Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Victim

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1961)

    Brian Robinson, introducing John Coldstream (as curator of the Dirk Bogarde season at BFI), informed us that Victim was a big box-office hit and in its opening weekend took more money than The Guns of Navarone.  I left before the Q&A – including  Coldstream and two of the film’s cast, Sylvia Syms and Peter McEnery – as the applause was ringing out in NFT1 (now with its new, very red seating).  I probably should have stayed because there were at least two questions in my mind.  Did audiences in 1961 flock to the film because they wanted to see a picture about homosexuality or Dirk Bogarde in a drama-thriller?  And was the audience gathered for the film’s half-century acclaiming a piece of socially progressive propaganda or a work of art?  It’s difficult, in a number of ways, not to respect Victim, and Bogarde for playing a role that was meaningful to him personally but which contradicted his screen image.  The film, written by Janet Green and John McCormick, aims to be an unequivocal protest against the law of the land which made homosexuality a ‘blackmailer’s charter’.  Victim – now the subject of a study by Coldstream (also Bogarde’s biographer) in the BFI Classics series – was initially banned in the USA; over here, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act passed into law slightly less than six years after its original release.  I took with a pinch of salt John Coldstream’s view that Victim made a legal difference (his intro was admirably clear) but it can’t have done any harm – and the film is a masterpiece compared with, say, Losey’s anti-capital punishment piece Time Without Pity (1957).  The plight of the Bogarde character, a brilliant lawyer called Melville Farr, whose sexuality threatens a stellar career at the bar, and the grinding unhappiness of most of the lives he touches, have an increasing emotional weight as the story progresses.    Yet I also found Victim (which I’d seen before, but not for many years) a little annoying and rather ridiculous – thanks to its combination of melodrama and solemn rectitude.

    The melodrama has some unfortunate effects.  By the end of Victim, we’ve encountered so many homosexuals – some obviously gay, others in due course unmasked – that it’s hard to disagree when the vicious bigot who’s the prime mover in the blackmailing plot (a middle-aged spinster, played by Margaret Diamond) seethes that ‘They’re everywhere!’  An elderly hairdresser, four times imprisoned and now planning to get out of London and make a new life Canada, has a neatly-timed fatal heart attack when, shutting up shop for the day, he receives a menacing visit from the other blackmailer (Derren Nesbitt), a shades-wearing motorbike rider whose dodgy haircut is, in the circumstances, confusing.  Each gay character is introduced by Basil Dearden in ways that are almost literally heavy-handed.   Norman Bird as a secondhand bookseller has to make himself a cup of tea and pours milk from a bottle with a hard-to-miss tremor; Nigel Stock as a car hire salesman tamps down his pipe tobacco in a gesture of furious repression; the camera records these hand movements emphatically.    There are one or two crappy ‘artistic’ flourishes.  Farr’s wife Laura teaches disturbed children (presumably because she’s realised this is as close as she’ll get to having any kids of her own):  we see a little boy doing a drawing of a face and then, as the watching Laura turns her attention to a newspaper with a story that increases her suspicion of what’s going on in her husband’s life, the boy obliterates the portrait with destructive brushstrokes.

    The rectitude is embodied by Bogarde.  He’d played Sydney Carton in the 1958 cinema adaptation of  A Tale of Two Cities and here’s another ‘far, far better thing’ that he does, as Melville Farr tracks down the blackmailers and, in order to bring them to justice, sacrifices his own reputation.   Farr’s rectitude has at least one reactionary effect.  We’re given to understand that, although his friendships with men are somehow abnormal, he hasn’t actually had gay sex.  The inadvertent implication is that his abstention from fully homosexual relationships raises his moral standing.  The impact of Bogarde in this role must have been startling.  It’s a comment on what he did subsequently that, within a decade, the casting would have seemed obvious.   For that reason, it’s hard to look at his face here, peel away the layers of self-recrimination he constructed in later roles, and see it as freshly conscience-stricken.   He’s expert but, if he’s affecting, I think that has more to do with the person we think Dirk Bogarde was offscreen.  His essential problem here is that the screenplay is so preoccupied with its progressive message that the main characters are underwritten as human beings.  Bogarde isn’t given the opportunities he deserves to dramatise what it means to Melville Farr to find his professional life, and the marriage that’s an intrinsic part of it, under siege.  The political requirements of the project reduce the protagonist’s dilemma.

    The same applies to the character of Laura, the judge’s daughter Farr wed when she was only nineteen – a marriage of convenience to her husband in more ways than one.  When, near the end of the film, Laura asks her husband what he wants her to do, it reminds you that Victim is describing a social order which now seems benighted in terms of the balance of power between men and women, as well as sexual behaviour.  Sylvia Syms is a limited and an obvious actress but she’s moving when she asks this question because she persuades you that Laura may not have an opinion of her own.  However, the condition of the Farrs’ marriage isn’t well worked out (or conveyed at any rate) – again, one suspects, because the film-makers, although they’ve taken on a controversial subject, pussyfoot around some of its implications.  Laura’s widowed brother (Alan MacNaughtan) tries to find out about the physical side of things between his sister and her husband; these siblings are so discreet in what they say that we’re none the wiser.   If Laura were a more sophisticated woman you could believe that her reply to her brother – ‘Yes, it’s been all right’ – is a simple euphemism but Syms’ Laura seems too artless for any kind of subterfuge.   That naivety makes it harder to believe too that (as we’re supposed to accept) she knew about Farr’s sexuality before they were married and accepted it.  Is it likely that a protected upper middle-class teenage girl of the fifties would have known much, if anything, about homosexuality?   It’s nearly incredible that Laura would have had the self-confidence to think she could get it out of her husband’s system.

    When I wrote a note on The League of Gentlemen the other week, I wondered whether Philip Green’s martial score, although Basil Dearden used it effectively, would have been any different in a film that was straightforwardly admiring of British military men.   Green’s excessively ominous music here, especially in the early stages, could hardly have been higher-pitched if Victim had been a send-up of a dark secrets thriller; and Dearden, perhaps because he believed strongly in the message of the film, tends to overdo things.  Some of the playing in the smaller parts may be relatively strong because the director thought these roles less important and the actors are less pressured in them.  Hilton Edwards and David Evans are especially good as a camp couple who turn out to be engaged in a form of extortion other than the central blackmailing.  They sit and eavesdrop conversations in a pub whose regulars include some other vivid characters – a blowsy, middle-aged bottle blonde (Mavis Villiers), and Donald Churchill as the pal of ‘Boy’ Barrett (Peter McEnery), the young man Melville Farr got too friendly with but who tried his best to keep the blackmailers off the barrister.  It’s Barrett’s suicide in a police cell that draws Farr inescapably into the intrigue.  Anthony Nicholls and Peter Copley are covertly gay pillars of the legal establishment, Dennis Price a well-known actor who’s part of the same clique.  Charles Lloyd Pack is a frightened barber. The two policemen on the case are a liberal-minded detective inspector (well played by John Barrie) and his puritanical sidekick (badly played by John Cairney).  Alan Howard has a cameo as a sexually ambiguous friend of Barrett’s, another married man.

    3 August 2011

  • Le Boucher

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claude Chabrol (1970)

    A butcher by profession is revealed to be a serial killer who knifes his young female victims.  His psychological profile is no less obvious.  Popaul has been brutalised by fifteen years in the army, during which time he returned to his home village only once – for his mother’s funeral.  (He hated his father – also a butcher.)  He seems drawn to Hélène, the headmistress of the village school, through a combination of sexual desire and emotional retardation.   In comparison, Hélène is, for a while anyway, an enigma – like Popaul, we wonder why this poised and beautiful woman is also solitary.  Yet when she explains that she had a hurtful experience in love ten years ago and doesn’t want to get involved again, she tells us all there is to know about her.  The themes of Le Boucher are uninspired but it’s engrossing and sometimes powerful, thanks to a combination of the two lead performances, Claude Chabrol’s assured handling of conventional thriller elements, and a more distinctive, near-documentary realisation of the Perigòrd village in which the story takes place (some of the actual villagers play minor roles in the film).

    The cave paintings over the opening credits – like Hélène‘s conversation with her pupils about Cro-Magnon man, as her class walk among the stalactites on a school trip to the caves – seems bogus and pretentious in its implicit linking of the murders with primitive instincts or behaviour.  You don’t feel that Popaul’s crimes illustrate a larger human condition:  they reflect the psychopathology of a particular man (even if the lack of imagination in Chabrol’s writing runs the risk of making the character a stereotype rather than an individual).  The dissonant music by Pierre Jansen is largely superfluous as a means of either suggesting psychological aberration or creating emotional tension.   Jean Rabier’s lighting, however, is very expressive:  it often resonates with what Hélène and Popaul are thinking or feeling.  There are some striking images – of sun through trees, umbrellas at a funeral, Popaul’s disappearing into the dark at the foot of a flight of stairs in the schoolhouse.

    Le Boucher opens with a wedding breakfast to celebrate the marriage of Hélène’s colleague Léon Hamel.  In this leisurely but absorbing sequence, Chabrol provides fine observation of local ritual and sets in motion the relationship between Hélène and Popaul, who are seated next to each other at the banquet (his shop supplied the main course, which he carves for her).  The interactions between them that follow – on the walk back from the reception, when she invites him to dine on the leg of lamb he’s presented her with (which, as Pauline Kael noted, is like a bouquet) – draw us in.  Chabrol describes the life of the village, and the impact of the killings on the villagers, with great skill.  When a murdered girl is discovered in a neighbouring location, a woman in the village’s boulangerie is not just morbidly interested – she likes the idea that the killing might put the area on the map.  When the next murder occurs and the victim is Léon Hamel’s young bride, we sense the stunned change of attitude in the community at a murder which is appallingly close to home.  The shock of learning the identity of this second victim repeats and enlarges the shock of her blood dripping over the edge of a crag onto a schoolgirl’s face and food below, as Hélène’s class picnic after their visit to the caves.  (This is the film’s most famous moment – although its showiness makes it a bit too salient.)

    Jean Yanne keeps the sinister signals to a minimum.  Although it’s clear from an early stage what Popaul will turn out to be, Yanne provides a rare example of a screen serial killer who verifies the real-life cliché ‘He seemed like a decent, ordinary bloke’ – yet he’s never innocuous.  Popaul eventually talks to Helene about killing people and killing animals and says that ‘The blood all smells the same’; the moment works because Yanne turns this into a matter of fact but almost baffled observation (even if Chabrol has a broader, schematic point about human bestiality in mind).  Hélène’s panic in the school, as she runs round locking doors and windows, is essentially, and largely comes over as, a generic trying-to-keep-the-killer-out sequence – but it’s strengthened by the alluring self-possession which Stéphane Audran gives to Hélène and which, in the course of the story, is revealed as an act of will and gradually dismantled.

    The Wikipedia article notes that ‘Critics have argued whether or not it is not Popaul who is responsible for what he does but rather society and in a sense Helene, for denying him affection (sic)’.  (Gavin Millar, whose Sight and Sound review was used for the BFI handout, is evidently among those critics.)  I’m not fully convinced by this because it seems such an obvious and tired idea to impose on the story (and how does it connect with the men-are-beasts thread?) but the interplay between Audran and Yanne provides some justification of it.  Hélène has the kids in her class dress in eighteenth-century costume and perform a formal dance in the gardens of the school.  When she mentions to Popaul that she’s going to do this, he talks about joining in – saying that he likes ‘playing the fool’.  It’s startling when he does so, in period clothes and wig, but smoking his usual cigarette.  The scene, which is peculiarly upsetting, vividly conveys the distance between him and Hélène (who’s wearing her normal clothes):  it shows Popaul both as a hopeless courtier and as a boy who wants to impress the teacher.  (He’s told Hélène that he loathed his actual teacher in the village school – Hélène is the ideal teacher he never had, as well as the lover he needs, and the mother he misses.)

    A little later, in the woods, collecting mushrooms with two of the children, Popaul asks Hélène why she lives alone, and there’s a strong and convincing tension between them.  She never loses her poised, charming smile as she answers – we realise that smile is not an invitation but a way of keeping a self-controlled distance.  Popaul likewise remains amiable yet we feel (and share) his desire to get closer.  He’s repeatedly on the point of abandoning the attempt but he can’t get rid of the itch to know more; Jean Yanne expresses this almost physically as he asks more questions – haltingly, tentatively, with a needling, forced casualness.   And when Popaul turns the butcher’s knife on himself and Hélène holds him, before driving him to hospital, we sense that he is fulfilled by the embrace – and by her kiss shortly before he dies.   I may have got it wrong but, for me, the duration of that kiss not only suggests guilty atonement for her previous coolness but also confirms that Hélène has been harbouring real feelings for Popaul.  (This chimes with her showing herself at an earlier point in the story desperately ready to dismiss what looked to be incriminating evidence against him.)   Driving back to the village from the hospital, Hélène gets out of her car and the film’s last shot is of her sitting, deep in thought, in the Perigòrd countryside as dawn breaks.   Chabrol suggests that she will never get Popaul out of her mind.

    22 June 2009

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