mchattiefest evening five: and yet another triple

The Lady's Not For Burning (1974. dir: Joseph Hardy) Filmed plays are problematic. Not only do they tend to feel static, the actors often haven't made that full jump to a cinema-friendly style. This one has those faults, plus the added hardship of a bicontinental cast (Brits and Yanks don't always play well in the same theatrical sandbox. Results are too often wildly unbalanced, if not in quality, then in style).

For about ten years, from the end of the thirties until the kitchen-sinkers stole all the theatrical thunder in the early fifties, verse drama made a gangbusters comeback with T.S. Eliot at the forefront of the poetical revolution. Christopher Fry was one of the most popular in his wake, and this was his grandest success. John Gielgud originated the lead, here played by Richard Chamberlain. Chamberlain and costar Eileen Atkins (and, in fact, McHattie in a secondary but delightful role) give lovely and strong performances, making most others in the cast look like high school kids in comparison. It's a tough play to do, a whimsical and melancholic comedy set in a peculiarly nonrealistic medieval village, but it's a charmer when it comes off right, and this production ultimately does. Hard to find and not recommended for the jaded, cynical, or anyone with a short span of attention.

MOVIE: 4 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 5 stars


Roughnecks (1980. dir: Bernard McEveety) Dull, awful and overlong outing about oil-rig drillers. McHattie is young and gorgeous, still dolled-up in his James Dean charisma, but most of the acting here is bad (including performances by Vera Miles and Harry Morgan) and the production values are maybe one step up from a Walker, Texas Ranger episode.

MOVIE: 1 star
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 2 stars


James Dean: the Legend (1976. dir: Robert Butler) For a guy who looked like nobody else in the world, Dean has managed to inspire some dead-on performances, including this one by McHattie, who puts all his joy and elan into it. This is probably the centerpiece performance of McHattie's early TV years, a great success, far outweighing the mediocre screenplay that supports it. Bill Bast was a college roommate of Dean's and wrote one of the early memoirs about my-life-with-Jimmy, culminating in this TV movie. It's got some bad acting (by Brooke Adams and Michael Brandon, to name a few who ought to know better) but a few successful set-pieces that linger in your mind afterwards: Bast's reaction the night of the East of Eden premiere rings true, there's an interesting if melodramatic dream sequence at the outset, and there are lovely moments in which Dean reads from the Little Prince or takes Bast out for seedy adventures. A must-see for McHattie aficionados.

MOVIE: three stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: five stars


POSTSCRIPT: Sorry if this one seems a little rushed. No doubt I'll seem distracted for the next few weeks until Euro 2008 is done. Who can get excited about movies when La Furia are playing their gorgeous, mercurial, and bewildering brand of football? If you like, follow along with us at a pretty move...

mchattiefest evening four: another triple feature

Kaw (2007. dir: Sheldon Wilson) *SPOILER ALERT* Not very scary, not very good, but well-acted and rather beautifully lit Canadian revisitation of the Birds. After feeding on Mennonite mad cow carrion, ravens get clannish, anthropophagous and very, very smart (smarter than the humans, who sit around jawing instead of boarding up the damn windows). McHattie enjoys a rare benign turn as the village sad-sack, a demon-rattled alcoholic who ultimately sacrifices himself to destroy the murderous threat, although I'd be hard-pressed to explain just how setting himself and a single gas pump on fire put an end to an entire sky full of mad birds. Ah, well. It's one of several nods the director gives toward the earlier Hitchcock film, including a stunt at the end which leaves an unpleasant, jokey taste in one's cinematic mouth. Still, it's far more enjoyable than I expected it would be, with Rod Taylor as the small-town doc, the Young Indiana Jones himself as a likable small-town lawman, and one surreal little piece of nightmare involving a woman and a pit full of pig carcasses.
MOVIE: 2-1/2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 3 stars



Mary and Joseph: a Story of Faith (1979. dir: Eric Till) McHattie steals the show as firebrand zealot Judah, preaching war and the advent of a Messiah who will emerge from the clouds dressed in full battle armour to smite down the foes of Israel, until Mary (who knows better) plants an interesting doubt in his mind. Either they're drawing on apocryphal works I don't know (entirely possible), or someone's making a bunch of stuff up in this chronicle of Mary and Joseph as they meet, fall in love, and embark on the hard road to marriage and ultimately the manger (in this case, a cave with some sheep in it). It's odd: some historical details they go to great lengths to get just so, others seem insanely off-kilter. Would the Jews of the time really have stoned to death a pregnant woman, regardless of her crime? Every monotheism I know veers wildly to the rescue of the unborn innocent, and both early Islamic and early Christian executions of adulteresses and other unacceptable women were carried out post-partum.

Also, there's something annoyingly contemporary about the way these people pray, something "Dear God, please let Levi ask me to the Prom" about it. As far as I know, the sympathetically-nodding God who pats our heads as we leave church was not yet conceived at that time. Yahweh then was still the guy who'd ordered Joshua and his heirs to rub out every man, woman and child in Canaan in a multi-generational pogrom. Somewhere in the Zohar it says, "God is not nice. He is not an uncle. He is an earthquake." You want the earthquake on your side, certainly, but you don't chat casually with it like it's your buddy.

Similarly irritating is this version of the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel speaks in the even, mellifluous tones of a DJ on a Muzak station... when we all know perfectly well that the angel Gabriel sounds like Christopher Walken.
MOVIE: 2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 4 stars



Belizaire the Cajun (1986. dir: Glen Pitre) Fantastic independent film from pre-Soderbergh, very-early-Sundance days when independent films were both low-budget and largely unwatched. Using the amount of money Spielberg probably spends on catering, Pitre recreates life in 19th-century rural Louisiana to a degree that feels like you got there in a tardis. It's the little details which convince: things like the powder (what is it? cornstarch?) they throw on the dance floor before the party starts, a card game using pecans instead of money, a neighborhood gathering announced by a rider carrying a red flag. Filming on location with natural lighting and no tricks or tomfoolery with the camera, the result is an unostentatious and authentic world... but that's just the backdrop. The real focus is on the story, and it's a good one. Armand Assante is better than perfect as trickster and healing man Belizaire Breaux: perfect is too sterile a word to describe this joyful and mischievous performance. McHattie plays (with his usual eclat) James Willoughby, the dastardly and dim-witted fellow who has married into wealth and will go to extreme lengths to keep it. (In one of my favorite scenes, the jailed Belizaire tricks the wary but uncomprehending Willoughby into making him rich.) Against rollicking Michael Doucet songs and a historical moment in which the "Americains" are trying to oust the Catholic and French-speaking Cajuns from their swampland homes, the movie is adventure, romance, and whodunnit all at once. Happily recommended.
MOVIE: 5 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 3 stars