Albert Finney (1968)
At the start of Charlie Bubbles, the title character (Albert Finney) parks his gold Rolls-Royce in a London street and goes into a posh restaurant for a business lunch with his agent (Nicholas Phipps) and tax accountant (Richard Pearson). Charlie, a best-selling writer, is instantly bored by the financial jargon coming at him from across the table – it’s plain to see money doesn’t bring him happiness. Once his attention has wandered to the other well-heeled diners, he looks even gloomier. At the end of the film, Charlie goes to a bedroom window in the Derbyshire farmhouse where he’s just spent the night. It’s the home of his ex-wife Lottie (Billie Whitelaw), a place bought by Charlie as part of their divorce settlement and where she now lives with their son Jack (Timothy Garland). Charlie sees a hot air balloon standing in a nearby field. He hurries out, climbs into the balloon basket, removes the sandbags and takes flight – he has to escape his life. During the intervening eighty-odd minutes, we’ve not learned much more about Charlie than that he’s unhappy and dissatisfied. Yet in spite of that and the glum theme, this is an engaging film.
Charlie Bubbles is distinctive too, even though there are tropes and details familiar from British cinema of the 1960s. Charlie’s whimsical (though supposedly real) surname has a whiff of the nickname of the eponymous hero of Billy Liar, a film also evoked when Charlie imagines shooting his querulous housekeeper (Margery Mason). His only kindred spirit in the swanky restaurant is his old pal Smokey Pickles (Colin Blakely), who has in common with Charlie not just a vaguely comical name but also a zany sense of humour. The subversive slapstick of the pair’s food fight, including items from the dessert trolley way upmarket from custard pies, is Morgan-atic. Charlie and Smokey are in their thirties but the clownish parts of their heavy-drinking afternoon after leaving the restaurant echo the antics of younger characters in A Taste of Honey and The Knack … and How to Get It (as well as Richard Lester’s Beatles movies). These things could be no more than derivative but it seems at least as likely that Albert Finney, directing his first feature film, and Shelagh Delaney, who wrote the screenplay, were making self-aware use of them. Like Charlie, Finney and Delaney both hailed from working-class areas of Lancashire[1]; he had played the lead in Billy Liar on stage; she had made her name in theatre with A Taste of Honey. Charlie Bubbles functions as a taking stock both of British New Wave pictures and of the price of fame for someone of Finney’s (and, to a lesser extent, Delaney’s) generation and background. The faces of successful writers, however, tend to be much less well known than those of successful actors. When complete strangers recognise Charlie on sight, Finney seems to be blurring, to improbable effect, the difference between the protagonist’s celebrity and his own[2].
The timeframe covers less than forty-eight hours. The business lunch and outing with Smokey take place on a Friday; Charlie goes up in the balloon on a Sunday morning. An episodic structure is reinforced by characters making an impression then disappearing from the film, never to return – first Smokey, then Charlie’s personal assistant Eliza (Liza Minnelli), then Lottie and Jack (of whom there’s no sign when Charlie finally takes to the air). Charlie also has several, more fleeting meetings with people in the course of his drive from London to Derbyshire and on his visit with Jack to a Manchester United match at Old Trafford on the Saturday afternoon. These entrances and exits are one means whereby Finney conveys the inconsequentiality of Charlie’s world – or his perception of it. The cinematography and the score are other means. Pauline Kael, who disliked the film except for Billie Whitelaw’s performance and the ‘details’ of Delaney’s screenplay, noted that it was ‘photographed by Peter Suschitsky [sic] in an extremely complicated style that attempts to produce for us the artificiality and flat unreality of how things look to Charlie’. The fairground flavour of Misha Donat’s sometimes discordant music suggests (as well as ‘Puppet on a String’, the chart-topping Eurovision winner of 1967) a roundabout ride.
Despite its prevailing cynical perspective, I didn’t recognise in Charlie Bubbles the ‘painfully monotonous movie’ that Pauline Kael saw. Each of Charlie’s brief encounters has a distinct mood. At the start of his overnight drive north, even a brief non-encounter is peculiarly gripping: as Charlie buys petrol for the journey and monopolises the garage attendant (George Innes), a disgruntled fellow driver (Arthur Pentelow) stands glowering a few feet away. At a stop en route at a motorway services station café, Charlie has an almost dreamlike meeting with an old acquaintance, a fur-coated woman (Yootha Joyce) who, like him, seems as melancholy as she’s conspicuously wealthy. While Charlie’s getting food in the café, an RAF man (Alan Lake) heading home on leave gets into conversation with Eliza. He asks who Charlie is – he thinks he recognises his face – then if there’s any chance of a lift. Eliza readily agrees on Charlie’s behalf. You expect Charlie to be annoyed but he isn’t. When the young man asks for an autograph for his wife, who’s a fan, Charlie obliges. The airman even takes over driving the Rolls for a while. Charlie and Eliza drop him outside the block of flats where he lives. This episode is repeatedly surprising and refreshing by being good-humoured and by nothing untoward happening.
At the Manchester hotel where Charlie and Eliza book in for a couple of hours, an elderly waiter (wonderfully played by Joe Gladwin) serves them breakfast. The waiter, recognising the local boy made good, tells Charlie he knew his father well in the 1930s and reminisces. ‘We’re all very proud of you’, the waiter concludes, ‘are you still working, sir, or do you just do your writing now?’ ‘Just the writing’, says Charlie, quietly amused. The waiter is one of several menials who, in the course of the film, receive a sizeable tip from him. It’s a way of keeping people at a safe distance, and Charlie’s conscience clearer than it might otherwise be. Immediately after this scene are two sequences of Charlie and Eliza making love in his hotel room, scored by spot-the-difference bursts of piped Muzak. At least part of the sex, perhaps all of it, is in Charlie’s dreams as he slumbers in bed.
It makes sense that, once he arrives at the small farm in the Derbyshire hills, the world becomes more solid: Lottie represents a past with more substance than Charlie’s present. When he kicks a football with Jack in the farmhouse garden, Charlie, who has seemed an observer of his life more than a participant in it, is dynamic for the first time in the film. While she scolds him persistently, you always believe from Billie Whitelaw’s playing of Lottie – and from Albert Finney’s reactions – that these two people go back a way and were, perhaps still are, attracted to each other. At Old Trafford, Charlie has a private viewing suite, in which he and Jack are sealed off from the crowds in the stands. If this were all that the scene showed, it would be tiresome. Finney takes it further not just by describing Jack’s dissatisfaction at being cooped up with his father but also by hinting at the child’s increasing inclination to mess up the afternoon. He spills some of his lemonade on the counter and, after eating his hot dog, wipes his hands on his seat. He presses his nose to the glass to stress his boredom. Gerry (John Ronane), an old school friend who now works on a Manchester newspaper, pops into the suite to talk with Charlie. Jack pops out and disappears. Charlie’s unavailing search for his son – in and out of the quickly emptying stadium, on a canal towpath – blends documentary description of locale with anxious drama. There’s nothing artificial or unreal about the moment when Charlie throws up, in fear of what’s happened to Jack and what Lottie will say.
Charlie returns to the farmhouse to find the boy watching television and in no mood for interruptions. Lottie is blasé as she assures Charlie that Jack usually makes his own way home. The relationship between mother and son is a clever element of Shelagh Delaney’s script. Lottie spoils Jack and he makes the most of it. This gives Charlie ammunition in a convincing row with Lottie; she, of course, can remind Charlie he’s a far from dutiful father. The accumulating weight of Billie Whitelaw’s bad-tempered Lottie is in striking contrast to the domestic whingeing routines in Billy Liar, which I saw just a week before Charlie Bubbles. The acting is generally strong. Whatever Eliza’s relationship with Charlie actually amounts to, Liza Minnelli, in her (adult) debut in cinema, fuses the girl’s gee-whizz over-eagerness with a hard streak of possessiveness for her employer. None of these other performances would work quite so well, however, without Albert Finney as the film’s mostly taciturn centre. His face is often impassive as far as other characters are concerned. Finney shows the viewer more of Charlie’s thoughts and feelings.
As a director, Finney varies the tempo admirably, except when he occasionally seems so fascinated by what he’s filming that he lingers on it too long. The obvious example is the monitors in Charlie’s house in London. A bank of CCTV screens is certainly different from, and an advance on, the split-screen effects that had become a cliché of 1960s cinema but they overstay their welcome. A couple of more broadly comic bits don’t work, for example when two local reporters (Bryan Moseley and Ted Norris) turn up at the farmhouse, trying to get an interview with Charlie and Lottie. The balloon finale sticks out as a bit of altogether high-flown symbolism and as a cop out. For the most part, though, you come out of Charlie Bubbles full of admiration for Albert Finney in front of the camera and behind it – and sorry that he has never directed for cinema again.
8 September 2018
[1] Afternote: On reflection, this phrase needs a good bit of clarifying. Finney and Delaney were both born and raised in Salford. His father was a bookmaker, hers a bus inspector. Finney’s incarnation of Arthur Seaton casts a long shadow. Some of his obituaries in 2019 placed him in the first generation of ‘working-class actors’. In one of his rare interviews, on the BBC’s Face to Face with John Freeman, Finney described his family background as lower middle class.
[2] While it’s never made explicit what kind of stuff Charlie writes, there are hints of a Len Deighton type. A few years older than Finney, Deighton was also a working-class, grammar school boy. Charlie’s work has been regularly adapted for the screen: more than one person he meets hasn’t read his books but has seen films of them. By the time Charlie Bubbles was in production, the movies of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin had already appeared and Billion Dollar Brain was about to follow.
