I Lost It at the Movies Read online

  Why did people who were so happy with Room at the Top ignore Look Back in Anger? It’s true, Joe Lampton is a relatively simple man with a goal — he wants to get somewhere — and Jimmy Porter can’t think of anyplace to go. But he tells us something about where we are — which Lampton is incapable of doing. Just as declamation, Look Back in Anger is exciting and both it and The Entertainer are original in their dialogue and characters. And, after all, none of these English movies is great as a movie. Compared to the work of a great director like Renoir or De Sica, Room at the Top, or Sons and Lovers, or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning are a high-school girl’s idea of cinema art. Look Back in Anger got the worst possible reception from the American press. The New York Herald Tribune really invited an audience with the statement: “The hero is probably the most unpleasant seen on film in years . . . it [the movie] dodges not one dreary issue.” Bosley Crowther in the New York Times lured them further with the information that Jimmy Porter was “a conventional weakling, a routine crybaby, who cannot quite cope with the problems of a tough environment, and so, vents his spleen in nasty words.” I won’t degrade you and me by attempting to quote the barbarous language of the local critics: they didn’t distinguish themselves any more than usual. It’s bad enough to look at the New Yorker: the masterly John McCarten opened with, “The hero of Look Back in Anger, a character called Jimmy Porter, is insufferable, and so is the film, of English origin, in which he figures.” McCarten seems to judge characters on the basis of whether they’d be unassertive and amiable drinking companions. Wouldn’t he find Hamlet insufferable, and Macbeth, and Othello, and Lear?

  We tend to take for granted a certain level of awareness — the awareness that binds us to our friends, that draws us to new ones. If someone I knew said of Look Back in Anger what Variety did, I would feel as if the Grand Canyon had suddenly opened at my feet. On what basis could one go on talking with someone who said that “Look Back in Anger’s thin theme is merely an excuse for Osborne to vent his spleen on a number of conventions which have served the world fairly well for a number of years.” Like colonialism, one supposes, and the class system, and segregation, and a few other conventions. How can good movies reach an audience when they’re filtered through minds like these? We need some angry young critics; we particularly need them in San Francisco, where a large audience for good films depends on the judgments of one not very gifted man who can virtually make or break a foreign film.

  Look Back in Anger is a movie about the intellectual frustrations of a man who feels too much — an idealist who hasn’t lost his ideals: they’re festering. It is about the way his sensitivity turns into pain and suffering and into torture of others. It is about the failures of men and women to give each other what they need, with the result that love becomes infected. And it is about class resentments, the moral vacuity of those in power, the absence of courage. It’s about humanity as a lost cause — it’s about human defeat. Richard Burton brings to the role the passion his countryman put into the lines: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” And the sordid flat Jimmy Porter lives in becomes a fiery landscape when he cries out against ugliness, injustice, stupidity. “Will Mummy like it?” he taunts his wife. Her “Mummy” stands for all the stale conventions of class society; and it is the “Mummy” in her that he keeps striking at.

  Much of the movie is in terrible taste — the hero crows like a rooster; but perhaps just because nobody seems worried about the excesses, something breaks through. If we’re going to have talking pictures, let us acknowledge the glory of talk, and be grateful for rhetoric which has the splendor of wrath and of wit.

  It was Osborne who once remarked that “The British Royal Family is the gold filling in a mouthful of decay.” His play The Entertainer — also filmed by Tony Richardson — is a study of decay and desperation. The Entertainer is what Death of a Salesman tried to be. Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not suggesting they’re on the same level. Osborne is immensely talented.

  The Entertainer reached wider audiences than Look Back in Anger. But that doesn’t mean it was well received. The New Yorker gave it a great send-off: Brendan Gill took care of it in a single paragraph, beginning with, “The Entertainer is a very good and a very depressing picture, and I hope you’ll be brave enough to go and see it.” Somehow one knows that few will. Everybody has heard that it’s “depressing,” but it’s bad movies that are depressing, not good ones. The rejection of both these films as “depressing” seems to stem from the critical school which regards all art as entertainment for tired businessmen — and theatrical and cinematic art as after-dinner entertainment. The tired businessman doesn’t want to get involved in the work or to care about it — it’s just supposed to aid his digestion. But suppose the play or film tells you why your stomach is sour or excites or upsets you so that you can’t rest easily that night. Well, most critics, wanting to keep you just as you are whether you’re a tired businessman or not — will caution you against it. They have a whole stock of cautionary terms. They will point out that it is “slow” or “turgid” or deals with “dismal” or “squalid” life or “makes demands on the audience” or is “full of talk.” You may have noticed that critics regard talk as something that is only acceptable in very small amounts — too much talk, one might think, like too much alcohol, cannot be absorbed in the bloodstream. If tired businessmen find Look Back in Anger or The Entertainer negative or depressing, who cares? No doubt, they find the plots of Shakespeare too complicated and the speeches ever so long. Is it the function of critics to congratulate them on their short span of attention by suggesting that all Shakespearean plays should be simplified and cut? The critic who does that has become a tired businessman. Archie Rice, the Entertainer, was described by the dean of American film critics, the colossus of the New York Times, as “a hollow, hypocritical heel . . . too shallow and cheap to be worth very much consideration.” In this country, the movie reviewers are a destructive bunch of solidly, stupidly respectable mummies — and it works either way, maternal or Egyptian.

  Archie Rice is no hypocrite; he is a man in a state of utter despair — but he is too sane and too self-aware to ask for pity or sympathy. He is one of the few really created characters in modern drama or films. And the movie, if it gave us nothing but Olivier’s interpretation of this character, would be a rare and important experience. The Entertainer is not a satisfying whole work. Tony Richardson may not be the film director people hoped he was: in both these Osborne films, he tries to set stylized theater pieces in documentary, Free Cinema–type locations. And though the locations are in themselves fascinating, and although the material of the drama has grown out of these locations and is relevant to them, Richardson can’t seem to achieve a unity of style. The locations seem rather arbitrary: they’re too obviously selected because they’re “revealing” and photogenic.

  It is, by the way, something of a shock to discover that the overwhelmingly literate Osborne didn’t attend a university; his mother was a barmaid. Which leads us to another author from the working classes.

  Sons and Lovers was made with American money, but it was made in England, with outdoor shooting in the industrial Midlands. The director, Jack Cardiff, was formerly known as one of the finest cameramen in England. The script is mainly by Gavin Lambert, formerly the editor of Sight and Sound, and easily the best of the English film critics; and the cast, except for Dean Stockwell, is also English. Sons and Lovers is one of the best movie adaptations of a major novel — still, when you think it over, that isn’t saying as much as it might seem to.

  The camera work by Freddie Francis, in black-and-white CinemaScope, is extraordinarily beautiful; the pictorial qualities, particularly of the outdoor scenes, make a stronger impression than the story line. It’s a curiously quiet, pastoral sort of film; the rhythm is off — the pictorial style, exquisite as it is, is neither Lawrentian nor a visual equivalent or even approximation of Lawrence’s prose. The vi
sual beauties aren’t informed by Lawrence’s passionate sense of life. The artist’s fire simply isn’t there — the movie is temperate, earnest, episodic. Perhaps the writer and director are too gentlemanly for Lawrence, too hesitant. They seem afraid of making some terrible mistake, and so they take no chances. But it’s like The Beast in the Jungle — nothing happens, and that’s the most terrible thing of all. The movie becomes a rather tepid series of scenes illustrating Lawrence’s themes, carefully thought out and, mostly, in very good taste.

  The movie fulfills a genuine function if it directs people to the book — but this is a boomerang. Pick up the book again at almost any point, and the movie simply disappears. There’s a richness and a fullness in the novel. So many of us for years have been referring to it casually as great, then you start reading again — and it really is great. But the movie has beauty for the eye, and the image of Trevor Howard as Mr. Morel is something to carry in memory forever.

  From the sublime to the ridiculous: can the movies grant us a few years’ moratorium on post-coital discussions? There are two sequences of this type in Sons and Lovers — and they’re the worst scenes in the movie — embarrassing, even grotesque. The first is with the frightened, inhibited girl who has submitted sacrificially — and the young hero then accuses her of having hated it. The second is with the emancipated older woman who accuses the hero of not having given all of himself. Lawrence does have scenes like this, but they’re the culminations of relationships that have been developed over hundreds of pages; they’re not really adaptable to the theatrical convention which speeds them up. In the film, it’s as if, as soon as two people hit the sack, they know exactly what’s wrong with their relationship and why it’s got to end. What happens to the crucial love affairs in the film version of Sons and Lovers is rather like what happened to the Crusades in the Cecil B. DeMille version — they became one quick, decisive battle.

  In fairness to Sons and Lovers, I should point out that the worst of the current post-coital sequences is in another film — the very fine experimental American film, Shadows. The despoiled virgin sits up, and with eyes swimming with tears, says, “I didn’t know it would be so awful.” Show me the man that won’t reduce to insect size. If all these sequences from recent films could be spliced together, a good title might be “Quo Vadis.”

  The press treated Sons and Lovers quite respectfully; it’s a very respectful movie. Time even announced that “this production, in only 103 minutes, includes everything important in Lawrence’s 500-page novel.” An incredible statement! Was it perhaps a deliberate suggestion to Time’s readers that there was no reason to read Lawrence? But then, it’s a little difficult to know what Time’s reviewer thought was important in the novel — he tells us that “Wendy Hiller is repellently pitiable as the carnivorous mother who entraps D. H. Lawrence’s hero.” The New Yorker provided a further simplification. Paul Morel’s struggle for freedom of spirit and for sexual expression — his problems with the two women — are summed up by Whitney Balliett as “short-lived alliances” with a girl who “devours only his spirit” and a woman who “devours only his flesh.” Lawrence, it would appear, was writing a nice old-fashioned novel about sacred and profane love.

  It was left to Life magazine to supply the final word: according to Life, “As in most of Lawrence’s works, the villain in Sons and Lovers is overindustrialization, which in the process of reducing its victims to slavery, also subverts their healthy passion. Although the message is dated, the film is given immediacy and sharp reality . . .” and so forth.

  Just how “dated” this message is you can see in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — set in those same Midlands a half-century later. Industrialization has swallowed up the whole working class. The movie is supposed to be a young man’s coming of age and accepting adult responsibility — becoming, to use the wretched new cant — “mature.” But when you look at what he’s going to accept, your heart may sink. He has spirit and vitality, and he has a glimmer that there should be some fun in life, and maybe a little action. What does he do to express his dissatisfaction? He throws a few spitballs, he has an affair with a married woman, and he announces that he’s not going to become like his parents. But he picks a proper, porcelain bride with an uplift so high it overreaches her mind. Caught in this gigantic penal colony of modern industrial life, she looks ahead to the shiny appliances of a housing tract — for her, it’s the good life. “Why are you always throwing things?” she asks him primly. The film ends sweetly and happily, but what future can the hero have when the movie is over but to fall into the stinking stupor of his parents, get drunk, quarrel with his wife, and resign himself to bringing up little working-class brats?

  It’s easy to see why Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a big box-office success in England: it expresses honest working-class attitudes and its characters are mass audience characters. Unlike the people of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer — both financial failures — they don’t talk about anything outside the working-class range of experiences. They’re concerned with the job, the pint, the telly, the house with plumbing inside. But it’s hard to know why the American critics should be so enthusiastic about this rather thin film — in this country, it’s playing to art-house audiences who, one might suppose, would be more excited by a wider range of emotion and experience.

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning goes about as far as a movie can toward satisfying the requirement for “commitment.” It is entirely set in working-class locations, the hero is a Nottingham factory worker, and the film is all told from his point of view. That may explain why English critics have been calling it everything from “the finest picture of the year” to “the greatest English picture of all time,” and describing the hero as the most revolutionary hero the British screen has had. I don’t know what they’re talking about. The film is brilliantly photographed — once again by Freddie Francis — and Albert Finney is very good as the hero. But the calculation is all too evident in the composition and timing. Everything is held in check; every punch is called and then pulled. When the hero and his cousin are fishing, the caught fish signals the end of the scene; a dog barks for a fade-out. The central fairground sequence is like an exercise in cinematography, and the hero’s beating is just another mechanical plot necessity. (Couldn’t we also have a long-lasting moratorium on the hero’s being beaten up as a punishment for adultery? We had it in Room at the Top, in Sons and Lovers, and now in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I don’t care if I never see another man beaten up.)

  What we see in this “committed” movie makes hash of the whole theory of commitment. When we look at the way people live, what we see raises questions that go beyond the scope of the “committed” answers. This reality of working-class life is the dehumanization that the anarchist theoreticians predicted. The concept of creative labor or satisfaction in work would be a howling joke in these great factories — and a howling joke to the union men — a complacent mass of Philistines. How can anyone take pride even in honest labor? Featherbedding is an essential part of the system. Further advances in welfare — guaranteed annual wages, pensions — are rational social advances; but these lives are so impoverished that more material comforts are like the satin quilting in a casket. The workers are well paid and taken care of — and nobody’s out to break any chains. The chains of industrialism are so vast, so interlocking, so unyielding that they have become part of the natural landscape.

  The hero has no push, either intellectual or economic, to get out of his environment. He’s a worker who’s going to remain a worker — unless the final stage of mechanization gives way to automation — then the state may support him for not working. He knows that if he stays where he is, he has protection, security, medical care.

  But Prometheus wasn’t a hero by virtue of being chained to a rock. And what is revolutionary about showing us working-class life if the rebellious hero is shown as just young and belligerent — a man who needs to marry and settle down? How
is he different from his fellows? Most of them aren’t aware that their lives lack anything. We rally around his poor little spark — but there’s no fire. It’s the old Warner Brothers trick: you identify with Humphrey Bogart, the cynic who sneers at hollow patriotism; then he comes through for his country and his girl. It turns out that he always really believed in the official values; he just didn’t like the tone, the bad form of officialdom. Our worker hero tells us his acceptance of the conventions is somehow different from his parents’ acceptance.

  An artist’s commitment must be to a fuller vision of life than simply a commitment to the improvement of working-class living standards; conceivably this fuller vision may encompass an assault on working-class values. There is a crude kind of sense in the notion that working-class life is reality: the lives of the privileged rich never seem quite real. But this often ties in with left-wing sentimentality and the assumption that the artist who attempts to deal with the desperate and dissatisfied offshoots of industrialism — those trying to find some personal satisfaction in life or in art — is somehow dodging the real issues. The English dress up their theory of commitment — but sometimes the skeleton of Stalinism seems to be sticking out.

  Time magazine, perhaps by the use of God’s eye, sees Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as a “stirring tribute to the yeoman spirit that still seems to survive in the . . . redbrick eternities of working life in England. After 900 years, if Sillitoe is right, the Saxons are still unconquered.” If that’s unconquered man, how does conquered man live? The indomitable Bosley Crowther says, “Unlike L’Avventura and other pictures about emptiness and despair, this one is clear-eyed and conclusive. It is strong and optimistic. It is ‘in.’ ” Crowther has never been farther out.