Reed All About It… August 6, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, British Film, Crime / Noir / Thriller , 3 commentsA Kid For Two Farthings (1955)
Carol Reed’s A Kid For Two Farthings tends to divide opinion. There are those that see it as a frankly soppy piece of contemporary nostalgia, filled with stereotypical characters, who inhabit a mythical, rose-tinted cityscape. And there are others who see a film with a great big heart, an extraordinary evocation, from Wolf Mankowitz’s novel and screenplay, of the post-war East End of London. I’m a cynic by nature, but, gentle reader, I fall unashamedly into the camp of the latter.
As if it wasn’t already obvious from Odd Man Out, The Third Man, Oliver! and The Fallen Idol, A Kid For Two Farthings is further evidence that Reed is a wonderful director of children, and in the lead as ‘Joe’, Jonathan Ashmore gives a stupendous performance - his only film performance - a boy who believes utterly in the magical powers of his pet ‘unicorn’, the eponymous pocket money purchased one-horned animal of the title.
Living above an impoverished tailor’s shop with his careworn mother, Joanna (Celia Johnson), Joe spends his days weaving between market stalls, chatting amiably with the spivs and the hawkers, beguiling kindly shop owners or staring wide-eyed at the wrestlers who bounce off each others bloated muscles in the gym. As in The Fallen Idol, we see the film unfold mostly from this innocent’s perspective, our perceptions tuned to his; the sights and incredible cacophony of the East End markets, the vivid colours that stand out midst the grimy, slum-like, post-war surroundings, the larger than life, almost Runyon-esque, characters. And a life-affirming belief, not only in magic - or the merest possibility that it exists - but that things can only get better.
Joe is told by the benign Jewish tailor Mr Kandinsky (David Kossoff - who else?), that unicorns exist and grant their owners wishes. When Joe buys a sickly goat with a single twisted horn, his childish innocence convinces him that his ‘unicorn’ will change life for the better not only for himself but also for those around him.
Woven into this tale we have body-builder Sam (Joe Robinson) and Sonia (the truly gorgeous Diana Dors), seemingly doomed never to name the day, ‘Ice’ Berg (Sid James), purveyor of dodgy diamond rings, ‘Python’ Macklin (played with impressive relish by former World Heavyweight Champ Primo Carnera), the bad-guy wrestler determind to get Sonia into his patented ‘Python grip’.
Home Vision’s US R1 DVD is open matte (it was most likely projected at 1.66:1), but the Technicolor cinematography of A.S. Bates is, if not perfectly presented, sometimes eye wateringly beautiful. Benjemin Frankel’s score is quite spare, most of the ‘music’ provided by the location, the occasional radio or record playing in the background, but the main theme wafts in and out played on an old gramophone wheeled around the East End on a pram by a wandering tramp (Joseph - father of Frances - Tomelty), another touch of whimsy, one of many in this wholly whimsical film.
It’s just one, I think, of the interesting aspects of a fascinating production that’s packed with familiar faces; as well as the aforementioned, the cast boasts such familiar faces as Brenda De Banzie, Irene Handel, Danny Green and Sid Tafler.
Where there is life, there is hope; it’s not an unwelcome message even in this most determinedly optimistic tale (especially in these determinedly pessimistic times). And while not everyone ends with their wishes fulfilled, A Kid For Two Farthings, tells us, while there is a glimmer of hope, to hang on tight to our dreams.
There are no extras on the R1 disc, but it’s available quite cheaply. A Kid For Two Farthings is also available in the UK, but from public domain specialists Orbit Media so I cannot vouch for the quality. However, it will be part of what looks like to be a super Diana Dors Collection from ITV DVD released this month in the UK, which also includes Good Time Girl (1948), The Calendar (1948), Oliver Twist (1948), It’s Not Cricket (1949), Diamond City (1949), A Boy, A Girl and a Bike (1949), As Long as They’re Happy (1955), and Three for All (1975). The set is completed by a couple of documentaries from the Granada Ventures catalogue: The Blonde Bombshell, and Who Got Diana Dors’ Millions?
The Man Between (1953)
If you’re searching for a theme that connects Carol Reed’s sublime Odd Man Out, The Third Man and The Man Between, then, I suppose, ‘men on the run’ is the most obvious. But while James Mason’s Johnny McQueen is a doomed idealist, crucified by accident and circumstance, and Orson Welles Harry Lime is an utterly charming, yet chilling moral vacuum, in The Man Between Mason’s Ivo Kern is the post-conflict everyman for whom the start of the war brought an abrupt end to everything he held dear. Though Ivo is German, his fate was mirrored by millions of others round the globe - the war brought an end to the former lawyer’s life of easy rationality and social order; it shattered his belief in basic justice and humanity. Ivo is, simply, a hybrid of the first two characters. And all of them are ultimately doomed by love.
Critics saw The Man Between as a somehow failed The Third Man, the two sharing blasted post-war backdrops and a protagonist who ghosts between the West and the netherworld of a Soviet controlled sector. Here it’s Berlin rather than Vienna, but the similarities do the film a disservice; Ivo is no Harry, he’s no serial user of friends and lovers, a criminal from cradle to grave. Ivo is damaged goods, a man who served his country at huge personal cost, who cannot accept that even broken by an overwhelming burden of guilt, he is still capable of an altruistic act. As Kerns Mason is, of course, typically brilliant.
Claire Bloom is also superb as the resourceful Susanne Mallinson, the girl who gets unwittingly caught up in Ivo’s world of gangsters and political thugs when she visits her Army medico brother Martin (Geoffrey Toone) and his wife Bettina (Hidegard Knef). When Susanne suspects Bettina of an affair with the charming Ivo, she can’t imagine that she’ll become the kidnapped pawn in a plan to capture allied spy Olaf Kastner (Ernst Schröder). With the pieces moving swiftly around the board in Soviet East Berlin, can Ivo get Susanne safely back to the West?
Having earlier mentioned Reed and children, it would be remiss of me not to spotlight Dieter Krause as the young look-out, ‘Horst’ (kitted out, deliberately, to resemble the all-American ’kid down the block’), and, ironically, it is this child’s love for Ivo as much as the blossoming relationship between Susanne and the German, that precipitates tragedy.
The Man Between is beautifully scripted by Harry Kurnitz and an uncredited Eric Linklater from Walter Ebert’s story, with Mason given some delightfully spry one-liners - ‘The Germans always had to learn languages - the army never knew where it would be going next’. It might not be quite as sharp as Greene (but then who is?), and it suffers the tricky problem of having a multi-lingual cast of characters. Reed solves the problem of Germans speaking to Germans by first having them speak in their mother tongue then switching abruptly to English, a solution I never find satisfying. I missed Robert Krasker’s signature stark cinematography, but that doesn’t mean to say Desmond Dickinson doesn’t do a fine, if workmanlike, job, and he’s given lots of opportunity as Ivo and Susanne dodge through Berlin’s pock-marked nightime landscape. There’s an atypical John Addison score, a decadent clarinet sounding out the theme for a Berlin, the ‘city between’, that is caught in a tug-of-war - the acceptable face of capitalism pulling harder than granite hearted communism.
The Man Between is part of Optimum’s excellent UK R2 James Mason: Screen Icon Collection. There’s an oddity inasmuch as it’s presented in anamorphic 1.66:1, and I’m almost certain this 1953 film was framed for Academy; the German R2, I am told, is presented full frame. Wide, The Man Between is a little tight and there are too many shots that leave tops of the actors heads out of the top of the frame. It may be that it’s one of those films that was indeed shown wide, as the widescreen boom took hold, but I’m not entirely convinced it was shot that way. In fact, I’m nigh on certain it wasn’t. The good news is that it’s decent transfer with nice contrast and very few marks or blemishes. The only audio track is English mono, which is good, and there are no subtitles or extras of any kind.
The third link, I suppose, between the three Reed films mentioned in this review, is the sense of despair and futility as the end credits roll, a sharp contrast to the reaction to A Kid For Two Farthings, but strangely, somehow, not a million miles from it. It might be something in the English psyche that I can see even that as a positive reaction, and I ache to put myself through it again, and again.
P.S…
Just a quick word on the rest of the titles that make up Optimum’s James Mason: Screen Icon Collection which is in the usual space saving folding digipack arragement typical of this series. I’ve had a quick look at the rest of the titles and it’s interesting to note that three of the discs precisely replicate - transfers, extras, disc art and all - the extant versions; 5 Fingers, currently available from Optimum, plus Network’s The Man in Grey and the sublime, the spectacular (I do like it…) Odd Man Out. Only Network’s rather nicely put together booket, Soldier in The Snow, from that title is missing.
Ealing’s The Bells Go Down is a fair transfer, a little grainy, some flecking here and there, and like The Man Between, no extras whatsoever. There’s a bigger budget at play, and a recognisable cast of star names, but, as a visceral document of London’s Firefighters during the Blitz it can’t hold a candle (no pun intended) to the same year’s I Was A Fireman (aka Fires Were Started) from Humphrey Jennings. More on that some other time, hopefully.