It’s in Hobson’s Choice that De Banzie and Mills effect one of the warmest and most real accounts of love and marriage ever put on film. Of many effortlessly achieved moments, perhaps it’s the morning after the wedding night we remember best: all nervousness gone, Will and Maggie meet in the kitchen, where he grasps his new bride around the waist and, in awed admiration, utters the now rarely used, once familiar Lancashire phrase, “By gum!”
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A man and woman meet in the back of a limousine. Their marriage is in trouble, but she’s not nearly as upset by his many girlfriends as by his growing drug problem. Making a last attempt to get him into rehab, she tells him she’s found a really good clinic; but, of course, it’s down to him; and he has to see himself making the change before he can do it for real. As shown by this final appeal to his imagination, she seems to know she’s talking to a highly creative artist.
The couple happens to be Priscilla and Elvis Presley, and, sadly, we don’t need suspicious minds to know that the marriage is already dead.
The scene is longer than most in Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022), which has its own significance, quick-fire montage previously having set the tone: life really is short – especially, it seems, for eternally young superstars.
A lot of British teenagers already knew that, whoever he was, “Colonel Parker” was a bad influence on an artist barely out of his own teens. Exactly how we knew is mysterious, since there was little in-depth information around in the mid-1950s. But after “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog,” many of us identified with everything – real or imagined – about Elvis.
Magical as it was – me and Tony, playing and replaying the shellac “Hound Dog” to new heights of mystical hissiness – such deathless unity would soon be mown down by the machinegun drumming of Time. Yet Luhrmann – with help from, among others, Tom Hanks (Parker), Austin Butler (Elvis), and Olivia De Jonge (Priscilla) – recalls some of our first excursions into a world not yet known as pop culture. As a dubious extra – and more than revisiting the frustrations of Youth with Age – the film also shows vistas of a bigger territory, where the hapless emotional frailty of humankind puts on one of its more disturbing shows.
In its Parker/Presley relationship, Elvis uncovers twin souls, whose eye-gouging codependency would not be out of place in a Bronte novel. Here, it’s a physical jolt to see the “Colonel” claiming indivisible oneness with his “boy.” And while we know this is based on Parker’s need to fund his own terminal gambling addiction, Hanks wrings every ounce of Kathy-and-Heathcliff out of at least one astonishing scene.
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At this point we remember that Gothic Horror – if not Gothic Romance – shares the common suspicion that marriage, of any kind, is no guarantee of everlasting bliss.
Martin Scorsese consistently leans into this psychic territory; and, though he brings other shadings to his work, it often centres on unhappy couples. Most recently, in Killers of the Flower Moon, (2023), albeit in a muddy stream of other vicious entanglements, we find: Lily Gladstone/Mollie Burkhart (well-educated Osage Indian) and Leonardo DiCaprio/Ernest Burkhart (poorly educated White).
Ernest is being steadily worked on by Robert De Niro/’Uncle” William Hale to poison his wealthy diabetic wife for her inheritance. And when this is not unwatchably bleak, its views of human weakness are all too persuasively complex.
Lily Gladstone has much weight to bear, in terms of screen time and as the film’s spiritual focus. “Listen to the rain,” she tells her fidgety husband at the evening dinner table. Indeed, Gladstone’s spellbinding performance might prove the one thing that saves a long and meandering edit from future oblivion.
This edit was, as usual, the product of Scorsese himself and long-time collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker – she who began her editing career as the young American wife of Michael Powell.
Made in England; The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024) is Scorsese’s most recent documentary, faithfully depicting a lifelong quest: to follow in his own career the revered hero of his adolescence, Michael Powell. It’s an improbable tale: youthful Italian New Yorker channelling middle-aged, not particularly urbane Englishman. Questioned about not talking much to Powell when the latter was living – at Scorsese’s invitation – in America, he explains it as yet another example of sheer awe on his part.
Here perhaps we’ve stumbled on what connects two ostensibly very different inner worlds. On the one hand: Scorsese’s frequent, often indirect allusions to our moral vulnerability; then, Powell’s somewhat clearer references, in film after film, to an elusive, always-threatened spirituality. For Powell’s generation – despite or because of two world wars – there is always something still out there in Nature.
Gone to Earth
The clearest example of this is Gone to Earth (1950), which pits inanimate and animate nature in a confused and confusing death struggle. With its well-cast leads, the film sticks closely to the 1920s novel by Mary Webb, in which Powell unearths more layers than are usually found in a bodice ripper. Though copies are hard to find, with its dense colour photography and equally strong musical soundtrack, Powell/Scorsese affinities are only better shown in one other, rather more famous, film.
Scorsese was still a boy when he first “discovered” The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948), a film which in postwar Britain had evoked little response. Though bravely pioneering, this deep dive into the unfamiliar world of ballet seemed set for equally deep obscurity. Then, seeking to recoup its losses, this most Expressionist of films crossed the Atlantic, finding a spiritual – and commercial – home in New York, where abstract expressionism had just been born.
Meanwhile, asthmatic teenager Scorsese watched The Red Shoes over and over on the family’s black-and-white TV(!). And though “terrified” – especially, perhaps, by hints of suicidal despair at the very centre of art-making – Scorsese began to see himself not as would-be priest but as a maker of films.
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For refuge, I move swiftly from America, then or now, to the bomb sites of postwar Britain and one of my all-time-favourite films. Starting as a successful but routine stage comedy, Hobson’s Choice (1954) was made by the young David Lean before his penchant for grand scale risked clouding an otherwise sure eye for great acting.
Lean’s telegram begging John Mills to play Will Mossop tells us a lot about British cinema at the time: overreliant on war films and particularly reliant on believably “ordinary” actors to play war heroes.
It also reveals an extraordinary artistic leap of faith: could Mills really deliver on his biggest-yet departure from “type’? Working with Lean on Great Expectations (1946), he had already shown more than a little talent for classical roles; and there’s no doubting that this previous partnership was in Lean’s mind. The History of Mr Polly (Anthony Pellissier, 1949) certainly had its admirers, even if the comic talents of John Mills look a touch lonely here. But in Hobson’s Choice there is no conventional safe haven in the cosy home counties of southern England to help seal the deal.
It’s still the Edwardian era, but we’re now in the gritty industrial north of England. Working below stairs in the high street shop owned by Henry Horatio Hobson (Charles Laughton), Will Mossop (John Mills) is a maker of bespoke shoes. Will, however, sees himself, if at all, as a simple cobbler.
Conscious that her two younger sisters are busy finding husbands, Hobson’s eldest daughter Maggie (Brenda de Banzie) takes a shine to her alcoholic father’s unacknowledged but nonetheless indispensable mainstay of his workforce. Ignited by Maggie’s faith, the film soon glows from every notch code with respect for and belief in Will’s craftsmanship.
Will Mossop, meanwhile, still has no idea of his professional or romantic potential. But this doesn’t deter Maggie, whose determination to marry and set up a business partnership with Will, however awkwardly things go at first, gradually becomes a joint destiny.
It’s here that De Banzie and Mills effect one of the warmest and most real accounts of love and marriage ever put on film. Of many effortlessly achieved moments, perhaps it’s the morning after the wedding night we remember best: all nervousness gone, Will and Maggie meet in the kitchen, where he grasps his new bride around the waist and, in awed admiration, utters the now rarely used, once familiar Lancashire phrase, “By gum!”
Maggie quickly breaks away, for the most part wordlessly implying that they wouldn’t have many shoes to sell this way, however beautifully made!
The crystal-clear black-and-white studio photography, typical of Lean’s first period – along with the location shots of Peel Park, Salford, so evocative of L. S. Lowry – remove any suspicions that this is just another worm-that-turns story. And for those who still crave nightmarish visions, Hobson’s experience of delirium tremens – played with unusually touching vulnerability by Charles Laughton – is both drily humorous and terrifyingly surreal.
But it is the power of achingly understated acting that in Hobson’s Choice carries all before it. Indeed, if there is a consistent theme in the films discussed here, I hope I’ve persuaded the reader as well as myself that totally believable performance art is as near as it ever gets.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the films discussed.
