The Films of John Schlesinger

Julia Prewitt Brown

Description

First comprehensive interpretation of the films of John Schlesinger

The city, with its manifold distractions and violence, its invitation to intoxication and dream, had long served to represent the experience of modernity in works of art at the time John Schlesinger made his acclaimed urban documentary ‘Terminus’ in 1961. To be a reader of the city was to be a reader of modern life, and Schlesinger was a discriminating, at times relentless, reader of the city throughout his career, especially in his three greatest films, ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘The Day of the Locust’, set in New York, London and Los Angeles, respectively. His character-driven stories, evocation of the significance of the everyday, and insistence on ambiguities of situation and motive – all qualities he was known for – point to literary influences that reach back to the nineteenth century and earlier. ‘The Films of John Schlesinger’ is not only the first book to fully acknowledge those influences, but also the first book to explicate the power of his art to capture the modern, urban experiences of becoming an adult in an atmosphere that relentlessly promotes fantasies of success and wealth; of coming to terms with one’s national identity in the context of international politics; and of attempting to transform the past, both personal and cultural, into a viable present.

Introduction; Part I: Coming of Age; 1. Leading Up to ‘Midnight Cowboy’; 2. Schlesinger’s ‘Bildungsfilm’: ‘Midnight Cowboy’ and the Problem of Youth; 3. Human Emergence in a Commercial Age: ‘Madame Sousatzka’; Part II: Identity and Nation; 4. ‘An Uncomfortable Truth’: ‘The Day of the Locust’; 5. ‘Honky Tonk Freeway’ and the Risks of Embarrassing the United States; 6. An Eye for an I: Identity and Nation in Films of the Reagan-Thatcher Years (‘Yanks’, ‘An Englishman Abroad’, ‘The Falcon and the Snowman’, ‘A Question of Attribution’); Part III: The Use of the Past; 7. History Hollywood-style: ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’; 8. The Resonance of Art: ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’; Epilogue: Refusal to Mourn: ‘Cold Comfort Farm’; Works Cited; Index.

Sujets

• Arts
• General officer
• General
• History
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 24 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781783089802
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Films of John Schlesinger
The Films of John Schlesinger
Julia Prewitt Brown
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
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Copyright © Julia Prewitt Brown 2019
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-978-9 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-978-4 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
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CONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Coming of Age
1 Leading Up to Midnight Cowboy : A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar and Darling
2 Schlesinger’s Bildungsfilm: Midnight Cowboy and the Problem of Youth
3 Human Emergence in a Commercial Age: Madame Sousatzka
Part II Identity and Nation
4 “An Uncomfortable Truth”: The Day of the Locust
5 Box Office Failure: Honky Tonk Freeway and the Risks of Embarrassing the United States
6 An Eye for an I: Identity and Nation in the Films of the Reagan-Thatcher Years ( Yanks, An Englishman Abroad , The Falcon and the Snowman , A Question of Attribution )
Part III The Uses of the Past
7 History Hollywood-Style: Far from the Madding Crowd
8 The Resonance of Art: Sunday Bloody Sunday
Epilogue: Refusal to Mourn: Cold Comfort Farm
Notes
Works Cited
Index
FIGURES
1 Abbie (Madonna) and Robert (Rupert Everett) in The Next Best Thing
2 Vic (Alan Bates) on a pedestrian bridge in Manchester in A Kind of Loving
3 Billy (Tom Courtenay) lies in bed fantasizing in Billy Liar
4 Billy leads his invisible army in the final scene of Billy Liar
5 Bagpipes in a supermarket communicate the surreality of the city in Billy Liar
6 A mock film is staged at a decadent party game in Darling
7 The Texas drive-in movie theater with which Midnight Cowboy opens
8 Joe Buck (Jon Voight) on the street in New York in Midnight Cowboy
9 Joe and Rico arrive in Miami in Midnight Cowboy
10 Life in Florida as Rico (Dustin Hoffman) imagines it in Midnight Cowboy
11 Extras on the set of Waterloo in The Day of the Locust
12 Tod (William Atherton) sketches his grimace in The Day of the Locust
13 A ghostly bus stop at the end of The Day of the Locust
14 Homer (Donald Sutherland) in The Day of the Locust
15 The drive-in mortuary in Honky Tonk Freeway
16 The American soldiers waving goodbye in Yanks
17 The opening credits of An Englishman Abroad , shot in Glasgow
18 Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in An Englishman Abroad
19 A Mexican police officer in The Falcon and the Snowman
20 Photographers awaiting Blunt in A Question of Attribution
21 Detective Chubb (David Calder) in A Question of Attribution
22 The opening credits of The Falcon and the Snowman
23 Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch) in Sunday Bloody Sunday
24 Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) in Sunday Bloody Sunday
25 Daniel addressing the camera at the end of Sunday Bloody Sunday
26 Daniel and Bob Elkin (Murray Head) in Sunday Bloody Sunday
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Parts of this book have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies , CineAction , Journal of Popular Film and Television , Jump Cut and Literature/Film Quarterly. I am indebted to the editors and advisors of these journals, especially the late Chuck Kleinhans and John Paul Riquelme, for ideas and suggestions. Full citations are given in Works Cited. Excerpts from Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” were reprinted with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
I wish to thank Ian Buruma, John Schlesinger’s nephew, for giving me a perspective on Schlesinger as an artist and a man that has stayed with me over time. I am deeply grateful to him for his conversation and for the insights into Schlesinger’s character and artistic development in Conversations with John Schlesinger .
I had the good fortune to speak with Michael Childers, Schlesinger’s partner of 36 years, who provided information about Schlesinger’s early work and granted me permission to quote from documents at the British Film Institute. William Mann, Schlesinger’s biographer, and Gene Phillips, author of the first full-length study of Schlesinger’s films, provided essential information. In my visits to the British Film Institute, Jonny Davies provided help in reviewing the Schlesinger archives. The editors at Anthem Press, especially Abi Pandey, were a pleasure to work with at every stage.
Boston University supported this book in many ways. Gene Jarrett, chair of the English Department and later associate dean of Faculty, was a friend to the project from its beginnings. Susan Mizruchi, director of the Center for the Humanities, and Karl Kirchwey, associate dean of Faculty, gave help at just the right time. I also wish to thank Mo Lee and Talia Vestri for advice and ideas at critical junctures.
To Bonnie Costello, Carol McGuirk, Dahlia Rudavsky and Barbara Schapiro, I am indebted for their wisdom and support. In contemplating Schlesinger’s film technique, I benefited from the taste and expertise of Nick Durlacher and Rudy Eiland.
My husband, Howard Eiland, first drew my attention to Schlesinger’s films as a possible subject of study and offered suggestions on every chapter. I dedicate this book to him, in loving gratitude for many years of conversation about the art of film.
INTRODUCTION
Isaiah Berlin’s famous division of writers into two categories—foxes, or those who know many things, and hedgehogs, or those who know one important thing—does not apply to film directors. Good directors know many things—about editing, acting, production design, cinematography, writing, music, sound technique, finance and much more—and great or “auteur” directors know all of these things in addition to one important thing. They have a personal vision of life that transcends and yet unifies the material elements of their art, and that develops over the period of their creativity .
I believe that John Schlesinger was one such director. Fox-like, he understood all aspects of filmmaking. Billy Williams, the great British cinematographer who directed the photography for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), described Schlesinger as the “most complete” director he ever worked with ( Sunday Bloody Sunday , DVD Interview). As the many stories of people who worked with Schlesinger attest, his ideas about the screenplay, art direction, music, cinematography and acting were so uncompromising, abundant, well-integrated and specific that, from the beginning of his career, they led often to conflicts with other artists and technicians on and off the set. When Schlesinger had full control over the making of his films, and when all the other things necessary to putting together a film worked in his favor, he was capable of creating brilliant art .
This is because Schlesinger was also a hedgehog. He knew one important thing: the importance of survival, of just getting through the day and of trying to make the best of what one has. This conviction ran deep in his family background, and it informs all of his films. He pursued it as a philosophical problem and proposition in the context of modern, urban life. When Schlesinger tried to engage the past directly, as in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), which is set in rural Victorian England, he was less successful in communicating this theme because it was something he understood in modern, urban terms. “I think that what makes John’s films so wonderful is that he has always been so in tune with life,” said Glenda Jackson (Mann 2005 , 345).
This is not to say that he was always in tune with Hollywood or film critics. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Schlesinger’s films were held in high regard, but by the time of his death in 2003, his reputation had declined. Honky Tonk Freeway , which appeared in 1981, was a major box office disaster. It not only made it difficult for him to get funding later, it also offended critics with its view of American society. Schlesinger also made some weak films from time to time, because he was personally driven to continue working, even when the best opportunities did not come his way. 1 Nonetheless, Schlesinger’s oeuvre—he made a total of seventeen feature films, five films for television and four documentaries—is notable. 2 Today he is best known for Midnight Cowboy , which won the Academy Award for Best Film of 1969 and is ranked by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time. Four films made in England— Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), Far from the Madding Crowd and Sunday Bloody Sunday— are listed among the British Film Institute’s selection of the Top 100 British films. Although his adaptation of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust received mixed reviews when it appeared in 1975, today it is taught in f