Get Hunter… The Rumour (1970)

This was a very important film for me, it got me into terrible trouble with Fleet Street…

Mike Hodges, BFI 2022.

Wikipedia might well have Mike Hodges making his feature film debut with the colossal Get Carter (1971) but here he is a year earlier making not one but two interesting feature length efforts for ITV Playhouse which hinted at the themes and the edginess his masterwork would soon contain. ITV Playhouse was an anthology series that ran from 1967 to 1983 and featured original ideas from the likes of Dennis Potter as well as Hodges who was working mainly in television production at the time as he moved into direction. He’d already tried one screenplay for Armchair Theatre and Suspect (1969) then Rumour (1970), made for Thames Television, helped launch Euston Films who would produce The Sweeney, Minder and many more.

In a 2021 interview with the BFI, the director said The Rumour had been instrumental in getting him the directing job for Get Carter having impressed not just that film’s producer, Michael Klinger, but also another ground-breaking filmmaker:

It was experimental filmmaking, in many ways, by the standards at the time… Malcolm McDowell was working with Stanley Kubrick, and Stanley saw it and came in the next morning when they were shooting… Clockwork Orange. He said to Malcolm that he’d just seen this film and he was very impressed by it… You have to be rather arrogant to think like this, but Malcolm told me that Stanley really thought it was a great film. 

It's true that The Rumour has an edge that is more cinematic than its TV origins and, not knowing of its background, I was surprised when an ad-break popped up. Hodges camera is tight to the action and holding his protagonist firmly centre stage even through the passers-by at Euston Station, his car windscreen, foliage and other ambient foreground materials. It creates the impression of Hunter at the heart of the story but also pushing himself forward no matter the risks… this is his journalistic instinct being revived and his time to face the music after too long in his discomfort zone the Fleet Street hack he’d probably always feared he would become.

The character is propelled through the film in the same irresistible way as Carter on his quest, and as cynical tabloid showbiz journo Sam Hunter (Michael Coles) starts the film speaking into his Dictaphone as he drives his pink 1950 Cadillac Fleetwood 75 Imperial Sedan towards the Blackwall Tunnel. This image is repeated over and over throughout the film driving us onwards until we eventually catch up with the full sequence and its significance is revealed. It’s a clever device and chilling in its way.

After this opening we see the Cadillac coming across the raised section at the A40 – the Westway Marylebone Flyover - then turn off the Marylebone Road down to Euston – via Camden (sadly there’s no Reel Streets breakdown at this stage!) – where he is due for a 2:00 PM meeting. All of this is soundtracked by the Moody Blues singing The Best Way to Travel from the album In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) … yesterday’s psychedelia already yellowing and curled up like so much tabloid pages with Hunter’s trade taking his readers on a magical mystery tour every day.

And you can fly

High as a kite if you want to

Faster than light if you want to

Speeding through the universe

Thinking is the best way to travel…

In Euston, he’s watched by two shifty looking men as he goes to the John Menzies in the central part of the concourse and glances at the sports headlines on the back pages of the Evening Standard where news is to be found of Alloway Lad winning the Brighton Cup – John Hayward riding the horse to success on 9^th August 1969. The front page announces that there’s “a serious crime every 25 seconds…” “Broken Britain” eh? We already have the Raymond Chandler vibe and the sense that there are plans already in motion.

Michael Coles and Vivienne Chandler

A young woman enters the station at dead-on time, Liza Curtis (Vivienne Chandler) and, as she and Sam sit down for a drink one of the men takes photographs, the black and white images clicking into view, another story in the making. She reveals that she is, as they used to say, a high-class call girl and that there are photographs of her and an MP, Julian Crawford (Jim Delaney), as well as others in compromising positions, which are being used to blackmail Crawford is being blackmailed. She wants out and to sell her story to Hunter’s paper, as king for £50,000 which, he splutters, they wouldn’t pay her even if she was the virgin Mary.

Probably your kind of journalism isn’t worth censoring, try writing the truth about something worthwhile Mr Hunter! You may get a surprise.

Next up for Sam is a reception for a new book launch, The Great Conspiracy from Pulitzer Prize winner Professor Arthur Kook (David Cargill) at Madame Tussaud’s. An inebriated Sam dismisses the “phoney American instant intellectuals” and his thesis which he hasn’t even read but is soon put in his place after accusing the Professor’s “research” as a means to make money.

Hidges often shoots his characters framed in their surroundings

After getting a call to visit Liza urgently, Sam arrives at her Mayfair flat where, once again the two men in black are outside as events are soundtracked by Bach’s Toccata in Fugue. Inside the flat Sam finds Liza has been suffocated in plastic with the radio blurting out Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in counterpoint to the horror in front of him. He takes her notebook and the key to a Euston safety deposit box and makes good his escape. His next stop is the premier of The Battle of Britain (released on 15^th September for those keeping track of the filming sequence…) in which we again here his glib Fleet Street copy for the event… again counterpoint, as the connection between his reality at that point and the world-weary ligger couldn’t be bigger. He phones the police anonymously.

Awaken by a call about the murder at 4:00AM, Sam feigns ignorance as he’s told that she died of an overdose… clearly this was not the case, something is not adding up despite his headline “Call Girl Suicide Shock”. He sneaks into the apartment but gets thrown out by the police who reiterate the cause of death, although he spots the name tag that he had found on the corpse.

I tell you what, rumours hurt people… a lethal weapon, unfortunately Fleet Street thrive on it.

One of the watchers...

There’s further suspicion when, having collected the photographs from Euston, Sam tries to get his editor Mike Weston (James Donnelly) interested but the possibility of organised and influential opposition makes him wary. Sam gets agreement to follow up on leads and heads off to interview the deceased’s mother… It’s probably no coincidence that Mike’s an Aussie and that he gets complained about later by one of the old guard, as a certain Rupert Murdoch had just acquired the News of the World, followed closely by The Sun.

As my car slithered to a halt outside the peeling door, urchins and children crowded round me asking for money. This is Gangland. Here the notorious Kray brothers operated. Here Diana Webb, alias Lisa Curtis grew up. Here I found her 46-year-old mother… I approached the door and was fearful of the tragic story it would open up to me…”

Hodges punctuates the film with Hunter’s composing his copy on his dictaphone and the disconnection between his words and the actually shows not only the dubious art of the gutter journalist but also the sad realities that it feeds off, no more so when he goes to visit the dead woman’s mother who he skilfully manipulates to find out as much information as possible. The total absence of any “street urchins” when his car pulls up is one of the film’s most telling moments. Hunter is telling tales but he’s also moving back to being a journalist and has found a story that needs uncovering.

Sam and Betty (Joyce Blair, sister of Lionel...)

He goes to Liza’s old workplaces, a strip joint run by old flame Betty Jacobs (Joyce Blair) and then a hostess bar where he “interviews” Sally (Clovissa Newcombe) a friend of hers and we get to see an artiste performing (Jill Chartell billed as a belly dancer). The men in black follow him each step of the way as do the police who break into his flat and, as he calls Mike to help, we see that his boss is sleeping with his wife Anne (Colette O'Neil). There are so many twists and turns, the pace is breathless and you’re constantly trying to second guess as we work with Sam as he runs headlong into the heart of the issue.

Is he just being manipulated through, have the people who hired the shadowy men picked the right target to propagate the “rumours” they want? Will Hunter get to the real truth and, will he or the story survive the attentions of the men in black? Hodges offers us tantalising hope at the end, a valediction of the role a free press can play in holding powerful men to account… and uncertain ending though and the doubts persist to this day: how can press rumour be made reality?

In a 2021 interview with Samira Ahmed at the BFI, Hodges talked about The Rumour was partly influenced by the treatment of Stephen Ward during the Profumo Crisis and how the establishment covers its tracks and manipulates. Working on World in Action, Hodges had encountered the showbiz reporters and saw a lot of sleazy work, “… most of it lies – none of it has changed, nothing’s changed… – I just wanted to make a film about it.”

Before mobile phones... there were dictaphones.

Dusty Verdict: I can see why Kubrick was impressed with Hodges’ film and the director’s very deliberate and high content approach to crafting this hard-hitting and unorthodox narrative. There's so much craft in Hodges script and direction: he doesn’t run head on at his targets and leaves it for the audience to decide on the moral weight of the characters. Sam Hunter is a hard man to sympathise with and yet we end up rooting for him all the same as he battles against the dishonesty of his own and his trade.

Michael Coles gives a superb performance, visceral, nervy and cocky, and is in virtually every shot, the narrative wound taught round his character like a noose. The only question is, can he write his way out of it?

And now the erm thoughts of Chairman Sam. As I speed through the City with its monolithic Victorian buildings towering above me, I wondered if the rich and illustrious bankers and merchants who inhabit these parts ever pause in the relentless business of making money ever pause and think of the sad, sordid poverty-stricken areas on their doorsteps?

 

You can find both The Rumour and Suspect on the Network DVD set, Euston Films Presents Armchair Cinema which includes lots of other goodies. It’s out of print but copies are still to be found on eBay and elsewhere. 

No street urchins as Sam arrives in the Eastend...

Euston Films began here!

 

 

The way we were... The L-Shaped Room (1962)

It’s still a surprise to find former ballerina and star of American in Paris and many more Hollywood films trudging around a grey and white London looking for a room to rent but it happened and Leslie Caron was deservedly awarded a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for best actress only missing out to Patricia Neal in Hud at the Oscars (along with Shirley MacLaine, Rachel Roberts and Natalie Wood!). She is indeed outstanding and is perfectly cast as the woman in trouble but who is able to get ahead of her situation.

In an interview accompanying the 2017 remaster, the remarkable Caron – then 86, now 94 – explains that in a meeting with screenwriter and director Bryan Forbes, she explained that she felt her character would have more agency and be less timid than as originally written. As she spoke, Forbes seemed to be doodling away at his desk but when he finished he presented her with an instant re-write of the part incorporating her views. So it was that her French sensibilities were able to alter the course of the film with results that remain impressive.

There’s some critical opinion that won’t quite accept Forbes as a full member of the Kitchen Sink Club but in ways his film reflects the broader sensibilities of say an Antonioni or Truffaut in terms of the communication between men and women. Tom Bell’s Toby is full of masculine energy as well as writerly disappointment and struggles to connect with Jane at first. Even when they eventually do, he’s at a loss in terms of how to respond: where she leads he finds it difficult to follow because of male pride and values that he might have expected himself to be free of.

Brock, Leslie and Tom

At the end he presents Jane with his manuscript for a story called The L-Shaped Room and it’s perhaps the only way he can explain the changes she has made in him. Caron is the perfect carrier for this sentiment; it’s not even swinging and here she is making her own choices, deciding on her choices, rebuffing support from the father of her child, Terry (Mark Eden, later the villain Alan Bradley in Coronation Street, killed by a tram in Blackpool!) on the grounds that she doesn’t love him. Tough choices and from a time when marriage was preferable to illegal abortion for some.

The film is indeed gentler than contemporary efforts set further North but I’ve a feeling that Forbes’ later successes have influenced the view of this film which deals with a number of taboo areas in a calm way that’s more accepting and less moralising than you might expect. Another famous Corrie legend, Patricia “Pat” Phoenix plays Sonia a sex worker with whom June has a very matter of fact albeit guarded, discussion about the nature of her work. The women understand even if the men struggle.

Vintage Classic promo for the Blu-ray

This is also one of those films that makes Reel Streets essential reading and it’s fascinating to see their “then and now” pictures of the locations especially when Jane trudges down St. Luke’s Mews, W11 as viewed from Basing Street, then Clydesdale Road, W11 and looking across to Colville Square. These streets look very fine now but in 1962, Notting Hill was less in demand…today's white-washed Georgian townhouses were yesterday's slums along with the mews with doors hanging at odd angles and a general air of poverty.

Those golden old days before eh?

Talking of which there are others in the house where June finds her accommodation in the famous L-Shaped Room - basically two rooms split into one sharing a tiny window in the top storey of a Georgian ruin, infested with bed bugs, damp and much else besides. No bed bugs were harmed in the making of this film although it’s difficult to say especially when Johnny (Brock Peters) the man in the I-shaped room next to the L, shows up with a means of squishing them. Brock Peters has a lovely intensity as the jazz-playing Johnny who, from Toby’s throw-away comment, we are to read as a gay man – his jealousy of his friend’s relationship perhaps being a reflection of his loneliness and need for inclusion?

Cicely Courtneidge, Leslie Caron, Bernard Lee, Avis Bunnage and Brock Peters

Similarly with Cicely Courtneidge’s superb turn as the ageing actress Mavis who famously performs Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty as featured later in the introduction to The Smith’s The Queen is Dead. She is so well-wrought and full of nuanced dark corners. There’s a scene in which she reveals herself to June by showing her a picture of the love of her life and the latter’s reaction says all we need to know. Jane is non-judgemental and, again, that’s something – clichés aside – you might expect from a broad-minded Parisian? Not that Sylvia Sims or June Richie couldn’t have done just as well?

Then there’s no-nonsense land-lady Doris (Avis Bunnage) who drives a hard bargain and yet doesn’t want to appear mean in front of one of her gentleman friends. Even the cameo players have depth such as Gerald Sim as the doctor in hospital who helps Jane to give birth with non-judgemental sympathy. Even in the big Smoke there are friends to be found and if that makes Forbes a tad more romantic than his peers then so be it. This is the story of one woman’s ability to make her choice and it is uplifting and more complex than many a more sanitised or superficially grimy take.

Dusty Verdict: Watch this film for the streets of London, for the craft of the actors and the rightly lauded work of the leading lady, it’s a snapshot of the Golden Age of post-war Britain. For those who dream of resetting this country at some point in the past… maybe a timely reminder of life when it was harder for everyone, not just the outsiders in the boarding house.

I watched the Vintage Classics Blu-ray which features the 2017 restoration and interviews with Leslie Caron and the writer of the original book, Lynne Reid Banks. There’s also a featurette on The L Shaped Room and the British New Wave. This was the start of the Sixties when this country began to look up and beyond the austerity post War and Empire, when Victorian laws were revised and thrown away. Clearly, we are still in the middle of this process…

 

PS: You can find Reel Streets here - it is very well researched and highly addictive!