Billy Budd
Peter Ustinov (1962)
In an unusual and effective introduction, each member of the ship’s crew speaks his name over the opening titles – reporting for duty. During the course of Billy Budd we hear plenty more of some of these voices: there’s a lot of dialogue in Peter Ustinov and DeWitt Bodeen’s screenplay. Melville’s novella, unfinished and first published in 1924, more than thirty years after his death, had also been adapted for the theatre in the meantime, in 1949. The film may be stagy in some respects but it’s not static – the ship, HMS Avenger, functions as a single set of a peculiar, and naturally dynamic, kind. All the actors are conscientious but some are less than fluid performers in the presence of a camera. You see them preparing their faces for delivery of their next line or reaction: it’s odd that Ustinov, whose facial and vocal expressions as the Avenger‘s captain shift rapidly and effortlessly, doesn’t seem to see the awkwardness of some of those he’s directing. Billy Budd, although it’s deeply flawed, is a strong picture – I’m so glad I’ve seen it at last. Ustinov directed only a handful of feature films during his long and variously prolific career; this is the only one he’s likely to be remembered for but it’s more than enough. He tells a gripping story: although something goes wrong with it in the second half, the puzzle of exactly what that is actually makes Billy Budd even more absorbing.
The something may reflect weaknesses in the original which, according to Pauline Kael, Melville continued to wrestle with and wasn’t satisfied by – but Ustinov’s own performance as Captain Vere is part of the problem too. He has been most impressive up to the point at which Claggart, the sadistic and self-hating master-at-arms, dies at the hand of the young sailor Billy Budd. Claggart schemes to implicate Billy in a planned mutiny on the ship and, in Vere’s presence, accuses him of being a conspirator. Billy is so outraged by the false charge that he can’t speak and strikes out with his fist instead of words – Claggart hits his head as he falls to the ground and dies of the injury. In the court martial that follows, I assumed that Vere would play a Pontius Pilate role; when he switches abruptly into prosecuting counsel mode, it’s jarring. The script too lurches into dialectic – a kind of pared down, high-speed reversal of the jurors’ change of heart in 12 Angry Men. Not having read the Melville, I don’t know which part of Ustinov’s characterisation is wrong but part of it must be. The way he plays it, the transformation of the mildly exasperated, somewhat fatuous Captain Vere into the by-the-navy-rulebook fanatic who persuades the other officers to find Billy guilty makes no sense.
The cast also includes, among others, Melvyn Douglas (rather pompous as ‘The Dansker’, a wisdom-spouting Danish sailor), Paul Rogers and John Neville (both good as, respectively, Vere’s first and second lieutenants), David McCallum, Lee Montague, Robert Brown and Cyril Luckham. John Claggart can’t cope with the innate goodness he sees in Billy Budd and it’s evident that his discomfort is increased by his feeling a physical attraction towards the young man. The latter isn’t made crudely obvious in the film but, because Billy’s physical beauty serves also as an expression of his spiritual beauty, the effect of the homoerotic element is unusual – concentrated and powerful. Robert Ryan is perhaps too good and natural a screen actor to be comfortable in the role of Claggart. He expresses a lot by economical means – the words can seem almost superfluous – and, because this is a man who has to keep a lot hidden, the camera sometimes lingers on Ryan without finding more: the film comes to a halt at these moments. But Ryan’s playing of Claggart pays off in the crucial night watch dialogue with Billy – and in his look of satisfaction as he dies, knowing that he’s done for Billy too.
One of the problems Ryan faces is that Claggart is essentially an interesting idea rather than a character. This might seem to pose an even greater challenge to the actor playing Billy (the script demands too that he’s sufficiently capable of anger to land the fatal blow required to take things forward but serene in a slightly puzzled way as he awaits execution). It’s a challenge that Terence Stamp rises to in this famous screen debut. His physical rightness for the role is liable to obscure how good Stamp’s acting is. (Watching him here made me think I’d been unfair in explaining his effectiveness in Theorem.) Billy, press-ganged from a merchant ship called The Rights of Man, appreciates his popularity among the crew of the Avenger but is innocent of how he achieves it. Stamp’s Billy has a natural charm; he’s able to deliver lines in a way that makes you believe that the thought behind them has just come into Billy’s head. The crowning example is Billy’s last words, as he’s about to be hanged from the ship’s yardarm. He feels he ought to say something and exclaims, ‘God bless Captain Vere!’ This is the climax of Stamp’s performance and of the film: the words have tremendous emotional impact, for the audience and on Vere himself. It’s so important to Billy Budd as drama that the title character is not merely symbolic. Terence Stamp makes Billy convincingly slow of thought and pure of spirit and humanises him.
The striking black and white photography is by Robert Krasker. The editing both at the beginning of the film and in the finale makes it somewhat confusing as to what’s happening on board although it’s all too clear, in the symbolic scheme, that Billy is taken from a ‘ship of peace’ to a warship (in the novella the ship’s name is Bellipotent) and that military imperatives trigger the ending to the story. A closing voiceover says something about justice and law. By this stage, however, pieties can’t compete with the powerful currents of good and evil that Ustinov’s Billy Budd has developed.
1 May 2013