It’s usually a tight call in Hollywood when they come to crowning the best Christmas film. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1947) is hard to beat but Brian Desmond Hurst’s cinematic classic Scrooge (1951) – released in the US as A Christmas Carol – always runs it close.
John Ford was right when he said: “I told Frank Capra, ‘It’s a good thing Brian went back to Britain. He could have given us out here a run for the money.”
Born and bred in east Belfast, Brian not only directed Scrooge but produced it as well – it is Belfast’s Christmas film gift to the world.
Made in post-war austerity both films underline the spirit of the day, tough times, hard luck and add a twist of fate. Alastair Sim’s curmudgeonly Scrooge is taken down and down in self-reflection just as Jimmy Stewart takes George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life to that bridge-edge moment of utter despair.
In the United States families traditionally gather and take in both films as they reset from a year just past and give thanks that there is an opportunity to move forward. It’s like pulling back from George’s bridge moment and back from Scrooge viewing his own gravestone and his possessions being pawned off.
It’s redemption in its purest cinematic glory with a message that there is a Clarence or Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future that could help anyone down on their luck.
The message as we blink through tearful eyes is that there is a future, there is redemption – never give up. Both are classic Christmas films with the leading US film critic Leonard Maltin arguing that Hurst’s Scrooge version of Dickens novella has never been equalled.
I’ll be joining one of our leading film-makers and film historians, Brian Henry Martin, on December 22 at the Strand Arts Centre to introduce Scrooge. It was directed by my great, great uncle, Brian Desmond Hurst. Brian was from the east of the city so the Strand – also having its own redemption and now receiving vital funding so its arts beacon can shine on – is the best of homes for this screening.
Never give up
‘Never give up’ could have been Hurst’s own motto and maybe it’s inevitable that he, like a moth to a flame, was drawn to the story of Scrooge. He used almost the same team as he had used on his previous film in 1951, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, but added one vital ingredient: Alastair Sim, who gave the performance of his life.
I’ll give no more spoilers ahead of our screening night. However, I do have to say that redemption seems to underline the whole Hurst story that I co-curated at the Ulster Museum in the ‘Film as Art: Brian Desmond Hurst’ exhibition running in the Belfast Room until January 11 2024.
Click here to read more about the Brian Desmond Hurst exhibition at the Ulster Museum.
People are now asking why Hurst isn’t mentioned in the same breath as Branagh, Morrison and CS Lewis. It’s a mystery to me but I did encounter a whispering campaign against Brian over the last two decades. Was he just too controversial?
Born as Hans Hurst in Ribble Street in 1895 and then living in Tamar Street, Finvoy Street, Welland Street and Connswater Street, he was a working class linen worker and pure east Belfast. Orphaned at 16 he joined the Royal Irish Rifles in 1914 and saw his comrades slaughtered at Gallipoli in 1915.
Wounded and unwell, he deserted the Labour Corp in 1917 but was not shot at dawn; instead he rejoined to fight again on the front line, courtesy of a new name – the Irish regal ‘Brian’ – and knocking a few years of his birth...
Luck turned and he became arguably our greatest war film director. He was unashamedly gay when his film colleagues were being locked up. He converted from Ulster Covenant-signing Protestant to Catholicism under the guidance of his mentor and greatest friend, the legendary John Ford.
He settled in London’s opulent Belgravia and amassed a Rolls-Royce, Bentley and art works including Picasso, Monet and Yates. His actress neighbour Hermione Gingold wrote the book How To Grow Old Disgracefully, and it’s probably fair to say when film-making left Brian’s life in 1962 his parties became increasingly wild and outrageous.
Material wealth was irrelevant to Brian and he gave everything away to die at 91, waiting for another bottle of champagne. When my grandparents attended his three-storey home in Belgravia, the house had been emptied apart from a few uncollected letters. There was no money left, so my grandfather paid for Brian’s funeral. Thankfully we are living in more enlightened times and the whispering campaign is no longer deafening – he may have been redeemed.
Brian’s own redemption from being so poor he ate bread off the street in Belfast came from being in the right place at the right time. He had a commanding presence, a twinkle in his eye and was described as the “human blarney stone” in a Scrooge article in the News of the World.
He could be persuasive and had the ‘gift of the gab’ and brought people luck – Richard Attenborough, Roger Moore, James Mason, Alec Guinness and Vanessa Redgrave were all given early career-building roles in Hurst films.
That probably says it all. He was not shot at dawn and reinvented himself. A key life event was leaving the War of Independence and Belfast and emigrating to Canada in 1920 to study art.
He later became part of the ‘bohemian’ movement in Paris and New York before finding his way to Hollywood and art direction. He then took his painterly eye into film and had the greatest of teachers in the legendary director John Ford – this was another lucky break as Ford happened across a Hurst painting in a shop and enquired about the “Irish artist”. The rest, as they say, is history.
Movies as an art form
Brian was fearless in projecting his art form. On returning to the UK in 1934 he formed his own production company to propel his art on film – a canny trick as it meant he didn’t have production houses overshadowing his art.
His first film, The Tell-Tale Heart (1934, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story) was dark and deemed too horrible to show in some cinemas but achieved artistic critical acclaim, with executives from Fox identifying his talent. His independently produced Irish Hearts (1934) was Ireland’s first feature length talkie, swiftly followed by an adaptation of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1935), financed by Gracie Fields, the English actress and singer.
Hurst’s breakthrough was his Irish War of Independence film Ourselves Alone (1936) which sold out in London and Dublin but was banned in Belfast – a copy of the banning order is in the exhibition.
Controversy can help an artist and Hurst was soon to be put under contract with Alexander Korda, the then leading British film magnate, to write a script for Lawrence of Arabia. Hurst, writing in 1936, described film as “the world’s only new art form” and flagged that “the full use of the camera as an art form has net been attained”. The full text is on display in the exhibition and current film directors tell me that Hurst’s perception nearly 90 years ago is still a template for film-making.
Pushing art boundaries, he directed Britain’s first bona fide film noir, On the Night of the Fire (1939), which is still capable of headlining any arts film festival.
The biggest grossing war film in the UK for nearly a decade was his Arnhem Airborne tribute Theirs is the Glory (1946). Hurst refused to allow any of Rank’s actors near the set and, instead, only used actual battle veterans on their actual battle ground. The authenticity made the film for every parent sitting in the audience in 1946 who had lost a son in the war.
Hurst knew war at it darkest but his war films carry a remarkable human touch – no blood, guts and gore here. Add in a series of big box office successes including Scrooge (1951), Malta Story (1953) and Simba (1955) and the visuals and art in Brian’s films underline how a picture is worth a 1,000 words and how a film, as an art form, is worth 100,000 words.
The Film as Art: Brian Desmond Hurst, Film Director exhibition is at the Ulster Museum until January 11 2024. The exhibition was inspired by the lavish book Hurst on Film 1928-1970 by Caitlin Smith (Allan Esler Smith’s daughter) and Brian’s friend Stephen Wyatt, a leading writer for radio, TV and stage. It is available on Kindle for £1.49 while the exhibition runs.
The Hurst on film eBook can be purchased here.
A screening of Scrooge, with an introductory Q&A by Brian Henry Martin and Allan Esler Smith, is at the Strand Arts Centre in Belfast at 5.30pm on December 22, strandartscentre.com
Click here to follow the Brian Demond Hurst Legacy page on Facebook for more information.
