L'opera del seduttore

Saw this, rather incongruously, with Spanish subtitles in a hotel in deepest, darkest Mexico... and made me feel a little homesick with its warm but too-close-to-the-bone portrayal of provincial English life. Lost dreams and opportunities, and eating chips in your car, staring at the gloomy sea and drizzle. Beautiful.

This is not an easy film to rate, or at least from personal experience. It has a fair share of people that have defended it, which is absolutely fine by me, but others have outright hated it. The play itself is very clever, very witty with well drawn characters carefully crafted. My biggest reason for seeing 'A Chorus of Disapproval' was the cast, so many great actors in what is essentially a creme a la creme who's who of British talent. Part of me did want to like it, being someone who is no stranger to amateur theatrics.

While 'A Chorus of Disapproval' is a long way from unwatchable, a large part of me couldn't help be disappointed at the same time. All the cast have done better before and since and deserved better, in material that should have suited them to the ground but they are not flattered very well. Despite Alan Ayckburn being on board adapting his own play, it was like it was written by somebody else. It also feels that comedy and Michael Winner do not mix.

Not everything is bad. Scarborough's atmosphere and charm has remained unscathed. Can find no fault with the music, which would still be great regardless of how it was treated. There are moments of wit and charm and there are moments where the send up portrayal of amateur theatrics is on the nose dead on.

Some of the cast do quite well, Jeremy Irons in a role that mirrors that of Macheath in 'The Beggar's Opera', sporting good comic timing and a pleasant singing voice, and Prunella Scales, playing her role with gusto, coming off best. Jenny Seagrove has charming moments too.

Anthony Hopkins was somewhat more puzzling though. He does give it absolutely everything and he can be funny, but he can be too over-forceful and the hamminess he shows in scenes unbalances the film a bit. And how can a film etc. waste Richard Briers and Lionel Jeffries with giving them far too little to do, with what they have not flattering them particularly well? It is great to see all the different kind of personalities one sees in this environment but the depth was missing.

Despite always trying to judge adaptations on their own terms, it is hard to not make exceptions when something is so far removed in quality from its source material, the case here. The heavy truncations do hurt the film, too much of the comedy lacks wit, any social satire that is intact tends to not be sharp enough, there is a very cold feel throughout, no real subtlety and have seen more insightful and energetic depictions of amateur operatic/dramatic societies. The energy is gone and replaced by a dreariness that can become tedious in longer scenes. With the cuts to the script and music, the relevance of 'The Beggar's Opera' is lost or at least not as clear. Winner's direction doesn't suit the material and has too much of a heavy touch, axes have more subtlety. There is too much of a mid-70s television series look to the photography and the sound is not always well balanced.

In conclusion, personally didn't disapprove of 'A Chorus of Disapproval' but it doesn't have enough to have my approval. Odd film and should have been better considering the play and cast, can see that there are people here that liked it and hold nothing against them but for me it was odd and underwhelming. 5/10

With all the high-flying "special effects" movies around these days, this movie is a bare-bones, real-life-like story about real people in a small town and the relationships among them. The cast is fantastic. Jeremy Irons should have gotten an Academy Award for his performance. Anthony Hopkins also turns in an admirable character-driven performance that is just one more example of his outstanding acting ability. There were technical aspects of the photography and sound that could be criticized, but, ignoring those, it is a wonderfully portrayed story. Be sure to watch this film with someone who is a feeling person with a good sense of humor and an interest in different people with different personalities. This movie is one of my all time favorites.

When I reviewed "The Revengers' Comedies" about ten years ago, I pointed out that the number of feature films based on the work of Sir Alan Ayckbourn could be counted on the fingers of one hand. That remains true today; the four that existed then ("The Revengers' Comedies", "A Chorus of Disapproval" and two by the French director Alain Resnais) have since been joined by a fifth, a Swiss version of "Season's Greetings", but no others. Sir Alan is one of Britain's most successful and prolific playwrights, with more than eighty full-length plays to his credit, most of which have been performed in London's West End and many of which have been adapted for television, but the British film industry has never taken much interest in his work.

When Guy Jones is transferred by his employers, a large electronics firm, to Scarborough, he joins the local amateur operatic society in order to make friends in the town, and becomes involved with their production of "The Beggar's Opera". Guy, a widower, begins an affair with Hannah, the neglected wife of Dafydd Ap Llewellyn, the society's autocratic Welsh stage director. Another plotline concerns a rumour that Guy's employers are considering purchasing a piece of waste ground adjacent to their factory, and several members of the society, hoping to make money from a piece of property speculation, try and obtain inside information from him. One offers him a cash bribe, and Ian Hubbard, a dodgy local businessman, tries to bribe him by offering the sexual favours of his attractive young wife Fay.

The film was directed by Michael Winner, a director whom I would not normally associate with comedy. The only other comedy of his which I have seen was "Parting Shots", a defiantly black and bad-taste, if sometimes effective, social satire, which could have been better but for some eccentric miscasting. One thing that "A Chorus of Disapproval" cannot be criticised for is the casting. The film features some of the leading lights of the British acting profession, including two major international stars in Jeremy Irons as Guy and Anthony Hopkins as Dafydd, and both play their parts perfectly well, as do most of the other cast members.

And yet I have never enjoyed the film as much as I did the original stage play when I saw it in the West End in the mid-eighties. Ayckbourn's success as a dramatist is due not merely to the quality of his plots and dialogue but also on matters which transfer less easily to the cinema screen, such as complexity of structure and his knowledge of stagecraft. (Besides being a playwright, he is also the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough). The screenplay for "A Chorus..." is very much abridged when compared with the original play, although not as much as "The Revengers' Comedies", which was a condensation of two plays into a single film. Winner's rather heavy-handed style of direction is probably more suited to a broad satire like "Parting Shots" than it is to Ayckbourn's more subtle comedy of manners. The original stage production I saw would probably have merited a nine, but something has gone missing between stage and screen. I cannot give the film more than 6/10.

I was keen to see this film because I am playing the part of Guy in a stage version. When I saw that Jeremy Irons was in it I was expecting a gem, but when I realised Michael Winner had directed it I lowered my expectations. Winner has coaxed bad performances out of good actors. Jeremy Irons' accent is dreadful. I know that the play is enjoyable, but this film version is paisley pants.