Travelling North

One of the good things that happens in movies is that people who last long enough will often gather rewards. This is as true for the hardworking, unglamorous character actor as for the writer, director, or leading player.

Sometimes a character actor will wade through a whole career’s worth of quirky, interesting, peripheral work before he or she reaches the capper. Ben Johnson, after a lifetime of wonderful supporting work as a part of John Ford’s stock company, got his Oscar for The Last Picture Show. Harry Dean Stanton hit what will probably remain his peak in Paris, Texas.

Now the exemplary British character actor, Leo McKern, has found a crowning role in a new Australian film. Travelling North. McKern is best-known to American audiences for his consummate work in the English series Rumpole of the Bailey. (Personally, McKern will always be indelible in my memory as the crazed holy man who attempts to get the ring of Kahili off Ringo’s finger in the Beatles’ movie Help!)

Though McKern is identified with English TV, movie, and stage work, he was born in Australia, which makes Travelling North even more of a fitting touch. McKern plays a 70ish engineer, a man of cultivated tastes, domineering demeanor and lacerating tongue, who retires to a lovely home on the Australian coast.

Accompanying him is a slightly younger divorcee (Julia Blake); they both leave their grown children back in Melbourne. But the golden years are not quite idyllic, mainly because a variety of physical problems, especially heart trouble, plague the cantankerous man. Having to slow (and calm) down forces the old fellow into a re-examination of his hot-tempered life, as he sees the end approaching.

Playwright David Williamson has not created a great deal in the way of dramatic action (and the woman remains too much of an enigma), but he has created a golden opportunity for a skillful actor. Under the direction of Carl Schultz (Careful, He Might Hear You), McKern blusters and soars in the meaty role, which allows him to spew a string of well­-chosen words of venom in one scene and delicately wave his conducting baton to a radio broadcast of Mozart in another. McKern uses every ounce of his considerable flesh and every roll of his masterful voice to carry off the part.

The best thing about McKern’s performance is that he genuinely communicates the seasoning of years of experience. You can’t deny the sense of years lived when, anticipating his death, he insists that his companion break out a bottle of champagne upon his passing: “For all my faults, I’m damn well worth a magnum!”

First published in the Herald, June 1987

I don’t remember the film, but it’s nice to see that McKern got a plum here. Careful, He Might Hear You was a fine film, and very well-received on the arthouse circuit; Schultz’s big Hollywood shot was The Seventh Sign, the Demi Moore horror picture. Must find my review of that. Then he went into being a regular director on the Young Indiana Jones series.