David O'ConnellThe Browning Version
December 8th 2010 04:30
Retiring schoolmaster Andrew Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) is a stodgy, stoic figure, earning the secret ridicule of his students for his lack of humour or empathy. “The man’s barely human” is the appraisal of one student; “He’s an absolute swine” offers another. A once-vaunted scholar, Crocker-Harris shows little emotion, preferring to impart his imposing knowledge of the classics in a dry, almost dispiriting way for young boys yearning for embellishment and colour in the classroom.
The Browning Version (1951), a coal-black portrait of one man’s moral distress and battle against the ingrained shortcomings of his own, very damaging, nature, was adapted for the screen by legendary playwright Terence Rattigan from his own masterpiece. How rare for an exemplary play to not only survive translation to cinema but to excel in its usually diluting waters? The Browning Version may be the greatest such example; it’s simply a masterpiece, from first frame to last.
Redgrave’s contribution to the film is Herculean in nature though it takes a few scenes to acclimatise to his seemingly mannered performance with its intrinsically British qualities. On every level Crocker-Harris is a fascinating character, with an unmovable, repressed core around which his marriage to a younger woman, Millie (Jean Kent), crumbles without comment, leading her to stray with popular schoolmaster Frank Hunter (Nigel Patrick).
Whilst Kent gives her all as the fiery but forlorn wife who holds an acidic grudge against her undemonstrative husband, it’s Patrick as the counter-balancing Hunter who reflects the greyer middle ground - on one hand sympathetic to Crocker-Harris’ betrayed status whilst simultaneously fleecing his marriage of its physical dimensions.
Taplow (Brian Smith) with Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave)
The bleakness of Rattigan’s observations is all the more pointed when finally offset by a gesture of genuine kindness towards Crocker-Harris from a young student, Taplow (Brian Smith), who otherwise willfully joins in when the teacher is ridiculed by his fellow students. It’s clear though that on some level the boy has reservations about such personal attacks and harbours a grudging respect for the embattled master. It’s Taplow’s tiny gesture - the offering of Robert Browning’s translation of Crocker-Harris’ beloved Agamemnon - on which the film turns. The devastating response it draws from the schoolmaster is like the axis on which the drama and our sympathies pivot. It’s an unforgettable moment; but then so is virtually every meticulously placed and enacted scene in the film.
As grim as things are in a professional, financial and medical sense for the old man, there’s little solace to be gleaned on the home front where he and Millie pass through rooms like strangers, reproach in his eyes, only venom leaking from hers. A gossiping old woman observes, “It does little to speculate on the mysteries of matrimony”, but a clearer picture emerges in time: the marriage has been a virtually loveless one from the start with Millie’s motivation tending towards the favourable monetary equations she might nimbly manipulate. The refusal by the Education Board’s Governor to grant Crocker-Harris a pension upon his forced retirement enrages her, causing a series of ugly marital wounds to resurface.
You’d have to be self-consciously finicky to find fault with The Browning Version. This virtually flawless film has been directed with astonishing precision by Anthony Asquith, turning a one-act play into a seamless, affecting drama that cuts to the bone with every perfectly composed line and minute observation.
Hunter (Nigel Patrick) with the disconsolate Millie (Jean Kent)
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Comment by Anonymous
Oswald Spengler was right, the west is in decline and movies like this will be an epitaph on the grave of civilization pointing to a time when good men were razed by adulterers, harlequins and cuckholds.
Excuse me while I go pound some sand.....
Comment by David O'Connell
20/20 Filmsight
Screen Fanatic
Comment by Anonymous
Dissatisfied housewife, incompatability, co-dependency, sikly weak husband..boy as a character study Asquith nails it.