ANOTHER COUNTRY (1984)

Now looking a bit touristy and maudlin, this look back (from his Russian exile) at the salad days of Guy Burgess’s sentimental education at British Prep School is more effective for spotting stars on the rise (Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Cary Elwes - all three lush of hair/dewy of eye) than in sussing out how the playing fields of Eton not only won the Battle of Waterloo but also set the stage of self-loathing & sexual hypocrisy that readied the soil for the Cambridge Five Russian spy ring to flourish.  With a cast old enough to matriculate from college let alone prep school (all in their mid-20s), director Marek Kanievska loses any idea of youthful sexual confusion in an all-boys academy and sits back while original play author Julian Mitchell’s sticks to his idea of Burgess as a sort of iconoclastic Oscar Wilde character, tilting at the lads in class until fatally falling hard for one.  Punished with a whipping on his bony bum, his indiscretions made only worse by crossing over house perimeters.  (Twice the prefects & ‘Gods’ you’d need to pacify.)  Burgess’s path to social & political revenge (a dish best served as cold as vodka at the Soviet Embassy) was set.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For a more sophisticated, if narrowly focused look at Burgess in exile, try Alan Bennett’s delicate miniature AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD/’83, broadcast while COUNTRY was still playing on stage.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-englishman-abroad-1983-question-of.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Everett got all the talk at the time (he’s certainly a striking figure, a Caravaggio portrait in British tweed), but Colin Firth, as an ultra-rational true believer steals the pic.