Monthly Archives: August 2017

  • Entertaining Mr Sloane

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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.

     

     

  • Tom of Finland

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dome Karukoski (2017)

    ‘Interestingly,’ writes Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review of the recently re-released Prick Up Your Ears, ‘this film doesn’t show Orton or Halliwell encountering homophobia as such’.  Bradshaw’s ‘interestingly’, with its implication of ‘surprisingly’, hints at a present-day perception of homosexuals of bygone years as predominantly victims – a unified group.  Prick Up Your Ears – all the more ‘interesting’ in that it was made during the AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s – isn’t a successful film but Stephen Frears and Alan Bennett did well not to show their protagonists on the receiving end of homophobia.  Joe Orton’s sexuality was hardly stifled by the laws, let alone the social and moral attitudes, of the time.  Kenneth Halliwell was into victimhood, but of a very particular kind.  In Dome Karukoski’s biography of the Finnish visual artist Touko Laaksonen (1920-91), the hero’s struggle is a more conventional account of a gay man’s difficult progress towards sexual and creative self-expression.  Tom of Finland, written by Alexsi Bardy, contains things that are improbable but next to nothing that’s surprising.  It isn’t very interesting in any sense of the word.

    Touko Laaksonen was conscripted into the Finnish army in 1940, to fight alongside Nazi Germany.   Karukoski’s film begins in the later stages of World War II, from which Touko (Pekka Strang) returns a decorated officer, to live with his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky) in Helsinki, where both work for an international advertising agency (McCann-Erickson).  In the army, Touko enjoys the company and uniforms of other soldiers and has furtive sex – in woodland, after dark – with a senior officer, Alijoki (Taisto Oksanen).  In peacetime, Touko cruises parkland under cover of darkness; on one occasion, a police patrol interrupts intercourse between him and a younger man.  Touko escapes but the other man, who has told Touko his name is ‘Nipa’, is beaten up.  During a trip to Berlin, Touko is arrested after a one-night stand that goes wrong and the German police call in a senior Finnish diplomat to interview him.  This turns out to be Alijoki, who initially claims they’ve never met before.  When Touko produces the cigarette case Alijoki gave him as a memento, as they parted company at the end of the war, the diplomat hurriedly pulls strings to arrange Touko’s release from custody.  Back in Helsinki, Kaija takes in a lodger – a young dancer called Veli (Lauri Tilkanen) – aka Nipa.  There’s no suggestion that Touko’s reunions with Alijoki and Nipa are anything but remarkable coincidences.  Taken together, they’re so unlikely that you wonder if they really must have happened.  On the other hand, they’re dramatically convenient enough to ring false.  They represent the choice of paths that lie before Touko.  Alijoki is the exemplar of contemporary covert homosexuality – a married man with an important career to protect.  Nipa becomes Touko’s life partner and, in due course, an early AIDS victim.

    Dome Karukoski presents Touko’s late-1940s existence as a continuation of life during wartime.  He is haunted by bad dreams about the violence in which he participated as a soldier.  The outside world of Helsinki is a living nightmare – a dangerous place for a homosexual, whether in public toilets or parks or wherever else Touko goes in the hope of satisfying his sexual needs.  His refuge and means of sublimating his feelings comes in his homoerotic drawings.  After early post-war work that includes images of men in military uniform, he moves on to highly stylised male figures:  typically leather-clad or wearing skintight T-shirts and jeans, they’re often depicted, with bulging muscles and crotches, in uncompromising, exultant physical proximity.  In the mid-1950s Touko submits drawings, signed with the pseudonym Tom, to an American beefcake magazine whose editor publishes examples of the work and, in doing so, coins the ‘Tom of Finland’ credit.  The US censorship laws of the time initially restrict the range of publishable images.  By the 1970s, gay pornography is becoming more mainstream and Tom of Finland’s art increasingly popular – an emblem of the sexual revolution gathering force on the other side of the Atlantic.

    That geographical qualification is needed because Tom of Finland doesn’t make clear how times are changing in Touko’s own country.  The preponderance of nighttime exterior sequences in Helsinki and the austere beauty of the landscape outside the city combine to make Karukoski’s Finland an expressive setting for love in a dark time – but you wouldn’t guess from the film that same-sex activity was decriminalised there in 1971.  Once Touko’s brushes with the law and the Alijoki episode are completed, Kaija Laaksonen is used, in effect, as the sole indicator of national public opinion.  Kaija continues to be more or less in denial of her brother’s sexuality, insisting that wider knowledge of it would bring shame upon their family.  The filmmakers ignore the possibility that, in her line of work, Kaija might have developed relatively permissive sexual attitudes – just as they ignore the possibility that she might, in view of the prejudices they’ve given her, have preconceived ideas about male dancers, especially ones who give off camp warning signals the way Nipa does.  Instead, she fancies him – to ramp up the tension between her and Touko.  Once her brother and Nipa are living together, however, Kaija is reduced to being an occasional caller and, whenever she turns up, a somewhat frustrated domestic drudge – insisting on vacuuming the carpet, offering to cook a meal.  Her continuing isolation is unexplained.  She becomes a ridiculous figure.

    As the story’s one persisting homophobe, Kaija is simply a negative and this one-dimensionality is typical of a film where individual personalities are in short supply.  Nipa is a cliché from ancient Hollywood:  from the moment he gets up from a sofa with a slight shiver and a little cough, you know terminal illness is on the way.  Lauri Tilkanen interprets him very obviously too.  Alijoki, whose career in the diplomatic service is almost symbolic, regularly invites male friends round for ‘games of poker’ (his wife, he tells Touko, is ‘very understanding’).  Taisto Oksanen therefore has the relative dramatic advantage of playing a man inhabiting two worlds – and certainly comes over as the most sensitive actor in Tom of Finland (particularly in the early scene in which Alijoki says goodbye to Touko, expecting never to see him again, and gives him the cigarette case).  The main American characters are badly conceived and played (by actors from and/or based in northern Europe – Jakob Oftebro, Seumas F Sargent).  The whole narrative gets shaky as soon as the action moves stateside in the early 1980s.

    Dome Karukoski and Alexsi Bardy show little interest in exploring, and relating to his personality, the distinctive characteristics of Tom of Finland’s idiosyncratic art.  Some of his images can be understood as illustrations of a larger post-war cultural development:  biker paraphernalia as an oppositional sub-culture, with particular attractions for gay men, thanks to its implications of risk and overt masculinity, its consequent contradiction of effeminate stereotypes.  How much, though, did the exaggerated macho and the determined humour of Tom’s work derive from the legal proscription of his sexuality and the misery that caused him?   The question becomes an insistent one – and the ignoring of it a more serious omission – thanks to Pekka Strang’s opacity in the lead role.   He doesn’t bear a close facial resemblance to the real Touko Laaksonen, according to online photographs of the latter.   More important, and although the tall, lean Strang has an engaging melancholy, it’s not easy to square his solemnity with remarks of Laaksonen’s like ‘The whole Nazi philosophy … is hateful to me, but of course I drew [Wehrmacht soldiers] anyway – they had the sexiest uniforms!’  When she first sees her brother in his leathers, Kaija laughs derisively.  She would, of course, but Pekka Strang’s physique and hangdog expression do make him look daft in the outfit; he’s more at ease in the tastefully co-ordinated clothes – beige, olive, mustard tones – that Touko usually wears in the outside world.  The effect is to make you suspect that Touko never acquired the appetite for demonstrating in public what was crucial to his underground artistic persona.   This is strikingly (even interestingly!) discordant in a piece of cinema that doesn’t only regard the expression of gay identity as A Good Thing but conceives that identity as essentially undifferentiated.  The film’s closing scene – in which Touko, back in America and in leathers, addresses a rapturous audience all turned out like Glenn Hughes of The Village People – seemed nightmarish to me because everyone looked the same.  Dome Karukoski presents it as Touko’s apotheosis.

    18 August 2017

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