Little Malcolm (1974) [Repost]

Here is one of those rarities, an actor's film. It has nothing to do with stardom or charisma, nor is it the familiar result of a player's fusion with a director's concept. It stands or falls by the conviction with which the central performer gets under the skin of the character he plays.
~ Gordon Gow

Here is one of those rarities, an actor's film. It has nothing to do with stardom or charisma, nor is it the familiar result of a player's fusion with a director's concept. It stands or falls by the conviction with which the central performer gets under the skin of the character he plays. And stand it does: an ironic metaphor really, in view of the theme. Little Malcolm is an essay on impotence: not only the sexual sort - although that too - but the chronic inability to function, the malaise of the spirit which vents its frustration in vicious fantasy or overt violence. In this case both.

Malcolm Scrawdyke is a pathetic type, and he is given to highly theatrical ranting. These are two of the elements that make him manifestly difficult to act for film, where intimacy is demanded by the close-range camerawork which is bound to prevail when the material, as here, has been taken faithfully from a loquacious stage play All the more remarkable then is the acting of John Hurt, who played the same role in David Halliwell's Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Garrick Theatre in London in 1966, and who moderates its nuances and its emotions to the film medium with such invisible skill that we might be looking clinically upon a specimen of loused-up life which arouses only intermittent pity and sporadic mirth, but which grips attention and holds it, perhaps a bit tenuously for the first half-hour or so, but after that with a sureness bom of technical command and the essential empathy to make the characterisation work - to make of the inherent weakness a compulsive, disturbing study.
Wisely, in view of its downer theme, Halliwell couches much of his original play in a form near to farce, and Derek Woodward's screenplay does likewise. The outcome is akin to A Clockwork Orange in that sense, although very much more modest in its production values. Indeed, with some justification and in spite of getting in as many scene changes as possible, it retains the close-knit intensity of a theatre piece with only a handful of players. Made entirely on locations in Oldham, Lancashire, it begins cunningly with a sample of reluctant will-power that all but the sturdiest will recognise: Malcolm, in his sleazy room where the cold seeps and the tap drips, wills himself to get out of bed and takes an exceedingly long time about it. Human, we think. Quaint, perhaps. But the frailty is steadily magnified; the compensations for it are carried to dangerous extremes.

Malcolm, an art student given significantly to self-portraiture, has been expelled from Tech as a bad influence, and resolves to have his revenge by means of an elaborate Putsch, with the aid of student friends: the idea being to steal a painting from an art gallery and force the head of the Tech, by blackmail, to rip it to shreds and consequently make himself a pariah. Wrapped up with this is the formation of a political group, four-strong with Malcolm as leader, to be known as the Party of Dynamic Erection. But the phallic emblem so neatly designed by one of the bunch is merely wishful, like Malcolm's Hitlerian tirade in a driving snowfall, the hyper-Nazi salute with fingers curled into claws, and the tribunal where a suspected traitor is allowed to plead either 'guilty' or 'very guilty' and is swiftly given the death sentence.

At this moment, a zoom to the face of the condemned man is a reminder that the film medium has something to add. Equally cinematic is a pertinent spate of low and high camera placing and hysterically giddy revolutions of the images as the gang enact the tactics they hope to employ when the principal of the Tech is at their mercy And only on film, to be sure, could you find the acute degree of realism which brings shock-force to a brutal attack on the girl who has been the first to see through Malcolm's charade of power, challenging him to sexual intercourse in the wily knowledge that he is incapable of it, and then realising with swift horror that Malcolm's lack of potency has been clumsily sublimated into prudishness of a particularly vindictive order.

Stuart Cooper's direction makes much of such moments, but in the main it is unobtrusively disciplined to focus our minds upon Malcolm's flawed ethos: no inspired revolutionary he, but a limp narcissist whose rallying cries give place at last to feeble soliloquy upon his faintness and his constipation, and whose automatic efforts to persuade himself to 'act -don't think', are doomed, like his fantasised lifestyle, to failure. The farce has fizzled out: the conclusion is solemn and tough. But along the way there has been much bounce, not least from David Warner as an argumentative and uncertain member of the party, waxing hilariously verbose (over a cup of tea) in an erotic account of his alleged 'primordial' magnetism. John McEnery is excellently attuned to the loyalty and subsequent disillusion of the most earnest of Malcolm's supporters; Rosalind Ayres comes on with a coolness that gives place effectively to terror; and Raymond Piatt underplays a rather gormless participant in events which seem for him both enticing and perplexing. But all of these serve really to point up the calamitous urges of Malcolm, whose benighted ethos is so remarkably portrayed by John Hurt, carrying the tricky burden with exactly the right variations of subtlety and panache.
~ Gordon Gow