The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (78 page)

Alan Clarke was a genius of TV—which means that he was better (or, to use Stephen Frears’s phrase, “more formidable”) than most regular theatrical filmmakers. He believed TV was an opportunity for looking beneath the rocks of the social order and giving voice to the anonymous, the wretched—the scum, even. One of his films was actually called
Scum
, and for years it frightened its makers, the BBC. They banned it, because it was exaggerated, too dramatic, too documentary, too disturbing, or too true—take your pick. These are the flavors in Clarke’s talent.

He was born near Liverpool, the son of a bricklayer. He worked as a laborer, and did his best as an insurance salesman before two years of National Service in Hong Kong. Then he emigrated to Canada, and while there he began to study acting and directing. In 1961, he returned to Britain and became a floor manager in television. From that, he worked his way into directing, and by 1969 he was at the BBC. In the rest of his life he made only three theatrical films: a second version of
Scum
(80), to evade the BBC ban;
Billy the Kid & the Green Baize Vampire
(85), an apparent disaster; and
Rita, Sue & Bob, Too
(86), a rowdy, randy sexual comedy about unglamorous people.

The rest is television in the British tradition of filming “plays”—i.e., worthwhile scripts commissioned from established writers and newcomers—that had something to say about life in Britain, something constructive maybe, but often something dangerous and angry. These plays were filmed modestly, on 16mm, yet with outstanding casts and crews. For example, Chris Menges photographed some of Clarke’s plays, and they feature actors such as Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.

Clarke filmed some short stories in his early days, including work by Alun Owen, Edna O’Brien, and William Trevor; he made a biopic on Horatio Bottomley, a famous British swindler from the years 1900–30; he filmed a David Hare script, a story from Solzhenitsyn, a version of Buchner’s
Danton’s Death
, and an episode from
Love for Lydia
. David Rudkin’s
Penda’s Fen
was rural, Arthurian, and mythic;
To Encourage the Others
was a treatment of the Bentley-Craig case filmed again later by Peter Medak as
Let Him Have It
(91). Clarke even directed Bertolt Brecht’s
Baal
. The director in British TV was dependent on what the writer provided—that may be the lesson of this last great example of the studio system.

Still, by the time of his maturity, Britain was in or close to the Thatcher era, and Clarke’s best work is an unflinching but haunted view of a country savaged by that lady’s revolution and of the hopelessness felt—and acted out—by those excluded from the revolution’s benefits.

Scum
(77), written by Roy Minton, is set in a juvenile prison, a prison for young offenders. Clarke sees a confinement for officers as well as youths, a rat-warren of power, intimidation, corruption, and violence. There is a protagonist, a new prisoner, who seems Cagney-like and heroic—until he takes charge and “becomes the Daddy here.” The language is foul, and, as so often in Clarke’s work, it is lower class and regional, not easy for an American to decipher. But there is no missing the damage of the Borstal, or the implication that prisons serve as our forgetting places … until they are full.

Made in Britain
(83), written by David Leland, is about a skinhead (Tim Roth) with a swastika tattoo on the bridge of his nose, who is headed for Borstal and seeks only violence, absurdity, and nihilism. The film never addresses why he is as he is, so “antisocial” and intransigent. But the kid, Trevor, is also so lively, so fuck-off eloquent, so much Tim Roth, that we are left to ponder whether such cases are hopeless or whether society needs to go back to zero.

Contact
(85) is a war film that might have been made by Anthony Mann in its depiction of a platoon of English soldiers patrolling the border between Northern and southern Ireland. There are no real characters (though Sean Chapman is riveting as the demoralized officer), and very little talk. Instead, we see the implacable prowling in idyllic terrain, searching for guns, trouble, or mines. It is as if the “Irish problem” had been filmed by a shell-shocked bird in a blasted tree, equipped with infra-red night-sight vision.

Elephant
(89, and written by Clarke) is Ireland again, taken to a terrible, surreal extreme: it is—no more, no less—the filming of eighteen murders. The people are actors and the deaths are arranged “action,” filmed with something like beauty. But there is no talk, no hint of context or explanation, just the list, the monotony, and the wonder in so many deaths (the real Ireland has had over two thousand sectarian killings). Viewers can walk away, become connoisseurs of slaughter, go into outrage, or face their helplessness.

Road
(89), from a play by Jim Cartwright, is set on a bleak housing estate in the North of England, a hellish existence, a prison without guards. The film is theatrical in that humble characters have long and even grand speeches; but the film is harsh and realistic, with momentous Steadicam tracking shots as these people walk the estate, lost in revery, anger, or the neurotic habit of marching.

The Firm
(89), written by Al Hunter, is a band of soccer hooligans. But these gang members are not unemployed kids. The leader, Gary Oldman, is an estate agent, a family man, and someone who has to have “the buzz.”
The Firm
is very funny and lethal (a mixture characteristic of Clarke), and only incidentally does it expose England as hardly fit for living in.

These are not easy or comforting films. Their power is cumulative, and Clarke is an amazing director, lucid, quick, pungent, very entertaining, unsentimental, a master with actors, and a poet for all those beasts who pace and measure the limits of their cages. No one has ever grasped the central metaphor of cramped existence in walking as well as Alan Clarke.

Patricia Clarkson
, b. New Orleans, 1959
She’s so authentically “Southern,” with a whisky voice and stringy, high-strung blonde looks—no wonder Patricia Clarkson dreams of playing Tallulah Bankhead one day. But is it possible that, while dreaming and waiting, she will have done so many Tallulah-ish short takes that there’s nothing left for the whole job? It sometimes seems as if she’s become the indispensable token actress for American independent films: give her a couple of scenes and she’ll be eccentric, sexy, off-the-wall, rowdy, and “a character.” She’s as solid as an NEA grant, and maybe better value—a feisty Clarkson scene does usually lift a worthwhile film and confirm that old chestnut that the real America is a place of quality supporting actors (instead of a mad audition for empty leads).

She studied at Fordham and Yale and she likes to keep busy in film, theater, and television. She’s a sport, usually up for “novel” casting, so it is still a nice surprise to see her young Mrs. Ness in
The Untouchables
(87, Brian De Palma) with hair you might brush all night—and nearly as beautiful as Caroline Goodall.

She was with Clint in
The Dead Pool
(88, Buddy Van Horn), in
Rocket Gibraltar
(88, Daniel Petrie), and then did a spell in television—on
Davis Rules
and
Murder One
, and later on
Frasier
and
Six Feet Under
. Meanwhile, she broke back into movies as a Fassbinder exile, Greta, in
High Art
(98, Lisa Cholodenko);
The Green Mile
(99, Frank Darabont);
Joe Gould’s Secret
(00, Stanley Tucci);
The Pledge
(01, Sean Penn); doing Agnes Moorehead in
Far from Heaven
(02, Todd Haynes); very funny as the wasted mother in
Pieces of April
(03, Peter Hedges);
The Station Agent
(03, Tom McCarthy);
Dogville
(03, Lars von Trier);
Good Night, and Good Luck
(05, George Clooney); as Sadie Burke in
All the King’s Men
(06, Steven Zaillian);
Lars and the Real Girl
(07, Craig Gillespie);
Married Life
(07, Ira Sachs);
Elegy
(08, Isabelle Coixet);
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
(08, Woody Allen);
Whatever Works
(09, Allen);
Shutter Island
(10, Martin Scorsese).

Jack Clayton
(1921–95), b. Brighton
1958:
Room at the Top
. 1961:
The Innocents
. 1964:
The Pumpkin Eater
. 1967:
Our Mother’s House
. 1973:
The Great Gatsby
. 1983:
Something Wicked This Way Comes
. 1987:
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
. 1992:
Memento Mori
(TV).

The brief list tells its own story. Despite a lauded debut, curiously identified in some quarters as a revived British cinema, Clayton had difficulty sustaining projects. He was for many years an assistant producer—raucously called for throughout
Beat the Devil
(54, John Huston), and also involved on
Moulin Rouge
(53, Huston) and
I Am a Camera
(55, Henry Cornelius). He directed the short,
Bespoke Overcoat
, in 1955 and always pursued the same neatly wrapped up and faintly realized exercises in literary emotion.
Room at the Top
was as brutal, inauthentic, and complacent as its book;
The Innocents
is an Arts Council–like piece of Jamesiana. Only
The Pumpkin Eater
is touching, because of the forlorn, bitter gulfs between Anne Bancroft and James Mason, Peter Finch and Maggie Smith.

Clayton’s six-year silence before
Gatsby
was warning of that disastrous film made with such erroneous and vulgar care.
Gatsby
is an unfilmable novel, if only because the last pages are so abstract and because Fitzgerald took great risks in leaving out things that a film must scrape together for fear of seeming bereft, arty, and enervated. If you wish to see the film of
Gatsby
, go to
The Magnificent Ambersons
(42, Orson Welles). Clayton’s movie has one salutary peak, when Robert Redford’s Gatsby laments, “It’s all been a terrible mistake.”

John Cleese
, b. Weston-Super-Mare, England, 1939
With ubiquity, and the great success of
A Fish Called Wanda
(88, Charles Crichton), it has seemed possible that John Cleese might pass as an amiable, middle-of-the-road, decent, jolly gent. He is in so many commercials; and, for actors, such ventures have a deafening common sense. He is known as the codirector of a company that makes comic training films. He has become relaxed on talk shows—garrulous, even—and at the time of
Wanda
he was even an appealingly gallant flirt with Jamie Lee Curtis. Altogether, there has been a concerted and by no means unimpressive effort to suggest that Cleese is a good, boring fellow.

I am unmoved. This is one of the authentic madmen that moving imagery has given us. This is desperation, the chronic urge to murder; this is the fury that has tried dealing with women; this is loftiness that goes in dread of pratfalls. This is the iron jaw of law and order that knows he will begin to speak in gibberish. There is hardly a screen presence that so instantly evokes the howls of laughter that are achieved by daily torture. And, of course, the greatness of Cleese is not in
Wanda
, or even in Monty Python; it is
Fawlty Towers
, an English defeat as dire as Hastings, a hotel of humiliation and mortification. If ever one is tempted to see humor in pathetic little men, Cleese is the corrective. There is nothing funnier than a huge man trying to inspire order in the world. Basil Fawlty is the tragedy of fascism, and Cleese is one of the screen’s great explosive clowns.

Fawlty Towers
was not long lived, nor did it air too often. It was blessed with a wife, Sybil (Prunella Scales), of such a sublime wisdom and stupidity that Basil had to know the gods were aiming at him. The hotel is all Spanish waiters, English colonels, colossal twenty-five-minute spirals of misunderstanding, with a severely deft half-landing where necks are meant to be broken. There is also the subtext of Polly (an American called Polly!), the maid, played by Cleese’s cowriter and ex-wife, Connie Booth, so delectable that the maddened, neutered Basil cannot notice her. So her presence is further provocation to murder the eternal Sybil. These episodes are sometimes as lacerating as the reportage of natural horrors and disasters. Even Buñuel might be breathless to see Cleese, his head rigid but revolving, his eyes driven into the skull by the certainty of disaster’s cunning.

Cleese met Booth, and Terry Gilliam, while touring in America in the early sixties with a comedy show put together by fellow students at Cambridge. He then wrote for TV before becoming the tent pole/minister/Frankenstein monster for the Monty Python assemblage. He has been in all of their films, of course, which are minor works compared with the TV shows. And he has acted in several non-Python films:
The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom
(68, Joe McGrath);
The Magic Christian
(70, McGrath);
The Statue
(71, Rod Amateau);
Time Bandits
(81, Gilliam);
Privates on Parade
(82, Michael Blakemore);
Yellowbeard
(83, Mel Damski);
Silverado
(85, Lawrence Kasdan);
Clockwise
(86, Christopher Morahan); and
Splitting Heirs
(93, Robert Young).

Most of these are so tedious and inconsequential that
Wanda
came as a special surprise. It was as if Cleese had realized there was a prospect in movies, and so he worked on the script and was executive producer, as well as a central actor. Still, it is hard to see him finding a role to match Basil Fawlty—although Prince Charles might be worth trying.

The Cleese of recent years has seemed lost. He has never really been an actor without the apparatus of
Fawlty Towers
or the Python zoo. He has turned very solemn sometimes in his self-help videos, and he has generally looked like a tall man with an unfunny stance wandering around:
Frankenstein
(94, Kenneth Branagh);
The Jungle Book
(94, Stephen Sommers);
Fierce Creatures
(97, Robert Young and Fred Schepisi), a sequel to
Wanda
, but a mess;
Parting Shots
(98, Michael Winner);
The Out-of-Towners
(99, Sam Weisman); as “R” in
The World Is Not Enough
(99, Michael Apted);
Isn’t She Great?
(00, Andrew Bergman);
Quantum Project
(00, Eugenio Zanetti);
Rat Race
(01, Jerry Zucker);
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
(01, Chris Columbus).