The Films of John Schlesinger

By Julia Prewitt Brown

The great historical and economic transformations of the late twentieth-century city are vividly reflected in John Schlesinger’s oeuvre. In films of the early sixties ‘A Kind of Loving’ and ‘Billy Liar’, the city was imagined as industrial and residential, with the characters confronting life on the local and familial level. In ‘Darling’, ‘Midnight Cowboy’ and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, films made from 1965 to 1971, the city had become cosmopolitan, ruled over by international finance and riven by class tensions. And in two films of the eighties ‘The Falcon and the Snowman’ and ‘Madame Sousatzka’, Schlesinger was emphatic in showing the desperation with which youthful characters struggled to come of age, not in a local urban environment, but in a national and global one. The specific economic and political forces driving these urban changes have been extensively treated in the growing body of scholarship on the ‘cinematic city’. While these forces form an important backdrop to ‘The Films of John Schlesinger’ , the aim of the book overall is to demonstrate the centrality of Schlesinger's aesthetic imagination, but not as something divorced from political, moral and historical life.

The distinguished British cinematographer Billy Williams once described Schlesinger as the ‘most complete’ director he ever worked with. Schlesinger combined a directorial ‘eye’ (mastery of camera movement, framing, editing, production design, etc.) with a profound literary sense (understanding of character and situation). He began his career with the award-winning documentary ‘Terminus’ (1961) and went on to make a total of seventeen feature films and five films for television. Several of his films had a genuinely innovative impact: Andy Warhol said that ‘Midnight Cowboy’ ‘took a real drawing card from the underground’ in the way it dealt with ‘forbidden subjects’. Pauline Kael described ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ as ‘a novel written on film’ and, in being so, an entirely new achievement, ‘instantly recognizable as a classic’. Other Schlesinger films are also of lasting interest: ‘Billy Liar’, reissued by Criterion in 2001, is a comic gem. ‘The Day of the Locust’ is taught in film schools today. Yet there is a dearth of intelligent conversation about these rich works. Contemporary reviews by leading film critics are insightful, as are selected articles and the sole full-length study of Schlesinger, which appeared years before his career ended. A full-scale ‘interpretation’ of what Schlesinger’s oeuvre teaches us about modern life has yet to appear.

Schlesinger’s films have been undervalued for reasons that have little to do with their achievement: he fell out of favour in Hollywood, offended critics with his satire of American society and made a few relatively uninspired films just to keep working. The time is ripe for a revaluation of his oeuvre. ‘The Films of John Schlesinger’ engages the innovative content and form of the major films, and makes critical judgements identifying their strengths and weaknesses. It explores their major theme, which is the importance of survival, and of trying to make the best of what one has, particularly as this theme is played out in modern, urban society. It takes up different theories of film – that of Benjamin, Hansen and others – but it is not a theoretical analysis intended solely for academics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Aug 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089802

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The Films of John Schlesinger

The Films of John Schlesinger

Julia Prewitt Brown

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Julia Prewitt Brown 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-978-9 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-978-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I Coming of Age

1 Leading Up to Midnight Cowboy : A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar and Darling

2 Schlesinger’s Bildungsfilm: Midnight Cowboy and the Problem of Youth

3 Human Emergence in a Commercial Age: Madame Sousatzka

Part II Identity and Nation

4 An Uncomfortable Truth: The Day of the Locust

5 Box Office Failure: Honky Tonk Freeway and the Risks of Embarrassing the United States

6 An Eye for an I: Identity and Nation in the Films of the Reagan-Thatcher Years ( Yanks, An Englishman Abroad , The Falcon and the Snowman , A Question of Attribution )

Part III The Uses of the Past

7 History Hollywood-Style: Far from the Madding Crowd

8 The Resonance of Art: Sunday Bloody Sunday

Epilogue: Refusal to Mourn: Cold Comfort Farm

Notes

Works Cited

Index

FIGURES

1 Abbie (Madonna) and Robert (Rupert Everett) in The Next Best Thing

2 Vic (Alan Bates) on a pedestrian bridge in Manchester in A Kind of Loving

3 Billy (Tom Courtenay) lies in bed fantasizing in Billy Liar

4 Billy leads his invisible army in the final scene of Billy Liar

5 Bagpipes in a supermarket communicate the surreality of the city in Billy Liar

6 A mock film is staged at a decadent party game in Darling

7 The Texas drive-in movie theater with which Midnight Cowboy opens

8 Joe Buck (Jon Voight) on the street in New York in Midnight Cowboy

9 Joe and Rico arrive in Miami in Midnight Cowboy

10 Life in Florida as Rico (Dustin Hoffman) imagines it in Midnight Cowboy

11 Extras on the set of Waterloo in The Day of the Locust

12 Tod (William Atherton) sketches his grimace in The Day of the Locust

13 A ghostly bus stop at the end of The Day of the Locust

14 Homer (Donald Sutherland) in The Day of the Locust

15 The drive-in mortuary in Honky Tonk Freeway

16 The American soldiers waving goodbye in Yanks

17 The opening credits of An Englishman Abroad , shot in Glasgow

18 Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in An Englishman Abroad

19 A Mexican police officer in The Falcon and the Snowman

20 Photographers awaiting Blunt in A Question of Attribution

21 Detective Chubb (David Calder) in A Question of Attribution

22 The opening credits of The Falcon and the Snowman

23 Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch) in Sunday Bloody Sunday

24 Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) in Sunday Bloody Sunday

25 Daniel addressing the camera at the end of Sunday Bloody Sunday

26 Daniel and Bob Elkin (Murray Head) in Sunday Bloody Sunday

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of this book have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, CineAction, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Jump Cut and Literature/Film Quarterly. I am indebted to the editors and advisors of these journals, especially the late Chuck Kleinhans and John Paul Riquelme, for ideas and suggestions. Full citations are given in Works Cited. Excerpts from Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis were reprinted with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

I wish to thank Ian Buruma, John Schlesinger’s nephew, for giving me a perspective on Schlesinger as an artist and a man that has stayed with me over time. I am deeply grateful to him for his conversation and for the insights into Schlesinger’s character and artistic development in Conversations with John Schlesinger.

I had the good fortune to speak with Michael Childers, Schlesinger’s partner of 36 years, who provided information about Schlesinger’s early work and granted me permission to quote from documents at the British Film Institute. William Mann, Schlesinger’s biographer, and Gene Phillips, author of the first full-length study of Schlesinger’s films, provided essential information. In my visits to the British Film Institute, Jonny Davies provided help in reviewing the Schlesinger archives. The editors at Anthem Press, especially Abi Pandey, were a pleasure to work with at every stage.

Boston University supported this book in many ways. Gene Jarrett, chair of the English Department and later associate dean of Faculty, was a friend to the project from its beginnings. Susan Mizruchi, director of the Center for the Humanities, and Karl Kirchwey, associate dean of Faculty, gave help at just the right time. I also wish to thank Mo Lee and Talia Vestri for advice and ideas at critical junctures.

To Bonnie Costello, Carol McGuirk, Dahlia Rudavsky and Barbara Schapiro, I am indebted for their wisdom and support. In contemplating Schlesinger’s film technique, I benefited from the taste and expertise of Nick Durlacher and Rudy Eiland.

My husband, Howard Eiland, first drew my attention to Schlesinger’s films as a possible subject of study and offered suggestions on every chapter. I dedicate this book to him, in loving gratitude for many years of conversation about the art of film.

INTRODUCTION

Isaiah Berlin’s famous division of writers into two categories—foxes, or those who know many things, and hedgehogs, or those who know one important thing—does not apply to film directors. Good directors know many things—about editing, acting, production design, cinematography, writing, music, sound technique, finance and much more—and great or auteur directors know all of these things in addition to one important thing. They have a personal vision of life that transcends and yet unifies the material elements of their art, and that develops over the period of their creativity.

I believe that John Schlesinger was one such director. Fox-like, he understood all aspects of filmmaking. Billy Williams, the great British cinematographer who directed the photography for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), described Schlesinger as the most complete director he ever worked with (Sunday Bloody Sunday, DVD Interview). As the many stories of people who worked with Schlesinger attest, his ideas about the screenplay, art direction, music, cinematography and acting were so uncompromising, abundant, well-integrated and specific that, from the beginning of his career, they led often to conflicts with other artists and technicians on and off the set. When Schlesinger had full control over the making of his films, and when all the other things necessary to putting together a film worked in his favor, he was capable of creating brilliant art.

This is because Schlesinger was also a hedgehog. He knew one important thing: the importance of survival, of just getting through the day and of trying to make the best of what one has. This conviction ran deep in his family background, and it informs all of his films. He pursued it as a philosophical problem and proposition in the context of modern, urban life. When Schlesinger tried to engage the past directly, as in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), which is set in rural Victorian England, he was less successful in communicating this theme because it was something he understood in modern, urban terms. I think that what makes John’s films so wonderful is that he has always been so in tune with life, said Glenda Jackson (Mann 2005, 345).

This is not to say that he was always in tune with Hollywood or film critics. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Schlesinger’s films were held in high regard, but by the time of his death in 2003, his reputation had declined. Honky Tonk Freeway, which appeared in 1981, was a major box office disaster. It not only made it difficult for him to get funding later, it also offended critics with its view of American society. Schlesinger also made some weak films from time to time, because he was personally driven to continue working, even when the best opportunities did not come his way.¹ Nonetheless, Schlesinger’s oeuvre—he made a total of seventeen feature films, five films for television and four documentaries—is notable.² Today he is best known for Midnight Cowboy, which won the Academy Award for Best Film of 1969 and is ranked by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time. Four films made in England—Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), Far from the Madding Crowd and Sunday Bloody Sunday—are listed among the British Film Institute’s selection of the Top 100 British films. Although his adaptation of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust received mixed reviews when it appeared in 1975, today it is taught in film schools. The sixties and seventies mark Schlesinger’s high period, but even during the eighties and nineties when directors were increasingly forced to bow to new financial imperatives, Schlesinger’s ideas continued to bear fruit. An Englishman Abroad (1983) and A Question of Attribution (1991), two films made for British television, won a total of six British Academy Awards. Cold Comfort Farm (1995), which was also made for the BBC and then picked up for theatrical release in North America, is a comic gem, widely admired by critics and audiences alike.

The writer Ian Buruma, Schlesinger’s nephew and the author of Conversations with John Schlesinger, writes of the director’s absolute belief in the supremacy of art (Buruma 2006, xxiii). The characters and plots of Schlesinger’s films came from material written by others, but his selection of them was almost always driven by personal interest, and his transformations of them into films were undertaken within a particular set of moral questions and aesthetic choices that were uniquely his own. As mentioned above, the theme of survival or perseverance—the idea that reality does not live up to people’s hopes and illusions and that they must simply make the best of it—persists throughout his career, and, judging from Buruma’s acclaimed biography of Schlesinger’s parents, who were the children of German-Jewish immigrants, Schlesinger did not pull this theme out of the air. It was part and parcel of his family’s history and of their experiences living through the First and Second World Wars. In terms of aesthetics, a modernist spirit of contradiction—or, more precisely, a refusal to be bound by genre expectations, a drive toward diverse artforms, subjects and tonalities—manifests itself throughout his career, evident both within individual films and in the broad contrasts among them. After sending shock waves with Darling in 1965, for example, he turned to the traditional subject of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. And just as Schlesinger’s uninhibited portrait of a sexually liberated woman of the sixties in Darling ends on a conservative note, Midnight Cowboy’s evocation of the abject poverty, economic inequality, social fragmentation and decadence in New York provides the setting for a surprisingly traditional tale of coming of age.

The main influences on Schlesinger’s art have been well documented by Buruma and Gene Phillips, author of the first and only full-length study of Schlesinger. Schlesinger’s early documentary, Terminus (1961), made for British Transport Films about Waterloo Station, is rooted in the British documentary tradition going back to John Grierson, and his first feature-length film, A Kind of Loving (1962), is associated with the British new wave of films and plays about the working class. Although Schlesinger was acquainted with the artists associated with this movement, like Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, he never identified himself with its political aims. His heroes were Vittorio De Sica, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray and François Truffaut, whom he saw as humanistic filmmakers, and he loved music enough to think of a film rather like a musical score (Buruma 2006, 33). Together these influences—kitchen sink realism, the humane films of the directors he most admired and his beloved music—account for the foundation of Schlesinger’s style. In his best films, an uncompromisingly realistic sense of life, however comic, is given human meaning by means of Schlesinger’s visual storytelling, cinematic rhythm and signature use of editing.

Buruma describes Schlesinger as a well-educated man who came from a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family, well-read and cultivated in music and the arts (Buruma 2006, xxiv). Schlesinger attended St. Edmund’s preparatory school in Hindhead, earlier attended by W. H. Auden, followed by his father’s alma mater, Uppingham boarding school, founded in the sixteenth century. At Uppingham Schlesinger’s unhappiness in not being good at the things boys of sixteen and seventeen were supposed to be good at was offset by pleasure in the discovery of his homosexuality and an incipient artistic drive (18). He attended Balliol College at Oxford where he joined a theater repertory company that toured the United States, performing Shakespeare. From the beginning, Schlesinger’s reading and engagement in the arts were reinforced at home by cultivated parents and grandparents who introduced him early on to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and English fiction, and took him to operas and plays. When he was an adolescent, his mother gave him a copy of Stella Gibbons’s satire of the romantic English novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which she discussed with him at length (Mann 2005, 74). Years later, Schlesinger would adapt both Thomas Hardy’s and Gibbons’s fiction to film.

Schlesinger’s character-driven stories, evocation of the intimate interrelations of character and setting, emphasis on the significance of the everyday and insistence on ambiguities of situation and motive—all qualities he is known for—point to literary influences that reach back to the nineteenth century and earlier. His knowledge of music and theater, which led him to stage operas and plays throughout his career, was another well from which to draw inspiration for films. Although he knew the history of film, he never received the defining imprint of a film school, as did so many important directors coming after him. Insisting in interviews that he had never focused exclusively on film either in work or leisure, Schlesinger identified with the entire European humanistic tradition of art, a fact that is sometimes overlooked in the case of earlier European-born filmmakers with long careers like that of Schlesinger, who lived and worked in Hollywood for many years. I’m not […] interested in becoming a one-line person, he said to Buruma, because I’ve always thought that the arts inform each other (Buruma 2006, 29). I feel European, he noted in 1985 while in Edinburgh, [a]‌ piece of me [is] always here (Schlesinger 1985a). Classics I think belong to you, he said in a lecture given the same year (Schlesinger 1985b).

Through the seventies and even into the eighties, Schlesinger had charge of the making of his films, but when producers began reducing the power of directors, he found himself increasingly overruled by the money-driven suits and ego-driven star actors in crucial matters of aesthetic choice. Stories about the making of Schlesinger’s last film, The Next Best Thing (2000), starring Rupert Everett and Madonna Louise Ciccone, are dispiriting to read. The film had the potential to be a finely shaped, morally astute comedy of contemporary sexual mores, but Everett was given permission by the producers to change the script without consulting Schlesinger and, in conflicts with Madonna on the set over the melodramatic tone of her performance, she is reported to have said to his face, You don’t know what you’re talking about! (Mann 2005, 21). The result is a film in which the story elements fail to come together and the acting is undistinguished, although the film contains one dazzling sequence, which I will discuss shortly, in which Schlesinger clearly had the upper hand.

Schlesinger was widely known for his talent for working with actors. Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay, Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight and many others credit him with developing their art. As the British actress Joanna Lumley said, he looked for the truth in a performance and was not afraid of what form it turned out to be (Mann 2005, 161). His best films offer the kinds of highly crafted, instinctive performances that only come when a director possesses a deep understanding of human character, both that of the actor and the figure being played. If, to this talent, we add his mastery of the medium of film, it is easy to see why the films are watchable today. A well-made film, with excellent acting, is always worth watching. But in the work of Schlesinger we see something more: a complex sensibility. Deeply sympathetic yet ruthlessly objective, bursting with humane humor yet with a strong sense of the grotesque, realistic yet drawn to the fantastical, he possessed a truly capacious sensibility and vision of life. It is this sensibility, so in tune with life, that makes us return to Schlesinger’s best films and that will, I believe, make future audiences return to them.

Schlesinger was born in London in 1926, only a few decades after film arose in France and the United States. After completing his education at Oxford, where he studied English literature, he learned his craft making documentary films for the BBC in the late fifties. Thus he would have been familiar with representations of urban life in early film and in literature written before the twentieth century. The city, with its manifold distractions and violence, its invitation to intoxication and dream, had long served to represent the experience of modernity in works of art. To be a reader of the city was to be a reader of modern life.

The portrait of Paris in the opening pages of Père Goriot (1835)—a novel that, like Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, envisions a young man going from the provinces to the big city with plans to make his way through pleasing women—offers a classic example of this sort of reading. Balzac’s narrator compares Paris to a labyrinth, beehive, battlefield and ocean, all total environments in which the only way to survive is to keep your wits about you but also to ignore things, to place your own survival, whether physical, moral or spiritual, above all other concerns. Behind this evocation of Paris stands a long tradition of religious writing in which the city or town is imagined as the tempting site of worldliness and corruption. In John Bunyan’s allegory of the late seventeenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a work that any English school boy of Schlesinger’s generation would have known, the main character comes upon a town in which everything is for sale: houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not (Bunyan 2006, 2147). Located on the highway to the heavenly gate, the town tempts the pilgrim to stray from the path of righteousness, but it does not wholly encompass him, as in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. No clear path through the phantasmagoric stations of Balzac’s Paris, Dickens’s London or, for that matter, Schlesinger’s New York can be discerned.

In Schlesinger’s great city films—Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, The Day of the Locust—his imagination of the city as a total environment is in keeping with the urban novel tradition. He would have known Sergei Eisenstein’s theory that the city artist Dickens laid the groundwork for D. W. Griffith’s use of montage. The elaborate montage of the dizzy tempo, hurricane, and roar of the city as Joe Buck enters New York in Midnight Cowboy echoes Oliver Twist’s entry into the self-enclosed space of London as much as it does ingénue Lillian Gish’s arrival in Boston in Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) as she is ushered into the great room of the mansion of her rich relations, a deep focus shot communicating a place of seemingly unlimited distraction, opportunity and danger.³ The layout of the city as a shifting constellation of disparate objects and milieux lent itself well to film montage in the early twentieth century.

The city symphony documentaries of the late twenties, a likely early influence on Schlesinger, come to mind. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Alberto Cavalcanti’s film about Paris, Rien que les heures (Nothing but Time, 1926), Joris Ivens’s film about Amsterdam, Rain (1929) are three seminal city symphonies made in Western Europe that any filmmaker working in documentary in the mid-twentieth century would have known. In these films the city possesses a language all its own: traffic signals and street signs, sudden inexplicable migrations of people, the movement of machines that participate in the vast, interdependent industry of the city. Here the city is a cipher of movements that are at once completely transparent and utterly mysterious, much like the city in Schlesinger’s Terminus. Nor does the resonance of the city symphonies diminish very much in Schlesinger’s oeuvre, where even a pedestrian crossing can become the site of dramatic