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CHARLIE
BUBBLES
8/10
UK 1967
: Albert FINNEY : 89 mins
Charlie
Bubbles so disturbed the all-powerful UK exhibition-distribution machine
in 1967 that it was effectively denied any kind of proper release. Since
then, Finney’s only similar credit has been as co-director of a mid-80s
TV movie about the Steve Biko case. Perhaps if/when he wins his Oscar
(for Big Fish?) and/or gets his knighthood, he might be encouraged
to have another try – because 36 years on, Charlie Bubbles holds
up well enough to suggests that Finney’s forced ‘retirement’ for directing
was possibly as big a blow to late-sixties British film as the suicide
of Michael (Witchfinder
General) Reeves.
Finney plays
the title character, a mega-successful author from Manchester now relocated
to a luxurious London mews house. Over the course of a longish weekend
Bubbles goes out on the piss with an old pal (Colin Blakely), then – accompanied
by his young American assistant (a touchingly perky Liza Minnelli in her
adult debut) – he drives back ‘up north’ to tour his old haunts, and visit
his ex-wife (Billie Whitelaw) and young son (Timothy Garland) at their
rural Derbyshire home.
Not a great
deal ‘happens’ in Charlie Bubbles: the closest the film comes to
the usual definitions of ‘plot’ is when our hero takes his kid to see
Manchester United play Chelsea at Old Trafford, and the kid – understandably
bored at having to watch the game through glass from an expensive box
- absconds to make his own way home. Instead the screenplay - by Morrissey-favourite
Shelagh Delaney (who also wrote A Taste of Honey – takes the form
of slightly disjointed, sometimes mildly surreal episodes built around
the jaded, disconnected central character, a writer enduring what F Scott
Fitzgerald called “the crack-up.”
Bubbles is,
financially speaking, enormously successful – we never find out exactly
what kind of books he writes, but the era, and the fact that many of them
have been filmed, suggests he’s perhaps some kind of a Len Deighton figure.
But otherwise Bubbles’ life seems to be a disaster-zone – it’s possible
to see Bubbles’ northern tour as a kind of deliberate leave-taking before
suicide, or some other kind of desperate escape. Indeed, the final moments
do see Bubbles quite literally float away from all of his troubles in
a sequence that is, depending on your perspective, enigmatic/pretentious/dreamlike/a
cop-out.
And of course,
given Finney’s own Salford background, his hard-drinking image (Bubbles
thinks nothing of driving halfway up the country after a day on the sauce)
and his sudden 1960s rise to fame, it’s very tempting to interpret the
film as an autobiographical cry of existential anguish – or perhaps an
attempt for Finney to interrogate/subvert his own ‘legend’ in the way
that several of Warren Beatty’s 1960s movies (directed by others) attempted
to do. Finney, however, is very much in charge of his movie, and
the focus is just as much on the a Britain awkwardly positioned with one
foot in the past and one in the future, where the old class definitions
are becoming blurred by money, where the old terraced houses are being
torn down while Manchester city-centre (unwisely) dives headlong into
a concrete-brutalist future.
Mike Hodges
must have seen Charlie Bubbles before making his similarly northern-metropolis-on-the-cusp
time-capsule Get Carter (1972) - which also features a colliery
jazz-band marching through what once was a vibrant housing estate - while
the Derbyshire sequences prefigure both The
Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1973) and 24
Hour Party People (2001) in their Manchester/Peak District dichotomy.
Finney’s film, however, has a character all of its own – seemingly blunt
but essentially enigmatic, much like the man himself. In terms of using
cinema as a means of super-confident, enjoyably egotistical, of-its-time-but-ahead-of-its-time
self-expression, in fact, the actor-turns-director movie which Charlie
Bubbles most strongly recalls nothing less than Citizen
Kane.
4th
December, 2003
(seen 30th November : CineSide,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
by Neil
Young
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