The Neglect of Edmund Gwenn (1935) 🇬🇧

April 26, 2023

Glyn Roberts appeals to the British studios to stop wasting one of the finest actors on the screen to-day before Hollywood snaps him up.

When Henry Ainley suddenly fell ill during the production of "The Good Companions," in which he was taking the fruity role of his fellow-Yorkshireman Jess Oakroyd, they called upon an actor who has never yet taken anything like so prominent a part in a film.

It was Edmund Gwenn, one of the most reputable and likeable and versatile actors of the West End stage, whose outstanding film roles had been as Hornblower in silent and sound versions of Galsworthy's "The Skin Game."

Big hits on the screen are never accidents. A great actor may appear in scores of films without catching the eye — because he had unsuitable parts.

Great parts may pass unnoticed, unrealised by the audience — because the actors chosen lacked either physical quality or the intelligence or the technical resources to exploit them fully.

When the fine actor and the suitable role synchronise, you get the big hit. It is surprising how rarely this happens. Gwenn's performance as Jess Oakroyd was a very marked instance of it. In that picture — it already had the enormous ready-made public of those who read and "heard about" the most famous English best-seller of recent times — he immediately took his place among the important character actors of the kinema, and one automatically thought of him as one of those men for whom "vehicles" are sought rather than as a man who adapts himself to subordinate character- roles in conventional films in which the youthful hero and heroine dominate the screen.

Whether this was a good thing or not I don't claim to know, but it surely was so.

This is the Golden Age of the character actor on the screen. For the moment, matinee idols, though they still enjoy huge fan-mails and fat salaries, do not arouse a fraction of the interest stirred up, in Europe, by Veidt, Jannings, Laughton, Hardwicke, and Arliss, and by such brilliant Americans as William Powell, Wallace Beery, the two Tracys [Transcriber's note: Spencer Tracy and Lee Tracy], Muni and Cagney.

All this is very good, of course, it is a real intellectual and emotional treat to see one of the more ambitious pictures of any of these men.

They are stars, in the real sense of the word, and, in my opinion, their work goes far to justify the much-abused star system.

The essence of this system, I take it, is that an individual actor is treated, from the very beginning, as being of more significance than the story in which he acts.

The jargon "vehicle," and the placing of the actor's name in larger letters than the picture, confirms this view.

The actor, so to speak, sits around while the authorities root about looking for roles which are made to measure for him; he does not offer his services for any odd character roles they may have available in films already under way.

Edmund Gwenn, by general consent, showed in his work as Jess Oakroyd that the English screen has in him a man who was clearly of this calibre.

Let it pass that his splendid stage record and his flawless acting technique should have convinced the film-authorities of this without any further evidence; in his first really worth-while screen part, he showed incontestably that, unlike so many brilliant London stage luminaries who tried their hand at talkies when the new invention made good voices indispensable, he could adapt himself effortlessly to the very difficult new technique of the camera and microphone.

His Jess Oakroyd was shrewd, humorous, pliable and very British, and yet he avoided insularity or sloppiness.

He irritated no one and delighted millions all over the British Empire. Scores of people who had been slightly repelled by the heartiness of the novel and by the "bluffness" of Oakroyd in cold print, found Gwenn's creation human and three-dimensional in a way very few characters on the screen contrive to be.

To this day, I regard a "still" of Gwenn as Oakroyd as one of the "reallest" portraits I've ever seen. He lived. We all know men like that.

The chain of circumstances which led to this success of the firm of Gwenn, Priestley & Co. may yet prove a big event.

J. B. Priestley is one of the shrewdest observers of the passing show, as well as one of the most adaptable writers in the contemporary world. What is as important, he is young and energetic and has no inhibitions about novelists not being able to write directly for the stage or screen.

He sat down just over a year ago and, with Edmund Gwenn in his mind's eye, wrote a play around the character he had envisaged for the actor.

Like everything that Priestley does, the play was about life as it is lived in Great Britain as we know it, and its characters breathed our air, tasted our pains and pleasures — and ate bananas like you and me.

And it had been "built around" Gwenn, intelligently and sympathetically by a man who had taken the liberty of stepping back a few paces, standing, and staring, and thinking.

That play ran for over a year. It was grand stuff. Now it is going to New York, and Edmund Gwenn, at a salary larger even than he has ever had before, is going with it.

Priestley has already gone. A few hours before he sailed, I asked him his opinion of Gwenn as an actor.

"Excellent," he said. "One of the half-dozen best in England. He's equally effective on stage and screen because his technique is so seeming simple, so clear cut. Oh, yes — a fine artiste. You can be sure I want to write more for him in the future — that is, if he wants me to and his engagements make it possible."

Hollywood, of course, is after Gwenn. Eternally on the look-out for men who will push out and replace simultaneously the stars of to-day, Californian talent-scouts have recognised "the goods" in Edmund Gwenn.

He is in just about the same position as were Marie Dressler and George Arliss before a belated world-boom raised them from being merely well-established stage artistes to international celebrities, "household names" in the most literal sense of the phrase.

I have heard reports of salary — offers of £70,000 a year, if Gwenn will make Hollywood his home for a few years.

It is the same old story, you see. Others may disagree with me, but it is more than I can do to name two really appropriate roles which have been given to Gwenn in the dozen or so pictures he has made since "The Good Companions. "

When he has been starred, it was in honest and not-quite-successful "hooey." His character roles have been trifling or else flagrantly unworthy of his enormous talents.

The part of the Burgomaster in that highly competent film "I Was a Spy" really suited him, with the result that he turned in a beautifully rounded and genuinely moving performance.

In his most recent pictures, Java Head from Hergsheimer's fine novel — "Waltzes from Vienna" and "Warn London," Gwenn acts flawlessly, though in only the third of these is he really the star.

In the first and second he is fitted into the pattern of the picture, and his skill makes him all the more unobtrusive.

Java Head is good dramatic stuff. Waltzes from Vienna is an extremely efficient transcript of the international stage musical success, and Warn London is a praiseworthy lowbrow thriller which unfortunately, to my mind, does not quite come off, though this is due more to shortcomings in the story than any failures on the part of the cast.

Because his technique is so assured and his personality so engaging, admirers of Gwenn's acting should certainly not miss any of these films, but whether any of them has really explored his possibilities to the full is, I think, very much open to dispute.

Gwenn, to my mind, is a character actor in the truest sense of the phrase. I should never apply the label to Veidt or to Laughton, whose personalities are so strong that I can never identify them with the characters they are supposed to be portraying (I except Veidt's "Rasputin" — a great performance.)

It is always a case of the tail, proving the stronger, wagging the dog. Because those personalities are engaging and gripping, Veidt and Laughton films are always stimulating and fascinating; but for me both men completely fail to sink themselves into the different characters they enact; this is heresy, I suppose, but it is the honest testimony of one who describes what he sees.

As for Arliss, has he ever budged an inch from George Arliss? Who wants him to? I have seen Benjamin Disraeli 1921 1929, Rothschild, Voltaire and Alexander Hamilton all give brilliant performances as Arliss.

Gwenn is not like that. Really and truly this man does sink himself into the character. This is not to say that his personality is vague or colourless; it simply is not that kind of personality.

He is the complete actor, conscious, careful, fastidious, sure of himself. He conserves his energy cunningly, so that his bursts of passion, his tears (he is a magnificent weeper) and his krage, are really disturbing.

He makes you take notice; you have to identify yourself with him in his joys and his problems.

He can be intense, careless, suspicious, gay, all in a moment. His broad, flexible face is the perfect instrument for reflecting the pretended workings of his brain and the emotions he is undergoing.

Nearly forty years of acting have gone to produce this facile, effortless acting technique, unexcelled in Britain to-day. He has played Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare, Barrie, Galsworthy, revue, farce, comedy, tragedy. He knows his job.

It simply is not good enough to waste Edmund Gwenn. "Waste" may be a strong word, but is it not substantially true?

To suggest that the roles he has been given have been good enough is to underestimate this great actor's potentialities appallingly.

Gwenn himself is much too easy-going to say anything about it — it is not an actor's job to unearth and write his own plays and scenarios.

The intelligent exploitation of the — as yet — incalculable quantity which is Edmund Gwenn is the concern of the British studio executives and writers. It is in their interest to get down to it. If they don't, Hollywood will, and another great artiste will have found real understanding abroad.