Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Screenwriter Guy Gallo, who died aged only 59 in 2015, had written a screenplay of Volcano while he was at Harvard. Fascinated by the novel, Gallo had managed to pare it down, shunning the extravagant stream of consciousness narrative. His script featured a drunken consul, now resigned, living in Mexico in 1938, his wife Yvonne, and his half-brother Hugh, with whom she has dallied. Gallo wrote the initial screenplay in a matter of days, although there were many revisions.

  The consul was a haunted, self-destructive figure, so it would have seemed ideal for another Burton/Huston collaboration, similar to The Night of the Iguana.3 After all, Burton’s own poisonous relationship with the bottle had filled thousands of magazine articles and about ten posthumous biographies. Yet Burton was in poor health. He had collapsed during the run of Camelot back in 1980.

  Burton was also committed to a run of Private Lives with Elizabeth Taylor on Broadway. The crowds flocked to see Liz and Dick ‘selling themselves’, in Lauren Bacall’s words. And Taylor had no intention of allowing Burton to bow out. Meanwhile, down south, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Huston was ready to shoot. He offered Burton the part. Burton declined, ‘Could he [Huston] wait?’ Huston told him that he had to do it now. Huston feared he would soon die. Ironically, Burton died first, prematurely, aged just 58, a year later.

  Anthony Hopkins was then approached. But he was committed to The Bounty. In interviews at the time Hopkins said he preferred to play Captain Bligh because he thought he ‘knew him better’, perhaps a curious comment from a recovering alcoholic. Finney was third choice. Huston and Finney had collaborated well on Annie two years earlier. Although Annie had lost a lot of money and failed to wow the critics, there was reason to believe that this, altogether more ambitious venture, would restore Huston’s reputation. Finney had read Lowry’s novel before filming began. He admitted to finding it ‘very complicated and very difficult to get into’, but said that he had liked it. It all sounded promising enough.

  Financing, however, had proved almost impossible. The great John Huston – the words naturally going together as they do with John Ford or Orson Welles – the director of such classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Misfits, was simply not ‘bankable’, and movies like Escape to Victory and, indeed, Annie, hardly dispelled the image of a director past his prime. Huston was 77 in 1983. The same year, he was honoured with the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The director’s reference to his increasing debility – ‘I’m being dismembered bit by bit’ – reminded the industry that he didn’t have long left.

  One of the eventual producers of Under the Volcano, Wieland Schulz-Keil, recalled the story behind the AFI tribute:

  No one would back Huston. I was told he was too old, he had had too many flops. I couldn’t believe it. He was one of the legends and we couldn’t raise a nickel on his name. All the moguls who had been turning me down were up there singing his praises. It was quite disgusting. By the end of the evening I was so angry I actually physically attacked a couple of film executives as they left the hotel.4

  But Huston had never been universally popular. (John Wayne, for example, fell out with Huston on the set of The Conqueror. ‘Outside Moulin Rouge and Asphalt Jungle I don’t think he’s done anything worthwhile when Bogie or his dad weren’t there to help him,’ Wayne once said, conveniently disregarding a lot of films.)

  Huston was by now bitter over his rejection and failing health – in particular emphysema – after a lifetime of heavy smoking and boozing. Ironically, his condition made him well-placed to direct such a tale. So too, in a way, was Finney, someone who clearly liked drinking. And here is as good a place as any to analyse Finney’s relationship with alcohol.

  Think of British hellraisers and Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed spring to mind. These were the four most famous imbibers of their generation. But the list is endless, Ian Hendry, Trevor Howard and, in the past, Robert Newton, as well as countless others. Finney is not mentioned in the same league but he had a ‘reputation’, as they say. Graham Lord’s biography of Jeffrey Bernard tells a funny, ironic story. When Finney was courting Anouk Aimée they went to the cinema with Lauren Bacall. Bernard was Bacall’s blind date. The writer was, as usual, pissed. Anouk turned to Bacall and said, ‘be careful of that Jeffrey Bernard. I think he is a drinkeur [sic]’ – clearly not aware of Finney’s reputation. But Finney has always denied being a hard drinker. He has often said that wine is his favourite tipple.

  We should be wary of quotes, misquotes and apocryphal anecdotes that are routinely bandied around. On the set of Annie, Huston said that Finney could drink a gallon of wine and hit his marks next morning, word perfect. Such routine hyperbole is the stuff of show business. A gallon is equivalent to 8 pints – not of beer, but of wine! Huston’s comment evokes an image of Finney, almost in the manner of pulling up at the petrol station, ordering a gallon of wine in the evening. He would have died long ago had he so consumed. Finney’s own account of his relationship with booze is more trustworthy:

  As a youth, it seemed relatively attractive to be the roaring boy. You know, where you drank at the pub during lunchtime and then gave a performance. I found the idea of it appealing, playing that role, but my system in those days – it’s got more hardened since – actually couldn’t cope with it. I guess it’s possible that it was a kind of escape hatch. If you’re regarded as someone of talent, expected to be an achiever, perhaps if you screw yourself up, they’ll say, ‘Well, if only he hadn’t become an alcoholic, he would have fulfilled the promise.’ But it didn’t happen for me because I simply couldn’t do it. My digestive tract couldn’t cope. After a few whiskeys I used to throw up – but I’d come back to the party and drink more Pernod anyway. Then my appendix burst. I got peritonitis and realised I couldn’t take it. It was what I call ‘the Barrymore syndrome’. You know – you’re more interesting and romantic if you seem bent on self-destruction. There may even be some ladies drawn to you who suffer from ‘the Florence Nightingale syndrome’. And then, you see, if you don’t live up to their expectations, you have the get-out clause.

  Finney is not an alcoholic. Friends often mention his drinking – and it’s clear that he has sometimes imbibed more than was good for him – but he was never in the same league as O’Toole, Harris or David Hemmings. Yet a lifelong teetotaler would have probably found it difficult to play the Consul.5 In the words of Jeannine Dominy, Guy Gallo’s widow, ‘you didn’t have to be a drunk to play the Consul but you had to know what it’s like to be drunk.’6 Likewise, Huston. A Times portrait captured the ‘grizzled veteran’, as he was frequently described, on set when filming started in August 1983:

  John Huston, grand old man of the American cinema, sits in a white golf cart from which he rarely stirs, his eyes focused keenly on its tiny video screen which monitors the images recorded by the camera. At 77, he is a shadow of a figure once so imposing. His legs are elongated and thinned out like a stork’s, his chest is hollow, his belly droops. But the eyes still have wit and intelligence, and age has enforced a calm sobriety.

  Lowry’s novel was set on the Day of the Dead. It covers the final day in the Consul’s life. Essentially, reduced to its simplest, a drunk mourns his wife’s desertion. He prays for her return. She comes back, but seeing her again, and his half-brother Hugh with whom she has had an affair, stirs his feelings of rejection. He takes off and drinks himself into oblivion. His actual death comes from criminals’ bullets in a clapped-out cantina.

  We must also remember the date, November 1938, and the backdrop of rising tensions in Europe. Finney, as the drunken Consul, questions the German ambassador about whether a Nazi movement is being funded in Mexico. The sense of threat is a motif in Gallo’s screenplay, further condemning Firmin. Later, when Firmin is cornered in the cantina by taunting bandits, he is accused of being a Jew. Firmin fends this off with the frequently cited comment that Jews are seldom ‘borracho’. He is surrounded by Nazis.

&nbs
p; Jeannine Dominy, who shared many discussions with her late husband about the filming and had access to his notebooks, believed that Huston was approaching the story through the lens of his own life. It was the Consul’s death that fascinated Huston – with the politics and the Consul’s erstwhile passion for his wife, Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset), on the backburner.

  Dominy said:

  Huston was an opinionated man, a real sadist who liked to play power games with people. He had a history of smashed-up relationships. He had not shaken off his Irish Catholic sense of guilt. He was paying off his sins. Can you have redemption at the last minute? He would bristle at suggestions of passion between the consul and Yvonne.

  So it seems that, for Huston at least, ‘soused in Mexico’ was a fair summary of the project. He saw the Consul as in some way an emissary from his own tempestuous life. ‘So long as the Consul comes out heroic and true, that’s all that matters,’ said Huston. It was self-destruction but also the possibility of salvation – literally, as it were, arising from the ashes of the volcano – that fascinated him. And when he, Huston, died, which he believed was imminent, would he have redemption? (Huston’s death was four years away.)

  Unusually, Huston allocated several days’ rehearsal to Finney. ‘It was important that Finney and I discuss the significance of the book,’ he said. Dominy believes that Huston devoted little time to Bisset or Anthony Andrews (Hugh). ‘I don’t direct actors. If I get the actor, I’m assuming he can do it,’ Huston said at the time. Or, in Dominy’s words, ‘if Huston didn’t trust an actor, he couldn’t be bothered to fix him’. At the time Huston said of Finney:

  I think we do feel the same way about the character, more or less. In fact we had a rather long session and I don’t normally do that with actors. Once I’ve made a decision in the casting I tend to leave it up to the actor and I tell them when they’re going a little wrong on the set.

  Finney later recalled that Huston would say, ‘I like to see what the actor offers me’. It appears to be the only time that Huston ever sat down with one of his actors to discuss a role.

  Finney approached the part determined not to be fazed by the portentous material. ‘You can’t say – my God – this film is profound and intensely personal and otherworldly. It is. But it’s the same if you play Lear or Hamlet. If you think like that you can never do it.’

  For Finney, however, the part was challenging; he was known for his carousing yet he was not a depressed individual, let alone a suicidal drunk:

  In no way have I ever been as self-destructive as the Consul. If I were to relate my own experiences to the state of the consul in the screenplay, I’d say that my depressions and highs are like mounds and hillocks compared to his mountain ranges. And therefore all I can do is extend imaginatively my own mediocre ups-and-downs and try to chart the extremities that are his.7

  Finney’s performance has many layers. The movie opens with the Consul, somewhat inebriated, meeting a friend. Finney always played drunks well, noting the person so afflicted walks with great precision in a bid to appear normal. (Peter O’Toole was equally skilled in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. O’Toole played the part as if he were a drunk trying to be sober – with sometimes explosive consequences. This was the correct approach. Tom Conti, by contrast, played Bernard as a blurry-eyed wreck when he inherited the part.)

  We see the Consul bend down carefully, tenderly stroking a dog. At once we get the driving force behind Firmin’s drinking – loneliness. He can’t survive without his wife: ‘Without love there is no life’. Later, at a reception, drinking furiously from an assortment of spirits, he insults the guests. A remarkable moment comes later in a cantina when he relates an episode from his service in the First World War. Finney, convincingly, does a double take when Yvonne returns. This was his best scene. It ends with him stumbling out of the bar, aided by Yvonne. ‘How, unless you drink as I do, can you understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?’

  Finney’s portrayal of drunkenness was convincing enough to make some wonder if he was sozzled during filming. What a cheek! Finney said that before a shot he would wet his finger with tequila and taste it to get a ‘flavour’ of the scene. But that was the limit of his daytime consumption. He didn’t believe that to play a drunk you had to be soused, and it would not have worked if he had.

  The trouble with films about alcoholism is that it’s simply too harrowing a condition to depict convincingly. It’s difficult to believe, for example, that Ray Milland’s desperate drunk in The Lost Weekend is really that desperate because his appearance doesn’t reflect his addiction. Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick were good, but somehow still too respectable in Days of Wine and Roses as a couple more besotted with the bottle than each other. Nicolas Cage’s rendition in Leaving Las Vegas was more credible but underwater swimming and lovemaking are not really dying alcoholics’ pursuits. Meg Ryan’s sozzled act in When a Man Loves a Woman, taking surreptitious midnight trips to the garbage to down vodka, just didn’t convince.

  Finney’s performance suffers in another sense. He looks like he has lived well rather than badly. There is nothing wrong with his actor’s kit. Indeed he is superbly well equipped to play such a part. But somehow his ruddy cheeks and burly build make him seem too healthy. And here again we could draw a distinction with Burton, emaciated and worn down and drained of vigour by run-ins with the life-sucking bottle, who would have been more credible. (Finney’s appearance, however, does match Lowry’s description of the Consul.)

  Another problem is that Firmin is treated rather like a horrific come-on by some of the other players. Only his friend and the barman recognise his tragedy. Otherwise we are treated to Firmin’s neighbour, Quincy, taunting him about his cat and whether he’s seeing pink elephants. Then there is the silly-arse Brit (played by Finney’s old RADA pal, James Villiers)8 who almost runs him over. But, rather than trying to figure out what the problem is, he merely offers him more booze. Similarly, Hugh (Andrews) never realises how far ‘Geoff’ has sunk. He enquires about his welfare rather like one would of a friend who goes on the occasional bender, not about someone drinking himself to death. And in the final scene, where Finney makes a reference to the earth revolving and him waiting for his house to come round, this sounds like an old Richard Harris joke.

  Clearly a lot of thought went into Finney’s portrayal, yet the pursed lips and rolling eyes – the sense that we are sometimes invited to laugh at this grotesque figure as he stumbles around his garden searching for hidden bottles – detracts from the tragedy. It’s a sterling effort but one that perhaps Huston should have, at certain points, reined in. This Huston did not do; he referred to Finney’s performance, again with a touch of hyperbole, as the greatest he had seen on film.

  Huston’s strength was a great eye for a telling image. The first day’s shooting had Finney tottering around in his tuxedo, wearing sunglasses, surrounded by the festival and various skulls. Out of nowhere Huston suddenly got the idea to do a shot looking into Finney’s face with a big skull reflecting perfectly in each lens of his mirror shades. Finney’s sunglasses made for a great movie poster.

  Ultimately, however, Under the Volcano’s shortcomings were more a failure of direction than acting. It was a valiant attempt to film a tragic story but perhaps finally brought down by unrealistic expectations and a director past his best. Dirk Bogarde, an actor who had longed to play Firmin, ‘and nearly did three times, once with the Mexicans, once with Cukor who backed out, and once with Losey, who eventually dumped me’, (but, of course, Losey did not end up making it either) wrote to Bertrand Tavernier that ‘it breaks my heart that Huston made such a mess of Under the Volcano.’9

  Tom Milne thought the film presented a different story to the novel:

  Ultimately one is left not, as in the novel, with a man destroyed by the apocalypse of his own imagination but with little more than another world-weary cuckold following in the wake of Greene’s whisky priest and all those other drunkards who ha
ve moored in Mexico.

  Finney and Huston greatly enjoyed their second collaboration. Huston said:

  Finney has a wealth of invention. He would do things that were completely surprising to me and I would sit back in amazement. We spoke in a kind of codal communication. I mean, I would nod and he would look at me and smile and that’s all there was to it. There was little or no directing required. All credit due to Finney.

  Michael Fitzgerald, executive producer, noted the same rapport:

  Albert would do something, they would both look at each other and they would crack up in laughter. Both knew that whatever had happened was awful. And so they did it over. Hardly a word was exchanged. Sometimes, John would shake his head and Albert would change completely in the next take. Or John would nod affirmatively, and Albert would smile. That was their sign language. They got along just like that. They seldom talked about things.10

  For Guy Gallo, Finney was the model of professionalism and played the part perfectly: ‘He delivers it as you wish to be delivered.’ Finney would sit with the crew at lunch, and Gallo was struck by his warmth and conviviality. ‘He only had lovely things to day about Albert,’ said Gallo’s widow.

  Finney won some excellent reviews. The Times’s David Robinson said, ‘it provides Finney with an ideal part. He is perhaps the only British film actor today still capable of the larger-than-life grand manner of Laughton. His consul is a rich, colourful creation by turns proud, pathetic, dignified, absurd, touching, comic, brave.’ Yet Robinson also noted, ‘the manner of gripping the lips at whatever is painful or angering is more noticeable and comes more often’. Leslie Halliwell thought the film too heavy for cinemagoers: ‘A subtle novel has on film become a drunken monologue, fascinating as a tour de force but scarcely tolerable after the first half hour.’