It is just six years since I started work on the first British all-talking picture, Blackmail. I am now preparing an adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps.
In those six years the sound picture has progressed and matured enormously, but there is a danger of our British studios being content to turn out standardized types of pictures. British talkies need more variety.
It must always be remembered that the primary aim of pictures is to provide entertainment. To entertain people, one must first capture their interest.
For example, the initial problem which has confronted every film director since the invention of moving pictures has been to give a three-dimensional (realistic) effect to his two-dimensional creations. You’ve got to convey the impression that your characters are really alive before you can persuade an audience to take them and their problems seriously. To do that the director relies on camera movement and other technical devices which give a full-bodied effect and, what is more important, freshness.
In the early talkie days there was a tendency to film plays just as they might have been seen from the stalls of a theater. The camera was set up, the microphone placed in position, and the actors reeled off whole chunks of dialogue for about five hundred feet of film without a single cut. The result was intensely boring.
We have learnt our lesson since then. Now we can film a stage play in which the action takes place almost solely in one room, yet give it freshness and movement by manipulation of the camera and skillful editing.
But why stop at that? Surely a film should have freshness and life in construction as well as in the way it is photographed and edited? To get that freshness one must have contrast. One must have light and shade.
It is because of their lack of light and shade that British films have hitherto been criticized as “stodgy.” They have been pitched too much on one note, and have maintained too level a style. A British film is too liable to be one solid chunk of drama or comedy and nothing else.
In this country we have overlooked the fact that a mixture of style can point a dramatic effect. Murder at the Vanities, to take rather an extreme instance, mixed musical-comedy and murder, so that the one acted as a foil to the other. The Americans have shown themselves adept at this trick of switching from grave to gay. Why shouldn’t we do the same?
I can see no reason why every British drama should be played out in an atmosphere of unrelieved tension. It defeats its own end. By being eternally dramatic it sacrifices its opportunity of rising to a contrasted dramatic climax.
See what happens on the stage. A play like The Last of Mrs. Cheyney has comedy in the first act, which builds up to the drama of the second, and concludes with a third act of pure farce. The continual change from one mood to another keeps the audience interested and heightens the effect of both the comedy and the drama. But if you suggested doing that in the average British film, you would be greeted with howls of horror.
Why? Simply because people believe that a film (for some unexplained reason) should be written and acted in the same style and the same mood throughout.
Yet the masters of the modern stage—Barrie and Pinero, for example—all laid the foundations of their plots with comic first acts. The comedy provided for one thing, the perfect coating with which to sugar the plot-planting pill. A more important consideration is this:
In a lighthearted setting, the advent of drama is made all the more effective by its unexpectedness.
That is the theory I have worked on in my latest picture, The Man Who Knew Too Much. I cannot tell you just how I have put it into practice—that would spoil the surprise. But I can promise that the entry of drama into the story will come with complete unexpectedness. It will come with a bang.
After all, that is how things happen in real life. Although a tragic event may be destined to happen some time during the afternoon, we do not go about all the morning with somber faces. We just don’t know that the catastrophe is coming—consequently, when it does arrive, we are as likely as not to be laughing and drinking in complete lightheadedness. Certainly we shall not be sitting around with that theatrical air of foreboding that enshrouds the characters in so many British pictures.
The more happy-go-lucky the setting, the greater the kick you get from the sudden introduction of drama.
Just as we have light and shade in mood, so let us have a little variety in setting. The Americans use imaginative backgrounds. They give us pictures about telephone exchanges, icemen, newspaper reporters, police cars, repair gangs—anything and everything under the sun. They make the most of every possible setting for their stories. Emergency Call, Looking for Trouble, It Happened One Night, The Crowd Roars, The Devil Is Driving—all of these were set against unusual backgrounds. They all had a freshness that is lacking in our drawing room school of drama.
Have you ever considered what an interesting film might be written round, say, the engineer of Tower Bridge who lets the bridge up and down?
If the Americans had had such material at their disposal they would have made a film about it years ago. The engineer as the central character, the river craft and docks for atmospheric background—and you can bet your life they would have managed to make their way up to Piccadilly for a little more atmosphere before the film was over! That is where they excel—in capitalizing the unusual and achieving freshness by contrast and variety.
Why don’t we do the same? Why must we always stick to our middle-class drawing rooms and our middle-class characters? Why don’t we go out more for variety and contrast in the telling of our stories, unusualness in the characters we present, and freshness in our choice of backgrounds?
“‘Stodgy’ British Pictures” was originally published in Film Weekly, December 14, 1934, 14.