The Browning Version (The Criterion Collection)
by Anthony Asquith
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Brian Smith, Jean Kent, Michael Redgrave, Nigel Patrick, Wilfrid Hyde-WhiteDirector: Anthony Asquith
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Desmond Dickinson
Editor: John D. Guthridge
Producer: Earl St. John
Producer: Teddy Baird
Writer: Terence Rattigan
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Special Edition
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-06-28
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of The Browning Version (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Heartrending & Timeless Achievement of One Man's Failure...
Summary: 5 Stars
Distant and removed from the immediate environment is how one could illustrate Andrew Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) who is notorious as the Crock among the students at an English public school where he teaches the Classics. He is the archetype for a hated teacher, as he plagues his students with precise etiquette and dreary epigrams. In essence, he is a eloquent and subtle bully that oppresses his students whenever they fail. Like a cold reptile the Crock snaps at all available opportunities for him to be perceived as an authoritative source. This causes his students to become preoccupied with what is wrong rather than what is right, as they strive to avoid error instead of learning.
In the light of present educators, it should be noted that teachers should try to catch the students doing good, as it will promote a positive learning environment. It does not suggest that the teachers should turn a blind eye to harmful or negative behavior, as this can be detrimental to academic achievement for the students. Here in the Browning Version Anthony Asquith directs a very different film compared to his other accomplishments such as Pygmalion (1938) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). This film deals with failure rather than success. The failure of Mr. Crocker-Harris to fulfill his life calling to the potential and to be revered as a superior colleague and educator by both students and faculty.
Nonetheless, Asquith remains honest to what he does best by making adaptations of novels and plays. The Browning Version does not bring the flamboyant joyfulness that many of his other films do. Instead, he delivers a dark and emotional story, which is the result of a play that Asquith visited in the late 1940s. He felt that he needed to make the film, but struggled with financial backing. Eventually, the money came around and he could focus on directing a personal epigram through the character that Michael Redgrave so delicately performs in this memorable film. The film went on to win the awards both for best actor and screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952.
Asquith opens the story with an external perspective of Mr. Crocker-Harris who emerges with an authoritarian and humorless persona. He follows a rigid schedule, as the students even have their watches set after his. In many aspects, it seems like nothing is allowed to bother Mr. Crocker-Harris, as if he has already been put to rest. To strengthen this notion, his wife Millie (Jean Kent) says, "You can't hurt Andrew. He's dead." On top of this, the only thing that seems to provide some form of joy for him are the Classics of long ago fallen philosophers and scholars such as Socrates, Plato, and Aeschylus. Amidst all of this there is an overwhelming sense of gloom and lifelessness around Mr. Crocker-Harris who also has acquired severe health problems.
The film rubs on the surface of contempt and hatred while it slowly submerges into a personal tale. It is through Mr. Crocker-Harris's lifeless persona a remarkably tender story begins to brew. The surfacing true thoughts of him begin to unsettle his disciplined and razor sharp mind, as some even refer to him as the Himmler of the lower Fifth. One true notion follows by another, which begins to rupture the strong and cold front that he has put on to be perceived as a strong individual. Meanwhile, his wife is cheating on him with another younger and more dynamic teacher, as her contempt for him continually increases. It is emotionally torturous to watch this old man being struck with one setback after another despite his past.
The film discloses the failure of one man, which is something that Asquith was accustomed to on a personal level. Maybe, it is here where he discovered the emotional turmoil that he implemented in the film, as he grabs the audience over the throat with iron grip of melancholic sympathy. Asquith's father was a former Prime Minister and his mother, an eminent woman in high society. Thus, when their son became a film director, it must have been frowned upon with the notion of failure since their son had all the opportunities in the world. Failure, or not, Asquith and Mr. Crocker-Harris' lives could only be successes, if love were to be given to themselves through the small victories of self respect and personal forgiveness.
Summary of The Browning Version (The Criterion Collection)
BROWNING VERSION - DVD MovieMichael Redgrave etched his subtlest and, in its peculiar way, most beloved screen performance in this classic film version of Terence Rattigan's play. Play and film chronicle the final day of teaching for Andrew Crocker-Harris, a cold-fish public school instructor who has long since outlived his early promise. That his classics students, his colleagues, and even his somewhat younger wife refer to him as "the Crock" is not a mark of affection. Wheezing pedantically, making arcane classical puns without hope of raising a laugh, he's an anti?Mr. Chips to whom nearly everyone will be happy to say goodbye. Except that on this last day, with his health failing, his wife (Jean Kent) openly carrying on an affair, and his headmaster (the redoubtably smarmy Wilfrid Hyde-White) eager to whisk him off to retirement, Crocker-Harris achieves an order of triumph that the film marks without a whiff of sentimentality.
Rattigan was a meticulous composer of the "well-made play," and Anthony Asquith, who directed 10 films from Rattigan scripts over a quarter-century, was a reliable craftsman who never tried to upstage his material. (Asquith's best film apart from Rattigan was the delicious rendition of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest he and Redgrave did the following year.) It's easy to protest that this is not a formula for exciting "cinema": every scene of The Browning Version could be (and had been) performed on stage. Yet this subtly shaded and finally very moving immersion in "human nature"--to use a phrase "the Crock" scorns at one point--makes a virtue of reticence. By the time it's over, you know it has all the cinema it needs. --Richard T. Jameson
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