Old Yorker

  • The Rocking Horse Winner

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Pelissier (1949)

    Two British films released in consecutive years, each based on a short story by a celebrated English novelist, share as a plot catalyst the friendly relations between an upper-middle-class boy and a servant.  Whereas Graham Greene wrote the screenplay for Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), an adaptation of Greene’s story The Basement Room, D H Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner reached the screen nearly two decades after the author’s death:  first published in 1926, the story is updated to the late 1940s in Anthony Pelissier’s screenplay.  The Fallen Idol is perhaps the better film (it’s certainly the better known) but The Rocking Horse Winner runs it a close second.

    In The Fallen Idol a diplomat’s young son moves from hero worship of the embassy butler to suspecting him of murder.  In The Rocking Horse Winner young Paul Grahame (John Howard Davies) and his parents’ newly recruited odd-job man Bassett (John Mills) hit it off immediately.  Paul, unlike the diplomat’s son, doesn’t become disillusioned with his much older companion but the two stories do have something else in common:  a child takes what he sees or hears from adults at face value, with traumatic results.   In The Rocking Horse Winner, Paul is misled not by Bassett but by his mother, Hester (Valerie Hobson).

    Hester and her husband Richard (Hugh Sinclair) have three children – Paul is the eldest – and a nice house.  They employ, as well as Bassett, a nanny (Susan Richards) and a cook but they live well beyond their means.  The family is continually in debt thanks to Richard’s failure to keep a decent job and gambling at cards, and Hester’s lavish spending.  The Grahames are repeatedly bailed out by Hester’s elder brother Oscar (Ronald Squire), whose batman Bassett was during the recent war.  Before that, he worked as a stable lad and occasionally rode as a jockey – Bassett shows Paul a photograph of him winning a race.  The boy is taken with it and with the rocking horse his parents get him for Christmas.  Bassett shows Paul how to sit on the toy horse as if it were a racehorse, assuring  the boy that ‘if you speak nicely to him and whisper in his ear, there’s not a race he wouldn’t win for you’.  When Uncle Oscar makes him a present of a whip, Paul is able to ride the rocking horse all the more vigorously.

    Paul realises his parents don’t have the money they need, and discovers from a crucial conversation with his mother why they don’t:  it’s all a matter of luck.

    Hester: Your father has no luck. …

    Paul: Are you lucky, Mummy?

    Hester: I thought I was before I was married.  Now I think I’m very unlucky.  …

    Paul: I’m lucky. … If you’re lucky, you keep on getting more money, don’t you?

    Hester: I suppose so.

    Paul: That’s what you said.  And I have money in my money box. And I keep on getting it. So I must be lucky, mustn’t I?  I’ll give it to you if you like, Mummy.  All of it.   You can have it all!

    All is twenty-two shillings and seven pence at the last count.  Even though Hester doesn’t take up his offer, Paul is determined to continue getting richer, to help his mother, whom he loves very much.  He finds an extraordinary way of doing so:  he develops a mysterious knack for picking horse racing winners.  He goes into ‘partnership’ with Bassett, who puts their bets on.  In time, Paul lets Uncle Oscar in on the secret.  The contents of a cash box, kept under lock and key in Bassett’s quarters, increase to several hundred pounds, and keep growing.

    The Rocking Horse Winner depends significantly on supernatural elements but there’s nothing fey about these:  they’re rooted in real psychological anxiety and need.  Paul hears the house ‘whispering’ to him – the insistent susurration ‘There must be more money, more money, more money…’ plays on the soundtrack.  What might have been a merely conventional eerie effect is transformed by our knowing that Paul isn’t just sensitive to domestic atmosphere but has picked up the house’s message from remarks he’s overheard his parents making.  His conviction that a particular racehorse will win comes through energetically riding the rocking horse – the result, in other words, of considerable physical effort and mental concentration.  It feels like an act of will rather than a piece of magic.  (Whenever Paul’s unsure about his choice of horse, it loses.)  And there’s no sentimentalisation of the animal in the nursery – quite the opposite.  Paul doesn’t give his toy horse a name.  (It is, rather, a means of eliciting other equine names.)  The exposed teeth in the rocking horse’s mouth give it an increasingly sinister grin.  The postscript to the story’s tragic climax sees Bassett, on Hester’s instruction, set fire to the rocking horse.  In the film’s final shot, the toy looks unnervingly resistant to the enveloping flames.

    Anthony Pelissier had an unusual career as a cinema director.  The Rocking Horse Winner was the second of six features he made within only four years, sandwiched between The History of Mr Polly (also starring John Mills) and Night Without Stars.  Pelissier also directed a segment of the anthology film Encore during this short time before moving into television.  In the late 1960s, he made a few documentary shorts but never directed a feature film after Meet Mr Lucifer (1953).  (He died in 1988.)  The Rocking Horse Winner suggests this was a real loss to British cinema.  Pelissier’s storytelling is clear, economical and sometimes imaginative – as in an episode cross-cutting between Paul’s exciting, enjoyable afternoon with Oscar at Goodwood races (and it really is Goodwood) and Hester’s concurrent, humiliating visit to a pawnbroker (Charles Goldner) – to raise the cash she needs to get rid of the bailiff (Cyril Smith) who has arrived at the Grahames’ home.

    As usual in a British film of the era, it takes a while to adjust to aspects of the acting style.  John Mills’s working-man accent, at the start, veers uncertainly between London and the West Country.   While Ronald Squire is agreeably relaxed and understated throughout, Valerie Hobson and Hugh Sinclair sometimes seem wooden.  Pelissier handles the cast skilfully, though:  in the end, all the performances are effective.  (This includes the smaller roles, notably Susan Richards’s nanny and Charles Goldner’s intent, observant pawnbroker.)   Leading players from David Lean’s famous Dickens films join forces here:  Mills and Hobson were the adult Pip and Estella in Great Expectations (1946), John Howard Davies the title character in Oliver Twist (1948).  It’s arguable that all three, under Pelissier’s direction, surpass what they achieved with Lean.

    In fact, this is unarguable in Valerie Hobson’s case.  It wasn’t a great loss to British cinema when, in 1954, she retired from acting to become Mrs John Profumo but what she does in The Rocking Horse Winner is in a different league from Hobson’s work in Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets.  What comes across at first as shallow acting somehow develops into a remarkably unsentimental portrait of a woman trapped in the social prejudices and compulsions of her time and class, whose determined materialism limits her capacity for maternal love.  Hobson’s speech rhythms reinforce Hester’s impatience – convey that she never quite has time to bother with Paul.  Hobson is especially good in the pawn shop sequence, where Hester, desperate and offended, repeatedly struggles to subdue her distaste for the man she’s forced to do business with.  Although he’s much stronger than Hobson in Great Expectations, John Mills’s presence here reminds you that he was on the old side to play Pip; in his late thirties at the time, Mills got by thanks largely to his lack of height and weight.  He’s effortlessly middle-aged in The Rocking Horse Winner, which he also produced.  He plays Bassett with humour, warmth and empathy, without salt-of-the-earth condescension.

    John Howard Davies (the future producer of Fawlty Towers) is so memorable in Oliver Twist that it’s harder to say that he’s better in The Rocking Horse Winner but his Paul is emotionally richer than his Oliver.  Here’s another similarity between this picture and The Fallen Idol: both feature outstanding performances from (fair-haired) boy actors.  Davies, who was ten when the film was made, manages to seem both older and younger than that:  he’s willowy, not much shorter than John Mills; he combines eager innocence with utter seriousness of purpose.  Paul is doing what he knows his mother needs but she doesn’t know he’s doing it – and he doesn’t understand the implications of her incorrigible extravagance (or his father’s financial irresponsibility).  John Howard Davies makes the predicament poignant.

    Although it might seem far from typical D H Lawrence material, The Rocking Horse Winner sometimes reminded me of Sons and Lovers, and not just because the protagonists have the same first name.   It’s a matter of resonances rather than direct similarities.  The bonds between Gertrude Morel and her sons are much more complex than the relationship between Paul Grahame and his mother; besides, Hester doesn’t come close to reciprocating the strength of her son’s feelings for her.  However, she, like Gertrude, thinks she deserved a better husband than the one she got.  There’s no antagonism between Paul and Richard Grahame, as there is between Paul and Walter Morel – yet both fathers are excluded from the salient dynamic within the family.  Richard (at least as Hugh Sinclair plays him) is such a weak presence he’s hardly there at all and his interaction with Paul is negligible.  (He’s also conspicuously absent from the final scene between Hester and Bassett.)  Richard nevertheless makes an interesting remark in response to Hester’s concern that Paul is ‘such a strange boy – so easily upset’.  ‘He ought to be at school’ is her husband’s brisk reply.

    That’s a thought the viewer may have been having throughout the film.  Paul is as short of other children’s company as the diplomat’s son in The Fallen Idol but the latter’s isolation, in the much shorter timeframe of the story, is no mystery:  the boy is left in the care of the butler and his wife while his parents are briefly away from their embassy home.  Paul Grahame has two younger sisters but, apart from the early scenes in the nursery and round the Christmas tree, they’re barely seen together.  The boy has no friends; when he first meets Bassett, Paul enthuses that ‘It’s great having someone new’.  Despite that, you don’t get the impression that Paul is bored or lonely but the set-up is skewed so as to stress how a young child lives in his own world and the primacy of his mother in that world.  It makes Freudian sense that Richard Grahame, shiftless as he is, speaks up briefly for the reality principle.

    The intensity of Paul’s mission is expressed both in the alarming effort that he puts into finding winners and in the size of the fortune he makes doing so.  After an especially lucrative run, Oscar arranges for five thousand pounds of the money Paul and Bassett have accrued to be paid to Hester, in five annual instalments, under cover of a story from the family lawyer that she’s inherited the money from a long-lost relative.  The immediate consequences make clear why Paul’s quest is doomed to failure:  when Hester resumes her former shopping sprees, her son’s ‘luck’ deserts him.  The losing bets mount up and the cash-box contents dwindle.  As the Epsom Derby approaches, Paul is already ill, showing signs of nervous exhaustion.  He’s nonetheless determined to find the Derby winner and, on the eve of the race, embarks on a marathon rocking-horse ride that ends with him calling out the name ‘Malabar’ and collapsing unconscious.  That night, he keeps calling out the horse’s name; Oscar and Bassett place a sizeable bet on Malabar.  The following evening, Bassett comes to Paul’s bedside to tell him the horse has won the Derby.  The boy comes to briefly, receives the news happily and dies.

    In a letter to Edward Garnett, D H Lawrence summarised the psychosomatic resolution of Sons and Lovers as follows:

    ‘The battle goes on between the mother and [the women with whom Paul Morel is romantically involved], with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the ties of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die.’

    The death that climaxes The Rocking Horse Winner also feels emotionally necessary – though it’s more upsetting than Gertrude Morel’s:  John Howard Davies’s radiant benevolence makes matters worse in that respect.  There’s no consolation in the film’s ending, except for Bassett’s refusal to obey the anguished Hester’s order to burn, along with the rocking horse, the contents of the cash box (£70,000 – a staggering sum, equivalent to around £2.4m today).

    This gripping and powerful film often looks good.  Desmond Dickinson did the black-and-white cinematography: he and Anthony Pelissier combine mainly realistic visuals with eccentrically angled camerawork and heightened lighting for Paul’s rocking horse rides.  William Alwyn’s score supports the action without, for the most part, over-interpreting it.  Even allowing for the grim conclusion, it’s hard to understand why The Rocking Horse Winner seems to have been so overlooked at the time of its release.  Perhaps spending money on a cinema ticket to watch a spendthrift in action just didn’t appeal to potential audiences in post-war austerity Britain.

    21 April 2020

  • Ginger and Fred

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Federico Fellini (1986)

    Ginger and Fred’s clear main purpose was as a vehicle for pairing, for the only time, Fellini’s two best-known collaborators – Giulietta Masina, his wife and muse, and Marcello Mastroianni, the director’s alter ego in 8½ and perhaps elsewhere.  The title characters were once a popular dance partnership, performing famous Astaire and Rogers routines, but Fellini doesn’t clarify whether on stage or screen or both, let alone suggest what the real Fred and Ginger may have meant to Pippo Botticella (Mastroianni) and Amelia Bonetti (Masina) – or to Fellini himself.  Ginger and Fred is all about what this film’s two stars mean to the director, and to his audience.

    Amelia and Pippo parted company – she left him, to be precise – in the mid-1950s.  Thirty years later, she’s a mother and grandmother, running her own small business.  He earns a pittance selling encyclopedias door to door.  Their reunion takes place in Rome, where they’re invited to take part in the Christmas special of a popular, trashy television show – ‘Ed ecco a vuoi’.  (The phrase translates variously, perhaps best in this case as ‘We are proud to present …’)  Two in a cast of hundreds in the glitzy extravaganza, they’re to perform a medley of tunes from Astaire-Rogers musicals, giving viewers the chance to laugh at, or be sentimental about, the spectacle of two sixty-somethings still trying to hoof it.

    Fellini isn’t ideally qualified to satirise this particular strain of exploitative TV pap.  Ed ecco a vuoi is a freak show but plenty of those taking part are familiar types in the director’s own work – conspicuously big-breasted women, gender benders, a troupe of dwarfs, elderly men with the faces and hairdos of worn-out circus clowns.  A couple of participants provide relatively topical digs at the all-embracing nature of TV celebrity culture:  a business tycoon (Friedrich von Thun), who survived kidnapping by political extremists; and a notorious Mafioso (Francesco Casale), granted a day out of jail for the occasion.  The clerics in the line-up – an ancient thaumaturge monk (Jacques Henri Lartique) and a priest (Luciano Lombardo) defrocked after abandoning celibacy – are a different matter.  They serve as reminders that religion was part of tabloid news and fraudulent show business in Fellini’s world as far back as La dolce vita.

    Fellini’s own form as a freak-show ringmaster is both a plus and a minus in Ginger and Fred.  On the debit side, he devotes so much time to parading the bizarre contributors – in the outer reaches of the TV studios, the dressing rooms, and so on – that the eventual show, though amusing enough, is short on climactic impact, despite Franco Fabrizi’s lively cartoon of a dazzlingly insincere master of ceremonies.  It might also seem a disadvantage that, when it comes to skewering such an entertainment and its cultural context, Fellini’s heart isn’t really in it.  In fact, this turns out to be one of the film’s appealing qualities – an admission on its maker’s part, though it may be an inadvertent admission, that he’s naturally drawn to this kind of excess.

    As Amelia and others appearing in the show head for their hotel in the taxi that picked them up at the railway station, they pass billboards displaying comically exaggerated images of nearly naked women.  Fellini seems to set up details like this as if to register disapproval but is that why he keeps going back for more?   In her hotel room, Amelia switches on the set and channel hops – a hackneyed device for illustrating the spiritual desert that television fare represents (this felt like a cliché in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, nearly twenty years before this film).  Even here, though, Fellini finds commercial inanities to enjoy (and for us to enjoy).  On the TV screen, a puppet of Dante solemnly intones the opening lines of The Divine Comedy before quickly brightening up:  ‘the way forward had been lost – but with this new wristwatch …’

    There’s another reason for Fellini’s dwelling on his company of grotesques:  the story of Amelia and Pippo – as distinct from the past and present of Masina and Mastroianni – is rather thin.  Amelia’s sense of entitlement and neat propriety are nicely contrasted with Pippo’s louche outspokenness but it’s a contrast created almost entirely by the actors rather than the script.  Still, the underwriting does have benefits, too.  A power cut blacks out the TV show just as the principals prepare to dance.  In the darkness, they have an urgent, funny conversation, in which they resolve to make a last-minute escape (needless to say, the lights come back on before they can).  As they talk, they also admit to accepting the TV company’s comeback offer chiefly in order to see each other again.  That isn’t mentioned again once the show is over and the film is the better for that.  Saying no more is recognition of what’s realistic in Amelia’s and Pippo’s lives after a thirty-year separation – besides, you can see their feelings in their faces as they say goodbye at the railway station.  Ginger and Fred began with Amelia arriving by train and it closes with her departing on one.  As the train pulls out, the camera briefly picks up the figure of Pippo in a crowded station café.  The diminuendo ending feels right.

    It also comes as a relief because things have been set up for something grimmer.  The Ed ecco a vuoi cast also includes a clairvoyant/medium (Ginestra Spinola), whose son and assistant (Sergio Ciulli) is armed with tape-recordings of voices his mother picks up from the next world.  These include a man called Pippo, which irrationally unnerves his namesake still in the land of the living.  Pippo is worryingly breathless as he and Amelia rehearse their dance.  During the actual performance, he tap-dances too enthusiastically, loses his balance and falls heavily.  After struggling to his feet, he and Amelia complete the dance; the studio audience applauds with relief.  Even so, the mishap is too shocking to be (as it seems to be) instantly forgotten by all concerned, Pippo included.  Yet there’s an upside of this short-term memory loss:  the film shifts sharply away from the sub-They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? territory it seemed headed for.

    At a few minutes over two hours, Ginger and Fred takes too long to tell its skimpy story.  (Fellini wrote the screenplay with two other long-time collaborators, Tonino Guerra and Tullio Pinelli.)  The first half hour or so, before Pippo joins the party, is notably leisurely.  These scenes may well be an expression of Fellini’s loving admiration of Masina – her continuing presence, for him, sufficient in itself – but there’s not much else to see in them.  I’m not a fan of Masina’s celebrated performances in La strada and Nights of Cabiria but she can’t be accused of being Chaplinesque in Ginger and Fred and I liked her more here, without finding her portrait of Amelia greatly various or surprising.  Masina does have a very strong moment after Pippo’s dance-floor tumble:  as he and Amelia resume the routine, her trouper’s keep-going-keep-smiling determination is vividly intact.

    The lengthy build-up to Marcello Mastroianni’s entrance certainly increases anticipation, though when it finally happens, I was worried.  Amelia is already failing to sleep, thanks to fears that Pippo isn’t going to show up at all, and to the light from a TV transmission mast that moves unceasingly across her hotel room (it’s like a spotlight no longer interested in her).  Then loud snoring starts in the neighbouring room and Amelia goes there to protest.  She knocks on the door – it’s opened by Pippo, who looks and sounds theatrically dilapidated.  This first appearance raises fears that Mastroianni will be expected to do a broadly outrageous-old-character.  It’s a false alarm:  for the most part, he’s wonderfully true to himself, and increasingly affecting.  His voice, at whatever volume, is expressive – his eyes and hand movements are sources of pathos and humour (but he’s not Chaplinesque either!).  Mastroianni may not have been a professional dancer.  His natural physical grace creates the illusion of one.

    The spiritualist lady in the TV show is a charlatan but Nicola Piovani’s score channels the musical ghost of Nino Rota (who had died in 1979) very effectively – giving substance to the nostalgic texture of Ginger and Fred, strengthening the piece as a remembrance of Fellinis past.  When Pippo and Amelia come off stage after completing their dance, he badly needs to get his breath back.  The floor manager unkindly hurries the couple out of the way – they’re instantly expendable.  It’s another swipe at the ethos of mindless commercial television but, like most of the others, it doesn’t cut much ice.  Fellini is just as keen as the TV man to move Amelia and Pippo on – to that sentimental but engaging rail station leave-taking.  Ginger and Fred is an essentially self-indulgent film but that is part of its charm.   It came late in the careers, and in the lives, of all three of Fellini, Mastroianni and Masina.  They’d done enough by 1986 to earn a bit of self-indulgence.

    18 April 2020

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