Monthly Archives: April 2025

  • Under the Volcano

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Huston (1984)

    John Huston’s Under the Volcano is a surprising entry in BFI’s ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’ programme.  It didn’t mark Huston’s return to filmmaking after long absence from the Hollywood scene:  a confirmed genre-hopper, he’d directed a big-budget family musical – Annie – only two years previously.  It didn’t go unnoticed on original release, premiering at Cannes and earning two Oscar nominations.  It certainly didn’t mark the end of Huston’s career:  the two films he made subsequently – Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and The Dead (released in late 1987, a few months after his death) – are widely admired.  Besides, this 1984 film is, in conception as well as in effect, a one-man show by the lead actor.  Adapted (by Guy Gallo) from Malcolm Lowry’s celebrated, partly autobiographical novel of the same name, Under the Volcano is remarkable much less for Huston’s signature than for Albert Finney’s performance.

    Finney is Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul in Mexico and an alcoholic.  The film’s timeframe is around twenty-four hours – the last day of Geoffrey’s life, which coincides with the Day of the Dead festival in November 1938.  The setting is Cuernavaca, capital of the Mexican state of Morelos.  Under the Volcano was filmed on location there – the volcano of the title is Popocatépetl – and Huston makes the most of it.  The opening title sequence is intriguing:  a succession of death’s-head and other puppets appear on the screen, accompanied by Alex North’s tingly music.  As soon as the film proper gets underway, Huston’s camera is touring the town’s streets and market stalls – dominated by Day of the Dead outfits and artefacts that have less impact because they follow straight on from that title sequence.  While subsequent bits of local colour – street theatre, a bullfight – are visually striking, you almost start to wonder if their purpose in the film is to give Albert Finney, and the audience, occasional breaks from his herculean labours.

    There are two main problems for Finney.  The first is that, although he’s given a great deal to say, his role is underwritten.  Malcolm Lowry regarded intoxication as an often gruelling but a visionary state of being.  In Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, his posthumously-published fictionalised autobiography, Lowry wrote that ‘not an hour, not a moment of my drunkenness, my continual death, was not worth it:  there is no dross of even the worst of those hours, not a drop of mescal that I have not turned into pure gold, not a drink I have not made sing’.  It seems Lowry saw Geoffrey Firmin’s alcoholism in terms similar to his own – but we don’t see or hear what’s going on inside Geoffrey’s head.  We’re merely in the almost constant company of a garrulous drunk.  It goes without saying that he becomes boring company.

    Finney is inventive and funny whenever he has someone with theatrical flair enough to spark with.  That’s clear from his single scenes with Katy Jurado, as Señora Grigorio, a bar owner and fortune-teller; and, especially, James Villiers, as an Englishman who stops his car just in time to avoid driving into Geoffrey, who’s lying face down in the road at the time.  Geoffrey picks himself up, dusts himself down and cheerfully insists that he’s fine.  The other Englishman spouts well-meaning, what-ho inanities even as Geoffrey heads off unsteadily down the road:  in response to these, Finney’s assenting murmurs and gestures are a fine blend of sociability and sarcasm.  Geoffrey has rather more screen time with a local physician, Dr Vigil (Ignacio López Tarso), at least some of which works well.  After Geoffrey laments how much he misses his wife Yvonne, from whom he’s recently divorced, Dr Vigil takes him to a church, urging Geoffrey to pray to a statue of the Virgin Mary for Yvonne to come back.  ‘I can’t,’ protests Geoffrey, with an appalled glance at Mary’s unappealing plaster features, ‘It’s like asking my fairy godmother for three wishes’.

    The following morning, Yvonne returns to Cuernavaca:  ‘A miracle!’, Dr Vigil declares, on being introduced to her.  But Yvonne’s arrival is where the second problem for Albert Finney – the casting of the two key supporting roles – starts to kick in.  Finney expertly suggests that Geoffrey, however boisterous and chatty, isn’t fully present in his interactions with most people – the effects of alcohol somehow close him off.  His now ex-wife, whom Geoffrey still loves, is an exception yet Jacqueline Bisset, who plays her, is impersonal.  This is intriguing for a while; once it emerges that Yvonne is still in love with Geoffrey too, despite his chronic drinking and his impotence, Bisset’s cautious, arm’s-length manner makes less and less sense.  The lack of connection between Finney and her, rather than illustrating the Firmins’ relationship, only exposes Bisset as an underpowered actress.  The fact that Yvonne is also an actress but not a greatly successful one, is hardly an excuse.

    Still, Jacqueline Bisset is considerably better than Anthony Andrews, seen here during his deservedly brief big-time cinema career in the wake of Granada TV’s Brideshead Revisited (1981).  He plays Geoffrey’s  much younger half-brother, Hugh, a journalist just back from the Spanish Civil War.  Hugh seems meant to be restless, impassioned and left-wing – during an outdoor lunch with Geoffrey and Yvonne, he shows how impulsive and hot-blooded he is by jumping into a bull ring and doing muleta business with a bull.  Hugh’s also supposed to have had an affair with Yvonne at some point.  You don’t believe any of these things.  Coiffed (1980s style) and cas in his cowboy jeans and boots, Andrews has two facial expressions:  smugly quizzical and, when Hugh gets serious, petulant.  There’s next to no characterisation.  Trying to play off  Bisset and Andrews, Albert Finney must have decided, reasonably enough, that he needed to do enough acting for three and John Huston lets him.

    Huston has occasional fun joshing supernatural assumptions:  after Geoffrey gets a result from not praying to the Holy Mother for Yvonne’s return comes Señora Gregorio’s prediction that ‘One day she may come back to you’.  Señora Gregorio is so used to the routine of prophecy that she’s oblivious to Geoffrey’s information that Yvonne already has come back – indeed, at that very moment is standing in the street opposite the Señora’s bar.  The film’s climax takes place in and around a bordello, where Geoffrey will meet his violent death and Huston conveys something of his disgusted fascination with the grotesquely aberrant.  His equation of repellent appearance and moral deformity is out of date now, though:  the parade of dwarves, transvestites and overweight, greasy Mexicans in the bordello is less a freak show than a display of political incorrectness.  Otherwise, Huston’s direction is unusually self-effacing.  After that promising start under the titles, Alex North’s score gets more conventional and less individual, too.

    21 April 2025

  • Mr Burton

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marc Evans (2025)

    Marc Evans’ biopic, arriving in cinemas a few months before the centenary of Richard Burton’s birth, has a deceptively simple, clever title.  Viewers not in the know about the stage and screen star’s early life will naturally assume he’s the eponymous Mr Burton.  He could be but probably isn’t.  The young man in Evans’ film – played by Harry Lawtey, from the age of seventeen to the age of twenty-six – is never referred to so formally.  Born and christened Richard Walter Jenkins, he’s usually Richie or Rich.  The prime candidate for title character is Philip Henry Burton (Toby Jones), who was Rich’s schoolmaster, acting teacher and, from just after the boy’s eighteenth birthday, his legal guardian, at which point Rich changed his surname to Burton.  Mr Burton chiefly concerns the relationship between PH, as Rich often calls him, and his protégé.   According to the film critic and biographer Hollis Alpert, PH later described Rich as ‘my son to all intents and purposes:  I was committed to him’; Richard Burton wrote of Philip Burton that ‘I owe him everything’.

    Marc Evans doesn’t often direct cinema features.  The most recent, Cassy and Jude, completed in 2015, is still unreleased (says Wikipedia); the only Evans film I’ve seen is Patagonia (2010).  (Among a longer list of TV credits, I’ve enjoyed his two crime mini-series The Pembrokeshire Murders (2021) and The Steeltown Murders (2023).)   Mr Burton isn’t greatly imaginative filmmaking.   The presumably CGI images of Port Talbot, where Richard Jenkins was raised, lack visual texture.  The screenplay by Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams, although it tells an extraordinary true story, includes what are familiar character types and stock scenes in a screen Bildungsroman.  Even so, Mr Burton is absorbing, thanks to some good dialogue, direction and performances, especially Harry Lawtey’s.  Until now, I’d seen Lawtey only in his small role in Terence Davies’ Benediction (2021).  I’ve never watched the TV series Industry, for which he’s best known – as Marisa Abela was until she played Amy Winehouse in last year’s Back to Black.  Whoever cast these two in Industry did a favour not just to them but to future film audiences.

    Most early reviews of Mr Burton have praised Lawtey – the minority lamenting that he lacks Richard Burton’s charisma are missing the point.  The performer Burton became wasn’t fully formed when he was still a teenager.  The actor playing him needs to suggest his potential for greatness, which Lawtey does splendidly.  Rich first appears in an amateur production at the local YMCA, playing an escaped criminal:  he’s so physically and vocally vital on stage that Philip Burton, in the prompt corner, is too distracted to respond instantly to the other person in the scene, who’s in urgent need of his line.  It’s crucial to the story that Rich, despite his stage presence and instincts, is a technically primitive performer until PH starts teaching him how to project his voice – and transform his Glamorgan accent into received pronunciation.  The elocution lessons, as PH marches Rich round the countryside above Port Talbot, are instructive as well as entertaining.  Harry Lawtey is precisely funny as he produces, in isolation, the correct vowel sounds repeatedly demanded of him.

    Once the narrative eventually (and suddenly) zips forward to 1951, when Richard Burton is playing Prince Hal in the two parts of Henry IV in Stratford-upon-Avon, Lawtey has developed and absorbed the fluently sonorous vocals that were heard just occasionally earlier in the film.  The new voice sounds odd at first but that’s expressive in itself – a reminder of how much actors of Burton’s generation had to reinvent themselves to have a career.  It’s nitpicking to complain that Lawtey, who’s twenty-eight, is too old to pass for a teenage schoolboy.  He gets close and it makes sense to have just one actor in the role throughout, giving us foretastes of the older Burton.  Lawtey is tall, slender and physically relaxed enough to be lanky, which helps him seem younger than his years.  His boyish sense of excitement is completely convincing – as when, for example, PH talks about the time he spent in Los Angeles and the Hollywood names he met there, and Rich laughs, incredulous and awestruck.  Lawtey’s facial features don’t closely resemble Richard Burton’s but in a few shots late on the set of his face is uncannily close to the real thing.

    If Harry Lawtey is a bit too old for Rich, Toby Jones, who’s fifty-eight, is much too old for Philip Burton, only in his late thirties when he became Rich’s guardian.  (Burton couldn’t legally adopt the boy precisely because there wasn’t a sufficient age gap between them.  The law of the time required a difference of at least twenty-one years:  the Burtons failed to meet that requirement by just twenty days.)  But Jones’ actual age isn’t a problem for the drama, whose set-up demands that PH be, in various ways, a senior figure.  Almost needless to say, Toby Jones does excellent things in the role but there are times when his portrait could use more asperity.  As well as teaching and directing theatre, PH writes scripts for BBC radio and mostly unproduced stage plays; the film presents him as quite well connected but creatively thwarted.  Jones is fine as Burton the teacher and when he lays the law down to Rich.  In some of his private moments, he’s a bit too transparently vulnerable.  Just after becoming his legal ward, Rich, disturbed by the repeated insinuations of others that PH is sexually interested in him, comes home drunk one night and turns on his mentor.  It makes sense that he gets even angrier when PH, though shocked, doesn’t say much back.   Toby Jones (and this isn’t just to do with his lack of height) turns this verbal onslaught into kicking a puppy.

    There’s a second outburst years later.  After a late-night SOS phone call from Stratford, PH hotfoots it there from Port Talbot to help Rich sort out his Prince Hal.  PH does help but it’s not long before volatile Rich is publicly, drunkenly branding his guide and guardian a nobody.  This time, though, he soon apologises and the conflict leads to one of Mr Burton’s best scenes, which is also Toby Jones’ outstanding moment.  The opening night at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre is a triumph for its young star (Kenneth Tynan wrote that Burton’s ‘playing of Prince Hal turned interested speculation to awe almost as soon as he started to speak; in the first intermission local critics stood agape in the lobbies’).  When PH comes to the dressing room to congratulate him, Rich impulsively hugs him tight and voices his gratitude.  He doesn’t know how affected by this Philip is:  their positions in the clinch mean that Rich doesn’t see PH’s face and PH says nothing.  This is very moving.

    The twelfth of thirteen children, Rich lost his mother when he was just two years old.  Following her death, his elder sister Cecilia (Cis) and her husband, Elfed James, took the infant Rich under their care.  In the film, when he’s still living with them, Cis (Aimee Ffion-Edwards) and Elfed (Aneurin Barnard) have two children of their own.  Elfed, like Richard Walter Jenkins Sr (Steffan Rhodri), is a coal miner (although the latter, in Mr Burton, is always seen down the pub rather than down the pit).  To Elfed, his young brother-in-law’s completing school, which PH persuades Cis to let Rich do, is an expensive indulgence.  In a later scene, Rich works on lines at the kitchen table, using the stage voice he’s developing.  Cross words are exchanged; when Rich disparages him, Elfed warns that, ‘Talking like that – you’re not just talking to me, you know.  You’re talking like that to all of us’.

    Even so, when PH broaches the matter of taking the boy legally under his wing, Elfed, along with Cis, readily agrees to Rich’s moving into the spare room at the home of ‘Ma’ Smith (Lesley Manville), where PH has lodged for years – after all, this will mean one less mouth for Cis and Elfed to feed.  Widowed Ma Smith is solicitous in both senses of the word.  She raises concerns with PH about what people might think and say about his and Rich living under the same roof though loyal affection for her long-standing lodger compels her to take Rich in.  It’s a strength of the screenplay that PH himself is alert to, and apprehensive about, the ‘optics’ of the arrangement:  Rich is the one who’s keen to move in at Ma’s.  That, though, is before he’s heard a couple of men sniggering about Philip Burton’s sexual preferences and his current girlfriend (Mali O’Donnell) questions Rich’s own.

    Mr Burton thus makes clear, without overstressing, important ways in which Richard Burton’s teenage years formed lifelong tendencies – a guilty conscience about how far he’d moved from his social roots and a wariness of homosexuality, as well as drink dependency.  The last may partly have been inherited from his father.  But it could also have been exacerbated by those other, snarled feelings and, as such, indirectly linked to the influence of PH:  Richard’s ‘I owe him everything’ tribute to Philip could be more ambiguous than it sounds.  Marc Evans builds the implied queer element sensitively (there’s nothing to suggest either that PH isn’t gay or that he would dream of letting Rich know this).  Yet this sensitivity also contributes to Evans’ storytelling going awry in the last part of the film.  The ‘eight years later’ jump is more startling because of the dominance of slowish scenes, freighted with increasing tension between PH and Rich, in the lead-up to it.  You can understand why the narrative doesn’t explain that and why PH couldn’t adopt Rich (see above).  But when he phones Ma Smith’s house in 1951 and PH heads for Stratford, it’s wholly unclear if the pair have had any contact at all since Rich’s outburst years before.  If they have, how have they been getting on?  If they haven’t, PH’s legal guardianship, at least until Richard turned twenty-one in late 1946, seems meaningless.

    Besides, the Henry IV rehearsal scenes in Stratford are coarse compared with most of the Port Talbot scenes.  The supporting characters in Wales are nicely played, especially Aimee Ffion-Edwards’ Cis, despite being thinly written.  Ma Smith, although she has a good deal more screen time, isn’t much of a character either.  For a while, I assumed the filmmakers had roped in Lesley Manville to guarantee getting the most out of a sizeable but skinny role (which Manville certainly does – almost too busily at times, though it’s very enjoyable to watch).  It turns out that Lesley Manville, along with Toby Jones, is an executive producer on the film.  There’s one intermediate scene in Swansea, where Rich, already in uniform for RAF training, auditions successfully for a small part in a new Emlyn Williams play (The Druid’s Rest) and makes a big impression on casting director Daphne Rye (Hannah New).  Daphne’s still there in Stratford, trying to mediate in the spats between Rich and Henry IV’s director, Tony (Daniel Evans).  This is actually Anthony Quayle though you wouldn’t guess it from the cartoon waspish thesp treatment he’s given.  Marc Evans is suddenly at pains to present Richard Burton as an authentic lone wolf trapped in a pack of luvvies.

    The 1951 episode that ends Mr Burton is saved by that dressing-room scene between the two principals.  Not just the hug:  PH is credibly specific in praising his protégé – rather than just saying Rich was marvellous, he commends his voice modulation in Act V, Scene V.  This kind of detail in the script is really satisfying.  Another instance, much earlier, comes at the start of one of the hillside voice training scenes, where PH asks Rich, still at school, what he’s reading and Rich says James Joyce:  PH glances at the book and remarks, ‘Not the best advertisement for the Irish education system’.  There are exasperating things too in this film.  Major example:  John Hardy’s score – weakly twinkly at first, portentous eventually, overused throughout.  Minor example:  the credits appear in a font so small it almost seems the people who made Mr Burton would rather we didn’t read them.  That modesty is misplaced:  there’s plenty to be proud of.  Marc Evans et al do justice to both Burtons in the story.  As far as the more famous one is concerned, they celebrate without whitewashing him.  The film lets us understand the ingredients of Richard Burton’s future success and unhappiness.

    16 April 2025

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