Film review

  • One Life

    James Hawes (2023)

    The title of James Hawes’s drama echoes the scriptural precept (written in the Quran and the Talmud) that ‘… whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity’.  Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake’s screenplay is based on the biography of a man who saved more than one life.  In the months before the outbreak of World War II, Nicholas Winton co-ordinated the rescue of 669 children, the vast majority of them Jewish, by arranging their passage from Prague to Britain and homes for them in this country.  Long after the event, the operation became known as the ‘Czech Kindertransport’ and the prime mover behind it was dubbed ‘the British Schindler’.  Born in Hampstead in 1909 to German-Jewish parents who had recently settled in London, Winton was a stockbroker at the time of the Kindertransport; post-war, he worked for, among other agencies, the International Refugee Organisation and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.  His work in the late 1930s came to public attention only in the late 1980s.   He was knighted for ‘services to humanity’ in 2003.  He died twelve years later, at the astonishing age of 106.

    One Life tells a heroic and an inspiring story but, until its closing stages, is frustratingly uninspired.  This is due partly to the narrative structure, which alternates between events in 1938-39 and 1987-88 and, within the earlier timeframe, what happens in Prague and in London.  While thirty-year-old Nicholas Winton (Johnny Flynn) is in the Czech capital, it’s his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) who forthrightly cuts through the British red tape obstructing her son’s initiative.  In 1987, the septuagenarian Nicholas (Anthony Hopkins) lives in comfortable but somehow thwarted retirement in Maidenhead with his Danish wife Grete (Lena Olin).  There’s little synergy between these different parts of the narrative; although it becomes a bit more focused once Nicholas and his mother are on screen together, James Hawes continues to rely too much on montages of envelopes getting sealed and opened, documents stamped, family photographs looked over – with Volker Bertelmann’s hard-working score underlining, mostly unnecessarily, the meaning of what we see.  More important, the 1930s sequences, without being poorly staged or played, have a stubbornly standard-issue feel that robs them of independent life.

    Things change in the film’s last half hour, through the agency of two surprising subsidiary heroes of the story, both now late and unlamented – the long-running BBC consumer affairs programme That’s Life! and Robert Maxwell.  In 1988, Nicholas Winton met with Maxwell’s wife Elisabeth (played in One Life by Marthe Keller), a respected Holocaust researcher.  He showed her his recently rediscovered 1938-39 scrapbook which contained the names and photographs of the children rescued from Czechoslovakia, as well as the names and addresses of families that took in these young refugees.  Seeing One Life the day after the release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents cache in America made it even harder than usual to have positive feelings about the Maxwell clan; but it was Robert Maxwell, presumably with his wife’s encouragement, who contacted That’s Life! about Nicholas Winton’s efforts on behalf of Jewish children in Czechoslovakia and it was Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life! team that assisted in tracking these survivors down.  Winton was invited to attend a recording of the show as a member of the studio audience and seated in the front row next to a middle-aged woman who, unknown to him, had come to Britain as one of his refugees.  He was invited back for another That’s Life! programme for which the entire studio audience comprised ‘Winton’s children’ or their descendants.  (The Czech youngsters who went on to distinguished careers in Britain included, by the way, the film-maker Karel Reisz and the Labour MP and subsequent peer Alf Dubs.)

    ‘But it’s such a silly show!’ says Grete Winton when her husband first mentions That’s Life!  He doesn’t disagree with her; it’s vaguely unseemly that this was how Winton’s great achievements were brought publicly to light; and Samantha Spiro’s version of Esther Rantzen in One Life would look crude even in a quick-fire impressions show.  Yet the sequences in the TV studio and Winton’s reunion with people whose lives he saved are unarguably moving and give James Hawes’s film a much-needed shot in the arm.  So does the narrative’s eventual concentration on the elderly Nicholas Winton, which allows Anthony Hopkins the uninterrupted screen time he deserves.  Hopkins was approaching his eighty-five birthday when the film was shot in late 2022.  He has always been a gifted, charismatic performer but his work in The Father (2020) and now here is that of a master actor, creating a richly detailed personality with the minimum of evident technique.  Hopkins makes you wonder if anyone has ever got to be as good on the cinema screen as he now is, at such an advanced age.  (Judi Dench doesn’t really count:  she was already in her sixties – and already great – by the time she started making films regularly.)  Despite a less than penetrating script, Hopkins’s portrait of Nicholas Winton feels, even in the early stages of the film, real.  He’s often funny, too – not least in one treasurable scene between him and Jonathan Pryce, Hopkins’s The Two Popes (2019) co-star, playing the older version of one of Winton’s colleagues in the Prague rescue effort.

    The stirring effect of the last part of One Life is, of course, to render the 1930s scenes – what should be the dramatic and emotional guts of the story – all the more marginal but Hopkins’s performance makes that a price worth paying.  It should be said that Johnny Flynn, though inevitably eclipsed by his senior partner in the role, does well as Winton:  Flynn has warmth, blends sensitivity with single-mindedness and, without seeming to imitate Hopkins, anticipates aspects of the older man.  This comes through strongly in the very last flashback to 1939.  In old age, Winton is still riddled with regret that the final, 250-strong group of children due to leave Prague on 1 September 1939 was prevented from doing so by Hitler’s invasion of Poland on the same day and the outbreak of war across Europe.  The stricken faces of the younger Nicholas, as he realises the implications of this, and his older self reflecting on it, are eloquently juxtaposed.  Helena Bonham Carter is entertaining as Barbara (Babi) Winton and Romola Garai makes Doreen Warriner, another of the unsung British humanitarian heroes working in Prague, remarkably individual, given the material she has to work with.  The same goes for Michael Gould, as a harassed British bureaucrat negotiating between the rule book and his conscience.

    4 January 2024

  • The Small Back Room

    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

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