Even in his relative youth on film, Trevor Howard was an unlikely film star. He always looked older than he was. His was a plain, simple face, with a nose broken long ago, rather large ears, a rough cheek, a mouth tight with resolution, (or is it pain?), eyes that seem haunted by unforgettable sights and feelings, and a voice, when he wasn’t asked to waste time playing one of those “Thanks awfully, old chap” type of parts, capable of both a fairly devastating restrained romanticism and gruff, hard-earned cynicism. In other words, he may have been a perfect exemplar of how an average Brit saw himself at the end of WWII.

One of the pleasures of this year’s Summer Under the Stars is seeing some seriously rare films–such as the broadcast of Barbara Stanwyck‘s first feature last night, The Locked Door (1929), (and boy, did the lock on that early talkie creak when they opened it–though any curiosity I might ever have had about Rod La Rocque is now satisfied), and the upcoming airing of Frank Borzage‘s quietly powerful Man’s Castle (1933) with Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young on August 31st.

While many of the performers featured each day are quite familiar to us, the lineup of films for one outstanding individual this Friday, August 22nd, when TCM will devote 24 hours to an exploration of Trevor Howard‘s films, is most welcome, (please click here for a list of the movies on that day). A transitional figure in British film acting between the touchingly elegant diffidence of a Leslie Howard and a Robert Donat and the grittier, realistic “kitchen sink” school associated with an Albert Finney and a Richard Harris, he was an artist whose naturalistic, seamlessly believable characterizations made you forget he was playacting, particularly when playing all too human characters. Like his friends and contemporaries, Jack Hawkins and Kenneth More, who tapped a similar, rich vein of no-nonsense acting with a few delightful fillips of humor and trenchant insight into the war-tempered generation’s experiences, the work that these actors did on film was popular on both sides of the Atlantic in their time. In recent decades, the unfashionable stoicism of the many Howard characters, the lack of broadcast-worthy prints, availability and dvds have all contributed to the neglect into which the reputation of this actor may have fallen today. The broadcast of several of Howard‘s best films on TCM may begin a voyage of rediscovery for classic film lovers.

Born in 1916, Trevor Howard was the son of a globetrotting executive for Lloyds of London. Howard had spent time in Ceylon, Canada and California before his teens. Trevor Howard was educated at Clifton and RADA in the ’30s, where, as he put it, “[t]hey never refused men. There were five men to twenty-five girls.” Not that the chance to even the odds for romance was averse to him, but he had, since childhood, found acting the most appealing vocation. This may have begun when, according to his sister Merla, they were playing on a California beach along the Pacific one day in December, and happened upon a film crew working nearby. There, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks allegedly found Trevor, who was expounding to all who’d listen about the anticipated visit of Father Christmas. Finding the unexpectedly English boy quite charming, he was supposedly offered a part in the picture, though I’ve never been able to spot a jug-eared blonde boy among the extras in the reported movie, (in her biography of the actor, Trevor Howard: A Gentleman and a Player, author Vivienne Knight cites “Bubbles” as the reported name of the Pickford film, though Suds (1920) seems to be a more likely production given the time period and the actual name of the film). It would be another quarter century before film fans met Trevor Howard in an unforgettable film and a detailed portrait of a man trying not to do the decent thing.

Though as early as the ’30s Trevor was approached to test for Hollywood studios, he was, he later explained, simply interested in being an actor. For him that meant the stage. After ten years on stage and first hand experience in the war, Howard made his film debut in an uncredited bit part in a David Niven war movie, The Way Ahead (1944), directed by Carol Reed, with whom Trevor would eventually make five feature films in all. In this first role, he played a jaded military officer with one word and no on screen credit. The way that he delivered the one word line “Lineshoot”* as he looked wearily aloft at a plane doing a victory roll over a field were all that producer and author Noël Coward needed to confirm that Trevor was the choice for the part Alec in a film adaptation of Still Life, the playwright’s one act play about an unconsummated love affair between two married people.

If, like me, you may be one of the army of besotted, romantic saps who fall for David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), hook, line and sinker whenever I come across it, the distant world that Celia Johnson as Laura and Trevor Howard as Alec inhabit may be familiar to you. I know better than to succumb to such a movie, don’t I? I could cite chapter and verse about the role of repression, sacrifice and the “women’s film” in cinematic history. Even Trevor Howard was said to have asked indelicately but in genuine wonder while filming the story, “why doesn’t he just f*** her?”. Well, for one thing, aside from the censorship problems, the movie is told from Laura’s viewpoint and narrated by her. One of the movie’s themes is about the difference between what a woman means by “love”, (which usually entails words and superficially meaningless gestures more than biology), and what life hands each of us (male or female) before we realize what we’re getting into.

From the 21st century, we may wonder too at the restraint of these characters, whose love seems to burn brighter the more that life pulls them apart. Yet, as created by Lean, Coward, cinematographer Robert Krasker, Rachmaninoff and company, the whole becomes irresistibly powerful, as full of inexplicable power and significance as that last, furtive touch of the shoulder that Alec gives Laura when they part, separated by propriety and their own inhibitions:

One of my favorite lines in the movie penned by Noël Coward comes about halfway into the doomed romance. After meeting in a train station when Howard, a doctor removes a bit of grit from Johnson’s eye, they find themselves drawn together. Though there are few direct allusions to the wartime period, the transitory nature of life that is in back of the film, illuminating the neediness and ephemeral state of life for each character. Perhaps significantly, on one of their futile excursions, as the unglamorous, emotionally unfaithful couple attempt to cast off their inhibitions, Alec, the gentle doctor played by Trevor Howard, blurts out “You’re only middle-aged once!”, he grasps the hand of Laura, (Celia Johnson, whose luminous and delicate synchronized performance matches his perfectly, as it would once again, 35 years on in the touching story of post colonials hanging on to their lives in India in 1980′s telefilm, Staying On). He leads her away, he hopes, from both of their prosaic, everyday cares. Yet there is a hopelessness in his ambivalent little joke, an uneasiness that they both feel in their bones about this interlude. The bright way that he delivers this line and the pained smile that accompanies it, which deepens as he sees Laura laughing, acknowledging his attempt at wit against the odds, touches me in a sharper way than the soaring music from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto in C Minor.

In a movie made in the same year, I See A Dark Stranger (1945), with a young Deborah Kerr, which is also scheduled for Friday on TCM, Trevor Howard playfully courts a naïve Irish country girl who has inherited a second hand hatred for all things British. While the atmosphere of a small English town in wartime and the scenes between Howard and Kerr are enjoyable , some attempts at American accents among a few minor characters never ring true and the real problem with the story is that Kerr‘s character is not only a bigot, but fairly stupid, to boot. A mystery by Christianna Brand provided the raw material for Green For Danger (1946), (also on Friday’s schedule), is a diverting entry from the team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. Trevor is one of several likely suspects in a murder set in a wartime hospital, redolent with medical intrigue and stylishly presented, even though Alistair Sim steals the show (as usual).

Still being courted by the studios in America, Howard remained resistant to their blandishments. Perhaps that’s just as well, since a couple of his American oriented movies, such as Run For the Sun (1956), during which production on location in Mexico, his intelligently sexy co-star Jane Greer was appalled find that the distinguished actor had no dressing room and almost no worthwhile role to play. Despite this, Howard, who was likely to choose movies for a chance to travel to a new country as well as to play an interesting role, did what he could by giving a funny and wistful spin to some lines in that remake of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) concerning his cultured fugitive’s longing for civilization. Howard’s ability to spin gold from straw also helped him to win a BAFTA award for his effective playing in his last Carol Reed film, The Key (1958), dominated by glamorous Sophia Loren and William Holden, (and financed by Americans). His underplaying in his few scenes, as a death-haunted man who passes along a key to an apartment (and Sophia, who is quite effective too) in this wartime tale of unprotected tugboat captains struggling to survive as they rescued wounded ships from U-boats, made his absence from the latter half of the film more telling. The Key, which is in Friday’s lineup, is worth watching for the authentic air of doomed tenderness and doggedness that Trevor gives it.

His next films in the earlier, pre-Hollywood stage of his career, are characterized by the chances they gave him to travel the world in between appearances on stage. While pursuing new adventures that satisfied his wanderlust and sometimes gave him complex characters to play, Howard also maintained a long, forty-four year marriage to British actress Helen Cherry, despite occasional reported liaisons with, among others, his very young French co-star Anouk Aimée in The Golden Salamander (1950), (a diverting little thriller set in Tunisia that airs on Friday on TCM).

Among three of the best films of this period were made with Carol Reed. The familiar, austere classic The Third Man, (which is among those scheduled) is not to be missed by those who relish its dark charm. Each of the better films from this period appeared to explore some aspect of the British experience abroad, as well as the need to examine the conscience of the fading Empire. Though I’ve never seen any comments in the literature about Trevor Howard, I wonder if his experiences as a youngster raised in colonial society and the upper echelons of British society might have influenced his choices of characters and themes to explore. While he could not have known it, this would be the most memorable period of his cinematic career.

Two of the Carol Reed-Trevor Howard films to be broadcast on Friday, however, are also among the best examples of film acting I’ve ever seen. Neither Outcast of the Islands (1951) nor The Heart of the Matter (1953) are perfect movies. When I saw them last about 20 years ago, both prints were dreadful condition, (I’m hoping that better ones have been found), and I’m interested in seeing how effective they might still be, seen through more mature eyes. They cannot match the legendary synthesis of timeliness, actors, story, photography and setting of The Third Man, but all three brought out Howard‘s best.

Calloway (Howard), the military investigator looking into the nefarious activities of a supposedly dead American hustler (Orson Welles), knows, explains to a doltish U.S. citizen visiting Vienna in the hopes of a job, (a character who is typical of Graham Greene‘s attitude toward unsophisticated Americans), that he should go home on the next plane. The blundering American refuses to do so, until he “gets to the bottom of things” once he learns that his friend and prospective employer is dead. As Calloway explains, his patience wearing thinner, “Death’s at the bottom of everything…Leave death to the professionals.” This worldly look at post-war disillusionment, exemplified by Howard‘s sardonic character, (and his decent, Western novel-loving aide, Sergeant Paine, wonderfully played by Bernard Lee), explores the underside of life in postwar Vienna, controlled, more and less, by four victorious powers. Howard attempts to give that arrogant American lunkhead Rollo (Joseph Cotten) a quick and dirty unsentimental education in the ways of the real world, and find out what really happened to drug trafficker Harry Lime (Orson Welles). In this video, Trevor Howard attempts to further explain the facts of life to Rollo:

Graham Greene and Carol Reed present a grotesque funhouse view of battered Vienna, with the exotic quality of the city enhanced by the brilliantly off kilter location photography and the zither music. The latter two elements of the film become as much a part of the movie as the vaguely sinister characters of the small, strange boy (Herbert Halbik) with the ball in the apartment house, and the older man (Paul Hardtmuth) who sweeps up.

I thought that the film of Outcast of the Islands (1951), loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad‘s remarkable novel of degeneration in a colonial backwater in Malaya, proves, in many ways, to be as elusive as all the other of the author’s stories that have been adapted to film, including Lord Jim, The Secret Agent and Apocalypse Now, (based on The Heart of Darkness). Yet Howard plays his foolhardy rascal to the anguished hilt, fully conscious of his own ebbing away of humanity as he pursues his own greed, lust and the betrayal of all he meets, who include Ralph Richardson, Wendy Hiller and Robert Morley, as well as an appropriately alluring young woman named Kerima, an Algerian actress of considerable beauty. His acting, which was described by the New York Times at the time as “superb” performance, with “traces chagrin and frustration on a titanic, agonizing scale.” Since truly dissolute anti-heroes, and films that don’t fit easy categories as adventures or dramas tend to be difficult to market, it is no wonder that Howard‘s work in this film has gone largely unnoticed since the movie premiered in the early ’50s, only to fall into relative obscurity since then. In describing why he chose his friend for the part in Conrad’s story, Carol Reed, perhaps being simultaneously mischievous, affectionate and respectful, claimed that “I knew of no one among contemporary film actors better suited to play Willems, the moral degenerate, than Trevor Howard.”The delicacy that Trevor Howard displayed in Brief Encounter is in his performance here, but he explores the other side of the coin with this character, revealing the weakness that could undermine a man who might be in over his head and not able to restrain himself from pursuing his own demons.

The Heart of the Matter (1953), based on a book that Graham Greene later disparaged as having been written when he was “rusty”, concerns a colonial policeman in Sierra Leone whose life unravels in the course of a few days. Lonely, kind, and scrupulously attentive to his job, his wife and his carefully reasoned faith, Scobie (Howard) does his job with as much humanity as he can muster. This decency and his characters enlightened understanding of Catholicism are all undone by the chaotic circumstances of his life. Elizabeth Allan, as his longtime discontented wife contributes her share, as does the loss of a child, the claustrophobic atmosphere of wartime colonial Africa, but a fateful meeting with a U-boat survivor (the seraphic Maria Schell), seals his fate, and causes him to question all his beliefs.

Trevor Howard‘s subtle performance shades the character’s rising anxiety with each tight-lipped smile, small eruption of temper, and compromise of his principles. The mounting pressures lead Scobie to long for his God to “condemn me but give them rest.” While the end of the film is a release and may be interpreted as an answered prayer for the character, Howard‘s struggle still stirs a strong sense of compassion for his plight in my memory.

Denholm Elliot, who is brilliant as a government weasel, a young Peter Finch as a priest who counsels his friend, and George Coulouris as an ethically flexible sea captain add to the already colorful story. I look forward to re-acquainting myself with this film once again. I hope that it lives up to my memory.

One rarely broadcast film that has reportedly been restored this year in honor of David Lean‘s centenary, is also being broadcast on TCM on Friday. In a kind of “glamourous follow-up” to the worldwide success of Brief Encounter, director David Lean took another foray into romanticism with a touch of film noir and many flashbacks thrown into The Passionate Friends (1949). Howard, playing a biology teacher who had once been in love with Ann Todd, (Mrs. Lean at the time) now wed to the inimitable Claude Rains as her moneyed older husband. Rains, who once suggested facetiously that he emigrated to the United States in part to escape from his native land, since he found the British so controlled and so understated that he needed America to feel unshackled from the social and cultural restraint on display in The Passionate Friends. I have an admitted weakness for this stuff. I am also curious about any David Lean film from his earlier, black and white, non-epic period, especially after recently discovering the complex and beautifully rendered period film of Lean’s Madeleine (1950), starring Todd as an enigmatic defendant. Ann Todd, who could be stiff and unresponsive in some movies, (i.e. Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case as Gregory Peck‘s chilly wife), was capable of suggesting an interior nature at odds with her appearance, as she also suggested another hymn to repression and possibly “unhealthy” relationships in the silly but enjoyable The Seventh Veil (1945).

The next time that Howard would work with David Lean was late into his epic-making period during the filming of Ryan’s Daughter (1970). The director experienced a critical and box office failure with his problematic story of a young woman (Sarah Miles) in rural Ireland during “the troubles”, who unhappily marries a much older man who had been her teacher (Robert Mitchum).

Despite the outcome of the overall film, one of the brightest spots in the film, other than the beauty of Dingle Bay on display, were the performances of Leo McKern, as a duplicitous pub owner and a then grizzled Trevor Howard, as a tough but fair priest. As he aged, Howard’s professional reputation , (and his capacity for partying and pursuing jazz in whatever city he found himself), may have affected his ability to find the best parts for his gifts.

Still, there are a handful of splendid performances that anyone interested in great acting might enjoy. Sons and Lovers (1960), directed by Jack Cardiff, is an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence‘s groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel starred Dean Stockwell and Mary Ure as the young, central characters. Yet, it is the powerful jealousies, passions, loyalties and acting tour de force between Wendy Hiller and Trevor Howard, as Stockwell‘s possessive mother and coal miner father that audiences understandably remembered. The only time that Howard received an Oscar nomination as a supporting player, this well made movie is worth watching for Howard and Hiller alone. Interestingly, Howard‘s performance in a made-for-television movie as a priest who has lost his faith in Brian Moore’s Catholics (1973) again included one of the actor’s most extraordinary turns as a soul in torment. Finally, next time you catch the rather notorious version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) featuring a foppish performance from an imploding and distracted Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as Capt. Bligh, watch carefully. While the frustration in the performances of the actors around Brando are understandably flustered, in several scenes, notably one at the dining table on the ship during which a discussion of the correct uses of corporeal punishment are delineated.

A fussy Brando, at his most epicene in the role, tries to upstage Howard repeatedly by folding and refolding his napkin. Craggy-faced Trevor, barely moving while he explains himself, completely dominates the scene with the sheer force of one thing: talent.

In a lifetime of acting, in such “interesting failures” as The Roots of Heaven, a lesser John Huston film about a man trying to protect elephants from predators in colonial Africa, as a dotty, incompetent Lord Raglan in director Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and a turn as a cryptic voice for the real life poet, Stevie Smith (Glenda Jackson) in Stevie (1978), (a wonderfully bookish movie, celebrating poetry), it is Trevor Howard‘s ability to bring reality, humor and poignancy out of situations of forced gaiety, human vulnerability and idealism. As he aged, and continued to elude easy categorization in films, these qualities would become mixed with a certain hard bitten irascibility and “getting on with life” attitude. Many of these moments revealed his character’s inner life, even when the films he appeared in brought him underwritten roles in flawed films. I hope that you’ll share your thoughts about this great actor’s body of work too.

Sources:

Knight, Vivienne, Trevor Howard: A Gentleman and a Player, Beaufort Books, 1986.
Phillips, Gene D., Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean, University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Soister, John T., Wioskowski, JoAnna, Claude Rains: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference, McFarland, 1999.
Wapshott, Nicholas, Carol Reed: A Biography, Random House, 1994.

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“Lineshoot”*: in the RAF of the war period, it was a term referring to a failure of all instruments on a plane, in other words, things are seriously out of whack. Similar to “flack happy” applied to men who were so fatigued they no longer saw the inherent dangers and constant watchfulness needed to survive their dangerous experiences.