Box, Muriel

b. 22 September 1905, New Malden, United Kingdom

d. 18 May 1991, Hendon, United Kingdom

The future director Muriel Box’s fascination with the medium of film first came upon her during her childhood in the 1910s, when a family friend who owned a cinema would permit her to sit in the wings and watch the show from behind the screen (posing a challenge when trying to read silent film intertitles), and sometimes even allow her to rewind the film spools, ‘and, if the film broke’, she recalled in her autobiography, ‘let me stick it together again which gave me a happy feeling of importance. I could take home the odd frame or two of the picture “lost” in the joining operation as a trophy’, providing the young cineaste with ‘a fine collection of tiny clips in a secret store […] examined and gloated over with the passion of a connoisseur.’¹ But this happy situation was jeopardised when she laughed so much at Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918) that other patrons were apparently perturbed by the strange sound coming from behind the screen and the owner asked her to keep quiet, which she found near-impossible.

Such stories are familiar fixtures in the biographies of directors, providing ‘origin myths’ for their future careers in cinema. But Muriel Box would find it a good deal more difficult than many of her male peers to realise her ambitions to, as she nervously told her mother, ‘go on the films’.² She would have to contend with a culture that refused to see women as equal, and which by the time she was in a position to direct had become actively antithetical to the very idea of a woman film director.³ While some gatekeepers, like Michael Balcon, Head of Ealing Studios, was explicit in expressing his view that women were unsuited to the job, others harboured the same feelings but perhaps did not articulate their prejudices so openly, although they raised objections and placed obstacles in her way nonetheless. In the end, Muriel Box did achieve her teenage goal of going ‘on the films’, not only becoming an Oscar-winning screenwriter but also one of the few professional women directors working in the British film industry during the 1950s and 60s, with thirteen full features and one featurette to her name, and input into a whole lot more besides (it is a somewhat chastening fact that she still remains the most prolific woman director in mainstream British cinema history; a powerful indicator of the ongoing challenges faced by female filmmakers).

In some ways that achievement of becoming a director at all is sufficiently noteworthy to merit attention. However, Muriel Box’s films are not only remarkable for their novelty factor of having been directed by a woman, they should also be celebrated in their own right as rich and beguiling examples of British filmmaking of the postwar era, passionately engaged with social realities but often refracting that reality through comedic metafictions and fantasies. While Box is, In many respects, a filmmaker firmly situated in her time and place working within the concomitant stylistic and generic conventions of her period, her particular emphasis on gender politics and her self-definition as a feminist made her stand apart from her directing peers: an ‘odd woman out’, as she described herself in the title of her 1974 autobiography.

Muriel Box’s entry into the industry was through roles designated as mainly female prerogatives, first as an extra for Stoll pictures in the mid-1920s, then secretarial worker for British Instructional Films in the later part of that decade, and then getting her opportunity to work on set as a stand-in continuity girl, a role she would later describe as ‘invaluable’ training for her later directorial role, giving her intimate insights into production processes and the integral importance of ‘meticulous attention to and recording of detail.’⁴ Further work in the clerical and continuity mould followed, for British International Pictures and for Michael Powell, and then Gaumont-British, with young Muriel always taking an omnivorous approach to gaining experience in every department and different aspect of filmmaking, from initial script ideas to a film’s final cut.

It was in her capacity of being asked to ‘keep an eye open for writers of promise and original talent’ for American producer Jerry Jackson that she wrote to an aspiring playwright whose work had been the toast of the 1932 drama festival at the Welwyn Theatre. That writer was Sydney Box, later to be Muriel’s husband and creative collaborator over several decades, and the great supporter and facilitator of her eventual move into film direction.

Their first collaboration as co-writers was on a series of plays intended for amateur performance. They had noted a gap in the market for plays for women to act in, and wrote two collections, Ladies Only and Petticoat Plays, to fill this gap. Muriel was still continuing her work for Gaumont-British at this time, and when asked by director Ralph Smart if she knew of a suitable writer for a documentary commentary recommended Sydney. Having been given this entrée into the film world, it is fair to say that Sydney Box picked up the ball and ran with it. He quickly became indispensable at the company Publicity Films, and would later form his own company Verity Films which would focus on advertising and documentary shorts. The outbreak of war in 1939, and the need for propaganda and information to be disseminated effectively to the populace, invigorated this sector of filmmaking, and by 1942, Verity had become one of the biggest and most successful producers of documentary films in Britain.

While Sydney had been building up a profile in film production, Muriel had had a daughter, Leonora, had been evacuated temporarily to Scotland on the outbreak of war, and then come back down to London and back into continuity supervision again, before turning to more regular work alongside Sydney at Verity Films. A scarcity of male filmmaking personnel due to wartime conscription gave numerous women opportunities that they would not otherwise have had, and Muriel Box was among them. Her first assignment as director, credited as Muriel Baker (her maiden name), was a short film for the British Council celebrating a particular aspect of the national culture, The English Inn (1941). She took pleasure in planning shots and directing on location, and even in this first directorial outing was already taking care to avoid gender stereotyping; this panegyric on the pub made sure that female customers were included in its mise-en-scene alongside the men. But although Verity was the place where she was able to make her initial foray into directing, it was also where she first experienced outright prejudice against women taking on this professional role. The short film on children’s road safety she had written and had intended to direct was instead reallocated to new boy Ken Annakin at the behest of the Ministry of Information who did not approve of this subject being directed by a woman (even one who’d devised the screenplay). As she lamented years later, Annakin ‘was young and fresh, although he only knew a tenth of what I did about films then. But women had to take second place.’⁵ It was the first of many frustrations she would experience in her directorial career – or rather her quest to be allowed to have one.

Sydney Box was increasingly keen to move beyond short form non-fiction filmmaking into fiction-based features, more akin to the dramatic work for the stage he had undertaken with Muriel. After the chequered productions On Approval (1944) – for which Muriel directed a dream sequence, uncredited – and 29 Acacia Avenue (1944), which was thought too sexually suggestive by the distributors, the Boxes finally hit cinematic paydirt with their collaboration on The Seventh Veil (1945). This intense romance centred on the troubling relationship between a concert pianist, played by the ethereal Ann Todd, and her cruel, inscrutable guardian, played by James Mason, with Herbert Lom playing the experimental psychoanalyst attempting to understand the workings of the young woman’s mind behind all its protective veils. In a period in which torrid melodrama seemed to match the cinemagoing public’s mood, The Seventh Veil was a huge box-office hit, not only in Britain but also in the US, where it also earned the acclaim of an Oscar win, for best original screenplay, making Muriel the first woman to win in this category.

The Seventh Veil

On the strength of that remarkable transatlantic success, achieved on a tight budget, Sydney Box was invited to take charge of Gainsborough Pictures by its new overseer J. Arthur Rank. He took the job and appointed Muriel as head of the scenario department, where she was expected not only to contribute her own scripts but also to improve on others’ in the capacity of script editor and, as before, to act as a talent spotter and nurturer – the process through which she had first encountered Sydney. The workload was huge for the Boxes at Gainsborough and although they enjoyed some significant successes during their tenure, including the Muriel-penned social problem film Good Time Girl (1948) and the series of films featuring the Huggett family inaugurated by Holiday Camp (1947), eventually they were keen to strike out in independent production once more. Sydney established a new company, London Independent Pictures, and their first slated project would provide an opportunity for Muriel to direct her first feature.⁶ This was the comedy The Happy Family (1952) and although its production was marked by serious financing concerns behind the scenes, none of this is evident in the delightfully light-hearted film which emerged from such stressful circumstances. The Ealing-esque scenario of a family fighting back against a compulsory purchase order on their house and shop to make way for the Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank is treated with due levity and a touch of the ‘mild anarchy’ Michael Balcon saw as the keynote of Ealing comedy. But although the US title Mr Lord Said No! suggested a strong solo stance by the patriarch (played by Stanley Holloway) in resisting the demolition of the family home, characteristically for Box it is the women of the family, Mrs Lord (Kathleen Harrison) and her sister Ada (Dandy Nichols), who are in some respects the true stalwarts in their rebellion against officialdom. The dotty spiritualist maiden aunt, so often a figure of ridicule in British comedy, is here proven correct in her prognostications of danger, and the film ends with her triumphant achievement of yogic levitation above the festival site (which found a way to accommodate itself to the Lord family home without having to move them on). Choosing such a quirkily different way to conclude a comedy foretold Muriel Box’s innovative approach to the genre which would resonate through later films. This film also marked the beginning of her longstanding partnership with editor Jean Barker whose input Box valued greatly.

The Happy Family

Although her first feature would end up being a success, the backers had been very uneasy about the film having a woman director at the helm. She and Sydney had to pretend that they were co-directors, the assumption being that she would just be acting as wifely helpmeet to her husband, in order to provide enough reassurance to go ahead. Box recounts having to be very evasive in talking to a journalist visiting the set, lest she give the game away. But once the danger had passed, Muriel could resume full control, with Sydney’s full support. It is important to note that this director’s career could only begin in earnest through an act of subterfuge; very different indeed from the promising young men who were openly celebrated and garlanded with opportunities to develop their talent, as suggested by Ealing Studios being described as ‘Mr Balcon’s Academy for Young Gentlemen’ at this time.⁷ Muriel was unusually fortunate in having a creative collaborator who was willing to use his male privilege to facilitate and enable her work as a director; probably the only way her directorial talent would ever have seen the light of day.

Her second feature would mark a return to the semi-documentary social problem investigation film she had worked on at Gainsborough. Street Corner (1953) focussed on the work of women police officers and the crimes and criminals they had to deal with. If The Happy Family could be seen as a nod to Ealing’s Passport to Pimlico (1949), complete with Stanley Holloway as star, then Street Corner was a more direct and intentional riposte to the same studio’s police drama, The Blue Lamp (1950) which, Muriel later noted, ‘never mentioned women and how they co-operated in doing police work. It was about time women had a chance to show what they did, and the film was specifically designed to show their work.’⁸ The character of a misogynist policeman was included in Street Corner to mouth all the usual suspicious platitudes about women doing what is supposedly men’s work (was Muriel thinking as much about film directing as policing here?) but they are roundly disproved by the courageous actions and intelligent detective work we see undertaken by a spectrum of women police officers, among them Anne Crawford and Barbara Murray. But as with Good Time Girl, those who are wrongdoers are presented in their full complex humanity and insights are provided into why they may have been drawn into criminality, from Peggy Cummings as a shoplifting moll to Eleanor Summerfield as a bigamist who’s gone AWOL from the army. They have their reasons, and those reasons are shown to be compelling.

Box’s featurette for producer George K. Arthur (who’d also supported the work of Muriel’s only British female peer active in film directing at that time, Wendy Toye), A Prince for Cynthia (1953), was followed by her first colour film, the Somerset Maugham adaptation The Beachcomber (1954), starring Glynis Johns and Robert Newton as a mismatched couple who encounter each other in the Christian missions of the South Sea Islands. The fact of her being entrusted to handle location work as well as colour cinematography suggested Box’s growing status as a competent viable director. The Beachcomber’s focus on the battle of the sexes and the intricacies of gender politics would be an important component in the run of films to follow. To Dorothy, A Son (1954) centres on the competing claims of two wives for a sizeable bequest in a will, contrasting the American nightclub singer first wife played by Shelley Winters with second wife Peggy Cummings who is about to give birth to husband John Gregson’s child. The bequest demands the fulfilment of this task by a certain point in time, and much comedic contention around their rather unusual situation ensues. The ultimate solution sidesteps female rivalry or pitting the single career girl against the stay-at-home mother in a battle for supremacy, as the women mutually agree to share the money equally. Once again, Box’s feminist refusal to glory in any woman’s humiliation was fully in evidence.

Her next film was perhaps one of her finest: the television satire Simon and Laura (1955). This prescient story of a real-life couple on the brink of divorce, also unemployed actors, who agree to play themselves in a television series presenting them as the perfect couple (wittily played by Peter Finch and Kay Kendall). Box’s deft handling of comedy earned her comparisons to Lubitsch, and the film also provided some very telling insights into the fledgling media industry of television (of course, cinema’s great competitor at this time) as well as being a feast for the eyes, partly thanks to Carmen Dillon’s work as Art Director and Julie Harris as Costume Designer. Sadly, Kendall was resistant to being directed by a woman (although you would never guess it from the film), making her one of a number of stars who caused difficulties for Box. Jean Simmons had objected to the prospect of Box directing the Gainsborough melodrama So Long at the Fair (1950) and intervened to prevent it. Later on in her career, Box confessed she found Hildegarde Neff ‘a pain in the neck’ as ‘the first artiste who ever refused to take a direction I gave on the floor.’⁹ Although all directors encounter difficulties in doing their jobs, there is no doubt that these were exacerbated in Box’s case because of her sex. Interestingly, Box recalled having ‘no trouble with the units at all. With artistes sometimes, yes, and certainly with the distributors, although not always.’¹⁰ Prejudice did not always reside where it might be expected; but solidarity and support likewise. In spite of her screenwriting Oscar and her solid directorial track record, Muriel’s desire to make a film in Hollywood would remain unrealised. Her agent Christopher Mann explained it thus, Muriel recalled: ‘I wish I could tell you different but, if I mention the name of a woman as a director, they just turn away and look out of the window.’¹¹ 

The film that she followed Simon and Laura with, the black and white thriller Eyewitness (1956), may have been more lowkey but it still conveyed a strong sense of suspense and menace in its focus on a pair of criminals intent on getting rid of the only witness to their crime, a young woman hospitalised in a road accident after fleeing the scene of the crime. Alongside the main players Muriel Pavlow, Donald Sinden, Nigel Stock and Belinda Lee, Box found room for Ada Reeve, one of her favourite character players, as an elderly hospital patient whose warnings of an intruder on the ward go un-listened to, old women being especially easy to dismiss. 

Eyewitness

Muriel Box’s next two films were perhaps her most fully realised personal projects, both of which she devised and wrote, in collaboration with Sydney, and then herself directed. The first is The Passionate Stranger (1957), another film, like Simon and Laura, that explores the gap between fantasy, especially idealised fictions of romantic love, and the less glamorous contours of lived reality. The film’s original title, and its title in the US, A Novel Affair provides a better insight into its content than its vaguer eventual UK title. A successful romantic novelist, played by Margaret Leighton, happily married to Ralph Richardson, is suffering from a spot of writer’s block when she takes inspiration from her husband’s appointment of a handsome Italian chauffeur to help him with his car (he is a wheelchair user). The novelist crafts a lush romantic narrative on the premise of an affair between a neglected wife and her chauffeur (presented in the film in colour, where real life is in black-and-white, in a bold aesthetic move) but complications come when the real chauffeur reads her manuscript and interprets it as her unfulfilled erotic fantasy which he then determines to convert into reality. Box manages to hold in balance these metafictional and technical complexities very effectively, making The Passionate Stranger an innovative exploration of the gulf between art and life, and the fraught interaction between those whose business it is to fabricate fictions and those who consume and interpret them in sometimes surprising ways.

Even more ambitious was Box’s next film, The Truth about Women (1957), which she later described as ‘personally significant to me above all others’ because it gave her an opportunity to bring her suffragette-inspired feminism directly into her filmmaking: ‘Unable to chain myself to the railings, I could at least rattle the film chains!’¹²  The Truth about Women is both about the romantic career of Humphrey Tavistock (Laurence Harvey) from boyhood to senescence, but also about the women who he gets involved with, enabling Box to explore ‘the status of women in various societies from the turn of the century until today’.¹³ One sequence hinges upon the invisible value of female labour, as a court case unfolds through which a woman’s financial worth is exposed via her estranged husband’s machinations (that the woman at the centre of this episode is played by Mai Zetterling, the Swedish actor turned feminist filmmaker, adds a further layer of meaning). In another, the gender politics of the harem are compared to the position of women in English society. The film is also unusually pointed in its analysis of the precarious, interrupted nature of women’s creative labour, which has to take second, third or fourth place to other duties. This is a sacrifice Helen (Julie Harris) has made gladly, taking joy in motherhood and family life before her untimely death in childbirth. But the sense of her unfulfilled potential is palpable as the camera tracks in towards her scribbled expiations on each of her unfinished canvases: ‘Susan had measles’, ‘Before I could finish it Katherine arrived’, and most poignantly of all ‘I shouldn’t have begun it – the twins will arrive quicker than I can finish it’. The visiting art dealer who saw huge potential in her work, believing ‘perhaps she will be one of the great ones’, perhaps even the next Cezanne, walks away crestfallen. Box spoke of the formative influence Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own had on her own nascent feminism, and here she transfigures Woolf’s ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, symbol of female talent thwarted by interlocking patriarchal strictures, into ‘Cezanne’s sister’, whose artistic career is also truncated. But the film insists there is no single ‘truth about women’, other than their desire to be, in the words of the hero’s first and last love, the suffragette Ambrosine (Diane Cilento), ‘a person, an equal partner in the business of life, free to do what is right and best for herself.’

The Truth About Women

British Lion, the distributor of the film, denied The Truth about Women a premiere or press showing, thus seriously compromising its chances to build up a positive critical buzz to assist its box-office performance. Box felt profoundly let down by this inexplicable decision to diminish the profile of this big-budget high-profile production. Although the reviews from film critics who made the effort to buy a ticket to see it were very positive about her witty and ‘cynically light-hearted film’, this only partially offset her sense of hurt and disappointment.¹⁴ 

Nevertheless she persisted. The next project she began work on was an adaptation of Elsa Shelley’s social problem play Pick-Up Girl, about teenage sexuality, prostitution and venereal disease, and thus a return to the territory she had previously explored in her screenplay for Good Time Girl, albeit in a freer censorship climate that enabled more candid discussion of the young woman’s plight at the heart of the story.  It would eventually reach the screen as Too Young to Love (1960) but in the meantime Box had directed a further two films: the efficiently suspenseful thriller Subway in the Sky (1959) with its Berlin setting and international cast comprised of Hildegarde Neff, Van Johnson, Albert Lieven and Cec Linder, and the wry comedy This Other Eden (1959) made at Ardmore Studios in Ireland and based on Patrick Kirwin’s successful satire from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Box showed great versatility as a director, and would continue to do so with her next film after Too Young to Love, a period drama of the Napoleonic wars centred on a group of youngsters for the Children’s Film Foundation, The Piper’s Tune (1962). This film came after a hiatus in her directorial career, mainly due to Sydney Box’s serious illness and the period of convalescence that followed (Muriel was never idle though, and always had a host of different creative projects on the go, from plays to novels to potential film ideas).

Shortly before The Piper’s Tune, she had pondered in her diary whether she would make another film and expressed her desire to have completed at least a round dozen. Her next film after it and, it turned out, her last would exceed that ambition, giving her a baker’s dozen of thirteen. This was a project Sydney had suggested, a film based on Charles Dyer’s hit two-hander play about a forty-year-old virgin down from Manchester for the cup final and a mercurial sex worker who takes pity on him and has her own vulnerabilities. Rattle of a Simple Man (1964), which ended up with Harry H. Corbett and Diane Cilento in the lead roles, encountered some problems with the censor but these were skilfully navigated, and the context was certainly more germane than it ever had been before in Muriel’s long career in film to tell stories on screen with a greater degree of sexual and social frankness. But, landing in the wake of the British New Wave and just on the cusp of the ‘swinging London’ phenomenon, Rattle of a Simple Man was in danger of looking slightly out of time, although film scholar Caroline Merz suggests that it ‘stands up rather better today than many of its male social realist counterparts’ particularly in its nuanced and sensitive characterisation of two misfits who find an unexpected connection.¹⁵ 

Rattle of a Simple Man

Although Rattle of a Simple Man did not perform as well commercially as had initially been hoped, the main factor in it ending up being Box’s final film was less a matter of poor box-office returns than the extreme emotional duress she experienced as her marriage to Sydney collapsed. It was the end of an era for her, personally, professionally and creatively. When the initial trauma abated, having to summon up the capital and the confidence to get another film project off the ground, especially since the youth-fixated 1960s film industry was unlikely to be welcoming towards a woman director in her late fifties (although no such prejudices seemed to apply to her male peers, it should be noted). Her directorial career had remained precarious to the very end, with Associated British Pictures querying ‘the woman director aspect’ even after studio space had been already been booked for Rattle of a Simple Man, because they hadn’t used a woman before ‘and were chary of it.’¹⁶ Pointing out her illustrious filmography and extensive prior experience seemed to make little difference. Sydney’s backing was the only thing that clinched it in the end, and that relationship had now been irrevocably changed. No wonder the prospect of having to shadow box against misogynist superstition had begun to seriously pall, and other creative outlets look more attractive and accessible by comparison. Box shifted focus to the establishment of a publishing company, Femina, specialising in books by and about women.

Directing during a period when the number of women filmmakers not only in the UK but internationally was miniscule, the fact that Muriel Box managed to direct any films at all was a minor miracle achieved through tenacity and intelligent male patronage, a problematic but necessary vehicle for enabling women’s screen work in a patriarchal industry (embedded within a patriarchal society). But that she was also able to make such eloquent and well crafted films spanning a wide generic range which all spoke subtly but firmly of her feminist concerns, seems even more miraculous. Box’s work has been subject to reclamation and celebration in the decades that followed, by film scholars such as Caroline Merz, Justine Ashby, and Sue Harper, by journalist and critic Rachel Cooke, and perhaps most prominently and significantly in recent years by filmmaker Carol Morley, who has discerned in Box a fellow traveller across arduous terrain.¹⁷ Against all odds, and overcoming multiple barriers, Muriel Box found a way to ‘go on the films’, and her own story, as well as the stories she told in her films, is both instructive and inspiring.

Filmography as director

 Shorts and featurettes

• Sweet Success (1936) – as Muriel Baker. Assistant director.
• The English Inn (1941) – as Muriel Baker.
• A Prince for Cynthia (1953)

 Features

• On Approval (1944). Directed dream sequence. Uncredited.
• The Lost People/Cockpit (1949). Directed additional scenes. Uncredited.
• The Happy Family (1952)
• Street Corner (1953)
• The Beachcomber (1954)
• To Dorothy, A Son (1954)
• Simon and Laura (1955)
• Eyewitness (1956)
• The Passionate Stranger (1957)
• The Truth about Women (1957)
• Subway in the Sky (1959)
• This Other Eden (1959)
• Too Young to Love (1960)
• The Piper’s Tune (1962)
• Rattle of a Simple Man (1964)

Endnotes