A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962)

June Ritchie and Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving

Cast: Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Thora Hird, Bert Palmer, Pat Keen, James Bolam, Jack Smethurst, Gwen Nelson, John Ronane, David Mahlowe, Patsy Rowlands. Screenplay: Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse, based on a novel by Stan Barstow. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Ron Grainer.

What we call "the Fifties" -- including the sexual naïveté and conformity to societal norms -- lasted well into the 1960s, as John Schlesinger's first feature film, A Kind of Loving, demonstrates. It also features Alan Bates in his first starring role as Vic Brown, a young man who lets his hormones and adherence to the values of his working-class family and dreary factory town trap him into a marriage to Ingrid Rothwell, a young woman he quickly falls out of love with. Bates is still a bit green as a film actor -- he hasn't yet developed the sexy bravura that would make him a star in films like Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966), Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969), Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971), or Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1968) -- but he gives a convincing performance. June Ritchie, who plays the tempting but essentially innocent Ingrid in what was also her debut film, never made it as a big star in an era dominated by the likes of Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Glenda Jackson. The film's villain is Thora Hird as Ingrid's sour, shrewish, widowed mother, who dooms whatever chances the marriage had. The film is a bit slow to start -- it spends too much time on establishing Vic's family and work milieu before settling down to the business of the ill-fated relationship of Vic and Ingrid -- and it's less successful in its portrayal of the postwar British working class than such films as Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964)

Anthony Quinn and Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek

Alexis Zorba: Anthony Quinn
Basil: Alan Bates
The Widow: Irene Papas
Madame Hortense: Lila Kedrova
Mavrandoni: Giorgos Foundas
Mimithos: Sotiris Moustakas
Soul: Anna Kyriakou
Lola: Eleni Anousaki
Pavlo: Yorgo Voyagis
Manolakis: Takis Emmanuel

Director: Michael Cacoyannis
Screenplay: Michael Cacoyannis
Based on a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis
Cinematography: Walter Lassally
Art direction: Vassilis Photopoulos
Film editing: Michael Cacoyannis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis

For a film that supposedly celebrates the life force embodied in its title character, Zorba the Greek sure is full of cruelty and death and destruction. I don't think I know a scene more horrifying than the ransacking of Madame Hortense's hotel after her death, when the black-clad, toothless harpies of the village swarm through in a riot of looting that ends with the dead woman on her bed in the stripped room. And yet at the end, after their mining efforts have collapsed spectacularly, after Basil has unwittingly caused the death of the widow and the suicide of his rival for her affections, Basil and Zorba dance. I suppose this is supposed to signify that life goes on. It was, nevertheless, a critical and commercial success, even though to my mind it's a disjointed film with radical switchbacks in tone. What it has going for it is a couple of colorful performances by Anthony Quinn and the Oscar-winning Lila Kedrova. Alan Bates, usually a fine actor, seems a little off in his performance, as if he hadn't quite got a hold on the character beyond the obvious odd-coupling of his mildly stuffy Brit with the flamboyant Zorba. It might be fun to see this film back-to-back with An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky, 1978), in which it's Bates who plays the life-force character, the shaggy artist Saul Kaplan, who brings Jill Clayburgh's Erica out of her post-divorce funk.

The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960)

Sleazy old Archie Rice was one of Laurence Olivier's theatrical triumphs, proof that a renowned classical actor, known for his Hamlet and Oedipus and Coriolanus, could take on the "kitchen-sink realism" of an Angry Young Man, John Osborne, and add glory to his already celebrated name. But the film version is an example of the difficulties that have to be overcome when a play is translated into a movie. For even though Tony Richardson, who directed the 1957 Royal Court Theatre version, also directed the film, and the play's author did the screenplay as well (in collaboration with Nigel Kneale), the movie lacks energy and direction. The play alternates between what's going on in Archie Rice's house and his performances on stage, while the film "opens up" to show the English seaside resort town where Archie's music-hall is located, and some of the events that are merely narrated in the play, such as Archie's affair with a young woman whose family he tries to persuade to back him in a new show, are dramatized in the movie. Olivier's creation of the "dead behind the eyes" Archie is superb, and his music-hall turns in the film manage to suggest that even though he was a hack as a performer Archie could have held an audience's attention, though it's clear that seeing Olivier on an actual stage would have had a stronger impact from sheer immediacy. The cast is uniformly fine: Brenda de Banzie as Archie's second wife, Roger Livesey as his father (Livesey was in fact only a year older than Olivier), Joan Plowright as his daughter, and making their film debuts, Alan Bates and Albert Finney as his sons. But in the end it's a collection of impressive performances in service of a not very involving story of a self-destructive man and his dysfunctional family.

Far From the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967)

People always complain about the way movies change the stories of their favorite novels, but screenwriter Frederic Raphael's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel shows why such changes are necessary. Raphael remains faithful to the plot, with the result that characters become far more enigmatic than Hardy intended them to be. We need more of the backstories of Bathsheba Everdeen (Julie Christie), Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), William Boldwood (Peter Finch), and Frank Troy (Terence Stamp) than the highly capable actors who play them can give us, even in a movie that runs for three hours -- including an overture, an intermission, and an "entr'acte." These trimmings are signs that the producers wanted a prestige blockbuster like Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), which had also starred Christie. But Hardy's works, with their characters dogged by fate and chance, don't much lend themselves to epic treatment. John Schlesinger, a director very much at home in the cynical milieus of London in Darling (1965) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and New York in Midnight Cowboy (1969), doesn't show much feeling for Hardy's rural, isolated Wessex, where the weight of tradition and the indifference of nature play substantial roles. What atmosphere the film has comes from cinematographer Nicolas Roeg's images of the Dorset and Wiltshire countryside and from Richard Rodney Bennett's score, which received the film's only Oscar nomination.