Of ducks and concrete

One of my favourite lines in all film literature is in a booklet note for the National Film Theatre, possibly in the early 1990s. The NFT was showing what I think was Rookery Nook, a British title from 1930. It was an early sound film and one of a series made around that time of what were known as the Aldwych farces – comedy films based on productions of Ben Travers comedies performed at London’s Aldwych theatre. The booklet note was provided by Geoff Brown, who said that the Aldwych farces took to cinema like a duck to concrete.

I can’t think of a better image for summing up the impact of those films, which are both weighed down with the most primitive of filming technique, yet just as much rise above it. After all, what else can a duck do when faced with concrete? The word conjure up the absurdity, the clumsiness yet the peculiar delight of a set of films with such wit and acting bravado (Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn, Robertson Hare, Winifred Shotter, Mary Brough).

Rookery Nook naturally features in Brown’s new book, Silent to Sound: British Cinema in Transition. There we learn that the author Ben Travers thought that talking pictures resembled ‘machine-gun practice in a parrot-house’, that the performers found it a struggle to judge tempo and delivery when there was no live audience to laugh at their lines, that filming out of sequence and with the script additions necessary for a film confused actors fresh from the triumph of the original staging, flat lighting owing to the use of multiple cameras recording the action simultaneously, and that despite all of the challenges for a medium in the process of reinventing itself audiences loved the results. Enough of the duck remained to be the duck they wanted to see and hear.

The period in which silent films turned into sound has always felt like a gap in film history, for all that writers such as Alexander Walker (The Shattered Silents) and Scott Eyman (The Speed of Sound) have endeavoured to fill it. It’s the period when no one involved really knew what they were doing, while the frequently creaky efforts that survive often baffle audiences of today. How was this film ever entertaining, with its antediluvian technique, its painfully laboured dialogue and its tinny sound? Historians can skim over this awkward period – I recently picked up a copy of Ivan Butler’s To Encourage the Art of Film (a 1971 history of the British Film Institute), to find that he deals with the emergence of the talking film in one pithy paragraph.

Not so Brown, who gives us 402 pages of the finest detail, documenting how British films, just at the point when they were starting to understand how a decent silent feature might be made, had to abandon such knowledge and battle with microphones and a new language of cinema. Producers had to decide which of several competing sound systems was the right one to choose, the art of sound editing had to be learned, cinemas had to be equipped for sound, and distribution models were thrown up into the air as the readily translatable medium of silent film was replaced by dialogue that would need to be changed for different language versions, were films to reach the same markets they had become accustomed to reach. Much of this is known by those with a general familiarity with film history, even if all you have seen on Singin’ in the Rain or The Artist. A world was lost through the all-conquering cacophony of a new one.

The lesson is familiar, but never before has the British angle been told with such thoroughness, not even by the redoubtable multi-volume historian of British cinema, Rachael Low. Indeed, Silent to Sound feels like the missing volume in Low’s History of the British Film series, to be squeezed in between her 1918-1929 and 1930s volumes. Researchers will be turning to Brown’s pages for decades to come, much as we do with Low, for comprehensiveness mixed with insight.

And humour. The man who saw Rookery Nook and thought of a duck landing on concrete is on good form throughout. There is a gently mocking wit that sends up the foibles and the follies while never being unkind, or indeed inaccurate. This comes to the fore when Brown describes some of the efforts when producers, technicians and performers were struggling to understand what the new medium demanded and how to achieve this. Having worked at the BFI’s National Film Archive for some years, I was able to see quite a number of these films, and know how painful the experience can be. There are the long pauses between dialogue delivered and the response to that dialogue, the uneven balance of the sound, the bizarre patches of silence before the next attempt at sound reproduction turns up, the faltering, rackety music, the rounded vocal tones that belonged only to the artificial world of the London stage, actors moving as though they had not simply landed on concrete but were trying to wade through it, and a general effect of something that was profoundly untrue to life.

A flavour of the problems such films had in production is given in Brown’s account of the filming of Under the Greenwood Tree (1929), based on the Thomas Hardy novel and directed by Harry Lachman:

Over the weeks and months, technical problems continued in step with human frailties. Alongside the damage resulting from peripatetic equipment, light fuses and high-tension batteries blew, microphone leads could not be found, rheostats misbehaved, local electricity supplies suffered disruption, rain clattered onto the studio’s corrugated roof, cameras jammed, the BBC’s animal impersonator when AWOL, a baby on the set cried and cried, and artists forgot their lines, while Lachman himself wasted time fussing unduly over the acoustical properties of the studio ceiling or the appropriate clothes for a Victorian gentleman.

The ‘knife’ scene in the sound and silent versions of Blackmail

Of course there felicities as well as follies. Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), made in both silent and sound versions, is rightly cherished for its inventive approach to sound, most notably in the famous ‘knife … knife … KNIFE’ scene, even if it takes eight minutes before a word of dialogue is spoken. Splinters (1929), with its lively soldiers’ banter and Lancastrian accents still shows why audiences responded to it so warmly as the time. Brown shares with me an affection for the gentle charm of Under the Greenwood Tree (1929), and I have a sneaking fondness for Sinclair Hill’s manic but stylish melodrama Dark Red Roses (1929) in which a sculptor, played by the reliably histrionic Stewart Rome, plans to chop of the hands with the pianist who has fallen in lover with his wife. And Rookery Nook, of course, as dazzling in performance as it is antiquated in style.

Dick Henderson singing ‘That’s what makes me love her all the more’ for DeForest Phonofilms, 1926

There are also the short films of variety acts which preserve the entertainers of another age, even if we may wonder at times how they were ever entertaining in the first place; and top marks to Brown for remembering that sound came to the newsreels too, a whole history in itself of live versus pre-recorded sound, of how to make commentaries work and how to fit in the music. British newsreels for the first few years of sound indeed had little or no commentary, instead settling for an introductory title followed by live sound which can give a startling effect of our having stumbled on uninterrupted actuality.

West Ham vs Huddersfield in ‘Soccer Again!’, Pathe Super Sound Gazette 30/27, 1 September 1930

But the follies are what make the films of this period fun, in a grim sort of way. Atlantic (1929), its story loosely based on that of the ‘Titanic’, is the film that is often singled out for the brickbats. Were you to look only at the clip provided by the BFI on YouTube, you would think that here was a film of grand style and creative use of sound, unsurprising to see from E.A. Dupont, director of the marvellous silents Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929). But when it comes to the dialogue scenes you are in a different world entirely, one that is like nothing so much as a play being performed in a cold and empty theatre. The most notorious scene is one in which John Longden, a wooden actor at the best of times, tells a wheelchaired passenger (Franklin Dyall) of the limited room available in the lifeboats. The slowness of the delivery, broken up by agonised looks into the middle distance, is jaw-droppingly awful. Just as bad is Madeline Carroll, accurately described by Brown as seeming ‘to be experiencing speaking in joined-up words for the first time’. Atlantic was a production of some importance, as the first of many multi-lingual British productions, with French and German versions being produced with different casts, the German and English versions being shot alongside one another in the same studio, the scene for one alternating with a scene for the other. Brown tells us that the German version, though not without its faults, was far superior, thanks to a more expert cast.

An extract from Atlantic (1929)

Silent to Sound is a grand book with multiple themes. Indeed, at times it feels like you are reading a novel, perhaps of the J.B. Priestley school, in which multiple characters weave in and out of our story, while the novelist brings in matters of industry, economics, social change and nation. Especially nation in this particular case. If there is one theme in Silent to Sound that overrides all the others it is the worries over keeping films and film technology British. Over and and over you read patriotic, defensive claims that such and such a sound technology will be better than anything the Americans or the Germans can produce, or that talking pictures will enable the English language as spoken by the English to triumph globally.

But what did the audience think of such change? The book doesn’t really say, beyond noting which films were popular, but then the audience didn’t have that much say at the time either. Sound films were just imposed upon them, because that’s the way the technology had developed. Reading Silent to Sound, I kept thinking of artificial intelligence. No one asked us whether we wanted to have our lives governed by AI. For the most part, we would have been entirely content living lives without it. But it has been introduced, made ubiquitous – so many search enquiry results begin with an AI summary of your question, apps have added AI capability, phones, cameras and who know what else boast of its capabilities – and is moving unstoppably from the desirable to the normal. No one will ask for a time when AI did not exist, except for a few nostalgists, because the technology will have changed them. So no one asked for sound films, and having been given them, no one – except for a few nostalgists – asked for the return of silent films. We’re fickle like that.

British films waddled out of the silent era and into the sound era with relief. Better things would follow now that the technology had settled. But they had lost the key battle of the silent-into-sound period, which was the English (or British) voice. The global language was not to be that of the London stage but that of the American streets. The American tongue flowed with the rhythm of film; the English tongue, for too many years, did not. Silent to Sound is a record of a faltering national cinema, conservative and petty-minded, seldom able to imitate or even understand innovations in other filmmaking countries, bursts of creativity drowned out by habitual mediocrity, uncertain above all about what its voice was. You can’t make good films if you don’t know what it is you want to say.

Links:

• Geoff Brown’s research was conducted as part of the AHRC-funded ‘British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound‘ project at De Montfort University, principal investigator Laraine Porter.
• Atlantic can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn3dNIHa9AY. The notorious Longden-Dyall scene is at 39:00. When the film stops talking it’s actually quite good. In parts.
• There’s an interesting piece by David Cairns about Atlantic on MUBI, which focusses on the good and bad parts of Dupont’s direction. His poor English may not have helped.