The Man Who Loved Redheads

This film based on Terence Rattigan's play ' Who is Sylvia ? ' is for me a near total disaster. To begin with the dreadful, come on title should have retained the title of the play and the casting was misguided to say the least. Only in the final scenes of the film does Moira Shearer rise to any heights in acting, and the male lead John Justin never does. The majority of the film is virtually unwatchable as Shearer puts on embarrassing accents as both a ' working class ' woman, and then a Russian. Justin is wooden and they do not seem to have any chemistry at all, and to add to this pitiful first half the long ballet sequence added insult to cinematic imagery. Then in the last scenes Gladys Cooper brought the whole thing alive in a performance that had true resonance and beauty and the rest of the cast, as if by magic responded. Much as I admire Rattigan's work he is partly to blame by the patchy dialogue, and this is a pity because the play is a melancholy and tragic portrayal of the destruction of a life by giving all to idealized, romantic love.

Unusual film in a way I suppose, because I gather there weren't a huge number of mainstream films made in the 50's about some fellow's lifelong fetish. But that's what The Man Who Loved Redheads is about, as the future Lord Binfield Mark St. Neots, (John Justin) becomes obsessed with the memory of Sylvia, (Moira Shearer), a 16-year-old redhead he met at a party as a boy, and vowed he would love forever.

The big drawcard for the film and ostensible lead is Moira Shearer playing four different red head roles. In her brief stint as Sylvia, sexy Shearer does convince as a flame- haired siren, who unwittingly leaves a permanent imprint on Mark's life. Unfortunately and given the title, the film ends up concentrating way too heavily on the rather dull life of the maturing Lord Binfield, who is the recipient of way too much screen time, besides the fact that his character, clearly has way too much general time on his hands anyway ... sufficient to live a double life as Mark Wright, your regular all round philandering good guy and playboy. Almost 65 years on from when the film was made, I think we're supposed to find his rather frequent matrimonial indiscretions, funny. You know the thing about boys being boys and behaving a bit badly.

So what we have is a pretty unfunny comedy. But then, quite bizarrely in the middle of the film, director Harold French inserts a 15 minute ballet sequence featuring extracts from The Sleeping Beauty, The reason? Well I guess it was because Moira (The Red Shoes) Shearer was in the cast, so let's hedge the producers' bets and try and attract ballet fans. Quaint, but very odd. Yes, Moira at that stage is playing Olga, a Russian ballerina, but this isn't The Red Shoes and Harold French isn't Michael Powell. And I don't think Shearer did a great deal of the dancing we are forced to unexpectedly watch anyway.

All in all, despite blazing redheads being the focus subject of this misdirected movie, it all ends up very much being a huge misfire (just couldn't help myself).

John Justin plays a wealthy Brit who has never forgotten the redhead he met at a party when he was a teenager. He marries and goes along in life until he spots a redhead on a London street, arranges for a tryst at a friends house and embarks on a lifetime of meeting a succession of redheads roughly from 1917 to 1955.

Charming comedy keeps it all light and bubbly and features a solid performance by Justin and a super performance by Moira Shearer, who plays all the redheads. Shearer plays the teenager Sylvia, the cockney secretary Daphne, the Russian ballerina Olga, and the model Colette. It's quite a showcase for Shearer, including a lengthy sequence from the Sleeping Beauty ballet. Roland Culver plays Justin's jovial friend. Gladys Cooper appears toward the end of the film to add the perfect ending touch of irony. Denholm Elliott plays the son. Beautifully filmed in Technicolor, the entire film has the look and feel of something from Powell and Pressburger.

The new title alone of this adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1950 West End hit 'Who is Sylvia?' made me think of Michael Powell; since it boasts Powell's protege Moira Shearer as four different redheads in the life of one man, compared to Deborah Kerr's three in 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' (with which it also shares colour photography by Georges Périnal and the presence of Roland Culver, here repeating his role from Rattigan's play).

Sadly this particular soufflé gets little chance to rise under the leaden direction of Harold French, and John Justin is plainly no Roger Livesey. But there are odd moments as narrated by Kenneth More - particularly the brief shot of Sylvia near the end - that actually achieve the touching quality it aspires to and which 'Blimp' achieved throughout.

This is a film based upon Terence Rattigan's play WHO IS SYLVIA, which in turn takes its title from both the original poem by William Shakespeare and its setting to music as a song by Schubert (a song with which my grandfather, a baritone, won much admiration). Rattigan also wrote the screenplay. This is definitely not one of Rattigan's happier moments. The film is ridiculously dated and corny, bordering on a travesty. The story is a simple one: the 'hero' played by John Justin fell in love at first sight at the age of 14 with a girl named Sylvia who had red hair and blue eyes, but he then lost contact with her. For the rest of his life he cheated on his wife and had a mews house in London for trysts with a succession of redheads who reminded him of Sylvia. Pretty silly, really. Harry Andrews plays a butler, Roland Culver has a jolly time playing a pal of Justin's who does the same sort of thing, though not with redheads, Denholm Elliott plays an earnest young son of the older Justin, and Kenneth More does a lively job of satirical narration (we do not see him). Gladys Cooper comes in towards the end with her usual assured style. It is Moira Shearer, seven years on from THE RED SHOES (1948), who plays all the redheads in succession, culminating in one who is a Russian ballet dancer named Olga. As Olga, we watch a great deal of Shearer dancing SLEEPING BEAUTY. Indeed, so much does the camera dwell on Shearer as a dancer, that one nearly forgets the film entirely. (By the way, the set and costume designs for that ballet production are simply appalling, quite a disaster.) This was the last feature film directed by Harold French, who by the way lived to be 100 and died in 1997. He made the excellent UNPUBLISHED STORY thirteen years earlier (1942, see my review). It is a pity that this film is based entirely upon wholly obsolete social codes of a bygone era, that its comedy is tepid, and that it is just not very good.