The 1930s in Film and Novel: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Winifred Watson's novel of 1938, is a fairytale in novel form. Set in London of 1938, the story revolves around a one-day adventure of an ill-starred but truthful governess who is granted a second chance. This light-hearted comedy of manners was turned into a film by director Bharat Nalluri in 2008. An Anglo-American collaboration, co-scripted by Simon Beaufoy and David McGee, the film converts Watson's quaint novel into an edged heritage piece that encapsulates the 1930s, the problematic decade between the two World Wars. The film, while sustaining the narrative core of Watson's Cinderella story, attempts to place it firmly within a wider current of the novel's setting or London in 1938, tapping into the major concerns of the interwar years that engage with characters in one way or another. Stylistically, the film presents Art Deco as a main visual idiom to convey the prevailing mood of nihilism and decadence of the day. The setting here takes on significance in that it offers a telling counterpoint to the giddy superficial world of the novel. The 1930s was a highly charged decade under the threat of fascism and the Great Depression, fraught with economic and socio-political tensions and apprehensions. The film makes an explicit reference to the dismal context which is suppressed in the original text. The thirties is, therefore, portrayed as a decade of contradiction. It features gay buoyant festivity, rampant consumerism, and shifting morals and attitudes towards love, marriage and sexuality. Yet lurking beneath the surface glamour are the symptoms of crises and the deep-seated anxieties on the eve of World War II. In this way, Watson's novel of manners has been recreated into a defining film on the 1930s with its period feel propped by the atmospheric lighting, the exuberant Jazz score, and the splendid Art Deco costume and production design.