eleanor Bron – The Magnificent 60s

Two for the Road (1967) ***

This film had everything. The cast was pure A-list: Oscar winner Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) and Oscar nominee Albert Finney (Tom Jones, 1963). The direction was in the capable hands of Stanley Donen (Arabesque, 1966), working with Hepburn again after the huge success of thriller Charade (1963). The witty sophisticated script about the marriage between ambitious architect Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) and teacher wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) unravelling over a period of a dozen years had been written by Frederic Raphael, who had won the Oscar for his previous picture, Darling (1965). Composer Henry Mancini was not only responsible for Breakfast at Tiffany’s – for which he collected a brace of Oscars – but also Charade and Arabesque. And the setting was France at its most fabulous.

So what went wrong? You could start with the flashbacks. The movie zips in and out of about half a dozen different time periods and it’s hard to keep up. We go from the meet-cute to a road trip on their own and another with some irritating American friends to Finney being unfaithful on his own and then Hepburn caught out in a clandestine relationship and finally the couple making a stab at resolving their relationship. I may have got mixed up with what happened when, it was that kind of picture.

A linear narrative might have helped, but not much, because their relationship jars from the start. Mark is such a boor you wonder what the attraction is. His idea of turning on the charm is a Humphrey Bogart imitation. There are some decent lines and some awful ones, but the dialog too often comes across as epigrammatic instead of the words just flowing. It might have worked as a drama delineating the breakdown of a marriage and it might have worked as a comedy treating marriage as an absurdity but the comedy-drama mix fails to gel.

It’s certainly odd to see a sophisticated writer relying for laughs on runaway cars that catch fire and burn out a building or the annoying whiny daughter of American couple Howard (William Daniels) and Cathy (Eleanor Bron) and a running joke about Mark always losing his passport.

And that’s shame because it starts out on the right foot. The meet-cute is well-done and for a while it looks as though Joanna’s friend Jackie (Jacqueline Bisset) will hook Mark until chicken pox intervenes. But the non-linear flashbacks ensure that beyond Mark overworking we are never sure what causes the marriage breakdown. The result is almost a highlights or lowlights reel. And the section involving Howard and Cathy is overlong. I kept on waiting for the film to settle down but it never did, just whizzed backwards or forwards as if another glimpse of their life would do the trick, and somehow make the whole coalesce. And compared to the full-throttle marital collapse of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) this was lightweight stuff, skirting round too many fundamental issues.

It’s worth remembering that in movie terms Finney was inexperienced, just three starring roles and two cameos to his name, so the emotional burden falls to Hepburn. Finney is dour throughout while Hepburn captures far more of the changes their life involves. Where he seems at times only too happy to be shot of his wife, she feels more deeply the loss of what they once had as the lightness she displays early on gives way to brooding.

Hepburn as fashion icon gets in the way of the picture and while some of the outfits she wears, not to mention the sunglasses, would not have been carried off by anyone else they are almost a sideshow and add little to the thrust of the film.

If you pay attention you can catch a glimpse, not just of Jacqueline Bissett (The Sweet Ride, 1968) but Romanian star Nadia Gray (The Naked Runner, 1967), Judy Cornwell (The Wild Racers, 1968) in her debut and Olga Georges-Picot (Farewell, Friend, 1968). In more substantial parts are William Daniels (The Graduate, 1968), English comedienne Eleanor Bron (Help!, 1965) woefully miscast as an American, and Claude Dauphin (Grand Prix, 1966).

Hepburn’s million-dollar fee helped put the picture’s budget over $5 million, but it only brought in $3 million in U.S. rentals, although the Hepburn name may have nudged it towards the break-even point worldwide.

An oddity that doesn’t add up.

Thank You All Very Much / A Touch of Love (1969) ***

The combination of Amicus and pregnancy might lead audiences to expect a monster baby of It’s Alive (1974) dimensions. Nor would you associate the studio, which made its name in horror pictures where women were either victims or sex objects, with feminism. But producer Milton Subotsky plays it straight, the only concession to the Margaret Drabble source novel is to change the title, from the obvious The Millstone to the more ironic Thank You All Very Much (in the U.S.) and A Touch of Love (in the U.K.).

It doesn’t go down the single mum kitchen sink route either, abandoned female struggling in poverty and desperate for a man. In fact, except in one instance, dependable men are in short supply. Though, it has to be said, female support isn’t much better.

*Now there’s counter-programming. A “woman’s picture” supported*
*by low-budget actioner aimed at men.*

Pregnant after a one-night stand with television personality George (Ian McKellen), post graduate student Rosamund (Sandy Dennis), after toying with home-made efforts at abortion, decides to have her baby. Luckily, she can afford it, living in a splendid apartment in what looks like South Kensington rather than a bedsit in a more squalid area of London. Her parents are more remote, tending towards the upper rather than the middle classes, the type who park their offspring in boarding school to minimize a child’s impact on their busy social lives.

Sandy Dennis (Up the Down Staircase, 1967) has quite a trick in her screen persona. She is generally initially presented as weak, whiny, vulnerable, trademark quavering voice helping this along, a potential victim until her inner steel exerts itself and you realize she is not the person you think she is. Almost an actorly version of the Christopher Nolan trope of letting you believe a character is one type of person until he/she turns out to be another.

There isn’t too much of the mother being tormented out of her skull by a baby screaming its head off – or as in Nolan’s latest opus Oppenheimer, a mother unable to cope handing the child over to someone else to look after – but she is very much alone, unable to reveal to the father his part in the pregnancy, despite having another one-night stand with him. So mostly it’s her coping with the system, suffering in silence in the traditional British manner endless bureaucracy, sitting in a long queue in a waiting room, and being beset by the very people you might expect to be more sympathetic.

*Supporting feature given more prominence here.*

But the nurses seem very much cut from the same pragmatic cloth as her parents. Prior to birth, one nurse informs her that it’s selfish not to give the child up for adoption. When the baby is convalescing in hospital after a heart operation, matron (Rachel Kempson), a graduate from the Nurse Ratchet school of health care, consistently refuses to let the mother see the baby as it’s apparently against hospital rules until in the best scene in the movie, and the one that achieves the Dennis trick, she literally screams the place down.

That nurses on a maternity ward full of little more than I would imagine at times screaming children are so disturbed by the prospect of an adult rebelling against the stiff upper lip conventions of British society says a great deal about the kind of uniformity and subservience expected of the public by those in charge of any large organization. None of the Angry Young Men of earlier in the decade would dream of such a simple solution to a problem.

Eventually, being allowed to sit by her child’s bedside until late into the night permits Rosamund to complete her thesis and win her PhD. She’s not quite as hard-nosed about George as she likes to imagine but since he’s not sufficiently taken with her child to allow it to disrupt a projected trip abroad, she realizes what had been plainly obvious to the audience that she is better off without men – or at least this particular, ineffective, individual – for the time being.

So most of the film is about Rosamund learning to enjoy her independence, able to achieve her goals without male assistance, and that’s generally done by action rather than dialogue or monologue, some heated debate or major crisis. Excepting the incident with Nurse Ratchet, it’s just about coping, and awareness that maternity need not cramp ambition.

Her arty friends (and parents for that matter) are all too keen on having a good time – the males mostly trying to bed her – to lend much support. Some like Lydia (Eleanor Bron) have a warped view of life.

In his movie debut Waris Hussein (The Possession of Joel Delaney, 1972) takes the striking narrative route of not allowing the picture to become tangled up with romantic complication, keeping it squarely focused on feminism, succeeding on your own terms, not reliant on men, embracing both motherhood and career. Margaret Drabble wrote the screenplay.

Sandy Dennis (Up the Down Staircase, 1967) delivers another telling performance, one of the few actresses permitted to be center stage in a non-romantic narrative, because this is the kind of role she can easily pull off. She manages a convincing British accent without falling prey to too much Britishness.

Minus the tell-tale diction that marked his later career, Ian McKellen (Alfred the Great, 1969) has an effective debut as the charming though selfish lover. Eleanor Bron (Two for the Road, 1967) is the pick of the supporting cast as the soft-hearted best friend who is too pragmatic by half. Others popping up include John Standing (Walk, Don’t Run, 1966), Margaret Tyzack (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), Maurice Denham (Midas Run, 1969) with Rachel Kempson (The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968).

Unfussy direction matched with another brilliant turn by Sandy Dennis makes this a must-watch.

Two for the Road (1967) ***

A linear narrative might have helped, but not much, because their relationship jars from the start. Mark is such a boor you wonder what the attraction is. His idea of turning on the charm is a Humphrey Bogart imitation. There are some decent lines and some awful ones, but the dialogue too often comes across as epigrammatic instead of the words just flowing. It might have worked as a drama delineating the breakdown of a marriage and it might have worked as a comedy treating marriage as an absurdity but the comedy-drama mix fails to gel.

And that’s shame because it starts out on the right foot. The meet-cute is well-done and for a while it looks as though Joanna’s friend Jackie (Jacqueline Bisset) will hook Mark until chicken pox intervenes. But the non-linear flashbacks ensure that beyond Mark overworking we are never sure what caused the marriage breakdown. The result is almost a highlights or lowlights reel. And the section involving Howard and Cathy is overlong. I kept on waiting for the film to settle down but it never did, just whizzed backwards or forwards as if another glimpse of their life would do the trick, and somehow make the whole coalesce. And compared to the full-throttle marital collapse of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) this was lightweight stuff, skirting round too many fundamental issues.

If you pay attention you can catch a glimpse, not just of Jacqueline Bissett (Bullitt, 1969) but Romanian star Nadia Gray (The Naked Runner, 1967), Judy Cornwell (The Wild Racers, 1968) in her debut and Olga Georges-Picot (Farewell, Friend, 1968). In more substantial parts are William Daniels (The Graduate, 1968), English comedienne Eleanor Bron (Help!, 1965) woefully miscast as an American, and Claude Dauphin (Grand Prix, 1966).