The Long Memory (1953)

Directed by Robert Hamer; produced by Hugh Stewart

Philip Davidson (John Mills) was a young man in love with the pretty Fay Driver (Elizabeth Sellers), whose sailor father, however, was involved with the criminal Boyd (John Chandos). Visiting the Drivers’ boat, Davidson intervened in a fight to prevent Boyd from killing a man, but in the struggle the boat burned and sank, leaving one corpse for the police to find. Davidson survived but was implicated in murder by the Drivers’ refusal to implicate themselves. Twelve years later, the bitter former convict is released to brood and implement his revenge.

A dark crime film with an uplifting message, The Long Memory is propelled by well-devised characters, very good acting, unusual settings and an unpredictable storyline. Mills was excellent in ‘every-man’ roles, and here he epitomises the part, appearing in flashbacks as a youthful, hopeful fellow with a future, and in the present as someone with nothing to live for except retribution. This is interesting because his character in the film is, at first, little else but that goal, and as complications arise, so his character evolves.

Sellers’s part may be seen as simplistic. She quickly forgot – or buried – her complicity in Davidson’s destruction, yet this is entirely realistic. People have the unfortunate ability to submerge memories of unpleasantness they’ve committed; they don’t forget, they just choose not to think about it. Her anguish when she must confront reality is restrained but convincing.

John McCallum plays her husband, an antidote to the cynical, hard-hearted police detectives of movie fiction. He is fair, honourable and even courteous: when he reflexively insults a subordinate for an unavoidable mistake, he quickly apologises.

Eva Bergh plays the love-interest, a woman given a rather more interesting background than many such characters, and represents another loner, another outsider; a counterpart to Davidson.

Other notable players are Geoffrey Keen as a conscientious reporter, Laurence Naismith as his decidedly un-conscientious editor, Harold Lang (an actor and acting teacher who died at only 49) as Boyd’s malevolent lackey, and the incomparable Thora Hird as a thug’s wife.

The Long Memory benefits from the use of locations not often seen in films, in particular London’s docklands (though they were used in the recently reviewed Forbidden Cargo, also starring Elizabeth Sellers) and a desolate strip of Kentish coast, which shows why for centuries it was used for smuggling. The latter location, with its rather disgusting little café and crumbling hulks stuck in the tidal mud, is effective.

The script is good, though the story poses a few questions. We are never told why Davidson, upon his release from prison, goes to seek solitude in a beached wreck. He seems to know precisely where he is going when he travels there. Perhaps he has a nautical past, considering his love for a sailor’s daughter, though this has no evidence for it. Nor do we know how a certain individual was aware of where Davidson was living; it could be assumed that he discovered it the way Keen’s reporter did, but, again, this is conjecture. These are small problems, and don’t affect the film’s over-all quality.

The Long Memory is a very good entry in the revenge/film noir category of movies. If the retribution exacted by Davidson is not what many American viewers, raised on the blood and thunder of modern revenge pictures, expect, it is nonetheless satisfying, and quite British, really.