If men do rightly what they do, we ought not to be displeased; but if they do not right, it is plain that they do so involuntarily and in ignorance.
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book XI.
The Duchess of Richmond set sail from Gladstone Dock in Liverpool in the early evening of Thursday, 30 May 1940. ‘The ship looked tired and shabby. We had the feeling it didn’t want us,’1 wrote Sherriff. ‘Our cabins were small and low-down in the ship, stuffy from months of sailing with blackedout portholes.’ Small and stuffy, perhaps, but at least one of them came with a bath, since he had taken the precaution of upgrading both cabins.2 Sherriff was a man who enjoyed his bath – indeed, he fell out with his old friend Joe Cowley on one occasion, because, having said he would call after his morning bath, he forgot to do so, leaving Cowley to fume that ‘You spend more time in your bath than is prudent for one who appears to be as busy as you are.’3
The crossing must have been a very anxious one. The usual time taken was about five days, but this journey took ten, to avoid the areas where the U-boats were most likely to hunt. And this was no idle threat; just a few months later, Arthur Wimperis, Sherriff ’s writing partner from The Four Feathers, would travel across on the City of Benares, which was torpedoed on 18 September with the loss of 260 lives (including about eighty child evacuees),4 although ‘Wimp’ survived.
According to Sherriff, the ‘misery of our U-boat-haunted voyage was mild compared with the ordeal that faced us when we docked at Montreal.’ He goes on to recount a traumatic tale of arriving in Canada with little money,5 and finding his way to America barred because of a sudden edict against writers entering the country. Sherriff paints a harrowing tale of the two of them stranded in cheap lodgings with only a $100 advance to keep body and soul together. In the end, Myron Selznick, Sherriff ’s Hollywood agent, saves the day, organises the entrance visa and arranges for Sherriff to be given all the cash he needs to get him to Hollywood. Hurrah!
Once again, however, Sherriff ’s tale is just too movie-neat for credence. In fact, we know, from a letter to him from Basil Bleck (who had moved to the Hollywood offices of Alex Korda Films),6 and a cable from Sig Marcus7 (at Myron Selznick), that some $300 was made available to him, although a few days may have elapsed after his arrival on 9 June before he could draw on the money. But he also had the resources of Curtis Brown to fall back on, and their New York offices also advanced him $500 to tide him over.8 Money, then, was unlikely to have been the problem. There is, though, another puzzle, which is to do with his onward journey to Los Angeles, which did not begin until 20 June9: why did he wait around in Montreal for eleven days? Sig Marcus’s cable sheds a little light on this, since it notes that Bleck ‘will request your postponing starting date with Korda until Korda returns.’ It then goes on to say that Bleck has authorised that Myron Selznick may offer Sherriff to ‘all studios immediately for one assignment before your Korda job commences’.10
This, then, may be the real source of the anxiety Sherriff was able to recall in his autobiography years later. A delay of a day or two in receipt of expenses was nothing much, and would not likely have left much of an impression on him. But to be in Montreal and to be told that his contract would not now begin immediately would surely have left a cavernous doubt. He had come to work, to earn the money he needed to finance his houses and his farm. If he could not begin work he would be even worse off than he had been in England, where at least his expenses would be less. The big question he had to face was: would another studio offer him work? Until that question was answered, he would be forced to wait, anxiously, in Montreal – because he was unlikely to be admitted to the United States unless he had a very clear job of work to go to. Happily, it took less than a couple of weeks for Sig Marcus to arrange a contract with MGM, beginning on 27 June. Armed with the promise of work, he was probably then able to secure his entry visa to the United States, and to arrange his onward itinerary.
Sherriff and his mother finally left Montreal on 20 June, heading first to Toronto, then to Chicago, where he arrived early in the morning of 21 June, breathing a sigh of relief that, after being in transit for three weeks, he had finally crossed the border into the United States. From Chicago it was the usual two-day run to Los Angeles, where they arrived around noon on 23 June. He was due to begin work for Metro just four days later, at a rate of $1,000 per week, with the proviso in his contract that, as soon as the call came in from Korda, he could answer it. He and his mother took an apartment initially at the Garden of Allah Hotel,11 on Sunset Boulevard (ten minutes from MGM studios), and Sherriff got to work, initially script doctoring on the screenplay of Flight Command,12 which was based on a story by ex-navy commander, Harvey Haislip, about a young navy pilot joining an elite group in training. He was only there a few weeks, however, before he received from Korda the summons for which he had been waiting.
Sherriff began work for Korda on 12 August, and was teamed with Austrian-born writer Walter Reisch, who had enjoyed a peripatetic screenwriting career,13 but had lately landed at MGM with a reputation as ‘a writer of strong roles for female stars’.14 They were given the challenge of distilling the life of Emma, Lady Hamilton, and especially her relationship with Lord Nelson, into a patriotic blockbuster. The historical subject matter would have appealed to Sherriff, and having not so long ago written about Napoleon he would at least have been familiar with the history of the period, if not the real-life stories of the two main protagonists in the film.
The tale is told by old Emma, after she has been thrown into debtors’ prison in Calais, and her narrative follows a chronological progression, touching the highlights of her life: her meetings with, and subsequent marriage to, Britain’s ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton; her encounters with Nelson, his battles and woundings; their very public affair and ultimate decision to live together, in spite of their marriages to other spouses. Nelson, of course, is killed at Trafalgar, and afterwards Emma falls on hard times, which takes her to the debtors’ prison, where the story began.
The broadly sequential narrative would have appealed to Sherriff – it is reminiscent of the way in which he and De Casalis structured St Helena, while the narration of the tale by Emma herself has echoes of The Hopkins Manuscript. No doubt the writers reached for easy and familiar structures, because time was of the essence. Money was tight, and the plan was to produce the film as quickly as possible – so that Sherriff and Reisch only had about six weeks to produce the script before shooting began on 18 September.15 Sherriff describes the pressure:
We scrambled through an outline of the screenplay to give them what they wanted to design the sets and get on with the casting, but only the first sequences were down in dialogue when they began to shoot the picture. From then on it was a desperate race to keep up with them. It was like writing a serial story with only a week between your pen and the next instalment to be published.16
With such a tight schedule, it was important that the PCA be kept informed, and a week before production started a letter went off to Joe Breen containing what they had of the script so far (about eighty-seven pages). In his reply17 Breen set out a number of detailed suggestions for changes that would be required, but he prefaced the list by warning Korda to be careful, because this was basically a story about adultery, and as such ‘to be acceptable under the Production Code, it will be necessary to inject into it what we call “necessary compensating values”.’ He then set out what that might mean:
Under the Code it has been found necessary, in dealing with stories of adultery, that:
(A) You definitely establish the adultery to be ‘wrong’;
(B) the adulterous situation be not condoned, nor justified, nor made to appear ‘right and acceptable’;
(C) the adulterous parties must be punished.
The warning from Breen could not have been any clearer.
On 19 September, George Bagnall replied to Geoffrey Shurlock at the PCA enclosing a longer script (now 105 pages); Breen was still not happy, noting that they still had not seen the ‘necessary compensating moral values’.18 The filmmakers tried again on 12 October, by which time Sherriff and Reisch had pushed the page count up to 160, with only another ten or so to come; but on 15 October they received a frosty reply19: ‘We regret to have to report that the material so far submitted does not seem to contain the full necessary compensating values for the treatment of adultery on screen.’
He then went on to specify in detail a number of scenes that appeared to support Nelson’s adultery, and seems to have been particularly annoyed that Nelson’s father – a minister – does nothing to condemn Nelson’s adultery. There followed a further three pages of suggested deletions and amendments, presumably to show he meant business.
In No Leading Lady, Sherriff recounts some of this tale, putting himself at the centre of events, but his timing is a little awry. He suggests that the movie was all but completed before Korda sent him to see Breen, whereas Korda had been smart enough to involve the PCA from the very beginning. But he does get right the fact that the scene with Nelson’s father was turned around so that the father no longer implicitly condoned the son’s adultery, instead rejecting it out of hand. Towards the end of October, Korda himself replied to Breen enclosing additional scenes (including one between Nelson and his father) that were designed to show that the filmmakers had been paying attention. Breen was beginning to come around, but still wanted more, even going so far as to suggest the type of dialogue that Korda might want to put in the mouth of Nelson’s father20:
It would help if the father would come out frankly and say, in words of one syllable, something like this:
‘This alliance of yours cannot help but end in disaster and I beg of you to break it up. Don’t be fooled by any seeming happiness that you may think you are now enjoying … you can’t defy the laws of God without being made to pay the price. Unless you catch yourself now, both of you will surely end up in the gutter.’
Amusingly enough, he then said that he didn’t want to suggest how the dialogue should be written, but rather just ‘give you our thoughts. … We think it would help us all very much if you have this very positive condemnation and prediction of disaster, which will follow as a result of their sin. This, we feel, is very, very important.’
By the time that Korda was receiving Breen’s final missive, Sherriff had already moved back to MGM, his work with Korda ending on 12 October, so whether he was on hand to ‘punch up’ the final dialogue on the scenes is not clear. It is entirely possible he was doing both jobs at once – and he did have a track record of assisting with rewrites on projects long after his formal involvement had ceased. The final scene with the father is not quite as Breen had suggested, although the old parson makes clear his distaste for Nelson’s adultery, and, when Nelson declines to deviate from his course, tells him that he then chooses to go with his son’s wife, Lady Nelson. Even if the parson’s words were not quite the PCA’s, at least they could be satisfied that Emma’s misery and decline after Nelson’s death conveyed the kind of disapproval of adultery that they expected.
Filming finished at the beginning of November,21 and the movie finally received its PCA certificate on 1 March 1941, with the world premiere of That Hamilton Woman (with the less implicitly judgmental title of Lady Hamilton in the UK release) taking place at the Four Star Theater in Hollywood on 19 March 1941. Given the timescale to which they had been working, the film is something of a marvel: it is sumptuously produced, with superb sets and costumes (‘The production must have cost a fortune,’ wrote Louella Parsons).22 Vivien Leigh is perfectly cast as the courtesan who cannot help following the great love of her life, and Olivier makes a marvellously heroic Nelson. Several scenes stay in the mind long afterwards. On a domestic level, her interactions with the King and Queen of Naples (and their large brood of children) are very funny, displaying flightiness on her part, which is gradually modulated as the film progresses and her love affair with Nelson deepens. Then there is a wonderfully lit scene on board Nelson’s boat, which is moored in the Bay of Naples: when Emma arrives and is taken to Nelson’s cabin she is shocked by his appearance because he has been wounded in his campaigns, losing an eye and an arm23 – her simple gasp and his fumbling for a bandage to cover his eye are brief but very moving gestures. When Nelson comes to see her on another occasion, and she is told in her bedroom that he is waiting on the balcony, such is the magnificence of Vincent Korda’s sets that it takes her almost thirty seconds to run to him – through rooms and hallways and along apparently endless miles of balustraded balconies.
The film was not intended solely as a love story, but as a paean to Britain’s historical past and her virtues as a nation with a long record in opposing tyrants. So there are action scenes24 playing up Nelson’s heroism, scenes of grandeur and pageantry in palaces and at Westminster, and there is a famous speech by Nelson in which he warns the men of the Admiralty that they should not try to make peace with a dictator:
Gentlemen … you will never make peace with Napoleon. He doesn’t mean peace today. He just wants to gain a little time to re-arm himself at sea and to make new alliances with Italy and Spain – all to one purpose. To destroy our Empire! … Napoleon can never be master of the world until he has smashed us up – and believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world. You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them. Wipe them out!25
In New York showings, ‘the last lines never failed to draw a round of applause.’26 The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, while not impressed with the love story (‘Perhaps if it had all been condensed and contrived with less manifest awe, the effect would have been more exciting and the love story would have had more poignancy’)27 clearly grasped the film’s purpose, noting Nelson’s ‘timely opinions about dictators who would desire to invade England’, and that ‘coming at a moment such as this, it should stir anyone’s interest.’
It is often suggested that Nelson’s speech came neither from the pen of Sherriff, nor of Reisch, but instead was offered to Korda by Churchill himself. It is certainly true that it has something of a Churchillian tone – but such mimicry would have come easily to two experienced screenwriters (and especially Sherriff, who had a wonderful ear for such things). Michael Korda suggests that his uncle would not have included such an ‘unsubtle’ scene if he had ‘not felt obliged to do so because of its authorship’.28 With such inference aside, there is not one shred of evidence to suggest that Churchill had a hand in it. Churchill appears twice in No Leading Lady – once after his letter to Sherriff regarding Journey’s End (see page 105) and once in his letter to The Times praising St Helena (see page 186). Nowhere in any of Sherriff ’s papers, however, is the subject of Churchill’s authorship of the Nelson speech ever broached – yet he would have been beyond proud to have been associated with such an intervention. Multiple sources agree that the movie was one of Churchill’s favourites, and that he saw it many times, also showing it to Roosevelt (at their Atlantic Conference) and later to Stalin as well.29 For his part, Sherriff simply noted in No Leading Lady that ‘Churchill had a copy sent to him, and he saw it many times in his private projection room. If it gave him a few evenings of relaxation in those arduous days it well repaid its making.’30
Wrapping up his work on one big British propaganda movie, Sherriff was quickly shunted on to another one when he returned to MGM. Kenneth McKenna, story editor at MGM, had written to him a week before he was due to finish with Korda, enclosing a copy of Mrs Miniver, by Jan Struther,31 and asking whether he thought that Metro should take an option on it.32
The Mrs Miniver character had first appeared in the court pages of The Times in October 1937, and ran until December 1939. She was a very well-to-do uppermiddle-class housewife (from the ‘top drawer but one’, according to E.M. Forster),33 living in Chelsea (with a second house in Kent) with her architect husband Clem and her three children. Struther’s columns had mostly been written before the war, although the last few, written in the autumn of 1939, began to mention it. The columns were collected into a book that was published in the United States in July 1940. What McKenna saw in it was ‘somewhat of a tribute to the stirringly courageous way that the British people continue their simple daily life under the present conditions’, and he felt that Sherriff might be interested in tackling it.
Before Sherriff had returned to MGM, producer Sidney Franklin had taken out the option, and decided that Sherriff and James Hilton would be ideal for the project, putting them to work on it together. By 6 November, Sherriff had produced some initial thoughts on what the film might look like, and set them down in an outline.34 This consisted of a ‘prologue’, followed by a dozen suggested scenes illuminating past episodes in their lives, and then an epilogue; the scenes would show such things as the people of the village, the children’s schools, how they fell in love with the house and so on. The next day he provided a script for the prologue,35 which begins with Mrs Miniver reading from Alice in Wonderland (that old Sherriff standby), then pans across the gas masks hung in the dugout (which, amusingly, showed everyone’s gas masks with their name, except for the one showing ‘Mrs’ Miniver), before leading on to the conversation between the two adults, which is peppered with typical Sherriff-style jokes. As they converse, the sounds of the air raid grow ever nearer and the strain begins to tell in their conversation, although they do their best to mask their fears.
Despite setting down the first thoughts, Sherriff was moved on from the project by mid-December, although quite why is not clear, especially since additional writers George Froeschel, Claudine West and Arthur Wimperis were brought on board, to work alongside Hilton. Much of the one scene he had scripted did remain in the movie, although it no longer formed the prologue, instead taking place towards the end of the movie (and with the dog which he had scripted – he was something of a dog-lover, after all – becoming a cat), but it remains one of the scenes which sticks most in the memory.36 Sherriff has also occasionally been mooted as the author of the first scene in the final movie – where Mrs Miniver is shopping in London for a hat – but there is no evidence that he had a hand in anything other than the dugout scene.37
The film was eventually released in June 1942, and shortly before then Sherriff bumped into Sidney Franklin in the street, prompting Franklin to write to him afterwards telling him much he had appreciated his efforts on the film:
I’m sorry it didn’t work out that you received screen credit, but this much I can do – and that is to let you know that I appreciated your work and the suggestions and thoughts of yours that did go into the final script. I hope that some day I will have the opportunity of working with you again, and that it will result in a credit.38
Shortly after arriving in the United States Sherriff was present at the formation of a brand new committee, designed to ‘assist the various organisations conducting patriotic work in Southern California’, and also to support the members of the British community in Los Angeles (and especially Hollywood). At the inaugural meeting on 21 August were Ronald Colman and Cedric Hardwicke (both of whom Sherriff knew well), and in subsequent meetings they would be joined by actor Herbert Marshall. Eric Cleugh, the British Consul in Los Angeles, popped along to lend his support, and to endorse their chosen title: ‘British Consulate War Charities Advisory Board’.39
The British community in Hollywood had been accused of ‘shirking’ by staying in or going to Hollywood when their country was at war. The criticisms had been coming from England since early 1940 (at first in a rather lame attempt at humour in Picturegoer magazine),40 and were particularly pointed in an interview given by Michael Balcon to the same magazine in May 1940, when he said that he was ‘disgusted’41 by British filmmakers heading to Hollywood. Here he had in his sights his long-time rival Korda,42 but Sherriff was probably aware of the general criticism of ‘cowards’ and ‘tax evaders’ and would likely have been sensitive about it. He might also have seen the letter from Sir Seymour Hicks43 (a well-known actor-manager), which poked fun at the Hollywood Brits ‘gallantly facing the footlights’, and suggesting that Charles Laughton, Alfred Hitchcock and Marshall might consider making a new movie, Gone With the Wind Up. However, as the British Ambassador to the US, Lord Lothian, had made clear to a delegation from Hollywood in July (including Cedric Hardwicke, Cary Grant and Laurence Olivier), only those between the ages of eighteen and thirty were required for military service. Britain did not want its middle-aged Hollywood stars to return, for they would add nothing to the war effort, and would be a drain on its resources: far better for them to remain in Hollywood and make pro-British pictures.
A few days after the inaugural meeting of the Advisory Board, Balcon again took aim at the expats, in the Sunday Despatch, criticising ‘people who prefer to remain in Hollywood instead of returning home to aid their country’s war efforts’. He singled out ‘a plump young junior technician … whom I promoted from department to department. Today he is one of our most famous directors and he is in Hollywood, while we who are left behind shorthanded are trying to harness the films to our great national effort.’44 The man in his sights this time was Alfred Hitchcock, who, as chance would have it, screened his new film Foreign Correspondent (featuring Herbert Marshall, and starring Joel McCrea) for three members of the new board just three days later (with the minutes recording that they found the film ‘of undoubted value to British prestige’). After the screening they were joined by the other board members, and adjourned to Hitchcock’s house, where ‘they were favoured with the gentleman’s views regarding the “Background” of the Sunday Despatch article.’45
In response to Balcon’s article, the board thought it would be a good idea for the British ambassador to issue a statement to the local press, clarifying the issue with regard to English actors. It started with a list of fourteen actors who had ‘fought for or otherwise served their country in the last war’, noting that many had been wounded or decorated46; then came six young actors (including Richard Greene and David Niven) who had been working in the US at the beginning of the war, but who had since enlisted in England or Canada; and then it noted that those of ‘intermediate age’ had ‘reported and registered their names at the British Consulate, placing themselves unreservedly at the call of their native country.’ The hope was that a cablegram to that effect could go to the Sunday Despatch to ‘correct the misstatements’47 it had made, and Sherriff even offered to write a piece for the same newspaper. It was decided, however, on the suggestion of a PR man with whom they consulted, that the best thing for them to do was ignore the Despatch article altogether.
The situation worsened that same day, with a broadcast given by J.B. Priestley to the United States in which he called the British actors in Hollywood ‘deserters’. This prompted a cable from Lord Lothian back to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, saying that the actors were only following his guidance on military service, and that Priestley’s accusations were undesirable:
The maintenance of a powerful British nucleus of older actors in Hollywood is of great importance to our own interests, partly because they are continually championing the British cause in a very volatile community which would otherwise be left to the mercies of German propaganda, and because the production of films with a strong British tone is one of the best and subtlest forms of British propaganda.48
This appears to have been the high point of the cross-Atlantic megaphone diplomacy, and tempers seem to have cooled thereafter – with the suggestion that government officials may have had a quiet word with Balcon to let him know that Hitchcock was working in America ‘at the express request of the British government’.49 Ironically, after being attacked from the British side, the Hollywood film-makers would, in the following year, be attacked by the ‘America First’ lobby (which was a combination of those who sought American neutrality in the war, and those more sympathetic to the German cause, including some well-known anti-Semites). Both Victor Saville and Alex Korda were identified as potential British spies (and, indeed, there is a suggestion that they may have passed information to British authorities, and in Korda’s case, may have directly facilitated Britain’s spy networks through his offices in New York and Hollywood). The America First lobby became sufficiently exercised by what they saw as a barrage of pro-British films that Senate hearings were engineered beginning in September of 1941, with Korda being summoned to testify on 12 December 1941. But the bombing of Pearl Harbour on 7 December brought the hearings to an end, and Korda was spared an appearance.
Sherriff seems to have remained sensitive ever after to the charges of desertion or disloyalty: his absence even caused a rift with his old friend Manning-Press.50 Consequently, in his public comments he would tend to downplay his time in the United States: in No Leading Lady, for example, he wrote that he and his mother were keen to go home and implicitly suggested that, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbour, they did so.51 But in fact they would not leave until mid-1944. In the same vein, after he returned, he would tend to play up the nature of the work that took him out to Hollywood in the first place, suggesting it was ‘semi-official’52 business. Of course, he had nothing to upbraid himself for – he had been offered no useful wartime work at home, and was keen simply to earn his living. Had he been offered the chance to do so in the UK, he would probably have stayed. But given that he left for Hollywood, it was at the very least important that he be seen to have done so for the right reasons.
By the end of November 1940, having just left work on Mrs Miniver, Sherriff was shunted on to a quite different project. Cargo of Innocence started as a short story of the same name in Ken magazine in May 1938. By Laurence Kirk,53 the story was an account of an incident during the Spanish Civil War, when a group of refugee children, accompanied by some pregnant young women, were picked up in the Bay of Biscay by the British ship HMS Tremendous. Metro had commissioned a treatment in 1939, and had even submitted the story outline to the PCA, but then seem to have put it on the shelf.
Sherriff got to work quickly. His first notes on the subject are dated 18 December, and set out the main strands of the story, most of which remained even after he had moved on. The story should focus on the life of a British destroyer under war conditions, to familiarise people with a routine Atlantic patrol. He suggested a young captain being given, as his first command, an old boat that had fought at Jutland, but had been renovated and brought back into service. Many of the men assigned to the boat would be disappointed with their posting, but the new captain would strive to instil a fierce pride in the crew, and he would be assisted by an old sailor who had fought in her all those years before and maintained a watching eye over her ever since. Only once the rhythms of the voyage had been established should the surprise of the babies confront the crew. A story outline a couple of days later expanded on the theme, adding an extra character – a young lieutenant from an upper-class family who serves as the admiral’s aide-de-camp, but whom the admiral feels would benefit from a tougher job.54
Next came a sixty-page script treatment by Sherriff, in conjunction with Harvey Haislip (with whom he had worked briefly on Flight Command). The script hews to Sherriff ’s outline fairly closely, but now the ship is engaged in a search and rescue mission, as well as joining a convoy. It is while steaming to join a convoy that they encounter a small tramp steamer, holed by a mine and limping home. The steamer has a party of women and babies on board – refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The final quarter or so of the script shows how the sailors look after the babies, and focuses on the successful births by the three pregnant women, all carried out under the watchful eye of the commodore, who is charged with leading the convoy.
There were subsequent changes to the script – an extra plot about the old seaman dying, and the rookie lieutenant disobeying the captain’s orders in order to help him – but by 14 March 1941, Sherriff and Haislip handed in their final script. MGM seems to have been thinking about perhaps shooting some of the scenes in the UK, with Robert Donat and Edmund Gwenn, but wartime production difficulties convinced them to shoot in Hollywood. When the US entered the war after Pearl Harbour in December, the focus of the film changed from the Royal Navy to the US Navy, and the ocean from Atlantic to Pacific. By that time the assistance of the US Navy had been sought by the producers, and some action scenes added. Production took place during 1942, with the final release date set for the very end of the year.
The film was eventually released, as Stand By For Action, in the United States on 31 December 1942 (although it remained Cargo of Innocence55 in the UK); it starred Brian Donlevy as the ship’s new captain, and Robert Taylor as the Harvardeducated lieutenant whom the admiral wishes to teach a lesson: the admiral, in this case, was a hopelessly miscast Charles Laughton. Walter Brennan played the old sailor who had been with the ship, man and boy. The reviews were not good. This from the New York Times56 sums up the flavour:
It sandwiches within a serious war plot some of the most incredible farce you ever saw. … Charles Laughton plays … the admiral like a character out of HMS Pinafore and Walter Brennan seems on the verge of tears perpetually as an ancient mariner who is devoted to the ship.
Sherriff – well away from MGM by the time the film was distributed – would likely have been disappointed, but not surprised, given what he later wrote to Haislip:
The happiest months of my stay in America were those when I was working with you on Cargo of Innocence, I enjoyed every moment of that collaboration and do hope one day that we shall work together again. It was a pity the picture was so horribly mutilated, but that is the luck of the game.57
After finishing his work on Cargo of Innocence, Sherriff carried on with MGM until the end of June 1941, during which time he seems to have been called on for some general script doctoring work, including on the Clark Gable/Rosalind Russell vehicle, They Met in Bombay. But he was unhappy in the US, anxious to return home, and wrote to Victor Cazalet asking if he might be able to find him a job back in England: ‘I would prefer it to be an active job, instead of a journalistic one, but I would do anything or go anywhere.’58 The studios were willing to release him to do any work requested by the British authorities, he wrote, and if Victor could find a definite job to do he would come straight back.
His keenness to return may have been due to frustration with his projects at MGM, and perhaps also a desire to rebut the ‘shirker’ charge, but he probably also felt the urge to get back to his houses, farm and gardens. His cash books show that the upkeep of Rosebriars was not cheap, and he had several projects progressing (very expensively) at Down House Farm, such as new farm buildings and infrastructure, and the little cottage he wanted as a weekend retreat. He would have relished the opportunity of being on hand to supervise things. But there was nothing Cazalet could do for him, although he did promise to keep a lookout in the future, so an early return seemed out of the question.
Two days after his contract with MGM ended, Sherriff ’s agent approached him with an unexpected offer from Twentieth Century Fox: would he be interested in adapting Eric Knight’s novel, This Above All, at a fee of $1,250 a week ($250 more than MGM was paying him), with the promise of a bonus when the screenplay was completed? He would indeed, and he started work almost immediately.59
This Above All was published in 1941 and is the story of embittered British soldier, Clive Briggs. Clive is working class, and has lived a hard life. One night he meets Prue, a rather sheltered WAAF60 from an upper-middle-class family, and they quickly become romantically and sexually involved (the novel, while not exactly blatant about the sex, does not shy away from it). Soon they take a trip to a south coast town, where much of the novel takes place, and their (long) conversations shed light on his hardscrabble upbringing and his experiences at Dunkirk, all of which have made him despise the ruling class. Why, he asks, should he fight for a country that has treated him and others like him so badly, and would likely do so again once the war is over?
They are joined by his army pal Monty, from whom we hear a great deal about Clive’s heroics at Dunkirk and Douai, and learn more about his character. Prue argues in favour of the prosecution of the war, believing that Britain will emerge changed afterwards; during one long night of bombing they thrash out their respective views of their country and the war, with Clive offering remarkably positive views of the effect that Hitler has had on Germany and Prue offering the vision of England for which they should be fighting. When the holiday is over, she returns to her barracks, and Clive goes on the run, encountering various characters along the way; but he soon tires of it and decides to return to the Army. He contacts Prue and they agree to marry, but on his way to meet her, he is injured in an air raid and the doctors find he has a brain disease arising from the pneumonia he contracted at Dunkirk. Prue’s father operates on him, but there is nothing much he can do, and Clive dies, leaving a pregnant Prue, determined that her child will grow up in a better England.
The book was published in 1941, while the memory of Dunkirk was fresh, and the war still delicately balanced. It was very provocative, airing arguments against Britain at the very point when morale had to be maintained, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic regarded it as a powerful and important work. Provocation aside, it is an incredibly ‘conversational’ book – the two of them talk endlessly, often at crosspurposes, and usually with overtones of snappy defensiveness. It is frequently harsh and cynical, so it is surprising that it would be optioned for a wartime movie – when ‘actioners’ or films shot through a romantic lens (like Mrs Miniver) might have been thought to be more of a box-office draw. But Darryl Zanuck, who picked up the rights, knew what he was doing. He had been a writer and wunderkind producer at Warners before leaving to co-found Twentieth Century Fox. He had a string of British themed movies behind him (most recently, A Yank in the RAF (1941), with Tyrone Power, who would be chosen to play Clive), and he saw that the key to making the film successful at the box office was to play up the romance, and downplay the politics. Zanuck engaged as his director the highly respected Anatole Litvak, a Russian émigré, by way of films in Germany and France, who had been working in Hollywood for Warners for several years. While Sherriff would not necessarily be the first choice screenwriter for anyone making a romance, his credentials had been burnished by the fine job he and Reisch had done on Lady Hamilton, and his work on Chips and The Four Feathers showed an ability to bring novels to the screen.61 He would also be able to navigate his way through the British class system and was familiar with the milieu, so he had a number of points in his favour.
The movie is out of the run of the usual pro-British Hollywood war movie. In the first place there are very few action scenes: like the book, it is mostly talking, first as Clive and Prue (played by Joan Fontaine) get to know each other, but as their relationship deepens, and she begins to probe his secrecy, they arrive at the point where they can share their competing views of the country. The adaptation does not open the book out much – in fact, it could almost be handled on a stage, with everything stripped away except Clive, Prue and Monty. Yet Clive’s life story could easily have been rendered in flashback, and it is surprising that at least the battle scenes at Dunkirk – which, after all, are a large part of why he is so embittered – are not brought to life, especially in a wartime movie. But of course, that would have drawn the attention away from the love story. The movie opts, sensibly, to focus more on Prue’s perspective than Clive’s. It maintains the air of mystery around Clive, and it also highlights the more likeable of the two characters – Prue is seen to be open and friendly, while Clive is always restrained by his bitterness and his past (although the movie Clive remains consistently more likeable than his novel counterpart).
According to studio memos,62 Sherriff ’s initial treatment, finished during July, was felt by Zanuck and Litvak to be too ‘preachy’:
Mr Zanuck emphasised that this story is first and foremost a LOVE STORY, in which the story of wartime England is combined but is not our focal point. Or, as Mr Litvak put it, it is a story about two people in England, and not England with two people in it.
Throughout the period of script development, both Zanuck and Litvak took a very active hand in the redrafting. Zanuck urged him to find ‘ways and means of getting the sex attraction of the novel into our story without offending the Hays Office’, and ‘stressed the importance of injecting as much of the sex element of the book into the script as we can get away with … as much as decency will allow.’ Sherriff was continually urged to get to the sex scenes more quickly – although ironically it was Zanuck and Litvak who delayed things by drafting an opening scene showing Prue upsetting her upper-class relatives63 by telling them she’s become a WAAF.
Trying to avoid offending the Hays office was – as always – quite a tall order. On 5 November, the producers received this discouraging reply:
In our opinion, this is a story of illicit sex without the compensating moral values required by the Production Code. In addition to the basic theme of illicit sex, the script also contains a very questionable element in the showing of two unmarried people going away for a week, for immoral purposes.64
Zanuck had tussled with the PCA many times.65 On this occasion he jumped to the film’s defence,66 arguing that the PCA reviewers were bringing their sense of the novel to the film, not viewing the film independently. He went through a detailed analysis of the potentially contentious areas of the film, underscoring that at no time are Clive and Prue seen to be having an affair:
I will bet my best walking-stick that if the so-called haystack scene were laid in another locale, no one would bat an eye from the censorship standpoint because the fact remains – Prue and Clive do not have an affair in this scene, nor in any other scene in the entire film.
The film was eventually approved after further negotiation, and Zanuck had done well to skirt the edge of what was allowable – even having Fontaine disrobing, discreetly, perhaps, but suggestively, during a couple of conversations with Clive. While Zanuck was correct that there is no clear example of their consummation of the relationship, the cutaways at certain scenes (especially the haystack scene) were clearly designed to make cinemagoers use their imaginations.
As in the book, an important part of the film is the clash, within the romance, between Clive and Prue’s competing views of England. In the book, Clive’s bitterness and resentment are partly explained away by his brain disease, but in the movie he is not provided with that excuse. As a result, his arguments are softened (there’s certainly nothing in praise of Hitler), and Prue’s are emphasised. Knight himself (born in England, but raised in the US from the age of fifteen), was convinced that England had to change, but was in no doubt that the first job was to defeat Hitler,67 so even in the book, Prue wins and Clive is willing to return to the Army. In the film the scales are weighted even more heavily in Prue’s favour by a long speech (billed at the time as the longest continuous speech ever made by a woman in a movie), beautifully delivered by Joan Fontaine, in which she tells him what England means to her, and what Clive and his friends should fight for.68 In the book, Prue is given about three pages to make her point, but Sherriff does a masterful job of whittling the word count down to a much more cogent 361.
The studio had planned to begin shooting in England in late September, and in August 1941, Hollywood Reporter announced that Zanuck would shortly be heading to England with Sherriff and producer Robert Kane. That was certainly Sherriff ’s impression, as he wrote to Victor Cazalet: ‘I feel practically certain I shall be on my way home soon, because this studio is working out plans to produce pictures in England.’69 But before long the studio changed its mind, sending Kane to England on his own to shoot background footage, and building a special set on a sound stage (at considerable expense) to match Kane’s footage.
At the end of November, shortly before production was due to begin in the US, Zanuck sent Sherriff a note saying, ‘You did an excellent job on This Above All. The changes that we discussed worked out perfectly.’70 Zanuck was a man of such immense significance at Fox (indeed, in Hollywood more generally), that it cannot have done Sherriff ’s employment prospects any harm that he was so pleased. Of course, the $5,000 bonus he received for the completed script was a very tangible expression of the studio’s satisfaction.
When the film premiered in New York in mid-May 1942, the critics were generally kind, seeing in it no faults that were not already in the book (in particular the lack of any serious rationale for Clive’s sudden volte-face when he returns to the Army), and generally applauding its sincerity. ‘Its strength and disarming distinction is that it tells a very moving love story with a sensitive regard for tensile passions against a background of England at war,’71 wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, although he cautioned that ‘There is a prudence about this romance which is not in keeping with nature, and which belies the frank disposition of the two participants.’ He also criticised the film for its failures to justify Clive’s animosities, by explaining his poverty-stricken background, although he acknowledged that Sherriff and the producers might well have wanted to avoid revealing ‘the degradation out of which the character rose, for fear of giving offense’. Knight himself was not a fan of the movie72 (although he felt it easily surpassed Mrs Miniver), but the public did not agree with him, for the film did well at the box office, drawing $2.4 million – not far outside the top ten (although well short of Mrs Miniver’s table-topping $6 million).73
Knight died in January 1943, in a plane crash in Dutch Guiana (now Surinam), along with a number of other military personnel. James Hilton was shocked, writing to Sherriff that ‘It is only a short time since I was lunching with him at the Brown Derby and we were discussing taking some trip together similar to the one on which he met his death. I am sure, as the scenarist of This Above All, you must feel something of a personal loss.’74 Shortly after Knight’s death another of his books would be made into a film that would win worldwide box-office acclaim, starting up something of a franchise: Lassie Come Home.
Sherriff ’s first contract with Fox had been for the time of his work on This Above All, but before his work was complete, on 25 November 1941,75 Fox had already exercised their option to engage him on another six-month contract, with a bump up to $1,400 a week.
The next project they had lined up for him was an adaptation of Hugh Walpole’s Blind Man’s House. The book was published in 1941, just before Walpole died, and was the story of Sir Julius Cromwell, a blinded ex-serviceman, who brings a young wife home to a country estate in the village where he grew up. Sherriff had a treatment76 ready by 10 December, and added a brief foreword discussing whether changes might be needed now that the United States had just entered the war. He then went on to specify his new story, which was actually only loosely related to Walpole’s novel, being based instead on a story he had himself been preparing at the beginning of the war77:
That of a distinguished British airman who was disabled in an early raid over Germany and who returned to his old English manor house in the country with a young wife. The whole story dealt with this man’s struggle to keep his home against the inrush of time.78
He would work steadily on the project during the next few months, but was still interested in finding a way home. To that end he contacted Eric Cleugh at the Los Angeles Consulate in March, asking for his help, although Cleugh was pessimistic about his chances of finding a berth on a ‘clipper’ (flying boat) service. When, in April, that request became moot (with Fox picking up its option on his services for yet another six months)79 he put his name down for a sea passage, in the knowledge that it would take some time before he and his mother made it to the top of the list. He was clear that they would be going back together (he wrote to Gerald Ellison that ‘She is so earnest about wanting to come home at the same time I do, I could not leave her here’),80 and to make themselves more flexible, should the call come, they even gave up their house on Ocean Way, and moved into one of the garden bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
By September 1942, Sherriff had managed to produce a temporary script81 for Blind Man’s House that was largely complete, although the final section was still in synopsis. Almost everything had changed from the initial treatment, but it would change still further in the months ahead. In the meantime, he also worked on other projects, most unusually when he was ‘loaned’ to Disney for a period, working on a script for Seversky’s Victory Through Air Power. This was an interesting project, essentially harnessing the might of the Walt Disney studio (through Disney himself) to a largely animated movie devoted to proselytising for air power, according to the theories advanced by Russian émigré Alexander Seversky in his book of the same name. In the end it proved a commercial failure – audiences could not quite work out what kind of movie they were watching, education or propaganda82 – but it did pave the way for Disney’s attempts at educational movies in the future. Sherriff received no writing credit, although he had been there for six weeks by the time he wrote to James Hilton telling him what a ‘fascinating’ job it was.83
Another film that utilised Sherriff ’s talents was Forever and a Day. This was a unique film, in that it represented the Hollywood British community’s attempt at a pro-British movie that would raise funds for good causes (like a 1940s version of Geldof ’s Band Aid). The film, with the original working title of This Changing World, had been conceived in March 194084 (just as the criticism of the Hollywood Brits was beginning to gather pace) at a meeting between Cedric Hardwicke, Alfred Hitchcock, Victor Saville and Herbert Wilcox, and the idea was that it would harness all the talents of the community – writers, directors and stars – to produce a charity film that would also bang the drum for Britain. It was conceived as an episodic film, which would be easier to make as people became available during their existing movie work. Sherriff was very much part of the British community, involved in the Advisory Board, and through it, in entertaining British officers who happened to be in California (including, at the end of 1941, Gerald Ellison, at that point attached to the Cruiser HMS Orion).85 So, even although the film had been conceived before he arrived, he was likely to have become involved quite quickly.
The approach adopted was taken from Noel Coward’s hugely successful play (and later film), Cavalcade, and featured a house in Britain during a passage of time. It would begin in 1804, with the house being built by an admiral returning from war with Napoleon, but the end date was not agreed at the beginning of development. The script took some time to finish (the story and treatment being credited to W.P. Lipscomb and Robert Stevenson), and shooting eventually began at the RKO Studio in May 1941. The first five sequences, featuring a galaxy of British movie stars, and showing the house’s development through the Victorian era, up to the end of the First World War, were completed by 14 December 1941. But that still left one final scene to be shot. Various suggestions were made: one was that it should end in 1939, although that was seen as ‘evasive’; another was to show the house being bombed in the war, but there were box-office concerns over that; a third was to end at some point in the future, but no one seemed struck on that idea. The discussion was crystallised, however, by the US entry into the war, as was noted by a report on the progress of the movie:
Due to the new situation created by America’s entry into the war, this part has had to be revised and a first treatment on the part, based on suggestions by various authors, including Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, R.C. Sherriff, Charles Bennett and Gene Lockhart, is now in Sir Cedric’s hands and under discussion. Although there is, as yet, no agreement on details, the general line of part VI has been decided upon. The sequence in the main will take place in the cellar of the house, now changed to an air raid shelter.86
Sure enough, that was the final sequence: an American (a distant relation of one of the earlier owners), arrives at the house during the Second World War, to be told its history by the woman who is its existing owner. While he is there the house is bombed, and all that remains is the cellar archway, welcoming ‘All who shelter here’, which had been installed when the house was first built by the admiral (played, inevitably, by C. Aubrey Smith). The final section featured no significant UK stars, since a number of those who had said they would take part had pulled out, and RKO, concerned about cost overruns, forced the filmmakers to begin filming with two of their relatively unknown leads lent to the production (Kent Smith and Ruth Warrick).
The film was released in March 1943, and much was made in the publicity of the vast collaborative effort undertaken. Seven directors were named in the trailer (with Cedric Hardwicke given a director’s credit, since he had conceived and led the project. The film itself opens with the names of eighty actors involved (and a comment to the effect that there were others who would like to have participated but were ‘unavailable’), and twenty-one writers (including Sherriff). With such a lengthy list it is not easy to detect Sherriff ’s hand, although he was clearly involved in discussions on the final section, and may have commented on the first section given his expertise in the area (C. Aubrey Smith has a line, for example, about the possibility of Napoleon invading if ‘Parliament doesn’t stir itself ’, which clearly has echoes of Nelson in Lady Hamilton).
The reviews from the quality press were as condescending as might be expected – but this was never intended to be high art. Others were prepared to see it for the entertainment it was: Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, for example, commented on the ‘amusing and affecting passages’, while the Evening Standard commended the film’s ‘charm and comedy and emotion’. It is a film that is well worth viewing, for a number of fine performances, but also for a game of ‘spot-the-actor’ in the cameos (Victor McLaglen as a doorman, for example, or June Duprez and Elsa Lanchester popping up briefly). By the time it was released, of course, the US was firmly engaged in the war and the sentiment against the Hollywood Brits had long vanished, so its propaganda elements were less required. But after RKO’s costs were settled it still succeeded in raising more than $800,000 for charitable causes, with donations made in each of the countries in which it played, many to the Red Cross.87
Towards the end of 1942, Sherriff was trying even harder to make his way home, and he contacted the embassy in Washington, asking their opinion. He was probably rather disappointed to be told that ‘Taking everything into consideration, it would be more advisable for you to remain in this country where your knowledge of Britain would … continue to be of considerable service to us.’88 But they also suggested he might want to consult with the studio, to see if they’d be prepared to offer a leave of absence for him to explore conditions back home. Sherriff thought this an excellent idea (‘I am certain the best and most significant stories of wartime England are hidden away in the towns and countryside and the only way to find them is to go there and hunt them out for one’s self ’)89 and immediately sent a memo about it to Jason Joy90 at Fox. He hoped they might contract him to make the tour, but if not, he would be happy to be given a leave of absence, and make the trip ‘as a freelance’. Within a month, however, the studio showed it was not yet ready to part with him, for his option was picked up again, this time for a full year, with a guaranteed minimum of forty weeks’ work at $1,500 a week. On the letter from Sig Marcus telling him the new terms, it is possible to see his handwritten calculation where he converts the weekly total into the rather grand annual sum of $60,000.91 At the prevailing exchange rate of $4 to the pound, that would net him more than enough to meet all the costs he was incurring in renovating Down House Farm.
On 5 February, he completed the second draft of a shooting script on the project that had been Blind Man’s House, but was now renamed as House of Chedworth.92 The story is about a young chorus girl (Peggy Fortescue) who falls for a blinded exairman (Sir Derek Chedworth), owner of a large estate in Cornwall. The day after they meet (when he admires her fortitude in continuing to sing on stage during a bombing raid), he sweeps her off to Cornwall, where they get married, and she becomes Lady Chedworth. She realises that the estate, and Sir Derek, are in dire financial straits: they cannot even afford to maintain the barn, which is washed away in floods. She tries to encourage him to ease up on some of the charity he doles out around the village, and to spend the money on the fabric of the estate, but he tells her not to interfere. The US Air Force comes to use the estate as an airfield, with Derek’s enthusiastic agreement, but Peggy, in helping the men organise a concert, becomes attracted to a young lieutenant (Roger Lindsay). When he begins to fly raids over Germany she worries about him, and rushes into his arms when he returns. She realises the situation is untenable, and pleads with Derek to leave with her, but he refuses, saying he must stay at Chedworth, no matter the burden that falls on him. At that moment there is an air raid, during the course of which Derek helps guide the American bombers away from the estate, and back to a safe airfield. In doing so he is killed, but not before leaving a written note to Roger, asking him to take care of Peggy. The film ends with Peggy and some workmen rebuilding the barn, Roger leaving, and Peggy committing herself to staying, as the last of the Chedworths.
Sherriff passed the completed script over to the studio, where it appears to have undergone some further changes – although nothing too significant – before it was finally submitted to the PCA in July. They had the usual minor objections – suggestions of impropriety, or potentially vulgar language – but also two major issues: one was a concern that, in one of Derek’s speeches, he ‘practically hands his wife over to her lover’; the other was that Derek’s death at the end could almost be construed as a suicide. The issues never seem to have been resolved, however, because the film, like so many others, ended in development limbo, never to reappear.93
Having completed the screenplay and handed it over, Sherriff contacted Alan Collins at Curtis Brown’s New York office. He had written to Collins the previous November, telling him he was hoping to make a novel out of his work on the Chedworth screenplay, and fretting a little that people might suspect some plagiarism on his part, given that Walpole’s book was also a ‘country house’ story. Collins had replied that, if nothing of Walpole’s story remained, there was no need to worry. Sherriff was grateful for the advice, feeling that the issue would be straightforward as long as the studio did not produce the finished film under the Blind Man’s House title (which he did not think they would).94 A few months later, he was able to write to Collins telling him that the studio’s legal department ‘raises no objection to my using in novel form the story and material which I have embodied in this screenplay,’95 and that he was now about to embark on the novel.
In mid-February, Spencer Curtis Brown cabled Sherriff from London96 to let him know about an intriguing offer that had come his way. Paul Soskin (who had a production company bearing his own name, and had recently completed the wartime movie The Avengers) wanted Sherriff to script a new movie, Signed with their Honour, which would be based on a novel of the same name by a young Australian war correspondent named James Aldridge. The book, which had come out in 1942, told the story of the RAF’s defence of Greece and Crete against the Luftwaffe, and was a big success, critically and commercially.
Soskin was offering generous terms and was willing to have Sherriff write the treatment in the US, before coming back to London to prepare the script. Immediately on receiving Curtis Brown’s cable, Sherriff had cabled in reply, saying he was interested.97 Actually he was very interested, because he was keen to get back home, and this might be the way to do it. He would need to get the agreement of Fox – which, of course, had him on contract for the next year – and he would need verification of the assignment to allow him to move up the sailing lists (which, at that point, he had been on for nearly nine months). Curtis Brown then cabled him with Soskin’s offer (£2,500 for the preparation of a shooting script, or £150 a week on a twelve-month contract, possibly with a profit-sharing arrangement and co-producing status),98 but Sherriff did not reply. After a couple of weeks’ silence, Curtis Brown implored him: ‘Please reply concerning Signed Their Honour. Is Soskin proposition unacceptable?99
It was. Fox had put him to work on a new screenplay and he felt unable to ask them for a release. But he hoped he would finish by the end of April, and then he would press to be freed from his current contract. He still seemed to be hoping that he could work out a scheme along the lines of the one he proposed to Jason Joy – even if it involved a leave of absence – but otherwise he seemed to be stuck. If he were to come back, however, and start working on UK films, he was clear about one thing:
Primarily I would like to have a writer-producer agreement – not because I am interested in the business side of film-making, but to retain some control over the scripts I write when the time for production comes. Although in most cases I have been pleased with the pictures that have come from my screenplays, I have had one or two unfortunate experiences where the script was garbled and distorted beyond reason.100
Perhaps it was just having moved on to the new screenplay that held him back from the Soskin deal, but there is something odd in the delay in reply, especially given the alacrity with which he had seized on the first cable he received. It may just have been that he would find it difficult to opt out of his one-year deal at Fox. But that had clearly not been a factor in his thinking when he had jumped at that first telegram. And although he reckoned he would be working on the new project until the end of April, there was no reason he could not have made a counter-offer to Soskin, delaying the start date. There was, however, one other factor involved: Soskin was not actually offering a great deal of money. Sherriff ’s deal at Fox was paying him nearly £400 per week – and to drop from that to Soskin’s £150 would be painful. He had long maintained that he was not too worried about the payment he might receive in England, if only he could just get home. But perhaps, faced with the prospect of such a large cut, he decide he could do better staying at Fox. Letters that he sent to Alan Collins in New York101 and to the New College bursar in Oxford102 hinted that he hoped to be sent to England by Fox in the near future, and to negotiate a writer-producer contract with them. Staying with Fox (at his present salary) and working on their stories in England looked a far better proposition than moving back to work with Soskin.103
Sherriff ’s optimism about a possible return to England seems to have coincided with the next project handed to him by the studio: an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s recent play, Flare Path.
Rattigan was an RAF tail gunner posted to Coastal Command, and he used his experiences there to write the play, which was completed in 1941.104 The play is set in a boarding house adjoining an airfield, from which bombers set out nightly on their raids over Germany. Some of the men are planning to spend the weekend there with their wives: Teddy Graham, a pilot; Dusty Miller, Teddy’s tail gunner; and Count Skriczevinsky, a Polish pilot. Teddy’s wife Pat, an actress, is surprised at the arrival of her lover (Peter Kyle, an ageing movie star), who hopes to take her away with him. The Count’s wife is a down-to-earth former barmaid called Doris, who speaks no Polish; the Count speaks no English, and communication is difficult, although they seem to be in love, but there is scepticism about how suited they are for each other, given the difference in their social status.
The men are called back to the aerodrome for a late scheduled mission, leaving the women at the hotel to agonise about their return. There is always concern when the flare path is lit up to allow the planes to take off, for that is the precise moment when the Germans can attack, and one of the planes crashes on take-off. They are all relieved when they find their husbands are not on board. Early the next morning, Teddy and Dusty return, but the Count has not come back. Teddy confesses to his wife about his fears while flying; this wins her over, so she tells Peter to leave without her. Before he goes he translates a letter from the Count to Doris, left behind in case anything should happen to him, in which he tells her he loves her, and would have wished to go back to Poland with her after the war. But the Count eventually arrives safe and sound, his delayed return explained by having ditched in the sea, and the play ends happily.
The play was first produced in London (by Binkie Beaumont) at the Apollo Theatre in August 1942 and was a huge hit, running for eighteen months. The Broadway transfer was not so successful, beginning on 23 December 1942, and ending just ten days later. Despite that lack of success, Fox had bought the rights to the play (for £20,000) and Sherriff was already at work on the adaptation on 1 March, when he told Alan Collins about it.
Sherriff ’s script105 takes quite considerable liberties with the play, opening it up with a ludicrous backstory between Ted and Pat (albeit with a nod to One More River, when they stay the night in a car together), yet downgrading the poignant relationship between Doris and the Count. He changes the character of Peter for the worse, stripping him of his vulnerability and turning him into little more than a Hollywood egotist, whose relationship with Pat becomes that much more difficult to fathom. Even the few action sequences carry less tension than the off-screen action in the play (when the characters watch, through the hotel windows, the ‘flare path’ being lit up and then wait anxiously to see if the planes will take off successfully). All in all, it must count as one of Sherriff ’s least successful adaptations.
In his article for Nigel Nicolson’s Contact magazine in 1948, Sherriff commented on the difficulty in adapting a play for the screen:
I think the average stage play completely unsuited to the screen. The tighter its construction the more unsuited it is. … I have seen reasonable films made from plays but I have never seen the play improved upon by the film version. And yet producers have always been attracted by stage successes and have bid high prices for them, mainly because they contain the valuable commodity of ‘dialogue’, never realising that the success of a play depends so much upon the construction of it which they cheerfully destroy for the screen.106
It is unlikely that he had Flare Path in mind when writing these words, since he prefaces the section by noting (incorrectly) that ‘I have never accepted an assignment to turn a stage play into a screenplay.’ Perhaps he preferred to forget about it.
Like Chedworth, Flare Path never made it to the screen with Fox. The script as Sherriff finished it was handed to the PCA straightaway, and they had a number of objections, raising that old chestnut ‘compensating moral values’. Changes were made and it was sent back to the PCA, which responded with a long list of further changes. There is no sign that the script was ever redrafted thereafter, and the project, like so many others, disappeared without trace.107
On 26 June, after completing his initial Flare Path script, Sherriff at last got a sixmonth108 leave of absence, and armed with a letter vouching for the helpful services he had rendered the British Consulate in LA, he and his mother made their way to New York to try to secure passage to England. He hadn’t quite burned his bridges, however, and continued to work for Fox out of New York – mainly on redrafting Flare Path in light of comments from the PCA and others – until the very end of July.
The plan was to stay in and around New York until a passage became available, but as he later explained,109 his difficulty came in trying to secure passage for his mother, and he would not travel without her. (Indeed, in May 1944, when she was offered passage but he was unavailable to go, she declined to take up the offer because she was unwilling to travel alone.)110 Nor did things ease as the summer months wore on, because restrictions had been placed on all but essential passenger travel. They made the best of it, however, enjoying their time in New York and in Chatham (on Cape Cod), where they spent about six weeks, perhaps reminiscing about their seaside homes in England. Sherriff ’s cash books111 show items including massages, sightseeing, theatre and pictures, as well as a trip to Atlantic City (which may well have been made at his mother’s request, since she enjoyed a flutter on the horses back in England). In all, they spent almost $6,000 on their trip – a bit more than he had received from Fox for his work in July.
By the end of September, they were getting restless; they seemed no nearer to securing a berth home, and Sherriff had no film income coming in, although he was at least working on the novel of Chedworth. At the end of September he got in touch with the Thomas Cook office in New York and told them that he and his mother were ‘ready and willing to travel on the first available British ship to England’. If no British ship were available, in the next six months or so, they would be willing to travel on a Portuguese ship, via Lisbon.112 In the meantime, as long as he could be guaranteed enough notice in the event of a ship becoming available, he would travel back to Hollywood, where at least he could find work. Accordingly, by the end of November, they had left the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and were back again at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles.
He kept working on Chedworth, reporting happily to Alan Collins at the beginning of 1944 that he’d completed about two-thirds of it.113 While working on the manuscript he and Collins discussed potential publishers, and he eventually signed a contract with Macmillan, who had published him before.114 Trying to concentrate on completing the book was difficult, especially with his mind firmly fixed on going home,115 but he was still able to send Collins the last chunk of the book at the beginning of May – which was just as well, because by then he had also taken on a new screenwriting contract.
The contract, with Warner Brothers, was for the adaptation of Dodie Smith’s play Autumn Crocus,116 which they intended as a vehicle for Bette Davis. Written in 1931, the play is a wistful romance, about a 35-year-old English schoolmistress and a cheerful, but married, Tyrolean innkeeper, which had already been made into a not especially successful film in Britain. Sherriff knew Dodie Smith,117 so he would likely have been happy to adapt her work for the screen; he would have been even happier that Warners were guaranteeing him ten weeks at $1,500 a week.118 The contract began on 20 March, and it was due to finish at the end of May, so that Sherriff could leave Hollywood immediately thereafter and make his way back to New York to await a ship. There had been no further updates from Thomas Cook, but he was busy making sure his papers were in order so that he could go as soon as the need arose.
In April he received an offer from Alex Korda that suddenly made the possibility of a quick passage home seem much more likely. Korda had made a deal with MGM at the beginning of 1943, whereby they would provide 100 per cent of the finance he needed to make pictures in England, and he would receive 25 per cent of the profits.119 Nothing much had come of it, owing to the exigencies of wartime production in the UK, but it looked as if it would be a powerful partnership. So Sherriff was delighted with Korda’s offer: ‘They tell me all arranged for me to join you in England and am very glad. Ready to leave immediately complete Bette Davis script at Warners beginning June. … Looking forward to good work with you.’120 He was also delighted that Korda’s offer would bump him up the priority list for the passage home. As he later wrote in No Leading Lady:121
Alex Korda came to the rescue. He gave me a contract, all signed and sealed and bound in silk tape. It looked very important and stated that I was engaged to write and produce three pictures for him in England and that I was due to begin preparation for them in London with as little delay as possible. Whether we should ever be able to fulfil the contract didn’t matter. Korda knew that as well as I did. He wrote it to help me to get home, and it did the trick.
The contract wasn’t quite as duplicitous as Sherriff suggested – Korda really did want him to work in England; the question was just how best to get him there. Reeves Espy, Sherriff ’s new agent at Myron Selznick, suggested that he go on the MGM payroll in the US as of 1 July, allowing him to go to England with them when transport became available. But Sherriff was not happy at that idea: he wanted to work for MGM in England, and not take the risk that he might be engaged on something with them in the US that might prevent him taking a ship home if one presented itself. Henry Blanke (the producer of Autumn Crocus) had already asked him to put in an extra two weeks, which would take him into early June, whereupon he intended to travel immediately to New York and await passage, which he was fairly confident would come quite soon:
They tell me it is almost definite that we shall have a passage on a Portuguese ship if the British line cannot take Mrs Sherriff. So you see it seems better not to get tied up with any other complication and just go right along with the Metro deal to work in England.122
So he completed his work for Warners in early June as anticipated, and set out for New York, leaving the script in the hands of Henry Blanke. The following year, enquiring about the film’s fate, Sherriff was told that, if Blanke re-signed with Warners, it would probably be ‘one of his earliest productions’.123 It was not.
Back at the Waldorf-Astoria, Sherriff and his mother were probably confident that their long wait was over; they had been assigned to a Portuguese ship that was expected to sail around 29 June. But with just three days to go, their hopes were dashed and they were told there would be a delay of ‘about three or four weeks’.124 Upset, they opted to get out of New York until closer to the sailing date, and they headed back to the coast at Chatham. A few weeks later they were unexpectedly offered a passage on a British ship, likely sailing on 25 July, and Sherriff immediately cabled his acceptance from the Chatham Bars Inn, where he was staying: ‘Returning New York twentieth to have four clear days preparation British ship which you advise me as possibly sailing about twenty-fifth.’125
This time there would be no last-minute alterations, and at 3.00 pm on Tuesday, 25 July, he and his mother left a rain-soaked New York behind them and finally headed home.