DIRECTOR: Richard Eyre

WRITER: Charles Wood [The Charge of the Light Brigade, How I Won the War]

PRODUCER: Richard Broke for BBC

PRINCIPAL CAST: Colin Firth [Robert Lawrence], David Calder [John Lawrence], Barbara Leigh-Hunt [Jean Lawrence], Sophie Thompson [Louise Stubbs] et al

ABOUT THE FILM: Tumbledown explore the inglorious folly of war, and was the most talked-about British TV program when it aired in Britain 1989. This true-life drama is about a British soldier in the 1982 Falkland Islands War who returns to a nation that salutes its war dead but ignore its wounded. In the beginning of the film, Robert Lawrence is a typical young officer in the Royal Scots Guards who likes a drink with the lads and a tumble with the girls. He also loves being a soldier. But all that changes when a large part of his brain is blown off by a bullet. Lawrence returns home a physical and mental wreck, and the treatment he receives from army and doctors doesn't help him to overcome his bitterness.

For his role as Robert Lawrence, Colin won the Royal Television Society Award for Best Actor and a BAFTA nomination.

From an interview 1990:

The film depicts a young man programmed for warfare, for whom actual combat is an eye-opener. His near-fatal wound is random and irrelevant to the battlefield performance. Robert Lawrence rages against his incapacitation. He hectors his nurses, threatens his doctors, abuses his fellow patients. His girl leaves him, his best friend can`t understand him. He survives and triumphs over his disabilities only by adopting a black, bitter outlook.

The film's steady refrain is: "It wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth it."

"Tumbledown caused a fantastic controversy in Britain, said Colin Firth, who stars as the arrogant guardsman humbled by his experience. The cream of British reactionism came out in force before Tumbledown aired, demanding the film's incineration, repeating every slur you can think of. The Left didn't like it either. There were front-page headlines for months. Then it went on the air and there was another three months of headlines. It was fun to be in the middle of it."

[The film]" is about the creation of a chocolate soldier, a man made to impress tourists outside Buckingham Palace, who turns into a psychotic beast during wartime, as any man must if he doesn't run away. It's not about the suffering war victim; it's about a man who was the perpetrator of his own misfortune. He comes back furious and inglorious, minus 43 percent of his brain, dribbling and incontinent. Instead of being lauded he's relegated to the back of the church during the memorial service, finally given a medal and told to shut up". [Chicago Tribune, May 1990]

Tumbledown, Colin says, changed his career. "Before that I was beginning to slip into a lot of callow youths. If I've got a rather neutral face, it doesn't make much sense to put me in rather neutral roles." [NY Times, January 1996]

"I've never been any good in anything badly written" says Firth, who is known to be highly self-critical, even of acclaimed performances like his portrayal of wounded Falklands soldier Robert Lawrence the award-winning television drama Tumbledown. Indeed, Firth is remarkable for having played three celebrated living characters [hostage John McCarthy, Lawrence and Hornby.]

"Being honest, I didn't think too much of my performance at the time, although a few years have passed now. You know, its that sort of part. He gets paralysed here, he stabs someone there, he cries here. It's straight drama school fare. Robert is a far more nebulous character than that. He's not reliant on his looks or his charisma; when you meet him you realise here's a man who's cracked by his own imagination.

The thing that shocked me most about Tumbledown was I'd got so close to Robert. Here was a guy who was at my side through the whole shoot. And I thought: I'm really like him. I was imagining being him, and then when the thing came out and all those familiar facial gestures appeared, I was physically ill with disappointment. It took years to appreciate what I'd done. It's just an actor and his vanity..." [Time Out, March 1997]



Firth still feels strongly about that role: "It's rather difficult to be objective about it as a drama. I got to know Robert Lawrence very closely and it was a very strange relationship because he's not someone I think I would have become friends with under normal circumstances. Seeing it, all I could think of was 'is that all, is that all that's made it onto the screen?' After what I learnt, what I went through, what we all went through - it's just a film, that's all it is."

Talking about the film, reminds Firth about another subject he's got definite view about scriptwriters: "Tumbledown was the most exciting film script to work on that I've ever had, and Charles Wood is the most underrated screenwriter possibly in the world! It's funny, you know, in the theater you can talk about going to 'a Pinter play', but you'd never talk about 'a Wood script'. And I think that the writer 's position in terms of recognition in this business is just appalling. We're nowhere without them. I've thought of Charles ever since I did Tumbledown. Nothing else has been interesting in the same way." [Film & Filming, Sept. 1989]



From the Sydney Morning Herald, March 1990
CRIPPLING disability, one can't help noticing, is big in Hollywood this year, with two of the five Oscar-nominated male actors taking to the wheelchair. In Born on the Fourth of July, Tom Cruise goes into hyper-emotive mode as Ron Kovic, the Vietnam veteran paralysed from the waist down, earning copious praise for his powerful performance - undoubtedly a career watershed.Meanwhile the low-budget My Left Foot, directed by Irishman Jim Sheridan, has won bucket-loads of accolades and big audiences for British actor Daniel Day Lewis's portrayal of the cerebral palsy-stricken Irish writer Christy Brown.

Coincidence? Only last year Dustin Hoffman took out the best acting Oscar for his portrayal of an autistic savant - a bizarre mix of psychiatric disability and unusual mental powers - in Rain Man. And the genuinely deaf Marlee Matlin won an Oscar for her performance in 1986's Children of a Lesser God. Let's not forget Mickey Rourke's recent role as a cheap crook who starts out in the thriller Johnny Handsome with a potato head, either. Or Chris Haywood's Greek deaf mute in Paul Cox's Island last year. Or Colin Firth as the crippled soldier in the British TV Falklands drama Tumbledown, recently repeated on ABC TV. /.../

Of course, there is nothing new in the use of disabled characters in films. Many will remember Joan Crawford as the crippled sister of the sadistic Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, where the victim's inability to walk led to a horrific entrapment. But this had little in common with the current films.

Perhaps the true precursor of both Fourth of July and Coming Home was the wartime British film Reach for the Sky, again based on a true story of a battling veteran, the legless fighter ace Douglas Bader. A heartstring tugger, this. Good old Dougie. Who could possibly argue?

What a relief was Tumbledown, then. While Tom Cruise assumed in Fourth of July that when a paralysed ex-soldier felt sorry for himself the audience should be feeling sorry, too, Colin Firth realised that it should be the other way around. His performance was ruthlessly disciplined and unshowy, admirably lacking in egotism.

Marlon Brando's much-praised screen debut was as a paraplegic war veteran in Fred Zinnemann's 1950 film, The Men, and another Zinnemann film, High Noon, raises an interesting question.

Legend has it that Gary Cooper played the role of ex-sheriff Will Kane in a state of agony due to a hip injury, and there's little question the strain added to the memorably tortured nature of the performance. Ask not how well a healthy actor can play an injured character, ask what an injured actor can bring to his or her role.
Maybe those representatives of the cerebral palsied who criticised Day Lewis for hogging the plum role of Christy Brown instead of giving it to a real palsy victim were right. Why aren't there more disabled actors in films? Are star names really for audiences to take the invalided seriously? Marlee Matlin hardly did Children of a Lesser God any harm.

Instead of more pyrotechnics, more feathers in the caps of career conscious thesps, can't we have more films which accept invalids as ordinary, albeit disadvantaged, members of society? Instead of getting all guilty and embarrassed, can't we respect them as flawed human beings like everybody else?

Charles Wood writes in the preface of the screenplay that it was an article in The Guardian that caught his eye and made him interested in Robert Lawrence. The article told the story of how Robert, a 21-year-old Scots Guards officer with five years army service, was sent to the Falklands in April 1982. And how he, a few days before his 22nd birthday and one and a half hour before the Argentinian surrender, was shot in the back of the head by a sniper during the assault on Tumbledown Mountain. For his part in the action, Robert was awarded the Military Cross, but still felt that while the sniper who shot him did his job, the military establishment and the Civil Service didn't do theirs in helping him return to a normal life.

Wood wrote the screenplay after listening to Robert tell his story and with the full co-operation of the Lawrence family. "We sat together and I watched him, listened to him, understood him, believed him, became a friend and found his curage, in telling all, heroic." [Charles Wood's screenplay was published by Penguin Books in England 1987.]

VIDEO: The film caused furious controversy, and filled The Times letters page with angry correspondence. And it's still controversal and difficult to find. But The National Film and Theater in London has Tumbledown for viewing. ENOUGH OF EGO TWITCHERS |
LYNDEN BARBER