The Man Who Loved Redheads

10 April 2012

THE MAN WHO LOVED REDHEADS Fri 27 Apr, NFT, South Bank, SE1 (020-7928 3232).Moira Shearer (left), who is being feted by the NFT this month, calls this 1954 light comedy directed by Harold French her favourite film: it gave the former ballerina and Red Shoes star a chance to display her comic flair ? in not just one role, but four. Yes: I agree, it?s featherweight, but it?s fun, as John Justin?s Guardee-cum-diplomat tries to have his amorous way with three women he meets at various times in 1917, 1929 and 1950, all of whom remind him of Sylvia, the 16-year-old he kissed when he was a schoolboy. All four female characters are played by Miss Shearer. She manages to interpolate a bit of her earlier ballet career into the roles, since one ?Sylvia? is a highly-strung but sympathetic Russian premi?re danseuse. Another ?Sylvia? is a mannequin whose deportment owes a fair bit to the corps de ballet as well as the catwalk. This one also does a spirited Charleston. And the third ?Sylvia? is a Cockney lass who might have been an early study for Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle. So far, so familiar. But when you know the story behind the film, it makes your mouth go dry; for you realise you?re watching a coded version of a family tragedy disguised as an amorous fantasy. The clue lies in its author: Terence Rattigan, then in his prime as a celebrity playwright, though still smarting from the failure of his play about Alexander The Great, Adventure Story, an ill-concealed tiptoe on to homosexual territory disguised as dramatised Greek history. It folded quickly in the West End. On the rebound, Rattigan looked nearer home for a new theme and found it in the marriage of convenience tolerated by his mother, the steely Vera (a model for Rattigan?s fictitious Average Play-goer, Aunt Edna) whose husband Frank had been a lifelong philanderer. Rattigan wrote about his parents in the new play, covering his amorist father?s infidelity with a light-fantastic veil of serial pursuit of the same feminine ideal. There was oedipal revenge here, too, of course, since Rattigan blamed his own homosexuality and absence of real feelings on his father while attributing to him, too, the pain inflicted on his mother by his succession of mistresses. The play, entitled Who Is Sylvia?, opened in the West End in 1950. The Evening Standard?s theatre critic, Beverly Baxter, thundered, ?This Will Not Do, Mr Rattigan.? It didn?t either. It pleased the public tolerably well, but most of the press scented a more serious play beneath the frivolity and blamed Rattigan for not having the guts (or talent) to write it. Four years later, not one to waste work, or fail to recycle his friends? or family?s real-life tragedies into dramatic output, Rattigan re-worked the play as a film script for The Man Who Loved Redheads. Of course, there?s yet another ?take? on the subtext: this one identifying the elusive ?Sylvia? with several of the boys Rattigan had affairs with from his Harrow days. Like father, like son: well, perhaps not quite. ALEXANDER WALKER

The Man Who Loved Redheads
Cert: N/A

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