Review: Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool

Posted on 15 March, 2018

“Has anyone told you that you look like Lauren Bacall when you smoke?”

“Yeah, Humphrey Bogart – and I didn’t like it then either!”

I’m not ashamed to say I begged wonderful Ros Hull to let me take on her film column this week. There’s something about Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool that has stayed with me since I saw it at the Rotterdam Film Festival a couple of months ago and heard a Q&A with director Paul McGuigan.

Adapted from the memoir of the same name by actor-writer Peter Turner, the film shows two worlds that couldn’t be further apart: the glamour of 1950s Hollywood and the grey, rainy streets of 1970s Liverpool. Gloria Grahame (Annette Benning), a starlet who never quite hit the big time despite winning an Oscar, is trying to reinvent herself as a stage actress in 1970s London, and meets Peter (Jamie Bell), a young Liverpudlian actor living in the same boarding house (that’s not quite as dour as it sounds, her rooms in the house are actually large and bright).

Differences in their ages, backgrounds and careers don’t matter, the two fall in love. The film explores their relationship but starts at a point sometime after they’ve separated. Peter receives a call from a theatre company saying Gloria has collapsed just before a performance and he is her emergency contact. Despite their difficult history, she begs him to take her to his family in Liverpool to recover. She has cancer though and as much as she’s trying to hide the truth, she is dying.

Much of the story is set in flashbacks, and it’s how these sequences were filmed that makes this film memorable for me. One of the early scenes between the erstwhile lovers has Peter angry and confused at Gloria, who lies in bed, frail and vulnerable. We know there is history between them but we don’t know what happened. As a bitter Peter walks out of the room, the camera moves down the dark hallway and merges into his memory of seeing her for the first time in their shared London digs. Her door is open and she’s doing warm up exercises. He is transfixed, a look of wonder and delight on his face.

This one scene shows what an underrated actor Bell is. This wasn’t a case of filming one scene, cutting and later filming another. McGuigan explained it was a single, tracking shot; as the camera moved down the hall and Bell was behind it scrambling to change clothes to get in position. That he could go from bitterness to enchantment without a break makes me want to see him on stage.

Benning is extremely good as the often infuriating Gloria, she is by turns bewitching, frustrating and flirty. Benning was a fan of the book and was adamant she didn’t want this to be a film about “an old woman dying upstairs”. The flashbacks stop that, there’s a great scene where Benning and Bell are dancing around her rooms to 70s disco, it’s the first time Bell has danced on screen his he made Billy Elliot as a child.

What comes across is a genuine and completely believable love. That love is extended to Peter’s family, who embrace and care for Gloria without hesitation. His mother is played by the always wonderful and warm Julie Waters (would you pass up the chance to have Molly Weasley as your mum?) and Kenneth Cranham is his father, a fan of Gloria’s in his own youth whose delightful summation of the situation is, “We never expected to have Gloria bloody Grahame in our kitchen eating a bacon butty.”

McGuigan intercuts original footage of Graham into the film, Peter watching one of her films at a revival theatre, while her hilariously brief Oscar acceptance speech is perfectly placed to pull at your heartstrings.

Film techniques like rear-projection create a luminous Californian backdrop reminiscent of classic Hollywood. They’re a huge contrast to the grey, overcast Liverpool setting and have a fairy tale quality.

What moves me about this film though is that this isn’t a fairy tale, it’s a warm, bitter-sweet story about two people who should have had nothing in common. Even long after she’s gone the real Peter’s love for Gloria shines through.