The Ealing comedy that shows how the Wirral used to be: The Magnet at 75
Starring a young James Fox in his second ever film, The Magnet – which turns 75 this autumn – is a lesser-known Ealing comedy that provides a unique time-capsule of north-west England in another era.
When we think of Ealing comedies, it’s London that tends to dominate the picture – from Passport to Pimlico (1949) to the King’s Cross antics of The Ladykillers (1955) via The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). But the celebrated British film studio also led the way in filming in settings across the country, even before regional dramas came to the forefront of British cinema in the late 1950s.
In Charles Frend’s charming 1950 film The Magnet, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this autumn, this travelling curiosity for Britain’s provincial corners is palpable. When I first watched it, it was a wonderful surprise to witness on film that most rare of things: a location I personally recognised as home. With its extensive filming around New Brighton, Wallasey and Seacombe, as well as Liverpool, The Magnet explores the rarely filmed coastal peninsula of the Wirral with a detail akin to a beautiful social document.
The Magnet follows Johnny (played by James Fox in only his second film role), a young boy growing up in New Brighton with his parents, Dr Brent (Stephen Murray) and Mrs Brent (Kay Walsh). Johnny is a free-spirited boy, the sort to write reward messages on his kite in many languages in case it drifts over to the continent. One day at the beach, he spots another boy with a powerful magnet. He wants it, so tricks him out of it, but soon the magnet brings him bad luck, landing him in all sorts of mischief.
Yet, unbeknown to Johnny, while he’s away at school the magnet becomes an emblem of funding for a new iron lung for the local hospital, after it’s gifted to a local scientist (Meredith Edwards). Arriving back to the Wirral and falsely believing his trick to get the magnet back has caused the death of the young boy, Johnny goes on the run. He’s sure that the people who are after him want to arrest him for murder rather than reward him for inspiring the funding.
Although some of the more leafy visuals in The Magnet were actually filmed in Ealing, the majority of Frend’s film is a stunning time-capsule of the Wirral’s north coast when it was still a popular tourist destination. Seeing the location used so integrally as part of the film’s narrative produces genuinely moving results for anyone from the area. But it’s a pleasure tinged with melancholy, for few places have changed as dramatically as New Brighton did in the postwar years. The resort was treated as a Xanadu of sorts by people across the water in Liverpool, visited en masse for its fairs, its vast public swimming baths, its tower, its pier and a wealth of other attractions. Most of these eventually disappeared after a series of derelictions and fires. As it was a popular resort, however, early documentary footage exists, such as in this 1904 film showing Edwardian promenaders in the area.
Filmed almost 50 years after this footage, The Magnet retains the same atmosphere of excited busyness. Equally, in the below promotional film from 1934, we can see a number of the same locations, including the ferry that Johnny’s father uses for his commute to work. We feel his pleasure at the possibility of seeing new boats. That same excitement over a ferry across the Mersey is there in Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City (2008) too, in which he recounts the joy of making the crossing to Johnny’s side of the river.
A few years ago, I wandered around New Brighton in search of several of Johnny’s haunts, as a last hurrah before moving away from Merseyside for the first time. It produced an unusual feeling, for these locations had associations of their own for me – a reversal of my usual relationship to researching and finding film locations. Johnny’s first wander on the beach seemed almost alien on first viewing, such is the dominance of the now vanished pier near Fort Perch Rock.
Elsewhere, I noted the steps of the Floral Pavilion Gardens where Johnny first runs from his bout of bad luck with the magnet. This was vaguely familiar in my memories, but on visiting I realised that only a visual echo remained.
Most intriguing of all was what is now called The New Palace of Adventure, the art deco building that Johnny is dragged into by another boy who wants to use the magnet to cheat on the pinball machines. The building still exists as an indoor funfair, but is now more haggard, including when I visited in my own childhood. It is one of the few aspects of continuity between the film, my memories and today, although the setting is best known now for its use by the photographer Martin Parr in his series The Last Resort.
Watching The Magnet today is an unusual but emotional experience. It toys with my own memories of where I grew up and the memories of several previous generations too. Like listening to Davies’s nostalgic discussion of the place in Of Time and the City, it feels like being briefly gifted access to the detailed, joy-filled memories of my grandparents’ generation. For an hour and a quarter of Frend’s film, I understand that naive look of happiness that often appears during their recollections; of days when New Brighton truly was childhood’s realm.