Pallisers 12:24: Almost there (for our heroes & heroines too); the next generation

Our heroines whose names at this point are: Glencora, Duchess of Omnium (Susan Hampshire) and Mrs Marie Finn (Barbara Murray)

Dear Friends,

I’ve put on this blog a summary of the episodes of this part (An Elegiac Culmination), prefaced by situating it in the whole series, and containing several transcripts of key scenes, quotations from others, and stills.

Tonight I add a commentary.

General remarks:

Silverbridge (Anthony Andrews) salutes his sister, Mary (Kate Nicholls), Lady Mabel (Anna Carteret) and Mrs Finn on this cold sunny day (see the blanket)

When we get to Pallisers 12:24 and move finally out of the Prime Minister and into Duke’s Children, the mood of this series changes radically. It becomes idyllic-elegiac, and picturesque. This last book is the most changed by Raven for Raven does not kill off the Duchess until the final episode. He shows her sinking; she looks old and she is continually taking medicines, but she is there and very active. He changes the meaning of the book.

We saw in reading Trollope’s novel, The Duke’s Children, its weakness is its real backstory and passion about the Duke’s dissatisfaction with his marriage finally and this is not brought to the fore. Too painful for Trollope to make a front story because perhaps a parallel with his own marriage. In the book the Duchess’s use of Mary as a vicarious substitute which leads the Duke to reject Tregear passionately.

Here in the film we have instead a deeply loving couple, different no doubt, but sharing grief, loss, outlook. This Duke has no backstory. And the forefront is his struggle with Silverbridge. It is significant that people writing about Trollope’s book before the series write eloquently, movingly, and sentimentally about the Duke v Silverbridge as central to the novel. John Wiltshire says one thing movies often do is make visible how the average person wants to see a novel.

But Raven does more: The Duke’s Children is one of Trollope’s more Victorian novels in some of its attitudes and Raven to put this across uses a mood of bright comfort and high idealism. He has only a fragment of Tregear so he is turned into a poignant lover of Mary which is then contrasted to Lady Mabel Grex’s loss of Frank and her unwilling to marry the boy.

All the proto-feminism of Trollope is erased here: we haven’t a woman who is not given a choice she wants and therefore no place; instead she is made somewhat superficially cynical and wavering with a desire to become Tregear’s lover-mistress again, and we have pairs of young lovers contrasted, and it’s clear Silverbridge and Mabel are the mismatched pair against Frank and Mary’s deeply felt yearning and Silverbridge and Isabel’s bright young hope and energy. This lays the groundwork for the wet dream of the the American girl which takes over (and replaces the function of Madame Max as superfemale in the European movie style)

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Facing it (defeat, later life): Duke (Philip Latham) and Duchess in their bedroom suite late at night

The duke and Duchess’s story:

Raven sees the Duke as noble, but also someone who would be lost, vulnerable, and something of a butt because he’s no networker and is not complicit or corrupt himself; he lives in a way others regard as dull; watching him talk with Phineas Finn through a window, his son, Silverbridge tells Lady Mabel he looks far older than his age. The implication is Silverbridge wants to enjoy life more and thus look younger.

For Trollope the character is this way too: but Trollope also identifies with the Duke, recognizes himself in him and critiques society for more than its materialistic corruption. All along, as Raven once said in an interview, the central figure for Raven has been the Duchess: it’s paradoxical, as Raven in part turned the series in many stories of gentleman attempting to succeed in the world.

Silverbridge is contrasted to his father and Anthony Andrews as Silverbridge gains gravitas when he is contrasted to the Duke’s deep idealism and genuine thought on the one hand and Dolly Longstaffe’s disillusioned cynicism and insight on the other.

There are two scenes between Silverbridge and his father, in the first Silverbridge tells of his desire to marry Lady Mabel and the Duke approves; the second is a central linchpin of the episode — and a powerful dramatic one. The Duchess’s disapproval of her son’s choice (what happened to that idealistic young girl of 1:1? we are to ask) contrasts with his father’s approval; his father’s dismay at his lack of altruism and depth contrasts with his mother’s way of regarding politics as a matter of family sheerly and individuals.

All this is true to Trollope’s conception, only it’s not in the Duke’s Children as the Duchess dies in the book’s first paragraph.

There is no contrast of the Duchess and Lady Mary. They are shown to love and glimpses of a deep relationship seen fleetingly, but there are so few scenes between them. The first is about entering the world together; the others about love affairs, Silverbridge for Marbel and Lady Mary for Frank. The Duchess identifies with her own lost love, not the girl in front of her for herself quite. Except for Marie Finn and the Duchess, at no point in all the series do we see women’s friendships as central to their lives beyond the early courtship before marriage, not even their family ones – as a mother-daughter pair would be. Lady Mary seems more acutely aware of her father: she worries lest Silverbridge upset him further; wants Tregear to appear to be serious and earnest before her father. Once her mother approves of Tregear at the close of 11:22, all is settled. I do not forget the Duchess early on we see her preparing an album to read with her daughter — in effect home-schooling her.

The culminating great scenes of the whole series as such are really the very long ones between the Duke and Duchess, which punctuate the series throughout. Sympathetically presented as they are, Phineas Finn and Madame Max (aka Marie) Goesler Finn are secondary hero and heroine. So their enjoyment of their park and grown children and the deeply felt scene at mid-point in the episode as the two learn to live with their loss of power are final moments in a 24 episode long story.

The film story began with a forced marriage between two very unlike people, deeply unsympathetic who had found people congenial to them, and we have experienced a long and rocky road with much estrangement and times of alienation, especially on the deep-feeling Duke’s part, and dogmatic uncomprehending insistence on his own way; for the Duchess it’s been frustration, deep and unending, at first an intense lack of fulfillment of her impulses and then when she had the chance for her ambition, and her desire to show off and have people admire her and feel on top and be ahead, she is thwarted, not appreciated, stopped, partly out of her own adequate judgement Trollope wants us to see, but also that (in the films this is there more unqualifiedly as the book’s anti-semitism and xenophobia has been cut) her protegee never had a chance. But now they are grown old together and have come to understand and appreciate one another.

Trollope’s critique of marriage becomes in the Raven team hands a reinforcement of submission and repression to family aggrandizement and social mores, for there are no such coming together loving scenes between the Duke and Duchess (and very moving they are) in either Phineas 2 or The Duke’s Children — for that matter 8:15 over the Duke’s death are invented and elaborated semi-original scenes too.

Phineas (Donal McCann) and Marie, secondary couple, standing out in the group of friends and family, and standing by

These scenes of Duke and Duchess are contextualized by three or four shorter between the Duke and Bungay, the Duke and Phineas and Bungay and Marie Finn and the Duchess. In all we see how the Duke has come to enjoy power and doesn’t want to let go because he wants to leave his mark on the society; he wants to have done something good and decent and far-reaching. Bungay says it was enough to hold on and provide peace. Phineas and Marie Finn’s views are simply that the Duke and Duchess have done what they could and now that their followers are tired of doing nothing exciting (bustle), nothing for war, for advancement of themselves, they have to let go and be glad they have escaped unscathed relatively, gotten what they could out of it.

The Duchess is as unwilling to let go as the Duke; and in their final long scene together she cries out more than he about their retirement which he has finally accepted before the scene begins.

It’s done in their bedroom with a mirror nearby and often we see her through the mirror — a device used repeatedly in films when women are at the center of the scene: it’s suggested in film studies that this shows how women judge themselves as they imagine society sees them, and invent an identity or assume one society imposes or wants them to enact, or they want to enact in order to be accepted.

Among these contextualizing scenes (for the Duke and Duchess) is the held-over the long scene in The Prime Minister (Chapter 68, “The Prime Minister’s Creed”), where Phineas and the Duke go for a walk in the park and talk politics. This is an important scene in PF2 and it is here too.

What is fascinating is how Trollope remains in generalities far more than the Raven team and how the Raven team update what’s said in Trollope to be a conservative message for the 1970s. In Trollope the Duke and Phineas remain in philosophical generalities like Monk does in his letter (the parallel moment in Phineas Finn when Monk defines what is meant by representative government and faces that it means government which includes the mediocre, the stupid, those who “represent” all the feelings and interests of their constituences. He does not think of lobbyists as we have them today :)):

In Trollope the implications have to do with income and property redistribution finally, it’s never made explicit. The Duke is simply a staunch liberal who wants to see more justice, noble loving hearts, clear intellect and egalitarian feelings spread through the earth and then produce legislation. In Raven’s film this is made explicit; he felt he could not remain vague. Palliser is talking of something that would bring about or call for redistributing property and rights and advantages and privileges. It’s Phineas who in both book and film says he is not sure he wants to go beyond fairness. The Duke says as people born to such privilege do they dare argue they deserve this and argue the others don’t (are ontologically inferior is what is meant) and not try to help others and also argue for their rights too, and work towards it. The Duke says this will increase happiness for all, but admits especially those without advantages.

Phineas’ reply in the film is that even those without advantages may not want egalitarianism, and it won’t make them happy to get rid of distinctions, not at all. Raven and his team are careful not to have Phineas argue the conservative view itself, and the Duke turns to his beautiful landscape and we see his luxurious room and remember how lovely his lifestyle and he says he wouldn’t want to give what he has up and maybe has the luxury of hoping for egalitarianism while he knows it will not happen for a long time to come.

This may seem far away from the 1970s, but the costume drama hides the agenda here. Bungay in his scene with the Duke argues (as he’s done before in the film and again not so explicitly in Trollope’s book) that English people don’t want revolution; they want things to remain at peace and orderly. This is Raven’s 1970s Toryism, for he has taken no poll.

Beyond contextualizing our aging hero and heroine this way, their life and times, the relationship and types the Duke and Duchess represent are shown visually and comically. The Duchess is to go out riding in a carriage with Lady Mary and Marie Finn with her sons and Frank Tregear on horseback. She is late dressing herself exquisitely. She does don a beautiful (alluring to my eyes) hat. How she loves coming out and Silverbridge telling her how lovely she looks. Then she refuses her seat in the carriage and instead takes the reigns away from her footman servant and leads the band herself on the top seat.

It’s touching: the young Lady Glen is there yet; this is just the sort of thing she loved from the beginning. After their dialogue the Duke and Phineas walk out and see the group. The Duke hurries over to take his wife down from her perch (lovingly of course) and worries that the young men’s race will hurt them. It’s just the sort of way he has of fretting over her health when she was pregnant in the early episodes. In character still.

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The second generation of heroines: the deep feeling Mary and Lady Mabel (these are the center for Raven, and Isabel Boncassen, so delightful for Trollope to conjure up as an old man, is marginalized as exotic, foreign) talk of their heroes, Tregear and Silverbridge and Mary of her father

This is matched by the scene where Silverbridge tells Tregear he must give it up; this is chosen to be dramatized twice (much earlier when the Duchess objected we had a version of this) as befits a series about gentlemen coping:

Then there is the Duke’s Children, or second generation material. How are we asked to see this in the film? Early in the episode is the very moving scene with Frank where she implies she is offering herself to him sexually again, and he refuses not on the grounds he does not love her or could not again, but that he cannot tear himself between two women.

This romance is not in Trollope; Trollope’s Tregear is harder and would not sentimentalize this way; we are not sure about any sex, and he is now bound to and wants Mary for herself and also what she can bring. Trollope’s feminism is also gone; he really does have Mabel lament she has nothing to do with her life; this is a new motif with him; he shows her in a bleak gothic castle with Miss Cassewary at the end of DC. Here she is simply cut and dismissed by Silverbridge (I like that as in Trollope he is nowhere as likeable as he is in this series). Her need for money as central motivation is in both book and film.

About half-way through the episode we have the scene between Silverbridge where he asks Lady Mabel to marry him and she refuses; while short, it is strong and powerfully emotional. They play at courtship and it’s lyrical and sweet at moments (not hard in the way of Trollope); still, she tells him she cannot marry without love, yet at the end relents to say when he is grown up, harder, to come again. Alas, she does not in the film realize harder means he will not come again. In the book we are told of further proposals (not dramatized) which she refuses; they do not occur here. In the final scene she is regretting having said no because now Isabel will get him.

David Lean says most of the time don’t pay attention to the end of a movie or an episode. It’s a sop for the masses, an upbeat piece tacked on to please nervous backers and distributors. This episode shows that. It’s in the middle of the episode that the great moments arise. I think mini-series and soap opera don’t work in the way of commercial singleton films and the middles and endings are important.

Once again, in Trollope’s Duke’s Children as we have it together (only 3/4s of the original book) the books’ hero is the Duke and he stands alone at the center of the children the Duchess left him who have been brought up by and resemble her. In the book the Duchess is least linked to Lady Mary because she sympathized strongly with the love affair with Tregear remembering her own. That’s why in the book the Duke is against it.

We see 20th century attitudes again (as we did in earlier episodes when we saw the Duke misbehaving in front of his son and the Duchess trying to mediate and “spoiling” her sons): the older folks Duke and Duchess are suffering badly over their loss of power but hide it from the children. It’s presented that adult parents hide all sorts of realities from their children. That’s a modern ideal or even norm perhaps in some places, but not then. Major Tifto is marginalized, not central in the early way of the book which weighs Silverbridge’s decisions about male friends as heavily as it does his relationship with his father and choice of Isabel over Lady Mab. Then both Duke and Duchess involve themselves in Silverbridge’s choice: is she presentable, they ask (as if he had to get a middle-management joy through giving dinner parties). It’s almost funny in the way the material lends itself to these anachronisms.

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As to technologies: how daring are the close-ups of Susan Hampshire and Philip Latham. Not until very recently did cameras come close to the faces of heroes and heroines (who we are to admire and want to be I suppose, identify with) to show their aging faces, slack skin, pock marks, blemishes of all sorts. This is also seen (a little farther off) for Phineas and Madame Max and Dolly to show them as aging, but not close up.

This is radical, an approach not seen until about 4 years ago.

Visuals have a logic of their own dependent on the particular actor/actress: they chose the yearning Nicholls for daughter of the originally brightly idealistic Lady Glencora; she is in dark green to deepen the pastoral green of the part. She contains in her a haunted spirit and is the visual genius loci of the part. This is why I began the first posting on this part with her

No it’s no Brideshead, The Jewel in the Crown, or Love for Lydia, 11-13 episodes of daring pictorialism and new techniques of various sorts, but I think the Pallisers is not written about in depth because (like the year-long Forsythe Saga), it was so ambitious, and is so difficult to remember, let alone apprehend precisely.

Onto Pallisers 12:25.

Ellen