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- Stevie Smith, Palmers Green, London (1966)
Photograph by Jonathan Williams
- THE POET REVISITS THE MOVIES
STEVIE
Starring: Glenda Jackson as Stevie Smith; Mona Washbourne as the Lion Aunt of Hull; Trevor Howard as the Man; Alec McCowen as Freddy. Story by Hugh Whitemore. Directed & Produced by Robert Enders. Running Time: 102 minutes. Release Date: 1978. Embassy Home Entertainment: VHS 3017.
There are few movies about poets and writers because, I suppose, all the poor things ever do is sit at desks in quiet rooms and write words on paper. There are also few, if any, movies about photographers moving about in the darkroom or on location at Point Lobos. Ken “Loony Tunes” Russell makes one farrago after another about artistic wackos and weirds and romantics, but nothing touches his portrait of Delius, showing the blind and paralyzed composer (”an indiscretion of Eros,” whispers Sir Thomas Beecham) at home with his wife in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, working with his amanuensis, Eric Fenby, and entertaining admirers like Percy Grainger. A lovely and moving work, about a sour misanthrope who wrote some of the loveliest music in the world.
Stevie Smith (1902-1971) was as touching a figure as Frederick Delius. A poet like no other, an inspired sparrow, a Blakean child, at home in the doughty northern suburbs of London, 1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green, buried away at the end of the Piccadilly underground line. She lived in a “house of female habitation,” where she lived her whole life, with her Lion Aunt from Yorkshire. Aunt brought Stevie up; Stevie took care of Aunt who thought Stevie’s literary work was “stuff and nonsense,” but loved her dearly until her death as a very old lady. Doesn’t sound too promising for a film. But, you’d be wrong if you thought that. Glenda Jackson (who never knew Stevie Smith, but once heard her read in public) is extraordinary. Mona Washbourne, as Aunt, is, if anything, more extraordinary. I used to visit Avondale Road back in the 1960s and the atmosphere of the film is uncanny and true to their life. Little details about whether there will be two glasses of sherry before supper and mint sauce or currant jelly with the lamb are unerringly droll and very poignant. I suppose I have watched Stevie fifteen times by now. I always show it to discerning friends who don’t know it. They are invariably moved. When Aunt dies in the upstairs bedroom, Stevie turns to the audience and says: “People think because I never married, I know nothing of the emotions. When I am dead you must put them right. I loved my aunt.” If you like jungle movies with three pythons, as well as domestic movies during which you cry twice, this is a moment for you.
The only other film I know about a writer as intimate and exact as Stevie is a television movie called Waiting for the Moon, about Miss Stein and Miss Toklas, with the incredible Linda Hunt as Alice. I don’t know the actress who plays Gertrude. She’s very good too, so self-absorbed and delightful and impossible, as genius-writers often are. When Gertrude sings “In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (her favorite song) and greets a new French lady acquaintance with “Hiya, toots,” you suddenly know much more about the redoubtable Gertrude Stein than you knew before. When the patron of their local bistro asks Alice how Miss Stein is, and she answers, “Miss Stein is like a rock,” you are in inspired territory. When you hear Ernest HeminGway (who seems more like my Black Mountain buddy, Fielding Dawson, than Hem the Macho Kid) say to his nemesis Alice, “Miss Tortluss, you’re a goddamned jewel,” you are again privy to something very, very good.
Anyway, back to Stevie. Trevor Howard is excellent as the mysterious friend and commentator on the action. He brings you out of the house of the two ladies and tells you of Stevie’s doings in the outside world. He delivers some of her poems with great emotion, including the fantastic poem, “Not Waving, But Drowning.” Alec McCowen is both farcical and believable as Stevie’s unlucky suitor. His lusty biting of an apple is a savory moment of theatre indeed. The rest is the interplay of aunt and niece and the intricate life in the suburbs, a world brilliantly achieved for us in a cinematic way that makes us care for these unique ladies.
LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE
Starring: Josette Day as Beauty; Jean Marais as the Beast, as Avenant, and as Prince Charming. Story from the 18th century fairy tale by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. Directed & Written by Jean Cocteau. Costumes and Settings: Christian Berard. Music: Georges Auric. Photography: Henri Alekan. Running Time: 90 minutes. Release Date: 1946. Embassy Home Entertainment: VHS 6038.
I hadn’t seen La Belle et la Bête in 46 years, not since I saw it eleven times at the Little Theatre in Washington, DC, when I was fifth-former in prep school. The few movies I have ever liked passionately I see over and over: The Wizard of Oz, for all its kitschy, cutey-pie stuff, about 35 times; Fantasia, for all the brooms and tyrannosaurs and hippopotami, about 20 times—it told me there was a composer named Igor Stravinsky when I was ten years old. More than ten times for Stevie and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. (I would have liked JFK much better if Jacques Tati had been the director.) More than five times: The Wages of Fear (Clouzot); and Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin). Less than five: Pixote (Hector Barbenco); and Blue Velvet (David Lynch)—those two are too searing and too repulsive to take on more often.
It’s dangerous, going back to films you adored when you were 18 or 20. Nowadays, Laura offers me not much but Clifton Webb in his bathtub reciting a few camp lines from Ernest Dowson, and Vincent Price dressed up like a rich Southern country-club faggot in a white suit. Beat the Devil seemed glorious at the time of Black Mountain College. When I saw it in Cambridge a year or so ago, it was reduced to two lines of dialogue: “I think I go upstairs now and read my Bible,” and “Tell me more of the Peerless Rita“; and the quivering profile of Robert Morley. I was quite prepared to dismiss La Belle et la Bête and write a substitute review of one of my favorite porn flix Sexdrive, by Jean-Daniel Cadinot. (Monsieur Cadinot’s films are certainly pervasive examples of “international cinema”. I have seen them in video hot shops in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, the USA, and even fire-proof England.) Sexdrive’s star is one David Di Lorenzo, American I would think, and he gives an amazing performance from both the front and from the rear. He is picked up hitching out of Paris in a Rolls occupied by two flashy Arab scumbag sheiks. These evil guys whisk our oh-so-innocent hero to their flood-lit chateau in the forest (Cocteau would have liked this one) and trumpets blare in the manner of the theme music for “Master-Race Theater” on PBS and “CBS Sunday Morning.” They offer the lad some of their best hashish through the hookah and they’re all off to the races. David Di Lorenzo is true sexual turn-on. And Cadinot knows about wit, style, and every camera angle there is.
The thing is, however, La Belle et la Bête, though it creaks a little technically and must have been made with hardly any budget at all, remains as compelling a fairy tale as ever. It is “Once upon a time” from beginning to end, childhood’s open sesame. Cocteau kept a journal of the film and it’s been sitting on the shelf, essentially unread, for 46 years because my French has never developed past knowing the names of foods and drinks. With a dictionary and the investment of 15 minutes of my friend Tom Meyer’s time, we can offer you this paragraph from Cocteau:
“My method is simple: I let the poetry alone; it comes on its own. It can only be called untameable. I’ve tried to build a table for the poetry. And for you, then, to eat there, to talk to it, or build a fire with.”
One would love to see the Beast’s chateau dans le fôret, but Cocteau’s journal makes it unclear to me whether it is named Rochecorbon in the Touraine, or Raray, north of Paris near Senlis. Most of the book appears to be about visits to doctors and dentists between rare moments on the set.
What one remembers with astonishing clarity are some of the great visual moments: the hall of candelabra held by human arms; the living caryatids with fiery eyes and smoke coming from their nostrils; the balustrade of animals in the Beast’s park; the door that tells Beauty that it is hers; the mirror that tells her it is hers alone. I have never forgotten the magic password: “Va ou je vais, le Magnifique, Va—va—va!” And the wonderful scene where Beauty’s wicked sisters, Felicie and Adelaide, hanging up the sheets on the washline, are dressed in great hats that make them silly goose girls. Henri Alekan‘s cinematography is luminous. You can’t hear much of Auric’s music on the soundtrack, but what’s there is very good.
Josette Day is enchanting as Beauty, and Jean Marais convincing as the poor Beast. He is at his best when he reveals to Beauty the secrets of his magic power in truly incantatory fashion: “My horse, my glove, my golden key, my mirror, and my rose!” It’s a real downer when he changes into Prince Charming—so big and butch, straight from the pages of the French equivalent of Physique Pictorial. But, that’s the look Cocteau and Genet liked in those dim days of yore. Treat your imagination to 90 minutes in “ce vague pays des contes de fées.”
Jonathan Willliams
(requested by Douglas Messerli, publisher of Sun & Moon Books, 1992)
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