Filmurbia and the Children’s Film Foundation

The films of the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) construct an arguably romanticised yet progressive image of the suburbs where children claim and consume the streets of the post-war British housing regeneration. In films such as Cup Fever (1965), Egghead’s Robot (1970), and Terry on the Fence (1985) children are foregrounded, whereas adults are relegated to marginal roles, and pushed indoors to work or perform domestic duties.

The CFF films celebrate and explore British suburbia as a site of childhood play and independence. For audiences of the time these films played a major contribution to the ways in which the suburbs were constructed through British visual culture, firstly in the cinema, and later on television.

I was part of the group of youngsters who stayed at home to watch Tiswas (1974 – 1982) and / or Multicoloured Swap Shop (1976 – 1982). However, I did see some of the CFF films – such as Sammy’s Super T-Shirt (1978) – on television in the mid 1980s. I was also familiar with CFF clips from the TV series Screen Test (1970 – 1984). 

The only time I've seen a CFF film was at the National Film Theatre many years ago when they screened The Glitterball (1978). I was there as a film student, making notes for a dissertation, and must have made an incongruous sight, scribbling notes on an A4 pad in the dark. This was before the film was available on DVD, and it's a good exercise for film scholars to try and make notes without being able to hit the pause button!

Now I’ve written a chapter for Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs (published April 2017). In it, I look at how boys and girls of the 1960s use the suburban streets to practice for an important football match, and how by the 1980s, the potentially-violent suburbs may have persuaded audiences to appreciate the safety of their own living rooms.

I’m looking forward to reading about the other screen suburbs in this edited collection.

Further reading:

Forrest, David, Harper, Graeme, and Rayner, Jonathan, (eds.), 2017,  Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan

Link to the Palgrave website

The Rex Cinema, Coalville: A Little Art Deco Palace

This is the Coalville Rex cinema. The last film it ever screened was 'Champions' starring John Hurt in 1984. The Rex was a two-screen cinema, with Screen 1 being situated at the top of a long staircase that took audiences to a large upper circle. Screen 2 had been built at a later date in the stalls area of the main auditorium.

For many years since the cinema's closure it has been used as a Dunelm Mill shop selling homeware and soft furnishings. Dunelm have been sympathetic to the interior of the cinema and very few alterations have been made.

If you visit the shop and concentrate on the architecture rather than the shelves of towels and bed linen you can find many tell tale signs about the Rex's former Art Deco splendour.

Entrance steps and sign for the buffet:












Foyer ceiling:






Corridor leading to screens 1 and 2 (the buffet was positioned on the right side and the box office on the left):







Floor and stained glass ceiling in the box office area:



















Main staircase leading to Screen 1:













Curved walls leading to fire exits in Screen 2 / stalls area of auditorium:












The above two photos are taken in the main shopping area of Dunelm Mill. A suspended ceiling above this area hides the cinema's auditorium from public view. However, a recent article in the Leicester Mercury shows that the cinema space itself is largely untouched.





(Above photo taken from the Leicester Mercury).

Dunelm are due to close the shop on 26th June 2016. It would be great if The Rex were to reopen as a cinema again. It would be a tragedy if the interior of this cinema is lost forever.

David McGillivray introduces House of Mortal Sin 8/11/14

                                 

My first experience of a Pete Walker film was catching the final 5 minutes of The Comeback (1978) on late night TV in the 1980s. A screening of House of Whipcord (1974) at a two-day film festival of 1970s trash at the Phoenix, Leicester in the 1990s cemented my addiction.

It was at the Phoenix festival that screenplay writer for Whipcord, David McGillivray autographed his Doing Rude Things book and dedicated it to the 'Twins of Evil' (my brother and I) simultaneously dismissing his own joke as "the usual rubbish".

McGillivray wrote a wonderfully economic script for Pete Walker's House of Mortal Sin (1976) that is both chilling and hilarious. However, he claims not to have seen the film since the cast and crew screening, so embarrassed is he by his work.

McGillivray has an eternally dry wit and self-deprecating sense of humour that is immense fun for the listener. Here he is introducing House of Mortal Sin at the Barbican, London, with Kim Newman, on 8th November 2014 (audio with stills):

YouTube clip of McGillivray's introduction

                                 

The Beauty Jungle (1964)

The Beauty Jungle (1964) is a welcome release to DVD, having been unavailable for many years – I only managed to see the film several years ago as a BFI viewing copy, despatched to the midlands in a pile of film cans.

The film offers a critique of beauty contests (as the DVD cover says, the film is an ‘inside story of the beauty racket’), and reveals the cynicism at the heart of the modelling industry, which glorifies women whilst simultaneously commodifying them. This can be seen in the montage of crass, regionally sponsored competitions such as ‘Cheltenham’s Miss Banana Yoghurt’, ‘Miss Devonshire Cream’ and ‘Pontypool’s Crumpet Queen’, and also in Monte Carlo’s grotesque circus promoting ‘Le Parfum Miss Trapeze’, in which clowns tickle the bikini-clad women with feather dusters in a nightmarish scene. The film offers a cautionary tale that the life of the international jet-set is not necessarily one to which ‘decent’ British girls like the heroine Shirley Freeman (Janette Scott) should aspire. As Shirley says at the film’s conclusion, “You take someone from nowhere, you give her something, and then, when the party’s over, you say ‘you’ve lost, go home’.”

Christine Geraghty argues that compared to the beginning of the postwar period – when cinema could be considered as the ‘entertainment for all’ – by the end of the 1950s it had largely become a ‘marginal pursuit’, with producers endeavouring to find niche markets such as youth audiences, or by presenting big-budgeted must-see, event films (Geraghty, 2000: 20). One of the ways in which British film attempted to broaden its audience in the latter postwar period was by striving for international appeal, or by working with American companies which could offer film distribution in the US. In 1956, for example, the Rank Organisation announced a policy of only producing films which would appeal to international markets and consequently established Rank Film Distributors of America (RFDA) in order to ‘penetrate the US market’ (Murphy, 2001: 90).

Although (in film terms) ‘international’ often refers to part-funding by an American film company, it could also be used to describe a feeling of internationalism conveyed for the most part by including overseas locations, international cast members, and ‘American’ technological advances such as Technicolor, CinemaScope and VistaVision. These technical innovations – which were largely a response to the encroaching dominance of television – arguably favour location filming, as the emphasised artificiality of studio-bound, widescreen Hollywood musicals such as Brigadoon (1954) and the ‘Barn-Raising Ballet’ in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) reveal. In opposition to this, the location filming in Summer Holiday (1963) and The Beauty Jungle, for example, works to the films’ advantage, in offering a ‘tourist gaze’ of Europe (Urry, 2002).

The Beauty Jungle (Renamed Contest Girl for its American release) bridges a wide gap between the traditional British seaside holiday of the immediate postwar era, and the exotic, foreign holiday seen in Summer Holiday, for instance. Starting in the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, and taking Shirley Freeman on a journey from the beauty contests of Butlin’s to an international modelling career, this colourful, CinemaScope film represents the spectacle of the Riviera and Mediterranean which the rich and famous flocked to in the late 1950s and early 1960s in order to gain that longed-for tan.

The film follows the postwar trait of fleshing out its cast with numerous ‘guest stars’, including Norman Hartnell (“the man who dresses the greatest beauties in the world”), the Duchess of Bedford, Stirling Moss, Hollywood actress Linda Christian, and musician Joe Brown (representing the teenage market) as contest judges. The British actor Edmund Purdom who had made a name for himself in American and European films also appears as the Hollywood star Rex Garrick (he was the husband of Linda Christian when the film was made).

The Beauty Jungle treats the cinema audience to ‘tourist gaze’ shots of Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo, where Shirley and her manager, Don Mackenzie (Ian Hendry), ostentatiously arrive in a ‘heli-taxi’ for the ‘Miss Globe’ contest. The numerous contestants for this competition bring an international flavour to the film, coming from places as far afield as Peru, France, Germany, America and Japan.

The film clearly follows neither the styles of Social Realism nor Swinging London, which had put the British film industry on the international map in recent years (despite these styles being arguably more indigenous and domestic in feel), and appears too naïve and gauche to really make an impact as an exposé of the glamour industry. In the film’s efforts to appeal to both British and international markets, and to critique the modelling industry whilst at the same time entertain the audience with glamorous spectacle, the end result is something of a curiosity, and invites repeated viewings. It is a pity therefore that the DVD transfer is in a 4:3 pan-and-scan version, and that a lot of the potential spectacle and subsequent viewing pleasure has been lost (a quick look at the customer reviews on Amazon.co.uk will give you a clue). In an age where widescreen television is the norm rather than the exception, the DVD is already dated, not by the film content – which as a mid-60s curio still has the ability to entertain – but by the more recent home viewing technology.

Here are the opening credits (in CinemaScope!):

Beauty Jungle (1964) opening credits

Bibliography:

Geraghty, Christine, 2000, British Cinema in the Fifties, Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge

Murphy, Robert (ed.), 2001, British Cinema of the 90s, London: BFI

Murphy, Robert, 1992, Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI

Urry, John, 2002, The Tourist Gaze, (Revised edition), London: Sage Publications

The Film Star Dolls of Vina Cooke

Note: Sadly, since I posted this blog in Spring 2012 the doll museum has closed and the premises are for sale. If I find out any more details about what has happened to Vina's collection, I'll post it here.

In a quiet corner of Nottinghamshire you'll find an almost-secret treasure. This is the Vina Cooke Museum of Dolls in the village of Cromwell... A staggering collection of dolls, dolls houses, and antique fashions housed in a grand Georgian house. Vina and her husband have spent several decades putting this collection together. Some might call it an exercise in British eccentricity, others will call it a labour of love.

The most interesting items are the pieces created by Vina herself. These aren't dolls per se, but reproductions of historical figures and film stars dressed in fantastic miniature costumes. Henry VIII and his wives, and Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev are some examples. 

Dorothy, Tin Man and Scarecrow modelled from The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The Cowardly Lion looks just like Bert Lahr!

 Film buffs however, will be drawn to the display cabinets housing Hollywood stars in authentic reproductions of costumes by the likes of Irene Sharaff (Liz Taylor in The Taming Of The Shrew 1967) and Cecil Beaton (Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady 1964). Cooke is particularly good at painting eyes - Bert Lahr is very accurate! - and  the way she has captured the movement of Brigitte Bardot dancing is also very good. 

Elizabeth Taylor in The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

A selection of film star dolls can be found in this room including Brigitte Bardot and Yul Brynner.

Cromwell is a short drive or bus ride away from Newark, so I recommend a quick excursion to see the dolls if you are in the area, but phone first to check for opening times. There's also a doll repair service available if diddum's is falling apart!

Tel: UK 01636 821364 

British Pathe film of Vina and her film star dolls

 

http://www.aboutbritain.com/VinaCookeMuseumOfDolls.htm
 
http://www.vinasdolls.co.uk/