The Eccentric Mr Turner (2015) Online

I found time to go to Stratford upon Avon over the weekend to see a late night screening of a film – The Eccentric Mr Turner. Yes another film about England's greatest landscape painter; if not the world's greatest.

The film is a short one and deals with the last part of the great man's life and features a virtuoso performance in the title role by Gary Taylor. With a few flourishes and flicks of the wrist, a nod and a wink here and there and a look in the eye that makes you think, look and wonder, Taylor introduces us to an aspect in the life on JMW Turner that the recent big budget bio-pic missed.

Why the eccentric and why the mister?

When he first started to stay with his eventual last lover, Mrs Booth, he was known, in her guest house, as Mr Booth - and the eccentricity?

The first thing we see in the film is a painting and we hear Turner admonishing someone; the someone in question has made some kind of mistake and made a mess of something – another fine mess you got me into – and we find out that that someone being lectured to, is a horse; his horse! And the horse's name?

Hercules!

We learn from Mrs Booth, ably played by Tina Parry, that Turner had fallen asleep and Hercules had to find his own way home.

And then he turns his attention to his two cats – Wellington and Napoleon, would you believe – and they are still out and will be disciplined upon their return.

As he wanders around his studio giving instructions to Mrs Booth, he is starting another painting - the painting turns out to be his most famous and notorious 'The Slave Ship' which he had completed many years before.

It soon becomes clear that his life is flashing before his eyes as Turner paints and goes through his experiences meeting again his father, to whom he was very close and misses so much: Charles Dickens, The Prince of Wales and George Stephenson. He also meets two of the crew of the Slave Ship; he learns that the human cargo are treated wretchedly and if any are sick they are thrown overboard. Just like that – no nursing needed just a chuck over one of the sides.

One of the crew, he meets again, struck up a relationship with one of the women who had been thrown into the ocean and the moving scene thrusts Turner on to The Slave Ship painting, and as we have been watching the film the famous painting slowly but suddenly appears before our eyes.

This has and is a one man stage show and Gary Taylor would paint The Slave Ship at each venue – he must have painted it many times but in this film he had but one chance as the film was shot in one long take.

No edits or cuts just one long take, in pristine black and white shot beautifully by Michael Booth who also directs.

I would like to think that this lovely little film would go on from here – it's low budget but doesn't look it.

Here is an excerpt from Turner's

"Fallacies of Hope" (1812):

"Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;

Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds

Declare the Typhon's coming.

Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard

The dead and dying - ne'er heed their chains

Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!

Where is thy market now?"