Pregled posta

Marketing

I am here, again, to smooth things out after my e mail last week, only to find those I want to see are all away. And so I find myself in an office here in gloomy Dunkerque, doing the same job I do in Ramsgate. It all seems a bit mad, but I am getting to speak to people face to face and listen to their problems and hear their side of the story and why the system, in their view, does not work.

I don’t know enough to decide who is to blame, even if there is someone to blame, but the system is certainly not working here, which is something that should not have been allowed to continue. But it has, and we are here to pick up the pieces and make order from chaos.

As is usual on a British bank holiday, the weather was pretty bad, with just Sunday good enough for going out photographing stuff; castles, trains and flowers, etc.

Friday night we went down onto the cliffs to watch the full moon rise; it was chilly, but the lights of Calais shone over the Channel, and ferries zipped across. We sat down and waited for moonrise, and as soon as the dark red ball rose, it went behind the clouds and so no good pictures to be taken. So it goes, so it goes.

We went back home, and I had a whisky to warm my blood and then we called it a night.

Saturday dawned grey and drizzly; we went into town for breakfast and then I went to have my mop of hair tamed, which involves sitting listening to the barbers cracking wisecracks and giving their view on the world. It passes a morning, and I look half presentable.
The forecasted rain did show up in the afternoon, and I settled down to watch the penultimate game of the season; another play-off. I should have cared more than I did, but I found myself nodding off.

Sunday was a much different affair, and we decided to head to the north and west of the county, to visit yet another castle and gardens. Scotney Castle is in fact two castles, a broken down ruin set in a moat, and a Victorian house overlooking it. With many rhododendrons and other spring plants in flower in the large gardens.
We arrived an hour after opening, and already it was filing up with tourists and the curious. The old castle was very picturesque indeed, all tumbledown walls and ivy covered towers; I snapped away. The spring flowers were reflected in the moat, ducks and lilies broke up the reflections; it was very pleasant I have to say.
We went round the new house, it was full of grand paintings and fine clothes, with the mundane mixed in to show it was until recently a home. An old TV, a small domestic stove beside an ancient Aga copies of “Your Cat” magazine mixing it with the first editions in the library.

It was lunchtime, and instead of eating in the expensive National Trust restaurant, we headed out into Tunbridge Wells to find something cheaper and more filling. And to find the Spa Valley Railway, as I knew there were smoke breathing locomotives to be seen there.

Opposite the station, in the old station building in fact, was an American West themed restaurant which had fine smells coming from it. We checked the times of the trains and found we had nearly two hours and so a nice leisurely meal lay ahead. In a surprise move, they only sold been in half pints or two pints, and so I had two halves, which make very nearly a pint, and Jools ordered BBQ ribs and me a ranch burger. With curly fries. And onion rings. Lots of onion rigs.

And then out into the steamy world of preserved railways, me snapping away at rusting hulks of locos of years gone by. Until our little train came in, and we climbed into the not-so-old carriage and into the wonderfully soft seats. And in due course we puffed away and chugged through the glorious spring fields of the Kentish countryside. The line ended at a neat little station in a cutting, and we waiting while the little engine ran round to the other end of the train so to do the reverse trip.
The middle three carriages had a wedding party going on, with the reception carrying on at a line side hotel, served by the line at a small halt. And at the halt guests got on and off, with just the bride and a few friends left on the train, until the journey back when they could get off. Or not.

We got off at the end of the line and headed back east; stopping off at a village on one of the highest points of the county, with the church at the highest point of the town. And the tower was open. The view from Goudhurst church was magnificent, as the spring sunshine cast green shapes over the high land of the Kentish Weald; scattered around were oasthouses, churches and many farms; all in all a glorious English scene. Another glorious scene was inside the bar of the pub, where we had a fortifying drink before heading back in the car and home.

Monday was all damp and grey again, and so we did go for a walk along the cliffs to spot some spring orchids and other spring beauties, before giving up as the drizzle turned to rain, and so we headed home to watch the rain fall through the windo

Bobby Henrey was born in France in June, 1939, and was brought up in both France and England and so was not only bi-lingual, but spoke English with a French accent. This was soon to stand him in good stead at the age eight in 1947, when the great director Carol Reed was looking for the right boy to play Phillipe in his new film The Fallen Idol. By chance, Sir Alexander Korda, head of London Films, based at Shepperton Studios, where the film was to be made, had seen a photo of Bobby on the dust jacket of a book entitled A Village in Piccadilly, written by Bobby’s parents, who were writers and showed the photo to Carol Reed, who said that the boy looked exactly how he imagined Phillipe to be. He contacted Bobby’s parents, Robert and Madeleine Henrey and asked them if they would allow Bobby to star in a film that was tentatively titled The Lost Illusion. At first, the boy’s mother was against it, but his father thought it would be a good experience for the boy.

At the time, Bobby was having a holiday on his maternal grandmother’s farm in Normandy, so Korda arranged, at no expense to the Henrey family, for a private plane to be sent out to pick up Bobby and bring him to London for a screen test and then be returned to Normandy the same day. This was done and both Korda and Reed were impressed with the result. Bobby was just what Reed had been looking for. He didn’t want a professional child actor who had been to stage school and picked up bad acting habits there, he wanted a boy who had never acted before and whom he could coax into giving a completely natural performance.

In the film, which author Grahame Greene had adapted from his own short story, The Basement Room, Bobby was to play Phillipe, the young son of the French ambassador to London, who lived in a huge embassy in Belgrave Square. Phillipe is a lonely boy who has no playmates of his own age, but idolises the embassy’s Butler, Baines (Sir Ralph Richardson) who regales the boy with stories of his past heroic exploits in Africa, putting down native uprisings single handed and so on. In reality and unknown to Phillipe, Baines has never been to Africa. When, through a chain of circumstances, Phillipe comes to believe that Baines has murdered his shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel), so that he will be free to be with the girl he loves (Michele Morgan), he tells lies to the police in an attempt to save his hero Baines from the gallows. But his lies only serve to make things worse for Baines.

All the exterior location scenes were filmed first. The first scene to be filmed, on Wednesday, September 17th, 1947, was Bobby running across the road outside the embassy as he runs after Baines. The filming took an incredible eight months...a long time by the standards of the day...and eventually cost a staggering ?400,000...during which Carol, a man of infinite patience with children and child actors, persevered with Bobby to the extent that he coaxed out of him the truly amazing and wonderful performance you see on the film. He did this by acting out the boy's part in front of him and then getting Bobby to mimick him. This, together with many takes of scenes involving the boy and his dialogue until the boy got it just how Carol Reed wanted it, paid off handsomely.

Three scenes among many really good ones in the film are standouts. One is where Mrs Baines, having found out where Phillipe was hiding MacGregor, his small pet grass snake that he adores, comes down the kitchen stairs with his pet wrapped up in newspaper and, just as Phillipe, not knowing what she has wrapped up in the paper, begins to climb the stairs with his supper tray in his hands, he tells her: "I'm sorry I said I hated you." "That's alright", says Mrs Baines, coldly and without looking at him as she opens up the stove and throws the parcel into the flames, incinerating poor MacGregor alive. You can't have a more explicit example of good and evil in the same scene than that. Another is where a tearful Philippe is being comforted by Ralph Richardson after discovering that MacGregor is dead and tells the boy that the next day, they will put up a little memorial to MacGregor in the garden with an inscription on it and Phillipe says, tearfully: "MacGregor...killed by Mrs Baines...and the date."

And last, but not least, the scene where he desperately tries to get the police to listen to him in the hope that by telling the truth, he can save his beloved Baines from the gallows and the police completely ignore him is almost too heartbreaking to watch and to listen to. It makes me feel so concerned for this desperate little boy, who still loves Baines even after he's discovered that all Baines' stories about his past heroics in Africa were all lies. No film made before it had featured such a scene involving a young boy and it hasn't been done since, either. It's unique in the history of the cinema.

Sir Alexander Korda was so impressed with Bobby's performance in The Fall