Film review

  • That’ll Be the Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claude Whatham (1973)

    I saw That’ll Be the Day twice in the 1970s – on its original release, then two years later, in a double bill with its follow-up, Michael Apted’s Stardust (1974).  Returning to Claude Whatham’s film for the first time since then, I didn’t expect to find it such an interesting concoction.  The Wikipedia entry quotes Time Out Film Guide’s dismissal of it as ‘a hugely overrated dip into the rock ‘n’ roll nostalgia bucket’.  The picture, with a screenplay by Ray Connolly, was overrated in 1973 and the soundtrack of well-known late 1950s and early 1960s tracks an important part of its commercial appeal.  But That’ll Be the Day has a sour, troubling aspect too.

    In a glum prologue, a man called MacLaine (James Booth), after fighting in World War II, returns to his home in suburban England.  He’s welcomed by his wife Mary (Rosemary Leach) and their little boy Jim (Sacha Puttnam – the son of David who, with Sanford Lieberman, produced the film).  MacLaine finds working in the family’s corner shop stultifying; it’s not long before he’s walked out on Mary and Jim, having explained to the child that he’s tried and failed to ‘settle down’.  The action then leaps forward some years.  Jim, about to take his A-levels, has turned into David Essex.  Mary, still running the shop, proudly expects her son to be at university in a few months’ time but it’s obvious she’ll be disappointed.  A brief classroom sequence establishes that Jim is bright but bored:  on the morning of his history exam, en route to school, he chucks his text books into a river, to the astonishment of his friend Terry Sutcliffe (Robert Lindsay).  Jim then leaves home and heads for the seaside.

    The coastal resort is not a specific but a synthesised location.  It’s the site of a Butlinesque holiday camp.  There’s a funfair.  Jim pays for his grotty rented room with money earned as a deck-chair attendant – a sinecure because it’s usually raining.  Perhaps this isn’t a single resort at all and Jim – who subsequently works as a barman and in the fairground – is drifting from place to spiritually similar place.  In any case, Claude Whatham’s purpose is to conjure up the quintessence of English seaside in the early post-war era.  Although his interest in rock ‘n’ roll is soon made clear, Jim isn’t from the outset hellbent on a performing career.  He plays the harmonica, he makes up and jots down lyrics but he shows no animation, let alone admiration, as he watches bands playing at the resort.  Jim is where he is because, like his father, he wanted to get away from something rather than get to somewhere.

    The time in which the main action is taking place is synthesised too.  There are no references to current affairs.  The snippets of songs, which come thick and fast, span several years of chart singles.  That’s plausible in the seaside holiday setting – it also guards against limiting the nostalgic aims of That’ll Be the Day (evident in its title) to a narrow time window.  In one scene, a group playing an Elvis song has ‘Rock Island Line’ emblazoned on their drum kit, killing two birds with one stone.  The film is proof of how quickly, once the 1970s had arrived, the culture of immediately preceding years was recycled as pop entertainment.  But the lack of  a specific date matters in another way too.

    One of the songs heard playing at the resort is Brian Hyland’s ‘Sealed with a Kiss’, a summer hit of 1962.  It doesn’t make literal sense that this is when Jim drops out of school:  if he was a six-year-old in 1945 (the age Sacha Puttnam was when the film was shot), Jim would have been taking A-levels circa 1957.  Literal sense counts for little, though.  The summer of 1962 is the right time for this story – it’s right too that, although the narrative moves forward at least three years, time stands still in the film’s pop universe.  Within a few weeks of the end of summer holidays in 1962, ‘Love Me Do’ was released:  the historical setting of That’ll Be the Day is, simply and necessarily, pre-Beatles.  A fed-up musician at the resort tells him that, in order to write your own material, you have to be American ‘nowadays’ but aspiring songsmith Jim anticipates a generation of British composer-performers that’s just around the corner.  The Beatles transformed things so much and so quickly that if the film explicitly crossed the line into 1963, it would be based in a new world that couldn’t fail to mention them.

    The casting adds layers to the script.  That disgruntled musician, who twiddles on the piano and explodes on drums, is Keith Moon.  His character is part of the support band for a singer called Stormy Tempest, played by Billy Fury.   Most important, Jim strikes up a friendship with an older man, Mike, and he is Ringo Starr.  Mike, a fairground worker most of the year and a pub waiter during his annual holiday, takes Jim under his wing.  He gets him work in a bar and on the funfair, showing him how to swindle the manager (Johnny Shannon) and customers on the dodgem cars there.  He also gets Jim started with girls.  Mike doesn’t, though, sing or play an instrument or show any real interest in contemporary music.  Ringo is witty and credible in the role; he also makes you feel he’s bringing something of himself to it.  That gives poignancy to the gulf between his own mega-celebrity and his character’s perennially run-of-the-mill existence.

    It didn’t seem so in 1973 but David Essex’s casting now enriches the texture too.  Although only seven years Ringo’s junior, he looks at least a generation younger:  in his mid-twenties at the time, he passes easily for an eighteen-year-old in the film’s early scenes.  Essex had had small acting jobs and released several unsuccessful singles by the time he first came to public attention playing the lead in the first West End production of Godspell, which opened in late 1971.  Just a few weeks before the release of That’ll Be the Day, in October 1973, he had his first chart hit with ‘Rock On’, his own composition.  As Stardust opened in cinemas, exactly a year later, Essex topped the UK charts with another song he’d written, the aptly named and themed ‘Gonna Make You a Star’.   He had another hit shortly afterwards with the title song from Stardust.  In That’ll Be the Day, however, he’s an actor, not a singer, and he gives a good, natural performance.   He reads his lines easily but expressively.  His face is very open to Peter Suschitzky’s camera.  And he increasingly suggests that Jim MacLaine can’t fathom why he’s so selfishly unkind.

    A protagonist who combines surface charm with ruinous inconstancy is what turns the film into something harsher and more disturbing than the people behind it may have intended.  Although Essex and Ringo play well together, That’ll Be the Day is struggling for momentum while it concentrates on Jim’s partnership with Mike.  Even so, a sense of Jim’s heartlessness is already starting to emerge.  He arrives at the seaside a shy virgin.  With Mike’s initial encouragement, he’s soon the local Lothario.  He treats the girls he goes with shabbily, and is ever alert to the threat of responsibility that might affect him.  As he prepares to go to bed with Sandra (Deborah Watling), he’s spooked by the sound of a baby crying in the next room.  (If this is 1962, Jim might recently have seen John Schlesinger’s film of A Kind of Loving and taken heed of Vic Brown’s fate.)  A bit later, he aggressively refuses to make love to a young woman who’s already a mother.  He isn’t evasive only in his dealings with the opposite sex.  When a group of men beat up Mike – they may be aggrieved boyfriends of girls he’s hit on, or punters he’s cheated on the dodgems, or both – Jim’s instinct is to make himself scarce.

    The attack on Mike is the last we see of him and appears to trigger Jim’s return to live with his mother.  The plot, from this point on, gathers pace.  Jim makes definite though short-lived efforts to upgrade the commercial ambitions of his mother’s business and enrols for night school.  He also starts dating Jeanette Sutcliffe (Rosalind Ayres), the hairdresser sister of Terry, who was never as clever as Jim at school but who’s now about to complete a university degree.  Here too, That’ll Be the Day mixes clichés with less expected elements to oddly convincing effect.  Jim’s mother is a familiar screen parent of her generation – pushy, scolding and envious of a son who doesn’t-know-he’s-born.  The role comes almost too easily to Rosemary Leach, and she’s saddled with some of Ray Connolly’s most clunky lines (‘Terry’s a credit to his mother … it wouldn’t be so bad if you got your hair cut’, etc).  Yet Mary MacLaine at least subverts another cliché.  She’s broad-minded enough to want Jim to continue his education rather than devote his life to the well-established family business.

    Timid, almost childlike Jeanette seems an unlikely girlfriend for someone as attractive and now sexually experienced as Jim yet you can believe that her innocuousness is a refreshing relief to him – until it turns to boredom.  On the night before his wedding to Jeanette, Jim has it off with her more confident and glamorous friend Jean (Beth Morris), who’ll be bridesmaid next day.  An earlier sequence in which he accompanies Terry to his students’ union crudely presents Jim as – in the eyes of Terry’s trad-jazz-loving, posh university friends – a despised curiosity.   But Robert Lindsay is amusing:  although actually younger than David Essex, Lindsay manages to make conformist Terry middle-aged even while he’s still in school uniform.  The older generations don’t fare at all well in this film.  Mothers have too much to say; fathers, in various ways, are struck dumb.  As Mrs Sutcliffe, Daphne Oxenford has to keep unsubtly reminding everyone that her daughter’s too good for her prospective son-in-law.  Jim’s father soon scarpers.  His grandfather (James Ottoway) suffers a silencing stroke.  Mrs Sutcliffe doesn’t let her husband (Bernard Severn) get a word in edgeways.

    The bare bones of Ray Connolly’s script set up Jim and his father as representatives of generational syndromes, expressed in a shared wanderlust.  The father illustrates (perfunctorily) the challenge of readjusting to prosaic normal life of men who’d seen action in World War II.  The son is a cinematically late example of a rebel without a cause:  it’s only in the closing stages that he morphs conclusively into another type, encapsulated in the Stardust tagline, ‘Show me a boy who never wanted to be a rock star and I’ll show you a liar’.  Yet the series of impulsive actions that keep changing Jim’s life and hurting other people – abandoning a ‘respectable’ future, marrying Jeanette, eventually walking out on her and their child – doesn’t, as it plays out, reduce to commercially calculating simplicity.  It’s upsetting in a different way.  In bed with Jeanette, Jim is working on some song lyrics that his wife insists on seeing.  The words are whimsical, even twee, but with a sting in the tail – something about daisies, buttercups and nettles.  Jeanette giggles she doesn’t know what he’s on about and asks why nettles.  ‘Because,’ says Jim, ‘I’m a bit of a prick’.  The next scene, he’s packing his suitcase.

    In the closing sequence, Jim buys his first guitar – in effect, giving notice of Stardust.   I’d always assumed that film got made on the back of this one’s box-office success but, if so, Puttnam and Lieberson moved remarkably fast.  With only twelve months between the two release dates, production on it must have started very soon after That’ll Be the Day started taking money.  Perhaps the films were conceived as a pair from the word go.  (Ray Connolly wrote both although the directors were different.)  An unimaginative price-of-fame melodrama, Stardust had the effect of devaluing Jim McLaine’s individuality:  it was as if his destiny as an egocentric, substance-abusing rock god, explained his precocious lack of feeling for others.  When I saw the films together in 1976, I didn’t like either of them.  Watching That’ll Be the Day on television now was a welcome opportunity to see it more or less afresh, and free of the shadow of its successor.

    11 August 2019

  • East of Eden

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1955)

    Although America’s entry into World War I is an increasingly prominent theme of this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, Elia Kazan’s East of Eden is quintessential 1950s Hollywood – CinemaScope, James Dean, the tale of a problem child whose problem is soon revealed to be his parents.  This is a highly uneven melodrama yet it’s often moving.  The effect of the erratic style and tone is to reinforce – in combination with the skewed camera angles that Kazan often favours – a strong sense of psychological and emotional disturbance.

    Set in California’s Salinas Valley and nearby Monterey, East of Eden is often described as a ‘retelling’ of the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve’s sons Cain and Abel.  Filial and fraternal tensions are certainly at the heart of the narrative.  The stern religiosity of the patriarch Adam Trask (Raymond Massey) is a significant feature too.  According to local sheriff Sam (Burl Ives), who has known him all his life, Adam had a sheltered upbringing and fell for the temptations of a lovely young woman called Kate.  Their marriage ended shortly after she gave birth to their two sons.  Adam, a rancher turned farmer in Salinas, has always told the boys their mother is dead and in heaven.  In fact, Kate, who refused to be yoked to her husband and his rules, left him to run what’s now a thriving brothel in Monterey.

    In Genesis (chapter 4):

    ‘… the Lord had  respect unto Abel and to his offering: …

    But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth.’

    In the film, it’s Adam’s rather than God’s partiality for one son, Aron (Richard Davalos), that causes  the other, Cal (Dean), such anguish and to believe himself to be ‘bad through and through’.  Although there’s no act of fratricide as such, Cal’s reaction, on Adam’s birthday, to his grateful acceptance of Aron’s gift and censorious rejection of Cal’s, triggers a series of events that sends Aron off to fight in the Great War.  Shortly before he departs, Adam demands to know Aron’s whereabouts and Cal, like Cain, replies that he’s not his brother’s keeper.  At the end of an action-packed evening, Sam reminds Cal that Cain, after slaying Abel, ‘went away and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden’. ‘Now why don’t you go away some place?’ suggests the sheriff.

    Yet the Biblical inspiration and references are overshadowed by more modern melodramatics, especially in the final stages of East of Eden.  The film starts with Cal’s discovery of Kate’s whereabouts and occupation; as it approaches its climax, he’s driven to enlighten Aron too.  He drags his brother to the brothel and, in a startlingly Freudian moment, physically forces him on their mother.  When Adam dashes to the railway station and begs Aron not to leave on a train full of other enlisting men, his favoured son grins menacingly then thrusts his head through the glass of the carriage window.   Aron says not a word but, as the train pulls out, gives a maniacal laugh in his father’s direction:  it’s a violently garish expression of the youthful disillusionment with, and recourse to extreme forms of trying-to-get-through-to, the older generation that are staple ingredients of heavy-duty Hollywood family dramas of the early post-WW2 years.  Adam collapses on the platform, having instantly suffered a stroke that leaves him paralysed.

    Whenever Elia Kazan goes for a subtler effect, the result is more satisfyingly effective.  Early on, Adam, Aron and the latter’s girlfriend Abra (Julie Harris) are heard singing or humming fragments of Leonard Rosenman’s original score:  it’s a deft and, in a non-musical film, a surprisingly unusual way of connecting what’s on the soundtrack to the characters on the screen – making the music seem part of their lives.  (Rosenman’s score is sometimes intensely overwrought but the main melody is lovely and memorable.)  The figure of Kate (Jo Van Fleet), as she walks outside the brothel in relative long shot, appears to be dressed in forbidding black.  Once Cal gets to meet and talk with his inside the place and Kate’s personality starts to emerge, Ted McCord’s lighting reveals the blues and browns of the clothes that had looked like widow’s weeds.  When the distraught Cal dashes out of Adam’s ill-fated birthday party, he takes refuge in the garden, behind a tree.  Abra follows to comfort him; she too disappears from view:  unseen but heard, Cal’s distress is more painful and Abra’s attempts to console him more affecting – both are more ominous to Aron, as he listens and calls Abra to heel.  In the film’s final scene, as Cal sits at his stricken father’s bedside and the two prepare to exchange words, Abra tactfully turns away and the camera briefly follows suit.  It concentrates on Julie Harris’s quietly dignified attitude and mane of red hair as Abra stands facing the bedroom wall.

    Kazan handles the set pieces – a patriotic war parade, a fairground episode – with characteristic aplomb.  He’s able to give such sequences a sustained visual rhythm while building up the drama of what’s happening in the margins of these public events.  When this moves centre stage, it tends to be less impressive:  a subplot illustrating the Salinas comnunity’s switch to hostility against Gustav Albrecht (Harold Gordon), an eccentric and hitherto popular German shopkeeper, is one of the cruder facets of the film.  Even here, though, there are compensations:  Burl Ives’s calm, decisive quelling of the crowd’s menacing encroachment on the German’s property; the quiet implacability of a local woman (Rose Plumer) who hands Albrecht a letter informing her that her son has been killed in Europe.

    Paul Osborn’s screenplay efficiently coordinates the main strands of the characters’ larger context – the war effort, rural economics, developing technology (including the motor car).  Adam starts up a long-haul vegetable business, depending on refrigerated produce, that collapses and costs him several thousand dollars.  Advised by his father’s longstanding acquaintance Will Hamilton (Albert Dekker) that the price of beans will go through the roof if the US enters the war, Cal resolves to win his father’s favour by recouping Adam’s losses.  Cal persuades Kate to lend him the capital he needs to start up, in partnership with Will, a bean-growing enterprise.   America goes to war, the venture prospers and Cal makes his father a birthday present of the money he lost on his soggy lettuces.  Fiercely moral Adam, now also chairman of the draft board, refuses to accept Cal’s gift, denouncing it as war profiteering.

    A less persuasive plot element is Adam’s seeming ignorance of what kind of successful businesswoman Kate has become, and response to Cal’s revelation that he knows his mother is alive.  Adam may lead a determinedly blinkered life but his local standing and connections with the likes of Sam and Will make it hard to believe he’s still in the dark.  There’s another, more narrowly dramatic reason why it would have made more sense to indicate clearly that Adam is in the picture about Kate’s afterlife.   On the fateful night, when Cal finally tells his father that ‘I know where she is and what she is … she owns one of them houses’, Adam doesn’t react enough.   The pretext for this seems to be that his priority is to find out from Cal where Aron has disappeared to, but this raises another difficulty with the storyline.   When Cal first tells his father that he knows his mother isn’t dead, Adam makes him promise that he won’t tell Aron.  Cal agrees to keep the secret but, since his father sees him as deplorably unreliable, it’s puzzling that Adam subsequently shows no sign of anxiety that Cal might not prove to be as good as his word.

    East of Eden was the only one of James Dean’s three films released during his lifetime (in the spring of 1955).  Returning to it for the first time in at least a couple of decades, I was surprised by how mannered some of his acting is.  Whenever he’s spurned, Cal hugs himself – seems to try to retreat and hide within himself.   This is a remarkable series of movements but it has the quality of a drama-class invention – a quality emphasised by Kazan’s concentrating the camera on Dean.  As Cal and Abra sit together, preparing to ride on the fairground Ferris wheel, their growing mutual feelings blossom into a sudden and prolonged kiss.  It’s noticeable that Cal’s free hand doesn’t, as might naturally be expected, move to touch Abra’s face.  This is because Dean needs to keep the hand free for the graceful gesture he’s already decided to make when the kiss ends.  Kazan has encouraged his leading man to express his character’s helpless turmoil through a headlong physicality that’s occasionally overdone.  Yet Dean is often wonderful too – this is his most eloquent performance.  Cal’s distress when Adam rejects the money is exceptionally upsetting; his passionate, imploring embrace of his father is almost as shocking to the viewer as it is to Adam.  And the rhythms of Dean’s line readings really do come across as fresh and novel.

    Unlike Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden isn’t a case, though, of an inventive young star’s exposing the limitations of older generations of actors.  Jo Van Fleet, although nearly forty and an esteemed stage actress, made her film debut here (and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress).  She’s very persuasive in suggesting the accumulated layers – and the strain – of the persona Kate constructed after leaving Adam and their sons.  Burl Ives plays the sheriff with fine controlled authority and Albert Dekker is unshowily good as Will Hamilton.  James Dean’s energy level seems to rise in his exchanges with these flexible actors, as if he’s relishing the experience.  You don’t get the same impression in his exchanges with Raymond Massey or Richard Davalos.  As self-righteous Adam, Massey has a stiffness that, because it’s familiar from other roles feels partly the actor’s rather than the character’s, though Massey is better in the latter part of the film.   To be fair to Davalos, Aron’s lurch from smiley complacency into vengeful jealousy is a thankless task.

    Glowering and sinister, Aron successfully upstages Cal at their father’s birthday party, which Cal and Abra have arranged, even before Adam opens Cal’s gift-wrapped parcel of bank notes.  Aron’s present is the announcement of his and Abra’s engagement – which delights Adam and stuns his prospective daughter-in-law:  while still professing loyalty to Aron, Abra knows by now which brother  she’s in love with.  James Dean looks to enjoy himself most of all in his scenes with Julie Harris and for good reason:  she’s marvellous.  All three of Dean, Davalos and Harris were significantly older than their characters are meant to be – she especially so – but none of them is awkward in acting younger.  For Harris, the age difference here must have been a piece of cake, only three years after she brought Carson McCullers’ Frankie Addams to the screen in Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding.   Harris’s vibrant Abra is a beautiful blend of sexual innocence and observant sensitivity.  Her acting negotiates with ease the narrative’s jarring tonal shifts.  A sequence in which Abra and Cal talk together in a field of tall yellow flowers is, as a visual conception, a studied pastoral.  James Dean and Julie Harris make the scene completely natural.

    They’re equally, differently impressive in the closing scene.  Abra tells Adam that she loves Cal and pleads with him to give his son ‘some sign that you love him … or else he’ll never be a man … if you could ask him for something’.  She pleads too with Cal, to talk to his father ‘before it’s too late … get through to him somehow’.  Cal, with difficulty, does so.  Adam, who seemed to have lost the power of speech, manages a few words in return, and does ask Cal for something.  Adam wants rid of the obnoxious, callous nurse (Barbara Baxley) who’s been hired to attend to him.  In the last lines of East of Eden, Abra asks Cal what his father whispered in his ear and Cal replies: ‘He said, “Don’t get anybody else.”  He said, “You stay with me… and you take care of me.”’  The camera pulls back to create the final image in the dark bedroom:  Cal almost locked into position beside his father’s bed, Abra watching a few feet away.   The tableau is another melodramatic composition yet it’s unarguably right.  It puts the seal on Elia Kazan’s unstable, absorbing fable of absent parents and needy children, of blood ties and family chains.

    4 August 2019

Posts navigation