EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 36, No. 2 Autumn 2005 Up to a Point, Mr. Foxwell: The Adaptation of Decline and Fall by Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma In October 1962, Evelyn Waugh wrote to his agent A. D. Peters that he was willing to listen to Ivan Foxwell’s proposal to film Decline and Fall, though he assumed that “modernization of the story means ‘proletarianization’” (Catalogue E1288). During the spring and early summer of 1963, as Waugh was gloomily preparing to sign the contract for the sale of film rights to The Loved One, in disappointment at the meager fee rather than in anticipation of the horrors which followed, the final touches to the contract with Foxwell were being negotiated. He was delighted, he told Peters, with the Daily Express report that Foxwell’s “social graces” helped him secure the rights. Knowing Waugh’s view of film people, one can assume that he was being sarcastic. Donat Gallagher tells me that Margaret Waugh said that her father liked what he had seen— probably of the treatment or script, since the film was not released until 1968, two years after Waugh’s death. If he saw anything at all, he may have been comparing that with Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965). At least Decline and Fall of a Birdwatcher is not entirely disgraceful. Up to a point—that being the end of the third word of the title—Foxwell and his collaborators were faithful to Waugh’s novel in many details if not in spirit. The added prepositional phrase encapsulates most of the film’s positive distortions. Overtly, there is only one use of the conceit. At the beginning, Paul Pennyfeather is returning to his rooms, spots a bird on a rooftop, and looks through his binoculars, unaware that two half-dressed young women are in the window behind. Mistaken for a peeping tom, he flees, encounters the upper-class rowdies, is debagged, and flees again, only to collide with and fall atop of a young woman. No other birds make an appearance, if memory serves. Perhaps running about trouserless was not, in 1968, grounds for dismissal from Oxford; attempted rape had to be added. Metaphorically, of course, “bird-watching” was at the time more suggestive in English than in American slang. With “indecent behavior” established as heterosexual, Foxwell and company relentlessly straighten out the novel’s sexual innuendos. In the preliminary heats of the sports, the boys disappear in pursuit not of basic creature comforts but of a bevy of girls who ogle them across the fence. And though Clutterbuck is mentioned in the credits (see http://us.imdb.com/), I realized that he was in the film at all only when I read the credits. Captain Grimes, admirably played by Leo McKern, is metamorphosed into an incorrigible heterosexual, or at least bigamist, married at least four times before he encounters Flossie Fagan. It is hard to quarrel with most of the casting. Robin Phillips is suitably blank as Paul; Donald Wolfit as Fagan and Rodney Bewes as Potts look exactly as people like them are supposed to look, as do many other cast members. One might object to the casting of Geneviève Page as Margot Beste-Chetwynde (not, as one Waugh critic argued some years ago, pronounced “Beast- Cheating” but as any American would pronounce it). As in the casting of Simone Signoret as the adulterous wife in Room at the Top (1959), English directors of that period found it impossible to believe that an Englishwoman could be sexually desirable, let alone threatening. Some things are done well, even brilliantly. The sets, especially Oxford’s dreaming towers, Llanabba Castle, the rebuilt King’s Thursday, Margot’s office, Paul’s suite at the Ritz, and the prison are, if not exactly what I imagined from reading the novel, striking in themselves and in their contrasts with each other. And every time a Beste-Chetwynde Rolls Royce appears (instead of the Hispano Suiza in the novel), it is a different color—a minor stroke of wit, but file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_36.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:42] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD effective. The film also enforces some parallels from the novel and adds others. Director John Krish draws effective comparisons between Paul’s attic room at Dr. Fagan’s school, reached after a climb up many flights of stairs, and his prison cell, similarly elevated if much starker and, drawing on Prendy’s and Paul’s different analogies between school and prison, between the crowding and noise of both. Paul’s debagging at Oxford is repeated when he is forced to disrobe at the prison. When Grimes appears at King’s Thursday, he says to Paul, “Not a word, old boy.” And in the closing scene, when Paul is leaving his supposed funeral, he encounters Grimes dressed as a chauffeur and repeats the line before he bounds off into the distance, shedding various articles of clothing, to begin a new life. The most startling and to my mind the most effective innovation is having Prendy’s body cremated at Paul’s funeral. This allows, if it does not excuse, the decision to ignore the novel’s return to Oxford, but it does point up the parallels between the Modern Churchman with no beliefs and the theology student with unexamined beliefs and implies that Paul will be able to cope with the chaotic world in which he has been immersed. Other innovations make little difference or can be explained by the mores of 1968—the period to which the story is transferred. Grimes’s proclivities are changed, verbally as well as dramatically, from “sex and temperament” to “temperament ... and ... my appetite” (ellipses to indicate delivery). Philbrick goes through with the plot to kidnap Lord Tangent and sells him as a rickshaw boy in the Far East, though the buyer is upset by his having only one foot. Mrs. Grimes has a big scene with Flossie (whose sister is cut for the film) to reveal Grimes’s bigamy and shows up, as chaperone, when Margot is auditioning girls for Latin American Entertainment. Paul goes not to Marseilles but to Tangier to extricate them. And in the interpolations to “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” revealing Prendy’s fate, the lines “Damned lucky it was Prendergast, / Might ‘ave been you or me” are given to Paul in what the Christian Century critic thinks a “D above middle C.” The trio of Philbrick, Grimes, and Paul performs this very well—but the callousness of the line is completely out of character for Paul. The much altered opening scene, bird and all, establishes a pattern in which physical slapstick substitutes for verbal wit. When Philbrick shows Paul to his room at the school, things fall out of cupboards and grotesque noises emerge from the bathroom. At dinner, Paul has to wrestle his chair free from a boy holding it beneath the table. On the Sports Day, a heavy rain falls (breaking while Margot appears), filling the Llanabba Silver Band’s tuba. Toward the end of the film, when Paul learns that he is to be arrested, he falls backward into a bathtub. And when Philbrick relates his plan to be named prison chaplain after Prendy’s death by his good friend the Archbishop of Canterbury, Paul elbows him off a bench. And the doctor who signs Paul’s death certificate wobbles about in wildly exaggerated stage-drunk fashion. Foxwell and his collaborators make some attempt to preserve the novel’s verbal wit, but they consistently miss opportunities. A close comparison of the scenes at the scholastic agency and the interview with Dr. Fagan shows the flattening. Dr. Fagan’s notice of vacancy, read aloud, says something like “Reply to Dr. Fagan, Ph.D.” and so on, much flatter than the novel’s “Reply promptly but carefully to Dr. Fagan ('Esq., Ph.D.,' on envelope), enclosing copies of testimonials and photograph, if considered advisable....” When the agent says, “School is pretty bad,” the novel continues, “I think you’ll find it a very suitable post.” And the “temper discretion with deceit” line and echo are cut entirely, as are many of the best lines in the novel. Some reviewers actually liked the film. Hollis Alpert hated the title but thought the film “as good a satire as I have seen lately” and thought “the fun is there and fairly constant.” It’s hard to tell whether Marion Armstrong in Christian Century liked the film or not, but the review describes the film at some length. The Village Voice had no doubt—the reviewer hated almost everything about the film, though he admitted that “there are many moments of institutional incompetence and grotesque school-tie sentimentality that reduce me to helpless laughter....” On-line reviews are also mixed. Time Out Film Guide’s reviewer thought it “Faithful to the letter if not quite the spirit of Waugh (it lacks the novel's bite, and is also unwisely updated), it's nevertheless endowed with strong performances all round and civilized, if literary, direction by Krish.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office for Film and Broadcasting reviewer file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_36.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:42] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD thought that “Director John Krish has caught the satirically solemn flavor of the original and his fine British cast never cracks a smile in carrying on with Waugh's outrageous lampooning of English high and low life.