Tag: Patrick Troughton

Richard III (1955)

Olivier stamps his claim to Shakespeare’s greatest villain in this gorgeous theatrical epic

Director: Laurence Olivier

Cast: Laurence Olivier (Richard III), Cedric Hardwicke (Edward IV), John Gielgud (Clarence), Ralph Richardson (Buckingham), Claire Bloom (Lady Anne), Helen Haye (Duchess of York), Pamela Brown (Mistress Shore), Alec Clunes (Lord Hastings), Laurence Naismith (Lord Stanley), Norman Wooland (Catesby), Clive Morton (Lord Rivers), Douglas Wilmer (Dorset), Stanley Baker (Richmond), Mary Kerridge (Queen Elizabeth), Esmond Knight (Ratcliffe), John Laurie (Lovell), Patrick Troughton (Sir James Tyrell), Michael Gough (Murderer)

Olivier had played the greatest Shakespeare hero in Henry V and made Hamlet the most romantic princes of film. Having scaled those heights, did he also want to set the benchmark for Shakespearean villainy? Perhaps, with his vaulting ambition and competitiveness, he knew his clipped, precise tones and physical suppleness was perhaps best suited to playing the villain. What better role to prove it than the “poisonous, bunch-backed toad” himself, Richard III. Olivier bought to the screen a performance that would be as influential as his Hamlet (perhaps even more so), an embodiment of the role that all future Richards would be compared to.

I like to think of Richard IIII as a twisted inversion of Henry V. Like that film, the action is shot in lusciously beautiful technicolour, with beautiful costumes and a marvellously stirring, magnetic score by William Walton. It has courtly intrigues, a charismatic lead, the seduction of a young princess, many of the same actors and caps itself in a bravura battle shot on location. The only difference being that, instead of “the mirror of all Christian kings”, our lead is a twisted, remorseless killer who acts as his own Chorus to bring us on-side with his Machiavellian schemes. (There is a fun little opening message, stressing that this is a legend not the truth, that almost feels like an apology in advance to the Ricardian societies of today).

Olivier’s performance is the heart and soul of this film, and it’s possibly his finest cinematic (and certainly his finest screen Shakespeare) role. This Richard is openly – almost proudly – cruel and hypocritical, sociopathic in his amoral ease with the death and slaughter of his nearest and dearest (including his beloved wife, brother and nephews to whom he is sweetness and charm), overwhelmingly impressed with his own cunning and eagerly inviting us to share in his villainy. Olivier practically caresses the camera in his readiness to get close to us, forever turning towards it with a smile, quick aside or delighted breakdown of schemes to come. Olivier inverts his matinee idol looks into a stooped smugness (his costume, with its dangling sleeves, frequently makes him look like a spider) and his clipped vocal precision is dialled up to stress his heartless self-confidence.

Stare into Richard’s eyes and all we see is an uncaring blankness, the chill of a man who cares for nobody except himself. His sigil maybe a boar, but he resembles a wolf, devouring the Lords around him. Much of the first two thirds sees him keep a steady illusion of outward good fellowship. He comforts Gielgud’s Clarence with genuine care, greets Hastings like an old friend, is mortified and hurt by the suspicions cast on him by the Queen and her family, smiles with affection at his cousins. It means the moments where Olivier lets the mask slip even more shocking: the matter-of-fact abruptness he urges murderers not to take pity on Clarence, the whipped glare of pure loathing he shoots at the princes after an ill-advised joke about his hunched back or the imperious hand he shoots at Buckingham to kiss after being acclaimed by the crowds, harshly establishing the hierarchical nature of their ‘friendship’.

While the charisma of course is natural to a performer as magnetically assuring as Olivier – and this Richard is truly, outrageously, wicked in his charm – he also nails the moments of weakness. Having achieved the crown, Olivier allows not a moment of enjoyment of his feat, but his brow furrows into barely suppressed concern and anxiety that he may be removed by schemes exactly like his own. The threat of armies marching on him sees him first lose his temper publicly and then leap to cradle the throne in his arms like a possessive child. The morning of Bosworth, he even seems quietly shocked at the very idea that he could feel fear.

Richard III, despite its length, makes substantial cuts to the original play, including throwing in elements from Henry VI. Several characters – most notably Queen Margaret, whose major confrontation scene with Richard is lost altogether – are cut or removed all together. Olivier reshuffles the order of events, most notably shifting the arrest of Clarence to split up the seduction of Lady Anne. Richard’s late speech of remorse before the battle of Bosworth hits the cutting-room floor (Olivier’s Richard never seems like a man even remotely capable of being sorry for his deeds). Several small additions from the 18^th century by Colley Cibber and David Garrick are kept in (most noticeably his whisper to his horse on the eve of battle that “Richard’s himself again”).

The film is deliberately shot with a sense of theatrical realism to it, Olivier favouring long takes so as to showcase the Shakespearean ease of the cast (much was made of the cast containing all four of the Great Theatrical Knights of the time in Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud and Hardwicke). The camera frequently roams and moves, most strikingly during the film’s first monologue from Olivier, where it flows from the coronation retinue outside the throne room, through a door, to find Richard himself waiting for us in the hall. It’s set is similarly theatrical, a sprawling interconnected building (with some very obvious painted backdrops) where the Palace of Westminster, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey seem to be one massively interconnected building.

The film makes superb use of shadows, the camera frequently panning from our characters (especially Richard) to see their shadows stretch across floors and up walls. The claustrophobia of the interconnected set also helps here, making events seem incredibly telescoped (it feels like the film takes place in just a few days at most). It makes the court feel like a nightmare world completely under the control of Richard, who knows every corner to turn and can seemingly be in several different places at once. In that sense, filming Bosworth outside on location in Spain seems like a neat metaphor for Richard’s lack of control of events: suddenly he’s in a sprawling open field, where it’s possible to get lost and it takes genuine time to get from A to B.

Olivier may dominate the film with a performance of stunningly charismatic vileness, but he has assembled a superb cast. Ralph Richardson is superb as a supple, sly Buckingham, a medieval spin doctor whose ambitious amorality only goes so far. While I find Gielgud’s delivery of Clarence’s dream speech a little too poetic, there are strong performances from reliable players like Laurence Naismith’s uncomfortable Stanley and Norman Wooland’s arrogant Catesby while Stanley Baker makes a highly effective debut as a matinee idol Richmond. Claire Bloom superbly plays both Lady Anne’s fragility but also a dark sexual attraction she barely understands for this monster. Perhaps most striking though is Pamela Brown’s wordless performance as Mistress Shore (mistress first to Edward IV then Hastings), a character referred to in the play but here turned into a sultry, seductive figure who moves as easily (and untraceably) around the locations as Richard does.

Fittingly for a film obsessed with the quest for power, we return again and again to the image of the crown. It fills the first real shot of the film, bookmarking its beginning and end and frequently returns to fill the frame at key moments. With the films gorgeous cinematography, it’s a tour-de-force for its director-star and a strikingly influential landmark in ‘traditional’ Shakespeare film-making.

The Omen (1976)

Extremely silly horror with a great score, more interested in inventive deaths and genuine fear or dread

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Gregory Peck (Robert Thorn), Lee Remick (Katherine Thorn), David Warner (Keith Jennings), Billie Whitelaw (Mrs Baylock), Patrick Troughton (Father Brennan), Leo McKern (Carl Bugenhagen), Harvey Stephens (Damien Thorn), Martin Benson (Father Spiletto), Robert Rietty (Monk), John Stride (Psychiatrist), Anthony Nicholls (Dr Becker), Holly Palance (Nanny)

“Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.” One of the sweetest things about The Omen is that the number of the Beast was considered such an unknown concept to original viewers, that its painstakingly explained to us. In some ways The Omen is quite sweet, a big, silly Halloween pantomime which everyone involved takes very seriously. If The Exorcist was about tapping into primal fears, The Omen is a gory slasher (with a cracking score) that’s about making you go “Did you fucking see that!” as actors are dispatched in inventively gory ways. It’s brash, overblown and (if we’re honest) not very good.

Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck, selling every inch of his innate dignity for cold, hard lucre) is an American diplomat told one night in Rome that his pregnant wife Katherine (Lee Remick) has given birth to a stillborn child. “Not a problem” he’s told by an absurdly creepy Priest (Martin Benson) – just so happens there’s another motherless new-born child in the hospital tonight so he can have that one, no questions asked, and his wife need never know. Flash forward five years: Thorn is Ambassador to the Court of St James and young Damien (Harvey Stephens) is a creepy kid, with few words and piercing stare. In a series of tragic accidents people start dying around him. Could those people warning Thorn that his son is in fact the literal anti-Christ himself, be correct?

Want to see how powerful music can be? Check out how The Omen owes nearly all the menace it has to it imposing, Oscar-winning score from Jerry Goldsmith (wonderfullyGothic full of Latin-chanting and percussive beats). It certainly owes very little to anything else. The Omen is an exploitative, overblown mess of a film, delighting in crash-zooms, jump-cuts and extreme, multi-cut build-ups to gore. Richard Donner never misses an opportunity to signpost an approaching grisly death, by cutting between the horrified face of the victim, the object of their demise and then often back again. For the best stunts – including a famous demise at the hands of a sheet of glass – Donner delights in showing us the death multiple times from multiple angles.

This slasher delight in knocking off actors – people are hanged, impaled, crushed and decapitated in increasingly inventive manners – is what’s really at the heart of The Omen. None of this is particularly scary in itself (with the possible exception of the hypnotised madness in the eyes of Holly Palance’s nurse before her shocking suicide at Damien’s birthday party) just plugging into the sort of delight we take in watching blood and guts that would be taken in further in series like Halloween (which owed a huge debt to the nonsense here). Donner isn’t even really that good at shooting this stuff, with his afore-mentioned crude intercutting and even-at-the-time old-fashioned crash zooms.

With Goldsmith’s score providing the fear, The Omen similarly relies on its actors to make all this nonsense feel ultra serious and important. They couldn’t have picked a better actor than Gregory Peck to shoulder the burden of playing step-dad to the Devil’s spawn. Peck has such natural authority – and such an absence of anything approaching fourth-wall leaning playfulness – that he invests this silliness with a strange dignity. Of course, Atticus Finch is going to spend a fair bit of time weighing up the moral right-and-wrongs of crucifying with heavenly knives the son of Satan! Peck wades through The Omen with a gravelly bombast, managing to not betray his “for the pay cheque” motivations, and investing it with his own seriousness of purpose.

Peck’s status also probably helps lift the games of the rest of the cast. Lee Remick may have a part that requires her to do little more than scream (and fall from a great height twice) but she does manage to convey a neat sense of dread as a mother realising her son is not quite right. David Warner gives a nice degree of pluck to a sceptical photojournalist (while also bagging the best death scene). Troughton and McKern ham it up gloriously as a drunken former devil-worshipping priest and an exorcist archaeologist respectively. Best in show is Billie Whitelaw who filters her Beckettian experience into a series of chillingly dead-eyed stares as Damien’s demonic nanny.

The Omen does make some good hay of its neat paedophobia. Harvey Stephens with his shaggy hair, impish smile and pale skin (not to mention darkly sombre wardrobe) looks like your worst nightmare – he’s creepy enough that the film doesn’t need to gift him a vicious rottweiler as well. Donner’s decision to never have Damien show a touch of any real emotion for most of the film also pays off, meaning even something as silly as Damien inflicting slaughter from behind the pedals of a child’s tricycle seems scary.

Of course, if Damien was savvy enough to present himself as a bright and sunny child perhaps Troughton, Warner, McKern and co would have struggled to convince Peck he was the Devil’s seed. In that sense he takes after his dad: Satan loves an over-elaborate death, and from a storm herding one victim to a fatal impalement under a tumbling church spire to popping the handbrake of a glass-bearing van for another, no trouble is too much for Satan when bumping off those who cross him. (The Omen could be trying to suggest that maybe everything is a freak accident and Thorn goes wild and crazy with grief – but that Goldsmith score discounts any possibility other than Damien is exactly what we’re repeatedly told he is.)

The Omen trundles along until its downbeat, sequel-teasing ending, via a gun-totting British policeman who sticks out like a sore thumb in a country where the cops carry truncheons not pistols. Donner balances the dialled up, tricksy, overblown scares with scenes of po-faced actors talking about prophecies and the apocalypse, all shot with placid straight-forwardness. There is a really scary film to be made here about finding out your beloved son is literally a monster, or how a depressed father could misinterpret a series of accidents as a diabolical scheme. But it ain’t The Omen – this is a bump-ride of the macabre. The Devil may have the best tunes – but he needs to talk to his Hollywood agent.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

The Argonauts take on dreadful monsters in Jason and the Argonauts. You gotta love it.

Director: Don Chaffey

Cast: Todd Armstrong (Jason), Nancy Kovack (Medea), Gary Raymond (Arcastus), Laurence Naismith (Argus), Niall MacGinnis (Zeus), Michael Gwynn (Hermes), Douglas Wilmer (Pelias), Jack Gwillim (King Aeëtes), Honor Blackman (Hera), John Cairney (Hylas), Patrick Troughton (Phineus), Nigel Green (Hercules)

Watching this film it’s impossible not to get swept up in childish glee. It’s one of the most gloriously entertaining, wonderfully imaginative and brilliantly enjoyable films ever made. Watch this at the right age and it’s got you for life. Its best remembered of course for its wonderful Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects – but to be honest the whole film is a brilliantly assembled package from start to finish, full of thrills and spills. I love it, I’ll always love it, and it’s got to be one of the best adventure stories ever filmed. Not much point writing more is there? But I guess I will.

The plot hews fairly closely (give and take) to the mythology. Pelias (Douglas Wilmer) seizes the Kingdom of Thessaly. Terrified of a prophecy that says a child of King Aristo of Thessaly will take the throne from him, he kills Aristo’s daughter at the temple of Hera (Honor Blackman). Outraged, Hera becomes the protector of Aristo’s surviving son Jason (Todd Armstrong), and 20 years later he returns. Jason needs to prove himself if he is to re-take the throne, and decides to find the legendary Golden Fleece in the distant land of Colchius. He builds the greatest ship ever – the Argus – and holds games to find the finest crew in Greece. But danger awaits!

If any film is associated the most with Ray Harryhausen, it’s this one. So it’s almost a shock to realise he didn’t direct it, and that the monster moments are carefully placed only at key moments – and that a lot of the rest of the film relies on human action. Jason and the Argonauts is so good because all these elements are brilliantly put together and superbly staged, with an old-school, boys-own adventurousness. How can you not enjoy this film?

The Harryhausen effects are astonishingly good, and their stop-motion brilliance have a grounded reality to them. The staggering copper monster Talos is fabulous – grinding joints, groaning weight and size. The shrieking harpies that plague Patrick Troughton’s put-upon Phineas have an unpleasant, grasping dirtiness to them. The Hydra guarding the fleece is a rattlesnake-like vicious beast. All brilliant. I love them all – just sequences to dream of.

But the highlight is of course the skeletons’ battle. Oh wow. This sequence still holds up so well. It took Harryhausen years in the making and planning, but really paid off. The skeletons are terrifying in their cold-eyed ferocity. For skulls, Harryhausen gives their faces a lot of expressiveness. I just love this sequence – it speaks to the child in all of us. And there is something extra magical from knowing that the sequence was put together frame-by-frame and the live action shots carefully choreographed to match-up with it. Not for nothing did Tom Hanks namecheck this film when presenting Harryhausen with an honorary Oscar.

These sequences really work though because the film has a wonderful Sunday-morning-serial briskness to it. Pacily directed by Don Chaffrey, the film motors so swiftly through its plot that you are surprised to find it’s only about an hour and a half. Its story structure is not always perfect: apart from Jason and Arcastus most of the rest of the Argonauts are so briefly introduced (despite the recruitment Olympics montage at the start) you’ll find them hard to tell apart. The arc of the story is often a little messy, and iIn fact it’s easy to forget the film ends on a cliffhanger (the sequel was never made) and that Douglas Wilmer’s sinister Pelias is totally forgotten after the first half an hour. But it’s so well done it doesn’t matter.

But Chaffey keeps the events moving forward so well, the tone so perfectly balanced between heroics, gods debating and thigh slapping jokiness that the film’s tone and momentum never slackens, with the Harryhausen monster sequences as exciting tent-poles in the film’s action. A lot of this feeling is carried across from Bernard Herrmann’s excellent score, a hummable mixture of bombast and slightly eerie mysticism that reflects and compliments the action throughout.

The film is extremely well-made and put together. The Gods as these gigantic figures living in Olympus (Jason is not a lot bigger than the chess pieces they use to guide the wars of the humanity) are great fun: Niall MacGinnis is a very 1960s idea of Zeus (the gods would be hot younger guys today, not tubby Brits), but gives it a headmasterly briskness. Honor Blackman is very good as a proud but caring Hera – the use of the Argus’ headpiece as her voicepiece works really well. It’s quite something that all this interference from the Gods never feels silly at all.

Todd Armstrong and Nancy Kovacks are, to be honest, pretty wooden as the leads but that seems to be what the film needs. Armstrong does a very neat line in middle-distance staring. Gary Raymond has a lot more fun as a scheming Arcastus. The film also manages to shuffle some perceptions: Nigel Green’s Hercules is more of a roisterer than the great warrior (and, with his meat-headed over-confidence, causes more problem for the Argonauts than most). Other performances are perfect adventure-story ham: Jack Gwillim chews the scenery outrageously as King Aeëtes, which kind of matches up with the overblown hyper-reality of the skeleton fight.

Talking about this film, it’s hard not to treat it as a sequence of scenes that I really love. But every scene in it has something. I love the moment where Hylas proves his worth via clever stone-skimming. The approach to the clashing rocks – and the intervention of Poseidon to hold the rocks apart – is brilliant. Hermes’ disguise being unveiled. Hercules doing something decent by staying behind on an island to look for a missing Hylas. All those brilliant Harryhausen sequences.

There is something about this film that is just endlessly and constantly entertaining. No matter your age, it’s a film for every single generation of children (young and old!) to enjoy. It’s simply marvellous, and Chaffey and Harryhausen deliver it wonderfully. Every scene is exciting, the pace never slackens, the special effects are brilliant. But on top of that, it’s a brilliantly put together, well directed, beautifully scored film. It’s exciting, it’s gripping, it’s wonderfully entertaining. I’m gutted they never made that sequel (although since Jason and Medea’s story is literally all down-hill from here, it’s probably just as well).