Gideon's Day (Gideon of Scotland Yard)
By David Sterritt

Apart from the fact that John Ford directed it, the 1958 release Gideon's Day has thoroughly English credentials — it was produced by Michael Killanin for Columbia (British) Productions and shot at the Elstree Studios with a largely British cast. By the time Columbia's domestic distribution arm brought it to American audiences the following year, however, the title was Gideon of Scotland Yard, the running time was nearly half an hour shorter, the Technicolor negative had been printed in black-and-white, and the screens it played on were less often downtown movie houses than art theaters devoted to low-key European entertainments. Although the movie holds many pleasures, it apparently wasn't splashy enough to suit Columbia's idea of big-screen entertainment in the age of competition from TV, so the studio cut its losses every way it could in the United States market. This lack of confidence proved infectious, and the picture's reputation still hasn't recovered among American viewers. It's hard to imagine a well-realized John Ford film being half forgotten today — especially one from the same decade that gave us The Searchers (1956) and The Quiet Man (1952), to mention just a couple of 1950s classics — but Gideon's Day has suffered that fate. Even now its continuity is choppy in spots, a lingering effect of cuts made for US distribution.

Gideon's Day was the second of two Ford movies produced by Killanin — the first was The Rising of the Moon a year earlier — and Ford acknowledged that in both instances the pictures diverged considerably from their shooting scripts, in line with his conviction that "as the basic story develops one must develop each character in the actor…besides [developing] the mood and the tempo, so that the drama is correctly mixed with humour."[1] As the title hints, Gideon's Day lends itself well to this evolutionary, quasi-improvisational approach, focusing as it does on the hero's quotidian activities as well as the particularities of the criminal cases that provide the picture's conventionally dramatic elements. In broad outline, the story follows Inspector George Gideon through a long, action-packed day that he, his family, and his associates take completely in stride, seeing every complication and inconvenience as part of a law-enforcement officer's regular lot in life. On one level the picture is a police procedural, observing Gideon as he tracks down clues to a murder, a rape, a bank robbery, and a case of police corruption, among other crimes. On another level it's a domestic comedy showing how the Gideon household copes with everything from an uppity traffic cop to Gideon's chronic habit of getting stuck at work late into the evening. It's common for police dramas to shuttle between personal and professional scenes, but it takes a Ford to interweave the two sides of the equation with such an unfailing sense of balance. He even pulls off the picture's silliest running gag, about Gideon's efforts to bring home a fish in time for supper, with reasonable success. Killanin said watching Ford direct was like watching a conductor lead a symphony orchestra, and although the piece being played on this occasion is not among the most profound in the leader's repertoire, he's in masterly control of his forces from the first note to the last.

Individual performances are crucial to this kind of concert, and here again Ford had an aesthetic policy that ideally suited the project: Gideon's Day, he said, was a picture in which "all the parts 'sing.'… I like casting for individuals[as opposed to typecasting] for I photograph people." To play the title character he enlisted English actor Jack Hawkins, whom he called the "finest dramatic actor with whom I have worked," even when measured by the lofty standards of Ireland and England, where Ford found "tremendous talent" in the profession.[2] Other members of the first-rate cast include Cyril Cusack as Herbert "Birdie" Sparrow, a Cockney snitch; Andrew Ray as Simon Farnaby-Green, an impertinent young constable; Michael Trubshawe as Sgt. Golly, whose oversized mustache should get a screen credit of its own; Maureen Potter as Ethel Sparrow, the snitch's gin-addicted spouse; Anna Lee as Kate Gideon, the inspector's long-suffering wife; and Anna Massey making her screen debut as Sally Gideon, their daughter.

The screenplay for Gideon's Day, by English screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke, is based on John Creasey's eponymous 1955 novel — the first of twenty-one books Creasey wrote about the inspector, all published under the name J.J. Marric, one of more than two dozen pseudonyms he used. (In addition to Ford's movie, the Gideon novels inspired a British television series, known as Gideon's Way in the UK and Gideon CID in the US, which ran for twenty-six episodes in 1964-65.) While the film's elements of humor reflect Ford's predilection for "traditional, understated wackiness," in critic Tag Gallagher's words,[3] their raw materials are ably provided by Clarke, whose credits include the deservedly acclaimed 1951 caper film The Lavender Hill Mob and such other Ealing comedies as Hue and Cry in 1947 and Passport to Pimlico in 1949. As is often the case with the more offbeat items in Ford's filmography, however, Gideon's Day fits too many categories to be easily pigeonholed. Along with its comic ingredients — from the fish-for-dinner motif to the cheeky junior cop who gives Gideon a traffic ticket and then starts wooing his starry-eyed daughter — it has unmistakably somber undertones, as when Gideon confronts the cold, hard facts of a brutal, senseless crime.

The movie's complexity of tone has pleased some commentators and flummoxed others. Ford was so famous for westerns that New York Times critic Bosley Crowther started his review by marveling at the absence of John Wayne and horses, then applauded the movie for its wry "spoofing" and for the "good British-comedy style" of its supporting cast.[4] Taking a more nuanced view, Gallagher calls it Ford's only tragicomedy, arguing that its cheerful scenes make the director's deeper interests—"the claustrophobia, craziness, and complacent despair of modern life"—stand out in sharper relief; not for nothing do we see a newspaper headline about the hydrogen bomb and hear a theme song with echoes of "London Bridge is falling down…."[5] On the other side of the Atlantic, where high-spirited French critics had descried a disconnect between the very concepts of "British" and "cinema," the independent-minded Louis Marcorelles wrote in Cahiers du cinéma that Gideon's Day was the "freest, most direct, least fabricated film ever to sprout from one of Her Majesty's studios."[6] This comment smacks of hyperbole, to be sure, but getting back to Gallagher, parts of his analysis are hyperbolic to the point of absurdity. I agree with his observation that the "quiet matter-of-factness of Ford's staging captures events as they are to their participants," but when he credits this strategy with "intensifying the horror of our passive witnessing," I wonder how anyone could feel "horror" at such a nuanced and civilized treatment of contemporary urban life. And does Gideon's "manly matter-of-factness" really cloak a "sense of purpose…even more potent and terrifying" than that of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers?"[7] That'll be the day.

Leaving critical fantasy behind and returning to the film itself, auteurists who haven't yet discovered Gideon's Day will have no trouble recognizing Ford's distinctive signatures woven through both story and style, however atypical its London setting and dry British humor are for this director. The imagery and editing are richly expressive and superbly economical, and Ford's personal stamp makes an especially strong impact in the final scenes, when Gideon finishes his day (at last!) by returning to his loyal wife and daughter, who are guarding the hearth and awaiting his arrival with the patience of a homesteading family on the Western frontier. London Bridge may be metaphorically falling down, but our hero has earned a warm welcome back into the fold, even if he does have to rush right out again when the Yard summons him long after nightfall. Ford didn't always discuss this picture seriously; in Peter Bogdanovich's monograph about his work he casually remarks, "I wanted to get away for a while, so I said I'd like to do a Scotland Yard thing and we went over and did it."[8] Such nonchalance was a familiar Ford trademark, however, and viewers of Gideon's Day are advised, as always with his films, to trust the tale and not the teller.

A shorter version of this essay appeared on TCM.com in 2007.

David Sterritt
© FIPRESCI 2009

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