South Riding

I thought that i would review this film as both the previous reviews come from the States.The first point i would make is that South Riding is that there is no such area as South Riding.East West and North yes,but South no.The most interesting aspect of the film for me was its insight into Local Government of that era.My late father was a councillor in London in the 50s and 60s and was fully aware of and fought against the corruption within local government as highlighted in this film.The backhanders and insider dealing were rampant.The Government finally had to act after the Poulson affair.To me the most interesting aspect of the film is the ambiguity in the characters.Richardson is clearly a Conservative with a capital C.Clements is clearly a Socialist.However in the end both act as if they belonged to the opposite party.I have not seen this film for well over 20years and i have to say i was surprised at just how good it was.I could not believe my eyes when is aw at the end that Richardsons daughter was played by none other than a very young Glynis Johns.

Basically this is a small town soap opera about the drama in the lives of various members of the town council of a small Yorkshire town. Much of this drama is engineered by the hiring of Sarah Burton, an idealistic new head schoolmistress from a working class background.

Superb acting by Ralph Richardson and Edna Best with strong supporting turns by John Clements and Edmund Gwenn. An adolescent Glynis Johns already has that distinctive voice as Ralph Richardson's high-strung young daughter. Wait for a gorgeous young Ann Todd as Sir Ralph's unstable wife in a flashback sequence. Everyone is quite young here and in good form.

The nuanced characterizations help flesh out a story that ends up being formulaic because a long novel has been compressed into a 84 minute programmer. Because of the compression, characters go from despising each other to being in love in a matter of minutes. Lots of plot lines are tied up and passed by in a pat way. Still quite enjoyable anyway though it could have been more with better writing and direction. I am quite interested in the 1974 miniseries with Dorothy Tutin - the extra time would give the characters more depth and more convincing development.

This is a drama about a small selection of diverse people all living in a small town in mid-thirties Yorkshire. Dramas and indeed novels like this can really grip you, they can become addictive when you can engage with the characters and want to know more about them. With a 400 page novel or a ten hour tv show you can get to know them but when, like with this picture, you've only got an hour and half, it simply doesn't work.

Philistine that I am, I've never read this book - it's not really my thing but believing it to be semi-iconic I thought I out to dip my toe into its water. I can vaguely remember as a young boy being forced to watch the ITV series back in the seventies so I subsequently avoided the BBC series about ten years ago. I thought that if it could be condensed down to an hour and a half it might be more palatable. Oh dear no!

I did find it reasonably enjoyable but hardly something I'd watch again. It's competently enough made and does look quite good - it is after all produced by Korda and directed by Victor Saville, but with a character driven drama like this where very little actual action happens, to try and squeeze a long nuanced story into a short feature film format results in it being little more than a glorified trailer.

Screenwriter Ian Dalrymple clearly loved the novel too much to sacrifice any of it which was what was needed to create a manageable movie. In his adaptation, all the themes of the novel have to be explored and all the characters have to be there. Instead of focussing on any one particular theme or person, what we end up with is therefore 4 minutes on snobbery, 3 minutes on poverty and the class divide, a couple of minutes on male chauvinism, 3 minutes about the value of girls' education (which could certainly be a film in itself), a minute on traditionalism vs. Progress, 2 minutes on hypocrisy and 6 minutes about corruption. And all that has to be done whilst developing the characters including a couple of romances. One has to give Victor Saville some credit, he takes an impossible task and whist he doesn't quite succeed, he does a reasonable job of it.

I said earlier, over condensed like this is it's like a glorified trailer - well one thing this film has done is inspired me to watch the ITV or BBC adaptation.

After watching South Riding, researching Winifred Holtby and learning of her life was even more fascinating than this film version of her novel. She can best be compared in America to Margaret Mitchell whose one epic work assured her reputation.

South Riding is the name of the town in the rural area of Yorkshire where Holtby grew up and from where she drew her characters for this novel. She'd been a newspaper writer for years and during the Twenties developed kidney disease. Knowing she had a limited amount of time left on earth, she wrote this novel as a portrait of the area of the United Kingdom she knew and loved and the people of it.

The lead character in South Riding is Ralph Richardson an aristocrat whose dwindling fortune is used to support daughter Glynis Johns in a posh girl's school and to keep her mentally unstable mother Ann Todd in the best sanitarium pound sterling can buy. Richardson is a man who is aware of his civic responsibility and serves on the area County Council. After initially opposing Edna Best's appointment as schoolteacher, he and Best find out they have a lot more in common than originally supposed.

Another councilor is John Clements who is a socialist and an ill man constantly coughing. That was an aspect of the character not drawn out by the film, I suspect the novel has a lot more to say about it. He's deeply concerned with slum clearance and has devoted himself to ridding South Riding of a row of shacks where the poor live.

Another councilor Milton Rosmer sees a quick shilling or two to be made in making sure he owns the land the houses are to be built on. Rosmer enlists Edmund Gwenn another councilor with a lovely skeleton in his closet in his scheme and they join Clements as 'reform' advocates for slum clearance.

I didn't read about Winnifred Holtby ever visiting America, but what I was watching reminded a whole lot of Chicago rather than Yorkshire.

Alexander Korda produced South Riding and director Victor Saville got great performances out of his whole cast, especially from Ralph Richardson. South Riding was later a television series for the BBC during the Seventies and I can see aspects of it easily adapting to a prime time soap opera type show.

I think Winnifred Holtby who died in 1935, three years before South Riding came to the screen would have been very proud of what Alexander Korda and Victor Saville were able to accomplish with her labor of love. She sounds like a great subject for a film herself.

As an adaptation of a wonderful book(for me on first reading three years ago it was a perfect remedy when recovering from major back surgery), it is far from ideal, and the 2011 BBC adaptation- not yet seen the 1974 series- apart from the rushed final episode did do a better job telling the story. However any adaptation of the book does deserve to be judged fairly in its own way, and on its own terms this film is decent. It definitely could have had a longer length, as a result of being too short some of the situations and storytelling felt on the jumpy and hastily-told side, so some parts weren't as cohesive as they could have been, and the character of Joe Astell was under-characterised and like a caricature. And while the first half is sumptuous and gritty too much of the latter half is caked in over-sentimentality, and has a slightly late 30s melodrama feel, the themes of the book are all there but not fully expanded. However, the film does look lovely, lovingly shot and with production values true to period, and the Yorkshire sights and sounds are deftly realised. Richard Adinsell's score is as sweeping and hauntingly beautiful as is characteristic of the composer, and the script is literate with some evidence of Winifred Holtby's prose. Victor Ssville directs admirably, and the performances are very good. Ralph Richardson's performance in particular is sensitive and nuanced. Ann Todd touches the soul even as a woman going/gone to madness, Glynis Johns is a charmer and Edna Best is similarly sympathetic. Edmund Gwenn doesn't have a lot to do but is not disappointing either and John Clements does what he can with how Astell is written, giving him elements of sleazy charm. Overall, a decent film on its own but will leave "purists"(sorry, I'll try and think of a better word that sounds less scornful) left wanting. 7/10 Bethany Cox