Very Naughty Boys [EBK] Page 16

  As with all HandMade films, the final cut of The Missionary resided not with the director but with the company itself, a policy that was rigorously enforced by O’Brien. Not that it was actually much of a concern here. ‘I’ve never had final cut and indeed wouldn’t want it,’ Loncraine states. ‘My feeling about final cuts is it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, the reason being if a studio spends $50 million on your movie and you have final cut and they don’t like your cut, what are they going to do, spend another $30 million on promoting a film that they don’t think’s going to work or bury your movie? Many a director has found out that the way you maintain final cut is maintaining your position as the dominant force on the job. But having it contractually isn’t worth it because they just dump you and they bury your film.’

  The Missionary opened in London in March 1983 to largely positive notices. For the first time, critics drew parallels between HandMade’s new brand of English film comedy and those golden greats from the Ealing studio. ‘Not since the Ealing comedies have the quirks of English character and absurdities of English eccentricity received such an affectionate and entertaining ribbing,’ gushed the Sunday Express. This sentiment was echoed by the Sunday Times: ‘The film quickens towards a rowdy end that smacks of Ealing at the top of their ludicrous form. Jolly funny.’ And the Sunday Telegraph purred, ‘A gloriously eccentric comedy of Edwardian manners. Both a satire and a morality. It is that rare thing in the contemporary cinema, a picture you could wish to last longer.’

  Unlike Scrubbers, The Missionary attracted good press attention and benefited from a more concerted ad campaign, undoubtedly due to Palin’s popularity. Indeed, Brian Shingles recalls that Ray Cooper received a phone call from David Puttnam lamenting the fact that HandMade’s film had got a higher profile than his own current release Local Hero. Puttnam’s film, though, went on to take more money and is regarded now as a mini British gem, while The Missionary, alas, is rather forgotten. Loncraine says, ‘When I say to people I made The Missionary, they go, “Oh, I love that film with the waterfall in South America.” A lot of that happens and I have to go, “No, unfortunately that wasn’t my movie.”’

  Opening in America in November 1982, The Missionary was greeted just as warmly by critics. The Hollywood Reporter declared it ‘a sumptuous and dry-witted comedy reminiscent in tone and execution to many of those priceless old Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers rib-ticklers of yore’. Of course, the film did no business whatsoever Stateside. Loncraine believes that O’Brien made the mistake of opening it on far too many screens instead of letting it out slowly in order to build and find an audience. It also pissed him off that the publicity surrounding the release inevitably revolved around the Python connection. ‘There was this chap called Marvin whom I used to call “the black hole” because every creative thought disappeared into his dark suits when you gave it to him. He was head of marketing at Columbia, who were distributing The Missionary, and I was over in America at the launch of the picture. It was a Monday morning meeting and we were all sitting around in this think tank with these young executives and Marvin is walking up and down and he’s got the poster and he’s saying, “We’ve got the one-sheet for the Monty Python The Missionary. This is a Monty Python presents The Missionary starring Michael Palin of Monty Python.” And I said, “Sorry, Marvin to interrupt you... this is Richard Loncraine, director. Marvin, this isn’t actually a Monty Python film and if we bill it as a Monty Python film I think people, with respect to Michael, may be disappointed that they don’t see the other Pythons and they won’t recommend it to their friends. But what do I know... I’m only the director.” And he looked at me, put his arm on my shoulder and said, “No, no. Directing is a real contribution.” And he wasn’t taking the piss, he was genuine. So that was one of the problems in America, it was billed as a Python film and it simply wasn’t.’

  The American backers also tried to sell the film as a sex comedy, as opposed to Palin’s view of it as more of an elegant look at Edwardian morals and manners. But he wasn’t stupid and realised that it had to be packaged a certain way for mass consumption. He visualised this mythical but representational couple in the mid-West planning their evening’s entertainment. ‘Well, we can either go to a rodeo or go see “an elegant look at Edwardian morals and manners”.’ As Palin joked, ‘It just wasn’t on.’

  The Missionary is a minor joy, not as funny as perhaps it ought to be but as pictorially stunning as any film of its era. This was intentional. According to Palin, why shouldn’t a comedy be made with just as much care and attention to detail as the most elegantly realised drama of, say, the Merchant/Ivory school? The Voice in America described the cinematography in The Missionary as ‘virtually indistinguishable from Tess’, but also made the point that ‘comedies can’t be too exquisitely mounted; beauty mitigates the joke’.

  Looking back on the film today, both Palin and Loncraine are brutally honest about its shortcomings. Palin says, ‘I think a lot of it was very funny in the first 40 minutes, I’m very happy with it. But I certainly could’ve done better with the story, tightened it up a little bit. But that’s what you learn from everything that you do... you can never get everything absolutely right.’

  Loncraine admits, ‘I think the problem with the movie commercially, seeing it from a distance now, is that we fucked up the ending, basically. I think the end in Scotland just didn’t work. I’m still proud of the film, there’s some wonderful stuff in it, but I think we weren’t sure what we were making, a comedy or a drama. I think we were trying to do too much. The film doesn’t know quite what it wants to be; if it wants to be a comedy then it’s not funny enough after a certain point, it changes its tonality, and I think the audience felt let down by that. It should have been more of an outrageous, out-and-out comedy. But it’s the happiest film I’ve ever made. Working with Mike was a joy from beginning to end. He’s a tough old cookie, but he’s very funny, charming, witty and a fine actor. I remember during the filming we’d say cut and no one would go home, we’d stay around. People would sit around the set drinking and chatting. It was a very sociable movie.’

  6

  STIFF UPPER LIPS ON PARADE

  After the distinct Englishness of The Missionary, HandMade’s next project had almost as much of a colonial feel to it. Privates on Parade began life as a play first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977 to critical and commercial success. Written by Peter Nichols, it was based very much on the playwright’s real-life experiences in an entertainment unit during his National Service in South-East Asia after the war, where he served alongside comedians-to-be Stanley Baxter and Kenneth Williams and future film director John Schlesinger.

  In fact, it was Kenneth Williams whom Nichols saw as perfect casting for the leading role of Terri Dennis, the impossibly camp old queen in charge of a concert party entertaining British troops. Nichols was much put out when Denis Quilley got the role, exclaiming that the Shakespearean actor was ‘much too straight’. It was the play’s director Michael Blakemore who persuaded Nichols that Terri Dennis was a part not for a comedian but for a proper actor capable of going screamingly over the top but also with the subtlety to shade in the vulnerability, too, of portraying the agony behind the camp ecstasy. Denis Quilley recalls, ‘Somebody wrote to me and said, “One so often sees these camp characters portrayed as cartoon characters or something to be laughed at. Thank God you played him as a human being that we could laugh with.” And I thought, yes, that’s true and that’s because I’m an actor and not a comedian. A comedian would have got more laughs out of it probably, but it might not have been so believable. And there are moments of charm and pathos in it, too, which are very important. Danny La Rue was dying to do it. When it was announced that we were doing the play, I was standing in Soho and this fur-coated figure sidled up to me and said, “I say, you’re muscling in on my territory.” And I said, “Danny, it’s not your territory at all.” And it’s not, but he was convinced that it was a great vehicle fo
r him.’

  Quilley did, though, have severe doubts about the part. ‘Michael Blakemore wanted me to do it. He knew me well and had great faith in me. It wasn’t that I was worried about playing a camp part, it was just that I didn’t know whether I had the skills for it. I met Peter Nichols and the producer for lunch and I said, “I reckon I’m all right as an actor but impersonation is not my bag. I don’t know whether I can do Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich, all these people.”’

  The highlight of both the play and the film are the wonderfully performed comedy routines and songs, a superb mixture of pastiche and tat, that makes the production come over like The Virgin Soldiers meets Cabaret. Quilley continues, ‘They plied me with drink and persuaded me that Terri Dennis was slightly over the hill and he’d probably never been a terribly good female impersonator in the first place. I mean, for Carmen Miranda all you have to do is put a bowl of fruit on your head and a pink dress with frills, come on and they say, “Oh, that’s Carmen Miranda.” So they persuaded me... it wasn’t that I was thinking of turning it down, not really, because it was such an ace part that I couldn’t resist it.’

  When Denis O’Brien saw the play he recognised its potential immediately and bought the film rights. At first, he intended casting all the Pythons in the various roles, an idea rejected outright by the group. Palin says, ‘Denis was always very keen to gather all of us together to help each other out and be in each other’s films. I’ve always resisted that only because I think to get all the Pythons back together without calling it a Python film would be a cheat and very often it would be something like Yellowbeard turned out to be, sadly. I felt Python had naturally run most of its course and what was better now was that people went off and did separate things and then came together to make films, or stuff like the Hollywood Bowl, rather than be all continually interlocked in each other’s material.’

  Unperturbed, O’Brien instead saw Privates on Parade as an ideal solo vehicle for John Cleese, whose current photograph in Spotlight (the actor’s directory) had him dressed as Queen Elizabeth. Cleese saw the play and thought he might have a shot at the part performed by Nigel Hawthorne, that of Major Giles Flack, a jingoistic and bible-punching officer and supreme upper-class twit combating Commie uprisings and gun-running from his own officers. It would represent the first time he’d ever played a proper leading character in a film, as opposed to the multitude of characters he usually adopted in Python productions. He was then 42.

  ‘I had absolutely adored Privates on Parade on stage with Nigel Hawthorne, who was absolutely wonderful and much better than I was in the film because, in a sense, the part came quite easily to me whereas I think Nigel had to work much harder at it and consequently came up with something better. My weakness as an actor is sometimes simply to try and see what the writer’s done and to try and interpret that instead of perhaps bringing a bit more to it, and I think I might’ve brought a bit more to Flack. But it was an easy part for me to play.’

  O’Brien next took the major gamble of hiring the play’s original director Michael Blakemore to helm the film, despite him only having one professional assignment to his credit, a short documentary about surfing in Australia. This marked the beginning of HandMade’s fruitful policy of giving new directors and writers their first major break in movies. Although, in this instance, it must be said that Cleese played a pivotal role in the choice of Blakemore. The two men had known each other for years ever since collaborating on a comedy home movie spoofing BBC canteen food. Blakemore was also familiar with Simon Relph, the producer O’Brien had brought in to oversee the production, having worked with him at the National Theatre. Since then, Relph had worked as line producer on films such as Reds and Yanks and arrived full of enthusiasm for the HandMade organisation and the way they conducted business. ‘It was a very unique thing that HandMade were actually out there looking to fully finance movies. It’s what we all dream of, a single source of financing and get left alone to make the movies the way you want to make them.’

  Blakemore’s overriding concern was whether or not the play he’d directed so well on stage could be turned into a film. ‘I did have some misgivings because I think that plays are much more difficult to adapt to film than are novels. Peter Nichols adapted it himself. It was rather difficult because he was wedded very much to the play and it was quite difficult to try and get him to really commit to a film script simply because any playwright who’s seen his work on stage will not forego dialogue. They remember how well it worked, what a big laugh it got or whatever, and I’m very sympathetic; why should they throw something out that’s been proven to work? But you have to in film, you’ve got to be quite ruthless. We worked very closely on the script before we started to shoot, but we didn’t have enough time, we were working up against deadlines. It really needed another couple of months of really considering this material very closely and being very tough. But one of the problems was that John Cleese, because he was very much in demand, he had this window in which we had to do the film, there was no other time it could be done. So I think we went into it without really quite enough time to turn the play into a film on the page.’

  It is a point of view shared by Peter Nichols. ‘It was a rush job to fit John Cleese’s availability and no one’s fault that we didn’t ever quite agree about how it should be done.’

  The biggest stumbling block was how to make a play that was almost music hall in origin work as solid film drama. Quilley remembers, ‘Peter Nichols rewrote it, really, in order to give it a more natural and normal narrative structure because in the theatre it was deliberately done like a series of almost sketches. He had to knit it together into a more conventional narrative whole, putting in a lot of exterior scenes, opening it out, which he did with great skill.’

  Ironically, it was Quilley’s own character that was the main casualty of the rewrite. In the play, Terri Dennis often spoke directly to the audience and Quilley desperately wanted to preserve that aspect of his performance. ‘I pleaded on bended knee to Peter Nichols to keep it in and he said, “No, direct address doesn’t work in the cinema.” And I said, “Well, you know Michael Caine did it in Alfie.” But he wouldn’t do it and I bitterly regret losing my asides to the audience because they are some of the best lines in the piece. But you can’t have everything.’ Still, Quilley delivers some blisteringly funny dialogue, like his casual comment to a wild-looking native, ‘Love the blow-pipe. Very you. Who does your hair?’

  To further ‘acclimatise’ the play for the screen, Blakemore insisted the actors rehearse prior to shooting. ‘Michael was aware, as we all were,’ says Quilley, ‘of the need to bring down our stage performances to a different kind of reality, which we achieved by rehearsing beforehand, which you don’t often get for a film. We rehearsed for about ten days in a rehearsal room, I think at the Old Vic. Michael had it all worked out and that’s when we got familiar with the new script, but most importantly brought our performances down to a film level without losing the energy that it had on stage, which is quite hard to do.

  ‘For my own performance, what I tried to do was to keep the same amount of flamboyance but just project it less. And I relied a lot on Michael there, who has a very good instinct for the essential truth of a scene... even at its most outrageous and camp it’s essential to keep the emotional truth of a scene. And Michael’s very good at that, it’s one of his greatest strengths. Michael can say, “Oh, Denis, I didn’t quite believe it when you...” He has this unobtrusive way of saying, “I think you’ve got it all wrong.” And he did that with everybody on the film and in the play, always going for the reality. Also, when you run through a scene, Michael will say, “Yes, very good, very good, not a lot to say about that, really. Very good. Well... one or two things,” and then you get about half-an-hour of detailed notes, all from memory, no little note books, and all pertinent and to the point.’

  The final hurdle was finance. The budget was tight, just under £2 million. Simon Relph remembers, ‘One of the big
decisions we had to make was whether we were actually going to go and shoot on location in Malaysia. Peter Nichols and I went out there, we did a recce, but we all felt that wasn’t a good use of money, to spend it all on locations, because we thought that actually is in the end not the point... the point is it’s about this little community of people. So we went round Malaysia, looked at places and thought about how we could copy that back in England. But it was fun, going back with Peter, staying at places like the Raffles Hotel.’

  In the end, the whole South-East Asian theatre of war was replicated at the Duke of Edinburgh barracks in Fleet. Blakemore’s impression was ‘it was absolutely perfect because it was built in the 1930s, very much the way a British army base would be built in Asia with little wooden huts with little verandas, it was extraordinarily apt. And it had a big parade ground. It served us very well. There were Gurkhas on the camp but it was rather curious because, as we were making this film, which really mocks a lot of army thinking and army routines, it was during the Falklands War and these Gurkhas who were playing small parts for us in the film were preparing to go off to fight that war. So during the filming there were operations of huge troop helicopters flying in and people scrambling aboard up long ladders to go off and fight, which made our endeavours seem even more flippant.’