Tag: Mona Washbourne

The Collector (1965)

Samantha Eggar is held captive by Terence Stamp in the unsettling The Collector

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Terence Stamp (Freddie Clegg), Samantha Eggar (Miranda Grey), Mona Washbourne (Aunt Annie), Maurice Dallimore (Colonel Whitman)

A lonely butterfly collector wins the pools. He’s rich, he can have everything he wants – but he’s still an outsider who can’t get a girl. Surely if a woman would just get to know him he’d find love. So the easiest way of doing that is probably kidnapping the woman you had a crush on at school, locking her in a carefully furnished basement in your Tudor mansion house and just wait for her to fall in love with you. Sounds like a perfect plan right?

William Wyler’s adaptation of John Fowles’ best-selling literary first novel sees Terence Stamp as the maladjusted loner and Samantha Eggar as his victim. It’s fascinating reading about the film today and the attitudes and perceptions towards it. Today the film is chilling in the obsessive, dangerous, self-pitying self-justifications of Freddie Clegg. But in the mid-60s a number of reviewers commented on the pity they felt for the kidnapper, and even expressed that in many ways he was acting on fantasies every healthy man has had (they haven’t). Quite rightly the film comes across differently today, a far more unsettling and disturbing portrait than it did at the time.

Wyler’s direction is intimate and a fine mixture of the theatrical – with its often single locations and two-actor scenes – and cinematic, particularly in the way he subtly builds up a Hitchcockian level of tension around the possibility of discovery and escape for Miranda. Sure visually he is a little too much in love with the crash zoom on key items (chloroform for example in Freddie’s car), and devices that seem a little too obvious (like the use of black and white for the film’s only significant flashback) but he mounts the entire film with an unsettling claustrophobia that works very well.

Further he draws out two fantastic performances from the leads. Terence Stamp was not a natural choice for the shy, timid outsider turned abductor – he’s obviously way too handsome and physically assured for the role – but he marshals very well the blinded arrogance of a man who believes the whole world would march to his tune if it only stopped and listened. His Freddie Clegg is softly-spoken, polite and controlled – so much so you almost forget how insane he is. Stamp also does a remarkable physical performance, making himself seem shorter and less dynamic than he really is, his body language having more than the hint of the schoolboy about it. Domineering, controlling, bullying and totally incapable of internal analysis of his actions. 

You realise watching the films events unfold – and Freddie’s inability to analyse the emotional truth behind them – that he is alone because he fundamentally doesn’t understand human relationships. While many of the (male) film reviewers at the time found this strangely tragic, today it’s hard to feel anything but contempt for his cruel self-pity.

The more difficult role falls to Samantha Eggar as Miranda. Wyler’s attempt to get the best performance from here seems pretty kin to the abduction the character goes through in the film – she was kept in isolation on the film set, Stamp was instructed to not talk to her outside of shooting while Wyler constantly held the threat of dismissal over her. More than a few echoes of Hitchcock in that – and Wyler’s praise on the film’s completion for Eggar’s (Oscar nominated and Cannes Award winning) performance as more than a whiff of self-praise to it. But Eggar herself is superb as a woman who oscillates between panic, desperation, ingratiating kindness, anger, contempt and fear. Miranda is a woman who tries everything she can to get out of this situation, only to constantly butt heads against the twin devils of her countryside isolation and Freddie’s own lack of emotional and intellectual intelligence.

Because the film interestingly makes clear what a tedious and not-very-bright monomaniacal man Freddie is, compared with the educated and quick-witted Miranda. When she tries to engage him on a discussion about modern art, he is utterly incapable of beginning to appreciate artists such as Picasso (‘It doesn’t look real’), completely fails to grasp any of the ideas in The Catcher in the Rye (the book she suggests he reads) or their relation to him, and is drawn only towards the blandest, most traditional drawings that she creates while whiling away the time in captivity. He fanatically collects butterflies, rooms lined with framed specimens that he can discuss in detail but with no concept of their beauty. Every time Miranda tries to scratch the surface of Freddie to connect with him she constantly discovers he has no depths at all, he’s a little boy lost in the world who can’t understand why he can’t collect people with the ease he catches and kills butterflies.

Whether the film has some sympathy for Freddie is less clear. Maurice Jarre’s luscious score certainly seems to suggest we should feel something for this misguided guy, but today it’s almost impossible to do so. The film works just as well without those feelings of implied sympathy though, which is a tribute to Wyler’s even-handed and controlled direction. Certainly Miranda’s fear and oppression are easy to connect with.

Is this a Stockholm syndrome film? Miranda – an intelligent and cunning woman – quickly realises that while she is the victim, Freddie’s desire to be seen as sort of chivalric gentleman does give her some power over his treatment of her – he wants her to fall in love for real with him. How much does she start to feel sympathy for this misguided loner? Is there any hint of real feeling at any point in her eventual attempt to seduce him (I doubt it heavily watching the film, but I may be adding a modern perspective, as I suspect Wyler wants to leave a hint there – again the score supports this feeling a bit)? I’m not sure – but the film’s eventual ending does leave little doubt that Freddie is a dangerous man, and the world is a less save place with him in it.

The Collector isn’t perfect – and perhaps its attitudes have dated – but it still has a real skill to it, some wonderful scenes – and two terrific performances from its lead actors, who I think have never been better than they are here. Wyler’s last success – and you can see his debt to the later work of Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock in each frame, even while he fails to match either of them – it still makes for an unsettling, troubling and fascinating watch.

My Fair Lady (1964)

Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison cover how to speak proper in My Fair Lady

Director: George Cukor

Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Eliza Doolittle), Rex Harrison (Professor Henry Higgins), Stanley Holloway (Alfred P Doolittle), Wilfrid Hyde-White (Colonel Hugh Pickering), Gladys Cooper (Mrs Higgins), Jeremy Brett (Freddy Eynsford-Hill), Theodore Bikel (Zoltan Karpathy), Mona Washbourne (Mrs Pearce), Isobel Elsom (Mrs Eynsford-Hill), Henry Daniell (British Ambassador)

My Fair Lady is possibly one of the most popular musicals of all time. A singing-and-dancing adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s most popular play, a satire on self-improvement and sexual politics, the original Broadway production ran for over six years and 2,717 performances, while the original cast-recording album was a smash hit bestseller. It was a question of when rather than if a film version would be made. When it finally happened, the film was garlanded with Oscars aplenty, not least Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.

The musical follows the story of Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a cockney flower girl in Victorian London, whose life is changed after a chance encounter with linguistics genius Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison). Higgins has a bet with his colleague Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) – he can change Eliza’s accent and manners so much that the shrill cockney girl will pass for a society belle. The bet will not only change their lives, but also those of Eliza’s father, sage-like binman Alfred (Stanley Holloway), and lovestruck romantic young gentleman Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy Brett). 

From the start, producer Jack L Warner wanted to develop a new verison of the film, fresh and different from the stage production. George Cukor, the esteemed director from Hollywood’s Golden Years, was brought on board as a safe pair of hands – but it was clear Warner was calling the shots. How to put your own stamp on a massive hit musical? Well you start by getting a fresh cast in. Julie Andrews had made the role her own in the original production, so Hollywood was stunned when she was overlooked for the part. Instead Audrey Hepburn was hired – while Julie Andrews got the consolation price of being able to accept Disney’s offer of the role of Mary Poppins. Warner knew who he wanted for Higgins – and Cary Grant was swiftly courted for the role. But Grant refused, allegedly responding that he wouldn’t even see the film unless Rex Harrison was retained in his signature role.

So Harrison owes him a drink or two, because the film allowed him to leave a permanent record of a stage role he had played over 1,000 times on Broadway and in the West End. Harrison had taken a revolutionary approach to musicals, by basically not singing. Instead he sort of spoke the songs rhythmically – an approach that every other performer of the role has stuck to. The film is a brilliant capture of this unique and authoritative performance, and while Harrison is not exactly fresh he’s certainly charismatic, delivering every scene with confidence and well-rehearsed bombast.

Harrison’s steely lack of willingness to compromise also lead indirectly to a revolution in sound recording in the movies. Harrison refused to obey the custom at the time to lip-sync on set to a pre-recorded soundtrack. Harrison insisted that his performance was subtly different every time so he could never lip-sync accurately. Instead the technicians were forced to invent a sort of wireless microphone that could be disguised in the over-sized neck ties Harrison wears. This also means that at least one musical number has the bizarre situation of Harrison singing live, Hyde-White lip-syncing and Audrey Hepburn being dubbed.

Ah yes Hepburn. If there is one thing everyone remembers about Hepburn’s performance in this film, it is that she doesn’t sing a single note of the final film. Her actual singing was quickly considered by Warner to be not up to snuff, and so she is replaced by voice-double-to-the-stars Marnie Nixon. It’s always a mark against Hepburn, whose performance is often rather shrill, stagy and (whisper it) even a little bit irritating. In fact, she’s pretty much miscast as the cockney flower girl, never convincing as a bit of rough from the streets, and is so horrendously misstyled throughout that she also jarringly looks like a 1960s fashion icon floated into a period film.

Having hired the male star of the Broadway production – not to mention Stanley Holloway also being retained from the original cast after James Cagney refused to be drawn out from retirement – the film quickly settles down into being a straight Broadway musical captured as faithfully as possible on the big-screen. My Fair Lady is a film crushed under the pressure of its design, and watching it today it looks unbearably studio-bound and flat. In every scene you can never forget you are watching the action take place on enormous sets, with the camera pulled back to try and get as much of the expensive soundstage work in frame as possible.

As a dance musical, it’s pretty flat – Holloway’s numbers in particular are strikingly lifeless in their dancing, which makes you regret even more that Cagney couldn’t be lured to star in it – and much of the singing feels forced or over-performed. Even Harrison’s numbers feel pretty by-the-numbers from Harrison’s constant repetition of them. Even the more impressive scenes – such as the race track sequence – feel artificial and over-designed, the money chucked at the careful period detail and over-elaborate costumes and set (designs courtesy of Cecil Beaton, who allegedly drew the designs and then disappeared to leave them to be interpreted by others) seeming more and more dated as the years pass by.

But then this was a film that probably felt dated at the time it was made – it beat Dr Strangelove for best picture, and in five years’ time Midnight Cowboy was lifting the Oscar – never more so than in Cukor’s direction. One wonders at times what Cukor really did: Warner cast the film and led on the design and staging. Harrison and Holloway had played their roles literally thousands of times already. The camera work is as conservative and unimaginative as you can expect, with the film dryly set up to give you the perfect view from the stalls. Several touches – such as the staging (complete with blurry focus edges) of Eliza’s fantasies of the domineering Higgins being punished by firing squad – are clumsy and obvious. It’s a film made with no real independent personality whatsoever.

Not to mention the fact that it completely fails to draw any chemistry from the Higgins/Doolittle relationship whatsoever. It’s an odd one, as the musical takes on a romantic ending of the two characters together – an ending, by the way, that Shaw famously hated when a suggestion of it was added to the original Pygmalion production. Here, this comes from nowhere, and feels unbelievably forced and artificial as Harrison has demonstrated no interest at all (other than irritation) for Hepburn, and she in turn offers little back. When they come back together it’s hard to care.

But they cared back then as this was a huge box office smash. It’s very odd to imagine it now – because this isn’t a great film, it’s a decently done one that carries some charm but never finds an identity for itself as film away from its musical roots and never brings anything unique and imaginative to the table. It’s extraordinarily flat as a piece of film-making and seems increasingly more and more dated in its performances, its atmosphere and its staging. It’s got some charm, but I’m not sure if it’s got enough.

If… (1968)

Malcolm McDowell as contemptuous bitter student Mick Travis in counter-culture classic If…

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Mick Travis), Richard Warwick (Wallace), David Wood (Johnny), Christine Noonan (The Girl), Robert Swann (Rowntree), Peter Jeffrey (Headmaster), Arthur Lowe (Mr Kemp), Mona Washbourne (Matron), Ben Aris (John Thomas), Robin Askwith (Keating), Robin Davis (Machin), Rupert Webster (Bobby Phillips), Geoffrey Chater (Chaplain), Anthony Nicholls (General Denson), Graham Crowden (History Master)

Lindsay Anderson’s If…emerged in the late 1960s, at a time of furious counter-culture reaction to the establishment. Only a few months before its release, Paris had been torn by student riots against everything from the government to class discrimination, which had sparked over a month of protests and strikes that consumed every part of society. If… was released in the midst of the aftermath to this event – and managed to capture the mood of Europe with an astonishing prescience.

In an unnamed English public school, “College House” is run by the senior prefects (“Whips”) who impose a harsh discipline upon the rest of the students. The head of house (Arthur Lowe) is an easily manipulated weakling, the school headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) is a well-meaning but distant figure, most of the staff are either bizarre, creepy, disinterested or all three. Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and his friends Wallace (Richard Warwick) and Johnny (David Wood) are three persecuted lower sixth formers, who (particularly Mick) have a burning resentment for the structures and traditions for the school: a resentment that slowly builds towards outright rebellion.

Lindsay Anderson’s background was Cheltenham College followed by Oxford. Only someone so thoroughly grounded in the background of private education as that could surely have produced a public school film as furious as this one. The entire film is like a kick in the teeth. Anderson understands the cruel traditions and oppressive rules of public schools completely, and the entire film is awash with moments like this that govern school life. There is not a single, solitary moment where there appear to be any positives at all in the life at the school, or any educational benefits (the school is proudly focused on turning out “gentlemen”). 

Anderson shoots all this with a careful eye for the surreal and flights of fancy. Much has been made about the black and white sequences that pepper the film. The natural light in the chapel caused the colour stock to be over-exposed, forcing Anderson to shoot the scenes there in black and white. However, Anderson loved the effect, and filled the film with scenes shot in monochrome to unsettle the audience and make them question the nature of what they are seeing. And that’s something you need to do with If…, as the film walks a fine tightrope between what is real and what is imagination.

While the film starts off grounded in a reality of cruelty and traditions, as it progresses it develops into something unusual and perverse. An extended sequence where Travis and Johnny skip school and head into town, steal a motorbike, drive to a country café and Travis seduces a Girl (Christine Noonan) becomes ever-more hyper real. Is the Girl even real? The speed of her seduction certainly seems to owe more to the boys’ adolescent fantasies of attractive women than any reality. In fact, the use of Noonan’s character (as sex object) is both a dated moment and an expression of the boys’ immaturity and fantastical longings.

The film is building of course towards the final act of rebellion: a firearms-laden shoot-out after the rebel boys discover a secret cache of automatic weapons on campus (this is in itself unlikely) and then proceed to machine gun visiting dignitaries and their oppressors from the roof of the school, who in turn return fire with their own machine guns. How much of this is real and how much is a flight of fancy from the students and from the film makers? It’s unclear – there is no consistency in the filming of this sequence. When does reality in the film start to cross over to fantasy? There are plenty of moments where this could be happening.

It comes down to the title of the film. If – is this Kiplingesque title suggesting the possibility of such things happening, or such things coming to pass in certain situations, rather than an actual reality? Anderson’s fury at the ghastliness of the class system in this country, and the institutions that promote it (the army, politicians and the church get the same short shrift) suggest a fantasy of bringing the whole system down in a violent outburst. It’s a fantasy, initially grounded in reality, that suggests a poetic realism with lashings of the surreal (most famously the reveal of the schools bullying and vile chaplain as living in a large drawer of a desk in the Headmaster’s office).

The film’s fury and counter-culture joy has the perfect lead actor in Malcolm McDowell, whose simmering, edgy anger as an actor, and chippy rage with a sneering sense of defiance, are perfect for Travis. I’m not sure if McDowell ever topped this first performance, one where he burns through every frame and brilliantly seems to embody every single cog in the system that wanted to thumb its nose at the boss (to mix some metaphors). Anderson and McDowell are clearly working in perfect sync in this film (they collaborated three more times on spiritual sequels). It’s a beautiful performance of simmering resentment and fury at the hypocrisy around him.

The film’s exploration of the injustice of the school doesn’t feel outdated at all. The brutality of fagging and caning plays is like a darkly twisted version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Robert Swann is particularly good as leading Whip Rowntree, a hypocritical patrician, and memorable sequences capture the eccentric inadequacy of the teaching, the drilling of school rules into new students (brainwashing them into continuing the pattern in the future) and the arbitrary cruelty of the Whips. Peter Jeffrey’s liberal but distant and ineffective Headmaster is a perfect Thomas Arnold parody, a man with grand ideas but no knowledge of the actual school he is running, who claims to understand the boys but knows nothing about them.

However, interestingly, it’s the rebellion itself that seems rather dated today. In the 1960s, it was easier to whole-heartedly invest our sympathies in the counter-culture rebellion of Mick and his friends – but it’s harder today, with our climate of school shootings in America (there was one the day before I watched this film), to root for our heroes carrying out an indiscriminate shooting, for all the vileness of the institutions Travis is taking on. Of course this sequence is shot with a surreal eye (and I’m not sure any of it is meant to be an expression of something that is literally true, just spiritually true), but it’s a little uncomfortable today.

But at the time, this gut punch of a picture by Anderson wouldn’t have been troubled by these doubts. It’s a brilliantly directed film, that burns with a genuine fury against the institutions it is addressing. There is virtually nothing sentimental or kind about the film – it’s entirely about kicking against the tracks. Nothing in the school is redeemable or decent, everything is corrupt and twisted. It’s a sneering, burning, angry shout of a movie that manages to avoid preaching to the audience and instead presents its hellish vision of class in this country with a witty grace. If… is a film that perfectly captures the mood of the time and understands the “small world” culture of public schools like few others: it’s an essential classic.