I Am a Camera ** (1955, Julie Harris, Laurence Harvey, Shelley Winters) – Classic Movie Review 5877

Director Henry Cornelius’s 1955 British drama is a lacklustre, uninspired, disappointing film, especially considering the quality of Christopher Isherwood’s brilliant stories of an Englishman abroad in Weimar-era Thirties Berlin in his classic book Goodbye to Berlin and the dazzling razzle-dazzle of the 1966 Broadway musical version, Cabaret, and its 1972 movie Cabaret.

Some dull, off key, awkwardly cast or miscast performances are to blame, along with producer Jack Clayton’s pathetically cheap-looking Romulus studio production on sets that look as though one little breath would blow them over.

As Berlin-living English aspiring writer Herr Issyvoo (that is Christopher Isherwood), Laurence Harvey is one-dimensional, wooden and unfeeling in a part that he is in some ways right for. Julie Harris seems a shade uncomfortable and off key – strangely so because she had been a hit on Broadway in 1951 with writer John Van Druten’s stage version – as the penniless cabaret singer Sally Bowles whom Issyvoo is emotionally but decidedly not sexually attracted to.

Perhaps Harris was just too showy a performer for the dowdy set-up here. Harris must have been a wow on stage as she won the 1952 Tony Award Best Actress in a Drama for the New York show, which ran at the Empire Theater for 214 performances.

Still, the movie remains watchable for the fascinating material, for the still reasonably compelling Harris, and for the appearances of Shelley Winters as Natalia Landauer, Ron Randell as Clive, Anton Diffring as Fritz Wendel, Ina de la Haye as Frau Landauer and Lea Seidl as Fräulein Schneider.

It was denied a Production Code seal in America because it featured a happy hooker and an abortion. It got a rare Condemned rating from the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, which also applied it to Psycho, Some Like It Hot and Breathless.

Ironically the film is best remembered for the famous review ‘Me no Leica’ but, in a further irony, the immortal phrase by witty Walter Kerr was in his review for John Van Druten’s stage play I Am a Camera, published on 31 December 1951, four years before the release of the film.

John Collier wrote the screenplay, based on Van Druten’s play and Isherwood’s book. Guy Green shoots in black and white, Malcolm Arnold scores, the music is by Ralph Maria Siegel and the designer is William Kellner.

Also in the cast are Jean Gargoet, Frederick Valk, Tutte Lemkow, Patrick McGoohan, Julia Arnall, David Kossoff, Zoe Newton, William Adams, Charles Andre, Bill Billington, Alexis Bobrinskov, Bill Brandon, Anita Douglas, Geoffrey Dunn, Vince Edwards, Ann Elsdon, Jack Healy, Don Koll, Stanley Maxted, Charles McDaniel, André Mikhelson, Stanley Morrell, Charles Mosconi, Zoe Newton, Clifford A Pellow, Peter Prowse, Henry Purvis, Sid Raymond, Charles Saynor, Harold Siddons and Paddy Smith.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5877

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