Steve Gordon (1981)

What struck me most about Arthur, which I’d never seen before, was how ropy the plotting was, usually but not always for the sake of instant gags.  When the fabulously rich New York playboy Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) first sees Linda Marolla (Liza Minnelli), the working-class waitress from Queens he falls in love with, she’s shoplifting a tie from a posh menswear store.  She takes it home for her father (Barney Martin), who puts it round his neck although he’s always shirtless as well as shiftless.  Linda looks set to be a kooky kleptomaniac but, even though it’s something of a relief that she’s not, nothing in her personality or behaviour later in the film chimes with her eyecatching first entrance as a thief (in a red and yellow outfit that’s much splashier that anything else in her wardrobe).  Arthur’s old-moneyed family wants him to marry the daughter of a brutal nouveau riche (Stephen Elliott).  What’s maddening about the lovely, dreary Susan (Jill Eikenberry) is that she’s infinitely understanding of Arthur’s dipsomania and its verbal accompaniments:  when he says exasperatedly to her, ‘You’re such an asshole, Susan’, she smiles back patiently.  Yet in the climax to the film, when Arthur jilts Susan on their wedding day, she reacts like a conventionally wronged bride – the writer-director Steve Gordon carelessly drops what had been distinctive about her.  Arthur’s warned by his father (Thomas Barbour) that he and his grandmother will cut Arthur off financially if he doesn’t marry Susan.  It would make sense if Gordon kept the grandmother (Geraldine Fitzgerald) under wraps so that she appeared just at the end of the film and overruled the father; as we see her early on and it’s clear she’s indulgent towards Arthur, her final intervention is pretty pointless.

Watching Arthur at this distance in time has its shocking elements.  I couldn’t remember who directed it until the credits appeared; when I looked up Steve Gordon on Wikipedia I discovered he died aged forty-four in 1982 (Arthur was his first and last feature).  It’s to Gordon’s credit that he doesn’t present Arthur’s heavy drinking simply as a problem that’s cured once he finds the right girl but it’s still hard to find his sustained inebriation and his drunken driving purely, delightfully comic.  Gordon doesn’t make the mistake of having Arthur lose his fortune and end up poor but happy – yet the implication that he can carry on enjoying his great wealth irresponsibly and ostentatiously but with the love of a good woman as a bonus doesn’t make for a satisfying ending either.   Steve Gordon had done plenty of TV comedy work in the previous fifteen years and Arthur is sketchy in more ways than one.  That it’s come to be regarded as a near-classic (it’s number 53 on the American Film Institute’s top hundred comedy films) is thanks to the performances of Dudley Moore and John Gielgud, as Arthur’s valet, Hobson.  Moore’s portrait is an unusually appealing combination of comedy turn and characterisation:  although he’d already had a big success in 10 (1979), he was still relatively new to Hollywood comedy and his performance feels fresh.  As you’d expect, Gielgud is masterly in his delivery of Hobson’s caustic one-liners – some of these are unpleasantly bitter but Gielgud’s relish of the words makes them not just palatable but a waspish delight.  When it turns out that Hobson is (a) deeply fond of Arthur and (b) dying, Gielgud manages the sentimental transition with astonishing taste and control.  Although Liza Minnelli, as Linda, is more successfully subdued than you might expect, you still sense it’s a strain for her to keep the lid on and to play second fiddle:  this comes out in the lack of connection between her and Dudley Moore.  Lou Jacobi has a good cameo as a man who runs a flower shop.  The film’s hit theme song, like Gielgud, won an Oscar and it was nice to hear it again.  Christopher Cross sings the song, which he co-wrote with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen.

28 December 2011