for this week’s Tribune : ‘Frownland’ [7+/10]; ‘Went the Day Well?’ (1942) [8/10]

Published on: July 8th, 2010


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FROWNLAND.   Director: Ronald Bronstein
WENT THE DAY WELL?   Director: ‘Cavalcanti’
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This week’s new multiplex releases Predators and Twilight: Eclipse may dominate the sides of the nation’s buses, but as usual the real quality cinema is hidden away in a handful of screens with minimal-to-zero ballyhoo. A freshly restored print of Albert Cavalcanti’s 1942 wartime classic Went the Day Well? is showing at the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre) and also at Bradford’s National Media Museum – with other arthouse venues around the country (hopefully) to follow. But Ronnie Bronstein’s sui generis nightmarish comedy Frownland is a capital-only affair, restricted to a single screen at the ICA in the Mall: ten showings in total between July the 9th and the 31st.
   Any kind of release for Frownland is welcome and overdue – the picture, named after the first track from Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica (“My smile is stuck. I cannot go back to your Frownland”) world-premiered more than three years ago at the South by SouthWest Festival (SXSW) in Texas, since when it has accrued a genuine cult following at festivals and on-off showings.
   A no-budget character-study of splutteringly inarticulate Brooklyn thirtysomething Keith (Dore Mann), stuck in a perpetual “state of freewheeling anxiety”, it’s further evidence that the ICA is Britain’s most adventurous and audacious “distributor” – even though they no longer “distribute” their selections any further than the confines of their own institution. This change of policy, while understandable in the current economic climate, is a shame – while clearly not for everyone, Frownland is one of the most important and memorable examples of genuinely edgy US independent (as opposed to the blanded-out “indie” genre) of the last decade.
   One sign of its merit has been its ability to violently divide reaction from audiences and critics alike – even a relatively hip outlet such as the online Slant magazine, whose Bill Weber slammed it as “a miserabilist, micro-budgeted 16mm freak show… Wallowing in emotional and aesthetic ugliness that feels like sandpaper on the nerve endings… [A] world of torment.” Then again, Frownland‘s fans wouldn’t actually disagree with Weber’s remarks – the picture is nothing if not aggressively confrontational in both its style and content, but executed with sufficient panache, intelligence and originality to ensure that the cumulative effect is bracing and cathartic: if nothing else, the central performance by newcomer Mann is a thing of magnetically horrible and exhaustingly sustained social and physical awkwardness.
   Bronstein (husband of Mary, responsible for Frownland‘s fine distaff equivalent Yeast [2008]) is no mean actor himself, by the way – a projectionist by trade, he starred in Go Get Some Rosemary (aka Daddy Long Legs) a not-dissimilar 16mm study of New York dysfunctional masculinity directed by the Safdie brothers, and approvingly mentioned in Tribune‘s May report from the IndieLisboa film festival. Writer, director and editor here, he delivers a work which is arrestingly unusual from the very first image.
   In a gambit borrowed from Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, this opening shot is actually taken from a different film altogether: Hammer horror Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974), with Dave Prowse hidden under layers of latex as the hapless, hideous creature. Offscreen, Peter Cushing is heard exhorting his creation to “start exercising your brain,” and of course he’s addressing not only Keith but also the Frownland audience – this is a film which requires patience, commitment and close attention, but which repays such investments severalfold.

Combine John Sturges’ The Eagle Has Landed (1976) with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), add in a generous dash of Miss Marple and you’re coming close to the rousing example of WW2 propaganda that is Went the Day Well? - perhaps the greatest British war-movie you’ve never heard of. And if you have heard of it, you’ll almost certainly have only seen in on afternoon TV, where its relative realism and shocking violence may well have made you choke on your coconut macaroons. Needless to say, the picture works even better on the big screen – as audiences at last month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, which hosted a preview of this restored print, discovered.
   Though only very loosely based on Graham Greene’s short story The Lieutenant Died Last - all that scriptwriters John Dighton, Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan retain is a single character (poacher Bill Purvis) and the basic idea of German paratroopers invading a somnolent English village with the help of fifth-columnists – the film takes place squarely within the contours of what has come to be known has ‘Greeneland.’ Meaning that the very British veneer of tradition, self-mocking humour and courtly, genial good manners regularly yields glimpses of the darker social and psychological mechanisms churning away just below the surface.
   And how typical that it should be a Brazilian of Italian extraction, Alberto Cavalcanti – often just billed by his last name – who should hold up such a revealing mirror to our national psyche. Cavalcanti, whose peripatetic journey through cinema included collaborations with Jean Renoir, Humphrey Jennings, W H Auden, Bertolt Brecht and Joris Ivens, was responsible for one of the most enduringly famous sequences in 1940s British cinema: the ventriloquist’s-dummy segment from the portmanteau horror movie Dead of Night (1945), starring Michael Redgrave. But Went the Day Well? (its title taken from a First World War Times epitaph) is surely his unfairly-neglected masterpiece, a masterfully-handled balancing between comedy and suspense, civility and brutality – predating the likes of The Avengers and Doctor Who by several decades.
   The fictional village of Bramley End is the scene of an audacious, well-planned Nazi assault: the Home Guard is disposed of with minimum fuss, but the less formal “home guard” provides rather more intransigent opposition. When Churchill said that we would fight them “on the beaches, on the landing grounds, the fields, the streets and the hills,” he left out the church-yard, manor-house, pub, telephone exchange and village-green. And that’s where the battles of Went the Day Well? take place, all the more startling for the bucolic calm of these quintessentially British backdrops.
   In contrast to previous works of wartime film-unit propaganda, Cavalcanti and his screenwriters opted for what at the time was regarded as uncompromising realism – even if this meant that certain sympathetic characters had to meet an unexpectedly premature and sticky end. The bloodthirsty scene involving a plucky postmistress (Muriel George) and her lodger, an axe and a bayonet still retains its power to disturb and shock, in a film which is commendably scrupulous about putting women right in the thick of it. And that includes an unfeasibly young Thora Hird as land-girl Ivy Dawking – in retrospect, Hitler vs ‘Our Thora’ was only ever going to have one outcome…

Neil Young
29th June, 2010
(written for the 7th July edition of Tribune magazine)



.FROWNLAND : [7+/10] : USA 2007 : Ronald BRONSTEIN : 106m (ICA) : {20/28}
.WENT THE DAY WELL? : [8/10] : UK 1942 : (Alberto) CAVALCANTI : 93m (BBFC) : {21/28}