The Long Memory

The Long Memory is directed by Robert Hamer who co-adapts for the screen with Frank Harvey from Howard Clewes' novel of the same name. It stars John Mills, John McCallum, Elizabeth Sellars, Eva Bergh and Geoffrey Keen. William Alwyn scores the music and Harry Waxman is the cinematographer. Plot sees Mills as Phillip Davidson, a man released from prison after serving 12 years for a murder he didn't commit. Finding a base home on a dilapidated barge in a boggy Thames inlet, Davidson sets about finding the liars who were responsible for his incarceration.

Moody and often downbeat, The Long Memory is a well directed and acted British crime thriller. Met with much negativity from the critics upon its release, it's a film that has since been re-evaluated and garnered better critical praise. Seen as a forerunner to Get Carter, it's also been mentioned in the same breath as They Made Me a Fugitive and Carol Reed's excellent Odd Man Out. However, a decent film it is for sure, but it's not in the same class as the three film's mentioned. The focus of the novel was the cop Bob Lowther (played by McCallum), but here it's rightly shifted to Davidson and his pursuit of those that wronged him. A good move that, even if the big culmination of the movie is a touch too contrived and not the moody high point it could have been.

John Mills was already established as an actor of note due to his fine work in the 40's, so this off the cuff film was, in his own words, merely a "job" for him, a means to pay some bills, and at first glance it looks an odd casting decision. John Mills as a vengeful ex convict stalking the dank London and Gravesend streets in search of revenge-hanging around in a run down coffee shop-living in a slum boat, doesn't sound right. Yet he cuts a surprisingly rugged figure, with stubbled chin and greasy kiss curl hair, he slots in nicely to the grungy backdrop painted by Hamer and Waxman. It's only really these two elements that make the film worth seeking out by fans of noirish British crime movies. There's the constant thought nagging away while watching it that it's a missed opportunity, a chance wasted to make a really bleak and potent thriller. What remains is decent in tone and narrative, if ultimately it's a watch once only movie. 7/10

Robert Hamer was not a prolific director; only around a dozen films are credited to him, and because of his serious alcohol problem there is some doubt as to the extent to which he was responsible for some of those, especially his final film, "School for Scoundrels". His career has been described as "the most serious miscarriage of talent in the postwar British cinema", yet during that relatively brief career he was responsible for some of the best British films of the forties and fifties. He is today best remembered for that brilliant Ealing comedy, "Kind Hearts and Coronets", but was capable of producing serious movies as well as comedies; his "It Always Rains on Sunday", for example, is a crime thriller showing the influence of the film noir style.

With "The Long Memory" from 1952, Hamer moves even closer in the direction of noir. The plot, based on a novel by Howard Clewes, owes something to Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo". A young man is sentenced to imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. Upon his release, he sets out to get revenge upon those responsible for his wrongful conviction, including his treacherous fiancée. The hero, Philip Davidson spends 12 years in prison after being wrongly convicted for murder, a conviction procured by perjured evidence given by his fiancée Fay, her father Captain Driver and a man named Tim Pewsey. Fay's motive for perjuring herself was to protect her elderly father, who had become mixed up in a criminal enterprise with Pewsey and another man named Boyd, the actual murderer.

Some purists maintain that film noir was an exclusively American genre, but I have never concurred with that opinion, as there were also a number of British films (and indeed French ones such as "Les Diaboliques") which share the characteristics of noir, and this is one of them. One of the classic noir features is the morally ambiguous lone male hero, and John Mills' Davidson is certainly a character of that type; had this been a Hollywood film he could have been played by Bogart or Mitchum. Although he has been the victim of a grave injustice, and in that sense has a claim on our sympathy, his experiences have made him, in many ways, an unsympathetic character, vindictive and unsociable. After his release he goes to live in a disused barge on the marshes, a dwelling reminiscent of Richard Widmark's wooden shack by the riverside in a great American noir, "Pickup on South Street". Davidson's closest friend is another of life's victims, wartime refugee named Ilse, and he has other allies in his fight to clear his name, including Craig, a journalist, and Superintendent Bob Lowther, a policeman who believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred. Lowther's position, however, is made difficult by the fact that he is married to Fay, the woman whose lies were responsible for Davidson's conviction.

Other noir characteristics present in this film include dramatic, expressionistic black-and-white photography and a gritty urban setting, with the dingy backstreets of Gravesend (a riverside port east of London and not normally regarded as an important cinematic location) here fulfilling the role which in an American noir would played by Los Angeles or New York. The setting is not, however, exclusively urban; many scenes were shot on the North Kent Marshes, the area around Gravesend and Rochester immortalised by Dickens in "Great Expectations". This marshland landscape around the Thames and Medway Estuaries, an area which I know well, is not conventionally beautiful in the way in which, say, the Lake District or the Cotswolds are beautiful. Indeed, it can often be bleak and forbidding, but it is also powerfully atmospheric. It makes a fitting setting for this tale of crime and revenge and gives the film has a strong sense of place. The film ends with justice being done, but here too there is a note of doubt and uncertainty; it is not, for example, clear whether Lowther's marriage to Fay can survive the revelations about her past.

The most famous British noir is probably "The Third Man", a British-made film even though it is set in Vienna. "The Long Memory" is less well-known, but with a strong performance from Mills in the leading role, its powerful storyline and Hamer's atmospheric direction I would place it in the same class as Carol Reed's masterpiece. 9/10

I have seen "The Long Memory" twice, and was sufficiently impressed (and like John Mills) that I bought the book when I found it. After seeing the film a second time I then started reading the book. To my delight (that's how I like films) it was close to the film, and I realized that much of the quality of the film, beyond its strong visual imagery of London dockside slums, damaged by the Blitz (you have to know this: there is no sign saying "house flattened by bomb"), and post- war austerity (rationing continued in Britain into the early 1950s!), is directly due to the book author Howard Clewes (about whom little is available on the internet).

Despite not LOOKING like the author described him, John Mills acts the character described by the author, as do the rest of the cast.

The post-World-War-II setting is crucial to appreciating the bleakness of the film. Life was tough then, for many British, and even more so for Displaced People -- war survivors and immigrants from Europe. Petty crime was rife. In fact things were probably tougher than during the flashback sequence to the Depression, when the young Mills character is accidentally drawn into cross-Channel smuggling of wanted criminals, and contraband.

The old "beachcomber's" singing of a traditional English folksong is a haunting addition to the film that does not appear in the book.

John Mills tracks down the real culprit of the murder he was sent to jail for in this tense British drama of exile and return. The real murderer is now a comfortable businessman, and the visual contrasts between his dubious offices in the London docks and Mills' derelict boat far out on the river estuary gives a resonance to the film it would be hard to find in a modern setting. Freed from jail but still imprisoned by the past, Mills' character spurns the touching companionship of another refugee on the Kent marshes (Eva Bergh) about whose past we know nothing, but it seems to be destiny that has brought them together. This is one of the few films that resolves a labyrinthine revenge-story without the plot becoming mechanical, and the bleak monochrome visuals are part of its emotional power.

I am a fan of British cinema but I must admit that there a couple of genres that Hollywood does much better, particularly musicals but also film noir. In fact I didn't know that the British had attempted noir until I saw Robert Hamer's `The Long Memory' which makes a fair fist of it while perhaps finally lacking the courage of it's convictions. The doomed characters, the shadowy, desolate streetscapes and of course the femme fatale are all there and John Mills convinces as a broken man at liberty after serving 12 years for a crime he didn't commit.

John McCallum and Elizabeth Sellars are perhaps a little too restrained in the English way (I know McCallum is Australian) but John Slater makes an impression as a punch-drunk ex-boxer. Incidentally, Slater's make-up reminded me irresistibly of Mills' Oscar-winning turn in ` Ryan's Daughter' years later.

In this solid, involving drama Mills has revenge in mind, Geoffrey Keene is an ethical reporter (an oxymoron?) looking for a story and nothing turns out as expected.

Well worth seeing.