All in the Family

The idea that two actors with such well-authenticated heterosexual credentials as Richard Burton and Rex Harrison would portray a pair of middle-aging homosexuals is calculated to strain, and simultaneously tease the imagination. From the time that the filming of Staircase was announced, cinemagoers wondered whether it was a stunt, an acting challenge or another bold foray into the territory of the taboo. The danger was that the pair would nance it up and produce a heterosexual parody of homosexual mannerisms--a kind of male pseudo-female impersonation act. It is to the credit of all concerned that Staircase is nothing of the sort. The foremost of the film's quiet, unobtrusive virtues is that it never caricatures or snickers or casts its two deviates outside the circle of the human family.

Essentially, Staircase is a kind of bickering domestic comedy. It could just as well have been about a pair of maiden aunts or bachelor brothers who in some 30 years have become fussily attuned to each other's quirky habit patterns. Charlie (Rex Harrison) is a peacock with a peckish tongue. Harry (Richard Burton) is a broody, sentimental mother hen with a semi-articulate cluck. Both men have auditioned for life and failed. Running a barbershop in a moldering district of London, they are each other's consolation prize. No hint of lust knits them together, only a saturating fear of loneliness. A special terror is to be aged and alone, and this is made chillingly vivid by Harry's bedridden mother (Cathleen Nesbitt), who lives with the couple. She is an arthritically gnarled stick of a woman who wets her bed, is only intermittently coherent and has to be spoon-fed by Harry, who tends her with a tactful if exasperated saintliness.

Moral of Compassion. The tie that binds also chafes. Since Harry does the cooking and the mending, he sometimes sulks like a put-upon housewife. Charlie is the male partner, as it were, and with a certain oafish, masculine crudity he does things like cut his toenails in bed. But his basic role is to nag at Harry and call him (her) a "twit." Be it ever so hurtful, there is no place like home, and in its pathetic way the Charlie-Harry relationship is a bad marriage that works. The law threatens to sever it. Charlie has been apprehended doing a transvestite turn in a gay club, and must appear in court. Like gentle, trapped and panicky animals, Charlie and Harry evoke the moral of compassion that underlies Staircase.

Adapted to the screen by Charles Dyer from his play, Staircase is a static, placid film in which the camerawork is subdued. Its strength is in its two key players. Each being determined, perhaps, to do his best acting before a peer, Burton and Harrison give firmly disciplined, finely delineated performances of undeviating honesty. Burton has rarely immersed himself in a part to the extent that one could forget he was Richard Burton, but he does it this time. Harrison has often seemed to be acting before a mirror rather than a camera. In Staircase he is acting before the broken mirror of a man's life, and he evolves a poignancy that is wonderfully real. At crucial moments in the film, he is given to saying "God help us all, and Oscar Wilde." Wilde would not have liked Staircase. It is not elegant. It is not witty. It lacks his opulent depravity. But in its modest and unassuming way it shows that Wilde's martyrdom has finally affected the conscience of humanity.

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