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These are snippets from Reviews of Paul's second film, The Clandestine Marriage. If you have subscribed to our Greeny club, you can get the full text of these reviews on the Greeny Clandestine Marriage Reviews page
The Clandestine Marriage is a silly, slightly vapid, occasionally bizarre, but still quite amiable Restoration comedy starring Joan Collins, Nigel Hawthorne, and Timothy Spall. Using just the one location - Lord Neidpath's handsome Stanway House in the Cotswolds - must have saved on cash, but the production nevertheless famously got into cash-related difficulties.
The performance Joan gives as the querulous Mrs Heidelberg is simply extraordinary, speaking in an unearthly, strangled voice that hints at a childhood upbringing divided between Ulan Bator and Swansea.Lots of game performances here, from sexy young names such as Tom Hollander and Natasha Little, and Nigel Hawthorne is splendid as ever. But they can't lighten the heavy weather of this stagey production.
Restoration romp about inter-marriage between two families from differing ends of the social spectrum.
America's got the Mob, Britain's got the aristocracy: a stratum of society that most people are fascinated by, but know little about - apart from what they garner from the cinema.
In 1776, the Oglebys, represented by the Lord (Hawthorne) and his fey son, Sir John (Tom Hollander), visit the home of Sterling (Timothy Spall), intending for Sir John to marry Sterling's eldest child, Betsy (Emma Chambers). Unfortunately, things take a turn for the complicated when everyone falls in love with people they're not supposed to, a farcical situation compounded by the fact that the Sterling's youngest daughter, Fanny (Little), is secretly hitched to Lovewell (Nicholls) and is carrying his baby.
It's British through and through, looks wonderful and boasts an impressive ensemble cast. Hawthorne is, as ever, superb, holding the piece together as the roguish sot who still fancies himself as a bit of a ladies' man. Unfortunately, his performance further emphasises the shortcomings of Collins, who is 'acting' so damn hard, at times she looks like she's going to burst. Meanwhile, the rest pull their weight - Nicholls and Little make an attractive central couple, while Chambers and Hollander, given not much to do, provoke the odd laugh.
Despite all its good intentions and embroidered trimmings, this adds nothing new to a well-worn genre.
Reviewer's Rating:
I do like a film that hangs together. Christopher Miles's The Clandestine Marriage must have been hell to keep in tune. It was certainly hell to make, with its stars having suddenly to assume a £500,000 indemnity to bail it out and finish it when the funding collapsed. But pity is not and never was part of my praise. Judged by results, it emerges as a most unlikely hit.
It's a period film, based on a 1776 play set inside and outside an English country house whose nouveau riche owners (Timothy Spall, Joan Collins) are about to bring off a marriage of cash and convenience between their elder daughter (Emma Chambers) and an aristocratic sprig (Tom Hollander) of a hard-up and rheumatically decaying branch of the nobility (Nigel Hawthorne).
How do you make social comedy, farcical mix-ups, political commentary and historical accuracy all take their proper places in the plot? Miles brings it off with grace, subtlety and an eye and ear for the ridiculousness of all but the two true lovers, the beauteous younger daughter (Natasha Little) and her father's poor but honest clerk (Paul Nicholls) who've already been secretly wed in the only place in England where a parent's permission is not needed - the Fleet prison.
As you might expect with such a cast, the film absolutely bursts with the dry wit that serious players of this calibre can muster when they play clowns. A straight face is worth a thousand jokes - well, a dozen.
Nigel Hawthorne, the vain and rickety Lord Ogleby, moves as if held together by rusty hinges. A Hogarth caricature of concupiscence every time he's tempted by the sight of a female bosom. Hawthorne's creation is a marvellously comic pendant to his late, great, mad, majesty King George III.
The scheduled marriage suffers a last-minute upset when the intended husband switches affections to the bride's sister without knowing of her clandestine betrothal, and Lord Ogleby in turn conceives a crush on the same girl. What could have been tedious and tortuous becomes in Christopher Miles's hands a light comedy of love and lechery. Joan Collins, as Spall's sister, the imperious Mrs Heidelberg from Holland, achieves a monumental vulgarity with every syllable of inflated dignity on which she takes her perilous stand.
Some critics may be only too easily disposed to see all kinds of shortcomings in the 91 minutes of mockery. I can honestly say I saw none, or none that mattered.
Reviewer's Rating:
'Oh, for a game of romps!' avows Nigel Hawthorne's leering Lord Ogleby, a rheumatic fop several decades past his prime, dandied up in rouge, peruke, and ill-fitting false teeth.
Here is a splendid and inexplicably sympathetic grotesque to set beside Hawthorne's King George. Hence his sufferance of the marriage between his son, Sir John (a characteristically louche Tom Hollander), and the nouveau riche Betsy Sterling (Emma Chambers). The only fly in the ointment is that Sir John has his eye on Betsy's beauteous a younger sister, Fanny (Natasha little), already secretly married to her father's penurious clerk, Lovewell (Paul Nicholls).
It seems appropriate that Nigel Hawthorne and Joan Collins should share an associate producer credit on Christopher Miles' film. The stars apparently bailed out the production after its funding collapsed - and the film was worth saving, even if its commercial prospects look shaky. You can sense its budgetary problems in the make-do editing (there clearly wasn't sufficient coverage for some sequences) and swathes of post-synchronised dialogue. Yet it's mostly a droll and elegantly coarse entertainment, a country house farce somewhat reminiscent of 'Le Règle de Jeu' and 'Smiles of a Summer Night'.
England in the late 18th century. Richard Lovewell (Paul Nicholls) secretly marries Fanny (Natasha Little), the younger daughter of his employer Mr Sterling (Timothy Spall), when he discovers she's carrying his child.
The play 'The Clandestine Marriage', by George Coleman the younger and David Garrick, was originally staged in 1766. Unfortunately a theatrical experience is all it remains, in this deeply indifferent film version, full of strenuous overacting.
The eye is lulled for a while by pretty locations (a real stately home, with of course no sense that anyone actually lives in it), and giant mouthfuls of scenery chewed by Hawthorne and Collins in turn. In the shade of these two, the rest of the cast seems lost. Emma Chambers (of 'Notting Hill' fame) in particular seems to have stepped off a time machine from the late 20th century.
Obviously done on the cheap, this is yet another British period piece - banking heavily on its literary heritage and big-name actors - masquerading as cinema. Even at an hour and a half, you'll watch this at the risk of falling asleep.
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