Leave All Fair

Lushly photographed, the film is as gentle and nuanced as Mansfield’s own writings, and the scenes between Gielgud and Birkin play with subtlety and insight

Leave All Fair, New Zealand, 1985

Director: John Reid
Production co: Pacific Films
Producer: John O’Shea
Screenplay: Stanley Harper, Maurice Pons, Jean Betts, John Reid
Photography: Bernard Lutic
Camera: Allen Guilford
Art direction: Joe Bleakley

With: John Gielgud, Jane Birkin, Feodor Atkine, Simon Ward

35mm, col, 88 minutes, PG cert

On the 7th August 1922, Katherine Mansfield wrote to her husband, John Middleton Murry, a ‘farewell’ letter. It contained some cruel accusations against him and ended: “All my manuscripts, books, papers, letters I leave to you. Go through them one day, dear love, publish as little as possible and tear up and burn as much as possible. You know my love of tidiness. Have a clean sweep, Bogey, and leave all fair – will you?”… Five months later, Katherine Mansfield died… Murry went on to build a career and a fortune on releasing for publication – gradually – the huge quantity of letters and journals which were in, or came into, his possession as her literary executor. He was within his legal rights in doing so.

“Filmed entirely in France, this elegiac story about John Middleton Murry, the husband of New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, returning to places where they’d lived together to oversee the publishing of a book based on her letters to him, is a sober, affecting experience… John Gielgud, playing and elderly man of letters, returns to France to meet his publisher (Atkine). The trip brings back memories of his life with Mansfield, memories made more painful when he meets Atkine’s mistress, Marie (Jane Birkin), who not only resembles his long-dead wife, but is also a New Zealander. … Lushly photographed, the film is as gentle and nuanced as Mansfield’s own writings, and the scenes between Gielgud and Birkin play with subtlety and insight… This is a refreshing, intelligent film… It’s a class act all the way.” —Variety, 22 May 1985

Leave All Fair contrives a fiction in which John Middleton Murry privately confronts and publicly evades accusations that his version of the New Zealand writer, the late Katherine Mansfield, is not the real one; that as her editor, lover and husband, he oppressed her, ignored her suffering, flouted her wishes, tailored her work to the market and tailored their love story to his own remote, romantic needs and then, with consummate false modesty, collected the royalty cheques after her horrible death. Gielgud’s performance is among his late best, a full-blooded rendering of a bloodless man. Jane Birken plays Mansfield as the gaunt and steely ghost who, in flashbacks, stalks his every move. She also plays Mansfield’s bolder, less brilliant alter-ego of 30 years later, the lover of the publisher of the latest batch of Mansfield pieces to be released by Murry. Gradually she comes to see Murry as a self-serving monster of the cold male ego and challenges him to justify his actions. Murry also stands accused of suppressing the New Zealand connection in this film which was shot (beautifully) in France, but written, produced and directed by Wellingtonians. A contemporary feminist response to Mansfield and the spirit of this Newish World merge in the script, accentuating the corruption of the old, male and literary world in which the story is set. John Reid’s direction dramatises the issues in the material with flair and authority and serves his exceptional actors well in this haunting and thoughtful film. — Bill Gosden, 14th Wellington Film Festival, 1985

Screenings: Leave All Fair screened on 8 August 2004 as part of a selection chosen by mediaplex manager Steve Russell; and on 8 November 2006 as part of a season acknowledging sound man Robert (Bob) Allen