Tag Archives: David Lean

Bravo! André Morell in David Lean’s ‘Madeleine’

Original poster for American release.

Original poster for American release

David Lean’s “Madeleine” (Rank Organisation, 1950) is a reasonably engrossing, if mildly dull, suspense tale set in Victorian Glasgow. Two men vie for the same woman; one of them ends up dead of arsenic poisoning. The story is based on a sensational murder trial that made headlines in 1857. Ann Todd, an attractive but extremely unsympathetic screen presence, plays Madeleine Smith, the seemingly docile eldest daughter of a stern father (Leslie Banks), who finds herself being wooed by an upstanding, earnest young man (Norman Wooland) of whom her father entirely approves, while she is secretly in love with a French chappie (Ivan Desny). Although the action takes place in Glasgow and there are a few Scots accents scattered throughout to remind us where we are, this is an English picture through and through. It is therefore a foregone conclusion that the mysterious Frenchman to whom our heroine has lost her heart is a bounder. The Englishman’s traditional disdain for his Gallic neighbor has been making me laugh for as long as I can remember. I cannot defend it, but neither can I help it: it’s funny. This Frenchy is particularly odious. His very name, Emile L’Angelier, seems to have been purposely devised to confound an English gentleman’s best attempts to pronounce it (the last name is misspelled in the credits). What’s more, this alien cad is clearly only after the girl’s money and position. When she realizes the truth about her paramour and demands that he return her letters, the sprat-eating brute turns to blackmail as a first, rather than a last, resort. The strain he puts on Miss Smith’s nerves almost reaches the breaking point when, handy dandy, he collapses outside his bed-sitter and dies the following morning, leaving Miss Smith’s billets-doux unreturned and his landlady’s bill unpaid. Anyone would think he was a Hollywood agent.

On the whole, the picture is very well acted, especially in the smaller roles. Ann Todd is glacial and pinched, as was ever her wont, but in this role her frosty discomfort seems appropriate, though certainly not inspired. On the other hand, André Morell, as her barrister, the noted advocate John Inglis, Lord Glencorse (in the picture, his character is listed in the credits as “Dean of Falcuty” [sic]), is truly inspired and memorably wonderful. His remarkable performance and the magnificent rhetoric Nicholas Phipps and Stanley Haynes have given him to speak are the subject of this essay.

André Morell

The Silver-Tongued André Morell

Lord Glencorse Opens His Summation

He begins his summation with the classic rhetorical device known as aporia (from the Ancient Greek ἀπορία: “impasse, puzzlement, being at a loss”), in which the speaker expresses his uncertainty about whether he will prove equal to the difficult task before him. I also draw your attention to another rhetorical device, used with exquisite finesse: dysphemism, which is the antonym of euphemism. Madeleine Smith is charged with murder, a capital crime, punishable by hanging. In 1857, this was a commonplace, but listen to the language Lord Glencorse employs to describe it. It is as fine an example of dysphemism as I know. He uses the device again at the end of this clip, when he speaks of the prosecution’s case. The rhetoric alone is enough to make me admire this speech, but Morell’s performance makes it entirely thrilling.

Some critics suggest that aporia is used to express a feigned doubt, but since aporia’s near synonym, dubitatio, specifically refers to the pretense of doubt, I prefer to restrict aporia to genuine (if misplaced) doubt, as it is in this case. One sees from André Morell’s masterful performance that Lord Glencorse is more than equal to the task before him; he employs aporia simply as an honest admission of his perplexity, while his misgivings indicate a most becoming modesty in the face of so terrible a responsibility. For that is the twin-purpose of aporia: to excite in one’s audience a feeling of sympathy for the speaker, and to establish the immense difficulty of what the speaker intends to convey. Shakespeare built the entire prologue to “Henry V” on aporia; Lincoln used the device to great effect in his address at Gettysburg and in his famous letter to the Widow Bixby.

By contrast, there is a fine discussion of dubitatio (though it is not mentioned by name) in Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay for “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” in which business tycoon Fredric March proposes to lard an important speech to a group of doctors with a lot of “Aw shucks, I ain’t no expert, gentlemen” folderol (i.e., dubitatio). All the yes-men in his employ express their enthusiasm for his Sage of the Cracker-Barrel pose, but then he runs the idea past that tall, marble allegory of Honorable American Manhood known as Greg Peck, who objects to March’s whole approach. March asks what’s wrong with it. Peck frowns and swallows hard: “Now, maybe I’m one hundred percent wrong, but it seems to me” — as arrant an example of dubitatio as one could hope to trip over — and then he goes on to make a clear and cogent case against the use of false modesty. “The worst part of it to me is a statement made over and over again that would only make me sore . . . because it’s so obviously untrue: that you’re a very simple, uninformed man who, in effect, doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. Because if they believe that, why should they ask you to be head of this campaign? But they’ll know better: they’re educated, intelligent men, and they’ll know who and what you are. And that whole part of it will have a completely phony ring at the very moment when sincerity is the thing you’re aiming at above everything else.” As irony would have it, Peck speaks this well-reasoned, carefully worded critical rebuke of false modesty while giving a stammering, gulping, artificial performance full of actorish/NPRish hesitations. As I remember it, his Adam’s apple makes like a pogo stick. Perhaps my memory is playing me false, but that is the effect of his performance: the earnest faking of sincerity.

When Lord Glencorse expresses his misgivings, there is nothing phony or foot-dragging about it. He is genuinely oppressed with doubt; his anxiety does him credit and elicits kindly feelings from his audience. He employs aporia, not dubitatio.

His dysphemistic description of the prosecution’s aims contains a number of rhetorical elements that enliven and ennoble it and give it balance: “You are invited and encouraged by the prosecutor to snap the thread of this young life and to consign to an ignominious death on the scaffold one who, within a few short months, was known only as a gentle and confiding and affectionate girl.” The verb phrase invited and encouraged has a delicious connotation of a tea dance or a race ball or a charity rout to which subscriptions are being offered for purchase. By using verbs that evoke such gay and genteel dissipations, the defense makes the prosecution’s goal appear utterly monstrous. Then to snap the thread of this young life ennobles the sentence with a classical allusion to the Fates (Ancient Greek: Μοῖραι, Moirai: “apportioners”). In Greek mythology, the Moirai were three sisters: Clotho (Κλωθώ: “spinner”), who spun the thread of life from her distaff onto her spindle; Lachesis (Λάχεσις: “allotter”), who measured the thread; and Atropos (Ἄτροπος: “unturning, inexorable”), who cut the thread of life. Though such an allusion would surely mystify the vast majority of a modern audience, in 1857, it would have been readily understood and undoubtedly very potent. (The educated audience of 1950, for whom the picture is obviously intended, would have recognized the allusion as well.) The two ands at the end — gentle and confiding and affectionate girl — are an example of polysyndaton, which gives a nice balance to the end of a long and complicated sentence. As for André Morell’s delivery of the line, his mastery speaks for itself. I have little to add, other than to say that he does not rush things along, neither does he luxuriate. As will be seen the next clips, it is a big performance, but it is too refined and magnificent to be thought of as ham.

He Speaks of Poison


Note that Morell’s sweeping arm gesture at approximately fifty-five seconds into the clip could hardly be more theatrical: it is almost panto. François Delsarte, who developed the once popular Delsarte System — an extravagant, systematized set of gestures and facial expressions in the years immediately preceding the dawn of motion pictures, and used by many actors of the Silent Era — old Delsarte himself would have approved. Yet the first few times I saw Morell’s performance, the gesture went by almost unnoticed because the actor had by this point completely engaged my attention and persuaded me of his sincerity. If I noticed it at all, it was simply that its splendid rightness gave me a little jolt of excitement. But how many actors could get away with it? Very few, in my experience. Olivier, for instance, was much given to such theatrical gestures, and they worked. But with Olivier, you’re always aware that you are watching him act. I’m not knocking him, it’s just that I never quite believe him: I like Olivier for his theatricality, not for his realism or sincerity, of which he has but little. Morell is both theatrical and realistic.

He Speaks of Opportunity

He Closes

I cannot hear this oration without feeling the urge to leap to my feet and give André Morell a standing ovation. Lord Glencorse makes Atticus Finch look like a pisher. Had his lordship practiced law in Alabama, poor Tom Robinson would still be chopping up chifferobes today.

If you want to see all four clips play one after the other, click below.

Happy Birthday, Claude Rains!

Claude Rains as Alexander Hollenius in 'Deception,' with friend.

Claude Rains as Alexander Hollenius in ‘Deception,’ with friend.

Today, November 10, 2014, is the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Claude Rains. To mark the occasion, I’ve pulled together some clips from three of his lesser known performances that I particularly admire. Since Bette Davis was his favorite co-star, I begin with her. This is from her November 17, 1971 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show.

The full interview is available on YouTube. It is well worth seeing. She and Cavett get along beautifully; they establish a convivial rapport almost at once. Bette Davis treats him with exemplary politeness. She listens carefully, responds generously, praises readily and gives every appearance of enjoying his company. They’re both skittish personalities, and it is delightful to see them relax as the interview progresses. Both of them are funny and extremely smart. They take turns charming one another and catching the other off-guard. They do it repeatedly. And since they both adore Claude Rains and speak about him so intelligently, they score a lot of points with me.

The Unsuspected

Original poster.

Original poster.

“The Unsuspected” (Warner Bros., 1947) is a mystery/thriller that starts out silly and eventually becomes preposterous. If you’re willing to make allowances and give your credulity a stretch, it is also very entertaining. As is usually the case, Rains is better than the picture is, and the role is unworthy of his talents. Yet he plays this sort of velvety rubbish better than anyone, and it’s a big, juicy part. One can’t help wishing he had better material to work with; there is nevertheless the unique pleasure of seeing a great actor whip up a feast from table scraps. Rains plays a radio celebrity with a weekly broadcast on which he tells lurid stories of murder and mayhem. (“I give you . . . ‘The Tragedy of the Missing Head.’ “) At the beginning of each broadcast, his announcer (Art Gilmore — one of the busiest voice-over artists in the forties and fifties: he’s also heard on the radio in the first scene of “Rear Window“) introduces him as “Your genial host: the renowned writer, art collector and teller of strange tales, Victor Grandison.” Franz Waxman’s score is hilarious.

Rains handles this sort of melodramatic nonsense so elegantly and makes the balderdash sound so eloquent, it’s easy to forget that the material is not merely second rate, but very hard to put across at all. He makes it seem effortless. Try speaking some of this stuff yourself, and you’ll see what he was up against.

An hour into the picture, Victor Grandison has already murdered three people that we know about. Presumably, there are others. Currently, he’s working on two more. There’s his ward, Matilda, a multi-millionairess debutante orphaned in childhood. She dotes on dear old Grandy. If she predeceases him, her fortune is his. She was lost at sea (plane crash); that was months ago; everyone’s forgotten her. And now she washes up. Alive. Touch of amnesia, though. Enter Mr Steven Howard (Michael North); says he’s her husband. She can’t remember him, but she’s falling under his spell. Handsome devil; mysterious — dangerous, perhaps. He’s in for a nasty bump on the head. Matilda, the dear child — a shame, really, most unfortunate. Oh, why did the wretched girl go and lose her heart to Mr Howard? Why does he keep poking about in other people’s affairs? Who is he, what’s he after? Well, no matter: at this moment, Mr Steven Howard is locked inside a trunk, unconscious, and about to be dumped into a landfill. And now, dear old Grandy must stage Matilda’s suicide — and quickly, too — finish the business before tonight’s broadcast. Watching Claude Rains cajole Joan Caulfield into drinking the fatal Champagne always makes me think of the old Flanders and Swann song, “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear.”

As you must expect in a Production Code picture, things go terribly wrong for our criminal. And it all leads to this thrilling conclusion.

The Passionate Friends

Poster from French release

Poster from French release.

Rains gave one of his finest performances in David Lean’s “The Passionate Friends,” but the picture has never found a wide audience. Perhaps the plot’s structure was too complicated for audiences in 1949. Perhaps it still is. After a brief opening narration, there’s an extended flashback sequence in which a second flashback sequence, also of considerable length, is nested. This creates, in the first twenty minutes or so, a chronological ambiguity that is more than a little disorienting. The mild confusion it creates is appropriate to the story, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it put many people off. And the leading lady, Ann Todd, is a semi-forbidding presence — frosty as Garbo but without the mystique.

Rains plays Howard Justin, a wealthy, powerful man; Ann Todd (Mrs David Lean at the time) plays his wife, Mary. Theirs is a reasonably stable, loveless marriage of convenience that has lasted more than ten years. Early in their marriage, Mary drifted into an affair with her old flame, Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard). Misery all round. Mary ended it quickly. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since. The infidelity episode is told in a flashback. Now the story moves to the present: it is nine years after the crisis. No further indiscretions have disturbed their chilly domestic calm. Mary is in Switzerland on holiday. Howard, detained by pressing business, will join her in a few days. Her first morning at the hotel, Mary is at breakfast when Stratton enters the café. They’ve had no contact for nine years and now Fate (or a missed flight connection) has thrown them together. His suite is next door to hers: he’s flying home that evening. He is mellower, easier; he’s happily married, a proud father. The sexual tension between them has disappeared, friendly goodwill and mutual interests remain. They decide to spend the day together. In the afternoon, while they’re picnicking across the lake, Howard arrives at the hotel — a day early. Mme Justin is out; she will return presently: very well, he’ll have lunch in the café, he and Miss Layton (Betty Ann Davies) will work until his wife shows up.

To a large extent, Claude Rains’ reputation is based on the range and complexity of emotions he is able to express with his extraordinary voice. One doesn’t think of him without thinking of The Voice. But this next clip demonstrates that he is also devastatingly effective when speaking not a word. David Lean’s direction of this sequence is wonderfully imaginative and cinematic.

Extraordinary how eloquently Lean’s staging of the episode conveys, wordlessly, the tidal wave of jealousy that crashes over Howard Justin when he sees his wife with his former rival. Nine years earlier, when Mary cuckolded him, he could readily forgive her and rise above his humiliation. But now, when she has not cuckolded him, when he only imagines she has, he finds the humiliation intolerable, unforgivable. What has happened to make it different this time? The sight of Stratton’s luggage outside the room next to Mary’s gives him a jolt, but a minute later, when he sees Mary come into the room, race out to the balcony and wave at the departing speedboat, the sight shatters him. When she turns her back on the lake, and comes back into the room — clever David Lean, to have those curtains hide her face! (“Beauty’s veil doth cover every blot”) — the tears in her eyes drive him into a frenzy. The first time I saw “The Passionate Friends,” I took these few extraordinary minutes as a particularly well-acted episode of a husband who, after being confronted with several pieces of damning evidence, arrives at the perfectly reasonable, yet totally wrong conclusion that his wife has betrayed him. That is, unquestionably, what happens in the scene, but the betrayal that drives him wild is not the most obvious one; it’s crueler and more subtle. But I was not fully aware of it until I saw their next scene together.

It is a month or so later, they’re back in London, living separately. Mary comes to his house one night. The divorce is still in the works. Howard has sworn to ruin Stratton: he’s prepared to be liberal with her, but her seducer must be punished. This scene contains what I consider to be some of the greatest acting Claude Rains ever did.

Mary begs Howard to believe that she and Stratton have done nothing wrong, and we know she’s telling the truth. But Howard doesn’t accuse her of adultery. It isn’t her sexual infidelity that he finds too hard to bear, it is his realization that she has starved him emotionally; until he saw her race out to that balcony, he had never seen her so unguarded, so lively, so passionate. And then those tears . . . affection, tenderness, love. And none of them for him. It is not only her body she has given to another man, but her whole self. And what has she given him? He says she has given him “the love you’d give a dog, the kindness you’d give a beggar, and the loyalty of a bad servant” — an accusation that cannot be gainsaid. (The excellent screenplay is by Eric Ambler.) Rains very rarely played anything of such naked emotional intensity. “The Invisible Man” is one of the only other pictures in which Rains cuts loose with such unhinged, volcanic fury. But the Invisible Man is already an emotional wreck when first we meet him: the wonder of that performance is Rains’ ability to sustain and increase the intensity over the course of the entire picture. “The Passionate Friends” presents a different challenge: an unflappable, highly polished man of the world who is pushed to the brink of madness by jealousy — and because the actor is Claude Rains, we see the precise moment that the madness strikes him. I cannot help thinking that Rains’ personal animosity toward Ann Todd is partly responsible for the stunning emotional violence he brings into this scene. He was enormously fond of David Lean, admired and respected him, but also really loved him. Ann Todd’s unprofessional conduct on the set drove Rains to distraction, but worse, he found her brutal treatment of Lean unconscionable. According to Rains, when she divorced Lean, she took every penny he had. Rains never forgave her.


Enoch Arden

If I had to choose, I’d say that Rains’ performance in “Deception” is my favorite of his movie roles. But I believe there’s one performance I love even more than his Alexander Hollenius: it’s his recitation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” with piano accompaniment written by Richard Strauss, which Rains recorded in 1962 with Glenn Gould. As Rains proved in his movie debut as the Invisible Man, he was capable of giving an unforgettable performance without being seen; he proves it again with his stunning performance of “Enoch Arden.” 1962 was the same year he gave a fine performance as Mr Dryden, a minor role in “Lawrence of Arabia.” He lived for another five years, but apart from a few television appearances, a cameo as King Herod in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and one excruciating courtroom drama, “Twilight of Honor,” “Enoch Arden” is really his swan song. And what an unforgettable performance to go out on!

Rains in 'Lawrence of Arabia,' filmed the same year he recorded 'Enoch Arden.

Rains in ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ filmed the same year he recorded ‘Enoch Arden.’

“Enoch Arden” is the story of a sailor, lost at sea and given up for dead by those he left behind: his wife, Annie, a young daughter, a younger son and a newborn baby boy. Within a year of Enoch’s departure, the baby dies and his family begins to drift into poverty. Ten years pass — “And no word from Enoch came.” Enoch and Annie’s childhood friend, Philip Ray — a prosperous miller — eventually persuades Annie (whom he has always loved from afar) to marry him “[a]nd lift the household out of poverty.” A year later, Annie gives birth to Philip’s son. And now, after more than a dozen years have passed, Enoch returns. He’s a broken man, unrecognizable. Finding his old house abandoned, he goes to a local tavern, where he collapses. While Enoch is recuperating, the “good and garrulous” landlady, Miriam Lane, tells him

. . . with other annals of the port,
Not knowing — Enoch was so brown, so bow’d,
So broken — all the story of his house.
His baby’s death, her growing poverty,
How Philip put her little ones to school,
And kept them in it, his long wooing her,
Her slow consent, and marriage, and the birth
Of Philip’s child.

Enoch does not reveal his identity, but becomes obsessed with the thought of seeing Annie one more time. “If I might look on her sweet face again/And know that she is happy.” So he goes over to Philip’s house one November night and peers through the window. Here is Tennyson’s description of what Enoch sees:

And on the right hand of the hearth he saw
Philip, the slighted suitor of old times,
Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees;
And o’er her second father stoopt a girl,
A later but a loftier Annie Lee,
Fair-hair’d and tall, and from her lifted hand
Dangled a length of ribbon and a ring
To tempt the babe, who rear’d his creasy arms,
Caught at and ever miss’d it, and they laugh’d:
And on the left hand of the hearth he saw
The mother glancing often toward her babe,
But turning now and then to speak with him,
Her son, who stood beside her tall and strong,
And saying that which pleased him, for he smiled.

Claude Rains takes it from here. “Enoch Arden” is another rare example of Rains’ unleashing a torrent of emotion, astonishing both for its energy and complexity. It’s no trick for an actor to shed tears on cue, nor to express rage at the top of his lungs. To do both together, while making sure that every word is clearly enunciated, each individual thought is specific and distinct (as opposed to producing a generalized wash of unhappiness), and to produce a believable result (i.e., the underlying technique must be invisible), but one that is better than merely believable — this is extremely difficult to do. It requires what the great Shakespearean director, John Barton, refers to as “Passion and Coolness.” Most actors will settle for one or the other. Actors like Claude Rains do both at the same time and, being the magicians they are, they don’t let you see how they do it.

Here is the finale.