FSimeoni wrote:
I wasn't thinking it was a masterpiece when I watched that bit, but a friend of mine watched a whole load of Gainsborough films and said that they were actually quite good despite their looking cheesy and dated. There's something about it that makes me want to watch it even if it isn't good, in fact because it isn't good!
An admirable position to take - but I have to say that
Jassy is pretty rubbish even by Gainsborough standards. I watched pretty much every Gainsborough melodrama a few years ago, and I'd rank them as follows (the links are to my Screenonline pieces, which are much more detailed):
1943 -
The Man in Grey - the film that started the melodrama cycle and introduced its major stars (Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger as the goodies; James Mason and Margaret Lockwood as the baddies, both fab); still stands up fairly well by comparison with the later titles. And Granger gets to play Othello in blackface.
1944 -
Fanny By Gaslight - for all the melodramatic trappings, this is actually a surprisingly complex and serious look at the British class system. I suspect the fact that it's the only Gainsborough melodrama by a heavyweight director (Anthony Asquith) played a part.
Madonna of the Seven Moons - the weirdest Gainsborough melodrama by some distance, with Phyllis Calvert as an Italian housewife who shares a split personality with a bandit's moll. Stewart Granger plays the bandit, which is good for a laugh or several.
Love Story - There's a famous story about this film in which Stewart Granger is travelling down to the Cornish location by train and starts chatting to a man in the compartment. The man sees that Granger is reading a script and asks about it. Granger says "it's the worst piece of crap I've ever read in my life". The man was Leslie Arliss, the writer-director. Whoops. (Granger was right, though)
1945 -
They Were Sisters - Along with
Fanny by Gaslight, probably the most socially interesting Gainsborough melodrama, in which three very different sisters make a series of disastrous marriages. One, inevitably, is to James Mason, who's at his most gloriously vile - he hated the script, got blind drunk every night to blot it out, and so he's acting with a raging hangover which helps his performance no end.
The Wicked Lady - the definitive Gainsborough melodrama, and startlingly racy even today. It was decades ahead of its time in its portrayal of a woman who will stop at nothing to achieve her aims, be they social, financial or sexual, and the mainly female audiences of 1945 lapped it up.
The Seventh Veil - not technically a Gainsborough melodrama, but the most successful of many independent rip-offs - and it has arguably the definitive 'Gainsborough' scene, in which James Mason's fanatically jealous guardian smashes his cane on the piano-playing fingers of his ward Ann Todd.
1946 -
Caravan - Rousing Boys' Own adventure with Stewart Granger, with only a few authentic Gainsborough moments, though the bizarre scene in which the evil Dennis Price invites a load of prostitutes to his wife's dinner party is worth watching the rest of the film for.
The Magic Bow - ridiculous biopic of Paganini starring Stewart Granger that's worth seeing for some very impressive technical sleight of hand. It really does look as though he's a virtuoso violinist, though the hands belong to two professionals (one bowing, one fingering), and the sound is courtesy of Yehudi Menuhin.
1947 -
Jassy - Gainsborough's only Technicolor melodrama looks gorgeous, but dramatically it's a pale shadow of its predecessors, largely because Margaret Lockwood's character is bizarrely unfocused: it's very hard to work out what makes her tick, which absolutely wasn't the problem with her earlier roles. And the courtroom climax is very dull.
Back on topic is there anything that MoC could release from the British archives? I expect almost everything is already owned by other distributors?
The world rights to most of the mainstream catalogues from the 1920s to the 1980s - Rank, Gainsborough, Gaumont-British, Associated-British, British Lion, Ealing, EMI and many others - are owned by either Granada or Studio Canal, who have exclusive DVD deals with Network and Optimum respectively.
In the past, they used to licence some of their less commercial stuff to independent labels like the BFI (which distributed Launder and Gilliat titles on VHS, for instance), but I think Network and Optimum now have exclusive deals.
This doesn't mean that an independent label can't get its hands on any British films, but in practice the overwhelming majority of mainstream "golden age" titles are off limits for the time being. Which explains why the British titles in the BFI's DVD catalogue tend to come from much further off the beaten track, with lots of non-fiction, experimental and other unconventional titles.
