Wednesday 21 December 2022

GHOSTS OF SCROOGES PAST

From my Christmas Carol archive: memories of three theatrical Scrooges: Patrick Stewart, Anthony Newley (and Scrooge composer, Leslie Bricusse) and Tommy Steele. 

 


 

I sent my programme for the Patrick Stewart one-man production – which one of the greatest pieces of theatre I have ever seen – to (what was then) The Albery Theatre and never getting it back, despite having enclosed return postage! But then, some 18-months later, long after I'd given up on ever seeing it again, the signed programme miraculously materialised, like one of Scrooge's ghostly visitors!

I can't recall how I got the Anthony Newley and Tommy Steele programmes signed, I probably left them with the Stage Door keepers (I was never one for haunting Stage Doors, waiting for the star to leave after a performance) but I certainly remember the circumstance of getting Leslie Bricusse to add his signature to the Newley Scrooge programme.

It was in Beverley Hills where I was interviewing Mr Bricusse for one of my radio shows. After he'd signed the programme, knowing his interest in Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge, I gave him a copy of The Unsung Story, my book on A Christmas Carol. He received it enthusiastically and then, suddenly jumping up, he rushed from the room calling back over his shoulder: "I've got something for you that you absolutely won't have in your Dickens collection!" He  returned with a copy of the Japanese libretto for the Tokyo production of Scrooge to which he added a typical inscription...

 

 


Tuesday 13 December 2022

THE PUPPET'S BACKBONE

 


 

After the truly shameful live-action version of Pinocchio recently released by Disney (a total betrayal of their great animation heritage) the prospect of another movie based on Pinocchio could only come with the knowledge that it couldn’t be worse than the one we’d just been given! As it happens it is, proportionally, as wonderful as its forerunner was dire.

 

If one could pick any director to film the story of a puppet that earns the right to become a real boy, Guillermo del Toro – having a reputation for emotionally complex movies – clearly deserves a place in any list of contenders and, with this truly astonishing film, he has not only proved himself worthy of the task, he has delivered what is nothing short of a masterpiece.

 

The medium in which del Toro has chosen to present this cinematic work of art is the time-consuming, labour-intensive craft of stop-frame animation. It is a technique as old as cinematography: it was responsible for some of film’s earliest experiments in conjuring the illusion of life, the amazing films of Czech puppet film-maker Jiří Trnka, Willis O'Brien’s legendary behemoth, King Kong, Ray Harryhausen’s dinosaurs and demons and the adorable menagerie of Aardman Animations. For this project del Toro has collaborated with Mark Gustafson who was responsible for the animation direction in Wes Anderson’s 2009 adaptation of Roald Dahl's  Fantastic Mr. Fox.  

 


 

Of course, del Toro’s Pinocchio is no closer to Carlo Collodi’s nineteenth century children’s story than was Walt Disney’s 1940 animated classic but – despite the undoubted moments of terror in Uncle Walt’s telling – del Toro has plumbed every nuanced psychological depth of the concept of a man-made creature given life that has been an ever-present narrative trope from Ovid’s Pygmalion and Galatea, via Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Chucky in the film Child’s Play and after.

 

Del Toros “little puppet made of pine” is no finely chiselled and polished marionette; he is a grotesque mockery of a child, crudely cobbled into being by an inebriated, grief-stricken Geppetto. We are in familiar del Toro territory: Pinocchio is a freak, a misfit, an outsider and a potential threat to everyone who conforms to societal norms. In a touching true moment of innocent self-understanding, Pinocchio compares his misaligned limbs with those of Geppetto’s finely carved figure of the crucified Christ (himself an image of the dangerous outsider) in the hillside village church. 

 

The script of this – the 22nd cinematic variation on the Pinocchio theme – admittedly plays faster and looser with Collodis didactic text than even Disneys script-writers: the explosive puppet-theatre showman is neither Collodis Mangiafuoco nor Disney’s (volcanically named) Stromboli, he is, here, Count Volpe: an amalgam of the original man-mountain of malignancy (his original puppet-persona is still to be glimpsed as one of the carnivals background-freaks) combined with the wily Fox and his side-kick Cat who were the stand-out rogues of the Disney version seducing Pinocchio from the straight-and-narrow with the romantic dream of an actor's life.” In this new incarnation, the films central villain focuses the myriad ideas and forces that oppose Pinocchio's naive integrity.  

 

 

Collodis life-empowering Fairy with Turquoise Hair (Disney’s Hollywood-blonde Blue Fairy) is here transformed into an wondrous being: a mystical blue creature with wings of eyes like some Biblical phenomenon that del Toro names a Wood Sprite – the spirit not just of the woods, it seems, but of all things wooden – who with her similarly blue, many-eyed horned sister – are ancient, fantastical, creatures from a hitherto unexplored cavern in Pans labyrinth.



As in Disney, the talking cricket (so swiftly and violently dispatched by Pinocchio in Collodi’s novel) assumes the role of storyteller with the task of having charge of Pinocchio’s moral education given new meaning by his actually living in a knot-hole in the puppet’s chest. 

 

 

The cricket (or to give him his new, grandiose name ‘Sebastian J. Cricket’ is spoken – and sung – for by Ewan McGregor in a mix of bug bemusement and human irritation while David Bradley (in his third movie for del Toro) gives us the perfect Geppetto – a damaged soul, haunted by the past, wounded by loss and wrestling with those issues that have – throughout history – confronted fathers and sons. There is a starry line up of supporting voices including Christoph Waltz (as the, by-turns, charming and malevolent Count Volpe), Tilda Swinton (and the Sprite and Death) and an impressive vocal performance from young newcomer, Gregory Mann, as the titular character.

 

Eschewing the original period of the book in favour of Second World War Italy under ‘Il Duce’, del Toro gives uses his seemingly innocent puppet show to address a vast agenda of topics including war and peace, faith and disbelief, trust and deceit, wisdom and folly, grief and joy, cowardice and courage and, ultimately – in Geppetto’s relationship with both his long dead son and his own self-carved replacement – we are asked to grapple with nothing less than matters of life and death.

 

The scenario hurtles towards its climax in narrative territory with which we are familiar from book and earlier films: Geppetto’s rescue bid to save his wayward puppet-child leading to Pinocchio’s quest to save his creator-father from the monstrous dog-fish that has swallowed him and his little boat. The ending, however, is not quite what we may have been expecting, but – without spoiling your discovery – it is one that not only feels true to everything that has gone before but also, perhaps, the only place where del Toro could possibly ring down the curtain.

 

There are many moments en route to that place when – so bound up are we in this story and its telling – that it is difficult to remember that all the characters in this intimate drama are puppets – not just the one who looks like a puppet!

 

 

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio achieves what only truly great animation can achieve: permission for an audience to invest in the sheer wonderment of story and characters and so allow themselves to be moved to laughter and tears by the age-old magic of puppetry. 

 



Thursday 8 December 2022

HUMBUG!



I am a devout and devoted ‘Dickensian Christmas Caroller’! (Did you know I am obsessed with Dickens’ famous “Ghost Story of Christmas”? Or that I once wrote a book about it?) So it’s always a case of anticipated pleasure when a December rolls around offering a new version of the best-known Christmas story outside of those in the Gospels!

 

 

Netflix’s Scrooge: A Christmas Carol, is very much an animated movie for our times: slick, brittle-hard, animation (oh, how I yearn, instead, for the humanity of Aardman’s Plasticine world); cute (but oddly unlovable) doe-eyed moppets; clumsy diversity-realigned characterisations (Scrooge’s nephew with an Indian Raj bride and even a hajib-wearing Londoner spotted in the crowd scenes); ratcheted-up grotesquery and exhausting, eye-tiring, over-the-top special effects sequences. Oh, yes, and there’s a dog: a bloodhound inherited by Scrooge from his “dead to begin with” partner, Jacob Marley. 

 


There is, of course, the obligatory starry voice cast: headed by the ubiquitous Luke Evans as Ebenezer Scrooge but with standout performances from a chilling Jonathan Pryce as the icy spectre of the late Mr. Marley and a cosy, quirky Olivia Colman as a mercurial Ghost of Christmas Past candle.

 


On the plus side (and every version of A Christmas Carol, although sometimes challenging to identify, will have occasional redeeming features), there are one or two smart plot embellishments such as having the young Scrooge working in a blacking factory and the put-upon clerk, Bob Cratchit, being (without knowing it) the son of one of those who, many years before, had been cruelly brought to ruin by Messrs Scrooge and Marley.

 

What really got me through this over-long, over-done interpretation were the sharp lyrics and fuzzy sentiment of the songs by the late Leslie Bricusse. It was, I admit, a case of chronic nostalgia for I first heard these songs on a December night, fifty-two years ago, when my best friend and I attended a royal charity premiere for Ronald Neame’s film musical, Scrooge, starring Albert Finney as Dickens’ “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” 

 

Later that evening, fuelled with the spirit of Christmastide (and a few ‘rum-and-blacks’) I recall we danced our way down Charing Cross Road singing Bricusse’s particularly catchy little ditty, ‘Thank You Very Much’ to the bemusement of passers-by.  


 

In 1992, Bricusse reworked the musical for the stage with his long-time friend and creative collaborator Anthony Newley (Stop the World – I Want to Get Off) as the titular humbug, a role later revived by Tommy Steele. Obviously, being the Carol nerd that I am, I saw both these titanic (if idiosyncratic) legends in the role.

 


It is the case, therefore, that these songs have been part of my musical psyche since I was 21-years-old and – alongside the carols that I’ve known since my childhood – are an indelible element of my personal Christmas soundtrack. Maybe that fact may have softened what might otherwise have been a less tolerant review of the new movie, but – as is almost always the case with adaptations of this book (think of the versions with Alastair Sim, George C. Scott, Kelsey Grammer, Mickey Mouse, The Muppets or Mr Magoo) something always comes through – powerfully or obliquely – of Dickens’ miraculous concoction of jollity and sorrow, hope and regret, the innocence of youth and the sagacity of age, searing social commentary, warm-hearted, open-handed Christian compassion and the very essence of ‘Christmasness’ as only this literary alchemist could conjure.