In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.
Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.
In 1953 the News of the World noted that Muriel Box would probably win a directing award at “one of those foreign film festivals – provided she changed her name to, say, Muriello Boxiana”. And this is surely prophetic: for while, in the 1980s, feminist film scholars worked to rehabilitate the legacy of Box, serious recognition has come from abroad, with sell-out retrospectives in France and Spain. To this day, she has never had a retrospective in Britain.
Two years ago, in an audio diary for Radio 4’s The Film Programme, I put out a “rallying cry” for a British retrospective – for a boxed set of Box – and asked listeners who had known her to make contact. Those who replied form the centre of my new Radio 3 documentary, Carol and Muriel. When 16-year-old Olivia Howell, Box’s great-great niece, contacted me from Australia, she said she was on a mission to spread the word: “If I can get one more person to learn about her today, that’s all I want!”
Karen Peploe was a film student in the mid-80s eager to write a thesis on Box. She found Muriel’s number in the phone directory, rang her, and was promptly invited to her Mill Hill home – “The most beautiful house I’ve ever been to.” She was asked to stay for dinner by Muriel, who was thrilled by this interest in her work. Karen never completed her thesis, and full of remorse, she told me: “I feel I let her down.” The reason was her tutor: “He was so dismissive. He said to me: ‘She’s no one. She only got to direct because her husband was Sydney Box.’”
Sydney Box was a producer and studio head, but in 1932, when Muriel first encountered him, he was ignorant of the film world. They met at an awards ceremony for amateur theatre. He was a journalist, while she had significant experience as a script supervisor on set and was working as a secretary in the Wardour Street film offices of Michael Powell. They corresponded, with Sydney writing: “It is tremendously refreshing to come into contact with someone in the film ring.” In due course Sydney moved into Muriel’s bedsit and their personal and professional relationship went on to last for 36 years.
I visit Charlie Dossett, Muriel’s grandson, in Oxford. “The amount of work to sift through is phenomenal,” he says, pointing to the many boxes of Muriel’s personal archive. Charlie has a pile of pristine hardcovers of Muriel’s memoir Odd Woman Out, each one dedicated to members of the family. I read this years ago after finding a discontinued library copy. Here she very much owns her achievements but also her outsider status, foisted upon her by a world that wasn’t ready for female film directors. On its publication, Muriel said she had written it to encourage other women, “particularly when they feel disconsolate and depressed”, not to give up. Charlie smiles when I tell him how much I credit his grandmother for giving me hope.
“Look at this!” he says, holding up a manuscript. “My grandmother wrote everything down. An inch thick on having a baby – my mum Leonora. Everything became stories.” Charlie reads to me: “We were not lovers of children as such, but this did not prevent my desire to bring into the world a living thing, whose growth I could watch and tend and if the gods were kind I could appreciate with a modicum of joy.” When I talk to Leonora Dossett, now in her late 80s, she is wistful about not giving her mother credit for what she achieved: “I know what a director does now, I didn’t place that much importance on it back then.” She laughs. “I’m always amazed my parents had so much money. But I suppose I’m picking a period in time when they finally had some.”
Indeed, Muriel Box didn’t always have money. Born Violette Muriel Baker in 1905, into “respectable poverty”, she lived with her family in Surbiton, and grew up as cinema itself was becoming established. Though she went regularly to the pictures and wanted “to go on the films”, she never dreamed of being a director: “It would have been outlandish to suggest that.”
Muriel went on to direct and write. She had at least 22 screenwriting credits to her name, and co-wrote with husband Sydney The Seventh Veil, for which she won an Academy Award for best original screenplay, the first woman to do so. The Spectator wrote of it: “As smooth a piece of popular entertainment as our studios have turned out for a long time.”
Even after the success of The Seventh Veil, opposition to Muriel as a director continued. Studio heads would say she didn’t have the “experience or knowledge” to control a film. Casting agents were suspicious of putting acting talent into a woman’s hands. It was not until her mid-40s, when Muriel had been in the business for more than 20 years and had directed many short public information and documentary films, that she got to direct her first feature, The Happy Family, about a working-class family fighting to save their house from demolition. To avoid difficulties, everyone was told it was to be jointly directed by Muriel and Sydney: “But the moment shooting started Sydney unobtrusively left me to carry on alone.”
At the BFI National Archive I meet curator Jo Botting. We marvel at the way Muriel could move seamlessly between satire, crime thrillers, light magical realism and melodrama. Jo talks enthusiastically about Muriel’s Simon and Laura, which centres on a married couple who agree to have their lives televised: “It’s the best British film of the 1950s. It’s funny, it looks amazing, it’s just perfect. I showed it to some young students recently and it was a revelation to them.”
Ahead of her time, Muriel co-wrote and directed the first film to be made about female police officers, 1953’s Street Corner. Jo reads me an extract from one of Muriel’s typed up diaries held in the archives: “As a lifelong feminist I frequently hear people asserting that we ladies cannot work together amicably without trouble brewing. This I am happy to say I was able to refute when I came to make Street Corner. Far from being male dominated, the technical crew that I assembled to make it was predominantly female. Never did I enjoy a happier or more carefree film.”
Despite a cleverly woven plot, and scenes of suspense that rival Hitchcock, the press reacted to Street Corner with headlines such as “nymphs of the law”, “beauty on patrol”, and a “peculiarly English piece of nonsense”. One critic complained there was “too much girlish chit-chat”, while others thought “it would be a pleasure to be arrested by any of them”. Yet Muriel’s work cut through prevailing attitudes and had a big impact. One male critic wrote: “Street Corner not only stifles our rude, instinctive laughter at the sight of policewomen, but actually succeeds in making us love, respect and admire them.” And the renowned film critic Dilys Powell wrote: “For once, I wished the film had been longer.”
Muriel had ambitions to work in Hollywood: “Yet my agent could never persuade any American producer to consider engaging me, although reviews of my films in the US were consistently superior to those received here. The mere mention of my sex was sufficient to damn my prospects out of hand.”
When I meet Muriel’s oldest grandson, Ben Dossett, in Bristol, we sit at Muriel’s mid-century dining table, and talk of how, after a bad reception to her 1964 film Rattle of a Simple Man, about the meeting of a sex worker and a football fan, her directing career ground to a halt. This coincided with Muriel discovering that her husband was in love with another woman. “Sydney ran off with his nurse to Australia,” Ben says. “A very glamorous, tall leggy blonde.” Muriel wrote about her anguish, but she also detailed how she remained on friendly terms with Sydney. “Our affairs being so inextricably entangled that they could not easily be sorted out or terminated.”
Muriel redirected her energy from film to literature. She set up the feminist publishing press Femina, and wrote books, including a novel The Big Switch, exploring a world dominated by women. She went on to marry Gerald Gardiner, the former Labour Lord Chancellor, describing their happiness together as “the kind most individuals aspire to but rarely achieve”. In these later years, Ben recalls his grandmother phoning him up after she had scrutinised the TV listings. “She’d say, ‘One of my films is going to be on at 1.15 in the afternoon on Channel 5, would you video it for me?’” Poignantly, this was the only way Muriel could own or watch her own films.
During the making of Carol and Muriel, news arrives that three of Muriel’s films have been restored and are being released on DVD and digital, and even more gratifying, while it’s not an entire retrospective, there will be a Muriel Box season at the BFI Southbank in May. I hope this will lead to a regional cinema tour. But let’s not stop there. What about a blue plaque? A statue? A documentary? Hell, even a biopic!
Sunday Feature: Carol and Muriel is on Radio 3 on Sunday 26 February at 6.45pm. Carol Morley’s new film, Typist Artist Pirate King, premieres at the women’s day gala at Glasgow film festival on 8 March
