Daily Archives: Tuesday, July 7, 2015

  • Margaret Thatcher:  The Long Walk to Finchley (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Niall MacCormick (2008)

    The Long Walk to Finchley is described on Wikipedia as a drama and on IMDB as ‘Biography, Drama’.  The latter does acknowledge that it’s a ‘light-hearted retelling of the true story’ of Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long campaign to become a Member of Parliament – a campaign that eventually succeeded when she was elected the MP for Finchley at the 1959 General Election.   In fact, Tony Saint’s TV screenplay is nothing if not a comedy, and a broad one at that.  This is clear from the sarcastic title that ridicules the idea of comparison of this political leader with Nelson Mandela, and relies, as so many British writers before Tony Saint have relied, on the belittling effect of English place names.  IMDB’s ‘true story’ is questionable too, as Saint’s smug subtitle (‘How Maggie Might Have Done It’) makes clear.  Srdjan Kurpjek and Mario Takoushis’s jaunty music underlines the facetious spirit of the piece.   Margaret Thatcher first stood as a parliamentary candidate in the General Election of February 1950, in the safe Labour seat of Dartford.   This film doesn’t bother to explain how she was selected as a candidate there; in view of the difficulties she encounters in finding another constituency that will have her, this might seem a surprising omission – but that’s how shallow The Long Walk to Finchley is.   Although there’s reference to her studying for the bar, Mrs Thatcher’s qualifying as a barrister is glossed over when she briefly decides to give up any hope of a political career.  If she’s not going to the House of Commons, she’s destined to be a housewife.

    The comedy in The Long Walk to Finchley comes often in the form of jokes that rely on the viewer’s prior knowledge of Margaret Thatcher’s future incarnation as a cabinet minister and then prime minister.   Once we hear the aspiring politician stress a commitment to free milk for all British children, we can practically guess the geddit lines to follow.  On honeymoon with Denis, his new wife kicks up a noisy fuss because they’ve been overcharged by a French waiter.  ‘When will you ever go the jungle?’ Margaret’s infant son Mark asks his twin sister Carol, circa half a century before her triumph in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!  In case you don’t pick this up, Mark then asks his mother if he can go to Africa one day and promises he won’t get lost there.  These jokes aren’t confined to the Thatchers – they extend to Edward Heath, although in a different and more personally unkind register.  Immediately suspicious of what he sees as Margaret Roberts’s uncompromising political ambition, the young Heath, to stress the importance of being a team-player in politics, uses the analogy of an orchestra but he’s seen by others, even in his early thirties, as a hopelessly confirmed bachelor and described, to his face, as preferring ‘to be alone with your organ’.  Once he becomes an MP in 1950, Margaret is encouraged to cultivate Ted as a political mentor.  He mistakes her clumsy flattery (‘With men like you thrusting forward …’) for a sexual approach and is terrified.

    It’s not surprising that most screen depictions of Margaret Thatcher to date have made fun of her.  Her influence on British life was large and largely destructive – if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.   As the reception of The Iron Lady three years on from this BBC film made clear, anything other than outright mockery of Thatcher is liable to be seen, in this country anyway, as contemptibly sympathetic towards her.  Although the jocose tone of The Long Walk to Finchley is very different from that of the confused Iron Lady, Tony Saint and the director Niall MacCormick hit the same problem that any account of Margaret Thatcher’s early political life is liable to hit:  the class and misogynist prejudices that she’s up against in the Tory establishment of the day, even when the grandee-chauvinists are as crudely caricatured as they mostly are here, are enraging enough for you to start rooting for her.  The film-makers try to get round this by having Margaret sometimes use her ‘feminine’ side to break through – she pretends to be tearful and strategically adjusts her skirt length and so on (see too the image on the DVD sleeve for The Long Walk to Finchley[1]).  I guess that Saint and MacCormick thought this would be effective because it makes fun of their protagonist as well as her antagonists but it still leaves you on the side of someone you feel you should be finding as loathsome as the real thing was.  It’s interesting too that suggesting, even for satirical effect, that Margaret Thatcher knew how to look good is enough to get an angry reaction in some parts of the British press.  In a Guardian article of June 2008 (‘Margaret Thatcher a style icon? Do me a favour’), Zoe Williams described the casting of Andrea Riseborough as Thatcher as ‘ludicrously flattering’ to the woman she was impersonating.

    Andrea Riseborough’s portrait is essentially a lampoon but she’s very witty.  In view of how much she has to say, it was probably a wise decision on Riseborough and Niall MacCormick’s part, because a relief for the audience, to give us a Margaret Thatcher more voice-trained than she may have been in the 1950s.  At first, the script is anxious to nail her lack of a sense of humour.  It always seemed to me that Mrs Thatcher was something worse:  she thought, mistakenly, that she did have a sense of humour, and Andrea Riseborough captures that well.  The way she tilts her head and looks pained at what an interlocutor is saying looks silly until you remember that Thatcher really was like this, at least by the time she was running the country.   Riseborough gets well-judged support from Rory Kinnear, who plays Denis rather sympathetically.  Samuel West has the decency to make Edward Heath, gnawed by political anxiety and emotional fearfulness, a substantially uncomfortable fellow.   Within the well-populated old boy networks of the Conservative Party, Oliver Ford Davis is amusing as the chairman of candidates and Geoffrey Palmer outstanding as John Crowder, the long-standing MP for Finchley whom Margaret Thatcher succeeded, virtually over Crowder’s dead body.  Palmer expresses Crowder’s reactionary misogyny as something seriously felt and meant – which gives impetus to Andrea Riseborough’s coruscating dressing-down of him, as the Finchley constituency party prepares to select its parliamentary candidate for the General Election of 1959.

    1 July 2015

    [1]  http://tinyurl.com/o7uv7q4

     

     

  • The Misfits

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Huston (1961)

    An expedition by the principal characters into the Nevada Desert, to capture then sell wild mustangs, is at the heart of The Misfits.  The mustangs are described by the aging cowboy Gay Langland (Clark Gable) as ‘misfit horses’ and the trio trying to round them up are misfits too – or, perhaps, ‘ex-fits’:  Gay and his friend Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift) have been left behind by the decline of cowboy culture; Gay’s other friend Guido (Eli Wallach), who piloted a fighter plane in World War II, is stuck in a job as a car mechanic in Reno.  The attempted roping of the mustangs is the most arresting part of, and makes for a powerful climax to, John Huston’s film.  This is partly because of the stark beauty of the monochrome images created by Huston and his cameraman Russell Metty – the dark horses and the men struggling with them in the white expanse of desert.  It’s also because the episode is shocking, at least to a twenty-first century viewer who expects that no-animals-were-harmed in the making of a film.  These horses are visibly and audibly frightened.

    There’s a kind of correspondence between this upsetting evidence of the horses’ distress and the reality of what was happening, or about to happen, to the stars of the picture.   Clark Gable, who insisted on doing some of his own, physically demanding stunts, suffered a heart attack two days after filming ended in early November 1960 and was dead within a fortnight:  The Misfits was released on what would have been his sixtieth birthday.  Montgomery Clift was already in a bad way when he made this film, although he had two more important performances still ahead of him (in Judgment at Nuremberg and Freud) before he died, aged forty-five, in 1966.  The fourth member of the group in the Nevada Desert, the one woman accompanying the three men, is the recently divorced Roslyn Taber.  She is played by Marilyn Monroe, whose marriage to Arthur Miller, who wrote The Misfits, was disintegrating as shooting began.  Monroe died in August 1962 and this was her last completed film.  Thank goodness for the compensating biography of Eli Wallach, who survived to be ninety-eight (he died in 2014) and whose marriage to Anne Jackson lasted sixty-six years.

    It’s to these off-screen facts of life and death that The Misfits owes its, by now, mythic status.  John Huston, as quoted by Gerald Pratley in The Cinema of John Huston (1977), saw the characters in Arthur Miller’s story as:

    ‘… the holdouts, as it were, against the stamped-out, factory-made article.  The ones who were in revolt against this movement, but who didn’t know it themselves, were pursued and harried and put-down the way the horses were …’

    Miller’s writing of these people, however, is characteristically (that is to say unintentionally) condescending; and their – or their creator’s – verboseness sounds ridiculous in the vastness of the desert landscape.  The misfits are small and pitiable, or would be if the screen personalities interpreting them didn’t make them bigger.  (Miller’s treatment of his dramatis personae is more exposed in the performance of Eli Wallach, a good actor but not a star, and in minor characters like Thelma Ritter’s Isabelle Steers, who disappears abruptly and conveniently from the story – so that Isabelle isn’t involved in the desert expedition.)   The presence of Monroe, Gable and Clift – what they mean to the viewer through other performances and from what we know, or think we know, about their own lives – gives The Misfits an unarguable heft.  There’s a pent-up pressure under Miller’s words and the performances that draws you in.  Alex North’s ambitious, impassioned score expresses something of this, even if it feels too big for the actual story on the screen.

    Marilyn Monroe seems wan and preoccupied in her early scenes.   According to Huston, ‘sometimes she would hardly know where she was’, let alone know her lines, and the sequence in which Isabelle is coaching Roslyn on what she needs to say at her upcoming divorce hearing is particularly painful to watch.  As Roslyn starts to enjoy life with Gay and Guido, Monroe seems more with it – although it’s hard to tell if this is thanks to Huston’s clever shaping in the editing room.  There’s a particular moment – Roslyn repeatedly jumps from a step outside Gay’s house and back up again – where the actress, as well as the character, looks to be really enjoying herself.  Although one doesn’t associate Clark Gable with Westerns (you can count on the fingers of one hand the number listed in his Wikipedia filmography), his magnitude as a Hollywood star is enough to make his superannuated cowboy Gay Langland seem iconic.  Gable didn’t have great range as an actor but his wary quality here is compelling.  Montgomery Clift is a surprisingly introspective choice to play a rodeo performer (albeit an unsuccessful one) but he’s appealingly different from the other men in the story – you can understand why Roslyn is, for a time, drawn to him.  Clift’s playing of Perce’s phone call to his mother, in his first scene in the film, is the finest piece of acting in The Misfits.

    25 June 2015

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