The problem is that in order to write reasonably about the BBC's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), I think I am going to have to re-read the original novel, rewatch the 1984 film, and then watch the television adaptation again, after which I will have to worry about things like being plunged into suicidal despair by The Daily Show. So this is not a review; it's more like a set of notes. Ignore whichever ones bore you.
1. In some ways, I am surprised—and not displeased—that Peter Cushing became so firmly identified with brilliant, obsessive roles like Frankenstein and Van Helsing, because based on his excellent performances in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Cash on Demand, he could as easily have been typed as characters who were (to steal Paul Delagardie's description of his nephew) all nerves and nose. We are introduced to his Winston Smith not as he writes in his forbidden diary, or screams state-sponsored hate with the rest of the crowd, or goes about his daily desk-job of damnatio memoriae, but as a pale face in a black round window, gazing out at the sky over ruined London from the Ministry of Truth, from which he is abruptly recalled by the telescreen: "KZ-6090 Smith, W. . . . You have been at the window of Bay 2 of the Records Department for over eighty seconds. What are you doing there?" He offers the excuse of a technical glitch—he's come to look for the spare part himself—and returns, reprimanded, to his desk. He's got forty-five seconds to go before the Two Minutes' Hate and he's running late. It's not just Cushing's thin, haunted face or his stick-insect frame; he's more hesitant than I remember John Hurt's Winston, with a preoccupied little flinch of a smile. When we hear his thoughts—his thoughtcrimes—they're clear and steady. Taking the risk of conversation, he never sounds so sure. Now I am genuinely curious to see his Sherlock Holmes, because I'm used to thinking of a clean break between Basil Rathbone's clinical intellect and Jeremy Brett's astonishing definitive translation with all neuroses intact, and I'm wondering if Peter Cushing is the missing link.1
2. I do not remember the class satire registering nearly as cuttingly in the later film. Everyone speaks RP at the Ministries, Cockney in the prole sector. Peter Cushing walking into a prole bar and trying to order himself a gin kills the mood all round; he's too obviously slumming, buying half-recalled, wandering fragments of the past from an old man for twelve cents' worth of beer with the same almost childish eagerness with which he pays four dollars for the paperweight in Charrington's shop.2 This is a production which gained, I think, tremendous resonance from being made within ten years of the novel's publication and the end of World War II. Rationing would just have ended. St Clement Danes was a Blitz ruin when Orwell wrote it into his book and a ruin still when the play aired; it wouldn't be rebuilt and reconsecrated until 1958. I'm betting the bombed-out streets of London weren't sets. And yes, it does rather look as though they spent all their budget on the exterior shots, but I find myself noticing the shadings of the dialogue more than the fact that there are basically no props; this is not (slightly Twilight Zone-ish opening narration aside) a production that hits you over the head. We are clearly in a dystopia, it's grindingly poor, brutally oppressive, and only getting worse, but there's still space in the script for notes of humor or pathos, not just the constant clanging fear or oblivion under which the characters live. And so we, like they, can be deluded into thinking there is space in their lives for things like love and compassion.
3. I wish I could find an article I remember reading some years ago, which argued that whether he realized it or not, what Orwell did with the concept of sexcrime and the constantly planning, constantly threatened secrecy of Julia and Winston's affair was to reproduce with a heterosexual couple the common experience of gay men in postwar London, for whom the idea of being arrested and harshly punished for making love in a rented room was not futuristic in the slightest. Only a straight reader would have thought in 1949, my God, it couldn't happen here. Nonetheless, I was not expecting the jolt of chemistry between Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell—the story should have it, that double charge of limerence and lawbreaking that is as much an affirmation of their political deviancy as it is the fuel for further rebellion, but in 1954 I figured it would be done mostly through dialogue or implication. But when they kiss for the first time, Cushing looks like a man who hasn't had the chance of sex in years, Mitchell as though she's been waiting equal years for the chance to devour someone the way she's doing now: with his hands all over her, making himself believe she's real; she's got one hand possessively around the back of his neck, caressing his hair as if they have been lovers long already. The camera does cut away, but I thought it would do so sooner.
4. I had expected less from the torture scenes, too. I should have remembered that what you cannot see is so often so much worse than what you can be shown.3
5. I suppose one way to judge an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is by the devastation of its final scenes. Full marks for the BBC, then: the last meeting between Winston and Julia in the Chestnut Tree Café is all the more horrible because of its utter lack of drama, which is the point. There is nothing momentous about this conversation. It's not a reunion of lovers. It's not even the like-minded recognition of a comrade. It's two discarded ghosts hanging in the same dead air, without even the desire to haunt one another. You might not recognize them, so ruined and broken; voices, faces, bodies, minds. O'Brien told him: "Things will happen to you here from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years." I thought of T.S. Eliot: We are the hollow men . . . Not with a bang but a whimper. It is a very short scene. It upset me far more than its counterpart in the 1984 film, which I think softens the blow by having the reintegrated Julia and Winston converse unemotionally about ordinary things as well as their mutual betrayal; they might be strangers now, but they are strangers with the same brainwashed concerns in common. Here, there is nothing for them to say to each other, ever. There is nothing to say to anyone but Big Brother. I love . . .
6. Seriously, Criterion. I know it's a television production, but so was Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982). Put it out as a set with the 1984 film and a selection of essays. I guarantee you will have buyers and they won't all be me.
7. And the clocks were striking thirteen.
1. I've realized my idea of his career was totally wrong. The numbers finally clicked when I was looking at IMDb: between 1951 and 1956, Cushing did twenty-three plays and serials for the BBC. Even if they weren't all leading roles, he would have been one of the most well-known faces on television when Nineteen Eighty-Four aired and, unless he dropped catastrophically off the map for a year I haven't heard about, when he starred in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). He must have been a godsend for Hammer. Now I have even more reason to resent the lack of recordings from the early days of British television—I understand the combination of technical limitations with the impermanence of live drama, but I would truly have liked the opportunity to see Peter Cushing as the fashionable eponym of Beau Brummell (1954), Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1952), or the dispossessed photographer-hero of Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1953), which I didn't even realized had been adapted for TV. Maybe there are kinescopes out there somewhere, but I would be very surprised. NASA taped over the moon landings. As a species, I think we kind of suck about information storage unless it's unimportant.
2. It seems that Leonard Sachs looks familiar to me not because I've ever seen him before, but because his son stole every scene he played on Buffy as Ethan Rayne. I like discovering these things.
3. I have not spoken much about André Morell, but his work as O'Brien provides another reason for me to rent The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959): there's the original television serial of Quatermass and the Pit (1958—1959) if I want to see the actor in a straight-up heroic role, but it might be more reassuring to know that he can actually share a screen with Peter Cushing without torturing him.
1. In some ways, I am surprised—and not displeased—that Peter Cushing became so firmly identified with brilliant, obsessive roles like Frankenstein and Van Helsing, because based on his excellent performances in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Cash on Demand, he could as easily have been typed as characters who were (to steal Paul Delagardie's description of his nephew) all nerves and nose. We are introduced to his Winston Smith not as he writes in his forbidden diary, or screams state-sponsored hate with the rest of the crowd, or goes about his daily desk-job of damnatio memoriae, but as a pale face in a black round window, gazing out at the sky over ruined London from the Ministry of Truth, from which he is abruptly recalled by the telescreen: "KZ-6090 Smith, W. . . . You have been at the window of Bay 2 of the Records Department for over eighty seconds. What are you doing there?" He offers the excuse of a technical glitch—he's come to look for the spare part himself—and returns, reprimanded, to his desk. He's got forty-five seconds to go before the Two Minutes' Hate and he's running late. It's not just Cushing's thin, haunted face or his stick-insect frame; he's more hesitant than I remember John Hurt's Winston, with a preoccupied little flinch of a smile. When we hear his thoughts—his thoughtcrimes—they're clear and steady. Taking the risk of conversation, he never sounds so sure. Now I am genuinely curious to see his Sherlock Holmes, because I'm used to thinking of a clean break between Basil Rathbone's clinical intellect and Jeremy Brett's astonishing definitive translation with all neuroses intact, and I'm wondering if Peter Cushing is the missing link.1
2. I do not remember the class satire registering nearly as cuttingly in the later film. Everyone speaks RP at the Ministries, Cockney in the prole sector. Peter Cushing walking into a prole bar and trying to order himself a gin kills the mood all round; he's too obviously slumming, buying half-recalled, wandering fragments of the past from an old man for twelve cents' worth of beer with the same almost childish eagerness with which he pays four dollars for the paperweight in Charrington's shop.2 This is a production which gained, I think, tremendous resonance from being made within ten years of the novel's publication and the end of World War II. Rationing would just have ended. St Clement Danes was a Blitz ruin when Orwell wrote it into his book and a ruin still when the play aired; it wouldn't be rebuilt and reconsecrated until 1958. I'm betting the bombed-out streets of London weren't sets. And yes, it does rather look as though they spent all their budget on the exterior shots, but I find myself noticing the shadings of the dialogue more than the fact that there are basically no props; this is not (slightly Twilight Zone-ish opening narration aside) a production that hits you over the head. We are clearly in a dystopia, it's grindingly poor, brutally oppressive, and only getting worse, but there's still space in the script for notes of humor or pathos, not just the constant clanging fear or oblivion under which the characters live. And so we, like they, can be deluded into thinking there is space in their lives for things like love and compassion.
3. I wish I could find an article I remember reading some years ago, which argued that whether he realized it or not, what Orwell did with the concept of sexcrime and the constantly planning, constantly threatened secrecy of Julia and Winston's affair was to reproduce with a heterosexual couple the common experience of gay men in postwar London, for whom the idea of being arrested and harshly punished for making love in a rented room was not futuristic in the slightest. Only a straight reader would have thought in 1949, my God, it couldn't happen here. Nonetheless, I was not expecting the jolt of chemistry between Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell—the story should have it, that double charge of limerence and lawbreaking that is as much an affirmation of their political deviancy as it is the fuel for further rebellion, but in 1954 I figured it would be done mostly through dialogue or implication. But when they kiss for the first time, Cushing looks like a man who hasn't had the chance of sex in years, Mitchell as though she's been waiting equal years for the chance to devour someone the way she's doing now: with his hands all over her, making himself believe she's real; she's got one hand possessively around the back of his neck, caressing his hair as if they have been lovers long already. The camera does cut away, but I thought it would do so sooner.
4. I had expected less from the torture scenes, too. I should have remembered that what you cannot see is so often so much worse than what you can be shown.3
5. I suppose one way to judge an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is by the devastation of its final scenes. Full marks for the BBC, then: the last meeting between Winston and Julia in the Chestnut Tree Café is all the more horrible because of its utter lack of drama, which is the point. There is nothing momentous about this conversation. It's not a reunion of lovers. It's not even the like-minded recognition of a comrade. It's two discarded ghosts hanging in the same dead air, without even the desire to haunt one another. You might not recognize them, so ruined and broken; voices, faces, bodies, minds. O'Brien told him: "Things will happen to you here from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years." I thought of T.S. Eliot: We are the hollow men . . . Not with a bang but a whimper. It is a very short scene. It upset me far more than its counterpart in the 1984 film, which I think softens the blow by having the reintegrated Julia and Winston converse unemotionally about ordinary things as well as their mutual betrayal; they might be strangers now, but they are strangers with the same brainwashed concerns in common. Here, there is nothing for them to say to each other, ever. There is nothing to say to anyone but Big Brother. I love . . .
6. Seriously, Criterion. I know it's a television production, but so was Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982). Put it out as a set with the 1984 film and a selection of essays. I guarantee you will have buyers and they won't all be me.
7. And the clocks were striking thirteen.
1. I've realized my idea of his career was totally wrong. The numbers finally clicked when I was looking at IMDb: between 1951 and 1956, Cushing did twenty-three plays and serials for the BBC. Even if they weren't all leading roles, he would have been one of the most well-known faces on television when Nineteen Eighty-Four aired and, unless he dropped catastrophically off the map for a year I haven't heard about, when he starred in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). He must have been a godsend for Hammer. Now I have even more reason to resent the lack of recordings from the early days of British television—I understand the combination of technical limitations with the impermanence of live drama, but I would truly have liked the opportunity to see Peter Cushing as the fashionable eponym of Beau Brummell (1954), Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1952), or the dispossessed photographer-hero of Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1953), which I didn't even realized had been adapted for TV. Maybe there are kinescopes out there somewhere, but I would be very surprised. NASA taped over the moon landings. As a species, I think we kind of suck about information storage unless it's unimportant.
2. It seems that Leonard Sachs looks familiar to me not because I've ever seen him before, but because his son stole every scene he played on Buffy as Ethan Rayne. I like discovering these things.
3. I have not spoken much about André Morell, but his work as O'Brien provides another reason for me to rent The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959): there's the original television serial of Quatermass and the Pit (1958—1959) if I want to see the actor in a straight-up heroic role, but it might be more reassuring to know that he can actually share a screen with Peter Cushing without torturing him.
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