Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Scapegoat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Hamer (1959)

    Alec Guinness plays John Barratt, a sad, self-effacing academic in a provincial English university, on his annual summer holiday in France (French is his subject).  In an opening voiceover, Barratt tells us that life has passed him by – he doesn’t expect anything much to happen to him now, so of course it does.  Guinness also plays Jacques De Gue – a French nobleman, who tracks Barratt to a bar and confronts him there.  After Barratt has recovered from the shock of meeting his physical double, they get into conversation, and De Gue gets Barratt drunk.   The Englishman wakes the next morning to find that De Gue has disappeared, taking Barratt’s clothes and passport with him, but leaving his identity – and the complications of his personal life – with his spitting image.  The Scapegoat, which Gore Vidal adapted from Daphne Du Maurier’s 1957 novel, wasn’t a success and didn’t deserve to be.  Guinness often makes it fascinating but his skill also exposes a fundamental weakness in the material on screen.

    Guinness’s surface anonymity – in combination with his more penetrating ability to suggest a man who’s empty and who knows it – pays some rich dividends.  As John Barratt pretends, by force of circumstances, to be Jacques De Gue, you become gradually more aware, as does Barratt, of the consequences of his uneventful life and subdued personality:  there’s nothing in his prior life that creates any friction with the new identity he assumes.  But the fact that Guinness makes the dead ringers subtly but decisively distinct is a problem.   Among Jacques De Gue’s household, it’s only his dog who realises the man who’s returned home is not his master, and who snarls at him.  Barratt isn’t, of course, in possession of all the facts of De Gue’s life.  He says things that puzzle his wife (Irene Worth), sister (Pamela Brown), daughter (Annabel Bartlett), factory manager (Peter Bull) and harridan, bedridden-but-imperious mother (Bette Davis) – they accuse John/Jacques of forgetfulness, but no more than that.   You can accept that no one thinks Jacques’s exact likeness isn’t him – but Guinness makes the voices and mannerisms of the two men so individual (Barratt speaks with euphonious melancholy, De Gue in maliciously witty tones that are slightly camp) that it’s incredible none of his family thinks he seems in any way changed.   Jacques’s mistress Bela (Nicole Maurey) pretty soon works out that she’s talking to a different man:   this is because she and Barratt are kindred spirits, made for each other (although, in a welcome moment of psychological complexity, Bela acknowledges there were things that attracted her to Jacques too).

    The climax to The Scapegoat follows Hitchcock’s dictum that ‘If you meet your double, you should kill him, or he will kill you’.  Robert Hamer’s direction – alert in the early encounters between Barratt and De Gue – grows more and more listless and the two men’s final duel is almost perfunctory.   The ending might have had a bit of ambiguous snap if it was left unclear which of them survived (I wondered anyway what happened to the corpse of the other).  I suppose that, as we don’t hear Barratt’s voice at the close of proceedings, it could be said we are left in the dark – but the survivor’s final reunion with Bela is staged (and scored – the overdone music is by Bronislau Kaper) in a happy ending way that makes no sense if Barratt has been killed.  The relentlessly British (or, in one instance, American) casting of the mainly French characters is oddest in the case of Geoffrey Keen as Barratt/De Gue’s loyal chauffeur Gaston.  Keen, as usual, gives a creditable performance but, also as usual, seems like a reasonably high-ranking military chap.  When Gaston says things like ‘I am but a simple man, madame – I have no education’, the effect is bizarre.  Most of the cast (which also includes Noel Howlett, Peter Sallis and Alan Webb) are good; Annabel Bartlett, who appears never to have acted again, has a rather beguiling blend of eccentricity and solemnity as the young daughter Marie-Noel, and Irene Worth has considerable neurotic strength as her mother.  The one exception, sad to say, is Bette Davis who does a crude, stiffly theatrical turn as the nasty old mother – her timing seems way off, with the stresses sounding wrong in nearly every line.  Maybe it was because I wanted to suppress the memory of how bad Davis is that I’d forgotten I’d seen The Scapegoat before.  I realised this almost as soon as the film began.  Like John Barratt, it had left next to no trace.

    16 August 2011

  • The Sapphires

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wayne Blair (2012)

    The Sapphires has been a big hit in Australia, both in the theatre and in this screen adaptation.  Although inspired by a true story, it’s a synthetic piece of cinema.  Tony Briggs, who wrote the stage show, based it on the experiences of his mother and aunt and their two cousins.  As youngsters, these Aboriginal women toured Vietnam as a pop foursome, performing to American (and Australian?) troops – in the late 1960s, when they had no chance of a singing career in their racially benighted homeland.  It’s evident from an early stage that the script, by Briggs and Keith Thompson, is crude – in pushing the narrative forward, in dramatising conflicts between the main characters (there are few tensions that register continuously:  once explained, they can be disposed of), in checking off the racial issues points.  Wayne Blair’s direction emphasises the crudeness.  This might not matter if the Sapphires’ numbers on stage obliterated the mechanical bits in between but they don’t.  (I admit I don’t have much appetite for the soul music that becomes their speciality.  Some of the songs leave me cold; when one that I like comes up, I just want to hear the original – of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, for example.)  Watching The Sapphires in the theatre may allow you to feel more the exhilaration that the girls experience as performers.  As a pop ensemble on screen, they’re good enough but unexciting.

    The McCrae girls – the sisters Gail, Cynthia and Julie and their cousin Kay – acquire an Irish manager called Dave Lovelace.  As Dave, Chris O’Dowd looks older than his thirty-three years and that makes sense:  Dave’s booze-based life (he’s a barman with a drink problem) is disappearing down the drain until the Sapphires – or the Cummeragunja Songbirds as they call themselves at first – enter it. The first singing in the movie is of ‘Yellow Bird’ by the girls’ mother and the two elder daughters – the third daughter Julie, the real voice of the family, eventually joins in reluctantly.  Unconvincingly, too:  she’s furious because her mother has said she’s too young – although Julie’s also a teenage mother – to get the bus with Gail and Cynthia to a talent contest taking place in a country town not too far from the family home.  Even so, the ‘Yellow Bird’ number works well in that you see what the singing means to the singers.  Nearly all the best musical bits of the film occur offstage.  The sisters’ country and western number (a Merle Haggard song) at the talent contest is effective because you’re on the girls’ side, in the face of the outrageous racist hostility from the audience and the landlady of the pub where the contest is taking place.   (It’s the pub where Dave works and he comperes the contest.)   Otherwise, the music takes off only when Dave himself starts singing:   rehearsing the girls and getting carried away with the music or – with Cynthia’s fiancé and the father of Julie’s child – supplying an intro verse to the Sapphires’ celebratory number, when they return home at the end of film.   The girls’ harmonies sung down the phone from Vietnam to their worried mother back home is too calculated to have real impact.

    There’s another, very different problem in moving the material from stage to screen.  The physical constraints of theatre justify keeping the less enjoyable aspects of Vietnam out of the picture;  there are some moments of peril and carnage in the film but these feel required and the war’s background role borders on the tasteless.  Something similar happens when the girls watch a television news report of the assassination of Martin Luther King.   A few seconds of the mountaintop speech on TV overpowers everything else in The Sapphires and it’s offensive that it’s included merely to flesh out the racial drama (even though, as I understood it, the McCraes had never heard of King – just as they didn’t know there was a war going on in Vietnam until they arrived there).  The moment when Dave tells the always-in-charge eldest sister Gail that she has the weakest voice of the four is clumsy in terms of the other girls’ reactions, which rub salt in the wound, but Deborah Mailman plays Gail’s shock at her relegation well.  Gail may be the vocal weak link in the Sapphires but Mailman, who played Cynthia in the original stage production in 2004, is by far the strongest and most fluid actress.  Gail seems a generation older than the other girls, whom she bosses and protects.  This sizeable woman is anomalous and touching when she’s pushed into the tight-fitting, sequined outfits the Sapphires wear on stage.

    There’s a real chemistry between Mailman and Chris O’Dowd.  He’s not the most adroit of actors:  you can often hear him preparing for the delivery of Dave’s punchlines (and few of these are witty anyway).  But O’Dowd gets inside the character.  The sequence during which Dave gives Gail a letter expressing what he really feels, telling her to read it when he’s not around, is pure cliché.  One screen minute after he’s handed over the note, a North Vietnamese bomb attack on the area in which the Sapphires are performing has separated the couple, and Gail doesn’t know if Dave’s alive or dead.  Even so, Chris O’Dowd manages to make the scene truthful:  when Dave says he’s never been any good at music or at life, he sounds as if he believes it, and that it matters to him.  O’Dowd is effective too (more so than Deborah Mailman) when Dave, in a hospital bed, is reunited with Gail.   I jotted down after seeing the film that I found Jessica Mauboy, as Julie, a bit X-Factory – before I knew that Mauboy is a former winner of Australian Idol.  With Miranda Tapsell in the audience-pleasing role of Cynthia (this is a turn rather than a characterisation), Shari Sebbens as the nearly-white cousin Kay, and two older women with remarkable faces, Kylie Belling as the three sisters’ mother and Lynette Narkle as their grandmother.

    25 September 2013

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