John Ford’s “Ealing” Movie

No, the head of Ealing Studios, Sir Michael Balcon, did not invite the great American director to work at his studio, even though it would have been quite feasible. Ford had broken with 20th Century Fox, with whom he had made Young Mr Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941) and My Darling Clementine (1946). By 1948 he was working for Herbert J. Yates at the much smaller Republic Pictures. This had proved very successful. It was at Republic that he made the cavalry trilogy—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950)—not to mention The Quiet Man (1952), for which Ford won his last Oscar. But his move away from the big studios had been to secure greater independence; and even if Balcon had been tempted to invite the American director to Ealing, Ford’s autocratic ways would not have gone down well in the studio that prided itself on its team spirit.

Nevertheless in 1957 John Ford did make Gideon of Scotland Yard in Britain from a script by T.E.B. Clarke, the writer of such Ealing classics as The Blue Lamp and The Lavender Hill Mob. In the title role was one of Ealing’s major stars, Jack Hawkins, playing the likeable but at times irascible Chief Inspector Gideon. The film was based on Gideon’s Day (the British and Australian title of the film) a novel by J.J. Marric, a pseudonym for the popular British crime writer John Creasey.

Generally writers on John Ford have ignored the great director’s “Scotland Yard film”. It is not mentioned in Pappy, Dan Ford’s biography of his grandfather, or in Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington’s John Ford; while J.A. Place’s otherwise excellent The Non-Western Films of John Ford regards Gideon as a strange anachronism. Only in Tag Gallagher’s John Ford: The Man and his Films is it treated seriously. But even there Gideon is discussed only as a John Ford film, and Gallagher doesn’t examine the British context. He ignores the contribution of its writer, T.E.B. Clarke.

Clarke was as accomplished a screenwriter as Ford’s regular collaborator, Frank Nugent, who had scripted the cavalry trilogy screenplays from short stories by James Warner Bellah. Indeed Clarke’s screenplay for The Blue Lamp (1950) has some fascinating affinities with the cavalry films. In Fort Apache and Rio Grande the regiments are portrayed as extended families. Everyone has served together for many years within a clearly defined hierarchy. The same applies to Captain Nathan Brittles’ (played by John Wayne) C Troop embarking on the captain’s last patrol in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

In some ways the relationships between the characters in the movies were similar to those between the director and his cast and crew. As far as possible Ford liked to work with the same people; actors like Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond and of course John Wayne. His usual cinematographers were Archie Stout, Winton Hoch or Bert Glennon, all of whom could create the distinctive John Ford visuals in colour or black-and-white. On set the great director could be irascible—Wayne was often a target—but when an actor had a scene Ford was sensitive and supportive. In later years, his cowboy hat on the back of his head, pipe in hand and with his arrival on set announced by “The Red River Valley” played on the accordion, he became positively patriarchal. Almost certainly Wayne’s senior officers in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande are versions of John Ford.

The Blue Lamp is not quite like this. Nor, I suspect, was its director, Basil Dearden, anything like John Ford. But the film’s idealised portrayal of a uniformed police force operating within a carefully defined hierarchy to keep a law-abiding society safe is not far removed from the American director’s equally idealised US Cavalry. Moreover the underlying assumptions about the British way of life in T.E.B. Clarke’s screenplay for Gideon of Scotland Yard are much the same as those of The Blue Lamp. It is just that the perspective is different. In The Blue Lamp we follow Jimmy Hanley’s rookie constable Andy Mitchell as he is guided in his first weeks on the job by the fatherly PC Dixon (Jack Warner). Gradually the young man is accepted into the world of the police force with its darts competitions and choir. Ultimately he takes on the role of his mentor when Dixon is gunned down by Dirk Bogarde’s small-time crook and plays a crucial part in the hunt for the murderer. In the shabby but peaceful postwar Britain portrayed in the film, shooting a policeman makes you an outsider and even the crooks help bring the killer to justice.

Gideon of Scotland Yard is told from the point of view of Chief Inspector Gideon as he is having one of those days. He has to cope with two murders, a corrupt policeman, three robberies, and a female con artist holding him at gunpoint. On top of all this Gideon’s private life is profoundly exasperating. He is beaten to the bathroom by his daughter, booked en route to the Yard by an officious constable, is interrupted at breakfast (where he obligingly make seal noises for his two small children), interrupted again at morning tea, at lunch at home, while having a pork pie at a pub, and at a midnight dinner at home. As Tag Gallagher observes, Gideon literally spends the film rushing in and out of doors. He is sustained by Kate (Anna Lee) who is like one of Ford’s cavalry wives at some remote outpost. And indeed the beautiful expatriate British actress had played a cavalry wife in Fort Apache. Comfortingly traditional values are upheld.

Gideon: Darling, will you get me my slippers?

Kate: Yes, dear.

Described like this Gideon of Scotland Yard seems like a comedy, and indeed the film has several witty and amusing sequences: the mock rages of Howard Marion Crawford’s Police Commissioner preoccupied with mounting a moose head on his wall and seemingly impervious to Gideon’s mock sarcasm, the running gag about the fish Kate wants her husband to pick up for supper that turns out to be a haddock instead of the salmon she’d asked for, not to mention Jack Hawkins’s delightful take-off of Ford himself when he copies one of the director’s characteristic mannerisms by pushing his hat back on his head and tossing aside the match he’s used to light his pipe—a moment only appreciated by film scholars. Still, Ford fans would probably have recognised the line from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in Gideon’s “this will get you a promotion in ten or twenty years”. And it is in character, as Chief Inspector Gideon would be just the sort man to enjoy a good western.

But even though T.E.B. Clarke demonstrates here just why he won an Oscar for the screenplay of the famous comedy The Lavender Hill Mob the same year John Ford won Best Director for The Quiet Man, Gideon is a fundamentally serious film. The pessimism when it comes is very black indeed. Sayer (Laurence Naismith), the mental patient who after being welcomed by Marjorie Rhodes’s housewife, gets a headache and goes upstairs and kills her daughter, is a chilling figure of mindless evil. Even more repellent are “the posh boys”, dinner-jacketed upper-class amateurs who stage a smash and grab at the Bank of England and shoot James Hayter’s likeable night manager. British society may be peaceful, with crooks that “know the rules”, but its citizens still have to be guarded by men like Gideon.

Supporting him are subordinates who have more than a passing resemblance to the non-coms and subalterns who back up John Wayne’s senior officers in the cavalry films: Sergeant Golightly (Michael Trubshawe), whose well-timed intervention stops his enraged boss from beating up a loathsome killer, and Frank Lawton’s softly spoken Inspector Liggett.

Working for the second time with ace British cinematographer Freddie Young, Ford’s visuals are richly pictorial. John Wayne once observed that there was an expressionist Ford—shadows and sometimes fogs—and an open-air Ford. Aided by designer Ken Adam’s splendid Scotland Yard set that seems to overlook the Thames, where as night comes the shadows accumulate around the hard-pressed Gideon, we certainly have the expressionist Ford. But this is nicely counterpointed by some realistic location shots of daytime London that reflect the actual geography rather than a synthesis of striking landmarks; all evidence of Ford’s eye for good locations.

Ford had a keen eye for the social and ethnic divisions in American society. But here he has embraced a unified vision of British life that still has to be defended by dedicated if at times harassed men like Gideon and his team. John Ford’s work here is very different from those Ealing films portraying similar subjects, such as The Long Arm and The Blue Lamp. But Ford shares their ideals—ideals that were perhaps in the late 1950s becoming a little out of date. But that should not prevent us enjoying the most untypical film of one of the great directors.