Pink String and Sealing Wax

I must admit a level of disappointment. I am getting these films from a list called Best British Noirs. I have to say that I haven't found the level very high. It's also possible I have already seen the best ones.

This film takes 45 minutes for a plot to develop. I know films have lost the art of the buildup, but it's one thing when you're waiting for the San Francisco earthquake to start and another for a woman to decide to poison her husband.

Most of the film, set in Victorian England, concerns a family run by a strict and unreasonable father. The son in the family meets the flirtatious soon to be widowed Googie Withers. She uses him to make a boyfriend jealous and then steals strychnine from the family pharmacy to kill her drunk husband.

A subplot has to do with the older daughter wanting to pursue professional classical singing. The singing did capture that old-fashioned technique students were trained in, with lots of tremolo.

The title refers to the way pharmacists wrapped their packages.

Googie livens up the proceedings.

Don't be fooled by the silly title, this is no flimsy, lightweight piece but rather a lurid, moralistic tale taking in adultery, murder, blackmail and suicide within its tightly-wrapped 90 minutes.

The action is set in late Victorian-era Brighton and framed by the local newspaper editor dictating recent town events to his copy-writer. It's fair to say this was a heavy-news day as we are flash-backed and introduced to the two town background settings for the story, the first being the local pub, run by a boozy landlord who drinks himself to a stupor to overlook his tarty wife's extra-marital affairs, particularly her current one with the appropriately-named dapper Dan, a handsome but married dandy of the insincere type. When the barman knocks her about once too many times for her perceived indiscretions the feisty wife hatches a plan to clear a better path for her and Dan which naturally doesn't bode well for her old man.

The other background setting is the family of the town coroner, the unforgiving, Puritanical Mr Sutton who rules his loveless house with a rod of iron in his bible-punching zeal, squashing the singing ambitions of his daughter, the romantic dreams of his impressionable young son and worst of all, the swine, the guinea-pig pets of his youngest daughter, which he instead plans to dissect for scientific research. There's only so much such a put-upon family can take however and they all proceed to quietly rebel in their own way against papa's iron-will authority, his seemingly docile wife quietly but tellingly informing her husband of her resistance over breakfast, the daughters secretly attend the concert of a famous singer who is visiting the town, with the intention of catching her ear by giving an impromptu public audition after the show and most significantly, the young son, his hopes of marrying his sweetheart dashed by dad, who wanders into the pub one night and sets his puppy-dog eyes on the figure of the landlord's alluring wife.

The two elements are nicely bound up together, no doubt with the pink string and sealing wax of the title and by the end the murdering widow has run her race, though not before a game attempt to shift the blame elsewhere and in an even bigger turnabout, the flinty old patriarch has changed his outlook towards his family, serving up a nice bow with which to tie up all the loose ends, in the process neatly reintroducing the newspaper article device introduced at the beginning.

Featuring in its cast two future doyens of British TV, Googie "Within These Walls" Withers as the scheming wife, her bosom heaving as she imperiously cuts a swathe through the menfolk in her wake until she takes it too far and the young Gordon "Upstairs Downstairs" / "The Professionals" Jackson as the simpering, lovelorn youth who falls under her spell. There are other good performances too, notably Mervyn Johns as the unyielding father, Mary Merrall as his long-suffering wife and John Carol who plays the heartless Dan, he and Withers possible fore-runners to the warring Dirty Den and Angie characters in the 80's BBC soap-opera "Eastenders".

I enjoyed Robert Hamer's direction, besides the tidy ending, I liked the way he used the pub lush, always asking for her penn'orth of gin, to comment on and indeed at times move along the action.

All in all, a highly enjoyable period melodrama well worth discovering and unwrapping.

Excellent acting from the lead players, (especially from Mervyn Johns as the puritanical Victorian pater familias and Googie Withers as the pub landlady and murderess), and a good supporting cast as well mean that this Victorian-era pot boiler set in Brighton could have been something special, given the right direction. Unfortunately, though, it lacks this latter quality and the plot development is disjointed and lacks the necessary twists and thrills to have done the job. What results is a very average, Saturday afternoon matinee thriller, which leaves you thinking of the many ways it could have been improved upon. Perhaps a film studies seminar could use it for this purpose? 6/10.

Having supplied an elderly female customer with a remedy for flatulence and served as analyst at a murder trial, stern faced pharmacist, Mervyn Johns returns home to impress his holier than thou, never spare the rod brand of ultra muscular Christianity upon his deeply unhappy, largely subservient family.

He perpetuates his oppressive regime by blocking daughter (Jean Ireland)'s ambition to become an opera singer, coercing her towards an unwanted marriage and a mundane future as a piano teacher. Eldest son (Gordon Jackson) is then ridiculed for writing love poems to the girl of his dreams. It's enough to drive the poor bloke to drink.....which it inevitably does! And that's before we even begin to consider his experiments on small animals. All in the name of science, of course. Everything stems from a sense of duty. Not least, rigorous church attendance, whilst bemoaning the fact that sermons are becoming ever shorter. (Sometimes, less is more mate!)

Drinking culture in Brighton 1880's style: Mainly flat capped men supping tankards of ale in a smoky, poky pub. Women prefer a succession of whiskies, with the odd brandy or port for variety. Inebriated landlord, Garry Marsh is a disciple of the hard stuff.....and just when we're all thinking that Johns is the villain for putting the fear of God into his timid family, Marsh's wife, Googie Withers - a piece of work if ever there was one - springs into action, making the formidable pharmacist look positively saintly. Attaching herself to the docile Jackson (amongst a legion of others) she sneakily gains access to some of the more virulent concoctions stored at the pharmacy and a cunning plan to dispose of her big, bald, boozy husband begins to take shape. Whilst on the domestic front there may be seeds of rebellion in the ranks at the Johns household.

With a similar ring to 'Arsenic and Old Lace', Pink String is the familiar title of a movie offering a fascinating vignette of late Victorian life. The extremes of deeply rooted Christian faith, overspilling into moralistic rigidity, starkly contrasting with the consequences of alcohol fuelled lasciviousness. Never quite goth, but set in a still steam driven world. The approaching advances of the next century remain two decades away. The only electricity here is generated entirely by Withers.

The detective plot is never really suspenseful , eminently predictable , and sententious at that ;after the first sequence ,in which Sutton did not spare a thought for the woman he helped send to the gallows,one could expect a more convincing backlash.

Therefore ,the most interesting side is the depiction of a Victorian -era petit bourgeois family ,where the holier-than-thou father rules his son and daughters with a rod of iron .They are not allowed to follow their dreams so it will have serious repercussions on the naive son ,who's denied the woman he loves and finds solace with an adultress ; one scene sums up this fossilized milieu in an admirably succint style: for the Lent ,the girls have to recite some kind of act of contrition !

The stand-out is arguably Googie Withers ,who ,in her last scenes ,literally mesmerizes the viewer ; four years later ,she would blow Gene Tierney off the screen in Dassin's "night and the city" ,not a small feat.