Co Inky Dink 2: The Zeno-Porthos Paradox

So, on Monday I read an article in The Guardian in which actor Rory Kinnear talks about his father Roy’s tragic death on the set of RETURN OF THE MUSKETEERS and the need for more careful control of stunts and/or health and safety risks on film sets generally.

As I always tell my students, when making films we always find ourselves doing silly things nobody would normally do, under pressure of time and money. The time pressure means people don’t think enough about what could go wrong and how to reduce danger. The money pressure means people are tempted to take chances, trusting the odds.

The information Kinnear fils provides is disturbing: his father had been terrified of riding a horse at full gallop over a stony bridge. A stuntman wasn’t engaged to double him. In spite of the fact that he was a poor horseman and in the original THE THREE MUSKETEERS he collided with a tree while trying to ride past it.

I’d heard Lester on the radio in 1983, discussing that scene, before Kinnear’s death made it unfit for joking. “I overheard Roy, shortly before he was to ride his horse into a tree, joking that ‘Dick always has me in his films. I don’t know why: I’ve never done anything to him.'”

But in another interview I read later, Lester spoke of his in-the-moment horror when Kinnear hit the tree, implying that it wasn’t planned in any way.

It’s in the film. I found it hilarious and amazing and wondered how on earth they achieved it safely. It’s not so funny now.

In RETURN OF THE MUSKETEERS part of the bridge ride is also in the film, but it cuts before the accident. You can’t even tell it’s Kinnear on the horse, but presumably Lester would have covered the scene in his usual multicamera way and there’d have been telephoto closeups of the horsemen, so that’s why he felt he needed Kinnear in the saddle, not a stunt double.

With the blackest of irony, to finish the film (the accident happened halfway through the shoot) Lester was forced to double Kinnear extensively, as well as getting a mimic in to impersonate him for dubbing, grim tricks indeed. Screenwriter George McDonald Fraser reports rolling up his sleeves and getting down to work, problem-solving the issue of the suddenly-unavailable actor, a task like any other. But Lester and everyone else report it cast a pall over the filming. “I’ve blanked it.”

But oh yes, the coincidence. The same day I read The Guardian‘s article I screened VIVRE SA VIE for students. Unlike the other films I’ve shown, this was one I hadn’t actually seen. I knew it’d be good and would provide a strong sense of the nouvelle vague‘s 60s innovations. And I had the Criterion Blu-ray, collected from their closet in New York. And I could talk about meeting Anna Karina at Bologna Airport.

Near the end of Godard’s episodic film (which is great), Karina’s Nana Kleinfrankenheim is lucky enough to meet philosopher Brice Parain in a cafe, and he tells her about the dangers of starting to think late in life without having practiced. He uses the example of Porthos’ death scene from Alexandre Dumas’ Twenty Years After:

The scene is very worth watching. And my psychic ears perked up because RETURN OF THE MUSKETEERS is a film of Twenty Years After / Vingt Ans Apres, the book Parain discusses. He recounts how Porthos, retreating from a bomb he’s planted in a cellar, gets lost in thought, wondering how movement is possible, the whole process of one step following another, basically Zeno’s Paradox of Movement. The bomb goes off and the roof caves in.

There are, however, problems.

In my youthful enthusiasm for Lester’s 1973 and 1974 films, I read all of Dumas’ Musketeers series. So I almost immediately realised that Porthos doesn’t die in Twenty Years After (or in RETURN OF THE MUSKETEERS). There are a bunch of sequels that come after and he’s in all of them. Depending on how the work is divided, 20YA is followed by three or four more volumes. Everybody dies at the end of The Man in the Iron Mask, which has been adapted far more often than 20YA.

I couldn’t remember how Porthos dies, so I tried to find out online, and came across an account by one Vagn Rønnov-Jessen in The British Medical Journal which describes Porthos collapsing after a strong exertion, and which it calls the first description of vertebrobasilar insufficiency in fiction. Nothing about a bomb in a cellar or Zeno at all. And this is definitely an accurate account of the death scene in the book — The BMJ wouldn’t make a mistake about that, surely.

MAYBE the bomb-and-Zeno incident occurs somewhere, disconnected from Porthos’ death, but I can’t find any description of it — a Google search just brings up Parain’s scene in VIVRE SA VIE. Did Parain or Godard make it up, or did it come from another book and get misremembered as happening to Porthos? Too late to ask them.

Anyway, strange, that. You wait ages for a Vingt Ans Apres reference and then two come along at once, only one of them isn’t.

The Old Sex Thing

I’ve just been to York to rummage and guddle through the treasures in the Charles Wood Archive. An essay/book chapter will result.

Multiple drafts of Richard Lester films THE KNACK, HELP!, HOW I WON THE WAR, PETULIA, THE BED-SITTING ROOM — I had to restrict my searchings somewhat as I just had a day, so I concentrated mainly on the sixties, taking in THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE and THE LONG DAY’S DYING too. And then I could resist peaking at the dialogue rewrites for THE THREE MUSKETEERS, partly just so I could hold George MacDonald Fraser’s jumbo script in my hands. Interleaved throughout are bits of suggested dialogue on tissue-thin pages, where Fraser’s brisk yet literary exchanges are substituted for Wood’s strange, informal yet archaic word patterns, full of hesitations, repetitions, non-sequiturs and talking at cross-purposes. In the finished film, often the scenes combine both texts, always favouring the tightest construction.

In THE THREE MUSKETEERS, Raquel Welch hitches a ride on a sedan chair, hanging off the side so she’s concealed from pursuers, but part of her is revealed to the chair’s occupant (Frank Thornton, Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served?). Fraser, I think, tried some dialogue for this guy, but Wood was asked to give it another go, and came up with ~

Pretties, a maiden’s bobbing pretties, bobbing … bub, bub, they go … oh!

Which didn’t make it into the film, possibly for reasons of taste, maybe because Welch’s “pretties” don’t bob, they jut like an escarpment.

It’s a cleverly devised visual gag, but maybe a bit creepy and that dialogue would have pushed it over, I think. But pushing things into an area of discomfort or conflicted response is rather a Wood speciality, it’s what he normally got paid for.

There’s a suggestion that Thornton’s aristocrat, off-camera (after blowing on his fingers to warm them) has a fondle of the pretties, at which Raquel jumps down from the sedan chair, and then oddly waves to it before running off, a peculiar, sweet touch — as if she thinks she now has a friendship with the occupant — which maybe softens the creepiness.

Wood’s textual descriptions are as great as his dialogue, and the only way to enjoy them is to get ahold of the scripts. There’s this bit from THE BED SITTING ROOM, in which Michael Hordern invades a woman who has mutated into a cupboard (while Rita Tushingham enjoys her reunion with the cupboard-woman, who is her mother) ~

 

“He enters the cupboard sexily.”

Michael Hordern’s radiant leer and the caressing hand on the door — eeewwww!

Lots and lots of fascinating stuff on THE KNACK which I’ll devote a whole post to.

Here’s a nicely described moment from HOW I WON THE WAR which made it in more or less intact ~

A WOMAN LOOKS THROUGH THE CURTAINS AND WATCHES ANOTHER WOMAN IN TURBAN AND STRAP SHOES BEING KISSED BY A FLAPPY TROUSERED MAN IN A RESERVED OCCUPATION WHICH HE HAS WRITTEN ON A PLACARD AROUND HIS NECK. HE HAS HIS HAND UP HER UTILITY SKIRT. THEY ARE BOTH SLIGHTLY DRUNK. WITH GAS MASKS.

The movie adds some dialogue, also no doubt by Wood — they would keep him around during filming to invent bits and bobs — “Here, you’ve brought your child’s gas mask,” says the woman, “Oh no, not in front of your child’s gas mask.”

The man is Frank Thornton, of course, whose presence always fires the erotic imagination.

Wood did a lot of uncredited work on PETULIA — enough to deserve a credit, really. He moved it definitively away from the source novel and the Barbara Turner draft (both of them are credited) before Lawrence B. Marcus came on and produced the final version. I *think* Marcus came up with the line “Was it the sex thing, Archie? Was it the old sex thing?” because I read two versions by Wood of the topless restaurant scene it is uttered in. But it sounds Wood-y, showing that his influence on the film remained — the fractured timeline/s were certainly introduced by Wood, no doubt with Lester’s encouragement.

A good bit ~

ARCHIE TOUCHES HER AND IT LOOKS LIKE ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS WE ALL KNOW AND LOATHE THAT ARE HOLLYWOOD SHORTHAND FOR YOU ARE A WONDERFUL HUMAN BEING AND I DEARLY TRULY LOVE YOU ABOUT TO BE SEALED WITH SPITTLE.

JUST BEFORE WE PUKE SHE SCREAMS AND FAINTS.

Everything’s Coming Up Hitler

Reading yesterday’s post, greatest living Scotsman Steven McNicoll texted me with two more Hitlers.

First off, Frank Finlay is Hitler! In an ITV play, The Death of Adolf Hitler broadcast in 1973, the same year Alec Guinness hitlered up — must have been awkward if they bumped into each other.

Hilarious! It’s just pure Frank Finlay, to the power of ten, dressed as Hitler. That may be the problem of doing it in English — you can’t very well put on a Hitler voice.

I once saw Michael Caine interviewed, saying, “What I offer people is the shock of recognition,” and I thought, I’ve never felt the shock of recognition with Michael Caine, unless he means, “Oh look! It’s Michael Caine!” But I do LIKE recognising Michael Caine. Similarly, here, I don’t see Hitler but I do see quite a lot of Frank Finlay and that’s always a welcome thing.

Interviewing Richard Lester, I asked him why he didn’t make Porthos in THE THREE MUSKETEERS a giant, as he is in the book. “It didn’t interest me,” he replied. So he just got Frank Finlay to act giant. Good call.

1981: The Bunker. Anthony Hopkins is Adolf Hitler! Well, he does have the initials.

This one looks quite interesting, but the only impression Hopkins can do is Tommy Cooper. His Hitler suffers the same problem as his Alfred Hitchcock (though again, right initials) — the few areas of resemblance just point up the big areas of difference. He has some eye makeup here, I think, and he’s trying to make himself lipless (would Branagh be good casting? — his Heydrich was fun!) by sheer effort of will, and there’s some good physical work with the hands. But it doesn’t work, I don’t think. Not only do you not think you’re looking at Hitler, you don’t think you’re looking at a person. Whereas with his turn in NIXON, you believe he’s a person, just not Richard Nixon.