A Film Canon

The first - and strongest - of the Gainsborough costume melodramas, The Man In Grey displays considerably more figurative ingenuity and poetic imagery than its progeny. In particular, Arliss complicates a fairly predictable equation of white with virtue, and black with evil, into a series of greys that belie the moral simplicity of the narrative, and centre on a blackface performance of Othello, as well as the colonial issues to which it gives rise. In the same way, the framing device - a WWII auction - ensures that a subsidiary narrative develops around the objects that the characters exchange and circulate, while translating the pervasive sense of doom into a more contemporary register. That said, the script is very stagy, as if it were lifted straight from Lady Eleanor Smith's novella, and frequently presents as little more than a rehearsal of cliches from Regency romance. From this perspective, Arliss' strongest achievement is to raise melodrama to a surreal, hallucinatory pitch that both transcends the contrivances of the script, and implicates every character - with the possible exception of the heroine, Clarissa (Phyllis Calvert) - in a web of hysteria, such that the foppish, calculating Lord Rohan's (James Mason) final, notorious violation of his mistress (Margaret Lockwood) effectively contains the narrative, enabling the unusually abrupt shift back to the framing device, which ends on a proportionately uncontained note.