Monthly Archives: November 2015

  • Backbeat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Iain Softley (1994)

    Film4 put some money into Nowhere Boy so it was no coincidence that I came back from seeing it on Sunday to find Backbeat showing that evening on television.  (Each commercial break in the Film4 screening included a trailer for Sam Taylor-Wood’s movie.)  It was chronologically convenient to see the two films in this sequence:  apart from a brief (but resonant) prologue, Backbeat picks up virtually at the point that Nowhere Boy ends – as the Beatles embark on their first residency in Hamburg in 1960.  Iain Softley’s film ends in mid-1962 (shortly before Pete Best was fired from the band and replaced by Ringo).  It focuses on the relationships between John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe and Sutcliffe’s German girlfriend, the photographer Astrid Kirchherr.  Softley wrote the screenplay with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward; according to Wikipedia, it’s based largely on interviews which the director conducted in 1988 with Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann (her boyfriend before Sutcliffe and, as I learned from the closing legends here, the designer of the ‘Revolver’ album cover and subsequently a member of the Plastic Ono Band).

    Stuart Sutcliffe is the pivotal character in Backbeat and this works both for and against the film.  Watching it clarified in my mind a fundamental weakness of Nowhere Boy:  it’s difficult to believe that the teenager played by Aaron Johnson grew up into John Lennon.  If the person playing someone as famous as Lennon doesn’t evoke the real thing he needs to create something magnetically different and Johnson, although he seems a competent actor, fails to do that.  There are no such problems with Lennon here:  that may be partly because he’s essentially a supporting character but it’s also because Ian Hart has a real feel for, and gets across, what you believe to be important qualities of John Lennon – his wit and aggression, and how he uses words (most of the time) to express that aggression.  Hart is good too at acting Lennon singing.  (The Beatles’ voices are supplied by a collection of American rock band singers.)  An actor playing Stuart Sutcliffe doesn’t have to deal with the audience’s expectations in the same way:  Sutcliffe is a shadowy, ill-fated figure whom we know only from Astrid Kirchherr’s photographs.  Stephen Dorff, who plays him, reflects rather too well our idea of Sutcliffe:  Dorff is a rather vapid, amorphous presence.  You could argue that this confirms the sense of mystery that surrounds Sutcliffe and Dorff’s wan glamour does help to make him a credibly obscure object of Lennon’s and Astrid’s desire.  It’s a limitation, though, in scenes in which Sutcliffe needs to be the motive force.  As Astrid, Sheryl Lee has a very arresting look (she was Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks) and her face seems perfect for the cropped hairdo.  Like Dorff, she’s more pictorial than dynamic but that does at least increase the impact of her emotional breakdown when Sutcliffe dies, of a brain haemorrhage.  Jennifer Ehle’s performance as Lennon’s future wife Cynthia Powell – already apprehensive about what fame for the Beatles might mean for her life with John – is much better than in later, better-known performances I’ve seen from her.

    Backbeat begins in Liverpool:  Lennon and Sutcliffe are in a bar, where a girl singer is performing indifferently (Marcelle Duprey does the bad singing very well).  They get into a fight with her boyfriend and his sidekicks.  Sutcliffe is badly beaten; as he falls to the ground, he hits his head against a wall and we’re meant to think this caused the injury which eventually kills him.   (Wikipedia says that Sutcliffe sustained a skull fracture in the fight and that this wasn’t treated at the time.)   The screenplay sets up the main themes of the story efficiently.  Lennon and Sutcliffe met at art college in Liverpool and the competing imperatives of painting and rock ‘n’ roll are clearly laid out.  (Sutcliffe left the Beatles to concentrate on his art:  I hadn’t realised that his work had been so successfully exhibited after his death.)  The alleged extent to which Astrid Kirchherr influenced the Beatles’ look when they first became stars and the progress of their career in Hamburg are conveyed neatly and believably.  (They start off as little more than a backing group for strippers at the Kaiserkeller; their residency is interrupted when they’re deported to England because George Harrison is underage and resumed after his eighteenth birthday.)  The unresolved nature of the love between Lennon and Sutcliffe, however, is pushed too hard into the dramatic centre of the story.  Lennon’s angry paranoid anxiety that people think he’s queer is one thing but some of the embraces between the two boys, and a couple of remarks that Lennon makes, are too emphatically ambiguous.  There’s also a clumsy, florid scene, when Sutcliffe comes back to the apartment he shares with Astrid to find her and Klaus (Kai Wiesinger) watching news of the erection of the Berlin Wall.  Sutcliffe gets the wrong idea, beats up Klaus and trashes the place and Astrid’s photographs.  By contrast, an exchange between Astrid and Lennon, in which she asks him what he’ll say about her when he’s famous, is well written and very well played by Sheryl Lee and Ian Hart.

    Backbeat is nothing special and it’s a missed opportunity in terms of a description of life within the Beatles during their time in Hamburg – the characters of Paul (Gary Bakewell), George (Chris O’Neill) and Pete Best (Scot Williams), and their relationships with Lennon and Sutcliffe, are very sketchy.   But I preferred the film to Nowhere Boy:  at its best – in the opening sequence in the Liverpool pub and Ian Wilson’s atmospheric photography indoors and outdoors in Hamburg – it has a gloomy friction that’s hard to shake off.   It brings to life a Beatles prehistory and the various levels of personal tragedy experienced by Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr, John Lennon and Pete Best.  The film creates a sense of darkness, from which the Beatles broke into elating light as 1962 became 1963.

    31 December 2009

  • Baby the Rain Must Fall

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Mulligan (1965)

    The triumvirate of Robert Mulligan, Horton Foote and Alan Pakula, after their success with To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), teamed up again for this unsatisfying but oddly touching film.  The opening credits of Baby the Rain Must Fall announce that it’s based on a play by Foote called The Traveling Lady.  The movie begins with Georgette Thomas, young daughter Margaret Rose on her knee, travelling on a bus to a new place and stage of her life.  It’s therefore a pretty safe bet that the film will end with Georgette moving on elsewhere.  And so it does, although the significance of the final sequence – thanks to Don Murray, as the local lawman who drives Georgette and Margaret Rose en route to somewhere else – is more interestingly uncertain than you might expect or, perhaps, than Horton Foote intended.   At the start, Georgette is travelling to be reunited with her husband Henry, just released from jail, but still on parole, for stabbing a man – he’s been inside long enough never to have seen his daughter until now.  As an orphan, the boy Henry was taken in by a spinster called Miss Kate, who still dominates his life.  Henry is the lead singer and plays guitar in a rockabilly band that performs in local bars and he wants a career as a musician.  Miss Kate wants him to ‘go back to school’ (although he’d be a rather mature student).  The setting here is small-town Texas rather than Alabama but, as with Mockingbird, Mulligan realises the locale very well, with the help of Ernest Laszlo’s photography and Roland Anderson’s art direction.  The large, white skies that dominate the parched mundanity of the landscape and the people in it are resonant.  The film has elements of Southern Gothic – the look of Miss Kate’s house and housekeeper, the adjacent cemetery and Henry’s climactic, knife-wielding desecration of his callously charitable guardian’s grave – but Horton Foote doesn’t have a Gothic appetite.  He has a penchant – and, although his approach is emotionally limited, a talent – for tidily dramatising the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, for revealing them to be extraordinary.

    Unquestionably a star, Steve McQueen wasn’t a bad actor either yet, whenever he’s making efforts to act seriously, the starlight dims.   Henry Thomas – a free spirit with a guilty conscience – is terrified of being sent back to ‘the pen’.  When he wakes from a nightmare that he has been returned there, Henry sits on his bed as Georgette tries to reassure him and McQueen, locked into Henry’s bad dream, is mesmerising.  At a moment like this you’re not conscious of McQueen projecting anything; you seem to be looking into him and he’s fascinating to watch.   But when he consciously interprets Henry, McQueen seems dutiful, uncomfortable.  I wasn’t sure from reading the BFI programme note whether he’d done his own singing:  even if he had (according to IMDB his voice was dubbed by someone called Billy Strange), I think he might have given the impression of miming because he acts singing too strenuously.  There’s no connection either between McQueen and Lee Remick as Georgette.  Remick is an intelligent, conscientious actress but she’s bland.  Georgette has a sweet, melancholy quality but she lacks poignancy because the unassailably ladylike Lee Remick isn’t able to suggest that this young woman’s beauty and resilience have survived through force of will and against the odds.  The best acting comes from Don Murray, as Henry’s boyhood friend Slim, now a childless, grieving widower and the deputy sheriff.   Murray conveys Slim’s loneliness subtly but powerfully:  sadness seems to have taken over every inch of his tall, thin body; his voice, when he tries to strike up friendly conversation, seems to be coming from a long way away – from another, lost world.  He wears his sheriff’s hat in most scenes:  it’s the effect of his removing it – and the fact that we can see his face out of hiding and sense someone edging back into life – that gives that last sequence in the car its ambiguous impact.

    Robert Mulligan occasionally undoes good work by clumsy underlining.  Henry helps his daughter to plant a chinaberry tree – or the beginnings of a chinaberry tree – in the earth outside the place where he, Georgette and Margaret Rose are living.  When you see the chinaberry in the corner of the frame, it’s affectingly fragile; Mulligan kills the effect by presenting its vulnerability as a central image, as Henry’s unhappy ending approaches.  Mulligan also appears to have orchestrated the supporting players to be a shade overemphatic.   Kimberly Block (in her only screen role, according to IMDB) is natural and affecting as Margaret Rose but the adults are too theatrically alert to be fully believable creatures of the world they inhabit.  You get this right from the start as an elderly woman strikes up a conversation with Georgette on the bus:  Zamah Cunningham is too eager – as a performer – to start chatting, although she quickly establishes a character. The same is true, in somewhat larger roles as local women, of Carol Veazie and Ruth White – they’re incisive and entertaining but their every look and line reading is prepared, nothing is spontaneous.  Given the conception of the character, it’s hardly surprising that this is even more the case with Georgia Simmons as Miss Kate but Estelle Hemsley is good as her housekeeper.    Paul Fix is the local judge; according to IMDB, Henry’s band includes an uncredited Glen Campbell.   The title song, with words by Ernie Sheldon and music by Elmer Bernstein (who also wrote the film’s score), is slightly intriguing heard in snatches but boring when it’s fully performed.  Even so, Wikipedia reports that Glenn Yarbrough’s version of it reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.

    12 August 2010

     

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