Tag: Alan Bates

Zorba the Greek (1964)

The popular image of Greece gets largely defined, for better and worse, in this flawed, over-long, tonally confused film

Director: Michael Cacoyannis

Cast: Anthony Quinn (Alexis Zorba), Alan Bates (Basil), Irene Papas (The Widow), Lila Kedrova (Madame Hortense), Sotiris Moustakas (Mimithos), Anna Kyriakou (Soul), Eleni Anousaki (Lola), George Voyagjis (Pavlo), Takis Emmanuel (Manolakas), George Foundas (Mavrandoni)

Basil (Alan Bates) a Greek-British writer, returns to Crete to try and make a success of his late father’s lignite mine and rediscover his roots. Joining him is Zorba (Anthony Quinn), a gregarious peasant, who believes in confronting the world’s pain with a defiant joie de vivre. In the Cretan village, their friendship grows and they become involved (with unhappy results) with two women: Basil with the Widow (Irene Papas), lusted after by half the village, and Zorba with ageing French former-courtesan Madame Hortense (Lila Kedrova).

Zorba the Greek was based on a best-seller by Nikos Kazantzakis, directed by Greece’s leading film director Michael Cacoyannis. Matched with Anthony Quinn’s exuberant performance, it pretty much cemented in people’s mind what “being Greek” means. So much so the actual film has been slightly air-brushed in the cultural memory. Think about it and you picture Quinn dancing on luscious Greek beaches. There is a lot of that: but it’s married up with a darker, more critical view of Greek culture that sits awkwardly with the picture-postcard tourist-attracting lens used for Crete.

Nominally it’s a familiar structure: the stuffed-shirt, emotionally reserved, timid and sheltered, is encouraged into a bit of carpe diem by a larger-than-life maverick. As is often the case, he needs t build the courage for romance and work on an impossible dream. Zorba the Greek however inverts this structure: the main lessons Zorba teaches is that you have to meet disaster just as you would meet triumph: with a shrug, a smile and a dance. It’s decently explored – and it lands largely due to Quinn’s barnstorming iconic performance – but also slight message. And Cacoyannis never quite marries it up successfully with the tragic consequences in the film.

Shocking and cruel events happen to the two female characters. The Widow – never named in the film – is loathed and loved by the men of the village, because (how dare she!) she’s not interested in sleeping with them. Played with an imperial distance by Irene Papas, she is condemned as a slut the second she does make a choice about who she welcomes into her bed (Basil, once). Madame Hortense (played with a grandstanding vulnerability by Oscar-winner Lila Kedrova) enters into a one-sided relationship with Zorba. Led to believe (by Basil) Zorba intends marriage, she becomes a joke in the village. Both women’s plot end with shocking, even savage, results.

A braver and more challenging film than Zorba the Greek would have used these events to counter-balance the light comedy and romance of the Greek vistas and Mikis Theodorakis’ brilliantly evocative score, by more clearly commenting on the darkness and prejudice at the heart of the village. In this Cretan backwater, lynching is perfectly legit, women are public property and even our heroes powerlessly accept what happens as the way of things. A smarter film would have pointed out that, in a savage land, Zorba’s ideology is essential or had Basil question his romantic view of Greece once confronted with the barbarism it’s capable of. Neither happens. Instead, the fate of these women is just another of life’s curveballs – the very thing that Zorba has been trying to train Basil to look past. They become learning points on our heroes journey.

Cacoyannis’ rambling script makes a decent fist at trying to capture the mix of Greek life and philosophical reflection that filled Kazantzakis novel. But he fails to bring events into focus or make any real point other than a series of picaresque anecdotes. Tonally the film shifts widely: a boat journey to Crete is played as slapstick, the eventual fate of the Widow chilling horror, the relationship between Zorba and Basil a buddy-movie tinged with the homoerotic. It’s a film that tries to cover everything and ends up not quite exploring any of its successfully.

It’s most interesting note today is homoeroticism. Helped by the casting of Bates, an actor whose screen presence was always sexually fluid (and who is excellent here), it’s hard not to think that Basil and Zorba are most interested in each other. Basil gets jealous, moody and lonely when Zorba leaves for weeks to fetch “supplies” from a local town. Zorba is equally fascinated by the twitchy and shy Basil, coming alive with him in a way completely different to the gruffness he shows to the other characters. Most happy in each other’s companies, there’s a fascinating homoerotic pull here that the film skirts around (not least by making sure both men have female love interests).

Basil is a curious character, strangely undefined and ineffective who listens a lot to Zorba’s messages but seems to learn very little. When the village turns on the Widow he watches like a lost boy. Zorba effectively takes over his home. The one time he tries to live life to the full, it leads to disaster. He remains strangely unchanged by events, which I am sure is not the films intention.

This misbalance is because the film really should be about him and the changes made to his life. It isn’t, because Quinn dominates the screen. A Latin American who most people thought was Italian or Arabic, here becomes the definitive screen Greek. Quinn’s performance here is his signature, grand, performative but also sensitive and strangely noble under the surface, a bon vivant just the right side of ham. He makes Zorba magnetic and hugely engaging and it says a lot that the Greeks effectively claimed him as one of their own. But he does seize control of the film and tips its balance away from its central figure.

Zorba the Greek is a crowd-pleaser, show-casing Greece, that skims on making a more profound impact on how beauty and savagery can live so close together. It doesn’t want to sacrifice the romance too much by staring too hard at the brutality. Tonally, Cacoyannis doesn’t successfully balance the film and its overextended runtime stretches its slight message. But, with its marvellous iconic score and wonderful performances, it’s got its moments.

Georgy Girl (1966)

Lynn Redgrave excels as permanent odd-girl out in Georgy Girl

Director: Silvio Narizzano

Cast: Lynn Redgrave (Georgy Parkin), James Mason (James Leamington), Alan Bates (Jos Jones), Charlotte Rampling (Meredith), Bill Owen (Ted Parkin), Clare Kelly (Doris Parkin), Rachel Kempson (Ellen Leamington), Denise Coffey (Peg), Dandy Nichols (Hospital Nurse)

Made at the height of the Swinging Sixties – when London was the coolest city in the world – Georgy Girl is, in some respects, a time capsule. It was seen at the time as almost impossibly naughty and subversive, with open talk of abortions and affairs, mothers who feel their lives have been changed for the worse by having babies and young people struggling to accept their responsibilities. Now of course, it all looks rather tame. But there remains a charm to the film – helped above all by its performances – that still manages to make it a winning film, despite some of its attitudes raising entirely different questions today than its makers intended.

Georgy (Lynn Redgrave) is the plain-looking (and doesn’t the film keep reminding us of this!) daughter of the devoted butler (Bill Owen) to millionaire James Leamington (James Mason). Leamington has supported Georgy while she grows up – even letting her use his house for her children’s performance classes – but now his interest in her is changing. With his wife dying, James offers her the chance to become his mistress (with an actual contract). Georgy turns it down – not least because of her growing interest in Jos (Alan Bates), the fun-loving boyfriend of her flatmate Meredith (Charlotte Rampling), a drop-dead gorgeous violinist who treats him and everyone else with disdain. When Meredith falls pregnant with Jos’ baby, the two of them marry – but Meredith wants nothing to do with the child, a contrast to Georgy who has always dreamed of family.

It’s actually a film of cold, hard realities. Beware any film which gives you a conventional happy ending – the hero chasing a woman down a street crying out that he loves her – around the half way mark. All the characters are presented with choices, and are forced to either compromise or run away. It’s telling that the characters who most fit the mood of the era invariably run away, while those with a more traditional outlook stick it out. You could argue that far from being a celebration of the 60s, Georgy Girl is a fierce critique.

At the time, Georgy was seen as something of a free spirit. Perhaps this was because of her unconventional looks or her playful imagination when working with the children in her performance class. Maybe it was the opening sequence, which sees her getting a fashionable haircut, only to instantly wash it out in a sink. Or could it be because she treats her father’s wishes for her to listen to her elders and betters with disdain? (Let’s skirt over the fact her father seems to be effectively pimping her to his employer.) The way she makes a scene at Leamington’s birthday party by performing a raunchy cabaret number? Most of all though it may well have been due to the catchy (and instantly recognisable) Seekers song that plays over the opening and closing of the movie and serves as her calling card.

Interestingly though, watching it now, there is something incredibly conservative about Georgy – and quite possibly about the film itself. While she lives in the heart of the buzzing metropolis, Georgy’s dreams seem to come from another age: to become a mother, in a comfortable domestic setting. It’s hardly a feminist rallying cry. Georgy is so keen for this, she is perfectly willing to step (almost literally) into the shoes of Meredith, inheriting her husband, child and home. The film also misses no opportunity to remind the viewers Georgy is plain, dumpy and sexually inexperienced. Redgrave has been dressed to look like a sort of Teutonic housekeeper. The film doesn’t seem to quite know where to land between praising Georgy and slightly encouraging us, to chuckle at her.

Georgy isn’t in fact the swinging 60s icon in the film. That unquestionably is Charlotte Rampling as Meredith. Looking absolutely stunning, dressed by Mary Quant, Meredith is everything we expect from the era: confident, outgoing, ambitious, sexually liberated. But Meredith is also a stone-cold, ruthless, heartless bitch. Superbly played by Rampling, she treats Georgy as a servant, Jos as a mix between comfort blanket and vibrator, and decides to get married and have the child (rather than abort it as she has two others of Jos’ children – without telling him) because she’s bored. Once the poor child is born, the idea of sacrificing anything from her life is anathema to Meredith who promptly disappears over the horizon.

Georgy Girl is actually a film with much more mixed – even satiric – views of women and its era. The sort of liberation Meredith enjoys goes hand-in-hand with a selfish shirking of responsibility and using her beauty as a justification to treat everyone she meets as supplicants. Georgy is stuck in the middle, a woman in an era of growing freedoms but whose aims remain solidly in the Victorian era. The men are an equally mixed bag. Today we would certainly call what Leamington has been doing grooming. Jos has a happy-go-lucky 60s charm to him, but is flighty, unreliable, selfish and disappears with a smile the second the going gets tough. For all the film is sort of remembered for its joie-de-vive, it’s actually a searing look at the era with mixed feelings about its characters.

The fact we really end up caring for Georgy is due to Lynn Redgrave’s wonderful performance. A second choice for her sister Vanessa, the role typecast Redgrave in Hollywood’s minds as sort of dumpy loser (especially after her Oscar nomination). But she brings the role a real magnetism. Georgy is doomed to play second fiddle in people’s lives (and perhaps even her own). Perhaps the most 60s thing about her though is her determination to get what she wants – whether that is avoiding an affair with her father’s employer, or securing a good life for Meredith’s baby.

The rest of the cast are equally strong. Bates brings the best of his impish charm to the part (even if at times he tries too hard), as well as a metrosexual edge to Jos as someone very comfortable with joking around and being a bit camp. James Mason (who took a massive pay cut for the role, a decision which paid off with an Oscar nomination) is superb as fragile but creepy Leamington, a man who believes he is genuinely in love and is also excited at the prospect of replacing his bed-ridden wife (played by Redgrave’s actual mother Rachel Kempson, adding a nice Oedipal touch) with a younger model. Bill Owen mixes both a hilarious servility with assertions that his daughter “owes” Leamington something for all he’s done for her.

Georgy Girl works well because it is – and remains – funny as well as being dramatic and thought provoking. It might not be a feminist tract – and the character most likely to be seen as a feminist in the thing is its least sympathetic by far – and it might well affectionately scorn a woman who doesn’t look like a conventional man’s idea of attractive, and give her a traditional outlook behind a playful exterior – but it’s an energetic and rather charming film that does make you care. Separating it from the era it’s set in, might well do it a world of good.

The Entertainer (1960)

Laurence Olivier excels as a faded music hall star in The Entertainer

Director: Tony Richardson

Cast: Laurence Olivier (Archie Rice), Brenda de Banzie (Phoebe Rice), Roger Livesey (Billy Rice), Joan Plowright (Jean Rice), Alan Bates (Frank Rice), Daniel Massey (Graham), Shirley Anne Field (Tina Lapford), Thora Hird (Mrs Lapford), Albert Finney (Mick Rice)

In the late 1950s Laurence Olivier was worried about his career. While he was still doing Shakespeare and Coward comedies (intermixed with the odd film), the world of acting and theatre was moving on. Not least as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was taking the West End by storm. Olivier seemed the polar opposite of the “Angry Young Men” of British theatre, a dusty relic. So Olivier changed gears – and his entire life – by asking to be cast in the lead role of Osborne’s next play The Entertainer. Olivier’s sensational stage performance – captured here on film – radically changed the path of both his career and his life, with his long-troubled marriage to Vivien Leigh broking down during it. But he also cemented himself as the leading British actor.

Olivier plays Archie Rice, a failing never-has-been end-of-pier comedy performer at an unnamed Seaside town in 1956. Rice’s routines are old-and-tired, his comedy tinged with desperation and he’s all but broke. Archie’s audiences are tired, bored and unamused. His home life, with his faded former beauty champ wife (Brenda de Banzie) is on the ropes due to his constant infidelity. His father (Roger Livesey) – a music hall celebrity with real talent – loves him but thinks he’s a disasater waiting to happen. His son Frank (Alan Bates) adores him but his daughter Jean (Joan Plowright) is more realistic. Archie through continues to peddle the idea of a success being round the corner, trying to put together a hit revue starring his latest mistress (Shirley Anne Field) and funded by her parents. Things will not end well.

The Entertainer’s main claim to historical note is that it captures that sensational stage performance of Laurence Olivier in the lead role. Olivier had always liked to claim that, with a few zigs and zags in his career, he would have become a third-rate comedian. His performance – with its ingratiating patter, it’s seedy sexually ambivalent campness, his selfishness and self-obsession and greed – is brilliant. Archie’s entire life is a desperate struggle to get himself the career he wants – while trying to shut his eyes to his own lack of talent (of which he is painfully aware). Olivier captures superbly not only the front of a man bent on self-promotion, but also the dead-eyed horror of a man who is aware all the time that he is dying inside.

Olivier’s eyes are drill-holes of death, and his life is an exhibition of selfish patter, with a constant sense of performance in every inch of Archie’s life. He’s a run-down, finished and disillusioned man trying to pluck what few moments of pleasure he can from a life he is only going through the motions in. All of it covered with a coating of self-delusion that quickly crumbles into sweaty desperation. While the film can only give a taste of the Olivier stage performance, it re-enforces Olivier’s energy, creativity and bravery. Olivier’s both bravura and tragically tired music hall performances alone are worth the price of admission.

Away from Olivier’s exceptional capturing of the washed up patter of the sleazy loser, it’s easy to overlook most of the rest of the film. But it’s directed with a kitchen-sink freshness by Tony Richardson, who brilliantly captures the faded grandeur and grubby failure of a failing seaside resort. Osborne’s play used the decline of music hall as a metaphor for the decline of the British Empire and while the film (for all its Suez references) doesn’t quite convey this, favouring instead domestic tragedy, it still perfectly captures the crumbling world of Rice and his ilk. Rice’s father – Roger Livesey, excellent and about a year older than Olivier – is a relic of the success of this era, and still carries some of its glamour, but still lives as a virtual tenant in the Rice home, eating spare cake where he can.

While the film is dominated by Olivier, this presentation of the play as a domestic tragedy works rather well. Brenda de Banzie (also reprising her role from stage) is very good as an ex-glamour puss (and former mistress of Archie) now turned into a faded, depressed matron, drunkenly bitter about what her life has (not) led to. Joan Plowright is excellent as the knowing daughter, alternately sympathetic and appalled at her father. Shirley Anne Field’s naïve lover is suitably naïve, under the control of her battleaxe mother, well played by Thora Hird. The cast is rounded out with Alan Bates and Albert Finney (both in debuts) as Archie’s sons.

While the film feels a little overlong at times, and is perhaps too much in thrall to Olivier, it offers a neat kitchen-sink view of failure and corruption in British life of the 1950s. There is, of course, no hope and no second chances here. Only the long, wearying decline and rotting as Archie’s life disintegrates under pressure and his own incompetent self-delusion.

Gosford Park (2001)

Cruelty, snobbery and viciousness – just another night at Gosford Park

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Eileen Atkins (Mrs Croft), Bob Balaban (Morris Weissman), Alan Bates (Mr Jennings), Charles Dance (Lord Stockbridge), Stephen Fry (Inspector Thompson), Michael Gambon (Sir William McCordle), Richard E. Grant (George), Derek Jacobi (Probert), Kelly Macdonald (Mary Maceachran), Helen Mirren (Mrs Wilson), Jeremy Northam (Ivor Novello), Clive Owen (Robert Parks), Ryan Phillippe (Henry Denton), Kristin Scott-Thomas (Lady Sylvia McCordle), Maggie Smith (Constance, Countess of Trentham), Emily Watson (Elsie), Claudie Blakely (Mabel Nesbitt), Tom Hollander (Lt Commander Anthony Meredith), Geraldine Somerville (Lady Stockbridge), Jeremy Swift (Arthur), Sophie Thompson (Dorothy), James Wilby (Freddie Nesbitt)

We’ve always fancied ourselves that when Brits make films in America – think John Schlesinger’s brilliant analysis of New York hustlers in Midnight Cowboy – they turn the sharp analytical eye of the outsider on American society. But do we like it when America turns the same critical eye on us? Gosford Park is a film surely no Brit could have made, so acutely vicious and condemning of the class system of this country, without the hectoring that left-wing British filmmakers so often bring to the same material, it’s just about perfect in exposing the hypocrisy and cruelty that undermines our class system. You’ll never look at an episode of Downton Abbey the same way again.

In November 1932, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) hosts a shooting party at his country house. McCordle is almost universally despised by his relatives and peers – most especially his wife Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott-Thomas) – but tolerated as his vast fortune from his factories basically funds the lives of nearly everyone at the house party. While the upper classes gather upstairs, downstairs the servants of the house led by butler Jennings (Alan Bates) and housekeeper Mrs Wilson (Helen Mirren) order the house to meet the often selfish and thoughtless demands of the rich. The house is rocked midway through the weekend, when a murder occurs overnight. With motives aplenty, perhaps the new maid Mary (Kelly Macdonald) of the imperious Countess Trentham (Maggie Smith) has the best chance of finding the truth.

First and foremost, it’s probably a good idea to say that this is in no way a murder-mystery. Robert Altman, I think, could barely care less about whodunit. While the film has elements that gently spoof elements of its Agatha Christie-ish settings, Altman’s interest has always been the personal relationships between people and the societies they move in. So this is a film really about the atmosphere of the house and most importantly how these people treat each other. Altman despised snobbery, and in a world that is fuelled by that very vice, he goes to town in showing just how awful and stifling so many elements of the class system really were.

“He thinks he’s God Almighty. They all do.” So speaks Clive Owen’s Robert Parks, valet, of his employer the patrician Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance, excellent). You’ve got the attitude right there: the rich see themselves as a different species to those pushing plates around and cleaning clothes below stairs. The idea of there being anything in common is laughable. Slight moments of casual conversation between servant and master in the film are governed by strict laws and carry a quiet tension.

It’s so acute in its analysis of the selfishness, snobbery, cruelty and arrogance of the British class system that each time I watch it I’m less and less convinced that Downton Abbey (the cuddliest version of this world you could imagine) creator Julian Fellowes had much to do with it. This film is so far from the “we are all in this together” Edwardian paternalism of that series, you can’t believe the same man wrote both. All the heritage charm of Downton is drained from Gosford, leaving only the cold reality of what a world is like where a small number of people employ the rest.

Upstairs the hierarchy is absurdly multi-layered. Everyone is aware of their position, with those at the top of the tree barely able to look those at the bottom in the eye, let alone talk to them. The rudeness is striking. Maggie Smith (who is brilliant, her character totally devoid of the essential kindness of her role in Downton Abbey has) is so imperiously offensive, such an arch-snob, she can only put the thinnest veil over her contempt when she deigns to speak to her inferiors. Her niece, played with an ice-cold distance by Kristin Scott-Thomas, embodies aloofness, selfishness and casual cruelty.

Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam, superb) – the one real person in the film, and a film star – is treated like a jumped up minstrel player, with characters falling over themselves to make snide comments about his career. His guest Morris Weissman (an excellent Bob Balaban), a Hollywood film producer, is treated with similar contempt – when reluctant to divulge details of the film he is in England researching (a Charlie Chan film) for fears he will spoil his plot, the Countess bluntly informs him “oh, none of us will see it”. Later, as Novello plays the piano (essentially singing for his supper) only the servants are pleased – most of the upper classes endure it under sufferance (“Don’t encourage him” the Countess says when there is a smattering of applause). You can see why, after only a few hours in the house, Weissman whispers to Novello: “How do you put up with these people?”

The servants themselves are bits of furniture, or barely acknowledged at all. Altman doesn’t shoot a single scene without a servant present, but this often hammers home their irrelevance to the upper classes (it’s made even more effective by seeing actors like Bates, Jacobi, Grant, Macdonald, Owen and Watson essentially being treated as extras). There are no bonds between upstairs and downstairs at all. Any upset witnessed on either side is responded to with silence. When Emily Watson’s Elsie (a brilliant performance of arch awareness of her place) momentarily forgets herself and speaks out at the dinner table, it’s treated like she has crapped on the floor – needless to say her career is finished.

The servants however echo the pointless rituals and ingrained hierarchy of their masters below stairs. For ease (!) the house servants insist the visiting servants are only addressed by the names of their employers not their own names. At their dinner table, their seating reflects the hierarchy of their employers. Many of the servants are more grounded and “normal” than the upstairs types, but they are as complicit in this system continuing as anyone else. They simply can’t imagine a life without it, and accept without question their place at the bottom rung of the house.

Ryan Phillippe, later revealed as an actor masquerading as a servant (for research), immediately shows how hard it is to move between the two social circles. The servants despise him as a traitor who may leak secrets about their views of the employers. The guests see him as a jumped up intruder, even more vulgar than Novello and Weissman. His later humiliation is one of the few moments that see both sides of the social divide united (it’s fitting that it is an act of cruelty that reinforces the social rules that brings people together).

The focus is so overwhelmingly on the class system – with Altman’s brilliant camera work (the camera is never still) giving us the sense of being a fly-on-the-wall in this house – that you forget it’s a murder mystery. Here the film is also really clever, archly exposing the harsh realities of the attitudes held by your standard group of Christie characters. Dance’s Lord Stockbridge in a Christie story would be a “perfect brick” but here we’ve seen he’s a shrewd but judgemental old bastard. The film throws in a clumsy Christie-style incompetent police detective, played by Stephen Fry. This is possibly the film’s only real misstep as Fry’s performance touches on a farcical tone that seems completely out of step with the rest of the film. But the Christie parody is generally wonderful, exploding the cosy English world the public perception believes is behind Christie (even if the author herself was often darker than people remember!).

It’s a hilarious film – Maggie Smith in particular is memorable, from cutting down her fellow guests, to judgementally tutting at shop-bought (not homemade) marmalade – but it’s also a film that creeps up on you with real emotional impact. Kelly Macdonald is very good as the most “everyday” character, who takes on the role of detective and has superb chemistry with Clive Owen’s dashing valet. But the film builds towards a heart-rending conclusion – a conclusion that, with its reveal about the darker side of Gambon’s blustering Sir William, feels more relevant every day – that shows the secret tragedies and dark underbelly of these worlds, with a particularly affecting scene between Atkins and Mirren (Mirren in particular is such a peripheral figure for so much of the film, that her final act revelations and emotional response carries even more force). It’s heart rending.

Gosford Park is a film continually misremembered as either a cosy costume drama or a murder mystery. It’s neither. It’s a brilliant analysis of the British class system and a superb indictment of the impact and damage it has had on people and the country. Hilarious, brilliantly directed by Altman with a superb cast – it’s a masterpiece, perhaps one of the finest films in Altman’s catalogue.

The Go-Between (1971)

Julie Christie enlists young Dominic Guard to pass notes in classic adaptation The Go Between

Director: Joseph Losey

Cast: Julie Christie (Marian Maudsley), Alan Bates (Ted Burgess), Dominic Guard (Leo Colston), Margaret Leighton (Mrs Maudsley), Michael Redgrave (Older Leo Colston), Edward Fox (Hugh, Viscount Trimingham), Michael Gough (Mr Maudsley), Richard Gibson (Marcus Maudsley), Roger Lloyd-Pack (Charles)

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

It’s a classic line from JP Hartley’s masterpiece novel of youthful disillusionment and trauma, The Go-Between. This film version perfectly captures the novel’s wistful reflections on a past that seems bright and glowing to the young boy caught up in the centre, while carefully and subtly suggesting the darker currents and temptations that lie under the surface.

In 1900, 12-year-old Leo Colston (Dominic Guard), a middle class boy, spends the summer at the country house of his wealthy school friend. There he finds himself increasingly drawn to the glamour and kindness of the family, who do their best to make Leo feel at home – particularly Marian (Julie Christie), the daughter of the house. Leo also befriends local farmer Ted Burgess (Alan Bates) and finds himself recruited to carry letters between Marian and Ted, little understanding what the messages and arrangements between the two may mean, and what it might mean for her engagement with the decent Viscount Trimingham (Edward Fox).

The Go-Between is a perfect Chekovian tragedy, which brilliantly captures the hypocrisy and dangers of the final days of the Victorian era. Of course it bubbles down to sex – and there is tonnes of it beneath the surface in the quietly built passion between Marian and Ted. But it’s also class as well – the primary reason why Marian’s affair with Ted remains so illicit is because the farmer (as the younger family members make abundantly clear) is socially unacceptable.

Class weaves itself into every part of the film. The Maudsley family work over time to make Leo feel as comfortable as possible in the house as they are all aware of the social gap between them. The Maudsley family treat Leo as almost a sort of social obligation, quietly buying him new clothes (as he ‘must have forgotten to pack’ the correct clothing for the scorching summer heat) and making much of him at the local cricket game. But Leo can never really forget that he falls somewhere in the middle between the Maudsleys and Tony, and finds himself out of place with both. This awkwardness is perfectly captured in Dominic Guard’s bashful performance.

Class is also lies under Marian’s affair with Burgess – and she seems to know it can never last. Indeed, she has every intention it seems of marrying Trimingham. Trimingam and her father, it’s implied, are even aware of the affair and expect it to burn out. It’s Mrs Maudsley who seems most threatened by the social possibilities of the affair – while the men expect the normal order to reassert itself, Mrs Maudsley (Margaret Leighton, who brilliantly simmers at the edge of the whole film before dominating its closing scenes) seems far more aware of the dangers that love and attraction have.

But it’s a story where the real victims turn out to be those outside the family. Ted Burgess (expertly played by Alan Bates, who made a living of playing son of the soil types like this) winds up feeling like an innocent, a bashful teenager who barely seems to know where to look when Marian accompanies him on the piano while he sings at the celebration after the village cricket match (Mrs Maudsley is appalled at this point). And Ted (constantly described as a lady-killer by Maudsley and Trimingham, despite all evidence to the contrary in his manner – further signposting their awareness of the affair) constantly feels like the weaker partner in the relationship, besotted with the lady of the manor.

As that lady, Julie Christie gives an intriguing performance (even if she is slightly too old for the part). Christie’s Marian is strangely distant, despite her many acts of kindness towards Leo. To what extent is she merely using the boy, winning him over with affection to manipulate him later to deliver her messages? How much does she care for the boy? She understands her relationship with Ted can never be – and is more than prepared to marry Trimingham – but how much is that a defence mechanism against her true feelings? We get only a half suggestion, as Leo does, of how she may really feel. It’s subtly left open for most of the film.

The film uses a neat device of intercutting moments of the story with the far older Leo (Michael Redgrave, whose voice is perfect for the moments of narration) revisiting the locations of the story again. Everything is in contrast to the bright, luxurious summer of 1900 as the older Leo heads around windswept and rainy locations. Unlike the past, the present day finds the soundtrack drained out by sound effects and ambient noise. It’s a quiet reminder of the foreboding doom that lies over the story – and the film makes good business from the suggestion of trauma that has affected Leo resulting from the events of 1900, and how it has shattered and reshaped his life.

Losey’s direction is a perfect capturing of the languid heat of that 1900 summer, and he perfectly frames events and action for maximum impact. It’s a film made of small looks, quiet asides and suggestions to the audience played from the perspective of a child, where we need to interpret the things we see to get a full understanding of what’s really happening and its implications. Harold Pinter’s script is equally strong, perfectly capturing the mood and feel of Hartley’s novel.

The Go-Between is an excellent film, stuffed with good performances (in addition to those mentioned, Edward Fox and Michael Gough are both excellent), and beautifully shot and filmed. It’s an intelligent and very faithful adaptation of the book that still manages to make the book more cinematic, with the intercutting between past and present giving us a sense of Greek tragedy, and the interrelations between the characters staged with subtly and intrigue. A wonderful adaptation of a great novel.

Women in Love (1969)

The stars of Women in Love: this publicity still gives only a hint of the simmering (and slightly strange) heightened passions you find therein

Director: Ken Russell

Cast: Alan Bates (Rupert Birkin), Oliver Reed (Gerald Crich), Glenda Jackson (Gudrun Brangwen), Jennie Linden (Ursula Brangwen), Eleanor Bron (Hermione Roddice), Alan Webb (Thomas Crich), Vladek Sheybal (Loerke), Catherine Wilmer (Christina Crich), Phoebe Nicholls (Winifred Crich), Sharon Gurney (Laura Crich), Christopher Gable (Tibby), Michael Gough (Tom Brangwen), Norma Shebbeare (Mrs Brangwen)

DH Lawrence is an acquired taste. While his writing is undoubtedly brilliant, reading his novels today it’s hard to shake off their sometimes histrionic melodrama – their revelling in all that (at the time) shockingly frank discussion of sex and all that Freudian analysis of fractured personalities against an alien industrial world. So perhaps there is a reason why one of the best interpreters of his work for the screen has been someone as melodramatic and envelope-pushing as Ken Russell.

Women in Love is Russell and Lawrence to the max. In a 1920s mining town, two sisters, Gudrun (an Oscar-winning Glenda Jackson) and Ursula (Jennie Linden) want to make their own way in the world. Local school inspector Robert Birkin (Alan Bates) wants to find perfect love and fulfilment. Alpha-male son-of-the-local-mine-owner Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) isn’t quite sure what he wants, other than to reinvigorate his father’s business. Naturally all four of these characters come together in romantic, intellectual and sexual tangles that lead to a lot more misery than happiness.

Wow this is a difficult picture to write about. How so? Because it is about two-thirds masterpiece to one-third pretentious, hyperbolical nonsense. That’s quite some tight-rope. Russell walks it pretty well, but his problem has always been he loves being a sort of enfant terrible of British cinema too much. Too often he succumbs to temptation and pushes things a little further, to go for the demented camera or editing trick, or to push the sexual content a little bit further. The whole film has a hint of a cocky teenager, jumping up and down to look cool and catch your attention.

But then on the flipside, sometimes this excess really works (or if you like, sometimes more really is more). Nowhere is this clearer than in the famous naked wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. It’s a high-blown, tightly edited, single-camera, increasingly artistic sequence that leaves little to the imagination as we wonder how far this nude, willy-waggling, sweaty wrestling turned intimate clinch will go (the final shot sees the characters roll off each other and lie exhausted on a carpet, breathless, in front of a roaring fire). But it works so well because the amped up shooting and content really tells us something about these two characters, their relationship, feelings, viewpoints on life, sexuality – everything. It’s a great scene and it’s a sign of how good this film can be.

And then you get other moments where you sigh and roll your eyes and almost want to say “yeah Ken we get it…”. As Robert and Ursula roll off each other after an intense sexual encounter in the woods, we cut immediately to two bodies found drowned in a lake, their bodies locked together in exactly the same position. Yup sex ‘n’ death. Gerald and Gudrun have sex, intercut with shots of Gerald’s mother. Other moments ape up stuff that was already pretty ridiculous in the book to the max: Birkin, after a bash on the head, runs naked into the countryside and smears himself with grass and mud and rolls in the dirt. For about three minutes.

But then this is the sort of film where Glenda Jackson tames some bulls by performing a bizarre dance. Why does she do this? Who knows (certainly not the characters). But then the film is full of moments like this. But what kind of makes it work, even when it is so ridiculously over-the-top and dated in its filming, is that there is a smartness in it. It is a film that does, underneath it all, have some profound thoughts about love and relationships.

It manages to bring together the themes that intrigued Lawrence with a bit of coherence. What do we want from life? It focuses overwhelmingly on the men of the story, and in particular Alan Bates (excellent) as Birkin. Made up to look like Lawrence, Birkin also carries a lot of the prose of the novel debating what makes us happy, whether we need equally strong bonds in our life with men and women, and what constitutes our completeness as human beings.

The film does this to a certain extent with the female characters as well – although we see them almost completely from the perspective of the men (which is interesting – maybe they were worried about making a film called Men in Love…). That’s possibly why Gudrun’s confused desires for Gerald never quite come into focus. Marvellous as Glenda Jackson is – surely an actress born to play this sort of part, marvellously passionate but strangely unknowable, vulnerable but harsh and even a little cruel – it’s hard to understand how Gudrun’s feelings change for Gerald. Maybe she doesn’t know herself.

Gerald and Gudrun seem to be characters who don’t understand what they want (Gerald even expressly says it). That’s part of the point of the film (and Lawrence’s book) – a yearning, like both these characters have, for freedom and something different from previous generations, but unable to really put their finger on what this is. Gudrun wants a strong, dynamic man – but she also wants freedom and artistic fulfilment, and can’t find this with Gerald.

The film juggles these themes, of people struggling to reach an expression of (or to understand) their desires. Russell understands this – and for all the highblown eccentricity of some of the shooting, he sticks with a brilliant understanding of these personalities and themes. It remains a very caring movie that understands and relates to its characters. It has a lot of heart under the madness of Russell’s shooting.

And it’s superbly acted. Bates and Jackson are both marvellous, as is Jennie Linden in a (to be honest) rather thankless part as the second sister. But it’s a revelation of what a fine actor Oliver Reed could have been, if he had not decided to become a professional drunk. Reed drips charisma and intensity and he gives Gerald a real frustrated, sensual depth – a confused sexual fear mixed with a determined machismo. It’s a brilliant performance. The rest of the cast are also good, even if Eleanor Bron is (partly deliberately) overdone as Birkin’s first lover.

Women in Love is very dated in its style, but still a fascinating and intelligent piece of filmmaking that engages with and juggles with ideas. Despite all its overblown Russell excess, I actually really liked it, it stuck with me and I’ve been thinking about it since it finished. I’d actually like to see it again and see if it unlocks even more for me – and blimey it even makes me want to read Lawrence again, which after The Rainbow I never thought I’d say…

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1971)

Janet Suzman and Alan Bates balance the pressure of bringing up a paralysed daughter in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

Director: Peter Medak

Cast: Alan Bates (Bri), Janet Suzman (Shelia), Peter Bowles (Freddie), Shelia Gish (Pam), Joan Hickson (Grace), Elizabeth Robillard (Jo), Murray Melvyn (Doctor), Constance Chapman (Moonrocket lady)

The playwright Peter Nichols’ daughter Abigail was born in 1960, suffering from severe physical and mental disabilities, requiring 24-hour care from her parents. Nichols transformed the experience into a play about two parents who struggle to care for their daughter, and spin out little fantasy conversations with their child, indulging in flights of fancy even while her father wonders if it is even worth carrying on with looking after a child who will never experience any improvement or independent life.

Alan Bates plays the husband Bri, a put-upon teacher at a boys’ school, prone to flights of comic fantasy. Bri feels increasingly frustrated about the unacknowledged strain their handicapped daughter Jo is placing on his marriage to Shelia (Janet Suzman), whose focus is almost exclusively on looking after their daughter. The couple use often surreal black humour to cope with the constant pressure of caring for the child.

The excellent Indicator blu-ray contains a fascinating interview with Peter Nichols, who clearly didn’t care for the film. He found it off-balance, too emotionally overwrought, too realist and essentially too depressing. He’s probably right. The play is a finely balanced mixture of near stand-up comedy and marital grief. Bri’s comic moments are vaudeville fantasy sequences, with funny accents and larger-than-life characters pulled together. This toying with the fourth-wall just can’t be translated in to cinema here, instead the film downplays the dark humour and humanity of the piece, and instead makes it a rather heavy-handed and glum watch.

Bates still has many of the essentially comic funny voices and character-based routines – there are sequences where he acts out the roles of various doctors and priests who have consulted on Jo in the past. But his performance is just a little too eccentric, a little too out-there, a little too twitchy – frankly it makes him hard to engage and empathise with. Maybe it’s the changing times that haven’t helped, but Bri’s constant whining that his sex life has been destroyed just doesn’t sound right.

Of course, Nichols is using this whining to touch upon the damage done by the pressure of constantly caring for a daughter who will never show any signs of improvement and never be capable of communicating with her parents. Nichols knows of what he speaks: he and his wife eventually hospitalised their daughter (and had two other children) – and he believes the parents should have done the same in his play. By making the entire focus of their life a child who is, essentially, an object (twice at opposite ends of the film she is pushed into a room slumped over a wheelchair), it’s clear the couple are causing no end of damage to their emotional lives. Maybe it’s just heavier going as well because the film features a real child – while the play used theatrical invention to represent the child.

The film slightly unbalances itself by moving away from black humour to emotional impact. Maybe part of this is due to Janet Suzman’s astonishingly strong performance as Shelia, a part she invests with great layers of emotion and hope, constantly refusing to give up hope that one day Jo may respond. Suzman has one extremely emotional speech, recounting a moment where Jo pushed over some play blocks, which she delivers with a teary, earnest, simplicity to the camera which is profoundly moving. It probably makes Bates’ performance seem a little more irritating than it actually is, because she is strong.

And that is a problem with the film, because in order for it to work you need to bond with both parents. You need to share and be inspired by Shelia’s hope, while at the same time see that Bri’s more realistic perceptive, and his dark longings to end Jo’s life of suffering, are in many ways just as legitimate. The film is all about this issue of euthanasia – conversations dance around it constantly – and it largely manages not to fall either side of the issue. There are points on both sides – and the real issue is should the parents find some other way to get support and help with caring for their daughter? Instead you don’t quite bond with both parents the way you need too. You feel Bri is a bit too sharp, and that Shelia is a bit too unrealistic in what she believes in.

The second half of the film introduces most of the secondary characters, particular Freddie and Pam (expertly played by Freddie Bowles and Shelia Gish), giving us a fresh perspective on the events. Freddie is bluntly concerned in a jolly way with doing what he can to help and urges the couple to consider hospitalisation. Pam, however, behaves with the awkward embarrassment many of us are ashamed to admit we feel when confronted with the seriously paralysed. We also get to see more of Joan Hickson (the only cast member from the original stage production) as Bri’s brassy and difficult mother, whose attempts to help largely only serve to increase tensions.

It slowly becomes clear though that this is a film about the collapse of a marriage under pressure, even more than about caring for a disabled child. But shorn of much of its humour – the fantasy sequences don’t really work, because they feel a little too heightened and overplayed – the film turns the play into something really quite bleak. It’s frankly a little too depressing and overbearing to really enjoy. It has plenty of good performances, but doesn’t really open up the play and instead turns it into an intense, rather overbearing chamber piece. A film that loses its balance from the stage version, and instead becomes something quite glum, in which Bates’ Bri doesn’t really win our sympathy as you feel he should do. It’s a tougher watch than Nichols intended – surely why he wasn’t really happy with it.

The Sum of All Fears (2002)

Morgan Freeman and Ben Affleck save the world from nuclear armageddon

Director: Phil Alden Robinson
Cast: Ben Affleck (Jack Ryan), Morgan Freeman (William Cabot), Bridget Moynahan (Dr. Catherine Muller), James Cromwell (President J. Robert Fowler), Liev Schreiber (John Clark), Ciarán Hinds (President Alexander Nemerov), Alan Bates (Richard Dressler), Michael Byrne (Anatoly Grushkov), Colm Feore (Olson), Ron Rifkin (Sidney Owens), Bruce McGill (Gene Revell), Philip Baker Hall (David Becker)

In the aftermath of 9/11, people debated whether that atrocity would lead to a change in how Hollywood made blockbusters. Would the public still have the taste for American landmarks being destroyed in the name of entertainment? I guess the answer was “sure they would”, because less than a year later Baltimore was being wiped out by a nuke in The Sum of All Fears. And people generally did find it entertaining. As they should: this is not a smart film, but it is fun, and with hardly any violence or swearing it’s a perfect “all generations” viewing thriller.

The fourth entry in the on-again, off-again Jack Ryan franchise, a series of loosely connected but enjoyable films based on Tom Clancy’s novels, this reboots the saga after two entertaining airport-novel style films starring Harrison Ford. Ryan (Ben Affleck) is now a young CIA analyst who is suddenly thrust centre stage in the Agency when Alexander Nemerov (Ciarán Hinds) rises to power in Russia. Before he knows it, he is working closely with CIA chief William Cabot (Morgan Freeman) and briefing the President (James Cromwell). Working with agent John Clark (Liev Schreiber), Ryan investigates rogue nuclear weapons in Russia, little knowing that it is part of a fiendish plan by European neo-Nazis, led by Richard Dressler (Alan Bates), to plunge Russia and the US into a nuclear confrontation.

First off the bat, Tom Clancy hated this film. He even does a commentary on the DVD which is a scene-by-scene breakdown of all the things he doesn’t like and the terrible changes he felt had been made from his book. I can see why he’s upset, but this is actually a very entertaining, solid, slightly old-fashioned piece of film-making. Clancy’s books aim to be “a few degrees to the left” of reality, to present something that could happen. This film is more of a Bond movie, not least in its choice of baddies. The book uses Arab terrorists. Wisely (I think) the film changes this to a set of Bond-villain like Nazis, embodied by Alan Bates’ enjoyable scenery-chewing performance as a slightly camp chain-smoking Nazi (“Ze Fuhrer vasn’t crazee. He vas stoopid”). There is even a scene where one of the plotters, Goldfinger-style, announces ’I will have no part in this madness’ only to be swiftly bumped off. Clancy hated it, but it’s something a little different and also enjoyably silly.

Besides, you might have felt there was enough vibe of reality in there for Clancy with the reaction to the big one being dropped on Baltimore. The build-up to this sequence is very well done, cut and shot with tension, and Jerry Goldsmith’s score really effectively helps with this build. It’s also quite shocking to actually see the plan succeed: and the shots of a mushroom cloud over the city are presented with a sombre sorrow. There is probably more Clancy criticism for Ryan’s effortless travel around the irradiated city (and his totally unaffected cell phone) but this sequence is still damn good.

Similarly skilfully done is the reaction of the politicians. Daringly, the US politicians are to a man sweaty, stressed old white guys (Air Force One takes off to the accompaniment of them screaming at each other). One of them even has a heart attack. The American politicians may be reluctant – but they are the fastest to rush towards pushing the button. They are also shown to be hopelessly lacking judgement when it comes to appraising the likely reactions to their decisions: one reassures the President that the Russians won’t respond to a full nuclear strike against military targets! The fast build from angry words to a bombers is terrifically done.

The Russians are similarly twitchy – and unlike the Americans, far more susceptible to bribery and collaboration with our villains – but interestingly their President is the “reasonable man”, whom Ryan (and the audience) respects. Charismatically embodied by that wonderful character actor Ciarán Hinds (the film deservedly brought Hinds to America’s attention and he hasn’t looked back since), Nemerov is the wisest, smartest guy in the room – a realist and level-headed man. Hinds is actually the stand-out in the film, superbly backed up by Michael Byrne as a shady (but surprisingly cuddly) KGB fixer.

The build-up to the remorselessly exciting nuke and aftermath sequences is pretty traditional fare but well directed by Phil Alden Robinson and a very good cast of actors largely deliver in their roles. Affleck at the time was heading into the height of his Bennifer unpopularity: he gives a decent performance as Ryan, but Ford is a tough act to follow and Affleck doesn’t quite have the same “ordinary-joe” quality Ford and Baldwin brought to it earlier. He also doesn’t quite have the leading man charisma the part needs to carry the film (Affleck’s best work is as a character actor, but he is trapped by his leading man looks). Fortunately Morgan Freeman, calmly contributing another of his wise mentor roles, offers sterling support. Schreiber and Cromwell are also good in key roles.

This is a very traditional, quite old-school thriller, inspired by a combination of Goldfinger and 1970s political thrillers. It’s not a special film – and not even the best in the franchise – but it is invariably entertaining, has a host of well-done scenes, and barrels along. Robinson also has an eye for tension in smaller sequences – a marvellously tense scene simply involves Ryan trying to get a card swipe machine to work – although he is less confident with some of the action. But in showing how quickly our trigger happy masters can push towards Armageddon, this is a film that seems to be endlessly relevant. And wouldn’t you rather have Nemerov of even Fowler running the US than Trump?