Old Yorker

Henry Koster (1952)

Richard Burton runs about plenty here and does it very well.  He’s especially good running upstairs – with a movement that convinces you of the youthfulness of the character he’s playing.  (Philip Ashley has his twenty-fifth birthday at a crucial point in the story; Burton was twenty-six when he made the film, his Hollywood debut.  It’s rather startling, even now, how much more than ten years he looked to have aged by the time he made The VIPs.)  Burton wears his Victorian gentleman clothes with style; his whole presence is alert and focused – he seems all set to do whatever is required of him.  What is required in this adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel is that Burton makes us believe that Philip is in the grip of an obsession – a passion for his mysterious cousin Rachel.  Burton fails through no fault of his own:  the du Maurier story (or Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay anyway) and Olivia de Havilland, as Rachel, make his task impossible.

Philip lives in du Maurier country – a big house in Cornwall, with the wind routinely battering the cliffs and the roiling sea miles below.  These are an amusing melodramatic reflection of the intensity and precariousness of Philip’s situation.  His parents died when he was an infant but he spent a childhood secure in the care of his much older cousin Ambrose (John Sutton).  Philip’s world changes forever when Ambrose, for the sake of his health, goes to stay in Florence, from where he never returns.  Philip receives a series of increasingly alarming letters:  the first describes Ambrose’s unexpected marriage to their cousin Rachel, the recent widow of an Italian count; the second, in shaky handwriting, makes clear that Ambrose is in a bad way – very sick and realising that he’s married a tyrant; the last, brief message is that ‘She has done for me’.  Philip travels hotfoot to Florence but he learns on arrival that Ambrose has departed this life and Rachel the scene.  Philip meets Guido Rainaldi (George Dolenz), Rachel’s smoothly equivocal legal adviser, who explains that Ambrose has left his estate to Philip (in trust until he turns twenty-five) and that Rachel won’t contest the will.  But Philip returns home certain that a cousin he’s never met has caused a beloved cousin’s death.  Although he hates Rachel vehemently, he invites her to the Cornwall estate to try to find out what really happened in Italy.  As soon as he sees her, Philip is smitten.  He gives Rachel an allowance, then some of the family jewels – before they even belong to him.  He wants to marry her and, on the night he legally enters into his inheritance, not only proposes but signs over to Rachel the estate which he’s now convinced himself is rightfully hers.

Olivia de Havilland’s arrival on the scene gives the film an immediate lift.  It’s been slow and creaky until then, with acting to match from all except Burton, Ronald Squire, in a well-judged performance as Philip’s lawyer and guardian Nick Kendall, and a golden retriever.  There’s a dynamic tension in the first exchange between Rachel and Philip but doubts about de Havilland soon set in.  Her willed graciousness and marmoreal calm are arresting but not alluring – and she lacks the sexual spark (except on the rare occasions when Rachel literally lets her hair down) that might explain how Philip is drawn to her in spite of her distancing manner.  She speaks in a careful, hyper-articulated, essentially condescending way that now unfortunately suggests Margaret Thatcher.  And the script deprives Burton of any opportunity to dramatise a battle between his desire for Rachel and his loyalty to Ambrose, which vanishes instantly in order to move the plot forward.   (Burton still does some fine things, however – like his imperceptible switch from vibrant excitement to stunned humiliation in the scene at Philip’s birthday party, when he announces that he is to marry Rachel and she witheringly denies this.)

The terms on which the estate is transferred to Rachel stipulate that if she marries again during his lifetime the property will revert to Philip.   (Simply signing away his inheritance seems bonkers.  This re-possessive clause suggests there’s more to Philip’s mind than we’re elsewhere led to believe but this also isn’t any kind of psychological insight – it’s purely a plot requirement.)  By the time we get to the climax of the film, he’s persuaded himself that Rachel is therefore trying to poison him, as she poisoned Ambrose, so that she can marry Guido the cad.  Her ‘special tisana’ (which she’s always on about) is an infusion of laburnum seeds.  While Rachel is out for a walk on the estate, Philip and Nick’s daughter Louise (who carries a torch for Philip although, in Audrey Dalton’s performance, its light is very dim) ransack Rachel’s boudoir in desperate search of a letter which Philip is sure contains clinching incriminating evidence but which, on discovery, does anything but.  Rachel’s promenade takes her over a bridge which we know is going to collapse from the moment earlier in the film when a workman tells Philip that folks need to keep clear of it.   Richard Burton does one of his best sprints at this point but the bridge has already given way and Rachel dies in his arms.

In the closing words of My Cousin Rachel, Philip tells us that he will forever live with the remorseful guilt of not knowing – ‘until we meet in purgatory’ – whether he was wrong to suspect Rachel of treachery.   We’re clearly supposed to feel similarly though more contentedly tantalised but I found the angel-or-demon knife edge, on which the whole thing depends, pretty blunt.  There’s too much that implies that Rachel is a wrong ‘un which isn’t explained away satisfactorily.  The brain tumour that Guido suggests caused Ambrose’s death isn’t a knock-down explanation of his letters from Florence.  Nick, who is no one’s idea of suggestible, tells Philip he has it on good authority that Rachel, during her first marriage, had a reputation for wildly extravagant ‘loose living’.  Nothing happens to make him retract that (even though he, less than credibly, takes to Rachel in the latter stages) – or to justify the debts she runs up with the bank, when Philip first gives her an allowance.  Why does she keep a neatly secreted supply of laburnum seeds in a locked drawer?   It’s Olivia de Havilland, however, who crucially undermines the intention to present Rachel as an insoluble mystery.  Her manner is so studiedly unnatural that it makes no sense unless Rachel is concealing something bad.

What is an insoluble mystery is how the retriever puppy, which Ambrose gives as a birthday present to Philip as a young boy, looks in the prime of life when his owner has reached his mid-twenties.  (Not that I minded:  this dog is a screen natural, especially when he’s playfully biting at a walking stick.)   Also a puzzle is the audience demographic for the Burton films I’ve seen so far at BFI.  Like the audience for The VIPs in NFT2, many of those watching My Cousin Rachel looked to be in their sixties.  (And there was a good turnout in NFT1 for this less-than-celebrated film.)  Their reactions again suggested that a spirit of nostalgia is drawing people to see Burton.  Nostalgia for what isn’t clear.  If you’re sixty now, that means that, when this film first appeared, you were many years younger than the golden retriever.

11 November 2009