In the Bleak Midwinter (VHS) [1995] Kenneth Branagh

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A Midwinter's Tale (1995)

In the Bleak Midwinter (UK title)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113403/

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A Midwinter's Tale (also known as In the Bleak Midwinter) is a 1995 romantic comedy written and directed by Kenneth Branagh. Many of the roles in the film were written for specific actors.

Richard Briers ... Henry Wakefield (Claudius, the Ghost, and the Player King)
Hetta Charnley ... Molly
Joan Collins ... Margaretta D'Arcy
Nicholas Farrell ... Tom Newman (Laertes, Fortinbras, and messengers)
Mark Hadfield ... Vernon Spatch (Polonius, Marcellus, and First Gravedigger)
Gerard Horan ... Carnforth Greville (Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Horatio, and Barnardo)
Celia Imrie ... Fadge
Michael Maloney ... Joe Harper (Hamlet)
Jennifer Saunders ... Nancy Crawford
Julia Sawalha ... Nina Raymond (Ophelia)
John Sessions ... Terry Du Bois (Queen Gertrude)
Ann Davies ... Mrs. Branch
James D. White ... Tim
Robert Hines ... Mortimer
Allie Byrne ... Tap Dancer

"A Midwinter's Tale is a comic look at the actor's eternal despair." The film begins with a monologue by out-of-work actor Joe Harper (Michael Maloney) about his slow decline into depression. In an attempt to beat his depression, Joe volunteers to help try to save his sister's local church from land developers for the community by putting on a Christmas production of Hamlet, somewhat against the advice of his agent Margaretta. As the cast he assembles are still available even at Christmas and are prepared to do it on a 'profit sharing' basis (that is, they may not get paid anything), he cannot expect ΓΓé¼ΓÇ£ and does not get ΓΓé¼ΓÇ£ the cream of the cream. But although they all bring their own problems and foibles along, something bigger starts to emerge in the perhaps aptly named village of Hope. This film encapsulates the hilarious and heartbreaking struggle of actor versus situation versus life, and often versus each other. It was shot in black and white for artistic effect.

Richaed Briers, Nicholas Farrell and Michael Maloney, who all appear in this film, later had important roles in Branagh's 1996 film version of Hamlet: Briers played Polonius, Farrell played Horatio, and Maloney played Laertes.

Populated mostly with unfamiliar faces and photographed in black and white, it's like one of those 1950s British comedies that assumed the audience was paying attention. It's about characters and dialogue.

The writer and director, Kenneth Branagh, has toured with his own troupe of Shakespeareans, and so he knows first-hand some of the problems of personality conflict, ego with or without talent, and grim living conditions.

The movie stars Michael Maloney as Joe Harper, an actor who feels he is adrift and must make a dramatic gesture to reclaim his soul. So he determines to put on a holiday production of "Hamlet" in a small provincial town. His agent is played by Joan Collins (somehow my fingers, with minds of their own, continue typing, and spell out "of all people"). She thinks it's a bad idea. Well, it is.

The broad outlines of this kind of movie have been established ever since Mickey and Judy decided to rent the old barn and put on a show. First there are auditions, at which everyone is spectacularly untalented. The best of the lot are cast in the play, and turn out to be career failures with severe psychological difficulties. They complain about the food, the lodging, and one another. But they all agree the show must go on, and somehow it does, even though the movie's theme song is Noel Coward's "Why Must the Show Go On?" Among the members of the cast: a weird production designer (Celie Imrie) who turns the church into an Elsinore that looks, well, exactly like the church looked to begin with. A nearsighted Ophelia (Julia Sawalha) who won't wear her glasses, and makes her first entrance by falling spread-eagled down the stairs. A Gertrude (John Sessions) played by a drag queen. A Claudius (Richard Briers) who remembers much better days in his career, and is aghast to learn he will share a room with the drag queen, since he hates homosexuals ("The English theater is dominated by the class system and a bunch of Oxbridge homos"). And, of course, the cast drunk (Gerard Horan).

A compulsion that many actors share is the need to say a great many unnecessary words about productions that speak for themselves.

Branagh's screenplay has fun sending up this tendency. The Laertes (Nicholas Farrell) assures Joe, "Hamlet is Bosnia. Hamlet is me.

Hamlet is this desk. Hamlet is the air. Hamlet is my grandmother!" And an auditioning actor, asked if he can fence, replies, "I live to fence. In a sense, I fence to live." In the tradition of backstage movies, camaraderie somehow builds among this motley crew, and then, of course, there is a crisis. The crisis is engineered by the Joan Collins character, who is the movie's one false note. She plays the agent well enough, but would actors at this grubby level be represented by an agent so sleek and glamorous? I envision an agent more along the lines of Zero Mostel in "The Producers." "A Midwinter's Tale" is the kind of movie that probably will appeal best to those with a background in the theater and Shakespeare. It asks, but never really answers, the question of why intelligent adults would devote their lives to such an ill-paying, frustrating, disappointing profession. Of course a great many other intelligent adults devote their lives to professions that are equally frustrating and disappointing, and, while they may pay better, are boring, and never have opening nights