Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (UK, 1980)
Directed by Steve Roberts
Starring Trevor Howard, Patrick McGee, Sheila Reid, Denise Coffey

In my review of Westworld, I argued that novelists who become filmmakers often lack the visual creativity to balance out the verbal richness of a given work. While certainly true of Michael Crichton's debut, this can also be applied to literary adaptations in general; the often-prolific use of voiceover and frequency of long speeches belie an unhelpfully literal approach to adaptation.Sir Henry at Rawlinson End proves the same can be true for spoken word albums. Vivian Stanshall's 1978 LP, culled from his stints on Radio 1 covering for John Peel, remains an irresistible slice of whimsical absurdity with wordplay which is utterly to die for. But in the hands of first-time director Steve Roberts, most of the charm and quality of Stanshall's work is eroded or withered away, resulting in a crushing disappointment.Sir Henry at Rawlinson End has been called everything from "the cinematic equivalent of cheese before bedtime" (The Big Issue) to "the missing link between Monty Python and Withnail & I" (Time Out). Set in and around the fictional English country manor of Rawlinson End, it follows a day in the life of Sir Henry Rawlinson (Trevor Howard), Great Aunt Florie (Sheila Reid) and various other eccentrics who inhabit or visit the estate. The film version extends the plot of the album, adding both the activities of a morose priest Slodden (Patrick Magee) and Sir Henry's attempts to exorcise the ghost of his brother, accidentally killed during a drunken fishing trip.The best way to understand the film is found in the words of Peter Sellers. When interviewed in 1972 just before a one-off Goon Show to mark 50 years of the BBC, he made the comparison between The Goons and Monty Python in terms of visual imagination on the part of the audience. Watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, you had a starting point for what the various characters could look like: in Sellers' words, "John Cleese always looks like John Cleese". Listening to the Goons, on the other hand, you had to create pictures of what the various characters looked like without much visual assistance, even from Spike Milligan's own drawings.

The great joy of Sir Henry as a record was Stanshall's skill with voices, accents and verbal acrobatics. Every sinew of the storyline was crammed full with wit and wordplay, with Stanshall's metaphors and imagery being up there with the best bits of Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas would have smiled favourably on corkers such as this: "A pale sun poked impudent marmalade fingers through the grizzled lattice glass, and sent the shadows scurrying, like convent girls menaced by a tramp."Like Under Milk Wood, the story of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End is secondary to the characters inhabiting it, whose every tic and foible is captured in superb detail by the rich language. With Thomas, it is the grotesquery of Mr. and Mrs. Pew, the melancholy of Polly Garter or the grief of the blind sea captain. With Stanshall, it is the absurdity and sheer lunacy of English aristocrats, from Sir Henry's simpleton son Hubert, "in his mid-40s, and still unusual", to walking encyclopaedia Reg Smeeton, who obsesses over the fact that there is no proper name for the back of the knees.

As delightfully hilarious as all of this sounds, it was always going to be difficult to capture the innate anarchy of Stanshall's unique mind. The very effect of adding a visual dimension takes away from the imagination of the record, offering a standardised version of events which, much like the Tele-Goons, will inevitably fall short of one's expectations. One could blame this on the director's inexperience or lack of talent: Roberts would later carve a niche for himself penning TV series based on successful Disney films. But Stanshall's close involvement, both at a script level and in a supporting role, leads one to conclude that it was simply a bad idea for anyone to attempt it.In adapting the album for the big screen, there has been a certain amount of plot-shuffling - understandable enough, and just about excusable considering the consistent quality of the material. But some of the best bits of the album are inexplicably missing. At only 73 minutes long, it is unlikely that they were cut for time, and more unlikely still that they were lost for lack of making sense. Most tragic is the omission of Sir Henry's monologue about Professor Molebottom, who in his mind "put the bounce in the bouncing bomb".The new additions to the story are poorly integrated, giving the distinct impression that the film would have been fine without them. Patrick Magee is a burning screen presence, as evidenced by his work with Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. But for all his charisma his character seems curiously pointless; his priest plots and glowers on the side-lines, but nothing ever comes of him being there. Harry Fowler's winkle-pickered Cockney is an obvious bum note, a pale imitation of Walker from Dad's Army. And the ghost exorcism plot is badly handled, arriving with some hokey special effects and being palmed off pretty quickly.

There have been a number of strange British cult films which have passed muster in spite of their shambolic narratives. Think of Richard Lester's The Bed-Sitting Room, co-written by Spike Milligan, or The Magic Christian starring Peter Sellers. But what saw these films through their short running times and perplexing turns of plot was a constant feeling that they were about something, even if they weren't going anywhere.Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, on the other hand, feels totally and indulgently aimless. It feels like the cast and crew were given a big house to play around in for a week - they shot everything they could, making it up as they went along and then tried to stitch it all together in the editing room. While the album may not have finished in an entirely satisfying way, it at least had the common decency to quiet while it was ahead. This hangs around for at least 20 minutes too long, ending with someone bungee-jumping off the battlements for no good reason.In amongst its disastrous execution, there are individual moments in the film which at the very least make it memorable. There is some pleasure in seeing Trevor Howard sending himself up so mercilessly; one can almost picture this is what his character in Battle of Britain might have become had he been given a peerage. He gets a number of pretty juicy lines which showcase his insanity - the best being, "I never met a man I didn't mutilate" - and his prisoner-of-war camp banter is quite fun.

Some of the visual decisions are also notable. Where The Bed-Sitting Room found Lester manipulating colour like his contemporary Nicolas Roeg, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End is shot entirely in sepia monochrome, reinforcing its amateurish, parochial feel. If one was feeling generous, one could call this a descendent of the early surrealist films, taking its place in the canon as a late-blooming English take on Luis Bunuel.In the end, however, there is precious little about Sir Henry at Rawlinson End that makes one feel anything like as charitable. It is a crushing disappointment for fans of the spoken word album, whose bizarrely annoying tone leaves no way in either for fans of English whimsy or for the casual viewer. The pockets of familiar bliss or tongue-twisting delight are padded out by incoherence, indulgence and irritation. In short, it proves that audience imagination is key to making these kinds of stories work, and that as a result, some things are best left unseen.

Rating:
Verdict: A crushing disappointment

Westworld (USA, 1973)
Directed by Michael Crichton
Starring Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Alan Oppenheimer

People always complain about film adaptations of books never living up to the source material, and yet when novelists turn to filmmaking the results are hardly extraordinary. The problem is often that novelists are so attentive to verbal content that they neglect the visual characteristics of great cinema. Stephen King's adaptation of The Shining may follow the original story more closely, but it isn't half as scary or discomforting as the Stanley Kubrick version.With Westworld, the task is made doubly difficult by the sheer number of genres involved. Michael Crichton's first film contains elements of pretty much every genre apart from rom-com, musical and gothic horror. It's an odd little number, shifting rapidly from western and action-adventure elements into conspiracy thriller territory, borrowing from horror as it goes along. While it never quite comes through with the goods in the way that we would like, it remains an interesting debut effort and a decent 1970s cult film.

The first thing in Westworld's favour is its achievements on a technical level. It was famously the first film to utilise pixelated graphics, showing certain short sections of the action from the androids' point of view. Original footage shot on celluloid was scanned into a computer and processed digitally, creating a blurred and distorted image which makes Yul Brynner's killings seem all the more merciless.The old-fashioned effects are pretty good as well. To create the effect of acid being thrown into Brynner's face, the production team mixed ground-up indigestion tablets into his make-up; when water was thrown at it, it would fizz to give the impression of skin being dissolved. The make-up and prop-making in general is impressive, particularly when it comes to the robots themselves. Brynner's face mask is very life-like, and seeing his charred body stagger into close-up without a face is quite creepy.Westworld's chief significance, however, is in its influence on subsequent thrillers. Crichton would rework the central premise of an elaborate amusement park gone wrong for Jurassic Park, one of Steven Spielberg's biggest and best blockbusters. Yul Brynner's Gunslinger was the Terminator of its day, with the same jerky, mechanical posture and relentless desire to kill. And there is some discussion about robots being indistinguishable from humans and being used as "sex models", subjects which would later be tackled in Blade Runner.

The various worlds of the Delos complex allow Westworld to dip in and out of various genres, picking and choosing as it sees fit. It only becomes a conspiracy thriller in its third act, with the duel between Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin becoming the driving force of the plot against a background of total chaos. In fact, one of the weaknesses of Westworld is that it dabbles a little too much. It gets so distracted by the various sub-plots - for instance, the knights duelling in Mediaeval World - that when all hell breaks loose, you don't feel quite so threatened by it.The film attempts to address a number of ideas which have become archetypal of low-budget 1970s cinema. Most obviously, it deals with the idea of a perfect machine going wrong, and by extension how mankind's increasing dependence upon technology will eventually come back to haunt them. But whereas Kubrick approached this idea from a conceptual or philosophical platform in both Dr. Strangelove and 2001, Crichton is more interested in the mechanics of such a rebellion. It is not so much a case of discussing morality as predicting the course of destruction that would occur, with Crichton steering closer to the work of Arthur C. Clarke in his matter-of-fact treatment of technology.

The Delos complex functions like the robots which populate it. On the surface it may appear incredibly sophisticated and refined, but it is ultimately a very fragile creature, reliant on constant input and highly sensitive to changes in its surroundings. Long sections of the film focus on the scientists surrounded by computer banks, endlessly checking temperatures and humidity levels, tweaking the system to respond to individual needs and weeding out any renegades. The repair sessions which take place at night resemble the A&E ward of a hospital, with doctors working against the clock just to maintain the status quo.Westworld also tackles the idea of mankind's nostalgia for the past. Like Deliverance a year earlier, its characters make the trip to experience an alternative to their carefully ordered, incredibly dull lives. There is the same desire to 'be at one with nature' or live in the past, while at the same time romanticising it. If, as Alfred Hitchcock said, drama is reality with all the dull bits cut out, then Westworld contains all that is fun and jolly about the American West without any of the drawbacks - disease, death, boredom or hard work.Within this there is also a comment about the compartmentalisation of violence, and the difference between the simulated world and the reality. Part of what attracts our heroes to Westworld is the ability to get away with murder on a daily basis. They can go around firing off guns without fear of getting killed or being thrown out; when Richard Benjamin is thrown in jail, it is merely the set-up for the jokey stunt that gets him out. Yet when things turn nasty and reality intervenes, Benjamin runs instead of confronting Brynner; even though the latter is still a robot, our hero cannot bring himself to practice what he has preached up until that point.

While all of these ideas are enticing, they are somewhat undercut by the film's execution. Crichton, for all his skill as a writer, is not a brilliant director, at least when it comes to sustaining and building tension. Because the film was shot using anamorphic lenses on MGM's sound stages, it looks a lot more professional than something equally ideas-driven like The Clonus Horror. But the tone remains uneven, so that even when it works really well you can't help wishing the whole film had been as good. This is exemplified by Fred Karlin's erratic soundtrack, which dithers between subtle underplay and energetic bursts in the manner of Bernard Hermann.The performances in Westworld vary from the intensely memorable to the completely forgettable. Brynner is great, sending up his role in The Magnificent Seven right down to wearing the same costume. He exudes menace and tenacity, and his delivery manages to sound stilted without tipping over into comedy. His co-stars, however, fare less well. James Brolin - father of Josh - is decent but has little in the way of character development, and Peter Morgan is not charismatic enough to carry the final section on his own. Without the Gunslinger constantly hunting him, the film would fall completely flat.Westworld is an entertaining and insightful film hamstrung only by its uneven execution. Its campy visual style may have dated, and it isn't constructed half as consistently as many would have liked. But when it does pull itself together, it meets all the requirements of a decent 90-minute thriller, giving us enough in the way of both ideas and suspense to sustain our attention. A decent start to Crichton's career in film, which would culminate twenty years later.

Rating:
Verdict: Uneven but influential