Monthly Archives: May 2019

  • Rogue Male (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Clive Donner (1976)

    Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, first published in May 1939, has been adapted twice for the screen:  in Man Hunt, a Hollywood film of 1941, directed by Fritz Lang; subsequently in this Clive Donner version, made for television and first screened on BBC in September 1976.  It was shown at the following year’s Toronto Film Festival and, says Wikipedia, ‘was regarded by the BBC as being suitable for a cinema release internationally’.  The reason this didn’t happen, according to the same source, was that it ‘had the potential to cause legal and industrial problems in the UK, because the crew had not been paid at the rate applicable to cinema releases’.  Now Donner’s film has been produced as a BFI DVD and issued as the latest quarterly DVD freebie for BFI Champion members, which is how I came by it.

    Household’s protagonist is an Englishman, a sportsman and a gentleman.  While travelling on the continent, he visits a country governed by a totalitarian regime, tracks down its dictator, and gets him in the sights of his rifle.  He tells himself he has sought out the potential quarry for the thrill of the chase and without intending to pull the trigger.  Members of the regime’s secret service, after arresting the Englishman, torture him, throw him from a cliff and leave him for dead.  He survives and, with the help of a civilian who is also a good sport, escapes to a seaport.  He stows away on a British ship and returns to England.  In London, he realises the dictator’s men are still on his trail.  He kills one of them, following a chase on the London underground, then finds himself pursued not only by the remaining agents but also by the British police for murder.  He goes underground again – literally so, in a hide in rural Dorset.  With time to reflect, he admits to himself that he did mean, as revenge for the execution of his fiancée by the totalitarian regime, to assassinate the dictator.  The protagonist now constructs a makeshift catapult with which, from within the bolt hole, he kills his chief pursuer – a compatriot in cahoots with the foreign dictatorship.  The hero takes this fifth columnist’s car, money and identification papers, drives to Liverpool and boards a ship bound for Tangier.  He begins to plan a second stalk of the dictator.

    Reviewing the new DVD of Rogue Male in Sight & Sound (March 2019), Robert Hanks situates Geoffrey Household’s novel within a strain of adventure-thriller fiction of the interwar period.  Household, says Hanks, ‘shares with [Eric] Ambler a distaste for fascism and an outraged sense that sides must be taken, and with [John] Buchan a deep Toryism and passion for the English countryside, not just as landscape but as the basis for a quasi-feudal social order whose passing is to be deplored’.  (Wikipedia’s biographical summary of Household endorses this interpretation, at least in the information that ‘After the [Second World] War, he lived the life of a country gentleman’.)  The English traitor in the novel is called Quive-Smith but the hero, the foreign country and its dictator are all unnamed.  In an interview with Radio Times for the broadcast of Donner’s film in 1976, Household was quoted as follows:

    ‘Although the idea for Rogue Male germinated from my intense dislike of Hitler, I did not actually name him in the book as things were a bit tricky at the time and I thought I would leave it open so that the target could be either Hitler or Stalin. You could take your pick.’

    To say ‘things were a bit tricky at the time’ is quite an understatement.  Even with a nameless arch-enemy, the novel seems, in retrospect, an urgent and a daring piece of work – published, as it was, only a few months before Britain was at war with Germany.

    Retrospect is perhaps the fundamental problem with Clive Donner’s disappointing film of the book.  Distance in time lends smugness to the view.  Frederic Raphael’s script includes an explanation of the novel’s title (a rogue male elephant separates from the herd and roams viciously alone); Household’s other animal and man-as-beast metaphors (going to ground, running to earth, etc) remain salient.  Yet the film often seems set in quotation marks, with a surfeit of caricatural acting and music by Christopher Gunning that suggests not just pastiche but tongue-in-cheek pastiche.  Even though the story is still eventful and moderately exciting, the screenplay undersells the source material’s ripping yarn aspect in favour of skewering the English class system.

    The apparent casting coup was getting Peter O’Toole for the lead – the hunted huntsman, now called … Sir Robert Hunter.  O’Toole’s aristocratic accent is amusing for a while and he does inventive things – though maybe that should be overdoes.   You get the increasing impression that his priority is to deliver lines quirkily, even if that means losing the sense of them.   Overall, O’Toole is so individual that it’s hard to get a handle on how unconventional Hunter is meant to be, and well nigh impossible to see him as representative of a type.  Although he has competitors in the cast, the star takes the prize for looking most out of period thanks to overlong hair.  You’re bound to wonder if Peter O’Toole refused a trim and Clive Donner was too grateful to have him to argue.

    The real casting coup is Alastair Sim because this proved to be his last performance:  he died a few weeks before the transmission of Rogue Male.  He plays ‘the Earl’, Hunter’s uncle, whose vague manner belies a clear understanding of his own best interests.  The Earl starts off a firm supporter of Neville Chamberlain; by the end, he’s a Churchill man through and through.   It isn’t vintage Sim but his natural eccentricity serves him well, enabling him to avoid the deliberate lampooning style of, for example, John Standing as Quive-Smith and Harold Pinter as Hunter’s  lawyer.

    It might have helped to give the audience its bearings by briefly introducing the protagonist in England, taking pleasure on the hunting field in easier times.  As it is, Donner and Raphael launch straight into the main action.  Place and time are announced as ‘Germany, Early 1939’.  The dark corpses of birds crash to the ground in close-up and the men bringing them down are Germans.  Ashen-faced Hunter isn’t part of the shoot but watches on the edge of woodland, some distance from the sounds of gunfire.  When we next see him, he’s training his rifle on a social gathering that includes Hitler.  The juxtaposition of sequences shows Hunter as a marksman on a mission but fails to imply he’s a man who got to know a gun by shooting for ‘sport’.

    It’s all the more frustrating that the film doesn’t set Hunter in his natural environment when it does rely on flashbacks to his doomed romance with Rebecca (Cyd Hyman).   These inserts are so feeble they’re spoof-like – they don’t have anything like the weight to suggest that the memory of Rebecca and what Nazi Germany did to her is what impels Hunter to action.   The historical circumstances inevitably point up the Jewish flavour of the name Rebecca, which naturally makes you wonder if Sir Robert Hunter is not just anti-fascist but sufficiently free of the prejudices of his class and era to fall in love with a Jewess.  It seems an important point but it’s one that the director and screenwriter, Jewish themselves, don’t trouble to explore further.

    6 May 2019

     

  • Loro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paolo Sorrentino (2018)

    I didn’t much fancy seeing another Paolo Sorrentino film but he’s so admired I felt I ought to and the trailers for this week’s high-profile new releases supplied stronger reasons to avoid them:  Vox Lux features flashing lights as well as Natalie Portman; hard to know where to start with Tolkien.  Besides, although the internationally released version of Loro lasts two-and-a-half hours, that’s much less than Sorrentino served up to his compatriots.  In spring 2018, this portrait of Silvio Berlusconi and his circle – the title translates as ‘Them’, though it could also be a play on l’oro (gold) – arrived in Italian cinemas in two instalments, with an interval of sixteen days between the openings and an aggregate running time of 204 minutes.

    Sorrentino starts with a lengthy disclaimer, described by some reviewers as tongue in cheek and ‘lawyer-baiting’.  Loro, set in the period between 2006 and 2009, ‘stems from its authors’ independent and free imagination’ (the screenplay is by the director and Umberto Contarello).  It draws on news stories but these have been used to create ‘a purely artistic film’ and with no intention ‘to represent an objective truth’.  Sorrentino’s visual imagination and skill turn out to justify the phrase ‘artistic film’; but if his disclaimer is code for ‘I’ve done what I liked’ with real people and events, the result, ironically, is less free than that might suggest.  Silvio Berlusconi is so well known a figure that, if you’re going to present him on screen – rather than use him as the basis for a Berlusconi-type politician and crook – you set up very definite audience expectations.

    These include that Loro will be a hatchet job.  Unlike older Italian film-makers like Marco Bellocchio and Nanno Moretti, Sorrentino isn’t publicly left-wing but no one familiar with Il Divo (2008), his biography of Giulio Andreotti, will have anticipated an admiring treatment of the outrageous political sensation that Berlusconi once was.  The film is, however, easier on its leading man than many would have guessed, at least in showing his septuagenarian vulnerabilities.  It’s less decidedly unsympathetic than, to cite an obvious recent example, Adam McKay’s account of Dick Cheney in Vice.  All this may go some way to explaining Loro’s commercial under-performance.  (According to Wikipedia, it’s taken less than $8m, having cost around $21m to make.)  Berlusconi supporters will have stayed away on principle.  Press reaction and word of mouth have probably combined to disappoint and deter Berlusconi haters.

    Whatever the reasons for Loro‘s poor box office, people who’ve not seen it haven’t missed a great deal.    Berlusconi is now recognised as a trailblazer for the media-savvy demagogues who’ve won power in Western democracies in more recent years.  He was the first Italian prime minister to assume that office without prior experience in government or public administration.  Sorrentino has him say at one point ‘I wish I could run the country like my businesses’ and several times illustrates his infantile egoism .  The resonances come through loud and clear.  As a cultural phenomenon, Berlusconi is no doubt interesting to read about.  He might be an absorbing documentary subject too but he makes for an inert drama.  Not only does his inescapably strong public image dictate proceedings; the film also concentrates on a period of relative inaction in Berlusconi’s career.

    As usual, Sorrentino’s lead is Toni Servillo, who also played Andreotti and the journalist protagonist of The Great Beauty (2013).   A formidable actor, Servillo is constrained here and not just because the make-up department, carefully replicating Berlusconi’s embalmed look, seems to have encased his face:  the script doesn’t allow him to go anywhere interesting with the character either.  Perhaps the make-up has been overdone to distract attention from physical differences between the actor and the man he’s incarnating (differences that don’t reflect a substantial reinterpretation by the film of who Berlusconi is).  Though he isn’t tall (1.81m), Servillo is nowhere near as short as the real thing (1.65m); nor is he, even in the facial disguise worn here, apparently thuggish.

    It must be forty minutes or so into Loro when Berlusconi makes his first appearance.   Until then, the main character is Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) – a thirty-something businessman in Taranto who traffics young female escorts and uses them, as bribes to local politicians, in order to obtain licences for business operations run by his father (Paolo Buglioni).  Ambitious to increase his income and power, Sergio is sure that his passport to these is Berlusconi.  He has a relationship, professional and sexual, with Tamara (Euridice Axen), an unscrupulous kindred spirit, and the pair head for Rome, with a view to making contact with ‘Him Him’ (as Sergio calls the great man).

    They make useful contacts in the capital but Sergio properly comes to his idol’s attention when he rents a villa in Sardinia, which he stocks with nubile escorts, close to Berlusconi’s summer residence.  Sergio is an obvious exemplar of the values of Berlusconi’s Italy and the early part of Loro is repetitive.  Even so, as a fictional creation, this character gives Sorrentino more room for manoeuvre and Riccardo Scamarcio’s blend of sly vitality and naïveté makes you almost root for Sergio.  You certainly want to see what happens once he succeeds in making contact with Berlusconi, even though the answer turns out to be, from Sergio’s point of view, not much at all.

    Sorrentino devotes most time to describing the notorious bunga-bunga parties and their personnel, and to exploring Berlusconi’s personal insecurities.  It’s been taken as read by some critics that, in repeatedly parading nearly naked young bodies, the talented director is a moral cut above the men in the story that assemble or enjoy the girls in question.  Although the DP Luca Bigazzi does construct some aesthetically remarkable images of groups of bodies, it’s not easy to perceive what Sorrentino is intending to show below the surface or how, as some admiring reviews of Loro have claimed, this ‘riot of decadence’ is ‘satirical’.

    A general election in 2006 sent Forza Italiano and its coalition partners into opposition.  Berlusconi’s exile from power throws into relief his unhappy marriage to Veronica Lario (Elena Sofia Ricci).  Sorrentino instances his weakness in other relationships too.  An opposition senator (Lorenzo Gioielli) whose support he means to buy tells Berlusconi that he despises him for his inferiority complex.   The remark visibly hits home – as do the words of a young actress (Anna Pagani) when, later in the film, she stops Berlusconi’s attempted seduction in its tracks by telling him his breath is like her grandfather’s – not bad, just ‘old’.  These moments stand out because the details aren’t what you expect.   In contrast, the dialogue in the climactic showdown between Silvio and Veronica is unsurprising, well though the exchange is acted.

    As in The Great Beauty, Sorrentino shows a knack for conjuring up regretful atmosphere when his camera moves away from frenetic hedonism, and participants in it, to people-less images – of Roman buildings in the earlier film, of land- and seascapes in Loro.  The effect – which echoes La dolce vita, on which The Great Beauty drew in several ways – is less potent this time, though, since the regret isn’t filtered through a personality as engaging as Toni Servillo’s Jep Gambardella (let alone Marcello Mastroianni’s Marcello).  Sorrentino doesn’t skewer Berlusconi as mercilessly as he might have done but he doesn’t, of course, admire him – an attitude that limits the impact of the film he’s made.  There’s one particular sequence in the closing stages that might be powerful if Sorrentino were more ambivalent about his central character and made the audience feel likewise.  In the grounds of his home in Sardinia, Berlusconi has a fake volcano.  He keeps telling his guests that he’ll show them it in action but he never does.  Alone now in the garden, he switches on the volcano and it sputters.  So does the sequence.

    Another element in the last part of Loro, though derivative in conception, is more striking.  In April 2009, a few months after Berlusconi became prime minister again, the southern Italian city of L’Aquila was hit by a major earthquake.  In the film, Berlusconi visits the homeless locals and promises them ‘a new town’ though we hear a woman’s voice call that ‘We want Jesus Christ back’.  She is referring to a statue that stood in a church destroyed in the earthquake (as well as suggesting that some parts of Italy haven’t been as irrevocably modernised as others).  Although he’s becoming increasingly politically isolated, Berlusconi delivers on his promise to the people of L’Aquila to build new houses for them.  This is upstaged by the recovery of the statue, hoisted by firemen from the ruins of the church before being lowered carefully to the ground.  The image inevitably evokes the prologue to La dolce vita, in which a helicopter transports a statue of Christ over an ancient Roman viaduct but Sorrentino then focuses on the faces of the firemen, tired by their efforts, and continues to do so through most of the closing credits.  This compassionate fascination with people comes out of nowhere and the tonal change is arresting.  It sent me out of the cinema feeling differently from when I went in.  In spite of everything that’s wrong with Loro, its very last gasp made me curious to see what Paolo Sorrentino does next.

    6 May 2019

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