Monthly Archives: July 2025

  • The Deadly Affair

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet (1967)

    It’s hard to be sure with such a crummy, undistinctive title but I don’t think I’d heard of The Deadly Affair before it turned up on Talking Pictures this week.  To be fair to John le Carré, the title of his novel, on which the film is based, was better – Call for the Dead is even mildly intriguing.  Another significant name change occurred in the adaptation of the source material.  Call for the Dead, le Carré’s debut novel, introduces his best-known character, George Smiley, but Paramount acquired the screen rights to the name in the deal they struck with le Carré for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) even though Smiley is only a minor character in that story.  He’s the protagonist of Sidney Lumet’s picture, made by Columbia, in which he has become Charles Dobbs and is played by James Mason.  To be honest, extraneous details like these are more interesting than most of what’s on screen in The Deadly Affair but there are a few compensations.  The film now comes across as both typical of its time and a curiosity.

    The Deadly Affair’s date of release immediately suggests it was made on the back of the box-office success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  Paul Dehn wrote the screenplay for both films.  Each was directed by a respected Hollywood name whose recent work had fared well critically and/or commercially.  The Spy’s director, Martin Ritt, had made Hud (1963); the latest from the notably prolific Sidney Lumet included Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), The Pawnbroker (1964) and The Hill (1965).  The Deadly Affair goes further than its predecessor in terms of high-profile international casting.  Except for Oskar Werner, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s main cast are native English speakers; The Deadly Affair has key roles for two recent Oscar winners, Maximilian Schell and Simone Signoret, as well as for one of Ingmar Bergman’s leading ladies, Harriet Andersson.  There are big-name contributors behind the camera and on the soundtrack, too:  cinematographer Freddie Young, who’d won Oscars for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965); Quincy Jones, who wrote the score for Lumet’s film along with a ‘theme song’ performed by Astrud Gilberto, by now internationally famous for ‘The Girl from Ipanema’.

    The action takes place in contemporary London, where MI6 man Charles Dobbs investigates the sudden and unexpected death, apparently suicide, of Foreign Office civil servant Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng), an admitted former communist.  Fennan is dead by the end of a day that began for him in Hyde Park with what seemed a mutually positive meeting with Dobbs.  The latter’s suspicion that Fennan’s death isn’t what it seems is increased by an interview with Fennan’s widow, Nazi concentration camp survivor Elsa (Simone Signoret).  Although his bosses want Dobbs to drop the case, he unofficially teams up with Mendel (Harry Andrews), a Met police inspector, and they uncover a network of Eastern European agents.  Meanwhile, Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell), with whom Dobbs worked during World War II, is in London on a visit from Switzerland.  Dobbs soon realises that Ann (Harriet Andersson), his promiscuous wife (forename unchanged from le Carré’s original), is having an affair with Frey.

    As usual in a John le Carré thriller, an involved plot is repeatedly interrupted by wordy speeches about the moral murkiness of post-war espionage, Britain’s decline in the shifting world order, and so on.  (I can’t certainly pin this on le Carré himself, having read only The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and some of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but it’s a standard feature of screen adaptations of his work.)   In any case, the storyline yields few surprises.  It’s not only familiarity with Tinker Tailor that makes the identity of The Deadly Affair’s key villain, the mysterious ‘Sonntag’, very obvious.  First, Maximilian Schell surely wouldn’t have agreed to play Dieter Frey if he were little more than Ann’s latest love affair.  Second, as soon as Sonntag’s Swiss connections are mentioned, you know he must be Dieter Frey – doubling his betrayal of his old comrade-in-arms and Dobbs’ anguish at Frey’s treachery.  Frey is the forerunner of Bill Hayden in Tinker Tailor, a personal and a political traitor who has been screwing both Ann Smiley and his colleagues in British intelligence – but here’s another interesting fact.  Ann’s affair with Frey was Paul Dehn’s invention for the film.  It seems le Carré decided to make use of the dual betrayal idea when he set to work on Tinker Tailor.

    Sidney Lumet’s direction of the actors is slack.  James Mason, saddled with the spying’s-a-rotten-business jeremiads, nevertheless gives a decent performance but he’s not only too handsome for the role but also too theatrically dynamic in it.  (Alec Guinness casts a long shadow over Smileys or aka Smileys past and future.)  There are also times when Mason seems to lose concentration.  The supporting work of the home side is highly variable.  Kenneth Haigh is tiresomely animated as Dobbs’ colleague Appleby, Max Adrian characteristically witty as his boss, and Harry Andrews excellent as Mendel – he manages to combine eccentric details (Mendel falls asleep at the drop of a hat) with a convincing portrait of someone getting on capably with a challenging job.  The more exotic casting also yields mixed results.  Maximilian Schell is no more than OK.  Harriet Andersson, a great actress, is a disaster as Ann:  she doesn’t get the hang of the character, let alone of delivering lines in English.  Simone Signoret, another great actress, is superb as Fennan’s widow.  With quite limited screen time, Signoret creates a remarkably rich sense of the psychological legacy of Elsa’s unhappy past.

    The oddest feature of the film’s clumsy attempts to be a prestige international number is the involvement, announced in the opening credits, of ‘the Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Peter Hall’.  This comprises two sections inside the Aldwych Theatre.  The first, presumably a skit on ‘classical’ theatre (though an embarrassingly unfunny one), is a rehearsal for Macbeth.  Corin Redgrave is terrible as the impatient young director, his sister Lynn not as bad as a clueless, debby ASM.  For some reason, the three witches include Frank Williams (the vicar in Dad’s Army).  The second RSC episode, consisting of excerpts from Edward II with David Warner as the king, takes place as Elsa Fennan anxiously waits for Dieter Frey to join her in the stalls while Dobbs, Appleby and Mendel, further back in the auditorium, keep a close eye on Elsa and the seat next to hers.  It’s a bit insulting to Warner and his RSC colleagues (Michael Bryant, Charles Kay, Timothy West et al), who seem to be doing their best, to have them appear just in order to be upstaged by the spy story reaching its climax beyond the footlights.

    Few of the main characters get out of the film alive.  The Deadly Affair includes more than enough violence, especially the sequences where Adam Scarr (Roy Kinnear), a dodgy cockney car dealer who’s somehow mixed up in the spy network, gets punched and kicked, thrown down a flight of steps and pushed over the edge of a building to his death.  Quincy Jones’ score is promising – as a sub-John Barry composition – under the opening titles but it’s forgettably generic once the film proper is underway.  The mushy melody for Astrud Gilberto’s love-theme number seems to recur, usually without the vocals, every time Harriet Andersson’s Ann appears.  It’s like a musical stalker.

    19 July 2025

     

  • Viridiana

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Luis Buñuel (1961)

    Buñuel’s anti-religious, anti-materialistic fable, set in Franco’s Spain, is deeply misanthropic and highly entertaining.  Except for one protracted sequence (which features Viridiana’s best-known image), the storytelling is briskly concise.  The title character is a young nun who, at the start of the film, is about to take her final vows.  Mother Superior (Rosita Yarza) instructs Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) first to visit the country estate of her uncle and sole living relative, Don Jaime, who has paid for her religious education and training.  Reclusive Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) lives in a decaying mansion with just his housekeeper Ramona (Margarita Lozano) and her young daughter Rita (Teresita Rabal) for company.  On the eve of Viridiana’s return to the convent, Don Jaime tells her his wife died in their bed on the couple’s wedding night.  He prevails upon Viridiana to wear his late wife’s wedding dress, which he has kept and fetishised throughout his years of widowhood.  He then begs his niece to marry him.  When she refuses, Don Jaime drugs Viridiana and carries her to bed.  On the point of raping her, he thinks better of it but next morning tells Viridiana otherwise.  Horrified, she hurriedly prepares to leave the house; it makes no difference when Don Jaime, distraught at her reaction, then says he didn’t go through with the rape.  At a bus station, Viridiana is confronted by uniformed police who inform her she must return with them to the mansion.  Don Jaime, in shame, has hanged himself.

    The terms of his will divide Don Jaime’s estate equally between Viridiana and an illegitimate son called Jorge.  Although Mother Superior comes to the house to plead with her to return to holy orders, Viridiana insists she no longer can.  She will instead devote her life to God by helping those in need.  She rounds up a collection of local down-and-outs, giving them food and shelter in outbuildings, to the disgust of the estate caretaker (Francisco René), who quits his job.  Jorge (Francisco Rabal), a city dweller until now, takes vigorous first steps to renovate the house and develop the long-neglected land on which it stands.  When he arrives to claim his inheritance, he’s accompanied by Lucía (Victoria Zinny), with whom he shares a bedroom and whom Viridiana wrongly assumes to be his wife, but Lucía doesn’t stick around long.   As well as missing the city, she suspects that Jorge has his eye on his lovely quasi-cousin – although he’s more obviously interested in Ramona, who returns the interest.  While Viridiana, Jorge, Ramona and Rita are absent at a meeting with lawyers, the vagrants break into the mansion.  They take their places at the dining table, eat, drink and are merry; two of them have sex on the floor; others come to blows; much of the décor is trashed.  The beggars’ banquet culminates in the notorious image that parodies Leonardo’s The Last Supper.  There’s further mayhem when the owners return.  Order is restored once Ramona calls the police and they arrive but Viridiana is dismayed that her piety has yielded such dire results.  A few nights later, Jorge and Ramona are in his bedroom, playing cards and listening to pop music, when there’s a knock on the door.  It’s Viridiana.  Jorge invites her to join him and Ramona in the card game.  She abjectly takes a seat beside them.  Jorge, as he prepares to deal cards, remarks to Viridiana, ‘You know, the first time I saw you, I thought, “My cousin and I will end up shuffling the deck together”.’

    BFI is screening Viridiana in their ‘From Censored to Restored’ season and that final sequence is a pleasing example of the comedy of censorship, which must have greatly amused its writer-director (Buñuel shares the screenplay credit with Julio Alejandro).  The Spanish censors of the early 1960s rejected the film’s original ending, which showed ‘Viridiana entering Jorge’s room and slowly closing the door behind her’ (Wikipedia).  The ‘acceptable’ ending, through the sexual innuendo of Jorge’s closing line and the implication of a ménage à trois, is more strongly suggestive than the sequence it replaced.  That said, ‘acceptable’ is, in this case, a very relative term.  Although Viridiana shared the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1961, it wasn’t released in Spain until 1977 (after Franco’s death) and the Vatican publicly condemned the film.  The opening titles are accompanied by the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah and appear against an exterior shot of the convent, inside which the camera then moves for the first conversation between Mother Superior and Viridiana.  Buñuel reprises the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ for the climax to the beggars’ evening of anarchic revelry.

    Buñuel ridicules Viridiana’s Christianity chiefly by demonstrating that good works are wasted on fundamentally venal and vicious fellow humans.  The vagrants are far from a band of brothers and sisters, and the elderly leper José (Juan García Tiendra) is worst off in their pecking order.  When the owners return to the mansion, however, José helps El Cojo (José Manuel Martín), a lame man who also paints and to whom Viridiana has seemed to take a particular liking, to knock Jorge out and tie him up.  El Cojo then prepares to rape Viridiana at knifepoint.  Once Jorge comes to, he urges José to kill his companion in exchange for cash; the leper considers his options, picks up a shovel and batters El Cojo to death.  The have-nots are an amazing collection of grotesque faces, shapes and sizes.  In his late-life autobiography, My Last Breath, Buñuel writes that he had known some of these individuals since the 1930s and recalls that Juan García Tiendra really was ‘half beggar, half madman, and was allowed to live in the studio courtyard during the shooting.  The man paid no attention whatsoever to my directions, yet he’s marvellous in the movie’.

    From the opening scene in the convent, Viridiana is strikingly clear-minded but the folly of her world view is soon implied during her initial stay with Don Jaime. Sleepwalking in her nightdress, she enters the room where her uncle sits.  Unaware that she’s exposing plenty of bare leg and inflaming his desire, she bends over the fireplace, emptying balls of wool and so on from a work basket, replacing them with handfuls of ashes from the hearth.  In her waking life, though, Viridiana is resiliently determined to organise:  Silvia Pinal’s vivacious practicality makes her eventual defeat and submission startling.  The two main men in the story are played and contrasted very effectively.  Fernando Rey’s Don Jaime is guiltily mired in his personal past and in cultural tradition.  Francisco Rabal’s Jorge isn’t entirely carefree (see below) but, in his relationships with women at least, is freewheeling.  He combines likeable earthiness and disquieting chauvinism.  Rabal (whose young daughter plays Ramona’s child) has a great bit when Jorge comes into Viridiana’s bedroom without asking, sits on the bed and tells her that he and Lucía aren’t married.  When he gets up to leave, Viridiana asks him to knock before entering in future.  Jorge replies by running his eyes over her; as a parting shot, he blows a puff of cigarette smoke in her direction and, with a slight hiss, gives a mocking smile.

    This isn’t among his most conspicuously surreal works but Buñuel is nonetheless cavalier about plotting, never letting realism stand in his way if it doesn’t suit.  Since Jorge is irked by Viridiana’s charity-begins-at-home project and takes a dim view of the unfortunates whose souls she means to save, it’s wholly implausible that he leaves the place unsupervised for the beggars to invade.  It seems unlikely that one of their number, Enedina (Lola Gaos), would get the others to pose for the Last Supper shot.  Without the invasion, though, there’d be no bacchanal; without Enedina’s camera to capture the moment, the freeze frame wouldn’t be the same.  It’s hard to argue that the film would be better off without them.  Buñuel’s view of human nature is wholly cynical yet his visual and comic flair makes Viridiana a bracing experience.  There’s excitement in watching a filmmaker express such a cogent vision of life, never mind that the vision is desolating.

    That said, one of my favourite moments in the film was an uncharacteristically hopeful one – though I realise I may be clutching at straws and that Buñuel may not have intended it this way.  Viridiana includes a fine image of predatory efficiency when a rat is shown on a pile of sacks in an attic and a cat leaps into the frame, pouncing on the rat.  A more extended animal sequence occurs when Jorge, with his foreman (Alfonso Cordón), is standing roadside on the edge of the estate and sees a peasant (Manuel Alexandre) in a cart, pulled by a mule; Jorge notices a dog, attached by string to the axle of the cart, and struggling to keep up with it.  The peasant drops off two uniformed policemen (these emblems of Franco’s police state reappear several times in the narrative – always briefly, always to sinister effect).  Jorge then reprimands the peasant for his treatment of the dog and offers to buy it from him.  In the conversation that follows, it becomes clear that the peasant isn’t as thoroughly callous about the animal as Jorge first thought, although the townie can’t fathom the countryman’s blend of cruelty and concern.  Jorge buys the dog and is warmly thanked by the peasant, who advises him that the less the dog eats, the better he runs.  As the peasant is about to drive away, Jorge asks the dog’s name, the man replies ‘Canelo’ and the dog (in an excellent cameo) immediately pulls to go back to his master – Jorge needs to keep a tight hold of the string leash.  As the cart recedes into the distance, another one approaches on the opposite side of the road.  Neither Jorge nor his foreman notices a wretched dog tied to the second cart’s axle.  This splendid visual joke is a blackly incisive summary of the film’s larger preoccupation with the futility of trying to sort out the world’s suffering.  I still felt that the first dog got a reasonably good deal out of Jorge’s transaction with the peasant.  Needless to say, however, that’s the last time we see Canelo.

    19 July 2025

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