One of the earliest references to anarchists I remember as a 10-year-old — or, if not exactly anarchists, at least to the ‘Just Men’ of ancient tradition who are present in every generation to confound the oppressors of this world — was in the 1956 Launder and Gilliat film, The Green Man, a comedy drama with the wonderfully benign Edinburgh-born Alastair Sim in the role of a professional assassin and his Glaswegian anarchist sidekick, Angus McKechnie, played by John Chandos (he appears at 7.55). The day job of this roguishly endearing pair is eliminating pompous politicians, investment bankers and tyrants, until, finally, they are betrayed to bourgeois justice through the intervention of a young George Cole. Many years later I struck up an unlikely friendship with John Chandos, who had had — to-say-the-least — an interesting military career in Special Operations Executive (SOE), GHQ Phantom Regiment and the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS), and who earned a living after the war as a bit-part actor, restaurant reviewer and author.* On one occasion I was drinking with John in the French House in Soho when a wartime friend from his SOE days recognised him and greeted him effusively. While reminiscing, the friend reminded John of an occasion at an SOE safe house in the Home Counties when John had taken him round to the garage and thrown wide the doors to show him what they had just brought back from occupied France — the latest model Citroën! John, who played minor roles in many Central Office of Information (COI) propaganda and feature films from the early 1940s to 1969, had also played one of the five Nazi U-boat men escaping through Canada to the US in another of Leslie Howard’s unforgettable (to me) anti-Nazi films, 49th Parallel. This film, his first feature film, released originally just before the US entered World War Two, had stuck in my mind since I had seen it on the telly in the 1950s because of its committed anti-fascist message, its memorable photography and the sympathetic portrayal of life and exemplary community spirit within a Dukhobor community in Canada. Another of Johns films that captured my young imagination was the 1958 Emile Zola-inspired film on the Dreyfus Affair, ‘I Accuse’, in which he played the part of the virulently anti-semitic publisher Édouard Drumont . John died in 1987; RIP old mate! * To Deprave and Corrupt... (on obscenity and the Lady Chatterley Trial) Boys Together: English Public Schools 1800-1864 In God’s Name: Examples of Preaching in England from the Act of Supremacy to the Act of Uniformity, 1534-2662 PS Spot the young)ish) Arthur Lowe...
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 16:36:17 +0000