The Man Who Loved Redheads (1955)
Director: Harold French
Based on Terence Rattigan’s play Who is Sylvia?, The Man Who Loved Redheads is the tale of Mark St. Noets (John Justin) and his lifelong obsession with one particular redhead – sixteen year old Sylvia – who he meets aged fourteen and vows to love for all eternity. So infatuated is Mark with Sylvia that he goes through his whole life desiring redheaded women who he believes resemble his lost love.
Told as flashback we see Mark’s pivotal relationships with three very different women – all cannily played by Moira Shearer, a multi-telented and versatile actor – at various stages of his life. The first rendezvous occurs when Mark is a young man who is a junior peer, junior member of the Foreign Office and with a career in the Diplomatic Corps ahead of him. The redhead is Daphne – who Shearer plays in full Cockney mode – who Mark invites to dinner at his home. ‘His home’ is really the property of his army friend and the evening soon goes awry when a stream of people enter the house unannounced and he has to maintain the charade that he owns the property.
The second redhead is Russian dancer Olga, a sweet natured girl Mark considers leaving the diplomatic service for. Olga is the most interesting of the women, particularly as the character allows Shearer to showcase her dancing talent in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty”. The character also serves to remind us of Shearer’s multi-layered talent – she trained as a ballet dancer before she began acting – and the international fame she achieved through the dance-themed The Red Shoes (1948).
In the final story, twenty-five years later and in the ‘present day’, Mark, “with all the old foolishness gone and forgotten”, is still as sprightly as ever as he attempts to woo the young stage actress Collette with a double date at the Old Vic theatre. However Mark’s ‘secret life’ is exposed when his blonde wife Caroline turns up – yes, for Mark is married to a non-redhead! – and introduces herself to the younger woman. In a completely calm and unthreatened manner she politely converses with Colette and tells Mark that she knows about his obsession with “the face” and has done for the past thirty-three years. Yet Mark is the one who feels deceived by his wife, as she has let him indulge his “harmless fantasy”.
That’s the beauty of the film: it is a harmless fantasy, pure fairytale and funny, all emphasised by Kenneth Moore’s off-camera narration and Roland Culver in the role of Mark’s bubbling man Oscar. Furthermore Mark’s preoccupation with his redheads never verges into being creepy or obsessive. Instead The Man Who Loved Redheads is light escapism and proves that very often a little fantasy can be a wonderful thing.
* The Man Who Loved Redheads is part of The British Film Collection and will be released 7 July 2014
Silver Embers 