The Good Die Young (UK 1954)

This is an intriguing film. It’s a hybrid in two different ways. Firstly, it’s a genre mix and secondly it’s an example of a British production seemingly targeting both an international and a domestic market. Add to this, the title is misleading. Some of the leading characters are ‘good’ but others are not – just as most are not particularly ‘young’. The narrative is constructed as a genre film but also has elements of social realism. The cast is very strong in terms of star players and familiar character actors. Overall it is certainly entertaining and, in its last section, exciting.

The production company involved here is Remus Films which alongside Romulus Films and the distributor IFD (Independent Film Producers) was the creation of the Woolf brothers, James and John, sons of C. M. Woolf, a major figure in British cinema in the 1930s as a distributor first with Gaumont British and then as founder of General Film Distributors. Both young men were sent to Eton and they embarked on their own film careers with Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) with Ava Gardner and James Mason and The African Queen (1952), bringing John Huston, Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart to London. They quickly became major figures in the British film industry, looking to make more outgoing, adventurous pictures. The Good Die Young was a novel written by a successful Hollywood scriptwriter Richard Macaulay. It too would utilise American stars, but this time in a setting transposed to London. It was quite common in the early 1950s to find American stars in British productions. There were two reasons for this. One was the belief that British audiences needed to see American stars in British films to make the films more attractive. The other was that because of the anti-communist witch hunt and the blacklist in the US there were more American writers, directors and actors keen to work in the UK.

The film is described in several publications and on websites as a film noir. There were films noirs made in the British film industry in the late 1940s and they shared the international visual mode of low-key lighting. They also shared with Hollywood noirs some of the aspects of men returning from the war with problems. But they also had more local concerns about the black market and the rise of the spiv in the austerity period of the immediate post-war. I wouldn’t place this film as primarily a noir. Apart from the final chase sequence across the railway tracks, copied perhaps from earlier films such as It Always Rains on Sunday (UK 1947), most of this film lacks the disturbed mise en scène and low-key lighting of a typical noir. Instead I’d label it as a crime melodrama but I do recognise that there are characters that fit the noir male figure of the wartime hero ‘gone bad’ or finding contemporary employment prospects problematic. There is an element of the mystery or ‘chance’ narrative in the plot outline which sees four male characters coming together, each with a money problem as well as a wife or partner who has placed them (not necessarily deliberately) in a difficult situation. None of the men have been involved in direct criminal activity before.

The narrative begins with a device which offers us a key point in the closing sequence: four men in a car who barely know each other are about to rob a Central Post Office where a large amount of used currency has been collected for disposal. We then flash back to see how the men met and set up this raid. The ‘leader’ is ‘Rave’, a nickname for Miles Ravenscroft (Laurence Harvey), a supposed war hero who has become a playboy snaring a wealthy wife (Margaret Leighton) and indulging a gambling habit alongside various affairs. Now he faces the collapse of these arrangements. Stanley Baker plays Mike, a boxer forced to retire because of an injured hand. His wife has given his savings to her brother in trouble. John Ireland is Eddie a USAAF sergeant whose film star wife Denise (Gloria Grahame) has cuckolded him and he’s deserted his posting. Richard Basehart is Joe an ex-GI back from Korea with Joan Collins as his young wife Mary and he needs money to take her back to the US, away from her controlling mother. The long flashback is delivered like an ‘anthology’ or ‘omnibus’ narrative so that we learn about each of the men’s stories in more detail. The final section is then the robbery and its aftermath.

The film is directed by Lewis Gilbert who had a long and successful career in mainstream British cinema covering war films, comedies, spy films and other genres from the late 1940s up to the early 2000s. (In 1953 he had directed the young Joan Collins in Cosh Boy.) The music is by Georges Auric and photography by Jack Asher who often worked with Gilbert. The film was made at Shepperton but includes extensive location footage around Farringdon and Barbican Underground stations and Waterloo Station among other familiar sites. There appear to have been odd production decisions because of objections by the BBFC. The differences between British and American censors often caused problems at this time (the British were worried about violence and the Americans were more concerned about sex). In the US the ‘heist’ plot was arguably more important but was somewhat undermined by the choice of a Post Office to rob. The Blu-ray released by the BFI includes what is described as the ‘international’ version of the film, including elements deemed as ‘anti-establishment’. I’m not sure which version I’ve seen but then, I’m also not sure how such elements would be distinguishable today.

The contemporary critics didn’t like the film much but the British reviews recognised that the film might sell well. Gilbert appeared to have been happy with its performance at both the UK and US box offices. I think the film does work because of Gilbert’s lively direction and a strong cast. The three Hollywood imports are all good. They are quite distinctive actors and with backgrounds in some good quality lower budget pictures were presumably quite comfortable on a British production. Gloria Grahame would return a year later to appear in The Man Who Never Was (UK 1955).

I’m not sure what I make of the film. There are two contrasting sets of elements across the whole film. One is the differences in the British actors’ presentations. Harvey revels in his role as a quite slimy creature, whereas Stanley Baker plays as if in a realist role. Both actors are in the early stages of their careers. Harvey would go on to become a major star following the success of Room at the Top in 1958. In this film he is listed as the lead above Freda Jackson and Rene Ray who play Joan Collins’ mother and Stanley Baker’s wife respectively. In the 1952 film Women of Twilight, Jackson and Ray were the leads and Harvey a supporting player. Stanley Baker was from the same Welsh acting background as Richard Burton who was only a few years older but came to prominence much earlier. Baker would make his first big impact as the lead in Hell Drivers (1957). His persona was that of the serious tough guy, here working well against Harvey’s smoothness and sleaze. In a similar way there is a contrast in the film between the studio sets and the night-time location work. I found the final section of the film with the heist and the subsequent chase exciting but I think I was more impressed by the melodrama which preceded it.

The film was intended to be released in the new widescreen ratio of 1.66:1 which was achieved simply by masking on the standard Academy ratio negative of 1.37:1 and then printing the result for projection. It is another indication of the international aims of the production. The new, slightly wider ratio was a stop-gap in the US for thos studios which didn’t immediately switch to Fox’s anamorphic 2.55:1 in 1954. In the UK and other European industries 1.66:1 lasted much longer. As well as the BFI Blu-ray and DVD, this film is often screened on British TV and it is available to stream from both Apple and Amazon.

(I’d forgotten that we carried an earlier posting on this film by Nick Lacey. You can read it here: The Good Die Young)