Cinesound Studios in the 1930s and ‘40s — Striving for a Home-Grown Australian Cinema in the Early Sound Era

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Heritage & Conservation, Leisure activities, Local history, Memorabilia, Performing arts, Popular Culture, Travel

Cinesound is a name that resonates brightly in the history of Australia’s film industry – it harks back to a time when the indigenous industry still had a place of some significance in the pecking order of world cinema. The establishment of Cinesound Studios (in 1931) to make talking motion pictures, evolved out of a group of movie exhibiting companies (including Australasian Films and Union Theatres) which had coalesced into Greater Union Theatres in the Twenties.

In 1925 Australasian Films purchased a roller skating rink at 65 Ebley Street, Bondi Junction, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Australasian converted part of the premises into a film studio but maintained the skating rink as an ongoing commercial concern to help finance the studios’ film production (by day a film studio, by night a skating rink) [‘Cinesound: From roller rink to sound stage’, (Waverley Library), www.waverley.nsw.gov.au].

# 1 Studios Bondi Junction ⬇

Greater Union (henceforth GUT) was involved in all forms of the movie business – production, distribution and exhibition. The Bondi Studios made a few silent films in the late 1920s, like The Adorable Outcast and most notably The Term of His Natural Life which cost £60,000 and bombed badly at the box office [‘Cinesound Productions’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Aug-1934 (Trove).

Stuart F Doyle, GUT managing director, appointed former film publicist Ken G Hall as general manager of the newly formed Cinesound Productions. Two more Cinesound studio locations were opened, one at nearby Rushcutters Bay and the other at St Kilda (in Melbourne). Over an eight-year period (1932-40), with Hall at the helm as producer-director, Cinesound produced 17 feature films (16 of which were directed by Hall). The first of the sequence, On Our Selection, revolved round the adventures of one of Australian cinema’s most popular characters, Dad Rudd and his family. The film, benefiting from a new sound-recording system invented in Tasmania, was a box office triumph for Cinesound, earning £46,000 in Australia and New Zealand by the end of 1933, providing a tremendous fillip for the fledgling studios [Andrew Pike & Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, (1998)].

Studios # 1 at Bondi Junction※ provided a large interior space for film production, over 20,000 square feet…with more than 100 craftsmen on the staff, the facility was equipped to complete “all stages of production, processing and sound recording, in the preparation of topical, scenic, educational, industrial, and microscopic films” [SMH, 06-Aug-1934, loc.cit.]. Some newspapers of the day erroneously referred to the main studios as being #3 and the location as Waverley (an adjoining suburb of Bondi Junction).

Cinesound and Hall exploited On Our Selection’s popularity with a series of sequels, Grandad Rudd, Dad and Dave Come to Town and Dad Rudd, MP. Of these the ‘Dad and Dave’ entry especially proved a hit, matching the profitability of the original movie.

↗ Ken G Hall (centre) with American actress Helen Twelvetrees during filming of ‘Thoroughbred’ (photo: Mitchell Library)

Sydney’s ‘Little Hollywood’
While Ken G Hall’s cinematic canvas was unmistakably Australian (only one of the Cinesound movies was not set in Australia), his approach to film-making saw Hollywood clearly as the model. With the characteristic “spirit of a showman”✺, Hall wanted to shape Cinesound Studios in the Hollywood mould⊡…to create a “Little Hollywood” with a star system, hyped-up promotion of the studios’ movies, etc. [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].

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↗ Twelvetrees outside Cinesound Studios

FT and Efftee Studios
Sydney-based Cinesound’s domestic rival in the film-making caper was Melbourne’s Efftee Studios, started by theatrical entrepreneur Frank W Thring (FT) in 1930. Thring produced the first commercially-viable sound feature-length film in Australia, Diggers (1931) in collaboration with Pat Hanna. Efftee, unlike Cinesound though, had to import the optical sound system for its movies from the USA. [‘Efftee Studios’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Other notable Efftee films of the Thirties include an adaption of CJ Dennis’ The Sentimental Bloke to the screen, and several George Wallace vehicles, His Royal Highness, Harmony Row and A Ticket in Tatts. Thring’s premature death in 1935 put paid to Efftee Studios’ productions.

 

⬆️ Australian cinema’s long tradition of Bushranger flicks beginning with the original 1906 feature film

The outlawing of bushranger films  
A 1930s Cinesound project for a film based on the popular Australian novel, Robbery Under Arms was quashed as it would have transgressed the standing prohibition by the NSW government (in force since 1912), banning movies about bushrangers✪ [‘Bonuses for Films’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20-Oct-1934 (Trove); ‘Bushranger ban’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Shirley Ann Richards: Cinesound’s contract female star  
In accordance with Ken G Hall’s star-making approach, he fostered the career of actress Shirley Ann Richards, starring her in several of his films (It Isn’t Done, Tall Timbers, Lovers and Luggers and Dad and Dave Come to Town). Richards, Cinesound’s only star under long-term contract, later emigrated to America and had a reasonably high profile Hollywood career (under the name Ann Richards).

The Kellaway brothers and Cinesound  
Alec Kellaway and his more famous brother Cecil were feature players for Hall and Cinesound. Alec was a regular performer, appearing in a raft of the studio’s movies including The Broken Melody, Mr Chedworth Steps Out and several of the Dad Rudd series. South African-born Cecil Kellaway started his acting career on the Australian stage, establishing himself first as a top Australian theatre star before appearing in two Cinesound films where his performances opened studio doors in Hollywood for him…Kellaway subsequently carved out a career as a major character actor in numerous US films.

George Wallace, Aussie “king of comedy”  
In addition to being a prominent actor in Efftee Studios musical-comedies, George Wallace was Ken G Hall’s “go-to” favourite comic performer, starring in two late 1930s Cinesound films directed by Hall – Let George Do It and Gone to the Dogs.With the outbreak of world war Cinesound called a halt on feature film production. During the war years the studios directed all energies into making newsreels, initially covering the war against Japan and beyond that on all aspects of Australiana.

Newsreel rivalry: Cinesound Vs Movietone: the focus on newsreels by Cinesound was not a novel innovation. From its outset Cinesound produced newsreels – short documentary films containing news stories and items of topical interest – in competition with the rival Fox Movietone company. The two newsreels differed in content, Cinesound concentrated on Australian only topics while Movietone covered a mix of international and national news✤.
Newsreels in Australia prior to 1956 occupied a unique place in media and communications. Before the introduction of television, cinema-goers’ exposure to newsreels (part of the “warm-up” for the main feature) were the only images Australians saw of their land – the footage of elections, natural disasters and other such events [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.]. Thus, newsreels like the Cinesound Review, with its distinctive red kangaroo symbol, were an important source of news and current affairs, and were an integral part of the cinema program [‘Cinesound Movietone Australian Newsreels’, (ASO) (Poppy De Souza), www.aso.gov.au]✙. According to Anthony Buckley, the newsreels reflected Ken G Hall’s “pride and spirited nationalism” [Buckley, A, ‘Obituary: Ken G. Hall’, The Independent (London), 17-Feb-1994].

The studios site post-Cinesound
In 1951 Cinesound sold off the Ebley Street building which became a factory manufacturing American soft drink. However, between 1956 and 1973 the building reverted to the world of visual communications, housing various film and television production companies including Ajax Films. Following that, it housed a furniture retailer. Today it is the home of a Spotlight store (fabrics and home interiors) [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].

Ken G Hall in his autobiography contended that Cinesound Productions never lost money on any feature films. Some did very well – crime drama The Silence of Dean Maitland, for instance, for an outlay of £10,000 returned takings of more than £70,000 in Australia and the UK [Graham Shirley & Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, (1989)]. One Cinesound movie however, strictly-speaking, probably did lose money…Roy Rene’s single venture into celluloid, Strike Me Lucky, in which ‘Mo’s’ humour, robbed of it’s spontaneity in live performance didn’t translate well to the big screen and was reflected in negative critical reviews and at the box office [Film Review: ‘Strike Me Lucky’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Nov-1934 (Trove)]. Despite Hall’s faith in the studios’ films, from 1937 there was a decline in box office returns (prompting GUT head Doyle to resign). Another (external) factor affecting Cinesound profitability occurred in 1938 with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act in the UK…under this legislation Australian films no longer counted as local, their removal from the British quota meant a loss of market for Cinesound and other Australian movie producers [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].

The war resulted in a temporary halt to Cinesound feature films, however the studios made only one more (postwar) feature film, Smithy, a biopic about pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith in 1946. Another blow to Cinesound’s future prospects at this time was a move by Rank Organisation – the British film giant purchased a controlling interest in Greater Union, preferring to use it to exhibit its own UK films in Australia [‘The first wave of Australian feature film production FROM EARLY PROMISE TO FADING HOPES’, http://afcarchive.screenaustralia.gov.au].

⬆️ ‘Smithy’ star Ron Randell later pursued a career in Hollywood

Stuart Doyle’s contribution  
WWII took all the impetus out of the Australian industry, there was a shortage of performers and crew due to recruitment and conscription. Stock available for film was also in short supply, what there was directed first and foremost to making propaganda and news films in support of the allies’ side. More particular to Cinesound’s challenges, the loss of MD Stuart Doyle before the war was especially telling. Film production is high cost (especially sound which proved massively more expensive) and high risk…Hall’s ability to pursue a good number of projects in the Thirties, depended on Doyle’s willingness to take a risk with Cinesound. When he departed, he was replaced by a “risk-adverse accountant who favoured real estate over film production” [ibid.].

Footnote: Cinesound Talent School  
The Cinesound people eventually established its own talent school for young actors. Run by George Cross and Alec Kellaway (a regular player in Cinesound movies)…offering training in “deportment, enunciation, miming, microphone technique and limbering”✥. By 1940 the school had had over 200 students including Grant Taylor, later a prominent actor in Australian movies and TV dramas [‘Cinesound Talent School, SMH, 02-Feb-1939, (Trove); Cinesound Productions’, Wiki, op.cit.].

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※ In 2002 GUT merged with Village Roadshow, these days Greater Union picture theatres go under the name ‘Event Cinemas’

✺ a trait shared by Greater Union boss Doyle
⊡ the company even closed down production at Bondi for several months in 1935 to let Hall go off to Hollywood to study American film techniques

✪ the state authorities felt that the popularity of the bushranger film genre would exert an ‘unhealthy’ influence on Australians, especially on the young, and make them more resistant to authority

✤ the two newsreel providers merged in 1970, forming the Australian Movie Magazine which folded in 1975

✙ the 1978 film drama Newsfront is a fictionalised account of newsreel makers in Australia between the late Forties and mid Fifties which includes actual newsreel footage from the period

✥ school director Kellaway’s brief was teaching dramatics and mic technique

Ealing’s Cinematic Voyage – West London W3 to Pagewood NSW: Studios in the Sand Hills of South Sydney

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Local history, Media & Communications, Popular Culture

Ealing is a name synonymous with British film comedy, Ealing comedies of the late 1940s through the 1950s…high quality, well written and acted feature films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers✲.

Ealing’s film association with Australia is less well known. It’s genesis lay with Ealing’s movie mogul and powerful postwar image-maker, Michael Balcon. With the Second World War still raging, Balcon despatched documentary film director Harry Watt to Australia to explore its filmable story possibilities. Balcon was looking to make films which reflected “the strength, diversity and stoicism of the (British) Commonwealth” [‘Ealing Studios in Australia: An Introduction ‘, (Stephen Morgan) (2012), www.thefarparadise.wordpress.com].

Pagewood before Ealing …
Once Ealing committed to Australia as a film production location, it sought out appropriate studios for projects, which it found in the southern Sydney suburb of Pagewood. These studios in fact were already operating as a film production unit…constructed in 1935 for National Studios❄ in anticipation of an expansion of the local film industry as a result of the Film Quota Act (1936) which imposed a minimum domestic quota on the level of film distribution in New South Wales❂. The studios’ first production was Charles Chauvel’s Uncivilised and other significant, early Australian movies were shot there – including Columbia’s “Australian Western” Rangle River (1936) and Ken G Hall’s Dad Rudd, MP (1940) – but a pattern of closures of National Studios (1937-40, 1942-45) hampered its efforts to establish itself as a film production unit [Sydney Morning Herald, 27-May-1936 (Trove)].

In 1946 Harry Watt fulfilled the task set him by Studio head Balcon by writing and directing the first feature for Ealing “down under”. The Overlanders, the story of an epic cattle drive across the continent, made Chips Rafferty an international star and an Australian screen icon.

The success of The Overlanders prompted Ealing to establish a film base in Australia. At the beginning of 1949 it acquired the struggling Pagewood studios❇. Ealing took over a “shambles of a place” (rundown through neglect and misuse by both the Australian and US armies during WWII occupancy), but nonetheless it invested considerable capital into the property to create state-of-the-art film studios with first-rate sound-engineering departments, cutting room and sound stage – a concern worth all up £100,000 [“The studio for indoor filming of ‘Kangaroo’ “, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 11-Sep-1950 (Trove)].

Chips Rafferty was chosen to head up the cast of Watt’s next Ealing Australian movie Eureka Stockade (1949) – the dramatic and symbolic story of miner resistance to overbearing British rule on the 1850s goldfields. ‘Eureka’ (released in the US as Massacre Hill failed at the box office (general consensus of critics was that Chips was miscast in the lead role of the 1850s Irish-Australian rebel Peter Lalor).

Bitter Springs directed by Ralph Smart followed…this time with Chips more comfortable returning to the role of courageous pioneering bushman in the Australian outback. The most interesting aspect of Bitter Springs is that it was prepared to tackle the polemical topic of indigenous land rights – in the movie white settlers clash with local Aboriginal people (Pitjantjatjara and Kokatha Mula tribes) over the possession of land. This screen subject was 25 to 30 years ahead of its time, however an assimilationist mindset prevails in its handling…in one scene Wally (Chip’s character) betrays the gross ignorance of Europeans about Aboriginal Australian – when the fair-minded territorial ranger (Michael Pate) questions the planned land grab, Wally summarily dismisses the Aborigines’ claim to the disputed land, stating that the Aboriginal culture was only about 1,000 years old! [Morgan, loc.cit.]✥. One jarring note is that the serious theme of Bitter Springs is undermined by Ealing’s decision to cast comic Tommy Trinder in the movie, Trinder’s character’s constant cracking of jokes tends to deflate the build-up of tension arising from the film’s central conflict between the blacks and the whites [Byrnes, ‘ASO’].

Chips Rafferty ▼

After 1950 however Ealing made few of its own films at the Pagewood Studios, instead it leased out the premises to other movie production companies, eg, to 20th Century Fox who made Kangaroo (1952) at Pagewood with Maureen O’Hara, the first technicolor film made in Australia.

Closing chapters of Ealing Pagewood

In 1952 the Pagewood Studios shut down production◙ (in what was meant to be a temporary move only), but the following year Ealing sold the studios to Associated Television which renamed the studios “Television City” and leased it to independent film producers. A 1954 independent production of the “Treasure Island” tale, Long John Silver, (with Robert Newton) was filmed at Pagewood (interiors) and exteriors shot at the Royal National Park [‘AAARRRHH There Matey! – The Strange and Wondrous Tale of Bill Constable & the Cinemascope Pirates of Pagewood…’ (Bob Hill, Oct 2018) www.apdg.org.au].

Ealing had been trying to make Robbery Under Arms in Australia since 1949 but it was finally completed by Ealing’s parent company Rank Organisation in 1957 – with some footage shot at Pagewood but mostly in London (exteriors: Flinders Ranges and near Bourke) [‘Film World Weather in Australia Disappoints Studio’, The West Australian, 03-Nov-1949, (Trove)].

Pagewood on it’s last legs

The final film to be made (or partly made) at what had become Television City (Pagewood) was a film version of the hit Australian play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1958/59). ‘Doll’ was made by Burt Lancaster’s HHL company using US and British leads…the production however took radical liberties with Lawler’s play and the film was ultra-Americanised with unsatisfactory results. In 1959 the Pagewood site was sold to General Motors Holden Australia which allowed the car manufacturer to expand its existing plant in the suburb. In the Eighties the studios’ land (and the adjacent bus depot) were redeveloped again, becoming the location of Westfield’s huge Eastgardens shopping mall and a housing estate built by the Meriton Group [‘Pagewood Studios’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

GMH Pagewood ▼


Ealing’s last Antipodean hooray

The Siege of Pinchgut (1959) was Ealing’s last film shot in and with an Australian setting (and as it transpired, it proved to be the company’s final ever adult feature). Harry Watt came back to direct what was a grim convicts-on-the-run drama filmed around Fort Denison (Pinchgut) in Sydney Harbour. ‘Pinchgut’, released in the US as Four Desperate Men, did not succeed at the box office⊛.

Australia closed for film-makers!

Ealing’s venture in Australia was never really a secure one…the follow up films to The Overlanders yielded only disappointing returns. The writing was on the wall for Ealing’s Australian enterprise from the time Menzies’ Liberal-Country Party won power in Australia in 1949 and took an antithetical attitude towards domestic film production. The LCP government refused to renew Ealing’s lease on the Pagewood Studios (a bitter pill for Ealing who’d already spent considerable funds on the Pagewood project). In a move which set the industry in Australia back decades, the government deemed that “film making was not an essential industry” and pointed out that the lease-holders (Ealing) were not an Australian residents in any case [The A-Z of Australian and New Zealand Cinema, (Albert Moran & Errol Vieth), (2009)].

If that wasn’t the tipping point for Ealing, it came with the studios’ own assessment… Balcon authorised the company’s accountant to undertake an financial evaluation of the Australian studios’ viability – which was negative [ibid.]. In the words of Eric Williams (manager at the Ealing Pagewood Studios), ultimately Ealing found it “impossible to maintain continuous production at a range of 12,000 miles”. That there was no Australian sponsor for productions was put forward as an additional disincentive for staying [‘Decision a blow to film industry’, The Mail (Adelaide), 26-Jan-1952 (Trove)].

PostScript: The failure of Ealing’s Australian venture was merely one chapter in the larger story of Ealing Studios’ global rise and fall. The rising costs and risks of big budget films of the parent company in Britain, large staff numbers and increasing expenditures, all contributed to the toll of financial problems plaguing Ealing and the UK industry as a whole…leading to Ealing’s eventual demise (this accumulation of pressures forced production head Balcon to unload Ealing in 1955).Note: the original 1930s studios in West London (above) were bought by the BBC in the 1990s and resurrected as a facility for hire [‘Remembering Ealing Studios and the golden age of British film’, BBC News, (Vincent Dowd), 30-Aug-2015, www.bbc.com].


︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵︵‿
✲ and by association, synonymous also with actor Alec Guinness, the star of most of this “purple patch” of Ealing classics

❄ at the time National Studios was built, Pagewood was largely an undeveloped wasteland of grassy sand hills, although at Daceyville, a few kilometres to the north, a model garden suburb had been carved out of the same sand hills in the 1920s – see my July 2018 blog Planning for a Working Class Lifestyle Upgrade, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Daceyville, NSW

❂ unfortunately the state government failed to back its own law, not allocating adequate funding to its implementation… when resisted by Hollywood distributors the legislation was killed off by the end of 1937

❇ Pagewood’s rival film production houses in Sydney, Cinesound at Bondi Junction and Figtree Studios at Lane Cove had folded, and turned into, respectively, a cordial factory and a transport depot [Barrier Miner, 11-Sep-1950]

✥ Wally’s band of settlers reinforce the stereotype with “disparaging views about stone-age men who do nothing with the land” [‘Bitter Springs (1950)’ Synopsis, (Paul Byrnes), ASO mobile, www.aso.gov.au]

◙ described by Ken G Hall as “a fatal blow” to the national film industry which would relegate Australia to “the bottom of the list of the world’s 60 film producing countries”

⊛ although an historical point of interest of the movie are shots of what was left of the old Fort Macquarie Tram Depot then being demolished for the construction of Sydney Opera House [‘Siege of Pinchgut’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

I’m All Right Jack – Not the Musical

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

❛ Wherever you look, it’s a case of “Blow you, Jack, I’m all right”. ❜

(Stanley Windrush)

☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬

The Boulting Brothers created some of postwar Britain’s most distinctive films across several genres, but it is their joyous 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack that stands tallest in the film-making twin brothers’ oeuvre of cinematic comedy classics.

I’m All Right Jack takes up pretty much where it’s prequel, Private’s Progress, left off. The protagonist of both movies is the gullible and seemingly gormless Stanley Windrush (played to a tee by Ian Carmichael). Naive and good-natured, the persona of Stanley can be best summed up as epitomising the bungling, accident-prone, upper class twit.

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In Private’s Progress Windrush “pussyfoots” his way through his army war service, causing unintended mayhem and allowing himself inadvertently to be duped…then by mistake he precipitates a chain of events leading to the capture of a division of enemy German soldiers and ends up an accidental war hero of sorts!

In I’m All Right Jack the Boultings reprise several of the previous film’s characters and actors…as well as ‘Stanley’ there is his scheming, unscrupulous “Uncle Bertie”, Bertram Tracepurcel (played by the urbane Dennis Price) and his harassed personnel manager, “Major Hitchcock” (the gap-toothed “professional cad” Terry-Thomas). Richard Attenborough plays “Sydney Cox”, Tracepurcel’s co-conspirator in perfidy and supposedly Stanley’s old friend from the war – the smoothest of smooth con men!

Ian Carmichael (Stanley) ◬ with ‘IARJ’ co-star Liz Fraser

I’m All Right Jack satirises 1950s British society, still coming out of the straitjacket of postwar austerity, with sabre-like sharpness. The Boultings’ film fixes its microscope on industrial relations in a missiles production factory, exposing both the bosses and its blue collar workforce as unconscionable and utterly self-serving, solely out for what they can get for themselves! The Boulting brothers are “equal opportunity satirisers”, skewering management and labour alike to a commensurate degree. For both sides of the workplace divide, self-interest is unchallengingly the “drug of choice”, hence the film’s title⍟. The Boutlings also dish up a few  barbs aimed at the fact-loose world of advertising along the way.

◬ Stanley’s bubble-car at the gate of Missiles Ltd

The film portrays the plant workers as work-shy and devious in their tunnel-visioned pursuit of the singular goal of doing less work than they are required to do✥…Stanley unknowingly upsets the “apple-cart” by demonstrating to the company’s T & M man (the ever-dour John Le Mesurier – another Boulting recruit from Private’s Progress) just how much work can actually be done in a day if one makes a “fair dinkum” effort (and of course this results in him being ostracised by the factory’s union). The factory management show themselves to be equally duplicitous – engaged in enriching themselves through a corrupt, clandestine arms deal with a swarthy, shonky Middle Eastern intermediary.

I’m All Right Jack also takes a comical pot shot at other societal institutions of the day – government for its torpid ineptitude, the English class system, advertising and the tabloid media for their falseness and alarming capacity to sway public opinion – lampooning each of them in turn! The Boultings are showing a Britain that is corrupt at its core, one that unearthed a late 1950s generation of “angry young men” dissatisfied with the blandness of society of the status quo [‘I’m All Right Jack review – Philip French on the Boulting brothers’ biting state-of-the-nation satire’, The Guardian, 18-Jan-2015, www.guardian.com].

Peter Sellers as Fred Kite is the movie’s stand-out, producing a gem of a performance. Kite is the comedy’s pivotal character, the chief shop steward who orchestrates the factory floor’s “go-slow” work culture, zealously obstructing management at every opportunity. “Red Fred” is your archetypal ‘Bolshy’ minor trade union official (with a Hitlerian moustache), but a union ‘heavy’ more ridiculous than menacing…a “Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his own class enemies” [Timeout, www.timeout.com]. Sellers’ ‘Kite’ is given to awkward, Gothic turns of phrase and a pompous, halting, almost robotic mode of speech…in his essence he is hilarious as a blinkered Sovietphile idealist: “Ahhh (he sighs wistfully), Russia. All them corn fields and ballet in the evening”❂ [‘ I’m All Right Jack and The Organizer: Bread and Roses and a Lot of Laughs’, Criterion, (Michael Stragow), 19-Jan-2018, www.criterion.com].

Sellers as Kite (centre) ◬

The success of I’m All Right Jack (it was the number one box office hit in the UK for 1959 and winner of a BAFTA award) triggered a number of British films focussing on the world of worker/management relations – including the diametrically different in tone The Angry Silence (1960) (also with Richard Attenborough).

The film climaxes with Stanley, having finally ‘twigged’ to the IR game he has unwittingly been a pawn in, exposing both sides for their greed and duplicity on national television. I’m All Right Jack ends with Stanley ‘retiring’ to a rural nudist colony…he is invited by a bevy of naked women, discretely obscured by a hedge (it was 1959 after all!) to a game of tennis. The characteristically nervous Stanley bolts at the suggestion and is last seen hareing full-tilt across a meadow frantically pursued by the bare damsels.

PostScript: A punchline for the nascent anti-Apartheid movement
The Boultings’ film resonated in unexpected circles. The New Zealand Rugby Union, unwilling to offend South Africa’s racist policy of non-contact between whites and non-whites in sport, declined to select any Māori players for the 1960 All Blacks tour of South Africa (the Nash Labour government was fully complicit in this gutless act of appeasement). The ensuing controversy provoked widespread protests within NZ (a call for “No Maoris, no tour”) and a most memorable placard inspired by the film: “I’m All White, Jack!”

(Photo: Marti Friedlander)
⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀⇀

✲ directed by John Boulting, produced by brother Roy, and written by John with Frank Harvey from a novel by Alan Hackney (the same creators of Private’s Progress)
⍟ “I’m All right Jack” (of naval origin) was a popular UK expression of the period, meant to signify a smug and complacent self-centredness
✥ a recurring Boulting theme…in both Private’s Progress and I’m All Right Jack Windrush enters a world of “gold-bricks”, people doggedly determined to go the last mile to evade work of any kind
❂ apparently BBC Television in 1979 canned a scheduled screening of I’m All Right Jack for fear that Sellers’ ‘Kite’ might prejudice viewers against the Labour Party in an upcoming election! [ibid.]

Unifying North Yemen through the Indelible Imprint of Foreign Intervention: A 1960s Civil War between Royalists and Republicans

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, Regional History

Yemen in 1962 was a trifurcated political entity – in the south and southwest was Britain’s eastern and western protectorates beset by tribal insurrection. In North Yemen (which borders Saudi Arabia), the ruler of the Hamid al-Din branch of the al-Qasim dynasty (of the Yemeni Mutawakkilite Kingdom) was about to face his own formidable internal challenge. In that year fighting broke out in the north when the newly elected imam (Muhammad al-Badr) was deposed by Yemeni rebel forces led by army strongman Abdullah as-Sallal.

YAR republican coup leader as-Sallal at military display in 1963 ⍗

An internal war augmented by ‘friends’ with benefits

Al-Badr escaped to Saudi Arabia where he rallied support from the northern Zaydi Shia tribes. Meanwhile the rebels declared North Yemen a republic – the Yemen Arab Republic. With the battle lines of the Civil War drawn, royalists V republicans, it immediately attracted the willing participation of competing foreign elements. Within a very short time, Egypt had entered the conflict on the republic’s side. President Nasser provided as-Sallal with bulk shipments of military supplies and a massive infusion of troops to fight the royalists. Later, the Soviet Union, after switching ‘horses’ in the conflict, contributed to the republicans’ armaments, delivering them 24 Mig-19 fighter planes.

At the same time Md al-Badr’s royalist partisans were receiving military aid from the Saudis and Jordan※, and diplomatic support from the UK – who was also bankrolling mercenaries to fight for the royalists [Stanley Sandler, Ground Warfare: The International Encyclopedia, Vol 1 (2002)]. In addition the Shah of Iran provided advisers for the royalist side, while Israel provided intelligence and its air force to airlift supplies to them.

A regional proxy war: Egypt V Saudi Arabia

There has been much written about Nasser’s motives for involving Egypt in the war (including the haste with which he committed the UAR). Nasser’s ambition to be recognised as leader of the Arab world had taken a hit in the couple of years prior to the war’s outbreak…in 1961 Nasser’s showcase creation, the United Arab Republic had unravelled when Syria, tired of the “second-class treatment” from Egypt, broke away from the UAR. By the summer of 1962 Egypt’s regional prestige had plummeted… only Algeria remained on good terms with Egypt, the UAR had lost control of the Arab League and the other major Arab states were all aligned against Nasser [Nasser’s Gamble: How the Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power, Jesse Ferris, (2012)].

These Egyptian reversals of fortune and an attempt in the same year at a power play by Iraq’s dictator Qasim who threatened to annex newly-independent Kuwait✣, were a wake-up call for the Egyptian president – he was, he knew, at risk of being isolated in the Arab world. Therefore, as has been noted, the Yemen Civil War presented “a foreign policy opportunity for Nasser to become relevant again” [Asher Aviad Orkaby, ‘The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard University, Mass.), April 2014]. And the involvement of the region’s leading monarchy, Saudi Arabia, in the conflict on the deposed imam’s side, was impetus for Nasser to do what he could to limit its expansion in the peninsula.

The early phases of the civil war saw initial successes by the royalists commanded by al-Badr’s uncle Prince Hassan, culminating in a drive towards Sana’a to retake the capital for the Imam. The offensive was checked only after Egypt increased its commitment to the conflict, providing essential air support for the republican troops. Estimated numbers vary but all up Nasser is thought to have injected at least 70,000 Egyptian soldiers into the war. As the war dragged on without resolution Egypt unleashed chemical warfare, a series of poison gas bombings of Yemeni villages loyal to the Royalists (1966/67).

UAR military instructors training Yemeni republican soldiers ⍗.

Parallel with the ongoing prosecution of the civil war on the battlefield, international efforts, spearheaded by the UN, were being made to encourage the proxy combatants Egypt and Saudi Arabia to pull back from the domestic conflict.

Yemen, “a cage for Nasser and Arab nationalism”

With regard to the superpowers’ role in reining in the combatants through mediating the conflict, some historians have argued that, behind the scenes, the superpowers were actually not unhappy with the prospect of Egypt being tied up militarily in Yemen for so long. The US and USSR, they contend, were content to see Egypt’s military strength shunted off into the Yemeni imbroglio. Thus preoccupied, the chances of war breaking out between Israel and the UAR (which would lead to the two superpowers intervening and the risk of a dangerous confrontation between them), was headed off. Washington also saw a secondary benefit in Egypt’s preoccupation with the war in North Yemen – it would be less likely to pose a threat to the UK base in Aden and to the US base in Libya [ibid.].


⍐ The Civil War in stamps – royalist & republican

The US had a vested interest in maintaining stability in the Arabian Peninsula … preserving access to vital oil resources was high on its agenda. The Soviet Union also had its own interests in Yemen to consider – it was of geopolitical advantage, making it a potential base for the Soviets to expand into the Arabian Peninsula, as well as a jump-off point into post-colonial Africa to make Cold War gains at the expense of western interests [Orkaby, loc.cit.]. The Soviet-built port at al-Hudaydah (Hodeida) was constructed to give Moscow an influential role in international shipping through the Red Sea.

YAR stamps commemorating the Soviet-built port at Hodeida ⍗

Egypt’s folly – the Vietnam parallel

The conservative western media at the time (Time, The New Republic, etc) was quick to call out Nasser’s military engagement as a monumental blunder [Tharoor, loc.cit.]. Later historians in hindsight have labelled Yemen Egypt’s ‘Vietnam’. Historians such as Michael Oren have attributed Egypt’s abysmal performance in the 1967 Six-Day War in part to the Egyptians’ being seriously understrength owing to the massive over-commitment to the Yemen war [Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, (M Oren), (2002)].

Sana’a (old town) ⍐

The civil war reached its climax in 1967/68. The royalist forces laid siege to Sana’a to try to break the back of the republican heartland. Bolstered by the hefty Egyptian contribution this attempt was resisted by the republicans and proved the war’s turning point. Although pockets of tribal royalist resistance lingered on till 1970, the royalists and al-Badr were effectively defeated. In late 1967 the republicans replaced as-Sallah (who voluntarily went into exile in Baghdad) as president with Abdul al-Iranyi (formerly the YAR prime minister in 1962-63).

Royalist territory in red/Republican territory in black ⍗

Rapprochement

In March 1969 the warring parties – of a conflict that had claimed around 200,000 lives including civilians – held peace talks in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), from which agreement was reached to form a unified government in North Yemen. The government was to represent both royalists and republicans although it would excluded members of the Hamid al-Din family. Subsequently in 1970, Saudi Arabia recognised the Yemen Republic (YAR) [Orkaby, op.cit.].

Wash-up of the war

As suggested from the above, Egypt, despite being on the winners’ side in the civil war, was a loser in the wider, regional political contest. Nasser’s reckless foray into the Yemen adventure expended an horrendous casualty toll on Egypt’s military manpower✪ and left it woefully ill-prepared materially for the pre-emptive, surprise strike from Israel when it came in June 1967. The six-day catastrophe that followed left Egypt with long-term disadvantages, loss of key strategic territories to its enemy and forfeited the ascendency to it in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

⍗ King Faisal – Saudi ruler 1960s-70s

Though a blow to Nasser’s foreign policy ambitions and a setback to the cause of Pan-Arabism, there were nonetheless some positives for Egypt that came out of the foreign venture. The Khartoum Agreement (1967) saw Saudi king Faisal and Nasser “bury the hatchet” and agree that both withdraw their support from the two sides in the war [‘How the 1967 War dramatically re-oriented Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy’, Brookings, (Bruce Riedel), 30-May-2017, www.brookings.edu]. In material terms, Egypt benefitted from the closer ties with its wealthy neighbour – many thousands of Egyptian workers gained employment in the Saudi oil industry. Geo-strategically, the outcome in South Yemen was a plus for Egypt – the British colonials were vanquished from Aden, allowing Nasser to secure the Red Sea approach to the Suez Canal (albeit with the loss of Sinai) [Orkaby, op.cit.].

As the YAR moved to the right (recognising West Germany in return for aid), Saudi Arabia acquired itself a stable ally on its southern flank, one dependent on Saudi financial support. The Soviet Union, despite seeing the YAR moving towards alliances with the West, also benefitted in the Cold War game of “one-upmanship” from the new status quo – the emergence of a Marxist regime in South Yemen saw its influence in the region broaden. The Soviets’ new naval and military base in Aden gave Moscow a convenient haven to launch missions into Africa countries experiencing revolutionary turmoil, (especially Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Somalia) [ibid.].


Footnote: North Yemen tribal politics and coup proclivity
The coup in 1962 would not have come as a surprise to the Hamid al-Din rulers of North Yemen. There had been a history of tribal-centred coup attempts in the kingdom⊡…in 1948 al-Badr’s grandfather Imam Yahya was assassinated by the Hamid al-Din’s Sayyid rivals, the Alwaziris, who briefly assumed the imamate until Yahya’s son regained power for the family after tribal and Saudi intervention. A second coup was launched in 1955 by the Alwaziris and some military officers but was easily squashed [Peterson, J.E. “Tribes and Politics in Yemen.” Arabian Peninsula Background Note, No. APBN-007. Published on www.JEPeterson.net, December 2008].

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※ however the Jordanians severed their material support to the royalist side in 1963 and formally recognised the YAR one year later

✣ prompting Britain and other Arab states to send troops to Kuwait to protect its sovereignty (forcing Iraq to back down)

✪ about 10,000 of which are thought to have died in the drawn-out war. Egypt also incurred massive war debts from its intervention [‘How Yemen was once Egypt’s Vietnam’, Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 28-Mar-2015, www.washingtonpost.com]

⊡ Yemen has been described as perhaps the most tribal-based society and nation in the entire Arab world (Peterson, op.cit.)