The marvellous British actress Glynis Johns has died at the grand age of 100. May she rest in peace.
Category Archives: Glynis Johns
Miranda (1948)
There’s a dreadful shortage of men below sea. With his wife Clare (Googie Withers) uninterested in fishing, Dr. Paul Martin (Griffith Jones) goes on holiday in Cornwall. There he snags mermaid Miranda Trewella (Glynis Johns) and is pulled into the water. She keeps him prisoner in her underwater cavern and only lets him go after he agrees to show her London. He disguises her as an invalid patient in a wheelchair and takes her to his flat for a month-long stay. Clare reluctantly agrees to the arrangement, but gets him to hire someone to look after their house guest and he selects Nurse Carey (Margaret Rutherford) for the eccentric nature that previously caused him to get rid of her and takes her into his confidence. To Paul’s relief, Carey is delighted to be working for a mermaid as she always believed they exist. Miranda’s seductive nature earns her the admiration of not only Paul, but also his chauffeur Charles (David Tomlinson), as well as Nigel (John McCallum), the artist fiancé of Clare’s friend and upstairs neighbour Isobel (Sonia Holm) arousing the jealousy of the women in their lives. Clare starts to follow her instincts and starts reading up on her suspicions. Nigel breaks off his engagement, but then he and Charles discover that Miranda has been flirting with both of them …. You’ve hated me ever since I set tail in this house. The delightful Johns has fun as the beguiling mermaid who insinuates herself into the life of a doctor living quite the de luxe life in his well appointed London apartment with his lovely wife Withers. And then she drives every man mad with desire. There are lovely moments when she can’t help herself – snacking on the goldfish straight from the bowl, scarfing cockles at the fish market and depriving a sea lion of his lunch on a trip to the zoo. Witty and surprising, this wastes no time in introducing Johns – two minutes – and once she fishes Paul out of the water and into her cave she wastes no time in telling him she had to throw the last two men back because their legs were too short. She has a disarming way of critiquing men’s physiques to their face. Withers plays opposite offscreen husband McCallum while the redoubtable Rutherford has an amusing scene in a museum with a mummy and off-screen husband Stringer Davis. Witty, charming fluff with Johns as bewitching as ever as the flirty fish out of water and some timely references including the novel Forever Amber – which plants the suggestive conclusion. Adapted from his play by Peter Blackmore with additional dialogue by Denis Waldock, this was produced by Betty Box and directed by Ken Annakin. Tail by Dunlop. There is a sequel, made 6 years later, Mad About Men. If you ask me there’s something very fishy about this case
No Highway in the Sky (1951)
All boffins are a bit crackers but I suppose he’s the worst. Theodore Honey (James Stewart) is an apparently eccentric mathematician and aeronautical engineer charged with discovering what caused the crash of a ‘Reindeer’ airliner, a newly designed carrier for the Royal Aircraft Establishment. As he travels to investigate, he realises en route that he’s flying on the very same type of airplane. He believes that after 1,440 airborne hours the metal in the tail will bend and fall off, causing the plane to fall out of the sky. But he can’t persuade the captain Samuelson (Niall MacGinnis, bizarrely uncredited). Convinced it will suffer a similar accident, he deliberately sabotages it once it lands, and soon finds himself defending his sanity in an English courtroom. Fortunately, a sympathetic actress Monica Teasdale (Marlene Dietrich) and a stewardess Marjorie Corder (Glynis Johns) both believe his desire to prevent certain death and come to his defence … People must be someone else’s concern – I can’t let it be mine. Stewart is cast as a kind of mad scientist, complete with a young daughter Elspeth (Janette Scott) who cares for him rather than the other way round, forgetting which of the lookalike tract houses he occupies despite living there 11 years. This adaptation of Nevil Shute’s 1947 novel is so interesting after a protracted set up simply because it expresses so much of the time in which it was made: the post-war era, jet engine propulsion, families torn apart by WW2. And in the centre of it are two very different kinds of femininity – the international jet setter movie star played by Dietrich (who else?) and the no-nonsense, efficient and kind Johns, woman now working in the air but who has a background as a nurse, another casualty of WW2. Typecasting always works and it’s one of the pleasing oddities of this story that they’re not exactly in competition, rather both support Theodore. The fear that a plane will just … fall out of the sky is the kind of catastrophising that typifies most of our intercontinental journeys and it’s the explanation as to why this could happen that provides the drama and tension as well as characterisation – Stewart is fine as the befuddled man who nonetheless gets it right but at a cost, with terrible publicity and a potential future in the lunatic asylum. Metal fatigue can lead to mental fatigue, it seems. Lending great support are Jack Hawkins as company man Dennis Scott and Kenneth More as Dobson, the co-pilot, also uncredited, like the other pilot! Written for the screen by R. C. Sheriff & Alec Coppel & Oscar Millard, Shute probably wrote his story as a kind of purge – he had been an aeronautical engineer, involved first with the de Havilland company and then as a constructor with his own firm, the British government created a vehicle in direct competition with one of his designs which ended disastrously. He knew whereof he wrote. Directed by Henry Koster who of course directed Stewart in his previous film, Harvey, and they would work together again on Mr Hobbs Takes a Vacation and Dear Brigitte, also starring Johns. We never walked out on one of your pictures
Another Time, Another Place (1958)
I still have a world of love to show you. American journalist Sara Scott (Lana Turner) is stationed in London during the last year of WW2 and meets BBC reporter Mark Trevor (Sean Connery). It’s love at first sight for both. Sara is conflicted on whether to marry her rich American newspaper owner boss Carter Reynolds (Barry Sullivan) but she chooses Mark on the eve of his departure for Paris – only to have him admit that he is married and has a son and wife in a small town in Cornwall. They decide to stay together and try to work things out. When Mark dies in a plane crash Sara collapses in grief and has to be treated in hospital for her nerves. Carter persuades her to return to New York and work for him. But to make herself come to terms with her loss she pays a visit to Mark’s hometown in Cornwall and accidentally meets both his son Brian (Martin Stephens) and his widow Kay (Glynis Johns) and after being found collapsed in the town recuperates at their home and lives with them, working to turn Mark’s wartime radio scripts into a book without ever revealing her role in Mark’s life. Carter arrives and tells her she must inform Kay exactly what she was to Mark …… His work in London first of all took him away from me. His death made it final. Now you’re bringing him back. Adapted by Stanley Mann from veteran screenwriter Lenore J. Coffee’s novel Weep No More, this is Grade A soap material performed by a wonderful cast particularly Johns. Turner is in her element as the lovelorn woman driven mad by loss. And how about Connery – but more particularly, his eyebrows?! They take up so much space on his face they deserve a credit of their own. And then there’s Sid James playing a typical – New Yorker?! Terence Longdon acquits himself well as Mark’s colleague and best friend, who knows exactly who Sara is because he met her in London and wanted Mark to drop her. There’s also a great opportunity to see Stephens, the creepy boy from The Innocents in an early role. It’s all very nicely done but what a shame this isn’t in colour because the location shooting by Jack Hildyard would have made it quite lovely. Directed by Lewis Allen, a British director who worked on Broadway and in Hollywood and did that great atmospheric chiller, The Uninvited. Coffee would get her final screen credit two years after this on Cash McCall but lived until 1984. And the places that knew them shall know them no more
State Secret (1950)
Aka The Great Manhunt. It’s very gratifying to think that a doctor can still perform a non-political operation. American doctor John Marlowe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr) is visiting England when he is deployed to Vosnia, a small middle European country where people speak Esperanto. He finds that he is there to operate on the country’s dictator who dies during brain surgery but is replaced by a look-alike. As one of the few who know, Marlowe is hunted by the country’s secret police who are intent on shooting to kill because the dictator’s death must be kept secret. Marlowe flees and seeks the help of music hall performer Lisa Robinson (Glynis Johns). They blackmail Balkan smuggler Karl Theodor (Herbert Lom) into helping them. Pursued across the country, they are on the point of escaping when Karl is shot and killed and Lisa is wounded. Marlowe could escape without her but remains. Government minister Colonel Galcon (Jack Hawkins) arranges a ‘shooting accident’ for Marlowe but as Marlowe walks to his fate, the false dictator’s speech is being broadcast on the radio. Shots are heard and Galcon confirms that the stand-in has been assassinated and realises that it may all be over for him … Have you changed your mind?/No, I’ve just lost it. Loosely adapted from a Roy Huggins novel by director Sidney Gilliat, this is a cracking thriller as you’d expect from one of the writing team (with producer Frank Launder) behind Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich It’s nicely shot by Robert (The Third Man) Krasker who has fun at the start with some point of view shots underscoring Fairbanks’ narration and Trento and the Dolomites make great locations although the locals weren’t too happy during production with post-war communist feelings at fever pitch. The suspense quotient is upped by a superior score from William Alwyn. The version of Esperanto here is made up of Latin and Slavic languages but the universal language is thrills and it has more of those when Johns joins the chase 45 minutes in and Lom cracks wise as the shyster because Fairbanks is a fairly flavourless lead. Every time I have a haircut I’ll be thinking of you
Personal Affair (1953)
You see sex in everything! 17-year old Barbara Vining (Glynis Johns) is infatuated with her Latin teacher Stephen Barlow (Leo Genn) who’s married to lonely and insecure American woman Kay (Gene Tierney). When Barbara disappears after a private tutoring session with Stephen and Kay notices the girl’s crush on her husband, rumours swirl and he has to defend himself from the suspicion that he may have raped and murdered her … I don’t think we are really ourselves in school hours. Lesley Storm adapted her stage play A Day’s Mischief; she had form in that regard, having written the original play The Great Day, also adapted for cinema. She was an established screenwriter, contributing additional scenes and dialogue for Graham Greene’s The Fallen Idol and Adam and Evelyne and writing several other screenplays, with another Greene adaptation, The Heart of the Matter, released the same year as this, 1953. This mines a rich seam of prurient gossip and innuendo in a small community and with a great supporting cast including Megs Jenkins and Walter Fitzgerald as Barbara’s parents, Pamela Brown as her aunt who had a permanent disappointment in love at a similar age that has poisoned her outlook on relationships, Thora Hird as the Barlows’ housekeeper and Michael Hordern as the headmaster, and a raft of young (if not yet familiar) faces like Shirley Eaton and Nanette Newman (in her first role) playing her school chums. William Alwyn’s exacting score underlines the melodramatic urgency of the story which paradoxically takes place mostly in conversation between the adults who admit their misunderstanding of human behaviour and the subtlety of instinct while three women at different stages of life enact their experience of love and potentially its loss. Directed by Anthony Pelissier. I’m no good without you
Josephine and Men (1955)
She had a weakness for the weakness in men! Suave bachelor Charles Luton (Jack Buchanan) tells Henry the Barman (Victor Maddern) the story of his niece Josephine’s (Glynis Johns) romantic escapades. She rejects her wealthy fiancé Alan (Donald Sinden) in favour of his friend David (Peter Finch), an unsuccessful playwright. But when their situations are reversed, Josephine’s interest in David starts to wane because she can’t help but be drawn to underdogs and the police are on Alan’s tail when he turns up at their rural idyll while David struggles to write a new play and Charles is overnighting… As a child she was alarmingly soft-hearted. You might imagine from the poster that this is a British answer to Moulin Rouge but relatively low-powered as this is in narrative impetus it manages to coast on a battery of real charm and a surprising element of jeopardy. Johns is as usual a bewitching delight and Finch enjoys himself immensely. Strangest of all is perhaps the screenwriting team behind this drawing room comedy: thriller writer Nigel Balchin, Frank Harvey (who would go on to write the brilliant satire It’s All Right Jack) and the director, Roy Boulting. It’s a welcome opportunity to see the great Buchanan and it’s also wonderful to see William (Doctor Who) Hartnell, Sam Kydd and Wally Patch in the supporting ensemble. Gilbert Taylor shoots in colour in a lovely variety of interiors while John Addison provides his typically witty score. A Boulting Brothers production. There is no deadlier creature on earth than a one-woman Salvation Army
Happy 96th Birthday Glynis Johns 5th October 2019!
The daughter of Welsh actor Mervyn Johns with whom she appeared in Halfway House, Glynis Johns came into her own in the mid-Forties and then did some wonderful historical films for Disney in the next decade as she moved to the US. Interspersed with gritty dramatic roles and a lot of TV she did great work in The Chapman Report. For some she will always be Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins, for others the delightful mermaid Miranda, for even more perhaps she is the great guest villain Lady Penelope Peasoup in TV’s Batman but for me she will always be Mary Katherine Gallagher’s Grandma in Superstar. And then there’s the little matter of her work with Sondheim. Whatever, the glorious Girl With the Upside-Down Eyes celebrates her 96th year among us. We are blessed. Happy birthday!
The Halfway House (1944)
Death is only a door opening. During the Second World War, people converge on the Halfway House, an inn in the Welsh countryside run by Rhys (Mervyn Johns) and his daughter Gwyneth (his real-life daughter Glynis Johns). In Cardiff, famous orchestra conductor David Davies (Esmond Knight) is advised by his doctor to cancel a tour and rest, or he will live for only about three months. In London, Lt. Richard (Richard Bird) and Jill French (Valerie White) argue about the education of their young daughter Joanna (Sally Ann Howes) who overhears them agree to divorce. Then Mr. French and Joanna go on holiday. Captain Fortescue (Guy Middleton) is released from Parkmoor Prison where he did time after being court-martialled for stealing the regimental funds. In a Welsh port, merchant captain Harry Meadows (Tom Walls) and his French wife Alice (Françoise Rosay) quarrel about their deceased son, a victim of the U-boats. Black marketeer Oakley (Alfred Drayton)departs from London for some fishing, while Margaret (Phillippa Hiatt) and her Irish diplomat fiancé Terence (Pat McGrath) take a train from Bristol…… Boyish girls and girlish boys. The fashion for the supernatural in wartime continues apace in this adaptation of Dennis Ogden’s play The Peaceful Inn by Angus Macphail, Diana Morgan, Roland Pertwee and T.E.B. Clarke. Arguments about what constitutes grief (should a mother feel more than a father), should a family stay together for the daughter’s sake and political righteousness (Ireland’s neutrality – a wish for an impossible peace or an excuse not to take sides) are all on the table. The final images suggest that the external landscape following the inn’s bombing is something that can be made and remade within the mind itself. Strange and fascinating Ealing production with all those familiar faces. Directed by Basil Dearden. That’s last year’s calendar!
Encore (1951)
My great aunt Louise very nearly had a man’s mind. She also very nearly had a man’s moustache. Anthology dramatization of three short stories by W. Somerset Maugham. The Ant and the Grasshopper: Tom (Nigel Patrick) is a thorn in the side of his diligent brother George (Roland Culver) but a chance meeting with a wealthy woman changes everything. Directed by Pat Jackson and adapted by T.E.B. Clarke. Winter Cruise: Miss Reid (Kay Walsh) is boring her fellow cruise ship passengers with incessant talking, so led by the captain (Noel Purcell) they set her up on a date with a handsome steward (Jacques Francois) that has surprising consequences for everyone. Directed by Anthony Pelissier and adapted by Arthur Macrae. Gigolo and Gigolette: Stella (Glynis Johns) and her husband Syd (Terence Morgan) are professional daredevils, but her worries about the future upon meeting two old troupers with a similarly dangerous act prompt her to risk it all at the casino in Monte Carlo. Directed by Harold French and adapted by Eric Ambler. I’ve always had a taste for Maugham’s stories and this is a pleasingly piquant collection, each introduced by the man himself from Villa La Mauresque, his home on the Riviera, where some of the action is set. Each story has a different rhythm and tone and yet they all coalesce into a solid whole with the obligatory (and rather unexpected) twist ending, giving Glynis Johns one of the best of her early roles. This was the third of a trilogy of films based on Maugham’s stories and it’s a treat.
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