Our latest blog comes from stipend holder David Cottis, Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting at Middlesex University. David explores our script resources to discover more about playwright and screenwriter Rodney Ackland and his adventures in cinema.
------------------
To the student of British film and theatre in the first half of the twentieth century, Rodney Ackland is an odd case study; a writer who had lengthy careers in both media without ever becoming part of the mainstream of either. At a time when most British dramatists were practitioners of the well-made play, a set of techniques of preparation and pay-off that had been honed throughout the nineteenth century and arguably reached their artistic peak with the works of Henrik Ibsen, Ackland was a disciple of Anton Chekhov, preferring a drama of multiple protagonists and ambiguous endings.
Ackland’s theatrical career lasted throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, then came to a rather spectacular end in 1952, with the failure of his play The Pink Room, set in a Soho drinking club on the evening of the 1945 election. He more or less disappeared from public view for more than thirty years, when he was rediscovered by Sam Walters, the Artistic Director of the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond – and when I say ‘rediscovered’, I mean that very literally, the writer was living in a council flat in Richmond in a state of considerable poverty. Walters got him to rewrite The Pink Room and staged it at the Orange Tree in 1988, under the title of Absolute Hell. Since then it’s been shown on television, starring Dame Judi Dench (1991), staged twice at the London National theatre, and is now regarded as one of the great plays of the postwar period. Ackland’s earlier plays have been restaged at venues like the Orange Tree, the Almeida and the Finborough.
Back cover of Ackland's memoir 'The Celluloid Mistress', written with his friend, film critic Elspeth Grant (EXEBD 10596) and published in 1954. The image at the start of the blog is the front cover.
Like most British playwrights of his era, Ackland also had a film career, and a genuinely remarkable one, at least in terms of his collaborators. He worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Number Seventeen (1932) with Carol Reed on Bank Holiday (1938), with Powell and Pressburger on 49TH Parallel (1941), with Lance Comfort on Hatter’s Castle (1942), and with Thorold Dickinson on The Queen of Spades (1949). It’s notable that he only worked with each of these directors once, and not all of them were happy collaborations – he writes in his co-written autobiography The Celluloid Mistress of his arguments with Powell and Pressburger, who he described as ‘the two most baffling characters I ever came across in the film industry, or, for that matter, anywhere else’ (Ackland and Grant, p. 97), while his frustration with Dickinson over The Queen of Spades, which he had originally been hoping to direct, led to the end of his film career, shortly before the failure of The Pink Room.
Lobby card from The Queen of Spades, Ackland's last film as screenwriter. (EXEBD 70415/3)
Derby Day is an unmade script by Ackland, running to a baggy 330 pages, written in collaboration with the expatriate German writer Wolfgang Wilhelm, and kept in the Bill Douglas Museum, as part of the coillection of Rank scripts they acquired in 2020. It was originally planned in 1939 as a follow-up to Bank Holiday, and shares some of that film’s technique and structure. Ackland writes about its genesis:
‘Ted Black [Producer at Gainsborough Pictures] asked me to write, in the shortest possible time, a story on the same lines as Bank Holiday, with cross-cuts of a group of people all of whom would be bound up in, responding to or re-acting [sic] against the events of some particular day. I had waited three years for such a chance. “What about Derby Day?” I suggested. “Derby Day! Splendid! Go ahead and write it!” said Mr Black. He was full of enthusiasm and so, indeed, was I – and we produced a script […] which pleased everybody. War broke out, and the picture was shelved.’
(Ackland and Grant, pp. 166/7)
Title page for Derby Day (EXEBD 94936)
Although the film was never made, the same title was used for a 1952 Herbert Wilcox film, with a starry cast led by Wilcox’s wife, Anna Neagle. This film seems to have no connection with Ackland’s script; in fact it’s closer to Bank Holiday, in using a festive event to tell a number of stories across the class spectrum – Neagle, for instance, plays a widowed aristocrat, honouring her late husband by seeing his horse run, while Googie Withers is a working-class woman who has murdered her husband, and needs her horse to win if she is to escape.
By contrast, Ackland’s Derby Day script focuses on the Bracey's, a lower-middle class family from Parsons Green. The family are shown as somewhat on their uppers – the family business, a newsagent’s, is being superseded by a large, modern chain called Booker’s which has opened on the other side of the street. One son, Victor, works as a press photographer, the other, Fred, is an aspiring writer, constantly receiving rejection notices for his short stories, while Beattie, the family’s 12 year-old daughter, is mocked by her classmates for having to deliver papers. Marjory, Fred’s wife, works in a beauty parlour, where her contact with wealthy customers crystallises her frustration:
‘MARJORY’s eyes fall on her wedding ring, which seems to be the symbol of everything that keeps her from the life which her good looks and intelligence should give her the right to enjoy. She touches her wedding ring with her other hand and then her eyes wander from her ring to the face that is still covered by a towel’
(Ackland and Wilhelm, p. 103)
The possibility of change arises when the family draw the Derby favourite in the Irish sweepstake, standing to win £15,000 if the horse, named Bank Holiday, comes in first, and £500 is it doesn’t. They promptly leave their jobs. Victor is nagged by his colleagues to go and blow a raspberry to the Editor, in the manner of Charles Laughton in the 1932 film If I Had a Million, (‘Go on, do it! Like he did in the film, remember!’ – p. 189). Initially he loses his nerve but returns and makes the gesture. The editor remains unmoved ‘Quite solemnly he makes the gesture back, then returns to his work. There is a burst of laughter from outside the door.’ (p. 192).
In the end, the horse doesn’t win, but the family’s individual stories work out well – Fred gets a job through writing an article about what it feels like to lose £30,000 [sic – the amount is inconsistent through the script], Victor becomes a successful photographer through getting a shot of an IRA man throwing a bomb into the water at Hammersmith Bridge, Beattie initially thinks she has failed her scholarship to Lady Margaret College, but discovers she has passed with honours and, as if to underline the symbolism, Whiskers, the family cat, which left the house on the day the ticket came up, returns on the day of the race. In the end, Mrs. Bracey, the mother, has the final word:
‘No, what I was trying to say before you chimed in was, they’ll all enjoy what they’ve got much more because they’ve earned it, and worked for it and they jolly well deserve it…. Much more than just through buying an old Sweep Stake ticket and an old horse that none of ‘em’s ever met in their lives coming in first and earning the money for them.’ (p.330)
Derby Day shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Ackland as a screenwriter. He manages multiple storylines skilfully, and adds some flourishes of visual storytelling, showing the influence of his cinematic idol, D.W. Griffith – for instance, an early shot of Marjory shows her reading Vogue in bed, with the cheap material of her nightgown forming ‘a striking contrast to the equivalent on the fashion page’. (p. 11). At the same time, he seems uncomfortable with what he clearly perceives to be the commercial demands of the form – the happy ending, and Mrs. Bracey’s carefully signalled moral, feel awkwardly tacked on. It’s possible that, even without the war, the film would never have been made; as it stands, it’s a fascinating example of the work of a skilful screenwriter who never really found a natural home for his talents.