The Man in Grey

Lord Rohan isn't to be blamed for wanting to marry a healthy young woman who will produce a male heir for him, nor is Clarissa to blame for so quickly accepting his proposal, after all her prospects weren't all that great. Nor can I blame Hester for wanting all the things she could never have growing up. No, this is just how it was in those days. I enjoyed Margaret Lockwood's performance the most; it's hard to show remorse in a cold, calculating character and she brings it off well. Calvert, Mason and Granger give her excellent support.

The Man in Grey is directed by Leslie Arliss and adapted to screenplay by Margaret Kennedy and Doreen Montgomery from the novel of the same name written by Eleanor Smith. It stars Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger. Music is By Cedric Mallabey and cinematography by Arthur Crabtree.

A forerunner of Gainsborough's Wicked Women movies, The Man in Grey is a delicious slice of British noir pie.

Proudly decked out in period attire, story is ripe with dastards, narcissists, connivers, the selfish and the cruel. Headed up by Mason's Lord Rohan and Lockwood's Hesther Shaw, these people will stop at nothing to get what they want in life. It doesn't matter who is around them, friends and family etc, if they can in any way hinder their respective selfish goals then they will be trampled upon and not a further thought will be given. It all simmers to the boiling point where lives will not just be ruined, but also ended.

The four principal players are great, their respective careers well on the way to leaving behind considerable bodies of work. Arliss (The Night Has Eyes) keeps the story simple in spite of the many character strands and traits jostling for meaty exposure, and photographer Crabtree (Waterloo Road) accentuates the miserablist ambiance with sharp black and white lensing.

The use of black-face on white actors is awfully out dated, as is some of the dialogue, but don't hold these things against The Man in Grey. It's a darn fine bodice botherer, resplendent with characters straight out of noir's dark alleyways. 8/10

"The Man in Grey" was the first of the "Gainsborough melodramas", a series of films made by Gainsborough Pictures; they generally had a period setting and a highly dramatic plot. They can be considered as "women's pictures" in that they were primarily aimed at a female audience. (During the war, with so many men serving in the Armed Forces, women made up the greater part of cinema audiences). Unlike many Hollywood "women's pictures" which revolved around a central female character, however, they often featured strong male characters in prominent leading roles.

The main action takes place during the Regency period, although this is set within the framework of a story set in 1943 and involving a romance between the modern descendants of the families featured in the Regency story. The "man in grey" of the title is Lord Rohan, a man notorious both for his debauched lifestyle and for his savage temper. (He has killed several men in duels). He marries Clarissa, a beautiful heiress, but theirs is a loveless marriage from the start. (He marries her partly for her fortune, partly to provide an heir to his family estates). They lead separate lives, and Clarissa falls in love with a handsome young actor named Rokeby. Rohan begins an affair with a scheming young woman named Hesther, who was a former school friend of Clarissa and an actress in the same troupe as Rokeby.

Some have drawn parallels between the four main characters in this drama with Ashley, Melanie, Scarlett and Rhett in "Gone with the Wind", who like Rokeby, Clarissa, Hesther and Rohan can be divided into "two good and two bad". It seemed to me, in fact, that the main influence on Eleanor Smith, the author of the novel on which the film is based, was Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". Apart from the Regency setting there are parallels between Hesther and Thackeray's Becky Sharp and between Clarissa and Becky's friend Amelia. One similarity with "Gone with the Wind" is that the "bad" characters are more memorable than the "good". We remember "Gone with the Wind" for Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable rather than Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland, and here it is James Mason and Margaret Lockwood who stand out more than Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger. (Of the four it was Lockwood who was the biggest star when the film was made; Mason and Granger, later to become big names in both Britain and Hollywood were young actors in the early part of heir career)'

Mason and Lockwood were later to star together in another Gainsborough melodrama, "The Wicked Lady", probably the best remembered of the series. In that film too, Lockwood played a beautiful but ruthless and amoral woman with a more innocent friend, and Mason played her lover. Her Hesther, like Becky Sharp, is from a lower social station than her friend and an ambitious social climber, although she is more evil than Becky, or for that matter Scarlett, ever knew how to be. Lockwood, however, did not only play villainesses; she was to play the heroine in "Jassy", a third Gainsborough melodrama.

Mason's Rohan is a particularly well-drawn character- a drinker, gambler, womaniser and brawler, an arrogant, cynical, dissolute libertine who never does an honourable thing and yet remains very touchy about his honour, so touchy that he is prepared to kill anyone whom he believes has dishonoured him. His family motto is "Who Dishonours Us, Dies." Lady Caroline Lamb's famous description of Lord Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" could apply to Rohan- perhaps even better than it did to Byron.

Today, Gainsborough melodramas like this one and "The Wicked Lady" can come across as very dated and more than a little camp, with their exaggerated emotion, their exaggeratedly black-and-white view of the world and their exaggerated style of acting. Our tastes in Regency drama today tend more to quiet, well-mannered adaptations of that quiet, well-mannered author Jane Austen, someone whom the British cinema ignored altogether in the forties. (The only screen adaptation of her work from the period was the American-made "Pride and Prejudice"). Yet, if we can make allowances for lurid, blood-and-thunder plots and stylised, non-naturalistic acting, they can still yield plenty of entertainment. 7/10

A good old-fashioned bodice-ripper, it was the first big success for Britain's Gainsborough Studios which decided to take on the big costume dramas of Hollywood with home-grown talent. Introducing to the masses soon-to-be-familiar names like Mason, Granger, Lockwood and Calvert, it set the template for succeeding and ever more successful variations on this particular formula, often employing different combinations of this same quartet of acting talent.

High art it isn't, based as it is on a popular novel of the day, but it's easy to imagine its populist and escapist appeal to a wartime audience. James Mason, for one, hated the film and his own acting in it but the fact of the matter is that it's his presence in the titular role, as the misogynistic, sadistic and decadent Lord Rohan, who despite his despised and feared personal characteristics has the fabulous wealth and high status which make him the most desirable bachelor of the day. This is how he meets the pretty, sparky, trusting debutante Clarissa Marr, played by Phyllis Calvert, whose mother offers her to Rohan at what can only be described as a female cattle market, indeed just like all the other mothers and daughters of the day in attendance.

However it's not long before the young bride comes to her senses after she does her wifely duty in siring him a son and heir at which opportune moment just when she feels doomed to a loveless marriage, into her life enters Granger's Peter Rokesby, an adventurer fallen on hard times but otherwise dashing, handsome and sincere in his feelings for her which she soon reciprocates.

Soon she gets him a place as librarian, of all things, at Rohan Hall but there's a viper in this new love-nest in the shape of the darkly beautiful Hesther Shaw, played with relish by Lockwood. Of low birth but with high ambitions, she uses Clarissa's desire for one good friend in her life to also enter the household and usurp her position as Rohan's woman of choice, becoming effectively his live-in mistress. This ABBA-esque set-up with all four new and ex-lovers under the one roof of course can't last with machinations on all sides of the quadrangle leading up to not one but two murders, one of them infamous for its brutality as Rohan gets the whip-hand over his wife's murderer.

Maybe I shouldn't have, but I really enjoyed this Regency romp. I found the "two-good, two-bad" interplay of the four main characters added a degree of psychological intrigue as the plot developed in sometimes surprising ways. It's not perfect, the young black boy (in obvious blackface, and why did he have to be black anyway?) who plays an important part in the denouement seems to be reading his lines off-screen, the background music is far too intrusive and I disliked the present-day framing device which threw together the descendants of Calvert and Granger to sweeten the ending.

But with its handsome and pretty leads, whirlwind action and impressive sets, it's easy to see why it was so successful in its day.

The Man in Grey was the first and probably the most successful of the Gainsborough melodramas. The lavish regency tale centres around the aristocratic Clarissa Richmond (Phyllis Calvert) who dutifully enters into an loveless arranged marriage with the cold hearted Lord Rohan (James Mason)- the Man in Grey of the title.

Love and intrigue are to enter Clarissa's life when a chance meeting with an old school friend, the scheming Hester (Margaret Lockwood), leads her to the dashing Rokeby (Stewart Granger).

The story reaches its dramatic conclusion through twists and turns of plot and excellent performances from who can be called the four cornerstones of the war time British cinema - Stewart Granger, James Mason, Phyllis Calvert and Margaret Lockwood.

The Man in Grey is my personal favorite of all the Gainsborough films, it is high drama and escapism. The Man in Grey is definitely worth another look.