Old Yorker

  • Mad Jack (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Jack Gold (1970)

    From my late teens until my mid-twenties, Michael Jayston was my favourite actor.  I was a serious fan.  In 1976, I travelled down from Yorkshire to London to see him play the psychiatrist Martin Dysart, in Peter Shaffer’s Equus at the Albery Theatre.  (I still have the programme that Jayston autographed at the stage door – a place I’ve never hung around at for anyone since.)  The following year, aged twenty-two, I made a point of watching Jackanory because he was the reader.  I remember going over from York to Leeds for a one-off screening of the film Peter Hall made of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, in which Jayston was Teddy.  (I’d guess this was 1978-ish though the film was made five years previously.)  A few weeks after I moved to London in early 1980, I saw him and Maria Aitken as Elyot and Amanda in a production of Private Lives in Greenwich.  Jayston was a member of the RSC in the 1960s but I’d first seen him on television.  In the last series of the ATV drama The Power Game (which my mother loved) in 1969; as Rochester in the 1973 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre; in the title role in Quiller (1975), a BBC spy series inspired by the character in The Quiller Memorandum (the series flopped and wasn’t recommissioned).  It was an earlier television role that had launched his very brief career in leading movie roles:  he was cast as Tsar Nicholas II in Franklin J Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) after the producer, Sam Spiegel, had seen Jayston in Mad Jack, a BBC Wednesday Play directed by Jack Gold.

    Michael Jayston has continued to work regularly on stage and screen (and as the voice of commercials and audio books) but it’s decades since he’s had big parts in television, let alone cinema.  He was Peter Guillam to Alec Guinness’s George Smiley in the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy at the end of the 1970s.  A decade later, he was excellent as Neville Badger in Yorkshire Television’s comedy-drama A Bit of a Do, adapted from the book by David Nobbs.  It seems from YouTube that Jayston is a smallish star in the Doctor Who universe:  he played a character called the Valeyard in 1986.  But his television CV since the turn of the millennium reads largely like a tour of the usual ‘continuing-drama’ suspects – EastEnders, The Bill, Holby City, Casualty, Emmerdale, Doctors – with the odd appearance in relatively upmarket things like Foyle’s War.   It isn’t easy now to understand why I thought Jayston was such a big deal.  Watching a Midsomer Murders a couple of years ago, in which he was a dodgy vicar, I didn’t think:  what a waste – at his age, he should be doing King Lear.  Yet, when I saw the BFI were doing a Jack Gold retrospective, I urgently checked to see if Mad Jack was included.  Because (a) it made a difference in Michael Jayston’s career and (b) I never saw it at the time, Mad Jack developed in the 1970s an almost mythic significance for me – which it’s never quite lost.

    Mad Jack’s title refers to its protagonist Siegfried Sassoon, who acquired the nickname for his seemingly reckless courage under fire in the Great War trenches.  A Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Sassoon was awarded the Military Cross in July 1916.  (The citation read: ‘For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded. Owing to his courage and determination all the killed and wounded were brought in’.)  At the end of a spell of convalescent leave the following year, Sassoon declined to return to duty and sent a letter to his commanding officer explaining why.  Entitled ‘Finished with the War:  A Soldier’s Declaration’, the letter expressed Sassoon’s view ‘that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest’.  Tom Clarke’s script for Mad Jack focuses on the immediate aftermath of the letter, which was published in the press and read, by a sympathetic MP, to the House of Commons; and on Sassoon’s state of mind, as he waits to learn if his refusal to return to action will result in a court martial.

    This sixty-eight-minute piece has considerable historical interest as television drama.  The very explicit verbal articulation of the moral and political issues in Clarke’s script suggests a theatre piece but Jack Gold and the cameraman Nat Crosby ensure that Mad Jack, shot entirely on location, has the appearance of a movie.  Watching it at BFI, I didn’t get the sense – as I sometimes have had, watching studio-based TV dramas screened there – that I was looking at the people on the screen as larger, more exposed images than was originally intended.  The movements into flashback, as Sassoon remembers his time as a soldier, seem rather primitive now but Mad Jack tells a compelling story and it’s an interestingly unusual example of a Wednesday Play that dealt with historical rather than contemporary material.  Worth noting too that, while average audience numbers were declining by the time it was screened as part of the last Wednesday Play season (Play for Today began later in 1970), there would still have been an audience approaching five million for Mad Jack when it was broadcast – at 9.10 pm on BBC 1 on 4 February 1970.

    The play is built around Michael Jayston’s face and voice – and succeeds chiefly thanks to the impressive traction between their different kinds of expressiveness.   The voiceover includes excerpts from some of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems and Jayston reads these superlatively, with a fine, tense blend of controlled anger and despair.  In Sassoon’s conversations with other characters, Jayston is subtly eloquent.  His relatively miniaturist use of eyes, smile and facial muscles complements his speech perfectly:  conveying a great deal vocally and giving away little physically proves a highly effective means of increasing the expressiveness of the character’s face – we know from the voice how much more Sassoon is feeling and thinking than he’s showing.  Jayston was nominated for the equivalent of a Best Actor BAFTA[1] for his performance in Mad Jack (and for playing Beethoven in the BBC Biography slot later in 1970).  According to IMDB, this is the only screen work for which he’s ever been nominated for an award.

    Jayston gets good support from, among others, Michael Pennington, Clive Swift and that splendid character actor James Cossins; both the last two named, as might be guessed, play military top brass.  A tea-party gathering of cultural celebrities who supported Sassoon’s stand – Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey et al – is too caricatural (though Jonathan Cecil’s natural eccentricity makes him an amusing Strachey).  There’s overkill in a joke-patriotic music-hall sequence:  Ann Beach plays the soubrette with aplomb but Jack Gold doesn’t need to show the foolish faces of the lapping-it-up audience and have Sassoon, an unsmiling spectator of the show, express his thoughts in voiceover about the careless public appetite for war.  The authorities eventually decide not to court-martial Sassoon but instead to deem him unfit for service on medical grounds and arrange for him to be treated for shellshock.  It’s a strength of Mad Jack, in long retrospect, that it ends with Sassoon’s arrival at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh – thus avoiding substantial overlap with the period of Sassoon’s life that has since become better known in print and in cinema, through Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991) and Gillies MacKinnon’s screen adaptation of it (in 1997).  Carl Davis’s sensitive, elegiac music is another of Mad Jack’s assets.

    The BFI programme note included two admiring morning-after reviews from 1970 – Peter Black’s in the Daily Mail was particularly good.  James Thomas in the Daily Express predicted that:

    ‘On the strength of work like this, the film industry will claim Mr Gold full time – and the sad thing is that he could certainly do many more people much more good by staying in TV.’

    There must have been a widespread feeling at the time that Thomas’s forecast would be an accurate one.  In the event, Jack Gold went on to make many more films for television, among them The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1972), Stocker’s Copper (also 1972, as a Play for Today), The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and  Goodnight Mister Tom (1998).  Gold, who died in 2015, did make cinema films but none had anything like the impact of his best-known television work.  Mad Jack may no longer be in the ‘best-known’ category but it’s surely up there with Gold’s best in terms of quality.  I’m so glad I’ve seen it at last – and seen Michael Jayston at his best too.

    Postscript

    On YouTube, you can watch Michael Jayston, who turned eighty last year, not only as an amiable interviewee about his services to Doctor Who but also in a short called The Man Who Choked, made in 2014.  Written and directed by Ross Jameson and produced for a budget of £5,000 under the auspices of Creative England, this eleven-minute film is a (virtual) two-hander.  Set in some kind of institution, it’s about an elderly man (Jayston) whose male nurse (Charlie Creed-Miles) appears to have discovered from a bedside diary the secrets of the patient’s criminal sexual past.  The nurse threatens to give the apparently bedridden man a taste of his own medicine.  In a pair of spectacles whose thick lenses distort his eyes, Charlie Creed-Miles somewhat overdoes the sadistic menace; the twist in the tale is a slick shocker; the whole thing borders on tasteless.  The Man Who Choked is worth watching, though, for the sight of Michael Jayston’s now lined face and the occasional sound of his still distinctive voice.

    30 July 2016

    [1] Prior to 1976, BAFTA was the Society of Film and Television Arts.

  • The Sound of Music

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Wise (1965)

    Seeing The Sound of Music for the first time in eight years – and eleven years after its original release – was very enjoyable.  This is an important film in that it displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing picture of all time but it didn’t, as was feared in 1965, herald a spate of like-minded and comparably successful movie musicals – a prospect dreaded by Pauline Kael in her famous review, entitled ‘The Sound of Money’.  Attempted blockbusters made in the years that followed proved cripplingly expensive for the industry – Doctor Dolittle, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Hello, Dolly! were among the costly box-office failures.  As Julie Andrews’s Maria says (twice), ‘God never closes a door without opening a window’ and The Sound of Music can be seen as indirectly responsible for killing off these sprawling musicals.  It’s not unlikely that the extraordinary quality of Cabaret (1972), a very different kettle of fish that’s had huge critical and popular success, will do for would-be emulators in a similar way and for even longer, although the forthcoming screen versions of the ‘classy’ musicals A Little Night Music and A Chorus Line may prove otherwise[1].

    It may have an Alpine setting but The Sound of Music is the Mount Everest of popular cinema.  This is many people’s favourite movie of all time and Odeon cinemas seem very pleased to have it back.  They’ve devised a new legend for the poster, in honour of the picture’s enduring allure:  ‘You can’t beat the best’.  In the mid-sixties, when I was a child, The Sound of Music had a legendary reputation.  We didn’t believe the film would ever be shown in York because, people said, our screens just weren’t big enough to accommodate it.  Pilgrimages were made to Leeds.  My mother took me, when I was ten.  After we’d queued patiently outside the cinema, I found the film a bit boring for about the first hour.  I remember forcing myself to laugh during ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ and this somehow worked:  I started laughing genuinely and things picked up from that point.  If they hadn’t, I’d have pretended otherwise.  Any word said against The Sound of Music was frowned upon among my friends and our parents.  I saw it again two years later and enjoyed it much more.

    I’d forgotten until this third viewing how strongly its songs are ingrained in my memory.  Re-experiencing the sentimental impact of ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ and the reprise of ‘Maria’ at the heroine’s wedding to Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) was emotionally powerful.   Although the clunkiness of the dialogue and the sustained manipulativeness of Robert Wise’s direction are more obvious and irritating now, the basic strengths of The Sound of Music are unchanged:  it’s supremely self-confident and, as the movie cliché goes, ‘it moves’.  Three hours long, it’s streamlined beside clumsy, post-Cabaret attempts at wholesome family musicals like Mame, Lost Horizon and The Slipper and the Rose (although parts of Bryan Forbes’s film are all right).  It’s ironic, though, that so many of its diehard fans adore The Sound of Music for its niceness, see it as a good deed in a weary world.   It’s an all-time great as a piece of commercial calculation.

    [1976]

    [1] Afternote:  They didn’t.  Hal Prince’s film of A Little Night Music was poorly received in 1977 and A Chorus Line proved not to be even ‘forthcoming’.  Richard Attenborough’s screen version finally arrived in 1985 and was a critical and commercial failure.

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