Quartet (1948)

Quartet, an unusual and entertaining British classic film, is a foursome of half-hour vignettes, each with its own director and cast, based on four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham.

Abroad for the first time by himself, a rising teen tennis star tests his father’s parting advice at Monte Carlo; a privileged young pianist has everything but the elusive artistic soul he craves; a kite enthusiast’s young wife must help her husband cut iron apron strings; and a pompous ‘man of affairs’ is nearly undone when his wife of thirty years publishes a book of poems which suggest she had a lover.

Maugham, who died the year the film came out, introduces the film with a succinct summing-up, noting: ‘In my twenties, the critics said I was brutal. In my thirties, they said I was flippant. In my forties, they said I was cynical. In my fifties they said I was competent. And then, in my sixties, they said I was superficial. I went my own way with the strength of the shoulders, following the path I had traced and trying with my work to fill out the pattern of life that I had made for myself.’

Perhaps Maugham, popular among readers but never quite in sync with the prevailing critical wind, simply was not the Right Sort of Chap. What writer is, though? This quartet deftly dramatized by R.C. Sherriff shows Maugham to have been a close and amused observer of both the Right and Wrong Sort, and the four casts share their pleasure in giving life to these vignettes.

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters and Caldicott.

The first story, The Facts of Life, directed by Ralph Smart, opens in a London club with the then-popular comedy duo Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) at a bridge table. Here, Radford plays Henry Garnet, the father of a rising tennis star, and Wayne plays his bridge partner Leslie, as they do their routine as utterly conventional club men and cricket lovers. 

Leslie (Naughton Wayne) draws out Henry Garnet (Basil Radford) at bridge.

Leslie gets Garnet to recount the tale of the first trip abroad of his 19-year-old son Nicky. After a good tennis outing in Monte Carlo, we see a friend first encourage Nicky Garnet (Jack Watling) to try the roulette table, where he meets Jeanne (Mai Zetterling); Nicky later loans Jeanne money, and then he catches up with her after hours—all contrary to his father’s parting advice, and with unexpected results in each instance.

 

‘What infuriated me was the boy’s so damned pleased with himself,’ Garnet said.

'The mistake you made in the first place, if you don’t mind my saying so, was to let him learn tennis,’ Leslie said. ‘A thing like that would never happen to a cricketer.

Dirk Bogarde and Honor Blackman in Quartet (1948)

In Harold French’s The Alien Corn, George Bland (Dirk Bogarde), the son and nephew of prosperous businessmen and beloved of Paula (Honor Blackman), announces to his family that, rather than complete his final term at Oxford, he will go off on his own to Paris to dedicate himself to the piano. ‘I used to be fond of fishing when I was a boy,’ grouses his father, Sir Frederick Bland (Raymond Lovell), ‘but I did not become a professional fisherman!’ After Paula persuades Sir Frederick to allow George a two-year grace period to sink or swim, George dutifully pecks her on the cheek. ‘Is that the best you could do?’ asks the future Pussy Galore—but clearly not the future Mrs. George Bland.

A boy and his kite are a mother's best friend--Quartet (1948) 

Arthur Crabtree’s The Kite explores that special English ground between hobby enthusiast and eccentric. Prison Visitor Ned Preston (Bernard Lee) tells of meeting inmate Herbert Sunbury (George Cole) in the course of his duties. Sunbury has been gaoled because he refused to support his estranged wife Betty Baker (Susan Shaw). His parents Beatrice (Hermione Baddeley) and Samuel Sunbury (Mervyn Jones) encouraged and supported their son in his kite-flying hobby from a young age; and then Herbert up and married a woman he met at the cinema. But Betty becomes frustrated at taking third place to her ‘Bert’s’ hobby and, not too far behind kites, his mother. Herbert cannot understand why Betty does not divine the proper order of things; though Betty manages to square the circle.  

Hermione Baddeley and George Cole in Quartet (1948)

The final story, Ken Annakin’s The Colonel’s Lady, may better be titled The Colonel’s Education. Colonel Peregrine (Cecil Parker) is a self-important businessman in a long, childless marriage with Evie Peregrine (Nora Swinburne). He keeps a younger mistress, Daphne (Linden Travers), ‘in town’. [Parker and Travers also played an adulterous couple in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938).] This man-about-town suddenly becomes aware that his wife not only has published a volume of poetry under her maiden name E.K. Hamilton, but that it is ‘a runaway success’ and ‘hardly suitable for children’. 

The colonel's lady wrote a book: Nora Swinburne and Cecil Parker in Quartet (1948)

At a reception for the book, Henry Dashwood (Ernest Thesiger), an enthusiastic critic, tells the horrified Peregrine, ‘What makes the book outstanding is the passion that throbs in every line. Naked, earthly passion. Of course, deep-seated emotion like that is completely tragic. How right Heine was when he said “the poet makes little songs out of great sorrows”.’

Linden Travers and Cecil Parker in Quartet (1948)

The colonel wracks his brain cherchant le pool boy, seeking an explanation from everyone but his wife. He admits to himself that he ‘can’t live without Evie’; with his next breath he adds: ‘I’ll never understand until my dying day: what on earth did that fellow ever see in her?’ A moment of clarity ensues.

Quartet 1948 U.K. (120 min.) directed by Saul Dibb; Jean Barker, editor; Ray Elton, cinematographer; screenplay by R.C. Sherriff, from four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham: The Facts of Life (25 min.), dir. Ralph Smart; The Alien Corn (25 min.), dir. Harold French; Kite (32 min.), dir. Arthur Crabtree; and The Colonel’s Lady (32 min.), dir. Ken Annakin with cinematography by Reginald H. Wyer.

Journey's End

Journey’s End is a compelling, unsentimental ensemble piece in which a group of seriously shell-shocked British officers and men await the brunt of an expected major German offensive in a forward trench.

The film is based on a 1929 play by R.C. (Robert Cedric) Sherriff, a screenwriter who had served three years as an infantry officer on the Western Front. Sherriff followed the play with a novel of the same title a year later. (Sherriff later won an Academy Award for his 1939 screenplay Goodbye, Mr. Chips.)

This is a war movie set in the darkest heart of the First World War, but there are few heroics and little derring-do. This infantry company of emotionally shattered men is led by officers equally as distressed, who know that empathy and emotional strength is the only way to keep the unit together and to try to keep their men and themselves alive, despite how broken they feel inside. 

Sam Claflin as Captain Stanhope in Journey's End

C Company is led by Military Cross recipients Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin) and Lieutenant Osborne (Paul Bettany), his executive officer, because they are best able to hold themselves and their unit together emotionally. Osborne clearly learned more about leading men from his background as a former schoolmaster, elite rugby player and father than from training the Army provided.

Paul Bettany as Lieutenant Osborne in Journey's End

The dramatic device that makes this narrative gel is that we witness the action mainly through the eyes of a bright, fresh-faced boy lieutenant eager to prove his mettle on the battlefield. Filled with Victorian vim and vigor, Second Lieutenant Raleigh (Asa Butterfield) is a teenaged school-leaver with rudimentary ‘officer training’—‘eight weeks on Salisbury Plain’ and ‘the Corps’ at school, he reports—who has requested to join the unit of an older former schoolmate he admires.


Asa Butterfield as Second Lieutenant Raleigh in Journey's End

The older ‘boy’ is Stanhope, worshipped at home for his Military Cross received for heroism in the capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917. Stanhope, who has a connection with Raleigh’s sister, Margaret—the novel gives the three a history of growing up and summering together in Sussex—told Raleigh to ‘look him up’ if he ever got over to France. But he is horrified to the point of anger when the worshipful boy shows up in his trench at this moment.

We are told that under the general order, each company served on the line six days per month. That may not sound like much. However, it is critical to note that the madness called the Western Front did not advance more than 20 miles in either direction, despite four years of intense fighting and millions of deaths. Both sides’ artillery consistently pounding the same places levelled what had been a region of abundant French farms and villages into a barren mud lagoon of stripped trees and death. 

This story takes place during five days in March 1918 in a trench in the middle of this quagmire, at the distance of ‘about the width of a rugby field’ from the German trenches. Stanhope’s company is sent into the line on 18 March. The long-anticipated German offensive is expected to come on 21 March. As C Company heads in, the unit they are relieving is bringing away everything they can carry. Company C arrives at what had been a French trench—the French army mutinied the summer before—in a nearly indefensible condition.

C Company going into the line on 18 March 1918 in Journey's End 

And then on 19 March ‘The Colonel’ (Robert Glenister) orders what Stanhope knows to be a pointless daylight raid the next day. Stanhope’s men are to raid the German trenches under cover of smoke to snatch a German soldier to try to get intelligence about the anticipated offensive.

 

The rest—the whole story—needs to be seen to be believed.

Two hundred reenactors were used and every detail down to the uniform braiding and military customs and courtesies looks meticulously authentic. There are older men in the company, such as Private Mason (Toby Jones), the officers’ orderly, and Second Lieutenant Trotter (Stephen Graham), but rather than the middle-aged men one sees in ‘war movies’ in roles that are properly younger, the ‘older’ men such as Osborne and the Sergeant Major (Andy Gathergood), look like young men aged by the horror of war.   

Tom Sturridge as Second Lieutenant Hibbert in Journey's End

Journey’s End is one of two outstanding recent war movies, less about the shooting than the men doing the fighting, which speak for the toll the two world wars took on Great Britain in particular. It is notable for taking on the subject of ‘shell shock’—post-traumatic stress disorder—in a direct and unsentimental way.

The other movie is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), particularly the narrative of the father (Mark Rylance) and two sons taking the family pleasure boat to pick up evacuees. These stories are neither weepy nor inspiring. They show the effect of a moment of war on individuals, and they stay with one.

Journey’s End 2017 U.K. (107 minutes) directed by Saul Dibb; screenplay by Simon Reade based on the play by R.C. Sherriff and novel by Sherriff and Vernon Bartlett; director of photography Laurie Rose; casting by John Hubbard; music by Hildur Gudnadóttir.
 

Homme fatal

Too Late for Tears 1949 U.S. Republic Pictures (99 minutes) Directed by Byron Haskin; screenplay by Roy Huggins (from his Saturday Evening Post serial); cinematography by William C. Mellor; editing by Harry Keller.

Too Late for Tears is a World War II-era crime picture featuring two film noir stand-bys, but it two-times the typical film noir trope. 

Alan and Jane Palmer (Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott) are a couple that has had their marital ups and downs since they met and married after Alan got home from the war. Alan is an upwardly mobile ex-serviceman; Jane, a housewife, would like to accelerate that upward mobility. Alan and Jane both had modest beginnings, although Jane was married briefly during the war to a wealthy man who reportedly killed himself.

Alan and Jane Palmer (Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott) in Too Late for Tears (1949)

The couple quarrel one evening driving to soirée with Alan’s boss Ralph that Jane does not want to attend. Jane complains that she does not want Ralph’s ‘diamond-studded wife looking down her nose at me like a big ugly house up there looking down on Hollywood.’

Alan stops their convertible on the shoulder. While he tries to reassure Jane, someone in a passing sedan tosses a Gladstone bag in their back seat. When they see the money in the bag, they realize they have been mistaken for a blackmail drop. Another sedan slips by. Thinking quickly, Jane takes the wheel. She gives Alan a white-knuckle ride, coolly shaking their pursuer as though she taught CIA’s evasive driving course.

Now what to do with the $60,000? Alan’s conscience tells him there is no way they can continue together if they keep it; Jane’s money-hunger argues there is no way she can give it up. In the end, each is proven right. But for the moment they compromise: they will check the bag for a week in the Parcel Check at Union Station and see how they feel at the end of the week. 

The chance of a lifetime: Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy in Too Late for Tears (1949)

Jane argues that she has dreamed of a chance like this all her life. Far worse than being poor, ‘We were white-collar poor, middle-class poor. The kind of people who can’t quite keep up with the Joneses and die a little every day because they can’t.’

Alan replies: ‘The money won’t help. There will always be Joneses with a little more. The only thing worth having is peace of mind and money can’t buy that.’

The very next day Jane unsurprisingly spends nearly $800 on luxuries, using their savings against their windfall. And, as Alan anticipated, their pursuer saw their automobile license plate. Right after she gets back from her shopping splurge, Jane entertains a ‘detective’ who appears at their apartment.

Dan Duryea the sleazy Romeo in Too Late for Tears (1949)

Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) claims to be investigating missing money. ‘You haven't anything to hide, have you?’ he asks. Jane sits down and crosses her legs. ‘No, I can see you haven't.’ Fuller, a bigger talker than a heavy, thinks he has the little woman in the palm of his hand; Jane, who hasn’t far to travel from greed to sociopathy, begins only to sense distress on the edge of her web.

Then things begin to happen quickly for Alan’s sister, Kathy Palmer (Kristine Miller), who lives in the apartment across the hall from Alan and Jane. First, her brother disappears and Jane quickly agrees with a homicide investigator­­—Police Lt. Breach (Barry Kelley)—that ‘another woman’ was involved. Kathy does not buy that. And then the bluff, pleasant Don Blake (Don DeFore), one of Alan’s squadron mates from the war, turns up looking for Alan.

Homme fatal?: Don Blake (Don DeFore with Kathy Palmer (Kristine Miller) in Too Late for Tears (1949)

Jane’s hunger for the money makes her wise to that old stunt, and then Blake plays her flirting like a proposition but without the least interest in her. Jane invites to her apartment a local man with whom she knew Alan flew in England during the war. The man confronts Blake. Kathy is puzzled because Blake seems so concerned about Alan but evidently never knew him. Jane is puzzled because Blake keeps buzzing around her web with no apparent interest in money or sex. Jane is not the kind of woman who likes being puzzled, particularly anything that finds its way between her and her money.

In any case, neither Blake nor Kathy know about the money at outset. They become allies in their suspicion of Jane and in trying to find out what really happened to Alan. And then Kathy turns up the Union Station parcel claim check in Alan's things.

The ‘reveal’ occurs in a glamourous resort in Mexico where Jane goes 'por un momento de sonho pra fazer a fantasia', pursued by the homme fatal and the Furies.