Middlebrow Cinematic Taste

4 TIME AND THE MIDDLEBROW IN 1940S BRITISH CINEMA Lawrence Napper In Ealing Studios’ popular wartime comedy Fiddlers Three (Watt 1944), Tommy Trinder, Sonnie Hale and Diana Decker are the victims of a cruel rupture in the otherwise linear structure of time. Caught in a storm on their way back from Navy leave, they take shelter under Stonehenge at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve. A confluence of cosmic forces results in their spectacular but unwilling transportation back to the time of the Roman Empire. However, for all the togas and centurions populating the scenes that follow, the social mores of Roman times seem curiously similar to those of wartime Britain. On spying a Roman legion, Trinder remarks that ‘it’s funny how you can’t get away from ENSA [Entertainments National Service Association]!’ The commanding centurion (James Robertson Justice) tells them they have no right to be in a ‘defence area’, and consequently they are shipped to Rome in a packing case stamped ‘British Druids: With Care’. The Empress (Francis Day) laments the fact that they will be victims of human sac- rifice, especially given the ‘manpower shortage’, although apparently Gladiators have been declared ‘a reserved occupation’. Trinder is able to divert the Roman court with an extended Carmen Miranda impression, and Nero (Francis Sullivan) upbraids his Empress for filling her bath with more than the regulation five inches of milk. Further variations of this gag form the leitmotif of the film which is, as Charles Barr complains, ‘repeated ad nauseum’ (1998, 196). Despite Barr’s crisp dismissal, I would argue that Fiddlers Three contains the germ of an idea about time that is surprisingly pervasive across a variety of cinematic, literary and theatrical texts produced in Britain during the mid-1940s, and which has particular significance for discussions of the ‘middlebrow’ in this period. Each of these texts flirts with the idea that time may not be a linear phenomenon in the way that we are used to thinking about it – with an increasingly unbridgeable gap 72 Lawrence Napper between the present and the steadily receding past. Instead, they conceive the con- nections between the present and the past to be closer and more permeable, and offer narratives where the past and present may influence each other in a variety of different ways, and where the reconciliation of elements of past and present may offer a pattern for the future. Mostly they do not take the straightforward time- travel route that is adopted by Fiddlers Three. Instead, and no doubt significantly given their production just around the end of the war, they often display an interest in the idea of the persistence of the human personality across generations and eras. In what follows I consider some of these narratives – films, but also the novels and plays from which they are adapted, as well as a play that was not adapted – to offer some wider observations about the relationship between non-linear conceptions of time and the ‘middlebrow’. Josephine Botting identifies Fiddlers Three as one of a trio of films released by Ealing Studios in 1944 which, in contrast to that studio’s reputation for wartime realism, employed fantasy elements to ‘comment on the war and its effects on British society’ (2012, 176). The other two films are The Halfway House (Dearden 1944) and They Came to a City (Dearden 1944). Compared to the broad knocka- bout comedy of the Tommy Trinder vehicle, these two Basil Dearden films fit much more comfortably within accepted definitions of middlebrow culture, which I will explore below. They are both adapted from stage plays – the first from a 1940 play called The Peaceful Inn by Denis Ogden and the second from J.B. Priestley’s play of 1943. Both films are earnest intellectual ‘problem’ pieces – a range of characters find themselves somehow outside time, come up against an unexpected conundrum (a ghostly inn and a utopian city, respectively) and must talk through the implications of their discovery with their fellows. As Barr, again, comments, both films are schematic, and ‘do not conceal their theatrical origins’ (1998, 185). These qualities caused him to judge them harshly in 1977, describing them as a ‘dismal experience’ (self-quoted in 1998, 185). However, in the revised edition of his Ealing Studios of 1993, he reverses this verdict, attributing it to a ‘prejudice which recent historical/theoretical work on theatricality and melodrama in cinema has made . difficult to sustain’. The theatricality of the films now offers ‘no obstacle’, he suggests, and he can recognize them as ‘bold, powerful and eloquent’ (Barr 1998, 185). The tendency of middlebrow culture to blur boundaries was one of the main charges levelled against it by critics in the interwar years. Virginia Woolf famously condemned the BBC in these terms, dubbing it the ‘Betwixt and Between Company’ (1942, 118). British film adaptations in particular came in for criticism as too literary or too theatrical – not cinematic enough. They blurred the boundaries between media, relying on literary and stage techniques such as dialogue and acting, rather than more purely cinematic effects like editing. Their audiences too were condemned for their naive assumption that cultural capital could be carried intact across the boundaries of media. It is perhaps this critical ‘prejudice’ that Barr alludes to when revising his initial condemnation of the Ealing stage adaptations. Time and the middlebrow in 1940s British cinema 73 As Barr’s change of heart suggests, more recent discussions of the middlebrow have reclaimed this blurring of boundaries as a positive dimension of the category. But that blurring also makes a clear definition of the middlebrow itself extraor- dinarily difficult to express. Is it audiences that are middlebrow, or the texts they consume? I would suggest that rather than describing the cultural objects consumed by a particular class of audience, or that audience itself, the term expresses a dynamic relationship between class status and cultural taste – one that is essentially aspirational. The term, after all, had originally appeared in England in Punch in 1925 to describe an audience for the BBC who ‘are hoping that someday they will get used to the stuff they ought to like’ (anon. 1925). In the hands of highbrow detractors, that definition was shifted to suggest both an audience and the cultural objects they consumed – an audience who mistakenly ascribed cultural value to works which (according to highbrow critics) did not have value, either because they were derivative of earlier cultural forms or because they drew on cultural capital acquired in other media (as adaptation did). This allegiance to a ‘false’ culture, rather than enabling the audience’s aspirations for cultural improvement, simply exposed their lack of discernment and reconfirmed their class status. Middlebrow novels, for instance, in Q.D. Leavis’s withering judgement, left their readers with ‘the agreeable sensation of having improved themselves without incurring fatigue’ (1932, 37). Such judgements were not the exclusive preserve of the literary elite – each reader, wherever they might be in the hierarchy of taste, might look down their nose at their neighbour and judge their taste to be falsely aspirational. Thus a working-class or lower-middle-class cinemagoer may express a pref- erence for the popular historical melodramas produced by Gainsborough in the 1940s as an example of their ‘refinement’ compared to Hollywood films: ‘I defi- nitely prefer a film in which I can listen to the perfect English diction which is so refreshing after the Yankee jarring effect’, claimed one respondent to J.P. Mayer in 1948, citing The Man in Grey (Arliss 1943) in the same breath as In Which We Serve (Lean 1942) and The Private Life of Henry VIII (Korda 1933) as films for which she felt ‘respect and admiration for a fine achievement’ (1948, 227). Meanwhile, a middle-class cinemagoer may value the Ealing films mentioned above precisely because their theatrical associations give them an air of ‘quality’ distinct from the full-blooded melodrama of the Gainsborough films. For their detractors, both of these figures might be condemned as ‘middlebrow’ because their cultural taste marks them out as aspirational – they value these films because of what they conceive a taste for them says about their own cultural status, rather than evaluating them according to more accepted and ‘objective’ critical criteria. These are the terms in which Graham Greene condemns a ‘middlebrow’ film-goer in 1936, who he suggests has a ‘middlebrow intelligence . an intelligence which has grown up as little as her face, so that the books and art which once seemed to the very young woman so lively and cerebral still excite her’ (Greene 1993, 397). For modern audiences, Greene’s project looks suspiciously like intellectual and social gate-keeping. By contrast, recent re-evaluations of the 74 Lawrence Napper middlebrow have precisely celebrated its dynamic potential (Light 1991; Humble 2001; Napper 2009). For audiences of the period, middlebrow culture appeared to offer a way of transcending intellectual and cultural boundaries, no matter how circumscribed that movement might have been in reality. The boundaries across which middlebrow culture trespassed were not limited to those of culture and medium; they were also to do with space and time. Since the 1930s, the suburbs have been widely understood to be the middlebrow space par excellence (Carey 1992; Hayes 1993; Medhurst 1997; Price 2015). Elsewhere I have argued that for some commentators the very notion of British cinema itself suggested a middlebrow, suburban blurring of boundaries through a sort of spa- tial determinism (Napper 2009, 25–7). Located in Europe, but sharing a language with America, British films were caught between two cinematic ideals and forced to compete with both.

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