Trollheart

THE STARS OF THE SHOW
There are really only two. Suzanna Hamilton in the role of Julia is good but although she's the instrument of Winston Smith's downfall she's kind of almost peripheral to the movie. She has no outstanding scenes. No, this movie is straddled by two titans of the screen, and it's hard to say who does the better job, though John Hurt has of course the larger role and is in the movie more. Still, for the relatively smaller part he plays, Richard Burton steals every scene in the final twenty minutes or so of the film.

JOHN HURT as Winston Smith: Hurt is the perfect actor to play Smith, the lowly, downtrodden, ordinary man who dreams of a better life but has not the wit nor the means to make those dreams come true. He snatches at his happiness when it presents itself and pays the awful price soon afterwards, when he realises he has been set up. Hurt presents a tragic, almost pathetic figure, his expression never transcending any more than a slight winsome grin. This is not a man used to laughing, or smiling: the Party frowns on such frivolous and unproductive behaviour. Besides, a man who is happy may start to think, and the Party does not want that! Smith, like everyone else in the story who labours under the brutal oppression of the State, exists in a state of near-perpetual fear and anxiety, worried that at any moment he might be shopped to the authorities as a subversive, a traitor or a thoughtcriminal. It matters not whether these accusations are true; in this world, a man is presumed guilty. There is no defence. Once you fall under suspicion your life is at an end and there is nothing you can say or do about it.

Hurt is slim too, sometimes to the point of near-emaciation when we see him naked in his love scenes, and certainly at the end of his torture at the hands of O'Brien, when he is little more than a rag of a man, a skeleton loosely wrapped in ill-fitting skin. He represents, as O'Brien remarks, the very worst of mankind. He is soft, scared, easily led, malleable. He fears the Party and wants to obey it, not out of love or loyalty but simply out of self-preservation. Yet he hates and loathes it for what it has made him, and his fellow human beings, become, and he rebels at first in the only way he knows how, a pathetically small show of personal defiance as he keeps his diary, an activity forbidden by the Party. Later, as he spirals down into subversism and rebellion, he meets Julia and falls in love with her. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he just wants to have sex, to do it under the nose of the Party to show he is not afraid of them, even though he is. Perhaps Julia is just a means to an end, and he is only using her.

His shock when he realises he has been betrayed, on two fronts, is palpable. He stands in the upper floor flat above the shop, naked literally and metaphorically, his protection stripped from him as easily as his clothes, his whole world crashing down upon his head, and he knows with certainty that there is only one way this can end. Even when the soldiers callously punch Julia in the stomach and she collapses gasping to the ground, he makes no move to help her. At this point, he has forgotten her to a great extent and is more intent on his own survival. Perhaps he even blames her for his predicament, feels like he has been led astray, as if she tempted him, not that he wasn't a willing subject. Some small part of him may think that Julia is a Party agent and that he has been doubly set up, though I don't think this is ever remarked upon or postulated. But definitely, from being two people against the world Winston Smith is suddenly reduced to a single man standing against the massive and powerful machinery of the almighty Party, and must feel very small indeed.

Hurt's voice, too, is low most of the time. Even when he rebels, when he meets Julia in the fields outside London and has sex with her, declaring his desire to corrupt and be corrupt, it is said in a low, quiet voice with little real inflection, as if maybe he can't quite believe what he's saying, or what's happening. The only time he gets really animated, understandably, is when he's being tortured by O'Brien and gives vent to his frustration, rage and fear, and his depthless, boundless despair. There is no escape, he knows that, and he just wishes O'Brien would finish with him and have him executed. But he knows that it will be a long time before that happens. He must be broken first, and broken totally.

He's the everyman of the story, the guy who goes to work to do a job he may not hate but certainly has no interest in, returns to a dingy flat not much better than the cubicle in which he works at the Ministry of Truth, and takes his only solace in the writings in his diary. During his torture Smith clings to his belief that somehow, someway, the Party and Big Brother will be defeated. When he tells O'Brien that the power that will eventually destroy him and his system of totalitarianism government is the spirit of Man, O'Brien laughs and says that if he is indeed a man, Smith is the last man, and that the Party member and his cohorts are the successors to mankind, and will never be defeated. They have successfully subjugated the entire populace, who are so completely conditioned that they don't even realise they are slaves in all but name, and there is no resistance, no-one to stand against them, nobody to fight much less defeat them. His despair is almost tangible as he realises that O'Brien is right: nobody cares, and if nobody cares, nothing will be done.

RICHARD BURTON as O'Brien: Never once raising his voice, Burton nevertheless manages to convey the most insidious evil through his conversations with Smith, both before, during and after his torture and rehabilitation. Proving that a whisper can be as menacing as a growl, sometimes moreso, Burton commands in his role and completely takes over the torture sequence. In a way this is not surprising as he has the lion's share of the dialogue, with Smith's responses mostly restricted to screams of pain and pleas for the torture to stop, but in his final ever performance Burton shines with a dark light that you feel few others could have managed.

And many were considered for the role before him. Originally intended for Paul Scofield, who had to cry off after sustaining an injury weeks before filming began, people like Brando, Hopkins, Steiger and Connery were all viable candidates, and I could see Hopkins, in perhaps his Hannibal Lecter persona, giving this a good shot, but Connery? Please! Burton has the world-weary face of a man who has seen and heard it all, and whose declining health possibly told him he was not too long for this world. Although only fifty-nine at the time of the filmng of this movie he looks much older, and health disorders like cirrhosis of the liver and kidney disease were obviously taking their toll. He would die of a brain haemorrhage two months before the movie opened in theatres.

In essence the part did not require him to do an awful lot other than talk. He was either seated at his desk or standing by Winston's side in all scenes; there was no action required, but then, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is hardly what you would call an action movie. Through nothing more than a pained expression and a voice that was reasonable and gentle but determined as he nodded to the operative on the electric-shock machine and muttered “Again” almost resignedly, Burton conveyed more real empathy and feeling than a hundred other actors could do. You hate him, but you somehow convince yourself that he's trying to help Smith, help him see the error of his ways. Of course he isn't; all he wants to do is break Smith so that he can plead his guilt to the nation and later be executed, another example to anyone who might be considering thoughtcrime, sexcrime or any other sort of sedition or activity contrary to the Party that it simply is not worth it: Big Brother is watching you. He never sleeps, and your treachery will be discovered.

O'Brien gives the Party a face, but it is, if this is not a contradiction in terms, a faceless face. It's like when he reveals to Smith that he wrote Goldstein's book: he tells him that he helped author it, as no book is written by a single individual nowadays. The Party frowns on independent thought, and a writer's thoughts must by his nature be independent and free. So although O'Brien is the face of the Party that we see, we can expect that there are hundreds more just like him, with kindly, stern, almost disappointed faces who will happily torture the enemies of the State and then go back to their offices and write up a report, and move on to the next traitor in line. O'Brien is not unique: he is probably not even considered that within the Party. He is simply a rather larger cog in a massive machine. He knows his place and he has learned long ago not to challenge or question that. O'Brien is his name, and if the Party should decide that his name is Thompson, then no doubt he will become Thompson. Nobody knows better than he that the Party gets what the Party wants, and you do not stand in its way, no matter your ranking.

WHY DO I LOVE THIS MOVIE?
Well, why indeed. I loved the book and thought it would be difficult to translate to a movie, but I'm glad to see that Orwell's widow stipulated in her will that no special effects be used, because if Hollywood had got their hands on this god knows where we would be. Luckily it was a fine English studio (Elstree) that took it on and they afforded it the respect it deserves, keeping the entire story line and altering nothing really. Of course, any film of a book is going to be shorter by definition, but I think they did really well with this adaptation. Originally supposed to have been filmed in black and white (which would have suited the story down to the ground) this idea was nixed by Virgin and so instead some long-winded procedure by which the colour is “washed out” of the prints was used, resulting in a strange, sort of bleached effect to the finished article, which worked well, but monochrome would have been so much better.

As I'm sure everyone knows, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is not a happy film. It is not a movie you watch to be uplifted or to have your faith in the perseverance of Man restored or confirmed. The hero, such as he is, is beaten down and defeated by the machinery of the State, and the only result of his small rebellion is that he is excised from history. His actions are meaningless now, as nobody will ever hear of them. He has been told by O'Brien, without the slightest trace of rancour or boast, that the Party is immortal, that Big Brother and his cronies have inherited the Earth, that they control everything and there is nobody to stand against them. And it's hard to doubt this, when you look at the absolute power they wield, the way the people are battered down, forced into an almost slavish existence and deprived of their basic human rights.

But there's something wonderful about the movie, and the story. In essence it shows Man for what he really is, or could become. Without question Orwell's vision has been sadly repeated many times since he wrote the novel in 1949, and surely one of his inspirations for the totalitarian state of Oceania must have been Nazi Germany, given the time it was written. But since then we have had so many tin-pot dictators spring up in countries large and small, and enforce their will upon their people, with no other aim in mind than total domination and subjugation of the populace. Pol Pot. Saddam Hussein. Gadaffi. And more recently, and perhaps the greatest example of this sort of state-run machinery, the rulers of North Korea. Though it could also be argued that the USA is heading in the same direction, if somewhat more subtly. Remember PNAC?

The fact that, like the last movie I reviewed, this is basically a two-man show is another of its strengths. There are supporting characters of course but they do little to move the story along, other than Julia of course. The film basically revolves around the twin fulcrums of Hurt as Smith and Burton as O'Brien, as the one brutally asserts his dominance over the other, and strips everything away from him until he is left with only one thing to cling onto: his love for Julia. And then, in a final act of psychological rape, O'Brien tears that from him too, taking his only anchor and setting him adrift on unfamiliar seas, where he soon crashes and drowns, saved by the Party but only to be used for their ends, and only until it suits them to dispose of him.

Winston Smith is a man who cannot win, cannot be expected to win. From the very first he is under observation: when he makes the bold step to rent a room for he and Julia he is blissfully unaware that the Thought Police are watching him, recording his crimes and preparing to deliver him into the hands of the Party. His happiness, short-lived as it is, cannot last, cannot hope to last. There is no hope in the world of Orwell's Oceania, only endless, pointless toil, interminable announcements and eternal wars, and the constant revising and changing of history. We know Smith cannot win, and yet we're drawn to his failure like an errant moth, burned by the flame of the knowledge that his quest is useless and doomed to collapse, end in horror, torture and eventual death. It's one of the bleakest, most unremittingly nihilistic movies I have ever seen, and yet in ways it serves as a warning too: let your leaders go too far and this could be you.

With the usage of the term “Party”, it's reasonable to assume Orwell is using the Soviets, as were, as his model, or perhaps the Nazi party as already mentioned. Both have an absolute ruler, a dictator at their head, a man whose very utterance is law and who rewards challenges to his authority with imprisonment, torture and death. This would seem to illustrate why at least a two-party political system is required, as the one will act as a watchman on the other: checks and balances. If you only have one party, it can do what it likes and face no opposition, and a dictatorship inevitably results.

MESSAGE IN THE MOVIE
On the face of it a very bleak one: when absolute, unquestioning and unfettered power is handed to any one organisation they are likely, in fact almost bound to run roughshod over the people's rights and do exactly whatever the hell they want. Goldstein's book --- we're told by O'Brien that this is nothing more than a construct of the Party, and that he helped author it, but can we be sure of this? Could this not be just another device by which to batter down Smith's last walls of defence, take away the supports that are holding him precariously up and send him tumbling into the abyss of despair? --- probably says it best: that the aim of the war is not victory, but continuance, and the net result of any prolonged war is that the populace remain in almost complete deprivation and subjugation.

You could also say that the message is that the power of one man is laughable when put up against the power of the State --- David vs Goliath, but without the heroic triumph of the underdog related in the Bible --- that one man cannot make a difference and that even if he manages to, the Party machinery will work to erase that influence from history, so that it will be as if the effort was never made, the victory --- small as it may be --- never won and the ideas espoused by the one-man rebellion crushed and ground into the dust. The Party, we are told, is immortal. Man is not.

But dark and callous as this message may seem to be, it could also serve as a warning, a cautionary tale, an admonition not to allow such a thing to develop. Surely, as I have already mentioned, it is an attempt to ensure that an evil entity like the Nazi Party never again comes to power, that men stand up and hold their lawmakers and politicians and generals and leaders to account, and do not bow down out of fear, ignorance or apathy. It could be seen as a clarion call to make men and women work more diligently together towards a common goal, but never to forget that they are men and women, and never to allow themselves to be sucked or subsumed into a huge oligarchical machine, giving it power and licence to roll over the world.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018