Peter Yates (1965)

A mostly effective adaptation of N F Simpson’s stage play, thanks to a screenplay by Simpson himself.   The early scenes suggest – at a distance of over forty years anyway – not much more than an agreeably eccentric sitcom, an effect both of the playing and of Richard Rodney Bennett’s pleasant, unremarkable score.  But once the action moves inside the Groomkirby family home, the absurdist momentum starts to build.  There’s a splendid moment when mother (Alison Leggatt), daughter (Julia Foster) and elderly aunt (Mona Washbourne) – all in the same downstairs room, all in their own worlds – talk at and over each other; and an upstairs choir practice of speak-your-weight machines, conducted by the son of the family (Jonathan Miller), joins in.

Mr Groomkirby (Eric Sykes) is reconstructing in the living room the central criminal court of the Old Bailey; the trial there is the centrepiece, both physically and comedically.    This gets to be a little tedious – again perhaps because a nonsense-satirical treatment of a court of law seems a much less fresh idea now than in 1959, when One Way Pendulum was first staged at the Royal Court.   The acting styles are a demonstration of the benefits of playing this kind of material with a combination of slightly heightened characterisation and straight line readings; and the consequences of peeping out from behind character and adding conventional comic flourishes.  In other words, Miller is unfunny, Sykes OK, Foster excellent, and Leggatt brilliant. The exchanges between Leggatt and Foster are a series of high points:  the daughter explains that her boyfriend bought her an ornamental skull as a memento mori but that it doesn’t make her think of death – ‘You want to tell Stan he’s been done there,’ replies her mother.  When Foster complains that her arms aren’t long enough – her character wants to be an ape, after earlier pterodactyl ambitions – Leggatt tartly reminds her that, ‘You should have thought of these things, Sylvia, before you were born’.

The best performances make you feel how a successful film version of an Orton play might have worked, albeit that it’s probably harder to deliver satisfyingly the epigrammatic banalities of Orton’s dialogue than the naturalistic lunacy of Simpson’s.     You certainly feel that Entertaining Mr Sloane might have prospered under the direction of Peter Yates – here at an early stage of his variously successful career and showing a sure touch with most of the cast.   Peggy Mount is very effective as an obligingly ominivorous neigbour.  With few exceptions, the women are better than the men – who include George Cole, Douglas Wilmer and Graham Crowden (too much, as usual) – although Glyn Houston, as a detective giving evidence to court, and Kenneth Farringdon (later Farrington – when he played Billy Walker in Coronation Street), as the put upon Stan, both do well.   The film, distributed through United Artists, was made by the Woodfall Films production company that Tony Richardson and John Osborne set up after the success of Tom Jones.

14 May 2008