Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 3 April

The Dresser (Yates, 1983)

There are lots of reas­ons why you might like to watch a film more than once.

For me, I often watch films again for pro­fes­sion­al reas­ons, espe­cially when I’m host­ing At the Movies. Filmmakers go to a lot of trouble to pro­duce their work, and it’s only fair that they get due con­sid­er­a­tion from a critic.

Then, there are the times that you want to share a film with someone who missed out the first time around. You can lend someone a nov­el, but you can’t read it along­side them. And live per­form­ances dis­ap­pear imme­di­ately into history.

But you can sit beside someone watch­ing a film and – as long as you don’t keep nudging them in the ribs say­ing, “this is a good bit com­ing up” – you get to enjoy their response as well as your ori­gin­al one.

And then there is the pas­sage of time.

I was intro­duced to The Dresser by an old friend who knew it so well that he could quote screeds of dia­logue from it at the drop of a hat. And very enter­tain­ing dia­logue it was, too.

We were theatre people then, so the milieu was famil­i­ar and the char­ac­ters were recognisable.

Albert Finney plays “Sir”, an old school actor-manager tour­ing Shakespeare through Northern England dur­ing World War II. The char­ac­ter was reportedly based on Sir Donald Wolfit, who writer Ronald Harwood had actu­ally ‘dressed’ at the begin­ning of his career.

Harwood wrote the story as a play in 1980 and the screen adapt­a­tion went on to great suc­cess, includ­ing act­ing Oscar nom­in­a­tions for Finney and Tom Courtenay as Norman.

“Sir”’s men­tal capa­city is deteri­or­at­ing and the com­pany – who rely on his star power for their live­li­hoods – are deeply con­cerned. Norman is attempt­ing vali­antly to keep the old act­or upright and on his lines, but the cause appears to be a los­ing one. Mishap fol­lows mis­hap until a final cru­cial per­form­ance of Lear in Halifax.

So, now I come to how a film changes due to the pas­sage of time.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

When we first fell in love it, it was because of the show­busi­ness gags and the beau­ti­fully flor­id dia­logue. To young men like us, it was a hoot.

It gave me quite the jolt to dis­cov­er that I am now almost a dec­ade older than Albert Finney was when he played the part and the theme of the passing of time, and the dimin­ish­ing of one’s capa­city, is now an unavoid­able cur­rent concern.

The Dresser is a much sad­der film than we gave it cred­it for at the time, and the World War II set­ting is more import­ant. To us, it just felt like gen­er­ic old England, but you can see now that war­time anxi­ety looms heav­ily over every­one, not least those whose employ­ment only con­tin­ues because the able-bodied are overseas.

One final note: it’s hard to believe that this film was dir­ec­ted by the bloke who made Bullitt, home of one of the best car chases ever filmed. Just goes to show that the careers of the jour­ney­man dir­ect­ors were (argu­ably) more inter­est­ing than they are now.

Where to watch The Dresser

There is a new (region free) edi­tion of The Dresser on Blu-ray from ViaVision’s Imprint imprint, dis­trib­uted in New Zealand by Madman Entertainment. You can buy dir­ect online from ViaVision here (AUD$34.95).

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from Apple

Australia: Streaming on Britbox

Canada: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon, Google or YouTube

USA: Streaming on Prime Video

UK: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon, Google or YouTube

There’s also a more recent adapt­a­tion of Harwood’s play (from 2015) star­ring Ian McKellen as Norman and Anthony Hopkins as “Sir”. It’s writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by Richard Eyre so should be worth a look. If you recom­mend it, please let us know in the comments.