Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, With a Terrifying Churchyard Scene)

“ ‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!’

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Great Expectations (1861)

The other day, while in a coffee shop, I picked up a copy of the Dickens classic and opened it to its second page, with the above passage. Wow!

The description grabs you by the scruff of the neck, not unlike the convict who appears out of nowhere and terrifies young Pip. You can imagine the terror of this orphan who just wants to mourn the family members buried here.

You’re fully expecting a crime story, but this is a novel in which things are not what they seem, and so it is here. Right after the threat in the dialogue, and that sentence about the “fearful man,” we are bombarded with verbs that suggest the vulnerability of this convict named Magwitch: “soaked,” “smothered,” “lamed,” “cut,” “stung,” and “torn.”

It’s no wonder that so much of Dickens’ work has been adapted for film and TV: any director worth his salt has an unforgettable picture to work with here.

(The image accompanying this post comes from David Lean’s magnificent 1946 adaptation of the Dickens novel, with Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Tony Wager as young Pip.)

This Day in Film History (Death of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Composer Maurice Jarre)

Mar. 29, 2009—Maurice Jarre, a French composer and conductor who netted three Oscars among his 150 movie soundtracks, died at age 84 of cancer at his villa in Malibu, Calif.

You might wonder why I picked a photo of Peter O’Toole to illustrate a brief account of someone else. Well, it’s because that picture instantly brings to mind the first of Jarre’s memorable Oscar-winning scores: Lawrence of Arabia.

Accomplished film composers have existed for nearly as long as there’s been a Hollywood, but except for John Williams, I don’t think that one has emerged as a name brand in his own right—and the latter’s fame was surely enhanced by his 14-year association with the Boston Pops.

But once you see that picture of O’Toole, more likely than not, the majestic theme of Lawrence of Arabia will resound in your head—as distinct a contribution to that epic’s grandeur as the spectacular cinematography of Freddie Young.

So indelible were the sounds created by Jarre that his soundtrack for the film was voted #3 on the American Film Institute’s 25 Greatest Film Scores of All Time, surpassed only by Williams’ Star Wars and Max Steiner’s Gone With the Wind.

Yet the soundtrack that Jarre produced for Lean’s next epic, Doctor Zhivago, produced an even more inescapable melody: “Lara’s Theme,” a hit international single.

Oscar honors came yet again for Jarre for his work on that 1965 film, then again 19 years later for what turned out to be Lean’s last big-screen epic: A Passage to India.

As Jarre’s agent and friend Richard Kraft noted in a 2009 appreciation for The Hollywood Reporter, Jarre came to the U.S. when pioneering symphonic-oriented film composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were passing from the scene, replaced by Elmer Bernstein, Alex North, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith interested in new sounds.

Although Jarre’s conservatory training leaned heavily on percussion, he shared the younger composers’ interest in different musical textures, using instruments that evoked the settings of his films, as seen in:

*The Man Who Would Be King, featuring sarangi and sarod, or Indian lutes;

*Ryan’s Daughter, with eight harps among the “lot of little experiments in the sound, music and concept” that Jarre mentioned in an August 1993 interview with Susan King of the Los Angeles Times;

*Witness, relying on synthesizers;

*The Dead Poets Society, with Celtic harp and flute layered over synthesizers.

Hired by producer Sam Spiegel, Jarre found Lawrence of Arabia a far more complex and high-stakes job than any he’d experienced in French theater and cinema. It was on a grand scale, requiring more than two hours of music; Lean was editing the second part of the film first, so Jarre would have to compose out of chronological order; and he had only six weeks to compose and conduct.

Making matters worse, as Sheila O’Malley noted in a perceptive 2007 blog post, Adrian Boult was engaged to record the soundtrack because British subsidies would not fund a foreign conductor, even though the first rehearsal made it plain that Boult didn’t know key aspects of what he was about to take on, such as keep an eye on the chronometer and an eye on the screen. (Boult ended up on the film credits, even though he didn’t record a note.)

Early on in researching this post, I wondered what Jarre’s personality was like—an inquiry triggered by Williams’ recent comment in an interview with Variety Magazine in which he discussed the older breed of film composers: “Alex North, David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith and others — brilliant, beautiful talents. All unhappy.”

I’ve come to think that, while Jarre might have been a “brilliant, beautiful” talent, he was far from “unhappy”, with these traits among his most prominent:

*Perfectionism: Lean helped instill this characteristic, Jarre explained in commentary for a tribute concert for the director recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

*Loyal: Jarre worked on the last four films completed by Lean and was starting on a fifth, an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel Nostromo, before the project died with the director’s death from cancer.

*Convivial: At the time of the composer’s death, Bernard Miyet, then leader of French musicians’ guild SACEM, praised his friend’s “eternal good nature, a way of living and a simplicity that became legendary.” Jarre loved to regale listeners with anecdotes spotlighting the films and personalities he had known over the years, including how during an L.A. recording session, his entire orchestra stopped playing after spotting actress Sophia Loren in the technician’s booth.

This Day in Film History (Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—and History’s)

December 16, 1962—Lawrence of Arabia, an unconventional epic that would go on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, premiered in New York City. 

Fittingly for a biopic about the British intelligence officer in WWI that consistently asked questions about his essential identity, archaeologist A.W. Lawrence, after watching the masterpiece, remarked that he did not recognize in it his older brother, T.E. Lawrence.

The younger Lawrence was nonplussed for reasons besides the fact that the actor embodying his brother, Peter O’Toole, stood eight inches taller than the short military hero who aided the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. 

(Nor would A.W. recognize his brother’s frequently dirty, desert-coarsened face in O’Toole’s well-lit, cosmetically enhanced visage. “If he were any prettier, they’d have to call it Florence of Arabia,” Noel Coward famously cracked.)

As the blogger “Groggee Dundee” wrote in a fine post on the blog Nothing Is Written, the film “is handicapped because historians do not agree on Lawrence’s importance, motivations or personality”—disputes that have abated little in the half-century since the movie’s premiere, even after the release of official military records not available up to 1962. Some difficulties arise from a personality that, even Lawrence himself admitted in a 1927 letter, was complicated.

Yet the process of giving a focus to a figure with so many different facets resulted in distortions that should lead the film to be thought of as historical fiction rather than biopic or docudrama. 

To embody particular points of view, for instance, composite characters were created, such as Claude Rains’ wily Arab Bureau diplomat Dryden, or Anthony Quayle’s Colonel Brighton, a representative for elements in the British Army who moved from disgust to admiration of Lawrence. 

The American journalist who transforms Lawrence into a figure of worldwide renown, Jackson Bentley, was strongly suggested by Lowell Thomas.

The family of General Edmund Allenby, Lawrence’s commander in the pivotal months of the Arab Revolt, lodged a formal protest over his representation in the Columbia release. The descendants of Auda abu Tayi and Sherif Ali pressed a lawsuit against the studio before finally dropping it 10 years later. Moreover, the film’s account of Lawrence's alleged capture and rape by guards under the control of the Turkish governor, Hajim Bey, remains hugely controversial.

Most accounts of Lawrence of Arabia treat it as an example of pure cinema—a perfectly valid approach that rightly celebrates the achievement of director David Lean. But seldom in cinema analysis is it more helpful, and even necessary, to consider the importance of the screenplay to a film’s success. 

This, after all, is a film about one man’s attempt to change and rewrite history—or, in its hero’s protest against the Arab status quo, “Nothing is written.” The movie itself is, in a sense, a revision of history.

For awhile, there was a serious question whether it would be made at all, given that so many players did not appreciate this version of history. Independent producer Alexander Korda secured the rights to Lawrence's memoir Revolt in the Desert all the way back in the 1930s, with Leslie Howard in mind for the soldier-scholar. 

Yet even the death of Lawrence in a motorcycle accident in 1935 did not give real creative freedom to Korda, who was told by the British government that a movie on this subject would not be helpful at that time. (The Turks didn’t like any implications that they had tortured prisoners; the Arabs hated the thought that they needed British aid to win their freedom from the Ottoman Empire; and British diplomats balefully eyed the prospect of unrest in what is now called “the Arab street.”) 

Korda sold the rights eventually to producer Sam Spiegel, as freewheeling a character in his way as Lawrence. More actors would see their names peddled in connection with the project—including Olivier, Brando and Albert Finney—before Spiegel and Lean turned to the young stage actor Peter O’Toole.

The screenplay, itself nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, flew in the face of other historical epics of the time because it was an anti-war satire about a military genius. 

Making possible the filming of a similar Hollywood treatment of a war hero, the 1970 film Patton, its creation, in turn, was facilitated by the success of Lean’s prior film, another Best Picture winner, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The two movies have more in common than a single man at the creative helm. In a sense, Lawrence is a brother under the skin to Colonel Nicholson, the protagonist of Bridge. Eccentric, flawed heroes, they perform their tasks far better than anyone can reasonably expect, only to come a cropper in a changed military/political environment.

(Those similarities must have been too pointed to ignore by Bridge’s Alec Guinness, who expressed a desire to play Lawrence for Lean, too—a wish the actor might have felt perfectly appropriate, considering he had played the hero in Terrence Rattigan’s play Ross. Told bluntly that he was too old to play the legend of Arabia, Guinness took another significant role in the production—Prince Feisal.)

Spiegel got much for his money out of the services of screenwriter Michael Wilson in Bridge: a WWII intelligence officer for the U.S. Marine Corps who understood in his bones the frequent absurdity of the military’s command structure and objectives, as well as a scribe who could be bought cheaply because his blacklisting left him desperate for work. 

(Wilson and co-screenwriter Carl Foreman, unable to accept their Oscars because of the blacklist, watched as the prize was awarded to Francophone novelist Pierre Boulle, who delivered what is believed to be the shortest acceptance speech in the history of the award ceremony: “Merci.”) 

The producer was hoping for similar magic with the story of Lawrence.

But, after two years and a massive script, Wilson disappointed Lean and Spiegel. The director found dialogue that was not as sharp as he liked it; Spiegel, on the other hand, was concerned that the script was too anti-military, or so it is said. 

In truth, however, the producer had nobody to blame but himself for the latter: Not only had Wilson’s original screenplay for Friendly Persuasion looked sympathetically on the Quaker characters’ pacifism, but Bridge on the River Kwai was absolutely scathing about the folly of war, and the writer’s prepared testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee had lambasted that body for its threat to the world's well-being (“I am not surprised to be hauled before a Committee that is trying to make peace a dirty subversive word”).

By Wilson’s own estimate, no more than 10% of the dialogue in the finished film was in his screenplay. But, if Spiegel was hoping for a script with a more benign view of the military from replacement Robert Bolt, he was terribly mistaken. 

The playwright of A Man for All Seasons possessed inclinations every bit as strong as Wilson’s against armed force. In fact, production in Spain had to be halted on the second half of the film when Bolt was arrested for participating in an antinuclear demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square. 

Bolt refused, More-like, to renounce his conscience, and languished in jail for several weeks without access to his typewriter. Nobody knows what combination of threats and blandishments Spiegel used to get Bolt to back down and get released early, but the screenwriter was so disgusted that he never spoke to the producer again.

If the first half of the film could be almost wickedly satirical about the military brass’s attitude toward the “balmy” Lawrence (General Murray: “I can't make out whether you're bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted”; Lawrence: “I have the same problem, sir”), the second half was dispiriting in tracing how the stress of fighting led to Lawrence’s terrifying recognition of his egomania and sadomasochism.

In a sense, it reflected not just the preoccupations of Wilson and Bolt, but also the vision of Lawrence presented by George Bernard Shaw’s 1932 play, Too True to be Good.

I first saw this play at the Shaw Festival in Canada in 1994. Though the first act was fine, the play truly snaps to attention (so to speak) with the introduction of the puckishly named “Private Meek” in Act 2. Shaw’s physical description of the character left little doubt about who was being depicted:

“He is an insignificant looking private soldier, dusty as to his clothes and a bit gritty as to his windbeaten face. Otherwise there is nothing to find fault with: his tunic and puttees are smart and correct, and his speech ready and rapid. Yet the colonel, already irritated by the racket of the bicycle and the interruption to his newspaper, contemplates him with stern disfavor; for there is something exasperatingly and inexplicably wrong about him. He wears a pith helmet with a pagri; and in profile this pagri suggests a shirt which he has forgotten to tuck in behind, whilst its front view as it falls on his shoulders gives a feminine air of having ringlets and a veil which is in the last degree unsoldierly. His figure is that of a boy of seventeen; but he seems to have borrowed a long head and Wellingtonian nose and chin from somebody else for the express purpose of annoying the colonel.”

And annoy the colonel, Meek promptly does, in much the way that the Lawrence of film does with Generals Murray and Allenby: “If I could get hold of the recruiting officer who enlisted you, I’d have his stripes off.” 

By the time that the soldier is revealed as a quartermaster’s clerk, interpreter, and intelligence officer—not to mention a colonel who prefers the ranks, where he has a “freer hand”—the playwright has described unmistakable terms the longtime friend who, when he entered the Royal Air Force, did so under the assumed name “T.E. Shaw.”

Whatever its pretenses as history, Lawrence of America has also become, in another sense, prophecy. Instead of Britain, another world superpower has found itself in the Middle East, sure that, under its guidance, ancient prejudices can be erased because “nothing is written.” 

Ironically, like Lawrence at the film’s end, the United States now can’t wait to extricate itself from this cat’s cradle, finding that geopolitical gamesmanship which might have begun with the best intentions only ends in moral ambiguity.

 

 

This Day in Film History (Director David Lean Dies)

April 16, 1991—David Lean, a director whose quest for perfection led to two Oscars and influenced a generation of filmmakers, died of cancer in London at age 83.

This year is the centennial of the director’s birth (which occurred on March 25), and this is as good a point as any to try to examine his mastery of his medium.

The two widescreen blockbusters that won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for Lean, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), are also fascinating character studies, satirical in spots, of how an extreme environment and the imperatives of war and modern politics combine to drive men mad. In contrast to the films of, for instance, Cecil B. DeMille during that time, they constitute thinking-man’s epics.

I find it fascinating that so many people in show business gravitate toward theater or film as a means of escape. Lean was no different in this regard.

His strict Quaker upbringing in a London suburb precluded any chance of going to the movies as a child. A charwoman who worked for his family got him interested in film as a youth with her descriptions and imitations of scenes in Charlie Chaplin films. “If you knew what the London suburbs were like, you will understand-it was very, very gray, and the movies were a journey into another world,” he recalled in an article published in American Film Magazine (March 1990).

Lean took no guff on the set—he and actress Judy Davis famously tangled during production of his last movie, A Passage to India (1984)—but more often than not, the results were worth it. That famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which a match blown out by Peter O’Toole gradually morphs into sunrise on an Arabian desert came about because Lean was willing to wait for as long as it took to get just the right shot. (That acute Lean eye also manifested itself in his private life: he was married six times, never for long, not just because of his difficult nature but because of his appreciation for the feminine figure.)

That Lawrence of Arabia scene also demonstrates that at the heart of the Lean style was mastery of blending wildly disparate shots into a seamless whole—a skill he developed even before he turned to direction, when he served as editor for some of the great British directors of the 1930s and early 1940s, including Anthony Asquith (Pygmalion), Gabriel Pascal (Major Barbara), and Michael Powell (One of Our Aircraft is Missing). His first directing credit was actually a co-credit with Noel Coward (who, despite writing screenplays and appearing on screen, had never directed a film himself) on the British wartime film In Which We Serve (1942).

Two Dickens adaptations increased his reputation in the film community after that: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). In particular, the latter features a scene with a technique I would today’s directors would emulate more: Bill Sykes’ murder of Nancy. It may have been shot out of necessity because of film censorship code restrictions of the time, but it is masterful in how it induces the audience to use its imagination.

We never actually see the murder taking place, but we know it’s occurring because, once we see Sykes approaching Nancy and locking the door, we know something terrible is happening because of the dog that is trying frantically to scratch at the door to help the doomed young woman.

Given the frequency with which they worked and the brilliant results they achieved, I figured that Lean’s favorite actor would have been Alec Guinness. In fact, I was surprised to learn in listening to a TV interview some time ago, it was William Holden. The surprise didn’t come because I thought Holden was bad—far from it—but because of the infrequency with which they worked.

Lean praised Holden for his performance in Bridge on the River Kwai—totally professional, simply diving right into the scene, with no lengthy preliminaries. In contrast, for all the respect Lean clearly had for Guinness’ work, the actor exasperated him at points.

In the American Film piece, Lean notes that Guinness had originally been offered the role of the Irish priest in Ryan’s Daughter, but that the actor’s several pages of suggested changes (inspired by his conversion to Roman Catholicism) led Lean to offer the role to Trevor Howard instead. Given how Ryan’s Daughter dismally performed at the box office, Guinness probably felt this was no great loss. (Let it be immediately said that the latter film, shot in Ireland, deserves a reevaluation; critics seemed unduly delighted to toss bombs at a director whose Doctor Zhivago, along with Bridge and Lawrence, had been great moneymakers.)

What is a loss is the amount of great work that Lean had to give up in his last two decades. Financing difficulties forced him to cease work on a film about the mutiny on the Bounty, illness forced him to withdraw from Empire of the Sun before the property fell into Steven Spielberg’s hands, and death claimed him while he was in the last stages of pre-production that could have turned into one of his most fascinating literary adaptations, Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo.