Tag: Anne Bancroft

Agnes of God (1985)

A chamber piece play is expanded into something less enigmatic or satisfying

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Jane Fonda (Dr Martha Livingston), Anne Bancroft (Mother Miriam Ruth), Meg Tilly (Sister Agnes Devereaux), Anne Pitoniak (Mrs Livingston), Winston Rekert (Detective Langevin), Guy Hoffman (Justice Joseph Leveau)

In a Montreal convent a naïve, other-worldly young novice, Sister Agnes Devereaux (Meg Tilly), has given bloody birth to a baby, that now lies strangled in a waste paper bin. The courts must decide if Sister Agnes is fit and capable of standing trial. That decision will be based on the recommendation of hard-smoking psychiatrist and atheist Dr Martha Livingston (Jane Fonda). Spending time with the devout young woman, Dr Livingston finds herself drawn to her and determined to discover why this girl who knows nothing of sex became pregnant. But she also butts heads with Mother Miriam (Anne Bancroft), the stern head of the convent, equally determined to protect Sister Agnes.

Jewison’s film – adapted by original playwright John Pielmeier – is a not entirely successful transfer of a three-hander chamber piece into cinema. The play, at its best as a series of monologues and duologues, deliberately left events open to interpretation: we have only their words and recollections to base conclusions on, all within an increasingly claustrophobic single-room set. Much of that pressure is lost in this film version, exposing instead the play’s flaws.

The “opening out” of the play focuses on introducing new characters and scenes. Unfortunately, these tend to stick out like sore thumbs. They invariably involve Dr Livingston talking to thinly sketched characters outside of the convent, who deliver stilted and dull dialogue that feels like clumsy padding. Members of the Canadian court take her on and off the case. A priest suggests she has an anti-Church bias. A brief visit to her Alzheimer’s suffering mother. A detective boyfriend passes her the odd file. All of these encounters feel exactly like what they are: scenes introduced solely so that we can see people other than the three principals.

They contrast greatly with the weightier and more engaging scenes between the three women, the meat of which is carried across from the stage play. Played with a high-pitched, breathless naivety by Meg Tilly (Oscar-nominated), Agnes is almost child-like in her interpretation of what the Lord demands of her and seems barely capable of understanding the adult world she finds herself in. She is enthralled by the ringing of bells and the sound of birds. She wants to make herself the perfect image of what she believes God wants.

It demands every inch of Dr Livingston’s professional expertise and ability to draw confidences and make psychological leaps to begin to understand this godly young woman’s psyche. Fonda is very good in a part that demands hard work with none of the flashy histrionics the other two roles have. Fonda makes Livingston a consummate professional, with a touch (not least in her constant parade of cigarettes) of the maverick to her, someone who never takes no for an answer and constantly drills deeper and deeper.

In many ways this makes her a kindred spirit for Anne Bancroft’s (also Oscar-nominated) Mother Miriam. Late to her calling, Bancroft brilliantly embraces a big, chewy part as a seemingly stern, slightly exasperated stereotypical head nun who reveals reservoirs of humanity and a strong sense of duty of care for her charges. It’s a standard twist on the grouchy older character who hides an affectionate smile, but Bancroft performs it with gusto and cements her clashes with Livingston in genuine resentment at the doctor’s initially glib assumptions about life in the convent.

The debates and confrontations between Miriam and Martha – and their attempts to both protect and draw truths from Sister Agnes – are the dramatic meat of the film and by far its most engaging moments. The problem is, the film’s attempt to expand these points with flashbacks and the grim reality of the camera undermines the suggestiveness of the original play,.

Like Equus – which demonstrated how real horses and a graphic horse-blinding scene can make a thoughtful play crude and clumsy on film – Agnes of God falls back into a POV flashback of choral singing, flying doves and undefined shadows to try and picture how Sister Agnes became pregnant. The implication seems clear that this was therefore something supernatural in this. (The film’s unsubtle love of stigmata blood smeared on various white clothes and walls hammer this home further.) What on earth does the film want us to take from that?

Especially as it ends with a confused up-beat ending, with an idyllic looking Sister Agnes (very different from the play’s bleak final monologue for Dr Livingston). If, as Sister Agnes (and maybe a part of Mother Miriam) believes, this child was conceived by God, what on earth does the film want us to make of Sister Agnes murdering (presumably) the second coming? When Sister Agnes, under hypnosis, rants and raves about her hatred for God, is she talking literally – or are we meant to think it is because the Lord has let a bad thing happen to her?

It ends up feeling incredibly unsatisfying, raising questions around faith and divinity, but pointedly running away from them and any implications they might raise. A braver film would have either kept the original’s inscrutability, or it would have dived into a truly critical look at religion and a world where God (at the very least) allows suffering. Agnes of God does neither. Despite good performances, it substitutes unsubtle bluntness for suggestion and insinuation.

The Turning Point (1977)

Two women struggle to have it all in a film that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1940s

Director: Herbert Ross

Cast: Shirley MacLaine (DeeDee Rodgers), Anne Bancroft (Emma Jacklin), Tom Skerritt (Wayne Rodgers), Leslie Browne (Emilia Rodgers), Mikhail Baryshnikov (Yuri Kopeikine), Martha Scott (Adelaide), James Mitchell (Michael Cooke), Alexandra Danilova (Madame Dakharova), Anthony Zerbe (Joe “Rosie” Rosenberg), Lisa Lucas (Janina Rodgers), Antoinette Sibley (Sevilla Haslem)

The demands of ballet are unlike any other artform there is. Complete physical and emotional commitment is needed to master it – so that means you got to make choices. The Turning Point is all about those choices. You might even call them ‘turning points’. DeeDee (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) were two young ballerinas who took radically different paths: DeeDee had a child with fellow dancer Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and left the profession behind; Emma remained with the company to become its prima ballerina. Now DeeDee’s teenage daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne) has joined the company: will she become the new prima ballerina? Or will she decide to focus on a relationship with playboy dancer Yuri (Mikhail Baryshnikov)? Will Emma and DeeDee resolve the tensions between them – and the conflict from their shared parental interest in Emilia?

The Turning Point was a big hit in 1977. That, and the fact that it was about (and featured a lot of) an artform as graceful as ballet seems to have convinced the Academy it merited a haul of eleven Oscar nominations. Come awards night, the film set a record for most unsuccessful nominations, converting none of them into Oscars. Perhaps that’s because, on closer inspection, The Turning Point is a fairly run-of-the-mill soap opera, that mixes in various clichés from backstage, traditional ‘women’s pictures’ and family drama to come up with a plotline that’s eventually very familiar.

For all its positioning as a female-led drama, it essentially boils down to the same old patterns that for decades such films have circled. Turns out women can’t have it all: you can have that successful career, but forever sacrifice the joy of being a mother or you can settle down and have the family but face a life of career unfulfillment. Twas ever thus, ‘tis one or t’other. Essentially the film boils down into a soapy drama about resentments and illicit backstage affairs and little more than that. It doesn’t even really double down on the fun this sort of set-up could provide, instead framing the whole thing as a very serious drama.

But then, the film was an autobiographical affair for those involved. Emma is based on Nora Kaye, who was married to the director Herbert Ross. DeeDee is based on Kaye’s childhood friend Isabel Mirrow Brown, who made the exact same choice as DeeDee, marrying a fellow dancer (just like Tom Skerritt’s character). Her daughter (and Kaye’s goddaughter) was Leslie Browne, who here plays a fictionalised version of herself based on her own experience of starting her ballet career. Characters based on Jerome Robbins, Lucia Chase and other leading figures from ballet and theatre appear. Only Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Yuri is purely fictional (although the character has more than few similarities with Baryshnikov himself, being a Soviet defector).

It does give an additional layer of interest to the film. Ross also mixes in a host of extended ballet sequences which showcase actual professional ballet dancers, with snippets from Swan Lake, Cinderella and The Nutcracker among others. The dancing is breath-takingly good. Not least from Baryshnikov and Browne, who are given multiple opportunities to showcase their skills. Baryshnikov in particular is at the height of his powers, a graceful artiste who moves with an astonishing finesse. Both landed Oscar nominations, one suspects largely on the basis of their dancing.

The acting is left to MacLaine and Bancroft as the leading ladies. There is something a little perverse that MacLaine, the former dancer, doesn’t so much as trot a step, while Bancroft (totally unexperienced) struts parts of Anna Karenina. However, the two actresses rip into these thinly written parts, giving them a lot more force than the film deserves. MacLaine balances motherly pride with bubbling feelings of something uncomfortably close to envy for her daughter’s success, spending time in New York trying to recapture some of her past (including a brief fling with Anthony Zerbe’s lecherous choreographer). Bancroft balances coming to terms with the end of her career as a ballerina with a growing regret that she has been left without a family. She becomes increasingly close to Emilia, mentoring her, dressing her and coaching her through a performance after relationship problems lead to Emilia getting roundly pissed in a bar before the show.

Needless to say, this unspoken squabble for ownership over Emilia – not helped by Emilia’s fury over her mother’s infidelity – only exacerbates tensions between the two women. It builds towards the film’s true climax (but unfortunately not its actual climax, as fifteen minutes remain for Emilia to be coached for her star-making performance) as the two women down drinks and exchange angry words and slaps, leading to a full blown cat fight outside the theatre. The fight later descends into cathartic giggling – and pity the two actresses who filmed it in ballroom dresses in what looks like a gale – but is acted with a great deal of attack by both, who bounce off each other (literally) hugely effectively.

But the scene is also a further confirmation that what we are really watching is a sort of high-brow family soap, that uses ballet as a backdrop for family feuds, scuffles, sexual escapades and tear-filled reunions. And it boils down to that struggle between career and family, the sort of struggle Bette Davis and Joan Crawford films were dealing with in the 1940s. Which is possibly another reason so many took to The Turning Point: even in 1977 it was an old-fashioned piece of entertainment, that did very little new.

That carries across to its whole execution: Ross competently directs the film (this was his annus mirabilis as he directed two Best Picture nominees, this and The Goodbye Girl) but really it gets all the force it has (and more than it perhaps deserves) from the two leads and a fine supporting cast (Tom Skerritt is very good as DeeDee’s laid-back, understanding father who perhaps masks secrets of his own). It’s a soap opera, solid but not spectacular, that really outside its showcase of ballet, doesn’t stand out from several other films of the same genre.

The Graduate (1967)

Dustin Hoffman is out of his depth in coming-of-age comedy The Graduate

Director: Mike Nichols

Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Benjamin Braddock), Anne Bancroft (Mrs Robinson), Katharine Ross (Elaine Robinson), William Daniels (Mr Braddock), Murray Hamilton (Mr Robinson), Elizabeth Wilson (Mrs Braddock), Buck Henry (Room clerk), Brian Avery (Carl Smith), Walter Brooke (Mr McGuire), Norman Fell (Mr McCleery)

In 1967, the world went crazy for The Graduate. This comedy of manners and sex tapped into a whole generation’s growing sense of rebellion. Who wants to be told their life has already been mapped out for them? The Graduate seemed to capture that mood and was celebrated as the ultimate example of how someone could break out of the mould. It’s a young person’s film, and perhaps you need to be young to watch it. The older you get – and the further away from those dreamlike days of the late sixties where everything seemed possible – the more the film feels like an amusing but soulless story, with a privileged bore at its heart.

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman – actually nearly 30) is a fresh-faced young graduate, top of his class and a sports star. Arriving back home in California, he’s depressed, lost, uncertain about what he wants from life, but pretty sure it isn’t the litany of office, marriage and a career in “plastics” that his parents expect. His isolation brings him to the attention of Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft – only 6 years older than Hoffman), the wife of his father’s business partner. She sets about to seduce him, partly out of boredom, partly perhaps because she feels the same ennui and depression as he does (not that Benjamin ever notices – more on that later). They start a long summer affair, conducted with supreme awkwardness on Benjamin’s part, which suddenly becomes complex when he falls for her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). Can true love triumph?

The good first. The film’s popularity was grounded in its wit – and it has a very funny script by Buck Henry, who also appears in one of the film’s funniest sequences, as an overly helpful desk clerk at the hotel where Benjamin is awkwardly trying to book a room for his assignation. The film is pacey and energetic and full of imaginative cuts (a brilliant one sees Benjamin flopping out of a pool, jump cutting to him descending onto Mrs Robinson in bed) and directorial flourishes. It’s a dynamic and sexy young film, full of bounce and appeal, with some great jokes.

Mike Nichols – who won the film’s only Oscar for Best Director – shoots the film with real vibrancy. He does a fantastic job getting us to invest in Benjamin. A huge percentage of the film sees the camera focus in on Benjamin, usually in medium-shot or close-up – and it’s a rare moment when he isn’t in frame. The camera rarely leaves him for the first ten minutes, first zooming out from a close-up of him sitting on a plane, following him along a conveyor belt to the terminal (where his blankness slowly changes to fearful anticipation of what waits at home) to tracking along beside him at his welcome home party. This party is stuffed with his parents’ friends, and Ben’s isolation, claustrophobia and insecurity seem all the more striking as the camera gets closer and closer to him. It’s a superb example of using the camera to build empathy for the character.

Nichols’ excellent work continues throughout the film, which makes excellent use of shots, editing and zooms to make us experience Benjamin’s emotions, helping us root for him. It also helps that the film is scored to some of the finest music Simon and Garfunkel ever performed. The slightly sad, wistful feel to their songs – from Sound of Silence to Scarborough Fair – seems to perfectly frame Benjamin’s doubts, just as the slightly more hopeful beats of Mrs Robinson seem to capture him embracing freedom at the film’s end.

The decision to cast Hoffman pays off in spades. Hoffman is no one’s idea of a WASPy sports-star alpha male, but he’s everyone’s idea of an outsider. His performance is pitched perfectly – awkward, shy, uncertain, unaffected and natural. In fact, the film is pretty much perfectly cast. Anne Bancroft’s performance defined her whole career, the predatory Mrs Robinson whom she invests with touches of emotional vulnerability and more than a trace of the very same depression and fear that Benjamin is feeling. An entire generation effectively fell in love with the charming Katharine Ross.

Freedom is what the film is all about. But today, you feel the film skims only lightly on depths it could explore in detail. Benjamin can feel all the ennui he likes: he’s got it so made, I wish I had his problems. With his wealth, his fast car, the vast array of businessmen falling over themselves to offer him low-work-high-reward jobs, not to mention the gallery of attractive women throwing themselves at him, it’s the sort of misery only the rich enjoy. Almost constantly dressed in suit and tie, with his combed down hair, he looks a million miles from the generation that would party at Woodstock and protest Vietnam. Benjamin probably went on to vote for Reagan (twice). There is nothing counter-culture about him whatsoever. He ticks off noisy teenagers at a drive in and seems to find the young as hard to understand as the old. He’s less a generation adrift, more of an individual misfit.

The film though loves him to pieces, in the same way it largely treats Mrs Robinson as somewhere between a joke and a monster. She’s written as either a horny exploiter of youth, or a vengeful harpy. Rather than a ruthless cougar, today she seems to be more of a vulnerable, damaged figure. Every scene with Bancroft carries moments of pain, sadness and world-weary depression. Why else is she so able to spot these traits in Benjamin? Watch her desperation and hurt when Benjamin starts to date her daughter. That’s real humanity there, miles from the empty selfishness of Benjamin, who genuinely doesn’t get why she could take it so amiss that he intends to replace her with her own daughter.

The most striking moment in the film that captures this is the scene where Benjamin attempts small talk during one of their nights together. The film wants us to think Ben is looking for something real, and that Mrs Robinson just wants the sex. But the conversation is a masterclass from Anne Bancroft of suppressed pain and regret, as she talks of having to drop her art degree because she was seduced by her husband, of years of living an empty life. Benjamin of course doesn’t get it – he guesses she dropped the art because she wasn’t interested – and then gets cross when he feels he’s being belittled. Mrs Robinson’s sad eagerness to persuade him to stay is rather affecting – more than the film really allows. I credit Anne Bancroft with much of this.

And then we have Elaine. The second half of the film shifts gear dramatically from the first. While the first half is a sex comedy and study of suburban discontent, the second seems to change into the sort of celebration of youthful energy that the first half could be said to be partially satirising. Elaine is an independent young woman, embracing her education and the opportunities it offers. Suddenly, an energised Benjamin is tearing across country to win Elaine back (let’s put aside that Benjamin behaves in this section like something between a stalker and a creep).

However, as the film nears its conclusion, that celebration of the promise of youth is undercut somewhat, as Elaine chooses to make all the same mistakes her mother made. The film even hints at this with its famous ending shot. After eloping from her wedding, Elaine and Ben sit on the back seat of the bus. The camera holds the shot as they laugh, until they stop laughing and then sit next to each other, and then awkwardly look this way and that as if waiting for someone to tell them what to do. What do they really have in common? Having made a spontaneous decision like this, what happens next? It’s another little genius flourish by Nichols – although it’s also the film having its cake and eating it, selling the sequence before this as a triumph of true-love, then asking us to question if the world is that simple.

Some of these ideas felt lost in the excitement of the film’s first release, when it captured a wave of public feeling. But the older the film gets, the more awkward it looks. As if the kids who watched it in the sixties and turned into the Reaganite Baby Boomers of the 1980s, slowly realised that the message it was selling was not quite true and perhaps their parents weren’t that different after all.

Watching The Graduate today, I found it hard to shake the feeling that if I flashed forward to the characters’ lives in 1997 I would find a very different, but still very similar story. Benjamin Braddock would be a wealthy businessman, still dressed in suit and tie, who went into plastics or computers or some such and swallowed the “greed is good” mantra from his corner-office. Elaine a depressed housewife, mother to a couple of kids, who left her dreams of forging her own life behind to marry the subject of a youthful fling. Who, with her own regrets, finally understands the sadness and misery at the core of her mother’s life. And is making eyes at that attractive young man next door…

The Pumpkin Eater (1964)

Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch in an unhappy marriage in the overlooked The Pumpkin Eater

Director: Jack Clayton

Cast: Anne Bancroft (Jo Armitage), Peter Finch (Jake Armitage), James Mason (Bob Conway), Cedric Hardwicke (Mr James), Richard Johnson (Giles), Eric Porter (Psychiatrist), Rosalind Atkinson (Mrs James), Frances White (Older Dinah), Alan Webb (Mr Armitage), Cyril Luckham (Doctor), Yootha Joyce (Woman at Hairdressers), Maggie Smith (Philpot)

Released in 1964, The Pumpkin Eater was rather unfairly seen as too strongly aping the new-wave of European film-making, in particular Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. It’s a strange trend in British culture to ruthlessly lambast anything seen to be too good or too well made, as if trying too hard is vulgar and flies in the face of our love for the amateur. This is supremely unfair for The Pumpkin Eater (which I will say is weighed down by a pretty terrible title – Scenes From a Marriage would have been better, but that one got nabbed by Bergman) which is a little classic of a film.

Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Penelope Mortimer about her marriage to lawyer-turned-writer John Mortimer (creator of Rumpole), Anne Bancroft (with an impeccable British accent) plays Jo Armitage: an intelligent woman, suffering from depression, with a huge number of children from three marriages. Her new husband, Jake (Peter Finch), is a charming man, a hard working screenwriter, an excellent father to all the children – and, alas, a selfish serial adulterer. The film charts the ups and downs of their marriage, often in a non-linear way, including Jo’s battle with depression and the fallout from Jake’s affair with the wife of a film producer Bob Conway (James Mason).

Shot in sumptuous black-and-white, The Pumpkin Eater is so well made by Jack Clayton it became almost a stick to beat it with. One contemporary review even mentioned it was “irritatingly without flaws” in its film-making, as if this was a bad thing! Clayton’s direction is detailed, precise and beautifully done and throws a host of fascinating images at the screen, as well as drawing out some simply superb performances from the cast. Clayton chooses interesting angles and visual mirrors – events from scenes are reflected and repeated, in different contexts, in later scenes. The camera takes up unusual positions, not least a zoom in on James Mason’s mouth as his character spits out vile insinuations.

Clayton’s direction also captures a superb sense of empathy with his characters. His depiction of depression and ennui in Jo Armitage captures the sense of drift beautifully. Early in the film, she is captured in shot aimlessly standing in the shade of a car port. At her lowest she seems to get almost stuck in the frame. The film’s most famous moment features Jo breaking down in despair in Harrods – a wonderful sequence that uses a combination of POV, overhead shots, a camera attached to Anne Bancroft as she works, and a crashing close up on Bancroft’s face (also repeated later in the film) that all serve to stress her isolation, her despair and the mixed to hostile reaction to her tears from the shoppers around her.

But the film doesn’t solely take Jo’s side. It’s interesting how many contemporary reviewers – men and women – found Jo a tiresome and selfish woman (she’s not, just an unhappy one). That’s partly due to the film’s success in making Jake a fully rounded character. Sure he’s charming and fun, but he’s also clearly a great dad and genuinely cares for Jo – it’s just that he can’t help himself doing things that end up hurting her. The film is also careful to suggest that, deplorable as some of his actions are, he has a point about the pressure of adding another child to a family which already has about seven (two of them at least have been farmed off to boarding schools, and it’s clear in one late sad scene that Jo now hardly knows them). How are they meant to cope? How are they going to be able to support another baby?

The film works as well because both Bancroft and Finch give extraordinary, fully rounded performances in the lead roles. Bancroft had just won the Oscar for Best Actress, and it’s quite something to think that committing to this British picture was her next gig. But she immerses herself in the character, and sells every single one of the complex emotional ups and downs Jo goes through. She’s perfect at drawing us deeply into Jo’s sorrow and uncertainty, but also her brittleness and anger. She’s not afraid to acknowledge that sometimes depressed people are immensely difficult and frustrating – or that they are also intensely vulnerable and fragile. Peter Finch is equally good as a hail-fellow-well-met, whose selfishness doesn’t quite fit into his self-image as a good guy but who is overflowing with good intentions and small moments of kindness.

Both actors are helped immeasurably by a very strong script by Harold Pinter. Pinter’s structure intelligently draws out great depths from the material, as well as playing smart games with structure and timeline that provoke thought. He is the master of the stand-out scene, and the film is crammed with smaller moments that stand out in the memory. Maggie Smith has a brilliant cameo as a shallow, gossipy house guest who may or may not be having an affair with Jake. In one extraordinary sequence, Jo is accosted at a hairdressers by a total stranger (played by Yootha Grace) who recognises her from a magazine article about Jake, who oscillates between wanting to be her friend and vicious bitterness that she isn’t.

It’s a sign of the gift parts that this film gives to actors. Stand-out amongst the remaining cameos is the great James Mason, whose cuckolded husband at first seems to be a decent, if overly bombastic life-of-the-party type, who reveals himself to have unending reserves of bitterness and poison and delights in pouring anger and suspicion into Jo’s ears.

Clayton and Pinter’s work dovetails perfectly here into a sharply intelligent, haunting film which throws you into a marriage that refuses to paint either side as either completely wrong or completely right (Clayton was even concerned the film may have gone too far in making Jake sympathetic to the detriment of Jo). A compelling storyline, in a beautifully made film crammed with intelligent lines and wonderful moments, The Pumpkin Eater can rightly claim to be an overlooked classic of British cinema.

Young Winston (1972)

Simon Ward as the Young Winston: episodic but fun look at the early life of the Greatest Briton

Director: Richard Attenborough

Cast: Simon Ward (Winston Churchill), Robert Shaw (Lord Randolph Churchill), Anne Bancroft (Lady Jennie Churchill), John Mills (Lord Kitchener), Jack Hawkins (James Welldon), Ian Holm (George Earle Buckle), Anthony Hopkins (David Lloyd George), Patrick Magee (General Sir Bindon Blood), Edward Woodward (Captain Aylmer Haldane), Pat Heywood (Elizabeth Ann Everest), Laurence Naismith (Lord Salisbury), Basil Dignam (Joseph Chamberlain), Robert Hardy (Headmaster)

Any poll of the Greatest Briton is bound to throw up, near the top, Winston Spencer Churchill. So famous is he, that his surname isn’t even required for Attenborough’s biography of the Great Man – just that name Winston gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get. And you’d be right, because this film gives you a pretty straightforward rundown of Winston Churchill’s early years, in an episodic breakdown that gives us some small insight into what shaped the chap who went on to implore us to “fight them on the beaches”.

Simon Ward is the Young Winston, with Robert Shaw and Anne Bancroft as his parents Lord and Lady Churchill. Lord Randolph is the high-flying MP who throws away his career, catches syphilis, loses his mind and dies aged 37 – all the time disappointed with the son desperate for his approval. Lady Jennie is his loving, supportive but slightly distant mother. Winston himself? A bright lad, but a hopeless academic, struggles at school, needs umpteen attempts to scrap into Sandhurst for a career as a cavalry officer (a dunce’s career in the opinion of Randolph), serves in the Sudan under Kitchener (John Mills) and starts writing books and newspaper articles – because hopeless academic he might be, he’s still gifted with words. A career in Parliament is his dream – helped no end by his escaping captivity during the Boer War, making him a popular hero.

You can probably tell from that plot summary that this is a somewhat episodic film. Although initially throwing us into a clash in North-West India between the 35^th Sikhs regiment and Pashtun rebels – an action during which embedded journalist Churchill wins a mention in dispatches – the film quickly settles into a straight narrative run down of Churchill’s early life, filtered through the great man’s own writings. This makes for an episodic, at times rather dry, box ticking exercise of key moments in his life although it gets enlivened with some decent scenes and some good performances.

The one fact that comes out most strongly from the film is the wretchedly unhappy childhood of Winston himself. A borderline dunce, Churchill is a hopeless student from an early age. His school days are miserable, dispatched to some ghastly boarding school where thrashings from the headmaster (ironically played by later regular – and definitive – Churchill performer Robert Hardy) are handed out as regularly as dollops of gruel. There is a certain emotional impact throughout these scenes, with extensive quotations from the pre-teen Churchill’s letters barely concealing pleas for his parents to visit him (save him) under protestations of his happiness at school.

But this emotional connection doesn’t really last once we get into the adventures of the younger Churchill. This is despite an excellent performance from Simon Ward, who perfectly captures the mood and manner of the more famous older man while splicing in plenty of youthful exuberance and naivete. Ward does a terrific job of holding the film together – so well in fact you are left feeling slightly sorry that he never got a part as good as this ever again. His final speech is a perfect capturing of the speech-making prowess of the young statesman.

The film takes a mixed attitude to Churchill’s parents. It’s very open about the syphilis that afflicted Lord Randolph, and even before that makes clear his career is one governed by rashness and poor judgement. Robert Shaw is excellent as Churchill’s father – a stern taskmaster, constantly disappointed in his dullard, lazy son, but spicing it with enough small moments of affection to make you understand why Churchill worshipped this man whom he surpassed by every measurable factor. Shaw also makes a pre-illness Churchill, sharp, witty and strikingly intelligent: making his later descent into illness and unpredictability all the more affecting. Randolph’s final speech in the House – raddled by syphilis he looks awful and can barely remember his train of thought for longer than a few seconds – is remarkably moving.

The film takes far more of a conventional view of Lady Sarah, presenting her far more as the idealised mother figure she must have been for Churchill. Anne Bancroft is saddled with a rather dull part that never really comes to life, as the more interesting aspects of her colourful life are largely left on the cutting room floor.

Attenborough’s film does try to drill down into the personalities of these three people with a curious device where each character has a scene speaking (direct to the camera) to an unseen journalist asking them questions about themselves and the events around them. This interrogational style looks like a rather dated 1970s innovation today – look how we put the spotlight on these people! – but it does give a chance to see them from another perspective, and give the all-seeing author of the screenplay (Carl Foreman) a chance to ask questions viewers are probably asking. It’s on the nose, but still kind of works, even if the revelations we get barely seem to give us any shocks.

It’s about the only slight moment of invention anyway in a film that is another example of Attenborough’s excellence at marshalling a huge number of actors and locations into something very reassuringly safe and professional that is going to have a long lifespan on Sunday afternoon TV schedules. Young Winston is a decent, enjoyable mini-epic, but it’s not the film for those really wanting to either understand the times or understand the personalities involved.

The Elephant Man (1980)

John Hurt is sublime as the tragic John Merrick in The Elephant Man

Director: David Lynch

Cast: John Hurt (John Merrick), Anthony Hopkins (Dr Frederick Treves), Anne Bancroft (Madge Kendal), John Gielgud (Francis Carr-Gomm), Wendy Huller (Mrs Mothershead), Freddie Jones (Bytes), Dexter Fletcher (Bytes’ boy), Michael Elphick (Jim the porter), Hannah Gordon (Ann Treves), Helen Ryan (Princess Alexandra), John Standing (Dr Fox)

In the late 19th century, society was swept up in the story of a circus show freak, Joseph Merrick (renamed John here, as per Frederick Treves’ memoirs), saved from a life as a circus exhibit by Treves (a doctor at the London Hospital). Treves introduced him into society and formed a close friendship with him. Merrick died young (27) but his life became a sort of byword for struggling for dignity. The Elephant Man follows this journey.

John Hurt plays Merrick, with Anthony Hopkins as Treves, and the film is a pretty accurate reconstruction of the major events of Merrick’s life. The Elephant Man must have seemed like a strange proposition at the time. Produced by Mel Brooks! Directed by bizarro director David Lynch! About a man grotesquely deformed by nature! But what emerges put those doubts to shame, because this is a beautiful and emotional piece of film-making, guaranteed to put a tear in your eye. It’s an extraordinary and moving film, it’s almost impossible not to love.

In a career made up of playing characters who undergo enormous suffering, it’s fitting that one of John Hurt’s most famous performance sees him utterly unrecognisable under a mountain of make-up. (Acting in this was no fun either – Hurt worked alternate days to deal with the discomfort and stress, telling his wife “They’ve finally found a way to make me hate acting”). But what Hurt does here is extraordinary: under this mountain of make-up, the humanity, sweetness and tenderness of Merrick sings out. He’s a character you feel a total empathy for, with Hurt making him almost a gentle child, an innocent who learns to value himself and his own humanity. It’s mesmeric stuff.

Lynch’s film is all about the place Merrick holds in the world – and it’s not sure shy of showing it is one of exploitation and display. Sure, the circus life for Merrick is horrible under Freddie Jones’ freak-masker (Jones is magnificent here, alternating between weaselly, conniving, vulnerable, self-pitying and loathsome). But he’s plucked from this lower-class hell not for reasons of charity or loving care, but (initially) so that Treves can display him at medical conferences.

Even after demonstrating his sensitivity and artistic richness, Merrick is still rammed into a different treadwheel of society curiosity. Paraded before the rich and famous, his freakish appearance combined with his gentle, otherworldly, politeness and kindness becomes a new show in itself – something Treves himself (in a wonderfully played scene of introspection from Hopkins) slowly comes to realise. Alongside this, Merrick is still seen as fair-game by Elphick’s brutish night porter: if the hoi polloi can watch the freak, why can’t he parade him in front of working class customers at night? All this is intensely moving.

Does Merrick even realise that he is (in some ways) still a freak show, even while he collects photos of his new friends? The film is deliberately unclear: although it is clear that the (eventual) genuine friendship of Treves does lead Merrick to value himself as something more. The famous anguished cry (simply brilliantly played by Hurt) of “I am not an animal. I am a human being” after Merrick is chased into a train station bathroom by a crowd of scared and disgusted passengers is goose-bump inducing in both its sadness and its newfound moral force. From this point on, Merrick makes decisions for himself (for good or ill).

Lynch’s film walks a delicate balance around Merrick’s character and how much his life was a question of being exploited. Although the film does at times shoot Merrick with the slow reveal coyness of a monster movie, it never fails to regard him (and almost demand we do the same) with the utmost sympathy. In many ways, it shoots Merrick the same way people first seem him – a sense of shock followed by a growing appreciation that there is much more to see there than you might first suspect.

That’s what works so well about Lynch’s inspired direction here – this is a sensitive, haunting and poetic film that wrings untold levels of sadness from Merrick’s life. Lynch reins in his more arty leanings very effectively. In fact, once you get over the film’s bizarre opening of Merrick’s mother being attacked (sexually assaulted?) by an elephant, the film relaxes into a classical style mixed with Lynch’s chilling eeriness and his games with time and mood (the timeline is particularly hard to work out in this film), while his sensitive handling of the macabre is perfect for this film’s storyline. While it’s easy to see this as the least “authored” of Lynch’s film, it’s possibly one of his finest and sets the groundwork for some of his later works, exploring humanity in the bizarre.

He’s helped as well by Freddie Francis’ simply beautiful black-and-white photography which brilliantly captures both the grime and the shine of Victorian London, with an inky darkness. Francis also embraces some of Lynch’s expressionistic style, and shoots the film with a real atmospheric sensitivity. It’s about perfect – and Lynch brings the outsider’s view to London that sees the entire city with a brand new eye.

There are some sublime performances. Anthony Hopkins’ Treves is a masterclass in contrasted desires. He’s the sort of guy who can grab Merrick like a collector, but still shed a tear when he first sees him. Watching him slowly realise that he has used Merrick just as Bytes has done – within the confines of his Victorian paternalism – and grow to love him as a father does his son (feelings of course never expressed in words) is extraordinary. In the less flashy role, Hopkins powers a lot of the feelings of sadness the audience feel. Alongside him, a host of British legends do brilliant work, particularly Gielgud and Hiller as authority figures who slowly reveal themselves to have huge depths of compassion and understanding.

And what you end up with is a marvellous film. Brilliantly made, wonderfully filmed and hugely emotional with powerful, heartfelt performances from Hurt and Hopkins among many others. It’s extremely beautiful, and stirs the emotions wonderfully. You would struggle to get to the end of the film and not feel overcome with the final few moments, its sadness and the sense of regret. It’s possibly the most heartfelt of Lynch’s films – and also the one I enjoy the most.