Tag: Wilfrid Lawson

War and Peace (1956)

Tolstoy is boiled down in this epic and luscious but soapy adaptation of the greatest novel ever

Director: King Vidor

Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Natasha Rostova), Henry Fonda (Pierre Bezukhov), Mel Ferrer (Andrei Bolkonsky), Vittorio Gassman (Anatole Kuragin), Herbert Lom (Napoleon Bonaparte), Oskar Homolka (Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov), John Mills (Platanov), Anita Ekberg (Hélène Kuragina), Helmut Dantine (Fedor Dolokhov), Tulio Carminati (Vasily Kuragin), Barry Jones (Mikhail Rostov), Milly Vitale (Lisa Bolkonskaya), Lea Seidl (Natalya Rostova), Anna Maria Ferrero (Mary Bolkonskaya), Wilfrid Lawson (Nikolai Bolkonsky), May Britt (Sonya Rostova), Jeremy Brett (Nicholas Rostov)

Let’s just say it right from the start: you can’t do Tolstoy’s War and Peace in three hours. All you can hope for is the little chunk of it you’ve bitten on is the most succulent part. King Vidor’s War and Peace zeroes in on the elements of the book Hollywood is most comfortably reproducing: a golden-tinged romance between Natasha and Pierre and the sweeping epic spectacle of Napoleon’s soldiers surging towards Moscow and limping home in the snow. While War and Peace, bravely, barely cuts a single major character or development, almost every other theme Tolstoy attempted gets shoved to the margins. This makes it both a SparkNotes version of the Greatest-Novel-Written, but also a very earnest attempt to do the impossible.

Tolstoy’s story stretched over seven years. The great Russian struggle against Napoleon is a backdrop to the lives of dilettante-turned-thinker Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda), vivacious and impulsive Natasha Rostov (Audrey Hepburn) and stolid-but-thoughtful Andrei Bolkonsky (Mel Ferrer). Around them swirl other characters: Natasha’s warm-but-useless family, worthless womaniser Kuragin (Vittorio Gassman), his sister and Pierre’s faithless wife Hélène (Anita Ekberg), heartless roister Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) and of course Napoleon (Herbert Lom) and his military antagonist, the pragmatic Kutuzov (Oscar Homoloka). Natasha falls in love with Andrei, betrays him then finds maturity caring for soldiers retreating from Napoleon, all while silently loved by Pierre.

This is compressed together into a film that certainly doesn’t feel like it is covering seven years despite its epic run-time. No one seems to age (just as well since everyone starts the film far too old) and the attempt to cover as much of the plot as possible means the film is moving forward so swiftly any sense of time is lost. It also means that the script frequently has to fill in the dots, communicating vital information that alters the lives of characters – major figures often die or are married off in short, easy-to-miss, sentences – and the ideas Tolstoy masterfully expounded about spirituality, destiny, fate, the quest for a life of meaning, are pretty much rinsed out in the plot focus.

War and Peace effectively reduces Tolstoy down into a sudsy romance against an epic backdrop. The romance is handled reasonably well, even if there is very little chemistry of any sort between any of the three protagnonists. Tolstoy’s rich leads, with the fascinating inner lives, are reduced to pen-portraits. There are odd moments where we have access to the inner thoughts and voices – sprinklings of voiceover dot around the picture – but they never feel real. Andrei has been robbed of the decency and warmth behind his thoughtfulness that attracts Natasha, while Pierre feels more like a second father or benevolent uncle than a soul mate.

This stripping down of Tolstoy’s complex characters to their bare principles fatally compromises all three lead performances. Hepburn comes off best, making a decent fist of Natasha Rostov. This is, after all, a character who embodies in her mix of passion, loyalty, fecklessness and self-sacrifice the very nature of Russia itself. No adaptation has ever managed to translate Tolstoy’s unplayable creation, but Hepburn has all the radiance and self-sacrificial guilt down pat. The film has to rush through her foiled elopement with Kuragin (Hepburn has more chemistry with Gassman than any of the others and their near elopement is artfully framed by Vidor with mirrors, reflections and a real illicit charge). Hepburn conveys the mesmeric impact this playboy has on Natasha and her selfish, tear-stained fury at the foiling of her disgraceful plans is laced with enough genuine guilt and pain by Hepburn to keep us caring. Hepburn skilfully translates this into a far wiser and more generous Natasha, placing others needs before her own.

By contrast, literally nobody reading the novel could picture Henry Fonda as Pierre (he’s the wrong age, shape, manner – there is nothing right about him at all), but Fonda does his best (as one reviewer at the time mentioned he’s one of the few actors who looks like he has read the book). He never convinces as the drunken playboy who gets into duels (he looks and sounds far too mature) and similarly doesn’t capture any of Pierre’s doubt and uncertainty (Fonda always looks like he knows exactly what he needs to do). It’s an intelligent reading for all that, but fundamentally miscast. Which is more than you can say about Mel Ferrer who turns Andrei into a stuff bore, ramrod straight and flatly monotone, an intellectual we never get interested in.

Honestly the film would have done better cutting more. Fonda is so unconvincing as the reckless young Pierre, they may as well have made him officially middle-aged to begin with. Similarly, Natasha’s brother Nicholas and his one-sided romance with cousin Sonya is given a mention so token its likely to confuse casual viewers. Andrei’s first marriage gets about five minutes and his sister Mary is reduced to a few dull scenes. Even John Mills’ thoughtful performance as Platanov strips out the characters worldview (and its profound impact on Pierre), turning it into one of simple, symbolic tragedy. It’s all the more noticeable when the film gets some stuff right, most notably Helmut Dantine’s bullying Dolokhov who war turns into someone with a sense of shame.

Faring much better are the historical characters. Like all War and Peace adaptations, this dials up the presence of Napoleon played with an excellent puffed-up grandeur by Herbert Lom, prowling with a swagger stick and collapsing into childish frustration, then silent tears as his plans for world domination collapse. Equally stand-out is Oscar Homoloka as scruffy realist Kutuzov.

Vidor’s film may offer a simplified, romantic vision of the characters but he delivers on the scale. If you can bemoan the fact the peace leaves the characters neutered, the film completely nails the war. War and Peace is a beautifully filmed by Jack Cardiff. From the sweeping vistas of the battlefield of Borodino, to the Dante-tinged flames at Moscow that cast orange light through the arches of a monastery where the Rostov’s take shelter, through the white-and-blue chill of the snow-covered retreat from Moscow, the film is an explosion of gorgeous colours. It’s also got the scale that old Hollywood loved. Borodino is restaged seemingly at 1:1 scale with a literal army of extras, soldiers and cavalry charging in their hundreds in long-shot and cannon fire peppering the land as far as the eye can see. Ballrooms are overflowing with extravagantly costumed extras and seemingly never-ending lines of Frenchmen march through the snow in the films closing moments.

It’s what this War and Peace is: a coffee-table accompaniment to the novel. You can look at the images it brings to life and the sweeping camera work Vidor uses to create nineteenth century Russia. But you’ll not understand anything that makes the novel great. In fact, to the uninitiated, you are likely to come away thinking the film must be a sort of high-brow Mills-and-Boon page-turner, a Gone with the Snow. What this tells us, more than anything, is that fifteen years on from the definitive Hollywood epic, Hollywood was still trying to remake it – and bringing Tolstoy to the screen was very much second to that.

The Wrong Box (1966)

Farce, murder, mayhem and comic energy abounds in this sometimes try-hard but fun enough knockabout comedy

Director: Bryan Forbes

Cast: John Mills (Masterman Finsbury), Ralph Richardson (Joseph Finsbury), Michael Caine (Michael Finsbury), Peter Cook (Morris Finsbury), Dudley Moore (John Finsbury), Nanette Newman (Julia Finsbury), Tony Hancock (Inspector), Peter Sellers (Dr Pratt), Cicely Courtneidge (Major Martha), Wilfrid Lawson (Peacock), Thorley Walters (Patience), Irene Handl (Mrs Hackett)

Do you know what a tontine is? For those who don’t (come on, own up!) it’s basically an investment named after the Florentine banker Lorenzo di Tonti in 1653. Investors pay into a scheme which gives a regular income while accumulating interest on the initial capital. As the investors die off, the individual payouts increase until the final surviving investor claims the full ‘pot’ of cash. It’s essentially a lottery for being the last surviving investor. That’s ripe for two things: murder and farce.

We got dollops of the latter in this slap-stick, old-school farce loosely (very loosely) based on a Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne novel. A Victorian tontine sees its members fall at regular intervals until there are only two survivors: estranged brothers, cantankerous Masterman (John Mills) and almost supernaturally tedious Joseph (Ralph Richardson). With Masterman pretending to be on his own deathbed to lure his brother out (to murder him), the blithely dotty Joseph is kept in health by his greedy nephews Morris (Peter Cook) and John (Dudley Finsbury). En route to see Masterman, a train accident leads to a series of farcical misunderstandings involving mis-identity, confusion and a dead body packed into a box and delivered to the wrong house.

Directed with an, at times, slightly too overtly zany bent by Bryan Forbes, The Wrong Box oscillates between being rather funny and trying too hard. It’s all too obvious to see the influence of the Oscar-winning Tom Jones in the film’s jaunty musical score and use of flowery-lined caption cards to announce events and locations. It’s also clear in the fast-paced, at times overblown, delivery of performances and dialogue, with its mix of improvisational humour and cheeky lines. Despite this though, The Wrong Box manages to be just about be fun enough (and it’s funnier than Tom Jones).

That’s probably because it’s not aspiring to be much more than a jaunt, an end-of-term treat in which a host of famous actors and comedians put on a show. Forbes might not have the inspired flair at comedy or the sort of timing this needs. But he’s got a nifty touch with dialogue and does a decent job of translating classic British theatre farce to the screen. The Wrong Box – even the title leans into this – is all about those classic farcical tropes of things being delivered to the wrong people because they have similar names, mistaken or misheard messages being passed on and people obliviously talking at cross purposes.

We get set-ups like Mills’ fake-bed-ridden old man trying multiple times to off Richardson’s bore, each attempt obliviously foiled by coincidence and accident. A body misidentified because its wearing someone else’s coat, then packed into a crate and delivered (to the wrong house) to disguise a death that hasn’t actually happened. Undertakers mistakenly taking away a man who has fainted at the foot of the stairs rather than a body in another room. All classic farce.

It’s not a surprise that experienced theatre actors emerge best. Richardson, in particular, is a delight as a man who has made such a study of trivia that he compulsively bores anyone he encounters. Fellow passengers on a train, a farmer who gives him a lift in his cart, attendees at a funeral – all of them glaze over in despair while Richardson’s Uncle Joseph, with monotonous eloquence, expounds mind-numbing trivia (including, at one point, in Swahili). He makes a fine contrast with Mills’ angry short-man, constantly fuming at a string of slights, real and imagined.

These two leads set the standard for the rest of the cast, a mix of comedians, theatre pros and star names. Peter Cook occasionally tries a little too hard as a bossy-boots determined to inherit the tontine – it’s remarkably that, even this early, Dudley Moore looks more relaxed in front of the camera (Moore’s later stardom would be inexplicable to the jealous Cook). Tony Hancock looks rather sadly like a rabbit-in-the-headlights as an inspector. Peter Sellers, not surprisingly, shows how it’s done: his two-scene cameo as a drunken doctor of loose morals, surrounded by cats and permanently sozzled is a master-class in low-key, rambling hilarity.

Michael Caine and Nanette Newman also acquit themselves very well. Throwing themselves into the spirit of things as our romantic leads – fulfilling the requirements of the genre by being both charming and sweet but also naïve and a little dim – they strike up a romance that manages to be both rather touching and also a neat parody of costume drama flirtation. Forbes shoots a rather nice scene where they breathlessly eye each other up, the camera cutting rapidly from exposed arms to facial features one after the other. Both are very funny, with Caine striking up a lovely double-act with Wilfrid Lawson as an almost incoherently drunk butler (Lawson’s finest hour since Pygmalion).

The film keeps its comic energy flowing well, with Forbes using a good mix of interiors and some attractive Bath locations (doubling for London). It’s also a film which – surprisingly since its written by a pair of Americans – really captures a sense of British eccentricity. I really enjoyed, in particular, the opening sequence that charts the deaths of the other members of the tontine – a parade of inept empire builders (soldiers, explorers, big game hunters) meting a series of surreal (often self-inflicted) deaths.

It probably does slightly outstay its welcome – 90 minutes would have been perfect. It’s a little too pleased with its semi-surreal set-up and stylistic flourishes – the floral on-screen captions definitely are far less funny than the films thinks. There is, at times, a little too much of the “isn’t this zany!” air about the film that can grate, with set-ups groaning with their desire to amuse (a late hearse chase scene falls into this) like a pub bore telling you a story in his self-proclaimed “inimical style”.

But at least The Wrong Box does make you laugh. And when that is all it is aiming to do, its hard not to have a soft spot for it.

Tom Jones (1963)

Albert Finney flirts with Diane Cilento (among many, many others) in Oscar winner Tom Jones

Director: Tony Richardson

Cast: Albert Finney (Tom Jones), Susannah York (Sophie Western), Hugh Griffith (Squire Western), Edith Evans (Miss Western), Joan Greenwood (Lady Bellaston), Diane Cilento (Molly Seagrim), George Devine (Squire Allworthy), David Tomlinson (Lord Fellamer), Rosalind Atkinson (Mrs Millar), Wilfrid Lawson (Black George), Rosalind Knight (Mrs Fitzpatrick), Jack Macgowan (Patridge), Freda Jackson (Mrs Seagrim), David Warner (Blifil), Joyce Redman (Mrs Waters/Jenny Jones), Rachel Kempson (Bridget Allworthy), Peter Bull (Thwackum), Angela Baddeley (Mrs Wilkins), Julian Glover (Northerton)

In early 1964, America was at the height of Beatlemania. Everything about Swinging Sixties London was the height of cool, so what better way to reflect that at the Oscars than naming Best Film of the previous year as being Tom Jones, the film that turned Henry Fielding’s work into the epitome of the era’s vibe. Watching Tom Jones today is a cruel reminder that generally nothing dates as hard or as fast as cutting-edge film techniques, and that time is often not kind to comedy. But Tom Jones was the first truly British film to lift Best Picture since Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948, so it was a sign of the short-lived all-conquering cool of British culture.

Adapted with a frenetic style from Henry Fielding’s novel, the film follows the trials and tribulations of Tom Jones (Albert Finney), adopted by Squire Allworthy (George Devine) after he is found abandoned on Allworthy’s bed as a baby. Growing up, Tom is a roisterer and rodgerer (especially keen on rodgering) but fundamentally decent, in love with Sophia Western (Susannah York) and the target of jealous rumours from his cousin Blifil (David Warner, looking a bit lost in his film debut). Banished as a result of Blifil’s schemes, he journeys to London encountering adventures along the way, not least a night of bliss with a Mrs Waters (Joyce Redman) who may (or may not) be his mother. Will Tom be able to prove his innocence, win the love of Sophia and escape his destiny of being “born to hang”?

Tony Richardson came to Tom Jones fresh from directing several searching, morally complex kitchen-sink dramas – and basically seemed determined to cut loose with this film by having fun. What he comes up with is an explosion of multiple different styles, from silent film to sped-up Benny Hill chases. Not a single editing or camera trick is unused, with the film stuffed to the gills with fades, wipes and freeze frames. Richardson basically used every single trick in the book. He was also lucky to have a perfectly judged score from John Addison (winning an Oscar).

It makes for a frenetic and fast-paced film, in love with its own 60s cool of anarchic comedy, sexual liberation and tongue-in-cheek lack of reverence all washed down with a bucket load of thigh-slapping bawdiness. It’s a film that’s inordinately pleased with itself, using Fielding’s interventionist narration style as the licence to break the fourth wall frequently and introduce a dryly hammy voiceover from Michael MacLiammóir. All of this was seen as the height of daring film-making back in the day – especially since Hollywood expected literary adaptations to be treated with reverence rather than as a high-brow Carry-On. But it’s dated badly.

Its smug, overbearing sense of zeitgeist cool comes across terrifyingly passé today, and the film’s daring use of every single cinema style makes it tonally feel like a complete mess. Richardson will segue from farce straight to an immersive hunting sequence where we are invited to feel every moment of the blood lust and violence, straight to a pastoral sequence showing the courtship of Tom and Sophia in glorious countryside.

Richardson himself – despite winning Best Director for his very self-consciously flashy work – also had mixed feelings about the film, recutting it shortly after its Oscar win into a shorter version which remains the version most people have seen today. He said of it that it “felt incomplete…and botched in much of its execution…whenever someone gushes to me about Tom Jones, I always cringe little inside”.

It’s a fair assessment of a film that is all flash – and way too much of it – and so little substance that it frequently becomes trite, smug and unpleasant to watch. John Osborne’s script (which apparently he submitted than refused to redraft) is in all honesty a mess (much of it was rewritten on set while the narration was a post-production addition to make it all make sense), with barely any quotable lines, and whatever skill the film has is all in the telling and the editing.

Did Richardson take the whole thing as a lark and then work out later on that comedy is harder than it looks? The entire film was a complete mess on set – several errors were in fact left in the film (such as Western falling off his horse due to Griffith’s drunkenness) and then turned into jokes through the voiceover. There is a slight air from all involved that this isn’t proper film-making, that this is just one to flog for a bit of cash. Its Oscar win is inexplicable, but can be chalked up to a horrendously weak year at the Oscars.

Albert Finney goes through the entire film on autopilot – little matter than it made him a star – and he seems a curious choice for a young lover, throughout the film he channels instead a sort of horny Arthur Seaton. Finney thought the entire thing bosh and a waste of his talents – an attitude that does come across on the screen. Lightness is not always Finney’s strength, and his distant disengagement with the film becomes more striking with every viewing.

Many of the rest of the cast mug shamelessly. Hugh Griffith bizarrely landed an Oscar nomination for a performance of gurning over-the-top mania. The film had three nominations for Best Supporting Actress: Edith Evans emerges best, although she could play this domineering Mrs Western standing on her head; Diane Cilento brings an attractive lightness to buxom Molly while Joyce Redman is good value and gets the film’s most famous sequence, a slobbery eating sequence with Finney where food is consumed in a very suggestive way as foreplay. Arguably the best supporting roles come from Joan Greenwood as the sexual but cruel Lady Bellaston and George Devine as the decent Squire Allworthy (the only character who isn’t some sort of caricature).

Tom Jones is most of all a memento of a particular brand of fast-paced, technique heavy, manic sixties comedy. It made a lot of money and won a lot of awards, so led to a torrent of similar films from bawdy Hogarthian costume dramas to sex comedies in modern London with naïve but well-endowed young men. Richardson and co. should have credit for catching this vibe first – but it makes for an odd experience today, like a slightly uncomfortable museum piece.

Pygmalion (1938)

Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller excel in Bernard Shaw’s own adaptation of Pygmalion

Director: Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard

Cast: Leslie Howard (Professor Henry Higgins), Wendy Hiller (Eliza Doolittle), Wilfrid Lawson (Alfred Doolittle), Marie Lohr (Mrs Higgins), Scott Sunderland (Colonel George Pickering), Jean Cadell (Mrs Pearce), David Tree (Freddy Eynsford-Hill), Everley Gregg (Mrs Eynsford-Hill)

“It’s an insult for them to offer me an honour, as if they have ever heard of me – and it’s very likely they never have. They might as well send some honour to George [VI] for being King of England.” That was George Bernard Shaw’s reaction when he heard that he had won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars. Now that’s a reaction that would have burned Twitter up today. Mind you Shaw wasn’t adverse to taking the film world’s money for bringing Pygmalion to the screen – and also means he is one half of a nifty pub quiz question (who is the only other person to win BOTH an Oscar and the Nobel Prize for literature?).

Pygmalion, always one of Shaw’s most popular plays, seemed a logical choice to begin for producer Gabriel Pascal’s dream of bringing a cannon of the playwright’s complete work to the cinema screens. Shaw agreed – so long as he had was on board as the screenwriter and with a personal supervision of the adaptation. He missed a trick by not insisting on creative control. Shaw re-wrote and restructured much of the play for the screen – and it’s this screenplay that forms the basis of My Fair Lady. So closely so, that it’s the most familiar version of the play – and so close does the dialogue cut that you end up wondering where the songs are.

Anthony Asquith was bought on board as the director, and Shaw oversaw the assembly of the cast. Leslie Howard was cast over Shaw’s original choice, Charles Laughton, and also given a co-director credit (although there are some disagreements about what this meant, with some claiming it was basically some on-set notes to actors). Asquith was a director with a gift for opening out literary adaptations onto the big screen, and he succeeds here in capturing much of the atmosphere and mood of Shaw’s comedy of manners. There was also a young whippersnapper called David Lean on hand to direct the montage sequences that showed Eliza’s training.

Leslie Howard was a major matinee idol, but also an accomplished stage actor – and both qualities come to the fore here in what is surely the best Higgins captured on screen (with apologies to Rex Harrison). His Higgins is a rough-edged, somewhat scruffy, eccentric who speaks before he thinks, treats everything with an absent-minded, off-the-cuff bluntness and is almost professionally rude. He’s never straight-forwardly charming, indeed sometimes he’s outright cruel and bullying, but there is a professorial lack of harm to him that makes him reassuringly British and decent. And he gives the final act a real sense of vulnerability and emotional repression that is vital.

If Leslie Howard makes a very good Higgins, I do think there is very little doubt that Wendy Hiller is the definitive Eliza Doolittle. Handpicked by Shaw, she is superb here. Her Eliza has all the fragility, worry and working-class chippiness you expect, but Hiller laces it with such a real streak of humanity that you end up deeply investing in her. Her flourishing sense of personality, of her growing strength of personality and feelings of independence dominate much of the final act of the play, and Hiller mixes it with notes of genuine hurt and sadness about the dismissive treatment she is receiving from Higgins. It’s a performance overflowing with nuance and pain – and the moment when a pained Eliza responds with a pained dignity when Higgins suggests she marry someone else that “we sold flowers….we did not sell ourselves” is a truly wonderful moment.

But this is also a very well made, cinematic movie with some really outstandingly funny sequences. The scene where Eliza – newly trained to talk “proper”, but with no idea about what makes for decent polite conversation – regales a dinner party in earnestly, perfectly accented English about her belief that “they done [that] old woman in” at great length is hilariously funny, as is Howard’s wryily amused response. There is also equal comic mileage to be got from Wilfrid Lawson’s very funny performance as Eliza’s selfish, street-smart father, the dustbinman with the mind of philosopher.

Asquith’s film is very well shot and assembled, helped a great deal by this inventively made and very structured montage sequences contributed by Lean (who also edited the film). It’s done with real snap, and Asquith’s camera movements and invention of framing dwarf’s the far more staid and flat production of My Fair Lady that would win many Oscars 25 years later. He knows when to go for low, static shots – particularly in those moments when Eliza realises she is just a toy for Higgins – and also close-ups and one-two shots that give even greater energy and dynamism to Shaw’s wonderful dialogue (again the final argument sequence benefits hugely from this).

Shaw didn’t go for creative control, so he failed to prevent the happy ending that was added to his play, as Eliza returns to Higgins (after seeming to leave to marry Freddy), and the Professor continues his pretence of indifference – which thanks to Howard’s excellent performance earlier we know is just that. To be honest, even with the performances of the leads, Eliza’s devotion to Higgins still seems to come from left-field (just as it does in the musical) and there isn’t much in the way of romantic chemistry between them. But it works for many people, even if it never works for me (or Shaw).

Pygmalion is a fine film, far superior to My Fair Lady (better made, better acted, better written, funnier, smarter, more moving and more heartwarming). It deserves to live a life outside of its shadow.

And that other Nobel and Oscar winner? Why Bob Dylan of course.