On Screen

MORRONE, JOHN

On Screen BRITISH MORES BY JOHN MORRONE Aprovocative thought suggested itself as I watched Scandal, Michael Caton-Jones' film about Britain's 1963 Profumo fuss. Wouldn't it be...

...No matter what was believed in court, his infatuation (which the script assumes remained platonic to the end) was less that of a ponce for his tart than of an obsessive artist for his largely indifferent model...
...Sex was fun, power was more fun, and living on the edge of this aphrodisiac combination made him greedy...
...Even if you do not care very much about a European political brouhaha of three decades past, the film offers something timeless in the pathetic grandeur of Hurt's rich, sour performance...
...And he lives up to the shape and inventiveness of a comedy whose mostflagrantjokeisapunembeddedin its very title...
...Scandal ends with Ward's suicide note, read in voice-over— "I'm sorry to disappoint the vultures...
...Ward enjoyed his roles as host and facilitator as much as he savored observing the upper class at work and play...
...But the pace is slow to the pointof being debilitating...
...Thematically, this is awfully familiar terrain...
...is followed by another even more dire: A boil is growing on his neck, and rather than dissipate, it is quite literally coming to a head...
...Thomas' script, whilebigonKeeler's sex appeal, is frustratingly vague on exactly how the political mess erupted and how it captured the public's imagination...
...Stacey, his white girlfriend...
...Which head will win...
...Leave Christine to me," he says when he is confronted by the Profumo connection...
...When he sheltered Keeler in his Wimpole Mews flat from the loud, jealous rage of her latest West Indian lover (played by Roland Gift of the rock group Fine Young Cannibals), he failed to notice that Christine was under observation by the press and the police, and that he, too, would be involved...
...Ward developed his impressive network of social ties by dint of his prodigious charm and judicious cozying-up...
...As the company man he is a camp villain, as florid as Captain Hook...
...Grant plays Bagley, a rail-thin, livewire account executive who is positively ad-dicted to his work—until the day arrives when the angle he needs to promote an acne cream eludes him, and he resolves never again to manipulate the vulnerable egos of helpless teenageconsumers...
...Returning home from his final tour of duty as a soldier in the Falklands, Ruben sees his neighborhood turned into a battleground of antipolice hatred, fueled by the routine abuse local detectives inflict upon the community...
...Though Keeler risked little —her name, albeit glamorous, was already mud—Ward risked his way of life...
...Written by the director and Trix Worrel, the film's strongest suit is its uncommonly well-conceived ensemble of supporting roles—Fish, Ruben's disabled Army mate...
...Then, just as a reporter from the Sunday Pictorial connects the dots between Profumo, Keeler and a Russian attaché named Ivanov to come up with a bedroom spy triangle, Scandal backs away...
...Not born to wealth but aspiring to it, he recognized the interlocking manipulations and rapacious behavior of London's power élite, and worked it for his own pleasure...
...As Keeler, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, who bears an odd resemblance to Natalie Wood, is expert at portraying both temptress and victim, but her range cannot be fully put to use because the film does not belong to her...
...the pimping he was accused of was at best indirect...
...Ruben is forced to choose, metaphorically, between "queen"—the false view of law and order to be maintained by white Brits—and "country"—the sometimes sordid yet immediate realities of living in a slum where people of every color are one's neighbors and, all too often, one's alibi...
...Punks, the chronically unemployed, even ordinary looking adolescents are primed for violence because of the undue pressure exerted by "the old Bill" on nonwhites suspected of a variety of crimes...
...A third English entry now making the rounds, Bruce Robinson's How to Get A head in A dvertising, was the highlight of the recent New Directors / New Films Festival...
...I dreamt Christine up...
...Colin, the sleek blond buddy who has made a fortune in drug deals with Arabs...
...He claims a longing to "liberate" her "untutored" beauty, and he begins to sketch her...
...It is now widely believed that Ward was scapegoated by the failing Conservative government to protect then Minister of War John Profumo from the uproar over his affair with Keeler and the possible breach of British military security it posed...
...His enervated, bitterly crybaby tone recalls another victim of Britain's sex wars between the classes: Ruth Ellis of Dance With a Stranger, a prostitute who shot her erstwhile posh lover and was the last woman to be hanged in Britain...
...Writer-director Robinson and star Richard E. Grant romp through this film—recalling their similar performance in its 1986 predecessor, Withnail and I—as if they were David Lean and Noel Coward on amphetamines...
...I can make her vanish...
...Ivanov, entrusted to Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbe, is virtually a bit part...
...They tell the story of an ad-man's comic collapse, and with Grant running amok physically and verbally, this movie is all talk and all action...
...A talkative little head, in fact, with evil, pus-ridden eyes, red gash mouth, and a habit for talking in promotional jargon that reflects the most dastardly capitalist ideals...
...Wouldn't it be interesting to match up Stephen Ward, the osteopath whose ambiguous relationship to sexual adventuress Christine Keeler resulted in his trial for procuring women, with Valmont, the aristocratic intriguer of Dangerous Liaisons...
...What chains these ghosts could rattle...
...Ward gets his first glimpse of Keeler in a Soho dive, where she is performing a dance surrounded by sparklers—an unreal, idealized image...
...Grant plays both head and boil (though not simultaneously—one has to see the film to observe how this works) with more than a bit of Michael Keaton's brand of ferocious quick-change lunacy...
...Imagine eavesdropping on their sexual gossip, their revelations of class privileges, and their feelings about being undone by public and private passions that ran wildly beyond their control...
...In these circumstances any expectation of protection under the law is at least naive, and director Martin Stellman hardly lets pass an opportunity to place Ruben in a threatening situation...
...The bom-again Bagley, who has learned to eschew materialism, or the boil, such a little chatterbox that Bagley plugs its mouth with giue (in perhaps the film's funniest and most disgusting scene) when he can't work its outbursts into his conversations...
...And the political lesson it aims to teach us—that the underdog usually loses—is of course painfully unsubtle...
...Profumo, played by IanMcKellen, is reduced to a supporting role...
...as the dropout from corporate life he is like Peter Pan in a state of perpetual anxiety...
...Although Scandal is absorbing, it seems to be so for reasons other than those intended by Caton-Jones or screenwriter Michael Thomas...
...In her goodbye note before she greeted the gallows, she too apologized—"Please forgive my writing, but the pen is shocking...
...There a young Kukuyu boy is torn between allegiance to his white protectors or to his Mau Mau compatriots...
...Another British export, For Queen and Country, an urban melodrama set in the housing estates of Southeast London, not only moves its characters toward defeat, it starts them off that way...
...In ably juggling urbanity, lust, politesse, and exploitation, Scandal gives John Hurt his most atypical yet most compelling role to date...
...A society given to impromptu after-dinner orgies was not, most of the time, a bad place to be...
...As Ruben, a congenial and intelligent working-class black, American actor Denzel Washington brings more quiet strength than he can actually use in a role designed to show how the best of blokes are targeted for cultural disenfranchisement by racism and an untrustworthy police...
...Played by John Hurt, Ward has a gravel-voiced sophistication—he is confident, randy, every bit a self-amused libertine...
...Valmont, the cynical satyr astonished to be tasting love at last, was run through in a duel over honor...
...The film meticulously reviews the ascent of Keeler and her protégé Mandy Rice-Davies from Soho nightclub dancers to good time girls with entrée into the upper crust, and it tracks Keeler's progress as human party favor to assorted peers of the realm and West Indian hipsters...
...We know, of course, he could not...
...In its schematic way, For Queen and Country is virtually identical to The Kitchen Toto, Harry Hook's superior 1987 film set in mid'50s Kenya...
...He only dimly accepted the precariousness of his state of social grace and how dependent his career was on the satisfaction of his customers—who were, on paper at least, his "betters...
...The personal crisis of Stephen Ward is the real scandal in Scandal...
...Pocketing social brownie points, not cash, from the men he introduced to Christine, he was simply "doing a friend a favor" (if the friend was in ahigh place) at a time in England when, it is worth recalling, even to obtain a bootleg copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover for a colleague was a yeoman act...
...Ward committed suicide to avoid imprisonment and the social annihilation he would suffer for life...
...It exploits that undying breed of English eccentric with a taste for soapbox pontification in language that is no less fruity than rhetorical, yet with a visual elegance quite unlike the often staid proscenium compositions still creeping into British cinema from conventions of theater and television...
...To make matters worse, although it requires little effort to sympathize with Ruben and his friends, the script saddles them with so many economic limitations and so much evironmental squalor that For Queen and Country is turned into an exercise in futile measures...
...His was the White Mischief crowd, home from the colonies and horny as hell...
...One discovery ("I have found that brains are being laundered daily, and it shall be no more...
...How to Get Ahead in Advertising leaves most other farces chasing their tails...
...In many ways it is the perfect kind of British comedy for the '80s...
...That the problems of contemporary London are less remote than those of colonial Kenya does not give Stellman's effort any edge, and it is not simply that Africa is prettier...
...Ward's position of relative comfort also blinded him to the dangerous fallout from indiscretions by Christinethat could be traced back to him...
...If Ward and Valmont wouldn't mind, she could join them at their table...
...Likewise, the screen time for Mandy Rice-Davies is as scanty as her underwear, even though Bridget Fonda is billed fourth...

Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 8


 
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