Window dressing

An interesting thing about T.S. Eliot's work is how quickly it escaped the preserves of poetry into the wider world of culture, to be quoted and recycled by other writers. The best known instance is Evelyn Waugh snatching a phrase from The Waste Land' for the title of A Handful of Dust: the novel was published in 1934, 12 years after the poem appeared. But there are other examples.

At the start of A Window in London (Herbert Mason, 1940 — also titled Lady in Distress), Pat (Patricia Roc) and her colleague Peggy are finishing the overnight shift on the switchboard at a swish London hotel as Lou and an unnamed girl arrive to take over.

Lou: Thanks for waiting. And if it is or if it isn’t, there it is and it’s up to you. I ask you, did you ever?
Other girl: I never.
Lou: Good morning, Pat. Morning, Peggy.
Other girl: Morning, Peggy. Good morning, Pat.
Pat: At last.
Peggy: You’re five minutes late.
Lou: Late, I ain’t never.
Peggy: You are late.
Lou: Well if I am it’s this way. Last night when I went off duty I —
Enter the porter, bringing a tray of tea
Porter: Here we are. Lovely. Cooled it with me own breath.
Lou: Hi, just what the doctor ordered.
The other girl takes a cup
Porter: 'Ere. 'Ere, that’s mine. Blimey, what a sauce.

Lou: Well, as I was saying, last night when I went off duty I meets my gentleman friend, and when I meets my gentleman friend, he says to me, Listen, Lou, what you say is, is. If you want to go your own way, he says, you can go your own way, he says. But, he says, it’s a bit of a change if for a change you went my way, he says. So I said if he felt that way we’d go his way, and of course if we’d gone my way we wouldn’t have been out half the night trying to find the way home.
Peggy: I’m very surprised you ever found your way home at all.

Remind you of anything? Reminds me of the monologue that closes 'A Game of Chess', the second part of The Waste Land.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself

…

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look…

…and so on. The torrential egoism, the jumbling of tenses (past and historic present), the tumble of he saids/I saids, as well as more specific echoes: the opening exchange of greetings ("Good morning, Pat. Morning, Peggy" / "Morning, Peggy. Good morning, Pat") mirrors the valedictions that close this section of the poem ("Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. / Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.") — the name Lou might be a clue, too; and "And if it is or if it isn’t, there it is and it’s up to you" is as ostentatiously commonsensical and as unhelpful as Eliot's "If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said." (Rhythmically, as well, it looks to have something in common with the first part of Sweeney Agonistes, 'Fragment of a Prologue', published in the Criterion in October 1926: "Well some men don't and some men do / Some men don't and you know who". But that's not how it's spoken on screen.)

 

The resemblance between the women in the poem and the women in the film could be generic — perhaps there are lots of examples of writers of the same period pulling the same kinds of trick to give an impression of the speech of the lower orders — but a connection to Eliot is plausible. The screenplay for A Window in London is credited to Ian Dalrymple: he was born in 1903 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, editing the university literary magazine Granta in 1924-25 — exactly the type of smart young literary man you'd expect would be acquainted with The Waste Land. Dalrymple's lasting importance in cinema history comes from his time at the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War, where among many other things he produced Humphrey Jennings's Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943) and Pat Jackson's Western Approaches (1944). Before that he'd worked as an editor and scriptwriter, sharing a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Citadel at the 1939 Oscars; he'd also worked, uncredited, on the film that won the category, Anthony Asquith's version of Pygmalion. That's interesting because it implies that Dalrymple must have had a sense of accent and class that the film doesn't show: Pat's husband Peter, a crane operator, is played by the unproletarian Michael Redgrave — his nickname at work, "the Duke", seems to acknowledge that he's got the wrong accent for the job. Lou the switchboard girl also leans a bit too far to the RP side of things. (I think the actress playing her, on the right-hand side of the photograph at the top, is Gertrude Musgrove — the credits have her down as "Telephonist", which is unhelpfully vague. Musgrove had a brief career in British film, never progressing beyond smallish parts, and was married to Vincent Korda, Alexander and Zoltán's younger brother, an art director whose credits included The Thief of Baghdad (1940) and The Third Man (1949); their son was Michael Korda, publisher and writer.)

 

Accents apart, the film has an acute sense of London. A large part of the pleasure in watching it is seeing the location footage of the city before the Second World War: Peter is working on the construction of Waterloo Bridge; Pat's hotel is Dolphin Square; the film opens with a bewitching montage of the river, the gates being opened at Westminster tube station, a pint of milk being left on a doorstep, a newspaper pushed through a letter box, a cat padding down area steps, empty streets. Earth has not anything, etc. Pat arrives at their tiny flat as Peter sleeps through a loud alarm clock; they complain about how little they see of one another; she wishes she could get a day job, and then drops off before he has left for work. Though the flat is perhaps a little too nice, her clothes a little too smart to give a real sense of poverty in the financial sense, you do feel how they are afflicted by a poverty of opportunity (it made me think a little of the desperate characters in Julian Maclaren-Ross's wonderful novel Of Love and Hunger, published in 1947 but set at precisely this moment, just before the war). The plot is simple enough: travelling to work by tube, Peter sees at a window a woman being stabbed to death. He rushes to the police, but it turns out that what he saw was a down-on-his-luck stage magician and his assistant/wife (Paul Lukas and Sally Gray) practising their act. Peter flirts with the wife, and a little bit more than that, the magician follows him and starts a fight, and Peter apparently kills him. The dénouement feels fudged but before that it maintains an unusual balance of suspense, comedy and romantic intrigue — the casual way the hero is allowed to drift into romance with a married woman is surprisingly unBritish: the source of the plot was a French film of 1939, Métropolitain (French — well, there you are). Lukas puts more feeling into his role than the script deserves, and Gray is very good, as always, despite an emotionally incoherent role. I tend to assume that a short film career represents some kind of failure, but she seems to have married happily, an Irish peer, and been content to leave the film business behind; try to see her in They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), the best example of the small sub-genre of spiv noir.