The Clandestine Marriage
by Alexander Walker
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 attributed to George Coleman Snr and David Garrick, 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. There the officiating cleric, who's due to be hanged shortly for crimes unmentioned, understandably begins with the funeral, not the marriage service. Never a good sign.
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. Spall's pompous fusspot, the sort of fellow the late Alan Clark would condemn for having to buy his own 18th century furniture, is the voice of Middle England counting its moneybags.
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, the minute he removes his foppish wig (and yellowed bridgework) in the privacy of the guest chamber, he reverts to the touching reality of a penurious peer trying to live up to his pedigree with the aid of his black servant Brush (Ray Fearon) and his Swiss valet Canton (Cyril Shaps). 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.
Because the film's rocky production history has become well known on the financial as well as the arts pages, 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. Everyone manages to ballast the boat with style and confidence, and Denis Crossan's photography provides a rich lick of paint to an old vessel I couldn't have believed would prove so seaworthy.
