Shuttlecock aka Sins of a Father

Shuttlecock, it says on the IMDB, with the year 2020 in a bracket. Strange, that guy looks like Alan Bates, I thought to myself as the grainy face of a middle-aged man appeared on the screen. Since Bates died in 2003 this seemed unlikely. Up come the opening credits and there is the name Alan Bates at the top of the list. What am I watching?

A bit more digging and I see there’s another film called Shuttlecock on the IMDB, from 1991, also directed by Andrew Piddington and starring… Alan Bates. A bit more digging still and (thank you Wikipedia, and, yes, I have sent some money) a picture starts to emerge, of a thriller directed in 1991 which was beset by financial and other problems. “The original film was never finished, really,” Piddington told the New York Times in a 2014 interview. Shuttlecock wasn’t very well received.

One final mystery I have only just solved by reading the New York Times piece the quote came from is precisely when Piddington went back to the film and had another go at it. End credits suggest 2014 (they also suggest another title for the film, Sins of a Father), which agrees with the NYT date, even though the IMDB is saying 2020. At the best of times films and the date of their release is a foggy area.

Anyhow, here we are in 2020 with what the IMDB are now calling the “director’s cut”, though actually this Shuttlecock is more than that. Piddington has re-assembled some of his cast, decades on, and has constructed a framing device bookending the film – at the funeral of the Second World War hero Major James Prentis (Bates), John (Lambert Wilson), the plodding son he never quite rated, and doted-on grandson Martin (David Oakes) confront the rift in their relationship and the truth about the man they’ve come to bury.

Back we go in time – to original material shot in the 1990s – and in roughly 1970 Major Prentis has decided to up sticks and move to Portugal under the one-party rule of dictator Salazar, last of the 1930s gang of fascists which included Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. This is an odd decision for a man who’d proved his mettle behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany. Doubly so, since Major Prentis has just published an acclaimed memoir about his war exploits, after much prompting, and is the toast of London.

There, in sunny Portugal, the major has a massive mental breakdown and is rendered mute. His son John (Wilson, looking much younger in this material, because he is/was) arrives with young son Martin (played in these sequences by Gregory Chisholm, who could not be located for the reshoots) to find out what’s wrong with the Major.

What then plays out is something along the lines of a Stephen Poliakoff drama, an excavation of the past see-sawing between the the wartime exploits of Shuttlecock (the Major’s code name), the late 60s/early 70s of the Major’s mental collapse in Portugal and the present day, where John and Martin are trying to get both the past and their current relationship straight.

Also, Poliakoff style, the drama is really concerned with psychological damage – the sins of the father – echoing down through time. The Major’s neglect of his son has had an effect on John and his grandson and also, it’s suggested, might have contributed to the end of John’s marriage.

But never mind all that, is the film any good? Yes it is. Piddington has successfully pulled the 1991 film out of the fire and by adding 20-odd minutes to it and re-editing has shaped a successful psychological drama that does justice to Graham Swift’s original novel.

For something interested in psychological developments it’s got big visual ambitions. So many cavernous, lushly shot spaces – the Liberal Club in London, the psychiatric hospital in Portugal to name just two, and an eye for a gorgeous old Mercedes winding along a night-time city street in Portugal. I’m also guessing that modern tech has allowed for some cleaning and regrading of the original material, to match it with the newer stuff. However it’s been done, it feels like an up-to-the-minute film, which makes Bates’s presence feel like even more of a bonus, if you’re a fan.

As for the man himself, Bates gamely barrels through Second World War action flashbacks he’s too old for but comes into his own in the Portuguese sequences – before, during and after his mute spell – while the son who never quite measured up digs into the history of a dad who might not be all he seems.

It’s a touch melodramatic now and again but all in all it’s a very satisfying psychological thriller, with the new material actually reinforcing the original idea, that the past has consequences, particularly if there’s something to hide.

Shuttlecock – Watch it/buy it at Amazon

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© Steve Morrissey 2020