by Allan Fish
the next in the series of small screen masterworks
(UK 1954 107m) not on DVD
Aka. Nineteen Eighty-Four
This has been a Ministry of Truth broadcast
p/d Rudolph Cartier w Nigel Kneale novel George Orwell m John Hotchkis art Barry Learoyd
Peter Cushing (Winston Smith), André Morell (O’Brien), Yvonne Mitchell (Julia Dixon), Donald Pleasence (Syme), Arnold Diamond (Emmanuel Goldstein), Campbell Gray (Parsons), Hilda Fenemore (Mrs Parsons), Pamela Grant, Keith Davis, Wilfrid Brambell, Leonard Sachs, Nigel Kneale (voice from telescreen), Richard Williams (narrator),
Ask anyone who saw Michael Radford’s perfectly passable version of George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare whether it was the first version to be made, and a few dissenters might have recalled Michael Anderson’s inferior 1955 film version, but very few – and certainly next to none outside of the UK – would have remembered this 1954 telecast. Yet it is one of the milestones of British television drama. It was originally shown as one of the BBC Sunday Night Theatre dramas, but was so successful – it was said that the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh most enjoyed it – they had to repeat it, but this meant actually doing a fresh live performance and it was in this guise it was repeated and was a massive success. It was adapted by none other than Nigel Kneale, the man behind Quatermass, which was then still in its prime; the auspices, it has to be said were good. There is therefore a truly bitter irony in the fact that the film went unseen for years due to the rights being bought out for the film of 1984 in the self same year. It was as if, come the year 1984, even this piece of art would be obsolete. Or, as Philip Purser observed, “in Orwellian speak, one of TV’s great landmarks now unexisted.”
There can be few people who do not know the story of Orwell’s horrific fantasy, of nobody Winston Smith’s secret rebellion against the tyranny of Big Brother, the ultimate totalitarian regime in which freedom of thought or expression is outlawed and only a momentary love affair with a fellow dissatisfied worker brings comfort. The treatment is what matters, and it could hardly have been better done, least of all thirty years on in the big screen version. The mournful matter-of-fact tone is captured almost instantly in the almost apathetic tones of Richard Williams’ narration (“here is one man’s alarmed vision of the future“) and continued in the telescreen broadcasts of the various Ministries of Plenty, Truth and the like. And, though there have been various Orwellian variations seen on the big screen – most memorably Terry Gilliam’s Brazil – none compare to the original novel or have quite the raw power of this production.
Andre Morell as O’Brien – Richard Burton come in, your time is up!
Certainly Kneale is to be congratulated on his distilling of the essence of Orwell’s ideas and prose, but there must also be much praise levelled at the actors, all of whom are superb, especially considering the conditions in which it was made. Cushing could not be bettered as Winston Smith, a perfect everyman in every way, while Pleasence is magnificent in his scenes as the doomed Syme, notably in his joy at the distillation of the language of Shakespeare into horrendous Newspeak (itself perhaps an eerily accurate presentiment of how language is distilled today in the form of text messages and infernal acronyms and abbreviations). Piece de resistance, however, must be André Morell; his scenes with Cushing – which have an added poignancy in the contemplation of his later playing Watson to Cushing’s Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles – are electric and his whole demeanour and speech utterly terrifying. When listening to his speech about humanity’s future (“if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face…for ever“) every bit as chilling as Ralph Fiennes’ speech about rewriting history in Schindler’s List. What also seems ironic, to lay another on an already growing pile orfironies, is that Orwell’s vision should be best captured on the small screen, not only because of its omnipresent telescreens in citizens’ homes, but because it was on the small screen that Big Brother would take on an altogether different – but in its own way equally dispiriting – meaning in the new millennium; “we are the dead” indeed.
