A Restored Masterpiece

SARABAND FOR DEAD LOVERS (1948), just released in the UK on DVD sixty years after its premiere, has to have one of the worst titles ever devised for a movie—up there with The Settlement (1983), Howard Rubie’s fine road film only now being recognised as one of the major achievements of the second Australian “New Wave”. The saraband is a stately and solemn dance associated particularly with weddings and funerals. The theme came from the East and made its European debut as a guitar tune in the 1500s. It was well known to Agostino Steffani, kapellmeister at the court of Hanover during the 1690s, where the action of the film takes place. Moreover, a scene was devised for the film where the saraband is sung in its slow form arranged by the conductor, Ernest Irving, for viol, gamba and guitar. The theme was also incorporated into Alan Rawsthorn’s splendid score.

All very impressive, but as anyone who has studied marketing will tell you, a title which has to be explained in that kind of detail is going to have problems. Saraband for Dead Lovers was released with great fanfare in Sydney at the Embassy theatre, then after a brief run disappeared into the limbo of mid-week screenings at suburban movie houses until the nitrate print fell apart. And it was much the same elsewhere. Which was a great pity because Saraband is one of the finest period dramas of the last century.

The plot was based on a famous scandal. Sophie Dorothea, the wife of George Louis, Prince of Hanover and the future George I of England, was divorced from her husband on January 31, 1694. The trial was a farce even by seventeenth-century standards. Sophie Dorothea was not present at the tribunal that declared she had deserted George Louis. By then she was a prisoner in the Castle of Ahalden, forbidden to write or speak in her own defence. It was all intended to distract attention from rumours of a love affair between the Princess and a Swedish mercenary soldier, Count Philip von Konigsmark, who had been secretly murdered to prevent the scandal from jeopardising George Louis’s chances of succeeding to the British throne.

By the time the film was made the story had been used in two novels, A.E.W. Mason’s impossibly romantic Konigsmark and Helen Simpson’s darkly bitter Saraband for Dead Lovers. It was of course the latter that was the basis for the movie. The book is in fact quite poorly written. Sentences are awkwardly constructed, there is very little description and Simpson mainly stays outside the characters. But she did write some excellent dialogue, most of which was used by John Dighton in the screenplay. (We can be reasonably certain that Dighton was responsible for the dialogue. His co-writer, Alexander Mackendrick, later to direct The Lady Killers and Sweet Smell of Success, told me that he was “no good with dialogue” and concentrated on the narrative.) As well the novel has the kind of structure that can easily be adapted to film—chapters written like scenes with lots of confrontations that result in further developments in the story. Mackendrick and Dighton made improvements, adding more of the politics, eliminating some rather boring sub-plots and creating a sexual tension barely hinted at in the book; but the basic material came from Simpson.

But why did Ealing Studios tackle a film like this? By 1948 they had made their name with semi-documentaries like It Always Rains on Sundays and The Captive Heart. Mackendrick told me that it was an attempt by Ealing to break into the American market, adding that it was his own local comedy Whisky Galore (1949) that finally made the breakthrough. At the time the studio boss, Michael Balcon, wrote that it was an attempt to widen the studio’s horizons. Certainly it made sense to use a period film to get into the US market. During the war British costume melodramas such as The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945) had been enormously successful in America and made stars of James Mason and Stewart Granger. And for Saraband they cast Stewart Granger as Konigsmark and decided to make this the studio’s first film in colour.

The problem was, I suspect, that they made the film too good. The Wicked Lady and The Man in Grey were enjoyable bodice-rippers with stereotypical villains, heroes and heroines. But the characters in Saraband for Dead Lovers are fascinatingly complex and in 1948 audiences were not prepared for complexity, at least not in this kind of film. Stewart Granger always insisted that Konigsmark was the best performance he ever gave. He was almost certainly right. One of the best period actors of the last century, remembered for films like Beau Brummell, Scaramouche and Young Bess, he was never to be given material quite this good again.

FROM THE OUTSET the film confronts us with the self-disgust beneath Konigsmark’s panache, deftly implying that he sleeps with Flora Robson’s enjoyably promiscuous Countess Platen to secure a commission to pay off his gambling debts to George Louis (Peter Bull). In most period films of the forties Platen would be an out-and-out villain, especially when she becomes a vengeful scorned woman at the climax. But there are scenes when she is vulnerable and pathetic, played to the hilt by Robson (who was on stage a much admired Lady Macbeth).

Joan Greenwood as Sophie Dorothea is very effective as the anguished victim but never sentimentalises the character. Unfortunately she doesn’t get to make Sophie Dorothea’s real reply to her accusers, unearthed by the film’s researchers—“If I am guilty I am unworthy of the Prince. If I am innocent he is unworthy of me”—but the actress never allows us to forget the character’s inner strength. Not the least of Greenwood’s achievements is delivering the narration in the voice of an older woman.

Naturally Saraband has some unmitigated villains— and very enjoyable they are too. Anthony Quayle (later to be cast as stalwart service types) is marvellously slimy as the spy Durer—he was by all accounts a fine stage Mosca and Iago—while Peter Bull is tauric and repellent as George Louis. Here the actor and writers were just being accurate. The early Hanoverians were among the most repellent of British monarchs, a point the film emphasises with its portrayal of the court in Hanover as decadent and rapacious.

To convey this, the director Basil Dearden and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe shot the movie like a film noir, the stultifying intrigues of the court suggested by deep shadows spilling across the frame. Slocombe said he tried to make the lighting seem to come from the ostensible sources of illumination in the scene, so that a fire in the grate, the yellow beams of candles or a lamp appear to pick out the blue, silver, grey and red of the costumes.

Most of the action was drawing-boarded so the director could concentrate on the performances. Such was the team spirit at Ealing that even the writers took a hand in this. Alexander Mackendrick told me that he sketched out many of the sequences himself. Framing was tight, with most of the action taking place in the foreground, with close-ups mainly representing the point of view of one or other of the characters.

With Ealing’s commitment to documentary they might have been expected to shoot the film on location, employing the actual palaces, as they had with the German POW camp in The Captive Heart. But Technicolor cameras were extremely cumbersome so it was all recreated in the studio. This had its advantages. Sets were designed to reflect the characters’ personalities and emotions. The Electress Sophia (Francoise Rosay) was provided with a cavernous library, her throne-like chair backed by a pillar of undressed stone as though she is the bastion of Hanover. Countess Platen’s house and bedroom are all Italian Baroque. They couldn’t show much back then but the sensual intimacy of the bedroom especially conveyed all that was needed.

For all this, the film was far more realistic than most period dramas of the thirties and forties, where Errol Flynn wore only a suggestion of an sixteenthcentury ruff in The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Don Juan while Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette appeared in unhistorical low-cut gowns to display her shoulders. In Saraband for Dead Lovers the periwigs and gowns were designed to suit the actors certainly, but were on the whole accurate.

For the superbly staged assassination scene the actors were supplied with properly weighted seventeenthcentury rapiers instead of the light foil-like swords that had been adopted for film duels since the early thirties to increase the speed of the routines. As well, everyone fights square-on and not in the modern fencing style that only began in the eighteenth century but had been used by movie fight arrangers for every period from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

The film-makers also came up with the most credible portrayal of Konigsmark’s end to date. It was known that he accounted for three of his assailants before being struck down—historically Konigsmark was one of the finest swordsmen in Europe—and that all the lights in the palace were extinguished to prevent the assassins from identifying their victim. So the writers came up with the chilling sequence where Konigsmark hunts his murderers in the dark that became in Dearden and Slocombe’s hands all shadows, flashing swords and the rasp of steel on steel. Dighton and Mackendrick also found the most likely explanation for Konigsmark’s mysterious return to Hanover to elope with Sophie Dorothea—his disgust that the woman he loves will be forced to submit to the advances of the gross George Louis. It works brilliantly dramatically and is splendidly conveyed by Granger. What’s more it may in fact be true.

Saraband for Dead Lovers is, I believe, one of the screen’s great tragedies. It was shamefully neglected by the critics when it first appeared and is virtually ignored in Charles Barr’s history of Ealing Studios. For nearly fifty years Saraband was only available in a black-andwhite television print and an inadequate video. Now with the DVD we can see the film in something like the form its makers intended.

Neil McDonald writes: I first saw Saraband two days after it was first released in Sydney at the Embassy. I was eight at the time but I can still remember being overwhelmed by the power of the images. From this very distant memory it seems the DVD is close to the way I first saw the film. Not long after that first viewing I bought the “making of” book for sixpence at an Angus & Robertson sale—the source of much of the background detail in this article.