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HEART OF ANGUISH Richard Brooks’ version of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim was financed by Columbia as a follow-up showcase for Peter O’Toole after the success of Lawrence of Arabia. With James Mason, Jack Hawkins and Paul Lukas in support, with cinematographer Freddie Young and camera operator Ernest Day using Super Panavision, Bronislau Kaper writing the score and Phyllis Dalton designing costumes, the intent was to create another adventurous and highly literate spectacle as big box office. Brooks’ many-years dream of bringing Conrad’s “heart of anguish” novel to the screen died early into the hard ticket run when audiences found it to be neither rousing nor lettered. The reviews weren’t favorable and perhaps the worst was written by a student back in 1965 for a high school paper. “Unpardonable Bomb” screamed the headline. The following doozies are included: “one massive surplus of pitiful celluloid”; “kicks its own bucket due to numerous trite sequences and patterns”; “Brooks’ journey into depth stops when we can’t plainly see a performer in the background in one of O’Toole’s many boring scenes”; “the cluttersome slobs Mason, Hawkins, Lukas, Curt Jürgens and Eli Wallach are assuming to portray undoubtedly serve genuine purposes in Conrad’s novel but they take precious footage away from Daliah Lavi as The Girl, the most beautiful creature you ever laid your eyes upon.” If one lives and perishes by what he writes, even at a tender age, then I’m among the walking dead. (Hyperbole aside, Lavi really was gorgeous back then, and the only thing worth seeing in the movie, this before she got Elizabeth Taylorized by the drooling cosmeticians. Her exotic beauty belied her Jewish Russian-German origins; skin and bone structure flawless, she defied any ethnicity. A Google image search confirms she remains incredibly lovely.) On the basis of a recent ReViewing, the movie doesn’t benefit from time’s miraculous healing, as it remains as much of a corpse as when reposing in theatres back in 1965; the moral-loaded tale of Jim’s quest for a second chance at redemption after cowardice at sea sinks from plot-heavy dreariness. Worse, and we can see it on screen, the actors seem insecure about what the script is articulating: according to the principals, not one received a full shooting script—Brooks kept it close to his vest—and given only those pages they were in. Beleaguered by production problems, native unfriendliness and infestations in Cambodia, he lost energy to coalesce Conrad’s heavier psychologies which also affected O’Toole, equally lost in efforts to supply his own specialty as conveyor of torment first introduced in Lawrence of Arabia and depended upon to elevate a neurotic Henry II in Becket. Having adapted and directed versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood, Brooks was fortunate that smart audiences, understanding the pitfalls inherent in censorship, surprised themselves by how much they enjoyed the substituted convolutions. But Lord Jim maxed out their allowances for moral literacy gone astray and O’Toole’s inscrutable Stations of the Cross. While readers know Conrad is cryptic in his intensified writings on the then-incipient science of mental behaviors, multimillion dollar epics have to give audiences something palpable, beyond the suicidal agonist’s blazingly healthy blue eyes. Probably sloshed when later saying Jim was the best role he ever acted, O’Toole hoped to secure profits from future rentals and sales, the reward of an uncredited associate producer with a few percentage points. At a cost of $12 million and box office receipts at $5 million, with dismal video and DVD sales, he barely earned a dime beyond his salary. (Opening 3/24/1965 at the Cinestage, running 13 weeks.) ROLL OVER IMAGE & POSTER
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER (Revised 9/2023) All Rights Reserved. |
