Age of Consent

Age of Consent
theatrical poster (Spain)
Directed by	Michael Powell
Produced by	Michael Powell James Mason
Written by	Norman Lindsay (novel) Peter Yeldham
Starring	James Mason Helen Mirren Jack MacGowran
Music by	Peter Sculthorpe (original / restored) Stanley Myers (replacement)
Cinematography	Hannes Staudinger
Editing by	Anthony Buckley
Distributed by	Columbia (US)
Release date(s)	March 1969 (premiere-Brisbane) 14 May (Australia) 15 November (UK) 8 March 1970 (US)
Running time	103 minutes 98 minutes (US)
Country	Australia
Language	English
Budget	A$1.2 million[1]

Age of Consent (1969) is an Australian film which was the penultimate feature film directed by British director Michael Powell. The romantic comedy-drama stars James Mason, who also co-produced it with Powell, Helen Mirren, in her first major film role, and veteran Irish character actor Jack MacGowran. The screenplay by Peter Yeldham was adapted from the 1935 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Norman Lindsay.

Plot

Bradley Morahan (James Mason) is an Australian artist who feels he has become jaded by success and life in New York City. He decides that he needs to regain the edge he had as a young artist and returns to Australia.

He sets up in a shack on the shore of a small, sparsely inhabited island on the Great Barrier Reef. There he meets young Cora Ryan (Helen Mirren), who has grown up wild, with her only relative, her difficult, gin-guzzling grandmother 'Ma' (Neva Carr-Glynn). To earn money, Cora sells Bradley fish that she has caught in the sea. She later sells him a chicken which she has stolen from his spinster neighbor Isabel Marley (Andonia Katsaros). When Bradley is suspected of being the thief, he pays Isabel and gets Cora to promise not to steal anymore. To help her save enough money to fulfill her dream of becoming a hairdresser in Brisbane, he pays her to be his model. She reinvigorates him, becoming his artistic muse.

Bradley's work is disrupted when his sponging longtime "friend" Nat Kelly (Jack MacGowran) shows up. Nat is hiding from the police over alimony he owes. When Bradley refuses to give him a loan, Nat invites himself to stay with Bradley. After several days, Bradley's patience becomes exhausted. Luckily, the problem is solved for him. Nat romances Isabel, hoping to get some money from her. Instead, she unexpectedly ravishes him. The next day, he hastily departs the island, but not before stealing Bradley's money and some of his drawings.

Then Ma catches Cora posing nude for Bradley and accuses him of carrying on with her underage granddaughter. Bradley protests that he has done nothing improper; finally, he gives her the little money he has left to get her to go away.

When Cora discovers that Ma has found her hidden cache of money, she chases after her. In the ensuing struggle, Ma falls down a hill, breaks her neck, and dies. The local policeman sees no reason to investigate further, since the old woman was known to be frequently drunk.

Later that night, Cora goes to Bradley's shack, but is disappointed when he seems to view her only as his model. When she runs out, Bradley follows her into the water. There, she finally gets him to see her as a desirable young woman.

Cast

Cast notes

• Helen Mirren, who was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and had played supporting roles in three films, was 22 at the time the filming of Age of Consent began.^[2]
• James Mason met his future wife Clarissa Kaye on this film; she played the part of Meg, Bradley's ex-girlfriend in Australia. Their scene together was filmed in bed, and Kaye, who was recovering from pneumonia, had a temperature of 103 degrees F. After the filming, Mason began corresponding with Kaye, and the two were married in 1971, and remained so until Mason's death in 1984. She was sometimes referred to as Clarissa Kaye-Mason.^[1]

Production

Before filming began on Age of Consent, director Michael Powell said about it:

My next film is the story of a painter who believes that he will no longer paint and of a girl who persuades him to begin again...He will probably end up painting her; but to see a painter sit down and paint a girl, this could be exciting, but I had the hardest time explaining to my scriptwriter that this didn't excite me at all. What interested me was the problem of Creation and the fact that this creation in the case of the painter was very physical. He will have to struggle, to fight, even more strongly than he will move away from reality. It will be a slightly bitter comedy that I will produce with James Mason who will play the leading role.^[1]

Powell and Mason had wanted to work together in the past, on I Know Where I'm Going!, but had not been able to come to an agreement on billing and Mason was unwilling to go on location to Scotland. After Age of Consent, Powell tried to recruit Mason for his version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, a project which never came to fruition.^[3]

Filming began in March 1968 in Albion Park racecourse and elsewhere in Brisbane, with location filming on Dunk Island and Purtaboi Island on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, and interiors shot at Ajax Film Centre in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney.^[1][4][5][6]

Age of Consent ran into trouble with censors in the U.K., who cut the opening bedroom scene between James Mason and Clarissa Kaye, and also one of Mirren's nude swimming scenes. Columbia Pictures executives also removed Peter Sculthorpe's original score and replaced it with one by Stanley Myers. Both the original score and both cut scenes were reinstated when the film was restored in 2005.

Reception

Contemporary critical response to Age of Consent was not positive, with Penelope Mortimer in The Observer writing:

I tremendously admire James Mason and believed, until I saw Age of Consent, that he could do no wrong...It is best forgiven and forgotten.^[1]

and the reviewer in Variety writing:

The film has plenty of corn, is sometimes too slow, repetitious and badly edited...Yet [it] has immense charm, and the photography and superb scenery make it a good travelog ad for the Great Barrier Reef.^[1]

Michael Powell himself thought the film had turned out to be too comedic: "A sensual comedy. Not a big success, but interesting anyway."^[1]

The film was re-released on 9 January 2009^[7] on DVD as part of a double set of Powell films, paired with A Matter of Life and Death.

Box Office

Age of Consent took $981,000 at the box office in Australia,^[8] which is equivalent to $9,711,900 in 2009 dollars.

References

Notes

External links

• Age of Consent at the Internet Movie Database
• Age of Consent at the TCM Movie Database
• Age of Consent at AllRovi
• Reviews and articles at the Powell & Pressburger Pages
• Age of Consent at the National Film and Sound Archive
• John Walker. (2009). "Age of consent (1969) film review. artdesigncafe. Retrieved 5 January 2012.

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