Another Neglected Masterpiece

When I began film teaching in the early seventies at Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst, I knew that whenever I screened The Last Valley I would have to book one of the larger lecture rooms, as students who had completed my course, not to mention their friends, would crowd in to see the movie, sometimes for a third and fourth time. This was not a film society crowd; although some were kind enough to say that after completing my course they were now taking a more informed interest in cinema. Many were Teacher Education, Business or Drama students—an intelligent mainstream audience; the sort of people who turn films into smash hits. Yet when The Last Valley was released in 1970 it was a resounding flop. Just why it failed continued to puzzle its writer-director James Clavell for the rest of his life. After all, the film starred Michael Caine and Omar Sharif, two of the major stars of the time, and Clavell had scripted The Great Escape (1963) and written and directed To Sir with Love (1967).

In Australia at least, one couldn’t blame the distributors. The Last Valley opened at the Mayfair, the first-run house for films like South Pacific, The Sound of Music and West Side Story. Then, after a fortnight of appalling attendances and indifferent notices, The Last Valley was transferred to the Randwick Ritz, in the seventies an innovative revival and first-run house for offbeat films. It was tracked down there by Bob Ellis, then the film critic for the Nation Review. He became one of the first to insist publicly that The Last Valley was a masterpiece. Others were the New York critic Pauline Kael and the British film magazine Films and Filming, which gave Michael Caine its best actor award for his role as the Captain.

For me The Last Valley remains one of the great period films of the last century. It’s based on a novel by the English author J.B. Pick originally titled The Fat Valley and follows the adventures of Vogel (Omar Sharif), a wandering scholar during the Thirty Years War between Protestant and Catholic in seventeenth-century Europe. (The novel places the action between September 1637 and March 1638.) Wandering through the ravaged countryside and devastated villages, Vogel stumbles on a rich village in a valley that has been spared. He arrives at the same time as a mercenary band led by the Captain is about to sack and plunder the village. Vogel persuades the Captain to spare the valley and winter there while the rest of Europe starves. The Captain makes Vogel his ambassador to Gruber, the leader of the small community, because “villagers hate soldiers”. Gruber accepts the situation and there is an uneasy peace. But then the conflicts that are tearing Europe apart divide the community.

All of this comes from the novel, which is written in a taut, spare style with the emphasis on dialogue and few descriptive passages. Clavell used some of Pick’s dialogue and most of his characters as well as some he invented himself. And it is these characters that are the main reason the film is so involving. As with Renoir or Tavernier they aspire to the freedom of real life. There are no stereotypes; nearly everyone is complex.

Dominating the film is Michael Caine’s Captain, ruthless—he dispatches three of his band in the first ten minutes—yet with an honesty and realism that ultimately win the viewer’s respect and sympathy. Caine also makes him quite terrifying. When he threatens the fanatical priest, “I will publicly castrate you before I cut off your feet”, it is horrifyingly believable. Caine’s is the finest portrayal of a character Clavell was to return to repeatedly in his fiction and, most notably, in the famous Shogun mini-series that he wrote and produced in 1980: the ruthless man who does “what is necessary”, and, by so doing, enables others to survive. The figure first appeared in Clavell’s novel King Rat. He is the American sergeant who is into all the rackets in the Changi prison camp but also uses his contacts and money to buy medicine to prevent a young British officer from having his leg amputated. The book was based on Clavell’s own experiences in Changi, where his life was saved by the real-life King Rat. Such were the sensitivities about the compromises that many POWs made in order to survive in Japanese captivity that Clavell never publicly described the real incidents on which his novel was based.

In The Last Valley Clavell shapes Pick’s very similar character of the Captain so he can explore the same issues he had in King Rat. In addition Clavell enriches the portrait by turning the Captain into a full-scale tragic hero whose fall is calculated to evoke pity and terror. (It certainly did with my students.) His tragic flaw is despair. After the massacre at Magdeburg—described in a superbly written and played scene between the Captain and Vogel, he has come to see himself as a killer animal: “No one is safe around me, not my wife, not my child.” When the brutal realities of the war catch up with him, the Captain doesn’t believe it is possible to make a life for himself and his mistress Erica in the valley he has helped preserve, and returns to the battle. Erica, played with smouldering intensity by Florinda Bolkan, is a character created by Clavell for the movie to intensify the rivalry between the Captain and Gruber (Nigel Davenport in one his best performances). In a superlatively played scene they dice for her favours.

Clavell also uses her character to portray the witch craze of the seventeenth century. This is not in the novel, but since the book’s publication Hugh Trevor-Roper had published his long essay “The European Witch Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”. Clavell doesn’t try to dramatise the lunatic cosmology of witchcraft that Trevor-Roper analysed with such civilised contempt but his disdain for the religious intolerance of the period is identical to that of the great historian. With Clavell gone one can’t be certain about these influences, but one can’t imagine such a conscientious writer-director not reading the most recent essay by one of the foremost authorities on the period.

Erica’s hideous death when she is tortured and burnt as a witch after the Captain has gone back to his war is as powerful an indictment of superstition and fanaticism as the cinema has given us. It works as well as it does because the priest is played with extraordinary conviction by the great Swedish actor Per Oscarsson. Once again Clavell has not written a stereotype. Father Sebastian lucidly debates theology with Vogel and courageously defies the Captain’s threats, but at the heart of his faith is a terrible cruelty that relishes the idea of hellfire and damnation. He may be a monster but the priest is a frighteningly believable one.

Back in 1970 those of us who admired The Last Valley saw it as an allegorical comment on the cruelty and fanaticism of the Vietnam War. Forty years later the film seems to have been shaped more by Pick’s and Clavell’s experiences in the Second World War. Pick was a Quaker who served in an ambulance unit and wrote the novel in the 1950s, while Clavell’s relationship with the real King Rat clearly influenced his characterisation of the Captain. Still, works as universal in their themes as The Last Valley acquire associations unimagined by their creators.

The film is a meticulous recreation of seventeenth-century life. The design of the village where most of the action takes place and the costumes seem to have been influenced by Breughel’s portraits of peasant life; while the terrifying battle sequence is lit like a Rembrandt painting. Clavell employs deep-focus crane shots to establish the environment, and long takes for the confrontation scenes, all of which worked superbly on the big screen for which it was intended. As with the epics of the 1960s this involved the audience in the world of the film creating a willing suspension of disbelief that made the dramatically satisfying resolution profoundly moving.

Sadly, Clavell was never to direct again. He went on to write a series of best-sellers such as Shogun and Noble House as well as producing the two mini-series based on the novels. Judging from postings on the internet, since Clavell’s death in 1994 The Last Valley has begun to acquire something of a cult following. The problem is that forty years later it is impossible to see the film as it was first screened in 1970. The Last Valley deserves to be revived in cinemas so that overdue justice can be done to an extraordinary achievement by both James Clavell and J.B. Pick.

Neil McDonald writes: Temple Grandin, reviewed in last month’s column, is now screening on Foxtel. The Last Valley is available on DVD.