Daily Archives: Saturday, June 13, 2015

  • The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jose Quintero (1961)

    Karen Stone (Vivien Leigh), a once celebrated actress of the American stage, travels to Rome to escape her failing career; her businessman husband (John Phillips), who’s also her rock, dies suddenly on the flight to Europe.   The widowed (and presumably childless) Mrs Stone moves into a luxury apartment at the top of the Spanish Steps.  The Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales (Lotte Lenya), a gadfly in fashionable Roman society, introduces her to Paolo di Leo (Warren Beatty), a young man who is actually one of the stars of the Contessa’s stable of gigolos.  Karen is, from the Contessa and Paolo’s point of view, frustratingly slow to behave like a usual client but she eventually takes and pays him as her lover.   Almost from the moment of her arrival in Rome, Karen is shadowed by another young man (Jeremy Spenser), also good-looking but ominously bedraggled – he keeps appearing in alleyways and beside her as she looks into shop windows.  This kind of companion seems to be part of the package for bereaved, psychologically troubled Americans in scenic Italian cities, which become metropolitan hearts of darkness.  The stalker in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone anticipates the less clearly seen dwarf in red PVC in the Venice of Don’t Look Now a decade or so later.  He is also, predictably enough, Karen Stone’s fate (‘She’s the tenant of the room/He’s the ruffian on the stair’).  At one point, Paolo tells Karen that middle-aged American women of her sort are forever getting themselves murdered – by men too young to want their bodies for sex but too needy to resist a well-heeled widow’s financial attractions.  Once Paolo has had enough of Karen, she invites the vagrant young man into her apartment, throwing the keys down to him from her high window.  Then she sits on a sofa, awaiting his entrance, and the film ends with a shot, from her point of view, of his slowly approaching figure.  Fade to black.

    Although the husband’s ill health is signalled in his one previous bit on screen, the cut from a summary of Karen Stone’s declining theatre career to the plane journey and his heart attack is so abrupt that you might think, if you didn’t know the basic plot in advance, that she was having a bad dream.   When her husband collapses, Karen is resoundingly hysterical and unreasonable, pleading for an emergency landing while the plane is over the Atlantic:  the circumstances seem terrible enough to excuse panic and suggesting nonsense but Mrs Stone is presented, even in this prelude, as foolish.  Once she arrives in Rome, she can’t win.  At first she holds back from a sexual relationship because she’s reprehensibly frightened.  When she gets into one, she exposes her hunger for sex.  She gives her body to her final visitor for sex and for murder:  the distinction between the two is dissolved.   The source material is a novella by Tennessee Williams (adapted for the screen by Gavin Lambert).   It’s at least arguable that Williams is expressing in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone a contemporary homosexual predicament under cover of a heterosexual one – as gay playwrights of his generation, including Williams’s exact coeval Terence Rattigan, sometimes did.  Mrs Stone encapsulates the very reasonable fear of a gay man through most of  the last century of expressing his sexual desires, of the danger inherent in fulfilling them, of a sense – because his life is so much centred on sexual self-expression – of being the sum of those desires and nothing more.  As a homosexual story, this would be real and powerful but, thanks to the prevailing culture that fuelled a gay man’s fear of sexual realisation, a writer such as Williams was under pressure to disguise it and, because the object of desire is necessarily male, to present it as a story of female (hetero)sexuality.  But the themes don’t entirely translate:  a woman of Mrs Stone’s time, place and social standing would not be at risk, to the same extent as a gay, of becoming a personality coterminous with her sexual orientation.

    Although, on this reading of the material, it’s possible that an element of self-mockery infuses Williams’s portrait of Mrs Stone, that portrait comes across, in this film anyway, as offensively unkind – an effect magnified through the very presence of Vivien Leigh, as well as through her characterisation of Karen.  According to Pauline Kael, the character in the novella is ‘a proud cold-hearted bitch without cares or responsibilities who learns that sex is all that holds her to life’.   Leigh, however, plays her sympathetically; her own fragility, in her personal life and as a film star, is undeniably a factor too.  Her marriage to Olivier was over by the time she made this, her first movie since The Deep Blue Sea six years previously (although she’d done a little theatre work in the meantime).   Mrs Stone is all about age:  anno domini is the cause of Karen Stone’s dying career as an actress and seems meant to make the life she leads in Rome ridiculous.  Leigh is as beautiful as ever and she wears the Balmain clothes superbly but she looks all of Mrs Stone’s supposed fifty years and her beauty is affecting partly because it won’t last much longer (she was dead six years later).   The character’s few moments of relative happiness are poignant, as when she emerges from an Elizabeth Arden salon with a rejuvenating new hairdo.  When she’s listening to someone, Mrs Stone is sometimes subtly attentive but often miles away:  Vivien Leigh conveys this fugue-like quality intriguingly.   Her hand movements, when the character’s fingers are nervously working the sash of a robe or wrapping the apartment keys in a lace handkerchief for their journey down to the street, are wonderful.  As in The Deep Blue Sea, she’s playing a woman whose poise is either natural or so long-practised that it seems natural – and this is both a kind of protective covering and a kind of straitjacket.  There are opportunities for her to be drily witty too; the ability to deliver a well-timed insult that Leigh showed in Gone With the Wind is still intact, in a register that’s quieter here but still incisive.

    As Paolo, the gigolo who finds Karen Stone more complicated and emotionally troubling than the women he usually services, Warren Beatty gives an interesting performance.  Getting the Italian accent and mannerisms requires evident effort on Beatty’s part but this isn’t a case of an actor losing rhythm or characterisation by focusing too hard on an accent.   The concentration he brings to the task seems to give Beatty’s playing an extra snap and to allow him to ‘find’ expressions and emotions that are authentic (and look or sound authentically Italian).  Beatty understands and gets across Paolo’s brittleness and petulance – his angry reactions on the two occasions when Mrs Stone laughs at him are particularly good.  Sometimes his understanding and his own intelligence are too apparent, and this tends to obscure the lesser intelligence of the man he’s playing.  But he embodies Paolo’s physical self-confidence perfectly and has a great bit running up the Spanish Steps.

    Apart from the two leads, the cast isn’t up to much, although Jeremy Spenser is all right as the fateful young man and Ernest Thesiger’s involved eccentricity gives an edge to the ruin he plays – an edge that’s lacking in most of the other Roman socialites.  (The depiction of their lifestyle is pretty crummy in comparison with the nearly contemporary La dolce vita.)  Coral Browne plays Karen’s unsuccessfully protective friend Meg – the character’s meant to be annoying but so is Browne.  Still, she’s better than the actors playing Karen’s other American friends, Viola Keats and Henry McCarty (who’s terrible), and, I think, than Lotte Lenya.  There’s no doubt that Lenya is vocally distinctive but the stress often lands on the wrong word and her acting is very deliberate.  The style in which Jill St John plays a movie starlet is even more clumsy and obvious than the writing of the role, which is saying something.  Jose Quintero, a famous theatre director, had never made a movie before and it shows:  he can’t get any rhythm going – scene after scene just sits there on the screen.  (Quintero never made another film.)  The score by Richard Addinsell is a curious mixture of what you’d expect in a tragic melodrama of the time and an anticipation of John Barry phrases – needless to say, the latter are the more interesting.   Cleo Laine appears and performs briefly as a singer in a club.

    28 November 2013

  • Sling Blade

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Billy Bob Thornton (1996)

    At the age of twelve, Karl Childers, an Arkansan boy with learning disabilities, killed two people and spent the next twenty-five years in a state mental hospital.  At the start of Sling Blade, he is about to be released; within a few months of his release, Karl has killed again and, in terms of physical location, he ends the film where he began it.  The pre-adolescent Karl’s victims were his mother and her lover.  (At first, Karl thought the man was attacking his mother – then he realised she was enjoying herself.)  A quarter-century later, Karl slays the viciously abusive boyfriend of Linda Wheatley, a thirty-something widow, with whose young son, Frank, Karl becomes fast friends.  (Money troubles drove the woman’s husband to suicide and Karl becomes a new father figure to the boy, who is now the same age that Karl was when he killed his mother.)  As Karl is about to leave his care, the head of the hospital explains that medical evaluations have repeatedly failed to detect any sign of persistent homicidal tendencies in him; when asked if he thinks he might kill again, Karl’s reply is ‘I don’t reckon I got no reason to kill nobody’.  He also reckons, however, that, faced with what was going on between his mother and her lover on the kitchen floor, he ‘done the right thing’; and whereas that killing was unpremeditated, Karl feels a moral obligation to get rid of Doyle Hargreaves, the alcoholic tyrant who’s making the lives of Linda and Frank a gruesome misery.  During his time in the hospital, Karl has learned to read and write and become a diligent Bible reader (‘I don’t understand all of it, but I reckon I understand a good deal of it’).  He is baptised just a few hours before he kills Doyle but the sixth commandment doesn’t prevent Karl doing what he’s sure he must do.  In his last conversation with Frank before Doyle’s death, Karl tells the boy, ‘You will be happy’, and there’s no doubt that Frank’s life will be happier with Doyle out of it.  Karl Childers is not just the protagonist of Sling Blade:  he’s its hero, and this makes the movie morally challenging.

    I was impressed by Sling Blade, and by Billy Bob Thornton as Karl especially, when I first saw it.  Fifteen years or so on, Thornton’s performance remains impressive but it’s admirable rather than overpowering second time around, and I now noticed other things, and bigger weaknesses, in the film, which Thornton expanded from a twenty-five-minute short, Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade, that he wrote and starred in, and that George Hickenlooper directed, in 1994.  Shortly before he leaves the hospital, Karl is interviewed by a college student, who has read of his impending release and wants to write a piece about him.  Karl refuses to be asked questions so the interview takes the form of a barely interrupted monologue, in which he tells the girl about his upbringing and the circumstances in which he became a killer.  George Hickenlooper’s film is built around this monologue and ends once it’s over.  (The interviewer in the short is a young professional journalist, rather than a college student, and is played by Molly Ringwald.)  The monologue is a highlight of the feature too but the lead-up to it, in both films, hints at Thornton’s somewhat Manichaean approach to the material.  It’s an approach which may help to confirm the story’s Southern Gothic credentials (I saw Sling Blade again last month as part of BFI’s Southern Gothic season) but which detracts from the piece as a credible drama and, not unexpectedly, becomes a larger liability in the longer film.  (All the following references in this note are to the feature rather than the short.)

    Before the interview, Karl sits quietly in a room in the hospital and is joined by another patient, called Charles Bushman.  (This may be his real surname; it may be a nickname appropriate to the anecdote he tells Karl.)  Charles pulls a chair over and settles himself on it, very close to Karl.  The noise of the chair being dragged across the floor is a good detail.  The sound goes through you; you also get an immediate sense that it’s a sound Karl has heard many times before, signalling the approach of the pestering Charles.  J T Walsh, though, overdoes Charles’s clammy, nudge-wink lasciviousness, his filthy laugh.  The effect is not only to make the chaste, God-fearing Karl grunt and squirm with discomfort but also to exclude sympathy on the viewer’s part for a man who, like Karl, must have been diagnosed as mentally ill.  When Karl eventually returns to the institution, he, of course, has to suffer Charles again.  This time Karl speaks up and says he’s not going to listen anymore.  The moment is presented not only as a kind of breakthrough for Karl but also as a comeuppance for Charles.

    Karl, who has become deeply institutionalised, is treated decently by various people in the outside world – by the hospital head (excellent James Hampton), at whose home Karl stays on his first night out of care, by the boss (Rick Dial) of a small-engine repair shop, who gives Karl – a dab hand at mechanical work since he was a boy – a job and a temporary roof over his head in the workshop behind the premises.  An employee of a fast-food outlet called Frostee Cream introduces Karl to the French fries to which he becomes so attached.  (The employee is Jim Jarmusch:  it’s a very nice cameo, centred on the Frostee Cream man’s struggle to keep his hat from slipping and a menu from colliding with it.)   Then Linda (Natalie Canerday) lets Karl move into the family garage and, even when she learns of his past, has no qualms about his spending time with her son.   As Frank, Lucas Black is stronger in his physical acting than in his line readings (his facial expressions are often good); John Ritter, although he’s OK as Linda’s awkward gay friend and the manager of the supermarket where she works, is playing a character who seems a bit dated now.  All in all, though, the sympathetic people are not only sympathetically played – they’re in a majority among those whom Karl encounters after his release.

    The minority, as J T Walsh’s playing of Charles Bushman has foretold, are excessively unsympathetic.  There’s one exception to this:  Robert Duvall, by far the biggest name in the cast, who has a single scene as Karl’s father.  Duvall makes this man – who treated his learning-disabled son appallingly in the boy’s first years and who now lives in squalid isolation, still in the family home – repellent and pitiable.  (It seems that Robert Duvall was a kind of mentor to Thornton, who has said that Karl Childers was inspired partly by the character of Boo Radley, played by Duvall in his screen debut in To Kill a Mockingbird.)   Doyle Hargreaves is a major weakness, however – narrowly written and played by Dwight Yoakam as very intentionally nasty.  There’s not a hint of any kind of charm or insouciance, which might have given a clue as to what Linda Wheatley saw in Doyle in the first place.

    The role of Linda is underwritten.  There’s a suggestion at first that a soft heart and gullible nature get her into problematic relationships but, as played by Natalie Canerday, Linda’s not a fool.  If she was still attracted to Doyle and, against her better judgment, couldn’t resist sticking with him, there’d be at least some tension in the family set-up – but there’s no evidence of this:  she appears to want rid of him as much as Frank does.  (Since her husband took his own life because he couldn’t afford to look after his family, it might have helped if Thornton had suggested more strongly that Doyle could offer Linda and Frank relative financial security – which would understandably be important to Linda.)  The longer Sling Blade goes on (and it goes on too long: 134 minutes), the clearer it becomes that the reason Linda and Thornton can’t get rid of Doyle is that he has to stay around for the sake of a tragic climax and dramatic symmetry, in other words so that Karl can kill him.

    Billy Bob Thornton had a big critical and commercial success with Sling Blade (and won an Oscar for his screenplay) but it takes a lot to direct a first feature in which you’re playing the lead, especially if you’ve hardly ever had a starring role before in a full-length picture.   Although the film  is consistently absorbing, this is thanks much more to Thornton’s performance than to his direction.   He makes Karl intensely likeable and often funny; the various mannerisms of the characterisation – the clasping and rubbing together of his hands, the nervous, guttural sound often appended to Karl’s words – are fully absorbed.  Thornton the director’s touch is less certain.  Shots often seem to be held for much longer than they deserve to be (one of Linda, Frank and Doyle eating dinner comes to mind particularly).   A sequence involving Doyle and the other members of the rock band he plays with some evenings – which is meant to be tense until it erupts into violence – is remarkably lacking in overlapping dialogue.  The use of accompanying music (the score is by Daniel Lanois) is incontinent.  Thornton the writer, although he created some thin characters in expanding his original script, comes up with plenty of good dialogue – and some memorable turns of phrase for Karl Childers.  The film is named for the implement with which Karl killed his mother and her lover:  ‘Some folks call it a sling blade, I call it a Kaiser blade’.

    31 May 2015

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