Carol Reed (1972)
Hot on the heels of Padre Padrone (1977), another fixture on the need-to-see list that can now be crossed off it… When I first read that BFI was doing a John Barry season this February and March, I was delighted: except perhaps for Nino Rota, there’s no other composer whose film music I enjoy more. When it came to booking for films in the season, I felt differently. Much as I like, for example, Out of Africa (1985), I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it again in the cinema; much as I like Barry’s songs for James Bond movies, I was sure I didn’t want to sit through those for the sake of a few minutes. Follow Me! came to the rescue. Notable chiefly as Carol Reed’s last feature, it also supplies Michael Jayston, my favourite British actor in the 1970s (see Mad Jack), with one of his few big roles on the big screen. BFI members’ booking for this month opened on 6 February. The previous day, Michael Jayston died, aged eighty-eight. Getting to see Follow Me! at last turned out an elegiac experience.
This peculiar romantic comedy was released in the US as The Public Eye, which is also the title of its source material, a theatre piece by Peter Shaffer. Charles Sidley (Jayston), senior partner in a London accountancy firm, suspects his American wife, Belinda (Mia Farrow), of infidelity. She spends long, unexplained hours out of the house each day; her priggish husband is especially irked when she arrives back late for a dinner party or a night at the opera. Charles engages a detective agency to spy on Belinda. The man assigned to the job, a Greek called Julian Cristoforou (Topol), is the most conspicuous private eye imaginable – he wears a virtual uniform of white suit, mac, cap and shoulder bag. Belinda can’t help but notice she’s being tailed as she goes from one tourist attraction to the next in and around London. Julian knows she notices. Soon they’re enjoying seeing each other but seeing is as far as it gets: they normally keep a distance of fifty feet and rarely speak. Charles discovers what’s going on and confronts Julian, who assures him that his wife still loves Charles but warns he’ll lose her unless he stops making her so unhappy. Although Julian is himself smitten with Belinda, he offers Charles a solution: he’ll look after the accountancy business while Charles, with Belinda’s knowledge, follows her around London in order to rediscover how wonderful she is. As the film draws to a close, Julian watches from his client’s office window as Charles, wearing Julian’s white coat and cap, sets off down the street, fifty feet behind his wife.
Peter Shaffer’s twin one-act plays The Private Ear and The Public Eye are three-handers. In their original double-bill production on the West End in 1962, Maggie Smith played the female role in both plays; the two men in The Public Eye were Richard Pearson as the accountant and, believe it or not, Kenneth Williams as the private detective. It’s striking in retrospect that these early lightweight pieces rehearse what became Shaffer’s recurrent, heavyweight theme in his most highly-rated stage (subsequently screen) dramas – a conflict between desiccated rationality and instinctual ‘genius’. The former is cultured, would-be controlling and eventually thwarted, the latter undisciplined and irresistibly life-enhancing. This in-the-red-corner-in-the-blue-corner set-up – common to all three of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus and Amadeus – is anticipated not only in the clashes of The Public Eye but also in The Private Ear, where an introverted office clerk meets a girl at a classical concert, invites her to dinner but feels compelled to ask his cocky, uncouth co-worker along to cook the meal.
Shaffer’s screenplay for Follow Me! is unsatisfactory in various ways. The dialogue is pleased with itself but, for the most part, has no right to be. (When, at their first meeting, Julian tells Charles that ‘My father was a Rhodes scholar – by that I mean he was a scholar from Rhodes’, you get some idea of what you’re in for.) The ten years between the first staging of The Public Eye and its becoming a film saw a lot of cultural change but Shaffer’s scenario doesn’t move with the times. It may have been plausible in 1962 for an English Belinda to turn in short order from giddy free spirit into subordinate wife; it makes less sense that in post-Swinging London an American, vaguely hippified version of Belinda, quite recently arrived in England, would hang around once the marriage had gone wrong for her, even to sight-see. The potentially happy ending is hollow. As we see in flashbacks, Charles, when he first meets Belinda, is bowled over by her. She instantly transforms his behaviour and outlook – but only temporarily. If she can’t, at the first time of asking, properly wean him off the people and values he’s always known, why will things work out better second time around? Shaffer supplies no kind of answer to the question.
It’s strange with Carol Reed’s films. I’ve liked most of those I’ve seen – Bank Holiday (1938), The Stars Look Down (1940), Kipps (1941), Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), The Man Between (1953). Two that I’m less keen on are his supposedly standout achievements – The Third Man (1949), widely agreed to be Reed’s masterpiece, and his biggest box-office hit, Oliver! (1968), which won him an Oscar. That was followed by a Western, Flap (1970), his penultimate film (like his last one, it was released with different titles on either side of the Atlantic – The Last Warrior in Britain). I was puzzled what had drawn him to Follow Me!, so soon after the international success of Oliver! An extract from Nicholas Wapshott’s 1990 biography, included in the BFI handout, explains that:
‘The failure of The Last Warrior ensured that Carol Reed would have to spend months in search of his next project. He came to the conclusion at one stage that, having wasted the credit he had gained for Oliver!, he would never be given another chance to work, but at last an opportunity to make a further film came from the American producer Hal B Wallis. Reed said: “I had nothing on my plate when Hal Wallis offered this. That’s the value of producers. As an independent, from finding the story to finding the money to casting, you’ve spent two years before you can start shooting. If you like making pictures, you’ve got to go from one [thing] to the other – within reason”. …’
Reed’s successful handling of a wide range of material over the course of his career is part of what I admire about him. It’s a pity that in what proved to be his swansong he’s not only below his best but made a film that’s not even recognisably his (Nicholas Wapshott notes that it ‘contained no magic and no hint that it was Carol Reed behind the camera’). Reed can’t overcome the underlying challenge here – stretching a one-act play into a feature-length piece (albeit that Follow Me!, which runs ninety minutes, isn’t that long). In order to pad things out, what was probably only verbal on stage is on screen visualised also. Perhaps it helped sell the film internationally to show Belinda wandering around scenic locations – Kew Gardens, Syon House, Windsor Great Park, and so on – with Julian following at a respectful distance; but once you’ve seen one of these sequences you’ve seen them all – or nearly all. The only such interlude that’s distinctive, and effective, comes when Julian leads the way. He’s nearly always eating something – macaroons and yogurt (not together) are particular addictions – and he conducts Belinda on a whistle-stop tour of London streets with food in their name (Poultry, Pudding Lane, Artichoke Hill, etc). Julian’s unsuitably eye-catching get-up was presumably Reed’s rather than Shaffer’s idea: it’s an instant joke that doesn’t play out, especially since Topol, even drably dressed, is not someone who blends in with the crowd.
Even though the flashbacks to Belinda’s and Charles’s courtship are also essentially padding and tend to the touristic (a picnic on the fringes of a stately home), these are some of the film’s most pleasing scenes. They first meet when Charles is the sole diner in a Persian restaurant (‘The Hanging Gardens’) where Belinda is working as a waitress. She drops a plate of chicken with caramel in his lap but he hardly notices: already he only has eyes for Belinda. Mia Farrow and Michael Jayston play these scenes very nicely, as Charles is charmed, then besotted, by Belinda – and becomes charming himself, despite remaining a bit of a stuffed shirt. This romantic episode makes all the more mechanical Charles’s reversion to his pre-Belinda self almost as soon as they’re married – a necessary means of setting up the main plot.
Mia Farrow’s character doesn’t add up but she strikes a fine balance between quirky allure and authentic anguish, as Belinda suffocates in the domestic subservience to which humourless, conventional Charles consigns her. It sounds like damning with faint praise to say that Topol’s Julian is much less annoying than Reed and Shaffer deserve but this is no mean feat. Julian, when he first turns up in Charles’s office, is exuberantly outrageous, for quite a long time. At the business end of the story, he has to deliver chunks of verbiage like:
‘Orpheus tried to lead his girl out of hell by not looking at her. Let Belinda lead you by not speaking. Do you think that’s so silly? How many people would become married, in fact as well as law, if they just shut up and looked and listened and heard each other’s heartbeats …?’
Topol somehow manages to invest this kind of stuff with real feeling. He looks surprisingly young and slim here simply because he’s playing someone his own age. As a screen figure, he’s virtually indistinguishable from his most famous role, the paterfamilias Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (1971), and therefore eternally grizzled and heavy-set. But Topol had just turned thirty when he first played Tevye on the Broadway stage and was only thirty-five when he reprised the role on screen. (He and Michael Jayston were exact contemporaries – both born in 1935.)
Carol Reed directs Topol and Mia Farrow more confidently than he does the home team, whose overplaying gives Follow Me! a strained and antiquated flavour. It doesn’t help, of course, that they nearly all have small parts they’re determined to make the most of. These are mostly people recognisable chiefly from TV – Annette Crosbie as Charles’s secretary, Dudley Foster as the head of the detective agency. An exception is Margaret Rawlings, best known as a theatre actress, who has rather more to say as Charles’s mother; Rawlings is assured but stagy. Minor figures in Charles’s social milieu are broadly drawn, to put it mildly, but hardly less offensive for that – notably in some ‘comical’ hang’-em-and-flog-‘em chit-chat at a party. (This would have been just as offensive at the time the film was made.) Michael Jayston’s performance is sometimes uneasily situated between this kind of acting and the freer, more individual charisma that Farrow and Topol bring to proceedings. Jayston’s very likeable when Belinda first casts her spell on Charles. He makes the man’s increasingly defeated self-righteousness amusing – but it’s also funny when Belinda is exasperated by Charles’s minimal emotionalism because she is, in effect, commenting on Michael Jayston’s trademark style. You can understand why his cinema career didn’t last long beyond Follow Me! It’s his work in television and on stage (especially as the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s Equus in 1976-77) that I cherish.
John Barry’s score does a lot of the heavy lifting in the tourist-brochure scenes. I wasn’t familiar with the music, which doesn’t feature on the Barry compilation albums I have; although unmistakably by him and pleasant listening, it’s not very remarkable – an echo, but rather a pale one, of Barry’s swooning, luscious ‘The Girl With the Sun in Her Hair’ (aka the Sunsilk shampoo advert music). There’s also a rather weedy song, ‘Follow Follow’, with music by Barry and lyrics by Don Black. Still, the theme from Out of Africa was playing when I entered NFT2. In the few minutes between taking my seat and the start of the screening, I enjoyed the best of both worlds, listening to the music from The Living Daylights and Dances With Wolves without having to watch them. Follow Me! is rarely good and sometimes dire but I’m grateful that BFI included this little-known picture in their selection for the John Barry season. Though not half as grateful as I am to Michael Jayston for what he did for me during the 1970s.
12 March 2024
