Picturegoer – Jan 1st 1957

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Bogarde – Man on a tightrope

Danger looms ahead for one of Britain’s most lasting screen stars. In this new series, Margaret Hinxman explains why

For Dirk Bogarde – the owner of the most lasting star career in British films – the next two years are the dangerous years. Who said so? Not I. Not the critics who have come around to thinking of him as an actor as well as a film star.

And not the picturegoers, who, despite his sixteen-month absence from the screen, still ensure him one of the largest fan mails of any British star. It was Bogarde himself who said it.

Since Cast A Dark Shadow was released in the autumn of 1955, the only public limelight centred on Bogarde has been in a not-wildly successful play, “Summertime.”

This month, two new Bogarde films Bogarde films are expected to make up that leeway. But both of them are remarkably off-beat films.

The Spanish Gardener – on release the week after next – is a strange story about a friendship between a man and a small boy, which casts Bogarde, improbably, as a peasant.

“Ill Met By Moonlight,” in London’s West End next week, is a war film. But it’s not an obviously box office war film. It stresses the humours as well as the grimness of war, sometimes attempts an uneasy mixture of both.

Risky Propositions

BOTH films are risky propositions that may or may not come off. The actor in Bogarde happily admits that they’re off-beat and is delighted to have the chance to flex his versatile talents on new roles.

But the careerist in him is acutely aware of those risks and is perhaps slightly uneasy about the outcome.

Consequently he’s preparing all kinds of insurance against those “dangerous” years – notably a contract with Rank that gives him an absolute okay on final scripts before he starts work on a film and the right to veto a leading lady, if he doesn’t think she’s right for the part.

This may not seem a great concession until you realize that, although many actors have the right to okay their scripts, strange things can happen to a script while the film is being made.

This, Bogarde has ensured, will never happen to him again.

He said once that seven years is the limit for a British film star to stay on top, if he hadn’t made a film in Hollywood or an enormous success on the stage.

Basicallv he still believes this; “although I’ve rather disproved it myself. I’ve been in films for ten years.”

But the fact still nags at the back of his mind and the wish to make a good film in Hollywood grows stronger all the time. Plenty of offers have come his way, but the parts, according to Bogarde, have been unsuitable.

And to make a flop or a routine film in Hollywood would be far worse than never making a film there at all, he feels.

At best, the combination of an actor of integrity and professional careerist – in one star – is a battling partnership. In Bogarde, though, it is almost a perfect union.

He is the outstanding example of the artist who has managed to soar to the top in British films as a star (a term he cordially dislikes) while retaining his self- respect as an actor.

In the theatre – where screen stars are often brusquely written off as the playboys of the profession – he is admired as a working actor. In films he is respected as a stalwart box office proposition.

A Planned Career

THIS is no chance development. It wasn’t luck that gave Bogarde’s career its extra- ordinary versatility. It was Bogarde. No Welfare State ever organized a public service as astutely as Bogarde has planned his own career.

“Everything in my life,” he freely admits, “is geared to my career. If I make a social engagement, invite friends for the weekend, I reserve the ri1ht to cancel it if I want to study a script or work on a part.

“Right from the beginning, when I was painting scenery in a Little Theatre, I was planning for the future. I knew sooner or later the opportunity would come and I wanted to be ready to accept it.

“But, if the opportunity didn’t work out, I knew I could go back to painting scenery because I was good at painting scenery.

“I see a career as a long corridor with a series of doors on either side. Some of them open an inch or two. Sometimes you miss an opening because you’re looking the other way.”

To Bogarde the spectacle of the actor who drifts from one part to another simply for the money is a sad one. “Too many stars work for the moment and lose sight of the main goal.”

It’s this passion for a well-ordered career that makes him in some ways the despair of his studio chiefs at the Rank Organization, to which he’s under contract. The despair, these days, is offset by understanding. Too often, he’s been proved to be right.

But his chiefs still shake their heads when he digs in his heels and insists on playing parts – for other studios – like the ingratiating spiv in Cast A Dark Shadow or the neurotic criminal in The Sleeping Tiger.

“They told me Maggie Lockwood would steal Cast A Dark Shadow from me. I was crazy to do’ it, they said.

“But as it turned out later the critics praised us both and it was a good, entertaining thriller.”

Bogarde’s chief fear is that anyone should ever regard him as a type. “That’s why I like variety. And you mustn’t do too much on the screen so that people say ‘not him again’ when you appear in another film.”

Like all good actors, Bogarde has a wholesome respect for the business of filming; a wholesome loathing of the “gin-and-tonic” directors – as he puts it – who clutter up the British film industry.

“I heard one director say, after he’d finished lunch: ‘Well, let’s go back and wrap up this rubbish.’ “

That any director could seriously embark on making a film believing from the start that it was rubbish is inconceivable to him.

Because of this, he finds directors with reputations for being “difficult,” like Lewis Milestone, who directed him in They Who Dare, and Michael Powell, who made Ill Met By Moonlight ,a rewarding challenge that puts him on his mettle.

A man who thinks, eats, dreams and worries films is his idea of a director. Ralph Thomas – director of the “Doctor” films – he admires as a fine box office director.

“He makes the kind of films that people want to see, the kind of films I want to appear in, “says Bogarde.

Humbled Himself

WHEN he heard that Milestone was in town a few years ago, he went to his hotel to see him.

Already a fairly big star in British films, Bogarde went in, humbled himself before the great man: “I hear you may be making a film. Could you possibly consider me for a part in it?”

Milestone looked at him, asked: “Who the blazes are you?” Bogarde told him. They sat down and talked. They Who Dare was the result.

It was possibly the most incredible film Bogarde had ever worked on. As the plane – carrying them to the location where most of the film was shot – landed, Milestone threw the script on the tarmac. From then on they worked without a script.

“I wouldn’t want to work that way again,” admits Bogarde. “But I trusted Milestone.” The picture was fascinating, according to Bogarde, until it was cut by hands other than Milestone’s.

But from the very beginning of his screen career, Bogarde was never the conventional star. “I think,” says Olive Dodds, casting director for Rank, “he is the only British actor who started in films on a co-starring basis (an extra’s appearance in Dancing With Crime hardly counts). And he was never a cheap actor – financially.”

He went to Pinewood ten years ago, after making an enormous success on the stage in “Power Without Glory.” He’d had plenty of offers from film studios.

He could, up to a point, pick and choose. He chose Pinewood. And when Stewart Granger opted out of “Esther Waters” Bogarde got the part. The first few days on set were a nightmare.

“I walked around with hundreds of pounds worth of costume on my back, in a daze.” When he asked the director how he should play a scene, he was told : “You’re the actor, you should know.”

The film wasn’t good. And Bogarde was slightly terrible. It was a humbling experience. But from it sprang his intense appreciation of the intricacies of filming – such a dynamic quality today.

Surprisingly, to Bogarde, Esther Waters didn’t kill him with the Rank Organization. He went into several films, did rather more than anyone thought he could with parts in Boys in Brown. and Quartet.

Then came crisis time for British filmdom. That was in 1948. He remembers that all the contract artists were called in separately, told that some of them might be dropped, but if they weren’t they might have to take a three-quarter cut in salary.

Some actors jibbed. But not Dirk Bogarde. He agreed to take the cut. The lean years – as scene painter and general factotum in the theatre – had left their mark. “I knew as a freelance I couldn’t even make THAT much money.

“It was the sheerest luck that I happened to have been signed to appear in The Gentle Gunman at that time. It wasn’t a film I particularly wanted to make. But I’m sure the Organization kept me only because I was scheduled to appear in it.”

Another version has it that such was the studio’s faith in Bogarde it was never suggested that he should be dropped.

Even so, the crisis was a tremendous setback to Bogarde, as it was to most screen actors.

In fact he admits that, professionally, be never quite recovered from it, until casting began on a comparatively low-budget picture about which no one, apart from Ralph Thomas and producer Betty Box, was very excited.

It was called ” Doctor In The House” – but I’ll tell you more about that NEXT WEEK.