Desmond Davis (1966)

Desmond Davis, now eighty-four, introduced the screening at BFI.   His cab was fifty minutes late and he was upset and embarrassed that the film was delayed because of him.   He handed the BFI person the microphone and read his notes; his hands were shaking.  He explained that I Was Happy Here represented a time when ‘some of us believed in a poetic cinema’, influenced by film-makers as different as Marcel Carné (Le quai des brumes was mentioned particularly) and John Ford.   Davis oddly and ruefully contrasted what he and kindred spirits were trying to do in the 1960s with the heartless technology and routinised violence in the products of twenty-first century Hollywood.  He went on to note how many of those involved in I Was Happy Here ‘are no longer with us’.  His flustered nostalgia made me sad even before the film was underway.

I felt sorry at the end too because I Was Happy Here, although evidently a labour of love, isn’t very good.   Based on a novella by Edna O’Brien, who did the adaptation with Davis, it’s about Cass(andra), a young woman from a small seaside town – not much more than a village – in Ireland, who returns there one Christmas after her life in London has fallen apart.  Cass went to England a few years earlier, expecting her boyfriend Colin, a local fisherman, to join her there.  When he broke things off, Cass, living a lonely bedsit life in the vastly unfriendly metropolis, somehow got involved with an Englishman, a sports-car-driving rugger-bugger called Matthew Langdon.  A doctor about to start in general practice (with support from his wealthy parents), Matthew gets Cass pregnant.  They marry but she loses the baby (I wasn’t clear at what stage of the pregnancy).   The action of the film takes place over the course of one evening (into early the next morning), in combination with extensive flashbacks.  Cass has absconded, back to her roots; Matthew has followed her to Ireland with a view to reclaiming what he regards as his property.  Back home, Cass wants to recapture her old life and, especially, to see Colin again.  He readily agrees; they meet and start to make love in his fisherman’s cottage before he reveals that he’s now engaged to another girl.

I suppose I Was Happy Here is ‘poetic’ in its description of Cass’s changing moods, in her occasional lyrical outpourings, in the look of the Irish landscape and of figures placed in it (the dramatically beautiful black-and-white photography is by Manny Wynn).  Yet it comes across as a literal-minded poetry, imposed rather than organic – poetry as a recipe, achieved by putting the correct ingredients together.  There’s no doubt, though, that without this kind of treatment the film would be trite indeed.   For much of the time, the unspoilt beauty of the Irish locale is contrasted with the malignant, noisy impersonality of London, and Matthew is set up as the villain of the piece.  Just as Desmond Davis contrasted independent British cinema of the 1960s with Hollywood blockbusters half a century later, as if there were nothing between, so Matthew seems meant to represent England.  Davis and O’Brien imply there were no other types of men in London available to, or interested in, a young, very pretty working-class Irish girl – who works as a petrol pump attendant (it’s at the garage that Matthew first meets her) and who isn’t so socially isolated that she doesn’t go out in the evenings (they next bump into each other in a pub).  Yet the story also confirms – of course – that a quiet life in the small Irish town is deadly to a would-be adventurer like Cass.  Eventually, she has to recognise what was obvious to anyone else from an early stage: that her nostalgic affection for her seaside homestead is built on sand.

When we first see Cass on the beach in Ireland, Sarah Miles strikes a pose then acts out exaltation in a way that makes your heart sink at what’s to come.  She turns out to be better than might be expected and has some good bits when she’s not working for an effect but she’s still not up to scratch.  I admit a resistance to the ‘free spirit’ concept of the role.  (At one point, Cass escapes from the suffocating drinks party she’s gone to with Matthew and discovers a bicycle outside, which she steals – an impulsive act which just infuriated me.)  And there are some sequences which anyone would have struggled to bring off.  The one in which Cass sees a man in the street, rushes down from the upstairs of a London double-decker and, in her hurry to get off the bus, falls off it, is baffling.  (It turns out Cass is still so crazy about Colin she sees him everywhere – even, in this case, in the improbable disguise of a bowler-hatted city gent.)  She loses the baby she’s carrying as a result and there’s another bizarre scene when she goes looking for its grave and talks with a gravedigger (well played by Cardew Robinson).  But even if the script presents challenges to the actress playing Cass, Sarah Miles’s vaguely loony, neurasthenic presence is a further and persistent limitation:  her Cass isn’t a sufficiently robust spirit to seem weakened by the way her life is going.  In her one scene as Colin’s new girl Kate, Eve Belton, with her combination of appetite, vitality and innocence, gives you a sense of how Cass might have been played – played better and with greater pathos (because there’s a genuinely happy girl to turn unhappy).

Sean Caffrey as Colin looks the part but lacks the charming insouciance needed to make it convincing.  You don’t believe that this seemingly sensitive boy, with a fiancée up his sleeve, would fall back into lovemaking with Cass so easily.  As a result, the revelation that he’s engaged feels artificially delayed to cause the maximum shock and distress to his old flame.  As Hogan, the patience-playing proprietor of the small hotel Cass has booked into, Cyril Cusack’s originality individuates a familiar character.  When Hogan starts musing about the uneventfulness of the place – partly to Matthew, partly to himself – the moment works dramatically (even poetically):  the Englishman is disconcerted by Hogan’s ambiguous tone.  Marie Kean (credited here as Maire Kean) plays another pub owner – as usual, she’s a strong but over-emphatic presence.

Apart from the masterly Cusack, by far the most interesting performance comes – against the odds – from Julian Glover as Matthew.  Glover makes him more complex and appealing than this selfish, snobbish young man, with his scathing remarks about ‘bog Irish’, must have read on the page.   It’s not just that he shows Matthew to be emotionally needy – Glover shows him realising, with alarm, that he’s needy.   At one point Cass remarks how different Matthew is when the two of them are alone together.  It’s very effective when, later and at a critical point in their relationship, he reassures her that it’s not the real him when he’s in the company of his pals.  Remembering in this way shows Matthew as sensitive enough to have absorbed what Cass said earlier and shrewd enough to remind her of it, in the hope of winning her over.  When Cass snaps back that it’s not a matter of only one of these selves being the ‘real’ Matthew, he’s taken by surprise.  Julian Glover plays the scene expertly; it provides one of Sarah Miles’ good moments too.

30 November 2010