Educating Rita **** (1983, Michael Caine, Julie Walters, Michael Williams) – Classic Movie Review 6555

Willy Russell’s 1980 Royal Shakespeare Company West End stage comedy proved even more popular on film in 1983 than in the theatre, partly thanks to the engaging interplay between Julie Walters as Rita, a 27- year-old working-class London hairdresser who takes an Open University literature course, and Michael Caine as her boozy middle-aged tutor Dr Frank Bryant.

The actors have the common touch and the jokes too have the popular appeal in Russell’s own adapted screenplay. And the film is very smoothly directed by British veteran Lewis Gilbert, who went on to repeat the trick with Russell’s Shirley Valentine (1989).

Both of the stars and the writer were Oscar-nominated, Caine as Best Actor, Walters as Best Actress and Russell for Best Adapted Screenplay. If there was no success at the Oscars, Caine and Walters both won Golden Globes as Best Actor and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, and they triumphed again as Best Actor and Best Actress at the Baftas, with Gilbert taking the award for Best Film.

Unfortunately both the film and Walters’s performance are coarser than the stage versions, where Walters enjoyed a score of short scenes to make a gradual development in her character, while on film here there is a sudden shift of gear as the ugly duckling all too suddenly grows into independent swan.

And the opening-out of the theatre two-hander play has also contributed to making it broader and less subtle. Surely Michael Williams and Maureen Lipman can’t have been pleased with their bits as Brian and Trish?

Caine doesn’t half do a good drunk act. Not easy, and he says you have to play it as though you’re trying to act sober.

Also in the cast are Jeananne Crowley, Malcolm Douglas as Rita’s husband Denny, Godfrey Quigley as Rita’s Father, Dearbhla Molloy, Patrick Daly, Kim Fortune, and Philip Hurd-Wood.

It is shot by Frank Watts, produced by Lewis Gilbert, scored by David Hentschel and designed by Maurice Fowler.

Caine says it is his favourite of his films and his performance of which he is most proud.

It is filmed entirely on location in the Republic of Ireland.

The stage production premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 1980, with Walters playing opposite Mark Kingston, and direction by Mike Ockrent. Laurie Metcalf played Rita, while Austin Pendleton portrayed Frank in the original 1987 Off-Broadway production.

When Bryant is drunk in the lecture hall, he says: ‘Not many people know that’, an in-joke for Caine’s catch-phrase, actually initiated by Peter Sellers when impersonating Caine on the Parkinson show in 1972.

Walters recalls: ‘I made Rita a bit rougher round the edges and toned my performance down. Michael was lovely, so generous to me.’

Michael Caine also stars in Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6555

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com