The Reckoning (1970)

Men who walk down the middle of the road tend to get run over.

When John Osborne’s incendiary Look Back in Anger hit the Royal Court stage in 1956, it repulsed those middle-class theatregoers used to the traditional “well-made play” and inspired a sea change in working class (or lower middle-class) representation on the British stage. The 1959 film adaptation starring Richard Burton marked the start of Woodfall Film Productions (a joint venture between Osborne and director Tony Richardson) that would go on to produce many of the landmark films of what would become the British New Wave - adaptations of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1961) - as well as storm the Academy Awards with their irreverent take on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1963). Osborne would also help introduce Laurence Olivier to a younger audience with The Entertainer (1957), add momentum to Albert Finney’s rising star in Luther (1961), and introduce London theatregoers to a brand new talent in Nicol Williamson with Inadmissible Evidence (1964).

Williamson did not fit the British New Wave mould; he had none of the earthy charm of Finney, Courtney or Tushingham. He was instead, as playwright and director Peter Gill once described, “lanky, ranging, awful sort of yellow hair, not a pleasant voice, Birmingham-Scottish, and yet he was a riveting actor, very funny, he spoke marvelously.” He wasn’t a star in the making; he was an actor who had made his bones at Dundee Rep¹ who was about to take on one of the most difficult parts of 20th century British theatre. Bill Maitland, the anguished, rapidly unravelling solicitor at the heart of Inadmissible Evidence isn’t exactly the sexiest of parts, but his three-hour litany of misery and inadequacy demands extraordinary skill and focus. Maitland is on stage for the full length of the play and has to deliver a series of complicated and frequently disjointed monologues, as well as effortlessly switch between Osborne’s trademarks of raging sarcasm and forensic self-loathing. Williamson was perfect in the role: his technique was neither classical nor method, instead hinging on impeccable diction, furious cadence, and a level of in-the-moment experimentation that made his performance feel as if it were happening in real time. His Maitland didn’t perform, he existed.

Inadmissible Evidence became Williamson’s calling card to greatness, enjoying an extensive run in London and transfer to Broadway, where even if American audiences weren’t so enamoured of Maitland’s relentless failure, they had to appreciate the performer behind it. The play would suffer in adaptation to film in 1968 in a version (written by Osborne) which effectively halved the run time, jettisoned most of the monologues, and lost much of the cumulative impact of the stage version, and while there’s certainly plenty to admire about the film (and you’re unlikely to see a decent version of the play these days, though Douglas Hodge gave it his all in 2011), it can’t compare to the stage version. The work involved in hauling Inadmissible Evidence from stage to screen also meant that Williamson declined opportunities that would have made him a more recognisable presence on screen, chiefly the villainous role of Roat in Wait Until Dark (1967), which ultimately went to Alan Arkin.²

Williamson instead appeared in The Bofors Gun (1968), an adaptation of the play Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun by John McGrath, directed by Jack Gold, in which he played the belligerent and suicidal O’Rourke. The film is a little hamstrung by its tight budget and stage origins, but Williamson’s performance is compellingly theatrical. As Spectator critic Penelope Houston noted, Williamson “clears the ground around him, turns it into a kind of disaster area, persuades you that something ominous and intolerable is about to happen.” She was right in more ways than one: while The Bofors Gun has a terribly bleak ending, it was about to get much darker. Jack Gold and John McGrath were about to give Williamson a role that would attempt to rival Bill Maitland.

The Reckoning - originally titled A Matter of Honour, which makes it sound less like a horror movie - is based on a largely forgotten novel by Patrick Hall, The Harp That Once. We first meet Michael Marler (Williamson) drunkenly hate-fucking his upper-class wife (Ann Bell) after a desultory dinner party. Marler is a vicious corporate type, backstabbing his way up the ladder in a London firm that makes accounting machines when he isn’t drinking himself bitter in the ugliest (and largest) suburban house you’ve ever seen. When he’s informed that his father has suffered a heart attack, he returns to his poverty-stricken home of Liverpool, only to discover that it isn’t just a heart attack that’s claimed his poor old Da: he was effectively beaten to death by a bunch of English hooligans who took exception to Da singing a good old Irish (i.e. anti-English) song. The locals, understandably reluctant to involve the police (thanks to rabid anti-Irish sentiment), put the responsibility of revenge on Marler. Thus Marler becomes a low-rent Hamlet, vacillating between the ostensible comforts of his materialistic life in London and bloody thoughts of revenge.

Much has been made of The Reckoning as a prototype for Get Carter (which came out in the same year in the United States and trounced The Reckoning at the box office), but the film owes less to Ted Lewis than it does John Braine, whose Room at the Top (1957) saw working-class Joe Lampton philander his way to success (adapted to screen with Laurence Harvey in 1959). Unlike Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) or Storey (This Sporting Life), Braine’s politics skewed heavily rightwards³, and Lampton’s rise - and subsequent stall in the sequel Life at the Top (1962) - acts as a proto-Thatcherite take on upward mobility, where amorality is a benefit to the striver. Through the socialist lens of John McGrath,⁴ this amorality becomes an inherently violent and antisocial trait: Marler is described as seeing the world with a predator’s eyes, his Irish soul lost to the London boarding school mob, epitomised by his reckless driving, his mutual loathing marriage, and his relentless corporate skullduggery.

And yet McGrath is careful to establish that Marler’s violence is part of his upbringing. His Liverpool is a place of slum clearances, filthy rain, and grinding poverty, where workingmen’s club wrestling matches devolve into the kind of sweaty, drink-fuelled brawls that wouldn’t look out of place in Wake in Fright (1971). There’s never really a question of if Marler will explode into violence; it’s more like when, how bad will it be, and will he get away with it. When the violence comes, it’s brutal but largely bloodless, with a whimpering Ed Sheeran lookalike getting his face caved in with a poker in a pub car park. And unlike most revenge stories, this act of violence is empowering, giving Marler the confidence to organise a corporate coup and - in the final scene - play chicken with a truck. He has discovered his true nature and welcomes it.

Most actors wouldn’t be able to make this sing, but Williamson is perfect casting. Like Marler, he was a working-class lad who had little time for his colleagues, believing them “self-indulgent, boring, conceited and largely unintelligent”. And unlike most of his contemporaries, Williamson was utterly unconcerned about likeability. Sure, many of them would play villains, but it took real skill to play an ordinary monster without appealing for sympathy or tipping the wink to the audience that he was just playing. In The Reckoning, Marler’s targets are unambiguously shitty people - never has “I never knew you were Irish” deserved such a punch in the face - and his grief over his dead father is genuinely affecting (nobody cries like Williamson); he also happens to be a funny bugger at times, and possesses the kind of restless energy that can almost make you believe that everyone else is the problem. But take a step back and you see that Marler is the kind of self-regarding anti-hero that repulses audiences, made compelling purely through the force of Williamson’s performance.

This is both a blessing and a curse. Williamson was absolutely correct when he said: “Anything that I do, you won’t fault me on - you won’t like it, but you won’t fault me on it.” There isn’t a dishonest moment in his performance, as repellant as it may be at times, and the movie revolves around it. This is also its curse. As Roger Greenspun rightly points out in his New York Times review: “I can think of no other reason for The Reckoning, which does not so much feature, as respectfully worship, the talent, the presence, the reactions of Nicol Williamson.” It’s a one-performance film, and while it’s a great performance, the rest of the film can suffer because of it. This isn’t to diminish the rest of the cast - Rachel Roberts in particular is seedily effective, managing to wistfully compare her sexual satisfaction to “two dollops of steam duff” - but, as in Inadmissible Evidence, they are dwarf planets orbiting a fiery sun and can feel underwritten as a result.

Williamson’s power and the ambiguity of The Reckoning (not to mention a lacklustre marketing campaign courtesy of Columbia) ultimately hurt its chances at the box office, not least in the United States, where the more obviously accessible (and genre-bound) Get Carter told a similar story (and included a particularly sleazy turn from John Osborne). Williamson’s off-screen and on-stage behaviour also damaged his reputation as a bankable actor. Like many of his colleagues, he liked a drink and though it never truly affected his work, it was often used as an excuse for his habit of walking off stage in the middle of performances, his teasing of other actors (one production gifted him a giant wooden spoon because he was such a “stirrer”)⁵ and his sometimes combative relationship with audiences, which included an instance where he attempted to auction off the contents of an audience member’s handbag which had tripped him on entrance. It made him seem unhinged, when in fact he was considered one of the most talented and focused (to the point of perfectionism) actors around.

There would be other notable roles after The Reckoning, including turns in Robin and Marian and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (both 1976), a knockout creepy Merlin in John Boorman’s bonkers Excalibur (1981) as well as a lauded performance in a television adaptation of Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui and, naturally, a guest appearance as “control expert” murderer Dr Eric Mason in Columbo,⁶ but his prickly reputation would ultimately push him from the spotlight and into cameos and self-exile in Lindos.⁷ For an actor who had been described as “the British Brando” by Osborne and “touched by genius” by Samuel Beckett, it was a somewhat ignominious final act for one of the greatest actors of his or any other generation.

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Next Up: After 20 years, what Detective-Sergeant Johnson has seen and done is destroying him.

1. Dundee Repertory Theatre boasts impressive alumni, including Richard Todd, Brian Cox, and at least three Doctor Whos (William Hartnell, David Tennant, and Ncuti Gatwa). I believe Donald Sutherland was also a regular for a while.

2. Troy Kennedy Martin also wanted Williamson for the role of Mr Bridger in The Italian Job (1969). I am conflicted on this. While Williamson would have made “I want Charlie Croker given a good going over” utterly chilling, it would also have meant missing out on Noël Coward’s impeccable delivery of “Someone has broken into my toilet.”

3. I’ve not mentioned Osborne here, because while he became something of an Edwardian Tory in his later years, his incandescent rage, fuelled by champagne and self-loathing, tended to transcend politics.

4. I would be utterly remiss in not mentioning John McGrath’s sterling work with 7:84 and his still-relevant and brilliant polemic The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil (1973), which manages to be both radicalising and a fun night out.

5. Another anecdote. When Williamson was playing a generation-defining Hamlet in the late ‘60s, Peter Gale, who played Osric, remembered: “One night, in the final tense scene, Nicol was acting with Anthony Hopkins and as he finished his line, he added under his breath, ‘You cunt.’ Anthony had terrible trouble trying not to laugh.”

6. Despite being one of the few Columbo murderers who attempts to do in our favourite rumpled detective, Williamson was not a fan. He professed not to remember anything about his performance and when playwright Valerie Manahan mentioned that she loved the episode as they strolled through New York, Williamson replied, “If you mention that again, I shall step off this kerb and hurl myself into oncoming traffic.”

7. Your Humble Narrator takes no pleasure in noting that one of Williamson’s mooted projects was a remake of Theatre of Blood. If it were up to me, that movie would be remade every fucking year. “Do you still say my Shylock was inadequate?”