The Mudlark (1950)

Directed by Jean Negulesco

It shouldn’t surprise us that the art and literature of a Christian culture often shows us the child as playing the part of an unwitting savior. Were it not for the little girl Eppie, Silas Marner would never have come out of his self-made shell of loneliness and resentment against all mankind. Were it not for Tim, hobbling with his crutch and his leg in a brace, Ebenezer Scrooge might never have uttered those splendid words on the morning when he awoke from his spectral dreams, “I am quite a baby!” Were it not for the spirited orphan Mary Lennox, and the neighbor lad who shows to her The Secret Garden, Colin Craven would still be a cripple, and his father would still be shut up in his isolation and grief. We should invert the old exasperated saying to get things right: “That child will be the life of me yet!”

So we come to our Film of the Week, The Mudlark, a charming bit of fiction that ought to have happened, even though it didn’t. The situation is this. Queen Victoria (Irene Dunne) has for fifteen years withdrawn from all public appearances. She will not leave her room in Windsor Castle, where she is surrounded by mementos of Prince Albert, the husband she loved so deeply, and lost. But by her self-imposed retirement, she is losing the love of her people. She does not neglect her strictly political duties, as we see in her interchanges with her prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (Alec Guinness). Disraeli is begging her to come out and be a mother to her people again, and he has in mind far more than sentiment. He and she both want a reform bill to be passed, to address the problems of poverty and homelessness, but the odds are heavily against them.

Meanwhile, the person who is going in the end to move the queen to return to public life is but a “mudlark,” that is, a kid who scavenges in the mud along the Thames, finding things to sell for a bit to eat and drink. The small boy, an orphan whose only name is Wheeler (Andrew Ray), finds a lovely cameo, which he calls a picture, of the queen, whom he doesn’t recognize, because no one has ever taught him anything. He doesn’t even know that there is a queen, or a place called “England.” And he has never known a mother. But he wants to see the lady in the “picture,” and so, without anybody to help him, and armed with no more than his desire, and the information that the castle is twenty miles up the river and to the left, he sets out.

The Mudlark could easily fall into mawkish sentimentalism, but it doesn’t, and in fact only the bluff protection of a Scots attendant to the queen, Mr. Brown (Finlay Currie; remember him in Great Expectations, Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, and People Will Talk), the stolid dullness of the Englishmen into whose charge the boy is delivered, and a political inspiration in the wheel-like mind of Disraeli, make that meeting between the boy and the queen possible. Pay close attention to the severely understated facial expressions of the queen — you will hardly believe it is the same madcap Irene Dunne from Life With Father and My Favorite Wife, or the love-brimming and courageous Swedish immigrant and matriarch in I Remember Mama. Pay close attention to the modulations in the voice of Disraeli, whose devotion to Victoria is not unmixed with a streak of the sly, and with a determination to win. Alec Guinness, as always, is subtle and intelligent, and he can do more with that native tremor in his diction than most actors can do in a solid hour of gestures and speech. But the great scene stealers are the boy and Finlay Currie — in a kilt! “You’re sodden, sir!” says the boy, when Mr. Brown offers, without anybody else around, to take him on a secret tour of the castle, including the throne room itself. “Not a bit of it,” says Brown, packing a flask of whiskey into his vest pocket. “Only as much as to ward off infection,” he says. “Always remember your health, my lad.”

Always remember your health! Well then, how can you do that if you have no children around? Even a mudlark can do the trick. Sometimes, I think, only a mudlark can do it.

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