The production was led by Kenith Trodd and Rick McCallum and John Harris. Ken Westbury did the photography. Jim Clay was in charge of design. I don’t know the economics, but I doubt very much that the six parts of The Singing Detective (300 minutes on air) cost more than a million pounds. In other words, this was factory filmmaking reliant on an agreed script, intense preparation, very good casting and acting, and an overall attitude that this kind of work—which provoked huge controversy over matters of taste—was “right” for the public.
That’s where the producers’ sense of the writer comes in. For there was no audience in Britain to say, Give us The Singing Detective, with the surreal excursions into musical, please. There was every warning that conservative views would be shocked by being offered so much sex. Yet surely Potter’s vision—of childhood making and warping the man, and of illness as a social metaphor—was profound and valuable. Dennis Potter on television has mattered as much to Britain as Bacon and Freud on gallery walls: Britten, Courtney Pine, and the Beatles playing music: David Hare and Harold Pinter onstage, as well as novels by… Well, name your favorites.
The large cast was distinguished by Gambon’s courage and vulnerability, and the other leads, but it was rich through and through: Lyndon Davies as Philip the boy, Bill Paterson, Jim Carter, Alison Steadman, David Ryall, Imelda Staunton, Gerard Horan, Leslie French, David Thewlis.
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
In the general agreement these days that Singin’ in the Rain is the greatest of the M-G-M musicals, and perhaps the best American musical altogether, everyone quickly adds, “… because it’s about something.” It has a story and a subject: the turmoil in Hollywood that greeted the coming of sound and the way one star, Lina (Jean Hagen), an empress in silence, became a fishwife when miked and had to give way to youth, spunk, and gotta-try (Debbie Reynolds).
It has to be said that the scenes that trace attempts to record sound and picture at the same time are very funny—“I can’t make love to a bush!” screams Hagen. In turn, that owes a lot to the script—by Betty Comden and Adolph Green—which is researched, funny, and in complete subservience to Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood, and Gene’s certainty that nothing should ever stand in the way of his panzer smile. So, if the film is about something, it could be a little more about Lina’s loss and a little less about Don’s heartless exuberance.
But this was Kelly at his peak, and the codirecting title he shared with Stanley Donen was generally taken as a kindness to Donen. Kelly ran the numbers, and he had a way of seeing the numbers start before others were counting. That said, so much had been learned on An American in Paris, and now Kelly was in home territory, given material that was a celebration of a song-and-dance man, and which had the complete backing of Arthur Freed for the very good reason that the picture was going to use many of Freed’s songs (done with Nacio Herb Brown).
Freed let himself be kidded in Millard Mitchell’s broad version of the studio boss who still “can’t quite visualize it” after a number has run. And the songs are bouncy, lively, and second-rate—but if this is the greatest musical, where is the great song? I love Donald O’Connor doing “Make ’em Laugh,” even if it is stolen from Cole Porter’s “Be a Clown,” and “You Were Meant for Me” has a sweet glide to it. The Broadway ballet is a knockout, and it introduces Cyd Charisse in lime green and legs forever.
Of course, there is one great number. Kelly gave Roger Edens credit for the humming intro to “Singin’ ” itself. It got him moving and it indicated the wistful, elegiac keynote to the number. It is night. He is largely alone. There are climaxes to the number, but it’s an inward, idyllic lyric—and with some quite lovely crane movements (Donen or Kelly? we’ll never know), it becomes one of the most intricately worked-out routines—not just a novelty, but a mood piece, and a song that, finally, resembles the whole point of the movies. For millions, all over the world, all the movies were singin’ in the rain—giving us a chance of mercy or delight when times were hard and the rain seemed toxic. That’s why the number lifts the whole film, and how it eclipses Kelly’s rather frantic ego.
La Sirène du Mississippi (1969)
I realized some time ago that I love this film beyond reason, and so I have had to learn not to make strenuous efforts of persuasion. Just state the facts, and let them sink in. Sooner or later, the people one might have thought to educate see the connection—that the film itself is about a love beyond reason. So they steer clear of me or give me a funny look—however you care to put it, they feel they have got my number. But numbers are infinite, aren’t they?
So let me tell you the story again; I can tell it forever. Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo) lives on the island of Réunion, a French possession in the southern Atlantic, a place off on its own, not sure whether it is lonely or eccentric. He is a tobacco farmer, well-to-do. He has a very good, large house, but he is single. So he has resorted to the correspondence columns in the newspapers to find himself a possible bride. He makes an epistolary contract with one, named Julie Roussel. And when her ship sails in, he goes down to the docks eager to meet her, her photograph in his hand and in his memory.
But he cannot find the woman in his photograph at the docks. Instead, there is a beautiful woman who says her name is Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve). She is a good deal more beautiful than the woman in the picture, whereupon he forgets the picture. The relationship is a little uneasy: the wedding ring purchased from a loop of string Mlle. Roussel had sent him does not fit. But she is Deneuve with auburn hair, bare-legged in the moist warmth of Réunion, extraordinarily beautiful. Is he an idiot, or just a fool? They marry. He feels they are in love. Snap—she is gone, with most of his money.
He hires a detective to track her down (Michel Bouquet). But then he goes to Europe to pursue her himself. And one day, by chance, he sees her on television. So he tracks her down in a shabby hotel room. She is contrite: Oh, my darling, she says, if only you knew. She has had an appalling life—she recounts her woes—and he is in love with her again. But the damned detective shows up, too stubborn to be let go. So Louis kills the man. They retreat into the country, to a cabin in the snows. He is ill. He guesses she is poisoning him. But he still loves her.
François Truffaut adapted this from the Cornell Woolrich novel Waltz into Darkness, and he has made it more gentle. In the Woolrich, the woman needs to kill Louis and he wants her hand to close his eyes. But Truffaut makes it a love story. At every deceit, Julie confesses and Louis is hers again. Their pursuits and reunions may repeat. Already, there is a longer version of the film. It could go on forever, this story. I wish it would.
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The power and the opportunity of the cinema to explore extrasensory stories may be one of its greatest challenges—and risks. It could even pioneer the opening up of that domain in real life. But the dangers are just as real, and the charm of The Sixth Sense is the adroitness with which it steers between horror and whimsy. I still admire the film, yet the career of writer-director N. Night Shyamalan ever since (one wreck after another) only underlines the rarity of this picture. It was sold as a kind of horror film, and it was a sleeper success (cost $55 million—earnings $293 million), but to call it that is to miss so much.
The setting is Philadelphia, Shyamalan’s own city, photographed by Tak Fujimoto so as to seem pregnant with possibilities. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a successful psychologist, is celebrating with his wife, Anna (Olivia Williams), when a crazed former patient (Donnie Wahlberg) breaks in. He shoots Malcolm and then kills himself. After the time a recovery would take, Malcolm is back at work and dealing with a new case, that of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Gradually, Cole will tell Malcolm that he “sees” dead people. And so the story proceeds, with Cole proving able to help several people he meets. In the end, in a gentle plot pivot that comes as a surprise to newcomers, he is able to help his own therapist.
Rather like James Cameron’s first Terminator, The Sixth Sense is one of the few mo
dern films that springs an authentic narrative surprise where ingenuity and plausibility are held in balance. For what happens here isn’t just a shock trick: it’s a tender realization of how mourning works and a state of mind finally that is not afraid of death, or daunted by it. The cinema has always had fantastic success in showing us the fact (the face, the person) and then stimulating us to feel sympathy or fear. After all, at the movies, we see dead people or strangers so unreachable they are, literally, on the other side. It was Shyamalan’s grasp of that and his ability to relate his story to the workings of movie that seemed so promising.
In addition, of course, it is a film rooted in a generous sense of how the mind may work, or employ openness, that is very sympathetic or encouraging to the possibility of telepathy. Shyamalan uses two shots of people who are not really together that are beautiful, sad, and also faintly comic. It was a rare delicacy that promised so much. Yes, I know, the years since have been crushing and the wisdom in Shyamalan has turned adolescent and fake. Never mind: This film still speaks for itself. The director was blessed to have Osment, easily the most interesting child actor in an age rich in that breed. But the subtle performance of Bruce Willis is very much a matter of the director’s vision and insistence. Add to that two wonderful pieces of work from Olivia Williams and Toni Collette (as Cole’s mother).
The Small Back Room (1949)
This is a war film, and a film noir; it’s even a story about a man struggling to overcome the twin handicaps of self-pity and booze. And such familiar genres are not common in Powell and Pressburger films, which had little taste for slices of ordinary life. Sammy Rice’s life is not commonplace, but it’s very real: He has to lie on the shifting pebbles of an English beach, trying to dismantle a bomb or a mine such as the Germans have not used before, and describing what he is doing over the radio-telephone in case he blows himself up.
Sammy limps. He has been wounded before, badly enough to have a tin foot. He despises the bureaucracy that endangers his work, and his fear of being under such pressure has driven him to drink and to the certainty that he is unlovable. Of course, there is a girl, but she has to ignore his gloom and his insults.
This comes from a Nigel Balchin novel, and Balchin helped the Archers with the screenplay—Michael Powell would compare his dialogue to that of Pinter, and in the dark and terse love scenes between David Farrar and Kathleen Byron there is a note of Hawks sometimes, of desperate fatalism. And of a need that voices itself as challenge. Sammy’s problem with life is also beautifully mirrored in the form of a Corporal Taylor (Cyril Cusack), an expert with lethal fuses, but a man haunted by the infidelities of his wife. He has been reduced to a dire stammer, and Sammy’s tin leg squeaks against the pebbles as he struggles to make sense of a bomb—Powell rejected the idea of a sandy shore and filmed at Chesil Beach. He wanted those pebbles in a film where sound is crucial and excruciating.
There are also nightmares where Sammy’s small back room is nearly crowded out by a monstrous whiskey bottle—these scenes are very impressive, yet in truth they work against the realist tension of the rest of the film and the restraint in Farrar’s performance. The bottle is one of those things where Powell goes too far and looks arty because of it.
The picture was made for Alexander Korda, with Christopher Challis doing the black-and-white photography, Hein Heckroth as the production designer, Brian Easdale writing the music (there’s a jazz club sequence, too, with Ted Heath and Kenny Baker), and Reginald Mills as the editor. Farrar is one of those actors let go by the British film industry, and he is very powerful here, just as Kathleen Byron had clearly become a Powell muse. (“She was too straight to be an actress,” Powell would write. “But she was a good one.”) The film was a failure (were war films going out of style, or is it too dark and personal?). To that extent, it’s a badly neglected film in the Powell-Pressburger collection, and it has fine supporting performances from Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks, Michael Gough, Milton Rosmer, Emrys Jones, Michael Goodliffe, Renée Asherson, Anthony Bushell, Sidney James, and Robert Morley as “the Minister.”
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
Does Ingmar Bergman get a royalty every time “Send In the Clowns” is sung? Well, why not? And if that sounds like a trivia question, let’s be unashamed of using the Broadway musical to advertise one of those fascinating Bergman works from the fifties, before he was exactly “Ingmar Bergman” and when he was trying on various hats to see what worked and thought he might try to be romantic.
Smiles of a Summer Night is a complex dance in which, at the moment of midsummer, some allegedly sophisticated but actually rather numb characters gather for a country house weekend in which the games, official or otherwise, will play out most of the sexual variations they long for but which are beyond their accomplishment. So it’s a potion against sadness, and thus one of Bergman’s more therapeutic films, even if its tone is often sardonic and even cruel. It is beautifully photographed by Gunnar Fischer, and nowhere are Fischer’s skills more refined than in the photography of Ulla Jacobsson—twenty-four here, exquisite, and arguably the loveliest of Bergman’s women, if not the greatest actress (she would end up as a screaming wreck hustled out of Zulu!).
Still, enjoy her as you can in the magic of Swedish dusk, along with Eva Dahlbeck (great beauty and great actress), Margit Carlquist, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Jarl Kulle. It is one of those films where Death does not appear, but his servants—neurosis and mortality—are everywhere. In other words, the festival of midsummer is more Viennese than Renoiresque. Never mind, Bergman with the idea of “pleasure” manages to be as shy and sinister as a cat with a big, fresh (but suspicious) fish.
The musical, A Little Night Music, came in 1973, lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler. There’s no doubt but that the young Sondheim responded to the tone of regret or dismay—and the summeriness of the musical is all in the halting pace of three-quarter time and a middle-aged ruefulness. But it’s a great work compared with Woody Allen’s foolish A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. The film of the musical (though directed by Hal Prince) is not very good—what am I saying? It’s awful. And so “Send In the Clowns” is a song that acquires different meanings as the decades pass. Frank Sinatra clearly thought it meant him—but Judi Dench recovered it on the London stage.
All of which can serve as a gentle reminder to see the Bergman film again. In his last decades, under the polite rubric of “retirement”—despite majestic works like Faithless and Sarabande—it had been possible to believe that he was sleeping, or resting. Whereas the great body of his work builds and grows like a noble wine. Whenever people think of ten bests, they should cross their fingers and plow on regardless—“except for Ingmar Bergman.” (He could so easily do all ten.) This is actually one of his best minor works. Elsewhere, I have suggested that as cinema began Sweden grasped it more surely than most countries. And now, past the end, who else can persuade you that the medium must be saved?
The Snake Pit (1948)
When you think about it, The Snake Pit is the title to a lurid adventure film—doesn’t Indiana Jones have an immense ordeal in such a place? Yet, just as I was going to the movies seriously, or regularly (it was the same thing then), I was warned by fond relatives not to think about The Snake Pit—it was unpleasant, disturbing, beyond me, and (here was the final roadblock) it was about this unhappy woman. Somehow, I felt even then that there was an antagonism between the movies and unhappy women. So I caught up with the picture years later when it was easy to see how stilted it was in its treatment of madness (and its treatment of treatments), not to mention a thoroughgoing women’s picture.
All of that is unfair. One has only to make the comparison with the dreadful nonsense of Spellbound (1945) to see that the postwar interest in madness and what to do with it could be earnest and grave. And I can see now that great credit goes to Anatole Litvak, who paid $75,000 of his own money to buy the rights to the novel by Mary Jane Ward and to sell the p
roject to Darryl F. Zanuck. Moreover, the film was a great critical success and a surprising box-office performer. It grossed over $4 million, the same as Johnny Belinda. And those two films were nominated for Best Picture, along with The Red Shoes, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Hamlet (the ultimate winner). You can see how much madness there was in 1948.
Litvak was nominated for the Best Director Oscar. Frank Partos and Millen Brand were nominated for Best Screenplay, Alfred Newman for his music, and, of course, Olivia de Havilland was nominated as Best Actress. Jane Wyman won for Johnny Belinda, but if de Havilland had won she would have had three in four years (with To Each His Own and The Heiress).
How does the film stand up? Well, it falls somewhere between the melodrama of its title and the kind of documentary-like work Fox was doing in those years. To see it now is to realize the enormous strides taken in fifty years in the general public understanding of mental disturbance. But it teaches us something else: about how far the various conditions of stress witnessed in war (to say nothing of the colossal dementia of the camps) had persuaded the public to pay attention to the inner life and how easily it could be unsettled. That is vital to film noir as well as all those movies that introduce this new character: the psychiatrist, the shrink.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 128
