Old Yorker

  • Withnail and I

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bruce Robinson (1987)

    I’d never seen it before.  I was prejudiced against it, not because it launched the screen career of one of my least favourite actors but I think because of the ‘classic British cult comedy’ tag.   Set in Camden Town and Penrith at the fag end of the 1960s, Withnail and I is about two out-of-work actors.  They embody a shift from one actor stereotype to another, even though you think of that shift occurring well before the late sixties.   Withnail (Richard E Grant) is a colourfully foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, bone idle egotist with an essential and supposedly redeeming patrician élan.  The unnamed I (Paul McGann) is tousle-haired, also hard-drinking, relatively prepared to work, more plebeian and less charismatic.   The centre of the film is the pair’s weekend away in the cottage of Withnail’s Uncle Monty in the Northumberland countryside, where they’re joined for part of the time by Monty himself.  When they return to London, the McGann character has landed a lead part, gets his hair cut and leaves their flat – now filled with Withnail’s pothead friend Danny and a mysterious chanting companion – for the real world.  The picture ends with Withnail declaiming one of Hamlet’s speeches in pouring rain just outside Regent’s Park zoo, to unresponsive wolves.

    It’s a British film all right.  The early scenes in the flat are cramped and ugly without that being made visually interesting.  The lighting of the Northumberland landscape and some of the interiors there is lovely without that meaning anything in terms of what else is happening on screen. There are outbursts of physical comedy to keep things moving and gobbets of ‘literary’ first person voice-over which doesn’t, however, become a coherent narrative style.  The writing of the opening and closing sequences in the flat between Withnail and I is stagy.  There are some good lines in between but Withnail and I is funny mostly at the level of ‘anarchic’ sitcom (some of Withnail’s tirades bring to mind Vivian’s rants in The Young Ones which the BBC had screened several years earlier).   The genuinely pleasing visual gags – such as the surreally clueless preparation of a chicken dinner – are rare.

    The story and the people in it have the texture – or lack of texture – of autobiographical material that Bruce Robinson hasn’t fully worked out.  The namelessness of I is indicative of this: Robinson hasn’t really bothered to write a character and Paul McGann certainly can’t find one – he gives an overeager, vague performance.  Richard E Grant, in contrast, is certainly distinctive – a lordly cadaver who keeps lurching into limp infantilism (though his emotional hollowness makes him dreary when, at the end, he tries to be genuinely touching).  Richard Griffiths’s arrival on the scene as Uncle Monty is very welcome.  He’s a proper character actor, fusing theatrical flair and empathy with the person he’s playing.  Griffiths is so much stronger than anyone else that Uncle Monty’s sustained attempts and failure to get I into bed dominate the proceedings almost too much.   Monty is greedily predatory and desperately needy; Griffiths’s bulk gives both aspects an extra insistence.   Ralph Brown, whose voice is a cross between Harold Steptoe and the speaking clock, is terrible as Danny.  Every time he opens his mouth, he kills the rhythm of the conversation – in the wrong way.  Michael Elphick has a good bit as a malign Northumberland poacher.

    6 March 2009

  • Make Way for Tomorrow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Leo McCarey (1937)

    An engrossing mixture of the maudlin and the brutal, which Leo McCarey regarded as his best film.  The screenplay is by Viña Delmar, from a play by Henry and Noah Leary.  The source of the play was a novel by Josephine Lawrence called The Years Are So Long.  The Bible verse that appears on the screen at the start – ‘Honor thy father and thy mother’ – makes it pretty clear that won’t happen in the story to follow; but Make Way for Tomorrow is more emotionally complicated than you might expect.  Bark Cooper (Victor Moore) and his wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi), the elderly parents in the story, have to move out of their house.  None of their three daughters or two sons can take them both in so Bark and Lucy are separated from one another.  As the children can barely rise to hypocrisy even in the opening discussion about their parents’ accommodation, this is several times worse than King Lear – both father and mother are humiliated, and from the word go.  Because the social situations and the household artefacts are familiar – from family dramas which tend to be heartwarming, in which people come through – part of you keeps thinking everything will be OK.  But the reality of Bark and Lucy’s situation keeps kicking in, sickeningly.

    One of the good complications is that (as in Lear), the parents are sometimes a pain – for example, Lucy, at her daughter-in-law Anita (Fay Bainter)’s bridge evening.   This makes it all the more regrettable that the children’s roles are one-dimensional and obviously played.  Except for Thomas Mitchell as the elder son George, the brood are too uncaring.  Mitchell manages to suggest a man who’s been able to keep his parents at arm’s length but stay in their good books (George is Lucy’s favourite child).   In the climax to the film, he has the decency – and the self-disgust (and disgust at his siblings) – to repay his mother for the great, face-saving favour she’s done him.  Lucy knows George and Anita are about to put her in a twilight home.  Her knowing this relieves her son of a terrible responsibility; instead of being told by him she’s going there, she tells him it’s where she wants to go.   The other son Robert (Ray Mayer) – an amiable fainéant – isn’t bad but the callousness of the two daughters that we see (Elisabeth Risdon and Minna Gombell), their husbands and Bark and Lucy’s granddaughter Rhoda (Barbara Read) is excessive.  This is especially so with one of the sons-in-law.  He also seems to be considerate to his parents, which rather undermines the film’s premise.

    Beulah Bondi’s acting throughout seems very free from the more obvious conventions of the time.  The same goes for Victor Moore, at least in the opening family gathering, when Bark and Lucy tell the children they can’t keep up the payments on the house.  In comparison, Fay Bainter, as the uptight Anita, seems antiquely stylised in her means of expressing character through movement and gesture, though she does it well.   (Bainter, a generation younger than Victor Moore, was in fact only five years Beulah Bondi’s junior.)   The playing of Maurice Moscovitch as Max Rubens, the benign Jewish shopkeeper who pals up with Bark, isn’t subtle but the key scene between the two old men is one of several in which McCarey gets something going between the actors, and keeps its going, so that it holds you.   These scenes are daringly extended.  Not much happens in them to move the action forward – yet the conversations develop a real emotional momentum.  The bridge evening is a particularly strong example.  It culminates in a phone call between Bark and Lucy.  The gathering watches and listens:  Lucy is too anxious to speak to her husband to mind.

    The film also has a strong historical interest as a Depression piece.  Bark’s unavailing search for work isn’t a consequence only of his age, even if his advancing years make the search all the more fruitless.  (It’s also clear that Bark’s never made much of himself – you see that the younger son’s shiftlessness is inherited.)  But it’s the couple’s final afternoon in New York City that’s in every sense the climax to Make Way for Tomorrow.  Their delight in their few hours together – a reminder of times past (they honeymooned in NYC), proof positive that they’re still in love – is elating to watch but you’re acutely conscious of the reality, that time is desperately short.    The disagreements about honeymoon details (a words-only foreshadowing of ‘I Remember It Well’ from Gigi), speaking a tongue-twister as they get tipsy and so on:  these details are sentimentally charming but poignant too.  One bit isn’t quite right.  A sneaky car salesman wrongly assumes the couple are well off and gives them a spin in the model he hopes they’ll buy but there’s no dramatic or comic payoff once he realises his mistake:  he seems neither thwarted nor contrite.  The manager of the hotel they go to, on the other hand, has a manner with Bark and Lucy that’s an oddly convincing mixture of perfunctory and attentive.

    The traction between sentimental escapism and the inexorable destination of the day is perfectly summarised when a ballroom orchestra starts playing the couple’s tune and, only a moment later, the bandleader calls time and their dance ends.  A clock chimes and Bark and Lucy scurry away before their yellow cab can be turned into a pumpkin.   The film ends with Bark boarding a train to California, to move in with the third daughter (whom we never see).  Lucy waves him off before heading for the twilight home (although Bark doesn’t know that – he expects Lucy to be joining him out West sooner or later).  Ozu acknowledged McCarey’s film as an influence on Tokyo Story.  The separation of Bark and Lucy is so extreme and unusual that the sense of rupture here is more disturbing than in the infinitely more famous Japanese film.

    16 January 2011

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