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Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, Volume 2 (The)
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (13th May 2013). |
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The Film
 DISC ONE:  Midshipman Easy (Carol Reed, 1935)
Made in 1935, Midshipman Easy was Carol Reed’s first solo directorial film. Peter William Evans suggests that it established some of the key themes in Reed’s work: ‘the maturing process of the male, and the difficulties of measuring up to a masculine ideal’ (2005: 4). In Midshipman Easy, along with The Young Mr Pitt and The Way Ahead, Reed explored heroism; in The Third Man and Odd Man Out, Reed ‘reviews its underside’ (ibid.: 119). Evans argues that Midshipman Easy, set during the Napoleonic War, is driven by ‘the pace of the boys’ adventure yarn’ (ibid.: 80). This is certainly the case: the film offers an episodic, almost picaresque, account of the experiences of Easy (the then-16 year old Hughie Green), who joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman on the ship HMS Harpy, under the tutelage of Captain Wilson (Roger Livesey). (Interestingly, the film also features future director J Lee Thompson in a small role, his only acting role in a feature film.) The early sequences, in which Wilson recruits Easy, establish the climate of equality in which Easy has been raised. ‘Always give way to a woman’, Easy’s father (Lewis Casson) tells Wilson: ‘It saves time or trouble. I never argue with my wife or my son. I believe all men are created equal, and all men have equal rights’. ‘Such a law would be hardly practical at sea’, Wilson says. Cut to Easy’s son saying, ‘All men are created equal, and all men have equal rights’ as he is chastened for fishing in someone else’s pond. ‘Then let me put you in possession of your property’, the man says as he kicks the boy into the water. On board the Harpy, Easy discovers that life at sea is less romantic than he imagined: he suffers from seasickness, and he is bullied by the other young men. However, Easy proves himself when, after being separated from the Harpy, he manages to capture a Spanish galleon and seize fourteen thousand doubloons. His adventures place him in jeopardy, but throughout the film Easy stands by his firm belief in equality, asserting that ‘I have been brought up to believe in equality and trust as the foundations of co-operation’. By the end of the picture, he has turned the tables on his bullies and proven himself to be a valuable member of the Harpy’s crew. Ultimately, Midshipman Easy is episodic, comic and light; Evans’ description of it as a ‘boys’ adventure yarn’ is most apt.  Brief Ecstasy (Edmond T. Gréville, 1937)
Brief Ecstasy opens in a café, where a young man, Jim Wyndham (Hugh Williams), meets a young woman, Helen Norwood (Linden Travers). Accidentally spilling Norwood’s drink, Wyndham attempts to make amends by patting her down with a towel and innocently touches her legs. Norwood slaps him and storms out of the café but leaves her bag behind. Seeing Norwood’s address is inside the bag, Wyndham visits her home and returns it to her. Wyndham and Norwood make a date and visit a dance club. They stay until the end of the evening, returning in the early morning. ‘I’ve never been so happy in all my life’, Norwood tells Wyndham. ‘No regrets?’, he asks. ‘None’, she says. ‘I should have told you before. I’m leaving for India today. My father lives there, and he’s very ill. I’ve got to go’, Wyndham informs her. Norwood is a student of astronomy, studying under Professor Paul Bernardy (Paul Lukas). Outside the lecture theatre, the female students fawn over Bernardy: ‘How long does he lecture for?’, one of the girls asks. ‘Never long enough for me’, another responds. ‘I wonder if he’ll wear that grey suit’, another of the students ponders. Bernardy offers Norwood a position as his assistant. Five years pass, and Norwood has become Mrs Bernardy. She is slightly resentful, as she has sacrificed her career to become a housewife: she is clearly disinterested as the gardener asks her about an issue with the garden flowers. She also faces competition from Bernardy’s housekeeper Martha (Marie Ney), who has been in Bernardy’s employ for twenty years and is clearly in love with her employer. When Wyndham arrives at the house, revealing himself to be the son of Bernardy’s close friend, Helen begins to feel her frustrations at her current life and her feelings for Wyndham intensify. The two spend time together, and although Helen is faithful to her husband, Wyndham tries to tempt her away from him. Meanwhile, Martha plots against Helen, informing him (incorrectly) that Wyndham and Helen have begun an affair. Ultimately, Brief Ecstasy, which details the conflict between desire and fidelity, is little more than a fluffy romantic drama. However, the film has some wonderful sequences. When, after Wyndham has arrived at the Bernardy home, he asks Helen to dance, she tells him, ‘No’. ‘Why not? You wouldn’t refuse if I were a stranger’, he notes. ‘You are a stranger. You must be’, she tells him. There are two visually interesting sequences. Early in the film, when Wyndham and Helen visit the dance club, there is a fascinating montage to show the passage of time: stacked chairs in the club, a knitted doll with its eyes covered by its hands, the pair (Wyndham whispering into Helen’s ear), a balloon bursting, a cup overflowing (overt sexual symbolism), hands reaching for gloves, a line of the club’s employees, etc. In the second sequence, as Bernardy reads his morning newspaper he imagines Wyndham and Helen kissing: the image is superimposed over the newspaper, allowing the audience direct access to Bernardy's paranoid imaginings. DISC TWO:  The Big Blockade (Charles Frend, 1942)
The directorial debut of Charles Frend, who would later direct the highly-regarded adaptation of Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel The Cruel Sea (1953), The Big Blockade has been labeled ‘a fairly typical Ealing wartime propaganda piece in their familiar semi-documentary style’, notable because it ‘features the only straight performance by the great comedian Will Hay’ (Shall, 2007: 74). Where Ealing’s earliest films about the Second World War, such as Ships with Wings (Sergei Nolbandov, 1941), focused on ‘clipped-voice, stiff upper-lipped officer types’, after 1942 Ealing’s war pictures ‘concentrated on collective heroism’ and featured a greater emphasis on realism – a product of ‘[t]he arrival of documentarists Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt at Ealing in 1941’ (Duguid, 2003a; Duguid, 2003b: np). The Big Blockade was produced on the cusp of these changes in Ealing’s approach to the war. Charles Barr notes that the film was ‘more closely linked to actuality than its predecessor [Ships With Wings], incorporating facts and figures and politicians’ speeches’ (1998: 27). However, as Barr notes the ‘fictional material […] is almost as bombastic as before’, with ‘Germans […] presented with relish as bullies and cringing cowards, through lengthy caricatures by such heavy actors as Robert Morley and Alfred Drayton’ (ibid.). Conversely, ‘[t]he British are cool and resourceful’, their ‘stiff upper lip quality and the strength it represents very much taken for granted’ (ibid.): in one sequence, Will Hay and Bernard Miles casually shoot down a German airplane which is attacking their ship whilst they hold a conversation about navy certs. The film opens with an onscreen narration which explains the film’s focus on the titular blockade. ‘Fighting is one side of war’, the narrator (Frank Owen) intones: ‘There’s another side: that is, stopping the enemy from fighting. We have seen the three great arms of Britain’s grand defensive against Germany. They are the airplanes; they are the tanks; and they are the ships. We have another weapon, one that weakens the Nazi power to strike back against us: the big blockade’. We are taken to the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which has ‘one purpose: to choke the life out of German trade and industry [….] We must keep from Germany all the vital raw materials she needs […] We must freeze Germany’s foreign trade [….] The striking forces are the ships of the Royal Navy and the bombers of the Royal Air Force’. The narrator takes us back to ‘Summer, 1939’ and to Budapest, ‘the Mecca of German commercial travelers, buying the fat Hungarian swine that go in millions into German’s national dish, the sausage’. From here, the film’s episodic narrative begins proper. In this sequence, we are introduced to a German man, Schneider, who is given a present by Hungarian delegates before embarking on a train journey and encountering an English traveler in his sleeping car. They discuss politics, and a blusterful Schneider – the first of Barr’s caricatures – asserts that unless Britain backs down, there will be war, ‘and this time, Germany will not be defeated’. The English passenger subtly mocks Schneider’s arrogance. The sequence sets the tone for much of the film: a series of vignettes offering a dryly humorous examination of British stoicism in the face of the arrogance of the Nazi ideology. Shortly after, in another sequence we are shown the directors of a German factory, who are ordered to increase their production by one hundred per cent despite, as one of them notes, the factory already producing its maximum output based on its electricity consumption. ‘Are you loyal Germans, meinen Herren, or are you decadent democratic saboteurs?’, they are asked. It’s a scattershot approach that sometimes hits its target but often falls short. There are some highly humorous sequences, largely dependent on broad stereotypes: a sequence in which Robert Morley (over)plays a Nazi official, Von Geiselbrecht, works wonderfully. The film also incorporates semidocumentary elements: Lord Haw Haw’s propagandistic radio broadcasts are represented in the film over newsreel footage of the German army. We are also shown clips from what is claimed to be a Nazi propaganda film which contains a declaration, ‘Say your prayers, for your last hour is at hand’. At the end, we pull out from a cinema screen, ‘Well there you are, a typical German newsreel’, one of the men in the auditorium asserts. Robert Murphy states that The Big Blockade is ‘a peculiar film and by no means wholly successful, mixing stylized reconstructions of life in Europe, newsreel, and a barrage of information on the vital importance of [the Ministry of Economic Warfare]’ (2004: 29). Murphy asserts that the film is ‘[c]rude, noisy and unrealistic’ but ‘in its vigorous and experimental way […] represents an interesting alternative to the mainstream of quiet, realistic, underplayed British documentaries’ (ibid.). The film was unsuccessful with audiences, and Michael Balcon later suggested this may in part have been due to its title: ‘Blockade is a dull word […] and the subject rather too abstract to be dramatic or exciting’ (quoted in MacKenzie, 2001: 47).  The Four Just Men (Walter Forde, 1939)
Adapted from Edgar Wallace’s 1905 novel of the same title, in which Wallace’s ‘Just Men’ (a group of vigilantes) was introduced, Walter Forde’s The Four Just Men had been preceded by an earlier adaptation of the same novel (in 1921) and would be followed by ITV’s television series in 1959. The film was released in American under the title The Secret Four. The film opens in the snow, and an onscreen title tells us the setting is ‘Regensberg, 1938’. Executions are to take place. One of the men scheduled to be executed is an English journalist, James Terry (Frank Lawton). He communicates with the man in the next cell, using the water pipes connecting the two cells to tap out messages in Morse code. After Terry escapes, via a ruse that will be instantly familiar to viewers of the later US series Mission: Impossible (Desilu/Parmount, 1966-73) – an accomplice poses as an officer who has come to escort Terry for further interrogation – Terry reveals that the other prisoner informed him of a plot to block the Suez Canal, cutting off British troops and supplies from reaching India prior to an attack. The plan is to be aided by a British cabinet minister, later revealed to be the Foreign Secretary Sir Hamar Ryman (Alan Napier), an outspoken pacifist. Back in England, Terry and the other Four Just Men – actor Humphrey Mansfield (Hugh Sinclair), playwright James Brodie (Griffith Jones) and fashion house owner Leon Poiccard (Francis L Sullivan) – work to stop the plot and uncover Ryman’s treachery. As the above outline may suggest, the film makes oblique reference to the then-impending Nazi threat. A line in which Terry warns of the ‘British Empire smashed to bits; world domination in one man’s hands‘ offers a fairly direct allusion to Hitler. Through the character of Ryman, who in one sequence argues that the re-armament programme is tantamount to ‘suicide’, the film suggests that Nazi appeasement is a form of treachery. (Notably, this was less than a year after Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘peace for our time’ speech, which followed the Munich Agreement, the failed act of appeasement towards Germany.) As with The Big Blockade, stereotypical English stoicism is valued: when Terry is told that he is needed for further questioning (part of the ruse by which he escapes), he arrogantly tells the officer, ‘For the last six weeks you’ve deprived me of food, water and every decency. But I propose to take my sense of humour with me, like it or not’. Meanwhile the Just Men are glorified by the press and labeled as ‘irresponsible criminals’ in the Houses of Parliament. James Chapman has referred to Forde’s big screen version of Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men stories as ‘[t]he most interesting of the eve-of-war spy films in terms of constructing an ideology of national identity’ (2001: 95). Chapman notes that, in comparison with Wallace’s source novel, in Forde’s film ‘a significant realignment of the story’s ideological position has occurred’ (ibid.). In Wallace’s first novel featuring the Four Just Men, the antagonist is the Foreign Secretary, Sir Walter Ramon, who introduces an Act of Parliament intended to prevent foreign nationals from seeking asylum in Britain. As Chapman notes, Ramon ‘is characterised as stubborn but honest and a man of integrity who firmly believes that the measure is necessary to protect Britain from an influx of undesirables’ (ibid.). The Four Just Men execute Ramon by electrocuting him. The novel is therefore highly ambiguous in its exploration of the Four Just Men’s methods; Wallace’s later novels would remove this ambiguity by pitting the vigilantes against more conventionally ‘bad’ antagonists (‘foreign anarchists and international criminals’; ibid.). Where in Wallace’s novel, the Four Just Men were comprised of men from several European countries, in Forde’s film the group is made up of three Englishmen and one Frenchman: the group thus becomes a patriotic society, committed to ‘protecting Britain against foreign threats’ (ibid.). The enemy, renamed Ryman in the film, is ‘clearly marked as a traitor which thus legitimises his assassination’, as compared with the moral ambiguity surrounding the Just Men’s execution of Ramon in Wallace’s novel. As Chapman notes, the ‘ideological positioning of the film in the context of the post-Munich era is clear: appeasement [represented in the film by Ryman] has been discredited and a firm stand has to be taken against foreign aggressors’ (ibid.: 96). In his book on Ealing Studios, Charles Barr has asserted that the film goes so far as ‘enforc[ing], irresistibly, the inference that appeasement is treachery’ (op cit.: 190). DISC ONE: Midshipman Easy (Carol Reed, 1935) (73:44) Brief Ecstasy (Edmond T. Gréville, 1937) (66:44) Gallery (6:41) DISC TWO: The Big Blockade (Charles Frend, 1942) (77:41) The Four Just Men (Walter Forde, 1939) (81:11)
Video
All four films are monochrome and are presented in their original aspect ratio of 1.37:1. The Big Blockade is in good shape, but there is some wear and tear present. Tonality is strong but contrast isn’t great: there are some heavy blacks with crushed detail. Four Just Men has better contrast and shows a similar amount of print damage. Midshipman Easy shows the most wear and tear out of the four films. Contrast is mostly fine, but there is a soft, diffuse quality to some sequences that doesn’t seem to be a product of the original photography. Brief Ecstasy is arguably the most handsome presentation of the bunch, with strong contrast and tonality throughout.
Audio
All four films are presented with a two-channel mono track. In both The Big Blockade and Four Just Men, there is some background hiss to the audio track, more present in some scenes than others, that from time to time threatens to drown out the dialogue. Sadly, no subtitles are included.
Extras
The first disc includes a gallery of stills and promotional material from all four films (6:41). Pressbooks for The Big Blockade and The Four Just Men, and flyers for The Big Blockade and Midshipman Easy are included as PDF files.
Overall
As with the first volume, this second set of films from Ealing studios contains a diverse group of pictures, all of which have been quite difficult to see in the DVD age. The presentation of all four films is more than adequate, although as noted above there is some hiss to the soundtracks in several of the films which makes some of the dialogue difficult to hear. Subtitles would be a nice addition, but even without them it’s easy to recommend this competitively-priced collection of hard-to-see films. References: Barr, Charles, 1998: Ealing Studios. University of California Press Chapman, James, 2001: ‘Celluloid Shockers’. In: Richards, Jeffrey (ed), 2001: The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929-1939. London: I B Tauris: 75-98 Duguid, Mark, 2003a: ‘Ealing at War’. [Online.] http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/445448/ Duguid, Mark, 2003b: ‘Ships with Wings (1941)’. [Online.] http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/801362/index.html Evans, Peter William, 2005: British Film Makes: Carol Reed. Manchester University Press Lovell, George, 2000: Consultancy, Ministry and Mission. London: Continuum International Publishing MacKenzie, S P, 2001: British War Films, 1939-45. London: Continuum International Publishing Murphy, Robert, 2004: Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939-48. London: Routledge Shall, Robert, 2007: British Film Directors: A Critical Guide. SIU Press This review has been kindly sponsored by: 
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