Old Yorker

Michael Caton-Jones (1989)

From early in his screen career, John Hurt was regularly on the receiving end of prejudice and/or injustice and/or vicious bullying – as Timothy Evans in 10 Rillington Place (1971), Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (1975), the prisoner Max in Midnight Express (1978), John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980), Winston Smith in Ninety Eighty-Four (yes, 1984).   Even when benighted social or institutional forces didn’t have it in for his character, Hurt was liable to be cast as a victim – as, for example, the jockey Bob Champion, suffering from cancer in Champions (1984).  The last-named was also a heroic survivor (Champion will be seventy this year); so, in a very different way, was Quentin Crisp.  But John Hurt was usually up against it and his empathy with those he played often reinforced their pathos – though Hurt always had the good taste to avoid pushing for easy sympathy.  The makers of Scandal are at pains to present Hurt’s Stephen Ward as – unequivocally – the British establishment’s scapegoat in the Profumo affair of 1963.  Although the idea is essentially sound, Michael Caton-Jones (whose first feature this was) and the screenwriter Michael Thomas oversimplify Ward and weakly sentimentalise his relationship with Christine Keeler.  They rely too heavily on John Hurt’s presence to substantiate Ward’s victimhood.

In the opening sequence, Stephen Ward stands in a London street – perhaps Cavendish Square, off Harley Street, where he ran his osteopathy practice.  He grins contentedly and humorously at the sight of pretty girls walking or cycling by.  This encapsulates Scandal’s conception of Ward.  John Hurt is entirely convincing as a man who seeks and finds pleasure in life – hobnobbing and gossiping with the rich and famous, often at naughty parties, though it’s not obvious from this movie that his hedonism included having sex himself.  He stood trial on trumped-up charges – living off the immoral earnings of Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and so on – but the film whitewashes Ward in order to stress the unfairness of his fate.  (He committed suicide, after being deserted by his friends in high places and before the trial verdict, which he saw as inevitable, was delivered.)  Caton-Jones and Thomas downplay the irony that a talented social climber ended up getting bitten by the hand that for some years had fed him.  (His osteopathy clients included members of the royal family and British aristocracy, as well as assorted other celebrities.)  Although the characterisation of Ward at his trial as a pimp was wrong, it seems he did talent spot in night clubs etc, introducing attractive, available young women to society acquaintances who might enjoy their company in bed.  Scandal doesn’t make that clear; nor is there evidence of the two-way mirror set up in his home at Wimpole Mews that allowed Ward and his guests to watch the bedroom action.

As a result, the film’s Stephen Ward seems to invite Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) to move in at Wimpole Mews out of the goodness of his heart.  Later on, he knows this is where assignations between Christine and the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo (Ian McKellen), are taking place during their short-lived sexual liaison of 1961 – but Ward’s attitude is nothing other than hospitable.  As for Christine, she seems to regard Stephen as the affectionate father figure she never had when she was growing up.  There’s a scene in which she and Ward nestle together on the sofa at his home:  when Christine murmurs, in an almost put-on complaining tone, ‘You don’t care’, he replies, quietly but seriously, ‘I do – more than you could possibly know’.  The conversation is interrupted by Mandy Rice-Davies (Bridget Fonda), who appears in a state of undress from a room behind the sofa; all three start to giggle.  This deflects attention from the question:  what does Ward’s remark mean?   While it’s believable that the brittle Christine Keeler’s initial revelations to a tabloid newspaper were made in a fit of pique at Stephen Ward (and got the press on the trail of John Profumo), the film’s interpretation of her feelings for Ward makes it harder to make sense of the damaging statements she made about him at his trial.  There’s not a strong implication either that Christine (unlike Mandy Rice-Davies) is shrewdly mercenary or that, when she tells the court of Ward’s ‘influence’ over her, she’s been pressurised by the police into doing so.

Nineteen sixty-three:  that was the year that was – the year I first took an interest in the news on the BBC (we didn’t get ITV until the very end of 1963) and in the Daily Herald.  The Profumo affair didn’t spark that.  I remember earlier events – the death of Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson’s election as his successor, the Beeching Report, Princess Alexandra’s marriage to Angus Ogilvy.  (Sport and pop music highlights don’t count in this list because I was already interested in those.)  But Stephen Ward et al persisted in the headlines through the summer.  I can remember being in my uncle’s car and hearing a radio news report of Ward’s death.  I didn’t understand what had been going on (I was seven years old) but that made it all the more intriguing – as did the exotic sound of the name Profumo.   (I guess it was its suggestion of fumes that linked it in my mind with ‘Passing Clouds’ cigarettes, with the picture of a Cavalier on its pink packet.  My father occasionally smoked these.)  Then there was Christine Keeler:  I liked her name too and thought she was beautiful, though I could tell my parents were uncomfortable about my enthusiasm.  Ten years or so later, I read Ludovic Kennedy’s The Trial of Stephen Ward.   There was a good deal of publicity attending the release of Scandal in 1989.  My interest was further increased because Pet Shop Boys had written a theme song for it, which Dusty Springfield sang.

With this track record, it’s no surprise that the film easily held my attention, on its original release and on this second viewing at BFI (as part of this month’s John Hurt season).  That’s rather in spite of Michael Caton-Jones’s uninspired storytelling.  There’s plenty of permissive behaviour and exposed flesh in evidence but hedonistic energy is in short supply – Scandal sometimes seems like the work of an indifferent voyeur.  When Johnny Edgecombe, the West Indian lover from whom Keeler had recently split, turned up at Wimpole Mews in December 1962 and began shooting at the front door, he effectively fired the starting gun on the Profumo affair.  (The incident got the names of the Mews ménage in the papers; it was in the light of this that Christine started talking indiscreetly to the press.)  Although the gunfire from Johnny (Roland Gift) wakes up Scandal too, what happens subsequently is, for the most part, oddly tepid – almost as if the film-makers’ priority was to distance themselves as far as possible from the excited press treatment of the scandal in 1963.  This would be fine if Caton-Jones and Michael Thomas provided insight instead but they don’t.  Thomas first wrote the piece as a TV mini-series but negotiations with the BBC and Channel 4 came to nothing.  You wonder if his screenplay is an abbreviated version of what he’d written for television and whether it needed to be more fully reconceived.  Although Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler are the main characters, neither is allowed to be the central consciousness of the story, which is told almost dutifully, with a paucity of enlivening detail.

A rare exception to this makes you all the more aware of what’s mostly lacking.  At one of Lord Astor (Leslie Phillips)’s house parties at Cliveden, there’s a race in the swimming pool involving the host, Profumo and Yevgeny Ivanov (Jeroen Krabbé), the naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London, whose fling with Keeler virtually coincided with Profumo’s.  (The national security implications of this were, of course, an important part of the scandal that subsequently broke.  The film reconstructs the BBC television interview in which Lord Hailsham (Iain Cuthbertson) memorably ticked off his interviewer (Robert Mackenzie)[1]  before pompously asserting that ‘a great [political] party is not to be brought down by a woman of easy virtue and a proven liar’.)   Profumo wins the Cliveden race.  In a later scene between Ivanov and Christine, the Russian complains that the winner cheated, by running instead of swimming the last few yards:  Ivanov considers this symptomatic of Britain’s moral bankruptcy.   There’s a hint here – though it’s only a drop in the swimming pool – that the material might have made a sharp satirical comedy rather than the half-hearted tragedy (of Stephen Ward) that Scandal turns out to be.

Roland Gift, lead singer in Fine Young Cannibals at the time, can hardly act at all but he’s an exception in a large cast of mostly familiar faces.  It includes Jean Alexander (Christine’s mother), Deborah Grant (Profumo’s wife, the former actress Valerie Hobson), James Villiers (a senior Tory – presumably Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, though this isn’t made clear), Daniel Massey (Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who led the prosecution at Ward’s trial, though he’s more notorious for doing the same job at the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, three years previously) and Richard Morant (one of Ward’s friends).  John Hurt is outstanding but there’s particularly good work too from Ian McKellen and Jeroen Krabbé.  Johnny Shannon, who usually played bookies in television plays, contributes a vivid cameo as Peter Rachman.  McKellen succeeds in spite of the distracting topknot on the skullcap that he wears as the balding Profumo.  McKellen may be miscast; there’s a sense of his working to suppress his natural sensitivity and get Profumo’s emotional bluntness but it’s a very intelligent performance.

The two girls are a problem, however.  It’s difficult, for a start, to convey how remarkably young Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were – Keeler was nineteen when she had her liaison with Profumo, and Rice-Davies two years younger.  They looked older, it’s true, but Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and Bridget Fonda (twenty-seven and twenty-four respectively) are wrong in other ways.  They’re brassy only in their early scenes, when both are showgirls at a Soho cabaret club.  Although the real Christine Keeler was glamorous, you want a contrast between her photogenic appearance and her less sophisticated personality – a contrast that Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, although she’s competent, doesn’t supply.  With her fine-drawn features, Bridget Fonda is much prettier than the eccentric, coarsely sexy Mandy Rice-Davies.  Fonda’s wit transcends that mismatch but her attempts at an English accent – then occasionally a Welsh one – are inhibiting.  By trying to sound right, she tends to lose the sense of her lines (though she delivers the famous ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ in court very well).

Michael Caton-Jones captures the period mainly by recourse to standard peripheral decoration – bits of black-and-white archive film at the start, pop songs on the primary soundtrack as well as playing on the characters’ radios.  As a bridge between 1961 and mid-1962, he inserts a second archive montage, carelessly including what is surely post-1962 footage of the Beatles and Martin Luther King’s August 1963 speech in Washington DC.  The curiously formal original music is by Carl Davis.  Pet Shops Boys’ ‘Nothing Has Been Proved’ plays over the closing credits.  It’s an interesting track:  though Neil Tennant’s lyrics are characteristically clever, they pack in almost too much information about the Profumo affair.  Still, the melancholy melody and arrangement are lovely and effective – and Dusty Springfield’s voice naturally contributes to the evocation of 1963.  (It was in November of that year that she released her first solo single, ‘I Only Want to Be with You’.)

The closing legends include the standard misleading information that in 1964, ‘the Conservative government fell from power, exhausted by scandal’.  The fallout from Profumo perhaps contributed to the (5.7%) swing from the Conservatives to the Liberals in the October 1964 general election but Labour increased its share of the vote by only a tiny amount (less than 0.3%) from the previous election in 1959 and gained an overall majority of just four seats.  This was in spite of Harold Wilson’s formidable communication skills and Alec Douglas-Home’s being written off as a major electoral liability.  Labour was ahead in the opinion polls in 1963 before the Profumo affair exploded.  The affair may well have marked a sea change in the British public’s attitudes towards politicians (though that’s debatable) but in 1964 the Tories were ‘exhausted’ by having governed for thirteen consecutive years – and were defeated by time-for-a-change syndrome – as much as by scandal.

19 January 2018

[1]  ‘Of course there’s a security problem.  Don’t be so silly!  A Secretary of State for War can’t have a woman shared with a spy … The question is not whether there was a security risk, but whether there was an actual breach of security.  Be sensible!’