Plumbing the depths darkly

In 1949, British director Robert Hamer helmed his masterpiece, “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” a delicious black comedy starring Alec Guinness as all eight members of an aristocratic British family who are murdered by a dispossessed relative.

But Hamer’s personal demons and his alcohol abuse eventually got the better of him, and he was dead a scant 14 years later at age 52, a near-forgotten figure in British cinema.

A new retrospective, “Robert Hamer: The Shadow Side,” imported from the British Film Institute by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, opens Friday, examining his pre-”Kind Hearts” career and his long-neglected films from the 1950s.

“The history of cinema is littered with ruined lives and wrecked careers,” says David Pendleton, UCLA Film and Television Archive programmer. “His pinnacle was ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets,’ but I think the films that come after have been underestimated. One of the reasons we wanted to do the series is to reevaluate the later films in light of his earlier films. The films gain by being seen as a group.”

Plus, he adds, “Here in the United States, that period of British cinema before the swinging ‘60s is generally under-known in this country.”

Hamer began his directing career at the small Ealing Studios run by Michael Balcon, grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis. From the late ‘40s through the ‘50s, the studio produced such comedy classics as “Tight Little Island,” “The Man in the White Suit” and “The Ladykillers.”

On occasion, Balcon would deviate from the “Ealing comedy” to produce more dramatic fare, such as the 1945 horror anthology film “Dead of Night.” Hamer’s episode, “Haunted Mirror,” which deals with a young couple drawn into sexual jealousy and madness, was singled out by critics.

“I want to make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to one another,” Hamer once said.

He achieved his goal in his next two films for Ealing, 1945’s “Pink String and Sealing Wax” and 1947’s “It Always Rains on Sunday.”

In “Pink Strings,” Gordon Jackson plays an innocent young man working in his father’s chemist shop who becomes attracted to a sultry pub landlady (Hamer favorite Googie Withers) who would like to kill her abusive husband. And in the thriller “Sunday,” Withers plays a dissatisfied lower-class housewife whose ex-con boyfriend reenters her life when he escapes from prison.

“A theme that recurs in Hamer’s films regularly is the dual nature of the human existence,” says Pendleton. “You have conventional, acceptable behavior which is constantly threatened or seduced by a dangerous, troubling darker side. But this attraction to the darker side can never be fulfilled and convention wins out again.”

British Film Institute’s Philip Kemp says there were many reasons for Hamer’s downfall. “It was a bit of everything,” he says. “I think if he had lived a bit later, he could have made the type of films he wanted to.”

Though married to an actress for several years, Hamer was a closeted homosexual -- he had been expelled from Cambridge in the 1930s for having an affair with a fellow student.

“Probably his homosexuality would have been less a burden to him,” says Kemp. “At that time it was still an imprisonable offense in this country. I don’t think it was legalized until 1967. It was a bit late for Hamer.”

Problems erupted with Balcon not just because of Hamer’s drinking problems but because he wanted to put more sex into his films.

“Poor Balcon was a bit terrified of sex,” says Kemp. “The other thing Hamer always wanted to get into his films was some sort of criticism of the institution of British society. And Balcon was a first-generation immigrant whose parents were East European Jews. He had been born here and brought up to feel that Britain was his hew home. And he would never hear any serious criticism of Britain -- the kind of films Hamer wanted to make.”

Still, Kemp believes that Balcon “always felt a little bit guilty about Hamer -- that he had contributed to Hamer’s decline by not allowing him to make the films he wanted to do.”

Kemp admits that none of Hamer’s post-Ealing films “totally work,” but he finds several of them, including 1949’s “The Spider and the Fly” and 1954’s “Father Brown,” to be consistently “interesting.”

Hamer remained sober during the production of the 1959 drama “The Scapegoat,” but he went on a major bender after MGM took the film out of his hands and reshot and reedited the material.

He managed to make one last film, 1960’s “School for Scoundrels,” but was replaced during production after he kept falling down drunk on the set.

“The word got around he was unreliable,” says Kemp. “It became harder and harder for him to get work.”

“Even if his life ended up unhappily, his films are wonderfully diagnostic of the period that he lived in, with this limiting sense of convention,” says Pendleton.

“It’s true and ironic that it’s the drama of his decline that generates part of the interest in him as a filmmaker,” he adds. “We are often attracted in film to people who have had dramatic lives.”

*’Robert Hamer: The Shadow Side’

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

When: Friday through Aug. 25

Price: $5 to $7

Contact: (310) 206-8013 or go to www.cinema.ucla.edu

Schedule

Friday: “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “School for Scoundrels,” 7:30 p.m.

Saturday: “Dead of Night,” “The Scapegoat,” 7:30 p.m.

Aug. 17: “It Always Rains on Sunday,” “The Long Memory,” 7:30 p.m.

Aug. 21: “The Spider and the Fly,” “Father Brown,” 2 p.m.

Aug. 25: “Pink String and Sealing Wax,” “To Paris With Love,” 7:30 p.m.

‘Robert Hamer: The Shadow Side’

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

When: Friday through Aug. 25

Price: $5 to $7

Contact: (310) 206-8013 or go to www.cinema.ucla.edu

Schedule

Friday: “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “School for Scoundrels,” 7:30 p.m.

Saturday: “Dead of Night,” “The Scapegoat,” 7:30 p.m.

Aug. 17: “It Always Rains on Sunday,” “The Long Memory,” 7:30 p.m.

Aug. 21: “The Spider and the Fly,” “Father Brown,” 2 p.m.

Aug. 25: “Pink String and Sealing Wax,” “To Paris With Love,” 7:30 p.m.