Monthly Archives: July 2019

  • The Ghosts of Berkeley Square

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vernon Sewell (1947)

    BFI curator Jo Botting seemed a bit below par introducing this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ number.  As usual, she supplied plenty of good background information but sandwiched it between suggesting the most interesting thing about The Ghosts of Berkeley Square was its gestation and explaining she’d chosen it for reasons of personal nostalgia.  Watching Vernon Sewell’s supernatural comedy again now, she admitted, had proved a rather underwhelming experience.  I wondered if Botting was regretting and uneasy about her choice.  At any rate, I was soon convinced she was right that its development was more worth hearing about than the film was worth watching.  I walked out after half an hour.

    With a screenplay by James Seymour, adapted from the comic novel No Nightingales by Caryl Brahms and S J Simon, The Ghosts of Berkeley Square opens at the annual reunion banquet of ‘The Ghost Society’, very like an old boys’ association shindig (the ghosts are all male) and being broadcast on television for the first time.  The wonders of modern technology mean that the gathering is also invited by the presiding spectre, General Burlap (Robert Morley), to watch on a big screen above the banquet table the story of his and his pal Colonel Kelsoe (Felix Aylmer)’s ghostly story-so-far.  At 50 Berkeley Square, during the reign of Queen Anne, these two old soldiers – known as Jumbo (Morley) and Bulldog (Aylmer) – prepare to play a trick on the preening Duke of Marlborough, whose military success and celebrity they resent, and whose appetite for further warfare they plan to thwart.  Just as they’re expecting a visit from the queen, the trick goes wrong and kills the pair.  Receiving the news as she arrives in her carriage, the miffed Anne returns to the palace whence she came.  The ghosts of Jumbo and Bulldog are condemned to haunt the house until such time as a reigning monarch crosses the threshold.

    The film’s narrative comprises a series of sketches, set in various eras from the early eighteenth century down to the present day.  Jumbo and Bulldog repeatedly hope to get the curse lifted and repeatedly fail, so remaining confined to Berkeley Square barracks.  Their luck finally changes when Queen Mary (still alive when the film was made) makes it through the front door.  The sketches include ‘when the Nawab of Bagwash moves in, played by [Robert] Morley in blackface’.   The first part of the film at least includes some weedy attempts to show bureaucracy surviving the afterlife – something Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death had done with purpose and imagination only the year before.  Jo Botting mentioned that Vernon Sewell had plenty of experience in cinematic special effects but I saw no evidence hat he had any understanding of directing screen action or actors.  The pacing is lame.  I felt embarrassed for Felix Aylmer to see his talents so wasted.  Although Robert Morley is one of those performers whose personality often seems to proof them against the defects of a picture, even he seems to feel the strain here.

    It’s an odd thing.  Whenever I see a British film drama of the early post-war years, I seem to find things of interest, regardless of the weaknesses:  My Death is a Mockery, screened in this May’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ slot, is an obvious recent example.  Isn’t-this-a-lark British comedies of the period, more often than not, tend to lack redeeming features.  A few weeks ago, a friend passed on to us a DVD of C M Pennington-Richards’ Ladies Who Do (1963):  watching it through was so stupefying I couldn’t even manage a note.  (By coincidence, Robert Morley was one of the stars of that one too.)   The evidence suggests in this particular case that isn’t a reflection of changing tastes:  The Ghosts of Berkeley Square fared poorly at the box office seventy-odd years ago, despite ‘its stellar cast of highly respected character actors and its inventive use of special effects’ (Wikipedia).   Jo Botting confirmed this, noting that the BFI showing would be only the third public screening of the film since its original release.  That’s probably at least two screenings too many.

    9 July 2019

  • Support the Girls

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrew Bujalski (2018)

    This time last year I hadn’t heard of either Regina Hall or Regina King (though I had, without realising it, seen King in small roles in Boyz n the Hood, Jerry Maguire and Ray).  Both actresses, who are in their late forties, received plenty of praise and prizes for 2018 films.  For me, Regina King’s gongs for If Beale Street Could Talk, culminating in a Supporting Actress Oscar, amounted to the most mystifying run of acting awards success since Patricia Arquette swept the board for Boyhood a few years back.  Although King was good in Beale Street, I didn’t think she gave even the year’s best performance by an actress called Regina in a supporting role:  that came from Regina Hall in The Hate U Give.  The latter also made her mark by becoming the first ever African-American winner of the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress, for her work in the writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls.

    The film, set in Texas, is a workplace comedy-drama.  Since the workplace is one that doesn’t (as far as I know) exist in Britain, it takes a little while to get your bearings.  Regina Hall plays Lisa, the manager of a ‘breastaurant’, a sports bar staffed by scantily clad waitresses.  The place is called ‘Double Whammies’ – a fictional name but credible enough:  as the IMDb ‘Trivia’ notes for Support the Girls confirm, across the road from ‘Double Whammies’ is a rival outlet called ‘Twin Peaks’ – an actual breastaurant chain.  Lisa is not only affable and competent putting out one fire after another; she’s also tenaciously, almost delusionally upbeat about the set-up where she works.  Her self-appointed role as den mother for the young waitresses has brought her into repeated conflict with her incompetent boss Cubby (James LeGros).  Most of the movie’s action takes place within the space of a few hours that bring tensions to a head and Lisa’s determined optimism to breaking point.

    The names in the opening credits appear in Day-Glo colours and are written in many different hands – presumably the cast’s and crew’s own.  The brightness and variety of the titles contrast sharply with the grey impersonality of the Texan highway against which they appear, alongside which Double Whammies is situated.  The contrast predicts the film’s tonal range.  Support the Girls is never short of humour and the tacky setting is hard to take seriously but there’s less and less to laugh about.  House rules are posted on the wall of the bar.  The first of these is ‘NO DRAMA’ and the problems and conflicts Andrew Bujalski describes don’t at first seem big enough to sustain a feature-length story (though this isn’t a long film:  91 minutes).  Yet Bujalski uses the framework of a single working day – a day both typical and exceptional – very effectively.  He does develop a drama and he expands its themes.  What starts as an agreeably observant comedy grows into a more troubling cultural picture.

    The team of waitresses includes bubbly Maci (Haley Lu Richardson), clueless new recruit Jennelle (Dylan Gelula) and single mother Danyelle (the rapper Junglepussy – real name Shayna McHayle), who brings her unwell son McKray (Jermichael Grey) to work with her.  With white waitresses in a majority, it seems reasonable to assume that Bujalski is concerned with economic rather than racial issues until we learn that Double Whammies regulations stipulate no more than one black waitress on any one shift.  What’s more, Regina Hall’s unactressy command and Junglepussy’s distinctive presence combine to ensure the story is principally about working women of colour.

    The boy McKray is probably the most positively drawn male character (Jermichael Grey is good in his scene with Hall), followed by two police officers who are bar regulars (Jesse Marshall and Luis Olmeda).  Others include – as well as the foolish, irascible Cubby – Lisa’s miserable, uncommitted partner Cameron (Lawrence Varnado) and Chris (Sam Stinson), the brutish boyfriend of a waitress called Shaina (Jana Kramer).  Double Whammies’ passing trade includes a fair share of male ‘deplorables’ but Bujalski doesn’t give the men in the story an unfair deal.   He implies their lifestyle, like the women’s line of work, is largely dictated and constrained by economics.

    Double Whammies is an apt name for the place, beyond the sexual innuendo.  The girls are expected to show themselves off but according to the ‘four B’s’ – ‘Be responsible, be informed, be friendly, be sexy’.   That means no relationships with the clientele – a rule that Maci disobeys by going with a much older man (Gerald Brodin).   The rules also prescribe no tattoos on employees:  Krista (A J Michalka) flouts that one with a large, prominent image of the basketball player Steph Curry on her exposed ribcage.  The sporting highlight in the bar on the day in question is a televised boxing match, though the cable TV is on the blink.  When Danyelle sashays over to an overweight, late-middle-aged man and sits beside him as he eats his meal, he sharply tells her to ‘stop shaking that thing – I’m here for the burger and the fight’.  She gets up and moves off sheepishly.  It’s one thing having to flaunt yourself for a living – a double whammy to be told, when you do, that you’re getting in the way.

    By this stage, Lisa is no longer in charge.  Cubby fires her for organising an off-the-books car wash (with the slogan ‘support the girls’) to raise legal funds for Shaina, who has hit the abusive Chris with her car and is now taking refuge at Lisa’s house.  When Lisa returns there, she learns from Shaina – it’s a series of last straws – that Cameron has moved out, Chris has moved in and Shaina will use the car-wash proceeds to pay her boyfriend’s hospital bills.   After retrieving the money, in spite of Chris’s threats, Lisa returns to Double Whammies to say her goodbyes.  Maci and Danyelle, shocked and angry that she’s lost her job, sabotage the cable and the boxing coverage, and get themselves sacked too.  Fights break out.  A gun is fired.  The après-Lisa-le-déluge chaos is a bit overdone but Bujalski, by biding his time, just about earns this injection of incident.  Throughout the film, some gags work better than others but his direction is alert and well judged.

    Double Whammies is under increasing pressure from the developing ‘ManCave’ chain.  In the skilfully ambiguous conclusion to Support the Girls – it’s a postscript and a climax – Lisa, Maci and Danyelle go for job interviews with this growing force within the brestaurant industry.  It’s both heartening and depressing that Lisa’s chirpy, numbingly corporate interviewer (Brooklyn Decker) reveals that she herself has graduated from the ManCave waitress corps to power-dressed executive status.  Lisa, Maci and Danyelle trying to stick together as a team might seem to be pushing the working girl camaraderie theme too far but Bujalski undercuts this incisively.  After they leave the ManCave offices, Lisa apologises to the two younger women for bringing their previous employment to an end.  Danyelle replies, ‘It’s not your fault we’ve lost our shitty jobs – anyway, there are plenty of other shitty jobs out there, like the ones we’ve just been interviewed for’.  All in all, this is one of the best original screenplays of the last couple of years.

    The trio sit out on a rooftop overlooking the highway, and drink from a bottle that Maci nicked from Double Whammies.  Dutch courage enables Lisa finally to join the other two in cathartic screams in the direction of the highway.  This is getting to be a popular device in the films I’m currently seeing (cf Cronofobia) but it has to be said these screams are impressively loud and sustained.  The distant traffic is no competition.

    2 July 2019

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