The playwright Shelagh Delaney returned to her home town for this early film by Ken Russell, made in 1960 for the BBC’s Monitor strand. Delaney is now best known for her play A Taste of Honey of Honey (1958) (made into the film by Tony Richardson, starring Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin), and of course, as the major influence on the lyrics of one, Steven Patrick Morrissey.
Russell’s film mainly focuses on an interview with Delaney, and has some well considered images of people, places, and Delaney wandering through Salford’s streets and market. After A Taste of Honey, Delaney wrote screenplays for The White Bus (1967) directed by Lindsay Anderson, Chalie Bubbles (1967) directed by and starring Albert Finney, and Dance With a Stranger, about the killer Ruth Ellis for director Mike Newell in 1985.
Being sent to prison for defacing library books was the making of playwright, Joe Orton. It gave the him isolation from the intense and difficult relationship with lover, Kenneth Halliwell, and allowed him to break free creatively. Orton had been in awe of the older Halliwell from their first meeting at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in 1951, and the two were soon lovers. The poorly educated Orton flourished under Halliwell’s tutelage. However, by the end of the decade, he had outgrown his mentor’s teachings. Moreover, as they lived, loved and wrote together, the intensity of their bond stifled Joe from finding his own creative voice and ambition.
Between 1957 and 1959, the pair took jobs to help Halliwell’s dwindling inheritance. With their earnings they purchased a small 16’ x 12’ one-room flat, at 25 Noel Road, Islington. It was to be their home until the fateful night Halliwell bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer, before overdosing on 22 Nembutals.
This tragic murder has always overshadowed the love and joy the couple shared. Their love wasn’t all doom and gloom as some would have us believe. No. Theirs was a shared glee that fatefully led to the prison sentence that changed their lives.
Annoyed at the poor selection of books in their local library, Orton and Halliwell concocted their own unique revenge. Together they stole and defaced approximately 72 books, and removed over 1,653 plates - many of which adorned the wall of their bedsit (see photo above). Theri actions were nothing more than jolly schoolboy japes. The pair stole and carefully modified the cover art or the book’s blurbs before returning them to the library. A volume of poems by John Betjeman was returned to the library with a new dustjacket featuring a photograph of a nearly naked, heavily tattooed, middle-aged man. A copy of The Plays of Emlyn Williams was altered to include such titles as “Knickers Must Fall”, “Up the Front” and “Fucked by Monty”. Bentz Plagemann’s novel The Steel Cocoon was re-covered with a picture of young man’s groin in tight, white trunks. Phyllis Hambledon’s book Queen’s Favorite had an image of two men suggestively wrestling or buggering each other on the front, and an oiled Adonis in supplication on the back. As Orton later recalled:
‘I used to stand in the corners after I’d smuggled the doctored books back into the library and then watch people read them. It was very fun, very interesting.’
The authorities didn’t think so, and when the pair were eventually caught, they were charged and tried in May 1962. The arrest was reported in the Daily Mirror as “Gorilla in the Roses” - referencing one particularly surreal cover of a grinning ape stuck atop a rose. Orton and Halliwell were charged with five counts of theft and malicious damage, were fined $400 and jailed for six months. The pair thought the sentence was unduly harsh “because we were queers.”
While prison life made Halliwell more introspective and morose, Orton thrived. He was free to do as he pleased, and as being a prisoner allowed him to clearly see the corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of liberal England.
“It affected my attitude towards society. Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallised this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul… Being in the nick brought detachment to my writing. I wasn’t involved anymore. And suddenly it worked.”
Released in September 1962, the couple returned to Noel Road - Halliwell to lick his wounds; Orton to start his career as a dramatist, writing such marvelous black comedies as Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw. Interestingly, Orton’s last commission before his death was a screenplay for The Beatles called Prick Up Your Ears - how different things could have been if the Fab Four had made Orton’s script about revolutionary anarchists rather than The Magical Mystery Tour
Orton’s and Halliwell’s vandalized book covers can be viewed here.
Bonus clip The Crimes of Joe Orton, after the jump…
Sean Connery once remarked that From Russia With Love was his favourite Bond film, as it depended more on story and character than gadgets and special effects.
This is true but the film also had a great title song, sung by the incomparable Matt Monro, and outstanding performances from Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya in its favour.
By the time of making From Russia With Love, Lotte Lenya was a celebrated singer and actress, known for her pioneering performances in, husband, Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s Mahagonny-Songspiel (1927) and the legendary Threepenny Opera (1928).
In From Russia With Love, Lenya played Rosa Klebb, a sadistic former SMERSH Agent who has joined SPECTRE to become Ernst Blofeld’s No. 3. You can uess what happened to 1 and 2. The name Rosa Klebb was a pun contrived by Bond author Ian Fleming, derived from the Soviet phrase for women’s rights, ‘khleb i rozy’, which is a Russian translation for ‘bread and roses’. Lenya’s perfromance as the sadistic Klebb is one of the most iconic of all Bond villains, with her poisoned tipped dagger, secreted in the toe of her shoe.
Lenya’s Klebb often overshadows Robert Shaw’s underplayed, though equally efficient Donald ‘Red’ Grant. Shaw was a highly talented man whose own personal tragedies (his father a manic depressive and alcoholic committed suicide when Robert was 12) and alcoholism hampered him from rightly claiming his position as one of Britain’s greatest actors.
Shaw established himself through years of TV and theatrical work, most notably his chilling and subtle performance as Aston in Harold Pinter‘s The Caretaker. He went on to throw hand grenades in The Battle of the Bulge (1965), and gave a deservedly Oscar-nominated performance as Henry VIII in A Man For All Seasons (1966). He delivered excellent performances in Young Winston, and, as the mobster Doyle Lonnegan, in The Sting (1973), then gave two of his most iconic roles, the quietly calculating and menacing Mr Blue in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and a scenery chewing Quint in Jaws (1975).
But Shaw’s success as an actor was countered by further personal tragedy when his second wife, Mary Ure, who had followed Shaw into alcoholism, died from an accidental overdose. Ure’s death caused Shaw considerable guilt and despair, and led the actor to become severely depressed and reclusive in his personal life.
Shaw countered this by continuing his career as a respected and award-winning novelist and playwright. His first novel The Hiding Place, was later adapted for the film, Situation Hopeless… But Not Serious (1965) starring Alec Guinness. His next, The Sun Doctor won the Hawthornden Prize. While for theatre he wrote a trilogy of plays, the centerpiece of which was his most controversial and successful drama, The Man in the Glass Booth (1967).
The Man in the Glass Booth dealt with the issues of identity, guilt and responsibility that owed much to the warped perceptions caused by Shaw’s alcoholism. Undoubtedly personal, the play however is in no way autobiographical, and was inspired by actual events surrounding the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann.
In Shaw’s version, a man believed to be a rich Jewish industrialist and Holocaust survivor, Arthur Goldman, is exposed as a Nazi war criminal. Goldman is kidnapped from his Manhattan home to stand trial in Israel. Kept in a glass booth to prevent his assassination, Goldman taunts his persecutors and their beliefs, questioning his own and their collective guilt, before symbolically accepting full responsibility for the Holocaust. At this point it is revealed Goldman has falsified his dental records and is not a Nazi war criminal, but is in fact a Holocaust survivor.
The original theatrical production was directed by Harold Pinter and starred Donald Pleasance in an award-winning performance that launched his Hollywood career. The play was later made into an Oscar nominated film directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Maximilian Schell. However, Shaw was unhappy with the production and asked for his name to be removed form the credits.
Looking back on the play and film now, one can intuit how much Shaw’s own personal life influenced the creation of one of theatre’s most controversial and tragic figures.
Bonus clips of Lotte Lenya singing ‘Pirate Jenny’ and Matt Monro after the jump…
