Monthly Archives: 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

  • The Liberation of L B Jones

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1970)

    William Wyler’s last film has things in common with Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967).  Both are contemporary stories set in the American South:  Sparta, Mississippi in Jewison’s picture; Somerton, Tennessee in Wyler’s.  Both begin with the arrival in town of a train, carrying passengers who’ll be important in the story, and end with the same characters’ departure on another train.  Both are adaptations of novels published in 1965 and have Stirling Silliphant’s name on the screenplay – Silliphant shares the writing credit for Wyler’s movie with the novel’s author, Jesse Hill Ford.  (Although Somerton is technically fictitious, it’s based on Humboldt, Tennessee where Ford, originally from Alabama, lived at the time he wrote the novel.)   Most important, both films are much concerned with local racism – but they treat the theme very differently.  In the Heat of the Night explores and dramatises it through strong characters and an involving crime plot.  The Liberation of L B Jones’s denunciation of racism is so explicit and dominant that characters and storyline are no more than means of illustrating the abominable social and moral codes of southern US states in the early 1960s.

    The three people of interest on the arriving and departing trains don’t all sit together.  Newlywed Steve Mundine (Lee Majors, a few years before he became bionic man Steve Austin), accompanied by his wife Nella (Barbara Hershey), is coming south to Somerton to be a partner in the legal firm of his uncle, Oman Hedgepath (Lee J Cobb), the town attorney and its most respected citizen.  Elsewhere on the train, a thirtyish African American, Sonny ‘Sonny Boy’ Mosby (Yaphet Kotto), has a handgun, hidden in a cigar box, for company.  Sonny Boy is returning to Somerton, after an absence of many years, with revenge in mind.  As a young teenager, he was viciously beaten by a white police officer, Stanley Bumpas (Arch Johnson).  A renewed confrontation with Bumpas nearly happens sooner than Sonny Boy anticipated.  After jumping from the train as it slows on approach to the station, he’s spotted by two white cops, one of whom gets out of the car and questions Sonny Boy.  This is Willie Joe Worth (Anthony Zerbe).  His work partner, who stays in the car, is Stanley Bumpas.

    Although both police officers will be crucial in what happens, Worth has a lot more screen time.  He’s having an affair with Emma (Lola Falana), the much younger wife of Lord Byron Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne), whose successful funeral business has made him the most affluent Black man in Somerton.  L B Jones first appears in Hedgepath’s office while the latter is showing his nephew round:  Jones explains that he’s going to divorce Emma, who’s pregnant with Worth’s child.  Hedgepath, chiefly to stop the cop’s affair with a Black woman becoming public knowledge, discourages Jones from pursuing divorce proceedings but he’s determined to go ahead.  For her part, Emma refuses not to contest the divorce:  marriage to Jones has accustomed her to a high standard of living; she wants to end up with alimony enough to maintain it.    Worth, who’s married with kids, is panicked by the threat of a miscegenation scandal and beats Emma up.  He and Bumpas, when Jones refuses to withdraw the divorce suit, then arrest him on trumped-up charges.  Jones escapes briefly but is hunted down in a scrapyard, where the two officers handcuff and hold him at gunpoint.  Worth shoots Jones dead.  Bumpas mutilates his body with the idea of making the murder look like a Black revenge killing and hangs the corpse from a wrecker hook.

    Emma and Jones’ assistant Benny (Fayard Nicholas) are initially arrested for the killing.  When it soon emerges that Benny was already in police cells at the time the murder took place, and that his and Emma’s confessions were obtained with the help of a cattle prod, Hedgepath tells the police to drop the charges. Worth, horrified by what he and Bumpas have done, turns himself in.  Hedgepath again sorts things out, swiftly arranging a cover-up.  He disposes of the murder weapon, issues Worth with a different gun and tells him to keep his mouth shut; Somerton’s mayor (Dub Taylor), present during this interview, is happy to let Hedgepath handle things.  While Bumpas is off duty and working land that he owns, Sonny Boy Mosby takes his revenge.  Rather than use the firearm he brought with him to Somerton, he pushes Bumpas into his own threshing machine.  For nearly all the main survivors, the outcome represents a pyrrhic victory.  Worth must live with his guilt.  Emma looks set to inherit her late husband’s wealth and be ostracised by the Black community that mourns L B Jones.  Hedgepath is abandoned by his nephew, who’s dismayed by his uncle’s conduct.  Steve and Nella Mundine return whence they came, presumably up north; their inability to do anything more than that is another kind of defeat.  Taking the same train out of town, Sonny Boy Mosby at least has the satisfaction of leaving Somerton his mission accomplished.

    The Liberation of L B Jones wasn’t a great success on its original release.  Not long before his death in 1981, William Wyler told his daughter that he had aimed the film at white audiences that he hoped to embarrass and enrage.  In the event, word of mouth and some negative reviews turned those audiences off seeing the movie at all.  Variety dismissed it as an ‘inter-racial sexploitation film’ and L B Jones was widely seen as shockingly untypical of Wyler, for its violence and bloodshed, and its unrelieved pessimism – though I don’t agree the latter quality is unusual in his work.  There are few Hollywood films with an ending as breathtakingly bleak as that of The Heiress (1949); two consecutive Wyler films of the 1960s, The Children’s Hour (1961) and The Collector (1965), are hardly more cheerful.

    The BFI handout for L B Jones screenings in their ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’ season comprises an admiring 2011 Sight and Sound piece on the film from Neil Sinyard, who declares himself ‘a huge fan of Wyler’s work’.  Yet the film has also more recently been acknowledged by critics very differently disposed to Wyler but who see L B Jones as ‘a disturbingly accurate picture of what hasn’t changed in America in the intervening half century’.  That’s Richard Brody in a New Yorker article of 2020, where he also describes Wyler as ‘a reserved filmmaker – theatrically precise as a director of actors and meticulous, if fussy, as a creator of compositions’.  BFI’s ‘Old Man’ programme has been curated by Karina Longworth, host of the ‘You Must Remember This’ podcast:  in her brisk introduction to the screening of Wyler’s film that I attended, Longworth, though far from disparaging of its director, echoed Brody’s recognition of L B Jones as highly-relevant-today, and was keen to stress its ‘misogynoir’ credentials.

    As a William Wyler fan, I must admit I found The Liberation of L B Jones startling for the wrong reasons – which are also reasons that I think really are untypical of Wyler.  The film is sometimes technically shaky and the performances are a mixed bag, to put it kindly.  In some early sequences particularly, the editing is awkward.  When he picks himself up after jumping from the train into Somerton, Sonny Boy sees the police car approaching before Wyler and his editor, Carl A Kress, cut to Yaphet Kotto’s face registering sudden alarm.  Once Worth has sent Sonny Boy on his way and returns to the car, there’s another reaction shot, from which it’s unclear if Sonny Boy is shuddering at the encounter with Worth or has spotted and recognised Bumpas inside the car.  After Hedgepath, preoccupied with introducing Steve Mundine to their business premises, has virtually dismissed L B Jones from his office, Mundine, struck by what Jones has said, looks thoughtful:  the camera stays on Lee Majors’ face too long.

    Easily the best performance in the film comes from Roscoe Lee Browne.  He conveys, economically but powerfully, the unspoken strength of Jones’s physical desire for Emma as well as his formidable rectitude (his initials could, in Somerton parlance, stand for law ‘biding).  Lee J Cobb’s playing is well judged, especially when Hedgepath, urgent yet businesslike, takes steps to conceal Worth’s crime.  Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey don’t make much impression because neither gets the chance to.  The real problem is the cast members other than Browne and Cobb with more to do.  Despite the supposedly highly-charged atmosphere of the story, most of the cast seem to be performing in isolation from each other.  Wyler allows most of the Black actors – even actors who would become as good as Yaphet Kotto did – to incarnate righteous anger or compassion so self-consciously that their scenes slow to a halt.  This is especially true of the elderly Zara Cully, as the woman who looked after Sonny Boy as a child.  Emma isn’t righteous or compassionate but Lola Falana also seems to be doing a disconnected turn.  The white cast are worse, though, eager to overdo their characters’ malignity or – in the case of Chill Wills, as another police officer – their comic ineptitude.  Anthony Zerbe acts up a storm; so much so that, when Hedgepath tells him to keep schtum about what really happened to L B Jones, you can’t believe the disintegrating Willie Joe Worth will be remotely capable of the self-control that demands.

    Richard Brody is right that Wyler ‘renders the performances blatantly emblematic’ (or too many of the performances anyway) although this may well, as Brody also implies, reflect Wyler’s own outrage at the events he describes.  If so, perhaps it wasn’t the first time this happened late in his career:  Wyler allowed some bad acting in The Children’s Hour, too.  It’s nevertheless remarkable how long he kept making high quality films of amazing variety.  His third last was The Collector, his second last Funny Girl (1968).  He didn’t sustain the quality to the very end but this last film certainly passes the variety test.  And although The Liberation of L J Jones is an anti-climax to a great career, there is a consolation.  Despite the poor health Wyler was in by the time he made it, the film isn’t listless:  there’s no lack of energy on the part of the ‘Old Man’ behind the camera.

    15 April 2025

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