Ronald Neame (1963)
I Could Go on Singing is about an unhappy, unstable American singing superstar, in London for shows at the Palladium and trying to get her offstage life sorted out. Fifteen years ago, Jenny Bowman had an affair with David Donne, a young Englishman who was completing his medical studies in New York. They had a child but Jenny couldn’t be a mother as well as an international star. David and the woman he’d married ‘adopted’ the boy, Matt. David’s wife has now died and, on her visit to London, Jenny goes to see him – ostensibly for a diagnosis on the state of her tonsils (he’s become a leading ENT specialist, she’s apparently neurotic about losing her voice) but really to try and see – and reclaim – her son. Jenny is played by Judy Garland, and this was her last film. Six years after its release, she died at the age of forty-seven, in London. Although Jenny doesn’t die (the film ends with her redemption on stage at the last night of her Palladium run), it’s impossible not to link the character and the woman playing her. Because of that – and our idea that Garland, at this point in her life, was a drugs-raddled basket case – her expressive but controlled acting comes as rather a surprise. We may feel that she’s drawing very considerably on her own personality but that gives the hackneyed role she’s playing a vividness it would otherwise lack. Her line readings are alert and she has a wonderful natural humour.
Garland’s physique makes for remarkable contrasts between Jenny on stage and off. She’s tiny and vulnerable away from the Palladium spotlight: Garland’s puffy face and large eyes mean that you’re conscious of Jenny’s head to the virtual exclusion of the rest of her body. When she’s performing it’s very different: her long, shapely legs give her an unexpected ranginess below the waist yet her upper body seems bulky and constricted. It makes for an electric tension. The problem I had was with Garland’s singing, which is compelling but disconcerting – the voice, overpowering yet fragile, sounds doped, clotted with emotion. And three of the four songs that Jenny sings at the Palladium are awful – the exception is ‘By Myself’ (by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz). Not knowing any of the others, I assumed they were specially written for the film, mechanical imitations of the anthems of determined, despairing self-affirmation that we associate with a Garland-like performer. (I was late arriving at BFI and got into NFT1 just as the opening credits were ending so saw nothing about the songs.) I was shocked to discover when I got home that Kurt Weill, with Maxwell Anderson, wrote ‘It Never Was You’ and that the title song was by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. The first number, ‘Hello, Bluebird’, by Cliff Friend, seems nothing more than (I suppose, is) a cheesy nod to ‘Over the Rainbow’. The only enjoyable musical interlude is, surprisingly, when Jenny goes backstage after a performance of HMS Pinafore at Matt’s school and joins the boys in ‘I Am the Monarch of the Sea’, where Garland’s jazzy looseness works well against the conscientious style of the boys.
One thing Dirk Bogarde does effortlessly is incarnate men who’ve reached the top of their profession – whether an academic or a lawyer or, in this case, a doctor. It’s a combination of that upright bearing and the clear-mindedness that he exudes – and the quietly spoken authority. Bogarde understands and conveys the essence of professional self-confidence – the certainty that you don’t need to speak long or loudly to make your point and settle the matter. And, for as long as Bogarde doesn’t raise his voice, his inflections are often marvellously witty and incisive. He’s a much less persuasive actor when he’s shouting – the display of that kind of anger feels forced and hollow. All these aspects of Bogarde are in evidence in I Could Go on Singing: for the most part, his relatively low emotional temperature makes him an effective counterpoint to Garland – although the lack of any sexual spark is a problem. It’s hard to believe Bogarde’s David was part of a passionate affair even some years ago. Jenny tells him when they first meet again that he’s changed (and he agrees) but Bogarde’s presence makes it hard to believe that too.
I Could Go on Singing puts together two clichéd types of film story: the mother who gave up her child, usually for selfish reasons, and now realises, too late, her terrible mistake; and the masochistic star performer whose one true love is her audience (it usually is a she) and who feels safe only when she’s on stage, It’s not the first time the two themes have been linked but the screenplay by Mayo Simon is very clumsy: much of the dialogue, rewritten by Bogarde (who refused a credit), is often better than the script’s construction. In their crucial, climactic conversation in a London A&E department (Jenny got drunk and sprained her ankle), David tells Jenny he’ll stay with her as long as she needs him. He gets her to the Palladium, where the sell-out audience has been kept waiting an hour already. She goes on stage, without any preparation or changing her clothes, and he waits and watches in the wings. Halfway through ‘I Could Go on Singing’, she already has the disgruntled punters eating out of her hand. She turns to look at David again and he’s gone. He’s concluded that Jenny is back (home) where she belongs and doesn’t need him any more. We’re meant to feel he’s both right and wrong: she doesn’t give the wings a second look; once the curtain falls, she’ll be alone again.
Ronald Neame may have been attracted to the idea of directing Garland but you sense that, by temperament, he was more at home with the offstage drama, and the script is just too weak to give him a chance of succeeding with it. Gregory Phillips, as Matt, has a very engaging quality but can’t carry the dramatic weight his character’s eventually expected to bear – when Matt finds out not only that Jenny’s his mother but that the man he thought was his adoptive father is his biological one. Jack Klugman is Jenny’s agent and Aline MacMahon her companion-dresser: they’re good but the scenes involving them are perfunctory. The only performer who registers apart from the three principals is Pauline Jameson, as David’s sinisterly attentive secretary. Garland’s children, Lorna and Joey Luft, appear briefly as two kids on a Thames riverboat. The little girl asks Jenny Bowman for her autograph.
6 August 2011
