“What makes God laugh is people who make plans”

PETER SHURE: bfi RETROSPECTIVE 2010

Tonight we continue our celebration of Peter Shure with a trio of films from the early 1970s. This was a period of Peter’s life when he was – it’s fair to say – an ‘itinerant’ actor.

Having divorced in 1967, and subsequently fallen out so disastrously with several important people on the London scene in 68/69, it seemed politic for Shure to seek new horizons. Two years of wandering across continents ensued, an odyssey that only really came to an end when Shure’s son Christopher famously took a wander of his own in Scotland. One wonders if wanderlust was in the genes.

‘Wellington’ (1971, 156 mins)

By 1970, Peter had just one more film written into his six-picture deal with de Laurentis, and he was keen to free himself of that burden as soon as possible.

The film was to be ‘Wellington’ -  first on our menu today. This epic historical biopic starred Christopher Plummer as the Iron Duke, with Peter playing his friend and colleague, the quartermaster general William De Lancey.

So keen was Peter to free himself from de Laurentis that he was prepared to travel anywhere and play any part. It turned out he would indeed have to travel a long way and take a part that became more and more diminished as filming went on. For both budgetary and logisitcal reasons most of ‘Wellington’ was scheduled to be filmed in Ukraine, behind the Iron Curtain, with the cooperation of the Russian state film company MosFilm.

Shure, with several other members of the cast, started in Rome for costume fittings, makeup tests and filming of some internal scenes. They then had to fly to Budapest and catch a rickety train for a gruelling two-and-a-half day journey to Uzhgorod Ukraine, with only cold roast chicken, wilting salads and vodka to live off, and a hole in the floor of one of the carriages serving as a toilet.

Accommodation in Ukraine was in the most basic Bolshevik hotel, serving borscht for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The British and European actors shared the town with thousands of unruly Russian soldiers (many fresh from invading Czechoslovakia), hired as extras for the lengthy battle scenes. Shure in his diaries likened the situation to his experiences in Stalag One in 1945.

From day to day during the gruelling shoot, Peter Shure’s part on the film shrank as Plummer demanded more lines and more close-ups as compensation for having to endure the low-rent living conditions.  In the final cut, Shure has no on-screen lines at all. His job is simply to repeat Wellington’s orders to the troops by shouting them off-screen. It’s not even clear whether it’s Shure’s voice we hear.

Shure sees more action during the Battle of Waterloo scenes. One can see him in the background several times, where he is racing across the battlefield on a horse he can barely control. (Horses were easily spooked by the battle noise and notoriously badly treated throughout this film. Rumours abound that the Russian soldiers barbequed several of them.)

Spectacularly, Shure ends up being struck in the back by a ricocheting cannonball and thrown violently over the head of his horse. (Shure insisted on doing his own stunts). He does not die immediately, but is taken unconscious to a barn where Wellington goes to visit him believing him to be dead. On finding him alive, Plummer’s famous line is: “Why! De Lancey, you have a rare advantage over the rest of men. You know what your friends will say about you after you’re dead!”

Shure duly dies without a riposte, a smile playing on his lips.

Peter spent over three months in Eastern Europe for what amounts to something like sixteen minutes of screen time in a two-and-a-half-hour film. De Laurentis once said that without Shure’s death scene the film would have been an even more disastrous box office flop than it was. And there’s no doubting the impact of his death scene. It is one of the few moments of powerful stillness in an otherwise noisy overblown movie.

‘Walkabout’ (1971, 100 mins)

While the rest of the cast of ‘Wellington’ retreated back to Budapest as quickly as possible and on to the safety of Rome, Shure headed just as rapidly to the other side of the world. Grabbing a flight to Istanbul, he transfered to Singapore, stayed two days there, and then hightailed it to Australia.

The lure was the chance to make a film with Nic Roeg, someone Shure had got to know whilst hanging out with members of the cast and crew on ‘Performance’, filmed in London in 1968.

The two men shared an idea of making films in an impressionistic, improvised away with none of the stuffy rules of the traditional studio system. They were also both pleased to be working in a country where they could operate as unknowns, far from the clutches of the British press.

Filming took place in the most remote places they could find. Initially Shure lived out of a caravan, but this became stuck in a mud pool after a cataclysmic downpour. He was known thereafter for sleeping out of doors with a mosquito net thrown over him, either in a hammock or sometimes in a cobbled together brass bed one can spot in the film. It is said he often woke up with a snake snuggled up next to him. The whole production had a chaotic feel about it. “It was like travelling around with a bunch of circus people,” recalled Jenny Agutter.

Shure’s wife, Helen Grosvenor, has claimed that Peter did try to get his son Christopher flown over to Australia to be in the film, but she fiercely fought that idea. Ursula Andress received a long distance call in the middle of the night from Shure trying to  persuade her to abandon her lover Jean Paul Belmondo and join him in Oz.

It is certainly true that the original plan for the movie was for Peter to play the father of the two children who end up abandoned in the Outback. So it’s an intriguing idea that Chris Shure might have been the boy in a film, so centred as it is around ancient concepts of the walkabout set in opposition to ‘civilised’ society. One can find the same thematic obsession in  Chris Shure’s own lyrical output from 1984 onwards.

Roeg did film Shure in an opening scene where the father tries to shoot both his children before setting his car on fire and turning the gun on himself. But both men were unhappy with the results -  Roeg because he didn’t feel Shure could be brutal and viscerally violent enough in the portrayal of a man trying to kill his kids; Shure because he simply didn’t like the way Roeg wanted to present images of violence and horror. “It was too close to the bone for my liking,” Shure later said. “I’ve had my share of horrors. I didn’t see why anyone would want to recreate them in that way.”

Instead, Shure relegated himself to the role of a silent sleeping mine worker who the two children walk past without comment. He did, though, remain  on location for the whole of the shoot and enjoyed himself enough to stay in Australia to contribute to another film.

Tonight we’re delighted to say we' ll be showing the scenes with Peter Shure as the father before presenting the full movie. You can make your own mind up as to whether Shure makes a convincing suicidal father.

‘Hemsdale’ (1972 52 mins)

Peter Shure enjoyed being part of the Australian New Wave. So much so that he signed up to work for a basic union rate on a short film by up-and coming director Peter Weir. Having worked with Roger Corman in America, Shure was very used to the kind of material that Weir was interested in.

Hemsdale is set in something akin to a care home, sited on a remote island near Sydney. A collection of archetypal characters are brought to the home as guests and are encouraged by various creepy carers and nurses to engage in a range of ‘therapeutic’ activities. One by one, the guests die in grisly but often darkly comic circumstances that might remind a viewer of Douglas Arthur Hickox’s ‘Theatre of Blood’.

Shure plays a war veteran who suffers from shell shock or what we would now call post traumatic stress  disorder (PTSD). He is one of the first to die during what starts as an innocent orienteering activity but ends quite literally with a ‘bang’.

Weir encouraged all the cast to develop their own characters and improvise scenes, something Mike Leigh became famous for doing in many of his films. It is perhaps not surprising that Shure would draw on his own experience as a war veteran (and as a sufferer of PSTD?). His performance is eerily convincing, even though he never actually speaks a line. He is a man whose fears have robbed him of speech, and who is constantly shaken by the noise and bustle of island and its other inhabitants. As usual his silence and stillness trump the camp busy-ness of the rest of the cast.

Why Shure didn’t stay in Australia is unclear. By 1973 he was basing himself firmly in New York, returning to England only occasionally to visit his children. Perhaps it was the concentration of performance and video artists in the U.S. that drew him there, offering the chance to extend his skills into the art space and away from film.

Meanwhile, to keep the wolf from the door, as he would put it, Shure signed up for a series of trashy spaghetti westerns and slasher movies produced by Carlo Ponti. Thus, in three years, Peter Shure had come full circle, ending up where he had started – in Rome.