Worth Reassessing

The British film director Anthony Asquith is best known for The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), a meticulous adaptation of the Oscar Wilde stage play that contains all the qualities that later film makers, like Lindsay Anderson, would abhor. These include emotional limitation, over-reliance on literary sources, gentility bordering on blandness and (horror of horrors) middlebrow concerns.

The disapproval has been contagious; David Thomson dismisses the director as “a dull journeyman supervisor of the transfer to the screen of proven theatrical properties.” Yet, as Tom Ryall shows, Asquith was a far more versatile, and appealing, figure than this reputation would suggest. From the beginning of his career in the 1920s to its end in the Swinging Sixties, he directed a wide range of material from documentary-style war films to Gainsborough melodrama. All this means that he is worth reassessing. Ryall has done a very good job of it.

On set, Asquith was famous for wearing a shabby boiler suit to indicate his sympathy for the workers but, as a man and a film maker, he was very upper crust. The son of the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and an alumnus of Winchester College and Oxford University, he was a founder member of the Film Society in the 1920s and, as such, was well up on the new cinematic styles and aesthetic debates that were flying in from across the Channel. His silent films expressed these concerns, so much so that Shooting Stars (1928) and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) helped to place him in the same critical bracket as his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock. The sound era was less congenial, however, and his career faltered until 1938 when, with its star Leslie Howard, he co-directed Pygmalion, a superb adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play.

From then on, Asquith was king of the hill and top of the heap. He directed outstanding war dramas like We Dive at Dawn (1943); with the playwright Terence Rattigan, he collaborated on screen versions of Rattigan’s West End hits, such as While the Sun Shines (1947) and The Winslow Boy (1948); there is even a British film noir, The Woman in Question (1950), a Rashomon-style thriller set in a Grahame Greene world of seedy boarding houses and fairground stalls. As Ryall shows, Asquith was not just a middle class middlebrow. He was a chameleon who shifted and changed depending on the work available.

Thanks to production conditions, then, it was impossible for him to establish a clear directorial identity. The nearest he got to one was as a maker of post-war “quality” films, which Ryall points out were a very British compromise between European art house and down and dirty Hollywood populism. The author demonstrates this hybrid quality in his chapter on Asquith’s theatrical adaptations. For example, The Winslow Boy possesses all the attributes that Lindsay Anderson despised. It is set in the past (the Edwardian era), it is middle class (the film concerns a retired bank manager’s fight for justice) and, being based on a play, it appears to be driven by words rather than images. Yet, as Ryall demonstrates, the film is infused with cinematic technique. For example, in one tense interrogation scene, lifted more or less intact from the play, editing, shot length and camera placement are used to make a dynamic piece of film drama, not an inert slice of photographed theatre. As Asquith said himself, he had “re-imagined his material in terms of his medium.” It is mild snobbery, perhaps, to dismiss this approach to directing as being bland and unimaginative.

By the 1960s, with international film financing becoming more dominant, the director ended his career with The V.I.Ps (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), two sleek all-star packages for MGM-British that did nothing for his reputation (although both are a very pleasant way of wasting a Sunday afternoon). Ryall makes no great claims for that reputation; he does not hail Asquith as some forgotten David Lean or Michael Powell. He does prove, however, that this...