The Card, a.k.a. The Promoter (Ealing Studios, Pinewood Studios, British Film-Makers, Ronald Neame Productions, J. Arthur Rank, Universal-International [U.S.], 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, April 23) I watched an oddball British film on Turner Classic Movies: The Card, an oddball 1952 movie made by the Ealing Studios in Britain, based on a novel by Arnold Bennett published in 1911 – which is when the film is set (there was a silent version in the 1920’s as well). It was directed by Ronald Neame, who’s also credited as one of the producers (at first I had a prejudice against him because the first film of his I ever saw was The Poseidon Adventure, but later I got to see some of his British films and quite liked him), and the script was by Eric Ambler, who was much better known for his spy thrillers and crime novels than a light comedy like this. It’s about a young man from the (fictitious, though based on a real place) town of Bursley in central England, one of the so-called “Five Towns” that make most of the nation’s plates and bowls for food. The young man is Edward Henry Machin (Alec Guinness, showing why this early in his career he was frequently compared to Stan Laurel even though his character here is resourceful instead of lovably dumb), whose first name is usually abbreviated “Denry.” He’s been raised by his mother (Veronica Turleigh), a widow who provides for them as a washerwoman. As a prank he sneaks into his teacher’s desk, forges better grades for himself than the ones he’s earned, and as he laconically explains in a voice-over he’s rewarded with a scholarship to college, where he’s relentlessly teased by the boys from wealthier families for being a washerwoman’s son. When it comes time for him to look for his first job, he gets it by returning a wallet a local lawyer named Herbert Duncalf (Edward Chapman, who in 1930 had starred in an adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock directed by, of all people, Alfred Hitchcock) dropped in the street.

He’s rewarded with a job as Duncalf’s clerk, and as a result he’s given the assignment of making out the invitations for a major ball hosted by the Countess of Chell (Valerie Hobson, older but still the same incandescent beauty she was in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein). He forges one for himself and another two for the tailor who he talks into making him a dress suit and the woman, Ruth Earp (Glynis Johns), from whom he takes dancing lessons. Denry gets noticed when he, dared by his friends, asks for and gets a dance from the Countess herself. Denry also gets a job collecting rents for local landlord H. Calvert (George Devine), and within a few reels this gig has made him, if not surpassingly wealthy, at least successful enough he can afford to take girlfriend Nellie Cotterell (the young Petula Clark) on an all-day trip to a vacation town. Alas, while out with both Nellie and Ruth, he gets worried about how long his money will hold out in the face of the extravagant purchases both Nellie and Ruth are making with his money. At one point one of them demands he buy them a glass paperweight, and out of sheer frustration he tells the merchant to send it to “Rockefeller” at “Buckingham Palace.” Ruth feels insulted by that remark and walks off, where she eventually marries a rich man. Denry is saved when the captain of a Norwegian fishing boat gets caught in a storm; the boat is salvaged but the captain is inclined to write it off until Denry offers to buy it from him and make it available for tourists interested in going out on the supposedly doomed boat.

Denry ends up with quite a lot of coins and uses them to launch a savings club for local residents at 15 percent interest. He also saves the local football club (that’s “football” as in “soccer,” though it’s a lot more accurately named than American football because it is, after all, about moving a ball with one’s feet) by recruiting a star player, Cregeen (Lyn Evans), who dramatically improves Bursley’s win-loss record. When Cotterell’s parents are ruined by a financial swindler and are emigrating to Canada via the steerage section, Denry rushes to the dock where their ship is about to sail and pays to upgrade their tickets to first class. The film ends with Denry being elected Mayor of Bursley, with Nellie as his first lady since he pulled her off the boat on which she was supposed to go with her parents to Canada and married her instead. During the parade to celebrate his inauguration, Ruth meets another elderly rich man who’s immediately attracted to her, and the two go off together. When it was released in America (by Universal-International even though J. Arthur Rank was the British distributor), the title was changed to The Promoter because The Card wouldn’t have made sense to American audiences in this context. (When I saw this film on the TCM Web page, at first I thought it was a film about gambling à la Pushkin’s novel and Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and thought the titular “card” was a playing card, not a person aggressively seeking financial and social advancement.)

What interested me most about this film was that it featured an upwardly mobile central character in a society that’s supposed to be more highly stratified than ours and where it’s considered virtually impossible to advance on one’s own merits. What’s even more ironic is that in the 1930’s the U.S. made quite a few films like this about determined men exploiting the opportunities the U.S. offered for financial and social advancement, but in the American movies along this line like Other Men’s Women and Dante’s Inferno, the nouveau riche protagonists always over-extended themselves and ended up precisely where they’d started out. These British filmmakers took what was essentially an American-style character, plopped him into the middle of Britain’s highly stratified, rigid class system, and had him not only rise to a position of influence and power but had him stay there at the end of the story. I also liked the subtlety with which Neame and Ambler depicted Denry’s rise, from the donkey-drawn dogcart he drives in the early scenes to a much fancier horse-drawn carriage and, eventually, a car. Though Ealing made funnier movies than this, including Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob and the woefully underrated Passport to Pimlico, The Card is quite good on its own merits and I loved the fact that at least three strong and highly characterized women are in the dramatis personae.