Best five films from British Directors (Part One A to J)

I have never seen it but it is available in the Public Domain on a free download, so I will give it a try. I like Romney Marsh and once accompanied a friend to visit Derek Jarman who had a cottage there.

Googie Withers stars in two of my all-time favorite movies:
It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Night and the City (1950) with its wonderful London settings.

I have just noticed that it was Michael Powell who gave her her first leading role when she was a very green extra.

I always thought she was one of your lot, but I now see she first moved to Australia at the ripe old age of 42. Only married once (to John McCallum, whom she met while making "Joanna Godden" ) and stayed together for 62 years until his death.

She was no great looker (too hard-faced) but picked some good roles. Would she have had more had she stayed in England?

Was it a remake of this classic?

Ah! The Good Old Days some of our regular posters here are so keen to return to.

I think you mean Nigel Cole, a useful addition to our list. He also directed Calendar Girls (2003). I think his best film is Made in Dagenham (2010).

Henry Cole was the distinguished director of the Kathy Lloyd Kit Off Special (1999). I am sure a respectable person like you did not mean him.

Sorry to be so slow getting back to you on this one, manfromplanetx, but I have been busy reading my hate mail here. 

Some useful additions to our list:

(Ken Annakin I have already discussed above).

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The Interrupted Journey (1949) was the first and best of nine low budget crime movies Daniel Birt directed from 1949 to 1956. More unusual were two films he made in 1948, both with scripts co-written by none other than poet DylanThomas. I know nothing about the first, The Three Weird Sisters (1948), which was set in Wales, but it sounds a bit arty. 

No Room at the Inn (1948) is a different story. It was a hard-hitting exposure of child abuse and spares neither the comfortable middle-class, the church, or the State (then, of course the nearest to a socialist state the UK has experienced). It is thus a precursor of the anti-establishment "kitchen sink" social realist dramas of the British New Wave in the 1960s, though it does have a too convenient melodramatic ending in which good triumphs and the villainess gets her just desserts. She is Freda Jackson in her best role, and she is amply supported by Joan Dowling (then 20) playing a teenage temptress who does what she has to to survive. She had made her name in the stage play version. Six years later she committed suicide.

Apparently the film is lost in copyright issues and can only be viewed at the BFI, London. Let's hope a decent version is released on DVD one day. It made a hell of an impression on yours truly as a eight-year-old. Freda Jackson was terrifying, like a cross between a fairy-tale witch and the evil alcoholic governess in Uncle Silas.

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John Gilling I know nothing about. He had a long and prolific career including a late run of Hammer Horrors. Are any of his films worth seeking out?

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Ken Hughes is on a different level. Not because he ever made a really outstanding film, but because he made a number of very good ones.

Wide Boy (1952) was his first and perhaps the only one in which perennial spiv and supporting actor Sydney Tafler played the lead, and very good he is. It is a blend of noir and social observation. IMDb states that it cost 7000 quid to make (about US$9000). Worth a lot more then, of course, but even so it makes you wonder about modern studios.

The Blazing Caravan (1954) was one of the Edgar Lustgarten program fillers, only 32 mins long. They were bottom of the barrel stuff. My brother worked briefly in props and continuity but soon lost his job because they did not have time or money to worry about continuity. The hero would jump into a Ford in broad daylight, drive round the corner and get out of an Austin in total darkness. But this one is a little gem, and I saw it again at the National Film Theatre decades later.

Other watchable Ken Hughes films were:
-- Joe MacBeth (1955)
-- Wicked as They Come (1956) a noir with Arlene Dahl made in my home town. When the studios folded my father bought the premises to store sanitary ware and paint cans.
-- The Long Haul (1957) another BritNoir with the unlikely pairing of Victor Mature and Diana Dors. These were the years when many British films were fronted by an American "star", usually B-list or past their glory years (but famous enough to cause a stir in our suburban town).

Hughes best film was The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960). I reckon the best of the Wilde biopics, thanks to the wonderful Peter Finch as Oscar. It had the great misfortune to appear at the same time as Gregory Ratoff's Oscar Wilde (1960) starring Robert Morley, which had a bigger budget and was heavily promoted. The latter is not bad, but not as subtle as the Finch movie.

Hughes followed with The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963) to cash in on the evanescent popularity of Anthony Newley.

The only good film he made thereafter was Cromwell (1970), a decent effort but I hope not the last word on the godfather of English (and therefore American) democracy.

Hughes had a hit with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). He later found it as embarrassing as I do, though Robert Helpmann as the Child Catcher is outstanding.

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Lawrence Huntington was directing from the start of talkies to 1966, by when his way of making pictures was really on its way out.

His best films were made in the late forties, which is beginning to look like Britain's Golden Age of Cinema, Sadly, few Brits then appreciated what we had.

I hope to write about The Upturned Glass (1947) in my Public Domain thread but I need to watch it again first to see if I am reading more into it than is really there. It is odd in structure and moral stance but I am not sure if that was intentional or the result of money and production problems.

The previous year he made Wanted for Murder (1946). For once, I think the American re-titling "A Voice in the Night" is better, less generic. And it is the name of the theme song, too. It stars one of my all-time favorite actors, Eric (The Glue Man) Portman. In Daybreak (1948) he plays a hangman. Here he plays the grandson of a hangman and it affects the plot (to put it mildly). The consensus is that the acting and writing are better than a rather absurd plot and there are some great London settings.

Then came:

-- When the Bough Breaks (1947) a weepie

-- Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1948) Mr Chips territory

-- Man on the Run (1949) a good story which might have been better with someone other than the rather bland Derek Farr in the lead

-- The Franchise Affair (1951) a good film but it loses some of the quirkiness of Tey's famous novel.

And he has sizable parts in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951).

Loach and Vaughn should be in British Directors (Part Two K to Z)

Duncan Jones is not my darling. He is briefly discussed in the thread above.