bed to bed
by
Douglas Messerli
John
Osbourne (screenplay), Tony Richardson (director) Tom Jones / 1963
Although
we often speak of the 1960s as if it were a coherent age of political and
sexual openness and experimentation, having been there I can assure you that
1963, the year of Tony Richardson’s joyous testament to youthful debauchery,
was not yet part of the liberated culture that followed it. As I have written
elsewhere and reconfirmed by many studies about which I’ve also written, the
early 1960s—at least in the US—was in many senses, particularly for gays and
those who might soon after seek out open sexuality—a very conservative period.
Although President Kennedy might have been living a quite satyric life, Jackie
sat with her pillbox hat in a room separate, perhaps whispering nice
appreciations into Leonard Bernstein’s ear, and even, at times, enjoying the
euphoria of drugs, but living in a world that no one might have perceived as “liberated.”
Life in the early 1960s for the vast
majority of Americans was not what the later 1960s might offer up to them.
No wonder the movie made millions and won
over nearly any Britisher and American living through those days, winning
several Academy Awards, including the best ‘film of the year, while being
described by popular journals such as Newsweek
as “The best comedy every made.”
That the usually anguished, working-class
spokesman, John Osbourne was so brilliantly able to whip up a screenplay out of
Fielding’s encyclopedia original satire, is truly amazing—akin to the
possibility that American playwright Arthur
Miller might have been able to create a comic masterpiece, which that sincerely-serious
writer was clearly incapable of.
And just as startling is that the director
of works like Look Back in Anger, A Taste
of Honey, Luther, and The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner could possibly stir up the delicious pot of
Keystone Comedy antics and the gluttonous sexual orgies of this film. Those who
worked with him, including cinematographer Walter Lassally, report that Richardson,
out of personal dissatisfaction with the results, almost boiled the frothiness
of this work away to a stale stew. Fortunately, finances and temporal
limitations prevented his further stirring. The accidental results are
absolutely memorable
The mad chase of Squire Western and
nearly everyone else of good will in this cinematic fiction to save Tom from
his much deservèd swing from the gallows is the glorious summation of hundreds
of cliff-hanging endings of early cinema serials.
For years after, in my literature
classes, I used this exuberant film to demonstrate narrative strategies that
were employed only by the most experimental of 20th century fiction
writers, including the intrusive narrations, the direct address of characters
to the reader/viewer, and the authorial interventions that so delighted 18th
century readers—until, one day, I realized that most of my students were not
even born when this popular film transformed its audiences.
Along with the Beatles and The Rolling
Stones, Richardson’s film represented a part of the British cultural revolution
that soon would change everything in American society, punching American
artists and audiences to transform the arts on an even larger scale. If Richardson, as his
later films reiterate, was hardly a cinematic visionary, in 1963 he was able to
create a work that suggested he might possibly be one, and helped to extend
what the French New Wave filmmakers had already intimated.
Two years later Godard would offer up, in Pierrot le Fou, the same sort of
self-conscious and self-destructive fool that Tom Jones was in Richardson’s and
Osbourne’s droll cinematic representation—but, even then, without Finney’s sexual
exuberance, Godard’s hero had no solution but finally to completely destroy himself.
Only in Penn’s 1967 Bonnie and Clyde,
did we discover characters as openly able to flaunt social and sexual
conventions as did Fielding’s handsome foundling—yet they too were necessarily destroyed
by the surrounding society.
By that time, however, everything,
everywhere had already changed, and the society of the late 1960s began realize
that death was not a necessary result of sexual and political
transgression; yet,
perhaps, given the 1970s and 1980s struggles with AIDS and other versions of
social and sexual scourges, that recognition came too late.
Perhaps, coming as it did before we even
expected it and could assimilate its radical message, Tom Jones should be perceived as a kind of self-enchanted trumpet
charge into a new generation, a work that had no idea where is was going, but
gracefully went there nonetheless. If Rick and Elsa will always have Paris, I
and millions of others of my generation, will always have the light-tripping antics
of night-shirted Tom, merrily traipsing off in utter confusion from bed to bed.
Los Angeles,
December 12, 2015
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