‘What sort of people sit in a restaurant and don’t even try to talk to each other?’
‘Married people.’
John Russell Taylor in The Times noted the disparity between the two performances:
Mr Finney is rather charmless for a character meant to be a charming oddball … the central couple in Two for the Road, whose marriage we see through 12 years of sunshine and showers are Hush Puppy sophisticates. They exchange, in winsome moments, strained bits of verbal humour, suggestive of After Eight munchers downing their gallons of black coffee on the terrace of that dream villa … Albert Finney is compelled to play the husband role as though he were a hater of women and a slave driver to boot.
A critic in New York Village Voice, on the other hand, noting the chasm between the two performances, concluded that it made the film. ‘The disparity in shapes and temperament between the thin, ethereal Hepburn and the chunky, earthy Finney makes the romance more moving and the relationship more challenging.’
Finney and Audrey certainly looked good. Fashion designers enjoyed fitting Hepburn out with a succession of eye-catching outfits. Everything from a psychedelic mini dress with flared sleeves through to what could be described as a kind of Star Trek cocktail party piece made out of acrylic pieces, sewn on thin metal chains. Finney’s outfits were apparently supplied by Savile Row tailor Hardy Amies.
For Finney, his slight on-screen surliness notwithstanding, the experience of working with Audrey was one of his happiest. And he was unusually forthcoming about it:
If I close my eyes, I can still see both of us spending a summer filming in the South of France. I see Audrey in the make-up trailer because it was hot and she had to change her hair, make-up and costumes three times a day. She was remarkable. She worked from five in the morning to late at night … I’ve been very lucky to work with pros. And sometimes when I think back, I actually cry about it. These are people who have been capable of going out on a limb in some way. And courage always impresses me.
Yet Finney’s next film was a world away from the fun and frolics of Two for the Road. He was about to gamble his reputation on directing and starring in a highly personal project that many observers saw as a slice of semi-autobiography. ‘If they reject Charlie Bubbles, they reject my feelings, attitudes and everything,’ he once said.
Finney never directed a film again. Finney, who seemed to be born under a lucky star, was about to experience a rare commercial failure.
9
CHARLIE
That always stayed in my head, that scene …
George Best.
Some images just sum up a mood. A celebrity takes off on his own in a hot air balloon. He has no destination in mind. He could be going anywhere. It seemed right for 1967, a time when the new breed of artists, often from humble backgrounds, struggled with their superstar status and just wanted to escape into the sky …
Salford-born Shelagh Delaney was only 19 when her play A Taste of Honey made her a star. Finney heard she was writing a story about the effects of early fame. Finney read what he later described as not so much a script but an outline, a sixty-page document, featuring a young, acclaimed northern writer, now London-based, disorientated by his surroundings and fazed by his success.
Finney said the project chimed with a point in his career when he felt the need to stretch his talent. ‘I have a facility for acting,’ he told Clive Goodwin1 in 1967 shortly after Charlie Bubbles had wrapped:
My danger is that I can do it [acting] too easily. I need the neurosis of making my work more complicated and more difficult than it need be in order to avoid this facility – that I’m not just getting away with it. It wasn’t that I was looking for a subject to direct. But I responded very much to the character and the situation – and felt I wanted to act it. I felt very strongly about the way it should be treated and that it would be wrong for me to hire a director. So I did both which has been very interesting.
Charlie is a successful but terminally bored author. He’s got too much money and can’t get his head around his business affairs. He visits his accountant (Richard Pearson) in a private West End club. Pearson, once accurately described by film historian David Quinlan as a ‘dead ringer for British Cabinet Minister Geoffrey Howe’, advises him on his finances in a monotone mumble. And, here, Finney, as director, cleverly has Pearson address the camera like a politician announcing the budget. Charlie is distracted by a friend in the same club, Smokey (Colin Blakely). They have a spaghetti fight and then adjourn to an old-fashioned drinking den where Smokey gets sloshed. Later, Charlie, with his secretary (Liza Minnelli), drives up north to visit his ex-wife and son.
On first viewing, Charlie Bubbles seems tame stuff, simply because our hero is so apathetic. Success has rendered him listless. Put simply, it’s the old story of a person for whom fame and fortune have come too early and too easily. What is there to do now? To which, naturally, most people would react that they would like to have his problems. Yet, if the story now feels clichéd, that doesn’t invalidate it.
Here we must note the similarity between Finney and Charlie. The actor became a huge star in his mid-20s. None of Finney’s talented contemporaries proved so precocious (perhaps, a quarter of a century on, only Kenneth Branagh would be more versatile at such a young age). It’s as though Finney’s life was on fast-forward. He had escaped national service, propelling him to drama school at just 17, and then had become a hit in his first film at just 24. By 30 he was a major star, producer and then director.
Significantly, Finney looks and plays older than his age in Two for the Road and Charlie Bubbles. In both films he exudes world-weariness, a jaded disappointment at wealth and opportunity. Charlie is famous but Finney is even more so. So it’s easy to see Finney’s first directorial effort as a reflection of his own attitude to stardom. The difference is that Charlie is relentlessly dour and unsociable, far removed from Finney. But, in terms of experience, and reaction to the perils of overnight fame, we can see parallels.
Displacement plays a big part in Charlie Bubbles. A local boy made good, corrupted by the Big Smoke and all its falsity, goes home. Strangers will be servile. Hangers-on will be eager to share his fame. Friends will rib him about his success. Also, perhaps, some envious souls will be itching to tell him that they no longer recognise the old Charlie. Finney must have felt all this too. It’s Burton returning to Wales or Finney returning to Salford.
Finney appears a bit grumpy in Charlie Bubbles. His personality is so powerful that his disillusionment fills the screen. It is still the performance of a star, but he is not really likeable. He rarely smiles or interacts much with other people. People approach him and then retreat quickly as if repelled by his defensiveness.
The film has a few laughs. Scribblers will permit themselves a wry smile when a hotel waiter (Old Salfordian Joe Gladwin) asks, ‘Do you just do your writing or are you still working?’ Other than that, it’s all downbeat. ‘You seem to forget you’ve got a son … it’s time you grow up and face reality,’ his ex-wife, Lottie (Billie Whitelaw), tells him. (Whitelaw and Finney had, in real life, what the actress referred to as a ‘mild affair … we’d known each other for donkey’s years’.)2
When Charlie goes home we see the full failure of his private life. Even his son hides from him as his car pulls into the driveway. They play football but do not communicate. Later, watching a match at Old Trafford, they occupy a secluded box. An old friend (John Ronane) delivers the line that sums up perceptions of Charlie: ‘It seems to me you can get bogged down with a lot of false values living in London’. Ho-hum …
Charlie’s disconnection is laid bare when his son runs away from the match. He can’t even describe the boy to the police. The film ends with Charlie sleeping over at his ex-wife’s home. ‘No champagne and kippers for breakfast,’ she tells him. The following morning, he takes off in a hot air balloon. It’s an intriguing end, a charming get-out, or a cop-out, depending on your point of view. Either way, fame and fortune never
looked as unappealing as they do in Charlie Bubbles.
It would be wrong to assume that Charlie was Finney. But the questions besetting Finney and Bubbles were doubtless similar. Where does this road take me? What does it all mean? Just as in the film Charlie has a young son whom he seldom sees, so in real life Finney had infrequent contact with his son, Simon, who was 8 when he made Charlie Bubbles. Because Finney did not have full-time parental responsibilities – and unencumbered by having children at home – he could follow his own path. But was the price tag too high?
The ending resonated with other celebrities, perhaps those like Finney, who dreamed of disappearing from the public gaze. George Best, for example, liked the premise and the final scene:
I knew Finney for a bit in Manchester back in the old days. He was in one of my favourite films, Charlie Bubbles, about a writer who can’t cope with fame and attention. In the end, he goes up in a balloon and cuts the rope. He sails off into the big blue sky. That always stayed in my head, that scene. Pure escape, turning your back on it all, on the world.3
Overall, Charlie Bubbles is a film more to admire than like. Technically, it’s accomplished but Finney’s performance is a bit too in-your-face downbeat. Subsequently, he revealed that, had he been directing another actor, he would have made the performance a little ‘less heavy’.
The film is also rather ghoulish because so many of the supporting players died young. Colin Blakely, whose drinking bout with Finney is like a sequel to their encounter in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was just 56 when he died.4 On the way up north there are motorway encounters with the doomed Yootha Joyce and the even more doomed Alan Lake. Joyce plays a rich ex-girlfriend of Charlie’s, dolled up like a gangster’s moll. A fine actress (witness her cameo in The Pumpkin Eater) she was swallowed alive by the George and Mildred comedy series. Drinking heavily, she died of liver failure in 1980, aged 53. Alan Lake, appearing here before he met Diana Dors, was Finney’s stand-in for the film. He also played a besotted fan who hitches a lift. Lake’s drunkenness made him difficult to employ. He committed suicide in 1984, several months after Dors’s death. Also appearing in Charlie Bubbles – but blink and you’ll miss her – was Finney’s new girlfriend at the time, actress Jean Marsh, most famous for classic television series Upstairs, Downstairs. Marsh appears, uncredited, as a waitress in the motorway café.
Delaney’s screenplay avoids making the players too clever or articulate, and in this context it’s a compliment (Delaney, deservedly, won best British screenplay from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain). Renata Adler, in the New York Times, caught this realism in her review, ‘The movie, in conversations, in gas stations, in elevators, always tends to stall exactly where life does. Very realistically, just long enough.’
John Russell Taylor in The Times noted Finney’s surliness:
As an actor, Finney has nearly all the gifts except charm. He’s fine as a rough diamond (Armstrong’s Last Goodnight), a fanatic (Luther) and as a maniac (Night Must Fall) but when he is required to appeal directly to audience sympathies, as in parts of Two for the Road, there seems to be some sort of block. It is, one might say, not so much that he cannot charm as that he will not. There is a sort of dogged stiff-necked refusal to ask for sympathy which runs through everything he does.
But the same review described Charlie Bubbles as ‘the most exciting, personal and accomplished feature film debut by a British director since Anderson’s This Sporting Life’.
Pauline Kael, however, reviewing it in The New Yorker, and later a fan of Finney’s work in films like Shoot the Moon, disliked it:
The movie is glum. Charlie’s life is seen through his eyes, and since he sees people joylessly, with apathy and distaste, much of it consists of close-ups of semi-repulsive faces that look cold and dead. The entire painfully monotonous movie is based on this single, small, unoriginal idea – the kind of idea that could be one element, or good for a short sequence.
Charlie Bubbles did not draw crowds anywhere but fared particularly badly in America. And the movie was very ‘British’. The depiction of wealth as an encumbrance, the exposé of the north/south divide – all this is quintessential ‘Blighty’ social commentary. It’s also permeated with homegrown British emotional understatement. Behind Charlie’s glumness there lurks someone of deep feeling, most graphically seen when he throws up after ‘losing’ his son. Yet his behaviour is perhaps too detached to resonate with American audiences. The movie was probably lost on them.
Finney was very much the returning local hero on Charlie Bubbles, giving lifts in his Rolls-Royce to commuters. He elaborated on the shooting to Hunter Davies in the Sunday Times:
We had this location which was a slum clearance in Salford, about two miles of it. I got up there about an hour early, at 7.30 a.m., still in the dark, to see how we could do the sequence. It was an area I used to know as a boy, I was walking around it when this copper stopped me, wondering what I was doing. ‘Oh it’s you, Albert.’ He knows I’m filming in the area.
Finney had many responsibilities on Charlie Bubbles, not least casting for the film. Kate O’Mara recalled an interview with Finney in which he gave her the (polite) brush-off:
Finney was charming and we were getting on famously when suddenly the phone rang on his desk. He picked it up and said ‘Oh yes, she’s here – it’s for you,’ handing me the phone. I was mortified and apologised profusely. ‘It’s all right,’ said Finney, grinning, ‘it’s your agent, you’d better see what he wants.’ He seemed highly amused at the interruption. Embarrassed, I spoke to my agent as briefly and tersely as I could, with Finney watching me, chuckling all the while. I apologised again as I handed the phone back to him. ‘It was just to say I’ve been offered a TV series, that’s all,’ I said, trying to make it sound unimportant. ‘I think you’d better take it, don’t you?’ said Finney in his charming flat north country accent. ‘Well, you know, just in case you don’t get this,’ he added kindly, and I realised he was letting me down gently as he didn’t think I was right for the part in his movie. ‘All right, thank you, I will,’ I replied breathlessly. I had seen Finney in Tom Jones and thought him devastatingly attractive. He eventually cast Liza Minnelli in the film, so it was quite obvious he thought I was completely wrong for the part. I remembered he had described the character as ‘kookie’ – I’m a lot of things but ‘kookie’ is not one of them!5
Finney never regretted directing Charlie Bubbles:
I suppose I had the most intense sense of creation I’ve ever had – at least sustained over a period of time. One of the drawbacks about being an actor is that it’s a very subjective profession. You go to the studio and look at yourself being made up. Then you look at yourself in costume. You rehearse and worry about your lines and your character. There’s a lot of self in it. Me, me, me. Directing is wonderful because you worry about everything and everyone else. It’s an objective position, and that makes for an extremely refreshing change.6
Charlie Bubbles was also the first film Finney had produced under the auspices of his new production company Memorial Films (a pun on the Albert Memorial which – of course – is named after him), founded by Michael Medwin and Finney. Medwin is best known as one of the stars of the television series The Army Game and, later, a regular as radio boss Don Satchley on the delightful series Shoestring, starring Trevor Eve.
Speaking in 1982, Finney explained the genesis of the company:
We never wanted to threaten Twentieth Century Fox. And indeed we’re [he and Michael Medwin] both actors, we’re both, you know, I suppose, temperamentally, strolling players normally. We didn’t want to sit in offices and go in at seven and read scripts and do deals. We kind of felt that now and again we might come across something we’d like to get made or like to see made, and that was the principle behind it. Which is why we have a rather infrequent record in terms of production … We made a film with Julie Christie called Memoirs of a Survivor, which we made two years ago. But we’ve not – I think our av
erage since the company was founded in 1965 or 6, is something like .42 of a film a year.’
Memorial did, however, produce an iconic movie from this period, Lindsay Anderson’s If … starring Malcolm McDowell. The film, which made McDowell into a star, could be seen as a scathing attack on Britain’s public school system or simply a fable for the times, with its theme of revolution and anti-establishment fervour. Finney was a hero to McDowell. He also idolised Finney’s future girlfriend, Anouk Aimée. McDowell, coincidentally, remembers Anouk stopping him in the street to praise him on his memorable entrance in If … when his caped schoolboy returns on the first day of term.
Other films produced by Memorial were O Lucky Man! starring McDowell and directed by Lindsay Anderson, and Mike Leigh’s first directorial effort, Bleak Moments. Leigh’s feature, about a secretary’s dull existence, was made for just £18,500.7 Although Leigh didn’t really become prolific until at least a decade later, he subsequently said that Bleak Moments remains, in some ways, ‘the mother of all Mike Leigh films. And I’m very proud of it.’
Perhaps in a bid to publicise Charlie Bubbles in America, Finney undertook his second stint on Broadway. He played Bri in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. This was strong stuff, Peter Nichols’s harrowing black comedy about a married couple coping with a severely disabled daughter. Finney had first seen Nichols’s work at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and immediately saw its potential. Memorial then bought the play and took it to London.
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg broke new ground. An appalling tragedy is largely played for laughs, even like some extended farce. And then, suddenly, the mask drops and we see the protagonists, Bri and Sheila, for what they are, a young couple forever living a shaggy dog story in which every emotion can be viewed as selfish or altruistic. If they put the child in an institution, are they abdicating their duty as parents while saving their marriage? If Bri lives out his fantasy of performing a mercy killing, is he a compassionate parent, ending the life of what his wife refers to as ‘a living parsnip’, or is he a cold-hearted murderer? The parents shun the choice and hide behind absurd, ironic jokes. ‘Lovely soft hands, you’ve got – like silk – they’ve never done rough work,’ says Bri to his daughter. It was, as Irving Wardle said:
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