The Tichborne Claimant
UK 1998
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
1876. The heir to the vast Tichborne fortune, Sir Roger Tichborne, presumed drowned at sea in 1866, is reportedly seen in Australia. His brother Alfred comes from England to investigate along with Andrew Bogle, the family's black African servant. When Alfred dies of drink on arrival the Tichbornes deny Bogle funds to return. He advertises for the 'missing' heir and chooses as his candidate a butcher known as Thomas Castro. Bogle brings him to England with his wife and three children, coaching him in deportment and background knowledge on the voyage over.
In London, the claimant is denounced as an impostor by the Lords Arundell and Seymour, but hailed by the dowager Lady Tichborne as her long-lost son. After furnishing him with funds, she is killed in a riding accident. Visiting the family estate in Hampshire, the claimant secures the support of his neighbours, including the influential Lord Rivers. In need of funds to fight his court case, he agrees to a scheme devised by shady businessman Onslow to sell shares in his hoped-for inheritance, and tours music halls to denounce the British establishment and gain working-class sympathy.
Arundell and Seymour consult the Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, who decides to hear the case himself. In court, the claimant's supporters are demolished by barrister Henry Hawkins, who argues the claimant is Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping. A brothelkeeper, Fanny Loder, claims to be Orton's wife. The jury find against the claimant, and Cockburn sentences him to 14 years for fraud. 1895: the claimant, released from jail, rescues Bogle from a workhouse to live out his last days in a luxury hotel.
Review
Money, class, drink, sex, family squabbles, long-lost heirs, intricate legal shenanigans: The Tichborne Claimant is a story with all the ripe, implausible ingredients of a great Victorian novel. Amazingly enough, it's true. There really was a Tichborne claimant, focus of intense public interest and a cause célèbre during the Victorian era. He even contributed to the language: so well known was the claimant's portly figure that the plump but diminutive music-hall comic Harry Ralph took the stage name Little Tich, confident everyone would get the joke, hence the word 'titchy'.
Wisely, David Yates' film resists the temptation to egg such a rich factual pudding further and, apart from shifting the action some ten years forward, sticks largely to the story as it happened barring a few narrative elisions. (Not even a Victorian Lord Chief Justice could have handed down the arbitrary sentence we see Cockburn impose on the claimant; in fact there was a second trial, for perjury.) The masterstroke of Joe Fisher's script is to filter the story through the viewpoint of the Tichbornes' African servant Andrew Bogle (a performance of grave dignity from John Kani). Through his eyes we see Victorian society as a parade of dangerous, Gilbertian grotesques, high on their own overstuffed pomposity but lethal when their interests are threatened. "Like children," Bogle's voiceover tells us of his aristocratic employers, "they require careful management," and as the full malevolent weight of the British establishment masses to crush his protégé, he muses, "We had roused the old lion England - and the older and sicker the beast, the more savage it becomes."
Yates, making his feature-film debut after directing television documentaries about British seaside towns, tells his bizarre tale with pace and gusto, abetted by a modern sense of political irony. Evidently the claimant's crime isn't that he tried to commit fraud, but that he aimed to rouse the British populace against their masters. There are echoes here not only of the later trial of Oscar Wilde (similarly destroyed for having challenged the order of things), but of more recent events. Cockburn's comments, when handing down his vindictive sentence, that the claimant "set a wind blowing through England that will take a generation to quiet," recalls Lord Denning's notorious dictum that it were better an innocent man be convicted than open up the "inconceivable vista" that the police might possibly lie.
As the claimant, Robert Pugh fills out his role with orotund relish. He's supported by a pungent gallery of performances, differing facets of the derangement that, as Bogle remarks, "the English choose to call eccentricity," and all (except Kani's) shrewdly pitched just slightly larger-than-life: Charles Gray, seething with venom as Lord Arundell; the paranoid defence lawyer Keneally, played by the film's producer Tom McCabe; Dudley Sutton, jovially venial as the dubious entrepreneur Onslow; and a masterly portrayal of twinkling malice from John Gielgud. The role of Hawkins, the ruthless prosecutor, makes a perfect vehicle for Stephen Fry's air of irritating superiority. The film's overall mood of razor-edged pantomime is enhanced by Nicholas Hooper's rambunctious score, with its glances at Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Tichborne Claimant presents English society as a process of masquerade, where (as in Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949, or Nothing But the Best, 1964) "an English gentleman" can be constructed or counterfeited by those with the wit to do so; the counterfeit may even outdo the genuine article. Such a society, where appearance is all, gets the impostors it deserves. As for whether the claimant was an impostor, there are hints that Arundell and Seymour suborned witnesses, and moments when the claimant seems to know things only the real Sir Roger could have done - yet we've watched the whole con fabricated before our eyes.
Credits
- Producer
- Tom McCabe
- Screenplay
- Joe Fisher
- Director of Photography
- Peter Thwaites
- Editor
- Jamie Trevill
- Production Designer
- Brian Sykes
- Music
- Nicholas Hooper
- ©Tom McCabe and Bigger Picture Company
- Production Companies
- Tom McCabe presents a Bigger Picture Company production in association with Swiftcall International Telephone Company and The Isle of Man Film Commission
- Line Producer
- Annie Harrison-Baxter
- Associate Producer
- Christopher Payne
- Production Co-ordinator
- Vicky Swift
- Production Manager
- Australia 2nd Unit:
- Shilo T. McClean
- Unit Manager
- Barry Smith
- Location Manager
- Andy Holt
- Assistant Directors
- Charlie Watson
- Amy Sugdon
- Matthew Penry-Davey
- Continuity
- Danuta Skarszewska
- Casting
- Paul Keenan
- Liverpool:
- Beverley Keogh
- Isle of Man:
- James DeYoxall
- Script Editor
- David Collier
- Script Associate
- Mike Ames
- Camera Operators
- Andrew Speller
- Nigel Kinnings
- Camera
- UK 2nd Unit:
- Peter Thornton
- Clive Gill
- Australia 2nd Unit:
- Tony Jennings
- Steadicam Operators
- Jamie Fowlds
- Alf Tramontin
- Jan Pester
- Simon Harding
- Visual Effects
- Chris Lawson
- Peter Kersey
- Russell Pritchett
- Ealing Effects Shots
- Director of Photography:
- Roy Field
- Operator:
- Tory Jennings
- Art Directors
- Alison Harvey
- Claire Rudkin
- Scenic Artists
- Glen Ibbitson
- Denise Slattery
- Storyboard Artist
- Manjinder Bains
- Costume Designer
- Pam Downe
- Costume Supervisor
- Steve Kirkby
- Make-up Design
- Michele Bayliss
- Paul Gooch
- Title Design
- Frameline
- Opticals
- Studio 51
- Music Performed by
- The Adderbury Ensemble
- Music Engineer
- Gerry O'Riordan
- Choreography
- Paul Harris
- Sound Recordist
- Richard Flynn
- Dubbing Mixers
- Peter Smith
- Paul Davies
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Paul Davies
- Dialogue Editors
- Mike Crowley
- Simon Gershon
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Paul Harris
- Foley
- Artists:
- Jack Stew
- Felicity Cottrell
- Editor:
- Bernard O'Reilly
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Gerard Naprous
- Cast
- John Kani
- Andrew Bogle Tiyonga
- Robert Pugh
- the claimant, 'Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne'
- Stephen Fry
- Sir Henry Hawkins
- Robert Hardy
- Lord Rivers
- John Gielgud
- Lord Chief Justice Cockburn
- Rachael Dowling
- Mary Anne Costa
- Paola Dionisotti
- the dowager Lady Henrietta Felicity Tichborne
- Charles Gray
- Lord Arundell of Wardour
- James Villiers
- Uncle Henry Seymour
- Anita Dobson
- Fanny Orton née Loder
- Perry Fenwick
- John Holmes of Cheapside, a lawyer
- John Challis
- Mr Rous, the landlord
- Dudley Sutton
- Onslow Onslow
- Tom McCabe
- Dr Edward Vaughan Keneally
- Roger Hammond
- Arthur Cubitt
- Christopher Benjamin
- Gibbes
- Claire McCabe
- Max McCabe
- Myles McCabe
- the claimant's children
- Howard Lew Lewis
- Buttes, the hotel manager
- Chas Bryer
- Frederick Bowker
- Ursula Howells
- Lady Doughty
- Matt Wilkinson
- Tom Hibbert
- Jennifer Hennessy
- Cousin Alicia
- Roger May
- Baigent
- Iain Cuthbertson
- Dr Alexander McKechnie
- Mike Ames
- street preacher
- Vladimir Vega
- Tom Castro
- Sean Tudor-Owen
- Charles Orton
- Ralph Nossek
- workhouse master
- Joanna Swain
- workhouse matron
- Sara Sutcliffe
- Lizzie Holmes
- Richard Underwood
- stage doorkeeper
- Dennie Cane
- Rule Britannia singer
- Gordon Langford-Rowe
- Lipscomb
- Ron Harrison
- jury foreman
- David Crawford
- court usher
Fiona Carnegie- Eugenie, dowager's maid
- Tom Harrison
- Chatillon, dowager's priest
- Certificate
- PG
- Distributor
- Redbus Film Distribution
- 8,837 feet
- 98 minutes 11 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour