Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Hamlet for Schools (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Tania Lieven (1961)

    Part of the BFI’s ‘UnLOCked’ season, which links to this year’s ‘World Shakespeare Festival’.  (Even though this is a showcase year for Britain, the timing of the Festival is odd, only four years before the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.)  It was frustrating that neither the programme note – a brief run through the relatively few Shakespeare productions on British commercial television – nor the introduction to the film supplied more information about the production.  When I got home and looked it up online, I discovered there were two versions of Hamlet produced by Associated Rediffusion in the autumn term of 1961 – each with a different director and cast and screened, on either side of the half-term holiday, as five weekly episodes.   This raises questions I don’t know the answers to – such as what proportion of schools had television in 1961, and what English teachers thought about pruning the text to fit the programme schedule. This Hamlet, with the five episodes stitched together in a recording retrieved as part of the discoveries in the American Library of Congress in 2010, runs for 123 minutes including closing credits (the most obvious cuts include the opening scene on the ramparts).   The BFI monthly programme booklet and note for the screening made a lot of how much playing Hamlet meant to Barry Foster, and the screening was introduced by his widow Judith Shergold, a likeably unconfident public speaker.  I hope it was a slip of the tongue when she described how her late husband had tried unsuccessfully to track down the recording and ‘the BBC said they knew nothing about it’.

    I like to think it was consideration for the needs of people preparing for exams, as well as limited technical resources, that caused Tania Lieven and her cast to put themselves at the service of the text rather than try to dazzle the audience.   There’s a good deal of conscientious but unremarkable acting from the likes of Neville Jason (Horatio), Peter Copley (the Ghost) and David Sumner (Laertes).  Jennifer Daniel’s very limited Ophelia is more of a problem.  Judith Shergold talked amusingly of Barry Foster’s anxiety about his crinkly hair and how, on the advice of a friend, he had it cut and, in effect, ironed for the occasion.   This was a smart move:  there are some wigs in this production that are not just unconvincing but evidently ill-fitting:  you notice both Laertes and Claudius checking their hairpiece is still in place at very unlikely moments.   (I assume the episodes screened were pre-recorded but that the recording itself was a single take.)   Michael Aldridge is pretty good as Polonius, although the character is richer when an actor gives you the idea that Polonius believes himself to be highly sophisticated (as Oliver Ford Davies did in the television adaptation of the David Tennant Hamlet a year or two ago).

    Barry Foster is a vigorous Prince:  there’s never a suggestion with him that the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.  (William Russell played Hamlet in the other – and preceding – Rediffusion production.)   Foster’s appetite for the role is obvious and appealing but he’s very self-aware.  The soliloquies (although I’d dozed off briefly at ‘To be or not to be’ time) are delivered in incantatory style and somewhat overwrought, even though Foster uses a fine voice to sonorous effect.  As a result, when Hamlet is telling the players how to perform, you feel this is a case of do as I say, not as I do.  Foster is much better when he forgets himself and plays to another actor instead of the camera.  He’s especially good with the two women.  The closet scene is excellent, and the Freudian edge to Hamlet’s relationship with his mother comes across strongly – not least because Patricia Jessel, without the head-dress this Gertrude usually wears and her hair down, looks so much closer in age to Foster here.  (There’s an effective resonance in the closeness between Gertrude and Hamlet in the final death scene.)   Sydney Tafler, with his long experience in cinema, is unsurprisingly more relaxed than most of the others in front of the camera.  Because he became typecast as a spiv in cinema, the other elements of his performance as Claudius are surprising, however – and a pleasant surprise.   In the early scenes, he gives the new king a believable shallow charisma; later on, Tafler’s throttled voice gets across the impacted guilt inside Claudius.  The players themselves are too hammy to be alarming but Tafler’s reactions to ‘The Mouse Trap’ are good.

    I enjoyed this Hamlet more than I would ever expect to enjoy the play on stage or even on film if it were done now.  It made me realise what an old-fashioned and narrow idea I have of ‘genuine’ Shakespeare – doublet and hose.  I found the absence of tricksiness a real relief.  ‘I’ve seen it before:  he dies’, is what John Osborne’s mother is alleged (by the son who loathed her) to have said, when Osborne asked if she was coming to see a production of Hamlet in which he was appearing.  For the most part, the actors in this Associated Rediffusion version allow the meaning of the lines to come through clearly and afresh:  the persistence of death in those lines, in Hamlet’s lines especially, shocks and thrills.

    5 July 2012

  • Great Expectations (1946)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lean (1946)

    This version of Great Expectations is widely regarded as one of David Lean’s best films and as a classic adaptation of a literary classic.  It may well be the former but I think it’s overrated, even if watching it again twenty-four hours after the 2012 remake leaves no doubt that Lean’s version is a relative masterpiece.  The visual scheme is nuanced, both spatially and tonally, though, as Pauline Kael says, the ‘rather creamy look’ hardly evokes the world of Dickens.  (Guy Green’s black-and-white photography won an Oscar nevertheless.)  It’s also something of a cheat when, in the film’s climax, the lighting in Satis House is crepuscular, which it isn’t in earlier scenes.  This is in order to give full impact to the moment when Pip tears down the dust-laden curtains to let daylight in.  The finale is the weakest part of the film – the least faithful to the book at any rate.  Dickens may have changed the original ending of Great Expectations to make it happier but when Lean has Pip and Estella embrace and caper away from Satis House under the closing credits the abrupt change of tone is false – lip service to what you think of as Hollywood requirements of the time.

    Lean’s storytelling is excellent and the ‘action’ sequences – the soldiers’ pursuit of the escaped convicts across the Kent marshes, the Satis House fire, the ill-fated attempt to get Magwitch across the channel – are imaginatively and expertly staged.  Yet the film is less atmospheric than Lean’s Oliver Twist two years later and the accent conventions of British cinema of the time blur parts of the main themes of the story.  If a character is not only essentially decent but to be taken seriously it’s de rigueur that their lines are delivered in RP.  This means that the boy Pip is as nicely spoken as Estella and, while Joe Gargery (Bernard Miles)’s accent is broad rustic, good, sensible Biddy (Eileen Erskine)’s is cut glass.  The same objection could be made to John Howard Davies’s speaking voice in Oliver Twist but that’s easier to accept as poetic, almost fairy-tale licence (and the voice goes with the way Howard Davies looks).  In any case, social climbing isn’t at the heart of Oliver Twist the way it is in Great Expectations.  Otherwise, Anthony Wager is excellent as young Pip and there’s some spiritual continuity between him and John Mills.  Mills is fundamentally an unexciting actor and rarely a daring one but there’s plenty to admire in his portrait of Pip.  Mills is good at suggesting Pip’s uneasy conscience, and at showing his positive and negative aspects simultaneously.  When Pip’s on his way from the forge to London his excitement is both appealing and offensive because you see he can’t wait to get away from life with Joe.  Even when Pip shows compassion to the dying Magwitch, there are still traces of distaste on Mills’s face.

    The real strengths of the movie lie in the character acting – especially the performances of two actors who went on to play very different characters in Lean’s Oliver Twist.  The standout is Alec Guinness, whose memorable entrance as Herbert Pocket – haring up the stairs to welcome Pip to his rooms and slowed down only by a door that sticks – foreshadows a physical recklessness which isn’t what you associate with Guinness and which makes this characterisation all the more special.  The surpassing, inventive wit is less unexpected but a treat for all that:  Guinness achieves that difficult thing – he makes affable human kindness richly entertaining.    Francis L Sullivan, the definitive Mr Bumble, is a superb Mr Jaggers; his obesity is a highly effective deception.  At first sight, Jaggers looks to be a figure of fun.  The more you see and hear, the more seriously you have to take him – Sullivan realises Wemmick (Ivor Barnard)’s description of his boss as ‘a deep one’ in a remarkable way.  Martita Hunt is a very good Miss Havisham – there’s a kindness to this woman which makes the unkindness of her plans for Estella more poignant.  Jean Simmons is marvellous as the young Estella.  Her merciless treatment of Pip when they first meet is powerful because Simmons fuses an almost generic spitefulness – the spitefulness of a precocious, self-possessed young girl – with something individual to the character.  It’s expressed in Estella’s proud, assertive walk – almost a march – as well as her incisive line readings. It was a pity that Simmons, seventeen at the time, was a bit too young to play the role all the way through.  In comparison with her, the stiffly ladylike Valerie Hobson is uninteresting as the adult Estella.  Finlay Currie is a compelling, physically imposing Magwitch.  The screenplay is by Lean, the producers Anthony Havelock-Allen and Ronald Neame, and Kay Walsh (Lean’s wife at the time, who went on to play Nancy in Oliver Twist).

    20 December 2012

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