Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                        CUDDLY FALSE COMFORTS

            It was one of those nights when we couldn’t be bothered watching free-to-air television with its frequent commercial breaks and generally inane programming and we had seen whatever was worthwhile on that rapidly diminishing platform Netflix. We do not subscribe to Sky and its affiliates, so we turned to Youtube and looked up whatever complete films it had to offer.

We hit on The Franchise Affair, a British film made in 1951 which I vaguely remembered seeing on television, when I was a teenager, in the late 1960s. Plot (based on a novel by Josephine Tey) concerned a teenaged girl who accused two women, who lived in an isolated mansion, of having kidnapped her and making her a domestic slave for some weeks before she was able to make her escape. Much evidence pointed to the women’s guilt as the teenager was able to describe in detail the interior of the mansion which, according to the accused women, the girl had never entered. So, as counsel for the defence, a local lawyer got to work examining the story, and lo!, he was able to prove conclusively that the teenager was lying. The little wretch had made up the story, with the help of a confederate who once worked in the mansion, to cover up her disappearance for a couple of weeks while engaging in – um - immoral sexual activities [the film, made in 1951, doesn’t spell it out, but it implies that she had a brief affair with a married man]. Happy ending for the accused women.

Watching this old film, we were aware of how very polite and middle class it all was. The two accused women were not just women, they were refined gentlewomen. Their lawyer was clearly a gentleman; while the accusing teenager was obviously of the lower classes and a specimen of unruly, disorderly behaviour, clearly the result of bad upbringing. To make matters even comfier, the lawyer was played by Michael Denison, who always played decent middle-class chaps, and the more articulate of the two gentlewomen was played by his real-life wife Dulcie Grey. How sweet.

So please do not laugh when I say that we enjoyed this film, for all its assumed smugness and its presumption that people should know their place in society and stay there. After all, it presented a world in which there are clearly defined and separate good and evil, in which the good prevails, and in which a story has a neat beginning, middle and ending – a linear presentation where all is solved.

A night or two later, we hit upon another film on Youtube that had a similar effect on us. This was the 1962 British “police procedural” detective story Jigsaw. In sleazy old Brighton, the corpse of a woman is discovered, hacked up into small pieces by some sadistic murderer. Of course, made 60 years ago, the film doesn’t give us close-ups of the gore, as would be the case if the film were made now, but keeps it off screen. Inspector Jack Warner (he of Dixon of Dock Green fame) methodically investigates and methodically cracks the case. Not quite as class-based as The Franchise Affair. Some intelligent and leading sympathetic characters had proletarian voices and Jack Warner himself had a matter-of-fact voice that spoke of his profession, not of his upbringing. Even so, here was a rational world in which evil is neatly exposed, the culprit gets nailed and justice prevails. No ambiguity.

In our final foray into looking at old movies on Youtube, we saw the 1946 American blockbuster The Best Years of Our Lives – all 2-and-a-half hours of it. It was a huge hit in its day and was regarded as an “adult” film concerning, as it did, a very topical issue - the difficult readjustment to civilian life of recently de-mobbed servicemen. I won’t go into details about this one, as it is so well known. Enough to note that it now seems very simplistic, with neat and happy outcomes for all its stressed ex-servicemen, with women who are incredibly understanding and forgiving of their husbands’ failures, and largely set in a neat and tidy picket-fenced world. (Okay, there is one woman who is, in the parlance of the day,  a “tramp” but she gets her comeuppance and goodness prevails.)

I think one thing that made these films comforting was the mere fact that they were all filmed in what cineastes call monochrome (i.e. what us peasants call black-and-white). Somehow, monochrome film immediately has an effect of nostalgia, of conjuring up a simpler and easily understood time (unless you’re watching brutal newsreels of course). Goodness prevails, problems are overcome, the bad are defeated, there are always happy endings and the story-lines move methodically from A to B to C to Z, speaking of logical rationality. No ambiguity, no agonising over what is right or wrong.

In short, such films now take us into a sort of fantasy-land, far removed from everyday reality. That is why they are so comforting.

Having watched these three films, we reverted to reality and returned to messy, contemporary planet Earth.