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I N 1958 MICHAEL REDGRAVE was appearing for the third and last time at Stratford-upon-Avon. The parts he played that year were Hamlet and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing . Hamlet was a brave choice. My father was by then 50. In an age less fearful than ours of growing old, great actors like Sir John Martin Harvey had been able to make a lifetime’s work out of a part like Sidney Carton in A
This book offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lacklustre period of the British film history. It includes fresh assessment of maverick directors; Pat Jackson, Robert Hamer and Joseph Losey, and even of a maverick critic Raymond Durgnat. The book features personal insights from those inidividually implicated in 1950s cinema; Corin Redgrave on Michael Redgrave, Isabel Quigly on film reviewing, and Bryony Dixon of the BFI on archiving and preservation. A classic image from 1950s British cinema would be Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, the epitome of quiet English integrity. Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, which deals extensively with British films of the 1950s, was written in the mid-1960s and was published in 1970. In a 1947 article called 'Angles of Approach' Lindsay Anderson delivered a fierce attack on contemporary British film culture, outlining a model for a devoted politics of creation, well in line with what we would later understand as auteurism and art cinema aesthetics . The war films of the 1950s together constitute the assented-to record of the emotions and moral judgments called upon to set in order those disorderly events. The book also talks about the Festival of Britain, White Corridors, and four Hamer's post-Ealing films: The Spider and the Fly, The Long Memory, Father Brown and The Scapegoat. A number of factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the 1950s as a decade in British cinema history.
is established through reference to the activities of Alan, a farmer, Goronwy, a miner, Bill, a train driver, and Peter, a wounded RAF pilot. A voice-over commentary, spoken by Michael Redgrave, narrates events and action and poses questions of the future in store for Timothy and the nation in the wake of the war. In the first section of the film the BBC Home Service announces Beattie_01_Chps.indd 103 06/10/2009 15:14 104 humphrey jennings that it is the fifth anniversary of the commencement of the war. On this day – 3 September 1944 – Timothy James Jenkins is
A pencilled note in the deputy stage manager's promptbook helps situate the production of Antony and Cleopatra that Glen Byam Shaw directed in 1953 at the Stratford-upon-Avon Memorial Theatre with Michael Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft in the title roles. After ‘Speak not to us’ (1.1.56) the deputy stage manager has scored through half of the editorial stage direction – ‘Ant & Cleo exit with their train ’ – to indicate that the twenty-seven assorted Egyptians who'd massed, at a run, for the star couple's first entrance (‘Look where they come
This book writes a performance history of Antony and Cleopatra from 1606 to 2018. After considering the particular challenges Shakespeare’s script offers any actors, directors or designers who stage it, the book looks in detail at Antony and Cleopatra on the Jacobean stage and then at Dryden’s All for Love (the play that replaced Shakespeare’s from the Restoration to 1849). Fast-forwarding across a number of Victorian adaptations and early twentieth century English productions, it arrives at 1953, when, directed by Glen Byam Shaw at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra and Michael Redgrave as Antony, the play’s modern performance history begins. Thereafter, chapters offer in-depth analyses of fifteen productions by (among others) the Royal Shakespeare Company, Citizens’ Theatre Glasgow, Northern Broadsides, Berliner Ensemble and Toneelgroep Amsterdam in five countries and three languages. Combining close readings of theatre records – promptbooks, stage managers’ reports, costume bibles, reviews – with deep historical contextualisation, it sees how, and what, this play has meant each time it has brought its thoughts on power, race, masculinity, regime change, exoticism, love, dotage and delinquency into alignment with a new present. It ends seeing Shakespeare’s black Cleopatra restored to the English stage. Tragedy, comedy, history, farce: this book demonstrates that in performance Antony and Cleopatra is all four.
(Michael Redgrave) is doubled in the prison glass as his condemned son, Alec (Alec McCowen), displays a calm fatalism in Time Without Pity (1957). 3 Amour fou: Keith Michell and Melina Mercouri make their pact with the Devil in The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957
by Michael Redgrave, Jean Kent, and Nigel Patrick respectively though other names were bandied around in the press prior to production. Eric Portman, who had played the Crocker-Harris role on stage, and Anthony Steel were mentioned, together with Margaret Lockwood who, according to one report, turned the part of Millie down ‘because she did not think she was suited for the role of the schoolmaster’s erring wife’.38 Michael Redgrave, in fact, won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance as CrockerHarris while Terence Rattigan won the
Matthews made in fulfilment of her contract obligations at the studio. She agreed to appear in Climbing High provided she was not expected to sing or dance. She was partnered Michael Redgrave, fresh from his triumph in The Lady Vanishes , and a string of other roles on the West End stage. As the ideal lover, Michael Redgrave was appearing here in the first of three films, followed by The Stars Look Down and Kipps , he made
of war, though Robert Murphy detects similarities of subject matter with I Live in Grosvenor Square (d. Herbert Wilcox, 1945). 6 Pilot David Archdale (Michael Redgrave) marries Toddy Todd (Rosamund John), who runs a hotel close to the airfield. They have a child whom Toddy brings up alone after David is killed in action. When the airfield is taken over by the United States Air Force, she becomes friendly
, that time was running out. Time Without Pity is the early film of Losey’s that particularly catches his peculiar qualities. Like its companion film of the same year, J. Lee Thompson’s Yield to the Night (1956), it is a plea for the abolition of capital punishment, as an alcoholic writer (Michael Redgrave) is given less than twenty-four hours to save his son (Alec McCowen