SIMON MATTHEWS watches Guy Hamilton’s 1957 film Manuela.
The age of Empire produced a body of literature about white men going to seed in the tropics. Ruined by misfortune, alcohol, and disease, these were characters adrift in a world where history, commerce and war intertwined. European notions of class were often discarded and the plots have a grandness and scope that allows the reader to feel they are digesting something epic and significant. Joseph Conrad (An Outcast of the Islands, 1896) and Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter, 1948) were amongst its most lasting, and widely read exponents.
As too was William Somerset Maugham. Born in France, and resident in that country from 1927, he spoke the language fluently and was influenced by their naturalistic writers. From the appearance of his first novel in 1897, through to the 1950s, he produced a prolific amount of fiction, short stories and plays, many of which were adapted for film or television. His work was astonishingly popular, and much of it, based on his own travels, was set in the tropics.
There were many who imitated this style, as well as others who wrote in the same vein. One such was William Woods, whose fourth novel, Manuela (1955) attracted some attention. About a young mixed-race girl trying to make her way to the UK, it was popular enough to run to a paperback edition, with a strap-line of: ‘She was seventeen – beautiful and dangerous enough to make a desperate bargain with a lust-crazed sailor.’ Which does sound rather like Maugham’s 1922 play East of Suez, about a mixed-race seventeen-year-old heroine trying, by any means, to reach the UK.
The film rights to Manuela were acquired by Ivan Foxwell, a cultured producer working with British Lion. Foxwell was looking for an international hit after scoring an immense UK success with The Colditz Story (1955), and brought in Guy Hamilton, who had worked on both An Outcast of the Islands (1951) and The African Queen (1951) to direct.
The plot follows that of the book. Manuela, who is possibly escaping her pimp, is brought onboard a rusty old freighter, the San Luis, by one of the crew, whilst sailing between Pernambuco and Surinam, before returning across the Atlantic to Bristol. The ships captain is a middle-aged, disillusioned alcoholic, perfectly played by Trevor Howard who starred previously in both An Outcast of the Islands and The Heart of the Matter (1953), filmed on location in Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone respectively. He also made Run for the Sun (1956) in the jungles of central America around this time, and often played characters with complex personalities.
Elsa Martinelli, twenty-one rather than seventeen, and known to gossip columnists as ‘the Italian Audrey Hepburn’, was cast as Manuela. Foxwell and Hamilton clearly made this choice expecting her involvement would attract a big audience. This was a reasonable assumption, but it removed one of the key elements driving the plot: Manuela is mixed-race and of uncertain occupation, whilst Martinelli is white and comes across as a Bardot-type film star. The co-starring roles are played by Pedro Armendariz, a burly and much-rated Mexican actor, and Donald Pleasance as Evans, the first mate. Warren Mitchell and Jack MacGowran play deckhands. It was Pleasance’s first major screen role after a spell with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he gives a solid performance, portraying Evans as a fidgety Welsh Methodist. For Warren Mitchell, it was also a step up after appearing in Sam Wannamaker’s acclaimed stage version of The Threepenny Opera.
The script is wordy, very much an actor’s piece, and Howard (predictably) is soon neglecting his duties as skipper in favour of a liaison with Martinelli. The cargo catches fire, the engine fails, the ship drifts and sinks. Howard, Martinelli and Armendariz end up in an open boat. (Pleasance and the others succumb). They are rescued and the film concludes in a market place of a port somewhere along the Caribbean/Atlantic littoral one tropical evening. Here, Manuela abandons her efforts to reach Bristol and willingly places herself in the custody of another man. Armendariz and Howard philosophise, and wander off into the night. Like Greene’s The Third Man (another Howard film), there is no definitive ending, just a downbeat conclusion.
In many ways, the speedy ‘winds of change’ liquidation of the British Empire that followed Suez was the death knell of this type of novel. It no longer represented contemporary themes, which was no bad thing. Colonial, and Imperial, fiction told exclusively from the point of view of white characters passed into history. Released in June 1957, Manuela flopped. Other than a few TV screenings it was rarely revived and The Independent referred to it, in Foxwell’s obituary in 2002 as ‘a rather sensual un-British story’. Maugham’s output, though, continues to be read, albeit mainly as period-piece romances, with three feature-film adaptations of his work appearing in recent years.
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Lion & Unicorn 