BASIL

A NEW FILM VERSION

The only known film version of Wilkie Collins's first novel of contemporary Victorian life - Basil - has now had its first public airing. It was shown on cable television in the USA - Sunday 29 November 1998, at 4pm Eastern Standard Time on the American Movie Classics channel. The film was sold to the channel by its US distributor Kushner-Locke, a Californian TV, film, and media company, after it pulled the film from the Toronto Film Festival in 1997. However, the version it sold was not approved by the Director, Radha Bharadwaj, and it is not clear if her cut will ever be made. Her only other film, Closet Land (1991), despite some critical success, was not a money spinner, grossing barely $250,000 in the USA.

The villain Mannion is played by Christian Slater, perhaps best known for Interview with the Vampire, Broken Arrow, and Murder in the First. Slater also co-produces the film. Claire Forlani

Margaret Sherwin, confusingly (known as Julia in the film) is played by 24-year-old Claire Forlani. She was, briefly, Sean Connery's angry confused daughter in The Rock, the forlorn girlfriend in Basquiat, and again in The Last Time I Committed Suicide. Since filming Basil she has taken stronger roles, most recently as Susan Parrish in Meet Joe Black (1998). Basil himself is played by Jared Leto, a 25-year-old American whose only previous sighting in the UK has been as Beck in How To Make An American Quilt but he is better known in North America as a soap star.

Sir Derek Jacobi, veteran of I, Claudius and Cadfael on television and Hamlet and Looking for Richard plays his autocratic father. He was also Arthur Clennam in the 1988 version of Little Dorrit. Mr Sherwin, Julia's father, is played by David Ross and Crispin Bonham-Carter plays Basil's brother Ralph.

The plot of the film

The movie begins with a very long section about Basil's young life which is not in Basil but which explains the background to his family life. It also includes a contrived meeting between Mannion and Basil which leads to Mannion introducing him to Julia (Margaret). He courts Julia and she responds with contempt and greed and their relationship is played out under the watchful eye of Mannion. They marry with her father's rather mercenary blessing. Mannion and Julia have had a secret affair for some time and Basil catches them in bed in Mannion's rooms. He brutally attacks Mannion and leaves him for dead. In fact he is left with a face so disfigured that he never looks at himself again. Basil is rejected by his father and is reduced to working for his bread. Mannion follows him and eventually reveals that he wanted revenge on Basil's family because his brother Ralph had seduced Mannion's sister and she had died in an abortion attempt. There is a showdown on the cliffs and Mannion, having seen the state of his face, throws himself off to his death. Basil is reconciled to his father and sister.

It is a watchable and almost believable film. Although the plot does not follow the book precisely it is a credible film version of it and the scenes of victorian London are lively and real. But several key parts of the book - which would have had huge dramatic impact - are missing such as the moment when Basil falls in love with Margaret Sherwin on the omnibus and the scene where basil's father tears the page out of the family bible to dismiss Basil from the family. The final scene on the cornish cliffs is changed so that Mannion commits suicide rather than falls to his death while fighting Basil. Basil's father has had an addition to his character - he is rather free sexually - and Basil's sister Clara is turned into an adopted child who is not the supporting and loving sister of the book.

Derek Jacobi is excellent as Basil's father, Clair Forlani is sutiably beautiful and disdainful, her father is played well by David Ross showing all the greed of the nouveau riche, and Christian Slater makes a fine villain. Jared Leto's acting lets the whole production down. The photography and sets are excellent, though the time and effort to travel by coach between Cornwall and London in the early 19C is taken rather lightly.

The Novel

Basil was published in 1852. It followed his first published novel Antonina (1850), a historical romance about the fall of Rome, and Mr Wray's Cash Box (1851), a slight comic novella aimed at the Christmas market. An earlier attempt at novel writing Iolani, a romance set in Polynesia before Europeans arrived, was never published in his lifetime. Basil shocked contemporary critics and began a long antagonism between Collins and his reviewers, feelings that were not shared by his millions of readers.

The Plot of the Novel

The eponymous hero Basil, we never learn his surname, is the younger son of proud man who, though without a title, can trace his family back to the Norman conquest of 1066. The story begins when Basil travels on an omnibus and sees and falls instantly in love with Margaret Sherwin, the daughter of a successful linendraper. He courts her. At first she seems not to reciprocate but eventually agrees to marry him. Basil cannot tell his father that he is to marry a woman of such low birth and so the wedding has to be held in secret. Margaret is to remain in her father's house for one year without consummating the marriage. Meanwhile, Sherwin's clerk, Robert Mannion, has his own designs on Margaret. On the eve of the first anniversary of the wedding, Mannion and Margaret disappear to a hotel. Basil follows them and hears them making love through the wall. He attacks Mannion and thinks him dead. At home in a delirium Basil mentions Margaret's name and, when he is recovered, his father forces him to confess his secret marriage. He disowns and dispossesses Basil who then learns that Mannion's seduction of Margaret was not due to love but revenge. Mannion's own father was hanged as a forger due to the action of Basil's father. Without money, Basil is rejected by both Margaret and her family. Only his brother Ralph and sister Clara support him. Eventually, Margaret dies of Typhus, Mannion and Basil grapple again, Mannion falls to his death, and Basil, his father also now dead, lives in peace with his sister Clara.

Paul Lewis
10 February 1999
version 2.50