Old Yorker

  • This Happy Breed

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lean (1944)

    The life of a London family over a period of twenty years – ‘the years of l’entre deux guerres’ – is presented episodically in this adaptation of Noel Coward’s play of the same name.  The screenplay is credited to David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan.  Coward produced and is believed to have been dissuaded by Lean from recreating his stage role as the paterfamilias, Edward Gibbons:  the director reckoned that, in spite of Coward’s relatively humble origins, his public persona was too posh for cinema audiences to accept him in the part.  Lean was probably right although, even without Coward in the cast of This Happy Breed, the quasi-Cockney accents – as you’d expect in a British film of the time – make the actors playing the lower-middle-class Gibbonses sound as if they’re walking a vocal tightrope.  The picture is of considerable historical interest, as propaganda (it was released in Britain in June 1944) and in its treatment of major cultural and political events of the inter-war years (the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, the General Strike, Hitler’s coming to power, and so on).  But this celebration of the lives and values of ‘ordinary’ Londoners is patronisingly conservative (and Conservative):  Noel Coward’s own life would have been very different if he’d practised what he preaches here and hadn’t acted on ambitions above his social station.

    The speeches from Edward Gibbons (Robert Newton) that characterise him as part of the backbone of England are tiresome and sentimental.  Coward’s outlook is politically broad-minded only to the extent that socialism – espoused by Sam Leadbitter (Guy Verney), who becomes the Gibbons’s son-in-law – is presented as an expression of forgivable, foolish idealism that you grow out of, while Tory prime ministers (Stanley Baldwin as well as Neville Chamberlain) are criticised for their policy of appeasement.  Fascism is a bugbear perhaps less per se than because it’s the cause of – and the enemy’s cause in – the current war.  I find the continually scolding manner of the older women in the story lowering rather than amusing, even though Alison Leggatt, as Edward’s spinster (and, in the later stages, spiritualist) sister, creates a vivid, intense portrait of neurotic eccentricity.   The querulousness on the distaff side does work powerfully when news is received of the death, in a car crash, of the Gibbons’s only son (John Blythe) and his very new wife (Betty Fleetwood):  the bickering is instantly, shockingly replaced by real grief.   The camerawork in this sequence might seem clichéd now but it must have been imaginative seventy years ago:  David Lean holds a shot of an open door and, beyond it, the Gibbons’s back garden, as their daughter Vi (Eileen Erskine) goes out to tell her parents about the car accident.   The camera remains stationary as Edward and his wife Ethel (Celia Johnson) receive the world-changing news.  Lean’s book-ending of the story with the family’s arrival at a new home in Clapham in 1919 and departure from it in 1939 is simply effective.  The domestic decor (the art director was C P Norman) is very persuasive.

    Edward’s anti-appeasement outburst, as crowds celebrate Chamberlain’s Munich deal in 1938, is Robert Newton’s high point.  Elsewhere, he’s less convincing but not as bad as you might expect because he seems uncertain – to be doing what he thinks he’s meant to do, suppressing his natural tendency to overdo things.   Celia Johnson looks a little young for the role of Ethel yet she’s believably careworn and gives a fine performance:  she varies the pace well and suggests a woman who’s both narrow-minded and deeply committed to doing what she thinks is best for her family.  There’s good work too from Stanley Holloway, as the Gibbons’s neighbour Bob Mitchell, an army comrade of Edward in the Great War; and from John Mills, as Bob’s son, who comes up through the ranks in the Royal Navy and never abandons hope of winning the heart of Queenie (Kay Walsh), the Gibbons’s glamour-hungry (and therefore misguided) other daughter.  Amy Veness is Ethel’s grumpy mother (she lives with her daughter and son-in-law) and Merle Tottenham the Gibbons’s maid.  Although modern audiences would naturally envisage the time and place of the story in black-and-white, This Happy Breed, photographed by Ronald Neame, is in Technicolor.

    7 September 2015

  • Up

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pete Docter (2009)

    I liked the idea of wearing 3-D glasses (for the first time) and sitting in Screen 1 of the Richmond Odeon when it was approaching full (for nearly the first time).  I liked the idea more than the actual experience, and the same goes for the film itself.  There was still plenty to enjoy, though.  The increasing flow of traffic to and from the confectionery kiosk and therefore the toilets (this wasn’t just the kids) began to get on my nerves but watching Up was a welcome reminder that, when an audience of children giggles daftly, it’s infectious.  (When grown-ups do the same it brings out the reactionary in me.)  And although I may not have followed the plot in every detail, I stayed mostly sure of what was going in – a relief after the sustained incomprehensibility of Pixar’s last feature, WALL-E.   Written by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, Up is an absorbing mixture of beautiful design, cheerfully brutal pyrotechnical action and persistent themes of loss and disappointment.

    There’s no point my trying to describe the construction of the computer-animated figures, except to say that, animal and human, they carry on a rich Disney tradition – we can read characters as soon as we see them and still be amazed by their ability to change mood and expression.   No surprises that I was most taken by the loss-and-disappointment department of the story.  To expand slightly:  the elements of bereavement, ambition-cum-obsession, lack of fulfilment, and disillusionment.  What amounts to a prologue describes the life together of Carl Fredricksen and his sweetheart Ellie, drawn together by their shared enthusiasm for the exploits of the adventurer Charles Muntz.  (We first see Carl as a child in a cinema watching – in a pair of what look very like 3-D glasses – newsreel footage of Muntz’s latest exploits.)  It’s the 1930s and Muntz has more than a forename in common with Charles Lindbergh:  his vehicle for adventurous exploration – an airship – is the ‘Spirit of Adventure’.  The Fredricksens, who can’t have children, enjoy a happy marriage – Carl sells toy balloons, Ellie is a zookeeper – without realising their ambition of following in the footsteps of Muntz by going to Paradise Falls in South America.

    Ellie dies.  Carl, who misses her desperately, is then threatened with the loss of the house they’ve always shared.  His violent resistance to the developers, who’ve already demolished all the neighbouring houses, lands him in court.  There looks to be no way out for Carl other than ‘Sunset Oaks’, an old people’s home.   On the morning that two of its staff arrive to take him to the home, Carl asks them to wait a minute and, in that minute, his house takes off – carried aloft by a multi-coloured cloud of Carl’s balloons, which he’s used to create an improvised airship, and by the spirit of adventure that he’s stubbornly determined to put into practice.  Carl is joined on his journey to Paradise Falls by Russell, a smilingly resilient ‘Wilderness Explorer’ scout, looking to earn his final merit badge (for ‘Assisting the Elderly’); a ménage(rie) à quatre develops in South America when they’re joined by one of Muntz’s dogs, Dug, and Kevin, a living (female) member of a species of bird that the explorer has spent his life trying to track down.  By this point, Up has shifted into a more conventional, action-packed journey and escapades – but without losing sight of the old man’s widowerhood.  Carl keeps invoking Ellie; the contents of their house and eventually the house itself have to be jettisoned along the way.

    In his exploring heyday, Muntz became a controversial figure:  he brought back from Paradise Falls the skeleton of a great bird and was accused of faking it.   He’s spent decades back there, obsessively determined at all costs to find a live specimen and vindicate himself. (Paradise Falls must have a Shangri-La climate:  Muntz has to be well into his second century by this stage but of course we ignore that.)    One of the most striking features of Up is that this obsession has curdled to the extent that Muntz – the Fredricksens’ lifelong hero – becomes, when Carl finally meets him, the villain of the piece, because of his monomania for capturing Kevin.  Moses-like, Carl never himself sets foot in the promised land of Paradise Falls but that’s where his unmoored house – home being where the heart is – comes to rest.  Pete Docter doesn’t push these darker elements so that they obstruct the sentimental optimism of the story.  The spirit of adventure is a rejection of the limits of old age.  The childless Fredricksen finds the son he never had in Russell and eventually agrees to be Dug’s new master.  Even so, it’s hard, for an adult anyway, to ignore the dark side; I wonder how kids receive it.  The airborne house and the eventual return home – with a renewed appreciation of it – aren’t the only elements that bring to mind The Wizard of Oz.  So does the fallibility of the person whom the protagonist thought so highly of.

    The violence is still too much for me and, because the characters have more substance than in traditional ‘flat’ animation, the bumps and blows that they’re dealt seem more hurtingly real.  Still, the story is well shaped so that the slam-bang stuff never gets to seem relentless.  Fredricksen is stocky and the engaging Russell is nearly round but skinny people get a raw deal here:  the developer ‘suit’ that Carl yells at is lean and hungry; it’s his hooked, cadaverous appearance that reveals that Muntz has turned bad.  The voices are really good – particularly Edward Asner as the curmudgeonly but sensitive Carl and Christopher Plummer as Muntz; the vocals from Muntz’s dogs, controlled by electronics in their collars, are funny too.    There’s a jolly score by Michael Giacchino.  When the house first takes to the air, the launch and the brightly-coloured balloons raise your spirits in a way that recalls the emotional lift-off of the corresponding moment in ET – but which, for me, doesn’t emulate that moment.  This is simply because, brilliantly designed though the figures in Up are, the story doesn’t feature actual human beings.  The themes and shape of Up are more satisfying to me as I write about them than they were as I was watching.  With the unique exception of Waltz with Bashir, I just can’t get that involved with animated film.

    11 October 2009

     

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