| VON HANGMAN : Adrian Shergold's 'Pierrepoint' [5/10] |
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| Sunday, 09 April 2006 | |
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A rather plodding biopic of Britain's most (only?) famous executioner, Pierrepoint - a UK/US collaboration between Granada TV and Masterpiece Theatre - was originally intended for small-screen exposure. That it's being given a spin in cinemas is presumably due to the unexpected success of Mike Leigh's Vera Drake - another ostentatiously dour trip down the mid-20th-century penal-system's memory lane*. Indeed, the last shot of Vera Drake (showing the title-character scurrying up a set of jail steps) could, with only a little editing jiggery-pokery, be made to segue quite smoothly into the opening of Pierrepoint, in which a group of would-be hangmen are quite literally "shown the ropes" about the mystery-shrouded occupation by an old hand. The time-frame is skew-whiff, however: Vera Drake takes place in the 1950s; Pierrepoint starts 20-odd years earlier, when Albert Pierrepoint (Timothy Spall) is working as a delivery driver in Oldham. He receives notification that he's been accepted onto the list of active hangmen - thus following in the footsteps of his father and uncle. Remarkably, hanging people never seems to have been a full-time affair for those concerned: Pierrepoint slots it in around his more mundane working life, and - until he is selected for a particularly onerous task in post-war Germany - is able to carry on without even his closest friends discovering the truth. In the late forties and 1950s, however, Pierrepoint became an odd kind of celebrity - his 'clients' including such prominent names as Lord Haw Haw, Ruth Ellis (of Dance With a Stranger fame), Neville Heath and John Christie, although only Ellis appears here). Pierrepoint retired in 1956, but returned to the public eye in the early seventies when his book Executioner : Pierrepoint became an unlikely bestseller. In the book, Pierrepoint famously recorded how he gradually came to oppose capital punishment ('no noose is good noose,' if you like), but Shergold's film - which concludes with a brief anti-hanging quotation from the book - doesn't really try to show how such a dramatic, Damascene conversion could have come about. Pierrepoint ostensibly retires not because of philosophical objections, but over a pay dispute - and he never vocalises what must have been a growing sense of unease with the morality of his chosen profession. We're left to fill in the blanks ourselves. It seems, for example, that Pierrepoint (who has always prided himself on his ability to detach himself from the more troubling aspects of his work) is particulary traumatised by having to execute a man who he himself knows from his 'private life' as a publican. A gregarious sort when the mood takes him, Pierrepoint often joins a bar-regular James Corbitt (Vera Drake's Eddie Marsan) for an impromptu Flanagan-and-Allen-style singalong double act - the pair addressing each other only as 'Tish' and 'Tosh'. Pierrepoint never learns Tosh's real name - until he confronts him on the gallows, Corbett having murdered his trampy girlfriend (Claire Keelan). It's an utterly unbelievable coincidence - one that, we presume, has been engineered for the benefit of Jeff Pope's screenplay. Further research, however, reveals that the whole 'Tish and Tosh' storyline is pretty much entirely accurate: an end title to this effect really should have been included, as audiences are likely to exit the cinema shaking their head at such naked, Hollywood-style, melodramatic contrivance. Jeff Pope (working in collaboration with Bob Mills) doesn't do a bad job, however, at capturing the uniqueess of Pierrepoint's position and the complexity of his personality. It's a pity, then, that he isn't very well-served by Shergold, who's much more comfortable working for TV (as with the BBC's superb Holding On) - he doesn't seem to have gotten to grips with the very different demands of celluloid. His contributions are perfunctory at best - he often allows Martin Phipps's score to veer into the unhelpfully over-emphatic - and when he tries to 'jazz' things up with directorial "flourishes" (by taking the camera off the tripod, for example) the results are invariably unfortunate. Shergold's limitations are also evident from the way he manages to elicit a very rare below-par turn from Juliet Stevenson in the underwritten role of Pierrepoint's homely missus. Spall, on the other hand, sails through proceedings with a quiet professionalism very much like Pierrepoint's own. In doesn't really matter that he's physically very different from the wiry real-life executioner: with his epicure's face and rotund frame, not to mention his occasional flashes of mordant wit (quite literally 'gallows humour') he bears more than a passing resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock: Pierrepoint's only rival for the title of Britain's "master of suspense." Neil Young 5th/7th April, 2006 PIERREPOINT : [5/10] : aka The Last Hangman : UK (UK/US) 2005 : Adrian SHERGOLD : 95 mins (BBFC timing) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 28th March 2006 - press show *With its emphasis on the minute mechanics of execution, meanwhile, Pierrepoint could also be taken as a transatlantic variant on Frank Darabont's The Green Mile. |
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