Wed 28 Oct 2009
Movie Review: A DANDY IN ASPIC (1968).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Suspense & espionage films[15] Comments
A DANDY IN ASPIC. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1968. Laurence Harvey, Tom Courtenay, Mia Farrow, Harry Andrews, Peter Cook, Lionel Stander, Per Oscarsson. Original music: Quincy Jones. Screenwriter: Derek Marlowe, based on his novel of the same name. Directors: Anthony Mann, Laurence Harvey (the latter uncredited).
A troubled production usually means a troubled if not bad movie, and A Dandy in Aspic is not much of an exception, if it’s one at all. Its director, Anthony Mann, died during the filming of this movie, and Laurence Harvey, to save the film, took over. (I’ve not been able to learn exactly what percentage Harvey did, but presumably it was all of the location shooting — in and around Berlin, Germany — and of course putting the film together at the end.)
Anthony Mann’s death also put the film way over schedule, which kept Mia Farrow overseas away from her then husband, Frank Sinatra, which strained their marriage to its final breaking point, or so I’m told. (That he was 30 years old than she was may have also had something to do with it.)
None of which does a viewer have to know to decide on his or her own that a movie just isn’t cutting it. It’s the tale of a Russian spy (a dashing but dour fellow named Eberlin, aka Laurence Harvey) who’s dug himself into the British spy service so well that no one knows that he’s also been busily assassinating some of their best operatives. They have his name, Krasnevin, but no more than that, and the task that Eberlin is asked to do is to eliminate him — or that is to say, himself.
It is difficult at first to understand all of this, and thank goodness for movies on tape or DVD where you can back up every once in a while. But this is one of those spy films in which the plot is deliberately kept murky so as to make a point about the dirty nature of the spy business, but which also helps make sure that the viewers are puzzled as well. (Avoiding this small difficulty is the narrow path that spy books and espionage movies must travel, without a lot of leeway. Only the best seem to do it well.)
My problem is that Russian names all sound alike to me — a deficiency on my part and no one’s fault but my own — and worse, many of the other mostly dour actors look very much alike. (Harvey is the only one who’s also dashing, but some of the chaps on the British side are rather overweight and somewhat humorous in that regard — but they’re suits only and otherwise pretty much indistinguishable.)
Getting back to Eberlin, he’s indeed dashing enough to attract the attention of a free lance photographer named Caroline, delightfully played by an innocently wide-eyed Mia Farrow.
In fact, Miss Farrow is the only source of light and utter joyousness in the entire movie. The rest is a deep study in emotions and deceptions — Eberlin’s only real wish is to return to his native Russia, but naturally he’s too useful to the Russians where he is — and of course the seriousness of the trap he finds himself in.
A musical score by the likes of a Quincy Jones is usually a plus for most movies, but in this case, it is not so. A good rule of thumb to go by is that if you notice the music, the movie is not completely capturing your attention, and so it is here. While the score is modern enough, for the late 60s, it’s also gimmicky and predictable.
For me at least, to sum things up, while this movie had its moments, enough so that to suggest watching it may be a worthy way to spend an evening, given the judicious use of the rewind button. And yet. There is also the ending, which I see I haven’t mentioned so far, one that comes as both a surprise and inevitable, as is true in most serious spy and espionage movies, but in this case, it is one, sad to say, that you will remember no more than five minutes after you have turned off the TV.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
I read the book when it was run in The Saturday Evening Post and became a fan of Marlowe’s, so the film was a disappointment to me. I did think Tom Courtenay gave a good performance as Harvey’s nemesis though.
Frankly I never cared for Mia Farrow and was not moved by her performance here which felt to me out of step with everyone else in the film. That may just be a personal bias though.
As for troubled productions your generalization is right, but keep in mind to some extent Gone With the Wind, Mister Roberts, and The Wizard of Oz were ‘troubled’ (multiple screenwriters, mid picture directorial switches — in the case of Roberts the John Ford sections were often directed by Ward Bond), and then too there are films where everything went right but the picture.
I don’t know if it was his health or what, but many of Mann’s later productions seem to have been troubled, though dying seems pretty near the top of the troubled list. Still, Macao survived Von Sternberg’s death (and may have benefited by Nicholas Ray taking over) and in this case at least Harvey had some directing experience.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Yes, indeed. Mia Farrow was certainly out of step with everyone else in the film. The only difference between you and me is that I saw her role and performance in a good way!
As I was writing up my review, it came to me that I really ought to see the movie again to be sure I understood everything that was going on. And maybe my opinion would change if I did, but with all of my extended usage of the rewind button, I kind of feel as though I’ve already seen it twice.
But maybe if I did (for the third time) I’d finally understand exactly what the role of Tom Courtenay’s character was supposed to be, in the Big Picture. That he was Harvey’s nemesis, yes, but I have the feeling that more was intended, and I did’t (and still don’t) have a grasp on that.
So I didn’t mention Courtenay in my comments at all, but I’m glad you did, as yes, he was substantially more than OK.
October 29th, 2009 at 2:23 am
Re Courtenay there is a bit of irony there we are supposed to pick up that the upper middle class Harvey is a Commie, while the lower middle class Courtenay is true blue.
There is a not so subtle comment there. Also there is the implication that Courtenay’s character both admires what Harvey’s character has that he can never be and resents it as well. It all goes back to the whole British class thing and no doubt there is a bit of an attack on the James Bond thing as well since the Bondish Harvey is a traitor. No doubt Marlowe has Kim Philby, another traitor to class as well as country, in mind when he wrote the book.
One of the problems when a writer adapts his own novel is that he can be too subtle in interpreting his own work assuming the audience gets what he was saying. Sometimes an outsider will make things more clear. And it is also possible that had Mann lived to edit the film he might have cut it in a way that made things a bit more obvious. As I recall Harvey’s directorial effort it was on the arty side.
In either case the film doesn’t manage to generate much suspense or irony from the Big Clock set up of the man who is hunting himself. You have to think Mann would have done better if he was in better health at the time.
October 29th, 2009 at 6:12 am
I’ve always kinda liked this movie, one of the few to capitalize on Harvey’s patently unlikeable persona. One serious problem with understanding the damthing is that two actors resemble each other (they are played by brothers!) and have roughly analogous parts: one works for MI5, the other for KGB, and it’s hard at times to tell them apart. Still, there are some nice bits in it, and I enjoy seeing it from time to time.
As for Mia Farrow, whom I also like, I guess she now objects to ther notion of a young adult woman marrying a man decades older than she.
October 29th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Dan and David —
Yes, there are indeed some nice bits in this movie, and thanks to your combined input, I’ve decided to buy the DVD, as I suspect I will be wanting to watch this movie again.
(When I taped it off cable a couple of weeks ago, it was interrupted for several seconds by some sort of FCC test alert on the screen, so a permanent — and intact — copy would be nice.)
And next time I’ll be looking for more overt signs of the class hatred Courtney’s character had for Harvey’s. David, what you say makes a lot of sense, but I missed it entirely, except in the most subliminal sense.
Question: Is this played up more in the book? In the movie, it’s obvious, now that you’ve pointed it out, but at the time, I slid right over it. (Or it slid right beneath me.)
— Steve
October 29th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Actually I think the casting of Courtenay makes the class thing more obvious in the film than the book, but it is there in both.
I suspect the whole class thing seemed so obvious to Marlowe and the British cast they may have missed that it wouldn’t be that clear to an American audience. Though I would think the casting of Harvey in the lead role and Courtenay as his nemesis was meant to exploit that aspect of the story with as little commentary as possible. But its a major element of the film and the book, second only to the protagonists plight having been assigned to kill himself.
The problem for Harvey was that unlike James Mason or Dirk Bogarde he couldn’t turn off that unlikeable streak, though he made good use of it in several films, notably Rebus (no relation to Ian Rankin’s John Rebus) where he plays an alcoholic agent.
And sorry guys I always found Mia Farrow to be one of the most annoying actresses on the screen and didn’t really care for her in anything until Woody’s Purple Rose of Cairo. I know it is just me, but I rooted for Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby. She was the primary reason I couldn’t watch Peyton Place on television. No matter what she was in she always seemed to be in a different film that everyone else.
And while we are on Derek Marlowe, find a copy of his novel Echoes of Celandine (1977 filmed as The Disappearance with Donald Sutherland) a good spy thriller, and Somebody’s Sister (1974) a Chandleresque pi novel about transplanted English pi Walter Brackett in a case set in seventies San Francisco. The latter is a damn good pi novel.
October 29th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
I’ve been doing some research. Not one of the online reviews of A DANDY IN ASPIC have pointed out what you have, David, the reason for the hatred of Tom Courtney’s character toward Lawrence Harvey’s, not VARIETY, not TIME MAGAZINE, not even the NEW YORK TIMES (Renata Adler).
Here’s a typical way their relationship is described: “Running out of operatives, his superiors decide that Eberlin must find and eliminate the killer they know as Krasnevin, and to do so team him with Gatiss who hates Eberlin for unspecified reasons.”
But I have not come across any British reviews of the movies, only US ones, and they all take it for granted that the key to the movie is the gimmicky one, the Eberlin is assigned to take out himself.
After that none of the reviewers seem to have known what was going on. Not one.
But you’re right, no doubt about it.
Too bad you’re so wrong about Mia Farrow, though. (But while I didn’t take an official tally from all those reviews I read, I have to admit that the anti’s as far as she is concerned are ahead by about a two to one ratio.)
The only book by Derek Marlowe I’ve read is SOMEBODY’S SISTER, and I echo you there. A damn good PI novel.
— Steve
October 30th, 2009 at 2:07 am
I suspect the Brits just didn’t think why Courtenay and Harvey disliked each other needed pointing out, and the Americans were just oblivious to it. But I would argue there is nothing unspecified about the tension between the two men if you know anything at all about the British class system. I guess they should have been more subtle about it and just cast Courtenay as a Cockney ala Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer.
In addition in the book we are told that Gatiss is the one agent in all the service Eberlin fears, the one most likely to catch him, and in the book it is made clear Gatiss is Jewish and may resent Eberlin’s obvious social superiority as well as not trusting his sort in general (in the book we are told Gatiss is the highest paid agent in the service and shown him holding himself apart from others in several scenes).
Gatiss isn’t particularly nice to anyone in the book, he holds himself reserved and apart — but it works on Eberlin’s guilty conscience. Eberlin depends on his charm to deal with people and Gatiss is oblivious to it. It’s as if Jean Valjean had been asked to team with Javert.
“Look Gatiss — who the hell asked you to burst in here? For Godsakes, its quite obvious there’s no love lost between us …”
“I don’t like you Eberlin. I don’t like you personally because you are weak and dishonest and pathetic and I deplore that. But more than that — I don’t like you because I don’t trust you. You’re frightened of me and that disturbs me. I want to know why…”
Maybe this key speech got left on the cutting room floor. In the book Gatiss is an outsider who doesn’t belong to or much care for the old boy’s club Eberlin moves so effortlessly in. I actually think the class thing is more emphasized in the film by the casting of Courtenay. Keep in mind Courtenay, like Albert Finney, came out of the ‘angry young man’ school of British cinema represented by John Osborurne’s Look Back in Anger from the late fifties and early sixties. Casting Courtenay in a role was designed to tell audiences something in itself.
re Mia, it’s not a comment on her talent, I’m just not a fan, though I do think she is completely off in this one. That whole deer trapped in the headlights thing she had never appealed to me. Horse races and all that.
Marlowe’s novels are a mixed bag. At least one is a Graham Greene style thriller, another a historical novel, Do You Remember England? a bit odd, and Echoes of Celandine a thriller about a British assassin obsessed with the disappearance of his wife. Donald Sutherland, Christopher Plummer, Virginia McKenna, David Hemmings, and David Warner star in the Canadian film based on the book, The Disappearance.
But that said, Somebody’s Sister is a damn fine pi novel. Too bad Marlowe never followed up on it or Walter Brackett.
October 30th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
I really enjoyed A DANDY IN ASPIC. It is a visually stylish and interesting story.
It helps that I’m Laurence Harvey’s only known film fan. I’m still mad at THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE for giving Harvey a bum deal!
October 30th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Mike, there are no fewer than >>(3)THREE(3)
October 30th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
While Mike and Dan continue to discuss how many fans of Laurence Harvey there are — so far they’re only up to less than the number of fingers on one hand — let me continue on with the conversation between David and myself.
I found a review of DANDY on Cinema Retro, which I believe to be a British magazine, but once again, the fellow doing the writing misses the key point that David has made about the movie. (He also does not think highly of Mia Farrow.)
See http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/150-DEAN-BRIERLY-REVIEWS-TWO-FILMS-BY-ANTHONY-MANN.html
I’m starting to wonder if any of people who’ve written the reviews I’ve found so far had read the book before they saw the movie. Maybe that’s what makes the difference in knowing what’s going on, or not.
I’m also starting to wonder if there’s some significance to the title that I’ve missed so far. I thought it was referring only to Harvey as a dashing and debonair agent caught up in a sticky plot. Maybe there’s more depth to it than that. David, any ideas?
— Steve
October 31st, 2009 at 6:43 am
The only thing is can add about the title has to do with aspic being a preservative, so in one sense a dandy in aspic is like a fly in amber — trapped and unable to move or hide, which is fairly close to the plot and much the same Steve says about aspic being sticky, but if I do say so myself far more pretentious in the true mode of this film.
I think part of the problem with the whole Gatliss/Eberlin dynamic is as simple as Marlowe himself wrote the screenplay and may not have felt the need to spell out what he thought was fairly obvious, though he does so in the book in one short scene I quoted above. There may also be a key scene on the cutting room floor since though Harvey finished directing the film there is no guarantee he got final cut. That may well have been a committee effort by the producers with little or no concern for the input of Mann’s intentions, Harvey’s work, or Marlowe’s screenplay. Indeed the film feels as if it was edited by a committee and not an individual.
But I still think the not so subtle contrast between the kind of characters Courtenay generally played and the type Harvey tended to play was likely thought to be sufficient visual shorthand to explain the conflict between the two men. Harvey tended to play slightly debauched or damaged aristocrats and Courtenay angry young lower class males (do you remember Courtenay’s role in Dr.Zhivago?). If you have a scene in a film with Harvey, Courtenay, and Peter Cook it shouldn’t take a genius to spot the odd man out socially or to draw the conclusion that if Harvey and Courtenay disliked each other at least some of that tension comes from their social position.
And I still think the film is making an obvious comment about the aristocrat with the Oxbridge accent being a Communist spy and the middle class Jew a loyal English agent. If nothing else it is turning the whole Bulldog Drummond/Sidney Horler thirties dynamic on its head, and I seriously doubt that was anything less than intentional on Marlowe’s part. There is a good deal of social commentary in all of his novels. I like Marlowe, but he is every bit of pretentious enough to do something like that.
If you stop and think about it The Manchurian Candidate plays on the same idea with a tension building in the lower middle class Marko, played by Sinatra, about this devotion he has been brainwashed to feel toward the wealthy upper-crust Raymond Shaw. Much of it isn’t spelled out there either, but implied by the casting of Sinatra and Harvey. This kind of theatrical shorthand probably dates back to Euripides.
Which doesn’t mean a critic would notice it.
Steve, Dan,
With no comment on Mia Farrow’s merits I think the majority opinion on this one would have to negative — which by no means negates your more positive feelings. I think the fairest way to put it is that good or bad her performance doesn’t contribute enough one way or the other to sway the overall judgment into the positive or negative column. Love her or indifferent to her I think here her contribution is a wash. And I’m not sure that is her fault.
I will say, perhaps because I read the book first, I didn’t find this half as confusing as many of the critics seem to — which has happened before, especially with spy films, where the critics sometimes seem to want every thing spelled out and telegraphed like a pie fight in a slapstick comedy. In the same way I’ve heard critics praise the supposedly twisty plot of LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold when in truth the plot is simplicity itself and the complexity lies in the moral dilemma confronting the burned out hero. You have to wonder if some of these critics could have told Agatha Christie from Pirandello if someone changed the names on them.
Keep in mind that with film critics you are sometimes dealing with men of some literacy and vision and sometimes with people who review movies because they haven’t the patience to review books. Not a slam at movie critics, but I’ve seen many a film review that revealed more about the intellectual shortcomings of the reviewer than the overall quality of the film. More often than the same is true of book reviewers. You have to at least know how to read a book to review one, but you don’t really need to know how to watch a film critically in order to review it
Here I think they are probably right on both counts against this film, but still likely miss some obvious things regarding the two main male characters that you would think someone familiar with movie short-hand, who makes a living interpreting it, would recognize fairly easily. On the other hand I would be more sympathetic to someone saying the film simply didn’t reward paying that much attention to.
It’s not worth the effort or it is too obscure in the way it handles the plot is fairer than trying to claim it’s all that complex. The film is less complex than unclear, less convoluted than unspecified. It leaves questions hanging not because it is so complex so much as because it is rather inept at stating them and answering them.
Somewhere between Mann’s death, Marlowe’s too self reverent script, and Harvey’s undoubtedly hurried and harried last minute filling in you get the feeling the movie that might have been made got left on the cutting room floor — if those scenes ever got filmed at all. This plays a bit like the unfinished rough cut of a better film.
October 31st, 2009 at 7:20 am
I think this bio of Marlowe from Wikipedia makes some of my points on the class thing a bit more obvious. Note Marlowe was born into a middle class family in Middlesex, attended a fairly ordinary school, and went to what is commonly known as a “redbrick” university in England. That together with some other evidence suggests he may have had something to say about the Oxford graduate Eberlin who appears to be an upper class Englishman, but is in reality a Soviet spy and assassin Certainly Gatiss is much closer to Marlowe than Eberlin whether he engages his sympathy or admiration more or not.
“Derek William Mario Marlowe (21 May 1938–14 November 1996) was an English playwright, novelist, and screenwriter.
[edit] Life
Derek Marlowe was born in Perivale, Middlesex, and lived there and in Greenford as a child. His father was Frederick William Marlowe (an electrician) and his mother Helene Alexandroupolos. He had early education at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Holland Park.
In 1959 Marlowe went to Queen Mary College of the University of London to study English literature. He never finished his degree course, but the college had a particularly fine theatre (the former People’s Palace in Mile End Road) and Marlowe became part of a core theatre group there. In 1960 the college group formed a semi-professional theatre company, the 60 Theatre Group, and took their production of Tennessee Williams’ play Summer and Smoke to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with Marlowe in the leading role opposite Audrey “Dickie” Gaskell.
He married Susan Rose “Suki” Phipps, stepdaughter of Sir Fitzroy Maclean, in 1968; together they had a son, Ben, to add to Suki’s two sons and two daughters from a previous marriage. He divorced in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles, California.
While working there, he contracted leukaemia, and died of a brain hemorrhage after a liver transplant. He was cremated in California, but his ashes were brought back to England by his sister, Alda. At the time of his death he was planning to return to England and complete a tenth novel, Black and White.
[edit] Work
In 1960 he adapted a story, The Seven Who Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev, for the stage. The 60 Theatre Group first produced the play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1961, and later took it to a student theatre festival in Zadar, Croatia (then Yugoslavia). It was produced in London as The Scarecrow in 1964, and won the Foyle award. In 1962 Marlowe adapted Maxim Gorki’s book The Lower Depths for the London stage.
He was the author of nine novels, notably A Dandy in Aspic (1966), Echoes of Celandine (1970) (re-published as The Disappearance), Somebody’s Sister (1974) and The Rich Boy from Chicago (1979).
His first work for the screen was as co-author with Larry Kramer of a semi-documentary about swinging London called Reflections on Love (1966) and featuring some of the Beatles.
In 1968 he wrote the screenplay of his own novel A Dandy in Aspic, directed by Anthony Mann and starring Laurence Harvey as the double agent ordered to assassinate his own alter ego.
He wrote two episodes of the BBC television series The Search for the Nile in 1971. Other screenplays included Jamaica Inn, Nancy Astor, A Married Man, The Two Mrs Grenvilles, and Grass Roots. His last work was a feature-length episode of Murder, She Wrote produced posthumously in 1997.”
November 30th, 2014 at 2:46 am
Will someone translate the code phrase LH says in German over the phone, for those of us who don’t have the book or DVD? It seems to me it ends in “blimt” phonetically, not enough that I can look it up. I like this movie because I’d rather watch people underact for a change – refreshing. The Disappearance is worth seeing for its atmosphere, and don’t let anyone spoil the ending for you, not even by degree, as in some comments above, which is why I look up something only after the fact – never know what will lessen the impact. Thanks in advance.
December 3rd, 2014 at 5:03 am
This is “A” answering my own question of 11-30-14 (this from a review of Bus Stop Dead Drop):
Die Welt ist Dumm, die Welt ist blind
Wird tauch Abgeschmackter!
Sie spricht von dir, mein schönes Kind,
Du hast keinen guten Charakter.
Die Welt ist Dumm, die Welt ist blind
Und dich wir sind immer verkennen
Sie weiss nicht, wie suss deine Küsse sind,
Und wie sie beseligend brennen.
The world is dumb, the world is blind,
and daily grows more silly!
It says that you, my lovely child,
are no pure-hearted filly.
The world is dumb, the world is blind,
and daily slights your fashion,
who knows how sweet your kisses are,
and how they burn with passion.