The Remains of the Day (1993)
"Why? Why, Mr. Stevens, why do you always have to hide what you feel?"
The Country House Movie. A noble tradition in both Film and Television. I'm making a list. Let's have a think. The Go-Between (1970), Brideshead Revisited (1981), The Return of the Soldier (1982), The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), The Shooting Party (1984), A Handful of Dust (1988), The Remains of the Day (1993), Gosford Park (2001), the contrarian Saltburn (2023), the dreaded Downton. These are the ones that immediately came to mind. There are, of course, several other films which kinda skirt the theme, sort of sub-Country House movies— and I'm thinking Sleuth (1972), set in a thriller writer's Elizabethan pile in Wiltshire, The Haunting (1963), in which a gaggle of ghost hunters spend the night in a creepy old Gothic monstrosity in New England; and Ghost Story (1974)— an endearing low-budget horror, shot in Bangalore Palace, India. But I'm not sure that we can describe them as 'Country House' movies, as such?
Which takes me to Merchant Ivory's The Remains of The Day (1993), adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel of 1989, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala of Heat and Dust fame. It is, in my opinion, an outstanding film (ranked by the British Film Institute as the 64th Greatest British Film of the 20th century). Could this be the very last film in the Country House genre? At least a film made without ironic intent. I remember thinking that, at the time— it was like watching one of those luscious, beautifully filmed period dramas from the 80s: Heat and Dust (1983), The Return of the Soldier (1982) or A Handful of Dust (1988), starring Kristin Scott Thomas as Brittle 30s Beauty, Lady Brenda Last. Although watching The Remains of the Day again last night, there's a directness, an underlying drive (enhanced by the soundtrack), which is very much a product of the 90s. Hardly languid.
Anthony Hopkins stars as Stevens, Lord Darlington's (James Fox) butler; Emma Thompson as the attractive, lonely, middle-aged housekeeper, Miss Kenton— a free spirit. Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire stands in for Darlington Hall, with the interiors filmed at various country houses, including Powderham Castle. The film is set in the 1950s, with prolonged flashbacks to the very late 1930s— in that fascinating period of appeasement, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when members of the upper-class Cliveden Set— ‘the gentlemen amateurs’— traumatised by their personal experiences in the trenches, sought a deal with the Nazis to avoid conflict. In the autumn of 1937, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited Hitler; with hindsight, an unwise decision: a time of secret meetings, rumoured conspiracies and supposed establishment plots— now very much the stuff of thrillers, popular history and low-budget documentaries on the cheaper television channels. Stephen Poliakoff covered this in the enjoyable, if preposterous, Glorious 39 (2009), starring Romola Garai and Bill Nighy as a traitorous Tory MP, prepared to commit murder to secure an early peace with Nazi Germany.
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