Elijah Moshinsky | Ghosts / 1987 [BBC TV production]

some questions to ibsen about his ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Ibsen (writer), Elijah Moshinsky (director) Ghosts / 1987 [BBC TV production]

 

I must presume that nearly everyone who has and is currently reading my USTheater, Opera, and Performance website and the many volumes of my annually produced My Year will know something, and may even have possibly read Ibsen’s 1881 drama, which had its premiere in, of all places, Chicago, Illinois in 1882, performed by a traveling Danish theater company, made up of mostly amateur performers.

     This play, if you recall, is not a work about tragic figures who are punished for their refusal to live up to the society’s moral values, but are brought down, quite ironically, by their refusal to break the strict values of the late 19th century provincial world in which they live.

      In particular, the seemingly saintly Mrs. Alving (quite brilliantly acted in this BBC production by Judi Dench), after long enduring her husband’s “degeneration”—which consists, evidently, of wine and women, including bedding the house maid Johanna—she rushes into the arms of her local pastor, Manders (Michael Gambon), for advice and, so it seems from her later confidences, perhaps even for love.

      Insisting that she return home to help her husband defeat his devils—a common dictum even today among hypocritical spiritual advisors who order women to remain in the bondage of abusive relationships—she has been forced as a young inexperience woman to fend for herself. Given the intelligence and fortitude Mrs. Alving naturally possesses, she returns, sending her young son, at a far too early age, to Paris to study art, she taking over her disinterested husband’s financial affairs which, upon his death, has made her a wealthy woman.

     Now, years later, she is able to build an orphanage in his name, partly a tribute to her guilty conscience and, at the same time, an attempt to close all debts, emotionally and morally, she may feel she still owed her entrapped husband—particularly after she has come to realize that as entangled as she was in a relationship of deceit, so was Captain Alving ensnared by close-minded values of those around him, including herself.

     Into this hothouse of sorrow and guilt, her son Oswald (Kenneth Branagh), after having some success in his artistic career, returns to the isolated, always darkened but immaculately kept house, presumably to help celebrate the new orphanage, but actually because he is having difficulty in seeing which has sent him to a doctor who, as close as Ibsen himself is able to speak the truth, is diagnosed as having a “softening of the brain”—or, in modern parlance, the young man is suffering from inherited syphilis and will soon become blind.

      All of this is complicated by Manders’ visit to the Alving manse to deliver a speech for the opening of the orphanage, a time when Mrs. Alving also chooses to reveal to him that her husband was the father of the beautiful young woman now working as her housemaid Regina (Natasha Richardson), not the often drunken and truly hypocritical Engstrand, who by cozying up to the pastor has hoped to get his “daughter” to return to town with him, where he plans to open a “home for wandering sailors” with perhaps a little grant for his new enterprise as well.

      As if things were not bad enough, Oswald appears to have taken a romantic liking to Regina, who unknown to either of them, are half sister and brother.

      Now that I’ve refreshed your memories a bit, I have two major questions to ask, both of which, have troubled me since I first read this play in Norway as a 16-year-old.

    Let me begin, Mr. Ibsen, with the problem of Engstrand (Freddie Jones), who is also the first character of your dark drama to express his chicanery. The savvy Regina immediately sees through his proposals to create a home for sailors, particularly when he insists that she come “home” to help him run it. The “home” clearly is to be a whorehouse, and the feisty woman whom Mrs. Alving has helped to educate wants nothing at all to do with it. Besides, it is clear that she has her eyes on the young son of the Alving family, who has previously promised to take her back with him to Paris. In secret she has even learned French. Indeed, Regina is quite openly embarrassed by her “father,” and several times insists he leave her and the house immediately.

     Engstrand, while later pretending a newfound religiosity, invites Manders to lead the nightly prayers, a ceremony he claims he has instigated for the betterment of his fellow carpenters.

     Even a 16-year-old boy could see through his plot. As the candles are lit for the prayers, flames are ignited by the fresh sawdust of the construction, and the would-be orphanage quickly burns to the ground. Engstrand, certainly the firebug behind the orphanage’s destruction, can now freely, if somewhat subtly, bribe Manders into making sure that he receives some of Mrs. Alving’s remaining funds for his sailor’s home project.

     Given Regina’s immediate recognition of her father’s intentions and Mrs. Alving’s knowledge that he is only the titular father of her husband’s child, how can Manders or anyone else—including Regina, when she finally learns of her true parentage, determines to become a prostitute in the tradition of her mother by returning to town with Engstrand—want anything to do with this scoundrel? Why, Mr. Ibsen, has Mrs. Alving, knowing what she does, even hired him, evidently paying him well, to work on the construction of the orphanage?

     And, of course, you carefully reveal Engstrand’s multiple deceptions—at one point even convincing Manders that in taking in Johanna, while ignoring the money she had been bequeathed by Mrs. Alving, he married her simply out of love and caring for a girl in her predicament.

     Hardly does Manders enter the Alving house, when he appears scandalized that Mrs. Alving is reading contemporary fiction, seriously warning her against their effects, although he has admittedly read none of them.

     A short while later he convinces the benefactress that if she were to buy insurance to cover the new orphanage she (and more particularly he) might be subject to local talk about the necessity to insure something that stood for a godly belief in the betterment of the society around them, both town and country.

     Later, he is outraged by the fact that Oswald has not only regularly dined with his artist friends, many of whom are unmarried and fathers of children, but that Oswald speaks out so strongly for the natural morality of his friends as opposed to church teachings.

     When we finally learn of his long-ago advice to Mrs. Alving and his refusals to accept her desperate love for him, we can only ask, Mr. Ibsen, what on earth was behind Fru Alving’s attraction to this hypocritically babbling idiot in the first place? Even she, when Manders becomes convinced of Engstrand’s defense of his marrying the Alving’s housemaid, calls him a “baby.”

     Dear Mr. Ibsen, why has she even allowed him—given her own self-revelations and her growing investigation of the narrow culture in which she lives—into her house? Letting him run her financial affairs with the orphanage is almost inexplicable. Throughout much of Elijah Moshinsky’s brilliant production, Dench is forced to sit in silent observation of this fool who seems more out of a comic opera or a play by Molière than one the great Norwegian characters of the past drawn from your prolific pen.

     In the end, I feel the Manders figure is almost a statement of your failure, Mr. Ibsen, in this play. If the events of Ghosts with its series of recurring patterns that apparently cannot be contained by its characters suggests a truly contemporary tragedy, its stock figures such as Engstrand and Manders to not feel appropriate to a work that so dutifully explores the intelligent and inquisitive performances of actors such as Dench, Branagh, and Richardson.

     Beyond the revelations of Mrs. Alving and the hard-hearted realism of Regina—we eventually learn that Oswald wanted her to remain close to him so that, when the time came when he would lose his sight, predicting that she would have grown tired of having to deal with such an invalid, Regina might willingly and mercifully have injected him with the morphine he brought back to Norway with him—my only possible justification Engstrand and Manders inclusion in Mrs. Alving’s and Regina’s hearts that the two would-be seers, each in their own way, are also quite blind.

     It is only Oswald, unable now to see even the sun along the horizon of daybreak, who can truly perceive that for all their failures he now must die. His cry of “the sun, the sun” might almost be read as emanating from a kind of new Christ, crying out “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they did.”

     The only choice for the indecisive Mrs. Alving, syringe in hand, is to become a kind of errant Mary, helping to kill her immaculately-birthed* child.

 

*I use this phrase because in Ibsen’s play, Mrs. Alving, who would have certainly passed on her son’s syphilis, seems to be free of all its symptoms.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2020).

John Ford | Upstream / 1927

the faith keepers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Randall Faye (screenplay, based a story by Wallace Smith), John Ford (director) Upstream / 1927

 

By the mid-20s 90% of all commercial pictures screened around the world were made in the US. One of the last stops of the US distribution shipments was New Zealand, and when they finished showing there, those distributors expected that either the copies would be destroyed or shipped nearly 7,000 miles back to the US. But New Zealanders, fortunately, did not listen much to the distributor’s expectations, and many of them fell into collector’s hands, ending up eventually in the New Zealand Film Archive, where at the turn of 21st century, film archivists found hundreds of canisters, unlabeled and even mis-labeled, containing numerous US films that were destroyed or deemed lost to decay in the US.

      Among those “lost films” was noted filmmaker’s John Ford’s early silent work from 1926 Upstream which along with some 176 films shipped to the US for preservation, was finally rediscovered by American audiences at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences showing in 2010.

      The film revealed a somewhat different Ford, far more experimental and influenced by unlikely figures such as F. W. Murnau and working in a comedic genre. If there is a hero here, it is the aging, slightly academic Shakespearian actor, Campbell-Mandare (Emile Chautard), penniless as all the others, yet allowed to stay in Miss Hattie’s (Lydia Yeamans Titus) “resting” house simply because of his long-ago status as flame-keeper of great Shakespearian theater. At one point in the work, in pure faith he lights candles to both the great interpreter of Hamlet, Edwin Booth and to his young mentor, Brashingham.

      What it does share is Ford’s later ability to gather a fairly large cast of character types but yet invest each with enough depth that we see them basically as individuals rather than the mere stereotypes.

      All of the figures in Miss Hattie’s house are second or even third-rate has-beens who work throughout the US on brief tours of vaudeville and burlesque, with only the elderly actor already mentioned and the “Star Boarder” (Raymond Hitchcock) having ever performed in legitimate theater. Hattie is particularly fond of her Star Boarder who, although equally poor, flirts shamelessly with Hattie and with any other woman upon whom he casts his eye, particularly The Soubrette (Jane Winton) with whom he regularly attempts to play “footsie” at the dinner table.

      Juan Rodriguez aka Jack La Velle (Grant Withers) is a knife thrower who works regularly with the lovely Gertie Ryan (Nancy Nash), both of whom have temporarily taken on a new member, Eric Brashingham (Earle Foxe), mostly because they feel sorry for him because of his absolute lack of talent and the fact that he has been ostracized from the great acting family of the Brashinghams.

      Hattie’s menagerie also includes a juggler, a sister act (Lillian Worth and Judy King) which the titles tell is closer related as mother and daughter than most such sister acts, and a black servant, who later gets involved in the knife-throwing act.

     Two of the most important tenants, due to their role with regard to the film’s central themes, are the “brother” dancing duo, Callahan and Callahan (Ted McNamara and Sammy Cohen), who as film commentator Hope Anderson confirms, in case anyone missed it, “are most certainly not brothers,” which suggests that the two, sleeping in one bed, are more likely gay lovers. Neither, moreover, are they both Irish, a fact that Hattie uses to threaten them for their non-payment, showing an advertisement of Cohen’s character in a before/after shot of rhinoplasty. The threat is not for their co-habiting as gay men but is an anti-Semitic threat. Jews were even less welcome to “rest” at most such establishments than a gay couple.

      The central subject of this film, however, is the trio of lovers Brashingham who appears to be in love with Gertie, Gertie who is most definitely in love with the fairly handsome untalented actor, and Juan or Jack (depending upon which day they are acting out a Spanish theme) who truly loves Gertie.

       Out of the blue, a theatrical agent, Al Forest, appears. For a moment everyone at the table imagines that he is visiting on their account, but all are shocked when he requests a meeting with Brashingham, who he is willing to hire to play Hamlet in London just on account of his family name.

       From a simply self-centered nincompoop, Brashingham’s transformation to a pompous ass is revealed by Ford through a few remarkably caught poses before the boarding house hall mirror. It is a brilliant scene which demonstrates all we need to know about his thoughtless villain of the piece, who keeps promising Gertie that he has something to ask of her before he leaves.

       She is certain that he will plead with her to join him or even ask her marry him on the spot. But when the time comes his “profound” question is, “Can you loan me 50 dollars?”

     Yet the disappointed troupe are pleased for his sudden, if undeserved opportunity, Campbell-Mandare even offering up to teach the fool—who at the table quotes Hamlet’s famous lines to Horatio “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio,” as “Alas poor Yorick, he knew me well.”—everything he knows about Shakespeare in one night.

     And evidently what he teaches Brashingham is brilliant, since just before going on stage the terrorized actor wishes that his teacher were there to remind him and calls up his mentor’s ghost instead of Hamlet’s father to help him get over his stage fright, another memorable cinematic moment in this excellent film. His performance is declared to be masterful and he is recognized even with a nod from the royal box.

       The brash young man becomes famous, traveling back to New York to throngs of followers who acclaim his performances. But the sad troupers at Hetties receive not a word, not even, in Campbell-Mandare’s case, a simple thanks.

       In the meantime, they all go on tour and return just as broke as they left, several pretending to have mailed Hattie checks, none of which, shockingly, has she received. Even Callahan and Callahan return, welcomed by Hattie and the others with open arms.

      Having completely recovered from her temporary infatuation with Brashingham, Gertie realizes she really loves Jack, and when Jack asks her to marry him quickly accepts with the entire troupe of actors applauding their celebratory kiss and planning their wedding with a boarding-house ceremony.

     All would be well and end well if Brashingham’s brazen agent, Forest, hadn’t suggested that his client pay a visit to the boarding house where he began his career began as a publicity stunt.

      Of course, as required in such plots, Brashingham arrives at the very moment that the couple have declared their vows and imagines that the snap of the camera is for him instead of the couple. The wedding party suddenly is represented, through the actor’s perverted logic, as a celebration for his return. Even Gertie’s bridal bouquet is usurped as flowers intended for him. His old friends can hardly get in a word to describe what is truly happening, both in real time and with regard their feelings about him.

      When Campbell-Mandare compliments him on his performance of Hamlet, hoping that perhaps we might finally be thanked for his contribution, Brashingham declares that his audiences do not come to the theater to see Hamlet but to see him!

     Along with Gertie—furious with her former heartthrob’s return on this special day—the old lover of the bard retires to his room in disappointment and anger.

      Still misconceiving all events, Brashingham even attempts to join the wedding dinner until finally, Jack tells him the truth, while noticing that the now famous Hamlet fraud has also sneaked away from the table to join Gertie in her room.

    Furious, Jack storms toward his new wife’s bedroom, with the now drunken Callahan duo just behind him as support, recognizing presumably what it feels like to be an outsider as Juan/Jack still is by societal definitions. “Honor of family at stake——Callahan and Callahan not foun’ wantin’,” they declare. It is strange perhaps, but maybe inevitable given that they have no family but the actors with whom they board, they become the staunchest of supporters for their friends’ heterosexual love. Ford transforms them into heroes of a different sort.

     But it is Campbell-Mandare who joins the others in this final show-down who truly gives Brashingham a comeuppance, even if the actor is too in love with himself to be affected by his words: “You, on whose unworthy shoulders fell the mantle of Booth, by accident—you, whose conceit is as great as your ignorance——You, in whose power it was to bring joy to thousands! You have degraded your great gift. Get from me! Go!”

       And with that they not only toss him down the staircase but out the front door where he rolls into the row of now several cameras arrived to get a picture of this now infamous celebrity.

       As Ford will achieve time and again through his career, he has restored moral values without diminishing those who may not live precisely according to the societal norm. The outsiders who “rest” at Hattie’s house have found a haven in their mutual concern and love.

     Oddly, Ford’s inclusive view is not so very different from the queer kinds of family love revealed time and again in films such as Rebel without a Cause; The Boys in the Band;  It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives; You Are Not Alone; My Father, My Mother; La Cage aux Folles; Parting Glances; Young Soul Rebels; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Boys on the Side; When Everyone Knows; Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train; Relax...It’s Just Sex, and so very many others, wherein the moral ground of family life is utterly redefined.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).