Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Providence

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alain Resnais (1977)

    The trailer for Last Year at Marienbad beforehand – presumably the original trailer in French cinemas in 1961, although some adulatory reviews in English had been inserted as legends – was worth seeing.  It was more enlightening than the whole of Marienbad itself or, at least, made clear that we, the audience, were expected to work out the film’s puzzle, reading the visual clues on offer.  Providence – Resnais’s first work in English, from a screenplay by David Mercer – at first looks set to be a puzzle too, as well as obviously indebted to Citizen Kane.  Ricardo Aronovich’s camera gradually approaches a huge house, wreathed in darkness.  The name of the place, from which the film takes its name, stands out on a sign that recalls ‘Rosebud’.  But Providence turns out to be, even if not straightforward, understandable.  Inside the big house, an elderly, ailing novelist called Clive Langham is having a sleepless night.  The scenes we witness are Langham’s imaginings of his next, we assume last, novel.  The characters in the novel are incarnated by Langham’s own family and their interactions are informed and sometimes confused by the writer’s feelings about those close to him.

    They include his late wife Molly whom he loved (but was often unfaithful to); Claude, the lawyer son he loathes and the son’s wife Sonia; another man, Kevin, who turns out to represent the writer’s illegitimate son and whose character in the story that Langham devises never quite manages to have an affair with Sonia, much as his creator seems to want him to.   The Freudian rivalries between Clive and Claude are made explicit through the affair that does happen in the novel and which involves Claude and an American woman who, although in the story she’s a journalist with a terminal illness, takes the physical form of Molly.  The characters in the novel move in a murky, ominous world of men turning into werewolves, of army patrols hunting them down, of refugees who may be en route to concentration camps, of imposing architecture (a Resnais trademark).  On this occasion, the architecture shares the screen with shots of buildings being demolished.   These all seem harbingers or representations of imminent death, with which Clive Langham is preoccupied and about which, during his nocturnal conversation with himself, he talks a good deal.

    According to Langham, as an artist he’s been accused of sacrificing feeling for style, which gives him a kinship with Alain Resnais.  And with David Mercer too:  the script of Providence is stuffed with misanthropic epigrams and occasionally, when one of his characters comes out with one of these, Langham will chortle and congratulate himself, as if show-off one-liners were the proof of a fine novelist.  These connections would be tiresome if John Gielgud weren’t so enjoyable as Langham.  There’s something satisfying in Gielgud’s using his legendarily beautiful voice to slag people off or to intone, after the old writer has administered a suppository, a line like ‘Now let science soothe the troubled rectum’.   Gielgud’s expert, lapidary acidity anticipates his perfect performance as Charles Ryder’s father in the Granada TV Brideshead Revisited (1981).  What’s also impressive here is his realisation of Langham’s fury with his soon-to-be carcass, and the pains shooting up and down it:  Gielgud rails at his geriatry and expresses physical discomfort not just with wit but with a power that can only be described as full-bodied.   Providence is entertaining too, for a while at least, because Langham’s commentary on the goings-on of his creations functions to some extent as a commentary on the way characters behave in a ‘mysterious’ Resnais film like Marienbad  or even Stavisky … 

    Dirk Bogarde – in his figure-hugging, double-breasted suit – is a perfect incarnation of Langham’s derisive description of his son:  a tailor’s dummy.  With his eyebrow even more arched than usual and his striking, self-conscious hand movements, Bogarde seems almost to be satirising his own coldness and mannerisms.   (Our sense that Claude will never be the man his father was has a double edge with Gielgud playing the latter and Bogarde the son.)   David Warner, by comparison, is a disappointment as the illegitimate son/lover manqué.   A shapeless sweater that comes down nearly to his knees exaggerates Warner’s beanpole physique amusingly but he doesn’t manage to do a lot with the improbably named Kevin – and Elaine Stritch isn’t nearly nuanced enough to get anything out of the mistress/mother doppelgänger.   As Claude’s wife Sonia, Ellen Burstyn is more interestingly (and not entirely) unsuccessful.   Burstyn’s not good at, and is certainly very uneasy, delivering Mercer’s high-toned bitchery but her emotional vigour breaks through occasionally.  It makes her distinctively human in this company of actors and enables her to come to life as a character in her father-in-law’s novel in a way that eludes everyone else, except for the young Denis Lawson, in the small part of the Warner’s character professional footballer brother.

    The last section of Providence takes place in the light of the day following Clive Langham’s disturbed night.  It’s his birthday and the members of his family whom we’ve met in his imagination come to lunch to celebrate it with him and the couple (Peter Arne and Anna Wing) who keep house for the old man.   In ‘reality’, Claude, Sonia and Kevin are so bland that I wondered for a while if Clive Langham was embarking on another flight of fancy, expressing negative feelings about the trio in a different way – this time to make them contemptuously innocuous.   (Ellen Burstyn is hopeless here and interpreting a pitiably decent man doesn’t come easily to Dirk Bogarde.)   On reflection, I don’t think this is what Resnais and Mercer are suggesting though I’m not clear what they do intend.  Anyway, this coda is much too long and eventually tedious, except for a remarkable movement of the camera, from the sunny lunch table into the ominously darker trees and shrubs bordering the garden and back into the light.  The film’s score is by Miklós Rózsa, a sometimes intriguing combination of his familiar Hollywood cadences, sub-Nino Rota details and suggestions of an incipient thriller.  Incipience is as far as we get, though, in the thriller department.

    10 July 2011

  • Yellow Sky

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William A Wellman (1948)

    At least I’ll know in future to avoid BFI screenings with an ‘extended’ introduction.  Yellow Sky, showing in the ‘Shakespeare on Film’ season, was preceded by a talk by Adrian Wootton, the Chief Executive of Film London.  Wootton would be ‘focusing on American Shakespeare adaptations’.  Although he assured us that he’d be ‘whizzing through’ each of its several sections, his talk lasted half as long as the film we’d come to see and was focused only in the sense that Wootton had a single point to make.  He took forty-five minutes to propose that Hollywood has always done better appropriating Shakespeare-inspired scenarios, for use in Westerns or sci-fi pictures or musicals, than making films of Shakespeare plays.  He rather oddly classified the former as ‘Shakespearean’ and the latter as ‘Shakespeare’ and showed a ‘mash-up’ of excerpts from Hollywood ‘Shakespeare’ and Hollywood ‘Shakespearean’.  Dominated by the ‘America’ number in West Side Story, this montage included some of the clips included in the trailer for ‘Shakespeare on Film’ that BFI has already been showing for several weeks.  The ‘mash-up’ was one of several overlong clips Wootton used to pad things out (one consolation of this was getting the whole of ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ from Kiss Me Kate).  He cited repeated examples of adaptations or reworkings of Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest but was sketchy on why these Shakespeare plays had proved especially capable of reinterpretation in different movie genres.  He started off saying that The Tempest was particularly appealing to Americans because of the (brave) New World references in the text.  He ended up suggesting the play was popular ‘probably because of the magic’.

    All this led, at last, to William Wellman’s supposedly Tempest-inspired Western Yellow Sky.  The characters include an elderly man and a young woman living in a largely deserted place – a post-Gold Rush ghost town.  Other major points of connection with The Tempest are less obvious.  A band of bank-robbing bandit treks through the California desert and eventually makes it to the ghost town.  This trek occupies the first third of Yellow Sky.  While their problem is a lack rather than a surfeit of water and while Shakespeare didn’t devote an act and a half to the immediate aftermath of the shipwreck of Alonso, Ferdinand et al, the antics of the more roguish of William Wellman’s bandits does remind you that a little of the drunken sailors in The Tempest goes a long way.  Fortunately, Yellow Sky is great to look at throughout.  Shot in black-and-white by Joe MacDonald, there are impressive chiaroscuro effects and the dusty, windswept terrain is highly atmospheric.  Wellman, MacDonald and the editor Harmon Jones put together action sequences that express a thrilling speed of movement.  The placing of human bodies in wide open spaces is very arresting – so are the compositions that show two characters facing the camera, one nearly in close-up and unaware of the other standing in the background.  The film’s title refers primarily to the name of the ghost town but the sky above the landscape has, even in monochrome, a sulphurous look.

    It comes as no surprise that James ‘Stretch’ Dawson, the leader of the gang, turns out to have been born of morally sound stock and that he reverts in due course to honest ways:  he’s played by Gregory Peck.  No surprise either that the initial hostility between Stretch and Constance Mae (‘Mike’) – the Miranda figure – turns to love.  Gregory Peck‘s straightness, both physical and temperamental, works very well in Yellow Sky.   He looks about ten feet tall:  dressed in black, he can seem threatening; his height also helps confirm the moral stature that Stretch eventually attains.  Peck’s deep, sonorous voice assists similarly – it’s capable of implying either menace or underlying nobility, as required.  Gregory Peck’s acting can seem a bit wooden in naturalistic drama but he gives depth to the character he’s playing in a stylised genre piece like this one.  He’s charming and amusing in Stretch’s prickly courtship with the pistol-packing Mike.   Anne Baxter doesn’t show a lot of range in that role but she’s an energetic, insistent presence.   Richard Widmark is monotonous as the nastiest piece of work in the band of robbers, who also include Robert Arthur, Charles Kemper, Harry Morgan and John Russell.  James Barton is Grandpa (Prospero).   Lamar Trotti’s screenplay, with decent dialogue, is adapted from a story by W R Burnett.  The climactic shoot-out in Yellow Sky felt overlong to me but I think this was the fault less of William Wellman than of Adrian Wootton.

    9 May 2016

Posts navigation