By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: director Anthony Harvey, who helmed The Lion In Winter, They Might Be Giants, Grace Quigley, and Eagle’s Wing.
In the world of cinema, late director Stanley Kubrick stand as something of a titanic figure, a man revered not just for his gifts as a filmmaker, but also for his peccadillos and creative perversions. Rather than a hindrance, his near-despotic perfectionism – and the bullying pedantry that often infamously flowed freely as a result of it – has long formed part of the inspiration for the critical and fan idolatry that has revolved so relentlessly around him. Stanley Kubrick is an enigmatic figure of such renown that even his frequent creative collaborators (including the likes of cinematographer John Alcott and producer James B. Harris) have achieved a kind of trickle-down kind of fame too, forming an essential part of the dark mythos that surrounds the director. Conversely, this also tends to shroud the abilities of said collaborators, particularly if (like James B. Harris), they are directors too.
Such a fate was certainly draped across the shoulders of the late Anthony Harvey, who served as editor on two of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier, most seminal works in 1962’s Lolita and 1964’s Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb. Though he cut other excellent films (1959’s I’m All Right, Jack, 1965’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold), it’s for his work on the Kubrick films that Harvey remains most acknowledged for. “He invited me to see him and I had at least four or five interviews,” Harvey has said of Kubrick, adding immeasurably to the director’s mystique. “He gave me the MI5 treatment. ‘What kind of hours do you work? What time do you go to bed? Are you married? Do you go on holidays?’ He wanted somebody who was going to be there seven days a week, twenty-two hours a day, and, indeed, I did work very long hours for him. But, my God, what a great experience! He’s a fascinating, funny, brilliant, eccentric fellow. I wouldn’t have missed working with him for the world.”
After his successful career as an editor (which had followed on from an equally successful one as a child actor, which had seen him star alongside the likes of Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains), England-born Anthony Harvey made his first film in 1966 with the highly provocative, 55-minute drama Dutchman, a then-confronting take on race relations in which the great Shirley Knight has a game-changing encounter with an African-American man (Al Freeman Jr.) on the New York subway. Adapted from his own play by groundbreaking black playwright Amiri Baraka (previously LeRoi Jones), the film was barely released commercially, but played to great acclaim at film festivals, where it was lauded for its strong performances and daring subject matter.
Vitally, Dutchman deeply impressed the mighty Peter O’Toole, one of England’s most popular and praised actors. So taken with Harvey’s skills was O’Toole that he lobbied power producer Joseph Levin to hire the largely untested filmmaker to helm the major historical drama The Lion In Winter. An adaptation of the 1966 play by James Goldman, the 1968 film depicts the personal and political conflicts of Henry II of England (played by O’Toole in vigorous, full-bodied form), his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn), their children and their guests during Christmas 1183. Expertly staged by Anthony Harvey, the film bristles with wit, and also features the big screen debuts of Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton, showcasing the director’s knack for casting. With Harvey’s editing background, The Lion In Winter is unsurprisingly sharp and finely honed in its movement, but the film is also strong visually, while the director also displays a very deft touch with actors. “Much as I absolutely worshipped Katherine Hepburn’s work, I sometimes thought she rather overdid it,” Harvey recalled to The Times in 2017. “So I said, ‘Kate, when you’re simple, you’re devastating.’ She was adorable about it.”
The Lion In Winter was a huge critical and box office success, along with a multiple Oscar nominee (including a Best Director nomination for Harvey), which sent Anthony Harvey into something of an existential crisis. Nervously unable to commit, Harvey turned down Love Story and Cabaret (to his later regret), and eventually tumbled into the ill-fated adaptation of Herman Raucher’s A Glimpse Of Tiger. A pet project for actor and 1970s superstar Elliott Gould, the film crumbled under the chaotic weight of the actor/producer’s rampant drug use, erratic unpredictability (co-star Kim Darby reportedly became so afraid of Gould that she hired bodyguards to protect her from him), and even connections to organised crime. Beset by problems from every side (Gould also clashed violently with Harvey), A Glimpse Of Tiger eventually collapsed completely after just four days of shooting when backing studio Warner Bros. saw the writing on the wall and pulled the plug.
Though not a commercial success, Harvey eventually equalled The Lion In Winter in 1971 with the delightful cult fave They Might Be Giants, once again based on a play by James Goldman Boasting a glorious abundance of wit, warmth and humour, this gleefully unlikely comedy features a stellar performance from George C. Scott, who finds grace notes aplenty in the character of Justin Playfair, a rich retired judge convinced that he is indeed the great detective Sherlock Holmes, and spends the day thwarting the evil “plans” of his “nemesis” Moriarty. When he encounters psychiatrist Dr. Mildred Watson (the wonderful Joanne Woodward), the plot thickens. Though the film was a box office failure, it remains something of a quietly cherished minor gem, and Harvey blamed its lack of success to backing studio not only meddling with the production, but also for their poor handling of the material. “They paid $400,000 for the property and for Joanne Woodward, but they didn’t understand it,” the director has said. “I remember having conversations in Hollywood and they didn’t know what Moriarty meant at all.”
After his first two films, Anthony Harvey’s career creatively fragmented somewhat, with the director moving onto a variety of projects that failed to really gain traction with audiences, though some were very good indeed. An adaptation of Ruth Wolff’s play, 1974’s largely forgotten The Abdication tells the bizarre true story of Sweden’s Queen Christina (Liv Ullmann), who abandons her country to embrace The Catholic Church, whom her own father had battled so fiercely. From there, Harvey moved on to the tepid Ali McGraw 1979 tennis romantic drama Players, and then onto the far superior 1979 western Eagle’s Wing. Highly unusual and esoteric, this visually poetic work stars Martin Sheen, Sam Waterston and Harvey Keitel and tells of the battle of wills that develops between a white trapper and a Kiowa Indian. Though hurt by the era’s insensitive approach to casting (um, we doubt very much that Sam Waterston would get many gigs as a Native-American these days), the British-produced, largely forgotten Eagle’s Wing takes a trippy, emotionally complex, enjoyably meditative and wholly idiosyncratic approach to the western genre.
Harvey reunited with Liv Ullmann for the 1980 drama Richard’s Things (in which a widow confronts her late husband’s lover, with the pair then forging an unlikely relationship) and Katherine Hepburn for 1984’s fluffy and lightly entertaining crime comedy Grace Quigley (in which the eponymous retiree engages in a curious friendship with Nick Nolte’s hitman), and helmed a long list of telemovies in between his big screen efforts. There were more than a few gems on Harvey’s small screen resume, with 1973’s Tennessee Williams adaptation The Glass Menagerie (starring Katherine Hepburn, Joanna Miles, Sam Waterston and Michael Moriarty), 1976’s The Disappearance Of Aimee (with Faye Dunaway, Bette Davis and James Woods), 1981’s The Patricia Neal Story (with Glenda Jackson as actress Neal and Dirk Bogard as her husband, author Roald Dahl), and 1983’s Svengali (in which Peter O’Toole pervy music teacher “mentors” Jodie Foster’s much younger singer).
It was the 1984 telemovie This Can’t Be Love (with Harvey’s dear friend Katherine Hepburn and Anthony Quinn), however, that would ultimately bring Anthony Harvey’s directing career to a halt. Confronted with perhaps the greatest indignity that a talented man like himself could be asked to endure – namely, the film’s producers brought in an inexperienced editor to recut the film – Harvey finished the film, and then retired to Long Island in the 1990s. “I felt it was very strange to let a guy – a perfectly nice fellow in the office downstairs – to come and chip along on my film,” Harvey later said. “I just thought it was unspeakable. And I tried to explain to the producers and they just laughed. I just thought it was ridiculous.”
Anthony Harvey passed away in 2017 aged 87. Though highly regarded for his editing work and for the acclaimed The Lion In Winter, Harvey made many other superb movies that have gone largely and very sadly unheralded, several of them bound thematically and narratively by the director’s obvious fondness for witty, charming stories about highly unlikely, not necessarily romantic, relationships that can develop between people with seemingly very little in common. Anthony Harvey was a lot more than just one of Stanley Kubrick’s most effective editors…
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