Langrishe, Go Down (1978) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

This is a Harold Pinter teleplay that was first broadcast on the BBC in 1978.

Pinter, the husband of Lady Antonia Fraser, may be the most famous living English playwright, and has been celebrated as a giant of the theater since he was in his twenties. He's not that old now (74), but has been an established playwright for nearly 50 years. He's an author whose oeuvre is the power of implication, whose characters always mean something quite different from what they say and demand that you and the other characters figure out what they really mean.

When his style works, it can be very effective. Mysterious threats appear in the form of ominous visitors. They don't do or say anything threatening, and yet they are - sinister. Tension is created with pauses, glances, silence. People seem to exist only in the present. Characters are more symbolic than filled in. Real communication rarely happens. Dialogue often consists of non-sequiturs or ironic filler like "oh, have you really?"

Frankly, I don't know what The Great Pinter was driving at with with this script, but I found it impossible to appreciate this film in any way.

A lonely Irish spinster meets and falls in and out of love with a pretentious Bavarian graduate student who is studying Irish folklore. They ramble about the way-too-quiet Irish countryside in the vicinity of Dublin, circa 1930. The Bavarian makes speeches. Guys in pubs make speeches. There is endless pontificating followed by pompous digressions about various uncinematic matters like the reproduction cycle of bees and the Irish theatrical tradition.

No, check that. That isn't precisely what I mean.

That sentence should read: "It is a complete waste of time, despite the presence of two of the greatest actors in film history."

It is a complete snoozefest - lifeless, tedious, and unfocused. I would also say "pointless" if it had been written by any ordinary mortal, but I have to grant that The Great Master Pinter must have had some point. Unfortunately, he managed to keep it a secret from me.

The technical aspects are just as flawed as the script. It was made for television in 1978, so it is in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and the quality of the print is not even mediocre. There are some suggestions and hints that the original cinematography may have been quite good, but it's difficult to say that with certainty because this print bears the same resemblance to a movie that a faxed sixth generation Xerox of an Ansel Adams photo bears to the original photo. If you see that multi-generation fax, you might think that Ansel was probably a helluva photographer, but you would not know for sure. Same problem exists here.

Besides its historical value (it was not seen for decades), the only interesting thing about Langrishe is a significant amount of nudity from a woman I would like to think of as my personal sex slave, Dame Judi Dench. You haven't lived until you have seen Judi Dench putting whipped cream on her nipples. Well, at least until you've seen a faxed sixth generation Xerox of Judi Dench putting whipped cream on her nipples.