I was just flicking through TV channels when I stumbled on this 1941 movie just as it was about to start. I have always been intrigued by this little-known era of British film, so I decided to watch it for a while to see what it was like.
Notoriously, routine British movies of the Thirties were vastly inferior to routine American movies. The War gave a huge boost to the British film industry and by the late Forties that gap in quality had all but disappeared. Most post-War British movies may have been too parochial in their subject matter for European or American tastes but they looked thoroughly professional and technically equivalent to the Hollywood product. The Common Touch illustrates this catching-up process in action.
Whatever its defects, it looks good. It is noticeably well lit and photographed. The production design is generally effective and the sets are unexpectedly lavish and spacious. Its a quantum leap beyond many of the pokey, cramped-looking 'quota quickies' of just a couple of years before.
The performances are not particularly memorable. Geoffrey Hibbert's Henderson is suitably callow (with hidden steel) and when he has to assume a working class accent he handles it well enough. Joyce Howard and Greta Gynt just say their lines and avoid bumping into the furniture. They are competent, but when you have said that you have said everything. It is no surprise that none of the leads ever became stars.
However, we do get introduced to the plethora of good character actors that were available at the time and it is they that carry the weight of the movie. Of course, the middle class characters are all terribly 'British' with plummy accents that might grate on our ears today and the working class characters are a stage school fantasy of the 'salt of the Earth' deserving poor, but those were the conventions of the time and there is no point in castigating this movie for not having the sensibility of movies made twenty years later.
As with so many British films of the Forties and Fifties, my main reservation concerns the material. British film-makers may have mastered the technology of cinema but were still not much good at storytelling. Barbara Emary's screenplay is only too typical of the era.
The story is just sentimental wish-fulfilment, but its 'we are all in it together' ethos probably struck a chord with audiences during the War. Young Henderson leaves school to take over his father's company and to the chagrin of the general manager, Cartwright, is not prepared to be a mere figurehead. He learns of a plan to demolish a part of Covent Garden that includes 'Charlie's Place' - a refuge for the homeless poor. Suspicious of Cartwright's motives, he decides to investigate by pretending to be a down-and-out and checking himself into Charlie's Place where he becomes involved in the lives of the other residents. Eventually he is able to defeat Cartwright's plans and ensure that Charlie's Place will be retained as part of his company's regeneration of the area.
It is a simple enough story and it is hard to see why it took 104 minutes to tell. More importantly, its various elements are quite poorly integrated.
For example, Henderson is assisted by an old school friend, but his only role in the picture is to give Henderson someone to talk to. This friend is briefly smitten with a nightclub singer, but they hardly interact and she is in love with another character that plays no other part in the story. The friend's sister is introduced early on but disappears for long stretches of the movie and is also marginal to the plot. Henderson falls in love with her, but this development occurs far too late in the movie to affect anything that happens. I guess all movies of the time had to have a love interest, but this one is especially perfunctory.
Another of Henderson's accomplices is a down-at-heel lawyer, known as Lincoln's Inn, but in the end he has no real part in thwarting Cartwright. Indeed, neither does Henderson! Cartwright is essentially defeated by another marginal character in a somewhat contrived plot development that pops up out of nowhere, like a rabbit being pulled out of a hat. In fact, it becomes obvious that the screenwriter has never worked out exactly what Cartwright's plan is and her attempts to hide this become faintly risible.
Similarly, most of the characters that hang around Charlie's Place are just 'colour' and never impinge on the actual story. Several of them seem to have fallen from affluence, including Lincoln's Inn and an ex-concert pianist, but the reasons for their decline are never disclosed. None are alcoholics.
The movie is also punctuated by musical interludes that are never integrated into the drama and further slow down its somewhat leisurely development. I enjoyed Ian Maclaren's virtuoso harmonica playing, but the nightclub numbers seemed rather feeble to me (although they might appeal to aficionados of that musical era). As a dancer, Greta Gynt was no Ginger Rogers.
All in all, it is a rather lame story, poorly structured, full of redundant characters and padded with sub-plots that mostly just dribble into sand. Nonetheless, having intended to watch it for only twenty minutes or so, I stuck with it to the end. It must have had something.
The Common Touch is of undoubted historical interest as a representative artifact of the British film industry during a now-obscure, but important, period of rapid transition.
However, I find it hard to recommend it on any other basis.
Notoriously, routine British movies of the Thirties were vastly inferior to routine American movies. The War gave a huge boost to the British film industry and by the late Forties that gap in quality had all but disappeared. Most post-War British movies may have been too parochial in their subject matter for European or American tastes but they looked thoroughly professional and technically equivalent to the Hollywood product. The Common Touch illustrates this catching-up process in action.
Whatever its defects, it looks good. It is noticeably well lit and photographed. The production design is generally effective and the sets are unexpectedly lavish and spacious. Its a quantum leap beyond many of the pokey, cramped-looking 'quota quickies' of just a couple of years before.
The performances are not particularly memorable. Geoffrey Hibbert's Henderson is suitably callow (with hidden steel) and when he has to assume a working class accent he handles it well enough. Joyce Howard and Greta Gynt just say their lines and avoid bumping into the furniture. They are competent, but when you have said that you have said everything. It is no surprise that none of the leads ever became stars.
However, we do get introduced to the plethora of good character actors that were available at the time and it is they that carry the weight of the movie. Of course, the middle class characters are all terribly 'British' with plummy accents that might grate on our ears today and the working class characters are a stage school fantasy of the 'salt of the Earth' deserving poor, but those were the conventions of the time and there is no point in castigating this movie for not having the sensibility of movies made twenty years later.
As with so many British films of the Forties and Fifties, my main reservation concerns the material. British film-makers may have mastered the technology of cinema but were still not much good at storytelling. Barbara Emary's screenplay is only too typical of the era.
The story is just sentimental wish-fulfilment, but its 'we are all in it together' ethos probably struck a chord with audiences during the War. Young Henderson leaves school to take over his father's company and to the chagrin of the general manager, Cartwright, is not prepared to be a mere figurehead. He learns of a plan to demolish a part of Covent Garden that includes 'Charlie's Place' - a refuge for the homeless poor. Suspicious of Cartwright's motives, he decides to investigate by pretending to be a down-and-out and checking himself into Charlie's Place where he becomes involved in the lives of the other residents. Eventually he is able to defeat Cartwright's plans and ensure that Charlie's Place will be retained as part of his company's regeneration of the area.
It is a simple enough story and it is hard to see why it took 104 minutes to tell. More importantly, its various elements are quite poorly integrated.
For example, Henderson is assisted by an old school friend, but his only role in the picture is to give Henderson someone to talk to. This friend is briefly smitten with a nightclub singer, but they hardly interact and she is in love with another character that plays no other part in the story. The friend's sister is introduced early on but disappears for long stretches of the movie and is also marginal to the plot. Henderson falls in love with her, but this development occurs far too late in the movie to affect anything that happens. I guess all movies of the time had to have a love interest, but this one is especially perfunctory.
Another of Henderson's accomplices is a down-at-heel lawyer, known as Lincoln's Inn, but in the end he has no real part in thwarting Cartwright. Indeed, neither does Henderson! Cartwright is essentially defeated by another marginal character in a somewhat contrived plot development that pops up out of nowhere, like a rabbit being pulled out of a hat. In fact, it becomes obvious that the screenwriter has never worked out exactly what Cartwright's plan is and her attempts to hide this become faintly risible.
Similarly, most of the characters that hang around Charlie's Place are just 'colour' and never impinge on the actual story. Several of them seem to have fallen from affluence, including Lincoln's Inn and an ex-concert pianist, but the reasons for their decline are never disclosed. None are alcoholics.
The movie is also punctuated by musical interludes that are never integrated into the drama and further slow down its somewhat leisurely development. I enjoyed Ian Maclaren's virtuoso harmonica playing, but the nightclub numbers seemed rather feeble to me (although they might appeal to aficionados of that musical era). As a dancer, Greta Gynt was no Ginger Rogers.
All in all, it is a rather lame story, poorly structured, full of redundant characters and padded with sub-plots that mostly just dribble into sand. Nonetheless, having intended to watch it for only twenty minutes or so, I stuck with it to the end. It must have had something.
The Common Touch is of undoubted historical interest as a representative artifact of the British film industry during a now-obscure, but important, period of rapid transition.
However, I find it hard to recommend it on any other basis.