Cause célèbre

Terence Rattigan liked to do plays based on actual crimes. He is best known for THE WINSLOW BOY, based on the 1911 Archer-Shee Case involving the social ruin of a naval cadet and his family when the cadet is accused of stealing postal money orders from his fellow cadets. It was twice filmed (both times quite well). CAUSE CELEBRE is based on the 1935 Alma Rattenbury - George Stonor murder case. Alma was a somewhat talented woman (she composed popular songs) who married Francis Rattenbury, an architect (his various public and private buildings in Vancouver are still part of the city's skyline). Francis was older than Alma, and she began an affair with Stonor, a handyman they hired. One night Stonor shot Francis, and he died in a couple of days. Stonor was arrested, and then so was Alma. It sort of resembles the Thompson-Bywater tragedy in 1922, but Alma was shown to have had nothing to do with the shooting. Stonor, however, was found guilty and condemned to death. Alma could not stand the loss of her young lover. She went down to a river near her home, and stabbed herself to death. Ironically, due to his age, Stonor's sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. Eventually he was released. However, in the 1980s (he was still alive) he was arrested on a morals charge. The play of course only deals with the events in 1935.

It never ceases to amaze me how one actor can so involve you in their characterization as to make you forget the person and remember the part. Helen Mirren is one of the greatest actors alive today. This is now available on video through Lance Entertainment. Watch it and you will be amazed. A great script interpreted by great actors. What more can you want from a film?

Is it any wonder that the Brits kick our butts when it comes to putting out good theater? Look at this cast: Helen Mirren, David Morrissey, Harry Andrews and David Suchet in a pre-Hercule Poirot role as a barrister. The story based on a defense of a woman's (Mirren) live-in handy-man lover (Morrissey) who violently kills her elderly impotent husband (Andrews). The barrister mounts a defense of how this younger, naive man misinterpreted the woman's involvement with him. The case takes strange twists as the woman winds the unwilling other victim whose only crime is one of indiscretion. Fine, fine acting and a gripping, well-written drama. I'm amazed it is not available on video. If it rolls around on PBS, be sure to check it out.

The Yorkshire-born architect Francis Rattenbury (1867- 1935) is something of a national hero in Canada where, in the 1890s and 1900s, he designed a number of iconic buildings, including the Parliament Buildings of British Columbia, which he designed at the age of only 25. In Britain, however, he is best remembered as the victim in a sensational murder case. On 23rd March 1935 he was discovered in the sitting room of his home in Bournemouth with severe head injuries, having suffered a series of blows with a carpenter's mallet. He died a few days later. His much younger wife Alma confessed to the crime, but did so falsely in the vain hope of shielding the real killer, her teenage lover George Stoner.

Alma and Stoner were both arrested and put on trial for the killing. The problem facing Alma's defence team was not her false confession, which she later withdrew and which the police had never taken seriously, but the widespread public hostility to their client. Public opinion, encouraged by hysterical reporting in the national press, was firmly of the view that she had encouraged and incited Stoner to carry out the crime. This narrative was eagerly adopted by Stoner's defence team, who believed that their only hope of saving him from the gallows was to paint him as the victim of an evil older seductress. (At the time of the killing, Rattenbury was 67, Alma in her late thirties and Stoner 18, young enough to be given the death penalty under the law as it then stood).

These events were later dramatised by Terence Rattigan in his stage play "Cause Celebre", which formed the basis for this film, made by Anglia Television, part of the ITV network. (Rattigan had earlier written another play based on a real-life court case, "The Winslow Boy", which was also filmed), It follows the events of the Rattenbury case fairly closely, although Alma's young lover is here renamed "George Bowman"; the real George Stoner was still alive in 1987. Scenes showing the progress of the affair between Alma and George and the killing of Rattenbury are intercut with scenes showing events in the courtroom.

There are two particularly fine performances from Helen Mirren as Alma, trapped in a passionless marriage to a much older man, and from Harry Andrews as Francis, grumpy and irascible but not altogether unsympathetic. Andrews would have been 76 in 1987, nearly a decade older than the real Francis Rattenbury. (This was his last film before his death in 1989). David Morrissey plays George as the sort of rather gauche and charmless young man who has never had a girlfriend of his own age, who feels an intense passion for an attractive older woman but who is unable to cope when, unexpectedly, he finds that his feelings are returned. One thing that, because of his youth and inexperience, he is unable to understand is that sexual attraction and affection are not the same thing. Francis and Alma's marriage may be passionless but it is not necessarily loveless. Alma loves her elderly husband as a sort of father-figure, but George mistakes her affection for him as evidence of a continuing sexual relationship, provoking his fatal fit of jealousy. Another good performance comes from David Suchet as Alma's defence lawyer Terence O'Connor, a humane man trying his best to save his client from the gallows even though she seems indifferent as to whether she lives or dies.

Had this been made as a feature film, it would probably be celebrated today as part of the great revival of the British cinema in the eighties, along with the likes of "Chariots of Fire", "Gandhi", "The Mission" and "Shirley Valentine". TV movies, however, tend to fall back into obscurity after they have been shown once, with a possible repeat a few years later, and so it has proved with "Cause Celebre". The film is today little known, although it does occasionally turn up on television, largely on the specialist movie channel "Talking Pictures" (which deserves credit for trying to keep alive films neglected by the major networks). And this is a film which deserves to be better known, both as an acute psychological study of a love-triangle and as a gripping courtroom thriller. 8/10.

As usual, Helen Mirren has it all wrapped up. I knew it would be great when she goes from smiling to weeping in the course of 10 seconds at the piano scene near the beginning of the film. Amazing how she does that. THis character seemed lighter than most of the characters she plays--but underneath you know that she is suffering and drowning in her despair from the very beginning. You think that the woman is hopelessly flawed because of her seemingly superficial need for money and status, and for her interest in a much younger man. Then you realize she is playing such a complicated character that you can't even imagine how she did it. Helen mirren. Amazing.