Monthly Archives: June 2018

  • International Velvet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bryan Forbes (1978)

    Bryan Forbes, erstwhile saviour of the British film industry and, in the sixties and early seventies, the director of ‘sensitive’ treatments of ‘difficult’ subjects like The L-Shaped Room and The Raging Moon (the former is actually good enough not to deserve those inverted commas), is now making family entertainment with a vengeance.   This well-meaning reactionary lacks the common touch needed to bring it off wholeheartedly.  Last time (1976), it was The Slipper and the Rose, the story of Cinderella transposed from a frankly magical realm to the world of big-screen romantic musical.  That film was careful and a bit dreary, missing out on the grotesquerie of English pantomime, let alone Grimm fairytales.  For example, Forbes’s ‘ugly’ sisters were merely less pretty and vivacious than the heroine.  This time, it’s International Velvet, a tenuous sequel to the 1944 hit National Velvet in which a teenage Elizabeth Taylor rode The Pie to victory in the Grand National.

    The Elizabeth Taylor character, Velvet Brown, now middle-aged (and played by Nanette Newman), sees the metamorphosis of her orphaned, raised-in-America niece, Sarah (Tatum O’Neal), from upsettingly sullen mixed-up kid to Olympic gold medallist in equestrian three-day event.  The Pie, a gelding when he won the National, has turned into a stallion of exceptional longevity:  it’s his last foal, named Arizona Pie in honour of Sarah’s home state, who will carry her to Olympic glory.  Watching Sarah’s progress, Velvet is able to review her own past and binge on food for thought about the course her life has taken since her Grand National triumph.  This gives International Velvet an ambivalent framework and although the story proceeds with relentless predictability, Forbes tends to make plot twists double-edged.  Intelligence is the root cause of the film’s worst flaws:  Bryan Forbes is learning that it’s difficult, if you’re as clever as he is, to aim low and keep things simple.

    A childless, animal-loving heroine has featured before in family films but not as consciously as here.  (In Born Free, Virginia McKenna overdoes to embarrassing effect the mother love she feels for Elsa the lioness and her cubs.)  Velvet explains to Sarah that she gave up riding because she lost her nerve.  John (Christopher Plummer), the writer with whom Velvet now lives (a typically Forbesian attempt to locate his implausible story in the ‘real’, modern world), reveals this is a ‘white lie’:   Velvet, who was married at the time, fell from The Pie, lost the baby she was expecting and couldn’t have children subsequently.  So Velvet remains devoted to The Pie because she needs something to care for and, when Sarah comes along, gradually switches her maternal instincts to the teenage girl.  After her Olympic triumph for Britain, Sarah somewhat peremptorily telegraphs Velvet and John to announce that she’s marrying the vacuously handsome captain of the American three-day event team (Jeffrey Byron) and won’t be returning to England.  It’s a false alarm to the extent that the happy couple do come back for a visit to Velvet and John but the suspicion persists that Velvet is once more reduced to ‘drifting’ (her word).  The film leaves you wondering what happened to all the double-barrelled misses of the show-jumping ring when they retired from competition.  Are they, like Velvet, stuck in a horsey, adolescent time warp?

    John refuses to marry because he is scared of ‘commitment’, of ‘anything signed and sealed’.  Bryan Forbes is cultivating a wrong-headed bloom:  interestingly (or that’s the idea) flawed characters, the kind of people in whom he’s always tended to be interested, sprout from the soil of storybook fantasy.   Forbes’s other fault as a gardener is to lay things on with a trowel.   In a scene reminiscent of Harriet Smith being pursued by ruffians in Emma but without Jane Austen’s voice to interpret proceedings, Sarah and her horse are chased across a field by a car containing beer-swilling yobs with a bag of chips on their shoulder.  Attempting to escape by jumping a stile, Sarah falls and is concussed.  At this point, most of the audience I watched the film with gasped in alarm; when the yobs’ car crashed and burst into flames, they went silent.  Did their terrible end serve those nasty boys right?  Did it serve to remind Sarah of the death of her parents in a car crash that has brought her into Velvet’s care?

    On Sarah’s first trip abroad with a British equestrian team, one of the horses goes berserk in the middle of a rough transatlantic flight and has to be destroyed.  Sarah is the team reserve; you assume the distressing incident is designed as an understudy-getting-her-big-break number, familiar from backstage musicals.  All that happens is that the dead horse’s rider uses Sarah’s mount as a substitute (which wouldn’t happen in the real world).  The whole unpleasant episode serves very little purpose.

    The world of International Velvet is one in which an Olympic equestrienne’s training is financed by kindly Uncle John knocking off a best-seller in double quick time.  Bryan Forbes seems to think that the fact that this supposedly gifted writer resorts to the soft-porn market transcends the cliché; in fact, it does no more than sour it.  The film is more problematic when Forbes applies his better qualities as a writer-director to the material and achieves an effect he then tries to stifle.  He illustrates Sarah’s alienated feelings in a strange country with a shot of Velvet fussing her dog with Sarah a lonely onlooker, through the ominous din of her schoolfellows’ cruel playground laughter and the clang of the school bell.  Velvet observes in voiceover that, ironically, Sarah is alive only because her parents cared too little for her to take her with them on their last, fatal journey.  These astringent details aren’t easy to forget but Forbes pours on Francis Lai’s savagely unvarying score as if to take our minds off them.

    What saves International Velvet and ensures an effective climax is the sporting context.  Pre-Games politicking and scandals during Olympic fortnight may have become de rigueur but the founding principles of Pierre de Coubertin (quoted here by Anthony Hopkins, as the British chef d’équipe), the still largely unchallenged status of most Olympic events as a world championship and the rarity of British Olympic gold medallists combine to ensure that, for armchair viewers in this country, the Games remain the most special of sporting events.  Bryan Forbes evokes an Olympic atmosphere well enough to remind you how exciting the real thing can be.  The outcome of Sarah’s show-jumping round is a foregone conclusion but it’s still more gripping than the most expertly edited car chase.

    [1978]

  • High Anxiety

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mel Brooks (1977)

    Mel Brooks is sometimes accused of playing a percentage game with the dialogue he writes, of piling on the gags at the expense of shaping his scripts.  Guilty as charged:  he may be a great film fan but his scattershot approach limits his effectiveness as a genre parodist.  Jokes that don’t grow organically from the material stick out like sore thumbs in this type of comedy; discipline is essential and what Brooks almost glories in lacking.  Thanks to the title song, the opening credits sequence of Blazing Saddles hinted at greater comic control but Brooks lost concentration in no time.   There are promising signs at the start of High Anxiety too:  John Morris’s pastiche of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho music, pairs of feet struggling to get a grip on an escalator, the dizzying design of a carpet in an airport departure lounge.  But they’re almost immediately offset by Brooks’ mugging imitation of terror on his first appearance on the screen, by a gratuitous queer-flasher joke and by the realisation that the lavishly anguished strings playing Morris’s score are masking a conventional ballad tune.  Brooks will use that tune later for a big set piece – a parody of Frank Sinatra that’s a highlight of High Anxiety even though it has nothing to do with a Hitchcock spoof.

    Brooks used to limit his own time on screen to mascot-like supporting roles (there were two in Blazing Saddles) but now he’s his own star.  He doesn’t inhabit a role; he just yells that he’s Mel Brooks (and he really does yell) throughout – as if comic acting consists of being yourself with a loud voice and exaggerated gestures.  Brooks is meant to be Dr Richard H Thorndyke, newly appointed head of the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous.  Towards the end of High Anxiety, the characters he and Madeline Kahn play disguise themselves as a cutely bickering Jewish couple to get past airport security officers because, ‘If you’re loud and annoying, psychologically people don’t notice you’.  This film proves otherwise – you can’t fail to notice the performers.  Brooks’s shouting is widely infectious (though Kahn stays clear of it); he also favours leering close-ups.  His lack of interest in the technical side of parody makes him ill equipped to mimic the unease that Hitchcock’s camera movement often generates.  Shot in black-and-white, Young Frankenstein was not only Brooks’ best but also his best-looking film to date:  there was a definite visual style to imitate and the cinematographer Gerard Hirschfeld sustained it.  Perhaps it’s the embarrassment of stylistic riches available to draw on in Hitchcock that has made Brooks and Paul Lohmann so visually unambitious.  The camerawork tends to alternate between static and frenetic, and there’s nothing subliminally scary.

    In a scene in which an Institute inmate is interviewed by Thorndyke and the sartorially impeccable Dr Montague to determine whether he’s well enough to be discharged, why is Montague (Harvey Korman) oily and insinuating, then comically weak willed, then malevolent?  The answer seems to be that it’s more fun for Brooks and Harvey Korman that way.   It’s not long before Montague is revealed to be a cringing masochist but he continues to conceal the fact in later scenes – pointlessly once it’s been exposed.  Cloris Leachman is the Teutonic Nurse Diesel, an extended replay of the Frau Blücher character she played in Young Frankenstein.  Leachman gave a fascinating performance in The Last Picture Show and is charming in TV comedy parts like Phyllis in The Mary Tyler Moore Show but here she’s required to be funny for an awfully long time on a single track, and she’s soon tiresome.  Nurse Diesel’s appearance is both farcically and realistically grotesque:  she has mammoth breasts that point like weapons but also a pencil line of dark facial hair.  The strain of growling out of the side of her large, oblong mouth really tells on Leachman.  Minor figures, like Ron Carey’s dimly sympathetic chauffeur and Darrell Zwerling’s nutty academic, have just one characteristic each.

    The only interesting playing comes from Madeline Kahn, with her combination of a cool, verging-on-prudish exterior and sensual fire down below.  The lustrous blonde wig she wears as Victoria – the daughter of Arthur Brisbane (Albert Whitlock), a rich industrialist who’s being kept a virtual prisoner as a patient at the Institute – recalls Hitchcock ice blondes like Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren; her tremulous line readings send them up.   Kahn doesn’t appear until about halfway through the film but she’s by some way its chief asset – especially when Victoria is ooh-ing and aah-ing in reaction to the Sinatra routine, which also sees Mel Brooks at his best.

    The ideas in the script (Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson share the screenplay credit with Brooks) are often lazy.  Dr Thorndyke describes an Institute inmate who believes he’s a cocker spaniel as the most amazing psychological phenomenon he’s ever encountered but wouldn’t an animal more unusual than a dog be more amazing?  Plenty of people must have had canine delusions for man-thinks-he’s-a-dog jokes to be so familiar.  When Thorndyke addresses a convention of psychiatrists, there are portraits of Freud, Jung, Adler et al on the wall.  Their presence serves only to underline how weakly written the sequence is – it needs a barrage of psychoanalytic jargon to be satirically effective.   During question time after the lecture, two little girls arrive in the auditorium and ask about penis envy and toilet training.  Thorndyke’s answers, expressed in coy baby talk, don’t stand out enough from what’s he’s been saying to the learned gathering.

    The menace of birds gathering on a telegraph wire is instantly dispelled when one of them shits on Thorndyke’s head.  Those pigeons are an early announcement that Mel Brooks isn’t interested in constructing a tight, logically satisfying plot or creating sustained tension to give his jokes more impetus.  Occasionally, he manages to reference two Hitchcock films at once[1] but, for the most part in High Anxiety, he thrashes around in a style more reminiscent of daft horror films than of Hitchcockian suspense

    [1970s]

    [1] Afternote:  Not that I knew many at the time, though I did understand where Dr Thorndyke got his fear of heights from.  I hadn’t seen Spellbound.

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