Henry Cornelius (1949)
Whether or not the filmmakers intended to create a social-historical record of London in the late 1940s, they succeed in doing so in the opening scenes of this famous Ealing comedy. What’s more, these scenes – and some of the people in them – are truly and easily eccentric. The story starts in a heatwave and Henry Cornelius creates an interesting atmosphere: the locals seem almost stupefied by the heat but there’s an ominous edge to the torpor – something’s going to happen. Some kids roll a tractor tyre down a big hole in the streets of Pimlico and it sets off the unexploded bomb we’ve already been told is lying there (the shot of the tyre rolling on its inexorable way is very good). The wizard idea of the writer T E B Clarke is the discovery in the bomb crater of an ancient document. It transpires that Edward IV ceded the house that stood on the site, and its environs, to the last Duke of Burgundy, when he sought refuge in London after being presumed dead at the Battle of Nancy in 1477. The charter has never been revoked. So Pimlico is legally part of Burgundy and the British government has no jurisdiction over the area. The Pimlico-Burgundians aren’t bound by rationing or the other bureaucratic constraints of British life in the immediate post-war years.
It’s easy to understand why the film was such a success at the time – when austerity Britain was able to look back with prideful relief and good humour at what the country had achieved in the war just ended. In Passport to Pimlico, the canny pluck and self-interested resourcefulness of the locals – which became almost a leitmotif of Ealing comedies – resonates with Britain’s underdog fightback against Hitler. When the rest of London thwarts Whitehall by throwing food parcels over the barbed wire to the hungry, sequestered Burgundians, it’s a reminder of how the country pulled together between 1939 and 1945 to defeat a common enemy. (These sequences echo too the even more contemporary Berlin blockade, which audiences in 1949 would have seen on newsreel in other recent visits to the pictures.) The montages of newspaper front pages (on which the progress of the story increasingly and, in the final minutes, excessively depends), the cinema newsreels, the black marketeers – all contribute to a texture that must have been deeply familiar but they’re used to tell an amusingly tall story. The opening dedicates the film, in ironically ‘loving memory’, to the ration book – which, of course, wasn’t yet a memory. The Pimlico folks tear up their ration books on euphoric impulse when they discover they’re no longer British citizens.
As I write this note, I can almost convince myself this is a classic national comedy. Yet it took me three sittings to get through what is a very short (84-minute) picture and I was nearly desperate for it to be over. It’s from the moment the film’s central comic premise takes over that it begins to annoy, and the eccentricity starts to curdle into knowingness. A classic is just what Passport to Pimlico isn’t. It’s of its time: in its contentment with the gradings of social hierarchy; in the smug, mild xenophobia (we’re English so we’ll stand up for the right to be Burgundians but we don’t think much of foreign grub); and, especially, in the styles of acting. There are people who are bound to be a problem – like Stanley Holloway as a shopkeeper, always letting us know what a card (he thinks) he is, and the Basil Radford-Naunton Wayne combo, reunited here as men from the ministry and as unfunny as they were in Dead of Night. But I got just as depressed by performers whom I’ve nothing against – because of the Ealing-ish types they were playing: Barbara Murray, as Holloway’s glam, inexplicably posh daughter; John Slater as a bashful fishmonger; Hermione Baddeley as a no-nonsense dressmaker; and a lot of Cockney (with a capital C) street urchins. Even Margaret Rutherford, as the excited bluestocking historian who authenticates the buried charter, is a little too anxious to please (in one of her most celebrated roles). Raymond Huntley is all right, although his work here isn’t a patch on his performance in When We Are Married. As the eighteenth Duke of Burgundy, Paul Dupuis is probably not much of an actor but his relaxed style is rather welcome with all the busy character work going on around him. The large cast also includes Jane Hylton, Sydney Tafler, Philip Stainton, Michael Hordern and Charles Hawtrey.
30 January 2012
