Gone to Earth (1950)

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djross
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Gone to Earth (1950)

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A young gypsywoman of limited means and education but possessing a pantheistic sense of the connectedness of all living things (well, animals mainly) and an unrepressed relationship to her own desire finds herself caught between the safety of a chaste and reserved man of faith, who has a difficult relationship to his rigid mother, and the dangerous temptations of a manly aristocrat with a passionate taste for women and blood, but who also displays, at times, a boyish vulnerability. Generally faithful to the novel by Mary Webb, which might be thought by ungenerous readers as tending towards being lurid, or at times overly obvious, but the book, like the film, is highly expressive, filled with a sense of locality (from the smallest scales up to the infinite scale of the cosmic), and ends up generating a strange but undeniable affective power that is ultimately devastating. In the book, it’s clear that Reddin has made Hazel pregnant.

If it is true that Hazel is caught, it’s because “the world is a big spring trap”: there is no place in the orders of nineteenth-century desire and society for someone who does not fit into the categories of either “good girl” or “bad girl”, not because she is neither, and not even because they are inherently false concepts, but because she is filled with too much life (that is, with “summat strong and drodsome, as drives us all”, as she says about Jack Reddin’s own motivation) to be contained by any moralistic Manichaeism or any opposition of heaven and earth (one might even say that she has a greater sense of the compositional duplicity of what Paul Klee called the upper way of cosmic community and the lower way of shared terrestrial roots, these two ‘non-optical’ ‘metaphysical’ ways together forming a contrast to the optical, that is, physical way). Extremely beautiful throughout, this somewhat overlooked Powell and Pressburger effort creates an atmosphere that is at once magical, mysterious, erotic and uncanny, with an incredible use of locations (around Shropshire and close to the border between England and Wales) and a fascinating and affecting exploration of faith, belief, passion and calculation that comes across very much as a precursor to Breaking the Waves (1996), if not to have directly influenced it.

Note: The version entitled The Wild Heart, created under the instructions of a dissatisfied David O. Selznick and released in the United States in 1952, is apparently very different, totally re-edited, almost half an hour shorter, and containing extra scenes filmed by Rouben Mamoulian. Leslie Halliwell describes this film as “unintentionally funny”: while such a reaction is perhaps not totally incomprehensible, one can only hope that the cause was his having seen only the butchered version. In general, Selznick’s interference and lack of enthusiasm seems to have contributed to the film’s relatively poor reputation and long history of neglect, though other factors may also have been in play, such as a change of mood in post-war Britain.

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