The Browning Version

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion Spine #294: Antho­ny Asquith’s The Brown­ing Ver­sion.

Sum­mer is over and since all the chil­dren are head­ing back to school I thought I’d bet­ter pick up where I left off 4 months ago and start watch­ing Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion films again. This film hap­pens to take place at the end of a school year, but no mat­ter. The Brown­ing Ver­sion is a movie based on Ter­ence Rat­ti­gan’s play of the same name. Rat­ti­gan also wrote the screen­play for this film, which won an award at Cannes over 50 years ago. The action flows around an old clas­sics teacher named Andrew Crock­er-Har­ris who has been bro­ken down by his wife and his near­ly 20 years of teach­ing.

Crock­er-Har­ris is every­thing that peo­ple loathe in a per­son, always punc­tu­al, unbend­ing­ly respect­ful of every rule, no mat­ter how triv­ial, and appar­ent­ly with­out a sense of humor or any oth­er emo­tion. He is con­sis­tent­ly referred to as a dead man, a corpse, and a man with­out a soul. His stu­dents live in fear of him, his wife has cuck­old­ed him, and he is being replaced by a younger more mod­ern teacher. Even the estab­lish­ment is cast­ing him aside with­out a pen­sion and com­pound­ing the injury by ask­ing him to give his give up his place of hon­or at the vale­dic­to­ry con­vo­ca­tion.

There is one young stu­dent who feels sor­ry for the chap and makes efforts to break through the accre­tion of apa­thy that has immo­bi­lized the once bril­liant Crock­er-Har­ris. His inter­est in Aeschy­lus’s Agamem­non reminds Crock­er-Har­ris of his past youth­ful exu­ber­ance regard­ing the same play. He opens up slight­ly and tells young Taplow that he once attempt­ed his own trans­la­tion in rhyming cou­plets, but nev­er com­plet­ed it. Lat­er, Taplow buys Crock­er-Har­ris the Brown­ing ver­sion of the Agamem­non, and inscribes, in Greek, the ded­i­ca­tion “God from afar looks gra­cious­ly on a gen­tle mas­ter.” [For an inter­est­ing reflec­tion and reverse engi­neer­ing of the Greek usage in the film see here.] This ded­i­ca­tion, com­ing as it does at the end of a day full of blows, touch­es Crock­er-Har­ris so deeply that he begins to cry. Though his wife still tries to crush his soul, this small act even­tu­al­ly gives Crock­er-Har­ris the strength nec­es­sary to accept respon­si­bil­i­ty for his past and the deter­mi­na­tion to do bet­ter in the time left him.

Two the­mat­ic ele­ments were high­ly vis­i­ble to me in this film. The first is the obses­sion with time as a diegetic motive. Crock­er-Har­ris, of course, is the most obsessed with it, and the con­stant bell-ring­ing and dec­la­ra­tions of what time it is [for din­ner, for fire­works, for tea] make it seem as though despite all his efforts, time is mere­ly pass­ing him by. The sec­ond theme is the film’s def­i­nite rela­tion and inter­ac­tion with The Agamem­non. In many ways Crock­er-Har­ris’s life mir­rors the life of Agamem­non, even down to the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, but the dif­fer­ence is that Agamem­non is phys­i­cal­ly killed, while Crock­er-Har­ris is only soul-dead. This cre­ates an inter­est­ing space for diver­sion from the orig­i­nal and allows the film more room for con­tem­po­rary con­cerns.

Asquith’s shot selec­tion is excel­lent as well. Crock­er-Har­ris is usu­al­ly seen in pro­file or slight­ly from behind, adding a sense of alien­ation and unap­proach­a­bil­i­ty to his already tac­i­turn nature. Even when he breaks down and cries, we only see his back. Only toward the end, when Crock­er-Har­ris begins to take charge of his life again, does he start to take an active posi­tion in the shot. Michael Red­grave’s act­ing is superb and fits hand-in-glove with Rat­ti­gan’s screen­play. While the film isn’t flashy at any point, for fans of dra­ma and ele­gance, this is a film to see.

• Cri­te­ri­on Essay by Geof­frey Mac­Nab
• Tran­scrip­tion and clip of Crock­er-Har­ris’s farewell speech.
• Wikipedia arti­cle on Ter­ence Rat­ti­gan’s play.
• The Brown­ing ver­sion of Aeschy­lus’s Agamem­non at perseus.tufts.edu. [I’m get­ting flash­backs]