Film review

  • Modesty Blaise

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Losey (1966)

    If Wikipedia is to be believed, the making of Modesty Blaise ‘saw creative clashes from [sic] director Losey and Blaise creator [Peter] O’Donnell over the vision of the final film, Losey wanting to create a “pop art”-inspired spoof of the spy movie craze prevalent at the time, in contrast to the relatively serious and grounded tone of the source material …’  I don’t know O’Donnell’s original but his heroine’s moniker sounds less than serious – the implication of her first name humorously contradicts the implication of her surname or, at least, its homophone.  (Never mind that O’Donnell, again according to Wikipedia, named her for Merlin’s tutor Blaise in Arthurian legend.)  At the same time, Losey’s alleged approach raises immediate doubts.  Whether you like him or not, you could never accuse this director of a light touch:  if you drew up a short-list of film-makers ill equipped for nimble pastiche, he’d have to be on it.  Besides, the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the James Bond pictures – which had begun in 1962 with Dr No and, by the time Modesty Blaise was being developed for the screen three years later, epitomised ‘the spy movie craze’ – made them less than easy to spoof effectively.

    Losey’s choleric tendencies might have qualified him for an aggressive parody of the 007 franchise, using his female super-agent protagonist to subvert the sexual balance of power in the Bond universe.  Even though Modesty (Monica Vitti) repeatedly gets the better of men who sometimes end up looking silly, this doesn’t really happen:  if required, she does the same to women as well as men – so does her sidekick Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp).  When Losey starts a scene with a close-up of a girl’s cleavage, the choice of shot seems not a comment on Bond-movie conventions but merely an example of them.  More generally, Modesty Blaise, with its various exotic locations – Amsterdam, the Mediterranean, somewhere in the desert – and flash cars, becomes less a dig at than an illustration of conspicuous waste in international movie-making.

    This film is altogether too listless to function as a lampoon of pictures that, whatever else they might have been, were energised, efficient entertainments.  There’s the odd meta moment to proclaim Losey’s awareness of what he’s up to.  Modesty leafs idly through newspapers prominently displaying the O’Donnell cartoon strip (with art work by Jim Holdaway).  A minor baddie, about to come to a sticky end, exclaims ‘Splat!’  But if he did want to pastiche contemporary spy pictures, Losey is very selective about what he can be bothered to poke fun at.  I enjoyed a bit where Modesty and Paul Hagen (Michael Craig), a British secret service man and an old flame of hers, swap champagne glasses repeatedly and at high speed, to avoid drinking from the glass laced with knockout drops (Hagen loses out, of course).  But the only sustained fun in the film comes from the exuberant décor (Richard Macdonald and Jack Shampan) and costumes (Beatrice Dawson).  The camerawork includes, as well as some eccentric angles and arbitrary zooms, movements from one place to another that suggest Losey didn’t know what he wanted, or care.  There are sequences where his direction is characteristically too deliberate, others that suggest he’s fallen asleep.

    The vibrancy of Jack Hildyard’s lighting of Med exteriors, in combination with the vivid colours and patterns of wall coverings and furnishings indoors, gives the film the pop-art look Losey was supposedly after.  You wouldn’t need to see many shots of Modesty Blaise to know what decade it was made.  There are references to other 1960s cinema images that have little to do with the vogue for spy movies, unless you count T E Lawrence primarily as a secret agent.  The plot involves the British government’s recruiting Modesty Blaise to help get a shipment of diamonds through to Sheikh Abu Tahir (Clive Revill), the ruler of a small but oil-rich Middle Eastern kingdom, thereby thwarting arch-villain Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde), who’s also a long-standing adversary of Modesty.   The (in theory) climactic showdown between Gabriel’s acolytes and the Sheikh’s forces sees the latter streaming across the screen like joke extras from Lawrence of Arabia.  Although the British diamonds are in exchange for a discount on the Sheikh’s oil exports, this is still an era when Arabs of both sexes are presented as mildly comical, thanks to their funny clothes – another element that makes Modesty Blaise, to twenty-first-century eyes, very much a period piece.

    It also anticipates films from later in its own decade.  As well as the poppy, pleasantly inane title song (sung by David and Jonathan, aka Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway), the soundtrack includes ‘We Should’ve’, a duet for Modesty and Willie.  They sing a bit then seem to think better of it; a few screen minutes later, they’ll have another go.  (The music for these songs is by Johnny Dankworth, with lyrics by Benny Green and, in the case of ‘We Should’ve’, Evan Jones.  Elsewhere, Dankworth’s orchestral score gives the impression he’s trying to convince himself, as well as the audience, that what’s on screen is zanily comical.  He seems to fail on both counts.)  What a number like ‘We Should’ve’ is doing in the spoof Losey had in mind is unclear but the Vitti-Stamp rendition of it limply foreshadows contemporary star actors and non-singers in big-budget musicals like Camelot (1967) and Paint Your Wagon (1969).  Gabriel’s Mediterranean lair could be next door to the secluded island home of the Elizabeth Taylor character in Losey’s Boom! (1968), a film that somewhat replicates the confused inertia of Modesty Blaise.

    Peter O’Donnell, who wrote early versions of the screenplay, claimed afterwards that ‘the finished movie retained only one line of his original dialogue’ (Wikipedia again).  Losey’s better films have in common a Harold Pinter screenplay; it may be significant that, although Pinter worked on this script, his name doesn’t appear on the credits alongside that of Evan Jones (who also did the screenplay for King and Country).  Losey’s seeming indifference to the plot not only ensures that Modesty Blaise is style over substance; it’s also tough on his high-powered cast.  As Sir Gerald Tarrant, senior partner in a British secret service double act with the fatuous Paul Hagen, Harry Andrews, a fine actor, seems an awkward one.  In addition to Abu Tahir, Clive Revill plays Gabriel’s literal-minded Scottish accountant, McWhirter.  It’s no coincidence that Revill is easier to take disguised in (light) brown face and burnous than when looking himself.  Dirk Bogarde’s uber-camp Gabriel is very occasionally amusing.  Given how many ‘funny’ lines he has, that’s a low strike rate.  Rossella Falk, as Gabriel’s psychopathic head of security, delivers her lines excruciatingly slowly and over-emphatically.

    The problem is that these actors, perhaps from anxiety, decorate everything they do with a comic sigh or grimace or smirk; because there’s no rhythm to any of their exchanges, they’re performing in a vacuum – and overacting.   Monica Vitti’s playing of Modesty is full of artificial flourishes too but the effect is different.  It’s sometimes enjoyable to watch a glamorous, self-confident star make the best of a bad job through effortlessness, coasting by on sheer presence, but that’s not what happens with Vitti here.   This was her first English-language role (there weren’t many to follow).  She often sounds as if she literally doesn’t know what she’s saying.

    Terence Stamp, although considerably younger than O’Donnell’s Willie Garvin, fares better – best, in fact.  He’s so thoroughly convincing, physically and vocally, as a Cockney Lothario that he nails the caricature with the minimum of effort, then has moments when he transcends it – when Willie is a disturbing blend of boyish charm and vicious potential (echoes of The Collector).  Stamp’s easy agility in the action sequences, allied to his looks, makes you think he’d have made an effective, and a distinctive, James Bond.  For this viewer, that would have been a waste of his talents though his appearance in Modesty Blaise probably damaged his career too.  It’s alleged that he rejected the title role in Alfie to play Willie Garvin.  That can’t have been a good decision yet Terence Stamp is one of the few things in Losey’s film – perhaps the only human one – to give pleasure.

    14 May 2020

  • The Blue Lamp

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1950)

    The Blue Lamp became an almost comical curiosity of British cinema – a means to the end of an extraordinary screen resurrection.  Halfway through Basil Dearden’s film, its central character, PC George Dixon (Jack Warner), is shot and killed in the line of duty.  Although the first name on the writing credits is T E B Clarke, the ‘original treatment’ is by Jan Read and Ted Willis (Alexander Mackendrick also gets an ‘additional dialogue’ credit):  Willis was the prime mover behind the BBC television drama series Dixon of Dock Green, in which George Dixon enjoyed an afterlife of twenty-one years (from 1955 to 1976).  At the time of its release, however, The Blue Lamp was a big deal in its own right, in this country anyway.  An Ealing Studios production, it was the year’s top British picture at the box office, and won the equivalent of the BAFTA for Best British Film of 1950.

    This isn’t surprising.  The Blue Lamp, as well as entertaining, makes clear from the start its serious-minded, socially responsible point of view.  The opening titles include thanks to the Metropolitan Police for help in the making of the film, which is dedicated to them and to their colleagues in other police forces.  This leads into a voiceover suggestive of public information films of the era, deploring the current crime wave, especially the increasing numbers of offending ‘youths’ and ‘delinquents’.  Even after a couple of these, Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde) and his sidekick Spud (Patric Doonan), have appeared on screen, the voiceover isn’t done.  It explains that such loose-cannon novices are despised and shunned by seasoned career criminals – and makes superfluous the visual illustration that follows:  in a seedy billiard hall, Riley and Spud approach a well-dodgy older man who looks askance at them, then away.  After this, the voiceover stops and doesn’t return, even at the very end of the film – the closing shot, simple and eloquent, is of the title illumination above a police station.  But those solemnly instructive tones have done their job in setting out The Blue Lamp’s stall.

    The second main character is PC Andy Mitchell (Jimmy Hanley), who has recently completed police cadet training.  The vastly experienced George Dixon, twenty-five years on the beat in Paddington, takes Andy under his wing.  The young policeman moves in with George and his wife Em (Gladys Henson), as their lodger.  When George proposes this to her, Em is doubtful.  It’s not long since the Dixons lost their own son (and, it seems, only child), presumably in World War II – he would now have been just the age that Andy is.  Once she meets her husband’s amiable colleague, Em instantly changes her mind.  He becomes, though this isn’t explicitly stressed, a surrogate son to her.  One other matter on which the Dixons aren’t at first agreed is George’s impending retirement.  Em thinks he’s earned the rest; George is keen to carry on another five years, and gets his way – or is on the point of doing so when he dies.  The timeframe of the story is short – it’s not suggested that he loses his life as a direct result of postponing his departure from the force.  Even so, the description of the Dixons’ happy marriage is enough to give a sense that a new phase of it, peaceful old age in each other’s company, was tantalisingly close.

    What’s more, the honourable example and death of the older man are crucial to the education, professional and moral, of the younger.  Nearly forty years later, this durable formula was still driving a police picture like Dennis Hopper’s Colors.  Despite their large cultural difference, both films use a similar, light-hearted opening and closing device to suggest continuity – the passing of a baton from one generation to the next – within the police force.  At the start of The Blue Lamp, George Dixon directs a passer-by, who asks the way to Paddington Station; at the end, Andy Mitchell does the same.  In Colors, Robert Duvall’s ill-fated LAPD veteran, like Dixon on the verge of retirement, tells a joke to his rookie sidekick, played by Sean Penn.  In the film’s last scene, Penn’s character, who’s matured a lot thanks to Duvall’s example, tells the same joke to his new junior partner.

    The voiceover commentary sees as a main cause of the rise in crime a shortage of bobbies on the beat.  Perhaps that’s why, in combination with his personal qualities, his bosses want George Dixon to stay on but the alleged manpower shortage is contradicted by the evidence before our eyes.  The screen is swarming with uniformed police.  They’re always bumping into each other as they patrol the local streets.  Back at Paddington Green station, there’s a male voice choir of boys in blue, supervised by, since he’s a Welshman, PC Taff Hughes (Meredith Edwards).  In order to keep the plot tight, Riley and Spud are responsible for both the major crimes investigated by the local force – a theft from a jeweller’s on the Edgware Road and the armed robbery of a cinema box office, in the aftermath of which Riley shoots George.  The circumstances of these crimes do little to show how differently things would have turned out with more policemen on the beat.  The worrying implication of his fatal confrontation with Riley is that George Dixon would have had a better chance of surviving not with another copper at his side but with a firearm in his hand.

    With Riley and Spud the only baddies around, there’s not a hint that the Paddington Green police are struggling to cope with the crime wave.  The other serious lawbreaking in the film consists of a spot of (off-screen) domestic violence.  The wife-beater is Alf Lewis (Frederick Piper) but his main purpose in the story is functional:  his daughter Diana (Peggy Evans) is Tom Riley’s girlfriend; she once lent him Alf’s old raincoat, which will prove to be important incriminating evidence.  For the most part, police business consists of dealing with the odd drunk and disorderly, the occasional elderly lady whose dog has gone missing – in other words, with familiar Ealing comedy types, exasperating, harmless, supposedly amusing.  A sequence in which the robbed jeweller’s girlfriend (Dora Bryan) fails to pick out Riley on an identity parade is a rare and glaring example of comical meeting serious, without the two things fusing at all.

    T E B Clarke may have been inspired to write The Blue Lamp by his own experiences as a wartime reserve constable but his benign, essentially complacent approach to English character is antithetical to the solemn parable side of the film that its introduction heralds.  Practically everyone in London, it seems, is united in the effort to bring Riley to justice.  The climax takes place inside a dog racing stadium (presumably White City), where Mike Randall (Michael Golden), an underworld man (the same one who gave the youngsters a dirty look in the billiard hall), joins forces with the police in order to apprehend Riley.  Men like Randall seem to be relatively acceptable to Clarke.  They’re proper Englishmen – they operate according to a code of behaviour that Riley and Spud just don’t have.

    Once Riley is sighted at the dog track, hand signals from the bookmakers and tic-tac men transmit a message that the wanted man is in the 4/- ring.  There are missing mutts and greyhounds in this film but no sign of the crafty underdog winning through, even if corps d’esprit, similarly beloved by Ealing, does so.  Although he ensures the story always holds your interest, the set-up defeats not only the stern didactic object of the exercise but also, for the most part, Basil Dearden too.  He and the DP Gordon Dines make good use of West London locations but they lack the texture of their East End equivalents in Pool of London, Dearden’s and Dines’s next collaboration.  Riley’s cramped bedsit is the most expressive place in The Blue Lamp.

    I was never a fan of Jack Warner even watching Dixon of Dock Green each week as a child.  The smugness I find off-putting hovers about him here too but Warner is a notably relaxed actor, and convincing in details ranging from George’s jubilant reaction to throwing the winning dart in a pub match with his mates to his unspoken sadness as his wife talks about their late son.  Warner was a popular film actor when The Blue Lamp was made; even if killing off his character midway through didn’t have the impact of Janet Leigh’s removal from Psycho a decade later, it must have come as a shock to audiences – not least because George seems to be recovering from his injuries before taking a sudden turn for the worse.

    As Em, Gladys Henson has a bigger role than she often had.  She plays it well yet I found her less moving than in Dance Hall, another Ealing picture of 1950, where Henson’s character is dealing with a much lesser crisis.  George takes great pride in the flowers he grows in the Dixons’ back garden.  Em has just picked a bunch to take to him in hospital when Andy and a senior officer (William Mervyn) arrive at her home with the bad news.  Em receives it and moves automatically towards an empty vase on the sideboard – ‘I’d better put these in water’.  It’s a stiff-upper-lip moment so predetermined to be touching that it falls short.  Gladys Henson is more strongly and ambiguously affecting when Andy assures her the police will catch George’s killer.  ‘Yes, I expect you will’, she replies.

    Jimmy Hanley radiates genial ordinariness.  It’s a relief that he and Dearden prevent Andy Mitchell’s undergoing a melodramatic transformation into a sadder and a wiser man.  Hanley is a good, natural laugher but some of his best bits come when Andy is struck dumb or keeps his feelings in check.  Although his accompanying superior has given him the job of breaking the news of George’s death to Em, Andy, in the event, can’t bring himself to do it.  Shortly afterwards, back on the beat, he pulls in a driver for failing to stop at a pedestrian crossing.  The posh woman at the wheel of the car (Renee Gadd) has a go at him:

    ‘Haven’t you anything better to do?  One of your own men shot down in cold blood, and all you do is waste your time pestering the lives out of innocent respectable people.  I’m not surprised all these murderers get away with it.’

    Her outburst briefly injects a welcome dissonant note into proceedings; in response, Andy controls himself to tell the woman, ‘I’m just warning you this time, madam, to drive more carefully in the future’.

    It’s to the film’s great advantage that the first officer to receive and register the news of George Dixon’s death, in a phone call to the police station, is played by the reliably excellent Bernard Lee.  As a CID man, he’s quietly alert and expressive in everything he does; Robert Flemyng too is unobtrusively effective, as Lee’s second-in-command.  I can’t resist noting that an actor called Sidney Pointer, playing a police superintendent, is shockingly wooden.  Although she sometimes struggles to sound common, Peggy Evans always looks right.  Diana is attractive but there’s a coarseness to her good looks, and a kind of desperation in how she wants to make the most of them.  Evans’s voice and Diana’s hysterics both get repetitious but they make sense of the girl’s brittleness.

    Dirk Bogarde (in his late twenties at the time) and Patric Doonan (who was four years younger) both seem a tad mature for tyro hoodlums but Bogarde gives a powerful performance.  Although his physical acting with Peggy Evans is occasionally forced, he’s much more credibly from the wrong side of the tracks in The Blue Lamp than he would be a few years later in The Sleeping Tiger.  Bogarde makes Tom Riley a plausible psychopath; it’s not his fault the script has no interest in probing this and prefers to present Riley as variously despicable.  He goes to pieces when he’s face to face with George Dixon outside the cinema and in the immediate aftermath of the murder.   When he goes to the police with a story designed to put them off the scent, Riley is gormless the moment Robert Flemyng’s detective starts to turn the tables.  After witnesses fail to pick him out on ID parades, Riley saunters back into the detective’s office in cocky triumph.  I guess it’s possible a pathological personality might go through this succession of behaviours but I don’t think that’s why Riley does so.  It’s because T E B Clarke sees him as the villain of the piece (and an aberration, according to Clarke’s conception of Englishness).  Riley’s changing moods leave you impressed by a versatile actor, unconvinced by the volatile character he’s meant to be.

    11 May 2020

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