One of the films that helped kill off Gainsborough melodrama, even though officially it was a Sydney Box Production - a big box office failure which, along with Christopher Columbus, turned the British film industry off costume pictures.
Interestingly both films were very male focused. There are women in Byron but the women are all about the guy.
This is a fascinatingly poor film - it doesn't work, for a number of reasons, but there's always something going on.
Dennis Price proves he's not a star by fumbling a role that needed James Mason or Stewart Granger. He's got a decent enough voice but he doesn't have charisma or looks and he over acts - look at his "I'm sick" acting at the beginning. He doesn't seem particularly passionate or lively. Maybe a better director and script would have helped - but from watching Price in other films I think he simply lacked that level of bigness that's required for a star. He was lucky in that for so long Gainsborough saw him as a James Mason back-up and gave him so many chances. A good character actor, no more.
The support cast are better. Mai Zetterling impresses as Byron's One True Love (not so true that he doesn't go off gallivanting to fight in Greece); Joan Greenwood is an ideal Lady Caroline Lamb and I like Sonia Hale as his wife (I liked Hale in Broken Journey too - she was pretty and could act). Linden Travers is quite good as his half sister (their scenes together do have urst). Raymond Lovell isn't bad as Byron's friend.
The film feels as though it tries to put in too much - to cover all the greatest hits of Byron's career, including the quips ("mad bad and dangerous to know","I woke up to find myself famous"), some key poems ("she walks in beauty"), the key love affairs (sensible wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, Italian girl, possibly half sister), they key career points (House of Lords, Greece).
It borrows from Citizen Kane in that we hear from the POV of five different people. It also adapts a radio play device of there being a court hearing in heaven (taken from an actual radio play). I know this was used in A Matter of Wife and Death but that felt cinematic - this feels like a radio play.
It's patchy, it shouldn't have cost as much as it did, it feels like a bunch of scenes were cut out. It's a good lesson to biopic makers for what not to do with its miscast star and lack of focus.
Still, some of the production design, costumes and acting deserve respect. The film doesn't work but it's not hideous.
No comments:
Post a Comment