Storm Continues. Enter Lear and Fool.

My internet's been bad all weekend due to rain so I watched something I had on file last night, Laurence Olivier's 1983 King Lear. It remains my favourite of all the productions I've seen.

I think Olivier, of all the Lears I've seen, does the best job of conveying the impression of a man going mad but who is also painfully aware of his madness. That's the real heartbreak in his repeated, "Let me not be mad!" line. Not that he's going mad, but that he's aware of it. It's a real horror, especially considering it's one we all may face one day.

His madness really stems from two causes--his age and his grief. It's one thing to say he's foolish for misjudging his loved ones, but then think for a moment about what that must be like. To be brought forcibly to the realisation that your nearest and dearest aren't who you thought they were. It really comes in two layers because first he believes Cordelia and Kent aren't who he always thought they were. He can at least muster confidence enough to banish them. But when he discovers how little he could trust the promises of Regen or Goneril, he learns he can't even rely on his ability to discern revelation. He thought he had a revelation, but he later realises he understood nothing.

This confusion is strikingly mirrored in the subplot about Gloucester and his sons. The poor old man, with his eyes put out, being led to the edge of what he thinks is a cliff. It's ironic that Edgar has the last line of the play, presented like a moral, that we should say what we feel, not what we ought. He spends a lot of time deceiving his father. On the other hand, maybe that was a product of a real temporary madness on Edgar's part. Also, if we interpret the words "say what we feel not what we ought," literally, they don't mean, "Always tell the truth," as they're often thought to mean. Pretending to be Poor Tom and then pretending to have seen a monster has a kind of emotional truth, not unlike the Fool's nonsense. And it's a truth meant to help the old man, not to cut him down, as Regan's, Goneril's, and Edmund's deceptions were.

Still, it's dangerous business. With all of life's ambiguities and confusions, who's really in a position to decide when it's best to tell a falsehood? For this reason, I do think Cordelia made the right choice. Truth is too rare a commodity.

Mistress in Strategy, Love, and Other Things

History remembers Admiral Nelson for his great victories against Napoleon at sea. But, as the popular 1941 film, That Hamilton Woman, shows, he also had an affair with a woman who achieved a great deal of fame in her own right as a society figure and beautiful portrait model. The film, unmistakeably pitched as anti-Hitler propaganda to promote Britain before the U.S. joined the war, was made primarily as a decadent romance by director Alexander Korda. It remains to-day a lovely indulgence.

The adulterous couple were played by a couple married in real life, Vivian Leigh as Lady Hamilton and Laurence Olivier as Admiral Nelson. Although Olivier had already starred in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, Leigh is unmistakeably placed as centre attraction here, likely owing something to the success of Gone with the Wind.

The story is presented from her point of view and we're given a version of her life story as close as the Hays code would allow--and a bit further. She mentions that there had been "other men" in her life before her marriage but doesn't go into detail, certainly not mentioning dancing naked on a gentleman's dinner table at fifteen or the illegitimate child she bore and was forced to give up as a condition of remaining mistress in the household of another gentleman. She's still indignant when she winds up in Naples, expecting to meet one fiance and finds she's been sold off to another, the British Ambassador, Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray). He tells her explicitly his intention is to have her in his home as an ornament, as much as his collection of statues, but also tells her she shall live comfortably.

She does exploit her position cleverly and by the time Nelson finally appears in the film she's able to reach the ear of the Queen and get him the troops he wants faster than her husband can, who would have to go through proper and slower channels. Nelson has an oddly passive role in the film--we hear about his victories at sea but never see them until Trafalgar at the climax in which his primary action is to get shot and wish to see Emma.

It seems impossible that anyone in real life could be as noble or as powerful as Emma is shown to be but the filmmakers had an uphill battle against public morality. It was around ten years later that Ingrid Bergman became an outcast in Hollywood because she and Roberto Rossellini became lovers without being married. Still, the real life Emma certainly did suffer a great deal more than she deserved and is an eminently suitable model for great romantic drama. Vivian Leigh bore enough of a resemblance to her, too, that a number of publicity stills were released where she was posed like the real Emma in her many famous portraits by George Romney.

She's very good in the film, a woman whose pride is certainly well earned, and you can see why Nelson becomes so devoted to her. That Hamilton Woman is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1254

A hidden piece abides in knightly hand.
A warning rook adorns the vacant hall.
A bishop washed a ship with glue and sand.
An active Queen bestows a chequered ball.
A shadow sushi dwelt beneath the sun.
A glowing sea conceals the swimming food.
Entire meals condense beneath the bun.
For ev'ry stage of day's a diff'rent mood.
The captured runner dwells in painted walls.
Expected beans became surprising vines.
Contented faces line the darkened halls.
A solemn troop attend the rustling pines.
A soup of novel words became a spark.
The gathered spots became a bigger mark.

The Gods Over the City

Charles George Gordon was a British officer whose list of seemingly impossible exploits occurred all over the world. He earned the commendation of the Emperor of China for putting down a rebellion and the love of the people in the Sudan for disrupting the slave trade. It all makes the events of 1966's Khartoum seem preposterous but I was surprised to read later how much of it was true. That said, the film has a lot of faults, generally coming off as a poor man's Lawrence of Arabia with its overuse of process shots, clear evidence of poor research, and some improbable plot contrivances. But the cast is great, including Charlton Heston as Gordon and Laurence Olivier as his opponent, the Mahdi, and Ralph Richardson is perfectly cast as a somewhat idealised version of the British Prime Minister William Gladstone.

In this version of history, Gladstone is secretly a strong supporter of Gordon's. Why he should keep it a secret when the public and Queen Victoria are passionately on Gordon's side is put down to the Parliament not liking the cost of Gordon's plan to defend the Sudanese town Khartoum; the Siege of Khartoum is the central subject of the story.

There are some terrific battle sequences in the film, though far from the best I've seen. There are too many shots of guys clutching their chests and falling over theatrically and too many times where the camera is misplaced, as when the front line of the Mahdi's troops rush directly at the camera moving backwards--the men run with obvious restraint to avoid colliding with the thing. But the biggest problem is that the film's stars, Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier, clearly spent very little time on location. We almost never see the latter--and almost always on soundstages when we do--and the former is lamely inserted with process shots that are particularly obtrusive in a night battle.

The film has two scenes where Gordon and the Mahdi meet in the Mahdi's tent; both scenes are somewhat preposterous poetic license and the idea that Gordon can safely drop in on the Mahdi is ridiculous even as the film makes a point of having characters remark on how dangerous it is. But apparently Gordon and the Mahdi really did correspond and the idea of having Heston and Olivier share scenes must have been too good to pass up, especially since the relationship between the two men ends up being the best part of the film.

It turns out, each sees something in the other similar to himself; each believes himself a key figure in the service of God. To the point where the implications of Gordon's defeat are troubling even to the Mahdi. The film spends a lot of time building up Gordon the point where you start to wonder if it's all to flatter Charlton Heston but it pays off in the end, giving the viewer an idea of what it's like when people have so much spiritual investment in their belief in one man.

There's a lot of brown-face in the film, really more than there needs to be, though personally I don't mind when its obviously someone as singular as Laurence Olivier. But the dozens of white actors playing Sudanese men shows just how little the production was willing to work with the location. Meanwhile, Charlton Heston's English accent seems almost okay in some scenes and then is completely absent in others. But otherwise he's good in the role and the film has some great visuals shot in Ultra Panavision.