The Dream of Wonderland of Long Ago

Delighted to have a contribution from Tim Hayes, the first entry to this blogathon to celebrate a composer, if I’m not mistaken. The composer in question being Basil Poledouris — if you know him, you love him, if you don’t know him, read the piece, you may find you have known him all along.

Coral Browne, stunning in DREAMCHILD (1985). It was to be her last role, and it is suitably valedictory. “The grim reaper wears a smile for me.” Written by Dennis Potter, whose work always had a quality of aching nostalgia, even when he was young, and whose masterpiece may be not a TV play, series or film, but his beautiful final interview.

DREAMCHILD is about facing death, which means facing your life and reflecting on it. As a vehicle for this, Potter chose Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the model for Alice in Wonderland, who made a trip to America aged 80 to be honoured by Columbia University. Potter equips her with a young companion Nicola Cowper, and a pushy American newspaperman (a ludicrously young Peter Gallagher). And, brilliantly, he mixes scenes from Lewis Carroll with memories of Charles Dodgson, the stuttering don who loved Alice and immortalized her, movingly played by Ian Holm (about twenty years too old for the part, but who cares when the performance is this good?).

I was lucky enough to see this on its (minimal, transitory) first release, with a Q&A with director Gavin Millar, a scholarly fellow who had made many BBC documentaries. One particularly good one on Fellini explains the presence of a rippling fabric sea in Wonderland, for the grotesque, menacing Gryphon and soggy Mock Turtle to exchange unpleasantries in front of.

The wonderland creatures, even the Hatter, are all played by animatronic creations from Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop. With its comparatively miniscule budget, DREAMCHILD could never have afforded these lavish practical effects, but Henson & Co decided to treat the film as r&d for the forthcoming LABYRINTH, so Millar got himself a bargain. The idea is to make the familiar fairytale figures threatening and disturbing, as the aged Alice has a bad conscience and is menaced by memories she doesn’t want to face. The Gryphon is voiced with Scots aggression by Fulton Mackay, who had plenty of experiences sitting on beaches in LOCAL HERO, the Turtle by Alan Bennett, and the March Hare by my idol Ken Campbell (who also appears as a radio sound effects man).

These sequences, and the transitions between them, are enhanced greatly by Stanley Myers’ sonorous score, which throbs and scrapes and elevates everything it touches with a high seriousness.

There are a few problems. The budget seems strained in places. Millar admitted that it was very hard to find stock footage of 30s New York in colour. I say that if stock footage is your answer, you may be asking the wrong question. Since the stock shots cannot be integrated with the actors, it can only serve as establishing shots, and “establishing shots are a waste of time,” as Brian DePalma once sagely grumbled. I can see why the movie might have looked too small and too internal without wide shots in the pretend New York (British locations and sets, reasonably effective). Getting a cameraman to the real New York and filming UP might have helped. Stylisation might have solved everything, but I can see why Millar wanted a contrast between the “real” and “fantasy” elements of the story.

Millar also confessed that the love story in the film struck him as its weakest element, and I agree. Part of this has to do with Gallagher, who seems quite capable of playing a fast-talking newspaperman of the period (Millar cited HIS GIRL FRIDAY as the model for this stuff), but who hasn’t been driven on or given his head, and who is surrounded by actors who need time to think, so the pace never reaches a third of what it should be.

Quibbles over — when the movie is in the past, it seems rich and lavish, and likewise the Wonderland scenes. Whenever it focuses on Coral Browne, it is a majestic success. And it has a secret weapon in Amelia Shankley as Little Alice, an incredible Personality Kid who can seemingly do anything, and is a match for Ian Holm in their scenes together. Millar remarked that the kids were amazingly good at looping dialogue, but really they’re amazing at everything. Shankley is immediately my favourite screen Alice, helped by the fact that she’s doing a different job than the others, playing the real girl rather than the fictional version (Potter’s character has more dimensions than Carroll’s) and by the fact that she’s close to the right age, unlike everyone else, ever. And since she has shorter, darker hair than the Tenniel illustration, she looks like the real girl and she’s free from comparisons with any other movie Alice anyway.

Millar’s excellent work with his cast is augmented by the disconcerting way he shuffles material — no doubt suggested at least by Potter, who delighted in flashbacks, dreams, daydreams — he brought the Fellini 8 1/2 approach to British television. It’s one big Kuleshov effect — elderly Alice looks, and the Charles Dodgson of seventy years ago looks back. Time shatters and the mirror fragments reflect a cluster of disconnected moments.

Browne was right to bow out here. There are distressingly few good roles for older actresses, and the chances of another part this rich coming along would be slim. With her big, wide, wide-apart eyes, she resembles at times an animatronic effect herself, but the life she projects is real, the lines on her face sculpted by time, not a modeller’s tools. I would wish for her a death as gracious as the one seemingly awaiting Alice, but it was not to be. Her death from cancer was protracted and undignified.

As a small recompense, she was granted immortality.

Cosmic Ray

Ray Bradbury is, of course, irreplaceable. Nobody in science fiction or in literature can occupy the place he held.

In the cinema, things are more problematic. I recall an essay by Harlan Ellison where he addressed R.B.’s patchy record of screen adaptations, arguing that Bradbury’s dialogue, like Hemingway’s, is designed to be read, not spoken, and sounds weird coming from the lips of an actor in a scene. He might have been talking of himself (or Clive Barker, for that matter). We could get into a debate about which of these authors writes great dialogue which is just too literary to perform, and which writes purple, gaudy stuff that is sometimes a little too rich even for the page, but never mind.

Rod Steiger liked to camouflage himself nude on people’s couches in hopes they’d sit on him. Creepy.

Being rather familiar with Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (a little patchy, I think, but with a great Herrmann score and one of the  most beautiful endings of any film), SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (flawed but seriously underrated, and I ought to treat it to a Forgotten round about Halloween), and MOBY DICK, scripted by Bradbury for John Huston, who did a great job except for the styrofoam cetacean and the balsa Ahab, being as I say rather familiar with those, we elected to watch THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, which I’d never previously been able to sit through, and The Martian Chronicles mini-series which I don’t think I’d watched since it first aired.

Both movies are based on novels which are really short story collections, things which grew organically without the usual diagrams. Of course, the slide rule and shoehorn and bacon slicer have all been deployed to hew them into some kind of cinematic shape. Jack Smight’s film of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN put me off as a youngster by being slow, ponderous and kind of depressive.

The movie stars Rod Steiger, who suffered from depression for real, but we can’t blame him for the film’s tone, he attacks his role with typical ferocity. (If you want to see Steiger acting while in the midst of depression — I can’t think why you would, but I’ll mention it anyway — see John Hough’s AMERICAN GOTHIC aka HIDE AND SHRIEK, where he can barely bring himself to mumble his lines. Very sad.) Jerry Goldsmith’s score is elegiac and lovely, but maybe a little lacking in forward thrust. But it’s the script and direction which really drag. In cutting Bradbury’s collection of tales down to three, screenwriter Howard Kreitsek forces each episode to hang about too long, turning them into turgid mood pieces when many of them are snappy potboilers on the page, pulp nasties with plenty of poetic ambition but one foot solidly in cheap thrills. The Veldt is basically a sci-fi twist on an EC horror story. But in the reverential treatment trowelled on by Smight and Kreitsek, everything is drawn-out, ponderous and aching with Significance. The other two stories become kind of pointless in the distorted form presented, although the planet where it always rains is beautifully designed, and shows that Douglas Adams was right to say that a towel is a useful thing to have in space.

Rod Steiger rocking the Ricky Gervaise look.

The exception is the framing structure, which peters out at the end with a crap zoom on a dusty road, but for much of the time is quirky, edgy, and a-quiver with a kind of homo-erotic menace I don’t recall in the book. Steiger is excellent here, with his dog in a bag (a Pomeranian named Peke), and Robert Drivas matches him in fervid intensity. The 30s atmosphere is rather besmirched by Claire Bloom’s very 1969 hair and makeup (did production designers not get driven to DESPAIR by the haircuts and cosmetics inflicted in those days? — I’m sure it’s just my imagination telling me Julie Christie wears white lipstick in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, but I swear it’s not far off) but otherwise this is lovely stuff. Somebody film some more Bradbury stories, replace the ones in here, and you’d be onto something.

The Martian Chronicles suffers more severe flaws, but is a lot more watchable, thanks to a comparatively nippy pace, a greater variety of schtick, and some enjoyable hams. Top marks to Stanley Myers for his epic mood stuff, deduct two points for the disco theme tune (VERY catchy though it is), and great credit to Assheton Gorton (BLOW-UP) for his production design. The rocketships are naff (Bradbury himself called them “flying phalluses”) and a few other elements are laughable, but the obelisks and pyramids constructed in Malta and Lanzarotte are striking and actually convincing, despite the fact that everything’s decorative, nothing’s functional.

Michael Anderson (DAMBUSTERS), a former AD to Asquith, production manager to Lean, is a prose artist rather than a poet, which is actually good from a story point of view. He can’t smother everything in damned reverence because he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t have the taste to avoid NASA stock footage and redundant miniatures docking in space which aspire to 2001 but land squarely in the key of Thunderbirds, but he dishes up the yarns in a no-nonsense way.

“They left out the magic. They left out the part that was Bradbury,” complained sci-fi scribe David Gerrold (and he should know: he created the Tribbles), but this is not wholly true. Each episode (three ninety-minute blockbusters with three stories loosely linked in each) hits at least one moment of the uncanny, maybe because each Bradbury story has at its heart a little something that IS purely cinematic. He was too much of a cinephile not to put that in, and screenwriter Richard Matheson is too shrewd a dramatist to miss those moments.

So in the adaptation of Mars is Heaven!, Anthony Pullen-Shaw is good and eerie when he suddenly admits to not being Commander Black’s brother, after all — and Anderson has remembered how effective Joseph Cotten’s turn to camera in close-up was in SHADOW OF A DOUBT, another tale of a murderous family intruder with telepathy in Thornton Wilder land.

This is not my beautiful house from David Cairns on Vimeo.

And in what was once And the Moon Be Still as Bright, there’s a great bit by Bernie Casey as the astronaut who goes native —

The Last Martian from David Cairns on Vimeo.

Casey has immense authority, a rich voice, and a great way of seeming to throw away lines while really turning them to catch the light, although much of the time here he doesn’t seem to have learned those lines too well, which he covers up by gesturing in a stylized manner. But with this speech he knows he’s got something a little immortal, and he nails it.