Film review

  • Suddenly

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lewis Allen (1954)

    An ordinary Saturday in a California backwater is transformed by news that the American president is coming to town that very afternoon.  Only a flying visit:  he’ll be on a train due at 5pm then walk to a car that will drive him to a nearby ranch.  A telegram directs town sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden) to lay on suitable presidential transport, liaise with the security service men coming in advance of the VIP, and keep things strictly confidential.  Dan Carney (Willis Bouchey), head of the security detail, tells Tod he’ll need the buildings facing the railway station checked – a row of shops and an overlooking hilltop house.  Tod, as he assures Carney, knows all the shop proprietors.  He knows the folks who live on the hill – the Benson family – even better.  In the opening scenes of Suddenly Tod was unsuccessfully trying to court Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates), as well as chatting with her son, Pidge (Kim Charney).  Ellen’s father-in-law, who owns the family house, ‘used to be in the Secret Service before a bad ticker retired him’.   That brings a smile to Carney’s face – Pete ‘Pop’ Benson was once his boss.  The security presence is to be reinforced by five cars of state police, who soon arrive in town.  Another car waits for them to go by.  Inside this one are three men who then make their way to the Bensons’ place.  John Baron (Frank Sinatra) introduces himself and his companions (Christopher Dark and Paul Frees) as FBI agents; Pop Benson (James Gleason) welcomes them in.  They’re not FBI men but hired assassins.

    On its original release, Suddenly was well enough received by critics but didn’t set the box office alight.  It’s a modest production in terms of scale (most of the action takes place inside the Benson house, where Baron and his sidekicks are soon holding the family and Tod Shaw hostage) and length (only seventy-seven minutes).  Its main selling point was that it marked Frank Sinatra’s first film appearance after From Here to Eternity (shortly before Young at Heart).  The theatrical release poster includes an image of an Academy Award, referring to the star’s Oscar for his previous screen outing, below an announcement, in much bigger print, that Sinatra in Suddenly is ‘a savage, sensation-hungry killer’.  Dan Carney’s attention is drawn to the hilltop house because it strikes him as ideally placed to allow someone inside to take a pot shot at the president.  Like the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.  In its afterlife, Suddenly acquired unexpected notoriety – especially when a story took hold that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched it shortly before shooting President Kennedy.   A year prior to that, a higher-profile film involving an American political assassination arrived in cinemas. The Manchurian Candidate also starred Frank Sinatra.  There’s another story, probably apocryphal but durable too, that, in the light of Kennedy’s death, Sinatra made attempts to prevent either film being seen publicly again.

    Since all this might seem to characterise Suddenly as a piece of fiction which is retrospectively looks not just startling but irresponsible, it’s worth drawing attention to a couple of points.  First, although the final corpse count in the movie is high, it doesn’t include the president, whose train, in the event, passes through the station without stopping.  (It becomes clear to the security men in town that something fishy is going on.)  Second, Richard Sale’s script reminds the viewer that presidential assassination in America, though presented as bizarrely unthinkable in the film’s virtually present-day setting, isn’t:  Baron derides the predecessors who shot and killed Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.  Yet Suddenly‘s scenario does resonate – not only with Oswald’s vantage point but also with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.  Baron isn’t personally motivated to kill the president.  He’s a hitman preparing to do a well-paid job of work on behalf of invisible, unidentified paymasters.

    As soon as it starts, Suddenly‘s title is more striking (and discomfiting) than you expected it to be.  The action begins (pre-opening titles) with Tod’s deputy Slim Adams (Paul Wexler) giving directions to a passing motorist (Roy Engel) who wants to get to a place called Three Rivers.  Before he drives off, the motorist asks what town he’s in and Slim replies ‘Suddenly’; when the motorist says that’s a funny name, Slim explains it’s a ‘hangover from the old days – that’s the way things used to happen here.  Suddenly.  Roads agents, gamblers, gunfighters’.   A few screen minutes later, the word ‘Hangover’ crops up in another context:  it’s the security services’ codeword for the arrangements around the president’s visit.  In his conversation with the motorist, Slim jokes that nowadays things happens so slowly in the town the council ‘wants to change the name to “Gradually”’.  Charles G Clarke’s cinematography easily evokes the small-town atmosphere and the required sense of it-was-just-another-day-until.  Yet the black-and-white images, especially the shots of shop fronts on the town’s deserted main street, have a flavour too of contemporary news reports – of serious crimes committed in unassuming, unexpected places.   David Raskin’s score and the use Lewis Allen makes of it are unnerving.  In the early stages, the music is a restless, jangling counterpoint to the bland visuals.  It’s less in evidence (or seems so) once the drama is fully underway.

    Suddenly‘s morality is an odd concoction.  Still grieving for her husband, who was killed in action in World War II[1], Ellen can’t return Tod’s affections and bitterly resents that both he and Pop are encouraging young Pidge’s interest in guns.  (There’s more than one play on real vs toy guns.)  Her father-in-law sharply rebukes Ellen for her pacifism and over-protectiveness of Pidge; before Baron et al have arrived on the scene, Pop tells her to stop ‘acting like a woman‘ and that her late husband, if he could hear her now, would be ashamed of her.  Ellen is set up as needing to learn a moral (and political) lesson, and she surely does.  In the climax to the story, it’s she who shoots Baron.  She comes to realise, in extremis, that a woman’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do (even if John Wayne didn’t say that on screen until 1965).  On the whole, the film appears to confirm the time-honoured Hollywood/NRA precept that ‘the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’.  Baron, though, is a less straightforward matter.  It’s true we have only his word for what he says about his past but his claim to have received the Silver Star for ‘killing Jerries’ at least raises the question of whether psychopaths can come in useful in warfare.  Asked if he never thinks about his parents, Baron replies, ‘I used to think of them a great deal.  My mother wasn’t married.  My old man was a dipso.  They left me in a home’.

    The people who made Suddenly may not have expected or even intended Baron’s description of his wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing to carry exculpatory weight, even though that was becoming a regular theme in post-war American cinema.  The poster’s lurid description of Baron is merely inaccurate hype – the film presents him as businesslike and cold-blooded (‘Show me a guy with feelings and I’ll show you a sucker’) rather than ‘sensation-hungry’.  More significantly, the filmmakers probably knew that audiences wouldn’t buy Baron’s hard luck story (or critics:  the Newsweek reviewer labelled him ‘one of the most repellent killers in American screen history’).  Yet Frank Sinatra not only makes Baron credible, as he proves that being a good ‘heavy’ needn’t depend on poundage.  He also uses his underdog quality to confounding effect.  Sterling Hayden’s size and presence contribute importantly to this – even when Tod Shaw is sitting down, nursing a bullet wound.  Tod wants to know more about Baron’s war record and asks questions that rattle him.  This seems to confirm Baron as a little guy on the receiving end.

    Hayden’s tough straightforwardness is invaluable, ensuring there’s nothing either falsely virtuous about Tod’s resistance to Baron or soppy in his overtures to Ellen.  And Willis Bouchey is just right as Carney, keeping himself in the background but also watchful:  it’s shocking when he’s the first fatality.  Some of the supporting players are less satisfying.  Paul Wexler’s eccentric looks serve to distract from his wooden line readings but Christopher Dark and Paul Frees, as Baron’s excessively contemptible henchmen are just ropy.  James Gleason is a good actor but the wily pep he gives Pop Benson makes an annoying character all the more annoying.  Even allowing for her unenviable role, Nancy Gates is alarmingly clenched.  At the end, with the siege over and Ellen able to give Tod romantic hope for the future, Gates still stands tensely, arms crossed over her chest, hands clasping her upper arms.  Some may see this as noir stylisation; it struck this viewer as what generations of Hollywood actresses have done when they can’t think of anything better.  Plucky Pidge wants to be a sheriff when he grows up.  Stocky, wide-faced Kim Charney is alarming as the upholder-to-be of the rule of law, easier to take when the kid resorts to schoolyard abuse of the Baron gang (‘You stink!).

    The two groups of soi-disant government men are similarly dressed; both flash official-looking credentials as they introduce themselves to others.  There’s a brief moment early in Suddenly, one of the best in the whole film, when you may be not quite sure which of these men are nefarious fakes and which – if any – bona fide.  Despite the variable performances, Lewis Allen does a good job of handling the claustrophobic action inside the Bensons’ home – yet there’s something almost blackly comical about the gathering too, especially when an amiable, bewildered television repair man (James O’Hara, appearing as James Lilburn) arrives to join it.  (Thanks to resourceful Pop, the Bensons’ temperamental TV set plays a crucial part in taking out the baddies.)  The story ends, not surprisingly, as it began.  A second motorist (Ted Stanhope) stops to ask directions.  This time it’s Tod who obliges and who, when told ‘That’s a funny name for a town’, says, almost to himself, ‘Oh, I don’t know – I don’t know about that …’   Richard Sale’s script includes plenty of lines better than this closing one but Sterling Hayden makes it work.

    15 June 2020

    [1] I’m assuming World War II rather than the recently-ended Korean War.  If that’s right, Suddenly isn’t set in quite the present day:  there’s a reference to the death of Ellen’s husband ‘three years ago’.  Richard Sale’s screenplay, adapted from his short story Active Duty, was published in Blue Book magazine in 1943.  That’s according to Wikipedia, which also claims that Sale got the idea for his story from reading ‘in the news about President Dwight D Eisenhower traveling to and from Palm Springs, California by train’.  Perhaps, but Eisenhower certainly wasn’t doing much of that (let alone serving as president) at the time the story appeared in Blue Book.

  • Shadowlands

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Attenborough (1993)

    When he first met Joy Davidman in 1952, C S Lewis was fifty-three.  He was an eminent scholar, a successful novelist and a renowned lay theologian.  He was also a confirmed bachelor, like his ex-army elder brother, Warren (‘Warnie’), with whom he’d shared a house on the outskirts of Oxford for more than twenty years.  Lewis’s partial autobiography Surprised by Joy was published in 1955.  The book takes its name from a Wordsworth poem, its subtitle is ‘The Shape of My Early Life’ and its narrative culminates in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity in 1931.  The title, in other words, has nothing to do with Joy Davidman, except that the coincidence of its publication and her unexpected, increasing importance in Lewis’s life is impossible to ignore.  He and Joy, who was American, married in 1956.  Seventeen years his junior, she died in 1960, after which Lewis wrote another book:  A Grief Observed was explicitly about Joy’s death and his bereavement.  Shadowlands is an account of this surprising love story.  It’s fitting that Richard Attenborough’s film is at its best when illustrating the relationship’s unlikely and unusual nature.

    For example, the couple marry twice and their first kiss in the film doesn’t happen until the climax to the second wedding ceremony.   The first seals a marriage of convenience.  When she met Lewis – known to family, friends and colleagues as Jack, rather than by either of his birth names (Clive Staples) – Joy was separated from her husband, the American novelist William Lindsay Gresham.  They divorced in 1954 and she came to live in England.  Joy and Jack were good friends by now.  He agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract that would entitle her to stay in the country.  The formalities were completed in an Oxford registry office in April 1956.  When the registrar in Shadowlands asks, ‘Do we have a ring?’ the answer, from bride and groom, is no.  Immediately after the ceremony Jack makes his excuses.  He has to be elsewhere and leaves Joy to go for a drink with Warnie.  A fine romance …  The Lewis brothers continued to live together, Joy in a separate house that Jack found for her in the vicinity.  It was after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, later in 1956, that Lewis reappraised his feelings and decided he wanted to marry her in a Christian ceremony.  This one is conducted beside Joy’s hospital bed.

    Shadowlands began life as a TV play script entitled I Call it Joy, written by Brian Sibley and Norman Stone.  The project didn’t go ahead on Thames Television as originally planned; when Shadowlands eventually aired on the BBC in December 1985, with Joss Ackland (wonderful) as Lewis and Claire Bloom as Joy, the writing credit went to William Nicholson, with Norman Stone directing.  Nicholson adapted the material for the stage in 1989 then for Attenborough’s big-screen version, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.  Now in his early seventies, Nicholson has a lengthy list of screenplay credits but Shadowlands, one of his earliest, remains his best work for cinema.  The first scenes show Jack Lewis equally, though differently, in command of seminars and public lectures.  The medievalist asks his students questions about representations of love in the Roman de la Rose.  The Christian apologist tells a packed house of older citizens that God, because He ‘wants us to grow up’, ‘makes us the gift of suffering’.   Nicholson and Richard Attenborough prepare the ground for a man who knows love through literature and engages with theodicy from a public platform, to discover what it’s really like to lose your heart and to suffer.  It’s a virtue of Shadowlands that it doesn’t suggest that Lewis, pre-Joy, is complacent in these matters.  When he learns from experience, it’s a profound upheaval but not a comeuppance.

    The screen announces at the start that ‘This true story takes place in the University City of Oxford 1952’.   There’s probably a disclaimer in the closing titles about adjusting some events and characters for dramatic purposes but, if so, it’s small print beside that bald (and, in the designation of Oxford, rather pompous) opening statement.  Some significant adjustments have been made to the facts of the matter.  Three in particular struck me – the number of Joy Davidman’s children, the location of Lewis’s senior academic appointments and the invented character of Christopher Riley, who regularly disputes with Jack in the pub and at college high table.  It’s worth exploring the rationale for these changes.

    Joy Davidman had two sons from her marriage to Bill Gresham, David and Douglas.  In this film (unlike the television Shadowlands) she has only one, Douglas (Joseph Mazzello).  His being an only child helps intensify Joy’s son’s feelings of isolation, even bewilderment, in alien England and the hospitable but strange environment of The Kilns, the Lewis brothers’ home.  It strengthens too Douglas’s kinship with Jack, who also was only a boy when he lost his mother to cancer – ‘I was your age,’ he tells Douglas.  This is precisely true in the film’s terms:  Lewis was nine when his mother died; Joseph Mazzello was nine when Shadowlands was made.  In reality, Douglas was fourteen when Joy died.  This doesn’t falsify the emotional dynamic but it does draw attention to the lack of detail in the film’s timeframe.  Although Attenborough is deliberately vague as to how far his narrative goes beyond 1952, Douglas’s appearance changes little in the course of the story – you wouldn’t guess that Joy’s death comes nearly eight years later.  It’s understandable that, for the sake of keeping things simple, the University City of Cambridge never gets a look-in.  Lewis moved in 1954 from Magdalen College, Oxford to Magdalene College, Cambridge, as inaugural holder of the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, but still lived at The Kilns.

    Christopher Riley (John Wood) has been described by some reviewers as ‘loosely based’ on J R R Tolkien, Lewis’s longstanding friend and colleague.  That association seems narrowly based:  Tolkien reportedly didn’t think much of books written faster than his own (which came to fruition slowly) and Riley takes Lewis to task for writing too quickly.  In fact, Riley’s double function in Shadowlands, in both its aspects, puts him decidedly at variance with Tolkien.  The latter was a committed Catholic and family man whose marriage lasted fifty-five years and produced four children.  Riley, who sees the soul only as ‘an essentially feminine accessory’ to male intellect, is solitary and celibate.  In a rare quiet exchange between them, Jack, wrestling with the implications of his growing attachment to Joy, asks if Riley is content.  The answer is, ‘I am as I am.  The world is as it is.  My contentment or otherwise has very little to do with it’.  Jack presses – ‘Don’t you ever feel a sense of waste?’ – and Riley bleakly replies, ‘Of course’.  He serves as a duo of academic types, brain-box unbeliever and eccentric egghead solitary.  His counterpoint in Lewis’s Oxford circle is the (also fictional) Harry Harrington (Michael Denison), a widowed Episcopal priest.

    Introduced to Joy at a faculty reception, Riley is characteristically full of clever words and devoid of emotional intelligence.  She leaves him open-mouthed with her parting shot:  ‘Are you trying to be offensive, or just merely stupid?’  Although he doesn’t come close to matching Riley’s insensitivity, the film does well to show Jack’s persisting cluelessness outside the world he’s been accustomed to.  He pays Joy a visit when she and Douglas are living in a London flat, following her divorce and move to England.  Jack is keen to be in her company yet doesn’t seem to know quite what he wants from her:  just as well that Joy, whose British visa won’t be renewed, takes this opportunity to broach the possibility of civil marriage.  (Her proposition is made off-screen but easily inferred from the next scene, when Jack informs his brother.)  Not long before Joy’s death, she and the notoriously untravelled Lewis go to stay in Herefordshire.  He’s bewildered by hotel room service – both the concept and the use of a telephone to ask for it.

    I’d never seen this film before.  I gave it a miss on its original release largely because I thought highly of the BBC Shadowlands and that turning it into a prestige picture, with higher-profile leads and a sizeable budget, was unnecessary and vexing.  Attenborough’s version does have its inflated side.  It’s a bit overlong (135 minutes, compared with the 90-minute TV film):  some of the excess comes from taking time to show off the Oxford locations and gatherings, and photogenic rural locations, without making these visually interesting.  No complaints about the star casting, though.   Anthony Hopkins had struck me as too charismatic for the physically unremarkable C S Lewis but he’s fully convincing.  Without obvious cosmetic aids but with good touches like a dog-eared shirt collar, Hopkins looks right and thoroughly inhabits the role.  Delicate hand movements express Jack’s initially timid fondness for Joy and Douglas.  He starts a second farewell wave to Joy’s departing car, then thinks better of it and drops his hand as if he never meant to raise it in the first place.  He nearly gives Douglas an encouraging pat on the shoulder.  At the same time, Hopkins gets Lewis’s intellectual combativeness.

    Debra Winger, who partners Hopkins most effectively, has this quality too.  The relationship between Lewis and Joy Davidman, in its early stages, was a meeting of minds that didn’t exclude differences of opinion.  Winger is just the right actress to realise on screen a lively intelligence.  She shows you what attracts and disturbs Jack about the extraordinary Joy (Jewish by birth, Christian by decision, atheist and Communist in the meantime, self-confessed ‘Anglomaniac’).  When Joy and Douglas spend their first Christmas at The Kilns the boy wants to phone his father in America; his mother says no; the disagreement – and what the disagreement is about – darkens the atmosphere.  After putting Douglas to bed that evening, Joy comes downstairs to carry on talking with Jack.  She tries to brighten up but can’t shake off the effects of what happened earlier.  Debra Winger has an exceptional ability to physicalise a character’s change of mood, completely but without histrionics.  This is a brilliant example.

    The film’s most emotionally powerful scene, however, comes not between the two leads but after Joy’s death – a conversation between Jack and Douglas.  You’ll need a stiff upper lip if you want to resist sharing in the tears shed by Anthony Hopkins and Joseph Mazzello, who’s excellent throughout.  (Mazzello has continued to get work in the twenty-odd years since this film but without making a big impression.  A friend who’d seen Shadowlands reminded me that he turned up recently as John Deacon in Bohemian Rhapsody.)  As Warnie Lewis, Edward Hardwicke is good enough to make you wish Attenborough had brought out even more strongly than he does the domestic status quo at The Kilns before Joy appears on the scene.  Hardwicke subtly conveys Warnie’s loyalty to his brother, discomfort with how things are changing, and gradual warming to Joy.   You sense Warnie keeps hoping that things will revert to how they used to be.  A vain hope:  by the time Joy falls ill, Jack’s world is transformed.  By then, though, Warnie’s feelings about her have altered too.

    A subplot involving a chippy, bloody-minded English student called Whistler (James Frain) is curious and, in terms of what difference it makes to the film as a whole, another contributor to its overlength.  In one testy exchange with Lewis, Whistler quotes the belief of his father, a village schoolmaster, that ‘We read to know we’re not alone’.  This sticks in Lewis’s mind and is repeated in two subsequent meetings with Whistler, the second a chance one on a train, soon after Joy’s death (and, it transpires, the death of Whistler’s father).   On this occasion, Lewis muses that ‘Some people would say we love to know we’re not alone – would you?’  Whistler replies, ‘Well, if you mean falling in love, I haven’t, really.  I mean, I probably know more about love from books than from personal experience’.   These words tie up a central theme of Shadowlands a bit too neatly, and Whistler’s purpose in the story seems limited to delivering his father’s adage, for repetition and recasting by Lewis.  Even so, I was held by the Whistler scenes:  James Frain left me wanting this character to be developed more than he is.

    When Joy first brings him to The Kilns, Narnia fan Douglas is overawed to meet Lewis.  Three of the series had been published (in Britain, at any rate) by the end of 1952 but the film mentions only The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and even these references are few.  Two other imaginative locations are more prominent, and coalesce.  The title derives from, as Jack explains, one of his stories, which posits that ‘We live in the shadowlands.  The sun is always shining somewhere else, around a bend in the road, over the brow of a hill’.   This echoes what he says when Joy first comments on a painting that hangs in The Kilns:  ‘It was on our nursery wall when I was a child.  I didn’t know it was a real place then.  I used to think it was a view of heaven … that one day I’d come round a bend in the road, or over the brow of a hill, and there it would be’.  The painting is actually a representation of the ‘Golden Valley’ in Herefordshire – where Jack and Joy go on their visit shortly before her final decline and where, in the film’s final shot, he returns with Douglas.

    Once Jack and Joy are properly married, the film almost inevitably loses some of its distinctiveness, fits more into the mould of terminal-illness love story.  What keeps the story out of the ordinary is the increasing challenge to Lewis’s religious faith posed by Joy’s physical pain and mental distress, and his own anguish.  The spiritual crisis is dramatised in very different registers.  Harrington’s reassurance to Jack that ‘We see so little here – we’re not the creator’ prompts a vehement response, cathartic for the viewer as well as for Jack:

    ‘No, we’re the creatures, aren’t we?  We’re the rats in the cosmic laboratory.   I’ve no doubt the experiment is for our own good, but it still makes God the vivisectionist, doesn’t it?’

    What’s unsaid has impact, too.  In an earlier exchange with Harrington, Jack explains that he prays not so that God will answer his prayers but because:

    ‘… I can’t help myself.  I pray because I’m helpless.  I pray because … I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.  It doesn’t change God.  It changes me.’

    These words are heard again in the closing stages – inside your head.  Richard Attenborough and Anthony Hopkins suggest life and death with Joy have also changed Lewis.  He’s like a man who has been badly hurt by a close friend but is ‘grown up’ enough not to sever relations.  He may not have lost his faith.  You nevertheless suspect he has less to say to God now.

    10 June 2020

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