Trevor Howard Box-Set Review

• 27th Sep 2013

Trevor Howard was represented as the perfect English gentleman in post-war Britain. But he was no Jack Hawkins, who was felt to always be like the ex-forces older paternal type. However while Trevor Howard always looked at his most comfortable in an officer’s uniform, he was always seemed troubled; as though there were something in his past he was trying to atone for. In Trevor Howard it seemed that was actually the case or so his enigmatic back story would have it. Trevor Howard was born in 1913 and by the time he made his first film he was 32-years-old, made right after the war. The story goes that in 1943 Howard was dishonourably discharged from the army for psychotic behaviour, yet there seemed to be conflicting stories as to the truth behind this. Howard, or so his publicity would have it, was that he was awarded the Military Cross for an undisclosed event. The real truth never came out either way or certainly seems to be foggy and vague. Never the less two years later he made his first film appearance in a small part in The Way to the Stars the story of an RAF aerodrome during the Second World War. But this film is not included on the disc. His next film though is. Made the same year it would become the film that would launch him to stardom, in Britain at any rate, in David Lean’s adaptation of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, the story of a perfectly ordinary and unassuming middle-class married housewife (Celia Johnson) who conducts an affair with a suburban doctor (Howard) with the pair going through all the guilt that an affair entails.

Brief Encounter has been considered as one of the best British films ever made and Howard was simply wonderful as the perfectly respectable pipe smoking Alec conducting this discreet affair. Very much the part, Howard seems stiff as Alec. One of the criticisms laid at Howard’s door was that he was a good actor but always played the same character. This is a completely inaccurate reading of the actor; yes, he has a very straight and stiff lipped but when comparing Alec to any of the other characters on the other five films on the disc it is clear that this reading is absolutely not the case.

Chronologically the second film on the disc is The Third Man and while he is only the support actor to Joseph Cotton and the mostly unseen Orson Welles (but his absent presence looms large throughout the film) this is a very important role in Howard’s oeuvre as Major Calloway the duffel coated career officer in post-war Vienna hunting down the unscrupulous black marketeer Harry Lime (Welles) in one of the best and films ever made. Howard plays the officer as a driven, war weary but determined officer, a part he would always seem most comfortable in.

Although later on Trevor Howard would settle down into strong support roles off this type or flawed paternal figures throughout the early 1950s he was given some fairly meaty lead roles. The first of these he played support to Anna Neagle in Odette (1950), a gritty story about a female resistance fighter in occupied France who is tortured by the Nazis in a concentration camp. Here Howard is support to Neagle in a very raw film. But the next film on the disc, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Outcast of the Islands (1951) Howard was second in casting to Sir Ralph Richardson but never the less steals the show in a very good contrast to his role as the gentlemanly doctor in Brief Encounter. Here, Howard plays the disreputable Willems on an un-named Indian Ocean island. He is an absolute scoundrel of a character, an immoral man who finds a remote trading outpost in which he corrupts the locals and the colonials alike and soon where he too finds himself an outcast, even here. This is a powerhouse performance from Howard who does a great effort to show a man who from the first time we see him on screen shows that he is on the verge of madness.

On the final film in the collection, The Heart of the Matter (1953), Howard plays a more restrained version of Willems. Once again set in a colonial outpost, this time in Sierra Leone he plays Scobie, the disenchanted middle-income Deputy Commissioner in a loveless marriage and fed-up with his lot who becomes involved in corruption and begins an affair with a younger widow. Wracked with guilt and the misery around him he contemplates suicide.

As can be seen from these films, this is a strong collection. Released as a part of the Screen Icons collection on StudioCanal with the typical dull collection box cover (although the disc menus do illustrate posters for the films) the one film that it noticeable by its absence, particularly from the early Trevor Howard films is They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), one of the great troubled character’s for this British icon where he plays a post-war spiv and as a result it is unfortunate that the film is not included. The Third Man is the only disc on the collection that has any extras, with extras on the music of Anton Karras, stills and a featurette on the film. It’s great that we now have a box-set collection of Trevor Howard’s films that go some way to re-enforcing the notion that he was more than an actor who was an archetypal English gent but was able to play a whole range of troubled characters.

Chris Hick