A connoisseur’s collection
ROGER LEWIS watches his favourites from the worlds of film, theatre and television, all available on DVD
The Father
(2020) Anthony Hopkins has always been good at staring into space and looking bewildered. His Academy Award-winning blank intensity is just the job for this tale of an old boy losing his marbles, fading away with dementia. Characters come and go – are they real or are they figments of a disintegrating consciousness? I imagine Florian Zeller reckoned he was directing a serious study of memory and meaning. In the end (the presence of Mark Gatiss is a clue), what we have is a glorified episode of Inside Number 9, with twists and counter-twists. Olivia Colman is on hand as the cheerful and long-suffering daughter. I thought it all added up to a very good case for assisted dying – compulsory assisted dying. (£9.99)
Wuthering Heights
(1958) This was broadcast from Brooklyn as a live NBC transmission on 9 May 1958. It was long considered lost, until a primitive recording or “kinescope” was unexpectedly found in 2019, amongst a pile of old game shows acquired by the Library of Congress. It is important, because Heathcliff is played by Richard Burton. He is exactly as you’d imagine him to be as Heathcliff, declaiming in an Old Vic way, swaying from side to side with emotion, smacking the furniture with a riding crop, banging doors, threatening to beat up Denholm Elliott, the epicene Edgar Linton. Grumbling away under wrinkled retainer make-up is Bernard Miles. Cathy is a very lovely, gamine Rosemary Harris. (£13)
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
(2018) Frankly, the film Terry Gilliam finally released, in 2020, is less gripping than the documentary, Lost in La
Mancha, about the film he had to abandon. This was in 2002, when the sets were destroyed by floods and his main actor, Jean Rochefort, fell ill with herniated discs. Rochefort then died in 2017. Here Jonathan Pryce plays Quixote and he is adequate although I thought Eric Sykes would have been better casting. But he also died. Adam Driver is an obnoxious director who, in a film-within-a-film, or fantasy sequence, is taught the error of his ways by Quixote, receives his comeuppance and learns to exploit people less. Or something – it is all rather banal. But, as ever with Gilliam, the visual virtuosity counts more than the narrative, and surely Cervantes’s stubborn and eccentric knight-errant is his idealised self-image. As Quixote also was for Orson Welles, who likewise struggled for years to finish his films, battling against all manner of bizarre odds, to an extent that made you think (as with Gilliam) chaos is the one element he felt absolutely at home in and possibly sought out. (£9.99)
A.J. Wentworth BA
(1982) I adored Arthur Lowe in everything he did, except Dad’s Army, which I never could stand, owing to the ropy scripts and duff, ill-rehearsed acting (and over-acting – Clive Dunn and John Laurie were bores). Lowe having died in April 1982, this series of six episodes was broadcast posthumously, and it is a lost gem – completely charming. Lowe is the eponymous schoolmaster, muttering about the price of pen nibs, and I suppose we are not a million miles from Walmington-on-sea, with an unruly class instead of the platoon. Captain Mainwaring’s irritable pomposity, however, has been replaced by a Wentworth who is
more of an idiotic day-dreamer. John Bird is Major Faggott. (£7.19)
The Day of the Jackal
(1973) I never cease being gripped by Fred Zinneman’s film – held together as it is by Michael Lonsdale’s dogged detective and Edward Fox (never better) as the ruthless assassin, organising his mission, testing his gun, planning his escape routes. There’s an extra dimension now, however – the way we can look back at the Sixties, at a France now gone, at police procedures before computers and when everyone smoked, frowned over Manila folder files and used, heavy, Bakelite telephones. The supporting cast is superb: Badel, Jacobi, Sinden, Cusack, Pickup. (£7.31)
An Englishman’s Castle
(1978) The Nazis invaded successfully in 1940. Churchill was executed. There was a token resistance but in time everyone capitulated, collaborated. A racial purity programme got rid of the Jews, the blacks, anyone tinted or tainted. Flash forward to 1978, when this series was made and set, and the British have long since come to full accommodation with a Fascist, German-run Europe. Off-stage, as it were, and ever-present, there are death camps and secret police well-trained in torture methods to deal with anyone rocking the boat. Which is where Kenneth More comes in. He is a television scriptwriter, churning out propaganda, and he lives a comfortable life – but he has a nagging conscience, pricked by his mistress, Isla Blair, and his son, Nigel Havers, who think the time has come for the British to revolt. What a great actor More was – very underrated. His face alone registers an amused weariness and integrity; a sense he’ll do the right thing.(£9.49)
Callas Forever
(2002) Franco Zeffirelli’s final work, a fictionalised biopic about the opera singer, which is full of his typically boisterous peasant crowds and lively café-scenes. The plot centres on a temperamental Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant) deciding, in the last year of her life, to make a film of Carmen, secretly lip-synching to a recording of her younger self. She then gets an attack of nerves, realises this is a deception and has the celluloid destroyed. Ardant is marvellous, with her sneers and glares. Callas’s real singing voice is used, karaokefashion. Made in 2002, this curiosity
was scarcely seen. I am glad to have found it at last. Joan Plowright bumbles about as a journalist, but I can’t recall if she approves of or wants to expose the scam. (£9.86)
Home
(1972) A straightforward recording of David Storey’s stage play, directed in 1972 by Lindsay Anderson, and starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, I wonder if this would possibly work with other, lesser actors? It is about absolutely nothing – characters killing time in a care home or a residential hotel, pottering about in the garden, talking about clouds and chrysanthemums. Then Mona Washbourne and Dandy Nichols come on, to share the table and wrought-iron chairs in the gazebo. Polite bickering ensues. There are paper leaves underfoot, the atmosphere autumnal. It turns out that all along we have been in an insane asylum, the characters dangerous fantasists, suicide risks and sex perverts. (£18.49)
Frenzy
(1972) Hitchcock’s London film, made on location (largely) in Covent Garden, when it was still a fruit and vegetable market. Barry Foster is well-cast as a smiling serial-killer, whose strangled victims are hidden in a potato lorry. Jon Finch is the man who is framed. Bernard Cribbens is the sneering pub landlord, Alec Mccowen the policeman and Vivien Merchant his wife, serving terrible gourmet meals. As always with Hitchcock, there is an air of black comedy – but the murders and rapes are graphic. ‘Lovely! Lovely!’ grunts Foster, as he throttles Barbara Leigh-hunt, the camera closing in on the saliva glistening on her tongue. One wonders if Foster was deliberately meant to sound like the cackling Sid James? (£17.52)
Peter the Great
(1986) Very lavish and epic, with people like Laurence Olivier and Trevor Howard in walk-on roles, this 350-minute mini-series won Emmy Awards in 1986, before disappearing. Maximilian Schell is the tsar who tours Europe to glean ideas, his ambition being to push and shove Russia out of its medieval past and into the modern world – well, the 18th-century world, of tricorn hats, cannons and Vanessa Redgrave. (£26.99)
All from Amazon - prices fluctuate