The forgotten Technicolor fashion-world drama: It Started in Paradise

All of Rank’s in-house costume designers were clamouring to work on the studio’s film It Started in Paradise when its production was announced in 1952. It was a designer’s dream – set in the cutthroat world of high fashion, it offered some wonderful costume opportunities, not least the design of an entire fashion collection based around the notion of ‘a new Elizabethan age’, to coincide with the accession to the throne of the young Queen. Shot in Technicolor to best show off the clothes, the film was bound to exhibit what the trade press called ‘feminine appeal’, and there were some incredibly talented women involved in its production both in front of and behind the camera. 

The much-coveted design commission went to 25-year-old Sheila Graham. Barnsley-born Graham had developed a passion for ballet at a young age and her early work was mainly designing and drawing ballet costumes. She went into theatre design after graduating from St Martin’s School of Art. At Two Cities Films after the war she worked on Victorian melodrama The Mark of Cain (1947) and psychological noir The October Man (1947), while also continuing her theatre work. 

For It Started in Paradise, Graham had to design nearly 100 dresses, suits and coats. In an interview with Kensington News and West London Times, she expressed her desire to show British women “a new purpose for bright colours used excitingly”, yet revealed that perhaps the most daring costume in the film was a black wedding dress with white veil and accessories. 

Her ‘new Elizabethan’ designs are even more striking, and the centrepiece fashion show invited comment from the critics. The Daily Herald wrote: “The real star of the thing is the mass of fashion on show… All praise here to Sheila Graham… whose name should be in as big type as the stars.” Sadly, Graham gave up costume design when she got married the following year. The BFI contacted her family when the film screened in the Projecting the Archive strand at BFI Southbank and they very generously donated the designs from the film to the BFI’s paper collection. Some of these actually appear on screen, along with partially finished costumes, making for some nicely self-reflexive behind-the-scenes sequences.  

The tale of subterfuge and backstabbing in the world of haute couture was the first screenplay by popular satirical writer Marghanita Laski. From a prominent family of intellectuals, she had spent a year working in the fashion industry herself and concocted a film script exposing what one critic called “the feminine jungle behind a dress-shop door”. 

Laski was a highly successful journalist and novelist whose 1949 book Little Boy Lost, about a man who goes to post-war France to search for his missing son, had financed the purchase of a mill in Somerset. She became a radio personality, a new breed in post-war Britain, regularly appearing on shows such as What’s My Line? and Any Questions? She was also one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Shooting began on It Started in Paradise on 17 March 1952, with Rank stalwart Bob Compton Bennett in the director’s chair and Jack Cardiff overseeing the Technicolor filming. With the release of Powell and Pressburger’s colour films in Japan, Cardiff had apparently become something of a celebrity, the press reporting that he was receiving large amounts of fan mail from East Asian filmgoers. He even brought touches of Black Narcissus to this film, at one point shooting an extreme close-up of Jane Hylton conveying her descent into hysteria. 

Laski’s screenplay opens on a moment of high drama: the sound of fabric ripping as a junior designer tears a red dress off a shocked model, frustrated by her boss’s rejection of her designs. Head designer Madame Alice is played by the imperious Martita Hunt; resplendent in a white wig she has an aura of Miss Havisham, living in isolation in her flat above the salon with curtains permanently drawn. She represents a dying breed: the ‘court dressmaker’ and the film’s early scenes are set in 1938, when such businesses were folding as the ‘coming out’ of debutantes became passé. New blood was needed and Madame Alice is out-manoeuvred by her assistant, Martha, played with verve by Jane Hylton. 

But as Hylton revealed to the Picturegoer journalist who visited the set, Martha ‘comes a cropper’, caught up in black marketeering during the war. It’s left to Alison (Muriel Pavlow) to save the salon from bankruptcy and irrelevance in a very different post-war world. It’s a role that shows off Pavlow’s talents to great advantage, demonstrating her skill at playing women with character and resolve. Several reviewers highlighted her performance; Paul Dehn writing in Sunday Chronicle gave the acting short shrift but felt: “only Muriel Pavlow, playing her first really grown-up heroine, brings freshness and a hint of sincerity to the young dress designer.”

Pavlow died in 2019 at the age of 97 and this film screened at BFI Southbank later that year as a tribute. While the British press were unenthusiastic on its release in November 1952, the audience at the BFI gave it a riotous reception, proving its humour is still sharp. Stealing the film is Ronald Squire as the preening fashion columnist ‘Mary Jane’, who utters his wonderfully waspish lines with great relish. 

The BFI National Archive unfortunately doesn’t hold a viewable print of this film, though it does preserve the original three-strip Technicolor negatives. A print was borrowed for the screening from the rights holder, providing a rare opportunity to see it on 35mm film. It Started in Paradise is a British title that deserves a home entertainment release, so that a wider audience can appreciate its humour, stunning costumes and reflection of the national mood as Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. 

Sheila Graham’s costume designs for It Started in Paradise are preserved in the Special Collections of the BFI National Archive. They were donated in 2019 and can be viewed by appointment at the J Paul Getty Jr Conservation Centre in Berkhamsted.