Film review

  • The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman (2025)

    ‘Last’ films don’t usually tell happy stories.  This documentary – a first feature by two young Americans, showing at this year’s BFI Flare festival – is no exception:  halfway through its ninety-odd minutes, The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel is shaping up as one of the unhappiest true stories you’ll ever see on a cinema screen.  The title location – on Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, off Route 66 – has gone downhill in recent times.  When it first caught the eye of Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman, the Holloway Motel was soon to be converted into temporary accommodation for homeless people.  The only evidence of current human life there was an elderly man, sitting out on a balcony with a glass of wine and a laptop.  This was the motel manager, an Englishman called Tony Powell, about to be evicted from the premises after decades running the place.  Petros and Freeman originally planned to make a short film about the motel’s closure and Powell’s reluctant departure from it.  Once they found out who Tony Powell used to be, their project expanded.

    Born in Bristol in 1947, Tony Powell grew up to be a successful professional footballer.  After several years at AFC Bournemouth, he moved to Norwich City in 1974, shortly before their promotion to the English First Division (the Premiership, in old money), where the Canaries stayed almost throughout Powell’s time at the club.  A tall, tough-tackling central defender with a tough-guy reputation on the pitch, he was regarded as something of a father figure to junior team members. He was literally a father figure too, with two young daughters.  His wife and the little girls stayed behind in England when Powell moved to the US in 1981 to continue his soccer career – first with the San Jose Earthquakes, then the Seattle Sounders.  In the mid-1980s, he retired from football and disappeared.  His wife and children, his brother and sisters had no idea how to find him.  Tony Powell is homosexual.  Closeted during his footballing career, he moved to West Hollywood to start a gay life there.  He thought his family would never forgive him if they knew, so he cut off all contact with them.

    In The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel’s early stages, you wonder if there is enough material to sustain a feature-length documentary.  The talking heads include Powell’s former teammates, Norwich City supporters and football journalists, recalling him as a reliable player and a reliable man.  This is fine as far as it goes, but that’s not very far.  Much of what’s said is routine – as is the interspersing with these interviews of bits of soccer action, and the usual clip of Margaret Thatcher, inveighing at the Tory conference against the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality (‘children are being taught they have the inalienable right to be gay’).  As for the main talking head, you also start to wonder if Tony Powell, whether answering the filmmakers’ questions or being followed by their camera around the deserted motel, really wants to be in the film at all.  He wants to talk only in the sense that he needs to:  his many years in hiding from those who most want to find him have made Tony reticent, often prickly when Petros and Freeman try probing further.

    You can’t help thinking he has repeatedly been in the wrong place at the wrong time.  A gay man who was a prominent footballer in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he arrived in West Hollywood just in time for the peak of AIDS.  We hear about his relationship with David Castro, a younger (on the evidence of photographs shown) and, from what Tony says, more confidently outgoing gay man than he himself was.  When David Castro contracted HIV, which developed into full-blown AIDS, Tony cared for him at home until he died.  The film is rarely explicit about dates.  It’s not clear, for example, when Tony divorced his wife (if he ever did).  It seems, though, that he was managing the Holloway Motel well before the turn of the millennium, in which case David died in perhaps the early 1990s.  Petros and Freeman interview his sister; since her brother died, she hasn’t seen or heard from Tony either.

    Almost needless to say, he cuts a lonely figure.  His only friends appear to be Erica, a trans woman who was formerly the Holloway’s assistant manager; a youngish man who was once a clerk at the motel; and Samantha (Sammy), Tony’s elderly chihuahua, to whom he’s devoted.  Tony finds an apartment that he can afford to rent but his health isn’t good:  he spends time in hospital for what seems to be a serious heart condition.  He’s delighted to be discharged, chiefly to be reunited with Sammy.  Not long after that, the dog dies and her owner is distraught.  At this point in The Last Guest, you just wish it would end – if only so that Tony can be left alone (in both senses of the phrase).  But Petros and Freeman had already found themselves making a film different from the one they first envisaged, and the one they’re making now takes an unexpected turn.  The filmmakers themselves may have something to do with that happening.

    Tony’s ex-wife Marilyn appears in the film only in photographs, but his two sisters have been prominent among the English talking heads, persistently anxious to make contact with him.  Petros and Freeman keep asking Tony why he doesn’t want that.  You get the impression that they’d like him to change his mind, both to energise their narrative and because they’re genuinely concerned for his welfare.  (When Tony’s suffering chest pains, it appears to be Ramiel Petros who gets him to hospital.)   Tony suddenly announces he’s going to phone one of his sisters, telling Petros and Freeman ‘I think you know me well enough to know if I say I’m going do that, I mean it’ (or words to that effect).  He does phone one sister, then zooms both sisters.  Next thing, he’s on his way to England, for an emotional reunion with them and with his brother.  (His sisters are much younger than Tony; childhood snaps from the family album convey quite how much younger – a decade or so.  I wasn’t clear if Tony was older or younger than his brother; the latter is so physically frail that it’s hard to tell.)  Tony also returns to Carrow Road, meeting with a couple of the Norwich City people we’ve heard talking about him.  Back in California, he also – even more nervously – speaks on the phone to one of his daughters.  (We hear only his voice in this conversation, and only the first moments of what he says before Petros and Freeman fade out.)   Both daughters, now presumably in their late forties, appear momentarily on screen, sitting smiling together.  Text informs us that Tony has met with them and is still communicating with his siblings.

    We think it’s all over … it isn’t yet.  Just as the closing credits look ready to roll, Tony’s sisters announce they’ve recently discovered, courtesy of one of those DNA testing kits, that Tony also has a son, older than his daughters; the son’s mother was a Bournemouth woman who gave him up for adoption.  A final montage of photographs includes, as well as one of Tony meeting up again with David Castro’s sister, a photo of him and his son side by side:  the film transforms before our eyes into an extraordinary variation on an episode of Long Lost Family.  It doesn’t do to get too meta about a true, poignant human-interest story, but The Last Guest not only serves to illustrate how documentary-makers can influence real events but also shows the possible effect of unexpectedly finding yourself at the centre of a documentary.  As he reaches a new low point, Tony Powell decides not just to accept that he’s the film’s lead but also to take the lead in his own story.  The Last Guest turns into something akin to those fictional dramas with a protagonist whose life’s in ruins before they reach a turning point, fight back and deliver an upbeat ending for their character and the audience.  Just as in some of those fictions, Petros and Freeman’s documentary even starts ignoring bits of the story-so-far that might get in the way of the feelgood factor.  For example, there’s no more mention of Tony’s heart problems once he’s found a new lease of life.

    This is still, of course, a fundamentally sad story.  Tony Powell starts off insisting he’s inevitably cut off from his family because they’d think him unforgivable.  Although he argues that it’s his homosexuality they could never accept, you suspect he knows all along it’s the abandonment of his children, who didn’t know for years if their father was alive or dead, that can’t be excused.  Yet it may also be a measure of Powell’s guilt about his sexuality that he felt compelled to disappear without trace, as far as his family was concerned.  What the tabloid press would have done if he’d been outed in the 1970s is one thing (we get a sample in the film of what they did do in the early 2000s, once rumours of the life he was now living in the US began to surface).  What his family would have thought was, for Tony, a more dreadful prospect – and not just because he had married and started a family of his own.  The first time he gets upset on camera is when he’s talking about the great relationship he had with his parents when he was growing up and how much he respected his father.  Tony’s sisters, well before he comes back into their lives, are adamant that they would never have minded his being gay.  You don’t doubt their sincerity, but it’s a lot easier to say that now.

    Even though the premises now have a new life too, and are serving a valuable social purpose, the empty motel functions as an expression of Tony’s prolonged exile from people, and the dead end he had reached.  Petros and Freeman are clumsy with their occasional arty embellishments.  Tony, sitting in the motel in the centre of the frame, is surrounded by superimposed images of footballers in an imagined Norwich changing room; they do a kind of striptease relay until the last-leg player is naked.  An empty armchair on a beach, first shown after David Castro’s death, is reprised with Tony, at a low ebb, seated in it.  But the film is also shot through with affecting resonances.  It’s a striking coincidence that Tony Powell’s teammates at Norwich in the 1970s included Justin Fashanu, who lived under the strain of being a Black as well as a gay top-flight footballer, until he couldn’t stand the strain any longer.  You can’t help comparing childhood photos of Tony’s two younger sisters with photos of his two little daughters – what a hero he was to the first pair as kids, how differently the second pair must have seen him.  It seems there’ve always been dogs in the Powell family.  Tony’s sister has one; in their first, very tentative phone conversation, she soon asks him if he has a dog.  (This is a week after Sammy’s death.)  When he returns to England and his sister’s home, her dog runs out to greet him.  It’s a real ice-breaker:  Tony can fuss the dog before he faces his family.  In one of his repeated assertions that the past is past, Tony says that his long-standing motto is ‘Shut the fuck up and get on with it’.  When, independently, one of his sisters talks about ‘a new chapter’ and the other about ‘a clean slate’ for Tony, their phrases are nicer ways of saying the same thing.

    In photos and the football footage from the 1970s, Powell looks a nearly stereotypical sporting pin-up of the decade:  six-foot-two-eyes-of-blue, big hair, blonde.  The hair’s grey now and thinner, as is his face, but he’s still a good-looking man.  As the film progresses, you keep thinking the elderly Tony reminds you of someone – you’re not sure who.  There’s a bit of Larry Lamb maybe, but Tony’s face is harsher, vulpine, more like Terence Stamp in old age.  You still feel it’s someone else he resembles, though.  Tony Powell makes such a persistently strong impression that, by the end of The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel, you realise that someone is probably himself.

    24 March 2026

     

  • My Fair Lady

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1964)

    Hit stage musicals turned into hit movie musicals of the 1960s were determined to end more happily than the classics of English literature from which they derived or, at least, a bit less unhappily.  Even in West Side Story (1961), and though it’s scant consolation to her, Juliet/Maria survives to mourn the death of Romeo/Tony.  In Oliver! (1968), the out-and-out villain, Bill Sikes, is duly killed but the entertaining one, Fagin, avoids the hangman’s noose and finally sings about changing his nefarious ways.  George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion ends with Professor Henry Higgins alone on stage.  He chuckles to himself at the absurdity of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower-seller whom Higgins has turned into a lady, marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill, an upper-class twit – but that, it seems, is what Eliza, who has now abandoned Higgins, is going to do.  In the last moments of George Cukor’s My Fair Lady, Eliza, after walking out of Higgins’ life, walks back into it.  He loses no time in making clear to her and the audience that he hasn’t changed his ways.  Eliza suddenly has changed, though.  The man who taught her good manners and impeccable diction also infuriated Eliza by treating her as a skivvy – enough for her to throw Higgins’ slippers at him.  Just a couple of scenes ago, when he asked her to come back to him, she coolly suggested that was because ‘You want me back to pick up your slippers’.  Higgins, in the film’s closing line, archly asks, ‘Where the devil are my slippers?’   After he’s had the last word, Eliza smiles fondly and moves towards him.

    I last saw Pygmalion at the Old Vic in 2023.  There was a lot wrong with the production, but that didn’t include Bertie Carvel’s unequivocal portrait of the leading man:  Carvel made clear that Henry Higgins, internationally renowned professor of phonetics, was a middle-aged mother’s boy, incapable of developing adult relationships; at the play’s end, he stood very thoroughly isolated.  I first saw My Fair Lady in the cinema in late 1967, soon after my twelfth birthday.  I can remember feeling let down, even then, by the supposedly happy ending, almost indignant on Eliza’s behalf.  I didn’t realise at the time how much this had to do with Rex Harrison as a performer.  My Fair Lady’s ending appears to vindicate Higgins:  despite being a childish chauvinist, he’s also meant to be irresistible – which may be possible if the man playing him shows some chinks of authentic vulnerability in Higgins’ egotistical armour.  Forget that with Harrison in the role.  The character’s self-satisfaction is indivisible from the actor’s.  Self-satisfaction is Harrison’s trademark – in evidence, before and after this performance, in films as otherwise unalike as Unfaithfully Yours (1948), The Reluctant Debutante (1958) and Doctor Dolittle (1967).

    Rex Harrison is the definitive Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady.  He originated the part on Broadway and in the West End before playing it in Cukor’s picture.  It’s a celebrated, Tony-and-Oscar-winning performance.  It’s widely assumed too that, in performing Higgins’ songs, Harrison invented speak-singing in musicals.  (His success in My Fair Lady certainly helped popularise the technique, but that’s not quite the same thing.)  When an actor replays in a film a part they’ve already played in a successful theatre run, they can seem too comfortable and practised in the role on screen.  Their performance looks to have been fully worked out on stage – has become accomplished in the wrong way.  Harrison gives that impression throughout Cukor’s film, but something worse happens in the single scene between Higgins and Eliza’s father, Alfred – with Stanley Holloway also reprising his role in My Fair Lady’s original productions on both sides of the Atlantic.  In this exchange, one actor (usually Harrison) sometimes anticipates, in a facial reaction or the delivery of a line, what the other actor is saying before he’s finished saying it – because he knows so well what’s coming.

    The film’s other main role was, notoriously, not played by its stage originator in New York and London.  My Fair Lady was a Warner Bros production and Jack Warner decided that Julie Andrews lacked the box-office appeal needed to ensure the film’s commercial success.  (My Fair Lady was eventually made for $17m – equivalent to around $200m nowadays, so considerably more than the budget for, say, Barbie (2023) or Wicked (2024).)   Andrews would no doubt have done her own singing.  The film’s Eliza, Audrey Hepburn, is dubbed by Marni Nixon, but that’s not all that’s wrong with the performance for the first hour or so.  As Eliza – to quote Higgins, a ‘draggle-tailed guttersnipe’, a ‘squashed cabbage leaf’, etc – Hepburn makes disastrous attempts to come across as downtrodden and to speak broad Cockney.  Higgins likens Eliza’s voice to that of a ‘bilious pigeon’:  Hepburn is painful to listen to, but because she’s so effortful.  It makes the press ridicule of Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent in the same year’s Mary Poppins (in which Julie Andrews enjoyed a huge success) seem very unfair.  At least Van Dyke’s accent was fluent, even if it was a strain of Cockney never heard within the sound of Bow Bells.

    Audrey Hepburn hits rock bottom early in the famous episode that culminates in ‘The Rain in Spain’ and, hot on its heels, ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’.  Higgins orders Eliza to elocute ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen’:  Hepburn drops each aitch laboriously.  But when, a few screen minutes later, Eliza succeeds in doing as she’s told (‘By George, she’s got it!), it’s also the turning point in Hepburn’s performance.  Once she’s allowed to speak ladylike, even while Eliza’s posh accent is still precarious, Hepburn is freed to act and charm like her usual self.  Julie Andrews’ biggest fans wouldn’t claim she could have looked as Audrey Hepburn does in the scenes at Ascot and the embassy ball.  Nor could Andrews have been as emotionally expressive as Hepburn is, once Eliza realises she’s falling for Higgins, then rebels against his tyranny.  Without Hepburn’s vivacious truthfulness, which illumines Eliza’s longing, the heroine would seem insane as she euphorically sings, ‘I only know when he began to dance with me …’  Rex Harrison, as a partner, gives her nothing – not even romantic inaccessibility.

    Audrey Hepburn was born exquisite, which makes for another apparent similarity between My Fair Lady and Oliver Twist – Dickens’ novel as well as screen versions of the story.  Despite his workhouse origins, Oliver is well-spoken, a quality that reflects both a nobility of spirit and the social class from which he’s descended and to which he’ll eventually return:  Dickens, for all his fierce social conscience, seems to view that as a return home for Oliver.  Eliza Doolittle is a different matter, not only in Pygmalion but in Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay for My Fair Lady, too.  Eliza, when she turns against Higgins, tells him that, by making her a lady, he’s turned her into a social misfit.  It’s in this respect that Audrey Hepburn is a problem in the role throughout the film.  She’s so innately classy that, once she’s speaking beautifully, Hepburn’s Eliza seems to become her true self, not at all a distortion of it.

    Even so, Hepburn’s talent and allure make the second half of My Fair Lady much easier to watch than the first, because she’s more at ease and because Eliza largely dominates the film’s later stages, as Higgins seemed to dominate at the start.  To be fair to Rex Harrison, he’s far from the only problem.  Many people consider My Fair Lady a triumphant climax to George Cukor’s long and distinguished career but I’m not among them.  The opening titles appear against images of glorious flowers, in predominantly pastel shades, while the Lerner and Loewe show’s greatest hits play on the soundtrack.  The floral images are still photographs:  they hint at both the decorative splendour and the visual lethargy of what’s to come over the next (nearly) three hours.  Cecil Beaton’s set and costume designs are wonderful creations, almost always on display.  It was interesting to see My Fair Lady again quite soon after revisiting, also after a long interval, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), in which the opulent settings are vitally inhabited by the people within them.  Cukor’s film could hardly be more different.  Inertia is essential, of course, in the ‘Ascot Gavotte’ sequence, where the upper-crust racegoers’ frozen attitudes and implacable dispassion harmonise with the superbly limited palette of Beaton’s outfits (black and white, grey and cream).  You can also accept the static quality of the embassy ball, to the extent that this is another top-drawer social ritual.  That doesn’t explain, though, why those attending the ball look so ill at ease (look, in other words, like a bunch of extras unsure of what to do).  Both at Ascot and the ball, Eliza, thanks to Audrey Hepburn, is just about the only person on the screen who looks comfortable in what she’s wearing.

    It’s in the musical scenes in and around Covent Garden, though, a place supposedly brimming with proletarian life, that Cukor’s direction is most deficient.  Stanley Holloway’s workshy Alfred Doolittle certainly doesn’t lack performing energy.  There are times when Holloway seems almost literally to be playing to the gallery, as if he were still on stage.  But he does a good job of conveying Doolittle’s dodgy charm – and his brio and rhythm, in both his voice and movement, are sorely needed.  The bit players with whom Holloway must interact are mechanical; other members of the Covent Garden chorus traipse round cluelessly.  Thanks to this and some peculiar editing choices, ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and, especially, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’ are arrhythmic.  In the film’s non-singing bits, Cukor has a maddening habit of holding characters’ reaction shots for much too long.  Actors as good as Mona Washbourne, who plays Higgins’ housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, hang around on screen telling us what to read from their expression long after we’ve read it.

    My Fair Lady’s collection of songs is rightly esteemed yet two of the most famous numbers don’t make great sense in the context of the narrative.  You understand why ‘On the Street Where You Live’, with its lovely, sweeping melody and deeply felt lyrics, became a standard; you don’t understand why the song is given to Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who’s otherwise written, and tends to be played, as a figure of fun.  Jeremy Brett’s casting as Freddy here, even though Brett gives one of the film’s most likeable performances, confuses the issue further.  There’s a comic spark between him and Audrey Hepburn, in their conversation at Ascot; this and Brett’s good looks combine to leave you puzzled why Eliza really doesn’t marry Freddy.  Brett also does a nice job not only of lip-syncing to the dubbed voice of Bill Shirley for ‘On the Street Where You Live’ but also of expressing the feeling in Shirley’s singing.  Yet the staging of the number is feeble:  ‘People stop and stare – they don’t bother me’ is a pointless assertion in an empty street.  Later, on the same street, a puzzled, crestfallen Higgins returns home Eliza-less.  Even I’ll admit that Rex Harrison’s rendition of ‘I’ve Accustomed to Her Face’ is a feat (Harrison’s better when he doesn’t have to share the screen).  It might even be touching, if only you believed a word of what he’s speak-singing.  ‘Her joys, her woes, her highs, her lows/Are second nature to me now’ – pull the other one, Professor Harrison-Higgins.

    Gladys Cooper plays her few scenes as Higgins’ mother with easy authority.  As Colonel Pickering, Higgins’ fellow phonetician and, for most of the film, house guest, Wilfrid Hyde-White has much more screen time – too much, given that Hyde-White is just doing his usual eccentric-urbane routine.  It’s rather bizarre when Eliza scolds Higgins by telling him Colonel Pickering has always treated her as a lady, when Pickering has often seemed as oblivious to her feelings as Higgins is, just less explicitly rude.  You have to agree with Pickering, though, when he tells Higgins that ‘one thing I can’t stand about you [is] your confounded complacency’.  In the impossible role of Zoltan Karpathy, the full-of-himself linguistics expert who threatens to unmask Higgins’ protégée as a fraud at the embassy ball, Theodore Bikel is less annoying than the part deserves.  Karpathy, a Hungarian, makes a fool of himself by declaring Eliza also to be Hungarian, and blue-blooded – a princess.  Since she’s aristocratic Audrey Hepburn, you have some sympathy with Karpathy’s mistake.

    The gestation of My Fair Lady‘s happy ending was a longer process than Lionel Bart’s decision to reprieve Fagin in Oliver!  Even though Pygmalion’s first production in 1914 was a success, some audience members, critics and even the play’s first Henry Higgins, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, regretted the downbeat finale.  According to Wikipedia, ‘Tree sought to sweeten Shaw’s ending to please himself and his record houses.  Shaw remained sufficiently irritated to add a postscript essay to the 1916 print edition, “What Happened Afterwards”, for inclusion with subsequent editions, in which he explained precisely why it was impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza getting married’.  He even wrote to Mrs Patrick Campbell, the first Eliza, that ‘When Eliza emancipates herself – when Galatea comes to life – she must not relapse.  She must retain her pride and triumph to the end’.

    When Pygmalion became a British cinema film in 1938, Shaw, who wrote the screen adaptation, was prepared to compromise with a conclusion that allowed Higgins and Eliza a ‘tender farewell scene … followed by one showing Freddy and Eliza happy in their greengrocery-cum-flower shop’ (Wikipedia again).  It was only at a private preview of the final film, directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, who played Higgins to Wendy Hiller’s Eliza, that Shaw discovered that the producer, Gabriel Pascal, had decided to end proceedings with Eliza returning to Higgins.  History doesn’t record whether GBS was at all consoled by winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Pygmalion (though it does record that he was the first man ever to win an Oscar as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature – an achievement unmatched until Bob Dylan completed the double in 2016).  Eliza Doolittle’s unprepared for, last-minute change of heart depends, for its emotional effectiveness, on the chemistry between the players in the two main roles.  Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller have it.  Despite Audrey Hepburn’s best efforts, she and Rex Harrison don’t.   The only way I can cope with My Fair Lady’ s abominable ending is by imagining that in a parallel universe, once Higgins mentioned the slippers, Eliza had second thoughts and made for the exit.

    21 March 2026

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