The same night (Saturday, at our online film club — join us?) we ran WITNESS IN THE DARK, we also looked at THE MAN UPSTAIRS, and it was an excellent night. TMU himself is the late Sir Dickie Lord Attenborough, gone berserk in a cheap flat, and beseiged by cops while his fellow lodgers try to decide amongst themselves whether to band together and help him.
It’s a knock-off of LE JOUR SE LEVE or THE LONG NIGHT, but instead of Marcel Carne or Anatole Litvak in charge it has Don Chaffey, distinctly of the B-list but he does all right here. He’s known for his Harryhausens, SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS and ONE MILLIONS YEARS BC, two of my favourites, and he was headhunted by Disney which maybe kept him away from more thematically ambitious works, but here he’s on top form, apparently relishing the limitations of shooting in and around a single building. Some great angles skilfully used.
TMU is evidently a much more lavish production than WITNESS IN THE DARK, even if it keeps things small. It has proper production design, giving it a sense both of solidity and social authenticity. Admittedly, the crowd gathered outside is rather tiny, and has to be swelled by the rather noticeable presence of Dickie’s chum Bryan Forbes (at least, I think it’s him. Could be Syd Chaplin). So nobody gets clobbered with a bicycle in the crush, it wouldn’t be credible. Asides from Attenborough, there’s Bernard Lee as the mulish copper who wants to barge in with tear gas, surely precipitating tragedy, and Donald Houston as the sympathetic shrink trying to de-escalate the situation. And there’s Virginia Maskell, Kenneth Griffith, Edward Judd (way down the cast as a secondary constable) and other persons of interest.
The conflict about how to tackle mental health crises when they impact public order is still timely — the police have very little training in this important part of their job (I think they get about a day) and they’re not always inclined to thoughtful or sensitive approaches (you don’t need ANY academic qualifications to join the fuzz in this country). If you were going to design a service purely to deal with mental health crises, it wouldn’t greatly resemble the police.
This all plays out neatly through interpersonal conflict between Lee and Houston. A British film in 1954 wasn’t about to diss the police for corruption or brutality, but suggesting they can be stupid or misguided was still pretty bold. And this kind of conflict is great to make Houston look good, in his duffel coat, and to get the audience agitated, which we were.
The film is less successful in piecing together Attenborough’s character’s backstory — we get very interested by the pills he’s on, by the fact that he’s a government research scientist involved with nuclear physics — but we don’t find out anything that could serve as a commentary on the bomb, militarism, or society. The neighbours organizing to help him seem motivated by the fact that he’s an educated, middle-class chap, not some yob. In the era of the angry young man, Attenborough is a perturbed middle-aged man.
But the tension is raised nicely — there’s almost no music, just the opening titles and some very faint rhythmic sounds during the final countdown to surrender or death. It’s all done with story, performance, lighting and framing (by Gerald Gibbs who shot WHISKY GALORE!), and editing (John Trumper, who cut GET CARTER). A slight overuse of the cucalorus, but those abstract, unmotivated shadows are lovely so I can’t begrudge them.
Apparently I was curious about it. But not so curious that I watched it in 1996. That would have made sense — I could have seen in in 70mm. I watched it this week.
I was curious about it being the full four hour unexpurgated play, but I came to believe that by not cutting, Branagh had given up a big part of the adaptor’s toolkit — directors typically choose what parts of the play to emphasise, they focus in, by cutting. And, while I can see doing it uncut on the stage makes sense, any uncut Shakespeare text on the screen is likely to suffer from redundancy as the characters take their time describing things we can SEE. Oh boy did that happen here.
I should give Branagh credit where possible: he makes the thing go at a fair lick. And when ones’ eyes and ears have not actually gone blurry, you can still tell what the people are saying. Sometimes, it is true, you wonder why everyone is in such a frenzy when there’s not so much happening, and often, it is true, you feel that a momentary dramatic pause would bring out a lot more meaning than the relentless jabber.
The film is cast in a racially-blind manner, before it was fashionable or popular, and this is good. Hamlet is totally a play you can do this with, and any call for realism can be dismissed outright since the characters are (a) speaking blank verse and (b) not speaking Danish. There are no important Black characters, but there are quite a few minor ones, and one of those is the excellent Don Warrington.
Branagh has a certain boldness. My friend Paul Duane calls him “the worst director who has ever lived,” and he is, essentially, correct, but Branagh does things which are wrong in surprising ways, not just in boring ways, so I can still find him preferable to, say, Richard Attenborough. Who turns up here, because, of course he does.
OK, I think I’m done being nice. It wasn’t a very impressive display of positives, I admit.
No Merchandising. Editorial Use Only. No Book Cover Usage.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Moviestore Collection/REX (1596346a)
Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh
Film and Television
Branagh’s boldness is manifest in the uncut text, in the 70mm format, in a certain gusto with which he throws the camera around, and in the chaotic mix-and-match approach to casting. The guiding aesthetic principle here is the Dunning-Kruger effect. Branagh swirls the Steadicam around his cast, goes into slomo, cuts furiously, because he does, at least, know he CAN, but doesn’t know whether, from moment to moment, he should or should not. We’re on random.
Similarly, Branagh throws together the classically trained theatrical knight, the movie star, the sitcom actor, with gay abandon — it’s admirable in theory — you can see it being exciting — but everybody is playing the wrong part. Brian Blessed — fruity ham — is the ghost. Charlton Heston — grim-visaged axiom of cinema — is the player king. Swap them around and you’d have something.
Jack Lemmon — a potentially fine Polonius — is Marcellus, essentially a random spear-carrier. You wonder why he’s the only American spear-carrier. And whether he’s a bit old for active duty. Richard Briers, a good sitcom actor, is Polonius. And it’s true that Polonius is the most sitcomlike character, and also true that Briers suppresses his natural affability to play the man as a more creepy and august figure, it doesn’t always work.
All the play’s double-acts are mismatched: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two interchangeable doofuses, are Timothy Spall and Reece Dinsdale, a grotesque and a normie. The two gravediggers are Billy Crystal and Simon Russell Beale, Borscht belt and Stratford. Crystal is possibly my favourite performance in the thing: he isn’t funny, his stuff with Beale is a snooze, but there’s a provocative sense of challenge when he’s matched with Branagh. One is a movie star and the other only thinks he is because he has no sense upon which to base his judgement. The result is tension, and the only place where the cutting back and forth between characters adds any excitement.
How badly cast is this film? We are asked to believe that Derek Jacobi has stolen Julie Christie away from Brian Blessed.
Jacobi — always cast as men called Claudius, is miscast as Claudius here. He’s not an impressive opponent. He does OK.
Branagh has realised one thing, I think, but he’s realised it in the edit: the shot/countershot cuts only work when we see who’s talking. It must have been discovered that reaction shots make you lose the thread of the speeches. Or else it was assumed. The result is a Dragnet approach to cutting, where every cut is on the end of a speech, cueing up the reply. I love Dragnet but it has a deliberately inexpressive cutting pattern, suitable for procedurals.
What Shakespeare needs, I suspect, and could very well get in a 70mm film, is dynamic blocking and long-held wide shots where everyone can act together in real time. There’s very, very little of that here, though there are plenty of scenes where the camera just circles the actors for no good reason. This is Branagh’s third Shakespearean adaptation so you would think he’d have a working theory of montage and mise-en-scene.
Olivier went into HENRY V with a plan: he knew that Shakespeare’s more rousing speeches seem to necessitate a certain building to a climax by the actor. The traditional approach to long scenes in the movies is to move closer. Olivier sussed that this would result in us looking right up his nose just as he was really getting into it with the yelling and gesticulating, so he reversed the pattern, very consciously: as Henry builds to a climax, the camera pulls back.
Actual saliva bubble
Branagh never realised that when he made his own HENRY V, so the film is a spittle-flecked shoutfest in which the King spends a lot of time screaming right in our ear. It’s distracting when you see saliva blasting forth in great gobs: it’s only appropriate to do spit if that’s the only thing you want the audience to notice.
Here we are, after MUCH ADO, and Branagh is still drenching the scenery with his face. He gets started early, when he meets the ghost. This is very bad: we have about three and a half hours to go at this point. How’s he going to top this? Shit, what happens when he goes/plays mad?
Plenty. The Dane froths, simpers, screams, and his voice goes comically high to suggest strong emotion. One of my favourite out-of-control performances is Alan Arkin’s last scene in LITTLE MURDERS. It’s huge and manic and (bouncing) off-the-wall. But it’s one scene. He builds to it, and then he stops. Branagh does have quiet moments — the only scene I’d seen excerpted from this was, predictably, “To be or not to be,” which is perfectly OK, and calm. But he spends about an hour running about doing full loony.
Kate Winslet, at least, is only wildly over-the-top for one scene.
As the film trundled on, I found myself no longer able to notice how badly directed it was. I had lost the aesthetic sense. I was in Branaghworld. But the opening scenes really pop and zing with ineptitude, and cry out for close analysis. I think it’d be fun to look at scenes from the Branagh, Olivier and Richardson HAMLETs, as I previously did with threevariedMACBETHs.
But not this scene. This scene I just include because it made me giggle. I’m not even sure why. Do you find it funny? I’ve written before about how certain actors should be put at the tip of an A composition because they can’t help but distract from the big foreground heads. Turns out Jack Lemmon is one. Everything he does is more interesting than what Hamlet and Horatio do, even when he’s just titling screen left so Horatio won’t block him from view (00.13).
But the funnier stuff is inside. Partly it’s weird because we see a normal door, and then Branagh cuts back and forth between two groups in the narrow doorway, and they both have the same background. Despite the fact that the camera angles must, presumably, be at least 90 degrees apart. This is called “cheating” and I generally approve of it — to hell with continuity, make the shots effective. Here it becomes subtly discombobulating and hilarious.
(Louis Malle said he was fond of shooting the closeups in a shot/countershot sequence against the exact same background, but I haven’t looked out examples to see how he gets away with it. He mentioned it in connection with ZAZIE so he may have been after the exact dizzy effect Branagh stumbles upon here.)
But there’s just something about the Dragnet cutting-on-dialogue that becomes hysterical to me when the actors build up a froth and the cutting gets faster. Thespian tennis. What do you think?
HAMLET stars Hercule Poirot; Martin Beck; Petulia Danner; Young Iris Murdoch; King Vultan; Sir Robert Peel; Smee; Airey Neave; Miracle Max; Lavrenti Beria; J.M.W. Turner; Sherlock Holmes; C.C. Baxter; Lenin; Cyrano de Bergerac; Dr. Satnam Tsurutani; Judah Ben-Hur; Aunt May; Johnny Rotten; Philip Smith; Popeye; Iris Murdoch; Lord Raglan; Sid Luft; Pinkie Brown; Captain R.F. Scott R.N.
THE DOCK BRIEF AKA TRIAL AND ERROR is a legal comedy adapted from a play by John Mortimer (the Rumpole man) and starring Peter Sellers and Richard Attenborough. We came for Sellers but stayed for Sir Dickie who, transfigured by ace makeup man Stuart Freeborn’s glue-on nose, plays a monkeylike Essex seed shop proprietor awaiting trial for the murder of his overly jocular wife (Beryl Reid, in flashback).
(I guessed, without having to check, that Freeborn must have assembled Sir Dickie Lord Attenborough’s nose for SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON, the flaw in the plan being that SOAWA isn’t a comedy, and anyway Dickie’s naked nose would have been an ideal nose for that part, so one spends the film questioning the putty, surely not the effect intended.)
Sellers is doing the posh, patronising old duffer routine, and it’s nothing particularly challenging for him — shades of Grytpype-Thynne. But he bounces extremely well off Attenborough’s man without qualities, a dull fellow who can’t really process the fact of being on trial for murder, but is submissively keen to help this dignified gent if he possibly can. The two wonder in and out of flashbacks and fantasies, observing their earlier lives.
Sellers’ character has been a lawyer for forty years without ever obtaining a case, though, so their prospects of success seem slim.
The name of director James Hill rang only the dimmest of gongs, but he’s quite imaginative here — we pass from the prisoner’s cell to the court as seen in imagination in a single swift pan, as if the two rooms adjoined (I’ve praised this kind of invention before). When we see in flashback Attenborough finally cracking under the strain of his appalling wife, the camera rushes at her, jump-cuts back to the starting block, and has another go. Repeat several times as the woman cackles insanely. Reaction shot of Attenborough, with the camera literally trembling as if situated by an erupting volcano.
I looked Hill up — extraordinary career the man had. Well, curious, anyway. BORN FREE, A STUDY IN TERROR, CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY are three I’d seen. He’d just got free of the Children’s Film Foundation. Later, he alternated between animal flicks building on the success of his lion thing — AN ELEPHANT NAMED SLOWLY, THE BELSTONE FOX, BLACK BEAUTY — and utterly disparate genre fodder including a sex comedy (THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y. and a spy thriller (THE CORRUPT ONES). By 1975 he was back at the CFF. His last movie, a 1984 Channel 4 adaptation of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters (sic) seems to have vanished without trace. I’d like to see that one. Alec McCowan and Tracy Ullman? A must.
As good as Attenborough is, the film’s funniest element is David Lodge, hulking comic actor who was generally brought on to Sellers films to keep the difficult star happy. In this movie, he plays a humorous lodger brought into the household to keep the laughing wife happy. It’s Attenborough’s secret hope that she’ll run off with the fellow. Reid makes her “good-natured” character suitably nightmarish, but Lodge, a chuckling man-mountain, is infectious the moment the front door opens to reveal him. Maybe a malignly amused woman isn’t as funny as an innocently but horribly fatuous man. At any rate, he’s hilarious.
Actually, of the 102 films Lodge was in, only about 12 of them had Sellers as well, so Sellers and I were not his only admirers.
shadowplay 