Poetry in the Movies

I can recall only a few times when a poem or poetry has stood out in a major film. By that, I mean where a poem has been read as a part of the story, where it fits in so effortlessly that you don’t notice that it is a poem. Of course poetry appears in many motion pictures, but how many of these can you recall? When the words have stopped you in your tracks? When the poem, or part of a poem, has not appeared as an artifice or an obvious cinematic device? When the poem has touched your emotions? When a poem has done what no moving image or well-performed dialogue could possibly achieve?

One anthology of poetry-in-film reveals that the best-known poets appear to have cornered the market. After Shakespeare, who appears to have been used in about twenty-seven films, the next, surprisingly, is William Blake, whose work (ten different poems), has appeared in sixteen films. ­­Walt Whitman manages to score eight poems in ten films. The next seems to be Edgar Allan Poe with six poems in ten films, then T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats with eight films each. Poetry by Byron, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Keats, Kipling, Marlowe, Marvell, Scott, Owen, Stevenson, Tennyson and Wilde have been the next most popular.

Why nineteenth-century (and earlier), poets should be so popular with script-writers and film-directors of the twentieth century is interesting and may well be a clue to the marginalisation of modern poetry to today’s narrow audience. It may be that modern poetry didn’t get lost to film and television—it was just never prepared to be part of it.

The one fairly modern film that should have showcased the art of the poet, The Dead Poets Society, failed to live up to its title. The poets, irrespective of the fact that they were dead, failed to appear—at least in any meaningful, poetic way. Robin Williams, playing the post-sort-of-modern English teacher Mr Keating, was about to deliver the best intro to a poem imaginable when the director stumbled. Keating wants his students to call him “O Captain! My Captain!” He explains to his spellbound student audience in the film (and, no doubt, the spellbound audience in any movie-theatre where the film played) that the Walt Whitman poem “O Captain! My Captain” was written to commemorate the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Robin Williams had both audiences in the palm of his hand. But instead of

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But o heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

—the audience is left hanging. Keating fails to quote the Whitman verse. The poem sums up the tragedy that Keating will eventually see unfold—his own—but Whitman’s words are left to wither, unread. The connection is lost.

One of the most memorable film-poems is from W.H. Auden’s film-script for the documentary Night Mail (1936). A dear friend, Pat Jackson (ninety-three), is the last surviving member of the GPO film unit that produced the film. He told me a few years ago that Auden struggled over the script till the studio floor was littered with pages torn from his writing pad. Nothing seemed to work. How do you write a poem about Engine Royal Scot 6115, flying through the English and Scottish countryside trying to get the London to Glasgow mail through on time? A mail-train speeding along an “all-clear” railway track? The great climb up Beattock, 1000 feet above sea level, pulling over 200 tons? The race to cover the distance from Euston Station to Glasgow Central, 645 kilometres in less than six hours? How do you describe the passion of the mail-sorters; the engine driver? The mail-vans, speeding to get to the various stations along the route, with their bulging bags of mail, ready to sling them onto the passing train? How do you turn the mundane into the magnificent?

This is the night mail crossing the border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

That’s how!

The poem needs to be read at the speed of an imagined steam engine and her coaches, in a race against the clock. As the film-poem proceeds, the pace of the train and the poem increases. It is helped along by the music of the then little-known Benjamin Britten (aged twenty-two) and the nerve of cameraman Chick Fowle hanging out of a carriage window as the train reached speeds of 100 mph. Pat Jackson recalls being perched on the coal-tender holding a reflecting board.

Auden’s was obviously a post-production script, written as he viewed the rushes and watched the editing. Pat Jackson was the editor’s assistant. The poem, following the clacketty-clack of the rail-joints, raced onwards to Glasgow Central:

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

Letters of joy from the girl and boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or visit relations,

And applications for situations

And timid lovers’ declarations

And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

News circumstantial, news financial,

Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,

Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,

Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts,

Letters to Scotland from the South of France …

Some people get sniffy about Night Mail but the segments with Auden’s poem are a delight. He was paid three pounds a week for his work. In 1937 this film must have electrified theatre audiences. But then, that was a pre-postmodernist age. Simple things, simple language, touched the heart.

Another film that uses a poetic technique is the 1937 New Deal film The River, written and directed by Pare Lorentz. The New York Times film critic Frank S. Nugent had this to say about it after the opening night at New York’s Criterion Theatre:

It is a simple statement of purpose, a simple statement of theme. In its simplicity and in the artful simplicity of its production, it is a poetic, stirring and majestic picture. The old words have been too freely used; to call it “epic” in Hollywood’s presence implies an ignorance of laudable superlatives. But we employ the word in the pre-Goldwyn sense, and The River is an epic—an epic of the great brown giant that served man and rose against him when he betrayed it.

Nugent’s “great brown giant” was the Mississippi River, the star of Lorentz’s film. In 1938 the script for The River was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. James Joyce described it as “the most beautiful prose that I have heard in ten years”.

Your mind’s eye must try to picture rolling rain-clouds gathering over the mountains of North America. A rain-drop hits a leaf. An ice-covered twig releases a droplet. Snow is melting. A trickle begins. A creek starts to swell; it becomes a stream—then a torrent. We see the birth of the spring-flow of the mighty Mississippi. To the most sensational shots (for the time) of America’s river system we hear:

Down the Yellowstone, the Milk, the White and the Cheyenne;

The Cannonball, the Musselshell, the James and the Sioux;

Down the Judity, the Grand, the Osage and the Platte;

The Skunk, the Salt, the Black and the Minnesota;     

Down the Rock, the Illinois and the Kankakee,        

The Allegheny, the Monongahela, Kanawha and Muskingum;         

Down the Miami, the Wabash, the Licking and the Green,  

The Cumberland, the Kentucky and the Tennessee;

Down the Ouchita, the Wichita, the Red and Yazoo;           

Down the Missouri three thousand miles from the Rockies …

The poem was never intended to be part of The River film-script. Lorentz had been asked to write an article for McCall’s magazine about his film project and penned a lengthy essay. Worried that the essay was too long, he also wrote the poem and suggested that the magazine choose which to publish. The magazine chose the poem. McCall’s received 150,000 requests for extra copies of the poem, which persuaded Lorentz to make it the narration-heart of his film.

Without the cinematography it is difficult to whip up much of a froth about this poem, but hearing the words married to the film images, cut to the beat, is a sensational experience. The pace of the poem suggests the throb of a Indian drum. Critics have likened it to Walt Whitman’s “Starting from Paumanot”, but I can hear tones of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” ringing in my ears.

A nasty group within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences managed to have The River excluded from the Oscar competition but the film won the 1938 Venice Film Festival prize, the first American picture to do so. It was up against Olympiad, the Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl.

The wonderful postwar film Stairway to Heaven (also known as A Matter of Life and Death) had several poems intrinsic to the story. The film’s director, Michael Powell, has David Niven leaping from his burning Lancaster bomber at 18,000 feet without a parachute. His death is imminent. As he is falling, earthbound, an audit in Heaven (yes, there is a bureaucracy up there), reveals 91,716 invoiced (to enter) but only 91,715 had been delivered. Niven is obviously the missing Heavenly soul, but he survives the fall, lands in the ocean and is washed up on a beach. One reviewer, Jeremy Robinson, said:

The opening of A Matter of Life and Death has rightly been celebrated: everyone remembers the desperate, emotional dialogue between Carter [David Niven] in his stricken Lancaster bomber somewhere over the Channel on a fogbound night and radio operator June [Kim Hunter]. It is a wild and improbable opening, with Carter reciting poetry, speaking metaphysically and crazily, and falling in love, in the space of five minutes, with June.

Meanwhile, in Heaven, the pen-pushers have sent down a courier to bring Carter in to make up the missing number. But the Heavenly bureaucrats haven’t figured on June. After dragging himself along the beach, Carter spots June riding her bicycle. We hear Byron’s poem “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night”:

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies,

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meets in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellow’d to that tender light

Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

The poetry in Stairway to Heaven also includes Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott.

Stairway to Heaven has the sort of script and concept that would never get financed today, at least not in Australia. Our cultural gate-keepers just wouldn’t get it. The clever Romantic aspects, the suspension of disbelief, the poetry, the non-digital special effects, the believable romance, the lack of coma-inducing drugs. It was a film made for the period. Britain, after the stress of war, needed Stairway to Heaven. The film was the first to be chosen for a Royal Command Performance and attracted a street crowd of 50,000 on the night.

Perhaps the best-known and admired piece of poetry in a recent film production is Auden’s “Song IX” which was read by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral. During the film, at a wedding party in Scotland, Gareth, played by Simon Callow, has a heart attack. He’d just finished telling an impressionable American lady that he didn’t know where Oscar Wilde was, but he did have his fax number. Gareth’s gay partner Matthew, played by John Hannah, is devastated by Gareth’s death and we cut to the funeral service, in somewhere-awful in southern England. Matthew reads:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The film-poem is an elusive creature. In the examples here, it is evident that poetry can slip into a film when no one is looking. A film about a mail train, a river, a fighter pilot selected by angels, and a gay man’s funeral?

Perhaps some day some young Australian film-maker will look at the Murray River, as Pare Lorentz did, when he took on the Mississippi. Perhaps some day.