Old Yorker

  • P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Michael Apted (1982)

    It occurred to me a few minutes in that, in the early 1980s, the likes of Michael Apted and Jack Rosenthal had clout enough to mean that a piece of modest scope and ambition involving them could make it to the big screen.  I’d forgotten that P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang was originally shown on Channel 4 rather than released in cinemas even though it’s back on television now on Film 4.  I’d never seen it before – it was a combination of recently watching Apted’s 56 Up and wanting to know what the title meant that made me record it.  Of course ‘p’tang yang kipperbang’ is a nonsense phrase, used repeatedly by fourteen-year-old Alan Duckworth and his school friends.  They have a penchant for other extravagant verbal inventions, especially to express their revulsion for girls, kissing etc (‘vomituosity’ and words to that effect).  Needless to say, their vocabulary conceals these grammar school boys’ intense and fearful curiosity about such things.  When Duckworth (known as ‘Quack Quack’) gets cast in a school play with Ann Lawton, the girl in his class about whom he continually fantasises, he starts telling his pals that their made-up words are  stupid.

    Jack Rosenthal enjoyed great success and acclaim as a teller of adolescent boy tales on television in the 1970s – The Evacuees, Bar Mitzvah Boy – but I tended to find his characters rigidly preconceived, sometimes embarrassing.   He relies heavily on audience recognition – not of full personalities but of familiar turns of phrase.  This is enough for many people to be convinced by a character – to say ‘I know someone just like her’.  But Rosenthal rarely reveals anything surprising or suggests anything original.   In P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang he writes about an adolescence nearly contemporary with his own – the film is set in 1948, when he was sixteen going on seventeen – yet Rosenthal’s teenagers are constructed as if he’d got an idea of what they were like from books or films rather than out of the experience of being one himself.   When Alan finally gets to tell Ann what he really feels about her, he concludes with:

    ‘But I’ll never forget you. And how you made me feel. Even when I’m 51 or something.’

    Spoken like a true fifty-one-year-old (Rosenthal’s age in 1982).  Earlier in this improbably long speech, Alan tells Ann that ‘Kids kid themselves’.  The only thing that works in favour of this archness is that John Albasiny, who plays Alan, has a strangely middle-aged quality.  It’s a pity that Michael Apted – who you expect, from his Seven Up films, to know better – also gives Alan a designed schoolboy untidiness.  P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang is essentially nostalgic, sentimental and emotionally very limited:  David Earl’s irritating music is perfectly appropriate and Tony Pierce-Roberts’ photography bathes the outdoor scenes in a golden glow.  Alan is a cricket fan.  He fantasises not only about Ann but about playing a match-winning innings for England in the Ashes series of 1948.   In the early stages, Apted and Rosenthal use extracts from John Arlott’s test match commentaries of the time (although the sound quality makes it clear they’re not the original broadcasts).   Later on, the elderly Arlott’s voice provides ‘humorous’ commentary on Quack Quack’s attempts to score with Ann – as the story goes on, there’s an increasing dependence on John Arlott’s contributions.

    John Albasiny and the other kids can act but Rosenthal’s approach proves infectious because, for the most part, that’s what they’re doing too evidently:  it’s only the nonsense words that come out fairly naturally.  Alan, Ann (Abigail Cruttenden) and Geoffrey Whitaker (Maurice Dee), a well-presented creep whom the other boys loathe, get cast together in the school play.  It’s typical of the lazy script that it’s a cast of three only, there are no auditions that we see, and the kids don’t rehearse with props.  The play is directed by the English teacher Miss Land, who’s in a tizzy for much of the film because she’s had it off with the school groundsman Tommy, and her period is late.   Alison Steadman overplays in nearly all her scenes in the classroom and at play rehearsals and Miss Land’s snobbish attitude towards the proletarian Tommy is crudely written but the best scene in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang is between these two – a testy conversation in a barn with some believable emotions emerging.   Garry Cooper as Tommy gives the film’s most straightforward and appealing performance.   This is in spite of the wearying predictability of the character he’s playing.   Tommy and Alan take a shine to each other, and the young man tells the boy about his experiences as a soldier in the recent war – ‘Dunkirk, El Alamein, the Battle of the Bulge, and Burma’.  He turns out to be a deserter, of course.  The last we see of Tommy, he’s being bundled into a police van.

    19 July 2012

  • Providence

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alain Resnais (1977)

    The trailer for Last Year at Marienbad beforehand – presumably the original trailer in French cinemas in 1961, although some adulatory reviews in English had been inserted as legends – was worth seeing.  It was more enlightening than the whole of Marienbad itself or, at least, made clear that we, the audience, were expected to work out the film’s puzzle, reading the visual clues on offer.  Providence – Resnais’s first work in English, from a screenplay by David Mercer – at first looks set to be a puzzle too, as well as obviously indebted to Citizen Kane.  Ricardo Aronovich’s camera gradually approaches a huge house, wreathed in darkness.  The name of the place, from which the film takes its name, stands out on a sign that recalls ‘Rosebud’.  But Providence turns out to be, even if not straightforward, understandable.  Inside the big house, an elderly, ailing novelist called Clive Langham is having a sleepless night.  The scenes we witness are Langham’s imaginings of his next, we assume last, novel.  The characters in the novel are incarnated by Langham’s own family and their interactions are informed and sometimes confused by the writer’s feelings about those close to him.

    They include his late wife Molly whom he loved (but was often unfaithful to); Claude, the lawyer son he loathes and the son’s wife Sonia; another man, Kevin, who turns out to represent the writer’s illegitimate son and whose character in the story that Langham devises never quite manages to have an affair with Sonia, much as his creator seems to want him to.   The Freudian rivalries between Clive and Claude are made explicit through the affair that does happen in the novel and which involves Claude and an American woman who, although in the story she’s a journalist with a terminal illness, takes the physical form of Molly.  The characters in the novel move in a murky, ominous world of men turning into werewolves, of army patrols hunting them down, of refugees who may be en route to concentration camps, of imposing architecture (a Resnais trademark).  On this occasion, the architecture shares the screen with shots of buildings being demolished.   These all seem harbingers or representations of imminent death, with which Clive Langham is preoccupied and about which, during his nocturnal conversation with himself, he talks a good deal.

    According to Langham, as an artist he’s been accused of sacrificing feeling for style, which gives him a kinship with Alain Resnais.  And with David Mercer too:  the script of Providence is stuffed with misanthropic epigrams and occasionally, when one of his characters comes out with one of these, Langham will chortle and congratulate himself, as if show-off one-liners were the proof of a fine novelist.  These connections would be tiresome if John Gielgud weren’t so enjoyable as Langham.  There’s something satisfying in Gielgud’s using his legendarily beautiful voice to slag people off or to intone, after the old writer has administered a suppository, a line like ‘Now let science soothe the troubled rectum’.   Gielgud’s expert, lapidary acidity anticipates his perfect performance as Charles Ryder’s father in the Granada TV Brideshead Revisited (1981).  What’s also impressive here is his realisation of Langham’s fury with his soon-to-be carcass, and the pains shooting up and down it:  Gielgud rails at his geriatry and expresses physical discomfort not just with wit but with a power that can only be described as full-bodied.   Providence is entertaining too, for a while at least, because Langham’s commentary on the goings-on of his creations functions to some extent as a commentary on the way characters behave in a ‘mysterious’ Resnais film like Marienbad  or even Stavisky … 

    Dirk Bogarde – in his figure-hugging, double-breasted suit – is a perfect incarnation of Langham’s derisive description of his son:  a tailor’s dummy.  With his eyebrow even more arched than usual and his striking, self-conscious hand movements, Bogarde seems almost to be satirising his own coldness and mannerisms.   (Our sense that Claude will never be the man his father was has a double edge with Gielgud playing the latter and Bogarde the son.)   David Warner, by comparison, is a disappointment as the illegitimate son/lover manqué.   A shapeless sweater that comes down nearly to his knees exaggerates Warner’s beanpole physique amusingly but he doesn’t manage to do a lot with the improbably named Kevin – and Elaine Stritch isn’t nearly nuanced enough to get anything out of the mistress/mother doppelgänger.   As Claude’s wife Sonia, Ellen Burstyn is more interestingly (and not entirely) unsuccessful.   Burstyn’s not good at, and is certainly very uneasy, delivering Mercer’s high-toned bitchery but her emotional vigour breaks through occasionally.  It makes her distinctively human in this company of actors and enables her to come to life as a character in her father-in-law’s novel in a way that eludes everyone else, except for the young Denis Lawson, in the small part of the Warner’s character professional footballer brother.

    The last section of Providence takes place in the light of the day following Clive Langham’s disturbed night.  It’s his birthday and the members of his family whom we’ve met in his imagination come to lunch to celebrate it with him and the couple (Peter Arne and Anna Wing) who keep house for the old man.   In ‘reality’, Claude, Sonia and Kevin are so bland that I wondered for a while if Clive Langham was embarking on another flight of fancy, expressing negative feelings about the trio in a different way – this time to make them contemptuously innocuous.   (Ellen Burstyn is hopeless here and interpreting a pitiably decent man doesn’t come easily to Dirk Bogarde.)   On reflection, I don’t think this is what Resnais and Mercer are suggesting though I’m not clear what they do intend.  Anyway, this coda is much too long and eventually tedious, except for a remarkable movement of the camera, from the sunny lunch table into the ominously darker trees and shrubs bordering the garden and back into the light.  The film’s score is by Miklós Rózsa, a sometimes intriguing combination of his familiar Hollywood cadences, sub-Nino Rota details and suggestions of an incipient thriller.  Incipience is as far as we get, though, in the thriller department.

    10 July 2011

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