Monthly Archives: September 2018

  • Two Gentlemen Sharing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ted Kotcheff (1969)

    Two Gentlemen Sharing, part of BFI’s ‘Black and Banned: The Films You Weren’t Allowed to See’ season, was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1969 and in the US, Australia and Sweden later that year or during 1970.  It never saw the light of day in the UK, where it was ‘[allegedly] considered an incitement to race-riot’ (BFI).  Even though that sounds laughably unlikely, this absorbing film is so confusing that audiences would no doubt have taken very different messages from it – and perhaps that’s what rattled the censor.  The theatrical release poster, reproduced in the film’s Wikipedia entry, has a tagline ‘What does a chap do when he can’t make up his mind?’   The question turns out to refer to two indecisive chaps, the protagonist Roddy Pater (Robin Phillips) and the other main male character Andrew McKenzie (Hal Frederick).  But the director Ted Kotcheff can’t make his mind up either.

    If you were told simply that the BBFC had judged a 1960s film called Two Gentlemen Sharing too hot to handle, you might assume it was about gay men.  You’d be wrong and right.  When Andrew answers Roddy’s advertisement for someone to share his rented Knightsbridge flat and visits the property, Roddy mentions that he went to a not very good public school:  ‘Homosexuality at reduced prices,’ he jokes.  This prompts Andrew to ask if he’s queer; Roddy, shocked, replies in the negative; Andrew says affably that it’s best to be clear from the outset.  Roddy is white and works in advertising; Andrew is black – Jamaican-born, Oxford-educated (as is Roddy) and looking to start a legal career.  What follows is a predominantly racial drama that never quite shakes off the spectre of Roddy’s sexual inhibitions, which emerge in his relationship with a girl called Jane (Judy Geeson).  She’s white but lives in a largely West Indian neighbourhood of London, was raised by a black stepfather and socialises with Caribbean immigrants.  Ted Kotcheff encourages us to wonder if an amalgam of racial prejudice and social snobbery is what’s stopping Roddy from making out with Jane.  Then, in the film’s final scene, Marcus (Ram John Holder), a flamboyantly gay West Indian, tries to seduce a drunken Roddy, who angrily – but anxiously – rebuffs him.  In the film’s closing shot, Roddy stares into the camera, as if forced finally to confront the sexual identity he’s been denying.

    If Roddy is in two minds about his sexuality, Andrew is ambivalent about his cultural allegiance and future.  With his pinstripe suit, bowler hat and upper-class accent, he’s exaggeratedly English (to that extent, a kind of forerunner of the super-civilised black lodger in the 1970s TV sitcom Rising Damp).  But Andrew wears the trappings of Englishness almost sarcastically:  he’s acutely and furiously aware of the racism that makes it difficult for him to get a flat-share in a nice area and which will surely exclude him from the legal establishment he’s academically qualified to enter.  To add insult to injury, the English weather is terrible:  Andrew insists he’ll soon be heading back to the Caribbean.  His girlfriend Caroline (Esther Anderson) – a model, from a middle-class family in Jamaica – has a more sanguine attitude to life in Swinging London.  Andrew is both hurt and vindicated when Roddy’s landlady Mrs Ashby-Kydd (Rachel Kempson) evicts him in a torrent of racial abuse.  When he’s offered a job interview with a high-profile partnership in the City, Caroline and Roddy persuade him to go for it.  Andrew arrives for the interview; he’s so oppressed by the portraits of dead white men covering the walls that he quickly makes for the exit.  Out on the street, he formally hands over his bowler and umbrella to a bewildered City gent.

    The narrative style and tone keep changing, which may be down to Evan Jones’ screenplay (adapted from a novel by David Stuart Leslie) as much as Ted Kotcheff’s direction.   In the early stages, when Andrew has first moved in with Roddy, there’s a fair amount of broad comedy.  Whether intentionally or not, this reinforces racial stereotypes   Roddy comes in late one evening to hear conversation between Caroline and Andrew going on in the latter’s room – ‘Let me come to you – harder, harder’, etc.  The camera moves through the wall to reveal Andrew practising cricket shots, with Caroline bowling to him.  This is followed by an actual cricket match, in which Andrew takes part along with Gary Sobers and the English fast bowler John Snow – virtually as themselves.  Snow has no more luck bowling to Oxford cricket blue Andrew than to Sobers (who’d achieved his famous six-sixes-in-one-over in an English county cricket match in August 1968).  You’d never guess from this demonstration of the relative merits of Caribbean and English cricketers that Snow, according to the start of his Wikipedia entry, is ‘known for bowling England to victory against the West Indies in 1967-68’.  Roddy, needless to say, is a mere spectator at the match.  It all makes for a white men can’t jump scenario, translated from the basketball court to the cricket pitch.

    At the start of the film, Roddy has a cartoon posh girlfriend, Ethne (Hilary Dwyer).  When she isn’t riding to hounds, she’s fighting off Roddy’s attentions on the sofa.  Her no-sex-please-we’re-Britishness deflects attention from what may be the root cause of his sexual under-performance.  He parts company with Ethne after meeting Jane, when he and his ad-man work colleague Phil (Norman Rossington) accompany Andrew and Caroline to a Caribbean jump-up in what looks like a town hall.  (There’s a nice touch at the end of the evening when the steel band plays ‘God Save the Queen’.)   Jane instantly both takes a liking to and distrusts Roddy.  The tension in their exchanges is (and continues to be) rather gripping but Jane’s class and cultural background are a distracting puzzle.  From the way Judy Geeson speaks, Jane could be middle-class, though her mother (Shelagh Fraser) sounds Cockney and Jane is not the sort to put on airs.  Her biological parents were both white:  after her father died when Jane was a baby, her mother married Jamaican Charles (Earl Cameron).  Jane is firmly rooted in the local Caribbean community in which she was brought up, going to West Indian dances and working as a hairdresser at a salon with a black clientele.  Yet from what he tells Roddy, on his one visit to the family home, Charles never wanted Jane to feel obliged to stay put in this way.

    Ted Kotcheff (a Canadian) handles contradictions of English class more surely in an episode where Roddy takes his friends for the weekend to his family home, a decaying country mansion.  His parents (David Markham and Avice Landon) live in near-squalor, with a lot of cats but without now being able to afford domestic help.  Roddy’s party includes Jane, Andrew, Caroline, Phil and Amanda (Daisy Mae Williams), a blonde-wigged black sexpot whom Phil got friendly with at the jump-up.  Along with the bedroom comedy supplied by these two and the bedroom angst of Roddy and Jane, there are economical, trenchant illustrations of racial discrimination in Andrew’s brief encounter with Roddy’s father.  The latter appears in the entrance hall as Andrew is admiring an antique vase.   ‘Would you mind putting that down, please?’ is all Mr Pater has to say to him.  It doesn’t help that Roddy, standing beside Andrew, can’t bring himself to introduce his black friend to his father.

    The climax to Two Gentlemen Sharing is a party, hosted by Roddy, when his affair with Jane is all but over.  She’s at the party but all the other guests are black:  this seems to be Roddy’s awkward, desperate attempt to insist on his colour-blindness, as well as recapture the atmosphere of his first meeting with Jane.   By now, the film’s mood has soured into a picture of romantic and race relations dead ends.  Andrew hasn’t got a job but he’s still in London:  at Roddy’s party, he’s in conversation with a Black Power supporter and scathingly contemptuous of the latter’s point of view.  Roddy, as he gets drunk, makes a clumsy, hopeless pass at a black girl, as well as conclusively alienating Jane.   After Marcus has made his move on Roddy, the police arrive, in response to complaints about the noise in the flat.  Roddy tells everyone to leave and is left to his own misery.

    The film perpetuates its own kind of racial discrimination in its exposure of black vs white flesh.  In particular, Ted Kotcheff seems keen to demonstrate that Andrew, for all his justified hang-ups about his ethnicity, can rest assured that, as a black man, he’s not only great at sex and cricket but has a body worth showing off.  Whereas Robin Phillips takes nearly the whole film even to remove his shirt in bed, Hal Frederick is repeatedly topless and briefly bottomless at the same time.  The one white bum bared to the camera is Norman Rossington’s – the culmination of the director’s determination to condemn Phil as a merely ridiculous lech.  (I felt sorry for Rossington, who seizes his few opportunities to show other sides to the character:  Phil‘s jovial racist remarks have a particularly nasty bite.)   We’re primed, of course, to expect a man who works in advertising to be nothing more than a vain egotist:  Roddy is an exception to the rule only because he expresses a low opinion of his line of work.  Robin Phillips’s stiff, impacted interpretation of the main character is certainly effective in keeping the viewer guessing whether this is a repressed racist, a repressed homosexual or just an uptight upper-middle-class Englishman.  Phillips may well be acting with extraordinary skill and subtlety but he’s uncomfortable to watch.  Besides, if Roddy is as personally screwed-up as Phillips makes him seem and as Two Gentlemen Sharing‘s final moments confirm, he’s severely attenuated as representative of typical contemporary racial attitudes.  What does this film mean to say?

    23 September 2018

  • Poor Cow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Loach  (1967)

    The opening titles are accompanied by Donovan, singing a gentle melody that he wrote, to words by Christopher Logue:

    ‘Be not too hard for life is short
    And nothing is given to man
    Be not too hard when he is sold or bought
    For he must manage as best he can’

    Over the decades, Ken Loach often has been hard on the people in his films.  If, for example, they’re employees of an authoritarian institution, Loach tends to depict them purely as its representatives and deny them any redeeming individuality.  But in this, his first feature for cinema, he follows Donovan’s recommendation.  Viewed in the context of this director’s later work, Poor Cow is surprising in other ways too.  In spite of the title and a heroine whose name is Joy (the former makes you think the latter will be ironic), the story is far from unrelieved misery.  It begins with Joy (Carol White) giving birth:  the sequence brings out, as well as the pain involved, the delight that results.  Although the main locations are working-class homes and haunts in London, scenes also take place in less familiar Loach settings:  a camping holiday in the Welsh countryside; a swish bachelor pad; a photo shoot for a girly calendar.

    Joy is married to Tom (John Bindon).  They enjoy a decent standard of living thanks to the proceeds of his robberies.  After a job goes wrong and Tom gets a four-year prison sentence, Joy and the couple’s baby son Johnny are forced to leave their home in Ruislip and move in temporarily with Joy’s Auntie Emm (Queenie Watts) in the East End.  Joy then takes up with Dave (Terence Stamp), also a professional thief and Tom’s former associate.  Dave lives in a shabby flat but is otherwise a big change for the better.  Whereas Tom abused Joy, physically and mentally, Dave is kind and sensitive towards her and to Johnny.  The romantic idyll ends abruptly, when Dave too goes to prison – for twelve years.  Joy moves back to Auntie Emm’s and gets work as a barmaid.  Earlier in the story, Emm shocks Joy by revealing that, when she can’t afford to pay her rent, she has sex with the landlord.  Joy still loves Dave and keeps writing letters to tell him so but she now drifts into selling her body, with the encouragement of Beryl (Kate Williams), who works with her at the pub.  A session where the two of them pose for a seedy group of photographers is a prelude to Joy becoming a part-time sex worker.  She also starts divorce proceedings but Tom comes out of prison before these get far.  The old, abusive domestic order is restored.   At the end of Poor Cow, Joy is still with Tom and still dreaming of happiness with Dave, in the far from near future.

    The film is based on a novel, also published in 1967, by Nell Dunn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Loach.  The narrative framework keeps changing, as if they’re trying out different possibilities and unable to decide between them.  At first, the action is punctuated by chapter headings and what seem to be quotes from Joy, which appear as text on the screen.  Then Carol White reads in voiceover extracts from Joy’s letters to Dave in prison.  In the closing stages, the voiceover expresses Joy’s feelings about what has happened to her – observations finally revealed by the camera to be what she’s saying to an unidentified interviewer.  So Joy ends up looking like the subject of a documentary being made about her life.  This doesn’t quite fit with what’s gone before, although Poor Cow has included plenty of quasi-documentary sequences – kids playing among the rubble of houses bombed in World War II, people on a day at the seaside.  The film occasionally seems under-dramatised but the avoidance of melodramatic resolution is welcome – in Joy’s relationships with both Tom and Dave, and especially in a distressing episode, near the end, when Johnny (Stephen King) goes missing but Joy finds him on a demolition site, unharmed.

    Ken Loach shows incisively but without censure how a life of crime is normal life for the main characters, especially in the prelude to and aftermath of the robbery that lands Dave in prison.  He has a bath (it’s a tin bath) before going out to do the job, telling Joy he shouldn’t be back too late.  When he returns, she’s in bed, where she tries on and enthuses about pieces of jewellery that he’s nicked.  Dave mentions that the old woman whose house was burgled and who the gang expected to be away for the weekend, was actually at home:  the gang had to lock her in a cupboard but ‘we made her a cup of tea before we left’.  (The account given by the judge (Gerald Young) at Dave’s trial is rather different:  a blow to the old woman’s skull has left her almost blind.)   Later on, Joy expresses sentimental regret at how unfair it seems, given their fondness for each other, that she and Dave have been separated.  Loach’s resistance of obvious judgments is thoroughgoing.  Joy sees no contradiction in continuing to be devoted to Dave while having relationships with other men.  Tom’s violence towards her is, for him, a matter of domestic routine, and more shocking for that.   The photographers getting Beryl and Joy to expose more bare flesh supply not just a male gaze but a male ogle yet this isn’t overdone.  Here too, restraint delivers stronger impact.

    The cast is a fascinating mix.  John Bindon, who’d repeatedly been in trouble with the law as a teenager, went on from Poor Cow to other acting roles (usually thugs) but his future criminal career was a bigger deal:  this can’t fail to give his portrait of Tom, in retrospect, an extra layer of credibility.  Carol White had starred in Loach’s celebrated Wednesday Play dramas Up the Junction (also based on Nell Dunn material) and Cathy Come Home (written by Dunn’s then-husband Jeremy Sandford).  You wonder at first if White’s beauty is going to be a problem.  Joy describes herself as ‘hard’-looking, which White isn’t.   In contrast, Kate Williams, who’s excellent as Beryl, has a natural hardness capable of transforming into something prettier.  Yet White proves herself an actress good enough to achieve the reverse.  Her playing is admirably relaxed and she makes you root for Joy.

    The choice of Terence Stamp for Dave is doubly surprising.  First, he was already a fully-fledged international star (Far from the Madding Crowd appeared the same year as Poor Cow and Theorem the year after).  Second, the script suggests that Dave, who envies the muscly legs of the footballers whose photographs decorate a wall in his flat, is no oil painting and low on self-confidence:  at the time, Stamp himself was a pin-up on bedroom walls.  One thinks of Ken Loach as avoiding big-name actors like the plague but perhaps he wasn’t so averse early in his career:  Ray Brooks had just made The Knack …  when Loach cast him opposite Carol White in Cathy Come Home.  The casting of Terence Stamp turns out to be an almost complete success.  He adapts easily to the naturalistic playing of Carol White and others.  He’s particularly convincing on the holiday sequence in Wales and in his scenes with Joy’s little boy.  Stamp gets inside his character’s tentativeness and gradual overcoming of it.  He conveys a niceness that makes Dave’s amoral side all the more startling.  The actor’s handsomeness works at a different level, serving to express how Dave is for Joy something of a dream come true.   He still looks a bit too good when she visits him in jail, though.

    The Donovan compositions and the succession of pop songs heard playing on the radio etc are complementary.  It’s refreshing, at this distance in time, to experience 1967 pop being used in an actually contemporary film, rather than imposed on the soundtrack of a later one.   There’s the occasional cheap shot at a ‘posh’ character – as when Joy asks her odd, awkward solicitor (Ellis Dale) if he’s married and he says no, he lives with his mother.  There’s an implication throughout that Joy’s life is wholly determined by her social circumstances – which is arguable, to put it mildly.  (Dave proves she has access to men who aren’t wifebeaters, even though he’s harder on rich old ladies.  Joy could even have settled down with a non-criminal.). The underlying political viewpoint isn’t intrusive, however.  In the mid-1990s Ken Loach described Poor Cow as ‘immature’.  It just goes to show that ripeness isn’t all.  This is one of his most appealing and engaging films.

    23 September 2018

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