Films in London – Nov 1970
PROFIT WITHOUT HONOUR
After 20 years of misuse and mishandling by British studios, Dirk Bogarde has left us. Of his last half dozen films, only one has been British (and that was just a guest appearance in Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War). He has made two films in succession for Visconti – The Damned and Death in Venice. Without honour in his own country, he went elsewhere. and it is only now that we are kicking ourselves for losing such a fine actor. Bogarde, now 50, lives in a farmhouse in France and made one of his rare appearances in England on Sunday to give a John Player Lecture at the National Film Theatre. The following is extracted from that lecture. Already established as a stage actor, Bogarde was courted into films in 1948 when Stewart Granger had a row with the Rank Organisation and vacated the leading role in Esther Waters. Bogarde arrived on set and asked the director what he was supposed to do. He was told that he was the actor- it was up to him. It was, he claims, five films later that he got his first proper instruction from a director – Basil Dearden in The Blue Lamp. Dearden subsequently coaxed two of the best “early” Dirk Bogarde performances from him in Victim and The Mind Benders In those days a Rank Organisation contract had its advantages: Bogarde was completely free to do stage work if he so wished and was given a selection of four scripts for every two he was required to do. Also, he recalls, 17 years of making at least two films a year- often more- gave him a vast repertory of experience on which to draw when he most needed it. The disadvantages were self-evident: he remembers taking two scripts in for consideration, but Rank turned them both down. One was Look Back in Anger, the other was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But it was also under the Rank banner (though not without a big fight) that he got cast as Simon Sparrow in the phenomenally successful Doctor in the House series: in all he made four titles.
It was around this time that his popularity (more as a matinee idol than as an actor) hit its peak. Hollywood was wooing him and he had turned down so many previous offers from there that his price had gone up gigantically. Finally he relented and signed to make Song Without End in which he played Franz Liszt. He remembers the whole experience as being a singularly unhappy one and vowed he would never go to Hollywood again. (In fact, his only appearance in a really bad film during the last few years was in the American-made Justine). When he returned from Hollywood he walked straight into The Singer Not the Song in which he had to play “a Mexican bandit deeply in love with John Mills. I chose myself a costume entirely of black leather, got some white frilly shirts and even a huge white Persian cat. They hadn’t the faintest idea what I was up to. It was an extraordinary picture from beginning to end, but it did tremendously well on the Continent and “Cahiers du Cinema” chose it as one of their ten best films of all time, or something”. There followed the celebrated thriller Victim, which highlighted the fact that under the existing law ( 1961) homosexuals were particularly prone to blackmail. Lord Arran later told Bogarde that those concerned with the film could consider that they contributed directly towards the subsequent reform. “It was an important film for me in other ways” he says, “because my fans fell away overnight. It wasn’t that I was playing a homosexual, because in most parts of England they think queer means you’re not feeling well; it was the fact that I was playing my age. I didn’t have the caps in my teeth, the hair was grey and they saw my right profile for the first time in 12 years. The kids had been used to seeing me play a happy little doctor with a perm in his front lock, looking for God. I delivered a baby in every film. Well, that was over. I realised that I was 40 and the cinema was moving on without me. I thought I’d better change my image fast and run to catch it up before it lost me. It meant abandoning that whole audience: they vanished overnight, and they never came back”.
Bogarde was soon to begin his association with Joseph Losey that gave the British cinema such films as The Servant, King and Country, Modesty Blaise and Accident. A whole new audience opened up-abroad as well as in England. Suddenly he was an international actor and offers began to come in from abroad. Bogarde measured them against the offers he was getting from studios in this country- “idiotic things like comedies about the man who takes the wrong pill and ends up randy instead of tranquillised” he once described them in an interview- and moved away. He encountered script troubles with The Fixer and Justine and solved them by the very sensible means of reverting to the dialogue of the original .. After 55 films and an innings that has lasted for 22 years, Bogarde is now seriously considering retirement. He has two films awaiting release- Harry Rosky’s Upon This Rock in which he plays Bonnie Prince Charlie and Visconti’s Death in Venice in which he plays Aschenbach. Alain Resnais has written a script specially for him (“It’s virtually a monologue and I play the Marquis de Sade-in the Bastille. It’s multo, multo abstracto, and I doubt very much whether we would ever raise the money to make it”).
