Filmtribute

Helen Morse (`Picnic at Hanging Rock'; `Caddie') delivers a notable performance as the graceful and determined quiet English woman with a thoroughly convincing strength of character, able to withstand the trauma of the Malayan trek and the challenges of a cross-cultural relationship in an environment alien to her. Although in many ways it is disappointing not to have seen Morse develop her promising film career beyond the following year's `Far East', for the past twenty years she has chosen to concentrate her prodigious talents on the Australian theatre instead where she finds the roles both challenging and fulfilling, something she suspects would not be available from current films. I find the comparisons others have made to Sigourney Weaver particularly significant as Morse gave by all accounts a harrowing portrayal of Paulina in `Death and the Maiden' for the Sydney stage to rank alongside her screen counterparts haunting rendition a year later in 1994. Curiously, they also both starred in Australian productions of Asia based `Casablanca' remakes released within months of each other in 1982; Weaver as Mel Gibson's love interest in Peter Weir's `The Year of Living Dangerously' and Morse as the prurient wife of a crusading journalist in John Duigan's `Far East'. Morse's recent outing as Theodora Goodman in Patrick White's difficult, both in adaptation and performance terms, `The Aunt's Story', which tells of her migration from dusty Australia to the relative calm of America via the maelstrom of Europe on the brink of the Second World War, has already received critical acclaim in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Though ably cast as Joe Harman, Leonard Maltin writing in 1994 believed that Bryan Brown has a likeability that had not been sufficiently tapped by the parts he had taken up till then, which included the romantic lead in `Gorillas in the Mist' also with Sigourney Weaver. His more recent Australian work in `Two Hands' (made in 1999 and ranked among Empire magazine's movie buffs top ten local films, though rather obviously heavily influenced by Tarantino's `Pulp Fiction') suitably cast Brown as a Sydney mobster boss with an unusual degree of compassion, providing along with the intensely black humoured heist the high spots of the film in an uneven mix of comedy and tragedy. Brown has also turned his hand to producing and last year returned from Hollywood to make local Australian films such as the gangster flick `Dirty Deeds' in which he took a starring role, and was released in the UK this summer.

Tragically, Arkie Whiteley who played the young barmaid Annie, died from cancer at the end of 2001 at the far too early age of 37. She was the daughter of the renowned painter Brett Whiteley, the subject of the original David Williamson play `Up for Grabs' which last year enjoyed a run in London's West End with the pop-goddess Madonna, before he and Australia, at the star's insistence, were unjustly usurped by Jackson Polock and America for an international audience. Whiteley's painting `Arkie Under The Shower' has come home ten years after the actress sold it, and it fetched $810,000 at auction in Sydney this August. Arkie was memorably the beauty against a backdrop of beasts in the squalid horror of `Razorback' before she made a successful career on the London stage, as well as appearing in TV productions in the UK such as `The Last Musketeer' in 2000. Also for the keen-eyed viewer, Anne Haddy can be spotted in a minor role as Aggie Topp, Jean's English friend who is brought to Australia to help out in her venture. Haddy, as I am sure we all know, went on to become as Helen Daniels the much loved and long serving matriarch of `Neighbours', that phenomenal export to the UK, before her life long battle with ill health was sadly lost in 1999.

Inspiration for Nevil Shute, came from the true story of 80 Dutch women and children who spent 2½ years walking around the island of Sumatra, although less than 30 survived the ordeal. The invasion of Malaya in 1942 also saw the forced march of legions of civilians fleeing the marauding army with many perishing en route. Incidentally the author spent the remainder of his years in Australia after researching for his novel `On the Beach' in which he depicts a nuclear holocaust in the Northern Hemisphere engulfing all life except for a few survivors in the Antipodean continent. The novel was published just three years before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that culminated in the critical Black Saturday on 27 October. Fortunately for us all, sanity just about prevailed as Kennedy and Khrushchev climbed down from the brink of a catastrophic nuclear strike, as was revealed in last year's BBC Radio 4 documentary commemorating the 40-year anniversary, and in a further BBC4 programme screened a few weeks ago.

The TV mini-series faithfully follows the original novel, and though at times at the same plodding pedestrian pace it still makes for a splendid love story set against the brutality of the Japanese occupation in Asia and the toughness of the Australian outback. It is a fine tribute to those essential qualities of human endeavour, courage and determination in overcoming life's obstacles in order to achieve personal dreams.

Although ScreenSound Australia holds a master video it is not permitted to sell the film overseas, however NTSC versions can be obtained via Amazon's website.

For those of us who were spellbound all those years ago by Lionel Jeffries' vision and would therefore view the idea of a further version with disdain, you should be delighted to know that Catherine Morshead, of the popular TV series `Silent Witness' and `Dangerfield' fame, has created just as much a treat thirty years on for Carlton TV.

Simon Nye of `Men Behaving Badly' fame provides a script that restrains any of the cast from copying the antics of his notorious creations, although his faithful adaptation includes Edith Nesbit's incredibly condescending remark by the mother as she tells her three clearly cosseted children, "We've got to play at being poor for a bit". This sentence is offered as explanation for the enforced move for the middle class family from a grand London house to the country, to a friend's cottage after the father is sentenced to five years imprisonment on spying charges. The 1968 BBC serial believably depicted a little white house of the book, unlike the later productions with presumably bigger budgets which opted for proportionally larger rambling farmhouses that would seem impossible to manage without servants, and not at all in keeping with a family of straitened means. The decision by the mother not to tell her children the truth is in keeping for the period but would seem unlikely in today's culture of celebrity gawping. Fortunately for them they are kept protectively away from school and thus any chance of mixing with other youngsters, so never run the gauntlet of cruel taunts. Thus with inevitable curiosity they find themselves drawn to exploring the nearby railway and its activities.

John Daly (from a host of TV productions through the 1990's including the exquisitely filmed `Persuasion') literally paints a picture in motion of the train ferrying the family to the country by dusk that is in splendid harmony with Simon Lacey's musical score, and an image of W H Auden's poem `Night Mail' is fittingly conjured up: "Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, Shovelling white steam over her shoulder, Snorting noisily as she passes, Silent miles of wind-bent grasses."

The 1903 period detail of this remake is commendable, allowing for the author's use of 1870's red petticoats and the absence of the starched formal Edwardian capes of the 1970 film. The Bluebell Railway on the borders of the Capability Brown designed Sheffield Park in Sussex, replaces the Bronte country and Keighly and Worth Valley Railway of the previous adaptations. The well preserved rolling stock gets full promotional treatment and the longest restored tunnel on a private line is in no need of a temporary extension, as was required for its predecessor for the hare and hounds race. Incidentally the Rev W Awdry wrote a tribute to the Bluebell Railway in 1963 to add to his `Thomas the Tank Engine' collection with a tale dedicated to the line's first engine, Stepney, a Stroudley Terrier built in 1875.

The Old Gentleman role is perfectly filled by Richard Attenborough in his quintessential Santa Clause mode borrowed from the remake of `Miracle on 34th Street'. Jenny Agutter makes a wonderful transition from her memorable performance as Bobbie three decades earlier, into a different Mother to her predecessor, Dinah Sheridan, but with a grace and charm of her own. Jemina Rooper manages to combine a modern Roberta with a past innocence and brings maturity to the role with her 18 years, as she asks the painfully pertinent question of her mother as to how long you can remember someone you really love without seeing them. Jack Blumenau (starring in Peter Pan at the Savoy Theatre) and Clare Thomas prove very ably suited for the younger siblings of Peter and Phyllis, with touching but not mawkish performances. On first sight Gregor Fisher (currently to be seen in Richard Curtiss' directorial debut `Love Actually') struck me as an unusual choice for Perks and in stark contrast to the excitable Bernard Cribbins of the 1970 film. I am more used to seeing him in a string vest uttering incomprehensible Glaswegian, at least to my uninitiated Sassenach ears, in his guise as Rab C Nesbit, which probably coloured my initial impression. However, I warmed to his creation and he interacts well with the severe stationmaster (Clive Russell) and the rest of the cast. Sophie Thompson is naturally the shrinking violet that she does so well as Perks' wife, akin to her Miss Bates in `Emma' and the antithesis of her prurient bridesmaid in `Four Weddings and a Funeral'.

Agutter argues that Nesbit's desire for a utopian society is reflected in her writing as alluded to in the `The Phoenix and The Carpet', which the BBC turned into a welcome children's teatime serial in 1997, and that, like all her Edwardian novels, captures an innocence that is to be destroyed with the outbreak of the First World War. A further theme of Nesbit's novels concerns time and memory as Agutter cites on the Carlton website, taking from the 'Enchanted Castle', the following: "The plan of the world seems plain, like an easy sum that one writes in big figures on a child's slate. One wonders how one can ever have wondered about anything. Space is not; every place that one has seen or dreamed of is here. Time is not; into this instant is crowded all that one has ever done or dreamed of doing. It is a moment and it is eternity." The plan of the world is indeed very plain when we are young with the clean slate before us, it is only as we grow that we complicate the simplistic. We become so embroiled in life's mesh that by the time we realise what has happened we have been caught too tightly in the grasp of the here and now to extricate ourselves.

This very fitting tribute to a timeless classic that has never been out of print, should ensure its continued popularity for generations to come with both book and film available from Amazon's website.

Although Shakespeare's comedy is set in Sicily it was filmed, appropriately enough for this Anglo-American production, in Tuscany where large parts of it have been anglicised by the Chiantishire set. As the Prince of Arragon and his noblemen return home from war, Hero is wooed by Claudio whilst her older cousin Beatrice seeks to renew her warring with Benedick, her equal in wit who in response to her enquiry "But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?" declares what all reasonable people must feel when love takes over their reason: "Suffer love! A good epithet. I do suffer love, indeed, for I love thee against my will." Unseen just beneath the happy veneer of frivolity the bastard Don John has plans to seek revenge upon his brother the prince by spoiling the affair for his gullible friend. The roles of Beatrice and Benedick are here presented, if not originally plotted by Shakespeare, as the two key performances and how could they be anything other than with the remarkable Emma Thompson (`Sense and Sensibility') and Kenneth Branagh (`Henry V') bringing their dynamic energy to the parts. Such is the direction and brilliance of these two that despite their dazzlingly white garments they have the unfortunate effect of casting the rest of the characters into the shade.

Although plot devices from his earlier `Romeo & Juliet' and later `Othello' are used here, they are less satisfactorily developed than in the great tragedies. The one key issue I have with this play is with the fickle suitor being so easily forgiven by his former love after publicly humiliating her. I would have expected a more testing punishment from the Bard although he presumably decided to leave the original ancient Greek storyline alone, highlighting as it does the double standards of men and the traditional portrayal of meek acceptance by women. His creation however of the razor sharp and independent minded Beatrice is an obvious exception to this who entreats Benedick to kill Claudio for the ill treatment of her cousin. The most telling point of Benedick's high regard for Beatrice comes when he takes her word that in her soul she believes her relation innocent, and upon this his mind is then set to act for her.

The wisdom of the use of some of the American actors has been questioned but Branagh obviously had regard for his intended audience that is reflected in his eclectic casting. The dude (Keanu Reeves) from `Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' and the 'existentialist' hi-tech Matrix series is a witty choice when he exclaims he is a man of few words, although Don John's character does not possess Iago's full scale of villainy as Kenneth Branagh dastardly delineates in his own film version of `Othello'. Last year's Oscar winning Denzel Washington reliably lends presence and credibility to his role of Don Pedro. Michael Keaton as a ludicrously off-the-wall caricature Constable Dogberry ensures he at least gets noticed along with his sidekick Ben Elton, who borrows from his own infamous `Black Adder' series creation of Tony Robinson's Baldrick.

Fortuitously the Royal Shakespeare Company toured last year with a marvellously funny staging of the play with the superb Harriet Walter as, in the words of the reviewer for the Independent, the "dazzlingly attractive" Beatrice, and Nicholas Le Provost (currently in `Foyle's War' on ITV1) her splendid verbal sparring partner. Although Branagh's version gives a visual treat of the Tuscan landscape and some pretty actors it has to be said that, perhaps rightly and justly so, the RSC production out-acted, out-directed and out-classed the film with its fuller more polished company performance. With such stylish productions it is sad to hear of the latest RSC financial report showing a serious drop in revenues, an affliction affecting all forms of British art resulting from the reduction in tourists following the outrage of 9/11. The resultant if startling initiative by the RSC is to turn to the video games market, with `The Tempest' fittingly to be the lead play to lend itself to the fantasy treatment. Also worth mentioning here and viewing if a copy can possibly be tracked down, is Stuart Burge's 1984 theatre-on-television version for the BBC with Cherie Lunghi and Robert Lindsay wonderfully cast in the lead roles. Incidentally in June of last year Harriet Walter also contributed to the excellent new Faber series of `Actors on Shakespeare' with her illuminating and empathetic interpretation of the Macbeths' "folie a deux" (although regretfully a couple of decades too late for my own O'level script I would highly recommend it to any students of the text), as well as producing her own thoroughly instructive and entertaining thoughts on acting in `Other People's Shoes'.

As a further point of interest the film's title lent itself to Michael Rubbo's 2001 Australian documentary `Much Ado About Something', shown on BBC4 this autumn, on an entertaining but not definitive examination of the age-old question of whether Christopher Marlowe was really behind Shakespeare's genius. Also for the BBC, an ardent Michael Woods earlier gave an entertaining and well-presented counter argument. Whatever the truth, Shakespeare's body of work has had an undeniably profound impact on the spoken and written word and with the translation into eighty languages his influence reaches around the Globe. Amongst its bewildering potpourri of a list compiled last year by the BBC of the Greatest Britons ever, he at least rightly featured in the top 5.

This film certainly makes a do about something that is clearly a fundamental truth of the battle between the sexes. A lot of noise and energy has gone into this production to ensure it remains something in the memory of the viewing public. It is readily accessible Shakespeare and for that merit it ranks alongside Mel Gibson's `Hamlet' (directed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1990 and at half the running time of Branagh's 1996 four-hour marathon) though it can be easily differentiated by more humour and a somewhat lower body count.