Billy Liar

Today in Summer Under the Stars is a day devoted to British actor Tom Courtenay. As it turns out, I've got one of his movies on my DVR from the previous time TCM aired it, so I decided now would be a good time to watch it so that I could write a post on it for the upcoming airing. That movie is Billy Liar, which kicks off prime time at 8:00 PM.

The scene is one of those northern towns, where the housing stock is old and twentysomethings who aren't married are still forced to live with their parents becuase good luck finding a place to live on your own. Tom Courtenay plays young Billy Fisher, who lives in one such house together with not only his parents (Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washbourne), but his elderly and sickly grandmother (Ethel Griffies). Billy has a steady job, but one that's unexciting, working as a clerk for local funeral home director Shadrack.

It's the sort of life that one dreams of getting away from, and Billy has an active imagination that could be well-used to figure out how to escape such a humdrum life. Unfortunately, Billy uses that imagination in the wrong way. He has some sort of made-up country called Ambrosia that you could imagine somebody writing a book about, but instead, Billy fantasizes about being the leader of Ambrosia. He claims that he's writing a book, but that's all just nonsense. Worse for him is that he lies to everyone around him about all sorts of things, such as the idea that he's going to get a job writing comedy for a comedian who's made good and is about to visit town, Danny Boon.

While these lies are bad, there are other lies that are worse because some are immoral and others actively illegal. Billy has been stringing two different young ladies along, Rita and Barbara. You'd think that since everybody knows about Billy's propensity to lie and make stuff up and that he's pretty much a laughing stock for it, no self-respecting woman would want a man like Billy. But somehow, he's got multiple women interested in him, as a third, Liz (Julie Chrisite) comes back from London for a short stay.

As I implied above, there are lies that could get Billy in legal hot water. One of Billy's tasks at the funeral home was to send out all the promotional calendars to various would-be clients. However, Billy could never bring himself to do this, storing all of the calendars in an armoire in his bedroom while basically embezzling all the money that he was supposed to use on postage to send out all of these calendars. Shadrack is understandably miffed about it, and could certainly press charges against Billy although he seems to be a bit lenient in that he's only docking Billy's pay until Billy pays it off.

But then Liz is about to go back to London and Billy might just be able to escape his life. At the same time, however, Grandma is rushed to hospital and Billy's father is furious that Billy was out of the house when this happened. Will Billy be able to find happiness in life? Will he be able to satisfy the demands that society puts on normal working people?

Billy Liar is the sort of movie that I can see why some people really like. I didn't exactly dislike it, but I have to admit that I don't have as high an opinion as others. That's because of Courtenay's character. Not Courtenay's acting; he does a fine job. But the character is such an obnoxious liar that I found it hard to have any sympathy for Billy, which is a bit of a problem for a movie like this.

So Billy Liar is definitely a movie worth watching, albeit with some caveats.

Far from the Madding Crowd

Another movie that I watched recently largely because it was about to expire from my DVR was the 1960s adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd.

Now, the first thing that I need to point out is that I haven't read the original novel, so I don't know how much the movie differs from the book. That, and any of you who have read the book will, I presume, already know the basic story. In mid-1860s England, one of those parts in the southwest where there are cliffs overlooking the ocean, lives sheep rancher Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates). Well, he's not really a rancher since he's poor and doesn't own any land; he just raises sheep. He lives near Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) and loves her and would like to marry her, except that he's terribly poor and she would like at least a bit better of a living than Gabriel could currently provide her.

And then disaster strikes. One of Gabriel's two border collies is evil, breaking down the fence to the pen where the sheep are held, not only allowing the sheep to escape and stampede, but literally driving them to their mass death on the beach at the bottom of the cliff! Now Gabriel has no land, no sheep, and no money to buy new sheep, leading him to look for a job with one of those gentry farmers who employs a bunch of people. On his way to the village where farmers look for new labor, we meet Sgt. Frank Troy (Terence Stamp). He's got a girlfriend Fanny (Prunella Ransome getting an "introducing" credit but winding up with only a modest career) in these parts, who stops him while his platoon is traveling by horse and ask him about the promise he made to marry her. Frank says he'll marry her when the time is appropriate.

Gabriel gets to town, and looks to get hired as a shepherd. On his way to a possible new job, the cart comes across a fire in the servants' houses, and Gabriel takes charge in how everybody tries to put the fire out, leading to some notice for him. The next day he shows up with the rest of the workers at a farm owned by... Bathsheba!? It seems Bathsheba's uncle died, bequeathing her his farm, and she's decided to take it on even though she doesn't really have anybody to run the place. She and Gabriel recognize one another, but now that there is a class difference between them any thought of marriage is out of the question.

Living on the farm across the way is William Boldwood (Peter Finch), to whom marriage would seem to make sense, at least in the class system of Victorian England. Indeed, William would like to marry Bathsheba after she on a lark finds a valentine left in her uncle's papers and sends it to William on a lark. But she's not serious about marrying him. Bathsheba meets Sgt. Troy because, as it turns out, Fanny is one of the workers on Bathsheba's farm. Fanny's presence there brings frank to Bathsheba's presence. When William finds that Frank is there, he gets jealous and tries to get Frank to leave, only to find out that Frank has already married Bathsheba, not Frank.

Frank, however, doesn't really love Bathsheba so much. And he's decided he's not going to marry Fanny because, in the meantime, he did set a wedding date. The only thing is, she went to the wrong church, the one at the garrison instead of the one in the village. That led the hot-headed Frank to decide no, I'm not going to marry you if you're so damn stupid. Plus, Bathsheba also has at least some money that Frank can burn through. All of this leads to quite a bit of sadness for the various characters, although I can't go into much more detail without giving away some serious spoilers.

This version of Far From the Madding Crowd is one of those 1960s films made on location in Britain with some lovely cinematography and production design. The performances are pretty good, too. However, the film runs close to 2:45 plus an overture and intermission music (the print TCM ran didn't have exit music). And, I have to admit, the movie does feel like it has a leisurely pace. So if you have a rainy day without much else to do, Far from the Madding Crowd is definitely a reasonable way to spend some time with.

The Go-Between

I think I'm down to one last movie that I recorded during the spring airings of Two for One on TCM that's getting its second showing during the autum re-run of the series. This time, the guest co-host is director Todd Haynes, and the first movie he selected is The Go-Between, airing tonight at 8:00 PM.

The movie flashes back and forth between time periods, which I found rather confusing as there were cars that looked like they were from at least the 1930s if not later, while other scenes had what looked like Edwardian fashion and a relatively young character who had a visible war wound from the Boer War. In fact, a reading of the synopsis suggests that the main action takes place around 1900, while the "50 years later" portions are presumably set in the early 1950s as the film is based on a book first published in 1953.

Leo Colston (Dominic Guard), is an adolescent boy who is being raised by a single mother after the death of his father. She's apparently been scrimping and saving, as Leo is able to go to a boarding school together with a much wealthier kid, Marcus Maudsley. Indeed, Marcus has invited Leo to visit his family over the summer as they live in one of those great country houses in Norfolk. Marcus has a sister of marriageable age, Marian (Julie Christie), and the hope is that she'll marry the class-suitable Viscount Trimingham (Edward Fox). Leo sees Marian, and as he's just entering puberty and is beginning to think of girls in a way he doesn't quite understand, he naturally develops a crush on Marian.

For Leo and Marcus, the summer is setting up to be a series of adventures, such as going for a swim in the lake and finding that Ted Burgess (Alan Bates), the farmer who lives across the lake, is already swimming. Apparently they can't swim together because of those class differences, and Marcus is almost snotty about making certain the proper class relationships are upheld. In any case, the adventures come to a screeching halt when Marcus comes down with a case of the measles, forcing him to be quarantined.

Leo, being left by himself, tries to make his own adventures, with one being jumping down a haystack on Burgess' farm. Unfortunately, Leo hits an axe at the base of the haystack, cutting himself badly enough to need first aid. Ted treats Leo, in exchange for Leo's taking a letter back to Marian for her eyes only. Leo would also like Ted to teach him about sex, although this being the early 20th century, it's not phrased quite so directly.

Leo gives Marian Ted's letter, and she actually writes back to Ted, having Leo deliver the letter thanks to those class differences and Marian not being able to be seen having any business with Ted. That, and the fact that she eventually gets officially engaged to Trimingham. Leo discovers that Marian and Ted are writing love letters to each other, and that only makes things worse.

The Go-Between has an interesting premise, although I have to say that I felt the movie was extremely slowly paced. It also doesn't help how the action from time to time comes to the present day. The cinematography is well done and the Norfolk locations scenes are lovely to look at. Also, the cast does a good acting job. But overall, the script (ah, it's Harold Pinter again, back after having made a royal mess of Accident) makes The Go-Between an aggravating movie to watch.

For those who like Hollywood movies trying to be hip

Another of the movies that I recorded due to it having an interesting synopsis and recently got around to watching was the 1968 film Petulia. Made at the height of the counterculture era, the movie is obviously trying to keep up with the times, but that's something which makes it a decidedly acquired taste.

The movie opens up at a charity ball in San Francisco designed to raise money for people who have suffered debilitating injuries in car accidents. Among the people attending is Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott), an orthopedic surgeon who operates on the patients who are the focus of the benefit. Also there is Petulia Danner (Julie Christie). As we eventually learn, she's the foster parent to a young child who got hit by a bus and for whom Dr. Bollen performed the operation, which is why she has a good reason to be there too.

The two also have something else in common, which is that they're both in marriages which seem well on their way to divorce. Dr. Bollen is further down that road, no longer living with his wife Polo (Shirley Knight), and having an affair with another woman while only seeing his children on weekends. Petulia is in a loveless marriage to David (Richard Chamberlain), a controlling man who uses his father's (Joseph Cotten in a small role) influence to maintain that control while most likely being abusive to Petulia along the way.

Petulia meets Archie, and finding out what they have in common, immediately propositions him, with the two going to an odd urban motel where everybody parks right next to their hotel room door, except that everything is in a parking garage and the "front desk" is all remote, which would have been very uncommon in 1968. Petulia is odd in other ways, too, stealing a tuba and taking it to Archie's bachelor pad where she apparently expects him to sleep with her.

As all of this unfolds, we learn about the pasts of Archie and especially Petulia in a series of flashbacks that aren't so obviously flashbacks at first; this is how we learn the full story of Petulia's becoming a foster parent and how the kid wound up getting in that accident. However, because the flashbacks aren't particularly obvoius, it makes the narrative structure a bit of a mess.

And that's the huge problem with Petulia. It's easy to see what the producers as well as director Richard Lester were going for, but unlike some other movies from the same era that had a daring narrative structure -- I'm particularly thinking of Two for the Road -- it doesn't always work. If the movie had kept a linear structure, I'd have a lot less of a problem with Petulia. It still wouldn't be one of my favorites, to be honest, but it would be easier to see the good things about it, especially the view of San Francisco as it was in 1968.

Still, it's another of those movies where I can easily understand why people who want something arty and deliberately trying to upend Hollywood conventions would like it. So for some people, it's definitely going to be more than worth a watch.

Shampoo

Several months ago, TCM had a spotlight on California in the movies. One of the movies I actually hadn't seen before was Shampoo, so I recorded it. I recently noticed that it's got a couple airings coming up on various of the Showtime channels, including tomorrow morning at 10:10 AM on Showtime Showcase.

Warren Beatty plays George Roundy, who at the opening of the movie is sleeping with Felicia Karpf (Lee Grant), on the night before the 1968 presidential election. But that romantic tryst is broken up with George gets a call from another woman, Jill Haynes (Goldie Hawn). Jill is technically George's girlfriend, although as we can see he's not above sleeping with other women because, well, it's just so pleasurable to sleep with a woman. Jill has some sort of nervous issue, and needs George to come over and see her because, well, reasons.

George knows both of these women, as well as a third, Jackie (Julie Christie), because of his job. He's a hairstylist at a high-end salon in Beverly Hills, and all the women rave about what a tremendous job George does on their hair. So much so, in fact, that he's often asked to go out to their houses to do the hairstyling. (How George ever finds time to work considering all the running around he's doing is a good question.) And because he seems to be the one they all want, George has decided that he'd like to go out on his own and start his own salon.

Of course, to do this, he's going to need some money. Even though he believes he's got a great business plan, and possibly he does although I wouldn't know how to judge a business plan for a hair salon, the banks aren't so sure, and probably for the same reasons as me. They want more financial and business information from George, which really ticks him off. However, while George is working at the salon, it's revealed that Felicia's husband Lester (Jack Warden) is rich, and invests in new businesses, or venture capital before they called it that. Perhaps Lester could fund seed money.

If George's life seems complicated from those few paragraphs, it's about to get a lot more complicated. Jill is an aspiring actress, and she's gotten a call from a producer about a part that would require her travelling to Egypt. Jill would like some commitment from George one way or another and this could lead to a break-up of their relationship. And then, George gets a call to do a hairstyling at Jackie's house. While he's doing it, in the bathroom, who should show up but... Lester? Jackie had been George's serious boyfriend before Jill came along, and George still things about trying to rekindle things. But Jackie has moved on and is now seeing Lester, despite being good friends with Felicia. Needless to say, neither of the Karpfs realize yet that the other is stepping out on them.

I mentioned at the beginning the the film opens on the night before election day, and George gets invited to an election party by Lester, who wants him to bring Jackie because nobody would have a problem with Jackie and George being an apparent item. (Lester, for what it's worth, things that George, being a male hairstylist and not a barber, must be gay.) Jill also shows up with another man. Eventually all the main characters leave that party for a house party that seems more like the swinging 60s, where some of the secrets are found out.

Shampoo is a complicated little movie, and that's probably going to make it hard for people to like. It also has some uncomfortable moments, such as the Karpfs' teenaged daughter (Carrie Fisher at the beginning of her career) propositioning George. It's also a movie that for a good two-thirds of it feels like it's not really going anywhere. Then there's the genre issue; most synopses claim it's a comedy, or maybe a satire or farce. For me, it was really more of a drama. On the bright side, however, the performances are uniformly quite good, and some people will probably enjoy seeing the Los Angeles area as it was back in the day.

Shampoo may not be for everybody, but it's certainly an interesting watch.

Young Cassidy

Er, not that Cassidy....

One of TCM's daytime themes back in December was of "young" characters, that is some famous people earlier in their lives. The movies included Young Cassidy, which is on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection. Not having blogged about it here before, I decided to watch and do a post about it.

Rod Taylor plays the title role, a man named John Cassidy who ultimately becomes the Irish playwright Seán O'Casey, whom you may recall from Alfred Hitchcock's version of his play Juno and the Paycock. (He was born John Casey, and among his pen names was apparently Cassidy and a Gaelicized version of Cassidy.) He's a laborer in Dublin circa 1910, a time in Irish history which was about to get very turblent, something that you may again remember from another classic movie, Clark Gable's Parnell. A lot of the Irish are getting radicalized due to the grinding poverty and want home rule if not outright independence. As for Cassidy, he tries to add to the support of his family by writing revolutionary pamphlets and short stories.

Along the way, Cassidy meets the prostitute Daisy (Julie Christie) and has a brief affair with her; he also meets bookstore employee Nora (Maggie Smith) and has an affair with her to. A couple of the events in the run-up to the 1916 Uprising are depicted, but Cassidy rejects joining the military arm of the revolutionaries because he thinks their military tactics are stupid. Eventually Cassidy sells a short story but is apparently too stupid to know what a check is or how to open a bank account, and he needs that money to pay for the funeral of his dear beloved Irish mother (Flora Robson).

Cassidy continues to struggle and eventually writes a play Shadow of a Gunman, which the famous writier and Abbey Theatre proprietor W. B. Yeats (played by Michael Redgrave; the name rhymes with mates and not meats) accepts for staging. It's not much of a success, but Cassidy eventually writes another play, The Plough and the Stars that causes a literal riot at the Abbey Theater (this was based on a real incident), and Cassidy has to leave for England, eventually becoming Seán O'Casey.

There's probably enough material in O'Casey's life to make a good biopic, but we don't really get it in Young Cassidy. That's because it was produced by John Ford, who was supposed to direct as well before illness got in the way. Ford had a nauseatingly doe-eyed view of Ireland culminating in the ultra-treacly The Quiet Man. Irish politics of the era was incredibly complex, since there was all that difficulty with Britain followed by a Civil War (to this day, the two biggest parties in Irish politics don't fit into the standard left-right spectrum seen in most other countries). But with the large number of Irish-Americans, we only seem to get a view of the country that says "Britain Bad, anti-Britain good" and generally avoids the complexity. (Granted, I probably go too far in the opposite direction from growing up with a mother of Irish descent and seeing the inveterate whining of the sort of Irish-Americans still claiming to be fighting against bigotry that hadn't existed for generations.) John Ford is probably the worst of the lot when it comes to the subject.

Still, some of the acting is good, as should be expected when you've got people like Maggie Smith and Michael Redgrave in the cast, and the production values with Irish location shooting are good. And some of you will probably like this one more than I did. So as always, watch and judge for yourself.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

I finally got around to watching McCabe and Mrs. Miller in its entirety off my DVR. The movie is available on DVD and Blu-ray, having been put out by the Criterion Collection about a year ago.

The movie starts off with John McCabe (Warren Beatty) showing up in a dark mining town in Washington state. McCabe is a professional gambler and a bit of a blowhard. There are rumors that he's a gunslinger who killed a man, and he's not about to let them die. He's got plans to set up shop in this town, big plans. He wants to build a competing saloon, and even bring in prostitutes for a bordello. This even though he really doesn't know the first thing about it, picking up a couple of cheap hookers.

He's in luck, though, as Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) shows up. She's run a bordello before, and she also knows all the practical things about women that a man just wouldn't know. She comes up with the idea that she'll run the place for McCabe, and the two will split the revenues. McCabe isn't necessarily happy about it, but he eventually accepts. It doesn't help that Mrs. Miller his hot, in his mind.

The business becomes successful, succesful enough to attract interest from outside. A big mining company sends in two men to offer a buyout to McCabe, one that would be fairly lucrative. But partly thanks to McCabe's hubris, and partly because he seems happy with his current position in life, he turns the big company down. They decide that if they can't buy McCabe out, they'll force him out.

Most of the reviews of McCabe and Mrs. Miller that I've read are much more positive than I would be. I found the movie to be extremely slow paced, without much seeming to happen for long stretches. There's also the 70s cinematography with its pointless zooms that I've never appreciated. And to be honest, I didn't particularly care for either of the main characters.

Still, you should probably judge for yourself. In that regard, it's a bit of a shame that the Criterion Collection discs are always pricier than run of the mill disks.