Anthony Asquith (1963)

It begins with shots of the main actors and the names of their characters – ‘Elizabeth Taylor as Frances Andros’ etc.  In spite of the international starry cast, this brings to mind weekly TV shows of times past.  Then comes a strikingly unimaginative title sequence – the names of those behind the camera appear beside emblems of ‘the high life’:  tiaras, champagne flutes, a box of cigars.  As a final flourish, a red carpet unrolls onto the screen.  It seems to sum up The VIPs that the colour on the print has faded so that the carpet is actually orange.   This is all accompanied – like far too much of what follows – by a gruesome Miklos Rosza score, often irrelevant and always intrusive.   The VIPs is written by Terence Rattigan – an original screenplay only in the basic technical sense.  It’s about a group of would-be travellers from Heathrow who, when fog delays their flight, are stuck in the airport’s VIP lounge, then in a hotel overnight.  Taylor is deserting her magnate husband Paul (Richard Burton) in favour of Marc Champselle (Louis Jourdan), a playboy-gambler.   Les Mangrum (Rod Taylor) is an Australian businessman, anxious to get to New York to prevent, with the help of his loyal secretary Miss Mead (Maggie Smith), the takeover of his tractor company by an omnivorous American conglomerate.  Film producer Max Buda (Orson Welles) needs to get off British soil urgently in order to avoid a hefty tax bill.  The elderly Duchess of Brighton (Margaret Rutherford) is heading for Florida for a temporary job working in a hotel – she needs the cash to keep her Sussex pile going.  It’s clear from the start that, with the potential exception of the Duchess, it’ll be hard to get interested in these types unless the script or the actors can bring them to life in surprising ways.  The VIPs has acquired some historical interest but, as a film, it’s worth seeing only for some of the actors (and by no means all of them).

The Wikipedia entry on the movie claims that Rattigan says the story was ‘based on the true story of Vivien Leigh’s attempt to leave her husband Laurence Olivier and fly off with her lover Peter Finch, only to be delayed by a fog at Heathrow’.  It’s hard to see that this ‘based on’ means anything more than ‘suggested by’ but Rattigan the playwright may have been attracted by the bad weather as a pretext for keeping the cast in the same place – having the travellers fogbound justifies treating them as stagebound.  For the most part, the characters in the different plot strands don’t interact at all and their situations are resolved neatly only because the writing is so thin.   The exception to the brevity (although not as a result of depth or complexity) is the central Taylor-Burton story.   The VIPs expresses what I imagine must be the appalling ennui of a long delay at an airport but the line gets very blurred between this kind of tedium and the tedium of waiting for Taylor’s inevitable decision to forsake Jourdan and go home with Burton.  Anthony Asquith’s impersonal, flat-footed direction doesn’t help.

Rattigan’s star in the theatre wasn’t in the ascendant in the early 1960s, a decade whose values he would publicly deplore – as he had already deplored the emergence of a new kind of stage play, epitomised by Look Back in Anger.   Even if you regard The VIPs as a trifle, as a distinguished writer slumming it, the writing is witless and now seems clumsily reactionary – although the NFT2 audience contained a fair number of incontinent titterers, evidently eager to see the picture as a kind of civilised entertainment that doesn’t get made these days.  The level of satirical humour is summed up in the opening shots at the film industry.  The VIP reception manager Sanders Richard Wattis) says with distaste that he has to ‘meet these film people’, then, like the professional creep he is, tells Max Buda how much he enjoyed his latest film -only to be told that ‘we no longer make films for people to enjoy’.  After Buda has said he’s not in the film business for the money, he asks his sidekick in an aside to remind him how many million his last picture grossed.  The dialogue is startlingly feeble and Rattigan is having it both ways but it seems clear from the audience reaction at BFI – the laughter at both of Buda’s self-condemning lines seemed to come from the same seats – that some people find it doubly witty to use the same character to have a go at arty cinema and, in his next breath, the industry’s moneymen.   There’s plenty more of this kind of thing when it comes to sniping or laughing at foreigners:  the airhead Italian actress (Elsa Martinelli) accompanying Buda; the name Paul Andros, presumably chosen to suggest one-of- those-Greeks like Niarchos or Onassis (although I missed any other suggestion that the character actually was Greek); hopeless jokes about the different menus for Russian and American passengers. This vein of humour climaxes at the very end when Sanders looks at the names on the next day’s VIP list and asks, ‘Who’s Prince Popo?’   The answer, a man in African robes, was greeted with dismaying hilarity in NFT2.   Also on this passenger list is ‘Mr Johnny Leyton, the pop star’ (more satire).

The success of the performances in The VIPs depends on whether the actor is sufficiently inventive to animate their role without appearing to despise what he or she is doing.  Orson Welles may have accepted the part of Max Buda to express his reasonably bitter contempt for the film industry; but his delivery expresses contempt for his line too (also reasonable).   Richard Burton suffers from the same problem:  not for the first time, he seems little more than fed up most of the time and relies too much on the beauty of his voice.  (There’s a bizarre moment when a traumatised Frances, after one of her encounters with Paul, sobs to Marc, ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face’:  Burton’s face is blank.)  He’s rather better when Andros is a broken man – although this works better when his despair is embedded in a scene (as in the exchange with Miss Mead) rather than its primary focus.  But the part is pretty hopeless anyway:  it’s revealed in one scene that Paul is the reason the couple are childless but it’s a hollow revelation (Andros as symbolically incapable of love), not followed through in any way – as if Rattigan had thought for a moment about writing something fuller but couldn’t be bothered.  Although her role too is vaguely written, Elizabeth Taylor is convincingly ambivalent as Frances Andros.  While you’re watching Taylor, you believe she’s in two minds about the two men in her life.  The trouble is, you know what’s coming so her conscientiousness in the part seems a waste of time.

As the Duchess of Brighton, however, Margaret Rutherford gives a really pleasurable performance (which won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar).  Rutherford, a true original, is effortlessly funny.  Part of the pleasure she gives comes from knowing that the seeming effortlessness is art that conceals art.   She’s working with base metal (the jokes about the Duchess taking uppers and downers for her maiden flight get pretty desperate).  She doesn’t need Miklos Rozsa music reminding us every time she appears that she’s an English eccentric.  Although the Duchess spends a night in a hotel, Rattigan doesn’t find any opportunities to link this with the work she’s going to do in Florida.  It’s sad that Rutherford has a scene with her real-life husband Stringer Davis (as a hotel waiter on the night shift) in which the gulf between their quality as actors is painful.   But she gives her own rhythm and freshness to the tired lines and has some wonderful moments.  My favourite was the business with a hatbox which won’t fit as overhead luggage and the Duchess’s exchanges, as the hatbox repeatedly descends, with the affable West Indian man sitting next to her and a snotty air hostess (well played by Clifton Jones and Moyra Fraser respectively).

It’s fascinating to see Maggie Smith here (in only her third film role).  Her intense oddness transforms the hackneyed role of the secretly adoring secretary:  she combines comically neurotic gestures with emotional truth to create a distinctively passionate celibate.   When she’s saved her boss’s bacon and so absorbed  his attention that Mangrum’s fatuously glamorous girlfriend exits crossly, and the door closes behind her, he asks, ‘What was that?’  Smith gives Miss Mead’s reply – ‘Miss Marshall leaving’ – a perfect blend of secretarial omniscience and suppressed euphoria, which made me laugh out loud.  As Mangrum, Rod Taylor is the most surprising success (even if this was partly because I hadn’t realised Taylor was himself Australian).   The deflation of this determinedly cocky Aussie and his eventual triumph are much more engaging than Burton’s and he and Smith play really well together.  Who connects with whom – and who doesn’t – is one of the interests of the picture.   The BFI note included an extract from Paul Ferris’s biography of Burton.  According to this, the picture was released as soon as possible to capitalise on the scandal of his affair with Taylor during the filming of Cleopatra but they don’t have much chemistry here.  There’s no doubt anyway that Taylor has more with Louis Jourdan, who’s so likeable (and skilful) as Marc that you can’t understand why Frances has any hesitation about her choice.  And Burton’s best scene is the one with Maggie Smith.

According to the BFI note and Wikipedia, David Frost plays a reporter (interviewing Max Buda); according to IMDB, he appears as ‘Himself – a reporter’.  I’ve no idea what the latter means but it’s ironically apt:  Frost sounds like an impressionist doing David Frost.   His performance is abominably bad:  it may be one of the first examples of someone who’d gained a sky-high reputation for sketch comedy on British television exposing their limitations on the big screen once they tried to do a character among proper actors.  (The VIPs was released when That Was The Week That Was was at its zenith; Lance Percival, another TW3 regular, is relatively tolerable as an airport official.)  Frost’s casting is ironic too given Rattigan’s evident antipathy to the zeitgeist.   There are several more terrible performances, including someone called Martin Miller as Buda’s sidekick Dr Schwutzbacher and Linda Christian as Miss Marshall (she speaks awkwardly – in an unplaceable accent that seems dismally at home in an ‘international’ picture like this).  There are also different varieties of British actor on display:  those who are usually described as ‘inimitable’, a euphemism for ‘always the same’ (Wattis, Dennis Price, Robert Coote); those who are underrated and, as usual, do well (Joan Benham, Peter Sallis); those who are very good and completely wasted here (Michael Hordern).

7 August 2009