Hindle Wakes

HINDLE WAKES (1927) Maurice Elvey's version of the controversial story set during a workers holiday week in Lancashire. Several other versions followed but this is apparently the most notable. Often cited as the start of the British cinema's characteristic strain of social realism which pervades so many later films - Powell & Pressburger providing the main creative island of respite - this one has some convincing opening shots documenting the workers in their mills and then off to Blackpool for their holidays. WAKES' story is mostly the familiar, melodramatic one of poor girl 'led astray' by rich man and suffers from a long middle section containing all the expected moralistic, and now dated, chest beating about the perils of natural fun outside marriage. What entirely redeems the film from this fossil nose dive is the character of the heroine, Fanny (Estelle Brody, later to appear in TV's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, of all things) who ultimately is entirely unrepentent towards her days of sexual indiscretion in Llandudno, and even dismisses the affair as just a "little fancy" before leaving home to seek freedom elsewhere. Slightly shocking, when seen in context of the times, even today.

The twenties version of the once sensational Stanley Houghton play must be considered central to it's makers' work and the British film of the pre-WW2 era. Both director and producer filmed it twice, Elvey shortly after the first stage performances in 1918 and Saville after the coming of sound. Mc Kinnel as the mill owner, who originated the part in the theatre, is in all of the productions and John Stuart played this son in the twenties and thirties films.

The work was notorious for showing a mill girl heroine, for who casual sex was as normal as it was taken to be for men - one of the most intelligent representations of the then celebrated "Single Standard."

Until we get a look at his first try, we must take Elvey's twenties version as the most important. It is remarkable that Elvey regulars Humberstone Wright and Marie Ault register more effectively than Saville's imposing Edmund Gwenn and Sybil Thorndyke doing the parent rôles with sound. The scene in Blackpool's Tower Ballroom is a quite hallucinatory climax to the extraordinary, protracted Hindle Wakes holiday sequence which outclasses similar material in the King Vidor THE CROWD.

Indeed the Elvey HINDLE WAKES may be considered the best English silent film surviving, more imposing than the Asquith and Hitchcock films that have been thrust at us down the years. With his recently recovered LIFE OF David LLOYD GEORGE this marks Elvey as the most important English film maker of the period and one of the most important in Europe. We can only wonder about an industry and its commentators who did so little to nourish his output and allowed him to die in obscurity.

Has anyone seen his Berlin and Hollywood work?

... shame the new (year 2000) soundtrack was so intrusive. The idea of a pop group putting a new soundtrack isn't new - it was done before with Metropolis, but at least that had several different artists contributing. This has just one group with just one or two recurring themes which sometimes overwhelm the feel of the scenes. It would perhaps be better to get a proper cinema organist or pianist to add an AUTHENTIC or period feel to silent movies of this type. But the film was good, if a bit long, and interesting for its views of a working Lancashire Mill before we closed them all down. What a shame the producers felt the need to add incongruous sound effects to the mill scenes. This barbaric practice is bad enough on war documentaries. Apart from anything else, it's distracting. Film restorers should realise the difference between re-working and restoration.

Three things are at work here.

The first is the music. It should be the image or the story or whatever first, but the music sticks out predominantly. It's actually really amazing music and very etherial, ephemeral, all those good dreamy-soft tones and stuff. They at first make the film seem VERY romantic and soft, and it's nice to watch and gets you into the film immediately.

Unfortunately, it sets the tone for a film that doesn't really keep that tone all the way through. The second element of this film is its story, the most simplistic part of the entire movie. High-class guy meets low-class girl, have a scandalous affair, and try to work it out in the end. It's just simplistic enough to surprise modern-day viewers, and yet complicated enough that it's not clichéd and throws a real curve-ball at the end. It's a nice story that, with the music, seems like it should be a kind sort of sad, but which is really less transient than that. This is why this movie is difficult to watch, the music is so gripping in mysticism and the story isn't really mystical at all.

The third element is the imagery. The music is great, but disjunctive. The story is great, but a little odd. The imagery is fantastic. Everything from this long, surreal shot of people dancing that is just amazing to a first-person roller-coaster ride that's more realistic-feeling than the many that have been made in color and with sound ever since.

Thus, it's really a good movie. Acting is pretty good too, forgot to mention that. You can get into it and enjoy it (the music sucks you in like that), so it's a great experience. It's just that after a while the plot will start to feel a bit "off" because of the tone of everything else not necessarily working for the tone of the story proper.

--PolarisDiB

A stunning masterpiece from the silent era. The plot tells of the development of true financial and sexual independence amongst the working mill girls of Lancashire. Ok it's funny in places by our standards now, but so far ahead of it's time. The latter part of the film depends on dialogue. Now to do that and do that well in silent movie takes talent.

I'm not asking anyone to go and see it. If you do, In The Nursery have put together a new soundtrack for it that captures the essence of the film perfectly.