Tour de Force: Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van

Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van.

2015 has been an abundant movie year for leading performances by women, but to my mind Maggie Smith walks away with the honors for her work in The Lady in the Van. Smith created the role of Mary Shepherd, an irascible eccentric who spends the last decade and a half of her life living in her van in the driveway of a house owned by the English playwright Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings). Bennett first encountered Miss Shepherd in 1970, shortly after he’d bought a house in trendy, gentrified Camden Town (the movie was shot in and around that actual house), but for a long time he resisted writing about their strange acquaintanceship while she was camped in his garden – an arrangement that he’d allowed reluctantly in 1974 as a temporary stop-gap but that became permanent without his ever actually agreeing to it. He eventually dramatized the story in 1999 and Smith starred in it at the National Theatre. I read about it at the time and eagerly anticipated seeing it when she brought it to Broadway, but she never did, so it’s a lovely surprise to see a movie version all these years later, with the same director, Nicholas Hytner. Hytner also staged Bennett’s The History Boys for the National in 2004 as well as the 2006 movie version, and except for Richard Griffiths, who died in 2013, the entire cast of that play shows up in The Lady in the Van. All but Frances De La Tour play cameo roles; she has a delightful supporting part as one of Alan’s neighbors, the widow of the composer Ralph Vaughn Williams, a robust specimen of the English bohemian artists’ community of an earlier era. (My favorite of the cameos is by James Corden, as a street market vendor.)

Robin Phillips: The Stratford Years

Robin Phillips, in 1977. (Photo via Torstar News Service)

Robin Phillips, who died on July 25 at the age of seventy-three, trained at the Bristol Old Vic and spent a decade as a young actor (he played the title role in the 1969 film of David Copperfield) before turning to directing. I own a copy of a TV movie of Strindberg’s Miss Julie that he directed in 1972 with a stunningly beautiful, sexually daring Helen Mirren playing opposite Donal McCann (a decade and a half before he played Gabriel in John Huston’s The Dead). After two years at the helm of the Greenwich Theatre in England, Phillips took the post of artistic director at Canada’s Stratford Festival and held it for six seasons, 1975 through 1980. I was in my twenties then, living in Montreal, and except for 1976, when I was traveling in Europe, I made sure to visit Stratford once or twice every summer, so I saw roughly a dozen and a half of the shows Phillips directed (or co-directed). I thought at the time that he was the most brilliant stage director I’d encountered in my young, fervent theatergoing life. It was an exciting time to be at Stratford: Phillips brought Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Peter Ustinov, Jessica Tandy and Margaret Tyzack to act alongside such Stratford stalwarts as Martha Henry, William Hutt, Douglas Rain, Alan Scarfe, Jack Wetherall and Domini Blythe. (Bedford ended up becoming one of those stalwarts.) Phillips claimed exhaustion when he left Stratford, and no wonder: during two or three of those seasons he staged five plays. His subsequent directing career was halting, though he worked in London and New York and around Canada; nothing evidently nothing he did after 1980 matched up to his achievements at Stratford. But those were glorious years, and I count myself fortunate to have attended so many of his dazzling shows.

The Many Charms of Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey (ITV, PBS) is now available on DVD

I must admit I’ve always been fascinated by British dramas and documentaries about that country’s class system. I was too young to be interested in the hit miniseries Upstairs, Downstairs, which chronicled the relations between servants and their masters in a stately manor house. It was an influential show that just celebrated its fortieth anniversary with the release of a box set, and whose sequel premieres on PBS on April 10.  But once I was old enough. I became riveted by everything from Michael Apted’s seminal Up documentary series, which examined the lives of select subjects every seven years in a series that’s reached to 49 Up, to Robert Altman’s 2002 Gosford Park, which meshed the vagaries of the British class system with an American-style murder mystery. Invariably, those shows and films depicted a hierarchy that was pretty rigid (especially the Up films) and suggested that you generally were stuck in whatever class you were born into for life. Unlike the American class system (yes, it does exist), which more often than not is based on wealth, the British class apparatus was (and is) always about who your ancestors are, a fact of life that influenced your education and where you could live in London. (Wealth is also a factor but not the dominant one.) There’s a great scene in Mad Men’s most recent season whereby Layne Price (Jared Harris), Sterling Cooper’s British partner, extols his love of America by expressing relief that upon coming to New York, he stopped being asked what school he went to. The fine, entertaining recent British mini-series Downton Abbey, created by Gosford Park’s screenwriter Julian Fellowes and co-written by him with Tina Pepper and Shelagh Stephenson, puts that system under a microscope, showcasing how ‘modern’ times begin to slowly change and erode the traditional way of doing things.

Chekhov Vaudeville

As its name suggests, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a parody of Chekhov. It’s been a while since Durang has written one of these delirious literary/dramatic-literary burlesques; this one harks back to The Idiots Karamazov (which reimagines Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers as the Tyrone family from Long Day’s Journey into Night) and his one-act take-offs of The Glass Menagerie and Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind (titled, hilariously, A Sty in the Eye). Vanya and Sonia is messy and overextended and it seems to stall in the middle of the second act. But it’s a vaudeville, so its structural problems don’t matter all that much – especially when it has so many funny lines and Sigourney Weaver, Kristine Nielsen and David Hyde Pierce in the leads. Fitted out in a deluxe production staged by Nicholas Martin at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse space, it made me laugh louder than any other recent comedy.

Flesh and Soul: A Life of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams at his desk in 1948. (Photo: W Eugene Smith/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

John Lahr’s biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which came out from W.W. Norton late last year, evolved in a curious fashion. In 1995 a San Francisco theatrical producer named Lyle Leverich with no other books to his credit published a very fine first volume of a Williams bio called Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams that took the playwright’s story up through the triumphant Broadway opening of The Glass Menagerie in 1945. Lahr had an odd connection to Leverich’s book in a number of ways. Maria St. Just, Williams’ infamously possessive and tyrannical literary executor, had attempted to frighten Leverich off by asking Lahr to write an authorized biography (which he refused to do). Then, ironically, it was Lahr whose help Leverich and his publisher asked in getting St. Just off his back, after she had succeeded in holding up the publication of his book for five years, and Lahr ended up writing a profile on her in The New Yorker. Eventually Tom saw the light of day, but Leverich died four years later, before completing the second part of his project. He and Lahr had become friends, and he had asked Lahr if he would finish the biography if he proved unable to; he went so far as to put that request in his will. That’s how Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh came into being, nearly two decades later. Lahr claims in the preface that it didn’t turn out to be part two of Leverich’s bio but its own stand-alone bio. But though the writers’ styles and approaches are understandably different, there’s so little overlap in the stories they tell that effectively they are indeed two halves of a deeply engrossing story, and readers who want to learn as much as they can about Williams’ life and career are advised to read them back to back. (Each runs roughly 600 pages.)

The Jewel in the Crown: This Is How It’s Done

Charles Dance and Geraldine James in The Jewel in the Crown (1984).

Many of us who have longed to see our favorite literary sagas rendered intelligently and comprehensively in dramatic form have hoped they’d wind up in good TV miniseries rather than truncated on the big screen.  (Everyone I know who thrilled to the Dickensian twists of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch felt let down when it was pared down to a two-and-a-half-hour movie last year – and apparently the film satisfied no one.) And for those of us who saw The Jewel in the Crown, Granada TV’s fourteen-part adaptation of Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, when PBS ran it in 1984, it has been a model for three and a half decades of how to bring the pleasures of a complex, riveting historical narrative to the small screen. Written between 1965 and 1975, Scott’s tetralogy – The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils – is set in India in the final years of the British Raj, beginning in the midst of the Second World War and ending with independence and the splitting apart of India and Pakistan in 1947. It is, I think, a masterwork: though it hasn’t achieved the celebrity of Forster’s A Passage to India (published in 1924), they deserve to sit next to each other on any discerning reader’s bookshelf.

The End of Downton Abbey and the State of Prestige TV

Hugh Bonneville and Michelle Suzanne Dockery in Downton Abbey.

The end of Downton Abbey was hardly the sort of dramatic, divisive event that has characterized the conclusions of so many shows from the so-called Golden Age of Television. There was no climactic shootout with neo-Nazis, no ambiguous ending scored by Journey, no revelation that ended in a Coca-Cola ad. Instead, we got a glimpse of a happy family, still completely intact from the start of the season (if not the series) and enjoying a moment of happiness amid Christmas decorations and falling snow. The finale, which aired on Christmas in the UK and this past Sunday in the States, was upbeat to an almost absurd degree, pairing off almost all of the potential romantic couplings and avoiding virtually anything that would darken the mood. In this regard, it was a fitting end to a series whose initial success and enduring popularity eventually sat at odds with general dismissal from critics.

Divertissement: Death on the Nile

Sophie Okonedo in Death on the Nile.

Watching Kenneth Branagh’s entirely entertaining remake of Death on the Nile, the Agatha Christie mystery, I thought I’d finally guessed what he and the screenwriter, Michael Green, had been going for in their 2017 adaptation of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Death on the Nile, which revolves around the murder of an heiress named Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) on her honeymoon – which is also an extended wedding party on a boat on the Nile – is played as a combination of high comedy and melodrama. In Orient Express the tone went out of whack: Green and Branagh took the material, which was inspired by the kidnaping of the Lindbergh baby, way too seriously, so the high comedy (a feature of Christie whodunits) got lost and the narrative played as if the filmmakers thought they were making a tragedy. The movie was glum, and once the train got stopped in its tracks halfway through, the glumness hung in the air like a bad smell. Even a first-rate cast, headed by Branagh himself as the vain Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, couldn’t rescue it.

Diana Rigg: In Memoriam

Dame Diana Rigg (1938-2020) as Emma Peel in the 1960s TV series The Avengers. (Photo: Terry Disney)

Diana Rigg, who died on September 10 at the age of eighty-two, belonged to the first generation of classically trained English actresses who were permitted to be devastatingly sexy as well as brilliant (Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren). Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-trained, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1959, she became an international sensation over her three seasons as Emma Peel on the television series The Avengers. Mrs. Peel, as her sleuthing partner John Steed (Patrick McNee) always called her, could down a villain with a kung-fu kick and then dispatch him once again with a wisecrack, delivered with the effortless dryness of a perfect martini. And she wore leather!

Neglected Gem #104: Girl with Green Eyes (1964)

Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in The Girl with the Green Eyes

Considering how prolific the Irish writer Edna O’Brien is – and how inherently dramatic her books are – it’s surprising that so few of them have been made into movies. (She’s also the author of a marvelous play, Virginia, neglected since its original productions at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario with Maggie Smith in 1980 – which I saw and have never forgotten – and the New York premiere with Kate Nelligan in 1985.) There are TV movies of her breakthrough novel The Country Girls and Wild Decembers (she wrote the teleplays for both), but only twice has her work reached the big screen: in 1964, when she adapted the middle book in the Country Girls trilogy, The Lonely Girl, as Girl with Green Eyes, and in 1972, when she turned Zee and Company into X, Y and Zee, and which starred Elizabeth Taylor in one of her best performances, opposite Michael Caine and Susannah York. Neither film is remembered today.

Podcast: Interview with James Ivory (1985)

Helena Bonham Carter in Ismail Merchant & James Ivory's A Room with a View (1985).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1985, I sat down with critically acclaimed film director James Ivory.

Ivory was most famous for his lifelong partnership with film producer Ismail Merchant. When I interviewed Ivory in 1985 their soon-to-be award-winning film, A Room with a View, had just been released. Starring Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands, A Room with a View would garner eight Oscar nominations – including Best Picture, Best Director, and a Best Supporting Actress nod for co-star Maggie Smith – and a win for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ivory's collaboration with Merchant and Jhabvala goes back to 1962 with The Householder, and prior to 1985 included The Europeans (1979), Quartet (1981), and The Bostonians (1984). They went on to make over a dozen more films together, including Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993). Ivory most recently won acclaim for this work on Call Me by Your Name, which he wrote and produced, winning him the award for Best Adapted Screenplay at this year's Academy Awards.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with James Ivory as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Peter O’Toole and the Modern Breed of English Movie Actors

Before Peter O’Toole died in mid-December at the age of eighty-one, he was probably the greatest male actor in the movies; if you wanted to be more circumspect you might have tied him with Michael Caine. His career in film stretched back more than half a century, on TV and in live theatre even farther. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1952 and 1954, where his classmates included Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Brian Bedford – just a sample of what can only be assumed to be the most amazing generation of British actors in history. Think about it: O’Toole’s cohort also included Maggie Smith, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Vanessa Redgrave, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Rosemary Harris, Tom Courtenay, Diana Rigg, Claire Bloom, Joan Plowright and Julie Christie. Their predecessors had included such luminaries as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Edith Evans, Michael Redgrave, Peggy Ashcroft, Alec Guinness, and of course Laurence Olivier: classically trained stage actors who conferred a kind of aristocratic status on the projects in which they were involved. They were strikingly different from their American peers – classier, better spoken, more pensive, with vastly more impressive dramatic ranges but (with the exceptions of Guinness and Olivier) less star dazzle. England didn’t cultivate stars; the English film industry, for all its virtues, was more sedate, more modest, a little grayer. O’Toole’s generation was more dynamic. They came up after the war, and the Suez crisis, which denoted the last gasps of the British Empire, helped to form their world view. When they began their careers the Angry Young Man playwrights were transforming the English theatre: Burton, Bloom, Plowright, Bates and Finney appeared in the exciting film versions of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. They married the same fastidious classical training the preceding generation had received with a more democratic sense of what theatre could offer, an instinct for the camera, the uncorseting influences of the American Method and the sixties, and a willingness to explore sexuality as part of the process of building a character. And they didn’t just want to be stage and TV actors; they wanted to be movie stars too, and many of them became just that.

Three Tall Women and Anna Christie: Pulitzer Prize Winners

Glenda Jackson, Alison Pill and Laurie Metcalf in Three Tall Women. (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe)

Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, but the original production was off Broadway (at the Vineyard Theatre), and until Joe Mantello’s luminous new revival with Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill – in the roles created by Myra Carter, Marian Seldes and Jordan Baker – it has never been performed on Broadway. I saw the Vineyard show and liked it quite a bit, though I remember finding the writing in the second act rather theoretical and pre-arranged. In act one the three characters – one in her early nineties, one in her early fifties, and one in her late twenties – have specific, realist roles, despite the fact that Albee calls them A, B and C. A is a wealthy, fading widow, estranged until recently from her son, incontinent and subject to sudden tantrums, childlike behaviors and episodes of dementia. B is her caregiver, whose mordant humor buoys up her worn patience with A’s erratic conduct. C is an emissary from A’s lawyer’s office, summoned because C’s affairs are in deplorable order. But in act two the old woman has had a stroke and lies unconscious in her bed while A, B and C embody her as an ingénue, as middle-aged and as a dowager, the two older women warning the youngest one, with a mixture of wisdom and perhaps a little sadistic glee, what she’s in for.

Overplaying Shaw: The Millionairess at Niagara-on-the-Lake

Steven Sutcliffe and Nicole Underhay in The Millionairess (Photo by David Cooper)

The two productions of Shaw plays at the Shaw Festival this summer are both wearying. Eda Holmes, who directed Misalliance, and Blair Williams, who staged The Millionairess, seem to be laboring under the misperception that if you make these plays more frantic and emphatic, then somehow their ideas will be clearer and the texts will seem funnier, when in fact there’s no special trick to penetrating their ideas, and all the overstatement numbs out the comedy. And the concepts are puzzling. Holmes has set Misalliance in 1962, for unconvincing reasons that she lays out in a director’s note; the characters don’t sound remotely as if they belonged in the sixties (the play was written a few years before the First World War), so Judith Bowden’s sets – which don’t really seem to belong to any historical era – and costumes just make you scratch your head. The Millionairess is performed without English accents, so when one of the characters refers to an American with whom he got involved in a business deal, you just wonder what he’s supposed to be. Canadian?

Shaw bills The Millionairess as a “Jonsonian comedy,” which would explain the outrageous character names, but the cast performs it as if it were Kaufman and Hart, and it’s such a silly play that I don’t imagine it matters. I’ve seen it three times over the years at roughly twenty-year intervals and each time even the plot fails to stick in my brain. The main character, an imperious and impossible heiress named Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga, marries two men, one before the play begins and one just after the final curtain, both of whom manage to pass her late father’s test and make money out of the small pile she deeds to them. In between she throws another suitor down the stairs for making an unkind comment about her papa and takes over two businesses and turns them into triumphs. The narrative doesn’t cohere very well (probably that’s why I can never recall how it goes) but it makes a number of typically Shavian observations about economics. The best thing in it is the third act, wherein Epifania offers herself for a job at a sweatshop and starts to make improvements in it before she’s even begun work. It’s not in the same style as the rest of the play, and in the production at the Shaw it’s the only scene that’s largely performed (at least, by Michael Ball and Wendy Thatcher, as the sweatshop owner and his wife) with some restraint.

Poetic Absurdity: The Genius of Beatrice Lillie

Beatrice Lillie (aka Lady Peel) in Exit Smiling (1926).

There’s a tradition of eccentric English actresses who made improbably triumphant careers for themselves in the twentieth century. One was the great high-comic technician Gertrude Lawrence, who couldn’t sing a note without quavering yet became a musical-comedy star, performing songs by Noël Coward, Cole Porter, the Gershwins and Rodgers & Hammerstein. Another was Margaret Rutherford, who embodied a kind of British dottiness – an unassailable uprightness and forthrightness, like that of a nanny shepherding her charges through the park – even when she was playing Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple. But my favorite was Beatrice Lillie, who was born in Toronto in 1894 but became a star in the West End twenty years later and performed on stage and occasionally in movies and on television for just over half a century. (Her final appearance was in the ill-advised 1967 musical film Thoroughly Modern Millie, in the role of the white-slaving villainess Mrs. Meers. It was hardly a worthy valedictory, though she did get to wear chopsticks in her beehive hairdo and execute a modest tap dance to get a stubborn elevator moving.) Canadian she may have been by birth, but no one could have captured so acutely a specifically English brand of silliness, though possibly the fact that she was officially an import from elsewhere in the Dominion may partly explain the fact that her portrayal of English aristocratic hauteur was always parodic – even though in real life she married a baronet (she was Lady Peel) and lost a son, a naval officer, in World War II.

Rob Lowe and Robert Wagner, Looking Backward

Rob Lowe’s second book of memoirs, Love Life (Simon & Schuster, 2014), has an affable rambling quality. He told his story in a linear fashion in his earlier book, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, and this time he elects to linger on a few select items loosely gathered around the title, which he translates broadly. Much of the book focuses on the things he loves: his wife of nearly a quarter of a century, Cheryl; his two sons, Matthew and John Owen; acting. But he also talks about sex, and about alcoholism, as a way, both for him and for the people he met when he went into treatment, of recovering lost life. (Lowe stopped drinking in 1990.) It’s a lovely little book – much better, I think, than the conventional Stories I Only Tell My Friends, which isn’t terrible by any means but has a sanctimonious side and (perhaps inevitably) a starry side, and practically drowns in superlatives. Love Life feels more relaxed, and the qualities in Lowe that come through in the first volume – his intelligence, his down-to-earth-ness, and his willingness to own up to his own follies – anchor the second one. Liking and trusting the author’s voice are key when you settle down with a memoir; I was utterly charmed by Diane Keaton’s in Then Again, and I became very fond of Lowe’s in Love Life, though God knows he’s not the person I’d consult for movie or TV recommendations. (In both Lowe’s and Keaton’s books the process was underscored by the fact that I listened to them on CD read by the authors.)

Tammy Grimes, 1934-2016

Brian Bedford and Tammy Grimes in Private Lives, 1970.

Tammy Grimes died at the end of October, many years after her celebrity had faded. If you went to the theatre in New York in the sixties you knew who she was: the ineffable sprite with the gingery brandy-snap contralto and the slightly preposterous bohemian hauteur who was born to play high comedy. The English-accented voice was her own invention – she was born in Lynn, Massachusetts – and if you listen to the original cast album of The Littlest Revue (1956), the first show in which she was featured (she had understudied Kim Stanley’s Cherie in Bus Stop on Broadway the year before), you can hear her trying it out: tentatively on her first solo, “Madly in Love,” more confidently on her second, “I’m Glad I’m Not a Man.” She was a cabaret singer as well as an actress; Noël Coward discovered her at Julius Monk’s Downstairs and nabbed her for his play Look After Lulu!, in which she played the first of several notable Coward heroines – she was Elvira in High Spirits, the 1964 musical of Blithe Spirit, and Amanda in a Broadway revival of Private Lives six years later. Strangely, though, her breakthrough role was that of the indomitable Colorado millionairess, raised in rural poverty and later one of the survivors of the Titanic, in Meredith Willson’s 1960 The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I saw her in it and was delighted by her performance; at ten it didn’t occur to me to wonder where a Colorado mountain gal acquired so cultivated a vocal effect. She book-ended the decade with Tony Awards for it and for Private Lives, in a part that surely suited her better. Due to a weird glitch in the rules (since modified), the first of these awards was for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, even though she played the title character in Molly Brown and was rarely off the stage during its running time. At the time only actors billed above the title were eligible for a leading actor or actress nod and, since Grimes was not considered a star in 1960, her name appeared below the title.

It Ends With A Bang: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

Well, it's over. Now what do we do? For the last ten years, there was always a Harry Potter film to look forward to. And now it's all over. As I outlined last year when I reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, the films have had their ups and downs. Mostly, thankfully, ups. After the strengths of Part 1, I thought we were in safe hands with director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves for Part 2. My trust in them has been fulfilled: Part 2 is both visually rich and emotionally moving.

As with Part 1, since I'm assuming most of you have read the books, I will keep the synopsis brief. The film starts (at the precise moment where Part 1 ends) when Harry and company have finished burying Dobby the Elf. Harry questions the goblin, Griphook (Warwick Davis), about the contents of a Death Eaters' vault in the Gringotts Bank on Diagon Alley. Harry cuts a deal with Griphook that he can have the Sword of Gryffindor if he helps Harry, Ron and Hermione break into the bank to retrieve a horcrux from said vault (a horcrux is an everyday object where the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) has hidden part of his soul). Davis, who's appeared in multiple roles in all the films (including Professor Flitwick at Hogsworth), is particularly good here. He is the consummate banker looking for his edge. Next, Harry questions the gravely ill wand merchant, Olivander (John Hurt), who explains the history of the wands Harry has acquired. Both of these sequences are strictly expository, but are evidence yet again of the increasing skills of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint as actors. As I said in my review of Part 1, if these three had not been able to keep up their end of the bargain, these last two films, which are almost completely focused on them, would have failed.

Neglected Gem #23: The Browning Version (1994)

Albert Finney in The Browning Version

The moment you see Albert Finney in the 1994 film of The Browning Version, you know you’re watching an actor in the grip of a great performance.  If you care about acting, you scarcely dare to miss anything Finney does, because you never know when he’s going to dazzle you:  in the British TV version of the Kingsley Amis ghost story The Green Man, for instance, or in The Playboys, as the alcoholic cop who’s strung up by his love for the independent woman he’s impregnated.  He’s even more amazing in The Browning Version – it surpasses anything I’ve seen him do, with the single exception of the 1982 Shoot the Moon. This was the performance of its year, but it was a trick to catch it on the big screen. Paramount – exactly the wrong studio to handle a British “prestige” picture – tried the movie out in Cannes, and when there wasn’t much response, they nearly dumped it. They didn’t bother screening it in New York or L.A. in time to make the long lead times of the monthlies, and when they opened it in the fall, they gave it a small ad campaign and a very limited release.  It was befuddling that no one at the studio figured out the audience for the Merchant Ivory pictures would happily troop out to see a film like The Browning Version if they knew about it, and even odder than no one could see Finney was a shoe-in for major award nominations if only his work was promoted.  (The Boston Film Critics gave him the Best Actor award despite the fact that the movie opened in the last-resort downtown art house – aborted by Paramount, it was ignored by Sony, the conglomerate that owned almost every theatre in the city at the time.) Ironically, Finney’s own (failed) performance in A Man of No Importance, a lousy movie about a gay bus conductor in fifties Dublin with an Oscar Wilde fixation, got far more notice.

Mike Figgis’s movie is the second film version of what is probably the best known of Terence Rattigan’s plays.  The script is built around the valedictory of an aging English schoolmaster named Andrew Crocker-Harris, a classics instructor at a ritzy boys’ school whose wife has come to despise him and whose students resent his old-fashioned doggedness and rigorousness, unleavened as it is by anything they can translate into humaneness.  In the course of the drama, Crocker-Harris suffers one indignity upon another.  When he finally gets a little pleasure – the one pupil with genuine affection for him gives him, as a retirement offering, Robert Browning’s edition of the Agamemnon – his wife ruins it for him by insisting that the boy was merely being shrewdly manipulative.  Rattigan’s play is small-scale and a little tight-lipped, but it’s poignant, and when Anthony Asquith filmed it in 1951 he had Michael Redgrave to march it through to greatness.  Redgrave laid a gently sibilant, slightly quavering voice like a skin over Crocker-Harris’s slivered bitterness.  As the performance proceeded, the teacher’s masterful control began to flake, and you saw what motivated the sarcasm and the misanthropy and the near-sadistic humiliation he leveled at his boys.  Probably no one in movie history besides Laurence Olivier has ever managed anything like the wit and elegant, intricate layering of Redgrave’s line readings, especially here and in Uncle Vanya and Dead of Night.  This first Browning Version isn’t the world’s greatest movie (it doesn’t contain a single memorable portrayal outside of Redgrave’s), but it is a great experience.

Curtis Hanson: A Career in Perspective

Eminem and Curtis Hanson (right) on the set of 8 Mile in 2002. (Photo: Eli Reed)

Film director Curtis Hanson, who died in September at the too-young age of seventy-one, was stuck in B-movie territory for a decade and a half before he graduated, in 1987, with the thriller The Bedroom Window. (One of his last B-pictures, Losin’ It, about three SoCal high-schoolers who drive to Tijuana to get rid of their virginity, was coarse and chaotic but very likable. One of them was played by Tom Cruise, just months before Risky Business made him a star, and I’ve never enjoyed watching him as much since.) Once he made it to the majors, so to speak, Hanson made eleven pictures, and I like all or part of every single one except for his first hit, the witless 1992 Gothic The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – it was efficiently directed, but the dunderheaded script was insurmountable. What made him so reliable a filmmaker was a combination of his bred-in-the-bone understanding of genre conventions, his transparent love of actors and his undervalued gift for getting fine work out of them, and his relaxed finesse as a storyteller. This last is no surprise: from his first days in movies, the early seventies, he was a screenwriter as well as a director, penning the compulsively watchable, enjoyably amoral Canadian mystery The Silent Partner (directed by Daryl Duke and starring Elliott Gould, Susannah York and Christopher Plummer) in 1978 and contributing to the scripts of Samuel Fuller’s White Dog and Carroll Ballard’s Never Cry Wolf in the early eighties. And he kept his hand in: he wrote The Bedroom Window and co-wrote the best picture he ever turned out, L.A. Confidential, with Brian Helgeland, as well as one of his last movies, Lucky You, with Eric Roth.