Irish Exilic Cinema in England Lance Pettitt the Axes of Ireland's Exilic

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Irish Exilic Cinema in England

Lance Pettitt

School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

Email: [email protected]

Irish exilic cinema is defined by the nexus of entanglements between Ireland and England as a subset of wider Irish-British relations. A case study of a Belfast-born director Hans – later known as - Brian Desmond Hurst (1895-1986) – is offered as axiomatic of the Irish exilic manifest in cinema. Using the idea of the ‘slipzone of anxiety and imperfection’1 to characterise the London-hub of the cinema business mid- century as an uneasy socio-cultural space, it explores Hurst’s career arc within this phase of Britain’s imperial history, including Ireland’s (re)positioning. Applying a queered concept of the auteur, Hurst’s exilic Irishness and sexuality are considered as ‘performed within material and semiotic circumstances’2 pertaining to a specific historical juncture. Analysis of films from Dangerous Moonlight (1941) to Dangerous Exile (1957) shows that Hurst’s most telling cinematic insights come not in films set in or about Ireland but rather in narratives of outsiders/exiles in British war and colonial films that expose socio- cultural anxieties about Englishness, class and decolonisation.

Keywords: exilic; British cinema; Hurst; auteur; queer cinema, Irishness

I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first, and in Britain I am still a foreigner.3

I wish one could either live in Ireland or feel oneself in England.4

The Axes of Ireland’s exilic cinema

Irish exilic cinema helps us to interrogate some of the dominant theoretical and historical paradigms that have been used to construct British and Irish filmmaking activities as national cinemas.5 British cinema may be mocked by Europeans, Irish cinema seen by some as ‘belated’ and indeed both have been over-shadowed and deeply penetrated by Hollywood products, funds and ideas. Yet both lesser cinemas have also drawn on European influences and Britain has enjoyed periods of intense invigoration through the incoming creative talent of migrants.6 What filmmaking that did take place in Ireland has largely taken place as a sub-set of British cinema

1 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt production and exhibition on the basis quite simply that ticket sales could not produce a profitable return in Ireland.7 From a historiographical point of view, the research on the emergence of an indigenous cinema in Ireland has favoured a ‘national cinema’ framework. Despite serious and acknowledged drawbacks with this body of theory and

Ireland’s material circumstances demonstrating the model’s very limitations, it shaped much writing about film in and about Ireland. The pervasiveness of emigration to the

USA has rightly been discussed as a constituent of Irish identities both for the migrants themselves but also for those remaining. The key part played by Irish along with other immigrant groups in the burgeoning film industry of the US forms part of an emigrant

‘success’ narrative and has been reflected in a bias towards Irish diasporic and ethnic filmmakers.8

Even critical versions of a national cinema have only just started to do proper work on the Irish in Britain and analyses of its screen representation.9 As I am defining it, Irish exilic cinema is characterised by the majority of traffic going along a west to east axis that converges on London. Since the 1950s there has been much Irish shuttling back and forth along this axis, but it is worth noting that there has been a very small counter-flow, a trickle in fact: English-born filmmakers who moved to Ireland.

Most internationally renowned of these is John Boorman (1933- ) whose films, from

Zardoz (1974) Excalibur (1981) through Hope and Glory (1987) to The General (1998) and The Tiger’s Tail (1998 and 2006), and autobiographical writing speak idiosyncratically to Arthurian legend, suburban Englishness and an urban Celticism.10

At a different level, lesser known lives and workaday figures like Dave Barker in

Belfast or John Peto in Derry have worked in Northern Ireland since the 1970s and

1990s respectively. In considering this reverse trickle, two pioneer figures in Northern

Ireland’s cinematic history, Donovan Pedelty and Richard Hayward (1903-1989; 1890-

1964) were themselves not born in Ireland. As John Hill has elegantly detailed, their cultural work, including some rudimentary films in the 1920s and 1930s, stands at the head of a gapped history of film post-1920.11 And it is with an exemplar figure who emerged from within this fractured, crossed-hatched history of Irish exilic cinema that the rest of this essay concerns itself.

From Belfast to Belgravia: The trajectory of exilic mobility

Hans Hurst (to use his given name) was born in working class Belfast in 1895 and grew up within late-Victorian Ireland. It was a provincial city strongly connected eastwards to London and outward to the British Empire, through industry, monarchy and political ties within the Union. Hurst was brought up as a Presbyterian amongst the linen mills and shipyards in streets off ‘Loyalist’ Newtownards Road, leaving school early but literate to work in a local mill. His early domestic life was fractured by bereavement, the remarriage of his father, frequent house moves and rivalry for attention with several step- and half siblings. Aged seventeen he signed the Ulster

Covenant12 and by nineteen had enlisted in the Irish Rifles, a regiment in the British

Army, knowing that he would be deployed abroad as World War One (1914-18) extended into a far-reaching realignment of imperial powers. Informally renaming himself ‘Brian’, perhaps to sound less German and more like Irish nobility (Brian

Boru?), Rifleman Hurst survived the horrors of a bloody defeat in Gallipoli and campaigns in the middle-east, Africa and Balkans. Unable to settle back in Belfast, disturbed by the anti-colonial conflict of the Anglo-Irish war (1919-21) and seeing no way to explore his creative nature, he took a government veterans grant and emigrated in 1920/21 to Canada. He studied art in Toronto (1921-23), then informally in Paris

(1924-27) and afterwards found work in the US as an interior decorator. Making his

3 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt way to Los Angeles, he worked for John Ford, first as an extra, then got into set design and art direction between 1928 and 1932.

The Depression, a dip in Ford’s fortunes and a lack of official work papers meant that Hurst decided to leave the US. He had assumed the twin forenames of

‘Brian Desmond’ from his time in Toronto in the attempt to impress would-be buyers of his art work. He settled in London initially with his sister, and through various connections - Irish lords, landed eccentrics and rich entertainers – and an embroidered past, he managed to finance three experimental films: The Tell-Tale Heart, Irish Hearts

(both 1934) and Riders to the Sea (1935) – the latter two featuring impressive location shooting in Ireland - which gave him critical attention and led to him being associated

‘with the London avant-garde in the 1930s’.13 Within four years of intense activity he had directed a clutch of more mainstream pictures: Ourselves Alone, Sensation (both

1936) The Tenth Man and Glamorous Night (both 1937) and On the Night of the Fire

(1939). He took up more prestige projects where offered (Prison without Bars, 1938 and On the Night of the Fire, 1939) and Alexander Korda contracted him to direct a major production of Lawrence of Arabia, the ‘plumb job of the year’ and for which he co-wrote the screenplay.14 With this, his work as co-director with Michael Powell and

Adrian Brunel on The Lion has Wings (1939), at the eve of WWII Hurst was positioned to ascend to British cinema’s top rank.

Hurst is thus an exemplar of the Irish exilic filmmaker, situated at the interstices of British/Irish cinema industries, where he had to negotiate himself consciously and persistently within the discourses available in Britain, essentially as a bohemian cineaste – cosmopolitan, cultured, convert Catholic and queer. By inhabiting the professional and social circles that he did in London from 1932 for the rest of his long life, he was socially and semiotically confronted with the contingency

4 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt of Irishness. As exilic, defined by the backward look to ‘Ireland’ as home – but not the actuality of his Belfast/domestic/family life, he felt a nostalgia for the kind of

Ireland he never knew and never lived in. He developed a strong kind of cultural and political conservatism – in his film practice, cultural tastes and social attitudes. In this way he is not quite one of those ‘aspiring careerists and arrivistes who may be referred to as ‘“micks on the make”’15, rather he could be seen as upwardly Ulster in

England. Hurst’s deracinated Ulster Irishness in the British industry comes through in an exilic sensibility – with its looking back, its sentiment for the past and its conservatism – that is grafted onto his films during the 1940s and 50s. That sensibility occupies the mental terrain and emotional landscape of particular kinds of Anglo- centric British identities with all their anxieties and contradictions. The exilic Hurst avoided assimilation, but nor did he quite ape the English to become a ‘West (End)

Brit’. Yet he also avoided the ethnic Irish ghettos pocketed in Hammersmith, Kilburn and Southwark because they were too close to the class roots of his adolescent

Belfast. Instead, his exilic imagination conjured up an Ireland that only partially existed. But, more important in assuming a London exile role and social circle was how he ventriloquised elements of upper-class Englishness, a déclassé Anglo-Irish identity, and a dying subculture of bohemian cosmopolitanism. This is epitomised in a letter to The Times written in 1951 in the following manner, where he expounds upon the virtues of a new National Film and Television Theatre planned for the South Bank because it would showcase:

An art that is capable of revealing to millions the English way of life, the English ways of thought and feeling, and, whether the balance of power is passing or not, England is the moral anchor of the world.16

This claim for Englishness and England’s values is all the more remarkable for it being made by an Ulster-born Presbyterian, albeit convert to Catholicism. So BDH experienced the axial circumstances of a cinema creative, located at the complex intersections between different kinds of Irishness within England mid-century.

Obliquely Hurst exemplifies an that Ulster Protestant experience in exile, albeit heavily scored by travel, partial assimilations, spiritual conversion, social affiliations and snubs, about which Louis MacNeice wrote in The Strings are False (1965). Hurst is in fact one of a long line of different kinds of Irish Protestant interpreters of

Englishness/British culture, including W.B. Yeats and G.B. Shaw from Dublin’s middle classes, whereas MacNeice, William MacQuitty and Robert Greacen were creative exiles all born, brought up and educated in Belfast’s comfortable suburbs.

The difference for BDH was that his cultured tastes and social habitus were consciously acquired, not nonchalantly absorbed and tutored from an early age.

All these creative men shared similar strategic, material reasons for adopting

England, more specifically London. The city was a cultural magnet, it had publishing houses, newspapers, the BBC and it had a film industry that provided income and opportunity. London and the south-east were the base of a cluster of film studios of various kinds, that started up, merged, collapsed or flourished between the early

1930s and late-1950s. What it produced fed into a major network of cinemas regionally, national and beyond to the Commonwealth dominions and the USA. At the creative and managerial level, it offered a social niche within a cosmopolitan circle of wealthy business, professional middle- and upper class people who aggregated around Mayfair/Belgravia and Knightsbridge with its country weekends at second houses in the comfortable Home Counties.

The exile’s survival strategy derives from the situation that they put themselves into and how it shapes them: as Naficy puts it, this is characterised by

‘liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society and the film industry’.17We can think of Hurst as an individual, socially aspirant and fugitive from his psychic past, but he clearly adopted a conscious career-role and public persona, not to assimilate but to efface Ulster Protestant-ness and assume the role of a cultured Irishman with a background of details which – if not always fictitious – were heavily embroidered.

This enabled him to move within and across social circles that he joined up in bizarre hoops of hospitality. Royals and English aristocracy included Louis Mountbatten and

Princess Margaret, Robin Maugham and Lord Montagu of Beulieu; Anglo-Irish aristocratic friends and house-guests included Lord Michael Killanin and the Earl of

Fingall amongst others. As well as senior military connections and déclassé

European/Russian aristocrats like Baroness Budberg, Hurst engaged professionally and socially with the displaced European creatives in the cinema industry, such as like

Anton Walbrook, Louis Golding, and the upper echelons of an international celebrity circuit that straddled fashion, music, dance, film directors/stars, theatre, photography

– John Ford, James Molyneux, George Cukor, Angus McBean, Hermione Gingold,

Dirk Bogarde, Noel Coward, Elizabeth Welch, John Gielgud, Sean Connery, Doiha

Young (Terence Young’s Irish wife), and the actress Siobhán McKenna. His studio apartment in an exclusive Knightsbridge mews bordered ‘society’ Mayfair and the edges of Bohemian ‘Fitzrovia’, but he also acquired substantial properties in leafy

Buckinghamshire in the 1940s/50s when his considerable earnings and film percentages boosted his income.

Critical Positioning: BDH, then and now

BDH clearly interwove his socialising and his film business associates in a complex pattern of overlapping circles. It is interesting to try to gauge his reputation, his critical/cultural capital during this phase of his career and with his posthumous reputation within different accounts of cinema history. In retrospect, from the evidence of some thirty or so feature films, across a range of genres, Hurst does not measure up to the accomplishments of David Lean, Michael Powell, or even Anthony

Asquith. Even during his peak at the end of the 1940s when he enjoyed regular employment, good salaries and some popular hits, he failed to crown his critical reputation. Whilst he had enthusiastic support from the likes of Alan Page, Peter

Noble and Raymond Durgnant, he also attracted damning assessments by Graham

Greene.18 Towards the end of his career in 1958, a Sight and Sound review gave a critical appraisal that struggled to comprehend Hurst’s output:

This director’s work has covered an almost bewildering range of themes […]. Such versatility makes it difficult to pin down any one aspect of a shifting talent. His films are rarely less than competently handled, but the unevenness of the scripts and subjects he has tackled has been such as rather to blur his own individuality.19

The legacy of this assessment is carried through to his absence from the list of directors featured on the British Film Institute’s screen online website. Even in the

1994 Companion to British and Irish Cinema, Kevin Rockett noted that although

Hurst made ‘a number of Irish-subject films …they are not among his best work’ and, having noted the eclectic range of his other work, concludes dryly: ‘Hurst’s career was punctuated by hits and misses, mostly the latter’.20 In the last decade, particularly since the retrospective of his work at the Cork Film Festival, the publication of a popular memoir/biography, The Empress of Ireland (2004), an accurate, succinct entry on the Irish Research Film and Television website21 and Barton’s Irish National

Cinema, Hurst has been more actively claimed for ‘Irish cinema’. Barton characterised BDH as ‘prolific but uncategorisable’ but whilst she notes that he

‘moved most successfully between Irish and other material’, the focus is on him as an

‘expatriate’ exploring Ireland, Irish settings and Irish characters. She is right to emphasise the specificity of Hurst’s position and its complex set of affiliations: ‘a

Northern-Irish [sic], working-class, bi-sexual Protestant artist that associated Irishness with Catholicism and the Free State’, thus exemplifying, she suggests, ‘that indeterminate Northern Irish hybridity [sic] that has dogged internal issues of national identity’.22 The hyphen and its disappearance does rather draw attention and begs the question: internal to which national identity, Irish or British? The point is that exilic film makers force us to question where the dividing line between ‘inside’/outside’ is drawn, how boundaries are implicit in the concept of national cinemas and the cultural identities that they articulate.23

North American critics Brian McIlroy in Canada (1986) and Anthony Slide in the USA (1988) have also grappled with the uncategorisable BDH. Both focus on

Hurst’s Irish-set, themed films or characters and thus promulgate a critical ‘category error’. To be fair to McIlroy, he did in 1994 subsequently analyse Hurst’s wider oeuvre within the British industry, taking it as ‘a tension-packed paradigm of the problematic relationship between the auteur and the system in 1930s and 1940s

Britain.’24 Although he mentions Hurst’s homosexuality once (p.26), he does not follow up on this subtext of social taboo that is resonant within his work and the period generally. McIlroy is hampered in these two essays by focusing attention on

Hurst as either an ‘Irish’ director or a ‘British’ auteur when the concept of the exilic

Irish in England is more productive. Arising from this adopted domicile, the key to

9 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt exploring the exilic with Hurst is to focus on his films of the 1940s and fifties, to see how he makes films about Britain during WWII and its aftermath.

Contexts for an Exilic Re-viewing

Hurst directed four films during the war or soon after VE Day: The Lion Has

Wings (1939) – for which he was credited as co-director – Dangerous Moonlight

(1941), A Letter from Ulster (1943) and Theirs is the Glory (1946). The first of these was an overtly propagandist piece about the preparedness of the British air force. By stark contrast of treatment and tone, the second of these was a melodramatic love story of a Polish pianist-turned-RAF pilot (Stefan, played by Anton Walbrook) who marries an American war correspondent (Carol, played by Sally Gray). It was very popular with audiences who had experienced the terrors of Luftwaffe bombing in UK cities – including London, Coventry and Belfast. Critics then and since 25 have pointed out how the film features a strong narrative exploration of exilic angst about belonging, personal love and national duty that was carried as much through its emotive musical motif, which became known as the ‘Warsaw concerto’, and its heightened visualisations in which Hurst excelled. Barton has deftly pointed out how

Hurst was adept at slipping in Irish roles and indeed actors into his films,26 showing how Stefan’s friendship with another pilot, Carroll (Derrick du Marney) plays off of his Irishness, subtly showing how the RAF’s resourcefulness and Britain’s survival ironically depended upon the courage of those displaced men being prepared to risk their lives.

Indeed the overtly propagandist short film A Letter from Ulster and the docu- reconstruction of the Battle of Arnhem both in their own ways insist upon Ulster’s

10 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt role in the war effort. Letter, a highly favourable picture of Northern Ireland welcoming US airmen to its bases, overlooks sectarian division, whereas the opening prelude scenes of Theirs is the Glory feature a tracking shot left past a row of British commando barrack beds with a voice-over that names and places different kinds of

Irishmen on the eve of the disastrous air-drop into Holland on which the film was based. So, these films are significant for their recognition of the Irish contribution to the British27 military, but a more pertinent point about them is their concern for gender and identity. In particular, it is telling how the homosociality of men in conflict, and how sexuality and repressed emotion, are represented visually and aurally. For this, I shall focus on Dangerous Moonlight (released in the USA as

Suicide Squadron).

Bourne and Barton respectively have opened up the film to queer and feminist readings in limited ways.28 Hurst’s own bi-sexuality is adduced, as is the production’s collective presence of homosexuals involved in the film; this is also indicated in the way that Stefan/Anton Walbrook are visually feminised by Hurst’s camerawork, by the actor’s mittel-European accent and the narrative fact that he is ‘musical’. In interpreting this, it is worth recalling Richard Dyer’s critical treatment of film authorship within a matrix of ‘material and semiotic circumstances’.29 In particular, his emphasis is that the director and his work occupy a ‘material social position in relation to discourses’30 of sexual, ethnic and cinematic codes, and that ‘cultural production must be understood to take place within, and to be a struggle about’31 these discursive limits. Thus Hurst’s exilic status is both conventional and subversive in this context. By his own account,32 Hurst had tried to direct Walbrook’s performance away from being – in his terms – ‘sissy’ or effeminate, yet the lens was looking otherwise. Secondly, of course, Stefan and Mike are involved in a classic

Hollywood two-men-and-woman love-triangle that is explicitly referred to in the dialogue. In such an obvious ‘gay classic’, it is odd that in his interpretation Bourne does not even mention Mike! Barton does but fails to follow through a queer reading.

Mike’s Irish surname (Carroll) indicates that he is the palimpsestic supplement to

Stefan’s repressed ‘musical powers’ – which are traumatically lost and transformed in conventional romantic love. The film’s ‘banal and novelettish script’33 comes to a creaky conclusion, but the same critic nevertheless found the scenario ‘moving and sincere’ if only when it is dealing with ‘the business of flying, the casual heroism of airmen’. The film’s pre-publicity describes Stefan’s patriotic duty in terms of sensuous desire, ‘an irresistible urge’ which overcomes the social convention of marriage. He leaves his new wife in the US to join the Polish squadron of the RAF where he enjoys intense male camaraderie with Mike in the officers’ mess. The two men row over Carol and it remains ambiguous if Mike actually has tried to give

Stefan her letters.34 After one such row Mike dies in an air sortie – it is heavily hinted that he might have recklessly killed himself – and Stefan finds letters from Carol in

Mike’s papers. Was Mike withholding some of the letters? Although Stefan comes to realise that his wife does love him, does he weep more for the death of his ‘best friend’? Whilst most movie-goers35 and critics praise ad nauseam the surging orchestra of the theme music, a scene the morning after Mike’s death provides a minor musical motif of major thematic importance because of how its exilic significations are associated with this queer narrative subtext.

In the Officers’ Mess, Stefan picks out the chords of a ballad that Mike has hummed, but nobody can remember, and become identified with in a kind of musical obituary (the tune that none can name?). In one of Hurst’s signature tableau scenes, straight diagonal lines of young uniformed men in profile, Stefan’s fellow officers are

12 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt drawn to the simplicity of the musical air, sharing its poignant tribute, and Stefan’s intimate emotional vulnerability is invaded. Unlike the film’s earlier famous scene in which Stefan plays the piano to seduce Carol during an air-raid in Poland,36 Walbrook is – I venture – in this quieter scene actually playing the ballad, the ‘Rose of Tralee’, himself and gets it slightly wrong. As Barton astutely points out, ‘the potency of cheap music’, particularly in films, is such that ballads carry multiple valences.37

Sung on film first by John McCormack in Song o’ My Heart (1930) and on record, this popular standard would be instantly recognised by Irish people in cinemas in

Britain and in the USA creating an exilic link emotionally, and musically evoking loss and separation. Here without the lyrics, the transposition of this screen rendition masks the gender reversal of the original song-narrative. The lyrics (attributed to

William Mulchineck and set to music by Charles Glover) tell of a male lover’s grief over his female love’s tragic death and their forbidden relationship that caused them to be apart. The tune had exilic resonances for Hurst – away from Ireland – and crucially it allows the possibility for homosexual desire to be screened and acoustically signified via Stefan’s playing and Walbrook’s performance, and in yet another layering we learn that Walbrook’s male-lover had been deported to Canada in

1940.38 As a war-time film, its capacity to engage those in the audience separated from loved ones by British military service abroad or bereaved by bombs closer to home gave it a poignant popularity. Chapman has noted its powerful resonance and that it, ‘suggests that realism and emotional restraint were not necessarily the only criteria of good propaganda’, at this stage in the war.39 Dangerous Moonlight can however be best understood as an exilic film, fashioned within the determining mesh of contexts which acknowledge the nature of Irishness in Britain in the 1940s. Less expressive of Hurst’s individual sense of self, the embodiment on screen of Irishness

13 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt through fictional characters and music ought to be understood – following Dyer’s model – as articulating collective identifications for those Irish people in the darkness of the auditoria in Britain and the USA. Crucially however the film also engages the feelings of wider audiences, other émigrés and displaced persons, lost ones and loved ones, including those socially eclipsed because of their sexuality.

Colonial and Costume Dramas

Until quite recently, Britain of the 1950s was popularly portrayed in a monochrome manner as a decade of austerity and stasis. But the period has been revisited to show a more complex picture of political, social and cultural shifts which were refracted through filmmaking before television came to be dominate the popular imagination.40 Over the course of this decade Hurst’s active career reached its peak but then quickly petered out. He directed a clutch of films mid-decade for the Rank

Organisation which attempted to exploit overseas markets in the colonies and recapture British cinema success from the 1930s. It is instructive then to explore

Hurst’s position as a director involved in popular colonial and costume dramas such as Simba (1955) and The Black Tent (1956) and Dangerous Exile (1957) featuring as they do questions of allegiance, mixed racial and cultural belonging, as well as the lingering memory of WWII, the nature of Englishness and monarchy, and all from his aforementioned Conservative perspective. Hurst’s exilic situation, the location production and overseas settings, and the dramatic narratives foregrounding exiled

Irish or estranged ‘nationals’ in ‘foreign lands’ expose several, interconnected discursive tensions and limits.

Simba (1955) featured the strained relationship of Howard and Mary, played by Dirk Bogarde and Virginia McKenna, as settler farmers in Kenya during the

14 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt unfolding anti-colonial unrest in which Mau Mau guerrillas and political activists campaigned for independence from Britain between 1952 and 1960. Hurst’s film was thus highly topical but, as critic Christine Geraghty shows, Simba the film attempts vainly to articulate a reformist British position on Kenya which its narrative, mise en scene and central performances cannot sustain the attempt to accommodate the liberal discourse of the new Commonwealth within generic conventions that are strongly linked to the films of empire’.41 One can note the irony of Hurst’s position, an ex-

British soldier with Irish nationalist sympathies making a film during an anti-colonial guerrilla war.42 Hurst’s ambivalence and casting of the Belfast actor Joseph Tomelty in a minor but significant role as the moderate Dr Hughes, does allow us to see the exilic dimension that imbues this film in ways passed over by Geraghty. His is an

Irish voice of moderate liberalism, tempering the knee-jerk violence of some of the

English settlers. At a time of a renewed IRA campaign in Northern Ireland, Tomelty’s role as advocate for understanding the causes of political violence was timely.

Based on a short story by Robin Maugham, The Black Tent (1956) was filmed on location in Libya.43 The film opens and closes with contrasting images of ‘home’: a Colonel’s English country house and gardens and a Bedouin tent in the desert.

Charles Holland (Donald Sinden) travels to Libya to find out the truth about his army captain brother’s disappearance during 1941 in North Africa. In the desert, he locates

Sheik Salem (Andre Morell) whose family had sheltered the injured David Holland

(Anthony Steel) from the Germans. However, Holland has fallen in love and married

Mabrouka the sheik’s beautiful daughter (Anna Marie Sandri) and had a son, Daoud.

In the final six minutes of the film the teenage and very blond, blue-eyed Daoud is confronted by a dilemma: to ‘return’ to England to claim his rightful inheritance, house and considerable wealth or remain in the black tents of his grandfather’s family

15 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt who puts this stark choice to him: ‘No man can serve two tribes, therefore you must choose between them’. The boy burns his father’s will, thus choosing the culture of his upbringing rather than legal entitlement.

The scenario, the dialogue, casting and the camera’s exoticisation of land, people and culture are typical of the period. Written, produced and directed by

Maugham, William MacQuitty and Hurst respectively, this blend of Ulster protestant and English aristocratic sensibilities explains how the film’s increasingly dated world view and production values combined in popular cinema. The casting of Donald

Pleasance as Ali, the devious Arab guide for Charles, and the ridiculousness of

Daoud’s public school accent (interestingly, played by a child-actor by the name of

Terence Sharkey), ought to be understood as stress points in the film’s representational limits that were symptomatic of a culture under pressure to reconcile itself to new political realities of Arabic resurgence.44 The film turns on Daoud’s choice between disowning his ‘Arab’ status and embracing his ‘Anglo’ heritage. The incidence of inter-racial marriages in England in the 1950s and sixties, and the complex, unspoken questions of plural cultural identities arising out of this new social landscape surely inform this narrative but are barely articulated.45

In the final of Hurst’s mid-fifties clutch of films to be discussed here,

Dangerous Exile (1957), the exile in question is a boy-king, Louis XVII of France

(Richard O’Sullivan). Despite its setting in the historical past, the scenario’s flaky narrative does find resonance within the context of Britain’s new ‘Elizabethan Age’ and its monarchic commonwealth. In the film, the Duke de Beauvais (Louis Jourdan) has sacrificed his own son’s life as a decoy to help the royal heir escape being murdered by republicans. Landing in Wales, he is taken in by the aristocratic Lady

Fell (Martita Hunt) and her – oddly Anglo-American – niece Virginia Traill (Belinda

Lee). The orphan Louis develops an oedipal attraction for his surrogate mother and she becomes the romantic interest of a contest between the eligible English Captain

Ogden (Frederick Leister) and the Gallic charms of Beauvais. This arrangement of character-ciphers and an attempt by French assassins to obliterate the royal line pits two kinds of imperfect Republicanism against the ‘heart-felt’ and dutiful patriotism of the young king.

Like Black Tent, the focus of such dilemmas of allegiance falls on the coming generation in the figure of the boy-King, who – despite his resolve to return to re- establish the monarchy - would like to remain in Wales where his ‘American’ stand-in mother would marry the dashing French duke. The closing scene of the boy framed by his ‘adoptive’ parents offers an ingenious if unlikely solution to his orphan status.

Likewise in Simba, the parentless Joshua, black child of the new Kenya is framed in close-up between unlikely English parents, McKenna and Borgarde. This and the fact that mixed-race Daoud in Black Tent will be brought up by his grandfather, are all scenarios that suggest more complicated, hybridised futures for new states and social structures. These films mobilise melodrama as a popular genre to work through socio- political crises. They provide an imagined line of monarchical continuity for British viewers that were witnessing their own grandee class reeling from the diplomatic, military and domestic political crises over Abd Al-Nasir’s rise to power which eventually brought down the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden in 1956, and perhaps Hurst’s own brand of conservative Republicanism.

Conclusion: Belfast’s cinenigmatic exile

In the post-war period Hurst enjoyed regular, well-paid work in the top rank of his profession. Although he maintained an interest in Irish themes up until his last realised work The Playboy of the Western World (1962) and beyond,46 Ireland itself as source and setting was not where he did his best work and has not been the focus of this exploration of Irish exilic cinema in England. Instead, Hurst presented audiences with films that tried to reassure them that fighting the war had been worth it and that the monarchy would provide stability for Britain’s emerging meritocracy and a benign

Commonwealth. His assumed affiliations ambivalently cast Ireland and the Irish as a particular exilic imaginary, in which ‘Ireland’ was idealised and Belfast was

‘stultifying’. In the city of his birth, he reflected, the artist lacked status: ‘it’s not only the lack of money, it’s the lack of appreciation that kills you in the end’.47 His self- fashioning effort to stave off the critical ‘death’ of not being remembered is captured in his still-unpublished memoir Travelling the Road whose publication was withheld by the Hurst Estate in 2009. BDH’s sense of himself - intimately linked to the perception of those who saw him as a ‘one-off’ - is paradoxical since he is in many ways typical of ‘professional’ Irishmen in London. As an individual Hans (Brian

Desmond) Hurst remains an exilic cinenigma of a man, a cinematic bridge between the silent films of Rex Ingram and John Ford and the new wave/diasporic cinema represented by Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan. These four are internationally recognised and – frankly - better directors. If lesser known, operating within the anxious terrain of the British studios of the 1940s and 1950s, Hurst is nevertheless a key figure within a history of Irish exilic cinema in England that has yet to be fully written.

The author acknowledges the RAE-funded leave in 2009 at Leeds Metropolitan University which enabled the research to be completed. He also wishes to thank Ruth Barton and Trinity College, Dublin, for the invitation to give the lecture at ‘Screening the Irish in Britain’ on which this paper is substantially based.

Notes

1 Naficy, ‘Situating accented cinema’, 111. 2 Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, 35. 3 Shaw, ‘Ireland eternal and external’, 295. This essay was originally published on 30 October 1948. 4 Louis MacNeice in a letter to Eric Dodds, quoted in Harte, The Literature of the Irish in Britain, 180. 5 Susan Hayward’s ‘National Cinema’ series commissioned Sarah Street and Ruth Barton to provide the British and Irish titles respectively. See also Gunning, ‘Waking and faking: Ireland and cinema astray’ which explores an alternative history and conception of Irish cinema, 19-31. 6 Gough-Yates, ‘Exiles and British Cinema’, 104-113. 7 This intersection of two ‘national’ cinemas is captured in the conjoined titles of Caughie and Rockett, Companion to British and Irish Cinema (1995), McFarlane, The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (2005) and Murphy Directors in British and Irish Cinema (2006). 8 See: Slide, The Cinema and Ireland, Negra, The Irish in US, Barton Screening Irish-America. 9 Pettitt, ‘Donnellan, Ireland and Dissident Documentary’ and Barton, Irish National Cinema, 3-12. 10 Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy London: Faber, 2003. 11 Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, 6-46. 12 See Census data for 1901 and 1911, the latter online. In a major public demonstration at Belfast’s City Hall and elsewhere in the province, the Covenant was conceived to provide a religio-political rallying point for Irish Unionism, to protest against nationalist ‘Home Rule’ legislation being considered by Asquith’s government in London and protect their ‘heritage of British citizenship’. Online documentation allows us to see Hans Hurst’s signature by searching for ‘Ulster Covenant’: www.proni.gov.uk. 13 Dusinberre, ‘Avant garde’, 48-49; see also from the mid-1930s Hurst’s own,‘World’s only new art form’, 4. 14 Hurst, Travelling the Road, 110; Costner, ‘Hurst to direct Lawrence film’, n.p. Miles Malleson produced a script co-written with Hurst. This is reproduced in Kelly Filming T.E. Lawrence with an informative editorial introduction, 1-21. 15 Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, 281-305. 16 Hurst, ‘The Future of Telecinema’, 7. In the absence of any recording of his voice, Hurst’s spoken accent is difficult to place socially or geographically – though acquaintances have indicated to me that he sounded ‘well-spoken’, ‘educated’ Irish and, in some memoir accounts, that it was quite high-pitched in tone. 17 Naficy, ‘Situating accented cinema’, 111. 18 These cover the late-1930s, the 1940s and 1950s and later assessments in the early 1970s. See: Page, ‘Mixed Bag’; Noble, The British Film Year Book 1947/48; Noble and Manvell, Twenty-Five Years of British Films; Ackland, Celluloid Mistress; Durgnat, A Mirror for England and Greene, The Pleasure Dome.

19 Quoted in McIlroy ‘British Filmmaking’, 26. 20 Caughie and Rockett, Companion to British and Irish Cinema, 87. 21 http://www.tcd.ie/irishfilm/ [accessed 28 July 2010] 22 Barton, Irish National Cinema, 56. 23 Interestingly, Richards in Films and British National Identity also focuses on Hurst’s ‘Irish’ films – with the exception of Scrooge – making the case that BDH was ‘British cinema’s equivalent of Ford as a director returning regularly to Irish themes’ (p.244) and then notes the irony of Twentieth Century Fox contracting Ford to make a trilogy of films about the British empire in India (p.246). 24 McIlroy, ‘British Filmmaking’, 25- 39. 25 Chapman, The British at War, 197-98. See also, Richards and Sheridan, Mass Observation at the Movies, in which some fascinating insights into the appeal – visual, star performance and music – for popular audiences across the country. 26 Barton, Irish National Cinema, 54. 27 Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, 35. 28 Bourne, Brief Encounters, 54-55; Barton, Irish National Cinema, 51-56. 29 Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, 35. 30 ibid, 34. 31 ibid, 36. 32 Hurst, Travelling the Road, 111-18. See also Birkbeck’s ‘Queer Fifties’ conference, May 2009, especially Elizabeth Wilson’s notion of ‘war damage’. 33 The quotation about the poor quality script is from an unnamed reviewer for the Sunday Times (n.d.) and the second is taken from the pre-release publicity booklet for the film, both on microfiche for Dangerous Moonlight, BFI microfiche collection, n.d. 34 Young, Dangerous Moonlight, 60. ‘Shot 331: CU Insert. On portion of letter [FROM CAROL]: “At least send me his address. I don’t know how to reach him you see”’. 35 Bombardier, later humourist and jazz musician, Spike Milligan, begged to differ. In his memoir he recalls seeing the film in Neasden, remembering ‘the bloody awful Warsaw Concerto’, Adolf Hitler, 57. 36 Off-screen the piano was played by Louis Kentner. Hurst, Travelling the Road, 119-20. View the sequence at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4cu1vtIVxo [Accessed 6 November 2009]. 37 Barton, ‘Potency of cheap music’, 205-06. 38 Hurst, Travelling the Road, 118. 39 Chapman, British at War, 198. 40 Geraghty, British Cinema in the 1950s. 41 Geraghty, 125. 42 Hurst, Travelling the Road, 155. 43 For a brief accounts of the film’s production see, Forbes, Notes for a Life, 253-54 and MacQuitty, A Life to Remember, 318-21. 44 Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, 353-69. 45 See for example Basil Dearden’s, Pool of London (1951) and Sapphire (1959) for much more progressive exploration of interracial relationships and racism in British film. In Robin Maugham’s original story, it is Sheik Salem not his mixed-race grandson who destroys the paper-legal lineage in a fire causing Charles to exclaim: ‘You’ve destroyed his chance of freedom’, Maugham ‘The Black Tent’, 50. 46 There is in a private collection, an extant but undated shooting script adaptation of James Stephens’ novel, The Crock of Gold (1912) from the 1960s which indicates

this. Additionally, the Killanin Papers of the Irish Film Archive, Dublin, corroborate Hurst’s memoir that he had developed a film called Jackboot in Ireland, based on the autobiography of the notorious Nazi commando/war criminal, Otto Skortzeny who was living in exile between in south Co. Dublin and Madrid in the 1960s. Dudley Sutton cast some light on the aborted attempt to put Liam Flaherty’s novel Famine on screen in the late-60s and early 1970s but the location-hunting trip to the west of Ireland that he recalls seems to be have been BDH’s excuse for drinking with friends than any serious work. Interview with author, London October 2008. 47 De’ath, ‘Exiles in London’, 576.

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