Anthony Asquith (1951)
The Browning Version, which Terence Rattigan adapted from his 1948 one-act stage play, is a character study. The character is that of the emotionally constipated classics teacher Andrew Crocker-Harris, who submerges his miseries in the social and professional routines of the public school where he’s taught for eighteen years. Suffocating constraint is an essential part of Crocker-Harris’s tragedy; it’s also a dominant element of the film’s style. In the first half, the writing, direction and playing are so unerringly predictable that the airlessness of the piece is nearly intolerable for the wrong reasons. The boys in the school are particularly excruciating. I couldn’t tell what I found so embarrassing about them – the roles being played or the teenage actors playing them, the posh accents and ‘lingo’ or the delivery of the lines and the crude attempts at characterisation. At any rate, these boys are convincing only as performers in a bad school play.
Crocker-Harris is about to leave the school because of ill health (dicky heart) to take up a worse-paid post somewhere in the sticks. His brassy, rapacious wife Millie is having an affair with the dashing science teacher Frank Hunter under her husband’s nose. The boys find Crocker-Harris forbidding but also ridiculous. On his last day at the school, he’s told by the headmaster that the board of governors has decided not to award him a pension (the timing is improbable). Weighed down with shame, Crocker-Harris retreats to his classroom to collect his things. Gilbert, who’ll succeed him as form master of the lower fifth next academic year, comes in and an awkward conversation begins. Crocker-Harris is well aware that he’s nicknamed ‘the Crock’; when Gilbert mentions that he’s also known as ‘the Himmler of the lower fifth’, it’s news to him. The bombshell is delivered in too considered a way (it should just slip out from Gilbert) and it’s unlikely that Crocker-Harris wouldn’t have already known about it (he doesn’t miss much – he just files his various humiliations away). But it’s here that The Browning Version takes off. You begin to be gripped by Michael Redgrave in the central role. From the start, he has expressed eloquently and sympathetically the mixture of pedantry and delight that infuses Crocker-Harris’s love of language. Redgrave’s formidable technical control is also evident from the word go. But now you also realise that what seemed mannered and a bit stagy in his playing in earlier scenes is part of Crocker-Harris’s technique of concealment. Redgrave shows us a man surprised and shaken that he’s finding it increasingly difficult to control what he’s saying aloud instead of keeping inside.
From this point, the film builds relentlessly towards the moment the following morning when the lower fifth-former Taplow gives Crocker-Harris, as a leaving present, something that really is unexpected: an inscribed copy of Browning’s translation of the Agamemnon (Crocker-Harris attempted but never completed his own translation of the Aeschylus play). Redgrave’s bursting into sobs when he receives the book is a masterly piece of acting, which Anthony Asquith succeeds both in showcasing and in presenting with subtlety – the first impact of the breakdown is achieved with Redgrave’s back to the camera. You think of Taplow’s gift as the climax of The Browning Version and in dramatic terms it is. Yet once he gets to this big moment Terence Rattigan keeps going further and deeper, and to startling effect. The emotional cruelty of Millie Crocker-Harris’s dismissal of Taplow’s gift – denying her husband the pleasure of receiving kindness and confirming his embarrassment that it moved him to tears – is breathtaking. In fact her motives are surely more complex than that: she doesn’t just want to hurt Andrew, she wants to get her own back on him for not being a husband (it seems he’s never been able to perform in bed). Rattigan and Asquith really have it in for Millie, though. Crocker-Harris says that he wronged her by marrying her but we’re given no opportunity to see her as wronged – and Jean Kent, arching her eyebrows and flaring her nostrils, is laughably villainous in the role – she acts in the style of a different kind of film. Even allowing that the Crocker-Harrises are an odd couple, it’s impossible to credit how the Kent and Redgrave characters got together – and Millie is much too crude a fake for other masters’ wives to be sympathetic towards her. We see too much of Millie’s trying to keep her affair with Hunter going – too much because we don’t have any interest in this part of the material.
Michael Redgrave and twenty minutes or so of the writing turn The Browning Version into a strong film, even though much of it is really bad. The juxtaposition of the dry-as-dust classicist and the dynamic chemistry teacher must have been tired even sixty years ago (the scientist’s charisma amounts to entertaining the class with combustion experiments cum magic tricks). It appears that the lower fifth do only Greek and Latin then, if they’re lucky, get promoted to the upper fifth, where they do only chemistry. Crocker-Harris talks about how the pupils’ attitude towards him has changed over the years – as if he’d had literally the same class of boys throughout his time at the school. The closing assembly is rescheduled to take place in the morning rather than the afternoon because Fletcher, the lionised teacher who’s also leaving the school, has a cricket match later in the day: opening the batting for England against Australia! The speeches at the assembly are poorly staged. Crocker-Harris defies Frobisher, the headmaster, by insisting on speaking after Fletcher, even though it’s expected that the latter’s popularity will make the Crock’s parting words an anti-climax. It’s a confusing moment when Anthony Asquith has Frobisher quieten down the applause for Fletcher when it’s already stopped.
In his own, halting speech, Crocker-Harris apologises for having failed as a teacher because he’s failed the boys – doing things by the grammar book and being cold and detached and betraying his noble calling. When he stops speaking, at first it’s only Taplow and Hunter, who’ve seen into the Crock’s broken heart, who applaud with feeling. The boy next to Taplow asks, ‘Do you think he really meant it?’ Taplow nods enthusiastically and the assembly hall instantly bursts into tumultuous, cheering applause as one. This is so false: even if Crocker-Harris’s speech had hit home it would have been too painfully revealing to get this kind of reaction (as distinct from shocked but respectful applause). This speech to the school isn’t in the play and it’s not the only point at which you feel the material, which runs forty-five minutes in the theatre (and has often been staged in combination with another Rattigan one-acter, Harlequinade), is being stretched thin over an hour and a half. An earlier scene that signals the end of the Crocker-Harrises’ marriage – Millie is driven away, with her husband determinedly not looking up from what he’s writing until she’s gone – would have been brought the film to a stronger close than it actually has. But Rattigan is a very odd writer and I think there’s more than dilution – or even the desire to protect the audience from a downbeat ending – occurring here. It’s almost as if – as a result of the penetrating passages that lead up to and follow the gift of the Browning – Rattigan himself, like Crocker-Harris, needs to apologise for forgetting himself, for an uncharacteristic outburst of raw emotion.
Wilfrid Hyde White is amusing as the breezily heartless, consummately shallow headmaster – he doesn’t seem remotely academic but that’s not a bad thing in the circumstances. As Gilbert, Ronald Howard has the face of his late father Leslie though none of his agility as an actor: still, he gives a likeable, honestly felt performance. The same goes for Nigel Patrick as Hunter, at a more accomplished level. Peter Jones and Sarah Lawson register in their small parts as another husband and wife on the school staff. Brian Smith, who plays Taplow, has, according to IMDB, worked regularly over the decades since the film was made without hitting heights. There’s something weirdly feminine (not effeminate) about Smith – a mixture of the elocuted sonority of his speaking voice and the fact that Taplow’s meant to be sensitive in a way the other boys aren’t. In view of the fog of repressed sexuality that inevitably hangs over a film involving Terence Rattigan, Anthony Asquith and Michael Redgrave, Smith’s presence is (I assume unintentionally) apt and unsettling. With Judith Furse as the only one among the masters’ wives who can see through Millie and Bill Travers, who’s well cast as Fletcher. Desmond Dickinson’s lighting of the dark recesses of the school – the chapel and the deserted classroom where Crocker-Harris takes brief refuge – is expressive.
22 April 2011
