Hindle Wakes (1931) User Reviews

picture of a vanished age

[malcolmgsw · 6/10 · 22 January 2005]

At the time this film was made it was the custom for whole towns to shut down their factories for one week in the summer so that the staff could go on holiday,unpaid,to Blackpool or Scarborough and other popular seaside towns.This film centres around the activities of a young couple and its effect on their respective families.Despitebeing directed by Victor Saville there is very little that is cinematic about this film.It feels like it is merely a filmed stage play.It is interesting to see a middle aged Sybil Thorndike with a leading role.Her film career was very sporadic.Edmund Gwenn is his usual bluff Northern type.The main interest is in a historic sense.Seeing a period and attitudes which seem centuries ago not a mere 74 years

Does the Sound of Clogs on Cobbles Mean Anything to You?

[boblipton · 6/10 · 19 January 2018]

The first sound version of HINDLE WAKES is more concerned with the issues of the play than the famous visual extravaganza that the 1927 silent version directed by Maurice Elvey was. Nonetheless, it is carefully and beautifully shot by Mutz Greenbaum, with much side-lighting to make it all look modern and dramatic, and the credits are offered as woven on a loom. There are many wild shots to permit a moving camera, and a rapid pace of cutting when people are speaking to each other. Nor, despite the fact that the sound on the copy I viewed was not very good, was the foley work neglected. All in all, it was a topnotch effort from Victor Saville (who has sometimes been credited with the flair for Elvey's silent version; Saville was credited as a writer), even if the ending has been changed to soften the consequences for the parties involved.

I have seen four or five versions of this play, and find this one strangely unfocused. Norman McKinnel's Nat Jefcote is rote, rather than moral, and John Stuart's Alan Jefcote... well, he's just an ass. Belle Chrystall, as the center of this storm, is fine, but it's never clear that, despite her big speech at the end, she's just a woman who has played her hand as well as she could, seen she is going to lose, and dropped out before she lost even more. Her willingness to get on with her life may be sensible, but compared with other versions of this story about how changing times and the rising ability of women to support themselves by their own efforts may change their choices, does it make it admirable?

In the end, this story remains a drama of its own time and place, shocking and, indeed important for that moment. I have my doubts about its universality. Neither does this version help sustain it.

Belle Chrystall's Brave New Woman!!

[kidboots · 8/10 · 14 November 2018]

"You were only an amusement, a lark, a diversion..." so says Jenny Hawthorne in an extraordinary climatic speech which still packs a thrilling power. Earlier in the film, the spineless Alan Jeffcote had used the same speech to his shocked fiancée, in an effort to explain his week away with mill girl Jenny. Beatrice counters with the "what if I had done the same" exposing the hypocrisy and double standard and of course Alan was horrified!!

It's Beatrice who precipitates events, by not giving into Alan's plans for an early wedding. He then goes off to Blackpool where he meets Jenny and they hit it off immediately - there is a fabulous carnival dance hall sequence, you can see the directorial hand of Victor Saville and the modernistic camera angles of Mute Greenbaum, capturing the rowdiness and gaiety of the working class atmosphere. Unfortunately it was the only time the film was opened out and the scene came alive, after that it was back to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the grim mill town. They decide to go away for a week in Wales and Jenny organizes postcards etc to be sent by her friend Mary, so folks at home will be kept in the dark but Mary is killed in an accident and Jenny, unaware of events, goes home to fireworks!!

Edmund Gwen, as usual, gives a stellar performance as Jenny's understanding dad, but he doesn't have centre stage this time, he has to share it with the fabulous Belle Chrystall and Norman McKinnel who, together with John Stuart as Alan, repeated their roles from the highly regarded 1927 version. He plays Nathanial Jeffcote, a self-made man who has never forgotten his beginnings, he started the mill with Hawthorne but couldn't convince his chum to come in as a partner so while he prospered, Chris remained a worker but they have always had a great friendship. When Chris comes, cap in hand, to tell him that his son has done wrong by Jenny, Jeffcote is adamant that Alan will do the honourable thing. That Jeffcote is determined not to cave in to his socially conscious wife (a trait she shares with Jenny's mother, Sybil Thorndyke playing in a very under stated way). Unlike the other reviewers I didn't get a dark or gloomy atmosphere about the movie - Chrystall was marvellous, so sensible and upbeat. Somehow you knew that life was not going to defeat her. She doesn't view her life as a "miserable horror" - far from it, life is for taking and getting the most out of. In fact Beatrice, with her upper class restrictions and the horror of being made the subject of gossip was going to have a far less happy time of it. She (a nice portrayal by Muriel Angelus) was the person you felt for - she and Alan made it up, but you knew she realised that Alan was less the person she thought he was. And Jeffcote is disgusted at the way his son handled things - "well, there's no accounting for taste" when he hears of her acceptance, seems to sum up his less than proud fatherly feeling!!

Very highly recommended.

Dark side of behaving badly

[westernone · 5/10 · 4 May 2012]

Contains Spoilers:Jenny(It was Fanny in the novel and Silent film) Hawthorne has been regarded as an Ibsen-like feminist heroine for turning the tables on the double standard, but her story is more of a lesson in the consequences of being stubborn and illogical than the journey of a crusader for sexual freedom. She has an illicit week end fling with the son of the boss of the mill she toils in, while the mill is closed for a holiday. She's supposed to be with friends, but when all is found out, she must marry the boy to save both families' honor. Her father's a henpecked wimp, her mother's an overbearing shrew with a penchant for hitting, the boy is a cad that will say anything he needs to Jenny or the girl he was supposed to marry, his mother's a social climber, and like Jenny's mum, no interest in love, maternal or otherwise. Of the lot, the owner seems most likable, caring for the honor of Jenny's family even at great sacrifice to his own, in prestige and power by arranging that she hitch up with his son. Inexplicably, Jenny refuses this jackpot because she doesn't see the fairness somehow. Her life has been a miserable horror, she lives in a hovel, her mother is a cruel and ignorant bully, she labors like a slave in a dirty woolen mill.(You can gag on the cotton dust in those places!)Her chance to move into a mansion, married to the richest family in Lancashire, and leave all the shabbiness behind isn't as important as making some smug point about something in an argument. She walks out on her family, empty handed, self satisfied, and short on common sense. We close on a scene some time later, still working at the loom on the same roaring shop floor, happily sharing shy smiles with her cipherous old boyfriend from the beginning of the film. There is a large chunk of the film that's missing, around where reel two might be, that established some of the characters, the ride to Blackpool, getting a hotel room there, and most of all, whatever update to the celebrated roller coaster scene in the silent version there may have been. Even so, just as in the silent, the film is dramatically cinematic and quite visually interesting, until the return to Hindle, where it becomes very conventional.