Term of Trial
Peter Glenville (1962)
The curator Jo Botting is one of the few people I look forward to hearing introduce a film at BFI. She’s not a confident public speaker but she knows how to use the mike, and she’s always well prepared and informative. Her introduction to Term of Trial was interesting for two main reasons. First, Botting explained how she found out about the film’s existence through discovering the James Barlow novel on which it’s based in a second-hand bookshop. Second, she couldn’t – although she’s notably mild-mannered – conceal her irritation with the accounts of the making of the film written ‘at great length’ by Sarah Miles in ‘one of her many autobiographies’. (An extract formed part of the BFI programme note.) Miles made her screen debut in Term of Trial, the story of Graham Weir (Laurence Olivier), a middle-aged teacher in a North of England secondary modern, and Shirley Taylor (Miles), the fifteen-going-on-sixteen pupil who’s infatuated with him. Weir is friendly and sympathetic, not least because Shirley’s like the daughter he never had, but he won’t go all the way. The rejected Shirley takes her revenge by reporting him to the police and Weir ends up in a magistrates’ court. Sarah Miles’ behaviour on the film, as described by Jo Botting, must have made her as big a pain as Shirley. Miles complained about Peter Glenville’s timid direction of a sequence in which teacher’s pet Shirley is threatened by some lads in her class – led by the school’s star bad boy Mitchell (Terence Stamp, who’d very recently made his film debut in Billy Budd). Miles felt this should have been a ‘horrifying gang rape’ – and the assault, which doesn’t go beyond the boys getting Shirley on the ground and cutting off a lock of her hair before they and she go back to class, is undeniably tepid. Miles didn’t like the long, climactic court scene any better: Glenville had the set rebuilt and Olivier returned to do the sequence again, free of charge. Miles also embarked on an on-off affair with her leading man. This was a double irony vis-à-vis the film’s scenario since Weir doesn’t go to bed with Shirley and his wife Anna (Simone Signoret) can’t have children: Olivier’s new wife Joan Plowright had just given birth to their first child together.
It seems that Olivier got mixed reviews for his portrait of Graham Weir – some critics, said Jo Botting, reckoned him too great an actor to play a ‘little man’. The problem isn’t that Olivier is superior to the role; it’s that he’s the wrong kind of actor for it. (Compare, for example, what Judi Dench does with her frustrated schoolteacher in Notes on a Scandal.) Olivier can do mediocre men who are hollow (like Archie Rice) or have a guilty secret (like Max De Winter) but playing someone apparently dull he struggles to hide his charisma, especially his physical charisma. He dramatises littleness and the effect is too spellbinding. There’s a moment I noticed early on when Olivier tries to blend the self-effacing Weir into the shadows in a room. He succeeds but you’re aware that it’s a triumph of technique. And because Olivier is continuously magnetic, we fail to see that Graham Weir is transformed when he’s teaching. In the trial scene, however, Olivier’s plea for justice is histrionically spectacular – and emotionally powerful simply because of the technical brilliance of the delivery. Olivier’s relief here at getting the chance at last to do what he’s best at doing is palpable. He earns his fee in this sequence alone (which makes it all the more remarkable that he came back to repeat it gratis).
Peter Glenville had just directed Olivier on stage in Anouilh’s Becket and was no doubt keen to renew the partnership. It’s hard to see what else motivated him to make Term of Trial; Glenville appears to have no interest in the social aspects of the material – or, come to that, in dramatic realism. The opening titles appear on the screen against the background of empty, unlovely streets but Glenville doesn’t linger on them. Instead, he livens things up by showing a young adolescent boy running from his grim-looking house and through the streets all the way into Graham Weir’s English lesson. Fair enough: Thompson (Roy Holder) is one of the few bright sparks and enthusiasts in Weir’s class – he wants to get away from home and to school as soon as possible (and the run is dynamically filmed – the cinematographer was Oswald Morris). But Glenville more or less drops this potentially interesting character halfway through; he even forgets about what, in the early stages, seem important features of Weir himself. There are so many reminders that he’s a drinker – nipping out to the pub during lunch break, polishing off what’s left in the glasses after he and his wife have said goodnight to their dinner guests – that you’re primed to expect his quasi-alcoholism to count in what happens next. It doesn’t.
The staff at Weir’s school are remarkably posh for a secondary modern with a working-class catchment area; not for the first time on screen, the kids in the same class are a baffling range of ages. Several key passages are ludicrously implausible. On the school’s Easter holiday trip to Paris, Shirley pretends to feel faint on a visit to the Louvre; Weir takes her outside then spends the whole day on his own with her – none of the other staff or kids bats an eyelid. After he’s been given a free pardon by the magistrates, he steels himself to start a new term and is asked immediately to see the headmaster, who encourages Weir to look for another job. Not only does Weir stand his ground but he ends the scene disappointed that he’s been passed over for the deputy headship. We’re meant to see the decision as hypocritical cowardice on the part of the head (overplayed by Frank Pettingell), although immediately promoting someone who’s recently been charged with indecently assaulting a minor in his charge seems an inherently unlikely proposition, however strong-minded the boss. (It’s never clear anyway why Weir is seen or sees himself as a candidate: he’s been at the school for only a few months; his career, we’re told, has been hamstrung by his conscientious objector past; he always defers to the older Trowman (Roland Culver), who eventually gets the deputy headship.)
The criminal case against Weir may be heard only by magistrates but Glenville doesn’t stint on the unbelievable melodrama (and Hugh Griffith plays Weir’s solicitor as theatrically as any Old Bailey barrister). The bench finds Weir guilty but gives him a conditional discharge: asked if he has anything to say (shouldn’t that question come before sentence is passed?), he has a great deal. Then Shirley wants to say something too and the chief magistrate lets her go on for even longer than Weir as she explains that her accusations against him are untrue. Then the magistrates see the error of their ways and pardon Weir. The whole thing is disorienting – not just because the sequence of events is improbable but because the engineered conclusion to the proceedings is unconvincing in itself. Why would the magistrates inevitably believe that Shirley’s retraction is the truth? Wouldn’t it be just as likely to confirm their view of her as foolishly exploitable by Weir?
Simone Signoret does wonders with the unoriginal role of Weir’s bitter, verging-on-frigid wife. Except for her outing to the trial, we always see Anna at home. That helps reinforce our awareness of her being trapped there but Signoret gives depth and variety to the claustrophobia. She isn’t relentlessly unfriendly towards her husband: she gives us a sense of how a marriage can go on in spite of being unhappy and an even stronger sense that Anna feels constrained expressing her impatience with Graham’s fruitlessly principled nature because there’s too much he can blame her for – their childlessness, their shared view that he married beneath him (although the latter is established, risibly, by the single fact that Anna once worked as a barmaid). You can see why Sarah Miles made an impression at the time and, to be fair, this is one of her best efforts. She makes Shirley too conspicuous but the strength of the girl’s needy coquetry, and her combination of charm and awkwardness, are persuasive. There are good performances by Roland Culver, who plays Trowman with cynical gusto, and Thora Hird, as Shirley’s fierce, sharp-tongued mother. Julia Foster has a vivid bit as a girl who, at the start of next term, fancies herself as Shirley’s successor in Weir’s affections. It will come as no surprise to those of my (TV) generation that Dudley Foster plays a police detective.
While Graham Weir has to make the court believe he didn’t act like a red-blooded male, both Shirley and Anna are, in their different ways, disappointed that he doesn’t. When, near the end of the film, Anna decides to leave him, he changes her mind by telling her that he did, after all, have sex with Shirley. What did actually take place when she presented herself to Weir in his hotel room near Euston station (the school party miss their connection on the way back from Paris and have to spend a night in London)? We see what happens, so we should know. Weir certainly doesn’t simply spurn Shirley’s advances. They certainly don’t have sex although he’s physically affectionate towards her. Because Peter Glenville’s screenplay and direction are often, respectively, improbable and clumsy, I wasn’t sure, when the lights went up, quite what had occurred between the pair. The obscurity into which Term of Trial has fallen is hardly undeserved. This flabby (130-minute) film is as shallow as it’s pompous, and often ridiculous. But it’s a genuine curiosity and Jo Botting has done well to excavate it.
29 March 2011