Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Finney equips himself well in the role, with a sleepy, soothing southern drawl that draws you in. There are nice shots of the water and the film wins points on atmosphere. You can feel the humidity, the swampy, lush vegetation, the relaxed, old-style charm of Charleston life. As a story, however, it is pleasant but utterly forgettable. ‘A meandering domestic drama, an attempt at a character study, which fails because its participants distinctly lack character, cleaving only to the obvious and expected,’ wrote John Walker. ‘It could play on television tomorrow and nobody would find anything amiss, save perhaps the ratings dropping precipitously as the audience drifted away in search of something more than genteel good taste,’ wrote John Harkness in Sight and Sound.

  Finney’s co-star Piper Laurie admitted that whenever she looked at him she still got goosebumps, ‘I’ve seen all his movies and I saw him in the theatre a lot and, well, I had a crush on him. It’s hard to get over that, you know.’

  Finney was the first actor approached by Beresford to play the father:

  Generally, when you’re looking for actors in their 50s, just about all the ones working are pretty good or they wouldn’t have been working so long. But you get some actors who can’t convey what the others can. We needed an actor with an emotional range. Albert had it … I think, of all the actors I’ve worked with, he’s the most aware of what’s necessary for film. Because you get a lot of actors who, when you’re fiddling with the focus and you’re measuring distances, and they’ve got to lean this way or that, a lot of them seem to have an attitude that it’s all some kind of a trick to make things difficult for them. They think you’re not doing it in fact to make them look good. But Albert understands everything you’re doing and you don’t have to explain.6

  The movie, however, was no great shakes. Much better was Mike Figgis’s remake of the Terence Rattigan classic The Browning Version, about an unpopular, unloved classics master at a boys’ boarding school. Ill health has forced Andrew Crocker-Harris into early retirement, and his wife is cheating on him with a younger teacher. Just when all seems lost, he is buoyed by an unexpected act of kindness.

  Some great actors had played Crocker-Harris, not only Michael Redgrave (in the 1951 film), Nigel Stock (in the 1976 King’s Head stage production) but also John Gielgud in an American TV version. Crocker-Harris is an introverted, weary corpse, spiritually and emotionally broken, and a dull, pedantic teacher. Redgrave, in particular, seemed the perfect choice for the part. Something about him suggested repression and trauma. Finney was an odd fit to play such a man, ‘a double first-class wimp’ to his wife (Greta Scacchi) and yet ‘Hitler of the lower fifth’ to the children.

  Ronald Harwood’s script explains this inherent contradiction. Crocker-Harris retains perfect discipline in his classes, a fact acknowledged by his replacement teacher (Julian Sands) at his final lesson. But when the headmaster tells him that he will not get a full pension, even though an exception was made for another teacher, he is too dejected to reply. Similarly, when his wife tells him that Taplow’s gift was merely a ploy to gain the promotion the boy craves, Crocker-Harris just disappears, tail ’tween legs. All very unlike Finney, one can guess …

  Perhaps Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Corin Redgrave or Ian Holm would have been more obvious choices for the part, yet Figgis wanted Finney. When the film came out some felt that Finney, whose larger-than-life persona was so different from Crocker-Harris, was miscast. To which one should reply that perhaps Finney was, technically, miscast. Yet sometimes casting against type can be rewarding. One thinks of Robert Mitchum as the shy, subdued schoolmaster in Ryan’s Daughter. Finney’s portrayal of Crocker-Harris is interesting because it’s a surprise.

  Figgis tells how he became interested in a modern version, ‘I was in LA getting ready to go to dinner when the old black and white version of The Browning Version came on TV. I wanted to do a remake and I always wanted Finney right from the beginning.’ (He had originally wanted Finney to play – yes – the part of Finney in his film, Stormy Monday, but Sting played him instead.) ‘Ridley Scott owned the rights to the remake but he immediately offered it to me.’7

  Figgis believes that Crocker-Harris’s character was misunderstood. ‘In the early days he might have even been seen as a hip sort of guy,’ he said. But with time he changed. Crocker-Harris may be a sad sack but he’s all too believable. Perhaps only British audiences, and especially those who have endured the luxurious, lonely lock-up of a boarding school, can understand the stifling atmosphere. You feel that the staff only exists in the confines of the school and that long-serving teachers can be emotionally stunted.

  On the first day of filming in the early summer of 1993 (Bryanston and Sherborne schools in Dorset were used) Figgis saw Finney standing by with a big marker pen, seemingly amending the script. Figgis, curious to see if Finney was changing Harwood’s words, approached him. Finney told him that the lines were ‘perfect’. He was just deleting some stage directions, psychological notes and prompts – presumably along the lines of ‘he gazes wistfully into the distance’ – that peppered the script. He just wanted the dialogue straight – no nonsense. Figgis noted Finney’s shrewd instincts. At one point the headmaster (Michael Gambon) tells Crocker-Harris to make his farewell speech at the beginning, rather than go last as tradition dictates, because the other departing master is ‘adored’ by the boys. Figgis suggested that perhaps Finney should cry. Finney, probably correctly, replied that he would be crying when Taplow gives him the book. Was it wise to bring on the tears too soon?

  The ‘Crock’s’ old-fashioned classes are shown up by the younger, trendy chemistry teacher Frank Hunter (Matthew Modine from Orphans) who is having an affair with Crock’s wife. Figgis handles the story movingly. Pained resignation, humiliation and an aura of quiet defeat do not come easily to Finney; they are not natural components of his personality, but he projects a melancholy that makes him credible. Above all, it is his fundamental stillness, his titanic, immovable presence, which sustains interest. Finney’s emotions spring loose in the final class when he injects some passion into the proceedings. By the time Taplow hands him the book, the audience starts to empathise with him.

  Harwood’s script adds some unusual touches, including bullied boys extracting revenge on an older pupil. It also injects some four-letter words to make it all more modern. Hitler is substituted for Himmler in the new version, presumably allowing for modern audiences’ unfamiliarity with Nazi tyrants. It keeps the original ending and here, one had to say, the address at the final assembly does strain credibility. It seems unthinkable that a schoolmaster, even one stricken by guilt, would readily admit so many failings. ‘I have deserved the epithet Hitler of the lower fifth,’ says Finney as Crocker-Harris. ‘I have degraded the noblest calling a man can follow. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for having let you down.’

  It all sounds rather like a post-torture confession at some state-sponsored show trial. Somehow one feels that the ‘Crock’, even when the floodgates have opened, would never go this far. It’s also difficult to believe that such a statement would win a standing ovation from the boys. What, after all, are they applauding? Crocker-Harris’s admission of failure? This seems like an odd reaction. It’s as though they are agreeing that he is useless.

  Figgis sometimes lingers too long over certain scenes – the way Crocker-Harris stares at the book from Taplow (a winning performance from Ben Silverstone) has a touch of melodrama to it. Yet, on the whole, it’s a thoughtful, provocative remake of a moving story, of how transformative little acts of kindness can be. And Finney’s unusual casting has its rewards. Perhaps the only comment would be that, rather like Burton’s failed, seedy university lecturer in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it’s difficult to see Finney as a failed anything.

  Such an unorthodox choice of lead was bound to draw strong reactions. And Figgis, although he enjoyed the shooting, recalled an unpleasant fallout involving producer Ridley Scott:

  I deli
vered the film. I knew that Ridley [Scott] didn’t like the film, and he made no bones about it. He didn’t like Finney’s performance. He didn’t like the way I directed it … I ended up back in LA with the film because I had to show it to the studio. Sherry Lansing from Paramount pictures was there, and Ridley was there, along with some others … I was being somewhat shocked by what appeared to be their favourable reaction. I remember catching the word ‘Oscar’ and Sherry saying, ‘it’s just the most beautiful film. Albert Finney is going to get an Oscar.’ It was kind of an odd situation because I knew Ridley really didn’t like the film and suddenly Sherry loved the film. She was the head of Paramount.8

  As it turned out, there were no Oscars or raspberries. The critics disagreed. Here was Quentin Curtis in the Independent:

  If, like me, you admire Rattigan’s work, watching the film will be like seeing a close friend being mugged. Ronald Harwood has adapted the play with distressing crudity. I also feel Finney is badly miscast. Think of Finney – of his fondness for wine, women and racehorses and you think of a bon viveur rather than a corpse. When we watch him overseeing his class he does not have a schoolmaster’s rigidity, borne of study and supervising, but the coiled stillness of a heroic actor. He is still outstandingly attractive, a magnificent physical specimen – a real problem since Crocker-Harris is supposed to have failed his wife in physical love.

  Doubtless, Finney would have smiled at that. As for the miscasting, one can only repeat the original point about interesting miscasting and downright stupid miscasting.

  Caryn James in the NewYork Times, while praising Finney, thought the subject should have been consigned to the past:

  Albert Finney, who has given some over-the-top performances in his time, is wonderfully restrained here, terse and not afraid to be unlikeable … [but] … it carries the unmistakable whiff of a musty tale dragged into the nineties, where it seems conspicuously out of place.

  John Walker called it ‘a remake of no particular distinction or point, cut adrift from its original period setting and losing in credibility because of it.’ Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker, on the other hand, liked it: ‘Strong and affecting – perhaps because neither the director nor the star has worked with this sort of material before.’

  Figgis loved working with Finney and puts him at the top of the pantheon of British acting greats. Like many before and since, he noted Finney’s generosity as well as his fondness for fine food, wine, Cuban cigars and good company. He was staying at a large manor house in Dorset. ‘We had an idyllic summer making the film in the most beautiful part of England,’ recalls Figgis. ‘Every evening cast and crew would have magnificent dinners. On the last night everyone was treated to a jug of wine at Albert’s expense.’

  The director recalls an interesting conversation with Finney about Figgis’s upcoming film, Leaving Las Vegas, then at planning stage. Figgis repeated what was presumably a bit of a joke by Nicolas Cage, who said, since he was to play a severe alcoholic, he may as well stay drunk throughout filming. Finney reacted with consternation, reminding him that this would spell disaster. He told him it was impossible for an actor to play a drunk if he really was sloshed.

  Figgis also revealed that, on the final day of shooting, Finney said he had rarely enjoyed making a film so much but that he ‘probably wouldn’t see it’, which says a lot about Finney’s detached attitude towards his work. He was always the perfect professional but, once completed, it was on to something else. Another bonus for Finney was that his son, Simon, then 35, was assistant cameraman on the film. ‘Get me out of focus and I’ll cut you out of my will,’ he’d quip to Simon.

  Some critics pondered the reasons for reworking a classic. Perhaps Mike Figgis should have the final word, ‘The play is done all the time but who under the age of 30 knows of it? Doing it in period would have no bearing on younger audiences and I wanted to attract them.’

  Soon after The Browning Version wrapped, Finney found himself in another unlikely part. He was playing a character called Alfie, but this was as far removed from Michael Caine’s Alfie as could be imagined. Virgin territory … yes, that’s right, from a guy like Finney, a veritable ‘lifer’ as far as women are concerned!

  22

  A WALK ON THE WILDE SIDE

  I was so touched by his childlike fascination for the machine that I bought it from the museum and gave it to him as a present at the end of shooting.

  Suri Krishnamma.

  Finney as a gay man may seem about as likely as Jack Nicholson playing Quentin Crisp. A Man of No Importance contains Finney’s most complete transformation in films.

  Dublin, 1963. The Profumo scandal is breaking; Kennedy is in the White House; and Finney is Alfie Byrne, a closet gay bus conductor and Oscar Wilde aficionado who delights in singsongs on the bus and staging his idol’s plays with local amateur actors. Meanwhile, he lusts after a handsome bus driver (Rufus Sewell). Barry Devlin’s screenplay even asks us to believe that his character is a virgin. But, somehow, thanks to the skill of Finney and director Suri Krishnamma, it all seems credible.

  Alfie lives with his sister Lily (Brenda Fricker) over the butcher’s shop run by Carney (Michael Gambon), who seems surprised that Alfie had never married. Has he, or more to the point perhaps, his sister, never guessed Alfie’s true inclinations?

  Krishnamma answered my question:

  So as far as Lily is concerned, her brother is simply a little behind everyone else. I don’t think it could occur to her that he is gay, given the context of the time and that homosexuality was illegal. It just wouldn’t be something she would think about, until of course it becomes evident in his behaviour and when the wider society around him gets to know.1

  Lily even tries to set him up on a date with the beautiful young Adele (Tara Fitzgerald) who Alfie casts in his local production of Salome, a staging that arouses suspicions among locals on account of its blasphemy. We quickly learn, however, that Alfie’s heart is not with Tara. It lies with his bus driver, Robbie, whom Alfie calls ‘Bosie’ (Wilde’s nickname for his lover). But still no one suspects that Alfie – who quietly kisses a photograph of Robbie he keeps at home – is sublimating his true passion.

  Finney’s Alfie is a revelation. This is a pudgy Finney with a red, cuddly cardigan, delicately placed spectacles, boyishly pink cheeks and a lyrical Dublin accent. Alfie, as played by Finney, is not effeminate as such, but rather a gentle tenderfoot. An air of bemusement surrounds everything he does. Even playing snooker with a few young lads (including Jonathan Rhys Meyers in his first role) seems audacious. Alfie is an innocent in his fifties who believes that Adele must be ill when he hears lovemaking coming from her bedroom.

  Yet Alfie, a stranger to the joys of the flesh, is a bit incorrigible in other ways, what with his tendency to stage Wilde plays. In the end he succumbs to temptation and seeks out ‘a cuddle’ in a pub. Predictably, he is mugged. It looks like he is finished. Yet somehow we know that it will work out, notwithstanding his tarnished reputation, because Alfie’s such a good-natured soul, and so kind to cash-strapped passengers on his bus. So his friends (including the wonderful David Kelly) will stand by him in spite of his wanderings.

  Finney’s achievement is massive. He is a totally different creature from Arthur Seaton. Easy to do, you may say, considering it was thirty-four years earlier. But I talk not of the passage of time. Seaton had a hard face whereas Alfie is one big softie.

  Krishnamma offered some perceptive comments on Finney. He had originally considered a younger actor, David Thewlis, then a rising star, to play Alfie:

  But when Albert was suggested it occurred to me that an older man might be more interesting and actually more appropriate for the role of someone who had spent his life struggling with his sexuality, bereft of any sexual experience himself. An older man might add a further dimension to a character wrestling with the distinct difficulties of repressed sexual desire that play out against the backdrop of sixties Dublin, where homosexuality was, of course, illega
l.

  Just like The Browning Version, but for entirely different reasons, Finney was an unusual choice to play the lead. Finney has cultivated the off-screen image of being a great sensualist. And Alfie is not only gay but, and this is perhaps a key point, his hands are ‘innocent of affection’, as he tells his sister.

  Krishnamma, however, was not particularly aware of casting against type:

  I only really see actors in two groups – good actors and bad ones – and a good actor should be capable of performing any role they are physically suited to. I have often cast ‘comedy’ actors in serious roles, such as Richard Briers in the BBC’s A Respectable Trade [1997] based on the novel by Philippa Gregory. In that drama, Richard played a dark, vicious and aggressive slave-trader, but was at the time better known for comedy roles. So when Albert was suggested it never occurred to me to consider whether he was capable of playing the part of Alfie Byrne given his towering talent. That said, ‘casting against type’ can help stretch an actor and encourage him or her to go to places they might be less familiar with. It may help release some hidden energy that has been constrained by stereotypical roles in the past. This approach to casting can extend into cross-gender casting too where new dimensions to characters can sometimes be revealed.

  Krishnamma, just 33 at the time and a relative novice, was understandably nervous at the prospect of working with such theatrical giants as Finney and Gambon, as well as Brenda Fricker, who had just won an Oscar for My Left Foot. The first time he met Gambon and Finney together was a hilariously bungled encounter:

  It was quite a disastrous start to our relationship. I’d already met Albert in London, had instantly fallen in love with him for the role, and then spent an agonising couple of weeks praying that the deal would be done to secure him on the film. That took longer than we’d expected, and the producer [Jonathan Cavendish] was being pushed to the brink by Finney’s people, whose unrealistic expectations simply couldn’t be met. On the day the deal was finalised, Jonathan and I were holed up in his office, aware that if we didn’t clinch it by the close of play, the production would be shut down and we’d all pack our bags and go home. So securing Finney was the single reason the film, ultimately, got made. So once Michael had agreed to join [as well as Brenda Fricker, Tara Fitzgerald, Rufus Sewell and many other brilliant local Dublin actors] we were flying with a truly great ensemble cast.