Victor Saville | The Good Companions / 1933

the sad clown

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ian Dalrymple, Edward Knoblock, W. P. Lipscomb, and Angus MacPhail (screenplay, based on the fiction by J. B. Priestley), Victor Saville (director) The Good Companions / 1933

 

In J. B. Priestley’s creaky but nonetheless effective machine of a story, each of three individuals, Inigo Jolifant (John Gielgud), Jess Oakroyd (Edmund Gwenn), and Miss Trant (Mary Glynne) find themselves on the outs of the worlds they’ve long inhabited and in need of a radical change of location and vocation.

       The elderly Oakroyd, who has just lost his job after 30 years of loyal service, on the same day loses his role as head of the house, and, even worse, loses his privacy and comfort in the house now being forced to daily withstand the endless verbal abuse of his wife (Florence Gregson) and simultaneously the gramophone musical intrusions by a new boarder Albert (Jack Hawkins), a friend of Oakroyd’s shiftless son Len (Cyril Smith). Oakroyd wants nothing to do with a new boarder, but his wife and son Leonard “out-vote” him and suddenly Albert’s friend is in, and Oakroyd, as he promised, in on his way out, hitchhiking down South with a man to whom the local bartender has just introduced, Jimmy. The only problem is that when Oakroyd arrives, the truck is just pulling out, and he’s told to leap in the back. He does so, only to discover hours later that the two with whom he’s hooked up are not Jimmy but a couple of crooks heading up North.

      At an inn run which one of their old girlfriends, they eat and sleep for the night, robbing Oakroyd of the only money he’s brought along before abandoning him. Forced to walk, he ends up at the crossroads to Rawsley, where he happens to meet up with another of our central characters in search of new experiences and new places, Miss Trant.

      Miss Trant, fitting the description of what might be described as an “Old Maid,” has lived for her father, caring and cooking for him at the expense of her own happiness. With his death and sale of his house and furniture she’s be left a small sum that will help survive if she takes up of a companion or some such capacity. Frustrated by having devoted her entire life to the propriety of caring for her father, she too wants to get out and explore the world while she still has the possibility. Against the advice of the local clergyman and her lawyer, she decides to take the entire sum left to her on go on a voyage to place in particular until she runs of money. She too runs into a series of semi-adventures on her way; her car is mistakenly taken by a man, Mr. Tipstead (Ivor Barnard) and a young woman with whom he’s run off from his wife (Mignon O'Doherty), the wife arriving soon after and knowing of their probable whereabouts takes Miss Trant in their car to the location to demand that her husband return home or forever remain apart. The husband returns home with her, leaving the distraught mistress in distress, soon after receiving a wire that her poor sister, having just had the traveling show she was in go bust, badly needs a basket which contains the rest of her worldly possessions. The show has closed, you guessed it, in Rawsley, and Miss Trant, having nowhere in particular to go, agrees to take the basket to her sister, there meeting up with Oakroyd.

     The third major character, Indigo Jollifant has for years been a teacher in the conservative Washbury Manor School run by the Tarvins (Laurence Hanray and Annie Esmond), in his spare time writing jazz music. The food at Washbury Manor is nearly inedible, there is no major entertainment, and the only major pleasure that Indigo and his fellow teachers find is in mocking the headmaster and his wife. When that couple overhears his imitations, he is fired. Happily, he too makes his way into an unknown future, taking the train, almost at random so that he too ends up at Rawsley, immediately meeting a traveling minstrel, Morton Mitcham (Percy Parsons), who plays the banjo, reminding nearly everyone he meets that he has traveled throughout the world.

      Morton has actually traveled there to seek out the theater company, “The Dinky Does,” hoping to possibly join them. But they are the very same company who have just gone bust, a member of which, that ambitious lead dancer and singer Susie Dean (Jessie Matthews) is awaiting her basket from Miss Trant. The company has been left without money or future bookings by their crooked manager. So, in some sense, all these itinerant individuals have been taken advantage of, but still look to the positive that their independent status permits them, and in their shared attitudes towards life they find an immediate kinship.

      If they have all been plagued by bad companions previously, they have now met up with the good ones of the work’s title.

      The “Dinky Doos” are a truly amateur performers whose members tell terrible jokes, dance through rather clumsy routines, and sing songs out of the British Music Hall tradition, all the while dressed as figures from the Commedia dell’arte.

      But after hearing of their plight, Miss Trant determines to support the company for a summer tour through the country, Indigo joining them as a pianist, Oakroyd as a backstage handyman, and Morton as a fellow performer. Changing their name to “The Good Companions,” the company bands together with their new friends only to discover that their tour coincides with the hottest summer on record, no one bothering to attend theater of any kind because of the heat.

      Almost at their end, once more, they determine to rent a theater for one more night. In the meantime, Indigo has created several new songs for the company and fallen in love with Susie—the young Gielgud even gets a chance to sing in this film—Oakroyd has fixed up their sets and props, and the entire company has become a far more serious venture. And miraculously, it rains. What was to have been their final performance is a hit!

       The rest of the film entails the details of the continued standoff between Indigo and Susie—the latter of whom has declared that she is devoted to her career and wants to become a London musical star—a jealous musical hall manager determined on destroying the company, and the inter-relationships between members, including Susie’s attempt to arrange a meeting between Miss Trant’s youthful love, now a doctor in a neighboring village.

     Despite an attack, organized by the music hall manager, on their most important benefit performance, Miss Trant meets her former beau, both of them falling in love all over again; the company finds a way to purchase a ticket to Canada for Oakroyd so that he might visit he beloved daughter; and Indigo travels to London to sell his songs to a famous musical theater manager, with the stipulation that he attend the benefit to see Susie Dean perform in person. She gets major billing in London and becomes a star.

       So all seems to end well. Perhaps only Indigo, left without the girl upon whom he’s developed a crush, does not quite get what he sought at the end—although he is awarded a career as a composer. But then, throughout, Indigo wears the costume of Pierrot, the sad clown who never wins his Columbine, the clown usually associated with gay men (think of later films such Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon and the sad mime Baptiste in Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise) which Gielgud openly was. Even Susie mocks him for his prissy, upper-class ways of speaking and behaving, and although she loves him as well, her career is truly her first love.

       It dawned on me as well, as I was writing this essay and even debating whether—despite its inclusion on some gay lists—this film might truly be described as an LGBTQ movie, that the relationship between Oakroyd’s son Len and his friend Albert seems quite suspicious. The two of them, without any source of income, seem to still dress as dandies, and obviously, if gay, have every reason to want to share beds in the same house.

      No British film of 1933 could do anything but nod in the direction of gay behavior, since it was not only something, if made more evident, that would bring down the blade of the censors but might get men like Gielgud arrested and imprisoned, his career ended. The subtle references to possible homosexuality here one might describe as coded, but are almost insignificant in their importance to the full fiction of the film itself. It was assumed that Susie would chose her career over love from the first moment we met her in the movie, and even if Len’s friend had been a heterosexual, it wouldn’t have altered his father’s decision to seek out other worlds. Yet these nods remain and, I’d argue, shouldn’t entirely go unmentioned.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).