The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Hinterland
Historic buildings get listed – and saved. Why don’t we do the same for endangered British films?
The joys of living in the 21st century are not especially plentiful, but one such has been the recent flood of old British films remastered and issued on Blu-ray. Most have been commercial ventures; some have been renovated by the British
Film Institute, a body to which cinephiles owe a considerable debt (and not just for restoring British films: they have done a pretty good job with some jewels of international cinema too, notably French). But there has been no systematic initiative. While most of the obvious classics have been done, quite a few haven’t, although a number of objectively third-rate films have found their way on to Blu-ray. The restorations also vary starkly in quality. Some are so sharp and clear that one almost imagines one is on the set – the Blu-ray restoration of Brighton Rock, for instance, makes one feel one is walking through the town in 1947. Others give new force to the phrase “the mists of time”.
In other art forms, preservation has long been taken seriously. We began what we now call the listing of buildings in 1906, the same year that the British Library started to preserve sound recordings, whereas the BBC routinely wiped them until a few years ago, denying us access to countless historic broadcast performances. We have copyright libraries not least to ensure that no book, however meretricious, disappears. Yet the preservation of historic cinema has some way to go.
We need a national strategy to ensure that the best British films are restored to the highest standard, and made accessible to everyone at a reasonable price. First, a group of people who understand the history of the cinema should draw up a list of the films that merit such preservation. Doubtless, in their different ways, they all do, as they are all in some measure historical documents, but we should start with the most culturally significant.
If a film is deemed commercially unviable for restoration, then it would be an excellent use of the National Heritage Lottery Fund to pay for it. One of the extras on the exemplary Blu-ray of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1943 masterpiece, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, is a documentary about the frame-byframe restoration process, all the more complicated because the film was shot in colour. Martin Scorcese, a deep admirer of Powell, paid to have the film restored in 2012, for which he deserves an honorary knighthood. If a restoration is worth doing, it is worth doing properly.
In the hope that such a committee will be set up, here is a suggested list of films deserving the full restoration treatment as a priority. Gainsborough Pictures films remain almost entirely absent from Blu-ray (unless directed by Hitchcock), so let’s start with Bank Holiday, Kipps, Night Train to Munich and The Young Mr Pitt (all directed by Carol Reed); then some bodice-rippers (The Wicked Lady, The Man in Grey and Jassy), two of our greatest war films (Millions Like Us and We Dive at Dawn) and the portmanteau of four Somerset Maugham stories, Quartet.
Holiday Camp and Boys in Brown, both acute social histories in different ways (though the first does what it says on the label and the second is about borstal, so there is overlap), also merit attention. And there is Gainsborough’s entire Will Hay catalogue, before he went off to Ealing, with gems such as Oh, Mr Porter! and Convict 99.
Studio Canal have restored most of the best-known Ealing films for Blu-ray, but some of the best are not the best known: The Magnet, Lease of Life (in colour, shot on location in Lincolnshire, with a superb performance by Robert Donat) and Hay’s best film, My Learned Friend.
Most great British films from the 1930s await restoration: the superb adaptations of Shaw’s Pygmalion and Major Barbara, but also
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Fire over England and The Private Life of Henry VIII. Two of John Mills’s finest – The Long Memory, directed by Robert Hamer, and The October Man – are hard to find even on regular DVD; as are the 1955 film of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, which I think has never been on disc, and the captivating 1950 social drama Chance of a Lifetime, about a conflict been workers and bosses at a tractor factory, which only turns up in boxed sets.
Some Powell and Pressburger films have been restored, but four of their works of genius have not: 49th Parallel, I Know Where I’m Going, The Small Back Room and a film that I believe is among the greatest handful of English films ever made. When the great restoration project begins, it must begin with A Canterbury Tale, which, scrubbed up, would be an absolute revelation.
Restoring films to full glory would be a superb use of Lottery money