Bryan Forbes (1978)

Bryan Forbes, erstwhile saviour of the British film industry and, in the sixties and early seventies, the director of ‘sensitive’ treatments of ‘difficult’ subjects like The L-Shaped Room and The Raging Moon (the former is actually good enough not to deserve those inverted commas), is now making family entertainment with a vengeance.   This well-meaning reactionary lacks the common touch needed to bring it off wholeheartedly.  Last time (1976), it was The Slipper and the Rose, the story of Cinderella transposed from a frankly magical realm to the world of big-screen romantic musical.  That film was careful and a bit dreary, missing out on the grotesquerie of English pantomime, let alone Grimm fairytales.  For example, Forbes’s ‘ugly’ sisters were merely less pretty and vivacious than the heroine.  This time, it’s International Velvet, a tenuous sequel to the 1944 hit National Velvet in which a teenage Elizabeth Taylor rode The Pie to victory in the Grand National.

The Elizabeth Taylor character, Velvet Brown, now middle-aged (and played by Nanette Newman), sees the metamorphosis of her orphaned, raised-in-America niece, Sarah (Tatum O’Neal), from upsettingly sullen mixed-up kid to Olympic gold medallist in equestrian three-day event.  The Pie, a gelding when he won the National, has turned into a stallion of exceptional longevity:  it’s his last foal, named Arizona Pie in honour of Sarah’s home state, who will carry her to Olympic glory.  Watching Sarah’s progress, Velvet is able to review her own past and binge on food for thought about the course her life has taken since her Grand National triumph.  This gives International Velvet an ambivalent framework and although the story proceeds with relentless predictability, Forbes tends to make plot twists double-edged.  Intelligence is the root cause of the film’s worst flaws:  Bryan Forbes is learning that it’s difficult, if you’re as clever as he is, to aim low and keep things simple.

A childless, animal-loving heroine has featured before in family films but not as consciously as here.  (In Born Free, Virginia McKenna overdoes to embarrassing effect the mother love she feels for Elsa the lioness and her cubs.)  Velvet explains to Sarah that she gave up riding because she lost her nerve.  John (Christopher Plummer), the writer with whom Velvet now lives (a typically Forbesian attempt to locate his implausible story in the ‘real’, modern world), reveals this is a ‘white lie’:   Velvet, who was married at the time, fell from The Pie, lost the baby she was expecting and couldn’t have children subsequently.  So Velvet remains devoted to The Pie because she needs something to care for and, when Sarah comes along, gradually switches her maternal instincts to the teenage girl.  After her Olympic triumph for Britain, Sarah somewhat peremptorily telegraphs Velvet and John to announce that she’s marrying the vacuously handsome captain of the American three-day event team (Jeffrey Byron) and won’t be returning to England.  It’s a false alarm to the extent that the happy couple do come back for a visit to Velvet and John but the suspicion persists that Velvet is once more reduced to ‘drifting’ (her word).  The film leaves you wondering what happened to all the double-barrelled misses of the show-jumping ring when they retired from competition.  Are they, like Velvet, stuck in a horsey, adolescent time warp?

John refuses to marry because he is scared of ‘commitment’, of ‘anything signed and sealed’.  Bryan Forbes is cultivating a wrong-headed bloom:  interestingly (or that’s the idea) flawed characters, the kind of people in whom he’s always tended to be interested, sprout from the soil of storybook fantasy.   Forbes’s other fault as a gardener is to lay things on with a trowel.   In a scene reminiscent of Harriet Smith being pursued by ruffians in Emma but without Jane Austen’s voice to interpret proceedings, Sarah and her horse are chased across a field by a car containing beer-swilling yobs with a bag of chips on their shoulder.  Attempting to escape by jumping a stile, Sarah falls and is concussed.  At this point, most of the audience I watched the film with gasped in alarm; when the yobs’ car crashed and burst into flames, they went silent.  Did their terrible end serve those nasty boys right?  Did it serve to remind Sarah of the death of her parents in a car crash that has brought her into Velvet’s care?

On Sarah’s first trip abroad with a British equestrian team, one of the horses goes berserk in the middle of a rough transatlantic flight and has to be destroyed.  Sarah is the team reserve; you assume the distressing incident is designed as an understudy-getting-her-big-break number, familiar from backstage musicals.  All that happens is that the dead horse’s rider uses Sarah’s mount as a substitute (which wouldn’t happen in the real world).  The whole unpleasant episode serves very little purpose.

The world of International Velvet is one in which an Olympic equestrienne’s training is financed by kindly Uncle John knocking off a best-seller in double quick time.  Bryan Forbes seems to think that the fact that this supposedly gifted writer resorts to the soft-porn market transcends the cliché; in fact, it does no more than sour it.  The film is more problematic when Forbes applies his better qualities as a writer-director to the material and achieves an effect he then tries to stifle.  He illustrates Sarah’s alienated feelings in a strange country with a shot of Velvet fussing her dog with Sarah a lonely onlooker, through the ominous din of her schoolfellows’ cruel playground laughter and the clang of the school bell.  Velvet observes in voiceover that, ironically, Sarah is alive only because her parents cared too little for her to take her with them on their last, fatal journey.  These astringent details aren’t easy to forget but Forbes pours on Francis Lai’s savagely unvarying score as if to take our minds off them.

What saves International Velvet and ensures an effective climax is the sporting context.  Pre-Games politicking and scandals during Olympic fortnight may have become de rigueur but the founding principles of Pierre de Coubertin (quoted here by Anthony Hopkins, as the British chef d’équipe), the still largely unchallenged status of most Olympic events as a world championship and the rarity of British Olympic gold medallists combine to ensure that, for armchair viewers in this country, the Games remain the most special of sporting events.  Bryan Forbes evokes an Olympic atmosphere well enough to remind you how exciting the real thing can be.  The outcome of Sarah’s show-jumping round is a foregone conclusion but it’s still more gripping than the most expertly edited car chase.

[1978]