Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I wonder if there is a connection between the rural tranquillity of film studios in this country, and the sense of sequestered unreality often on our screens? Entering the grounds of these studios, one is struck by the greenness, and a pleasant sense of timelessness. The stages and workshops of Pinewood proliferate around what was once a stately home. Several aristocratic sequences of British comedy have actually been shot on its smooth lawns. There is a grotto of sorts, and a lake, and at least one of the lavatories is still the original mahogany. At Shepperton the gardens are equally trim. The glimpse of rooftops over the trees suggests that one might be about to encounter a sleepy village with a spire, or a straggly piece of Victorian red-brick like William Morris’s house at Bexley.

     I went to Sheperton to watch the filming of Kingsley Amis’s novel That Uncertain Feeling. The film is being produced by Frank Launder and directed by Sidney Gilliat, who made The Gilbert and Sullivan Story, The Happiest Days of Your Life, and the St Trinian’s films. Peter Sellers appears in That Uncertain Feeling as John Lewis, the Welsh librarian. Virginia Maskell is his wife, and the disruptive Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams is played by Mai Zetterling. The day I was there turned out not to be one of the most illuminating. They were shooting inserts and short sequences inside the granite dwelling where the Lewises live in squalor. Several sets were standing, or in course of preparation. The first of these represented the landing and stairs leading up from the Davies’ menage on the ground floor. The banisters were diarrhoea-coloured, and the wallpaper a dingy, imitation Regency-stripe in apple green. At the top a small gate of lath and chicken wire had been fixed to hold the children in check.

     When I went in, Peter Sellers was just bounding up the stairs to announce the unexpected arrival of the ineffectual Bill, one of Elizabeth’s ex-lovers who has been sent over to baby-sit. Sellers was wearing a sort of evening dress, with a stiff wing collar, and looked the proper blend of shambles and aspiring provincialism. His wife, clad in a demodé long taffeta evening gown with a rose clamped to her bosom, was waiting suspiciously at the top.

     ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened. Mrs Gruffyd-Whatnot has sent some character to baby-sit for us, so we can go to her party.’

     ‘What sort of character is he?’

     ‘Oh, you know. Just some chap. He looked sober enough, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t look like a confirmed rapist or anything.’

     In the second take ‘confirmed senna-pod drinker’ was substituted for ‘rapist’, which seemed decidedly weaker. I couldn’t quite see why. It may have been to forestall the censor, although the original line was back when they later shot the same scene from below. Sellers, in any case, ad-libs the whole time, so each scene is apt to vary from take to take.

     All the sets were encouragingly life-like, or Amis-like if that is the same thing. The main one — the sitting room — was stuffed to capacity with tatty furniture, and suggested convincingly the hopeless air of furnished lodgings. There was a sprinkling of antimacassars, and framed photographs of un-eminent Victorians. A monolithic mantelpiece with mirrors and souvenir china was bordered by two alcoves, crammed with books on unpainted shelves that had started to show the pull of gravity. Overpatterned walls, bric-à-brac, a broken doll’s pram, whisky bottles and a vintage wireless set (with one of those speakers in the form of rays of the setting sun) added to the atmosphere. From the front (another set) the house was grey roughcast — semi-detached and respectable. Net curtains screened the glare from the television set inside; genteel evergreen shrubs guarded the entrance, where a man had just finished painting in the paving stones. Despite the fact that most of the exteriors were shot in Wales, there were several backings in the studio depicting Welsh vistas, chiefly narrow houses and irregular granite walls.

     The story of That Uncertain Feeling has had to be considerably adapted for the screen. Bryan Forbes, who wrote The Angry Silence, has done the screenplay. There has been no collaboration with Kingsley Amis, who has a clause in his contract which permits him to dissociate himself from the finished result if he so wishes. There were several problems of adaptation. First because the actual plot is weak, and also because much of the book’s humour (and point) derives from Amis’s descriptive phraseology and farcical Weltschmerz — unreproducable on the screen.

     ‘All those phoney novels and stories about the wry rhetorical wisdom of poetical miners, all those boring myths about the wonder and the glory and the terror of life in the valley towns, all those canonizations of literary deadbeats, charlatans and flops — all this in a part of the world where there was enough material to keep a hundred honest poets and novelists chained to the typewriter. And then, as if Goebbels were to have lamented the decay of personal truthfulness in the Third Reich, you got chaps with the emetic impertinence to complain that Welsh culture was declining. If stuff like The Martyr represented Welsh culture, then the sooner it shut up the better.’

     This sort of thing is difficult to translate into terms of camera angles, or even acting performances, and invariably ends by being sketched in — if at all — in terms of dialogue. This has been one of the greatest changes from novel to screenplay, the change of emphasis from comedy of situation or description to comic dialogue. Some of the original dialogue, I imagine, would still work — like the conversation between the librarian and an obtuse borrower in a parody of a bishop’s mitre:

     ‘Have I read this one?’ she began by asking — a popular query, this, and spoken in the tone of the high-level business executive to the confidential secretary.

     ‘No,’ I said firmly.

     After a searching don’t-lie-to-me glance, she turned over the pages doubtfully and inattentively, then stared hard at the lettering on the spine. ‘Who’s it by?’ she asked at length.

     ‘A very good author.’

     ‘Not too light it isn’t, I hope?’

     Curiously, the one or two scenes of broad farce in the book have been deleted. The one, for instance, where Lewis jumps from his mistress’s bedroom window clad as a period Welsh lady, and is subsequently assaulted by a late-night drunk before he has a chance to reveal himself. This was felt to be out of harmony with the humour of the rest of the film as it now stands. The climactic sequence on the beach, where the affair between Lewis and Elizabeth is consummated, now takes place in the comfort of her home, on the carpet. The main changes in the plot are to do with making more of the hero’s family life (the hero’s what?, as Jim would say), pepping up the competition for the sub-librarian’s job, and leavening the incongruous note of seriousness at the end.

     Few of the protagonists of the film were Amis devotees previously, although most of them now claim to recognize in the author an unmistakable Lucky Jim. Sidney Gilliat, having met Amis, was particularly impressed by his predilection for face-pulling, and was vastly amused by seeing the one for Sex Life in Ancient Rome, so to speak, in the flesh. When the book first came out, Gilliat read it, was unimpressed and was only struck a year later by the idea of putting Peter Sellers into a film version. He wanted to do the screenplay himself, as he normally does, but hadn’t time. So he called in Bryan Forbes, whom he knows well and values highly. Gilliat himself is a small, very intelligent man with a sense of humour. His father was Managing Director of the Evening Standard, so he was earmarked early for journalism. Unfortunately, he disliked it. He bamboozled his way into films via Mycroft, the then retiring film critic of the Standard. After vetting and adapting various scripts, he was fired for over-efficiency, and Frank Launder was appointed in his place. Out of this in some way developed their present partnership. His brother, Leslie Gilliat, is also one of the producers. Peter Sellers tells a story, claimed to be true, about the time when Leslie was searching for a location for Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams’s house. He approached a suitable Victorian mansion, found only the wife at home, and promised to return that evening to discuss the question with her husband. The wife, as it happened, had to stay in that afternoon and, running out of cigarettes, borrowed one of her husband’s cigars which she smoked while making-up in the bedroom. The husband later returned, sniffed the cigar haze surrounding his wife, and demanded to know what man she had been entertaining. Re-enter at this point Leslie Gilliat, who takes from his pocket some of the same cigars which he happens to smoke, and offers the husband one. The resulting asmosphere would have made a Kingsley Amis episode in itself.

     Peter Sellers had also read That Uncertain Feeling, and thought little of it until he was offered the screenplay, which he liked. In discussing this (or any) matter with him, it is difficult at first to know when he is being serious. When I asked him whether he had read Amis’s other novels, he said he hadn’t had time as he had been boning-up on the works of Sigmund Freud. I took this to be part of a general interest in psychology, but it turned out that there is a film in the offing in which Sellers will play Freud. John Huston is making it, and it will not be a comedy.

     Sellers is a dry, shy, retiring man. Getting hold of him is not always easy. He has a system of defences to protect him (in the most charming way) against those he is not anxious to meet. I waited while the press officer set off in search of him. When she was away fruitlessly peering into odd corners of the set, I saw a short figure in evening dress lope from behind some scenery and dart into his caravan. Minutes later the press officer came back. She said that she was sorry, but Peter Sellers was in his dressing room with the door locked, reputedly asleep. I pointed out that someone very similar had just gone into his caravan. He was brought out, and proved then to be very amicable.

     We talked about his latest film, Mr Topaze, which he directed and acted in, and which the critics have mauled. He regrets now having tried to combine acting and direction, but in this instance was rather forced into it. When they came to look for a director for Mr Topaze, it appears that any who were suitable were not available, and there was no one sufficiently versed in Pagnol’s work. So Sellers himself volunteered, was accepted, and made the best he could of it with a stand-in to go through the motions of his part while he directed. His previous experience of directing had only been with The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film. I asked him, appropos of this, how the extraordinary goon humour developed (of which my own favourite scene in the film was the one where a man leans with ostentatious indifference on a fence until the gamewarden Sellers has passed, then takes a gramophone record from his jacket, places it on a tree stump and runs madly round and round it, holding a needle and an amplifier to the disc). He said that the scenes developed, as one might imagine, round a table, with people throwing in ideas and refining them: ‘Now what could be funny here? I know, let’s have a man playing a violin in a field with a music stand in front of him.’ ‘Yes, that’s quite funny. But supposing the music stand is a long way off. Suppose he reads the music through a telescope.’ ‘That’s better. But how does he turn the pages over?’ ‘Suppose he gets on a bicycle and rides over . . . ,’ and so on. It all follows naturally, if you happen to have four people who start by thinking in terms of men pitching tents in the middle of the open countryside and placing mats in front of them to wipe their feet on before entering.

     During the time I talked to him, Sellers was called away to do several short scenes. One of them took place in the entirely enclosed, two-level set of the house, so I couldn’t see what was going on. Another was the sequence where Lewis and his wife return from the party to find Bill, considerably chastened, waiting to tell them in his sepulchral, embittered voice that he has visited the lavatory seven times with their small son. The scene was played slowly, and the banality and unease of the conversation was given a Ionesco-like emphasis, which made it sound very funny. When it was over, Sellers brought out a huge polaroid camera of his own, and started lining up the cast for photographs. He is a rabid photographer, and had, on a set of this kind, plenty to work on. I should particularly like to see his shots of the raucous Welshwoman playing Mrs Davies, who was striding about the set in a drooping sateen dress and old woolly, making amiable jokes about her bust.

     It was difficult to gather, from this evidence, whether That Uncertain Feeling will be good or not. The novel is not Amis’s best; (after Lucky Jim they all seem rather pale and derivative). But both Sellers and Sidney Gilliat, who were unimpressed at a first reading, have high hopes of Bryan Forbes’s adaptation. They themselves represent talented additives to the original mixture, and if the sets are anything to go by, the film will at least have an air of belonging to the present era.