Mr Hargreaves (1959)

D. John Guillermin
B&W


If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.

In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.

This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.

Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.

(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)

Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.

At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.