This commentary contains some spoilers and may be better read after the screening.
Wendy Toye’s 1952 short film The Stranger Left No Card – hailed by Jean Cocteau, megastar of the avant-garde, as a masterpiece – is unlike anything else in British cinema. Its story of an unconventional man who moves to a town and enchants the local people with his idiosyncrasies before committing a crime is deceptively simple. Watched again, more complex ideas begin to emerge. Some of these complexities are hinted at by the choice of music that relentlessly, sometimes uncomfortably, accompanies and informs the action: Hugo Alfvén’s Swedish Rhapsody No. 1. The film itself is a kind of rhapsody: an exuberant and free-flowing piece of work with complex contrasts of mood, colour, and tone. These contrasts go far beyond a mere twist in the tale and say something about the vexed subject of English eccentricity.
The English have, for centuries, been associated – not always flatteringly – with eccentricity. The spectacle of unconventional behaviour – from types of aristocratic haughtiness to philosophical unconventionality and artistic bohemianism – has been conveniently categorised under this term. Paul Langford, in Englishness Identified, lists eccentricity as one of the nation’s six defining features. And the comedy films made in the twenty years that followed the Second World War are teeming with eccentrics, often played by the likes of lugubrious Alastair Sim, exuberant Margaret Rutherford, stentorian Edith Evans, disreputable Terry-Thomas, chaotic Irene Handl, and angular Joyce Grenfell. And generations of film fans and critics in the decades since have insisted that these eccentrics are cosy and lovable, like the dotty aunts and uncles who enliven family gatherings.
But are they so cosy and lovable as we have always thought?
The stranger in The Stranger Left No Card, who initially introduces himself to the town as Napoleon, is a 24-carat gold eccentric. He dresses unconventionally; he mocks stuffy institutions; he experiments and plays with everyday objects; he approaches life with a seemingly unflagging childish anarchism. But these games that he plays are dangerous. His childishness becomes frighteningly grown-up. As he says, “I didn’t make much of a furore – no more than an earthquake.” His seismic effect on the town is scandalous, shocking, and scintillating.
The philosopher John Stuart Mill writes in his great work On Liberty that every healthy society relies on its eccentrics to innovate and lead change. Well, the stranger in The Stranger Left No Card certainly changes things. But this is not cosy and conciliatory change. This is a revolutionary change built on the demands of the anonymous masses for justice. The dawning of the 1950s brought new kinds of campaign for a fairer social deal for the marginalised and the downtrodden. Wendy Toye’s masterpiece, to the jaunty strains of Alfvén’s Rhapsody, dances its funny, dark, and violent way through an image of eccentric social revolution in which the overlooked take control. And perhaps it helps us to return to those other eccentrics – to the bomb-bunging Alastair Sim in The Green Man, the nation-splitting Margaret Rutherford in Passport to Pimlico, and all their cronies – and realise that post-war British cinema is not so cosy after all.
The Stranger Left No Card | 1952 | directed by Wendy Toye | starring Alan Badel