Sapphire

TCM is running a day of movies directed by Basil Dearden tomorrow morning and afternoon. I think I mentioned some time back picking up Criterion's Eclipse Series set called "Basil Dearden's London Underground". It looks as though all four movies in that set (and others) are showing, starting at 6:00 AM with Sapphire.

Sapphire in this case turns out to be the name of a woman, Sapphire Robbins, whose body we see getting dumped in London's Hampstead Heath to start the film. Cut to the Royal Academy of Music, where a student who happens to be ond of Sapphire's friends talks with architecture student David Harris (Paul Massie), who also happens to be Sapphire's boyfriend, about Sapphire's not having shown up after having left to visit her brother up in Birmingham. The viewer can assume, then, that Sapphire is the dead woman, and that the police are soon to find her.

They do, and Supt. Hazard (Nigel Patrick) and his detective partner Learoyd (Michael Craig) start doing the standard-issue investigation that you'd see in any Hollywood crime movie. They find that her only known living relative is that brother, who happens to be on Dr. Robbins (Earl Cameron), so definitely of a higher social standing under normal circumstances than any of Sapphire's London friends.

But when Dr. Robbins comes to London to see the police and identify the body, the police find that... he's black. And Sapphire is very much white. Actually, they're both mixed-race having a white mother and black father, but the brother looks unmistakeably black while Sapphire found that, like Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life, she could pass for white. And with there being racism in the London of the late 1950s just like there was in America, lots of people thus have a bit of a motive to want to see Sapphire dead.

That includes David. Sapphire had told him over the weekend she was murdered that she was half-black, and David insists that that wasn't really an issue for him and supposedly not even for the rest of her family. But she also told David that she was pregnant, something which was discovered in the autopsy. David was going to have to marry her, and claims to have been willing to do so, but there's an issue of an architecture scholarship in Italy that he was set to take. One of the clauses in it apparently required him not to be married as they're not paying room and board for a family.

Sapphire's pregnancy also indicates that she had a bit of a wild past, as the police discover during their investigation. Before the incident that made Sapphire realize she could pass herself off as white, she spent time at the International Students' (mostly Caribbean and black African) Club, dumping all of them when she started being white. That, and spending a fair amount of time in dive bars where she danced to jazz music: there's a half-torn picture of her dancing, and the police figure the dance partner could be a suspect.

Sapphire is a really fascinating movie, especially in my eyes as an American, because of the very rare look into racism in UK society of that time. None of the characters (except for the two police detectives) come off well here, as everybody in the Harris family is trying to hide something. Sapphire herself basically rejected all of her black friends once she started passing as white, while there's even some bigotry from a couple of blacks who consider themselves higher status as the sons of diplomats. Have a truly serious relationship with a thing like Sapphire? Yeah right.

The location shooting of London as it was in the late 1950s is also a nice treat, and the story itself is pretty darn good. Sapphire is a movie that really deserves to be better known on this side of the Atlantic, and I'm really glad I got the chance to see it.