UK/LA 1988 : Cross-Cultural Ties That Bind : The Cross-Cultural Ties That Bind the UK/LA

George Bernard Shaw may have made his tart joke about Britain and America being divided by a common language. But in practical fact, the shared language has led to an interrelationship in arts and letters between two powerful nations that is without exact parallel in the world.

In the early years of the Republic, an Englishman sneeringly asked, “Who reads an American book?” Even so resolutely American a writer as James Fenimore Cooper, he of the Leatherstocking Saga, decided after years of living abroad that American ways were coarse and common and that the cultural superiority of Britain and the Continent was immense.

Cooper was savaged at home for his snobbery. The irony was that he was writing just as Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman were producing what amounted to an American declaration of literary independence. No one thereafter would ask “Who reads an American book?” any more than “Who reads an English book?” Dickens and Kipling, Jack London and Hemingway have been consumed with enthusiasm on both sides of the ocean.

The UK/LA ’88 Festival, a three-month importation of British creativity that opens Thursday, arrives in an era in which many forces of history appear to have drawn the nations even closer together culturally than they had been before.

The movies, which loom large in the festival offerings, can claim significant credit for this. They have been a lure not only for performers and directors and designers but for writers. Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley all found that film work could provide an economic base for the literary exercises that were undoubtedly nearer to their hearts.

There was such a sizable British colony within the movie colony here in the early ‘30s that it had its own cricket club, presided over by C. Aubrey Smith, who with his imperious mustache often seemed even more regal than his country’s kings and princes.

Years ago, nursing a late afternoon drink in his home above the seaside at Brighton, Laurence Olivier got to remembering his first stay in Los Angeles at the start of the 1930s. He lived in small rented digs in the Hollywood Hills and palled around with two other young bucks of the moment, Robert Montgomery and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

His window commanded a sweeping view of the Los Angeles Basin, by night a vast carpet of incandescence then as now. Olivier remembered one of the pals saying, “From here, dear Larry, you can see all of Marion Davies.”

It was a small jokey commentary on the exotic excitement all the visiting Britons felt at coming to Hollywood. What Olivier was remembering at twilight in Brighton was exactly the larky delight and the sense of promise that California and America seemed to hold for him and all the British visitors, whether or not they would become expatriates.

Olivier also remembered a summons for his wife and himself to spend a weekend with William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon. They motored up and arrived late Friday evening, dusty and hungry. They hadn’t stopped for a meal, having had visions of a restorative martini and some supper at the Castle. But everyone had retired and it was only after Olivier found his way down back stairs to a kitchen that a maid concocted ham sandwiches and glasses of milk, which Olivier carried back to the bedroom.

But it all became part of the adventure, and although Olivier’s subsequent American career had its ups and downs (he and Vivien Leigh dropped most of their life savings on a disastrous Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet”), the pleasures overrode the pains as he looked back from Brighton.

The cultural cross-pollination between the UK and its former colony was already of long standing when Olivier came to test the Hollywood climate and found lodgings above the Sunset Strip.

The roster of British performers who settled, more or less permanently, in Southern California has been long and distinguished. To cite only a few, it runs from Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant to Ronald Colman, Boris Karloff, David Niven, Eric Blore, Charles Laughton, Reginald Owen, Greer Garson, Richard Burton, Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons and in later times Michael York, Samantha Eggar and Michael Caine, who has only recently returned to live in England again. Errol Flynn, born in Tasmania, qualifies as a British colonial who hit his peak here.

Alfred Hitchcock heads the shorter list of film makers who found a creative home in Los Angeles. Guy Green, Clive Donner, John Schlesinger, Michael Apted and Ridley Scott are others who, in a jet age, call California home at least some of the time. The high taxes in Britain no doubt convinced many to make L.A. a semi-permanet residence.

In the ‘60s in particular, the tide flowed the other way as well, from Hollywood eastward to England. There were so many American film people living in London in that eventful decade that the British film critic and historian Alexander Walker called his book about the period “Hollywood UK.”

On Sunday mornings in Hyde Park, there was a softball game featuring the expatriate writers and executives. It was memorialized in “A Touch of Class.”

There were clubs and restaurants favored by the visiting Yanks. One was a posh Piccadilly establishment called Les Ambassadeurs, called Les A for short. On one memorable noontime an American agent named Harvey Orkin, who had inadvertently become a London talk show star as well, stood at the bar of Les A, shouting out short orders as at a Manhattan coffee shop. “BLT holda mayo,” Orkin would cry in the penetrating tones of Brooklyn.

While no British reaction to Orkin’s litany was recorded, the breezy openness and vigor of the American presence was, it seemed to me, admired secretly if not openly and was missed when the tides of fortune took it away again.

Wardour Street was then as now London’s Film Row, and the Columbia HQ at 142 turned out a string of hits, including “The Guns of Navarone,” “Born Free” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

Universal had an imposing office at 139 Piccadilly and there financed some spectacles like Hal Wallis’ “Mary Queen of Scots” and several fine but commercially disappointing small films in the British style, like “Work Is a Four-letter Word” with David Warner and Michael Winner’s “I’ll Never Forget Whats ‘is Name” with Oliver Reed.

Several blacklisted American writers, producers and directors--Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson--found work and fresh success in London and contributed to that brief, bright phenomenon called “Swinging London.”

Fueled in part by American capital, the period was not unlike Miss Millay’s candle. In film making especially, it burned at both ends and it gave a lovely light, but it did not last the decade, although the films continue to glow.

It was an extraordinary decade--perhaps a bit more, actually, from the late ‘50s to the very early ‘70s. The postwar rise in tourism was in full steam and there were summer days when London seemed to echo to as many American voices as British. In all ways, the cultural affinities between the two nations had never been so close.

The comedies from Ealing and elsewhere starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers had been followed by the vigorous films of social commentary like “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” “Morgan,” “This Sporting Life,” “Billy Liar” and “Darling.”

This was also the Britain that gave the world the Beatles, the Rolling Stones (and the Kinks, the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, Gerry & the Pacemakers and many a solo singer). As evidence of the cultural interplay between the two nations, it is worth noting that the Beatles and the Stones both acknowledged the influence of American groups like Bill Haley & the Comets and individual artists like Muddy Waters. It’s worth noting as well that the first two Beatles movies were American-financed and produced as part of the “Hollywood UK” invasion.

But the British ‘60s also gave California and the world David Hockney and several other painters and sculptors who are equally highly regarded if a bit less vivid and identifiable personally.

There were fashion leaders like Caroline Charles and Mary Quant; instrumentalists like the late Jacqueline Du Pre; triumphs in ballet (the partnership of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn) and opera (the Maria Callas “Tosca” at Covent Garden, among other historic productions).

And there was British television, which continues to set standards of daring, originality and excellence for television everywhere else.

A case can be made that “The Forsyte Saga” helped to rescue American public television from its UHF obscurity and to build the large and loyal audience that has been steadily amplified by “Upstairs Downstairs,” “Brideshead Revisited,” “The Jewel in the Crown” and the other majestic series that have followed.

In documentaries like “Civilisation” as well, British television has immeasurably enriched American viewing. Whether “Dallas” is fair exchange is a question, but the ratings suggest that British audiences would say yes.

What the UK/LA ’88 festival means to prove is that although the world has spun about several times and the British lion surveys a much-diminished domain, still British artists in every area are making their mark.

And while it is impossible to make summary judgments on so large and varied a set of offerings as those that will be on view, it seems fair to say that the British arts, like the Empire itself, are working on a smaller scale.

Intimacy and individuality rather than spectacle is the prevailing mode. The great British films of postwar (not counting the international or largely American co-productions) have been essentially close-up studies of character and relationships, up to “Mona Lisa” and “My Beautiful Laundrette” of the recent past.

The films and television from the ‘80s that will be shown in the festival generally suggest that we are to expect intensity rather more than scope.

It may well be that economic realities have been the mother of the downscale inventions in size. But even a cursory look at British film history discloses that the UK has always had a way with the chamber film.

British television, on the other hand, has never hesitated to think big, and “Jewel in the Crown” was a very large undertaking, as is the series now on PBS, “Fortunes of War,” based on two trilogies by Olivia Manning. But in fiction or in documentary, British television has acquired its image by seeking the highest expression rather than the lowest common denominator.

A new generation of film and television directors is being introduced during the festival. And in the other creative areas as well, from painting and sculpture to music, fashion and architecture, the festival can be seen as an ambitious attempt to prove that in ‘80s Britain is still swinging, or is swinging again.