Foreign News: Gone to Earth

“Riding after them, breaking from the wood on every side, came the hunt,” wrote Authoress Mary Webb in the climax to her 32-year-old novel, Gone to Earth. “Coming, as they did, from the deep gloom, fiery-faced and fiery-coated, with eyes frenzied by excitement, and open, cavernous mouths, they were like devils emerging from hell on a foraging expedition.”

Last summer, when British Movie Director Michael Powell and Producer Emeric Pressburger set up their cameras in Britain’s green Shropshire to film Gone to Earth, starring Jennifer Jones, the horsy set at the market town of Much Wenlock (pop. 14,149) were only too delighted to get into the act. Most of them had been too busy hunting all these years to read novels; they did not know much about the book’s antihunting message or its sad ending in which the rapacious foxhounds chew up the heroine as she tries to save her pet fox from wicked hunters (one of whom had callously seduced her in an earlier chapter).

For a month the shooting of the outdoor sequences clicked along without a hitch. When the moviemakers went back to London to finish some indoor shots, the squires of Much Wenlock finally holed up to have a look at Mrs. Webb’s novel. What they read led them to draft a hasty letter to the potent British Field Sports Society.

Last month the filmsters went back to Much Wenlock to shoot Gone to Earth’s climactic scenes. They found a new and unexpected chill in the Shropshire air: there was not a Master of Foxhounds in sight who would lend a pack of hounds to them. They tried farther afield, but the Sports Society had done its work well. “We gave no orders to any M.F.H.,” explained its Assistant Secretary Michael Shephard. “We simply advised them that in the opinion of the B.F.S.S. it was inadvisable to cooperate in the making of this film.” Dejected, the moviemakers returned to London. “We hope that somewhere,” wrote Messrs. Powell and Pressburger to the Times last week, “there is a Master of Foxhounds with a mind of his own and enough sporting blood to help us finish this film.”

It seemed a forlorn hope. “The film,” loftily retorted the Sports Society’s president, the Duke of Beaufort, “is not one in which any real sportsman would wish his hounds to take part.”