by Stephen Vagg
The release of Snow White, and its accompanying controversy over the lack of genuine little people in the cast, has prompted us to look back on a forgotten British film from 1955, The Woman for Joe – a contemporary drama which features a man of short stature in the lead role who is treated with utter respect and dignity.
One typically associates movies made by Britain’s Rank Organisation in the 1950s with three main genres: comedies, war movies, and attempts to capture the international market. Those are certainly the efforts that garnered the most “noise” – Reach for the Sky, the “Doctor” series, all those Dirk Bogarde melodramas, etc.
Yet the studio’s repertoire was wider than that and included some films that were unique and different. An example was 1955’s The Woman for Joe – a rare movie to not only feature a short statured person in a lead role (if not the lead role), but to have him play a complex, contemporary, three-dimensional character.
The Woman for Joe was based on an original script by Neil Paterson, a very good writer (and former professional soccer player) who had just written The Kidnappers (1953) for Rank. This movie, about two young children, was a critical and commercial “sleeper” and a personal favourite of the company’s chairman, J Arthur Rank. (Paterson would go on to win an Oscar for Room at the Top in 1959).
The story of The Woman for Joe revolves around fairground owner, Joe, who is struggling to keep his business afloat (Paterson had a fondness for circus backdrops – there was one in his story that formed the basis of the 1953 Elia Kazan movie, Man on a Tightrope). Joe “buys” George, a Casablanca-born trapeze artist who is just over four feet tall, and together they combine to rejuvenate Joe’s business, doing a variety of jobs (NB. the fact that George can be bought and sold is presented in a matter-of-fact way that leads us to believe that it must have been based on research).
While recuperating from an illness, George falls in love with a Hungarian barmaid, Mary, and asks Joe to employ her. Joe does so with reluctance, but Mary proves to be a success, her jobs including lion taming, among other things (it’s very charming in the movie how everyone has multiple jobs at the fair).
George falls in love with her, but although Mary likes him, she doesn’t love him – she’s got the hots for Joe, and Joe is keen for her, but goes away to calm down his sex drive. When Joe returns, he discovers that Mary has tried to fix things through “buying” George a short statured woman, the Princess, unaware that Joe tried to do something like this earlier in the film, upsetting George who, in his own words, “hates dwarves.” George then breaks his back in a trapeze act and is mortally wounded (it’s not clear if this is a suicide or convenient accident), but not before a death bed speech where he says Mary must have loved him in some way because she bought him the Princess. Joe and Mary wind up together.
The love triangle plot and circus setting evokes memories of Freaks, Tod Browning’s legendary 1931 film where a little person falls in love with a sexy blonde woman who’s in love with a tall man. In Freaks, the big people are terrible – the woman’s after her husband’s money, marries him to get it, and cuckolds him – which sets up the gripping climax where the “freaks” take revenge. However, in The Woman for Joe all the leads are nice. Well, they’re supposed to be nice – Joe cares for George as does Mary (Joe is so “noble” that he turns down the chance to sell George to another fairground owner even though he’d make a profit). But the thing is, they both end up being terrible. She’s a gorgeous blonde and would have a lot of romantic options while Joe is a handsome dude who presumably has options too, but he goes for Mary. The two of them fight their attraction a little but not too hard and they basically come across as selfish pricks and all the sympathy goes to George. We were expecting George to get fired up and start plotting revenge, but, nope, he just accepts it like a… well, a character in a film that’s been executive produced by Earl St John, who was Rank’s head of production at this time.
We think that’s why The Woman for Joe, despite receiving a decent release in Britain, made such a minimal splash at the box office and has been so little remembered since. But it deserves to be remembered for putting the character of George front and centre. George is smart, capable, charismatic, good at his job, studying at university via correspondence, funny, a loyal friend (he organises the fellow employees to bail out Joe in a tight spot); he has dreams and sexual desires. He is easily one of the most the most fleshed out, three-dimensional, short statured characters in 20th century cinema (not a very long list).
This doesn’t make The Woman for Joe a decent movie. An interesting one, absolutely – but not well made.
Rank and Paterson had every right to make a film that treated this story seriously and sensitively, without any Freaks-style pulpy elements like betrayal, murder and sex. The thing is, a trashy version of this story would have been essentially director and actor proof – because you’ve got the locomotives of narrative and sensation to keep you watching. Playing it straight and sensitivity means that you need really good acting and directing and The Woman for Joe doesn’t receive it.
The film was directed by George More O’Ferrall, better remembered for his television work, who was coming off a big hit with Angels One Five (1952). He was protected on that movie because it was a war picture, and had inherent genre tropes to help him (plus Jack Hawkins in a star-making turn), but was left to his own devices a little more on The Woman for Joe. He doesn’t do a bad job, but the script needed a director to do a good job and didn’t get it. O’Ferrall can’t really get into the mindset that the script needs – the pain and pleasure of unrequited love, the charge of sexual attraction, and the magic and camaraderie of the unconventional world of the carnies. (George Baker, who played Joe, said George More O’Ferrall’s nickname among the crew was “More and More Awful”, which was bitchy if amusing.)
Stories like these also need perfect casting. Australia’s own Diane Cilento was borrowed from Alex Korda to play Mary; she is gorgeous and likeable on screen, even if her character is basically a dim blonde (a common character type in 1950s British cinema). George Baker tries his best as Joe but doesn’t get there – the man was not really a movie star (as would be proved several times throughout the 1950s), and Baker wrote in his memoirs that even he felt the role should have been played by Peter Finch; Baker was dead right – Finch had worked in carnivals as a young man and would’ve brought a danger and torment to the part.
Incidentally, Baker also claimed in his memoirs that he had an affair with Brigitte Bardot during filming while the French star was making Doctor at Sea at Pinewood – we mention that just for spice.
The key role of George was played by Jimmy Karoubi, an Algerian with circus experience who was cast while working as MC at a cabaret in Paris; years prior to The Woman for Joe, he achieved some fame as a “court jester” in the entourage of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Karoubi’s performance isn’t fantastic – he’s definitely not as good as some of the better-known short statured actors over the years such as Angelo Rossitto, Billy Barty and Peter Dinklage. However, in fairness, Karoubi wasn’t that experienced as an actor, and he does have tremendous presence, intelligence and dignity; he’s far more comfortable in a fairground setting than George Baker. And he does have that tremendous character to play.
This fact alone makes The Woman for Joe worth watching. So too does the circus setting with some lovely Maurice Carter art direction and a line-up of supporting characters which was very diverse by the standards of 1950s British cinema – it includes a European Jewish man (played by David Kossoff), obese woman (Violet Farebrother), and a black man (Earl Cameron). The film is stolen at literally the last minute by an unbilled Terence Longdon who plays a grossly insensitive doctor (the story could’ve done with more caddishness like that).
The Woman for Joe is also of use to screenwriting teachers because it demonstrates that you can make a film about characters who are nice people but whom audiences will still hate if they don’t act with some nobility and sacrifice. Joe and Mary in The Woman for Joe may as well have been villains – they are villains, really, in movie morality terms – but the film treats them like heroes, which is unsatisfactory. Furthermore, for all Neil Paterson’s skill of creating characters, he, like the movie, takes forever to get going – the first half consists mostly of set up scenes. And like many Rank movies from this period, it avoids opportunities for drama – we don’t see the scene where Mary presents George with his own little person, it happens off camera; we don’t see George discovering Mary and Joe in an embrace, or even when Mary falls for Joe and he falls for her (they’re just told that they love each other). Maybe something was cut out. Or it was too exciting.
According to Diane Cilento’s memoirs, Jimmy Karoubi was later arrested for murder and spent time in prison, although by the mid-sixties he was appearing in French films, notably Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and Claude Chabrol’s Code Name: Tiger (1964). Maybe she heard wrong. Or maybe it was a short sentence. If anyone knows, let us know.
Regardless of these flaws, The Woman for Joe remains one of the most fascinating films from the Rank Organisation, and the studio had a lot of guts to make it.
