In Which We Serve

In Which We Serve is one of those famous British movies with a reputation that transcends the actual movie.  It was made in the middle of the 2nd World War, and includes many of the top British actors of the day. All the officers have posh accents; the lower classes talk in a variety of dialects. Noel Coward did practically everything on the movie: wrote the script, produced it, co-directed it with David Lean, and wrote the music. Oh, and acted in it. I've only just caught up with the film for the first time.

Ronald Neame was the cinematographer, and the only shots that don't stand out are those drawn from stock footage of battles. Otherwise, each shot is wonderfully clear and clean, beautifully lit and framed. The opening, with its documentary style of the building of the ship that is the feature of the story, has taken lessons from Eisenstein, perhaps.

It's a little difficult now to feel so emotional about the ship, but the actors - in particular, Coward - give us every reason to do so. Coward is a very upper middle-class Captain, humane and generous: the very model of a proper Naval Captain. Celia Johnson plays his wife and they have some warm scenes together in the various flashbacks that fill up most of the film's centre (Daniel Massey, aged nine, appears as Coward's young son. He would later play Coward himself in Star). Bernard Miles is the Chief Petty Officer, and we get to see some of his home life too; Joyce Carey plays his wife and Kathleen Harrison his mother-in-law.

Production shot from the movie

Coward has given all his characters some decent scenes to play; some of the 'moments' might seem unoriginal to us now, but it's mostly because they've been copied over and again by later writers and directors. A fairly young John Mills is the lowest ranking seaman; he falls in love quickly with a young girl on a train (Kay Walsh) and marries her (their baby is played by Mills' own daughter, Juliet). Their brief time together is sharply drawn without excessive sentimentality. Michael Wilding also gets a girl, but his scenes are very short and not built up in the same way as the other three.

There are many other familiar names: Richard Attenborough (as a young seaman who deserts his post), Derek Elphinstone, Philip Friend, Hubert Gregg, James Donald, Lionel Grose, Lesley Dwyer, to name just a few.

The film's shape is a little odd: it begins with a superb sea battle, moves to the loss of the ship that's so important to the film, and to the drifting of a dozen or so seamen on a raft. From this point, we shift back and forth between the raft and the characters' back stories: these are developed to a degree, but they don't contribute to a unified whole. Nor does the ship itself really make us feel it's the centre of the story, which means there's a kind of lack in the structure. For all that, the film moves along at a good pace, and the direction and acting keep us from noticing too much about how it's all put together.

It's also perhaps difficult in hindsight to feel comfortable with Coward in such an authoritarian role, but when the film was first shown there would have been little difficulty for the audiences in accepting him as shown. We've long since moved past the point when Coward was such a star in both the theatre and the movies.

Noel Coward

I'm reading The Privilege of His Company by William Marchant at the moment - it was lent to me by a friend. It's a book about Noel Coward and gives quite a different picture of him than I'd ever come across before: he's seen as a gracious and generous man, one who is happy to mentor a young writer and help him to success. Of course the wit and urbanity is there (although Coward frequently lectures Marchant against urbanity in the book), and the theatrical stories...and, most importantly, the understanding of stagecraft which to me is the most interesting part of the book.

I think what is perhaps now forgotten to a great extent is the admiration other actors had for Coward, and this permeates the book. They loved him because of his generous nature and personality; there were few airs about Coward, and no arrogance.

It brings to mind a scene in one of his films - one of several made late in his life, none of which were particularly remarkable in regard to the parts he played. This film was The Italian Job which, on a recent viewing proved to be a pretty unremarkable piece of filmmaking, and worth less than its following (and sequel) warrants. Coward is one of several well-known British actors in it (Irene Handl makes a brief - and rather coarse - appearance, for instance) and his first main scene is in prison, where he's treated with great respect by all the inmates...and the staff (who basically allow him to do what he likes). This was his last film, made only 3 or 4 years before his death, and Coward doesn't look particularly well. He was seventy at the time.

This first (longish) scene has Coward doing nothing more than walking slowly down the stairs of the prison clapped in time by the inmates. He waves his hand in a regal gesture. It has nothing to do with the movie, but perhaps a good deal to do with the veneration he was naturally given by other actors and directors.

Easy Virtue - the play

Last night I mentioned going to see Easy Virtue, the movie. I thought it would be interesting to see what the original play was like, so got it out of the library today. Crikey. The first and most interesting thing is that the movie is far better than the play. The departures from the original are so considerable that only things that are similar to Coward's play are the following:

• A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
• A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
• An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
• A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
  
• Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
  
• John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
  
• The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
  

The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.

But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.

And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'

Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.

In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.

On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.

I thought When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!

Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).

Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.

Easy Virtue

This makes the 1100th post on this blog. Doesn't seem that long since I was looking at a 1000.

Anyway, went to see Easy Virtue tonight, after having had it recommended by one of my work colleagues today. I don't know enough about Noel Coward's original play to work out what belongs to the original script and what doesn't, but certainly there are some wonderful lines. (I'm getting a copy out of the library to have a look.)

The cast are uniformly superb, and Jessica Biel, (someone I don't remember seeing before), is a match for all of them as the Outsider in the family. Colin Frith plays someone who is pretty much dead in his soul, which suits him well, as that seems to be the role he likes to play most of the time, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Biel's mother-in-law pours absolute venom with every line and look. Each and every smaller part is filled with a top-notch character actor, though perhaps Kris Marshall, as Furber the butler steals any thunder that's left over.

Fabulous stately homes play an important part, and the countryside looks terrific, thanks to Martin Kenzie. And then there's the 20s music, flitting in and out of the character's mouths and onto the soundtrack seamlessly.

What more to say about it? The story leaves all sorts of corners open at the end, even though the finale is satisfactory, and you have to wonder what a sequel might possibly bring. Death or life for those of the family who are left? Thoroughly enjoyable.

The First Italian Job

I thought I'd seen the original The Italian Job back when it came out around 1969, but there wasn't a thing in it that was familiar. (I watched it last night with a group of the blokes from church - it was our 'petrol-head' selection.)

It was surprisingly disappointing. My impression was that it had been an excellent comedy, with great car chases. The comedy is weak, however, and the car chase stuff takes so long to arrive that the long-winded expository stuff makes you impatient.

The actual heist idea is pretty good, although all the preliminary explanation seems to bear not a great deal of relevance to what actually happens, and the three Minis running around Turin and the Roman countryside are quite fun, but you come out thinking, So what?

Michael Caine is pretty wet in his role - there's no guts to it, which doesn't help - and Noel Coward makes a tired impression in his last screen role, one that doesn't do his memory any good whatsoever. Benny Hill appears playing Benny Hill and then is dumped from the film for no apparent reason; and the only pleasant moments on the acting side come from Irene Handl and John le Mesurier playing their usual screen personalities, personalities which served them well in film after film. Rosanno Brazzi has a few minutes of screen time, along with Raf Vallone as the Mafia boss. Both of them are woefully underused.

Peter Collinson was the director; he's not someone I know at all, so I checked out what else he'd done. Very little of substance, which probably accounts for why the film hasn't stood up to the test of time too well. No doubt it was the car chasing around that made it a hit at the time.

The ending is an extraordinary cop-out. After successfully making off with four million pounds of gold bars (which never seem to be as heavy as they ought to be), the three Minis are dumped spectacularly down the Alpine hillsides - a rather sad moment really - and then the bus driver drives wildly around the various twists and turns in the road in his jubilation at being part of the gang to have pulled off the heist. This causes the bus to miss a turn and somehow to wind up hanging half over the edge of the road; it's the back half with the gold that's hanging over, of course.

Now at this point you'd think the writers would have come up with a clever way of getting the crooks out of their mess - or else rescuing them without the gold. Nope. None of these. The last we see of the crooks is them standing in the half of the bus that's over the road while the gold slides further towwards the back of the bus. And that's it. In a helicopter shot, we fly further and further away from the scene. Goodbye!

What a woeful ending!

Quoting The Times

David Baddiel in The Times, Nov 17, 2007, in an article on Norman Mailer:

Married six times (it never fails to amaze me how many women are happy to shack up with women-hating men) to the ‘low, sloppy beasts’ – his description of the gender to Orson Welles – he stabbed the second, Adeles Morales, at a party, nearly fatally. ‘A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul,’ he announced in a 1972 speech to the University of California. Like many significant male creative figures of the past century – Picasso, D H Lawrence, Jean-Luc Godard, Eugene O’Neill, Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, etc, etc – his work, and his life, were fuelled by an anger towards (and its usual corollary, fascinated mythologizing of) women. For Mailer, as for a lot of these men, authenticity was about masculinity – to be an artist meant to be a rebel, to be difficult and raging and driven, and that energy, although often directed at class, or convention, or artistic orthodoxy, always, via an association of marriage and monogamy and imprisonment, ended up also directed at women.

Joe Joseph in The Times, Nov 17, 2007, in a review of Coward’s Letters:

[Noel Coward] lived in an age when fame fell like a warm cloak on to the shoulders of those who had dazzled theatre audiences, or readers of fiction, or cinemagoers, or art lovers. It was a time before celebrity had become a commodity that you settle for when you don’t have enough talent for success.