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AT THE PICTURES: THE STORIES BEHIND THE SCENES

BISH! BASH! BOSCH!

Nestled in the Chiltern Hills, Turville is a tiny hamlet boasting the sort of chocolate box looks that have film location scouts swooning. To that end, its sixteenth-century stone cottages have been the backdrop to scores of TV dramas and feature films such as I Capture the Castle and The Vicar of Dibley (its church, Saint Barnabus, is actually Turville’s St Mary the Virgin). The hamlet is cinematic shorthand for idyllic, pastoral England; a place where nothing changes, where time appears to have slowed. An inspired choice, then, for the location of the most shocking British film of the Second World War, a film intended as a rude wake-up for the nation.

Went the Day Well? was a British box office hit, released late in 1942. By the standards of the time, it was an extraordinarily graphic depiction of what might happen following a Nazi invasion of Britain. Some scenes – including a housewife attacking a man with an axe – still pack a punch today. Ealing Films, more famous for their comedies, produced the film and shot it on location at Turville, renamed as Bramley End.

The film tells the story of how a platoon of Nazi paratroopers is sent to soften things up ahead of a full-scale invasion of the UK. In June 1940, Germany really had drawn up plans to invade Britain, codenamed Operation Sea Lion. Went the Day Well? was deliberately intended to warn the UK populace that an invasion remained a possibility and that they must stay forever vigilant. It managed to deliver its warning positively and without scaremongering.

In the film, the invasion advance guard arrive mob-handed at Bramley End, disguised as British soldiers. Stationing themselves in the village, they’re warmly greeted by the unwitting locals (mainly women and children). The soldiers are especially welcomed, and aided, by the local squire – a Nazi insider who knows their real identity. Soon, however, the women of the village begin to note that all is not as it seems about these Tommies. A blink or you’ll miss it clue is the way that some of the squaddies write their numbers – in the Continental way, with a cross through the stem of a 7. Later, one of the soldiers publicly manhandles one of the kids. But what actually betrays the platoon is, of all things, a bar of chocolate.

‘Schokolade? Funny sort of way to spell chocolate,’ says a village boy on inspecting the legend stamped into the unwrapped bar. ‘Yes,’ chuckles his mother, ‘that’s the German spelling of…’ The camera holds on her face as the penny slowly drops.

Die katze is now out of the bag, so the Nazis must now brutally suppress the villagers before anyone can escape and warn the real British army based some miles away. The women, children and pensioners of the village manage to mobilise and fight back, the action concluding at the manor house with a horrific shoot-out that could go either way.

Throughout the conflict, the Nazis remain in British khaki uniforms. Had the events depicted really have taken place, the soldiers would have been contravening both the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions. Both state that it’s legal for soldiers to be disguised in their enemy’s uniform, but add that it’s a war crime to go into combat without first removing that uniform and replacing it with their own.

Some in authority worried that the film would cause panic – especially as Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti drew on his background in documentary filmmaking to give parts of the film an almost fly-on-the-wall edge. Still, with average weekly cinema audiences of 19 million in 1939 – growing to more than 30 million by 1945 – that was a lot of civilians being alerted to the fact that any moment they might be called on to fight German soldiers, tooth and claw, outside Lyon’s Corner House on the High Street.

As it turned out, the message of Went the Day Well? – to practice vigilance at all times – fell by the wayside. The threat of Operation Sea Lion had significantly waned by the time the film was released. Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union – starting with Operation Barbarossa – took precedence and was proving to be a costly mistake.

The film, though, remains a fascinating document of the times, and still has the power to shock. It was to prove the catalyst for many British films and books that dealt with the question of what would happen if the Nazis had invaded.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks did it with songs in 1971 (see page 64), but the1976 blockbuster The Eagle Has Landed is, to all intents and purposes, a remake of Went the Day Well? with a bigger budget and a couple of plot differences. Filmed at the beautiful village of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, it’s the story of German soldiers, led by Michael Caine, who are not an invasion force but simply ordinary squaddies (most definitely not Nazis) sent on a regular suicide mission to kidnap Churchill. They stick to the Geneva Conventions by removing their Polish uniforms when one of their number dies after saving a child caught in a waterwheel.

Len Deighton’s alternative history novel SS-GB took the invasion to London and is a far less plucky – and more historically accurate – vision. The south of Britain is now under the jackboot, the rest of the nation will surely follow – and the round-ups have started. The stark choice is: collaborate, or die.

McCARTHY’S CONTRIBUTION TO BRITISH CINEMA

In 1973 filmmaker Carl Foreman was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay Young Winston, the story of one of the great figures of the twentieth century: Winston Churchill. Given a CBE for services to the film industry, it symbolised his status as British cinema aristocracy. Not bad for a homesick American who had been exiled from Hollywood 20 years earlier, and had his American passport revoked.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, America was in the grip of an anti-communist witch-hunt lead by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Suspected communists faced the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), including leading names in Hollywood like Carl Foreman.

Foreman had been a member of the Communist Party in his youth but had left in 1941. Nonetheless the Committee ordered him to name other party members. He refused. That meant that he was blacklisted in Hollywood and his film career was over.

At the time he was working on High Noon, the powerful 1952 western about a town’s principled lawman forced to face a bloodthirsty gang, alone. The film would receive seven Oscar nominations (winning four, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper) and is generally regarded among critics and audiences alike as one of the greatest films ever made. Many can identify with the dilemma at the centre of the film on some level, but Foreman, who wrote it, also lived it. Says film critic Matthew Sweet:

High Noon is in a way a portrait of the turmoil in Carl Foreman’s life at that moment. Gary Cooper is the marshal of a town under threat from the imminent arrival of a gang of killers. He’s desperately trying to recruit deputies who’ll help him defend the town. He goes to the church and he discovers that the population gathered there, who he has protected in the last few years, don’t really want to help him. So this is a film about your friends not standing by you.

Some in Hollywood saw a message in High Noon they didn’t like. John Wayne called it the most ‘un-American thing’ he had ever seen. Matthew explains, ‘John Wayne looked at the last scene in the picture, where Gary Cooper throws down his marshal’s badge into the dust, and he saw that as a symbolic rejection of American values. It was an act too far for him.’

Facing the moral quandary of naming names in front of HUAC, Foreman left the USA in 1952. He headed for London to try and set up as a scriptwriter – but with a very heavy heart, says his son Jonathan Foreman.

He very much felt that he had been driven out. He knew, if he’d stayed, he wouldn’t be able to work at all. There he had been, in America, the sort of Quentin Tarrantino of his time, hugely successful, especially after High Noon, and then suddenly it was all taken away.

Even in Britain, the blacklisting meant he had to write under pseudonyms. When he co-wrote another cinematic classic, The Bridge On The River Kwai, his name was left off the credits. Foreman’s screenplay was based on the novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï, which was written by French author Pierre Boulle. In spite of his amused admission that he couldn’t even speak English, Boulle took the screenwriting credit so that Carl could avoid the blacklist.

Foreman’s most ambitious film was the epic The Guns of Navarone about an Allied plot to blow up a German fortress. The film is packed with gung-ho action and adventure, and an outstanding turn by the English actor David Niven. But like High Noon, Foreman was writing on a number of levels, says Matthew Sweet:

Essentially it’s an antiwar picture. It has all the explosions, it has all those action sequences, but when the cast discovers that the munitions they are going to use to blow up the super-guns have been sabotaged they question the whole point of the mission and the film turns into a kind of play about the rights and wrongs of war.

Winston Churchill didn’t notice the subtle underlying message. He saw the film and loved it enough to request a meeting with Foreman. The main topic of conversation? How to turn Winston’s early life into an action movie. It would certainly be an exciting film but Foreman had a concern, says his son John.

He said to Churchill, ‘You know I’ve had these political problems back in America, which is why I came here?’ and Churchill sort of basically said, ‘Oh my dear boy, don’t worry about that, I don’t care what a man believed when he was a boy, all I care about is if can he do the job.’

Churchill expected to see the finished film in a matter of months, as Carl Foreman related in a 1970s BBC documentary:

So he said, ‘You’ll have it finished in two or three months, I suppose’ and I said, ‘No, sir, two or three years would be more like it.’ ‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘When we decided on opening a second front in Normandy it didn’t take us that long.’ I said, ‘Yes, you had more money.’

The film Young Winston didn’t come out until 1972 – six years after Churchill’s death – but Foreman was proud of it, calling it his love letter to England.

As the blacklist faded into insignificance, Foreman returned to work in America in 1975. Out with his kids he had a chance encounter with a former friend and fierce critic, remembers John. ‘My father took my sister and I, walked us over to his table and John Wayne stood up, he was an enormous man, and they shook hands. It was weird… but it was a sign that things really were over.’ Foreman was back where he felt he truly belonged. But, says Matthew Sweet, the British, especially the film business, benefitted hugely from his exile. ‘I think that we should be proud that he worked here because if he had stayed in America he would have been condemned to silence.’

Carl Foreman died in Hollywood in 1984 aged 69 – a unique American who made some remarkably British films.

BRITAIN IN A SPIN

It had next to no budget, took six weeks to shoot on cheap 16 mm film and its controversial plot destined it to a graveyard slot on Channel 4. But when the TV play My Beautiful Laundrette was shown at the 1985 Edinburgh TV festival, the reaction to it was so rapturous that it was transferred to 35 mm and shown in cinemas. Now it was a proper film, and the next thing the cast and crew knew, it had received a nomination for an Oscar – Best Original Screenplay.

Set in the early 1980s and in a rundown corner of London, Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) is a young British Pakistani in thrall to the Thatcherite dream of making money and being judged on your merits, not your background. He persuades his wheeler-dealer uncle (Sayeed Jaffrey) to hand over the keys to a rundown launderette. Omar sees a bright future in soap suds and plans to turn the mundane task of doing a wash and spin into a Las Vegas-like experience.

But as his launderette plans get spinning, his own dirty linen is about to be publicly aired. Omar’s gay, from an ultra-conservative Muslim background and his wedding is being arranged. He’s attacked by a racist gang, the leader of whom is his former lover, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis). It’s a little awkward, but eventually the boys resume their relationship and realise the dream of the über-laundromat together, but racism, Omar’s Muslim heritage and his impending arranged marriage all threaten to compromise their success. Will it all come out in the wash?

Written by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette is a bittersweet and very funny observation of life in the entrepreneur economy of the 1980s. The story was partially autobiographical, Omar’s dilemma being familiar to many first-generation British born Muslims who found it difficult – and dangerous – to balance their Western aspirations with what their immigrant parents expected of them. Gordon Warnecke, who played Omar, explains,

I was fresh out of drama school and this was my first film. It tackled all the stereotypes of the time with real grit and humour, something I was really interested in doing, so this was a project I just had to be involved in. Thatcherite economics were key to Laundrette, and they were personal to me. We were part of the ‘do it yourself’ generation’, surrounded by the spirit of free enterprise. But the film asks how far you can go before you find yourself torn between two cultures.

That Omar is gay – and largely unapologetically so, in private at least – caused consternation among the Asian Muslim community worldwide, for whom the issue of homosexuality is, by and large, taboo.

Director Stephen Frears was hooked immediately by what the film had to say about Britain in the 1980s.

I read the script and just had to meet Hanif Kureishi. His mother was White British and his father was from Pakistan, so he lived and observed both cultures simultaneously. I mean, I was just white and middle class, so learning from him about that life was really eye-opening. I thought the critique of Mrs Thatcher was really the most important thing, I didn’t notice that there were gay themes that were going to echo around the world.

But My Beautiful Laundrette doesn’t preach, doesn’t try to ‘tick boxes’ and has a magic ‘common touch’, which appealed to a wide audience. And Omar is constantly faced with the dilemma of whether he can eat the cake he has.

Souad Faress played Cherry, the manipulative Uncle Salim’s wife, who questions where Omar’s true identity lies. In the film she cries, ‘I’m sick of hearing about these in-betweens, people should make up their mind about where they are!’ Looking back, Souad says:

I loved the script. Cherry’s view is, ‘Right, you have to side with us or side with them.’ There’s degrees of racism on both sides, but it made people at least look at the issues how they really are. One thing that seemed to bewilder people was that the immigrant family, the Pakistani family, were so aspirational. They were a wealthy middle class family, but people just didn’t equate immigrants with success, yet it has been proven over and over and over that in Britain’s social history immigrants are very aspirational.

Powders – the name of the Launderette in the film – was on Wilcox Road in Vauxhall, south London. Today it’s a Portuguese restaurant.

CUSHING THE BLOW – WHEN DR WHO BOMBED WITH THE FANS

In 1965, Doctor Who hit the big screen in eye-popping widescreen and retina-burning Technicolor, with Peter Cushing in the titular role. Dr. Who and the Daleks followed very closely the plot of ‘The Daleks’, the first, (black-and-white) encounter between the TV Doctor, played by William Hartnell, and the psychopathic pepperpots.

A sequel, Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150AD, landed on screen less than a year later. Cushing again starred as Dr Who in the story that was, also again, a remake of a Doctor Who TV serial originally starring Hartnell. In both films, Cushing travels through time and space with three companions: his granddaughters, played by Roberta Tovey and Jill Curzon (the 1961 Women’s Clay Pigeon shooting world champion, no less), and a companion who has stumbled on the Tardis by mistake. In the first film, this was Roy Castle; in the second, it was Bernard Cribbins, who would later play a significant role in the rebooted TV show during David Tennant’s tenure.

The films were rushed out to cash in on the craze for all things Dalek that had swept the nation since their TV debut. Amicus, the producers, bought the rights to adapt the stories and characters from the BBC for £500. (The rights were limited, which explains why the famously spooky theme from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – composed by Delia Derbyshire – is absent from the films and replaced by a racy, but rather ordinary, orchestral score). Terry Nation, the television writer who came up with the Daleks, had held on to the rights of his creation and was free to exploit his weaponised bollards with whomsoever he wanted. This is the reason the Daleks were also spun off into comic scripts that didn’t feature Doctor Who characters.

In order to part-finance the second film, Amicus struck a £50,000 deal with Quaker Oats. In spite of being levelled by Dalek death rays, London is completely riddled with product placement: the huge billboard posters prominently displayed in the film suggest that in the far-flung future, the British eat nothing but, – surprise, surprise – Quaker’s Sugar-Puffs.

The sets in both films are impressive, especially the post-Dalek-induced apocalypse scenes set in London. The Daleks – which, who knew cancelled, come in a variety of colours denoting rank – look twice as menacing in vivid colour. It’s only a shame the proposed Dalek flame-throwers were nixed at the last minute in case they gave kids nightmares – or the wrong sort of inspiration for their homemade versions. Instead the Daleks in both films fire deadly gas (actually carbon dioxide from fire extinguishers).

The distinctive flying saucer in which the Daleks travelled to London – their evil plan to remove the Earth’s core via a huge mine in, of course, the suburb of Shepperton – was dusted down and recycled three years later for the utterly terrible British sci-fi film The Body Stealers. That film starred Neil Connery – brother of Sean – and was probably responsible for his almost total screen obscurity since.

It has to be said, the Dalek films are far from classics – even the legend Peter Cushing delivers a ropey turn – but they do have a lot of charm and they don’t even approach the awfulness of the TV Doctor Who of the mid to late 1980s. However both films drive ‘true’ Doctor Who fans to despair because – they say – Peter Cushing is an imposter. And it’s true, the films took a lot of liberties with the Doctor Who legend.

If you weren’t familiar with the TV show in the 60s – if you were American, say – you’d be flummoxed by the backstory, so the producers understandably simplified it for the widest possible audience. What was unforgivable for fans, however, is that Peter Cushing played a dotty human grandad who was an inventor not a Time Lord and whose surname was, actually, ‘Who’. The true Doctor is extraterrestrial and nobody knows his name. The suffix ‘Who’ is applied by the people he encounters, as in ‘Who are you?’ That’s the reason why you never see Peter Cushing included in the canonical lineup. You could argue that this all seems a bit churlish – after all, this is Peter Cushing we’re talking about, one of the true greats of cult British films and also a cast member of the original Star Wars (and recently reanimated by CGI for Rogue One). However, there are some things in the universe you tinker with at your peril – and chief among them is the Doctor Who backstory!

ANY SIMILARITIES TO MARY POPPINS ARE PURELY COINCIDENTAL. HONEST!

An apprentice witch, a trio of cockney urchins and a cowardly spiv search for the missing component to a magic spell useful for thwarting the Nazi invasion of Britain. Not a recently released wartime MI5 file, unfortunately, but the plot of Disney’s ballsy, brash comedy-musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks, tipped at the time to become an absolute classic of the studio’s canon.

It had all the makings of one: a stellar cast that included Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, Roddy McDowall and Bruce Forsyth; a cracking set of songs by the Sherman Brothers; impressive special effects and animation sequences; classic baddies (in this case, the German Army); and orphans. It’s a lovely, light-hearted fantasy worthy of Christmas classic status. So why did it fail to make back its productions costs?

Partly, perhaps, because it was so similar to Mary Poppins that the two merged in the consciousness of audiences. It featured the same star – David Tomlinson, Disney’s go-to English twit; the same London setting; the same crew; similar themes (families are weird but they’re all we’ve got); and stylistically very similar songs because they were written by the same songwriting team. Standout number ‘Substitutiary Locomotion’ is basically a rewrite of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, and ‘Portobello Road’ could have been in either film and few would notice the difference. In fact, another of its showstoppers – ‘The Beautiful Briny’ – had been written for Mary Poppins but was dropped at the last moment. In Bedknobs it was simply revoiced for a frantic live action animated sequence that looked like a continuation of the one in… Mary Poppins.

The film was released in 1971, a week prior to the death of Roy Disney, who had been in charge of the magic castle since his brother Walt died in 1966.

That’s not to suggest that the film’s lack of success played a part in his death – it opened strongly and was five times Oscar-nominated – but Roy’s eye not being on the ball might explain why the film reached the theatres at an overindulgent (and hardly child-friendly) three hours long. A second release was cut to a more endurable two hours and then again to 90 minutes – with all but two of its songs excised.

Bedknobs was largely studio shot in California, including, sadly, the tremendous song and dance number ‘Portobello Road’. There were, however, significant location scenes filmed at Corfe Castle and the surrounding village in Dorset. The three child stars were Roy Snart, now a software manager in Basingstoke; Ian Weighill, now a train driver; and Cindy O’Callaghan, last seen in EastEnders as Andrea Price and now a child therapist.

‘My overriding memory is how well the three of us kids got on,’ says Cindy, sitting down for a cup of tea with Ian and Roy for the first time in nearly fifty years. ‘I don’t remember any of us, however young we were, being naughty. It was a really professional engagement and Angela sort of set the tone. We upped our game because of her, she was very much an inspiration for me.’ None of the kids could sing or dance when they were cast for an all-singing, all-dancing musical and Angela Lansbury’s motherly encouragement could only go so far. ‘Oh I was terrible, I was terrible then and an appalling singer now,’ groans Roy, shaking his head. Ian concurs: ‘I was a thirteen-year-old English boy, and I had to dance throughout the “Substitutiary Locomotion” song.’

During the animated sequence, the kids had no idea what was going on at all on what, to them, was a completely empty sound stage. ‘All we could do was listen to the crew,’ remembers Roy. ‘They’d shout out, “There’s a fish right next to you. Now talk to the fish!”’ The overall experience, though, they all agree, was magic. In one instance literally. ‘We did this one scene with the brass bed knob. We were all gathered around it and it turned pink, it was amazing.’ Cindy was equally impressed, ‘I remember! I still wonder how they did that, don’t you?’ Ray thinks he knows: ‘It’s easy, it’s just Disney magic, isn’t it?’