Gideon
Of Scotland Yard
(1958)
is
not much of a film, not by anyone's standards, and certainly not by
the standards of its director, the legendary John Ford. What the
creator of The
Searchers
and The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
was doing in the late 1950's with the small-budget London-based
policier
which is Gideon,
is a bit of mystery. But there it is, Ford's only cop movie and one
of very few films that he set in (what was then) the present day. I
have now seen it twice, which is probably once more than John Ford
ever saw it.
What's
the story? We follow Chief Inspector George Gideon (played by Jack
Hawkins, an actor whose head was directly attached to collar of his
suit, no neck involved) through the course of one stupendously busy
day, involving multiple murders, gun crime (quite a rarity in 1950's
England), a Docklands boys' club, bribery & corruption, some
fresh fish, an assault occasioning actual bodily harm, several
routine traffic offences, and a lino-textured subplot involving the
Inspector's daughter (played by a very young Anna Massey) and a
chinless tyro police constable.
In
the course of the action Inspector Gideon consumes (along with
several cigarettes and a couple of pipefuls of ready-rubbed) five
cups of tea, two bottles of beer, one pint of draught bitter, and two
whiskies. Other members of the cast get through tea, whisky, a pint
of half-and-half (light & bitter? mild & bitter?), gin (part of
my ongoing gin fixation finding expression in the towering goblet of
neat, room-temperature gin drained off in one scene by the slatternly
wife of Cyril Cusack, playing a police snitch), plus a
glass of
some
other drink. This
is briefly sipped by Mrs. Kirby, the wife of a bent (and actually,
dead) copper, before being tossed furiously in Gideon's startled
granite face. What is it? It is never made clear - but
it could be some kind of wine.
Not
an appellation,
clearly - this is 1958, and most of England was nowhere near that
kind of cosmopolitanism, except at some restaurants and
mausoleum-like gentlemen's clubs - but I'm guessing a wine-based
beverage, maybe a Vermouth, maybe some kind of horrible Tonic Wine, a
Wincarnis, at any rate something consumed in a chi-chi patterned
wineglass with a stem and a foot, things that Inspector Gideon would
be immediately suspicious of.
Rightly
so: drink, soft or alcoholic, not only punctuates the movie, it
provides a rubric, a commentary on the moral sense of the drinker.
Tea, British tea, is the constant on which everything else depends.
The virtuous consume it like water. Even the widow of the bent
copper, otherwise a picture of weakness and corruption, has a cup of
tea at The Yard while in for questioning, a sign that her sense of
right and wrong is still, just, reclaimable. At the other end of the
continuum of virtue? Whisky. In the film's only scene of real
tenderness, Gideon and his superdependable ADC, Sergeant Golightly,
share a nip of whisky from a hipflask kept in a filing cabinet and
mutely reaffirm their love.
It
is also whisky which is offered by the vampy Mrs. Dellafield - yet
another suspect in the incredible catalogue of toerags and grifters
who make up Gideon's day. She gives him a choice of drinks: he opts
for whisky, of course. She is still on safe ground at this point. But
when she attempts to drown the precious fluid in ginger
ale,
Gideon's suspicions go straight into the red zone, rightly, as it
happens. Whisky, morally correct in the proper hands, becomes
ambiguous, part of the currency of investigation, in the wrong ones.
But
then, we kind of know from the start that Mrs. Dellafield is up to no
good, the moment we glimpse her drinks tray on the way in: it
looks just like Mrs. Kirby's – in fact it might even be the same props, cynically re-used. What
have we already seen in Mrs. Kirby's illicitly-paid-for apartment? A
couple of decent post-War big brown bottles with black and white
labelling - whisky, perhaps a sherry too - but also some deformed and
foreign-looking glassware and even
a thing like a champagne bottle.
I mean, it can't be, but the message is clear: the merest suspicion
of wine, and you've got a likely perpetrator. Same stuff in the
Dellafield studio-cum-boho-pad? All it takes is five minutes (after
all, the Inspector still hasn't been home for his dinner) and the
cuffs are on.
It's
a simpler world, and in many ways, a much more appealing one. If your
drink of choice is brown - tea, beer, whisky - you're probably in the
clear. Any other colour? Alarm bells ring. Police work was like that
in 1958. In fact, everything was like that. Mine's a half-and-half,
and I'll trouble you for one of those individual pork pies, if I may.
CJ
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