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Hello Ivor!
Gosford Park resurrects Novello
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Every movie is a kind of mosaic, many pieces coming together to make a whole. In Gosford Park, director Robert Altman makes that idea part of the visible — and audible — texture of the film. And music plays an especially crucial role in that mixture — music that holds up well on the new Decca soundtrack CD.

One of the most poignant scenes in Gosford Park comes after an indiscreet outburst by one of the servants (Emily Watson) shakes the precarious stability of the country estate. The lady of the house (Kristin Scott Thomas), who has just been humiliated, asks one of the guests, a handsome celebrity played by Jeremy Northam, to distract everyone by singing. The guests are pleased or bored, depending on their level of snobbishness, while the servants gather furtively in the corridors to listen, and even dance, thrilled at their proximity to a famous star.

Northam’s character is Ivor Novello (1893–1951), the one real person in this fictional plot — another element in Altman’s complex texture of dichotomies: rich versus poor, master versus servant, winner versus loser, considerate versus thoughtless, imaginary versus real. Novello was a matinee idol, a British movie and stage personality, like No‘l Coward, who also wrote plays and songs. In one memorable exchange, the dowager Countess, played with delectable snideness by Maggie Smith, makes a show of her contempt for celebrity. "Tell me," she asks, "how much longer do you think you can go on making films?"

"Well, I suppose that rather depends on how much longer the public wants to see me in them."

"It must be hard to know when to throw in the towel," she responds, dripping with solicitude. "What a pity about that last one of yours. What was it called? The Dodger!"

"The Lodger.

"The Lodger. It must be so disappointing when something just . . . flops like that."

The Lodger was actually a silent-film landmark, Alfred Hitchcock’s very first thriller, and Ivor Novello gives a memorable performance as the moody loner who may or may not be Jack the Ripper. And Maggie Smith’s insinuation is off the mark — it was actually a big hit.

"How do you manage to put up with these people?" Novello’s gay Hollywood producer friend (Bob Balaban) asks him.

"You forget I earn my living by impersonating them," Novello replies.

It’s an inspired stroke of Altman’s to use Novello’s songs to express the emotional longings neither the servants nor the aristocrats can ever realize. Every lyric seems to provide a wry commentary on the action. Altman gives even Novello’s sentimental side an ironic edge. If this film has a themesong, it’s the exquisitely nostalgic "Land of Might-Have-Been" ("Somewhere there’s another land, different from this world below,/Far more mercifully planned,/Than the place we know").

After his great World War I anthem "Keep the Home Fires Burning," my favorite Novello song is a droll novelty number (lyric by Dion Titheradge) called "And Her Mother Came Too," a comic lament about a couple who are never left alone. In the film, you don’t get to hear the punch line because the plot is taking a sudden turn (it seems there’s a murder . . . ). But on the soundtrack album, Jeremy Northam sings it all — and in impeccable style, with his brother Christopher Northam stylishly accompanying him on the piano:

To golf we started —

And her mother came too!

[Three] bags I carted —

When her mother came too!

She fainted just off the tee,

My darling whispered to me —

"Jack, dear, at last we are free!" —

But her mother came too!

There are six original Novello tunes on the CD, and a couple of rather strange songs by soundtrack composer Patrick Doyle (whose score to Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V won the 1989 British Academy of Composers’ Ivor Novello Award), with lyrics by Robert Altman — one of them not used in the film, the other barely noticeable in Altman’s labyrinth of episodes. His cutting back and forth between aristocrats and servants, one room and another, is like Gosford Park itself, the vast country house — a labyrinth of shadowy corridors. Mary (Kelly Macdonald), Maggie Smith’s young maid, repeatedly gets lost trying to find her room. She’s also the character who unwinds the mystery. In the dim light, those corridors seem like a prison, an image out of Piranesi — which is just Altman’s point: who isn’t trapped by the prison of money and class?

Doyle’s evocative score dovetails elegantly with Novello’s tunes and subtly reinforces that sense of labyrinth, spinning out its thread of repeating musical motifs, alluring and ominous, as it follows the characters — and leads us — through those winding corridors of house and plot.

Issue Date: March 7 - 14, 2002
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