Four from the forties: Arliss, Crabtree, Knowles and Huntington

By Brian McFarlane

The ‘Gainsborough melodramas’ were a mainstay of 1940s British cinema, and helped make the careers of such stars as Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Stewart Granger. But what was unique about these films? And who were the directors behind them? This book presents four key filmmakers, each with his own talents and specialities. It traces their professional lives through the highs of the 1940s, when the popularity of Gainsborough films was at its peak, to the tougher decades that followed the genre’s decline. Featuring expert analysis of such films as The Man in Grey (1943), Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945) and The Upturned Glass (1947), alongside valuable historical context, the book constitutes the first extended examination of this group of directors. It combines critical acumen with readability, making it a valuable resource for students, lecturers and general readers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526110589

Brian McFarlane

Brian McFarlane is associate professor of English at Monash University, Melbourne. He is compiler, editor, and chief author of The Encyclopedia of British Film.

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BRIAN MCFARLANE, NEIL SINYARD series editors

ALLEN EYLES, SUE HARPER, TIM PULLEINE, JEFFREY RICHARDS, TOM RYALL

series advisers

already published

Lindsay Anderson: Cinema authorship JOHN IZOD, KARL MAGEE, KATHRYN MACKENZIE, ISABELLE GOURDIN-SANGOUARD

Anthony Asquith TOM RYALL

Richard Attenborough SALLY DUX

Roy Ward Baker GEOFF MAYER

Sydney Box ANDREW SPICER

Jack Clayton NEIL SINYARD

Lance Comfort BRIAN MCFARLANE

Terence Davies WENDY EVERETT

Terence Fisher PETER HUTCHINGS

Terry Gilliam PETER MARKS

Derek Jarman ROWLAND WYMER

Humphrey Jennings KEITH BEATTIE

Launder and Gilliat BRUCE BABINGTON

David Lean MELANIE WILLIAMS

Mike Leigh TONY WHITEHEAD

Richard Lester NEIL SINYARD

Joseph Losey COLIN GARDNER

Carol Reed PETER WILLIAM EVANS

Michael Reeves BENJAMIN HALLIGAN

Karel Reisz COLIN GARDNER

Tony Richardson ROBERT SHAIL

J. Lee Thompson STEVE CHIBNALL

Michael Winterbottom BRIAN MCFARLANE AND DEANE WILLIAMS

Four from the forties

Arliss, Crabtree, Knowles and Huntington

Brian McFarlane

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Brian McFarlane 2018

The right of Brian McFarlane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 1054 1 hardback

First published 2018

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

For Andrew Spicer, with grateful thanks

Contents

List of figures

Series editors’ foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Leslie Arliss

2 Arthur Crabtree

3 Bernard Knowles

4 Lawrence Huntington

Afterword

Filmographies

Select Bibliography

Index

Figures

1 Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in The Man in Grey, 1943 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. Edward Black)

2 Michael Rennie and Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. R.J. Minney)

3 Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in The Wicked Lady, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. R.J. Minney)

4 Kieron Moore and Margaret Johnston in A Man About the House, 1947 (British Lion Films: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. Edward Black)

5 Cicely Courtneidge and Joss Ambler in Miss Tulip Stays the Night, 1955 (Bill Luckwell Productions: dir. Leslie Arliss, prod. John O. Douglas and Bill Luckwell)

6 Peter Glenville and Stewart Granger in Madonna of the Seven Moons, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. R.J. Minney)

7 Phyllis Calvert in Madonna of the Seven Moons, 1945 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. R.J. Minney)

8 Dennis Price (seated), Robert Helpmann and Anne Crawford in Caravan, 1946 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. Harold Huth)

9 Film poster for Fiend Without a Face, 1958 (Producers Associates: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. John Croydon)

10 Michael Gough in Horrors of the Black Museum, 1959 (Anglo-Amalgamated and Carmel Productions: dir. Arthur Crabtree, prod. Jack Greenwood, Herman Cohen)

11 Nigel Patrick, Patricia Roc, Pamela Devis (Olga the robot) and Miles Malleson in The Perfect Woman, 1949 (Two Cities Films: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Alfred Black and George Black)

12 Pamela Devis and Jerry Verno in The Perfect Woman, 1949 (Two Cities Films: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Alfred Black and George Black)

13 Richard Attenborough and Bernard Knowles on the set of The Lost People, 1949 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Gordon Wellesley)

14 Tom Conway, Brian Worth and John Horsley in Barbados Quest, 1955 (Cipa Productions: dir. Bernard Knowles, prod. Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman)

15 Raymond Lovell and Leslie Dwyer in Night Boat to Dublin, 1946 (Associated British Picture Corporation: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. Hamilton G. Inglis)

16 Pamela Kellino and James Mason in The Upturned Glass, 1947 (Triton: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. James Mason, Sydney Box, Betty E. Box)

17 Film poster for The Upturned Glass, 1947 (Triton: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. James Mason, Sydney Box, Betty E. Box)

18 Rosamund John and Patricia Roc in When the Bough Breaks, 1947 (Gainsborough Pictures: dir. Lawrence Huntington, prod. Betty E. Box and Antony Darnborough)

19 Still from Man on the Run, 1949 (Associated British Picture Corporation: dir. and prod. Lawrence Huntington)

Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to present in lively, authoritative volumes a guide to those film-makers who have made British cinema a rewarding but still under-researched branch of world cinema. The intention is to provide books which are up-to-date in terms of information and critical approach, but not bound to any one theoretical methodology. Though all books in the series will have certain elements in common – comprehensive filmographies, annotated bibliographies, appropriate illustration – the actual critical tools employed will be the responsibility of the individual authors.

Nevertheless, an important recurring element will be a concern for how the oeuvre of each film-maker does or does not fit certain critical and industrial contexts, as well as for the wider social contexts which helped to shape not just that particular film-maker but the course of British cinema at large.

Although the series is director-orientated, the editors believe that reference to a variety of stances and contexts is more likely to reconceptualise and reappraise the phenomenon of British cinema as a complex, shifting field of production. All the texts in the series will engage in detailed discussion of major works of the film-makers involved, but they all consider as well the importance of other key collaborators, of studio organisation, of audience reception, of recurring themes and structures: all those other aspects which go towards the construction of a national cinema.

The series explores and charts a field which is more than ripe for serious excavation. The acknowledged leaders of the field will be reappraised; just as important, though, will be the bringing to light of those who have not so far received any serious attention. They are all part of the very rich texture of British cinema, and it will be the work of this series to give them all their due.

Acknowledgements

For a great deal of help in giving me access to viewing copies of some of the films I'd had trouble finding and for so much assistance in tracking contemporary critical appraisals of the films of the four directors, I am much indebted to the staff of the British Film Institute, including Jo Botting and Steve Tollervey. At the BFI Library, I am particularly grateful to Ian O’Sullivan, Sarah Currant, Victoria Crabbe and Adrienne Rashbrook-Coope, who all coped patiently with my technical ineptitude. In Australia, Tom Ryan initiated me into the use of YouTube as a source of rare items, which was very helpful, especially in regard to ancient television episodes. As for my now-fragile copies of Picture Show and Picturegoer, which I have often drawn on for this study, I probably should offer a belated thanks to my late parents for the (meagre) pocket-money that enabled me to buy them – and to my dear late wife's tolerance about my storing of these for so many decades. And once again, my thanks to my daughter Sophie for setting me to rights about computer matters and for formatting the book's final manuscript.

Andrew Spicer was enormously helpful in providing copies of key films and the book is dedicated to him with gratitude and affection.

Introduction

There is nothing new in proposing the 1940s as arguably the enduring high point in the history of British cinema. Books continue to appear about the great names of the period, such as David Lean and Michael Powell; but, as well as the ‘quality cinema’ associated with these directors, there was also a popular output from film-makers who have not yet been subject to such detailed treatment. There are also excellent books that focus on the period at large,¹ but they are apt to be more concerned with the prestige arm of British film or with thematic concerns.

The purpose of the present book is to draw attention to four directors whose career trajectories had a good deal in common and can tell us much about what British filmgoers were flocking to see in this crucial decade when they were at their most prolific. They are Leslie Arliss, Arthur Crabtree, Bernard Knowles and Lawrence Huntington. All were born at the turn of the century (Arliss in 1901, the other three in 1900); all had been active in a range of film-making functions in the 1930s; and each would do his most proficient and popular work in the 1940s. After that they prolonged their careers, if not their reputations, in ‘B’ movies, co-features and television, but even in these reduced circumstances their long-honed professionalism would see them through. If none of them hurdled the decade with the comparative ease of their contemporary Lance Comfort, they are all responsible for some of the better moments to be found in the lower depths of post-1940s cinema in Britain. At whatever levels, they all persisted into the 1960s, and to have maintained thirty-year careers in the often crisis-ridden British film industry says something for their persistence – and entitles them to a closer examination. Taken together, they may offer a commentary on the changing fortunes of British cinema over the period of their prolificacy – and perhaps some insight into why this declined.

These are not biographical studies, but, as well as offering some detailed discussion of their major films, the aim is also to reflect on the contexts in which they operated, contexts both industrial and social, though the emphasis will be on the kinds of preoccupations and dexterity revealed by a close analysis of their films. There will be some account of the involvement of each member of the quartet in the lead-up to his most significant period. It is not intended to offer a detailed account of all the films with which they were associated in the 1930s but, rather, to identify some tendencies in their work that may help to account for their later successes.

They were as much a part of the crucial war and post-war decade as the more obviously prestigious names who have been so much written about. As well as examining the films themselves, both as entities and for how they resonate with the cultural and social climate of the time, part of the aim will be to place them in the spectrum of British film-going at that time when audiences were at a record high. It will be useful to distinguish the sorts of output associated with this quartet from that commonly associated with the idea of Britain's ‘quality cinema’.²

All four emerged as proficient commercial directors in the 1940s, but this should not elide the different paths by which each reached this status. For instance, Arliss continued as a screenwriter and directed a couple of modest pieces (The Farmer's Wife and The Night Has Eyes) before staking his claim to box-office success with The Man in Grey in 1943. Huntington also maintained his screenwriting career along with directing five minor genre entertainments before his ‘A’-film breakthrough with Night Boat to Dublin in 1946. Former cinematographers Crabtree and Knowles pursued this aspect of their art before making their directorial debuts in 1945 with, respectively, Madonna of the Seven Moons and A Place of One's Own. The individual chapter on each will trace the sort of ‘preparation’ each engaged in before his major work as director: certain aspects of that preparation will recur in each, others will be marked by divergence in matters of both work and reputation.

Popularity as a phenomenon is always worth considering for what it tells us about society at large at any given time. No doubt film-makers – not just directors but, obviously, producers and studios as well – are always interested in, hopeful that they have tapped into, what will attract the film-going public. The public in its turn will show by its response at the box-office to what extent the film-makers have been successful in this matter. Just what was it about, say, The Man in Grey that occasioned such popular success – and that led to a cycle of films in the costume melodrama genre? Was it just a matter of respite from the difficulties of the wartime period? Or was it also because such films, in more oblique ways than the more obvious realist (and critical) successes of the time, offered other ways of reflecting on lived experience?

What follows is not essentially a sociological examination of ‘film and society’, but it is impossible in considering the key films of the chosen directors not to be aware of resonances that go beyond – and grow out of – the narrative trajectories of the individual films. As film-making conditions changed, they had to find different opportunities, and these opportunities also reflect on changing audience tastes and production possibilities. Above all, this book aims to focus on four craftsmen who made significant contributions to the ongoing pattern of British film over several decades. These are names that have too often been allowed scant, if any attention in the critical discourse relating to the period of their prolificacy. Admiration for, say, Brief Encounter or The Way Ahead does not necessarily preclude appreciation of the skills involved in Madonna of the Seven Moons.

Of course, I have made reference where appropriate to valuable critical writing about films directed by the four highlighted in this study and have also been interested in what various actors and other collaborators have had to say about their work for these directors. In general, though, I have been more concerned with researching how they were received by popular contemporary magazines such as Picturegoer and Picture Show, and what trade papers like Kinematograph Weekly and Today's Cinema made of them. These might be thought to have had their fingers on the pulse of what was likely to appeal to large, receptive audiences.

Notes

1 For example, Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, London: University of California Press, 1977; Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–48, London: Routledge, 1989; Charles Drazin, The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

2 Term used by John Ellis in ‘The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema 1942–1948’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views, London: Cassell, 1996.

1

Leslie Arliss

There is a tendency among critics when writing about Leslie Arliss's three big commercial hits for Gainsborough Studios to attribute their success to the studio and thus to undermine the director's contribution, at least by implication. Whatever critics had to say about these films at the time of their release – and these writers were often scathing – nothing could deny their popular success, and, without invoking auteurist claims, a case must be made for Arliss as director and screenwriter on all three as at least a key collaborator in this success and in such craftsmanlike proficiency as they exhibit.

Writing his way through the 1930s

Arliss's work in the 1930s (and in his thirties) as (co-)screenwriter would scarcely seem to have prepared him for the films of his greatest successes in the following decade. Though the IMDb website lists him as uncredited co-author of the screenplay for Hitchcock's 1928 version of The Farmer's Wife, adapted from Eden Phillpotts's play, it seems likely that this is confused with the 1941 version, on which Arliss received his first credit as co-director. More reliably, he began his credited screenwriting career in 1931 with Tonight's the Night: Pass It On for British International Pictures (BIP), starring then-popular comedian Leslie Fuller. Like several others who later became directors, including Sidney Gilliat and J. Lee Thompson, Arliss had early training with BIP's scenario department. For the rest of the decade, he shares screenplay or dialogue credits or is credited as ‘co-author of the scenario’ or for ‘story’ or ‘adaptation’, the shared attribution of course making it difficult to account for Arliss's input.

However, watching the dozen or so of these films available for viewing, there is at least an ongoing sense of readiness to milk a comic situation for good-natured laughs and to provide established comics such as Will Hay and George Formby with material they could work to the effect their public expected of them. For instance, ‘the fat boy’, Graham Moffat, and/or ‘the old codger’, Moore Marriott, in Where There's a Will and Windbag the Sailor (both 1936) bring their distinctive physical presences to bear on some neatly contrived situations and verbally sharp exchanges in scenes involving Hay that render them still amusing eighty years on. Did Arliss (or co-writer Austin Melford) come up with ‘If I thought you mean what I think you mean, I'd slap your face’ for Vera Pearce to threaten Albert Burden with in Road House (1934)?

Of the films of the decade available for this study, he received solo credit as ‘author of the screenplay’ on only one film, Said O’Reilly to McNab (1937), though even then Marriott Edgar was credited with ‘dialogue’. The film has an amusing scenario that pits Scots against Irish, UK against US, and Will Fyffe and Will Mahony act out the stereotypes with vigour and comic know-how. But there is really not much point in trying to discern a continuing ‘Arliss touch’ in these films: Hay was a sort of comic genius whose persona of shifty authority (e.g. when catapulted into captaining a ship when he had never before been to sea, in Windbag the Sailor) could probably have risen above much less inventive screenplays than those Arliss was involved with. The same claim might be made for Formby's immaculate timing, on display in Come on George (1939), an often funny, pacey vehicle for the toothy star as an ice-cream seller who, via a chain of events too complicated (not to say improbable) to discuss here, becomes a hero of the equine racetrack.

From 1940 there was a change of generic direction for Arliss as writer. On For Freedom (1940) he shares scenario and dialogue credit with Miles Malleson for a serious and ingenious piece of wartime propaganda – a quite complex amalgam of newsreel, production–studio interaction and staged action footage depicting the battle of the River Plate. In the same year, for the Boulting brothers’ Charter Films, he is one of three credited with the ‘screen story’ for Pastor Hall, a powerful study of the conflict faced by a German pastor who is at odds with the rise of Hitler. Angus McPhail, by this time an Ealing regular, has top billing in the screenplay credits for The Foreman Went to France (1942), his name given in larger type, and followed in order by John Dighton and Arliss, who thus probably does not deserve to be blamed for its tonal uncertainty as it moves between serious wartime exploit and ill-fitting comic inserts to exploit Tommy Trinder's personality.

The director emerges

The Night Has Eyes (1942)

Released in the same month, June 1942, was Arliss's directorial debut, The Night Has Eyes. The full credit reads: ‘Written and directed by Leslie Arliss’, and the film remains a lively enough thriller, which begins in comic mode before settling into full-blown melodrama, with murder on the moors, a house that seems to have secrets, and a lot of shadowy effects, all enhanced by Günther Krampf's evocative cinematography and Duncan Sutherland's art direction. Produced by John Argyle, adapted from Alan Kennington's novel, made at Welwyn Studios (‘one of the few studios that was not requisitioned at the outbreak of war’¹) and distributed by ABPC, it is in fact a melodramatic precursor of Arliss's time at Gainsborough, which began a year later. This feeling is intensified by the casting of James Mason as the handsome, enigmatic, possibly cruel protagonist.

At the end of term, two young schoolmistresses, Marion (Joyce Howard) and American Doris (Tucker McGuire), are going on holiday to the Yorkshire moors where a colleague, ‘poor Evelyn’, was lost the year before. The sniffy headmistress of Carne School suspects they are going off chasing men, believing Doris ‘is no lady’, but an older teacher (Amy Dalby) chides her with: ‘Remember, she isn't English’. A police officer warns them not to go trekking over the moors in the poor weather, but nevertheless they head off in thickening fog and rain, and Doris inevitably gets stuck in a bog from which Marion has to rescue her. A flash of lightning illuminates a house and a man with a torch who grudgingly takes them in. As Michael Omasta writes: ‘There is one superb scene early on in the film where we first see Mason and the old dark house that stands stark and brooding in silhouette amidst the storm with the single small frame of an open door ominously lit up. Apart from the dramatic effect they created, fog and storm were perfect cover for the use of miniatures disappearing in the depths of the moor, obviously to great success.’² Omasta rightly claims that Krampf and art director Sutherland ‘worked wonders with their limited B-movie resources’.³ James Mason, who failed to get on with Arliss, paid tribute to Krampf as ‘a perfectionist. He had to see that the fog remained consistent through every scene of that last exciting sequence.’⁴ Considering the film was made entirely at Welwyn Studios, it no doubt needed all the help it could get in creating its sense of a remote place and mystery.

The man lit up in the doorway is Stephen Deremid, who tells the women ‘I like storms’, and, more portentously: ‘The moors are like quicksand. They never give up their dead.’ On their first night in this unpromising accommodation, Marion seems to establish some rapport with the brooding, reclusive Stephen, while Doris acts the heroine's wise-cracking friend. (This kind of complementary female pairing proved to be a common thread in Arliss's later melodramas.) Stephen is a composer who ‘gave up music for war’, by which he means the Spanish Civil War, during which – he adds bitterly – ‘Civilisation watched on the sidelines to make sure there'd be no fair play.’ This first evening concludes with Marion saying to Doris that she is suddenly feeling ‘nearer to Evelyn than I have since she died’. A detail: Doris's speech is peppered with ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ – diction the American actress would never have been allowed in her puritanical native US. Arliss would later come up against this prissiness in relation to his Gainsborough pieces, more of which later.⁵

By this time the full panoply of melodrama has been set in place. Here are two plucky but vulnerable young women, in an isolated house, with an embittered, ‘artistic’ hero who pounds away at the piano late at night, shadows on the wall and the possibility that the missing Evelyn, in spirit at least, is somewhere on the premises. Next morning, floods cut them off from the outside world. Stephen warns them about not looking for hidden rooms and to keep out of his study, the immediate implication being that there are secrets waiting to be discovered. Stephen lends Marion, who has fallen in a trough, an off-the-shoulder dress that belonged to his grandmother; later, at dinner, they talk of men she has met and he offers the perception about ‘the queer fascination cruelty has’, foreshadowing further the kinds of role that would be Mason's lot at Gainsborough.

The film builds up our suspicions of Stephen – he has a revolver, there is a scrap of a Carne School report in the house that Evelyn must have brought there – before introducing the two characters who will prove to have been responsible for Evelyn's fate. These are handyman Jim Sturrock (Wilfrid Lawson) and housekeeper Mrs Ranger (Mary Clare). Mrs Ranger, whom Stephen has spoken of warmly, seems friendly, though any viewer familiar with Mary Clare's filmography (think of the Baroness in The Lady Vanishes) would tend to reserve judgement. Jim starts to talk about the ‘last’ lady visitor, then stops himself, and Mrs Ranger, though apparently kindly, seems anxious to get rid of the young women. In Lawson and Clare, Arliss had two very experienced character players and their surface benevolence is convincingly enough depicted to cause viewers, rather than suspect them, to remain wary of Stephen's potential for cruelty. After all, war may have traumatised him, and he has shown himself capable of verbal harshness, insulting Marion as ‘a sentimental little schoolma’am’ when she offers advice about ‘climbing back on a horse’ and urges him to ‘Use me as your cure’. Mrs Ranger warns Marion that ‘this is a bad house’ and tries to persuade her to leave.

As the film moves to its quite powerful end, with Stephen and Marion watching while the guilty Mrs Ranger and Jim are sent off to their slimy reward in the quicksand, it is impressive to note how skilfully the details of the plot have been worked into a persuasive whole. Arliss has maintained firm control over narrative elements, achieved (with the help of his key collaborators) a visual patina that is appropriate to the melodramatic context and obtained performances of just enough complexity from an able cast. If he is not yet in top gear, as he would be in the following year, he shows every promise as a popular genre film-maker.

Here, the ‘old dark house’ mystery is stiffened by the sense, apt for 1942, of the harm that war might wreak on individual character as well as in wider contexts. It may be the Spanish Civil War that is at issue, but the film implies any war can produce such trauma. This is not to suggest that the film has a solemn or didactic purpose, but its entertainment quotient is subtly enriched by its glancing awareness of what life was like in the contemporary war-torn world. Robert Murphy, after listing a number of films that exemplified the shift ‘from murder mysteries and crime thrillers to films dealing with espionage and resistance’, claims that: ‘More indicative of anxieties which would infect post-war films is The Night Has Eyes (1942)’, which has a ‘hero’ who is ‘undeniably sadistic in his treatment of the fluffy young heroine’.⁶ In this way, Arliss's treatment of the character of Stephen not only anticipates Mason's more brutal protagonists in The Man in Grey, The Wicked Lady and The Seventh Veil, but a more general tendency to depict men damaged, most often by war, in the British film noirs of the later 1940s.

Not a great deal has been written about The Night Has Eyes, but it is worth noting for its own merits and as a progenitor of two different strands of British film-making. At least one reviewer at the time enjoyed it, praising it for ‘[f]orthright direction, powerful leading portrayal, plenty of light relief’,⁷ though another felt that: ‘The direction and production of this film are too stagey to get the most out of quite a good plot.’⁸ Tony Williams, meanwhile, writes: ‘Although justifiably forgotten, The Night Has Eyes reveals the importance of seeing Gainsborough films against a broader and relevant historical and cinematic canvas.’⁹ One may take issue with ‘justifiably forgotten’, but the latter claim about the broader canvas deserves attention. Perhaps that is what the reviewer in The Times had in mind in this appraisal: ‘There is some ingenuity and not a little cinematic skill in this British film which shows by the quality of its dialogue that it aims to be something more than an ordinary thriller.’¹⁰ That ‘something more’ is really focused in the role of Stephen, and Mason rewards it with a performance that guarantees the film's power and watchability. Mason did not get on with Arliss, claiming that he ‘was one of the only two directors with whom, throughout the length and breadth of my career, I have had cross words’.¹¹ However, he certainly owed the director the setting in place here of a persona he would proceed to hone to immense success in the next couple of years.

Gainsborough's bad men and worse women

In a curious way, British commercial film-making never seemed as identifiably a genre cinema as so much of the Hollywood output was. Such genre activity as there was usually required a studio name to place it firmly: thus, Ealing comedy, Hammer horror and, of course, Gainsborough (mainly costume) melodrama. Those 1930s comedies with which Arliss was associated were in many cases introduced by the smiling Gainsborough lady but they have never really acquired that sort of connection with the studio that the famous ‘bodice-rippers’ of the 1940s would. It is essentially Arliss who set this genre success story in motion, though other directors highlighted in this book – Arthur Crabtree and Bernard Knowles – would also make their contribution to this immensely popular vein of British film production.

Of course, it is not just the directors who