How TV boosted cinema in the '60s
CINEMA, "Talking About..", The Messengers, Film of the Book - Orders To Kill...On The Beach
by Harry Dobermann
TV is traditionally viewed as being responsible for the decline in cinema attendance during the 1960's, but in Britain at least, television also played a big part in the growing appreciation of film. For instance, I first came across the movie Orders To Kill,in a TV series using film to explore ethical dilemmas.
Leslie French as the unwitting target of airman Paul Massie's 'Orders to Kill'
In the 1960's, British Cinema exhibitors viewed TV as a rival. They were still doing good business showing double bills of old movies,and didn’t want to see those films turning up on TV for free. As the power of the exhibitors wanted in the late 1960’s, the studios finally began selling high quality packages of movies to British television. And ITV certainly made the most of it. Granada had been running a film review programme called CINEMA since 1963, but in the late 1960’s they began making a more imaginative use of the new product.
"Talking About.." was a 1969 series made by Granada TV for ITV's Sunday teatime "God Slot" (both BBC and ITV screened religious or ethical programmes in the same early evening period, so there was no escape).The series was billed as using feature films to illustrate moral dilemmas, and the general format was to split the film into three 40 minute segments, with a studio discussion taking up most of the third segment. Perhaps surprisingly, the studio discussion was led by David Steel MP - then the youngest MP in the House of Commons, later leader of the Liberal Party. Orders to Kill is a 1958 movie directed by Anthony Asquith and starring Paul Massie as American bomber pilot Gene Summers. In 1944, Summers is grounded after flying 50 bombing missions because his reactions have become too slow. Anxious to prove he still has "the right stuff", Summers accepts a mission to kill a traitor in occupied France. The traitor is a member of the resistance network - a "cut-off" or intermediary. Five out of nine agents working through the "cut-off" have been killed by the Nazis, and the Free French have concluded that he is a traitor. The decision to have the man eliminated is taken by the American Colonel with the same hasty consideration as sending out for a takeaway pizza, and Kimball (John Crawford - Hell is A City) is ordered to get it done as quick as possible.
Orders to Kill was based on a story by former Office of Strategic Services officer Donald Chase Downes, who had published his memoir The Scarlet Thread in 1957. The screenplay was by Paul Dehn, who would go on to script Goldfinger and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Dehn had been a trainer for the Special Operations Executive during World War Two. Therefore, it would be reasonable to assume some degree of authenticity in the script. Early on, a psychiatrist ( Fraud Squad's Ralph Nossek) tells Kimball that Summers is psychologically healthy but cautions that, "You don't want a nice ordinary guy. You want a nimble-witted thug." Summers is shown to be easily caught out by the cheery, familiar manner of Lionel Jeffries during a fake interrogation. Later, Major MacMahon (Eddie Albert) expresses concern to Summers' combat trainer (James Robertson Justice) that Summers is playacting and hasn't considered the reality of what he's been asked to do. The instructor replies that, "I've got to stop civilised men from thinking about the reality of killing a fellow human being with his bare hands. If they think about it - they might not do it!"
In the second episode, Summers arrives in Paris. In a cafe, he accidentally comes face to face with his quarry, Lafitte (stage actor Leslie French, who would later be on the short-list as the first Dr. Who). As he comes to know the process server, he learns that he is a "hen-pecked" family man (a strong performance as the worn-down and hectoring Mme Lafitte by Anne Blake who would later play Miss Punch-Blake in John Bowen's adaptation of The Treasure of Abbott Thomas). After Lafitte warns him about a gestapo raid on his lodgings, Summers begins to doubt that he is guilty. When MacMahon first showed him Lafitte's photo, Summers commented, "he looks a real rat". A concerned MacMahon asked, "Would it matter if he didn't?" and Summers laughed it off. But when Summers learns that Lafitte has hidden the family cat in his office after his wife has ordered him to dispose of it, fellow cat-lover Summers uses this to substantiate his belief that Lafitte is innocent.
Irene Worth at the Old Vic
Summers explains his concerns to Leonie, his resistance cut-out. “I’m not convinced that he’s guilty and I can’t kill an innocent man." Leonie replies, "It's not your business to judge Lafitte. It's your business to kill him." Leonie was a BAFTA award-winning performance by Irene Worth (who had won critical acclaim in 1951 for her fresh interpretation of Desdemona in the Old Vic production of Othello) Leonie challenges the argument about Lafitte being a cat lover. "Himmler likes cats, Goering likes pictures, Hitler likes music, Goebbels is a wonderful father". In short, having something in common does not mean you can trust someone (ironically,Massie had pompously thrown in the observation about the cat as his final piece of evidence because Leonie is a woman and "it's somewhat sentimental".) Leonie delivers the final blow to his argument by asking, "When you were ordered to drop bombs over France, did you refuse because you might kill innocent Frenchmen, or women, or children like yourself?Or cats?"
(SPOILER)Massie goes ahead with his mission and kills Lafitte although it’s not as clean and easy as planned. Revolted by what he has done, Massie steals some cash to make it look like a robbery and becomes a drunken drifter. After the war, Albert finds Massie in a hospital. He tells him that Leonie was captured and murdered by the Nazi’s. He also confesses that Lafitte was proven innocent. Massie has earned back pay for all the time he was wandering in France and he visits Lafitte’s wife and daughter, giving them the money and telling them Lafitte was a great patriot.
The third episode of Talking About Orders to Kill concluded the movie and followed it with a discussion led by David Steel MP. The panel included the Rev G Grobecker (Senior Chaplain at Sandhurst) and Lt.Col Richard Heslop, a former Special Operations Executive agent who had organised the Marksman circuit of resistance groups in occupied France. The third panellist was Professor Grigor McLelland, founding director of Manchester Business School. McLelland would have been an interesting panellist, not just because he could have spoken with some authority on motivational aspects, but also because he had been a Conscientious Objector during the war, driving ambulances in North Africa and later in France after D Day.
Unfortunately, I can't remember much about the discussion other than the point about not trusting people just because they love cats. Orders to Kill is an unjustly forgotten movie, and certainly provided a good jumping-off point for this series about ethical dilemmas. The next film in the series was Life for Ruth (1962) - US title Walk in the Shadow - starring Patrick McGoohan, Janet Munro and Michael Craig as a father who refuses to let his daughter have a blood transfusion on religious grounds. Other titles were The Jailer and the Jailed (a documentary about prison reform) and Lease For Life (1954) starring Robert Donat as a clergyman who is told he is going to die.
Irene Worth as Leonie dismisses the concerns of Paul Massie as Summers
As noted above, Talking About... was just one of several ITV shows which used movies in an educational fashion and most of them seemed to come from Granada. Their flagship was probably Cinema, the late evening magazine programme showing clips from movies - not just current releases, but older movies too. Since ITV had bought the older movies, showing clips would create anticipation in the TV viewers. But it also seems to have been part of 1960's television's mission to explain. Even when visiting stars such as James Stewart were in town to promote their latest movie Cinema would run illustrative clips from their past movies, talking about the latest film in the context of their career. Cinema was the brainchild of Leslie Halliwell, creator of The Filmgoers Companion.
The Messengers was Granada TV's contribution to ITV's programmes for schools (Before 24 hour TV, before endless game shows and antiques programmes, both ITV and the BBC used to screen educational programmes in the mornings and afternoons). Although The Messengers was aimed at "14 year olds and over, looking at Cinema and TV" I managed to see several episodes because I used to skive off school a lot. The series seems to have begun in 1968, presented by Carol Chell ( of Play School. Some episodes would run behind-the-scenes footage of the making of current movies like "Half a Sixpence" but as with Cinema the more general format was to run a number of clips under a unifying theme. So, for instance, "The Finger on the Button" ran clips from Fail Safe and Seven Days In Noon and dealt with nuclear war. the format was really a no-brainer, especially when it came to keeping 14-year olds interested in school, and the show appears to have run on to at least 1970 when Brian Truman (later writer of Danger Mouse) was the presenter. Certainly this was my first chance to see clips from movies like The Valley of Gwangi and Charley.
On The Beach - part of the Film Of The Book Series
The Film Of The Book was an innovative variation on the theme. Although produced by Granada, it was also run on Rediffusion (which served the London weekday franchise) and Anglia TV. Running from the autumn of 1967, it took a film adaptation of a famous novel and chopped it into seven 30 minute segments. The films included Noel Langley's 1952 adaptation of The Pickwick Papers and Gordon Parry's 1952 adaptation of Tom Browns Schooldays. The presenter was Bill Grundy, one of the original Granada newsreaders who is unfortunately best known today for his career-killing encounter with The Sex Pistols in 1976. Back in the 1960's however, Grundy was dealing with more wholesome stuff. Poet Ian MacMillan recalled The Film of the Book in a Yorkshire Post column where he said, "I can recall rushing in from my Auntie’s garden at 34 North Street in the summer holidays with my mate Geoff, and persuading Uncle Charlie to turn the racing off so that we could watch an earnest presenter sitting at a desk and discussing a film that had been adapted from a book"
Personally the sequence which sticks most in my mind was April 1968's presentation of On The Beach. This was more up-to-date than most of the great books - Nevil Shute's novel had been published in 1957 and Stanley Kramer's film was released in 1959. The synopsis said that the film was, "set in Australia in the early 1960's and shows how a group of people react when under severe tensions and pressures". The movie opens in Melbourne after a nuclear war, and includes a voyage back to San Francisco by Gregory Peck's nuclear submarine to follow up mysterious morse code signals. Even allowing for adverts, cutting a two hour movie into seven parts must have called for some extensive commentary by Bill Grundy, but all I can remember now is his warning that, "by the end, you'll be sick of the tune Waltzing Matilda." Maybe that confrontation with the Sex Pistols wasn't so out of character.
To sum up, Granada hit a winning formula with Cinema, and to a certain extent they kept it running with The Messengers and later on in the early 1970's with Clapperboard (Graham Murray was researcher/writer of both shows, so that's probably not a surprise). They also came up with a more imaginative/cost effective method of exploiting the films they'd bought with the Film of the Book and Talking About...
What was constant was the idea of educating through entertainment. I dare say a lot of viewers of my generation grew up with a thirst and an appreciation for movie that had been released often before I was born, because of this imaginative presentation.*
*Other brands are available Department: It has been pointed out that the BBC also ran the quiz show Screen Test in the 1970's, based on a mixture of film clips and behind-the scenes features. BBC 2 also ran the early 1970's review/historical programme Film Night with Tony Bilbow and Philip Jenkinson (eventually killed off, after pressure from distributors) and Arena Cinemapresented by Gavin Millar. Both ITV and later the BBC screened the Disney Time holiday specials which, while arguably nothing more than extended promotions for Disney were still welcome additions to the Bank Holiday schedules.