Daily Archives: Thursday, July 21, 2016

  • A Passage to India

    David Lean (1984)

    Adapting E M Forster’s novel for the screen would seem to present a considerable problem.  The book’s dramatic centre is a non-event or, at least, an unresolved event – something that corresponds to the unfathomableness of India for the British characters in the story.  David Lean hardly overcomes this problem:  Adela Quested’s allegation that Dr Aziz tried to rape her in the Marabar Caves is reduced to a matter for resolution in a court of law; and Lean’s predilection for marshalling crowds results in too great an emphasis on the political stir caused by Aziz’s arrest.  But A Passage to India is, for most of its one hundred and sixty minutes, a fine film.  The rhythm and clarity of the storytelling are, until the closing stages (the ‘Temple’ section of the novel), very satisfying.  In the effectively satirical description of colonial 1920s India, the cultural distortions imposed by British government are epitomised by a richly uniformed Indian brass band who swelter through ‘Tea for Two’ at a ‘bridge party’, an absurd social event organised by the British chief administrator.  (The natives are invited to the bridge party then ignored by their hosts.)  The sharply observed social comedy doesn’t, however, diminish the larger mystery of the setting, which Lean conveys through his use of the local landscape, colours and (especially) weather.  His penchant for cosmic imagery is a real strength:  the discrepancy between the representatives of a short-lived colonialism and the physical scale and spiritual age of the country containing these representatives is an integral part of the story.  (In Lean’s previous film, Ryan’s Daughter, it seemed the characters’ passions were meant to measure up to the gigantic geography of their surroundings; the fact that they didn’t made the movie ludicrous.)  Maurice Jarre’s score, too, though overly reminiscent of his Ryan’s Daughter theme, suggests very well the absurd collision of two different cultures and apprehensions of time.

    The elderly Mrs Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) and Dr Aziz (Victor Banerjee) first meet in a moonlit mosque and he thinks she’s a ghost:  it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the strength of the two actors’ contrasting emotional expressiveness in this scene gives it a spiritual power.  Adela Quested (Judy Davis), newly engaged to Mrs Moore’s son Ronny (Nigel Havers) and full of doubts about it, takes a bicycle ride alone and comes upon a disused temple surrounded by massive statuary of Indian figures in embrace.  She is fascinated, then flees, terrified by a horde of monkeys that descends screeching from the temple – the monkeys resemble malign, little, naked men.  This fusion of alien, carnal mystery and immediate physical threat vividly predicts the fear that we assume overwhelms Adela in the Marabar Caves (even though the sequence there, perhaps because you expect much from it, delivers less than the earlier show of panic).  The standard objection that Judy Davis is too attractive to play Adela seems hardly valid:  she’s made up in such a way that you can accept she would have been deemed unbeautiful by both the British and Indian communities of the time.  Davis may be too charming:  Adela’s desire ‘to see the real India’ comes across as the expression of a reasonably enlightened and modern sensibility rather than the raw, earnest lack of humour that characterises Forster’s Miss Quested.    Davis is also vocally rather muted – perhaps a slight unease with the English accent causes her to blur a few lines.   But her great alertness and sensitivity as an actress help to reveal Adela’s neurotic depths sympathetically and surprisingly:  the young woman she creates is far from a foolish virgin.  (It’s refreshing to find a surprising characterisation in a David Lean film.)  Judy Davis gives a terrific tension to the courtroom climax – a tension it needs.  As Aziz, Victor Banerjee occasionally fails, perhaps through over-eagerness, to make the most of his comic opportunities but he is beautifully persuasive in emotional extremity.

    Professor Godbole calls Mrs Moore ‘an old soul’ – that is, she’s had many incarnations.  Peggy Ashcroft’s artistry illuminates the phrase in both this Eastern sense and the more colloquial Western one.  Mrs Moore may be nearer to God than the other British characters but she’s also nearer to death; she’s both receptive to, and intimidated by, the experience of India.  Ashcroft’s radiance as a performer allows you to believe in Mrs Moore as a figure of spiritual authority.  Her plain-speaking, time-bound fearfulness and simple physical tiredness make her a real, vulnerable human being.  James Fox embodies the fair-mindedness of the schoolmaster Fielding easily and straightforwardly.  Fox isn’t a powerful actor but he’s likeable here, even when he’s wooden:  you root for this Englishman abroad with his decent, rather ineffectual determination to see justice done.  It’s a relief that the British actors playing colonial grotesques mostly do so with tact, especially Richard Wilson as the chief administrator.  Among the Indians, Saeed Jaffrey is outstanding as the Hamidullah, Aziz’s rather two-faced mentor.  There’s one major disappointment in the acting – and from the least expected quarter.  As the Hindu professor Godbole, Alec Guinness fails to suggest a mind that has cultivated transcendence of Western time and rationality.  He makes Godbole goodness-gracious-me comical.   (Guinness is the only white actor playing an Indian so his contribution seems doubly anomalous.)  The cast also includes Michael Culver (working hard to sustain a Scottish accent), Antonia Pemberton, Clive Swift, Ann Firbank, Art Malik, Roshan Seth and Sandra Hotz.

    Photographed by Ernest Day; production design by John Box.  The adaptation is by David Lean, who also – and fittingly for this, his last film – edited.   (The credits perhaps reflect his order of priorities:  the screenplay is a separate credit, subsidiary to ‘Directed and edited by David Lean’.)

    [1990s]

  • A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

    Richard Lester (1966)

    Richard Lester’s breakneck direction ruins this adaptation of the Broadway hit musical by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, with songs by Stephen Sondheim.  Lester had recently enjoyed critical and commercial success with The Knack and the two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, where his hyperactive camera style supplied an apt cartoon tempo (and, in effect, built up the slender material).  Both the choice of Lester to direct A Funny Thing Happened and the end product assume that, since this is a farce (inspired by Plautus), it must be frenetic – and that, if it’s frenetic, it’s bound to be funny.  The incontinent camera movement and editing aren’t just redundant:  they distract attention – Lester’s as well as the audience’s – from the plot and, much worse, break up the actors’ rhythm.  No one can take a couple of steps without being spliced or speak more than two consecutive lines without breaking off into a mugging grimace to camera.

    This doesn’t stop you liking or recognising the talents of the likes of Zero Mostel, Buster Keaton, Michael Hordern and Jack Gilford but you feel frustrated for them.   Keaton (as Erronius), Hordern (Senex) and Gilford (Hysterium) give definitely American or British personalities to their toga-ed characters; Mostel’s hysterical, jowly cupidity as ‘the lyingest, cheatingest, sloppiest slave in all of Rome’ transcends nationality in a satisfyingly eccentric way.  Phil Silvers is less confidently incongruous in the antique setting:  he sometimes sounds to be sending up the vaguely exoticised American accent familiar from Hollywood biblical or classical world epics – surely the wrong note of parody here.   The most successful performance is Leon Greene’s as the massively self-admiring soldier, Miles Gloriosus.  (He had also played the role on Broadway.)  Greene’s square-jawed handsomeness is amusingly impervious to the impatient camera:  the effortful, minimal changes of facial expression achieve a virtually slow-motion effect.  His commanding baritone makes his jolly entrance song a musical highlight as well as a comic one.  Greene’s vocal power cuts through the jumpy mess of accompanying images and lets you enjoy the wit of Stephen Sondheim’s words and music.

    A Funny Thing Happened includes an odd assortment of elements of big film genres of the 1950s and 1960s:  the dancing slave girls belong to the opening credits of a James Bond movie; the lashings of desperate ‘action’ recall abortive attempts to ‘open up’ screen versions of more conventional stage musicals; the forced zaniness of a climactic chariot chase is unfunny in the style of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  The film also anticipates subsequent BBC sitcom successes:  not only the obvious offshoot, Up Pompeii! (in which the cheap, static studio setting and the mostly lame acting were – as he might himself have said – ambrosia and nectar to Frankie Howerd) but also Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em.  Michael Crawford’s juvenile lead, Hero, with his daft, nervous giggle and acrobatics, seems in retrospect a try-out for Frank Spencer.

    The large cast also includes Beatrix Lehmann, Roy Kinnear, Alfie Bass, Jon Pertwee, Peter Butterworth (indistinguishable from his Carry On persona), Jack May and Janet Webb (the fat lady who always interrupted the finale of The Morecambe and Wise Show).  The ‘virgin’ babes in A Funny Thing Happened probably found secure employment in The Benny Hill Show in the twilight of their voluptuous years.  Screenplay by Melvin Frank and Michael Pertwee; musical direction and (poor) incidental music by Ken Thorne; photographed by Nicolas Roeg; sets and costumes designed by Tony Walton.  Richard Williams’s titles are a dazzling, slick recycling of Ancient Roman imagery:  this pop mosaic is wittily stylised like nothing else in the film.

    [1990s]

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