The 1990s: Heritage Orwell
It’s probably fair to say that the big-screen version of Keep the Aspidistra Flying—renamed A Merry War for the American market, from a line in the book about Comstock and Rosemary’s relationship—is one of the more contentious adaptations of Orwell, at least in the UK. Whatever the literary purists were expecting in 1997, it wasn’t a romantic comedy.
Stateside critics were more enthusiastic (in Time magazine’s view, it was one of the ten best movies of the year) and in 1999, once the dust had settled, screenwriter Alan Plater and director Robert Bierman recorded a commentary for a U.S.–only special edition DVD.1 Plater, echoing comments he’d made in print at the time of the film’s release, joked that Bierman had “betrayed” him by shooting his script “almost syllable for syllable. So if it doesn’t work, who do I blame?”
This, remember, was one of Britain’s most respected screen dramatists, a man who’d won Baftas and an International Emmy. “His name guaranteed a quality of humour, heart and humanity,” wrote The Guardian when he died in 2010, aged 75, “usually matched by high standards of acting and production values.”2
“Orwell did the social message and Alan did the wit,” is how his widow Shirley Rubinstein characterizes the Aspidistra movie, but the reaction in their home country was disappointing to say the least. “The kind of comment I remember was sort of ‘the dead hand of public money,’” she says, alluding to its Arts Council funding. “There seemed to be an attitude to it before people had even seen it. It opened the London Film Festival and we sort of got a feeling there that it was not going to be liked.”3
So, what happened? For the full story, we need to step back another 13 years, to that most Orwell-centric of times: 1984.
Bierman bought the rights to Keep the Aspidistra Flying in the early eighties—“my favorite Orwell book,” he calls it on the DVD.4 Casting around for someone to write the film, his first thought on watching The Crystal Spirit—a thrilling work, he thought, based on the less-than-promising scenario of “author writes book”—was “here’s a man who understands Orwell.”
In February 1984, Plater agreed to write a treatment and two draft scripts. His aptitude for penning adaptations was well known by this point, with credits such as the 1977 film It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, based on James Herriott’s memoirs; Yorkshire TV’s 1980 serialization of JB Priestley’s The Good Companions; and Anthony Trollope’s The Barchester Chronicles, which garnered rave reviews for the BBC in 1982. Five years later, memorably, he would script a BBC mini-series of Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War—the epic that introduced Kenneth Branagh to future wife Emma Thompson.
Interviewed by the author of this book in 2000, Plater explained his philosophy. “If you do a classic like The Barchester Chronicles, you’re honoring Mr. Trollope,” he said. “But if you’re doing, say, A Very British Coup, which is not a good book,5 you’re redeeming it. It becomes halfway to being an original piece of work.”6
Rubinstein remembers his working methods well. “He would read the original time and time again,” she says. “For something as big as the Trollope, the Barchester, or for Fortunes of War, he would do an enormous time chart with characters, showing where they came in and out. Make sure he didn’t forget anybody. You needed fewer characters than were in the book, so deciding who to conflate, who to drop…. And then he would start writing. But he would soak himself in the writer of the original. He said it was a different set of muscles from an original. What you had to do was climb inside it and shine a light for a modern audience. That’s what he did with Aspidistra, or tried to do. Obviously people didn’t feel that the film quite worked and we’ve never really been sure why.”
Plater’s treatment for the proposed film, held in the archive at Hull History Centre, is lively, thorough and remarkably perceptive. Take this opening line: “Orwell’s novel was first published in 1936. Its central character, Gordon Comstock, is an anti-hero supreme—an Angry Young Man, twenty years ahead of the fashion.”
He went on: “Comstock is not merely angry. He is, in Orwell’s own words, ‘a snivelling, self-pitying little beast’ dedicated to the overthrow of practically everything. He is a self-confessed poet, but hates books and their writers, with the exception of Lawrence and Joyce, ‘before he went off his coconut.’ He hates money and capitalism, but has equal loathing for the trendy socialists seeking to destroy them. He hates middle-class conformity and respectability, epitomised by his own family, and is haunted, on a daily basis, by aspidistras, symbol of all that he despises. Periodically, he looks to the skies, praying for the arrival of aeroplanes with high-explosive bombs to destroy the universe, so that mankind might start again with a clean sheet.”
Comstock’s “highly personal Odyssey” was the novel’s narrative core, argued Plater. “He throws up a successful career as an advertising copywriter to become a poet. His supplementary ambitions are to avoid the money-trap, and persuade his girlfriend, Rosemary, to go to bed with him. Towards the end of his period in the wilderness, she does so though, predictably, it is a fairly joyless experience. Rosemary becomes pregnant, Comstock marries her, gives up his poetic ambitions, returns to the advertising agency, but insists, in a final act of perverse defiance, that they should have an aspidistra in their home.
“In Gordon Comstock, whining self-pity achieves a kind of nobility. He is a unique and remarkable comic character in a world dominated by poverty, unemployment, the lust for respectability and the fear of war. He fails, but does so with style, booze and bad grace. He doesn’t behave like a true-blue Englishman, and that is perhaps his greatest triumph.”
Plater’s early suggestions were “an opening shot at how Orwell would have told his story if he’d been working with a camera,” and one of his first steps was to discard the book’s back-and-forth timeline. “The novel contains a lengthy ‘story-so-far’ section in Chapter 3. In the film, part of this—Comstock leaving the New Albion—moves to the head of the story. In dramatic terms it is the natural beginning. Thereafter the film proceeds in natural time sequence but with the option of brief flashbacks concerning the Comstock family, built into the scenes between Gordon and Julia.
“The cinematic style will echo Orwell’s prose style: simple, direct, crystalline, with a good journalist’s eye for precise visual detail. The characters in the novel tend to spend too much time walking about, talking and brooding—especially brooding, in Comstock’s case. In the film, they will be placed in physical situations that add point to the story—thus, Comstock and Rosemary will play out their love story in settings that they can afford to visit: public parks and transport, station waiting rooms, bus shelters, alleyways, cheap tea shops, all smelling strongly of the 1930s.
“Above all, the film is conceived as a comedy, though the laughter should scratch a little. Wherever possible the comedy will be visual, and all the dialogue will have to work its passage.” This, wrote Plater, implied a visual style somewhere between Buster Keaton and the pioneering Scottish documentary-maker John Grierson.
Key images would recur. “The posters created by New Albion will crop up everywhere, reminding Comstock of his past and possible future; the bombs will fall whenever he calls upon them; and there will be aspidistras in every window and across all the land.
Page one of Alan Plater’s first draft of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (photograph by David Ryan, courtesy estate of Alan Plater).
“The stanzas of London Pleasures will be used as a running narrative commentary throughout, again with comic intent, and of course the love story will be given proper emphasis. Comstock and Rosemary are capable of having fun amidst the gloom, and we will share it with them.
“At its heart, the film will celebrate James Thurber’s dictum about the Dignity of Man: ‘It is only when he falls down that we realise how straight he can stand.…’”
With his playful wit and distinctive take on the world, Plater’s dramatizations were anything but workaday. To illustrate this, Rubinstein namechecks Reginald Hill, author of the Dalziel and Pascoe crime novels he adapted for the BBC. Hill used to “go through the script, saying: ‘Did I write that or did Alan?’ And when he’d found [a line] he’d written, it was bingo.”
The earliest Aspidistra script, which sticks more closely to the novel’s plot than the finished film does (sometimes to its detriment), is a case in point. It’s jokier and more warm-hearted than Orwell, but right from the opening titles—a slightly tongue-in-cheek montage of archive footage, overlaid with a jolly Jessie Matthews–like soundtrack—it makes a serious, socialistic point: that in mid–1930s England, the upper classes were living it up while the lower orders were struggling to survive.
At the New Albion Publicity Company, graphic designer Rosemary is working on the Bovex hot drink account. Comstock, en route to the office of their dullard boss, Mr. Erskine, takes one look at its Corner Table character—a bespectacled clerk in a cafe—and damns him as a “little rat-faced monster.” He’s rude to Erskine too, responding to his offer of a pay rise by blurting out his resignation, almost by accident. The executive takes this in his stride, musing good-naturedly that poetry and advertising aren’t so different—they’re the same words, only in a different order.7
Breaking the news to Rosemary, Comstock quotes Wordsworth—“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”—and flings out an arm, spilling a pot of paint. Twenty-nine isn’t young, she retorts, in a line that won’t survive the casting of 39-year-old Richard E. Grant. With money borrowed from his long-suffering sister Julia, he calls on his benefactor Ravelston, who’s lounging in bed with his caustic, sexually voracious girlfriend, Hermione. The suave champagne socialist and magazine publisher, fresh from printing Comstock’s poem about dying prostitutes, secures him a job in a Hampstead bookshop—much to the disgust of Hermione, who regards Comstock as “a little turd.”
On the advice of new boss McKechnie—a benign, white-bearded Scotsman—Comstock looks for lodgings in Willowbed Road, close to the shop. Drawn to the window with the biggest aspidistra, he rents a room from what Plater calls the “malignantly respectable” Mrs. Wisbeach. Two fellow tenants, lost from later drafts, are Flaxman, a fat, lecherous sales rep who’s been thrown out by his wife, and Lorenheim, a fatalistic, largely taciturn European. They’re a double act, essentially: while Lorenheim frets about the prospect of fascist bombing raids, Flaxman chirrups that he’d be happy to die drunk, “with a tit in one hand and a bum in the other.”
Gordon, meanwhile, suffers one disappointment after another. Turning up at the Ritz hotel—where critic Paul Doring is hosting a literary gathering, according to Ravelston—he finds a roomful of rabbis, as the event has been rescheduled. Yelling: “Go and fuck yourself!” at Doring over the phone, he sulkily heads home to torture his aspidistra with a burning cigarette.
To put the spark back into their relationship, he and Rosemary arrange a trip to the countryside by train, financed by Julia; the £5 he’s borrowed in total was supposed to be her Christmas money. On the big day, the lovers visit a high-class hotel, eat the cheapest meal they can get away with and, merry on claret, find an alcove in the forest where Rosemary strips off. Gordon, being thoughtless, hasn’t brought condoms, so she pushes him away in annoyance. Presently, she changes her mind and drags him into a barn, but this time it’s Comstock who cries off, whimpering about the eightpence in his pocket. “Poverty castrates a man,” he moans.
The next night, at a cheap alehouse, he rants at Ravelston about women, the intelligentsia and people with an income of more than £500 a year. Refusing the loan of a tenner, he slinks off, fantasizing about bombing raids. But a day later, his luck changes. He’s having breakfast when it happens, listening to one of Flaxman’s limericks.
There was a young couple of Aberystwyth
Who united the parts that they kissed with
And as they grew older
They also grew bolder
And united the parts that they good morning Mrs. Wisbeach….
A surprise $50 check has arrived from an American magazine, prompting a night on the town with Rosemary and Ravelston at one of London’s swankiest restaurants. Gordon emerges boozed up and boorish, mauling Rosemary until she slaps him, dragging Ravelston into a drinking den and picking up a couple of hookers. With his mortified pal in tow, the revelers take a cab to a hotel, where Comstock instantly blacks out. Waking up in a police cell, and missing the £5 he planned to give Julia, he is fined by a magistrate and bailed out by Ravelston.
When a newspaper court report costs Gordon his job and his lodgings, the only work Ravelston can find for him is in poverty-stricken Lambeth. He rents a squalid room from a Mrs. Meakin—a friendly old lady who more or less offers to sleep with him—and is comforted by the knowledge that he can’t sink any lower. This nihilism, coupled with his decision to give up writing, horrifies those closest to him. But when Comstock comes home one evening, he finds Rosemary in his room, ready and willing to spend the night. Next morning, they share a stilted conversation. “Clearly,” says the script, “their love-making has not been an occasion of majesty and joy.”
The script ends, much as the finished film does, with copywriter Comstock bringing an aspidistra home to his pregnant wife. In the draft version, though, a rousing Rule Britannia strikes up. The camera pulls out, out, out, until the Comstocks are microscopic—“much as he suspected all along,” writes Plater.
“Refreshingly simple, this bit,” the screenwriter wrote in May after consulting his backers. “Consensus view is that everything’s fine up to the Great Pissup, but gathers speed and rushes a little too eagerly to the end of the movie thereafter.” Other alterations included a “slight change of emphasis in Erskine—his genuine concern that he’s losing his best copywriter” and the addition of an undertaker “out of Joe Orton” to the Lambeth sequences. “He and Gordon compare notes daily on books sold and stiffs buried—the serious subtext being that what Gordon has come to terms with is the certainty of his own mortality and that’s always good for a few laughs.” The final scenes also required work, such as “a Gordon bathing, shaving and cleaning himself up sequence, so that we see the lower-middle-class man restored” and a “going into work sequence where Gordon demonstrates his near-genius as a copywriter—his knowing sellout to the System.”
A rewrite duly appeared in July, but wasn’t taken up. No one was interested in making the film. “It was on the shelf,” says Rubinstein, “with the not-abandoned projects, as it were.”
Finally, in 1995, Bierman approached producer Peter Shaw, owner of United British Artists (UBA), a company he’d formed in 1983 with John Hurt, Maggie Smith, Albert Finney, Glenda Jackson, Harold Pinter, Diana Rigg and Richard Johnson. Impressed with the script, Shaw felt confident he could find the money. Knowing that Bierman had the interest of Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter, he agreed to arrange the financing and distribution.
Shaw wrote to Plater in January 1996, enclosing a draft of the screenplay that UBA was promoting and setting out plans to shoot the picture in Dublin that summer. Returning to the project, Plater wrote: “It’s always a little alarming to be confronted with a piece of work written some time ago, but I cannot tell a lie: I enjoyed reading the screenplay. It seems to have caught that characteristic Orwell stance: merciless observation redeemed by irony and the merest hint of compassion. And all a bit dark, which seems to be the spirit of our times: can’t imagine why. It’s also funny and about the only thing I know about audiences is they enjoy laughing.
“Here as elsewhere, he’s better at depicting men than women. Rosemary is a bit of a doormat and we should honour the changes that have taken place since the 1930s by clarifying her motives a little. It isn’t enough to say she loves Comstock. Why does she love him? We probably need to be told. My instinct says she loves him because she loves the rebel and the outsider—there’s something of the rebel in her, long subdued. There are lots of ways we might explore this—e.g. (and I’m improvising) supposing at the end she paints a beautiful but sardonic picture of the aspidistra and hangs it over the fireplace8? Maybe an end shot comprising picture, baby, Rosemary, Comstock and the real aspidistra, already with its first cigarette burn? Graft that on to the line: ‘The Comstocks are on the march again’ and we’d have a nice complex resolution that doesn’t betray Orwell or anyone else.
“Otherwise, I’d love the chance to do a personal polish, with special reference to the end section, Rosemary in general (bearing in mind it’s already twenty years after the suffragettes) and a few grace notes along the way, including a lovely Bill Naughton line I’d like to pinch for Mrs. Meakin’s speech on p84:
“‘and a public wash-house on the Lambeth Road. I go there on my birthday. Whether I need a bath or not.’”
Tightening the screenplay, which at that juncture exceeded two hours, Plater axed peripheral characters and played up the romantic comedy angle. Out went flabbier scenes—the “poverty castrates” sequence, Comstock and Ravelston’s heart-to-heart in the alehouse, the fantasies about bombing raids—and in came the Lambeth undertaker, “Orton.” Gordon’s exploitation of his sister was toned down (in the movie, he makes of point of returning her Christmas money on his wedding day) and the dalliance with prostitutes (one of Orwell’s cliché scenes, he argues on the commentary) pretty much erased. When Bierman objected to the f-bomb, which cropped up twice, Plater found alternatives. First for the chop was the “Go and fuck yourself!” line: when Doring bleats that the cancellation should have gone out on the grapevine, Comstock suggests instead that he stick his grapevine up his rectal orifice.9
The idea of Rosemary lying naked in the countryside also bothered Bierman, as it might make shooting Comstock’s side of things more difficult. “The other way is to put her in underwear, this may be funnier,” he told Plater in one of his notes. Writing to Bonham Carter’s agent in December 1996, Bierman stressed that the actress wouldn’t have to bare all and that Plater’s rewrites would “give Rosemary a more significant role” in the story. She would, he promised, be “a star illustrator” whose career would flourish in Gordon’s absence.
Plater states on the DVD that “a kind of non-story” in the papers, “that we had rewritten the part to make Helena’s character more of a feminist”10 had upset her. The truth, says Bierman, is that she had asked, rightly, if her part could be expanded. Orwell’s Rosemary is a doormat, replies Plater; her relationship with Gordon wouldn’t convince a modern audience. Bierman agrees, pointing out that in his copy of the novel, the two don’t meet in person until page 131.
After Shaw’s plans for Dublin fell through, shooting took place in London in the spring of 1997. Locations included the Institute of Directors’ basement restaurant in Pall Mall (Julia’s tea shop), St. Pancras Station (filmed throughout the night, when it was closed) and an East End street off Brick Lane (doubling for Lambeth). The New Albion’s exterior, with “Blair Bros” delivery van, was in Holborn, not far from the West End; its art deco interiors were in Bethnal Green town hall, an East End landmark.
Trade journal Screen International put the budget at £6m ($9.5m), half of it supplied by the American sales and distribution outfit Overseas Filmgroup and the rest shared between the Arts Council of England (ACE) and UK distributor First Independent Films.11 ACE’s contribution—in effect an interest-free loan from the National Lottery, recently introduced by the government—was crucial. “Putting the money together for a film like this is tortuous,” Shaw told the magazine. According to Bierman, Overseas Filmgroup salvaged the project after a crisis with domestic backers a week before filming. In a flurry of phone calls and faxes, he pulled off a deal in two days—“a miracle,” he says on the DVD.12
Production wrapped in April at the end of a six-week shoot and Plater, as Rubinstein remembers it, “was just very excited it was going to be made.” The couple adored the cast and crew. “Helena was perfect, and Richard, lovely Harriet Walter [as Julia]—well, all of them—and Bob [Bierman] just loving the material and the spirit of Orwell that pervaded it all. I think it was better than it was assessed at the time.”
Given his upbringing in Swaziland’s British expatriate community, leading man Grant already had the accent and mannerisms of a 1930s Englishman—and, says Bierman, looked eerily like Orwell when he wore a moustache for a camera test. (He removed it when the make-up ladies told him it was a turn-off.)
The shoot had its ups and downs, of course. Day one, with Grant and Bonham Carter strolling towards the Hampstead shop,13 was disrupted first by a helicopter, which buzzed them until Bierman called air traffic control, and then by a man who walked into a shot naked. A “very famous” actor, cast as McKechnie, was fired for turning up drunk at rehearsals.14 And when aspidistras proved impossible to find in the UK, the crew was forced to import them from the Netherlands.
Another challenge for Bierman was an obligation to cast as many disabled actors as possible to meet ACE’s diversity quotas. His solution was to place a one-legged man outside a bank, playing a First World War veteran begging for cash. Comstock, who’s there to convert his $50, cheerfully obliges.
For a time, Bierman considered a modern-day setting, as he wasn’t interested in making a period film per se. The trouble was that no one in the nineties yearned to be a famous poet. The film’s detractors accuse him of making its Depression-era setting too colorful, too pretty, but he disagrees, citing Madame Yevonde’s sumptuous color photography as evidence that the thirties weren’t as drab as we imagine. He also defends the changes to Orwell’s plot: Gordon’s night with Rosemary, for example, is shown to be a happy experience to “give them some hope.”
At a gala evening on 6 November, Keep the Aspidistra Flying opened the London Film Festival. One of the guests, Richard Blair, assured Bierman that “dad would have loved it.”
The publicity effort that followed centered largely on Grant, who was open about his indifference to Orwell. Speaking to The Observer’s Lynn Barber, he said Plater’s screenplay improved on the “relentlessly nihilistic” novel. Barber, one of Fleet Street’s star writers, thought she and the actor had hit it off famously, but learned through his PR that he’d hated the whole experience. Miffed that she hadn’t asked enough about the film, he ruled out any more interviews.15
On Moviewatch, a Channel Four youth show, however, he did describe the story in a roundabout way: “I think it’s a classic case that still persists now of somebody who’s middle class stabbing themselves for being middle class. Trying to be working class but never succeeding.”16
The adaptation, starring Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter, met with scorn when it opened 1997’s London Film Festival. Critics saw it as a fusty, smug, glorified TV movie (copyright First Independent).
Two champions of the film hailed from Tony Blair’s Labour government, which had cut short 18 years of Conservative rule in May and was still enjoying a honeymoon with voters. At the festival’s opening, culture secretary Chris Smith—reminding journalists and movie folk that Orwell and the prime minister shared a surname17—used it to promote the British film industry, predicting that in the 21st century, the UK would become the center of film-making. Unfortunately, wrote The Guardian’s Jonathan Romney, Keep the Aspidistra Flying was a “fusty” echo of a bygone age. “It’s one thing to depoliticise Orwell, something else again to come up with such a smugly reactionary trifle as this.”18
Future prime minister Gordon Brown, then overseeing the economy as chancellor of the exchequer, also showed a keen interest in the film. In a piece for The Times headlined “The chancellor keeps the aspidistra flying,” Melvyn Bragg commented on the annual Spectator lecture,19 given by Brown that year, in which he’d addressed the issue of Britishness—in particular, “what Orwell called the British Genius.”20 Bragg struck a positive note, about Brown at least (“Like his hero Orwell, he has told it like it is”21), but others at The Times loathed the picture. Critic Geoff Brown labeled it “small and archaic” and “the most pointless British film of the year,”22 and colleague Daniel Britten thought Orwell must be turning in his grave: “The man who proclaimed that truth is more important than politics has now had his novel … turned into the sort of trivial romantic comedy that he despised.”23
“A key problem,” wrote Sight & Sound’s Claire Monk, who thought the script was superb, “is that the liberal-bourgeois preoccupations which are supposed to provide Aspidistra with its central dramatic substance are now such well-worn themes of British literary drama, the film risks seeming like a pastiche.”24 At The Independent, Matthew Sweet considered it “unremarkable but efficient period film-making, crucially energised by a performance of battery-acid tartness by Richard E. Grant.”25
Empire magazine’s Darren Bignall thought the film deserved the same attention as Orwell’s better-known works, praising its “sprightly and sweet-natured” qualities.26 Screen International’s Sheila Johnstone was another admirer, writing: “Prospects look bright for this well-designed, highly entertaining piece with fans of sophisticated comedy and heritage drama.”27
At the mass-market Daily Mail, though, Christopher Tookey took exception to the film. In a column headlined “Why do our movies still live in the past?” he wrote that Plater’s script was a failure, riddled with anachronisms; that Grant, overacting manically as he recycled his character from Withnail and I, was almost impossible to like; and that Bonham Carter, soldiering on gamely, had little to work with in terms of character. This was, he believed, a disastrous festival opener: “There is the antiquarian obsession with the minutiae of a mythical past, an unconscious snobbery, a failure to involve us with its characters, and an air of having been made for television, with no thought of the movie-going public.”28
The following April, Tookey resumed his attack in a double-page spread lambasting the Arts Council’s Lottery panels. “Fool Britannia” blared the headline, “(Or how the British film industry took £150 million of your money and produced two dozen turkeys).” Alongside flops such as Photographing Fairies, Stella Does Tricks, The Secret Laughter of Women, Crimetime, Wilde and My Son the Fanatic, he damned Keep the Aspidistra Flying as a doomed attempt to turn “Orwell’s gloomy, social-realist novel into light romantic comedy.” From a £3.2 million budget, the Mail claimed, not a penny of the £1 million grant had been repaid.29
“I think the reviews were probably mixed,”30 says producer Peter Shaw. “No one was ecstatic about it, that’s for sure, except—and I think this is a very important ‘except’—it got very good reviews in America. It got better reviews in America than it did in the UK. I have a feeling that UK critics in a sense were getting fed up with semi-classics—which I suppose anything from George Orwell would be considered as—being turned into films which they probably considered to be a bit old-fashioned by the standards of what the nineties was pressing forward to try and achieve. Whereas in America, they just took the film for what it was, and in fact they gave it a different title. I like the title. It’s not George Orwell’s but it’s a good title—a good, commercial film title. I think the British critics were very stuffy about it, to be honest, and couldn’t see it for what it was.”
Time’s “best of 1997” top-ten list placed the “splendid adaptation” seventh, saying that Grant “struts and mopes majestically.”31 Entertainment Weekly gave the film an A-minus, calling it “a dissection of class struggle as pointed as in any Mike Leigh movie.”32 Ty Burr in The New York Times thought it “a sprightly, proto-yuppie farce”33 and LA Weekly’s Ella Taylor enjoyed “a wickedly clever piece of satirical fun.”34
This was a “wistful, witty movie,” wrote Boxoffice’s Susan Green, that “skillfully balances the humor and sorrow of Gordon’s predicament.”35 “It’s always fun to see people full of themselves fail,” snickered the U.S. edition of GQ,36 while Ed Kelleher at Film Journal International thought Bierman and Plater captured “much of Orwell’s vitriol and perhaps more importantly, his heart.”37
“I always liked the film,” says Shaw. “I thought Richard E. Grant was very good in it. I thought Helena was fine. I thought Bob did a pretty good job. It could be classed a bit pedestrian, I suppose. It could be classed a bit old-fashioned in a way, but it’s quite an old-fashioned subject, isn’t it? The trouble is—and we knew this at the time, everybody involved knew this—a film of this nature, on this subject matter, is bound to be considered a bit of an arthouse film. It’s difficult to break a subject like this out of that and to get really wide distribution. We were destined for the arthouse-type audiences as opposed to getting into the multiplexes.”
A Merry War (a.k.a. Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
Gordon Comstock: Richard E. Grant
Rosemary: Helena Bonham Carter
Ravelston: Julian Wadham
Erskine: Jim Carter
Julia Comstock: Harriet Walter
Hermione: Lesley Vickerage
Mrs. Wisbeach: Barbara Leigh Hunt
Mrs. Meakin: Liz Smith
McKechnie: John Clegg
Cheeseman: Bill Wallis
Mrs. Trilling: Lill Roughley
Old woman: Dorothea Alexander
Old man: Peter Stockbridge
Beautiful young man: Grant Parsons
Paul Doring: Malcolm Sinclair
Lecturer: Derek Smee
Ravenscroft waiter: Ben Miles
Head waiter: Richard Dixon
Barmaid: Eve Ferret
Policeman: Roger Morlidge
Magistrate Croom: Roland Oliver
Orton the undertaker: Roger Frost
Dora: Dorothy Atkinson
Barbara: Harri Alexander
Factory girl: Lucy Speed
Librarian: Joan Blackham
Cabby: Roy Evans
Customer: Maggie McCarthy
Girl in Modigliani’s: Lone Vidal
Man at club: Steven Crossley
Screenplay by: Alan Plater
Directed by: Robert Bierman
Produced by: Peter Shaw
Production designed by: Sarah Greenwood
Director of photography: Giles Nuttgens
Music composed and conducted by: Mike Batt