Look Back in Anger
Tony Richardson (1959)
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is a notoriously verbose play. A striking feature of the film version is that it’s several minutes in before we hear a word spoken. The opening sequence takes place in a jazz club, where Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) is playing a trumpet solo. The camera follows Jimmy from the club, through the streets of the Midlands town he lives in, to the house where he and his wife Alison (Mary Ure) rent a flat. He watches her sleep before getting into bed with her, and wakes next morning with Alison already up and about. It’s only when Jimmy goes to rouse Cliff Lewis (Gary Raymond), whom we glimpsed at the jazz club and who lodges with the Porters, that conversation starts. Though it’s certainly not the only highlight, this opening is arguably the best bit in the whole of Tony Richardson’s film. It shows Jimmy absorbed in the music he’s playing and enjoying the applause he receives. In the moments that follow, he comes down to earth definitely but not melodramatically. Richardson, directing his first feature film, makes things too fancy on the approach to home: Jimmy plays a few notes on his trumpet and a ghost trumpet answers in the deserted darkness. But this only briefly interrupts the absorbing journey from the convivial, jam-packed club to the cramped, silent apartment.
The film shifts as soon as Richard Burton starts talking. In his mid-thirties, he was perhaps a little too old for the role (Kenneth Haigh was twenty-five when he played Jimmy in the 1956 stage production at the Royal Court) – but Burton’s refractory charisma serves him well. It’s his extraordinary vocal instrument that’s the problem. Although his effortless, rhythmical delivery of Osborne’s abundant invective is pleasurable, his voice is so richly sonorous and magnetic that it not only contradicts Jimmy’s (and Burton’s own) socially humble origins. It’s also essentially wrong for a character driven to keep talking and shouting because he feels no one is listening. A second shift – which also proves problematic throughout – occurs soon afterwards. The whole play takes place in (to quote the text) ‘the Porters’ one-room flat in the Midlands’. It’s one thing for Tony Richardson to start outside the flat and move back there; quite another for him then to keep opening out the action: the jazz club again; pubs and cafés; the market square where Jimmy, with Cliff’s assistance, runs a confectionery stall; a hospital and a graveside; a railway station, where the climax takes place. When Alison leaves Jimmy, there’s a brief sequence back at her parents’ home to emphasise her comfortable middle-class background. It’s understandable that Richardson and Nigel Kneale (who gets a sole credit for the adapted screenplay: Osborne is credited with ‘additional dialogue’) were nervous about the commercial implications of staying indoors but the narrative’s wanderlust has a diluting effect. Plenty of people find Jimmy Porter, even in the theatre, a tiresome egocentric windbag but the play’s setting – Jimmy is stuck in the middle of contemporary England with nowhere else to go – reflects and makes sense of his furious claustrophobia. On screen, with plenty of opportunities to get out of the flat, he’s a much less justified moaner.
It follows from the opening out that the cast is much bigger than the play’s quintet of Jimmy, Alison, Cliff, Alison’s relic-of-empire father, Colonel Redfern, and her friend Helena. The significant additions include a little-Hitler market inspector Hurst (Donald Pleasence), an Asian immigrant market trader Kapoor (S P Kapoor) and Ma Tanner (Edith Evans), a widow who gave Jimmy some financial help to set up his sweet stall. (Ma Tanner is mentioned in the text of the play but doesn’t appear in it.) Donald Pleasence unsurprisingly gives Hurst’s small-minded vileness a sinister edge. The detail of characterisation that Edith Evans achieves is amazing, given how little material she has to work with, and her Ma Tanner is convincingly working-class – a remarkable achievement for an actress of Evans’s generation and theatrical cachet. Yet although these three are individually convincing as characters, they’re designed to suggest that what drives Jimmy Porter’s (and John Osborne’s) splenetic tirades is straightforward socially conscious moral outrage; as such, they seem somehow peripheral. When Ma Tanner greets her, Alison almost flinches from an embrace with a social inferior. Kapoor’s career on the market place is doomed by the commercially anxious racism that pervades it. Of course such prejudices fuel Jimmy’s anger but his disaffection is part of a more complex personality: he may be a political radical but he’s a sentimental misogynist too. Tony Richardson was able to satisfy his appetite for social critique more fully in his next three films – The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). Here, alongside the additional characters, it’s reflected in minor, pat details like the respectable middle-aged woman eager to read salacious Sunday paper stories before she heads for church.
The relationship between Jimmy and Alison’s actress friend Helena (Claire Bloom) is the film’s most dramatically satisfying. Through precise line readings and gestural detail, as well as her own porcelain beauty, Claire Bloom embodies the class difference between herself and Jimmy in ways that Mary Ure’s Alison doesn’t. While she’s staying with the Porters before the pregnant Alison returns to her parents, Helena is as openly hostile to Jimmy as he is to her (though in a different register). Claire Bloom gives occasional indications, subtly but incisively expressed, that Helena is strongly attracted to Jimmy. Once they become lovers after Alison’s departure, we realise the feelings Helena was suppressing fortified her antipathy towards him. Mary Ure’s odd, compelling presence contradicts Alison’s description of herself as a ‘conventional girl’. Ure’s blonde hair, pale skin and light-coloured clothes (the film is in black and white), combined with her character’s lack of force, give Alison an almost zombified quality. At the same time, Ure (the only member of the Royal Court cast in the film) has a tension that makes Jimmy’s reference to Alison’s ‘relaxation of spirit’ – during the final reconciliation scene between them – quite baffling. It’s easy to believe in the physical attraction between Jimmy and Alison but not much more.
Glen Byam Shaw, a famous name in 1950s theatre, plays Colonel Redfern rather too stiffly. There are cameos from George Devine (a doctor), Nigel Davenport and Alfred Lynch (a couple of commercial travellers). Alan Bates was Cliff Lewis in the original stage production: in retrospect, it seems surprising the screen role went to an actor who didn’t go on to the major film career that Bates enjoyed. Gary Raymond nevertheless gives a most appealing performance as Cliff, the young Welshman devoted to both Jimmy and Alison. Raymond is emotionally fluid and makes Cliff’s boyish hero worship of Jimmy natural and touching. It’s a pity Cliff’s on the receiving end of a couple of miscalculations on Tony Richardson’s part. In the flat, Jimmy and Cliff indulge in, as well as horseplay, occasional pretend music-hall routines. As part of Jimmy’s get-Helena campaign, he and Cliff gatecrash her play rehearsal at a local theatre – they take to the stage and do one of their double acts. Cliff eventually gets embarrassed but it’s unbelievable that he would start to behave like this in public, even allowing that Jimmy calls the tune in their relationship. When Alison has moved out and Helena taken her place, Cliff decides to return to Wales. There are two farewell scenes between him and Jimmy – first in the flat then at the train station. Gary Raymond plays both scenes well but only one was needed.
The final scene on the railways bridge between Jimmy and Alison, after Helena has taken her leave, is a miscalculation too. Oswald Morris’s lighting makes the scene visually powerful but the couple’s lengthy heart-to-heart speechifying is artificial in this dark, cold, outdoor setting. It’s doubtful, though, that the conclusion to Look Back in Anger could be made persuasive whatever the location. The most telling part of this exchange in the film is a bit of dialogue that doesn’t appear in the play’s text. As Jimmy and Alison discuss the baby she’s lost, Richard Burton laments, ‘It wasn’t my first loss’, and Mary Ure, in a good, strangled voice, replies, ‘It was mine!’ These three words have more impact than Alison’s more colourful and improbable exclamations during the finale (‘I want to be a lost cause!’). The trouble is, the thoughtless self-pity from Jimmy that prompts Alison’s trenchant reply makes it all the less plausible that she would think of returning to him.
3 April 2018