Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • The VIPs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Asquith (1963)

    It begins with shots of the main actors and the names of their characters – ‘Elizabeth Taylor as Frances Andros’ etc.  In spite of the international starry cast, this brings to mind weekly TV shows of times past.  Then comes a strikingly unimaginative title sequence – the names of those behind the camera appear beside emblems of ‘the high life’:  tiaras, champagne flutes, a box of cigars.  As a final flourish, a red carpet unrolls onto the screen.  It seems to sum up The VIPs that the colour on the print has faded so that the carpet is actually orange.   This is all accompanied – like far too much of what follows – by a gruesome Miklos Rosza score, often irrelevant and always intrusive.   The VIPs is written by Terence Rattigan – an original screenplay only in the basic technical sense.  It’s about a group of would-be travellers from Heathrow who, when fog delays their flight, are stuck in the airport’s VIP lounge, then in a hotel overnight.  Taylor is deserting her magnate husband Paul (Richard Burton) in favour of Marc Champselle (Louis Jourdan), a playboy-gambler.   Les Mangrum (Rod Taylor) is an Australian businessman, anxious to get to New York to prevent, with the help of his loyal secretary Miss Mead (Maggie Smith), the takeover of his tractor company by an omnivorous American conglomerate.  Film producer Max Buda (Orson Welles) needs to get off British soil urgently in order to avoid a hefty tax bill.  The elderly Duchess of Brighton (Margaret Rutherford) is heading for Florida for a temporary job working in a hotel – she needs the cash to keep her Sussex pile going.  It’s clear from the start that, with the potential exception of the Duchess, it’ll be hard to get interested in these types unless the script or the actors can bring them to life in surprising ways.  The VIPs has acquired some historical interest but, as a film, it’s worth seeing only for some of the actors (and by no means all of them).

    The Wikipedia entry on the movie claims that Rattigan says the story was ‘based on the true story of Vivien Leigh’s attempt to leave her husband Laurence Olivier and fly off with her lover Peter Finch, only to be delayed by a fog at Heathrow’.  It’s hard to see that this ‘based on’ means anything more than ‘suggested by’ but Rattigan the playwright may have been attracted by the bad weather as a pretext for keeping the cast in the same place – having the travellers fogbound justifies treating them as stagebound.  For the most part, the characters in the different plot strands don’t interact at all and their situations are resolved neatly only because the writing is so thin.   The exception to the brevity (although not as a result of depth or complexity) is the central Taylor-Burton story.   The VIPs expresses what I imagine must be the appalling ennui of a long delay at an airport but the line gets very blurred between this kind of tedium and the tedium of waiting for Taylor’s inevitable decision to forsake Jourdan and go home with Burton.  Anthony Asquith’s impersonal, flat-footed direction doesn’t help.

    Rattigan’s star in the theatre wasn’t in the ascendant in the early 1960s, a decade whose values he would publicly deplore – as he had already deplored the emergence of a new kind of stage play, epitomised by Look Back in Anger.   Even if you regard The VIPs as a trifle, as a distinguished writer slumming it, the writing is witless and now seems clumsily reactionary – although the NFT2 audience contained a fair number of incontinent titterers, evidently eager to see the picture as a kind of civilised entertainment that doesn’t get made these days.  The level of satirical humour is summed up in the opening shots at the film industry.  The VIP reception manager Sanders Richard Wattis) says with distaste that he has to ‘meet these film people’, then, like the professional creep he is, tells Max Buda how much he enjoyed his latest film -only to be told that ‘we no longer make films for people to enjoy’.  After Buda has said he’s not in the film business for the money, he asks his sidekick in an aside to remind him how many million his last picture grossed.  The dialogue is startlingly feeble and Rattigan is having it both ways but it seems clear from the audience reaction at BFI – the laughter at both of Buda’s self-condemning lines seemed to come from the same seats – that some people find it doubly witty to use the same character to have a go at arty cinema and, in his next breath, the industry’s moneymen.   There’s plenty more of this kind of thing when it comes to sniping or laughing at foreigners:  the airhead Italian actress (Elsa Martinelli) accompanying Buda; the name Paul Andros, presumably chosen to suggest one-of- those-Greeks like Niarchos or Onassis (although I missed any other suggestion that the character actually was Greek); hopeless jokes about the different menus for Russian and American passengers. This vein of humour climaxes at the very end when Sanders looks at the names on the next day’s VIP list and asks, ‘Who’s Prince Popo?’   The answer, a man in African robes, was greeted with dismaying hilarity in NFT2.   Also on this passenger list is ‘Mr Johnny Leyton, the pop star’ (more satire).

    The success of the performances in The VIPs depends on whether the actor is sufficiently inventive to animate their role without appearing to despise what he or she is doing.  Orson Welles may have accepted the part of Max Buda to express his reasonably bitter contempt for the film industry; but his delivery expresses contempt for his line too (also reasonable).   Richard Burton suffers from the same problem:  not for the first time, he seems little more than fed up most of the time and relies too much on the beauty of his voice.  (There’s a bizarre moment when a traumatised Frances, after one of her encounters with Paul, sobs to Marc, ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face’:  Burton’s face is blank.)  He’s rather better when Andros is a broken man – although this works better when his despair is embedded in a scene (as in the exchange with Miss Mead) rather than its primary focus.  But the part is pretty hopeless anyway:  it’s revealed in one scene that Paul is the reason the couple are childless but it’s a hollow revelation (Andros as symbolically incapable of love), not followed through in any way – as if Rattigan had thought for a moment about writing something fuller but couldn’t be bothered.  Although her role too is vaguely written, Elizabeth Taylor is convincingly ambivalent as Frances Andros.  While you’re watching Taylor, you believe she’s in two minds about the two men in her life.  The trouble is, you know what’s coming so her conscientiousness in the part seems a waste of time.

    As the Duchess of Brighton, however, Margaret Rutherford gives a really pleasurable performance (which won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar).  Rutherford, a true original, is effortlessly funny.  Part of the pleasure she gives comes from knowing that the seeming effortlessness is art that conceals art.   She’s working with base metal (the jokes about the Duchess taking uppers and downers for her maiden flight get pretty desperate).  She doesn’t need Miklos Rozsa music reminding us every time she appears that she’s an English eccentric.  Although the Duchess spends a night in a hotel, Rattigan doesn’t find any opportunities to link this with the work she’s going to do in Florida.  It’s sad that Rutherford has a scene with her real-life husband Stringer Davis (as a hotel waiter on the night shift) in which the gulf between their quality as actors is painful.   But she gives her own rhythm and freshness to the tired lines and has some wonderful moments.  My favourite was the business with a hatbox which won’t fit as overhead luggage and the Duchess’s exchanges, as the hatbox repeatedly descends, with the affable West Indian man sitting next to her and a snotty air hostess (well played by Clifton Jones and Moyra Fraser respectively).

    It’s fascinating to see Maggie Smith here (in only her third film role).  Her intense oddness transforms the hackneyed role of the secretly adoring secretary:  she combines comically neurotic gestures with emotional truth to create a distinctively passionate celibate.   When she’s saved her boss’s bacon and so absorbed  his attention that Mangrum’s fatuously glamorous girlfriend exits crossly, and the door closes behind her, he asks, ‘What was that?’  Smith gives Miss Mead’s reply – ‘Miss Marshall leaving’ – a perfect blend of secretarial omniscience and suppressed euphoria, which made me laugh out loud.  As Mangrum, Rod Taylor is the most surprising success (even if this was partly because I hadn’t realised Taylor was himself Australian).   The deflation of this determinedly cocky Aussie and his eventual triumph are much more engaging than Burton’s and he and Smith play really well together.  Who connects with whom – and who doesn’t – is one of the interests of the picture.   The BFI note included an extract from Paul Ferris’s biography of Burton.  According to this, the picture was released as soon as possible to capitalise on the scandal of his affair with Taylor during the filming of Cleopatra but they don’t have much chemistry here.  There’s no doubt anyway that Taylor has more with Louis Jourdan, who’s so likeable (and skilful) as Marc that you can’t understand why Frances has any hesitation about her choice.  And Burton’s best scene is the one with Maggie Smith.

    According to the BFI note and Wikipedia, David Frost plays a reporter (interviewing Max Buda); according to IMDB, he appears as ‘Himself – a reporter’.  I’ve no idea what the latter means but it’s ironically apt:  Frost sounds like an impressionist doing David Frost.   His performance is abominably bad:  it may be one of the first examples of someone who’d gained a sky-high reputation for sketch comedy on British television exposing their limitations on the big screen once they tried to do a character among proper actors.  (The VIPs was released when That Was The Week That Was was at its zenith; Lance Percival, another TW3 regular, is relatively tolerable as an airport official.)  Frost’s casting is ironic too given Rattigan’s evident antipathy to the zeitgeist.   There are several more terrible performances, including someone called Martin Miller as Buda’s sidekick Dr Schwutzbacher and Linda Christian as Miss Marshall (she speaks awkwardly – in an unplaceable accent that seems dismally at home in an ‘international’ picture like this).  There are also different varieties of British actor on display:  those who are usually described as ‘inimitable’, a euphemism for ‘always the same’ (Wattis, Dennis Price, Robert Coote); those who are underrated and, as usual, do well (Joan Benham, Peter Sallis); those who are very good and completely wasted here (Michael Hordern).

    7 August 2009

  • Nebraska

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Payne (2013)

    Woody Grant is determined to get from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, the state capital of Nebraska, to collect the $1m that he’s been told his won.  The good news arrived in a form letter.  His exasperated wife Kate and sons Ross and David keep telling Woody the letter’s bogus but the old man is hellbent on claiming his prize.  Woody, who used to be an odd job man and drove a truck, has now lost his driving licence – presumably because he was drunk in charge of the vehicle.  (He’s long been a heavy drinker.)  More than once, he starts the eight-hundred-mile journey on foot without getting more than a few hundred yards.  Eventually, the younger son David decides to indulge Woody:  the trip will be a change of scenery and an opportunity for Woody to go back to his roots (he was raised on a farm outside Hawthorne, a small Nebraskan town).  It will also be a chance for David to try and get to know the taciturn, cantankerous father he’s never been close to.

    I wasn’t convinced that Woody, ornery but seemingly resigned to a life that’s been unsatisfying, would feel compelled to pursue his million dollars but there’s no movie if he isn’t.  And it’s a shrewd move on the part of Alexander Payne and his scenarist Bob Nelson to give Woody both a personality and hints of a medical condition – incipient dementia or the effects of decades of alcoholism or both – that mean he has probably limited powers of thought and certainly little to say:  his idée fixe can thus be kept in the dark.  His wife and sons, as sceptics about the cash prize, are in a small minority.   In Hawthorne, Woody’s extended family and old acquaintances are all too willing to believe that he’s struck lucky.  Not only that, they like their chances of touching him for money – for the settlement of a claimed unpaid debt, in the case of his ex-business partner and nemesis Ed Pegram.  (For Woody’s part, it still rankles with him that Ed, many years ago, purloined the air compressor that belonged to him.)   These interested parties aren’t materially well off and don’t have any prospects of changing their life.  The strong implication is that if you’re desperate enough you’ll believe anything; and that, for the people of Hawthorne, Nebraska, being envious and mercenary is doing what comes naturally.

    A recent New Yorker profile of Alexander Payne by Margaret Talbot quoted Jim Taylor, who co-wrote with Payne the screenplays for all the latter’s movies before The Descendants, as follows:

    ‘We’re interested in people who are both ridiculous and noble in their dedication to what they’re after.  We sometimes get ‘Oh, you’re making fun of people’.  Well, we try to remember how ridiculous we ourselves are.  And it’s not hard.’

    Nebraska is unique among Payne’s features in that he doesn’t have a screenplay credit but it fits neatly into his oeuvre (and it’s better than the inexplicably overrated The Descendants).  He may well see his films in a similar light to Taylor but it’s harder for anyone else to interpret them that way:  watching the obese, often ugly, rarely intelligent blue-collar types in evidence in Nebraska, you’re unlikely to think they’re a self-portrait of clever, good-looking, wealthy, Oscar-winning Alexander Payne.  His sympathy for people in this story is manifested only in moments of sentimentality and loss of nerve – that is, when he turns back at the last minute from the implications of his pervasive misanthropy.  Kate scolds Woody in everything she says – right up to her last line:  as he lies in hospital, she grumbles that he’ll be the death of her but she then kisses his forehead before she departs the scene.  More largely, Payne has to make the trip ultimately worthwhile in that it brings about a rapport between Woody and David.  I found both the kiss and the new father-son bond a relief and I don’t see them as inherently unlikely.  They come across as false, though, because they contradict what Payne suggests in the rest of the movie.  They’re unpersuasive through being untrue not to life but to the scheme that the director has constructed.

    Payne was born and raised in Omaha and is still much involved with it:  you’re meant to take it as read that he fully understands the places and people of Nebraska.  In this movie his attitude to the non-human features of the state is more benign than his treatment of its inhabitants.  The wide-screen black-and-white images of fields and skies, farm machinery, small town streets and mostly deserted roads, shot by Phedon Papamichael, are bleakly beautiful – although they are photographs rather than moving pictures.  Some of the shots of people too – like Woody and the other men in the family arranged in chairs to watch a football game on television as wives prepare lunch – suggest the work of an artful photographer rather than a movie-maker.   Margaret Talbot’s piece gave several examples of Payne’s care in choosing or designing just the right location and you can see this – inside and outside the bars and outhouses, in the shop fronts, at a cemetery.  But the spatial contrast between the draughty, largely empty locale and the constricted, humdrum lives lived within it is obvious and, as far as the smaller roles are concerned, you knew what you were in for from the off-putting trailer for Nebraska.  The only engaging minor character is an elderly woman called Peg, who still runs the local paper in Hawthorne.  She was Woody’s girlfriend half a century ago, until Kate appeared on the scene.  Angela McEwan, who plays Peg (who doesn’t feature in the trailer), is an experienced actress but Payne has cast non-actors too.  As you can soon tell from their clumsy line readings, he’s cast them solely for their eccentric verging on grotesque appearance.  There’s virtually nothing to suggest anything attractive in the existence of these people:  the closest they come to community spirit is late on, in a sequence in a bar, as they join in laughing as Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), who’s got hold of the $1m letter, reads it out with derisive glee.   Payne relies for emotional variety on Mark Orton’s wryly effective, sometimes charming strings music.

    The performances of Bruce Dern (Woody), Will Forte (David) and June Squibb (Kate) amount to more than you might fear from the trailer and although the role of the elder son Ross (he has hopes of a career as a late-blooming local TV anchorman) is thin, Bob Odenkirk plays him nicely.  Eighty-four year old June Squibb is the bridge between the characterisation of the Hawthorne folks and the (somewhat) more nuanced treatment of the core of the Grant family.  Squibb (who made a briefer appearance as the wife who died and set off the main narrative in Payne’s About Schmidt) speaks her lines deliberately but you gradually discern more shading in her set vocal rhythms and facial expressions.  I still felt a resistance to the character of Kate, though, which depends heavily on the assumed comedy of an old woman talking dirty and embarrassing her modest son.  As for that kiss in the hospital:  I can’t help finding it depressing to see and hear an elderly couple who normally moan at and about each other showing, in a crisis (but only in a crisis), that they really care.  All the evidence suggests that the marriage of Woody and Kate has been an unhappy one – I must have dozed off at the point at which her decision to join the men in Hawthorne, after berating them both as they set off on their trip, is explained.    I never much liked Bruce Dern in his 1970s heyday and haven’t missed his absence in the many years since then.  Although he showed a terrific, startling intensity as the basketball coach in Jack Nicholson’s Drive, He Said (1971), he was monotonously strident in films such as The Great Gatsby (1974), Family Plot (1976) and Coming Home (1978).   But his rangy, gawky physique is remarkable and his bug-eyed stare makes sense in the role of Woody, whose enervated, closed-down quality also means that Dern’s aggression is rationed.

    It’s Will Forte, however, who keeps you going through Nebraska.  A Saturday Night Live stalwart, Forte, who’s in his mid-forties, hasn’t done much straight acting and what he does as David isn’t major but it’s emotionally expressive at the right level and the character is more likeable than everyone else in the film put together.  Forte’s also a relief in this company simply by virtue of being reasonably good-looking.  David – a nice, harassed, disappointed man – has just broken up with his girlfriend of two years.  She’s the unglamorous lump you’d expect in the Montana as well as the Nebraska of Alexander Payne’s USA, although Missy Doty plays her one scene well.   David has an unrewarding job as a salesman at a computer store – the only customers we see him with are, of course, physically unprepossessing and disagreeably curt.  Not only does David not ‘know’ Woody; he seems to know very little about anyone else in his family.  In the Hawthorne cemetery, Kate talks to her son about his grandparents as if they were distant ancestors.  But you still want things to work out for David.  After he and his father have made it to Lincoln and received the inevitable confirmation that Woody is not a millionaire, David trades his car in for a truck, buys the air compressor Woody’s missed for decades, and lets the old man drive the vehicle in triumph through the main street of Hawthorne until they’re on the road home to Montana, where David gets back in the driving seat.  By the close of Nebraska, I felt I was on the same wavelength as the principals at least in terms of being grateful for small mercies.  I wasn’t convinced by the upbeat ending but it was preferable to a downbeat one.

    18 December 2013

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