The first big-screen foray into Airstrip One is not, it must be said, well liked. Its chief detractor, Sonia Orwell, held it in such contempt that she forced its withdrawal from circulation in the mid-seventies, relegating it to the status of “unfilm.”1 The general consensus was that British director Michael Anderson’s black-and-white movie was inferior to Rudolph Cartier’s vastly less expensive TV play, which preceded it by 16 months. But until 2007, when the American edit emerged on DVD in the UK, it was practically impossible to compare the two.
“The BBC TV production caused a lot of fuss, and for its time it was artistically quite an important production, certainly in terms of its shock value,” says Tony Shaw, author of British Cinema and the Cold War. “A lot of viewers were genuinely scared by it and it was quite a sophisticated production for its time.” Animal Farm has aged well too, says the history professor, and is a milestone in British animation history. But “the 1956 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four was a stinker, I think. It bombed at the box office and was criticized heavily in the press at the time as a badly acted, cheap production.”2
The blame for this, if one agrees with Shaw’s assessment, lies with independent American producer N. Peter Rathvon. The former lawyer,3 banker and businessman had at one time been a big noise in Hollywood, serving as president of RKO Pictures from 19424 to 1948. This ended abruptly when its new owner, billionaire Howard Hughes, unceremoniously fired him.5 Rathvon, by all accounts, had McCarthyite sympathies, shedding few tears for the “Hollywood Ten”6 in 1947 when the Senate blacklisted them from the industry for refusing to reveal their politics. Journalist Frances Stonor Saunders, in her book Who Paid the Piper?, suggests it was U.S. intelligence officer Howard Hunt who solicited his help with 1984.7
In any event, the film rights passed to Rathvon in 1953, the same year President Eisenhower founded America’s public relations arm, the United States Information Agency (USIA). Presented with a chance to veto the BBC’s dramatization, Rathvon shrewdly agreed to let it go ahead and capitalized on the stink it caused. “The smartest option I ever dropped,” he told a journalist.8
According to Shaw’s researches, the USIA granted the movie a $100,000 subsidy and guaranteed worldwide distribution in exchange for control of the screenplay.9 In September 1954, three months before the BBC controversy, a report in The New York Times claimed Rathvon and Lothar Wolff, an associate of Louis de Rochemont, would shoot parallel German and English versions in West Germany, possibly with heart-throb Cornel Wilde.10
By Christmas, Orwell-obsessed newspapers in London were running a different story: that Associated British Pictures would produce a movie at Elstree Studios in April with a yet-to-be-finalized British and American cast. To give it a drabber appearance, Rathvon announced, they’d be shooting in monochrome.11 As assistant producer Ralph Bettinson revealed, the British Board of Film Censors had passed the script without cuts, giving the film a pre-emptive “X” certificate that would bar under-18s from seeing it.12 This blow to its box-office prospects skewered any chance of casting Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell, who were unknown outside of the UK.
With its Thought Police riding turbo-charged motorbikes near a beehive-shaped ministry building, this lobby card demonstrates the ambition of 1984’s production designer, Terence Verity (copyright Columbia Pictures, 1956).
To generate interest Stateside, Rathvon plumped for second-tier American stars—“plumped” being the operative word for Edmond O’Brien, the beefiest “Winston Smith of the Outer Party” we’ve seen. The 39-year-old New Yorker had just hit a career high, winning the best supporting actor Oscar for his role as a sweaty publicist in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954).
Jan Sterling, a 34-year-old New York blonde, won the role of “Julia of the Outer Party’—though, judging from an interview with Joan Fontaine at the time, she may not have been first choice.13 The job coincided with her actor husband Paul Douglas filming an Americanized Shakespeare update, Joe Macbeth, in Walton-on-Thames.14
Lending some British class to the proceedings was Michael Redgrave, playing “O’Connor of the Inner Party”; presumably the new surname was to avoid confusion with Edmond O’Brien. For reasons of religious sensitivity, perhaps, screenwriters William P. Templeton and Ralph Bettinson replaced Goldstein with the futuristic-sounding “Kalador” (played by the uncredited Bernard Rebel).
Winston Smith (Edmond O’Brien) and Julia (Jan Sterling) meet in Victory Square for 1984’s last scene. Director Michael Anderson shot alternative endings for the U.S. and UK markets (copyright Columbia Pictures, 1956).
Anderson, at the helm, had made his name with the 1955 war film The Dam Busters, in which Redgrave—one of the names on Orwell’s list of suspected “fellow travelers” in 1949—portrayed Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb. In fact the 35-year-old director, who had toured with his actor father Lawrence as a child,15 had witnessed totalitarianism at close hand. Interviewed in 1967 about his Berlin-set spy thriller, The Quiller Memorandum, he said: “I was in Germany long before the war, in 1933, at the time of Hitler’s ascent to power and was deeply influenced by it.”16
Anderson, who died in April 2018 at the age of 98, reportedly penned an autobiography in his final years, a project he mentioned to the author of this book in a 2015 email.17 In 1989, the American sci-fi magazine Starlog asked him about the film. “It was done on a shoestring, which is a shame,” he said. “But I think it was fairly true to the Orwellian novel.”18
With so few production staff still around, it’s lucky for us that Rathvon and his team at the incongruously named Holiday Film Productions were relaxed about allowing journalists on set. Picturegoer magazine ran an especially detailed report from a night shoot in Stepney, East London, where reporter Ernie Player quizzed art director Terence Verity about his distinctive production design.19 The blue-gray Party uniforms—made to look synthetic and one layer thick—and the Thought Police’s turbine-driven motorbikes were in a modernistic style that would, by the time of the film’s release, nettle Mrs. Orwell terribly. Verity’s main challenge, though, was finding bombed-out locations in a city that was putting the Blitz behind it. “Everything has been cleared up,” he said ruefully, as he watched his crew import their own rubble.20
At Elstree, Verity rebuilt Trafalgar Square—or rather, Victory Square21—installing telescreens in the base of his replica Nelson’s Column.22 The ministry buildings clustered around the Thames (and shot from a great height in some of the establishing scenes) resemble gun-metal beehives, as he reasoned that they “must be bomb-proof and not too noticeable from the air.”23 To viewers now, they’re strangely reminiscent of London’s Swiss Re building, better known as “the Gherkin.”24
Speaking to The New York Times in the middle of shooting, Rathvon promised to improve on the novel, which he thought was too preoccupied with background. Taking its cues from Templeton’s Studio One TV script, the film would be about people: “a love story against a background of terror.”25 Speaking to the same paper, Anderson stressed that he was keen to avoid anything that smacked of “the fantastic or science-fiction.”26 Room 101’s rats would be suggested rather than shown, he said, as Oceania was more “a tyranny of the mind” than the body.27
In a script “freely adapted” from the novel, as the opening credits phrase it, this was by no means the only liberty taken. Julia and Winston meet four minutes in, huddling in a shop doorway as bombs rain down on London; Smith starts his diary on 18 April, two weeks later than the date in Orwell’s book; and when he roams the streets at night, searching for a hidden note from Julia, little Selina Parsons demands to know what he’s up to.
The prole sector is “the people’s area,”28 The Times is now The Gazette and Winston’s fiery garbage chute, the memory hole, is labeled the VAPORISER. At least Newspeak, so cruelly ignored in Templeton’s Studio One script, is mentioned in Winston and O’Connor’s conversations, albeit sketchily.29 At every turn, the political message is dumbed down. While Smith is reading from Kalador’s book, for example, Julia is going gooey at the sight of a baby outside. “I’d have liked to have had a child,” she simpers.
Orwell’s ending was mutilated too—for British audiences, at any rate. In fact, Anderson shot two finales: one faithful to the novel, the other with a modicum of hope. To understand why, let’s return to Stonor Saunders’ research: specifically Rathvon’s correspondence with the writer Sol Stein, executive director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist body.30
Stein’s advice as a script doctor was: (i) to make the Big Brother of the posters a human being, rather than a cartoon caricature, which would ground the story in reality; (ii) to replace the Anti-Sex League sashes with armbands, because sashes are rarely seen outside diplomatic ceremonies31; and (iii) to avoid trumpets, as they’re associated with pageantry.32 To judge from the finished movie, these suggestions were heeded.
But Stein’s gravest misgivings concerned Orwell’s ending, which he called “a situation without hope.” In its place, he suggested a schmaltzy addendum to Winston and Julia’s last meeting, which runs as follows:
• The pair leave the cafe, heading in opposite directions, Winston sees the faces of children, shining with a natural innocence. He quickens his pace, the music swells, and he’s “near the secluded spot where he and Julia found refuge.”33
• Smith notices another loving couple and as he turns to walk away, the audience hears his heart beating. He peers at his fingers, remembering that two and two make four.
• “We continue to hear his heart beating, and by extension, the human heart beating—louder, as the film ends.”34
Even for a Hollywood producer, the advice was too sickly to follow.
In both of the finales Anderson filmed, the traumatized ex-lovers meet in Victory Square. The more-or-less faithful version ends with Winston joining a mob and chanting: “Long live Big Brother!” in response to good news from the African front. (“This, then, is a story of the future,” the narrator declares, in sententious tones and an American accent. “It could be the story of our children if we fail to preserve their heritage of freedom.”)
The “happy” ending, missing from the 2007 DVD but available to read in script form if you know where to look,35 takes an altogether different tack. This time around, Winston defies the crowd by yelling: “Down with Big Brother!”—a phrase he repeats until the Thought Police shoot him dead. Julia runs to join him and is gunned down just as brutally. As her hand reaches for his among the swirling autumn leaves, the camera pans up to Big Brother’s poster.
Worried that the first option might be “too morbid” for Americans, Rathvon asked his distributors in the U.S. and UK to put the matter to a vote. Columbia’s staff went for depressing, obedient chanting while their British counterparts favored hands-among-the-autumn-leaves mawkishness.36
The cheesiness didn’t stop there. When London’s Warner Theatre hosted the £300,00037 film’s premiere on March 1, 1956, a squad of black-clad Thought Police roared into Leicester Square on motorbikes and escorted Rathvon inside, smiling sweetly.38 Sonia Orwell boycotted the event, telling the Daily Mail that, unlike the BBC’s “honest attempt” to do the story justice, the film was a poor reflection of the book. To make matters worse, Rathvon had ignored her pleas to scrap the “happier” ending.39
The producer’s brazen response was that the rewrite was more logical: “It is the type of ending Orwell might have written if he had not known when he wrote the book that he was dying.”40 This was more than Sight and Sound, the most highbrow film journal in Britain, could take. Livid at the movie’s insipid, “love conquers all” morality, it accused Rathvon of defending “this cheap and gratuitous piece of bowdlerising in terms almost worthy of Newspeak.”41
To this viewer at least, the film isn’t as bad as it’s painted. Once the ominous opening voiceover is out of the way (enhanced by an eerie model shot of the British Isles from space), it settles into a cornily entertaining, shinily oppressive sci-fi groove. Verity’s design is an arresting combination of dreary and futuristic; Redgrave makes a convincingly bloodless technocrat; and a handful of Anderson’s set pieces impress, whether it’s the fast-cut Two Minutes Hate or Winston hiding his diary from the telescreen in his apartment, gracefully kicking it across his floor to the sound of muzak.
Moreover, the images have a scale that the BBC and CBS could never hope to match. Gigantic telescreens, fixed to the sides of buildings, glare down at pedestrians; Thought Police roar through the streets like paramilitary Hell’s Angels; trucks with cages attached parade Eurasian prisoners around Victory Square; and for the first time, the countryside looks real.
In 1954, opposite the estimable Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence oozed star quality as Syme. This time around, as Parsons, he acts Edmond O’Brien off the screen. It’s fun, too, to see an uncredited Patrick Troughton of Doctor Who fame as a mustachioed telescreen announcer, nine years before he played another sci-fi icon, Winston Smith, on BBC radio.
Unlike Studio One, the film dwells on the Party’s attitude to sexual relationships. A friend of Julia’s, boasting in the cafeteria that the Marriage Committee has arranged her wedding, points out her intended husband: a fat, scowling, bullet-headed older man from the Victory Orations Department who’s sitting across the room. At another table, a battleaxe from the Anti-Sex League is talking loudly about smashing the family unit and abolishing love.
The torture scenes, admittedly, are banal, and the image of Edmond O’Brien—looking beery and unshaven, with electrodes attached to his temples—is so silly, you wonder why they used it in the ad campaign (tagline: “A film of tomorrow to SHOCK you today”). Just as Anderson promised, rats are notably absent from the Ministry of Love scenes. There’s a darkened Room 101, a cage and some sound effects, yes—but no rodents.42
Critics were unforgiving. The book’s message, wrote CA Lejeune in The Observer, “is pessimistic and negative; its atmosphere cruel and sordid; but the unpleasantness is intellectual. To dress it up as horrid science fiction romance is to miss the point and emphasise its failings.”43
The Daily Sketch’s Harold Conway thought the film reduced Big Brother to “a Little Bore.” Heaping praise on Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier’s BBC play, he commented: “The film—ten times more costly and spacious—plods through the same episodes without ever capturing Orwell’s sardonic, bitter meaning.”44 In the Daily Worker, Thomas Spencer agreed that it was “more a dreary bore than a shocker.”45 Sight and Sound’s Derek Hill complained that the world shown on screen was “half cheap science-fiction and half studio slum,”46 while Maryvonne Butcher at The Tablet found the whole thing dull—“one of the most resounding disappointments the cinema has yet handed out.”47
In the U.S., Columbia marketed 1984 as a standard sci-fi thriller. As well as playing up the romance angle, this poster redesigns the Thought Police uniform and gives one of its spies an Anti-Sex League armband (copyright Columbia Pictures, 1956).
Trade publication Kinematograph Weekly wrote off the movie as a “squalid political melodrama” and “the very antithesis of entertainment.” The torture would turn stomachs, it warned, adding: “The more realistic the presentation, the more strident and nauseating the hymn of hate becomes.”48 But it was The Spectator’s Isabel Quigley who laid into the film most viciously, labeling it “a gloomy giggle” and condemning the ending as a travesty. In the ridiculous torture scenes, she wrote, O’Brien looked sozzled (the actor had a drinking problem in real life). As for Jan Sterling, the “glacial blonde” was “embarrassing beyond critical words.”
What sort of audience, Quigley wondered, was this movie hoping to reach? “To anyone who caught even a glimpse of the book’s meaning and message, the film must make nonsense; and who would go and see it as a straight, rather coldly acted love story conducted in faintly Martian-looking dress49?”
Here and there, critics tempered their misgivings with faint praise. Rather than slate the film for the last few minutes alone, The Times’ critic, for example, found merit in Anderson’s “sombre and sober” approach.50 The “confined, ‘studio’ look” was certainly a drawback, noted The Manchester Guardian, but overall, the book’s force had been diminished, not destroyed.51
On 5 March, a BBC show compared the two adaptations, airing Winston and Julia’s arrest in its big and small-screen forms. The TV version “had a far more menacing and sinister atmosphere,” sniffed Robert Cannell in the Daily Express.52 Kneale, in his 2006 biography, remembered being “hauled” in by TV host Malcolm Muggeridge “to do a live denunciation of it, on the telly. Michael Anderson was there, and Michael and I argued the toss. I said, ‘What you’ve done is, you’ve turned the story into exactly what Big Brother would have approved of. You’ve killed it.’ Poor Michael looked put out, because he hadn’t intended to kill anything. He was the gentlest of people. He’d simply been overridden by the money men.”53
In fairness, several critics defended the film. These included Edward Goring in the Daily Mail, who thought that it was brilliantly directed and should not be missed54; Reg Whitley at the Daily Mirror (“as a piece of screencraft it is first rate”55); and the Daily Herald’s Anthony Carthew, who found the revised ending “more true to life.”56 The Daily Film Renter liked the movie too, informing its readers that “Michael Redgrave as O’Connor gives a brilliant performance; Edmond O’Brien, although physically wrong for the starveling Winston Smith, does give us a sense of the horror of a controlled existence,” and “Michael Anderson’s direction holds the story in continual suspense.”57
“Should bring in the customers in droves,” concluded another trade paper, Today’s Cinema.58 In the event, figures for the Associated British Picture Corporation suggest that 1984 was one of the biggest flops of the fifties, with gross billings of £32,274. Anderson’s hit, The Dam Busters, took £552,687, while dimly remembered productions such as Weak and the Wicked, Will Any Gentleman, For Better for Worse and Yield to the Night all comfortably topped £100,000.59
It didn’t help that in America, the film was marketed as a standard sci-fi thriller; or that it was released in the fall of 1956 as part of a double bill with B-movie The Gamma People60—a slice of British, black-and-white hokum in which another burly American (Paul Douglas) curtails a mad scientist’s gamma-ray experiments in a minuscule European autocracy.
In common with much of the American press, the reaction to 1984 at The New York Times was tepid. The drama, wrote critic AH Weiler, “is fitfully projected and its impact is felt only in a crescendo-like climax. A disturbing fiction that shocked, startled and terrified its readers has been transformed in England into a stark, sober and thoughtful, if not altogether persuasive, film.”61
By now, Orwell must have seemed like box-office poison. It would be 28 years before another film adaptation made it to the screen.
When Sonia finally appeared on camera, it was as part of a documentary on BBC2 in 1965 (see chapter 6). Describing Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel, as “the incredibly subtle working out of an idea,” she said that had her husband been in better health, he’d have made a better job of the ending. This wasn’t in the sense that Rathvon meant, she maintained. Orwell wouldn’t have made it happier, but he would have rewritten it more elegantly.
Agreeing with interviewer Malcolm Muggeridge, who derided the movie’s ending as “fatuous,” she seized the opportunity to denigrate Rathvon publicly. “The producer said: ‘I know it’s got an unhappy ending, but I have a belief in human nature.’ And I was so cross—I said: ‘Well, your belief does you credit, but you’ve simply missed the point.’”62
1984
Winston Smith of the Outer Party: Edmond O’Brien
O’Connor of the Inner Party: Michael Redgrave
Julia of the Outer Party: Jan Sterling
Charrington the junk shop owner: David Kossoff
Jones: Mervyn Johns
Parsons: Donald Pleasence
Selina Parsons: Carol Wolveridge
Outer Party announcer: Ernest Clark
Inner Party official: Patrick Allen
Rutherford: Ronan O’Casey
Outer Party orator: Michael Ripper
Outer party orator: Ewen Solon
Prisoner: Kenneth Griffith
Kalador: Bernard Rebel (uncredited)63
Man on telescreen: Patrick Troughton (uncredited)
Big Brother: John Vernon (uncredited)
Telescreen voice: Anthony Jacobs (uncredited)
Screenplay by: William P. Templeton and Ralph Bettinson
Director: Michael Anderson
Producer: N. Peter Rathvon
Art director: Terence Verity
Music: Malcolm Arnold