The Elephant Man (1980)

Pamela's Nite
Joe's Special (Grass-fed Beef Scramble), Roasted Potatoes, Birthday Cake

Stuart: Well, that was the best movie we've seen, is it not?

Joseph Carey Merrick (August 5, 1862 - April 11, 1890), known as "The Elephant Man", gained the sympathy of Victorian Britain because of his extreme deformity.

Early biographies of Merrick inaccurately give his first name as "John", an error repeated in many later versions, including the 1980 film The Elephant Man.

Born in Leicester to mother Mary Jane Merrick, he had a younger brother and sister. He began showing signs of deformity at age two. His mother died when he was 11. According to family accounts, she too was "crippled". He then was forced to live with his father and stepmother, who did not want him and forced him to earn his keep by selling goods on the street. For the better part of his life he was unemployable, so as a last resort he took a job as a sideshow attraction. He was treated decently, and made a small amount of money. When sideshows were outlawed in the UK in 1886 he traveled to Belgium to find work and was mistreated by a showman.

Merrick was befriended by Dr. Frederick Treves, a physician at London Hospital and was given a permanent home there. He was something of a celebrity in High Victorian society, eventually becoming a favorite of Queen Victoria. He found some solace in writing, composing both prose and poetry in his later years. He was cared for at the hospital until his death from suffocation while sleeping, which was apparently accidental. Merrick was unable to sleep horizontally due to the weight of his head, but may have intentionally tried to do so in this instance in an attempt to imitate normal behavior.

His life story became the basis of a 1979 Tony Award-winning play, and in the following year an Academy Award-nominated film, which were unrelated but both called The Elephant Man.

Joseph Merrick is also rumoured to have helped to design the East Stand, also referred to as the matchstick stand at Filbert Street.

The Elephant Man's Mistaken Identity: The Elephant Man was not the Elephant Man.

To be more precise, John Merrick did not suffer from the genetic disorder which has come to be known as "Elephant Man disease." Recent studies of Merrick's remains have confirmed theories that Merrick was the victim of a much rarer disease that was unidentified until a century after his death, in a discovery that would be comparable to learning that Lou Gehrig did not have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

One early belief was that Merrick suffered from elephantiasis, a disorder of the lymphatic system that causes parts of the body to swell to grotesque proportions. Later it was theorized that he had an extremely severe case of neurofibromatosis. This nervous system disorder causes nerve cells to grow out of control, creating large, misshapen tumors. Neurofibromatosis is not phenomenally rare, occurring in one of every 4,000 births, although no known case of neurofibromatosis has ever been as profound as Merrick's condition.

In 1979, a much more rare disease was identified as causing overgrowth of bone and other tissue. This disorder, named Proteus Syndrome, has been recorded in fewer than 100 cases, ever. Several years ago a U.S. National Institutes of Health panel suggested that Proteus Syndrome may have been the true cause of John Merrick's plight. A study of Merrick's remains at the Royal London Hospital appears to back up this diagnosis.

Radiologist Amita Sharma found that Merrick's spine was not as sharply curved as is normally found in cases of neurofibromatosis. In addition, Merrick's ribs do not demonstrate the peculiar notches and thinness associated with neurofibromatosis, and are actually abnormally thick. The extreme overgrowth of bone in Merrick's skull and the right side of his body is consistent with Proteus Syndrome.

Sharma based her conclusions on a series of x-rays and CAT scans produced at the Royal London Hospital, where Merrick's remains have been kept since his death. Contrary to popular belief, the Elephant Man's skeleton has never been in the possession of Michael Jackson or any other freak-obsessed private collector.

New York Times Review: The time is the late 1880's and the place is London, where the beau monde, the rich and fashionable as well as the mannered and the educated who aspire to higher things, live in a refinement that's all the more precarious for the assaults of the Industrial Revolution, which is wrecking the social order. Just beyond the elegant parks, malls, and town houses is the real London of crowded, narrow streets, slums, factories and sweatshops, and the ever-present smoke, grime, noise, and degradation.

In such a setting it's no surprise that a kind of sad, desperate genteelness was once equated with human dignity. To be kind and polite, in such a landscape, under such circumstances, when the masses were living in such squalor, were reassuring signs of orthodoxy to a threatened London Establishment.

The Elephant Man uses some of the devices of the horror film, including ominous music, sudden cuts that shock, and hints of dark things to come, but it's a very benign horror film, one in which "the creature" is the pursued instead of the pursuer.

Unlike the play, in which the actor playing John Merrick wears no makeup, his unadorned face representing the beauty of the interior man, the audience thus being forced to imagine his hideous appearance, the movie works the other way around. John Hurt, as John Merrick, is a monster with a bulbous forehead, a Quasimodo-like mouth, one almost-obscured eye, a useless arm, and crooked torso. It's to the credit of Christopher Tucker's makeup and to Mr. Hurt's extraordinary performance deep inside it, that John Merrick doesn't look absurd, like something out of a low-budget science-fiction film.

But what we eventually see underneath this shell is not "the study in dignity" that Ashley Montagu wrote about, but something far more poignant, a study in genteelness that somehow suppressed all rage.

That is the quality that illuminates this film and makes it far more fascinating than it would be were it merely a portrait of a dignified freak. Throughout the film one longs for an explosion. That it never comes is more terrifying, I think, than John Merrick's acceptance of the values of others is inspiring.

The key sequence in the movie is when Dr. Treves, played with humane, quirky compassion by Anthony Hopkins, brings Merrick home to tea with Mrs. Treves in a perfectly ordered Victorian drawing room.

Merrick, looking like the fastidiously dressed Walrus in the Tenniel illustrations for "The Walrus and the Carpenter," is a most dainty guest. He speaks in the acquired accents of an English upper-class gentleman's gentleman, and has the same sort of manners. "They have such noble faces," he says of the Treves family photographs on the mantelpiece, and then shows his hosts a picture of his mother, a very pretty woman. "Yes," he acknowledges, "she had the face of an angel," adding so delicately that one can only suspect what depths of feeling are being ignored, "I must have been a great disappointment to her. I tried so hard to be good."

Alan Splet (1939–1995) was an oscar winning sound designer and sound editor. He worked on numerous film projects throughout his career, including Eraserhead, Dune, and Blue Velvet. He had a fruitful and lasting working relationship with the director David Lynch whom he worked with on many films.

Gary Rydstrom Interview: I don't think an audience is going to care which parts of the soundtrack are coming from an orchestra and which parts are sound effects. Alan Splet was the best at using sound effects in an overtly psychological and musical way. His ambiences were stunning: applying rhythms and pitches of sounds as evocatively as a composer would.

Splet, Carson & the Oscars: Five-time host and beloved ad-libber Johnny Carson was known for off-the-cuff wisecracks such as his 1980 riff on no-show Oscar-winning sound editor Alan Splet ("First George C. Scott doesn't show, then Marlon Brando, and now Alan Splet"). What does a host need most? Uncanny quickness so he can react comically when the unexpected happens.

Freddie Francis Bio:
A clapper boy in British films while a teenager, Freddie Francis became a camera assistant and in the mid-1950s was an operator for Oswald Morris,the director of photography on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1953) and Beat the Devil (1954); he also directed second-unit footage for Huston's Moby Dick (1956). As a director of photography himself, Francis worked for directors Karel Reisz (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [1961], Night Must Fall [1964]), Jack Cardiff (Sons and Lovers [1960]), and fellow Huston-alumnus Jack Clayton (Room at the Top [1959], The Innocents [1961]). In the early 1960s he began directing but still occasionally shot films for such directors as Reisz and David Lynch. As a director, Francis has specialized in horror films, notably at Hammer, but also for producers Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky and the anthology films Dr. Terror's House of Horrors [1965], Torture Garden [1967], and Tales from the Crypt [1972]).

Freddie Francis on B&W: Although Francis recently won his second Academy Award (for GLORY), he earned his reputation with black & white cinematography, on ROOM AT THE TOP, SONS AND LOVERS and, later, THE ELEPHANT MAN. Scorsese wanted to replicate the stark contrast and murkiness of black & white photography, which Francis finds easy to do: "I don't really know anything about color. I still photograph things in black & white, but the fact that it's color stock means they come out in color. I know that sounds rather facetious — I am rather facetious anyway — but I prefer to think in terms of light and shade than in color."

Glenn Erickson: Freddie Francis, the great cameraman of Sons and Lovers and The Innocents and himself a director of middling horror films, gives Lynch's vision a celluloid interpretation with many layers of visual complexity. Dusky office interiors are just right, and you can almost feel the late 1800s in the struggling-to-be-antiseptic surgical theater. The cramped streets and cozy salons have an evocative richness that never becomes saccharine, as in Oliver!, yet is far more expressive than its nearest English horror competition, the very good The Flesh and the Fiends. Francis brings out the best in directors both fussy (Jack Clayton) and exacting (Jack Cardiff). Here in Elephant, David Lynch is able to create several very different worlds - the dark and nightmarish French circus (very much like scenes in Night of the Hunter), the stuffy hospital, and John Merrick's phantasmagorical inner world.

Screenonline: In interviews, he has expressed his unhappiness at being typed as a horror film director and insisted that he has no particular affinity for the genre. His willingness to challenge generic conventions, as in his combination of horror and humour in the strange and perverse black comedy Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), suggest that the originality and adventurousness of his cinematography might, in a different context, have found greater expression in his directorial assignments.

Ashley Montagu (1905-1999), born Israel Ehrenberg in East London in 1905, was one of those rare men of learning who succeeded in making substantive scholarly contributions to their academic disciplines while at the same time maintaining contact with the educated layman, indeed contributing substantively to the latter's learning. In addition, he was a dedicated and articulate social critic, concerned with bringing the findings of the social and biological sciences to bear upon the betterment of man's lot, while subjecting some of those very findings to critical social scrutiny. His accomplishments in these three domains, the scientific, the public-educational, and the socioethical, will be treated as a unity in what follows, in accordance with what was clearly the spirit of the program that guided his life's work.

Montagu's papers on race in the late 1930s, culminating in his book "Man's Most Dangerous Myth; The Fallacy of Race" (1942a) and followed by a series of works (including Montagu 1951; 1964; 1975), had the effect of upsetting the traditional concept of race accepted by most anthropologists in that it challenged the reality of anything corresponding to that notion. Montagu emphasized that gene-frequency analysis of traits would tell us more about the evolution of human populations, arguing that the omelet conception of racial mixing was totally artificial and did nothing to explain the origins and consequences of the differences between populations.

Wikipedia: Later in life, Montagu actively opposed genital modification and mutilation of children. In 1994, James Prescott, Ph.D., wrote and named in honor of Dr. Montagu, who was one of its original signers, the Ashley Montagu Resolution to End the Genital Mutilation of Children Worldwide: A Petition to the World Court, The Hague. Supporters worldwide sign it now at http://MontaguNoCircPetition.org.

Montagu taught and lectured at Harvard, Princeton (where he chaired the Department of Anthropology), University of California, and New York University. He wrote over 60 books. He collaborated with Sir Frederick Treves to research and write The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity.

The Evil That Men Do: After a happy childhood despite a lot of moving around, Lynch at age 19 enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, to study art. One of his projects was to combine visual arts with cinema to make Six Figures Getting Sick (1966), a looped animation projected onto one of his sculptures. On the strength of this 'moving painting' Lynch was able to secure funding to make his first two short films The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970). The critical success of these films, followed by a move to Los Angeles with his new wife and child, inspired Lynch to spend the next six years making his first feature, the sublime Eraserhead (1976). Partly inspired by his disgust of industrial and violent Philadelphia, and expressing many of his anxieties over having just become a father, Eraserhead remains Lynch's most personal film.

Eraserhead is a nightmare vision of a world where men control all aspects of reproduction, turning sex into a mechanised process. The result is a world of industrial decay where life is more morbid than death itself. The infamous baby in Eraserhead is not naturally conceived but created by The Man on the Planet (Jack Fisk), a deformed monster who unnaturally creates life by pulling levers. Without love, life is an artificially created abomination.

One of Eraserhead's biggest fans was comic writer/director Mel Brooks who famously once described Lynch as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars". Brooks introduced Lynch to Hollywood by having him direct The Elephant Man (1980), the beautifully sad true story of grotesquely deformed John Merrick (John Hurt). The Elephant Man was the first film to combine Lynch's unique industrial and organic visuals with a truly moving story about inner beauty and familial love. It was nominated for several Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.

Guardian Interview: "Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle," he says, but just as he appears about to delve into his darker muses, he adds cheerily: "Meantime I know that the Maharishi's peace plan will work and I want to do what I can to help it."

Director Profile: The Elephant Man, though shot in black and white and possessing many of Lynch's unique touches, was accessible to a mainstream audience. Its immense critical and commercial success awoke the industry's interest in Lynch's talent. This interest led to Lynch directing the hugely expensive science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a box office failure.

A POEM OFTEN QUOTED BY MERRICK:
Tis true my form is something odd.
But blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew,
I would not fail in pleasing you.
If I could reach from pole to pole,
Or grasp the ocean with a span,
I would be measured by the soul,
The mind's the standard of the man.

(This poem was used by John Merrick in a pamphlet accompanying his freak show, and later when he wrote to thank people for their generosity in caring for him)

More on Alec Guinness

New York Times Reviews Guinness biography: His wretched childhood scarred him deeply. His mother, a semi-constant drunk and occasional shoplifter and thief, never revealed the identity of his father. Uncertainty and neglect haunted his early years and left him, like Dickens, with an abiding sense of shame about his background. "He was like someone without an outer skin," his wife wrote in a letter after his death. "He bled."

Like many artists, he vacillated between grandiosity and debilitating self-doubt. "I feel I have the seeds of genius in me," he announced to a young friend after reciting a speech from Shakespeare after dinner. He had not yet spoken a line on the stage. At a rehearsal of "Macbeth" in 1966, he raised titters among some inattentive fellow actors by bellowing, "When I was a boy we would have been studying a great actor at work." Yet, toward the end of his life, heaped with honors and acclaim, he could write in a letter, "I sometimes wonder if I have ever acted, and how I dare to ask for a salary."

His film career, from "Great Expectations" to "Star Wars," was blessed with extraordinary luck. At a time when Gielgud, his mentor, had to take any film part that came his way, Guinness, who had appeared in classics like "Oliver Twist," "Kind Hearts and Coronets," and "The Bridge on the River Kwai," could pick and choose. He turned down "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" ("Do you think my varicose veins would show through the fishnet stockings?" he asked a friend) but took on "Star Wars" ("fairy- tale rubbish but could be interesting perhaps"). Somewhat to his disgust, the film raised him to new heights of international stardom.

The Man in the White Suit (1951)

Stuart's Nite
Thin crust pizza, ice cream, cookies

Screenonline: The Man in the White Suit (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1951) is perhaps the most cynical, and certainly the most complex, of the Ealing comedies. It was Mackendrick's second film as director, following the surprise success of Whisky Galore! (1949), and the first of two films with Alec Guinness.

Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, mild-mannered but single-minded inventor, whose discovery - an unbreakable, dirt-repelling fabric - threatens an entire industry with ruin. It is perhaps the best of Guinness's string of fine performances for the studio.

As Sidney's only real ally, the industrialist's daughter Daphne, Joan Greenwood is, as she was in Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer, 1949) and Whisky Galore!, a very untypical Ealing woman: clever, sexy, and manipulative.
The film started life as a stage play, by Roger MacDougall, Mackendrick's cousin. Mackendrick was attracted to the play's premise, that the invention of the fabric causes managers and unions to find common cause in overcoming the threat to their interests. Like his later Ealing films, The Man in the White Suit explores a Britain in which progress is stifled by conservatism and the iron grip of the past. As Mackendrick put it,

"Each character in the story was intended as a caricature of a separate political attitude, covering the entire range from Communist, through official Trades Unionism, Romantic Individualism, Liberalism, Enlightened and Unenlightened Capitalism to Strong-arm Reaction. Even the central character was intended as a comic picture of Disinterested Science."

More than one critic has suggested that Sidney is a stand-in for Mackendrick himself, the free-thinking genius whose vision is held back by the conservatism of the studio hierarchy under Ealing head Michael Balcon. The film does have something of Ealing in its characterisations: Mackendrick reportedly guided Cecil Parker, in his portrayal of the pompous factory boss Birnley, to "model yourself on Mick [Balcon]".

But Sidney's unworldly innocence disguises his disregard for the real social consequences of his actions. The film's most poignant moment comes near the end, when Sidney, pursued by an angry mob, runs into his aged landlady, Mrs Watson (Edie Martin), carrying a basket of laundry. Sidney pleads with her for something to hide his suit, but she rejects him, asking, "Why can't you scientists leave things alone? What about my bit of washing, when there's no washing to do?" Her plea gives Sidney pause but, at the end, he is back to his selfish dreaming.

Alexander Mackendrick: Alexander Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1912 and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. In the 1930s, as an art director for the J. Walter Thompson Advertising firm, he designed layouts for a variety of clients including Phillips in Eindhoven, where he worked with George Pal, the Hungarian animator. When the war in Europe broke out, J. Walter Thompson acquired the Ministry of Information as a client to work on propaganda related projects.

In 1941 Mackendrick was sent to North Africa, then Italy as part of the psychological warfare division shooting newsreels and documentary coverage as well as working on leaflets and radio news for the Allied commando effort. When Rome was liberated in 1943, Mackendrick was made director of the film unit and one of the projects he approved was Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), a film that owes much to its documentary footage. In 1946 he was offered a contract with Ealing Studios, a relatively emerging production company that brought hope for Britain's movie culture by dominating the 1950s with its peculiar brand of comedy.

At the time, British cinema was an unremarkable byproduct of the documentary movement of the 1930s and consisted mostly of literary adaptations. Some comedies were popular, particularly those starring George Formby and other vaudeville mainstays. The wartime population regarded other movies – those incorporating realist techniques from the documentary movement – with sober acceptance. This naturalistic but dull style hindered any progress in the cinema's evolution.

What Ealing Studios brought in was quiet revolution. Films at Ealing were carefully guided under Michael Balcon, the head of production, who exercised authority with a trusting, liberal generosity that challenged the weak traditions of previous filmmaking. The studio was increasingly becoming known for its collegiate atmosphere and democratic, round table conferences that Balcon held, where ideas would be greeted with a kind of paternal affection.

“There are about half a dozen people who claim responsibility for [Mackendrick's arrival at Ealing]” (2), Mackendrick's wife Hilary maintains, yet it seems the circumstances were just of chance. His first job at Ealing was as designer of 'set-ups', or more detailed storyboards that included the characters in proportion to the framing of shots. He then moved on to fully storyboarding and cowriting Saraband for Dead Lovers (Basil Dearden, 1948), along with working on additional dialogue and directing the second unit on The Blue Lamp (Dearden, 1949). In 1948, he was offered a chance to direct the unusual comedy Whisky Galore!. Mackendrick's contribution to Ealing would prove enormous, even if his track record of films would be less so.

Mackendrick's second film, The Man In The White Suit (1951), is the best of his Ealing comedies. A scientist currently working as a lab janitor discovers the formula for an indestructible type of fiber but finds himself under opposition from both the unions and executives of the textile industry. The story, based on a play written by Mackendrick's cousin Roger MacDougall, owes little to its source material. The issue that the director was concerned with was the polemics of industry and its responsibilities. The result is a deeply pessimistic portrait that challenges values and obligations of business and society, and is not so much a light comedy as a cautionary tale to the excess of idealism. Before facing white and blue collar opposing forces, the inventor, Sidney (Alec Guinness), is initially keen on the benefits of his discovery. Like the naive Waggett in Whisky Galore!, the consequences of one character's inexperience results in changes that affect the whole community.

Stylistically, the movie pays small homage to Fritz Lang, and is strikingly photographed by frequent collaborator Douglas Slocombe. Sidney whips through dark alleyways, wearing the pristine suit, and several union members dirtily paw at it, the expressionist claustrophobia apparent. Stony black-suited monolithic executives also hover over him throughout the film, observing his moves with a jealous superiority reminiscent of the vigilante jury from M (1931).

The casting of Alec Guinness as Sidney was a coup for Mackendrick, as his indistinctive appearance permits him to be regarded more as a vehicle of idealism, untouched by pressures of consumer society. The austere businessmen of the textile industry portray a ripe parody of establishment as fatuous capitalists. They are afraid of change and attempt to hold on to legacy and tradition; essentially, the crumbling facade of English imperialism. But even Sidney, maladroit and innocent, is doomed to failure. His priorities shift throughout the picture: idealism turns into opportunity and action, reality becomes experience, but he remains ambiguous.

The characters however, are never polar opposites, and only divide in matters of personal ethics. Sidney, Mackendrick emphasized, is not “pure” (3), and is as devious and self-interested as the industry men who try to stop him. This is the most destructive quality of his innocence. He doesn't have the experience of the executives to realize the effect on the community. Perhaps it is his childlike approach to the situation that warrants sympathy, and a quest for some kind of absolute. But there is no universal answer. The result becomes cynicism and frustration in the mechanics of a comedy.

Mackendrick bio: Alexander Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 8 September 1912, the only child of a shipbuilding draughtsman and civil engineer, Francis Robert Mackendrick, and his wife Martha, who had migrated to the USA from their native Glasgow in the previous year. When Alexander was only six years old, his father died in the post-World War I influenza epidemic, and his mother, attempting to pursue a career as a dress designer, gave the boy over to his grandfather, who took him back to Glasgow in 1919. He was never reunited with his mother, and later in life realised that his childhood had been lonely and rather unhappy.

After attending Hillhead High School between 1919 and 1926, Mackendrick enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art for three years before moving to London to take up a job at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT). He was soon promoted from layout artist to art director and he remained at JWT throughout the 1930s. Characteristically, he said of the early years of his career that his training in advertising had been invaluable, "though it's an industry I in effect despise". During this period he co-wrote a script with his cousin Roger MacDougall, which was bought by Associated-British and released under the title Midnight Menace (d. Sinclair Hill, 1937). Between 1936 and 1938, he also scripted and storyboarded five cinema commercials for Horlicks, which were shot in Technicolor by the stop-puppet animator George Pal.

During the early years of World War II, Mackendrick scripted and storyboarded wartime propaganda films for a new animation unit at JWT headed by John Halas and Joy Batchelor. In 1942, he and MacDougall set up their own production company, where Mackendrick cut his directorial teeth with three ninety-second 'instructional' films to be inserted into the Pathé Gazette newsreel. In the following year, he travelled to Algiers and Italy with the Army Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), drawing cartoons for Allied propaganda leaflets. After the fall of Rome he and the art director Peter Proud directed two documentaries, I granai del popolo (a propaganda piece aimed at persuading Italian farmers to make surplus grain available for general distribution) and Le fosse Ardeatine (on the aftermath of the Nazis' massacre of partisans at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome).

When the war ended, Mackendrick set up Merlin Productions with MacDougall, making documentaries for the Ministry of Information. When the company ran into financial difficulties, Mackendrick sought work at Ealing Studios and in 1946 was taken on as scriptwriter and production designer on Basil Dearden's Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948). This was the start of a new phase in his career: he stayed at Ealing for nine years, directing five films, establishing himself as a key figure in Britain's post-war film industry and acquiring a considerable international reputation.

The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mackendrick's next assignment, was based on a play by MacDougall about the invention of an indestructible cloth by a scientist working for a textile mill: in the film the scientist, Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness), is an idealist who regards his invention as potentially revolutionary. One of Mackendrick's dangerous innocents, Stratton fails to take account of the less positive aspects of his brainchild; and it is his lack of awareness that provides the source of the comedy. In Charles Barr's view, "perhaps the most intelligent of British films [and] certainly one of the most complex", The Man in the White Suit is stamped with its director's mordant humour and displays degrees of irony and ambiguity exceptional even for Mackendrick.

Roger Macdougall, cousin of Alexander Mackendrick worked in films first as composer, then writer; at Ealing as writer intermittently between 1939 and 1953, meanwhile working for several years in the 1940's as writer and director of documentaries for his own Merlin productions. Continued writing for the stage, occasionally for films; The Mouse that Roared (1959).

Joan Greenwood: Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#63).

Encyclopedia of British Film: The irresistible leading lady of some of the most enduring British films, seductive of voice, face and figure, searching the language - and indeed the world - for booby traps, Greenwood's performance record must be nearly unrivalled among British leading ladies. RADA-trained and on stage from 1938 (delectably malicious as Hattie in The Grass Is Greener, 1959; sharply ambiguous in The Chalk Garden, 1971), she was in films from 1940.

She was one of The Gentle Sex (1943) celebrated in Leslie Howard's film, was a sympathetic helper for The October Man (d. Roy Ward Baker, 1947), and a doomed Sophie Dorothea in Saraband for Dead Lovers (d. Basil Dearden, 1948), but it was as the female lead in a series of benchmark comedies that she made herself indispensable to British films.

In Whisky Galore! (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1949) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer, 1949), she is the drily beguiling Peggy and the wonderfully minxish Sibella respectively; she deflects Alec Guinness from his experiments in The Man in the White Suit (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1951, 'What could I do?' she asks, as if it wasn't obvious) and she is, in her way, as imperishably Gwendolyn as Edith Evans is Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (d. Anthony Asquith, 1951).

She did better in America than some of her contemporaries (cf. Moonfleet, d. Fritz Lang, 1955, and Stage Struck, d. Sidney Lumet, 1958). She played character roles back in Britain but remained a star till the end, which came after Little Dorrit (d. Christine Edzard, 1988), as Mrs Clennam, and it was good to see her brilliant at the finish. There was some TV and stage work but she is above all a British film star, the genuine article.

Never, it seems, very ambitious, she had a late but happy marriage to actor André Morell and worked only fitfully after that.

Alec Guinness, best known and most loved British actor of the 20th century, made 77 films over nearly 50 years, beginning in 1946 and 1948 with David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and continuing beyond the Star Wars Trilogy to A Passage to India in 1984 and later films for television . He brought to the screen timeless qualities of comedy brilliance, an individual sense of the eccentric and the macabre, and an inner reality of character which has rarely been surpassed. Although he began as a stage actor, the cinema transformed his career, proclaiming his phenomenal range and bringing him world-wide recognition. He became the supreme entertainer about whom there always remained something unknown: this sense of an impenetrable secret, of something deliberately hidden - also maintained carefully in his personal life - became the key to his continuing fascination. All his films are full of his special genius.

After the two Dickens films, when Ealing Studios resumed film-making after the war, Guinness quickly rose to become its leading star with Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob. He stayed mainly with Ealing for the next five or so years, but came to tire of the idea, projected in the comedies, of himself as the master of a hundred faces. From then on his range broadened to central dramatic roles, saints, men of genius, leaders, spies and master-criminals, all distinct and observed with his ironic sense of detachment.

Guinness was always a very subtle performer, with a meticulous attention to detail, and an extraordinary power of concentration. As his talent and career burgeoned he became not so much interested in big effects, but paring away everything that was inessential. His mastery of expressing hidden feeling, of being tortured and of mental suffering, emerged fully in The Prisoner, in which he played the persecuted Roman Catholic Cardinal, and in The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he deservedly won an Oscar for best actor. In many of his films there emerges the sense of a personal quest, of a search for identity, as he successively disappeared and re-emerged completely disguised as fictitious people, or as, say, Hitler, Freud, Charles I or Marcus Aurelius. His Fagin, with its ferocious display of evil, was censored in parts of the U.S.A. for being anti-Semitic; his Fuhrer provoked a ban in Israel for its human sympathy- but he maintained in both cases he never minded thoroughly evil people, whom he found more interesting to act than good ones.

While he was occasionally courted by avant-garde and art directors, he stayed in the mainstream of popular cinema, although he occasionally engaged in ventures of his own, for instance when he produced, and played Gulley Jimson, in his own adaptation of The Horse’s Mouth. Given his five years wartime experience in the British navy he played many and varied serving officers, the best of which was the hard-swearing, hard drinking Jock Sinclair in Tunes of Glory. You rarely see Guinness, in this extraordinary wide variety of films in the NFT programme, letting himself rip, but Tunes of Glory is the glorious exception. With the advent of the British obsession with spies it took little for Guinness to become supreme in this field as Smiley in the two Lé Carre series made for television.

Mackendrick's first film at Ealing, Whisky Galore! (1949), ranks high among the comedy classics of British cinema. Based on Compton Mackenzie's novel about a shipwrecked cargo of whisky off the Hebridean islands, the film focuses on disagreements between the inhabitants of the island of Todday and officialdom (in the form of the Englishman in charge of the island's Home Guard) about what should be done with the whisky. In a variant of a theme which was to surface repeatedly in Mackendrick's work, the Englishman represents Innocence, the islanders Experience. But in Mackendrick's world, oppositions are rarely clear-cut and humour is always double-edged: in Whisky Galore! innocence is potentially dangerous, experience devious and exploitative.

Two qualities distinguish Guinness as unique. First the so-called anonymous face, sometimes defined as that of the man in the street, yet which can turn into anyone’s: as George Lucas said of him, 'Like a chameleon, Alec has a lot of different shades, different colours and different characters'. Second, he always avoided finding the permanent, comfortable role. No striking effects, no direct emotional statements, an eavesdropping style easy to overlook.
-- Garry O’Connor, Author of 'Alec Guinness the Unknown: A Life

Household fame, though, came with films. An extra in Evensong (d. Victor Saville, 1934), he didn't film again until his beautifully exact Herbert Pocket in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), followed by his controversially repulsive Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948) and the series of Ealing comedies with which, to this day, his name is most tenaciously associated. (Except of course by the very young who know him only as Obi-Wan in Star Wars (US, d. George Lucas, 1977), for which he famously took a percentage and needed never to work again.)

There are seven of these comedies, most memorable of which are the immaculate Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer, 1949), in which he played eight members of a ducal family, The Lavender Hill Mob (d. Charles Crichton, 1951), as the mild bank clerk dreaming larcenously of gold bars, The Man in the White Suit (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1951), as an inventor in the grip of an idée fixe, and The Ladykillers (d. Mackendrick, 1955), as the unctuous, snaggle-toothed leader of a gang of incompetent crooks. In 1989, he claimed never to feel comfortable playing characters too like himself, and most of these films allow physical disguise to complement the inner obsessions. His own physical appearance as a young man was pleasantly ordinary rather than glamorously film starrish.

Ealing Studios can claim to be the oldest film studio in the world. The stages and offices are steeped in history having survived the onset of the talkies, two world wars and the more recent technological advances in film and TV.

Will Barker, a pioneer of British cinema, originally acquired the site in 1902. Basil Dean, owner of Associated Talking Pictures took over from Barker in the early 1930s and Ealing Studios was established. In 1938, Michael Balcon joined Dean as Head of Production. The golden era of Ealing Studios had begun.

This fabulous period of creativity would last until the late 1950s. Films like the Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets were created and formed the pinnacle of the most astonishing British film production ever seen.

The BBC bought the Studios in 1959 and they spent the next 20 years creating television productions from Ealing Studios such as Colditz, The Singing Detective and Fortunes of War.

The Studios were acquired in mid-2000 by Uri Fruchtmann, Barnaby Thompson, Harry Handelsman and John Kao. Together these partners aim to rebuild the Studios with a vision that brings film, technology and property expertise together in order to revive and continue the outstanding quality of past productions made here at Ealing.

Ealing Studios has recently accommodated high profile films including An Ideal Husband, Notting Hill, Star Wars – Episode 2, Lucky Break and The Importance of Being Earnest. Recent television productions include The Royle Family (Granada), Bedtime (HatTrick), Randall and Hopkirk Deceased (Ghost) and Emma Brody (20 Century Fox).

More on Ealing: It was a place in which the editor was highly regarded, and nearly all Ealing's directors had served earlier in the cutting-rooms - Charles Crichton, Charles Frend, Henry Cornelius, Thorold Dickinson, Robert Hamer, Leslie Norman, Michael Truman and Seth Holt were all former film editors. A much smaller number had graduated from screenwriting - this group included Basil Dearden, Harry Watt and Alexander Mackendrick. But significantly no actors were ever elevated to a directorial role. Ealing operated almost on a repertory basis, with a number of reliable performers appearing again and again, no doubt attracted as much by the idea of regular work as of contributing to the product of a much-favoured British studio. But Ealing, good as it was for reputations, was no place in which to get rich.

Sidney Stratton Lives! PALM SPRINGS, Calif., Feb. 12, 2002 - To show that nanotechnology is more than hype, David Soane stands before an audience of about 250 people at a nanotech investing forum, and holds up a pair of beige cotton slacks.

Molecular structures that are part of the Nano-Texprocess are much smaller than a grain of sand or even a virus. That prevents the human eye, or touch, from detecting even a minor difference between Nano-Tex fabric and regular fabric, the company says.
"This is a pair of pants," Soane says casually. "You can buy them in any Eddie Bauer," the retail chain with a store even in Palm Desert, Calif. That's not far from the table where Soane picks up a glass with liquid in it.

"Imagine you're at a cocktail party and you have red wine..." Soane empties the glass on the fabric. The liquid rolls off. "One hundred percent cotton," the Berkeley chemical engineering professor-turned-entrepreneur says triumphantly.

Room at the Top (1959)

Peter's Nite
Salad, Pizza, Carrot Cake, Ice Cream

Review: "In this striking debut from director Jack Clayton, who never again achieved at this level, Lawrence Harvey plays a small-town man who comes to the city to make it big. Harvey, he of the shark face and empty eyes, is coldly charming, and quickly wins the admiration of those who are unable to see through the blustery exterior to the cold inside. He sets his sights on Susan (Heather Sears), the daughter of a local bigshot: the movie is about his calculated efforts to win her over against her uppity family's resistance. In the meantime, he starts an affair with Alice (Simone Signoret), a member of a theater group he joins in order to get closer to Susan, the heiress.

Alice is ten years older and infinitely wiser than Susan, but she falls for Joe anyway, probably because he is open and honest with her. Joe starts to fall for her too, complicating his plans. He must choose between the love of his life, which turns out to be Alice, and what he thought he wanted, represented by Susan."

Screenonline: "It is difficult to categorise Jack Clayton's work as a film director. Given that all of his feature films were adapted from novels, he could be seen as the most literary of British film-makers, and yet he was also deeply committed to using all the resources offered him by cinema. His films were always carefully crafted but they also contained moments of spontaneity and rawness.

This craftsmanship earned him the respect of his fellow film-makers but - with the notable exception of Room at the Top (1959), which in many ways was his least typical film - he rarely enjoyed substantial commercial success. A director of remarkable talent, Clayton's uncompromising independence led not just to a relatively small output - with only eight feature films completed in his entire career - but also to his often being out of step with what the market, and sometimes also the critics, wanted."

John Braine: "John Braine was born in Bradford in 1922 and spent much of his early life at Thackley near Shipley. In 1933, he won a scholarship to St Bede’s Grammar School but he was not an academic success and left in 1938 without a School Certificate.

He took various minor jobs, finally settling at Bingley Library as a librarian until, in 1942, he was drafted into the Royal Navy where he trained as a wireless telegraphist. Before he could find active service, he was invalided out of the Navy, suffering from tuberculosis, and was sent to convalesce at the sanatorium at Grassington, in the Yorkshire Dales.

When he was discharged, he resumed his position at Bingley Library and finally passed his School Certificate in the summer of 1944. In 1947, he attended Leeds School of Librarianship, returning to Bingley as Senior Assistant Librarian. Whilst living and working there, he became involved in the Bingley Little Theatre, an experience that was to provide inspiration for themes in Room at the Top and other novels that he later wrote.

Determined to become a writer, Braine left his job at Bingley in 1951 and went to live in London. He did some writing for Lilliput, The New Statesman, and Tribune, but his early days as a writer were a desperate struggle and for a time he lived in poverty, finally returning to Bradford in November 1951 for the funeral of his mother. Shortly afterwards, his health deteriorated and he was re-admitted to Grassington Sanatorium for eighteen months. It was whilst he was there that he developed an idea for a novel based on a verse play he had written called The Desert in the Mirror, inspired by the theme of Faust, about a young man who sells his soul for riches. The novel’s original working titles were Born Favourite and Joe for King. Shortly before it was published – and having encountered the obligatory publishers’ rejection that most gifted writers seem to face, as though their talent cannot be judged – Braine wrote gloomily:

“I was a failure at the age of thirty-five, not even able to provide a home for my wife and the coming child. And the novel on which I had pinned my hopes had been rejected by four publishers.”

When the novel that he had written in longhand in his hospital bed was finally published in March 1957 as Room at the Top, it became an overnight success, thrusting John Braine onto the international stage and bringing him fame and fortune.

He went on to write a dozen novels over the next thirty years, as well as TV adaptations of his later books, and two non-fiction works, J B Priestley, and Writing a Novel. His second novel, The Vodi, drew heavily on his time spent as a tuberculosis patient at Grassington. His fourth novel, The Jealous God, was also strongly autobiographical.

John Braine died in October 1986. Grassington Sanatorium was demolished several years ago to make way for an executive housing development. Room at the Top has never been out of print."

In "What Would a Writer Do?" John Braine reminds writers that they must give considerations of “self” over to the work: “You must realize that you yourself don't matter. Only the work matters” (48). All serious writers understand this concept as an element of the process, the writer's working for an altered state of concentration. The problem for the teacher is how to induce it so that students can experience writing in the way writers do.

Screen On Line: "Room at the Top, released at the beginning of 1959, was the first of the 'new wave' films. It came from established industry producers, John and James Woolf, and was a huge box-office hit. This success opened up new possibilities for British filmmakers. Audiences had proved they were prepared to see adult storylines, gritty realism and political comment, and so the new wave as a commercial proposition was born. War films and romantic comedies dried up and the provinces and proletariat were suddenly discovered.

As a trailblazer which had a big impact on the British film industry and its audience, Room at the Top has inevitably faced a backlash. After an initial consensus that it was daring and different, a new consensus emerged that it was stolid and indifferent.

Maybe it's time for the backlash against the backlash, for there are many fine things in Room at the Top. It may lack the punch of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (d. Karel Reisz, 1960), the lyricism of A Taste of Honey (d. Tony Richardson, 1962), the humour of Billy Liar (d. John Schlesinger, 1963) or the depth of This Sporting Life (d. Lindsay Anderson, 1963), but it has the virtues of a direct challenge to national complacency and a searing emotional honesty about personal relationships.

No other new wave film takes on the class system as boldly. It offers a complex analysis of class warfare that challenges the accepted state of things in Britain at the time. Joe is proud of his class but, unlike Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night, keen to leave it. The only way to do this is by cold calculation and emotional manipulation."

Simone Signoret (March 25, 1921 - September 30, 1985), was a French actress.

"She was born Simone-Henriette-Charlotte Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany to Andre and Georgette (Signoret) Kaminker. She was the oldest child of three, with two younger brothers. Her father was a French army officer and a linguist who later worked in the United Nations. She grew up in Paris in an intellectual atmosphere and studied the English language in school, earning a teaching certificate. She tutored in English and Latin and worked part-time as a typist for a French newspaper.

During the German occupation of France, Signoret formed close bonds with an artistic group of writers and actors who met at a local cafe. By this time, she had developed an interest in acting and was encouraged by her friends to follow her ambition. In 1942, she began appearing in bit parts and was able to earn enough money to support her mother and two brothers as her father, who was Jewish, fled the country. She took her mother's maiden name for the screen to help hide her Jewish roots.

Signoret's sensual features and earthy nature led to type-casting and she was often seen in prostitute roles. She won considerable attention in La Ronde (1950), a film which was banned briefly in New York state as being immoral. She won further raves, including an acting award from the British Film Academy, for her portrayal of yet another prostiute in Jacque Becker's Casque d'Or (1951). She went on to appear in many notable films in France during the 1950s including Therese Raquin (1953), Diabolique (1954), and The Crucible (1957).

In 1958, Signoret went to England to film Room at the Top (1959), which won her numerous awards including the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was the first woman to win the award appearing in a foreign film. She was offered films in Hollywood but turned them down and continued to work in France and England. She did return to America for Ship of Fools (1965) which earned her another Oscar nomination and she went on to appear in several Hollywood films before returning to France in 1969.

In her later years, she was often criticized for gaining weight and letting her looks go but Signoret, who was never concerned with glamour, ignored the insults and continued giving finely etched performances. She won more acclaim for her portrayal of a weary madam in Madame Rosa (1977) and as an unmarried sister who unknowingly falls in love with her paralyzed brother via anonymous correspondence in I Sent a Letter to my Love (1980)."

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
-- Simone Signoret

"Laurence Harvey was born October 1, 1928 in Joniskis, Lithuania. His real name was Laruschka Mischa Skikne, which he changed when his parents emigrated to South Africa to escape persecution for their Jewish faith, when he was five years old. At 15, he debuted on stage with the Johannesburg Repertory Theater, but later he joined the army and served until the end of WWII.

He went to England after the war and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, staying there three months before joining a Manchester repertory company where he soon began to play leads. He was married three times first to Margaret Leighton in 1957, then to Joan Cohn in 1968 and then to Pauline Stone in 1972. They had one daughter named Domino. After his breakthrough film Room at the Top in 1959, Hollywood again took interest in Harvey, and in 1960 he co-starred with John Wayne in The Alamo, followed by an appearance in the Elizabeth Taylor hit Butterfield 8. A role in the 1961 British production The Long and the Short and the Tall was next, trailed by a pair of Hollywood flops, Two Lovers and Summer and Smoke. Finally, in John Frankenheimer's masterful The Manchurian Candidate, he found a role perfectly suited to his talents, portraying a brainwashed assassin shorn of emotion; the performance was the best of his career, but in a cruel twist of irony the film was pulled from distribution by producer/star Frank Sinatra when its plot too closely foreshadowed the tragic death of President John F. Kennedy. He worked steadily until his death from stomach cancer at his home in Hampstead, London, in 1973."