POWER & PREJUDICE (III)
TURN THE KEY SOFTLY, THIS SPORTING LIFE & VIOLENT PLAYGROUND
Turn The Key Softly (1953) attempts to take things further from Good Time Girl. Again dealing with convicted women, it centres on the story of three female prisoners, all released on the same day. They are very distinct types: first, there is Monica (Yvonne Mitchell), whose lover made her assist him in a housebreaking, then escaped when the police arrived leaving her to face arrest; next is Stella (a youthful Joan Collins), a high-class prostitute, now reformed, who intends to marry a bus conductor; and finally Mrs Quilliam (Kathleen Harrison), who steals small items from shops and cares only for her dog, Johnny. Rather improbably, the three meet twenty-four hours later for a reunion in a restaurant and discuss their hopes and fears.
As it turns out, despite her efforts to go straight, Monica’s lover deceives her again. Stella flirts with her old career, before finally settling for the conductor. Lonely Mrs Quilliam loses her dog and is run over looking for him. Eventually a saddened Monica retrieves the dog and takes him home. Although a valiant idea, a ponderous script prevents the film from taking off with its contrivances and implausibilities defeating the efforts of director Jack Lee and the performances.
What When The Bough Breaks, Good Time Girl and Turn The Key Softly demonstrate is the unwillingness of realistic ideas of society to come together cinematically whilst conforming to the narrow censorship of the 1940s and 1950s. It would be another decade or so before realism truly began to materialize and its shape was the curved ball of a rugby prop forward, literally kicked across the screen with all the hate, fury and pent-up frustration that Frank Machin could muster. Machin, as portrayed by the exciting newcomer Richard Harris, could express all the discontent of the trapped working classes with one lunge of his powerful frame. Leaving a ruck of scrambling players behind, Frank accelerates clear – all the way to the goal line.
This Sporting Life (1963) was a real breakthrough. Here was the way to ‘escape’ all right. From lowly miner to top‑paid rugby footballer, Frank crunches his way out. And all you can hear are the screams, and the sound of values being broken underfoot. Frank is a young miner, who rooms with Mrs. Hammond (Rachel Roberts), a widow with two young children. But Frank has ambition. He can play a great game and intends to be the best. An old scout for the club, Johnson (William Hartnell), has faith in Frank and persuades the City Club to give him a trial. Frank’s skill and evident love of brutality impress Weaver, the club's owner. Frank is signed and receives a cheque for $1,000. Unbelievable money.
Frank hopes that Mrs. Hammond will warm to him. She doesn’t. In fact she seems more aggressive more antagonistic; she belittles Frank’s money by saying it’s more than her husband’s life was worth. When he died in a pit accident, there was hardly any compensation. Frank’s failure to win her over only results in him becoming cruder and rougher but eventually she softens. Frank resists the advances of an industrialist's wife and with it the ‘good life’, but his relationship with the intransigent Mrs. Hammond only worsens, culminating in her death from a brain hemorrhage. Frank is shattered, and torn by remorse, but he recovers to find even more brutal strength on the rugby pitch.
This Sporting Life was the highly acclaimed feature debut of the Lindsay Anderson, whose early documentaries - Idlers That Work (1949), Wakefield Express (1952), Green And Pleasant Land (1955) - were poignant commentaries on English working‑class existence. When he turned to features, no-one was surprised at the ferocity of his film. The performances are also uniformly good, especially Richard Harris as bull‑headed Frank, and the latent sadness that underpins Rachel Roberts's steely, resolute, 'in‑control' Mrs. Hammond. William Hartnell and Colin Blakely, who support Frank through his darkest hours, and Alan Badel as the slippery-smooth Weaver, the epitome of middle‑class aspiration, also provide strong contributions.
Lindsay Anderson often found it difficult to find his niche in contemporary British cinema. Maybe he was too uncomfortable with the Establishment. But after This Sporting Life he delivered a trilogy that would be deservedly heralded by world cinema. If (1968), O Lucky Man (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982) charted a country’s disillusionment that finally broke down completely in a welter of strikes and unemployment. These austere pictures of Britain in decay aren’t the pleasant viewing, but their essential truth, presented by a film-maker who cares, cannot be ignored.
As an increasingly socially aware 1950s progressed, other themes came sharply into focus: the law, juvenile delinquency and racism. Two films from the prolific producer / director team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, tentatively studied these issues. The first, Violent Playground (1958), is set in Liverpool. A city beginning to find its way after the War, with its melting pot of Irish and black immigrants and bombed-out slums that still pitted the city’s vistas like open sores. A city simmering with tension liable to blow at any moment. The reluctant hero of Violent Playground is a policeman, Det-Sgt Truman, played by Stanley Baker. He is taken off a series of arson cases and transferred to the junior liaison division.
The subject at the crux of the film is the Juvenile Liaison Officers’ Scheme, ‘The Great Experiment’, introduced by the Chief Constable of Liverpool in 1949. In simple terms this meant that, at the discretion of a police officer, a boy or girl under seventeen who admits a first minor offence need not appear before a magistrate, but is instead put in the officer’s charge. In 1958 it was reported to have been 98 per cent successful, although policeman like Det-Sgt Truman had their patience tried by children who soon began to understand it was quite simple to get away with a first offence – as a young child says to him, “You can’t frame me, I’m not eight yet!”
Although dealing with kids doesn’t seem to be his strength, Truman battles on gamely. One of his duties is to keep a watchful eye on the young Murphy twins. In doing so, he gets to know their older brother, Johnny, who’s a gang leader. In fact, he also suspects Johnny of being an arsonist. Spending more and more time in the Murphy home, because he has fallen in love with Cathy Murphy (Anne Heywood), Truman becomes convinced in his suspicions, while Johnny, cornered and dangerous, believes he has been betrayed by his sister. Taking a class of children hostage in a classroom, he eventually gives himself up, persuaded by Cathy’s quiet pleas.
Violent Playground is, generally speaking, an honourable attempt at portraying the problems which were rapidly arising in Britain’s inner cities. Stanley Baker is always watchable, and he brings to Truman a humanity (almost a naivety) that makes him sympathetic. If today’s entrenched audiences would not accept its simplistic statements of life, love and the law, this is not to say that those people who witnessed Violent Playground on first release should be denigrated for an acceptance of a world that is not quite the ‘Violent Playground’ the world has become since.
SAPPHIRE, FLAME IN THE STREETS, FAME IS THE SPUR & NO LOVE FOR JOHNNIE