Think British Films Are a Cold Lot? Not so Jolly Fast

Americans’ ambivalence toward things British is nowhere more pronounced than at the movies.

Like the 1999 theatrical reissue of Carol Reed’s “The Third Man,” the DVD release of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” should jolt movie lovers into remembering the diverse virtues of classic English directors.

For decades, Lean was denigrated as impersonal or middlebrow. American filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg swore allegiance to Lean’s craft, and British filmmakers such as Hugh Hudson (“Greystoke”) and Ridley Scott (“Gladiator”) tried, in vain, to emulate him. But film school professors taught future scholars that Lean was a pitifully empty purveyor of high-class kitsch.

This bias is rooted in Americans’ mingled love for and resentment of English culture. In his most famous essay, Philip Rahv, one of the founders of Partisan Review, divided American writers into “Paleface”--the author of keen sensibility--and “Redskin”--the author of passionate expression. He proclaimed Redskins “the true-blue offspring of the Western hemisphere.”

As far as our attitudes toward British and American movies go, Palefaces and Redskins more properly could be labeled Tories and Rebels. To appropriate Rahv’s definitions: “At his highest level, the [Tory director] moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere; at his lowest, he is genteel, snobbish and pedantic. In giving expression to the vitality and the aspirations of the people, the [Rebel director] is at his best; but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, combining aggression with conformity and reverting to the crudest forms of frontier psychology.”

Since narrative movies are, like jazz, a native American art form (as novels are a native English art form), film historians everywhere have usually been harsher on the “genteel, snobbish and pedantic” flaws of British movies than on the “aggression mixed with conformity” and “crude frontier psychology” of American movies.

A year ago, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” dominated the revival scene. It was probably Hitchcock’s defection to Hollywood in 1939 that sealed the textbook fate of British movie-making. Hitchcock won the reputation of being primarily an American director, and the British movie industry won the reputation of not being sufficiently serious about frivolity to hang on to its most brilliant technicians.

This, of course, is the root of the Tory myth: that British films have always been bloodless, insipid, earnest, lacking the emotionalism and originality of continental cinema and the hustling vitality of Hollywood’s Dream Factory.

But British filmmakers of every era have found ways to echo and occasionally outclass American pop.

Wild beauty and invention permeated even Tory filmmaking in its 1940s prime. Michael Powell, whose 1947 “Black Narcissus” blew away the other clipped films at last month’s Academy Awards, was often berated in his own day for being too gaudy and unruly--too “Hollywood.” In fact, Powell had to be rediscovered decades later as a “personal” movie-maker. Andre Bazin, the critical inspiration of the French New Wave, once proclaimed that Lean, perhaps the compleat Tory director, had hit on cinematic techniques so exact and expressive that they could be used “over and over indefinitely.”

The DVDs of “Pygmalion,” “The Third Man” and “Lawrence of Arabia” cleanly demonstrate how Tory directors could beat Rebels at their own game.

“Pygmalion”--a 1938 Gabriel Pascal production, co-directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, with Howard as Henry Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza Doolittle--adds emotional coloring to George Bernard Shaw’s play without smothering it in chic the way George Cukor’s “My Fair Lady” did. This movie doesn’t muffle Shaw’s cleverness, but it too is a popular entertainment, peppered with visual flourishes: Eliza’s first bath is an inspired piece of slapstick, and Higgins’ brutal phonetics lessons become the stuff of mad-scientist parodies.

Shaw was pleased with the result, and even permitted the film to end with the tentative suggestion that Higgins and Doolittle might live happily ever after. (The movie has achieved its own happy ending with a Criterion Collection DVD; although this disc has no extras, it boasts the sharpest image and sound this film has had in more than 60 years.)

In 1982, when the British film magazine Sight and Sound conducted its once-a-decade international critics’ poll of all-time favorite movies, “The Third Man,” directed by Reed and written by Graham Greene, was the only British film to be awarded even an honorable mention. Of course, if you haven’t seen it in years, just a mention can bring back the coiling plot about the black market in divided postwar Vienna; Orson Welles’ dash as that irresistible villain Harry Lime; and the plunk and tingle of Anton Karas’ zither music.

But what’s most fascinating today is how both Reed and Greene pit Yankee obviousness against European sophistication at every turn. All-American simplicity doesn’t belong merely to the male lead, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton, at the peak of his form), who resembles the blundering Americans in Greene’s other works about political hot spots. It also belongs in an amoral way to Martins’ old friend Lime, a bouncing American boy who sees the world as a source of plunder.

The diverse supplements on the Criterion Collection DVD make Reed’s strategy clear. It was Reed’s inspiration to cast Welles, not Noel Coward, as Lime. But ever since, Welles’ idolaters have speculated that he ghost-directed the movie and wrote his own part. The DVD obliterates that fantasy.

Peter Bogdanovich testifies that Welles himself said he contributed just one speech: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed; and they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Granted, it’s the most famous speech in the film, but it’s often taken the wrong way--as a piece of wisdom. Heard fresh, in Reed’s original British cut, it registers for what it really is: a terrifyingly glib self-justification.

There are three disappointments attached to seeing “Lawrence of Arabia” on the Columbia TriStar DVD. First, the images aren’t as superbly nuanced as in the out-of-print Criterion laser-disc set. Second, the men responsible for saving Lean’s vision from oblivion--film restorers Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten, who produced the print released in 1989--are ignored. Third, the extra features, while abundant, are prosaic.

“Lawrence of Arabia,” though, is still the most satisfying attempt in modern movies to interpret spectacular historical events through one man’s perspective. Nearly every sequence has Lean’s spring-driven energy.

With this film, he came as close as any Tory could to going native.