The Long Memory

I caught this on film four a couple of weeks ago and thought it was excellent. It is a painful story at times, watching John mill's former lover grappling with her guilt, often physically is portrayed with undignified desperation. Her husband, the investigating officer quietly torn apart by the realisation of his own hand in a miscarriage of justice and his subsequently crumbling home and professional life. John Mills' constant struggle to realise a revenge that has torn him throughout his years in prison and an inability to exact that revenge. He shows, without being sanctimonious, how damaging and unfulfilled revenge is and the characters around him prove that redemption is always hard won.

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.

This is a highly superior British film directed by Robert Hamer. All of the cast give splendid performances, and there are some truly wonderful character roles, the best such performance coming from John Slater, who is amazingly bizarre and original. The film features a man let out of prison after twelve years for a murder he did not commit, and his search for the people who gave false witness and put him there. John Mills delivers one of his first rate performances as a grimly determined, sombre and brooding man who is obsessed with the injustice done to him. With him at the centre of the story, the entire film then becomes wholly convincing. There are some wonderful location shots, and the row of abandoned barges rotting in the mudflats of the Thames Estuary is an eerie main setting for much of the action. Elizabeth Sellars is particularly effective in making this film work. She plays a despicable coward, whose cowardice runs so deep it effects every aspect of her existence. In order to portray something as profound as this, it was essential that she do so with understatement and restraint, occasionally veering near to immobility as the fear freezes her up inside. The fact that Elizabeth Sellars does this successfully and never gives way to the temptation to overact or settle a scene with some easy broad stroke is a tribute to her professionalism. Eva Bergh is a bit too young and pretty for her part as the Eastern European refugee girl, but that is the only slightly false note. Thora Hird is marvellous, as always. John McCallum underplays his police inspector-married-to-a-dodgy witness role very satisfactorily. The story culminates in the main characters having to face moral choices, so that this powerful, gripping and effective thriller is not only well made, but has a worthy purpose.

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

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.