The Dresser (Albert Finney)

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.



I watched the Kenneth Branagh edition of Murder on the Orient Express over the weekend. While it failed to give me any compelling reason for its existence, it did one nice thing for me - it reminded me of the first edition, made in 1974, directed by Sidney Lumet, and starring Albert Finney in the role of Hercule Poirot. Within minutes of watching Branagh's film (he directed it and played Poirot), I learned of the death of Finney, aged 82, and I found myself looking back on his career that is almost as long as my lifetime. But rather than rattle off my own list of favorites, I've been meaning to write something about the 1983 film The Dresser for the longest time, and the time has, alas, arrived. 

Ronald Harwood wrote the play, based on his experience as the dresser to the outsized actor/tyrant Donald Wolfit. The setting is England under the Blitz, when all able bodied men were in the war. There was no one left to play male roles in the theater except men unfit, for various reasons, to fight, and men well last their prime. A great old Shakespearean actor known in the film only as "Sir," around whom a company of actors - the Coronet Players - has been formed, is traveling around London, wherever a theater and an audience to sit in it has survived the V1 attacks. Sir, as his dresser Norman calls him, is drifting into dementia. He should've retired ages ago. He's a declamatory horror onstage, a ghost of theater past, when actors needed the lungs to fill the hall with their voices and therefore never ceased doing so. Just a few minutes into the film, we are treated to a scene in which Sir arrives with his company in tow at a train station where the train is leaving without them. In full-throated glory, he shouts STOP THAT TRAIN. The engineer, thinking that he's heard the voice of God, pulls the brake. Sir and the others climb aboard. 

But Sir suffers a breakdown moments later, handing out playbills to people in the streets. He hands one to a shell-shocked man whose house has been bombed and is being hosed down by firemen. "For the theater," he says to him. "I trust you will find comfort there." Norman finds him when he draws a crowd, stamping on his hat and bellowing to the heavens, "How much further do you want me to go?!" Norman collects him and brings him to a clinic where a doctor tries to give him a shot. "It's just to help you sleep," the doctor tells him, to which Sir replies, "Sleep? Sleep?! Glamis hath murdered sleep!" 

As everyone knows - except, it seems, Norman - Sir can't subject himself to the physical strains of performing for hours night after night. His mind, just like his body, is breaking down. He's the embodiment of Samuel Beckett's title, "I can't go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." But he's there to provide Londoners with much-needed distraction from the horrors of the Blitz, and his company of actors depend on him for steady work. So he goes on. Left alone to prepare for his performance, he mistakenly applies blackface when he's playing Lear. "I'd give anything to see the play," Norman says, applying cold cream. "You blacked-up, and Cordelia saying: 'You've begot me, bred me, loved me.'" In a deep Calypso accent: "'Well, you see, ducky, this King Lear, he been about a bit."

Preparing for King Lear, the longest of Shakespeare's marathons, Sir knows that his company is the real tragedy: "Thornton, toothless as Fool. Brown, lisping as Oswald. Oxenby, limping as Edmund. What have I come to? I've never had a company like this one. I have been reduced to old men, cripples and nancy-boys!" There are stories about actors playing Lear. Diana Rigg had one. She played Cordelia to Paul Scofield's Lear. To increase his stamina, before every performance he drank a honey elixir that made him flatulent. In the last scene, carrying the dead Cordelia in his arms, he farted at every step, while Rigg had to struggle to keep herself from "corpsing."

Eileen Atkins plays the director of the company, but Tom Courtenay, as Norman the dresser, is the one who makes everything work. But he depends far too much on Sir, and pushes him once too many. With the sound of explosions coming from outside and plaster falling from the ceiling, Sir rises to the occasion. The inspired performance done, to the ovations of a packed house, the old man, spent, sinks into his chaise in his dressing room - and dies. Albert Finney delivers a terrific performance, magnificently over-the-top. 

Finney was often lucky with his choice of film roles, working with Tony Richardson, Stanley Donen, John Huston, and Sidney Lumet. Peter Yates, who directed The Dresser (he also produced) is known to American audiences from the Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt and the excellent The Friends of Eddie Coyle. He made a beautiful film here, one that Ronald Harwood intended as a tribute to a now extinct kind of acting, and to his unsung dresser. Yates manages to evoke the period with telling details: a period BBC radio broadcast, a ration book, a produce market filled with empty tables. 

Albert Finney was in his mid-40s when he took on the part, made up bald with an infelicitous comb-over. And he handles it commandingly. But, after all Sir's upstaging of everyone around him, it is Tom Courtenay's film. He played the role on stage, and the proximity of the camera magnifies Courtenay's brilliance. His tantrum when he finds his master dead (after reading in his will that he's left him nothing) turns heartbreaking when he cries out, "Where will I go? Where? I'm nowhere out of my element. I don't want to end up running a boarding house in Westcliffe-on-Sea! Or Colwyn Bay!" saying, finally, his ultimate tribute, "This isn't a place for death. I had a friend!" 

He that hath but a little tiny wit,
With a hey ho, the wind and the rain.