Daily Archives: Tuesday, March 15, 2016

  • I Was Happy Here

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Desmond Davis (1966)

    Desmond Davis, now eighty-four, introduced the screening at BFI.   His cab was fifty minutes late and he was upset and embarrassed that the film was delayed because of him.   He handed the BFI person the microphone and read his notes; his hands were shaking.  He explained that I Was Happy Here represented a time when ‘some of us believed in a poetic cinema’, influenced by film-makers as different as Marcel Carné (Le quai des brumes was mentioned particularly) and John Ford.   Davis oddly and ruefully contrasted what he and kindred spirits were trying to do in the 1960s with the heartless technology and routinised violence in the products of twenty-first century Hollywood.  He went on to note how many of those involved in I Was Happy Here ‘are no longer with us’.  His flustered nostalgia made me sad even before the film was underway.

    I felt sorry at the end too because I Was Happy Here, although evidently a labour of love, isn’t very good.   Based on a novella by Edna O’Brien, who did the adaptation with Davis, it’s about Cass(andra), a young woman from a small seaside town – not much more than a village – in Ireland, who returns there one Christmas after her life in London has fallen apart.  Cass went to England a few years earlier, expecting her boyfriend Colin, a local fisherman, to join her there.  When he broke things off, Cass, living a lonely bedsit life in the vastly unfriendly metropolis, somehow got involved with an Englishman, a sports-car-driving rugger-bugger called Matthew Langdon.  A doctor about to start in general practice (with support from his wealthy parents), Matthew gets Cass pregnant.  They marry but she loses the baby (I wasn’t clear at what stage of the pregnancy).   The action of the film takes place over the course of one evening (into early the next morning), in combination with extensive flashbacks.  Cass has absconded, back to her roots; Matthew has followed her to Ireland with a view to reclaiming what he regards as his property.  Back home, Cass wants to recapture her old life and, especially, to see Colin again.  He readily agrees; they meet and start to make love in his fisherman’s cottage before he reveals that he’s now engaged to another girl.

    I suppose I Was Happy Here is ‘poetic’ in its description of Cass’s changing moods, in her occasional lyrical outpourings, in the look of the Irish landscape and of figures placed in it (the dramatically beautiful black-and-white photography is by Manny Wynn).  Yet it comes across as a literal-minded poetry, imposed rather than organic – poetry as a recipe, achieved by putting the correct ingredients together.  There’s no doubt, though, that without this kind of treatment the film would be trite indeed.   For much of the time, the unspoilt beauty of the Irish locale is contrasted with the malignant, noisy impersonality of London, and Matthew is set up as the villain of the piece.  Just as Desmond Davis contrasted independent British cinema of the 1960s with Hollywood blockbusters half a century later, as if there were nothing between, so Matthew seems meant to represent England.  Davis and O’Brien imply there were no other types of men in London available to, or interested in, a young, very pretty working-class Irish girl – who works as a petrol pump attendant (it’s at the garage that Matthew first meets her) and who isn’t so socially isolated that she doesn’t go out in the evenings (they next bump into each other in a pub).  Yet the story also confirms – of course – that a quiet life in the small Irish town is deadly to a would-be adventurer like Cass.  Eventually, she has to recognise what was obvious to anyone else from an early stage: that her nostalgic affection for her seaside homestead is built on sand.

    When we first see Cass on the beach in Ireland, Sarah Miles strikes a pose then acts out exaltation in a way that makes your heart sink at what’s to come.  She turns out to be better than might be expected and has some good bits when she’s not working for an effect but she’s still not up to scratch.  I admit a resistance to the ‘free spirit’ concept of the role.  (At one point, Cass escapes from the suffocating drinks party she’s gone to with Matthew and discovers a bicycle outside, which she steals – an impulsive act which just infuriated me.)  And there are some sequences which anyone would have struggled to bring off.  The one in which Cass sees a man in the street, rushes down from the upstairs of a London double-decker and, in her hurry to get off the bus, falls off it, is baffling.  (It turns out Cass is still so crazy about Colin she sees him everywhere – even, in this case, in the improbable disguise of a bowler-hatted city gent.)  She loses the baby she’s carrying as a result and there’s another bizarre scene when she goes looking for its grave and talks with a gravedigger (well played by Cardew Robinson).  But even if the script presents challenges to the actress playing Cass, Sarah Miles’s vaguely loony, neurasthenic presence is a further and persistent limitation:  her Cass isn’t a sufficiently robust spirit to seem weakened by the way her life is going.  In her one scene as Colin’s new girl Kate, Eve Belton, with her combination of appetite, vitality and innocence, gives you a sense of how Cass might have been played – played better and with greater pathos (because there’s a genuinely happy girl to turn unhappy).

    Sean Caffrey as Colin looks the part but lacks the charming insouciance needed to make it convincing.  You don’t believe that this seemingly sensitive boy, with a fiancée up his sleeve, would fall back into lovemaking with Cass so easily.  As a result, the revelation that he’s engaged feels artificially delayed to cause the maximum shock and distress to his old flame.  As Hogan, the patience-playing proprietor of the small hotel Cass has booked into, Cyril Cusack’s originality individuates a familiar character.  When Hogan starts musing about the uneventfulness of the place – partly to Matthew, partly to himself – the moment works dramatically (even poetically):  the Englishman is disconcerted by Hogan’s ambiguous tone.  Marie Kean (credited here as Maire Kean) plays another pub owner – as usual, she’s a strong but over-emphatic presence.

    Apart from the masterly Cusack, by far the most interesting performance comes – against the odds – from Julian Glover as Matthew.  Glover makes him more complex and appealing than this selfish, snobbish young man, with his scathing remarks about ‘bog Irish’, must have read on the page.   It’s not just that he shows Matthew to be emotionally needy – Glover shows him realising, with alarm, that he’s needy.   At one point Cass remarks how different Matthew is when the two of them are alone together.  It’s very effective when, later and at a critical point in their relationship, he reassures her that it’s not the real him when he’s in the company of his pals.  Remembering in this way shows Matthew as sensitive enough to have absorbed what Cass said earlier and shrewd enough to remind her of it, in the hope of winning her over.  When Cass snaps back that it’s not a matter of only one of these selves being the ‘real’ Matthew, he’s taken by surprise.  Julian Glover plays the scene expertly; it provides one of Sarah Miles’ good moments too.

    30 November 2010

     

     

  • I Remember Mama

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Stevens (1948)

    I didn’t realise that I was watching Ellen Corby but the presence of the future Grandma Walton in I Remember Mama is apt in retrospect.  For much of the film – adapted by DeWitt Bodeen from John van Druten’s Broadway hit (which was based on Kathryn Forbes’s autobiographical novel Mama’s Bank Account) – everything works out fine.  It works out fine even when your experience of family recollection movies leads you to expect the odd tragedy:  the Hanson family’s youngest daughter Dagmar is seriously ill with a mastoid but pulls through; the family cat (Uncle Elizabeth) is sick – the administration of chloroform helps it not on the way to eternal sleep but to a miraculous recovery.   Glad as I was to see this, the Hansons’ virtuous resilience gets pretty wearing – especially in a crisis surrounding a high school graduation gift for the narrator-protagonist Katrin.  Mama and Papa Hanson and their family contemporaries are Norwegian immigrants in San Francisco in the early years of the last century.   The tensions within the family – between Katrin and another sister, Christine; among Mama and her sisters – are laid out obviously.  The comedy of the domestic routines is innocuous but strenuous. As Uncle Chris Halvorsen, the head of the family, Oscar Homolka is definitely continental European (Austrian-born, Homolka was often assumed to be Russian) but he isn’t remotely Scandinavian.   His characterisation is laboriously colourful (unlike the others in the cast, he’d already played the role on stage) and makes the heavy going heavier.  The score by Roy Webb keeps telling you that the story being told is moving but you don’t feel it – not, that is, until the film’s last half-hour.

    That traumatic graduation night is a turning point for Katrin and for I Remember Mama as a whole. Her father allows his eldest daughter a cup of coffee to prove she’s an adult (it seems that kids aren’t allowed the drink) – Katrin’s so upset by the events of the evening that she takes only a mouthful or two before running upstairs in tears.  When the voice of her older self then announces on the soundtrack that ‘There’s a time to be born and a time to grow up … and a time to die too’, you expect what follows – given what’s gone before – to be a token recognition of death.  It turns out to be a lengthy but wonderfully rich sequence at the deathbed of Uncle Chris (a heavy drinker).  Oscar Homolka, although still pretty lively for a dying man, is relatively subdued and redeems himself here.   But what’s impressive is that you really do seem to be seeing the scene through the retrospective eyes of the older Katrin – whose narration is telling the story of her girlhood and of how she got published by recalling that girlhood in writing.  George Stevens captures the heat of Uncle Chris’s room and on the porch outside in a way that’s dramatically atmospheric but almost documentary.   The sequence is wonderfully lit by Nicholas Musuraca.  From this point onwards, everything in the film seems right, including the domestic comedy.  Light-hearted details of family housework back at the Hansons’ home – a window that won’t shut, Katrin’s brother Nels’s initiation into pipe-smoking – are juxtaposed with the heroine’s coping with the serious business of having a short story rejected.

    The quality of what happens in the home straight obliterates the well-behaved benignity of what precedes it.  By the end, it’s hard to believe that you were grateful – simply because there was so little other friction in evidence – for Christine’s exasperated envy of Katrin.  The finale also ties together what was laid out early on, particularly Mama’s careful approach to money.  To be fair to Stevens, his direction is very skilful throughout:  even in a particularly contrived sequence when Mama pretends to be a ward orderly so she can stay with Dagmar while the little girl’s in hospital.  The acting is strong throughout – and the eccentrically passionate Ellen Corby is one of the best performers.  Given Irene Dunne’s capacity for grand condescension, she’s extraordinarily good as the noble mother – her Scandinavian accent is convincingly absorbed.   And given what a pain Katrin might be, Barbara Bel Geddes is amazingly likeable – she’s genuinely sensitive and her emotions seem truly felt.  Philip Dorn is good as Papa; the other kids are played by Peggy McIntyre (Christine), June Hedin (Dagmar) and Steve Brown in the role of Nels.  You can’t help wishing, though, that the actor who played the role on stage – his Broadway debut – had reprised it on screen.  His name was Marlon Brando.  Florence Bates makes a welcome appearance as the successful lady writer-gastronome whose encouragement to Katrin (via Mama) helps deliver the happy ending.  As a lodger who never pays his rent, Cedric Hardwicke reads to the family from classics of English literature.  (When he makes a quick exit, he leaves them his wonderful library, along with a dud cheque.)   Hardwicke reads so marvellously it’s hard to believe in him as the actor manqué his character’s meant to be.

    18 January 2013

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