QUAINT MISBEHAVING
It’s nearly a thing of beauty, but the true story of how Women’s Libbers hijacked Miss World in 1970 can’t work out if it’s comedy or social history
AFEW years ago I wrote a book about growing up in front of the telly in the Seventies, and devoted a chapter to my unmissable annual date with Miss World.
Even relatively enlightened families, which I like to think ours was, loved to sit down and extol Miss Denmark’s legs, while rubbishing Miss Paraguay’s nose. Or whatever.
My mother was just as hooked as my dad and I were. She worked full time and was strongly in favour of equal rights for women, but if it ever occurred to her that beauty contests were degrading, she certainly never said so.
In fact, she had a much keener eye for the slightest physical flaws than we did. For some reason, a condition known medically as genu valgum was her speciality.
‘Just wait until you see Miss Argentina in the swimwear round,’ she used to say. ‘She’s terribly knock-kneed.’
But that was then. As we all know, the past is a foreign country, all the better to poke fun at.
Misbehaviour examines the 1970 Miss World contest largely through the eyes of the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement, and by extension, if we see #MeToo as part of the same lineage, through the prism of 21st-century sensibilities.
Nonetheless, it’s a true story. A bunch of early ‘Women’s Libbers’, as they were none too affectionately known, infiltrated the audience at the Royal Albert Hall and, to the consternation of BBC producers who were beaming the pictures live to a global audience of 100 million — more than the number who watched that year’s World Cup Final — chucked flour bombs at the bemused host, Bob Hope, played by Greg Kinnear as an unreconstructed sleazebag.
Of course he considers the feelings of women, he
quips. He considers feeling women all the time. The story contains an impressive set of -isms. Sexism, feminism, paternalism and racism, just for starters. But that also poses problems for director Philippa Lowthorpe and writers Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe, which they don’t entirely resolve. Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley play the principal agitators, Sally Alexander and Jo Robinson. Sally is an academic (who in real life, by the time of the events fictionalised here, had been briefly married to the actor John Thaw)
Jo is a flat-vowelled northern English firebrand, which brings class, too, into the unwieldy mix — at first she regards Sally with the utmost suspicion.
While they are plotting to disrupt the Miss World contest they loathe so much, the same event provides an exciting springboard for 22-year-old Jennifer Hosten (Gugu MbathaRaw), who is competing as Miss Grenada. For her, Miss World has yielded opportunities that, as a black woman growing up on a poor Caribbean island, she would never otherwise have had.
The film tries a little halfheartedly to tackle this irony, this inconvenient clash of -isms — notably by contriving an unconvincing encounter between Sally and Jennifer.
One of the film’s own advertising posters illustrates a further problem. A photograph of the cast — which also includes Rhys Ifans and Keeley Hawes as the Miss World organisers Eric and Julia Morley, and Lesley Manville as Bob Hope’s long-suffering wife Dolores — shows some of them mugging goofily to camera, and others looking portentously solemn.
This uncertainty of tone taints the film, too. Is Misbehaviour a comedy? Nobody seems entirely sure. I recall even at the time thinking Eric Morley pretty creepy, and his raven-haired wife creepier still, but he is presented here not as the shrewd businessman he undoubtedly was but as an extended joke.
‘Yugoslavia, what are you doing here? Brazil, eyes on me please,’ he thunders during rehearsals. ‘Japan, stop pushing! Come on, Mexico!’
Clearly, he’s meant to embody the dehumanising, cattle-market element of beauty pageants. Fair enough. But Ifans plays him for laughs.
All this is perfectly watchable, fun even, with unmistakeable echoes of the 2010 film Made In Dagenham, which told the story of women workers at the Ford car factory going on strike over pay and conditions in 1968.
Moreover, for those of us whose memories stretch back half a century, the period detail is obligingly slapped on with a trowel. No TV in a British film set circa 1970 is ever without its horizontal-hold issues, and so it is here.
But I am as conflicted about Misbehaviour as it seems to be about itself. And let me also question the casting of Keira Knightley, a limited actress whose great success, in my view, owes far more to her looks than her talent.
Unhelpfully, that’s precisely the opposite of the message this film wants to convey.
MIXED messages abound, too, in The Hunt. A dozen random people all over the US have been drugged and wake up, gagged, in what they think is deepest Arkansas.
Soon, they realise they are being hunted down and murdered as a form of sport.
Their pursuers are educated liberals who perceive them as boorish social inferiors, not even entitled to exist on account of being racist, sexist, homophobic, opposed to gun control or all of the above.
The hunters call their quarry ‘deplorables’ — the very word used by Hillary Clinton to describe Donald Trump’s supporters during the 2016 presidential election campaign. So, is The Hunt satirising the kind of so-called liberal elites who sneer endlessly at others without ever quite realising they are guilty of the very narrowmindedness they purport to despise?
If only. In fact, The Hunt isn’t that clever. It doesn’t even have the courage of its own convictions, making the most empathetic ‘deplorable’, played by Betty Gilpin, a victim of mistaken identity.
Long before she winds up in a climactic showdown with her chief tormentor (Hilary Swank), we have realised that this isn’t much of a satire at all, just a gruesomely violent survivalist thriller.
On the one hand, that makes Craig Zobel’s film an apt release for Friday 13th. On the other, it was meant to come out last September, but was postponed in the wake of a couple of deadly mass shootings in America.
Had it never seen the light of day at all, cinema would have been none the poorer.