Le jardinier espagnol

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.

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.

The Spanish Gardener is an adaptation from A. J. Cronin's novel of the same name. It tells the story of a British diplomat called Harrington Brande {Michael Hordern excellently grumpy} who is relocated to Cataluña, Spain, after his marriage falls by the way side. Taking his young son Nicholas {Jon Whiteley tender} with him, Harrington is perturbed when Nicholas forms a loving and trusting friendship with the estate gardener Jose {Dirk Bogarde charming}. Bitten by jealousy and tortured by his own inadequacies as a father, Brande becomes nasty and spiteful, and it gets to the point where he will stop at nothing to break up the friendship. All of which is keenly observed by the shifty, and often drunk butler, whom it seems has a very vested interest in the family proceedings.

The Spanish Gardener is a lovely sweet movie that really hits the spot if one is looking for a warming humanistic fable. It has no pretensions to be ground breaking or feel the need to garner critical appraisal. It's message is simple and it relies {and succeeds in my case} on the viewers basic willingness to be engaged by its integrity and story telling worth. Yes it's far from flawless. You will need to accept Dirk Bogarde as being Spanish, what with his fluctuating tan shades throughout the picture being obvious, not really helping that train of thought. Then you will have to get over a disappointment that the budget didn't let the production utilise more of the sumptuous Cataluña {oh my that Sea} location {interiors done at Pinewood Studios}. But couple the warmth and sincerity of the story with John Veale's lovely score, and it's not with the niggles that you come away with.

It's not one I would suggest you rush out to see, but if you get the chance to watch this film, you should do so, for I'm sure you will feel all the better for it come the end. 7/10

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

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.