The Gull

With me already having written one post for today, my next post is going to be a bit briefer of a review than normal, although that's also in part because it's a movie based on a classic work of literature: a 1968 international production of The Sea Gull.

The movie is of course based on the play by Anton Chekhov, which probably should have been originally translated as just The Gull since the movie isn't set anywhere near the sea. Instead, it's set at a country estate somewhere not far south of Moscow where bureaucrat Sorin lives. His sister Arkadina (Simone Signoret) visits; she's a successful actress whose son Konstantin (David Warner) would like to be a writer but is writing more daring stuff that the public doesn't care for.

More successful with the public is Trigorin (James Mason), but he doesn't much care for the sort of stuff that sells commercially; he's also carrying on an affair with Arkadina. And then, living over on the next estate, is young Nina (Vanessa Redgrave). Konstantin has been pursuing her, but she meets someone successful like Trigorian and she's immediately smitten with that achievement. The various characters see each other and philosophize a lot, to the point that the whole proceedings get boring.

Eventually, it comes time for everyone not living in the area to go home, except that Nina goes off with Trigorin to become his mistress. Two years pass, and most of the same characters return to Sorin's estate because he's getting to the age where everybody expects him to die soon. There's more philosophizing, and then an ending that's a bit shocking.

Apparently the first performance of the play back in the 1890s was a critical failure and it wasn't until a few years later when a new production was an artistic breakthrough. I'd never seen any version of the play, nor read it, before seeing this version of the movie. All I can say is that having seen this movie, I can understand why the original stage play was a failure. The one thing that the movie has going for it is the settings; the movie was filmed in Sweden with lake areas just outside Stockholm substituting for country Russia, and doing so rather beautifully.

However, I think Signoret is miscast as a Russian actress, while director Sidney Lumet didn't do anything particularly imaginative in the direction. The actors mostly declaim their lines, as if they're not on screen together, and since the movie is slow and talky, none of this really helps the production.

Term of Trial

I hadn't really intended to do reviews on two movies with Terence Stamp in them in close proximity, but then Modesty Blaise showed up in the FXM rotation. But in going through the backlog of movies on my YoutubeTV cloud DVR, I got up to another movie that also happens to have Terence Stamp in a supporting role: Term of Trial.

The star here is Laurence Olivier. He plays Graham Weir, who is a teacher who doesn't have the best of personal lives. He's married to Anna (Simone Signoret) in a marriage that's become loveless in part because she apparently can't bear him any children. Graham has dealt with this by turning to the drink. He's also got a lot of the tropes of school movies whether British like Violent Playground or American like Blackboard Jungle; notably this includes the juvenile delinquent type like Mitchell (that's 23-year-old Terence Stamp playing high school-aged).

Also in his class is Shirley Taylor (Sarah Miles), a nice young girl of working-class parents who wants to get ahead and go to "night school", after-school catch-up classes for students who think they need remedial education. But since the current term is halfway done, her signing up for that might not work out so well. So she gets the idea that perhaps Mr. Weir can come to her house and help her out one-on-one, which you get was her intention all along. After all, students having a crush on their teachers has also always been a staple of movies set in high school. Much complicating matters is that Mitchell thinks Shirley should be his girl.

Meanwhile, there's the faculty-related stuff going on. Mr. Sylvan-Jones (Allan Cuthbertson), the current deputy headmaster, is taking on a new position elsewhere at the end of term, so a promotion to deputy headmaster is up, as the headmaster tells everybody in an assembly. Graham might be good in that job, but there's that personal life, which includes being a conscientious objector during World War II. Also at the assembly, the headmaster announces that there are going to be two field trips to the Continent during the Easter recess. Weir's class is going to be heading off to Paris.

This gives Shirley the chance to put the moves on Weir even more, as it becomes clearer that she's got a crush on him. It goes so far as to feign a fainting spell in the Louvre in order to get some time alone with Weir, and then showing up at his hotel room after everybody has ostensibly gone to bed. But when Graham figures out what's going wrong and tries to put a stop to it, Shirley decides to intimate that Graham was the one doing untoward things, leading to the titular trial.

Despite all the tropes, Term of Trial is actually a pretty darn good movie. Part of this is due to the presence of Laurence Olivier, who unsurprisingly gives a fine performance. But another part of it comes from being adjacent to the British "kitchen sink" movies of the early 1960s. There's something about the production values here that seems so much grittier than we could get from Hollywood movies of the era.

So if you get the chance, definitely give Term of Trial a watch. One note, however: Wikipedia and IMDb both list it as having a 130-minute running time, while the print TCM ran is only 114 minutes.

Save me from tomorrow

No, not that Ship of Fools

Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools aired on TCM during 31 Days of Oscar as it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars. It's getting another showing tomorrow at 5:15 PM on TCM, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on here.

After a montage of stylized pictures of the cast assembled into the shape of an ocean liner, wet get the opening words from a dwarf, Glocken (Michael Dunn), breaking the fourth wall to tell us that the ship is packed with fools of all kinds. Shortly we'll get to meet all of those "fools".

It's 1933 in Veracruz, Mexico. A German ocean liner is about to disembark, and if you know your history, you'll know that 1933 is the year that the Nazis came to power. So there are powerful changes coming as everybody makes their way back to Europe. Among the passengers are:

Rieber (Jose Ferrer), a German who is sympathetic to the Nazis' anti-Jewish propaganda. He's married with a wife and kid back in Frankfurt, but has an affair with a young woman on the ship;
Lowenthal (Heinz Rühmann), a German Jew who because of his Jewishness is excluded from the captain's table and is seated with Glocken. Lowenthal thinks the Jews have been too good for Germany for the Nazis to carry out their threats;
Freytag (Alf Kjellin), a man who gets demoted from the captain's table when Rieber finds out Mrs. Freytag is Jewish;
The Huttens, an older couple with a dog; and the Lutzes, who are traveling with their adolescent daughter;
David (George Segal), an artist who in a relationship with Jenny (Elizabeth Ashley), which seems more about the sex than real love;
La Condesa (Simone Signoret), a Spaniard who has an opiate addiction and is being deported to a prison in the Canary Islands);
Mary Treadwell (Vivien Leigh), a wealthy divorcée who seems to be looking for a younger man; and
Bill Tenny (Lee Marvin), a failed baseball player who meets Mary and finds the hatred is mutual.

There's also the ship's doctor, Schumann (Oskar Werner), who treats the Condesa and finds that he's falling in love with her. He's sickly, having had a heart attack in his early 40s, and wants to leave his wife behind and treat the Condesa if possible.

So, on the face of it, there's a lot going on, with things getting even more complicated when the ship is more or less forced to pick up 600 migrant workers that the Cuban government is throwing out and deporting back to Spain. Most of the passegners try not to pay attention to those poor Spaniards down in steerage, instead focusing more on their own personal dramas that nobody else on the ship really cares about.

Frankly, it's hard as a viewer to care about these people. There's just too many stories going on, and the characters seem more like archetypes who are there to fit the pontifications of Katherine Ann Porter (who wrote the novel on which the movie is based) and director Stanley Kramer, who never shied away from putting even more of a message into his social message pictures.

Other people, however, will probably enjoy Ship of Fools more than I did, so definitely give it a go and judge for yourself.