Monthly Archives: March 2020

  • Misbehaviour

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Philippa Lowthorpe (2020)

    This is a year like no other but there was just time, before the lights went down in cinemas in a new way, for a familiar stage of the British film-going year to get started.  As soon as the awards season is over, a clutch of home-grown pictures dominates the trailers and new releases.  At least one of them will be hailed somewhere in the press as ‘the feel-good film of the year’, even though the year is only a few weeks old.  In 2020, it’s Peter Cattaneo’s Military Wives.  I couldn’t face Kristin Scott Thomas doing heartwarming-but-humorous sisterhood – or, for that matter, Steve Coogan skewering a Philip Green-inspired billionaire in Michael Winterbottom’s Greed.  I bought a ticket for Misbehaviour instead.  It looked naff from the trailer but at least Philippa Lowthorpe had an interesting subject – how, in 1970, the Miss World contest was politicised as never before.

    As the screenwriter of Their Finest (the feel-good film of the year in April 2017), Gaby Chiappe has form in the British post-awards fare department.  She has co-written Misbehaviour with Rebecca Frayn.  The narrative involves four main groups or couples:  Eric Morley, founder of the Miss World pageant and, with his wife Julia, the competition’s chief organiser; Bob Hope, whom the Morleys persuade to do a guest compere spot on the show, and his wife Dolores; a few key contestants; and the motley crew of proto-feminists whose demonstration will eventually hijack Hope’s performance and steal the Miss World show.   One of the many strong points of the recent TV mini-series The Trial of Christine Keeler, written by Amanda Coe, was how it described an apparently disparate collection of individuals colliding to produce the Profumo affair:  the director Andrea Harkin[1] made their convergence entertainingly inexorable.  Something similar might have happened in Misbehaviour, at least in its juxtaposition of the feminists, who aren’t planning from the outset to disrupt proceedings, and the other characters.  Until they clash at the supposed climax, the various contributors take repeated turns as the focus of attention.  But there’s no rhythm or momentum in the storytelling.

    BBC Films were among the production companies behind Misbehaviour.  To coincide with its release, the BBC broadcast a documentary – Miss World 1970:  Beauty Queens and Bedlam, directed by Hannah Berryman – about the same events and personnel.  The documentary form naturally enables this one-hour film to be more straightforwardly informative than Lowthorpe’s; Berryman’s effort is more insightful and funnier too.  It presents the political issues clearly and captures the bizarre comedy aspect of what happened.  The documentary also has some inbuilt advantages, not least the retrospective interviews with the main dramatis personae, most of them now in their seventies.   They include the demonstrators Sue Finch, Jo Robinson and Sarah Wilson, the contest winner Jennifer Hosten (Miss Grenada), runner-up Pearl Janssen (Miss Africa South) and bookies’ favourite Maj Christel Johansson (Miss Sweden), who ended up fourth.  Footage from the BBC’s live broadcast of the contest from the Royal Albert Hall[2], of which there’s plenty, suggests that Bob Hope’s worst remarks were prompted by lack of audience laughter at his early jokes.  He pushed harder and more offensively for a reaction, and got it in the form of flour bombs and water pistols.

    The usual Miss World compere at the time was Michael Aspel, who shared the stage with Hope in 1970 and whose recollections in Beauty Queens and Bedlam are consistently interesting.  Now retired (and a well-preserved eighty-seven), Aspel was a versatile and highly professional broadcaster:  he’s well aware that he got the Miss World job because the BBC felt his cachet as a newsreader would give proceedings a patina of respectability.  He has a likeable mixture of candour and ruefulness in talking to Berryman.  ‘People love to look at girls,’ he says matter-of-factly, then uncomfortably recalls the cameras moving up and down the contestants’ bodies.  Whereas Berryman includes visual proof of this, Philippa Lowthorpe is in a bind with it.  She wants to condemn the ‘cattle market’ appraisal of the girls but she can’t replicate the camera movement except via a female gaze (even if her DP is a man, Zac Nicholson).  The result is camerawork that seems oddly prudish.

    Although the 1970 television broadcast looks technically quite primitive now, Michael Aspel isn’t the only one of Hannah Berryman’s talking heads to make clear the importance of Miss World in the annual TV calendar of the era.  Philippa Lowthorpe is so intent on conveying the squalid ethos of beauty pageants that she makes the show too downmarket.  There’s not enough distinction between the grey, windswept seaside resort setting of the British eliminator and the main event in London – and that’s in spite of the national contest itself looking too bargain-basement (it’s reminiscent of the bathing beauty competition in The Entertainer).  Even fifty years ago, Eric Morley was widely regarded (and by plenty of Miss World viewers) as sleazy but he turned the Mecca organisation into a major entertainment organisation and his cheque-book wasn’t small.  It doesn’t seem to occur to Lowthorpe that the lavish surface of the contest might have been used to strengthen her film’s censure of what Miss World represented.

    The theatrical release poster shows the main characters, several of them wearing exaggerated facial expressions.  This seems to promise broad comedy but the film, although it includes plenty of coarse acting, doesn’t turn out that way, for two reasons.  Philippa Lowthorpe’s lack of comic touch is reinforced by her evident conviction that the story she’s telling is no laughing matter.  The legends on the screen at the end conclude with ‘Attempts to bring down the patriarchy remain ongoing’.  It would be nice to think this inelegant wording was itself a joke – a signal of humorous self-awareness – but it would also be wishful thinking.  Misbehaviour (the faintly punning title is one of the better things about it) seems less feminist than Manichaean about the sexes:  women are good and men are bad.

    Except for the xenophobic little cartoon of Miss USA (Suki Waterhouse), all the female characters are treated kindly.  They don’t need to be feminists – like educated, middle-class Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) and mouthy, blunt northerner Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley), her polar opposite in the group.  You’re encouraged to feel sympathy for Dolores Hope (Lesley Manville), acutely aware that the last time Bob appeared on Miss World he followed it up by having a fling with the winner.  You’re sorry even for Julia Morley (Keeley Hawes), whose ladylike fragrance stresses her bad luck to be saddled with such a grubby husband (Rhys Ifans).  The male characters are rubbished in a lazily derisive way:  they have to be, more than pernicious, incompetent.  Dolores Hope runs rings round the clumsy philanderer she stays loyal to.  Eric Morley is portrayed as a martinet manqué – someone who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.  It hardly seems worth the trouble of excoriating patriarchy as ineffectual as this.

    In an early scene, Sally Alexander goes for a university admission interview, in the history department of UCL[3].  Sitting waiting to be called in, Sally, who’s in her mid-twenties, is sandwiched between school-uniformed teenage boys and girls.  The improbably numerous panel of six interviewers are all men.  As Sally takes a seat and before she’s said a word, one of the panel passes his neighbour a note, giving Sally a score of seven out of ten.  The other man frowns humorously, changes the seven to a nine, and passes the note back.  Honestly, it’s like these academics are judging a beauty contest!    The interview questions that follow characterise the panel as either stuffy or hostile – to a man.  Sally leaves in high dudgeon.  A couple of scenes later, she learns that UCL has offered her a place.  How come?

    Lowthorpe isn’t interested in the answer to that sort of question.  She just wants to take a dim view of the UCL panel before moving to the next thing on her checklist-cum-hit-list.  Just as Misbehaviour’s Eric Morley is a hectic, hopeless chancer, so Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) comes across as a showbiz has-been with no better offers coming his way than the one he gets from Morley.  The most striking male characterisation is of Sally Alexander’s domestic partner Gareth Stedman-Jones (John Heffernan).  Along with Sally’s mother Evelyn (Phyllis Logan), Gareth looks after their home and Sally’s young daughter from her short-lived marriage[4].  When she worriedly warns her daughter that assigning a homebody role to a man risks emasculating him, Evelyn Alexander is illustrating the pitiable benightedness of her generation.   She’s right, though:  Gareth, according to the film, is just a wimp.  Misbehaviour makes fun of the only man in evidence whose understanding of gender roles is relatively enlightened.

    The racial politics of the story aren’t susceptible to the same simplistic treatment as the sexual politics so it’s no wonder race themes have a relatively secondary role in the film.  Of course Lowthorpe and the screenwriters stress that Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) was the first black winner of the contest but her win in 1970 really was overshadowed by two factors, minor and major.  The judging panel included Eric Gairy, the Premier of Grenada.  The film shows Gairy[5]  recommending himself to Julia Morley but omits mention of the post-contest mutterings that Jennifer Hosten got a prejudiced helping hand from the judges.  (Beauty Queens and Bedlam doesn’t ignore this:  there’s an interview clip in which Gairy calmly points out to Martin Bell that, when Miss United Kingdom won a few years previously, there were four British judges on the panel.)  More important, the runner-up to Hosten was another black contestant.  The presence in the competition, for the first time, of a black South African alongside the country’s white representative, was an egregious attempt, urged upon the relevant South African authorities by Eric Morley, to prevent Miss World being stymied by anti-apartheid activists, who’d recently done so well to derail British sporting tours by white-only South African teams.

    Miss World 1970 would have been a more potent political parable if Pearl Janssen, rather than Jennifer Hosten, had won but this isn’t why Misbehaviour downplays the racial dimension.  (It just about ignores the irony of both South African entrants reaching the final seven and of Pearl Janssen beating the white Miss South Africa (Emma Corrin), who finished fifth.)  The film-makers feel morally obliged to present the black contestants’ one-two as better than nothing but this actually gets in the way of their main concern.  Since the competition is degrading to women, it would have made life easier for Misbehaviour if the result had also confirmed a pro-white bias, so as to demonise the contest unequivocally.  Another black contestant says at one point, ‘we’re black – we’re not going to be Miss World’.  It’s almost a letdown when one of them is.

    Misbehaviour, needless to say, doesn’t make clear that, although no black woman had previously won Miss World, there had been non-white winners – Carole Crawford (Miss Jamaica), who was of mixed race, in 1963; Reita Faria (Miss India) in 1966.  Faria was a medical student at the time and, after her year’s ‘reign’ as Miss World, went on to qualify as a physician.  The where-are-they-now information on the screen at the end of Misbehaviour summarises Sally Alexander’s successful academic career (she’s now Professor Emerita of History at Goldsmiths) and notes Jennifer Hosten’s subsequent educational achievements, as well as her term as Grenadian High Commissioner to Canada.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, Hosten, the first Grenadian to compete in Miss World, was in 2006 ‘appointed the National Director of the Miss Grenada World Contest.  The event … chose only the third Grenadian woman in history to compete at the Miss World finals’.   That doesn’t get mentioned in the closing legends.

    Beauty Queens and Bedlam likewise says nothing about Carole Crawford or Reita Faria but it does more than Misbehaviour to address the issue of the Miss World girls being willing or eager participants, and how much that was dictated by socio-economic circumstances in their native country.  Rather than give the contestants the opportunity to voice their thoughts, Philippa Lowthorpe prefers to let them gaze inscrutably at the camera – until, that is, a daft powder-room meeting between Jennifer Hosten and Sally Alexander, a few minutes after the former has been crowned and while the latter is trying to escape pursuing police officers.  Hosten sharply tells Alexander that, ‘I look forward to having your choices in life’.  Another item on the checklist ticked off though little to suggest the remark gives Sally Alexander pause – or Keira Knightley’s interpretation of her, at any rate.

    In a promotional video for Misbehaviour available on the Independent website, Jessie Buckley informs us that ‘In the 1970s, women weren’t allowed to dream beyond making a cupcake’ – a thick remark that foretells Buckley’s disappointing, nuance-free playing of Jo Robinson.  As Eric Morley, Rhys Ifans sounds like Mike Yarwood doing Bruce Forsyth.  Ifans has crude energy to burn – a pity he couldn’t have loaned some to Greg Kinnear, a tepid Bob Hope, imprisoned in prosthetic make-up.  Gugu Mbatha-Raw is OK in her underwritten role.  It’s kind of apt that hard-to-dislike Keeley Hawes was cast as Julia Morley, whose name still features on a hugely popular BBC fixture.  Her late husband also introduced Come Dancing to the world so Julia gets a credit on the screen at the end of every Strictly show.

    It goes almost without saying that the most incisive (and enjoyable) performance comes from Lesley Manville.   Alexa Davies and Lily Newmark have only minor roles within the feminist collective but these two good young actresses (Davies was one of the few assets of the seriously overlong White House Farm on ITV recently) are admirably natural beside the leading lights of Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley.  Misbehaviour has no visual style.  In Beauty Queens and Bedlam, Jo Robinson recalls the flour bombs exploding from on high and, as it descended in the Albert Hall lights, looking ‘like snowflakes’.  Hannah Berryman uses animation to create this effect.  It’s a more striking image than any in Philippa Lowthorpe’s feeble film.

    17 March 2020

    [1] Harkin directed the first four of the six episodes, Leanne Welham the last two.

    [2] For reasons unclear, the competition venue in Misbehaviour is the fictional ‘Princess Theatre’.

    [3] Or what is now UCL:  in 1970, its formal name was University of London, University College.

    [4] To the actor John Thaw:  the child in the film (played by Maya Kelly) grew up to be Abigail Thaw, nowadays a regular in Endeavour.

    [5] The actor is uncredited on IMDb.

     

  • Deliverance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Boorman (1972)

    Adapted by James Dickey from his own (1970) novel, Deliverance tells the story of an adventure weekend from hell.  Four Atlanta men in their mid-thirties drive to the north Georgia wilderness.  They plan to canoe down the river, taking in the unspoiled natural beauty of the area before it disappears forever:  the Cahulawassee River valley is soon to be flooded by construction of a dam[1].   The quartet’s experience of the great outdoors varies widely.  Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is the proven action man of the party.  His friend Ed (Jon Voight) has accompanied him on expeditions before.  Bobby (Ned Beatty) and Drew (Ronny Cox) are tenderfoots.  The men’s views about what’s to happen to the river valley differ too.  Lewis is alone in bitterly lamenting the loss of the ‘last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unfucked-up river in the South’ – the coming ‘rape’ of the landscape.

    John Boorman doesn’t immediately announce the ghastliness to come.  (Ari Aster and the Jordan Peele of Us would do well to note.)   The opening of Deliverance is ominous partly because it’s hard to put your finger on what’s making it so.  Shots of the river and bulldozers encroaching on the surrounding landscape are accompanied by the voices of the four men arguing, vigorously but good-naturedly, over whether or not the damming and creation of what Lewis derides as ‘a big, dead lake’ is progress:  why is that juxtaposition of image and sound unnerving?  Once the weekenders appear, the camera’s occasionally slithering movement seems to suggest it’s looking at something neither these characters nor the audience can see.  The lack of accompanying music is another contributor to atmosphere – until, that is, one of the film’s best-known sequences, featuring virtuosity and humour at the same time as it raises the discomfort level.

    This is the ‘Dueling Banjos’ duet of Drew on guitar and a teenage boy (Billy Redden) on banjo.  The latter’s face is an undoubted and a twofold element of the discomfort – viewers may well recoil from his extraordinary appearance and feel guilty about doing so.  (This one did.)  The teenager, named Lonnie in the credits, isn’t the first unusual and unappealing local specimen to appear.  Two of the tourists have already muttered about ‘genetic deficiencies’ of their hosts; when Lonnie then appears, he looks the epitome of hillbilly inbreeding.  The accelerating tune he plays with – or, rather, against – the affable, musically stimulated Drew is both exhilarating and alarming.  The musical duel ends and Drew offers to shake Lonnie by the hand but the boy silently refuses and turns away.  One of the two elements that still makes Deliverance startling to watch is its pretty blunt equation of warped physiognomy and moral dereliction – an equation foretold  in Lonnie’s jolting presence and behaviour.

    The Atlanta quartet arrives in the area on a Friday afternoon.  (The plan is to be back home Sunday afternoon, ‘in time for the football game’.)  There are a few minor tensions within the group, only two of whom (Ed and Lewis) are already friends, but the mood is convivial as they camp out on their first night.  Deliverance‘s other enduringly shocking element is what happens the following morning, which catalyses the whole of the subsequent plot.  The men travel in two canoes and one pair is temporarily separated from the other.  As Ed and Bobby land, they’re confronted in woodland by two locals (Bill McKinney and Herbert Coward), one of them armed with a shotgun.  After a brief verbal exchange, the backwoodsmen tie Ed to a tree and order porky Bobby to strip.  One of them assaults him, twisting Bobby’s ear and telling him to ‘squeal like a pig’, before sodomising him.  The other, conspicuously toothless man takes grinning pleasure in watching this, while continuing to hold Ed at gunpoint.   Bobby’s squeals and cries of pain are heard by Lewis and Drew.  Unseen by the attackers, they approach just as the hillbillies prepare to sexually assault Ed.  Lewis fires an arrow from his recurve bow, killing the man who raped Bobby.  The toothless man runs off into the woods.

    When I saw Deliverance on its original release, at the age of seventeen, I’d never before seen anything like this on a cinema screen.  At the age of sixty-four and thousands of films later, I’ve still not seen too much to compare.  This episode is both the crux of the film and the start of a nightmare that is nearly unrelenting until the closing stages.  (Even then, sanctuary is more apparent than real.)  Bobby’s brutal humiliation is so gruellingly realistic and protracted that its horror is of a different order from subsequent events yet the speed of these is more than enough to convey a sense of things spiralling out of control.  Lewis and Drew argue about what do next; Bobby and Ed take Lewis’s side and the four men bury the corpse of Bobby’s torturer before hastily resuming their journey down the river.  They soon hit a perilous stretch of rapids, where Drew falls into the water and disappears.  The canoes collide on rocks and Lewis sustains a terrible leg injury.  Hair-raising and dreadful as these events are, they’re recognisable action-thriller crises in a way the preceding rape wasn’t.  Yet the aftershock of that assault boosts the terrific momentum that Boorman, his DP Vilmos Zsigmond and editor Tom Priestley give to the ordeal on the river.

    Weaknesses in the material are visible below the compelling surface.  The rape of Bobby resoundingly echoes Lewis’s opening prediction of the rape of the land and it isn’t the screenplay’s only example of rhyming that’s fancy but crude.   The first thing Ed does after getting up on Saturday morning is try and shoot a deer with Lewis’s bow and arrow; his nerve fails and the animal runs away.  On the Sunday morning, he wakes to see the man he’s been pursuing – the toothless man who witnessed the murder of his partner in crime – a short distance away.  Like the deer, the man doesn’t know Ed is there; unlike the deer, he doesn’t survive the encounter.  In the meantime, Ed has achieved the improbably stupendous feat of climbing (with bow and arrows) all the way up from the rocks, where Bobby has stayed with the stricken Lewis, to the top of a sheer cliff[2].

    There are compensating ambiguities in Boorman’s direction, though. The Atlanta visitors’ early complacency and more persisting sense of superiority are unmissable but never overdone.  Although his companions assume that Drew must have been shot by the toothless man, his death by drowning could just as well be suicidal:  when they get back on the river, Drew, after his unavailing attempts to persuade Lewis and the others to inform the police of what happened in the woods, declines to wear a lifejacket.   Just as the cause of his fall into the water remains unclear, so neither Ed nor Bobby is sure that the man Ed has slain is the other woodland assailant – even though he looks, to them and to the audience, very similar and similarly in dire need of dental treatment.  These identity doubts sharpen a viewer’s awareness of seeing the hillbillies through prejudiced, they-all-look-the-same-these-people eyes.

    The argument over burying the rapist’s corpse is a rare static and wordy segment.  This lack of movement and surfeit of dialogue make you notice the disputants’ symbolic accoutrements – pragmatic Lewis in his action-man outfit vs decent, conscientious Drew, the only member of the foursome who wears spectacles.  Even so, the length of the debate contrasts effectively with the later decisions – increasingly rapid, nearly instinctive – taken by Ed and Bobby to survive and protect themselves.  In Aintry, the small town downriver that was always the men’s planned destination, they tell the police that Drew’s drowning was accidental.  They say nothing about their experiences with the two locals killed by Lewis and Ed.  Deliverance segues from savage drama generated by forces of nature – the powerful river and the feral locals – into a tale of submerged secrets.

    The Wikipedia entry for James Dickey’s novel makes clear that Ed is a graphic artist, Lewis a landlord, Drew a soft drinks executive and Bobby an insurance salesman.  Only the last-named’s job is mentioned in the screenplay but the omissions scarcely matter:  there are definite characterisations from all four actors.  Ed, the first-person narrator of the novel, is the central consciousness of the film.  (It seems that he’s a friend of each of the other three men, none of whom knows the other two well.)  It isn’t on the level of his work in Midnight Cowboy but Jon Voight gives a first-rate performance.  Even before doing so becomes a necessity, Ed always seems to be keeping something hidden.  (When Lewis presses to know why Ed accompanies him on ‘these trips’, the answer is, ‘You know, sometimes I wonder about that’.)   This elusiveness counterpoints Voight’s natural emotional candour and open face, which ensure that you root for Ed from start to finish.

    Ned Beatty was making his film debut.  Now retired, he’ll probably be best remembered for the role of Bobby – more specifically, for what happens to Bobby – but Deliverance gave Beatty’s screen career a well-deserved, considerable impetus.  In the next few years, he would feature in such films as Nashville, All the President’s Men, Network and Wise Blood (among numerous others).  He’s especially good here in expressing the usually garrulous Bobby’s hushed shock in the aftermath of his harrowing experience in the woods.  Beatty and Ronny Cox were both cast after Boorman had seen them in a play in Washington, though you can’t help wondering if Cox’s guitar-playing skills were what really landed him the role of Drew.  Deliverance was an important film for Burt Reynolds, who was keen to get into movies more substantial than the ones he’d been making.  He’s OK but there’s a shallowness about Lewis that you sense is a quality of the actor playing him rather than of the character.   Casting someone a bit less effortlessly alpha-male might have given Lewis more friction.  As it is, Reynolds is most striking after Lewis suffers his injury.  He makes it easy to believe that being immobilised and deprived of the means to assert himself is, for this man, a fate worse than death.

    James Dickey himself makes a short but telling appearance as the Aintry sheriff who doesn’t believe the survivors’ story but isn’t able to bring them to book.  ‘Don’t ever do nothin’ like this again – don’t come back up here,’ he tells them.  It’s fitting that Bobby is the one who replies, ‘You don’t have to worry about that, Sheriff’.  I hadn’t seen Deliverance for forty-seven years, which may be about the right length of interval.  This often horrifying adventure thriller is not easy to watch.  It’s gripping, though, and, nearly half a century on, still impressive.

    15 March 2020

    [1] Although the place names are fictional, the setting was inspired by real locations.  The Coosawattee River in northwestern Georgia was dammed and flooded by a reservoir in the 1970s; the process was completed a few years after James Dickey wrote his novel and the film was made.  Deliverance was shot mostly in northeastern Georgia, the canoe sequences on the Chattooga River.

    [2] Not that improbably stupendous, it turns out.  According to Wikipedia:  ‘The film is infamous for cutting costs by not insuring the production and having the actors perform their own stunts (most notably, Jon Voight climbed the cliff himself)’.   The same note also records that:  ‘In one scene, the stunt coordinator decided that a scene showing a canoe with a dummy of Burt Reynolds in it looked phony; he said it looked “like a canoe with a dummy in it”.  Reynolds requested to have the scene re-shot with himself in the canoe rather than the dummy. After shooting the scene, Reynolds, coughing up river water and nursing a broken coccyx, asked how the scene looked.  The director responded, “like a canoe with a dummy in it”.’

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