Archive for Yootha Joyce

Blue Sky Alice

Posted in FILM, literature, Television with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 8, 2020 by dcairns

“Blue sky casting” is a screenwriter’s trick — you imagine anyone you like, living or dead, in a role, and that hekps you find the character’s voice. If you’re writing for Jeff Goldblum or Michael Redgrave, different things happen. What you probably shouldn’t ever do is cast the person you were thinking of — there’s an exciting tension that happens if you cast, say, Joan Cusack, in a role written with, say, Myrna Loy in mind.

It’s also a fun exercise: here’s a fantasy cast list for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. I found as i was coming up with it that it was tending to a mid-1950s feel, and naturally British. But it began when Fiona proposed Peter Lorre as the Dormouse.

It turns out I’ve been carrying in my mind various casting ideas for Alice, and they cam tumbling out and were joined by others…

It just seems crazy that Kenneth Williams never played the Mad Hatter. Put it down to typecasting — the Carry On films, though hugely popular, rendered all the actors uncastable in anything other than sitcom or sex farce. The two main productions KW would have been eligible for, Jonathan Miller’s rather wonderful TV Alice in Wonderland, and the execrable musical ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, have excellent Hatters in Peter Cook and Robert Helpmann respectively, but Williams would have knocked it out the park.

It’s kind of obvious that Jimmy Edwards, extravagantly-tached comic actor, should be the Walrus, but I think Norman Wisdom is very close to Tenniel’s drawing of the Carpenter. It’s starting to look like this production belongs in the mid-fifties to sixties.

Not for any physical resemblance, but the wide-eyed dithering innocence John le Mesurier brought to his work in Dad’s Army seems to suit the King of Hearts nicely. And he practically plays the role in Gilliam’s JABBERWOCKY.

I feel that Irene Handl deserves a crack at the Queen of Hearts — though associated with working class roles (she argued with Billy Wilder about how to play cockney dialogue), she was actually quite posh, seemingly, and derived her characterisations from her observation of her family’s maids when she was young. And she’s the most versatile and surprising and funny of actors, seriously underused. (If you were doing it later, Prunella Scales would be immense, and she’s a lot like Dodgson’s own drawings.)

I’ve always seen Lionel Jeffries as the White Knight. He has such an air of melancholy. I can never read the Knight’s verse without tears springing unbidden to my eyes. Same with Lear’s The Jumblies: “Far and few, far and few…” an incantatory lament.

Okay, granted, Roger Livesey has to be a contender too.

Charles Gray as Humpty Dumpty, because.

When I look at Tenniel’s White Rabbit, I see Edward Everett Horton, which makes it odd that Paramount cast him as the Mad Hatter in the 30s version. They should have borrowed George Arliss for the Hatter and given Horton the rabbit. Fuck Skeets Gallagher. But if we’re going for anxious British players of the 1950s, maybe Alastair Sim? Or Alec Guinness, but there you’d be opening up a can of worms. Who could he NOT play? We know he’d make a magnificent Duchess:

And that’s a role which should really be done in drag, for compassionate reasons. Peter Bull was pretty perfect in the seventies abomination. Leo McKern would be good too.

Peter Sellers is maybe the only man to have played motion picture versions of the March Hare AND the King of Hearts, and he’s another can of worms if we let him in. But in the Miller piece he does the unimaginable, improvising Lewis dialogue in character, so he should be essential. Since this would be early, chubby Sellers, maybe we should be thinking in terms of the caterpillar, a somewhat shadowy figure in the illo.

If we’re having Sellers, then Spike Milligan would be a fine Frog Footman (see YELLOWBEARD for some exemplary footmanning from SM).

Based on Tenniel, there can be no question that the White King and Queen are Thorley Walters and Joan Sims. though Handl is another possibility for the latter. The Red Queen could be Flora Robson or Patricia Hayes, but I’m going for Yootha Joyce (energy) whereas the Red King, apparently dreaming the whole thing like in INCEPTION, doesn’t ever wake up and so it seems like wasted effort to cast a celebrated thesp. Might as well be John Wayne.

Miller cast Finlay Currie as the Dodo, an impressive feat — the only human actor to LOOK like a dodo. But he’s too old, since Dodgson based this didactic fowl on himself, incorporating his stutter — Do-do-Dodgson. Trying to find an actor not aged in the 1950s, with Dodgson’s sad eyes and an impressive beak, I stop at Richard Wattis.

Cecil Parker, arch-ovine, must be the Sheep, a rarely-filmed character but one with great material. I suppose the sheep should really be female, but drag is allowed. We’re through the looking glass, here.

The Gnat also has some really good jokes, and is never presented onscreen — perhaps because Tenniel didn’t deign to draw him. Another tutelary figure — you can really tell the author is a lecturer — he could really be played by anybody from Terry-Thomas to Robert Morley. The latter is more pompous, so he’d do, but then for heaven’s sake why not Noel Coward? Or Dennis Price, who quotes Lewis with relish in Mike Hodges’ PULP?

Of course, given the period, we can have perhaps Britain’s greatest child actor in the title role, Mandy Miller (MANDY, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT), and by happy coincidence it appears she’s a fan of the author:

Randy Cook suggests Benny Hill for the Cheshire Cat. What are your thoughts? I presume that, like me, you have been carrying casting ideas for Alice around in your heads for decades.

Things I Read Off the Screen in CATCH US IF YOU CAN

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 6, 2015 by dcairns

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THRILLS

I’ve had a built-in resistance to seeing CATCH US IF YOU CAN, aka HAVING A WILD WEEKEND, John Boorman’s first feature, starring the Dave Clark Five. “Surprisingly good,” say most reviews, before commenting on its unusually bleak quality. I was never tempted because A HARD DAY’S NIGHT holds a prominent place in my heart, and the DC5 are no substitute for the Fab 4.

But those reviews are accurate, and also the film is damned odd, a worthy debut for its maker, a visionary, or would-be visionary, whose visions have often taken him in quite curious directions. CUIYC/HAWW seems perversely calculated to avoid the upbeat charm of AHDN, and even when the action is occasionally fast or rambunctious, the tone is sour, or depressive, or grumpy or just flat.

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MEAT. GO!! GO!! GO!! MEAT FOR GO!!

The mild satiric impulses in Cliff Alun Owen’s Beatles script are amplified here to take in everything about the movie’s world. The DC5 play stuntmen, ludicrously referred to in the script as “stunt boys,” as if that were a thing. Mr. Dave Clark-Five himself runs off with a model, the latest face of British meat, Barbara Ferris, and her jealous boss plants a story in the press that she’s been kidnapped. The other band members are only occasionally along for the ride, and the script doesn’t bother to differentiate them at all, though several seem more interesting and up for it than Mr. Clark-Five. The few songs aren’t performed, they just turn up on the soundtrack, jostling for space with instrumentals by a uncredited John Coleman and the reliably melancholic Basil Kirchin (THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES).

So it’s mostly Ferris and Clark-Five on the road, failing to have adventures, get into scrapes, or meet extraordinary characters. Instead they mope, even at speed. But the movie is unexpectedly brilliant. Like LEO THE LAST, it feels like Boorman has spent his life in an entirely other England and is reporting back from this alien plane. It helps that Manny Wynn’s b&w cinematography is so gorgeous, and the wintry landscapes so well-chosen. The movie always looks as exquisite as a breaking heart.

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DANGEROUS BUILDING

One of many collapsing Boorman properties, from EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC to HOPE AND GLORY. And then there’s the trundling church in DELIVERANCE.

Guest stars turn up — a very naturalistic David Lodge, and a posh couple in Bath played by smarmy Robin Baily and acid Yootha Joyce, who at first seem intended to embody middle-class, middle-aged malaise, but turn out to be good sports. At a fancy dress event at the Roman baths, he has a good time as the Frankenstein monster (an emerging theme here at Shadowplay as we near Halloween) and she drags up as Chaplin, which OUGHT to be the scariest thing ever — imagining Yootha at her most corrosive, crossed with Gloria Swanson’s creepy Little Tramp act in SUNSET BLVD… but it’s oddly mild, since Yootha doesn’t bother doing any Chaplin schtick.

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GUY

The screenplay is by Peter Nichols (GEORGY GIRL, A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG) which grounds the whimsy, which was more than a little heavy already. There’s an encounter with ragged hippies, and Actual Drug References (Clark-Five has never heard the term “spliff,” apparently), and The Writing is already On The Wall as far as that lot are concerned. They are in awe of their mystical leader, a raddled drug casualty who drones garbled prophecies through his implausible facial hair, for this is Ronald Lacey, the bald Nazi from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

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On the basis that pop fans were going to turn up for this anyway, no matter what the actual plot or tone consisted of, Nicholls and Boorman deserve credit for making something nobody would otherwise have commissioned, a glum picaresque of urban and rural England providing none of the expected chirpy pleasures and gloriously vague about what alternative delights we should be getting from its meandering maunderings. It’s pure Boorman, far closer to ZARDOZ, if you can believe that, than it is to any pop film before it.

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H.M.S. DANDY

The ’68 Comeback Special: Charlie Bubbles

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 5, 2013 by dcairns

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Running a themed blogathon at the same time as two alternating columns (The Forgotten and this one, shared with Scout Tafoya who writes it every other week) presents the amusing challenge of coming up with a Thursday article which can fit both the theme of Thursday’s regular feature — the movies that were to have competed at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival — with the theme of the blogathon. In 1968, the hot directors were mostly young, so finding a last film from the line-up might seem a tricky task, but fortunately the Cannes selection committee have provided me with a choice of two — critic Michel Cournot’s LES GAULOISES BLEUE and Albert Finney’s CHARLIE BUBBLES. Both films are the first, last and only films directed by these luminaries, though both have substantial non-directing careers (and Finney co-directed a TV play in 1984).

I’ve plumped for Finney because it’s cheering to see another GOOD British film after GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE and the nightmarish memory of HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH hanging like a miasma over my psyche. And besides, Cournot’s Godard-imitation doesn’t seem like my cup of tea. Hopefully Scout can cover that one…

I’m often skeptical of film stars becoming directors, simply because they can — they often do it on a whim, carried by their box office clout and the studios’ understandable desire to curry favour. But though Finney’s film didn’t win many passionate defenders at the time, and he seems to have slumped back into acting (albeit with less enthusiasm and care than before), I think the movie stands up remarkably well. It’s one of the least fashion-conscious films of the bunch, in no hurry to yell about how with-it the filmmakers are, and of course this works against it dating like the Cardiff and Donner films (though their cringe-making qualities are probably timeless and were apparent even to contemporary observers), but it’s still very much en courant in its subject.

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Writer Charlie Bubbles is a northerner in London, a huge financial success with his novels and their various adaptations. We first meet him arriving at a swank restaurant for conference with various agents, publishers and accountants, all full of schemes to make and save him/them money. Charlie, who’s uncommunicative at the best of times, ditches these boring parasites in favour of a food-fight with fellow Northerner Colin Blakely (whose Yorkshire accent keeps veering into his native Ulster cadences, but whose crazily erratic timing with dialogue is as beautiful as ever).

Drunkenness ensues, then Charlie returns home for a cheese sandwich from his domineering housekeeper Mrs Noseworthy, a Danvers manqué (but he doesn’t eat it), then returns the soused Blakely to his forgiving wife and heads oop North in his Rolls to visit his ex-wife and son, taking with him American student and acting secretary Liza Minnelli, as “Eliza Heyho”, whose first movie this is (apart from guest spot as baby in her mom’s movie, a sort of carry-on role).

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John Simon wrote “The supreme deadweight in the picture is Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland’s daughter, whose screen debut proves easily the most inauspicious since Turhan Bey’s. Miss Minnelli is so untalented and homely, and so blithely unaware of it all, that her performance must rate high on the list of any collector of unconscious camp.” Marginally witty, offensively sexist and mean, and of course deeply stupid, since how would Liza’s performance be improved by a knowledge of her supposed homeliness and lack of talent. We can easily compare Minnelli’s reception with that accorded Angelica Huston for her work in her dad’s rather lovely film maudit A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH. Simon wrote of her, “the face of a gnu and a body of no discernible shape,” and critics united in hostility at what they saw as an amateurish, flat performance lacking in the panache expected from a leading lady. Of course Huston is now universally admired, and it’s probably assumed by many that decades away from the screen studying her craft caused her to improve, but her amazing, fresh, unstudied, unshowy and touchingly believable perf in dad’s movie (which she didn’t really want to make) already demonstrates her abundant talent. The critics just didn’t see it because, like Minnelli, she was performing in a register of idiosyncratic naturalism unrecognizable to them. Once you get used to an unusual actor, you can usually tell they’re good, but at first it can be tricky. There was even a review of THE GRADUATE denouncing Dustin Hoffman as having “no acting ability whatever.” The mainstream critics have rarely embraced anything qualitatively new.

Of course, few filmmakers work alone, and Finney has the help of Peter Suschitzky on camera, Fergus McDonnell (ODD MAN OUT) as editor, and a lovely score by Misha Donat, who did THE WHITE BUS the same year and little else. And speaking of that Lindsay Anderson film, we must acknowledge that both it and BUBBLES were the work of author Shelagh Delaney, whose film career promptly ground to almost a complete standstill in wake of this double box office disappointment. At least she had literature.

But Delaney’s voice is definitely one I miss in cinema. She had a blithe way of combining fantasy and reality, and the realistic and the surrealistic, which emerges here in subtle, disconcerting ways. THE WHITE BUS has one of my favourite moments ever, when we see Patricia Healey at work in an office, then cut to her legs dangling lifelessly from top of frame as if she’s hanged herself, while an unconcerned cleaner vacuums in the background, then we cut back to her typing. A momentary fantasy.

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Some of the cutting in CHARLIE BUBBLES makes me think of that moment, even when no fantasy is at play. By dropping in shots of unconcerned diners while Finney and Blakely are smearing fine foodstuffs all over each others’ kissers, McConnell’s cutting makes one wonder whether it’s really happening at all, but a breezy cut to the two soiled Mancunians parading down the street confirms the evidence of our eyes.

A film full of erratic elevators — the one in Charlie’s townhouse doesn’t work, and the one in the hi-rise hotel takes forever for the doors to close, as the operator fumbles diligently with the controls and the bellhop rolls his eyes heavenwards, before ascending. Is this an in-joke? Lindsay Anderson produced IF… using Finney’s offices, and lost several crewmembers on the way to a production meeting. “So this is how it ends… trapped in Albert Finney’s elevator… possibly forever.” I’m paraphrasing David Sherwin’s account but the world-weary comic despair is accurate.

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A bold move for Finney to play a character so low-energy and indifferent to everybody around him. His lack of reaction to the offer of sex from Minnelli is hilarious, if cruel. Her baby-fat peachiness is incredibly alluring to me in CABARET, but without the dynamic poses it’s easy for them to make her look puddingy, which they proceed to do. But the joke isn’t on her, it’s about Finney/Bubbles disaffection and ennui. Each stage of her undressing seems to depress him more, but he carries on stripping her, with defeated dutifulness. Why can’t everybody just leave me alone?

Gratuitous Yootha Joyce. Which we like.

Billie Whitelaw, the pinnacle of just about everything. We have to wait an hour for her — she’s like the Colonel Kurtz at the end of this journey into the heart of British low-affect despond. And then there’s what feels to my inexpert eye like some really acute observation of the dynamics of the ex-marrieds with kid. Coming into the household from outside, Finney sees problems, but is perceived as having no moral right to intervene or voice an opinion. He abrogated that when he left home. Also, she’s the only one in the film he looks at with interest, longing, pain.

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“Why don’t you go into the parlour and write a book,” she snaps. And her refrain, “There’s no need for that.”

This is what the film is interested in — allusiveness, the unspoken, strange moments. Not story and not even drama. The sharpness of the observation justifies everything. On first encountering his small son, Charlie happens to have been looking at Billie’s false eyelashes, so he immediately affixes them to the lad’s upper lip, fashioning a dapper moustache. Finney gets great stuff from little Timothy Garland — not so much performance as behaviour. Stuff of him laughing at a TV show that just isn’t acting, it’s real, but it’s blended into stuff where actors act.

The film’s theme, I guess, has something to do with the new classless hero of British culture, who comes from a proletarian background and achieves a dizzying success which completely cuts him off from the mainspring of his creativity. Did Delaney experience this herself (do novelists actually GET as successful as Bubbles?) or did she borrow it from Finney. I can well believe he experienced it. And it later affected his playing — had he carried on as a director he might have avoided such ennui. He might have at least avoided SCROOGE, LOOKER, ANNIE… But a movie star always has an escape hatch — a film director who can do something else probably will do it — he’s not going to starve if he doesn’t direct…

Charlie, incidentally, is offered food all through the movie, but only eats what Billie Whitelaw offers. And only a little of that. And then he catches a balloon and sails away. As Sydne Rome says in WHAT?, “It’s the only way we can end the movie!”

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