Screen magic you can't plan for - adaptation of the movie 'The Winslow Boy'

Interview, May, 1999 by Graham Fuller

Can lightning strike twice in the movies? Surely not. The thing we call screen magic - was well as all those moments of white noise and dead time that make up a film - is by its very nature unrepeatable. Although different physics apply to animation, in live-action cinema people and animals are photographed moving in time and space, once and eternally, and the trick - the fall of light on a face, the way the air between actors can seem to throb - cannot be reproduced by others on celluloid any more than it can be in life. Or can it?

The best life can come up with in this respect is deja vu - the disorienting, never-quite-enjoyable sensation, provoked by unconscious emotional connections, that one is encountering an event or place that has been experienced before. The best that movies, which unlike life are scripted and choreographed, can come up with are remakes, a kind of subspecies of film. Still, memory is a personal issue, not a critical one: Hitchcock's Psycho will never be replaced in the pantheon by Gus Van Sant's recent remake, but there must be many among Van Sant's audience who have never seen the original and would deem it the lesser film if they did. Movies come to most of us randomly and, each our own auteur, we lock down our impressions and edit them into our own subjective reality.

The Winslow Boy, David Mamet's new film, is not a remake but a fresh adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1946 play, first filmed by Anthony Asquith in 1948. As you'd expect from Mamet, his is a taut and precision-engineered version, masculine where Asquith's was feminine, yet more respectful of the heroine's feminism. The story is familiar: A newly retired Edwardian paterfamilias risks all to clear the name of his twelve-year-old son, Ronnie, who has been expelled from naval college for stealing a five-shilling postal order. The boy has a pretty suffragette sister, Catherine, who's halfheartedly engaged to a soldier. Fortunately, the lawyer briefed to defend her brother is Sir Robert Morton, a brilliant and handsome MP, whose superciliousness is a mask for his diffidence as a lover. Mamet's film is particularly clever in the way it allows the father's legal cause to parlay into his daughter's romantic cause, and to give an emotional as well as moral resonance to Morton's oft-quoted axiom, "Let right be done."

That loaded phrase was used in a more recent drama that purported to be about one thing but was really about another. The words, however, sound more convincing coming from Robert Donat in the original Winslow Boy film and Jeremy Northam in Mamet's than they did from Henry J. Hyde when he wrapped up the case against Bill Clinton on February 8. Mamet told the British film journal Sight and Sound that the main reason he was drawn to Rattigan's play was that it raises the question, "When does a fight for justice become an arrogant pursuit of personal rectitude?" One can't help thinking of another Clinton adversary, Kenneth Starr, when Mamet puts it like that, but it wasn't the polemical echoes in his film that made me shiver when I saw it.

What did was Northam's portrayal of Sir Robert. In certain shots and in certain lights - for example, when surrounded by the agitated Winslow family in the moments before Morton's informal but ruthless interrogation of Ronnie Winslow - Northam's jaw ripples with what appears to be barely withheld contempt. In repose, his face adopts a look of boredom or disdain especially when he's addressing Catherine - as, indeed, a professional overachiever with little knowledge of women might do when flustered by a female whose conversation is full of antagonism and whose eyes are full of sex. We've often seen this defensive masculine hauteur in films and TV - it was a Laurence Olivier trope and it's the calling card of every Mr. Darcy in every Pride and Prejudice - but watching Northam I felt I'd only seen it once before: in Donat's portrayal of Sir Robert Morton.

This mirroring is somehow revelatory, uncanny, akin to what people mean when they say, "I thought I'd seen a ghost." It's the product of cinema's own deja vu, and it's an evocation of a mood so rare and tangential that film criticism barely bothers with it. It cannot be willed into existence by actors, writers, or directors, but is part of the secret history of movies. Here's another example: Watching the actor Jason Watkins stride cluelessly but determinedly along a London street in Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988), I was reminded of Tim Roth doing the exact same walk in Leigh's Meantime (1983). I subsequently put this to Leigh, who said he hadn't noticed the resemblance, but admitted he was "the lowest common denominator" between Watkins's and Roth's characters. In other words, Leigh, consciously or more likely unconsciously, induced that walk from the actors.

Rattigan is the lone sensibility that informs both Donat's and Northam's work in the two Winslow films. Perhaps it speaks to the exquisiteness of his writing that it should produce, from a liquid endeavor like acting, two such identically hued performances fifty years apart, but this thesis falls flat when comparing, say, Cedric Hardwicke (as Winslow St.) and Margaret Leighton (as Catherine) in Asquith's Winslow with Nigel Hawthorne and Rebecca Pidgeon in Mamet's. Fascinatingly, in the upcoming An Ideal Husband, Northam plays another MP called Sir Robert who gives a speech from the same position on the same House of Commons set that his Morton does in The Winslow Boy but, appropriately, this Sir Robert is nothing like Morton - Donat's or Northam's.