Le jardinier espagnol

A minor English diplomat is posted to Catalunya in the aftermath of his collapsed marriage. He takes his young boy with him, with visions of nurturing the father-son bond. Unfortunately, Brande is a 'stuffed shirt', a cold prig of a man who fails to comprehend his son's needs. He orders the gardens of the residence to be reduced to bland English regularity, instead of leaving them as a wild, overgrown delight for a child's imagination.

Jose is jobless and penniless, but the local pelota champion is a prince among men - young, handsome, charismatic and kind. When Jose is taken on as the gardener, he begins to supplant Brande in Nico's affections.

A decision was obviously taken, pre-production, to dispense with Spanish accents. There is some sense in this, because it can seriously detract from the film's purpose if the actors are constantly struggling to sustain funny voices, but it does produce an odd result. Dirk Bogarde is 'darkened up' for the part of Jose and looks great, but his smooth middle-class English delivery seems incongruous in the mouth of a Catalan labourer. When Nico visits Jose's home, every generation of the extended family speaks flawless English. That would be amazing in the year 2000: how likely was it in 1956?

Brande (played beautifully by Michael Hordern as a spiritual cripple) embarks on a campaign of emotional blackmail towards Nico and a policy of bullying Jose. He is incapable of seeing that this approach is doomed to failure, or that the subtly obsequious Garcia (Cyril Cusack) is the Iago to his own Othello. The ungracious refusal of Jose's fish marks the first breach of trust between father and son, but character is fate, and Brande is set on a course from which he cannot extricate himself. The confrontation between Brande and Nico on the staircase is one of the best things in the film. Young Jon Whiteley, in the part of Nico, gives an outstanding performance.

Bogarde plays the accusation scene with spot-on coolness, but would the theft of a watch, even at Franco's apogee, even if it involved a foreign diplomat, merit custody, handcuffs and an armed Civil Guard escort? Would someone accused of such a minor offence really prefer to take to the hills as a brigand?

Brande's Lear-like volte face in the rain-sodden mill is an affecting scene, and though the whole thing is rather far-fetched, it works as an entertaining fable.

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.

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.

AJ Cronin 's book is a cruel one, and its denouement is not a happy one .It is actually one of the most depressing ending I know .

Although played by first-rate actor Dirk Bogarde and wiz kid John Whiteley he meets again after the poignant "hunted" ,the readers will be fatally disappointed ; the story was strongly watered down ,not only the ending ,but also the scenes with the charlatan /shrink Harrington Brande who must have got a Mickey Mouse degree .Which would not matter if it did not cause such a harrowing tragedy .The scenes in José's house are a pale reflection of the writer's depiction .

Fortunately ,the rapport José has with his friend,thanks to the sensitiveness of both principals ,is intact .One can enjoy their little trip in the country ,where they fish trouts and share their picnic; the scene in which José suffers humiliation when he brings his gift to the vain father was kept and climaxes the movie ; the way both friends communicate when the proud father forbides them to speak to each other warms the viewer.The polota game is also a great moment.

It was impossible to transfer the book to the screen while making a movie aimed at the family market .In the end ,Garcia will take all the blame deservedly and the father becomes a father again ,which has nothing to do with Cronin's bitter epilogue in Stockholm .

Watch it ,anyway;both Bogarde and his young co-star deserve your undivided attention and all your admiration.But,please,read the book afterward.

DIRK BOGARDE gives one of his more restrained performances in the title role, a man whose friendship with a young boy (JON WHITELEY) drives a wedge between the boy and his over-protective father (MICHAEL HORDERN). It's the interplay between these three characters that drives the story and there are some melodramatic events before the happy ending.

But it takes its time in developing the characterizations, sags in the middle and then picks up again during the last half-hour when all the melodramatic conflicts have to be resolved.

Unfortunately, the TCM print shows murky color photography (especially after showing a dazzling print of BLACK NARCISSUS). Whether the film was shot in a process other than the usual British color I don't know, but the color photography was sometimes less than satisfying.

The story is one of friendship that the boy so badly needs when his father has too little time to share many activities with him. The bond between him and the Spanish gardener is based on mutual trust and the boy comes to hate his father when he realizes that he's been the cause of the man being jailed for a crime he didn't commit.

JON WHITELEY gives a remarkably natural performance for a child actor and his scenes with DIRK BOGARDE and MICHAEL HORDERN are excellently played.

There are problems of pacing that plague some parts of the film, but the last half is particularly absorbing and leads to a satisfying conclusion. Well worth watching.