Andrew Davies’s Signalman (Dickens ghost story) and Henry Herbert’s Malachi’s Cove (Trollope nature parable as 1970s film)

Denholm Elliot when first seen close up as the signalman

Veronica Quilligan when first seen in medium shot as Mally loading her donkey with seaweed

Dear Readers and friends,

Over the past couple of weeks now I’ve been watching movies where the screenplay (and often much else) is by Andrew Davies. I’m on my 12th film. This is part of my background studies for my projected book, working title, The Austen Movies. I’m going to have to put it down or away for a while while I work on three different papers (one at a time) so I thought I’d keep good records on my thoughts about them by writing a few blog-essay-reviews. The first one I saw, among Davies’s earliest films, and his first readily available film adaptation of an older text, is a dramatization in televisual terms of Dickens’s ghost enigmatic ghost story, “The Signalman.”

It’s superb, a perfectly realized filmic version. That it’s just 40 minutes suggests the lack of puffery (and commercialism). It has some revealing parallels with an 85 minute 1974 TV film adaptation of superb story by Trollope, “Malachi’s Cove” (which was released to cinemas in the UK, which I wrote about on my old blog, but apparently failed to retrieve). In both the use of landscape is cinematic and expressive: the small picture space is filled to overflowing with a cliff and wild sea in the one (Trollope’s story) and a train, gorge, deep chasm in the ground, and tiny signalman’s house (Dickens’s story) in the other. So I will compare these two to start with.

The story of “The Signalman” in a nutshell: a man comes over the high hill just as a train is coming out of a tunnel and sees at the bottom a figure looking puzzled: the signalman.

Bernard Lloyd as the visitor

The visitor climbs down and stays to talk with the signalman in his isolated tiny home; the signalman tells the visitor how he lives in dread (and we feel despair), and attributes his suffering state of mind to accidents that have been occurring just after he sees a gnome appear at the mouth of the tunnel. We see he has grown to live in intense anxiety because left alone all he has to do is ring a bell to warn a train and the need to make sure he does it right each time has come to prey on imagination. The visitor leaves, apparently contemplating telling this man’s “superiors” about his bad state of health; he does not, but returns the next day to see the man killed by a train just as he apparently is again haunted by the gnome.

The train

Many questions come to mind: who is this visitor and why did he come to this lone place? Was he sent by the company to spy on this man’s state of mental health? Is the signalman hallucinating, and providing himself with a rationale to commit suicide? Is he pursued by a malign mischievous ghost? Or has he himself become a creature subject to supernatural forces around him? We never know.

Well, the film astonished me. Perhaps I was startled to see something so televisually original this early, but since “Malachi’s Cove” is two years earlier and if not as original in feel, is equally astute in visuals and sound, that’s not quite so. It’s more that the film adapters under the influence of Dickens’s text display emotions we rarely see.

Basically it’s that Davies and the film-making team (which includes Lawrence Clark as director, Rosemay Hill as producer) do real justice to Dickens’s appreciation of how technology can place an individual in terrible isolation and how this isolation can wreak havoc on his (or her body and soul. Denhom Elliot plays the Signalman who shows his visitor how little he has to do but be there, how alone he is with his bell to ring, living in meagre circumstances; he also tells his visitor how he is an educated man who lost out. It’s so touching when he tells of how he sits and read math, but no one to talk to or appreciate or ask questions of, but he plugs on. (Such a character might have been found comfort in the Internet.) But now he subject to a spectre who signals him with a fiery light too late for him to save anyone.

Says the signalman in story and film: “surely this is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do?”

The really worrying elements of Dickens’s story are given visual and verbal presence in this film. There is the man who comes to visit (perhaps investigate really) and sees the Signalman die worries me. Is he part of the malevolent ghost apparatus (deriving from the universe or nature)? for why doesn’t he help more? how could just a passer-by want to come again?

And there is the signalman. We see him in half light and half-darkness. It’s more than he’s bound to his position or place: at the moment the train comes round we see a red flash, a bird flies high and away, as if scared, and the man utters: “I am simply a man.” Paradoxically this makes us wonder if he has become fused with the too powerful and scary vibrations of energy (terrifying and anonymous) coming from the huge train, which lead to its wrekage. It’s this sort of visual, sound (the bird fluttering, the train’s hoot, the dark clouds, breezes) and movement that projects a kind of psychic terror.

It’s important that the atmospherics are not overdone. The day for example above the hill is sunny to start with. The smashing of the signalman by the train is recorded or registered by the horror on the visitor’s face.

We don’t see the accident, only hear the train.

I’ve no doubt this story arose from Dickens’s own train accident, the terrors and pain of this experience (where Ellen Ternan was with him) are gotten across.

Anyone seeing this would easily understand why Davies would be approached to do more film adaptations. I also watched his early original (non-adapted) mini-series A Very Peculiar Practice (1983). I won’t be writing separately about this one (too long, at least 2 seasons, and complicated). Like Dickens, in A Very Peculiar Practice Davies uses strong caricature and grotesque presentation of characters/presences in an empathetic way too. More generally, its central hero, Stephen Dakar (as played by Peter Davison, who was also Campion) is central to understanding all Davies work as well as his progressive humanist stance, interest in social and psychological issues. Dakar is a vulnerable man doing the best he can in a difficult situation, the male as a beleaguered person, by no means a macho-male but a sensitive spirit looking for congenial companonship, integrity, a sane existence (and in this series on education, to do good).

Now for the comparison with “Malachi’s Cove” (this is retrieved from a draft of the lost blog): written and directed by Henry Herbert, this adaptation of Trollope’s brief masterpiece is also about a desperately poor and socially isolated character, this time a young girl, Mally (played by Veronica Quilligan) who makes a meagre living for herself and her grandfather, Malachi (Donald Pleasence who was also brilliant as Mr Harding in The Barchester Chronicles), in this film, a badly crippled sick alcoholic but still sane and well-meaning old man.

Mally (Veronica Quilligan) gathering seaweed-manure

I’ve wondered if the inspiration for this story is the series of moving lines in Shakespeare’s King Lear where Edgar imagines the manure-gatherers high on a cliff to persuade his father, Gloucester, to leap where there is no cliff. Gloucester wants to commit suicide and does leap; then Edgar persuades him he was miraculously saved. The sceptical ironies of this passage could be working themselves out at a distance in Trollope’s mind. Given full concrete visualization in a film, such verbal play disappears (if it is there in the original).

The story: Mally falls into a competition for the manure high on a cliff with the wild sea nearby; her opponent or rival, Bart, the son of another desperate family, is also attracted to her despite her poorly dressed state and how she is apparently an outcast, and feels herself despised by the community (she cannot get herself to go to church): he has seen her from afar. She both beats him out and saves his life; at first she is blamed by his family for almost killing him, but he tells the truth of what occurred and as the story ends, there seems to be some amelioration of their lives on the way in mutual help, companionship and perhaps love to come.

Herbert’s film somewhat softens the portrait of Mally’s grandfather. He is still basically the same hard-drinking half-crippled desperate and selfish clinging old man

Donald Pleasence as grandfather (“Dada”)

But Herbert has the grandfather also at great risk to himself perform the impossible feat of climbing down the rocks to hold onto the boy while Mally goes for help. This does not happen in Trollope’s text and has the effect of making the grandfather seem not an irresponsible leech, but rather a desperate father-hero to his granddaughter. So this alteration works to deepen relationship of the girl-grandfather pair. Early on in the story a flashback, a depiction of Molly’s bad dreams dwells on and recreates the drowning of her parents (implied but not dramatized in Trollope’s story). The grandfather and child have thus existed together near the rushing waters which drowned Mally’s mother and father. Frail and selfish, half-drunk as he may be, he has taken care of her all these years; he watches over her from afar.

Mally walking on the cliff

We see her visit their grave, so a theme of the film is how to the poor living close to nature there’s a fragile thin line between life and death. In this the film, Malachi’s Cove resembles Davies’s The Signalman, and might be a similar projection of a theme consonant with a 1970s perception of experience.

In Herbert’s film adaptation of Trollope, we continually hear the water rushing, sometimes loud and wild, sometimes soft. The non-diegetic music of the film is folk song, sung in high lilting fragile tones by a soprano. The figures are so tiny against the Cornwall coast (yes this is the era of Poldark, a several season film-adaptation of a cycle of historical novels set in Cornwall, later 17th century). How different this from the stereotyped “toffs and tiaras” that TV foists on Trollope as appropriate to his fiction (all wrong or so misleading in my view).

Molly first glimpsed on the shore below the cliffs

There’s an excellent several page analysis of Dickens’s text and Davies’ film, together with a reprint of the story in Sarah Cardwell’s excellent study, Andrew Davies. As far as I know the only lengthy analytic account of Trollope’s story is on my website.

Ellen