1983 - AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD, a sidebar in British history

You have to know something about Great Britain in the 1930's, Cambridge and the Soviet Union's espionage efforts in Britain to appreciate this fascinating little film.  It seems during the 1930's the Soviets were able to recruit a group of disaffected upper class Cambridge students into spying on their own country.  As the years went by these students managed to make their way into the British intelligence service and in one case Buckingham palace.  None of them were exposed until the CIA broke a code naming them as Soviet agents.  Instead of being arrested by the authorities three of them managed to defect to Moscow.   It was a major scandal for British Intelligence who had managed to keep the exact circumstances of their spying secret from the public for years.

Jumping ahead a few years later. A touring company of actors went to Moscow to perform Hamlet as part of a cultural exchange program.  While there one of the defectors Guy Burgess approached Coral Browne one of the performers in Hamlet.  Burgess was looking for a favor.  It seemed he wanted Browne to get in contact with his old tailor in London and have the tailor make and send him a new and proper English three piece suit.  From this story, the director John Schlesinger and the writer Alan Bennett have dramatized Browne's encounter with the now ex-spy and ex-Englishman, Burgess.

 

The cast is a relatively small one with Alan Bates as the traitor Guy Burgess and Coral Browne playing herself.  Although supposedly a committed socialist and communist, Burgess is still a very proper Englishman.  The film is a clever and amusing look at a man now exiled from the country he grew up and lived in and the reality of his drab life in Moscow.  

 

This is one of the director John Schlesinger's better latter day efforts in his career after a series of less than interesting films.  When Schlesinger was on his game nobody was better at getting good performances out of his cast and filming interesting stories.  An Englishman Abroad turned out to be an excellent film about the English character and mentality.  Definitely worth a look.

The running time is 60 minutes. 

1979 - YANKS, disappointing World War II love story

The love story is one of the hardest genres to make a good film out of.  YANKS would appear to have everything going for it.  The film had the then hot actor Richard Gere, Vanessa Redgrave was as usual no slouch in the acting department and John Schlesinger an Englishman of taste would seem the perfect person to direct a story about 1940's England during the war years. 

The film chronicles the romances between three American soldiers during World War II.  Richard Gere is the army cook who falls in love with a local girl who already has a fiance fighting the Germans.  Toothy William Devane get involved with upper class Englishwoman Vanessa Redgrave and Chick Vennera ends up marrying a local British woman. So much for a complicated story line.

An expensive production filmed on location in England.  It has good photography, a large scale cast and impressive production design. If all those things could make a great love story YANKS probably would have been a hit.  As it is the film moves along at a rather slow pace and good if understated acting and direction can't seem to generate any heat to make it a romantic classic,  everything is completely underplayed.

 

The major set piece in the film is a race riot at a dance hall between white and black American soldiers.  While this scene is interesting it  throws the entire picture out of wack.  It's becomes two different films at this point.  In order to teach the white American soldiers a lesson the British women end up dancing with the black soldiers.  However this really doesn't ring true, say what you want but the British are hardly what I would call that open minded when it comes to race relations.

 

YANKS  flopped badly,  John Schlesinger got one more shot at the big time with a dumb comedy called Honky Tonk Freeway which featured a water skiing elephant, another disaster.  That was it for him the A list projects dried up.

The film was written by Colin Welland and Walter Bernstein, the running time is an overlong 141 minutes.