Daily Archives: Friday, June 17, 2016

  • The Leather Boys

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney J Furie (1964)

    Sidney J Furie already knew his way around British youth culture of a kind but The Young Ones (1961) hardly prepares you for this.  (Furie directed another Cliff Richard film, Wonderful Life, released in the same year as The Leather Boys.)  Nearly half a century on, this story of London motor-bikers stands up as a strong piece of drama, although it’s fascinating for reasons largely linked to the passage of time.  The locations and details supply a rich social record (a hoarding advertising Watney’s Pale Ale particularly took my eye).   When the young marrieds Dot and Reggie go into the Ace Cafe (a real place in North London), where the bikers and their girls congregate, she orders two teas and the waitress automatically turns to him for the money; at home in their tiny flat, Reggie’s peremptory demands for meals on time now seem outrageous.  At the heart of the story, however, is another relationship – the one between Reggie and another leather boy, Pete.

    It soon becomes clear that Pete is queer but Reggie’s sexuality remains opaque.  This, according to Wikipedia, is a significant change from the source material – a 1961 novel of the same name by Gillian Freeman – in which the two men become a homosexual couple.  No doubt it was caution that caused the film-makers to modify the book’s central theme – Freeman also wrote the screenplay – but what’s so interesting about The Leather Boys is that this timid approach makes the film more suggestive, especially in retrospect.  When Reggie splits from Dot and goes back to live at his gran’s house, Pete becomes a lodger and they share not just a room but a double bed.  I doubt that two working-class boys sleeping together in the early 1960s necessarily signified what it virtually has to signify now.  (Increased sexual enlightenment and liberation may mean that two people of the same sex are more constrained about sharing a bed today than they were in the dark ages.)   As far as we see, Reggie and Pete don’t exchange any physical affection in bed.  What we do see is that, as a consequence, the sleeping arrangements can be sustained because Reggie needn’t worry and Pete is getting something out of their spending each night together (albeit less than he wants).

    The centrality of the men’s relationship is also obscured by the casting.  Dot is played by Rita Tushingham and, because she’s by some way the biggest name in the film, we tend to assume the main story will be Dot’s short-lived marriage to Reggie.   When they’re on honeymoon at Butlin’s in Bognor, Reggie wants to do nothing but have sex with Dot; once we pick up their lives a few months later, he won’t touch her and it’s she who’s the frustrated one.   I guess in the novel this is a clear signpost; retaining it in the screenplay without confirming Reggie’s homosexuality may amount to a loss of nerve yet it creates an indefiniteness that’s preferable to neatness.  When Reggie and Pete go on a trip to Brighton they pick up a couple of girls. Reggie’s eager to do this; it’s obviously not what Pete had in mind and the encounter doesn’t lead anywhere.  This too could be seen as a weakness in the script but that’s not how you experience this non-event.   You experience rather a renewed sense of Reggie’s mixture of restlessness and inertia – the same two qualities, both suggesting discontent without pinpointing the cause of it, which were hinted at in the scenes of him and Dot in their Butlin’s chalet.  The lighting in the chalet seems to get darker and the atmosphere there certainly does:  Sidney Furie and the DoP Gerald Gibbs manage to get across in these sequences a sense of sexual uncertainty and an accompanying unhappy bafflement on Reggie’s part that feels highly expressive of the time.

    Colin Campbell makes Reggie touching because he suggests, without condescension, a young man who’s not very bright.   Campbell doesn’t show a wide range and it’s no surprise he didn’t go on to great things (perhaps his best-known role subsequently was in the highly successful ITV drama of the early 1970s, A Family at War).  But he’s highly effective here:   Reggie may be slow on the uptake and unsure of his feelings but Campbell also shows how he’s naturally, immediately drawn to the warmth of different kinds of affection – from Dot, from Pete, from his gran (beautifully played by Gladys Henson).  You root for Reggie all the way through, even when he’s bawling out Dot for not getting his tea on the table.  As Pete, Dudley Sutton seems bad at first, veering from one accent to another as if he’s trying out different ideas for doing the part.   But the upside of this is an emotional variety and edge and Sutton’s protean quality begins to make sense:  he creates a character who can – has to – get by in different environments:  in his temporary labouring job, down at the Ace Cafe, making Reggie and his gran laugh with his theatricality and humour; in the gay dockside pub in the closing scenes of the film, where Reggie finally understands Pete’s sexuality and walks away.  (This closing image, although striking enough, is clichéd – and doesn’t make a lot of sense.  I asked Sally where she thought Reggie was heading and she thought it was anywhere, as long as this was in the opposite direction from Pete.  I guess that is what we’re meant to think but, since Reggie can go straight back to his room at his gran’s, the decisive march towards camera with Pete’s figure receding at the back of the frame doesn’t really amount to much.)

    Rita Tushingham’s acting is out of kilter with what Campbell and Sutton are doing.   Either she or Sidney Furie or both of them appear to see it as obligatory that she gives A Performance to an extent not expected of the lesser lights.  Tushingham’s facial eccentricity holds your attention but she defines Dot in a busy, mannered way.  (She’s better in her quieter moments and perhaps best in her silent ones.)  On a competitive bike ride to and from Edinburgh (with a few shots of the Mound), Reggie and Dot are reconciled:  he began the journey with Pete and she with another biker (Johnny Briggs) but Reggie and Dot return together.   When they get back, well after the others, to the Ace Cafe, Pete ambushes Reggie but the night they spend together – with Reggie in an armchair – is their last.   Reggie goes to the flat intending to make a fresh start with Dot.  He finds the man she started the Edinburgh trip with in her bed.   The outcome is obvious but the sequence of events leading to it gives a rather scary idea of how Dot’s mind and emotions work.  She thought she was going to get back with Reggie, then Pete whisked him off; although Reggie seemed a bit reluctant to go, Dot decides she must have got it wrong so she resumes with the other man instead.  Simple as that.  The sense that Rita Tushingham is doing a (self-conscious) turn has the effect of making the early spats between Dot and Reggie lightweight.  When the rows get more serious, you can’t work out how things got to this point.  This feeling of puzzlement gives the relationship’s trajectory a more lifelike quality.

    I don’t mean to suggest that The Leather Boys is merely a series of happy accidents.  Furie consistently gets a good rhythm between the actors, even if Tushingham’s playing sometimes halts it.   He stages the rows between two people better than ones involving more than two.  (An argy-bargy outside an old people’s home involving Reggie and Dot and several members of Reggie’s family, as they make unsuccessful attempts to try and put his grandmother in it, is particularly crude.)   But it’s the scenes without cross words but full of tensions you can’t always fathom that are especially strong.  Furie also shows fine judgment in conveying how the bikes give the boys a more stimulating life and identity but this isn’t overdone – it’s part of the film’s texture rather than a foreground theme.   At the same time, the road sequences impart excitement and danger.  And Gillian Freeman writes excellent realistic dialogue, most subtly in the early scenes between Dot and Reggie, with the repetitions in what they say hinting at the possibility of suffocating routine ahead.  (Freeman must have had a thing about leathers:  four years later, she also worked on the screenplay for Jack Cardiff’s The Girl on a Motorcycle.)

    21 February 2012

  • The Killer Inside Me

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Winterbottom (2010)

    Jim Thompson’s novel was published in 1952 and, according to Wikipedia, the first plans to film it came not much later.  The three main characters are Lou Ford, a twenty-nine-year old deputy town sheriff who’s also a serial killer; a prostitute called Joyce Lakeland; and Amy Stanton, who is Ford’s girlfriend.  Names such as Marlon Brando (for the role of Lou), Marilyn Monroe (Joyce) and Elizabeth Taylor (Amy) were all associated with the project at one time or another.   The Killer Inside Me was eventually filmed in 1976 by Burt Kennedy, with Stacy Keach as Ford, although it doesn’t appear to have made much impression.  During the many years leading up to this remake, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are among those who’ve been linked to the main part.  It’s hard either to see Stacy Keach inventing a bland veneer or to imagine either DiCaprio or (to a lesser extent) Pitt managing to convey what’s going on underneath one.   In Gone Baby Gone, Casey Affleck, although he very rarely smiled, was able to suggest interesting differences between the inside and outside of the private detective he played.   Affleck isn’t tall and his neat profile and small, tight mouth give him a mean-spirited quality but, as Lou Ford (and as in Gone Baby Gone), he has a surprising physical magnetism and command of the screen.  His performance is misconceived, though.

    Also according to Wikipedia, in the novel by Thompson (who wrote The Grifters too):

    ‘Ford’s main coping mechanism for his dark urges … is the relatively benign habit of deliberately needling people with clichés and platitudes despite their obvious boredom: “If there’s anything worse than a bore,” says Lou, “it’s a corny bore.”‘

    I got no sense of this from the movie.  Lou seems highly unsociable; he may be boring (Affleck makes him vocally boring anyway) but he’s far from innocuous.  You can believe  some women might find his combination of boyishness and sexual enthusiasm and arrogance attractive.  It’s harder to accept that any of his work colleagues (and he evidently has no male friends outside work) would see or trust him as a regular guy.  Perhaps Michael Winterbottom and John Curran, who wrote the screenplay, are making the point that the people of the small Texan town where the story is set can’t conceive of Lou as anything other than a good chap because he’s one of them – he’s a lawman and his father was a respected local doctor to boot.  He plays and listens to classical music (although the stereotyping of Texans in cinema might make you feel that would raise suspicions in the locals’ minds).  The district attorney, who comes from elsewhere in the county, has doubts about Lou from a much earlier stage than the townspeople.

    Whatever the rationale for Affleck’s Lou looking every inch a psychopath, it’s puzzling that the script doesn’t accommodate it at key points.   When Joyce Lakeland first sets eyes on Ford, she describes him derisively as ‘a boy scout with a sheriff’s badge’ but his saturnine manner doesn’t fit the description.   Later on, the DA, certain that Lou is responsible for the several murders which have occurred and appalled at his insouciance, says exasperatedly, ‘You just sit there, explaining and smiling’.  Ford is unsmiling:  this isn’t even one of the moments at which Affleck’s face cracks a sneer.   Except for a sequence near the end, when various dramatis personae gather in his house (and which I took to be taking place in his imagination), Lou only really smiles when he’s in bed with Joyce or Amy.  Winterbottom and Affleck may want to subvert the idea of an outwardly affable murderer but that idea seems essential to Thompson’s concept.   And the film’s gruesomely literal violence makes the movie less challenging to the audience if Lou is disagreeable.  If he had charm that might at least be disorienting:  we would have to make sense of enjoying his company when he wasn’t expressing his inner self, while recoiling from his terrible acts.    (In a novel written in first-person narrative that challenge is nearly guaranteed.   The reader enters into the world created by the narrator and relies on her or him for information.  Even when voiceover narrative is retained, as it is here, we’re still at a remove from the narrator because he inhabits the world created by the director.)

    Lou is a sadistic killer and a sadistic lover.  It’s plain to see the sexual element in his taking his belt to Joyce Lakeland after she’s got violent with, and stimulated, him on their first meeting.  It seems we’re meant to believe that Ford has been able to keep the killer inside him for a couple of decades before this provoking moment – even though his murderous violence seems to be an extension of the sexual sadism.  The plot synopsis of the book on Wikipedia explains that Lou finally ‘reveals to the reader the full nature of the inner demons that drive his criminal behavior’.   In this adaptation we soon see demonstrations of that behaviour but we never get much of an explanation of it and the graphic nature of the violence tells us very little more about Lou.  After he’s killed Joyce, he seems briefly to try to make himself feel remorse – he’s had an education, he knows that’s what he should feel – and to fail.  His mind flashes back to what he did as a child to another child and he returns to the present with a shudder; but again he seems startled by not feeling too much about it.  In these moments Casey Affleck is very convincing:  he goes beyond the trademark cold-eyed detachment of a screen psychopathic criminal.   I wasn’t completely clear, however, what the boy Lou did to a little girl:  did he murder as well as assault her?  (Whatever he did, it was his older stepbrother who took the rap.)  It’s not just the realistic, protracted violence against women that’s hard to justify in The Killer Inside Me.  The display of naked female flesh seems voyeuristic – we certainly don’t always see it from the protagonist’s point of view.  As a result, the implication that the women enjoy, up to a point, the sexual rough treatment meted out to them by Lou made me all the more uncomfortable.  Presenting flagellation as a kind of vigorous foreplay seems worse when the voyeurism elsewhere in the film suggests that you’re witnessing a sexual fantasy which isn’t just Lou Ford’s.

    The Killer Inside Me is well acted throughout.   The casting of Jessica Alba as the prostitute and Kate Hudson as the respectable girlfriend is effective not least because Hudson has a lewder quality.   In smaller roles, Ned Beatty, Simon Baker, Bill Pullman and Elias Koteas (especially) are all excellent.   Brent Briscoe is a bum-nemesis whose hand Ford burns and who returns to haunt him:  Briscoe overdoes it in the blackmailing scene but his later panic is very good.  A bug-eyed, hare-lipped lawman played by Matthew Maher is a more familiar Texan grotesque – although it works well that his looks are deceptive.  Winterbottom seems to me to have realised the locale fully and naturally (it’ll be interesting to see what American critics think about that) but the music he’s chosen, although it’s various, is consistently obvious – in the conventional, menacing score for the film by Melissa Parmenter, in ‘Fever’ played over the opening titles (designed to lead you to expect something more playfully noir than what you get), in the double helping of irony supplied by more lightweight pop songs of the period and emotionally soaring snatches of opera.  This wasn’t the best week to see a film called The Killer Inside Me (I booked my ticket on Wednesday morning, shortly before the news of the Derrick Bird rampage in Cumbria) but I think I would have found this movie unpleasantly unsatisfying anyway.   Because no film made in Hollywood before the late sixties could have contained much violence, a screen adaptation in the era in which the book first appeared may well have been more interesting than Michael Winterbottom’s.

    4 June 2010

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