The decency that allows us to put each other back together when power has crushed us. The decency that makes us great by insisting that we meet the challenge set by the needs of others. The decency to refuse to let someone die alone. ‘I Cain’t Say No’ … Gloria Grahame in Oklahoma! Photograph: Magna/Kobal/Rex/ShutterstockĪnd in the end, that’s what this film is about: common decency. They all just get on and do the decent thing. Peter and Gloria’s relationship is lopsided, age inappropriate and sexually confusing. But here, the family is a vortex of tolerance and understanding. Billy Liar is a good example, even if he doesn’t, in the end, get on that train to London.

Greenhalgh tenderly preserves all this, while granting us the unexpected pleasure of watching Bell dance again.īritish films often present family as the thing you have to escape if you want to fulfil yourself. The book also has pages of funny, anxious cross-dialogue about whether to call the doctor and when to call the priest as the whole family – Peter is one of nine children – rallies round. Gloria’s death involves them all, from Mum and Dad’s once-in-a-lifetime trip to Australia being disrupted, to older brother Joe’s heroic high-speed mercy dash. I think she had a bucket list – and joining the RSC was part of thatīut screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh and director Paul McGuigan make the film as much about Peter’s family as about the lovers. “Andy Capp and Mrs Mopp” is how Peter characterises such a take. In other hands, this could have been a cheery British farce about the odd-couple pairing of a working-class lad and Hollywood royalty.

But the film gets its unusual power from the fact that it has something to offer in place of fame and sexual oppression. In the shadow of Harvey Weinstein, the case of Gloria Grahame – chewed up and spat out by the studios – could not be more relevant. Precise and self-effacing … Grahame with James Stewart in 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life. “The only biography of her is called Suicide Blonde,” says Peter. If you watch her work now, you can see an accomplished actor doing precise, effective, self-effacing work. The star was also bullied into having work done on her face and, during her divorces, highly paid industry lawyers spread hideous stories about her that tame showbiz correspondents made sure stuck. “But,” says Peter, “she wouldn’t ride unaccompanied in the limo with the then head of RKO, Howard Hughes.” So she was thrown aside. Gloria was offered the lead in the 1950 film Born Yesterday. Because, yes, the city has changed and the nature of fame has changed, but one thing hasn’t: how female stars are treated.

What really kept him going, of course, was love, the need to do justice to Gloria. I’m interested in how Peter managed to keep faith in the project during the years when, as he says, “It refused to get made”, almost as if “Gloria wouldn’t have it”. This is one of my favourite moments in the film: the crystalline beauty of the actual black-and-white CinemaScope Gloria, peering from under her hooded eyes into the shadowy warmth of a present-day picture house. “Thirty years ago,” says Peter, “we didn’t have DVDs, let alone YouTube.” Peter had to trust his parents for an account of his LA girlfriend’s glory days – and wait for an art-house retrospective. As if to emphasise the point, we are speaking in the Pen Factory, an elegant bar and bistro in the city. The film is now a period piece, the battered Liverpool it portrays having all but vanished. The book, when it was first published, was about a recent memory. ‘It refused to get made’ … Annette Bening and Jamie Bell as Gloria Grahame and Peter Turner.

Starcrossed 1985 full movie