Film review

  • The Small Back Room

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1949)

    My cinema year, which started with The Red Shoes at BFI, happens to end with a film by the same directors showing at the same venue.  The Red Shoes has been the centrepiece of BFI’s latest Powell and Pressburger retrospective with an exhibition devoted to the picture, as well as multiple screenings of it.  I prefer The Small Back Room, though.

    The source material, Nigel Balchin’s novel of the same name, was published in 1943 – the year in which the film is set.  As its production notes made clear, The Small Back Room ‘[in] its broader sense … stands for all the hundreds of research workers who gave untiring and unseen devotion to the cause of scientific progress’ as part of the war effort.  The focus of the story is one particular research section, attached to a British government ministry, which occupies a small part of a large building in London’s Park Lane.  The Archers’ camera, when it first enters the building, scrolls down a visitor’s guide to the assorted occupants of the place – Norwegian Merchant Seamen’s Enquiry Office, Czechoslovak Cultur [sic] Institute, American Red Cross, Free French Information Bureau, Polish Enlistment Office, etc – with accompanying multi-lingual babble on the soundtrack.  All these headings are printed but the camera comes to rest on a humbly hand-written sign for ‘Professor Mair’s Research Section – First Left’.  Mair (Milton Rosmer) is an unworldly academic; his polar opposite is the high-handed, careerist R B Waring (Jack Hawkins), the unit’s only non-scientist.  The central character is bomb disposal expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar), doubly embittered by physical disability and the politicking between military top brass and his immediate boss Waring that repeatedly encroaches on the research team’s testing of new weaponry.  Sammy is in love with Susan (Kathleen Byron), Waring’s secretary, and she with him though they keep the relationship secret.  Sammy’s artificial leg gives him almost constant pain and makes him feel unworthy of Susan.  Outside office hours, he subsists on a diet of painkillers and alcohol.  He drowns his sorrows whenever he can though he tries to keep off whisky – the demon drink as far as Sammy’s concerned.

    With one notable, extended exception in the climax to The Small Back Room, nearly the whole film takes place indoors.  Not just the title location in the bowels of ‘Park Lane House’:  there are numerous scenes in Sammy’s flat; a key sequence in a committee room; another in a night club, where Susan finally loses patience with Sammy’s defeatism, and walks out on him.  Even when the action moves outside to Salisbury Plain, where military exercises are taking place, the crucial part of this section – an interview with a young field gunner (Bryan Forbes in his first screen role) mortally wounded by a German explosive device he unluckily came upon – takes place under tent canvas.  Christopher Challis’s camerawork invests interiors with more than just claustrophobia:  the close-range shots and the lighting (not to mention the resident cat), sometimes give Sammy’s flat the feel of a snug refuge – until, that is, the bottle of Scotch that’s a constant in the décor there is opened and transforms the space into a domestic battlefield.  Before that happens, his agonies of alcoholic temptation are expressed in a nightmare vision of hugely magnified, multiplying images of the whisky bottle.  That surrealist flourish is certainly spectacular but visually uncharacteristic of a film whose concentrated drama is achieved through less flamboyant means.

    David Farrar’s performance is aligned with, and contributes powerfully to, this quality of The Small Back Room.  Among the most naturally charismatic British actors of his generation, Farrar uses his strong face to compel attention but resists grandstanding.  His interiorisation of Sammy Rice’s resentful anguish increases suspense in ways both major and minor.  It’s part of what makes the hero’s climactic defusing of a German booby-trapped bomb on Chesil Beach in Dorset so extraordinarily gripping.  It’s also present in small details like Sammy’s pensively rubbing his chin: the rasp of bristle registers as a subtle sign of tension.  Like Farrar, Kathleen Byron’s face was her cinematic fortune.  As Susan, Byron is not only beautiful but emotionally convincing whenever her character is – as she often is – disguising her true feelings; she’s less effective when Susan gives vent to her exasperation with Sammy.  In the supporting cast, Cyril Cusack, almost needless to say, is outstanding.  Corporal Taylor – Professor Mair’s ‘star pupil with fuses’ whose long working hours give his flighty wife extra time to misbehave and distress her self-effacing husband – isn’t a large role in terms of screen time but Cusack’s characterisation is rich and affecting.  The many other familiar faces in the cast include, to name just a few:  super-dependable Michael Gough (as the army captain who works closely with Rice); Leslie Banks (a colonel, sporting an astonishing moustache); Renee Asherson (an ATS corporal who plays an important part in the Chesil Beach episode); Sid James (a pub landlord); and Robert Morley (a cameo appearance as a clueless, bonhomous government minister).

    The three-pronged upbeat ending comes as a surprise that’s very welcome – testimony to how credibly pessimistic the film mostly is.  His success on Chesil Beach paves the way for a leap in Sammy’s self-esteem, his acceptance of an invitation to take over as head of the army’s new scientific research unit, and reconciliation with Susan.  The earlier committee meeting which debates the pros and cons of a new type of gun serves also as an illustration of some of the Archers’ strengths and relative weaknesses.  The background details – the committee’s discussion in continued competition with the noise of drilling in the street outside, the drawing of blackout curtains – are excellent; the asides and supposedly covert glances exchanged by disputing figures around the table are too emphatic.  This is one of several instances in The Small Back Room where the prevailing style comes across as a slightly uneasy suppression of Powell and Pressburger’s natural film-making modus operandi.  Yet this relatively introverted piece is also one of their most satisfying dramas.

    30 December 2023

  • Hello, Dolly!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gene Kelly (1969)

    Even on television, Hello, Dolly! looks a million dollars – and so it should.  Ernest Lehman and Gene Kelly’s adaptation of the 1964 Broadway musical (based on Thornton Wilder’s stage comedy The Matchmaker) cost $25m – the equivalent of $209m today.   You can see from the production design and set dressing (John DeCuir and others), as well as the costumes (Irene Sharaff), where some of that money was spent.  The cinematographer was Harry Stradling, the choreographer Michael Kidd, the director a still more famous name in the annals of screen dance.  Lehman wrote the screenplay as well as producing:  his two immediately preceding writing credits were for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Sound of Music (1965).  All these people must have commanded fees to match their standing in the movie industry; for playing Dolly Levi, Barbra Streisand was paid ‘$335,000 for twenty weeks of work, plus 10% of net profits’ (the Barbra Archives website).  The film wasn’t quite a commercial flop but 20th-Century Fox expected a return of far more than $26m from theatrical rentals and the soundtrack’s album sales were disappointing.  Hello, Dolly! proved to be one of the mega-budget ‘family’ musicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s that doomed the (sub-)genre as a bankable proposition for Hollywood studios.

    This white elephant is made on an elephantine scale:  the foolish thinking behind Hello, Dolly! was evidently that it had to be a comprehensively big deal.  Every location – whether outdoor or indoor, in New York City or upstate Yonkers – seems designed for the film’s Panavision format.  The ostentatious Harmonia Gardens restaurant, where the showiest dance routines and the title number are staged, is vast.  The business premises of rich but miserly animal feed merchant Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau) are ranch-like.  The main sub-plot involves two of Vandergelder’s underpaid employees, Cornelius Hackl (Michael Crawford) and Barnaby Tucker (Danny Lockin), taking an impromptu trip from Yonkers to NYC, where they pair up with Irene Molloy (Marianne McAndrew), a milliner, and her assistant Minnie Fay (E J Peaker), and spend way beyond their means.  Judging from their appearance, though, none of the quartet is on their uppers (and Irene’s shop is as palatial as everywhere else).  Among several good numbers in Jerry Herman’s song score, ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’, its melody a winning blend of jollity and yearning, may be the best; the de luxe world of the film dilutes, though, the poignant charge of the song’s assertion that ‘There’s no blue Monday in your Sunday clothes’.

    As in Thornton Wilder’s play, the protagonist of the Broadway Hello, Dolly! is Dolly Gallagher Levi, Irish-American widow of a New York Jew.  Unless I missed it, the film gets rid of the ‘Gallagher’ bit so that its star is ethnically right for Dolly; even so, twenty-six-year-old Barbra Streisand is much too young to play this middle-aged matchmaker.  Streisand’s imperious domination of proceedings gives her a kind of seniority but the wrong kind:  it’s startling to see that, just a year after Funny Girl, she had already become the phenomenal but invulnerable presence that, more often than not, would make her hard to take on screen.  Although there’s characterisation in the performance, it’s eclipsed by her own star persona; as a result, Dolly Levi barely registers – you’re aware only of how lavishly talented a singer and comedienne Barbra Streisand is.  As Cornelius and Irene leave her to watch a procession down 14th Street in Manhattan, Dolly sits alone on a park seat.  Streisand, her large hat tilted, uses the visible part of her face to indicate Dolly’s emotional need for a life partner to replace her late husband, Ephraim (cue for a song:  ‘Before the Parade Passes By’).  While it’s already clear that Dolly has her sights set on ‘half a millionaire’ Vandergelder, whose marriage broker she supposedly is, this expression of need is new in the narrative.  Streisand switches it on like a light, the effect impersonal rather than luminous.

    She and Walter Matthau got on notoriously badly on the shoot – there’s no chemistry of any kind between them – but Matthau is uncomfortable and bad-tempered beyond what’s expected of his grumpy character whether or not he’s in a scene with Streisand.  The little singing he’s given to do is still too much.  When Horace finally capitulates and admits he wants to marry Dolly, you don’t believe it for a moment:  you just think – oh, it’s obviously time to wrap things up.  Whenever Cornelius Hackl is hesitant or nervous, British audiences will hear Frank Spencer’s nasal bleats issuing from him; that said, Michael Crawford is the only performer who combines musical comedy skill with a bit of soul.  Compared with everyone else’s dancing, Crawford’s is flexible, athletic and amusing.

    The most bizarre miscasting is Marianne McAndrew as Irene.  The character seems meant to be a would-be gold-digger (rich Horace Vandergelder can ‘rescue me from the millinery business’) who eventually finds a heart of gold to fall in love with Cornelius.  McAndrew, in her screen debut, is physically imposing but remarkably inexpressive.  The storyline suggests a borderline coarse working girl; the actress seems, if anything, rather well bred.  I spent the film assuming she must have played the role on stage or at least been cast for her strong singing voice:  it turns out that (according to Wikipedia) ‘All the actors did their own singing, except for Marianne McAndrew … whose singing was dubbed by Melissa Stafford for Irene’s vocal solos and Gilda Maiken for when Irene sings with other characters’.

    Gene Kelly, alas, also seems miscast as a director. The film opens with a still frame of a New York street in 1890.  After a while, the still turns into a moving image but you wait in vain for Hello, Dolly! to burst into life – as distinct from effortful, engineered exertion or confusion.  When the parade does pass by – a cast-of-thousands procession, of course – it doesn’t look either to be actually happening or satisfyingly stylised.  It gives the impression only of crowds of people gathered for a film shoot.  Even allowing that Michael Kidd has sole credit as choreographer, it’s distressing to see Gene Kelly preoccupied by logistics at the expense of choreographic feeling and vibrancy.  In smaller things, too, he lacks finesse.  One of Walter Matthau’s few good moments – what should be a good moment anyway – comes when Vandergelder looks silently aghast at what confronts him in the Harmonia Gardens.  His stricken face is funny but Kelly keeps the camera on it long after Matthau’s expression has passed by.

    We watched Hello, Dolly! with the benefit of subtitles:  at least I now know that I’ve been mishearing a line in the famous title number for fifty-odd years:  I’d always thought ‘You’re still glowin’, you’re still crowin’’ was ‘You’re still glowin’, you’re still growin’’ – though I’d never understood why Dolly was getting larger.  The BBC aired the film and Funny Girl consecutively and in that order.  There wasn’t time to watch the whole of William Wyler’s only musical but I saw enough of it to be reassured I hadn’t imagined how much better it is than Hello, Dolly!  And how refreshingly different Barbra Streisand is – not only dazzling but varied, vulnerable and affecting – as Fanny Brice.

    29 December 2023

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