Basia Bulat, The Entertainer and a voice you could write a book about − Reviews #241

LIVE



The Entertainer (Garrick Theatre) − It makes sense that Kenneth Branagh would close his first season at the Garrick with this: a play synonymous with his hero, Laurence Olivier. Branagh is Archie Rice, the unhappy, dissolute and past-it music-hall star Archie Rice, whose fey, innuendo-laced stylings are playing to dwindling audiences in '50s Yorkshire.

John Osbourne's play is very much of its time, but director Rob Ashford does well to mine it for its modern relevancies: patriotism, racism and the pathos of an artform on its last legs, and plays Archie as a slight, sad figure, his bags of charisma obscuring a complete lack of moral character, or really any substance at all. He's fast, erudite and fills a room (if not a concert hall) with his bravado, and his rants are more lost than vitriolic. It's a reading of the character that convinces but doesn't always lend itself to emotional dynamism, and that's problematic in a play that has some serious longueurs. On a more prosaic note, I remember reading years ago that Branagh doesn't work himself up into a teary state, but aims for the same effect through simple acting shorthand, and that synthetic approach leaves me feeling rather detached and cheated.

After a stunningly modern opening that sees a silhouetted Branagh slowly tapdancing with his back to the audience, as he's joined by four young chorus girls, we're largely trapped in a room with his family. The first dialogue scene, with Branagh's daughter (Downton Abbey's Sophie McShera) and his father (Gawn Grainger) goes on forever and has little to offer but vast swathes of unpopulated space and an oppressive mundanity. As Greta Scacchi enters as Archie's wife, Phoebe, and the star breaks off for music hall routines pitched perfectly between the dated and the devilishly good, it does begin to work up some momentum, but the first half never really hits its stride until the final seconds.

Once that happens, it doesn't lose it: suddenly it seems to have a purpose and a theme, the characters crumbling like the edifices of the music halls, their viewpoints complex but apparent, and their relationships shifting like cogs in a rotting machine. I don't rate McShera as an actor, and she speaks increasingly throughout the play with that unbearably false intonation that convinces people they don't like theatre. The other principals are fine though: Grainger's comic timing, sentimentality and irascible detachment are a joy in themselves and lend the climax a real emotional heft, Scacchi is largely terrific as a woman drunk on her own hard-luck stories, and Jonah Hauer-King is tuneful and gently nuanced as Archie's lanky son, Frank.

It doesn't ever quite hit the heights I was anticipating − and one can only imagine what John Hurt might have made of Grainger's character if he hadn't been forced to drop out − but at its best it's a valuable, fascinating portrait of the Britain that was and perhaps still is, with a commanding, committed and often brilliant performance at its centre. (3)

***






Photos by me, can you tell?

Basia Bulat (Oslo Hackney) − Barnstorming power-pop princess Basia Bulat lit up London again last week, surely confirming her status as just about the best live act around. A knockout In the Name Of, a three-song autoharp solo spot comprising Heart of My Own, Gold Rush and In the Night, a heart-stopping, brokenhearted cover of Damaged by Primal Scream, and a dizzying version of her 2013 song The Wire that concluded with her screaming into a voice distorter, it often took the breath away. She never stands still; every time, every song sounds new, thanks to her restless imagination, a Sandy Denny-like gift for reworking melodies, and that notable fondness for odd gadgets. If you get the chance to see her, leap at it. (3.5)

See also: I've reviewed other Basia gigs, at the Slaughtered Lamb (my favourite show of 2015), Rough Trade East and − best of all − Hoxton Square Kitchen. ***

FILM



CINEMA: Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1940) − I had a rough day on Thursday, then I went to the BFI to watch this, and my worries just floated away. It's a film I return to time and again, and it always has the same effect on me.

The movie is dominated by Judy Holliday's tour-de-force as ill-educated, complacent former chorine Billie Dawn, whose gangster fiancé (Broderick Crawford) decides that she needs her edges smoothing off, but doesn't bargain for what happens next. You could write a book about Holliday's voice alone: the working class accent, the seductive impediment, the cartoonishness that accentuates the comedy but is never broad or alienating as Billie transforms from an abused adornment to a self-possessed modern woman.

Garson Kanin's script pulls a punch or two to circumvent the censors (the rogue congressman who Crawford bribes is the exception, not a rule) and William Holden's columnist − the catalyst for Billie's change − comes off as a tad smug, but it's rare to find a mainstream movie that elides so succinctly with my own views: that anti-intellectualism is dangerous, that intellectual posturing is tiresome, and that a woman improving herself for her own sake is more beautiful than if she reforms for love.

Cukor's direction is curiously drab, but almost everything else about the film works, with Howard St. John superb as Crawford's refined, self-hating lawyer, two dozen big laughs, and some eloquent polemicising that's arguably more relevant in 2016 than it was in 1950, dealing as it does with crooked lobbyists, spineless legislators and rampant misogyny.

Its greatest strength, though, remains Holliday's astonishing characterisation: so hilarious, vital, heart-warming, nuanced and specific. She would give other truly great performances, but none as great as this. People who say women can't be funny should have their eyes stapled open and be made to this film. It'll improve their Thursday. (4)

See also: This movie is in my all-time top 100, which you can read about here.

***

Thanks for reading.

Lillian Gish, Henry V, and Woody Allen in 2015 - Reviews #223

A few reviews. Next time: a journey through the back catalogue of Francois Truffaut.

FILMS



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Irrational Man (Woody Allen, 2015) - In 1989, Woody Allen created one of his greatest movies, Crimes and Misdemeanours: a bleak, gently blistering drama in which Martin Landau kills his mistress then tries to deal with the guilt of it all. Since then, Allen has made three serious crime movies and, to a greater or lesser degree, they are all terrible. This latest one is perhaps the least terrible of the three (the others are the tone-deaf Match Point and the brain dead Cassandra’s Dream), but it still falls down an elevator shaft after 50 minutes.

Joaquin Phoenix is a brooding cliché of a philosophy professor – dark, sexy, dangerous – who attracts the attention of both an unhappily married lecturer (Parker Posey) and a guileless student (Emma Stone) while toying with the idea of murder. At first you can forgive the film its flaws: lazy exposition, laughable lines and erratic performances (often helpless in the face of the dialogue), because the story is surprisingly involving and watchable, but after a while even that starts to go wrong, and there’s nothing left to cling to.

The movie’s conformity is a problem for me: it purports to wrestle with serious philosophical quandaries (albeit like a low-rent Rope), then goes for the easiest possible way out. And it conforms in its characterisation too. Phoenix’s professor disastrously calls to mind Half Nelson, a film against which almost everything looks unoriginal and somewhat pathetic. In that movie, Gosling’s crack-addicted teacher tries to impress his sister-in-law with his magnetic brand of nihilism and she literally laughs in his face. Here, no-one laughs in Phoenix’s face, they just want to boff him.

In the one interesting choice Allen makes, he has Joaquin’s penis misfiring early on, but when he gets the chance to build on this later, he falls short of pushing the character as far as it will go – they both do – and the results are just unbelievably frustrating. Watch the end of Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class for an example of how you kick your film into another gear, with a seductive, beguiling paragon of evil.

As I have said at least once before, I prefer the ever-underrated In My Father’s Den to the widely-praised You Can Count on Me because the muscular, avenging angel of an anti-hero gets kicked down some stairs and called a prick when he tries to do the right thing, rather than winning out in some pyrrhic but vital way. I prefer Half Nelson to Irrational Man for about 800 reasons, but it starts with Phoenix’s drab if extremely charismatic caricature, and the hypnotic effect his character has on everyone, with his hilariously stupid malt-swigging.

He is also the only actor I’ve ever scene who has scenes stolen from him by his own tummy, Phoenix’s funny little pot belly arriving in the room shortly before him, with a kind of scene-stealing grace that Peter Lorre might have admired. Stone, meanwhile, does her best, and has a handful of truly, unexpectedly impressive moments (considering she’s in a film that simply doesn’t work), but more often than not she is – well – powerless to act, her line readings sounding like something from a 1930s B-movie actress. Or a porn star.

Another problem with the film (and there are many) is Allen’s superficial understanding of philosophy, which both undermines the serious message he is attempting to impart and, more prosaically, means that his brilliant professor is often just spouting rubbish, or paraphrased platitudes. Allen has read the chapter headings in his textbook, it seems, but gone no further epitomised by the frankly embarrassing scene in which Phoenix says the class will consider “Sartre’s classic line, ‘Hell is other people’”, which is as much Sartre as we get. Woody also has no idea how to build a crime narrative, as evidenced by the sequence in which Stone explains that everyone a murder victim knew “couldn’t have done it” – an equivocal shorthand that is frankly insultingly stupid.

I suppose he is 80 now.

At this stage in his career, Allen is desperately in need of a script editor who can tell him: a) You don’t know how teenage girls speak; b) You can’t write working class characters in a contemporary setting; c) You’ve forgotten how to subtly interweave exposition; d) Your plotting is built on contrivance and coincidence, not anything that resembles real life.

In the excellent 2012 documentary detailing his life and work, Allen fascinatingly reveals how he decides which film to do next, emptying a drawer onto his bed and then searching through scraps of paper on which are written one-line summaries of possible projects. He used to dress and augment these frameworks, until the incidental joys were as great as the story they adorned. Now – with the exception of Midnight in Paris and perhaps Blue Jasmine – that isn’t really true: from photography to performance to dialogue to sound, it all feels perfunctory: we simply travel from A to B, his hand revealed well in advance, the minor pleasures few and far between, if they are there at all.

As far as bad dialogue goes; well, it simply doesn’t get any worse than this:
Phoenix: “I’m just… too far gone.”
Stone: “I’m going to be late for my piano lesson.”

And then there are the Allenisms that pepper his work: stock phrases that emerge from the mouth of so many of his characters, no matter how different they are supposed to be. Will he ever again make a film in which someone doesn't say, "This is cra-zy."

The film isn’t funny, either. Not in the way that the first hour of Magic in the Moonlight isn’t funny: this one isn’t even supposed to be. In Crimes and Misdemeanours, among his greatest masterstrokes was to run a hysterically funny narrative in parallel to the main affair, with Allen’s self-righteous documentary maker outfoxed by his insufferable rival (Alan Alda), his character receiving a devastating final sting that threw him and Landau together, and cast the central story into a different light. Here, everything is in the same tone – visual, verbal and philosophical – with no wit or nuance to leaven the po-faced, self-serious quasi-moralising.

These problems are epitomised by a potentially interesting scene near the close, which somehow manages to be taut and tense but also completely embarrassing, with apparently improvised dialogue that has to be heard to be believed, and an action pay-off that’s like a Byker Grove outtake. It’s a fitting climax to an unredeeming, tacky and obvious third act that just about explains itself but is as uninteresting as Allen has ever been. Except for Cassandra’s Dream<, which is the caveat that keeps on giving, and the worst film that Allen will ever make.

In Allen’s hands, it seems that fatalism – predicated on chance – has none of the danger, cynical humour or dark poetry of noir, it’s merely predictable coincidence, playing out in bright colours and dull words. (2)

***



The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926) - A year before their towering masterwork, The Wind, director Victor Sjöström, writer Frances Marion, and stars Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson made another film – The Scarlet Letter – a flavourful, somewhat fanciful adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. Miss Gish is ideally cast (though perhaps wearing a bit too much make-up, historical accuracy fans) as Hester Prynne, whose illegitimate child outrages Puritan, 18th century New England, visiting tragedy upon her restrictive community. Hanson is her troubled lover, the outwardly respectable Rev Arthur Dimmesdale.

MGM’s films from this period never quite seem to match – say – Fox’s in terms of their scale or authentic set design, and the plotting sometimes comes off as forced or convenient, but Sjostrom's imaginative staging leads to a succession of visually striking passages (he was a great director of shadows and of feet) and the acting grabs your attention and holds it, with Gish’s inventive, intuitive gesturing creating a Hester who’s flirtatious, resolute and also feels intensely, every thought transmitted by the actress’s peerless evocation of the inner life.

Her innocent seduction of Hanson is the sort of scene she so rarely got to play - not that you'd know it from her effortless, uncompromised sensuality - while the sequence in which she reveals the scarlet letter, if plumb in the centre of her comfort zone, is a masterpiece of subtle expression and heart-wracking poignancy. (3.5)

A thousand thanks to Owen for getting hold of this one for me. I’ve been after it for years.

***



Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944) - Olivier’s near-mythic adaptation of Henry V is a film of dazzling, bravura moments, but not altogether a great film. Beginning with a brilliant gimmick – a framing device that presents the action before an audience at The Globe in 1600 – it then abandons the conceit at exactly the right time, with a staggering fade that takes us from London to the sky above the ocean, where a swelling British fleet is moving stealthily, hazily towards France. Once they get there, though, we face a world that lurches weirdly from fantastical castles to earthily realistic battlefields, as the narrative mixes Henry’s rousing speeches and introspective ruminations with some of the broadest, most unbearable comedy imaginable (at one point a Welshman wears a leek on his head while ending every sentence with the words, “Look you”), culminating in a wooing scene that seems to go on for ever.

Despite those shortcomings, there are scenes as rich in beauty and emotion as just about anything British cinema produced in the ‘40s, thanks in no small part to the sumptuous Technicolor photography and Olivier’s astounding performance, which – despite the occasional recourse to simply yelling – is full of tenderness, steel and imperious regality, while exhibiting his unique gift for Shakespearean delivery: his understanding so rich, his interpretation so clear, that the dialogue could just as well be in modern slang, were it not for its power, its consequence and its ability to stir anyone with a pulse, an English birth certificate and, ideally, a sword. He also has one hell of a way with a battle sequence: the long take of advancing French cavalry moving from a trot to a murderous gallop is just an astonishingly exciting piece of action cinema.

Olivier adapted two further Shakespeare plays as director and star – Hamlet and Richard III – and while both are better than this celebrated first effort, Henry V still has moments that simply take the breath away. (3)

***



All Through the Night (Vincent Sherman, 1941) - This is the other film in which insular isolationist Humphrey Bogart has a change of heart to battle despicable Nazi Conrad Veidt. But unlike in Casablanca, he’s a gangster who gets in over his head while searching for the killers of his favourite cheesecake supplier.
This weirdly pitched yarn is a curious mixture of heavy-handed propaganda, mannered dialogue and variable suspense: a melange of Hitchcock, Damon Runyon and what we now recognise as ‘WWII Warners’, as the studio warms to the cinematic possibilities of the conflict. It starts oddly and ends badly, but what’s in between is often good fun, with a frankly astonishing cast doing what it can with a peculiar script that promises much but delivers relatively little.

Though he’s given rather too many visual gags for a performer whose talents lay elsewhere, Frank McHugh’s line deliveries are – of course – an utter joy, while Peter Lorre is perfect as the mirthfully malevolent gunman, Pepi, the diminutive, sleepy-eyed legend having turned this type of playful, cigarette-led scene-stealing into nothing short of an artform. (2.5)

***

BOOKS



The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1965) – This story of a Scottish schoolteacher engaging her charges in twisted adult games is slim, spare and economical, warped, waspish and filled with malevolent, brilliant throwaway jokes, its nastiness masking a poignancy and perception that linger, along with the bitter taste of betrayal. When Spark’s Sandy talks about the virtue of economy, as a way to live and to create art, she may as well be commenting on the book in which she finds herself. (4)



Orson Welles: One Man Band by Simon Callow (2015) – The third volume of Callow’s biography is another stunning achievement: fast-paced, fascinating and immensely readable, the author expertly juggling disparate sources to not only document and explains Welles’s triumphs and disasters, but also to discern the truth behind his endless self-mythologising, coming as close as anyone has to explaining who Welles was, and why he was like that.

Dealing with Welles's life between his estrangement from Hollywood in 1947 and the release of his intensely personal Chimes at Midnight in 1964, it’s often sad, occasionally punch-the-air inspiring and - for the most part - wonderfully written, with Callow a fond but wise and moral adjudicator with a rare insight into the art of acting. And for that, we can forgive him some excessive use of Latin, an occasional recycling of his pet theories and the suggestion that classic ensemble dramas include “Casablanca and Four Weddings and a Funeral".

Sometimes I did wish we could linger longer on the majesties of those things that work - Othello, Touch of Evil, et al - before moving onto the next backstage debacle, but by any standards it's an exceptional work, and for fans it's pretty much essential.

I'm not sure I will ever get over not seeing Welles's stage play of Moby Dick. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

MovieMail: Toffs and terror

A pair of reviews written for the April 2010 MovieMail catalogue:



The Night My Number Came Up (Leslie Norman, 1955)

The Night My Number Came Up is one hell of a ride: a suspense yarn with a supernatural flavour that builds to a terrifying climax. The opening scenes are shrouded in mystery. Commander Lindsay (Michael Hordern) barges into an RAF base in Hong Kong and demands to see the officer in charge. He thinks he knows where a missing plane has downed, but he won’t say how. In flashback, we find out.

It is the week before, and Lindsay is recounting a chilling dream in which a flight carrying eight passengers, including air marshal Michael Redgrave and civil servant Alexander Knox, crashes by a snowy fishing village, with all lives lost. At first, they laugh it off, but as the film unfolds, each detail of the premonition seems to slot into place, until they’re hurtling through a storm in the pitch black, their fuel supplies perilously low and with nowhere to land.

It’s an ominous, insidiously eerie film with an ingenious script from Journey’s End playwright R.C. Sherriff, supposedly based on real events. The characters, from cool-headed Redgrave to nervy war hero Denholm Elliot, neurotic first-time flyer Knox and showy salesman George Rose, are neatly etched, each with a clever back story and a different take on the question of fate. Knox wants to tinker with the passenger list, Rose wants to throttle the pilot and Redgrave – though sceptical about the supernatural – isn’t sure he’s going to sleep tonight.

The tight, atmospheric direction boasts tremendous use of sound, employing a portentous score and Hordern’s words of warning to often startling ends. The actor had a unique gift for voiceover – witness the gold dust he sprinkled over Young Sherlock Holmes through nostalgic narration – and he’s just the man you want to soundtrack your worst fears.

This is another gem from Ealing Studios and further proof of the film factory’s ability to craft unforgettable dramas as well as first-rate comedic fare. Not that The Night My Number Came Up is without humour. Its pay-off line, with more than a nod to past hits Dead of Night and Green for Danger, is both absolutely petrifying and utterly hilarious. (3.5)

***

The Divorce of Lady X (Zoltan Korda, 1938)



“How are you, dear fellow? Terribly well? Don’t ask me – terribly unwell!” Ralph Richardson steals the show in the battle-of-the-sexes comedy The Divorce of Lady X, playing a cuckolded Lord whose divorce case causes untold difficulties in the burgeoning romance between barrister Laurence Olivier and judge’s niece Merle Oberon.

Olivier plays a woman-hating lawyer who can "dissolve a marriage quicker than an aspirin". Taking on a case for buffoonish Richardson, he gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks his new girlfriend (Oberon) is the adulterous wife. Though made at Denham Studios, the film presents a Lubitsch-esque view of England, beginning in a pea-souper and taking in swanky hotels, hunting trips and the sexual peccadilloes of the nobility.

This delightful slice of escapism, produced by Alexander Korda, was shot in three strip Technicolor, showing off both the expensive sets and Olivier’s green-shirt-and-brown-suit combo to best effect. Oberon, by this time a major Hollywood player, is sparkling in her playful role, while the offbeat casting of two Shakespearean stage stars as a romantic lead and his diim client works a treat. (3)