There’s nothing wrong with The Shout that a different screenplay wouldn’t fix. In front of and behind the camera it’s brilliant. But further back than that, at the conceptual stage, there’s not much beyond a spectacularly tedious allegory about something or other.
Into the marriage of John Hurt’s Anthony and Susannah York’s Rachel comes a stranger, a domineering man dressed in black whose shout, he says, can rip universes apart, pulp souls, burst brains, and so on. But is Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) just a lunatic, as he appears to be? We have after all first met him at an asylum watching a very English cricket match overseen by a chief medical officer (Robert Stephens) and a new doctor (Tim Curry playing Robert Graves, who actually wrote the original short story).
Anthony and Rachel are a nice conventional middle-class couple, very much in the sort of love that this wild, unruly outsider is going to test, first by arriving mysteriously, then by setting himself up in the couple’s home, where he will hypnotise Rachel with his dark satanic looks and intimidate Anthony with his ability to utter a noise like nothing on earth. Anthony, we are told straight away, is a sound recordist by profession. Whereas Charles is sound itself.
Graves wrote the story in an attempt to get on to paper what it is for a poet to be visited by the muse – a dreadful, destructive-creative force – but possibly also as an attempt to put a high-minded gloss on a relationship he and his wife had been having with a woman called Laura Riding.
Either way, the Graves character does not feature very much in director/co-writer Jerzy Skolimowski’s reworking of the story and the cricket match etc acts as a mere bookend to the film, which mostly takes place in the cold and spartan cottage where Anthony and Rachel entertain their new guest.
As said, there is nothing wrong with what we see or how the actors interact – Hurt is the meek male, York the sexual prize and Bates a minotaur in human form. Devilish, glowering but not particularly charming, Charles is the sort of character you’d slam the door on if he appeared at it and it’s one of the plot’s weaknesses that Anthony and Rachel even give him the time of day when he first shows up. Once Charles has his hooks in, though, that’s a different matter.
Nor is there anything wrong with the direction. It was one of a string of films – of which Deep End is probably the best – the director made on an extended layover en route from Poland to the USA. He’s as agile and thoughtful as you could want and even throws in a couple of visual nods to Nicolas Roeg early on, who had been originally slated to direct but pulled out. His DP is Mike Molloy, who gives Skolimowski fabulously atmospheric images, as he had done for Roeg in Walkabout and Kubrick in Barry Lyndon (surely one of the most fetishised bits of cinematography ever committed to celluloid).
This was the first film produced by Jeremy Thomas, the legendary British producer who has made films in this vein ever since – intelligent, layered, well acted, with a mainstream/arthouse crossover appeal thanks to the stars he’d attach to his movies.
None of that, sadly, makes The Shout that interesting, which comes down to the fact that it’s a short story stretched way beyond its length at the 86 minutes Skolimowksi manages to push it to.
The shout itself, though, is awesomely convincing, frightening even, and when Charles finally gives vent to his bellow, Skolimowski shows us him up very close, as if he wants to get right into Bates’s mouth. And there are other little compensations, like Jim Broadbent in his first appearance (he’s a fielder in cricket whites catching a ball), plus, for fans of the band Genesis, the soundtrack by Michael Rutherford and Tony Banks.
It came out in 1978, when this sort of allegorical, portentous, symbolism-heavy movie with a lick of the surreal had already gone out of fashion. It feels like a 1960s movie that’s somehow escaped (the casting of York reinforces the impression). In spite of the fact that it won the Grand Jury prize at Cannes, it is now a curio.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
