swo17 wrote:See discussion starting
here
I was intrigued to hear in Moffat's interview that the original, lost version of
George's Room was some kind of montage experiment, with more than 200 cuts crammed into about 25 minutes. If so, that makes the surviving version very different indeed.
The
Half Hour Stories are very standard, though generally high-quality, low-budget British TV plays, but you can see Clarke already trying to do formally interesting things within the extreme constraints of the format.
Stella might be the best example, with its eccentric pseudo-deep-focus compositions and
Dragnet Girl-style ultra-low tracking shots. Those embellishments don't exactly serve the material, which, like all the other
Half Hour Stories, is two people talking on a single set, and don't signify much more than a fidgety director. The real strengths of this early work lie with the scripts and the performances the director elicits, which are uniformly excellent.
The Last Train through Harecastle Tunnel is a half-step on from this material. It's a much more ambitious work, but it still boils down to a series of two- or three-hander conversational scenes, in the course of which each character (and most notably our trainspotting protagonist) reveals themselves to be more complex than we'd first assumed. It's kind of a basic gimmick / structure, but it's nevertheless an enjoyable ride, and it's notable that this schematic generosity even extends to the stock office antagonists of the framing scenes, whose weekends didn't conform to their own stereotypical expectations after all.
Sovereign's Company is the first full-blooded Clarke film in the set, and it's really a proto-
Scum, in which an officer's training corps is run along pretty much the same lines as a borstal. But once again, Clarke and writer Don Shaw are atypically generous in their characterization. Each cadet has contrasting and complicated motivations and reactions; the powers that be are sympathetic to this and pragmatic in their decisions. However awful we might think the institution, it's not depicted as malevolent. The big, central scene presents a very interesting play on our sympathies for the protagonist. There's a stupid, ugly 'raid' / brawl that everybody in the company is coerced to take part in, and Cantfield slips away from it, but not on the basis of any principle, but from sheer sweaty, shaking cowardice. It's the kind of thing that normally is intended to make a character repellent, but here it's complicated by empathy (obviously the boy is temperamentally unsuited to this career, and it's monstrous that he's been railroaded into it), objective rationality (the brawl is an ugly debacle, and we don't want the protagonist to be involved in it), immediate anxiety (the repercussions will be horrible for him if the other boys find out), and a more global, long-term anxiety (if he manages to become an officer, he'll likely be a dangerous liability in the field, putting the lives of others at risk). And that complex of reactions in turn puts us into the shoes of various other characters within the film.
The Hallelujah Handshake has already been spoken about at length, and I'll just join in the praise for this rich, unassuming character study of a small community. There are lots of interesting things going on with the structure and form as well, with flash forwards, inner monologues and so forth, and the rug of our preconceptions is continually pulled out from under us. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other film in which the members of a church (or similar group) respond to an external challenge in a variety of ways as individuals. At best you might end up with two sparring factions.
I also watched Clarke's 1972 episode of
The Edwardians,
Horatio Bottomley. It's an odd little film, in which we follow rather repetitive vignettes in the long life of a high-profile con artist (financier / editor / Member of Parliament). The film presses the restart button multiple times as Bottomley slips from scam to scam, recycling old cons and old rhetoric, punctuated by triumphant court appearances and basic interstitial animations to mark the passage of time. It, frankly, becomes a bit of a slog before the strategic need for all those repetitions becomes apparent in the final scenes, and particularly the very last one. In a very strange way, the structure of this film kind of anticipates
Elephant. It's a subject that I can imagine fitting Orson Welles like a glove.