A walk in Hertfordshire

The village pond, with the church in the distance

There are several ways of looking at a place. I am surrounded by books concentrating on buildings (Pevsner), or focusing on walks (various guides), or even landscape (the marvellous Hertfordshire: a Landscape History), yet they none of them describe the totality of the experience of one short walk.

The place was Barkway, and the walk just three or four miles, a circular tour starting in the village, walking East between the grounds of a large house and a wood (Earls Wood), then following the edge of the wood around three sides and returning down a very gentle slope back to the village.

 The village (claimed a noticeboard by the village pond) had been a coaching stop on the route from London to Cambridge and Kings Lynn. There was an unusual number of interesting houses along the main N-S street through the village, but to be honest, the village itself was nothing special. No sign of any poverty; the noticeboard stated there was a local foodbank, but I didn’t see any sign of anyone who might benefit from such an initiative.

 All that you read from the noticeboard was that there is one pub left, and you could see just one shop. That shop, curiously, sold flowers and served coffee and cake. Clearly, if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread or a pint of milk in Barkway you would be out of luck. It didn’t seem to bother the inhabitants too much, judging from the size of the cars passing us as we walked up the main street; there were not one but two Teslas parked outside one barn conversion.

So here was a village, clearly prosperous enough to sustain a flower shop, but not sufficiently pressed for everyday needs to have a corner store. No sign that there had ever been a station.

The walk started at a recreation ground, interesting for a few features. A sign at the entrance stated the ground had been the recipient of Premier League and Football Association funding for changing rooms – a very welcome reminder that football need not all be about making more money for the top clubs, as the European Super League had tried to do. The recreation ground had adults in it – it was not a no-go area abandoned to outsiders. Finally, there was a very nice semi-circular seat in memory of someone, a lovely place to sit and to enjoy your coffee.

 

Earls Wood, Barkway

The highlight of the walk was not the village or the recreation ground but the wood, about a mile to the East. I couldn’t find any mention of the wood for anything exceptional. It was a deciduous wood, not ancient, and with the trees planted quite far apart, which meant on the ground there was quite a bit of vegetation: plenty of bluebells and cowslips to be seen Every few hundred yards the wood had been partially cleared, as if for a fire break, but then there would be  a few big trees in the clearing. No, the purpose of the wood was evident from the iron steps provided at several locations, and the prominent signs saying “private – no entry”. This was a wood for shooting game. For the walker, the enjoyment of the wood from the edge or from the middle was pretty much equal, so I couldn’t complain. In fact probably the best view of the wood was along the edge, where you could observe the trails made by animals (badgers? deer?) in and out of the trees. The whole wood, indeed the whole walk, had some very light gradients, which gave a pleasant aspect to the walk. It was a circular walk, but the path changed direction every few hundred yards, which meant for the most part you couldn’t see what was coming next.

Barkway, main street: the historic centre

After the wood, back to a new development at the southern end of Barkway, where the footpath was hemmed in by tall fences on either side making sure the new houses could not be viewed by any of the walkers. Then back to the main street, the school, some almshouses, a village pond, and to the start. 

How could you sum up such a village? A great walk, a lovely wood, a recreation ground. No shops. Expensive cars. Land organised around shooting. Which of these represented Barkway? A bit of all of these?  

Sullivan's Impossible Travels

 

Sullivan and his butler

What an astonishing film! It reaches heights (and, to be true, depths) that other movies don’t approach. Always watchable, the story lurches between starkly opposing genres and tones, and never successfully resolves them. There are at least three different genres contained within the film:

o   A smart Hollywood comedy of manners, much like Sturges’ earlier The Lady Eve; a cast full of gifted character actors (an English butler, two film studio bosses, a would-be film actress)

o   social issues, just a few glimpses of what must have been common sights: a night camp for the homeless; hundreds of tramps  running to join a freight train; a church with a singing pastor, accompanying the congregation

o   Slapstick humour, from silent film comedies, as when the car Sullivan hitches a lift in goes at top speed with the motorhome behind it trying to keep up and causing chaos in the motorhome galley

How the three ever manage to come together is difficult to imagine. Any other film would have collapsed with just two of these themes. Let’s look at what works, and what doesn’t: 

The conversation scenes between Sullivan and his entourage: his two butlers, who severely remind him that trying to see the poor is a foolish activity;

The wonderful dialogue between Veronica Lake as a would-be actress buying a cup of coffee for what she thinks is a hobo (“Can you get me an introduction to Lubitsch”?

Most unexpectedly, a few magical minutes where a pastor in a black church asks his congregation not to look down on the prisoners coming to watch a movie. To the best of my knowledge this is one of the very few moments of pre-1960s Hollywood in which a black actor appears in a part that is not clearly subservient and demeaning. He sings a song with his congregation, and they all watch a Disney film together.

Joel McCrea is that strange phenomenon, a leading male who is just a shade too mundane and ordinary-looking to be a perfect romantic lead like Cary Grant. But in this film he is perfect as the idealistic, well-meaning but rather ineffectual film director who believes he should get more experience of real life. He is tall and handsome, so we feel confident he will not suffer too much in the real world, but in any case he is surrounded by an entourage of people who give him constant advice and shield him from the everyday.

These were the successes. What about the failures?

Veronica Lake (playing a part without a name, just “the girl”) has a moment of magic in her first scene. She doesn’t know who Sullivan is; he is just someone down on his luck. She buys him coffee (it’s the last thing she buys him) and for a moment they converse as equals. But within a few minutes the truth emerges; he is a fabulously wealthy film director, and her attitude changes. She herself recognizes the change: 

The girl: “You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!'”

 That’s typical of this film, which is both bravely commenting on but enslaved by the social system of its day. Later in the film, she is desperately trying to tag along with him; she has become subservient and dutiful. 

The whole premiss of the film is compromised in the same way. Sturges’ aim in this film is stated in the first scene – and immediately knocked down, just as Sturges probably was by his own studio bosses:

Sullivan: “I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man.”

            Lebrand: “But with a little sex in it.”

As fast as we reach a serious message, it is undercut by knockabout comedy (a car chase, or people being pushed into a swimming pool) and the movie loses all its taut energy. Not entirely vapid, because it is almost always redeemed by the sparkling script that holds you spellbound by its wit and readiness to talk about things never before mentioned in Hollywood: 

Policeman at Beverly Hills station: How does the girl fit into the picture?

John L. Sullivan: There's always a girl in the picture. What's the matter, don't you go to the movies?

Finally, the film collapses (as you suspected it might) because Sturges can’t resist hammering home his message. For a few magic seconds, we see a church full of people laughing their heads off at a Disney cartoon; but nobody in the congregation laughs at the prisoners being given a treat at the same time in the same place. Even Sullivan laughs. For a few seconds, the movie has respect for others, and is profoundly moving. But then the skilled film-making disappears as Sullivan spells out the message, as if we weren’t capable of seeing for ourselves:

Sullivan:  There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.

 Forget any condemnation of the crazy excessive wealth of the studios and stars, or the system that creates such stark contrast of wealth and poverty. It’s all about laughter.

The Searchers

You would imagine a famous film, regularly voted one of the best films of all time, would not cause gratuitous offence. But The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) certainly does that.

The character of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is guaranteed to offend. From his first appearance on screen, he says a racist remark to young Martin Pawley, who has some Indian blood in him – something that in Ethan Edwards’ eyes makes him less than human. When an innocent family is massacred by Indians and one of the daughters, Debbie, is kidnapped, Edwards vows to find her. More than five years later he finally finds her, but instead of capturing her, he tries at first to kill her. Now she is an Indian’s wife, she is no longer human either.  

For almost the entirety of the film, Edwards casts his obsessive, anti-social pall over the other characters, up to the very last moment when he turns away from a house that represents community and companionship. For many commentators, his turning away, when he has nothing left to search for, is a moving moment. For me, it exposes the limitations of the Western’s moral universe. 

Characters like Ethan Edwards are common in modern literature. He has much in common with Esteban Trueba in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Like Alan Ladd in Shane, Ethan Edwards arrives from nowhere, and disappears into nowhere. But unlike Shane, Ethan Edwards could never belong in a community, not even for a moment. There is a wonderful moment in Shane where Ladd joins in an activity: a tree stump has to be removed, and it has proved impossible for Van Heflin, the small-scale farmer, to get it out of the ground. For a joyous moment, Ladd joins the homesteader and the tree stump is conquered. Sadly, you could not imagine Edwards abandoning his obsession even for a moment. Such a character is deeply disturbing. It is certainly the best acting role I have seen for John Wayne, although that’s not saying much, seeing the trivial parts he was so often expected to perform.  

The Searchers is a film full of questions. It simply doesn’t add up in so many respects. The film is set in the most inhospitable desert where no farming would be possible, yet we are expected to believe a farmer and his family live there. We see an Indian massacre and believe it appalling, but later in the film an entire Indian village is wiped out, without, it seems, any comparisons being made. Nobody asks what Wayne has been doing in the three years since the end of the Civil War. Nobody asks what Wayne is going to do as he heads away at the end of the film. There is nothing civilised he can do. This is a film that celebrates a sociopath; it makes you question what kind of person John Ford, the director, was. Is this the kind of film you would watch for entertainment? Hardly. It ranks with Taxi Driver, for moral unease, in that you initially enjoy the excitement of the shooting, but then you realise it has left a bad taste in your mouth.