Here’s to the Memory (1952)

Toronto Film Society presented Here’s to the Memory (1952) on Monday, August 20, 1984 in a double bill with Richard III as part of the Season 37 Summer Series, Programme 6.

Production Company: Pathe Documentary Unit.  Executive Producer: Howard Thomas.  Director: Jack Howells.  Script: Jack Howells.  Photography: George Stevens.  Editor: A. Milner-Gardner.  Set Design: Don Ashton.  Music: Alan Paul.

Panel:  Rosamund John, Norman Wooland, Veronica Hurst, James Laver, Lord Brabazon of Tara

In its beginnings, film was a documentary form, and it was not until the fabulous stories of Georges Melies (A Trip to the Moon) and the more everyday adventures of Edwin Porter (the Life of an American Fireman that it became a narrative one.  What audiences saw at the turn of the Twentieth Century was primarily recorded history, not fiction:  a train entering the station in Paris, President McKinley opening the Buffalo Exposition, Pope Leo riding in his landau.  Some history was even staged:  the blowing -up of the Maine in Havana harbor and the execution of McKinley’s assassin were solemnly recreated as truth on film, though no camera was present at the actual event.  One of the first major historical events that the motion -picture camera did record, however, was Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901, duly reproduced in this documentary of the first half of the Twentieth Century (Viewers of The Forsyte Saga in the 1960s may remember this footage intercut there, as the old Forsytes watch the passing of the era from their club windows).

This film sees those fifty years as primarily a series of royal occasions, though by no means exclusively.  We see the suffragettes, agitating merely for the vote rather than the Vice-Presidency of the United States, we see strikes, wars, advances in the conquest of the air, changing fashions in clothes (The audience reaction of 1984 may well be plus ça change, or in plain English, what else is new?)

Commenting on what may have seemed in 1952 to be an extreme case of future shock is a panel which the Monthly Film Bulletin in its review found composed of “five rather curiously chosen people,” though they seem from a thirty-year distance rather more appropriate:  three actors, Norman Wooland, who had played Horatio in Olivier’s Hamlet, and appears also in Richard III, Rosamund John, who had played in several important British films of the ’40s (The First of the Few, The Way to the Stars), and Veronica Hurst, who had just begun her career (Laughter in Paradise); James Laver, an authority on design and fashion who was also a playwright and curator of the theatrical collection at the V & A Museum, with a subsidiary interest in film; and Lord Brabazon of Tara, asked to appear not as a refugee from GWTW, but presumably because of his pioneer flying activities, and his position in Churchill’s wartime cabinet.  The panel, therefore, was well equipped to comment upon most aspects of a rapidly changing Britain over five decades; all that lets the film down is the lack of spontaneity in the script, its frequent excursions into declamation.  But at least Richard Dimbleby isn’t present!

1952 was a heady year in Britain.  The Festival of Britain had just ended, the King had just died, and there were serious projections of a new Elizabethan Age.  Britannia no longer ruled the waves, but the idea that she might again was not as unlikely as it is now.  This film was a timely review of a significant period in her history, unshadowed by thoughts of decline.

Notes by Barrie Hayne