BOBBY DEERFIELD (1977)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Sydney Pollack

SCREENWRITER: Alvin Sargent

FILM STARS: Al Pacino, Marthe Keller, Anny Duperey, Walter McGinn, Romolo Valli, Stephan Meldegg, Jaime Sánchez, Norm Nielsen, Mickey Knox, Dorothy James, Guido Alberti

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Star

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1977

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1961

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: Heaven Has No Favourites (serialised as “Borrowed Life” in 1959 before appearing as a novel in 1961).

NOTES

GENRE: Drama

WORDS: I watched this many moons ago, back in the 80s. I was getting into Pacino films on television (and video) and convinced he couldn’t make a bad film. He went on to prove me wrong, a lot. But, Booby Deerfield, was the first piece of evidence. It was a nicely photographed awful film. Though, as has occasionally occurred, maybe I was too young ta appreciate it and I should watch I again. Naaahhhh.

Bobby Deerfield with Al Pacino is a hangover .. a contemplative late 60s film in flares and wide lapels. Pacino’s character is all brooding determination and alienation until he meets a girl …. who is dying. The film manages to combine two seminal, in their own way, 70s films … the racing film Le Mans (1971) and the romantic drama  Love Story (1970).

Like clockwork every generation will throw up a romantic drama with a race car race track backdrop with mood reflecting whatever is the zeitgeist of the time

For extra gravitas the films should be Formula One cars on the European circuit but they are not limited to that. Films like, The Crowd Roars (1932) with James Cagney and the depression era optimism power to overcome obstacles, The Racers (1955) with Kirk Douglas and the mid 50s you can’t have it all career, Grand Prix (1966) with James Garner, Winning (1969) with Paul Newman and Robert Wagner and Le Mans (1971) with Steve McQueen and their contemplative 60s heroes, Days of Thunder (1990) with Tom Cruise and its 1980s like gung ho optimism, Driven (2001) with Sylvester Stallone and its action for action sake with snips of faux emotion, and Rush (2013) with Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl and the need for realism amongst the racism.

Love Story is the (money making) peak of the doomed love (“terminal love”) films but it is not an uncommon romantic drama trope – Dark Victory (1939), Love Story (retitled “A Lady Surrenders”) (1944), Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978), Dying Young (1991), Griffin & Phoenix (2006).

Some Bobby Deerfield was clumsy and little hokey which is odd because both director Pollack and screenwriter Sargent specialised in “people’ stories (albeit slick American people stories). I don’t think they could get around the European-ess of the book. it may have been filmed in Europe but making Pacino’s character American was probably a mistake. But despite all this it made money … though I suspect that was on the back of Pacino whose career and popularity were riding a high.  Even if the mix of the racing and romance genres is popular the film is neither here nor there. You have to have a boot firmly placed in one of the other. And here, for a film about a Formula One champion race car driver there is relatively little racing whilst the the smell of the oil and screech of the tires get in the way of the romantic drama.

The bigger surprise is it was based on a book.

Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1961 novel “Heaven Has No Favorites” which is a much better title than the film title … there is no Bobby Deerfield in the book and he isn’t American. The racer is French (if I recall correctly) and he is simply known as Clerfayt. He meets a Belgian girl dying of tuberculosis at a Swiss sanatorium, and they fall in love.

Oddly, the novel bares a resemblance to a 1947 Barbara Stanwyck film The Other Love where she plays a seriously ill concert pianist Karen Duncan is admitted to a Swiss sanatorium (although it is never stated in the film it is hinted that she is suffering from tuberculosis). Despite being attracted to Dr Tony Stanton, she ignores his warnings of possibly fatal consequences unless she rests completely and opts for a livelier time in Monte Carlo with dashing racing car driver Paul Clermont.

I got this book because I like the author Remarque, though to be honest I have only read two of his other novels. His most well known “All Quiet on the Western Front” which is still powerful and still suitable subject matter for films, now three (the first is still the best). He was a contemplative writer and though most of his books dealt with war, or characters touched by war (perhaps not surprising for a German writer writing between the 1920s and 1970s) most are not action oriented but people oriented. Here the characters are living lives for the moment and a post war melancholia hangs over them (another problem with the film was updating it to 1976 you lose that mood). Racing is just a backdrop. Remarque reminds us that it is not only war that kills. Both the healthy and the ill fall in this novel and inevitably life takes us all. Hence, heaven has no favorites.

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