— RANKING: 53 —
YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE: Winston Smith (Edmond O’Brien) is dwarfed by the towering image of Big Brother (John Vernon) in this tightly budgeted, high-quality British adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian future classic. Courtesy: Holiday Film Productions/Columbia.
CREDITS
Holiday Film Productions/Columbia Pictures; Michael Anderson, dir.; George Orwell, novel; Ralph Gilbert Bettison, William Templeton, scr.; Bettison, N. Peter Rathvon, pro.; Malcolm Arnold, mus.; C. M. Pennington-Richards, cin.; Bill Lewthwaite, ed.; Terence Verity, prod. design; Len Townsend, art dir.; Barbara Gray, costumes; George Blackwell, Bryan Langley, Norman Warwick, F/X; 90 min.; B&W; 1.37:1.
CAST
Edmond O’Brien (Winston Smith); Michael Redgrave (O’Connor); Jan Sterling (Julia); David Kossoff (Charrington); Mervyn Johns (Jones); Donald Pleasence (Parsons); Carol Wolveridge (Selina Parsons); Ernest Clark (Outer Party Announcer); Patrick Allen (Party Official); Ronan O’Casey (Rutherford); Michael Ripper, Ewen Solon (Outer Party Orators); Anthony Jacobs (Telescreen, voice); John Vernon (Big Brother).
I love Big Brother!
SMITH, FINAL LINE FOLLOWING HIS RE-BRAINWASHING
BACKGROUND
English author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) invented modern dystopian fiction with Brave New World (1932). Drawing his title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Huxley (while in the final stages of tuberculosis) penned a harsh satire of the utopian novels by H. G. Wells, who had argued that a perfect society might be created through socialism and science. Observing the recently developed assembly lines at actual factories, Huxley concluded the opposite, arguing that technology would outrun humanity. If Brave New World stands as the most important pre-war cautionary fable, 1984—written by George Orwell (1903–1950) in 1948, the final digits reversed for his title—updated Huxley’s vision. Orwell set his book in a post–nuclear war civilization, establishing a model for post-modern sci-fi.
THE PLOT
Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and he has secretly begun to despise his job: rewriting history to bring the past more in line with the actuality of his futuristic society’s ideology. Love is banned, though reproduction, at the government’s bequest, is not. Smith has just received a note from co-worker Julia, who asks to meet him at one of the final green garden spots in Oceania, formerly England. They make the mistake of trusting their secret affair to stern executive O’Connor and antique shop owner Charrington, falsely believing that both men are part of the anti-government Underground. Captured, Smith and Julia undergo a process designed to use their deepest personal fears to turn them against each other, once more loving only the state and the distant leader figure known as “Big Brother.”
THE FILM
In 1954, the BBC presented a daring production of the novel starring Peter Cushing. The program received critical and popular acclaim, inspiring N. Peter Rathvon to produce a larger-scale film that might play all over the world. Distribution in the highly lucrative U.S. market would be possible only if the leads were played by American names. Edmond O’Brien and Jan Sterling look nothing like the characters as described by Orwell, but their commitment to bringing the roles to life countered any concern about casting.
Director Michael Anderson understood that his team of production designers and special effects artists must portray the future in a non-generic manner. Working on a tight budget, Anderson sensed that Orwell’s richly detailed and highly specific descriptions could not be recreated. Rather than try and fail to realize elements like the war-decimated “Airstrip One,” which represents the land mass earlier known as England, the director devised his own futurescape. As the opening credits inform us, this is the future, though not that of fantastic films so popular at the time. The challenge was to come up with a world in which the sleek metallic look of previous “serious” movies, including Things To Come (1936), would be revised while retaining key realities of London as it existed at the time of filming. The final “look” of the piece proved close to perfect for a film made in 1956, based on a novel published in 1949, about the year 1984.
THEME
The term “Orwellian” has come to mean any government that intimidates citizens through mind control. In an example of “doublethink,” Orwell’s Ministry of Peace insists that perpetual war is the only means to achieve stability and absolute loyalty to the all-powerful state.
At the time of the novel’s release, Orwell’s target was believed to be the sort of fascist regime recently overthrown, Big Brother serving as a fictional counterpoint to Adolph Hitler. As such, the controversial novel was beloved by liberals, who perceived in it an attack on right-wing oligarchy. In recent years, many conservatives have insisted that the opposite is true. The political ideology “Ingsoc” is short for English Socialism; just such a government must stamp out any shred of individualism. In fact, Orwell had hoped to warn against any extremist form of government, left or right; the book was political in the most all-encompassing, least narrow sense of that term.
TRIVIA
In 1984, Michael Radford remade the film, which starred John Hurt and Richard Burton. However clever the idea might have seemed, the results bordered on disastrous. Some elements of the book were altered to bring Orwell’s vision of the future more in line with the way things had actually turned out, destroying the literary connection, while others were played precisely as written. The contrast between Orwell’s vision of what might come about and the world as it had actually emerged in that now-mythic year clashed, rather than meshed, onscreen.