Scandal. - movie reviews

National Review, June 30, 1989 by John Simon

A COUPLE OF reviewers having already quoted Philip Larkin's verses on the significance of the 1963 Profumo scandal for Britain's sexual mores, I shall have to forgo the pleasures of verse in dealing with the English film Scandal. Too bad, because Larkin's "Annus Mirabilis" is ever so nice. In plain prose, however, the dalliance of John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, with Christine Keeler, an 18-year-old showgirl turned good-time girl, eventually toppled the Macmillan cabinet, and conservatism, in more ways than one, was out. At the storm's not so calm center was, besides Christine, Stephen Ward, the vicar's son and society osteopath, who also acted as unpaid pimp to the nobility. He groomed girls like Christine as "escorts" to the high and mighty, and enjoyed in exchange such privileges as the cottage on the estate of Cliveden, which Lord Astor rented him for a pound a year. It turned out, in the end, to be more like a pound of flesh.

After Christine, out of fear, spite, and greed, spilled the beans-and he himself made matters worse by blabbing-Ward was abandoned by his powerful clients and friends, and was brought to trial as the fall guy; he took his life before the guilty verdict was in. Profumo had to confess not only to adultery but also to lying; he had to resign, and he and his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, devoted themselves to charitable works, eventually earning him a CBE. Miss Keeler spent nine months in jail for perjury, lost her good looks, and eked out an obscure existence, coming into slight prominence in 1983 with the publication of her autobiography, and now with this film. Her even younger fellow callgirl, Mandy Rice-Davies, was the only one tough and canny enough to emerge unscathed; she went on to a career as a songstress and owner of a chain of night-clubs in Israel.

Clears there is a cinematic goldmine in all this, but Michael CatonJones, the director, and Michael Thomas, the scenarist, have not been able to make much of a movie. Some of the reasons are obvious. Caton-Jones wanted to direct a TV mini-series, allowing scope for details and full development; a feature film was deemed more salable. The result is ferocious foreshortening and severe stinting on character analysis. A bigger handicap was the draconian British libel law, not to mention the filmmakers' intent to make this an attack on the class system and, as far as possible, to whitewash Ward and Miss Keeler. So we do not get the man with the two-way mirror in his living room, for him and others to watch the goings-on in the bedroom; the man who, seldom if at all sleeping with his girls (he lived, at different times, with both Christine and Mandy), nevertheless participated in orgies; the man who derived some latent physical satisfaction from offering his Galateas to men he envied, admired, longed to be. We do not even get the trendy osteopath who treated the likes of Churchill, Averell Harriman, Danny Kaye, and Elizabeth Taylor.

What we do get is the victim of class consciousness. Already at public school, we learn, Ward was caned for an offense everyone knew he had not committed, and though he became a successful healer, drove a white Jaguar, enjoyed hobnobbing with the great for whom ,he arranged sexual encounters, he never quite arrived. "It is a closed society," we see him explaining to Christine, whom he has just taken under his wing; "you have to be either beautiful or rich." Ward was neither, but by supplying beauty (though never for actual payment), he could barter his way into belonging.

Why was becoming a member of Society so crucial to him? This is one question Scandal never really addresses; the other is exactly what happened between him and Christine. All right, there was no sex, we gather, though Christine, it seems, came to want it. Well, why not? Was it Ward's voyeurism or sadomasochism, which bypasses normal fulfillment, or was it latent homosexuality, which requires vicarious means for its satisfaction? The film

takes Ward's craving to become part of Society as a given and, except for tenuous hints, does not concern itself with his sexuality. The platonic quasiromance between the principals is not even as believablee as that in John Schlesinger's Darling.

We do get some mild orgying with social-climbing and kinky overtones, though here the film ran into censorship troubles in the United States. A rather stylized bit of party sex on top of a piano had to be cut, which is carrying soft-pedaling a mite too far. But an aging, saggy-breasted, bragging hostess and former JFK playmate is still there, unappetizingly embodied by Britt Ekland. So, too, is the likewise naked elderly man (reputed to be a High Court judge) serving drinks and wearing a placard round his neck instructing those unsatisfied with his services to flog him.

Is this what Ward was trying so hard to break into? Either there was much more to it, or else he was even shallower than all but ,his worst detractors would have had it. No wonder the filmmakers tried to squeeze a specious love story out of these drab events. But Christine, rather unromantically, got involved with a couple of West Indians, lustier and nearer her own age. It is a savage knife fight between those two that really precipitated retroactive revelations; that, and one of them shooting up the front door of Ward's flat, where Christine and Mandy were cowering. In one of the best scenes, a neighbor woman, witnessing the assault, phones Stephen at his office: "Dr. Ward, I thought you should know there's a black man shooting at your front door." Ward replies, "It's very kind of you to call." This believably conveys Ward's gentleness. Not so the unconvincing silent love scene at Ward's trial, where Christine and Stephen exchange mutely adoring glances until he jumps up in a self-damaging outburst, in an effort to spare Miss Keeler more excruciating grilling in the witness box.