Victor Saville (1938)
The legends on the screen at the start pay tribute to Winifred Holtby and describe this film as a ‘pictorial impression’ of her novel. And that’s what it is (‘pictorial’ meaning ‘cinematic’, rather than denoting a particular visual style): at only eighty-five minutes, it could hardly be anything else. (The BBC’s 2011 adaptation of South Riding comprised three one-hour episodes, Yorkshire Television’s 1974 version thirteen fifty-minute ones.) Although the book, published in 1936, was an immediate best-seller, the film-makers evidently felt no obligation to be faithful to it. In the novel, Robert Carne, the local landowner under increasing financial and personal pressures, dies. In the final scene of this adaptation, with a screenplay by Ian Dalrymple, the progressive young headmistress heroine Sarah Burton and Carne, the love of her life, look set for a happy future together. The finale shows the people of Kiplington waving flags and singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in celebration of the coronation of King George VI: while the value of local community is an important theme in Winifred Holtby’s novel, this take on it is surprising. All in all, Victor Saville’s version of South Riding suggests that a British film made in the 1930s was expected to be a film – no matter how popular its literary source material, no matter how different from that source material the screen adaptation might be. This means not only that the central love story between Sarah Burton and Robert Carne has to work out. It also means that South Riding, which is very well photographed by Harry Stradling Sr, is visually atmospheric and occasionally exciting (especially in the horse riding sequences). It possibly means too that the coverage of the lives of the Holly family, well below the poverty line, is particularly attenuated.
The film’s brevity is frustrating because much of it is well acted, especially by Edmund Gwenn, vivid as the clumsily crooked councillor Alfred Huggins, and Ralph Richardson as Robert Carne: Richardson is magnetic because he’s able to express Carne’s miseries from inside. Although Edna Best’s Sarah is a little dull and a great deal too posh, Best gives an intelligent performance and produces the odd moment of real emotional power – as when Sarah watches Carne leave a room: they haven’t had an argument but you feel her deep emptiness that they’ve parted without any connection being made, without his even saying goodbye. Ann Todd is Carne’s insane wife Madge (not a name you usually associate with a fictional madwoman). Todd is a poor actress at the best of times but you feel rather sorry for her here – as a victim of how insanity was conventionally presented in popular cinema of the era. Ten-year-old Glynis Johns has a real spark as the Carnes’ daughter Midge. With Marie Lohr as Alderman Mrs Beddows, Milton Rosmer as the egregious Alderman Snaith, John Clements as the socialist Joe Astell (his smoker’s cough comes and goes as required), and Felix Aylmer as the chairman of the local council.
10 July 2012
