SCANDAL
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Fine, engrossing docu-drama about the Profumo affair that toppled the British government in 1963. Many fine ironies in the script. Is it redundant to say that John Hurt turns in a good performance? Rating: +2.
Dr. Stephen Ward is the son of a vicar and a successful osteopath. His hobby is hobnobbing with the real newsmakers in the upper circles of the British (and some foreign) governments. One way he does this is that he finds young women who have natural beauty and develops them like a one-man finishing school, giving them some class and making them the kind of women men in government like to be around. Just having these women around makes Ward popular with his inner circle. When a friend in MI5--the British equivalent of our FBI--gets interested in Ward's activities along these lines it begins a chain of events that will eventually topple the British Conservative government.
SCANDAL is the engrossing story of Stephen Ward and the entire Profumo affair. The story tells how Ward (beautifully and slightly seedily played by John Hurt) finds Christine Keeler (played by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) as a somewhat cheap-looking in a girlie show. Like Pygmalion, or perhaps Svengali, he shows her a bit of the rich life and begins tutoring her and friend Mandy Rice-Davies on how to get it ("you have to be very clever or very beautiful"). As the film portrays him, Ward has a passion for beauty and wants to be intimately but totally platonically involved in the lives of the women he has transformed. His interest is not sex, but helping his "babies" get what they want and at the same time Ward wants the feeling that, like James Bond, he is a man with power. This power, like the gratitude of the women he has transformed, he firmly refuses to exploit for any tangible advantage. His biggest payoff is the irony that the woman he trained has managed to have simultaneous affairs with the British Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Soviet military attache Eugene Ivanov. But just as Ward is seduced by a feeling of importance, Christine is also when the newspapers learn of the scandal two years later. And only when the government desperately needs a scapegoat does Ward realize how vulnerable he has left himself.
SCANDAL seems very much the British equivalent of the American STAR '80. While that film's Paul Snider does not have Dr. Ward's unselfish goals, both men are puppet masters who instinctively know how to make women attractive and how to make them stars. Both films depend very heavily on erotic photography independent of their narrative values. Both films tell of Svengali destroyed by overreaching himself.
The film is sprinkled with familiar actors. Joanne Whalley-Kilmer was previously the nurse in THE SINGING DETECTIVE. Ian McKellan plays the nervous Profumo with appropriate style considering he has the strangest- looking hairdo of the pre-punk era. We see little of Deborah Grant as Mrs. Profumo, but a side note of interest is that the real Mrs. Profumo was Valerie Hobson, who played the title role in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. (Think about it before you try to correct me.)
SCANDAL punctuates its story--as so many films about the recent past do--with a broad choice of music of the period. But no piece of music is better used than "[Listen,] Do You Want to Know a Secret" superimposed over a montage of scandal-laden newspaper headlines. This is one more entry in a run of good recent films. I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
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