Listen to Britain: The Great Cut

The gun and the violin. This visual juxtaposition introduces a twenty-minute masterpiece of association and contrast. A wartime film intended to bolster morale, Listen to Britain (1942) offers an idealised vision of a homefront Britain working together for victory. It is a film about pulling a nation together, in which the director Humphrey Jennings and his editor Stewart McAllister (who receives a credit as co-director) use the art of editing as a needle and thread to create a poignantly beautiful tapestry of Britain during its “finest hour”.

For the way in which it distils the essence of a remarkable film-poem, one cut stands out. In a perfect match of style and meaning, about two-thirds of the way through, there is a switch from the wartime double act of Flanagan and Allen, singing at a lunchtime concert before an audience of factory workers, to the pianist Dame Myra Hess, giving one of her famous lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery to a very different audience of the “great and the good”.

With a segue, in the same key, from the then well-known Flanagan and Allen song, “Around the Back of the Arches”, into the allegro movement of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major, this cut  – better to call it “a join” – symbolizes the unity of a people at war, all differences of class and status subordinated to their shared higher purpose.

But Jennings and McAllister were not the only people in the cutting-room at Denham Studios, where the film was produced by the Ministry of Information’s Crown Film Unit. With them was a seventeen-year-old assistant whose job it was to file the strips of film and to make the physical joins. His name was John Krish. I was pleased a few days ago to discover an old interview I had recorded with him about thirty years ago, in which he remembered the exhilaration that Jennings and McAllister felt when they got a great cut to work. In spite of the background hiss of an old audiotape, it brings alive a precious moment in British film history:

John Krish: I remember to this day the absolute joy that Jennings and McAllister showed with that cut from Flanagan and Allen to Myra Hess ... It’s the same key. I mean I made that join. And I made it more than once, for them to get it right, because it had to be finely judged. And we went on and on and on re-doing and re-doing it. They just fell about with delight that it had come off, but it was not in anybody’s script or any preconceived idea. It was how the film was put together. ‘Let’s try that.’ And it was all ‘Let’s try that’. ...

I became an editor eventually. And editing was largely sticking Elastoplast over things which don’t work, I mean figuratively speaking, making the best of something, of correcting directors’ mistakes, more often than not, and the chances of doing something which is as wholly creative as that was – those opportunities don’t arise very often.

But it was a difficult experience for Krish. Jennings was notoriously temperamental and had such a bad temper that one of his colleagues at the Crown Film Unit – Gerry Bryant, the unit manager – even wrote this poem about it:

Why does Humphrey shout?

What's it all about?

Is it his salary

or NATIONAL GALLERY?

Or because Theatre 3

is never free?

Why does Humphrey scream

And let off so much steam?

Is Mac to blame

for losing a frame?

Or is it that Krish the cretin

isn’t yet in?

Just what it is,

Is hard to tell,

But the fact remains that he shouts like hell.

It must have been some kind of consolation for Krish to know that he wasn’t being singled out. Jennings shouted at his co-director, Stewart McAllister, just as much.

Listen to Britain started out as a film about Dame Myra Hess’s celebrated wartime concerts at the National Gallery (the original title for the film), but developed into a much more ambitious project to capture the sounds of Britain at war.

Depicting a nation working harmoniously together in its shared goal of defeating Nazi Germany, the film has a simplicity and serenity as spontaneous as the Mozart piano concerto that provides its climax, but there was very little serenity in the cutting-room when they were putting it together. John Krish’s reminiscences capture well the tears, temper tantrums and sheer hard work that were involved in the editing of this extraordinary film. He felt that his role was somehow to manage the creative chaos, “because they were both very chaotic people, and if there’s one thing you can’t be in a cutting-room, it’s chaotic, especially with so much footage and no script”:

The arguments they had were Olympic standard. They sort of got on intellectually but both were very combative. McAllister was a fairly solitary figure. He just really wanted to be left alone to experiment. He was very proud of the  fact that he could stick two pieces of film together using spit rather than acetone. I mean they would argue like mad.

Because I was the junior, I was not allowed to work at night, and I also lived in South London. So they would work on through the night, and when I came in in the morning  I would have to re-file the film because all the shots would be all over the place. Some would be hung up, some would be all over the benches, all out of the tins. And yet the moment that I arrived, they’d want something. They’d want a piece of film this long.  So every morning I would re-file the film, so that he knew where everything was. Which was hell.

And it was being recut and recut, so I spent a great deal of time at the joining machine. Humphrey would stand over me very impatiently because he wanted to see it on the screen, of course. The joining machine was lethal. You could remove a finger with it – that’s how lethal it was. These days everything’s joined with Sellotape. But in those days you joined it with acetone, an acetate mix. You put the film between two presses, which were pedal-controlled and came down with a great weight and bonded the join.

So there was always a tremendous feeling of wanting to see it: let’s get it up on the screen, or run it on the moviolas endlessly, endlessly, and being recut and recut and recut. And it was purgatory for an assistant. But I must have picked up something very important because I was devoted to Humphrey even though he treated me appallingly. When I was older we became quite close.

In an interview for the film union BECTU, Krish gave some elaboration on what that “something very important” was, recalling with admiration Jennings’ “incapacity to even think, to even say, anything like, ‘Oh, that will do.’ I mean it would be absolutely impossible for that sentence to come out of his mouth: ‘Oh, we’ll get away with that.’” Krish considered it a blessing to have started his career not in the features industry, but in this much less glamorous world of wartime documentary, working “with people who were being paid incredibly badly, who were incapable of clock watching, who were absolutely un-cynical, who loved being there, loved working all hours, loved what they were doing, and spread it. And I was fortunate enough to catch it and it stuck with me for ever.”

Listen to Britain is free to watch on BFI Player: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-listen-to-britain-1942-online