Last night we reconstructed our Linux-driven pseudo-TV and tried it out; tonight we had a full-fledged movie night complete with movie cat and I feel the fact that we have just finished Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs (1955) proves that I will put up with almost any amount of soap in exchange for some decent engineering, although it was a close thing. Alexis Minotis as a wry and honest High Priest of Amun helped. Joan Collins made up like Jean Simmons in Black Narcissus (1947) did not. According to TCM, Hawks really wanted to make a movie about the building of a pyramid and was obliged to come up with a plot to justify it and the order of importance shows; the best scenes look like Cinemascope translations of double-page spreads from David Macaulay's Pyramid (1975) complete with thousands of extras and location shooting that verges on the Fitzcarraldo—one exterior set involved redressing the Unfinished Northern Pyramid of Zawyet El Aryan—and then the palace intrigue is pasted on with lines of dialogue like "Even a queen may be lonely" and gratuitous misrepresentation of cobras. The finale is spectacular and ironic and the film doesn't quite seem to realize just how powerful it could have been if thematically rather than moralistically built up to. Afterward in trying to find an article about the labor strike at Set Maat I was reminded of the Shit Pyramids of Sneferu, which cheered me up considerably. I can't believe I have finally seen an Egyptian epic that made me feel better about Cecil B. DeMille.
2022-11-13
Just about eight weeks ago, Martin Jarvis crashed through the windshield of my interest with a beautiful guest turn on Mr. Palfrey of Westminster (1984–85), after which in the finest traditions of character actors everywhere he turned out to have been in view all along; with his wife Rosalind Ayres, he is one of the mainstays of L.A. Theatre Works whose radio plays my father has been pressing on me for more than a decade and finally this weekend just digitally threw in my direction in the form of a drive with an assorted ton of productions on it. One of them was a live recording from 2012 of Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version starring Martin Jarvis as Andrew Crocker-Harris. This afternoon while trapped under a cat on the couch, I obviously listened to it.
Allowing for the normal emendations for radio, the text is the original one-act play from 1948 rather than its expansion into the 1951 film which was my introduction to the story and until now my only point of comparison beyond the page as well as one of my favorite movies which I have never managed to write more about, meaning it's been in my head so lastingly and so long that the greater or lesser differences in interpretation kept flicking out at me as I listened to LATW, which was delightful. It might have been useful to annotate more of them, but there was one that caught me so effectively that it could stand for an entire compare-and-contrast. It's one of the script's most piercing moments, Andrew's bitter denial of the value of the gift from one of his pupils at end of term which had reduced him to scalding, hopeless tears only a few moments and a crucial interruption before:
"Exactly. It will mean a perpetual reminder to myself of the story with which Taplow is at this very moment regaling his friends in the House. 'I gave the Crock a book to buy him off, and he blubbed. The Crock blubbed. I tell you I was there. I saw it. The Crock blubbed.' My mimicry is not as good as his, I fear. Forgive me."
Redgrave delivers his version of this passage—the film uses the more closely alliterative "cried" instead of the more demeaning, schoolboyish "blubbed"—with a kind of deliberate, ironic amazement, as if burlesquing his own shock at his emotional response through the fantasy of an even more nonplussed Taplow. Especially in his high-wire reed of a voice, it sounds almost successfully dismissive, but the precision with which he enunciates the words gives their pain away: he is reasserting the mask of his own caricature into which he let himself fossilize over the eighteen years of his failure as a schoolmaster, emphasizing himself as the dead man whom nothing can hurt, to talk so blandly of his own humiliation; it convinces neither the audience, his interlocutor, nor himself, but it's a valiant try.
As rendered by Jarvis, this flight of ruined fancy is remarkable for its venom—a nasty, sneering, jeering little impersonation, far more contemptuous of himself than Taplow ever sounded in the moment of fatal levity when his imitation of the desiccated classics master whom he had actually admitted to liking offered a suburban Clytaemnestra the weapon with which to stab her Agamemnon to the soul. His voice in its accustomed cadences is so dry and resigned, the animation as much as the malice sticks out like a snapped bone, a kind of scrawled rage of mimicry that isn't even close to an impression of his pupil, but then it really isn't meant to be; it's Andrew's own self-lashing shame, his anger at himself for falling for the cheap trick of being vulnerable and human and still capable of crediting that one boy at the school might not regard him with fear and derision as "the Himmler of the Lower Fifth." It's almost as unguarded as his tears, though he catches himself faster this time. There's even something juvenile about it, as if he were a cruelly pranked new boy instead of a master on the verge of retirement who claims to have accepted his inadequacies long ago, but then he was young when he came to his post, straight off his three prizes at Oxford and the joy of composing his own translation in verse of the Agamemnon, and perhaps it's that sensitive, academically passionate, socially gauche Andrew Crocker-Harris who has uttered such an audacious speech, not so far beneath the calcified appearance as would make the total mess of his life easier to bear. Whoever's acting it, the entire play is about peeling back the husks of accumulated time to uncover a living tragedy, but I love how differently it can be done.
Curiously, it never occurred with Redgrave's, but when Jarvis' Andrew cold-shouldered a colleague's sincere effort at reassurance with a clipped, almost interjected "I am not particularly concerned about Taplow's views of my character: or about yours either, if it comes to that," I thought suddenly of Harry Fordyce in Cash on Demand (1961), perpetually not in the least interested in other people's opinions, especially of himself, especially when he's acutely afraid they might be right, and then I couldn't believe I hadn't made the connection before. Peter Cushing even played Andrew Crocker-Harris for the BBC in 1955 and all I got was this rehearsal photo.
If this article is correct that Joanne Whalley was originally penciled in for this production, then I assume she would have reprised her part from this broadcast the previous year, directed by Jarvis for BBC Radio 4; Ian Ogilvy seems to have. Anyone who's heard that version, please give me an opinion of Michael York and/or a line on a recording. The reason I have never really written about The Browning Version, of course, is that it's important to me.
Allowing for the normal emendations for radio, the text is the original one-act play from 1948 rather than its expansion into the 1951 film which was my introduction to the story and until now my only point of comparison beyond the page as well as one of my favorite movies which I have never managed to write more about, meaning it's been in my head so lastingly and so long that the greater or lesser differences in interpretation kept flicking out at me as I listened to LATW, which was delightful. It might have been useful to annotate more of them, but there was one that caught me so effectively that it could stand for an entire compare-and-contrast. It's one of the script's most piercing moments, Andrew's bitter denial of the value of the gift from one of his pupils at end of term which had reduced him to scalding, hopeless tears only a few moments and a crucial interruption before:
"Exactly. It will mean a perpetual reminder to myself of the story with which Taplow is at this very moment regaling his friends in the House. 'I gave the Crock a book to buy him off, and he blubbed. The Crock blubbed. I tell you I was there. I saw it. The Crock blubbed.' My mimicry is not as good as his, I fear. Forgive me."
Redgrave delivers his version of this passage—the film uses the more closely alliterative "cried" instead of the more demeaning, schoolboyish "blubbed"—with a kind of deliberate, ironic amazement, as if burlesquing his own shock at his emotional response through the fantasy of an even more nonplussed Taplow. Especially in his high-wire reed of a voice, it sounds almost successfully dismissive, but the precision with which he enunciates the words gives their pain away: he is reasserting the mask of his own caricature into which he let himself fossilize over the eighteen years of his failure as a schoolmaster, emphasizing himself as the dead man whom nothing can hurt, to talk so blandly of his own humiliation; it convinces neither the audience, his interlocutor, nor himself, but it's a valiant try.
As rendered by Jarvis, this flight of ruined fancy is remarkable for its venom—a nasty, sneering, jeering little impersonation, far more contemptuous of himself than Taplow ever sounded in the moment of fatal levity when his imitation of the desiccated classics master whom he had actually admitted to liking offered a suburban Clytaemnestra the weapon with which to stab her Agamemnon to the soul. His voice in its accustomed cadences is so dry and resigned, the animation as much as the malice sticks out like a snapped bone, a kind of scrawled rage of mimicry that isn't even close to an impression of his pupil, but then it really isn't meant to be; it's Andrew's own self-lashing shame, his anger at himself for falling for the cheap trick of being vulnerable and human and still capable of crediting that one boy at the school might not regard him with fear and derision as "the Himmler of the Lower Fifth." It's almost as unguarded as his tears, though he catches himself faster this time. There's even something juvenile about it, as if he were a cruelly pranked new boy instead of a master on the verge of retirement who claims to have accepted his inadequacies long ago, but then he was young when he came to his post, straight off his three prizes at Oxford and the joy of composing his own translation in verse of the Agamemnon, and perhaps it's that sensitive, academically passionate, socially gauche Andrew Crocker-Harris who has uttered such an audacious speech, not so far beneath the calcified appearance as would make the total mess of his life easier to bear. Whoever's acting it, the entire play is about peeling back the husks of accumulated time to uncover a living tragedy, but I love how differently it can be done.
Curiously, it never occurred with Redgrave's, but when Jarvis' Andrew cold-shouldered a colleague's sincere effort at reassurance with a clipped, almost interjected "I am not particularly concerned about Taplow's views of my character: or about yours either, if it comes to that," I thought suddenly of Harry Fordyce in Cash on Demand (1961), perpetually not in the least interested in other people's opinions, especially of himself, especially when he's acutely afraid they might be right, and then I couldn't believe I hadn't made the connection before. Peter Cushing even played Andrew Crocker-Harris for the BBC in 1955 and all I got was this rehearsal photo.
If this article is correct that Joanne Whalley was originally penciled in for this production, then I assume she would have reprised her part from this broadcast the previous year, directed by Jarvis for BBC Radio 4; Ian Ogilvy seems to have. Anyone who's heard that version, please give me an opinion of Michael York and/or a line on a recording. The reason I have never really written about The Browning Version, of course, is that it's important to me.
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