Daily Archives: Friday, May 22, 2015

  • A Double Life

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1947)

    A Double Life, from a screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, is based on the idea of an actor becoming the role he plays.  (This in turn is based on the idea that an actor is somehow inadequate as a human being – an empty vessel filled by the other people that he temporarily pretends to be.)  I feel this is a well-worn premise although I can’t immediately think of other films or plays propelled by it.   The actor’s name is Anthony John and he is played by Ronald Colman, whose first penetrating look to camera instantly announces a troubled mind.  That look has terrific impact even if in retrospect it doesn’t make much sense:  at this point John is enjoying a huge success in a drawing room comedy on Broadway.  And Colman’s impatience is unnecessary anyway – within a few screen minutes Anthony John is being encouraged to play Othello and what’s to come is certain sure unless you don’t know what happened to the Moor of Venice.

    Did those in the know find the film’s realisation of the contemporary theatre world believable?   The smart dialogue and George Cukor’s direction certainly give it a convincing feel.  There’s a crackle to the talk, particularly in the early scenes, about what actors, and this one in particular, do.  Because it’s clear that the protagonist is destined to commit murder (and to pay for it with his life) the focus of A Double Life is on the character of Anthony John and the pressure is on Ronald Colman to keep the film going.  The working out of the plot, once John has murdered Pat, a working-class girl who becomes John’s mistress in the hope of becoming an actress, is mechanical and protracted – there’s not much interest in waiting for the cop played by Edmond O’Brien to catch up with what the audience already knows.   Fortunately, Colman is excellent.  The bright dangerous eyes in a face that’s otherwise pale and ageing are very expressive – and the effect of seeing those eyes through the Moor’s dark make-up is strong.   Colman is vocally less charismatic as Othello on the Broadway stage but he’s powerful speaking lines from the play as he finishes off Pat, who’s well played by Shelley Winters.

    George Cukor too is much more successful handling the scenes between Anthony John and his ex-wife Brita or with Pat than he is with the scenes from Othello proper (and Signe Hasso also is more persuasive as Brita than she is as Desdemona). There’s a tension and rhythm in these exchanges – particularly John’s first conversation with Pat in the Italian eatery where she’s waitressing – that seem unusual for a Hollywood melodrama of the period.  Cukor orchestrates the most extended excerpt from the play with great care but the effect is not quite right:  this Broadway production of Othello is stranded uneasily between screen Shakespeare and stage Shakespeare.   In visual terms, though, the sequences on stage are good.  They’re dramatically lit (by Milton R Krasner) and the strangulation of Desdemona by a kiss – Anthony John’s big idea for making his Othello unique – is unnerving, just as the people in the theatre audience on the screen feel it to be.

    5 June 2012

  • A Doll’s House

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Losey  (1973)

    To say that Ibsen’s play makes a virtue of a single set is putting it mildly.  It illustrates and intensifies the predicament of Nora Helmer, who can’t extricate herself from the consequences of past actions which have come back to haunt her.  It’s integral to the theme of the claustrophobic marriage, which emerges as her underlying captivity.  David Mercer’s opening out of the story in this adaptation is counterproductive and sometimes ridiculous.  He tacks on to the Christmas Eve starting point of the play a good fifteen minutes of backstory.  We see Nora and Kristine Linde together, in the days before Nora married Torvald Helmer;  Nils Krogstad is glimpsed, an ominously looming figure, on a hillside above the frozen lake where the two women have been skating.  We get the bedroom of Nora’s dying father, with Dr Rank in attendance – then preparation for the Helmers’ trip to Italy.  A short scene shows Kristine giving Krogstad the brush-off, another Krogstad throwing his splenetic weight around at the bank where Torvald is about to take over as manager.  It all serves no purpose except to reduce the impact of the characters – especially Krogstad – when they re-enter the action.  Once the Ibsen part of the picture gets going, Mercer’s screenplay (based on Michael Meyer’s translation for the stage) is pretty faithful in terms of dialogue – but it’s broken up into scenes, much shorter than the play’s, located in various places around the town where the piece is set.  (The film was shot in provincial Norway.)   Mercer didn’t rewrite the material enough to provide a rationale for why the characters keep zipping around – at several points there’s no good reason for their being where they are, except that it’s not where we last saw them.

    Joseph Losey and Mercer appear to think that, because A Doll’s House was pioneering naturalistic theatre in 1879, it’s made for adaptation into naturalistic cinema a century later (as if there were just one kind and level of dramatic naturalism) – and that regular changes of location are enough to make a piece more ‘cinematic’.   It’s a crazy miscalculation.  Most of the relocated scenes remain essentially static conversation pieces – the same goes for the apocryphal additions.  (Once they’ve taken their skates off, Nora and Kristine just sit and talk in a café.)  Occasionally Losey’s appetite for melodramatic colour produces an unintended laugh, as when Krogstad bellows threats to Nora on a snowy hilltop.  (This bit gives a new meaning to the earlier line in the script that this is a small town where news gets around fast:  it’s a wonder that Krogstad’s imprecations don’t echo down the hill so that the whole community can hear.)    Losey’s use of exteriors also draws attention to the fact that there’s a lot more daylight than you’d expect in Norway in midwinter.  (The film hasn’t aged well visually in even the most basic sense:  the BFI apologised for the quality of the print – one of those fade-to-pink jobs.)    In the early stages Michel Legrand’s meaningless score is on the soundtrack almost continuously and the film’s lack of impetus means that, in spite of the changes of scenery, the tempo is pedestrian (it feels a good deal longer than its 106 minutes).  The pointlessness of the Losey-Mercer approach comes across most clearly in the climactic exchange between Nora and Torvald, which takes place, as it should, in one room:  it’s the only sequence in the picture with any momentum.

    All five of the main performances are thoughtful but I found myself watching the actors at a remove – getting an idea of how effective they might have been if the mise en scène hadn’t been so misconceived.  And they’re performing in different styles:  Losey isn’t able to orchestrate the playing – so that you never believe this collection of individuals belong to the same time and place.   Edward Fox snarls plenty but he has no real inner force as Krogstad:  you don’t get a sense of how this man’s self-loathing and vengefulness feed off each other.   (Fox is surprisingly more effective when things start looking up for Krogstad.)   As Kristine, Delphine Seyrig is markedly less theatrical than the others:  her hesitancy speaking English means that some of the stresses are wrong and – a bigger problem – she throws away too much.  Even so, she’s a lovely, rather mysterious presence:  Seyrig, an intuitive screen actress, makes you want to know more about Kristine than she tells you.  Trevor Howard is good at suggesting Dr Rank’s suave misery, particularly his fear of death, although some of his effects are relatively stagy.   David Warner’s is probably the best performance:   he’s absorbed Torvald’s boringness and bullying condescension and created a convincing portrait of a quiet tyrant, imperviously self-centred.  He also shows Torvald as strongly physically attracted to his wife – an aspect of the relationship I’ve not seen before.  Although she’s resourceful and often vivid, Jane Fonda is probably miscast as Nora – frivolity, even willed frivolity, doesn’t come easily to her.  The distance between the naturalism of A Doll’s House and that of 1970s American cinema, which Fonda epitomises, is jarringly evident in a scene like the one when Kristine reappears in Nora’s life:  you can sense Fonda’s incredulity that, in a matter of seconds, Nora would get beyond her surprise at seeing Kristine again and they would be straight into intensely personal conversation.   Fonda is powerful in the final showdown with Torvald but I felt that she came out of character here to an extent that went beyond Nora’s transformation.  It’s as if Jane Fonda has been marking time until this point – doing the supposed scatterbrain on sufferance, impatient to get to the feminist meat of the piece.

    16 July 2009

Posts navigation