Peter O'Toole

Peter O'Toole on attending the Academy Awards ceremony in 2003: "I enjoyed it. The only thing that wasn't enjoyable was in the green room. I said, 'Can I have a drink?'  'We have lemon juice, apple juice, still or sparkling water.'  I said, 'No, I want a drink. No drink? All right, I'm fucking off.'  A man with earphones said, 'No! No!' and eventually some vodka was smuggled in."

Legend!

HELLRAISERS: The Stunt Man

Fast forward from Peter O’Toole playing a tyrannical Nazi general in an over-the-top war movie in 1967 to Peter O’Toole playing a tyrannical director making an over-the-top war movie in 1978*. And whaddaya know, it’s the director who’s the most dangerous character. Our boy allegedly based his portrayal of messaniac helmer Eli Cross on David Lean.

I’m saying nothing.

The perks of retrospect permit the observation that Eli Cross sounds quite similar to Eli Roth.

Again, I’m saying nothing.

Besides, Cross is shooting a war film not an exercise in torture porn. Or is he? Everything is about the shot; about provoking the audience. “I know a man who made an anti-war movie,” Cross reminisces, “a good one. When it was shown in his home town, army enlistment went up six hundred percent.” Cross wants his movie to be subversive, and to that end views newly hired stunt man Cameron (Steve Railsback) as more or less expendable. What’s a mere human life compared to getting the shot?

Cross’s fixation on getting the shot is demonstrated when a camera quits shooting with 22 seconds of still-usable film in the camera. When he dares to be flippant and ask what Cross could possibly have captured in 22 seconds, the director rounds on him: “In 22 seconds, I could break your fucking spine. In 22 seconds, I could pinch your head off like a fucking insect and spin it all over the fucking pavement. In 22 seconds, I could put 22 bullets inside your ridiculous gut. What I seem unable to do in 22 seconds is to keep you from ruining my film.”

So with Cross monstrously egomaniacal and the stunts he demands crazy if not suicidal, why on earth does Cameron go along with them? Ah, thereby hangs the dynamic of Richard Rush’s film.

Cameron is a Vietnam vet with a hazy past. He’s on the lam. In the opening scene, he avoids arrest by a couple of hick cops who could have wandered in from ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ and duffs up a would-be hard nut who tries to prevent his escape. Hitchhiking out of town, he’s crossing a bridge when he thumbs a lift from a man driving an old Duesenberg made up to look like a German staff car; the driver responds by kicking him out of the car and then almost running him down. Cameron heaves a lump of iron after him and walks angrily away. Next thing he knows the car has gone off the bridge and a helicopter has appeared out of nowhere, Cross borne down out of the skies in Leni Riefenstahl-ish magnificence.

Cameron has found himself, inadvertently, in the middle of one of the key shots in Cross’s movie. Moreover, he’s just killed the stunt man who was about to engineer said moment. Cross, quickly intuiting that Cameron has something to hide, makes Cameron an offer: he’ll keep the cops off Cameron’s back and in return Cameron will take the stunt man’s place. Reluctantly Cameron agrees to it, and Cross begins by having the on-set hairdresser give him a do that emphasises his resemblance to the dear departed.

A warped and satirical battle of wills ensues. Cameron engages with his new career head-on, earning the approbation of the crew and the affections of leading lady Nina (Barbara Hershey), while Cross manipulates him at every twist and turn until Cameron becomes convinced that Cross wants him to take the dead man’s place in every single respect including the all-important bit about not being alive anymore.

And this is where, for all its flaws, ‘The Stunt Man’ resoundingly succeeds. (And there are flaws: I was going to use the phrase “gaps in the logic of the film”, but “gaps” suggests restricted pockets of space you’d be hard pushed to squeeze through. The gaps I’m talking about are huge, wide-open, drive-a-fleet-of-trucks-through-without-touching-the-sides affairs. Also, it’s overlong; the humour doesn’t always gel; and Railsback’s performance is plank-like.) But where ‘The Stunt Man’ works is in its blurring of the lines between reality and make-believe, between authorial conception and directorial vision, between perception and paranoia.

“If God could do the tricks that we can do he’d be a happy man,” Cross declares, delighting in the integration of rampant egomania and huckster-like chicanery that epitomises his personality. It’s a key line. ‘The Stunt Man’ is a house of cards, a hall of mirrors, a tissue of lies and a web of deceit. And so it should be. It’s about Hollywood.



* ‘The Stunt Man’ requires its audience to think, therefore the studio got cold feet, shelved it, and it was 1980 before the film saw the light of day.

HELLRAISERS: The Night of the Generals

An all-star production of the over-produced, over-publicized, over-long archetypally ’60s variety, ‘The Night of the Generals’ blends murder mystery, conspiracy thriller and war movie tropes into a heady cocktail of WTF. We’re talking two and a half hours of hopelessly confused narrative digressions and howlingly incongruous scenes.

Occupied Poland, 1942: Major Grau (Omar Sharif) attends the scene after a prostitute is murdered in a dingy tenement building. Dressed in an ankle length greatcoat and black boots, he questions a witness who is hesitant about co-operating. And with good reason. “He was an officer,” the witness mumbles fearfully. Grau asks how he knows. “He was wearing trousers like yours.” Trousers, that is with a red stripe. The kind of natty apparel you don’t get to strut around in till they make you a general.

Like me reiterate at this point that Grau is dressed throughout this scene in a long greatcoat and high boots. His trousers are obscured. The man could be wearing a freakin’ kilt! Also, he’s played by Omar Sharif, whose swarthy Egyptian looks, while toned down with a dusting of white powder, remain more swarthy and ethnic than you’d credit anyone with in a military hierarchy based on Aryan purity.

The incongruities continue. The Polish hooker is revealed as a German agent, only for this tantalising subplot to disappear. A Corporal who’s a talented pianist complains at having to play Chopin when Wagner is his composer of choice. (Aside from the orchestral piece ‘Siegfried-Idyll’, Wagner’s entire output was opera or lieder; he wrote no piano music.)

Then there’s the lurching flash forwards to the mid-Sixties as Interpol agent Inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret) – a man whose connection to the events of the war isn’t established until halfway through the film – plods around tracking down the surviving protagonists and asking them blandly procedural questions in a manner that makes ‘Midsomer Murders’ look like James Ellroy on crack.

Oh yeah, and no sooner has the mise-en-scene returned the audience to Poland in 1942 than it’s suddenly Paris in 1944 and everyone’s been transferred and have co-incidentally met up again. Or maybe it’s not such a co-incidence, since ‘The Night of the Generals’ takes another lurch at this point and the 20th July plot (you know, the old bomb-in-a-briefcase under the table, let’s kill der Führer routine) is in full swing and all but one of the potential murderers are involved in the conspiracy.

But wait, you protest. The 20th July plot took place back in Germany. What’s all this malarkey about the conspirators being in Paris? Well, they’re waiting for word that the craply-moustachioed one is toast, whereupon they can establish a new government and curtail the war and … oh, what the hell? The point is, the conspirators have to keep the non-conspirator out of the way for a couple of days, and some fucking genius involved in the production of this Euro-pudding decided that huge amounts of tension and suspense could be wrung from one of the major characters being driven around Paris interminably and having a Stendhal Syndrome kind of turn when he goes to view some allegedly decadent art (you know, the kind that features naked women). This character being a hardcore Hitlerite and having a tendency to viciousness, could he be the murderer?

There is absolutely no mystery to ‘The Night of the Generals’. No suspense. It is by turns ludicrous, clichéd, overacted and pedestrian in its direction. It boasts a powerhouse cast – Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray (two Blofelds in the same movie! playing Nazis!), Christopher Plummer, Coral Browne, Philippe Noiret, John Gregson and Nigel Stock – all of whom are miscast, underused or saddled with appalling dialogue: Noiret’s is exposition-heavy and, although at ease in English-language productions elsewhere in his filmography, he seems distinctly unconfident here; and pity Pleasance, desperately trying to breathe life into a clunker of a line like “am I to assume that if Stage 1 meets with resistance we will go to Stage 2 and possibly Stage 3” (I can only quote Paula’s monumentally derisive comment: “Wow, so there isn’t a Stage 1a, 1b or 1z, then?”)

All, I should say, except Peter O’Toole. He takes hygiene-obsessed General Tanz (ostensibly the most one-note character in the whole piece) and imbues him with the insouciance of T.E. Lawrence (or at least the version of Lawrence essayed by O’Toole in David Lean’s epic), the provocative and oddly threatening dandyism of Dirk Bogarde in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, and an icily ironic remove that pre-supposes Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.

Armed with cap, boots, swagger stick, leather gloves and a piercing thousand-yard stare, O’Toole stalks through the film, disdaining Anatole Litvak’s somnolent direction, rolling the deficiencies of the script around in his mouth before spitting them out, and making mediocre material memorable simply by treating it, imperiously, with the contempt it deserves.

HELLRAISERS: Plenty of O'Toole

Deciding on the Hellraisers project – rave about one film a month, alternating between the careers of Messrs Burton, Harris, O’Toole and Reed – I logged into my LoveFilm account and enthusiastically updated my list with the highlights of these gentlemen’s back catalogue. I arranged the list so that I’d get a fair selection for each actor that would give me plenty of material for the next few months.

Many of my choices, however, were flagged with “short wait”, “long wait” or “very long wait”, which I am convinced is a euphemism for “there is a copy of this on DVD, honest, but we largely suspect it’s being used as a beer mat by an oil-rig worker based off the coast of Shetland, but the moment we get it back we’ll send to you, honest we will”.

The first two hellraiser titles to hit my doormat were ‘The Night of the Generals’ and ‘The Stunt Man’. And so it is that the project kicks off, over the next two evenings, with a Peter O’Toole double bill.

Hellraisers

There are some film books that effortlessly pin down an era in cinema history, such as Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’. There are some that chronicle in car-crash detail the disastrous consequences of a misconceived, miscast, all round flop – Julie Salamon’s ‘The Devil’s Candy’. There are some autobiographies that are so staggeringly egomaniacal (Michael Powell’s ‘A Life in Movies’) or so elegantly persuasive (any of Dirk Bogarde’s memoirs) that the truth hardly matters. There are diaries that reveal the day-to-day frustrations of even the greatest directors (Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Time Within Time’). There are biographies that so effectively get under the skin of their subject (Kevin Brownlow’s book on David Lean; John Coldstream’s on Bogarde) that they remain unforgettable.

Then there’s a book like Robert Sellers’s ‘Hellraisers: the Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed’, which is an unapologetic way-hey-the-lads celebration of the collective boozing, brawling and bad behaviour (womanizing needs to be added but I can’t think of a synonym beginning with “B” which will preserve the alliteration) of four of the most devil-may-care talents ever to grace the silver screen.

Because believe it or not, between the bars and the arrests and the brawls with paparazzi and the on-off romances (mentioning no names, Mr Burton) these boys actually made the odd film or two.

In fact, between them, they clocked up some of the most visceral, intense, challenging, dynamic and kick-ass performances in cinema: think of Burton losing it on the pulpit in the opening scene of ‘The Night of the Iguana’, Harris looking like he’s about to ask the fucking camera outside in just about every frame of ‘This Sporting Life’, O’Toole casually announcing “we have taken Aqaba” in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Reed getting stuck into a little nude wrestling with Alan Bates in ‘Women in Love’. And that’s just for starters …

From next month I’ll be running an ongoing series on The Agitation of the Mind, celebrating the bad boys of British cinema. There will be booze. There will be blood. There will be some fucking great movies. It all kicks off first week in May but until then the bar is open at The Agitation of the Liver, so raise your glasses to these gentlemen, drink to their hellraising and rue the fact that we live in a world where Zac Efron headlines movies, launches a thousand merchandising products and doesn’t even have the common decency to trash a restaurant, shag for England (oh all right then, America) and wake up in a holding cell wondering what time the pubs open.

Venus

My thanks to Viv Apple for the following piece:

The Velázquez painting, “The Toilet of Venus” is perfection. I had the pleasure of seeing it in an exhibition of the painter's work at the National Gallery two years ago. I saw Roger Michell’s ‘Venus’ at the cinema just before I visited the gallery, and I have to say that the film was pretty close to that description as well.

The ‘Venus’ of the film is Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the great niece of ageing actor Ian (Leslie Phillips), one of a trio who regularly meet up in a caff for drinks and regrets. The other thespians are Richard Griffiths, and Peter O’Toole as Maurice, who is captivated by Jessie as soon as she comes to look after Ian in return for a room in his London flat while she looks for work.

Jessie is a bolshy 19-year-old, both repulsed by and emotionally drawn to Maurice, who conveys her confused feelings with an amazing skill and economy of words. Their relationship is tender, erotic, and revealing of their changing attitudes towards each other.

Vanessa Redgrave as Maurice’s ex-wife features in only two telling scenes, filling in the background to the old philanderer’s re-awakened longings. They’ve both been there, done that, and understand each other.

As in all the best films and the best reality, the story interweaves hope with resignation, hilarity with despair. Peter O’Toole was rightfully nominated for an Oscar for his part (he lost out to Forest Whittaker for ‘The Last King of Scotland’), and all the performances match the sharpness of writing and direction.


by Viv Apple

100th Post: PERSONAL FAVES: Ratatouille

'The Incredibles' was a work of genius, the film that got me genuinely enthusiastic about Pixar. The follow-up, John Lasseter's 'Cars', attracted some of the most indifferent reviews the studio has yet received. Its main failing - so the critical consensus seemed to have it - was that it wasn't 'The Incredibles'.

Personally, I enjoyed 'Cars': even if it's not the out-and-out masterpiece its predecessor was, it's still a damn good film - with a great ending. And there's no arguing that the level of animation raised the bar yet further.

Then came 'Ratatouille'. It arrived on a wave of publicity that made the marketing campaign for 'Revenge of the Sith' look reserved. It had a title that didn't exactly roll off the tongue (the posters featured a pronunciation guide!) and it was about a rat who enjoyed cooking.

A rat? I thought. In a restaurant? This doesn't look good.

I was wrong. I was about as wrong as I've ever been about anything. 'Ratatouille' is Pixar's cleverest, most nuanced, most imaginative, most beautifully animated work to date.

Where to start on what makes it so great?

Brad Bird's script and direction. The very idea of a rat taking advice from the ghost of a dead chef as he teams up with an incompetent dishwasher/garbage boy to create culinary masterpieces which turn around the fortunes of an ailing restaurant calls not so much for a suspension of disbelief but a bloody great industrial crane to winch up the audience's disbelief, lower it onto one of those low-loaders that are so big and so wide that the truck towing it needs a police escort, and haul it off to a warehouse the size of Texas. Bird achieves this by taking time to establish character and situation, the main character here being Remy the rat (voiced by comedian Patton Oswalt).

The first act sets up Remy as a connoisseur of good food, his brother Emile (Peter Sohn) as an archetypal rat living off the barely edible (Remy's attempts to broaden Emile's palate provide much of the comedy in the early scenes), and their over-bearing father Django (Brian Dennehy) as the pack leader. Django scorns Remy's dietary refinements and insists that Remy is just a rat, the same as the rest of the pack. The conflict between them - family vs. individuality; the human perception of Remy as vermin vs. Remy's desire to integrate with a world beyond the pack - gives the film a surprising depth and poignancy, particularly when Django shows Remy a shop window filled with traps, poisons and the dangling corpses of rats thus disposed of.

Human machinations are just as insensitive elsewhere. Remy's infiltration of a farmhouse kitchen (Django and the pack are all nested in the rafters) sees the little old lady who lives there go psycho with a shotgun, almost demolishing her home in her obsession with blasting the rodents. Fleeing the carnage, the pack heads for a nearby river where Remy becomes separated from them. Washed up in a sewer beneath Paris, Remy goes above ground, guided by the spirit of deceased restauranteur Gusteau (Brad Garrett), and finds himself embroiled in shady dealings at Gusteau's old restaurant, where current chef Skinner (Ian Holm) plots to retain ownership of the establishment when he discovers Gusteau had a natural heir.

It is against this background that Remy forms an unlikely partnership with Linguini (Lou Romano), a complete clutz working a dead-end job at the restaurant. They hit a winning streak with Remy's inspired creations, but things are complicated by Skinner's increasing suspicions, the attentions of vituperative food critic Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole), a prying health inspector and a budding romance between Liguini and fellow chef Colette (Janeane Garofalo).

Then the pack find Remy and again he is torn between dedication to family and the desire to prove himself ...

'Ratatouille' has an intricate, multi-layered script. Sure, there's plenty of fast-moving set-pieces - most notably a chase through the streets of Paris and a mass raid by the pack on the restaurant - but Bird's emotional investment in his characters is what counts. Just as attentive and detailed is the animation, which even bests that of 'Cars'. Instead of waxing lyrical about how astounding textured everything is, let me just say this: halfway through seeing 'Ratatouille', sitting in Nottingham's Cineworld and my stomach growling even though I'd eaten before coming out, I turned to Paula and whispered, "We're going a restaurant the moment this ends." The cooking scenes are so evocative you can almost smell the food.

Some films make me laugh, some make me cry. Some films transport me in the world they create. Some make me feel infinitely better about things. 'Ratatouille' does all of these - there's a lovely vignette where a simple meal evokes a childhood memory that's damn near had me blubbing on more than one occasion - as well as making me hungry. I can't think of any other film I can say that about.