Daily Archives: Monday, August 24, 2015

  • The Strange World of Gurney Slade (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Alan Tarrant (1960)

    Why is it that some actors are so much better on television than in the cinema?   The obvious explanation of the reverse phenomenon is the ‘size’ of a film star’s overpowering presence.  The reasons why someone who makes their name in concentrated psychological drama on TV and fails to translate to a big action movie aren’t hard to work out either.  But what if there’s not that much difference in the physical scale of the pieces of television and cinema in which an actor makes such a different impression?  In The Hour, currently on the BBC, Ben Whishaw is not only emotionally precise and expressive – he’s charismatic too.  Could he replicate this kind of power on a bigger screen?  He was feeble in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; although he gave a fine performance in Bright Star, his John Keats was for the most part an unusually quiet protagonist and Jane Campion succeeded in creating an unusual intimacy between the principals and the audience.  Jon Hamm, a very different physical type from Whishaw, looks a master actor in Mad Men:  in his cinema roles last year in The Town and Howl, he was vague and unremarkable.  As a character antithetical to Whishaw’s in The Hour, Dominic West is no less excellent; several years on from his huge success in The Wire on HBO, his big-screen filmography hasn’t been much embellished.

    Apart from his Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist, I’ve always found Anthony Newley a rebarbative performer – self-aware, egocentric, excluding – whether I’m watching him in films or just listening to his singing voice.  It hadn’t occurred to me that, on the small screen, Newley might have been a truly engaging actor.  The Strange World of Gurney Slade is proof that he was.  It’s because of that, as much as because this television series was so unusual for its time, that I found these two episodes of it shown at BFI so revelatory and enjoyable.

    Gurney Slade (the name of Newley’s character, taken from that of a town in Somerset) aired on ATV in the autumn of 1960.  Only six episodes were made:  according to Wikipedia, the first two (the ones screened at BFI) went out at 8.35pm and the last four were shunted into a graveyard slot of 11.35pm.  Newley was a big name at the time and was given free rein by ATV to develop this comedy vehicle.  It was written by the rapidly up-and-coming Sid Green and Dick Hills (who later wrote for Morecambe and Wise) and produced and directed by Alan Tarrant (who also did some late Hancock and Arthur Haynes’ The Worker in the first half of the sixties).   The Newley character often speaks to us in stream-of-consciousness interior monologue that has a wryly melancholy, philosophical flavour.  Early in the first episode, he walks out of his living room in exasperation with his family and neighbours and off the set, exchanging grumpy words with the producer – the alienation device rather anticipates the Armchair Theatre adaptation of N F Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle the following year.  Gurney Slade laments more than once being trapped in a television programme.  At the time, this may have been a comment about Newley’s own plight as a celebrity but it now comes across as a striking foreshadowing of The Truman Show, made nearly forty years later.

    There are surrealist elements – Gurney romances with a girl in a poster on a hoarding who comes to life; they take the vacuum cleaner she’s advertising on the swings in a park; other inanimate objects are as vivified as the people Gurney encounters (a newspaper transforms itself alarmingly and passes moral judgments on Gurney, a voice issues from the bowels of a dustbin).   The suburban (North London, by the look of the street signs) settings are so impeccably familiar that they intensify the surreal effects.  It’s not hard to see why The Strange World of Gurney Slade flopped on ATV in 1960 and has developed a cult following in its afterlife.

    In the very first scene, in the overpopulated sitting room of Gurney’s house, Newley seems to be doing too much, working to draw attention to himself – just as I’d have expected.  Once he’s out of the house and heading down the street in his buttoned-up light-coloured mac, his movement is comically inventive yet you still feel his priority is to remind you he’s talented.  Because of this, it took a little while for me to warm to him:  I suspected he was comfortable because he had the camera to himself.  But the longer I watched Newley, the more charming I found him.  He reads the bizarre lines naturalistically, and with great control, and makes them consistently funny.  And he does interact – especially in conversation with a (talking) mongrel dog but with human beings too, including us.  You feel you’re really on Anthony Newley/Gurney Slade’s wavelength.

    There’s a serious risk in this kind of set-up that the rest of the cast will try to make too much of their small parts but no one overdoes things and nearly everyone’s effective – notably Una Stubbs (as the poster girl), Dilys Laye, Keith Smith and Norman Pitt in the first episode, and Hugh Paddick, Edwin Richfield and Anneke Wills, who was at BFI for the screening, in the second.  The agreeable, eccentric music by Max Harris, conducted by Jack Parnell, seemed very familiar.  It turns out it’s been used in other well-known television programmes subsequently.  (I think I recognised it from Vision On.)

    11 August 2011

  • Rosemary’s Baby

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roman Polanski (1968)

    This highly entertaining horror story is hard to enjoy because of the resonant coincidences between Ira Levin’s fiction and real life.  What may have been in-jokes at the time the film was made seemed horribly bad jokes a year or so later.   Roman Castevet, the leader of the New York coven at the heart of the tale, shares his first name with the picture’s director.  The full name is an anagram of Steven Marcato, the son of a martyr to the Satanist cause, who lived in the same New York apartment building where the main action of Polanski’s film is based.  Castevet is anagrammatically only a letter or two away from the surname of the movie’s male lead, John Cassavetes.  Released in the US in June 1968, Rosemary’s Baby has as its protagonist a woman raped and impregnated by the Devil.  In August 1969 Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, was one of five people murdered in California by followers of Charles Manson, members of ‘The Family’.

    The movie is a reminder that Polanski’s blackly pessimistic sensibility predated his wife’s murder yet he seems to have had fun making the film, which makes what happened after the event all the more uncomfortable to think about.  This was his first picture in Hollywood and you sense that he felt the Levin book, which Polanski adapted for the screen, was dramatically enticing but superficial stuff.   His light-cum-cold-hearted approach and outsider’s treatment of the American settings and humour are largely why the film works so well – its stylishness has the odd effect of both intensifying and alleviating the nastiness of the material.   Polanksi’s direction keeps you absorbed and uneasy:  you’re never certain where the protagonist Rosemary Woodhouse’s hallucinations and paranoia end (if they do end) and the reality begins.   The speed of movement of much of William Fraker’s camerawork, the unpredictable cuts, the dream sequences (and the crucial scene that you assume is one such sequence until Rosemary cries out, ‘This isn’t a dream – this is really happening!’ then wakes, assuming it was a dream) – the combination of these elements keeps Polanski in control and the audience off balance.

    The story is beguiling too because it’s propelled by a singular mixture of biology-psychology and showbiz satire.  Rosemary’s anxieties and terror are an extreme illustration of what we understand to be the potentially traumatic aspects of pregnancy – a woman’s fears about what’s happening to her physically, about why she’s eating strange things, of being alone and/or at the mercy of doctors, of her partner finding her changing body no longer attractive, of what she might eventually give birth to.  Yet Rosemary’s predicament is thanks to her actor husband Guy selling his soul so that the black magicians next door can help him get a lead in a Broadway play.  (The rival originally cast goes suddenly and unaccountably blind.)

    As Rosemary, Mia Farrow is so touching, such a perfect embodiment of emaciated fragility that it can be hard to watch her distress.  She looks almost too young for child-bearing (reminding you that Dean Martin is alleged to have said to Frank Sinatra, when he married Farrow, ‘I’ve got Scotch older than she is’).  She’s also, retrospectively, an iconic late-sixties image in this film – the clothes, which she looks great in, as well as the Peter Pan haircut.   John Cassavetes is very convincing as Guy:  from the word go, you perceive a man who fancies himself and is selfish enough to betray his wife for his career – when he does so it both makes sense and makes you laugh because the betrayal takes such an outlandish form.  Sidney Blackmer is arresting as Roman Castevet and although Maurice Evans, as the Woodhouses’ friend Hutch, isn’t part of the coven, his weirdly deliberate Englishness makes him not much less sinister than Roman.  Ralph Bellamy is the genially sinister Dr Sapirstein, Rosemary’s obstetrician, but – in an amusing echo of Roman and Hutch – it’s Charles Grodin as the dull, conventional younger man that Sapirstein usurps who is creepier (thanks especially to his unimpressive, fungal moustache).

    The star turn is Ruth Gordon as Roman’s wife Minnie.  Her determined scene-stealing is pretty outrageous but very funny.  Gordon’s caricature of New York Jewish nosy neighbour is familiar – but familiar from such a different type of film that it makes Minnie’s supernatural proclivities vivid and startling. The haunting, sinister lullaby music is by Polanski’s compatriot Krzysztof Komeda. I’d never heard of Komeda until I looked him up on Wikipedia just now.  He died at the age of 37 in April 1969 as the result of brain injuries sustained in an unexplained accident in Los Angeles in the autumn of the previous year.  I better stop before I start looking for more believe-it-or-not fatalities that followed the making of this variously memorable film …

    18 October 2010

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