Year of the Rat

It wasn’t much commented upon back in 1984 but the advent of breakfast television in the UK — incredible to think we were so late in adopting it, but also incredible that anyone would want to watch television while getting ready for work — and if you were going to watch television, why would you watch GARISH and NOISY television full of IDIOTS?

Hang on, I’ve gone off the rails.

Start again: 1984, the year Orwell wrote about, was marked in the UK by the advent of breakfast television, and two of the stars of that new phenomenon were the Green Goddess, an exercise instructor straight out of Orwell’s book, and Roland Rat, a puppet rodent straight out of Orwell’s book. And it was the Chinese year of the rat. Not that Roland R actually ate anyone’s face off. THAT WE KNOW OF. But as O’Brien might have said, it’s the thought that counts.

I was at school. Thatcher was in power. I kept thinking, Why does nobody else see this?

Thirty-eight my god years later, the BFI has a Blu-ray out of Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier’s teleplay NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (no numerals for the BBC), which should have been out eight years ago but the Orwell estate is rather funny, which is why we never got a Bowie musical version of the book (but we did get Diamond Dogs so on the whole we won that round).

Trailers for this release made it seem like the greatest feat of restoration in human history, but inspection of the actual article clarifies the achievement: the play went out live but bridging sections had been shot on film to enable scene changes. It’s these bits that look as if they could have been shot yesterday. The live portions are your typical kinescope haze, but looking about as good as they ever could. It feels like we’re watching the action from inside Winston Smith’s little snowglobe.

Film and tube camera, side by side.

The double aesthetic is fascinating — both styles work in their distinct ways. The locations for filming are mostly BBC buildings so, like in The Goon Show‘s parody, 1985, Airstrip One and the British Broadcasting Corporation are conflated. The stark lighting of BBC corridors and post-WWII London makes for bold and striking imagery. Only the addition of Orwellian signposts makes it science fiction. Whereas Mike Radford’s film version, made in 1984, strove for the look of 1948, the year the book was written, this version is perfectly clear that 1984 is RIGHT NOW. Mainly I suppose because they couldn’t afford to make it anything fancier.

The one big special effect is an unfortunate affair. The painting — not a matte, not a backdrop, just a static painting — is technically decent enough to pass under the circumstances, but why does the Ministry of Truth have windows the size of office blocks, and why, when we see Winston Smith looking out one of them, is it suddenly a tiny porthole.

But that’s the only stupid bit.

The interior sets are strictly from poverty, and this works nicely. “Despair enacted on cheap sets,” as Errol Morris is always saying. The Ministry of Truth canteen is a bit of backcloth. The walls of Winston’s flat don’t even meet, so that the most felicitous nook in all English literature is compiled of a series of flimsy-looking flats you could post a letter between.

The show is so cheap it had Kneale himself as the voice of the televisor and production designer Roy Oxley is Big Brother. And a very effective BB he is too: he looks stern and noble, rather than shifty and sinister which is the dumb way of portraying him. Obviously BB would be from Central Casting and would look like an inspiring leader. Or, I suppose, like a cuddly clown. That could work…

In the leads we have Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell — a few years later he would inaugurate Hammer Horror while she introduced kitchen sink drama with WOMAN IN A DRESSING GOWN. Cushing is amazing in this — like Karloff, he exploits a physical advantage, removing a dental plate to portray Smith in his final decrepitude.

“So much face-crime!” Fiona enthused. Cushing just can’t help showing us what he’s thinking.

As O’Brien we have the excellent Andre Morell, who was also a Quatermass for Kneale, also a Watson for Cushing’s Holmes, and his tormentor (again) in CASH ON DEMAND. Morell has a bluff, matey quality that works nicely in counterpoint to O’Brien’s more obviously vicious aspect. He’s cold, but superficially clubby, chummy. Affable. When the Thought Police come for us, they will be wreathed in smiles.

Donald Pleasence is Syme, and I don’t have to tell you how much entertainment HE brings — a warm-up for similar turns in the CIA-backed 1956 version (where he plays Parsons) and THX 1138. Parsons is an extraordinary gremlin called Campbell Gray, who looks, sounds and acts just like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE’s P.R. Deltoid, Aubrey Morris, so much so that I thought it could be him under an assumed name. Which would make this some kind of dystopian trifecta.

Also: Wilfred Brambell (in two small roles) and a pre-beard Sydney Bromley.

Highly recommended. I find the desaturated eighties version drab and dull, whereas this one delivers its moments of horror with a lipsmacking relish more in keeping with Orwell’s grand guignol tendencies. Instead of speeding up at the end, it slows down, delivering a series of grisly blackout sketches whose recurrent punchline is the death of hope.

Almost the best thing on the disc, however, is the original continuity announcer, a plummy gent (unidentified) who welcomes the people of Aberdeen to the BBC, regrets that the Scottish comedy they’d hoped to present has been postponed, worries a bit about what they’ll make of this offering, muses aloud that perhaps the people of Aberdeen have never SEEN a play, and sums up the thematic concerns of the work in a remarkably sophisticated manner. There we have it: the Reithian vision of the Beeb, to inform and educate as well as entertain, coupled with a good dose of condescension. It’s real time travel, quite a fitting epitaph for the British Broadcasting Corporation now that the government has finally decided to destroy it.

Meanwhile, actor Dan Stevens has appeared on the BBC’s The One Show (a wonderfully Orwellian name) and shocked the nation by uttering an actual political THOUGHT not sanctioned by universal consensus. The palpable terror in the room!

The Further Adventures of Commodore Slick

Last we saw, Charlie was waking up in a strange bed. “This is not my beautiful house,” sings David Byrne in the movie trailer. (Why do trailer editors keep doing that?)

We’re at about 11.30 in the above.

Albert Austin, with his upper lip uncharacteristically nude, enters as a butler. Charlie receives fine clothes. Impostures and mistaken identities are as central to Chaplin’s work as they are to Wodehouse’s. Wodehouse may have felt like an imposter in the upper class scenes he described. Chaplin surely must have sometimes felt he didn’t belong amid the riches of Hollywood. And, though his screen character had a magical transformative power — he becomes a lampstand in this one — the comedy demands that he should struggle to adapt his behaviour to such settings.

Eric is flirting with Edna, but his hideous bifurcated beard is tickling her bare arm. The conjoined beard makes him look like two Rasputins standing close together, (each with one eye closed). A hopeless romantic prospect in any sane world.

Attired in a tux, but with giant flapshoe boots, our man descends to join the other guests. The name’s Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin.

Charlie has the same approach as me when it comes to free drink. When there’s free drink, one should attempt to drink all of it, because later there will be no free drink. This approach has a flaw in it somewhere, but looking at it in black and white (or white and black) I’m not sure just what it is.

Albert Austin’s role here, as ever, is to stand by looking vaguely appalled. He’s great at it. Chaplin relies a little less on a stock company from here on, or at least he mixes things up more, but Austin will still be around.

Edna welcomes Charlie eagerly — he’s rescued her from drowning and now he’s rescuing her from a tickly beard. Eric and Charlie square off. We get another iteration of Chaplin’s cigar-burn gag, a rather ouchy piece of supposed slapstick that’s fallen well out of favour today. The last comic cigar burn I recall was in TIME BANDITS, and there David Rappaport merely singed little Craig Warnock’s hair by mistake, and apologised afterwards.

A bit of arse-kicking here, which is funnier because it’s being done covertly. A curtain is introduced so the men can boot each other from adjoining rooms. Since Chaplin gets many effects using contrast, his traditional arse-kick gets funnier when performed in polite circles, discreetly between pleasantries. Also, an innocent party gets kicked, by Eric, naturally.

Henry Bergman is Edna’s dad, his second role in this one. Usually if he’s doubling up, one role will be in drag, but only social class and an inextinguishable pipe separate his twin characters here.

Eric discovers Charlie’s secret: the newspaper carries a story on the recent escapee, complete with incriminating mug shot. Note that Chaplin is quite keen to keep his character nameless. Here, he’s Convict 23, alias “The Eel,” and at the party he’s assumed the pseudonym of Commodore Slick.

Eric resolves to expose his rival, but foolishly leaves Charlie alone with the newspaper. When he presents it, triumphantly, to his fellow guests, it’s been cunningly altered.

Hilariously, the beard is clearly not drawn on to the photograph: Chaplin has had two photos taken and printed up as two newspapers, only in one of them he’s wearing Campbell’s beard.

Unlike in most Hollywood movies, the full text of the news article seems to have been typed out — it doesn’t turn into Latin when the print gets small, it doesn’t turn into a completely unrelated story. “Officials Completely Baffled.” Chaplin has anticipated that I will be freezeframing his work 105 years later. Further evidence of time travel to compliment that woman with the cell phone.

The threat seemingly defused, “Commodore Slick” mingles, continuing to soak up all the free drink he can swipe, even tipping the contents of Loyal Underwood’s glass into his own.

Meanwhile, one of the prison guards from reel one is being entertained by the cook. This twist is borrowed from POLICE and THE COUNT — cooks may be relied upon to entertain kops and the like, bringing fresh jeopardy into the scenario. It’s hardly necessary here. But since the guard is an interloper it not only adds jeopardy, it produces the irony of the guard hiding from Charlie rather than the other way around. The natural order is subverted. We’re through the looking glass here, folks.

Charlie is left on edge. This guard is prowling around the house. Every champagne cork is now a threatening shotgun. With relief, he allows himself to be escorted upstairs to the ballroom by Edna.

Unknown Chaplin reveals that the director considered two added elements for the ballroom, but deleted both. There was to be a sexy Spanish dancer, and a malfunctioning radiator. Charlie would find himself getting hot under the collar, think it’s the result of the tarantella lady, then discover he’s sat next to the radiator which is spurting steam up him. You can still see the radiator, but he deleted this curious gag.

Instead, he disinterestedly contemplates sticking a pin in a big lady’s backside, but doesn’t, only because Edna’s watching. We’re all glad he restrained himself. This kind of active malice is being eliminated.

Meanwhile, Eric phones the prison with a tip-off.

The ballroom has provided only spot gags, but a more promising invention is the balcony/ice cream gag. Chaplin wrote a fairly long analysis of this for the press, emphasising that dropping ice cream down the back of a fat lady’s dress works on TWO LEVELS.

Firstly, the audience is familiar with the cold wetness of ice cream, so they can relate to the gag on a tactile level. He compares this to the gooeyness of the cream pies of yore, harking back to some mythical, prelapsarian age of incessant pie throwing which seems to have been a dim cinematic memory even in 1917. Which is curious, because film historians have found no evidence that it ever really happened.

Secondly, dignified fat rich ladies are fair game. Like rich men in silk hats, the exaggerated dignity of the dowager demands to be taken down a peg or three. So the gag combines, in dynamic tension, the opposite qualities of empathy and alienation. Surprise and not-me.

(All explanations of comedy are only partial at best, and so the one devised by the desensitized dystopia-dwellers of Nigel Kneale’s TV play The Year of the Sex Olympics is as good as any: a gag must be surprising, and it must be befalling someone else.)

But what makes the ice cream gag funny in this case, is its effect on Eric Campbell. He’s just teased the dowager with his ice cream spoon on her bare back, and been gently scolded, but it’s all in good fun.

Then Charlie has an ice cream accident, depositing the whole of his dessert down the front of his trousers. This is traumatic enough to provoke a sympathy-seeking glance at his chums in the audience ~

The ice cream globule completes a shiversome odyssey down the baggy pants leg, and is chuted out by trouser cuff over the edge of the balcony — SPLAT!

The poor lady gets the dairy bombshell down her dress, and Eric gets the blame. “You’ve gone too far this time, Campbell!” His shamed squirming is very funny, and he’s a much more deserving victim than the lady. She’s just collateral damage. His attempts to help out, rolling up a sleeve to retrieve the offending item like some dapper veterinary surgeon, get him deeper into social disgrace.

Very funny reaction when she sits down. You can tell exactly where the melting ice cream has gotten to, just from her acting.

And this is the same woman Eric kicked earlier, doubling his disgrace.

But who is it? The IMDb has May White, the big lady from A BURLESQUE ON CARMEN, in this, but she’s not. But the IMDb is fatally confused about White, misattributing one of her roles in A NIGHT IN THE SHOW. I *think* this is Marta Golden, playing Edna’s mother, in which case it’s quite strong mistreatment for a heroine’s mother. But Chaplin could be like that.

Edna, incidentally, has not much of a role in this one — the romance doesn’t really develop into anything we care about, maybe because Chaplin knew he was going to end it by running away.

Nicely judged aftermath to the ice cream incident. Charlie hastily leads Edna back into the ballroom, Loyal Underwood innocently wanders out onto the balcony, and Edna’s dad comes up and assaults him in vengeance for the ice cream drop. Charlie watches nervously — NOT gleefully, as he had as recently as THE RINK, when someone else gets the blame for his blunders. The character, and Chaplin’s grasp of him, keeps improving.

Frank Coleman and his prison guards turn up en masse. An absolutely brilliant chase ensues — it’s the opening pursuit restaged for a house. Suddenly all the features of the home reveal themselves as having been chase-landscape-in-waiting. The staircase allows Charlie to run up, vault off, and hide under the grand piano while his persecutors pursue thin air. The lampshade can be placed over his head as a cunning disguise (the first time this was done?). The balcony can be leapt off of, Fairbanks-fashion.

A chaste kiss on Edna’s cheek is a nod to romance. Then Eric, throwing off the shackles of civilisation amid the melee, attempts to seize Edna, so Charlie lays him out with arse-kick, lampshade over head, and a slug to the massive gut that makes the antagonist collapse like a dynamited tower block.

Charlie makes some noble and romantic declarations to Edna — think of the lines Chaplin overdubbed on THE GOLD RUSH if you like: “I am going, but when I return, I shall come back again.”

He flees, taking the lampshade with him.

But we’re not done. Coleman chases Charlie back upstairs, and the ballroom’s sliding doors are turned to Charlie’s advantage. The best architecture-as-gag yet. It builds fast and brilliantly. The doors, refusing to behave like normal doors (Charlie’s only just gotten used to hinges) are at first a menace, then a weapon. By the time our hero has used Coleman’s stolen handcuffs to trap both a revived Eric and Coleman himself, a disembodied head and a matching headless body, things have reached an intense pitch of invention, panic and hilarity. It takes less than a minute but it’s absolutely perfect.

There’s only one more gag. Edna spurns Commodore Slick, who is now unmasked as the mere Eel. No time for pathos, though. Collared by Coleman, Charlie uses the airs and graces of the class system to make his escape: formally introduced to Edna, Coleman has no choice but to take her hand, at which point our man legs it.

You could make a case that having Edna play a more active, willed role in Charlie’s escape would be much better from a character arc viewpoint. Instead, Charlie/Chaplin kind of reduces her to another prop.

The abrupt fadeout leaves us laughing, though I could probably do with a shot of Convict 23 on the open road, heading for the sunset. But there’ll be time for that later.

20,000 Leagues of Their Own

Inspired by the Karel Zeman documentary we didn’t watch a Zeman film but instead looked at Disney’s THE BLACK HOLE 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. First time I’ve made it through the thing, more or less, without drifting off. And yet, it’s not THAT boring.

It’s an impressive technical feat — everything they need to do, they pull off, and Bob Mattey’ giant squid is a wow. No wonder they brought him out of retirement to do Bruce the shark in JAWS. Quick! What was Richard Fleischer’s lawyer’s name? If we knew that, we would know what the squid should be called.

Melvin? Ken? Diablo?

Jules Verne’s episodic, meandering novel has given the adaptors some trouble — scenarist Earl Felton had written a couple of LONE WOLF movies (yay!) and a few small-scale works for Richard Fleischer, including the fantastic THE NARROW MARGIN, and suddenly he’s charged with penning this undersea epic which never had much of a plot. Once the protagonists are taken prisoner by Captain Nemo (James Mason) there’s nothing to do except wander around the magnificent Victorian sub, and go for the occasional jaunt. It all looks great but there’s no dramatic ticking clock to say anything in particular needs doing.

It’s interesting that Nemo is an ambiguous character and the fellow most sympathetic to him, Professor Arronax (Paul Lukas) is also most sympathetic to us. No strong decision seems to have been taken as to who Peter Lorre is playing, so the film’s best actor is somewhat rudderless, although as Fiona pointed out it’s kind of nice to see him playing somebody basically nice. And then there’s Ned Land, whaler and troilist, an appalling lout-hero, ably personated by Kirk Douglas, giving it both knees as usual. This seems to connect somehow to the Harryhausen/Juran FIRST MEN IN THE MOON — both feature delightful Victorian scifi vehicles (see also Pal’s THE TIME MACHINE) and thuggish heroes contrasted with appealing but powerless intellectuals. The Harryhausen movie actually made this WORK, though. (And this almost brings us back to Zeman, since his BARON PRASIL begins with a modern cosmonaut meeting Munchausen on the moon, much like FIRST MEN’s NASA opening, drafted by Nigel Kneale.)

THE BLACK HOLE, it’s been pointed out, is Disney’s unofficial remake of LEAGUES — Maximilian Schell even borrows James Mason’s beard (well, he had no further use for it) — to the extent of stealing the maelstrom from Verne, which doesn’t appear in the movie, and putting it front and centre and calling it a black hole. Where LEAGUES is meandering, though, HOLE is violently incoherent, though it does have an insane psychedelic/religiose ending which elevates it to the category of something or other that happened.

This must surely have been storyboarded to within an inch of its life but, curiously enough, Fleischer’s compositional genius isn’t much in evidence. I guess it’s his first Scope film.

Asides from the actors named above, the movie has one other favourite figure, Percy Helton, who turns up at the start as a salty sea-dog, looking less grotesque than usual in a beard of his own. He should’ve kept it, or vice versa. It’s one of those no-moustache Irish jobs, which usually make people look worse (Lincoln pulled it off, sorta), but dear Perc has the kind of face you can’t disimprove upon, so he ends up looking quite cute — from goblin to garden gnome.