No.97. Sexual Boundaries - THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT (1975)

THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT (1975)

“I am an effeminate homosexual…a minority within a majority”. 

With refreshing candour such as this, Quentin Crisp wafted through life - scarved, hatted and coiffeured, scattering witty and incisive bon mots like elegant flower petals – a latter-day Oscar Wilde for the Ovaltine generation. In this charming TV film from 1975, John Hurt masterfully captured the life of an eccentric aesthete whose flamboyantly effeminate dress and behaviour caused amusement, bemusement and physical persecution yet concealed a brave soul within who became a sought-after and highly quotable style maven.

Based on his autobiography, THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT opens with something of an endorsement by the man himself, the real Quentin speaking to the audience from the bedsit where he spent much of his later years. He’s a unique and contradictory personality; hermet-like in private but an exhibitionist in public. Although he leads an ascetic life of monastic absence of sex, money or music, happy to let dust accumulate for years untouched in his home, he is still seduced by romantic glamour. Upon hearing of a film to be made of his life, he recalls being excited as he’d spent his life trying to escape into the fantasy world of the silver screen. When told the aim is to be a realistic depiction, he stifles disappointment by venturing to suggest an idealised preferred opening scene to temper the intrusive desire for unwanted grittiness. We then segue into Quentin the child lost in a swaying reverie in Edwardian female clothing before the mirror, morphing into the young 1920s adult embodied by John Hurt, setting a tone of elegant bewitching playfulness.

The film spans the period from the ‘20s to 1975, focusing mainly on the more challenging formative years that shaped Quentin’s personality. Born into a typically repressed, suburban middle-class family in High Wycombe as the prosaic ‘Dennis Pratt’, Quentin is shown as the product of an unsympathetic solicitor father and an unassuming but usefully well-connected mother. His private dreams and tentative steps as a gay man are cautious in a society still decades away from the legalisation of homosexuality. One evening, a chance doorway encounter with a similar cross-dressing but far more worldly-wise chap leads him into a nocturnal world of kindred souls. He finds himself accepted into a late-night ‘café society’ of camp and fearless male prostitutes. (The actors in these scenes are clearly having a ball, including a young Roger Lloyd-Pack). Through the security of their camaraderie Quentin grows in confidence and begins to build the beguiling armour that has to deflect violence from men and at one point even a sudden slap from a woman on the street, offended by his appearance. It is here in his twenties that he changes his name to Quentin Crisp, a pseudonym more befitting his demeanour.

Populating the colourful world of Quentin’s friends and lovers are future notable TV and film actors. Operatic Welsh character actor John Rhys-Davies, most famous as Gimli in LORD OF THE RINGS, is a lovable childlike boyfriend, and Patricia Hodge belies the period drama ice-maidens she often played on screen as a fey, effusive dance teacher.

The pre-war period setting of the early scenes is nicely achieved within the obvious limits of a TV drama budget, neatly aided by amusing silent movie-style dialogue cards that frame some of Quentin’s more sensational pronouncements such as “Sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation” and his defining observation that “Exhibitionism is a drug – you get hooked!” .

Our curiosity as to how such a person would get by in society is answered as we see Quentin move from rent-boy through professional commercial artistry. Before settling into a lucrative career as an artist’s model, or as he calls it: “A naked civil servant. My vocation in life”, his search for how to make a living is interrupted by World War Two. For me, one of the two fascinating key scenes in the film is his interview by the Army Medical Board. Here, we could understand or predict a plot device of attempting to dodge conscription by using his sexual orientation, but no, he earns our sympathy even more by the unexpected desire of actually wanting to enlist, albeit due to the pragmatism of getting three square meals a day. Bravely, he doesn’t deceive them about his sexuality and when asked what such an unlikely soul could contribute to the army, replies with disarming logic: “Well, anyone can get killed…” His steely practicality is admirably at odds with our perceived stereotype of him at this point.

There is no sense of Quentin trying to harangue or embarrass the ‘normal’ people around him with militant shock tactics to extort acceptance. Although his appearance brazenly stands out as a challenge, his code of behaviour toward others is discreet and respectful, a model for how he simply wishes to be treated in return. The other stand-out sequence that beautifully illustrates this is when he is in the dock defending himself on a police fit-up charge of soliciting. With enormously persuasive dignity and feeling, Quentin calmly explains that in order to survive he could not possibly afford to prostitute himself so publicly. Moreover, out of respect (and fear of reprisals): “I do not approach or speak to anyone unless spoken to, or look at anyone unless they demand that I look at them”. It is a greatly affecting scene by Hurt, one of the finest I’ve ever seen him play. Quentin’s subsequent acquittal due to ‘insufficient evidence’ is hardly a consolation for being forced to justify his lifestyle in court so painfully.

Happily, as the decades rolled by, Quentin becomes a kind of icon in demand, a personality that embodies the counter-culture of the 1960s and beyond. His later lease of life is as a quotable and entertaining raconteur who ultimately never moved with the times, but let the times catch up with him. He sums himself up self-deprecatingly amid the flower-power youths: “I am not merely a stopped clock. I am a stopped grandfather clock”.

At the close, he fends off the weak harassment of teenage toughs (spot a very young Phil Daniels here) and intones as narrator: “I am one of the stately homos of England…” - a winningly wry and dignified ending.

Hurt is wonderful in the central role, richly deserving his BAFTA award for it. Externally he fully commits to the feminisation of clothing, hair, make-up and physicality, but without ever seeming a distancing, ‘pantomime dame’ caricature of women. You feel this is a man whose true nature is revealed, not disguised, by assuming a woman’s appearance - and it’s a harmless, utterly likeable one. There is none of that cynical hard edge that male drag queens sometimes give off in their posturing - (maybe that’s why I’ve always found them so irritating?).  Watching source interviews with the real Quentin (such as the engrossing ‘World in Action’ one filmed in his flat in 1968), you can also see how successfully Hurt alters his distinctive gravelly tones to reproduce that gentle velvety voice and upward speech inflection.

I remember Hurt once memorably describing himself as ‘the official victim figure of the British film industry’. It’s an insightful label and amongst his illustrious CV, a direct parallel can be drawn between his playing of Quentin Crisp and another real-world ‘outcast’ – John Merrick in THE ELEPHANT MAN. Both men suffered greatly from the inhuman cruelty of others, persecuted by those who feared as well as underestimated them for the way they looked.  Tragically for Merrick, human understanding came all too late for him, compared to Quentin’s triumph of living long enough for his look and original wit to be celebrated more than discriminated against. In both cases, Hurt’s talent and sensitivity goes to great lengths to represent these people fully on screen.

Hurt also made a welcome return as Quentin in 2009’s AN ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK which documented his years living in the more tolerant world of New York.

No. 96. Klaus Kinski/Werner Herzog: AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (1972)

HERZOG & KINSKI: The Making of AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (1972)

When Werner Herzog decided to make his film AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD there was only one actor he had in mind for the main character: Klaus Kinski – a man whose volatile reputation preceded him like the weather warning of an incoming tornado. Herzog had feverishly written a screenplay for his sixth film that pitted man against the elements in a story of all-consuming greed and single-minded madness. He had found the perfect male embodiment of these qualities...if he could survive the filming.

Herzog had some advance idea of what he was letting himself in for; some years before Kinski had rented a room in his family’s apartment and the director had witnessed first-hand the volcanic, inexplicable rages of which the actor was capable. In his entertaining documentary MEIN LIEBSTER FEIND (‘MY BEST FIEND’), Herzog remembers a blistering forty-eight hour rampage by Kinski, decimating the family bathroom to the point where the fixture damage could have been strained through a tennis racquet. Kinski was a gifted self-taught talent, a veteran of many films who channelled colossal passion instinctively, but was also a vessel for its unchecked reign as relentless egomania.

The timing of AGUIRRE had come just as Kinski had left his infamous one-man tour of Jesus uncompleted, the show had little to recommend it except the spectacle of the actor venting his un-Christ like spleen at the audience. This made it a must-see, filling major German arena venues before he suddenly quit. Despite this and his previous experience, Herzog was committed to using Kinski and two days after sending him the script, he received a 3am phone call of intense ranting that turned out to be Kinski’s great excitement at undertaking the main part.

AGUIRRE is set during the Spanish Conquistador conquering of the Incas of South America in 1560. Hearing the subjugated Indians speak of a fabled city of gold, El Dorado, a nobleman Pizarro leads a team of soldiers and nobles along with one hundred Indians along the Amazon to capture the city and its mythical treasure. Their number includes Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, (Del Negro) a priest who sees their mission somewhat naively as a religious one “to spread the Word of God”, though even he is tempted by the lure of enabling hallowed Catholic artefacts to be fashioned from such wealth. The church’s arrogant trampling over the indigenous culture to convert them by force is clearly no more altruistic than the soldiers’ plundering, for all its holy sanctioning.

The reckless men, and their accompanying fair ladies, fall victim to their own corrosive greed for power and money, none more so than Lope de Aguirre (Kinski), a lieutenant smouldering with treacherous cunning.  Pizarro realises the inadequacy of their provisions along the epic journey, and orders two rafts of 40 of the men led by Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra) to go out as a search party seeking food and information about the hidden hostile natives. Aguirre sees his chance to manipulate destiny for his own ends. He arranges a henchman to blow apart a trapped raft with their cannon, and leads a mutiny against Ursúa rather than turn back to their original camp. Aguirre is seized with the pioneering zealot’s confidence of Cortez. Nothing will stand in his way of taking El Dorado. He installs the fat Guzmán, (Peter Berling) from the Royal Spanish lineage, as their puppet Emperor-to-be, flattering the corpulent dimwit whilst biding his time as the power behind the throne. After a kangaroo court presided over by Brother Gaspar declares Ursúa guilty of treason, Guzmán surprisingly offers clemency, but both ‘Emperor’ and the Don’s days are numbered – the former is hanged and the latter strangled. 

Now the way is clear for Aguirre’s true intent – to take power himself as Emperor of El Dorado, severing all ties with Spain.  Like all before him, he foolishly underestimates the prowess of the native Indian tribes along the river. Finally, with the mythical city nowhere in sight, he is monarch of a raft of mortally-wounded followers, the only man standing…

AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD is a powerfully impressive epic about the darker qualities of mankind’s adventurousness: the selfish and self-destructive pursuit of material reward and cultural dominance, as opposed to the heroic taming of unoccupied territory such as the Moon. Kinski, his eyes blazing like hot coals, is perfectly cast as the lightning rod of the film, a terrifyingly driven ogre ferociously bullying the woefully-unprepared soldiers and enslaved Indians, and all too briefly showing a tender concern toward his own daughter. Aguirre sees himself not as the Messiah but as a divine weapon of biblical scale - “I am the wrath of God!” empowered to control all of wildlife and nature. As such, Kinski is electrifying and entirely believable.

The establishing scene of the film, the calm before the gathering storm, is a thing of beauty, a snake-like procession down a mountain of the silent troops and their gear accompanied by a haunting score by the rock group Popol Vuh. It is almost entirely depicted in master shots so we can drink in the splendid landscape that dwarfs these reckless human beings. In shooting this sequence, Herzog recalled feeling a kind of spiritual perfection of purpose. Puncturing this poetic imagery was Kinski’s crude egotism; he was enraged at not being the centre of attention here and could not appreciate that any natural landscape could be as interesting as the human face – more specifically his. Either as punishment or sensitivity, Herzog in fact removed all close-ups of him that were intended later on in the scene.

As filming progressed, director and lead actor gradually battled each other as much as the conditions. Kinski wanted to play Aguirre as a crazed madman. Herzog felt a quieter, contained menace would be more effective. He realised as he got to know Kinski’s behaviour that by inciting one of the actor’s childish tantrums he would then get it out of his system so a calmer state would be left to use in the take.  However, this was immensely debilitating to the production to the point where a threatened leaving by Kinski caused Herzog to seriously threaten to kill them both. The genuine Peruvian Indians used in the film were perplexed by the actor’s outbursts. Their culture was much more serene and gentle in resolving problems, leading the head of their tribe to sincerely offer to kill the troublesome actor if Herzog gave him the word. The director kindly rejected this – owing to the further scenes that needed filming.

Herzog acknowledged that sometimes his leading man’s instincts and skills were valuable. The actor had developed a shrewd understanding of camera technique. He showed Herzog a highly effective improvement on the usual dull way of entering the frame in profile (sideways on) and then facing forward. He perfected a move Herzog nicknamed the ‘Kinski spiral’ where the actor would pivot round the camera fluidly as he entered the shot, an arresting and much more interesting visual trick.

On screen, the trials were worth the demands. AGUIRRE’s exotic imagery, passions and conflicts over power and faith echo in later films such as THE MISSION (1986). A more direct influence though was on APOCALYPSE NOW. Coppola was inspired by Herzog’s epic vision when creating the visuals for his meditation on war (the awful anticipatory silence as the raft sails into hostile enemy territory for example). He similarly found that the making of the film became the material for it. Both directors had begun with a loose script and changed the text organically during production.

There are many memorably staged scenes. The discovery of the enemy camp with evidence of cannibalism is macabre, as is the sequence where predatory tribesmen flit in and out of the jungle calling repeatedly to each other as they watch the Spanish pass them – translated chillingly as “Meat is floating by”. Amidst the awful human degradation of the down-river passage, there is even a moment of black humour as a soldier is pierced by an arrow: “The long arrows are getting fashionable” he deadpans as he keels over.

Herzog had managed to make AGUIRRE for the incredibly low budget of $370,000 (a third of which was spent on Kinski), which had been arduous enough to raise much less eke out on a location picture deep in the Amazon rainforest. The film struggled to find a mainstream audience on release, yet gained a great cult following on the arthouse circuit and is now acclaimed as a masterpiece.

In spite of their tempestuous relationship. Herzog and Kinski went on to collaborate in four more highly-regarded projects that channelled the latter’s undeniable searing intensity well including NOSFERATU, WOYZECK and COBRA VERDE. FITZCARRALDO, their second, is the most reminiscent of AGUIRRE’s cruel obsessive mission of madness, the tale of an industrialist who insanely demands the dragging of a full-sized steamship through the Amazon (actually undertaken for real during filming) to access rubber for the funding of an ‘opera house for the peasants’ dream. The logistical nightmare was an apt metaphor for Herzog’s ongoing artistic personal battles with Kinski. An example of these one-man cyclonic outbursts can be seen in MEIN LIEBSTER FEIND from the set of FITZCARRALDO where Kinski rails against the production manager for perceived poor quality of location catering.

Ultimately Herzog was exhausted by his leading man’s constant rages over the years and they severed all ties, but not before Kinski enlisted the director in a bizarre request of his own. Writing his autobiography, the actor feared the public would find it boring if their working relationship was described in glowing ‘luvvy’ terms, so he asked Herzog to help him create fictitious insults he could level in print at the director.  At least they spent a happy afternoon doing something demented together.

(One final point: Lest we think that Klaus’s clashes were solely a personality mismatch between Herzog and him or circumstantial, there’s an insightful video on Youtube by director David Schmoeller about the making of their horror film CRAWSPACE together in 1986. In ‘Please Kill Mr Kinski’, Schmoeller recounts Kinski’s on-set insanity in even more alarming terms. He mercilessly abused his power, systematically emasculating his poor director’s authority by insisting on removing the calls for ‘Action’ and later ‘Cut’, Kinski haughtily decreeing that he will begin and end only when he is ready. The title plea, considered half-seriously, sounds strangely familiar…)

No. 95 - Spike Milligan - THE GREAT McGONAGALL (1974)

                                                 THE GREAT McGONAGALL (1974)

In 1974 director Joseph McGrath reunited Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers in the enjoyably crazy THE GREAT MCGONAGALL. Scripted by McGrath and Milligan, it’s a loose (in more ways than one) biopic about one of the world’s worst poets, the real life Scottish writer William Topaz McGonagall, as infamous to rhyme as Ed Wood is to cinema - which means he may have the last laugh as both men achieved an odd genuine fame eclipsing many of their better contemporaries.

An opening crawl gives a brief background of this eccentric as ‘the greatest bad verse writer of his age”. He lived during the reign of Queen Victoria and as he put it: ‘decided at the age of forty-seven to resign my position as a handloom weaver and give myself completely to the muse’. None are more terrifying to the arts than the untalented who give full force to their delusion of possessing a divine gift – and this makes him ideal source material for the gloriously demented Milligan mind, who drew eccentric parallels between himself and the Scotsman.

McGonagall was regularly condemned during his twenty-five year creative output for his inability to scan or to use any metaphors in a poetic sense. Here’s a sample from his notorious ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ (available online):

‘The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,

Because ninety lives had been taken away,

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.’

Milligan and McGrath take his banality of expression and admirably crackpot self-belief and concoct an indulgent and nutty vehicle for themselves and their friends, but one whose consistent through-line of Goonish surreal humour makes it more amiable fun than the previous year’s GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN.  That’s not to say it’s in any way a polished, coherent piece. It was shot somewhat chaotically in just three weeks (including one week of hard to credit rehearsal) mainly at London’s famous Wilton’s Music Hall in what seems an attempt to maintain a Victoriana setting without many costly period-dressed external scenes. It was also a deliberate choice as Milligan was keen to aid the restoration of the venue, and knew that the location fee from the production would help. This means the plot unfolds mostly as a staged theatre production, an unusual device (and to be fair one used by esteemed director Joe Wright in his recent film of ANNA KARENINA) and allows even more zany stylistic gags – at one point McGonagall ‘forgets’ a line and calls off for a prompt, relayed back by Valentine Dyall in a tin-bath.

If you’re a fan of Spike’s ‘Q’ series like myself, you might enjoy some of the recurring motifs in this film. John Bluthal pops up in numerous roles including a blackfaced John Bull in a bizarre musical number spoofing the British imperialist racism of the time (minstrel make-up was a recurring taste-fee shock tactic in the show). Spike performs in his familiar lunatic expressionist style, complete with copious raspberries and that fiercely declaimed delivery. The stage rep company feel is further enhanced by the aforementioned Dyall using his distinguished forebidding ‘Man in Black’ tones as various parts, as well as Victor Spinetti. Julia Foster does her best to cope as McGonagall’s long-suffering wife.

It’s crafty of the marketing team to claim a co-starring credit for Peter Sellers in the film as he only pops up three times. He gives a Queen Victoria cameo twice of fairly restrained madness, channelling a ‘Hinge and Bracket’ falsetto and a naughty glint in the eye when relating to Prince Albert, wickedly portrayed as a kilted Hitler to mock his Germanic ancestry - another familiar figure to ‘Q’ fans. After Albert brazenly snogs another man in full view of his wife, he asks why she dresses in black. She savours the reply: “You’ll see Albert. All in good time”.

Sellers appears right at the beginning of the film actually as himself in an in-jokey prologue where he begins to work on Spike in the studio make-up chair in modern dress with Milligan helplessly bound and gagged. This is one of a number of odd fourth-wall (illusion) breaking sequences - reminiscent of the police seizing the film at the end of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL that same year. Another one which takes the viewer by surprise is the leaving in of an outtake which gives an insight into Spike the actor: he suddenly pauses, unsure of whether he should be copying a line of Spinetti’s about his appointment with the Queen. It’s slightly startling coming in mid-scene when we’re so used to such curios being left to the end of a film; doubly so as it isn’t the normal indulgence of ‘corpsing’ (the actor laughing), but a moment of genuine off-guard confusion of Spike’s. It’s interesting as well to hear McGrath off-camera establishing order and Spike having enough performer’s self-awareness amidst the insanity to ask: “I’d like to do the take over again because I was over the top. It’s all over the top...”

We then get a fake intermission with a few quick shots of the cast and crew at lunch if you haven’t had the suspension of disbelief broken enough.

The hit-or-miss gags in the film aren’t just surreal meta-jokes. Fittingly for a music hall, there are some that must have been around when it was being built, such as the old ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ faithful, with McGonagall adding “Enjoying the show. Doc?” There are also some deliberate anachronisms on display, such as a heckler shouting “Get your hair cut, you hippie!” when McGonagall is in the dock and a burst of a very modern gratuitous female nude gyrating in his jail cell. This was to appease the producer David Grant who’d made his money in porn.

Overall, THE GREAT MCGONAGALL is something of an undisciplined home-movie. McGrath had observed in a later interview that Spike could be temperamental during the shooting, a different person depending on what day you worked with him (which must have echoed his experience with Sellers on CASINO ROYALE). Don’t go looking for a traditional narrative, but if you’re a Spike Milligan fan in the mood for his anarchic Goon-style humour on screen it’s worth seeing…

No. 94 - Spike Milligan - ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL (1973)

ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL (1973)

In 1973 United Artists took Spike Milligan’s hugely successful first volume of war memoirs and brought it to the big screen. Although every effort was made to bolster its chances of success, the film doesn’t quite work but is by no means a failure.

In choosing Norman Cohen as director (and co-writer along with Spike and Johnny Byrne), the studio made use of his WWII comedy expertise in having directed the film transition of DAD’S ARMY. They also drafted in Spike to play his own father, Jim Dale, my favourite member of the CARRY ON team, to play the young Spike (real name ‘Terence’), as well as another alumni from that series, Bill Maynard, as the Drill Sergeant.

The film follows the book’s plot in focusing on Spike’s younger days - from being called up following the outbreak of war through his basic training and closing with his unit train-bound to a foreign battlefield. Somehow the sublimely funny surrealist wit of his writing doesn’t easily translate to the screen. Maybe because in his autobiography Spike almost creates his own slightly off-kilter world. You’re never quite sure how much of it is true, yet where he’s woven in invented one-liners and situations it doesn’t matter - it all blends together into its own hugely entertaining reality. As a movie though, unlike CATCH 22 whose overall tone is consistently surreal and dark allowing the actors to simply play the absurdities of war straight-faced to earn the laughs, ADOLF HITLER is set in a recognisable ordinariness. This backdrop means that Dale’s quick verbal ripostes make him sometimes stand out as a comedian doing shtick rather than being integrated believably into the story. Often, he makes a quip and ends it as if expecting a ‘ba-dum-bah’ response from the band when you’d really like his charm to be a little more relaxed and real to match the setting.

Dale’s infectious energy and comic physical dexterity sit better in the physical scenes, such as in the boxing ring and the exertions of the platoon’s five mile run. Where the film and he also seem more secure is in the serious scenes. Like the book, it manages to shift gears into sombre moments well. This is where the grounded reality works in its favour. Having slipped the boys into the barrack-room life away from home deceptively easily, gradually the uglier side of war rears its head. A crashed German pilot hints at mortality and amid the Sergeant’s order to loot the body before the authorities arrive, Spike’s sense of humour and repartee temporarily desert him. Later, Geoffrey Hughes (later to become a household name in both CORONATION STREET and KEEPING UP APPEARANCES) has a powerful scene shambling into the barracks numb with grief at the news of his whole family being wiped out in a bombing raid.

ADOLF HITLER benefits from another notable connection to DAD’S ARMY with a more benign turn as a commanding officer from Arthur Lowe, who gets to pay tribute as in the previous film to the quality of the British service personnel. He gives the film dignity and gravitas as well. As the soldiers carouse in preparation for shipping out, his second in command remarks hopefully that it could be a good war. Lowe touchingly replies: “It will be, Colin. For some of us”. There is perhaps too much reliance on that much-loved sitcom on discovering that the last act of this film is a copy of that spin-off movie’s plot: an inter-platoon war game between Spike’s 56^th Heavy Artillery and the 2^nd Scottish Highlanders, botched by his men capturing Lowe instead of the enemy commander.

Spike Milligan and Pat Coombs book-end the film playing his own parents, Spike acting in that stiff, slightly expressionist style which again jars against the naturalism elsewhere, although he has some welcome absurdist moments such as enjoying ‘Terence’s homecoming meal with the wine “at shelter temperature”.

The best thing to be said for ADOLF HITLER ultimately is its legacy of showcasing future stars of other TV military sitcoms. Amongst the rest of the cast is Tony Selby, shortly to make his name in the National Service series GET SOME IN, and a brace of future IT AIN’T HALF HOT MUM names - Donald Hewlett and the roaringly splendid Windsor Davies, here channelling his Celtic apoplexy for the Scottish side.

No.93 Unusual Romances - Part 2 - LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972)

LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972)

“I want you to put your fingers up my ass”.

No, it’s not BRIEF ENCOUNTER. This infamous line comes from a very different type of romance: Bernardo Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS, notorious in it’s time for a physically and verbally graphic sexuality that caused a furore for American censors and our own BBFC when it came to classifying it for UK release in 1973.

The opening credits depict two of Francis Bacon’s famously troubling and facially distorted paintings, foreshadowing that despite the title, we are heading for anything but dreamy chocolate-box glamour.  We are shown separate male and female portraits of damaged, isolated lives which are then placed side by side. Set in Paris, the story unfolds as a recently-widowed American, Paul (Marlon Brando), distraught over the sudden suicide of his wife, meets a young French woman, Jeanne (Romy Scheider) when they both view the same apartment. They spontaneously couple in rough, urgent sex and begin an affair with strictly controlled rules at Paul’s insistence. They are to remain anonymous to each other: “We don’t need names here”. They must reveal nothing of their real lives either, and no reference to the world beyond the apartment. “Everything outside this room is bullshit” Paul declares. Theirs will be a convenient and controlled false reality - on his terms.

Whilst seeing Paul, Jeanne has an ongoing relationship with a pretentious film-maker boyfriend Thomas, (Jean-Pierre Leaud, famous for his work with Truffaut beginning with LES QUATRE CENT COUPS), who relentlessly films everything she does for some vaguely-mentioned movie. In that respect, she is simply trading one fake and exploitative relationship for another.

Inevitably, the retreating couple (if you can call such an emotionally isolated pairing this) begin to share details of themselves; what passes for post-coital intimacy causing them to recount their family backgrounds. This is the most interesting aspect of the film as allegedly Brando willingly improvised at length in one such scene, choosing to bare details of his difficult real-life upbringing. In his autobiography, Brando said that Bertolucci “..wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me.” He did this willingly, the product of many sessions unburdening himself cathartically with the director in preparation for the role. Bertolucci arranged for full magazines of film to be loaded, which in the pre-digital era allowed a maximum of ten minutes’ recording, and simply let Brando loose. He recounts his alcoholic parents in pitiless, uncomfortable detail, bitterly describing a father who was “a whore-fucker… tough…super-masculine” and a mother “Poetic…also a drunk” whom he remembers once being arrested in the nude. He is more sympathetic to her, but these moments hint at why Paul may be so constipated in the soul in the present day. They also helped to earn Brando the actor an Oscar nomination (likewise Bertolucci).

Scheider did not likewise go beyond the part into revealing her real self on camera, yet in later life by association she was mistakenly viewed as giving an equally autobiographical performance. This was the least of her concerns. In a Daily Mail interview in July 2007, she recalled the physical sufferance she was exposed to on set much more against her will. In the filming of the infamous ‘butter sodomy’ scene where Paul lubricates himself with a little dairy help and then takes Jeanne forcibly via the road less travelled, she felt “…humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”. Despite this sequence, an idea of Brando’s not in the original script, Scheider forged a close relationship with her co-star. Contrary to rumours, all of their sex scenes were faked, not done for real, though of course that kind of speculation never harms the box-office for a cynical studio.

To be fair to Brando, his request line quoted at the start of this review puts his character on the receiving end of a compromising moment of his own, but it’s hard to ignore a recurring theme of this period in cinema of female characters being violated and the actress being expected to acquiesce in performing this in what must have been a male-dominated atmosphere of questionable sensitivity or support.  1971-1972 saw the releases of two other films, CLOCKWORK ORANGE and STRAW DOGS, whose depictions of female rape on-screen not only received a critical backlash but whose timing along with LAST TANGO IN PARIS created a storm of controversy leading Stephen Murphy to leave his job heading Britain’s BBFC board.

Whilst Brando was keen to expose something of himself Method-style in this role, he was reluctant to give consideration to line-learning. By now, he’d developed a technique as an actor of having his dialogue written on cue-cards, believing it enabled his performance to retain spontaneity. This is debatable; not only could it also be interpreted as laziness, Brando was known for making eccentric demands sometimes deliberately to test his employers. It certainly created problems for Bertolucci in keeping the cards out of shot, not to mention the difficulty I would foresee as a fellow actor for a scene partner to maintain any connection whilst Brando’s attention would continually be distracted by reading.  Mostly this foible of his is unnoticeable, although in the very moving private eulogy he pays his wife’s corpse, at one point he looks up for no other reason than searching for the next line. To give credit where it’s due though, he demonstrates an impressive linguistic grasp of the copious amounts of French dialogue he’s required to say, much more than the cursory amount an American would usually speak as a foreigner in a European film.

Gradually, Paul’s quest for meaning in his grief leads him nowhere except within, to confront the inner pain he’s been avoiding through a forced construct of artificial sexual conquest. His meetings with his wife’s lover and her mother give no solace. His claustrophobic and perverse passion smothers Jeanne; via a brief sequence of conventional romance in a ballroom dancing event where he attempts to role-play chatting her up as a stranger, she realises the ultimate toxicity of staying with him.  Her shooting of Paul as he confesses finally wanting to know her name at the end can be interpreted in different ways: Is she putting a wounded, self-destructive animal out of his misery? Does she fear that he is creating an awakening co-dependency in her? She has already decided to return to Thomas, who offers her a married life that has its own unreality but is arguably less corrosive.

Like much of the film - and relationships in real life - the characters’ motivations in LAST TANGO IN PARIS are complex. Behaviour and its pay-offs are sometimes a strange self-medication, like that of addicts or those in the grip of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. How we as humans deal with pain is not always easy to fathom to outsiders or even ourselves. For this reason I feel LAST TANGO IN PARIS justifies itself as flawed but valid. Whilst not having seen or read the more recent FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, I have to plead a Mary Whitehouse-style deference to what I gather is a tameness in comparison to this film’s brave rawness in documenting a doomed ‘negotiated’ relationship. At times the physical acting-out by Paul upon Jeanne is uncomfortably non-consensual (and for the viewer), the graphic sexual language is sometimes difficult to empathise with, but I feel that overall Bertolucci dares to explore a very private aspect of humanity with sincerity.

No.92. Unusual Romances - Part 1 - HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971)

HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971)

Among the odd, risk-taking pleasures of the 1967-75 era is this eccentric developing romance between a death-obsessed 20 year old (Bud Cort) and a life affirming old lady turning 80 (Oscar winning Ruth Gordon). Based on a screenplay by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby, it has a peculiar charm all of its own and a central premise that it’s hard to believe passed a pitch meeting at Paramount – but fortunately for this film’s later cult following it did.

Harold is the scion of a wealthy family whose morbid fascination with mortality manifests in regular fake suicide attempts to antagonise his mother (Vivian Pickles), and when asked by his therapist what he does for fun replies: “I go to funerals”. At one such service, he is approached by the elderly live-wire Maude, who shares his love of them but in a more positive frame, and rejuvenates him with her spontaneity coupled with an anarchic disregard for the agreed rules of society. She is an inveterate car-thief and drives like a dangerous nutter, yet has such joie de vivre that Harold is drawn to her, begins to smile for once and gradually falls in love with her. Their romance is consummated, off-screen, and their relationship is so perfect a rounding-off of life for Maude that she happily decides to end hers whilst at this high-point. Though distraught, Harold goes on, his life enriched for having known her…

Bud Cort is a quirky, entrancing presence as Harold, possessed of a cadaverous pallor and a stare that alternates between vague and piercingly intimidating, thus rendering him totally believable as this strange man-boy. He had already proved himself as an actor in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and the lead in BREWSTER MCCLOUD and auditioned for Hal Ashby with a high confidence that came from relating profoundly to Harold. In real life, Cort had a distant relationship with his own father, a veteran of Dachau, and when introduced by Ashby to the creative team at the meeting stated simply: “I’m playing this part”. He threw himself method-style into the staged suicide bids, freaking out Vivian Pickles with his need for veracity. My favourite is during his mother’s inane interview of a dating agency candidate, where through the window we spy Harold appearing to calmly settle himself enshrouded on a bench, pouring on gasoline and then immolating himself  - before somehow popping up in their room to ‘comfort’ the two ladies.

Ruth Gordon deservedly won the Academy Award as Maude for her eccentric life-force that brooks no opposition. There is a marvellous protracted scene illustrating this beginning when she and Harold are pulled over by a traffic cop (an almost obscured Tom Skerritt) during one of her car-theft jaunts. He asks for her license, which she rebuffs with: “I don’t have one. I don’t believe in them”. To compound the non-compliance, she drives off leading the officer in a merry dance along the high-way, and even after he catches up with them a second time, steals his motor-bike, giving Harold a backie.

On paper, HAROLD AND MAUDE’s tracing of a friendship becoming a sexual union across such a wide generation gap sounds like a perversely queasy premise; however, the oddball nature of this unlikely twosome still seems somehow chaste even when we see them post-coital in bed together. Ashby wisely opts not to show anything physical between them. There is no need. Their closeness is a meeting of polar-opposite views on life that connects somehow in a shared middle-ground of unconventionality.  It’s hard to be offended by people who find a soulmate in any context and showing eccentricities we can’t relate to – yet whose flouting of repression we might love to emulate in other ways?

Harold and Maude aren’t the only two weird elements in the film. Charles Tyner, the creepy sadist Boss Higgins in COOL HAND LUKE, plays his uncle General Ball, a Nixon-loving war-mongerer – and Eric Christmas slavers lasciviously over his “firm young body” as his priest.

To offset the stranger ideas on display, there is a score of multiple songs by Cat Stevens, including ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ strikingly used later by Ricky Gervais later on TV for THE OFFICE.

Post-filming, HAROLD AND MAUDE was not without problems. In a July 2014 interview for the Guardian newspaper, Cort recalled that Paramount wrestled control of the edit away from Hal Ashby. Cort vowed that he would not publicise the film unless Ashby was reinstated, which the studio duly did although a filmed kissing scene was cut by paramount head Robert Evans.

Critical reaction upon release was a widespread panning, due principally to condemning word-of-mouth about the subject matter. HAROLD AND MAUDE was pulled from cinemas and disappeared from cinemas inside a week. Happily though, it has since acquired true cult status, being highly praised by Hollywood directors of a respected ‘indie’ sensibility like Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne and Cameron Crowe…

No.91 Peter Sellers - RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER (1975)

RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER (1975)

After something of a wilderness period making box-office flops and worthy experimental films that stretched his versatility if not his career, Peter Sellers came back to the winning partnership he enjoyed with director Blake Edwards with a long-overdue third PINK PANTHER film. Though they antagonised each other off-screen, the two headstrong talents knew they wove movie gold together on-screen in the previous Clouseau films as well as the brilliant sight-gag classic THE PARTY. Their careers had mutually declined in the intervening years and Sellers’ opting not to do the INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU sequel for Edwards in 1968 meant they both needed a hit more than ever.

Edwards had struggled to get the funding for a proposed sequel in the meantime and managed to wangle the green light for this as the second of a two film deal with Lew Grade.

Happily, RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER showed that neither Sellers nor Edwards had lost their collaborative magic. Such is the director’s confidence that post-credits (designed by Richard WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, no less), he spends the first ten minutes of what is a laugh-out-loud comedy presenting a daring and engrossing theft of the infamous Pink Panther diamond as if it were a dramatic heist genre movie. Edwards then can’t resist capping it with a more characteristic neat repeated sight-gag where a guard is slammed into unconsciousness twice by the same closing door.

Clouseau himself belatedly appears, busted down to beat-cop status on the streets of Paris, where he confronts one of Sellers’ real-life pals again (the familiar John Bluthal) as a supposedly blind street entertainer, lacking “A ly-sonce” for his “mernkey”. Once again, Sellers shows off the comic genius idea of a Frenchman whose accent is so impenetrable even other French people can’t understand him. Clouseau’s superior stating of the rules gets the better of his self-celebrated powers of observation, failing to notice a bank robbery that the performer was serving as a look-out.  This gets him carpeted by the welcome return of Herbert Lom’s sublimely apoplectic Dreyfus for yet another incompetency on the job.  

As with THE PARTY, Edwards shares the visual comedy stylings amongst his cast, giving Dreyfus a recurring gag confusing a gun-shaped cigarette-lighter with the real thing. There’s also some amusingly surreal touches like the gentleman in the hotel foyer who offers to take Clouseau’s hat, coat and gloves and brazenly drives away wearing them to our hero’s bemused resignation. We also get two bursts of Kato (Burt Kwouk)’s amazing stunt set-piece sudden attacks to marvel at. These are all immaculately timed and edited, combined with the sensibility of a cartoon reality (the cannonball-shaped bomb, the frazzled smoky clothing post-explosion etc)

The lion’s share of the business of course goes to Sellers, who assumes a variety of disguises in pursuit of the beautiful people who are his prey: Sir Charles “Phantom, the notorious Lytton” and Lady Claudine, (the effortlessly elegant Christopher Plummer and Catherine Schell). Never mind the plot concerning the criminally charming couple and their covert thieving ways, when it comes to stealing the cat burglar Sellers takes everything that isn’t nailed down. Schell in particular has difficulty stopping herself ‘corpsing’ at least twice as she’s hit by wave after wave of gloriously absurd Clouseau creations washing over her. First, there is Emil Flornoy, his walking disaster-area telephone engineer who succeeds in submerging his van in the swimming pool just as his first vehicle is being fished out. He then becomes a moustached housekeeping attendant who sneaks into her room and struggles manfully with a popping light-bulb, a vacuum cleaner of frightening intensity and an intransigent parrot. I’ve always had a soft spot for his latter guise of Guy Gadbois, the preposterous lounge lizard sporting triangular sideburns, calling Lady Claudine “a beautiful chicken”, exuding a faux-casual swagger whilst causing mayhem with the soda syphon and trolley.

The devious manipulations of Lugash Secret Police agent Colonel Sharki (Peter Arne) are conveniently nullified by a bungled assassination attempt on Clouseau by his now homicidal boss, sending Dreyfus gibbering into the nut-hatch, acquitted “by reason of insanity” and Clouseau into his job, setting the scene for the wonderfully over-the-top THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN, my favourite of all the sequels.

RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER is a fine way to close this 1967-75 retrospective on Peter Sellers, restoring he and Blake Edwards to their deserved place at the top of the screen comedy hierarchy…