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t e r v i e w
spotlight september/october/november 1997
Alan Bates: An
Actor Who Prefers To Be Anonymous
by Peter Buckley
From SHOW (the magazine of films and the
arts) May, 1972
© 1972 by H&R Publications, Inc.
PART TWO (of three). Naturally Alan is excited
about the surprise run-away success of Butley - "We
knew it was good, but we had no idea that everybody else would
think it was that good" - but not excited enough
to turn it into a personal long-run. "A few months here
in the West End, then a few more in New York, if they even bother
to ask me, and that's it. No more long-runs. They're very bad
for an actor; you just stagnate and that's death in this business.
And besides, take-overs are very much the thing these days, aren't
they. Everybody's doing it, and often the second cast makes the
play work so much better, although I suppose I really shouldn't
say that. Christ, I know all about those deadly long-runs. I
lived with Look Back in Anger for over two bloody years
and it almost ruined me. Actually it made me, so I can't really
complain about THAT, but it was
a long time ago."
 Cliff, the "other man" in Anger,
was more than the start of Alan's career; it was the first of
his many second-lead roles and it's all evolved naturally from
there. Throughout the years he's kept up that well tuned second
fiddle - always there, always superb, and always in the back
seat. In Zorba the Greek it was all Anthony Quinn, in
Georgy Girl it was Lynn Redgrave, while in Women In
Love it was Glenda Jackson's turn. Even in The Fixer,
for which he was nominated for the Academy Award, his central
figure was overshadowed by the superb mosaic of minor characterizations
that made the film so memorable, and in the award winning The
Go-Between, everyone, including Bates, is far out-stripped
by Dominic Guard.
  
  
A "well-tuned second
fiddle"?
Yet this is the way the parts have been written
- they are by nature supporting roles - but second lead certainly
doesn't mean second place. Alan was far and away the best thing
in Far From the Madding Crowd, although the script was
balanced on the side of Julie Christie, Peter Finch and Terrance
Stamp, and while Finch may have seemed the only one completely
at home in Hardy country, Bates' Gabriel Oak was a memorable
and loving creation. It is in fact almost the same role that
he repeated last year as Ted Burgess in Joseph Losey's study
of recherche, The Go-Between.
But in all these films, Bates was less than
number one, and perhaps that's one of the reasons why he likes
to return to the stage again and again. There he holds center
spotlight, and as he lets out all the stops, his power and versatility
have been a great surprise to many who have come to regard him
as a gentle, brave soul.
The theater also gives him the chance to
display his natural ability with comedy - he's a born comic and
mimic witha broad strain of Rabelaisian camp running throughout
his urban patter - but his films, as a general rule, have ignored
the fact that he is a very funny man. Even in comedies he's starred
in, he has always seemed the straight man in the midst of the
lunacy, but onstage he lets rip on all sides and even his Hamlet
had the odd flash of comic invention.
But the theater is less than half of the
Bates story. More than any other leading English actor, he alternates
religiously between the cinema and the stage. Right after finishing
The Go-Between, he plunged into his spectacular, starry
Hamlet, and long before Butley came onto the scene,
Joe Egg was in the can. Like so many of the films that he
has starred in, he admits surprise at the commercial success
of The Go-Between, and an understandable apprehension
over the possibilities of Joe Egg.
  "It's
hard to guess how the public is going to react to Joe.
It is, to say the least, a very tricky subject and it could put
a lot of people off. It's a very real and tragic situation, so
tragic in fact that the only way to face it is with a laugh.
The film is actually quite different from the stage play, even
though it has been adapted for the screen by Nichols [Peter Nichols,
on who's autobiographical play the film is based].
"When it was done live, there was a
much greater reliance on outrageous fantasy - like the vaudeville
bits and the actor-audience dialogue - and on an excessive use
of broad comedy. That's really the bigest cop-out of them all
when you think of it. I mean if you can get an audience rolling
with laughter, it's much easier to kick them in the teeth. It's
a trick, a good one which works in the theater. In Butley
every other line is a laugh line and it's hysterically funny,
but underneath it is a serious play and you're never for a moment
allowed to forget that. You can do that much more easily when
you've got your audience right there. You can throw out the conventions
and juggle them all up in the air, but it doesn't necessarily
work on film. It's a different medium and it requires a different
approach.
"The film of Joe is a more sober,
realistic piece. You've got the kid right there on the screen.
You're with the problem, and there's a whole new feeling of claustrophobia.
You can't suddenly turn your back on the situation and start
trading jokes with the audience. That talking to the camera business
hardly ever works when you're trying to play it straight, but
with comedy, it's always disaster. As a result, the film is a
whole different piece than the play. Don't get me wrong, it's
still very funny, but the humor doesn't come so easily. It's
not quite to obvious.
"The company claimed that they held
it back until after they released Nicholas and Alexandra
- because there was such a strong similarity between the two,
you see. Honestly, I don't understand all of that distribution
crap, or maybe I just don't buy it. I just think they were afraid
of Joe. They weren't sure of what they had and didn't
know what to do with it. It happens all the time. Anyway, the
nicest thing about it all was that the wait for Joe's
release meant that I didn't have to rush into another movie for
a while. We don't want to glut the market with Alan What's-his-name,
do we."
The film industry hasn't exactly been overwhelmed
with what's-his-name over the years - just over a dozen movies
in the same amount of time - but with few exceptions, they've
all been excellent, important films. From his first appearance
in 1960 in The Entertainer, Bates' name on the credits
has had a certain box office appeal as well as a guarantee of
quality, and he personally values three of them as important
steps in his career.
   "A Kind
of Loving (1962) was the big break of course since it was
my first major part, and although it had a limited success at
the time, it still stands up as a fine movie. Then Zorba
- that was the first one aimed at the big international market.
The earlier ones were specialized English studies - good, but
tight, little films for tight little audiences -- and then there
was The Running Man which was supposed to be big but never
got off the ground, but Zorba really soared and it opened
up the whole new international field.
"The most important one for me though
was The Fixer, not so much because of the film itself,
but because of the part. It was totally different from anything
I'd ever tried before, totally new, and undoubtedly the hardest
bloody thing I'd ever done in my life, both physically and mentally."
Go to Part Three
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