Rattigan's films are as important as his plays

Spectator

13 hours ago

A campaign is under way to rename the West End's Duchess Theatre after the playwright Terence Rattigan. Supported as it is by the likes of Judi Dench and Rattigan Society president David Suchet, there's evidently a desire to right a historical wrong. Author of classics such as The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan was known for his poise, melancholy and restraint, all of which put him at odds with the coterie of upstart writers of the 1950s – still amusingly known as the Angry Young Men.
It's an oft-repeated chapter of theatre history that arch-kitchen-sinkers such as John Osborne made the environment virtually impossible for Rattigan to work in. Rattigan joked about it at the 1956 opening of Look Back in Anger. It was as if Osborne were saying, 'Look, Ma, I'm not Terence Rattigan!' he quipped. However, the Rattigan-bashing was always an empty indulgence. Osborne himself admitted as much on these very pages in 1993, writing: 'I have been intrigued by the success of the current revival of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan was under the general frown when I first joined the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and both George Devine and Tony Richardson were appalled when I confessed to being moved by the play.'
Perhaps a Rattigan Theatre would indeed lay some of the ghosts to rest. But on first hearing news of the campaign, another thought occurred: Rattigan deserves a cinema as well. Film was arguably much kinder to him than theatre ever was in the low ebbs of his career. It supplied him with constant work, saw some of his best adaptations, and allowed his writing to weather the storm.
Without his breakout play French Without Tears (1936), British cinema wouldn't have acquired one of its classic rogues, Rex Harrison, whose name it thrust into the spotlight. But French Without Tears was chiefly important because its adaptation in 1940 was Rattigan's first collaboration with director Anthony Asquith – and the first success of his screen career. Few could match Asquith's ability to adapt stage classics for film. The son of liberal prime minister Herbert, Asquith junior had directed an Oscar-nominated Pygmalion (1938), with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, as well as the most celebrated version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), with Edith Evans as the definitive Lady Bracknell.
Like so many British artists, Rattigan and Asquith were drafted into propaganda duties during the war. And it resulted in their first truly great work, The Way to the Stars (1945). The film had a Who's Who cast – Michael Redgrave, John Mills and Trevor Howard, all of whom would return to work with Asquith and Rattigan – and in its quieter moments, observing the grin-and-bear-it times of a British bomber base, hinted at their true creative potential.
Postwar, Asquith returned to Rattigan's stage work with an adaptation of The Winslow Boy in 1948. It perfectly captured the it's-just-not-cricket mentality of the original play with its story of a boy unjustly expelled from naval college. Rattigan would take up these themes again (to lesser effect) in The Final Test (1953), but The Winslow Boy had the advantage of Robert Donat in the lead role at the height of his powers.
Asquith's take on The Browning Version was another great example of his refusal to follow the growing spectacle – albeit much of it magnificent – of contemporaries such as David Lean and Michael Powell. Refraining from visual tricks or even much of a musical score, Asquith allows Rattigan's poise and melancholy to speak for itself. It may be one of the most quietly devastating English films ever made. And as the retiring classics teacher who may or may not be missed by his pupils, Michael Redgrave gives one of his most heart-wrenching performances as Crocker-Harris.
Rattigan was not tied to Asquith, and pursued multiple projects outside of his preoccupation with upper-middle-class England. He created the original screenplay for Brighton Rock (1948), for example, Graham Greene's story of wide-boy knife gangs directed by John Boulting. It was reworked before reaching the screen but Greene crucially retained Rattigan's vision of the work as a thriller rather than an intellectual treatise. The Boultings kept Rattigan's change of ending, too, in which a gramophone recording of Pinkie (Richard Attenborough) jams on 'I love you…' before he lays into his love interest.
Rattigan didn't generally shy away from the brutality of romantic relationships. The Deep Blue Sea (1955) is testament to that. Influenced by the relationship between Rattigan and actor Kenneth Morgan, the play's curtain-twitching portrait of a squalid postwar London is still one of his most unflinching of love stories. Vivien Leigh was cast as Hester, the spurned lover of RAF pilot Freddie, played by Kenneth More, who had transferred from the original play. More suggested that Leigh brought too much glamour to the part. Yet with Leigh's mental health deteriorating and her personal life crumbling, she appears in hindsight to have been all too right for The Deep Blue Sea.
Rattigan then teamed up with Leigh's husband Laurence Olivier on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), but Rattigan's last great screen work was his collaboration a year later with Delbert Mann on the Oscar-nominated Separate Tables. Another of his tragic ensemble pieces, the film saw a wealth of stars gathered in a run-down Bournemouth hotel, all forced to examine their lives after the revelation of a scandal involving the retired Major Pollock played by David Niven. Niven has the film to thank for the only Oscar win of his career, and Rattigan for his second nomination. (He received his first in 1952 for scripting David Lean's The Sound Barrier.)
What happened next might have been the apex of Rattigan's screen career yet turned out to be the beginning of the end. In 1960 he had started working with the Rank Organisation to adapt his T.E. Lawrence play Ross. It was to star Dirk Bogarde and Asquith was slated to direct. But there was a problem: another Lawrence film was already in the works. Out of respect to David Lean – and under some pressure from Lawrence of Arabia producer Sam Spiegel – the studio pulled the plug on the project. Bogarde called it his 'bitterest disappointment'.
Rattigan and Asquith ploughed on, assembling star-studded casts for two further movies, The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), with all favours from friends called in. But even with Rattigan's work finding new audiences on television, the 1960s were relentlessly unforgiving. His last screenplay of note was the wonderful musical adaptation of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969), with Peter O'Toole, before he fled into creative (and tax) exile to Bermuda. A knighthood in 1971 and a minor reconciliation with the theatre industry before his death in 1977 did little to remedy his unhappiness.
The West End rediscovers Rattigan's work almost every decade. But the screen never forgot him. Terence Davies's hypnotic version of The Deep Blue Sea (2011) with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston converted a whole new generation.
Rattigan no doubt deserves a theatre. His contribution continues to enrich the British stage – especially in its deeply English themes, its styling and restraint. But his dedication to the screen suggests a Rattigan cinema wouldn't go amiss either.