One of the accomplishments of modernism was the erosion of the good guy/bad guy dichotomy in novels, theater and films. By now, no one objects to the sympathetic portrayal of killers. There have been just as many works that present to us the Madman as Hero and the suggestion that the wrong people are populating lunatic asylums.
The Robert Graves story “The Shout” was written in 1924, during Graves’s long convalescence from the war. He experienced what was then known simply as shellshock (an overtaxing of the adrenal gland) and was so badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme that he was pronounced dead. His obituary even appeared in the London Times.
Along with his fellow war survivor, Siegfried Sassoon, Graves was familiar with the institutions that treated war veterans and their various mental conditions. One such institution is depicted in “The Shout” – a quite genteel English asylum in which the inmates are hard to distinguish from their doctors.
Charles Crossley is one of the patients, whom, the lead doctor explains, suffers from "delusions”. The story’s narrator, a new member of the hospital staff, is delegated to be scorekeeper of a cricket match. Crossley is in the scoring booth with him and he tells him the story of Richard and Rachel.
In the story-within-a-story, Charles tells Richard that he has the power to kill with a shout:
It is a magic shout that I learned from the chief devil of the Northern Territory. I took eighteen years to perfect it, and yet I have used it, in all, no more than five times… My shout is not a matter of tone or vibration but something not to be explained. It is a shout of pure evil, and there is no fixed place for it on the scale. It may take any note. It is pure terror, and if it were not for a certain intention of mine, which I need not tell you, I would refuse to shout for you.
Being careful to shout in a remote place, Richard and Charles go out on the sand dunes and are quite alone when Richard instructs Charles to shout on his signal. Without Charles seeing him do it, Richard has put candle wax in his ears. We get no description of the sound itself, just the odd appearance of Charles’s face and Richard fainting.
A contest of dominance over Rachel ensues between Charles and Richard, and when Richard loses, he practices some magic of his own and smashes a stone he found in the dunes that he believes is Charles’s soul. The action of the story returns to the cricket match where a violent storm has appeared. During the ensuing deluge, Crossley becomes agitated. The chief doctor tries to calm him but Crossley threatens to shout him dead. Just then a lightning bolt strikes the scorer’s booth, killing Crossley and the doctor. The story concludes with the narrator informing us that he is boarding in the house of Richard and Rachel, who know of Crossley only as a clever conjurer.
The story runs to only twenty pages and seems a little thin to have been made into a feature-length film. It opens at the end of the story, with Rachel (Susannah York) hurriedly arriving at the hospital and uncovering three dead bodies: the chief doctor (Robert Stephens) , Crossley (Alan Bates), and – presumedly – another patient. The same scene takes place at the end of the film, with Rachel concentrating her attention on the body of Crossley.
John Hurt plays Richard, and the narrator, identified as Robert Graves, is played by Tim Curry. The major difference between the story and the film is that in the story Crossley’s tale is pure lunatic invention. The married couple, Richard and Rachel, who figure prominently in Crossley’s tale, barely know who he is. The filmmaker, Jerzy Skolimowski, chose to make Crossley’s story “true”, which leads to some confusion. In the film Crossley is captured by police for the murder of his “children.” In the story he is arrested for the murder of a couple in Australia. After he shouts one of the policemen down, Crossley is taken away in the back of a police car – presumably to the asylum. When the film opens, Crossley is driving a motorcycle and sidecar past Richard and Rachel’s car. Rachel drops Richard at the hospital right before we meet “Robert Graves.” A scene early in the film suggests some infidelity from Richard. And why is Rachel tenderly doting on Crossley’s dead body in the final shot?
Jerzy Skolimowski, a Polish filmmaker of the same generation as Roman Polanski, has had an uneventful career. His best and most personal work was made in Poland prior to his expulsion. His best-known and best-remembered film in the West was the quietly heartbreaking Moonlighting, about a group of Poles working in England when Jaruzelski’s martial law is imposed. Skolimowski chose to turn Graves’s story of a delusional mental patient into a kind of New Age horror movie, similar to The Wicker Man. It makes no attempt to explain or justify the magical elements, the evil shout, a stolen shoe buckle and the stones that are supposedly souls. Graves, who was no stranger to magic, simply made them Crossley’s ravings. Skolimowski tried to leave us guessing – which will not do.
Otherwise the film is occasionally breathtaking to watch. Mike Molloy, the Aussie cinematographer who also shot the excellent The Hit, creates striking images with locations in North Devon. Two of the original members of the rock band Genesis, Anthony Banks and Michael Rutherford, created an unusual soundtrack for the film. The staging of the shout itself, on the dunes of North Devon, is brilliant.
That leaves the superb cast, headed by Alan Bates and John Hurt. Bates exudes genuine power in every scene he is in, while Hurt struggles valiantly to keep his wits about him. Susannah York, who was a darling of 60s British film, supplies the film with her nude presence in many scenes, including a few in which she is manipulated – indirectly – by Bates. I recall reading how a very old Robert Graves sat beside her at the film’s premiere. How it must have tickled dotty old Graves to be sitting next to her during those nude scenes.
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