Devil Girl from Mars (1954)

Posted on July 14, 2014January 30, 2018 by James

Thirteen years before Mars Needs Women, the red planet was apparently running drastically low on the other sex. To balance the numbers, a female Martian named Nyah – clad in black leather and accompanied by a giant robot – travels to earth on a mission to round-up suitable males for breeding…

This is the premise of Devil Girl from Mars (David Macdonald, 1954), a curious movie that certainly fits the ‘accidentally hilarious’ category, but also one that possesses some unusual quirks which set it apart from other science fiction B-movies of the decade. Distinctly British in its approach and execution, Devil Girl from Mars is played with a seriousness that contrasts starkly with its low-budget effects and stage set.

The basic concept was by no means unique, for the early 1950s saw a wave of Hollywood movies about alien intruders, including The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Man from Planet X (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953) and The War of the Worlds (1953.) Without denying that these films may have had some influence, Devil Girl from Mars was a British production and feels very different from the American science-fiction movies it might have imitated. There are elements of the ‘country house mystery’ in the way disparate characters are drawn to the remote inn, a concern for matters like social class, moral behaviour, justice and redemption – plus a very British appreciation for tea and other beverages. Some of these elements betray the film’s radio play origins, although I have been unable as yet to trace any broadcast details. In structure and pacing the film remains stagebound, with its limited locations, excessive speechifying and over-reliance on dramatic entries and exits.

None of this can be anticipated from the film’s opening shots, however, in which an aircraft is mysteriously destroyed in mid-air. The mystery is not just in the mode of destruction, but also in its relevance to the story: it is never explained what this has to do with Nyah’s mission.

Following the plane explosion and the title credits, the scene switches to the Bonnie Charlie Inn ‘in a lonely part of Inverness-shire,’ which will be the setting for the rest of the film. Despite being closed for the winter, there are four staff in residence – Mr and Mrs Jamieson (John Laurie and Sophie Stewart), barmaid Doris (Adrienne Corri) and handyman David (James Edmond) plus Mrs Jamieson’s young nephew Tommy (Anthony Richmond). They have only one guest, glamorous model Ellen Prestwick (Hazel Court), who has come here to hide from her married lover.

This small household is soon bolstered by the arrival of escaped convict Robert Justin (Peter Reynolds), who was actually Doris’s lover before he was jailed for killing his wife, although her death appears to have been accidental: (and as Doris points out in his defence, ‘she was bad’.) Doris took the job at the Bonnie Charlie in order to be nearer Robert, although one wonders why she didn’t choose a pub nearer Stirling, which must be at least a hundred miles away. She might have been safer too, given the apparent pickpocketing powers of fish in the Highlands:

Isn’t it awful, Mrs Jamieson? He’s lost his wallet, he’s just been telling me…There he was crossing the stream, and he..he looks over to see a fish that’s in the water, and the next thing he knows…his wallet’s gone.

Mrs Jamieson will not withhold the Highland tradition of hospitality, but she gives Robert a suspicious look and warns him, ‘I’m counting the spoons.’

Next to arrive are Professor of Astrophysics Arnold Hennessy (Joseph Tomelty) and reporter Michael Carter (Hugh McDermott) from the Daily Messenger, who got lost in their car on their way to investigate reports of a meteor.

With all the characters now assembled, it is time for the Devil Girl to arrive. The spaceship lands right outside the inn in a cloud of fire and smoke, disturbing the group just as Carter reveals Robert’s real identity. Mr Jamieson declares that the craft ‘looks like a flying saucer’, using the term that had become popular since Kenneth Arnold’s encounter with UFOs seven years earlier. Professor Hennessy is reluctant to believe it could be a spaceship, but he and Carter head off to try and find a phone to inform the Home Office.

Miss Prestwick looking forlorn when Carter leaves the room. ‘I know it sounds silly, but I don’t like to be left here on my own.’

Viewers might agree that Ellen’s anxiety was justified when they receive their first sight of the ‘flying saucer’ pilot. After a dramatic stride down the landing ramp and a close-up of her face, the Devil Girl meets David and is unimpressed by his poor sight and limping gait.

All that is left of what Nyah judged ‘a hopeless specimen’

The Devil Girl’s agenda is not yet apparent, but this scene leaves no doubt as to her ruthlessness and capacity for cruelty. However, most viewers were probably still goggle-eyed at Nyah’s costume, with her skin tight helmet and full length cloak of black PVC. Once she enters the inn, the inner part of the costume is revealed as a black mini-skirt and tights.

Nyah explains her mission to Hennessy and Carter: on Mars, ‘the war of the sexes’ was literal, and after a bloody conflict the women emerged victorious, leaving only a handful of enfeebled male survivors with which to breed. Faced with the demise of their race, the Martians have sent Nyah to earth to bring back some virile men to help repopulate their planet. Before anyone asks why the Martians chose a remote part of Inverness-shire for their harvest of men, Nyah blames it on her sat nav: her spaceship was programmed to land in London, but having underestimated the thickness of the earth’s atmosphere (i.e. Scottish weather?), the spaceship was damaged on entry and forced to land in the Highlands for repair.

Nyah’s explanation of the repair process introduces the first of several technical discussions: we learn that the spaceship is made of organic metal that repairs itself by regeneration. The concept of a ‘living spacecraft’ was, I think, quite original at this time. A short while later Professor Hennessy quizzes Nyah on her spaceship’s power source:

N: A form of nuclear fission, on a static negative condensity
H: A negative condensity?
N: Exactly. Your atomic bomb is positive, it can cause an explosion to expand upwards and evaporate; our force is negative and explodes atomic forces into each other, thereby magnifying the power a thousand fold.
H: And the fuel?
N: Self-propagating

The science may be flaky in the extreme (don’t ask about the ‘perpetual motion chain reactor beam’), but there is something impressive in the deadpan seriousness with which it is presented. Despite its campy and unintentionally comic elements, this is an ambitious little film.

How many earth men could Nyah have fitted in here?

The notion of the self-repairing spaceship is crucial to the plot. Nyah is stranded at the Bonnie Charlie for ‘four earth hours’ until her ship is ready to fly again, forcing her to kill time with the inn’s residents while she waits. Viewers of the film start to feel much the same way, as an inordinate amount of time is spent watching characters wander backwards and forwards between the spaceship and the inn. Did Nyah travel 200 million kilometres for this?

The purpose of her one-woman invasion of earth is really to test the capabilities of the organic spacecraft, in preparation for a much larger ‘man-hunt’ that will follow shortly. Nyah therefore shows little interest in kidnapping any of the five males at the inn. She takes little Tommy, but then is persuaded by Carter to let him swap with the boy. After Carter has wandered back to the inn, Hennessy strolls out for a look around the spaceship and offers to accompany Nyah to London to act as a guide. She agrees, but he is soon back in the Bonnie Charlie as well. When the ship is repaired and she is ready to leave, everyone is hiding down in the cellar except Robert….

The three women may not be at risk of being whisked back to Mars, but they are as determined as the men are about stopping Nyah’s mission. When Carter introduces the Devil Girl to Mrs Jamieson, the landlady is given one of the best lines in the film:

– ‘Mrs Jamieson, may I introduce your latest guest, Miss Nyah. She comes from Mars.’
– ‘Oh, well, that’ll mean another bed.’

The earthlings face the alien threat with the sort of stiff upper lip and cheeriness typical of British wartime movies. Mrs Jamieson exemplifies the spirit of the Blitz with her down to earth remark:
‘While we’re still alive, we might as well have a cup of tea.’
Tea is not the only beverage drunk at the inn, and copious amounts of alcohol are drunk by Mr Jamieson and Carter in particular. I find it quite refreshing when films of this era depict heavy drinking in such a matter of fact way, without either moral judgment or any suggestion that large and frequent tipples are indicative of a problem.

Carter orders ‘A very large Scotch and a very small soda’

‘Has the tomato juice girl got any Scotch?’ ‘No, but I have some brandy.’

The free-flowing whisky and the Highland setting are not the only Scottish elements in the film; the director and four of the main actors were Scottish. The name of the inn might even be a subtle joke – ‘Bonnie Charlie’ refers to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, who landed in the Western Highlands in 1745 seeking to gather an army of men to support his cause – Nyah might have done well to reflect on how well that turned out.

Patricia Laffan was best known at this time for playing Nero’s vixenish wife, Queen Poppaea, in Quo Vadis? (1951), a film in which Adrienne Corri had a minor role. Laffan excelled in long-legged imperious arrogance.

Devil Girl from Mars actually has a pretty good cast compared to similar B-movies of the era:

The lovely Hazel Court had enjoyed starring roles in several dramas and thrillers during the 1940s, and was even considered for the role of Vicky in The Red Shoes (1948), but following Devil Girl she moved into horror after playing Peter Cushing’s young fiancee in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957.) Her ‘scream queen’ career saw her appear in a number of Hammer horrors and Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe tales. In 1990 she said of Devil Girl: ‘I think it only took about two weeks to shoot and it was made on a shoestring. We got paid next to nothing.’

Shades of Dad’s Army – ‘Shoot, man, shoot!’

Although he is best known for his role as Private Frazer in Dad’s Army, John Laurie’s distinguished film career began way back in 1929 and he appeared in two Anton Walbrook films as well as Fanny by Gaslight (1944.) Sophie Stewart had appeared in two H.G. Wells adaptations, Things to Come (1936) and The Man who could Work Miracles (also 1936) while Hugh McDermott had a role in another Wells tale of space travel, First Men in the Moon (1964).

Experienced, talented actors like these deserved a better script, but unlike many B-movies in the genre, the film appears to take itself quite seriously, and the cast do their best with the cornier lines and contrived situations. There is, unfortunately, one stand-out leaden performance, and that is from Nyah’s companion Chani.

‘I can control power beyond your wildest dreams! Come, come and you shall see! Now earthmen look, watch the power of another world…’

Chani is Nyah’s robot companion, whom she parades before the inn’s residents after Carter’s ill-advised attempt to shoot her with Jamieson’s revolver. The robot is operated by a handheld remote control device, and Nyah clearly enjoys demonstrating her robot’s powers as he destroys a tree, broken-down tractor and a barn using a light beam fired from his head. The muskets used at Culloden were probably quicker to aim and fire than Chani’s head-beam, but Nyah is blind to his flaws; the only time she shows any emotion in the film is while watching her robot perform before the awestruck earthlings.

Proud mum. Nyah is clearly bursting with pride as she shows off Chani’s abilities at walking and blowing up tractors. Such human touches give the film a curious charm.

Mind that branch… Chani may not be the most frightening robot in cinema history, but for entertainment value he beats anything in the Transformers franchise

Devil Girl from Mars is probably best remembered for two costumes: Nyah’s black PVC dominatrix uniform and Chani’s cardboard fridge & styrofoam coffee-cup arms. These Martian invaders make an odd couple, and though they were clearly inspired by the pairing of Klaatu and the robot Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, they fall far short in terms of effective teamwork and combined resources. Despite her impressive robot, powers of hypnosis and ability to enter the fourth dimension, Nyah’s mission turns out a spectacular failure. At the end of the film, is there a moral as to why?

The inability of the Martian women to procreate is symbolised by Nyah’s pairing with the mechanical Chani; furthermore both of them show a total absence of feeling throughout the film. In contrast, the Bonnie Charlie is a hotbed of romance and warm emotions, even in the depths of winter: Doris and Robert are reunited and both show willingness to sacrifice everything to protect the other; Ellen falls for Carter, finding the strength to break away from her married lover while succeeding in breaking through Carter’s cynicism and gruff exterior. Behind the Jamiesons’ constant bickering banter, there seems to be a steadfast relationship and a tender devotion to their young nephew. The cheesy dialogue and over–wrought domestic dramas may well amuse modern viewers, but they show that Devil Girl from Mars was looking in the opposite direction from most of its contemporaries. This is not another Cold War metaphor or guilt-ridden nightmare about atomic power. Devil Girl borrows the trappings of 1950s science fiction while exploring some fairly old-fashioned British themes about love, duty, altruism and moral principles. The similarity between Nyah’s black-booted outfit and the Nazi uniform is surely no coincidence; this is a flying saucer movie that looks to the past as much as the future.

This blog post is part of the ‘Accidentally Hilarious’ blogathon, and there’s some brilliant pieces on other classic films – including silent movies, the work of Ed Wood, more monster/alien flicks and all sorts of wonderful weirdness – to be found here. Enjoy!

Haldane Macfall’s Whistler

Posted on July 2, 2014April 29, 2020 by James

Last Friday ago I picked up this little book in an antique shop by the River Exe. Whistler: Butterfly, Wasp, Wit, Master of the Arts, Enigma, (Edinburgh & London: T.N. Foulis, 1906) presents a brief account of the life and work of artist Sir James Abbot McNeill Whistler, and was written by Haldane Macfall (1860–1928.)

Macfall’s literary career began while serving in Africa with the West India Regiment in the 1880s, when he began writing about his experiences for The Graphic. A skilled artist, he also contributed illustrations to the magazine, designed bookplates, decorated books and exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Quite apart from my interest in Whistler, I was attracted to the book’s design and page layout, and particularly intrigued by the presence of hand-drawn pencil sketches opposite the opening page.

There is nothing here to identify the artist, although there seem to be quite a few copies of Macfall’s books in circulation bearing pencil sketches on their blank pages.

Chambers Haldane Cooke Macfall was born in 1860 but lost his mother when he was still young. His father Surgeon-Major David Chambers McFall (1833-98) remarried in 1871, and his new bride – Frances Clarke – became stepmother to Haldane and his brother Albert. At sixteen, Frances was only six years older than her eldest stepson, and within a year she gave birth to a boy named Archibald. The Macfalls spent five years in the Far East, returning to England in 1876, but the marriage proved an unhappy one. Frances left her husband in 1890, subsequently changing her name to Sarah Grand.

Sarah was a forceful campaigner for women’s rights and a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her first novel, The Heavenly Twins (1893) sold over 20,000 copies and caused some controversy due to its strong feminist message and frank treatment of medical matters relating to sexual behaviour. She was active throughout the 1890s, lecturing on topics such as women’s suffrage and rational dress. In 1898 Haldane McFall moved in with his step mother, having been forced to leave the army due to a serious bout of fever. His first novel The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer was published the same year. His next novel, The Masterfolk (1903) was a witty portrait of Bohemian life in London and Paris in the 1890s, declared by Vincent Starrett – in his essay on Macfall in Buried Caesars (1923) – to be ‘the last word on the English decadents.’ Other novels include Rouge (1906) and The Three Students (1926), while his biographies included Ibsen: The Man, His Art & His Significance (1903), Sir Henry Irving (1906), Fragonard (1909), Boucher (1911) and a spirited defence of his friend Aubrey Beardsley (1928.) He returned to the army to serve during World War One, and published a number of books and essays on military topics. He collaborated several times with the artist Claud Lovat Fraser, who – along with Edward Gordon Craig – provided illustrations for Macfall’s essay on art and aesthetics, The Splendid Wayfaring (1913.) Macfall seems to have been on friendly terms with both artists. Gordon Craig’s father had been a friend of Whistler’s, and he was godson of another of Macfall’s biographical subjects, Henry Irving. He engraved bookplates for both Macfall and his wife Mabel, and wrote an appreciation of Macfall after his death.

Whistler exercised a considerable influence on the aesthetic movement in Britain – not only through his artwork, but also by his insistence on the autonomy of art, which he believed existed for its own perfection rather than for didactic purposes. Wilde had made a similar argument during his 1895 trials, and Whistler also found himself defending the notion in court during the libel case that followed Ruskin’s slur on the artist’s Nocture in Gold and Black. By contrast, Whistler’s response to reading some of Macfall’s art criticism was apparently ‘Ha ha, this man knows.’ It was probably just as well that he found nothing to offend, for Whistler made a formidable enemy – the waspish wit collected in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890) may amuse readers, but being on the receiving end of Whistler’s wrath was far from pleasant.

This aspect of Whistler’s work was symbolised in the butterfly monogram that appears on the cover of Macfall’s book and elsewhere inside. The artist used this on his paintings in place of a signature from 1869 onwards, basing it on his initials ‘J.W’ but developing a series of variations over the years. When using the monogram to sign his more acerbic correspondence, he would give the butterfly a stinging tail.

Whistler knew of course that these theatrical exchanges with the press would provide valuable publicity for his art, and he enjoyed near celebrity status when Macfall’s career was beginning. Although Macfall seemed to abandon the paint brush for the pen later in life, he produced some interesting artwork that reveals the influence of fin-de-siecle aestheticism. This Beardsley-ish image formed the frontispiece to The House of the Sorcerer (actually a fragment of The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer):

I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of Macfall’s work in future.

‘the happiest I’ve ever been’ – Exeter Plaque

Posted on June 13, 2014January 30, 2018 by James

During the years I’ve lived in Exeter I’ve had many occasion to walk along Blackall Road, and this plaque makes me smile every time. I’d love to know the story behind these words, and yet at the same moment I fear this might take away the mystery and diminish its appeal. However, I’m grateful to whoever wrote these words and took the trouble to have them fixed to the wall; so many memorial inscriptions and commemorative plaques ask us to remember deaths and tragedies – it’s rare that someone invites us to share in a happy memory, even if one senses here a tinge of the bittersweet.

Cleavage and the Code: a study in cinemorality

Posted on June 6, 2014January 31, 2018 by James

Following on from my previous blog on Abbot Wilfrid Upson’s visit to Hollywood – ‘A Monk and His Movies‘ – I wanted to expand a little on his comments about the difference between British and American views on censorship.

The one film that earned the abbot’s ire was Forever Amber (1947), a racy Restoration romp based on Kathleen Winsor’s 1944 novel about the exploits of Amber St. Clare (played by Linda Darnell, who never looked lovelier.) Having been brought up in the repressive Puritan village of Merrygreen, Amber runs off to London and hops from one bed to the other, ascending the social ladder with every conquest until she becomes the mistress of Charles II.

The reputation of the novel was such that its transfer to the screen was dogged with controversy from the outset. The trouble lay not so much with the visual content as with the lack of any moral condemnation of Amber’s actions, while her opinions – e.g. ‘Adultery is not a crime, it’s an amusement’ – appalled The Legion of Decency, who threatened to rate it a C (condemnation) unless significant changes were made. Father Patrick Masterson (whom Abbot Wilfrid met in Los Angeles) arranged a meeting with the director and 20th Century Fox officials in October 1947, and negotiated a compromise that saw him write a prologue for the film – read as a voice-over – in which the Catholic view was stated clearly: ‘This is the tragic story of Amber St. Clare, slave to ambition, stranger to virtue, fated to find the wealth and power she ruthlessly gained wither to ashes in the fire lit by passion and fed by defiance of the eternal command – the wages of sin is death.’

This dire warning did nothing to deter cinema audiences from watching Amber’s on-screen exploits, and she was not the only rebellious, scheming, cross-dressing Restoration heroine found on cinema screens in the 1940s…
Daphne du Maurier’s novel Frenchman’s Creek (1941) was made into a Paramount movie in 1944 and told the story of Lady Dona St Columb (Joan Fontaine, above, in her second Du Maurier film) whose love for a French pirate has her disguising herself as a cabin boy, betting, and wielding a knife, amongst other activities not expected of an aristocratic lady in 17th century Cornwall.

Although the gorgeous colour and lavish costumes of Forever Amber and Frenchman’s Creek make the films very easy on the eye, both of them seem excessively long and not nearly as much fun as they should be. This cannot be said of The Wicked Lady (1945), a film adaptation of Magdalen King-Hall’s The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton, which had been published earlier that same year. Loosely based on the life of Lady Kathleen Ferrers, it starred Margaret Lockwood as Barbara Skelton, who opens the film by stealing the groom of her best friend Caroline (Patricia Roc) at the altar. (Roc also supported Lockwood in Love Story (1944) and Jassy (1947), slapping her face in all three films.)

Bored with married life as the lady of the manor, Barbara starts dressing as a highwayman and carrying out armed robberies at night. During one such escapade she meets notorious highwayman Jerry Jackson (James Mason), and the two become lovers as well as partners in crime. Inevitably, their exploits catch up with them, Caroline gets her revenge, and the gallows beckon for at least one of the wicked pair…

Margaret Lockwood clearly relished the part of Lady Barbara, and audiences loved her performance. Gainsborough melodramas excelled in such bodice-ripping productions, with lavish costumes and Gothic settings. Unfortunately, when the film crossed the Atlantic in 1946, the American censors were upset by what they saw.

Although it had not been a problem in Britain, the low-cut costumes worn by Margaret and Patricia exposed rather too much flesh for American tastes, and in consequence, Lockwood and Roc were called back to Gainsborough Studios at the end of August so that certain scenes (such as the two ladies bouncing along in a coach on their way to Tyburn) could be re-shot from different angles. This was a tedious and costly business, as – to ensure continuity – both actresses had to replicate gestures and expressions, while props needed to be reassembled in precise positions. Decorative frills and ruffles were added to Elizabeth Haffenden’s beautifully-designed costumes to cover up any bare flesh, and one of Lockwood’s dresses had to be borrowed back from Hermione Gingold who was using it a sketch in her satirical revue Sweetest and Lowest at the Ambassadors Theatre. Gainsborough resented the tiresome and costly fuss, but it succeeded in generating a great deal of publicity that gave the film a new lease of life at the box office.

The studio, of course, needed to accept the distributors’ demands in order to have The Wicked Lady shown in the U.S.A. In outlining the nature of the problem, officials at the MPAA devised a new word, ‘cleavage’, which replaced the old-fashioned ‘décolletage.’ How they came up this word I do not know; perhaps the answer can be found in original papers held in the MPAA archives? As a youngster I used to wonder why the Bible (in the King James Version with which I grew up) had the line: ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh’ – which suggested two things cleaved together – when everyone knew a meat cleaver cut things in two. I’ve still never really understood that, but the OED defined ‘cleavage’ as ‘The cleft between a woman’s breasts as revealed by a low-cut décolletage,’ and stated that the first use of the word was in an article in Time magazine on 5 August 1946, which I give in full below.

[Note: The ‘Johnston Office’ is a reference to Eric A Johnston (1896-1963) who succeeded Will H Hays in 1945 as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. Understandably, one of his first actions was to simply the organisation’s unwieldy title to the Motion Picture Association of America.]

Cleavage & the Code

Time: the weekly news magazine
Vol. XLVIII, No.6 (August 5, 1946) p.98

Which is more sexy – an actress’ half-covered bosoms or her uncovered legs?

British moviemakers, puzzled by U.S. cinemorality, want a serious answer to this question. For the past fortnight, the man who knows all anyone needs to know about U.S. censorship has been in London trying to explain it in simple English. It is a tough job – even for the Johnston Office’s jowly, jolly Joe Breen, No.1 U.S. ‘interpreter’ of the Hollywood morality Code.

The basic fact that amazes the British – the Code is a voluntary brake Hollywood puts on itself. Its clearest purpose: to keep non-Hollywood censors – official and amateur – out of the industry’ hair. (The Code’s dozen-odd pages of printed rules need no explanation. Samples: ‘Adultery…must not be…justified, or presented attractively…Complete nudity is never permitted…)

What really makes the Code tricky is the way it is ‘interpreted’ for each picture’s particular questionable scenes. Four ‘interpretations’ are currently troubling the British.

Wicked Lady, a 1945 picture starring Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Patricia Roc, was a big moneymaker in England. But the U.S. will have to wait to see it. Low-cut Restoration costumes worn by the Misses Lockwood and Roc display too much ‘cleavage’ (Johnston Office trade term for the shadowed depression dividing an actress’ bosom into two distinct sections). The British, who have always considered bare legs more sexy than half-bare breasts, are resentfully reshooting several costly scenes.The picture’s chief moral lapse: it makes adultery look like too much fun. At the end of all his wenching, the rake dies as he has lived – happy and unrepentant. Death is not just what he deserves, but the Johnston Office wants him to show some remorse too.

Pink String and Sealing Wax stars Googie Withers, who was none too careful about that cleavage. The Hollywood Codists – who convinced themselves that Hollywood’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice were morally clean – have raised eyebrows over the picture’s theme: premeditated murder.

Bedalia allows Margaret Lockwood to poison three husbands for their insurance and then commit suicide when her fourth begins to get the idea. Suicide, in the U.S. is a sloppy out for wrongdoers. A tidy U.S. ending will hand the murderess over to the cops.

In London, last week, Interpreter Joe Breen’s good humor was holding up. ‘The difference between me and most people in Hollywood,’ he said, ‘is that I know I am a pain in the neck.’ But the British press – ignoring the fact that British movie men had invited him over – attacked him as a bluenose. The New Statesman and Nation complained:

…America’s artistes many strip
The haunch, the paunch, the thigh, the hip,
And never shake the censorship,
While Britain, straining every nerve
To amplify the export curve,
Strict circumspection must observe…
And why should censors sourly gape
At outworks of the lady’s shape
Which from her fichu may escape?
Our censors keep our films as clean
As any whistle ever seen.
So what is biting Mr. Breen?

************

In Fairyland

Posted on May 23, 2014January 30, 2018 by James

At Barnstaple pannier market a while ago I came across this old framed print and – after circling the stall several times – succumbed to temptation. The illustration is taken from the book In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf World (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1870) and was the work of Punch illustrator Richard Doyle (1824-83.)

The artist was of one of the seven children of political cartoonist John Doyle (1797-1868), whose artistic skill was inherited by his four sons Richard, James, Henry and Charles (father of Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.) Of the four, Richard Doyle had the most successful career, and his early talent found him a place on the staff of Punch magazine when he was only nineteen. It was he who devised the famous image of the Punch cartoon character that adorned the magazine’s front cover from January 1849 until October 1956, replacing his earlier cover (January 1844) that featured crowds of elves and fairies.

Doyle’s talent for fairy drawings was first made public in 1846 with his artwork for The Fairy Ring (a new translation of Grimm’s tales), followed in 1849 by his illustrations for Fairy Tales from All Nations and Punch editor Mark Lemon’s The Enchanted Doll. He clearly relished the subject matter, and his skill in depicting pixies, elves, fairies and other fantastical creatures attracted commissions for a series of other fantasy titles such as The Story of Jack and the Giants (1850), and John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River (1850), which went through three editions in its first year of public.

Another publication in 1850 had important consequences for Doyle’s career, however.

On 29 September 1850 Pope Pius IX issued a papal brief Universalis Ecclesiae that restored the Catholic hierarchy to England; this was followed in early October by a somewhat triumphalist pastoral letter by Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman. The combined effect outraged many Protestants who interpreted these texts as territorial claims on British soil, and Punch magazine was at the forefront of the backlash against ‘papal aggression.’

Doyle came from a devout Irish Catholic background and found himself increasingly unable to reconcile his faith with the magazine’s trenchant anti-Catholic stance. After the above cartoon appeared in November 1850, Doyle resigned from Punch. Over the next few years he undertook book illustration work for Thackeray and Dickens, before finding a new sense of purpose when he returned to his fairy artwork in the late 1860s.

This was by no means unusual at a time when fairies inhabited nearly every nook and cranny of Victorian literary and artistic culture. Their popularity raises some intriguing questions for a society that saw strident advances in industrial technology, and seemed proud of the victory of scientific progress over naive superstition. One wonders if the colourful jewel-like fairy world offered a sense of hope, an antidote, or the possibility of escape, when set against the rapid expansion of sprawling, smoking cities and the loss of rural traditions. Great artists – including Royal Academicians – recorded their fantastical visions of fairy lore on huge canvases, with the same painstaking precision and technical virtuosity applied to serious landscapes and religious subjects.
Here is just a small selection:

Richard Dadd The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke

The artist worked on this painting between 1855 and 1864 when he was transferred from Bethlem Hospital to Broadmoor.

John Anstler Fitzgerald, The Fairy Bower

John Anstler Fitzgerald, Fairy Hordes Attacking a Bat

Joseph Noel Paton The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847)

Joseph Noel Paton The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849)

It is to this tradition of Victorian fairy painting that Richard Doyle’s In Fairyland belongs. Although dated 1870 on the title page, it was actually published in time for Christmas 1869. The folio was richly bound in green cloth, cost over 30 shillings, and has been described as one of the finest examples of Victorian book production. There are 16 colour plates – of which this my picture is the last – and 36 line drawings. Doyle was given free rein to design his own illustrations, which were later re-used in Andrew Lang’s The Princess Nobody (1884.)

Each plate was accompanied by a verse written by Irish poet William Allingham (1824-89), whose wife Helen was a skilled watercolourist and illustrator. That for Plate XVI reads:

Asleep in the moonlight. The dancing Elves have all gone to rest; the King and Queen are evidently friends again, and, let us hope, lived happily ever afterwards.

I have hung the picture on my study wall, between an oil painting of my childhood home and a line drawing of the cottage in which I now live. It seemed an apt place for the fairies to sleep.