The Spanish Gardener (The Rank Organisation, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, September 6) at 7 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies for two films featuring this month’s “Star of the Month,” Dirk Bogarde. First off was a 1956 melodrama called The Spanish Gardener, based on a novel by A. J. Cronin, published in 1953, about Harrington Brande, an American diplomat stationed in Spain who loses out on the promotion he’d been expecting to head the Spanish consulate in Madrid. Instead he ends up being posted to a far less prestigious office in San Jorge on the Costa Brava, at least in part because six months earlier his wife left him, returned to the U.S. and left their son Nicholas in his care. Lonely and tormented by his dad’s overprotectiveness, Nicholas is fair game for the attentions of José Santero, the titular Spanish gardener, whom Harrington hires after he’s lost his previous job at a vineyard (so at least he knows how to grow things) and who’s also a hero at the local sport of pelota, a violent ballgame similar to the Mexican jai-alai. For this film version, screenwriters John Bryan and Lesley Storm changed Harrington from an American diplomat to a British one and altered Cronin’s bittersweet ending – permanently estranged from his father, Nicholas decides to return to his mother in the U.S. (in the film she’s moved to Scotland instead) – to have him and his father reconcile. The Spanish Gardener is a badly dated film because it’s impossible to watch the scenes between Nicholas (Jon Whiteley) and José (Dirk Bogarde) and not think José is “grooming” him to molest him – especially since director Philip Leacock dresses José in skin-tight blue jeans that show off Dirk Bogarde’s basket while every other adult male in the movie is wearing slacks.

It’s somewhat amazing that we can no longer watch a story Messrs. Cronin and Bryan and Ms. Storm clearly intended as a boy finding a friend and male role model in an unrelated adult when his father is being such an asshole to him (and everybody else) without reading it as a tale of sexual predation, but we can’t. Not that they don’t try; at one point Leighton Bailey (Bernard Lee) tells Harrington up-front that despite his impeccable academic and professional credentials, the reason he keeps getting passed over for the promotions he thinks he deserves is he’s not a “people person” and he’s too cold and hard to be a good diplomat – or a good father. The Spanish Gardener lurches to a climax on a train from San Jorge to Barcelona, where José is being taken to be tried for allegedly stealing Nicholas’s watch and other personal items from the Brande household. The actual thief is Garcia (Cyril Cusack), who along with his wife are servants in the Brande home; we see Garcia steal the watch and plant it in José’s jacket pocket, and of course Harrington is primed to believe the worst about José and takes the same train to testify against him at the trial – only José escapes by pulling the train’s rip cord to stop it and tears off into the forest country which he knows well while the British people hardly know it at all. Nicholas goes off in a terrific rainstorm in search of his friend, and Harrington realizes José is innocent when he comes home and Garcia has finished ransacking the place. Nicholas is able to find José by recalling a small lake where José once took him to fish, and Harrington traces his son there and ultimately all three principals are reunited. Eventually Harrington is reassigned to a British consulate in Stockholm, Sweden, and Nicholas goes with him after his dad acknowledges that José was innocent and their friendship was perfectly respectable.

The Spanish Gardener’s credits proclaim it “A British Film” and insist the whole thing was shot at Pinewood Studios, though TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said most of the outdoor scenes (which constitute the bulk of the film) were shot on location in Spain. Also, the credits include a VistaVision logo but the version TCM was showing was in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, which makes the film seem “scrunched” and shows us all too many half-people at either side of the image – though this isn’t as bad as some 4:3 versions of films shot in wide-screen I’ve seen. Also Ben Mankiewicz ridiculed the film for the fact that everybody in it, whether they’re playing Brits or Spaniards, speaks perfect British-accented English – though quite frankly I didn’t mind that at all. Dirk Bogarde did seem to me to have slightly tweaked his speaking voice to suggest “Spanishicity,” and that seemed much better than the Frito Bandito accent all too many Anglo or Anglo-American actors have adopted to play Hispanic or Latino roles. The Spanish Gardener is a story that dates very badly, though part of that is our loss; we’re simply too attuned to allegations of sexual abuse to see this story as the innocent cross-generational friendship Cronin, Bryan and Storm intended it to be.