Once, over dinner, I heard the late Fielding Dawson chortle:

“Body heat is a Fielding Dawson film! It’s just so full of everything that is me!” I thought at the time it was the wine and the star-struck company working on this middle-aged writer’s brain, but now I too have found a film to cackle over: Alex Cox’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Indeed, I’ve been cackling over the original play (by Thomas Middleton, or some say Cyril Tourneur) for quite a few years. Here’s an example of the powerful writing found in the play in just the opening scene. Vendice (the Revenger) is talking to his lady friend’s skull about his intentions toward her murderer the Duke:

Duke; royal lecher; go, grey-hair’d adultery;
And thou his son, as impious steep’d as he;
And thou his bastard, true-begot in evil;
And thou his duchess, that will do with devil.
Four excellent characters–O, that marrowless age
Would stuff the hollow bones with damn’d desires,
And ’stead of heat, kindle infernal fires
Within the spendthrift veins of a dry duke,
A parch’d and juiceless luxur. O God!–one
That has scarce blood enough to live upon,
And he to riot like a son and heir?
O the thought of that
Turns my abused heart-strings into fret.
Thou sallow picture of my poison’d love,
My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
When life and beauty naturally fill’d out
These ragged imperfections,
When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set
In those unsightly rings–then ’twas a face
So far beyond the artificial shine
Of any woman’s bought complexion,
That the uprightest man (if such there be
That sin but seven times a day) broke custom,
And made up eight with looking after her.
***

One can’t beat the Elizabethans for their language (as Hart Crane knew) and the play is full of brain-popping tropes that draw one further and further into the wind-up mechanism of the plot.

In the same manner Alex Cox gives us a grim eye-popper of a movie, as mannered visually as the language in Middleton’s play is mannered to the ear. Set in Liverpool in 2011, the Revnger’s Tragedy takes place in a decadent city in a punked-out country presided over by the present Queen and her degenerate minions. When the duke dies he’s surrounded by teddy bears and love and miss you notes like Princess Di was, and immediately after his death Vendice and his brother and sister watch the duchess fornicate with her son on a sci-fi holographic screen floating in the middle of the polluted air. The look these three have on their faces is one of the high points of the film.

The other is the opening sequence, which encapsulates the out-of-control feeling of the whole production.

A critic on the BBC complained of the “roughness” of the play–but I believe that the studied roughness and the inspired ineptness of some of the performers is part and parcel of punk aesthetics–just as much as the out of tune howls of the Sex Pistols and the jerky narratives of Kathy Acker’s best novels. If there is a weakness in the film, I’d say it’s in the fact that the language as well as the plot of the original play are not fore-grounded enough. When seeing the film, I’d suggest that you read the play first, then Cox’s brilliance shines like a strobe light.

The sound track by Chumbawamba is a stunner too.

Christopher Eccleston does the job as the Revenger Vedici; Eddie Izzard is the Duke’s effete heir.

I know I’m behind the times here–the film’s been around since 2003, I see, but what the heck, better late than never. My advice: see this DVD with the one you love.