Lease of Life

Lease of Life is an ironic title as this was the second to last movie made by its star, Robert Donat.

He plays the Reverend William Thorne, a vicar in a small Yorkshire village.

He and his wife Vera live a modest lifestyle on a vicar's salary. Their daughter Susan is a gifted pianist who is on the verge of a place at a music school in London. If she obtains a scholarship, her tuition fees will be paid but her parents will need to pay for her accomodation and they cannot afford it.

Suddenly Reverend Thorne falls ill and is told by the doctor that he has a year to live at the most.

Now looking at life differently. He gives a sermon at a cathedral which is different from his original intentions. It causes both consternation and praise as the Reverend wants people to disobeying rule and enjoying life a bit more.

He even makes the press headlines. In fact his wife Vera gets the wrong end of that sermon. As she borrows £100 that was given to the reverend on trust by a dying parishioner.

Donat is excellent. This is just a small scale soapy melodrama though. Not that exciting and the script needed much more work.

Was pleasantly surprised with this quaint vintage film. I found it quite engaging. Lots of period elements that seem so odd today like a benign impromptu sermon makes the national newspaper! A doctor who makes house calls! A drunken Church Sexton.

I saw Donat in Goodbye Mr Chips (1939) about 30 years ago and I was profoundly affected by the nobility of the character, and this is much the same. Cried my eyes out. Why were my teachers not like that!

So much emotion packed in to the morality play but wrapped up tight in quintessential English reserve, making it all the more lachrymose for moments.. the music assists... reminds me a bit like stiff upper lip Brief Encounter (1945) with Rachmaninoff at full blast.

A young Denham Elliott as a creepy music teacher!

So the parson is burdened by a miserable dodgy wife!

Theologically speaking, seemed mostly about virtue, what it looks like in Christian terms, you know self-sacrifice. The comfort of faith and death. .. A distaste for establishment defference and 'heaven' postponed - which I totally agree with, also perhaps a role for compromise and even subterfuge for the greater good for our character which the article in the New York Times described as Quixotic. Perhaps the Parson is not Mr. Chips, but he's a very upright fellow.

Great acting by Robert Donat who one could see was clearly not well (a less than kind contributor mentioned he looked aged). The story itself a familiar plot of a dying man making the most of the time left. However beautifully done against the backdrop of village life in 1950s England, with a vicar faced with choosing between that which is expected of him and that which his heart and his faith demand. A spoilt daughter and a supportive though somewhat demanding wife who turns out to be quite vulnerable keeps the interest afloat. The characters in the village and the twists and turns of the tale make this a film well worth watching. If you prefer stories about life rather than spectacular action, depiction of morals and values against big budget drama and reality over fantasy then this should keep you entertained for the duration.

Great shots of Beverley Minster and clever camera work I thought for what was probably a fairly low budget affair.

Fans of Robert Donat will not want to miss this one. As I watched the film, with its strong and unflinching view of daily life in which the Church structures every act in every household, I kept thinking of Agatha Christie and her conception of Miss Marple's detection of crime in an English village. In Donat's parsonage, there are no murders, but there are small transgressions, which, in the large scheme of things, may matter little, but under the microscope of vicarage life, mean as much as a daughter's music career hinging on 20£s being too little.

Donat's character is reminiscent of Mr. Fred Rogers, of television fame, who just passed away. As with Mr. Rogers, his view of life is one of gentle humor and of quiet strength, always facing up to the challenge that each individual has in life when he is placed on this earth. The screen writer Eric Ambler is unknown to me, but his view of daily life in 1950's England, while a decade away from the war, was still one of struggle with a slightly grim, but not cheerless, overcast. The women are all strong, and, while the men not all good-looking, are a tad on the shrill and demanding side. We wonder if Donat's parson could survive without Kay Walsh's, and then the daughter Adrienne Corri's, constant ministrations, verbal and actual. The other women in the village also seem to be like harpies, which makes one wonder about the women in Ambler's life.

Adrienne Corri, unless I am mistaken, actually does play the piano in the film-- the big Romantic composers into which she pours her heart as an escape from the potentially stifling life in Hinton. We see her as a younger beauty in Jean Renoir's classic "The River," which she made just four years earlier. Her beau in the film is the young Denholm Elliott, who in a long and distinguished career, plays, here, a rather aggressive and unsympathetic, though professionally encouraging to Adrienne, church organist.

The movie is about character, and the performances remind us that ordinary life in a small English town revolved around the structure that religious life gave it, and that both pleasure and pain hinged on the degree of conformity that one presented to the outside world. Kay Walsh's character, both heroic and petty, also reminds us of how many vicar's wives have been sacrificed in real life to the altar of their husband's career and to fulfillig the lives of their children, through which they lived vicariously, as Mrs. Thorne through her daughter's musical talent.

This film was an Ealing Film Studio production, and like other Ealing products, bears an honesty and respect for the dignity of ordinary people in the telling of its story, regardless of the director. Is this saying too much for a movie company, or is it the English character? One has only to consider the other Ealing Studio films which Turner Movie Classics has made available from time to time, "The Magic Box" (another Donat classic), "Shiralee" (an early Peter Finch), as well as a number of great comedies, like "The Wrong Box," "Man in the White Suit" (an Alec Guinnes classic), and others, that poke fun at human nature and its foibles with a sense of manic pleasure, but never losing sight of gentle humanity.

"Lease of Life" was apparently the second to the last film that Donat made before he succumbed to chronic asthma, a tragedy as that ailment today can be so easily controlled. His last film "Inn of the Sixth Happiness" was ironically made for Hollywood, which he tended to avoid. In it he plays a dignified mandarin, both looking and speaking the part -- the only actor, in my experience, to have mastered the Chinese language in a western film.

For "Lease of Life" four**** out of five***** for its rarity.

Few contemporary films address religion with any sense of the nuances inherent in a belief in the supernatural. This film does so, and does so in ways so lovely that when it comes to its rather abrupt ending you're left saying "Wow...that was really interesting."

Donat plays the classic English parson, a role unchanged since Trollope, poor, scrimping, of moderate talents but immense goodness. When forced to face his own mortality, he becomes happier than ever before, since he can act with his beliefs out there for all to see.

The film also addresses the very common idea that a life of religion is one of rules alone, and demolishes it brusquely. The religious life is not one of rules but one of freedom. Freedom from many things, but freedom to do others. It is compellingly summarized in his brief but heartfelt sermon that is eagerly misinterpreted by the masses. But it is the message Jesus offered 2000 years ago. If you believe, and act on that belief, rules no longer are important. That is the ultimate freedom, and why Donat can be so happy while under a death sentence.

Fine film, understated yet potent.