Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  One couldn’t really help but continue identifying HandMade with Python, though, when members of the group (John Cleese, Michael Palin and, much later, Eric Idle) were only too happy to return and make films for O’Brien. Gilliam asserts, ‘But I thought it was wrong. I could never get the others to get angry enough about it to do something.’

  Several pseudo-Python projects did almost come to fruition under the HandMade banner. During one Christmas party, Terry Jones approached O’Brien with an idea to do a Viking musical. Brian Shingles says, ‘But Denis always maintained that films that had boats in them were very expensive.’ So he passed and the film was eventually made under the title Erik the Viking. Jones openly admits, ‘But I very much valued Denis’s involvement in some of my other projects. He was keen to do this film of mine about the peasants’ revolt. But I wasn’t quite sure whether Denis really got the idea. I think he thought it was a comedy, and it really wasn’t.’

  Graham Chapman also interested HandMade in his pirate romp Yellowbeard. ‘More bloody boats,’ O’Brien must have feared. While Cleese had Fawlty Towers, Idle had The Rutles and Palin and Jones had Ripping Yarns, Chapman was enjoying no high-profile success and was desperate to get Yellowbeard off the ground. After much preparatory work, HandMade let the project go and it was picked up later by Orion. The film ended up a box-office disaster despite one of the all-time great comedy casts — John Cleese, Eric Idle, Peter Cook, Marty Feldman (who died during the last week of filming), Madeline Kahn, Cheech and Chong, Spike Milligan and Chapman himself, whose unbelievably eccentric performance makes the film almost worth watching.

  O’Brien appeared to favour one particular Python above all the others — Michael Palin. Busy working with the rest of the gang on The Meaning of Life, but frustrated that progress was slow, Palin began ruminating over the possibilities of a solo project: ‘People were doing lots of different things at the time and were absent from discussions, whereas they weren’t in Life of Brian, people were always around. There was a feeling then of everyone spreading their wings and doing their own things. So that’s why I thought I’d have a go at The Missionary. And I remember when I had the idea. I was actually running over Hampstead Heath and it suddenly came to me, this idea of a missionary as a central figure.’

  In spirit, The Missionary is closer to Palin and Terry Jones’s Ripping Yarns, those affectionate parodies of Boy’s Own adventures, than it was to Python. It was also a paean to Palin’s schooldays when he’d sit fascinated listening to visiting missionaries whose lectures barely touched upon religion but were instead full of heroic tales about paddling up the Limpopo and avoiding being eaten by tigers. Palin’s own fictional hero, Reverend Charles Fortescue, is returning after a lengthy and liberating spell in Africa to an Edwardian England steeped in hypocrisy and social prejudice. He is given a new responsibility of establishing a refuge for prostitutes in London’s impoverished East End with orders to ‘find out why they do what they do, and stop them doing it!’

  Michael Palin explains, ‘I wanted to go back to the whole area of Life of Brian, sort of hypocrisy and double standards. The idea of a missionary who has a lustful sex life when he’s out in Africa and then he gets into trouble when he comes back home because of the attitudes towards sex and prostitutes. I thought this had comic possibilities with a serious theme underneath it.’ Palin even went to the meticulous lengths of researching prostitution at the British Library, just to see if during that period there had been any serious attempts at reform. Alas, his suspicions were proven right; the Edwardians treated prostitutes as wicked women, considering it their duty to clean them up with carbolic soap and prayers.

  Funding the £2 million project, which at one time was playfully entitled The Missionary Position, was simplicity personified. Palin says, ‘I went to see Denis and we were all on quite good terms then because Time Bandits had been this unexpected success, so Denis was happy to work with people who’d worked on that. I’d also done Life of Brian, so I had an enormous track record. George was reasonably happy. I don’t think it was actually a film that George particularly wanted to do. But what is important is that Denis supported me at a time when I wanted to make a film like The Missionary, and later helped finance something like A Private Function, because those films may well not have been made, certainly not made with the amount of control we had, with anybody else. That’s definitely on Denis’s credit side.’

  The Missionary represented a considerable step forward in Palin’s professional ambitions, his first project as star, writer and co-producer. And it was a real opportunity to find out what he could achieve on his own away from the slightly restrictive world of Python. He balked at the prospect of directing it himself, though. ‘I’ve never been tempted to direct. I’m more interested in writing first, acting second, and I think to write, act and direct is extremely difficult, very few people do that successfully. I haven’t got the sort of concentration, quite honestly, to do all three, it’s a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week job. I’ve seen others do it — Terry Jones and Gilliam become almost different people, utterly and completely absorbed and weighed down by the responsibilities which are ultimately yours right through the film. So I’m quite happy for someone else to take that responsibility.’

  Palin’s ideal director turned out to be Richard Loncraine, with whom he’d wanted to work for some time. Having just finished shooting Dennis Potter’s gothic Brimstone and Treacle with rock star Sting, the idea and challenge of doing a comedy was certainly appealing. ‘So I literally came off Brimstone and went on to The Missionary, which was not a good idea for all sorts of reasons that my ex-wife will tell you about. It was a pretty exhausting time. But I’ve always liked comedy because I think it’s so hard and so dangerous. The thing about comedy is that you can’t get it half-right; if they laugh they laugh, if they don’t laugh there’s no excuses. You can have a horror film that’s a little bit frightening, but if it’s a comedy and nobody laughs you’ve got something wrong.’

  Pretty much from the word go, Loncraine found himself at odds with Denis O’Brien, something Palin realised early on. ‘Richard is a London boy with a very good line in patter, but fairly scatological and fairly fruity in his language. We all had a meal together to sort of meet up at a rather smart restaurant in Chelsea and Denis was sort of doing his bit and talking to Richard and saying I want to do this and I want to do that... there was a bit of bargaining going on here and there. And at the end of it, Richard said, “Well, Denis, you know what you are, don’t you?” And Denis looked rather pleased with himself. And Richard said, “You’re a cunt!” It was just wonderful. Denis collapsed. It was just quite brilliant, not really what anyone normally says to a producer who’s prepared to give you a lot of money. And it was said with a certain amount of affection to it, and I’ve never ever forgotten that. Denis was quite taken aback, but I think after that understood Richard much more.’ Loncraine still fondly remembers the insult. ‘I couldn’t think of a more articulate word at the time.’

  To appear opposite Palin in what was essentially his first real dramatic screen role, Loncraine cast arguably the greatest actress of her generation in Maggie Smith. She plays Lady Isabel Ames, the sexually frustrated wife of a bigoted peer of the realm, who offers to finance Fortescue’s home for fallen women on the condition that he goes to bed with her. The acquisition of Maggie Smith was a real casting coup and a daunting prospect for any actor. Palin remembers, ‘I’m just in awe of her really because she’s so good, so easy to work with. It’s a bit like working with John Cleese, doing comedy, you just know they know exactly what to do, they just don’t make a false move. Some people find Maggie difficult to work with because she doesn’t suffer fools at all, she can be quite tetchy sometimes, a very quick wit, but that’s good, that keeps you on your toes. I absolutely adored working with her.’

  The two stars make an appealing team and Palin more than holds his own against the future theatre Dame. He’d come a long way indeed from the parrot sketch.<
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  On set, Maggie Smith was never less than a real trouper and enjoyed the experience immensely, but like most stars needed to know that she would be treated with the respect her status deserved. ‘I learnt a few lessons with Maggie,’ Loncraine observes. ‘She’s a hard taskmaster and was a bit of a handful, but I’ve always been very straightforward with actors. Maggie doesn’t fall into this category but many of the big Hollywood stars surround themselves with sycophants, but they hate you being sycophantic to them. With actors, it’s about them trusting you and the moment you start lying to an actor your game’s up. Some actors have got great brains, some have got very little brains, but all of them have an instinct for when they’re being bullshitted. Let’s say, if you do a take and they’re obviously bad and you go, “Wonderful, darling, marvellous, terrific... Let’s just do one more,” they may not say it but you know inside they’re going, “What a wanker, it was real rubbish.” If you’ve really got the relationship right, as I did with Maggie, I could blow a raspberry and go, “Rubbish, Mags,” and everyone would laugh and she would laugh and we’d do it again because she knew that I cared about her, respected her and it was no threat.’

  A cherished memory of Maggie was during location work up in Scotland. She’d finished for the day and went to leave as another shot was being set up. Loncraine recalls, ‘I’m on this very high cliff and I see Maggie walking about 300ft below on this little goat track and I shout, “Goodnight, Maggie.” She looks up and just ignores me and I said to the guy next to me, “Silly bloody woman,” and I kicked this little stone out of frustration and it rolled down the hill. But it hit another little stone, and another one, and it created an avalanche of really quite big stones, some of them a foot across, enough to break your legs, and they went round Maggie and she was running backwards and forwards in this great crinoline dress dodging these boulders. Eventually, it all rolled away and she stood there looking up at me and you could hear a pin drop in this valley. She looked up and she said, “You stupid, stupid child,” and walked off back to the hotel. She worked with me again on Richard III, so she can’t hate me that much. The timing of that insult though was absolutely perfect, she waited until the last boulder had dropped... it was like waiting for an audience to calm down before you do the next line. Oh, she knew how to play it.’

  The film’s supporting cast, too, featured thespians of the highest calibre. Working with actors of real distinction, as opposed to mere comedians who may hanker for dramatic recognition, was deliberate and began on Ripping Yarns when, instead of going for obvious comedy casting, Palin brought in actors he admired and whom he knew could do justice to the material. ‘I remember getting Denholm Elliott to be in one of the first of the Ripping Yarns — Across the Andes by Frog. It was a great coup because we didn’t see why there should be this barrier between serious actors and comedy actors. If you wrote material which had to be played seriously but the humour was in how well it was played, then you should go for those people.’

  Elliott turns up again in The Missionary as a bombastic Bishop of London. Loncraine remembers, ‘Denholm was a complicated man. I mean, it’s complicated enough being a heterosexual, I find, so being a bisexual... But I liked him and he was such a good actor. He was a bit hard work, he’d have loads of tricks if he dried because he never bothered to learn his lines properly. If he dried, he’d turn and say, “Oh, darling, please don’t move that when I’m trying, you’re in my eye-line, lovey.” He knew every trick in the book not to take the blame.’

  Then there was Michael Hordern whose delightful cameo as a forgetful butler who can’t find any of the rooms in his master’s vast stately home almost steals the film. Loncraine’s view was that ‘the stuff with Michael getting lost at Longleat, I don’t think there’s funnier comedy. I saw previews of the film in America and people were falling off their seats. And I became very fond of Michael, a sweet man and a fine actor. He was a joy to work with. I’d say to him when we were filming, “I think we can get you off by about three this afternoon, Michael.” “Jolly good,” he’d say. “Thank you ever so much. I’ll see if I can get you one,” because he’d go off fishing, he was a great trout fisherman and he’d come back before we’d finished shooting with a trout for me and anyone else he could find one for. He was a really lovely man.’

  Undoubtedly, the most difficult personality was Trevor Howard, perfectly cast as Lord Ames, imperial bigot and fascist by appointment to her majesty. According to Loncraine, ‘It was very sad because Brief Encounter is one of my favourite films ever. Trevor played the pompous canon wonderfully, but he was just so drunk and didn’t know where he was. The scene we did in Longleat when he’s writing this letter — “How do you spell decapitate?” — he couldn’t learn his lines. He wouldn’t put on glasses so he couldn’t read cue cards and he was very aggressive; actually, he behaved unspeakably badly in the end. Then he wouldn’t come in and do post-sync, and really it was making him look better. But he was an alcoholic... what can you say? He woke up one night in the little hotel we were staying in when we were filming in Longleat and his dresser two doors down heard this screaming and went into his room and he’d got into the wardrobe and couldn’t get out. He was completely gone and looked like shit. This was about a year I think before he died.’

  Filming had got under way in March 1982 on locations ranging from the West Country and London’s East End to Scotland. There was also a brief sojourn to Africa. Palin says, ‘We had to battle to get that Kenyan sequence. Denis wasn’t really very keen to go off to Africa and felt it could all be shot in England, but we won the battle to go. The shooting itself was extraordinary, everything I hoped it would be. We managed to get this little church built for the sequence where I’m playing the organ and a congregation of Africans is singing. I thought it was a nice comment on what we taught people during colonial times and the way they picked it up and went with it. It also makes a comment on the attitude of those who think colonialism was something inflicted brutally upon people. Not always; there were times when people rather liked singing these silly Victorian hymns.

  ‘We had our problems... I remember the Masai women would not go bare-breasted in any of the scenes, which, of course, they would have done in 1906. The Masai women said they’d been told that the American tourists wouldn’t come by any longer unless they covered themselves up. That was a bit of a disadvantage, it was actually quite important because the whole film was about sexual embarrassment in England but not in Africa.’

  Palin holds the opinion that going all the way out to Africa was important for the integrity of the production, making it stand out as something that everyone had taken the trouble to do properly. Loncraine agrees. ‘One of my fondest memories of The Missionary was Michael and I on the recce; just he and I went out to Kenya. And I will never forget as long as I live sitting in the back of an open Toyota Land Cruiser with the sun going down. And those sunsets in Africa are amazing, literally driving through giraffe and buffalo and Michael doing the Python sketches for me and, of course, he could do all of the characters. And I just remember crying and asking him please to stop because I couldn’t get my breath. That, I think, is one of the great moments that I will never forget.’

  The African filming was largely done at a small and remote village called Lerata where the inhabitants were as helpful as they could be to the travelling English crew. Palin recalls, ‘As a thank you, we asked is there anything you would like that we can leave behind and they said, “You could put a roof on our school.” They were building a school at the time and couldn’t afford even to put a roof on. So our carpenters put on a corrugated iron roof. That was 1982 and I went out there in 1991 when I was doing the BBC Pole to Pole series. We went down through Lerata and the roof was still on and I met the children and told them all about my connection with the village and gave them my blow-up globe because I’d carried it all the way from the North Pole. And really I gave it to them so they could learn geography and they ended up kicking it around like a footb
all.’

  Still smarting perhaps from the ‘cunt’ jibe, O’Brien’s relationship with Loncraine never really reached even cordial status. Both were, in Palin’s words, ‘at loggerheads, though in a reasonably pleasant way. They gave as good as they got to each other.’ Loncraine’s view was that ‘Denis would never come on the set and throw his weight around, he would stay in his office. I think he was looking after the next deal, he was always on the next picture. He might sometimes say, “I don’t think we can do it that way,” or have a mad idea about casting. He had like 50 bad ideas and maybe 10 good ones, but you had to navigate through the rubbish, so that got a bit frustrating, but no more frustrating than half the people I’ve worked for. You could drop Denis into Hollywood today and he wouldn’t be out of place. Denis wasn’t a stupid phenomenon, he was just a product of the industry, really. As for George Harrison, he came down once or twice, but again just to smile and say hello. He was always a figure in the background. Denis was difficult at times but charming. I don’t find many people intimidating unless they’ve got a knife at my throat. I certainly didn’t find Denis intimidating. I was very lucky and protected because Michael did the battles. I would shout at Denis and we’d have the odd screaming matches. But he was very fond of Michael so, when we needed something, Michael would say to Denis, “I think we need this,” and we had it. So I was very cushioned.’

  One particular battle involved the film’s opening titles. Loncraine was determined to get it right and wanted large brass lettering that would spell out the words of The Missionary with a golden gleam. Palin remembers, ‘Denis said, “Brass! Why can’t it just be plastic or special effects?” And Richard said, “No, it’s got to be this brass lettering.” So Denis got the estimate and said, “You know how much this brass lettering costs? About £l ,000 a letter.” But, in the end, he did it. And about a year later, I was meeting Denis for lunch in this restaurant and in he comes with this huge great rectangular parcel under his arm, enormous great thing, and he’s laughing even before he sees me, this high-pitched cackle. And then he comes up to the table and I’m looking — “What is this? Is he going to shoot me?” It’s like someone coming in with a machine-gun in a case. I was a bit worried. And he rips the paper off and there is “The Missionary” in brass lettering, the original panel that we had done. And he gave it to me as a present.’ Today, it resides in a garden shed at the bottom of Palin’s London home.