Casablanca .... that film ... on the wireless today

It's the film pretty much everyone says they like.

And why not?

Set against the backdrop of the struggle against the Nazi regime, it has a superb plot, a clutch of excellent actors, screen writers and memorable scenes.  To which can be added that song and stunning cinematography and a heap of unforgettable one liners.

It is hard to select one scene that stands out, but for me one must be when the Nazi officers singing a German patriotic song are drowned out by the club's band and clientele performing "La Marseillaise".

More so because some of the actors were themselves refugees from Occupied Europe.

All of which is an introduction to theis week's In Our Time we features a discussion on the film.

And it was so good I listened to it twice.

"Recorded at the Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield, Misha Glenny and guests discuss Casablanca, one of the greatest films from Hollywood’s Golden Era.

The film stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and features the unforgettable song As Time Goes By.

Casablanca opened in November 1942 when Europe had been at war for three years and the USA for one. 

It was among Hollywood’s first major films to explain to US audiences why the war was worth fighting, and alongside this became a huge box office hit.

It was created by a cast and crew full of emigres and refugees from lands under Nazi control. They produced a movie that has authenticity as well as astonishing emotional power that continues to this day.

With Ian Christie, Emeritus Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University of London, Pamela Hutchinson, Film historian and critic, Sheldon Hall, Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University.

Producers: Simon Tillotson & Sam Peach"

Pictures; Casablanca poster, and scene from the trailer

*Casablanca, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00325cd 

From a factory canteen “somewhere in Britain.”

You have to be a certain age to remember Worker’s Playtime and Music While You Work and even older to have participated.

Both began during the war years and both ran on into the 1960s.  They started as a way of entertaining the workforce and were part of that bigger drive to maintain moral during the war.

They also reflected that more collective style of entertainment where cinema audiences would regularly take part in sing-along’s with the words flashed up on the screens, or in the dance halls where young couples would form up in a procession for the odd dance.

Not that we should be over surprised.  After all in many of the northern towns and cities it had been  the practise that when almost all the factories closed for the wakes holiday many of the workforce went off to the same holiday resort.

And I suppose in the interests of war time morale it made sense to capitalise on this and use it to forge a common sense of unity.

You see it also in many of the films of the period, particularly those dealing with people who were thrown together by the necessities of the war.

In Millions Like Us made in 1943 it was an aircraft factory while The Way Ahead followed a group of civilians conscripted into the army.

What both have in common is that they are about ordinary people from very different backgrounds and parts of the country who have a common purpose.

That common purpose was best expressed in the film Mrs Miniver.  It was an American film made in 1942 but set in a Kent village just after Dunkirk.  Here ordinary people  confronted with fear and danger rise to the occasion.  Mr Miniver using his small pleasure boat takes part in the rescue of the British Army from the beaches of Dunkirk, his wife confronts a German airman and the class barriers in the village are broken down.

And it finishes in the church with a sermon.  The building is in ruins and the village has come together to mourn the loss of those killed in an air raid.

The local inhabitants assemble at the badly damaged church where their vicar  affirms their determination in a powerful sermon:

“ We in this quiet corner of England have suffered the loss of friends very dear to us, some close to this church....... There's scarcely a household that hasn't been struck to the heart. And why? Surely you must have asked yourselves this question? Why in all conscience should these be the ones to suffer? Children, old people, a young girl at the height of her loveliness? Why these? Are these our soldiers? Are these our fighters? Why should they be sacrificed?

I shall tell you why. Because this is not only a war of soldiers in uniform. It is the war of the people, of all the people. And it must be fought not only on the battlefield but in the cities and in the villages, in the factories and on the farms, in the home and in the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom. ....... This is the People's War. It is our war. We are the fighters. Fight it then. Fight it with all that is in us. And may God defend the right.”

And so back to where I started and those two wartime radio programmes.

Music While You Work had begun in the June of 1940 and was a daytime radio programme of continuous live music.  It was broadcast twice a day on workdays and consisted of music from light orchestras, dance bands and military bands.

Worker’s Playtime began a year later in 1941 and was broadcast at lunchtime, three times a week from a factory canteen “somewhere in Britain.”  It was a mix of music and comedy and featured many of the most popular acts of the time.

Much of the humour played on the everyday niggles of war time, so when in the September of 1942 Gert and Daisy (Elsie and Doris Waters)* did a lunchtime session they made light of such things as the quality of the food and that old standby the gas mask which was guaranteed to get a ready response.

“I’ve just had a row with the fishmonger, it’s the fish he sold me, just smell this” 
“Oh it’s a bit on the turn, on the turn is that.” 
“On the turn its half way up the plate”

“What you carrying your gas mask around for?  
“You don’t do that at home.” 
“Well I’ve got to carry the shopping home in something”

And the usual mix of light humour which could have been heard on music halls across the country.
“Is your face dirty or is it my imagination?” 
“Well my face is clean but I don’t know about your imagination.” 

And, “Listen to this from the newspaper, ‘Dear Betty I’ve been walking out with my young man for 20 years.  Do you think it would be alright to kiss?'
After 20 years you wonder if they can remember what they are walking out for.”

Both shows survived into the post war period but a decade later they seemed a little old fashioned and a bit to reminiscent of a time gone by.  So Workers Playtime finished in 1964 and Music While You Work three years later.

And I have to admit by the time I was in my teens I too rather thought they were old hat, but with the passage of time I can see the purpose they played, the affection they were regarded in and just how entertaining some of them still are over 70 years later.

Pictures; Women in an ordinance factory, 1951, m08082, and textile workers, 1931, m 59215, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, and groups of workers and hospital staff from North Shields, some of whom like my father had been conscripted in war work as a driver, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and front cover of the DVD version of Millions Like Us

Gert and Daisy - Won't We Have a Party, 1942 British Pathe, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ_md44bOfQ

The Glue Man, three young people and a fascinating insight into the Britain of 1943

Now the thing about old films is that long after their contemporary appeal has faded they become a piece of history.

It starts with the the clothes, the cars and the buildings and moves on to the assumptions, prejudices and attitudes of the people portrayed along with its period comment on the events of the time.

So it is with A Canterbury Tale, made in 1944 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

The film is loosely based around the Canterbury Tales and involves three very different people all with their own unique and powerful stories who come together in a Kent village just outside Canterbury in the summer of 1943.

The three consist of a British sergeant an America sergeant and a Land Girl who are thrown together by the mystery of the Glue Man.

The events last only a few days but in the course of those three days we get to see how these young people from different places and different walks of life work together to solve the mystery and come to a closer understanding what they have in common.

Now given that the film was made in 1944 it is pretty easy to see the motivation that drives the plot and that of course is part of its value today.

The threat of a common enemy in the form of the Glue Man unites the three and along the way we get to know more about their own lives which have been put on hold by the war.

And as the plot unfolds the film offers some wonderful scenes of Kent over 70 years ago, from the bombed out houses on streets in Canterbury to rural scenes in the fictitious village of Chillingbourne.

These are themselves a priceless record of a past which no longer exists.  The hay waggon loaded high with a land girl sitting on top, the old men outside the pub and the carpenter talking about when to lay down timber for the future are scenes of a rural way of life which seem timeless but has pretty much vanished..

And of course that is one of the messages of the film that here is a way of life unchanged for centuries which is at the very heart of what we were fighting for.

Added to which it provided an opportunity to show just what we had in common with the United States as the that young American talks to a carpenter and finds out that he lays down timber for the future in exactly the same way as in America.

And as you would expect of a film with an eye to its propaganda value, all three receive good news.

The Land Girl discovers her boyfriend who was shot down has survived and that his father no longer opposes them getting married, our American gets news that his girlfriend is serving with the Women’s Army Corps in Australia and the British sergeant gets to play the organ in Canterbury Cathedral.

All of which in itself echoes those themes of the People’s War which pitched people out of their ordinary lives and threw them new challenges and in the process showed how the country was united in its determination to win.

And that is all I want to say, if you want more the film is available and as well as being a good tale is real history lesson.

Of course there are a shed load of equally interesting films from the period which no doubt I will return to.

Pictures; cover from A Canterbury Tale, and Canterbury in 2009 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Lost and found …… no 2 …. a bit of Hollywood behind the fuse box

I like silly history.

By which I mean the stuff that serious historians might well dismiss as trivial, but which offers up insights into how we lived and if you are lucky zips you off down all sorts of different twisty turny paths.

And this bit of cinema history does just that.

Last year Brian Norbury posted it on social media with the comment “Found behind a fuse board I was replacing. How did people rent films in 1944?”

Now as someone who rented old fashioned reel to reel films back in the 1970s I was drawn in, and while I thought there might well have been a market for such things in 1944, I thought it might be more likely that this was a trade paper for independent cinemas.

And a trawl of the internet revealed that the Daily Renter was “The most widely read Daily Film Newspaper in Great Britain" and “reaches every Producer, Distributer, and Exhibitor in the United Kingdom at the breakfast table every morning”.*

The same search brought up a link to The British Entertainment History Project which “has been recording the stories of men and women working in the UK film, television, theatre, and radio industries to ensure that information on their lives and experiences is preserved for future generations. 

These interviews tell us about the challenges these people had to overcome, the skills they employed, and the enduring human relationships they forged as Britain developed into one of the world’s major centres of the film and television industries.  

Consisting of more than 700 recordings so far, it is one of the most extensive audio-visual archives of its kind in the world. 

For students, researchers, and members of the public alike, it offers a unique insight and a link to a time when we made some memorable films and groundbreaking television programmes.”**

And one of those recordings was a fascinating sound interview with Harold Myers, who talked about his career as a journalist from the 1930s into the 1980s, writing about and for the cinema, including a stint on the Daily Renter.

So, having gone down several by ways I turned back to the fuse box edition of The Daily Renter.

It was published on Monday July 24th and carried pictures of 24 Hollywood stars, and to my surprise I could tick off a full fourteen who I not only knew but had seen at least one of their films.

Equally interesting was page 12 which featured Days of Glory, a new film in production by RKO, which the Daily Renter commented  “had discovered many potential stars” for the film.

It was released later in 1944 and told the story of a group of Soviet partisans  fighting the German invasion of USSR in 1941, and marked the film debut of Tamara Toumanova and Gregory Peck, as well as most of the other principal actors.***

I can’t say I have ever seen the film but occasionally clips do pop up and no doubt as the war continued through its fifth year and into final one,  Days of Glory might have been expected to be a tool in the propaganda battle.

Alas some critics complained it was too wordy and lacked enough action scenes, and according to one source the film recorded a loss of $593, 0000.***

So there you have it, leaving me just to thank Brian for posting his little bit of 1944 film history.

And after the story went live, Brian came back with two more pages which I couldn't resist including.

Ladies Courage had come out in February 1944, which told the story of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron formed in the United States during World War II.

It received poor reviews from the critics and worse still when a group of WASPS pilots saw the film, they, were astonished at the soap-opera histrionics exhibited by the characters on screen and  immediately dubbed the film "Ladies Outrageous"

To which one article has added "More recent evaluations ranged from a lukewarm Leonard Maltin review - "Well-meant idea fails because of hackneyed script and situations' to noted aviation film historian Bruce Orriss, who dismissed the film as '... little more than an embarrassment to the members of this earnest group of pilots.'"****

Location; behind Brian’s fuse box

Pictures; pages from The Daily Renter, 1944, courtesy of Brian Norbury

*Advert for The Daily Film Renter, 1936

** The British Entertainment History Project,  http://historyproject.org.uk/content/about-us

***Days of Glory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Glory_%281944_film%29

****Ladies Courageous, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_Courageous

Laughing at our Brave New World ………

Now I have a lot of time for the first post war Labour Government.

And Now Win the Peace, Labour Poster, 1945

In quick succession after it was elected in 1945, it set up the National Health Service, created the Welfare State, and introduced measures to improve the conditions of women, children, and workers while reorganizing key infrastructure industries, creating bold new development corporations to construct new towns and started a huge house building programme.

But as exciting as these were, they were set against a post war world where money was tight, rationing remained in place, and Britain underwent the awful winter of 1946-47 which saw massive disruptions to industry and agriculture with closed factories and animals freezing to death in the fields.

And as ever when faced with such a testing time the British film industry set out to make people laugh.

All of which is the introduction to a series of films made during the 1940s and 50s which I have been revisiting,

Back then I was too young to have seen them, but now over 70 years after they were made, I am watching the best.  Some like Passport to Pimlico released in 1949 have become classics and are watched because they remain funny but also as a commentary on the period.  

Family Ration Book, 1946-47

In short, a small piece of Pimlico discovers it is part of Burgundy not Britain and so is not subject to post war rationing and a heap of other Government regulations.  

What follows is a comical take on how the new “Burgundians” react to their new freedoms, matched by the Governments’ harsh measures to restore the status quo by turning off supplies of water, electricity, and gas, as well as preventing supplies of food entering the area. 

Coupons for clothes, 1946-47

This leads to a mixed set of reactions from the wider public which at first seeks to take advantage of the end of rationing by flooding into Pimlico buying up everything from nylons to sweets, but then responds by trying to defeat the Government’s food blockage by throwing food parcels over the barriers, parachuting in pigs, and delivering milk via a hose and a helicopter.

Three years later and a year after the very successful Festival of Britain, the film The Happy Family sought to re explore the conflict between the little people and their Government, centering around the opposition by one family to the demolition of their home which is in the way of a vital road into the festival site.

It milks the same themes of rigid bureaucracy set against the individual, revisits the Government’s tactics of a food blockade and the direct action from the family when confronted with a police attack.  

Celebrating the Festival of Britain, 1951

But because this the film is set in the Britain of 1951, the direct action consists of pelting the authorities with over ripe vegetables and flour bombs, leaving the audience to note that “no one was hurt in the making of the film”.

But like Passport to Pimlico, a compromise is reached after a direct intervention from the Prime Minister and leads to the architects redrawing the plans so that the road goes on either side of the house.  

And in that "best of all possible worlds" the film ends with the family enjoying a day out at the Festival.

There were other films exploiting that period of the Brave New World, and in time I will go looking for them.

Location; London, 1945-1952

Pictures; And Now Win The Peace, Labour poster 1945, Clothes Ration book, 1946-47 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and The Festival of Britain emblem, designed by Abram Games, from the cover of the South Bank Exhibition Guide, 1951

Films of the 1940s and '50s

“You have got to kiss a lot of toads before you meet your Prince Charming”*

Which could equally be true of British films of the 1940s and ‘50s. Many were dominated by themes from the Second World War and covered tales of daring, British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity and light humorous pieces. Given the awful seriousness of the war years there is nothing wrong in that.
Most were blatantly made as propaganda or in the years after the war reflected back to a moment when we still felt great just as the Cold War plunged the world into an uncertain place and Britain began to be marginalized as a real power. At the same time as the growing consumer boom of the ‘50s made the decade of rationing, and make and mend a thing of the past.

Some of the films of the war years can be still be watched, partly because they were good films but also because they are often an insight into how film makers incorporated propaganda. So A Canterbury Tale by Powell and Pressburger took the theme of Chaucer’s poem with its collection of odd characters on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to weave a story of three young people swept up by the war. Here against the backdrop of an English village with its unchanging character were the elements of a new time created by the war and pulling together both Americans and Britons in a common cause.

At the same many of the films aimed to convey the destruction of the old class system as people of all walks of life pulled together. Of these my favorites must be Millions Like Us made in 1943 set in a wartime aircraft factory and The Way Ahead following a mixed bag of civilians who having been conscripted into the army are shaped into a fighting unit and go on to fight in North Africa. All the themes are there from the stories of different people from across Britain to the problems of the families left behind as well as romance and death with a touch of humor and plenty of war time grit.

Often these films were made and starred the very best. So The Way Ahead, starred David Niven and Stanley Holloway and a legion of actors who were to make it in the ‘50s and was written by the author Eric Ambler and the young Peter Ustinov and directed by Carol Reed.
Of all these the one I go back to is Waterloo Road. It is part melodrama, and part documentary. The story of a young married couple separated by the war whose relationship undergoes further challenges from a dishonest racketeer who tried seduces the young wife was filmed against the backdrop of war damaged streets in south east London.

There are other candidates for the top five films and these I would suggest should include The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1943 which contrasted the values of the early 20th century with those needed to fight the war. It follows the career and romantic life of the young officer, Clive Wynn Candy. Set at the end of the 19th century through the two world wars it both celebrates the British notions of honour and sacrifice with more modern attitudes which would win the war.

So, certainly these films were full of propaganda but are very much a way of viewing this country at a moment in its history.

*graffiti recorded in a Chorlton Lavatory
Picture; cinema poster from A Canterbury Tale