Gotham Diary:
Coral
10 October 2013

Last night, I watched a movie that I hadn’t seen since it came out, in 1972. It’s one of George Cukor’s last movies, based on a Graham Greene story: Travels With My Aunt. I haven’t read the Greene, which can’t possibly be as frothy as the adaptation by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler — can it? The film has not aged well, particularly because of Tony Hatch’s glitzy score, which contrives to clash hideously with its look and feel. Travels With My Aunt would not be very satisfying to sit through if it did not exist in a world of other movies, to several of which it makes pointed, if unintended reference.

That’s the great thing about movies — and why I consider cinema a branch of literary fiction. I have technology to thank. Technology has made it not only possible but convenient to watch movies on demand at home, which was certainly not the case when I was a boy. In other words, I can choose to dip into a movie exactly as I might do with a novel. I love watching movies with friends — friends who will countenance my outbursts and running commentaries — but I am perfectly happy to experience film as I do print: alone. The charms of sitting among strangers in the dark are lost on me.

Being able to watch movies on demand includes being able to watch them often, and I’ve seen many movies many times. I try not to exaggerate, but I am certain that I have seen My House In Umbria a dozen times — at least. Made for TV but indistinguishable from a feature film, Hugh Whitemore’s adaptation of a story by Trevor Nunn, directed by Richard Loncraine, is an exquisitely restrained romance; more bitter than sweet, given the terrorist act that sets it in motion. I thought of it often, during Travels With My Aunt, because it’s in so many ways the “real” version of the same story. Maggie Smith pretends, in Travels, to be what she really is in Umbria: elderly. And the romp has simmered down; champagne gives way to dry cocktails.

As romps go, Travels With My Aunt is the missing link between Auntie Mame and La Cage aux Folles. You have an exuberant, extravagant lady of a certain age. She goes from being a rich woman who loses her fortune to a classy prostitute to a man in drag. Then you have the ingénu, first a little boy, then a middle-aged bank manager (assistant!), to an extremely correct Catholic family. The movies at either end of this continuum are much better than the one in the middle, but Travels With My Aunt is explicit about themes that are barely tacit in Auntie Mame, while at the same time Maggie Smith’s performance is so over the top that she might be impersonating a female impersonator. The movie looks both ways. You might miss that, or not find it very beguiling, if you could see features like Auntie Mame and La Cage aux Folles only rarely, at festivals in theatres.

***

I’m reading The Tempest with a keen interest in Prospero’s derelictions as Duke of Milan. In I, ii, Prospero, the usurped duke, tells his tale to his daughter, Miranda (and to the audience):

My brother and thy uncle, called Antonio —
I pray thee mark me — that a brother should
Be so perfidious! — he whom next thyself
Of all the world I loved, and to him put
The manage of my state, as at that time
Throughout all the signories it was the first
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, for the liberal arts
Without a parallel: those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.

This is the stuff of tragedy. The duke is so illustrious that he allows himself to believe that the tedious governance of his realm can be delegated, whilst he passes the time “rapt in secret studies.” It is impossible to imagine that Shakespeare regarded such conduct as anything but wicked. The Tempest, however, is not a tragedy. The point of the drama must surely be to teach Prospero that he brought his downfall upon himself, and is responsible for Antonion’s encroachments. It has been a while since I’ve read the play — so long, in fact, that I might be said never to have read it.

Who does not love the lines of Ariel’s song to Ferdinand?

Full fathom five they father lies;
  Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
  Nothing of him that doth fade
  But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.

“Sea change” has entered the language as a phrase of uncertain meaning — suitably uncertain, since the transformation into “something rich and strange” takes place in the dark, too slowly for the unaided eye to notice. As a dramatist, Shakespeare has no time for dawdling processes, so Alonso’s bones have turned into coral mere hours after his death. That justifies the technical misuse of “sea change” to signify a pronounced, and possibly sudden, change of atmosphere. The song is deceptive, of course; Ferdinand’s father, even if he is the wicked king of Naples, does not lie at the bottom of the sea, but is as safe as his son. Since we in the audience know this, we are spared Ferdinand’s melancholy associations. The song is delightful and mysterious, but not ominous.