'Straight on Till Morning'

      Another film like 'The Ballad of Tam Lin' or 'Get Carter' in the sub-genre of what has been called on Twitter the 'Sixties Disillusionment Film'. (But then, one may ask, has there ever been a film about Swinging London that has ever been other than critical, or at least ambiguous about the whole parade?) Anyway this one is a product of Hammer Studios, purveyors of cheap, yet now cultish, horror. Though this offering may be more accurately and neatly categorised as violent psychological thriller. The director is Peter Collinson, of 'The Italian Job' fame - a film which unaccountably has never appeared on this blog and yet which I love. 'Straight on Till Morning' is however of a very different cut. I doubt it is something I could watch over again. That's not to say it's that bad only that it does make for uncomfortable viewing. There is something deeply unsettling, disturbing, about this film. Remorseless even. It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.    

     Brenda a painfully naïve girl, played by Rita Tushingham, moves to London from an anonymous drab northern town looking for a husband for her baby. Brenda you might remember is the name of Tushingham's character in 'Smashing Time'. Poor Brenda, she seems doomed from the very beginning. In London she is a fish out of water. For a brief while things begin to right themselves when she gets a job in a fashion boutique and a room in a flat share. But then a chance with meeting with the cool, aloof Peter, played by Shane Briant, puts pay to all that. Things indeed get very dark.

Straight on Till Morning

1972

Director:                 Peter Collinson

Producer:               Michael Carreras

Cinematographer: Bryan Probyn

Dinefwr

     Over to Llandeilo last Monday to meet up with family who were staying there for a couple of days.

     After a tour of the town we walked over to the landscape park at Dinefwr. Quite interesting for the hand of Capability Brown, who was employed here as an adviser, and who could be terribly dull, but here had good bones to work with.

   It was our second visit and it is only in researching post have I come to realise how rich, complex and ancient is the history of this site. There is an Iron Age hill fort where the castle stands and a large Roman fort under the park. With the collapse of the Empire in the West the ancient Kingdom of the Demetae (its civitas was at Carmarthen) re-emerged as Dyfed. The subsequent history is one of repeated dissolution and consolidation, until the emergence of Deheubarth, which was centred on Llandeilo and Dinefwr where eventually the Lords Rhys erected a castle high on the bluff above the river Towy. A small town grew up to the north of the castle augmented by a second community, Newton (Drenewydd) further north still. Both have disappeared, and the Park has swallowed their remains. The castle survives though succeeded by Newton House, aka Plas Dinefwr, built on the site of that second community. And Newton House was our first destination, though because of Covid closed to the public. I'm not that sure we missed much. I wrote about this in my first Dinefwr post, but I will say it again. The National Trust should have employed a leading interior designer to work on the interior. This was their policy in the 1960s & 70s: David Milnaric at Benningbrough; John Fowler at Clandon Park and Sudbury Hall; and David Hicks at Blickling Hall. These designers combined historical knowledge and refined aesthetics. It was a self-confident approach, but like many institutions today confidence is something the Trust lacks. Enough with the rant. Newton House dates from the 1660s and was given a thorough-going High Victorian Gothic face-lift in the 1850s by J R Penson. The result is, perhaps, not entirely satisfactory.

     Our next stop was the castle. The views from the battlements were wonderful. The 12th century round keep, continued in use into the 17th century, a belvedere being added to the top to take advantage of those views.

     Our final stop was Llandyfeisant church - a tiny structure embowered beautifully in trees below the park, dedicated to St.Tyfi. One of the followers of St Teilo, there are a number of confusing traditions around the saint one of which places his martyrdom here. Heavily restored in c. 1879, but rather beautifully and sensitively done. According to 'The Buildings of Wales' the architect was Rev William Wiggin of Hampnett, Glouscetershire, Lord Dynevor's brother-in-law; according to 'Coflein', J Kyrke Pearson (I think they mean Penson) of Oswestry, the guy who worked on Newton House. Roman remains were found here in the late 18th century and it was then asserted that the church stands on the site of a Roman temple. Contemporary historians have suggested it stands on the site of a Roman bath house attached to the fort. Just to the north of the church we found what we wondered was a holy well. Research on the internet didn't get me very far. There was mention of the Dinefwr Well and the Nant-y-Rheibis, but nothing to firmly locate it by the church. Long the estate church of Dinefwr, the late 20th century has not been kind and for a number of years the church was derelict.  It is now being restored.

'Spirits of the Dead'

     A few months ago now I found a very good fan edit video of Roxy Music's 'Love is the Drug' on YouTube. With a bit of research, getting lost on the way, we found it was constructed from fragments of the Fellini film 'Toby Dammit', starring Terence Stamp. I mean I really did get lost in the process, inaccurately attributing the clips to Passolini's 'Theorema' also starring Terence Stamp, which we duly watched. I must review that sometime. It was very interesting.

     Anyway back to the film in question. 'Toby Dammit' forms the third and final segment of a portmanteau film of adaptations of short stories by the American Gothic writer Edgar Alan Poe under the title 'Spirits of the Dead'. The French title, 'Histoires Extrordinaires' is perhaps more fitting. The other two films are 'Metzengerstein' directed by the notorious Roger Vadim and 'William Wilson' directed by Louis Malle. All are very good, though we both felt that Fellini's offering was perhaps not the best, lacking as it did a little focus. It was nevertheless full of striking visual imagery (perhaps the reason it worked so well, edited down, as a pop-video) and the awards ceremony scene was satiric enough - self-congratulatory, shallow and dull. It was also the only one of the three that gave a contemporary setting to Poe's work. The title too was changed. The original short-story becoming, in effect, a stepping stone to an exploration of contemporary Italy popular culture, in particular the nascent cult of celebrity.

     Visually 'William Wilson', starring Alain Dellon and Brigitte Bardot, was for me the most successful. A rather, sombre, restrained palette, in which the eponymous William Wilson, a young man without moral compass, is haunted by his own embodied conscience as though at some unspecified date the two were cleaved apart to live separate but occasionally intertwining lives. 

     This visual sobriety is in strong contrast to the element of decadence in the other two films - bear in mind that 'Histoires Extraordinaires' was the title Baudelaire gave for his collection of translations of Poe - a decadence heightened in 'Metzengerstein' by casting Peter Fonda opposite his sister Jane (then wife of director Roger Vadim) as the object of her frustrated desire. Tellingly filmed in Brittany among ruins and decay.  All very Late Sixties.  So perhaps decadence is what to varying degrees these films have in common, but to take an apophatic approach; all films are about an absence that has its locus in the main character; absence of moral compass and  ultimately an absence of meta-narrative. And that is essentially about us and our society.

Spirits of the Dead

1968

Producer:                  Alberto Grimaldi, Raymon Eger

Director:                    Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Frederico Fellini

Cinematograpgher:  Claude Renoir, Tonio delli Colli, Giuseppe Rotunno

Arthur's Stone

     Our first proper outing since the start of Lockdown was to the crown of the great sandstone ridge of Cefn Bryn on peninsular Gower, taking the Red Road over the common from Llanrhidian. It was our first visit and we were properly rewarded with panoramic views in all directions. It certainly feels like the very centre of the peninsular - whether that's entirely accurate is a different matter.

     On the north flank of the hill, and with panoramic views over the Loughor estuary to the Brecon Beacons is Arthur's Stone. (I mention that because it could have significance as to the placing of this monument.) Its Welsh name is Maen Ceti. The stone is a glacial erratic, now split into two, that forms the capstone of a two chambered burial cairn - time and the hand of man removing its covering of stones. I'm not sure if anybody knows for certain whether the stone was moved to this location, or that the burial chamber was excavated from underneath the pre-existing stone. Either way it's a hell of a thing to achieve. As its English name suggests it has connections to the legend of King Arthur, but to St David also. Both men are credited with cleaving the stone in twain. Arthur used Excalibur and David his pastoral staff. A little further off to the west is a second cairn.

McMorran and Whitby

     The other Saturday my latest ebay purchase arrived in the post. A monograph on the post-war classical architects McMorran and Whitby. Obscure, perhaps. Except British readers will have seen their work, and in particular one work, on television many times. That work is the extension to the Old Bailey, and for some, particularly the late historian and critic Gavin Stamp, it is their greatest work. I like it but am not wholly convinced. Neither, for that matter, am I wholly convinced by his description of McMorran and Whitby as 'progressive classicists' or that it's full of reverences to Lutyens and Vanburgh. Indeed I have to say that I find their work uneven, sometimes bland, occasionally rebarbative, but at their best these buildings have a quiet satisfying lyricism. 

This monograph forms part of series on 20th century British Architects published by the RIBA in collaboration with the Twentieth Century Society and English Heritage. Inclusion of McMorran and Whitby in the series perhaps indicates a change of attitude, among some historians and critics at least, towards contemporary classical architecture for in the years between the War and the advent of Post-Modernism, and in the early 70s the collapse of Modernism, the profession, critics and architectural press in the UK were dogmatically Modernist to the point of totalitarianism. As a result the profession came to be seen as aloof and arrogant. Look upon it as one of those strange paroxysms that British architecture is occasionally subject too when the doctrinaire has the ascendancy. Very few, such as Sir John Betjeman, stood against this, though the weight of popular opinion sided with the likes of Sir John and not the professionals. And for that lonely stand alone, regardless of the quality of their work, the likes of McMorran & Whitby, and Raymond Erith, deserve, and need, to be remembered. It was not an easy furrow to plough, as I can testify as a classically inclined student at Kingston Polytechnic School of Architecture in the late 80s. Not an experience I would want to repeat. On occasion it was close to bullying. I dropped out.

     McMorran & Whitby's historical context established, I think I should also make clear at this point that we are really talking about the work of McMorran here. Whatever the role of Whitby in the practice McMorran was the source of designs discussed here and in the book. There is one building designed by George Whitby illustrated in the book and that is the formidable, if not outright domineering, Plashet Girls School, East Ham, 1952-54. Not the sort of design one would normally associate with children's education.

     Donald McMorran, (1905-1965), spent a number of years before the Second World War in the office of Vincent Harris. At his best Harris was the designer of some great buildings, such as the Manchester Library and the City Hall in Sheffield, but at his worst could be unspeakably dull. Like Harris McMorran came to specialise in public buildings both housing and offices, and like Harris he was heavily influenced by that early twentieth century master Sir Edwin Lutyens. The final thing that McMorran designed in Harris's office was his master's house (10 Fitzroy Place, Highgate). It is an almost uncompromising brick box, the hipped roof hidden behind a parapet, mouldings superfluous. The redeeming feature, its one element of domesticity, is the (drawing room?) bay window dropped into the composition in an almost post-modern manner. Overall it is a hard and cold design, displaying all those things I would hate if it was a Modernist building. And rightly too. It is a Modern, but not Modernist, design. And it leaves me cold. Perhaps that was what Gavin Stamp meant by 'Progessive Classicism'. Be that as it may, McMorran's work is in continuity with that of the previous generation, that is it is essentially Neo-Georgian. And I suppose like the majority of post-War Modernism it, on the whole, just isn't that exciting. British architecture of either stripe had sunk low since its Edwardian heyday.

     Enough of this negativity. There are perhaps six buildings that really are excellent: (in chronological order) The Police Station, Hammersmith, 1938-9; The Lammas Green Estate, Forest Hill, 1953-7, Devon County Hall 1954-63; Cripps Hall, The University of Nottingham, 1957-9; The City Police Station, Wood St, The City of London, 1959-66; The County Library, Bury St Edmunds, 1965. In them McMorran overcame the economic strictures of Post-War Britain, with its sluggish economy, to produce lucid, intelligently designed Classical buildings. Humane buildings, sensitive to context and their place in a complex hierarchy of history, place and purpose. All are worth investigating, studying, existing within their time and yet part of the long British Classical tradition. Perhaps even timeless.

McMorran & Whitby

RIBA Publishing

London, 2009