Ronald Neame (1964)
An elegant, elderly woman on a walking stick looked as if she might be someone important as she hovered uncertainly around the front rows of NFT3. Sure enough, she was introduced by the BFI curator Jo Botting as Julie Harris – the British costume designer rather than the American actress. This Julie Harris, who won an Oscar for dressing Darling (1965), is now in her ninetieth year. (The other Julie Harris is coming up for her eighty-fifth birthday.) Botting explained that Harris was one of the prime movers behind the Deborah Kerr retrospective at BFI – and this conversation with Harris was one of the best things about going to see The Chalk Garden, an adaptation of the stage play by Enid Bagnold. The guest of honour rambled a bit but she was very conscious of that. I also liked the fact that she was rather irritated to be introducing a film that gave her more of a budget than an opportunity for creative costume design: as she said, the clothes she put Deborah Kerr in (although Harris had obviously loved dressing her in other pictures) looked a bit too expensively tailored for a governess earning £12 a week.
Miss Madrigal (Kerr) comes to a big house in Sussex, close to the chalk cliffs, to be interviewed for the job of governess to Laurel (Hayley Mills), the teenage granddaughter of the lady of the house, Mrs St Maugham (Edith Evans) – a widow, who is estranged from her daughter Olivia (Elizabeth Sellars), Laurel’s mother. As the butler-cum-handyman Maitland (John Mills) explains, Laurel goes through governesses like loaves of bread and we soon see why: she’s a self-dramatising dissembler with a caustic tongue that she uses to wound herself and others. Mrs St Maugham treats this maladjusted girl largely indulgently – or self-indulgently: the old lady’s one aim in life appears to be to ensure that Olivia doesn’t take Laurel away. Mrs St Maugham is a keen but unsuccessful gardener: none of the plants in her care – including the granddaughter named for an evergreen – will grow. (Julie Harris dressed Edith Evans in some enjoyably colourful outfits – I wasn’t sure if the choices of fuchsia, lilac etc were ironic, given Mrs St Maugham’s horticultural failures. Otherwise, The Chalk Garden, as photographed by Arthur Ibbetson, is visually toneless.) The symbolism, and the fact that Mrs St Maugham must, in the nature of morally conventional theatre, get her comeuppance, are so obvious so soon that your attention quickly switches to the governess who arrives in the household without references or, it seems, a past. (But she has green fingers!) It emerges – after a series of heavy hints (Laurel has a ghoulish appetite for true crime, the governess isn’t keen on locked doors etc) – that Miss Madrigal has just been released from prison, having served many years for the murder of her stepsister: she was sentenced to be hanged but the sentence was commuted because of her tender years. One of Mrs St Maugham’s old flames is a judge and she invites him to lunch in the hope that he can ‘do something’ to ensure that Laurel’s mother can’t get her hands on her daughter. It turns out that the judge is the same one who donned the black cap at Miss Madrigal’s trial. (I’m not making this up.)
Perhaps Enid Bagnold’s crude symbolism and melodramatic plotting might get by in the theatre, where the stage is the world and you’re willing to accept the scope for human interaction as being limited to the people who appear before us. In other words, it’s a small world; watching The Chalk Garden as a play, you can maybe suspend disbelief in the improbability of the judge’s going back a long way with both Mrs St Maugham and Miss Madrigal. The virtually inevitable visual aids of cinema, and the external reality in which the film’s action is set, make these mechanics ridiculous. As if we hadn’t already got the point, Ronald Neame displays the garden’s rows of moribund shrubs as the characters walk among them. At the lunch with the judge, it might be possible on stage for the actors to generate the tensions of the situation; on screen, the intensive close-ups of Miss Madrigal and Laurel, as she cottons on, merely expose its falsity (and Malcolm Arnold’s madly energetic music, here and elsewhere, hardly helps). Besides, given the way the main parts are played, the moral scheme of The Chalk Garden doesn’t make sense. The destructively possessive Mrs St Maugham is meant to be a monster but Edith Evans’s acting is so much richer than anyone else’s that’s not how she comes over – you see the neediness in the old woman’s selfishness. Because of this and because Mrs St Maugham is less prone to moralise than most of her household and visitors, she had my sympathy. Elizabeth Sellars, one-dimensional and delivering her lines in an elocuted coo, is ghastly as Olivia: gruesome as Laurel is, you wouldn’t wish this mother even on her. Miss Madrigal can ‘see myself’ in Laurel but there’s not a hint of emotional kinship between Deborah Kerr and Hayley Mills. (If we could be persuaded that Miss Madrigal’s perception was deluded that might solve the problem but we’re not.) Kerr, in spite of her tidy, by-the-book style of acting, is interesting in her early scenes; less so once the governess’s secrets begin to be revealed. Felix Aylmer looks very right as the judge and gives you the sense that, although the old man’s manner is faintly gaga, he’s taking everything in. As a result, you’re left feeling flat by the scene in which Miss Madrigal admits to him who she is and it turns out he hadn’t already realised this.
I struggled to make sense of the enthusiastic audience in NFT3. An atypically young(ish) man sitting next to me laughed decisively whenever a character said something outrageous or epigrammatic and applauded ostentatiously at the end. But most of the people there were much older than him – quite a bit older even than me. They must have been in their early twenties when the film was released. It doesn’t seem to be material that age group would enjoy, unless their tastes were remarkably old-fashioned; and were many people now in their mid-sixties big fans in their twenties of Deborah Kerr or Edith Evans or John or Hayley Mills? Is it rather that some people, once they reach a certain age, become nostalgic for the films of their youth, and the performers that go with them, because, even if they didn’t particularly like them at the time, these movies represent a lost golden age? (I’m one of these people to an extent but I’m not yet desperate enough to think that something like The Chalk Garden is any good.) Edith Evans is playing the villain of the piece yet, from the delighted tittering reactions, she might as well have been saying ‘A handbag?!’ every time she opened her mouth. As Maitland, John Mills gives a familiar, complacent performance. (I felt the character needed to be much more drily bitter in act one – to get across the difference that the advent of Miss Madrigal makes to his regretful life.) Hayley Mills’s Laurel is grotesquely artificial – perhaps the audience lapped up her clumsy, charmless histrionics because her immutable image in their memory is that of Infant Phenomenon.
In a sense, the film’s ludicrous ending – Laurel goes home to mother, Miss Madrigal agrees to stay on with Mrs St Maugham (and cultivate, as well as the garden, a budding romance with Maitland) – fulfils the audience’s quest for cosiness. The minor characters are played by Toke Townley (a shopkeeper), Tonie MacMillan (cook) and Lally Bowers, who overacts as a short-lived applicant for the governess job. I used to enjoy Bowers on television and remember her making a good Miss Prism in a BBC Play of the Month production of The Importance of Being Earnest in the 1970s. One of Miss Prism’s best-known lines is: ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means’. In The Chalk Garden everyone ends happily: Mrs St Maugham has learned her lesson and changed her spots; Laurel has gone through an experience which has solved her emotional problems. It’s as if they deserve this outcome because they’re stalwarts of British stage and screen. They are the good.
12 October 2010
