Seasons of Mist

Posted on October 12, 2013September 7, 2020 by James

This was the view from my bedroom window a couple of days ago, and when driving up through the Exe Valley last week I noticed thick banks of white mist hanging over the fields to the side of the road and thought of Keats’ lines in Ode to Autumn:
Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.
Autumn is almost upon us now, and I like the pleasing contrast between the white mist and the piles of bronze and gold leaves that are starting to accumulate on the ground. I call it ‘mist’ rather than ‘fog’ because I’ve always associated the latter with the sea. Strictly speaking, however, the distinction lies in visibility: fog is thicker than mist, and there is a precise point at which one becomes the other. Hill-walkers, drivers, seafarers, pilots and others have good reason to dislike such treacherous conditions: routes are hidden from view, dangers concealed, sounds are muffled and distances become hard to judge. Fear of what lies within the mist, or fog, is also a familiar trope from the worlds of film and literature. Perhaps the most notorious example would be London’s ‘pea-souper’ fogs, which have provided the atmosphere (literally) for numerous acts of murder and skulduggery by Victorian villains.

Contrary to popular belief, Conan Doyle never used the term ‘pea-souper’ in his Sherlock Holmes stories. Another common misconception is that the Whitechapel murders ascribed to ‘Jack the Ripper’ took place in thick fog, when in actual fact the killings ceased during the month of October 1888 – the only time when there really was a pea-souper. These murders provided the inspiration for Hitchcock’s silent thriller The Lodger (1927), starring Ivor Novello as the suspected serial killer. Its full title is The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Although Novello’s appearance matches the description of the killer as ‘wearing a scarf over the lower part of his face’ (above) many Londoners at this time would have masked their faces in the same or similar ways to protect themselves from the damp unhealthy air. Is the lodger the killer? Viewers’ inability to decide is just another aspect of the fog’s power to dull our powers of perception.

There is more confusion over mistaken identity in the film Footsteps in the Fog (1955), set in the early 1900s and based on a short story by W.W. Jacobs, the author of the classic horror tale The Monkey’s Paw. It starred the then husband and wife team of Stewart Grainger and Jean Simmons, caught up in a dark plot of murder and blackmail. The basic set-up – murderous husband teaming up with flirty maid – recalls the dysfunctional household in Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight which was filmed in 1940 by Thorold Dickinson and then remade in Hollywood in 1944. Again, fog is used to hint at villainy – when we first see Paul Mallen (Anton Walbrook) leave the house and sets out on one of his nocturnal missions (below).

Sergeant Rough, wrapped up against the London fog with the same thoroughness as Ivor Novello – although falling short of the latter’s sartorial elegance – is able to use the fog as a cover for following Mallen as he crosses the square.

Gaslight was set around 1885, but as late as December 1952 thousands of Londoners died during a dense smog that enveloped the capital for several days. This led to the Clean Air Act (1956) which sought to banish black smoke in urban areas through the introduction of smokeless fuels. It took many years, but London’s pea-soupers eventually became a thing of the past. Times were changing in other ways, as the televised Coronation in March 1953 encouraged huge numbers of British households to invest in TV sets. The 1950s are now regarded now as the ‘golden age of science fiction’ and programmes made for television began exploring themes of space travel, frightening technology and strange creatures from other worlds. Most of these were aimed at young audiences, but a six-part series The Quatermass Experiment – broadcast in six half-hour episodes on Saturday evenings in July-August 1953 – was aimed at adults, and proved amazingly popular: when the last episode was broadcast on 22 August 1953, audience figures were estimated at around 5 million. The film industry took notice, and Hammer Films bought the rights, releasing The Quatermass Xperiment in cinemas in 1955. In America, it was renamed The Crawling Terror and was equally successful.

Although less famous, The Trollenberg Terror followed a similar trajectory to Quatermass. Occupying the same Saturday evening slot, it was broadcast in six episodes between 15 December 1956 and 19 January 1957, and then quickly bought up and remade into a film for release in 1958. In America it was renamed The Crawling Eye, possibly to capitalise on audience’s familiarity with the Quatermass film, although ‘crawling eyes’ is a perfect description of the monsters. Their appearance, however, is concealed until the end of the film by a cloud of mist; this aspect of the film, one might argue, was a direct influence upon later horror films such as The Fog (1980) and The Mist (2007.)

Most of the action takes place on the Trollenberg, a mountain in the Swiss alps which has been partially covered by a mysterious cloud that remains static over the south slopes. The phenomena is being monitored by scientists from a nearby observatory, led by Professor Crevett (actor Warren Mitchell, soon to become better known as Cockney bigot Alf Garnett), who has detected high levels of radioactivity in the cloud. This is not the only sinister happening: since the cloud’s appearance, mountain climbers have been found with their heads torn off. Crevett is joined by his old friend Alan Brooks, a United Nations expert who investigated similar goings-on in the Andes three years earlier. He arrived at Trollenberg along with two sisters, Anne and Sarah Pilgrim.

Anne Pilgrim (played by the lovely Janet Munro) is in fact telepathic, and has just finished performing a mind-reading show in London with her older sister Sarah (Jennifer Jayne.) Later, Anne’s psychic powers forge a link with the alien creatures in the mist, allowing her to visualize events on the mountainside and direct rescue operations. The aliens sense her power and try to have her killed by human ‘zombies’ whose minds they control. The presence of the sisters is one of the more intriguing elements in a film that – although full of absurdities – I have enjoyed watching several times.

John Carpenter saw The Crawling Eye as a child, and provided at least some of the inspiration behind his film The Fog (1980.) During their commentary for the 2002 special edition DVD of The Fog both he and producer Debra Hill refer to it as one of their favourite films. Carpenter’s image of the fog billowing under Dan O’Bannon’s doorway and entering his room is just one of several incidents that are reminiscent of those that took place on the Trollenberg. Another source of inspiration was a visit to Stonehenge made by Carpenter and Hill in 1977 when they witnessed a fog bank ‘just sitting on the horizon, way past Stonehenge’ causing Carpenter to wonder ‘what if there’s something in that fog?’

The malevolent beings concealed within the fog are, in this film, ghostly rather than alien: exactly one hundred years earlier, in 1880, the founders of the Antonio Bay community lit false beacons to lure a ship onto the rocks – a cruel trick allegedly employed by wreckers in Devon and Cornwall in years gone by (as depicted in Jamaica Inn for example), although there seems to be little documentary evidence to support these tales. All those aboard died in the wreck, but their vengeful spirits have returned on the night of the town’s centenary celebrations, and are intent on claiming the lives of six descendants of the original murderers.

The horrific killings take place within an eerie bank of glowing fog, that rolls in from the sea. As in The Trollenberg Terror the cloud of fog defies nature, moving against the wind. Local radio broadcaster Stevie Wayne (played by Carpenter’s then wife Adrienne Barbeau) plays a key role in the night’s events, as her radio station is located in a lighthouse overlooking the bay. From this vantage point she is able to provide a running commentary on the inexorable progress of the fog to her listeners. For me, the most memorable part of the film is listening to her voice:

‘It’s moving faster now, up Region Avenue, up to the end of Smallhouse Road…just hitting the outskirts of town…Broad Street…Clay Street… It’s moving down Tenth Street, get inside and lock your doors, close your windows…there’s something in the fog. If you’re on the south side of town, go north. Stay away from the fog…Richardsville Pike up to Beacon Hill is the only clear road. Up to the church. If you can get out of town, get to the old church. Now the junction at 101 is cut off..if you can get out of town, get to the old church. It’s the only place left to go. Get to the old church on Beacon Hill.’

Oddly enough, in James Herbert’s novel The Fog an empty church is also a place sought for sanctuary – but it is the fog that takes refuge there, rather than its victims. Apart from sharing the same name there is no relation between Carpenter’s film and Herbert’s novel, which was published in 1975. Interesting to note, nonetheless, that both men turned to the theme following their first big breakthrough. After a few minor films, Carpenter had just enjoyed his first great commercial success with Halloween (1978) and invited several of the actors to take roles in The Fog. Herbert’s first novel The Rats (1974) had sold out within weeks and attracted a great deal of attention – not all of it positive by any means – due to the graphic descriptions of death and violence. The Fog was written in the same vein and expanded upon The Rats’ theme of natural disaster brought upon by misguided government experiments; this would also form the basis of Stephen King’s novella The Mist. Herbert’s tale begins in Wiltshire when an earthquake unleashes a foul yellow fog that erupts from a crack in the earth and begins drifting through the southern counties of England. Those who are caught by it are affected mentally and the novel progresses through a series of horrific episodes in which the madness leads to murder, mass suicide, mutilation and sexual violence. The fog here does not conceal any monster other than itself; the fog is the horror, and it is slowly revealed that is has a biological life of its own.

The horror within Stephen King’s Mist shares more similarities with that of the Trollenberg cloud than either of the Fog stories. The first film Stephen King remembers seeing was The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and he was about eleven years old when The Crawling Eye was released in the USA. The film is referred to in his 1986 novel It, which is set around the time of the film’s release in the summer of 1958. King’s youthful immersion in popular culture – early horror and science-fiction films, radio drama serials such as Dimension X and E.C. comics like Tales from the Crypt – were important influences on his later writings.

‘There’s something in the mist!’

There are a few superficial parallels between The Trollenberg Terror and the 2007 film The Mist, which was director Frank Darabont’s adaptation of King’s novella of the same name, first published in the Dark Forces collection (1980). I was on holiday in Cornwall when I first read the story in 1985, after it had been republished in another anthology, Skeleton Crew. It is by far the longest story in the collection but I read it all in one continuous session, curled up in a dormitory bed with my borrowed book and a packet of biscuits. It made quite an impression on me, and the only other story I can remember from that collection is The Raft. My vision of the scenes differed rather a lot from that of Frank Darabont, who had already brought two of King’s other stories to the screen – The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999.) Many of King’s fans were displeased at the shocking twist – not in the book – with which Darabont decided to end the film. Personally, I approve of the ending. Few modern horror films contain genuine shocks; the final frames of The Mist have an undeniable impact that has unsettled audiences. The ending neatly confirms what has been true of all the films above – fog and mist not only conceal terrifying threats, but they cloud judgment as well as vision, rendering opaque the distinction between innocence and guilt

So when I’m walking across the fields again this week and happen to see banks of mist (or worse still, fog) drifting over the ground towards me, the question is bound to come to mind….what lies within?

Vivien Leigh and Anton Walbrook

Posted on August 4, 2013November 5, 2020 by James

Today’s post celebrates the opening of the exhibition ‘Vivien Leigh: a Century of Fame’ at Topsham Museum, which runs from the 3 August to 31 October 2013.

The actress, best known for her role as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1938) was born Vivian Hartley in India on 5 November 1913. Like Walbrook, she was educated in a Catholic religious school; he was taught by the Christian Brothers in their ‘Lazarenkloster’ school
in Schopenhauerstraße, she by the Sacred Heart runs at Roehampton and elsewhere. She showed a talent for drama from an early age and took a leading part in several school productions. The last two years of her education (1929-31) were spent at a finishing school at Bad Reichenhall in the Bavarian Alps, run by Baron and Baroness von Roederer. From here she regularly crossed the border into Austria to attend operas in Vienna and Salzburg. She also spent ten days in Munich at the end of March 1931 and sat through eight hours of Parsifal. Walbrook was at this time in Berlin, appearing in Eine königliche Familie, Victor Barnowsky’s production of the Broadway hit poking fun at the Barrymore acting family. By this time Vivian spoke both French and German, but she returned home too soon to see Walbrook’s first sound film: Salto Mortale was released in August 1931.

Back in England, the Hartleys settled in Devon for the winter, staying at a bungalow called Troy near Polzeath. Vivian went to stay with her friend Mills Martin at Teignmouth, and it was thanks to him that she met her husband, Herbert Leigh Holman. Martin took Vivian to the Hunt Ball at the Two Bridges Inn on Dartmoor- this was in February 1932 – where she was introduced to Holman, a well-established barrister whose family lived at nearby Holcombe Down. (There is another version of this story that claims they met at the South Devon Hunt Ball on Torquay Pier, although this seems less credible.) Holman’s family had a long connection with Topsham, the port town on the edge of Exeter.

After a short courtship Vivian and Leigh were married on 20 December 1932. Her new husband requested that she drop her studies at RADA and abandon thoughts of an acting career, but even after the birth of their daughter Suzanne the following October, her desire to return to the stage persisted. Leigh finally relented, and as her theatrical agent did not like ‘Vivian Holman’ as a stage name, she took her husband’s first name instead and altered the spelling of her own. She appeared in four minor films in 1935: Gentlemen’s Agreement, Look Up and Laugh, Things are Looking Up and The Village Squire.

Vivien’s rising career was watched with interest by her sister-in-law Dorothy Holman, who carefully collected press-cuttings and photographs. Over the next two decades Vivien visited Dorothy many times at her house in Topsham, at No.25 The Strand. This lovely building, which dates back to the late 17th century, became the Topsham Museum after Dorothy Holman’s death. The memorabilia collected by Dorothy is on display in a special room. It is rather remarkable that Dorothy and Vivien remained on such friendly terms, given that the Holman’s marriage broke down following her affair with Laurence Olivier.

Vivien first met Olivier in 1935 and they grew closer during the filming of the historical drama Fire Over England in which she played Cynthia, lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I (Flora Robson) and lover of brave sailor Michael Ingolby (Olivier.) The film was a typical blend of patriotism and propaganda by Alexander Korda, with Spain standing in for Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition representing the Gestapo. While they were filming Fire Over England, Walbrook had left Germany and was on his way to Hollywood, which he would dislike almost as much as Vivien. In the meantime she was acting alongside another anti-Nazi emigre, Conrad Veidt, in the spy drama Dark Journey. Here she played Madeleine Goddard, a Parisian costumier working as an undercover agent in Sweden during WWI, who falls for German spy Baron von Marwitz. Watching the film is rather a dark journey itself, due to the various murky plot twists that can leave viewers confused about what’s going on, but it’s worth watching for the performances of the two stars. I find Vivien more beautiful here than in Gone with the Wind and the chemistry between her and Veidt more compelling than that with Clark Gable. Although Veidt hated the Nazis with the same fervour as Walbrook, the two actors undertook opposing methods of fighting fascism: Veidt specialised in playing sinister German officers such as Baron von Marwitz, Captain Hardt and Major Heinrich Strasser, while Walbrook played ‘good Germans’ such as peace-loving Hutterite Peter, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff and Kurt Muller, all of whom deliver eloquent and impassioned condemnations of Nazi ideology. Both actors were effective in teaching British filmgoers to hate the Nazis – although the wartime experience must have done a great deal to achieve that anyway. The cameraman was Georges Perinal, who would later film Walbrook in Dangerous Moonlight, Colonel Blimp and Saint Joan.

Fire over England had its London premiere in February 1937 and six months later Vivien left her husband and moved in with Olivier at his Chelsea home. In the autumn she was in Hollywood for the filming of A Yank at Oxford co-starring Robert Taylor and Lionel Barrymore, while Olivier worked on The Divorce of Lady X with Korda’s wife Merle Oberon (for whom the early version of The Red Shoes was originally written.) Olivier then accepted the role of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – starring opposite Merle Oberon, and joined Vivien in America. Leigh Holman filed for divorce in January 1940; this was granted on 26 August, allowing Vivien and Olivier to marry in California on 31 August 1940. The next two months saw them acting together as Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton in Korda’s That Hamilton Woman (1941) – rather ironic, given that it depicted a semi-public and scandalous relationship similar to the one they had just formalised by getting married. Korda’s main aim with the film, however, was to encourage America to support Britain’s war against Nazi Germany. This was also the intention of Powell and Pressburger’s 49th Parallel which starred Olivier and Walbrook as – respectively – a French Canadian trapper and a Hutterite leader, who come face to face with Nazi submariners in Canada. Also in the film was Leslie Howard, who had played Ashley in Gone with the Wind and with whom Vivien did not get on. Olivier by this time was serving as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, having joined in April 1941. He would have taken the starring role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp had it not been for Churchill’s opposition to the film – as a consequence, the Fleet Air Arm refused to release him, and we got Roger Livesey instead (D.G.)

Olivier was not the only one from theatrical circles who joined the forces. Ralph Richardson served alongside Olivier in the Fleet Air Arm, while Vivien’s co-star from Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable, became a captain in the US Air Corps and flew on bombing missions over Europe. Rex Harrison, with whom she starred in Storm in a Teacup (1937) also joined the Royal Air Force. He had appeared with Walbrook and Diana Wynyard in Noel Coward’s play Design for Living, first in the west end and then – after the outbreak of the war – travelling around the provinces. At this time Walbrook was in a relationship with Norwegian artist Ferdinand Finne, who had joined the Norwegian Air Force after the invasion of Norway in April 1940. He had been working as a costume designer for the Norwegian National Theatre when he first met Walbrook on a train in France in 1938. They returned there in 1939, travelling together through Brittany and the South of France, as well as staying in Paris where Finne’s circle of acquaintances included Coco Chanel and Somerset Maugham. After the German attack on his home country, Finne reported immediately to the Norwegian Embassy in London (where the above photograph was taken) which became the organizational base for Norwegian resistance. King Haakon and his son, Crown Prince Olav, resided at the Norwegian Legation in Kensington. Finne helped set up ‘Little Norway’, a training base in Canada for exiled Norwegian Air Force personnel. He was posted there while Walbrook was filming Dangerous Moonlight. The photograph shows Leigh, Walbrook and Admiral Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, founder of the Norwegian Air Force and the first commander of Little Norway.

After the war, Walbrook joined Finne in Norway, spending time at the actor’s home and visiting places such as Lillesand, Langoya and Fornebu (west Oslo.) After Finne was asked to design the sets for a west end production of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s dark family drama, The Wild Duck, he suggested that his friend audition for the lead role of Hjalmar Ekdal. Walbrook got the part, and appeared in The Wild Duck at St Martin’s Theatre from 3 November 1948 to 26 March 1949. Their relationship ended that same year, which also saw Walbrook’s disastrous and short-lived return to Germany. In the meantime, Vivien had appeared in a series of critically-acclaimed stage plays – many of them with Olivier – culminating in her brilliant performance as the tragic Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Olivier at the Aldywch Theatre (where Walbrook had starred in Watch on the Rhine in 1943.) She went on to win an Oscar in the 1951 film version, having already won the same award in 1940 for playing another, very different, Southern belle. She died on 8 July 1967, one month before Walbrook.

Topsham Museum is open from 2pm to 5pm on Mondays, (Tuesdays this month only), Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Admission is free, and a new booklet about Vivien has been produced to mark this centenary exhibition.

Silent Cloisters

Posted on July 12, 2013January 31, 2018 by James

Following on from last month’s post about nuns photographs, I have looked out a postcard this time of a scene from the silent film The Convent Gate (1913.) This was directed by Wilfred Noy and adapted from a scenario written by Marchioness Townsend (1884-1959) that involved a jilted bride, insanity and a life-threatening blaze, in addition to the nunnery. In her autobiography It Was – and it Wasn’t (1937) the Marchioness revealed how the screenplay was developed with the help of a model theatre in her garden and cardboard cut-out nuns. Whether or not this led to two-dimensional characterisation, this postcard makes me sorry that The Convent Gate has not survived.

The film’s leading lady, Dorothy Bellew (right), was photographed by Bassano four years later – and she certainly does not look like a nun in this portrait.

This postcard shows a scene from The Monk and the Woman , which was released four years after The Convent Gate. On the left is Australian actress Maud Fane, playing Liane, a young French girl who finds shelter in a monastery while trying to escape the attentions of lecherous Prince de Montrale. The character on the right is young monk Brother Paul, played by Percy Marmont. Brother Paul has been given the job of watching over Liane, but (surprise!) ends up falling in love with her, leading him to clash with his abbot, the prince and the king….

Both the play and film caused controversy when released in Australia, being condemned by Archbishop Michael Kelly of Sydney. An austere prelate of puritan piety, Kelly remained at odds with the modern world all his life. He argued that The Monk and the Woman presented a distorted view of Catholicism that was offensive to the faithful; his views were supported by the Australian Catholic Federation, whose members boycotted screenings and applied pressure on advertisers to withdraw their custom. Critics, on the other hand, applauded the warmth and humanity shown in the film, as well as the performances by Fane and Marmont. Again, I’m disappointed to find that this film too is considered lost.

This is a still from Häxan: witchcraft through the ages (1922) an extraordinary silent film in seven chapters by Danish director Benjamin Christensen. Thankfully, this film has survived and is easily accessible on DVD: I’ve had the opportunity to watch it many times and it still retains the power to shock and mesmerize. Mixing documentary segments, slide lectures and dramatized horror sequences – including infanticide, witches’ sabbaths and the torture of suspected witches – the film has an avant-garde, surrealist feel that accentuates its nightmarish subject. Inevitably, however, this weakens Christensen’s rationalist argument: if his aim was to condemn medieval superstition and ignorance, why spend so much of the film experiencing false visions, and imbuing them with a power that only enhances viewers’ horrified fascination?

Anyway, even if we regret and abhor the cruelty of religious persecution, and the sufferings caused by ignorance, I doubt the sort of secular rationalism advocated by Christensen would really have helped matters in medieval Europe. Ninety years have passed since he made Häxan and aspects of his solution appear almost as dated as the medieval mindset he mocked. Christensen’s attempt to compare witch’s behaviour to that of hysterics treated by Professor Charcot (Chapter Seven) is one particularly unconvincing argument – Charcot’s category of ‘hysteria’ has now as much credibility as the demonic creatures depicted during the witches’ ritual in Häxan. Christensen can be forgiven for that, though, as he raises some challenging points about the misuse of power and shows real compassion for the unfortunate women, old and young, who became victims of witch trials.

The film is fairly anti-clerical throughout, portraying gross, lustful and gluttonous friars in addition to the cruel Inquisitors. A short sequence set in a convent shows the devil (played by Christensen himself) causing appearing to one of the nuns and inciting her to stab a consecrated host – an outrage that throws the rest of the community into a frenzy of writhing and, well, hysteria.

The resulting scenes of bedlam bear strong similarities to those in the late Ken Russell’s film The Devils (1973), which was based on Aldous Huxley’s books, The Nuns of Loudun, although the events in Loudun took place over 100 years after those depicted in Häxan. In his rendering of church interiors and religious garb, Christensen is to be commended for his attention to detail and efforts at historical accuracy.