Laurence Olivier (1957)
Olivier is in charge behind the camera but that’s not enough for him: he has to be in charge in the acting department too. There’s an unpleasant pressure in his scenes with Marilyn Monroe, as if he wants to make sure she knows who’s boss. It’s possible that Olivier’s frustration that, as a director, he couldn’t control Monroe made matters worse when they were on screen together; but it’s far from certain that’s the sole explanation, given the sort of actor he was. In this adaptation by Terence Rattigan of his stage play The Sleeping Prince, Olivier plays the Prince Regent, Charles, who is in London – with his son Nicolas, the teenage king of the fictional Balkan kingdom of Carpathia – for the coronation of George V in 1911. Monroe is Elsie, a young showgirl who takes Charles’s fancy. Olivier’s mittel-European accent is amusing at first; he wears his costumes (by Beatrice Dawson) well; there’s the odd moment when, silently, he makes the Prince’s desire for Elsie very strong. But it’s a dislikeable performance – so competitive that it blots out the supposed poignancy of this man-who-has-everything-but-love. Besides, Olivier had already played the part on stage (opposite Vivien Leigh) and you can sense his over-familiarity with it: his portrait of Charles feels increasingly congealed.
Marilyn Monroe is very charming. It’s always difficult to see beyond her star effulgence to her acting but she’s accomplished and graceful in most of the bits of physical comedy. Olivier directs her sensitively when he’s not on screen with, and acting against, her. Monroe’s Elsie is poignant – especially in her final exit, as she returns to her normal life with only a tenuous hope of seeing Charles again; and this quality is genuinely there in the performance, not just in the knowledge of what happened in Monroe’s own life afterwards. It may go without saying that she wears the clothes well too – but it’s worth noting that she’s expressive whatever she’s wearing, especially the mac that Elsie keeps putting on whenever she thinks the royal episode is about to end. As Nicolas, Jeremy Spenser has an attractive blend of seriousness and subliminal appetite for fun: like Olivier, Spenser does an entertaining funny foreigner accent but his playing has a much more agreeable spirit. Sybil Thorndike is tiresomely ‘theatrical’ as the Queen Dowager; as the British civil servant assigned as an aide to Prince Charles, Richard Wattis isn’t so bad – but you feel his delivery of the lines is just what their creator intended. Since the creator is Terence Rattigan this is not a compliment. There are plenty of familiar faces in the cast – Maxine Audley, Jean Kent and Harold Goodwin among them – and Gladys Henson has a nice cameo as the showgirls’ dresser. Olivier, with the help of Jack Cardiff, creates some remarkable perspectives within the vastness of the Carpathian embassy to underline distant or oblique relationships between characters. But the coronation sequence in the middle of the film is a bit naff: the director seems to be going through the glories-of-age-old-tradition motions and it’s only Monroe’s reaction to the proceedings (and perhaps this is the actress’s as much as the character’s reaction) that gives them any spark. I hope the forthcoming My Week With Marilyn, about the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, is better than its source material.
31 July 2011
