The Talkies/More Dangerous Liaisons

...T hose who remember the Profumo 1 affair (which didn't make it into the pages of my own chief news source at the time, the Weekly Reader) will recall that the scandal unfolded, over a number of months, in a dizzying series of as-told-to newspaper exposés, public apologies, betrayals, court cases, a resignation, and a suicide...

...E ven the scenes of upper-class depravity in this film have a rather quaint, old-fashioned quality...

...and when a murderously jealous black dude with whom she's become involved shoots a few holes in Stephen's front door, the good doctor sends Christine packing—directly, as it turns out, into the waiting arms of a tabloid reporter, to whom she begins to spill her whole sordid story...

...Between the breathless giggles of old Miss Americas and the nasal drone of yesteryear's mid-level government appointees, too many people exist with too little to say...

...Victor Gold, onetime press secretary to Barry Goldwater and Spiro Agnew, long-time adviser to George Bush, a spectator of, participant in, and reporter of the Washington power game for nearly three decades...

...On one level, it should be noted, this film is far less about Profumo than about what the publicists might call the "very unusual love story" of Christine and Stephen...

...as I say, I was busy reading the Weekly Reader...

...Granted, it was extremely significant: it helped topple the Macmillan government, and, like Watergate, may be said to have opened a nation's eyes to various unpleasant (and undying) truths about the moral conduct of many public servants...

...With views and ideas not crushed to boring blandness by an Inside-the-Beltway mentality, these four provide a refreshing and unique perspective on the men, women and ideas shaping tomorrow's America today...

...No murmuring blabber, just some of the most well-informed, intelligent, interesting people today, including: • Kenneth Adelman, President Reagan's top arms control adviser from 1983 to 1987, complimented by Soviet news agency TASS for his "pharasaism, duplicity, and fabrication of falsehoods...

...One doesn't doubt for a minute the lustiness of England's upper classes—but could the men who walked Britain's corridors of power in the late fifties and early sixties really have been this puerile, this vulgar...

...the extremely interesting later lives of the scandal's principal players are relegated to brief summaries preceding the closing titles...

...Before long, Christine has entered into clandestine affairs with both John Profumo (Ian MacKellan), the secretary for war in the new Macmillan government, and Eugene Ivanov (Jeroen Krabbe), the Soviet naval attaché, and has managed also to link up her best pal from the chorus, the vapid Mandy Rice-Davies (Bridget Fonda), with Stephen's friend and benefactor Lord Astor...

...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator, syndicated columnist, author/editor of five books and scholar of society's catastrophies, large and small, since the 1960s...

...If she has a tragic flaw, it is that she actually appears to feel guilty about the way she's used her charms: her attraction to dangerous members of the underclass, for instance, seems a manifestation of an unconscious desire for abasement, punishment, even self-destruction...

...as if to imply that, thanks largely to the Profumo affair, the romantic illusions associated with the pre-rock fare have been banished from England forever...

...Like the equally gripping All the President's Men, in short, Scandal doesn't have a satisfactory dramatic wind-up: it just stops...

...And as long as we're asking questions, isn't there something just a bit dishonest about a film that manipulates the viewer into a feeling of sympathy for such people as Christine, Stephen, and Profumo, even as it depicts cops and reporters as uniformly, and uncomplicatedly, crass and corrupt...

...And for director Michael Caton-Jones and writer Michael Thomas to have chosen the latter route would certainly have been a mistake, since the movie's chief strength, I think, lies in its painstaking, subtly ironic delineation of the characters and their interactions...

...For more information, write: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SPEAKER'S BUREAU P.O...

...Warren Brookes, award-winning political-economics columnist for the Detroit News, recognized for his relentless exposure of factual fallacies in the conventional political-economic wisdom of both the left and right...

...Far from being flattered or moved by her rejection of Profumo's offer, however, Stephen is angered by it...

...Where Scandal is somewhat less successful is in its implicit attempt to make the Profumo affair seem even more significant than it really was...

...But it can't last...

...One of the things which make this picture so absorbing—and which make it seem far less sensational and exploitative than it might—is its relentless attention to the moral dimension of its principal characters and their acts...

...She has a certain stubborn intelBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...Not even John Hurt, I submit, could make the average moviegoer in 1989 care much for such a person...

...one has the impression that Thomas and Caton-Jones have made it their goal to take a certain set of widely familiar and (on first glance) ethically unambiguous facts and to explore the complicated—and even paradoxical—human truths behind them...

...Profumo, for example—a potential prime minister whose political career is utterly destroyed by the scandal—proves to be sensitive and gentlemanly, a far less randy and more honorable sort than most of the other M.P.'s whom we see up close in this film...

...But a sadistic cat-swinger...

...Conceivably, I suppose...

...Try THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...

...The atmosphere is pure frat party...

...Yes, Miss Rice-Davies may be lying about Ward and the cat—but then that makes her something other than the harmless doxy the film would have us believe in...

...his companion is the very beautiful Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), whom he has plucked out of a burlesque show and whom he—being something of a cross between Henry Higgins and a pimp—has moved into his London townhouse, given a new hair color, and trolled past some very big movers and shakers indeed...

...Rather than wasting your group's money, and your members' time, with the inanities of today's regular speakers, hire the extraordinary: The American Spectator Speaker's Bureau...

...Box 10448 Arlington, Virginia 22210 or call: (703) 243-3733 Not Just Another Bunch of Pretty Faces 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989...

...Nor, despite certain rumors, can he be linked to any particular men...

...But Thomas and Caton-Jones aren't satisfied with that...

...Highly dubious though some of their elisions, emphases, and implicit moral verdicts may be, the creators of this film are nonetheless to be congratulated for the seriousness of their approach—and for the thoroughly engrossing film that has resulted...

...BORED BY THE SAME OLD RUN-OF-THE-MILL BLATHER...

...The speaker is the very clever Dr...

...Next meeting, for a refreshing change of pace, try The American Spectator Speaker's Bureau...

...Fine...

...THE TALKIES MORE DANGEROUS LIAISONS by Bruce Bawer N ear the beginning of Scandal, the riveting new British film about the Profumo affair of a quarter-century ago, a man and woman stroll the grounds of Cliveden, Lord Astor's sumptuous estate...

...Bit by bit, and less (it would appear) out of vengefulness or even greed than out of an irresistible compulsion to confess, Christine brings the whole lot of them down: Profumo, Stephen, Astor, all...

...One feels encouraged, for instance, to take seriously Stephen's image of himself as a crusader against class barriers, to admire THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 37 him for his efforts in this regard, and to see his downfall as a tragic consequence of his brave challenge to the system...

...All four of these principal roles—Christine, Mandy, Stephen, Profumo—are intelligently and vividly acted...

...One has only to glance at certain documents in the history of the Profumo case to realize how much has been omitted, sanitized, distorted in this film...

...It seems a bit much...

...She's certainly not as enthralled by Profumo's position and wealth as many girls would be...

...All this is drastically telescoped in the film (which, we are told, was originally to have been a four-part television miniseries...

...He needs me," she explains to Profumo...

...SPEAKER'S BUREAU . . .for a change D o the sleep-inducing sonorities of today's lecture circuit habitues have your organizations nodding off into their desserts...

...When I protested, he merely sniggered and tossed the poor creature into the corner of the room...

...Partly because Christine is not your ordinary tart...

...though she's a good-time girl of the first water, it's important to her that, technically speaking, she's not a prostitute, having never taken cash in explicit exchange for sexual favors...

...Clearly, these are a couple of lucky bimbos...

...And Stephen, for his part, is both morally and sexually ambiguous: carousing with his parliamentary buddies, he rhapsodizes about the delights of promiscuous sex, but never makes a move on Christine—for whom he truly cares and wishes well—and isn't known to be consorting with any other girls...

...In her memoir My Life and Lovers, for instance, Mandy Rice-Davies tells of walking in on Stephen Ward "to find him, for no apparent reason, swinging Christine Keeler's cat round by the tail and laughing as he did so...

...For the first hour or so, the film's musical score consists largely of Verdi arias and Sinatra and Nat King Cole ballads...

...Forget it...

...the picture is worth seeing a second time simply to appreciate the remarkable way in which these paradoxical characters are captured, made believable, and even rendered sympathetic by the leading actors...

...It's a world you're born to," says the man—referring, of course, to the British upper-class world to which he has won provisional access, and into which he wants to give her a leg up...

...With the exception of Mandy—the classic blond airhead who, when she appears on the steps of a courthouse after testifying, waves and blows kisses to the crowd like a starlet at a movie premiere—they're all fascinatingly complex...

...There's no Caligula in this crowd: in one scene, Stephen throws an intimate "sex party" at which respectable-looking men in Savile Row suits carry on like horny pubescent boys, rolling their eyes at cheap chorines, grabbing at their naughty bits, and giggling over a threefoot-high phallus that serves as the centerpiece of an otherwise elegantly appointed dinner table...

...Stephen Ward (John Hurt), a vicar's son, high-society osteopath, and "connoisseur of sin" who considers it his vocation to "liberate" working-class beauties into the bedrooms of England's movers and shakers...

...then, when the scandal erupts, the score switches suddenly to the Beatles (including, appropriately, "Do You Want to Know a Secret...

...A puckish but good-hearted sensualist...

...ligence (remember, we're talking about movie characters here, not the actual people upon whom they're based), a perverse pride...

...they would appear to want us to read their film—on one level, anyway—as an object lesson in the evils and hypocrisies of the English class system...

...To be sure, in order to cover the scandal and its aftermath effectively, the film would have had to be at least twice as long as it is, or would have had to give shorter shrift to the material that it has concentrated on—the psychology of the principals, the ways they meet and get to know each other, the feel of their relationships...

...Anyone who wants to enter this world has to be very clever or very beautiful...

...in fact, when he offers to set her up as his mistress in a flat of her own—an achievement that, for most girls in her position, would represent a consummate victory—she refuses to bite, preferring to stay with Stephen, the one man whom she truly loves (and one of the few with whom she's never slept...

...Such concerns notwithstanding, however, Scandal is on the whole an admirable piece of filmmaking—a shrewd and full-blooded treatment of the sort of fact-based story that has inspired many an inane, one-dimensional movie in recent years...

...More broadly, the film seems to imply that the Profumo affair—by demonstrating the moral bankruptcy of the ruling classes—played a major role in the fall of the old England of traditional values, of prosperity and world power, and of government by old-boy Oxbridgeans, and the rise of the anomie, morally jaded, increasingly multi-ethnic Britain of the late sixties and beyond...