Vague Visages’ Dirk Bogarde essay contains spoilers for Once a Jolly Swagman (1949), Boys in Brown (1949), The Blue Lamp (1950), Hunted (1952), Desperate Moment (1953) and The Sleeping Tiger (1954). Check out VV’s film essays section for more movie coverage.

In the aftermath of World War II, a restlessness and disaffection overtook British life. At the exact moment when the glow of victory should have erased any discomfiting shadows, there was a gnawing sense that the exertions of war must be rewarded with meaningful social change. This desire was articulated in the landslide which brought Clement Attlee’s Labour government to power in the 1945 general election, ousting wartime talisman Winston Churchill. Labour’s resounding victory was as much informed by symbolic desire as material considerations; it was a mandate to recast the country as something other than a waning imperial power beholden to past glory, to put geopolitical adventure aside and set the nation on a more equitable footing. Multiple efforts were in progress to shake off this post-war malaise, and cinema was not exempt from this. Many within the British film industry saw it as an ossified cottage industry trading in shopworn whimsy, provincial and complacent, hamstrung by the same class distinctions as wider society. However, developments further afield could not be ignored by those with an interest in British cinema being anything other than a tawdry production line. New attitudes and approaches were emerging across the arts which sought to process the wartime experience and channel it into methods of expression which spoke to a certain survivor’s guilt, and an exaltation that the conflagration had cleared the way for a challenge to convention and tradition. 

Dirk Bogarde was at the heart of this disquiet; the English actor was not content to be another disposable matinee idol, as he expressed his admiration for the internalized and intense school of acting promulgated by the likes of Montgomery Clift, a star to whom he was frequently compared, and encouraged the studio to which he was contracted, Rank, to develop groundbreaking new works like Look Back in Anger (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). But the old guard in charge of Rank saw no reason to diverge from a production strategy that prioritized stability over inspiration. Thus, Bogarde had to be content to play a succession of what he described as “spivs, wide boys and junior crooks.” But there was within these adolescent roles the germ of a rebellious spirit which led the actor to break free and seek succor among European auteurs and Hollywood exiles as the 1960s progressed. But until then, there was a perennial high wire act between the demands of Bogarde’s carefully cultivated screen persona and his desire for artistic growth. It began in a seemingly inauspicious manner with Once a Jolly Swagman (1949), but Jack Lee’s speedway drama is a parable on the pernicious influence of fame and influence, feeling like a warning from those very power brokers who had nixed Bogarde’s attempts to elevate the material at his disposal. Bogarde’s Bill Fox begins as one of those very same angry young men, daydreaming his way through his dehumanizing job in a lightbulb factory, an ambitious outsider restlessly probing for openings into society’s circle of winners. 

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Bill thinks he has found his entrée into a more rewarding existence through motorcycle racing; a grimy, frenetic metaphor for the merciless whirl which propels bodies toward glory and doom, in which success is contingent upon the racer’s ability to remain in the seat while others fall around them. One such casualty is Lag Gibbon (Bill Owen), a veteran racer whose injury paves the way for Bill’s elevation into a sporting heartthrob and valuable commodity. Taking place on the cusp of World War II, Once a Jolly Swagman strikes a cautionary note in its depiction of Bill’s rise, going so far in one montage as to counterpose the screams of the protagonist’s adoring fans and the accumulating press clippings with footage of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini delivering speeches, straining to make clear the destructive power of a collective will in thrall to a dynamic personality. When Bill’s brother, Dick (Patric Doonan), returns home from fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his class consciousness is piqued and he strives to secure better conditions for all the racers. The screenplay from Lee and William Rose clearly seeks to draw parallels between fascist idolatry and labor agitation in Bill’s tilt from self-directed striver to locker room rabble rouser. It is the outbreak of war which tempers both impulses, holds them in check and subjugates the protagonist to a more strategically useful form of the “dash and glamour and courage” that animates the racers. Fame and heroism function as twin death drives, undergirding the male energy which generates as much destruction as accomplishment. Bill ultimately rejects radicalism, vows to “go straight” and embraces the status quo. It was an outcome which the young Bogarde took to heart; he grasped from the outset that a star is only as valuable as their ability to uphold the mythos they are tasked with embodying. He would break loose with the release of Victim (1961), but until then he continued to lend his charm and charisma to doomed young rebels accelerating into the abyss.

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One such juvenile delinquent was Alfie Rawlings in the borstal drama Boys in Brown (1949). Bogarde plays a supporting role alongside Richard Attenborough’s Jackie Knowles, who is sent to a youth correction facility after participating in a botched robbery. Rawlings at first appears to be a diffident young man looking to find “a pal” in Knowles, but he transforms into a budding Iago. The character reveals himself to be a hard-bitten cynic with a vindictive streak, one who succeeds in ingratiating himself into a plan to stage a getaway, probing for weaknesses in his fellow inmates to plunge them into a hopeless disposition which mirrors his own fatalistic outlook. Rawlings knows from the outset that the plan will fail, but he wants to take everyone else down with him, laying traps with promises of a hollow yet intoxicating freedom, leaving them free to scramble, struggle and fail in an outside world which regards them as “failures and no-goods..” Rawlings has abandoned any hope of being rehabilitated by his confinement; he is now resolutely outside of society. Like Bill in Once a Jolly Swagman, Rawlings cannot see a way out of his subcultural rut, but there is no prospect of his being elevated into the straight world. The only option is to construct a cadre of fellow “fifth grade gangsters” who can sneer at the pretensions of the law and its institutions as they swim in the mire. For the rest of the inmates, Rawlings is their guide into the darkest depths of anomie, seeding in them his own nihilistic amusement. Bogarde’s performance hints at his capacity to deliver something beyond the intrinsically decent wrongdoer who is reformed by the stern yet benevolent hand of a paternalistic authority.

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A signature role came with The Blue Lamp (1950), in which Bogarde made his entry into the pantheon of young ruffians with a performance to rival Attenborough’s Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock (1948). The actor plays Tom Riley, a small-time crook who the film’s narrator takes pains to introduce as “a new problem,” a distressing mutation that threatens to rend the fabric of post-war British life. Riley and his cohorts constitute “a class apart” whose “natural cunning and a ruthless use of violence” has resulted in their being rejected even by the traditional criminal underworld. These “restless and ill-adjusted youngsters” come from homes “broken and demoralized by war,” and the resulting “crime wave” represents a stain on the nation’s conscience. It is from this point of view that The Blue Lamp unfolds; the viewer from the “ordinary public” is encouraged to peek at this cruel, paltry existence on the outskirts of respectable life, guided by the upright and avuncular PC Dixon — played by Jack Warner, who was also the Governor in Boys in Brown. The Blue Lamp presents a clear dichotomy between the forces of order — characterized by Dixon’s catchphrase “all correct” — and a social decay that throws disruptive shadows over the cozy provincialism of the Ealing Studios universe. London is transmuted into a noir city, beset by stark chiaroscuro and exaggerate angles, threatening to engulf the cozy certainties of the bobbies on the beat who confront the denizens of this demimonde, hiding among the scars of war until night falls and the streets become theirs.

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In the stifling daylight, the imperative for these “little layabouts” is to “act natural,” to put up a plausible façade as they pass through a world that has cast them as antagonists and malefactors. Riley carries his wiry frame in defiance of society’s rejection, and Bogarde lends him a taut, skittish quality —  the character barely speaks in full sentences, communication being just another weapon that thrusts life forward, staring blankly into a future full of violent vindication. This act sees Riley through a jewelry heist, but when he and his accomplices plan to rip off a cinema, events overtake the performance and Riley is forced to shoot Dixon to death. A bloody Rubicon has been crossed, and parts of Riley’s persona fall away in transit; he becomes increasingly bedraggled and haggard, straining under the weight of social opprobrium, and devises a ploy to “put us in the clear” which only serves to heap scrutiny on himself. Riley is now definitively at odds with the world, a grotesque excrescence detested by everyone who has bought into the agreed upon hypocrisies which allow the social contract to be upheld. Gangsters ally with their ostensible enemies to make everything correct again. Fear and hubris coalesce; Bogarde imbues Riley with the faintest tremble as he ventures into the coliseum to be torn apart for the catharsis of the crowd that files into White City Stadium for a dog racing event. Riley cannot hide among the crowd, as it expels him like a foreign body that threatens to upset its delicate equilibrium — his capture by the state’s emissaries is the revenge of a mass that yearns for authority to assert itself against rebellion. Riley is a man who will be hanged to reinforce the terms of the old contract.

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Within the constraints of what was permissible in the British cinema of the 1950s, Bogarde had to seek out material which chimed with his own experience. He was a closeted gay man at a time when homosexual activity was still a criminal offense and public exposure was ruinous, particularly in an industry where a star’s designated image was everything. Forms of sexual nonconformity are alluded to in Boys in Brown and The Blue Lamp, but this is presented as concomitant to the criminal disposition, a shameless abnegation of propriety, one aberration reinforcing another. Bogarde tiptoed up to the threshold of acceptability, investing Rawlings and Riley with some measure of his own struggle, but these characters were coded as anomalies whose behavior could be safely dismissed. A mood of peril and persecution pervades the roles in which Bogarde stands apart from the mannered screen behavior of his co-stars, lending emotional weight to a solitary look or turn of the head, freighting minute gestures with the reverberations of an inner tumult. This tendency to shade his roles from the early 50s with a psychological density they scarcely deserved is most pronounced in Hunted (The Stranger in Between, 1952). Once again, Bogarde finds his character — a sailor called Chris Lloyd who has murdered the company director with whom his wife was having an affair while he was at sea — traversing the noir city that grew out of post-war austerity. The rubble serves to shelter Lloyd in a subterranean realm where the repercussions for his crime of passion can be held in abeyance. Lloyd is joined by Robbie (John Whitely), a six-year-old boy who has fled his adoptive home after he believes he has burned it down while playing with matches. United by their misdeeds, Lloyd and Robbie step into the unforgiving daylight of the ordinary world, which has become cold and hostile, where everyday activity stymies any way out, where the old pleasures have turned into snares.

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Robbie serves as an unwitting emissary from the straight world, and must bear the brunt of Lloyd’s pent-up rage. He represents what Loyd can never have, a recognition that the world is not made for him, that its proscriptions have stripped him of agency no less than Robbie. Lloyd and Robbie descend into a shared childhood, fighting to uphold a convincing front in public view, keeping one’s true self hidden in the interest of survival. Neither can go home again, as they have turned their backs on the stability of family life. Lloyd’s family are strangers to him, and his peripatetic existence at sea has destroyed his marriage; when he reaches out to the family for salvation, he is turned away by his estranged brother, Jack (Julian Somers). Lloyd and Robbie belong to an outcast class now, thrust to the bottom of the social hierarchy — a fact underscored in a scene where the only person to show them any courtesy is a Caribbean immigrant who gives Lloyd his last cigarette. With every day that passes, Lloyd becomes a more conspicuous target, rubbing his unshaven face and knowing that he is falling out of the social rituals which betoken conformity. Lloyd tells Robbie a bedtime story about “a terrible giant” who causes the whole world to shake and gets hungrier the bigger he gets, leaving chaos in his wake. Lloyd knows the stain he carries cannot be erased; as he and Robbie stand in the shadow of dark satanic mills and cross dense woodland, he knows that the sea is the only shelter, a lonely reprieve from the penalty that is waiting. Lloyd sets sail with Robbie, but when the child falls ill, he grasps that the path is clear to an honorable destruction — a noble sacrifice that sets him apart from the vicious, ignominious demise which befalls Riley in The Blue Lamp.  

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It was justifiable on the part of those in Bogarde’s predicament to regard the law as a blunt instrument, to see its judgments as being wholly in service of the prevailing power structure, reinforcing rather than ameliorating any shortfalls in personal sovereignty. Once again, Bogarde was being pursued by the forces of law in Desperate Moment (1953). As an actor, he turned running into an art form, every breathless gesture invested with the knowledge that the next step could be the decisive one. A close-up of his tortured visage introduces viewers to Simon Van Halder, a former resistance fighter who is about to engineer a failed escape attempt from the train that transports him to prison for the murder of a British soldier while fleeing Germany at the tail end of the war. Simon maintains his innocence, but has been given a life sentence; he is resigned to his condemned status, but when he learns that his wife, Anna (Mai Zetterling), is alive when he believed her to be dead, he stages a prison break and sets off to bring about a retrial and clear his name. Subtext serves to enliven this formulaic chase film — when Simon tells Anna, “You’re free, you don’t know what it’s like to be in a place like this,” it could be read as Bogarde’s own articulation of the ways in which his liberty is constrained, a prison of circumspection and public expectation which requires him to affect identities like the disguises which Simon must don to avoid detection. Post-war Berlin echoes post-war London with its ruins that function as a refuge for those whose transgressions have left them “without rights,” allowing Anna and Simon to reunite in the shell of a theatre where both the Kaiser and Hitler attended gala nights. The nature of guilt is called into question, positing that one’s criminal status can be contingent upon unjust norms. Simon learns that he is the designated perpetrator, the vector through which all social wrongdoing is interrogated, and a conspiracy is in motion to uphold the legitimacy of the official narrative. Alas, the moment of absolution which ends Desperate Moment had no analog in Bogarde’s personal circumstances.

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Bogarde had reached a career crossroads; the time had come to decide if he would take up the mantle of the suave leading man, or if he would embark on a more creatively rewarding course. This decision was precipitated by the unexpected success of Doctor in the House (1954), a lightweight medical romp in which he plays dashing medical student Simon Sparrow. The film spawned three sequels, and threatened to consume Bogarde; he would have to fight to not be trapped by Sparrow. Help was on its way in the form of Joseph Losey — a victim of the Hollywood Blacklist who fled to Europe and began making genre films under a variety of pseudonyms. It was under one such alias — Victory Hanbury — that Losey directed The Sleeping Tiger (1954), and thus began a collaboration with Bogarde that included such landmark British films as The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967); performances which helped to establish the rising star as a heavyweight actor, and redefine him in the eyes of audiences. In 1959, Picturegoer magazine described Bogarde as “probably the most skillful tightrope walker in filmdom today.” It was Losey who empowered the actor to make ever more audacious forays across that highwire, stealthily removing the safety net as he brought out hitherto unseen degrees of cruelty and cunning in the form of petty hoodlum Frank Clemmons. But this character skews the archetype of the “slum product” driven by grim necessity into a life of crime; he is a cultured crook from a respectable family who is taken under the wing of Dr. Clive Esmond (Alexander Knox). The psychiatrist welcomes Clemmons into his home after a street mugging attempt, and sets about getting to the root cause of his criminal leanings.  

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The Sleeping Tiger presages much of the work that Bogarde and Losey would go on to make together in its provocative tenor and psychological dimension. Like The Servant, the domestic tension escalates to a war of attrition which unleashes the feral spirits stalking the “dark forest,” the tiger that the doctor is determined to tame. Clemmons initiates the psychiatrist’s wife, Glenda (Alexis Smith), into the darkest depths — a seductive hook clawing at the “tight wire” that had previously held her impulses in check. Clemmons nurtures the significant chip on his shoulder, giving his objection its fullest expression and casting off all constraints. The prisoner has turned the contradictions of the institution to his advantage, and just as Clemmons exploits the “certain amount of freedom” he is permitted under the doctor’s supervision to engage in clandestine activities, so Bogarde clearly revels in the chance to play a character with some teeth. Losey and Bogarde channeled their own anger at a system that had condemned them, the differing forms of McCarthyism which prevented them from fully expressing themselves. They take aim at the edifice of control which is symbolized in the Esmond home. For Clemmons, the house is both refuge and prison; he writhes under the microscope of the doctor’s clinical scrutiny, but the domestic order is in danger of being destabilized by the confluence of sexuality and violence that beckons Clemmons and Glenda toward the heart of darkness. Bogarde’s character unearths sickness where health had advertised itself most strenuously, but there is no gratification in the liberation that ensues; it induces a vertigo which sends Glenda careening into the tiger’s maw. 

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In the 1985 memoir Gathering Evidence, Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard describes his family’s relationship to “normal life” as “nothing short of a tightrope act” that is “stretched over an abyss that threatened us with death at any moment and had no safety net to cover it.” It was the thrill of this potential fall from public approbation which drove Bogarde to eschew the security of endless variations on Simon Sparrow; to align himself with the likes of Losey and Harold Pinter; to set off across Europe in pursuit of auteurs on the level of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alain Resnais; to tempt professional obloquy by seeking out roles like the former Nazi concentration camp officer who begins a sadomasochistic affair with an ex-inmate in The Night Porter (1974). Like Aschenbach, the besotted composer in Death in Venice (1971) who ventures back into the cholera-ravaged city to be closer to the young boy who is his paragon of beauty, Bogarde was willing to place himself at the mercy of the cruelest muse, to draw an enlivening force from his pain. One of Bogarde’s co-stars in Doctor at Sea (1955) was Brigitte Bardot, who shared with him a valuable insight — there is “one killer word” that is essential: “No.” Rejection is the purest form of rebellion. Bogarde was never embraced by Hollywood in large part because ambivalence is not a bankable asset. He left too many questions unanswered.

D.M. Palmer (@MrDMPalmer) is a writer based in Sheffield, UK. He has contributed to sites like HeyUGuys, The Shiznit, Sabotage Times, Roobla, Column F, The State of the Arts and Film Inquiry. He has a propensity to wax lyrical about Film Noir on the slightest provocation, which makes him a hit at parties. The detritus of his creative outpourings can be found at waxbarricades.wordpress.com.

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