Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  I nearly accepted, but at the last moment my heart failed me. I dislike that building, and the people in it, so much. And when I read the play again, it seemed to me forced and schematic. And not particularly relevant to our time and our problems. Was I wrong? Also they wanted me to work with the National Theatre ‘Company’, which meant Peter Hall’s choice, not mine. And they seemed to me an unexciting bunch, including Albert Finney, who has been acting badly ever since he started at the National, I’m sorry to say. His Hamlet was very disappointing. Of course, he should not be playing Hamlet but Claudius – and I didn’t see his Tamburlaine. Then The Cherry Orchard, which was really a lamentable production altogether by Peter Hall, and most recently a disappointing Macbeth. It is sad when you think that he was undoubtedly the most promising talent of his generation.7

  Finney had one final commitment to the National. He played John Bean in Has Washington Legs?, Charles Wood’s comedy about filmmaking, written to mark America’s bicentennial celebrations. ‘Finney dons a cloak and prowls incognito over the set, thus precipitating a deliciously funny parody of the tent scene from Henry V,’ said Wardle.

  On 23 November 1978, Finney was granted a decree nisi from Anouk Aimée on the basis that they had lived apart for two years. It was the end of his marriage and also the end of his stint at the National. Finney had finally tired of what he viewed as Hall’s ‘academic’ view. He felt that Hall’s insistence on getting the text right smothered the spirit.

  Hall had once said, in 1977, that he wished ‘dealings with all actors were as pleasant as they are with Albert’, but, a year later, the relationship seemed fractured. Hall’s diary entry, dated 17 July 1978, records that their mutual agent, Laurence Evans, told Hall that Finney was now ‘disgruntled’ at the National and felt that he had been ‘overworked, abused and mishandled’. Hall felt it was just sour grapes on Finney’s part after the poor reception to Macbeth. ‘I’m afraid I let Laurie have it,’ recorded Hall. ‘I told him how little I had wanted to do Macbeth, and how dishonourable I felt the accusations were. These things nearly always happen when a production doesn’t succeed.’

  Later, Finney declared he was never a fan of the National’s stages, in particular the Olivier Theatre:

  If you stand on the stage of a ‘proper’ theatre, there is a circuit of energy flowing out to the audience and back to the performer again. Here the circuit wasn’t completed. The energy going out of me didn’t come back. Instead of being recharged, like a dynamo, I felt like a battery running down.8

  (But Finney was never as rude as Jonathan Miller, who likened the building to the Brent Cross Shopping Centre, or John Osborne, who called it ‘Colditz on Thames’.)

  Hall, as we have seen, was not without his critics. Some actors I have interviewed, such as Bernard Hepton, have simply said they disliked his approach. Hall’s insistence on adherence to the text, while endearing him to playwrights, could irritate actors. Richard Harris, speaking to Michael Parkinson in 1988, said, ‘I don’t give a damn for Peter Hall or his Lear. I want to see the actors’ Lear. I want to see O’Toole’s Lear.’9 (In the same interview, Harris said that he had never seen himself in the same league as ‘the greats – Peter or Albert’.)

  Simon Callow described Hall’s approach more diplomatically:

  Hall’s theatre is always about preconceived ideas rather than creative intuition, and it is always dependent on a unanimity of approach from both performers and the creative team. Hall, like every subsequent director of the National Theatre, has a degree in English from Cambridge University, and the values of textual rigour and moral judgement famously inculcated by F.R. Leavis were at the centre of his work.10

  Finney, after 1978, never acted in Shakespeare. Neither did he work with Hall again. To movie audiences, Finney had disappeared altogether. Yet he believed this ‘block’ of theatrical work required a long commitment:

  Just because I wasn’t making movies, people thought I’d retired. I think it’s important to stay with the theatre for some time when you’re doing the classics, because they require a particular breathing technique for control. In order to go as far as you’d like to go, it requires getting on the boards and doing it for a while. It’s the same with cinema. You have to do a few movies to be comfortable in front of the camera.

  There had been movie offers along the way. Finney had even started filming one of them in August 1975 – a French drama called The Story of Marie and Julien, directed by Jacques Rivette and co-starring Leslie Caron. But the director had suffered a nervous breakdown only a few days into shooting and the project was abandoned.11 Then Finney had been considered for the W.C. Fields biopic, W.C. Fields and Me. The part went to Rod Steiger. Probably Steiger, with his off-screen eccentricity, was better suited to portray such a misanthrope.

  Finney was also set to play General Zod, the villain in Superman. Finney’s only caveat was that a stage commitment meant he had to be released from filming no later than 5 p.m. No deal – Terence Stamp played Zod instead. Producers tried to get Finney to re-team with Audrey Hepburn, playing Robin in Robin and Marian, but negotiations broke down.

  Finney wanted to get back to making films. He ended up making three misfires in a row. But before that he got ‘lost’ up the Amazon.

  14

  LOSING HIS HEAD

  If you’re not in the movies people think you’ve either died or are in a sanatorium.

  Albert Finney.

  After such a long stint at the National, Finney decided it was time for another extended period away. He and Diana travelled to South America in early 1979, conveniently missing London’s Winter of Discontent and one of the coldest on record.

  The Times, on 10 April, reported that Finney and Diana were now five days overdue from a Latin American trip that was to include a boat journey up the Amazon and a visit to the Galapagos Islands. Friends waiting for them in Los Angeles were now ‘seriously alarmed’, according to Michael Medwin. He added that the couple had no planned itinerary, making it difficult to know where to start looking for them.

  Medwin said he had left Finney and Quick in Rio de Janeiro on 26 March. He had then flown to Los Angeles to set up some business meetings. Finney had been scheduled to arrive on 4 April. Medwin had been unable to trace anyone who had spoken to the couple on the islands. He even wondered if they had got there at all. (Ah, the days when people could go completely incommunicado!) ‘This is uncharacteristic of Albert,’ said Medwin. ‘We were to have had talks with 20th Century Fox and when it comes to business Albert is always on time.’ Medwin then said he had phoned the Foreign Office in London to make enquiries.

  Yet the drama was short-lived. On 11 April 1979, The Times reported that Finney and Diana had arrived in Quito. The couple had visited the Galapagos Islands and were expected to leave for LA soon. Finney later claimed that he had sent a cable to postpone the meeting with 20th Century Fox but it had never arrived. They were having breakfast in bed in a five-star hotel in Quito when Diana saw her boyfriend’s picture on the front cover of a local newspaper. ‘Something awful has happened to you,’ said Diana to Finney in between mouthfuls of croissant. But it hadn’t; they had not, after all, been eaten alive by marauding Amazonian cannibals.

  Perhaps the trip stirred some unconventional ideas in Finney (man versus nature?), because when he returned to acting after a ten-month hiatus it was in the most unlikely project imaginable. Sporting unkempt shaggy locks and, ironically, a vaguely lupine look, Finney played an over-the-hill unshaven cop, Dewey Wilson, in Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen, based on the Whitley Strieber novel. It’s no classic but it’s the best of the three misfires Finney made in the 1979–80 period – gory, macabre and totally risible, but a guilty pleasure for those who enjoy seeing decapitations.

  It’s also a grim portrait of a bombed-out, run-down South Bronx circa late seventies. New York has never looked so unappealing. Wolfen’s premise was that the destruction of the area had raised the ghosts of Native American wolf spirits. Finney explain
ed his attraction to the story, and he made clear that Wadleigh’s inexperience did not faze him:

  If somebody wants me to do a project, I don’t think there’s any point in having a long meeting with the director, even if he’s one of my heroes. I’d rather read the script, and if there’s something in it that intrigues me, that’s the time to meet the director. Everybody can talk a great script. But it has to be on the page.

  Wolfen hinted that there are more things in heaven and earth than we understand in our philosophy. Certain animals have a fascination for us. Wolves are very powerful in European mythology. And there’s all this research being done now with sea mammals. What drew me to Wolfen was the sense of mystery surrounding those creatures. If I respond to the script, and if I then talk to the director and feel sympathy with him, I don’t worry about his track record or lack of track record. I’ve done other films with first-time directors if I trusted them.1

  Finney insisted on calling Wolfen ‘a surrealist thriller’ until the studio objected. They didn’t think such a description had much box office appeal. ‘Nevertheless, that’s what I felt it was,’ said Finney. ‘I certainly hoped it would be scary, but I also hoped there would be something rather haunting about it.’

  Gregory Hines made an impressive film debut as Dewey’s mischievous medical examiner friend, Whittington. Hines, who died prematurely in 2003, and memorably tap-danced at a tribute to his cancer-stricken idol Sammy Davis Junior in 1989, apparently spent some time drinking with Finney off-duty. And, just occasionally, it shows. Not that Finney ever looks as hungover as Richard Burton in Villain or The Klansman, but he is surprisingly piggy-eyed and unkempt. Luckily, the dishevelled look suited Dewey.

  Playing a militant Native American activist was Edward James Olmos, a conscientious social activist off-screen who took a shovel to the streets in the wake of the 1992 LA riots. God knows what he made of the South Bronx; the area was at its worst in 1979. It looks like a demolition site – so much so that some German filmmakers even used it for a film about the bombing of Dresden. David Gonzalez in the New York Times remembers:

  Community School 61 was about the only occupied building on Charlotte Street when I arrived in September 1979 to teach photography. It was an old-style red-brick schoolhouse, unlike the Brutalist concrete learning factories that had become popular that decade.

  The classroom overlooked a heart-breaking panorama of rubble, on streets that had incongruous names like Suburban or Home. One week, a Hollywood film crew descended on a nearby block and built a wood-frame church. Just as quickly, they torched it, so it could serve as a suitably charred ruin for their movie, Wolfen … If wolves had actually roamed this area centuries before, one could see why they were upset with how things had turned out.

  Wolfen begins with a chauffeur-driven, cocaine-snorting couple of socialites (former Miss World Anne Marie Pohtamo plays the ‘rich bitch’) getting slain in Battery Park. And in a particularly grisly fashion, one might add.

  ‘How would you like to see your own body and know you’re dead?’ asks Whittington. ‘The brain can live without oxygen for a minute.’ Well, you know what’s coming after that … Those of nervous disposition better turn off. It gets even more bloodcurdling when Dewey, casually munching cookies, visits a blood-strewn morgue. Whittington makes a startling discovery – there’s not a trace of metal anywhere in the victims.

  The death of Dewey’s NYPD superior, Warren (Dick O’Neill), is a veritable party piece. His severed head rolls around the street and appears to speak, to voice horror at the sight of his own headless body (Whittington warned you!). Whittington, on the other hand, likes to think he is prepared. ‘If violence comes, I’m ready,’ he says, demonstrating his karate skills. (Hines later said it was the first time he had ever undertaken any kind of showbusiness work that didn’t involve dancing. He would have needed deft footwork to get away from these monsters.)

  It’s all rather difficult to take seriously. How Finney or any of the other actors can keep a straight face in the midst of all this carnage is a mystery. Wadleigh, whose chief claim to fame before this was as a documentary maker of the Woodstock 1969 music festival, directs as if determined to maximise the gore.

  The studio wanted Dustin Hoffman to play Dewey. And, Hoffman, a native New Yorker, would have been more authentic casting if nothing else. Perhaps Finney was better able to portray a bruised, boozy burnt-out cop. Yet it’s still a strange choice.

  Wadleigh lured Finney into some brave feats; walking atop Manhattan Bridge afforded spectacular views. And there’s a creepy lunar transformation by Olmos as he dances across the sand. But rewards are few, although fans of the genre still like it. By the ludicrous climax, whereby some understanding appears to have been reached between humans and wolves, the movie’s message, presumably that capitalist development is interfering with things best left untouched, has been lost in blood and gore. Finney’s cop is believable enough, even if his accent does occasionally stray. Perhaps the best thing about Wolfen was the camera angles, courtesy of a handheld Steadicam so that the humans were seen through the wolves’ point of view.

  Hines found Finney a great teacher, not complex motivational psycho-babble, but simple ‘think it through and it will show’ mechanisms:

  I knew the director, Michael Wadleigh, from when we were hippies together. Once I got the part, I was with Albert Finney, and I was hooked. Just a small conversation with Albert Finney is like Acting 101. I remember one time when we were supposed to come through this doorway, walk through the morgue, and have some dialogue. I was back there trying to figure out how to do this thing.

  Wadleigh wasn’t the type of director who’d really talk to you, unlike Francis [Coppola], director of The Cotton Club. If you even look like you don’t know what you’re doing, Francis will say, ‘Wait! What do you need?’ Or he’ll just start talking to you about the way you should be feeling. Anyway, Albert was sitting down, waiting for our cue, and he said to me, ‘If I were you, when I go through that door, I’d feel anxious because I’m late. I have someplace else to go, yet I’m intrigued by the possibility that this will be an interesting case.’ It was like a light bulb going off in my head. Then I knew exactly what to do.2

  Joy Gould Boyam, in The Wall Street Journal, summed up the overall mood:

  As terrifying a movie as you’re likely to see. But you’re also unlikely to see a movie that is quite this gory (lots of dismembered body parts lying around and scenes in a morgue) or quite so pretentious, thematically muddled, and just plain mad.

  Loophole should have been better – given its illustrious cast – but wasn’t. A one-dimensional heist caper, filmed over nine weeks in London in 1980 by first-time director John Quested, it featured a criminal godfather (Finney) who recruits an architect (Martin Sheen) to carry out a bank robbery. The movie barely comes alive despite a fine cast that included Susannah York (a last-minute replacement for Julie Christie), Martin Sheen, Colin Blakely (in his fourth movie with Finney and, needless to say, his name is misspelled as ‘Blakeley’ in the Brent Walker trailer), Jonathan Pryce and Robert Morley. The film was solid, professionally made but rather forgettable, thoroughly eclipsed by The Long Good Friday with rising star Bob Hoskins.

  For Finney, the most enjoyable part of Loophole was his friendship with Martin Sheen. The American actor remembered, while working as a cinema usher in New York, seating Finney during a break in Luther when Finney decided to catch a movie. Finney and Sheen were both interviewed by American television on the set of Loophole and joshed each other throughout, staging mock rivalry. During Sheen’s interview, Finney bellowed, in his best Shakespearean manner, ‘Must I wait until the last syllable of recorded time?’

  Sheen shot back, ‘I’m going to tell them about my film successes.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Finney, ‘We’ll not be waiting long then.’

  Sheen had nearly died during the shooting of the picture Apocalypse Now, made the previous year, but that did not stop him drinking copious amount
s alongside Finney. Sheen’s staple was Guinness, whereas Finney’s favourite tipple was always wine.

  Director John Quested, who had initially wanted Michael Caine to play the part of Daniels – somehow he had the idea that the central character should resemble Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds – praised Finney’s approach:

  He’s always prepared to take that extra risk as an actor, not necessarily keeping to the trunk of the tree but sometimes bouncing on the branches instead. You have to know what you’re doing with him. But he’s always very professional, loyal and kind to other actors. Albert came up to me during filming and said, ‘you’re very lucky to get Martin Sheen’. He didn’t seem to realise that Martin was in it only because of him [Finney]. Finney contributed in every way he could. He even used his own car in the film. He was always so helpful during filming and is that rare case of a famous actor who’s well-adjusted and with a great sense of humour. He could have pursued more classical roles later in his career. But it’s up to him. He made his choices. I wanted to work with him again but it was always a case of finding a part that interested him.3

  Quested said that once you got a star like Finney then others always wanted to jump aboard, great names like Robert Morley, Jonathan Pryce and Blakely. Quested added, echoing the views of many people I interviewed, that it would be hard to assemble such a cast of old ‘reliables’ these days: ‘I’m not sure those kind of people exist anymore. Where are they?’

  Unlike The Long Good Friday, which was more about professional gangsters, Quested said he ‘wanted to create a story about what it takes to corrupt somebody, how much has to happen before someone is tempted off the track’. He remembers, as an aside, that Finney corrupted Sheen into betting on the horses. But the film did not stretch Finney much and is now rather obscure. (Although Quested, interviewed in 2016, wondered, as others did, if London’s Hatton Garden jewel thieves had seen it!)