Robert Hamer (1959)

Alec Guinness plays John Barratt, a sad, self-effacing academic in a provincial English university, on his annual summer holiday in France (French is his subject).  In an opening voiceover, Barratt tells us that life has passed him by – he doesn’t expect anything much to happen to him now, so of course it does.  Guinness also plays Jacques De Gue – a French nobleman, who tracks Barratt to a bar and confronts him there.  After Barratt has recovered from the shock of meeting his physical double, they get into conversation, and De Gue gets Barratt drunk.   The Englishman wakes the next morning to find that De Gue has disappeared, taking Barratt’s clothes and passport with him, but leaving his identity – and the complications of his personal life – with his spitting image.  The Scapegoat, which Gore Vidal adapted from Daphne Du Maurier’s 1957 novel, wasn’t a success and didn’t deserve to be.  Guinness often makes it fascinating but his skill also exposes a fundamental weakness in the material on screen.

Guinness’s surface anonymity – in combination with his more penetrating ability to suggest a man who’s empty and who knows it – pays some rich dividends.  As John Barratt pretends, by force of circumstances, to be Jacques De Gue, you become gradually more aware, as does Barratt, of the consequences of his uneventful life and subdued personality:  there’s nothing in his prior life that creates any friction with the new identity he assumes.  But the fact that Guinness makes the dead ringers subtly but decisively distinct is a problem.   Among Jacques De Gue’s household, it’s only his dog who realises the man who’s returned home is not his master, and who snarls at him.  Barratt isn’t, of course, in possession of all the facts of De Gue’s life.  He says things that puzzle his wife (Irene Worth), sister (Pamela Brown), daughter (Annabel Bartlett), factory manager (Peter Bull) and harridan, bedridden-but-imperious mother (Bette Davis) – they accuse John/Jacques of forgetfulness, but no more than that.   You can accept that no one thinks Jacques’s exact likeness isn’t him – but Guinness makes the voices and mannerisms of the two men so individual (Barratt speaks with euphonious melancholy, De Gue in maliciously witty tones that are slightly camp) that it’s incredible none of his family thinks he seems in any way changed.   Jacques’s mistress Bela (Nicole Maurey) pretty soon works out that she’s talking to a different man:   this is because she and Barratt are kindred spirits, made for each other (although, in a welcome moment of psychological complexity, Bela acknowledges there were things that attracted her to Jacques too).

The climax to The Scapegoat follows Hitchcock’s dictum that ‘If you meet your double, you should kill him, or he will kill you’.  Robert Hamer’s direction – alert in the early encounters between Barratt and De Gue – grows more and more listless and the two men’s final duel is almost perfunctory.   The ending might have had a bit of ambiguous snap if it was left unclear which of them survived (I wondered anyway what happened to the corpse of the other).  I suppose that, as we don’t hear Barratt’s voice at the close of proceedings, it could be said we are left in the dark – but the survivor’s final reunion with Bela is staged (and scored – the overdone music is by Bronislau Kaper) in a happy ending way that makes no sense if Barratt has been killed.  The relentlessly British (or, in one instance, American) casting of the mainly French characters is oddest in the case of Geoffrey Keen as Barratt/De Gue’s loyal chauffeur Gaston.  Keen, as usual, gives a creditable performance but, also as usual, seems like a reasonably high-ranking military chap.  When Gaston says things like ‘I am but a simple man, madame – I have no education’, the effect is bizarre.  Most of the cast (which also includes Noel Howlett, Peter Sallis and Alan Webb) are good; Annabel Bartlett, who appears never to have acted again, has a rather beguiling blend of eccentricity and solemnity as the young daughter Marie-Noel, and Irene Worth has considerable neurotic strength as her mother.  The one exception, sad to say, is Bette Davis who does a crude, stiffly theatrical turn as the nasty old mother – her timing seems way off, with the stresses sounding wrong in nearly every line.  Maybe it was because I wanted to suppress the memory of how bad Davis is that I’d forgotten I’d seen The Scapegoat before.  I realised this almost as soon as the film began.  Like John Barratt, it had left next to no trace.

16 August 2011