Unusual times breed unusual film-makers, and in Britain the decade of the 1940s – years of much hardship and upheaval, both in peace and war – the most unusual film-maker was Richard Massingham. He made only short films, chiefly for Government departments anxious to bombard the British public with instruction and exhortation to make them better citizens. No-one likes being given instructions; but by trial and error the Ministry of Information’s Film Department learned that instructions were easier to swallow if liberally coated with humour. Humour, in the propaganda war, became Britain’s secret weapon.
During the 1940s everybody who went to the cinemas in Britain could identify Massingham, even if they were unsure of his name. He was the bemused, rumpled figure who appeared in the one-minute trailers shown with the newsreels. He played an Everyman character, well-meaning but absent-minded, always in need of friendly instruction to make the Government’s points sink home. Bathe in five inches of water (a wartime fuel conservation requirement). Drive and cross the road carefully. And always, always, sneeze into a handkerchief.
Massingham was also these trailers’ guiding spirit. He headed Public Relationship Films, specialising in instructional films. He served as producer, often as director, and brought to his assignments a brand of wit and imagination quite beyond the normal. Other individual talents were at work in the field. To prove the point, this programme opens with two films by Len Lye, the experimental animator, who was able to keep cheerful even when asked to make a film about cooking a vegetable pie (WHEN THE PIE WAS OPENED, 1941).
One part of Massingham’s creative personality was rooted in the acute observation of life’s little joys and miseries. Another part ascended into absurd humour and the kind of visual jolts that would have tickled a Surrealist’s heart. Henri Langlois, Emperor of French Cinemathèque, once extravagantly attributed to Massingham the joint virtues of Méliès, Vigo, Buñuel, and Mack Sennett. This raises expectations that Massingham’s films cannot really fulfil; even so, in bits and pieces you can see what Langlois was thinking of.
He was born in 1898 into a distinguished family; several members were leading journalists. Richard specialised in medicine; he rose to become Senior Medical Officer at the London Fever Hospital. His earliest films were made in his spare time, beginning with TELL ME IF IT HURTS (1934), a comic account of the pains associated with a visit to the dentist. As a film-maker Massingham was entirely self-taught. He obviously admired the European avant-garde. His humour’s black streak is also obvious; you find it at its blackest in the food hygiene epic ANOTHER CASE OF POISONING (1949) and WHAT A LIFE (1948), a film designed to counter post-war Britain’s feeling that the country, ground down by austerity, was “going to the dogs”. Seen through Massingham’s eyes, post-war Britain actually seems a more dangerous place than the Britain bombed by Hitler. Troubles lurk everywhere, in the food you eat, the pavement you step off, the saucepan of water boiling on the stove.
In the one hundred films or so that Massingham was involved in, as director or producer, not one stretched to feature length. Massingham’s gifts lay more with the short sharp burst than the sustained sequence. He died too soon in 1953, though his room for manoeuvre as a film-maker had already shrunk with the election two years before of a Conservative government – a government much less receptive than its predecessors to cinema’s value as an information service. Throughout the 1940s, Massingham had reflected British life in his own individual crazy mirror: a life of restrictions and shortages, of bad diet and soothing hot drinks, of bemused but kindly people struggling to cross the road and arrive safely on the other side. His work was done.