Le jardinier espagnol

The "Spanish Gardener" is a warm-hearted film that entertains, teaches and gratifies all at the same time. Dirk Bogarde is a wonderful actor who never got his due as a great interpreter of character on screen. This is a simple film, but what a film it is! Sometimes simplicity is a more powerful conveyor of truth than complex renditions that lose the audience before they can redeem themselves. So much garbage is being produced currently on film today that I wonder why filmmakers don't just sit back and learn from their predecessors, often English directors, who can teach so much just by simply observing how they craft their films?

Jose helps form a bond of friendship with a young boy that cannot be broken even by the boy's jealous older father who selfishly guards his young son as a prized possession who must not have contact with anyone. This film reminds me of "A Man Without a Face" (1993) with Mel Gibson, another wonderful film.

I cannot recommend this film too highly. It will warm your heart and break it too. But isn't that what films are supposed to do? Touch your heart and get at the universal emotions of people, much like a Beethoven Symphony would, to stir, conquer and triumph! This 1957 film is a victory because of fine directing, acting, story and execution of plot which allows the audience time to absorb and feel the emotions that develop within and between the characters, resolving itself towards a beautifully crafted ending.

Dirk Bogarde is "The Spanish Gardener" in this 1956 film also starring Michael Hordern, Cyril Cusack and Jon Whiteley.

Hordern is Harrington Brande, a low-level diplomat sent, against his wishes, to Catalunya. His marriage is over, and his young son Nicholas (Whiteley) is everything to him - so much so, that he cannot see that his son needs to be with children his own age and participate in the same types of activities that other children do.

He hires a gardener, Jose (Bogarde) who befriends the boy and becomes almost a surrogate father to him, letting him help with the planting and digging, talking with him and playing with him. When Nicholas' father finds out how close the gardener and his son have become, he forbids the boy to speak to him any longer. When that doesn't work, he takes further steps to make sure that Jose doesn't steal the love of his son.

This isn't the plot of the Cronin novel - in that story, the father is a closet case who can't handle his attraction to the gardener.

Nevertheless, "The Spanish Gardener" is a wonderful character study of a gentle soul with a kind heart, the gardener, coming up against a class-conscious, jealous, embittered man who thinks the best way to keep his son's affection is to make sure he never socializes with anyone else who may pose a threat. He doesn't realize that the worse he treats Jose, the more his son hates him, and that love sometimes means letting go.

The acting is superb. Hordern is fabulous as a person whose career hasn't progressed because he hasn't progressed as a person, and Whiteley is sympathetic and earnest as the young boy, whom the gardener calls Nico. Bogarde is at the peak of his handsomeness in this film, and gives a beautiful performance, playing a man of humility but not submission.

Interestingly, I doubt a film like this could be made today. I'm sure in the '50s, the friendship between the gardener and Nico was taken for what it was without suspicion of sexual misconduct, which would certainly be an element now and add another dimension. Simpler times.

Definitely worth seeing.

I just want to correct a little misstatement made by FAC (fachang@mailexcite.com) in his (or her) well written Spanish Gardiner comment. He (or she) mistakenly says Spanish Gardiner and How Green Was My Valley were novels both written by A.J. Cronin. In fact, the latter was written by Richard Llewellyn.

Spanish Gardiner also made a strong impression on me, since I was at the age of the boy in the film when I saw it first in a cheap black and white copy, at a garden cinema in Izmir, in the Fifties. Dirk Bogarde had been my hero then due to the Spanish Gardiner in which he was unjustly treated and along with it his other two films in both of which he died. (In A Tale of Two Cities he was the first character I watched being beheaded by the guillotine. In The Singer Not The Song, he was a handsome, malicious, romantic villain wearing black from top to hills and paying for his sinful deeds at the end.) I was very sorry for Bogarde at that time. I thought however he was a bandit villain (in The Singer Not The Song) he should marry beautiful Mylene Demongeot. (Oh! How could I have forgotten her for so many years!) COSKUN BUKTEL

The very first frame brilliantly sets the mood and theme. As the movie opens, young Nicholas is isolated on the frame's left side leaving the remainder to a void, specifically, the gloomy interior of a British Embassy. He is peering out a window at a busy street below. Soon we hear raised voices from the next room. Then, two men enter, and the story swings into action. But this first glimpse shows us what we need to know—a lonely, curious boy separated from the world by elegantly impersonal surroundings and apart from adults in his life. In effect, the movie's 90-minute remainder shows us the boy's difficult journey from that detached space above to the worldly space below.

Naturally, a human interest story like this depends heavily on the quality of the performances. Fortunately, they're almost uniformly outstanding, particularly Hordern's. As the emotionally bottled-up father he's simply superb. He's very good at concealing unwanted emotions before they betray inner conflict and possible weakness. And being a diplomat in British employ, the self-discipline goes logically with the job. The trouble for Brande (Hordern) is that he has allowed that professional demeanor to take over his private life, as well, resulting in an emotional prig who's already lost his wife and is in the process of losing his son. The latter are quietly wrenching scenes, especially when the Spanish gardener Jose (Bogarde) arrives and the boy's conflicts become painfully evident.

It's significant that the boy's mentoring companion is made a gardener—that is, a man who knows how to make young things grow. (Note too how quickly the screenplay connects the handsome Jose with a girlfriend, thereby forestalling possible innuendo.) Ironically, then, it's the understanding menial and not the father, who provides Nicholas with the needed opportunity to grow. Thus, when Nicholas doffs his white shirt to join in the gardening and the sun, it's a highly symbolic act, and I was reminded of those imperial times when the conquering British were disparagingly said "to go native" by adopting customs from the locals. As a result, the rivalry between the cultured diplomat and the athletic gardener can be taken in that broader sense as involving more than matters of personal jealousy. Thus Dad's first admonition to Nicholas is to put the shirt back on, and all that signifies.

To me, the movie's first two-thirds come across as a triumph in the art of stylistic naturalism—the riveting seaside vistas, the subdued performances (excepting Cusack's overdone Garcia), along with the sensitive dialogue— for example, note the subtle lengths Robert Buford and others go to so as not to offend the insecure Brande. However—in passing —I do think the accusatory line about failing as a man is unnecessary and contrary to the film's strength, a strength that lies in "showing" rather than in "telling". In short, we've already been shown Brande's key character failing, no need to tell us.

Unfortunately, the movie's final third turns baldly melodramatic and contrived. The stagey storm and chance meetings at the mill may provide some dramatic action, but they also undercut the modulated naturalism that's so effectively defined the movie. I don't know how much of the melodrama was in the Cronin novel, but the sudden departure prevents the movie from being the classic it should have been, at least in my little book.

Nonetheless, it's an unforgettable film in so many ways. Of course, the slow pace is not everyone's cup of tea-- which may be why the last part was turned into melodrama. Still and all, there's so much that's impressive, from Whiteley's affecting performance to Bogarde's smiling approach from the bosom of the seaside. I guess the story could be taken as an allegorical comment on what happens to even the coldest-climate British when introduced to the soothing rays of the Spanish Riviera. However that may be, it remains a moving film of memorable moments and one of my favorites.

A beautifully filmed (in VistaVision and Technicolor) and very interesting character study. A sort of Eternal Triangle story where the three main characters are male. Adapted from A. J. Cronin's controversial 1950 novel of the same name, the plot concerns a middle aged diplomat at the British Consul in Madrid, Harrington Brande (Michael Hordern), who is posted to a sleepy coastal town on the Spanish Costa Brava. His wife has left him and all he has is his eleven years old son, Nicholas (played by eleven years old Jon Whiteley), on whom he dotes and of whom he is so possessive that he will not allow him to go to school or to make any friends at all, even of boys his own age. Brande wants his son all to himself. His excuse for this is that Nicholas is "delicate", having suffered a serious childhood illness and must be "protected." When Brande hires Jose (Dirk Bogarde) as a gardener for the villa, Jose and the lonely Nicholas become firm friends from their first meeting, much to the consternation of the insanely jealous Brande, who goes to much trouble to destroy the friendship between his son and the gardener.

At the time, Jon Whiteley's parents were concerned about the implied sexual relationship between Jose and Nicholas in Cronin's novel and were assured by the director, Philip Leacock and the producer and screenwriter, John Bryan, that "the darker side of Cronin's novel would be omitted and the film designed for family consumption." One scene from Chapter 15 of the novel that was cut entirely from the film was where, at Brande's insistence, his friend Professor Halevy (the character changed to Doctor Harvey for the film and played by Geoffrey Keen) has a "man to man" talk with Nicholas as the boy lays on his bed in his semi-darkened bedroom and talks to Nicholas about the boy's sexual feelings and tries to get him to admit to having a sexual relationship with Jose…especially when he and Jose went fishing together in the isolated countryside…something which, much to the consternation of Halevy, who is convinced that there is something of a sexual nature going on between them, Nicholas will not admit to. Even though all this was left out of the film, the film still comes across as ambiguous and the viewer is left to put their own interpretation on the relationships between Jose and Nicholas and between Nicholas and his very possessive father.

Overall, the performances are uniformly fine, only in one instance coming across as contrived…the scene where Nicholas runs into Jose's arms and sobs. Good as he was within his range, Jon Whiteley just couldn't handle this scene and comes across as the worst sounding and most unconvincing sobber in film history. Whether or not he could have handled the scene of the "man to man" talk about his character's sexual feelings and his feelings for Jose if it had been left in the film is a debatable point. Certainly, he had the right director in Philip Leacock to help him through such a scene, as it was Leacock who, three years earlier, had directed him in "The Kidnappers", for which Jon had won an Academy Award.