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Films & Filming review
THE DOVE
- Directed by Charles Jarrott.
- Produced by Gregory Peck.
- Screenplay by Peter Beagle and Adam Kennedy from the book by Robin
Lee Graham and Derek Gill.
- Director of photography, Sten Nykvist.
- Editor, John Jympson.
- Music, John Barry.
- Art director, Peter Lamont.
- Distributed by EMI.
- British. Panavision. Technicolor. 105 mins.
- Robin Lee Graham, JOSPEH BOTTOMS;
- Patti Ratteree, DEBORAH RAFFIN;
- Lyle Graham, JOHN McLIAM;
- Charles Huntley, DABNEY COLEMAN;
- Mike Turk, JOHN ANDERSON;
- Tom Barkley, COLBY CHESTER;
- Kensington, IVOR BARRY;
- Young Fijian, SETOKI CEINATUROGA;
- Darwin harbour master, GORDON GLENWRIGHT.
GORDON GOW
Any film that has been photographed by Sven Nykvist is
bound to be worth looking at; and so, to a delightful degree, is The
Dove. It compensates by sheer beauty for the old-fashioned and extremely
sentimental treatment of a very promising theme: the fact-founded odyssey
of the young Californian, Robin Lee Graham, who set out at the age of
16 on a solitary circumnavigation of the world in a 23-feet sloop, 'The
Dove'. A dropout with a difference, he escaped in a heady combination
of symbolic flight and realistic practicality, encouraged on the manhood
ticket by his father until such time as the kid shacked up in Darwin with
a girl, herself a dropout, whereupon dad, in the film at any rate, came
racing after them in a rash of trad indignation, but was soon won over
by the girl's clean sweetness. Despite the considerable stickiness of
the story-telling, one warms to the pictorial graces.
From the very start we realise afresh the thing we knew
so well from all those Ingmar Bergman films - we are regaled by a master
cinematographer. Refracted early sunlight glints between skyscrapers to
the murmur of distant traffic: an ordinary morning is rendered momentous,
because this is the day of Graham's return to Los Angeles harbour. A flashback
is soon to come, and it will encompass visual wonders often culled from
areas that seem to me among the least enticing on earth: the Australian
outback, for example, a wilderness of parched red soil wherein the girl
walks her lonely way as the camera swings and zooms to bring her close
to us out of the awesome landscape. Or, by contrast, there is the spirit-lifting
dash she makes through the busy little streets of Lourenco Marques, where
she has gone to wait confidently for the eventual sight of the sloop after
Graham has been given up for lost by everybody else.
The best of it happens at sea, however. Ashore the dialogue
passages are inclined to be stilted—as perhaps they really would
have been when the speakers were shy young lovers or an embarrassed father
and son but veracity is no guarantee in itself of dramatic strength. Consequently
the film sings almost solely through the camera, which reflects what is
implied by one of the better lines in the script where Graham describes
his rapport with the ocean: 'I can feel every wave ... I can just soar.'
In another mood he waxes apprehensive before a dangerous stretch of the
voyage, and talks of ancient maps where unknown seas were marked with
the words 'Here there be dragons' - Nykvist's camera is able to give us
the dread breath of this as well.
Nearing Madagascar, the sloop is beset by tempestuous
waters in a storm that is presaged by a sinister grey sky. Into the heart
of the lashing waves go vessel and camera, with some of the finest matching
long-shots and close-ups imaginable as Graham in his yellow waterproofs
is grappling and praying and pitting his vulnerably new manhood against
ferocious elements. The flexibility of the camera here is pretty sensational.
Later, becalmed in the Atlantic, crazed by sunstroke,
waxing hysterical over a dish of soggy rice, shouting 'The Ancient Mariner'
to the silver and silent haze of the doldrums, the boy is sure to touch
a sympathetic vein at last in those among us who have found the characterizations
rather soppy up to then. Not that good-looking Joseph Bottoms and Deborah
Raffin don't put a fair show against the material to hand, but I preferred
the acting of three ginger cats that masquerade as one and serve as a
disgruntled and scratching shipmate for much of Graham's sailing: snarling
from the rigging, clambering high up the mast to avoid capture, and then
reduced to baleful glowering when confined to a lobster pot, Avanga the
'psycho-cat' is a wow, and its exit from the film introduces a dash of
the toughness and shock that might have been cultivated to advantage elsewhere,
even if it had meant bending the facts a bit.
Some light comic relief is introduced from time to time
by far-flung and variegated representatives of a travel magazine which
is doing its difficult utmost to make a photographic coverage of Graham's
progress, and getting some improbable postcard poses in the cause –
thereby, of course, accentuating the predominant allure of Nykvist’s
work. One is reminded, though, how much more effectively the same sort
of thing was dramatized by Kon Ichikawa in Alone on the Pacific (1963), which chronicled the lone venture of 23-year old Kenichi Horie
in the yacht, ‘Mermaid’, from Osaka to San Francisco, a distance
I’d reckon to be quite far enough. |
