Loot

Black comedy may be an acquired taste but it still takes a clever and wickedly funny practitioner of the form to pull it off and Joe Orton was one of the best. The enfant terrible of British theatre in the sixties, Orton's promising career was cut short in 1967 when he was bludgeoned to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. This final curtain, along with the events that led up to it, were covered in detail in John Lahr's excellent biography of the acclaimed playwright Prick Up Your Ears, which was adapted to the screen in 1987 by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Alan Bennett and featured Gary Oldman as Joe Orton. While Frears' biopic was a fascinating character study, it didn't really delve into the nuts and bolts of Orton's craft or why such stages farces as Entertaining Mr. Sloane and What the Butler Saw became such popular and scandalous causes celebres among theatre critics and playgoers. The only thing that can really do justice to Orton's particular brand of outrageous comedy and satire is a first rate production of one of his plays. A film adaptation would be much trickier because so much of Orton's humor involves language - its proper and improper usage, double entendres, slang, class accents and other specifics. Of course, that didn't stop filmmakers from attempting to bring his work to the screen and Loot became the first Orton play to receive the big screen treatment in 1970. Adapted by scenarists Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and directed by Silvio Narizzano (Georgy Girl, 1966), Loot captures the frantic theatrical quality of Orton's stage production but the tension and comic precision achieved by actors trapped in a claustrophobic single set has been lost in Narizzano's attempts to open the play up with extraneous exterior shooting and jazzy editing. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote in his film review that Narizzano "has stretched it out with no great imagination, not only by showing us all of the action that takes place outside the hotel, but by making a movie, that is, by cross-cutting between scenes of simultaneous action and by breaking up individual scenes into close-ups, medium shots and long shots. The effect, which is as deadening to Orton as to Feydeau, is one of constant, nearly fatal interruption." Unless you have an opportunity to see a critically acclaimed revival of an Orton play, however, the film version ofLoot is your next best option and it at least serves up all of Orton's favorite obsessions and targets: death, sex, the police, religion and Englishmen. The plot brings together a strange gaggle of characters under one roof; in this case, a second rate hotel. The proprietor, Mr. McLeavy (Milo O'Shea) is preparing for his wife's funeral - her body is lying in state in the parlor - while the late Mrs. McLeavy's nurse Fay (Lee Remick) is plotting to become the next Mrs. McLeavy. Meanwhile, Hal (Roy Holder), Mr. McLeavy's son, and his companion Dennis (Hywel Bennett) have pulled off a major bank robbery and are attempting to hide the money in the hotel. Add a crooked cop (Richard Attenborough), a none-too-bright Catholic priest (Joe Lynch) and other eccentrics and stir until boiling. As you can imagine, the corpse is soon displaced, popping up in unexpected places around the hotel such as the dumb waiter, while the coffin becomes an ideal place to have sex or hide loot. Orton once said "One must shake the audience out of its expectations. They need not so much shocking, as surprising out of their rut." Certainly, the stage production of Loot achieved this as evidenced by reviews at the time which called it everything from "one of the most revolting things I've ever seen" (The London Evening News) to "the most genuinely quick witted, pungent and sprightly entertainment by a new young British playwright for a decade" (The Sunday Telegraph). What Orton did in Loot was change one's perceptions of farce, breaking the rules and creating his own interpretation of it. "As I understood it," he once said, "farce originally was very close to tragedy, and differed only in the treatment of its themes - themes like rape, bastardy, prostitution...a lot of farces today are still based on the preconceptions of a century ago, particularly the preconceptions about sex...a thirties farce is acceptable because it is distanced by its period, but a modern farce which merely nurses the old, outworn assumptions is cushioning people against reality. And this, of course, is just what the commercial theatre usually does. In theory there is no subject which could not be treated farcically - just as the Greeks were prepared to treat any subject farcically. But in practice farce has become very restricted indeed...My feeling is that the dramatist must have the right to change formal gear at any time. There's supposed to be a healthy shock, for instance, at those moments in Loot when an audience suddenly stops laughing. So if Loot is played as no more than farcical, it won't work." Orton, of course, didn't live long enough to see any film adaptations of his plays though he did entertain several proposals during his lifetime. One of his diary entries from February 17, 1967 reads, "I went to see a man in Brook Street about making a film of Loot. He was very keen. He said he wanted to film it with the colours very bright and glittering. He suggested [Brigitte] Bardot for Fay. Extraordinary idea." But Orton always knew his best work was intended for the stage and predicted correctly that Loot was "unfilmable" and that it would fail on Broadway as well (it did) as it was simply too British for American tastes. When the film version of Loot was released in the U.S., Vincent Canby's mixed review in The New York Times did offer some positive things to say about it, praising the performances of Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough as "the policeman who often sounds like Margaret Rutherford" and Roy Holder as "the androgynous son who looks like Rita Tushingham." He also called attention to what occasionally did work in Loot - Orton's witty dialogue and taboo-shattering humor. In one scene, "the mourning husband demands to be able to open his wife's coffin. "She's my wife. I can do what I like with her." Says the shocked policeman, who is about to divide the bank loot with Hal, Dennis and Fay: "Indeed not, sir. Conjugal rights should stop with the last heart beat!" I quote this dialogue at some length because there are still enough examples of Mr. Orton's displacements of conventional attitudes to make the movie Loot quite funny." Loot would go on to receive a Golden Palm nomination at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. Yet, the film was neither a financial or critical success and the same applied to Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Douglas Hickox's film adaptation of Orton's play, released the same year. Someday a filmmaker may come along and do a smashing cinematic adaptation of an Orton play. Meanwhile, the movie versions of Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloane at least give you some idea of what this groundbreaking dramatist was all about. Producer: Arthur Lewis Director: Silvio Narizzano Screenplay: Ray Galton, Alan Simpson (writers); Joe Orton (play) Cinematography: Austin Dempster Art Direction: Anthony Pratt Music: Keith Mansfield, Richard Willing-Denton Film Editing: Martin Charles Cast: Richard Attenborough (Inspector Truscott), Lee Remick (Nurse Fay McMahon), Hywel Bennett (Dennis), Milo O'Shea (Mr. McLeavy), Roy Holder (Hal), Dick Emery (Mr. Bateman), Joe Lynch (Father O'Shaughnessy). C-101m. by Jeff Stafford SOURCES: Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lahr (Alfred A. Knopf) The Orton Diaries, Edited by John Lahr (Methuen) The New York Times, a review by Vincent Canby www.afi.com IMDB