Lease of Life

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.

A cruelly ironic title, since Robert Donat - still only in his forties but looking sixty - is visibly dying, thus reinforcing - in Charles Barr's words - the "moving kind of bleakness" of this Ealing cross between 'Le Corbeau' and 'Diary of a Country Priest'.

With a suitably melancholy score by Alan Rawsthorne; through the camera of Douglas Slocombe, Ealing's first production in the new marvel of 'Eastman Colour' (sic) handsomely creates on location in Lincolnshire the deceptively pretty little parish of Gilchester (as well as vividly displaying a young Adrienne Corri's Titian mane as Donat's vibrant young daughter), which beneath it's picturesque facade throbs with intrigue and venality; it's poisonous passions ignited by Donat's unguarded sermon addressed to his flock.

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.

The story's so simple and so human. It's one of no events whatsoever but it grips from the start. This is one of four on an Ealing Rarities collection, Vol 11, and it's worth the cost for this alone. I'd just finished being bored to tears by Avengers Assemble (I'd not seen that in the cinema) and then decided to put this on. Donat's never been better. The script, By Eric Ambler, is beautifully structured. It's also a fast film, it never lags, because every scene is useful and does real work. It's impassioned as well. Don't miss this one. In colour. And you can see the location, Lund in Yorkshire, hasn't changed that much. The pub's still there as is the church.

The very frailty of Robert Donat who suffered from asthma his entire life was never more in evidence than in Lease Of Life. In this film Donat plays a country vicar as if Mr. Chips had decided to take up the ministry.

The very title of the film says in no uncertain terms we do not own life itself. It's something we're granted a lease on and it's up to us to try and do as much as we can for ourselves, our families, and for the whole of life itself.

Donat knows something that no one else does that his lease on his capacity to breathe may get terminated very soon. What he's determined to do is make his life count in every conceivable way. With an invitation to speak at an Eton like prep school's graduation he gets such an opportunity and a bit of notoriety as well.

Domestically Donat's major problem is putting together enough money for his daughter Adrienne Corri's musical education. She's a piano prodigy, but the living that a country parson has might not be sufficient to pay her way. That leads wife Kay Walsh to do something very stupid out of her concern.

Lease Of Life is a gentle film about the life of an Anglican parson in a country village. No frills, no outrageous characters as one normally gets in an Ealing film. The people are quite real with all the strengths, foibles, and weaknesses we all have.

Most of all it has Robert Donat and given that his health limited his film work the chance to see him at all should never be missed.