Film review

  • Operation Daybreak

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lewis Gilbert (1975)

    I was already feeling depressed entering the York ABC for the double bill of Operation Daybreak and The Master Gunfighter.  The adverts didn’t improve things.  In Pearl & Dean’s repulsive ‘Welcome Home’, a pretty young woman and a smart young man enjoy a spiritual experience watching their home in the early stages of construction and envisaging its final, flawless reality.  As a pin is inserted into a piece of wood, the heroine muses, ‘Just think:  those little pegs are our future’.  Nails and coffins come to mind but the couple carry on rhapsodising – ‘It will be clean and new, our very own’.  The script might have been written by Margaret Thatcher.  ‘Welcome Home’ is presumably being shown nationwide.  It’s a relief – the audience laughs – when a local postscript pricks the Utopian balloon with the words ‘R D Pilcher & Son of Haxby’ appearing on the screen.  A relief too that this commercial is so technically crappy.  The grainy, jumpy film makes the dream house look extremely ugly.  The advert ends with an anti-climactic shot of the man’s shoes on the doormat.

    A mixture of unintentional laughs and well-staged action sequences, Operation Daybreak dramatises events leading up to and following the assassination of the German general Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942.  Ronald Harwood’s screenplay is adapted from a book by Alan Burgess, Seven Men at Daybreak.  The plan to assassinate Heydrich, the Nazis’ administrative chief in occupied Czechoslovakia, is devised in Britain:  three young Czech men – Jan Kubis, Jozef Gabcik and Karel Curda – are to carry out the killing.  A striking feature of the story, in spite the film’s many generic scenes, is how much goes wrong with Operation Daybreak[1], even at the climax.  The two assassins (Curda has turned traitor) ambush Heydrich’s car and Gabcik prepares to shoot but his machine-gun jams.  He escapes, pursued by Heydrich’s chauffeur.  Kubis then throws a grenade at the car and gets caught in the blast – though so too, and with fatal results, does Heydrich.  Only at the very end, cornered in a church crypt and resisting the Nazi horde with seemingly inexhaustible ammunition, do Kubis and Gabcik seem more conventional screen heroes.  The celebrated cinematographer Henri Decaë did the austere lighting.  Thelma Connell’s editing seems unambitious in the finale, compared at any rate with The Day of the Jackal, the last assassination-plot drama I remember seeing.  At the end, Lewis Gilbert inserts documentary footage as part of a summary of the Germans’ response to the death of Heydrich, including the complete destruction of the town of Lidice.

    Operation Daybreak is entertainingly skewed by the casting, at least for those of us who watch plenty of television.  Cyril Shaps, a small-time Jewish businessman in numerous small-screen dramas and comedies, is a gallant priest.  William Lucas, the heroine’s doctor father in Black Beauty, is a very different medic here.  Best of all is Diana Coupland, who plays a resistance stalwart.  Her first line is, ‘Call me Aunt Marie – everyone else does’, but she remains Jean, Sid James’s wife in Bless This House.  The two main assassins are Timothy Bottoms and Anthony Andrews.  Whereas Bottoms tries and fails to convince with some kind of European accent, Andrews is straightforwardly a dashing young British regiment officer.   These two aren’t the only reasons why, as the film goes on, it starts to seem that the Czechs are heroes only if they’re obviously Anglo-American.  With his dark beard and quiet voice, Martin Shaw, as the third assassin, has a more exotic quality and he turns out to be the treacherous one.  The ethnic confusion is such that it’s almost reassuring to see the archetypal Aryan Anton Diffring in the role of Heydrich.  I thought for a while that George Sewell (Special Branch) was playing Hitler but must have got this wrong because his character’s moustache disappears halfway through.  The Nazis also include Philip Madoc, familiar from roles ranging from Magua in The Last of the Mohicans to an Afrikaans tyrant in The Goodies.   Nicola Pagett (Upstairs, Downstairs) is enjoyably sparky as the resistance worker who falls in love with the Anthony Andrews character.  There’s a genuinely good performance from Pavla Matéjuvská, a real Czech, as Aunt Marie’s frail-looking but courageous daughter.

    Tom Laughlin, who made Billy Jack and The Trial of Billy Jack, is once more a loner in The Master Gunfighter.  The film, which claims to be ‘part fact, part fiction but mostly interpretation’, is set in southern California in the 1830s.  The protagonist is Finley (Laughlin), an ace gunfighter and swordsman, who attempts to prevent the massacre by a group of Latino ranchers of the Chumash Indian tribe.  The folksy familiarity of the narrative voiceover (from Burgess Meredith) can’t conceal the fact that Laughlin’s storytelling is all over the place.  The Master Gunfighter is a weird mishmash of Western and Samurai mythology.   Laughlin plays Finley with excruciating seriousness – as if in disapproval of the sundry atrocities that, as director, he’s put on the screen.   The result is still very boring and I fell asleep for a while.  I was awake when, about twenty-five minutes before the film was due to end, someone on the screen said a line that included the words ‘no choice but to leave’.  I took the hint.

    [1976]

    [1]  Afternote:  It was actually ‘Operation Anthropoid’:  the name was presumably changed for commercial reasons, with a nod to the title of the Alan Burgess book.

  • Great Expectations (1974)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Hardy (1974)

    This Great Expectations[1] has turned out a bit like a Shakespeare adaptation might do if the adapter had only read Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.  Sherman Yellen’s screenplay reduces Dickens’s novel to a love story.  Themes other than the relationship between Pip and Estella, as well as the rest of the characters, are assigned strictly to the margins.  Important locations like the blacksmith’s forge and Satis House are oddly spacious – a quality emphasised by Freddie Young’s lighting.   The music by Maurice Jarre suggests bits that he decided not to use for Doctor Zhivago.

    The role of young Pip is well played by Simon Gipps-Kent, even though he’s too mature for the opening graveyard encounter with Magwitch (James Mason).  This sixteen-year-old actor speaks clearly and well but his voice also has a gruff timbre – it’s believably the voice of what Estella calls a ‘coarse boy’.  Gipps-Kent’s closed-off, red-faced embarrassment and self-conscious movement at Satis House are better pieces of characterisation than anything that Michael York, as the adult Pip, achieves.  The transition from boy to man occurs during a montage of shots of Pip working with Joe (Joss Ackland) in the forge.  You want to laugh when York’s face appears because Pip becomes a gentleman of leisure in that moment:  to indicate strain and sweat, York languidly pushes his hand through his hair.  His male-model presence makes nonsense of the professed regret of Joe and Biddy (Heather Sears) at Pip’s quest to be a successful social climber:  York’s Pip is always the glass of fashion.  You can’t believe Miss Havisham (Margaret Leighton) could speak to him without scorn or condescension:  he’s patently a worse sycophant than Sarah Pocket (Maria Charles), even though the film’s Sarah is a more blatant sycophant than the one in the novel.  Casting York as Pip may have some vague box-office appeal but otherwise it’s senseless.  In this Great Expectations, the lead actor contributes only to Pip’s snobbish, soulless aspect.

    In contrast to Michael York, Sarah Miles as Estella does far too much and her actressy mannerisms are distracting.  Estella’s revelation at the end of the story that she has always loved Pip but feared greatly that he should know that, and break her heart as Miss Havisham’s heart was broken, is meaningless here:  as Miles plays her, Estella is driven off her rocker by Pip immediately.  Sarah Miles hasn’t the weight to play heroines.  Her Rosy Ryan in Ryan’s Daughter couldn’t measure up to the epic imagery with which David Lean surrounded her.  Her Lady Caroline Lamb was such a fey, screeching madcap that you couldn’t understand what attracted either Lord Melbourne or Lord Byron to her.   But Miles found a niche for her slender talent in The Hireling:  her lovely, fluttering nervousness was perfect there.  It contrasted with the rock-like presence and manner of the chauffeur played by Robert Shaw (and illustrated her character’s treatment of him as a piece of furniture).  It was also well suited to the overlapping dialogue that barely concealed the tensions between the Miles character and her mother – their remote, fragmented small talk disintegrated into gibberish at times.

    Sarah Miles plays Estella throughout – so from her very first meeting with Pip at Satis House.  Her attempts at girlishness are excruciating.  All she needs to do is insult Pip coolly and look beautiful but, as usual, she’s hyper-self-aware.  Her face keeps breaking into half-grins and tiny suppressed giggles gurgle up from her throat.  She moves her head from side to side, catches her breath, and moves her hands distractedly around her neck and hair.  She has no poise, no allure as a paragon of a higher social order – which is Pip’s vision of her.  Far from being Miss Havisham’s instrument to break the heart of men, this Estella is much more eccentric and offputting than her guardian (Margaret Leighton is curiously mundane).  Elizabeth Haffenden and Joan Bridge has designed some effective costumes for Miles.  An elegant montage describes the blossoming of the rose into English society:  Sarah Miles wears a succession of dresses and, along with them, flattered or tentative smiles.  Her stop-go-stop voice is quiet for once.  Yet Estella doesn’t age believably.  In the final scene, her costume is symbolically grey and her voice more modulated and sadly detached but Miles seems hollow in the wrong way.  There’s no indication of Dickens’s early Estella – ‘self-possessed … and as scornful … as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen’ – at any stage.

    It’s not only the principals who are physically miscast.  Mrs Joe, for example – described in the novel as having black hair and eyes and a skin so red that Pip wonders if she uses a nutmeg-grater instead of soap – is played by blonde-haired, blue-eyed, creamy-skinned Rachel Roberts, whose likeable presence is concealed beneath her attempt at an all-stops-out sadist (which is wrong anyway).   There is, however, a good performance from Anthony Quayle as the lawyer Jaggers, compulsively shifting his eyes as well as biting his index finger.

    [1970s]

    [1] Afterrnote:  The film, according to both IMDB and Wikipedia, was made for television though it was released in British cinemas.  I’m pretty sure I saw it in the cinema rather than on television.  I’ve not classified it as a TV piece.

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