Another Billy Budd

Seeing Peter Ustinov's excellent film adaptation of Billy Budd back-to-back with Benjamin Britten's opera is tremendously illustrative. Ustinov was a triple threat on this production, as director, co-writer (with, as it happens, DeWitt Bodeen, twenty years after he penned Cat People for Val Lewton), and star (as Captain Vere). Ustinov directed eight feature films, of which this was the fifth; but the others are not readily accessible, which means I have no way of putting his considerable achievement here into context. I will say that as actor-director, he seems not merely dutiful and professional as Robert De Niro does with The Good Shepherd, but brilliant as George Clooney does with Good Night, and Good Luck.

Operas are so stripped-down. Sung words are fewer than spoken words; musical tableaux take their time. This poses real challenges for the sort of psychological opera that Britten specialized in: how to convey the subtle-but-portentous mental shifts of Herman Melville or Henry James or Thomas Mann in such a tight format? Choose their shorter works for adaptation, that's for starters; but even so, the challenges remain. There have to be five times, maybe seven or eight times as many words in Ustinov's two-hour Budd as in Britten's two-and-a-half-hour Budd; which means that that much more meaning, in words, can be conveyed. Music certainly conveys other meanings, in Britten, but so does the visual and aural surface, in Ustinov; in general, Ustinov has more of an expanse to work with.

And he uses it. Just as novels are almost always more subtle and detailed than their film adaptations, this film adaptation of Melville is more subtle and detailed than Britten's operatic adaptation. How could it not be? These differences are built into the media; even at comparably high levels of excellence, Britten and Ustinov are working in different territories of potentiality.

Not all differences are dictated by the medium, of course. Ustinov's Budd is Claggart-dominated while Britten's opera is Vere-dominated; that is artistic choice. Remember how I asked for a Claggart that was as self-tormented as other-tormenting? It didn't take me long to find him. Robert Ryan's Claggart is one of the greatest (and fullest) "villains" in film history (odd to think that he didn't receive a single award for this performance). Ryan did much great acting over the years, but this is truly exceptional. He dominates the long central section of the film, in a series of brilliant dialogues with Ustinov's Vere, Terence Stamp's Budd, and Lee Montague's Squeak; and this material (more detailed even than in Melville) spells Claggart out without simplifying him. There is no equivalent explication in Britten's opera, not for Claggart or for Vere either; opera relies on broader strokes.

Terence Stamp was only 22 when he made his film debut as Billy Budd, and it can be said without exaggeration that he was born to play this role (and it got his career off to a charmed start to debut in it). Stamp didn't seem to have to reach very far to summon the innocence of Budd; either it coincided with something in him at the time, or he is an even cannier actor than one would suppose. In any case, he got recognized but fast, garnering an Academy Award nomination for his first film part.

Ustinov's Vere is highly accomplished without being moving in the way that Philip Lsangridge is in the English National Opera production of Britten's opera (and that Britten's music calls on him to be). In the movie, Vere's damning involvement in Budd's trial and conviction follows Melville almost word-for-word, while Britten, significantly, skips most of that. And Ustinov is commanding in that scene, and in his confrontations with Budd and Claggart. But in the end, one isn't pained for him, the way one is in Britten and in Melville. It might have been beyond Ustinov's not inconsiderable range to involve the audience in that way.

The movie benefits enormously from being largely shot on an actual ship at sea; never underestimate the power of location. Billy Budd readily passes another Patrick Murtha test of quality cinema, easily demonstrated on a DVD player: pause at any frame, plucked randomly from the image flow, and the resultant image not only looks great but highly significant -- interpretable.

Ultimately, the interpretable party here is Herman Melville, who draws forth such greatness in his adaptors. I should re-read the novel Billy Budd, to go back to the source.