Daily Archives: Saturday, November 14, 2015

  • An Englishman in New York (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Richard Laxton (2009)

    Effectively a sequel to The Naked Civil Servant, An Englishman in New York covers the period of Quentin Crisp’s long life from his departure from England to New York in 1981 until shortly before his death in 1999, a few weeks before his ninety-first birthday and the new millennium.  The director, Richard Laxton, has worked mainly in television – he directed the praised Hancock and Joan, which I found unwatchable.  The writer Brian Fillis authored The Curse of Steptoe, much the best of the quartet of TV films of which Hancock and Joan was part.  The first ten minutes of An Englishman in New York are so creaky that I nearly didn’t go any further.   In the opening sequences, there’s next to no suggestion of any contrast between the reality of NYC and how Crisp saw it – that is, as a place where any individual could be herself or himself without being threatened.  The movement of the camera over the actors’ faces is stiff and the acting is wooden, especially from the theatre audience at Crisp’s early one man shows in America.  Even after the film improves, there are some very ropy bits.   Quentin Crisp’s career and reputation within the gay community took a dive when he described AIDS as ‘a fad – nothing more’:  there’s a scene here in which he’s confronted by a group of enraged gays, led by a man whose partner is dying of AIDS, which is staged in crude mimicry of sequences in The Naked Civil Servant where Crisp is set upon by ‘roughs’ in the streets of London.  (There’s also one glaring continuity error.  Even accepting that Quentin Crisp likes to ring the changes with his shirts and scarves, it seems too much for him to put on a different colour combination in the course of going from outside a building to inside.)

    The Naked Civil Servant – written by Philip Mackie, directed by Jack Gold and produced by Verity Lambert – was brilliantly hard-edged:  the style of the film chimed with the stylish nihilism of its protagonist.  Because it was also a great story of bloody-minded survival and became the epitome of Crisp’s achievement of stardom, the LWT film also has a triumphant quality, which has grown over the years.  An Englishman in New York, by contrast, has an often sentimental feel, which seems alien to the spirit of Quentin Crisp.  Laxton, Fillis and John Hurt as Crisp also have a more fundamental problem on their hands.  The bons mots in the book and screen version of The Naked Civil Servant are enjoyable partly because they were created by someone in obscurity, as far as the general public was concerned.  Some of the ones I heard for the first time in this film are very good (‘I don’t believe anyone has rights – if the human race got what it deserved, we would starve’) but, once Quentin Crisp became a celebrity, his penchant for shocking epigram became a practised professional habit, and, as such, a bit boring.

    Yet An Englishman In New York won me over.  By the end, its weaknesses don’t seem so serious – and to say that the film still isn’t in the same class as The Naked Civil Servant is hardly to disparage it.  The wan music (by Paul Englishby) eventually gives way to the song that gives the movie its title and which Sting wrote about Quentin Crisp:  its sprightly melancholy makes it one of Sting’s most successful songs and, because it was written in 1987, when Crisp was still going strong, its elegiac quality is more complex now.  Crisp’s relentless iconoclastic witticisms also develop a new dimension once we realise that they’re an essential part of how, in old age, he kept himself going, kept his brain working.  It’s good this film wasn’t made immediately after Crisp’s death:  the interval has given John Hurt more time to grow closer to the right age for the elderly Crisp (Hurt is now coming up seventy).  In light of the success of The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp described Hurt as ‘my representative on earth’ and that phrase has an extra meaning now that Crisp is no more.  (You hope, for his sake, that he’s no more:  he writes in The Naked Civil Servant that ‘The one thing I would not wish on my worst enemy is eternal life’.)   John Hurt doesn’t in the least rely on his original interpretation of Crisp to make his performance in Englishman effective but you can’t help being reminded that it has been, for all the excellence of his work in 10 Rillington Place,  I Claudius and The Elephant Man,  the highlight of his career.  He has some marvellous moments here:  when the elderly, ailing Crisp applies his make-up in a kind of determined trance; when – looking incredibly ancient as Crisp playing Queen Elizabeth in Sally Potter’s Orlando – he utters the queen’s quiet demand that Orlando never grow old.  And what gives Englishman its own individuality is the skilfully developed description of three of Crisp’s relationships during his years in New York:  with a gay magazine editor and critic called Phillip Steele (according to Wikipedia this is an amalgam of two of Crisp’s friends, Phillip Ward and Tom Steele); the painter Patrick Angus; and a theatre performer known as Penny Arcade (real name Susannah Ventura).

    Phillip Steele invites Crisp to write film reviews for his magazine.  It’s hard to work out what these reviews actually consisted of.  We see the pair coming out of a cinema showing Tootsie; Steele asks Crisp his opinion and Crisp replies, ‘I enjoyed it very much.  Mr Hoffman is very brave.’  Later on, he has a commendatory one-liner about ET too.  (ET and Tootsie are both wonderful films but I’d have preferred to have heard Quentin Crisp’s views of Annie and Gandhi, which appear to be on at the same cinema – the place clearly specialises in pictures with one-word titles:  Diner is also showing there.)  Steele and Crisp fall out over the AIDS controversy but their friendship resumes and develops in Crisp’s last years.   As Steele, Denis O’Hare is especially good in the later stages of the relationship, running errands for the geriatric Crisp to and from his tiny Manhattan apartment (and himself aging very convincingly).  Crisp insists on continuing to use ‘Mr’ in addressing all and sundry – an affectation both archaising and distancing; the moment that he starts calling Steele by his forename heralds an unaccustomed dependence and closeness.  (We gather that, in his late eighties, Crisp was suffering from an enlarged heart and psoriasis and in remission from prostate cancer.)  Brian Fillis develops the character of Steele gradually and intelligently.  When Crisp says, early on, to Steele that he looks ‘frayed around the edges’, I wrongly assumed this was the first sign of AIDS-related illness.  It transpires that Steele has just ended a love affair:  I understood from what followed that, taking a leaf out of Crisp’s book, he stays solitary from then on.

    If that’s right, it chimes unhappily with the relationship involving Patrick Angus.  He’s a regular in the audience for Crisp’s one man show; in these sequences, Jonathan Tucker acts a little too eagerly but things get interesting as soon as he starts up a conversation with Crisp in the latter’s regular choice of diner.  I got to like Tucker’s performance very much.  When he laughs at Crisp’s bleak, lapidary pronouncements, Tucker has a ring of real truth – the laughter speaks delight and desperation.  When they get talking in the artist’s studio, Angus comes out with things like ‘I think love is impossible’ and we see that Quentin Crisp is much less comfortable hearing his own pessimistic epigrams quoted back at him by someone whom he likes and who’s having an unhappy life.  Angus dies of AIDS:  his gay-themed work was successfully exhibited posthumously, according to the film.  As Penny Arcade, Cynthia Nixon makes an over-emphatic entrance – which is very awkwardly staged – but she gets over touchingly the real affection Penny feels for Crisp.   (They have a long-running stage partnership.)

    An Englishman in New York confirms that Quentin Crisp, when regarded as a ‘gay icon’, was radically misunderstood.  Early on in the film, a gay man in the theatre audience, exasperated by some of what’s being delivered from the stage, misguidedly rounds on Crisp, yelling ‘You used to be a pioneer!’  The exchange is clumsily done but a reminder that Crisp’s promotion of individuality could never, with any kind of thought given to what he said and wrote, have been confused with a gay rights crusade.   Even if his description of homosexuality – during his later, controversialist phase – as a ‘terrible disease’ is to be taken with a pinch of salt, Crisp consistently saw his sexual orientation as one doomed to failure.    He reminds his theatre audience of a central tenet of The Naked Civil Servant (I’m paraphrasing):

    ‘For people like me, the object in life is to win and keep the love of a great, dark man – a real man.  The definition of a real man is that he cannot love members of his own sex.’

    Of course, as Fillis’s screenplay makes clear, Crisp’s sexual outlook doesn’t apply to gay men generally.  (He appears to like to think it does:  when he and Phillip Steele visit a gay bar and Crisp sees punters dressed as construction workers, he reflects tartly that ‘To get a great, dark man you obviously must first look like him’.)  But I’m sure it was true for him and that it’s true for others.  Crisp’s farewell stage appearance in America, before departing for the speaking tour of Britain during which he died, is in Florida (Phillip Steele gets him there).  We see him performing and the gay audience giving him a rapturous reception.  This may be misleading in implying that he was, after all, a queer hero – it may seem like the film-makers having it both ways.  But it’s credible in illustrating what is an unarguable aspect of Crisp (né Denis Charles Pratt)’s personality.  As the audience applauds and cheers, John Hurt, with a beatific smile on his face, mouths ‘Thank you’.  He reminds us that Crisp loved to be in the limelight without the fear of its exposing him to abuse or assault.  In this moment, Laxton and Fillis create a genuinely powerful resonance with a scene from The Naked Civil Servant ­ – the great sequence of the evening under starlight in Portsmouth, when Quentin Crisp encounters a group of sailors, who gather round him curiously, laugh at him but also with him, and do him no harm.

    30 December 2009

     

     

     

     

  • The Public Enemy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wellman (1931)

    You can see why the opening and closing legends, which assert the film’s moral purpose, were needed.  They tell us that syndicated crime is a vicious growth, thriving in the prohibition era and which must be rooted out, and stress there’s nothing appealing about gangsters.  The fact that James Cagney’s Tom Powers is such a potent and attractive character makes it less than easy to follow Warner Bros’ injunction.  Cagney’s physical versatility and relaxation are amazing:  are they a legacy of the decade he spent in vaudeville (including some time in non-musical theatre) before his Hollywood debut in 1930?  There’s no doubt that his movement often has a dancerly grace and definition but it always looks natural (his hands are also very expressive).  His characterisation of Tom Powers – a juvenile delinquent then a senior one (without ever seeming to grow up) – has great colour and real subtlety:  you experience the cruelty and the charm.

    This trim, taut film is famous for making Cagney a star and for the scene in which Tom, at the breakfast table, plugs half a grapefruit into his girlfriend Kitty’s face.   The fact that Kitty (Mae Clarke) is a whinger and the clip is so well known doesn’t make it any less startling in the context of the film as a whole because the characters are so involving and the momentum of The Public Enemy is so strong.   Other sequences seem to anticipate what grew to be conventions of gangster pictures or tropes of Hollywood melodrama more generally.    When Tom shoots a man, William Wellman cuts from the man singing at the piano (he is worth shutting up) to Tom with the gun.  We see Tom shoot and the music stops but we don’t see the man receive the bullet.   At the end of the film, a phonograph record keeps going round on the turntable, the needle stuck in the groove, after the song (‘I’m Forever Blowin’ Bubbles’) has ended.  There are also some strong images which still feel individual – like Tom’s adoring mother’s plumping up a pillow as she makes up Tom’s bed in readiness for his final homecoming.  (He comes home as a corpse.)   Wellman uses newsreel footage of New York as a prologue to the opening scenes, set in 1909, and that prologue is followed by scenes of Tom and his lifelong sidekick Matt Doyle as kids.  These sequences are the weakest in the picture:  they seem both forced and tentative.  The young performers as a group aren’t much to write home about and Frank Coghlan Jr, who plays the boy Tom, has nothing that connects with Cagney.  The best of the bunch is Frankie Darro as the boy Matt – you can believe he’d grow up into either Cagney or Edward Woods, who plays the older Matt.

    The adult performances are a pretty mixed bag too.  On the plus side there’s Jean Harlow and Joan Blondell.  It’s astonishing that Harlow was only nineteen when she made this:  you’d think she was in her mid-twenties (in fact she died when she was only 26) and an established star.  As the amusingly glamorous Gwen, she’s very funny in her first meeting with Tom (Cagney’s funny too) and affecting in her disappointment when he leaves for a criminal engagement and she realises what his priorities are.  As Matt’s girl Mamie, Joan Blondell is excellent – precise and charming but instinctively knowing her place in the cast hierarchy (it’s not surprising she had such a successful career in supporting roles).  Edwards Woods is good at getting across Matt’s lifelong, affable subservience to Tom.   Leslie Fenton has an amusing cheap suavity as a sharply-dressed mobster called Samuel ‘Nails’ Nathan and there’s a bellicose verve in Robert O’Connor’s portrait of the bootlegger Paddy Ryan.  On the debit side, Frank Cook is boringly melodramatic as Tom’s censorious elder brother, a shell-shocked war veteran, and Mia Marvin is pretty ropy as a squalid hostess.  Beryl Mercer, who plays Ma Powers, does the part in what seems an outdated, specifically theatrical style, although you can’t doubt her emotional engagement with the role.   There is a fine moment when she visits Tom in hospital, where’s he lying full of gunshot wounds, and she lays her head on the sheet cuff.  Cagney’s gesture in touching her hair is beautifully restrained and eloquent.  The screenplay is credited to Kubec Glasmon, John Bright and Harvey F Thew (from a novel by Bright called Beer and Blood).  The cinematographer is Devereaux Jennings.

    8 July 2009

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