Daily Archives: Friday, August 25, 2017

Douglas Hickox (1970)

Joe Orton died before either of these screen adaptations of his play went into production.   The first read-through for the ITV Playhouse version, broadcast in July 1968, took place just a week after Orton’s murder, according to Clive Francis, who played Sloane.  The opening titles of the cinema version, released in April 1970, appear against shots of a cemetery:  the words ‘In Loving Memory’ on a gravestone and the name of Joe Orton are juxtaposed on the screen.  Peter Moffatt’s TV Sloane, for which Orton himself did the adaptation, is unsurprisingly relaxed about restricting the action to a single studio set and, in this important respect, more successful than Douglas Hickox’s film, which has a screenplay by Clive Exton.  The performances in the big-screen Sloane are more memorable, though, especially those of Beryl Reid and Harry Andrews as the middle-aged siblings Kath and Ed – hosts to the young psychopath Sloane and, eventually, his joint captors.

Peter Moffatt begins and ends with shots from outside the front window of the house that Kath shares with her father Kemp, known as ‘Dadda’.  There are a couple of brief sequences in the hallway to the stairs.  Otherwise, Moffatt uses a single location – the living room.  The concentration of the action expresses justifiable confidence in Orton’s writing and guards against diluting the black comedy momentum.  The very confined space has some disadvantages, though.  With the camera always close up, much of the acting seems too big.  In view of Ed’s raging misogynist disgust for Kath, it feels wrong that he’s so often in such physical proximity to her.

Sheila Hancock had already played Kath in the ill-fated Broadway production of Sloane, which ran for only twelve performances in 1965.  Born just a few weeks after Joe Orton in 1933, she’s young for Kath, who may be older than the forty-one she admits to being.  That turns out not to be a problem with Hancock’s performance but there are others.  Her distinctive speech rhythms are too unvarying and her voice always sounds like a put-on voice.  She’s continuously on the lookout for pointing a line or doing a bit of business that will get a laugh.  Her character’s avidity is, to say the most, intermittent:  Hancock’s Kath is sex-starved without being ravenous.  Edward Woodward, though occasionally stagy as Ed, is the strongest member of Peter Moffatt’s cast and realises Ed’s wound-up lust for Sloane to startling and funny effect.  Perhaps because Sheila Hancock isn’t rapacious enough, Woodward comes across, in Ed’s first scene with Sloane, as too eager too soon but his delivery of the monologue in which Ed warns Sloane off women, is a great success.  Although his playing too seems conceived for a larger performing space, Arthur Lovegrove is good as the unfortunate Dadda.

‘Eddie’, wrote Orton (to the director of the ill-fated Broadway production, Alan Schneider), ‘naturally, doesn’t know how amoral Sloane is.  He imagines that he has a virgin on his hands’.  Clive Francis, only twenty-one at the time, is physically suitable as the innocent that both Ed and Kath imagine him to be, and as a boyish killer.  Francis is good when he’s insouciant but that’s not often enough.  He’s anxious to act – especially to react – even if the result doesn’t seem right for the character:  Sloane is too often uneasy or upset.  There’s a hint of the Harold Steptoe quaver in Francis’s voice and Peter Moffatt also has Sloane occasionally mispronounce big words – which misses the point of Joe Orton’s stylised writing.

The look of the cinema Sloane contrasts instantly with the suburban drabness of the TV version (which is black and white, of course – the film is in colour).  The prologue in the cemetery raises hopes of an assured visual style.  The camera cuts from one grave to another before switching from stones and statuary to the pink-varnished nails of a hand.  It moves up to a wrist with a multi-coloured bracelet, a chiffon-covered arm, a throat bearing a necklace matching the bracelet and a gold crucifix.  Then a mouth, which sucks (audibly) on an orange and yellow ice lolly.  The face of Beryl Reid’s Kath is revealed.  She first encounters Peter McEnery’s Sloane working out among the gravestones.  The lines of the opening scene of Orton’s play are delivered as the pair move around the cemetery, Reid teetering, unforgettably, in high heels and a diaphanous mini-dress.  This episode introduces a performance that’s as physically fearless as it’s vocally imaginative.   There are misjudgments in Clive Exton’s screenplay but changing Kath’s ‘I’m forty-one’ to ‘I’m thirty-nine’, when the claim is made by fifty-year-old Beryl Reid, isn’t one of them.  Reid’s Kath – randy and prim, soppy and scolding, grotesque and touching – is a singularly bizarre, brilliant concoction.

The stylistic promise of the start isn’t fulfilled.  Entertaining Mr Sloane is hardly the first screen adaptation of a stage play to resort to anxious opening out of the material but Douglas Hickox’s direction is, in more ways than one, all over the place.  Hickox is in trouble almost as soon as the sequence of single shots in the cemetery is done and he has to put together a motion picture.  He appears to have taken the view that, because the source material is richly subversive, the film can be as undisciplined as he likes, so long as it’s oddly eye-catching.  The family home is church-like, with stained glass windows.  Wolfgang Suschitzky’s camera zooms incontinently.  There are frenetically unfunny action sequences involving Ed’s car.  These and a visit by Sloane and Ed to an outdoor swimming pool contradict the essentially offstage nature of what the two get up to – though the swimming-pool bit is partly salvaged by Harry Andrews’s blend of arousal and distaste, as Ed rubs sun oil into Sloane’s back, complains it’s ‘filthy stuff’ and wipes his hands clean.  The phallic images – the spadix of the graveside lilies, Kath’s ice lolly – are amusing at first but soon desperate.  There’s a sausage on a breakfast plate, with two fried eggs for good measure.  Cadbury’s Flake is prominent in a shop confectionery display (the product had been advertised suggestively on television well before the film was made).

The potent understatement of the play’s last scene – Kath and Ed, having blackmailed Sloane into staying with them, agree a contract to share him sexually, six months at a time – is replaced by a double wedding ceremony.  The film ends on a freeze frame of the trio’s faces:  as Harry Andrews and Beryl Reid, on either side, kiss him, Peter McEnery gives a rueful, what-can-you-do smile to camera, as if to reassure the audience they’ve been watching a cheeky, innocuous sex caper.  There’s a title song, performed by Georgie Fame; pleasant, mellow and mildly witty, it has nothing in common with other aspects of the film, let alone with Joe Orton’s original.  Hickox’s weirdly angled close-ups of the characters are counterproductive.  Orton’s language is often coded but it’s rarely difficult to understand, especially if the actors deliver the lines as expertly as they do here.  It’s a tautology to see their close-up faces expressing the same message as their voices.

This is a particular problem with Sloane.  Peter McEnery, in his T-shirts and leathers and with his hair dyed blond, is a strong 1960s image.  He’s not a boy, though (he was thirty), and, though he shows a lot of skill, he’s too knowing.  The camera’s proximity exposes both these things.  As a result, Sloane is both less seemingly innocent and less threatening than he needs to be.  Alan Webb plays Kemp busily but he justifies Kath’s chiding of Dadda for behaving ‘like a sick child’.  The three older actors all give their character an emotional age much younger than their physical one.  This is especially engaging with Harry Andrews’s Ed, whose nostalgia for his youthful good times with his ‘matie’ is rather less blatant than Kath’s infantilism or Kemp’s petulance.  Andrews uses his pronounced jaw and lofty, ramrod rectitude splendidly – the connotations of his many screen roles as senior military men increase his comic force.  The zeal of Ed’s contempt for loose living – ie for having anything to do with women – is breathtaking.  When Andrews hints occasionally at Ed’s emotional need, as well as his carnal appetite, for Sloane the effect is remarkably poignant.  Ed’s sartorial style and Kath’s blowsy lack of taste are a triumphant combination:  Harry Andrews and Beryl Reid both wear their clothes superbly.   They completely respect Joe Orton’s injunction that his characters should be played straight:  as a result, they’re formidably funny.   As a piece of film-making, Entertaining Mr Sloane is a mess[1]. But it’s a treasure too – a record of the two best performances in a Joe Orton piece ever given on screen.

14 and 22 August 2017

[1] The film version of Loot – directed by Silvio Narizzano, with a screenplay by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson – arrived in British cinemas just a few weeks after Entertaining Mr Sloane in 1970.    The cast is nothing if not eclectic – Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick, Milo O’Shea, Hywel Bennett, Roy Holder, Dick Emery.  Like Douglas Hickox, Silvio Narizzano tries desperately to be zany and with-it but the farce plot of Loot puts a higher premium on coherent direction.  The actors can’t rise above the lack of it as they do in Entertaining Mr Sloane and the result is unwatchable.  I gave up on Loot after half an hour.