Visions of Yesterday

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317928607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Film is an important source of social history, as well as having been a popular art form from the early twentieth century. This study shows how a society, consciously or unconsciously, is mirrored in its cinema. It considers the role of the cinema in dramatizing popular beliefs and myths, and takes three case studies – American populism, British imperialism, German Nazism – to explain how a nation's pressures, tensions and hopes come through in its films. Examining the American cinema is accomplished by analysing the careers of three great directors, John Ford, Frank Capra and Leo McCarey, while the British and German cinemas are studied by theme. The analysis of the British Empire as seen in film broke exciting new ground with a pioneering account of 'the cinema of Empire' when it was first published in 1973.

With full filmographies and a carefully selected bibliography it is an outstanding work of reference and its lively approach makes it a delight to read.

Reviews of the original edition:

'A work of considerable force and considerable wit.' – Clive James, Observer

'…a work that is original, mentally stimulating and most pleasurable to read.' – Focus on Film

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Part 1 The Cinema of Empire

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1 Towards a Definition of the Cinema of Empire

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If it is possible to date the apogee of the British Empire, then that date is surely 1897. For in that year Victoria, the Queen-Empress, celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, sixty glorious years on the throne of the mightiest empire the world had ever known. Potentates from the four corners of the earth gathered to pay homage to her. An Imperial army, drawn from men of every colour and creed, paraded in glittering splendour through London. The most powerful fleet in the world lay for review at Spithead. Odes poured from the pens of poets, great and small. From Gibraltar to Rangoon, from Hudson’s Bay to the Falkland Islands, people gathered to sing and dance and feast and revel. The Times called it the first Pan-Britannic festival. ‘Imperialism in the air,’ wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary; ‘all classes drunk with sight-seeing and hysterical loyalty.’ For that moment in history, Imperialism was in the air, a new kind of Imperialism, not Roman or Russian or French but British Imperialism. The celebration of the jubilee of its living embodiment, the almost legendary Great White Mother, can now be seen as the climax of that Empire and that Imperialism, an intoxicating burst of fervent enthusiasm for the destiny of the British race, an explosive expression of a divinely ordained British mission to rule the world.

Within the space of twenty years and two bloody wars, men were breathing a different kind of air, full of socialism, Bolshevism, nationalism, change and revolution. It was an air which proved fatal to the Empire. It took less than seventy years for the sun to set for ever on that seemingly imperishable realm. The great Imperial structure, with its complex balance of elements: good and bad, blood and sacrifice, profit and glory, nobility and snobbery, aspiration and dedication, had crumbled into nothingness. Even the last melancholy echoes of the durbar trumpets had melted into silence, the long, wearying silence of mediocrity.

Because the British Empire has ceased to exist and because the attitudes it most prized are currently unfashionable, a whole genre of films, constituting what I have called the Cinema of Empire, has remained undefined and unexplored. In this section, I propose to make a preliminary exploration and lay down some tentative guide-lines for future study.

By the Cinema of Empire, I mean not simply films which are set in the territories of the British Empire but films which detail the attitudes, ideals and myths of British Imperialism. Films which fall geographically within the boundaries of the Empire, such as Australian ‘Westerns’, fall spiritually outside the limits of the genre.

I shall begin by establishing, from an examination of politics and literature, what precisely British Imperialism was believed to stand for. What it actually stood for and how it was really created is unimportant for this study. What is important, as with all myths, is what it was believed to stand for and what it meant to its adherents.

In going on to analyse the myth, I shall discuss the Imperial archetype and the public school code, which sustained him, a discussion that necessarily involves examining films which have no connection with the actual, physical entity of the British Empire. I shall look at the attributes of Englishness, the idea of the white man’s burden, the hierarchic structure of society and of the armed forces and the Imperial pantheon of gods and heroes. I shall end with an examination of the racial base upon which the Empire was constructed and its responses to the different categories of native: the worthy opponent, the faithful servant, the rootless half-caste and the educated agitator.

One of the major contributions of the cinema to the dissemination of Imperial ideas was to give glamorous celluloid life to the great folk myths of Empire. The archetypal Empire builders, who had hitherto been faceless, were clothed in the flesh and features of the great stars. Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks and Cary Grant lent their special magic to the Imperial cause, imbuing with their own charisma the key images: the square-jawed, pipe-smoking, solar-topeed English sahib, standing on a rampart at the mouth of the Khyber and shading his eyes as he scans the hazy horizon for evidence of Afridi restlessness; and the square-jawed, pipe-smoking, gold-braided naval officer, pacing the bridge of one of Her Majesty’s ships and shading his eyes as he gazes through the salt spray for evidence of enemy surface raiders. These images are what the cinema of Empire is all about, crystallizing an ideal figure, the ideal striven after and imitated by the exponents of the myth of British Imperialism.

It is possible to discern two separate cycles of Imperial films, both in British and American cinema. The first cycle comes in the 1930s when the Empire is still flourishing and produces the classic expositions of the Imperial idea. In Britain Alexander Korda produces a memorable Imperial trilogy (Sanders of the River, The Four Feathers, The Drum) and in Hollywood almost every major studio contributes an Imperial epic to the cycle inaugurated by Lives of a Bengal Lancer in 1935.

A question often asked and not yet satisfactorily answered is: What was the fascination of such a subject as the British Empire for the United States, which had after all seceded from that concern in 1776? Several answers suggest themselves. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, the far-flung African and Indian outposts of the Empire fulfilled the thirties’ desire for exotic and romantic escapism, just as the South Seas, Shangri-la and Ruritania did. Secondly, there was the commercial factor. Film-making was primarily an industry. Its principal aim was to make money and so film companies cashed in on any success with imitations. It was the runaway success of Paramount’s Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) that directly prompted the decision of Warner Bros to film Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), with most of the action taking place in India. Other major studios followed suit, notably 20th Century-Fox with Wee Willie Winkie, Four Men and a Prayer and Clive of India.

The Imperial ideological content is partly to be explained by straight imitation of the prototype Bengal Lancer. Storm Over Bengal (1938), for instance, followed the prototype so closely that it even utilized three members of the cast of the prototype (Richard Cromwell, Douglass Dumbrille and Colin Tapley). It is also partly to be explained by the choice of subject material and scriptwriters. The scripts tend to be the work of Englishmen, such as John L. Balderston, W. P. Lipscomb and Barré Lyndon, and the inspiration, either direct (as in Wee Willie Winkie and Gunga Din) or indirect, is Kipling, whose ideas inform the whole body of Imperial films.

Few American directors returned more than once to British Imperial themes and there was no director who worked in them with the consistency that Ford or Capra worked in populist themes. This suggests that the genre of films of Empire was a studio-created genre and the ideas were those of the writers and not of the directors. Ford, who, being Irish, profoundly disliked the British Empire, did in fact make three Imperial films (Wee Willie Winkie, King of the Khyber Rifles and Four Men and a Prayer) but his feelings towards them seem to be reflected in his comment on the latter: ‘I just didn’t like the story or anything else about it, so it was just a job of work.’¹

The fact that the studios continued to make Imperial films throughout the thirties indicates that there was a market for them and Americans do seem to have responded to Britain’s folk myths in the same way that Britain responded to America’s, the Westerns. There is in fact an area of cross-reference between the two genres. Physically, the Imperial archetype resembles the classic Westerner: tall, thin, phlegmatic. Gary Cooper, one of the greatest of all Western stars, made two significant contributions to the Imperial genre: Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) and Beau Geste (1939). While two notable films of Empire were actually remade as Westerns. Gunga Din (1939) became Sergeants Three (1961) with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Peter Lawford as U.S. Cavalry sergeants and Sammy Davis Jr as a Negro Gunga Din; and Four Men and a Prayer (1938) became Fury at Furnace Creek (1948) with budgetary considerations reducing the four men to two — but keeping the same prayer.

Ideologically, American films of Empire were little different from British films of Empire. The one major difference seems to have been the unusual preponderance of Canadians who turn up in the British Imperial service, a device necessary to explain away the American accents of members of the cast. This went so far in Bengal Lancer as to give the British colonel an estranged American wife in order to explain the broad Yankee accent of his son, who claimed to be straight from Sandhurst, and to make the star Gary Cooper ‘a Scotch Canadian’.

To what extent Hollywood was consciously propagandizing for the British Empire in the thirties is difficult to say. Britain undoubtedly was. Korda’s Imperial films were an expression of his personal devotion to the British Empire, symbolized by the flying of the Union Jack at Denham Studios and his legendary comment when he received his naturalization as a British citizen: ‘Now we’ll show the bloody foreigners.’ A similar patriotic feeling lay behind the Imperial films produced during Michael Balcon’s regime at Gaumont British (Rhodes of Africa, King Solomon’s Mines, The Great Barrier) and Herbert Wilcox’s Queen Victoria films, a long cherished project of his. Sixty Glorious Years (1938), the second of them, was scripted by Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office, who declared to Wilcox: ‘You’ve made a film that is a warm tribute to the British Empire and at a time when the first step has been shamefully taken to bring about its disintegration.’² The Admiralty gave official backing to Our Fighting Navy (1937) and the War Office to O.H.M.S. (1936) in order to publicize the peace-time activities of the Armed Forces.

But although Hitler regarded Bengal Lancer as a valuable piece of propaganda for the British Empire and said so in a comment reported by the trade papers,³ it is difficult to see Paramount regarding it as more than a bang-up action picture for their rising star, Gary Cooper. As the European situation worsened, however, a conscious propaganda content did creep in. Brian Connell recalls that in the late thirties Douglas Fairbanks, a noted Anglophile, consciously undertook a series of roles in pro-British Empire films (Gunga Din, The Sun Never Sets, Safari), in the latter two of which the villains are Fascists.⁴ Some newspapers in the United States went so far as to protest at the pro-British slant of these films.

Ironically it was the war which killed the first cycle of Imperial films. The film of Empire bowed out in 1940 with The Sun Never Sets being followed by the prophetically titled Sundown. Both films showed the British Empire standing for values opposed to those of their Nazi villains. There was pro-British propaganda in abundance during the war. History was re-written to give it an anti-Nazi slant in films like Lady Hamilton (1941) and Young Mr. Pitt (1942). Hollywood produced a succession of tributes to the embattled and beleaguered British: Mrs. Miniver (1942), The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), and Forever and a Day (1943). The latter, directed by a syndicate of directors convened by Cedric Hardwicke and featuring a host of British stars, was deliberately designed as a tribute to the British spirit. Its profits went to the aid of the British Red Cross.

But films lauding the virtues of British Imperialism ceased, and this seems to have been deliberate policy. This is suggested by the fate of the proposed film version of Kim. In 1942, M.G.M. planned to film Kipling’s classic novel with Mickey Rooney, Conrad Veidt and Basil Rathbone. But the plan was shelved at the suggestion of the Office of War Information, who were afraid that a film about the glories of the Raj might offend India at a time when her co-operation was needed in turning back the tide of the Japanese advance.⁵ Their fears were perhaps well-founded for there had been riots in Indian cities when Korda’s The Drum was shown. Another indication of the change is to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Frontmatter
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Cinema of Empire
• Part 2 The Cinema of Populism
• Part 3 The Cinema of National Socialism
• Conclusions
• Appendix: Filmographies
• Select Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Film Titles