Film With Sleep

Roy (Ward) Baker’s NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP opens with Gary Merrill waking from a nightmare, so I immediately felt cheated. Firstly, the character has been asleep, secondly, he’s Gary Merrill. I decided to watch the movie for Linda Darnell, and instead we have GM, seemingly quite good guy, but adequate to hold one’s attention onscreen only in ALL ABOUT EVE, where he’s supported by more interesting players on all sides. He serves, I guess, as a kind of anchor. He has what Ken Campbell called “the legendary minus factor,” — you can inject him into a scene if it’s in danger of getting too exciting. He’s like Hugh Beamont’s less exuberant brother.

NWS casts GM as a neurotic alcoholic songwriter whose problems with his stage mother have left him incapable of forging relationships. He’s married a rich woman, has an exotic mistress, and grasps at a last-chance “redemptive” fling with starlet Darnell, a looong way into this film. We seem to be supposed to be on his side, but it’s pretty hard to sympathise, and the potential “solution” to his worries, another mistress, doesn’t convince — isn’t he just making the same mistakes over again?

My copy of the film is grungy, which doesn’t help. Impossible to really judge the emotional effect of the film when everything looks like it’s been shot through translucent black soup.

Had NWS starred Richard Widmark, it might have stood a chance — an actor whose dynamism and nerviness could often compensate for really unsympathetic character traits. Merrill can only play for pathos by being a sad-sack. The grimy transfer makes him seem older, a disconsolate empty scrotum with a hairstyle that looks like it landed on him from above like a pancake.

The women around him are a mixed bunch — June Vincent avoids making her mothering wife an appalling character, a noble choice, but maybe that would have been more interesting to watch? Hildegarde Knef’s vocal delivery is quite Schwartzeneggerian, which is distracting. Darnell makes everything brighter and better, before she’s called upon to perform a peculiar roleplay, which goes on for a long time and is embarrassing to watch, the more so as she’s built up some warm feeling.

There’s a final plot twist which isn’t. An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour with Tony Randall did the alcoholic blackout thing far better (and Randall is astonishing in it). The script seems to have been intended to float a series of possible twists, each of which is then disproven, but it SO doesn’t pull this off.

The most interesting aspect, for me, was that the movie, a product of Baker’s brief stint in Hollywood at Fox, has several of the same qualities as his better-known DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK, recently recalled to memory by its featuring in BLONDE (although we never meet an English director in that movie’s “reconstructions”). Both films feature cod psychology (dollar-book Freud, as Welles called it) and make their leading ladies seem awkward with almost unplayable scenes, where Baker seems unable to help them, or not enough anyhow.

(I don’t remember INFERNO well enough to say if it follows these trends.)

But this movie makes DBTK look like The Mahabharata.

What’s surprising and disappointing is that RWB, who was capable of striking effects in terrific films, doesn’t seize upon the resources of Hollywood to do anything interesting or expressive or different, despite the psychological bent of the films he was assigned. This one has a flashback within a flashback, flashbacks which then turn out to be possibly false, but then again turn out to be true after all, but none of it encourages him to any formal experimentation at all. It’s like he was intimidated by the studio apparatus rather than inspired by it. Which would seem strange, as he was known in the UK as quite a formidable tough guy who wouldn’t hesitate to tear a strip out of a crewmember who displeased him.

I have other questions about Baker. More soon.

Shrew Business

Last time I saw Zefferelli’s THE TAMING OF THE SHREW it was on VHS, so when I found a DVD cheap at my favourite charity shop (St Columba’s Bookshop) I acquired it for my Z shelf.

I hadn’t realized that FZ’s career was so odd — something called CAMPING in 1957, lots of theatre and TV, and then SHREW as an abrupt superproduction, produced by the Burtons, cinematically speaking coming out of nowhere.

Having made an extra on THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD I could see where Burton had scooped up the English-language script contributor for his first film as co-producer, ex-black ops commando trainer Paul Dehn, and where he’d recruited Michael Hordern. But I figure Zeffirelli had also seen A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, as proof that Hordern could do farce — both movies have scenes of characters rehearsing their plans in parallel alleyways, with the director cutting back and forth. And both use houses with big central spaces surrounded by a gallery with a stair, staging action on both levels…

Victor Spinetti also comes from Lester; Alan Webb from Welles (CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, “Jesu, the days that I have seen.”)

Anyway, it’s fun. There are matte paintings done in almost renaissance style, beautiful sets, what is known as lustiness, and a nice moment where Michael York’s soliloquizing draws curious stares from Paduan street characters, as if they’ve never seen anyone do Shakespeare before.

The filmmakers’ solution to the plays more noxious qualities is, basically, to say, “Well, we’ve cast the stars of the twentieth century’s greatest love story, so there can be no question that this is a beautiful romance.” All evidence of torture and gaslighting to the contrary. Burton getting Taylor to say the sun is the moon is uncomfortably similar to the way he gets John Hurt, at the far end of the Rich career, to agree with him how many fingers he’s holding up, in 1984.

The script is quite impressive, since it contains several scenes Shakespeare didn’t think to include, and the characters go on talking in them, as if the blank verse was available. I can imagine Suso Cecchi D’Amico just deciding there needs to be a seen where Petruccio destroys Kate’s bed, and leaving Dehn to figure out what they can say to each other while it’s happening. Hordern can rhubarb amusingly while waiting for the next pentameter. Zeffirelli seems to have told him to wave his arms around in an Italiante fashion, which sits oddly on his frame, but shows off his nice long sleeves.

Burton can combine sonorous versifying with low comedy. Taylor’s fishwife screech is textually justified, as it was in VIRGINIA WOOLF. Her violet eyes get a lot of extreme closeups. Her husband’s bloodshot orbs do not rate such inspection.

Zeffirelli the misogynist (in the editing room, he would say “Cut to the bitch”; women who have abortions should be executed) probably saw no reason to question the four-hundred-year-old play’s sexual politics. It’s funny until the wedding, even with the discomfort of it being a forced marriage as far as Taylor’s Kate is concerned, and then not too funny once the torture starts. Taylor is given some quiet moments early on where she can suggest some attraction towards Burton’s brawling drunkard. And when she falls in line eventually she can hint that this is a fun game to play, master and slave. Can’t escape the problem that she’s been forced into it, though. At the end, they at least manage to make some suspense. Maybe one effect of the passage of time is that the servants are now the most appealing characters.

The Fairbanks-Pickford version was mocked for the credit “Additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.” This one has a jokey but far more respectful title:

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW stars Cleopatra; Thomas Becket; Glaucus; Major Grapple; Joe Beckett; Master Shallow; Max Kalba; D’Artagnan; and Foot.

World of Women