Down to the Smallest Detail: Deceased Artiste Ian Holm

Although he received plenty of honors in his lifetime (the most notable being a knighthood), Ian Holm was not a household name. He had a “familiar face,” though, from the incredibly popular films he appeared in (Alien, The Hobbit). His appearance rarely changed significantly, but he was indeed a character person who moved from role to role, expertly incarnating a number of different “types.”

The very popular films he was in have been covered to death, so I’d like to focus on just four of his less-discussed performances. The first is in the stunning film of The Homecoming (1973) by Harold Pinter. The film was part of the “American Film Theater” project and features four of the six actors who had been in both the London and NYC productions of the play. (The film director, Peter Hall, directed both of those productions as well.)

Here Holm is part of a top-notch ensemble but he still shines in all of his scenes, as the brother who will not back down (and seems to make his living as a pimp). The Homecoming is admittedly a filmed play, but the play is a very “tight” piece with many of Pinter’s trademarks, including characters who indulge in long bursts of dialogue that don’t seem connected to what the other characters are saying.

In one particular scene, he faces off against his brother’s wife (Vivien Merchant, then Mrs. Pinter; she tragically committed suicide), who has broken up the curiously all-male family unit of her husband. The clip below includes consecutive two-character scenes. In both, Holm appears to be the dominant character because he’s the one with the most dialogue, but he is the unstoppable force met by immovable objects — namely, his sister-in-law and his father (Paul Rogers).

The next exquisite moment is from much later in Holm’s career and comes from a more cinematic film. Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997) follows a lawyer (Holm) who wants to start a class-action suit against a town and a bus company, following an accident where a bus full of school children sank into ice.

Affecting a good “streetwise” American accent in the role, Holm delivers a monologue, which can be found below at 56:15. The monologue is beautifully written and directed, and expressively acted by Holm. It’s a tearjerking moment without being Spielbergian (read: mawkish and coy) and remains with viewers as much as the more seminal scene where the bus sinks into the ice.

In a just world Oscars would be given to turns like this one:

Now, onto the meat of the matter. Any time I can, I like to return to an ongoing discussion of the work of Dennis Potter. Potter deeply respected the medium of television (he worked for years as a TV critic for The New Statesman and then for The Sunday Times) and, in an era where elongated Netflix series are praised as being the “new literature” or “the new cinema,” his work should be hailed as the model for “auteurist TV.”

Meaning dramas and miniseries that tell a story in a confined period of time (his longest miniseries had only seven episodes) and are deeply personal works that could only have come from the imagination of a single artist, rather than the collaborative work that happens to have flourishes of great dialogue and is structured in a “goes down easy” mode and stays in production for season after season after….

It’s true that Potter hit his stride in the late Seventies with Pennies From Heaven, but his Sixties dramas are impeccable in their own low-key, low-budgeted way. One of the first great ones is a drama that served as a sort of “rough draft” for Pennies, an episode of the ITV Sunday Night Theatre titled “Moonlight on the Highway” (1969).

It’s an absolutely beautiful and quite anguished piece about David Peters (Holm), a nostalgia addict who is obsessed with the music of Al Bowlly, a British singing star who died during WWII when a German mine exploded outside his apartment. Potter shows us how David gets his depression medication through an NHS hospital and how his favorite form of escape from the real world (of which he doesn’t seem quite fond) is to listen to Bowlly’s records and lip-synch to them — setting up the lip-synching to dreamy Thirties tunes in Pennies.

The piece goes to those places that great modern artists go (think Cassavetes), and those who write for Netflix, HBO, and Amazon Prime do not — to scenes that are uncomfortable to watch for their sheer naked emotion. Here, we see the memory that haunts David (a man molesting him when he was a boy — reflecting a real incident in Potter’s life), a disturbing scene where a young female TV researcher working on a Bowlly documentary comes to his apartment and he makes a fool of himself over her, and the finale, where he attends a Bowlly fan gathering (made up mostly of senior citizens) and gets very drunk (and his doctor had warned him not to mix his depression meds and alcohol).

The result is a drama that is, indeed, like Cassavetes, not easy to watch. But the odd sense of liberation that comes at the show’s end is a beautiful release. David reveals a secret about his private life to the attendees of the Bowlly gathering that they are embarrassed by, but which frees him from his massive inferiority complex (and alienation from groovy Sixties culture).

Holm plays it all to perfection — one often cringes watching David but, in the long run, one knows people like him (or, one has aspects of his odd personality in oneself). Potter’s writing was so intensely personal and emotional (yet, again, never Spielbergian) that one ends up liking David and not just pitying him, thank to Holm’s performance. In Potter’s late work, the heroes had more dominant fantasy lives to escape to, but David, with his lip-synching and the Bowlly fanzine he edits, is a prototype for the fan-nerd of today.

And Holm – like Bob Hoskins, Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, et al — was ideally suited to be a Potter protagonist/surrogate. Potter’s actors rarely returned to do additional plays or films, since there were so many good English actors “of a certain age.” One can see why a move from, say, Gambon to Finney, was never a downward trajectory (even the young, unknown Ewan McGregor, was fine in Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar).

Holm shows up twice in Potter’s filmography, though, as he played the Reverend Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) in the underrated Dreamchild (1985). An amorphous and admittedly odd creation, the film has three threads: the welcoming in America in the early Thirties of Alice Liddell (Coral Browne, in her last film role), Alice’s memories of her time as a girl with the Rev. Dodgson, and daydreams (and creepy nightmares) she has of living in Dodgson’s “Wonderland,” created to honor her.

The last-mentioned section features a weird and memorable use of the Muppets. (Making this one of the most “adult” films they appeared in — Henson was nothing if not open-minded.) Adding that elements makes the film a full-blown fantasy, but at the center of it all is Alice, trapped (in both good and bad ways) by Dodgson’s creation. The other key figure here is the sporadically seen Dodgson, wonderfully rendered by Holm.

Dodgson/Carroll is, of course, a “problematic” figure (that all-too-often-used phrase!). Holm beautifully conveys Potter’s take on him as a stuttering, introverted teacher/artist who truly does have a romantic love for a little girl but would never exhibit his love for her in any physical fashion. He is thoroughly embarrassed when the girl occasionally busses him on the cheek, and we suffer with him in a later scene where the maturing Alice joins with others in laughing at his stutter as he recites a passage from Wonderland during a picnic.

It’s a fascinating depiction to consider in this time period, when “cancel culture” is in existence and feminists decry the “male gaze” in art. Potter never shied away from the fact that he had a madonna/whore complex about women — he, in fact, showed how a male artist can “trap” a woman in his art in his controversial and much-decried miniseries Blackeyes (1989) (another underrated, discordant gem).

Here, we realize that the shy Dodgson could only show his love for Alice by putting her in his stories, thus both making her famous with his heartfelt gift (to both her and readers in subsequent eras) and also keeping her a girl forever, celebrated for being the little-girl muse for one of the finest-ever satires and a masterpiece of whimsy.

Dreamchild was, of course, made in ’85, and one wonders if any kind of positive depiction could be presented of Dodgson at this particular moment in history when simple depictions (and simple answers) are what is desired in art and entertainment. Holm’s nuanced and moving depiction of Dodgson thus reminds us that “problematic” artists not only produce the most intense, memorable work but also the most interesting discussions. And once discussions cease, art is dead.

In any case, the film may be an uneven creation at points, but its odd, amorphous tone makes it a challenging, thoughtful, and emotional piece — a triumph for Potter, Browne, and Holm.

‘The song is ended, but the melody lingers on...’: Deceased Artiste Bob Hoskins

Bob Hoskins was one of those special performers who didn't ever look like he was “acting.” He was not a chameleon – he rarely wore elaborate costumes or makeup, he basically looked the same in every role. But there was something about his “every-bloke” appearance and charm that made him the most talented of “artless” actors.

His death last week at 71 was sad but it wasn't that big a surprise, as he had retired from acting in late 2012 because of the onset of Parkinson's disease. What struck me when he retired was that I had really, really loved his work and yet hadn't seen a thing he'd done – and Hoskins was a guy who kept on working, no matter – since the male tearjerker Last Orders back in 2001.

Some of the later items look particularly good, like the British TV series The Street or the film Made in Dagenham, but all too often Hoskins was either in a small role or the film was just too goofy – as with the Jamie Kennedy comedy vehicle Son of the Mask or the last film Hoskins appeared in, Snow White and the Huntsman.

 
So, having confessed that I have no knowledge of the last decade of Hoskins' work (aside from his supporting roles in Beyond the Sea and Paris, Je T'aime), I want to honor him for all the work that came before that. Americans who only watch mainstream multiplex stuff knew him best for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Hook, and really, really bad crap like Mermaids, Heart Condition (where he's a detective haunted by dead cop Denzel Washington – fuck, it's bad), and Super Mario Brothers (which Bob said was indeed the film he liked the least of anything he'd ever done).

Better remembered by those who watch British film and television were Hoskins' early supporting roles in things like Dennis Potter's “Schmoedipus” (the source for Track 29) and Rock Follies of ‘77. I also have a major fondness for John Byrum's Inserts, which was a major flop but was a well-acted small ensemble piece that featured Bob as a gangster.

And there were the films he was so memorable in: Dennis Potter's beautiful miniseries Pennies from Heaven, The Long Good Friday, The Cotton Club, Brazil, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Twenty Four Seven, and of course Mona Lisa.

Hoskins didn't become an actor until he was in his late 20s, when he accompanied a friend to an audition and he was asked to audition as well. Prior to that, he had worked as a porter, a truck driver, and a window cleaner. You can see examples of his early work online, including the 1974 sitcom Thick as Thieves (right), which is up in its entirety.

One of the most entertaining segments featuring a younger (read: early 30s) Hoskins is an educational show about adult literacy called BBC on the Move, which aired in the mid-'70s. The show is the kind of earnestly sincere educational fodder that was lampooned so well in the series Look Around You; it also has the feel of the Children's Television Workshop programs done over, albeit redirected to an adult audience:

A fun example of Hoskins doing comedy is this sketch from The Ken Campbell Roadshow:

He proved himself more than equal to tackling the Bard as Iago in Jonathan Miller's 1981 TV version of Othello, in which he starred opposite Anthony Hopkins:

As the years went on and he became phenomenally successful, he became an easy target for impersonators, as seen here in sketches from The Peter Serafinowicz Show and The Adam and Joe Show.

Here is the real Bob, on The Gaby Roslin Show talking with fellow guest Ian Dury about their work together on one of two films Hoskins directed, The Raggedy Rawney, as well as Dury's thoughts on being disabled and Hoskins inability to understand Ian's Cockney rhyming slang:

The film that made him a star on both sides of the Atlantic was The Long Good Friday (1980), a terrific gangster picture. The conclusion of the film is online and it shows Hoskins at the top of his form. The segment starts off with him telling off two American Mafiosi (one played by iconic tough guy Eddie Constantine), shutting up one of them by referring to him as “you long streak of paralyzed piss.”

The beauty of the sequence (cheesy electronic music excepted) is the final moment in a car where Hoskins delivers a number of emotions in a close-up. It’s a masterclass in how to shift from emotion to emotion, seeming genuine all the way.

His next big knockout of a film was Mona Lisa (1986) for which he won the Best Actor award at both the Cannes Film Festival and the BAFTAs. It’s a beautiful Neil Jordan picture where he is teamed with the earlier iconic Cockney tough-guy, Michael Caine.

The critical and popular success of the film enhanced both Jordan and Hoskins’ careers, leading in Bob’s case to two more films with George Harrison’s Handmade Films (The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and the first feature film he directed, The Raggedy Rawney). The full film is here:

A decade later, after having made several big hit films, including Roger Rabbit, Hoskins received rave reviews for his work in another low-key character study, Twenty Four Seven (1997). If only he could’ve made many more films like this one:

Last Orders is a very special film, in that it has an unspoken connection to the past of British cinema, as its incredibly talented ensemble of lead actors blends actors known for their work in the Sixties (Michael Caine, David Hemmings, Tom Courtenay) with the two actors who most exemplified the “working-class” Brit in later films (Hoskins and Ray Winstone) as well as one of British cinema’s classiest ladies (Helen Mirren, who began in the Sixties as a sexy “dollybird” in movies).

It’s a wonderfully elegiac film that I’m very glad to have seen with my own dad, given that it is about memories of a father.

I want to close out on the one item that showcases Hoskins’ talents like no other, Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven (1978). I am an obsessive fan of Potter’s work and have found that it only gets better as the years go by. Hoskins was nothing short of perfect as Arthur Parker, the sheet-music salesman who believes that popular songs have all the answers to life’s problems.

The lip-synching technique that Potter had his actors utilize in Pennies, The Singing Detective, and Lipstick on Your Collar is sublime here. We see how the characters’ lives “light up” when they’re caught in the world of the song, and how the bleakness of the real world returns just as soon as the song is over (but they act out the tunes in their natural surroundings, something that was switched around for the Herbert Ross feature film made from the material).

Check out Bob dancing up a storm in this number:

Potter’s signature song (used in several of his teleplays) is heard here, as Hoskins gorgeously acts it out. The delicacy he affects (as he lip-synchs to a female vocalist) is exquisite and serves to underscore the optimism of the lyrics:

And there is no better way for me to end a tribute to Hoskins than by presenting the finale of Pennies, in which a Threepenny Opera ending is introduced, because we so want these sad, ill-fated characters to get together. Arthur literally is “resurrected” to recite with Eileen (Cheryl Campbell) the song lyric that I used as the title of this piece. Then the two dance off to “The Glory of Love.”

Farewell, old son, and thanks for the memories.

Surely, Dennis Potter would be smiling….

As I’ve been watching the developments in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal grow in severity — from “merely” hacking the phones of celebs to those of politicians and murder victims — and have seen Rupert and his son James be called on the carpet by Parliament, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dennis Potter.

Now surely this “unraveling” won’t really harm Murdoch financially, since capitalist moguls are made of Teflon and never truly suffer for the crimes that were committed in their name. Yes, his responsibilities as the head of a dynasty of uncommonly sleazy “journalistic” enterprises is finally coming into question, but no doubt News Corp will continue on, with the old man perhaps retiring and putting one of his kids in charge. If the shit really hits the fan, an outsider (read: someone not named Murdoch) will take over and the sleaze will continue. The same business under a new name.

However, for the time being we can indeed take some small comfort in the fact that what everyone pretty much suspected is true: that Murdoch can, without blinking, simultaneously state that he is a “hands-on” mogul, and yet he knows nothing about the illegal activities carried on at the newspapers he so prizes.

There have been several media commentators who have spoken about the nature of Murdoch as both an omnivorous acquirer and despoiler of media, including Bill Moyers. However, I want to point you to the words of the exceptionally talented writer of brilliant teleplays, Mr. Dennis Potter.

Potter was the best British television writer ever and was certainly one of the world’s best as well. His creations were emotional, cerebral, and trailblazing — just look at how many people, including talents like Alain Resnais and Woody Allen, have made use of the “fantasy musical” construct that Potter pioneered in Pennies From Heaven.

When you reflect upon the contributions of the two men, perhaps the only entertaining thing that Murdoch has been involved with was the fashioning of the catchiest and sleaziest headlines ever (as with The New York Post’s memorable “Headlesss Man in Topless Bar”). He wasn't creatively involved with this at all, though — he was just the "wallet" behind the news.

What Potter created, on the other hand, are some of the finest television programs EVER. Full stop, no arguing about it. His work has a resonance for me and the millions of others who’ve seen it because he reflected upon both the darkest and the most hopeful parts of the mind and heart. This can be seen to best advantage in this scene from Pennies From Heaven, in which he uses for the first time the song that became a kind of signature piece for his “memory” plays, “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By.” Potter’s gift lives on long after his departure:



And yes, he despised Murdoch, and here is the clip I’ve been thinking about all week:



The gent who put this up at the Handwritten Theatre blogspot, notes that Dennis left us in 1994, and Murdoch is still prospering. But whose name will live on longer? I don’t think I even need to answer that. Just watch the plays.

“The song is over, but the melody lingers on.”

Sins of the Flesh: Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle

On any short list of things that MUST come out some day on DVD in America are the brilliant television plays of British TV genius Dennis Potter. Currently, the only place to discover these slices of innovation, raw emotion, and just incredibly fine writing are at the Paley Centers in New York and L.A., but at least one of Potter’s many “missing” masterpieces is available on YouTube. Two posters in fact have put up the original television version of his Brimstone and Treacle. I thank them both heartily, and any other Potter gems they can throw our way would be more than appreciated.

The 1976 play was banned from the BBC, and didn’t air until 1987, but by that time the British public had the opportunity to see it on stage (in ’77), and in a big-screen version starring Sting and Denholm Elliott. It concerns a drifter who scams his way into the house of a couple tending to their daughter, who is in a coma because of a hit-and-run incident years before. It is implied that the charming-yet-sinister drifter could well be Old Scratch himself. The play is only one of the many brilliant Potter productions that need desperately to reach a broader audience (currently it's only easy to find his Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven in the U.S.). If I needed to make a short list (having seen most of the stuff the Paley Center has in its simply amazing coffers), I’d also include Moonlight on the Highway, Joe’s Ark, Schmoedipus, Double Dare, Blue Remembered Hills and, most definitely, Follow the Yellow-Brick Road. For the time being, feast thine orbs on the original Brimstone: