Staircase ½ (1969, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison) – Classic Movie Review 2972

Producer-director Stanley Donen’s shameful 1969 effort is a ghastly, dated and embarrassing film version of Charles Dyer’s 1966 two-hander stage play. Two of the acting profession’s most celebrated heterosexual movie stars, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, play a couple of bantering elderly homosexuals living in disharmony above their barber shop in the West End of London.

Naturally Harry Leeds and Charlie Dyer are hairdressers and also care deeply for their mothers! And after 20 years living together, naturally they are starting to get unpleasant with each other like George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. And naturally things get worse when Harry has to care for his sniping invalid mother (Cathleen Nesbitt).

The film unfolds during one night as they discuss their shaky past and uncertain future as one of them is a part-time actor about to go on trial for propositioning a policeman.

And very bad Burton and Harrison are too, badly doing a bad thing, turning in hideously caricatured pantomime camp performances, with theatre-mad Harrison spouting all the spiteful ‘witticisms’ and a bewigged Burton just pathetic.

If the stars are hopelessly miscast, Donen, expert director of musicals and glossy farces, is hopelessly miscast too and all at sea as well as director. Dyer writes his own screenplay, so he can’t complain if the result is so awful. Dyer names one of the characters after himself and rearranges letters of his name to provide other lead character name – Harry C Leeds.

This appeared around the time of gay lib, no doubt setting back the just cause. At least the film was widely denounced as homophobic, Harrison said he hated it and it was a critical and financial disaster.

Also in the cast are Cathleen Nesbitt as Harry’s Mother, Beatrix Lehmann as Charlie’s Mother, Avril Angers, Stephen Lewis, Gwen Nelson, Pat Heywood, Shelagh Fraser, Neil Wilson, Gordon Heath, Dermot Kelly and Jake Kavanagh.

Filming was moved to France to save money.

The original Broadway production opened at the Biltmore Theatre in New York on March 2 1968 and ran for only 12 previews and 61 performances with Eli Wallach and Milo O’Shea. It was first produced in 1966 in the UK by the Royal Shakespeare Company, graced with Paul Scofield and Patrick Magee.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2972

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