The Wind Cannot Read

Did I say I was running out of material with 'The Mind Benders'?

Scratch that.

'The Mind Benders' is freakin' 'Rashomon' compared to 'The Wind Cannot Read'.

Directed by - it's that man again! - Ralph Thomas from a novel by Richard Mason, 'The Wind Cannot Read' is the kind of they-don't-make-'em-like-that-anymore melodrama that perfectly demonstrates why they don't make 'em like that anymore.

The title is from a Japanese poem which states:



A decent metaphor for a narrative about transience, uncertainty and those twists of fate which blow us off course and against which it is as futile to struggle as a rose petal against the wind.

And if you think my emphasis of the title is heavy-handed, wait till you see how Thomas gets stuck into it. He structures the opening sequence - which, to be fair, contains some effectively grim imagery of emasculated survivors, the bones of the not-so-lucky and the dark shapes of the vultures who have picked them clean - around the retreat from Burma, RAF pilot Michael Quinn (Dirk Bogarde) and two of his fellow airmen almost at death's door by the time they make it to safety. They stumble upon a beautifully cultivated garden with - yep - a sign urging them not to pick the flowers. Thomas slaps the poem over this image, then follows it up with the title in letters so big and garish they fill the entire screen.

Later, just for good measure, he includes some husky-voiced crooner singing "the wind cannot read" at the exact moment that Quinn first lays eyes on Sabby (Yoko Tani). Our boy's been sent to India by this time, studying Japanese while he recuperates so that he can be useful in an intelligence role. It's here that he crosses swords with up-his-own-arse officer type Fenwick (Ronald Lewis). Predictably, Sabby just happens to be the class's new instructor. Equally predictably, it's Fenwick who discovers Quinn and Sabby's taboo-busting, definitely-against-regulations cross-cultural romance.



The ensuing complications are interrupted when Quinn gets orders to return to Burma. It gets even more melodramatic than that, but on the slim chance you're keen on seeing 'The Wind Cannot Read' (word of advice: have a book to hand; maybe some knitting), I won't spoil it for you. Just don't say the title didn't tell you so when it finally lumbers to an end. Oh, and look out for a young Donald Pleasance in the last sequence.

Quinn and Sabby's romance - progressing from tentative courtship to marriage - occupies two thirds of the film and is played out against a tourist board vision of India where everybody wears bright colours and mostly ride on elephants, the beggars are clean and Thomas shoots the Taj Mahal from every conceivable angle during a pointless scene that seems to have been concocted purely to accommodate this barrage of National Geographical style shots.

Actually, a back copy of National Geographical would probably hold more interest than 'The Wind Cannot Read' - you'd at least learn something about the countries visited and there's always the off-chance of some bare-breasted tribeswomen.

But I digress.

What makes it worse is that 'The Wind Cannot Read' could have been, Mason's tortuous narrative notwithstanding, an interesting project.

David Lean began pre-production on 'The Wind Cannot Read', under the auspices of producer Alexander Korda. He wrote a screenplay in colloboration with Richard Mason and began scouting locations. When Lean discovered 22-year-old Japanese actress Kishi Keiko, he was convinced she was perfect for Sabby. Determining to capture the real India on film - as well as telling a passionate and poignant love story - Lean's enthusiasm was running high. Then came a series of conflicts with Korda - over the script, over casting - which remained unresolved when Korda died in early 1956. By this point, Lean was already in talks with Sam Spiegel for 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. Everything fell through and the property passed to the Rank Organisation; Lean turned his attention to 'Bridge'; and Keiko - who had been brought over to Britain in a storm of publicity and talked up as the next big thing - was robbed of a potential breakthrough role for western audiences and returned home.

When the project passed to them, Thomas and his partner/producer Betty E Box worked from Lean's script (although the credits suggest Mason wrote the script single-handedly) as well as using some of the locations Lean had already scouted. But Ralph Thomas was no David Lean (his pedestrian direction sucks the life out of scene after scene) and it's impossible to watch 'The Wind Cannot Read' without a frustrating curiosity nagging away at you as to what might have been.

Although Lean would certainly not have cast Bogarde (Kenneth More was his preferred choice), it's certainly down to Bogarde's popularity that 'The Wind Cannot Read' was a box office hit. In his magnificent biography of David Lean, Kevin Brownlow records that the director's response, when he saw the eventual film, was to ask Thomas for a share of the profits.

Hot Enough for June

Nore - in Godalming, Surrey - was the last and most extravagant of the country houses Dirk Bogarde owned in England before he upped sticks for France and settled in a Provence farmhouse. Set in ten acres, it was more of an estate, with two cottages and a studio in addition to the house itself, which boasted ten bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Bogarde and his manager/partner Tony Forwood paid £40,000 for it. That was in 1962. When it went on the market in 2004, the asking price was £2.5million.

Imagine the upkeep! It's no coincidence, as John Coldstream points out in his magnificent biography of Bogarde, that he began "accepting parts purely for the money". Even then, he wasn't enamoured about appearing in 'Hot Enough for June', Ralph Thomas's adaptation of Lionel Davidson's novel 'The Night of Wenceslas'. It was only when Tom Courtenay was in the frame for Nicholas Whistler, the hapless linguist who becomes a spy without even knowing it, that Forwood, as Coldstream recounts in the biography "said to Dirk in front of the producer and director: 'I'm not sure, Dirk, that you can afford to turn this down. Everyone knew that 'afford' was meant in the literal sense."

It wouldn't be the last time Bogarde gritted his teeth and made a film he had no interest in - nor the last time he'd do it to fund the upkeep on a house. In the 70s, he again returned to the espionage genre (with 'The Serpent' and 'Permission to Kill') and sunk the paycheques into Clermont, his property in France. I've not seen either of these, although both have eclectic casts and sound like they might be highly entertaining films. I have seen 'Hot Enough for June', though, and while it's not the abject mess that many critics would have you believe neither is it (unfortunately) a camp, spoofy underrated gem ripe for rediscovery.


That it never really gels is because it isn't camp or spoofy enough.

The plot in a nutshell: aspiring writer Nicholas Whistler (Bogarde) is happily signing on at the Labour Exchange when he's given an interview, ostensibly for a trainee management position. Picked for an overseas assignment due to his fluency in Czech, he has no idea that his new boss, Cunliffe (Robert Morley) is actually a big wheel in MI5, or that he's an unknowing courier, there to collect a formula and carry it back to London. Arriving in Prague, he is assigned a chauffeur: the glamorous Vlasta (Sylva Koscina). He has just as little idea that Vlasta's father, Simoneva (Leo McKern) is a ranking member of the Secret Police and Cunliffe's opposite number. Simoneva wants Whistler for his contact and the formula. Vlasta just plain wants him. Hilarious shenanigans ensue.

Or should have ensued. The opening scene, even before Whistler is recruited, sets the scene for the film 'Hot Enough for June' could have been. In a non-descript office, spymaster Roger Allsop (John le Mesurier) returns to the quartermaster a plethora of gadgets, ruing the untimely demise of the agent to whom they'd been issued. A cut to an index card reading "007 - deceased" provides the punchline. Although the number is never mentioned, it's clear Whistler has been recruited as 008. Only without anyone actually bothering to tell him.

At this point (ie. three minutes in), Ralph Thomas and scripter Lukas Heller - best known perhaps as co-writer, with Nunnally Johnson, of 'The Dirty Dozen' - could have gone one of two ways: absurdist humour played dead straight (a la 'Dr Strangelove'), or out-and-out camp spoofery. Sadly, 'Hot Enough for June' is neither one thing nor the other, and such pleasure as it does offer are incidental ones. Such as Morley and McKern chewing up the scenery, the latter bringing a brusque physicality and a droll wit to his characterisation of Simoneva.

There are wry touches - although much more humour could have been milked from them - in a smattering of scenes which point up the differences between Whistler and his better-known predecessor: when Whistler dons a tux it's not to make a dashing entrance into an opulent casino but to impersonate a head waiter as he makes his escape through a restaurant (he tarries long enough to serve up a Hungarian goulash with dumplings; when Whistler needs a mode of transport to get away from his pursuers it's not an Aston Martin DB5 with modifications but a stolen push bike.

Bogarde bumbles through the (deliberately) half-arsed action scenes like a good sport, maintaining an air of perplexion throughout. The man was no stranger to light comedy at this stage in his career, as his almost unholy popularity as Simon Sparrow in the 'Doctor' films attests. He even invests his scenes with Sylva Koscina with a bit of sparkle.

But, ah Sylva Koscina! If there is any reason to watch 'Hot Enough for June', it's Sylva Koscina. Playing Vlasta as an ice-maiden one moment and a purring, coquettish kitten the next - and with a twinkle in her eye that lets you know the whole thing's one big joke - she sways and shimmies through the film with a knockout 60s hairdo, an hourglass figure and a disarming amount of likeability.

Never really achieving the Hollywood cross-over success of Sophia Loren, Koscina propped up any number of forgotten thrillers and sex comedies in the '60s and '70s. Coincidentally, her motivation for accepting roles was not dissimilar to Bogarde's: most of the money went into her well-appointed villa in Rome's affluent Marino district.

Campbell's Kingdom

Ah, the great and prolific actor/director relationships: John Wayne and John Ford, Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, Dirk Bogarde and Basil Dearden Joseph Losey Ralph Thomas.

Bollocks!

It pains me to discuss the Bogarde/Thomas relationship (nine films together compared to the five he made with Losey and the four with Dearden) since Thomas was a journeyman director and did little to tap into either the brooding sensuality or the tortured intensity of Bogarde as an actor. Nevertheless, it was the likes of the 'Doctor' films ('~ in the House', '~at Sea', '~ at Large', '~in Distress'*) which made him a matinee idol. His dreamy turns in 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'The Wind Cannot Read' went over big with his legions of fans, as well. 'Hot Enough for June' - considered elsewhere in this year's Dirk-fest - didn't quite recapture the mainstream magic, while their final collaboration, 'The High Bright Sun', is largely forgotten.

Which leaves 'Campbell's Kingdom' - certainly my favourite of a frankly not-that-remarkable canon. Adapted from Hammond Innes's bestseller, it opens with Bruce Campbell** (Bogarde) turning up at ramshackle Canadian mining town Come Lucky having inherited his late grandfather's land, a tract the old man was convinced was rich in oil. Old man Campbell's undoing was an unscrupulous partner who defrauded their backers, amscrayed with the money and left Campbell to take the fall ... and do some time. Bruce, recently given six months to live following (it transpires) something of a misdiagnosis, decides Campbell's Kingdom is a nice isolated spot to end his days.

He hasn't reckoned with crooked contractor Owen Morgan (Stanley Baker) who is cutting corners and using cheap materials in the building of a dam which will eventually flood Campbell's land. Prevented from even visiting the Kingdom (the only way to the high ground it occupies is a clanking industrial hoist which Morgan owns and controls), Bruce bristles at Morgan's assertion that the land is worth nothing and is suspicious of the geologist's report Morgan produces which indicates there was no oil. Refusing to sell Morgan the land, Bruce makes contact with the geologist, Bladon (Michael Craig), and discovers that Morgan falsified the report.

Never mind that he's pale, weary and at death's door, Bruce gets a new lease of life fending off Morgan's overtures (which graduate from fiscal imperatives to acts of sabotage) and determining to prove that his grandfather was right about oil under the Kingdom. To this end, he engages the services of roughneck driller MacDonald (a spendidly miscast but loving-every-minute James Robertson Justice) who in turn employs world-weary trucker Tim (an equally miscast Sid James) to head a convoy hauling his equipment from Calgary to the Kingdom. A five hour drive with the little matter of roadblocks and Morgan's hoist at the end of it.

What follows is the centrepiece of Thomas's proficient thriller: a contrived but decently executed quarter of an hour's worth of hairpin bends, vertiginous drops, rock falls and dynamited bridges as Campbell, Boyden and MacDonald strive to outwit Morgan and has vicious crew and get the convoy up to the Kingdom. Scenes of truck wheels spinning and failing to gain traction as chasms yawn beneath them homage Clouzot's 'Wages of Fear' (released three years earlier), while the mechanics of the hoist and its tense ascent of the unforgiving mountainside predate 'Where Eagles Dare' by more than a decade.

This and a couple of other set-pieces (a night attack on the Kingdom and the inevitable climax as the jerry-built dam bursts) tick the right boxes; Baker is rugged, menacing and properly hissable as the villain; the Rockies provide a dramatic backdrop (even if Ernest Steward's cinematography does tend to come on a bit like a tourist brochure); and at a tight 100 minutes it never outstays its welcome.

On the flipside, the presence of half of Thomas's usual stable of Rank Organisation bit-players is somewhat offputting - you know you're in Canada because of the mountains but it all seems a bit East End, dahnit? - and Bogarde resolutely fails to gel with Barbara Murray in the shoehorned-in romantic subplot. The ending's a bit of a cop-out, as well, but to be fair it's replicated more or less faithfully from the source material (the only false note in Innes's otherwise pacy and atmospheric novel). Thomas's worst sins, though, are his blithe rejection of the standard editing room modus operandi of actually having shots that match. I don't think I've ever seen more screamingly blatant day-for-night shots than in 'Campbell's Kingdom'. Day-for-night? More like bright-blue-sky-for-pitch-black. The high bright sun, indeed.

*The latter a belated, almost cameo-like, return to the role.

**No relation to the prominently-chinned actor.