Articles/Interviews

IN RETROSPECT, it seems that Oliver Reed made as many, or more, bad movies as good ones - as though it was his intention to play the "bad boy" onscreen and off. Sometimes, especially in later years, it appeared he would take any role, regardless of how it made him look - possibly even because it would make him come across as exactly the buffoon he was always on the verge of becoming in real life. He appeared in impossibly awful movies that denigrated and wasted his talents, indulging in the kind of shtick that his performances in his great films sometimes flirted with, but always sidestepped. Finally, Reed's outrageous living (it wasn't a lifestyle; Reed was too busy living to think in those terms) caught up with him and put an end to a life and career that even his worst choices couldn't quite manage.

There was indeed something fitting about Reed's demise in a pub -following some social drinking with friends and some serious imbibing with a group of sailors. "I am very sorry he has gone, but I think he probably went out the way he would have wished," commented Reed's WOMEN IN LOVE (1969) co-star, Glenda Jackson. That sentiment was echoed by Ken Russell, whose connections with the actor include not only that film, but date back to 1963's THE DEBUSSY FILM and all the way forward to the 1997 radio play, THE DEATH OF SCRIABIN (in which Reed played the notorious Aleister Crowley). Saddened, but not in the least shocked by Reed's death ("He could so easily have gone anytime in the last few years"), Russell, in a phone conversation with me, was quick to note the fitting manner of his passing, and added, "At least he went out working."

It was during this conversation, where we fell into talking about favorite Reed performances in films like Russell's own and Winner's THE JOKERS (1966) and I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S 'IS NAME (1967) - along with some of his less stellar turns such as DR. HECKYL AND MR. HYPE (1980; "I think I missed that one," deadpanned Russell) - that I realized the true enormity of Oliver Reed's film career. Indeed, when tabulating his good and even great performances in good and even great and often adventurous films, the miserable prospects of such groan-inducing rubbish as VENOM (1982) and THE HOUSE OF USHER (1988) fade away into the insignificance they so richly deserve.

Here is a man, often thought of unfairly as a limited actor by those who confused his public persona with his abilities, who worked with nearly every major director of his time. Who else, working today, could claim to have worked with Ken Russell, Richard Lester, Michael Winner, Joseph Losey, Carol Reed, David Cronenberg, Nicholas Roeg, Terry Gilliam, and Ridley Scott? The list of filmmakers is in itself impressive; the performances Reed gave under those filmmakers is even more so.

Like most Americans, I first encountered Oliver Reed in CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961), one of the most admired Hammer films, and a film in which the young actor was allowed the kind of role that his earlier turns - usually as a thug or ruffian did not allow. Here was a part that called for Reed to express the inner turmoil and tragedy of a character-and to release some of his own in the bargain. Ironically, Reed himself seemed to feel no great pride in his horror films, glossing them over in his autobiography REED ALL ABOUT ME, and not even mentioning what is surely the best of them; Joseph Losey's THE DAMNED (US: THESE ARE THE DAMNED, 1961).

Losey's unrelentingly grim science fiction film presents Reed in what is easily the finest performance of his early career - as King, the ringleader of a vicious Teddy Boy gang. True, King is a role cut from much the same cloth as Reed's other early roles for Hammer, but he is also far more complex than such a description suggests. King also affects a Jaguar and the best Saville Row tailoring, setting himself well apart from his minions - almost like a fantastic Fritz Lang crimelord on a British seaside town scale! Moreover, King's incestuous obsession with his sister Joan (Shirley Anne Field) suggests something far more deep-seated than mere delinquency. Nor is the homoerotic nature of the gang mindset overlooked. When Joan takes off against his wishes with Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), King settles for putting his arm around one of his henchmen and doing a mincing chorus boy impression. The incestuousness is certainly in the script and the chorus boy touch may be there or a directorial touch, but it takes Reed's special charisma to bring them to life. More important, though, is his ability to humanize the character as the film progresses. There is brilliance in Reed's revulsion when he touches the cold face of one of the film's radioactive children and recoils in horror, crying, "He's dead!" Similarly, there is a sense of growth as he comes to care for this child - and more than a touch of bitter irony when the first person he has let himself care about brings about his own end. King's realization that he cannot escape with the boy, and his subsequent decision to drive his car off a bridge into the sea, is as powerful as anything in Reed's later work.

In Reed's mind, the importance of his horror pictures lay mostly in the fact that they attracted the attention of Michael Winner, who would play a key role in his film career. Winner is not a filmmaker to everyone's tastes - for that matter he isn't even a filmmaker for the tastes of his admirers, much of the time - but the best of Winner is very good indeed, and some of Winner's best is also the best of Oliver Reed.

Their first collaboration, THE SYSTEM (US: THE GIRL-GETTERS, 1963), is a kind of extension of the "Angry Young Man" school of drama, with Reed cast as a cocksure Lothario, who ultimately realizes the emptiness of his life and his failure at real love. The film earned Reed his best reviews to date, but something was lurking around the corner that he could not have foreseen, that almost seems inevitable in retrospect, considering Reed's habits.

While getting thoroughly inebriated with friends in a pub, another man accosted him, making sport of his performances in horror films. At first Reed joked with the man, but the man came back for more and when Reed suggested he take his leave in bluntly Anglo-Saxon terms, the heckler turned attacker - badly slashing Reed's face with a broken glass. The incident left Reed with the scars we now know so well, and he was certain it was the end of his film career, and it might have been, if Fate - and a certain filmmaker - hadn't intervened.

"Hammer Films had given me my start and Michael Winner my bread, then Ken Russell came on the scene and gave me my art," Reed forthrightly states in his autobiography. Russell, it seems, didn't even notice the scars - and after all, in the role of composer Claude Debussy, Reed had to wear a beard. Reed called THE DEBUSSY FILM "the turning point" of his career, and it was certainly that even if only by bringing him into association with Russell.

Despite the fact that Russell has occasionally simplified Reed's acting techniques, Reed became one of the most capable actors to help Russell bring his unique visions to the screen. The rapport was apparently immediate. Not only did the two enjoy working (and occasionally drinking) together, they liked each other. Reed was back on hand whenever Russell had occasion to employ him - first as narrator of his film on the painter, Henri Rousseau, ALWAYS ON SUNDAY (1965), and then in the most ambitious of his BBC TV films, the brilliant DANTE'S INFERNO (1967), a portrait of poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement in art.

Just prior to DANTE'S INFERNO, Reed made THE JOKERS for Michael Winner, an engaging popart "Swinging London" souffle about two brothers (Reed and Michael Crawford) who steal the Crown Jewels for a lark. The film is interesting as one of the more charming artifacts of the era, and as one of the earliest expressions of Reed's considerable comedic gifts. To some degree, he takes a back seat as Crawford's older, wiser brother, but he makes the most of his chances, coming across with a charm and a flair for self-deprecating humor beneath a cocky exterior that would serve him well in later, more complex roles, of which Winner's I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S 'IS NAME is a fine example.

This time, Winner was creating anything but a lightweight film. Where THE JOKERS revelled in the "Swinging London" scene, I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S 'IS NAME deconstructs it within the dictates of its own style. Moreover, where THE JOKERS took place in a world where everything was for fun and relationships had the fleetingness of the Carnaby Street fashions that decorated the scene, I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S 'IS NAME is about work, the real world within this imaginary realm, and is literally brimming over with relationships that refuse to go away. Reed plays Andrew Quint, a wildly successful director of television commercials, whose shallow, disreputable calling is fleshed out with a wife, two mistresses, a girlfriend, and an egomaniacal boss, Jonathan Lute (played to the hilt by top-billed Orson Welles), who has far more claim on him than any of the women in his life. The film recounts his efforts to free himself of the "deceitful, superficial, and self-indulgent" world of advertising, all the while dealing with the various bits of baggage of a public school background and the illusions of his idealistic days at Cambridge.

The film is anything but subtle; it was not meant to be. No film that opens with Reed traversing the streets of London with an axe (which he uses to destroy his posh office desk) is designed to be an essay in subtlety. Reed brings everything he has learned about acting to date to bear on the role of Andrew Quint, giving a performance built on a series of touches and nuances that allow him to move from his "traditional" brooding character (as Andrew attempts to break away from his past) to a charming, slightly jaded intellectual. The life-story conversation he holds with Carol White in a Carnaby Street boutique while he daringly mocks his own toughness by festooning himself with a brightly colored array of feather boas is an indelible moment in Reed's filmography.

In the end, I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S 'IS NAME is a sobering portrait of an essentially decent man coming to terms with the world as it is, not as he would wish it to be, and with the things he allowed himself to lose while he was aging. In a scene where Reed finds himself out of place at a trendy party, an even more misplaced middle-aged man asks him, "Why is it that these days everyone seems to be 21 years old? What happened 21 years ago tonight?" "All the grown-ups went home to bed," Reed answers him, and the film cuts to him watching the party from the street below as he does the same - in saddened recognition of the fact, like it or not, he is now one of the grown-ups.

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S 'IS NAME should have blasted Reed to the forefront of stardom and it might have done, but for its timing and daring. Released in 1967 - the year before the MPAA ratings system was introduced - the film took a few too many liberties in the bare breast department, brazenly included Marianne Faithfull's line "You fucking bastard!" (Universal's half-hearted attempt to mask this with a car horn fooled no one), and depicted (below the frame-line) Reed bringing Carol White to orgasm orally. Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church was having none of this and slapped their "Condemned" rating on the film, while the MPAA denied it their seal of approval. As a result, despite glowing reviews, the film received few bookings.

Undaunted, Reed was cast by his uncle, Carol Reed, as the villainous Bill Sykes in the musical OLIVER! (1968). Not exactly the star turn, Bill Sykes nonetheless expanded Reed's visibility and, despite the limitations of the task of playing one of literature's most loathsome characters, Reed managed to show a good deal of the pain beneath the villainy, suggesting that perhaps Sykes was less "made" this way than "turned" this way by the world he inhabits. The reality of Reed's performance is no small feat in a film not known for the realism of its otherwise rather well-scrubbed characters.

While filming Michael Winner's HANNIBAL BROOKS (1968), an innocuous and forgettable WWII story involving Reed and an elephant crossing the Alps, Ken Russell surprised the actor by arriving on the scene and asking him to play Gerald Crich in his next film, WOMEN IN LOVE.

Physically, Oliver Reed was virtually the opposite of the character of Gerald Crich as he was depicted in D.H. Lawrence's novel. In every other respect, he might have been born to play the role, so completely does his matter-of-factness offset the dreaming, unsettled quality of Alan Bates' Rupert Birkin. Early in the film, Russell establishes Reed's character as something solid and immovable, by panning down onto him from the cold stone edifice of a church, making him at one with the building. It therefore becomes doubly ironic that it should be his character who does not survive the story - the one person in the film who seems the strongest is instead the most vulnerable, the most fragile. A case can be made - indeed has been made - that Reed's character is inwardly dead from the beginning, and that his death from freezing at the end is as much an internal event as an external one.

Symbolically, this makes a certain amount of sense, but it shortchanges the complexity of Reed's characterization, which is more suggestive of a man who has a chance at life but loses it - or throws it away - by his inability to genuinely accept the love of others, most specifically the friendship and love (which has the possibility of romantic as well as platonic love) of Rupert Birkin. Throughout the film, Gerald's character constantly - perhaps willfully -misunderstands Rupert's motives (which, in all fairness, Rupert may not himself understand). Following the famous nude wrestling match between the two (which Reed had insisted should be done as in the novel), Gerald and Rupert lie exhausted on the floor in a scene that could scarcely be more suggestive of a post coital moment. There is a tenderness between the two men. Gerald even delicately strokes Rupert's arm at one point in a gesture supposedly conveying the mingling of blood in a blood brother pact, but which goes on longer than that and carries a quite different punch. It is, in fact, the most completely human moment Gerald has in the film. However, it is cut short the moment that Rupert suggests anything like commitment from the other man, saying that they should "swear to be true to one another all our lives." With that defining moment, Gerald recovers himself, announces that he wants to wait till he understands it better, and withdraws back into himself.

Since Gerald will not or cannot accept love on Rupert's terms, he seeks it elsewhere in the more "appropriate" form of Gudrun Brangwen (Glenda Jackson), a woman who, rather than seek to become one with him, is interested in controlling him, subduing him, mastering him. (That Gerald should choose the sister of Rupert's own "appropriate" romantic partner is psychologically telling in itself.) Their lovemaking scenes are ironically less lyrical than the wrestling match, though tellingly scored with the same tortured music, stressing the fact that the relationship is more a contest of wills than anything to do with love. With Gudrun, Gerald uses sex not for purposes of love or even lust, but as a path to a kind of oblivion. He finally dismisses Rupert in what is perhaps the film's most horrifically cruel moment. The two friends' last exchange finds Rupert reminding Gerald, "Don't forget, I've loved you as well as Gudrun has," only to have it thrown back in his face by Gerald's deadly response, "Have you, Rupert? Or do you just think you have?" It is a line that is unthinkable of being spoken by anyone but Oliver Reed. The truth, of course, is that Rupert has not only loved him "as well as Gudrun has," but far more so. It is significant that the only person crying over Gerald's frozen corpse after he deliberately wanders into the snow to die is Rupert. (In many ways, the title of the film is ironic, since the two men are clearly much more in love with the reality of each other than the women can ever hope to be.) Reed's portrayal of Gerald, as is so often the case, clearly draws on his own inner demons - the need to live up to an image of himself, even if doing so destroys him in the process. In many ways, it is a portrait of what would happen to Reed in his own life, adding yet another bit or resonance to a film that was already as disturbing and haunting as anything the screen has ever witnessed.

Reed's next great performance was also for Ken Russell: THE DEVILS (1971). As the Jesuit priest Urbain Grandier, Reed offers a portrayal of such power and intensity that it surely must rank as one of the great performances of all time. The film itself was, and remains, extremely controversial. Reed's performance, on the other hand, never received anything less than praise. He seems to become Grandier, the politically inconvenient priest who was burnt at the stake in 1634 on trumped up charges of sorcery. Comparatively, the roles of Gerald Crich and Grandier are in striking contrast, even though at one point Grandier comments that he has "terrific need to bring about my own end." However, Grandier is much more alive than Gerald ever allows himself to be. He is a fighter, a rebel, and a would-be reformer, who does indeed bring about his own end, but he does so by accepting the love that Gerald cannot - in the person of Madeleine DeBrou (Gemma Jones)- and the responsibility that goes with it. In essence, Grandier might be viewed as the same Oliver Reed on a different path, but one that also leads to a bitter end.

There is not one false move on Reed's part in the film (there are blessed few false moves in the film period) and his fine moments are actually too numerous to catalogue. From his opening funeral oration to his voice crying out through the flames to the people to forgive him for "defending your city so badly," Reed is at the top of his form. His arrival on the scene of the revolting mass exorcisms - "You have turned the house of the Lord into a circus and its servants into clowns!" - is breathtaking in its eloquence and dignity, as are all of his "courtroom" scenes before the tribunal that will judge him a sorcerer and a heretic. Neither Reed, nor Russell ever shy away from the full depiction of the horrors of Grandier's torture and one is dazzled that acting can be this completely, shatteringly real. But perhaps Reed's finest, most heartbreaking moment comes when his accuser, the sexually frustrated Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), sees him for the first time. Despite her obsession for him, the woman has never set eyes on him until after he has been completely shaved bald and tortured, so that she is confronted with this broken and bloodied man who must drag himself along on legs crushed to pulp. "They always spoke of your beauty and now I see," she tells him. "Look at this thing I have become - and learn the meaning of love," he responds.

Most of the productions that immediately followed this mammoth achievement were lesser Reed to say the very least. Some measure of rescue came in 1973 in the form of Richard Lester's brilliant romp, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, with Reed in particularly fine form as Athos. Reed did Ken Russell the favor of a one-shot cameo as a train conductor in MAHLER (1974), and this led to his being cast in Russell's TOMMY (1975), an unreservedly brilliant adaptation of Pete Townshend's 1969 rock opera that contains what I believe to be the finest of all Oliver Reed performances.

The character of Frank Hobbs is, in many respects, very close to Reed himself, especially to his public image as a conniving, jovial boozer and ladies man. In fact, Reed's role grew as the film progressed in Russell's mind with his character taking on a significance and importance that was not in the original treatment, where the character often took a back seat to Keith Moon's over-the-top "wicked Uncle Ernie." The role that finally emerged is virtually a compendium of Reed's film career - the oily Lothario who woos and wins the not-quite-widowed Nora (Ann-Margret) is really a long-in-the-tooth seducer version of his character in THE SYSTEM; his tough-guy routines are all variants on his lesser performances in lesser films, here made warmly funny, and so on. What makes all this work so remarkably is the fact that Reed takes these various elements and, undeniably with Russell's help, makes a two-dimensional villain into a three-dimensional character. His unabashed lechery as regards Nora is smarmy without being quite offensive. There is a constant hint that, even though Frank is onto a "good thing," there is an inept innocence about him and suggestion (borne out by the film in its entirety) that he also actually cares for Nora. Never has such a wholly awful character been so almost inexplicably lovable.

The key is perhaps that trace of innocence (first conveyed by him hopping up and down as he walks to get a look over the garden wall at the house his alliance with Nora will get him) that is woven through the entire performance. This is perhaps nowhere so evident as in the scenes involving taking the deaf, dumb, and blind Tommy (Roger Daltrey) to a Specialist (Jack Nicholson). From the moment Frank barges into Nora's nouveau riche white-on-white nightmare bedroom, all country gentleman tweeds, sporting a shotgun and the obligatory slaughtered duck, he is so painfully out of step with any kind of reality, so obviously trying to behave as he believes the wealthy are supposed to behave, and doing it so badly, that it is impossible not to like him. The actual scene with the Specialist - Reed now all British gentry morning clothes, grey topper, and monocle (that refuses to stay in his eye) - is quite on the same level. The fellow tries so hard and just keeps getting it wrong - if it isn't the monocle constantly falling out of his eye, it's him "suavely" biting the end off a cigar and spitting it on the expensive rug, and if it isn't that, it's him flaunting his money, and it isn't that, it's his inability to achieve, let alone maintain, the proper upper class accent! And while a great deal of this is at least partly the work of the filmmaker, no amount of filmmaking expertise can account for the acceptability of the moment where Frank happily stomps on young Sally Simpson's (Victoria Russell) fingers to keep her from clambering onto the stage with Tommy. The moment belongs solely to Reed, who executes it with such vicious good humor and almost balletic grace that it is more funny than appalling. By the end of the film, our feelings for Frank are such that, in spite of ourselves, his death at the hands of a mob is genuinely moving. It is a performance truly in a class by itself.

Everything that follows TOMMY inevitably pales, though there were certainly years of good work ahead. Reed's Otto von Bismarck in Lester's ROYAL FLASH (1975) was another deliriously droll romp and if it added little to his career, and his supporting role as Eddie Mars in Winner's updated THE BIG SLEEP (1978) was no disgrace (nor was the film, which actually retained far more of the plot and dialogue of the Raymond Chandler novel than the 1946 Howard Hawks version, even if the time period and location seem skewed). Probably his best film from this period is David Cronenberg's THE BROOD (1979), in which Reed plays a seemingly sinister, but actually well-intentioned (and extremely complex) psychiatrist-scientist, whose experiments in trying to externalize rage have horrific and murderous results. The film is brilliantly unsettling - the first of Cronenberg's great films and, not surprisingly, the best acted of the early ones, thanks especially to Reed and his childhood friend, Samantha Eggar.

It would not be until Nicolas Roeg's CASTAWAY in 1987 that Reed would find another role even remotely worthy of his immense talents. Everything else seemed to just be marking time and the films that followed, while sometimes worthy in themselves and containing wonderful bits of Oliver Reed, were hardly starring vehicles. Reed's turn in Terry Gilliam's THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988) was delightful, deftly trading on his image, but it was essentially a guest star role. Much the same was true of his hysterically funny bit as a visiting Cardinal (complete with a preposterous stage Italian accent that might have shamed Chico Marx) in Stuart Gordon's THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1990), despite that film's obvious connections to THE DEVILS ("What do you think Reed and I talked about between scenes?" Stuart Gordon once told me).

One of the most frustrating of Reed's performances is sure found in his last film for Ken Russell, PRISONER OF HONOR (1991). To be sure, there is nothing wrong with Reed's performance. The old magic is there. The problem is that Reed's old magic (and that of a number of Russell regulars like Ken Colley, Judith Paris, Murray Melvin, and Christopher Logue) only makes Richard Dreyfuss's stilted and impossibly vain performance look just that much worse. One wishes that the final cinematic Russell/Reed collaboration had been a somewhat grander send-off, but such was not to be.

Looking back over Reed's work in film - the good, the bad and the magnificent - it becomes ever clearer that the film world lost one of its true greats on May 2, 1999. But more importantly, it lost - we all lost - a unique personality with whom we had grown for over 30 years. In many ways, Oliver Reed was one of the last great movie stars, for as much as he was a gifted, even brilliant actor, he was also a star in the best sense of the term.

So while we wait for next summer's release of his final performance in Ridley Scott's GLADIATOR, let the revival houses crank up the projectors, and let's pop our favorite Oliver Reed pictures into the VCR... and though most of us have neither the capacity nor the capital to quite equal Ollie's final $400 bar tab, let's knock back a few in memory of a man who gave us all so many treasured moments for so many years.