Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

English as she is Spoke: The First British Talkies

2012; Routledge; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439685.2012.727341

1465-3451

Robert C. Murphy,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Thanks to the British Academy and De Montfort University for paying for film viewings in the BFI National Archive, to Kathleen Dickson and Steve Tollervey for organising them, and for Geoff Brown, Steve Chibnall and Andrew Spicer for critical guidance. Notes Notes 1 D. H. LeMahieu, Culture for Democracy: mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars (Oxford, 1986), 227, 246, 253. 2 Kinematograph Weekly, 17 November 1930, 23. 3 World Film News, January 1937. 4 See Lawrence Napper, A despicable tradition? Quota-quickies in the 1930s, in: Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London, 2009), Steve Chibnall, Quota Quickies: the Birth of the British 'B' Film (London, 2007), and John Sedgwick, Popular Film-going in 1930s Britain: a choice of pleasures (Exeter, 2000), for evidence of the popularity of British films. 5 The most important source remains Rachael Low's The History of the British Film 1929–1939: film making in 1930s Britain (London, 1985), which has useful chapters on 'The arrival of the talkies' and 'Language barriers' and gives an overview of the films made between 1929 and 1932. Linda Wood's British Films 1927–1939 (BFI Library Services, 1986), which consists of useful extracts from the trade journals Bioscope and Kinematograph Weekly and a chronology of films made in the 1930s, including their date of production and the studio where they were made, is also valuable. Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s (London, 1998), includes Tony Aldgate's fascinating and relevant chapter 'Loose ends, hidden gems and the moment of "melodramatic emotionality"', which will be referred to later. Kelly Robinson's University of Southampton thesis, 'The influence of German cinematographers on British cinema 1925–1936', is excellent on BIP's early years and has perceptive analysis of the use of sound and light in The Flying Scotsman, Harmony Heaven and The Lady from the Sea. Jeffrey Richards' groundbreaking The Age of the Dream Palace: cinema and society in Britain 1930–1939 (London, 1984) deals with Hitchcock's The Skin Game, Saville's Hindle Wakes and two key First World War films, Journey's End and Tell England, though most of the films Richards discusses were made between 1933 and 1939. Stephen Shafer's British Popular Films 1929–1939: the cinema of reassurance (London and New York, 1997) deals briefly with working-class characters in early talkies but finds more to write about in the films made from 1932 onwards. Lawrence Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter, 2009) and the books by Sedgwick and Chibnall cited above, are all also focused on the 1932–1939 period. My article, Coming of sound to the cinema in Britain, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 4(2) (1984), 143–160, to which this essay is a belated counterpart, concentrates on the industry rather than the films. 6 David Quinlan, British Sound Films: the Studio Years 1928–1959 (London, 1984), 14. 7 Many more survive from later in the 1930s, but I restricted myself to 1929–1931 as the period most neglected. Though few of these films are available on video or DVD, a small number of them can be viewed for free at the BFI's Mediatheque and on YouTube (particularly on the invaluable www.youtube.com/user/eh44). Being able to view them as 35-mm films on a Steenbeck is more expensive and time-consuming, but it remains a unique experience. 8 Siegfried Kracauer, The little shopgirls go to the movies, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (London and Cambridge, MA, 1995), 292. 9 The German version, Die Bräutigamswitwe (1931), starred Mártha Eggerth and Georg Alexander. 10 Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1929–1939: film making in 1930s Britain (London, 1985), 94. As the Kinematograph Weekly reviewer put it: 'The Viennese atmosphere may not be convincing, but it is colourful …', 10 December 1931, 32. 11 The main creative force behind Elstree Calling was Adrian Brunel who devised 'revolutionary plans for camera and editing treatment' and shot the film mobilising 'every possible camera and operator' (including himself). The Elstree editors welcomed the opportunity to work on the wealth of material he supplied them with. But studio boss John Maxwell, impatient of such frippery, reduced the editing schedule from eight to two weeks and rushed the film out 'slung together … looking like casual newsreel photographing', much to Brunel's disgust. Hitchcock's contribution—a series of linking passages with Gordon Harker attempting to fix a television set which will enable him to see the acts—is disappointingly crude. Adrian Brunel, Nice Work: the story of thirty years in British film production (London, 1949), 158–161. 12 Blackface acts (such as Al Jolson) were as popular in Britain as they were in the USA. The Three Eddies, however, were African-American rather than white under their black make-up, as are Scot and Whaley in John Baxter's pleasingly liberal Kentucky Minstrels (1934) 13 Vitality from another world, 13 May 2004, Gary170459 from Derby, UK, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020852/reviews, accessed 22 April 2012. 14 Kracauer, The Little Shopgirls … , 292. 15 Summers described the film to P. L. Mannock as 'something of a Tommy's Journeys End', Kinematograph Weekly, 20 February 1930, 34. 16 Summers served as a captain and was awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal, but there is no dwelling on heroism here. 'Court martial, shot at dawn as a deserter. Gas mask over your face, mouth stuffed with cotton wool to prevent you yelping and putting the firing squad off their aim! Aah, there's no hope for the poor old infantry.' Summers is the most interesting and prolific of the early sound film directors. See also his Men Like These (1932), a documentary-like drama about men trapped in a damaged submarine. Kelly Robinson, The Influence of German Cinematographers on British Cinema 1925–1936, 179, notes the high regard Summers was held in by Paul Rotha and Walter Mycroft in the early 30s. She also gives a detailed analysis of Suspense, 178–183. 17 James Chapman, Celluloid shockers, in Jeffrey Richards (ed.) The Unknown 1930s (London, 1998), 75. 18 Kinematograph Weekly summed up fairly: 'Edgar Wallace has, in effect produced a series of stage scenes, and neglected to give them much atmosphere or continuity. The climaxes are weak, and too much reliance has been placed on the dialogue, to the exclusion of pictorial development.' 5 June 1930, 47. 19 Peter John Dyer, Young and Innocent, Sight and Sound, Spring 1961, 81, quoted in Chapman, 82. 20 Hitchcock plays things in reverse in The 39 Steps, where Carroll three times tries to denounce man-on-the-run Richard Hannay. Hannay's jokey account of how he fell into a life of crime is prefigured by Denant's exchange with a sympathetic teenage pony rider who asks: "Would you mind giving me your autograph?" He replies 'Ink or blood?" and tells her, "When you're an old woman, you'll be able to say you met murderous Matt. Shake hands on it." 21 Despite impressive acting, unusually extensive location photography and an intelligent script, the film pleased neither audiences nor critics. See Victoria Lowe, Escape from the Stage? From play to screenplay in British Cinema's early sound period, Journal of Screenwriting, 2(2) (2011), 215–228. There is also a 1948 version, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with Rex Harrison as Denant and the women's roles amalgamated to give him a love interest (played with gusto by Peggy Cummins). 22 For Saville, see Charles Barr, Desperate yearnings: Victor Saville and Gainsborough, in: Pam Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures (London, 1998), 47–59. 23 Tony Aldgate, Loose ends, hidden gems and the moment of 'melodramatic emotionality', in: Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s (London, 1998), 224. 24 Kinematograph Weekly, 8 January 1931, 98. 25 Kinematograph Weekly, 29 October 1931, 50. 26 Symphony in Two Flats was considered to have 'a certain feminine, if not general, appeal' by Kinematograph Weekly, 24 July, 45. Benita Hume, who had played the long-suffering wife in the stage play, took over the role from American actress Jacqueline Logan when she fell ill, though the IMDb reports that there is an American version of the film with Logan in the part. 27 Aldgate, 230. 28 Kinematograph Weekly, 5 March 1931, 49 29 Kinematograph Weekly, 29 January 1931, 53. 30 There are fascinating glimpses into how the role was played by Marcelle Romée in the French version and Tala Birell in the German version on the show reel of Cape Fear made up for screening at the Film Society and held in the National Film Archive. 31 All traces of Cornwall have been eliminated in the version made available by Grapevine Video on DVD, where the music and setting make it seem more like France. 32 Bette Davis revels in sluttish nastiness in John Cromwell's 1934 version of Of Human Bondage, twisting the shy, gentlemanly Leslie Howard round her little finger until—like Zola's Nana—her spiritual corruption becomes physically manifest and she dies a horrible death. Ida Lupino is equally effective as Bessie Broke, the prostitute who destroys the masterpiece Ronald Colman manages to complete before going blind when she sees how he has revealed her inner ugliness in William Wellman's classic version of The Light That Failed (1940). 33. Bioscope, 2 October 1929, 22; Kinematograph Weekly, 7 November 1929, 23. Geoff Brown's judgement on Atlantic—'a film thudding along with portentous words mournfully synchronised, slowly delivered'—is harsh but difficult to argue with. Life among the rats, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 5(2) (2008), 253. 34. Kinematograph Weekly, 15 August 1929, 53. 'Although the dialogue has been eliminated, this makes no appreciable difference to the quality of the entertainment; in fact the reverse is the case.' Kinematograph Weekly, 31 October 1929, 37. 35. Kinematograph Weekly, 22 August 1929, 29; 24 October 1929, 42. 36. Kinematograph Weekly, 2 January 1930, 67. 37. 'This Year's British Pictures: A Critical Analysis', 'British Films Gala Supplement', Bioscope, 5 November 1930, xxvi. 38. Kinematograph Weekly, 25 July 1929, 43. A virtually dialogue-less version of The Wrecker was released on DVD by Strike Force Entertainment in 2009, with a new score by Neil Brand. Unencumbered by ponderous dialogue, the melodramatic plot hardly seems a problem. The railway crash footage was re-used in the remake Seven Sinners (1936). 39. Kinematograph Weekly, 8 May 1930, 39. 40. The female star who topped the poll, getting more votes than Colman and Brook combined and trumping Greta Garbo, Janet Gaynor and Bebe Daniels, was the ladylike Ruth Chatterton who 'speaks English of singular, unaccented purity' and though born in New York, 'is a woman of European culture'. Best Voices of the Talkie, The Film Weekly, 7 June 1930, 10. See also Vicky Lowe, 'The best speaking voices in the world': Robert Donat, stardom and the voice in British cinema, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(2) (2004), 181–196. 41. Kinematograph Weekly, 8 January 1931, 99. 42. Michael Balcon, Michael Balcon Presents … A Lifetime of Films (London, 1969), 51. 43. Documentary movement stalwarts Stuart Legg and Teddy Baird both began their careers as assistant directors on Windjammer.