The Cartier Affair

The Fanatics is a play produced as part of something called Theatre 625 in 1968, for the BBC and directed by Rudolph Cartier (The Quatermass Experiment, 1984). One of the reasons Cartier, an Austrian, made such a name for himself at the Beeb was that he knew all these European plays nobody here had heard of. Like Lubitsch with his Hungarians.

The source here is a play called L’Affair Calas by Stellio Lorenzi, Andre Castelot and Alain Decaux, adapted for TV by Max Marquis. It’s a true story of injustice from France in the 1760s — when a Huguenot hangs himself, the Catholic authorities rush to accuse his father of murder, on the assumption that the son was considering switching faith. The father is tortured to death — and then Voltaire gets involved.

My initial interest was Cartier’s involvement, but then I saw we’ve got Leonard Rossiter as Voltaire and Alan Badel as “the Capitoul” — the authority figure whose blind prejudice causes the tragedy. Those are two of my favourite hams, though sadly they never appear together. If they did I might suffer a fatal overplotz.

The narrative has aspects of WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, with the ailing Voltaire being told by all and sundry that he mustn’t take the case, it’d kill him. Among these advisors is the splendid Bernard Hepton. Rosalie Crutchley is Madame Calas.

I also got very excited to see this chap, as the chief torturer, breaking a man on the wheel before the titles have even rolled (Take THAT, Mrs. Whitehouse!). I know him from all kinds of stuff. His name is Milton Reid and he’s an Anglo-Indian ex-wrestler. He has a laborious fight with Roger Moore in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and is Vincent Price’s first victim in DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN (death by telephone!). His vaguely “exotic” looks got him cast in all sorts of inappropriate roles. But his appearance always gives me pleasure.

The real surprise was John Paul, the ship’s captain from A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG, whose existence I’d never really been aware of before, though I’d seen COUNTESS before and also DOOMWATCH. He plays Calas, and he suffers mightily all through the show — bereaved, accused, tortured and executed. He’s very good.

The acting generally here is much better than in Out of the Unknown (see yesterday), though it is, to use Alex Cox’s phrase, “a certain type of acting.” Slightly rhetorical and olde-worlde. The kind of acting where people hold out parchments and rap them with their knuckles to make a satisfying BAP sound. Here, one man holds out the document and another man makes it go BAP. Teamwork! Ensemble playing at its finest!

Cartier blocks beautifully — the TV play, rehearsed extensively and then either filmed live or in great twenty-minute sections, doesn’t allow quite the finesse of a movie, but the rigours involved make for sound creative choices: make every shot last as long as it possibly can (figure out when the angle’s going to fall apart, and intercede before it does); cut only with a definite dramatic purpose; keep lively by moving the people about and forcing the cameras to work to keep up.

Badel has the best part — his character is semi-fictitious, and amalgam of various guilty officials and a work of the imagination — it’s fascinating to work out what’s going on with this guy. Bigotry, certainly, but to what extent is he sincerely deluded and to what extent just going with what seems expedient? There’s no good result in a case like this, just different fascinating shades of evil. Badel keeps us guessing, which stops the capitoul from devolving into a stock baddie.

Bunker Mentality

I was in the mood to see some more of Rudolph Cartier’s work — I’ve decided to insert him into my next novel — the director of the first three Quatermass serials and Nigel Kneale’s 1984 adaptation — also the producer of the remarkable CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS. Pushing the boat out ever so gently I looked for more of his science fiction work, and found the surviving episode of two he made for Out of the Unknown, a classy sf anthology show. (Huge amounts of Cartier’s work is either lost or unavailable due to the BBC’s formerly feckless preservation policies — a lot of his work went out live with no recording made, or the recordings were junked.)

Level 7 (1966) is adapted from a Mordecai Roshwald story by J.B. Priestly, of all people, and is set almost entirely in a bunker thousands of miles deep, designed to withstand nuclear attack, and it’s simultaneously an attack on police states and on the idea of the survivable nuclear war. Cartier does a little “It’s me!” wave to us by using Mars from Holst’s Planets Suite on the soundtrack.

Nice, stark design makes this dystopia oppressively claustrophobic, and avoids the sillier elements of TV-sf. The fuzzy kinoscope look suits the grimness.

The acting is… variable. We have a lot of characters with speaking roles, and numerous of them go for an overly fervid approach. Even when they don’t, the acting often has quotation marks around it, or feels like it’s happening in the past tense, or you feel the actor’s self-consciousness. Stand-out player is the mighty Michelle Dotrice, famous mainly as sitcom imbecile Frank Spencer’s hapless Betty in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, which may give the viewer dramaturgical whiplash, but I’ve already seen her officiate at a satanic rape rite in BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW so I feel nothing she does will surprise me in a distracting way. She’s just persistently true, in her jumpsuit and beehive.

I was waiting for a big plot-twist ending whereby the whole troglodytic society would prove to be a test of endurance, but such cop-out fake-outs are avoided, even though Priestley, we know, love twists. Instead we just have this awful, inhuman society gradually destroyed by radiation sickness. The reality of what that would be like is simply too unpleasant for TV at this time (The War Game would get banned for going anywhere near it) so our characters gradually go blind and freeze like statues, which is disturbing as hell but slightly absurd too. “He’s gone completely rigid!” a bit player exclaims.

I think that, when your excuse for being depressing is that you’re following the truth, you need to signal clearly whether it’s a poetic or a documentary truth. I guess the whole Level 7 setting is science-fictional enough to allow some latitude.

I’ve just discovered the existence of The Fanatics, a Cartier-directed teleplay starring Leonard Rossiter as Voltaire and Alan Badel as a torturer and I am delighted to be watching that RIGHT NOW.