The Browning Version (1951 film)

Infobox Film
name = The Browning Version


caption = The Criterion Collection release of "The Browning Version"
director = Anthony Asquith
producer = Teddy Baird
Earl St. John
writer = Terence Rattigan
starring = Michael Redgrave
Jean Kent
Nigel Patrick
music = Arnold Bax
Kenneth Essex
cinematography = Desmond Dickinson
editing =
distributor = General Film Distr. (UK)
Universal Pictures (USA)
released = 1951
runtime = 90 min.
country = U.K.
language = English
budget =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id = 1:7273
imdb_id = 0043362

"The Browning Version" is a 1951 British film based on the play of the same name by Terence Rattigan. It was directed by Anthony Asquith.

Plot

Andrew Crocker-Harris is an aging Classics teacher at an English private school, and is forced into retirement by his increasing ill health. The film, in common with the original stage play, follows the schoolmaster's final few days in his post, as he comes to terms with his sense of failure as a teacher, a sense of weakness exacerbated by his wife's infidelity and the realization that he is despised by both pupils and staff of the school.

The emotional turning-point for the cold Crocker-Harris is his pupil Taplow's unexpected parting gift, Robert Browning's translation of the Agamemnon, which he has inscribed with the Greek phrase that translates as "God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master".

Differences between play and film

Terence Rattigan wrote the screenplay from his own one-act play. The chief difference is in the film's extended ending. The play ends before Crocker-Harris's farewell speech to the school; the film shows the speech, in which he discards his notes and admits his failings, to be received with warm applause and cheers by the boys. The film ends on a final conversation between Crocker-Harris and Taplow.

Cast

Michael Redgrave played the embittered Andrew Crocker-Harris, a role taken up in the 1994 remake by Albert Finney. Jean Kent plays his wife Millie, and Nigel Patrick plays her lover Frank Hunter, Andrew's fellow schoolmaster who eventually rejects Millie for her cruelty towards her husband, and takes pity on him. A young Ronald Howard plays Gilbert, Crocker-Harris's successor, and Wilfrid Hyde-White plays the Headmaster. Brian Smith plays Taplow. There are also notable uncredited appearances by Bill Travers and Judith Furse.

Production

The film was shot at Pinewood Studios. The school exteriors were filmed on location at the Sherborne School in Sherborne, Dorset.

The Greek text that appears on the blackboard in Crocker-Harris's classroom is from [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0003:line=403 the Agamemnon] . Apparently a description of Menelaus's despair after his abandonment by Helen, the lines were [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0224:line=403 translated] by Robert Browning thus:

"And, through desire of one across the main,
A ghost will seem within the house to reign.
And hateful to the husband is the grace
Of well-shaped statues: from—in place of eyes
Those blanks—all Aphrodite dies."

References

Notes

Bibliography

*The Great British Films, pp 150-152, Jerry Vermilye, 1978, Citadel Press, ISBN 080650661X

External links

*imdb title|id=0043362|title=The Browning Version
* [http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=294&eid=420&section=essay Criterion Collection essay by Geoffrey Macnab on the 1951 film]