If you had the good fortune to watch the Dirk Bogarde version of Tale of Two Cities while you were young and impressionable, then it will have made an indelible mark on you. With age, there are cracks at the edges: Dorothy Tutin's Lucie Manette seems one-dimensional, although unoffensive enough. A crucial plot-point, the supposedly uncanny resemblance between Sidney Carton (Bogarde) and Charles Darnay (Paul Guers), requires so vast a suspension of disbelief as to daunt the cheeriest filmgoer. The ending dances dangerously along the cliffside of emotional blackmail with Carton's gallows-edge friendship with the absurdly innocent beauty who goes just before him to the guillotine.
Still, its power survives because the story is one of the best romantic adventures ever written, and because the secondary roles are filled to perfection with the likes of Ian Bannen, Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance, not to mention a stunning Madame Defarge turned in by Rosalie Crutchley, striding through the movie like an Act of God. I don't think you could remake it after this: she so fully embodies the character that she owns it absolutely, as Brando does Stanley Kowalski, and any new portrayal would be either an imitation of or a reaction against the perfection of this one.
If Bogarde weren't there, Crutchley's performance would be the thing one took away, the touchstone by which one remembered the film. Thank God, though, Bogarde IS there, playing a role that Dickens seems to have written for him, playing it with a deadly blend of sardonic wit and stoic resignation, punctuated by wild moments of zealous idealism. His Carton is the Romantic past his prime; all hopes have been crushed beneath the brutal drudgery and banal horrors of daily life, while death is still an impossibly distant promise of release. He manages to go on by dulling the rough edges with a constant drunkenness, at least until he meets the unobtainable girl who will reawaken his passion for life. Bogarde's performance is unassailable, and it's all but impossible to look away from him, even when he's standing still in the background. Every small, cynical twist of smile is perfectly timed, and his most demanding scene, when he drunkenly confronts Lucie with his impossible love, could not be more real: it veers wildly between the mortifying and the courageous, a combination of awkwardness, self-loathing, and undeniable nobility.
Although Tale might have been his apotheosis as a matinee idol, it was perhaps in his collaborations with writer Harold Pinter (the Servant, Accident) and, more importantly, with director Joseph Losey (the Servant, Accident, King and Country), that we find his greatest legacy. He was a great taker of chances in the roles he chose, exploring psychological darkness and diving into small, "problem" films which travelled as far from easy Hollywood glamour as he could go.
King and Country is a mid-sixties anti-war film adapted from a play and set in the trenches at Passchendaele. Sprung up from a genre that was popular in British theatre at the time, it starred the unimpeachable Tom Courtenay as a simple, fed-up Englishman being tried for desertion. Losey's camera is a vital force, a living thing, surreptitiously climbing and moving in too close, all without drawing attention to itself, and it saves the movie from its static, stagebound script without sacrificing the merciless claustrophobia of the trenches. There is never a moment, not a single flashback, which gives us respite from their closeness or from the wasteland of the battlefield, except for a single still photograph of the King in his regalia riding alongside the Kaiser, possibly sharing a joke. Although the tragedy seems to belong to Courtenay's doomed foot-soldier, it really resides in the pocket of Bogarde's wiser, more experienced, more fully despairing Captain Hargreaves, who knows from the outset that the trial is a sham formality but must do his utmost to defend the fellow anyway. After it's done, and Hargreaves is barely holding his own against a tide of anguish, he asks the presiding officer a rhetorical question to which he receives a devastating answer. The camera remains still, the officer in extreme forefront, but in the following seconds, the revelation playing across Bogarde's face is the film's true emotional climax.
If I had to choose his three most important films (allowing that there are many I have yet to see), I would say the Servant, Accident, and Victim. This triptych of psychological terrorism is by no means flawless even for a rock-solid Pinter fan. And if you are not a Pinter fan, if you find his earlier stuff pretentious and over-stagey and under-articulate, the first two will be hard going for you. What Pinter does in these scripts (separated by four years; the Servant came out in 1963 and Accident in 1967, but the gap feels longer) is what he does best: brings to life dark, malevolent power struggles which manifest without anyone ever speaking plainly about anything. Bogarde has a facility for it, expressing to us in tiny facial tics or a shadow of emotion fleeting past the eyes exactly what he is thinking.
As for Victim, it's one of those films which was more important at the time than as it ages. In 1961, an Englishman could still be tossed into the hoosgow and his life and fortunes ruined for the crime of being gay, and this was the film which took a brave stance against that bigoted law. Taking the role (which quietly put to rest the matinee-idol portion of his career, incidentally) was stouthearted, as Bogarde was gay himself. Because it's a film with a mission, a mission which is long since accomplished, there is a tiresome tendentiousness about it, but its production values are so good, and it so brings to life the moment in history (London just building up to "swinging") that it's still worth watching.
There is a popular quote of Bogarde's (I don't know where it came from; probably one of his many engagingly written memoirs): "The camera can photograph thought." He seems to have built his acting style firmly around that simple, resoundingly true premise, and it is why he so fascinates: enigma that he is, he shows us his thoughts, which are more interesting than those of most actors. If you revisit Darling, that Carnaby Street spectacular in which Julie Christie first knocked off all our socks, now she comes across like a prettier, girlier Courtney Love and Laurence Harvey just seems rather carelessly vacant, whereas Bogarde's intelligence communicates itself continuously, particularly in the cracks and folds between speeches. Therein lies the eloquence of his personal daimon, and it is the reason we will keep watching him, long after others from his era are forgotten.
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