Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Reluctant Debutante

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincente Minnelli (1958)

    The people who made it seem to have thought that, because it’s ‘frothy’, it can be nonsensical in terms of its basic premise.  To be fair to William Douglas-Home, that wasn’t the case with his 1955 stage play, on which the film is based.  In the play, Jane Broadbent, the title character, is an English girl whose neurotic mother wants to see her successfully and suitably paired off in the course of the debutante season.  In the movie, Jane is – for Hollywood star casting purposes – an American just arrived in London (for how long isn’t clear).  Her parents are divorced, her own mother is still in the US, and the frantic driving force behind the deb campaign that Jane doesn’t want to be a part of, is her father Jimmy’s new, young wife Sheila – whom Jane’s never met before.   Why would this American girl feel any kind of obligation to play along with her stepmother’s stupid vicarious ambitions in a social world that means nothing to her?

    Rex Harrison was between the Broadway and West End productions of My Fair Lady when he filmed The Reluctant Debutante and you keep hearing Henry Higgins – especially when Jimmy Broadbent expresses his exasperation with what-all-these-damned-women-are-up-to.   It’s an expert but characteristically lazy performance, which involves a fair amount of mugging.   Sheila Broadbent is perhaps the film role for which Kay Kendall is best remembered; even now, it’s poignant to watch because this was the last of her movies released during Kendall’s lifetime (her final film, Once More With Feeling, came out after her death).  She does have great personal style – and she wears the Balmain clothes sensationally – but it’s not a style that chimes with the character she’s playing:  Kay Kendall is too eccentrically modern to convince as a woman obsessed with success in such a constrained and ridiculous world as the debs’ balls circuit.  Her line readings are pleasingly free compared with most of the rest of the cast but she’s required to be so frenetic that she becomes rather wearing.  For much of the time, Sandra Dee as Jane looks more than reluctant – more like resentful – but who can blame her?   She doesn’t exactly liven things up but she’s competent and, because the situation that Jane’s stuck in is so annoyingly implausible, you really do want her to escape from it.

    John Saxon, who plays David Parkson, the Italian-American that Jane falls in love with, isn’t a great actor but he has charm and, in this company, his underplaying is a relief.  It’s typical of the material, which appears to satirise the English upper classes but deep down (if that’s the phrase) finds them adorable, that the supposedly disreputable David Parkson turns out to be an aristocrat.  It’s also typical of the careless script that Saxon, although handsome, doesn’t at all answer to Sheila Broadbent’s description of David Parkson’s other attributes.  She says he’s ‘tall and lean’.  Saxon is quite square and shorter than Rex Harrison.  Hardly any of the physical casting makes sense.  Is Clarissa, daughter of Sheila’s cousin twice removed Mabel Claremont (‘Twice removed isn’t far enough’), meant to look like the back end of a bus and be desperate for a man?  Her devotion to silly-arse David Fenner and his ignoring her seem to imply that.  But Diane Clare as Clarissa is reasonably pretty and perfectly pleasant; since Peter Myers as Fenner is physically unprepossessing as well as personally repulsive, the relations of these two are baffling.  (It’s even more baffling that Myers was the only member of the London stage cast who kept his role for the movie.)  Because this David is unfortunate looking, you feel it’s he who must be the desperate one.  This gives a rather distressing as well as an uncomfortable edge to the revelation that David tries to force his attentions on young women.  Angela Lansbury’s verve and characterisation skills just about see her through as Mabel.  Ambrosine Phillpotts, who played Lansbury’s part on stage, makes rather too much of her smaller role here as Jimmy Broadbent’s secretary.

    A little of Douglas-Home’s wit goes a long way with me (he co-wrote the screenplay with Julius J Epstein) but there are problems putting The Reluctant Debutante on screen that aren’t to do with the deficiencies of the original.  In the theatre, all the action takes place in Jimmy and Sheila’s flat.  In the movie, the audience isn’t spared the tedium of the actual balls.  The film was made in the year of the last debutante season, which the young Queen Elizabeth II had decided to abolish.  There’s a single reference to this, clearly just stuck in for ‘topical’ effect, although it’s unbelievable that the demise of the deb balls wouldn’t have mattered to, and been a persisting subject of conversation between, people like Sheila Broadbent and Mabel Claremont.   Watching this immediately after watching Some Came Running (for a second time), it was hard to believe they were the work of the same director.  There’s a lot wrong with Some Came Running but it has real visual life and atmosphere (and fine lead performances).  Vincente Minnelli may have been intrigued by the social peculiarity of The Reluctant Debutante but this gruesome movie is one of his worst.

    13 May 2012

  • The Pumpkin Eater

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jack Clayton (1964)

    ‘Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater,
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her;
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well.’

    I guess this is the source of the title of Penelope Mortimer’s novel, which Harold Pinter adapted for the screen.  If you google ‘Peter, Peter’, it regularly comes up on lists of nursery rhymes with darker hidden meanings:  there are suggestions that it may be about uxoricide or that a ‘pumpkin shell’ was code for a chastity belt.   The protagonist of The Pumpkin Eater, Jo Armitage, is the mother of six children from three marriages.  Her psychiatrist suggests to her that Jo can justify having sex only with procreation in mind.  Her marital misery plumbs new depths after her adulterous third husband – Jake, a screenwriter – has persuaded Jo to have an abortion and be sterilised.  She’s then told by an acquaintance called Bob Conway that his wife is carrying Jake’s child after an affair on a film shoot in Morocco.

    The family’s London house and the now disused windmill where they once lived are realised brilliantly by Clayton and his cinematographer Oswald Morris.  We experience the house as if through Jo’s eyes – so that the details of its décor and the textures of the life going on within it seem both barely noticed, because they’re so familiar, and horribly separate, alien.  There are images intersected by door or window frames that convey, strongly but not over-emphatically, a sense of Jo being closed off or closed in.  This sounds consciously artful and so it is – but the visual scheme always connects with the mind of the main character.  Although there are many shots that suggest a bleached out world, Morris’s black-and-white photography is emotionally varied; so is Georges Delerue’s supple, melancholy score.  Jack Clayton’s previous film was The Innocents and there are moments in The Pumpkin Eater when Jo’s brood are not much less disquieting than the brother and sister in the earlier movie.  Because it takes some time to get clear just how many children there are, they’re powerful on an almost supernatural level, yet they emerge as individuals too.  When they’re playing together, the bursts of noise can be violently disorienting.  Wide, long shots of the children emerging one by one from the distance and coming towards Jo are eerily beautiful.

    Anne Bancroft’s face is often mask-like in its shifts between sadness and inscrutability.  Occasionally her head is framed so that it seems a cutout, the dominant part of an image but detached from it and from the rest of her body.   With the help of Motley’s clothes (and hats) and the skilful make-up (George Frost) and hairdressing (Gordon Bond), Bancroft’s angular beauty reinforces the presentation of Jo as a series of facets struggling to cohere as a single identity.   Bancroft is the brittle soul of The Pumpkin Eater and the connection between her and Peter Finch is electric when Jo and Jake first meet (they’re introduced by Jo’s then husband – the second one).   Having not seen him for some time, I’d forgotten how much Finch was able to draw the camera, his ability to express conflicted emotions with remarkable naturalness.  Jake is an impressive character because his charm and (he obviously believes) his decent aspects are not, in Finch’s performance, at all compromised by the increasing evidence of his sexual faithlessness.   As Conway, James Mason’s vocal edge and versatility are thrilling; his grin at first suggests lethal insincerity, then desperation.  Conway invites Jo to afternoon tea at London Zoo and they talk together as Jo’s children, with a nanny supervising ineffectually, enjoy themselves.  Conway reels off the choices on the menu.  A few minutes later, he’s reading from a love letter his wife sent to Jake.  In these passages especially, Mason shows himself a superb interpreter of Harold Pinter’s words.  Pinter provides some coruscatingly nasty lines.  The dialogue is not always so impressive when it’s used for a relatively conventional exchange.

    There’s a lot to admire then in The Pumpkin Eater; its weakness is that, at this distance in time anyway, its subject is just not that interesting.  Within a few years, other movies, as well as sustained public debate, would have addressed issues of female and feminine identity and the tensions between sexual partnership and motherhood.  These themes may have been unusual when Penelope Mortimer’s novel was published in 1962 but it’s hard, coming to the material for the first time now, to find it original.   Even so, it was good to see The Pumpkin Eater – I can’t remember noticing it in television listings for many years.  The strong supporting cast includes Richard Johnson as Jo’s second husband, Cedric Hardwicke as her father and Alan Webb as Jake’s, Eric Porter as the psychiatrist and Cyril Luckham as a doctor.  The young Maggie Smith’s intense eccentricity as an unwelcome (from Jo’s point of view) house guest is compelling.  Yootha Joyce is riveting as a spectacularly unhappy woman who starts a conversation with Jo at the hairdresser’s.   The children include Phoebe Nicholls, Frances White and Kate Nicholls (the last two as the same daughter at two different ages).

    20 August 2010

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