The Raging Moon
Bryan Forbes (1971)
Bruce Pritchard (Malcolm McDowell) is a jack the lad in his early twenties, from a Northern working-class family. At the start of The Raging Moon, he’s playing in an amateur soccer game: he scores a goal that’s disallowed and gets sent off for arguing with the ref. After the match, Bruce goes back to the home of his parents (Jack Woolgar and Patsy Smart), with whom he still lives. So does Bruce’s elder brother and antithesis – plodding, wary, virginal Harold (Geoffrey Whitehead) – but he’s getting married next day and Bruce will be best man. At the wedding reception, Bruce and his pal Terry (Chris Chittell) enjoy themselves, chatting up girls and getting drunk. Later that evening, Bruce starts feeling ill and passes out. When we next see him, he’s lying in a hospital bed, struck down by a disease that has left him paralysed from the waist downwards and which is incurable. With his life stopped in its tracks, Bruce feels embittered and ashamed: he wants to cut himself off from his family and friends and he goes to live in a church-run home for the disabled somewhere in the country. Bruce rails against the petty rules and regulations of the place and the cold-as-charity smugness of the people in charge. One of the other residents, Jill Matthews (Nanette Newman), piques his interest but Bruce keeps his distance at first and, when they eventually talk, his belligerent sarcasm puts her off. Bruce seems to have missed his chance when Jill leaves the institution and returns to live with her affluent parents (Norman Bird and Constance Chapman) and enjoy the attentions of her long-term fiancé (Michael Lees). Jill quickly realises, however, that ‘normal’ life isn’t going to work. Her infantilising mother is smothering; her fiancé is embarrassed but grateful when Jill decides they don’t have a future together. She comes back to the institution and this time Bruce doesn’t miss his chance. He and Jill fall in love. They plan to marry and they want to have sex. They consummate their relationship one night. The following day, Jill dies.
A digital restoration of The Raging Moon was premiered at this year’s London Film Festival. Bryan Forbes’s widow, Nanette Newman, and the film’s editor, Timothy Gee, attended and joined the BFI curator Jo Botting on stage for a post-screening conversation. Needless to say, the BFI hadn’t supplied enough mikes for three people[1] but Jo Botting was, as always, agreeable and well prepared, and Nanette Newman, who’s eighty-one now, looked amazing. She recalled that her husband had a full-time job as the head of EMI when he made The Raging Moon; she also stressed the unusual nature of the material, particularly its sexual aspect, for a movie of the early 1970s. I’d seen the film once before, I guess in the mid-1970s, but remembered little beyond the basic plot. I’d forgotten too the source of its title: Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’, the second stanza of which is spoken as a prologue to the action[2]. As I watched the film, I couldn’t quite see how the title was apt. Bruce Pritchard wants to be a creative writer but this isn’t integral to the plot in the way the male lead Toby’s literary ambitions are in (to make the obvious comparison) Forbes’s The L-Shaped Room. Once I’d read up on the source material, the title made more sense. Peter Marshall’s novel The Raging Moon was published in 1964, when its author was twenty-five. Marshall had contracted polio, which left him virtually paralysed, seven years earlier. His autobiography, Two Lives, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1963. In 1967, Marshall adapted The Raging Moon into a one-hour television play, as part of the first series of Boy Meets Girl (the main parts were played by Ray Brooks and Anna Calder-Marshall). He appears not to have been involved in the writing of the big-screen version. He died, the year after Forbes’s film was made, at the age of thirty-three.
The adjective in the title is remarkably incongruent with the tone of the film. It’s plain, even without knowledge of Peter Marshall’s own life, that The Raging Moon is meant as a reminder that paraplegics have emotional and sexual needs like anyone else. But Bryan Forbes, in spite of what Nanette Newman said about his relishing the challenge of the material, is determined to subdue the more uncomfortable aspects of the story and disinclined to allow the characters complexity. Casting the lovely, gentle Newman as Jill has a sweetening, simplifying effect: she has some effective moments but her fragrant presence and limitations as an actress combine to ensure nothing is too upsetting. One of the strengths of The L-Shaped Room was Forbes’s refusal to shy away from the destructive, dislikeable qualities of Tom Bell’s Toby. In contrast, Forbes seems nervous of allowing Bruce to be hurtful. The young man has good reason to be bitter about the disease that’s put him in a wheelchair but Forbes treats his anger as a righteous anger tout court, and limits its impact. He presents Bruce with a kid-gloves condescension that he wouldn’t extend to an able-bodied protagonist. Bruce’s sharp tongue and uncooperativeness stand out as subversive, in the days following his arrival at the institution, only because all the other residents are so uniformly uncomplaining; and Forbes is impatient for Bruce to turn into a ‘nicer’ person than he was when he could walk. He acclimatises very abruptly (indeed – since he’s not yet close to Jill – prematurely), amiably playing chess and table tennis with fellow resident Clarence Marlow (Michael Flanders), whose invitations to join in games Bruce previously rejected. (Michael Flanders was himself a wheelchair user for much of his life, after contracting poliomyelitis while serving in the navy during World War II.)
One is more aware of Forbes’s muffling tactics – and less willing to accept the reformed character of Bruce – because Malcolm McDowell’s vivid pugnacity at the start of the film makes a strong impression. As a result, one wants to know more of how Bruce thinks and feels about being suddenly and permanently disabled but, except for his occasional sarky outbursts, he keeps morosely quiet until he falls in love with Jill and has a new raison d’être – and an opportunity to regain some of his bolshy energy, by rebelling against small-minded attempts to thwart their relationship. The film is evasive even about the nature of the illnesses that paralyse him and extinguish her – as if it would be tasteless to go into this kind of detail. We’re told that Bruce’s affliction isn’t polio but not told what it is. Jill’s paralysis is the result of polio but, for some time before she and Bruce eventually sleep together, she is confined to bed with ‘a virus’. I wasn’t clear if the virus proved unexpectedly lethal or if we were meant to assume it was physically dangerous for someone with her long-term medical condition to have sex. Whatever the explanation, the unfortunate implication of the finale is that Jill’s one sexual experience is enough for a lifetime (it’s one more sexual experience than she expected to have) and that it finishes her off.
The Raging Moon is inferior to Bryan Forbes’s best-known 1960s films (Whistle Down the Wind, The L-Shaped Room, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, The Whisperers) – and things don’t bode well from an early stage. The opening credits are accompanied by one of two poor numbers written for the picture by the often good song-writing duo, Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. (A third original song, ‘Long Ago, Tomorrow’ by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, supplied the otherwise meaningless title the film was given on its US release.) The early scenes of Bruce’s home life and Harold’s wedding reception are crude and protracted social commentary (even if Malcolm McDowell’s excellent acting drunk at the reception is some consolation). Forbes is scornful of or hostile towards numerous characters throughout the film, and his cast tends to follow suit: Margery Mason, as the matron of the home, and Geoffrey Bayldon, as the sanctimonious chairman of its board of trustees, are particularly striking examples; dependable Forbes regulars like Bernard Lee (a relative, taking inept photos at the wedding reception) and Gerald Sim (the vicar attached to the home) show their quality only occasionally here. Forbes’s screenplay and direction are mostly very unsubtle: the story would have much more traction if some of the powers-that-be who exasperate Bruce and Jill were more appealing to the audience. If they were, it might disturb our complacency – and make us feel that we too, although sympathetic to the young couple’s situation, don’t fully appreciate what it must be like to be them. The playing of the able-bodied people whom Forbes likes is richer and these characters are more convincing. This is especially true of Barry Jackson and Georgia Brown as Bill and Sarah Charles, a married couple on the staff of the institution. George Hilsdon is good too, in the small part of a commissionaire there. Although his role is unenviable, Geoffrey Whitehead has a strong moment when Harold, after travelling with Bruce to the home, awkwardly kisses his brother’s head before leaving him.
The camera movement is stiff and Forbes’s preference for close-ups limiting. When, for example, matron interrupts a relaxed get-together of Jill, Bruce, Sarah and Bill, the scene would be more dynamic if we were given a sense of the characters in physical relation to one another, instead of tight facial reaction shots. Forbes lacks the visual style to bring off a sequence in which the wheelchair users rebel and whizz round the grounds of the home – although this bit does come as (relatively) comic relief. There are regularly interleaved images of the natural world – bare winter trees, snow-covered ground, blossom in bud, a couple of birds preparing to mate: this symbolic underlining of developments in the main story is embarrassingly banal. After Jill dies, a shell-shocked Bruce wheels himself into the games room and, with the encouragement of Clarence, picks up a table tennis bat. Forbes fades out on a shot of the two men playing. He seems to be implying that life, though tragic, goes on (or doesn’t, as the case may be) and that Bruce Pritchard has grown up to recognise that. It’s fortunate that the aggression behind some of Malcolm McDowell’s table tennis shots gives a bit of astringency to this closing message.
15 October 2015
[1] See note on One Floor Below.
‘Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.’