Old Yorker

Joseph Losey (1957)

An alcoholic writer arrives at London airport on the morning of the day before his son’s execution for murder.  The father spends the few hours left before then, trying to prove his son’s innocence, on a whistle stop tour of the British establishment (the law, the government, the press) and interviews key individuals (the murdered girl’s sister, the son’s friend, the friend’s step parents, the stepfather’s mistress and her mother).  Time Without Pity is based on an Emlyn Williams play (called Someone Waiting) but Joseph Losey, in an interview that was included in the BFI handout, claims that he and the screenwriter Ben Barzman radically changed Williams’s material – from a whodunnit to, in effect, a contribution to the contemporary campaign for the abolition of capital punishment in Britain.  (Death by hanging was suspended for a five-year period by the new Labour Government in 1964, then more or less abolished in 1969.)  The picture is much more entertaining than Losey’s The Criminal but largely because it’s so silly; given the subject, you feel this isn’t the right kind of positive judgment to be making.    Time Without Pity is so bad that it leaves you thinking Losey and Barzman should have been grateful for the death penalty, which at least provides a suspenseful race against time, without which the film would be even more hopeless than it is.

The anti-hanging message is conveyed through two ineffably clumsy set pieces.  First, the writer, David Graham (Michael Redgrave), listens in on a confab of MPs in which standard lines in the capital punishment debate are doled out among the participants:  the main speaker delivers his message – he’s agin it – in an amazingly stilted physical attitude.  Then Graham makes an appeal to a newspaper editor (George Devine), with whom it turns out he was at university (a pointless connection).  The editor takes a we-are-all-guilty – more precisely, a why-didn’t-you-protest-when-others-were-about-to-be-hanged – line.  This reaction might be credible as a sarcastic comment on journalists’ propensity for pompous censoriousness – but not as the chastening home truth it’s presented as.   (The editor is right, however, that Graham hasn’t been paying enough attention to hanging protocol.  When he’s first picked up at the airport, he asks his companion what time the execution will take place.  He evidently doesn’t know of the standard practice of carrying out a hanging at 8am on Wednesday – a tradition woven into the fabric of British life of the time.)  The man who meets Graham on his arrival in London is called Jeremy Clayton (Peter Cushing).  He’s meaningless as a character (he’s there just to move the plot along) but he’s integral to the first of the film’s ludicrous exchanges.  When Graham asks ‘What happened at the trial?’, Clayton replies ‘I’ve brought you the transcript’.   (Graham’s rejoinder – ‘I haven’t got time to read all that’ – is fair enough in the circumstances.)   There’s plenty more where that came from.  Pleading with the editor (Devine give this cipher a bit of colour by sitting in his chair throwing darts at a board on his office wall), Graham says ‘If you print it in your paper, there might be public protests to stop the execution going ahead … ‘.  These would be public protests in reaction to a morning paper – due next to appear on the morning of the execution – yes?

That moment wouldn’t seem so daft if you were made to feel Graham’s irrational desperation; you don’t, because the writing and direction are so relentlessly melodramatic – keeping things high pitched seems to be, for Losey and Barzman, an end in itself.  For the first half hour, Graham denies temptation whenever he’s offered a drink but he eventually succumbs and gets smashed in the course of the evening.    He wakes up on a tube train and, when it stops, forces himself out of the door (why does he need to?), startling an elderly woman passenger in the process.  He seems to have no idea what station he’s at or where he wants to be but so what?  Every scene, no matter how nonsensical, is grist to the hyperbolic mill.   In spite of all the mechanical plot twists, however, the script doesn’t supply any evidence to speak of about the murder for which Alec Graham has been convicted.  (It’s not clear on what basis Alec was found guilty beyond the fact that on Christmas Eve, several weeks before the murder, his girlfriend Jennie came home bruised and it was assumed, wrongly, she’d been out with Alec.)  The avidity for melodrama has some counterproductive effects.  As the condemned man, Alec McCowen has a warped, volatile intensity enough to make you think he would certainly be capable, in extremis, of uncontrolled, perhaps violent behaviour.  If Losey and Barzman had preserved the whodunnit element, McCowen’s disturbed quality might have created suspenseful uncertainty; as it is, it gets in the way of our seeing him as an innocent man.  Michael Redgrave, as his father, has a genius for playing characters on the verge of mental disintegration but here Redgrave doesn’t suggest (or hasn’t been allowed to suggest) any core of sanity that David Graham’s emotional fragility is threatening to destroy.  The son is scared and resents the father and the father is full of guilt but McCowen and Redgrave go too far in making them both head cases:  their histrionics are compelling but overpower the human interest (father-fighting-to-save-his-son) theme.  The real killer is the filthy rich car manufacturer Robert Stanford (the stepfather of Alec’s friend Brian).  Leo McKern plays Stanford in a Northern accent that comes and goes but he’s a strong presence and has some powerful moments, particularly when Stanford loses his self-control.  Through a combination of McKern’s unpredictability and the screenplay’s requiring the character to behave (repeatedly) contrariwise, Stanford also seems insane.

In some of the smaller roles too, good people are hamstrung by Losey’s fondness for heavy-handed bizarrerie.  Renee Houston, in her first moments, seems spot on as Mrs Harker, the gin-sodden, mercenary mother of Stanford’s mistress.  I liked the alert, needling way she kept inviting Graham to join her in a drink.  But Losey requires her to get theatrically drunk at very high speed and she becomes a joke.   (Her room is full of alarm clocks which keep going off, getting on what’s left of Graham’s nerves.  Their purpose is presumably to remind him that the hour of execution is nigh but you have to wonder if Mrs Harker uses them to time how quickly she can get sozzled.)   Paul Daneman, as Stanford’s stepson Brian, is rather ingenious:  he gives such odd stresses to many of his lines that he succeeds in building up a disorienting rhythm, which gets across (and certainly makes more interesting than it would otherwise have been) Brian’s unease.   Although her part too is negligible, Joan Plowright has a surprising vividness as Agnes, the murdered girl’s sister; and Dickie Henderson is excellent as the louche MC at the Windmill, where Agnes is a dancer.

Some members of the cast, like Lois Maxwell as Stanford’s mistress, probably wouldn’t have benefited from better direction.   Ann Todd, as Stanford’s wife Honor, with her cut-glass vowels and impregnable lack of nuance, is as glacially inexpressive as ever.   (As with The Criminal, I occasionally had the sense that exchanges wouldn’t have been so laughable if the characters had had American rather than English accents.  I tend to think this effect derives from something in the direction rather than the dialogue, in view of the different nationalities of the writers of the screenplays concerned.)  One of the oddest sequences in the picture is when Alec, in his cell, asks Honor to kiss him and her response is on the lips and lasts for ages.  It’s implied afterwards that this is the first time she’s realised and shown her true feelings for Alec – yet he doesn’t seem surprised.  With Ann Todd administering the passion, this scene is all the more baffling.

If Time Without Pity, at the time of its release, was deemed effective anti-capital punishment propaganda then it can’t be dismissed as negligible but, as a film drama, it’s thoroughly ridiculous.  As well as the cack-handed script and the awkward staging (the actors often moving so artificially they look as if they’re trying to do no more than hit their marks), there’s Tristram Cary’s hyperactive music – which seems to be in conversation with itself rather than with what’s on the screen.  Losey’s claim that he made the killer’s identity obvious from the start is fair enough (even if directors have been known to put audiences off the scent with a sequence like this film’s opening).  But, because Losey and Barzman didn’t wholly jettison the Emlyn Williams whodunnit framework, Time Without Pity is still set up as a mystery and you want to know how the murder came about.   Losey seems to have been so preoccupied with the moral(ising) aspect that he overlooked how much the suspense elements worked against the piece as an anti-hanging  tract.  It’s not clear either whether he and Ben Barzman could see that their progressive message was actually compromised by making clear at the outset the condemned man’s innocence – as if people could be convinced by the case against capital punishment only if they were sure that the wrong man was being hanged.   What are we to make of the film’s ending?   David Graham achieves moral salvation and, thanks to a very early morning start by all concerned to bring about the crazy climax, it’s implied that the exposure of Stanford as the killer will save Alec Graham from the gallows.  We feel pleased that Stanford gets his comeuppance; if that comeuppance is a death sentence and the audience goes out feeling justice has been done, what have Losey and Barzman achieved?  Maybe the idea is that it’s safe to assume that Leo McKern will convince a court that Stanford is bonkers enough to escape the hangman’s noose.

15 June 2009