Ryan's Daughter

Ryan's Daughter (David Lean, 1970) This is director David Lean's supposed "big flop," although, now, given a few decades of perspective (40 years?), Time can be seen to be quite kind to it, revealing it to be solid as a film, and as film-making, unburdened by the need to survive in the capricious tastes of film-critics during the "youth-culture" cusp of the 1970's. While so many of the films that were sending the filmophiliacs into paroxysms of tortured metaphor have crumbled into the dust of pretentiousness, this one still stands up as a story well told...even if the story might be a little frayed and dog-eared.

One can quibble. Yes, it's elephantine in a way that a small-scale story shouldn't be (it's more than 3 hours, time enough for an epic, or at least a couple more infidelity stories thrown in!) and the huge landscapes that Lean favors tend to dwarf the participants of the tiny Irish town of Kirarry (not to mention there's a LOT of people in the crowd scenes...where do they all LIVE!). But, the only serious charge is that Lean is merely being Lean (as in being himself, as opposed to the inelegantly penny-pinching film-making of its era—he spent a year making it "just-so," due to the ever-changing coastal climate of the location, and another year editing and fine-tuning it). Lean may not have been a versatile director, altering his technique for every film (nor does a leopard change its spots...because it's a gall-durned leopard and doesn't have to) but he certainly achieves the maximum in every shot...and one is never confused or questioning what is going on. For all the big vistas, there's a lot of small nuance going on, that merely represents good story-telling.

Sure, there are things that grate: Maurice Jarre's egregiously "mickey-mousing" score, or maybe a couple of scenes are pushed a little hard—the post-traumatic stress incident that erupts from John Mills' "village idiot" swinging his leg against the wall, the venality of the town's citizenry—but, one can see why Lean did what he did, and the drama benefited, ultimately, from such touches.

It started out as an adaptation of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" by screenwriter Robert Bolt. By this time, Bolt and Lean had a working relationship as tight as Powell and Pressburger ("The Archers") did. Lean told the writer he was not interested, even if it was written for Bolt's wife-at-the-time, Sarah Miles. Lean had higher ambitions for his films now. Like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, he wanted the problems of his figures in a landscape to have political overtones, rather than just the caprices of their natures. And with present day tensions in Belfast between British Army forces and the IRA in the headlines, locales were switched, accommodations made, and, one feminist nice concession, the female adulterer didn't have to pay the ultimate price for her crimes of indiscretion. Oh. She pays...(things hadn't advanced that far!), but it's the male (a cute, but out-of-his-depth, Christopher Jones) who sacrifices himself...in the guise of destroying evidence.

Bolt wrote his "Irish Bovary," but called it "Michael's Day," after John Mills' poor unfortunate—unfortunate, maybe, but he's the only character who doesn't judge, the lowest of the social strata, but the highest in moral character, followed by the priest Father Hugh (Trevor Howard), who is judgemental, but doesn't allow that to not seek the judged's salvation. In Kirarry, the first one now will later be last, and those who are triumphant by film's end will suffer a life of misery due to it...just by being themselves.

Lean's Irish crowds can be seen in the cackling crones of John Ford's Irish films, or the scandalously rich elite in George Cukor's films—these film-makers are only too happy to take down the gossips and gadabouts in the eyes of the audience, showing their true colors despite the trappings of civility. In truth, they are more like barnyard animals taking full advantage of pack mentality and pecking order.  It's not the only instance of Lean using Nature to tell the story, not with so much scenery and weather filling his frames perfectly. But, their shallow triumphs have no permanence, because their attitudes leave a lasting impression, long after they've left the screen.

The actors, save for the callow Jones, are great: Miles is not afraid to show her Rosy Ryan as a selfish brat, Mills creates a character as pathetic (and sometimes as mawkish) as Chaplin's Little Tramp (and he won an Academy Award for it), Leo McKern, bold and blustery as Rosy's too-eager-to-please Conformist-father, but the best are Robert Mitchum, cast against type as Rosy's cuckolded older husband—a bull in a china shop just aware of breaking his first dish—and Trevor Howard, who even whispers in a roar as the Kirarry parish priest—a great, bold, stamping performance of ingenuity and froth.

But, in the end, it is Lean's film, as personal as he could make it with those wide Earth-framing lenses. The figures may be fighting the crags and spray of the Irish coast, but when Lean chooses to bring them front and center, it is always with the best design sense and a painter's eye. Look at the two frames below: as Rosy runs from her husband's bed to join her wounded soldier of a lover, smoke inexplicably—chimney fire, maybe?—roiling over the hill, darkening the moment; and the next shot, as Mitchum's school-master Charles Shaughnessy, sees with his own eyes and not his suspicions, his betrayal out in the open, trapped behind glass and bars, he retreats, his eyes falling into shadow, displaying the loss he is reluctant to express. 

It doesn't get much better than that.  And there's over three hours of this meticulousness and beauty. It might be a bit rich. But it's quite the banquet. 

Brief Encounter (1945)

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) Two people (Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson) sit in a train depot cafe with few words passing between them, even though the need for words is agonizingly felt. This is a meeting of great import for these two people far beyond the casual and humble setting it is situated in. The time is precious and limited, and words could be balm or weapons, so they are avoided. It is agony, but neither one can avoid this meeting for both of them know it will be the last. And the clock is ticking. And words go unspoken. So much of that.

In Brief Encounter, the near-entirety of the story is told in flashback as a confession that never escapes the heroine's lips. Laura Jesson (Johnson) is considering telling her kind, stable, and decent (but dull) husband of her adultery, but the words go unspoken, flashing only in her mind, like a secret life passing through her mind before it dies. Only the audience is allowed the hearing. Only the audience will know the agony of that first scene.

But, not yet. As Laura and Dr. Alec Harvey (Howard) watch their tea cool and dread last words, they are interrupted by Dolly Messiter (Everley Gregg), a friend of Laura's and oh-so-chatty. Dolly is about to catch a train and what a lovely surprise to see Laura here and oh, how she does prattle on about the most meaningless, silly things and takes up all the oxygen—and time!—in the room, while Laura and Alec can only sit and be polite—it's not her fault, she doesn't know (although Laura will be thinking "I wish you'd stop talking. I wish you'd stop prying and trying to find things out. I wish you were dead - no I don't mean that. That was silly and unkind. But I wish you'd stop talking.") 

"Isn't it awful about people meaning to be kind?" is something she says that might also be applied in the situation. The underlying drama beneath an innocent seeming example of "two's company-three's a crowd" will not be disclosed (and only to us) the length of the picture away, but we get the gist—Dolly Messiter is intruding, but she knows not on what and is much too shallow to care. She might if she knew the possible ramifications it would lead Laura to in the near-future, but only in hind-sight, and there is something in Laura that might want to deny her the satisfaction—as satisfaction has been denied her.

Laura and Dr. Harvey part and there is only a fond hand on the shoulder to serve as a last embrace. He leaves. And as Dolly prattles on, director Lean does something amazing—he tilts the camera on Laura as her thoughts become desperate, and the image is a vertiginous tilt forward, like leaning in but off-kilter like standing on the edge of a precipice and the gravity drawing down, down, down. That tilt will remain as her resolve breaks and she runs out of the shop to the train tracks and a passing train blows her physically back and as it does so, reality —the camera returns to normal, the impulse broken. The world is "righted."

That's a bold move on Lean's part, and serves as a nice visual encompassing of the movie. The world goes off-axis during the affair, which for both parties is a secret double-life—they're both married and both quite proper. They're both racked by guilt for the indiscretion, which is as discreet as can be, as less than a handful of people suspect (and that's all they can do, besides judge), but it is enough to cause misery despite the happiness and longing they can't deny. But, it is played out in private and in the shadows, for fear of it being found out. Anyone will tell you this is common, despite how uncommon it all feels.

After all, in that very cafe, there are flirtations and affections being spouted all the time and at high volumes—particularly between station jobbers played by Sterling Holloway and Joyce Carey—and no one pays any attention to that. And on the platforms, PDA's are rampant and displayed in full, furtive view. In such an environment, guards might be down and desires encouraged. But, that's other people. Dr. Harvey and Laura Jesson are a different class and Society expects more of them, as they expect more of themselves.

Double-edged sword, that. They want more, expect more, but can't have more, and if they succumb, it tends to curl that stiff-upper-lip, even if they know forthright from wrong. Then, the inner dialogue begins, the repercussions, the guilt, the doubt, the shame. More is expected of you by denying yourself. You end up taking a lot of the joy out of it by second-guessing it and second-guessing whether you deserve it or not.

Noel Coward says all this much better than I can. By presenting that inner dialogue as a confession that will never be spoken, it offers the better parts of altruistic honesty without actually committing to it or suffering the consequences. By letting the audience in on the inner thoughts, it makes us co-conspirators and makes us put some skin in the game. And it is such a soaper that it allows the catharsis of tears without letting the figures involved on-screen so much as salt a lapel. They're allowed dignity, even if we have to blow our noses.

Clever little movie, another reason why Coward is revered as a scenarist and Lean a master craftsman. They do all the sneaking around in shadows and we do all the crying. That is a fine romance.

Triple-Cross (1966)

Triple-Cross (aka The Fantastic History of Eddie Chapman, Terence Young, 1966) Fresh off the success of his third James Bond movie, Thunderball, director Terence Young took on a personal project he'd been trying to get to the screen for awhile—the story of a former flat-mate who spent the war (so he says) playing both ends against the middle, spying for both the Nazi's and the British.

Eddie Chapman (Christopher Plummer) is a safe-cracker, and a good one, part of a team of plastique experts called The Gelignite Gang who would blow safes and keep low enough to avoid detection. Chapman has a criminal record a mile long and is well-known to authorities with many outstanding warrants. But, by happenstance, when serving time in a prison in Jersey, France, he comes up with the scheme of all schemes. seeing the Nazi's land on the shore of Jersey, he demands to see the Nazi high command. 

Chapman is such a slick operator and facile enough to tell anybody what they want to hear, that by his first meeting (with Gert Frobe and Romy Schneider) he already has the suspicious Nazis thinking that they might have an upper hand in their efforts to undermine British defenses using Chapman as a field operative. He is given the name Franz Graumann and tested in procedures and given a nice snappy Nazi uniform and careful (very careful) supervision. Chapman/Graumann is so slippery that, at first, they can't believe that an Englishman would so casually betray his country until they realize...you can't believe anything he says. He becomes both a source of amusement and suspicion for the Germans who realize that, for a buck (or a mark or a pound), he'll betray anybody.

The Nazis put him through their paces, training, testing, and trying to break him, all with the patronage of one Baron von Grunen (Yul Brynner—he could have built a career out of playing Nazis) that, eventually, Chapman is given a bit more free reign. As long as he's closely monitored and closely watched, it doesn't matter how cavalierly he acts, he gets the job done to their satisfaction. Or enough for Chapman to convince them he's on the level.

But, what Chapman wants is to get back to England—it was the initial pitch at his first meeting about his value as an asset for the Axis. He gets his first chance when he's dropped out of an airplane where he's supposed to make radio contact. To his dismay, he finds he's still merely in Germany; the Nazis have taken captured ordinance and are testing Chapman to see what he'll do when he thinks he's back in Old Blighty. He quickly makes the discovery and radios back for pick up where he lets his superiors know that he is not pleased and pushes to be sent to England for real.

Chapman meets with the French Resistance (who, of course, must be Claudine Auger)

That comes with his next mission where he's smuggled into England via steamship and once in London he goes straight to the British Command, who are even more suspicious than the Nazi's. He's vetted, sweated, and when his information pans out, he is given a meeting with British Intelligence MI5 (led by Trevor Howard), who make their own negotiations with Chapman—a slightly larger sum of money and his criminal record expunged if he continues to convince the Nazis he's working for them and passes along misinformation to the benefit of the Allies. His first mission for the Nazis and the British: infiltrate the work-force of the Vickers bomber plant and destroy the facility—or do enough damage to make it look convincing. The British choose a portion of the plant not vital to the manufacture of the bombers and conspire with Chapman to blow it up—spectacularly—and do enough damage to fool Nazi aerial reconnaissance. Things go so well that Chapman receives The Iron Cross for his efforts.

And, at this point, one must say that this follows the dictum of most "Based on a True Story" movies that are produced with an eye towards the dramatic rather than the truth, best expressed in Blake Edwards' Sunset, "It's all true—except for a lie or two." Yes, there was an Eddie Chapman. Yes, he played "Yojimbo" between the Nazis and Britain during the War. The Iron Cross only went to military personnel, which Chapman was not, and it was the de Havilland plant and not Vickers, one of the prominent Nazis is shown being shot and killed for his participation in the plot of kill Hitler (did ya see Valkyrie?"), when he actually survived the war, remained lifelong friends with Chapman and even attended his daughter's wedding. Details, details. They get in the way of a good story.

But if the devil isn't in the details, he certainly was in Eddie Chapman. That much is true. You have to be something of a narcissist, a sociopath and not even casual friends with the truth to pull off the stuff he did on record, and Young and his scenarists have romanticized this story and Chapman to the "nth" degree, no doubt wanting to recreate the "charming rogue" or "gentleman spy" Young got away with in his initial Bond films. 

In that, he has an able and willing accomplice in Plummer, who plays Chapman in so casual a manner that one becomes used to the fact that Chapman doesn't deal with facts. He's always quipping, making snide comments under his breath, and constantly making the case for himself that he is a complete bounder...and just doesn't care what anybody thinks about it. Variety (when the film came out) called Plummer's acting "listless" but that is a mis-characterization of what Plummer is doing. Plummer doesn't display much emotion on his face because Chapman doesn't show much of any genuineness, whether it's for the Nazi's or the British, and if anything comes through his eyes, it's the hint of surprise or wariness of something doesn't go exactly according to surprise, which quickly evaporates while he joshes his way out of it. It's a performance so completely amoral that one almost doesn't want to root for him, so much of an anti-hero the character is. 

Young directs in his usual style of brightly-lit busy master shots punctuated with mid-close-up's and subliminal attention to detail. Young was considered a more able "host" than director with a fine eye and slightly seedy good taste, and his way of directing action is to set up a few cameras and get as much usable coverage out of the confusion as possible (in one scene of a German garrison being strafed by an RAF fighter, it's pretty obvious that Young used a couple angles of the same plane to pad out and inflate what meager means he had to create the scene). If there is a bit too much detail and some unnecessary plotting to create tension, that's a bit of Young's style, too. The film's subject, Eddie Chapman, did not think much of the film (it did take a lot of liberties with the story, but so did Chapman's version of it) and the film did not achieve the cult status of Young's work on Bond, where the film did far better in Europe than it did in the U.S.

"So tell me, Eddie: whose side were you really on?"

Chapman's forged papers to enter Portugal

Operation Crossbow (aka The Great Spy Mission)

Operation Crossbow (Michael Anderson, 1965) There actually was an "Operation Crossbow" during the second World War of the 20th Century, designed to stop the next generation of weapons the Nazi's were dabbling in, after the costly Battle of Britain and before an anticipated amphibious landing on the shores of Great Britain—the V-1 (or "buzzbombs") and the V-2 rockets (predecessor to both the American and Russian space programs, but designed to deliver explosives and blind destruction). The reality was a bit more mundane than here, which is staged like The Guns of Navarone (the script was initially drafted by Emeric Pressburger of "The Archers") with a team of experts charged with infiltrating the German development complex with a plan to destroy it from without and within.

As with so many of these "true stories" of the war, it's only partially true:  the threat was real; dealing with it was another matter. The film is comprised of two sections: the administrators of the mission (Richard Johnson, Trevor Howard, John Mills) coming up with various strategies to deal with the pilotless weapons and the recruits (George Peppard, Tom Courtney, and Jeremy Kemp) whose job it is to drop behind enemy lines, pose as dead or missing German engineers and infiltrate the Peenemünde rocket-works, gather information and/or sabotage the facility.

Bunker windows are letter-boxed!
Watching a V-1 test—actually the most interesting part of the film.

From the beginning, the mission is sabotaged by a lack of complete intelligence and by infiltrators in the process: one of the missing Germans is missing for a reason—he's wanted for murder and sticks out like a sore thumb to the authorities when he suddenly shows up in plain sight; one of the specialists volunteering to break into the rocket plant is a German spy (Anthony Quayle) who goes back to Germany and runs interference throughout the rest of the film.

"You want us to...what?"  Courtney, Kemp and Peppard
Operation Crossbow

Then there's Peppard's alias—seems his German has a wife (Sophia Loren) who comes looking for him when she learns that he's suddenly turned up in a German hotel. Well, that complicates things when she discovers the man with her husband's name and identity is a total stranger. She's kept under wraps by a resistance couple (Lili Palmer, Philo Hauser) until the trio can escape the scrutiny of the German authorities.

"Uh...what's she doing here?"

Loren's role is completely unnecessary—and very brief—as there are enough complications with the purloined identities to make things rough going. No, she's there to be confused, wistful, play slightly drunk, and exit, and not too quietly. Oh...and get top billing to bring in the crowds, and to provide the unnecessary (and frankly irrelevant and mislabeled) "love interest"—although it hardly qualifies—for a film that is essentially all-male in character and scope.* 
While the historically valid "Crossbow" occurs in the skies over London with the various anti-aircraft measures designed to blow the missiles out of the skies or at least knock them off-course, the trio of infiltrators (minus one) get recruited at the vast underground missile complex and begin the process of finding the weaknesses of the weapons (while ironically working to fix them to maintain their cover) and the complex (which they, unironically, intend to destroy).

Peppard and Kemp compare notes on missiles—Peppard has appeared to be
beaten up, although that sequence was cut from the film.

The film did not do well at the American box-office, prompting the studio to re-name the film The Great Spy Mission (check out the poster paste-over to the right) upon re-release as they thought the "Crossbow" reference might have confused audiences into thinking it was involving knights and archery (and as the movie-going public was in the midst of being bombarded with everything James Bond...hey, it couldn't hurt). The film, whatever its title, has more in common with The Guns of Navarone than with Bond, although the next year the Bond producers would begin work on You Only Live Twice, which, itself, more resembled Navarone and this film than anything from Fleming's source-novel. Certainly, Crossbow's imagining of Peenemünde has as much basis in reality as a hollowed-out volcano space-command does. And the writers-producers have upped the ante by introducing a new weapon that has come online—the "New York" bomb, that city presumably being the target because, hey, bombing London just isn't enough, especially if you're trying to sell a film to an American audience.

Peenemünde looks like a very big place...

As dumb as that idea is, and the whole puffery of the thing, you do have to give some sort of pointage to a film that had the balls (Spoiler Alert) to kill off two its major stars before the half-way point of the film and eliminate all of its heroes by the film's end. For all the fantasy that the film imparted to the war, it dared to not reward courage but show the indiscriminate horror of war, despite all efforts and good intentions. America was in the midst of the Vietnam war at the time, and despite its trappings of fantasy amidst the threads of the true story, it dared to show the true nihilism of war—in the generation of deliberate destruction, no one gets out alive. Operation Crossbow has real problems as a film, but it dared to not cave in to a happy ending with garlands and celebration, or even of satisfaction with a mission accomplished. It leaves the viewer with a realization of cost towards the noble in the most ignoble of times.

*Not entirely true, that: some of the best scenes involve a German aviatrix, Hannah Reitsch—yes, she did exist—who worked on the project investigating why early test pilots of the V-1 in its planning stages were being killed trying to land the thing.  She discovered the V-1's had a tendency to stall and lose all guidance capabilities—not good if you're targeting something.