Old Yorker

  • Grand National Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bob McNaught (1953)

    The Grand National has been an essential part of my year since 1964, when I was eight.  For a few years after that, it vied with Christmas as the annual event I most looked forward to, and which produced the strongest sense of anti-climax as soon as it was over.  I still sometimes have dreams in which it’s the eve of the National – a time, that is, of nearly unrivalled excited anticipation.  This year’s Grand National was one of the earliest Covid-19 sporting casualties, called off a few days before horse racing in the UK was suspended generally.  At the time of the announcement, advance notice didn’t seem as bad as the National-that-never-was of 1993 but I felt more deflated after watching this year’s virtual race, shown by ITV on 4 April at just the time the real thing should have been happening.  A few days later, I realised my brain didn’t quite accept there was no Grand National 2020.  In some part of my mind, I felt it must be taking place somehow, somewhere, maybe in a parallel universe.  I’ve recorded eighty-four films from television over the last three or four years that are still unwatched.  With cinemas closed, it’s now or never to work through these (though now could go on some time).  The prospect is a bit daunting but another kind of National substitute seemed a good place to start.

    Grand National Night opens with agreeable shots of horses exercising in the early morning.  These are rudely interrupted by a different kind of horse power as a car whizzes past, screeching to a halt outside the house that overlooks the gallops.  Out from the passenger seat steps Babs Coates (Moira Lister), arriving home after her latest night on the tiles.  Her husband, owner-trainer-breeder Gerald Coates (Nigel Patrick), has high hopes for his runner in the next day’s National but Babs, an alcoholic and a grade A bitch (the film was released in the US as Wicked Wife), instantly upstages the equines that she thinks occupy far too much of Gerry’s attention.  After a few scornfully obnoxious remarks to the Coates’s elderly butler Morton (Gibb McLaughlin) and a quick change from décolleté evening gown into jodhpurs and riding boots, Babs demands a horse.  The only one not out at exercise is a mare about to foal, which Babs nevertheless insists on taking.  She sets off across the gallops, riding the animal with nasty vigour.  They fall at the first fence, attempting to clear a hedge.  Babs, alas, is unhurt.

    Although I didn’t expect sporting action to dominate the thriller Grand National Night, I wasn’t prepared for just how unimportant the great race would prove to be.  The following afternoon, Gerry’s horse Star Mist does indeed win the National.  (By coincidence, the actual winner in the year of the film’s release was Early Mist.)  There are a couple of sequences supposedly at the races, substantiated by inserts of some old Pathé news film of the Grand National (Grand National Night is in black-and-white).  But Star Mist never appears and Gerry doesn’t even go to Aintree to watch the race.  He’s more concerned with the ill-used mare, which goes into labour after the exertions of the day before.  He’s concerned too with the mare’s attractive owner, Joyce Penrose (Beatrice Campbell).  It’s immediately clear that Joyce carries a torch for Gerry and he one for her, although they’re both terribly well behaved.

    Unlike Babs.  She’s carrying on with roué Jack Donovan (Leslie Mitchell), the manic chauffeur in the earlier scene; and she does go to Liverpool for the big race, staying overnight with her sister Pinky (Betty Ann Davies) beforehand.  Star Mist’s victory is a good reason for Babs to paint the town red on the Saturday evening but the celebrations come to an abrupt end when she falls out with Donovan, who’s ogling another woman.  Babs gets hold of his car and, even though she’s lost her licence after causing death through dangerous driving, careers back home in it that night.  There she falls out with Gerry too, goes at him with a knife, they struggle … along with Morton, we see and hear Donovan’s car driving off from the house.  The next morning, Babs’s dead body is found in the car in Liverpool.  A manhunt for the vehicle’s owner quickly tracks him down but Donovan has an alibi – ‘a red-headed one’.  The suspicions of the investigating detective, Inspector Ayling (Michael Hordern), fall instead on Gerry.

    As a piece of thriller plotting, Grand National Night is distinctly undernourished.  It has a more generous supply of clunky dialogue and coarse acting.  But the film, at this distance in time, is startling as an illustration – to some extent, it seems, an unconscious illustration – of contemporary snobbery and parochialism.  (It had something of the same effect on me as reading the rampantly conservative Josephine Tey’s mystery novel The Franchise Affair last year.)  These social prejudices come through in the monied characters’ attitude to not only their servants but also the police.  Ayling is described, disparagingly, as ‘a very ambitious man’.  The film-makers – like Gerry, Joyce, Pinky and the Coates’s louche acquaintance Buns Darling [sic] (Colin Gordon) – regard Ayling, in his efforts to nail Gerry for Babs’s death, as a jumped-up spoilsport who needs taking down a peg or two.  The film has much more time for Gerry’s creepy butler Morton, who recognises his first duty as loyalty to the master.  The local bobby Gibson (Barry MacKay) is altogether a better chap than the Liverpool CID man.  Gibson is less interested in helping Ayling solve the riddle of what happened to Babs than in arranging for Gerry and the unseen Star Mist to appear as guests of honour at an upcoming gymkhana.

    It’s soon revealed that Babs was dead when Gerry picked up her up from the drawing room floor to which she fell as they fought with the knife – an oriental knife brought home by Gerry as a memento of his two years in a Japanese prison camp.  When he mentions this to Ayling, the detective says nothing – his silence tantamount to proof the rotter didn’t even fight for his country in the recent World War.  It transpires that Babs had a weak heart and died of natural causes.  Gerry did wrong by driving her corpse back to Liverpool in Donovan’s car, abandoning both there and repeatedly lying to the police but Ayling is finally deprived of what he thought was compelling evidence of that nighttime journey.  In the film’s closing shot, Gerry and Joyce walk off in the direction of a sunny future together.  The director Bob McNaught thus achieves something rather remarkable.  When Babs is dispatched, you initially feel Gerry has done everyone a favour:  you mourn neither the character nor Moira Lister’s playing of her.  By the end of Grand National Night, this viewer felt close to outrage – on behalf of Ayling and that Gerry got the happy ending he didn’t really deserve.  Needless to say, the fact that he’s just trained a Grand National winner – a Grand National winner! – couldn’t  now be further from the hero’s mind.

    I must admit my feelings had something to do with the acting too.  Even with this material, Michael Hordern is so much more deft and varied than any of his one-note fellow cast members that it seemed only right that Inspector Ayling should come out on top.  Nigel Patrick, although he cuts a plausible figure as a racehorse trainer, doesn’t do much to dramatise Gerry’s predicament.  (The dynamics of the piece might have been very different with, say, Trevor Howard in the main role.)   The cast also includes Noel Purcell (the go-to man for resounding Oirishness in British cinema of the early post-war years),  as a vet.  May Hallatt is the maid who discovers Babs’s high-heeled shoes in Morton’s wardrobe.  (Don’t go there.)

    Grand National Night is adapted from a play by Campbell and Dorothy Christie.  There isn’t a screenplay credit as such:  by the end, you can’t help wondering if this is a case of no one being prepared to own up although a ‘brought to the screen by’ credit points the finger at George Minter.  (He isn’t the producer – that was Phil C Samuels for the Renown Pictures Corporation, UK.)   Jack Asher’s camerawork includes occasional, striking zooms in and out, at supposedly key moments.  The sharp editing is by the subsequently celebrated Anne V Coates (an Oscar winner for Lawrence of Arabia a decade later).

    So:  one down, eighty-three to go.  Next up – I’m going to try and find a link between each backlog film watched and the succeeding one – will be The Rocking Horse Winner.

    15 April 2020

  • Fire Will Come

    Old YorkerFilm review

    O que arde

    Oliver Laxe (2019)

    Although it doesn’t feel short as you watch, Fire Will Come runs only eighty-five minutes.  The first six are devoted to images of the movement and collapse of trees in a forest.  An hour into the film (available on Curzon Home Cinema), the promised conflagration of the title arrives.  In the mountains of Galicia, a hamlet and the surrounding area burn – for more than ten screen minutes.  No one is to be seen in the opening arboreal sequence.  There are people battling the inferno but the viewer isn’t encouraged to regard them in a conventional way.  You’re not concerned for the safety of the firefighters, who are upstaged by the visual power and beauty of a flaming night sky.  The length of these two episodes, combined with their focus on landscape and destruction of the natural world, gives an idea of where the writer-director Oliver Laxe’s priorities lie.

    This isn’t to say that human beings don’t matter in Fire Will Come (the apocalyptic flavour of the English title is absent from the Galician original, which translates literally as ‘that which burns’).   The two principals, in particular, are compelling camera subjects throughout.  But Laxe, whose third feature this is, and Santiago Fillol, who shares the screenplay credit with him, don’t trouble to explore the people in their story or pursue the suggestive thematic elements they give to it.   In contrast, Laxe’s image-making is meticulously detailed, including his images of people and animals – the middle-aged protagonist Amador (Amador Arias Mon), his aged mother Benedicta (Benedicta Sánchez), her Alsatian dog, the three cows that Benedicta keeps on her smallholding in the mountains.  Mauro Herce’s lighting is perhaps even more remarkable indoors than out.  Shots of Amador and/or his mother sitting or eating in the kitchen of Benedicta’s home are like portrait paintings come to life.  These shots are often held for some time so the compositions are nearly still life too.

    In the tenebrous woodland of the opening section, a selva oscura if ever there was one, the trees’ motion is both disturbing and verging on comical – as they keel over, the trees look to be getting in each other’s way.   The tone changes sharply once Laxe reveals that a bulldozer is bringing them down.  He cuts from this opening to pairs of human hands handling a hefty dossier:  the transition brought to mind the university I worked at and the rueful I-see-we’ve-destroyed-another-rainforest joke that committee members made ad nauseam about their bundles of papers.  The one tree left standing at the end of the introduction is a eucalyptus, whose unique survival reinforces its sinister look.  Later on, Amador describes this Australian immigrant to the region as ‘a plague … worse than the devil’.  He’s unhappy too to discover that a local man called Inazio (Inazio Brao) is repairing tumbledown properties in the area with a view to attracting tourists.  There’s a persistent implication that Fire Will Come has something to say on environmental damage, including (like Mark Jenkin’s Bait) gentrification.  Yet Laxe persistently refuses to say it.

    That dossier appears to be a set of case notes.  As it passes from one pair of hands to another, voices on the soundtrack discuss Amador Coro.  An alleged pyromaniac, he has served two years in jail for setting ‘the whole mountainside on fire’ and is now being released on parole.  One of the voices, which presumably belong to police or parole officers, refers to Amador as a ‘poor bastard’:  there’s a hint here that he may not be guilty of the crime for which he was convicted, that he could be an undeservedly marked man.  He’s definitely a solitary one.  After getting off the bus he catches after leaving prison, he sets out to walk to Benedicta’s smallholding, refusing a car-driver’s offer of a lift.  (As he continues on his way, Amador Arias Mon’s lone/ly wolf gait is expressive.)  Later, he turns down Inazio’s offer of work, choosing instead to help look after his mother’s cows.  In spite of her remote habitation, Benedicta is more sociable than her son.  We see her at the well-attended funeral of a neighbour.  It’s she who suggests to Inazio that he offer Amador a job.  When the vet Elena (Elena Fernández) calls to treat one of her cows, Benedicta urges Elena to stay for coffee.

    The suggestion that Amador will be on the receiving end of give-a-dog-a-bad-name prejudice proves to be deceptive.  Others in the vicinity see him as an oddball but there are no signs of ill will towards him – not until, that is, a sequence both pivotal and puzzling.  This takes place in a bar in the town of Navia, where Amador drives one day.  You assume this is to meet Elena.  He first meets her when the cow that she later treats is stuck in water and Amador can’t single-handedly get the animal out.  As they drive back in Elena’s jeep, Amador, for the first and only time in the film, nearly smiles, during a sparse, halting conversation about the Leonard Cohen song (‘Suzanne’) that Elena has playing.  She also asks Amador if he ever goes to Navia and he says he sometimes does.  He puts on his best clothes for his visit there but as he sits alone, watching other people in the bar, Amador looks even more bereft than usual.  When Elena approaches, he says a glum hello and asks if people have told her about him.  She says they have but ‘you know how people are’.  Elena then asks how the cow’s doing and the scene ends.  Oliver Laxe has been elliptical throughout but this sequence is something else.   From the way it’s played, it’s hard to tell whether Amador and Elena had arranged to meet at all, let alone whether what Elena has now learned about Amador’s reputation and criminal record has changed her mind about spending time with him.

    This is a turning point in the story, nevertheless.  Back at the smallholding, Benedicta calls in vain for the Alsatian dog that wanted to follow Amador when he drove into Navia.  (The animal is never seen again; there’s no indication of what happened to it.)  As he drives homewards, Amador passes fire engines heading in the opposite direction, sirens blaring.  He is then absent from the action throughout the night-long struggle to control the blaze.  None of those fighting the fire voices suspicion as to who might be responsible – if anyone is:  Laxe seems to leave open the possibility of a purely natural event in the intense summer heat.  The following morning, there’s nothing to suggest that the police are investigating the fire.  It’s left to Inazio, whose renovated cottages were destroyed in the blaze, to take the law into his own hands and beat up Amador.  Inazio’s pals eventually persuade him to stop.  Once the men have gone, Benedicta approaches and asks Amador if he’s OK.  He silently gets to his feet.  Mother and son walk off together.  The film ends.

    As might be guessed from the shared forenames of characters and those playing them, the cast are not professional actors.  In a short but instructive Sight & Sound (April 2020) interview, Laxe gives the following answer to Jonathan Romney’s question about how he found his non-professionals:

    ‘Through auditions, mainly.  Benedicta [Sánchez] emigrated to Brazil in her twenties, worked as a photographer, then came back.  She’s 95 now, and basically a hermit.  Inazio [Abrao] is a carpenter.  Elena [Fernández] really is a vet.  I always want to work with the person more than the character.’

    That, at least, is clear from Fire Will Come.  Laxe has assembled a collection of arresting faces and physiques, gets some fine naturalistic acting from his cast but shows no interest in penetrating appearance or behaviour.  We never know if Amador is an eccentric eco-warrior, an antisocial scapegoat or someone else.

    The fires in the film are real ones that raged in Galicia two consecutive summers.  These are perennial acts of God rather than arson although, in the second year, after unprecedentedly heavy rainfall, Laxe and his crew had to wait a long time for them to start.  I assume that Fire Will Come‘s most distressing sight, a skinny horse stumbling through a field in the aftermath of the fire that has left the creature burned and blind, was something the film-makers actually saw.  The animals in evidence are sometimes as eloquent as the landscape.  As Laxe also explains in his S&S interview:

    ‘I wanted to represent the ineffable.  In that [opening] sequence, you have the forests and the machines, but there’s something else behind them – the machines aren’t just machines, the trees aren’t just trees.  I wanted to make people feel that behind the world of exterior forms is another world of subtle forms. …’

    Laxe realises the natural world with such skill and visual imagination that those first images, and some others, do have an almost animistic charge.  It’s frustrating that his people remain opaque.  This slow-moving film is often impressive but it’s more interesting to read and write about than it is to experience.  Unlike another recent fire-themed enigma, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Fire Will Come is a mystery that’s less involving than exasperating.

    10 April 2020

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