Four from the forties by Brian McFarlane

Author:Brian McFarlane [Brian McFarlane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Man Within (1947)

This was Knowles's first experience, as director, with Technicolor, as it was also for producer Sydney Box, and part of the film's quality is in Geoffrey Unsworth's restrained use of colour. Knowles had of course had Academy recognition for his contribution to the colour cinematography on The Mikado. Derived from Graham Greene's novel of the same name and with a screenplay by Sydney and Muriel Box, The Man Within is a strange and compelling tale of innocence corrupted, of trust and betrayal. Its bland US title, The Smugglers, seems to suggest a simple-minded adventure and to rob the film of its complexities, as was so often the case with transatlantic title tamperings. Though filmed at Gainsborough Studios, Shepherd's Bush, The Man Within is not officially a Gainsborough production; it was Box's first film after taking over the studio but the film does not feature the Gainsborough lady and the opening credit is simply ‘A Sydney Box Production’.

With this, his third film as director, Knowles is still working in the larger category of costume melodrama but at a considerable sub-generic move from A Place of One's Own and The Magic Bow. Though made at Gainsborough Studios, it resonates differently from the run of films that made the studio's trademark famous in the mid-1940s. No doubt the Technicolor helps to distinguish The Man Within from Knowles's two previous productions for the studio, but it is also, within its adventure-story framework, a film of some moral and character subtlety, to which a mere outline of its plot manoeuvres would not do justice.

‘There's another man within me that's angry with me,’ quoting from Sir Thomas Browne's seventeenth-century philosophical classic Religio Medici, is the film's opening title. This at once alerts us not just to the source of Greene's and the film's title but also to the idea that we may be in for something more confronting than an adventure melodrama might usually lead us to anticipate. The acting of Richard Attenborough in particular will justify this promise, which the sombre musical soundtrack behind the quoted title also induces. We also recall Greene's recurring preoccupation with moral dilemmas, with lies and truth, right and wrong.

Attenborough is first seen as young Francis Andrews, being brutally tormented with a red-hot poker and being interrogated by a prison officer (Ralph Truman), who demands to know: ‘When did you first see Carlyon?’ In this exchange, what will prove to be the film's chief relationship is introduced, and it initiates a flashback to Andrews's schooldays, with Attenborough looking convincingly youthful. In terms of structure, the film's narrative is unfolded through a half-dozen flashbacks; a slightly less fractured approach arguably might have increased its momentum, but this is not a major concern – the film's holding power is in the interplay of character and the issues cited above.

In the first flashback, Andrews is seen running to the headmaster's study where he is given the news that his father has died and that Andrews is to be placed with

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