Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright on British Cinema

• ‘Martin Scorsese Selects Hidden Gems of British Cinema’ runs at BFI Southbank, London, until 8 October. Many of the titles will screen from 35mm prints in the BFI National Archive, including a rare nitrate screening of Went the Day Well? on 23 September. A selection of the films will also stream on BFI Player from September.

It’s been said that even if Martin Scorsese had never picked up a camera, he would still have become one of the world’s great teachers of film. Scorsese’s knowledge of cinema is famously encyclopaedic, but it’s the way he has shared that knowledge that has been his true gift.

It was that generosity that Edgar Wright wanted to acknowledge when he wrote to Scorsese back in the uncertain days of the Covid lockdown in 2020. Shut up at home like us all, Wright had turned to a list of international film recommendations Scorsese had once compiled for a student. Watching them brought revelation after revelation, and Wright wrote to Scorsese to thank him. At the end of his letter, almost as an afterthought, he asked Scorsese about some of his favourite British films. A few weeks later, a reply arrived in which Scorsese listed more than 50 of his personal favourites, many of which had had a defining influence on him when first seen while growing up in New York.

Scorsese assumed, he wrote, that Wright was familiar with the most canonical figures and films – Powell and Pressburger, Hitchcock, the great Ealing comedies, the epics of David Lean. So, with no claim to be comprehensive, he compiled a more subjective list, one that also side-stepped the ‘kitchen sink’ realism of the British New Wave and the art cinema tradition of Nicolas Roeg and others, to focus instead on titles by directors of the 1930s through to the early 1970s, who were typically closely associated with particular studios, and in many cases with genre. The list included popular Gainsborough melodramas like Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey (1943), atypical Ealing films such as Alexander Mackendrick’s drama Mandy (1952), pre-horror Hammer thrillers such as Terence Fisher’s Stolen Face (1952) and titles by the prolific likes of Roy Ward Baker, Basil Dearden, Arthur Crabtree, J. Lee Thompson and Seth Holt, directors whose work has arguably been critically neglected as that of the competent journeyman. 

A few years later, Wright proposed a season of films for BFI Southbank that would draw from Scorsese’s list. Working closely with him, we in the BFI National Archive selected 22 titles that retained the range of directors on the longlist; and also looked to where we held good, often original 35mm prints.

Scorsese’s longlist was never intended as a ‘best of’, nor as a list of obscurities. But what it does show is how formative Scorsese’s relationship with British cinema was. Ahead of the BFI season, I sat down with Scorsese and Wright to discuss the programme.

James Bell: Martin, when you compiled the longlist for Edgar back in 2020, you turned to films you had seen growing up in New York. Where would you originally have seen them? And was one of the attractions specifically that they were British? 

Martin Scorsese: Well, I saw them first on television. At that time, 1948, television was a sixteen-inch black and white, and there were a number of British films that were shown constantly: a lot of the Alexander Korda films – The Thief of Bagdad [1940], The Man Who Could Work Miracles [1937], The Shape of Things to Come [1936]. Plus, so many others that I experienced. This was when I was five, six, seven years old. When I was taken to the theatre, British films were part of the programmes. I was aware that there was a difference, but they were also familiar. It was part of our culture already in America. This had to do with television, but also with the way we saw these films. We could only afford the second-run theatres, and often these films were the bottom half of a double bill, or in the case of The Red Shoes [1948] – which is the only Powell and Pressburger I saw at that time on release – it was a major event.

JB: Your championing of Powell and Pressburger is, of course, well known, and the basis of the list was to offer personal favourites from British cinema that looked beyond the obvious: P&P, Hitchcock, the major David Lean films…

MS: Yes, though one of the key directors we tend to leave out these days is Carol Reed. When we think that the four major names that come to mind when you’re dealing with British cinema are Hitchcock and Lean and Carol Reed and Powell and Pressburger. Carol Reed is someone that has to be reassessed, particularly in view of what we may call noir. You could say The Fallen Idol [1948] is one, possibly. It’s a magnificent film. But certainly Odd Man Out [1947] and The Third Man [1949], and then you have the ambiguity and the experimentation of The Man Between [1953], which may not be as successful as The Third Man or Odd Man Out, but is a haunting film. Another that has to be appreciated more is Outcast of the Islands [1951]. We know about the production problems, but when I saw it as a young person, I couldn’t tell that there were cutaways to studio shots and that sort of thing. The extraordinary performances of Trevor Howard, Kerima and Ralph Richardson, and this almost biblical story of a prodigal son who never really goes back to his father. It’s quite beautiful; a very powerful movie.

Edgar Wright: What tends to happen when directors like Carol Reed directed an especially famous film, as with The Third Man, is that it becomes canon. Then when there are lists, that becomes the only one that goes on, and other works in their filmography require people to go looking further afield for them, like Reed’s more light-hearted Night Train to Munich [1940].

MS: Absolutely. And Our Man in Havana [1959] really holds up, and The Key [1958] too. When that film was released there were two endings. The American ending was a happy ending; we made sure we found the British ending, which wasn’t.

EW: In My Voyage to Italy [Scorsese’s 1999 documentary on the history of Italian cinema], you talk about travelling to Italy for the first time through film. Did you have a similar feeling about travelling to the UK through the British films you saw?

MS: That’s a good question. We were certainly aware of London – the brighter and the darker side. The darker side seemed very familiar, especially when we moved back to Manhattan with my family in 1950. We were living in the Lower East Side, which was similar to the London locations in Night and the City [1950] and It Always Rains on Sunday [1947] and The Small World of Sammy Lee [1963] and A Kid for Two Farthings [1955], another beautiful film by Carol Reed. Basically, that’s where we were. It had the same foundation. It was working class. This is before the British New Wave, before Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. I saw Italian Americans react with familiarity to the working-class depictions in the British films, especially Cockney. This was something that we all felt comfortable with – we understood the struggling. Definitely London. I’m still obsessed with the architecture of the streets. I watch it on YouTube now sometimes, just a walking tour of London, taking me to certain places.

EW: You were living near the ‘other’ Soho in New York; was it strange to see your Soho twin on screen?

MS: We never thought of it as Soho. Soho is London – you know, Wardour Street. I was there in 1968. It was a little different then to what it is now, but in 1968, I can tell you… It was almost like an invasion, saying that the area in downtown New York is Soho. I guess one could term it south of Houston Street.

EW: It’s always confused me, because there seem to be lots of different explanations for the naming of Soho in London, whereas at least Soho in New York makes geographical sense as an acronym: South of Houston.

MS: At that time, in the 40s and 50s, there was no such thing as a section called Tribeca or Soho or Boho. It was all factories, trucks everywhere. It was a working place, with working people. At night, when the trucks were not there, it was a good place to go if you wanted to steal hubcaps. It was so dark. It was very dangerous, actually. You grew up in those shadows. That’s how I saw the world – particularly the Bowery. So when we saw British films like They Made Me a Fugitive [1947], it was as if it was next door.

JB: They Made Me a Fugitive has been called a British film noir. What is it about the British take on noir that’s distinctive?

MS: It seems to me it’s in the behaviour of the characters. I think a lot of it has to do with the roots of the underworld in England, going back to Cornwall, wrecking ships, the whole village being in on the destruction in order to take the cargo – Jamaica Inn, basically. The British noir has elements I tend to think of in terms of English gothic literature, and it has a toughness to it that you see in Night and the City, or in The Criminal [1960] by Joseph Losey. There’s a strong, mean edge to it and the characters are hardened. It comes from hundreds of years of being hardened. You go back to the highwaymen, you go back to Dick Turpin, you go back to all of that.

There’s a toughness in the British style that doesn’t have any room for compromise. Look at The Long Good Friday [1980] or Down Terrace [2009]. Just watch them. I came across it too while working with wonderful English actors and Irish actors on Gangs of New York [2002]. I’ve found similar with Irish American actors in Boston. I’m used to the other way, which is where I grew up, which was all Italian and Neapolitan and Sicilian, and a very different approach to the underworld business. I’m not an authority, but I happened to grow up in the midst of it. So I’m aware of how it was day-to-day, as in GoodFellas [1990] or Mean Streets [1973]. There’s a decidedly American edge to it. But the British thing, they have no time for any nonsense.

JB: In the upcoming BFI season based on the films you listed, To the Public Danger has that mean edge to it, in the drunken goading of the boyfriend [Barry Letts] by one of the men he takes for a drive. 

MS: That guy really gets into the Letts character, he eggs him on so that the car goes too fast and it [seems as though it] hits someone. The instigation is truly evil. I think that many people – most of us – are capable of letting ourselves go in that direction. I find that fascinating. It goes into the Jekyll and Hyde story, too. That’s why any version of Jekyll and Hyde is fascinating, because it’s a metaphor for who we are. 

EW: To The Public Danger is based on a Patrick Hamilton radio play. His books and the adaptations of his plays all talk about the darkness lurking just under the surface of London. Hangover Square [1941], Gas Light [1938]. And the amazing trilogy of novels 20,000 Streets Under the Sky [1929-34].

MS: Wow. I didn’t know about that one. 

EW: The film Bitter Harvest [Peter Graham Scott, 1963] is a very loose adaptation of The Siege of Pleasure, the second volume of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky. And, of course, ‘gaslight’ is a term that everybody now frequently uses today. I often wonder what percentage of people know it’s from Hamilton’s play and the later films [Thorold Dickinson’s 1940 adaptation and George Cukor’s 1944 remake].

MS: You may have hit on something, and that’s the nature of ‘good manners’. I’m not an authority on it, but I tend to experience it in England. In England, there is something under the surface, and in the Hammer films and the noirs and the gothic pictures, all these things seep through. One becomes aware of the darker side. The more polite you are, the more the darker side makes itself known. There are elements of that in The King of Comedy [1982] – degrees of aggression in line deliveries by Rupert Pupkin [Robert De Niro], where it took sometimes 26 takes because we kept trying different things, based on the level of aggression in his dialogue to Shelley Hack or to Jerry Lewis. Particularly the line when she [the assistant played by Hack] gives Pupkin back his audition tape, saying, “Work on it and come back, let’s hear what you do with some new material.” And he says, “Thank you, thank you.” Then she starts to go and he goes, “Excuse me, are you speaking for Jerry?” We did, like, 26 different versions of that line with different levels of aggression. It had to be right. I happened to look again at Kind Hearts and Coronets [1949] and it’s all there, that under-the-surface violence.

EW: That goes all through the films in the season. When I was watching the initial list – and talking to Quentin [Tarantino] about this too, because he watched all of the films as well – we came up with a subgenre called ‘James Mason is a bastard!’.

MS: [Laughs] I screened The Seventh Veil [1945] last week. It’s mystical and intriguing and magical in a way. It creates a spell. I saw it on its first release. My brother took me. I was five, six years old. We took it, at that time, 1948, almost as a horror film. It had that quality, and a lot of it had to do with Mason. There’s something in it that creates a hypnotic feel as you watch. You’re under Mason’s spell, and also The Man in Grey [1943] and The Wicked Lady [1945] and the other pictures he made. Those are wonderful films. The Seventh Veil is marred, of course, by the idea that if you want to cure someone, just hypnotise them. At that time, [with films like Hitchcock’s] Spellbound [1945], all the movies were that way about psychiatry. But there’s something really fascinating about The Seventh Veil that still holds up. Ann Todd’s so great in that. Her face, her eyes. She’s so beautiful. She’s a wonderful character. But how Mason behaves, the dialogue – there’s an attraction to the cruelty. That’s part of the essence we find in these films. Part of the insight in Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater [1964], for example, also. I find that a very cruel film. Harold Pinter’s screenplay is very good. It’s that under-the-surface violence. It’s disturbing. 

JB: The Pumpkin Eater has an unforgettable scene with Anne Bancroft and Yootha Joyce in a hair salon, where Joyce’s character switches back and forth between being fawning and nervous, to being snarling and vicious, which absolutely suggests that violence beneath the surface of good manners.

EW: I was just going to say that. Joyce’s monologue there is incredible. That feels, to me, like the most Pinter-ish moment. The scene with Yootha Joyce is amazing.

MS: Brutal, brutal. I’m not saying that we should celebrate the cruel. It’s just that it’s truthful. That’s why I was talking about this idea of manners and ritual, and under it – that just keeps seeping up – is the danger in who we are as human beings and in our societies. There’s Jack the Ripper. The interesting thing – we don’t know who he was. It’s almost like some entity that came out of the earth, came out of the cobblestones… I’ve done a great deal of reading about the period and the time in English literature since Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson [Richardson’s novel was first published in 1748]. It seems that with the suppression of evil, somehow evil will make itself known and come out in strange ways. That’s why there’s so many wonderful gothic films and novels coming out of Britain. 

The British noirs, for me, seem to have roots in the gothic novel. You have Horace Walpole of [The Castle of] Otranto, you have the Brontë sisters. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a seminal work that never goes out of style, especially now with AI – she was a prophet. [John William] Polidori, of course. Then you have Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. You have [Charles] Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. You also have the wonderful [contemporary novelist] Sarah Perry. Her first, The Essex Serpent [2016], I thought was a wonderful book. But Melmoth is even better. I just finished reading that. Melmoth takes that gothic strain all the way through to the modern world, to modern literature. It seems to come out of the imagery of the land itself. The way the Isles of Scilly look in Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago [2010] – something about the rocks feels like the people in the movie. How they’re interacting with each other, the dysfunctional family situation. Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England [2013] – somehow the land itself is alive. Of course, nature is alive, but this really has another spiritual element to it

JB: In British cinema, those gothic cultural tropes are often revealed in genre films. Do you feel that in Britain we’ve often underappreciated many of the directors on your list because they worked in genre, or were so closely associated with a studio? The Roy Ward Bakers, the Terence Fishers: we typically don’t give them the auteurist elevation that we might do to, say, a Raoul Walsh in the studio system in Hollywood. 

MS: The idea of the auteur itself is under great scrutiny, particularly in the world now of hyper-democratic film appreciation and criticism, which is very different from when we were making films in the 70s. Usually, despite the fact that so much could happen between the moment the first word is put on a page of a script to the moment that it’s finally screened, one person steers the ship, so to speak. That has a lot to do with what we’ll call an auteur. Often, it depends on how strong you are or how weak you are. You may be in a situation where you were strong on one film and you’re weak in another because of a financial situation, or because of the wrong collaborators, where it just doesn’t connect. 

What I’m getting at is that when you say Roy Ward Baker or Terence Fisher, I like to look at their body of work and say, out of the ten films I’ve seen, six of them are really terrific. That means they really held on to the reins of the runaway horses as well as they could within the circumstances, and whether there’s genre or not, it doesn’t matter. 

Also, in order to make genre, we’re talking about an individual where he or she has to have their vision despite the financiers, despite problems on the set, despite troubles in the editing. They have to hold on to those ideas and get as much as they can on the screen in the final product that represents their visual narrative. That is, where to place the camera. Does the camera move? When do you cut? Where do you cut?

For example, I was last week at dinner with Chris Nolan, and I’ve since sent him a film called The Man in the Sky [1957], that Charles Crichton directed. It’s one of the Ealing films and Jack Hawkins – the great Jack Hawkins – is in it. I learned so much about sound effects editing from watching that about 30 years ago – I think it was on television. Take a look at that picture: in terms of the sound of the airplane, what it sounds like from cut to cut… It’s a suspense piece; the plane is in the air, and he has to land, and it’s dangerous. He has to circle the airport. On the ground, everyone’s very quiet. All you hear is the wind. It cuts to the airfield, and then you have a plane going by. It cuts to the interior of the conning tower and the plane comes into frame, but the sound is different. That quiet and control really was like another character in the film. I find this a lot in British films: an understanding of editing and especially of sound editing. You see it in David Lean’s films, certainly. And Carol Reed, and Hitchcock, of course.

JB: Several of the directors on the list came through the ranks at the studios as cinematographers, writers or editors. Seth Holt, for instance, was a great editor for Ealing. When he came to direct his own films, like Station Six Sahara [1963], how much do you feel that background was significant?

MS: Definitely Seth Holt. His films stood out. He had an understanding of how you tell a story by cutting from one image to another. I remember Elia Kazan coming to talk at NYU back in 1965. They were in production of the play After the Fall with Arthur Miller and Kazan happened to be across the street, so they talked him into speaking to the students, which was a rare thing at that time. Somebody asked him, “If you were to start all over again, where would you start? The theatre?” He said, “No, I’d start in the editing room. That’s where you learn to tell the story with pictures.” I’m not denigrating scriptwriting in any way, but then it has to be transformed into a visual narrative, and very often there’s a lot of craftsmanship that goes into that, which slips into beautiful artistry at times. For me, Seth Holt had a complete understanding of how to tell a story through pictures. His pictures really hold up. Frame by frame, they have strength in composition. He has a dark streak, there’s no doubt. I like his pictures. Taste of Fear [1961], The Nanny [1965]. There’s a crispness to the photography and framing and pacing.

Station Six Sahara is a big revelation. It’s minimal: they’re in the desert and these men are stuck together. I always found it to be very close to The King of Comedy, because it’s the comedy of management. The sense of cabin fever and the way each character plays off each other in what they would today call microaggressions – especially the wonderful Ian Bannen, and what he does to poor Denholm Elliott with his letter. Then in the midst of this, an American Cadillac and a blonde, Carol Baker, crashes into the film in a highly unlikely, outrageous manner that is pure pulp. But it really has to do with character. The weaknesses of character, the strengths of character. Seth Holt was amazing in how he perceived them and how he chose to show them. It’s very disturbing, because of that.

EW: A good companion to Station Six Sahara in this season is John Guillermin’s Guns at Batasi [1964]. It’s also a single location film, a film of simmering tensions boiling over.

MS: That’s it. That black-and-white widescreen CinemaScope, tracking past the guns, rifles lined up, placed in position… You could feel the cuts in that movie. You could feel the sound effect cuts, too. Let alone the great Richard Attenborough, and his performance, with that voice of his, playing that sergeant major. Guns at Batasi is a wonderful display of extraordinary craftsmanship in terms of editing and sound effects editing and camera movement.

EW: And composition.

MS: Composition, in that 2.39:1 aspect.

EW: Back to what you said about craftsmanship, that’s exactly what I take away from this series. When you watch Hammer Films, obviously there’s an assembly line nature to their production, but these directors manage to tell the story with such economy. There’s a shot in Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde [1971] that if I had watched it when I was younger, I wouldn’t have understood what I was seeing. But now, having made films, seeing the first transformation in the mirror made me literally jump out of my seat. It’s so brilliantly conceived and it’s also so cheap. Ralph Bates turns into Martine Beswick, and it’s just done by tweaking the precise angle of the camera and the mirror. It’s absolute genius.

MS: It really is. It’s a wonderful film, it goes into very forbidden territory. Besides good and evil, it’s male and female. It’s trans. It’s everything. Which was very daring for the time. It’s reimagining the story of Jekyll and Hyde with something very fresh. 

JB: Another film in the season, The Flesh and the Fiends, about nineteenth-century murderers Burke and Hare, is also remarkable for its time. It was shot in 1959, but it’s so grimy. 

MS: Again, the black-and-white Scope is beautifully composed and, as is mentioned in the BFI programme notes, one can’t help but think of the etchings by Hogarth. It’s all there on the screen. Billie Whitelaw is amazing in it. Donald Pleasence is brilliant as always, but even maybe more so in this film. It’s a very disturbing character that he plays [Hare]. You really do feel a sense of place in that film; it’s claustrophobic, and like being stuck on the Bowery where I grew up. These are the alcoholics in the street, all those guys dying in the street, basically. That’s what the characters in The Flesh and the Fiends are like. I grew up around it.

EW: I directed Billie Whitelaw in her last movie [Hot Fuzz, 2007], and The Flesh and the Fiends is one of her earliest appearances, and she’s heartbreaking in it. What struck me about the film is that it’s more naturalistic than it is gothic, which makes it terrifying. It’s the best Burke and Hare film by far. Donald Pleasence in The Flesh and the Fiends seems like an antecedent of the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange. This also shows up in Joseph Losey’s The Damned [1962]. When I watched that, I was like, “Wow, I wonder if Anthony Burgess or Stanley Kubrick ever saw this?”

MS: Of course. You’re right. 

EW: The opening with Oliver Reed wearing his tweed jacket and twirling his umbrella, flanked by his leather motorcycle gang. There’s an especially striking shot where they’re walking down the street whistling ‘Black Leather Rock’.

MS: [Hums the film’s theme tune] “Black leather, black leather, rock, rock, rock.” Yes, and it’s a science fiction film from what I understand.

EW: It’s sort of a mix of a biker movie and a Nigel Kneale film.

MS: Yes, but it has a distinctive Losey style. There’s something again about the framing – black and white in 2.35:1. There’s a gravity in the framing; there’s a gravity in the characters. There’s a certain gravity in the nature of the movie itself that elevates it from a more run-of-the-mill genre piece. I feel the sense of growing up under the Cold War. We always expected the atom bomb to hit us and I feel that watching that film.

EW: I was rewatching Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury [2000] the other day, his documentary on the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten – John Lydon – talks about the allusions to Richard III [in Rotten’s persona]. Then, when you watch films like The Flesh and the Fiends and The Damned, there are these early signifiers of punk, in the way that Burke and Hare are dressed, or the way that Oliver Reed and his gang dressed. It feels like a style that’s going to explode fifteen years later.

JB: There are a few Basil Dearden films on the list you wrote for Edgar [The Blue Lamp, 1950; Sapphire, 1959; The Mind Benders, 1963]. We put The Mind Benders in the season, which is arguably an atypical title – but then, even if his so-called ‘social problem’ films might be what some people think of first, perhaps there isn’t a typical Dearden film; his work had such a range.

MS: The Mind Benders is a very unsettling picture, to say the least. It gets into the man [Dirk Bogarde]’s soul and [how] he falls out of love with Mary Ure’s character, and the way he treats her. It is one of the most upsetting films to watch because of how he changes and what he does to her. It really is a unique picture because of that. It goes very deep. The horror is what they do to his soul through this deprivation of [his senses], the isolation experiments. 

When I think of Basil Dearden, I think of the editing in The Blue Lamp. His visual narrative, his editing, the way he tells the story in the pictures, you can see in The Blue Lamp. There’s a robbery scene towards the end. You watch the editing of that, where the policeman gets shot, the composition. All of this comes to a high point with the introduction of Eastmancolor in Sapphire. The colour becomes like a character; it feels noirish, disturbing, and feels like it’s a violation.

EW: I feel Dearden doesn’t get enough credit for the darkness of his films. It’s interesting, The Mind Benders is a continuation of him constantly subverting Dirk Bogarde’s persona – first through The Blue Lamp and then Victim [1961, in which Bogarde plays a gay man who challenges a blackmailer]. Taking a matinee idol and showing the ambiguities beyond that image.

MS: I didn’t realise for a long period of time that he was associated with social themes. But Victim makes sense then in his body of work. When that film came out, as you know, it made a major splash. I see now that it is a social issue, but it’s also a moral issue. The film embraces it, and so does Bogarde, wholeheartedly. Meaning that it’s beyond provocation. It just presents it and it breaks all the taboos. The ability to take on a project like that at that time with somebody like Bogarde. It was an amazing feat.

EW: I definitely think he’s underrated in terms of his range. To have these films and then also do something like The League of Gentlemen [1960]. I like his film Frieda [1947] as well. It’s very strong-willed. 

MS: Frieda is very good. The whole idea of the German girl coming into England, then her brother comes back and he’s still a Nazi. I’d like to watch it again. The Halfway House [1944] too. The other figure I think is interesting is Ronald Neame. Doing two of the greatest to come out of England, that is The Horse’s Mouth [1958] and Tunes of Glory [1960]. Alone, just those two films. They’re timeless pictures. 

EW: Then there’s Thorold Dickinson. The Queen of Spades [1949] was on your list, but we didn’t put it in the season because it has played recently as a restoration. But he was one of the biggest revelations for me. I hadn’t seen the film before and it completely knocked me out. They shot it in Welwyn Studios in Welwyn Garden City, and every single shot is on a stage, constructed just for the camera.

MS: Of course, the rustling of her [the countess played by Edith Evans] dress. Again: sound. Queen of Spades and a second film, Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer [1955], were on American television a great deal. I became very conscious of those two films. In fact, I thought Queen of Spades was a Powell and Pressburger film at first. Confusing the Anton Walbrook presence and the occult feel to the picture. But Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer is fascinating because it has a documentary feel to it. You knew that it was something that was not shot in a traditional studio way. It went to locations. It had some very interesting editing. Years later, I saw his version of Gaslight [1940] and Men of Two Worlds [1946]. 

JB: There are several Ealing Studio films on the list, though deliberately not the most well-known of the comedies. Was the fact that the films were made by Ealing the attraction when you were originally seeing them? Was it the studio you were familiar with, before the individual directors?

MS: Well, once we saw the logo come up, we began to understand this was something special. Meaning that, it may have genre elements, but it was not strictly genre. Like, The Lavender Hill Mob [1951] was a satire. The Man in the White Suit [1951], the same thing and The Ladykillers [1955], certainly. That was the difference. Whether it was semi-noir, or whether it was straight – whether it was Mandy [1952], let’s say. These things had a distinction to them.

The Ealing films were essentials. The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers were pictures that were A films on the double bill. These were films that people went to see. Father Brown [1954], too. Also 
A Run for Your Money [1949] and Whisky Galore! [1949]. These pictures were right up there as main attractions. 
The one that we didn’t see in theatres, but that we lived with on television, was Kind Hearts and Coronets. That was shown in the late 40s all the way through the 50s. In its tone, the attitude of it – and that includes the performance by Dennis Price – and the language and the use of voiceover and the editing, cutting back and forth in time with no continuity, it actually led the way to GoodFellas. There’s something about the restraint of the voiceover. The voiceover is different in Casino [1995] or in The Wolf of Wall Street [2013]. But in GoodFellas, it had to do with placing the images with the voiceover. Kind Hearts and Coronets was part of my DNA, I saw it so many times. You could say it’s a radical change [from Kind Hearts and Coronets to GoodFellas]. It actually isn’t. Of course, our language is very different. But the attitude of it, and the humour of Kind Hearts and Coronets, finds its way, in a darker vein, into GoodFellas. There’s no doubt about it.

I mean, yes, there are elements too of the first three minutes of Jules and Jim [1962] – pace and speed. But if you look at Kind Hearts and Coronets’s first twenty minutes: he talks about being born and next thing you know, he says, my father saw me as a baby, but unfortunately, he didn’t live to see me grow up. The father dies. We never met him before. He’s just a figure in the frame. It breaks the continuity of storytelling in very much the same way [as GoodFellas] later on. 
Only a couple of years ago, I read [Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of] Tristram Shandy. Kind Hearts and Coronets has that feel to it. It breaks all the rules. And so it freed us. We started thinking that way. Why can’t we cut straight forward and not have the beginning and the middle and the end of the scene? 

See it. Whenever somebody’s being buried, it’s always the same angle of the same church and the coffin comes in from the left of the frame. There’s a bell being rung on the cut. It is so funny. It’s hilarious. 

EW: One of the Ealing comedies in the season is Hue and Cry [1947]. Watching that again, I was really taken with the post-war location photography, the bombed-out docks. A lot of areas of post-Blitz London remained that way for several years after World War II. It’s incredible to see them used so inventively.

MS: Hue and Cry is a revelation. I don’t recall that being in New York theatres on an A or B listing in any way. Maybe it was not considered for the American market.

EW: Talking of London locations, David Lean’s This Happy Breed [1944] is part of the season. It’s his first colour film, and for me, seeing Clapham in vivid Technicolor was really wonderful.

MS: Of course, I don’t really know the differences to Clapham. I don’t know the neighbourhoods, but I knew it was a working-class house. Normally we saw that in black and white, and this was different. The story of the house, the voiceover of the house speaking in the beginning. Plus, of course, the final confrontation with John Mills playing the young sailor. Robert Newton, his wife played by Celia Johnson. It’s terribly moving. The other British film I always talk about, and it’s not in our season, that was shown as an A film on a double bill, was The Magic Box [John Boulting’s 1951 portrait of early cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene]. That taught me all about how pictures move. I did see that on its first release and why I think of that is the colour – I think of the colour for The Magic Box similarly to the colour for This Happy Breed. I feel a similar sense of it.

JB: Picking out some of the many great performances across these films, Green for Danger [1946] and Yield to the Night [1955] each have memorable, though very different performances, by Diana Dors and Alastair Sim respectively.

EW: Quentin is a huge fan of Green for Danger. He turned me on to that one. What’s interesting is it marries together two different things prevalent in the season: it has a comedy element because Alastair Sim is such a charming, unconventional detective. But it marries that together with the darker, noir films we were talking about before. 

MS: That’s true, and it has a wonderful climactic scene. Alastair Sim as an actor… once we were aware of British actors, there’s no doubt. I mean, once you take away Olivier and Gielgud, that’s separate, but it was Alec Guinness, Alastair Sim, James Mason, Jack Hawkins, Attenborough, John Mills, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee… All these people became so familiar to us. Sim was a key one, not only in that film but also in his extraordinary performance of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol [1951]. And the women: Joan Greenwood and Valerie Hobson, Margaret Lockwood, early Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr and Googie Withers… They became household names in America, at least on the East Coast.

EW: Yield to the Night is interesting because Diana Dors is somebody who wasn’t taken too seriously as an actress. Yield to the Night was her chance to prove herself as a great dramatic actress. Later in her career she became more of a figure of light entertainment fun, but Yield to the Night proved that she really had chops.

MS: Yeah, absolutely, and up to the late 60s, to Skolimowski’s Deep End [1970]. But Yield to the Night, she really nailed it in terms of her performance. [Yield to the Night director] J. Lee Thompson too. The earlier J. Lee Thompson films we should look at again. Murder Without Crime [1950], that’s an interesting one. Take a look at them.

EW: I love [J. Lee Thompson’s] No Trees in the Street [1959], with Herbert Lom, who’s another actor who recurs a lot in these films. He later became more known for his comedic acting, but in his early career, he was sort of a cross between Bogart and Peter Lorre. He’s such an incredible noir fixture.

MS: He plays a gangster beautifully in No Trees in the Street. But he really nailed it in Night and the City, in which he’s the head of the wrestling game and wants to protect his father from this ne’er-do-well of Richard Widmark. It’s quite moving. It’s a beautiful picture. 

JB: Most of the films on your list are from the 1940s to the 1960s, but you included a couple of silent titles by Anthony Asquith. We’re showing his first, Shooting Stars [1928], in the season. When would you have first seen these films? 

MS: Over the past twenty years, in the BFI’s restorations. The Asquith films… I keep using the word ‘revelation’, and they are revelations. They really are. There was Hitchcock and him, at that time. He used every editing technique to come out of Russian cinema – German to a certain extent, but mainly Russian. I think it’s in A Cottage on Dartmoor [1930] where they’re in the barbershop and listening to a cricket game, and they cut to the actual cricket game while the man’s hair is being cut and actually, in effect, you are hearing the cricket game. Instead of hearing it, you’re seeing it – but you’re hearing it through seeing it. He was doing that with images and cutting. He did it in Shooting Stars too. Also in A Cottage on Dartmoor, there’s the scene where they go see a movie and all he shows is the orchestra playing. He doesn’t show the film. He shows the people reacting to the film and the orchestra, the different instruments. It’s brilliant. He really was in the avant garde of cinema at that time. He was pushing the boundaries.

JB: You only have one title from the 1930s on the list, in Edmond T. Gréville’s Brief Ecstasy [1937]. But if you’re talking about style and imagination… It’s almost florid, a brilliant use of technique.

MS: Definitely. In the nightclub scenes in the beginning, if you see it on a big screen, and at the BFI you will, one thing you should have a reaction to is the extraordinary use of close-ups. Her face, his face. And then specifically later on, there’s a scene in the doorway, the cuts to their faces. [Gréville] implied the sexuality, yet it was really there on the surface. Whereas in It Always Rains on Sunday, which has the noirish element to it, it has what they say is erotic, but it’s [in fact] more carnal. In Brief Ecstasy, there’s a delicate eroticism and it’s done through these close-ups. Just watch where he places the close-ups and how he cuts them. It’s remarkable. It’s the film that Graham Greene described.

JB: Greene praised it for being a mature and honest film about desire.

MS: Yes, of course. He pointed out the pool game. The intercutting there, certainly there’s an eroticism to it. As opposed to the kind of gnarly carnality of It Always Rains on Sunday, particularly Googie Withers and the guy who plays Tommy Swann and the daughters. Now, particularly the fight that they have in the hallway, very ferocious. All this sexual tension building up in this little house, everybody cooped up. It reminds me of being in a New York tenement. 

EW: When you gave me the list, the only film I couldn’t find was Brief Ecstasy. But you burnt me a DVD and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it had been taped off British afternoon TV. It was a copy from Channel 4!

MS: [Laughs] We got them everywhere. We were madly collecting over the years, and then better copies and better copies.

EW: It’s great that we’re showing a BFI National Archive print. But it also shows how titles can slip between the cracks if they’re not part of an established library, or from an established studio – or even a specific genre.

MS: Yeah, I mean, I just ran this film… Oh my goodness, the director. It’s Lance Comfort. Got to get into Lance Comfort. The film is Daughter of Darkness, 1948.

JB: Oh, Daughter of Darkness, fantastic. Do you know that Edgar?

EW: I don’t know that. I know Daughters of Darkness [1971], the Harry Kümel film. 

MS: Not as good. Lance Comfort should be looked at again, there’s no doubt.

JB: Temptation Harbour [1947] is another good Lance Comfort film – a Georges Simenon adaptation.

MS: Bedelia [1946, starring Margaret Lockwood] is another. Like The Upturned Glass [Lawrence Huntington, 1947], or A Place of One’s Own [Bernard Knowles, 1945], these have this polite society above and then under… and [Arthur Crabtree’s Gainsborough melodrama] Madonna of the Seven Moons [1945], where the wild gypsies want to erupt and run rampant through the countryside. It’s remarkable and quite enjoyable for its kind of pulp story. It was one of the films [through which] I began to understand what we were talking about earlier, the surface and that which wants to seep up through.

EW: What would you say typifies a Gainsborough melodrama, Marty?

MS: Besides that logo? Well, they’re like romantic gothic stories. But they’re almost like popular novels. In terms of the subject matter, they’re not as serious as, let’s say, Saraband for Dead Lovers [1948] or Blanche Fury [1948]. But they had a wonderful embracing of a kind of dubious taste. It didn’t pretend to be anything else. The Wicked Lady, The Man in Grey… [they’re] nineteenth-century theatre – street theatre – embracing the underbelly of English society.

EW: I wanted to ask about the last film, in terms of chronology, on the list: The Legend of Hell House [1973]. I’ve always loved it and I always think it’s interesting because Pamela Franklin is in both The Legend of Hell House and The Innocents [1961]. To me, The Innocents is one of the most subtle evocative horror films, whereas The Legend of Hell House as a counterpoint is like John Hough hitting you in the face with a brick – in a great way! It’s all those low wide angle shots.

MS: Well, that’s the style of it. It’s a serious horror film. It really is. It didn’t evade the issue by shocking cuts and what they call now jump scares. It really placed you in that house and it had a creepy feel to it, especially the ghost who takes down the covers of the bed, and then she gets in the bed and then they find her in the morning and she’s got scratches on her. It had a sense of a deeper element of evil. The sense of evil in that house – it’s titillating in terms of the eroticism of the picture, and what do you do with those wide angle lenses as you say. It certainly was a companion piece for me for The Haunting [1963].

EW: The whole film feels unsafe. It’s got this lurid quality about it. To watch the movie is to be slightly unclean!

MS: There’s so many more [titles] we could do for a second season: [Lindsey C. Vickers’] The Appointment [1980], [David Greene’s] I Start Counting [1970]. And there’s this one I want you to see: [Leslie Megahey’s] Schalcken the Painter [1979]. Do you know it?

EW: Oh, you know what? I have it. That’s on BFI’s Flipside [DVD and Blu-ray] label. I must watch it. 

MS: Take a look at that. Leslie Megahey framed everything like Vermeer. The story is based on a [Sheridan] Le Fanu story.

EW: The Appointment shows that there was obviously a point in the British film industry, especially in the late 70s, early 80s, where the industry was on its last legs. Some directors couldn’t get a second movie financed. The idea that the director of The Appointment was barely seen again, and never directed a second movie, is very sad. 

MS: It’s a really excellent film. There’s a lot going on there. Don’t forget, Performance [1970] was late 60s.

EW: Performance feels like the moment the major studios decided to leave London.

MS: That’s what I was going to say. They pushed to a point and Performance came, then, where can you go beyond that? The Appointment comes out of that vein of experimentation – that special way of telling a story. Oh, recently I looked also at Hammer’s Never Take Candy from a Stranger [Cyril Frankel, 1960].

EW: Oh, it’s so good. It’s a great thriller that keeps going exactly where you don’t want it to go. I know you love [Vernon Sewell’s 1962 suspense thriller] Strongroom, but you must have seen Cash on Demand [Quentin Lawrence, 1961] with Peter Cushing?

MS: I have to look at that again. I’ve got sidetracked by some of these other British films, by Lance Comfort and others, like some earlier Michael Anderson films. And do you know Four in the Morning [Anthony Simmons, 1965]?

EW: Oh yes, with Judi Dench. Marty, I want to thank you for going on this journey with all of these films. It’s such a revelation.

MS: Well, they continue to be revelations to me. Screening them again on the big screen, reliving them and saying, “Wow, not only do they hold up, but I still have more to learn from them” – and a lot of that learning is just becoming excited about filmmaking again. To say, “Hey, let’s go make a film.”