The Clandestine Marriage
UK 1999
Reviewed by Peter Matthews
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
England, the late eighteenth century. Richard Lovewell, clerk to landowner Mr Sterling, secretly weds Sterling's younger daughter Fanny who is pregnant with his child. With Fanny's inheritance at stake, the lovers determine to wait to announce the marriage to Sterling and his imperious sister Mrs Heidelberg. Fanny's elder sister Betsy is engaged to Sir John, who arrives at the Sterling household accompanied by his father Lord Ogleby.
On the day of the wedding, however, Sir John confides to Lovewell that he wishes to marry Fanny instead. Fanny repels Sir John's advances; Betsy swears revenge on her sister. Sir John proposes to decrease the dowry in exchange for Fanny's hand, and Sterling agrees if Mrs Heidelberg also gives her consent. But she is outraged at the idea and demands Fanny be exiled to London. Hoping that Lord Ogleby will intervene on her behalf, Fanny confesses to him that she loves another - which the old roué interprets as referring to himself. Ogleby offers to marry Fanny on improved financial terms, and Sterling acquiesces. A water pageant, planned to celebrate the union of Betsy and Sir John, accidentally soaks everyone. Blaming Fanny for the mishap, Betsy hopes to catch her in flagrante delicto with Sir John. Late that night, she rouses the entire household to witness Fanny's disgrace, but is astonished to discover Lovewell in her sister's bedroom. The clandestine marriage is revealed. An irate Sterling banishes the couple, but Ogleby resolves the crisis by volunteering to wed the forsaken Betsy. As he explains to Sterling, his family needs the money.
Review
Probably the only reason anyone will go to The Clandestine Marriage is for the sadistic pleasure of watching Joan Collins play an old bag. As the vulgar arriviste Mrs Heidelberg in Christopher Miles' cut-price screen version of George Coleman's and David Garrick's 1766 comedy, she wears brownish false teeth, an array of disfiguring beauty spots and more cadaverous make-up than Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). At one point, her ample bosom is so cruelly photographed it resembles parchment - but Collins seems past caring. She has never been one to stand on false dignity. Invariably good-humoured and pragmatic, she gleefully embraces her own tackiness and remains perpetually willing to indulge the spitefulness of her so-called fans. Here she looks relieved to discard the hot-bitch persona long past its sell-by date (Collins was born in 1933) and come out as the monster everyone already thinks she is. It's a broad, campy and supremely likeable performance.
Both Collins and Nigel Hawthorne are listed as associate producers - a polite way of saying they bailed the movie out when its principal backer withdrew. This isn't the sort of scuttlebutt which inspires confidence, and neither does the spotty track record of director Miles, best known for his shrill 1974 rendering of Jean Genet's The Maids as well as two indifferent stabs at D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy (1969) and the biopic Priest of Love (1980). He has also helmed projects (That Lucky Touch, Time for Loving) of fathomless obscurity with long intervals between engagements. Raggedly edited and often crudely post-synchronised, The Clandestine Marriage was only too evidently slapped together in a race against insolvency. It will no doubt expire and be mourned by no one, yet there are far worse movies around. In some ways, the depressing air of poverty results inadvertently in a certain realism.
Set in the Georgian era, the story concerns the symbiotic needs of city wealth and country title, and how both conspire to pervert the course of true love. If the film is any indication, the original play must have been poised uneasily between the curdled cynicism of Restoration comedy and the sentimental literature that developed in reaction to it. Miles and screenwriter Trevor Bentham appear to have looked at The Draughtsman's Contract for a couple of scenes that evoke Peter Greenaway's misanthropic universe - polished on the surface, foul and festering underneath. There are traces of sour intent in the alternation of sculpted, geometrical landscapes with revolting details of physical decay - most of them afflicting Hawthorne's arthritic dandy Lord Ogleby, inserting his own rotten bridgework in hideous close-up.
Hawthorne makes a poignant figure out of this preening fool, aware of the grisly spectacle he presents yet unable to control his drives. But whether the play is too soft to support the interpretation or the film-makers lack the dyspeptic talent for the job, their attempted portrait of aristocratic depravity comes across as smirky rather than truly virulent. The movie is little more than a harmless romp in the topiary, now and then toned up with handsome painterly effects - a Fragonard-like image of Collins on a flower-bestrewn swing or a shot of Hawthorne and two nubile maids suggestive of eighteenth-century pornographic illustration.
On the whole, though, economy has forced Miles to stage the action simply, and that turns out to be the picture's chief asset. While plusher theatrical adaptations (like the recent An Ideal Husband) sweat themselves to be cinematic, The Clandestine Marriage opts for the straightforward solution of treating a stately home and its grounds as extensions of the proscenium arch. Characters dart in and out of the shrubbery with a minimum of fuss, so that the best parts of the movie attain a relaxed al fresco quality. The house itself feels as plausibly lived in as the tourist trap it doubtless functions as in real life. But this very absence of texture makes it a suitable residence for a family of parvenus. A comparable synchronicity operates in the big water-pageant scene, where the parsimonious measures included hiring members of the Bath Minuet Society as extras. Their stiff unease before the camera gives the event a kind of documentary authenticity that brings out its full quotient of ghastliness. In movies, failure can't always be distinguished from success.
Credits
- Producers
- Rod Gunner
- Johnathan B. Stables
- Steve Clark-Hall
- Screenplay
- Trevor Bentham
- Adapted from the play by George Coleman the elder
David Garrick - Director of Photography
- Denis Crossan
- Editor
- George Akers
- Production Designer
- Martin Childs
- Music
- Stanislas Syrewicz
- ©Stanway Films Ltd
- Production Companies
- Portman Entertainment and BBC Films present a Portman production with the participation of British Screen
- The Gunner and Stables Group and Milesian Films
- Executive Producers
- Alan Howden
- Tim Buxton
- Co-producer
- Andrew Warren
- Associate Producers
- Nigel Hawthorne
- Joan Collins
- Production Co-ordinator
- Nathalie Tanner
- Production Manager
- Mark Mostyn
- Post-production Supervisor
- Mairi Bett
- Assistant Directors
- Alan J. Wands
- Claire Hughes
- Mark Murdoch
- Script Supervisor
- Sam Donovan
- Casting
- Director:
- Mary Selway
- Local:
- Candy Marlowe
- ADR Voice:
- Louis Elman
- Steadicam Operator
- Peter Cavaciuti
- Visual Effects/ Cascade Sequence
- The Film Factory at VTR
- Alan Church
- Visual Effects Producers:
- Simon Giles
- Diane Kelly
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Peter Talbot
- Visual Effects Lighting Cameraman:
- Matthew Twyford
- Visual Effects Compositor:
- Trevor Young
- Special Effects Supervisor
- Stuart Brisdon
- Art Director
- Mark Tanner
- Set Decorator
- Celia Bobak
- Costume Designer
- Deirdre Clancy
- Costume Supervisor
- Alan Flyng
- Wardrobe Mistress
- Joyce Stoneman
- Make-up
- Chief Artist:
- Sallie Jaye
- Artists:
- Norma Webb
- Deborah Jarvis
- Chief Hairdresser
- Jan Archibald
- Main/End Title Design
- Simon Giles
- Title Design
- The Film Factory at VTR
- Music Performed by
- Academy of St Martin-in-the-Field
- Conductor:
- Nic Raine
- Music Supervisor
- Roger Watson
- Programmer
- Jonathan Cook
- Music Engineer/Mixer
- Mike Ross Trevor
- Studio Co-ordinator
- Denise Love
- Soundtrack
- "Secret" by Trevor Bentham, Julia Taylor-Stanley, Stanislas Syrewicz, arranged by Julia Taylor-Stanley, Ian Lynn, Stanislas Syrewicz, performed by Miriam
- Choreographer
- Bath Minuet Company:
- Diana Cruickshank
- Production Sound Recordist
- Bruce Wills
- Re-recording Mixers
- Tim Cavagin
- Steve Single
- Sound Editor
- Dennis McTaggart
- Dialogue Editor
- Jason Adams
- ADR
- Mixer:
- John Bateman
- Foley
- Artists:
- Jean Sheffield
- Terry Busby
- Mixer:
- John Bateman
- Horse Wrangler
- Debbie Kaye
- Cast
- Nigel Hawthorne
- Lord Ogleby
- Joan Collins
- Mrs Heidelberg
- Timothy Spall
- Sterling
- Tom Hollander
- Sir John Ogleby
- Paul Nicholls
- Richard Lovewell
- Natasha Little
- Fanny
- Cyril Shaps
- Canton
- Mark Burns
- Capstick
- Ray Fearon
- Brush
- Timothy Bateson
- gaoler
- Craster Pringle
- Ruben
- Hugh Lloyd
- Reverend Parker
- Lara Harvey
- Lucy
- Jenny Galloway
- Mrs Trusty
- Philippa Stanton
- Chamber
- Emma Chambers
- Betsy
- Cavan Kendall
- Sergeant Flower
- Roger Hammond
- Traverse
- Nigel Perrin
- Zeus
- Pippa MacDougall
- Jozik Koc
- choir singers
- Andrew Price
- Adonis
- Gemma Aston
- Aphrodite
- Amanda Berrow
- Persephone
- Suzi Steer
- Samia Murphy
- Charles Hetherington
- singers
- Dennis Edwards
- Kirsten Elliot
- Dean Millard
- Jeremy Badcock
- Andy Sheriff
- John Newman
- Joyce Griffiths
- Les Smitherman
- April Hadfield
- Tessa Newman
- dancers, Bath Minuet Company
- Maxwell Steer
- Sharon Lindo
- Andrew van der Beek
- Jeremy Barlow
- Michael Muskett
- party orchestra, Bath Minuet Company
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Universal Pictures International
- 8,167 feet
- 90 minutes 45 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour