Loot (1970)
Directed by Silvio Narizzano

Film Review

Such was the impact of Joe Orton's second major stage play Loot, once it had bedded down and become a much lauded West End hit in the late autumn of 1966, that a frantic bidding war for the film rights was soon set in motion.  A figure of £100,000 was quoted in the national press as the sum Orton was to receive for selling the play to producer Arthur Lewis, who was best known at the time for his popular television series The Asphalt Jungle (1961) and Brenner (1959-64).  The actual amount paid was nearer £25,000, but this was a colossal sum at the time, and a small fortune for a writer who, until recently had been living on a paltry £3 a week from National Assistance.

The film's gestation proved to be as protracted and almost as difficult as that of the original play and it wasn't until December 1970, almost three and half years after Orton's brutal murder by his lover Kenneth Halliwell, that the film finally hit the cinema screens - only to be a huge commercial flop.  The critical reaction to Loot's manically overdone screen adaptation was very mixed (some reviewers were impressed by what they saw) and it lost a great deal of money.  The film's failure was at least down in part to Orton's rapid tumble into obscurity after his death.  The spectacular failure of a lavish (but poorly executed) West End production of his final play What the Butler Saw in January 1969 provided the final nail in the coffin of what was possibly the boldest, most innovative British writer since the Second World War.

There had been an earlier film revamp of another Joe Orton play - Douglas Hickox's Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970) - but this had had the good sense to stick, as far as it could, to the original text, its only notable cinematic embellishment being to move some of the scenes out of doors to give it greater visual impact.  The overriding failing of director Silvio Narizzano's film version of Loot is that it pretty well shreds the original play and brings in a large quantity of new material which mostly has the effect of completely undermining Orton's intentions and reducing the play - a dark commentary on the venality that thrives on the phoney values of contemporary society - to what is little more than a lazily thrown together caper movie, similar in spirit (if not in substance) to Peter Colinson's The Italian Job (1969).

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson - undeniably the greatest comedy writing team the UK has ever produced (their successes including the now legendary Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe and Son) - but they were completely unsuited for the task of reworking Orton's subversive comic masterpiece Loot into a popular cinema offering.  Galton and Simpson's forte was primarily character-based situation comedy, a form of entertainment at which they excelled (they have often been cited as the inventors of the British TV sitcom).  Orton's comedy is, by contrast, pure farce with a deadly, keenly honed satirical edge that savagely mocks the prim social conventions and resultant foul-smelling hypocrisies that he utterly loathed.  There is no way that these two comedy styles could have been brought into a happy union and the resulting film bears this out.  Narizzano's vertiginously manic film looks like a knock-out contest between two wildly different approaches to comedy, one that ends in both contestants pummelling themselves into the ground.

The one aspect of the original play which Galton and Simpson manage to preserve in their staggeringly uneven screenplay is Orton's core message - namely that conventional morality is inherently harmful for both society and individuals.  Orton implies (in virtually all of his work) that it is healthier for individuals to create their own morality rather that to mindlessly kowtow to a moral system imposed on them from above, one deriving from those to whom we grant authority over us - primarily the Church and the State.  In Loot, the apparently immoral outcome (in which the lawbreakers all succeed and the virtuous perish) is a natural consequence of the ludicrous state of affairs that society appears willing to accept because it doesn't know any better.  Those who feel bound by the dictates of social convention end up as stooges and scapegoats, whilst those who know for sure that they are outside the law (a serial murderess, a pair of homosexuals and a corrupt cop) have nothing to lose (and everything to gain) by exploiting the rotten system for their own nefarious ends.

And it is real life that Orton draws on in warning us of the dangers of conventional morality and the self-serving pillars of authority that serve as its bulwark.  Loot's most prominent character, the monstrously unethical Truscott of the Yard, was closely modelled on a real-life police inspector, Harold Challenor, who had a habit of planting evidence so he could arrest suspects, acquiring lasting notoriety with his quip 'You're fucking nicked, my beauty.'  Truscott epitomised the bogus authority figure that Orton reviled, a man who is capable of twisting every situation to his advantage whilst indulging his penchant for sadism and self-aggrandisement.  Played well, he is surely the most grotesque and memorably funny character in Orton's oeuvre.  Unfortunately, Richard Attenborough portrays him in the film as nothing more than a ridiculous pantomime buffoon, exorcising Orton's darker purpose in just about every scene he appears in.  All sense of menace, sarcasm and humour is lost as this totally out-of-place actor lumbers hammily through some of the most embarrassingly bad moments of his career, reducing the whole dodgy enterprise to the level of cheap vaudeville.

Attenborough may be one of the finest dramatic actors to grace any British film (Brighton Rock (1948), The Guns at Batasi (1964), The Sand Pebbles (1968), 10 Rillington Place (1971)), but what he does with Inspector Truscott must rate as one of the worst comedy atrocities ever committed on a British soundstage.  The kind of hammy excesses in which he indulges are precisely what Orton strove to abolish from all stage productions of his plays.  In his mature phase, Orton was wise enough to know that there is no surer way to kill comedy than by trying to play it for laughs.  Attenborough's comic book overacting merely renders Truscott unforgivably silly, his best lines dying an ignominious death before they have barely had a chance to pass his lips.  One of the things that Joe Orton had to learn the hard way during the national tour of the first, seemingly doomed production of Loot, was that the play required Truscott to be played absolutely straight.  Having Kenneth Williams in the role (as Orton had originally decided), and giving him carte blanche to send it up shamelessly was a huge error that very nearly consigned Loot to the scrap-heap of failed theatrical projects.  Only by recasting the role and insisting that Truscott be played more soberly was the play salvaged and allowed to triumph in the West End.  Attenborough haplessly revives the ghost of the play's first reviled incarnation, and the outcome is all too predictable.

There is much that Joe Orton would have hated about this film if he had seen it.  The hideous representation of Truscott is one of countless offences it commits in an all-too-obvious attempt at widening the appeal of a play that was originally intended for a theatre audience of some sophistication.  The insensitive treatment of the embalmed corpse of Mrs McLeavy (one of the most shocking aspects of the stage play) has none of the irreverent malice that Orton intended (as an attack on the pointless rituals attached to death) - indeed the author's wry message is lost entirely, swept away in a torrent of camp cartoonish silliness.  The planning and execution of the bank robbery is shown in laborious, tedious detail, with a crude attempt to spice it up by shooting it through psychedelic colour filters and having the two gay protagonists steal the titular loot in their birthday suits (no doubt Galton and Simpson thought this a suitably Ortonesque touch, having seen What the Butler Saw).  Roy Holder plays Hal not as an ordinary-looking homosexual lad as Orton intended, but as a fashionable transvestite, thereby kyboshing the credibility of the character's relationship with both his father (Milo O'Shea) and straight-looking boyfriend (Hywel Bennett).

As the sexy but appallingly venal Nurse McMahon, Lee Remick is the only member of the cast who comes within spitting distance of Orton's conception of the role, so it's no surprise that her scenes (most retaining the dialogue of the original play) are by far the funniest and most enjoyable.  Dick Emery's constantly complaining Mr Bateman is one of the few additions to the original text that makes a positive contribution, adding a jolt of well-intended humour to make up for all of the anarchic silliness that infects most of the film as it gallops way beyond farce into the most ludicrously inept form of slapstick.  Intermittent bursts of the sprightly but ultimately irritating theme song, with lyrics intended to clarify the plot, provide another unwelcome distraction, assailing your ears with a cacophony that is the exact aural equivalent of the retina-searing colour scheme that is employed in just about every frame of the film.  The designer and cinematographer were both clearly ingesting far too much LSD whilst working on this film, for Loot's over-exuberant sensory overload (which kicks in immediately with the boisterous credits sequence and never relents until the whole toe-curling ordeal is over) makes it feel like the worst kind of drugs-induced hallucinatory experience.

You're genuinely glad when this wildly out-of-control juggernaut finally hits the buffers, after having well and truly knocked the stuffing out of one of the boldest and funniest British stage plays of the era.  Loot was the play that firmly planted the 33-year-old Joe Orton on the road to wealth and fame (sadly he would not enjoy either for long, as he died within eight months of it finally becoming a success).  Loot was also the West End phenomenon that played a significant part in launching the counterculture revolution that erupted in Britain of the late 1960s, early 1970s.  The ease with which the main characters succumb to the allure of filth lucre and are drawn into skulduggery to slake this craving, uninhibited by a moral system that is farcically no longer fit for purpose, feels alarmingly modern - indeed in many respects Loot is more relevant today than when it was first conceived.  How sad then that its one and only screen outing to date should be such a criminally poor effort - a spluttering, over-egged comedy hybrid in which Joe Orton's distinctive voice - a well-mannered but savage rage against convention - is scarcely heard.

Film Synopsis

Mr McLeavy is understandably bereft when his beloved wife dies after a long illness, during which time she has been assiduously cared for by her nurse, Fay McHanon.  McLeavy's son Hal is less upset by his mother's passing and intends using this in a scheme he has concocted with his boyfriend Dennis to rob a bank.  The plan is to break into the bank from the funeral parlour where Dennis works and hide the stolen money in Mrs McLeavy's coffin.  Posing as a water-board official, Inspector Truscott inveigles his way into seaside hotel that is home to the McLeavy family and starts by trying to extort a confession out of Hal, so sure is he that this young ruffian stole the money.  Meanwhile, Fay is weighing up her options as the prospective future of wife of Mr McLeavy or Dennis.  She will base her decision on who will bring her the greatest boost to her bank balance.  With his ill-gotten gains, Dennis is the front-runner, with a third share of the stolen money rightfully his after Fay has claimed a third for herself in return for her silence.  Truscott's dogged investigation leads him to identify Fay as a serial killer who makes a habit of murdering her husbands for their money, a crime that the former nurse is compelled to admit to.  After a thwarted attempt to evade police arrest, Hal, Dennis and Fay are forced to share their new wealth with the totally corrupt Truscott.  The inspector manages to close the case to everyone's satisfaction by coercing Mr McLeavy into confessing to the bank robbery.  Fay is now free to marry Dennis, although this means giving Hal the boot so that the newly weds can keep up appearances.