Old Yorker

  • Georgy Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Silvio Narizzano (1966)

    I’ve always liked the title song – by Tom Springfield and Jim Dale, performed by The Seekers – but had never seen the film until now.  It turns out that, for more than half a century, I’ve had the wrong idea about Georgy Girl, assuming, from the song lyrics, that this was an ugly duckling romantic comedy.   It turns out to be a gruesome example of 1960s British ‘New Wave’ cinema at its most hyperactively zany (Richard Lester has a lot to answer for) – and bleak into the bargain.  The film’s only depth is in the depth of its cynicism.

    Almost needless to say, I don’t know the source material – a Margaret Forster novel of the same name, first published in 1965.  Even though Forster did the screenplay, with no less a co-writer than Peter Nichols, it’s hard to think that Georgy Girl, as directed by Silvio Narizzano, is a tonally faithful adaptation of the book, at least if Wikipedia’s summary of the latter is to be believed.  According to this, the novel ‘describes the choices open to a young working-class woman in London in the Swinging Sixties’.  The time and place are the same in the film, and the parents of Georgina ‘Georgy’ Parkin (Lynn Redgrave) in service, but Georgy’s circumstances are so extraordinary that she’s not a remotely representative girl of slender means.   Her parents, Ted (Bill Owen) and Doris (Clare Kelly), are the live-in employees of wealthy businessman James Leamington (James Mason), who’s in a loveless marriage, has no children of his own and has treated Georgy as the daughter he never had.  She speaks with a posh accent because James paid for her education at a Swiss finishing school.  She teaches music and movement to young kids in a studio of his vast house, in another room of which James’s ill-tempered, hypochondriac wife, Ellen (Rachel Kempson), languishes in bed all day.

    Twenty-two-year-old Georgy, ungainly and a bit overweight, lives in a nearby flat, which she shares with beautiful, hedonistic Meredith (Charlotte Rampling), an orchestra violinist.  Meredith gives her ever-compliant flatmate doormat treatment; her boyfriend Jos (Alan Bates) doesn’t fare much better.  Georgy, who has never had a bloke, is happy, when Meredith can’t be bothered to see him, to cook for Jos and play Scrabble with him.  ‘Why do all the boys just pass you by?/Is it that you just don’t try or is it the clothes you wear?’ sings Judith Durham at the start.  Naïve Georgy, with an apparent crush on Jos, doesn’t seem to know the answer to the first question even though she goes out of her way to stay dowdy.  In the course of the opening titles sequence, Georgy ventures into a hairdresser’s, gets a new (ridiculous) look, sees her reflection, dashes to the nearest public lavatory, fills a wash-basin and washes the offending lacquered hairdo away to restore her normal, less than soignée appearance.

    Two main developments drive the storyline.  First, James Leamington, whose feelings for Georgy are no longer purely paternal (if they ever were), offers her a written contract:  in exchange for his practically unlimited financial support, Georgy will be his mistress.  She manages to put off giving him an answer.  Even before he proposes the contract, James has made his attitude towards her pretty clear in a startlingly nasty exchange with Georgy’s father:

    James:   If I were you, Ted, I’d take her across my knee, pull down her knickers and give her a good tanning.

    Ted:      She’s too big for that … she’s like some enormous lorry driver …

    James:  She ought to be made to feel what she owes me.

    Second, Meredith gets pregnant by Jos.  She’s had abortions before but this time decides to have the child and to marry Jos because she’s ‘bored’.  She’s soon bored with pregnancy, too, and Jos announces that he’s in love with Georgy instead.  It’s typical of the film that, when he does so, Georgy flees the apartment in terror and Jos pursues her through the streets of London, declaring ‘I love you’ over and over again, and threatening to strip naked on the spot if Georgy doesn’t come back home with him.  They return to the apartment and go to bed, only to be interrupted by Peg (Denise Coffey), an improbable ‘friend’ of Meredith, making her first appearance in the film to convey the news that Meredith has gone into labour.

    When the baby’s born, it’s hate at first sight as far as her mother is concerned.  Meredith tells Jos she’ll have the child adopted, and divorce him.  Instead, he and Georgy live together, caring for baby Sara, but Jos soon tires of the ménage a trois:  he’s not a natural father and it’s clear that Georgy is interested only in looking after Sara.  Jos disappears from the scene, as does Ellen Leamington, proving she wasn’t such a hypochondriac after all.  The suddenly widowed James proposes marriage to Georgy.  She accepts, in order to dissuade social services from taking Sara into care.  The film ends with the wedding and the couple leaving the church.  Just before their chauffeured car pulls away, their adopted daughter is passed through the window to Georgy.  She devotes her attention to the baby, ignoring James entirely.

    These closing moments, like the film’s opening, are accompanied by The Seekers song but with lyrics (and lots of them!) that didn’t feature in the hit single version:

    ‘Hey there, Georgy girl, pretty as a picture, told you so,

    Can it be the Georgy we all know or somebody new,

    I wonder?

    Hey there, Georgy girl, hurrying away to celebrate,

    Got yourself a man but wait –

    There’s somebody else for you.

    Who needs a perfect lover when you’re a mother at heart?

    That’s all you wanted right from the start.

    Well, didn’t you?

    Hey there, Georgy girl, now that you’re no longer on the shelf,

    Better try to smile and tell yourself that you got your way

    You’ve made it.

    Now you’ve got a future planned for you,

    Though he’s not a dream come true at least he’s a millionaire,

    So don’t despair,

    You’re rich, Georgy girl!’

    This isn’t the only music in the film – there’s also Alexander Faris’s score.  It keeps assuring you that what’s happening on the screen is wacky and somehow fun, but it’s really grim.  Trying to give Georgy Girl a feminist spin is a fruitless exercise.  Georgy uses a man in order to fulfil her ambition to be a mother but, since she ends up shackled to James (who’s unlikely not to insist on his idea of conjugal rights), it seems a pyrrhic victory.  It wouldn’t be so bad if she were sexually more experienced and eventually came to the view that she didn’t need a man, only a child.  But Georgy’s social and sexual awkwardness more often than not suggests arrested development rather than unconventionality or single-mindedness.  The only consolation is that the heroine – ditto the unspeakable Meredith, for that matter – is such a bizarre conception that the film never seems to be trying to say something about young women of the 1960s more generally.

    On the evidence of Georgy Girl, it’s as well that Silvio Narizzano moved increasingly away from cinema, though not before making the quickly unwatchable screen version of Joe Orton’s Loot (1970).  (Narizzano’s subsequent work for Granada Television included the excellent ‘The Little Farm’ in the Country Matters series (1973) and the pre-Jewel in the Crown dramatisation of Paul Scott’s Staying On (1980).)  The governing principle of Narizzano’s terrible direction here is:  make everything over-emphatic and thereby ‘dynamic’.  Things are never put down, always thrown:  Ellen petulantly rejecting the bottled medication her husband delivers to her bedside, Jos handing over flowers and chocolates to Meredith in the maternity ward (and he’s not even annoyed).  There are endless swift exits – sometimes angry, sometimes panicked but always door-slamming.

    As a result, there’s no impact to things that seem meant to be distinctive.  Georgy is so repeatedly eccentric that her bits of crazy invention around her music-and-movement classes seem merely to be her doing her usual thing.  The effect is different only when, very occasionally, her off-the-wall behaviour lasts for more than a few seconds of screen time, as it does at a grand party for James’s birthday (his forty-ninth).  Her vile father demands of Georgy why she can’t ‘behave like a lady just for once’.  In response, she dashes up to the studio, grabs a few props from the dressing-up box, and sashays down the staircase delivering a mock-vampish number – to James’s delight, his guests’ stunned silence followed by perfunctory applause, and this viewer’s embarrassment for Lynn Redgrave.

    I was more often embarrassed, though, for Alan Bates, while also admiring his sheer stamina in keeping up the unrelenting stream of jocose chatter and physical clowning required of him.  Some of the antics call to mind David Warner’s carrying on in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (released a few months before Georgy Girl) but Jos is, if anything, a more advanced case.  The character makes no sense:  Bates’s acting energy is all that holds together the manic, mannered jesting.  Lynn Redgrave was less beautiful than her elder sister (Warner’s co-star in Morgan) but hardly a plain Jane so it’s remarkable what a physically convincing klutz she makes of Georgy.  What Redgrave gets across in her more natural moments makes you frustrated there aren’t more of them.  Though hardly at his best, James Mason still gets inside his character, so that James Leamington is almost unbearably creepy.  There’s some coarse overplaying of smaller parts:  Bill Owen is the worst.  Charlotte Rampling was a successful model before she got into acting; as Meredith, she still hasn’t got into acting.  It’s a small mercy but one benefit of watching Georgy Girl fifty-odd years on is the relief of knowing that Rampling eventually learned to do more than look good on screen.

    25 April 2022

  • Tootsie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sydney Pollack (1982)

    The big winner at the 1983 Academy Awards was Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, which landed eight Oscars from eleven nominations, including Best Picture.  Not for the first or last time, the Academy was rewarding worthy subject matter rather than film-making quality and flair, and did so chiefly at the expense of examples of Hollywood at its entertaining best.  Attenborough, named Best Director, acknowledged retrospectively, and decently, that ‘I was certain that not only would ET win, but that it should win.  It was inventive, powerful [and] wonderful.  I make more mundane movies’.  What is still Spielberg’s finest film won only four Oscars from nine nominations but still did better than the other most-nominated picture of the year:  Tootsie took home a single statuette from ten nominations.  Sydney Pollack’s singular romantic comedy, which is also a satire and celebration of acting, shares two of the three main qualities Richard Attenborough ascribed to ET.  Tootsie wasn’t exactly ‘powerful’ but, forty years on and seen through the lens of a much changed understanding of sexual and gender politics, it stands up impressively well.  And the film remains, as Pauline Kael described it in December 1982, ‘marvellous fun’.

    Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is a New York City actor whose intransigent perfectionism has made him unemployable.  He earns a crust waiting tables and teaching acting classes but is desperate for performing work and the funds to produce and star in a play written by his flatmate, Jeff Slater (Bill Murray).  When Sandy Lester (Teri Garr), Michael’s student and girlfriend, goes for the role of new hospital administrator Emily Kimberly on popular daytime soap ‘Southwest General’ and gets turned down, Michael drags up to audition for the role, calling himself Dorothy Michaels, and lands it.  Portraying Emily as a feisty feminist, Michael/Dorothy repeatedly goes off script, primarily in order to fend off the pawing attentions of John van Horn (George Gaynes), the soap veteran and inveterate skirt-chaser who plays senior medic Dr Brewster.  The show’s director Ron Carlisle (Dabney Coleman), a fellow sexist, doesn’t like Dorothy’s approach but Rita Marshall (Doris Belack), the canny producer, wants to see how it plays with audiences.  Emily Kimberly is a popular sensation.  Michael succeeds in holding down an acting job.

    The transvestite enterprise also generates more and more complicated personal relationships.  Michael falls for his soap co-star Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange):  on set, she’s a nurse, outside work, a single mother in a toxic relationship with Ron Carlisle.  Michael, as Michael, approaches Julie at a party and gets wine thrown in his face.  On another occasion, he can’t, even as Dorothy, quite control his feelings, startling Julie, who has come to value Dorothy as a friend and source of motherly advice.  On the point of breaking up with Ron, Julie invites Dorothy for a weekend at the home of Julie’s widowed father, Les (Charles Durning), who’s charmed by his daughter’s mature companion.  Soon after, he invites Dorothy to dinner in a New York restaurant and proposes marriage.  Dorothy pleads for time to think the offer over and dashes home, only to find she’s been followed there by John van Horn.  He tells Dorothy he’s crazy for her, then discovers, when Jeff appears on the scene, that she’s evidently spoken for.  The exhaustingly insecure Sandy hasn’t been sure about Michael since she caught him trying on her clothes.  No sooner has van Horn left the apartment than Sandy is banging on the door.  Jeff lets her in and keeps her talking while Michael gets out of his Dorothy kit and back into his own.  When Sandy confronts him, he admits that he’s in love with another woman – without mentioning the other men in love with the woman he’s pretending to be.

    Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal and Don McGuire shared the screenplay credit though at least two other well-known names, Barry Levinson and Elaine May, also had a hand in the writing.  All the prime movers on Tootsie, behind and in front of the camera, were steeped in the worlds of Broadway, Off Broadway, Hollywood and American television.  It really shows.  Sydney Pollack is also on screen, as George Fields, Michael’s agent.  George is a coiled spring, trying and usually failing to keep calm when he’s talking to the exasperating Michael.  Pollack the director transmits nervous energy to the narrative.  The film, especially in its early stages, moves at a terrific pace – the opening summary of Michael’s travails in New York theatre is elating – but is never out of control.  As the plot thickens, the tempo becomes increasingly varied.

    Tootsie has a top-class cast to match its script:  impeccably orchestrated, they make the abundant dialogue sing.  Michael/Dorothy is a double act tailor-made for Dustin Hoffman.  Michael’s egocentric quest for perfection chimes with the reputation of the man playing him.  Dorothy is a showcase for Hoffman’s theatrical appetite and aplomb.  He makes the one desperately maddening, the other likeable and both of them a pleasure to watch.  It adds up to the performance(s) of Hoffman’s career.  Jessica Lange (the film’s lone Oscar winner) completely embodies the dream girl that Julie is to Michael but Lange’s lovely naturalistic acting creates a real person to go with the ideal image.  Teri Garr’s vivid hysteria is a reminder of the star she might have been in the golden age of Hollywood screwball comedy.

    The male supporting roles include three splendidly different contributions.  Charles Durning is very witty and even more touching, Bill Murray’s deadpan delivery an invaluable complement to the prevailing emotional mayhem.  (It peaks in Jeff’s mock-appalled response to Dorothy’s unlooked for romantic involvements – ‘You … slut’).  Best of all is the director himself.  Sydney Pollack hadn’t acted for years; it was Hoffman who persuaded him to play George Fields.  The first exchange between them – culminating in a litany of Michael’s infuriating demands, whatever acting job he’s on – is an all-time favourite of mine:

    Michael:   Are you saying that nobody in New York will work with me?

    George:    No, no – that’s too limiting.  Nobody in Hollywood wants to work with you either.   I can’t even send you up for a commercial.  You played a tomato for 30 seconds and they went a half-day over schedule because you wouldn’t sit down-

    Michael:  Yes – it wasn’t logical.

    George:   You were a tomato!  A tomato doesn’t have logic – a tomato can’t move!

    Michael:  That’s what I said – so if it can’t move, how’s it going to sit down?

    Dabney Coleman, originally cast as George, has had a variously successful television career:  in the cinema, he’s unfortunately best known for two egregious sexist roles but he’s much better in Tootsie than in Nine to Five (1980).  George Gaynes is excellent, both as the increasingly bewildered John van Horn, and as Dr Brewster:  he delivers the latter’s lines (whenever he can manage to read the autocue) in orotund tones that anticipate Duncan Preston’s magnificent parody of soap actorly delivery in ‘Acorn Antiques’.  Native New Yorker Doris Belack is spot on as the TV producer who has seen it all, at least until Dorothy Michaels appears on camera.  Geena Davis dazzles in her screen debut, the small part of actress April Page, who plays another of Southwest General’s nubile nurses, and has learned how to steer clear of the show’s resident lechers.

    I feared that Tootsie revisited might now be uncomfortable to watch.  In fact, it seems almost politically prescient.  The clue is in the title.  ‘Tootsie’ is one of the dubious terms of endearment which Ron Carlisle addresses to Dorothy on set and to which she responds: ‘My name is Dorothy. Not “Tootsie,” not “Toots,” not “Honey,” not “Sweetie,” not “Doll.”’  Roger Ebert praised the film for making ‘some light-hearted but well-aimed observations about sexism’.  For plenty of viewers today, the light-heartedness alone will be enough to condemn Tootsie without qualification, male sexual entitlement being, by definition, not a laughing matter.  But for those of us still willing to accept as a major function of comedy the skewering of all manner of undesirable attitudes and behaviour, the film is a highly effective example of treating a serious subject within a comedic frame.  Even better (though this too might damn the film from a narrowly PC point of view), the protagonist’s discovery of what it’s like to be a woman is always anchored in Michael’s character.  Pauline Kael again:  ‘… Michael finds himself when he’s Dorothy … because when he’s Dorothy he’s acting.  He’s such a dedicated, fanatical actor that he comes fully alive only when he’s playing a role …’

    Despite Tootsie‘s extraordinary momentum, you’re always wondering how and when Michael is going to come clean.  It eventually happens when, with the show’s producers keen to extend Dorothy’s contract for another year, a technical problem forces ‘Southwest General’ to be aired live, and Michael seizes his chance to improvise.  Dorothy removes her spectacles and false eyelashes, tears off her wig, drops her accent and vocal register, and declares her/himself to be not Emily but Edward Kimberly, the avenging twin brother of the late Anthea Kimberly (it’s a long story), ‘proud enough to be the woman who was the best part of my manhood, the best part of myself’.  Pollack cuts to reactions in the studio and of armchair viewers beyond it.  Sandy screams.  A cameraman faints.  Les drops most of his sandwich, bites grimly on the bit remaining.  Jeff observes, ‘That is one nutty hospital …’  Ron Carlisle declares, ‘I knew there was a reason she didn’t like me!’  It’s a hard coup de théâtre to follow but Pollack does so nicely.  Wandering unhappily through Central Park, Michael approaches a mime in whiteface, thinks about dropping money in his hat but decides to push him over instead.

    There’s barely a weak moment in most of Tootsie’s 116 minutes.  A photo-shoot montage, summarising Dorothy’s meteoric rise to cover-girl celebrity, is a delight but it detracts from Michael’s subsequent argy-bargy with George Fields about the gender-discriminatory pay increase offered Dorothy:  she has become too big a star to earn less than even an ill-fated male patient on ‘Southwest General’.  It may have been self-effacement on Pollack’s part that led him to omit George’s reaction to Michael’s big reveal; whatever the reason, you feel the lack.  The film’s two original songs – the title track and ‘It Might Be You’ (both with music by Dave Grusin, lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman) – aren’t up to much.  Only in the closing stages, though, does Tootsie start to struggle, as it’s bound to do.  It’s not only Michael who has to extricate himself from a knotty situation:  so does the script.

    Outside ‘The Syracuse Playhouse’ a poster advertises ‘Return to the Love Canal’ – Jeff’s play, starring Michael Dorsey and Sandy Lester.  Next door is Injun Joe’s bar, which we know from earlier dialogue is one of Les Nichols’s favourite haunts.  Michael goes in to face the music.  The exchange between Charles Durning and Dustin Hoffman is beautifully played but their reconciliation is too easily achieved.  This applies even more to the closing sequence, in which Michael approaches Julie outside the television studios.  When he removed his disguise, Michael looked not into camera but at Julie to address the words ‘the woman who was the best part of my manhood’.  He now expands on this idea, telling Julie:

    ‘I was a better man with you, as a woman, with you, than I ever was as a man, with a woman. … I learned a few things about myself being Dorothy.  I just have to learn to do it without the dress.’

    What makes Julie’s, and her father’s, attachments to Dorothy special is that, as well as being funny, they feel truthful:  this is a different order of comedy from Some Like It Hot (1959).  Julie is processing the loss of her friend Dorothy, as well as Michael’s deception.  She couldn’t do either quickly – and even this formidable team of acting, writing and directing talents can’t bring off the instant happy ending.  But the exhilarating journey to that destination makes Tootsie one of the 1980s’ most richly entertaining films.

    21 April 2022

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