Vincent Canby in the New York Times described Loophole as ‘a film of such ineptitude that you are allowed to suspect there’s a far more interesting (and possibly more cautionary) story behind the screen than anything that’s on it.’ Turning the knife, he added, ‘Jonathan Hales’s screenplay, an anthology of irrelevant detail, appears to have been directed by John Quested by long-distance telephone and then edited by a committee of financial receivers. The actors look bewildered.’
Looker, which Finney made late in 1980, completed a mediocre movie medley that augured little for his return to film. Finney played, rather lackadaisically, a plastic surgeon uncovering a dastardly plot involving supermodels. Director Michael Crichton had made the engrossing Westworld, which raised some interesting questions about holidays of the future and the ‘independence’ of robots. From Finney’s public comments at the time it’s possible that he just accepted the film because he wanted to experiment with different genres. ‘Instead of playing a slouch, boozy, burnt-out cop, as I was in Wolfen, I’m playing a very chic and successful California plastic surgeon, almost a Cary Grant role. So that was a nice contrast,’ he said in 1981.
Looker might have had something to say about the craze of plastic surgery which was to overtake Hollywood a little later. It might have accurately foreseen the future, yet that didn’t make it entertaining. Critics ridiculed it and it failed at the box office. Vincent Canby wrote:
The plot is pretty silly but Mr Crichton’s handling of it is even sillier. Mr Crichton has fun sending up television commercials in one extended sequence, but his direction of the rest of the film is so sloppy one suspects that if he himself were a plastic surgeon, two ears might wind up on one side of the same head.
Coincidentally, the period around 1980 was also a dreadful time for many of Finney’s talented contemporaries. O’Toole had bombed in Macbeth; Harris was making instantly forgettable movies like Highpoint (better titled Lowpoint) and Your Ticket is no Longer Valid (all too true!); Burton had made the lamentable Circle of Two and Tristan and Isolde. As for Finney, he had not made a truly good film since Murder on the Orient Express, seven years earlier.
At the box office it was all Caine and Connery. By 1981, Finney was no longer famous enough to ‘open’ a film and his name was increasingly mentioned only in cinema retrospectives, restaurant and racetrack sightings and at glamorous events with Diana Quick. Not that this really bothered Finney. In many ways it suited his personality not to be recognised. ‘Nobody knows who I am because I’m not in that many films and I look different in almost every role. Even people who saw me in Tom Jones are convinced I haven’t made a picture in the last twenty years,’ he once said.
But a meaty screen role was long overdue. And who better than the director of Midnight Express, one of the most harrowing movies of the late seventies, to provide Finney’s return to form on film?
15
BACK IN THE GYM
I used to wake up in the middle of the night, weeping at the impossibility of relationships.
Albert Finney.
‘What the HELL do you want from me?’ screamed Finney. And, for once, it was not in character, in this case as the violent, self-pitying writer George Dunlap. Finney was shouting at his director, Alan Parker, in the middle of San Francisco. It was several weeks into the filming of Shoot the Moon and Finney was not a happy man.
Shoot the Moon typified the family histrionics genre that was trendy in the early eighties. Throw in the essential ingredients to cause mayhem – usually the three D’s of death, divorce or disease – and audiences left cinemas feeling that their own problems weren’t so bad. Movies such as Kramer Versus Kramer, Ordinary People and Terms of Endearment were also great actors’ vehicles from which stars could, hopefully, emerge Oscar-laden.
Parker had approached ‘the usual suspects’, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson, to portray George Dunlap, a celebrated writer, four-time father and philanderer. (The backdrop of success is essential for this kind of film. Viewers must home in on the trauma. The usual problems afflicting couples, especially mundane money concerns, must be extraneous.)
After Pacino and Nicholson declined, Parker searched out Finney:
Albert had been a hero of mine and to most of my generation of filmmakers, but when we started to get the chance to make films, he wasn’t there and it was very frustrating. You’d see him having lunch, telling wonderful stories, but offer him anything, and he’d always say ‘no’. I originally thought he was plain lazy, but then he did things like Hamlet and Tamburlaine on stage, so it wasn’t that. Suddenly it all changed and I got lucky. I knew he’d done that weird thing Wolfen but I probably thought that was just him being bloody-minded, choosing some weird subject, considering that he turned down anything that was good in previous years.1
Parker sent him William Goldman’s script. At first Finney declined, but some gentle coaxing persuaded him. It was the right decision. Shoot the Moon, a gruelling actor’s piece about a marital break-up, was just what Finney needed after three turkeys. He joined the set in San Raphael, north of San Francisco, in January 1981, straight after Looker wrapped.
The ‘trouble’ for Finney, if one can call a heavy part ‘trouble’, is that he had to summon deeper emotions than he had done recently on film. Yes, Finney would bare his soul in The Dresser, but that was for a totally different character. George Dunlap was a modern protagonist, recognisable to many middle-aged, unhappily married men. George, however, is not only a cheating husband. He’s also a child-beater and a bit of a nutcase. For Finney, an actor who shunned introspection, the film proved tortuous but ultimately rewarding.
Parker and Finney disagreed from the outset, not over interpretation but voice. At the first reading Finney mustered his best American accent, one that had served him well in Looker and Wolfen. Parker objected and urged him to play the part as a Brit. After all, many successful British writers would be married to American women in California.
Maybe Parker had made a bad start. Finney, a gifted mimic and observer, can take a funny walk, a posture, an accent or a squint and incorporate them into the part, then he draws upon his superb actor’s toolkit to bring the character to life. Perhaps also Finney felt more comfortable becoming someone else, especially for such a flawed, hostile character as George. But Parker said that he ‘was never fond of Finney’s American accent – you never know whether he’s taking the piss or not’.
The opening scene called for Finney to walk to his study and cry. Parker congratulated him and Finney brushed it off, ‘That’s acting. If you don’t feel it, fake it. That’s what I do for a living.’ Parker bristled; he contrasted this with Diane Keaton who lived the character – no faking.
The early scenes are relentlessly downbeat, accompanied by a melancholy piano beat. Finney and Keaton, playing George and Faith, travel to San Francisco to collect an award. George looks anguished and momentarily speechless. Ironically, by then she knows he’s cheating on her with a younger woman, Sandy, played by Karen Allen.
Explosions come next morning. Finney breaks a plate in the kitchen and Keaton responds by serially smashing more. With less skilled actors it could have seemed staged; to their credit it seems truthful. But Finney was getting testy about what he saw as Parker’s effusive praise of Keaton. So much so that he cornered Parker in between plate-smashing. ‘You always say, “great Diane, very good Albert”.’ To which Parker would reply. ‘Well, Albert, she always is great.’
Parker was becoming concerned by the disparity in their performances:
You watch someone walking and you want them to run. You know they can run but won’t. There’s something holding them back. They’re not trying too hard, as if it’s rather vulgar. To Albert, I never seemed happy, and he’d become irritated by that and would ask me why – and maybe I couldn’t probably articulate it. … He’d never been acted off the screen before in his life and now this was actually happening. Yet I was also beginning to think that if he could get away with walking through a s
cene, he would. That’s nothing to do with laziness; it’s to do with the fact that he had to rekindle the passion he once had for the job. For the moment, after walking through his last couple of films, he seemed to have lost it. For too long he’d been enjoying lunch more than acting. I knew that in order to push him where he knew he had to go, and for the sake of the film too, I had to risk my friendship and confront him head on.
The screaming between Parker and Finney occurred outside San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. Although an early scene in the film, it was shot six weeks into shooting. Parker can’t remember the exact trigger, but it appears that he told him off in front of extras and the crew while a rain machine spewed water in the background. Parker recalled:
Suddenly there we were, both of us, face to face, standing under the rain machine getting drenched. Here were the same lungs that had stood on stage declaiming Hamlet and Luther yelling at me in the middle of San Francisco. It was not an experience I would recommend, after all that, and more than a bit dampened, I said to him. ‘It’s good you’re letting me know what you feel.’ He said: ‘What is it? What is it?’ So I told him it’s just that I know you can be great. That’s all I want.
Finney described the incident differently. He remembered a night scene where he and Keaton, as George and Faith, leave their car to attend an awards dinner. After the shot, they retired to Finney’s camper where he offered Keaton a glass of wine. She said no, but Finney poured himself one. According to Finney, Parker suddenly entered, saying the scene had to be redone because the cameraman suspected a technical problem. Finney recalls:
Parker came up to me and got very angry because I’d been having a glass of wine – remember, I had thought the shot was done – saying I was treating everyone with disrespect. And I was terribly pissed off, because this was nonsense. I got angry at Parker, but then I got angry with myself afterward for being angry at him. It was an irrelevant incident. I don’t get angry that often.
Finney was unusually contemplative for the rest of the shooting:
Trying to do the real thing, in this case intensely harrowing marital scenes, for make-believe purposes can really put you through the mangles. I didn’t feel like going home at night and having a giggle after screaming at Diane Keaton, an intelligent and particularly ‘live’ actress, all day. So many of the scenes in the film were so realistic they were uncomfortable. We’ve all had relationships somehow of this sort at some time in our lives. I must say I’ve never lived through a marriage quite like the intensity of that one and the experience taught me that so often things become vicious and break up because you are simply unable to articulate. It’s the kind of role where you have to dig into yourself and present yourself on the screen and that’s always tough. Particularly in scenes where we were fighting or arguing, it’s not pleasant to be reminded of times when my own behaviour has been monstrous.2
George becomes more unhinged. He turns violent when he tries to deliver a typewriter to his oldest daughter (Diane Lane) and she doesn’t want to see him. George breaks into the house, surrounded by Faith and four screaming girls (a nice authentic touch rather than the usual boy/girl split) and threatens her. (She should have heeded a police officer’s advice to put bolts on the doors.) It’s a nasty scene.
Suddenly, he explodes. David Denby, writing in New York Magazine in 1982, captured the full force of the assault:
The scene is terrifying. Albert Finney’s full, bullying strength, which up to now has looked useless, even ridiculous, breaks forth with horrible fury. The children are frightened and ashamed for their father and finally George is ashamed too. And yet, although he has disgraced himself, perhaps unforgivably, he is never more their father than at this moment. In the ghastly silence as he walks out of the house, a little voice pipes up, ‘Daddy, do you want a Band-Aid for your hand?’ This extraordinary scene, almost Sophoclean in its combined power, complexity and piteousness shows up a similar bit of hanger whomping in Mommie Dearest for the flamboyantly absurd atrocity that it is.
George gets worse. Even at the deathbed of Faith’s father, supposedly a friend of George, anger simmers. ‘Fight it!’ he screams at his father-in-law as the old man struggles for breath. Predictably, the next scene is a funeral.
Goldman’s screenplay doesn’t really probe the reason for George’s rage. Many years later, Finney told Melvyn Bragg that he believed the character of George had ‘resorted to a violent act because he couldn’t cope with the fact that he’d fallen for someone else; he just didn’t have the wherewithal to cope with it’.
Finney became depressed during the fourteen-week shoot:
I used to wake up in the middle of the night weeping at the impossibility of relationships – that forever isn’t going to happen. You get into your own memory vault, the emotional memory of it, and drawers used to fly open and infuse your body with the blues.
An accident outside filming only made matters worse. Diana visited Finney during shooting, between completing Brideshead and its transmission. In San Francisco, with Finney, she was leaving a Ry Cooder gig when she fell on her chin and fractured her jaw in two places. She lost sixteen teeth, her voice box was badly damaged, and she needed a year’s recuperation to rebuild her voice from scratch. ‘For a while I thought I wouldn’t be able to earn my living as an actor,’ she said.
Meanwhile, the movie became more melodramatic. A restaurant scene where Finney and Keaton have a chance meeting after their break-up seems overblown. They scream at each other and George even thumps a fellow diner while a pianist struggles to keep tune in the background.
Parker gave a contemporary interview in which he conceded that this was his most personal film:
I’m constantly walking the tightrope, as everyone does, of trying to stay married. In that respect it’s the first film I’ve made that’s close to my heart. Although it was Goldman’s screenplay he said he ‘put in as much of myself as it is possible to do’. Bo and I sat there in a hotel room and we became amateur shrinks for one another. I believe the film’s strength is that it does hit certain truths about our relationships, all our relationships.
Dave Smith, interviewing the director in 1982 for Photoplay magazine, suggested the film was perhaps too violent. Parker seemed unsure:
I think where we have shown violence it is a cinematic extension of a lot of the rage and anger that we have within us. I certainly have it in me and it’s anger that we don’t often admit or often express. For the film that safety valve was overridden and suddenly emotions do explode. I stand by my decision to do it that way but I know many people do feel it to be a little too much.
Parker, perhaps keen not to fall out with Finney, later praised his performance:
His was the more demanding role, and I think it was more taxing for Albert than many of the films he’d been making. It’s not simply acting out a charade. You draw on your own pain, and very often, for extremely emotional scenes, you ask of yourself things you don’t really want to open up. Albert taught me how much an actor gives of himself. As a director you have to be as sensitive as possible to an actor’s feelings. I could shout ‘cut’ and start chatting to the cameraman or something. But Albert would sometimes have to go away and sit down for half an hour or so after a particularly emotional scene.3
Finney thought Keaton was great:
Shoot the Moon was very exciting because of Diane. She’s very spontaneous as an actress and that’s a quality you tend to lose or at least restrain when you’re trained in the theatre as I am. I try to reproduce a performance once I’ve got it. Whereas I noticed she’d try something new in every take if it occurred to her. She was terrific to work with. It was real proper tennis. One has to respond to that, not the way you did it in the last take. You have to be relaxed about it.
Karen Allen, a great Finney fan, said she ‘adored’ him: ‘He was a pleasure to work with and we remained friends for some years after. He was one of the best storytellers ever. He had such a spirit of fun and mischievousness.’
Overall, Shoot the Moon doesn’t quite convince. Parker offers many picturesque shots of northern California and an anguished Finney hunched over his typewriter as the surf rolls in, or sitting on his boat under a starry sky. Yet there isn’t enough insight into George’s character. Feminist groups were appalled at the violence George meted out to Faith and, in particular, the veiled suggestion at the end that she might take him back.
The final scene saw more mayhem. George mows down a new tennis court that Keaton and her new lover (Peter Weller) have built. According to Finney, ‘we made three endings for the film but none of us could actually articulate about how we felt so Alan went round canvassing the unit to see which one they felt suited best.’ As it turned out, the film stopped before any of the endings began. Perhaps the film’s abiding message is ‘pity the children caught in the carnage’.
For Finney it was a step back on to the pedestal of great movie acting, although the film was far from universally acclaimed. ‘A halfway decent actors’ piece which doesn’t really justify its time or leave affectionate memories behind. In essence it adds nothing except noise to what was being done in this field forty years ago,’ said Leslie Halliwell.
After the anguish of Shoot the Moon, Finney wanted some light relief. Like Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, he believed that life and art should be enjoyed. Recalling failed relationships had unsettled him. In that respect, the actor’s life suited him, ‘For a very brief span you get obsessed by something. Then it’s over and you move on to something else.’
So it was that Finney went from gut-wrenching adult drama to dancing with little Aileen Quinn in Annie.
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