Old Yorker

  • Legend

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brian Helgeland (2015)

    In bringing to the screen his account of the Kray twins at their vicious zenith, the writer-director Brian Helgeland is advantaged in two main ways.  First, he has Tom Hardy playing both brothers – an intriguing gimmick that turns into a remarkable pair of performances.   Second, the earlier biopic of Reggie and Ronnie, Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990), is hardly a tough act to follow.   (Billie Whitelaw’s performance as the twins’ mother, Violet, was widely regarded as all that made The Krays worth seeing.  It may be no coincidence that Helgeland reduces Violet, in terms of screen time, to a very small role in Legend – although Jane Wood plays her well.)   Neither of these factors explains, of course, why anyone would want to make another film about the Krays but Helgeland’s title is an obvious clue.  He said in a recent Guardian interview that he thinks the Krays (of whom he first heard in 1998) ‘were glamorous guys’ and this is evidently not just a distance-lending-enchantment American perspective on the grim brothers.  Here is Nick James in the October 2015 Sight & Sound:

    ‘Legend … homes in on the twins’ heyday, which begins with their assault on rival gangs, continues with their acquisition of Soho nightclubs and builds towards the climax of the murders of [George] Cornell and [Jack] McVitie.  That’s the Kray story that every Englishman expects and will come out for …’

    In his adulatory piece about Tom Hardy in the same issue of S&S, David Thomson describes the Krays as ‘that undying Laurel and Hardy of London in the 60s …, our adorable untouchables’.  Thomson’s words here are as tongue-in-cheek as James’s ‘every Englishman expects’ but both mean what they say at some level, and I can’t help being enraged by their treating the Krays as a laughing – worse, a chuckling – matter.   Thomson is rather more serious when he writes, later in his piece, that:

    ‘There is a fantasy in getting off on the Krays (just as there was with the Corleones), yet if you look at photos of the real twins there is a blankness in their faces, a nullity, that can’t work on the screen, and which we don’t much want to see.  Evil in life is not always glamorous, not even with the best swaggering actor around.  Actors don’t do dull, or emptiness.’

    Thomson’s mention of the Corleones is a reminder of his much less humorous judgment of The Godfather films.  In his entry on Francis Ford Coppola in The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (Fifth Edition), Thomson is troubled that:

    ‘The Godfather is deeply reassuring in its rejection of chaos and disorder, and its paranoid insistence on the family as that dark, mysterious home where all strangers are enemies.  When family is so strong, so loving, then the Corleones seem to be standing up for an old fine order, no matter that slaughter and graft are their trades.’

    The Michael Corleone of The Godfather Part II, Thomson says:

    ‘… is unequivocally wicked:  he turns on his own family.  But still Coppola cannot disown the adolescent authority, the acting tough, of the gangsters … There is no horror in Part II, no moral outrage.’

    The first two Godfather films are certainly disturbing – less for the reasons Thomson suggests than because the confusion of appalling and appealing qualities in the Corleones pushes the viewer into uncomfortable ambivalence.  But even if he were right about what’s wrong with Coppola’s approach, the contrast between the stern moral strictures of the biographical dictionary and Thomson’s levity about the Krays would be startling.  He deplores in the Godfather films the glamorisation of fictional gangsters; in the Sight & Sound piece, he wants screen recreations of actual gangsters to be more glamorous than the real thing.  It’s as if Thomson now sees the homicidal gangster as primarily a creature of the cinema screen – a creature capable, moreover, of de-realising the true-crime gangster and eclipsing his inconvenient, malicious ‘nullity’.  Here’s another example of a self-confident cinéaste subordinating life to the movies – and something of the same malaise informs Nick James’s indulgent reaction to Legend.   Another depressing (and related) subtext to the James and Thomson pieces is that Britain doesn’t have as rich a mobster history as America, either in real life or in the cinema:  we should therefore be grateful to the Krays for keeping our end up in gangster screen mythology.

    Thomson is right about the faces of the actual Krays:  you need only look again at David Bailey’s famous images of them to be reminded of that.  I remember first seeing the best-known Bailey photograph as the cover of The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, John Pearson’s 1972 book, on which Brian Helgeland purports to have based his screenplay for Legend.  Tom Hardy is better-looking than the men he’s playing; and this, combined with the natural animation in his face, has the effect that David Thomson seems to be after.  Hardy is also younger-looking – in spite of the fact that he’s already a few years older than the Krays were in 1969, when they were sentenced to life imprisonment:  the actor’s youthfulness is thus a continuing reminder that the Krays, in their gangland prime, were in only their early thirties.  Helgeland puts a strong emphasis on Reggie Kray’s attempts to manage the psychotic behaviour of his twin and Hardy is very good at expressing Reggie’s toxic combination of fraternal allegiance and criminal professionalism.  Hardy’s Ronnie is grotesque in a rather more stylised way – but this fits with the slipperiness of the film as a whole, as Helgeland veers between the grim reality and the beyond-belief aspects of the Krays’ lives and operations.   Although I didn’t spend time trying to work out the technical process whereby we see two Tom Hardys on screen at once, I did wonder – in both senses of the word – how Hardy was able, when playing a scene between Reggie and Ronnie, to spark with himself as he might with any other actor.

    At 131 minutes, Legend is much too long; although Dick Pope lights the streets and club interiors interestingly, the film is sluggish until the mayhem gets underway.  The staging of this is so emphatic and bludgeoning that I suppose it’s meant to go beyond reality, into black-comedy-strip-cartoon territory, but the grievous bodily harm and worse were still too real for me.  The exaggerated violence isn’t that surprising in a Brian Helgeland film.  Articles about Legend have tended to describe Helgeland simply as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of LA Confidential but it’s worth remembering that the first feature he directed (and co-wrote) was violently sadomasochistic swill – the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (1999).  Helgeland has, though, come up with a mostly effective narrative strategy for Legend.   The voiceover is provided by Frances Shea, Reg Kray’s girlfriend for several years, and his wife for a much shorter time:  they married and separated in 1965, and Frances committed suicide in 1967.  The narration is well written to suggest an in-her-own-words tabloid account.  Frances is (I think) meant to be affecting and Emily Browning, in her scenes with Tom Hardy, is certainly that.  Her insubstantial prettiness makes her seem very right as a sixties sylph; and Browning gets across well Frances’s sad development from smitten simple-mindedness to pill-popping depression.  But the language of the voiceover, at once lame and hyperbolic, gives Frances’s narration (even posthumously) a sustained satirical streak.

    Paul Bettany finds Charlie Richardson, leader of the gang who were the Krays’ main East End rivals, very hard work but there’s some good acting elsewhere in Legend.  David Thewlis is excellent, in a thoroughly naturalistic style, as the twins’ business manager, Leslie Payne.  Casting Christopher Eccleston as Detective Superintendent ‘Nipper’ Reed, the Krays’ nemesis in the Met’s Murder Squad, also works well – at least if, as seems likely, Helgeland wanted to present Reed, repeatedly thwarted but eventually successful in sending the Krays down, as a somewhat ridiculous figure.  (I wasn’t sure how much Eccleston’s characterisation owed to imaginative skill and how much to this actor’s trademark humourlessness.)  Among the establishment figures, John Sessions is pretty good as Lord Boothby and Kevin McNally does a creditable job as Harold Wilson.  The all-as-bad-as-each-other implication of Boothby’s role in the story is hardly valid, however, since he’s being compared with the Kray brothers.  As for Wilson, a script editor should have pointed out to Brian Helgeland that no British politician (as distinct from an American one) would refer to a forthcoming General Election as ‘the elections’ (plural).

    21 September 2015

  • Vertigo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

    When I was about nine, it was on television one evening.  I was terrified by the James Stewart character’s bad dream, couldn’t watch anymore and had to go to bed, where it took me a long time to get to sleep.  I’d never seen the film in its entirety until yesterday in NFT1, when I managed not to doze off, although it was sometimes a struggle.  (Stewart’s nightmare – apart from the concluding image of the falling man, used on the Saul Bass-designed poster for the film – was underwhelming; it certainly seems garishly shallow compared with Professor Borg’s dreams in the nearly contemporary Wild Strawberries.)  The picture’s fortunes too have changed over the half-century since its original release.  It opened to mixed reviews and didn’t do that well at the box office.  In later years, it’s appeared on top ten lists of the greatest films of all time.   Neither of these two things seems too surprising but on balance – and in spite of the various astonishing features of Vertigo – I tend to agree with the lukewarm American public of 1958.

    Stewart plays John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson.  In the opening, breathtaking sequence, Scottie (in plain clothes) and a uniformed policeman are pursuing a man across rooftops.   Scottie trips and falls; he then hangs on – extremely precariously and looking down in terror at the street miles below – to a ledge, which looks about to give way.  In the course of trying to save Scottie, the other officer falls to his death.  Exactly how Scottie survives is unexplained but the incident leaves him, unsurprisingly, with an extreme fear of heights, manifested in persistent vertigo, and he retires from the force.  We pick up his life when he’s talking with his friend (formerly and briefly his fiancée) Midge, a lingerie designer, in her San Francisco apartment.  Vertigo overpowers Scottie even when he tries climbing up a stepped stool.  He is approached by an old college acquaintance, Gavin Elster, who asks Scottie to follow his beautiful wife, whose name is Madeleine.  Elster is concerned that Madeleine has become obsessed with – may even be possessed by the spirit of – a woman who turns out to be one of her ancestors, name of Carlotta Valdes.  (This information emerges in a way that seems clumsily rather than tantalisingly piecemeal.)  Madeleine’s days are spent visiting Carlotta’s grave and a painting of her that hangs in a museum.  As he follows her around, Scottie becomes strongly attracted to Madeleine.  At the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, Madeleine appears to attempt suicide by jumping into the San Francisco Bay and Scottie dives in to save her.  Madeleine tells him of her dreams that take place at a mission.  This, like the cemetery and the museum, is a place that Madeleine travels regularly to, some way out of San Francisco, but seems to have no recollection of visiting.  Scottie drives her to the mission in an attempt to conquer her troubling dreams.  At the mission, Madeleine suddenly runs into the belltower, where Scottie’s vertigo prevents him from following her all the way up the staircase. Through a window, he sees Madeleine plummet from the top of the tower to her death.

    After an inquest at which he’s harshly censured, Scottie descends into a depression in which he’s silent and unreachable even to the loyal Midge.    We next meet him having emerged from catatonia but evidently obsessed with trying to find the love he’s lost, stopped in his tracks in the street or a restaurant by any well-tailored ice blonde that might fit the bill.   He then sees a young woman whose face resembles Madeleine’s, although her hair is darker.   He follows her to her hotel room – it’s the same one where Madeleine was staying earlier in the story (and the hotel was the Valdes family home a century earlier) – and talks with her.   The young woman’s name is Judy;  she’s an ordinary girl from Kansas – a bit tarty, compared at least with the super-refined Madeleine.  After Scottie persuades Judy to have dinner with him and she’s left alone, we learn that she is the woman he knew as Madeleine and that Elster employed her to pretend to be the mentally unstable wife that he actually threw from the belltower.   Judy, for her part, really did fall in love with Scottie; she decides to go ahead with seeing him instead of leaving him a letter revealing who she really is and what really happened.  As their relationship develops, Scottie tries to refashion Judy in Madeleine’s image and eventually succeeds completely.  One night, as she’s dressing for dinner, he notices her wearing a blood-red, jewelled pendant that belonged to Madeleine (and which features strongly in the nightmare sequence).  At this point, the policeman eclipses the demented lover in Scottie.  He sees what Judy has been up to, drives her in the gathering dusk to the mission belltower, and angrily forces her to confess the truth.  She does and he appears to forgive her.  As they go into a clinch, a spooky, shadowed figure comes up the steps and startles Judy, who falls off the ledge to her death.

    Vertigo is adapted (by Samuel A Taylor and Alec Coppel) from a French crime novel, Sueurs froides: entre les morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, but the film is echt Hitchcock.  The angles and deliberate movements of the camera (of which you’re probably more than usually conscious because much of the film moves slowly), the effective (if pretty obvious) use of lighting and objects to denote psychological or sexual states, the female iconography – these elements in combination leave you in no doubt about the auteur.   How much of this makes for cinematic art of originality or quality is harder to say.  BFI supplied two notes.  One of these, by Dave Kehr (in Film Comment (May/June 1984)), includes statements like:

    ‘The spatial organisation of [the sequences in which Scottie follows Madeleine], with the observer and the observed isolated in separate shots, duplicates the spectator’s position before the screen:  we watch Madeleine as Scotty (sic) does, and he watches Madeleine as we watch Vertigo.’

    The last statement must apply to a great many films where the person on screen is observing, unseen, another person.    The other note, by Peter Wollen (in Sight and Sound (April 1997)), is a mostly interesting and convincing read and it’s possible that what I take to be its conclusion is simply the end of an extract that’s being used.   But, on the face of it, it seems misleadingly to imply that Vertigo culminates in Scottie’s disillusionment:

    ‘The disintegration of his dream leads inevitably to discovery of the full depth of his deception and his loss, to the traumatic realisation that his bewitching image of Madeleine, far from being a magical dream, had been created simply as a prop in Elster’s banal murder plot.’

    In fact, this realisation is overtaken, in rapid succession, by other banalities, although they’re emotionally effective ones – in the way Hitchcock makes them virtually collide:  Scottie’s forgiveness of Judy and their embrace; the shock tactic of Judy’s death fall; the film’s ending there and then, before we can notice anything other than that Scottie has managed to look down at the fallen body without feeling giddy.    This heartless superficiality is, I know, what’s supposed to be part of why Hitchcock is the Master although I never can see what’s great about it.   His admirers can probably see some good reason too for the (usual) terrible, wooden acting in most of the smaller parts in the film – by Tom Helmore (as Elster), Henry Jones (the coroner), Raymond Bailey (the doctor in the clinic) and Konstantin Shayne (a local historian-bookseller).

    Vertigo really takes off – the tempo increases and the themes expand – at the point at which Scottie meets Judy.  His attempts to recreate her as Madeleine extend well beyond a single character’s obsession into a critique of a particular type of male-female relationship in the society in which the story is set (the staff in Ransohoff’s costumier’s, where Scottie takes Judy to be kitted out, are surprised but not appalled that he insists exactly how she’s to be dressed); then into the larger territory of Hollywood’s moulding of its female stars.  From there, the material develops greater specificity – and, I assume, self-awareness – in dealing with Hitchcock’s notorious preference for and preoccupation with a particular physical type as his leading lady.   The casting of Kim Novak as Madeleine-Judy (even if Vera Miles was Hitchcock’s first choice) is especially fascinating.  Having seen her last year in Pal Joey and The Man With the Golden Arm, where she seemed self-conscious and painfully awkward as a performer but – because of that – had a distinctive and touching presence, I thought in the early scenes of Vertigo that Novak was more sympathetically cast as a woman who exists primarily as a fascinating, elusive image.  The problems start as soon as the dialogue begins.  Kim Novak sounds weirdly disconnected from whatever she’s required to speak and it makes little sense when we’re told that Madeleine keeps going into a trance:  Novak never seems to be out of one.  Yet, while she may be a weak performer in every technical sense, she’s once again here a strongly unhappy presence and her odd, stately movement – which seems to combine ethereality and uncertainty – virtually dictates the pace of the picture.   When she reappears as Judy, the dark wig has the effect of a mask:  satisfied that she’s in disguise, Novak is unusually free.  She still seems a very limited actress but at least you can understand at this point how on earth it was that she got into the acting profession in the first place.   Because there are moments when Judy, with her streak of coarseness, seems rooted in life rather than celluloid, the way she’s treated by Scottie and her eventual fate are distressing in a way that takes you by surprise; and the effect is intensified by having Kim Novak in the role of a living brunette whom a fetishist wants to turn into a replica of a woman he thinks is dead.  (This is given an added edge, of course, by our knowledge that Hitchcock wants the brown-haired aberration to revert to his preferred Nordic blonde type.)

    As Scottie’s pal Midge, Barbara Bel Geddes provides presumably ironic evidence that he might have had an agreeable life with an attractive fair-haired woman if their college days’ engagement hadn’t ended after three weeks.   Bel Geddes is particularly good in her first scene, in which she has to impart a lot of set-up information but manages to do so naturally, creating a reasonably believable character as she goes along.   She and Stewart get a nice affable rhythm going – they convincingly suggest a real friendship but one laced with unresolved tensions.  Even so, Bel Geddes is badly used by Hitchcock.  The scene in which Midge offends Scottie by painting a portrait that comprises her own head and the body and costume of Carlotta Valdes is offensively stupid:  you just don’t believe Midge would produce a picture as thoughtless (and egocentrically tasteless) as this.  When Scottie walks out on her, the director ruins the effect of Bel Geddes’ angry self-remorse by having her simply repeat it.  The staging of her last scene with a doctor in the clinic where Midge has been visiting Scottie is incredibly crude.   It’s good nevertheless to be reminded that Barbara Bel Geddes the actress was much more than Miss Ellie (and that Ellen Corby, as the hotel owner here, was more than Grandma Walton:  she gives a rather too busy performance but it’s a lot better than the men in the supporting roles).

    Alfred Hitchcock has plenty to thank Bernard Herrmann and James Stewart for in the course of his career.  In this uneven film, Herrmann’s score stands out as perhaps the most sustained – and dramatically sustaining – element, expressing emotional layering as well as psychological disorder and obsession.    Stewart is awfully good too;   not just at the things you expect – the self-deprecating wit and charm, the sense of a decent, essentially ordinary man going into dark places – but also in his willingness to go to those places.  Or most of the time anyway:  there are a few moments when you sense Stewart would find it easier to be his usual likeable self.  Hitchcock uses him very astutely – and uses the audience’s feelings of affection and respect for Stewart to increase the sense of shock at seeing Scottie in the depths of depression and, especially, at his exploiting Judy for psychologically deviant and startlingly selfish purposes.

    Postscript:  One remaining puzzle:  when Scottie is first trailing Madeleine and sees her standing at the window of her hotel room, he goes in and asks the hotel owner who the woman on the second floor is.  The hotel owner says, as Scottie expects, that her name is Carlotta Valdes but that she’s not in her room.  Incredulous, he insists that she goes up to check, which she does and confirms that the room is empty.   Is the idea that Scottie, because he’s becoming obsessed with Madeleine, imagined that he saw her in the window?

    20 March 2009

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