Monthly Archives: November 2023

  • Typist Artist Pirate King

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Carol Morley (2022)

    Audrey Amiss, born in Sunderland in 1933, trained as an artist at the Royal Academy in the 1950s but didn’t complete the course due to mental illness.  She continued to make art throughout her life, periods of which were spent in psychiatric hospitals, although Amiss also had secretarial jobs and travelled abroad.  Her creative work wasn’t recognised during her lifetime.  When, after her death, her niece and nephew cleared the Clapham home where she lived a reclusive existence in her later years, they discovered ‘hundreds of sketchbooks, scrapbooks, photograph albums, account books, record books and log books, spanning from [sic] Amiss’s early life up until the day of her death on 10 July 2013’ (Wikipedia).  The following year, her family donated this material in its entirety to the Wellcome Collection, where the archive has now been catalogued and can be viewed online.  Typist Artist Pirate King – the intriguing title is what Amiss entered as occupations on her passport – describes itself as ‘inspired by the life and times of Audrey Amiss’.

    Writer-director Carol Morley seems well qualified to explore this curious figure.  Morley made her film-making name with Dreams of a Life (2011), a formally inventive and absorbing drama-documentary, which pieced together the identity of another eventually solitary and sadly overlooked woman.  The puzzle of Typist Artist Pirate King, though, turns out to be not who Audrey Amiss was but the choices that Morley has made in this fictionalised portrait of her.  It’s hard to gauge exactly how old the film’s Audrey is meant to be – perhaps early sixties?  (Monica Dolan, who plays her, is in her mid-fifties but has been made up to look older.)  Audrey, in her London flat, makes herself unpopular with the people upstairs by banging on the ceiling at all hours in protest:  she imagines her neighbours are sexually abusing her by remote control.  She insults and tries the patience of Sandra (Kelly Macdonald), the care worker who visits her regularly.  Audrey is suddenly compelled to undertake an urgent mission – to get her work exhibited as never before.  She’s read about the ‘local’ art gallery concerned in the newspaper; Sandra gamely agrees to drive her there.  Once they’ve been on the road for a little while, Audrey reveals the gallery is in Sunderland (‘it’s local to me!’).

    Morley thus launches the pair into a road movie – unusual to the extent that Audrey is an unusual personality but structurally familiar.  The principals eventually arrive in Sunderland to find that their destination closed down years ago.  (When Sandra expresses regret that she didn’t bother to check the date of Audrey’s newspaper cutting about the art gallery, it sounds a bit like Carol Morley admitting to shaky plotting.)  Once Audrey’s quest for belated recognition is thwarted, a quest for reconciliation and healing moves centre stage.  Audrey claims her married sister Dorothy will have nothing to do with her; Sandra urges her to try to mend fences; when they pay Dorothy (Gina McKee) a call, it emerges that Audrey’s the one who broke off contact.  From an early stage in the narrative, there’s mention of a pivotal traumatic event in Audrey’s youth, when she was nineteen – a fall from rocky, hilly terrain in which she sustained serious injury.  In the climax to the story, she revisits the site of the accident – accompanied by Dorothy, Sandra and Gabe (Kieran Bew), a Geordie taxi driver who kindly provides transport once Sandra’s car is out of action.  Audrey re-experiences emotionally what happened there decades ago.  In the process, she appears to realise for the first time that Dorothy wasn’t to blame.  Morley’s reliance on tropes – an odyssey, a turning-point trauma, a crucial misunderstanding resolved in an epiphany – serves to conventionalise Audrey’s life (and it’s hard to see how Morley is critiquing these conventions).  The film’s score, by Carly Paradis, contains unusual sounds but it’s used conventionally, as mood music.

    Audrey keeps seeing individuals encountered during the journey north as significant people from her past:  a woman taking a senior citizens’ yoga class in a church vestry is her grammar school headmistress; another elderly woman in a suburban house, where Sandra seeks directions, is a less fondly remembered teacher, ‘Miss Hunter’, and Audrey starts yelling at her.  This episode is untypical in that the unfortunate woman is scared and tells Audrey and Sandra to get lost.  For the most part, Audrey’s repeated loss of temper and control, for all the noise she makes, takes place in a vacuum.  A choir practice is going on in the church at the same time as the yoga class; Audrey marches straight through the singers, with Sandra in tow.  The choir, rather than reacting, forms the first in a series of similar tableaux – the yoga women, an historical re-enactment group, Morris dancers whose performance Audrey interrupts.  At least in the last instance, when the men let her join in, there’s some movement, even if Audrey’s own idiosyncratic dance doesn’t quite fit with the Morris choreography.  The protagonist herself reacts fully – when, for example, after a spat with Sandra, she hitches a lift with a driver who tries to grope her.  But we rarely get a sense of how disruptive and alarming Audrey’s behaviour can be; even when she loses it and trashes the entrance lobby of a hotel where she and Sandra stay, the receptionist calls the police as if it’s just part of a day’s work.  It can’t be that Carol Morley means the prevailing under-reaction to suggest that the world keeps failing to notice Audrey:  long-suffering Sandra keeps shushing, and apologising for, her – unnecessarily, since no one bar ‘Miss Hunter’ seems bothered.

    Monica Dolan, a super actress, would need to be a superhuman one to satisfy in this role.  Dolan does witty, affecting things here but seems always to be giving-a-performance and – wearing Audrey’s colour un-coordinated outfits – in unfamiliar costume.  Kelly Macdonald is a good actress, too, but Morley has set her a thankless as well as an impossible task.  The invented character of Sandra is given no context or opportunity to reveal more about herself.  When Audrey, paranoid-quixotic and tilting at windmills, mentions that Sandra’s surname is Panza, we get the idea – and that Sandra is hardly more than that:  as a car driver, she literally supplies a vehicle for the story, merely gets the show on the road.  Some of the acting in smaller parts is pretty ropy.  This hardly matters when a character comes and goes within seconds; it’s a bigger problem with, say, a young male hitchhiker to whom Sandra gives a lift and who stays around for several minutes.  The one pleasant surprise in the cast is Gina McKee.  With not very much screen time, she conveys Dorothy’s persisting affection for, and exasperation with, her unruly sister:  by creating a character, McKee also gives Monica Dolan something to engage with.

    The Audrey-Dorothy exchanges convince you these are people with a past together that neither can shed; so much more of Carol Morley’s film feels awkwardly artificial.  She punctuates the narrative with shots of Audrey Amiss’s actual art work, assorted jottings and memorabilia, which also appear as the closing credits get underway.   These images are tantalising rather than complementary to the drama.  I wanted Typist Artist Pirate King to work.  I’m really sorry that it doesn’t.

    8 November 2023

  • The Queen’s Guards

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell (1961)

    BFI’s current Powell and Pressburger retrospective includes as well as their collaborations the films they made independently.  The Queen’s Guards, a Powell-without-Pressburger, was screened under a double heading:  it was also this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ offering, introduced, as usual, by curator Jo Botting.  Not as usual, she had a special guest with whom to share the introduction – Jess Conrad, one of the few surviving cast members from The Queen’s Guards and eighty-seven now.  If Jo Botting has ever seen The Very Strange Story of the Legendary Joe Meek, Alan Lewens’ wonderful 1991 documentary for BBC Arena, in which Conrad was among the talking heads, she might have guessed what she and the NFT3 audience were in for.  It was clear from his small contribution to Lewens’ film that Conrad was a boring braggart; unlike the TV programme-makers, Botting wasn’t in a position to edit him.  He went on and on, as tedious as ever, now short-term forgetful too – although, alas (and contrary to BFI speaker tradition), Conrad still knows how to use a mic.  He kept repeating how he graduated from actor in rep to pop star; his stuck-record spiel, replete with jokey sexism, was received in stony but also embarrassed silence.  The handout for the screening indicated presciently that the film would be introduced by Conrad and Botting, in that order.  It’s to be hoped the latter said all she wanted to say in her Sight & Sound (November 2023) piece, reproduced in the handout, because she could barely get a word in edgeways with her special guest.  Well done to Jo Botting, though, for keeping her cool and her temper before she finally managed to get Jess Conrad off the stage.

    Michael Powell is on record as calling The Queen’s Guards ’the most inept piece of filmmaking that I have ever produced or directed.  I didn’t write the story (weak) or the screenplay (abysmal) but I take all the flak’.  The story is credited to Simon Harcourt-Smith, a friend of Powell’s, and the screenplay to Roger Milner (whose stage comedy ‘How’s the World Treating You?’ would, a few years later, give Patricia Routledge her first role in the West End and on Broadway).  According to Jo Botting’s S&S piece, Harcourt-Smith ‘[f]inding himself outside Buckingham Palace one day, … mused on what secrets the guards’ poker-faces might conceal’, which sounds a promising enough idea.  The film’s scope and potential for surprise are somewhat limited by the decision to make these secrets those of an established military family but this evidently appealed to Powell, a self-confessed ‘sucker for stories about the services’.  He was clearly stimulated, too, by the challenge of blending dramatised reconstruction of Trooping the Colour on the sovereign’s official birthday with the real thing; he sought and received the Queen’s permission to film the parade in June 1960.  With a team including cinematographer Gerry Turpin and editor Noreen Ackland, Powell achieves seamless colour and texture matching between the actual and created material for the ceremony on Horse Guards Parade.  Beyond that, it’s not too hard to understand his damning judgment of The Queen’s Guards.

    Voiceover narration comes from the protagonist, John Fellowes (Daniel Massey), an officer in the Grenadier Guards, whose battalion is ‘to have the honour of trooping its colour before the Queen’, with Fellowes ‘lieutenant of the escort’.  Powell switches between the preparations of John and other characters on the morning of the parade; and longer flashbacks describing their lives and interactions before the big day itself.  John is the younger son of retired guardsman Captain Fellowes (Raymond Massey) and his wife (Ursula Jeans), whose house overlooks Horse Guards Parade.  Fellowes Sr can no longer move from his chair, except by hooking canes into loops on an overhead rail, and hauling himself along.  The contraption was designed by David, John’s elder brother, whose death in the North African campaign of World War II casts a long shadow over the family.  For generations past, the firstborn Fellowes son has always been a guards officer.  John has pursued his own military career acutely conscious of being second best to David, especially in the eyes of his father, who treats John with contempt.  For her part, Mrs Fellowes still insists that David is missing in action rather than dead.

    We see John progress from clueless cadet to respected guards officer; the animosity between him and another young guardsman, Henry Wynne-Walton (Robert Stephens), that turns to friendship; John’s romance with flirty Susan (Elizabeth Shepherd) and, when she switches her attentions to Henry, with Susan’s more demure flatmate, Ruth Dobbie (Judith Stott).  Ruth and her father (Ian Hunter), a rank-and-file soldier in WWII and now a haulage contractor, are among the spectators at the Horse Guards ceremony although George Dobbie is there on sufferance.  When Ruth asks why ‘you keep pretending you hate John’, George replies, ‘I don’t hate him:  I just hope he falls flat on his face’.  It’s soon clear, from what a senior officer (Frank Lawton) tells John, that David Fellowes’ death in action wasn’t the noble self-sacrifice his younger brother has always assumed it to be.  The details of what really happened in the Western Desert are, unsurprisingly, revealed much later – in the light of John’s own, more honourable conduct in a combat operation in an unnamed desert country.  Powell is impatient to get this underway.   He gives perfunctory and rhythmless treatment to some of the other flashback episodes.  Despite some striking images (blue, white and yellow parachutes descending in a blue sky), the desert combat accounts for too much of the film’s total running time (a quarter of the 110 minutes).  Powell obviously wanted to craft some military action scenes but the attention he gives them is disproportionate to their importance in the overall story.

    Some of the cast are better than Powell’s low opinion of The Queen’s Guards would have you believe.  Ursula Jeans and Jack Watson (as an army sergeant) do good work in their supporting roles.  In his first film lead, Daniel Massey gives John a distinctively sensitive masculinity.  Robert Stephens, with his easy wit and insolence, complements him well:  a bedroom conversation between John and Henry, when the latter stays overnight at the Fellowes’ home, makes for one of the best scenes.  Massey and Stephens get across – here and elsewhere but never too emphatically – that these two men care for each other.  Stephens’ appearance in this film in the same year as A Taste of Honey is a reminder of his versatility.  Massey is also particularly good on the plane flight en route to the desert operation:  he was, like his sister Anna, a much better actor than their father, despite Raymond’s higher-profile filmography (his pompous tones are a drag in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), even in East of Eden (1955)).  The Queen’s Guards is notable as the only time father and son appeared together on screen; it’s not Massey junior’s fault that they don’t spark.

    Michael Powell’s film-making priority was telling stories that offered opportunities to realise his visual flair and imagination.  His relative lack of interest in actors may explain why he condemned The Queen’s Guards so unequivocally; it’s also reflected in one of its most glaring defects.  It’s true that at the time the film was made it was still unusual in British cinema for regional or non-RP accents to be done convincingly; but when social class and military status are such significant themes, why cast people who can’t get the vocals right?  Fellowes Sr seems meant to be typically English old school; Raymond Massey conceals his native Canadian accent erratically.  Ruth’s father has a decidedly pleb name, a line of business to match, and a vehement prejudice against the officer class; every so often, Ian Hunter suddenly remembers to drop his aitches.  Jess Conrad?  His acting is pretty good, as it also was in Nick Moran’s Telstar: The Joe Meek Story (2008), where he played Larry Parnes (and Nigel Harman played Conrad).  As Dankworth, a junior guardsman, Conrad is pleasingly natural.  Unfortunately, he also sings – something called ‘Oh Susanna’, in an idiotic pub sequence:  a barmaid drools over how marvellous Dankworth is (‘He’s going to be in the guards!’)  You understand Powell’s indifference to this particular scene if not how he got landed with it.

    Once John Fellowes returns from dealing with the natives in the desert (Roger Milner’s dialogue is often jarringly imperialistic), Michael Powell seems in a hurry to get things over with, happily resolved.  It makes sense that Captain Fellowes, struggling on his ‘trolley bus’ contraption to get a good view from an upstairs window of the Trooping of the Colour, eventually recognises John as the son to be proud of.  It’s a mystery as to how watching the ceremony seems to persuade George Dobbie, judging from the look on his face, that Grenadier Guards officers aren’t so bad after all.  In one of her few chances to speak before the screening, Jo Botting stressed that The Queen’s Guards, despite its imperfections, was well worth seeing in a theatre in all its Technicolor/CinemaScope glory, worth avoiding in the ‘appalling’ version of the film available on YouTube.  I’m afraid I ignored her advice.  I left the screening a bit before the end and finished the job at home.  The visual quality on YouTube certainly is dire but I wasn’t having Jess Conrad make me miss my train.

    2 November 2023

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