Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Little Minister

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Wallace (1934)

    Katharine Hepburn is Babbie, a high-spirited and high-born Scottish girl, engaged to be married to her guardian Lord Rintoul.  To take her mind off the stultifying life in store for her, Babbie spends a good deal of her time running and singing in the woods outside the little town of Thrums, pretending to be a wild gypsy girl.  At one point, one of the locals suggests that she may be ‘one of those Southern gypsies – they have a grand manner when it suits them’.   There’s no denying that this is an accurate description of Hepburn.  Watching her in this adaptation of J M Barrie’s 1891 novel, which he turned into a stage play a few years later, made me realise why she became ‘box office poison’ during the 1930s.  (The Little Minister didn’t recover its production costs.)  Hepburn’s  unusual athleticism makes her fascinating to watch in motion; her ability to express a character’s feelings through her physical attitude means that she’s magnetic when she comes to rest.  But when Babbie is beguiling the amusingly serious-minded Gavin Dishart, the minister of the title, she’s pretty annoying.  One of the amazing things about Katharine Hepburn, however, is that, faced with a seemingly impossible challenge, she not only meets it but makes what she’s doing seem natural.  Babbie and Gavin are about to declare their love, and explain her identity, to the scandalised community of Thrums when the little minister receives a serious stab wound and spends a night hovering between life and death.  Babbie begs God to spare him.  Hepburn gives herself over to the prayer so passionately and unselfconsciously that the moment isn’t the melodramatic cliché it ought to be:  it is – because the actress also is – transcendent.  And in spite of Hepburn’s air of visiting royalty – it never occurs to you that Babbie’s anything other than aristocratic – the romance between her and John Beal’s Gavin works well.  The gulf between her flamboyance and his staid conscientiousness is appealing, and Beal has a nice balance of earnest propriety and vulnerability.  There’s an especially good bit when Gavin is in the pulpit, inveighing against the temptress Eve.

    The opening legends explain that the story we’re about to see takes place in 1840, when life was ‘simple’, but I struggled to understand the plot.  Lord Rintoul (Frank Conroy), although he seems dull rather than tyrannical, is trying to keep the workers of Thrums, as well as Babbie, on a leash:  Thrums is a weaving community and a dispute about low wages is (I think) the reason why there are soldiers in the town.  (Thrums was Barrie’s fictional stand-in for his own home town of Kirriemuir.  It is, in its relocation to Hollywood, remarkably spacious.)  I wasn’t sure either whether the minister’s littleness referred to his height or his youth.  John Beal isn’t tall but few of the locals are:  The Little Minister sometimes looks to be set in Munchkinland.  (The dour church elder Tammas Whammond (Lumsden Hare) is one of the exceptions; Hepburn of course is another.)  Barely five feet tall, J M Barrie knew all about diminished stature.  The genuinely surprising turn of events when Gavin Dishart is knifed had me worried for a moment not only that the minister wouldn’t survive but that the Barrie family’s autobiography was going to take over the story.  Gavin lives in the manse with his mother, to whom he’s very close.  Beryl Mercer plays Mrs Dishart very well but her anguish at her son’s injury makes it hard not to think of the ice-skating accident in Kirriemuir that took the life of Barrie’s elder brother, and his mother’s favourite son, David.   The Little Minister needs this eleventh hour jolt, however.  It’s never greatly involving and has begun to drag by this point.  The film is well acted, though (and the Scottish accents are, for the time, not bad).  The supporting players include Donald Crisp as the doctor who saves Gavin, Alan Hale as a drinker with a heart of gold, and Mary Gordon as (I assumed) Babbie’s ex-nanny.   Gordon is one of the genuine Scots in the cast.  Another, Andy Clyde, plays the local policeman, Wearyworld, who’s more a music hall turn than a character.   The music includes jolly arrangements by Max Steiner of ‘Loch Lomond’ ‘Comin’ Thro’ the Rye’ etc.

    15 February 2013

  • The Life of David Gale

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alan Parker (2003)

    An anti-capital punishment campaigner ends up on death row.  You feel this must be based-on-a-true-story – in fact there’s no such excuse:  the florid irony is the idea of the screenwriter Charles Randolph.   David Gale (Kevin Spacey) is the former head of a philosophy department in a Texan university and a leading light in Deathwatch, a group of anti-capital punishment activists.  As he awaits execution for the killing of Constance Harraway (Laura Linney), a fellow academic and Deathwatch member, Gale agrees to tell his story, for a six-figure sum, to Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), a news magazine journalist.   The film is structured around her interviews with Gale.  These introduce lengthy flashbacks to the story of how he got to the condemned cell.

    This is a lousy film from start to finish.   You know it from the opening sequences in the news magazine offices (the crude expository dialogue; the mechanical, hollow dynamism of the camera movement).  In the hysterically unimaginative climax, Bitsey gets out of her car and runs the rest of the way to the prison where Gale’s being held, clutching the evidence she believes will exonerate him (a videotape showing that Constance Harraway, who was dying of leukaemia, filmed her own suicide).   Alan Parker’s direction is characteristically overheated but he seems to be on auto-pilot – or trying to remember how he overdid things in Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning and ended up with a hit on his hands.  Parker doesn’t do much more than keep the action going:  as a stupid entertainment, David Gale is moderately entertaining.   As a politically serious film (which I imagine it wishes to be), it’s a dud.  There’s one particularly crummy device:  Parker inserts every so often a little montage of key words relating to what we’ve just seen – ‘Rape’, ‘Guilt’, ‘Doubt’ and so on flash onto the screen as if subliminally (but not subliminally enough).  The on-campus scenes have a special ludicrousness, with each member of the faculty trying to sound like Oscar Wilde.   Charles Randolph seems really to think that academics are all-round geniuses whose common sense is naturally equal to their analytical powers.  In an early exchange with Bitsey, the tyro journalist Zack (Gabriel Mann), who tags along with her to cover the story, expresses doubt about David Gale’s guilt because Constance’s death was clumsily staged and Gale has a PhD in philosophy.

    The picture is not just badly written but badly overwritten – so much so that getting through the surfeit of lines seems to sap the actors’ expressive energies.  It’s no surprise that the scenes between Zack and Bitsey are perfunctory but there’s not much going on between Gale and Bitsey either.  That could be justified, on his part anyway, by the twist in the tail of David Gale but Kevin Spacey seems to be going through the motions in other scenes too.  Although you know you’re watching a highly skilled actor, you don’t get the sense he’s fully into the role in sequences between Gale and his son, or when Gale’s having anal sex with a girl student, or when he’s weeping and raging.  Spacey never seems sufficiently passionate about the anti-capital punishment cause that Gale’s committed to (although he brings some intensity to his face in the close-ups behind the mesh of the prison cell).  Kate Winslet isn’t bad exactly but her nervy breathing and American accent are too deliberate and she’s certainly less interesting here than in any other role I’ve seen her in.  The role of Constance is pretty demeaning but Laura Linney brings it a lot of charm in the moments when she’s allowed to stop emoting angrily.  The scene between her and Spacey which precedes Gale going to bed with Constance is by far the best in the picture.  Matt Craven is nicely ambiguous as Dusty, another member of Deathwatch.

    Five minutes before the end of David Gale, I was all ready to deride Parker and Randolph for seeming to assume that an unhappy ending, however daft, must be tougher and more thoughtful than a happy one.   But the film-makers then take you by surprise – both Sally and I were baffled by the closing sequences and spent some time trying to work them out.   According to Wikipedia, this is what happens:

    ‘In a frenzy, Bloom tries to present the [videotape] evidence to stop the execution. Unfortunately, she doesn’t reach the courthouse in time and Gale dies an innocent man. The tape is released after his death, resulting in a media and political uproar over the execution of an innocent.  … In an epilogue, Dusty delivers the interview fee from the magazine to Gale’s wife in Spain, along with a postcard from Berlin [the girl student he had sex with] apologizing for the false rape accusation. His ex-wife looks distraught, knowing Gale told the truth and that she effectively stole their child away from him.  … A differently edited videotape is delivered to Bloom much later, labeled “Off the Record.” This one shows Dusty confirming Harraway’s death and then stepping aside to allow Gale, also present, to caress her one last time. It is in this way Gale leaves his print on Harraway’s plastic bag. … Bitsey realizes she has been royally had by Gale and indeed his entire entourage of ‘associates’. Was the intended message delivered? Was Gale secretly wishing to be pardoned at the last moment? Or did Dusty finally get the revenge he appeared to have wanted from the start?’

    Who knows?   One further question.  When David Gale looks into the camera at the end of the ‘Off the Record’ version of the tape, Kevin Spacey’s expression suggests that he knows he’s looking at Bitsey Bloom and making her realise she’s ‘been royally had’.  Is Gale clairvoyant?

    20 April 2010

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