Talent-spotted at age 19 by legendary wit Noel Coward in 1942, a new generation of cinemagoers have yet to scratch the surface of the rich acting and directing career of baby-faced, diminutive Richard Attenborough, who passed away this Monday at 90.
For a man whose life and work, past, present and future, continued to be dominated by his love of labour Gandhi, Attenborough’s deceptively kindly screen persona is all paradox and enticing mystery – one which remains to be unravelled. The most interesting, even exciting, perhaps, facets of Attenborough’s acting career have been given short shrift in the wake of his passing.
For millions of Indians Attenborough means Gandhi, for some children and uninitiated cinemagoers in the West, he may signify either the enigmatic scientist of Jurassic Park (a film where actors are de-emphasized in favour dinosaurs) or Kris Kringle in an insipid 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street .
But this benevolence has masked two of the most twisted and original psychopaths of modern cinema, has belied an iron resolve in a classic, boys-own-adventure war epic and manifested into a bafflingly cuckolded meekness in a stunning domestic thriller.
After being noticed as a hysterical, highly strung seaman in Coward’s patriotic World War II fare In Which We Serve , the young Attenborough gave the performance of a lifetime in 1947, playing the scar-faced boy gangster Pinkie in the film adaption of Graham Greene’s haunting crime masterpiece, Brighton Rock . Nearly six decades after its release, Attenborough’s nihilistic performance curdles the blood in our veins in this perverted tale of Catholic damnation in the seedy London underworld.
Its rebelliousness is far more lethal than the flashy antics of Americans Brando and Dean. It is a chilling precursor of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange .
Attenborough followed this with a string of solid British wartime films like Morning Departure (1950) and Dunkirk (1958), with Attenborough playing efficient, standard-issue types.
The turning point came when the germ of collaboration was sown with another kindred spirit (similarly diminutive and variously talented), fellow actor-writer Bryan Forbes. The duo forged a partnership with their own production house, aptly named ‘Beaver Films’ after they (as Forbes later recalled) had ‘had it’ working for directors who they thought were no great shakes after all.
The first film from Beaver Productions, fashioned on a typically low budget, was ‘The Angry Silence’ (1960) - a controversial drama about a man (played brilliantly by Attenborough) refusing to join a wildcat strike and the nasty consequences that ensue for him when he asserts his independence over the organized workers in his shop.
Forbes and Attenborough reached the summit of their collaboration with 1964’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon , from a novel by Mark McShane. This strange, creepy, claustrophobic psychological thriller about the hatching of a kidnap plot by a crazed, fame-hungry ‘trance medium’ and her meek, devoted husband is undoubtedly Forbes’ masterpiece and a watershed in the acting careers of Kim Stanley (playing the medium) and Richard Attenborough (who plays the passive husband).
In 1963, Attenborough achieved trans-Atlantic fame when he joined an all-star ensemble in John Sturges World War II action classic The Great Escape . While Americans Steve McQueen and James Garner received star billing, it was Attenborough, playing the feisty, determined escape mastermind Roger ‘Big X’ Bartlett, who made an indelible impression.
Next year, he excelled at yet another military type, playing an anachronistic, spit-and-polish martinet in a remote African outpost in Guns at Batasi (1964), for which he was rewarded with a British film award (BAFTA) for ‘Best Actor.’
This was followed by a solid and memorable part in another ensemble adventure classic, this time in Robert Aldrich’s Flight of the Phoenix (1965) about an airplane crash in the Sahara and its debilitating effects on the motley group of survivors. Attenborough more than held his own as an alcoholic navigator alongside greats like James Stewart and Peter Finch. He was even more memorable in 1966’s The Sand Pebbles , reuniting with Steve McQueen to play a humane gunboat sailor.
In 1970, long before the advent of Hannibal Lecter, Attenborough stunned audiences with his portrait necrophilic psychopath John Christie in Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place . The scenes where he murders Judy Geeson and tricks hapless Timothy Evans (played by John Hurt) offer a full-bodied showcase to Attenborough’s complex acting skills.
The best films (and not all of them were good) Attenborough directed reflected monstrous perfection and an obsession with detail. Never interested in striking an auteurial pose, he strove to gracefully transform the complex into the mass-market. 1977’s A Bridge too Far , where Attenborough assembled no less than a division of acting legends, stands testament to his finest abilities in directing.
The film, from Cornelius Ryan’s 1974 military classic about Operation Market Garden - Field Marshal Montgomery’s disastrous airborne landing behind enemy lines in Holland to capture six vital bridges in a bid to shorten the Second World War – was ludicrously panned by critics like Roger Ebert as “wretched excess.”
Today, the film, which featured a staggering roster of actors from Dirk Bogarde to Laurence Olivier, stands as one of the finest, most detailed commentaries on the catastrophic impact of military ego in warfare.
Film critic Judith Christ summed Attenborough’s acting talent in a finely-wrought observation, commenting on “a certain physical suggestion of everydayness, a certain universal but never quite mundane quality that is uniquely his.”
Richard Attenborough was all this more – a versatile who could switch from playing the ambiguous Inspector in Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap to the meek Billy Savage in Séance on a Wet Afternoon without a twitch.
Infused with the industry of Dickens, embodying the efficiency of the BBC, he is a ‘legend’ whose ‘legendariness’ remains unmined, resting largely on his skill in bringing alive on cinema the world’s greatest peacenik.
