Empire – May 1994
Enigmatic for the People
Perhaps most famous for his light comedy, Dirk Bogarde is also a Euro-luvvie, novelist and complex performer. With a clutch of his films released on video to buy this month, Kim Newman celebrates Bogarde’s eclectic career…
Dirk Bogarde has so long lent an elegant, supercilious presence to European cinema, alternating refined sensitivity and snakelike nastiness, that his earlier reputation as a purely British film star is almost obscured.
Born in Hampstead in 1921 of Dutch descent, Derek Niven van den Bogaerde is living proof of novelist Len Deighton’s dictum that “all the best Englishmen have foreign names these days”.
Originally a commercial artist (he worked as a set-dresser on Josef von Sternberg’s famously abandoned I Claudius in 1937), Bogarde came out of World War II and on to the stage, making his screen debut in Esther Waters in 1948.
His first film of interest was Terence Fisher’s So Long At The Fair in which he played a suavely mysterious artist who helps Jean Simmons find out what happened to her missing brother in turn-of-the-century Paris. But Bogarde gave notice of his star potential as the wideboy criminal in The Blue Lamp. Snivelling and cowardly enough to gun down kindly old Jack Warner, Bogarde’s villain was more watchable than the plodding boys in blue the film was supposed to celebrate, nudging the already bolshie star into his first brush with typecasting.
In the early 50s he was heard to lament “Save me from spivs”, as much because his obvious good breeding rendered such criminal roles slightly silly as because he wished to resist more parts involving hold-ups at dog tracks and razor-fights in dancehalls. Nevertheless he took the plum part of the mixed-up hoodlum in Joseph Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger, and was a murderer who bonds with a runaway orphan in Hunted.
The miscasting says a lot about the problem British films had with Bogarde. Gentlemen of his class weren’t supposed to be as sexually magnetic, which gave him the option of taking the James Mason route to Hollywood via romantic villain roles (as in Cast A Dark Shadow) or of slipping into an alternate typecast niche as a sensitive but neurotic artist (as Liszt in Song Without End).
Strangely, his most successful streak in the 50s was as a light comedian, playing the weedily nice lead of the Doctor series which began with Doctor In The House in 1953. Bogarde returned for Doctor At Sea and Doctor At Large, before passing the role on to the likes of Leslie Phillips, though he confused some by starring in The Doctor’s Dilemma, which had nothing to do with the series. Otherwise, he was officer material in 50s British war films. He was a commando (They Who Dare), a bomber pilot (Appointment In London), an escaped POW (The Wind Cannot Read and The Password Is Courage), and, best of all, a romantic guerilla leader posing as a comic opera bandit in occupied Greece in Powell and Pressburger’s Ill Met By Moonlight.
Yet having demonstrated his stiff upper lip in the service, Bogarde was willing to muck about with his image in later movies, playing a sadistic naval officer flogging and sneering in HMS Defiant and a subtly weak World War I officer unable to save Tom Courtenay in King And Country.
Mixed in with these were a few distinctly weird ventures, such as the slightly camp adventuring of the Canadian-set Campbell’s Kingdom and the outrageously camp, leather-trousered Mexican banditry of The Singer Not The Song. Having tackled the subtleties of The Spanish Gardener, playing a Mediterranean type who befriends a repressed English boy, and taken a stab at Great Literature in A Tale Of Two Cities, going to the guillotine with a shrug, he looked about the British cinema for more challenging roles. As a blackmailed bisexual barrister in Victim, he established the dignified, agonised gay screen image still in use in “serious” films like Philadelphia, and while the film ‘s idea of homosexuals loitering in antique shops has not worn well, Bogarde’s cracking decency remains compelling.
After offering stalwart support to a self-destructing Judy Garland in I Could Go On Sleeping, Bogarde reunited with Losey for Accident and The Servant, in which he was required to step down a class or two, and added a vein of creepy resentment to his portrait of the deferential tyrant who takes over his master’s house.
In the late 60s Bogarde departed for residence in France and took up a European film career. With Luchino Visconti he made Death In Venice and The Damned, going from obsessive gay composer to a German industrialist cashing in on Hitler’s rise. He threw in a Nazi footnote in the once-controversial The Night Porter, as the war criminal-cum-hotel functionary who reacquaints himself with Charlotte Rampling, the Jewish socialite he enslaved during the war.
Keen to work with great directors, he gave perhaps his best screen performance in Alain Resnais’ recently revived Providence, as several incarnations of John Gielgud’s gently resentful son, and was a chocolate manufacturer prospering under the Nazis in Fassbinder’s otherwise disappointing Despair.
Bogarde is hardly a prolific actor these days, seemingly unwilling to resign himself to cameos in younger stars’ films, though he will venture before the cameras if offered a meaty role like the wistfully ailing father he played for Bertrand Tavernier in Daddy Nostalgia (a.k.a. These Foolish Things). The author of three volumes of autobiography and a novelist of note, he recently played Roald Dahl in The Patricia Neal Story for American TV and was a reluctant televangelist in the Beeb’s The Vision, but still hasn’t made a Hollywood film in Hollywood; There is, one feels, still time …
The Pick of Dirk Bogarde to Buy
The Blue Lamp (1950)
Directed by Basil Dearden.
Starring Jack Warner, Dirk Bogarde.
Duration 81 mins.
Cert. PG £10.99
Video
A gritty peacetime version of the British war movie, with police uniforms replacing khaki. Fatherly Sergeant Dixon (Warner, introducing the character he would play for decades on television) educates raw recruit Jimmy Hanley in grace under fire, but the calm community copper comes up against quiffed tearaway Bogarde, who guns him down after a Jewel grab, spurring Hanley to shock the audience by calling Dirk a bastard and run him down at the dog track. Written by T.E.B. Clarke and Alexander Mackendrick, this is a key film in its depiction of the British police, though the jam bun-dispensing decency of Dixon and company is now a lot less entertaining than Bogarde’s fast talking, flashily dressed spiv. ★★★★
They Who Dare (1953)
Directed by Lewis Milestone.
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Denholm Elliott, Akim Tamiroff.
Duration 104 mins.
Cert. U £10.99
Video
It seems odd that World War II prompted Milestone, the director of All Quiet On The Western Front, to endorse the patriotic self-sacrifice and bloodthirsty heroism his classic war movie condemned. Bogarde stiffens his upper lip as a commando leading a raid against a couple of German airfields on Rhodes, bringing along cynical sergeant Elliott, ethnic blusterer Tamiroff and essential comic Sam Kydd. It has a nicely understated finish, as two survivors sit at a table laid out for all ten of the platoon, but is mainly boys’ own war action material. Nevertheless, Bogarde’s slightly cracked hero is more interesting than the usual officer material.★★★
The Sleeping Tiger (1954)
Directed by Joseph Losey.
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Alexis Smith, Alexander Knox.
Duration 85 mins.
Cert. U £10.99
Video
In his first collaboration with director Losey, Bogarde plays a neurotic mugger who tries to stick up psychologist Knox and is persuaded to take six months’ therapy rather than a jail spell. As the unreasonably decent Knox delves into the causes of Dirk’s criminality, the hood takes time off to commit armed robbery and have an affair with Knox’s wound-up-tight wife (Smith), who falls apart at the seams as Dirk manages to get it together. A fascinating film, this offers a couple of interesting maniacs in Bogarde and Smith, both of whom blame it all on unloving parents, but falls down by not presenting Knox, whose actions seem to be those of a real nutcase, as equally unbalanced. ★★★★
I Could Go On Singing (1963)
Directed by Ronald Neame.
Starring Judy Garland, Dirk Bogarde.
Duration 95 mins.
Cert. U £10.99
Video
Sailing close to the wind of her own biography, a pudgy Garland plays an unstable, middle-aged singing star unable to take the pain of performance any longer. A tactful Bogarde provides support as the distinguished doctor father of Judy’s long-lost son. Taking a late fling at motherhood, Garland screws it up as much as everything else in her life, but (with hideous irony, since this was her last film before a pretty pathetic death) the finale finds her committing to a one-day-at-a-time cure. Though it could do with a better score, it offers revelatory onstage moments as Garland belts out her woe in torch songs. Bogarde’s job is mainly to look reasonable, offering British repression as an attractive alternative to foreign neurosis. ★★★
The Servant (1963)
Directed by Joseph Losey.
Starring Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig.
Duration 110 mins.
Cert. 15 £10.99
Video
A rich young man (Fox) hires an apparently perfect valet (Bogarde) to oversee his town house, and the man proceeds to usurp his position, alienating his proper fiancée (Craig) and bringing in his “sister” (Miles) to reign over increasingly orgiastic and strength-sapping goings-on. Bogarde is unusually cast as the covertly common servant, showing sides to his personality muted in his long run of decent chap parts. Harold Pinter adapted the story from a novel by Robin Maugham, and neither he nor Losey ever reached quite this standard again in subsequent screen work. Shot in evocative black-and-white, this is a rich piece of early 60s gothic: spare, suggestive and sinister. ★★★★★
Accident (1967)
Directed by Joseph Losey.
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Michael York.
Duration 100 mins.
Cert. PG £10.99
Video
A poised and poisonous drama of death and upper-class perfidy at Oxford, with an elliptical Harold Pinter screenplay. The stars represent three different stripes of inadequate 60s British manhood, while Jacqueline Sassard and Delphine Seyrig provide seductive, untrustworthy foreign femininity. The plot is triggered by a nasty road smash, then flashes back to a tangle of rivalries and relationships which pit the virile but dumb student (York) against two dons, a macho TV pundit (Baker) and the more reflective, slyly hollow Bogarde. Lots of snappy patter with long pauses between jokes, and plenty of sun struck picnics on the lawn to underline the reasons why everybody hates everyone else. ★★★★
Death In Venice (1971)
Directed by Luchino Visconti.
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Silvana Magnano.
Duration 131 mins.
Cert. 15 £9.99
Video
Thomas Mann’s slender, perfect novella is drawn out on screen into a self-conscious wannabe masterpiece that alternates moments of startling brilliance with unfortunate doses of sweating kitsch. Aschenbach, the central character, is based on Gustav Mahler, and Visconti accordingly casts Bogarde not as Mann’s great writer in decline but as a distinguished composer on the slide, allowing for the powerful use of Mahler on the soundtrack. In Venice at the turn of the century, Dirk is fascinated with an angelic young boy whose family is staying at the same hotel, and tempted to linger longer in the plague capital of Europe than is good for his health. The atmosphere of combined innocence and decay, evoked by some suggestive performances and the sinking architecture, is powerful. ★★★★
