The Man in Grey (Arliss, 1943): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm
This film, also screening on September 17th, is part of the Martin Scorsese's Hidden gems of British Cinema season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Time Out review:
James Mason was in fine caddish fettle for this Gainsborough bodice-ripper, a
Regency romp (from Lady Eleanor Smith) chronicling the fortunes of old
school chums Phyllis Calvert and Margaret Lockwood, the latter eventually to seduce her
pal's roguish husband, Mason's glacial Lord Rohan. The strangled vowels
and heaving sighs play like the highest Barbara Cartland camp, but in its day
this was raunchy stuff for the British screen. In fact, the low-cut
dresses distressed the Americans so much, they asked for portions of the
film to be reshot so they could get it past the censor.
BFI Screenonline wrote that it was "easy to see why" the film was so well received: "It caught the national mood quite brilliantly, by fusing elements of previously successful "women's pictures" such as Rebecca (US, d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), Gaslight (d. Thorold Dickinson, 1940) and of course Gone With The Wind (US, d. Victor Fleming,
1939) with a surprisingly distinctive formula of its own, blending
authentic star appeal (James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert,
the then newcomer Stewart Granger) with a plot whose novelettish surface
concealed an intricate labyrinth of contrasts and doublings: good
against evil, obedience against rebellion, male against female and class
against class. The ingredients of virtually all the subsequent
Gainsborough melodramas can be clearly seen taking root here." Full review here.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment