Almost the only shot of a nubile Patrick MacNee in THE SMALL BACK ROOM is a startlingly big closeup, during a hellish board meeting scene in which droning boffins and generals and bureaucrats are frequently drowned out by roadworks from outside. A friend described the whole film as being on the verge of hallucination, and you can see it in this scene (and STILL he wasn’t convinced the giant whisky bottle fitted the film’s schema).
Here’s what the meeting more typically looks like:
But director Powell is forced to push in to an alarmingly intimate view of Mr. MacNee because he has to let us hear a murmured confidence, and if he showed it in a wide shot we’d wonder why everyone else couldn’t hear it, and get offended by it.
Putting the above two pics together emphasises how Chris Challis’s lighting ties the room together.
Board meetings ought to be slow death in films, as they are in life, but this one is electrifying. Our hero, David Farrar (at his most effective — as effective as anyone gets to be, ever) performs a volte-face, switching from dutifully towing the line to stabbing his hated boss in the back over a matter of principle. (And the film makes really fine use of Jack Hawkins — he should have played oily, matey creeps more often.)
For some reason in our weekly watch parties I’ve found myself programming a bunch of films I first wrote about for the BritMovies website — those pieces are now lost to time, and so maybe I felt I’d like to create new versions, or maybe it just felt like time I rewatched the films — ENDLESS NIGHT, the INSPECTOR HORNLEIGH films (which I haven’t written anything about yet) and now David Greene’s SEBASTIAN and I START COUNTING. But I’ve just remembered — I wrote about SEBASTIAN in a very early edition of The Forgotten, my MUBI column.
Greene’s British phase — before he became an American TV movie specialist remaking classics like NIGHT OF THE HUNTER — is not well-represented on home video, so for instance there seems to be no viewable copy of THE STRANGE AFFAIR (strange indeed to imagine Michael York as a police constable — I START COUNTING offers the equally arresting image of Simon Ward as a bus conductor) and the copy of SEBASTIAN we made do with was a 4:3 pan-and-scan.
This is a film of considerable interest — a nervy romcom disguised as an espionage codebreaking thriller — developed by Michael Powell with writer and former real codebreaker Leo Marks, his collaborator on PEEPING TOM. Powell was so deeply unfashionable at this point (1968) that he got tipped out of the director’s chair and retains only a productorial credit.
In his oeuvre, it’s closest to THE SMALL BACK ROOM — a fraught love affair between smart professionals with a background of a high-stakes stressful military-adjacent science project. Marks, having experienced codebreaking at Bletchley Park in wartime postulates a big room like a bingo parlour, crowded with all kinds of girls. In fact, wartime codebreaking was a very feminine occupation since women were available and willing and competent, while most of the men were occupied elsewhere. By 1968, I rather doubt that the field was so female-dominated — the men would have moved back in and elbowed them out. Since the film is determined to be up-to-the-minute it does show us where the women were expected to be at this point — in the discotheque and boutique. The result is a best-of-both-worlds situation considerably better than the reality.
I like seeing gay actors doing espionage hook-ups.
Sebastian — his name appears onscreen via anagrammatic computer-typing courtesy of Richard Williams, while Jerry Goldsmith’s Avengers-like score plays — is Dirk Bogarde. Susannah York is the recruit who throws her head at him. Supporting players include John Gielgud, Ronnie Fraser, Janet Munro, Lili Palmer, and in a single scene, shot during his computer scientist phase, Donald Sutherland (in the following year’s BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN, Sutherland plays both a scientist AND a computer).
I really like this film. Marks was rewritten by Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, a TV playwright best-known for THE DUELLISTS, to the extent that he’s known at all. He seems very switched-on to the contemporary idiom — he’s clearly absorbed the way Pinter, for instance, uses repetition and rephrasing.
Her: “You’re not a bit off-putting really you don’t really put me off a bit.”
Him: “I haven’t got into my stride yet.”
When swinging London movies are unbearable it’s because they’re unconsciously recycling tired tropes. But I like time travelling, so I enjoy the glimpses of the era we get. The film’s incomprehensible excitement over concrete hi-rises even works in its favour because it means we’re spared the trooping of the colour and all that boring tourist stuff.
The movie is designed by Wilfrid Shingleton — tasked with designing a dream home in ENDLESS NIGHT, he concocted a hideous nightmare — here, he crafts an amusing shagging palace for Janet Munro, but his version of Bogarde’s apartment, which is meant to be drab, is actually rather lovely.
Anyway, for more you can read the piece at MUBI. Re-reading it, I really like it! But this one has clearer pics.
SEBASTIAN stars Gabriel; Sophie Western; Sra. Fourneau; Richard Ashenden/Edgar Brodie; Katie O’Gill; The Army; Agnes Isit; Duke of Norfolk; and John Klute.
Even funnier than him smoking his first cigarette in THIS LAND IS MINE. You can see why David Lean liked him — even though the grumpy director — “Actors can be rather a bore” — and the tricky actor would seem like a match made in hell, on paper. Lean even wanted to cast Laughton in the Guinness part in KWAI, imagining that with a bit of a diet Laughton could play a starving POW. Eventually he realised that if Laughton could will himself to look thin for a part, he would have already done so for real life.
Laughton’s drunk scene — chasing reflections of the moon in the puddles of a cobbled street — is rightly celebrated, and hits some moments of weirdness comparable to THE SMALL BACK ROOM’s giant whisky bottle. Especially when Laughton falls down a hatch in the street, an effect achieved with rear projection, I think, and Laughton moving in extreme slomo, with the length of the drop expressionistically exaggerated.
And then there’s the “liver attack” — a would-be comic version of the DTs that Fiona declared to be the most terrifying scene Lean ever filmed. Number one in a crowded field, if you think about it.
I actually put the film on to convince Fiona of John Mills’ brilliance as an actor, a mission which was successful, but here I am talking about Laughton of course because it’s easier to do. Follow-up post?
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