On 2nd November 1952, the main cast of a new Rank Organisation comedy joined the start of the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run.
The management at Pinewood was unenthusiastic about the film’s prospects. None of the four leads was well known.
Who would pay 1/9d to see a film about the owners of two elderly vehicles?
The inspiration for Genevieve was from the expatriate American writer William Rose, who witnessed the 1950 Brighton Veteran Car Run pass his Sussex cottage.
The South African-born director Henry Cornelius finally optioned the script, but his alma mater Ealing Studios turned down the production, claiming lack of space.
Eventually, Rank agreed to provide 70 per cent of the £115,000 budget, with the remainder from the National Film Finance Corporation.
Cornelius’s original choices of leads were Dirk Bogarde and Claire Bloom as Alan and Wendy McKim, but he eventually cast John Gregson and Dinah Sheridan. Bogarde advised her the part was ‘really you’, even if the director unchivalrously informed her that, at 31, she was too old for the role.
As for the McKims’ rivals, Cornelius had been highly impressed by Kenneth More’s stage performance as Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea. He told the actor that the part of Ambrose Claverhouse was written with him in mind. This was not entirely true: it was initially intended for Guy Middleton.
Finally, Kay Kendall, an actress in the tradition of Carole Lombard, was to be the bon viveur and trumpet-player Rosalind Peters.
The 57-day shooting schedule started in September 1952. The Veteran Car Club of Great Britain suggested a Darracq 10/12 HP Type O and a Spyker 14/18 HP ‘Roi des Belges’ Open Tourer for the leading vehicles.
Gregson took the wheel for a few scenes, despite not having taken a driving test. Sheridan remembered ‘trying not to be seen giving him instructive help out of the side of my mouth’. The actor was so nervous that he hid a glass of milk on the floor so he could quell the symptoms of an ulcer.
A standard 1950s comedy would have extensively featured back projection, but ‘internal accountancy’ ruled out Genevieve’s using Pinewood’s sound stages. Instead, the cinematographer Christopher Challis described how the crew would ‘take advantage of whatever turned up’ on location.
Frequently, dire weather meant that the cast had to drink brandy so their faces wouldn’t look blue with cold.
Cornelius mortgaged his house to fund the completion money, but the production eventually ran out of budget. More remembered ‘little men prowling around the studio, switching off lights that weren’t needed’.
Meanwhile, pressure from the American distributors meant Larry Adler, the composer of the Genevieve Waltz (and later an Oldie columnist), would not be credited in US prints of the film until 1991.
When shooting finished in February 1953, Rank’s head of production, Earl St John, was unimpressed: ‘We may get a few car nuts to go along and see it.’
In fact, Genevieve became the UK’s second-most successful box-office attraction, and the British Film Academy declared it the Best British Film of the Year.
One reason for such acclaim was a cast that was, quite simply, perfect, from Sheridan’s witty and resigned wife to Gregson’s understated depiction of the keen motorist as a petulant, overgrown schoolboy.
Genevieve’s success also meant the elevation of Kendall and More to the stardom befitting two of British cinema’s finest light comedians.
The sequence of Rosalind miming to Kenny Baker’s trumpet belongs on a BFI list of Top Ten Sublime Screen Moments. Cornelius so liked the actress’s mistaken reference to playing the ‘plumpet’ that he kept it in the final cut. As for More, Claverhouse represented his long-term goal of a film role of ‘real character’.
As with any comedy of note, there was also an impeccable supporting cast: Joyce Grenfell’s hotelier, surrounded by aspidistras; Reginald Beckwith as a hapless Allard owner; and a cameo from Leslie Mitchell, the voice of Movietone News.
Above all, there is Rose’s script with its affectionate but not uncritical eye for British eccentricities. Penelope Houston wrote in Sight and Sound that Genevieve had ‘a hard urban flavour’; the dialogue between the McKims is remarkably frank. Cornelius had to shoot two versions of their bedroom scene in case Rank decreed the first ‘a shade too French’.
Today, the Darracq and the Spyker are part of the Louwman Collection of vintage cars.
It is difficult to appreciate that the picture that made them world famous is 70 years old – until you recall that Michael Medwin, who played a young expectant father, died in 2020, aged 96.
Genevieve captures a Ladybird Book vision of the Home Counties, with the London described by Gavin Stamp: ‘shabby and ravaged, full of bomb sites and dereliction, and yet which is somehow authentic’. Much of the traffic looks pre-war, with the occasional Ford Consul as a harbinger of the affluent society.
It is a film that barely dates precisely because is so firmly rooted in time and place – and because, even today, certain old car enthusiasts are prone to ‘hawling like brooligans’.
The final words should go to Dinah Sheridan: ‘Genevieve will be our epitaph.’
