Don't Make a Drama Out of a Crisis
We’ll Take Manhattan Preview
Earth 1962. The world teetered on the brink. Political leaders were paralysed and reduced to watching nervously as events inexorably unfolded. What would happen next? Would David Bailey manage to persuade the Editor of Vogue to publish the snaps of Jean Shrimpton that he took with his Pentax, or would he be forced to reshoot with a medium format camera on a tripod? It could have gone either way, and the consequence of failure would surely have left us all inhabiting a very different world. All in all, the perfect scenario for a BBC4 drama production: no need to make up a story (it happened); no need to worry about script structure (there’s a chronology of events); and it involves just a handful of charismatic people (cuts down on actors). The only problem is that there’s very little drama, and certainly not enough to fill 90 minutes.
Joking aside, there’s little doubt that Bailey and Shrimpton’s Vogue photo shoot in New York was an important cultural moment, whether or not you regard it as the real birth of the Sixties. We’ll Take Manhattan recounts how Bailey (Aneurin Barnard) was sent out by Vogue to capture something that would appeal to a younger demographic, and how, in the teeth of major opposition from the magazine in the form of Lady Clare Rendlesham (Helen McCrory), he was allowed to use his near-unknown girlfriend Jean Shrimpton (Karen Gillan) as his muse and model. Bailey’s work in the shoot was radical, massively influential and is still vibrant today. It was also freighted with aspects of the social revolution then stirring, and the film explicitly embodies this in Bailey’s fierce working-class dislike of Lady Clare and all that she stood for. It’s not too much of a stretch to see the New York shoot as one of the many little crisis points emerging in society as popular culture as we understand it struggled into being.
All very interesting then. But is it dramatic? In the case of We’ll Take Manhattan this cultural crisis point amounts to David Bailey and Lady Clare Rendlesham sniping at each other repeatedly for over an hour while Shrimpton looks on with an increasingly glazed expression. It’s hard to blame her when the dialogue is like this: “The negative area produced by a medium format camera is several times the quality produced by that thing” -- as you can imagine Bailey is quick to defend his Pentax S3 but unless you’re a camera buff it’s hard to care. I’ve no doubt that this is exactly what the shoot was like, and I’m aware that Bailey’s radical technical choices were crucial to the final results, but while the story would make a good documentary, in the hands of writer/director John McKay it makes an unengaging and frankly boring drama.
The deficiencies in the script would be less damaging if the relationship between Bailey and Shrimpton worked onscreen. Unfortunately, there is little chemistry between the leads and the love story, which surely must have been vibrant, is virtually non-existent here. None of the performances are bad exactly, although Frances Barber as Diana Vreeland is indistinguishable from her role as Madame Kovarian in Doctor Who, but they struggle to overcome a lacklustre script. Aneurin Barnard is believable as Bailey (although at times his accent becomes so much like Ralph Brown I kept expecting him to offer Lady Clare a Camberwell Carrot) and Karen Gillan does her best with a thankless role, being particularly good in the early scenes showing Shrimpton’s family background. But the whole thing fails to take off, in stark contrast to the events portrayed.
We’ll Take Manhattan isn’t all bad. Some of the New York scenes are handsomely shot, and unlike some BBC4 dramas it looks as a reasonable budget was used well. None of this alters the fact that if (and it’s a big if) Bailey and Shrimpton’s New York adventure was worth dramatising then it needed a much more imaginative approach than is on display here. In one way it’s sad that cuts may mean the end of home-produced drama on BBC4, but when you look at the bulk of what was produced -- a ragbag of simple-minded biopics about light entertainers -- it’s hard to mourn too deeply.
We’ll Take Manhattan is on Thursday 26th January at 9pm on BBC4
