So You Think You Know It All: A compendium of extremely interesting and slightly strange true stories. The Show One
Geneva Conventions by removing their Polish uniforms when one of their number dies after saving a child caught in a waterwheel.
Len Deighton’s alternative history novel SS-GB took the invasion to London and is a far less plucky – and more historically accurate – vision. The south of Britain is now under the jackboot, the rest of the nation will surely follow – and the round-ups have started. The stark choice is: collaborate, or die.
McCARTHY’S CONTRIBUTION TO BRITISH CINEMA
In 1973 filmmaker Carl Foreman was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay Young Winston, the story of one of the great figures of the twentieth century: Winston Churchill. Given a CBE for services to the film industry, it symbolised his status as British cinema aristocracy. Not bad for a homesick American who had been exiled from Hollywood 20 years earlier, and had his American passport revoked.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, America was in the grip of an anti-communist witch-hunt lead by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Suspected communists faced the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), including leading names in Hollywood like Carl Foreman.
Foreman had been a member of the Communist Party in his youth but had left in 1941. Nonetheless the Committee ordered him to name other party members. He refused. That meant that he was blacklisted in Hollywood and his film career was over.
At the time he was working on High Noon, the powerful 1952 western about a town’s principled lawman forced to face a bloodthirsty gang, alone. The film would receive seven Oscar nominations (winning four, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper) and is generally regarded among critics and audiences alike as one of the greatest films ever made. Many can identify with the dilemma at the centre of the film on some level, but Foreman, who wrote it, also lived it. Says film critic Matthew Sweet:
High Noon is in a way a portrait of the turmoil in Carl Foreman’s life at that moment. Gary Cooper is the marshal of a town under threat from the imminent arrival of a gang of killers. He’s desperately trying to recruit deputies who’ll help him defend the town. He goes to the church and he discovers that the population gathered there, who he has protected in the last few years, don’t really want to help him. So this is a film about your friends not standing by you.
Some in Hollywood saw a message in High Noon they didn’t like. John Wayne called it the most ‘un-American thing’ he had ever seen. Matthew explains, ‘John Wayne looked at the last scene in the picture, where Gary Cooper throws down his marshal’s badge into the dust, and he saw that as a symbolic rejection of American values. It was an act too far for him.’
Facing the moral quandary of naming names in front of HUAC, Foreman left the USA in 1952. He headed for London to try and set up as a scriptwriter – but with a very heavy heart, says his son Jonathan Foreman.
He very much felt that he had been driven out. He knew, if he’d stayed, he wouldn’t be able to work at all. There he had been, in America, the sort of Quentin Tarrantino of his time, hugely successful, especially after High Noon, and then suddenly it was all taken away.
Even in Britain, the blacklisting meant he had to write under pseudonyms. When he co-wrote another cinematic classic, The Bridge On The River Kwai, his name was left off the credits. Foreman’s screenplay was based on the novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï, which was written by French author Pierre Boulle. In spite of his amused admission that he couldn’t even speak English, Boulle took the screenwriting credit so that Carl could avoid the blacklist.
Foreman’s most ambitious film was the epic The Guns of Navarone about an Allied plot to blow up a German fortress. The film is packed with gung-ho action and adventure, and an outstanding turn by the English actor David Niven. But like High Noon, Foreman was writing on a number of levels, says Matthew Sweet:
Essentially it’s an antiwar picture. It has all the explosions, it has all those action sequences, but when the cast discovers that the munitions they are going to use to blow up the super-guns have been sabotaged they question the whole point of the mission and the film turns into a kind of play about the rights and wrongs of war.
Winston Churchill didn’t notice the subtle underlying message. He saw the film and loved it enough to request a meeting with Foreman. The main topic of conversation? How to turn Winston’s early life into an action movie. It would certainly be an exciting film but Foreman had a concern, says his son John.
He said to Churchill, ‘You know I’ve had these political problems back in America, which is why I came here?’ and Churchill sort of basically said, ‘Oh my dear boy, don’t worry about that, I don’t care what a man believed when he was a boy, all I care about is if can he do the job.’
Churchill expected to see the finished film in a matter of months, as Carl Foreman related in a 1970s BBC documentary:
So he said, ‘You’ll have it finished in two or three months, I suppose’ and I said, ‘No, sir, two or three years would be more like it.’ ‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘When we decided on opening a second front in Normandy it didn’t take us that long.’ I said, ‘Yes, you had more money.’
The film Young Winston didn’t come out until 1972 – six years after Churchill’s death – but Foreman was proud of it, calling it his love letter to England.
As the blacklist faded into insignificance, Foreman returned to work in America in 1975. Out with his kids he had a chance encounter with a former friend and fierce critic, remembers John. ‘My father took my sister and I, walked us over to his table and John Wayne stood up, he was an enormous man, and they shook hands. It was weird… but it was a sign that things really were over.’ Foreman was back where he felt he truly belonged. But, says Matthew Sweet, the British, especially the film business, benefitted hugely from his exile. ‘I think that we should be proud that he worked here because if he had stayed in America he would have been condemned to silence.’
Carl Foreman died in Hollywood in 1984 aged 69 – a unique American who made some remarkably British films.
BRITAIN IN A SPIN
It had next to no budget, took six weeks to shoot on cheap 16 mm film and its controversial plot destined it to a graveyard slot on Channel 4. But when the TV play My Beautiful Laundrette was shown at the 1985 Edinburgh TV festival, the reaction to it was so rapturous that it was transferred to 35 mm and shown in cinemas. Now it was a proper film, and the next thing the cast and crew knew, it had received a nomination for an Oscar – Best Original Screenplay.
Set in the early 1980s and in a rundown corner of London, Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) is a young British Pakistani in thrall to the Thatcherite dream of making money and being judged on your merits, not your background. He persuades his wheeler-dealer uncle (Sayeed Jaffrey) to hand over the keys to a rundown launderette. Omar sees a bright future in soap suds and plans to turn the mundane task of doing a wash and spin into a Las Vegas-like experience.
But as his launderette plans get spinning, his own dirty linen is about to be publicly aired. Omar’s gay, from an ultra-conservative Muslim background and his wedding is being arranged. He’s attacked by a racist gang, the leader of whom is his former lover, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis). It’s a little awkward, but eventually the boys resume their relationship and realise the dream of the über-laundromat together, but racism, Omar’s Muslim heritage and his impending arranged marriage all threaten to compromise their success. Will it all come out in the wash?
Written by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette is a bittersweet and very funny observation of life in the entrepreneur economy of the 1980s. The story was partially autobiographical, Omar’s dilemma being familiar to many first-generation British born Muslims who found it difficult – and dangerous – to balance their Western aspirations with what their immigrant parents expected of them. Gordon Warnecke, who played Omar, explains,
I was fresh out of drama school and this was my first film. It tackled all the stereotypes of the time with real grit and humour, something I was really interested in doing, so this was a project I just had to be involved in. Thatcherite