Rent Secret People (1952)

Glamour and Grimmer - Secret People review by CH

GLAMOUR AND GRIMMER

“We must love one another or die.” This is, of course, a famous line in a poem written by Auden in a New York dive-bar as Germany invaded Poland. He later observed, “after it had been published I came to the line 'We must love one another or die' and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ So, in the next edition, I altered it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.”

This comes to mind when watching Thorold Dickinson's Secret People (1952). This opens with an exile (Charles Goldner) who lives above a London café where he receives a letter with tidings of a friend's likely death at the hand of fascists – as in Greene's The Confidential Agent, Franco is implied - and that his daughters are waiting downstairs for his help. That letter quotes Auden's original line as something to live by. The only thing is that this scene is set in 1930 – almost a decade before Auden wrote it.

As such, it is an emblem of the way in which this film appears realistic – steam from the coffee machine – and yet is almost an allegorical depiction of that decade's struggle. Dickinson, who is perhaps now best now for the original film of Gaslight (that and the Hollywood version have their different merits), brings his own form of poetry to all this while, with a leap to 1937, those sisters (Valentina Cortese and a young Audrey Hepburn) make their way in London while figures from the past – those secret people – meet clandestinely, intent upon assassination.

As a thriller, it has longueurs – perhaps, paradoxically, because Ealing cut it to about ninety minutes when it could have gained from elaboration of its many close observations (one to survive is the startling moment when Valentina Cortesa gently slaps Audrey Heburn's left buttock to spur her at a successful audition to join a ballet company). Secret People has many such moments – what Christopher Isherwood called Forster's “tea-tabling” of drama; all of which enforces the explosive moments (Forster had a propensity for sudden deaths).

Such were the hopes for this film that Dickinson engaged the young Lindsay Anderson to write a now-scarce book about its making. Perhaps, come the Fifties, the subject had missed its moment; it is, though, a perennial one: how far can the quest for liberty entail the death of innocents?

A film is not a pamphlet. What makes Secret People so rewarding is that it is a continual work of composition; everything has its place, as it does in the work of Henry James. How does he come into this? The latest DVD of the film, wonderfully restored, has a ten-minute talk by a James expert, Philip Horne, who has also edited an absorbing book about all of Dickinson's work, which is one fit to set beside Dickinson's own study of film.

Naturally, many remark upon this being an early appearance by Audrey Hepburn but it is also a chance to see Irene Worth, more usually regarded as a stage performer. What's more, it is yet another film in which a few seconds' screen time has one exclaiming, “that's Sam Kydd!”