Nineteen Eighty-Four (stylized as 1984) is a 1984 dystopian film written and directed by Michael Radford, based upon George Orwell’s 1949 novel. Starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, and Cyril Cusack, the film follows the life of Winston Smith (Hurt), a low-ranking civil servant in a war-torn London ruled by Oceania, a totalitarian superstate.
Smith struggles to maintain his sanity and his grip on reality as the regime’s overwhelming power and influence persecutes individualism and individual thinking on both a political and personal level.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was Burton’s last screen appearance; it was released two months after his death and is dedicated to him.
The film was released in the United Kingdom on 10 October 1984 by Virgin Films. It received positive reviews from critics, and was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Art Direction, and won two Evening Standard British Film Awards for Best Film and Best Actor.
Plot
In a dystopian 1984, Winston Smith endures a squalid existence in the totalitarian superstate of Oceania under the constant surveillance of the Thought Police. He resides in London, the capital city of the territory of Airstrip One, formerly Britain, and works in a small office cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history as dictated by the Party and its supreme leader, Big Brother, who never appears publicly but instead appears only on propaganda posters, advertising billboards, and television monitors. Smith attends mandatory public rallies at Victory Square where the citizens are shown propaganda films of the current war situation as well as contradictory and false news stories about Oceania’s war effort to unite the civilized world under Big Brother’s rule. While his co-worker and neighbour, Parsons, seems content to follow the state’s laws, Winston, haunted by painful childhood memories and restless carnal desires, keeps a secret diary of his private thoughts, thus creating evidence of his thoughtcrime. However, he tries to do it out of sight of the telescreens, to maintain his safety.
His life greatly changes when he is accosted by fellow Outer Party worker Julia, a mysterious, bold-looking, sensual, and free-spirited young woman who works as a print machine mechanic in the Ministry of Truth, and they begin an illicit affair.
During their first meeting in the remote countryside, they exchange subversive ideas before having sex. Shortly after, Winston rents a room above a pawn shop in the less restrictive proletarian area where they continue their liaison. Julia procures contraband food and clothing on the black market, and for a brief few months they secretly meet and enjoy an idyllic life of relative freedom and contentment together.
Their affair comes to an end one evening, when the Thought Police suddenly raid the flat and arrest them both. It is later revealed that a telescreen hidden behind a picture on the wall in their room recorded their transgressions and that the elderly proprietor of the pawn shop, Mr. Charrington, is a covert agent of the Thought Police. Winston and Julia are taken away to the Ministry of Love to be detained, questioned and “rehabilitated” separately.
There O’Brien, a high-ranking member of the Inner Party whom Winston had believed to be a fellow thoughtcriminal and agent of the resistance movement led by the Party’s archenemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, systematically tortures him.
O’Brien instructs Winston about the state’s true purpose and schools him in a kind of catechism on the principles of doublethink – the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts in the mind simultaneously. For his final rehabilitation, Winston is brought to Room 101, where O’Brien tells him he will be subjected to the “worst thing in the world”, designed specifically around Smith’s personal phobias.
When confronted with this unbearable horror – a cage filled with wild rats – Winston’s psychological resistance finally and irretrievably breaks down; he hysterically repudiates his allegiance to Julia. Seemingly subjugated and purged of any rebellious thoughts, impulses or personal attachments, Winston is restored to physical health and released.
Winston returns to the Chestnut Tree Café, where he had seen the rehabilitated thoughtcriminals Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford (themselves once prominent but later disgraced members of the Inner Party) who have since been “vaporized” and rendered unpersons. While sitting at the chess table, Winston is approached by Julia, who was similarly “rehabilitated”.
They share a bottle of Victory Gin and impassively exchange a few words about how they have betrayed each other. In spite of everything they have gone through, they still reaffirm their bond and express desire to see each other again. After she leaves, Winston watches a broadcast of himself on the large telescreen humbly and remorsefully confessing his “crimes” against the state and imploring forgiveness from the populace.
Upon hearing a news report declaring the Oceanian army’s utter rout of Eurasia’s forces in North Africa, Winston, appearing to have been deprived of his freedom to think and feel for himself and reduced to a mere shell of a man, soon to be deprived of his physical existence, looks at the still image of Big Brother that appears on the telescreen but then quickly turns away from it and looks in the direction of Julia with tears in his eyes as the words “I love you” are heard whispered in his voice.
Cast
John Hurt as Winston Smith
Rupert Baderman as Young Winston Smith
Richard Burton as O’Brien
Suzanna Hamilton as Julia
Cyril Cusack as Mr. Charrington
Gregor Fisher as Parsons
James Walker as Syme
Andrew Wilde as Tillotson
Merelina Kendall as Mrs. Parsons
John Boswall as Emmanuel Goldstein
Phyllis Logan as Telescreen Announcer (voice)
Roger Lloyd-Pack as Waiter
Bob Flag as Big Brother (only as a still image)
Pam Gems as the Washerwoman
Pip Donaghy as Inner Party Speaker
Janet Key as the Instructress
Hugh Walters as Artsem Lecturer
Shirley Stelfox as the Prostitute
Matthew Scurfield and Garry Cooper as Guards
Rolf Saxon as Patrolman
Production
In winter 1983, the director Michael Radford asked his producer to try to obtain the rights to Orwell’s novel, with low expectations that they were available. It turned out that the rights were held by Marvin Rosenblum, a Chicago lawyer who had been trying on his own to get such a film produced.
Rosenblum agreed to become an executive producer, and while producer Simon Perry raised the production money from Richard Branson, Radford wrote the script, inspired by his idea to make a “science fiction film made in 1948”. The script was finished in three weeks.
For the role of O’Brien, Paul Scofield was originally contracted to play the part, but had to withdraw after sustaining a broken leg while filming The Shooting Party.
Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, and Rod Steiger were all then considered. Richard Burton, who was living in Haiti, joined the production six weeks into its shooting schedule and insisted on his costume of a boiler suit being hand-made for him in Savile Row.
Some sources claim that principal photography began on 19 March 1984, ending later the same year in October 1984. The film was released that same month, however, and a title card at the end of the film explicitly states that it “was photographed in and around London during the period April–June 1984, the exact time and setting imagined by Orwell.”
The budget was originally £2.5 million, but this rose during filming and additional funds were required. The opening scenes of the film showing the Two Minutes Hate were filmed in a grass-covered hangar at RAF Hullavington near Chippenham in Wiltshire. Some scenes set in Victory Square were also filmed at Alexandra Palace in London. Senate House (University of London) was used for exterior shots of the Ministry of Truth.
The disused Battersea Power Station in Wandsworth served as the façade for the Victory Mansions, and the Beckton Gas Works in the Docklands of Newham was used as the setting for the proletarian zones. The pawnshop exterior, a pub scene and a scene with a prostitute were filmed in Cheshire Street, in London’s East End, an area Orwell had visited and commented on in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London.
The canteen interiors were filmed in a disused grain mill at Silvertown. In contrast, the idyllic, dreamlike “Golden Country”, where Winston and Julia repair for their first tryst and which recurs in Winston’s fantasies, was filmed in the southwest county of Wiltshire at a natural circle of hills called “Roundway”, near the town of Devizes. The scenes on the train were shot on the Kent and East Sussex Railway. The film shared a number of locations with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which was filmed the same year.
Radford and cinematographer Roger Deakins originally wanted to shoot the film in black and white, but the financial backers of the production, Virgin Films, opposed this idea. Instead, Deakins used a film processing technique called bleach bypass to give a distinctive washed-out look to the film’s color values.
This technique was invented by Japanese cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa for Kon Ichikawa’s film Her Brother (1960), in imitation of a more complicated process developed by Technicolor and Deluxe for the 1956 version of Moby Dick. The process was recreated for this production by Key.
The film is a very rare example of the technique being applied to every release print, rather than the interpositive, that was struck from the original camera negative, or the internegative (struck from the interpositive); as the silver is retained in the print and cannot be reclaimed by the lab, the cost is higher, but the retained silver gives a “depth” to the projected image.
Release and reception
Nineteen Eighty-Four made its theatrical debut on 10 October in London and on 14 December in New York City. It was released in the United States for one week in December 1984 at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles to qualify for the 1985 Academy Awards and grossed a house record $62,121, despite stormy weather.
Vincent
