FILM CLUB - Gone To Earth

Powell & Pressburger Season - 1950

Hazel (Jennifer Jones) is a wild unworldly young woman, more attuned to nature than she is to humankind. Carrying around with her constantly a pet fox cub called Foxy. Her Father is the local jack of all trades, who also plays the harp for village fairs, at which Hazel usually sings. Hazel appears on the surface to be a charmingly innocent simple hearted waif. She holds on to notebooks her deceased Mother wrote. These contain spells and invocations, and she listens to see if she can hear the responses of fairies. But whenever she hears the sound of Squire Reddin ( David Farrar) on his horse, she fearfully hides herself away. For though also a force of nature, he is a malevolent one.

One day she swears to the spirits on Gods Mountain and to her Father, that the first man she encounters that day she will marry. That person turns out to be the parson Edward (Cyril Cusack) . Squire Reddin turns up after their wedding day and its clear he has 'known' Hazel intimately before. She is both scared of him, but cannot refuse him, when he insists she comes away to live with him.

This film forms part of the neo romantic movement in British films that burgeoned in the immediate post war years. One which Powell and Pressburger were a central, if eccentric part of. The underpinning of Gone to Earth is derived from Mary Webb's original novel, but given technicolour lusciousness and an Archers script. The story is hugely indebted to every novel ever written by the Brontes, but now transposed to Shropshire. Where a free spirited Kathy is faced with a brooding sexually rapacious rotter version of Mr Rochester. It is ridden with such novelistic clichés. The heroine is bound to die tragically at the end, which she duly does. Falling down an old mine shaft. So, symbolism alert, she is literally gone to earth.

The Shropshire countryside is beautifully filmed by Powell. Its rare to see the English landscape captured quite so dramatically and with such a magical wildness to it. If someone had said it was really filmed in the Carpathian mountains, because England was closed, I could well have believed them. It also captures a more mythically inclined rustic culture, in tune with the seasons, but on the point of becoming embroiled in the modern world. Having won the war, films began harking back to an even older national identity, one in touch with the spirit of  ancient Albion. A world where folklore and tradition were still paramount.

Gone to Earth is not one of my favourite Archers movies. It neither earns nor gains your emotional engagement. The story line, these days, creaks, and Powell & Pressburger don't quite do enough to lift it visually out of its hackneyed genre origins. Seven years away from their partnership dissolving, this feels like an early indication of the gradual post war decline in the quality and inventiveness of their films. Returning to themes, but carrying them off with less verve or success. 

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8