Terence RattiganReseñas

2023 movie #54. 1958. David Niven won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a fake major living in a long term residence hotel on the English seashore. He comes to disgrace after being arrested for 'nudging' a young lady at the cinema. God performance by Lancaster as well.

[not seen]

A slightly strange story about the last day of term in a boys' public school in the 1950s. In black and white. The unpopular classics master is leaving; his colleagues and students see him as unemotional, almost 'dead' emotionally, but his real self emerges in various ways.

We meet his unbelievably ghastly wife, a boy in his class who's fairly empathic and also quite likes classics, a colleague who has been conducting an affair with his wife, and more.

The acting is good, in a 1950s kind of way, once you get past the pseudo-BBC accents. The directing is good too. The people are believable and the flow of the film works well.

But it's rather a depressing story without any clear conclusion. We are unlikely to watch it again.

Several rich people have a delayed flight.

1.5/4 (Meh).

It's a horrendously badly-written melodrama, about entirely unlikable characters who create their own problems.

(Apr. 2021)

Horse race tipster and journalist Colin Metcalfe is picked for the job of foreign correspondent in Norway when Hitler invades Poland. On the way to Norway his boat is attacked by a German U-Boat. However, when he tells the Navy about it, they don’t believe him, and to make matters worse, he is removed from his job. When German forces invade Norway, Metcalfe returns determined to uncover what is going on and stop the Germans in their tracks. (fonte: imdb)

An interesting set of what is actually two plays, though it reads more like two acts of one play, connected only by the same characters and setting. The stories could be told independently, and no one would ever know they were connected. I found both of them somewhat disturbing, but particularly the second. They are steeped in the ideas and morals of their time, and that means that the characters fuss about things no one would likely notice today. The dialogue is often quotidian, but I think that is the direct intention of the author. He intends this to be about people in their usual mode of interaction, thrown into a new situation. I didn't find the stories particularly compelling, but perhaps onstage they would play better than they read. The edition included some alternate scenes for the second act, which were never performed because they were too...problematic...for the time, I suppose. I must say, I preferred the alternate scenes. The original act as written was difficult to deal with because it depicted actions that were then and remain criminal, and violated the rights of various women, and we are expected to forgive the act. In the alternate scenes, the ones where the actions were too troubling for audiences, most of us would probably say, so what? But at the time this play came out, those were criminal actions that got much more serious penalty than the much more disturbing (to modern minds, especially women) scenes that were deemed more acceptable for stage. So this was an interesting exercise in trying to view a work through the eyes of its own time. At the very least, it made me glad I live in this time, warts and all.

This play is based on the real-life story of Alma Rattenbury, on trial for murdering her husband in concert with her lover, who (shock horror!) was 20 years younger than she was. The play shifts between the circumstances leading up to the murder, the trial, and the family dynamics of the jury forewoman, Edith Davenport.

I found the play a bit messy when shifting between these timelines, and I’m not sure how much the staging would have helped, especially if the sitting-room setting is supposed to be both the Davenports’ living room and the Rattenburys’. This play is almost better conceptually as a TV adaptation, where the shifts in time and place can be much more clearly defined. (The existence of the TV adaptation, featuring a young David Morrissey as the lover, Stoner in real life but Wood in the play, is the reason I read this play in the first place.)

This was Rattigan’s last play, and it kind of shows, with the messy chronology and the somewhat samey-sounding characters. I ended up looking up the original case and found the circumstances more interesting than the play. The murder victim, Francis Rattenbury, practised architecture in Canada and designed the British Columbia provincial legislature, as well as the Empress Hotel in Victoria and the former provincial courthouse, which is now home to the Vancouver Art Gallery. And it was his affair with Alma, who later became the wife who murdered him, that caused a scandal in the Canadian society he lived in, stopping the flow of work and precipitating his return to England.

If you are at all interested in this play, hunt down the TV adaptation. Don’t bother reading it.

An excellent one-act. The outcome surprised me in that the main character appeared to be doomed to a hellish existence with his whorish wife, but Rattigan suggests that that may not be so. He leaves one with a feeling of hope after all.

La storia di Lawrence d'Arabia- Ritratto drammatico in due anni

Wonderful 1940's play about a middle-class father's defense of his boy, a very young military academy student, against the unthinking might of English military and judicial institutions. (I couldn't help but picture Rebecca Pidgeon as the sister - she was perfectly cast in David Mamet's movie version.)

The version I read had two pictures of the actors in character and on stage, which was nice to get a feel for things. I saw the David Niven movie, loved it, and loved this just as well. In fact, better, since it's written as two separate plays, which makes more sense. Very good.½

This play cemented Terence Rattigan’s reputation as a serious, mature playwright. It is viewed as one of his best works, and one of the best one-acts ever written. First performed at the Phoenix Theatre, London, England, on September 8, 1948, The Browning Version was coupled with another one-act by Rattigan entitled Harlequinade under the umbrella name, Playbill. This show ran for 245 performances, and Rattigan received the Ellen Terry Award for The Browning Version, his second. (The first was won two years earlier for The Winslow Boy.)
The Browning Version concerns the life of Andrew Crocker-Harris, a classics schoolmaster at a British public school. Andrew is disliked by his unfaithful wife Millie, his colleagues, and his students. Rattigan based the character and the story of The Browning Version on a classics master he had at school as a student. Though only a one-act play, The Browning Version is a well-crafted and complete psychological study, indicative of his future direction as a playwright.½

Based on his own experiences in the RAF, this play, written in 1941 and first staged in 1942. Set in a hotel near an RAF Bomber Command airbase during the Second World War, the story involves a love triangle between a pilot, his actress wife and a famous film star. It was his first successful serious drama and first commercial success since the mid-1930s. The title of the play refers to the flares that were used to light runways to allow planes to take off and land but the flare paths were also used by the Germans to target the RAF planes.
The play portrays the impact on three couples of the demands on the fliers who leave, perhaps never to return, and their wives and lovers who wait for their return. Of the three couples, one is a young sergeant whose working wife is visiting for the weekend. Another is a Polish emigre Count who has married a British bar maid so that he may join the fight against the Germans. And the third couple is a young Lieutenant who is facing his own demons and is unsure if he is a worthy mate for his wife, one Patricia Graham, an actress from London, who has something of her own to tell her husband Teddy, the bomber pilot. The situation is complicated when Peter Kyle, a Hollywood film star, arrives at the hotel, and Teddy is sent out on a night raid over Germany. Patricia is torn between a rekindled old flame and loyalty to the husband who relies on her for support. The tension mounts as the the night moves into morning and the fliers begin their return. Rattigan effectively ratchets the emotional tensions and the suspense upward until the climax.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As I mentioned last week, I've finally gotten my Sony eBook Reader to start playing nice with the website of the Chicago Public Library, which now allows me to partake of the futuristic activity of checking out digital library books (a clever system run by Adobe in which loaned books literally erase themselves off your device after three weeks); and since the CPL's current collection of around three thousand electronic titles is so bizarre and random right now, I've decided to use it to catch up on bizarre and random picks myself, for example like Vintage's bound 1999 collection of two David Mamet screenplays, 1997's The Spanish Prisoner and 1998's The Winslow Boy. Both screenplays are great, although couldn't be more different from each other, and in fact I suspect were only collected together in the first place as a simple promotional project, in that the films themselves were released only a year apart: The Spanish Prisoner is a modern thriller concerning an ultra-complicated con game, memorably starring Steve Martin in a non-comedic role as the actual con man; The Winslow Boy, on the other hand, is a slow-moving Edwardian drama about the ways that honor and reputation used to be so important even from a practical aspect in British aristocratic society. Both are fine reads, although if you're not checking them out of the library randomly yourself, you'd probably be better off simply renting the actual films.

Out of 10: 8.4

I read this first, on my own, not as an assignment, as a teenager. I think it was an old battered pupils edition of the play, from my parents bookshelves. Hard work, but an intriguing story even back then (I must have been 13 or 14).
I find that I did not understand very much back then. Back then, for me the story was about the boy, about the fight to find justice for him. Re-reading it now, I see that it is about everyone *but* the boy. There is the parents, specifically the father, putting everything (money, reputation, health) into the task of getting their boy exonerated from the accusation of being a thief. The siblings suffer for this, the older brother loses his place at Oxford because the parents cannot pay for it anymore, the older sister loses her fiancé due to the publicity. Even the barrister whose help they enlisted, gets himself deeply involved in a tangle of political mudfights, legal battles and last but not least his unacknowledged attraction to a lady. There is a number of subplots going on, and the end does not only see the boy exonerated but nicely ties a few of these subplots as well. There is an open ending that is just lovely and unexpected --or not, if you have been reading attentively!
There is a 1999 film version of this play by David Mamet, which is worth watching.½

Both screenplays are enjoyable, though The Spanish Prisoner is more enjoyable. The stories are a bit predictable, yet still interesting.½

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