Film review

  • The Queen’s Guards

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell (1961)

    BFI’s current Powell and Pressburger retrospective includes as well as their collaborations the films they made independently.  The Queen’s Guards, a Powell-without-Pressburger, was screened under a double heading:  it was also this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ offering, introduced, as usual, by curator Jo Botting.  Not as usual, she had a special guest with whom to share the introduction – Jess Conrad, one of the few surviving cast members from The Queen’s Guards and eighty-seven now.  If Jo Botting has ever seen The Very Strange Story of the Legendary Joe Meek, Alan Lewens’ wonderful 1991 documentary for BBC Arena, in which Conrad was among the talking heads, she might have guessed what she and the NFT3 audience were in for.  It was clear from his small contribution to Lewens’ film that Conrad was a boring braggart; unlike the TV programme-makers, Botting wasn’t in a position to edit him.  He went on and on, as tedious as ever, now short-term forgetful too – although, alas (and contrary to BFI speaker tradition), Conrad still knows how to use a mic.  He kept repeating how he graduated from actor in rep to pop star; his stuck-record spiel, replete with jokey sexism, was received in stony but also embarrassed silence.  The handout for the screening indicated presciently that the film would be introduced by Conrad and Botting, in that order.  It’s to be hoped the latter said all she wanted to say in her Sight & Sound (November 2023) piece, reproduced in the handout, because she could barely get a word in edgeways with her special guest.  Well done to Jo Botting, though, for keeping her cool and her temper before she finally managed to get Jess Conrad off the stage.

    Michael Powell is on record as calling The Queen’s Guards ’the most inept piece of filmmaking that I have ever produced or directed.  I didn’t write the story (weak) or the screenplay (abysmal) but I take all the flak’.  The story is credited to Simon Harcourt-Smith, a friend of Powell’s, and the screenplay to Roger Milner (whose stage comedy ‘How’s the World Treating You?’ would, a few years later, give Patricia Routledge her first role in the West End and on Broadway).  According to Jo Botting’s S&S piece, Harcourt-Smith ‘[f]inding himself outside Buckingham Palace one day, … mused on what secrets the guards’ poker-faces might conceal’, which sounds a promising enough idea.  The film’s scope and potential for surprise are somewhat limited by the decision to make these secrets those of an established military family but this evidently appealed to Powell, a self-confessed ‘sucker for stories about the services’.  He was clearly stimulated, too, by the challenge of blending dramatised reconstruction of Trooping the Colour on the sovereign’s official birthday with the real thing; he sought and received the Queen’s permission to film the parade in June 1960.  With a team including cinematographer Gerry Turpin and editor Noreen Ackland, Powell achieves seamless colour and texture matching between the actual and created material for the ceremony on Horse Guards Parade.  Beyond that, it’s not too hard to understand his damning judgment of The Queen’s Guards.

    Voiceover narration comes from the protagonist, John Fellowes (Daniel Massey), an officer in the Grenadier Guards, whose battalion is ‘to have the honour of trooping its colour before the Queen’, with Fellowes ‘lieutenant of the escort’.  Powell switches between the preparations of John and other characters on the morning of the parade; and longer flashbacks describing their lives and interactions before the big day itself.  John is the younger son of retired guardsman Captain Fellowes (Raymond Massey) and his wife (Ursula Jeans), whose house overlooks Horse Guards Parade.  Fellowes Sr can no longer move from his chair, except by hooking canes into loops on an overhead rail, and hauling himself along.  The contraption was designed by David, John’s elder brother, whose death in the North African campaign of World War II casts a long shadow over the family.  For generations past, the firstborn Fellowes son has always been a guards officer.  John has pursued his own military career acutely conscious of being second best to David, especially in the eyes of his father, who treats John with contempt.  For her part, Mrs Fellowes still insists that David is missing in action rather than dead.

    We see John progress from clueless cadet to respected guards officer; the animosity between him and another young guardsman, Henry Wynne-Walton (Robert Stephens), that turns to friendship; John’s romance with flirty Susan (Elizabeth Shepherd) and, when she switches her attentions to Henry, with Susan’s more demure flatmate, Ruth Dobbie (Judith Stott).  Ruth and her father (Ian Hunter), a rank-and-file soldier in WWII and now a haulage contractor, are among the spectators at the Horse Guards ceremony although George Dobbie is there on sufferance.  When Ruth asks why ‘you keep pretending you hate John’, George replies, ‘I don’t hate him:  I just hope he falls flat on his face’.  It’s soon clear, from what a senior officer (Frank Lawton) tells John, that David Fellowes’ death in action wasn’t the noble self-sacrifice his younger brother has always assumed it to be.  The details of what really happened in the Western Desert are, unsurprisingly, revealed much later – in the light of John’s own, more honourable conduct in a combat operation in an unnamed desert country.  Powell is impatient to get this underway.   He gives perfunctory and rhythmless treatment to some of the other flashback episodes.  Despite some striking images (blue, white and yellow parachutes descending in a blue sky), the desert combat accounts for too much of the film’s total running time (a quarter of the 110 minutes).  Powell obviously wanted to craft some military action scenes but the attention he gives them is disproportionate to their importance in the overall story.

    Some of the cast are better than Powell’s low opinion of The Queen’s Guards would have you believe.  Ursula Jeans and Jack Watson (as an army sergeant) do good work in their supporting roles.  In his first film lead, Daniel Massey gives John a distinctively sensitive masculinity.  Robert Stephens, with his easy wit and insolence, complements him well:  a bedroom conversation between John and Henry, when the latter stays overnight at the Fellowes’ home, makes for one of the best scenes.  Massey and Stephens get across – here and elsewhere but never too emphatically – that these two men care for each other.  Stephens’ appearance in this film in the same year as A Taste of Honey is a reminder of his versatility.  Massey is also particularly good on the plane flight en route to the desert operation:  he was, like his sister Anna, a much better actor than their father, despite Raymond’s higher-profile filmography (his pompous tones are a drag in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), even in East of Eden (1955)).  The Queen’s Guards is notable as the only time father and son appeared together on screen; it’s not Massey junior’s fault that they don’t spark.

    Michael Powell’s film-making priority was telling stories that offered opportunities to realise his visual flair and imagination.  His relative lack of interest in actors may explain why he condemned The Queen’s Guards so unequivocally; it’s also reflected in one of its most glaring defects.  It’s true that at the time the film was made it was still unusual in British cinema for regional or non-RP accents to be done convincingly; but when social class and military status are such significant themes, why cast people who can’t get the vocals right?  Fellowes Sr seems meant to be typically English old school; Raymond Massey conceals his native Canadian accent erratically.  Ruth’s father has a decidedly pleb name, a line of business to match, and a vehement prejudice against the officer class; every so often, Ian Hunter suddenly remembers to drop his aitches.  Jess Conrad?  His acting is pretty good, as it also was in Nick Moran’s Telstar: The Joe Meek Story (2008), where he played Larry Parnes (and Nigel Harman played Conrad).  As Dankworth, a junior guardsman, Conrad is pleasingly natural.  Unfortunately, he also sings – something called ‘Oh Susanna’, in an idiotic pub sequence:  a barmaid drools over how marvellous Dankworth is (‘He’s going to be in the guards!’)  You understand Powell’s indifference to this particular scene if not how he got landed with it.

    Once John Fellowes returns from dealing with the natives in the desert (Roger Milner’s dialogue is often jarringly imperialistic), Michael Powell seems in a hurry to get things over with, happily resolved.  It makes sense that Captain Fellowes, struggling on his ‘trolley bus’ contraption to get a good view from an upstairs window of the Trooping of the Colour, eventually recognises John as the son to be proud of.  It’s a mystery as to how watching the ceremony seems to persuade George Dobbie, judging from the look on his face, that Grenadier Guards officers aren’t so bad after all.  In one of her few chances to speak before the screening, Jo Botting stressed that The Queen’s Guards, despite its imperfections, was well worth seeing in a theatre in all its Technicolor/CinemaScope glory, worth avoiding in the ‘appalling’ version of the film available on YouTube.  I’m afraid I ignored her advice.  I left the screening a bit before the end and finished the job at home.  The visual quality on YouTube certainly is dire but I wasn’t having Jess Conrad make me miss my train.

    2 November 2023

  • Donnie Darko

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Kelly (2001)

    The Donnie Darko story – what happens in the film and what happened to the film – has strong 9/11 connections.  Writer-director Richard Kelly’s debut feature was shown at Sundance in January 2001 and opened in American cinemas nine months later.  The seminal event in the plot – a jet engine crashes into a suburban house – was a mortal blow to Donnie Darko’s commercial prospects when the film opened (the crash had also featured in the trailer).  But Kelly’s extraordinary genre mash-up – a time-travel-mystery-cum-existential-horror-thriller-cum-social-satire – anticipates more expansively, and unnervingly, the psychic state of the nation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  In suburban Middlesex, Virginia, where the action takes place, the time is out of joint in more ways than one.  Apocalypse is predicted.  The soundtrack’s signature song is a cover version of Tears for Fears’ ‘Mad World’.

    That cover version – by Michael Andrews, who also wrote original music for the film, and Gary Jules, who did the Mad World vocals – was part of Donnie Darko’s vigorous afterlife beyond its first theatrical release, which ended in April 2002.  By then, the film, which cost $4.5m to make, had recouped only just over $500k at the box office.  It had, though, built up a fan base.  The Pioneer Theatre in New York City began midnight screenings in spring 2002 that continued for twenty-eight months; by October 2002, when the film opened in this country, it was acquiring cult status.  Donnie Darko made the sterling equivalent of $2.5m in the UK and grossed $7.6m worldwide.  ‘Mad World’ is a fine song though not a festive one:  the Andrews-Jules cover nevertheless became the UK’s Christmas No 1 in 2003.

    Released when George Bush Jr was in the White House, Donnie Darko is set very precisely in the month before the presidential election that his father won in November 1988.  A dinner-table dispute – focused on Michael Dukakis, Bush Sr’s Democrat opponent in that election – introduces the voices of the five members of the Darko family.  Nineteen-year-old Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who’ll be voting for the first time, is pro-Dukakis, to the chagrin of her Republican parents, Rose (Mary McDonnell) and Eddie (Holmes Osborne).  The Darkos’ two younger children aren’t old enough to vote but sixteen-year-old Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an expert stirrer; as he winds Elizabeth up, they exchange expletives that ten-year-old Samantha (Daveigh Chase) is curious to understand.  Rose pulls the plug on this war of bad words but not before we’ve learned from it that Donnie is in therapy and, according to Elizabeth, has recently not been taking his medication.  Prior to this scene, we’ve seen Donnie waking up on the edge of a cliff above the village of Middlesex, dressed in nightwear but with his bike beside him.  He then pedals downhill and home, where his parents and siblings are all to be seen in the garden.  Perhaps inspired by the opening sequence of Blue Velvet (1986), Richard Kelly presents a suburban idyll that instantly looks vulnerable.  As in David Lynch’s film, there’s a clear blue sky (as there also was in New York City on the morning of 9/11 – the sort of detail not lost on Donnie Darko cult followers).   A garden hose is central to the start of Blue Velvet; Eddie Darko brandishes a powered leaf vacuum which he jokily turns on Elizabeth.  Samantha is jumping on a trampoline.  Rose is reading a book.  But DP Steven Poster ensures that early morning shadows give the tree-lined garden a sombre quality, despite the fine weather.  Rose’s paperback is Stephen King’s horror story It.

    We also see Donnie’s extreme sleepwalking come to his rescue on 2 October 1988.  He wakes from a dream, just before 1am, and a weird voice tells him to get up.  He goes outside to encounter a six-foot figure in a grotesque rabbit costume and head (James Duval is the actor inside).  This is Frank, who tells Donnie that the world will end in exactly 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.  Donnie wanders off down the street and wakes up on one of the greens of a local golf course.  He returns from there to find a crowd gathered outside his home; police cars, fire engines, a news van in the garden; a crane lifting a huge jet engine from the demolished top of the house.  The engine crashed into what was Donnie’s bedroom.  In the days that follow, he experiences further visions of Frank, which Donnie’s psychotherapist (Katharine Ross) interprets as a hallucinatory symptom of paranoid schizophrenia.  After Frank asks if he believes in time travel, Donnie refers the question to his science teacher (Noah Wyle) who, by way of response, passes Donnie a book on the subject, written by one Roberta Sparrow, an ex-teacher at the school.  Roberta (Patience Cleveland) still lives in the area; she’s now very old, apparently senile and nicknamed ‘Grandma Death’ by the local teenagers.  She’s always looking to see if there’s mail in her mailbox but there never is.  Other kids deride Grandma but Donnie is an exception.  He’s astounded to discover who she used to be.

    This is the set-up of Donnie Darko.  For the benefit of the few people who read this note and aren’t already familiar with the film, I won’t say much about the denouement.  I will say a bit more about the collection of supporting roles in the story – to give a flavour of Richard Kelly’s ambition in trying to blend social comment and comedy into the various other things that his film tries to be.  There’s ‘Gretchen Ross’ (Jena Malone), the new girl at Donnie’s high school, with whom he gets friendly:  she and her mother have just moved into the neighbourhood under assumed names, to escape Gretchen’s violently aggressive stepfather.  There’s upright, uptight Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), who branches out from teaching gym to giving Donnie’s peer group ‘attitude lessons’ and their parents, Rose Darko especially, censorious advice; Kitty’s also the coach of Sparkle Motion, a junior dance group whose members include her own daughter (Tiler Peck), as well as Samantha.  The attitude lessons are based on the ‘positive energy’ credo of motivational speaker Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), a local quasi-celebrity.  There’s English teacher Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore), who has Donnie’s class read Graham Greene’s short story The Destructors – to Kitty Farmer’s fury.  It’s this ‘filth’ that, as Kitty tells the PTA, has caused an act of vandalism on school grounds – damage to a water main, which floods the place:  the young gang in Greene’s story does the same, and more, to an old man’s house.  The high-school flood is also inspired, however, by Frank, who has directed Donnie to vandalise the water main during one of his somnambular episodes.  Donnie is throughout the story the chief adversary of its morally self-righteous characters; again abetted by Frank, he’s also, in due course, Jim Cunningham’s nemesis.

    Jake Gyllenhaal is remarkable in the title role – which was also his breakthrough role.  Gyllenhaal was nineteen when the film was shot but easily passes as three years younger.  Brokeback Mountain was in production just four years later but Gyllenhaal changed from a boy to a man in the meantime.  His face in Donnie Darko is fuller than it soon became – the strong jawline isn’t yet in evidence.  Gyllenhaal’s humour and sheer affability are, though.  When Gretchen tells him about her stepfather’s ‘emotional problems’ Donnie brightly replies, ‘Oh, I have those, too!  What kind of problems does your dad have?’  (After a pause, Gretchen responds, less brightly, with the information that he stabbed her mother.)   Maggie Gyllenhaal, also playing a few years less than her actual age and credibly, is particularly good in the opening dinner-table spat:  the real-life sister and brother act very easily with each other – no one else in the cast is quite in their league.  Drew Barrymore overacts as Karen Pomeroy but Mary McDonnell gives Rose a nice blend of conventional poise and anxiety.  Patrick Swayze likeably sends up his own charismatic nice-guy persona.

    As the countdown to doomsday gathers pace, Kelly looks to be steering Donnie Darko into Halloween horror territory (also reflected in the film’s release date, on both sides of the Atlantic):  a Halloween party at the Darkos’ (quickly repaired) house is a major, gruesome set piece but the plotting to make it happen is strenuously contrived.  It’s not very convincing that, when a stash of child pornography is discovered in Jim Cunningham’s possession and he’s placed under arrest, his rabid disciple Kitty stands by him – and consequently can’t chaperone Sparkle Motion to a competition in Los Angeles; or that she asks Rose to deputise for her on the LA trip; or that it’s Donnie, when Elizabeth learns she’s got a place at Harvard, who’s eager that, in their parents’ absence (Eddie is away on business), they throw an impromptu party.   The mayhem that ensues there is really a bridge to Kelly’s big finish, in which the existential nightmare thread returns to centre stage – in a blaze of spectacular visual effects.

    Although the world in autumn 2023 is hardly a happier place than it was in autumn 2001, it’s good to be able to view Donnie Darko now through a lens other than 9/11 – and to get a sense of what it seemed to promise for the man who made it when still in his mid-twenties.  During the more than two decades since, Kelly has released a director’s cut of Donnie Darko (in 2004), written a Tony Scott crime movie called Domino (2005) and been writer-director on just two further pictures, Southland Tales (2006) and The Box (2009).  None of the last three-named films was a hit, either with critics or audiences.  I’ve no idea why there’s been nothing since The Box but Kelly’s long fallow period almost adds to Donnie Darko’s mystique.  He tries lots of things in the film and some don’t work but the surfeit of ideas is part of what makes it exciting to watch.  In retrospect, it seems to make sense that Richard Kelly put all his eggs in one basket.

    28 October 2023

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