There's hardly an actor of Hollywood's golden age - short of Jimmy Stewart - with more good will on his side than the glowingly decent, lethally handsome, stunningly stalwart Gregory Peck. Unfortunately, as I think this month's TCM bears out, the overpoweringly redoubtableness of his nature produced very few interesting movies. One striking exception however is the British produced THE PURPLE PLAIN of 1954. Here is the one Peck picture whose residual effect is different from all the others. The story adapted by Eric Ambler of an H.E. Bates novel is about a nerve-wracked, embittered, R.A.F. pilot reassigned to a Burmese mission in the war for reevaluation. During this time, he is restored somewhat to humanity through the good offices of a brilliant and good doctor (Bernard Lee), a spiritual lady (Brenda de Banzie) and most importantly, a lovely young Burmese nurse who works with the doctor at the hospital. Peck's character is called Forrester and the pivotal action of the movie is when he crashes a plane behind enemy Japanese lines. Two men are with him in the disaster. One is a dour medic named Blore (Maurice Denham) whom Forrester loses and another is a young navigator whom he bravely rescues along with himself. On the face of it all this conforms to the image of Peck the perfect. But just beneath the surface of the narrative resides the fairy tale of a man who loses his first love in an air raid in England (which he witnesses helplessly) and then has it restored to him through his meeting with the Burmese girl. Nothing could sound more corny but the treatment is anything but. The very last moments of THE PURPLE PLAIN are so perfectly judged, so uncannily rendered in their strangely erotic sense of deliverance that they take one's breath away. The "coming home" feeling of surrender at the end pulls one up short in a beautiful way that has to be experienced by the true lover of cinema - not laboriously described. With a haunting film score by John Veale, this is a most unusual production that deserves searching out. It doesn't deserve to be played at 3 in the morning but that's par for the course for pictures of this nature. It might be what contributes to their cult although THE PURPLE PLAIN isn't quite there yet as a cult item. It should be.
Review of The Purple Plain
