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I'm as much up against it as you are
Thanks to the ironies of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927, TCM recently ran four quota quickies produced at Teddington Studios for its centenary month of Warner Bros. and as soon as I saw that two of them were directed by Michael Powell, like any sensible person I watched them.
Something Always Happens (1934) describes both the plot of this rattling-fast, eccentrically good-natured comedy and the motto of its hero, one of the most lackadaisical embodiments of chutzpah I have encountered in my life. Cleaned out at cards, with a London-wide trail of debts behind him and nothing resembling employment, lodging, or regular meals in his future, Ian Hunter's Peter Middleton sallies forth with Depression-era optimism and with very little else in his favor proceeds to blag his way up the intertwined ladders of class, career, and romance like the first coming of J. Pierrepont Finch. His equivalent in an American picture of the same year might well have been brasher, more of a go-getter, but so much of the character's appeal is his boundless and unworried confidence in himself to think of something before he has to pay for anything. It is a tribute to his amiable actor that we never tire of watching him succeed, or at least fail in a profitable direction. He adopts an urchin as down-and-out as himself through the happenstance of facing down a bullying apple seller and admitting with rare honesty afterward, "I mostly run, too," but the company of a tatterdemalion moppet like John Singer's Billy earns the two of them an extended deferment on the rent from a landlady who can't bring herself to give the boot to a divorced father. He meets cute with Nancy O'Neil's Cynthia Hatch in the process of trying to hustle her 1934 Bentley 3½ Litre and when she turns the screwball tables by playing the grateful shopgirl to his generous swell, her covert efforts to recommend him to her industrialist father rebound into a war for the hearts and minds of Britain's drivers as a patronizing dismissal provokes our hero to offer his services to a rival chain of petrol stations. A sometime salesman, Peter defines a commission for Billy as "money I get for selling something I haven't got to someone who doesn't want it." The same breezily specious ethos undergirds the presciently diversified advertising scheme he devises to boost the stock of the languishing Blue Point Petrol Stations: "Give them a swimming pool in summer, an ice rink in winter! In other words, we must correct all those unsightly rows of petrol pumps into a vast chain of roadhouses where the madding crowd can go as mad as it likes—and pay for the privilege!" Whiffle your way round Britain while you're at it. The underlayer of reality to all this surefire cheek is the film's frank acknowledgement that Peter is a million-to-one chance himself, being most realistically relatable on his early rounds of failing to find work. "Jobs are scarce enough for young people," he sympathizes with Cynthia, whom he then offers to engage as a secretary even before he has an office to install her in. Unlike so many tricksters, he never has the second thought of looking down and so never falls through the plain air the audience can see under his feet, not that the pace of his picture gives him much time to try it. Who cares if there's not much more to this snappily worded exercise in wish-fulfillment than its charm? In this great city of mugs and opportunities, who needs anything more?
Crown v. Stevens (1936) may be the most blandly misleading title that could have been assigned to this super-saturated hour of proto-noir. Even the title of the 1935 source novel by Laurence Meynell—Third Time Unlucky—at least suggests something of the cavalcade of mischance that befalls its central naïf from the moment he gets himself jilted by a pert con artist to the tune of a diamond ring on approval. Caught between a £19/10 IOU and a raise he didn't receive, he finds only the illusion of a reprieve in the corpse of his creditor, since it leaves him an accessory after the fact to the woman who pulled the trigger, his sour boss' discontented wife. As bitterly as the most hardboiled of dames a decade later, she snaps shut the curtain to her sitting room and declares, "Ten million people in London and it had to be you." In light of some of the rats played by Patric Knowles in his Hollywood career, it feels like a joke on the future that his Chris Jensen is such a schnook—Beatrix Thomson's Doris Stevens needs to exert only the most minimal wiles to convince him to cover for her act of supposed self-defense, one moment the brave little woman with the tremble of tears in her throat and the next her mouth curving in the smallest, depthless smile as she watches her hook, line, and sinker of a chastened young mark go. I have no reservations about identifying her as a femme fatale, a splendid and not unsophisticated example of the species. A former chorus girl who married for the money her husband turned out too mean to share, her great-eyed pixie face is brittle with boredom as she smokes and flips through issues of Film Pictorial and Punch; her Kelvin-zero manipulations of men are sharply contrasted with her vivacity around Googie Withers' Ella Levine, a magnanimous gold digger of 1936 who drapes her own sumptuous furs around her old friend's shoulders and sets her up a party with all the free-flowing liquor and free-living theatrical types she's been missing: "I know just the boy for you!" We can't really approve of Doris' belt-and-braces plan to poison her husband with the sleeping tablets she bought with such innocently anxious care from the chemist and then leave him all night in the garage with the engine running, but when he refuses her perennial request for a new dress with the self-righteously rote "I will not have my wife look like an overdressed trollop," the thought occurs that it might not be so dreadful if he just croaked of the flu. Here, too, as so often in noir, a good girl can be spotted by her financial independence, as a love interest for Chris emerges out of the interior design client of Glennis Lorimer's Molly Hobbes, who owns a shop of her own selling "soft furnishings." Other familiar faces populate the supporting roles, Frederick Piper as the ill-intended Arthur Stevens, Bernard Miles as the forensics-minded Detective Wells of the Yard, Reginald Purdell as Alf, the no-nonsense foreman of the firm who matily steers Chris farther down the course of crime by opining that no man worth the name would shop a woman to the police. When it comes to it, Doris can handle herself, extending a final cigarette with stone cold composure: "Arthur needn't strain himself . . . Besides, he doesn't know the really interesting parts."
I know less about the organization of Teddington than I do about Warners in Hollywood, so I can't tell if it's coincidence or preference that both of these films shared a screenwriter in Brock Williams, a cinematographer in Basil Emmott, and even an editor in Bert Bates, but it makes them an even more compact double feature than I had imagined. Well ahead of the timeline of the official noir style, Crown v. Stevens sports some efficiently dark, stark photography and one marvelously artificial street scene of mist-wet bricks limelit by construction, while the courtyard of a Victorian housing estate and the barrows and stalls of Covent Garden in Something Always Happens are naturally lit, neorealistically vérité. The action of the earlier film ricochets like cross-talk, intercutting parallels like punch lines and the flipsides of coins; the later runs remarkably straight down the line from murder to murder, most of its digressions ironies. Both offer quotably turned dialogue, whether Billy confidently describing a millionaire as "a fat man what wears his Sunday suit weekdays" or Ella praising her stage-door boyfriend as "awfully good at charging things." I have no idea why it is possible to find Something Always Happens on the Internet Archive and Crown v. Stevens, without access to Watch TCM, nowhere. Shouldn't there be a BFI box set by now? Powell famously joked that if any more of his early films were rediscovered, his reputation would never recover, but my fingers are crossed for the survival of the rest. I like these cheap little features and their weird, CanConnish niche in British film history, their glimpses of obscure showstoppers and not yet stars. This privilege brought to you by my interesting backers at Patreon.
Something Always Happens (1934) describes both the plot of this rattling-fast, eccentrically good-natured comedy and the motto of its hero, one of the most lackadaisical embodiments of chutzpah I have encountered in my life. Cleaned out at cards, with a London-wide trail of debts behind him and nothing resembling employment, lodging, or regular meals in his future, Ian Hunter's Peter Middleton sallies forth with Depression-era optimism and with very little else in his favor proceeds to blag his way up the intertwined ladders of class, career, and romance like the first coming of J. Pierrepont Finch. His equivalent in an American picture of the same year might well have been brasher, more of a go-getter, but so much of the character's appeal is his boundless and unworried confidence in himself to think of something before he has to pay for anything. It is a tribute to his amiable actor that we never tire of watching him succeed, or at least fail in a profitable direction. He adopts an urchin as down-and-out as himself through the happenstance of facing down a bullying apple seller and admitting with rare honesty afterward, "I mostly run, too," but the company of a tatterdemalion moppet like John Singer's Billy earns the two of them an extended deferment on the rent from a landlady who can't bring herself to give the boot to a divorced father. He meets cute with Nancy O'Neil's Cynthia Hatch in the process of trying to hustle her 1934 Bentley 3½ Litre and when she turns the screwball tables by playing the grateful shopgirl to his generous swell, her covert efforts to recommend him to her industrialist father rebound into a war for the hearts and minds of Britain's drivers as a patronizing dismissal provokes our hero to offer his services to a rival chain of petrol stations. A sometime salesman, Peter defines a commission for Billy as "money I get for selling something I haven't got to someone who doesn't want it." The same breezily specious ethos undergirds the presciently diversified advertising scheme he devises to boost the stock of the languishing Blue Point Petrol Stations: "Give them a swimming pool in summer, an ice rink in winter! In other words, we must correct all those unsightly rows of petrol pumps into a vast chain of roadhouses where the madding crowd can go as mad as it likes—and pay for the privilege!" Whiffle your way round Britain while you're at it. The underlayer of reality to all this surefire cheek is the film's frank acknowledgement that Peter is a million-to-one chance himself, being most realistically relatable on his early rounds of failing to find work. "Jobs are scarce enough for young people," he sympathizes with Cynthia, whom he then offers to engage as a secretary even before he has an office to install her in. Unlike so many tricksters, he never has the second thought of looking down and so never falls through the plain air the audience can see under his feet, not that the pace of his picture gives him much time to try it. Who cares if there's not much more to this snappily worded exercise in wish-fulfillment than its charm? In this great city of mugs and opportunities, who needs anything more?
Crown v. Stevens (1936) may be the most blandly misleading title that could have been assigned to this super-saturated hour of proto-noir. Even the title of the 1935 source novel by Laurence Meynell—Third Time Unlucky—at least suggests something of the cavalcade of mischance that befalls its central naïf from the moment he gets himself jilted by a pert con artist to the tune of a diamond ring on approval. Caught between a £19/10 IOU and a raise he didn't receive, he finds only the illusion of a reprieve in the corpse of his creditor, since it leaves him an accessory after the fact to the woman who pulled the trigger, his sour boss' discontented wife. As bitterly as the most hardboiled of dames a decade later, she snaps shut the curtain to her sitting room and declares, "Ten million people in London and it had to be you." In light of some of the rats played by Patric Knowles in his Hollywood career, it feels like a joke on the future that his Chris Jensen is such a schnook—Beatrix Thomson's Doris Stevens needs to exert only the most minimal wiles to convince him to cover for her act of supposed self-defense, one moment the brave little woman with the tremble of tears in her throat and the next her mouth curving in the smallest, depthless smile as she watches her hook, line, and sinker of a chastened young mark go. I have no reservations about identifying her as a femme fatale, a splendid and not unsophisticated example of the species. A former chorus girl who married for the money her husband turned out too mean to share, her great-eyed pixie face is brittle with boredom as she smokes and flips through issues of Film Pictorial and Punch; her Kelvin-zero manipulations of men are sharply contrasted with her vivacity around Googie Withers' Ella Levine, a magnanimous gold digger of 1936 who drapes her own sumptuous furs around her old friend's shoulders and sets her up a party with all the free-flowing liquor and free-living theatrical types she's been missing: "I know just the boy for you!" We can't really approve of Doris' belt-and-braces plan to poison her husband with the sleeping tablets she bought with such innocently anxious care from the chemist and then leave him all night in the garage with the engine running, but when he refuses her perennial request for a new dress with the self-righteously rote "I will not have my wife look like an overdressed trollop," the thought occurs that it might not be so dreadful if he just croaked of the flu. Here, too, as so often in noir, a good girl can be spotted by her financial independence, as a love interest for Chris emerges out of the interior design client of Glennis Lorimer's Molly Hobbes, who owns a shop of her own selling "soft furnishings." Other familiar faces populate the supporting roles, Frederick Piper as the ill-intended Arthur Stevens, Bernard Miles as the forensics-minded Detective Wells of the Yard, Reginald Purdell as Alf, the no-nonsense foreman of the firm who matily steers Chris farther down the course of crime by opining that no man worth the name would shop a woman to the police. When it comes to it, Doris can handle herself, extending a final cigarette with stone cold composure: "Arthur needn't strain himself . . . Besides, he doesn't know the really interesting parts."
I know less about the organization of Teddington than I do about Warners in Hollywood, so I can't tell if it's coincidence or preference that both of these films shared a screenwriter in Brock Williams, a cinematographer in Basil Emmott, and even an editor in Bert Bates, but it makes them an even more compact double feature than I had imagined. Well ahead of the timeline of the official noir style, Crown v. Stevens sports some efficiently dark, stark photography and one marvelously artificial street scene of mist-wet bricks limelit by construction, while the courtyard of a Victorian housing estate and the barrows and stalls of Covent Garden in Something Always Happens are naturally lit, neorealistically vérité. The action of the earlier film ricochets like cross-talk, intercutting parallels like punch lines and the flipsides of coins; the later runs remarkably straight down the line from murder to murder, most of its digressions ironies. Both offer quotably turned dialogue, whether Billy confidently describing a millionaire as "a fat man what wears his Sunday suit weekdays" or Ella praising her stage-door boyfriend as "awfully good at charging things." I have no idea why it is possible to find Something Always Happens on the Internet Archive and Crown v. Stevens, without access to Watch TCM, nowhere. Shouldn't there be a BFI box set by now? Powell famously joked that if any more of his early films were rediscovered, his reputation would never recover, but my fingers are crossed for the survival of the rest. I like these cheap little features and their weird, CanConnish niche in British film history, their glimpses of obscure showstoppers and not yet stars. This privilege brought to you by my interesting backers at Patreon.
Whifflimg!
"Murder must advertise," anyway.
Re: Whifflimg!
Reference-understanding noted nonetheless!
As soon as Peter brought out his roadhouse scheme, I thought of Sayers, and since his entire success in business depends on canny marketing, it didn't really stop.
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Unlike so many tricksters, he never has the second thought of looking down and so never falls through the plain air the audience can see under his feet.
--That is **such** a great line. And it seems perfect for the film you describe.
And the second one sounds excellent too, if by virtue of theme not quite as ebullient!
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It is a pretty nearly unalloyed delight of a movie and I would happily run it alongside any of its American competitors. It even has the cheerful cynicism I guess was an international trait of Depression-era pictures.
--That is **such** a great line. And it seems perfect for the film you describe.
Thank you! I like Ian Hunter and I'd never seen him pre-Hollywood, although it looks as though he played both sides of the Atlantic for a couple of years in the mid-'30's, including three more quota quickies with Powell; he never seems to have been a great beauty and it was irrelevant to his charm. I really enjoy it. According to the Iliad, Odysseus wasn't much to look at, either, but just wait till he started talking.
And the second one sounds excellent too, if by virtue of theme not quite as ebullient!
I had no idea it would be so relevant to my interests. The one-line summary on TCM is actively inaccurate and did not in any case scream noir genealogy ahoy! I was captivated by Thomson; it seems to have been her only starring screen role.
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Nine
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I am totally going to watch the two non-Powell quota quickies, too. I am a little worried about Mr. Cohen Takes a Walk (1935), but Crime Unlimited (1935) stars a pre-Bismarck Esmond Knight.
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I have not! The play's been on my radar because of Emlyn Williams, but not the film. I will check it out. [edit] I CAN'T BELIEVE MONTGOMERY DIDN'T WIN THE OSCAR FOR THAT.
(My TCM watchlist is also mysteriously huge at the moment.)
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Right? I'm pretty sure it's the first film of his I ever saw, and nothing I've seen since gives a clue that he had that performance in him.
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I saw him in other films first—dramatic parts, even—and none of them gave a clue! I had no idea anything like Danny was hanging out in 1937 Hollywood. He is a truly uncanny object. He made me think of Herbert Farjeon's assertion that supernatural horror is fundamentally reassuring, because the alternative that such people exist who aren't werewolves or vampires is barely to be borne.
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I'm so glad! You're very welcome! I hope