The Talkies/The Baron of Brighton
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES THE BARON OF BRIGHTON F or decades—indeed, since long before many of us were born—it has been a commonplace that Laurence Olivier was the greatest actor of our time. So much of a...
...1=1 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 'SEPTEMBER 1989 THE TALKIES THE BARON OF BRIGHTON F or decades—indeed, since long before many of us were born—it has been a commonplace that Laurence Olivier was the greatest actor of our time...
...Olivier turns in one of his richest comic performances as a cold, choleric middle-European aristocrat, the Regent of Carpathia, who, in London for the coronation of King George V, finds himself involved with a giddy, sentimental American dancer named Elsie Marina (Marilyn Monroe...
...And of course the very idea of Olivier in Harold Robbins's The Betsy (1977), or as Neil Diamond's father in a remake of The Jazz Singer (1981), was enough to induce nausea...
...And Olivier impersonated a second national icon in his last major wartime movie, Henry V (1944...
...Written and directed by Peter Glenville, the film is a gripping, intensely disturbing morality tale, and Olivier's portrayal of the teacher—a virtuous man trapped in moral circumstances wherein his worst enemy is his own virtue, and the only means of his ultimate salvation a lie—is deeply credible and affecting...
...He served as little more than high-class adornment, for instance, in such high-gloss spectacles as The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968)and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and was hardly challenged by his part as a murderous mystery novelist in the lightweight thriller Sleuth (1972...
...Even his deathbed scene in Brideshead—the character feeble, gasping, nearly immobile—has fire...
...To be sure, much of that contribution is forever lost to us: Olivier, who shook off this mortal coil on July 11 at the age of eighty-two, was perhaps most celebrated of all for theatrical performances which few of us were privileged to witness...
...Though he appeared in a number of films in Britain in the early thirties by Bruce Bawer among them Fire Over England (1936) and 7iventy-One Days (1939), in both of which he acted opposite his wife-tobe, Vivien Leigh—Olivier first came to international prominence in a trio of classic American films based on romantic English novels...
...Rattigan based the script on his stage play The Sleeping Princess, in which Olivier had recently appeared with Vivien Leigh...
...the two leads play splendidly off each other's wit, and the combination of mutual animosity and attraction between them feels wonderfully real...
...And it was another natural step from that film—which won the Academy Award for best picture—to the same year's Pride and Prejudice (scripted by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin), in which Olivier played the proud Mr...
...and idiosyncratic titled folk of Evelyn Waugh, Terence Rattigan, and James Costigan...
...Darcy to Greer Garson's prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet...
...And it was a joy to watch him in the television miniseries Brideshead Revisited (1981)—though one suspected that Waugh's suave, cosmopolitan Lord Marchmain was hardly a stretch for Lord Olivier...
...If Olivier THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 31 can be faulted for occasional overacting in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, his performance here is essentially flawless...
...He served as little more than high-class adornment, for instance, in such high-gloss spectacles as The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968)and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and was hardly challenged by his part as a murderous mystery novelist in the lightweight thriller Sleuth (1972...
...But, over a period of six decades, he also compiled a sizable body of work on film—sixty-odd movies in all, some of which he did just for the money (and it shows), but many of which are masterpieces, and most of which (thanks to the videotape revolution) we can see again and again...
...His ability to portray a pitiful loser is far more movingly displayed in Term of Trial (1962), in which he appears as a sensitive and literate secondary-school teacher in a gray, working-class English town, one of whose students (Sarah Miles) has falsely accused him of sexual molestation...
...Vivien Leigh played Nelson's mistress, Lady Hamilton...
...So much of a commonplace has it been, alas, that many of us may well have taken his genius—and his contribution to his art—for granted...
...So much of a commonplace has it been, alas, that many of us may well have taken his genius—and his contribution to his art—for granted...
...And it was another natural step from that film—which won the Academy Award for best picture—to the same year's Pride and Prejudice (scripted by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin), in which Olivier played the proud Mr...
...Carrie (1952)—directed by William Wyler from a mediocre script by Ruth and Augustus Goetz—turned Dreiser's biting naturalistic novel Sister Carrie into a routinely bland Hollywood tear-jerker with top production values and a modestly talented star (Jennifer Jones) in the title role...
...His most splendidly realized movie characters tend to inhabit the extremes of life: he seemed born to play both the most virtuous and the most sinister of characters, the most glorious of national heroes and the most forlorn and shabby of losers...
...Brilliant as he was in his adaptations of Hamlet, Richard III, and other Shakespearean plays, he was equally adept at enacting everything from the brooding romantic heroes of Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and Daphne du Maurier to the whimsical Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...The carnal wife of this cerebral pedagogue is played by Simone Signoret...
...Carrie (1952)—directed by William Wyler from a mediocre script by Ruth and Augustus Goetz—turned Dreiser's biting naturalistic novel Sister Carrie into a routinely bland Hollywood tear-jerker with top production values and a modestly talented star (Jennifer Jones) in the title role...
...This tears-of-a-clown piece about a downat-the-heels vaudeville comic, Archie Rice, has always struck me as dull, facile, and stagy, the protagonist's seedy pathos as ultimately pointless...
...His performance, two years later, as a Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter in the rather shabby Boys from Brazil was considerably less impressive...
...One can hardly believe he was over forty at the time...
...T he inferior roles, needless to say, 1 were a waste of his time and ours...
...The screenplay was written by the playwright Robert Sherwood...
...Yet none of this force, this fire, seemed in-genuine: indeed, in his intensity Olivier generally appeared, if anything, realer than the more subdued performers around him, more vital, more acquainted with passion, with evil, with the night...
...T hese films were followed by the 1 less worthy That Hamilton Woman (1941), an engaging (if thoroughly routine) World War II-era excursion into historical drama, courtesy of the British producer-director Alexander Korda...
...Vivien Leigh played Nelson's mistress, Lady Hamilton...
...filmed in black and white, on an austere, expressionistic, almost Bergman-like set consisting mostly of mist-enshrouded stone, Olivier's version of the "story of a man who could not make up his mind" (as he identifies it in a prefatory Wellesian voice-over) features a highly fluid camera and voice-over soliloquies, omits several characters and speeches, and seems designed to make the Bard coherent and captivating to the average moviegoer...
...one was conscious of it, rather, in the way that one is conscious of a writer like Joyce or Nabokov even as one is thoroughly absorbed in his fiction...
...But given a halfway decent part, Olivier was almost invariably mesmerizing...
...even a gloomy character like Heathcliff, in his most controlled, inward moments, exudes an unsettling forcefulness...
...And it was a joy to watch him in the television miniseries Brideshead Revisited (1981)—though one suspected that Waugh's suave, cosmopolitan Lord Marchmain was hardly a stretch for Lord Olivier...
...while George Roy Hill's A Little Romance (1978) was quite charming, moreover, one grew rather uneasy at the sight of Olivier (in the insubstantial role of a petty con man, Julius Edmond Santorin) providing support to a couple of less-than-brilliant child actors...
...Olivier turns in one of his richest comic performances as a cold, choleric middle-European aristocrat, the Regent of Carpathia, who, in London for the coronation of King George V, finds himself involved with a giddy, sentimental American dancer named Elsie Marina (Marilyn Monroe...
...To be sure, much of that contribution is forever lost to us: Olivier, who shook off this mortal coil on July 11 at the age of eighty-two, was perhaps most celebrated of all for theatrical performances which few of us were privileged to witness...
...But he was made good use of—and was very funny—as an Edwardian barrister in James Costigan's Rattigan-like television drama "Love Among the Ruins" (1974), and managed to make a three-dimensional character out of William Goldman's ruthless Nazi dentist, Christian Szell, in John Schlesinger's Marathon Man (1976...
...Many of his movie assignments of recent years, indeed, required Olivier to be little more than old, colorful, and cantankerous (one thinks, for instance, of the television movies "A Voyage Round My Father" and "The Ebony Tower...
...One can hardly believe he was over forty at the time...
...It's a virtually perfect adaptation, rich and charming and funny—the best possible answer to anyone who claims that a great novel cannot be made into a first-rate movie...
...And of course the very idea of Olivier in Harold Robbins's The Betsy (1977), or as Neil Diamond's father in a remake of The Jazz Singer (1981), was enough to induce nausea...
...fussy, stately, stylized, and almost too richly hued, it hovers awfully close (in tone and aspect) to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's luxuriant, borderline-campy The Red Shoes (1948) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), but is saved by its intelligence, its patent earnestness of intent, and by its director's manifest reverence for the text at hand...
...I s The Entertainer still considered as 1 wonderful as it was in 1960...
...The earliest of Olivier's Shakespearean adaptations and his first directorial effort, the film is a tour de force almost in spite of itself...
...In his last two decades, Olivier seemed to show up more frequently than ever in films, though the vehicles themselves were often mediocre and the parts mere cameos...
...And Olivier impersonated a second national icon in his last major wartime movie, Henry V (1944...
...His most splendidly realized movie characters tend to inhabit the extremes of life: he seemed born to play both the most virtuous and the most sinister of characters, the most glorious of national heroes and the most forlorn and shabby of losers...
...The film, indeed, set a standard by which Shakespearean adaptationshave been judged ever since...
...and Olivier's vigorous, athletic Hamlet—a Dane as full of life as he is haunted by death—is well-nigh unforgettable...
...T hese films were followed by the 1 less worthy That Hamilton Woman (1941), an engaging (if thoroughly routine) World War II-era excursion into historical drama, courtesy of the British producer-director Alexander Korda...
...Even his deathbed scene in Brideshead—the character feeble, gasping, nearly immobile—has fire...
...From first-rate renderings of Shakespeare, Olivier proceeded (unwisely, perhaps) to a third-rate adaptation of Theodore Dreiser...
...It was a natural step from Heathcliff to the equally glamorous and enigmatic Maxim de Winter in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), based on Daphne du Maurier's best-selling Bronte-ish novel about an ingenuous young bride (Joan Fontaine), her terse, secretive consort, and his vast, gloomy manse...
...He is equally commanding in the lighter but far more successful The Prince and the Showgirl (1958), which he directed from a very funny, charming, and wittily constructed screenplay by Terence Rattigan, then the reigning master of well-made middlebrow English drama...
...One was, to be sure, often aware of Olivier's acting—yet it was not in the way one is aware of some Strasbergian's plodding Methodism...
...this would-be morale-booster cast Olivier as yet another romantic hero, the difference being that the romantic hero in this instance was the national icon Lord Nelson...
...The earliest of Olivier's Shakespearean adaptations and his first directorial effort, the film is a tour de force almost in spite of itself...
...Somehow, with Olivier, the illusion of reality coexisted happily with one's delighted awareness of the maestro's artistry...
...His pairing with Garson is particularly fortuitous...
...Though he appeared in a number of films in Britain in the early thirties by Bruce Bawer among them Fire Over England (1936) and 7iventy-One Days (1939), in both of which he acted opposite his wife-tobe, Vivien Leigh—Olivier first came to international prominence in a trio of classic American films based on romantic English novels...
...and Olivier's vigorous, athletic Hamlet—a Dane as full of life as he is haunted by death—is well-nigh unforgettable...
...one thinks, for instance, of the bold-yet-melancholy Roman general Crassus in Spartacus, and of the savage-yet-gentle stableboy Heath-cliff in Wuthering Heights...
...But given a halfway decent part, Olivier was almost invariably mesmerizing...
...Olivier's spirited performance seems wasted on the one-note script (which was based on the acclaimed play by Angry Young Man John Osborne...
...Its patriotic pageantry gave way to the more Spartan Hamlet (1948), which won the Academy Award for best picture (and for Olivier as best actor...
...The film, indeed, set a standard by which Shakespearean adaptationshave been judged ever since...
...Spartacus (1960), meanwhile, offers a somewhat, different patricianand-peasant contraposition: in this provocative epic about the slave revolt of 73 B.C., based on Howard Fast's sentimental-Marxist novel and directed by Stanley Kubrick from a most skillful script by Dalton Trumbo, Olivier brings not only great authority but an exceptional poignancy to the character of Crassus, the urbane, corrupt Roman general and dictator whom the film consistently contrasts with Kirk Douglas's true-blue, unrefined slave general...
...Written and directed by Peter Glenville, the film is a gripping, intensely disturbing morality tale, and Olivier's portrayal of the teacher—a virtuous man trapped in moral circumstances wherein his worst enemy is his own virtue, and the only means of his ultimate salvation a lie—is deeply credible and affecting...
...But, over a period of six decades, he also compiled a sizable body of work on film—sixty-odd movies in all, some of which he did just for the money (and it shows), but many of which are masterpieces, and most of which (thanks to the videotape revolution) we can see again and again...
...Yet none of this force, this fire, seemed in-genuine: indeed, in his intensity Olivier generally appeared, if anything, realer than the more subdued performers around him, more vital, more acquainted with passion, with evil, with the night...
...His pairing with Garson is particularly fortuitous...
...one thinks, for instance, of the bold-yet-melancholy Roman general Crassus in Spartacus, and of the savage-yet-gentle stableboy Heath-cliff in Wuthering Heights...
...Take him for all in all, we shall not see his like again...
...Darcy to Greer Garson's prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet...
...and idiosyncratic titled folk of Evelyn Waugh, Terence Rattigan, and James Costigan...
...even a gloomy character like Heathcliff, in his most controlled, inward moments, exudes an unsettling forcefulness...
...As Hurstwood, the affluent Chicago restaurateur whose fortunes plummet as his beloved Carrie prospers, Olivier all but wipes everyone else off the screen...
...To peruse Olivier's filmography is to be reminded at once of his humor, his energy, and his remarkable range as a movie actor...
...So much of a commonplace has it been, alas, that many of us may well have taken his genius—and his contribution to his art—for granted...
...His ability to portray a pitiful loser is far more movingly displayed in Term of Trial (1962), in which he appears as a sensitive and literate secondary-school teacher in a gray, working-class English town, one of whose students (Sarah Miles) has falsely accused him of sexual molestation...
...In Wuthering Heights (1939)—directed by William Wyler from a script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur—he played Heath-cliff to Merle Oberon's Catherine, bringing to the part a vigor that bordered on the flamboyant...
...To be sure, much of that contribution is fore...
...But he was made good use of—and was very funny—as an Edwardian barrister in James Costigan's Rattigan-like television drama "Love Among the Ruins" (1974), and managed to make a three-dimensional character out of William Goldman's ruthless Nazi dentist, Christian Szell, in John Schlesinger's Marathon Man (1976...
...Its patriotic pageantry gave way to the more Spartan Hamlet (1948), which won the Academy Award for best picture (and for Olivier as best actor...
...The carnal wife of this cerebral pedagogue is played by Simone Signoret...
...As Hurstwood, the affluent Chicago restaurateur whose fortunes plummet as his beloved Carrie prospers, Olivier all but wipes everyone else off the screen...
...Olivier's spirited performance seems wasted on the one-note script (which was based on the acclaimed play by Angry Young Man John Osborne...
...His performance, two years later, as a Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter in the rather shabby Boys from Brazil was considerably less impressive...
...filmed in black and white, on an austere, expressionistic, almost Bergman-like set consisting mostly of mist-enshrouded stone, Olivier's version of the "story of a man who could not make up his mind" (as he identifies it in a prefatory Wellesian voice-over) features a highly fluid camera and voice-over soliloquies, omits several characters and speeches, and seems designed to make the Bard coherent and captivating to the average moviegoer...
...From first-rate renderings of Shakespeare, Olivier proceeded (unwisely, perhaps) to a third-rate adaptation of Theodore Dreiser...
...He was especially gifted, too, at capturing protagonists with an enigma, a contradiction, at their hearts...
...one was conscious of it, rather, in the way that one is conscious of a writer like Joyce or Nabokov even as one is thoroughly absorbed in his fiction...
...One was, to be sure, often aware of Olivier's acting—yet it was not in the way one is aware of some Strasbergian's plodding Methodism...
...The wondrous thing is that the film actually does so without seriously compromising the play...
...He was especially gifted, too, at capturing protagonists with an enigma, a contradiction, at their hearts...
...The wondrous thing is that the film actually does so without seriously compromising the play...
...It's a virtually perfect adaptation, rich and charming and funny—the best possible answer to anyone who claims that a great novel cannot be made into a first-rate movie...
...T he inferior roles, needless to say, 1 were a waste of his time and ours...
...I s The Entertainer still considered as 1 wonderful as it was in 1960...
...This tears-of-a-clown piece about a downat-the-heels vaudeville comic, Archie Rice, has always struck me as dull, facile, and stagy, the protagonist's seedy pathos as ultimately pointless...
...To peruse Olivier's filmography is to be reminded at once of his humor, his energy, and his remarkable range as a movie actor...
...In his last two decades, Olivier seemed to show up more frequently than ever in films, though the vehicles themselves were often mediocre and the parts mere cameos...
...The screenplay was written by the playwright Robert Sherwood...
...Brilliant as he was in his adaptations of Hamlet, Richard III, and other Shakespearean plays, he was equally adept at enacting everything from the brooding romantic heroes of Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and Daphne du Maurier to the whimsical Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...the two leads play splendidly off each other's wit, and the combination of mutual animosity and attraction between them feels wonderfully real...
...In Wuthering Heights (1939)—directed by William Wyler from a script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur—he played Heath-cliff to Merle Oberon's Catherine, bringing to the part a vigor that bordered on the flamboyant...
...while George Roy Hill's A Little Romance (1978) was quite charming, moreover, one grew rather uneasy at the sight of Olivier (in the insubstantial role of a petty con man, Julius Edmond Santorin) providing support to a couple of less-than-brilliant child actors...
...Many of his movie assignments of recent years, indeed, required Olivier to be little more than old, colorful, and cantankerous (one thinks, for instance, of the television movies "A Voyage Round My Father" and "The Ebony Tower...
...fussy, stately, stylized, and almost too richly hued, it hovers awfully close (in tone and aspect) to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's luxuriant, borderline-campy The Red Shoes (1948) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), but is saved by its intelligence, its patent earnestness of intent, and by its director's manifest reverence for the text at hand...
...He is equally commanding in the lighter but far more successful The Prince and the Showgirl (1958), which he directed from a very funny, charming, and wittily constructed screenplay by Terence Rattigan, then the reigning master of well-made middlebrow English drama...
...If Olivier THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 31 can be faulted for occasional overacting in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, his performance here is essentially flawless...
...Spartacus (1960), meanwhile, offers a somewhat, different patricianand-peasant contraposition: in this provocative epic about the slave revolt of 73 B.C., based on Howard Fast's sentimental-Marxist novel and directed by Stanley Kubrick from a most skillful script by Dalton Trumbo, Olivier brings not only great authority but an exceptional poignancy to the character of Crassus, the urbane, corrupt Roman general and dictator whom the film consistently contrasts with Kirk Douglas's true-blue, unrefined slave general...
...Take him for all in all, we shall not see his like again...
...Somehow, with Olivier, the illusion of reality coexisted happily with one's delighted awareness of the maestro's artistry...
...Rattigan based the script on his stage play The Sleeping Princess, in which Olivier had recently appeared with Vivien Leigh...
...It was a natural step from Heathcliff to the equally glamorous and enigmatic Maxim de Winter in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), based on Daphne du Maurier's best-selling Bronte-ish novel about an ingenuous young bride (Joan Fontaine), her terse, secretive consort, and his vast, gloomy manse...
...this would-be morale-booster cast Olivier as yet another romantic hero, the difference being that the romantic hero in this instance was the national icon Lord Nelson...
...he offers us a genuine tragic character in the midst of much unconvincing pathos...
...1=1 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 'SEPTEMBER 1989 THE TALKIES THE BARON OF BRIGHTON F or decades—indeed, since long before many of us were born—it has been a commonplace that Laurence Olivier was the greatest actor of our time...
...he offers us a genuine tragic character in the midst of much unconvincing pathos...
Vol. 22 • September 1989 • No. 9
