For almost a decade from the 1940s through to the 1950s a group of critically scorned British films proved to be the box-office hits of their day. High-flung over-wrought costume melodramas. Ingredients were basic: passion, romance, sadism, heroism and plenty of sex. Characters were forceful: dominant women, devoted lovers and violent, cold-hearted husbands. They arrived on screens at a time when Britain was entrenched in a desperate World War and longed for release.
The majority of the films were made by the productive and innovative Gainsborough Studios, located in Islington, North London. The company was established in the late 1920s by Michael Balcon and had been responsible for some of the most interesting films of' the 1930s including the lavish musical “Chu Chin Chow”, early Carol Reed efforts such as “Bank Holiday”, the Will Hay comedies, and Hitchcock's early British thrillers, “The Lady Vanishes” and “Young and Innocent”. However, it was upon the succession to administrative power of Edward Black and Maurice Ostrer that change was made.
Almost by accident, the rights to the novel 'The Man In Grey' was acquired and things were never to be the same. Perhaps success was the family atmosphere which the small studio was able to foster and sustain. On each film it’s essentially the same key technicians behind the camera, and the same regular stars and supporting cast in front. Though it was not all by design: wartime meant personnel was at a minimum and everyone was pitching in to help, a position further accentuated by relatively small budgets, and the necessity for productions to overlap.
Yet despite the constraints of money and manpower, one of the most impressive features of these films is a lush, dream-like veneer. Uniformly stunning to watch, they combine stark set design with stylish camerawork and opulent costumes to conjure up a distinctly sensual atmosphere, one that is deliberately unrealistic and overtly theatrical (indeed the costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden graduated from West End theatre). The look is never historically accurate, retaining modern influences so that the films seem to exist in some curious time warp. It lends them an ageless quality. None of which is to claim that the films need to be regarded as definitive cinematic masterpieces, simply that they should not be automatically dismissed, and that they deserve to be re-assessed as the entertainments their makers meant them to be.
Mason, Granger, Lockwood and Calvert were the four cornerstones of the films continued appeal. Indeed, their first film together, “The Man in Grey” (1943), immediately catapulted them to stardom. In terms of style, it perhaps lacks the panache of the later productions, but the involved, twisting narrative and emotional conflicts (characters are motivated through escalating degrees of lust, jealousy and pride) more than compensate. During the actual shooting, director Leslie Arliss said in an interview: ‘The background doesn't matter, it's the people you have in the foreground I want to find a human story about real people. I am not afraid of sentiment and am working to overcome shyness and to put unashamed feelings on the screen rather than to depend on speed or action.’ Little could he know, though, how phenomenally popular the results would be: audiences quickly helped it become the most financially successful film of the War.
The story involves the unhappy marriage of Clarissa (Phyllis Calvert.) and Lord Rohan (James Mason), both of whom are in love with other people: Calvert with an actor, Rokeby (Stewart Granger) and Mason with the cunning, vengeful Hesther (Margaret Lockwood). When Calvert decides that loyalty to the state of marriage supersedes her own feelings and refuses to elope with Granger, it all builds to a shattering climax, as Calvert is murdered by Lockwood who is in turn thrashed to death by Mason.
At the time cinemas were still packed with the heroics of British and American war movies, and only the determined, astute Maurice Ostrer believed he had a potentially hot property with Lady Eleanor Smith's novel. It was eventually made at a disused factory in Islington which had been transformed into Gainsborough's two sound stages out. The budget of £95,000 was one-third less than the average British production in 1943. It was released in August of that year and by the beginning of 1944 fan magazines were unanimous in bestowing on it Best Film awards.
Public reaction was particularly strong for Mason and Lockwood, although neither had originally intended to be in it: Margaret Lockwood said she was simply unprepared for such a nasty character, but finally realized it was too good a part; while James Mason had been originally cast in Granger's role, with Eric Portman set to portray Rohan, ‘the man in grey’.
The greatest uproar caused by the film came from the final confrontation scene, when Mason sadistically kills Lockwood with a whip. It created a whirlpool of outraged / excited letters from female fans convinced that Mason was like that in real life: ‘Are you really like that?’ ‘Do you treat your wife in the same way?' In the end the actor struck back and wrote a short article for the magazine Lilliput entitled ‘YES, I beat my wife’.
The whipping sequence is pure Gainsborough: beautiful people pictured in a glorious Regency setting, where emotions are liable to (and do) explode into sexual violence at any moment.
