Veevers muffs it

THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON (1957) shows director Lewis Gilbert coming into his own, has possibly Kenneth More’s most subtle and effective performance, and an entrancing star turn from Diane Cilento. Also, it’s a good adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s play, and Cecil Parker as Lord Loam brings the entertainment.

But I want to trash-talk Wally Veevers’ special effects.

The film was shot on Bermuda but there are some faked-up shots done back in the studio, for unknown reasons. Either weather/schedule difficulties prevented everything from getting filmed, some shots didn’t come out right, or Gilbert missed something he should have captured.

But first, here’s a rather good effect — a model ship founders on real sea and rocks.

It’s not immediately obvious how Veevers has achieved this. I had to cogitate a bit, which I’m not as good at as I once was. I worked out that the model was filmed against the real sea and rocks, mounted on a device that allows Veevers to move it forward and tilt it. The rocks it hits are actually far behind it, but the camera can’t see that because it photographs flat. Also, the bottom part of the frame would be masked off, removing the underside of the boat, the simple machinery moving it (a track and a hinge, and Veevers’ hands), and all the background below that line.

Then WV would re-expose the film with the top half masked off. This time he’s just photographing the sea, which will now appear to cut off the bottom of the miniature boat, creating an optical-effects version of a waterline. Voila!

Really clever. But this next one’s really stupid. I’m not sure why this shot of the ship, run aground, is slanted in a “Deutsch tilt” — I get why the boat SHOULD be tilted, having hit the rocks. But there seems no reason why the waterline should also be at a jaunty angle. There are no other Deutsch/Dutch angles in the movie. It’s nutty. I think, having positioned the ship at a suitably slanting angle, Veevers discovered that a horizontal ocean (matching the horizontal clouds) would either cut off too much of the ship on the left, or reveal too much on the right, so he had to angle it nonsensically.

The other horrifically bad job is a set of reaction shots of our extended Swiss English Family Robinson Loam looking out to sea. This is one of those shots which for some reason was not filmed on location, so it’s been recreated in the studio using blue-screen. Whenever an effects shot like this was called for in Britain, it seems the rear projection man and the blue-screen man would get into a fight about which technique was best. I tend to side with the rear projection man because I like those old process shots, and matte lines always strike me as ugly. Admittedly, rear-screen projection is a lot more glaring in colour, though.

The trouble is, only one background plate has been used for three angles.

The wide shot doesn’t create an immediate problem because there are cutaways in between it and the closer angles which follow.

But the closer angles share the exact same background, so that when Gilbert cuts between them, it doesn’t look like two angles — it looks like one character has effected a Melies-like teleportation and another has apported in to replace them. It’s strikingly goofy.

Even if there were only one background plate available, Veevers COULD have enlarged and reframed it to make a slightly different bg for each shot. I suspect the compartmentalisation of filmmaking practice, and some poor communication, was involved. Say Veevers is supplied with the blue-screen shots and simply told that they all require a rocky island shore background. He perhaps isn’t told that the shots are going to be directly cut together. Meanwhile the editor (future James Bond style-setter Peter Hunt) has assembled an edit using what he has at present, the shots of characters against blue screen. He doesn’t get to see the finished effects shots until the film is basically complete. then, ouch.

Gilbert is forced to use this lone plate again and again, but at least he never cuts directly between different characters stuck onto it again. Still, that rock assumes a Beckettian inescapability.

I’d love to be able to blame the foul-up on Sony Pictures who have released a pretty shoddy DVD of the film. But I just can’t see them recompositing the effects shots — the ugly matte lines are pure 1957. So I think we have to chalk this one up to the anti-genius of the system, and budgetary limitations which prevented fixing a bizarre-looking screw-up.E

Even weirder — we do briefly glimpse a SECOND PLATE showing a different bit of scenery. But it’s not used anywhere that makes sense or helps anything.

This makes me wonder if maybe the lab screwed up. It’s always the lab, isn’t it?

Still, I’m sure everything will be all right, children, if we all shout just as loud as we can, “I DO believe in Wally Veevers! I DO! I DO!”

Monty’s Double C’est Moi

A number of good things about I WAS MONTY’S DOUBLE. It never mentions Operation Mincemeat, but the events of the film are happening alongside those of THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS, both plots concerning misleading Hitler about the proposed site of D Day. One worked by floating a dead body with fake documents off the coast of Franco’s Spain, the other by leaking the movements of a lifelike Field Marshal Montgomery impersonator recruited from the acting profession. And, weirdly, Clifton Webb, the star of the big-budget ‘Scope Deluxe Color Fox production, could have made a passable Monty or Monty Double himself. The filmmakers did consider hiring a movie star to play the part, before latching onto the genius idea of letting M.E. Clifton James, Montgomery’s actual real-life double and the author of the source memoir, play himself.

Given that, it’s a terrible shame they didn’t also cast the real intelligence officer who recruited James — David Niven. The idea MUST have been considered. I don’t know whether Niv was unaffordable, unavailable, or didn’t want to take part in a travesty. It would have elevated the film enormously, though his chum John Mills is excellent in the part.

Cecil Parker makes everything good.

Supposedly, the film is fairly true to life, except for the invention out of whole cloth of an action climax where the Nazis try to kidnap the ersatz Monty. This is the sequence where director John Guillermin pulls out all the stops, which mainly involves suspenseful tracking shots depicting POV and reaction of various characters, putting the audience right in there. Too bad none of it happened. It feels stylish yet inauthentic as you watch it, partly because the rest of the movie has yielded to, or embraced, the difficulties of the true-life adventure: moving in fits and starts, introducing and dropping a myriad of characters (where a fictioneer would have combined several into one), which does however allow plenty of room for beloved British character thesps. Also, the rest of the movie is played, and scored (by John Addison), as light comedy.

I don’t know if James’ memoir included all the stuff about stage fright and other bits tending to make fun of the acting profession, or at least having fun with the conjunction of war, espionage and acting. Screenwriter Bryan Forbes might be responsible for some of that.

I’m inclined to credit much of the visual panache of Guillermin’s most striking film, RAPTURE, to its French camera department, just because nothing else in his career seems to account for it. Elsewhere, he alternates weirdly between vigour and flair and living down to Welles’ characterisation of him as “one of the truly great incompetents.” His sadism comes through in a bit where a soldier gets shot and blood splashes the guy’s face — from a completely impossible angle. Guillermin obviously liked this bit so much (wrongly), he recycled it in EL CONDOR.

The next Guillermin film I watch will either be THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN, because I have it, or THE TOWERING INFERNO, because I haven’t seen it since it’s first UK TV airing and I have next to no memory of it. How bad could it be? Don’t answer that.

Oh — apologies are due to Duncan Lamont — he’s disappointing in this but I was forgetting about his amazing turn in the first TV Quatermass. Unforgiveable.

I WAS MONTY’S DOUBLE stars Monty’s Double; Professor Bernard Quatermass; The Major; Rex Van Ryn (voice, uncredited); The Sorting Hat; Grapple of the Bedou; Conductor 51: Mrs. Terrain; Victor Carroon; Mr. Kipling; Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond; Buller Bullethead; Midnight; Arnold Bedford; Milchmann; Bryce Mercer; Shagal, the Inn-Keeper; Sgt. Wilson; General Gogol; Jelly Knight; The Malay; Tanya; Victor Maitland; and Turk Thrust.

Blue Sky Alice

“Blue sky casting” is a screenwriter’s trick — you imagine anyone you like, living or dead, in a role, and that hekps you find the character’s voice. If you’re writing for Jeff Goldblum or Michael Redgrave, different things happen. What you probably shouldn’t ever do is cast the person you were thinking of — there’s an exciting tension that happens if you cast, say, Joan Cusack, in a role written with, say, Myrna Loy in mind.

It’s also a fun exercise: here’s a fantasy cast list for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. I found as i was coming up with it that it was tending to a mid-1950s feel, and naturally British. But it began when Fiona proposed Peter Lorre as the Dormouse.

It turns out I’ve been carrying in my mind various casting ideas for Alice, and they cam tumbling out and were joined by others…

It just seems crazy that Kenneth Williams never played the Mad Hatter. Put it down to typecasting — the Carry On films, though hugely popular, rendered all the actors uncastable in anything other than sitcom or sex farce. The two main productions KW would have been eligible for, Jonathan Miller’s rather wonderful TV Alice in Wonderland, and the execrable musical ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, have excellent Hatters in Peter Cook and Robert Helpmann respectively, but Williams would have knocked it out the park.

It’s kind of obvious that Jimmy Edwards, extravagantly-tached comic actor, should be the Walrus, but I think Norman Wisdom is very close to Tenniel’s drawing of the Carpenter. It’s starting to look like this production belongs in the mid-fifties to sixties.

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Not for any physical resemblance, but the wide-eyed dithering innocence John le Mesurier brought to his work in Dad’s Army seems to suit the King of Hearts nicely. And he practically plays the role in Gilliam’s JABBERWOCKY.

I feel that Irene Handl deserves a crack at the Queen of Hearts — though associated with working class roles (she argued with Billy Wilder about how to play cockney dialogue), she was actually quite posh, seemingly, and derived her characterisations from her observation of her family’s maids when she was young. And she’s the most versatile and surprising and funny of actors, seriously underused. (If you were doing it later, Prunella Scales would be immense, and she’s a lot like Dodgson’s own drawings.)

I’ve always seen Lionel Jeffries as the White Knight. He has such an air of melancholy. I can never read the Knight’s verse without tears springing unbidden to my eyes. Same with Lear’s The Jumblies: “Far and few, far and few…” an incantatory lament.

Okay, granted, Roger Livesey has to be a contender too.

Charles Gray as Humpty Dumpty, because.

When I look at Tenniel’s White Rabbit, I see Edward Everett Horton, which makes it odd that Paramount cast him as the Mad Hatter in the 30s version. They should have borrowed George Arliss for the Hatter and given Horton the rabbit. Fuck Skeets Gallagher. But if we’re going for anxious British players of the 1950s, maybe Alastair Sim? Or Alec Guinness, but there you’d be opening up a can of worms. Who could he NOT play? We know he’d make a magnificent Duchess:

And that’s a role which should really be done in drag, for compassionate reasons. Peter Bull was pretty perfect in the seventies abomination. Leo McKern would be good too.

Peter Sellers is maybe the only man to have played motion picture versions of the March Hare AND the King of Hearts, and he’s another can of worms if we let him in. But in the Miller piece he does the unimaginable, improvising Lewis dialogue in character, so he should be essential. Since this would be early, chubby Sellers, maybe we should be thinking in terms of the caterpillar, a somewhat shadowy figure in the illo.

If we’re having Sellers, then Spike Milligan would be a fine Frog Footman (see YELLOWBEARD for some exemplary footmanning from SM).

Based on Tenniel, there can be no question that the White King and Queen are Thorley Walters and Joan Sims. though Handl is another possibility for the latter. The Red Queen could be Flora Robson or Patricia Hayes, but I’m going for Yootha Joyce (energy) whereas the Red King, apparently dreaming the whole thing like in INCEPTION, doesn’t ever wake up and so it seems like wasted effort to cast a celebrated thesp. Might as well be John Wayne.

Miller cast Finlay Currie as the Dodo, an impressive feat — the only human actor to LOOK like a dodo. But he’s too old, since Dodgson based this didactic fowl on himself, incorporating his stutter — Do-do-Dodgson. Trying to find an actor not aged in the 1950s, with Dodgson’s sad eyes and an impressive beak, I stop at Richard Wattis.

Cecil Parker, arch-ovine, must be the Sheep, a rarely-filmed character but one with great material. I suppose the sheep should really be female, but drag is allowed. We’re through the looking glass, here.

The Gnat also has some really good jokes, and is never presented onscreen — perhaps because Tenniel didn’t deign to draw him. Another tutelary figure — you can really tell the author is a lecturer — he could really be played by anybody from Terry-Thomas to Robert Morley. The latter is more pompous, so he’d do, but then for heaven’s sake why not Noel Coward? Or Dennis Price, who quotes Lewis with relish in Mike Hodges’ PULP?

Of course, given the period, we can have perhaps Britain’s greatest child actor in the title role, Mandy Miller (MANDY, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT), and by happy coincidence it appears she’s a fan of the author:

Randy Cook suggests Benny Hill for the Cheshire Cat. What are your thoughts? I presume that, like me, you have been carrying casting ideas for Alice around in your heads for decades.