Alan Bates and Simon Gray: a perfect fusion

Alan Bates' Ben Butley was a tour de force of the theatre (Tony award-winning). The film overall suffers, as did most of the films in the American Film Theatre series which it was part of, from coming across as being a bit too theatrical for cinema, but Bates' performance of itself was breath-taking, dominating the screen with his larger-than-life presence! His character, brilliantly written for Bates by the razor sharp Simon Gray, is at once cruelly, devastatingly funny and pathetically sad. Through the film Butley, propelled by some sort of manic defence mechanism, delivers savage put-downs of staff members and students alike. But as we reach the film's denouement, Butley emerges as a "has-been" English lecturer, eclipsed both professionally and personally by younger rivals. Once a brilliant academic but now no longer capable of teaching, he is reduced to going through the motions, left to fend off a harsh world armed only with his increasingly repetitious, literary bon mots. Filmed (exteriors at least) at the University of London, Butley was the directorial film debut of stage icon Harold Pinter. Good support for Bates, especially from the "much put-upon" Jessica Tandy, seen here 15 years before her belated acclaim by American audiences in Driving Miss Daisy. Gray and Bates together were a wonderful creative union in contemporary British theatre, and in 1992 they again successfully collaborated in the TV mini-series Unnatural Pursuits with Bates reprising his greatest-ever character as an ageing Butley-esque author.