Jack Gold (1975)
Jack Gold enjoyed a deserved succès d’estime with The Naked Civil Servant, first broadcast in December 1975. Less than three months later, Gold’s Man Friday (which had premiered at Cannes the previous year) arrived in British cinemas and sank without trace – also deservedly, though it’s a curiosity worth watching. Written by Adrian Mitchell, Man Friday started life on TV in 1972 in the BBC Play for Today slot, with Ram John Holder in the title role and Colin Blakely as Robinson Crusoe. Mitchell reworked the piece as a stage play, produced in London in 1973, then did the screenplay for Gold’s cinema version, in which the coast of Mexico stands in for Crusoe’s desert island.
That possessive is right enough. At the start of the film, the white Christian castaway is reading his Bible – in Peter O’Toole’s interpretation of Crusoe, declaiming it. Genesis, chapter one. God, after creating man and woman (an amusing coincidence that ‘male and female created he them’ features in the Man Friday script as it also featured, memorably, in The Naked Civil Servant):
‘… blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’
Five Caribbean islanders, sea fishing in their canoe, are caught in a storm and washed ashore. The eldest dies; the others prepare his body, in a ceremony of some reverence, to be eaten. Startled by footsteps in the sand, then to come upon the cannibalistic ritual, Crusoe asserts his dominion by shooting all but one of the men dead. The sole survivor (Richard Roundtree) saves his skin by making clear he’s no threat to Crusoe, who spares and virtually enslaves him, and names him Friday.
In Daniel Defoe’s original, Robinson Crusoe redeems the ‘savage’ Friday by teaching him English and converting him to Christianity. Adrian Mitchell subverts Defoe’s adventure-parable into a lampoon of western, specifically English, mores and colonialism. The Union Jack flies high above Crusoe’s shack, which he shares with his talking parrot. The film quickly turns into an episodic, predictable demonstration, at Crusoe’s expense, of what’s morally objectionable, or ridiculous, about individual ownership, competition, fear of God, shame for carnal desires, and so on. The values of the rigid, domineering Crusoe are contrasted with the community ethos of the island tribe to which Friday belongs. As he recounts his life as Crusoe’s dogsbody to his people, in sequences that punctuate the main narrative, they’re sometimes puzzled, sometimes helpless with laughter.
Once Crusoe has killed Friday’s companions, the pair’s only, and short-lived, human company on the island comes in the form of Carey (Peter Cellier) and McBain (Christopher Cabot), ashore from the British slave ship on which they’re senior crew. Crusoe is ready to give the slave traders Friday in exchange for safe passage home; when it emerges that Carey and McBain plan to sell them both, Crusoe and Friday join forces to murder their visitors. It’s inevitable, thanks to the lack of other personnel and to the moral of Mitchell’s take on Defoe’s story soon being obvious, that Man Friday‘s effectiveness depends almost entirely on the two principals. Despite the change of title and hero, Crusoe remains the bigger part and emphatically the more talkative one, so the burden on Peter O’Toole is particularly heavy. Even he struggles to make Crusoe’s irascible, lordly foolishness entertaining – it’s an uncharacteristically effortful turn. Outside the regular moments of crisis, Richard Roundtree is an agreeably easygoing partner to O’Toole but, despite swapping John Shaft’s sharp wardrobe for a loincloth, an air of smooth modernity clings to Roundtree, most conspicuously in the tribal interludes.
Friday’s quick thinking on their first encounter – he binds his hands and Crusoe assumes he was a prisoner of the cannibal party – predicts the intelligence he’ll show repeatedly. He rapidly masters English so is well placed to interrogate Crusoe’s rules and customs. (Bilingualism comes easily to the tribe more generally: for comedy purposes, there are early references to Friday’s native tongue but the conversations on his own island are conducted entirely in English.) Clever Friday is soon trying to educate benighted Crusoe into a more relaxed, less egotistical approach to life. However, Friday’s intelligence also serves to expose as a plot contrivance how slowly he cottons on to the fraud of Crusoe ‘paying’ him to work. After Crusoe has exhausted his stash of useless coins, Friday even obediently deep sea dives to recover a further supply of gold pieces from the ocean floor.
Although Crusoe keeps reverting to assertions of superiority, it’s when he’s revealed as a weak and needy figure that Man Friday, in the closing stages, develops a bit more energy and momentum. Peter O’Toole stops being hammily outrageous and starts being tragically doomed, and the transition is worth waiting for. Friday brings Crusoe, via raft, to his native island; it transpires that he’s telling his people about his time with Crusoe before they decide whether to accept the Englishman into their community. Crusoe insists he can teach them useful things but his egocentric tyranny has already taught Friday to be more worldly wise, less laidback than before. He vigorously argues against the tribe’s adopting Crusoe, who’s sent back whence he came into lonely exile. He no longer even has the parrot for company, having shot the bird by mistake when, in a deranged fit of anger, he was aiming at Friday. Back in solitary confinement, Crusoe turns his rifle on himself. Jack Gold cuts from the futile suicide to a closing sequence that plays throughout the final credits. Friday and his people sing a weedy song (the last of several in the film) – something about the tribe and its traditions going on forever. Perhaps, though the ending leaves you more inclined to think Crusoe has managed to corrupt Friday’s trusting beneficence.
18 November 2020
