“God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.”
Ten years ago on this
blog I compared the two film adaptations of Terence Rattigan’s play The
Browning Version, Anthony Asquith’s from 1951 and Mike Figgis’s from 1994.(1)
While Asquith’s film has the distinction of preserving for the ages the
magisterial performance of Michael Redgrave as Andrew Crocker-Harris, Figgis’s film
rehabilitates the role of Crocker-Harris’s wife, Millie (Figgis renamed her
Laura).
Looking for a
streaming source for the Mike Figgis version, I chanced upon yet another Browning
Version, aired on the BBC in 1985, with Ian Holm playing Crocker-Harris and
Judi Dench playing Millie.(2) While it isn’t quite a film, but much more of a filmed
play (the script is attributed to Rattigan, who in ‘85 had been dead for eight
years), it has the advantage of getting us much closer to the actors – and getting
close to Ian Holm and Judi Dench is always rewarding.
I am indebted to PBS, America’s
public television, for honing my television tastes throughout the 1970s. Much
of the programming was imported from the UK and presented weekly on shows like Masterpiece
Theater. What I wrote about that show six years ago on this blog bears
repeating:
Long
ago critics started using the words "masterpiece theater" as a
pejorative term, implying that certain films had been subjected to such
high-minded treatment that they were stuffy, plodding, or - to use the ultimate
dirty word - literary. I wondered how many of those critics had ever actually
watched Masterpiece Theater or ever watched PBS for that matter? If
they had, they might have discovered just how dangerous it was to use such a
term, since the show, which aired out of WGBH Boston, could be some of the most
challenging television around.
Once
the action of this BBC Browning Version was underway, my initial response
was surprise at seeing a strapping young man (Stephen Mackintosh) playing the
schoolboy John Taplow. In the better-known film versions he was played by pubescent
– and rather inadequate – boys. Stephen Mackintosh was 18 when the BBC filmed the
program, set entirely in the Crocker-Harris’s drawing room. To some, Mackintosh
may seem rather old for a boy in the Lower 5th form, but in English
boarding schools the 6th form is the senior year, so Taplow’s age
would’ve been about 16.
The one-act play is quite familiar to me now: Andrew Crocker-Harris is a boarding school schoolmaster at what the British call public school, but which is exclusively private, teaching Greek and Latin. He is so unpopular among his students, past and present, that he has been called by them the “Croc” and the “Himmler of the Lower 5th.” The reason for such “soulless petty tyranny” becomes clear when we meet his wife, Millie, who treats him with open disdain and is carrying on an affair with Frank Hunter, the science master of the Upper 5th form. One of Crocker-Harris’s students, named John Taplow, confesses to Frank that he feels sympathy for the Croc. His sympathy inspires him to buy the Croc a parting gift – a copy of Robert Browning’s verse translation of the Agamemnon. Inside it he writes, in Greek, “God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.” The gift of the book and the inscription is so unexpected that Crocker-Harris is overcome with emotion. It is the climax of the play and the three actors I’ve seen perform the role of Crocker-Harris make it exceptionally moving.
The
only thing that prevented Ian Holm, who died last June at 88, from being as famous
a stage and screen presence as, for instance, Anthony Hopkins, was his size. He
was just shy of 5’5”. He was consigned to supporting roles for decades, yet in
film after film his presence is unforgettable: The Return of the Soldier,
Dreamchild, The Madness of King George, The Sweet Hereafter,
Joe Gould’s Secret. As Crocker-Harris, Holm is refreshingly steady
rather than doddering. Michael Redgrave portrayed him as a kind of cipher – a
walking shadow, to which his nightmare marriage had reduced him. Albert Finney tried
to make him more sensitive (more sympathetic), but his performance lacked a cohesive
center. This may have been due to the transformation of Millie (renamed Laura)
into a more sympathetic, if complex, unfaithful wife. The drama becomes more
nuanced because of this shift in the balance, and it makes for a more
satisfying conclusion. For the Asquith film Rattigan wrote a climactic scene in
which Crocker-Harris apologizes to the assembled student body for “having let
[them] down.” Figgis includes the scene as well, but since the play is presented
intact in the BBC production, the climax lacks the sheer spectacle of the film
versions, but is more subtle and quite consistent with the rest of the play. Crocker-Harris
simply tells Millie, “I don’t think either of us has the right to expect
anything further from the other.” I could almost hear the slamming of a door.
This is
where the three Browning Versions stand or fall – on the character of
Crocker-Harris’s wife. Rattigan made her into a monster who not only cheats on
her husband but who informs him of the progress of her cheating. She throws
herself at another schoolmaster (not the first, we discover), whose response to
her has cooled when the film opens. It was Rattigan’s way of exposing the
rotten core of middle class English respectability, and that cruelty lies just
beneath its smooth surface. Millie may have had her reasons for going astray,
but Rattigan clearly wanted us to believe that it is Andrew who is more sinned
against than sinned. Millie witnessed the erosion of Andrew’s spirit. When
Hunter mentions the “soul-destroying Lower Fifth,” Andrew insists that his soul
wasn’t destroyed. The generous gesture of Taplow, the copy of Browning’s
translation of the Agamemnon, arouses him from what turned out to be a
hibernation of the soul.
Ian
Holm doesn’t fill his performance with “business” the way Redgrave did. He
isn’t fidgety or subject to nervous tics. Nor is he dodgy with his accent, as
Finney was. Finney spoke in an affected, refined accent. Holm is at home
with his attuned, enunciated lines
because a classics teacher would be pedantic about such things.
Enter Judi
Dench, who is a tigress. She not only fills out the role of Millie,
contributing depths to the character previously unseen, but also – at last –
believability for her cruelty to Crocker-Harris. In her first scene with
Michael Kitchen, who plays Upper Fifth master Frank Hunter, she practically
chases him around the room. What she doesn’t know is that he’s suffering an attack
of conscience and is planning to use Crocker-Harris’s – and Millie’s – imminent
departure from the school as a good excuse to break things off with her.
Everything
about the production is as near to perfection as it could get. The settings, costumes,
and the direction are superb. The director, Michael Simpson, had extensive experience
in the theater, and he handles the pacing splendidly. But what we are left with
at the play’s conclusion is the image of Millie serving Crocker-Harris his dinner,
a domestic scene between a Clytemnestra who has failed to destroy her Agamemnon,
reduced to a housewife offering a dinner plate to her husband.
(2) There is one more Browning Version, made for American television in 1959, with John Gielgud as Crocker-Harris and a young Robert Stephens playing Taplow. It was directed by John Frankenheimer.
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