A review of the 1951 film The Browning Version. No plot recap; some familiarity assumed. It is streaming on the Criterion Channel for the curious.

Civil engineers check for structural stress; critics must check for structurally induced pathos. Too much of it means the building’s liable to buckle.

Terence Rattigan’s play, transferred nearly intact to film, might work better under the proscenium arch, but on screen it comes across as overly engineered. Michael Redgrave’s Crocker-Harris can do next to nothing against his antagonists (his school, his marriage, his health), which turns him into an experiment subject, a dose-response test. Under pressure, he squirms and learns. We watch. The structural beats are so tight that the emotions land basically by chemistry—reaction guaranteed. Drama earns its emotion when plot is driven by character: the converse, as here, is rarely a sign of health.

Crocker-Harris’s psychological turns recall another tragic figure: King Lear. No less. Both grapple with the delayed recognition of a catastrophic mistake, revelation under pressure, and the too-late attempt at repentance. And the same charge of structural coercion can be leveled at both plays: I’ve always found Lear weakest when psychological acuity gets sacrificed to the maw of the plot (think Lear’s Act I detonations; Gloucester’s credulity about his son’s betrayal—something I certainly struggled with when I played Gloucester in a high school production). But Lear escapes (or rather rises above) the charge because of its overwhelming force: its tragic scale, its mounting dread…

KENT: Is this the promised end?
EDGAR: Or image of that horror?

Bodies pile up. The stage picture turns apocalyptic, a Bruegel in motion. The dramatic effect is undeniable. Indeed, Shakespeare critic A.C. Bradley described Lear as “Shakespeare’s greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play.”

Rattigan, by contrast, has no such shield. As a chamber character study, Browning is subtler by design. The psychology often rings truer than Lear’s (for Crocker-Harris, at least—his henpecking wife is unfortunately drawn in coarser chalk); and the film’s best moments come from, again like Lear, his lamentations over his mistake. The standout scene is in Crocker-Harris’s classroom, where he reflects on his career with the teacher who’s replacing him: “I realize I did not possess the knack for making myself liked. But at the beginning at least I did try very hard to communicate to the boys, those boys sitting out there, some of my own joy in the great literature of the past.” He failed, and now for years has no longer tried. Redgrave gives a virtuoso performance and is able to get across the full rainbow of emotion in the very repressed, strictured range of expression that his character permits. The close-ups certainly help—score a point for the screen over the stage.

But oof, that ending. The concluding speech to the student body is a misfire, not least because of the implausible burst of spontaneous applause that greets it. It’s the opposite mistake from before: now everything bows to cinematic payoff and the demand for a big concluding moment. Why, oh why, must Crocker-Harris’s redemption be in public? It has neither theatrical nor narrative logic. He has no Cordelia from whom to beg forgiveness. His students and colleagues wouldn’t care what he thinks of himself—it’s already shown he’s seen as little more than a dinosaur, to be buried among his Greek and Latin books. Doesn’t it undercut the tragic finality by having some external recognition of his own new insight? Is it not the more fitting for this lonely, self-repressed character to have no one with whom to share his final eureka?