World Film Locations: Liverpool eds. by Jez Conolly and Caroline Whelan (review)

Liverpool, a city on the Northwestern coast of England, is a place of profound dualities. As a thriving port city and center of industry, it was an essential gateway to the Empire (and the rest of the world). It has a large immigrant population, including the closest connection to Ireland of any city in England. Its people enjoyed the riches of the Industrial Revolution and were early witnesses to the marvels of modernity: the railway, electric lighting, and cinema. By the era of Margaret Thatcher (the late 1970s and early 1980s), however, Liverpool loomed large as a symbol of decline. With a retreat of heavy industries and reduced importance for trade, the city reeled under high unemployment. Continued sectarian violence, crime, and crumbling infrastructure gave it an almost post-apocalyptic air. Yet, sometimes fortunes reverse. In 2008, it was made European Capital of Culture. Although problems remain, as in all cities, this metropolis on the Mersey thrives through tourism, nightlife, its musical heritage and, somewhat surprisingly, as a destination for cinema production.

Jez Conolly and Caroline Whelan's World Film Locations: Liverpool is full of surprising revelations about the city's pride of place in the history of movies. Some of these are momentous. Conolly's entry on Jean Alexandre Louis Promio's Panorama Pris du Chemin de Fer Electrique I-IV (1897), notes that it is the first extant film with images set in Liverpool as well as the film with the earliest known tracking shot. Promio operated his camera from a train carriage, giving us both a traveller's eye view of the city and a point of entry for the "phantom ride" film genre, whose impressions of motions and space delighted early cinema audiences (12). Other tidbits from the book are slightly more esoteric but no less fascinating. Fans of the offbeat film No Surrender (1985), directed by Peter Young, with a script from famous Scouse writer Alan Bleasdale, in which Protestant and Catholic old age pensioners square off against one another in an overbooked nightclub on New Year's Eve, will be delighted to learn that the movie's main outdoor location was constructed in front of a hangar at RAF Burtonwood in nearby Warrington (52-53).

Conolly and Whelan's book connects filmmakers, favored genres (especially social realist melodrama), and local actors with specific locations in and around the city. Like other books in the World Film Locations series, thematic essays break up a chronological assessment of films that cover the 100-plus-year lifespan of motion pictures. The essays are quite short and feel more like invitations for readers to discover new works than a space to make a complex argument. Each provides something worthwhile, especially Jacqui Miller's account of proto-New Wave, location-heavy films made in Liverpool. Although easily dismissible as routine melodramas and thrillers, The Magnet (Charles Frend, 1950), The Clouded Yellow (Ralph Thomas, 1950), and Violent Playground (Basil Dearden, 1958) have resonances with critically lauded traditions like Italian Neo-Realism and offer unrecoverable glimpses of a vanished cityscape (68-69).

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book is its construction of Liverpool as a city of absences. Beyond discussion of several films that are set in Liverpool but filmed in other cities--most famously Educating Rita (1983, Lewis Gilbert)--is a constant reliance on the ghostly traces of an uprooted past. The films of Terence Davies, especially the elegiac Of Time and the City (2008), in some cases literally embody this mentality. In an excellent essay on the legacy of the "Merseybeat" moment, when The Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers embodied a new mode of pop that had not yet been co-opted by culturally omnivorous London, Nick Riddle reminds us that there is precious little film footage of The Beatles playing their music in Liverpool. A Granada Television crew captured their August 22, 1962 performance, but most of The Beatles on screen is overshadowed by the London of A Hard Day's...