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Richard Attenborough RIP


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#1 chrisno1

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Posted 25 August 2014 - 03:16 PM

I heard this sad news as I drove home this morning at 3.00am.

Of course everyone has to go sometime and Richard Attenborough had had a very full and successful life by the time he passed away aged 90. He epitomized both on screen and off something of the quintessential Englishman, those endless 'luvvies', the stiff upper lip, the quiet strength and determination, the modesty, the open heartedness. One look at the endless awards and accolades he received for humanitarian and non-cinema related projects and the long list of charities he helped proves how highly regarded his influence was. 

While his off screen work is laudable, it is his cinematic persona we are most familiar with. A young earnest actor in the 1940s, he made his bow in Coward's In Which We Serve, a WW2 drama which ironically was repeated on TV here in London the day before he died. While the role as a young stoker brought him some attention it wasn't until after the war that he made a name for himself in John Boulting's brilliant Brighton Rock, a thriller based on Graham Greene's novel. He was superb as Pinkie, a teenage hoodlum and latent psychopath, and the film itself was the most profitable British film of 1947. It was decades before the BAFTAs, but I think it likely he would have been honoured for the year's best performance. At times in this film he is remarkably frightening, his very stillness seeming to fill the screen; you can sense the animosity creeping out of his pores. It is a very great performance in a great film.

Sad then that he was forced to embark on a series of routine films for the next fifteen or so years until, frustrated by the inability to find decent and profound material, he formed the Beaver production company with director Bryan Forbes and they made The Angry Silence a very serious riposte to I'm All Right Jack. Both films concentrated on union action in Britain's industrial North, but Attenborough's was weighty, provocative and compelling, while Boulting's (which he'd also featured in) was tongue in cheek cheerful. Forbes was given a BAFTA and received Oscar nominations for his direction and writing. More importantly it finally allowed Attenborough to make films he considered worthy, both of his talent and his audience.

There followed throughout the sixties a run of outstanding film roles and producer credits. Films during this period included The L Shaped Room, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, The Sand Pebbles, Whistle Down the Wind, Flight of the Phoenix and The Great Escape, the latter garnering a much deserved international profile.

The sixties climaxed with the satirical Oh What a Lovely War, a film adaptation of Joan Littlewood's groundbreaking play, which set its historical WW1 action against a background of popular musical hall songs of the day. It was a magnificent debut for Attenborough as a director. The final heartrending aerial shot of millions of war graves still pulls at the conscience. It would be worth politicians revisiting this film while they talk of 100 year commemorations. They might think twice before sounding so blithely gung-ho about 'the sacrifice'.

Attenborough continued to act and he was outstanding in 10 Rillington Place, but directing became his new career which culminated in winning Oscars for Gandhi, a film rather out of step with the times, which owed more to the David Lean school of production than the David Lynch style that Hollywood was embracing. It is a great piece of film making. I remember a documentary where Attenborough commented that at one point they had to command 200,000 extras - a feat these days achieved by CGI. His list of directing efforts encompassed Chaplin, A Chorus Line, Yong Winston and Magic. Many of these movies featured Anthony Hopkins. They seem to work well together and in Shadowlands he drew from Hopkins one of the actor's great performances as the poet and author C.S.Lewis. 

Attenborough's skill behind the camera was always competent, sometimes debatable, and in truth as he aged his movies got less interesting and the topics seemed to overrun the action.

By this time he was both a Knight and a Peer (Lord Attenborough, Baron of Richmond) and had been chair of BAFTA. He took on more acting roles and was excellent in both Jurassic Park as the well meaning Professor Hammond and a remake of Miracle on 34th Street, where as Kris Kringle he virtually became Santa Claus. These roles brought him younger fans who we can only hope will be indebted to his legacy.

For me, however, Attenborough's greatest cinematic legacy has been the stunning, gripping, torturous factual epic A Bridge Too Far. Recently voted the greatest war film of all time, this reenactment of the Arnhem offensive of 1944 features an all star cast and some of the greatest battle action seen in the cinema. It compares favorably to movies like The Longest Day in its documentary style, Saving Private Ryan in the grim, gruesomeness of conflict and his own Oh What a Lovely War in the futile heroism of it all. Needless to say Hopkins is again outstanding, but so are Sean Connery, James Caan and Laurence Olivier.

He stopped making movies in 2007 and suffered a stroke which left him wheelchair bound. His death leaves an aching hole in British cinema.

Richard Attenborough 1923 - 2014

 



#2 Major Tallon

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Posted 25 August 2014 - 03:29 PM

A lovely tribute, chrisno1.  I've seen him in dozens of films and have always considered him a remarkable talent, both in front of and behind the camera.  A great man.



#3 thecasinoroyale

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Posted 26 August 2014 - 07:26 AM

Very nice chrisno1 - wonderful passage.

 

A wonderful man on and off screen, and such great warmth and passion for his films. The roles that will stand with me as watching from a young age are John Hammond from 'Jurassic Park' and the one and only Kris Kringle in 'Miracle On 34th Street' - the best Santa on screen we've had.