February 16, 1992 | For Britishers of a certain age, the onstage performances and offstage misadventures of tenor Josef Locke are the stuff of legend. For director Peter Chelsom and co-screenwriter Adrian Dunbar, they are the inspiration for fanciful filmmaking.
And for Ned Beatty, the roly-poly, Kentucky-born character actor who plays Locke in Hear My Song, the delightfully whimsical comedy opening Friday at the AMC Greenway 3 Theatre, Locke’s music and misadventures are the stuff of a fabulously full-bodied movie role.
The real Josef Locke, a native of Derry, Northern Ireland, first gained attention throughout Great Britain during the 1940s.
“Jo was one of the youngest sergeants in the British Army in North Africa during the Second World War,” Dunbar says. “And he was, like, 6-foot-3. He got on Armed Forces radio, and he sang. And when everybody heard this guy back in England, Ireland and Scotland, it really kind of cheered them up. They thought, ‘Here’s this young guy, out fighting in the desert, and he’s getting up, singing with a band, singing all these songs.’ He became popular, like, overnight.
“And after the war — at that time, most tenors were about 5-foot-3, Welsh or Italian. Suddenly, this guy arrived. And there was this famous story where he sung on the phone to (impresario) Lew Grade up in Blackpool. And Grade says, ‘This guy’s got a real voice — what’s he like?’ And Grade’s talent scout says, ‘Well, he’s 6-foot-3, and he’s good-looking…’
“And Grade says, ‘Right! Book him!’”
Locke began his career as an opera singer, but, lured by fame and fortune, he quickly changed his repertoire to include romantic pop tunes. (The title Hear My Song comes from one of his signature songs.) By 1948, says Chelsom, “Jo was the highest paid entertainer in the country, earning 2,000 a week. And remember — you could buy a car for 60 in those days.”
“And this was the thing: Jo spent it!” Dunbar says, his voice a playful mixture of admiration and amazement. “It was a real gray, postwar period. And Jo spent his money. He’d go to parties, and Jo would be buying champagne, and there’d be an entourage. He spent his dough. And so, therefore, when the tax man came along to ask him for some, he didn’t have very much around. But he was a real glamorous influence on that period. That’s what gave him a lot of public appeal.”
Locke enjoyed his greatest success as a performer in the seaside resort of Blackpool, Chelsom’s home town, which the director describes as “sort of like your Atlantic City. In its heyday, everybody — Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich — played there.”
But the tenor beat a hasty retreat back to Ireland when tax agents came calling. During his years of exile — and for several years afterwards — a rival tenor, Eric Eliefson, took advantage of the legend that Locke left in his wake. With the help of clever advertising come-ons — posters that announced “Mr. X — Is he or isn’t he?” — Eliefson gave sold-out concerts of Locke’s songs. Sometimes, even Locke’s ex-lovers (whose number throughout Great Britain were legion) were fooled by the imposture.
Mixing a few of these facts with generous helpings of blarney and pixie dust, Chelsom and Dunbar collaborated on the screenplay for Hear My Song, a madcap yet heartfelt comedy about romance, redemption and rowdy Irish charm that was a highlight of the recent Sundance Film Festival.
Dunbar winningly stars as Micky O’Neill, an Irish-born impresario who books Mr. X into his Liverpool nightclub, hoping to attract customers and, not incidentally, greatly impress Nancy (Tara Fitzgerald), his spirited girlfriend. But Mr. X also attracts the attention of the chief constable (David McCallum) obsessed with arresting Josef Locke for tax fraud. Worse, Mr. X is exposed as a fraud when he tries too hard to get too friendly with one of the real Locke’s former sweethearts (Shirley-Anne Field) who just happens to be Nancy’s mother. To redeem himself, Micky returns to Ireland to lure Jo Locke out of his tax exile.
And that is where Ned Beatty comes in.
“When they first sent me the script,” Beatty recalls, “I read it, and I loved it, and I thought, ‘Here’s a wonderful piece of material — but I don’t know what they want me to play in it.’ I finally said, ‘Well, they must want me to play Mr. X. That sounds like my kind of part. But I wonder who they’re getting to play Jo Locke?’”
Beatty admits he was dumbfounded, and “very dubious,” when he learned who Chelsom had in mind for the part.
“I had figured, that’s a leading man kind of part,” Beatty says. “They want an aging leading man, they don’t want me. So Peter finally came to my house and said, ‘No, I want you to play the part.’
“I never got a substantial answer when I asked him why, to tell you the truth,” Beatty adds with a chuckle. “I still haven’t got one. But I think he did a very unusual thing. He took a leading man type of actor, David McCallum, and cast him as the villain, if you will, or the bad guy, and took a character actor and cast him in this romantic part. And I can’t complain. I’m still not comfortable with it. But I love the fact that people love the film.”
“Actually,” says Chelsom, “I like casting people in ways that redefine them, or push them on into an area that they’ve never been in before. I can tell you, there’s only one person who would have been as good to play Jo Locke, and that’s Ray McAnally (the Irish-born, Oscar-nominated co-star of My Left Foot), who died a couple of years before we did the film.
“It’s funny, though — when we had our party before filming began, Ned turned to me, visibly shaking, and said, ‘I’ve never been so nervous in my life.’ And I said, ‘The same here, Ned. Maybe we’re about to do something good.’”
Maybe so, but Beatty continued to have qualms about playing Locke, and about lip-synching during Locke’s concert performances.
“I was dubious about dubbing somebody else’s voice because I was a singer when I was younger, and that sort of thing always bugged me. I always thought, ‘If you’re going to have a singer, cast a goddamn singer.’ I went through that with Peter. And his basic answer was, ‘Well, if Pavarotti was available, I would have cast him.’ I said, ‘Is that the only tenor you would hire?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’”
Beatty believes that, even after the passing of two decades, Deliverance remains the movie for which he is most widely recognized.
“It really is the best film I’ve ever done. But I think Hear My Song is maybe the second-best film. And the only reason is it’s not the best film is that, story-wise, it’s not quite as big. Deliverance is just an awesome movie.”
Hear My Song, on the other hand, is simply, and enjoyably, gloriously loony and exhilaratingly romantic. It earned Beatty a Golden Globe nomination and may very well get him an Academy Award nomination as well. More important, from Beatty’s view, his performance has pleased his most demanding critic.
The real Josef Locke – who’s alive and well and living in Clane, Ireland — “really likes the movie,” Beatty says. “This really fascinates me, because there was no attempt to make him squeaky clean or anything like that. The only thing that we really tried to say about him, ‘The S.O.B. could really sing.’”
“But I can tell you this,” Chelsom says. “Hear My Song was shown in Jo’s hometown of Derry. And there’s never been a bigger thumbs-up for the film than from Derry.”
