Old Yorker

  • The League of Gentlemen

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Basil Dearden (1960)

    How old was I when I first watched this on television – perhaps eight or nine?  Mum really liked it and I think of watching it with her – twice, maybe three times – but it must be forty years since I’d seen it.  A motley collection of ex-army officers plan a bank robbery.  It’s a serviceable idea turned into a highly entertaining film and there are some funny scenes.  But the picture is also darker than I expected or remembered.  The build-up, as each of the characters is introduced, takes some time, during which we get a strong sense of the men’s unhappiness.  Before they come together, they’re all in situations that are variously straitened or humiliating.  What’s particularly good about The League of Gentlemen is how it shows working together, in preparation for the bank raid, as life-enhancing for each member of the group ­– and Basil Dearden achieves this without either pushing that idea too much into the foreground or making these would-be lawbreakers adorable.  The prime mover, who plans the robbery and rustles up his partners in crime, is Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Hyde – he had a good war but he’s out of a job now and desperately short of cash.  There’s a social comment there but this isn’t too salient either – all the more surprising when Basil Dearden and the producer Michael Relph are perhaps best known for work where a social conscience is more blatant (films like Sapphire (1959) and Victim (1961)).  What’s much more striking – and sinister – about Hyde is that this man, who held a rank senior to the others in the army, knows the weaknesses of his recruits, their misdeeds during the war or in civilian life subsequently.   He’s inviting them to earn lots of badly needed money but there’s a whiff of blackmail too.

    The screenplay was adapted by Bryan Forbes from a 1958 novel of the same name by John Boland and it’s a sharp, well-constructed script (with some pretty acid lines).  Dearden lets a sequence at an army training base (from where the gang steal most of their tools for the bank job) go on too long but the climactic robbery is well done and the aftermath is enjoyably suspenseful.   For someone of my generation the cast is a delight – not just because there are plenty of decent performances but also because people I associate with television rather than cinema keep turning up and it’s great to see them again, almost regardless of whether or not they’re up to much.  For every one who’s a good actor – like Dinsdale Landen (uncredited, as a young man getting a massage) – there’s more than one who isn’t – for example, Gerald Harper and Patrick Wymark (although Harper’s not bad as a what-ho captain on the army base).  Brian Murray does a jolly turn as an army trainee complaining about the canteen food.  Terence Edmond, PC Sweet in Z-Cars, anticipates that role with a cameo as a rookie constable.  There are also familiar faces from both television and British films of the period (David Lodge, Norman Rossington), and a single big-screen name of the future – Oliver Reed, amusingly vivid in a thirty-second appearance as a camp amateur actor.   The women’s roles don’t amount to much:  the two relatively glamorous ones are played by Dearden’s wife Melissa Stribling and Forbes’ future wife Nanette Newman; the only actress who registers is Doris Hare as a yattering housewife.

    Part of the appeal of this band of demobbed criminals is that we naturally associate some of the actors with their roles in war movies and/or with characters of a particular social rank.  Jack Hawkins brings little characterisation but a strong presence to the role of Hyde.  The two majors are Nigel Patrick (wittier and freer than I expected, as Race, an unsuccessful gambler) and Terence Alexander (rather touching as Rutland-Smith, floundering in a marriage of convenience to a faithless but moneyed wife).  Bryan Forbes is one of the four captains in the company:  Porthill is a kind of young-middle-aged gigolo and Forbes creates something persuasively hard and nasty in his personality.  The others are Kieron Moore, Norman Bird and Roger Livesey.  Moore is hopeless as Stevens, an ex-Mosleyite homosexual who runs a gym:  it takes him all his time to get his lines out (and he doesn’t seem remotely gay).  Bird, however, as Weaver, an ex-bomb disposal expert (who liked a drink and managed to blow up some of his fellow soldiers when under the influence), creates one of the most compelling characters in the film.  The scene which introduces Weaver and his soul-destroying home life (with Doris Hare) is really oppressive.  Drab, downtrodden husbands were Bird’s speciality of course but Weaver’s backstory gives his portrait an extra edge here.  We expect richness of characterisation (as well as voice) from Roger Livesey and get it:  there’s a beguiling blend of humour and self-loathing regret in his ‘Padre’ Mycroft, a quartermaster dismissed for gross indecency (who now makes a living impersonating vicars and selling pornography).  Lexy was militarily the most junior member of the outfit and is now a repair man-cum-petty crook (in his army days, he sold information to the Russians).  Richard Attenborough is thoroughly seedy in the role.  He has one of those vile moustaches that look like a dead rodent on the upper lip.

    As the men celebrate the ill-gotten gains at Hyde’s house, someone knocks on the door – and keeps knocking.   It’s a heart-stopping moment but the man outside is only Hyde’s old army boss – bonhomous, bibulous Brigadier ‘Bunny’ Warren.  It’s tough for a performer to gatecrash at this late stage but Robert Coote delivers a triumphantly funny caricature and the blend of comedy and suspense in what follows is nicely judged.  The martial music by Philip Green invites you to spot the difference between the music for a straight military movie of the time and a relatively subversive piece like this one.   For me, the phrase ‘league of gentlemen’ still connotes, before Royston Vasey, this film.  It was very good to renew its acquaintance.

    28 June 2011

     

     

  • Victim

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1961)

    Brian Robinson, introducing John Coldstream (as curator of the Dirk Bogarde season at BFI), informed us that Victim was a big box-office hit and in its opening weekend took more money than The Guns of Navarone.  I left before the Q&A – including  Coldstream and two of the film’s cast, Sylvia Syms and Peter McEnery – as the applause was ringing out in NFT1 (now with its new, very red seating).  I probably should have stayed because there were at least two questions in my mind.  Did audiences in 1961 flock to the film because they wanted to see a picture about homosexuality or Dirk Bogarde in a drama-thriller?  And was the audience gathered for the film’s half-century acclaiming a piece of socially progressive propaganda or a work of art?  It’s difficult, in a number of ways, not to respect Victim, and Bogarde for playing a role that was meaningful to him personally but which contradicted his screen image.  The film, written by Janet Green and John McCormick, aims to be an unequivocal protest against the law of the land which made homosexuality a ‘blackmailer’s charter’.  Victim – now the subject of a study by Coldstream (also Bogarde’s biographer) in the BFI Classics series – was initially banned in the USA; over here, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act passed into law slightly less than six years after its original release.  I took with a pinch of salt John Coldstream’s view that Victim made a legal difference (his intro was admirably clear) but it can’t have done any harm – and the film is a masterpiece compared with, say, Losey’s anti-capital punishment piece Time Without Pity (1957).  The plight of the Bogarde character, a brilliant lawyer called Melville Farr, whose sexuality threatens a stellar career at the bar, and the grinding unhappiness of most of the lives he touches, have an increasing emotional weight as the story progresses.    Yet I also found Victim (which I’d seen before, but not for many years) a little annoying and rather ridiculous – thanks to its combination of melodrama and solemn rectitude.

    The melodrama has some unfortunate effects.  By the end of Victim, we’ve encountered so many homosexuals – some obviously gay, others in due course unmasked – that it’s hard to disagree when the vicious bigot who’s the prime mover in the blackmailing plot (a middle-aged spinster, played by Margaret Diamond) seethes that ‘They’re everywhere!’  An elderly hairdresser, four times imprisoned and now planning to get out of London and make a new life Canada, has a neatly-timed fatal heart attack when, shutting up shop for the day, he receives a menacing visit from the other blackmailer (Derren Nesbitt), a shades-wearing motorbike rider whose dodgy haircut is, in the circumstances, confusing.  Each gay character is introduced by Basil Dearden in ways that are almost literally heavy-handed.   Norman Bird as a secondhand bookseller has to make himself a cup of tea and pours milk from a bottle with a hard-to-miss tremor; Nigel Stock as a car hire salesman tamps down his pipe tobacco in a gesture of furious repression; the camera records these hand movements emphatically.    There are one or two crappy ‘artistic’ flourishes.  Farr’s wife Laura teaches disturbed children (presumably because she’s realised this is as close as she’ll get to having any kids of her own):  we see a little boy doing a drawing of a face and then, as the watching Laura turns her attention to a newspaper with a story that increases her suspicion of what’s going on in her husband’s life, the boy obliterates the portrait with destructive brushstrokes.

    The rectitude is embodied by Bogarde.  He’d played Sydney Carton in the 1958 cinema adaptation of  A Tale of Two Cities and here’s another ‘far, far better thing’ that he does, as Melville Farr tracks down the blackmailers and, in order to bring them to justice, sacrifices his own reputation.   Farr’s rectitude has at least one reactionary effect.  We’re given to understand that, although his friendships with men are somehow abnormal, he hasn’t actually had gay sex.  The inadvertent implication is that his abstention from fully homosexual relationships raises his moral standing.  The impact of Bogarde in this role must have been startling.  It’s a comment on what he did subsequently that, within a decade, the casting would have seemed obvious.   For that reason, it’s hard to look at his face here, peel away the layers of self-recrimination he constructed in later roles, and see it as freshly conscience-stricken.   He’s expert but, if he’s affecting, I think that has more to do with the person we think Dirk Bogarde was offscreen.  His essential problem here is that the screenplay is so preoccupied with its progressive message that the main characters are underwritten as human beings.  Bogarde isn’t given the opportunities he deserves to dramatise what it means to Melville Farr to find his professional life, and the marriage that’s an intrinsic part of it, under siege.  The political requirements of the project reduce the protagonist’s dilemma.

    The same applies to the character of Laura, the judge’s daughter Farr wed when she was only nineteen – a marriage of convenience to her husband in more ways than one.  When, near the end of the film, Laura asks her husband what he wants her to do, it reminds you that Victim is describing a social order which now seems benighted in terms of the balance of power between men and women, as well as sexual behaviour.  Sylvia Syms is a limited and an obvious actress but she’s moving when she asks this question because she persuades you that Laura may not have an opinion of her own.  However, the condition of the Farrs’ marriage isn’t well worked out (or conveyed at any rate) – again, one suspects, because the film-makers, although they’ve taken on a controversial subject, pussyfoot around some of its implications.  Laura’s widowed brother (Alan MacNaughtan) tries to find out about the physical side of things between his sister and her husband; these siblings are so discreet in what they say that we’re none the wiser.   If Laura were a more sophisticated woman you could believe that her reply to her brother – ‘Yes, it’s been all right’ – is a simple euphemism but Syms’ Laura seems too artless for any kind of subterfuge.   That naivety makes it harder to believe too that (as we’re supposed to accept) she knew about Farr’s sexuality before they were married and accepted it.  Is it likely that a protected upper middle-class teenage girl of the fifties would have known much, if anything, about homosexuality?   It’s nearly incredible that Laura would have had the self-confidence to think she could get it out of her husband’s system.

    When I wrote a note on The League of Gentlemen the other week, I wondered whether Philip Green’s martial score, although Basil Dearden used it effectively, would have been any different in a film that was straightforwardly admiring of British military men.   Green’s excessively ominous music here, especially in the early stages, could hardly have been higher-pitched if Victim had been a send-up of a dark secrets thriller; and Dearden, perhaps because he believed strongly in the message of the film, tends to overdo things.  Some of the playing in the smaller parts may be relatively strong because the director thought these roles less important and the actors are less pressured in them.  Hilton Edwards and David Evans are especially good as a camp couple who turn out to be engaged in a form of extortion other than the central blackmailing.  They sit and eavesdrop conversations in a pub whose regulars include some other vivid characters – a blowsy, middle-aged bottle blonde (Mavis Villiers), and Donald Churchill as the pal of ‘Boy’ Barrett (Peter McEnery), the young man Melville Farr got too friendly with but who tried his best to keep the blackmailers off the barrister.  It’s Barrett’s suicide in a police cell that draws Farr inescapably into the intrigue.  Anthony Nicholls and Peter Copley are covertly gay pillars of the legal establishment, Dennis Price a well-known actor who’s part of the same clique.  Charles Lloyd Pack is a frightened barber. The two policemen on the case are a liberal-minded detective inspector (well played by John Barrie) and his puritanical sidekick (badly played by John Cairney).  Alan Howard has a cameo as a sexually ambiguous friend of Barrett’s, another married man.

    3 August 2011

Posts navigation