STUDIO CANAL are releasing the newly restored version of ‘The Gentle Gunman’ 1952, starring Dirk Bogarde and John Mills, Robert Beatty and Elizabeth Sellars on DVD, Blu-Ray and Digitally on March 7th 2022.

STUDIOCANAL is proud to announce the release of a newly restored version of the rarely seen classic crime thriller from the celebrated Ealing Studios, THE GENTLE GUNMAN.

Directed by Ealing Studios stalwart, Basil Dearden (The Captive Heart, Saraband for Dead Lovers, The Goose Steps Out) and Starring Dirk Bogarde (The Servant, Death in Venice), John Mills (Great Expectations, Ice Cold in Alex), Robert Beatty (2001: A Space Odyssey, Where Eagles Dare) and Elizabeth Sellars (The Barefoot Contessa, Forbidden Cargo), this stunning new restoration of THE GENTLE GUNMAN will be available to own available to own on Blu-Ray, DVD and on Digital March 7.

Based on the stage play by Roger MacDougall, THE GENTLE GUNMAN is set within ‘The Troubles’ of the U.K in 1941. Following an intricate restoration process, the film, accompanied by new extras material, is the newest addition to the VINTAGE CLASSICS collection.

At the height of World War II, Terry (John Mills) and his younger brother Matt (Dirk Bogarde) are undercover IRA foot-soldiers working in London. But while Matt is fully committed to the cause, Terry is now beginning to question their violent methods. When two fellow IRA members are arrested, the brothers are asked to break them out. Will Terry follow his orders, or will his misgivings put the two in harm’s way?

Basil Dearden enjoyed a long and successful relationship with Ealing Studios, both producing and directing many of their best loved films of the 1940s and 50s.

Extras Material:

A Closer Look At The Gentle Gunman With Writers Matthew Sweet and Phoung Lee
Behind The Scenes Stills Gallery

Running Time: 86 mins

Cert: PG

PRE-ORDER HERE

Films which influenced Public Opinion and the Law

An important date for your diary is Saturday 9th October when we are in the cinema auditorium for an event involving many parts of the Chichester community. We will look at clips from two life changing films which influenced public opinion and changed the law.

VICTlM
A landmark in the history of cinema and British society. lt fearlessly tackled the existing law governing homosexual offences and, by doing so, eased the path towards partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.ltwas also a brave decision on the part of the star of the film, Dirk Bogarde, who shed his matinee idol image to take on the main part in the film

CATHY COME HOME
Controversial, moving and brilliantly acted – this film is arguably the most influential TV drama ever broadcast. Watched by l0 million people, it provoked major public and political discussion and was instrumental in the foundation of charities SHELTER and CRlSlS. The film tells the story of Reg and Cathy, a couple with 3 young children whose lives are spiralling into poverty.

To assist with the planning and delivery of our programme we have involved, among others, law students from Bishop Luffa School, The University of Chichester, representatives of local law firms and executives from the local charity Stonepillow.

We are also delighted to welcome as a participant, John Coldstream, the official biographer of Dirk Bogarde.

All of these guests will play an active part in the programme and we welcome audience participation.

Saturday 9th October – Main Auditorium – Chichester Cinema at New Park
10am to 2.30pm with short breaks and a lunch break

Admission FREE – all welcome

France Magazine – October 2021 – Issue 277

In the year that would have marked the centenary of the distinguished actor, Amanda Hodges explores his happy days in France

Reviewing his life in 1990, Dirk Bogarde wryly summarised his own existence thus: “At 17 an art student; at 19 scrubbing out pots in the tin wash at Catterick camp [wartime service]; at 27 ‘a film star’ and at 50, deciding to take stock and readjust the seasoning of life, I left England for Provence and sat up on a mountain among my olives and sheep very contentedly.”

But what had led this quintessential British film star to France? As recalled in his acclaimed autobiography, Sussex offered a halcyon childhood but memories evoked “early days when we came to France each summer for cherished holidays which marked me forever with a deep and underlying love for the country. Long ago I’d decided that, when the time was right, I would seek out a place there and stay for good.”

It was 1970 and the cultured Bogarde, once dubbed ‘the idol of the Odeons’,was disenchanted with British cinema, longing for fresh challenges. Invited by director Luchino Visconti to appear in Death in Venice, a seminal film marking his successful transition to European cinema, Dirk and longtime companion Tony Forwood decided to move abroad. And, as Bogarde’s perceptive biographer John Coldstream emphasises; “so began the happiest period of Dirk’s life. Most of the surface gloss applied through stardom had now …been peeled away and the days to come would be enjoyed in the sort of uncluttered simplicity which had characterised his childhood.”

The call of Provence

It was to a quiet corner of Provence, high up in the hills near Grasse, that he headed, intent on an abode offering solace and space yet not easily accessible. Le Haut Clermont was a 17th-century farmhouse, possessing a bucolic charm and sense of history that captivated Bogarde: “I was instantly in love… It stands on the slope of a hill among 12 acres of giant olives… and looks right down the plain to the bay of La Napoule. Sheerest beauty, half an hour from Nice airport and 30 minutes from Cannes. “From the upstairs former hay loft, a view of “the sea shining some way off tike a sheet of silver paper” was visible.

For Bogarde, a man of considerable artistic ability, the beautiful light keenly appealed. He reflected: “Magic has it’s components and… without this it is fair to say the Riviera would not exist…. This is why Monet and Renoir came, determined to capture ‘the Light’ and set it on canvas. “After a mistral had cleared rain clouds one day he recorded “a light to break one’s heart – of such beauty. This is why we came to Clermont.”

As he describes in the memoir An Orderly Man, Clermont fitted perfectly into his vision “as smoothly and effortlessly as a foot into a well worn slipper. I knew I had found my ideal.” With an architect’s aid he reshaped the house, honouring its character while enhancing comfort. To Patricia, wife of director Joseph Losey with whom Bogarde had worked on The Servant, he expounded, “It is really rather fine. We have… opened up walls and doors and generally transformed a stable, workroom and kitchen into a 50ft room with a great terrace. “Here a steady stream of guests visited during the summer months, drawn to what John Coldstream calls, “a house of immaculate taste that always exuded warmth.”

A writer’s retreat

In the 1970’s, House & Garden magazine profiled Clermont, praising it’s “magnificent, panoramic views and idyllic setting, the house surrounded by hundreds of olive trees clinging to the terraced slopes… Bogarde is one of the few actors who really do like getting away from the limelight, amply confirmed by the situation of his retreat approached by a steady uphill climb along a rough private path.”

Writing rather than acting took principal focus. Encouraged to pen his autobiography he used the former olive studio as his study, the house’s only nod to his profession being photos on the study wall. Outside Bogarde built “a real English pond in the terraced hills of Provence,” but subtle subversion of the local ecology bought unexpected visitors. “I knew there would be a great many changes in life when I came here but lugging dustbins filled with mating toads was not one of my expectations,”he drolly recalled. A visiting journalist found him though, a contented man, “elegant as ever,” dubbing Bogarde “a toiler of the soil, painter, farmer and gardener all rolled into one.”

To his editor Nora Smallwood he mused, “Isn’t it strange to love a place so deeply?” His adopted country bestowed the distinction of Chevalier de L’Ordre de Lettres plus the honour of being the first British President of the Cannes Festival jury in 1984. Only Tony Forwood’s advancing ill-health could disrupt the idyll and there were several false starts before “the heavens all of a sudden fell” and Clermont was very reluctantly sold in 1986, England beckoning.

Home to France

But Bogarde would return to France, albeit posthumously, as his beloved nephew Brock van den Bogaerde explains: “In the early 1970’s I spent my summer hitchhiking and camping in the South of France. Knowing that I might need rescuing, my father gave me the address of Uncle Dirk. The address continued to smoulder in my rucksack until one morning, in sweltering heat, curiosity got the better of me and I found myself outside Le Haut Clermont. I’d only met my uncle once, when a small child, so had no idea what to expect.

“From the gate I could just make out the shape of a farmhouse, among the olive trees, with it’s red crab shell roof and tall cypress trees. This was an old unspoiled olive farm on the side of a hill. With a deep breath I followed the path up through the neatly mowed terraces until I heard a dog barking. Daisy, the house boxer, was the first to say hello. “A man approached and I asked if he was Uncle Dirk? He looked me over, seeing I hadn’t had a bath for days, and said in a dismissive tone, ‘you can pitch your tent there’.

“‘Don’t you have a bed?’ I retorted. We looked at each other… and in that moment I knew we were going to be friends. That was the beginning of a friendship where little by little, over many wonderful years, he gave more and more of himself. I was not to know then that I was standing on the very spot where one day I would be trusted to scatter his ashes and return him to his beloved France.”

Dirk Bogarde

Free Thinking

Actor Wendy Craig, who played Susan in The Servant, writer Mark Ravenhill, film critic Phuong Le and BFI curator Josephine Botting join Matthew Sweet to talk about Dirk Bogarde.

A soldier liberating Bergen-Belsen, a supporter of voluntary euthanasia, who began his acting career as a matinée idol for Rank, won a BAFTA for his role in The Servant, debuted in the West End in a play by JB Priestley, his1961 film Victim saw him playing a barrister fighting blackmailers, and an ageing composer in the 1961 film version of Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice: today’s Free Thinking explores the life and career of Sir Dirk Bogarde (28 March 1921 – 8 May 1999). Matthew Sweet hosts and his guests are actor Wendy Craig, film critic Phuong Le, BFI curator Josephine Botting and writer Mark Ravenhill.

Bogarde won Best Actor in a Leading Role for the 1963 film The Servant, a kind of upstairs downstairs examination of class and fraught relationships, which Harold Pinter adapted from Robin Maugham’s novella and Joseph Losey directed. His co-stars included Wendy Craig, Sarah Miles and James Fox. The film has been restored and shown in cinemas around the UK and is now also available on blu-ray DVD. The BFI are curating a season of Bogarde films to screen in December.

Producer: Fiona McLean

You can find a series of programmes exploring film history in the Free Thinking Landmarks playlist including Glenda Jackson remembering the filming of Sunday Bloody Sunday, episodes focusing on Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Jacques Tati and films by Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray.

44 minutes

Broadcast

Wednesday 22 September – 22:00

THE SERVANT 

To celebrate the centenary of British acting legend Dirk Bogarde STUDIOCANAL is thrilled to announce a brand new 4K restoration of Joseph Loseys ground-breaking 1963 classic THE SERVANT .

Following the 10th September screening at the excellent Fulham Road Picturehouse Cinema a Q & A with James Fox was hosted by the Richard Ayoade.

Q & A with James Fox hosted by Richard Ayoade
Fulham Road Picturehouse Cinema

UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 19th August

In cinemas on 10th September

4K UHD Collector’s edition Blu-Ray, DVD & Digital from 20th September

Brand new trailer & poster

New artwork by Edward Kinsella

Trailer on YouTube

Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Losey & crew behind the scenes

STUDIOCANAL announces a 4K restoration of Joseph Losey’s 1963 classic
starring
 Dirk Bogarde & James Fox

THE SERVANT 

UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 19th August

In cinemas on 10th September

4K UHD Collector’s edition Blu-Ray, DVD & Digital from 20th September

Brand new trailer & poster

New artwork by Edward Kinsella

New artwork by Edward Kinsella

To celebrate the centenary of British acting legend Dirk Bogarde STUDIOCANAL is thrilled to announce a brand new 4K restoration of Joseph Losey’s ground-breaking classic THE SERVANT.

The multiple BAFTA-winning film, which has been meticulously restored as part of their VINTAGE CLASSICS collection, will premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 19th August, followed by a cinema release on 10th September and a 4K UHD collector’s edition Blu-Ray, DVD & Digital release on 20th September

Based on the screenplay by revered playwright Harold PinterTHE SERVANT stars beloved British actor Dirk Bogarde (THE BLUE LAMP, DARLING, ACCIDENT) in the title role, alongside James Fox (A PASSAGE TO INDIA, THE CHASE), Sarah Miles (THE BIG SLEEPRYAN’S DAUGHTER) and Wendy Craig (THE NANNY, THE MIND BENDERS).  

Cited by Bong Joon Ho as one of five films that influenced his masterpiece PARASITETHE SERVANT is considered ahead of its time for its ambitious cinematography and its exploration of class and sexual politics in 1960s Britain. It boasts stunning cinematography from Douglas Slocombe (THE LAVENDER HILL MOB, KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS), a fantastic soundtrack by composer John Dankworth (THE AVENGERS, DARLING) and is considered by many to be one of the greatest British films of the last century.

SYNOPSIS:

Sexual tensions and class conflicts run high in must-see classic THE SERVANT with BAFTA-winning performances from Dirk Bogarde and James Fox. Marking the first of three collaborations between director Joseph Losey and celebrated playwright Harold PinterTHE SERVANT follows sly and seductive manservant Barrett (Bogarde) as he worms his way into the affections of foppish aristocrat Tony (Fox).  Barrett’s awe-inspiring efficiency cleverly masks his true intentions, ultimately giving way to a suspicious and insidious control where the roles of master and servant are reversed. Adapted from Robin Maugham’s short story and with stunning black & white photography from cinematographer Douglas SlocombeTHE SERVANT is a thrilling and ingenious British classic that’s not to be missed.

4K UHD COLLECTOR’S EDITION BLU-RAY

Available to own on 20th September, or via pre-order now the special UHD collector’s edition Blu-ray presented in both 1.66 and 1.77 aspect ratios, offers exciting bonus content including a brand-new video essay with Matthew Sweet and Phuong Le, a new location featurette with Adam Scovell, a Richard Ayoade interview with James Fox, plus interviews and commentaries with cast, crew and industry experts. The full list of extras includes:

  • NEW: Video essay with Matthew Sweet and Phuong Le
  • NEW: Location featurette with Adam Scovell
  • NEW: Trailer
  • Stills Gallery
  • James Fox interviewed by Richard Ayoade
  • Interview with Wendy Craig
  • Interview with Sarah Miles
  • Interview with Stephen Woolley
  • Harry Burton on Harold Pinter
  • John Coldstream on Dirk Bogarde
  • Audio interview with Douglas Slocombe conducted by Matthew Sweet
  • Joseph Losey & Adolphus Mekas at the New York Film Festival in 1963
  • Harold Pinter Tempo Interview
  • Joseph Losey talks about THE SERVANT
  • 64-page booklet with essays from Peter Bradshaw & Anna Smith

ABOUT THE RESTORATION

Scanned from the original negative on the ARRI 4K, the restoration was completed at Silver Salt, taking 450 hours. In-depth manual repair was undertaken on certain reels, some requiring significant stabilising and dirt clean-up work and sections of the film were wet-gate scanned and scratch fixed. The film was also graded in Dolby Vision in order to capture more detail and contrast than ever before. 

114mins / English Language / Cert: 12 

Download press materials here

Trailer on YouTube

Dirk Bogarde was truly a Renaissance man – writer, poet, artist, WWII veteran and of course an internationally renowned screen actor. Joining Peter Woodadge to discuss Dirk’s war years including his time in Normandy, Holland and Germany is his official biographer John Coldstream. Peter also talks about Dirk’s film career and particularly his role as General “Boy” Browning in A Bridge Too Far.

John Coldstream’s article about – Dirk Bogarde and Belsen

The education team at Chichester Cinema at New Park can’t hold any events at the moment so they decided to produce some short educational projects to fill the void. To date they have produced two podcasts and a film. The podcasts are in audio form, one on staircases in film and the other on the use of the harmonica in film. For the third Patrick Hargood, Education Officer at Chichester Cinema, who interviewed John Coldstream for Dirk Bogarde’s Centenary, decided to do something new and sticking to the Dirk Bogarde theme he produced a short educational film about Darling. We think it is terrific.

Patrick Hargood’s look at Darling can be viewed here: 

https://www.youtube.com/user/newparkcinema

This Sunday marks the centenary of one of British cinema’s greatest stars, the incomparable Dirk Bogarde, born on 28 March 1921. He began his career as a matinee idol (he memorably described his own handsome profile as that of a “little boy looking for God”) and ended it playing some of the most memorably corrupt characters on screen, as well as writing famously unreliable memoirs (the truth, if it is to be found, dwells deep between the lines). Postwar British film, and global arthouse cinema, would not have been the same without him. 
Scroll down this newsletter to read Nick James’s 2011 essay on Bogarde, the star he first admired in the 1970s as “the archetypal stylish, sensitive Englishman of artistic bent, flirting with the grand bohemian decadence of the time”.
If you’re not so well acquainted with the actor’s work, or just want to devote his centenary weekend to an at-home Bogarde festival, here are some pointers. To get a sense of Bogarde’s early work, encounter his teenage gangster in The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1949), available on the BFI Player. It’s far from a straightforward thug role. As Matthew Sweet wrote for the Guardian, even this far back in his career: “The fury he committed to the screen was rarely the righteous kind. It is usually a product of something deeply felt but morally murky.” The recurring role of Simon Sparrow, beginning with 1954’s Doctor in the House, made Bogarde a pinup, and you can sample its vintage humour on Amazon Prime. Powell and Pressburger reluctantly cast the young star in war film Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) – you can watch for yourself on BFI Player to see how he shapes up in battle. See also, another gripping war film: The Sea Shall not Have Them (Lewis Gilbert, 1955), also on BFI Player. It’s in the 1960s, especially after Bogarde left the Rank Organisation, that things began to get really interesting, but first he appeared as a leather-clad bandit in 1961’s Mexico-set The Singer Not the Song (you may have to er, hunt around for this one), which was a box-office flop, but is now embraced as a camp classic, and not just because of Bogarde’s trousers. Bogarde’s next move was one of his greatest roles, as the blackmailed barrister in Bearden’s landmark gay film Victim (1961, rent it on BFI Player): a remarkable performance in a brilliant thriller and a bold career choice for Bogarde. Two more mid-60s roles in anti-establishment classics directed by the American director Joseph Losey and written by Harold Pinter cemented Bogarde’s standing. First he was the title character in The Servant (1963, watch on Prime), a needling class-based intrigue recommended for fans of Parasite, and then he was an adulterous Oxford don in Accident (1967, also on Prime). Just to keep the 1960s swinging, don’t miss him in Darling (1965), opposite Julie Christie, which is also on Prime. A trio of cult European films sealed Bogarde’s status as one of the most interesting actors of his generation. Two films for Luchino Visconti: The Damned (1969, available on DVD), in which Bogarde plays a working-class man on the make in Hitler’s Germany, and the celebrated Death in Venice (1971, on BFI Player), in which he’s a dying composer growing obsessed with a young boy during a sickly summer on the Lido. Notoriously, he also appeared in Liliana Cavani’s psychsoexual drama The Night Porter (1974), playing a Nazi officer reunited with one of his victims (Charlotte Rampling) in Vienna. The film is newly available in a 4K restoration on Blu-ray from Cult Films. All this is just to scratch the surface of a fascinating career. Bogarde’s final film role was in Daddy Nostalgie (1990), directed by Bertrand Tavrnier, who sadly died this week. This film is hard to find, but you may be able to track it down on an out-of-print import DVD. Enjoy your weekend, and thanks for reading, whenever you joined us.

Dirk Bogarde: a class act

A bland British comedy star in the 1950s, Dirk Bogarde reinvented himself as an icon of European arthouse. But on screen, as in his memoirs, he remains a difficult actor to pin down. We revisit this feature from our September 2011 issue to celebrate the actor’s centenary.

26 March 2021

By Nick James

Sight & Sound
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Dirk Bogarde

As a species, the movie star is reckoned – in these post-reality-television, everyone’s-a-star days – to be under threat. There may be no better time, then, to look back at the career of Dirk Bogarde (1921-99), a natural screen actor who, over 60-odd films, managed a rare transformation that some of today’s faltering marquee attractions might look upon with envy.

From being an adored matinee idol (and, for publicity purposes, English ‘lord of the manor’) for the Rank Organisation in the 1950s, peaking in popularity as the dashing young medic Simon Sparrow in the comedies Doctor in the House (1954), Doctor at Sea (1955) and Doctor at Large (1957), he went on to become a highly regarded master performer in such European arthouse films as The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971) and The Night Porter (1974).–– ADVERTISEMENT ––about:blank

That’s the official story, self-created in the actor’s own writings. But here I want to give a personal view. Two simultaneous and contrapuntal responses to Dirk Bogarde are traced below: a critic’s growing respect and sympathy, coupled with a devotee’s mature disenchantment. And the obvious lesson to be drawn is that, if you want to keep the faith with a celebrity, you should try not to learn too much about them.

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This feature originally appeared in our September 2011 issue.

My own admiration of Bogarde stems from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was one of my icons of masculine ‘style’. This was a moment in popular culture when such things seemed crucial. Robert Mitchum (about whom I’ve written before, see ‘The Actors’, S&S, August 2005) was perhaps more important to me – and it’s pretty obvious which end of the masculinity spectrum Mitchum represents, despite his voluptuous looks when young. In comparison, a slipperiness of sexual character is intrinsic to Bogarde, especially in his characterisation of himself; his extreme reluctance to be nailed down or pigeonholed is not only half of his charm, but also half the reason why he annoyed the hell out of some of his collaborators.

To me, in the late 1970s, Bogarde was the archetypal stylish, sensitive Englishman of artistic bent, flirting with the grand bohemian decadence of the time. It was a great act, at which no one could touch him. Never mind that he was of mixed Flemish, Dutch and Scottish descent – he was christened Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde. (As novelist Len Deighton famously observed, “All the best Englishmen have foreign names these days.”)

But any observant fan should have known that Bogarde was a flawed figure. His legendarily catty and rather whining television interview with Russell Harty in 1986 made him look like a miserable git, when his life seemed on the surface such a portrait of aesthetic bliss. But at the time I didn’t know that his lifelong companion and manager Tony Forwood (always referred to by his surname in Bogarde’s books) was slowly dying of Parkinson’s disease and liver cancer. The keeping up of appearances so necessary to the movie-star life is, of course, at the heart of the Bogarde dilemma, and I was to learn that the lifestyle that I envied from afar – the pre-Peter Mayle Provençal idyll of his house in Grasse – was quite carefully contrived.

Indeed, the first thing one discovers in researching Bogarde is that the many eloquent books (seven memoirs, single collections of letters and journalism, and six novels) written by this complex, fascinating, contradictory, self-obsessed figure should come with a health warning. John Coldstream, in the introduction to his authorised 2004 biography of Bogarde, contradicts the actor-writer’s claim that “it’s all there in the books, if you know where to look. The lines are wide enough to read between.” As Coldstream writes: “Dirk was a writer whose entire oeuvre became a fiction, thanks in large part to his hyperactive imagination and his fantasies – fantasies so vivid and powerful that they were, for him, a reality.”

No wonder he became a throwback icon of the style-obsessed era of the late 1970s and 80s, for he was a kind of prodigy of self-invention. That does not mean, however, that the realities of his life can be set aside in discussing his work, for his was a life lived in the heart of the contradiction of craved privacy and sought-after fame.

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Kay Kendall and Dirk Bogarde in Doctor in the House (1954)

Rise from the Ranks

The teenage Bogarde had flirted with stage acting before he was called up for military service in World War II, making his West End stage debut in 1939 as Derek Bogaerde in J.B. Priestley’s Cornelius. He also attended Chelsea College of Art. His own account of his wartime experiences, during which he gained a commission and ended up as an intelligence officer analysing aerial photographs, is riddled with cautious self-disparagement, but includes the claim that he was present at the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. This is now widely considered to have been one of his self-convincing fantasies. However, he did come out of the war with a feeling common among survivors of being inferior to those who died – though these occasional fits of self-loathing did not restrain the bumptious self-confidence with which he tackled his early acting roles on screen.

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The Blue Lamp (1950)

That was the way to get noticed in the British film industry of the time, and one of the most startling aspects of Bogarde’s early career is how quickly he evolved from the routine ingratiating young character actor we see in his feature debut, playing the groom in Esther Waters (1948), to the screen-commanding spiv hoodlum he plays in The Blue Lamp (1950). Already in this role, what Bogarde himself called his “absurdly boyish face” seems adored by the lens. His sympathy-seeking doe eyes, though, were then undermined by his gaping lips and poor teeth. (He would soon learn to keep his mouth clamped shut when in repose.) The quiff that connects the well-bred man of polished manners he was in reality to the Teddy Boys then emerging on London’s streets makes him seem ahead of his time, even if his cockney pronunciation of the word copper (“copahh”) sounds scarcely more authentic than Dick Van Dyke might have managed.

Over the next ten years, the young actor was burnished into bright British stardom under the Rank Organisation banner (though he always insisted he never attended the notorious ‘charm school’). This period in Bogarde’s life is the one he chronicled least. Secretaries handled all his correspondence – the mountains of fan letters and photo requests. Thus the published collection of his letters only begins with the transition period from Rank to what he called his ‘continental’ years.

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Marcus Goring and Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight (1957)

During his time at Rank, Bogarde became a full-time heart-throb celebrity and idol to thousands of British women – a position he fought desperately not to undermine throughout most of the rest of his life. We can get some sense of what this did to him as an actor from Michael Powell’s autobiography Million-Dollar Movie. Apropos of Bogarde’s work in his 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, Powell wrote: “I didn’t know that he was as subtle as a serpent, and with a will of steel… He knew all about me and actors, and he had absolutely no intention of acting in my film. He would smile (he had a charming smile), he would dress up (fancy-dress costume), he had a good figure (light and boyish), and he would speak the lines – or rather he would throw them away – with such careful art that camera and microphone would have to track in close… He would listen with attention to me while I told him what I wanted, and then would give me about a quarter of it.”

Watching Ill Met by Moonlight confirms much of what Powell says, but then the 36-year-old Bogarde may have known that he had been foisted by Rank on to Powell and his Archers partner Emeric Pressburger. Or was it that he was bored with playing war heroes in the Greek islands? (He’d given a much better performance three years earlier in Lewis Milestone’s They Who Dare, about a raid on Rhodes.)

Set in 1944, Ill Met by Moonlight tells the true story of the kidnap of a German general by Patrick Leigh Fermor (the recently deceased travel writer), then a British intelligence officer organising the Greek resistance. As Leigh Fermor, Bogarde looks splendid throughout, and the camera loves him; but you can see he’s refusing to do more than be winsome, enigmatic and charming, while biding his time until the next film. The odd thing about this collaboration is that, outside the experience of the film itself, both Powell and Bogarde write about each other in the friendliest fashion.

The films I’ve seen from the Rank period vary wildly in quality, and can be enjoyed on many different levels. Bogarde shows sweet sensitivity as the eponymous lead in The Spanish Gardener (1956), a poor, pelota-playing local who helps the young son of a stuffy Englishman to gain confidence, but he looks as if he’s just come from a West Side Story audition.

There are obvious kitsch excesses towards the end of the run, such as his hilariously camp turns as the brilliant pianist-composer Franz Liszt in Song Without End (1960) or a leather-clad western bandit in The Singer Not the Song (1961). He dominates every scene as a sadistic Naval lieutenant in H.M.S. Defiant (1962), but earned a reproof from his co-star Alec Guinness, who commented that Bogarde was like “no naval officer I ever met”, while socially he was “gay and amusing but pretty silly.”

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Victim (1961)

But by then Bogarde had played the first redefining role of his career – a very courageous decision that was central to his identity. By starring in Basil Dearden’s Victim (1962) – as Melville Farr, a barrister who is determined to prosecute the blackmailers of homosexuals, only to be blackmailed himself because he too is sexually desirous of men – Bogarde deliberately undermined his own matinee-idol image and took the huge risk of allowing himself to be assumed to be homosexual, at a time when exposure as such might still lead to a prison sentence.

The exact nature of Bogarde’s sexuality remains shrouded in a carefully nurtured ambiguity, though his devotion to Forwood was lifelong, and we would do well to remember how hard to prise open the closet door needed to be for his generation. But whatever his personal connection to the subject matter, this was a landmark passionate performance, and the film itself helped bring about the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK. It also sparked a change in Bogarde’s career, firing his sudden need to pull out of what he called “the chrysalis of crap”.

The top of his game

The golden period of Dirk Bogarde’s film career begins with Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) and ends with Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977). The films that really matter are not that many in number, but together they contain the performances that define what it means to be able to act thought on screen.

The only other actor I’ve seen who’s as good at this as Bogarde is Helen Mirren (particularly in her portrayal of Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the occasional TV series Prime Suspect). Both Bogarde and Mirren do what I call the ‘weather face’ superbly well. Emotion is expressed wordlessly through convincingly subtle changes of facial expression: in small movements of the eyes, mouth and nostrils, in nervous swallows, in tiny tilts and swivels of the head, in flexings of unnoticed muscles (this kind of acting cannot be achieved, one imagines, by users of Botox). The effect is that these actors seem to be able to convey what’s going on behind the eyes. They can portray thought.

Bogarde’s characters usually grow from his own soigné persona. He’s imperious first, as if expecting a challenge, but behind that try-me-if-you-dare bravado, there is usually a wound of self-doubt or enthralment to another. He has a cat’s ability to stare enigmatically, and his affected superciliousness can be wielded with cruelty.

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Alexis Smith and Dirk Bogarde in The Sleeping Tiger (1954)

Losey had first worked with Bogarde on The Sleeping Tiger (1954), in which the actor plays an invited intruder (he tries to mug a psychologist, but the psychologist gets the better of him, and then invites him into his house to be a test case for reform). The Servant is a more sophisticated version of the same theme, in which a well-off young gentleman (James Fox) hires a butler named Barrett, who proceeds to take over his life by slow degrees.

As Barrett, Bogarde gives a brilliant, sly and menacing performance. He claimed to have based the character on a batman (a military officer’s personal servant) he’d had during the war. Bogarde’s anxiety about how he was perceived by the public is obvious in the way he described the role in a 1971 interview with Films and Filming: “It was enormous fun to do [but] it was no effort. It was entirely technical to act… Harold Pinter had written it so unfailingly that that you couldn’t put a foot wrong… It cost me very little emotionally, because I’m nothing to do with the man I played… So therefore it was much easier to expand my realms of fantasy and imagination and become a North Country bastard called Barrett.”

What The Servant revealed most tellingly was that the middle-aged Bogarde was now built to play sleaze as well as superiority, although it would take a while before the seamy roles became dominant. In King & Country (1964), for Losey again, he plays a frosty World War I military lawyer who tries to advise a simple-minded private (Tom Courtenay) under the threat of execution. John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) casts him as a television journalist who embarks on an affair with Julie Christie’s superficial gold-digging it girl, only to be left in her wake.

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Jacqueline Sassard and Dirk Bogarde in Accident (1967)

My personal favourite of his mid-career roles is Stephen in Losey’s Accident (1967), the married Oxford don who unwisely becomes besotted with one of his students who happens to be both an Austrian princess and the girlfriend of his protégé. A sexual tragedy of manners scripted, like The Servant, by Pinter, Accident makes Stephen’s class anxieties look similar to those displayed by Bogarde himself. Stephen tries to engineer a tryst with the girl, but hasn’t the guts to go through with it. Later he takes cruel advantage of the opportunity afforded him by the titular accident.

Bogarde himself worried about a real connection here. “In Accident I had to sublimate my own personal feelings,” he told Films and Filming, “because I don’t believe in actors being – actors have got to act. The character… is a really gentle man. A loser-out. A quiet man who is lost and settles for something. I’m a loser but we all are, aren’t we? I was very aware of the emotions of the man… and I was almost in a trance for about four months after I finished it.” (In another version of the story, however, it only took him a few hours to shake off the character.)

At the heart of my slow disenchantment with Bogarde the man is the matter of class. The way he always writes about Luchino Visconti, the Italian aristocrat who gave him two of his key later roles, reeks of the snobbery of the lower middle class – that combination of reverence for nobility combined with hatred of parvenus. In Bogarde’s version, he and Visconti – as superior beings – understood each other naturally, without needing to communicate. As Frederic Raphael put it, “Dirk appeared set on proving that first class was never quite good enough for him.”

Anyone so determined (in his books and letters) to constantly assert his superiority over others is surely angsting about his own true status. Bogarde’s memoirs positively throb with anxiety about guests, both pleasing them and getting rid of them – a by-product, I suppose, of the contradiction between his generosity and his much-trumpeted shyness. The often purple prose is served with lashings of poshlust, a diet I now find too rich. And the gushing letters can be worse, as full of capitals and underlinings as a teenage girl’s diary.

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Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter (1974)

But none of that can take away anything of Bogarde’s acting talent. All his traits and abilities are put to their utmost dissipated use in the operatic Italian films he made around the start of the 1970s: Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Death in Venice (1971), and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974).

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Death in Venice (1971)

In the Macbeth-like scene in The Damned where Ingrid Thulin encourages Bogarde’s industrial magnate to murder the head of the Von Essenbeck family so he can take over their steel corporation under the Nazis, Bogarde projects a stream of frantic emotions communicated in one storming flow of cajolement and entreaty as he crosses the room towards her. This role was meant to be a pinnacle of Bogarde’s achievement, but emphasis was moved by Visconti away from his character towards the mad, beautiful young industrial heir played by Helmut Berger. “It was a rotten part,” Bogarde later commented, “difficult because there was no substance to it, but the magic of working with Visconti made it absolutely worthwhile… My character was swamped, but then it was supposed to be swamped. There were two parts of consequence in the film [Thulin’s and Berger’s] and I didn’t have one of them.”

His reward for accepting this downgrading was the lead in Visconti’s next feature, an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. This was a cult film of its time (one that I alternately adored and disliked). All that aesthetic pile-up – the ‘Adagietto’ from Mahler’s 5th Symphony; the enchantment of twilight on the Venice lagoon and the city itself; the comic absurdity behind the elderly composer’s supposedly purely aesthetic adoration of Tadzio, the young Polish boy in the bathing suit; the painstaking beauty of the pre-World War I good life – was either intoxicating or indigestible, depending on one’s mood or predilection. Visconti’s removal of the novella’s interior monologue strips the film of meaning, but Bogarde does a brilliant job of trying to reinvest the composer’s tremulous emotions, culminating in the unforgettable beach scene where he sweats away his life as his make-up cracks and the hair dye starts to run.

It would be tempting to end the Bogarde story there, with what he clearly thought was the pinnacle of his career. Certainly he may have had cause to regret his role in The Night Porter as the former concentration-camp officer who is reunited with the Jewish prisoner he previously kept for his own sexual purposes. Susan Sontag picked on this film and The Damned as egregious examples of the 1970s interest in “Fascinating Fascism”. Certainly The Night Porter plays both ends against the middle of this argument; if you agree with Sontag that “fascist art glorifies surrender… [and] glamorises death”, and that “never before was the relation of masters to slaves so consciously aestheticized”, then The Night Porter certainly follows those precepts, even if it does so in order to show their bankruptcy.

What sort of career Bogarde thought might follow Death in Venice needn’t concern us here, but it’s obvious that his concentrated interest fell away when the great parts and scripts either didn’t come his way, or didn’t seem good enough when they did.

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Providence (1977)

His run at the top of his game ended with Alain Resnais’s Providence, in which he plays the son of John Gielgud’s dying writer, seen by his father as estranged, ridiculous and disappointing. The film is constructed around a contemporary bourgeois house party, and in Bogarde’s performance you can see a more relaxed, less operatic style at work, that’s classier than ever. What a shame there wasn’t more from him in this vein.

By M. C.

The Times Literary Supplement

March 26, 2021

To Dirk Bogarde’s biographer John Coldstream we owe the information that this is a year of ‘multiple Bogarde anniversaries”. The actor was born on March 28, 1921. It is fifty years since the release of the film Death in Venice, In which he played Thomas Mann’s doomed composer Gustav von Aschenbach. It is sixty years since Victim, the first English-language film to use the word “homosexual”, and sixty years since a dubious cult favourite, The Singer Not the Song. Twenty years before that, Mr Coldstream writes, Lance-Corporal Derek van den Bogaerde, of the Royal Corps of Signals, made his debut as a published poet, in the TLS.

Attributed to “Derek Bogaerde”, “Man in the Bush” appeared in the issue of august 30, 1941 – well before he became known as an elegant memoirist and novelist, but not long before he saw all too much of the horror of war, as an intelligence officer, around Europe and the Pacific. This poem works on a more modest scale. Its narrator, pressed against a tree, observes his enemy, and waits for the morning mist to give way to the “cautious sun”. The enemy is a single soldier; and the poem seems to reflect what the biographer calls the poet’s “predilection for camouflage”.

I saw him move
his head
behind that green
bush.
I must wait until
he moves again ...
My gun is heavy to
hold,
and my arm is aching.
Man in the bush,
does your arm ache
as you watch me?

And so the poem – which is to be republished in full on the TLS website next week – inches forwards, as rain starts to fall and a pigeon footles about (“I think it was / a pigeon”). Then: “A crack!” That pigeon flies off. “This is the first man I have killed …”

A second poem appeared two years later in the Poetry Review, September 1943, in a selection of “More Poems from the Forces”, by which time Bogarde had become a lieutenant in the Queen’s Royal Regiment. Following the tense stand-off of “Man in the Bush”, he he writes in “Steel Cathedrals” of a different kind of waiting game: “It seems to me, I spend my life in stations. / Going, coming, standing, waiting. / Paddington, Darlington, Shrewsbury, York. / I know them all most bitterly”. It ends: “The station clock with staggering hands and callous face, /says twenty-five-to-nine, / A cigarette, a cup of tea, a bun, / And my train goes at ten”. A third poem, a tribute to Bogarde’s agent Robin Fox, is known to date, neatly enough, form 1971; but that seems to be that. He must have had other things to do by then.

M.C.

Copyright – The Times Literary Supplement

Man in the Bush

I saw him move
his head
behind that green
bush.
I must wait until
he moves again.
The mist is rising,
soon the sun will
come, the cautious sun,
and probe with tentative
fingers into this sombre
undergrowth.
My gun is heavy to
hold,
and my arm is aching.
Man in the Bush,
does your arm ache
as you watch me?
These nettles here are
bejewelled with the
night dew.
And here brambles,
all strung with
liquid diamonds,
clutch at every move
I make.
I saw him move
again
behind the green
Elder Bush, green
with new born shoots.
The mist is risen now
and turned to rain,
soft rain.
My gun and hands
are one.
Are yours too, Man in
the Bush?
Why won’t he move?
This tree is my
protection,
pressed against
the roots I lie
and wait.
A pigeon
cried.
I think it was
a pigeon.
He moved again.
And now, with
stealthy hands,
he parts the greening
branches of the Elder.
I must not move.
Slowly his head,
in steel encasement
rises, gleaming with
the rain.
His face, pale and
haggard,
peers at me;
but I am not
seen;
this pine is my
protection.
Move my gun
slowly
O! so slowly
to the aim.
Stretching himself
yet crouching
he peers unseeing.
Watch his face,
white and muddied,
expressionless.
To the aim.
A crack!
Startled, a pigeon
blusters through the bushes.
A wisp of smoke
eddies in the damp
air.
He has rolled,
a sad bundle
amongst the Elder
branches, a huddled
lump,
with legs and arms
awry,
and the rain
glinting on his
helmet.
This is the first man
I have killed,
And blood, not
dew, bejewels
now the nettles,
rubies strung
on all the trembling
leaves.
And now, with
cautious fingers, the
sun peers amongst
the pillars of the
wood and sparkles
on the barrel of my
gun.
Sad Elder!
And sad the rubied nettle!
A thrush has sung.
It is the Morning.

DEREK BOGAERDE

By Carmel DaganFILM

Variety – Mar 25, 2021 8:14am PT

Bertrand Tavernier
Copyright: Jean Luc Mège Collection Institut Lumiere

Bertrand Tavernier, the prolific French filmmaker noted for films such as “Coup de Torchon” (1981), “A Sunday in the Country” (1984) and “Round Midnight” (1986), has died. He was 79.

The director’s death was confirmed on Thursday by France’s Institut Lumière — for which he served as president — and Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux. Tavernier had struggled with a pancreatic infection for some time, but it’s believed his death was abrupt.

Besides presiding over Lumière and organizing its annual film festival with Thierry Fremaux, Tavernier was working on a film adaptation of a book by Russel Banks, and also writing the sequel to his book “50 Years of American Cinema.”

Roger Ebert called Tavernier “one of the most gifted and skilled of French directors, the leader of the generation after the New Wave” and asserted that the director’s work represented a quiet repudiation of “the auteur theory that he once supported, since Tavernier never forces himself or a style” upon the viewer.

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“If there is a common element in his work, it is his instant sympathy for his fellow humans, his enthusiasm for their triumphs, his sharing of their disappointments,” said Ebert. “To see the work of some directors is to feel closer to them. To see Tavernier’s work is to feel closer to life.”

His other films that drew attention outside of France include “A Week’s Vacation,” “L.627,” “It All Starts Today” and “The Princess of Montpensier.”

In 1980’s “A Week’s Vacation” (Une Semaine de vacance), Nathalie Baye played a schoolteacher who takes a week off to ponder her life, and in her sensitive performance, the actor expresses the doubts and anxieties that can plague us and demonstrates the power of rediscovery.

The following year, in “Coup de Torchon,” Tavernier took a Jim Thompson novel and transplanted it to North Africa, creating an atmospheric film with interesting moral dimensions. Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert star in the story of a broken-down police chief in a small village who opts to begin dispatching the town’s unworthy denizens with his gun. The New York Times said: “Mr. Tavernier re-creates the film’s setting and time period with great care and paints a detailed portrait of the racial tensions generated by colonialism, as well as of the moral deterioration of the colonials themselves.”

“A Sunday in the Country” (1984), set in a country house near Paris in 1912, was a “graceful and delicate story about the hidden currents in a family,” said Ebert. The film has “a haunting, sweet, sad quality. It is about this family, and many families. It is told by Tavernier with great attention to detail, and the details add up to the way life is.” He won best director at the Cannes Film Festival for the film.

Meanwhile, “Round Midnight” explored the world of jazz in the way that only a lover — and student — of American culture could. The Washington Post said: “It’s the eleventh hour for a generation of jazzmen and ‘Round Midnight’ sounds a requiem for be-bop. It’s a simple-sounding word for a demanding discipline, notes Dexter Gordon, whose 40 years in the groove give credence to his role as a winded saxophonist in this eloquent ode by Bertrand Tavernier.

Scripted by Tavernier’s ex-wife Colo Tavernier O’Hagan (“Story of Women”), “Daddy Nostalgia” (1990) was Dirk Bogarde’s last film, and Tavernier elicited a performance worthy of the final performance of a great actor.

“Life and Nothing But,” in which Noiret returned to play an officer charged with figuring out what happened to all the missing in the wake of World War I, won the BAFTA for best film in a language other than English in 1990 and a total of four Cesar Awards.

“L.627” (1992) couldn’t have been more different. The gritty police drama depicts the futility of the efforts of Lulu, a narcotics cop who doesn’t play by the rules. Variety wrote: “In his remarkable new film, Bertrand Tavernier takes an impassioned inside look at the day-to-day activities of a small, ill-equipped branch of the Paris Drug Squad. With extraordinary documentary realism, the director has produced one of his best and most challenging films.”

In 1995’s “The Bait” (L’Appât), which won the Golden Bear at Berlin and was based on a real 1984 event, Tavernier explores a murder committed by two boys and a girl, with the girl acting as bait. “It All Starts Today” (1999) followed a year in the life in the life of Daniel (Philippe Torreton), head of a preschool in an economically depressed former coal-mining region of France.

More recently, “Safe Conduct” (2002) explored the French filmmakers who continued to work during the Nazi Occupation. “Holy Lola” (2004) followed the efforts of a young French couple to adopt an orphaned child in contemporary Cambodia; and the feature documentary “Histoires de vies brisées” explored the double punishment levied on immigrants convicted of crimes: After serving their terms, they are deported from France.

The director’s 2010 compelling period drama  “The Princess of Montpensier” finds a young noblewoman “torn between passion, duty, companionship and ambition, each quality personified by a different man,” Variety said.

Tavernier was born in Lyon. By the time he reached adolescence, he wanted to become a filmmaker. In a discussion before an audience in Australia in 2009 as part of an “On the Set with French Cinema” program, the director, according to the Socialist World website, “told the audience that every artist and intellectual had a moral responsibility to be faithful to his characters and his art and to tell the truth. This outlook, he said, had been instilled in him by his writer father, René Tavernier, who published a resistance literary journal in Lyon during WWII and had provided sanctuary for anti-Nazi intellectuals.”

Tavernier was a student at the Sorbonne when he interviewed director Jean-Pierre Melville, for whom he worked briefly as an assistant director. He ended up as a production publicist for the company that produced Melville’s films on the director’s 1962 film “Le Doulos”; he subsequently partnered with a friend to become independent press agents, working on the films that interested them.

He occasionally worked as an assistant director in Italy during the 1960s, and he directed segments of two films in 1964, but Tavernier made his feature directorial debut on the poignant, emotionally complex mystery/crime film “The Clockmaker of St. Paul” (1974) — which won France’s prestigious Prix Louis Delluc as well as the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival — and worked steadily as a director after that.

Tavernier penned a guide to U.S. film history whose first edition was called “20 Years of American Cinema”; it was subsequently expanded to “30 Years…” and then “50 Years of American Cinema.”

The director’s other book on U.S. cinema is called “American Friends.” “This has interviews with many American directors from John Ford to Robert Altman, to Robert Parrish and Roger Corman, and many others who had not been interviewed before,” Tavernier told an interviewer. “I got to know practically everybody who was blacklisted and interviewed many people — John Berry, Joe Losey, Abe Polonsky and others.”

He was married to screenwriter Claudine (Colo) O’Hagen from 1965 to 1980.

Tavernier is survived by their two children, son Nils Tavernier, a director and actor, and daughter Tiffany Tavernier, a novelist, screenwriter and assistant director, as well as his second wife Sarah.

Manori Ravindran and Elsa Keslassy contributed to this report. 

(Credit: Alamy)
(Image credit: Alamy)

By Sophie Monks Kaufman – 23rd March 2021 – BBC Culture – Film – History

From heartthrob to icon of edginess, the actor had an extraordinary career. On the centenary of his birth, Sophie Monks Kaufman wonders if we will see so daring a leading man again.

Many actors have undergone transformations, from Olivia Colman morphing from a British sitcom mainstay into a serious actress of international repute, to Robert DeNiro trading method-actor intensity for jovial fare like Meet The Fockers – but no-one has made quite such a provocative career turn as Dirk Bogarde

The British actor had two distinct phases: from 1948 he lit up screens as a dashing matinee idol, and then, from 1961, he chose roles that challenged received morality and that pushed the scope of cinema. All the while, he stayed alive to the world beyond his forcefield, as revealed by the entertaining letters he wrote to everyone from collaborators to random penpals.

Bogarde became a pin-up in the 1950s thanks to his role as dashing medic Simon Sparrow in the Doctor film series (Credit: Alamy)

Bogarde became a pin-up in the 1950s thanks to his role as dashing medic Simon Sparrow in the Doctor film series (Credit: Alamy)

As we approach the centenary of his birth this weekend, it’s interesting to reflect on a unique star whose legacy is a clarion call to pursue creative freedom. By the time he became an actor he had experienced enough of the heaviness of life to take fame lightly. In other words: he didn’t believe his own hype, even though there sure was a lot of it not to believe.

The crowd-pleasing early days

“Presenting Britain’s most popular star” shouts the trailer to the 1958 Charles Dickens adaptation A Tale of Two Cities, cutting to a figure who is every inch the romantic gentleman with a cravat, top hat and furrowed brow: “Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton”. 

Bogarde was, as his official biographer John Coldstream tells BBC Culture, “box-office catnip” and had been since 1954’s Doctor in the House, a lightweight comedy about hijinx in a London hospital. Bogarde was cast as shy medical student Simon Sparrow, a role he played a further three times in Doctor At Sea (1955), Doctor At Large (1957), and Doctor in Distress (1963). His Simon is quietly dashing, a soulful presence in contrast with brasher peers, whose nurse-ogling is played for laughs and so has not aged well. Sparrow captured the public imagination, and it was rare to find a film magazine in the 50s that didn’t feature Dirk frowning under a soft forelock of dark hair. Contracted to British studio The Rank Organisation since 1948, he was busting out movies at a rate of three to four a year, and his status seemed set as a crowd-pleasing A-lister. He had been an above-the-title name since playing a seductive footman in Esther Waters (1948), and by the early 1950s, he was a big face in the celebrity industrial complex, placing highly in best movie star polls – indeed, as relayed by Coldstream in his biography, Olwen Evans, a shorthand typist from Kent “won” a date with Bogarde, in the Daily Mirror’s Teen Queen contest.

Then, in 1961 with his contract at Rank coming to an end, Bogarde took the role of barrister Melville Farr in Basil Dearden’s Victim, a black-and-white thriller about gay men being blackmailed under threat of exposure and jail time, which was made six years before the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised “homosexual acts in private between consenting adults” in the UK. Under the original working title Boy Barrett, Jack Hawkins was cast as Farr. He backed out, and the part was turned down by two more actors, James Mason and Stewart Granger, before the idea dawned on Pinewood bigwig, Earl St John, to offer it to Bogarde. In a letter written by Victim’s producer Michael Relph to its co-writer Janet Green at the time, Relph notes: “In spite of the obvious dangers for [Bogarde], he jumped at it.”

He knew his box-office appeal would suffer. But by that time, he’d said, ‘Come on, I just want to make the work I want to make’ – John Coldstream

The obvious danger was that Bogarde was gay and living with his partner Anthony ‘Tote’ Forwood, as he would until Forwood died in 1988. “This was a way of getting out a message” says Coldstream. “He couldn’t go on a chat show and say, ‘Look, I’m living with Tony Forwood'”. Victim was the first British film to use the word “homosexual”, and it played a role in helping the 1967 Sexual Offences Act through its 10-year gestation period. Lord Arran, who introduced the legislation that would become the act, wrote to Bogarde in 1968 praising his “courage in undertaking this difficult and potentially damaging part”, adding “It is comforting to think that perhaps a million men are no longer living in fear”.

Back in 1961, on the film’s release, the prospect of covering it was not a straightforward matter for critics. Press baron Lord Beaverbrook, owner of The Daily Express, Sunday Express, Evening Standard and The Scottish Daily Express, all but banned the mention of homosexuality in his titles, especially in a sympathetic context. The Evening Standard’s lead film critic Alexander Walker was told by his deputy editor “I’d ignore it if I were you.” Walker did not ignore it. “At last, after years of playing paper-thin parts in paperweight films, Dirk Bogarde has a role that not only shows what a brilliant actor he is – but what a courageous one he is, too,” he wrote. Other impressed reviews rolled in, as did a new kind of audience, more critical, less popular. “He knew his box-office appeal would suffer,” says Coldstream. “But by that time, he’d said, ‘Come on, I just want to make the work I want to make'”.The film ushered in a new and compelling era of Bogarde, by then aged 40 – the Bogarde that cinema-lovers still think of today.

Bogarde's 1961 film Victim was the first British production to use the word "homosexual" (Credit: Alamy)

Bogarde’s 1961 film Victim was the first British production to use the word “homosexual” (Credit: Alamy)

He wasn’t interested in Hollywood and perhaps Hollywood wasn’t interested in him, although he dabbled, starring opposite Ava Gardner in 1960 war drama The Angel Wore Red. Instead, there was a mutual attraction between him and auteurs. One of these was Joseph Losey, whose 1963 film The Servant is an immaculately crafted exploration of the power struggle between the wealthy and clueless Tony (James Fox) and his Machiavellian manservant Hugo Barrett (Dirk). The film was scripted by Harold Pinter, and Bogarde filled those famous Pinter pauses with crafty looks galore. “He conveyed thought and people read his thoughts,” said his co-star Fox in a the 2000 instalment of the British TV documentary strand Legends devoted to Bogarde. Tension between the two characters burns slowly, until a climax executed with merciless triumph by Barrett.

A motif across Bogarde performances is the capacity to show naked cruelty – all bone, no meat; all blade, no sheath. 1967’s Accident, another Bogarde-Losey-Pinter collaboration, is so full of dread that it is nearly unbearable. Bogarde worked with Losey a total of five times (1954’s The Sleeping Tiger, 1964’s King and Country and 1966’s Modesty Blaise were the other three) and had an extensive correspondence with both Losey and Losey’s wife, Patricia. Bogarde often had a tone of brotherly exasperation at his friend and collaborator’s downbeat nature. “Life is’nt [sic] all that bad, Joe. It can, actually, be fun if you try!” went a postcard dated 16 October 1969 from Villa Berti in Rome, where Bogarde and Forwood had just relocated from the UK.

His European era

The Losey films marked the start of Bogarde’s dive into the more shadowy side of human nature. Once installed in Italy, he worked twice with Luchino Visconti, first on The Damned (1969), and then on Death in Venice (1971). The latter, an adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella, evidences Bogarde’s mastery of micro-acting via finickity movements, flare ups of quickly quelled distress, and even the pompous way he eats a strawberry. His sickly composer Gustav Von Aschenbach (based on Gustav Mahler, whose music forms the score) is adrift and alone as he indulges a silent obsession with Tadzio, the embodiment of youth and beauty in the Mann original, lent an overt sexual gauze in Visconti’s adaptation. This is particularly troubling in light of the abuses Bjorn Andreson, the 14-year-old Swedish actor playing Tadzio, suffered afterwards, as chronicled in a new documentary, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World – the title that Visconti ascribed to his teenage star while they were promoting Death in Venice at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.

For his part of Von Aschenbach, who has fled to Venice after tragedy and humiliation, Bogarde’s dialogue is mainly choleric outbursts at hotel staff. Otherwise, his face performs a mute dance of longing and regret; life flashing before his eyes and amounting to less than the flesh and blood boy before him. For the finale, he has a make-over in the clownish bourgeois manner of the time: all white face powder, rosy lips and jet-black hair. As the wretched von Aschenbach lies in a deckchair, dye sweating down his face, it’s hard to recall the clean-cut matinee idol who launched a thousand magazine covers. Bogarde did this to himself whole-heartedly, writing to Visconti afterwards: “It seems incredible to me that the film is over only by a few weeks… I am very nostalgic for it and for Gustav… and always for you.”

Every actor has his own inner orchestra, a kind of expressive instrumentation that can be very rich, which was the case with Dirk – Liliana Cavani

The most divisive – and, indeed, my favourite – Bogarde film was yet to come. There could scarcely be a more controversial subject than that of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). Set in 1957, it sees Bogarde play Max, a night porter in a Viennese hotel, living quietly, hiding from his past identity as a Nazi officer. One day, concentration camp survivor, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), visits the hotel and they rekindle a sadomasochistic relationship that began in the camp. What sounds from its top-line like poor-taste pornography is infused with strange powers: although Lucia should hate Max, he makes sense to her somehow. Neither character can move on from this one indelible moment in history which binds them together in abjection.

The troubling Death in Venice saw Bogarde play a sickly composer indulging a silent obsession with a teenage boy (Credit: Alamy)

The troubling Death in Venice saw Bogarde play a sickly composer indulging a silent obsession with a teenage boy (Credit: Alamy)

Cavani had been impressed by Bogarde in The Servant, she tells BBC Culture: “He gave a performance made of subtlety and skill so, when I was able to make my film, I wanted only him.” She was taken by her agent to meet Bogarde at his home, which was now on the Côte d’Azur in France, and realised she had truly found her Max. “He was indeed my protagonist; he exuded intelligence, curiosity and restlessness.” There followed a night of enviable bonding and excess. “I had a child’s command of English, so we spoke French to each other the whole evening, over dinner and whisky afterwards. On the way back to the airport my agent asked what we had discussed. I told her we had drunk a bit, but with all the lucidity I could muster I declared that he was my main character. The next day he couldn’t really remember the conversation either but he agreed to do the film.”

Bogarde and Rampling were equally well cast, sharing a deep magnetism. “Every actor has his own inner orchestra, a kind of expressive instrumentation that can be very rich, which was the case with Dirk,” says Cavani, “Without Dirk’s inner richness – and Charlotte Rampling’s as well – my film might have become a turbid little story. Instead, Dirk and Charlotte went deep into their characters, holding on to them so tightly, they almost lost themselves.”

He was for me a good and great man, but he wasn’t a goody-goody, that’s for sure – Charlotte Rampling

The idea for these characters had fermented in Cavani over time, fuelled by the years she has spent mired in research for other projects: both watching “kilometres of film” on the Third Reich for La Storia del Terzo Reich, a four-episode series broadcast on Italy’s RAI TV from 1965-66, and conducting interviews herself for her one-off 1965 documentary on the same channel, La donna della resistenza, about women who had participated in the Resistance struggle. “I interviewed two partisan women who had survived the concentration camps, one in Dachau and the other in Auschwitz,” says Cavani. “The Dachau survivor was a teacher from Cuneo who went to Dachau during her holidays in order to not forget and to bear witness. The Auschwitz survivor had left her family and lived alone because she did not want to keep hearing the same advice: ‘Forget everything!'”

Why did Dirk want to play a character defined by the most horrific act of the 20th Century? “He’d seen a lot of bad stuff,” says Coldstream, referring to Bogarde’s time in the Allied Forces during World War Two, when he visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp following its liberation. “The darker side of humanity had been unveiled to him and he knew how badly people could treat each other in life. He was shielded from a lot of that because he had a very happy relationship himself, but he was fascinated by the depths that people would go to.”

Bogarde's most controversial career choice was his role as Nazi officer Max in sadomasochistic romance The Night Porter (Credit: Alamy)

Bogarde’s most controversial career choice was his role as Nazi officer Max in sadomasochistic romance The Night Porter (Credit: Alamy)

In an interview for the Legends documentary, Charlotte Rampling says of Bogarde: “He was for me a good and great man, but he wasn’t a goody-goody, that’s for sure.” Her mouth then curves in delight: “He was wicked.” This is correct. He was irreverent and unshocked by taboos, drawn to edgy material, not to provoke, but to show a lesser-seen side of human nature. He regularly rejected praise that he was “brave” as he was driven by integrity, acting out his interests with an acid sense of humour, and choosing to collaborate with idiosyncratic greats who also included John Schlesinger (1965’s Darling), Alain Resnais (1977’s Providence), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978’s Despair) and Bertrand Tavernier (1990’s Daddy Nostalgie).

Across the final two decades of his life, before his death in 1999, the inveterate letter-writer almost gave up on acting, and instead turned to public penmanship in the form of six novels, ten memoirs, and wide-ranging forms of journalism. His writing is indecently great; crisp, funny, detailed and full of the feelings that powered his acting. After Forwood died from cancer in 1988, Bogarde became a book reviewer for The Telegraph at literary editor Nicholas Shakespeare’s suggestion. “Nicholas didn’t know it at the time , but it was he who chucked a plank across the ravine for me,” wrote Bogarde in the introduction to his journalism collection For The Time Being, When Shakespeare moved on, it was Coldstream, in fact, who became Bogarde’s editor. At the beginning of our call, Coldstream says simply of his old friend and colleague: “I miss him”. 

Looking back at his career inspires a sense of loss – not only for Bogarde as an actor, but for a personality that served higher ideals than box-office bottom lines, and deeper truths than a wipe-clean image. Perhaps the modern star most comparable to him is Robert Pattinson, who turned his back on mega stardom after the Twilight franchise to make strange, transgressive films with directors like David Cronenberg, The Safdie Brothers and Claire Denis. Still, Pattinson’s choices are artistically niche with a side of nihilism, rather than morally challenging, and hence he is tame by comparison. There is no one today like Dirk Bogarde. 

One of the first Dirk Bogarde films I saw at the cinema was during a Bogarde season at Glasgow Film Theatre in 2000. He was in the Judy Garland vehicle I Could Go On Singing (1963), and when he appeared on screen I gasped. He’s handsome, but I wasn’t swooning (well, maybe a little) – I was struck by his presence; he barely had to do anything and I was riveted. Born on 28 March 1921, Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven Van den Bogaerde was made for the big screen.
I’ve been an avid Bogarde fan for just over twenty years and I’ve consumed most of his writing, including all seven autobiographies, and have read the John Coldstream biography twice. Despite this, I’m not as interested in Dirk the man as I am in Dirk the actor, which he likely would have found quite pleasing given how private he was, his autobiographies disguising more than they reveal. He talked of his need for armour, for a second skin: “I was rather like a hermit crab. Tight in his borrowed shell. I was safe from predators; and by predators I meant everyone I met.” He was an elusive creature, and as his biographer confirms: “Dirk is a nightmare to pin down.” Remain unpinned, I say. Remain elusive.


Career
During the late forties and early fifties, Bogarde was in danger of being typecast as the shifty criminal before he rocketed to stardom in 1954 at the age of thirty-three playing the straight man Dr Simon Sparrow in the first of four Doctor comedies.

With Kenneth More & Donald Houston – Doctor in the House (1954)

Under contract to Rank, this Idol of the Odeons drew the crowds, reaching a pitch that could rival Beatlemania. Stardom aside, his early career was patchy, and he was rarely given a role with bite, but amidst a few forgettable films there’s some standout performances, including the brooding, tortured murderer and kidnapper in Hunted (1952). Still, critics tended to underestimate him, and it wasn’t until Basil Dearden’s Victim in 1961 that they began to take him seriously, The Evening News declaring: “At last Bogarde becomes a heavyweight.”

Victim (1961)

In Victim, Bogarde plays Melville Farr, a married barrister whose love interest, Jack Barrett (Peter McEnery), is targeted by blackmailers taking advantage of British law (homosexuality was a crime for men). When Barrett kills himself, Farr assists the police in bringing the blackmailers to justice, and in the most powerful scene in the film admits to his wife (Sylvia Syms) that he’s gay. In volume two of his autobiography, Snakes and Ladders, Dirk says of Victim: “It was the wisest decision I ever made in my cinematic life.” Which is quite the declaration. It was also a brave role to take on: Dirk was a contradiction – he never came out as gay, and his life partner Anthony Forwood was always referred to as his manager or companion, but a number of his roles had – at the very least – queer undertones, and aspects of his acting were quite deliberately camp. He was hiding in plain sight. Bogarde goes on to say of Victim that “It is extraordinary in this over-permissive age, to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring, or dangerous to make. It was, in its time, all three.” Victim is thought to be partially responsible for a shift in attitudes which helped push through a change in law in 1967 – homosexual activity in England and Wales was no longer illegal as long as it was consensual, in private, and between two men over the age of 21. A welcome change, but not nearly enough, and certainly not equality. Homosexuality was still considered by many as a flaw or mental illness, and Victim sadly reflects this. Still, it was a significant step forward, and a strong role for Bogarde. Despite showing his mettle, Bogarde muddled along in below-par roles until in 1963 he played the title role in Joseph Losey’s The Servant.

With Wendy Craig – The Servant (1963)

This, perversely, is the same year as his final Doctor film, and I couldn’t think of more diametrically opposed roles; the light, breezy Dr Sparrow is in stark contrast to the malevolent, corrupting Barrett, marking the second major turning point in Bogarde’s career. In the Sunday Express, Thomas Wiseman wrote: “With this performance, the best he has given so far, Mr Bogarde places himself in quite a new category as an actor, and makes himself eligible for a whole new range of parts previously regarded as beyond his range.”

With Sarah Miles – The Servant 1963

Dirkisms
Not everyone has been as appreciative of Bogarde’s acting prowess over the years. Geoffrey Moorhouse offered this barbed appraisal of Bogarde’s performances: “I can enjoy and applaud them as much as most, but I wouldn’t call them acting.” Comparing his work in King and Country (1964) and The Damned (1969) he stated: “There came moments when both raised their right eyebrow, just so, and dilated their nostrils, like that, and looked very levelly at someone they despised because that was another stock Bogarde response.” Pauline Kael in her damning review of The Night Porter (1974) concurred: “We know his neurasthenic tricks – the semaphore eyebrow, the twitching mouth, the sneaky vindictive gleam…”
There’s some truth in this; Dirk had his tics, the infamous raised eyebrow being one. At times appropriate and effective, it was often overused. As a fan, I have some affection for these Dirkisms, and tend to be less damning than critics, but dismissing him based on these go-to mannerisms risks underestimating him, overlooking the breathtaking skill he had for quiet subtlety, his ability to somehow convey turbulent emotion beneath a still masque.

Accident
Using this skill in Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967), he made the clichéd midlife crisis of an Oxford professor utterly compelling. Bogarde worked with Losey five times, first on the lightweight but entertaining The Sleeping Tiger (loaded with some pretty suspect pseudo-psychology and clunky dialogue), The Servant, anti-war film King and Country, the flawed but deliciously camp Modesty Blaise (Dirk imprisoned in the desert shouting “Champagne! Champagne!” is a favourite moment), and finally on Accident.

With Jaqueline Sassard & Michael York – Accident (1967)

Dream team Bogarde, Losey, and Pinter (who also scripted The Servant) bring us loaded silences and British repression in a male-centred film, where Anna (Jaqueline Sassard), the student all the men lust after, is simply a tabula rasa onto which they project their desires. When Bogarde’s pregnant wife, Rosalind (played by the brilliant Vivien Merchant) learns of an affair Stephen’s colleague is having with Anna she delivers an upbraidment that cuts through their self-absorption: “How pathetic. Poor stupid old man. I’ve never heard of anything so bloody puerile, so banal.” Accident, dangerously, is built around this banality, but succeeds through the artistry of all involved, and the unflinching examination of the rot that lies beneath middle class civility.

Throughout the film, Stephen is largely an observer, his feelings for Anna simmering just beneath the surface. The turning point is when he takes Anna for a walk through the woods and they stop by a field, their hands resting on a fence, inches from each other. We see their backs, Anna gazing out across the field, Stephen in profile, looking at Anna, nervous with indecision. He waits too long; Anna turns and says, “Shall we go back now?”

With Jaqueline Sassard – Accident (1967)

The spell broken, his moment gone. His more brazen colleague, Charley (Stanley Baker), whose success he’s already jealous of, embarks on an affair with Anna, and even while Stephen sees its destructive impact, he’s envious. Just over halfway through, when Stephen finds out about the affair, his buttoned-down British response is to passive-aggressively make an omelette. I’ve watched this scene several times, including without sound. It’s one of my favourite (one-shot) scenes in cinema, Bogarde getting across so much with the line “I’m gonna make an omelette”, his body language and silences, and – always – through his eyes. There’s little sign of any Dirkisms in Accident. In fact, it’s a perfectly understated performance, one of the finest of his career, Bogarde himself describing it as “the most exacting work I had ever had to do on screen.”
While there’s brilliance in the likes of The Servant and Accident, it wasn’t until his later European work that Bogarde truly came into his own (Bertrand Tavernier called him “totally European” ).

Having failed to conquer Hollywood with Song Without End (1960), and becoming increasingly disenchanted with the British film industry, he uprooted, moved to France, and was embraced by Luchino Visconti, Alain Resnais, Liliana Cavani, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, taking on roles poles apart from Dr Simon Sparrow.

The Damned
Bogarde first worked with Visconti on The Damned (1969), an operatic exploration of the Nazi rise to power, focussing on the Von Essenbeck family, owners of a steelwork business. Bogarde gives a decent performance as Frederick Bruckmann, a Macbeth-like character who attempts to take control of the family business. It’s a thankless role; he’s clearly playing second fiddle to Helmut Berger, but one hour and forty-six minutes in, Bogarde steals the film by doing what seems like very little. Surprised, I had to pause for a moment, not quite grasping what I’d seen. Rewind. Rewatch. Repeat.

The Damned (1969)

It’s Visconti’s big set piece: the Night of the Long Knives. After a night of revelry and debauchery, we witness the SA being gunned down by the SS. When two men (Konstantin Von Essenbeck and his lover) are shot, Aschenbach, a prominent Nazi, walks in and smiles. The camera pans to Bruckmann standing in the doorway holding a machine gun, closing in on his face. There’s a slight tremble, and he looks up at Aschenbach, tears in his eyes. There’s no tics – no narrowing of the eyes, no raised brow. He’s still for a beat, then trembles again, his mouth opening in horror as he looks back down at the corpse.
Up until this moment, the massacre is distant and mannered: naked and half-clothed bodies are strewn in a tableau with too-bright blood slopped across them, all slaughtered with a cold ease. In a matter of seconds, because of that look on Bogarde’s face, the distance is gone; I suddenly felt complicit in something truly harrowing, as if the rot and guilt of Nazi Germany was permeating my being.
In Dirk’s account of this scene in Snakes and Ladders I was surprised to find it was the first thing he shot, apparently with very little direction or feedback from Visconti. It amused me that such an affecting scene involved Bogarde shooting and then staring in distress at “a large apple crate with an X chalked on it.” It could be he misremembered this because, without a cut, the camera pans straight from the bloody body of Konstantin’s lover to Dirk (though it’s possible Konstantin’s body and Aschenbach weren’t there). Whatever truth there is to this, it will forever be known to me as ‘the apple crate scene.’ It’s only a few seconds in a film that runs at one hundred and fifty minutes, but those seconds alone make me want to declare Bogarde one of the finest actors of his generation. Thankfully, I have more than those seconds to back me up.

Death In Venice
Bogarde worked with Visconti again on Death In Venice (1971). In an interview with Russell Harty in 1986, Bogarde said, “I’ve got a quality. And the quality is what they call charm. And I flog it.” But in his Death In Venice role, there’s no easy charm; he’s an irascible, moody character, and playing an ailing elderly man with shaggy greying hair, a pallid complexion, make-up accentuating the lines on his face and exaggerating the dark circles around his eyes, Bogarde can’t rely on good looks either. It’s all in the eyes.

With Luchino Visconti – Death in Venice (1971)

Gustav von Aschenbach is a composer who has lived by the principles of discipline and order. He is convalescing in Venice when he comes across Tadzio, a boy staying in the same hotel, and is instantly in thrall to this embodiment of ideal beauty. Aschenbach’s strict Apollonian foundations start to crack, and in an effort to restore order he decides to cut his trip short. As the vaporetto transports him to the station, the camera is focussed on him. There isn’t quite the same stillness as Stephen swallowing down his emotions in Accident; even as he sits, hunched, hands on his cane, there’s a twitchiness to Aschenbach, a nervous energy. But we’re drawn to his eyes, where we find both reluctance and resignation; he has pulled away from Tadzio, but order has returned, even if it’s tinged with melancholy. When at the station, Aschenbach uses the excuse of a mix up with his baggage to return to Venice. The halfway point of the film becomes a literal turning point as Aschenbach turns around, heading back to the hotel. On the vaporetto again, it’s a similar scene to only a few moments before, but this time he’s returning to Tadzio, the joy evident in his eyes. To the soaring music of Mahler, he stands, arms outstretched, triumphant. It’s a beautifully choreographed moment.

Death in Venice (1971)

Bogarde gives a masterful, devastating performance while seeming to do very little as he spends the majority of the film sitting, watchful, rarely speaking. Bogarde embodies Aschenbach entirely (frailty, a shuffling and hesitant walk, the nervous energy) but where Aschenbach truly comes through is in his eyes. Visconti said of Bogarde, “I knew I could make a film based on his eyes.” And he did.

The Night Porter
Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) features Bogarde as Max, an SS Officer who has a sadomasochistic relationship with one of his prisoners, Lucia (the ever brilliant Charlotte Rampling). The film opens in post-war Vienna, with Max working as a night porter in a hotel. When Lucia arrives with a garrulous crowd, Lucia and Max immediately recognise each other. A silent moment of shock is shared between them before Lucia is whisked away by her oblivious husband. Other than the moment Max sits a few rows behind Lucia at the opera (which could easily be Lucia’s imagination), they don’t meet again until almost an hour into the film, but their awareness of each other’s presence in the hotel disorientates them. They turn in on themselves, caught up in the memories of their relationship in the concentration camp, which we witness through disturbing flashbacks as they both ruminate.

With Charlotte Rampling – The Night Porter (1974)

My favourite aspect of The Night Porter are the moments Dirk spends brooding, particularly in the first half (although, there’s a misstep where Max delivers a brief monologue after being reunited with Lucia – it was all obvious, superfluous; simply focussing on a silent Bogarde would have been enough). One particularly mesmeric moment is around ten minutes into the film, when Max turns the reception light off and takes a seat, a small lamp illuminating his face. He sips on his drink and with the glass still held by his mouth he puts his palm across the rim, the side of his hand pressed lightly against his lips. He sits, thinking, conveying so much through stillness.
I can honestly say I could watch hours of Bogarde simply thinking and I lament that such footage doesn’t exist. I will have to make do with the captivating moments of stillness that do, including – in the final film I’ll appraise – a moment so powerful it felt like a gut punch.

Providence
Alain Resnais’ Providence (1977) explores relationships, old age, and death through John Gielgud’s Clive Langham, an ailing cantankerous writer-narrator, as he co-opts his family and moves them around in his own bitter narrative. As personal melodrama unfolds, there’s an underlying unease as the military round people up, depositing them in a sports stadium. Bogarde as Langham’s son, Claude, is camp, acerbic, and hyper-arch as he coldly dissects his wife’s motivations and mocks her attempt at an affair. Claude seems only mildly perturbed by the increasing military encroachments, and his reaction to an elderly man collapsing in the street is that of irritation. In the rare moments he’s not delivering mannered monologues there are glimpses of melancholy, but on the whole, Claude remains unmoved and entirely one-dimensional.

Providence (1977)

That is, until Clive’s narrative spell is broken when his real-life family gather for his birthday and Claude greets his father with genuine warmth. It seems he’s not the monster Clive had conjured, and the change in demeanour from his father’s waspish avatar to a warm, slightly reserved son is so extreme and so well executed, it’s a shock. I recall gawping at the screen in surprise, watching Dirk do… well, it seemed, not much at all. Sitting in a beautiful garden on a sunny day, wearing a beige cardigan and flower-patterned shirt, he gazes at his father. The sadness in his eyes is unbearable. It hurts. It feels obscene. It’s almost offensive, this unexpected rawness, even more so because of how underplayed it is.

Providence (1977)

Craft
In an Omnibus interview Dirk stated: “The camera is capable of photographing thought… It’s an internal thing and this is the essence of concentration. And without the absolute tightness of concentration, here, in your head, nothing works on the screen… if you can establish a rapport, a love affair between yourself and the lens they will do everything in their power to help you, but you’ve got to be thinking.” He said this several times in his writing and interviews, and as a non-thespian civilian I admit I thought it was a pretentious and easy soundbite masquerading as craft. Until, that is, I saw Providence. I subsequently re-evaluated his previous work and came to appreciate his skill for stillness, realising he was absolutely right – the camera does photograph thought and he did have that rapport. It was even evident as early on as 1948 (when he was only 27) in the Alien Corn segment of Quartet where, just after he is delivered a life-altering blow, the camera lingers on his impassive face, emotion roiling just beneath the surface. Dirk Bogarde, I realised, was not just a pretty face or a merely decent actor, he was a master craftsman.

Providence (1977)


References
Bogarde, Dirk (1987), ‘Backcloth’, Penguin, p58
Coldstream, John (2004), ‘Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography’, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p14
Ibid, p278
Bogarde, Dirk (1988), ‘Snakes and Ladders’, Penguin, p201
Ibid, p201
Coldstream, John (2004), ‘Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography’, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p297
Ibid, p366
Ibid
Ibid, p380
Bogarde, Dirk (1988), ‘Snakes and Ladders’, Penguin, p246
Coldstream, John (2004), ‘Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography’, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p507
Bogarde, Dirk (1988), ‘Snakes and Ladders’, Penguin, p263
‘Dirk Bogarde: Above the Title’, 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfeDhkJ-w_8
Coldstream, John (2004), ‘Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography’, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p360
Omnibus interview in ‘Talking Pictures’ (a look at television appearances made over the years by Dirk Bogarde), 2013

Quiet compassion in Victim

Terence Davies, director of Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth, A Quiet Passion chooses a sequence from Victim.

In Victim, Dirk Bogarde plays a closet homosexual barrister who risks both his career and marriage to break a blackmailing gang when his young friend kills himself rather than implicate him.

There is a small scene towards the end of the film when Bogarde calls for his clerk to join him. Bogarde shows him the photograph that has obvious implications. William (the clerk) looks at the photograph and says they must get the negative, having added, if the boy wasn’t crying there could be no basis for a criminal charge. As William goes to leave, Bogarde says that surely he must have one question, and William says that he’s worked for Bogarde for 10 years and that he has never doubted his integrity.

It is a small scene of compassion and loyalty – a compassion that is so moving because of its very reticence. It moved me to tears then. It moves me to tears now.

From The Guardian, 17th March 2021