| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | Cinema |
The British equivalent of Streetcar Named Desire with Britain’s answer to Marlon Brando: Richard BURTON.
Because class interests are inherently inimical, meaningful relationships between (& within) social classes are essentially impossible. The eternal tension between the various parties makes conflict inevitable; while helping to sustain the very system that the anger rails against. Yet, the struggle is internecine since each group needs the other - in the absence of mutual respect - to determine itself; each class defining itself by what it is not rather than what it is.
Mary URE is peculiarly effective as the masochistic wife of the archetypal Angry Young Man - the intense BURTON; making them an exceptionally realistic couple who have transgressed social norms by crossing class boundaries to self-nullifying affect. Yet, they clearly do love one another.
The only uneasiness in the movie is an unholy dramatic strain between the gritty realism of the mise en scène and the often overblown language. This can grate on ones nerves in a film, when it would be perfectly acceptable on the stage.
The film itself is successfully opened-out beyond the screenplay's theatrical origins to make it a movie in its own right. Yet, the emotional claustrophobia of the original is still necessarily present to suggest a culture at war with itself in a physically crowded, emotionally uptight England. Burton’s state-of-the-nation rants are perfectly valid despite being expressed amid a stream of personal invective and self-loathing. The class consciousness of those who have no other way to identify whom they are, the inherent retrospection of a declining imperial power and the emotional & sexual sterility of English life are unmistakably gotten out of his system - until the next tirade. A man who is easy to love but hard to live with.
Along with The Servant, this is a febrile exploration of the negative effects of the British class system.
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