The Revolt of the Pendulum (25 page)

Spiegel put the dough together on the assurance that the finished product would be readily intelligible to an American audience. There was never then, and still isn’t, a reservoir of
finance within Britain to sustain a film industry without a pipeline to the American market. Korda’s productive heyday lasted for a while, and Michael Balcon’s for a while longer, but
without one eye on America nobody can last indefinitely: the true wording of
British Film Forever
should have been
British Film Sporadically
. This was the biggest theme demanding to
be treated by a documentary survey of the history of British Film. Its almost complete absence guaranteed that the commentary could not be serious. So we got sprightliness instead.

It pains me to say that the results were seldom tolerable and all too often deadly. But Jessica Hynes, the actress who was given the task of speaking the words of Mr Sweet, is yet young, and it
wasn’t her fault that she had to say, when evoking the directorial rigour of David Lean, ‘And if it meant getting the shot he wanted, Lean could
lean
.’ It probably
wasn’t even Mr Sweet’s fault that he had to write such stuff. It’s a tone, the tone of British documentary television in its last speeding inches of terminal decline before it
hits the concrete, and the tone was almost certainly imposed on him by producers who no longer know any better.

Leaden verve used to be the occasional mistake made by documentary production teams who, when the task dictated, thought that they could achieve humour just by fiddling with their diction. (Cue
archive close-up of Kenneth Williams with mouth forming a small circle.) They had seriousness to depart from, and could always get back to it. But the
British Film Forever
bunch think that
an unswerving facetiousness is the only way to talk.

Would-be liveliness came stumbling from the screen. Every few minutes the stream of semi-consciousness unintentionally revealed that Hollywood was being held as the measure of true success. Who
was the author of some of ‘the greatest thrillers in the history of Hollywood’? Alfred Hitchcock. ‘Where else could he come from but good old Blighty?’ Alas, the voice-over
narrative was not alone in its capacity to irritate. Too large a number of the numberless guest experts talked the same way.

Among those that didn’t, some weighty people had been interviewed for the usual half a day so that the occasional single short utterance could be extracted. From the top of the heap,
Harold Pinter was intermittently present, and one doesn’t doubt that his complete interview would make an excellent programme about British film on a serious channel in a serious world: for
one thing, his jokes, even when bitter, would be funny. The same could be said of Frederic Raphael, who was called upon to say exactly one line. Sir Richard Attenborough, who has never talked for
less than a whole day about anything, was cut to a few paragraphs. Anna Massey was briefly there too, and many another established actor, although one doubts that Mischa Barton falls into that
category quite yet. She was there because she was a real live American.

After a clip showing a fragment of the tremendous performance by Diana Dors in
Yield to the Night
, Pauline Collins spoke with authority when she said she couldn’t help wondering why
Dors was never rewarded with ‘a really big Hollywood career.’ Thus was the game given away completely, or would have been if it hadn’t already been given away ten times in every
episode.

Canvas-chair veterans from Jack Cardiff through to Bryan Forbes were on hand for a few seconds each. Cardiff, if asked, could have told them that the only thing that might have stopped him from
being lighting cameraman on a Spiegel-global international blockbuster like
The African Queen
was a few more all-British projects like
Black Narcissus
and
The Red Shoes
, but
they were in short supply, because not even Powell and Pressburger put together added up to a British Film Industry. Forbes, if asked, could have told them what he once told me, that if his popular
thriller
The League of Gentlemen
had featured even one American big name, it would have cleaned up.

These and many other formidable people of the British film world deserved better than to be given equal time, or even less, with some standard television face-workers whose specific
qualifications weren’t always obvious. Daisy Goodwin might conceivably know something about poetry, a subject she had previously been deputed to make approachable for audiences who presumably
knew nothing about poetry at all. But speaking about British Film, she deployed an even less analytical vocabulary. About the famous scene in
Tom Jones
when Albert Finney and his next female
target eat themselves into bed, Daisy had this to say. ‘It’s all very kind of, you know, phwoar!’ I couldn’t remember her speaking the same way about John Donne.

To remind us that she was not just a hot number but a highbrow as well, Daisy managed to squeeze the word ‘quintessentially’ into her lightning discussion of
Far From the Madding
Crowd
. In the new low language of the higher journalism gone wrong, ‘quintessentially’ is the only way to say ‘essentially’, just as ‘implode’ is the only
way to say ‘explode’. Ever more grandiose and less accurate, this detestable meta-language is always in the process of – to use one of its favourite words –
‘reinvention’, as in ‘reinvention very much the name of the game.’

Very much characteristic of a self-generating patois like this is its levelling effect, by which nobody can think but everybody can have an opinion. Speaking of
The Long Good Friday
,
someone billed as a broadcaster said that ‘Thatcherism, the IRA and the Mafia’ gave the film its edge. He might have at least considered that Thatcherism gave the film some of its
finance. Haunted all over again by the film’s savage visual imagery, I wondered if he would have spoken more to the point, as it were, if he had been hanging upside down from a hook with Bob
Hoskins breathing the aftermath of a hot curry into his face.

What nobody said was that this deservedly celebrated nail-biter, for all its crackling plot and stellar performances from Hoskins and Helen Mirren, was yet another British film that gave the
game away: the Mafia were in it because the local gangland scene was thought to need beefing up a bit for international distribution. From just the same perennial impulse,
Yield to the Night
had featured a Ford Thunderbird in the streets of Soho.

But
Get Carter
stuck manfully to a Sunbeam Alpine, not to mention a G Reg. Cortina. Against all odds, there have been British gangland films that have managed to snare a world audience
while remaining socially realistic. It might have had something to do with the unexpected success of Social Realism itself. After half a century, the chapter on Social Realism (‘Hardship
Humour and Heroes’) was still getting over the shock inflicted by the unexpected interest shown by a respectable number of British people in films concerned with their own unadorned
lives.

As the commentary told us in a rare moment of pertinence, the directors, most conspicuously Lindsay Anderson, were, in the main, distinctly upstairs. Whether their view of downstairs was in
service to a political programme was not questioned here, but their daring was made plain: realism should have been a formula for bankruptcy. (The culminating example was Ken Loach’s
Kes
, which, though it looked good, sounded as if designed to go broke, with dialogue that would have benefited from being subtitled even in Britain.) My own memories, however, tell me that
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, one of the movement’s first international hits, worked not so much because of its cutaway view of the decaying class system as because of its view of
Albert Finney’s face.

Out there in Sydney I copied Finney’s libidinous smirk the same way that I had previously copied Marlon Brando’s sneer. It was a portent: there was as much glamour in the muck as in
the brass. But unless they employed star power, the consciously subversive British films nearly always tanked: whatever the commentary to these programmes thought,
A Taste of Honey
will
remain obdurately un-forever, and
Scum
, which the BBC refused to transmit in its original form as a television drama, survives as a film now only because Ray Winstone became well known
later. (See him in the wonderful
Sexy Beast
, featuring Sir Ben Kingsley as a psychopath with an unsettling resemblance to Gandhi.)

But with the right cast, British Social Realist films could, and did, give the makers of gangland and action movies the idea that the whole thing could stay British and still interest the world.
If the story was good enough, even the Americans would sit still for the preposterous idea that there might be another country that spoke their language but looked different, with tiny cars and
plates with hardly any food on them. Somewhere out of that idea came
Get Carter
, whose permanent status was only momentarily compromised when it was remade with Sylvester Stallone in the
leading role.

That role, as we all know, belongs always (British Film Forever!) to our (all right, your) very own Michael Caine, lips pursed with contempt over teeth bared in anger – the greatest
thespian feat of his life, and a living demonstration of the eternal truth that all a star has to do is be. (An actor has to do more, but even Olivier, with thousands of lines of Shakespeare in his
head, would have given a lot for even one role in which he only had to stand there in a smart blue raincoat while the surrounding action made a hero of him.)

When
Get Carter
came out, I saw it several times on the trot, dazzled by the neatness with which it was put together. In
The Ipcress File
, which I had also memorised shot by shot,
Michael Caine had worn glasses. In
Get Carter
he didn’t. What a range! And once again, the leading man had a superbly suave, impeccably British heavy to outwit. In
The Ipcress
File
it had been the great Nigel Greene, he who had murmured ‘Look to your front’ in
Zulu
and died too young. In
Get Carter
it was none other than John Osborne,
unforgettably proving that he could have had an authoritative screen career had he wished, although he might have needed a fully functioning British film industry to hold his magnetically petulant
face aloft, up there where the money turns to light.

There for a triumphant moment and then gone again, exultant at the black-tie awards ceremony and then back scrambling for a pittance, the British Film Industry has always been a creature in
oscillating transit, somewhere between a phoenix and a dead duck. Even in the glory years of J. Arthur Rank, the man beating the gong was the only reliable element in the picture. As the Americans
discovered in the earliest days of their studio system, a film industry must have two tiers, in which the second-rate output is good enough to pay the overheads: rely on the first-rate and
you’re dead. But who would be allowed to say so? At one of the serialised commentary’s many moments of concentrated fatuousness – Ruth Ellis was being described as having been
‘hung for a crime of passion’ when, unless I have always been misinformed about her gender, ‘hanged’ must have been the word they meant – I started to concoct my own
ideal version of the script in my mind.

Pinter would say more than just a few words about how he and Joseph Losey and Dirk Bogarde put
The Servant
together, and then, after the clip of Muriel Pavlow saying that in
Doctor in
the House
she and Bogarde were just having ‘innocent fun’, there would be someone else to say that Dirk Bogarde was a brilliantly complex one-off whose idea of innocent fun was to
don full leather and rev his motorbike in the attic, and then Sir David Puttnam would give a twenty-minute lecture on just why, in
Chariots of Fire
, the two lovers had to look out of the
window of their hotel in Paris and discuss an Olympic stadium that the audience couldn’t see. (The budget barely ran to three pairs of long white shorts.)

And then there would have been selected readings, perhaps by Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench, from the best book ever written about the British Film Industry,
My Indecision is Final
,
by Jake Eberts and Terry Llott, wherein it is explained how Goldcrest, even after
Gandhi
became a sacred cash-cow world wide, still managed to go bust because there was nothing else on the
production slate that made money except Paul Knight’s television serial about Robin Hood. And then . . .

I noticed, however, that my ideal script was leaving less and less room for the clips. The far from ideal script on the screen still had the only right idea, which was to introduce the history
of British movies to an audience that knew little about the movies and nothing at all about history. That, you had to remind yourself, was the purpose. For a few lucky young people out there, half
a minute of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard struggling to make their clipped accents heard above Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto (‘You know what’s heppening, don’t
you?’) would introduce them to
Brief Encounter
, not to mention Rachmaninov.

They might even be introduced to the bewildering concept that there was once an almighty war in which the Americans, when they finally came to the aid of us British, saved us from tyranny, but
the salvation led to the dissolution of our empire, and then to slowly dying dreams of power, and then, finally, to a new assessment of reality – a process in which British film has played a
vital part, if only by providing us with a store of visual and verbal markers we can exchange when we meet. In that regard, even the pitiable epigrams supplied to James Bond come in handy, to
remind us that Felix Leiter and all the other Americans really do regard Britain as a source of sophistication.

And they’re right. One of the clueless viewers who needed informing was myself, because I hadn’t yet got round to seeing Steve Coogan in
A Cock and Bull Story
, the film based
on
Tristram Shandy
. The quoted clip made me determined to tune in when the complete film took its allotted place in the season. I did so, and I was bowled over. Coogan is so adventurous that
other people catch originality from him: when I realised that the voice his sidekick Rob Brydon was using to impress Gillian Anderson had been borrowed from Roger Moore, I fell out of the
couch.