L'homme en gris

"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

I'll explain the subject of my review later.

I won't lie and say I enjoyed this film, though I certainly loved seeing all the actors so young, and their acting was marvelous.

"The Man in Grey" begins at a modern-day auction where Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger meet. Granger is hoping to pick up something from the Rohan family - one of his ancestors was involved with a Roham. Calvert actually is a Rohan.

As they look over the various small items available, the film dissolves to an earlier time period. We see how these items were connected to the various people in the story.

The lovely Clarissa (Calvert) marries the wealthy, arrogant Lord Rohan (James Mason) not for love, but so he can have an heir while he continues with his hedonistic life. While in school, Clarissa befriended a poor girl, Hester (Margaret Lockwood). One night she sees that Hester, who had run off to get married, is in a play, and makes contact with her.

It's not long before Hester is living in the manse with Clarissa and Lord Rohan and decides that three's a crowd. The unhappy Clarissa meets Rokeby (Granger), and they fall in love. He wants her to leave Rohan. What will happen to the lives of these four?

Apparently this film was a huge hit and really established these stars. For me it was problematic. The first complete turn-off was a discussion of a disgusting dogfight. Thank God it was just a discussion. I nearly stopped watching then but soldiered on. It solidified Lord Rohan for me as a revolting human being.

And then we have little Toby (Antony Scott). You're kidding, right? He plays a boy slave who is devoted to Clarissa. He's a white kid in blackface. Stupefying. Or was he? Supposedly he is the son of Harry Scott, part of the minstrel team of Scott and Whaley. Scott and Whaley supposedly actually were black. But boy this kid looked like he had on blackface. A little mystery that I couldn't solve.

The Man in Grey is a story where good is good and evil is evil, no in betweens. Hester and Lord Rohan are nasty pieces of work.

See it for the fine actors and as an example of Gainsborough films - this is probably the most successful one.

The four stars who were the cornerstone of the British Film Industries Gainsborough Pictures, James Mason, Phyllis Calvert, Margaret Lockwood, and Stewart Granger got to star in The Man In Grey. It's a brooding tale of unhappily married wife during the Regency Period, probably after the Napoleonic Wars. There certainly is no mention of the war in the plot.

Two people Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger meet during an auction sale during wartime Great Britain. An estate is being sold off as the last of the male heirs has died. Calvert is the last surviving woman who can't inherit and Granger is the descendant of a man who was involved with one of the ancestors and has an heirloom or two of his own. The camera focuses on a series of mundane antiques and then it dissolves to the Regency period where the story is told and we see the connection of all these objects to the lives of the four stars.

James Mason is in the title role and he's a titled Earl who is haughty and arrogant and revels in being an aristocrat. He has to take a wife to begat an heir, but he wants one who won't get too much in the way of the rakish lifestyle he has no intention of changing. Among Regency aristocrats even he's giving them a bad name, a fact that Raymond Lovell and Nora Swinburne as the Prince Regent and Mrs. Fitzherbert are quick to notice.

Who Mason has chosen for a bride is Phyllis Calvert, a pretty and somewhat naive young thing. Naive so much that she takes as a friend a young woman not of her class when they were both in Martita Hunt's finishing school.

Calvert's ill chosen friend is Margaret Lockwood who gets thrown out of the school for some indiscreet behavior. Years later when Calvert is married to Mason she finds Lockwood now with an acting troupe. Back then being an actor if you weren't William MacCready or Edwin Forrest you were not considered respectable. And note those two examples were men.

Calvert's like Melanie Hamilton who sees only the good in people. But Lockwood is one exponential Scarlett O'Hara. Imagine Scarlett on steroids and you have Lockwood's character. She wants Mason with all that the title and privileges will bring. And his mojo really gets going with her.

And Calvert's mojo gets going for the first time in years with likable gypsy Stewart Granger. This was Granger's first real big part in film and it brought him great critical notices and fulfilled promises of future stardom.

Good as Granger and Calvert are, they pale beside the evil characters that Mason and Lockwood essay. I would have to say Lockwood is the more evil mainly because she hides it so well until the end. Mason's a lot, but he isn't a hypocrite.

One curious piece of casting is young Harry Scott as the young black slave Toby is interesting. It could be the only case of blackface in the British cinema. Since this was the only credit young Mr. Scott had we don't know for sure, but I think this was a white kid in makeup.

The Man In Grey is one of the best films the British cinema turned out during World War II. Like the lead characters who wonder about the connection between them, the British movie-going public went to see this film and put themselves in the places of the leads and wondered about their ancestors and their doings during a postwar period of peace. It's got some of the best acting going by four very skilled players and a good cast in support. And it holds up very well today.

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