Colin Gregg (1988)
Colin Gregg’s film is based on J R Ackerley’s supposedly autobiographical novel of the same name and set in 1950s London. Middle-class Frank loves working-class Johnny, who made a big mistake marrying nasty, shrewish Megan. (They have two young children – by the end of the picture, a third.) When Johnny is jailed for housebreaking, his mother Millie and stepfather Tom look after his baby son and his Alsatian dog. Frank – who appears to have been paying Johnny for some time in order to keep a hold on him – recompenses Millie for her trouble. On his regularly visits to her terraced house, he becomes increasingly alarmed that the dog, Evie, is confined to a bit of back yard, becoming a nervous wreck, and being beaten by Tom. Frank’s growing fears and affection for the dog reflect his more or less conscious feelings about Johnny, whom, to Frank’s frustration, he’s prevented from seeing in jail: Megan monopolises the ration of visits allowed. When Johnny is released, Frank tries to resurrect their relationship but it gradually disintegrates. Frank involves himself more and more with Evie and eventually buys her from Johnny. The film ends with a brief, amiable meeting in a park; then Frank and Evie go one way, Johnny, Megan and their kids the other.
Although it was released in the cinema, We Think the World of You might as well have been made for television. It’s one of those pieces where, because the story is essentially a character study, someone seems to have decided there’s no need to film it with any style or imagination or precision. (The film is slackly edited.) Colin Gregg’s view of his material is literally short-sighted: he keeps the camera so admiringly close up on the actors that he does them a disservice – at this range, you can see them preparing and producing their effects. As a result, a highly accomplished performance – such as Gary Oldman’s as fickle, likeable Johnny – is made to seem brittle and mechanical. Liz Smith’s natural eccentricity enables her to bring individuality to the unsurprising role of feckless Millie: she convincingly suggests a woman spiritually worn out by a life of drudgery. But the performance with the strongest rhythm is Max Wall’s as ailing Tom, a slyly, sourly prejudiced know-all, seemingly brutalised by his own physical pain. Alan Bates showed terrific (and surprising) empathetic flair in his interpretation of Guy Burgess, an extravert homosexual, in An Englishman Abroad. Having Bates play a thoughtfully suffering homosexual is a more obvious piece of casting and the results are much less entertaining. Watching Alan Bates is often a case of witnessing an actor’s evident understanding, rather than full realisation, of the character he’s playing; as the Ackerley alter ego, Bates is so much more morally self-aware and patently vulnerable than anyone else in the film that he becomes hard work. The scenes between Frank and Johnny’s family might have more snap if you got a sense of Frank’s being distanced from them by social class and intelligence as well as by sexual orientation. Alan Bates’s portrait becomes rather more interesting when Johnny is released from prison and Frank shows a talent for exploiting as well as a tendency to be exploited.
In Ackerley’s book, Frank’s passion for Evie is sometimes expressed physically – thanks to the rhapsodised descriptions of her body, the man’s stroking the dog develops a prurient edge. (It may be literal-minded to think this but the fact that Evie is a bitch seems to give an extra perverse twist to her functioning as a surrogate male homosexual lover.) It’s hardly a disappointment that the film has lost the novel’s singular, cloying sexual atmosphere but it seems rather pointless without it. There is one brief sequence, when Frank wakes to find Evie lying by his side on his bed and pets her, and another – stronger – moment, when the dog lies on a settee and Johnny, kneeling, nuzzles her belly and murmurs, ‘You like that, don’t you?’ This is expressive. Johnny is being fought over by Frank and Megan. You experience here his relief at the simplicity of the affection he can give to (and receives from) the dog. Otherwise, Ackerley’s material has become innocuous – and not just in its sexual implications. People get irritated with each other but you rarely feel their tensions – or the irrational erosion of Frank’s life to his twin, thwarted obsessions with getting access to Johnny and to Evie. What’s weird about the adaptation is that, having lost the discomfiting perspective of the novel, it can be experienced as a more straightforward animal film: you lose interest in the fate of the human beings but not in the welfare of the dog. When Frank fervently champions Evie, he’s not that different from Born Free’s Joy Adamson (who, in her own way, may have been as much an oddball as J R Ackerley).
Frances Barber is Megan. The clumsy screenplay, which incorporates several awkward little soliloquies for Alan Bates, is by Hugh Stoddart. The phrase which gives the piece its title (or a slight variant of it) is spoken to Frank by the other characters increasingly often and registers as increasingly heavy-handed irony: after half an hour or so, you can spot it coming many lines away. The dire music by Julian Jacobson is reminiscent of impersonal British movie scores of the 1950s and used in similar ways: for example, as the film starts, there’s a different bit of perky tune each time the camera shot changes. But when stir-crazy Evie gets her chance to go walkies, the music is all ecstatic liberation in the style of (early period) Lloyds Bank black-horse-galloping-free commercials.
[1990s]
