Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 4: Song of Summer (1968)

The final film in the six-film box set of Ken Russell's work at the BBC in the 1960s is on the English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934). Of all the films in the set, this is the closest in its narrative organization to a conventional feature and the most subdued in tone. It is also the only film of the six based not on an original screenplay but on an existing source, the book Delius As I Knew Him by Eric Fenby, who collaborated with Russell on the screenplay, and it is to this that Russell attributes his stylistic restraint: "Song of Summer was less fragmentary and kaleidoscopic than some of my work. But the book was a straightforward story [with] a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there didn't seem to be any point in jazzing it up." Although the least tricked up film in the set, it is ultimately the most satisfying, a moving work that offers Russell's most profound insights yet into the creative mind of the artist.

The film covers the last five years of Delius's life and his association with a young Yorkshireman, Eric Fenby, a self-taught musician and composer who became Delius's assistant during this time. Hearing a work by Delius on the radio one evening, Fenby writes to Delius's wife Jelka offering his services. By this time, Delius is paralyzed and blind and has for several years been unable to compose. Jelka invites Fenby to join them in their house outside Paris, where they have lived essentially in isolation for more than thirty years. Fenby finds the atmosphere of the household "sinister" (his room is decorated with a copy of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream) and Delius cranky, opinionated, and demanding. At first the two don't get along. Unimpressed by Fenby's limited musical education and inability to follow the composer's attempts to dictate his musical ideas for transcription, Delius bullies the diffident young man mercilessly. Fenby manages to form a close relationship with Jelka, though, and she encourages him to stand up to Delius.

Fenby does assert himself, and eventually, through trial and error, the two are able to work out a method of musical dictation that makes it possible for Delius to begin composing again. The bulk of Delius's compositions were impressionistic tone poems based on natural scenes and elements—places, seasons, the time of day, for example—and although very different in temperament, the two men have one important thing in common that allows them to forge a working relationship: their ability to hear the music in nature and to use that as the source of their inspiration. When Fenby puts a broadcast of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the radio, Delius reacts dismissively: "Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and that lot. . . . A complete waste of time. . . . Listen to the music of nature. Forget the immortals. I did long ago."

The scenes of their first successful working sessions together, about half an hour into the film, are just stunning. Film biographies have often attempted to portray the almost subliminal communication of creative minds that can occur when songwriters work together, but Russell's depiction of this process in Song of Summer is far ahead of any other attempt of this kind that I'm aware of. The film critic Richard Schickel once called Song of Summer "the best dramatic television program I've ever seen" because of its insights into the creative process and the creative personality, and I have to say that, along with Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, it's the best film of any kind on these subjects I've seen. As he slowly returns to life, Delius doesn't abandon his waspish personality altogether, but you can nevertheless sense an easing of his frustration and hostility. And you can see his attitude toward Fenby evolve into something resembling gratitude as the two collaborate to translate the melodies in Delius's mind into musical notation. For his part Fenby is very much the receptor in all this—he describes himself as Delius's "amanuensis"—but you can sense his active pleasure in enabling the great composer to regain his creative voice.

The film may concentrate on the last five years of Delius's life, but as he develops greater intimacy with Fenby, he opens up to him and begins reminiscing about the past, and this permits Russell to work in unobtrusive biographical details about Delius. Two episodes from Delius's past are particularly striking. One is of his experiences in Florida as a young man working as a factor on an orange plantation near Jacksonville. After Delius asks Jelka to play a recording of "Ol' Man River" on the gramophone, he tells his young assistant of the profound effect on him of the African American music of Florida, its spontaneous sense of harmony, rhythm, and counterpoint such a contrast to the academic music of Europe. It was in Florida, he tells Fenby, that "I first felt the urge to express myself in music."

The other experience, this time shown in flashback, is one that happened in Norway years earlier, when he could no longer walk but before he lost his sight. He wanted to go to the top of a nearby mountain to see the sunset and was taken there in a chair carried by Jelka, his friend the English composer Percy Grainger, and a Norwegian servant. This is a beautifully conceived sequence which shows the group ascending higher up the snow-covered mountain through clouds that grow ever denser. Then suddenly at the last moment they break through the clouds at the top of the mountain and see the sun setting in the distance. All this is accompanied by glorious music by Delius that exactly corresponds to the mood of the images, building in intensity until it suddenly seems to resolve itself tonally, soar free, and float away in an almost mystical sense of calm and release. Visually and dramatically, this small, technically simple sequence is the centerpiece of the film, a return to the melding of rapturous music with rapturous imagery that distinguished Russell's earlier biographical films on Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy.

In the earlier films in the set, Russell tended to use non-professional actors—often choosing them, like Fellini, for their faces—and to mold their characterizations himself through the writing, photography, and editing. But in Song of Summer, with its more conventional narrative approach, he concentrates more on getting his main actors to create sustained characterizations. And it pays off. Christopher Gable, who plays Eric Fenby, was a ballet dancer who had appeared in only one television program before this film. But he seems wholly comfortable with his character here, conveying all the boyish enthusiasm, hero worship, and insecurity of the young Fenby. Later, as he becomes a full-fledged collaborator with Delius, he makes plain Fenby's greater maturity and self-confidence. (He would go on to work with Russell five more times before his death in 1998.)

Maureen Pryor, an experienced film and television actress who plays Delius's wife Jelka, grounds her character in Jelka's selfless devotion to her husband and her motherly but companionable support of Fenby. Her finest moment comes when Delius delivers a tirade to Fenby against marriage. "It's only from your art you will find lasting happiness in your life," he tells Fenby, then advises him that if he must marry, marry a woman who is more devoted to his art than to him. The blind Delius cannot see the effect his thoughtless words have on Jelka, but we can, and the pain provoked by his insensitivity registers clearly on her face.

As good as those two actors are, though, it is really Max Adrian as Delius who carries the film. At this point in his life, Delius is paralyzed, confined to a wheel chair, and blind. His character unable to gesture or use his body, unable to see, his eyes often concealed behind dark glasses, and his facial expressions immobilized by his illness, Adrian must create a portrait of Delius largely through his voice. Despite these limitations, he gives Delius a tremendously vivid personality. Another of Russell's troubled geniuses, he has the additional burden of being an artist still in possession of his full creative ability, but physically unable to express it. His resentment of his dependence on Fenby gradually becomes tolerance then admiration as Fenby subsumes his own creativity to Delius's and becomes a channel for the great composer's inspiration. Delius may never entirely lose his irascibility and egotism, but Adrian lets us see some of the sharp edges to his personality begin to soften and suggests just a touch of increasing regard for someone other than himself.

Song of Summer is a remarkable finale to the six works in this box set. Beginning with Elgar, the closest to a traditional biographical documentary, Russell proceeds in these films through stages that become more and more idiosyncratic. "There are certain points in every film I do, where I deliberately want to shock people into awareness," he once said in an interview, and in these works you can see him honing this vision of cinema as shock treatment. Finally he arrives at Song of Summer, in which he synthesizes all he has done in the previous films and integrates it into a more subdued yet still emotionally intense experience. To follow Russell through these six films is to be taken through the successive phases of a truly original filmmaker's experimentation with how to tell the life stories of artists in innovative ways. It's a journey well worth taking.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 3: Dante's Inferno (1967)

If you didn't know you were watching the beginning of Ken Russell's 1967 biography of the English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-1882), you might think you were watching a black-and-white Hammer horror film from the 1960s. The film opens in sensational Hammer fashion, with the nighttime exhumation of a grave. While eerie, melodramatic music on the soundtrack builds in intensity, torches wave over a coffin being raised from an open grave, the scene shot from overhead. The lid slides away from the coffin and we see an arm sweep away cobwebs from the shriveled remains of a woman in a burial shroud. The arm reaches into the coffin and lifts out a small moldy book, the camera moves in for a closer shot of the face, its skin sunken and stretched tight over the skull, and suddenly the title of the film appears: Dante's Inferno.

Immediately the scene cuts to a shot of Oliver Reed, who plays Rosetti, leaping directly at the camera over a bonfire around which a group of people are cavorting as they toss in paintings in the style of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds and chant slogans like "Away with the wishy-washies!" A narrator explains in voice-over: "Arson, rapine, riot, civil insurrection is terrifying Europe. This is 1848. . . . In England rebels conspire to overthrow the Royal Academy of Art." Thus the film begins in Ken Russell's typically flamboyant style, with the juxtaposition of horror, social rebellion, and high jinks.

For the next hour and a half Russell gives us a crash course in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with its fascination with knights and damsels and all things medieval. The cast of characters surrounding Rosetti sounds like a who's who of the movement: his sister the poet Christina Rosetti, the painters Millais, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones, the decorative artist and founder of the English Arts and Crafts Movement William Morris, the poet Algernon Swinburne, the critic John Ruskin. But always at the film's center are Dante Gabriel Rosetti and his lovers: his model Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Burden, another model who later married William Morris before beginning an affair with Rosetti, and Fanny Cornforth, yet another model with whom Rosetti lived off and on for several years at the end of his life. The film concentrates especially on Rosetti's relationship with Elizabeth Siddal (Judith Paris), a milliner's assistant who became his model, his muse, his mistress, and eventually his wife. Siddal posed for many of the best-known paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, including Millais's iconic Ophelia. Their relationship was a stormy one, complicated by her mysterious chronic illness, her addiction to laudanum, and her adoption as a protégée by the domineering John Ruskin.

The tone of the film—at least for the first hour—is the mixture of satire and seriousness of Russell's earlier films on Henri Rousseau and Isadora Duncan. The PRB might be preaching a revolutionary message, but unlike their champion the priggish John Ruskin (when offered snuff, he declines, saying condescendingly, "Art is my stimulant"), they aim to have a good time doing it. When early in the film Russell accompanies their prankish behavior with Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business" playing on a carnival organ on the soundtrack, we know that these are young men living their lives as theater. Later when Rosetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, and Swinburne spend the summer in Oxford painting murals of the Arthurian legends on the walls of the Oxford Union debating hall, they frolic like buffoons, becoming Russell's Pre-Raphaelite version of the Marx Brothers. Yet when they go out punting on the Isis with Jane Burden, who is posing for the murals as Guinevere, the visuals become almost idyllically beautiful.

After Siddal's death in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum, the tone of the film takes a sharp turn, becoming serious, hallucinatory, and morbid, and stays there for its last half hour. Siddal's death is portrayed in the film as suicide after she learned of Rosetti's affair with Jane Morris. (The coroner's verdict was accidental death.) It is Elizabeth Siddal's grave which is opened at the beginning of the film, and the book inside her coffin is a journal of Rosetti's containing the only copy of his early poems. Persuaded by an unscrupulous art dealer to exhume Elizabeth Siddal to retrieve those early poems so they could be published, Rosetti chose to place commerce over art, and he never really got over what he came to view as a betrayal of the idealistic principles of his youth. Already in a fragile mental state, his health ruined by alcohol and dependence on the drug chloral hydrate, Rosetti was haunted by what he had done. "He accuses and condemns himself . . . endlessly," his sister Christina says of his despair over the exhumation. Russell has said it was specifically that incident and its effect on Rosetti which inspired him to make Dante's Inferno and guided his approach to portraying Rosetti's life.

The film continues the style Russell developed in the earlier semi-documentary biographies in this box set, but with all the elements of that style more elaborate than ever. Voice-over narration, fully dramatized scenes, and a copious number of passages from Rosetti's poetry recited by Reed accompany stunningly staged, photographed, and edited images filled with detailed period decor, costumes, and Pre-Raphaelite art. Especially memorable are images of the Lake District, where Rosetti and Siddal pursue their romance, and a waterfall used as a recurring location at key points in the film. It appears to be the same waterfall where Millais posed John Ruskin for his portrait of Ruskin, an amazingly realistic, almost photographic work that illustrates the Pre-Raphaelite creed of "truth to nature." (The waterfall's exact location wasn't discovered until 2010, so the one used in the film must be a similar one, though it appears virtually identical.)

Early in the film Rosetti paints Siddal posed there. Later, after the exhumation, it appears in a hallucinatory dream/nightmare sequence while Rosetti is stoned on chloral. Still later it appears again in another hallucinatory sequence during his attempt to commit suicide with laudanum, with Siddal reaching out for Rosetti from her open coffin, which is resting on a boulder in the stream, and Rosetti plunging headlong off the boulder and into the stream at the end of the sequence. At the very end of the film, he returns to the Lake District setting of the early days of his romance with Siddal and yet again to that waterfall, which has become an image of the untamed drama of Rosetti's life.

Dante's Inferno is a wonderfully apposite follow-up to Russell's film on Isadora Duncan. Like Isadora, Dante Gabriel Rosetti was a great artist, but also a self-centered showoff who lived life on the grand emotional scale. His contradictory personality was, like Isadora's, composed of traits that were frequently at odds with one another, his serious creative urges shot through with pretension and a degree of dilettantism, his troubled personal and professional lives dominated almost as much by a showbiz mentality as by the artistic impulse. Both were youthful innovators who later ran out of new ideas, who grew stale and saw their creativity fossilize, and whose response to this and to their personal troubles was behavior that became increasingly self-destructive. Theirs was the tragedy of those artists who blaze bright in their youth and burn out in middle age.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 2: Always on Sunday (1965) and Isadora (1966)

After his New Wave-influenced The Debussy Film, in which he presented the composer Claude Debussy's life as an intricate Chinese box of time, character, point of view, and narrative mode, Ken Russell next turned to the life of the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). In his film on Rousseau, Always on Sunday, Russell returns to the more conventional approach of his 1962 biography of the composer Edward Elgar. He uses a combination of impersonal voice-over narration (by Oliver Reed), first-person narration by Rousseau (the voice and accent of the actor playing Rousseau, James Lloyd, sound exactly like those of the English actor Jim Broadbent), passages from contemporary critics' reviews of Rousseau's work, music, and dramatized scenes—some factual, some imagined—to tell Rousseau's story.

Rather than covering all of Rousseau's life, Russell begins with Rousseau's retirement, at the age of fifty-one, after twenty years as a French government civil servant, to devote his life to painting. The very first scene shows Rousseau packing his civil servant's uniform and the French flag (he was a customs inspector) in a trunk and pouring mothballs over them. On the soundtrack we hear a chauvinistic passage from the valedictory letter of Rousseau's supervisor expressing the hope that in his retirement he will produce art which will raise the opinion of France in the estimation of "foreigners." If the title of the film, with its word play on the title of the movie Never on Sunday, doesn't make us suspect that something not quite straightforward is up, Russell gives us a clear indication within the first minute that this is a film whose tone—both visual and verbal—will combine seriousness with satire. That is the innovation of Always on Sunday—its combination of a conventional stylistic approach and a wildly unconventional and constantly shifting tone in which scenes of restrained visual beauty alternate with scenes of outlandish comic exaggeration.

Rousseau retired the same year the avant-garde painters of Paris founded the Salon des Indépendants. This was an annual exhibition in which painters like Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Seurat could display work that had been rejected for the annual exhibition of the conservative Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In fact, anyone could enter work in the new exhibition, and this is exactly what Rousseau did that first year and nearly every year for the rest of his life. But Rousseau, a self-taught painter and ordinary middle-class retiree, was not part of the Impressionists or any other artistic movement or group and was ignored by other artists and scorned for his primitive style even by critics and those members of the public sympathetic to the new style of painting. This gives rise to a jaw-dropping scene early in the film in which Russell gives full rein to his mordant sense of humor and his extreme sense of dramatic hyperbole.

At the first exhibition of the Salon, a group of onlookers gathers around Rousseau, who is standing beside one of his paintings, and ridicule him. At the front of the group are a rakish gentleman and a woman in tawdry dress. As she gorges on a huge box of chocolates she is holding, the two trade repartee in working-class British accents for the benefit of amused bystanders. The painting, of Rousseau's Army unit, is titled 51st Artillery: A Portrait of the Artist and His Brothers at Arms (it's pictured above), and the couple are making fun of the fact that all of the soldiers look pretty much alike. (They do.) "Which one's he then?" the man asks. "That's him," she says, pointing to one of the soldiers. "No, uh, that's him," he replies, pointing to a different soldier. The pair continue trading those two lines—"That's him!" "That's him!"—faster and more shrilly as the whole group breaks up with laughter and the abashed Rousseau looks on in humiliation. Finally the woman silences the man by shoving a chocolate in his mouth. The entire absurd routine wouldn't seem out of place in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Things get even more peculiar when Rousseau is adopted as a protégé by the proto-surrealist dramatist and poet Alfred Jarry, who promotes Rousseau's original painting style as "unconscious" genius. "Why should strangeness provoke mockery?" he asks. Their scenes together are filmed in a frenetic physical style which recalls that of silent comedy, not the balletic comedy of Chaplin or the acrobatic comedy of Keaton, but the hyperactive knockabout farce of the Keystone Kops. Rousseau and Jarry, who is played by the five-foot tall actress Annette Robertson from The Debussy Film, become a weird comedy team of physical opposites in the style of Laurel and Hardy.

If the film later settles into a comparatively more sedate style, it never loses its satirical edge. Yet even though it pokes fun at just about everything in sight, it never makes fun of Rousseau, portraying him as a naïf (he actually considered himself a "realist" painter) and as a perennial outsider, too odd to be fully accepted by the straight world, too unfashionable to be embraced by the avant-garde art movement. Russell treats the neglect of Rousseau's talent during his lifetime—he was consistently dismissed by the public, critics, and other artists—seriously as well. Despite being championed by Jarry, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and very late in his life by Pablo Picasso, who discovered Rousseau after buying one of his paintings for a few dollars in a junk shop, Rousseau was only truly recognized as an innovative genius by the Cubists and Surrealists, who claimed him as a forerunner of their styles, years after his death.

Russell takes the satirical exaggeration of Always on Sunday even further in the fourth film in the set, his biography of Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World, and this time extends it to the subject of the film herself. The film begins with a narrator reading from newspaper articles describing events in Isadora's life: being banned from Boston after a nude performance, the death of her two children when their car rolls into the Seine, the suicide of the mad Russian poet she married, Isadora's suicide attempt on the French Riviera, finally her bizarre death and her funeral. Accompanying this Citizen Kane-like opening, however, are images played strictly for farce, filmed in fast motion and edited like a manic two-reel silent comedy. The rest of Isadora continues in this vein, as lyrical passages lead to outrageously comic ones. But mostly the tone is comic, covering just about every variety of comedy—farce, satire, irony, parody, visual and verbal humor.

Aside from that opening newsreel-style sequence and a few passages where Isadora (Vivian Pickles) reads from her letters, the narration is by Sewell Stokes, a writer who was a friend of Isadora and is given credit along with Russell for the screenplay and sole credit for the dialogue. "I suppose Isadora had the most sensational life of any woman who has lived during this century," he begins, and what follows makes a strong case that he is not exaggerating. The film really has two stars. One of these is, of course, Isadora herself as portrayed by Pickles. A stage and television actress who was also a trained dancer, Pickles, with her flat-voweled, drawling imitation of an American accent, is a marvel as Isadora, whose motto was "To dance is to live."

A self-taught dancer born in California who modeled her movements on what she imagined to be those of dancers in the statues and frescoes of ancient Greece, Isadora didn't set out to shock, even if that was often her effect on others, but to express herself without the customary constraints of society and to spread her "message of beauty and freedom." She did this above all by using the fluidity of her body in motion to express through movement her inner life and blend her entire being with the moment. If Isadora as portrayed in this film is impossible to take completely seriously, Pickles makes it clear that Isadora took herself seriously. No matter how extravagant her private life or how theatrical and impetuous her behavior, Isadora was absolutely serious about her dancing, which Pickles makes seem earnest, graceful, and spontaneous.

The other star of Isadora is Ken Russell. Here Russell takes the application of the auteur principle to the film biography, begun in The Debussy Film, and goes all the way with it. One expects a film in this genre to be serious, especially when it is dealing with a life as frustrating, unorthodox, and at times tragic as Isadora Duncan's. (Think of Karel Reisz's Isadora with Vanessa Redgrave, which was made at the same time as this film.) Yet nearly everything about Russell's Isadora pulls the film in an opposite direction from its serious subject. Russell's seemingly capricious style is all over the map, veering from gorgeous high-contrast scenes that might have come from a Murnau silent, to scenes of decadence reminiscent of those in a Stroheim silent, to sequences inspired by Mack Sennett and by British New Wave films like Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones. The choice of music is sometimes serious, sometimes jokey—everything from Satie, Prokofiev, and Beethoven to John Philip Sousa, "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," and "Bye Bye, Blackbird." Serious subjects like death, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse sit side by side with hysterically funny passages that will have you laughing out loud.

For all the gravity of its subject and the quirkiness of Russell's treatment of it, this is one seriously entertaining movie. It's an incredibly dense movie too, covering in one hour more than most films could manage in twice that time. Yet in the end, Russell's synthesis of opposing styles is not merely self-indulgent cleverness, but rather an intentional choice used to make some very important points. Of all the films in the set I've written about so far, Isadora has the most vivid and clearly defined main character. And for all Russell's stylistic shenanigans, this is also the film that makes the strongest statement so far on the nature of art and artists. If anything lingers after watching Isadora, it's the paradox of just how close individualism is to narcissism, genius to foolishness, and a life's tragedy to farce.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 1: Elgar (1962) and The Debussy Film (1965)

In 2008 BBC Video released Ken Russell at the BBC, a three-disc DVD collection of six biographical documentaries Ken Russell made for the BBC between 1962 and 1968. For the next few weeks I'll be writing about these groundbreaking films.

When John Schlesinger left the BBC arts program Monitor in 1959 to pursue a career in feature films, Ken Russell was hired to replace him on the program as a director of documentaries. According to Russell, his task there was to make films that were "inviting, accessible, and entertaining." He made short documentary profiles of people as diverse as Spike Milligan, the creator and costar (along with Peter Sellers) of the BBC Radio comedy program The Goon Show, the playwright Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), and the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. He stayed with Monitor and its successor series Omnibus for the next ten years, until he too left to make feature films. When Russell made his first documentary on a composer for Monitor, on Sergei Prokofiev in 1961, he asked the producer if he could hire an actor to re-create some scenes from Prokofiev's life. The producer was horrified at the idea of adding anything remotely fictional to a serious, high-toned documentary film but finally relented and allowed Russell one shot of an actor impersonating the composer, but only seen in reflection in a pond filled with floating leaves.

When Russell made his next film on a composer the following year, it was immediately apparent how far his and his producer's vision of what was permissible in a BBC documentary had progressed in the interval. This time the subject was the British composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934), and the complete title of the episode is Elgar: Portrait of a Composer. If this didn't convey the message that Russell's approach to his subject was going to take the definition of such a film in new directions, then the opening minutes of the film certainly did. After a brief voice-over statement that Elgar spent much of his boyhood riding in the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire, where he was born and grew up, for the next two minutes we see nothing but a young boy riding a pony across Malvern landscapes while Elgar's rhapsodic Introduction and Allegro for Strings plays on the soundtrack, a two-minute long cinematic tone poem.

Elgar contains no spoken dialogue, only voice-over narration that summarizes the composer's life and occasionally quotes from letters, diaries, and even postcards written to his daughter. But if the narration is conventional, the imagery that accompanies it most definitely is not. Russell illustrates the straightforward biographical narration with a combination of dramatized re-creations of scenes from Elgar's life—some shot with a hand-held camera to emulate the immediacy of newsreels and home movies—landscapes, still lifes, still photographs, and genuine period newsreel footage, all set to the glorious music of the composer. Using a mélange of images, inventive camera work and editing, music, sound effects, and narration, Russell overturns the traditionally impersonal tone of an established genre and replaces it with the personal vision of an inspired filmmaker. If today this approach to the biographical documentary seems less experimental than it once did, Elgar still seems remarkably fresh, and I think that's because of Russell's thorough commitment to finding creative ways to tell the story of Elgar and his music.

He also uses Elgar to explore themes he would delve into in greater detail in later films made for Monitor and Omnibus on composers and painters. Taken together, his ideas on these themes can be considered a working treatise of Russell's views on the nature of art and artists. Through Elgar's relationship with his wife Alice, Russell explores the intersection of artists' personal lives and relationships with their art. In emphasizing how many years it took Elgar to be accepted as a serious composer—in part at least because of his lower middle-class background and lack of formal musical training—Russell explores the ways that artists' battles with society can inhibit critical and popular recognition of their genius. Most significantly, he explores the sources of the artist's inspiration, here by focusing on the relationship between Elgar's music and the natural world. Elgar was a self-professed plein-air composer who always composed outdoors and claimed to draw his inspiration from nature, a source of inspiration hinted at from the very beginning of the film in that opening sequence of the young Elgar riding across the countryside.

Above all, Russell tells the story of Elgar's life through his music, using the music to comment on events in the composer's life. This marriage of Elgar's music with Russell's images reaches its peak in the last few minutes of the film. As a passage from the elegiac Second Symphony plays on the soundtrack, we see newsreel footage of the funeral procession of King Edward VII in 1910, which then segues into newsreel footage of World War I, while the soundtrack slowly segues into Elgar's most familiar work, the Pomp and Circumstance march. We are told how the sentimental and patriotic associations with that work were exploited to manipulate public feelings about the war and how this jingoistic appropriation of his music appalled Elgar, leading to his dismay with the modern world as a place with "no soul, no romance, and no imagination" and finally to his last great work, the hauntingly beautiful and mournful Cello Concerto, one of my own favorite pieces of classical music. (You may recall Jacqueline du Pré's exquisite version from the movie Hilary and Jackie of a few years ago.) After the sudden death of his wife Alice, Elgar gave up composing and returned to Worcestershire, and we see him making the journey across the Malvern landscapes in his automobile in a mirror image of the opening sequence, as the concluding section of Introduction and Allegro for Strings, the same piece used in that opening sequence, plays. The closing montage of the elderly Elgar confined to his bed as he drifts through his memories while the Enigma Variations plays on the soundtrack is almost unbearably sad.

If Elgar seems far removed from the standard highbrow BBC documentary of the time on a great artist, the next work in the set seems to come from another universe altogether. To call The Debussy Film innovative would be a tremendous understatement, so extreme a departure is it from anything one might have expected from the BBC circa 1965 or even from the imaginative director of Elgar. Revolutionary would be more like it, for the film constitutes an all-out assault on the traditional documentary film biography, finding startling new ways to tell the story of the life of a famous person on film and to match storytelling technique to the particulars of the subject's life.

As in Elgar, Russell announces his intentions in the opening minutes of the film. The first thing we see is a group of modern cars arriving at what appears to be a French château, where props and actors in period costume are already waiting. Then we see a film director, played by the Polish actor Vladek Sheybal, explaining to a small boy in costume that the scene about to be filmed is the funeral cortège of the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918), played in the film by Oliver Reed. (This was the first of nine times he would work with Russell, who says he cast Reed because he thought the actor looked like Debussy.) After this we watch the actual scene being shot while the director shouts directions to the actors from offscreen.

What we are watching is not a straightforward biography at all, but a film about the making of a film about Debussy. For nearly an hour and a half Russell slides between episodes from Debussy's life re-created for the film biography, dramatized scenes of that film being made, scenes of the fictional director and actors discussing the documentary both outside filming and during filming, and scenes of the performers in the documentary acting out events in their own lives that mirror the relationships of the people they are portraying in that film. At one point, right in the middle of a scene in the documentary, the director steps into the frame, yells "Cut!" and begins discussing the scene with the actors. At another point the director, now in period costume himself and playing the part of Debussy's controlling patron Pierre Louÿs ("What he really liked was to manipulate people . . . a kind of Svengali," the director has explained to Reed without a trace of irony), suddenly breaks out of character and yells "Cut!" directly at the camera. Later in the film, Russell takes the concept of the play within the play even further, as the director and cast watch other actors in period costume theatrically overacting a scene from a real play, The Naked Lady, which was based on a sex scandal from Debussy's life that they plan to cover in the documentary. To characterize The Debussy Film as multi-layered would barely begin to describe its intricacy.

In The Debussy Film Russell emphasizes his subject's personal life even more than he did in Elgar. The entire narrative of the film is organized around Debussy's love life and his succession of lovers and mistresses, especially Gaby Dupont (Annette Robertson), suggesting erotic underpinnings to Debussy's sensual music. Naturally, the actors playing these people are having a tempestuous offscreen love affair. Russell also explores how Debussy's scandalous sex life—he was part of the French avant-garde movement of the late 19th century that consciously set out to live up to its motto, épater le bourgeois (shake up the middle class)—set back his musical career.

Russell also examines the way artistic movements of the time influenced Debussy's music. It's interesting that although Debussy is usually described as an Impressionist composer, the Impressionist painters are never mentioned. Instead Russell dwells on the influence on Debussy's music of the Art Nouveau style and the English Pre-Raphaelite painters (a movement Russell and Reed would examine in detail in Dante's Inferno, their 1967 film on Dante Gabriel Rosetti). In one scene, the director explains to Reed Debussy's fascination with the Pre-Raphaelites as he guides Reed through the Pre-Raphaelite collection at the Tate Gallery. It's a good example of the imaginative ways Russell repeatedly disguises biographical and background information about Debussy as part of a narrative rather than simply having someone read the information in voice-over as was traditionally done in biographical documentaries, including Elgar.

Debussy was also inspired by the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose poems he transposed into symphonic compositions. Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun" inspired one of Debussy's best known works, which in Russell's hands becomes one of several passages in The Debussy Film that are forerunners of the music video. As well as the music of Debussy, Russell manages to mix in, thanks to the modern, non-biographical sections, music as disparate as The Ride of the Valkyries, Rodgers and Hammerstein's "It Might As Well Be Spring," and even the Kinks' "You Really Got Me." Talk about musical diversity! But the most impressive musical passage in The Debussy Film is La Mer, and rightly so, for as Russell has his director character explain to Reed, this was the culmination of Debussy's musical innovation and the work that made his career.

The final minutes of The Debussy Film are a knockout. In a long, dreamlike passage Russell relates Debussy's obsession during the last days of his life with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." He came to identify strongly with Roderick Usher, the main character of Poe's story, and to identify his former mistress Gaby Dupont with Usher's dead sister. Visually, these are some of the simplest but most arresting parts of the entire film, the compositions reminiscent of those of Citizen Kane or Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible movies in their austere, formal beauty. And this section of the film points ahead to Russell's increasing preoccupation with bohemian eccentricities that border on, and sometimes cross over to, madness. As in Elgar, Russell brings The Debussy Film full circle at the end, by showing us straight, without any manipulation of the film's point of view, the scene of the funeral cortège that was being prepared and shot in the opening sequence. It's a marvelously unembellished, stately coda to what has been a thrilling rush of nonstop invention that transforms a staid format into something exciting, passionate, and visionary.

Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 2

Contraband (1940)
***^½


With Great Britain declaring war on Germany within weeks of its release, The Spy in Black, the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, was a smash hit in Britain. It was also a huge success across the Atlantic when Columbia Pictures released it in October 1939 in the US, where it was retitled U-Boat 29 after the name of the submarine Conrad Veidt commands in the film. (It didn't hurt the film's box office that less than a month before it opened in the US, the first British Navy ship to be lost in the war, the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, had sunk with the loss of 518 lives after being torpedoed by an actual German submarine named U-29.) When Powell suggested to Pressburger that they follow up The Spy in Black with another picture starring Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson, Pressburger told him he would think about it while Powell vacationed in Scotland. A few days later Powell received a message from Pressburger saying that he had begun writing the story for the proposed film and needed Powell to return to London immediately to work with him on it.

Like The Spy in Black, the new film, titled Contraband, was an espionage thriller. Conrad Veidt plays Capt. Andersen, the captain of a Danish freighter, and Valerie Hobson plays a mysterious passenger, Mrs. Sorensen. As the ship passes through the English Channel on its way to Rotterdam, it is stopped by the British naval authorities, who are searching all merchant ships and seizing war matériel bound for Germany. Mrs. Sorensen first attracts Capt. Andersen's attention with her contrary behavior at the breakfast table, where she refuses to wear her life jacket as required. During a dressing down in the captain's quarters, she uses the opportunity to steal two shore passes the British have provided the captain and his first mate so they can make an overnight trip to London. Capt. Andersen soon sets off in pursuit of Mrs. Sorensen and her friend (Esmond Knight, who had appeared in two of Powell's earlier quota quickies and would go on to make six more films with Powell, most notably Black Narcissus).

This section of the film occupies about twenty minutes of its hour and a half running time, and even Powell admitted in his autobiography, A Life in Movies, that it is the least interesting part of the picture: "So far, it was a conventional beginning to an obvious romance between two attractive principals. Only the . . . charisma of the actor and actress, saved the scenes between them from banality." Indeed, the purpose of this section of the film was as much propagandistic—to send Hitler the message that Britain was fully prepared to control the seas and prevent war matériel from reaching Germany—as it was to set the narrative in motion.

After the action moves to London, the film picks up considerably as it becomes a tremendously thrilling race against the clock as Capt. Andersen and Mrs. Sorensen try to deliver a vital message to the War Office while tangling with a band of vicious Nazi spies and falling in love. All of this takes place in the dead of night during the London blackout. Powell called the picture "basically a chase in the blackout" and lamented that the US title, Blackout, wasn't used in Britain. He was right, for if there has ever been a movie with a more evocative sense of the wartime blackout in London, I've not seen it.

Contraband is in every respect an advance over The Spy in Black. Apart from that rather rudimentary opening passage on the freighter, the film is more inventive, more consistent in tone, progresses more smoothly from one event to the next, and is better paced, building in intensity without the occasional narrative lull of The Spy in Black. Much of this is surely down to the fact that the screenplay was completely original. Even though The Spy in Black kept little from the novel it was based on aside from the title and almost completely reorganized what did remain, Powell and Pressburger were still in some ways constrained by the basic elements of the source material. In Contraband, however, they were free to tailor the plot to their stars and to their own interests and inclinations. In this, Contraband was the forerunner of their great films of the 1940s, which by and large were based on original ideas that were then molded into a form reflecting the imaginations of the creative pair.

Unlike The Spy in Black, Contraband contains large doses of humor—not just the comic relief of Spy, but a deft blend of whimsicality and suspense that recalls the best films of Alfred Hitchcock from the the 1930s. Moreover, Powell and Pressburger emphasize the interplay and the evolving romantic relationship between Veidt and Hobson in the same way Hitchcock so memorably did with Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps and Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes. This not only makes their characters more central to the plot, but gives Veidt and Hobson a chance to shine, to show the range they were capable of, in a way the more somber tone of The Spy in Black didn't.

Additional humor is provided by the Scottish actor Hay Petrie, who specialized in eccentric characters and had a small but vivid role in The Spy in Black. He has two parts in Contraband, one as Capt. Andersen's first mate, the other as his twin brother who owns a London restaurant called The Three Vikings and who, along with his staff, becomes instrumental in helping Capt. Andersen rescue Mrs. Sorensen from the Nazi spies and foil their scheme. The Nazi gang, by the way, far from being humorous, is genuinely sinister, led by character actor Raymond Lovell, who is aided by three henchmen whom Veidt and Hobson call the Brothers Grimm, played by chubby Peter Bull, a baby-faced Leo Genn, and a hatchet-faced actor named Stuart Latham.

The plot of Contraband permits Powell—aided by the brilliant production design of Alfred Junge (they would work together on six more films, including some of Powell's most important films of the 1940s, right up to Black Narcissus), and the cinematography of the great Freddie Young (Lawrence of Arabia)—to show off his nascent flair for the kind of stylish set pieces that would become a hallmark of the later Powell-Pressburger films. The scenes in the elaborately detailed headquarters of the spies, hidden in the basement of a night club. The tour of several night clubs by Capt. Andersen and the staff of The Three Vikings to locate the spies' hideout, guided only by Andersen's memory of the music he heard from the basement before escaping. (A scene with 19-year old Deborah Kerr as a cigarette girl in one of these night clubs ended up on the cutting room floor.) No less than two vertiginous chases across rooftops that will send the pulses of acrophobes everywhere racing. A shootout between Andersen and the Nazis in the Patriotic Bust Co., filled with plaster busts of Neville Chamberlain. All these are masterfully realized set pieces that approach the best of Alfred Hitchcock's.

"It was all pure corn, but corn served up by professionals, and it worked," Powell says of Contraband. That may be an accurate description of the picture, but in saying this, I think Powell understates his achievement. The film may lack the rarefied aesthetic aspirations of Powell and Pressburger's later masterpieces, yet to call it merely "professional" downplays the level of artistry and inspiration present here. As an intelligent and imaginatively executed piece of purely escapist suspense entertainment, it "works" and then some, fulfilling genre expectations while delivering a wholly pleasurable experience of its own.

Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 1

The Spy in Black (1939)

***





During the 1930s Michael Powell (1905-1990) directed more than twenty movies, most of them "quota quickies." These were hastily assembled films made to fulfill the requirements of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, which stipulated that a certain number of films shown in British theaters be British-made, a law created to protect the domestic film industry in the face of competition from the US and the Continent. For Powell the Act was a boon because it meant that an inexperienced but enthusiastic director like himself could gain a great deal of practical filmmaking experience, including how to finish a film on schedule and on budget, in a short amount of time. In 1935 alone he completed seven pictures.



The noted producer and director Alexander Korda—he had produced or directed prestige films like The Private Life of Henry VIII, Rembrandt, and The Scarlet Pimpernel—so admired Powell's 1937 film The Edge of the World, a sensitive account of a community in the Shetland Islands forced to relocate to the mainland, shot mostly on location, that he put Powell under contract. Powell's first project for Korda was another picture set in Scotland, The Spy in Black, a star vehicle intended for Korda's contract players Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson that was stalled for lack of a good script. Also on the film was a screenwriter working for Korda, Emeric Pressburger (like Korda a Hungarian émigré), whom Korda had called in to rescue the film by rewriting the screenplay. So impressed were Powell and Pressburger by each other's talent and so great was the rapport between the two men that they not only went on to work together on more than twenty additional movies, but in 1943 formed their own production company, The Archers, and from 1942 on signed their films jointly: "Written, Produced, and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger."

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

The Spy in Black, their first collaboration, is an espionage thriller very much in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's tremendously successful spy thrillers of the 1930s. The action takes place during World War One in the Orkney Islands of northern Scotland, where the British Grand Fleet, the main fleet of the British Navy, was based during the war. Conrad Veidt plays Captain Hardt, the commander of a German U-boat who is ordered to land on a remote island in the Orkneys and rendezvous with a German spy. Their mission is to find out when the fleet will be leaving the safety of the mined harbor and put out to sea. With this information German submarines can lie in wait, attack the entire fleet, and destroy the British Navy.



When Hardt arrives, riding a motorcycle to avoid suspicion, he finds that the German spy who will be helping him is a young woman (Valerie Hobson) masquerading as the island's new schoolmistress. Providing the vital information about the fleet's departure will be a disaffected, alcoholic British naval officer (Sebastian Shaw). Hardt immediately finds himself attracted to the beautiful young spy, who clearly is also attracted to him. But she insists that they keep their relationship strictly professional, going so far as to lock him in his room at the school house at night, ostensibly to keep the cleaning woman from blundering into the room in the morning. The tension between romance and duty seems to be the main focus of the film, for the plan appears to be going so well that there is little chance of anyone finding out about it.



As might be expected in a work taking its cues from Hitchcock, the plot of the picture turns out to be far more labyrinthine than it at first appears. During the last part of the film, the pace of events rapidly escalates, culminating in an exciting chase on the high seas between Hardt, trying to escape on a hijacked passenger ferry with Hobson on board, and a pursuing British destroyer, a chase complete with moral conflict (the destroyer has orders to sink the ferry with its civilian passengers and crew) and sudden ironic reversals. Taking another cue from Hitchcock, Pressburger leavens the espionage plot with comic relief in the form of several bumbling, eccentric islanders.



In his 1986 autobiography, A Life in Movies, Powell acknowledged the film's modest nature, calling it "a little film . . . an expanded quota-quickie." Powell's characteristic commitment to quality and detail, however, pushed The Spy in Black beyond the limitations of the material and the scale of production he was working with. Knowing that the picture's budget precluded a second unit crew, Powell took three colleagues who had worked with him on The Edge of the World on a surreptitious three-day trip to the Orkneys. Even though the rest of the movie was made at Korda's studio in Denham, west of London, the footage they shot in the Orkneys, skillfully interpolated into the studio footage as establishing shots and matte shots, adds a real feeling of authenticity to the finished picture. Powell also pressed the film's young cinematographer to achieve atmospheric effects with lighting, with the placement and framing of actors within the decor, and with the use of close-ups—all in emulation of the style of German Expressionism. Most important, he used the film as a showcase for Conrad Veidt, an actor he clearly was in awe of—he calls him a "great actor" and "legendary personality"—but whose talent he felt had not been properly used in the pictures Veidt had made in Britain since leaving Germany in 1933. Powell emphasizes Veidt's imposing physique and facial features to bring out what he describes as Veidt's "overpowering" screen presence, making his character and his performance the centerpiece of the film. Veidt does a remarkable job with his ambiguous character, making a person we should look upon as an enemy in many ways sympathetic—intelligent, charming, and rather dashing.



If The Spy in Black falls short of Hitchcock's best films of this type, and if it doesn't reach the exalted heights Powell and Pressburger would later achieve with their masterpieces of the 1940s, it's still a good, entertaining genre movie. Although the picture is set during World War One, audiences of the time would surely have recognized its topical relevance, for by the time of the film's release in the UK in mid-August 1939, it was clear that military conflict with Germany was unavoidable. Indeed, less than a month later Britain and Germany were at war.



Next week I'll be writing on Contraband (1940), Powell and Pressburger's follow-up to The Spy in Black.

Yearning to Express Myself: The Life and Career of Tom Courtenay

"As artists we would always have something to learn and our lives would always have meaning. I remember hoping against hope that I might possibly become one of these artists. It was the only thing that would give my life meaning."

—Tom Courtenay, Dear Tom: Letters from Home (2000)

In the early 1960s, the groundbreaking films of the British New Wave introduced four young actors who seemed destined for an important place in cinema history. Richard Harris (1930-2002) had been acting in films and television for several years before his breakout performance in This Sporting Life (1963) as a Yorkshire coal miner who becomes an overnight rugby superstar, a performance that earned him not only an Oscar nomination but the best actor award at Cannes. But after this auspicious role in one of the seminal films of the British New Wave, his career veered all over the place—from the lead in Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) to King Arthur in the big-budget musical flop Camelot (1967) to an unlikely leading man for Doris Day in one of her last movies, Caprice (1967), and even several pop music albums—before fizzling away to leads in mostly forgettable films and then supporting character roles in better films like Unforgiven (1992).

Alan Bates (1934-2003) had better luck with his career. After becoming familiar to American audiences playing opposite Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek (1964) and a couple of years later opposite Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl (1966), he enjoyed a strong career for more than twenty-five years, dividing his time between the stage (in 1972 he won a Tony for Butley, which he later filmed as part of the American Film Theatre series—costarring Jessica Tandy, directed by Harold Pinter and highly recommended) and American and especially British films, giving consistently fine performances for some of the best directors of the time, such as John Schlesinger, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, and Robert Altman.

After his breakout performance in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961), Albert Finney (b. 1936) became a huge star in the Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963). Today he continues to be one of our greatest film actors, the recipient of five Oscar nominations and certainly the most successful, not to mention the most versatile, of his generation of British New Wave actors. Appearing as a romantic leading man opposite Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road (1967), in heavy disguise playing Hercule Poirot while still in his thirties in Murder on the Orient Express (1976), in heavy disguise again as a senile elderly actor in The Dresser (1983), as a self-destructive alcoholic British expat living in Mexico in John Huston's Under the Volcano (1984), as a Prohibition-era Irish-American gangster for the Coens in Miller's Crossing (1990), as Julia Roberts's bemused boss in Erin Brockovich (2000)—nothing seems beyond his reach.

The fourth of these young men, Tom Courtenay, has had the most perplexing career of all. As gifted an actor as Bates and Finney, he saw his career soar in films of the early and mid-sixties before settling into a leisurely pattern of sporadic success largely in stage and television roles. Unlike the clearly ambitious (but also temperamental and alcoholic) Richard Harris, though, Courtenay's relatively obscure later movie career seems to have been by choice. "I never did anything about my stardom, it never meant anything to me," he said in a 1995 magazine interview. "I didn't like the parts I had and I just longed to work in the theatre, and so that's what I did."

Tom Courtenay was born in 1937 in the Yorkshire coastal town of Hull in northeast England. "Mother told me that the evening before I was born she heard 'Pennies From Heaven' on the radio. As I was expected any minute she thought of it as my signature tune [theme song]," he writes in Dear Tom: Letters from Home, his autobiographical book published in 2000. His family was working class, and he attributed the success of his early career at least in part to the fashion of the early sixties for casting young actors from working-class backgrounds in films about working-class young men: "Of course my early fame as an actor was due in some measure to my background, but I never beat my chest about being either North Country or working class. . . . I wasn't proud of it and I wasn't ashamed of it. I certainly didn't want to make a career out of it. It's just the way it was."

Tom grew up in the area of Hull called Fish Dock, where his father and most of his relatives worked in some capacity as part of the commercial fish trawling industry. His description of his boyhood makes it sound virtually impoverished, growing up in a small nineteenth-century row house without even an indoor toilet or bath, although I don't think this was that unusual in working-class houses of the time in northern England. Despite the lack of money, he describes a tight community and a close and supportive relationship between his own family and their large extended family and neighbors. Even though for years his mother complained bitterly about their terrible living conditions and dreamed of a house in the suburbs, after finally moving to a council house away from the city center when Tom was in his twenties, she felt isolated and unsettled and longed for the liveliness and sociability of Fish Dock.

Tom's academic talent took him to the local grammar school (at the time the British equivalent of a college prep high school), Kingston High, one of only two in his middle school class of fifty boys to qualify. Here he developed a lifelong passion for literature and the theater and appeared in his first plays, playing Mr. Knightley in a school production of Emma. In his senior year he was head boy and won a scholarship to University College London, the first in his family to attend university. Although he majored in English literature, a course of study he hated because of its emphasis on historical minutiae and arid literary analysis, his real love was always acting, and he soon found his life at UCL dominated by the college's drama society. In fact he chose UCL over other universities because it was just down the street from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in Bloomsbury. He held back from revealing his ambition to become a professional actor, though, because he feared his family's reaction to what he thought they would consider an impractical dream. He felt he owed it to them to complete his university education before applying to RADA. In the end he failed his final exams at UCL and didn't earn a degree but had no difficulty getting a place at RADA.

His family was actually very supportive of his pursuit of an acting career, especially his mother. Tom had a particularly close relationship to his mother. Both his parents had left school at fifteen—this was the norm in Britain before the Second World War unless you were going to university, which was really out of the question for children of the working class—but his mother Annie was clearly an intelligent and sensitive woman who loved both classical and popular music (she could play the piano by ear), poetry, and literature and encouraged her son's interest in these things. "The yearning to express myself and the instinct for doing it I got directly from my mother," he writes in Dear Tom. Much of this book consists of the weekly letters his mother wrote to him during the five years he spent in London at UCL and RADA, and the book is really as much about her as it is about himself. Her life was essentially restricted to her household and neighborhood, yet in her letters to Tom she expresses the beauty and poetry she found in everyday things. In those letters she comes across as a woman of delicate health who was frequently depressed, a sensitive and artistic woman who felt frustrated and restricted by her lack of education and was determined to see that Tom got the opportunities she never had.

Even before Tom began attending RADA he was being called "the next Albert Finney," and he soon made a name for himself there. Also in Tom's class at RADA were Sarah Miles and his lifelong friend John Thaw (television's Inspector Morse), who actually beat Tom for the Kendal Medal, the top prize of the last term at RADA. But despite the praise of others, Tom himself was unsure of his talent. He saw himself onstage as "too fidgety, too emotional, and too uncontrolled," and apparently some of his instructors agreed. "At present he is inclined to be uncontrolled and do more than is quite necessary," wrote one instructor in an end of term report. Today such a view is hard to reconcile with the gentle, introspective, and restrained image he has projected for practically his entire acting career.

Tom's big break came during his next-to-last term at RADA when he was given the lead in, of all things, a musical called Shut Up and Sing, in which he played the leader of a gang of East End teddy boys. He was a good singer—he'd been performing for his family since he was just a few years old—and fortunately wasn't required to dance. Representatives of the top London talent agencies attended to check out the promising young actor. He soon signed with one of these agencies and was on his way to a professional acting career. "I have always thought of that little musical at RADA as the greatest success I have ever had," he writes. "For the first time I felt certain that I had been right all along in wanting to become an actor. That I would become one. That my dream of being an artist was going to be fulfilled."

Even before graduating from RADA in 1960, Tom was offered the lead in the Old Vic production of Chekhov's The Seagull, costarring with Judith Anderson, and invited to become a member of the Old Vic company. He played the part for a month at the Edinburgh Festival and later at the Old Vic Theatre in London, receiving rave notices for his performance. At the same time, he was also being interviewed by Peter Hall for the Stratford Shakespeare company and by the most famous of the British New Wave film directors, Tony Richardson, who immediately promised Tom the lead in the movie version of a novel by Alan Sillitoe he was planning to film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. In 1961 Tom replaced Albert Finney in Billy Liar, his first West End theater triumph, a part he later repeated in the film version directed by John Schlesinger.

Tom's first film was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which finally started shooting in February 1962. "My first day filming The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was the longest of my life," he writes. But he soon settled into the process and actually came to enjoy it. "Tony Richardson made it as easy for me as possible," he recalls. "I scarcely remember a shot ever lasting more than one or two takes. He gave me the impression that he was letting me do whatever I wanted, even sometimes asking me to say whatever I wanted. . . . Tony made me feel very much the man of the moment. And I liked that." When it was released in the fall of 1962, the film was a smash, and Tom received the BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer.

Shortly after filming of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner began, Tom's mother was admitted to hospital, and it soon became apparent that she was suffering from a recurrence of the breast cancer for which she had been operated on several years before and that it was untreatable. She died that spring, before The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was released, and was never able to enjoy the great success that launched her son's long acting career. Tom later credited his mother with helping him form his philosophy of acting. He writes that when he and his mother discussed ideas for his grammar school essays, "we were expressing ourselves, making little stories out of our lives. That I chose to give voice to other people's words rather than my own, hardly matters. Good acting always tells a story. . . . Inner life and outer life seem to be connected. If that's not a story, what is?"

Recommended Viewing

• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). In his first major film, Courtenay is Colin Smith, a rebellious teenager sent to a borstal (reform school) for a petty crime. The school's governor discovers Colin's talent for running and enters him in a sports competition with a posh prep school. While practicing, Colin reflects in stream-of-consciousness on his past and the events that brought him to his present situation. Brilliantly directed by Tony Richardson, this is for me the best British New Wave film of them all. With Michael Redgrave as the borstal governor, James Fox as a runner from the prep school, and Courtenay's RADA classmate John Thaw as one of the other borstal inmates. (In 1998 Courtenay was a guest star in an episode of Thaw's British TV series Kavanagh QC.) Knowing that Tom's mother was dying while he was making this picture and how close he was to her makes his performance all the more poignant.

• Billy Liar (1963). Courtenay plays Billy Fisher, a North Country undertaker's clerk who dreams of being a television writer in London. At moments of stress or boredom, Billy retreats to his fantasies, where he is the king of a mythological place called Ambrosia. Billy's love life is a mess. He is engaged to two different girls and in love with a third girl, a bohemian named Liz. The highlight of the film is the fantasy sequences in Ambrosia, directed with surreal comic panache in the same style director John Schlesinger would later use in Midnight Cowboy. With Mona Washbourne as Billy's mother and a ravishing 22-year old Julie Christie as Liz. (Christie replaced another actress who dropped out when she got ill and whose footage had to be reshot.) Courtenay had replaced Albert Finney in the stage version of Billy Liar (directed by Lindsay Anderson). It's hard to imagine Finney bringing the comic wistfulness to the role that Courtenay does. Courtenay received a BAFTA nomination for best actor for his performance.

• King and Country (1964). Courtenay plays Private Arthur Hamp, a 23-year old British soldier suffering from battle fatigue who is court-martialed for desertion during World War One. The last survivor of his original unit, he simply walks away from camp one day and heads home for England. Directed with great visual flair by Joseph Losey, the film shows this war in all its folly—the filth and brutality, the class divide between officers and enlisted men, the grim resignation of men caught up in the machinery of a self-perpetuating process. Courtenay's understated performance as the young soldier too naive to grasp the gravity of his situation, an ordinary man trapped in circumstances beyond anyone's control, is remarkable. Losey is smart enough to leave just a little room for doubt as to Hamp's ultimate fate and to avoid portraying those in authority as two-dimensional martinets, making the film seem more melancholic than truculent. With Dirk Bogarde as the "soldier's friend" assigned to defend Hamp. People writing about this film at IMDb and Netflix complain of the poor quality of the available DVD, especially the sound. I was fortunate enough to see a very good print of it on TCM. This is surely a prime candidate for a quality DVD release so that it can take its place alongside those other great film indictments of World War One, All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. Courtenay received yet another BAFTA nomination for his performance.

• The Dresser (1983). Courtenay stars as Norman, the fawning gay dresser to an aging, temperamental stage actor he calls simply Sir, supposedly based on the actor Donald Wolfit. As they tour England during World War Two, with Sir appearing as King Lear, Norman has to cajole and flatter the failing, alcoholic, and nearly senile actor every night to get him onstage. Norman idolizes Sir, and Sir is almost totally dependent on Norman to keep him going from one performance to the next. Courtenay is very touching in his devotion to his idol and almost heartbreaking in the picture's sad conclusion. Courtenay played the role on the stage and received a Tony nomination. Sir is played with a flamboyance that matches Courtenay's by his one-time rival Albert Finney, the first of two times they have appeared together, and both received BAFTA and Oscar nominations for their performances. With Eileen Atkins as the long-suffering stage manager.

• Me and the Girls (TV) (1985). Based on a story by Noel Coward, this BBC production was broadcast in the US in 1986 as part of the five-part series Star Quality: Noel Coward Stories shown on Masterpiece Theatre. Courtenay plays Georgie, the gay head of a troupe of female singer-dancers who tour England and Europe. The story is told in stream-of-consciousness style while Georgie is dying of cancer in a clinic in Switzerland. Courtenay is just marvelous—by turns funny, tragic, noble, and pathetic as he faces death with stoic courage. The British musical theater actress Nichola McAuliffe costars as Mavis, Georgie's best friend in the troupe, his singing and dancing partner and would-be lover. Their performance of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" is a highlight and, given the circumstances, very moving. Tom finally did have to learn to dance for this production and does a creditable if not exactly graceful job. His singing, though, is quite good. Me and the Girls is available as part of a seven-disc DVD box set released in 2008 by BBC, The Noel Coward Collection, which contains quite a few other choice productions as well.

• A Rather English Marriage (TV) (1998). This was the second time Courtenay costarred with Albert Finney. Roy Southgate (Courtenay) first meets Reggie Conyngham-Jervis (Finney) in the hospital as both are visiting their wives, who are dying. Later a helpful social worker suggests that Roy move into Reggie's large country home so the two widowers can keep each other company, and Reggie, effectively cut out of his rich wife's will with only a modest yearly stipend, agrees. The two are complete opposites—the working-class Roy a quiet, modest man and the upper-class Reggie a loud, assertive man who takes the privileges of his class for granted. The two soon develop a relationship not unlike Norman and Sir in The Dresser, with Roy waiting on Reggie and organizing his life for him. Finney and his boisterous Reggie dominate the first half of the film, but as Reggie becomes more dependent on Roy, Courtenay and his character gently edge their way into the foreground. Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous) costars as the gold-digging divorcée Reggie romances. Both Finney and Courtenay were nominated for the BAFTA television award as best actor, with Courtenay winning.

• Little Dorrit (TV) (2008). Courtenay plays the heroine Amy Dorrit's father in this Dickens classic. Dorrit is an inmate of debtors' prison, a spiritually broken man who clings to the prison as a refuge from the cruelties and injustices of the world. When the family's fortunes unexpectedly change and the Dorrits are not only released from debtors' prison but become rich to boot, Dorrit undergoes a complete change of personality, becoming obsessed with concealing the family's shameful past and keeping up social appearances. Courtenay is utterly convincing in his transformation from excessive shame to excessive pride, giving Dorrit a quiet intensity that lingers in the memory. Little Dorrit has everything we expect from the BBC's adaptations of Dickens: lavish production values, great period detail, an intricate plot filled with a number of interlocking subplots, a love story, a sadistic villain (played with real menace by Andy Serkis), a host of eccentric supporting characters, satirical humor, tragedy, and moments of almost surreal weirdness. In an impressive cast of British actors, Courtenay walks off with the acting honors and received an Emmy nomination for best supporting actor.

In 2000 Tom Courtenay received a knighthood. The working-class boy from Fish Dock in Hull is now Sir Thomas Daniel Courtenay. Albert Finney was knighted in 2000 and Alan Bates in 2003. Except for the one quotation from an interview published in Empire magazine in November 1995, all other quoted material comes from Dear Tom: Letters from Home (London: Doubleday, 2000). This is a wonderful book that concentrates on Courtenay's formative years and his family, especially his mother Annie. It is intelligent, candid, gently funny, and at times quite moving—rather like Tom Courtenay himself, I imagine.