carte buffet of satirical sketches, beloved character actors and exquisitely crafted garments and props. On the contrary, Blandois is essential to the unravelling of the central Do Not Forget mystery and the unearthing of the notoriously elaborate Will. The denouement in fact becomes more complicated without Blandois since it becomes necessary to create convolutions involving the remaining characters to replace his initiatives.

Writing about Edzard’s casting of Sarah Pickering as Amy, Carey takes the view that the resulting performance so successfully vivifies the character that for the viewer and reader it becomes inextricable from the source itself. It would be difficult to disagree with this. Given the familiar and prestigious aspect of the rest of the main cast, it must have been essential to cast someone who was unfamiliar to viewers as well as having the essential physical characteristic of littleness. Little Dorrit is little. She’s little because she spent her childhood malnourished in a prison, because she later slaved to support her insufferably self-regarding father and siblings, and because of every social and political ill that Dickens rages against in his work. We should be subliminally reminded of the material causes of her littleness every time we see Amy.
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As well as smallness, Amy must be able to evince quiet resilience, patient tenacity, intuitive wisdom, and eventually sensual desire. Pickering fulfils all this. Now, almost four decades after the creation of the film, we know that she either wasn’t interested in pursuing a further film acting career or for whatever reason was unable to. We might think this regrettable although, viewing the film today, it adds a layer of imaginative credibility that would be weakened if the actor now had a long back catalogue of major roles. It’s almost as though she arrived through a temporal portal straight from Charles Dickens’ dreams and onto our screens to provide an ideal manifestation of Amy Dorrit for the late twentieth century and then, job done, moved on.

The BBC 2008 Andrew Davies adaptation stars Claire Foy as a slightly taller but suitably lean and wholly credible Amy, Matthew Macfadyen as Arthur Clennam, and Tom Courtney as William Dorrit. It was aired as twelve half-hour TV broadcasts bookended by two one-hour episodes — around eight hours total airtime. But BBC programmes are delivered one-minute shorter than their broadcast slot and, subtracting every episode’s titles, credits and the obligatory ‘earlier’ and ‘coming up’ teasers, the actual dramatic diegesis of Little Dorrit probably occupied closer to seven and a quarter hours, so somewhat, though not substantially, longer than Edzard’s six hours but telling the story linearly and with comparatively minor plot-point and character excisions. Fortuitously, but coincidentally, the series was broadcast in the year of the international banking crisis so viewers had no need of internal pointers to the parallels between Mr Murdle’s criminal investment scams and those of his neoliberal descendants, and the casting and pace appear calculated to appeal to a broad contemporary demographic.

A major strength of the BBC film is its portrayal of William Dorrit’s brother, Frederick (James Fleet), a down-at-heel clarinettist in the pit orchestra of a rundown music hall. William’s characteristic predisposition is to haughtily accuse Frederick of dishonouring the family by his shabby demeanour and lack of gentlemanly aspirations, oblivious to the irony that Frederick, however humbly, earns his own living while he, William, a prisoner, exists by shamelessly sponging from his visitors and exploiting his daughter’s devotion. Dickens puts key descriptive passages about Frederick in the mouth of William, whose relationship with his brother is predicated on comparing him unfavourably with himself.

Frederick Dorrit might easily be a thankless role. On a superficial reading of the story, the character could be required to do little for most of the duration except to represent an old man with diminished abilities. Until, that is, his two moments in the spotlight – his sudden tirade, years in the festering, against Amy’s exploitation by her father and her siblings and then his own death from grief at William’s bedside during the night following his demise. Edzard's 1987 version opted not to show Frederick’s death (probably wisely given that notorious up-stager Cyril Cusack was cast in the role) but instead to notionally postpone it and have Amy briefly report it as a bare fact in a later scene.

The BBC adaptation’s foregrounding of Frederick’s kindly disposition, his shrewd introverted watchfulness and the late revival, nurtured by Amy, of his abandoned love of music are important for the denouement’s lucidity. Frederick, although he doesn’t ever know it, is the vector, the unwitting ghost-carrier who connects the Clennam and Dorrit families in the novel’s backstory.

Only at the conclusion do we learn that the embittered recluse Mrs Clennam is not Arthur’s real mother and that this was a young singer who had been nurtured in her career by Frederick Dorrit when he ran a boarding house for musicians and actors many years ago. Arthur’s father, before being forced by his guardian, Gilbert Clennam, to marry the Mrs Clennam of Little Dorrit, passionately loved this nameless singer and Arthur is their child. Mrs Clennam, motivated by spite and vengeance but cloaking her actions in the rhetoric of Christian piety, requisitioned Arthur and brought him up herself while having the singer confined until she died insane. Gilbert Clennam eventually repented the harm he had caused and, unable to compensate the singer directly but aware that Frederick had once supported her, left a complicated bequest that is rightfully Amy’s and which triggers many of the convolutions of the plot. Once you know all this, the experience of re-reading or viewing the story imbues every appearance of Frederick with additional significance and poignancy.

Phiz, Dickens’ illustrator, depicted Frederick as, if anything, even more decrepit than the text suggests, a shrunken shuffling dribbler. In James Fleet’s empathetic portrayal of the worn down but fundamentally kindly and perceptive Frederick Dorrit, however, it’s possible to perceive the attractive and youthful bohemian he once may have been.

Tom Courtney has the vantage of being recognised as a great actor, as distinct from Guiness’s canonical, and burdensome, status as Great Actor. Courtney subtly channels William Dorrit’s tremulous vulnerability and inner hurt, largely masked in the earlier episodes by his venal pomposity and delusional self-regard, but flickering through in his private moments with Amy, such as when, after railing at length against the very thought that his daughter could be engaged in paid work, his expression meekly acknowledges that it is necessary.

The difference between Courtney’s humanitarian portrayal of William Dorrit and Guiness’s more externalised, theatrical performance is exemplified in the death scenes in the two films. Edzard’s staging of William Dorrit’s death is exquisitely framed on a relatively plain set and contains some of the film’s most eloquent close-ups of Sarah Pickering’s Amy. But for all the brilliance and physical subtlety of Guiness’s performance, which is clearly based on a close study of the physiological manifestations of the final moments of life, we are not watching the death of the self-regarding Father of the Marshalsea or of Amy’s dearest father, we are inevitably observing how Sir Alec Guiness does William Dorrit’s death. Maybe this is why Raphael Samuel found that after the scene he remained dry-eyed having been ‘witness to a spectacle rather than engaged by a drama.’

Shortly preceding his death, William Dorrit suffers a serious and very public episode of cognitive confusion, imagining that he is back in the Marshalsea Prison and that those around him are inmates or visitors. This calamity is heralded by small incidents of memory loss and comes to a head at a grand society event hosted by Mrs Merdle, wife of the speculative banker, mounted when she is still at the pinnacle of society before the ruinous financial crash and her husband's search for a penknife.

In Edzard’s film, as in the novel, William Dorrit’s mental crisis takes place at a lavish seated banquet (featuring the aforementioned Sèvres dinner plates). In a brilliant visual and dramatic transposition, Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation has the scene take place at a Venetian masked ball where the sight of a looming, grotesque throng of uncanny figures at the top of a palatial staircase finally untethers the weary old man from reality.
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Believing himself back at the Marshalsea and trying to get up the narrow stairs to his prison room as the evening bell goes to banish visitors, William frets for Amy to help him and then, to the bemusement of the assembled society guests, begins a ghastly, confessional reprise of his habitual begging address to his visitors. Tom Courtney here brilliantly and movingly registers the pitiful struggle of a dementia sufferer who realises that he’s become the object of attention, concern and ridicule because his wits are failing and that his proud efforts to pretend otherwise are undignified and hopeless, but he must nevertheless persist with them. Later, as William lies on his deathbed with Amy beside him, Courtney convinces us, at a depth that Guiness did not, that this vain deluded man has at last understood how much he loves his daughter and how very much she has sacrificed in return.

Little Dorrit is not a historical document but, as Raphael Samuel points out, it’s an imaginative fiction that conflates Dickens’ memories of his childhood time in the Marshalsea in the 1820s and the speculative bank scandals of the 1850s into an 'about-thirty-years-ago' fictional timeframe. One person’s authenticity is the next person’s nitpicking — where do you stop in pursuit of it? Does too much of it inhibit art and imagination? If authenticity requires a character's undergarments to be hand stitched, then might not the handstitchers also be required to work by candlelight and live on bread and dripping?

Dickens himself robustly defended his own laissez faire attitude to historical detail when a correspondent accused him of anachronism over his description of a stained-glass window depicting Christ in Majesty in the church where Amy and Arthur are married: 'As the window in St George's Church appropriately carried out the pervading spirit of the tale at its conclusion, Mr Dickens made reference to it. He knew it was not as old as the date of the story, but did not consider that slight anachronism of any importance'.
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Quite so. His opinion on the visibility of machine stitching on costume corsets is not believed to be on record.

FILMS
A 24 minute silent film of Little Dorrit (1920) made by the Progress Film Company of Shoreham (UK) is held by Brighton University and is streaming at: https://screenarchive.brighton.ac.uk/detail/3473/

​A 131 minute Danish silent film Lille Dorrit (1924) with Danish intertitles translated as English subtitles is streaming at: https://www.stumfilm.dk/en/stumfilm/streaming/film/lille-dorrit

Christine Edzard’s 1987 Little Dorrit is available as a two-disc set with accompanying illustrated booklet. If purchased direct from Sands Films website you will be helping to fund current projects: https://www.sandsfilms.co.uk/shop-1.html

The BBC’s 14 episode Little Dorrit adapted by Andrew Davies (various directors) can be found streaming on the BBC iPlayer or is available on DVD or Bluray 4 disc box sets.

AUDIOBOOK
An unabridged Audiobook of Little Dorrit read by Anton Lesser (who plays Mr Merdle in the BBC  TV adaptation) is available here:  https://naxosaudiobooks.com/little-dorrit-unabridged/

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Canby, Vincent. Review/Film; A Dickens Adaptation In Novelistic Detail. The New York Times. 26 March 1988. Archived from the original on 2 April 2024. Retrieved 25.01.2025

Carey, John. Little Dorrit, An Introduction by John Carey. In Little Dorrit, A Story Told in Two Films. Sands Films Ltd, 1987

Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. (1857). Into and notes by Steven Wall and Helen Small, Penguin Classics edition 1998.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today. In Mast, Cohen and Braudy, Film Theory and Criticism (Fourth Edition). Oxford University Press,1992.

Naremore, James [Editor and Introduction]. Film Adaptation. Rutgers University Press [Depth of Field Series], 2000.

Samuel, Raphael. Dockland Dickens and Who Calls So Loud. In Theatres of Memory Vol.1, Verso, 1994.

Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester University Press, 2003

Reflections on Of Human Bondage (UK.1964)
Directors: Ken Hughes, Henry Hathaway, Bryan Forbes. Screenplay: Bryan Forbes, from the novel by William Somerset Maugham. DP: Osward Morris. Production design: John Box. Costume design: Beatrice Dawson. Main cast: Kim Novak, Laurence Harvey, Nanette Newman, Siobhán McKenna, Roger Livesey.

Philip and Mildred inhabit the familiar costume-film London of gas lamps and horse drawn cabs. Philip is a medical student and Mildred is a waitress. Philip sees Mildred once and Philip is obsessed. Philip becomes so obsessed with Mildred that Philip will suffer any degree of humiliation just for a kind word from Mildred, and he does this many times. Philip is as obsessed with Mildred as Scotty was with Madeline. Of course he is — she’s Kim Novak.

But Philip isn’t quite as stupid as Scotty. At some level he perceives that Mildred is using him, can’t help using him, and that his obsession will destroy him if he doesn’t watch it. He’d probably settle for an alternative, but the trouble is that none of the alternatives are ever Mildred, just as Scotty’s Midge is never going to be Madeline.

Accounts from those involved indicate that Of Human Bondage had a troubled production history and on release it generally underwhelmed both the critics and the public, with Kim Novak’s cockney accent attracting disproportionate scorn (it really isn’t all that bad in the great scheme of dodgy accents).

Early in the shoot the American director, Henry Hathaway, publicly humiliated Novak on set and was replaced by Ken Hughes, with reliable all-rounder Bryan Forbes directing some scenes during the changeover in addition to writing the script and appearing in a small part. As well as Novak’s trouble with Hathaway, rumours of discord between Laurence Harvey and Novak still thread their way into assessments of the film. She is said to have interrupted the shoot in Ireland by disappearing to London for a day to go shopping. If true, maybe she just forgot to come out of character at the end of the previous day – it’s for sure the most Mildred thing she could have done short of completely disappearing.

In his 1989 memoir Labour of Love, Tony Booth, who plays the small part of Mildred’s pugilistically inclined lover, wrote his own account of the Hathaway/Novak crisis in which he outlines the main course of events (while not neglecting to paint himself as the hero of the hour, chivalrously pleading with Hathaway to cut short his noxious tirade against Novak).

Hathaway is said to have wanted Elizabeth Taylor, who was the same age as Kim Novak within a year or so, to play Mildred, and years previously to have planned a version with Marilyn Monroe. Whether or not these two could have produced more acceptable cockney accents than Kim Novak, both had the potential to enact Mildred’s volatility and her underlying vulnerability, but did either possess Kim Novak’s inherent noirish inscrutability or very contemporary erotic appeal? Voluptuous, that very 1950s adjective denoting curvy sex appeal, could be, and sometimes was, applied to Monroe and Taylor, but it simply doesn’t fit either with Somerset Maugham’s Mildred or Kim Novak’s screen persona. She’s just more modern than that.
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In any event, Kim Novak left the set in distress after Hathaway’s prolonged verbal onslaught and refused to return. If Hathaway was hoping that his exhibitionist tantrum would result in Novak being replaced by Elizabeth Taylor, the strategy spectacularly blew back in his face. What happened instead of Novak leaving the film was that producer Ray Stark wasted no time in having himself driven hot-foot to the studio and sacked Hathaway. Tony Booth relates that by the time he got back to the crew's Dublin hotel Hathaway had already been dispatched onto a flight back to the USA.

As is often noted, Novak’s performance opposite Fred MacMurray in Pushover*,  the 1954 quasi-noir heist thriller, prefigures her role in Vertigo, as do aspects of the film’s plot - most notably in the car tailing scenes - not to mention the spectacular age difference between herself and male lead MacMurray. But Pushover could also be an early audition for Of Human Bondage. Novak’s character in Pushover is not ruthless or inscrutable enough to be a top-ranking noir femme fatale but is a good match for Mildred’s instinct for an opportunity to practice advantageous duplicity.

Laurence Harvey didn’t live long enough to have a late career, or even a full middle career, by which to assess his stature as an actor in comparison to his contemporaries, but he did pack a lot of varied roles into his twenty-five year or so screen career. In so far as there was a common denominator of critical reception, it was a suggestion that his acting mediated the character he was playing via a sort of technical detachment, a lack of conviction (or at worst that he just wasn’t very good). In relation to his performance in Of Human Bondage, such criticism misses the point. Philip Carey’s burden is that he doesn’t know who he is or believe he can do anything, unless he attains Mildred. He is sleepwalking through his own life at the mercy of his own impulses and of other people’s opinions. Told that he won’t be a great artist he opts to try a full 180° flip from art to science and train as a physician.

Having spent the first five years of his life in Lithuania and the next twelve in South Africa before arriving in England and later making forays into Hollywood, Laurence Harvey was well practised in cultural and vocal shapeshifting and he maintained an ambiguity, not uncommon at the time, about his sexuality. In his screen roles, even when playing an unsympathetic character, he evinced some degree of the boyish vulnerability on show in Of Human Bondage.

Who of Harvey’s star contemporaries in British cinema would have been a better fit for sensitive physically disabled introvert Philip Carey? Not Michael Caine or Richard Burton, and certainly not alpha stallion Sean Connery. Peter O’Toole… maybe. Dirk Bogarde would have been too old in the mid-1960s but a strong contender when younger, although his back catalogue of Rank Organisation Doctor comedies might be a substantial impediment. From the US, maybe Anthony Perkins, who shares with Harvey a boyish demeanour and relatively slender build. But then he’d recently starred in Psycho – it would be risky, to say the least, to have that legacy shadowing a screen Philip Carey. Far from being one of its problems, the Novak/Harvey casting may be one of the remaining merits of this flawed, uneven and now usually neglected film.

Any screen version of Somerset Maugham’s interminable Bildungsroman must almost inevitably boil it down to Philip and Mildred’s affair - only one of several key narrative strands in the book - as do both the 1937 John Cromwell film and this 1964 version.

The film very briefly establishes Philip’s unhappy childhood and signposts his club foot, then goes straight to his decision as a young man to abandon his failed artistic career in Paris and return to London to train as a doctor, so moving briskly to his encounter with Mildred in the café where she is a waitress and all that then follows.

So, as this is a mid-century British film, here comes ubiquitous Robert Morley with yet another of his comic turns as a pompous pedantic bore. This time he’s impersonating Dr Jacobs, formidable head of the medical school where Philip is studying. When an opportunity presents itself, Dr Jacobs naturally loses no time in undermining Philip’s fragile self-esteem by making him expose his club foot to the class (although not to the camera, which has to make do throughout the film with an expensive looking costume boot).
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And here among the boisterous and inattentive medical students is British cinema and TV stalwart Ronald Lacey, freckle faced and with peculiar whiskers and a permanently bewildered expression, playing Philip’s friend ‘Mattie’ Mathews. When we first meet Mattie it is he who is besotted with Mildred, whom Philip has yet to set eyes on, but Mattie is too shy to speak to her. Philip offers to act as Mattie’s intermediary, so triggering the remainder of the plot.

Now here's Roger Livesey, trailing clouds of Powell and Pressburger, playing Philip’s friend and eventual saviour Mr Athelny. In the 1934 film version Athelny was essentially a comic turn: an extravagant and rumpled fez-wearing caricature with comical facial hair and bohemian table manners, coupled with conservative views about the place of women. Mr Athelny in the 1964 film has to be, to a degree, relatable for young swinging 60s audiences, as of course do Philip and Mildred, in spite of being Victorians. So, while still extrovert and opinionated, this Athelny is, sartorially at least, a less flamboyant old boy - with Livesey’s well-shaped moustache, his silver hair neatly brushed back and wearing a well-tailored elegant suit or a gentleman’s tweed overcoat - some resemblance to the recently retired patrician Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, re-impersonated by Colonel Blimp, might be implied.

In fact, some items of the younger men’s wardrobe in Of Human Bondage seem to have been selected with a relaxed eye for period authenticity, either for reasons of economy or to connote a contemporary aura. Tony Booth recounts that, at director Hathaway’s insistence, he wore on set the suit he had worn to travel to the studios, and in some scenes Jack Hedley (as Philip’s fellow student, Griffiths) is wearing belted trousers cut to the hip which could have just dropped out of a Carnaby Street carrier bag.

The film, unlike its 1934 predecessor, excises the episode of Philip’s homelessness and near starvation that occupies a significant place in the novel, substituting a less severe period of gentlemanly financial embarrassment as he is progressively ruined by his attempts to support Mildred and her nameless baby.
The problem both in Maugham’s book and the films is that during Mildred’s absences, Mildred is absent. As Jane Smiley* observes in her introduction to the novel: 'With Mildred’s every entrance into the narrative, the novel perks up.'

All the more obliging of Somerset Maugham, then, to conclude Mildred’s appearances in the book with the definitively terminal  line: 'That was the end. He did not see her again.'  Thus the reader is freed to choose whether to bother ploughing through the remaining thirteen un-perked-up-by-Mildred chapters to find out whether Philip ever graduates as a doctor and marries Sally Athelny.

Ah, yes. Sally Athelny. Sally, who is definitely desirable and eligible but is equally definitely not-Mildred. She’s described by Maugham as blue-eyed and buxom, with a broad brow, full breasts, broad hips and golden hair, and as getting progressively more plump during the course of the story. With robust disregard for every word of this description, Nanette Newman, Bryan Forbes’ dark and fashionably slim wife, was cast in the role. This may represent nepotism, but it's also spot-on casting in the sense that Newman is sufficiently not-Kim-Novak to fail to entice Philip for the duration of his Mildred obsession, but is self-evidently attractive within conventional norms, so providing 1960s audiences with a satisfactory pairing with international film star Laurence Harvey at the story’s denouement.

Having finally qualified as a doctor and, as he believes, seen the last of Mildred long ago and determined to make a go of his medical career by serving the poor, we find Philip nearing the end of a long shift in an austere charity clinic. He’s washing his hands, carefully but with a far-away look in his eye. A nurse looks in and tells him the next patient is ready.

This, of course, is Mildred. She looks ill, although not so ill that she doesn’t look like Kim Novak. She is pale, has very dark rings round her eyes and wears the sort of wide-brimmed hat decorated with feathers favoured by factory girls and sex workers. She complains of a bad sore throat. So Philip examines her throat, peering deep down it with the aid of a spatula, a procedure that obliges him to put his face close to hers which, given the new circumstances, neither of them enjoy. Mildred just wants to be given a bottle of sore throat medicine and then get on her way, but Philip is edging towards a diagnosis. So tests are ordered, which naturally take place in a room featuring vials of bubbling liquid heated by Bunsen burners and staffed by men of few words in white lab coats.
​
Mildred has fled the hospital, but once the tests are in Philip traces her to a crepuscular subterranean brothel run by a pair of grubby characters straight from a Gustave Doré engraving of the villainous poor.

​‘I don’t want to frighten you,’ says Philip, looming over Mildred as she cowers shivering on her rickety iron bedstead, ‘but have you ever seen anyone die of syphilis?’. To his credit, Laurence Harvey manages to minimise the comedic potential of this notable line of dialogue, so far as is humanly possible while still actually speaking the words.

Obsession can arise from unattainability. Although in this film (inevitably in a version made for the swinging 60s) Philip briefly attains Mildred sexually, he can never possess her in the idealised romantic way he yearns for. He will never be able to transform her into what he wants her to be. In this, the film’s portrayal of Mildred is inevitably and effectively underscored by the legacy of Vertigo in Novak’s screen persona. A ghost of a ghost of a collective memory of an illusion.

At one point in the novel, Mildred thoroughly trashes Philip’s room while he is away. But  Somerset Maugham doesn’t give us a firsthand description of the act itself; the reader finds out about Mildred’s rampage when Philip arrives home and sees the extent of the violent damage. In the 1934 film, Bette Davis, dagger-like kitchen knife in hand, is seen furiously, psychotically slashing Philip’s paintings, ripping apart his treasured books, and burning his documents. This, obviously, is Bette Davis’s forte and it would have been a pity not to allow her, of all people, the scene. But the 1964 film follows the novel and we only see the damage through Philip’s eyes when he discovers it later. To have actually seen Kim Novak running rampage with a knife would have been too explicit a sight, a diversion from Mildred’s ultimately more deadly weapons: the wide warm eyes, the tilt of the neck, the mocking giggle, the bare shoulder framed by a white feather-boa glimpsed through the bedroom door, and her barbed, repetitive catchphrase – flippant but, for Philip, accumulatively wounding - ‘I don’t mind’.

And here, for the 21st century viewer, is the problem with both films. We’re not watching Philip and Mildred’s story, let alone Mildred’s story. We’re watching Philip’s story. We only see Mildred from Philip’s neurotic, obsessive point of view, both narratively and very often literally. It’s true that we hear her angrily accuse Philip of spying on her (or as we would put it, stalking her), but we aren’t shown cinematically how this feels for her. Bette Davis’s room trashing scene in the 1934 film is an outlier. So critics who suggested that Kim Novak’s 1964 performance lacked depth might more usefully have turned their attention to the adaptation itself, the innumerable major script and editing choices and micro-decisions made by Hathaway, Forbes, Hughes and their teams.
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Suppose instead a revisionist version in which, rather than us only seeing Mildred when Philip is present, the exact reverse of this operates: we encounter Philip only when Mildred does and see his possessive obsession from her point of view, see her life when he isn’t there, meeting her other lovers, trying to look after her baby (which in this imagined version she has given a name), her slide into overt sex work. Is it really her aunt she lives with in the house in Peckham that Philip only ever sees the outside of? What is she like when she’s out with her female friends? This, of course, could only peripherally claim to be a film from Maugham’s novel, but imagining it highlights that the limitations of the existing film do not lie primarily in Novak or Harvey’s performances but in a patriarchal determinism originating back in the source text and embedded in the film’s authorship.

Readers turning to the novel after seeing the film may be disappointed, or even perplexed, to find that, with nearly a quarter of the book still to go, it takes its leave of Mildred not on her deathbed or at her funeral but crossing a busy London street and then buying an admission ticket and disappearing into a music hall and out of the book.
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But, for the purposes of a ninety minute film adaptation, the powerful narrative arc set in motion by Philip’s obsession and the consequent cycle of mutually abusive episodes can only find a cathartic resolution if Philip’s life remains hopelessly entangled with Mildred’s right to the bitter end of her unhappy life, and that is the case both in this film and the 1934 one.

In the case of this version, Philip’s promise to Mildred to make sure she has a proper funeral -‘Like a lady’ - prefaces a touching (or, if you prefer, bathetic) final cinematic image as well as an economical narrative resolution to his relationships with both Mildred and Sally.

The interment itself in a bleak cemetery backing onto a railway embankment is seen in distant longshot – a small handful of black-clad men, presumably paid undertakers and gravediggers, are hastily carrying out the necessary work, along with an officiant priest in a white surplice. Right on cue for the committal, a dirty little steam train chuffs along the tracks in the background. Contaminating the air.

In the foreground with his back to us stands Philip, just inside the cemetery gates but observing the proceedings from a non-participatory distance. Is he only there to see that what he has paid for is done as directed or does the flame still burn, if only faintly? Either way, the camera tracks slowly back as he turns to leave and we see that Sally Athelny is waiting for him beside a carriage. In the deep background of the shot the priest who has just buried Mildred appears, striding away from the grave and towards the couple, signifying the inevitable future wedding.
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The filmmakers, understandably reluctant to give us any less than our moneysworth of this striking and ingenious narrative tableau, then freeze and shrink the image into a black frame around which the end credits appear, accompanied by Ron Goodwin’s romantic Limelight-esque theme, swelling to one final crescendo.

The novelist George Gissing was in a sense a real-life analogue of Philip. His lifelong fascination with working class women fuelled unforgettably vivid characters such as the Lambeth hat-factory girl Thyrza in the eponymous novel. While a student at Oxford, Gissing embarked on an obsessive relationship with a sex worker, Helen ‘Nell’ Harrison, who suffered from epilepsy and alcoholism. Gissing eventually stole some money from a fellow student to supplement his frantic efforts to support her, so terminating his university career and leading to a brief gaol sentence. He nevertheless married Nell and a cycle of tempestuous separations and reunions ensued.

Gissing was unable to live with Nell for long and, although he continued to pay her a small alimony for the rest of her short life, she died in atrocious poverty and suffering from tertiary syphilis, alone in a tiny, bare back room in what was then a slum area behind Waterloo railway station.

Gissing was summoned to the house. He viewed Nell’s body and with a novelist’s eye compiled a careful list of her few possessions, which included one sheet and one blanket on the bed (in February), one crust of bread in a drawer, some pawn shop tickets, and all his own letters to her as well as his photograph and small prints of a Raphael Madonna, a Landseer, and portraits of Tennyson and Lord Byron*. Gissing paid for Nell’s funeral but did not attend it.

In his diary entry for the day that he had seen her body laid out in those insufferably bleak surroundings he wrote: ‘Came home to a bad, wretched night. In nothing am I to blame; I did my utmost; again and again I had her back to me. Fate was too strong.’

Fate, eh? Maybe Philip saw things that way as well.

Now and then
One of the many strands of Queen Elizabeth the Second’s efforts to refresh the popularity of the hereditary monarchy was to have herself schooled to speak less like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.
 
In this she may have done Brief Encounter and other British films of the 1940s a reputational favour, the much derided and often satirised vowels sounds and clipped enunciation of middle-class speech of the era having receded, by the first quarter of the twenty-first century, into a tolerated generality of anachronistic curiosities such as gramophones, men always wearing hats in the street, and the existence of manual telephone exchanges.
 
Brief Encounter’s success in identifying and communicating the anguish and joy of what it feels like to fall in love with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with seems to have helped it to transcend the superficial internal obstacles to its own longevity. Nevertheless, it’s extraordinary to consider that it was released a mere decade and a half before, for example, A Taste of Honey (Richardson, 1961), which we would in the main identify as a modern film emerging from a social perspective close our own.
 
David Lean’s film, made in 1944-5 but set outside wartime, concerns two married people in their mid-thirties, at that time regarded as early middle-age — Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) — who meet by chance and fall in love.

Made and released in the edge-time between the war of attrition in Europe beginning to resolve and the hostilities actually ending, Brief Encounter was always slightly adrift in historical time. Accounts of the shoot record that wartime rationing dictated that some of the food and packaging required to stock the railway refreshment room set was unobtainable and had to be made up as props, and Noel Coward, producer of the film and author of its source stage play, was away entertaining allied troops during most of the shoot.
 
Co-written as well as produced by Coward, the film takes place in a vague ‘not very long ago but before the war’ time-loop. Two squaddies in uniform travelling on military warrants appear briefly in the station refreshment room demanding, but being denied, alcoholic drink. Cinema audiences in 1945/6 would be familiar with encountering whole trainloads of such conscripts, and some would have been part of the audience. There is a passing visual reference to the 1914-18 conflict when the distraught and rain-soaked Laura sits on a park bench near to an elevated war memorial that conspicuously features a phallic bronze machine gun looming menacingly above her. And 1940s audiences would likely have noticed that among the objects at her young son’s bedside is a model plane marked with RAF roundels.
 
The disruption and potential destruction of the marriages of Laura and husband Fred (Cyril Raymond) and of Alec and his wife Madeleine could be seen as analogous to the disruption about to be caused by the Second World War to the stable, class-entrenched, lives and habits of both the middle-class and working-class characters within the story. At the conclusion of the film Fred believes that his and Laura’s lives have returned to a normality that he seems only dimly to have realised had just been under existential threat. But we, the audience, know that for Laura this is a ‘new normal’ and, however much she may wish it, she will never be the same person she was before she met and loved Alec.
 
“There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore, when I can look back quite peacefully and cheerfully and say how silly I was”, she says. But we know that she doesn’t want that time to ever come, and neither do we. The question that we know will remain with Laura at the end of the film is the same as the question that haunted Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War and of Covid19 — having been through all that, will the survivors build the new normal to be better than the old one, or worse?

There’s an often-noted degree of slipperiness about where the film takes place. The geographical relationship between ‘Milford’, the substantial town where Alec and Laura meet and conduct their affair, Laura’s home in ‘Ketchworth’, and Alec’s in ‘Churley’ is sufficiently indicated for narrative purposes — how could it not be when the entire plot is dictated by the passage of trains to and from these places. The destination signboards seen at the platform location on Carnforth station place the action indisputably in the north of England, but the working-class accents of the railway and refreshment room staff are southern, including Myrtle (Joyce Carey), who affects a faux-refined attempt at middle-class diction and syntax.
 
Apart from the railway platform scenes, the Milford town exteriors were mainly shot on locations in southern England, and this would have been obvious to anyone in a contemporary audience who paused to consider the question. So the film, although broadly a realist undertaking, is not attempting geographical verisimilitude or coherence. It substantially takes place in Laura’s anguished and exhausted mind as she imagines a confession of the affair that she is unable to make out loud to her husband, and never will. 

Railway timetables and the occurrence of Thursday afternoons dictate absolutely what is possible for Alec and Laura, but broader calendar time is left unspecified. Laura’s children squabble about whether they should be taken to the pantomime or the circus but nobody mentions Christmas, although the eagle-eyed may spot that a poster for a British Legion event in the background of one shot features a graphic icon of Christmas trees. So the action probably unfolds during January and February, and possibly into early March. At the boating lake where Alec, a hopeless rower, eventually falls in and gets his trousers soaked, the lovers at first find the boats shut away for the season, but a suitably picturesque boatman is nevertheless in his nearby shed and they are able to persuade him to open up.
 
There are Thursdays when the sun shines, but the trees are bare and almost everyone wears a raincoat or overcoat and scarf. “Cold?”, Alec asks Laura during a brief afternoon trip into the countryside. “Not really”, she diffidently responds, having more crucial matters on her mind. Every room we see has a lighted open fire or a stove in it, although, curiously, the sash windows in the Jesson’s living room (“library”) and their children’s bedroom are partly open, causing the curtains to billow.

“One can’t really expect spring at this time of year, can one?” remarks Mrs Hermione Rowlandson (Lorna Davey), one of a gossipy pair of acquaintances who have unfortuitously observed Laura and Alec enjoying a champagne lunch in a smart Milford hotel.
 
So Laura and Alec’s affair takes place in an all-purpose generic England during an all-purpose generic winter, a southern English winter that happens to take place in the North of England, a season that might be remembered in Milford for one or two heavy downpours, but really quite mild overall, since you ask. A familiar place and time inhabiting a cosy, blurred, nostalgic national memory. The old normal.

Strange Disruptor
An element of the film that most of today’s audience might perceive in a more nuanced way than many of its original viewers is the brief but crucially disruptive appearance of the character of Stephen Lynn (Valentine Dyall, uncredited). As played by Dyall, Stephen presents a disturbing and slightly uncanny embodiment of Laura’s guilt and of the prevailing middle-class anxiety and hypocrisy around sex, sexuality, divorce, and behavioural conformity.
 
The scene between Alec and Stephen after Laura has fled from Stephen’s flat is, as Richard Dyer points out (Brief Encounter, BFI. 1998), the only scene in the film that appears to be a significant event at which Laura is not present and so cannot have detailed knowledge.
 
We might consider the scene, therefore, either as being narrated to us directly by the filmmakers (suspending Laura from her otherwise ubiquitous narrative role) or, and more likely, as Laura’s imaginative conjuring of the event in the light of Alec’s retrospective reassurance that “[Stephen] doesn’t know who you are… …We didn’t speak of you. We spoke of some nameless creature who has no reality at all.”

​Laura has never met Stephen Lynn and so, on this reading, it’s in effect Laura’s unconscious that has decided that Stephen looks and sounds like the actor Valentine Dyall. Maybe this is why he seems to have migrated from a noirish gangster movie that Laura may have seen on a Thursday afternoon at the Palladium in Milford, a blackmailer or a pimp.
 
We are told that Stephen is the “chief physician” at Milford hospital and a long-term friend of Alec who graduated at the same time. Stephen lives alone in a service apartment equipped with a convenient back exit through the kitchen and down the fire-escape. We might reasonably conjecture that Alec and Laura are not alone in having utilised this facility when disturbed.
 
The flat, whose staircase and lift we see as well as its interior, is modern in its architecture and furnishings, contrasting with the stifling chintzy clutter of Laura and Fred’s living room and the Victorian vernacular of the station refreshment room. This might suggest a tenant with modern attitudes who would be relatively relaxed and tolerant of Alec’s affair, or at the very least willing to bring some sympathetic understanding to the situation. And Stephen’s opening words, at least at face value in the script, suggest that this is the case: “I'm the one who should apologize for returning so inopportunely… we've been friends for years and I am the most broad-minded of men.” But Dyall’s smirking, waspishly sarcastic delivery of the lines, his general demeanour, and the way in which he is shot, suggest suppressed rage. “I’m not angry, just disappointed” he hisses, by way of a farewell to Alec.
 
Stephen Lynn, whose surname assonates with “sin”, is the only character in the film who it’s possible to imagine being played by Noel Coward himself. It’s worth replaying the scene’s audio and imagining Coward’s hooded eyes and permanently ironic countenance in place of Dyall’s, and his contemptuous, arm’s length flicking of Laura’s abandoned scarf.
 
Alec has evidently not told Stephen why he wanted to borrow his car for the afternoon. There must surely be at least a suspicion that Stephen had a very good idea why, and he has in effect set a trap for Alec and deliberately arrived home early feigning illness, having perhaps watched his own residence from outside.
 
Some commentators read Stephen as a gay character, of necessity closeted by the legal and social climate of the times. Following this interpretation, Stephen may regard Alec’s marriage as a convenient alibi against any suspicion of improper desire for his friend and colleague, but see the affair with Laura as a threat to his continuing access to Alec’s company. When he bursts into his own flat, apparently lingering in the front lobby without removing his overcoat but nevertheless long enough to be spared actually setting eyes on Laura, and he confronts Alec, is it barely supressed jealousy we are seeing played out?

Linger on
Why does the film have enduring popularity such that multiple spin-off versions, commercial opportunities, and popular cultural references persist? For all that the cinematic telling of the story entails a sophisticated narrative device, the extended flashback has long been a familiar trick and ultimately Brief Encounter tells a very simple, familiar, story with broadly sketched and easily distinguishable secondary characters. On this level it is straightforward and entertaining viewing, but on an emotional level it relentlessly wrestles at our identification with the central protagonists.
 
Today’s viewer would have little difficulty discovering reasons to avoid too close an identification with Laura and Alec. The narrow, casual snobbishness which makes them see the banter of the refreshment room staff and the figure of a plump, bespectacled, jobbing musician (Irene Handl) as objects of casual amusement is uncomfortable. Laura demands brandy, writing paper, and the postponement of closing time from the kindly Beryl, the most engaging and profoundly portrayed of the Milford Junction staff, with just sufficient entitled curtesy to obtain what she wants and with minimum eye contact.
 
Laura and Fred’s household apparently includes a uniformed maid who is at least a daily fixture and may possibly live in, and the couple have a routine of dressing for dinner. At first sight it’s difficult to square this with the fact that at the cinema Laura regards sitting in the circle rather than the stalls as something of an extravagance. She hesitates guiltily about spending so much money on Fred’s birthday present, a clock that she is sure he will love, thereby reminding us that the money comes from Fred in the first place. This is the sort of performative frugality that is guaranteed to irk those who find themselves in no position to indulge in it.

​We never see Alec’s wife Madelaine or their children, and so are let off the hook of emotional engagement or identification with them. We learn that Madelaine is “delicate”, which in the 1940s could mean any number of things, including that she has lost interest in sex with Alec. The central love affair is narrated in minute detail from Laura’s point of view — we can only glean what Alec is thinking and feeling via Laura’s perceptions and what we see of his words and actions. Partly because of Trevor Howard’s slightly detached screen persona and partly because we never occupy Alec’s head as we do Laura’s, it’s possible to interpret Alec’s motivations and character through a range of readings, some more charitable than others.
 
And yet…
 
Alec and Laura are clearly passionately attracted to each other physically and their on-off resistance to their urges was puzzling to some people even at the time (not least, apparently, to a bemused Trevor Howard) and may be incomprehensible to later generations. Laura, of course, has more to risk than Alec and we are reminded of this by a reference during the refreshment room staff banter to “getting a girl into trouble”. But all this is part of the point. The film insists that the affair remains unconsummated because the film needs that to be the case. Because the affair must remain, for the characters and the viewer, an encounter. Brief — “Nothing lasts really, not even life” – but enduringly deep, irresistible and indestructible.

​While long term devotees of Brief Encounter may enjoy recalling snatches of the dialogue…
“I’m sure I don’t know to what you are referring.”
“I'll forgive you if you'll forgive me.”
…anyone who has seen it even once will surely include three things in their recollection:  a soft-focus memory of Celia Johnson’s exquisitely photographed features, the reprise, again and again, of the yearning, swelling, melodies of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, and the inexorable iron and steam rhythm of the railway whose relentless timetable both enables and threatens the lovers.
 
The appeal of steam trains now that, in Britain at any rate, they are almost only found in our collective memory of cinema, holds confusing and contradictory connotations. But one of them whispers insistently to us, “You know what's happened, don't you? I've fallen in love with you.”
 
The concluding shot of the film has Laura in her armchair, her sewing basket in her lap, and a grateful Fred kneeling beside her and then leaning in, interposing himself between the camera and her face, all but eradicating her image.
 
But we’re not completely done yet. Rachmaninov surges to full volume for one final time. Then the end title is superimposed on a still showing a deserted Milford Junction with glinting railway tracks stretching away out of the darkness towards a dazzling brightness — a cinema screen perhaps, offering infinite possibilities for other stories of chance meetings and irresistible love.
 
Pass me a tissue, would you. I think there’s something in my eye.

Story and plot structure: an outline of Brief Encounter
The film recounts a passionate but unconsummated love affair between two married people, Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey, who meet by chance in a railway refreshment room. The story is told from Laura’s point of view, using interior monologue during a long flashback within a framing device that shows us the lovers’ final meeting after they have decided to conclusively end their affair.
 
Laura lives with her husband Fred and their two children in the village of Ketchworth. Every Thursday she travels by train to the town of Milford to shop, change her library book, and sometimes go to the cinema. Alec is a doctor, a General Practitioner, in Churley, a place situated in the opposite direction to Ketchworth. On Thursdays Alec also travels to Milford, to provide cover at the hospital for a friend and colleague, Stephen Lynn. Both Laura and Alec are in the habit of having a cup of tea in the Milford Junction refreshment room as they wait for their respective trains home at the end of the afternoon.
 
The refreshment room also serves to introduce us to a group of railway and refreshment room staff who provide both an entertaining background to Alec and Laura’s meetings and a colourful and robust working-class counterpoint to the guilt and tight-lipped restraint of the middle-class lovers.
 
The pair first encounter one another at Milford Junction station when Laura gets a piece of railway grit in her eye and Alec removes it for her, necessitating a moment of close proximity and eye contact. Following a further chance meeting in the town the following Thursday, their affair rapidly develops with visits to the cinema and to restaurants, although Laura is troubled by guilt at her betrayal of her kindly but dull husband and with fear of discovery when they are seen by local acquaintances.
 
One Thursday, Alec borrows Stephen Lynn’s car and drives Laura out to the country for the afternoon. Returning the car after dark, Alec says that he has arranged to return the key to Stephen’s flat, to which he has been lent the latchkey, and asks Laura to come up with him. She refuses and makes her way to the station and boards her train, but at the last second jumps off and returns to the flat, although only intending to stay for a short while so she can remain in Alec’s company a little longer. They hear Stephen arriving at the door and Laura flees by a back exit and wanders the rainy streets of Milford for hours.
 
The humiliation and guilt triggered by this incident determines Laura to end the affair. Alec reluctantly agrees and decides to accept a job he has been offered in Johannesberg, but they agree to end the affair gently and amicably.
 
As Laura and Alec spend their last moments together in the Milford Junction refreshment room, they are interrupted by Dolly, an insensitive and tediously voluble acquaintance, a moment we have seen out of context at the beginning of the film. Alec’s train is announced and he leaves, a discreet gesture of placing his hand on Laura’s shoulder his only means of a meaningful farewell*. Laura hopes he will return, having not caught his train, but he does not appear. In despair she rushes onto the platform to throw herself in front of an express train but is unable to do so. The framing device loop thus closed, the final moments of the film return to domesticity and involve, at last, a recognition by Fred that his wife has been troubled, distant, and in need of his support but has now returned to him, reconciled to the norms of marital fidelity.

*Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) employs a very similar framing device and references Brief Encounter’s hand on the shoulder moment, but goes on to an optimistic and liberating conclusion.

​Graham Greene succinctly describes his screenplay for The Fallen Idol as “the story of a boy who believed his friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defence”.  The boy, Phil, lives in a London embassy where his father is ambassador and the boy’s friend, Mr Baines, is the butler. As much as Phil (Bobby Henrey) adores and admires the kind and avuncular Mr Baines (Ralph Richardson), he loathes his wife, the domineering, jealous, and volatile housekeeper Mrs Baines (Sonia Dresdel).
 
Left in the care of the Baines couple while his parents are both away, Phil stumbles on a dangerous secret. Mr Baines and a young typist, Julie (Michèle Morgan), are in love and meet surreptitiously. Baines has agreed to tell his wife of his affair and ask her to set him free to be with Julie, but he cannot bring himself to do so. Subsequent events lead to Mrs Baines accidentally falling to her death within the Embassy and the police suspecting Baines of killing her until they stumble upon evidence that clears him.

​The source short story, The Basement Room, was written by Greene twelve years and a World War before he worked on the screenplay for Carol Reed’s film and it is considerably more bleak, both in its characterisations and its conclusion.
 
The upper class family mansion of The Basement Room is more claustrophobic than the mainly airy spaces of the large embassy building evoked by Vincent Korda's elegant sets for the film. And the Mr Baines of the short story actually does kill his wife instead of being wrongly suspected of doing so and then vindicated, as in the film. Furthermore, a few deft sentences in the short story predict an austere future and an eventual lonely and bewildered death for the adult Phil as a direct result of the childhood incident described. The Basement Room also has an inescapably misogynistic edge. The Julie character (Emmy) is a weak and passive figure identifiable by little more than her “thin and drawn figure” and her light raincoat. There is a nastily drawn female police officer, Rose, a minor character but described with relished disgust as having wrinkled stockings and discoloured teeth and, in Greene’s clinching expression of repulsion, resembling a male impersonator.

​In the film, the character called Rose becomes a flamboyant and resilient prostitute (Dora Bryan) who befriends the traumatised Phil at the police station and provides the film’s single bring-the-house-down laugh line: when the desk sergeant finally coaxes it from Phil that he’s the Ambassador’s son, Rose beams delightedly: “Ohoooo!  I know your daddy!”

​Greene thought the film’s title, which he says was chosen by the distributors, “meaningless”. To a British filmgoer in 1949 who had not troubled to enquire otherwise, The Fallen Idol would probably have suggested that they were in for some tale of daring-do in the colonies featuring pith helmets, impenetrable creeper, dangerous animals, and drums in the night, which at least ties in with the entirely untrue stories about his past in colonial Africa with which Mr Baines entertains and diverts young Phil.

​A more accurate and intriguing title would have been Secrets and Lies, and Mike Leigh’s 1996 film of that name, although set in a very different time and social milieu, indeed explores similar themes of how we deceive ourselves and others to our own eventual cost. For the US release, David O Selznick re-titled Reed’s film as The Lost Illusion, which is perhaps more pertinent than The Fallen Idol, if more prosaic. But then if Selznick had got his way a couple of years later The Third Man would have been called “A Night in Vienna” and starred Noel Coward as Harry Lime. 

​A major difference between the source story and the film stemming from the decision to relocate the action to an embassy is that Mr Baines' lover Julie (a secretarial worker on the staff} becomes a European, someone from a significantly different milieu and life experience to Baines, which in itself makes Baines a more complex, interesting, and sympathetic character. The dull and manipulative Mr Baines of The Basement Room would not have stood a chance with the film’s Julie. Although Julie’s background is not deeply explored in The Fallen Idol's dialogue, she represents an utterly different sensibility from the stuffy, sexually repressed, England of deferential servants and stale wasp-ravaged cakes in steamy café windows.

​As rounded out by the screenplay and played with quiet luminosity by Michèle Morgan, Julie becomes the central character most capable of recognising and dealing with the consequences of her own desires and of taking responsible action. Baines, on the other hand, takes refuge in denial and evasion and Mrs Baines in bitterness and retribution. When Baines concocts his naïvely reckless plan to spend the evening and night with Julie in the embassy, even in the improbable event of it remaining undetected it seems likely that he would have continued to postpone decisive action in relation to his marriage and would have lost Julie in the process.

​Phil’s sheltered but privileged seven year old lack of understanding and precocious sense of entitlement means that much of what he does and says makes things worse for his grown-up friend. A major strength of the film is that Phil is not a stereotypical cute kid or even a wholly sympathetic character. We may occasionally marvel at Baines patience or admit a shred of sympathy for Mrs Baines exasperation. As Geoffrey O’Brien points out in his essay for the Criterion Collection release, we may sometimes think that Phil ”begins to look quite odious, a little monster getting in the way of lovers desperate to be alone together.”

There are a few moments, however, when Phil inadvertently aids the lovers’ enterprise. Just after the scene in which he has unexpectedly and highly inconveniently discovered Baines and Julie agonising over their affair in a cheap local café, the couple part, apparently conclusively. But as a bleakly disconsolate Baines walks away with Phil, the boy turns to investigate a parked car that interests him and notices, which Baines has not, that Julie has lingered longingly at a distance, Phil's distraction so precipitating an immediate reunion and the remainder of the plot. 

​Doubtless for the avoidance of offence (and litigation), the country of the Embassy remains unspecified and when we briefly see a flag over the entrance it is a fictitious design. Both French and English, the languages of diplomacy, are spoken. Michèle Morgan is well known as a French film star and Bobby Henrey was cast from among hundreds of bilingual children to play Phil. The  Ambassador and the First Secretary, played by the respectively German and Czech actors Gerald Hinze and Karel Stepanek, both speak English with a slight central European intonation, so probably there was a deliberate intention to muddy the waters and present the Embassy’s homeland to its 1949 British audience as a sort of all-purpose ‘abroad’. In which vein, comic potential is extracted from the figure of Detective Hart (Bernard Lee) who has been included in the police investigation team because of his evidently much overrated ability to understand French. In both the café scene and the police investigation, we can also infer that Baines understands at least some French, but we do not hear him speak it.

​But Julie, although her homeland is unspecified, is identifiably French both in accent and in her liberated attitude to sex, a characteristic that a French identity in a young woman would have instantly connoted to post-War British filmgoers. In a key exchange with Detective Crowe (Denis O’Dea), who is trying (largely with admirable patience) to unravel the events leading to Mrs Baines fatal fall, the Scotland Yard man questions Julie as to whether “intimacy” had ever taken place between herself and Baines. Standing right beside the bed on which this British A Certificate film indicates, but cannot show, that intimacy had indeed taken place, Julie responds that she and the police don’t talk the same language — and she doesn’t mean English. Further pressed by the tenacious detective, she angrily retorts: “Last night was the first time we were ever like this. Now, you, you take your photographs and fingerprints and everything. It’s love you’re photographing, not ‘intimacy’.”
 
In the United States, the Breen Office censors requested that the scene was recut and additional dialogue inserted to indicate that Baines and Julie, rather than having sex at the time of Mrs Baines fatal fall, had been discussing terminating their relationship. Equally ludicrously, Breen asked for changes to the Police Station scene so that Dora Bryan’s brassy plastic-raincoated Rose became not an arrested prostitute but a local housewife who just happened to have dropped into the Station for a casual chat in the middle of the night. 

During Baines and Julie’s earlier rendezvous at the Zoo with Phil in tow, the scene’s dynamic is driven by the tension between Baines’ need to keep the ever-demanding Phil entertained and the more vital business of persuading Julie to give him one last chance to confirm his commitment by confessing the affair to his wife.
 
Baines’ fantasies about his non-existent past career in colonial Africa are his own compensatory delusions as much as they are diversions for Phil. This also becomes evident in the Zoo scene. Baines and Phil are sitting on a bench in the Lion House at the start of what Phil had believed to be an excursion for the two of them. At first Baines is reminiscing distractedly to Phil, his eyes constantly darting away in anticipation of the arrival of Julie, whom we infer he has arranged to meet at this spot. Seeing a woman of superficially similar appearance in the distance Baines momentarily looks hopeful, but then becomes reabsorbed in his Africa fantasy and it is actually Phil who notices Julie approaching.
​

To a modern audience, aware of animal welfare and conservation, the conditions of captivity of the animals in the Zoo scene will likely serve more powerfully than they did in the 1940s as a metaphor for the subjugation of the film’s human subjects within a rigid and censorious social order. If conditions in today’s major zoos have become more benign and scientifically informed, what we see of London Zoo in The Fallen Idol seems to be only a slight improvement on the royal menageries of earlier centuries.
 
There is no establishing shot of Baines and Phil travelling to or entering the Zoo. Instead Reed delivers a perceptual jolt by cutting via a rapid dissolve from a bored Phil idly pacing the Embassy lobby to a close-up of the male Lion swiping his claws through the heavy steel bars of his brick cell and roaring aggressively. Later in the reptile house we see a provoked cobra lashing out at its glass and parrots chained to a line of outside perches having their tails thoughtlessly tweaked by Phil to produce squawks.

​Images suggestive of surveillance, entrapment, and captivity resonate through The Fallen Idol. The first image of the film is Phil crouching behind and peering through an iron balustrade, later we see the barred view of the feet of passers-by from Baines basement room, Rose under arrest, the detectives walking in a kind of ominous slow dance, like living prison bars, around their suspects. Phil’s pet snake, MacGregor, apart one brief wriggle across a balcony, is always confined — behind a loose brick in the wall, stuffed into Phil’s trouser pocket, in the tiny box supplied by Baines, and finally in Mrs Baines’ rag to be disposed of in the blazing stove, an image made more shocking by our ignorance as to whether she has first killed the animal using some swifter method.

​Towards the end of the Zoo visit Phil is fascinated by a cage of lively monkeys while Baines and Julie are in intense conversation a short distance away. As we hear an orgasmic screech from one of the monkeys, Phil turns and calls out “Oh look, Baines! Come and look at this. Baines! What are they doing?”. Rendered untypically speechless by one of Phil’s questions, Baines at first looks frozen by the same inhibition that threatens his love for Julie, while Julie smiles knowingly as they both turn their gaze away from Phil and towards each other.

​In Greene’s source story The Basement Room, the butler had actually served with Philip’s father in colonial Africa so his stories are at least notionally based on experience, whereas in the film they are wholly fantasies derived from the pulp adventure stories that for a century washed unhindered through the consciousness of the children of the British Empire. An audience today may find their sympathy with Baines checked when he invokes a vicious confrontation with rebellious “blackies” in which he casts himself as the fearless and solitary white hero.
 
When eventually forced to confess the untruth of his fantasies, Baines murmurs resignedly “That was just a game, Phil”. The violence of his Africa tales is a symptom of the casual ubiquity of imperialist and racist attitudes in English popular culture (particularly that produced for boys) and is at odds with Baines’ gentle character and the decency and kindly humour that Julie and Phil both love him for. When Baines tells Phil that he left Africa because he wanted to marry and there were no white women available, Phil asks “Must they be white?”.  Ralph Richardson’s face and the brief  “err.. ah” sound that escapes him suggest that Phil has naively precipitated a small but effective breach in Baines defensive and circumscribed world view.

​In the final scenes Baines, having initially denied to the police that anyone was with him in the Embassy during the night of Mrs Baines’ death (thus denying Julie’s agency and their love), goes on to lie hopelessly over the inconsistencies in his earlier lies. The yarn he told Phil about the African rebellion culminated in him shooting the leader dead, supposedly in self-defence. Inconveniently, Phil mentions this boast in the presence of the police when Baines is already strongly suspected of murdering his wife, so obliging him to inflict further humiliation on himself by admitting in Phil’s hearing that he has never been out of the country, adding feebly: “Except once. To Ostend.”

Phil, in spite of all he has witnessed, is no less baffled by the grown-up world at the end of the film than he was at the beginning. So maybe The Fallen Idol is a film about a boy beginning to grow up, but the boy is Baines who has at last begun to learn the difference between life and "just a game". 

​Ralph Richardson excelled at portraying decent but flawed and conflicted men, and his Mr Baines is an outstanding picture of a good man trapped in a hopeless situation partly of his own making and partly the result of a censorious society. In Baines’ final quiet, confessional, exchange with the confused and tearful Phil, Richardson’s distinctive voice is resonant of the intimate recording of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence that the actor was to make in the 1950s. Richardson was well known to resist talking about his work, preferring to discuss cricket or motorbikes and regarding himself (like Carol Reed) as simply a technician in the service of good stories rather than an artist, remarking that actors are just “the jockeys of literature”.  

   BAINES: We don’t have any call to judge... We’ve got to be very careful, Phil, because we make one another.
   PHIL: I thought God made us.
   BAINES: Trouble is, we take a hand in it.

​The film resolves Phil’s strand of the narrative with the return to the Embassy of his long absent mother, but the future of Baines and Julie is left in as much doubt as it has been throughout. Baines’ bathetic Ostend reference serves to remind us that Julie has already booked herself a one-way train ticket to the Continent in anticipation of his ongoing failure to commit to her. And while we now know that the police will testify that Mrs Baines’ death was an accident, for Baines and Julie there are surely troublesome and painful consequences to follow from the night's events.
 
So the film provides, for the child notionally at the centre of Graham Greene’s story, a conventional enough resolution sufficient to satisfy distributors and censors, and to reassure audiences that they have seen a happy ending. But Greene, master of the inexhaustible ability of the human heart to court calamity, has his screenplay leaving the grown-up lovers suspended in anxious anticipation of the next twist.

​Meanwhile, we can be sure, the wasps continue to feast on the broken and dusty little jam tarts in the café where we first met Julie, while at the Zoo the lion still rages within his steel and concrete prison and weary fathers become conveniently inattentive when their sons demand to know what it is the monkeys are doing.

Sometimes a much-loved classic film can have one thing, just one little tiny thing, that jars every time. A thing that makes you think “How did that get in? What a pity.” Not a continuity or authenticity mistake, so-called bloopers — they’re just part of the rich texture of cinema. What we’re looking at here are things that unaccountably trigger disappointment or irritability every time and out of all proportion to their significance.
 
In the case of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, it’s Jean Marais’ quiff.
 
Fair enough, it’s 1949. Elvis’s first single is only a few years over the horizon – have a quiff. You’re playing an established poet who’s trying to look cool among the Left Bank kids, so a quiff should work. But this isn’t a quiff. It’s a QUIFF. The quiff seems to precede Marais’ face by several frames wherever he goes. Once seen, it’s impossible to look at anything else. It should have its own credit, as should the quiffs in Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboy films.
 
Admittedly, Édouard Dermit as Cégeste can also be said to carry a quiff. But Dermit is actually playing one of the Left Bank kids that Orpheus is trying to look cool among, and what’s more he's wearing appropriate trousers to prove it.
 
Marais got by just fine as the Beast in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête with no quiff at all, and as Avenant and the Prince in the same film with a modest almost-quiff that confined itself to a respectable position to the rear of his eyebrow line. Returning to play a wandering Oedipus in Le testament d'Orphée, the 1960 sequel to Orphée, Marais appears (sticklers for Classical authenticity will be relieved to hear) without eyes but in a wig that looks as though its main purpose is to forcibly suppress his own quiff. The whole thing had obviously got out of control by then.
 
A fine example of Cocteau’s love of in-camera trickery occurs in one of the between-worlds Zone scenes in Orphée. Heurtebise, played by François Perier, and Orpheus are moving toward camera in slight slow motion. Heurtebise, in front, appears to be advancing effortlessly while Orpheus seems to be impeded by some unseen force, but it is Heurtebise’s hair and costume that are ruffled by a powerful wind, a wind which has no similar effect on Orpheus. To convince us that they nevertheless occupy the same magical space, a street glazier crying his wares passes across the foreground and then moves towards and beyond Orpheus. But in spite of this trick of perception with the glazier we’re not thinking, “Magic! Look, an unearthly wind is buffeting Heurtebise but not Orpheus”. No. We’re thinking — “Back projection! Back projection! Look at his quiff not moving. Look at it!”.
 
In Cocteau’s version of the myth, Orpheus is moderately fond of his wife Euridice but falls madly in love with the supernatural agent of his own demise. The styling and costuming of Marie Casarés’s Princess represent everything that a quiff is not. She is the immortal anti-quiff. Death, the slayer of quiffs. A goth shape-shifter with a mocking smile never far from her lips, her jet black hair scraped tightly back in defiance of the very possibility of a quiff.
 
So maybe Marais’ hair stylist was actually onto something after all. Orphée est un quiff ou il n'est rien. That line must have got cut.

“What is the difference between a lighthouse and an ocean on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, photographically, is not clear to me.”
David O Selznick

​How does this initially unsuccessful film speak to us now? Is it about an elemental battle between the imperatives of linear time and those of human desire? Or art transcending mortality? Or a flawed celebration of earlier cinematic forms and tropes just before they disappeared from memory? Or is it just Hollywood’s pretentious and mawkish trial run for Vertigo, as its producer’s biographer thought? Or today might we even find in it an unwitting early warning that climate change will ravage the future of our children?
 
It is debated whether Portrait of Jennie is a ghost story or not, but it is certainly haunted. Haunted from the past by the history of its own production and that of its makers and by the tropes and visual techniques of silent film and earlier media. And haunted from its future by Scottie diving into the Bay, by the nameless protagonist of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), by the threads of the uncanny and transcendent that surface in the films of Neil Jordan, Julio Medem, and Christian Petzold, and by Hurricane Katrina smashing mercilessly through the levees. It’s a product of the stardust machine in the west, haunted and tugged eastwards by the forlorn call of the Old World and older ways of telling stories.

With the German born émigré William Dieterle as director and with Jennifer Jones cast as the mysterious girl, Jennie Appleton, and Joseph Cotton as the artist, Eben Adams, work on the production began in Autumn 1946.

​The cinematographer was Joe August, a great veteran of the silent era who had worked on over forty films since 1916, including several William S Hart and John Ford westerns, Dieterle’s own Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and his fantasy film The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Westerns had taught August to photograph skies and open spaces with a consummate eloquence that is one of the enduring delights of Portrait of Jennie. He died suddenly while completing the film and so also haunts the film as, in both senses, an illuminating spirit.
 
Though set in the mid-1930s, the film makes visual reference to the previous decade and the late silents. Joe August used vintage lenses for some of the photography, mimicking the soft halo effect which older viewers in 1948 would associate with romantic melodramas they had enjoyed twenty years earlier such as Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March. Even more boldly, the film is black and white until the great hurricane at the climax of the story starts. Then a terrific bolt of green lightning bisects the screen during which the aspect ratio has opened out from 4:3 to widescreen.  (Available discs include the colour effects but not the ratio switch)

​The spectacular storm which follows, Eben and Jennie’s final fatal reunion at the foot of the lighthouse, and the subsequent short scene, then use expressive colour tinting and toning in the style of silent films. Then the stock finally switches to full colour when we see the finished portrait in the gallery. So Portrait of Jennie is also self-consciously haunted by its stylistic antecedents.

​Storms at sea, shipwrecks, and daring lighthouse rescues were the stock in trade of Victorian stage melodrama and magic lantern shows, and the tropes associated with them run through into the era of silent film so would have been familiar to many in the early audiences for Portrait of Jennie. The allegorical religious painting Rock of Ages by Johannes Oertel showing a near-drowned woman being saved from a sea storm by a divine figure was widely known in innumerable derivative versions and is still on offer at tattooists to this day.   

​FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK?
Plenty of haunting, then. But should we consider the film as akin to a fairytale (wonder tale) rather than as bedfellow to psychological ghost stories such The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944), The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) or The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)?
​
​The homelands of what we now think of as traditional European fairytales, like that of much of the talent that found its way to the American studios in the 1930s and ‘40s, were Germany and France, where the process of collecting and publishing the tales was consolidated, along with an inclination to sanitise them (which Disney, for one, did not neglect to inherit).
 
In a fairytale, things are the way they are because the tale says so. If a tree can talk but a horse cannot, that’s how it is. In novels and films, even if the subject is fantastic, we are primed to look for an internal logic and to consider them flawed if the logic doesn't hold.

Cineastes and folklorists of a psychoanalytical persuasion will find plenty to bite on in Portrait of Jennie, not least because of Eben’s pride in his drawings of the Lands End Lighthouse and Jennie’s revulsion from them, together with their final and irrevocable parting at exactly that location amid a tumultuous explosion of sea spray — symbolism as evident as any in Little Red Riding Hood.
 
Jennie, like most of the girls at the heart of a fairytale, seeks and deserves true love and must experience setbacks and undergo transformations in the hope of achieving it – a transformation first into adulthood and then, by way of a death that she has already died once, into tranquillity within the memories of others. Eben must similarly endure onerous delays and undertake puzzling and eventually heroic tasks to fulfil his destiny and become the man he has the potential to be.
​
The patronage of a fairy godmother who appears at crucial junctures, the gallery owner Miss Spinney, both determines Eben’s obstacles and assists him to overcome them.

His course is intermittently guided (to use the taxonomy of the folk tale formalists) by magical helpers or agents such the little dog of gallery co-owner Mr Mathews, which runs away in the Park and finds Eben just when he needs to be found. In a premonitory echo of the ocean, the dog is named Skipper. “He doesn’t usually take to strangers” remarks Mr Mathews, adding “Unless he thinks they’re in trouble.” 

More crucially, the magical agent of Jennie’s scarf, which remains in Eben’s world after Jennie is taken from him forever, provides apparent material evidence that she existed and that she loved him.

​The film, however, is short of an obvious villain, except perhaps in the abstract form of Eben’s internal demons and of the cruel blows that time inflicts on love. The source novel has a clear candidate — the landlady Mrs Jekes, the sharpness of her name offering an early hint as to her character. Habitually harassing the penniless Eben for his rent, she eventually discovers Jennie (who in the novel is as real to her as to Eben) visiting the artist in his room. She vindictively ejects Jennie and serves Eben with notice, although the pair seem to have been doing nothing less innocent than fantasising about visiting Paris.

In the film Mrs Jekes (Florence Bates), although still firmly pursuing the rent, is a more benevolent character who admits to her gossipy friend that she indulges Eben on account of his good looks. 

TROUBLE AT T’LIGHTHOUSE
Portrait of Jennie was supposed to be an uncomplicated project for the highly regarded and powerful producer of Gone with the Wind, David O Selznick. It was not.
 
Right from the word go, the Benzedrine-popping workaholic Selznick worried away at the script and the shooting schedule like a dog whose bone had fallen through a grating. He hired and fired scriptwriters and revised their work, seeking to discover a generic internal logic within a source story whose principle charm and strength is that it has none.
 
As photography began on Portrait of Jennie at various New York and East Coast locations in February 1947 Selznick was simultaneously seeing to the wrapping up of Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947). Eventually, alarmed by escalating costs for what he regarded as meagre results, beset by major crises in his private and financial affairs, Selznick ordered the Portrait shoot back from the European-facing East Coast to his comfort zone of the Hollywood studio and milieu.

He was certainly right that the almighty hurricane scene at the climax of the film could only have been achieved by process work in a major studio and not at the seaside. But in any case the Hollywood mindset was that the moguls had not invested the hard-earned capital of their grandparents just so that their minions could waste weeks over on the eastern seaboard fooling around sitting in hotels waiting for the weather to get worse.
 
The recall of the Jennie shoot to Hollywood is a trace re-enactment in miniature of the imperatives that hauled the entire nascent industry west from New York in the first place. Joseph Cotton (1987), remembering his relief when the cast and crew returned to Hollywood, succinctly celebrates: “Home, sun, studio hours. Special effects”.
 
As the costs spiralled out of control Selznick’s personal, financial, and reputational problems became insurmountable. The film was too far advanced to cancel, and too far from completion to avoid exponential cost inflation. Hauling the production west to Hollywood, Selznick found himself loaded into a catapult of misfortune that would soon propel him and his remaining career all the way east to the Old World and to directors such as Carol Reed and Michael Powell who were more than capable of ignoring his blizzards of memos and getting on with their jobs as they saw fit.

GARDEN OF EBEN
In printed form the name of the artist Eben Adams is obviously, indeed prosaically, suggestive of the biblical Eden and the first man. And Eben’s very own Eve, Jennie Appleton, has the name of the forbidden fruit as her surname’s emphatic component. The first person text of the novel, and therefore Eben’s conscious thought, is intermittently bothered by the Judeo-Christian God -- as when Gus, the Jewish taxi driver (Irish in the film) engages with the artist in homespun theological musings.
 
In the film this strain of the sacred is secularised into portentous dialogue and narrative-voice speculation about the nature of existence, time, and love, likely with an eye to frictionless distribution. The reassignment of Gus’s origins to Ireland enables a lyrical scene in which he plays a harp and sings a plaintive song, “Yonder, yonder”, again pointing us towards the European homelands and evoking popular associations of Celtic themes with the folkloric supernatural.
 
The exteriors in the film and what we see through the windows of the interiors frequently reminds us of the natural world — a wintry Central Park and the buildings of New York shot to recall painted landscapes, a formation of ducks pursuing an ancient migration route heedless of the recently established city, sheep grazing the Park in spring.
 
“Landscapes… landscapes” tuts Mr Mathews the first time he reviews Eben’s portfolio, as if the very word was an affront to his gallery’s Manhattan business model. More kindly, and with a view to both keeping a grip on Eben’s fate and enabling him to work, Miss Spinney commissions a flower painting. Nature, but cut and arranged to suit the parlour.

​A little way into the story, Eben is commissioned to paint a mural in Mr Moore’s Alhambra diner in exchange for free meals, so saving him from starvation. In the novel, the mural is a bucolic scene of a group of clothed women at a picnic in a verdant lakeside landscape --“It has to be clean”, insists Mr Moore.
 
In the film the mural’s subject becomes a heroic celebration of the Irish Nationalist soldier and statesman Michael Collins, killed in 1922 during the Irish Civil War. This switch provides the film with a boisterous unveiling scene and an artwork with more dynamic impact than the novel’s sedentary picnic scene, but one that disrupts the centrality of the natural realm in landscape-specialist Eben’s imaginative world.
 
It would be whimsical to think that any of the key creators of Portrait of Jennie gave a second thought to Anthropocene climate damage while making the film. But viewed today their work is eerily if subliminally insistent throughout that it is nature that intersects our lives and give us licence to succeed in our purposes, and not the other way round. And the climactic tidal wave has all too vivid resonances of the climate change catastrophes that increasing populate our headlines. 

ARTIST OF THE PORTRAIT
Hollywood in the mid 20th century, ever mindful that the indulgence of art has the capacity to hinder commerce, usually plays safe when dealing with painting (unless making a populist point about “modern art”) and often depicts it as a representational craft that either produces a workable likeness or doesn’t. Hence Midge’s ill advised self-portrait in Vertigo is a technically less accomplished copy of the Carlotta Valdes portrait with Midge’s own bespectacled features and fuller figure substituted, but with little suggestion of creative stylistic divergence or originality of technique.
 
Writing his novel, Robert Nathan had the advantage that Eben’s paintings and drawings remain safely in the imagination of each reader, whereas the filmmakers were obliged to give them physical form and hence make aesthetic decisions about the artist’s style and competency. The audience could perhaps be allowed to see very little of the landscapes and sketches Eben manages to sell to the gallery early in the story, but a film will inevitably have to give the audience a gratifying sight of the titular portrait itself, both in progress and when finished.
 
Selznick was to marry Jones shortly following the completion of the film. The painting we see is a portrait of the film star Jennifer Jones, commissioned by her lover David O Selznick and painted to order by Robert Brackman, with a secondary function as a film prop representing the fictitious Eben Adams’ portrait of the fictitious (and possibly illusory) Jennie Appleton.
 
Brackman was a well regarded painter and a respected teacher, capable of producing compelling if relatively conventional portraits. While he refused point blank to move his studio to Hollywood to execute the Selznick commission, it seems likely that he was subject to a level of the producer’s usual assiduous micro-specification, indeed Joseph Cotton records that Selznick sent Brackman daily memos.
 
The portrait described in the novel depicts, is indeed titled, a Girl in a Black Dress. It is safe to speculate that Selznick, having long-term proprietorial claims on both the oil painting and the sitter, required Brackman to refrain from delivering anything too spooky.
 
Whatever the case, the dull and docile appearance of the girl in the portrait when we finally see it hanging in the Metropolitan Museum struggles to find defenders, even among admirers of the film. While Brackman’s technical rendering of surfaces and light is highly competent, as a key narrative component of the film any force that the portrait delivers stems almost exclusively from the fact that the stock switches to full colour as we see it.

​In the novel, Jennie appears at Eben’s studio for a portrait sitting in the bridal white uniform of her convent school instead of in her signature black dress. Eben is momentarily disappointed, but remarks that he can always finish the dress without her there. Furthermore, he searches out a length of old yellow silk he bought during his student days in Paris (another fragment of the Old World) draping it behind Jennie and then placing an old black coat of his own over her. The absence of the golden background and the substitution of the black dress by the white garment in Brackman’s portrait compounds the failure of the painting’s appearance to deliver either wonder or catharsis — a fundamental failure inevitably stemming from the sentimental and submissive pose in which Jones is placed, wholly at odds with Jennie Appleton’s defining characteristics of determination and mystery.

The word “legendary” is sometimes applied carelessly to movie people, but it would be churlish to deny it to Gish. She cultivated her own version of conquering time, maintaining a lifelong vagueness about her exact age and the supposedly aristocratic French origins of her surname. Born in the nineteenth century she made her stage debut as a child at the dawn of the twentieth, made her final film (another Atlantic coast drama) Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August in 1986, and died in 1993. She had wanted the great African-American baritone and actor Paul Robeson to recite the twenty-third psalm at her funeral, but she had outlived him by almost two decades.

​Like Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie, Gish had as a young adult convincingly played a troubled and doomed child, in DW Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1920). Her appearance in Portrait of Jennie also carries resonances of young women battered by extreme weather events: in Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928) buffeted mercilessly by a choking and toxic studio sandstorm, and in DW Griffith’s Way Down East whirling helplessly in an actual blizzard before being carried across ice floes wearing only a dress by a terrified (but fur coated) Richard Barthelmess.

Her headdress in Portrait of Jennie functions diegetically to identify her as a nun but also isolates her features, providing (cut-out doll like) a blank template on which subliminal recall of the Gish career can be hung, whether by the original audiences or today’s film history enthusiasts. Paula Marantz Cohen (2001) identifies Lillian Gish’s DW Griffith films as crucial to the emergence of the centrality of the close-up in screen narrative codes. Gish’s costume in Jennie ensures that even in medium-shot her distinctive face is isolated as in close-up.

With her strong features, warm piercing eyes, and her distinctive voice and delivery, with just sufficient trace of theatrical declamation, Barrymore was ideally cast to embody Miss Spinney's blend of authority and shrewd kindness tinged with melancholy. 
 
Lee Kovacs (1999), advocating for the film as a ghost story, closely analyses the supernatural resonances of both novel and film and places Barrymore’s Miss Spinney character as a presiding spirit medium. Gem Wheeler (2019) also points out that Miss Spinney, rather than Eben or Jennie, is the true protagonist of the film. Watching the film in the light of these propositions, it is clear that Spinney has more consistent agency than either Eben or Jennie. Her first appearance is a high angle back view as Eben visits the gallery to try to sell his landscapes. Unnoticed by Eben, who has arrived in haste without an appointment and turns directly away from camera towards Mr Mathews’s desk, Spinney seems, sentinel like, to have been lying in wait for Eben and only moves into the action when her intervention will prevent him leaving empty handed.

Her subsequent appearances at key moments in the drama are suggestive of a fairy godmother figure, a guide who functions in liminal relation to the action like the Ringmaster in Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes (1955). We are told by Eben after Spinney’s appearance in the Park that she can’t see Jennie. But do we take his testimony in this respect (or indeed in any other) as reliable? After Jennie’s final disappearance he presses Spinney to confirm that she believes in Jennie’s existence and she replies equivocally that all that matters is that he does-- exactly the response we might expect from a dea ex-machina who had magiced Jennie into Eben’s life in the first place.

REGULAR GUY — JOSEPH COTTEN
Cotten, the sound of whose name holds connotations of both comforting softness and the dark history of the Trade, was perhaps the ideal American everyman for this depression era tale. The actor’s air of slight bewilderment at finding himself playing whatever role he does happen to be playing makes him a perfect fit for Eben Adams.
 
His autobiography (1987), which he insists is entirely self-penned, is a diligent chronological catalogue of events and show business anecdotes which provides limited insight into his motivations or inner ​life.

Although habitually reliable and professional on set, Cotten doesn’t seem to have overburdened himself with character preparation. Engaged to play an Irishman in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, he arrived at the shoot unsure as to whether he could articulate what would pass for an Irish accent, perhaps calculating that he had a reasonable chance of making a better shot at it than his co-star, Ingrid Bergman.

​In preparation for playing Eben Adams in Portrait, Cotten travelled to Brackman’s studio on Long Island Sound to study the painter at work. He made notes of “two or three” of Brackman’s habits, which doesn’t suggest an extended or painstaking level of research. But then we see almost nothing of the actual application of paint in the film. Cotten was, though, particularly struck that when Brackman wished to review his work from more distance, rather than taking a pace or two backwards, the artist bent his body back into a gravity defying arc. Triumphantly reproducing this curious antic on the shoot, Cotten was respectfully directed to desist.
 
His account of appearing in Portrait gives little insight into his perception of the story or his character’s motivations. But he comments on the universality of occasional brief experiences of the apparent collapse of time and he does seem to have been touched and intrigued by the question of whether, as he puts it, Jennie exists.
 
Commenting that Eban “never exhibits a violent, exaggerated display of emotion” Kovacs (1999) sees him as a ghostly figure “less alive than Jennie”. While there is considerable truth in this, it is to Cotten and Dieterle’s credit that the actor’s self effacing capacity was so effectively harnessed in the role. James Stewart, for example, would likely have over-emoted the part into oblivion. We can imagine Willem Defoe or Bruno Ganz as effective occupants of Eben Adams, but not Tom Cruise. Laurence Olivier, who with Vivian Leigh might at one stage actually have been cast in Jennie, could no doubt have done the obsession very well, but could he have done the self-effacing introversion as well as Cotten?

​FINDING TIME
Eben: Do you think it’s possible that there might have been others in other times whom we might have loved, and might have loved us?
Jennie: Oh, no. No-one else. Of all the people who’ve lived from world’s end to world’s end there’s just one you must love, one you must seek until you find him.

Searching for traces of Jennie’s parents The Flying Appletons, killed in a high wire accident in 1910, Eben enquires first of a mature cop (John Farrell) who knows nothing but can direct him to someone who might, a vaudeville old timer called Pete (Felix Bressart), a one time song-and-dance man now working as stage doorman at the Rialto Cinema. Pete sits at the rear of the screen, dwarfed by the dancing images of the medium that has replaced him. He boasts of a good memory “but sometimes forgets things”.
 
To answer Eban’s query about 1910, Pete has to laboriously count aloud through a decade of years, recalling various acts by the name of Appleton. In a comical mirroring of Jennie’s quest, Eben impatiently urges Pete to hurry more quickly through the years.
 
“Please!” responds the old man, “Let me do it my way. I have to go backwards and then start from the beginning, you see. Otherwise I will not remember and I don’t like not to remember”.
 
Finally recalling the Flying Appletons, Pete suggests that Eben visits the former wardrobe mistress of Hammersteins Music Hall, a woman named Clara Morgan, remarking “Those coloured people, very wise people. They know what trouble is.”  This is surely not only a generalised observation. The comment may simply be implying that if anyone knows all about the Appletons accident then Clara will, but it is alluring to read it as a suggestion that Pete's intermittent memory can glimpse the future as well as the past, and he senses that Eben’s quest will end in doom.
 
Clara (Maude Simmons), a hospitable woman with an alert and accessible memory, receives Eban in her homely sitting room and produces her Hammersteins Music Hall scrap book, easily locating cuttings concerning Jennie’s parents. A loose photo of Jennie as a child in her black dress drops out of the book and Clara identifies her as the Appletons’ daughter. Eben pleads that she must be mistaken and this must in fact be their granddaughter. Assured that this is not so, he dazedly takes his leave and we see that torrential rain is lashing at Clara’s window, prefiguring the hurricane that Eben’s enquiries have just drawn him a step nearer to.

THE WAVE
Eke: It was a wave alright. Sometimes I think I never seen it. That I just read about it, like somethin’ in the Scriptures. It come up out of the sea like a mountain, comin’, comin’, toward the land. Like a day of judgement.

​In the novel there is an extended Cape Cod interlude of several months between Eban placing the completed portrait in Spinney and Mathews' hands and his final reunion with Jennie in the hurricane.

​Cape Cod, that finger of America pointing or beckoning to Europe, is Eben’s spiritual home and the place to which he gravitates to seek resolution or destiny. In both novel and film, as he says goodbye to Spinney before leaving New York she asks him to paint her a picture of a little white church and warns him, with pointed explicitness, against drowning in the sea.
 
The novel recounts how Eben stays briefly with his friend Arne and then rents a small house (“a shack really”) perched above the ocean. He immerses himself in the natural world, observing with the eye of an artist, as well as what we would call an environmentalist, the colours and textures of plants, the skies, the earth, and the sea, the eternal cyclical changes of season and climate. Arne, by contrast, is meanwhile creating a painting of a new power station, believing such a subject to be the true future for art.
 
Although Eben’s sojourn in nature is undisturbed and brings him some inner quietude, there is an undercurrent of anxiety that runs through this penultimate section of Nathan’s novel. Eben knows that Jennie will —must— return to him, but he does not know when. A different film than Dieterle’s would have included some representation of this extended retreat from the city, and it may be that this was scripted at some stage but never included, or that such a quiet contemplative interlude so late in a film was simply a non-starter in Selznick’s creative orbit.
 
So in the film there is no long summer of contemplation and immersion in the natural world. A few seconds of stock train footage brings Eben hot-foot overnight to the fog bound coast.  Before he can obtain a small boat, he must pass a trio of gatekeepers mirroring the three who directed his earlier passage of discovery into theatreland – the authority figure (the Cop), the guide to remembrance (Pete) and the wise witness (Clara). Here these are replaced by Captain Cobb (Clem Bevans), the seasoned mariner who consults the barometer and confidently denies the possibility of a hurricane; his nameless bespectacled companion (Robert Dudley) who remembers that the 1920s hurricane indeed arrived without warning; and the boatman Eke (Henry Hull), who knew Jennie and witnessed the events surrounding her drowning in the hurricane.

As a slightly choppy sea develops into a heavy storm Eben’s tiny sailing craft reaches the massive, eerily abandoned, lighthouse. Cast onto the rocks, he enters the unlocked structure, runs to the top, and desperately calls out against the storm for Jennie. At last he sees her little boat, tacking across an uncannily calm patch of water at a distance. The storm becomes a savage hurricane and the sea boils up as Jennie is wrecked at the base of the lighthouse. Eben pulls her out of the water and they are reunited on the rocks in a brief moment of intense passion. Eben entreats her to come with him to the safety of the lighthouse. If viewed realistically, this escape might just be logistically possible, but they are so rapt in intense desire that they fail to move to safety soon enough. The mountainous tidal wave rears up and overwhelms them.
 
It has been suggested (Kovacs 1999) that Eben’s small craft is simply caught in an ordinary squall and dashed onto the lighthouse rocks and that the whole hurricane and reunion with Jennie may be a hallucination he suffers as a result of the blow. Like the so-called Owl Creek reading of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this is ingenious but in the case of Jennie isn’t it superfluous? Neither melodrama nor fairytales demand explanations for their events. As Charles Barr (2002) says of the glaringly improbable plot points in Vertigo, their plausibility is “poetic and psychological rather than literal.”
​

 
The lurid green tinting of the hurricane gives way to soft warm tones as we briefly see a calm sea lapping the shore and the distant lighthouse while flocks of birds cruise gently overhead. Eben lies in a bed, tended by Captain Cobb, who is just finishing giving him a shave. A visitor appears and sits beside the bed, Miss Spinney. Eben anxiously asks if anyone else was found when he was saved and insists there was a second boat, but Captain Cobb is adamant that there was no one else at sea in the hurricane.

Eben despairs, but then notices that Spinney is holding a scarf which she says was found beside Eben when he was rescued. Jennie's scarf.

A brief coda in the Metropolitan Museum tells us that Eben has become a renowned artist and that his recognition began with his painting Portrait of Jennie. Three museum visitors, teenage girls, discuss whether the sitter was a real person and decide that she must at least have been real to the artist. A smiling Miss Spinney appears for the last time and commends the girls for their wisdom. Then we see Robert Brackman's portrait of Jennifer Jones in full Technicolor.

But you may prefer instead to close your eyes and imagine Eben Adams' painting Girl in a Black Dress, a piece of yellow French silk hung behind her and with her big sad eyes staring straight into yours.

Selznick’s biographer David Thomson (1993) is decisively no admirer of Portrait of Jennie, which he says finds its “eventual realisation” in Vertigo in which “love is turned to madness.”  He hypothesises that Jennie (if it had to be made at all) should have been a silent film or a film “in a foreign language”. This rather gives the game away. It isn’t modern enough, it isn’t American enough. It’s an old film, a European film, it’s in the wrong place, as if its American and European émigré creators had made it by mistake.

Bernard Hermann, later the composer of Vertigo’s Wagner-inflected music, was first choice to score Portrait of Jennie but he was sidelined during production in favour of Russian émigré and one time silent film pianist Dimitri Tiomkin, who provided arrangements of yearning Debussy themes, conjuring shades of Vaslav Nijinsky rather than Kirsten Flagstad. We should be thankful for this decision which, like Joe August’s sublime photography, draws us gently into the realm of “once upon a time” and holds us there. 

​Marina Warner (2014), considering modern fairytale films such as Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011) and Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (2012), proposes that the unambiguous ‘happy’ ending consisting of marriage and lifelong contentment is no longer a viable component of fairytale and that fairytale films are increasingly intended for adult audiences. The feisty orphan Blancanieves achieves vibrancy, respect, and recognition in life, but ends the film shut in her glass coffin as a shoddy, fetishistic, sideshow attraction.

​Portrait of Jennie also doesn’t have a conventional happy-ever-after ending for its leads. But its internal world is restored to equilibrium for the time being, with Eben recognised as the renowned artist that his talents warrant and Jennie returned to her graceful place within the memories of her sanguine elders, Clara the chronicler of Vaudeville and Eke the boatman.

REFERENCES
Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: her legendary life. 2001.
Barr, Charles. Vertigo. 2002
Cotten, Joseph. An Autobiography: vanity will get you somewhere. 1987.
George Eastman Museum: Portrait of Jennie: The Rarest Cinematic Experience of All Time (accessed 21/04/21)
https://youtu.be/xh2oyrWmUf8
Kovacs, Lee. The Haunted Screen: ghosts in literature and film. 1999.
Maratz Cohen, Paula. Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth. 2001.
Nathan, Robert. Portrait of Jennie. 1940
Propp, V (trans. Scott, L). Morphology of the Folktale. 1958/2015.
Thomson, David. Showman: the life of David O Selznick. 1993.
Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time: a short history of the fairytale. 2014.
Wheeler, Gem. Portrait of Jennie remains one of Hollywood’s strangest melodramas. (Publ: 6/5/2019. Accessed 14/04/21)
https://lwlies.com/articles/portrait-of-jennie-william-dieterle-hollywood-melodrama/
Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: the unknown history of fairytale films. 2011.

​

​For filmmakers, Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Hound of the Baskervilles has merits that place it out of the ordinary in the Sherlock Holmes canon.
 
The story is already familiar to many people in outline even if they have never read the book, thanks to earlier films and other adaptations. It is a full length novel rather than a short story and so can afford to dwell on the development of character, atmosphere, and location. The action is bookended by the familiar Holmesian London settings of the Baker Street lodgings, Hotels, messenger offices, and Hansom cabs, but the extended central section describing the unfolding and solving of the mystery happens on a gaunt, autumnal, granite strewn, Dartmoor — a place haunted by ancient curses and inhabited by people who may never be quite what they seem to be. The great convict prison at Princetown looms in the distance and at the heart of the Moor is a treacherous swamp, the Great Grimpen Mire, where to place a foot or a hoof wrong is to risk being pulled gulping helplessly into the slimy depths.
 
Sherlock Holmes himself is absent for a large part of the investigation, or so Dr Watson believes while he acts as investigator, security advisor, and houseguest to Sir Henry Baskerville, the new master of Baskerville Hall, an ancestral mansion that stands at the very edge of the bleak Moor. Watson endeavours to unpick the sinister threat to the life of his host, young Sir Henry, whose uncle Sir Charles Baskerville has recently died in circumstances about which spectral, hound-related, suspicions have arisen. We eventually learn that Holmes has been busy conducting his own parallel investigation, partly from Baker Street and partly while staying incognito in a local Devon town or bivouacking on the Moor itself. Watson and he are reunited for the terrifying dénouement where the demonic Hound is finally seen in material form and destroyed. So for a significant chunk of the novel, Watson is in the foreground both in his usual role as narrator and as the lone (he thinks) investigator.
 
This may raise a problem for screen adaptation. If Holmes is not seen to be ferreting around for clues with his magnifying glass and craftily questioning suspects, how is it a Sherlock Holmes story? If his undercover activities are portrayed explicitly, parts of the puzzle are revealed and elements of plot tension are lost. Some adaptations seem to have simply thrown all the elements of the story up in the air and strung them together however they landed, or made major and invariably ill-advised changes to character and plot.

​For many viewers the quintessential screen Holmes is Basil Rathbone, who had a stab at The Hound in 1939 (dir. Sidney Lanfield). The problem with the Rathbone films for a modern audience (or even a discerning audience at the time) is that although Rathbone’s own appearance and characterisation are superb he is saddled with a preposterous friend and partner in the person of Nigel Bruce’s bumbling nincompoop of a Watson, who is mostly of limited assistance beyond brandishing a revolver and isn’t funny either. Unfortunately the long shadow of this reductive caricature persisted through a number of Bruce’s mid-century successors in the role.
 
Through the 1950s and 60s, however, a more informed and nuanced reading of the characters and stories had emerged, and by the 1980s two great television embodiments of Holmes had appeared. In Britain, the Granada TV series conceived by the imaginative and tenacious producer Michael Cox with Jeremy Brett as Holmes was launched, while in the Soviet Union the prestigious Lenfilm studio created their series starring Vasili Livanov, directed and largely written by Igor Maslennikov. Livanov came from an artistic family and had worked prolifically as a theatre and film actor. He was also a successful director and voice actor in animated film, so had an astute awareness of the value of framing, movement, and the timing of dialogue.

Granada and Jeremy Brett had two excellent Watsons — David Burke in the early series and later Edward Hardwicke. Lenfilm and Livanov had the reliable and prepossessing classically trained actor Vitali Solomin as Watson. Both these series took on The Hound of the Baskervilles and gave it memorable feature length treatments that in their essentials were true to Doyle’s text.

​In spite of, and maybe also partly because of, being the creator of the great rational detective, Conan Doyle was fascinated by the supernatural, famously championing the authenticity of the Cottingley Fairy photographs in 1921 and defending the claims of spiritualism. The first two chapters of The Hound toy with the idea that there may be a supernatural rather than a criminal event at the heart of the mystery, and a residual whiff of the ancient and the uncanny pervades the book right through to the final slaying of the Hound.
 
Granada’s writer Trevor Bowen and actor Jeremy Brett do not neglect to explore the resonances of this otherworldly trace during the opening scenes of their Hound film, although these echoes of a gothic undercurrent unfortunately become muted or absent as the film progresses.
 
Having been briefed about the case in the opening scene by Dr Mortimer (the Dartmoor doctor whose very name signifies death) Holmes spends a day closeted in the Baker Street apartment, thinking about the case and smoking his pipe. As a result, the room, when Watson returns after a day at his club, contains a dense fog to rival any that might be found in a London back alley or a Dartmoor culvert, a metaphorical pointer to the ontological mystery that shrouds the legend of the demonic hound. Holmes has a large map of Dartmoor pinned up on an easel. He points out to Watson the position of Baskerville Hall and various dwellings and topographical features that he needs to familiarise himself with.
 
"And all the rest..."  Holmes concludes, "is waste."  Jeremy Brett brilliantly draws out the final word and lets it die on the air, conjuring in that single sound the misty granite expanses of the desolate primeval Moor. The two men briefly ponder the possibility of a supernatural explanation and then move on, but without explicitly dismissing it.

The novel’s plot plays with the notion that the Barrymores may be implicated in the dark threat that imperils their master. But Watson uncovers the truth that their troubles involve a more private grief. The escaped convict Seldon, whose presence on the Moor is disturbing the locality just as much as sightings of the dreadful Hound, is the younger brother of Eliza Barrymore and was incarcerated years before for the brutal slaying of a family in London. Dr Watson and Sir Henry Baskerville are moved by Eliza Barrymore’s tears and by John Barrymore’s persuasive entreaties that the child-like Seldon is no longer dangerous and anyway will soon be out of the country. The Baronet and Watson reluctantly agree not to inform the police of Seldon’s whereabouts. This is a somewhat unconvincing turnabout by Watson and the Baronet in the novel, but Bowen’s script brilliantly adds a clinching argument not found in Doyle — "They done surgery on ‘im, Sir, to tame ‘im"  pleads Pickup’s gentle and dutiful John Barrymore, and when later we briefly see Seldon after his death he indeed has a scar encircling his brow.

Despite such occasional evocative flashes, the direction does mainly deliver routine by-the-book continuity editing and is short on imaginative or exhilarating moments, and writer Trevor Bowen has expressed disappointment with how his vision was translated to the screen by Granada and staff director Brian Mills. Likewise Jeremy Brett, already suffering the early stages of the physical and mental ill health that would destroy him, was not satisfied with the film and remarked ruefully that he would have liked to have had another shot at The Hound. He was particularly scathing about the unfortunate dog that portrayed the Hound.

Apparently the key question of how the final appearance of the Hound would be achieved, instead of being discussed and settled at the starting point of pre-production work, was decided piecemeal during the shoot. Conan Doyle describes a cross between a mastiff and a bloodhound but bigger than either, the size of a small lioness, and Paget’s illustration shows a huge heavily built animal. What we see all too clearly in Granada’s film is visibly a svelte Great Dane. True, Danes are the tallest real dog available but they are not proportionally wide and a somewhat smaller but more heavily built dog ingeniously shot and edited, or a good animatronic, would have served better. Although there is a fairly convincing optical effect to simulate the daubing of phosphorus on the hound, its final appearance and demise is shot in a rather pedestrian sequence that fails to get anywhere near the horror of the novel’s description of the event:
"Not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen… Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face..."
 
Possibly the problem for film adaptors of The Hound is that the monstrosity that hurtles out of the fog is indeed, both on the page and in Conan Doyle’s imagination, an authentically supernatural terror that only becomes a dog daubed with phosphorus once it has been dispatched by being riddled with revolver bullets. As Watson/Doyle writes: "…that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal" explicitly signifying that until that very moment there was still doubt about the matter.

​What are largely absent from Granada TV’s film are sufficient prickles of gothic menace to suggest the chilling possibility that The Hound of the Baskervilles is simultaneously a yarn about a cunning criminal enterprise and a historical ghost story.
 
First-hand accounts suggest that by 1988 Granada TV were at a stage with the Jeremy Brett Holmes dramas where the money-men felt obliged to keep the series trundling along on its reputation while the company penny pinched wherever they could. In the novel, Inspector Lestrade, longstanding target for Holmes’ intermittent sarcasm, arrives by train from London bearing an unsigned warrant to add the weight of the law to Holmes’ thwarting of the villainous Jack Stapleton. Granada’s regular Lestrade was unavailable so the peculiar contrivance was adopted of having the local doctor, Dr Mortimer, join Holmes and Watson’s arrest party, rather than employing another actor for a day or two to portray an alternative London police Inspector. The presence of a legal authority figure is important to the tension and weight of the scene, and the substitution of Dr Mortimer for Lestrade makes it look like a gentlemen’s adventure and not a legally sanctioned armed stake out.
 
An economy that arguably serves the Granada film well is the decision not to dramatize and show the 17th century origin of the demonic Hound legend, as recounted on the antique scroll in the possession of Dr Mortimer. While it seems intuitive to assume that film is a medium ideally placed to visualise this chilling episode (and most adaptions have done so) this can disrupt the focus on Holmes and Watson’s reception of the case and the viewers’ orientation, and unless done superbly may dilute the impact of the legend and reduce it to a Merrie England tally-ho romp. It is, after all, a brutal story of privilege, kidnap, and intended rape ending in murder. Lenfilm do very successfully include flashbacks to the origin legend — this works well because Maslennikov shoots and edits the sequence as an accelerated nightmare rather than a picturesque costume drama caper such as we see in Hammer’s 1959 Hound of the Beskervilles (dir. Terence Fisher).

​Granada’s Hound falls short of achieving the spinetingling frissons of gothic darkness and dread that ran through their own earlier and far more accomplished feature-length Sign of Four (dir. Peter Hammond). Nevertheless it is a version that insofar as it succeeds does so by substantially placing its trust in Conan Doyle’s telling of the story and rendering of the characters. Jeremy Brett is on lively and sometimes sparkling, if not absolutely top, form. Edward Hardwicke, as ever, consolidates the Granada series restoration of Watson’s decency, intelligence, and humanitarian kindness. 

​Non-Russian newcomers to Lenfilm’s Sherlock Holmes films, and particularly those expecting a conventional and realistic Holmesian universe, may initially find themselves slightly startled on encountering the Baltic character of Baker Street and other exteriors, albeit they are dressed with painstaking attention to detail using authentic red post boxes and immaculately correct English language signage, and peopled by authentically costumed extras such as Victorian London bobbies, red-coat soldiers, and scruffy urchins.

​Vasili Livanov is now widely recognised as one of the greatest interpreters of Sherlock Holmes and he and Vitali Solomin were both born to play their roles. Livanov has less angular features than Brett and plays Holmes as more centred and less mercurial, although certainly a man of action as well as intellect. As Watson, Solomin is instantly a convincing and sympathetic incarnation of the young ex-colonial Doctor.
 
The series also gives Mrs Hudson —Rina Zelyonaya— a more active role than is often customary and more depth of character, amusingly indicating that she has understood the basics of Holmes’s deductive methods long before Watson’s arrival as a novice. Mrs Hudson appears neither in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles or the Granada film, although we might expect her to show Dr Mortimer and his spaniel in and out of the house in the early Baker Street chapters. In Lenfilm’s version she is not only visibly on household duty, she is the member of the Baker Street menage who can swiftly locate the correct atlas page on which to find the large scale map of Dartmoor.
 
Inspector Lestrade, played with moustachioed panache by the diminutive actor Borislav Brondukov, a master of gesture and physical comedy, features as irrepressible foil to Livanov’s Holmes throughout the Lenfilm series, including The Hound. 

​Granada made a conscious production decision at the outset of their series to elide Holmes and Watson’s first introduction and early friendship and to eliminate Watson’s later marriage from the saga. Lenfilm chose to do the exact opposite and to present a measured account of the development of the Holmes/Watson partnership as scaffolding on which to arrange their chosen cases from the canon. Just as in the Conan Doyle stories, we see Watson meeting Holmes for the first time and moving into 221b Baker Street and we follow the two men’s partnership through Watson’s marriage to Miss Morston and eventually to the Sussex bee-keeping retirement of Holmes and the eve of the First World War.
 
Lenfilm’s Hound of the Baskervilles, like Granada’s, largely stays close to the narrative outline of the novel. Beyond Holmes and Watson, the male characters in the Soviet film are played more broadly and somewhat closer to caricature. In particular young Sir Henry Baskerville (who as in the novel has just arrived from Canada) appears as a blunt if naïve frontiersman, complete with a drinking habit, cowhide riding chaps and an enormous fur coat, as if transplanted from a Jack London adventure or Chaplin’s Gold Rush. At one point, frustrated by Beryl Stapleton’s failure to reciprocate his courtship, he takes to horseback and rides across the Moor wildly firing off his revolver in a bout, presumably, of Freudian displacement symbolism. Nevertheless, he is also lampooned as a big baby and in a comic coda is seen being comforted and nursed in bed by the secondary characters like a spoiled little boy.

The Barrymore couple, Dr Mortimer, and the meddlesome old crank Mr Frankland are all used to both sinister and comedic effect, Dr Mortimer appearing to be something of a curtain twitcher. The Grimpen village postmaster, a complacent besuited bureaucrat, affords an opportunity for some wry Russian satire as he twirls the handle of his mechanical pencil sharpener and inspects the results with more diligence and interest than he condescends to award actual post office business. There are also small sardonic nods at western culture — Dr Mortimer’s ill-fated little dog (unnamed in the novel) is called Snoopy and in the Baskerville Hall scenes there is a running joke about the dietary virtues of porridge.
 
As in the novel (but not, as we have seen, in Granada’s film) Inspector Lestrade arrives from London for the denouement. But unlike the novel, in which he falls to the ground in terror upon seeing the Hound leaving Holmes and Watson to attend to attacking the beast, Lestrade is here the fearless professional policeman whose firepower quickly dispatches the animal after Homes and Watson have both missed their aim and the monstrous creature is already at Sir Henry’s throat. The Hound here is considerably more effectively conceived and photographed than Granada’s. It wears a skull-like demonic mask of blinding white and moves purposefully towards our point-of-view position with what seems to be a supernatural pace and gait.
 
The Moor in Lenfilm’s Hound of the Baskervilles has little in its appearance that resembles the actual scenery of Dartmoor. Having neither the means nor the inclination to produce a simulacra of Devonshire, the Russian filmmakers place the story in an environment that, compared to the rolling Yorkshire of Granada’s film, is a bleakly sinister world that resonates powerfully with Holmes observation that “…the setting is a worthy one. If the devil did decide to have a hand in the affairs of men.” 
​

​Everything seems to be either wet or barren. Rutted muddy roads splosh with rain and melting slush,  fetid meres are fringed with gaunt and stunted conifers. Where there is not stagnant water there are bleak gullies of jagged grey stone, like quarries long abandoned as being unworkable. Unkempt fields and gardens mark the boundaries of dilapidated mansions. The deadly Grimpen Mire itself is just the most noxious and treacherous bog in a panorama of swamps — a grey and smoky Tarkovskian hellscape where the rotting remains of troglodyte industrial huts protrude from the bottomless ooze. The freedom of the Russian filmmakers to wholly reimagine Dartmoor from the atmospheric bare bones of Conan Doyle’s thriller, rather than attempting to reference the actual locations, provides a fantastic and dramatically striking look that make this a memorably successful Hound film.

​Of the significant female characters in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Beryl Stapleton is the one most often developed or transformed by film adaptors. Imbued with undercurrents of exoticism and intrigue, she is bound to the psychopathic and sadistic Stapleton while retaining moral boundaries that compel her to resist or subvert his murderous schemes. On the night of the attempt on Sir Henry’s life at the end of the book, Stapleton has whipped and gagged her and tied her to a pillar in the attic thereby supplying, for a film adaptor so inclined, an opportunity to inject a frisson of sadomasochism to add to the whiff of incest already hanging over Beryl’s shifting narrative status as sister and wife to Stapleton. Something of this psychological complexity may be intended during the rescue scene in Granada’s film when, in a briefly lingering close up of Holmes tenderly and uncharacteristically cradling Beryl’s battered head after her release, Jeremy Brett may be expressing a hint of ambiguity in the sexually ascetic detective’s expression, or it may just be perplexity at the eternal wickedness of his fellow men.

In the equivalent scene in the Soviet film, Livanov's Holmes similarly supports the traumatised and injured Beryl but, as in the novel, swiftly and professionally administers that universal nineteenth century restorative, the brandy flask.

Key to the plot mechanism of The Hound of the Baskervilles but not featuring prominently in the narrative is the intriguing character of Mrs Laura Lyons. The adult daughter of the cantankerous eccentric Mr Frankland, Laura married an artist called Lyons some years prior to the events of the novel and soon separated acrimoniously from him. Disowned by her father, she obtained charitable help from old Sir Charles Baskerville and others to set up as a typist (a modest but viable home-based occupation in the 1890s).
 
Having been duped by Mr Stapleton into playing a small and unwitting role in luring Sir Charles Baskerville to his death, Laura’s name enters Dr Watson’s investigative trajectory. He learns from Dr Mortimer that Laura married the artist Lyons without seeking Frankland’s consent and that Lyons in time deserted her, although in Dr Mortimer’s view "the fault may not have been entirely" on the husband's side. Watson, then, already understands Laura to be "of equivocal reputation"  before setting off to visit her at her home in the small town of Coombe Tracey.

​Stapleton had entrapped Laura by assuring her that he will marry her if she can obtain a divorce from Lyons, although as we later discover Stapleton is already married to Beryl whom he is currently passing off as his sister. Watson is not yet aware of the latter fact, but he does have evidence that Laura played a role in ensuring that Sir Charles was enticed into leaving the safety of Baskerville Hall on the night of his death, and is it about this that he now wishes to confront her.
 
Dr Watson, never at a loss to voice appreciation of a desirable women when he encounters one, describes Laura Lyons like this:
"The first impression... was one of extreme beauty. Her eyes and hair were of the same rich hazel colour, and her cheeks, though considerably freckled, were flushed with the exquisite bloom of the brunette, the dainty pink which lurks at the heart of the sulphur rose."
 
Having thus not held back, he checks himself and decides to temper his enthusiasm with some secondary reservations, remarking that her face held: "some coarseness of expression... hardness, perhaps of eye... looseness of lip"  which marred the perfect beauty of "a very handsome woman".
 
Substantially holding her own in the face of Watson’s polite but tenacious interrogation, Laura sends him on his way with his investigation only slightly advanced. We meet her once more when Holmes and Watson visit her together, just hours prior to the melodramatic denouement on the Moor. This time Holmes, in a hurry and doubtless immune to the dainty pink which lurks at the heart of the sulphur rose, carries out a robust and pitiless interrogation during which he discloses the depth and cruelty of Stapleton’s abuse of Laura’s emotional and financial vulnerability.

​On screen, the character of Laura Lyons should offer productive opportunities in script and casting to inject a seam of smouldering redheaded rebelliousness and equivocation. After all, this woman was brought up by Frankland, a colourful and inventive father figure if an unreliable one, and she herself made a headstrong and socially defiant decision to elope with an artist.
 
Some adaptations have endeavoured to open out the Lyons strand of the story. A 1983 film (dir. Douglas Hickox) with Ian Richardson as a sardonic Holmes and Donald Churchill as a Watson still trapped hopelessly in the blithering nincompoop tradition, makes substantial changes to the core narrative, almost every one of them detrimental to the pacing of the unravelling of the mystery. In that version, Laura Lyons (Connie Booth) is still living with her husband, characterised as a violent drunken brute but with a heart of gold — so enabling a lamely written and rather monotonous turn by an interminably bellowing Brian Blessed, eclipsing any feminist recalibration of Laura’s situation that may have been intended. More absurdly, the script has Laura’s fatal assignation with Sir Charles be part of a developing romantic liaison instead of a petition for the elderly Baronet to finance her divorce from Lyons.
 
Half a decade of identity politics later, the Granada/Jeremy Brett version opts for a straightforward Laura Lyons as serial victim of patriarchy approach. The two visits by the detectives are truncated into a single one with Holmes leading the questioning. Laura’s strained face evidences her “unhappy history” — neglect and rejection by her father, a brutal marriage to Mr Lyons, abusive manipulation by Stapleton, and now an aggressive interrogation by Holmes. Although sympathetically and intelligently played by Elizabeth Spender, there is nothing here approaching the erotic charge of Watson’s first description of Laura in the novel. The scripting, costume, and design and set dressing of the cottage leave the character as little more than a functionary of the detective mystery, although the scene is sympathetically amplified by a dialogue-free interlude in which Laura leaves the room to recover from shock by bathing her face.

​By contrast, Lenfilm’s Hound of the Baskervilles team have clearly understood that if there is a femme fatale in the story she is Laura Lyons and not Beryl Stapleton, and that this woman is an avant-garde adventurer whose history has been associated with artists and with an unconventional and rebellious lifestyle. In this version, before Watson makes his first visit to Laura he has endured a tirade of invective from Mr Frankland, who is momentarily under the misapprehension that Watson is trying to locate his daughter because he wishes to verify at first hand her promiscuous reputation.
 
Having extricated himself from this outburst Watson arrives at Laura’s home in Coombe Tracey, is shown in by a neat maid (as in the novel), and finds himself in an elegant salon with distinctly oriental influences in both the décor and its occupant’s relaxed costume. Played with nonchalant charm by the acclaimed theatre and film actress Alla Demidova, this Laura Lyons may easily be believed to be as much adventurer as victim. She sizes up Watson with an experienced eye and when his questions move into uncomfortable territory she coolly produces an elegant long stem pipe and plays for time by filling and lighting it.   
 
For the second visit to Laura at the climax of the story Lenfilm dispense with Watson’s presence (on the credible pretext that he instead goes to meet Inspector Lestrade from the train) so that the scene involves Holmes and Laura Lyons alone. This makes cinematic sense since Watson’s role in this scene in the novel is purely that of observer. The absence of a character already familiar to Laura puts her at a disadvantage when she is now suddenly confronted by the formidable Sherlock Holmes and heightens the sense of dramatic resolution.

​During Holmes crucial revelation concerning Stapleton’s marital status and murderous motives, both Holmes and the viewer see only the back of Demidova’s head and not her face, allowing for the intriguing possibility that Laura is artfully preparing herself to exhibit an appropriate reaction rather than suppressing an involuntary one. Is she more shocked and upset by the prospect of losing the money than by the treachery of the man?
 
In casting Demidova and in the direction and mise en scene of the two Laura Lyons scenes, and by amplifying Old Frankland’s estimation of his daughter’s scandalous character, the Lenfilm team have foregrounded a layer of exotic mystery that is hinted at en passant in Conan Doyle’s novel but not developed ​there.

The Soviet Lenfilm and British Granada films of The Hound of the Baskervilles both have the intrinsic merit of sticking broadly to the trajectory of the story as told in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel while also starring the greatest incarnations of Sherlock Holmes of the second half of the 20th century.

Jeremy Brett is now so universally associated with Holmes that his distinguished theatre and screen career in other roles can tend to be neglected, a process that started during his lifetime and may have exacerbated his lifelong health conditions. Vasili Livanov’s status as a definitive screen Holmes is recognised internationally, including in Britain where he was awarded an honorary MBE.
 
A few weeks after the conclusion of the adventure on Dartmoor, Conan Doyle sets a “Retrospection” chapter in which Holmes and Watson sit in front of a roaring fire at 221b Baker Street and reflect on the case. Ostensibly an attempt to tie up the loose ends, instead it mostly succeeds in highlighting the absurdities of the plot and shining a light on Sherlock Holmes preposterously risky strategy for protecting the life of his client. But then, maybe The Hound of the Baskervilles isn’t so much about whether you can believe in an absurd and labyrinthine criminal enterprise to steal an inheritance but about whether you might believe in a smouldering hell hound when you have ventured alone onto desolate moorland in "those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted”.
​

​Bibliograpy:
Cox, Michael. 2011. A Study in Celluloid: A Producer's Account of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. 1902. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes
Stuart Davies, David. 2012 (revised electronic edn.) Bending the Willow, Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes
 
Online resources re Lenfilm and Livanov:
http://russia-ic.com/people/general/l/168
https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Vasily_Livanov
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news/sightsound/studio-lenfilm-under-siege
https://youtu.be/ZiqF4dEVkzw
# all accessed 04/03/2021
 
Also of interest:
Bayard, Pierre (transl. Mandell, Charlotte). 2008. Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
In this provocative and sometimes hilarious book Bayard, a psychoanalyst and professor of literature, uses philosophical theories of fictional worlds and applies Sherlock Holmes own deductive methods to exonerate both Mr Stapleton and his dog and to identify the true murderer 

Appraisal of Louise Brooks’ third European film, Prix de Beauté (aka Miss Europe, 1930) is routinely overshadowed by the towering reputation of her two G. W. Pabst directed silent films, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.
​
Initially planned and shot as a silent film and catapulted into the sound era, ready or not, Prix de Beauté is sometimes regarded as a flawed compromise, if not a downright failure — not least by Brooks herself who on being told, decades after the film’s completion, that its producer was planning a re-release retorted “He must be nuts”

​The discovery and restoration in the early 21st century of the original (and longer) silent version of the film has further dented the sound version’s reputation, particularly among silent film purists. However if we set aside the notion that one or the other version must be superior and definitive, then the sound version, far from being some ham-fisted fiasco, can be experienced positively and pleasurably in the context of the receptive possibilities enabled by sound film after it became widespread but before it became highly sophisticated. If we put aside our received expectations of both silent and sound films, perhaps what we hear in Prix de Beauté is, as the humourist Wilson Nye said of Wagner’s music, much better than it sounds

The film was conceived by Pabst and Rene Clair, Clair initially hoping to direct it. Due to production delays it was eventually directed by the Italian Augusto Genina, an experienced and well regarded director, but one who spoke no English and was thus perfectly matched with the star Louise Brooks, who spoke no Italian. The film’s dialogue, of course, was in French. Speech was thus a troublesome  area on the shoot even before it was addressed in the film itself.
 
Fortuitously, the DP engaged was the brilliant Rudolph Maté who had worked with Karl Freund and had shot Dryer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. In spite of speaking very little Italian himself, the Polish Maté seems to have acted as unofficial interpreter between Genina and Brooks after the official translator proved both unreliable and mischievous. Genina later claimed that Brooks was drunk out of her head during the entire shoot. Though there is probably some truth in this, the integrity and precision of her performance in the finished film suggests that it is likely exaggerated. 

The film’s frequently analysed concluding and most famous scene takes place, appropriately, in a sound test screening room. A test of beauty queen Lucienne (Brooks) performing a popular song about jealousy and fidelity is being shown. The siren image and chanteuse warbling of Lucienne, up on screen, enchants both herself and the small audience of industry magnates. But her psychotically jealous husband André steals into the room unseen by the distracted projectionist, produces a pistol, and fatally shoots the original of the image. Lucienne lies dying in the arms of André’s aristocratic rival, the Prince, while the projector whirrs on and the song continues, a deflated André making no attempt to escape his detention by the burly projectionist.

​This scene is critically celebrated because it is remarkably beautifully constructed — but also because it embodies several layers of artifice and is emblematic of both the transition to sound cinema and the ephemeral nature of celebrity, stardom, and human life itself. Besides the narrative irony intended by the film makers, we may be aware today that the American Louise Brooks, silent movie icon and supreme physical actress, is present as a radiant image throughout this film but that her voice is not only dubbed in French, but dubbed by two different women (Hélène Regelly and Hélène Caron).
 
“Lucienne” is thus a shape shifter. Just as the character moves between milieus, occupations, loyalties, life and death, her representation is fragmented elusively between sound and vision, movement and stillness, between Lucienne’s pain and Brooks’ reputation for hedonism and her back catalogue of damaged and exploited girls. While not quite the end of Brooks’ acting career, the heart breaking use (or preposterously arch use, take your pick) of recorded sound in this final scene supplies a triumphant full-flight exit from her short European career.

In fact Brooks had a perfectly fine speaking voice, as the handful of American sound films she made after Prix and the recorded interviews she gave in later life attest. The decline and abrupt termination of her career in America had to do with her blatant antipathy towards Hollywood and not the transition to sound.

Kenneth Tynan derides this final scene of Prix de Beauté , declaring sniffily --“the French infatuation with irony is fearsomely indulged” . This in 1979, a year when England was so awash with irony as to both embrace New Romantic pop music and elect Margaret Thatcher. Tynan did, though, concede that Brooks brought “her indomitable flair” to the scene. 

At the beginning of Prix de Beauté we are introduced to the central working class characters — the good looking couple Lucienne and André and their friend, the kind hearted and comical but physically goofy Antonin.
 
Significantly, we meet them enjoying a leisure activity — a bathing excursion. As well as providing an early opportunity to show Louise Brooks changing into a bathing suit, the scene establishes their economic status. This trio belong to the emerging class of young urban working people with a small but regular surplus of disposable income to spend on consumer activities such as cinemas, bars, magazines, smart weekend clothes, day-trips and fairgrounds. They even possess a small car. They are cinematically related to the young foursome in 1929’s Menschen am Sonntag (Siodmak and Ulmer) who we also see enjoying the physical and economic freedom of a bathing trip in a scene to which the opening of Prix has some superficial resemblance.
​
​This first scene introduces us clearly and succinctly to the protagonists’ characters: Lucienne’s carefree delight in her own body and men’s admiration of it, André’s easily triggered jealousy, and Antonin’s role as the pair’s loyal and sexually unthreatening sidekick. However, the scene also occupies itself with pointedly inserting images and sounds of technology and lifestyle into the montage — a huge pile of parked motor bikes and bicycles, and the first of a series of horn loudspeakers that punctuate the film blaring out recorded music or public announcements. As well as being a romantic melodrama, this is a film that flirts with a documentary mode, celebrating and foregrounding both the sight and the sound of the technology of the modern age and the city — typewriters, enormous printing presses, public address systems, mechanical pianos, telephones, motorised traffic, express trains, and finally sound film itself.

​Lucienne is a typist at a major newspaper, Le Globe. Her work consists of typing letters and newspaper copy which is then fired by pneumatic tube down to the print room where both André and Antonin work as compositors, serving the enormous printing machines. The three are thus figuratively tied into a chain of technology which provides them with means to aspire to the lifestyle promised by the very advertisements and features that their labour makes manifest.
​
The editing of Prix de Beauté and the construction of its sound track blurs the clear distinctions, which were to become standard practice as synch sound became more established, between diegetic and non-diegetic music and between non-diegetic music and sound effects. Some of the disappointment with the film, both on its release and since, complains of poor synchronisation and relatively primitive use of tacked-on diegetic sound. However, looked at another way, could these qualities not instead provide the film with a discursive dimension that, while sometimes providing an unintended Brechtian reminder that we are watching an artifice, also counterpoints the film’s visual preoccupation with documentary images of technology and consumerism, so underlining the alienated plight of its working class characters. The street and railway station scenes have a documentary quality reminiscent more of a Vertov or Richter city symphony than the formal staging of a Pabst or Murnau film.

In the opening bathing scene, images of swim-suited extras enjoying themselves in and around the water are accompanied by splashing sounds and snatches of conversation and laughter which no attempt is made to synchronise with the images. So from the start sound and image have a sometimes elastic relationship. The sound loosely complements rather than mimics the visual text.
 
When Brooks appears to sing part of the song “Je n'ai qu'un amour” to André at the end of the bathing scene, what is happening diegetically? Is Lucienne joining in with the record we have just seen playing in close up (and if so why can we hear only one voice), is she playfully miming to the song, or might we mistakenly conclude that the film we have started watching is going to be a musical? The broad brush attitude to sound which drives Prix de Beauté is unconcerned with such receptive details. The sole point is that André hears this song, apparently from Lucienne’s lips, at the both the beginning and the end of the film — the first time it reassures him of Lucienne’s devotion and the second time its falsehood confirms her total betrayal and underscores his murderous impulses. It therefore equates more closely to a theme played live during a screening of the silent version of the film than to a realistic aural detail, indeed we have already heard an orchestral version over the main titles and a number of variations recur at key dramatic points. Elsewhere in the film, the sound of a cuckoo clock or the rumble of a train seem to emerge from the score rather than overlay it.

The Globe newspaper, corporate employer of our threesome, is sponsoring a beauty contest to select Miss France. Despite André’s disapproval Lucienne enters and, initially unbeknown to André, wins. The selection is apparently by photograph, conveniently accelerating the plot to the point where Lucienne is hastily but lavishly outfitted at the Globe’s expense and whisked away by luxury train to San Sébastien to compete for the title of Miss Europe. After winning the title in a vast outdoor catwalk contest, she is courted at a lavish reception ball by two aristocratic suiters, a Maharajah and a Prince. But André, who has followed her to Spain, arrives. Touched by his devotion, Lucienne welcomes him joyously but he flees in a jealous rage. Lucienne follows him to the train and, lovingly reunited, they return home.

An abrupt cut next shows Lucienne living a life of domestic boredom in the couple’s claustrophobic apartment. Evidently she is now married to André and no longer goes to work at the Globe. Her days are measured out, in a heavy double dose of avian symbolism, by the melancholy cheeping of a caged canary and the relentless ticking and sounding of a cuckoo clock. Her consolation is found in playing a record of the tango that she danced with the Prince in San Sébastien and in signing fan photos of herself as Miss Europe. Discovering a pile of the latter, André rips them to pieces in a rage.

​While André is out at work, the Prince arrives, having tracked down Lucienne, and offers her a contract for screen tests and by implication a position as his mistress. Angrily, she initially dismisses him, but faced with the continuing boredom of her life and André’s unabated jealousy she finally abandons André and goes to the Prince, precipitating the events of the famous final scene in the screening room.

Moments of silence in Prix de Beauté are few and very brief. There is music almost throughout, driving the narrative along, as there would have been at screenings of the silent version. So early distribution screenings of the film would have avoided the echoey, uncanny, crackle and hiss from the optical sound track, so characteristic of the gaps between dialogue lines in Tod Browning’s ponderous Dracula (1931) and similar soundstage-grounded fare. The dialogue in Prix, perhaps because it was added to a film conceived as a silent, augments the characters of the protagonists somewhat but is mainly inessential to understanding the plot. It would be possible for a non-French speaker watching an un-subtitled print to follow the story with a minimum of puzzlement.

In one scene André, Lucienne, and Antonin visit an urban fairground and the two men try their hand at a try-your-strength sideshow involving hurling a miniature truck on rails up a steep incline with the aim of getting it to the top. André succeeds in this task, symbolically rehearsing with this fairground toy his later desperate pursuit of Lucienne by rail. But he fails to notice that during his exertions Lucienne is distracted by her revulsion towards the rowdiness and uncouth eating habits of the working class men who are crowding around her.

Having thus confirmed his masculinity in a trial of strength, André takes Lucienne to a fusty fairground photographer whose camera and shabby arcadian backcloth, to say nothing of his posing regime, belong to the nineteenth century. Unlike the reconciled husband and wife in a similar scene in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, having their portrait taken as a couple fails to cement André and Lucienne’s affection, instead giving Lucienne further cause to doubt their compatibility.

​The whole fairground sequence is accompanied by a montage of thumping fairground organ music and raucous crowd walla, underlining Lucienne’s growing realisation that André’s unambitious and unsophisticated tastes offer her a constrained future. The volume drops slightly, a concession to realism, as the couple enter the photographer’s booth and are obliged to wait their turn, watching while the simple and unprepossessing couple before them are subjected to the photographer’s banal patter as he fusses with his cumbersome apparatus.

The small restaurant where Lucienne, André, and Antonin habitually spend their lunchbreaks is aurally coded by the sound of a mechanical piano. In keeping with the film’s documentary fascination with, and celebration of, technology and automation, Genina several times shows us the piano keys moving independently and the hammers striking the strings. There is more to this than simply the director of an early sound film saying “Look, this is the real sound of what you are seeing.”  It is part of a sound montage about machines and automation running through the film that complements, and slips in and out of unison with, its visual counterpart.

A key scene in this restaurant occurs when André has purchased an engagement ring and is proudly showing it to Antonin. The absent Lucienne has just been awarded the Miss France title and is at that very moment being feted at the train station by the press as she boards the sleeper to San Sébastien. Antonin knows this, because he was earlier given the job of typesetting the story. André does not.
 
A group of other diners approach André to teasingly congratulate him, he initially assumes, on his engagement to the beautiful Lucienne. But on being shown the Miss France news story in the newspaper he learns the truth that the kindly Antonin has endeavoured to shield him from. The group of diners standing over André start to laugh at him. Here the dubbed, loosely synchronised, slightly forced laughter serves to heighten André’s angry humiliation. It is the aural equivalent of laughter in upper case and in quotation marks. As with Lucienne’s song in the opening scene, the sound demonstrates rather than closely mimicking the visual narrative.

Refuting the widespread notion that “the story of early cinema was one of a gradual progression toward ‘The Jazz Singer’”, Norman King writes of the use of live sound in the silent era:
​
“Essentially it produced effects in the cinema that recorded sound could not, a sense of immediacy and participation. Live sound actualised the image and, merging with it, emphasised the presentness of the performance and of the audience.”
 
A witty demonstration of precisely the draining away of this sense of immediacy and participation upon the arrival of talkies occurs in Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) when several the characters go to the cinema. Having enjoyed the pit band’s lively exertions accompanying a silent comedy, the audience are variously perplexed, bored, or irritated when the talkie starts and the musicians leave their instruments and get out the playing cards and sandwiches.
 
In the sound version of Prix de Beauté this “presentness of the performance” may indeed have been absent in 1930. But Genina’s insistence on foregrounding the sights and sounds of the new technologies and the faces and figures of the public facilitated and emphasised the original audience’s participation in the screen world, even if today we are several removes from steam trains and gramophones.

By 1933 the critic Rudolf Arnheim ruefully concluded that the coming of sound had all but annihilated the art of film just as it was finally getting into its stride. And watching some early sound offerings it’s difficult not to concede that he had a point.
 
But to imaginative directors such as Carl Theodor Dryer, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock sound offered new ways to conjure passion or invoke menace or transcendence or to build suspense. Additionally, there could now be consistency. Yes, the presentness was lost, but audiences, particularly in the outer reaches of the distribution chain, could now hear the original sound of a song or a dance tune rather than having to rely on a local pianist or pit band’s best guess or interpretation of sheet music. It should be remembered that the normally excellent quality of accompaniment we experience from today’s dedicated specialists was not the universal experience of 1920s picturegoers. There had been film sound experiments using discs since the 1890s, culminating in the cumbersome Vitaphone system used for The Jazz Singer. But experiments they largely remained, until the development of optical sound tracks which literally embedded the sound data within the same ribbon as the image.

The received view that developments in sound, like innovations in film photography, are part of a linear trajectory towards realistic perfection can skew our appreciation of a film such as Prix de Beauté. Realism and surface polish are aesthetic choices, not defaults. To contemporary film makers such as Guy Maddin and Bill Morrison and their audiences, degraded nitrate footage is not a catastrophe but a cornucopia of opportunities. In making the Cornwall set film Bait (2019) the director Mark Jenkin devised a kind of social anti-realism by shooting silent using a clockwork 16mm camera, deliberately contaminating the processing chemicals, and dubbing the entire film in post-production.
 
One person’s convincing realism is another’s irritating gimmick. It’s not an unreasonable perception that today's surround sound, far from completing the illusion that we are immersed in the screen space, merely alerts us to the presence of multiple speakers in the auditorium (or worse, makes us wonder why a barking dog has been shut in the toilets). To paraphrase Mark Kermode’s remarks about 3D, no-one ever complained that the problem with Gaslight is that you can’t hear Anton Walbrook pacing about in the auditorium ceiling.

​Having gained the title of Miss Europe at the San Sebastian contest, Lucienne is feted at a lavish ball in the palatial hotel. She does not know it, but André is hurtling through the night by train to confront her, huddled on a wooden third class bench.
 
The tango, of all dances, typically evokes both enchantment and betrayal, arousal and loss, the rose and the thorn. Unsurprisingly it has often been used by filmmakers to signal exactly these eternal contradictions.

At the Miss Europe celebration ball we initially see bright young couples dancing a foxtrot while the elderly rich in their old fashioned evening clothes and conspicuous jewels look on voyeuristically. Lucienne is sitting out the foxtrot, lounging in a comfortable chair, radiant, holding court to her two rival suitors, the Prince and the Maharaja.
 
A drum roll is supplied by the dance band drummer (naturally, Genina gives us a close-up of this). An elderly dignitary makes a short announcement during which the dance band is replaced by a tango orchestra and singer. The Prince asks Lucienne to dance. The music starts.
 
In long shot, young couples take the floor. We can’t see the Prince and Lucienne, and won’t see them just yet for a while. The lighting has switched to strong low angle backlight streaming across the dancefloor, haloing the glamorous young tango dancers and making a vivid shadow dance on the floor. 

Then at last the camera finds the Prince and Lucienne. And of course she has completely fallen for him and he is seducing her in extreme close up. Here we definitely don’t need the brief snatches of dubbed dialogue to assist our comprehension.
 
This exquisite scene of less than three minutes is the powerful pivot point of the film. Although familiarity and compassion do temporarily reunite Lucienne and André as a domestic couple, the die is cast here that inexorably leads to the fatal screening room. There is no escape from the tango.

REFERENCES
Arnheim, Rudolph. 1957. Film as Art
Brooks, Louise. 1982. Lulu in Hollywood
King, Norman. 1984. The Sound of Silents. From Screen 25.3 (In Abel, Richard (Ed).1996. Silent Film)
Metz, Christian. 1975. Aural Objects (In Mast, Cohen, & Baudry. 1992. Film Theory and Criticism)
Paris, Barry. 1989. Louise Brooks, A Biography
Spadoni, Robert. 2007. Uncanny Bodies.
Tynan, Kenneth. 1979. The Girl in the Black Helmet. (Intro to Brooks, Louise. 1982. Lulu in Hollywood)

The three young working class Londoners at the heart of Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy of novels, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, have dreams but few expectations. Like many millions in the 1920s, they seek occasional brief intervals of escape from their troubled lives and tangled hearts by going to The Pictures, often followed by Going Out to Tea.
 
The first book, The Midnight Bell, is the story of Bob, waiter at the eponymous pub near Warren Street, and his obsessive and self-destructive courting of a young prostitute, Jenny. Jenny’s life is inevitably chaotic and precarious and at the end of the book Bob, having spent all his careful savings trying to rescue her from it, leaves in despair to go to sea.
 
The second book, The Siege of Pleasure, is the back story of how Jenny originally fell into prostitution after a brief but stultifying stint as cook and general servant to three elderly householders in Chiswick. Apart from a few framing pages set at the same time as the culmination of Bob’s story in The Midnight Bell, the main narrative of The Siege of Pleasure takes place five years or so earlier.
 
The final volume, The Plains of Cement, tells the story of Ella, barmaid at the Midnight Bell pub and Bob’s friend and secret admirer, and is set in the same timeframe as Bob’s story in the first novel. Ella, whose education has been limited but whose intuition is sharp and her heart generous, harbours an unrequited passion for Bob, who regards her just as a kindly friend. Ella is obsessively courted by a pub customer, the considerably older and crashingly insensitive Mr Eccles, whom she finally rejects.
 
Going to The Pictures together with Going Out to Tea, often to a Lyons restaurant, punctuate the trilogy like route markers in a swamp.

The Midnight Bell was published on its own in 1929. The Siege of Pleasure followed in 1932 and The Plains of Cement in 1934. Since the main action of the first and last volumes of the trilogy is concurrent and that of the middle volume is set earlier, we can assume that Hamilton sets the novels and the various expeditions to The Pictures roughly between the years 1923 and 1928. He was therefore writing the trilogy across the transition from silent to sound film, but it was all set during the late silent era. (What is regarded as the first British talkie feature, Hitchcock’s Blackmail, was premiered in London in 1929, in parallel with a silent version).
​
Bob finally goes away to sea, therefore, just in time to miss the advent of The Talking Pictures.

Major transformations also took place in Patrick Hamilton’s life between starting the first novel of the trilogy and completing the last. He became a successful playwright with Rope and Gaslight, his beloved mother died, he got married, and he was nearly killed and severely facially scarred in a car accident. And he became a Marxist. As his biographer Sean French (1993) relates, Hamilton’s Marxism was a personal variant that accommodated not only decades of admiration for Stalin and all his works but, in later life, wholehearted support for the British Tory Party, including its epoch shattering 1956 Suez escapade.

But perhaps Hamilton's theoretical understanding of the role of wider economic factors in the shaping of character and motive led to his portrait of the barmaid Ella in The Plains of Cement being deeper and more empathetic than either his earlier rendering of her in The Midnight Bell or his bleak account of the prostitute Jenny in The Siege of Pleasure.

THE MIDNIGHT BELL
Desire, Tussauds, and the Sea
​
In the first few pages of the first volume, we learn that Bob the Waiter and Ella the Barmaid live-in at the Midnight Bell pub and have adjacent bedrooms at the top of the building. Their employers (known only as the Governor and the Mrs.) are a kindly pair who are well disposed towards their staff. Ella has worked at the pub longer than Bob, a recent arrival of five months standing. Ella was initially hopeful of a romance with him and early on he took her Out to Tea twice and once to The Pictures. But, ‘There, however, the thing had ended.’  The good natured Ella has instead settled for friendship and good will but, as Bob is uncomfortably aware, she has a very acute sense of his moods and inclinations.
 
One evening, two prostitutes, a dark-haired one accompanied by the blond and beautiful Jenny, come into The Midnight Bell for a drink. And so begins the infatuation that will lead to Bob’s personal and financial downfall. His position as a waiter means that he is mobile and, duties permitting, he can chat to customers seated at the tables, a situation he now quickly takes advantage of.
 
Jenny and her friend, with well-honed professional flirtatiousness, comment on Bob’s good looks. The friend opines that he looks like a film star they saw at The Pictures recently, whom Jenny identifies as the smouldering Spanish-American actor Antonio Moreno. Bob bashfully declares that no-one had ever suggested this resemblance before.
 
‘But’, writes Hamilton, ‘the compliment enriched his soul, as he stood there.’
 
Learning that Bob, who is half-American and half-Irish, had an American cop for a father, Jenny again references The Pictures to conjure a mental image of the man, and her friend teasingly suggests that Bob should himself go into the films.

The flattering glamour of The Pictures then, is the honey in the trap that first ensnares Bob and eventually costs him his precious savings and threatens his sanity. His self-inflicted torture over the ensuing weeks and months consists of multiple chaste assignations with Jenny where she either doesn’t appear at all, appears late, or on one occasion appears early as if to criticise his own punctuality, goads him with signs of devotion or with harsh indifference, and all the time incrementally relieving him of his money while volunteering absurd promises to pay him back.
 
Patrick Hamilton, like his late Victorian predecessor George Gissing, had first-hand experience of the obsessive and destructive pursuit of prostitutes and other desirable but incompatible sirens, and many of his novels feature such obsessions and the occasionally murderous or suicidal feelings engendered.
 
Early on, after Bob and Jenny have spent the evening in a bar and dance hall near Leicester Square, Jenny hints that she will spend the remainder of the night pursuing her profession in nearby Soho. As they part, Bob ruefully reflects that he has lost an evening off which he might more enjoyably (and inexpensively) have spent visiting The Pictures on his own. But, infatuated by Jenny’s beauty, he quickly dismisses the thought.
 
The next morning, as Bob and Ella chat while they prepare the pub for opening, the attentive and intuitive Ella comes near to guessing who Bob has spent his evening with. Embarrassed by how close she has come to hitting the truth, he lies, telling her that he indeed spent a quiet evening at The Pictures. ‘I’ve heard that one before’ retorts Ella, further discomforting him and perplexing him with her perspicacity. ‘Her femininity’, the author informs us, ‘was beyond him’.
 
Some evenings later, looking forward to what he hopes will be a more successful assignation with Jenny the following week, Bob unexpectedly asks an astonished Ella if she’d like to come to The Pictures with him the next afternoon. He broaches the subject by teasingly raising her infatuation with the square-jawed American screen actor Richard Dix (née Ernest Brimmer).
 
‘For although Ella, in her heart of hearts, was a placid and efficient girl, she also worshipped at the shrine of pure beauty and romance. And in Richard Dix both these forces were incarnate.’
​

​Bob and Ella’s excursion to the Madame Tussauds Cinema to see Richard Dix in The Gay Defender is one of three accounts in Hamilton’s trilogy of visits to 1920s picturehouses that touch on the cinema experience itself and its effect upon the characters.
 
Madame Tussauds famous museum in the Marylebone Road had caught fire in 1925 and, unsurprisingly for a waxworks museum, had burned furiously for many hours causing damage which necessitated two years of rebuilding work. There had been a small Edwardian cinema in the building but this was replaced for the grand reopening in 1928 by a larger, modern cinema. To this, then, Ella and Bob now proceed…
 
The Gay Defender was indeed released by Paramount late in 1927 and starred Richard Dix and Thelma Todd. Dix played Joaquin Murrieta, a heroic Mexican outlaw figure said to be the inspiration for Zorro (and who may possibly have been more plausibly impersonated by Antonio Moreno).
   
From the environs of The Midnight Bell, somewhere near Warren Street, Bob and Ella take a bus the short distance along the Marylebone Road to Tussauds. Ella is ‘almost’ dressed for the occasion, but Hamilton fails to supply us with further details of this partially successful outfit. We know that she has dark fashionably shingled hair and a trim figure.
 
Bob purchases their two-shilling-and-fourpence seats. Ella views this as a great extravagance but refrains from saying so, intimidated under the scrutiny of the smartly uniformed cinema attendants. In addition to having savings, on which his entanglement with Jenny has already loosened his grip, as a waiter Bob benefits financially from tips to the extent of about a pound a week. Ella, positioned behind the bar, does not. So Bob has spent nearly a quarter of his weekly supplementary income on the cinema tickets, and there is the expense of Tea to come. 

In the auditorium, Bob and Ella encounter ‘dim shaded lights and heavy carpets’ as well two ‘voluptuous but doll like creatures wearing pert brown dresses and enormous bows in their hair’. Directed down a centre aisle by one of these exotic attendants, they stumble blindly along a row until they find their seats and are transformed into:
 
‘…part of the audience. That is to say their faces had abandoned every trace of the sensibility and character they had borne outside, and had taken on instead the blank, calm, inhuman stare of the picturegoer - an expression which would observe the wrecking of ships, the burning of cities, the fall of empires, the projection of pies, and the flooding of countries with an unchanging and grave equanimity.’
 
In this state, they watch Ella’s heartthrob Richard Dix — or, as the author tartly reminds us, ‘the two-dimensional ghost of Mr Dix’ — in The Gay Defender. They do not speak, except for Ella’s occasional remark of ‘Silly’ when something in the film amuses her. Bob has a different sense of humour and politely acknowledges her amusement with a smile, but does not share it — a situation familiar to many a picturegoer across the decades. Sadly, we will never know what nuggets of silliness may have invigorated Richard Dix’s interpretation of The Gay Defender — it is now thought to be a lost film.
 
They watch a newsreel, and then the main feature starts, a German film called ‘The Spy’. Is Hamilton thinking of Fritz Lang’s 1928 Spione? He is, of course, writing a fiction and not a historical document, but what follows suggest strongly that it could be Lang’s film that the Waiter and the Barmaid are seeing.
 
They decide that they will not be able to stay for the entire Picture, for they have yet to go Out to Tea and be back at the pub in time for their evening shift. This relieves them from engaging seriously with the film and they become talkative.
 
When the female star appears, Ella, again revealing her needle sharp intuition in matters relating to Bob, remarks ‘This is your type, ain't it, Bob?’
 
 ‘It was true. It was his type - a large-eyed, slim and shingled blonde. In calm and loveliness she eclipsed even the little beauty [Jenny] to whom he had given a pound two nights ago.’
 
The description fits well with the appearance of Gerda Maurus, the Austrian star of Spione, and the seductive, manipulative and duplicitous nature of her role is a fine match for Hamilton’s account of Jenny in the trilogy.

Conflating the vision of loveliness and eroticism on the screen not just with Jenny but with all the women he might now desire, Bob muses on who should deserve to possess such a creature. He decides that the rich are undeserving of this reward and only a heroic figure ‘or, in the last resort, himself’  is worthy of the prize. In other words, he has surrendered himself to the deceitful magic of The Pictures and their beautiful two-dimensional ghosts.
 
His reverie is further enhanced by the pit orchestra accompanying the film: ‘The music played tenderly, and Bob's soul was filled with adoration.’
 
Glancing at Ella beside him in the dark he unkindly wonders if she believes herself to be even the same sex as the vision he has just seen on the screen. But it is not in Bob’s nature to give Ella even a hint of this secret disparagement of her attractions and as they leave the cinema, now pointedly ignored by the uniformed ushers, and go out into the cold evening he takes her arm and leads her over to a little restaurant for Tea. Ella protests that this is extravagant compared to the anticipated Lyons or A.B.C., the affordable food franchises of their day, but Bob will have none of it.
 
The following Monday, a day obliterated by a suffocating brown London fog, Bob makes another expedition to Tussauds Cinema but by himself and in a wild mood. His prearranged phone calls to Jenny’s lodgings, from a coin-operated phone box and so entailing more expense, have not produced his anticipated assignation with Jenny but only repetitious and fruitless exchanges with her monosyllabic landlady. Resolved to spend on himself the money he planned to spend on the object of his longing, he makes his way through the fog to Tussauds and takes a one-shilling-and-threepenny seat. But this time he ‘had no pleasure’, being unable to concentrate on anything but his own disappointment.
 
The fog has thinned by the time he leaves the cinema to walk back to work at The Midnight Bell. But as if to remind him of the darkness of his misery, the kindly Governor shows him the front page of the Evening News which has a ghostly photograph of a policemen working by the light of flares in what should be broad daylight — thereby unwittingly confronting Bob with a gloomy visual metaphor for his own state of mind.
 
In the coming months, as his infatuation becomes more desperate and damaging, Bob patrols the streets of the West End in search of Jenny during his afternoons off and ‘never dreams of going to the pictures.’

​As Will Self (2016) notes, Bob stalking through the teeming West End in search of the ever unreliable Jenny is in a line of descent from Thomas de Quincey's wanderings in Soho a century earlier, searching for the kind child-prostitute Anne, who had saved his life. But while De Quincey was searching with compassion and hope, Bob is increasingly fuelled by a burning fetishistic rage which can eventually only be quelled by signing up on a ship bound for chilly Iceland.

Structured like many a film, with a framing sequence set in the present at its beginning and end, and an extended flashback comprising the central narrative, the second novel initially picks-up where The Midnight Bell ended.
 
Jenny has failed to turn up at Victoria Station to accompany Bob on a Christmas holiday to Brighton and she has spent the twenty-five pounds (nearly £1500 today) he gave her to accompany him.
 
She now needs to earn some money, but is fearful of a furious Bob finding her soliciting on her usual West End beat. Also concerned that a plain clothes man is about to arrest her, she urgently needs to get off the street and so picks up the first punter she can, a shifty looking character in a white silk muffler, and hails a taxi to take them to a hotel in Paddington.
 
In the taxi the punter asks how she became ‘a bad little girl’, triggering the flashback account of Jenny’s backstory that comprises the bulk of the novel.
 
Hamilton’s biographer Sean French (1993) recounts that the author’s initial intention in The Siege of Pleasure was an exposé, in the vein of G B Shaw’s Mrs Warrens Profession, of the economic and social forces that fuel prostitution. To say that the novel falls short of this intention is an understatement. French concludes that the book served instead as an extended revenge on Lily Connolly, a prostitute with whom Hamilton had been obsessively involved. Certainly, while the reader can infer the economic factors determining Jenny’s situation from the plain facts of the story, the narrative voice repeatedly highlights her supposed weakness of character, selfishness, and inability to either empathise or love as being causes and not symptoms of her situation. All the same, because the author may have despised Jenny it doesn’t mean the reader has to, and the story is intense and compelling, sparkling with vivid dialogue and accounts of the people and places that shape Jenny’s precarious life in the underworld of 1920s London.

​Now rolling back five or six years from the scene of Jenny and her seedy punter in the taxi, we find a genteel household in Chiswick where two sisters in their seventies and their eighty-three year old brother are in the grip of the so-called Servant Problem that tormented the middle classes following the First World War.
 
The spectre of women’s emancipation and of bolshevism, together with the blurring of class distinctions and the emergence of new work opportunities for girls such as retail and office work, had unnerved the upper and middle classes in their dealings with servants. Potential employers of household staff became wracked by the possibility that their inferiors would be prone to slovenliness, dishonesty, licentiousness, or (horror of horrors) ‘Answering Back’. The latter crime was the eventual downfall of a long-serving housemaid, the improbably named Audrey Custard, in Hamilton’s novel Craven House (1926).
 
Such are the anxieties of the elderly ladies who interview the eighteen year old Jenny to serve in their Chiswick villa. However, the sisters are in the event delightfully impressed by the applicant, and agree to a trial of a couple of days attendance, on the satisfactory completion of which she will ‘bring her box’ and switch to living-in. Bring her box, Jenny never does.
 
But not because of unsatisfactory work. On the contrary, she proves to be beyond exemplary as a servant and cook, and the sisters privately declare her to be a ‘treasure’.
 
Their only mild reservations, ominously, are that she has previously worked in a factory, that she is quite extraordinarily pretty, and that she ‘makes up’. Unable to do anything to undo the causes of the first two of these qualms, they also rapidly dismiss the third with the consoling thought— ‘But then they all do, nowadays.’
 
The cosmetics industry had exploded during the 1910s and 20s in symbiosis with the Motion Picture industry, addressing itself to the same new mass audience of female consumers with the same promises of glamour and escapism. Exposure to films whose stars were so evidently made up encouraged emulation, and industrially produced products such as mascara, eyebrow pencils, and lipstick (in the new swivel-up tubes) fuelled the consequent demand.
 
The cinema, then, had facilitated the popularisation among working class women of an affordable means of routine adornment that has previously been largely the province of actors, ballet dancers, transvestites, and whores.

We learn that the teenage Jenny is at this stage lodging in Camden Town above a pet shop (seemingly not the legendary animal emporium Palmers, but a nearby downmarket outlet). The one picture adorning her room is a photo of Rudolph Valentino torn from a magazine and fixed up with a single drawing pin.
 
Valentino was in a category of film stars, including other Latin types such as Antonio Moreno (mentioned by Jenny in The Midnight Bell) who in the Anglophone world were often seen by male filmgoers as suspiciously eroticised objects of desire unworthy of admiration by respectable women, in contrast to more homely and rugged Anglo-Saxon stars such as Ella’s Richard Dix.
 
Hamilton describes Jenny’s Valentino pin-up —  ‘The charmer’s drooping lids and sensuously ominous gaze followed her around the room’. Having thus set the scene and described Jenny’s humble and otherwise anonymous lodgings, the novelist immediately delivers his cruellest swipe at his own creation: ‘It is doubtful whether Jenny could be said to be the owner of either a character or a conscience.’
​

​Jenny has a devoted admirer about whom she is substantially less than enthusiastic, a young electrician called Tom, a pale thin youth who may or may not be consumptive. Devotedly making his way to Chiswick to meet Jenny after her first day in service there, Tom hopes to take her to The Pictures, the only place where she habitually permits him the intimacy of holding her hand.  Straight from her day’s exertions as a servant, though, Jenny is more immediately interested in going out to eat and suggests that they do this before going to The Pictures. Tom, disturbed about the cost to his wallet of doing both, protests that after eating out it will be too late to go to the cinema.
 
‘Not for the Big picture’ retorts Jenny, succinctly terminating the discussion. In the days of continuous programming and double features, as we saw with Bob and Ella’s visit to Tussauds in The Midnight Bell, a visit to the cinema did not necessarily mean watching everything on offer in the programme. Bob and Ella primarily went to see the Richard Dix second feature and stayed for part of the main film, only coincidentally enabling Bob’s enraptured encounter with its ravishing lead. Jenny and Tom are proposing to do the reverse of this and arrive in time to see only the main feature.
 
So first they go to a Lyons. For Jenny, visiting a Lyons, with its distinctive gold and white framed show windows loaded with confectionary and its bright and elegant art-deco interior, gives her almost as much pleasure as The Pictures. Lyons restaurants, particularly the larger Corner House complexes, were designed to offer affordable refreshment for working people in settings that, like the new super-cinemas, provided a glowing fantasy of palatial living.
 
So now the girl who an hour previously had been dutifully acting the part of the perfect servant could herself be waited on by a smart girl in a white apron and amuse herself contemplating the foibles and faults of the other customers. Lyons simultaneously ‘appeased her social cravings’, ‘provided her with entertainment’, and ‘furnished a setting for herself’. In other words Lyons dissolved the distinction between audience and performer. Going Out to Tea at Lyons is not just a supplement to Going to The Pictures, but a surrogate for appearing in them.

​Jenny having consumed a fish supper plus a cheese roll while Tom makes do with a cup of coffee, Tom purchases Turkish Delight at the confectionary counter on the way out. This is an essential aid to softening Jenny’s demeanour towards him, with particular reference to hand holding at the Pictures.
 
They make their way by bus to a small picture house in the vicinity of Camden Town, probably either a small converted music hall or a purpose built Edwardian cinema. Tom purchases their one shilling seats.
 
Jenny does, as anticipated, allow Tom to hold her hand during the film but herself concentrates solely on watching the film and on eating her Turkish Delight. Tom is happy about this because, her attention being so absorbed, she does not speak, which would inevitably involve contradicting or inhibiting him. He can fantasise silently in the darkened cinema that all is well between them and that Jenny actually will one day be his.

​This fantasy is abruptly shattered once they leave the cinema, and Jenny heads briskly home to her lodgings, leaving Tom with a brief kiss and an undertaking to meet him the following evening, but only on condition that she can bring her friend Violet, who she knows from her factory days.
 
The evening has cost Tom a precious five-shillings-and-threepence. This is approximately £14 in today’s money, which doesn’t seem bad for a meal (for one), a quarter pound of Turkish Delight, and two cinema tickets. But Tom’s wage, at three-pounds-ten-shillings a week, is substantially lower than an equivalent young electrician in London would earn today and Tom has forfeit what he regards as a substantial outlay without in the least enhancing his chances with his intended.
 
The following day Jenny again charmingly and diligently fulfils her full day’s duties at Chiswick, takes her leave of the grateful old ladies, and then sets off to meet Violet in Hammersmith.
 
The next eighty or so pages, the bulk of this short novel, cover just that evening and night and the following morning. This consists of what Hamilton mostly sees as the emergence of Jenny’s irredeemably weak and sordid disposition in hopeless conflict with her common sense and upbringing. We are likely to read it today as the grooming and abuse of a naive teenager.
 
Violet and Jenny soon find themselves in the company of two young men, Rex and Andy. Jenny is introduced to drink, under the influence of which she abandons her promise to meet Tom and is persuaded by Andy that he can get her a well-paid job as a mannequin (i.e. a model) if she sticks around with him. As the inebriated evening progresses Tom appears briefly and Jenny contemptuously and conclusively dismisses him from her life. Late in the evening the four are joined by a Gentleman, who divides his time between whispering banal endearments to Jenny, giving her whiskey, and, bizarrely, yodelling into the night.
 
After closing time Andy takes them all for a fast, drunken, ride in his car and runs down a cyclist, but fails to stop.
 
Jenny has never ridden in a motor car before and has never drunk alcohol before, but for a Christmas sherry and glass of Guinness once or twice. She is now close to unconscious with drink and at the mercy of unscrupulous and inebriated strangers.
 
The following morning she wakes up confused and with a tremendous hangover in what turns out to be the yodelling Gentleman’s flat in Richmond. Initially she is desperate to get to her job and terrified she will be implicated in the car accident. But eventually, having been plied with more drink, she agrees to spend the day with the Gentleman and to take payment from him, thereby abandoning any remaining hope of resuming her career in service at Chiswick. Lunch at a smart restaurant is promised, followed by a visit to The Pictures.
 
Just in case the reader has any residual sympathy for the two old ladies in Chiswick and their servant problem, a short chapter set a few days after Jenny’s disappearance now has them revising their view of their perfect little treasure and convincing themselves that she was probably a thieving dolled-up little slut from whom they have had a lucky escape.
 
Returning to the framing narrative, we find Jenny and her seedy customer having breakfast in the Paddington Hotel. Jenny has remembered where she has seen him before— he is none other than Andy of the drunken hit-and-run incident several years previously. She has remembered not only his face but his name, so manages to blackmail him for extra cash before he scurries away.
 
Much of the account of Jenny’s tumble into prostitution in The Siege of Pleasure is told through her apprehensive inner voice and her vivid assessments of the other characters’ demeanour and motives. This makes for a scintillating and at times darkly hilarious read. If Hamilton is harsh in his account of what he sees as Jenny’s responsibility for her own downfall, he is no more sparing in his treatment of the curtain-twitching snobbery of the old ladies at Chiswick, the spivvy banter of Rex and Andy, Violet’s air-headed and lascivious connivance, and the ignorant and privileged indifference of the yodelling Gentleman.
 
Himself a nearly lifelong alcoholic who died from drink related disease at the age of 58, Patrick Hamilton knew a thing or two about how drink incrementally damages your judgement and consequently your ability to identify your own best interests. Perhaps in spite of himself he left us able to extract a more sympathetic portrait of Jenny/Lily Connelly than he ever intended.

The Plains of Cement
The Theatre, the Capitol, and the Last of London

Hamilton’s earliest novels had been criticised for their archaic stylistic flourishes, but by the time he gets to The Plains of Cement his dialogue, rather than recalling Charles Dickens, anticipates Harold Pinter.
 
Early in his pestering courtship of her in the saloon bar of The Midnight Bell, the dull Mr Eccles presses his visiting card onto a wary Ella as she serves him. She promptly deposits the card against a bottle behind the bar and, attempting ‘some sort of facetiousness’, retorts pithily and dismissively — ‘I’ll keep that. So I can refer to it.’
 
Mr Eccles first manoeuvre in his unlikely campaign to acquire Ella as his bride is to invite her out, not to The Pictures, but to The Theatre which, he has correctly guessed, she adores but has few opportunities to visit. Her initial lines of resistance being defeated, they attend a matinee on her afternoon off, followed by not only Tea but later by Dinner, although Ella is disappointed that the latter turns out to be at a Lyons and not at a smart Soho restaurant.
 
While the fastidious middle-aged Eccles clearly has some private means, the true extent of the wealth that he hints at remains doubtful, just as, while he regards himself as an Army Man through and through, he admits to having never been in the army. We are told that he lives (like Jenny’s late employers) in suburban Chiswick with his dominating Sister-in-Law and, we are unsurprised to learn, is grouchily displeased with his household’s servant girl.

​During the months of his pursuit of Ella and of her vacillating resistance to the dreary prospect of marriage to him, Eccles does not take her to Theatre again, and only twice to The Pictures. Any temptation on Ella’s part to succumb to his plans are driven by either her own lack of self-worth or her desire to better the circumstances of her impoverished and abused mother.
 
But while the reader may long for Ella to be rescued from the ludicrous advances of Ernest Eccles, he is not a wicked or unprincipled man. He is, like Bob, another lonely soul wandering the plains of cement and making ill-judged and hopeless choices in his quest for solace.
 
We learn no details of Ella and Mr Eccles two visits to The Pictures. But the novel does contain a retelling from Ella’s perspective of Bob and Ella’s visit to the Tussauds Cinema from The Midnight Bell. We again hear that she is surprised and delighted by Bob’s invitation, but now in the light of our additional knowledge that it provides an opportunity of respite from being pawed at by Mr Eccles in Regent’s Park. As before, we are told that Ella dresses up nicely, but not to ‘the Nines’, that she protests Bob’s extravagance and that they only watch part of the main feature. But there is no mention this time of either Richard Dix or Bob’s enrapturing German siren.
 
In the final chapters, as the narrative moves into close parallel with that of the climax of The Midnight Bell, Ella learns from the Governor that Bob has left, not for his one weeks holiday in Brighton, but for ever and to go back to sea.
 
Deeply distressed by what she sees as her friend’s abandonment of her to her loneliness, Ella resolves then to end matters with Mr Eccles. She writes a letter to him thanking him for his kindness but firmly asserting that they are ill-suited and must seek no future together. Still thinking of her impoverished mother, though, she does not post the letter but goes on her own to The Pictures.

​The new Capitol Cinema close to the hub of London’s West End in the Haymarket was in 1928 one of the latest American style super-cinemas. Its own publicity, doubling up on both hyperbole and capital letters for good measure, declared the Capitol to be ‘THE SUMMIT and THE CENTRE of the Entertainment World’. With palatial mirrored lobbies and a grand auditorium dripping with gilt and seating upwards of 1500, it was designed to showcase the great spectacular films coming from Europe and the United States and had admission prices to match.
 
For Ella to make her way to the palatial Capitol in her solitude and despair and on the way to buy her favourite Italian cream sweets was an extravagance, but the only way available to her ‘to hide from the roaring world, and try to divert her mind from its aching preoccupations by looking at the shadows.’
 
We are not told what film she sees. But in any case The Pictures fail this time to work their magic.
 
Feeling belittled by the uniformed staff as she buys herself the cheapest ticket, Ella is shown to a seat near the front of the enormous auditorium. She has arrived in the middle of a film and tries her best to enjoy her sweets without making herself feel sick, but is intermittently kicked from behind by a restless group of children. Unable to concentrate or think of anything but her adoration of Bob and his abandonment of her, she gets up and flees the cinema.
 
‘But you cannot walk away from sorrow like that. And in any case there is nothing in the world more dreary, damping, and obscurely perturbing than to come out of a cinema in the afternoon to a noisy world.’
 
Cold and at a loss as to what to do about anything, Ella walks in the dusk towards Piccadilly (Jenny’s loitering ground) and is met by an apocalyptic vision of deafening traffic and swarming humanity:
 
‘…it really seemed as though things had gone too far. It seemed as though some climax had just been reached, that civilisation was riding for a fall, that these days were certainly the last days of London, and that other dusks must soon gleam upon the broken chaos which must replace it.’
 
But a voice calls out from behind her and Ella turns, dumbfounded, to find Bob, who has after all not yet left but has a few more days before his ship sails.
 
They go to Tea in a small deserted restaurant. And in an exquisite parting scene almost wholly told through dialogue, the real story of The Plains of Cement becomes clear— Ella’s realisation of the true depth of her love for Bob, and perhaps a realisation that although her love is not reciprocated there is something precious and lasting that is.
 
Ella must hurry back to The Midnight Bell to start her shift, and she asks Bob to post her letter to Mr Eccles, which he promises to do.
 
In a typical Patrick Hamilton touch, the Governor and the Mrs. have decided to move Ella into Bob’s old room, which is larger and better appointed than her own, an act of kindness with the unintended consequence of increasing her sorrow.
 
In the final sentence of the novel the new waiter, an unprepossessing and weedy youth, goes to bed in Ella’s old room and, through the thin dividing wall, hears her weeping.
 
The BBC’s fine and respectful 2005 television adaptation of the trilogy opts for a more subtle and optimistic parting from Ella, with the perfectly cast Sally Hawkins as Ella sitting silent and thoughtful on Bob’s old bed, gently clutching one of his precious history books to her heart.

Employed by Hitchcock to write a screen version of his own play Rope (1948), Hamilton engaged in weeks of tortuous (though very handsomely paid) labour at the unfamiliar discipline of writing for film, only to be dropped from the project by the great director without so much as a word of explanation or a thank you.
 
Writing to his brother Bruce, Hamilton said of cinema: ‘Films are fundamentally no good because they are ephemeral, ephemeral. You must write either printed books or printed plays.’  (in: French, 1993)
 
Yet his writing, and in particular the structure of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and its acutely observed commonplace dialogue with its Pinter-like repetitions and misinterpretations, is wonderfully cinematic.
 
In the 1920’s some general audiences were still puzzled by parallel editing and montage, let alone flashback narrative, and they required substantial pointers to understand the presentation of non-sequential events. As late as 1939 the initially limited success of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se Lève was attributed in part to its flashback construction. An achievement of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is that it anticipates our appreciation of cinematic displacements of time and character perspective without resorting to tedious cross referencing pointers.
 
If Patrick Hamilton had lived longer and had he developed an interest in writing for cinema that was more than pecuniary he might have contributed significantly to the canon of quality British film in the mid twentieth century.

Publicising its usual seasonal screenings of Frank Capra’s 1946 morality tale It’s a Wonderful Life, the BFI proclaims that the film is as much part of Christmas "as tinsel and turkey” . Good cause then, to consider alternatives.

Despite early grumbling from the House Un-American Activities Committee that Capra’s film was communist propaganda, as the decades have passed its mawkish rocking-chair Protestantism and some of the social attitudes that surface in it have passed from quaintly passé to cringeworthy. Of course something similar might be said of many twentieth century films (and we make allowances, don’t we) but It’s a Wonderful Life is offered up uncritically year after year as a timeless family classic, and implicit in the offer is that dissent would be the killjoy equivalent of ripping the fairy off the top of the tree and dropping her in the slop pot. As Andrew Gilcrest (Guardian, 22 Dec 2014), in a withering take-down, comments — the film has “more suburban prejudice than Margaret Thatcher at a Grantham fete.” Quite. Time to search for alternative seasonal delights.

​Films with either “Christmas” or “Santa” in the title can be disqualified on sight. Better to look for great films that aren’t about Christmas but happen to have a Christmas in them.  Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows is a strong contender on the basis of the inclusion of snow, Christmas trees, family misery, and a cute but symbolically overwrought wild animal. But then again, perhaps those grown up children of Cary's are just a bit too irritating for a bit too long to compensate for watching Rock Hudson crouching in the snow and hand feeding a fawn for a few seconds.

G.W.Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) ends with a Christmas, but one so utterly existentially grim that even the most hardline turkey and tinsel refusenik would be severely taxed to detect the tiniest glimmer of seasonal comfort in it — Lulu (Louise Brooks) lies slain at the hands of Jack the Ripper, a starving Alwa (Franz Lederer) trudges wearily after the wobbly Salvation Army donkey cart, and only the drunken amoral old pimp Schigolch (Carl Götz) is happy, tucking into a complimentary Christmas pudding in the pub.

​Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) must surely be in with a chance as a modern seasonal classic. Not only does it have a romantically charged Christmas tree buying scene which is a clear homage to the one in All the Heaven Allows, it has a screenplay that pivots around the Christmas period and is a superbly crafted work that evokes the optimism of youth in mid-century America and defies the conservative social attitudes of the older establishment. And, of course, it's called Carol.

The spirit of Patricia Highsmith’s source novel The Price of Salt is faithfully, shrewdly, and beautifully transferred to the screen in Haynes' film. The inevitable changes, particularly the truncating of the road trip (interminable in the novel) into the key Christmas/New Year period, are necessary improvements in a screen adaptation for modern audiences. Therese (Rooney Mara), a trainee stage set designer in the book, aspires instead to be a photographer in the film. So as well as being relieved of heaving around cardboard scale models she can instead practice her camera verité on Carol (Cate Blanchett) while Carol chooses a Christmas tree in the snowy market, and eventually land a nice job at the New York Times. The private detective hired to spy on the two women, a lugubrious and somewhat inefficient old has-been in the novel, becomes a fit young practitioner of ironic impersonation and technical wizardry in the film.

Although the final act takes place after an interval of time which encompasses substantial character development, including the establishment of Therese’s photographic career, somehow spring and summer are either elided or have not yet arrived — the wintery Edward Hopper light and texture of the Christmas episodes inhabit the whole film like a spell that must not be broken. 

The transition to the screen of the final paragraphs of The Price of Salt is so exquisitely true in Carol that a seasonal tear could roll down your cheek at its cinematic perfection, were it not already rolling there for Therese’s heart as she glides across the crowded restaurant towards Carol.

Made almost contemporaneously with It's a Wonderful Life, Clouzot’s film is part-love story part-musical part-backstage melodrama part-murder mystery and police procedural. It is set in a Christmas time Paris, and made within a film industry, recovering from the trauma of occupation and war. Although this is never treated explicitly (aside of a brief reference to black market butter) the characters are haunted or driven by mistrust and suspicion for much of the film. In this respect it continues the themes of Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943), made during his wartime involvement with the Nazi-controlled Continental Films. As if reflecting and marking Clouzot’s rehabilitation, though, at the end of Quai des Orfèvres the arrival of Christmas and the snowfall symbolically marks the restoration of love and trust between the characters and the fulfilment of promises.

The film is set among the theatrical variety and musical artists of Paris and those who service them or control their fortunes, and many of the scenes are carried along by jaunty popular music, dance, and song, either in rehearsal or performance. It is not until over a third of the way into the film that the mighty Louis Jouvet, as police Inspector Antoine, wearily hauls himself out of his pyjamas and into the action. Even during the subsequent murder investigation his enquiries are seldom conducted without a lively background of music in theatres, cabarets, or cafes. In one thrilling scene Jouvet conducts a probing interrogation to the accompaniment of ambulatory fiddlers practicing an insanely accelerating Klezmer tune as his hapless victim’s alibi wobbles and cracks.

The film was the fourth most successful film in France in 1947 and this must be partly attributable to the array and variety of musical numbers and popular entertainment that is woven into the film, including a glimpse of an equestrian circus, and the convincing scenes of the close-knit backstage theatrical community which the Inspector is obliged to penetrate. At one point a theatre manager tells him “We’re just a big happy family”. “That’s what I’m starting to think” Antoine mutters sardonically as he retreats, nose to the trail.

For its initial release in the USA the film was titled Jenny Lamour, the stage name of the principle female character. This explicit evocation of l’amour is perhaps a more apt title because, although Jouvet’s Inspector Antoine is a creation of genius and his police colleagues are vividly drawn, it is the various manifestations and modes of love and lust that weave through the story which compel.

At the heart of the film is a married couple, singer Jenny (Suzy Delair) and composer and pianist Maurice (Bernard Blier), a rising popular musical duo. They clearly adore one another and Clouzot subtly makes it clear that they have a passionate sex life, but Jenny can’t restrain her natural flirtatiousness when she believes it will assist her career and Maurice is constantly enraged by petty and unfounded jealousy. Their friend and neighbour is Dora (Simone Renant), a thriving studio photographer who has been a platonic friend of Maurice’s since childhood but now carries a flame for Jenny. Although both Jenny and Maurice seem to be unaware of this, it does not, of course, elude Inspector Antoine.

​Jenny unwisely visits the home of an abusive industrialist and film producer, Brignon (Charles Dullin), believing that he will get her into films on the basis of her talent, though of course he has other ideas. Le plus ça change, Harvey Weinstein. We later learn that the producer has assaulted Jenny and in self-defence she has struck his head with a champagne bottle and believes she has killed him. Maurice has learned of the assignation and goes to the house with a gun, bent on killing Brignon and having constructed an elaborate alibi involving conspicuously visiting a variety theatre twice. He finds Brignon already dead and flees the house to discover that his car has been stolen, comically making the timing of his alibi plan nearly impossible to achieve. Jenny tells Dora that she has killed Brignon but has left her fox fur at the house in her panic. Out of devotion to Jenny, the ever cool Dora immediately goes to Brignon’s house and retrieves the fur, also enterprisingly wiping fingerprints from a glass. Therefore all three friends have visited the house of the murdered man during the fatal evening and soon attract the dogged scrutiny of Inspector Antoine.

​There is no shortage of moral complexity in Quai des Orfèvres. Maurice goes to Brignon’s house with every intention of killing him, and possibly even Jenny as well, but an opportunist intruder has beaten him to it. Dora’s relatively comfortable lifestyle is enabled by a side-line taking naked photos of showgirls to order for Brignon. The Inspector confiscates the licence of a frail elderly taxi driver to coerce him into identifying Dora in a police line-up, he interrogates Jenny as she is changing in her dressing room, and he ignores, although doesn’t participate in, the rough tactics of his subordinates. And just in case you're minded to think that the real murderer of the repellant sex abuser Brignon may have done everyone a favour, he has also killed a young police officer and a bank cashier.

The Inspector is under pressure from his superiors to bring to justice the killer of a man who, although universally seen as obnoxious, is immensely rich and powerful. But he also has his own reasons for wanting the case wound up by Christmas. A wounded veteran of the Foreign Legion, he is raising a beloved child, a North African boy of nine or so whom he refers to and cares for as his son, and he has promised the boy that they will have a celebratory meal before he returns to school. Late in the film, when the Christmas snow is falling right on cue and the real murderer (the career criminal who stole Maurice’s car) is about to be charged, thereby leaving the three friends cleared, Antoine tells the enigmatic Dora that he has grown to like her, adding “We’re the same type. We’ll never have a chance with women”. The photographer and the eccentric detective, outsiders and meticulous observers both, their struggles and compromises in a wicked world momentarily reflecting their common humanity and unfulfilled desires.

​Christmas Day brings resolution and forgiveness. The officials and journalists who have spent a night of suspense and disputation at the Quai have dispersed to their homes, in one case bearing a Christmas turkey. Jenny has put up a tinsel laden Christmas tree to welcome Maurice home after his near suicide in a police cell, saved only after the screams of a friendly prostitute in the adjacent lock-up have woken the slumbering guard, and released when the real murderer confesses. Inspector Antoine pays the reunited couple a final visit to return Jenny’s fox fur, which has been held as evidence, and then plods away into the snow to take his boy for the promised meal, pelted with a well-aimed snowball for his trouble.

​“Fourteen and a half” says Manuela moodily in response to being told she’s a big girl for fourteen. The source of this assessment of Manuela’s inappropriate stature is Fräulein von Kesten, the pinched and anxious assistant to the tyrannical Headmistress at the gloomy boarding school where Manuela is being summarily dumped by her aunt.

The film was co-written by Christa Winsloe and based on her own successful stage play, Yesterday and Today. It was directed by Leontine Sagan, an experienced theatre director and actress who had twice directed the play on stage but had no experience of directing film. The producer, Carl Froelich, was also credited with technical supervision and is known to have exercised considerable control over major aspects of the film including its title and its ending, which radically reverses that of the play, and day-to-day supervision of the shoot.
 
The plot concerns Manuela’s passionate attachment to her charismatic teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg, culminating in her declaration of love before the whole school following her acclaimed performance as the male lead in the school play, Don Carlos. The ensuing scandal and punishment of Manuela results in her near suicide, but (unlike in the play) she is saved by a rebellion of the other pupils.
 
The school at which Manuela’s Aunt deposits her prides itself on providing a suitable education for the daughters of Prussian aristocrats and military officers, this defined as preparing them to be the “mothers of soldiers”.  Apart from a small number of brief montage sequences showing buildings and heroic sculptures in Potsdam, the action takes place entirely within the school’s boundaries and has an all female cast. It is set roughly contemporaneously with or slightly earlier than its production.

Jaunty martial music over the opening titles then accompanies a brief montage of shots showing neo-classical buildings and monumental sculptures of militaristic male figures, including naked wrestlers. The montage cuts to a close-up of marching female feet, followed by a wider shot showing a column of around forty schoolgirls in vertically striped uniforms, noted by Lotte Eisner (1952) in The Haunted Screen as “convict dress” . The girls, headed by a teacher and with their heads bowed meekly towards the ground under broad-brimmed hats, are marching along a gravel path beside formal lawns with a background of tall regularly spaced trees, themselves reminiscent of parading soldiers. So, within a minute of the film’s start, we are seeing exactly what Carl Froelich’s changed title (written with the express intention to titillate) promised us — girls in uniform.
 
As we will see, it is not only the girls who are subject to strict codes of dress. Aside of a handful of peripheral instances, every character wears some sort of uniform except during the scenes on the evening of the School play, when the wearing of theatrical and cross-gender costume dissolves discipline as well as identity.

A fleeting glimpse of a man occurs in the following panning shot which shows individual girl’s faces for the first time. In the background we momentarily see a gardener standing watering the lawns with a powerful hose.  As he comes into view he is looking directly to camera (and therefore at the passing girls), then he is momentarily masked by one of the girls, then seen again turned away, then the pan loses him. The water jet’s arc, shimmering in the sunlight, provides a suggestion that the gardens are provided with more care and nourishment than, as we soon learn, are the girls.

Still accompanied by the military tune, the procession marches on into the gloomy cloistered interior of the school buildings and leaving the sunlight behind.
 
A cut to silence and a dim and severe institutional waiting room with bare walls and hard bentwood chairs introduces us to Manuela’s Aunt (Gertrud de Lalsky), seated in the foreground. Behind her Manuela (Hertha Theile), her back to us, has pulled aside a translucent window curtain and is peering out into the sunlight that we, and she, have just left behind. The Aunt complains about being kept waiting by the Headmistress, by whom she had expected to be greeted. Her suspicion that they are not being treated with the courtesy that the family warrants is confirmed by the arrival not of the Head, but of her sharp faced and myopic deputy and chief enforcer, Fräulein von Kesten (Hedwig Schlichter), bearing excuses.
 
As Manuela turns from the window and comes forward to be received we see her face for the first time and that she is wearing a sailor-suit dress —  her own clothes, but with connotations of both childhood and military uniform, and subtly prefiguring her cross-dressed performance in Don Carlos. Hertha Theile had played Manuela twice before on stage and, although in her early-twenties when the film was shot, both her face and her acting convince far more effectively than many “playing-younger” performances of before or since.
 
At mention of her Mother, who has died, Manuela starts to weep and is reprimanded by her Aunt.  Fräulein von Kesten, however, provides a modicum of consolation, opining “there’s no harm in a few tears”  — an early indication that von Kesten is more of a jobsworth than a natural tyrant in the iron mould of the Headmistress.

​Outside in the hallway we see that a girl, in the uniform familiar to us from the procession, has been listening at the door, evidence of a typical institutional culture of eavesdropping and snooping. This is Marga (Ilse Winter), who has been assigned to show Manuela the ropes.
 
Manuela emerges from the reception room alone and starts to climb a grand, carpeted, curved staircase with a heavy stone balustrade. Marga comes out from the shadows where she has been hiding and calls Manuela down, explaining that these stairs are forbidden to all except the Headmistress and important guests.
 
Marga tells Manuela that she will help her but that in return Manuela must serve her by bringing her washing water in the mornings and other chores. In fact we subsequently see nothing of this and Marga’s prefectorial authority appears to be limited.
 
The Aunt leaves Manuela with a cold formal farewell and departs the school.
 
We now learn, along with Manuela, that the school had two staircases — the forbidden staircase we have just seen and the massive main staircase, several stories high, uncarpeted and utilitarian but with iron balustrades, the shadows of whose distinctive pattern provide a strong barred motif which the filmmakers use to full effect throughout.

During Marga’s shepherding of Manuela, we briefly cut away to a shot of a class of girls singing a patriotic hymn. As Marga and Manuela set off up the staircase, we return to this scene and are introduced to a key supporting character, Ilse. The camera tracks in to isolate Ilse in close up, the audio simultaneous revealing that while appearing to lustily sing the praises of the Fatherland she is actually substituting words of her own complaining about the dire inadequacy of the school food.

A view of the silent main corridor, characterized by its hard checkered floor tiles and regimented pilasters, their vertical fluting echoing the vertical stripes of the school uniform, is punctured by a shrill electric bell and a moment later a classroom door opens and girls spill out and disperse, including a trio with their arms round each others shoulders, a first visual indication of the girls’ easy physical intimacy and solidarity.
 
A vertiginous shot down the well of the main staircase from above establishes both its great height and the routine bustle of groups of girls moving up and down it and chattering.
 
On one landing, Manuela and Marga, going up, meet a group of girls going down, some of whom introduce themselves by name (slightly confusingly, there are two girls called Ilse – here we will refer to the subversive girl we have already seen in the singing scene, Ilse von Westhagen, as Ilse).  On learning that Manuela is in Fräulein von Bernburg’s dormitory, Ilse launches into a satirical impersonation of a girl in an ecstasy of infatuation with von Bernburg and desperate to know if it’s true that von Bernburg gives the girls kisses. Mildly amused, Manuela merely says she has had several strange teachers and follows Marga upstairs to the fourth floor and the wardrobe.
 
In the wardrobe room, a dingy somewhat claustrophobic workroom space in contrast to the stairwell, we meet a representative of the third distinct group of women in the film, the school servants. Elise (Else Ehser) is a cheerful soul, a bustling middle-aged multitasker in a regulation dark work dress. As the mistress of the wardrobe she is the custodian of the all-important uniforms and perhaps enjoys more autonomy than the other servants who, as we see soon, wear their own version of the uniform.

Elise’s workroom is dominated by the stock and tools of her trade, large cupboards, a sewing machine and a huge pincushion, but she has also made sure to surround herself with home comforts, a teacup, a dresser with ornaments and books, and a display of pinned up picture postcards, indeed her room is the only space seen in the film which has a touch of homely cosiness.

​Theile’s acting here is particularly good as she channels the misery of a shy adolescent obliged to undress in front of a stranger and surrender her familiar clothes. We see her looking vulnerable in just her chemise, an article of dress that will gain central significance later.
 
Elise sits Manuela down and, rather painfully, dresses and pins her hair into the severe regulation style, meanwhile cheerfully humming a somewhat tuneless version of Carmen’s aria “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”  — Love is a rebellious bird that cannot be tamed.
 
Indeed it is, as we will see.
 
Provided with a striped uniform Manuela balks at it being used goods, but is intrigued to find a talisman attached to it bearing a heart and the initials “E.v.B”. Elise readily explains, chuckling, that this stands for “Elizabeth von Bernburg” and the uniform was previously allocated to a girl who had a crush on the teacher.

​This evocation of her name is followed instantly by the first shot of Fräulein von Bernburg herself, advancing along the corridor towards the foot of the main staircase. The severe horizontals and verticals of the corridor’s architecture are lit in a way that subtly fragments and distorts them, providing a backdrop to our first sight of von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck) that suggests complexity behind the vertical institutional rigidity.
 
Von Bernburg wears an austere high-necked dress and medallion of authority identical to those we have already seen on Fräulein von Kesten, her hair pulled up in the regulation style we have just seen inflicted on Manuela and topped with a small white cap. Clearly the teachers are subject to rigid uniform regulations of their own.

​Going briskly up the stairs, von Bernburg suddenly halts, looking at something that has caught her attention on the landing above and smiling with evident pleasure. She has, of course, seen Manuela on her way down. But Manuela, preoccupied with the unfamiliar discomfort of her coarse striped uniform, has not yet seen von Bernburg. So for the second time in the film (after Marga) Manuela is unknowingly observed. They meet face to face, von Bernburg a step or two below Manuela and so obliged to literally look up to her at the same time as firmly establishing her authority over her. Finding minor fault with Manuela’s hair, despite it having being arranged according to regulations minutes earlier, causes (or enables) von Bernburg to touch Manuela briefly for the first time, patting her hair and turning her by the shoulders.
 
This short encounter establishes the twin strands of von Bernburg’s educational strategy — love, and the absolute discipline that the regime demands — and lays the seeds of her eventual inner conflict.
 
The main staircase is an insistent presence, both bringing together and, by level, separating the pair at their first meeting. Expressionistic shadows of the balustrade, inexplicable from any digetic light source, frame the close shots and visually implant the narrative significance of the staircase.

Marga allocates Manuela her locker and then confiscates forbidden items from her luggage — a novel, chocolate, and some money — sources respectively of imaginative escape, nutritional comfort, and the possible means of flight. Ilse draws Manuela away from Marga’s uncertain authority and shows her, hidden inside her own locker, an extensive collage of photo postcards of the film star Hans Albers, shown twice to us in close-up. She says that another girl has a rival display of pictures of Henny Porten (star of several Carl Froelich films), but the issue for banter apparently concerns which star has more “sex appeal” rather any question of gender. Two other girls are seen looking at a magazine photo of a muscular man in swimwear.

​Edelgard (Annemarie von Rochhausen) arrives in the room and introduces herself to Manuela.

The girls examine Manuela’s confiscated book, spotting an apparently sensational illustration, and they pass it rowdily from hand to hand. Von Kesten arrives to remove the confiscated items and (somewhat gratifyingly) reprimands the officious prefect Marga for not having promptly and tidily completed her duties. Glaring closely at Manuela, von Kesten details the school’s system of discipline and punishment. As she departs, Ilse thumbs her nose after von Kesten. Cut to…
 
The Headmistress. Our first sighting of the Headmistress (Emilia Unda) in her study is one of the most arresting images in the film. For an instant, we could be seeing a familiar film image of a male fin-de-siècle tycoon or ambassador at his desk reading a newspaper, a momentary misapprehension partly created by her appearance and partly by her surroundings.

​In semi-profile behind an enormous dark desk furnished with an ornate telephone and inkstands, the Headmistress sits stiffly upright on a throne-like chair. She is absorbed in reading an open newspaper, signifying that she concerns herself with the state of the country as well as that of the school, as is soon confirmed. In the background to the left of her is a sunlit gauze-curtained window, emphasizing, as in the reception scene, the deep gloom prevailing within the room. Here though, unlike in the reception room, the rectangular symmetry of the window is broken by the dark arc of a heavy fringed curtain which could be utilized either to shut the sunlight out altogether or to shut out the cold of winter.
 
It is often said that the Headmistress is styled to resemble Frederick the Great. Her high hairline certainly resembles that of an 18th century wig, and with her slightly bulging eyes, and two ornate badges of insignia, one at her throat and one on a ribbon round her neck, the superficial resemblance can hardly be coincidental. At the extreme left of the image a sculptural ornament depicts an aristocratic 18th century male figure, possibly Frederick himself, with hunting dogs.
 
Von Kesten comes into frame, a file of papers in hand, obsequiously trying to attract the Headmistress’ attention. The Headmistress ignores von Kesten just long enough to humiliate her, continuing to read the newspaper and then putting it aside. The files concern the expenditure of the school and the Headmistress complains that not enough savings are being made. Again revealing her repressed humanitarian side, von Kesten pleads that the girls complain of hunger. “Hungry!” retorts the Headmistress furiously “Prussians have always been hungry.”  And later: “Through discipline and hunger we shall be great again, or we shall be nothing.”  Von Kesten submissively concurs.
 
A group of girls, including the round faced, kind-hearted. Mariechen (Dora Thalmer), sit outside in the bright daylight of the gardens discussing various delicious foods they have known at home, and one of them remarks that some girl’s parents are now no longer so wealthy, an explicit indication that the school draws its pupils from a slowly declining class.

​In the kitchen four of the servants are also discussing the school food and the measures they are forced to take to economise with it. They express sympathy with the girls’ hunger and their fear of complaining, and criticise the harsh disciplinarian culture. Like the pupils and the teachers, the servants wear the appropriate uniform of their class and occupation. This consists of a dress with short sleeves and a tunic neck, made in heavy cotton with a fine vertical stripe that echoes the broader “convict” stripe of the girls’ uniform, a crisp white maid's apron, and a small white cap on the back of the head over regulation pinned-up hair.
 
A brass bell in the main corridor is rung and the girls are brought to attention in straight lines for an assembly. The Headmistress slowly walks along the lines like an officer inspecting troops. She moves slowly, very upright with a stout walking cane in her hand. This will later prove to be a symbol of authority rather than an essential aid to remaining upright. We also discover that the Headmistress creaks as she walks, an example of the filmmaker’s creative grasp of the metaphorical and atmospheric possibilities of the new sound medium.

As she passes them, the girls are required to follow her progress with the heads and eyes. At the very end of the film we will see this same gesture transformed from a sign of respect and subservience to one of contempt and defiance. She comes to Manuela (framed by the profiles of her friends Ilse and Edelgard in the rear line) and curtly acknowledges this new addition to the school.
 
The girls are manoeuvred with military precision into a semicircular formation around the base of the forbidden staircase, on which a lectern has been placed for the Headmistress. This position is thus established as a nexus point of authoritarian power in the school, returning later in the film for the visit of the patron Princess. Positioned behind her lectern, the Headmistress guards her gloomy domain and defends its values. The teachers join the assembly and a hymn is sung. Following a brief prayer asking the girls to reflect on their sins, the Headmistress gets down to the real business of the assembly, a disciplinary tirade based on intelligence she has received that letters are being smuggled out complaining about conditions at the school. She threatens anyone caught doing this with a catalogue of severe punishments including being prohibited from wearing the uniform.
 
We might think this sanction to be more of a reward than a disincentive, but the implication is that a girl wearing her own clothes in a procession such as that seen at the start of the film would not only be identified as a miscreant but might also suffer ostracization or public rebuke. Given the solidarity we see later, the Headmistress may be wrong about this, but it is telling that she assumes that loyalty to, and identification with, the uniform is unqualified

​Moving to evening and darkness, the chimes of a church clock are heard through the large open window of a dormitory and we see a line of institutional iron bedsteads. Two of the younger girls, arm in arm and in melancholy conversation about the miseries of the school, sit together in the dark looking out of the window and identifying the sounds coming from the nearby military barracks. Outside the tall windows behind them, leaves are fluttering in the night breeze.

A sudden change of lighting causes the two younger girls to turn inward as if caught in a breach of the rules — a teacher, Fräulein von Gärschner (Lene Berdolt) has appeared and switched on the bright overhead dormitory lights, ending their reverie. Later we will see von Bernberg theatrically reverse this change for atmospheric purposes of her own. Von Gärschner closes the window, banishing the outside world, and packs the two girls off to the washroom.

​We initially see the washroom in a wide shot from a high angle – a harsh institutional space is transformed by the vivacity and playful activity of the girls, as with the locker room earlier. Rows of drab rectangular cubicles are strewn higgledy-piggledy with discarded uniforms, shoes, and towels, and a flurry of activity is in progress. Then we see close-ups of several girls with bare shoulders and arms, their hair loose, evidently taking sensory pleasure in the freedom of wearing only their underwear while they perform various preparations for bed. One of them has a mirror and is experimenting with some sort of makeshift lipstick.
 
Ilse calls everyone round Mariechen and cajoles her to reluctantly perform a trick, busting a button on her uniform by swelling out her ample chest — a transgression from the ethos of the school both in terms of maidenly modesty and respect for the uniform. The ensuing uproar brings Fräulein von Gärschner in to restore order. Sensory pleasure and ribald spontaneity now suppressed, the girls are ordered into their individual cubicles and the cubicle curtains closed, rapidly transforming the space to drab institutional and hygienic order, and restoring puritanical modesty.
 
A slightly odd continuity cut replaces von Gärschner with von Bernburg (seen from behind) as she approaches Manuela and Edelgard who are sitting side-by-side on a bed with their backs to us, in the brightly lit dormitory. They have their arms around one another, Manuela already in her white  nightdress, evoking bridal wear, Edelgard in just her chemise, arms and shoulders bare, and her constraining uniform discarded in a heap beside her as she embraces Manuela. Although it soon transpires that Edelgard is comforting the grieving Manuela, the establishing image of their backs could just as readily denote a romantic tryst.
 
And indeed we might conclude from Von Bernburg’s reaction that this possibility also occurs to her. She calls Edelgard’s name sharply, bringing both girls to their feet and springing them apart as though caught in a misdemeanour, Edelgard snatching up her discarded uniform. Von Bernburg separates them, literally coming between them, and demands to know what they were doing. Edelgard explains that they were talking about Manuela’s mother, who is dead. While she listens to this, Von Bergberg pointedly averts her eyes from Edelgard, then glances back to her and curtly orders her to go to the washroom, thereby supplanting her as Manuela’s confidante and comforter.

​Hints of eroticism in the washroom scene and the framing and costuming of Edelgard and Manuela together on the bed prepare the ground for this second intimate encounter with von Bernburg, again shot and lit using the conventions of cinematic romance. “The camera observes on Manuela’s face the shift from the silent bearing of grief to the upsurge of desire.” (Dyer, 1990). As Manuela gazes adoringly into the older woman’s face, von Bernburg comforts her, telling her that she will soon get used to the school and must pray to God to help her.
 
Marching music recalls the opening of the film and we again see marching legs and feet, this time in ankle length nightdresses and slippers as the girls are drilled from the washroom to their dormitory and get into bed, overseen again by Fräulein von Gärschner. In a somewhat startling stylistic flourish, perhaps Soviet influenced, an extreme close-up of von Gärschner’s mouth is seen gabbling (unheard) orders. She then departs, having acted as a sort of stage manager — marshalling the scene for von Bernburg’s entrance and the performance of the famous “kiss” scene that now follows.
 
We see incidentally here that the military austerity of the dormitory is marginally relieved by small plaques hung above each bed, presumably religious or moral texts with decorative borders, the nearest thing to personalisation of the girls’ bedspaces permitted.
 
Once von Gärschner has departed, Ilse stands on her bed and performs her imitation of the headmistress, causing an outbreak of disorderly mirth. The prefect Marga barks an instruction and all lie down and are silent. The scene is set for the kiss routine.
 
Fräulein von Bernburg makes her entrance, stepping briskly and theatrically through the door, her arrival heralded, vamp like, by her shadow on the glass doors. She stands briefly at attention, her neat upright figure framed by translucent panels, and asks if everyone is ready, to which comes a chorus of assent. In a closer shot, she then operates her own lighting cue, reaching smartly to flick a wall-switch on her right. This extinguishes the bright overhead dormitory lights and is the precise reverse of the lighting change we earlier saw the disciplinarian von Gärschner operate in order to disrupt the intimate conversation between the two young girls by the open window. Von Bernberg is now momentarily seen in classically lit romantic twilight with a segment of bright ethereal halo behind her head. Simultaneously, a peal of bells erupts in the distance.

​The girls rise in unison in their beds and kneel expectantly at the lower end while an unseen light source now casts theatrical shadows of them, like a shadow play of a fairytale, humanising the clinical harshness of the dormitory walls. We have seen the girls moving in unison to form preordained patterns before, but in the formations of soldiers on parade. This is more like the action of a romantic ballet, and indeed the sound of bells is replaced by an orchestral melody inflected with soft echoes of the earlier bugle calls, these giving way to swelling strings as the following action comes to a climax. 
 
Von Bernburg moves slowly along the beds, taking each head in turn between her hands and kissing each forehead, then gently pushing the recipient away to lie down. We see Manuela following this progress with her eyes, radiant and smiling. Turning her head as von Bernburg comes to her side of the dormitory, Manuela’s gaze catches the gaze of the camera for an instant, implicating us in her anticipation. The irrepressible Ilse gives Manuela a whispered commentary as von Bernburg at last approaches their adjacent beds. Ilse, kneeling upright and rigid like a plaster saint contemplating heaven, receives her kiss on the forehead and lies down.
 
Manuela has not, like the other girls, already adopted a kneeling position when von Bernburg arrives in front of her, but is still sitting. This facilitates an extra, and significant, fragment of action. Shot from behind so that it is von Bernburg’s face we see, Manuela, bride-like in her nightdress, rises to match the teacher’s level. This movement injects a romantic dramatic charge into what would otherwise be too similar to what we have already seen with the other girls. Manuela throws her arms around von Bernburg’s neck and buries her head in her right shoulder, von Bernburg turning her head to the left so we see her face. Her hands come forward as if to return the embrace, hesitate, grip Manuela’s sides and then there is a cut to a close-up two shot. Von Bernburg slowly pulls Manuela’s clinging arms down from the embrace then lowers her head, kisses her on the mouth, turns away and leaves. Ilse, briefly glimpsed, already has her eyes closed so we assume that she (and the others) have not witnessed the kiss. This was a secret moment shared only with the camera. Manuela lies down contentedly and peacefully to sleep.
 
In spite of its reputation and contentious meaning, the kiss on the mouth itself is actually very brief. But the visual and auditory build up to it, in a different emotional and stylistic key to anything that precedes it, and its position at the end of act one, mark it as climactic.

There now follows a variation on the montage of martial sculptures that started the film, again with military bugle calls over it. As well as serving as a reassertion of the prevailing authoritarian and patriarchal order in the wake of the erotic undercurrents of the washroom and explicitness of the kiss itself (McCormick, 2008), the montage also ends the first act and indicates the elapse of a considerable period of time. The film until now has followed Manuela’s first day, but soon we will hear evaluations of her academic progress which suggest the passage of several weeks.
 
The bugles ringing in our ears, we cut to the school corridor and a military-style exercise is indeed in progress, a single column of girls marching in a repetitive loop while Fräulein von Gärschner acting as drill sergeant calls “Left! Left! Left!”.
 
The French teacher Mlle Oeuillet (Lisi Scheerbach) and the English teacher Miss Evans (Margory Bodker), invariably seen together and the nearest thing the film has to a comic duo, sit chatting (probably gossiping) on a bench, ignoring the drill.
 
Two girls, Mia and Marga (not the prefect Marga), who are not involved in the drill, talk excitedly about how Mia has received a romantic note from a younger girl, Josi. They have not noticed the proximity of von Bernburg, who confiscates the note, tears it up without reading it, then hands it back with instructions to throw it away. Her reprimand dismisses the content of the note, which she has clearly overheard, as trivial, and identifies the misdemeanour as a breach of the school’s prohibition on passing notes, a displacement consistent with Rich’s (1984) view of von Bernberg’s modus operandi as positioning herself as the exclusive object of erotic desire and so neutralising the girls’ desires for their fellow pupils. Relieved, the two girls retreat smiling.
 
Edelgard, who has witnessed the scene along with Manuela, enthusiastically acclaims von Bernburg’s generously lenient treatment of the incident.

An indeterminate time later, a staff meeting is in progress in a meeting room in the same stylistic territory as the Head’s study, gloomy and claustrophobic with dark patterned paper or fabric lining the walls.
 
The establishing shot, from a low angle at the end of a heavy boardroom table, shows a regimented symmetrical grouping. All six teachers in their identical uniforms with identical pens held upright in their right hands sit three-a-side at the table. At the far end the Headmistress sits glaring sternly, elevated half a head above her subordinates and framed by a murky oil painting on the wall behind her.
 
Von Bernburg is defending her educational methods against the Head and other teachers, who complain that affection and friendship towards the girls is inappropriate and will arouse emotion, and that discipline and competitiveness must be fostered. The lugubrious von Gärschner opines that the German classics must be nurtured, at which Mlle Oeuillet lets out a quickly suppressed giggle. The Headmistress complains that von Bernburg gives few “black marks”. She responds that her pupils behave and learn well without punishment. Relishing being thrown this cue, von Kesten raises Manuela’s name and von Bernburg has to admit that she is not progressing well. The other teachers seize the moment to compete in proclaiming that Manuela is in fact an excellent pupil in their classes. On the defensive, von Bernburg replies that her teaching generally produces very good results, which the Headmistress acknowledges, but advises her, with a wry smile and a strange ambiguous twitch of her eyebrow, not to aim any higher.  The Head’s expression in this close-up is intriguing – could it be taken to imply that she is only too well aware of the emotional desires she dreads being unleashed because she shares them?

Cut to a classroom where we will see for ourselves what has just been discussed at the staff meeting. The girls are waiting at their school desks and von Bernburg enters and takes her place on an elevated dais at the front. The functional monotony of the room is solely relieved, curiously, by a picture on the wall behind her of what appears to be an anatomical cross-section of a cow’s head, the only educational aid on view besides a blackboard.
 
The lesson requires the girls to individually recite memorised Christian passages. Mariechen, endearing stalwart of light relief, is the first to be called. Despite having very timidly raised her hand to volunteer, she does well with a passage from Genesis involving Jacob’s beautiful wives, his ewes, and his pottage of lentils. This inevitably raises an inappropriate snort of amusement from Ilse (a witty doubling with Mlle Oeuillet’s inappropriate giggle at the mention of German classics in the previous scene).

Next Edelgard is called. Seated directly behind Manuela, she stands smartly and begins. While the other girls turn to watch Edelgard recite, we see that Manuela’s adoring gaze remains transfixed on the front of the room.
 
Edelgard begins to fervently declaim the text of the Lutheran hymn “O daß ich tausend Zungen hätte“  – “Oh, that I had a thousand voices and a thousand tongues to praise my God”  (not, as sometimes referenced, the Song of Solomon with which it shares some similar phrases but which might be unlikely homework in this school). While nominally a religious text, the passionate words as recited by Edelgard supply an erotically charged aural backdrop to what follows visually.
 
As Edelgard recites we see a close-up of von Bernburg. This dissolves to an extreme close-up of Manuela gazing adoringly at her, their faces merging briefly. In a reverse shot of von Bernburg, she appears unsettled and embarrassed and averts her eyes from Manuela’s gaze. In response we see an even closer shot of Manuela’s gaze, her face cut off just above the eyebrows but showing the fullness of her mouth, site of von Bernburg’s dormitory kiss.

As Edelgard pauses her recitation at the end of the verse, von Bernburg recovers her composure and authority and instructs Manuela to continue.
 
She manages the first line but then, completely tongue-tied and crestfallen, is unable to go on.  A brief shot shows Von Bernburg looking at her lovingly, willing her to be able to continue. The inner struggle has begun. Then, standing and coming close to her, she curtly reprimands her.
 
Immediately after the class, we see Manuela timidly hiding in the corridor at the base of the Main Staircase. Von Bernburg approaches, accompanied by two girls carrying her books.  Manuela comes forward as they pass, then, ignored, she follows them up the stairs at a distance.

In von Bernburg’s office, a light spacious room with a large sunlit window, the kindly servant Johanna is sorting laundry. Von Bernburg glances at her very briefly but does not acknowledge or greet her and sits at her desk to work.
 
Out on the staircase, Edelgard has followed Manuela to comfort her. The book-carrying girls appear on a landing higher up the staircase, echoing the placing of von Bernburg and Manuela before their first meeting. They tell Manuela that the teacher wishes to see her.
 
Johanna shows Manuela’s worn chemise to von Bernburg and adds compassionately that she feels sorry for her because her pillow is always wet from crying with homesickness at night. Von Bernburg is disdainful and bluntly dismissive of the servant’s concerns, but takes the chemise over her arm.  Johanna shakes her head despairingly and mutters at her behind her back as she leaves. We have learned that von Bernburg’s courtesy and principled humanitarianism does not extend to the woman who handles her dirty laundry.
 
Outside in the passage Edelgard drags Manuela by the wrists towards the teacher’s door and not only knocks for her but turns the handle and pushes the door open.
 
Once inside, Manuela, doubtless expecting her poor lesson preparation to be the subject of discussion, finds that instead she is asked to account for worn out state of her chemise. It is interesting to note that von Bernburg did not know about the worn chemise when she sent the book-carrying girls to summon Manuela — the conversation with Johanna takes place after they have left the room. So the chemise as a significant object is unforeseeably introduced by the servant and immediately seized on by von Bernburg for the purpose of repairing the bond broken by Manuela’s poor performance in class, discussion of which is abandoned. 
 
Agreeing that the old chemise (thought serviceable by Manuela’s Aunt) is wholly unfit for purpose, the pair break into shared laughter and the ice is well and truly broken in preparation for what follows.
 
There is no close-up of the chemise to emphasise its poor condition or its narrative significance, and the three people we have seen touch it all do so fairly cursorily, handling as just a piece of defective laundry.  However, we have seen other girls in their chemises enjoying innocent sensual activity in the washroom scene and most particularly we have seen Edelgard in hers on Manuela’s bed, so the film has already attached a subtle erotic charge to the generic garment.
 
Equally, when von Bernburg now makes the crucial gift to Manuela of one of her own chemises we see it briefly as an immaculately pressed and folded article, and even when she shakes it out (to estimate the fit) it mainly drops out of frame.
 
Now for the second time in the film Manuela flings her arms around von Bernburg and clings to her. In a reverse of the same action in the kiss scene, this time we see Manuela’s joyful face on the teacher’s shoulder and von Bernburg does not move to prise her arms away until Manuela starts sobbing. However, mid-gesture her hands cease to push Manuela away and instead support her in a cradling embrace that lasts several silent seconds. Then, leaving Manuela sitting on a chair to control her tears, von Bernburg ignores her and settles at her desk to work.
 
Sitting before the bright window with its row of well nurtured pot plants in bloom, her new chemise grasped in her lap, Manuela blurts out that she doesn’t know why she is crying because she is not unhappy. Perhaps already sensing what is coming next von Bernburg, grasping at the information she earlier scornfully dismissed from Johanna’s lips, prompts Manuela to say if she is homesick, so inevitably opening the door to full confession of the real reason for her night tears.
 
Their chairs now turned to face one another and their eyelines level, Manuela fully declares her love for the teacher, her despair that she cannot go to her in her room at night, and that one day it will be other girls who are kissed at bedtime. Alarmed by this frankness (which she has just been at pains to invite) von Bernburg leaps to her feet and re-assumes her cold authoritarian persona, dismissing the confession, telling Manuela to confine herself to being a good friend, and reminding her that if exceptions were made the other girls would be jealous.

​Having thus extinguished hope, von Bernburg immediately reignites it with — “I think of you a lot, Manuela”, a line with some currency in debates about the film’s sexual ambiguities.
 
Promising not to cry any more, relaxed again and excitedly fingering the fabric of her new chemise, Manuela asks von Bernburg if she is happy. She replies that her happiness comes from living for all the children, and affably resists Manuela’s attempt to prolong the conversation.
 
After leaving the room we see Manuela again ruffling the fabric of the chemise with her fingers as she goes on her way, smiling happily.

​A peal of church bells and another glimpse of the external world, a brief tilting shot of the church tower.  The upward camera movement on the church reiterates the upsurge of (bridal?) joy we have seen Manuela experience in the previous shot, while its image sets the scene for the Sunday morning sequence that follows.

​In the dormitory a panning shot first reveals Mia and a friend lying relaxed together on one bed, Mia eating an apple (the Fall) and her friend lying across her, eyes closed. Then we see Ilse on her own bed stretching and rolling over languidly. They are all in full school uniform (“convict dress”) and it is only necessary to imagine this same scene with the girls in their nightdresses to realise the powerful function of the uniform in the suppression of sensuality. Bright sunlight illuminates the scene, creating barred shadows of windows and bed frames that supplement the atmosphere of confinement.
 
Elsewhere, but confined by similar shadows, Edelgard and a friend are seen sitting side by side and talking about the misery of the school life. Edelgard quotes her mother (echoing the views of the Headmistress) that the coming times will require strength and iron resolve.
 
The most vertiginous shot yet of the bright main staircase introduces a scene that confirms its colossal height and establishes its potential as a place of physical danger. Ilse and two friends on a high landing first spit and then drop toy cap-bombs down the stairwell, the latter startling the ever-snooping von Kesten on a lower landing.
 
Outside the cloisters in front of sunlit trees groups of girls stroll or talk in groups. Bell chimes indicate more Sunday hours have passed.
 
In some sort of day room, eight girls are seated at a circular sewing table making repairs to their worn out undergarments, including stockings and chemises. Mariechen, wearing her strong glasses, holds her work close to her eyes.
 
Ilse is not sewing. She is reading out a letter she has written home and intends to smuggle out alerting her parents to the lack of sufficient food — exactly the serious misdemeanour that the Headmistress warned about in the assembly scene.
 
Von Kesten comes in to check the sewing, and she very nearly discovers the letter. Her attitude in this scene (removed from the immediate scrutiny of her boss) is relatively benign and encouraging, admonishing a noisy interruption with no more than a stern look and then complementing the offender after finding no fault with her sewing.

Into the main corridor, the servant Johanna emerges in her light coloured Sunday best dress, gloves and wide-brimmed hat, striding out cheerily for her afternoon off, swinging her reticule. Ilse stops her and asks her to smuggle her letter out to the post. Johanna happily and unhesitatingly agrees (suggesting that Johanna is the regular courier for such letters), patting Ilse encouragingly on the back as she leaves, a gesture of sisterly solidarity rather than adult patronage. The ubiquitous Von Kesten inevitably appears, but seconds too late to witness the crime.

​Two girls are hand printing a poster and we understand that a period of time has passed. A close-up shows us a playbill for a performance of Schiller’s Don Carlos in honour of the Headmistress’ birthday, listing the cast.

Mariechen is to play King Philip II of Spain (an inspired piece of casting if ever there was one). Manuela is Don Carlos, Edelgard is the Marquis of Posa, and Ilse is the Friar Domingo. While we read the poster the preparation period is elided and we hear Manuela reciting some of her lines and another girl telling her how handsome she looks in her costume.
 
In a makeshift dressing room behind the stage we see Manuela in full Don Carlos costume, with plumed hat and tights and seated in an elevated position while the girl we have just heard sits at her feet and strokes her leg. Manuela asks if “she” (von Bernburg) will like her in her costume, adding that she must like her.
 
The bustling room is full of girls in stage costume preparing for the performance, while Elise, the cheerful and maternal wardrobe servant, attentively scurries around checking details. Ilse, in her friar’s hooded habit and long grey beard, rehearses with a girl in full armour a scene in which they plot to ruin Don Carlos through intercepted letters — church and the military conspiring against love.

Cut from the excited buzz of the dressing room to the grim stillness of the Headmistress at her desk in her Study. A reverse angle of the film’s memorable first sighting of the Headmistress now shows heavy shelves behind her carrying a dark bust of a male statesman or military leader and huge masonry-like books or ledgers add to the sense of burdensome historic gloom.
 
Von Kesten has brought in Ilse’s smuggled letter, which has been returned by the postal authorities because of an error in the address. (It seems slightly odd that Ilse would misaddress a letter to her own home, but it’s important for the film to establish that the letter has come into von Kesten’s hands in this way and not because of any betrayal by Johanna.)
 
Back in the dressing room Ilse’s rehearsal of the plotting scene is soon interrupted by von Kesten brandishing her letter. As it is read out, Ilse pulls back her hood and stage beard, deflated and anticipating the punishment which indeed follows swiftly — she must remove her costume  and cannot appear in the play. Forbidden the creative exercise of her talents through playing the duplicitous Friar with the verve with which we have previously seen her impersonate the Headmistress, she tears off her costume, angrily throwing aside the long patriarchal beard and the heavy Christian cross that completed it, revealing her imprisoning and infantilising striped uniform underneath.
 
She hurries to the deserted locker room and pulls down her suitcase, evidently preparing to flee the school.

​Back in the dressing room, Fräulein von Attems is hearing individual cast members rehearse their lines. As Mariechen mumbles her lines before the teacher, we see for the first time in the background Edelgard in her elegant black costume as Marquis Posa, pacing anxiously and practicing her lines from the book. A dashingly romantic figure, as she takes her place to be examined by von Attems we see that she wears a black cape, a close fitting pearl-buttoned doublet, white ruff, and a magnificent (real) sword on her hip. Unlike the Friar and the King, she has not been furnished with a stage beard or moustache, so retaining an undiluted boy/girl ambiguity that will provide an additional frisson in the party scene.
 
Edelgard has obviously enthusiastically identified with the emotional power of the drama. Deciding to deliver a line standing instead of kneeling as directed, she is dismissed by von Attems with the reprimand: “Don’t think. Obey!” — perhaps a wry in-joke about actors and directors additionally serving as a presentiment of the coming rebellion by the girls, but also in hindsight a chilling axiom in the context of 1930s Europe.
 
Dissatisfied with delivery of the girl playing the Princess, von Attems (like any drama teacher) seizes the opportunity to display her own thespian prowess by way of example, going so far as to slide forward seductively onto the desk opposite her uneasy pupil.

Von Attems is interrupted by Elise, bearer of a message that the play must begin.
 
The tiny proscenium stage is in a formal hall area opening off the main corridor and the audience of uniformed girls is already in place. The Headmistress and five ladies, her distinguished guests, are processing to take their places for the play, passing an upright piano in the corridor. They take their seats on an elevated platform at the back of the hall thereby signalling their superior status, an iron railing in the familiar pattern of the balustrade of the main staircase isolating them further from the girls. The teachers, including von Bernburg, sit in the front row and will enjoy the closest view of the actors.
 
The stage is flanked by decorative evergreen shrubs in pots and the heavy curtains are closed. This is the largest space we have seen within the school, and also the grandest, featuring not only the theatre proscenium (promise of escape to different worlds) but opulent chandelier lighting and heavy marble busts mounted along the walls, possibly representing doyens of the German culture which so amuses Mlle Oeuillet.
 
The setting has therefore shifted to a more imposing scale, anticipating the heightening drama of both the play within the film and the film itself. The following sequence cross cuts between the locker room, where Ilse’s personal drama of escape is playing out, and the stage in the hall where the drama both of Don Carlos and of Manuela’s determination to inspire the love of von Bernburg is about to begin.

In the locker room, a tearful Ilse is salvaging her secret Hans Albers photo collection from the back of her locker door.
 
Von Attems appears in front of the stage curtains to announce that that the role of the Friar Domingo will now be read by a girl who has been selected to replace Ilse. A flutter of disappointed murmuring goes through the audience of girls, reminding us of Ilse’s popularity as the pupils’ subversive humorist.
 
In the locker room, Ilse hurriedly finishes packing her suitcase, places her outdoor coat ready beside it, and leaves the room.
 
On stage, the play has now begun. Ilse’s replacement as the friar, despite being drafted in at the last minute and having to deliver her lines from behind both an enormous beard and a handheld script, is declaiming confidently opposite Manuela as Don Carlos.
 
Returning to the locker room to pick up her suitcase Ilse finds von Bernburg sitting on it. Skilfully taking her in hand, both literally and metaphorically, von Bernburg neutralises both Ilse’s tears and her frustrated anger (“I can’t be in the play either”), instructs her to wash her face and join the audience, and then dismisses her with a gratefully received slap on the bum.
 
In the play, Manuela’s Don Carlos is on his knees declaring his mortally prohibited love to the Queen (Elizabeth, also von Bernburg’s name).
 
Von Bernburg returns to her seat in the front row of the audience, earning an enquiring smirk from Mlle Oeuillet, just as the play Queen Elizabeth is starting to warn Don Carlos of his mortal peril. In another witty theatrical in-joke, von Attems leans out unnecessarily into view from the wings to prompt the Queen as she invokes mercy for Don Carlos to save his life.
 
“Death is not a high price to pay for an hour in paradise” responds Don Carlos/Manuela. Cut to a close shot of the teachers in the front row, von Bernburg between Mlle Oeuillet and von Gärschner. All three are evidently approvingly engaged by the drama but von Bernburg’s fixed gaze recalls Manuela’s gaze towards her in the classroom scene. The play ends with the Queen alone and weeping. Vigorous applause erupts, the usually severe von Gärschner, most martial of the teachers, smiling and clapping with the others.

​In the kitchen the servants are preparing a large steaming vat of punch for the girls’ party, one of them pouring a bottle of wine into it.  Johanna squeezes lemons into the mixture then sucks the lemon skins with evident relish, but upon sampling the punch itself pronounces it undrinkable and spits it out. It will later become evident that at some point more than enough strong alcohol is added to the bowl, maybe to compensate for the kitchen’s usual shortage of palatable ingredients, but once again the servants are seen to be doing their best to ameliorate the girls’ harsh life.
 
Back in the Hall the curtain call is finishing. The curtains close but the girls are still clapping and calling Manuela’s name, a sound which will be repeated in desperate circumstances before long. In a fleeting comedy moment, Von Attems opens the stage curtains and, seeing Manuela coming forward to take another bow, she hastily demotes the inattentive Mariechen from King Philip to tab operator, restrains Manuela, and steps forward to graciously receive her own share of the ovation.
 
As the Headmistress and her guests vacate their platform and leave the Hall, the audience of girls lift their chairs over their heads as one body and carry them out, instantly restoring the space temporarily to its institutional austerity.

​​Face to face in a very tight close up, their noses almost touching, Ilse is telling Manuela about the reactions of the Headmistress and von Bernburg to her performance (some of this information must be second hand, as they were seated at opposite ends of the Hall).
​
Ilse reports the Headmistress as commenting repeatedly on the beauty of Manuela’s legs, (whether because of a disinterest in Schiller or of repressed desire, we can only speculate). Von Bernburg apparently didn’t take her eyes off Manuela throughout the performance or say anything. Is Ilse, no stranger to hyperbole, at least partly telling Manuela what she knows she wants to hear? Von Bernburg dutifully left the performance for a while to forestall Ilse’s escape, and straight after the curtain falls we see her chatting amiably with the other teachers.

The Hall has been transformed with long cloth-covered dining tables which the girls are laying in preparation for their party. The cast, still in full costume, come surging through the stage curtains and down into the Hall like the players arriving in Elsinor, so breaking the fourth wall between fantasy and reality that had prevailed during the play itself. They are greeted with cheers and more cries of “Manuela!”

Standing beside the piano we saw earlier, von Bernberg and von Attems look on with smiling approval.  Von Attems moves into the Hall among the girls and compliments the whole cast, then singling out Manuela for special commendation but adding, as ever, that she must remember in future to prioritise declamation over emotionalism (advice which before long is spectacularly ignored).

​A two-shot of Manuela and von Bernburg isolates them in front of the balustrade that fenced the Headmistress’ platform during the play — a visual premonition of the staircase that will later provide the site of the film’s climax. Von Bernberg praises Manuela’s acting fulsomely, going so far as to suggest she could be a fine actress. In the context of the school’s ethos of military conservatism (“the mothers of soldiers”) this seems to be flagrantly off-message career advice.
 
Johanna enters to cheers, holding aloft her jug of punch. As with the chemise and the smuggled letter, she is again the humble and well intentioned agent of a major plot development. The teachers have now apparently withdrawn.

​In a small Guest Parlour, furnished and lit with the same opulence as the Hall, the Headmistress and her visitors, along with von Kesten and other teachers, are seated at small round tables being served tea or coffee. On opposite walls at either end of the space, just out of parallax with the camera, tall mirrors produce multiple images suggesting that this gruesome gathering of conservatives stretches on, like the heirs of Banquo, to infinity .

​Back at the girls’ party the punch has been poured and Ilse, her extrovert verve completely recovered, stands and proposes a toast praising the actors and Manuela in particular while mocking the rhetorical style of the Headmistress.
​
All rise and drink the toast, but are clearly initially dismayed by either the taste or the unaccustomed strong alcohol. Back in the kitchen, the servants have evidently been sampling their own share of the punch for a while, and the homely Elise smilingly pronounces its taste wonderful.
 
In the Hall, the girls are also now persuaded of the drink’s merits and we see Manuela drain a whole glass. General merriment is evident and a girl has gone to the piano and strikes up a fast waltz, causing a general rush to seize a partner and start dancing. She is very soon lobbied to play something more modern and launches into a popular song, to which singing and dancing erupts. A close shot reiterates the film’s recurring motif of uniformed feet and legs, this time cheerfully dancing to the jazz rhythm and including not only the familiar striped uniform fabric but also a pair of long legs, Edelgard’s legs, in black tights and velvet shoes. 
 
Wider shots show all the girls dancing, laughing, smiling, and swapping partners. Briefly, Manuela dances with Edelgard — still of course in their respective male costumes — momentarily conflating the chivalrous love between Don Carlos and Marquis Posa and the loyal friendship between the two school-friends.

​In the kitchen, the servants are merrily dancing to the same tune as the girls — a metaphor that it would be superfluous to labour.
 
In the Guest Parlour von Kesten asks the Headmistress if she should instruct the girls to keep the noise down, the Headmistress responding with feigned generosity that they should be allowed to enjoy themselves (well, it is her birthday), but nevertheless suggesting that Von Kesten keeps an eye on them, which she scurries obediently away to do.

​The pianist is playing a smoochy slow dance tune accompanied by a chorus of languid humming and dubbed onto the soundtrack with additional reverberation, instantly evoking a late romantic hour and a smoke filled nightclub. Minus smoke and candlelight, the groupings and action we briefly see next could indeed have been transported from a Wiemar era Berlin cellar. Most of the girls are sitting or leaning around the periphery of the room in pairs or small groups, swaying to the music, while a few couples dance languorously in each others arms. In the foreground, Manuela and Mia (the girl who had her love note confiscated by von Bernburg earlier in the film) are dancing closely as a couple, physically and emblematically commandeering the platform from which the Headmistress had watched the play. In soft focus in the background Edelgard can be glimpsed, her head nestled on the shoulder of another girl who embraces her while they sway dreamily to the music.
 
Discovering a painfully scratched “tattoo” of E.v.B on Mia’s arm, Manuela determines to make her speech and calls everyone around the platform, her second theatrical stage of the evening. The nightclub atmosphere is instantly transformed to that of a rally, a sea of eager faces turned towards the orator.  Drunk and ecstatic, Manuela proudly and loudly declares the gift of the chemise adding that she was sure it was intended as a love token. With immaculate timing, von Kesten pokes her nose around the door and hears this, beating a hasty retreat to alert her boss. Warming to her theme, Manuela declares that she is now sure of von Bernburg’s affection and fears nothing and no-one, this last spat into the face of the Headmistress who has entered the room at speed, parting and dispersing the girls by her very presence, but inevitably finding herself looked down on physically as well as temperamentally by dint of Manuela’s occupation of the platform. After a couple more defiant cries of adoration of von Bernburg, Manuela faints and the Headmistress pronounces a scandal as striped uniforms flee in terror behind her.

​The next morning the school’s corridors are bristling with activity. Mlle Oeuillet and Miss Evans sit gossiping about the scandal and appear to have a relatively sympathetic and liberal attitude towards Manuela, Mlle Oeuillet opining that it’s understandable in life to occasionally resort to drink. A small point is perhaps being made here about more relaxed attitudes to hedonism in France than in conservative Prussian society, but it is not insignificant that these two outsiders, while they may be enjoying the gossip, are broadly sympathetic to Manuela. Fräulein von Gärschner predictably takes a harsh view, advocating a remand home. A group of girls, including Edelgard and Mariechen, chatter excitedly, dismayed that they are not allowed to see Manuela. Mlle Oeuillet waylays von Bernburg and advises her not to jeopardise her position at the school for Manuela’s sake, but is curtly rebuffed. The exchange here comes close to hinting that the tolerant young French woman assumes that Manuela and von Bernburg’s relationship is amorous on both sides.
 
The Headmistress stalks the corridors, made yet more infuriated because as she passes these various encounters no-one seems to notice her presence until reminded of it (an early sign that the affair will soon dynamite her authority entirely).

In the school Infirmary, Manuela is seen from a high angle as she sits up in bed questioning the motherly and sympathetic Nurse, Hanni, as to how she comes to be there. The Nurse also sits comfortably on the bed, offering a consoling solidarity. As commentators on the film have observed, the furniture here is characterised by bars and the lighting is dominated by particularly heavy shadows cast by bar-like shutters. Manuela has apparently entirely forgotten the events that have led to her isolated imprisonment in the sick room. The Headmistress’s voice is heard loudly approaching the door and the Nurse leaps to her feet and stands aside.
 
The Headmistress enters and approaches the bed, her shadow ominously engulfing Manuela. During her ensuing wrathful tirade their shadows extend up the wall in a sinister inversion of the romantic shadow play seen in the dormitory kiss scene.
 
Outside in the corridor, Mlle Oeuillet has perched herself on a conveniently placed seat and is eavesdropping on the diatribe while pretending to read a book. Von Kesten approaches and asks her where the Headmistress is, somewhat superfluously since she can clearly be heard yelling her head off at Manuela inside the Infirmary. A concerned Edelgard hovers in the background.
 
As a parting shot, the Headmistress tells Manuela that von Bernburg will never forgive her. Von Kesten finds the Headmistress and tells her that the Princess (Patron of the School) has telephoned and will pay a formal visit to the School that very afternoon. In response to this fresh catastrophe, the fraught Headmistress directs von Kesten that Manuala must attend the presentation but that the other girls may not speak to her.

​In the dormitory, the girls are silently changing out of their striped uniforms and into their formal full-length white (brides-for-soldiers) best dresses. Edelgard rushes in and announces, presumably as a result of overhearing the previous scene, that the Headmistress has forbidden them to have contact with Manuela. There is a noisy chorus of concern and indignation. The prefect Marga characteristically dissents and blames Manuela but is pushed out of the group, the first authority figure to be sidelined.
 
Von Kesten enters briskly and calls order. In an outstanding Eisensteinian sequence, the girls become silent but stand should-to-shoulder staring defiantly at von Kesten. Discomforted to the point of feeling threatened, a close-up of von Kesten, frowning and squinting through her strong spectacles, suggests a bewildered ebbing of her authority. She pulls herself together and imparts in detail the stern command that contact with Manuela is now forbidden under pain of severe punishment. While we listen to this, the camera tracks along the defiant line of girls’ heads and shoulders, some in uniform and some already in bridal white.
 
Edelgard, still in her striped uniform but with the top buttons undone and the collar pushed back exposing her throat (strictly speaking a continuity error, but rendering her immediately more adult), her face half in shadow, glares furiously at von Kesten from the back of the group.

​We see a much wider shot than we have previously of the Headmistress’ Study, looking towards the large window from which stronger sunlight now streams through the ubiquitous gauze curtains.  Her high throne is vacant, a dark void in the centre of the frame. She herself stands with her back to us by the window, standing sentinel for her superior the Princess, another museum piece like her furniture and ornaments. She turns and wearily lays her cane of authority on her desk.
 
In the Main Corridor Von Kesten passes on the Headmistress’s dictat to von Bernburg, instructing her that she must not speak to Manuala and receiving a terse acknowledgement. The girls, now all in their long formal white dresses are standing talking or sitting in groups waiting to be drilled into place for the presentation ceremony. A group of them, led by Edelgard, argue about what action to take in support of Manuela and one of them volunteers to speak to the Princess about her plight. Teachers appear and drill the girls into silent columns lining the two sides of the corridor. Von Kesten summons Manuela and she takes her vacant place in the line, her neighbour touching her arm and guiding her into place in a small gesture of support, and maybe of defiance.
 
In her Study, the Headmistress is seated, not in her throne of authority but on a low visitor’s chair.  Hearing a sound, she leaps up and runs to the window. Then, like a naughty schoolgirl frightened of being late for class, she runs helter-skelter down the Forbidden Staircase, her skirt held above her ankles and, absurdly, carrying her cane.

​​The Headmistress and von Kesten having met the Princess and her companion, they process to the foot of the forbidden staircase where the teachers wait in line. We initially see the Princess only from behind and slightly above — a looming funereal figure in a voluminous black plumed hat, significantly dwarfing the Headmistress and drifting slowly towards the assembled girls like a spectre. The teachers are presented in turn, the Princess addressing Mlle Oeuillet and Miss Evans in their respective languages.  The pale lines of girls drop to the floor in deep curtseys as the Princess passes between them.
​
In the kitchen, Johanna, pulling on and tying her work apron to get down to kitchen drudgery, tells a colleague how much she would like to see the royal spectacle that is taking place above.

Back upstairs, the two lines of girls are now standing and the Princess and the Headmistress are making their way back along the line in review. When they reach the girl who has volunteered to speak on Manuela’s behalf, her courage fails her and she steps back into line.
 
Using the foot of the Forbidden Staircase to elevate herself yet further above the Headmistress, the Princess asks to have two particular pupils presented to her, the second of whom is Manuela (although, rather pointedly, she has forgotten Manuela’s family name and has to be reminded of it by her lady companion, who appears to be her own version of von Kesten). After making the two gracious remarks most likely to precipitate an unfortunate incident — that she had known Manuela’s late mother, and that Manuela looks rather unwell — the Princess is reassured by the Headmistress that all is well and the royal party retire up the forbidden staircase.
 
Ilse, Edelgard, and prefect Marga (who seems to have joined the dissenters) berate the girl who failed to speak to the Princess and she is left isolated.

Later, in the Headmistress’s Study, she and von Bernburg are discussing Manuela. The Headmistress is sitting, though again in the lower visitor’s chair and not her throne, a visual hint that her authority is already slipping away. Von Bernburg stands in her presence, an inferior position in terms of etiquette but a dominant one visually.
 
Riled by von Bernburg’s assertion that she knows the girls better than the Headmistress and moreover loves them, the latter, her eyes glinting, raises the question of the gifted chemise.
 
Alone in the corridor, still in her white presentation dress (bridal gown and shroud), in profile and isolated in a pool of light, Manuela, her head bowed, sits on a bench flanked by two columns as if imprisoned between guards.
 
From behind camera (and so on our behalf) Edelgard approaches the disconsolate figure and leans to her and takes her hands.
 
Jolting our identification with the trajectory of this kindness, von Kesten immediately appears also from behind camera and calls Edelgard away. She takes her into an adjacent room to reprimand her and Manuela forlornly tries to follow her friend but has the door closed on her.

What follows reveals again a relatively lenient, or at least pragmatic, side of von Kesten and perhaps the degree of power that Edelgard’s aristocratic status implicitly affords her. Edelgard has after all just flagrantly broken the very strictest direct injunction from the Headmistress, issued with dire warnings about the consequences of its breach. Von Kesten invokes the wrath of the Headmistress and the potential disappointment of Edelgard’s parents, but these are clearly rhetorical ploys rather than intentions to further complicate her own workload. On her part, Edelgard’s responses brush aside the status of the teacher and cut straight to the humanitarian urgency of the situation. Von Kesten can only respond by tetchily adopting the role of critical friend and darkly suggesting to Edelgard that associating with Manuela will only do her harm. Edelgard responds angrily, in close-up practically spitting into von Kesten’s face that Manuela is not bad.

​On which gratifying sight we cut to the Study, where von Bernburg is about to tell the Headmistress exactly the same thing in different words.
​
She has now moved closer to the Headmistress’s chair. Looming over her and gripping its back while addressing the side of her head, Dorothea Wieck delivers the famous line that enjoys much traction in discussions of sexuality in Mädchen in Uniform.
 
“What you call sin I call the great spirit of love in all its thousand forms.”
 
Coming around in front of the Headmistress to face her, von Bernburg then offers to talk to Manuela and persuade her to restrain herself. Now rising to her level, the Headmistress angrily forbids von Bernburg to have any further contact whatsoever with Manuela, whom we now see still out the in the corridor.
 
Manuela stands, in a curiously disturbing profile pose that suggests a hanged body, in front of glass panelled doors identical to those of the dormitory through which von Bernburg memorably emerged in the kiss scene. Returning from her confrontation with the Headmistress, von Bernburg is now intercepted by Manuela, who will not be pacified and falls to her knees desperately kissing the teacher’s hand. At a loss, von Bernburg tells her to go to her room and wait.

A concerned Mariechen and a friend discuss how unwell and close to fainting Manuela looked at the presentation.
 
Von Bernburg’s room is in darkness.  Manuela is kneeling sobbing in front of the desk chair, her face buried in the seat. The teacher enters briskly, switches on a light, and pulls Manuela to her feet, where the distraught girl flings her arms around her.  After calming her by seating her and stroking her head, von Bernburg tells her that they must never again mention what she has done and that her punishment will be isolation in a separate room, adding that the Headmistress has been lenient in not expelling her.  Manuela pleads that she will be still allowed to visit von Bernburg, but when it is made clear that she will never be allowed to see her again she says that she can no longer live.
 
This alarms von Bernburg, who has turned away as if herself nearly overcome, and she rushes back to the girl and tells her sternly she must use all her strength to be healed.
“Healed? From what?”
“You must not love me so much”  replies von Bernburg.
“Why?” Manuela replies in bewilderment —  going simply and directly to the core of the film’s subject matter.
 
Persuaded at last to leave the room, Manuela passes the Headmistress in the corridor creaking purposefully towards the door.

Now begins the famous staircase sequence. Groups of girls are running around the lower corridors and deserted classrooms, calling Manuela’s name in a frenzied whisper that will eventually rise to an uninhibited crescendo of shouts.
 
Manuela walks slowly up the staircase, clinging to the balustrade for support and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

​We see the staircase from below suddenly peopled on several floors with the frantically calling girls and Manuela’s distant white figure at the very top clinging to the balustrade, then a straight cut to the perilous reverse view from behind Manuela’s shoulder.
 
In von Bernburg’s room her final angry showdown with the Headmistress continues.
 
All adherence to the rules abandoned, a girl goes to the large brass firebell in the main corridor and rings it furiously, accompanied by an ever louder chorus of Manuela’s name. The school is now under riotous occupation by the girls. We never see von Kesten, who might be expected to be in full bluster here, again.
 
Back in von Bernburg’s room, the Headmistress rants on, telling her to leave the School immediately.  Von Bernburg has turned away from her now irrelevant and powerless boss, her hands over her ears, not, we realise, to shut out the Headmistress’s thundering, but to better receive a warning, intuitive or telepathic, of Manuela’s peril.

​A dissolve, in extreme close up and straight to camera, from Manuela’s face to von Bernburg’s is followed by her own cry of “Manuela!” and her flight from the room, now fully identifying with the girls’ search, just as…
 
Manuela is on the point of letting go of the balustrade and falling to her death. She is at last seen by the searching girls who rush up the staircase and rescue her, tenderly laying her in safety on the landing.

The Headmistress arrives on one of the landings, a wall of striped uniforms and accusing faces awaiting her from every angle. Von Bernburg comes to stand accusingly beside her, telling her sternly that the girls have averted a disaster that would have haunted them both forever. The Headmistress slowly descends the staircase. The girls stand back to let her pass and follow her with their eyes, but now in indictment and brazen defiance and without the deferential curtsy we are used to seeing.
 
A close-up shows Manuela being gently kissed on the face by her rescuers.
 
The Headmistress continues her humiliated descent.
 
On the landing above, Edelgard steps to von Bernburg’s side, others following.
 
The Headmistress, now fully in need of her cane for support, reaches the bottom of the staircase and, expelled from the domain of the girls, retreats slowly along the corridor towards her own, as we hear the bugles again and the film ends.

Marcel Carné’s masterpiece of ‘poetic realism’ Le Quai des Brumes (1937), scripted by Jacques Prévert, is the story of an army deserter, Jean (Jean Gabin), who arrives in the foggy port of Le Havre in the hope of escaping across the ocean, only to find himself trapped in a tangle of love, crime, jealousy and mischance, resulting not in escape but death.
 
A series of gifts punctuate the action of the film, each one an act of generosity but each one inadvertently bringing Jean closer to his fate. Ironically, the villain of the piece, the shifty and lecherous Zabel (Michel Simon), connoisseur of classical music – ”religious music in particular” – is the proprietor of an actual gift shop.
 
Elements of the film recall the tropes of the folktale or fairy-story, particularly the scenes played out in the three major sites of action meticulously created for the film by the great art director Alexandre Trauner – Panama’s bar, Zabel’s  shop, and the Fairground.  Indeed Zabel explicitly likens himself to Bluebeard and, although he is referring to his appearance and not his personality, we eventually discover that he really is a killer who, like Bluebeard, has dismembered the body of his victim.  The ubiquity of encompassing fog, which Jean identifies as both an external element and a state of mind, is also reminiscent of a curse upon the town and its inhabitants which might have been placed by some malign entity in a folktale.
 
We first meet the fugitive, Jean, still in his army uniform, when he is given a lift into Le Havre by a truck driver (Marcel Peres).  This down-to-earth proletarian, making conversation with the tired and hungry soldier, asks him if he is on leave.  Instead of replying with a lie or an evasion, Jean remains silent.  He accepts a cigarette, the first gift of the film, from the driver and soon falls asleep.  Arriving at the outskirts of the port, the two men almost fight after Jean seizes the steering wheel to avoid the truck hitting a stray dog. But they part amicably, the truck driver giving Jean his packet of cigarettes.  While not explicitly stated, it is clear that the truck driver understands it to be likely that Jean has deserted the army and the gift of the cigarettes implies class solidarity and a promise of silence.

​In the backstreets of Le Havre, Jean meets Quart Vittel (Raymond Aimos), a drunken vagrant who he initially finds irritating but warms to after Quart Vittel obligingly helps to shelter him in a doorway from a passing police patrol.  The vagrant then guides Jean to Panama’s, an isolated bar on a spit of land beyond the harbour.  As much as a building, Panama’s resembles the superstructure of a ramshackle craft beached by an ocean wave, and waiting to be one day carried away by another. In every way an edge place, it is apparently a refuge for lost souls rather than a commercial concern, or indeed a real place in the way the truck was real.  Presided over by Panama (Edouard  Delmont), a phlegmatic guitar-strumming former seaman in a crumpled white suit and a Panama hat which he claims to have bought in Panama in 1906, the establishment boasts a barometer whose needle has been nailed to always show fair weather and a dusty model ship corked immobile in a bottle. Talk of fog, says Panama, in his fog-bound domain, is not allowed.
 
Jean’s immediate need for food and shelter are provided for by Panama, shrugging off the soldier’s total lack of money. But the place, and the night, has more significant gifts to give.  When the melancholic, suicidally inclined, artist Michel (Robert Le Vigan) arrives, Jean is irritated by his pretentious banter but largely remains tactfully civil.  Michel will indeed decide to escape both his art and Le Havre by deliberately swimming naked to his death the following morning.  In surrendering the life he no longer feels a need to prolong, he will deliberately gift Jean not only a set of much needed civilian clothes and a large sum of money but also his passport and identity, a complete escape kit which will nevertheless be thwarted by the unintended consequences of other gifts
 
Shown into a rear room beyond the bar to eat his first food for days, Jean encounters seventeen-year-old Nelly (Michèle Morgan) who he initially takes to be a prostitute, to her mild amusement rather than dismay.  Referencing Red Riding Hood, Jean says he doubts she has come to Panama’s just to bring her granny a cake.
 
The justifiably famous first shot of Nelly at the window of Panama’s in her black beret and transparent, glistening, Chanel raincoat transforms the eccentric whimsy of Panama’s bar into lyrical enchantment.  Frequently described as ethereal, the vision of Nelly presented to Jean, and to us, in this scene offers “transcendence from the physical world, and all the misery it can bring” (Driskell, 2012).

​If Jean, guided to Panama’s by a chance meeting with the simple but instinctively subversive Quart Vittal, courier of fate, had on arrival been granted three magic wishes he would likely have asked for food, a beautiful young woman, and a new identity, and that is exactly what the misshapen hut on the promontory does indeed conjure up.
 
During his evening at Panama’s and the beginning of his infatuation with Nelly, Jean moves from trying aggressively to drive away the little dog he earlier saved from the truck, which has followed him, to acknowledging it as his own and feeding it morsels of his precious meal.  The dog, in folktale fashion, has arrived in Jean’s life from nowhere and stays with him, issuing occasional warnings, throughout his efforts to escape Le Havre – but it will eventually leave him and return to its own domain when Jean’s quest fails.  In The Morphology of the Folk Tale the structuralist Vladimir Propp identifies agents such as “grateful animals” which begin as donors by begging for either help or mercy and “later place themselves at the disposal of the hero as his helpers”.
 
Lucien (Pierre Brasseur), a psychotic petty criminal with aspirations to be a gangster, and his two accomplices arrive outside Panama’s by car in pursuit of Zabel, who they believe (correctly) to be hiding nearby.  They approach the door and demand to be let in, which Panama, revolver to hand, refuses.  A short firefight ensues, but the criminals speedily drive away defeated, despite outnumbering Panama three to one (a ratio repeated in their subsequent humiliating encounters with Jean).
 
As if hedged about by an exquisite force field emanating from its proprietor’s sanguine decency, the quaint and flimsy wooden building itself as much as Panama’s old revolver seems to repel Lucien and his gang – “the house’s powers of protection against the forces that besiege it” (Bachelard, 1964).  
 
Ominously, though, evil does penetrate the bar in the form of a random bullet that portentously smashes the bottle containing the model ship, much to Quart Vittal’s astonished dismay.  Discussing miniature artefacts contained in vitrines, Susan Stewart (1993) writes “The glass eliminates the possibility of contagion, indeed of lived experience, at the same time that it maximises the possibilities of transcendent vision.”  We do later glimpse Panama beginning to repair the model ship but, the glass shattered, it is too late to exclude the contagion from his land-bound craft and those it shelters.

Ship wreck: Quart Vittal witnesses a miniature disaster.  Raymond Aimos  

​Zabel, the lecherous and jealous guardian of Nelly, is indeed hiding outside, unaware of her presence inside. His hands are literally bloodstained but not, as he at first insists, because of a cut.  We will eventually infer that he has murdered Maurice, associate of Lucien and suitor of Nelly, and that he was in the act of disposing of dismembered body parts in the sea when pursued by the gang.  A suspicious Panama, taking an instant and unconcealed dislike to Zabel, permits him to briefly enter the outer room to get a good look at him and interrogate him.  Although Jean and Nelly are safely concealed in the back room, Zabel notices the dog, which, true to its mission, barks aggressively at him  but thereby enables him when he sees it again later to guess that Nelly was at Panama’s and had encountered Jean there.
 
At dawn, Nelly, Jean, and the dog leave Panama’s and walk towards the town, the latter having undertaken to try to find Jean some civilian clothes by evening, though as yet unaware of Michel’s proposed self-sacrifice.
 
Michel delegates Panama to pass on his possessions to Jean when he returns and then calmly carries out his fatal intention to escape his own existential fog.  Carne’s shots of Robert le Vigan walking naked into the sea were vetoed by the producer (Gregor Rabinovitch), but Raymond Aimos as Panama, his baggy white suit flapping in the wind, succinctly and less sensationally conveys both the grandeur and the futility of the event.  Later, Panama will dutifully convey the artist’s morbid bequest, and then attempt to dispose of the tell-tale military uniform in the sea’s depths as phlegmatically as he served Jean his complimentary bread and cheese when he arrived the previous night.

Aimlessly wandering the harbour streets, he chances instead upon Zabel’s shop and sees in the window a typical seaside souvenir – a small box covered in shells.  Earlier, at the dockside, he and Nelly had contemplated the detritus in the shallow harbour water, old shoes and a comb, and Nelly had commented that this was not the real sea bed which is far further out and deeper.  Jean sees the shell-box as a way of returning some of Nelly’s gift of money, which his pride prevents him from accepting, and of expressing his love.  At the same time, he has just learned of a freighter bound for Venezuela that will sail soon, so the shells also echo the call of escape to the further out and deeper sea which had earlier seemed remote and unattainable.
 
This bijou trinket in the shop window, the likes of which can still be found in seaside gift shops today, gets its own close-up from Jean’s point of view, nestling in shiny paper or cellophane that recalls Nelly’s glossy raincoat. The close-up shot isolates the box, rightly identifying as a significant object, for it represents the turning point in Jean and Nelly’s fate, embodying a naive expression of love but also pointing the way to death, since it facilitates the meeting of Jean and Zabel and therefore triggers events that lead to both their murders – Zabel’s at Jean’s hands and Jean at Lucien’s.

Zabel’s realm, like that of the fairytale ogre he resembles, has a series of chambers: the outer shop, pretty and enticing, full of foolish delights and playthings; the inner dining room and bourgeois parlour where dubious hospitality is dispensed on fine china while choral music on the radio proclaims Zabel’s intellectual superiority over uncouth hoodlums and simple soldiers, drowning out sounds of murder and abuse from his innermost chamber, the cellar.
 
The function of the shell box gift as a plot device is brief; it is soon ignored and set aside on the shop counter once it has served to ensnare Jean in Zabel’s malign orbit.  Although Jean angrily and violently resists Zabel’s blackmailing approaches and escapes for the moment, from here on Jean is fatally torn between devotion to Nelly and escape across the ocean.

​After arranging to meet Nelly in the evening at a local fairground, Jean returns to Panama’s where he learns of and receives Michel’s bequest of civilian clothes, identity documents, and money.  Panama is typically non-committal as to why and how Michel decided to bestow the gift that has apparently solved all Jean’s problems, relieving the soldier of the knowledge that in every sense he now occupies a dead man’s shoes.
 
Returning to the docks in his new guise as Michel Kraus, artist, Jean encounters the ship’s doctor, Dr Mollet, of a Venezuela-bound cargo vessel, the Normandie, which will sail the next morning.  Mollet was once an aspiring watercolourist and relishes the company of a real artist on the voyage, so jokingly invites Jean to enrol as a passenger.
 
Taking the offer at face value, Jean, revealing to us his intention of betraying Nelly, says that there’s nothing to keep him in Le Havre, and a deal is struck with the Doctor for his passage to Venezuela. Later, in the bar of a dockside hotel, Jean reiterates his denial more specifically. The Doctor asks him straight out if he is attached to someone for whom he will return.  Jean replies: “No… No-one.”
 
An immediate cut follows these words and we hear jolly fairground music and see a close-up of Nelly leaning on what appears to be a ships rail – as the camera pulls back she is joined by Jean and we realise that they are posing before a naively painted fairground photographer’s backcloth of an ocean liner, also called Normandie.
 
If Panama’s bar is a somewhat ineptly enchanted hut where wishes can be granted and Zabel’s shop is a pretty gingerbread house hung with poisonous cookies, the fairground is a charmed if gaudy thicket where time stands still so that love can blossom and an absurd goblin (Lucien) can be sent packing, shrieks of derision from his entourage ringing in his ears.
 
Nelly buys a pretty lead for the hitherto unencumbered dog, consolidating the three of them as a family unit even as Jean has just slipped away briefly to obtain his passport photo. The lovers find a dark spot between two sideshows and in the ensuing romantic exchange the tension in Jean between the growing certainty of his love for Nelly and his equally certain intention to take the ship is masterfully channelled by Carné, Gabin, Morgan, and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan.  In extreme close-up Gabin delivers the simple, famous, line that that was to identify Michèlle Morgan’s star persona for years: “T’as de beaux yeux, tu sais” (You’ve got beautiful eyes, you know). The two embrace and kiss passionately.
 
Later, on the fair’s bumper-car ride, Lucien aggressively swipes off Jean’s hat, which of course is Michel’s hat, both provoking Jean and exposing his disguise.  In response Lucien receives vigorous slaps from Jean for the second time, to the bemusement of his two sidekicks, their loyalty to their boss now visibly evaporating.  Further humiliated by the hysterical laughter of his raucous girlfriend (Jenny Burnay) Lucien retreats, vowing to kill both Jean and Zabel.

​Later Jean and Nelly sit at a café table beside a gently turning children’s roundabout ride in the now nearly deserted fairground. They muse on their situation and on the mystery that is the occasional kindness of strangers, who bestow gifts on those who need them and then disappear from their lives.  Jean speaks some reassuring words to Nelly about their future, but his expression betrays ambiguity about his intentions.  As they depart the deserted fairground, a high (omniscient) shot concluding in a fade shows a man on a ladder hanging dark tarpaulins around the now static roundabout, shutting away the magic.
 
Likening the enduring appeal of Quai des Brumes in France to that of Casablanca in Anglophone countries, Turk (1989) concludes “Its nostalgic power derives in large measure from its depiction of love… Carné succeeds, too, in rendering palpable a scenario of two beings who assert their love despite the odds”.
 
Part of this appeal resides in the public knowledge that Gabin and Morgan themselves became lovers. Although this was not until a couple of years after the Quai shoot, it is anecdotally clear that whilst Gabin was professionally guiding the inexperienced teenage actress he was also flirting.  In her autobiography Morgan (1978) recalls that when shooting a (subsequently cut) scene between the two, Carné instructed her to direct her eyeline to cameraman Schüfftan’s ear. By the time the cue arrived, Gabin had placed his own “beautiful blue” eyes between Morgan’s eyes and Schüfftan’s ear.

​Jean and Nelly spend the night together as lovers at the quayside hotel close to the berth of the Normandie.  In the morning they discover from the newspaper and the hotel waiter that the sea has relinquished both the dismembered corpse of Maurice, Zabel’s victim, and Jean’s military uniform, inevitably causing the authorities and public gossip to link the two and classify “the soldier” as a murderer. 
 
Jean confesses to Nelly that he has deceived her and will soon leave her to board the ship.  She responds tenderly that it would have made no difference if she had known that the night before.  He explains that he is a wanted man and must leave on the ship, but will in time return for her.  They part, Nelly to Zabel’s, to try to silence him with her accusations of Maurice’s murder, and Jean to the ship, where in the Doctor’s room he ties the dog to a post by its new lead and paces anxiously.
 
In Zabel’s cellar Nelly confronts her guardian with her certainty that he killed Maurice.  Zabel eventually self-pityingly confesses that he murdered Maurice out of uncontrollable jealousy and he starts to threaten and molest Nelly but is interrupted by Jean, who has left the ship to return to her. They attempt to leave the cellar but are attacked by Zabel with a box-cutting knife. Enraged and disgusted, Jean overpowers and kills Zabel, smashing his head several times with a brick.
 
As a response to Zabel’s attempt to violate Nelly and kill Jean, as Turk (1989) points out, “despite its luridness, the atrocity takes on the character of a spiritual act. With sacred choir music blaring from the radio upstairs, Jean assumes the role of a Saint George slaying the dragon in his lair.”
 
After killing Zabel, though, Jean appears dazed and indifferent to the urgency of escape.  For him, the fog of war, the fog in his head that he described to the truck driver at the beginning of the film, has engulfed him. Taking charge, Nelly is no longer the sweet girl at the fairground, she is a lover who must think for both of them. She urges Jean to get back to the ship and steers him to the door, but outside the shop with its window of dainty seaside trinkets he is gunned down by Lucien, who then drives away in his car.
 
As Jean dies on the cobbles, Nelly gives him the last gift, and the only one still possible, she kisses him for the final time.
 
Lucien has sped away from his deed of revenge in his car but, as in his fairground bumper car, he has nowhere to go.  Bluebeard has laid an irreversible curse on him – we learned earlier in the film that Zabel has arranged that in the event of his own sudden death certain documents incriminating Lucien in serious crimes will be released to the right people.
 
Quart Vittal, who earns a bare subsistence by tapping wine barrels at the docks and selling-on the haul, has for once resisted blowing all his day’s takings on drink and taken a room at the hotel where Jean and Nelly spent the night.  Playing fairy godmother to himself (for who else is there to grant his desires) Quart Vittal fulfils his own wish to sleep between clean white sheets just once in his life.  Wakened by the deafening blast of the departing freighter’s whistle, he retreats beneath the covers to shut out the reality that has shattered his modest and only dream.
 
In Doctor Mollet’s room on board the Normandie the dog breaks free from the pretty lead, literally snapping the last tie to the enchantment of the fairground and to the power of love over adversity, and just making it onto the dockside as the gangplank is hauled away.
 
“T’as de beaux yeux, tu sais”.
 
He runs fast, the little dog, trotting back along the Route Nationale on which we first met him – heading to anywhere but Le Havre.

“Animals came from over the horizon.  They belonged there and here.  Likewise they were mortal and immortal.  An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion and each ox was Ox.”
                        John Berger, Why Look at Animals. 1977
​
And each dog was Dog.  A live animal in a film can seem to offer a more vivid intimation both of mortality and continuity than does an actor, an extra, a familiar landmark.  Our awareness that we are seeing a dog portraying a dog is of a different order to our awareness that we are seeing Ingrid Bergman portraying Ilsa Lund.  Although we now expect the routine "no animals were harmed..." disclaimer and an animal trainer's appearance in the credits, the presence of a dog alerts us consciously to the process and artifice of film making.

​Animals were certainly in at the beginnings of moving photographs.   Writers such as Rebecca Solnit and Jonathan Burt have described the importance of animal motion studies in the technological and philosophical origins of cinema.

One of the workers leaving the factory in the one-shot Lumière Brothers’ Sortie d’Usine, shown at their historic public screening at the Grand Café in Paris on 28th December 1895, is a dog.

The dog makes his or her entrance about twenty seconds into the film, with lively encouragement from a large man in a work apron, who presumably is not on his way home but has been assigned to ensure that the dog performs as required - an early example of an animal wrangler blatantly in shot.  As the gates close at the end of the film we briefly see the dog heading back into the factory yard, this time not accompanied by apron-man, so perhaps called or whistled from inside the gates in expectation of a reward.
 
The opening of the gates at the start and their closing at the end is sometimes cited as evidence that this one minute film is not plotless but has a narrative arc, however simple. Equally it could be seen as a short film about a dog.  Most of the stream of workers seem oblivious to the camera and doubtless have been instructed to ignore it, but the dog is clearly performing and being coached, albeit visibly, in an “as himself” role.
 
The Lumière’s German rivals, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, projected films to a paying audience in Berlin several weeks before the Paris Grand Café show.  Although their projector was the weight of a bullock and their film transport mechanism depended on inserting metal eyelets into the film stock by hand, their subject matter was right on the money.  Not for them, things you could see any day of the week - a train pulling into a station or someone feeding a baby with a spoon - the highlight of their presentation was a boxing kangaroo.
​
In America, Thomas Edison’s company developed and privately demonstrated a film projector at around the same time as the Skladanowskys and the Lumières, but Edison’s favoured method of distributing films was via his own “peep show” Kinetoscope Parlours.  This neatly provides a vivid figurative demonstration of the voyeuristic essence of cinema, while for Edison it ensured that every customer was using, and paying for, some Edison electricity.
 
By the time the Edison Manufacturing Company made Electrocuting an Elephant in 1904 it is probably just as well that their films were usually viewed in the privacy of a Kinetoscope booth and only after the insertion of a coin.  This gruesome spectacle records the killing of a female elephant named Topsy at Luna Park on Coney Island.  Topsy had killed at least one man in retaliation for cruel treatment and her owners condemned her to public execution despite some intervention by an animal welfare organisation.
 
The Edison company supplied both the bespoke copper electrocution shoes and the necessary 7000 volt current for the killing of Topsy, and filmed the event.  The film appears to have survived because Edison, ever mindful of protecting their assets, deposited a paper-print copy with the Library of Congress as insurance against breach of copyright.

​The Edison company already had form in facilitating animal electrocution, their facilities having previously been made available for experiments in killing stolen domestic dogs and cats.  It seems  unlikely that Thomas Edison himself had any part in Topsy’s execution and his defenders say that if  electrocution had not been made available the animal would have suffered a far more cruel end by hanging.  By registering the title as Electrocuting an Elephant the film seeks to identify itself as a quasi-scientific document – Electrocuting Topsy would have given it away as the peepshow snuff porn it was likely consumed as.
 
In Britain the following year Cecil Hepworth, established in his own studio and with nearly a decade of film-making experience, released Rescued by Rover.  Co-directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, this is a “stolen baby” genre piece with a dog hero.  Due to a young nursemaid’s carelessness, a middle class family’s baby is abducted.  The family dog, on his own initiative, sets out on a search and finds the baby in the attic of a terrace of slum cottages.  The dog returns home then guides the father to the rescue and the family are reunited.

The secondary roles were played by professional actors and the family were played by Cecil Hepworth himself and his wife and baby daughter.  The hero of the piece was played by the Hepworth’s own Collie, Blair.  Blair has the advantage of appearing in most of his scenes with people he is familiar with, including the infant girl.  But nevertheless his training and disposition result in an immaculate performance, including some complex series of actions within single shots - such as his search for the baby along a terrace of several dwellings, trying various front doors and diligently ignoring a number of human extras lounging in doorways.

​RITA

Anyone who has seen Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours: Red (1994) is likely to remember that there’s a dog in it. Rita, an Alsatian bitch, is hit by the car of the film’s protagonist Valentine (Irène Jacob), which incident leads to Valentine meeting the retired judge and obsessive eavesdropper Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant).  If you saw the film a long time ago you may have forgotten that, in one of numerous doublings, there is also a second dog, Auguste’s dog.  Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) is a young lawyer studying to qualify as a judge whose deluded love life in the present appears to mirror that of Kern decades ago.
 
Valentine and Auguste live in nearly adjacent buildings but spend most of the film failing to encounter one another while both being in relationships with other unsuitable partners.  In the controversial ending of the film, Valentine and August are two of only seven survivors of a ferry disaster, and a briefly glimpsed TV newsreel suggests that they have indeed now met for the first time on the rescue boat.  Kern, who may have predictive powers or may just be an exceptionally shrewd reader of people, has foreseen that Valentine will be happy with someone eventually.  We are, as ever with Kieslowski, invited to tease ourselves with whether that someone is or isn’t Auguste.
 
The Alsatian Rita is diegetically present during just under half of the film’s 90 minute running time - including lengthy dialogue scenes between Valentine and Kern during which Rita is present in Kern’s house but largely unseen - although an ornament representing a pair of dogs is often in shot behind Valentine, suggesting the omnipresence of Dog.
 
As several commentators have pointed out, Rita functions as a kind of messenger or agent for Kern, pulling Valentine into his orbit and ensuring that she will return there, even after the conclusion of the film.

​ROAD TRAFFIC ACCIDENT

​We first meet Rita when Valentine’s car strikes her, causing, as we later find out, only minor injuries.  A few moments earlier, in the background of a wide shot of a dark street, we have briefly seen a female extra crossing the road with a different dog on a leash, thus subtlety planting the idea of Dog in our minds in preparation for a significant event.

​We don’t see the actual accident impact, but this violent introduction to Rita immediately brings the dog-playing-the-dog to our conscious attention.  Rita lies prone in the roadway, apparently unable to get up and issuing (likely dubbed) squeals of pain.  When Valentine attempts to lift her she doesn’t do what a dog would naturally do and stand up, she whimpers and stays stiffly prone.  How did they do this, we think.  Is the dog very well trained and rehearsed for this scene?  Is she tranquillised?  How much time has Irène Jacob spent socialising with the dog to gain this level of trust?  Dog is simultaneously within and beyond the narrative.
 
Having managed to lift Rita into her car, Valentine discovers that her collar is marked with the dog’s name and Kern’s address.  Although a shot of the collar shows us the name “Rita”, Valentine also speaks it out loud, establishing a bond between her character, the dog, and the audience.  In fact not only is Kern’s name as the owner not on Rita’s collar, his name is only revealed when in later scenes it can be briefly glimpsed on a letterhead and it is heard called by an usher at the court he has to attend, not as a judge but as a miscreant.  In the script he is simply The Judge.

​THE JUDGE, THE DOCTOR

​Valentine drives to Kern’s house with the injured Rita and discovers that he seems wholly indifferent to the animal's fate.  When she challenges him as to whether he would be so unfeeling towards his daughter he simply replies that he hasn’t got a daughter – an apparently callous remark that we later understand is born from the pain of betrayal.
 
Upset by Kern’s unconcern for Rita and his evident misanthropy, Valentine takes Rita to a veterinarian (Marion Stalens), one of several briefly glimpsed but evidently sympathetic women in the film (although in the script* the vet is described as “he”).  Learning that Rita’s injuries are slight and incidentally that she is pregnant, Valentine takes her home, the dog’s front right leg in heavy bandaging.

We next see Valentine and Rita in daytime in Valentine’s flat. Rita is at rest on the bed while Valentine sits on the floor beside her.  In a two shot, their heads are level and given equivalent screen space as Valentine speaks by phone to her obsessively jealous but habitually absent boyfriend, Michel.  To tease Michel, Valentine pretends she has human company and holds the phone for him to hear Rita’s licking and panting.  (Why is the Dog who plays Rita panting while at rest? Has she been taught to pant on command? Is it the lights?)  Unamused, the controlling Michel tells Valentine, who is tenderly holding Rita’s paw, to get rid of the dog.  This, she does not do.

​HOME FROM HOME

​After an interval of some time, unspecified but evidently sufficient for Rita’s leg to fully recover, we see Rita apparently happily adopted into Valentine’s home life.  After some cash is delivered, which Valentine correctly guesses is sent by Kern to reimburse her for the veterinary fees, Valentine attempts an off-leash walk in the park.  There ensues the scene where Rita’s Ariel-like function to Kern’s gloomy Prospero is most explicit.
 
On being unleashed, Rita pauses and licks Valentine’s face before bolting at speed.  The lick is important – it is a signal that there is a bond between them and it is an invitation to follow, which Valentine of course does.  Rita bolts from the park and into the streets and Valentine’s concern turning to panic will be recognised by any dog walker.   After all, this dog has only just recovered from one road traffic accident.
 
After avoiding collision with a family on bicycles, Rita next runs into a church during mass and seemingly disappears.  Valentine follows her into the building and the priest and celebrants, apparently undisturbed by the dog’s incursion, are momentarily put out by the young woman’s.  While Valentine is apologising, Rita gives her the slip and vanishes.
 
Guessing that she has gone to her old home, Valentine drives to Kern’s house where she is indeed greeted in the driveway by Rita.  Kern emerges from the house and insists that Rita now belongs to Valentine.  Rita appears unable to decide between Valentine and her old master.
 
Kieslowski himself analyses this scene in detail (in a short film included in the Artificial Eye disc of Red) describing Rita as a magnet that draws Valentine to Kern.  The director seems to suggest that he would have liked to have Kern, Rita, and Valentine in the same wide shot in the driveway with Rita looking back and forth between the two people.  As it proved difficult to get the dog to do this, a compromise was achieved by cutting in close-ups of Rita turning her head (presumably instructed by her handler).  This actually foregrounds Rita as an agent with a dilemma, and is perhaps therefore more satisfactory for a dog-centred reading of the various relationships.
 
Valentine then explains that the cash Kern sent for the veterinary treatment was too much, hands him some banknotes, and asks him how he knew where to send the money.  He replies that this was easy, but does not explain.  This does seem to be a puzzle.  She didn’t tell him her name on her first visit and he didn’t see her car.  We can take this as a suggestion that Kern has powers beyond those of ordinary mortals, or we can simply follow the Dog and surmise that he has rung round the likely veterinary clinics for the information.

​SMALL CHANGE, BIG CHANGE

​Kern goes inside his house to get the right change but does not reappear, thus triggering Valentine to follow him inside.  She there discover that he spends his time spying by tapping his neighbours’ phones, and the remainder of the plot unfolds.  The scenes that follow between Valentine and Kern are the heart of the film, described by Geoff Andrew as “her innocence transformed by his wisdom, his humanity revived by her compassion.”

When Valentine goes home after her disturbing first-hand encounter with Kern’s spying and his dismal view of human nature she does not take Rita, despite Kern’s earlier insistence that Rita is now her dog. Nor, having now learned that Rita is pregnant, does Kern make any move to insist, suggesting perhaps his old indifference or perhaps the beginning of his revival.  In effect, Valentine has given Rita back to Kern, knowing that he needs the dog more than she does.  In the script Valentine, on getting home, dejectedly drops the red dog lead she has bought into the trash, but this does not appear in the film. 

Kern’s regained humanity at the end of the film is manifest in his affection for Valentine and her brother (who we only hear on the phone and see in a newspaper photo).  But also significant is Kern’s rediscovery of his delight in animals and his care for Rita.  The script has him watching Rita suckle her puppies “when something occurs to him quite unexpectedly” and he immediately starts to write the letters confessing his spying.  In the finished film, Rita does not appear to have had her puppies yet, but she is already ensconced in the den that Kern has provided for her.  Instead of watching her suckling the puppies as in the script, Kern and Rita in close-up exchange attentive, meaningful, glances.

In a later scene, Valentine takes her leave of Kern before the near-fatal ferry trip, and asks him if she can have one of Rita’s puppies when she returns.  The sudden and fulsome smile that Jean-Louis Trintignant produces in response to her wish is a high marker of Kern’s rehabilitation.  His very few previous smiles, as when he opens a bottle of pear brandy, have been little more than twitches, but this transformative smile resembles the sudden burst of sunlight that he has drawn to Valentine’s attention earlier in the film.

​ANOTHER JUDGE, ANOTHER DOG

​The first words we hear in Red, apart from some generic phone babble over images of cable, are Auguste ordering his dog “Come here” as he prepares to leave his flat.
 
He exits his front door with his dog on a leash and starts to cross the road.  He then has to pull back rapidly, hauling the dog away, as a red car corners fast in their direction - thereby planting in our minds the possibility of a road accident involving a dog.  We will indeed witness such an accident shortly, though of course not with this dog.

​Auguste’s dog plays a smaller role and has less agency or influence than Rita, but from time to time he serves to highlight the deficiencies in Auguste’s character.  The script suggests a running theme that his dog is always ready and eager for a walk or a game but that Auguste usually has other priorities.  This theme is less overt but still discernible in the finished film.
 
There are two occasions in the script where August’s dog is described as being aware of and interested in Rita, but these do not appear in the film.  The first is during Rita’s bolt from the park and would have interrupted the editorial flow of Valentine’s quest to locate her dog.  The second is when August drops his lover Karin off at her flat at the same time that Valentine is visiting Kern in his nearby house.  This time August’s dog is indeed visible inside his red jeep, and in long shot we see Karin briefly lean in and stroke him, but there is no indication of any contact between the two dogs.  It appears that at some stage the explicit doubling of human and dog destinies was abandoned, perhaps as too obvious or too cutesy.
 
Auguste exhibits two instances of ill treatment of his dog.  After witnessing Karin in flagrante with her new lover he returns home and throws himself on his (single) bed in despair.  The ever bouncy and affectionate dog jumps up to comfort Auguste and he roughly lashes out and pushes him to the floor.  In the film this is a somewhat badly aimed gesture of anger, but the script specifies a hard deliberate thump on the snout.
 
Later we see Auguste halt his jeep on a lakeside freeway, take the dog out and tie it to a post, then drive rapidly away.  The script has him undergo a change of heart a few metres down the road, reverse his jeep, and retrieve the animal immediately.  In the finished film, though, we only infer that he has gone back to rescue the dog when we eventually see Auguste board the doomed ferry carrying him, and we are given no idea whether it took him minutes or hours to change his mind.

At the conclusion of Red, the thing we know most certainly about Valentine’s future is that she will adopt one of Rita’s puppies when she returns to Geneva.  It seems unlikely that either the jealous absentee Michel or the self-absorbed Auguste would be patient house-training partners.
 
Sadly, when we finally see Kern watching the TV coverage of the sea rescue, it is evident that the miraculous selective survival of the stars of the Three Colours Trilogy does not include Auguste’s animal companion.  Well, there might be air pockets in the vessel that haven’t been investigated yet.

At the time of writing, the principal actors from Red are still here, Trintignant making films into his late eighties.  Kieslowski has gone and so, of course, has the dog who plays Rita and the dog who plays Auguste’s dog.
​
But each dog is Dog…

​JUDGE NOT

Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman (2017) is story of prejudice and fear of difference.  Marina (Daniela Vega), a trans cabaret singer, is in a relationship with an older man, Orlando (Francisco Reyes) who dies suddenly.  Ruthlessly shut out from any involvement with the usual procedures and rituals surrounding shared grief by both Orlando’s bourgeois family and the agencies of the state, Marina finds some solace in the companionship of the couple’s Alsatian bitch, Diabla (She-devil).
 
Though they seem to have little interest in or affection for dogs, Orlando’s family remove Diabla, simply because they can and they want to exclude all traces of Orlando from Marina’s life.
 
After suffering a savage physical attack Marina resolves to regain autonomy, relinquishing Orlando’s flat and possessions but determined to get Diabla back.  By way of a parting shot, as Orlando's family are driving away from the crematorium Marina intercepts their car and, jumping onto the roof, inflicts substantial heel damage to the bodywork while her heartless tormentors squirm helplessly inside.
 
In the concluding scenes the dog and the singer are reunited in a new life.  In one eloquent scene, Marina and Diabla are lying silently together on a sofa as naked companions – species and gender irrelevant to their bond.
 
At the end of the film, Marina feeds Diabla before going out to debut as a classical singer, performing Handel’s exquisite aria Ombra mai fu while the camera tracks gently in from the back of the auditorium to a full close-up.

Diabla does not act to drive the narrative in A Fantastic Woman as Rita does in Red, but her presence supplies a valuable living symbol of Orlando and Marina’s bond, the one thing that hostile forces are eventually powerless to remove.   Orlando appears several times in the film after his death, a ghost-like guide for Marina.   After her regeneration and the return of Diabla, he too can move on. The ghost's work is done, but Dog's continues.

​Watching Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, 2000) will undoubtedly have led some viewers to seek out and relish F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) for the first time. Good. Travellers in the reverse direction are likely to find some delights, but also some significant disappointments.
 
The premise of Merhige’s film is that Max Schreck, the actor who played Count Orlok (the Dracula figure) in Murnau’s film was in fact a real vampire, recruited by Murnau in secret and unbeknown to anyone else in the cast or crew. Having invented this amusing notion, the filmmakers spend the duration of the running time ensuring that it becomes progressively less amusing. The fundamental problem of the tension between the historical facts and the premise of the film generates a blizzard of contrivance and exposition, much of it delivered through occasionally laborious dialogue, including an explanation of how slow motion is achieved in a hand-cranked camera.
 
To accommodate the comedic conceit that Max Schreck was a vampire, we can of course expect to be asked to disregard some of what we may know about Murnau’s film – the fact that Nosferatu’s night scenes were shot day-for-night, for example, or that actors Greta Schröder and Gustav von Wangenheim survived the shoot unharmed and continued their careers – what is insurmountable is the preposterous characterisation of Murnau, played by John Malkovich, which does no service to the film, even in its own terms, and almost derails it for anyone with more than the most superficial notion of Murnau and his work. There is no doubt that Murnau was an exacting perfectionist who was determined to get what he wanted, but he was not an Otto Preminger bully on steroids.
 
The film is in English and adopts the quaint British war film convention, long moribund, of having Germans converse among themselves in English but with German accents, although most of the principal cast are either native or fluent English speakers.
 
Pursuing his art ruthlessly in the face of any and every disaster, and there are many, Shadow of the Vampire’s Murnau alternates furious yelling and ranting with sotto voce off-camera instructions and encouragement to his increasingly terrified cast. He wears a white lab coat and dark glasses on set and is addressed as “Herr Doktor” by his crew. This last may be authentic, but adds to the overall effect of referencing, if not actually evoking, the stereotypical cinematic figure of the mad Nazi doctor. Indeed at times Malkovich’s performance eerily recalls another lab coat wearer - Hans Vergerus, the demonic proto Josef Mengele character played by Heinz Bennent in Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977).
 
It is left to Udo Kier (an actual German) playing Nosferatu’s producer Albin Grau (an actual occultist - though the film neglects to exploit this) to provide a sense that Merhige’s enterprise is a little more than a lifespan distant from Murnau’s. In his review of Shadow of the Vampire, the critic Peter Bradshaw comments that “[Udo Kier] would have made a more plausible, and a more compelling, Murnau” (Guardian 2.2.2001).
 
Equally, Willem Defoe, who plays Schreck, would probably have made a considerably more plausible Murnau. In fact, in an ideal scenario he might have played both parts, which would have also made psychological sense, his Murnau pitched about a third of the way along a spectrum between his Pasolini and his Jesus.
 
Max Schreck certainly existed, his height and striking features marking him out as a character actor. He worked with Berthold Brecht as well as with Max Reinhardt, appearing in the Brecht-scripted short “Mysteries of a Barber’s Shop”, which can be found on YouTube. The Internet Movie Database lists 46 film credits for him, including one other Murnau film, Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (The Finances of the Grand Duke, 1924).
 
Defoe’s performance, make-up, and costuming builds cannily on Max Schreck’s original, not without an occasional knowing glance towards the Klaus Kinski/Werner Herzog incarnation, particularly its animalistic tics and noises. An unconvinced Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard described Defoe’s performance as “a hammy caricature of the cinematic Schreck”. A degree of hammyness, it could be argued, is both inevitable and desirable in this context, and Eddie Izzard’s comic turn as the unlucky Gustav von Wangenheim is built on a successful calibration of the appropriate degree of ham in his Gustav and in his Gustav-as-Hutter manifestations.
 
Rather than a caricature of Schreck, what Merhige, writer Steven Katz, and Defoe have created is a new entity - Orlok’s more mischievous younger cousin - provided with a voice and addicted to practical jokes as well as to throat chewing. Given the unsympathetic portrayal of Murnau, the audience should have little difficulty siding with Schreck when, in a key scene in Schreck’s crepuscular lair, the two of them engage at close quarters in a trial of physical strength, Murnau hastily fleeing in defeat. As Murnau disappears into the night, Schreck, alone in his den, turns towards us in a fit of triumphant eye rolling which culminates in a direct glance to camera, shattering the fourth wall and both implicating and threatening the audience.

In an earlier scene, after the cast and crew have abandoned shooting for the night following a vampiric outrage, Schreck explores the improvised studio and in a dark corner discovers a hand-cranked projector which he examines and coaxes into life.
 
What he sees on screen are not the fresh, crisp, perfectly exposed frames that would have actually comprised Murnau’s 1922 rushes but fragmented land or seascapes, beautiful in their fragility and as elusive and as resonant as dreams. Schreck has not stumbled into Murnau’s cutting room, but into the subconscious of a twenty-first century film restorer. The brief scene is outstanding, both in its eloquent tribute to the power and the fragility of film, and in its value in establishing the underlying nobility and pain of Nosferatu, a creature deprived of delight and wonder as well as companionship, for eternity. It’s a lost opportunity that the film offers a characterisation of Murnau so absurd that it is unable to similarly touch on the real Murnau’s personal demons.
 

In an early scene in Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1973), the protagonist, a German writer at the end of an assignment to produce an article about the USA, arrives at the New York office of his publisher. Phillip (Rüdiger Vogler) is broke, past his deadline, and hoping for an advance. The problem is that he has failed to produce a single word of the commission, proffering instead a cardboard box full of images - Polaroid photos. He has told his story but used the wrong language, and so receives short shrift and no cash.

Trying to get a flight home, he encounters nine year old Alice (Yella Rottländer) and acts as translator for her mother, Lisa (Lisa Kreutzer), whose English is insufficient to negotiate with the PanAm desk girl. Later, in a touching reversal of this situation, Phillip is himself dependant on a truculent Alice to translate his instructions to the Amsterdam barber who is trimming his hair.
 
The film, a tender European subversion of the Hollywood road movie, offers a catalogue of the inadequacy of both words and images to communicate needs and desires. On their transatlantic flight, Phillip and Alice play the word game Hangman. When Phillip wins the game by using the word traum (dream) Alice protests that this is the wrong sort of word and only real things should count. Delightedly examining a Polaroid taken from the plane window she declares “What a lovely photo- it’s so empty!” In Amsterdam it becomes clear that Lisa has temporarily abandoned her daughter to the care of Phillip and so the unlikely pair set off on a quest through a succession of German towns in search of Alice’s grandmother.
 
The child is unable to name the place where her grandma lives, but reveals a Proustian fragment of memory, neither word nor image but texture and sound - coal dust rustling the pages of a story book. This leads the duo to search the Ruhr district in a Renault 4 - antithesis of the Hollywood road trip automobile - hired with the last of Phillip’s travellers cheques. Casually, Alice reveals that in her luggage she actually has a photograph of Grandma’s house. This turns out to be a nondescript building, typical of the region, but by an unlikely coincidence the image does eventually lead them to the house. But Grandma has moved away two years previously, leaving no forwarding address.
 
Earlier, Phillip escapes his charge by handing her over to the police, and, chancing on a flyposted advertising image, he attends an open-air concert by Chuck Berry -
“Help me find the party tried to get in touch with me,
She could not leave her number but I know who placed the call…”
 
Apparently the song was Wenders’ original inspiration for his story. He has recounted that he and his cameraman, Robbie Müller, did actually shoot some footage at a Berry concert in Germany, but were unable to afford the rights and eventually had to use clips of an American concert from a secondary source, which they were never satisfactorily able to match to Müller's 16mm black and white for the rest of the film.
 
While Alice in the Cities is generically situated within the New German Cinema project of asserting a German identity in the face of US cultural hegemony, the brief scene at the concert serves to confirm Phillip/Wenders’ love of American popular culture and to offer a counterbalance to his frustration in the face of the banality of American media - established in an earlier scene where Phillip destroys a motel TV set.
 
Although in going to the Chuck Berry gig Phillip is at last doing something he wants to do, in the company of a cool crowd of his own generation, a brief close-up seems to point to his isolation and lack of purpose in the absence of his recently acquired responsibility. The intuitive (and ultimately more resourceful) Alice has meanwhile evaded her police guardians at the first opportunity and that evening, like a film noir detective, she slips from her hiding place in the city shadows and back into her place in the passenger seat of the Renault.
           
Misunderstandings and the deliberate withholding of information are familiar and vital elements of the vocabulary of storytelling, as are improbable coincidences. Words and images serve to frustrate an immediate goal, thereby enabling a broader or more rewarding one. Several times Alice withholds information which might have curtailed the adventure, just as at the beginning Phillip supplied his publisher with copious deliverables, but not in the required form, thereby precipitating the remainder of the plot.
 
At a Netherlands bus stop (where, in overt homage to Hitchcock, Philip and Alice are placed near a sign that reads “Northwest”) Alice asks to take a Polaroid of Phillip - “So you can see what you look like.” We may wonder whether this image will serve its intended purpose any more effectively than the one of Grandma’s house.
 
Lisa’s initial difficulty at the airport at the start of the film resonates throughout. We have understood that flights home are delayed or cancelled, but our command of the local language is too poor to negotiate an alternative.