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?

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

‘Pure Hepburn, and nothing else.’ ‘Mary of Scotland’ (1936)

Posted on May 10, 2014January 31, 2018 by James

Mary of Scotland was Kate’s tenth film, but the first in which she attempted to play the part of a mature woman. Typically, the project was her initiative: her interest in playing Queen Mary arose after she saw the Broadway hit of the 1933/34 season, Maxwell Anderson’s blank verse play Mary of Scotland. On stage, Mary Stuart had been played by Helen Hayes, who followed this up with another critically-acclaimed regal performance in Victoria Regina – but portraying famous monarchs, either on stage or screen, poses some unique challenges, and the role differed somewhat from those previously tackled by Kate. True, she had done two period films, one of which – The Little Minister (1934) – was set in 19th century Scotland: but the character of Babbie shared the same feisty spirit of many other Hepburn heroines, caring little for the solemn shackles of historical accuracy. How would she respond to this challenge?

Mary, Queen of Scots (Kate) with her future husband, the swashbuckling, roguish James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell (Fredric March.) Family legend claimed that Kate was a direct descendant of the Earl; throughout the film he is referred to as ‘Bothwell’, and never ‘Hepburn.’

Films about royalty – like the actual monarchs themselves – need to find a fine balance between public office and private personality. In Mary of Scotland the rival queens both get the balance wrong: Mary is tempted to follow her personal feelings over her state duties – ‘What’s my throne?’ she tells Bothwell, ‘I’d put a torch to it for any one of the days I’ve had with you.’ In complete contrast, as Mary tells Throckmorton, ‘Elizabeth has never taken a single step that wasn’t political.’ The film grinds home the connection between Elizabeth’s preoccupation with power and statecraft and her status as the ‘Virgin Queen.’ While Elizabeth is continually surrounded by her courtiers and cabinet, frequently seated behind a writing desk or large table, we see Mary in domestic settings, small intimate gatherings that feature music, needlework and gentle banter with her ladies-in-waiting.

Such a dichotomy between a women’s sexuality and her career fits better with the outlook of the ‘Thirties than with contemporary views on gender equality, but the film’s portrayal of the two queens was shaped by a number of factors.

Kate originally wanted the film directed by George Cukor, who enjoyed a reputation as a ‘women’s director’ due to his nuanced work with strong female leads. He worked with Hepburn on eight films, including her debut A Bill of Divorcement, and also found success with stars such as Bergman, Garbo, Crawford and Holliday. The box-office failure of cross-dressing Sylvia Scarlett (1935) meant that RKO producer Pandro Berman refused to hire Cukor, signing instead John Ford, regarded as a ‘man’s director’ – his output of 140-odd films is dominated by male stars, with only a handful of decent female roles.

Unsurprisingly, Ford placed less emphasis on the romantic aspects of the story than he did on the film’s historical pageantry and atmospheric set designs. Mary and Bothwell’s relationship develops against a backdrop of fog-shrouded castles, the courtyards of which are teeming with soldiers and animals; there are torchlit processions, massed bands of pipes and drums, plus the inevitable clashing of claymores and rearing horses.

The queen did not remain aloof from all the action, and in one scene Kate had to run down a flight of stone steps in her heavy costume before mounting her horse and galloping off. She did the stunt herself, as she would continue to do until her early seventies, despite the danger of tripping over the cumbersome dress with its flowing train.

Her costumes had once again been designed by Walter Plunkett, who excelled at recreating period dress and worked closely with Kate during her RKO years. One of these, a dress of crimson silk, decorated with gold thistle emblems, was displayed at the V&A’s Hollywood Costumes exhibition (2012-2013.) Plunkett was not the only one to take period detail seriously. Before filming began, both Ford and Hepburn spent time researching Scottish history and reading up on Mary’s life and background. Kate rehearsed in private wearing Plunkett’s costumes, practising – for example – how to turn her head naturally wearing a high ruffs collar such as this.

Nonetheless, there are numerous anachronisms – not least in the musical settings – while the historical bias in Mary’s favour overlooks a number of dark deeds and murky motives, the blame for which cannot be entirely laid elsewhere. It was impossible for a Hollywood film – even at two hours – to convey the complex religious and political turmoil of 16th century Scotland, with the kaleidoscope of shifting allegiances amongst the Scottish Lords and the web of conspiracies, plots, counter-plots and forgeries in which Mary was embroiled all her life. In consequence, her romance with Bothwell is pushed to the forefront, and that in turn required that his character be whitewashed: their possible involvement in Darnley’s murder is represented only as a wild accusation from the mouth of firebrand Protestant preacher John Knox.

Moroni Olsen, who gave a dramatic performance as Knox, was the only member of the original Broadway cast to appear in the screen adaptation.

The screenwriter Dudley Nichols – a regular collaborator with Ford – did away with Maxwell Anderson’s blank verse, but his screenplay retains much of the speechifying and dramatic monologues that betray its stage origins. Kate did her best with the stilted, over-expository dialogue, but neither Ford’s direction nor Nichols’ script really allowed her enough space to develop Mary’s character. Frustration about this led to a disagreement during filming on the 10th April, when they were due to shoot the intimate scenes between Mary and Bothwell on the ramparts of Dunbar Castle, the night before their final separation. Ford wanted to drop the scenes as an unnecessary piece of soppiness, while Kate regarded them as central to the film’s depiction of the relationship. After a heated exchange, Ford handed her the script and megaphone, walked off the set and told her to direct the scene herself if she thought it so important. She did, and the film is better for it.

Ford’s direction of Hepburn reveals the strong feelings he had for her: there are a disproportionate number of close-ups, the camera lingering upon her face with an attentiveness granted to no-one else in the cast. Few films captured Katharine’s beauty so well. The luminosity of Joe August’s cinematography, combined with the close-up editing of Jane Loring, made the footage of Kate fit perfectly with Elizabeth’s comment on Mary, in Anderson’s play, that not since Helen of Troy:

has a woman’s face
Stirred such a confluence of air and waters
To beat against the bastions. I’d thought you taller,
But truly, since that Helen, I think there’s been
No queen so fair to look on.

A miniature shown to Queen Elizabeth as an indication of her cousin’s youthful beauty. Not a bad likeness of Katharine Hepburn either.

Filming was completed on 25 April 1936 and Mary of Scotland was released on the 28 August. Three days later the New York Times praised the picture’s ‘depth, vigor and warm humanity’, but admitted dissatisfaction with Hepburn’s portrayal of Mary. The moments when the Scottish queen was ‘womanly, tender, impetuous and of high courage’ were convincing, but – while Anderson’s play showed Mary’s vengeful and ruthless side – the film script had tried to soften this and thereby introduced inconsistencies to her character.

It was only towards the end of the film, when Mary was imprisoned and put on trial, that this forcefulness began to burn through and Kate’s performance took on new vigour.

Mary’s cousin Queen Elizabeth (left) was played by March’s wife, Florence Eldridge, although the part was sought by both Ginger Rogers and Bette Davis.

The face-to-face meeting of the two queens (above) provided much-needed dramatic intensity – something that both audiences and critics found lacking elsewhere in the film. One person who did not like the scene, however, was Viscount Mersey, who found the historical inaccuracy sufficiently disturbing that he complained about the film before the House of Lords on 9 December 1936:
On the night before her execution at Fotheringay Castle, Queen Elizabeth was made to go into Mary’s cell and have an altercation with her. It is common knowledge to those of your Lordships who are interested in the history of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots that they never met in their lives.
Lord Mersey then proposed a motion calling for ‘some form of control over the historical accuracy of films produced or shown in this country.’ After the Marquis of Dufferin pointed out that cinema’s presentation was little different from the romantic stories passed on by Shakespeare, Scott and Dumas, and that the fictitious meeting also appeared in Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Lord Mersey withdrew his motion.

Entertaining performances came from Douglas Walton (left), camping it up in lipstick and earrings as the effeminate Lord Darnley, and John Carradine as the queen’s Italian secretary Rizzio.

Debate continues – albeit less formally – about Katharine’s performance, and indeed about her casting in historical films. In the early part of her career, she appeared in a series of 19th century period dramas – The Little Minister, Little Women, A Woman Rebels (notice a theme..?) – few of which stand comparison with the witty contemporary comedies in which she played characters more similar to herself.

To suggest that her best performances are those in which her characters are closest to her own personality, is not to diminish her acting skills. The distance between Mary, Queen of Scots and Katharine – in terms of both time and personality – challenged her, demanding more effort, and it is interesting to hear Kate’s voice in Mary of Scotland display far wider range and pitch than in her later films.

Part of the problem lay with Kate’s lack of empathy for her character. In her autobiography Me she recalled: ‘I never cared for Mary. I thought she was a bit of an ass. I would have preferred to do a script on Elizabeth.’ There is certainly little doubt that Kate would have excelled as Elizabeth. Both Ginger Rogers and Bette Davis had wanted the part but had been rejected by Ford. Davis only had to wait three years before playing the queen in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, adapted from another Maxwell Anderson play.

Hepburn returned to playing royalty later in her career, winning an Oscar for her performance as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, which also starred the late Peter O Toole as King Henry II. Her success here was largely due to her ability to identify keenly with Queen Eleanor as a person: ‘She was something I’ve always tried to be — completely authentic.’

Sadly, the same cannot be said of Mary Stuart, whose downfall was brought about through a series of compromises and misplaced confidences. Kate, on the other hand, was far too sure of her own identity and opinions to let herself be shaped by others. Fiercely independent in spirit, she defied whatever conventions clashed with her style, and the drama critic of The Sunday Times summed this up succinctly in his review of Mary of Scotland when he wrote ‘Her accent was not of the Highlands, the Lowlands, nor a pure French equivalent. It was pure Hepburn, and nothing else.’

What else did we expect?

This post is part of the Great Katharine Hepburn Blogathon hosted by Margaret Perry at The Great Katharine Hepburn.

Follow this link http://margaretperry.org/the-great-katharine-hepburn-blogathon-has-finally-arrived to see all the other posts this weekend!

The Great Katharine Hepburn Blogathon!

Posted on March 27, 2014January 31, 2018 by James

I’m delighted to be contributing to ‘The Great Katharine Hepburn Blogathon’, which will be taking place between 10th and 12th May this year. My blog post will be about her performance in Mary of Scotland (1936), John Ford’s RKO movie about which I spoke a little at the British Monarchy on Screen conference in 2012.

There will be lots of other fantastic blog posts that weekend, covering a range of Kate’s films from all sorts of unusual angles, including costumes. I can’t wait to read them – but I better not delay in writing my own!

For more information, check out Margaret’s post at http://margaretperry.org/announcing-the-great-katharine-hepburn-blogathon

The Curse of Frankenstein

Posted on December 2, 2013January 31, 2018 by James

Today I seized the opportunity to see The Curse of Frankenstein on the big screen, courtesy of Exeter Picturehouse as they show a number of films tying-in with the BFI’s current Gothic season. Before the film started there were only two of us in the cinema and I wondered if this was going to be like a previous experience many moons ago at the Grosvenor in Glasgow’s Ashton Lane, when I watched The Silence of the Lambs in the company of one other lone stranger sitting a few rows back in the dark. Given the nature of the film, the two of us kept exchanging suspicious glances every now and then…just in case. The Silence of the Lambs contains far more graphic horror than The Curse of Frankenstein but in 1957 several critics were appalled at Hammer’s ‘depressing, degrading’ movie. How does it stand up today?

This was the first horror film in which Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee appeared together, and the pair would co-star in around twenty others, many of them Hammer productions. For copyright reasons Hammer needed to distinguish their imagery from James Whale’s 1931 classic, and make-up artist Phil Leakey made Christopher Lee look very different from Boris Karloff’s creature. The contrast is more than skin deep, however – Lee plays the creature as a brain-damaged monster, with little apparent capacity for thought or emotion; it is hard for modern audiences to feel much sympathy for him, especially given the creature’s lack of screen time. The physicality of Lee’s performance is astonishing nonetheless; jerking, flailing and lurching, he captures the tragedy of a being unable to controls its own limbs.

The real monster of the film is Victor Frankenstein, who is prepared to sacrifice everything – ethics, friendship, his fiancee, mistress and unborn child – for science. Peter Cushing’s performance is impeccable; the subtlety of his facial expressions seemed much more impressive on the big screen. He returned in this role for another four films, all directed by Terence Fisher: The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein must be Destroyed (1969) and Frankenstein and The Monster from Hell (1974.) In 1958 he played Von Helsing opposite Lee’s Count Dracula, and the two of them would continue to reprise these roles – with constant variations – over the next two decades. Hammer Film Production’s reputation as purveyors of luridly-coloured Gothic gore began with The Curse of Frankenstein and the film contains motifs that would recur again and again in the studio’s output.

Talking of lurid colour, the brilliant palette of Jack Asher’s lush cinematography is particularly impressive on the big screen. Although Hammer had already used colour in Men of Sherwood Forest (1954) this was the first colour horror film that they made. There has been criticism of the anaemic quality of the colour on the recently restored Blu-Ray dvd version, but such shortcomings were not apparent in today’s screening. The film was made using Eastmancolor, a single-strip technique invented by Kodak in 1950 that was far more cost-effective than the cumbersome three-strip Technicolor process; it is, however, more prone to fading over time. The unprecedented combination of horror and colour was something new, and I was struck during today’s screening by a number of scenes that seemed to celebrate the power of colour:

Symphony in Red

Symphony in Green

Symphony in Blue

The Lady with the Lamp

Another highlight of the film was the lovely – if rather underused – Hazel Court, playing the part of Frankenstein’s fiancee Elizabeth. She gets to wear a series of ravishing costumes in the film, of which the gown below is probably the finest. Not ideal for grubbing around a dungeon full of chemicals, but certainly a feast for the eyes. Hazel was a classically trained actress and had done several films before The Curse of Frankenstein – hence my regret that her character is so under-developed. Elizabeth is a typical heroine-victim in the Gothic tradition, entering a house of horror (both building and family lineage, as in the House of Usher) through marriage, and thereby trespassing upon dark secrets that threaten to engulf her. A comment by Paul Krempe indicates that Frankenstein had forbidden Elizabeth to look behind his laboratory door – a prohibition that recalls the legend of Bluebeard’s Castle – but of course she does…

Certain elements of the plot are reminiscent of other Gothic narratives, and there is a parallel with Gaslight in the baron’s flirting with the maid behind his fiancee’s back. He is ultimately punished for his immoral behaviour and the innocent Elizabeth finds refuge with Frankenstein’s friend and former tutor Paul Krempe, who is often regarded as the film’s moral compass. Despite his sanctimonious pontificating, however, his conduct seems to me as murky as the baron’s. He knows that Frankenstein’s experiments are unethical and repeatedly warns that their work ‘can only end in evil’, yet he keeps returning to help and evidently cannot resist his fascination with Frankenstein’s project. As his mind has not been corrupted to the extent that Victor’s has, Krempe arguably has more capacity to end the wickedness, and so his failure to act makes him even more culpable. His final silence not only conceals his part in the baron’s work, but also offers a neat way to remove Elizabeth’s fiance from the scene when it is obvious that he wanted her for himself all along. Just as Frankenstein got rid of his former lover when she began to get in the way, so too does Krempe callously dispose of his friend, using the executioner in much the same way that Frankenstein used the creature. (Although if the 1958 sequel The Revenge of Frankenstein is to be believed, the baron evades the guillotine and returns to his work.)

There is always the temptation, of course, to read more into these old films than their makers ever intended. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster has been frank about the extent to which his work was driven by purely commercial concerns, admitting his bewilderment when Hammer fans ask him about Freudian symbolism, literary echoes and other esoteric nuances that they detect. That is not to say that such motifs are actually absent. Fisher may have wished to create a definite distance between The Curse of Frankenstein and Universal’s 1931 movie, but his film – consciously or unconsciously – contains clear homages to classic horror tradition, e.g.

Nods to Nosferatu

Watching the film on the big screen today has helped me appreciate the visual impact that The Curse of Frankenstein would have had on cinema audiences back in 1957. It seems a shame that this experience was shared by such a small audience – but for the record, our numbers had doubled by the time the lights dimmed.

A Monk and His Movies

Posted on October 23, 2013January 31, 2018 by James

Some notes on the 50th anniversary of the death of Abbot Wilfrid UpsonOn this day fifty years ago occurred the death of Abbot Wilfrid Upson OSB (1880-1963), the first abbot of Prinknash Abbey near Gloucester, and author of Movies and Monasteries in USA (Gloucester: Prinknash Abbey, 1950), about which I wish to write in today’s blog. As some of you may know, I have been researching the religious applications of film and photography for many years. and am particularly curious about the way these arts were used, interpreted and criticised by clergymen in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Abbot Wilfrid is a little bit unusual in that – as well as making 16mm home movies -he travelled to Hollywood and took an inquisitive interest in the workings of the film industry.

John Henry Neil Upson was born in London on 28 June 1880. His family belonged to a Nonconformist sect, The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, and kept a strict Sunday observance that saw books and toys packed away from Saturday night to Sunday morning. In his late teens he became interested in the Church of England, attending High Anglican services at St Augustine’s, Stepney, where the name of the Pope was included in the prayers. He got involved in youth work, running clubs for boys at the St Frideswide Mission in Poplar as well as travelling to Kent to help with evangelical missions for the hop-pickers in the fields. A large marquee was set up in which they held concerts during the week and, on Sundays, religious services at which he played the harmonium and helped lead prayers. Adopting a classic pre-cinema technique, a large lantern sheet was erected in the middle of a field on which to project devotional images such as the Stations of the Cross.

While Upson was engaged in these activities, a young Anglican medical student named Benjamin Fearnley Carlyle (1874-1955) was struggling to establish a tiny monastic community at a house in the east end of London. ‘Br Aelred’ as Carlyle called himself, was by no means the first Anglican drawn to religious life: the tradition stretches as far back as Nicholas Ferrar’s community at Little Gidding. The 19th century saw a surge of interest in monastic life, spurred on by the Gothic revival in art and architecture, the influence of Romantic literature, and the religious ideals of the Oxford Movement. From around 1845 Anglican Sisterhoods began to rise up under the direction of men such as J.M. Neale and Pusey. The development of religious life for men was later and slower. ‘Father Ignatius of Jesus’ (Ignatius Lyne, 1837-1908) made the first serious attempt in the early 1860s, followed by the Society of St John the Evangelist (‘Cowley Fathers’) in 1865, the Community of the Resurrection (1892), the Society of the Sacred Mission (1893) and the Society of Divine Compassion (1894.)

By 1896 Aelred Carlyle had gathered around him a few sympathetic young Anglo-Catholics at ‘The Priory’ in London’s Isle of Dogs, where an idiosyncratic form of monastic life was combined with pastoral work among the working boys. They had to leave this house in 1898 and over the next few years the community flitted from place to place, gathering and losing members, changing its habit from black to white to Cistercian black and white. In 1906 they returned to Caldey Island, where they had spent a short interlude in 1901-2. This was to remain their home for the next 22 years.

Having joined the Church of England, John Upson gradually felt he had a vocation to the religious life and contacted the Superior of the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham Hall in Nottinghamshire. After he failed the Society’s medical, he recalled seeing a magazine called PAX which was being printed at Kelham. This was the magazine of the monks of Caldey, and so he contacted Aelred Carlyle to enquire about joining their community instead. They met for an interview in London, after which Upson arrived on Caldey Island in April 1908.

Carlyle’s vision was influenced by the romantic medievalism of his time, and the community became closely associated with the contemporary Arts and Crafts movement. Work carried out by the monks included painting, woodcarving, sculpture, stained glass manufacture, pottery, calligraphy and metalwork. Br. Wilfrid felt at home on Caldey, and was able to develop his artistic skills with pen and ink sketches and small watercolours. He excelled at other visual media too, organising theatrical productions of medieval Passion Plays during Lent that were performed by the monks as well as local islanders. This took place for many years and became well-known. Writing in Time and Tide magazine, Miss Christopher St. John enthused: ‘Not since Gordon Craig’s Masque of Love have I seen such harmonious grouping and movement . . . the great achievement of the Caldey Passion is that visions are created instead of illusions.’ He was in fact adept at illusions too, as he had learned a number of conjuring tricks and enjoyed entertaining the community with magic shows.

The monastic life led on Caldey Island went far beyond what was generally accepted within the Church of England, combining spartan austerity with observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict, full Roman liturgy involving incense and Gregorian chant in Latin. Tension grew between the community and the Anglican authorities, which eventually led to a parting of the ways: in 1913 almost the entire community converted to Catholicism. Although in some respects this made life much easier, the community was severed from its Anglican friends and benefactors, many of whom felt grieved at the loss of the money they had invested in the unfinished building projects. It soon became apparent that the financial situation was dire.

Aelred Carlyle was ordained priest and returned to Caldey to be blessed as the Benedictine Abbot of Caldey in October 1914. He struggled on for seven years before resigning and moving to Canada where he spent the next thirty years doing missionary work in Vancouver. While the local bishop assumed jurisdiction over the monastery, Wilfrid Upson – who had been ordained priest in 1915 – was appointed Prior. To sort out the financial mess, Pius XI asked the Abbot General of the Cistercians if he could purchase Caldey, as the Benedictines had been offered a home at Prinknash Park near Gloucester. They moved off the island in 1928, floating the wooden refectory tables over the water to the mainland and transferring all their goods to the Tudor mansion of St Peter’s Grange at Prinknash, the former home of the pre-Reformation Abbot of Gloucester Abbey. In 1929 the community joined the Cassinese Congregation of the Primitive Observance. This was, and remains, the largest of the Benedictine congregations with houses all over the world. The peculiar background of Caldey had made the community reluctant to abandon their own ideals and practices, and they were resistant of being absorbed into a highly centralised order. Exhausted by the strain, Fr. Wilfrid resigned as superior and went to act as chaplain to a community of nuns in Westgate-on-Sea.

Monastic life continued to flourish at Prinknash and when the monastery was raised to the status of an abbey in 1937, Wilfrid Upson was elected its first Abbot. The community grew to such a size by the early 1940s that it was necessary to open overflow houses at Bigsweir and Millichope. Plans were also put in motion to start new foundations at Farnborough and Pluscarden, in addition to building a new monastery at Prinknash. Much of the building work was carried out by the monks themselves and Abbot Wilfrid recorded some of these activities in his home movies, which he shot on a 16 mm camera. He took still photographs too, and continued to enjoy sketching and painting. The community were regularly entertained with his film-shows, recording visits to places of interest – such as Lourdes – as well as scenes of monastic life. Arranging the new foundations required him to travel outside the monastery, making site visits, negotiating with lawyers, contractors and benefactors, as well as trying to raise funds from Catholic parishes, guilds and societies. This was particularly challenging in postwar Britain, given the scale of the abbot’s projects, and it seemed sensible to cast his net slightly wider. And so it was that Abbot Wilfrid, accompanied by his subprior Fr. Norbert Cowin, sailed to New York in November 1947 on a fund-raising trip that would last six months, cover some 20,000 miles, and involve two separate visits to Hollywood.

The abbot with matinee idol Tyrone Power (left), swashbuckling hero of The Mark of Zorro (1940), Prince of Foxes (1949) and The Black Rose (1950).

‘All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up…’

Here, Cecil B. DeMille – director of sits between Abbot Wilfrid (left) and Fr. Norbert (right). DeMille began directing in 1914 and was the first Hollywood director to become a celebrity in his own right. His films include several Biblical epics such as The Ten Commandments (a silent version in 1923 and a very different Technicolour film starring Charlton Heston in 1956), The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Samson and Delilah (1949.) They also met with Sam Goldwyn and the Warner Brothers, Harry and Jack.

Considerable time at these meetings was spent discussing moral issues, as debate over the power of cinema – for good or for evil – had become an important topic of debate amongst Catholics. After its reception into the Catholic Church, the Caldey community shared the tendency of many converts to become ‘more Roman than Rome.’ Sensitive to what many Catholics might regard as a Protestant past, the monks were keen to prove that they were as thoroughly orthodox in matters of doctrine and morals as any other Catholic religious institute. As Abbot of Prinknash, he took a generally conservative standpoint on points of theology, although this was moderated by his aesthetic tastes and serious interest in film and art: qualities which were not shared by everyone involved in making decisions on what should or should not be shown on the screen. During his visit he met with Joe Breen (1890-1965) – who for many years was responsible for implementing the so-called Hays Code – as well as Fr. William Masterson and other members of the Legion of Decency. Both Breen and the Legion campaigned vigorously against what they perceived as being objectionable or morally offensive content in films. Abbot Wilfrid also attended a private screening of the recently released Forever Amber, which starred Linda Darnell as Amber St Clair, an orphan who sleeps her away to the top in 17th century England. Upson thought it ‘A film of much artistic merit but unworthy of the art of the cinema.’ Kathleen Winsor’s novel was in fact much racier than the film, which was edited and watered down in response to condemnation from the Catholic church. Roughly the same thing happened in America that year to Black Narcissus – perhaps cinema’s finest fictitious portrayal of monastic life.

Quite apart from his interest as a film-maker himself, Abbot Wilfrid had an official role in such matters as Chairman of the Catholic Film Society. Dominican priest Fr. Ferdinand Valentine O.P. founded the Society in 1934, shortly after the formation of the Legion of Decency. Both organisations were responding to growing Catholic concern about the moral content of films, which had been highlighted in a section of Pius XI’s 1929 encyclical on education, Divini illius Magistri. The Production Code had been drawn up the following year, but a perceived failure of its efficacy led to the Legion being set up in 1933. Another papal encyclical Vigilanti Cura (1936) was dedicated entirely to the topic of motion pictures, setting out provisions for each country to have a National Reviewing Office that would monitor film production. In England, the activities of the Catholic Film Society were more practical. Initially, they organised film shows of religious and general interest, screening religious documentaries and other short films; gradually this shifted to providing information and discussion of mainstream films, reviews of which were published in the monthly magazine Catholic Film News. After fading away somewhat during WWII, the Society was revived and reorganised in 1946 with Upson elected as Chairman.

Abbot Wilfrid’s visit was a mixture of religious discussion and film shows, as well as (it must be said) a great deal of socialising, even if this was undertaken for a good cause. Before leaving Hollywood he managed to assemble a seventy-strong audience for a screening of his own colour Kodachrome 16mm film, Abbey Builders of the 20th Century, which was accompanied by a talk on the community’s history.

Abbey Builders had been filmed in 1940, and incorporated footage of some of the great English ruined abbeys – such as Rievaulx and Fountains – which were then juxtaposed with shots of the overcrowding at Prinknash. The abbot was shown discussing with the other monks the need to build a larger monastery, followed by close-ups of some of the monks looking doubtful or asking one another sceptical questions. Other scenes include the laying of the foundation stone, vignettes of daily monastic life that emphasised the manual skills required for the building work, and a lovely sequence where a rainbow breaks over Prinknash – no doubt Abbot Wilfrid really was hoping for a pot of gold at the other end.

Amongst the audience were Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon (right.)
Cinema goers were used to seeing them together, both on the screen and off it, as they were good friends in real life and played a married couple in no fewer than eight films: Blossoms in the Dust (1941), Mrs Miniver (1942), Madame Curie (1943), Mrs Parkington (1944), Julia Misbehaves (1948), That Forsyte Woman (1949), The Miniver Story (1950) and finally Scandal at Scourie (1953.) They were just the sort of screen couple of which the League of Decency could approve – wholesome, virtuous, morally upright, mutually supportive, kind and courageous. Little surprise that the abbot was smiling.

Others who watched the abbot’s film included movie columnist Louella Parsons, Loretta Young (fresh from playing opposite David Niven and Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife), Ruth Hussey – who played the photographer in The Philadelphia Story (1941) – and Pat O’Brien, a former altar boy who was cast as a priest in several films, including Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and Fighting Father Dunne (1948.) Most of these stars were Roman Catholics, either from birth or -like writer Clare Booth Luce, who invited Abbot Wilfrid to her house – adult converts. Luce had been received into the Catholic Church in 1946, two years after losing her young daughter in a car accident, taking to Catholicism with the same zeal she applied to all her work. In 1949 her screenplay Come to the Stable was made into a film, starring Loretta Young and Celeste Holm as two French nuns founding a children’s hospital in the New England town of Bethlehem. Abbot Wilfrid met Loretta Young again before leaving Hollywood when Louella Parsons organised a tea party for the two monks, inviting the actress and her husband producer Tom Lewis, along with Maureen O’ Sullivan, Irene Dunne and Mgr Patrick Concannon of Good Shepherd parish, Beverly Hills. The group may all have appeared highly pious, but their personal lives were often more tangled than those of the characters in their films, and some of Loretta Young’s early films might have brought a blush to the abbot’s cheeks.

The only disappointment at Louella’s tea party was that she had a 35mm projector and the abbot was therefore unable to show the guests any of his 16 mm films. In addition to Abbey Builders he had taken his colour film of a day in the life at Prinknash Abbey, which was titled (after a local saying) As Sure as God’s in Gloucestershire.

The two monks took their leave of Hollywood in March 1948 and spent the next few weeks journeying east, visiting monasteries in Kansas, St Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington before reaching New York from whence they returned to England. In terms of raising funds the expedition fell short of expectations, but this did not prevent the foundation at Pluscarden going ahead. A special Mass was celebrated at the ruined monastery in Moray on 8 September 1948 to celebrate the return of monastic life to the spot, after almost 400 years. Abbot Wilfrid was there with his camera:

Fr. Norbert was appointed Superior of the Pluscarden community in 1951, a post he held until 1961, which was the year that Upson stepped down as the Abbot of Prinknash. He died two years later, on 23 October 1963. Requiescat in pace.