![]() ![]() In 1984, his haggard, pale face, devoid of any makeup, perfectly captures the odd mix of passivity and petty rebellion that makes up Winston Smith. And yet at his best he was wonderfully understated, the first glimpse of his ability to communicate volumes with very little being his appearance as Raskolnikov in the 1979 BBC adaptation of Crime and Punishment. ![]() ![]() Both roles were delivered with an over-arching fey theatricality which marked him out initially as talented, mercurial and flamboyant performer. My first encounter with Hurt was through The Naked Civil Servant, and I, Claudius, in which he played the demented Emperor Caligula. Set in this wonderfully realised post-war desolation, John Hurt, Richard Burton and Suzanna Hamilton turned in stunning performances. Computers are operated by Bakelite telephone diallers, police surveillance consists of little more than a helicopter hovering outside your bedroom window, and Winston Smith is tortured on an old fashioned rack. It’s a world of filthy tenements, steaming workers’ kitchens and black and white TV. There’s no hi-tech, no gleaming chrome or sophisticated computerised surveillance. Not only did it embrace the industrial grunge look pioneered by Ridley Scott in Alien, but the whole premise was that time had stopped in 1948, when the book was written. The movie was also perhaps the first to create a retro vision of the future. The UK, severely split under Thatcher’s Tories and not yet emerging from the decline of the 70s and early 80s was, for many people, a world of unemployment, seedy decay and empty industrial landscapes, used to stunning effect by Radford. Having said that, all of the movie’s exteriors shots were filmed in real, contemporary British locations. Not surprisingly the Labour party pointed out how Thatcher’s Britain was a fair approximation of the poverty-ridden dystopia of the book, while the Tories triumphantly proclaimed that by voting them in the country had narrowly avoided a 1984 communist hell which the deranged left would have imposed on us all. Finally reaching the year inevitably prompted endless discussions about whether reality matched Orwell’s original vision. My favourite John Hurt film has to be Michael Radford’s 1984, released in the same year, with Hurt as Winston Smith, Richard Burton as O’Brien and Suzanna Hamilton as Julia. ![]()
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