Green Grow the Rushes (UK 1951)

I’m surprised that I didn’t know about this film (available FREE on BFI Player). I think I was aware of the production context, however. This feature was made by the ACT (Association for Cinematograph Technicians), the trades union for film production staff (now BECTU). ACT Films was set up in 1949 with support from the then President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson. Wilson recognised the importance of a British film industry and Labour have historically been more supportive than the Tories in the UK. However his handling of the dispute with the Hollywood studios in the late 1940s, which resulted in a blockade of American films, is still controversial. It’s worth pointing out that at this time there was also a national newspaper begun by trades unionists, The Daily Herald, and there were other film and theatre groups set up by working-class organisations.

The main aim of ACT Films was to ensure work for British film workers during the crisis in the industry at the end of the 1940s and this first film was not directly ‘political’. Later attempts to make more directly political films found it difficult to attract funding and to make distribution/exhibition deals – more on this later. Green Grow the Rushes is a comedy, seen by many critics and reviewers as derivative of the then highly popular ‘Ealing comedies’. An outline of the plot certainly seems to support that view. The setting is a remote area of coastal marshland in South East England (the location footage was shot on Romney Marsh and around the town of New Romney). The area has a history of smuggling and this is still in operation in the narrative with the connivance of most of the local population. The smuggled goods are mostly cases of French brandy, avoiding customs duty. The other crucial aspect of the plot is that the area believes itself to be ‘independent’ of the British crown, having been granted local sovereignty by Henry III. The community calls itself the ‘Liberty’ and has its own laws and procedures. The ‘disrupting factor’ that kicks off the narrative is a visit by three ‘Men from the Ministry’ (of Agriculture and Fisheries) who arrive to inspect the farms which seem to them to be remarkably unproductive. Inevitably, the smugglers are worried that these interlopers will discover their activities, especially when a storm washes their vessel ashore with a large consignment of brandy aboard.

The obvious references here are to Whisky Galore! (1949) and Passport to Pimlico (1949), the former focusing on whisky taken from a shipwreck, the latter based on the idea of a part of London belonging to the Dukes of Burgundy and therefore exempt from UK taxes and rationing. Rationing was still in place in the the UK in 1951. Both the Ealing films were very successful so the perceived links are not surprising. However, the film is actually an adaptation of a comic novel by Howard Clewes published in 1949. Clewes was an established writer who had eight films made from his novels or original screenplays. The Long Memory (1953) was based on another of his novels and I now realise that it has has some links to Green Grow the Rushes, being set further round the Kent coast in the Thames estuary. (However it is more a noirish thriller.)

Green Grow the Rushes seems to have at least covered its costs during its cinema release from November 1951 but it didn’t enamour itself to critics in the same way as the Ealing films. However, I enjoyed it and found it interesting in several ways. First, it has strong casting for the lead roles. Top of the bill is Roger Livesey as Captain Biddle, the smuggler. His accomplice ashore is Bob Hammond organising the fishmonger’s crew who act as cover for distributing the brandy. He’s played by a young Richard Burton. Burton is a beautiful 26 year-old and he’s given the romance possibility of making it with the wonderful Honor Blackman as Meg, the daughter of the local newspaper editor, who has just started to ply her trade locally. The rest of the cast is made up of familiar British character actors and in this sense is similar to the ensemble feel of the Ealing pictures. But just to pick out a couple of faces, future writer and director Bryan Forbes appears as a young member of Biddle’s crew and Geoffrey Keen is one of the three ‘Men from the Ministry’. Keen was a great character actor who was occasionally allowed to dominate scenes. In this film he is a sharp and intimidating Ministry official, very different to his newspaper journalist in The Long Memory.

The film is relatively short at 78 minutes and it moves along in the more than capable hands of Derek Twist. During the 1930s Twist worked with both Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell as an editor and then became part of The Archers operation with Powell and Pressburger. As might be expected given the ACT connections, the rest of the crew is similarly distinguished with Harry Waxman as cinematographer and Lambert Williamson as music composer/arranger. Williamson was another who had worked with Powell, as was Fred Pusey the art director. The film was shot on location as noted above with interiors at Elstree but it also made use of the unique camera system at Pinewood which involved a ‘travelling matte’ – a process that allowed live action to be filmed against a background using a single ‘beam-splitting’ camera. At this point in the early 1950s Rank claimed that their technology was superior to American processes. This would turn out to be another issue picked up by critics.

The problems encountered by ACT Films in getting a release for Green Grow the Rushes are well worth exploring and I’ll come back to them. First, I want to deal with the critics’ responses to the film. Richard Winnington, a well-known and celebrated critic (for the News Chronicle) writing in the Daily News, November 1951, describes the the film as “. . . a hopeless medley of British comedy gags conducted at funereal pace”. The Monthly Film Bulletin (December 1951) reviewer ‘J.H.’ is similarly not impressed suggesting that any copyist of the Ealing style has to be careful/sensitive of the dividing line between the “gay, light touch” of Ealing and the “heavy-handed quasi slapstick” which presumably is the fate of Green Grow the Rushes. ‘J.H.’ praises the cinematography but claims the travelling matte work as being “badly registered”. I have researched the coverage of Green Grow the Rushes in the newspapers and journals available online and I can summarise my reactions like this: first, the ‘popular’ press reviewers tend to like the film much more, it’s the more serious critics who are very down on it. This makes me think about the general attitudes of the more highbrow critics of the period. They were often critical of fantasy, ‘whimsy’ or virtually anything that strayed too far from ‘realism’. I’ve noted that several of the cast and crew had worked with Michael Powell and The Archers and the critics also piled into some of Powell and Pressburger’s more fantastical and playful films. It occurs to me also that while several of the character actors on display would be much better known in 1951 than they are today. Maybe it is not unreasonable to find their antics too familiar. Even so, I do think there are some important points here. Compared to Ealing films, I think Green Grow the Rushes is at times more bawdy and possibly more subversive, especially in the way in which the local fairground celebration of ‘the Liberty’ shows its distaste for the interference of the bureaucrats.

I want to conclude by running over the trials and tribulations of getting Green Grow the Rushes into cinemas. The film went into production in June 1950 with a budget of £95,000 (most coming from the National Film Finance Corporation and a smaller proportion from the Co-operative Movement). It was completed by November and handed over to British Lion as its distributor a few weeks late but under budget. It then spent a whole year in limbo before getting a London release in November 1951 and a release elsewhere in the UK in 1952/3. One of the reasons why it was given the cold shoulder was because it didn’t have ‘stars’ according to the circuits. This seems odd because Roger Livesey had been one of the stars of three of the most popular Powell and Pressburger films (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and I Know Where I’m Going). The irony is of course that now most people probably watch the film because of Richard Burton and Honor Blackman. For the circuits, ‘star’ here means an American star or one of the Brits whose image is like the American star’s.  But there is also a subtext in which the circuits and the studio distributors such as GFD/Rank or ABPC don’t want to see films made by trades unionists for purely political or industrial reasons. In Kine Weekly‘s reports the ACT technicians are referred to as ‘communists’ by some commentators.

The film’s eventual release may have been forced on distributors and exhibitors by the Board of Trade as this was in its powers, but by November 1951, the Conservatives had returned to power winning a general election in which they won most seats despite Labour gaining most votes overall. I haven’t managed to find the evidence of how the release of Green Grow the Rushes actually happened but ACT Films went on to make a further 23 films, but none ‘political’. It’s also worth noting that another film that caused the distributors and exhibitors to feel threatened was Chance of a Lifetime, a satire on industrial relations produced, co-written, directed by and starring Bernard Miles, also in 1950. Again it had to be forced on the distributors. It was a different kind of film and deserves its own post. The early 1950s is often dismissed as a dull period in British Cinema but there was actually a lot going on. Green Grow the Rushes is free on BFI Player and is also streaming on Criterion in the US, I think. If you know the folk song with the similar title, I’ll just note that the ‘Lily-whites’ of the song have a different meaning in the film.