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First
Meeting between Imogen and Otto ... RPS
"What are you
doing to me ..." RPS
(This scene is interspersed with scenes of Imogen's older sister, Helen, silently serving herself tea)
Thanks to Hil and Diane P. -- both from the UK
Video Release Update 08/21/03
...
Langrishe, Go Down is going to be released
on video by Image Entertainment in the
Kindest regards,
Email sent by a Website Visitor to Rearguard Productions about the possibility of this movie coming out on DVD and VHS tape: Dear Jane, We have recently signed a contract with a distributor for the DVD and home video release of our picture. Realistically, it will probably be a year before it's available in the stores. The film will eventually find its way to other theatrical engagements and then to TV. Best regards, Julie G. M. Thanks to Jane H. for sharing this information
Hollywood Producer Keeps Busy at 88 Fri July 11, 2003 02:19 AM
ET LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Producer Max Rosenberg is nothing if not persistent. At age 88, he's getting ready to release a picture he made a mere 25 years ago. And he says, "I hope there are more customers at the theater than interviews that I do" when it opens in Los Angeles on July 18. Its title is "Langrishe, Go Down." Based on a novel by Aidan Higgens about three Irish spinsters in the 1930s, one of whom has an affair with a young German student, it was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and directed by David Jones. It also happens to feature some of the earliest screen work by both Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons, who play the lead roles. Dench, then in her early 40s, was already an established London stage star, but still two decades away from her Oscar-nominated turn in "Mrs. Brown." And Irons, just about to turn 30, had not yet appeared in either "Brideshead Revisited" or "The French Lieutenant's Woman," the two 1981 vehicles that established his name. The film was originally produced by Rosenberg for the BBC but, he says, "In effect, the picture now belongs to me. The BBC made a contract that was the essence of stupidity. They financed it, but all they did was buy it for two runs and then it reverted to me." Even so, "it took me older than you are to swim through that bureaucracy and try to clear it all up." Rosenberg enjoys holding forth in his Miracle Mile office -- "I came in late this morning: 20 (minutes) after 6," he says of his work habits -- in a manner that is at once courtly and profane. "My life is monolithically devoted to reading and working," he explains. "At the risk of a self-serving declaration, I'm probably the best-read guy in the industry -- and all of it came about after my so-called academic education, which is still more extensive than some of the ... illiterates (in the business)." His marathon list of credits range from one of the earliest rock 'n' roll movies, 1956's "Rock! Rock! Rock!" featuring Chuck Berry, among others, to a string of English horror pics beginning with 1957's "The Curse of Frankenstein," to artier titles like Pinter's "The Birthday Party" (1968). "I worked with the best writers in the English language and some of the worst directors, which shall be nameless -- in fact, Nameless was about the worst one," he cracks. (That remark sounds like vintage Groucho Marx, but he insists that it isn't.) And Rosenberg, whose current company is monikered Rearguard Prods., claims that it ain't over yet. He's optioned a shelf-full of books -- like Al Alvarez's novel "Day of Atonement," which Alan Plater has adapted -- as well as several original screenplays he can't resist pitching. "I was reading an anthology of feminist writers," he recounts, "and believe me, I was so bored I was up to my a--hole in orgasms -- don't ask. But I read a story called 'The Black Madonna' by a professor at Michigan State University called Maria Bruno," and Rosenberg persuaded her to write a screenplay adaptation that he calls "wonderful." At the same time, he's also pursuing a project called "Count Dracula," in which a mensch-y vampire coaches a Little League team. "I think that project," he predicts, "will make more money than all my pictures put together." Just as long as he doesn't have to wait another 25 years for it to open. Reuters/Hollywood Reporter Thanks to Beth G. for bringing this Article to my attention "Langrishe, Go Down" is getting yet another theatrical showing. It will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA from December 20 through Jan. 12th, 2002. The schedule is on their website www.mfa.org. Big Thanks to Beth G. for this info
"Langrishe, Go Down" to be shown at the
Connie E's
Review of Langrishe ,Go Down: Judi Dench as Imogen Langrishe to Jeremy Irons, "You miss Munich whores? What do they do that I can't do? What do they do that I don't do? What do they do that I won't do?" There are many scenes in this movie that I found more sensual than the nude scenes mentioned in the Miller biography. Their impact would be best discovered personally by each viewer, and I hope a video release will enable all to see this sensual film. One advantage of seeing it in a theatre, which the original British audience of 1979 did not have, was hearing all of the audience laughter. The audience giggled at Jeremy Irons pompous pronouncements as well as some of Judi Dench's exhibitionist nudity ( I assume the "air baths" on the part of an otherwise dignified character started the ball rolling on this one). Judi Dench is beautiful in the flashback scenes, which comprise the body of the movie. In the end, the aging Imogen Langrishe, who "never looks well" is seen behind the end credits opening and rereading old letters. In four out of five viewings of this film, the audience never moved until the very last credit. Judi Dench has top billing and the starring role; and she is superb in her subtlety in a movie that is, to a certain extent, a collection of character studies. I recommend this movie. I expected not to like the film as I am not a Harold Pinter fan, and the publicity photos for the film make Dench's character look as disinterested in the affair as Iron's. There is this element in the end, but it is not the essence of her portrayal.
Theatrical Release
Time Out New York -- July 18, 2002 Issue (Page 103)
Thanks to Connie E.
From the July 29'02 New York Observer, Andrew Sarris writes: "A Dench-Irons Flashback David Jones' Langishe, Go Down (1978), from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on the novel by Aidan Higgins, provides us, at the very least, with an opportunity to see what Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench looked and acted like almost a quarter of a century ago. The story takes place in the Dublin countryside during the 1930s. Ms. Dench plays Imogen Langrishe, a lonely single woman of aristocratic Anglo-Irish origins stranded on a decaying estate. She allows herself to be seduced by an impoverished 35-year-old German graduate student named Otto Beck who is working on a hopelessly esoteric thesis. The affair ends badly, with Imogen taking a shot at the fleeing German. In between, the fragmented storytelling is, well, vintage Pinter, but Ms. Dench and Mr. Irons remain mesmerizing after all this time." Thanks to Marla
The New Yorker -- July 22, 2002 Issue (Pages 19-20) LANGRISHE, GO DOWN Thanks to Connie E.
New York Post by Megan Turner July 17, 2002 -- THERE'S more to this cinematic time capsule than the curiosity of watching a young Judi Dench and an equally unlined Jeremy Irons strut their already formidable stuff. Made for the BBC in 1978, "Langrishe, Go Down" is an atmospheric and subtly engrossing relationship saga, which wowed the critics when it played on British TV and is just now getting a theatrical release. Harold Pinter wrote the finely nuanced script, based on a novel by Aidan Higgins, and he also appears as a minor character. But the film, set in the Dublin countryside in the 1930s, belongs to Irons and Dench and the trajectory of their love affair. Irons, in his first-ever leading role, is superb as Otto Beck, a pedantic intellectual with a clipped German accent and a battery of precious mannerisms. He rents out a coach house on the grounds of an estate run by the three Langrishe sisters, well-bred but cloistered women whose inheritance is crumbling around them. Dench's Imogen Langrishe, a free spirit trapped in a tightly laced-up personality, succumbs to his well-honed charms. Their affair burns bright but not long, and David Jones' direction beautifully weds its creeping deterioration with a general atmosphere of decay.
A Foolish
Affair in a Frustrated Life It was a German who discovered parthenogenesis in bees." I have not corroborated this assertion — to be perfectly honest, I'm not altogether sure what it means — but it is one of the many tantalizing non sequiturs uttered in the course of "Langrishe, Go Down," a teasing, oblique curiosity of a movie that opens today at Film Forum. It will perhaps be helpful to mention that the screenplay for "Langrishe," broadcast as a BBC Play of the Week in 1978, was written by Harold Pinter. Paul Schrader once noted that "Pinter's characters are always saying one thing and meaning something slightly different," and that remark about the bees would seem to be a case in point. The speaker is a German researcher, Otto Peck, who is living, ostensibly for purposes of scholarship, in the Irish countryside. There he pursues a love affair, somehow both torrid and world-weary, with Imogen Langrishe, a fading flower of the fading Anglo-Irish ruling class, who lives with her sisters in muted Tennessee Williams decadence in the old family plantation house. It is the late 1930's, and World War II is impending, though it impends with unusual subtlety for a period drama. The declining gentry declines with a corresponding slowness. The film's title refers to this gradual ruin, and perhaps to the desire that it might hurry up a bit. The chief fascination of "Langrishe, Go Down" — what makes its belated arrival in this country something of an event — is that Otto and Imogen are played by Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench, who were great English actors long before they came to personify Great English Acting. Watching Mr. Irons, with his wolfish grin and elaborately precise diction, you are reminded that he has done some of his best acting in Continental European accents, playing a deracinated Danish socialite in Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune" and a migrant Polish carpenter in Jerzy Skolimowski's "Moonlighting." His deep Englishness — the glum stoicism of his face, the stiff diffidence of his posture — works best when it seems put on, revealing what a sly comedian he can be. Otto, a perpetual graduate student pursuing an interminable thesis (he pronounces it THEE-ziss) on Ossianic mythology in Irish folklore, with special reference to Goethe and the Brothers Grimm, is nothing if not pretentious. Imogen seems aware of this from the start, and her dalliance with him is, in the beginning, the product of boredom as much as lust. Dame Judi, with her blunt features and intelligent eyes, is at once aloof and vulnerable. For all Otto's moody self-dramatization, the real drama takes place within Imogen, who, with curious deliberateness, sets about falling in love with a man who is, morally and intellectually as well as socially, not good enough for her. At first, she expresses her pent-up sexuality by venturing into the countryside naked (on forays she refers to as "air baths," one of which is witnessed by the prurient Otto), and then proceeds to waste it on a banal seducer. The story is a muted melodrama made strange and haunting by the manner of its telling. The pacing and chronology are, as in Mr. Pinter's theatrical work, splintered. David Jones's direction, with its hushed intensity and stop-and-go rhythm, suggests the influence of Joseph Losey, for whom Mr. Pinter wrote some of his earliest screenplays. A rapid collage of scenes will occasionally give way to a long, digressive passage, like the drunken boarding-house conversation in which Mr. Pinter himself expounds, in a thick brogue, on the Irish theatrical tradition, and Dame Judi ends up, sensibly enough, in tears. Her tears, like much in "Langrishe, Go Down," are somewhat mysterious: their immediate cause is ennui and frustration, but they also indicate a deeper sadness, a sense of terrible, inexpressible thwartedness that Mr. Pinter's arch, elusive writing gestures toward and that Dame Judi bravely lays bare. LANGRISHE, GO DOWN Directed by David Jones; written by Harold Pinter, based on the novel by Aidan Higgins; director of photography, Elmer Cossey; edited by Chris Wimble; music by Carl Davis; produced by BBC Films; released by Castle Hill Productions. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 105 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Jeremy Irons (Otto Beck), Judi Dench (Imogen Langrishe), Annette Crosbie (Helen Langrishe), Harold Pinter (Barry Shannon) and Margaret Whiting (Maureen Layde).
New York Times -- July 14, 2002 Before
They Were Stars, They Were Star-Quality LANGRISHE, GO DOWN," a 1978 movie made for British television and belatedly having its American theatrical premiere on Wednesday in New York, is one of those buried treasures that are unearthed for reasons that have as much to do with star power as with quality. The stars in question are the 29-year-old Jeremy Irons and the 43-year-old Judi Dench, who play lovers. Unlike so many early screen performances by not-yet-stars, both Mr. Irons, who affects an impeccable German accent, and Dame Judi, who is almost unrecognizable as the actress of today, are already in full possession of their talents. The movie, directed by David Jones, would probably never have been released had it not elicited praise during a recent Harold Pinter retrospective by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Mr. Pinter, who adapted the screenplay from a 1966 novel by Aidan Higgins, had originally planned to direct "Langrishe, Go Down" for the BBC, starring his wife Vivian Merchant, Mr. Jones recalled in a recent interview. But when the time came to make the film, the marriage had unwound, and Mr. Jones took over. He later went on to direct Mr. Irons (with Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge) in "Betrayal," adapted by Mr. Pinter from his play. "Langrishe, Go Down" was filmed a few years before "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981) and "Brideshead Revisited" (the 1982 television series) made Mr. Irons an international star. His character, Otto Beck, is a pretentiously erudite young German scholar living in the rural outskirts of Dublin in the 1930's. Otto, who is working on his thesis about Irish mythology and Goethe, has rented the coach house on a crumbling estate owned by the Langrishe sisters, three spinsters whose small inheritance from their father is rapidly dwindling. While living there, Otto initiates an affair of convenience with the youngest sister, Imogen (Dame Judi), who falls head over heels in love and allows him to stay rent-free. Although Dame Judi was well established on the British stage at that time, she had to wait nearly two decades (until 1997) to become a full-fledged movie star by portraying Queen Victoria in "Mrs. Brown." "Judi had never been out of work since drama school, but early on, she was told she didn't have the right kind of face for films," Mr. Jones explained. "The same thing happened to Peggy Ashcroft, who had to wait for `The Jewel in the Crown.' " In "Langrishe, Go Down," Dame Judi's character is a hot-blooded woman and secret sensualist who confesses to Otto at one point her penchant for stealing out of the house in the middle of the night and stripping naked to take "air baths." In one of the film's several nude scenes, she tempts Otto into bed by coquettishly dabbing meringue on her nipples. It is a pleasure to watch Dame Judi give herself with such voluptuous relish to a character in full sexual bloom. Mr. Pinter's resonant screenplay is full of veiled allusions and meaningful pauses. One intriguing device that illustrates the characters' emotional isolation overlaps images of characters in one place with dialogue from somewhere else. Both the story and the mood of the film evoke a doomed Chekhovian fatalism that echoes both "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard." That mood is deepened by Carl Davis's string quartet soundtrack, whose folk-flavored classical style Mr. Jones describes as a cross between Schubert and Janacek. The Langrishe property, like the estate in "The Cherry Orchard," is in debt, and the mansion Imogen shares with her sisters Helen (Annette Crosbie) and Lily (Susan Williamson) will eventually have to be sold. For the moment, they are helping to meet expenses by selling trees for lumber. As Imogen carries on with Otto in the coach house, Lily, who is simple-minded, dreams about her childhood (in flashbacks) while Helen silently stands watch, desperately curious about the affair taking place under her nose but never commenting or even alluding to it. The vision of siblings who share the same roof but live in self-enclosed, fiercely guarded private worlds suggests a clenched Irish reserve under which emotional volcanoes threaten to erupt. Mr. Jones said he considers Ireland to be a major character in the film. The more deeply Imogen, the "bad" sister, immerses herself in the affair, the more determinedly the "good" sister, Helen, who is disapproving, envious and voyeuristic, clamps the lid on her frustrations. She emerges as a figure of almost unbearable loneliness. Mr. Irons's Otto is charming, insufferable and even comical when he ostentatiously flaunts his intelligence by mouthing streams of disconnected esoteric blather. At first he seems like a liberating force in Imogen's constricted life, but as the lovers clash and the affair begins to unravel, he comes off like a parasite and a gigolo. Few films have calibrated the rise and fall of a complicated relationship with such a minute emotional precision. But even with its prestigious stars, "Langrishe, Go Down" is far too refined and introspective a film to expect box-office glory. If it draws an art house audience, Mr. Jones said, he hopes it can enjoy some commercial success on home video. Watching the film, fans of
Dame Judi can only lament the brilliant screen career that might have
been had her face not been deemed uncinematic. Mr. Jones agrees.
"For those who only know her from 'Mrs. Brown,' Judi in her prime
should be a revelation." Note
from Chris: There are alot of us who feel Dame Judi is still
very much
Thanks to Delda W, Sandra C. and Shelley B.
In the late '70s Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench starred in a Harold Pinter adaptation of an Aidan Higgins novel - the story of a lonely single woman, of gone-to-seed aristocratic origins, who throws herself into a passionate love affair with an unscrupulous intellectual living on her property. Though wildly praised when it played on the BBC, LANGRISHE, GO DOWN never received a theatrical release. Here now is the subtle, exquisite drama British critics hailed as "a richly detailed, resonant, totally satisfying film" with a script that is "complex, funny, entirely engrossing" (Time Out, London); "Harold Pinter wrote this superlative story redolent of personal and social decay... Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons give magnificent performances as the lovers... A must." (Evening Standard, London). Screened
at the Harold Pinter Festival in NYC, July 2001
Review by Paula ... July 26, 2001 The film was stunning. I saw it last night as part of Lincoln Center's Harold Pinter Festival. The director, David Jones, introduced the film, which was written by Harold Pinter from Aidan Higgins's book The Big House. It was shot in 16mm over 23 days near Waterford, Ireland during 1978 and aired only one time on the BBC in 1979. Last night's showing was the film's American debut. According to Jones, "Go Down" can be interpreted in a few different ways including deterioration of the house and/or of the Langrishe family. Judi Dench gave a performance that was magnificent, and she was beyond beautiful; her Imogen Langrishe is one of three spinster sisters who share the family home and a declining bank balance. Dame Judi possesses, among other talents, a barely-there secret smile that conveys pride or very mild amusement. It's the same smile for both emotions but there is no confusion about which is which; the difference is in her eyes. Imogen is a contradictory character, as much predator as prey and prude as sensualist. Jeremy Irons played Otto Beck, a penniless German graduate student (age 35) who is renting the cottage by the Langrishe's back gate and has yet to complete his doctoral thesis. He was wonderfully striking as Otto, by turns passive, aggressive, sometimes tender, but always selfish. And extraordinarily make-your-knees-go-weak handsome. Both gave performances that were totally opaque—only the character is seen, not the actor inside giving the performance. Harold Pinter appeared in the film as Shannon a hard-drinking drama critic. Paula ... PS - the Pinter festival is still running through Friday when Pinter will be at the Juilliard theater talking about his work and then the 1973 film The Homecoming is at the Walter Reade Theater.
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