Alternate Best Actor 1961: Peter Finch in No Love For Johnnie

Peter Finch did not receive an Oscar nomination, despite winning a BAFTA, for portraying Johnnie Byrne in No Love For Johnnie. 

No Love For Johnnie follows an MP as he struggles with love and his political career. As the Labor party refuses to give him a cabinet position and his wife leaves him. 

A quick sidebar I will say the more I see from Peter Finch the more I am impressed by his career-best work in Network, if only because this has been a bit of a reverse-engineered look, where I started with his final and best feature film performance, and have retroactively seen what his more expected presence was. This is to the point, I imagine if I had gone in the opposite direction I likely would've said "I didn't know he had THAT in him in" regarding his final film. Because the rest of his work, while consistently good and often more than that, fits much more within a certain type of somewhat repressed Englishman, dealing with emotional turmoil in a rather subdued way, as seen in Far From the Madding Crowd, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Girl with Green Eyes, and I'm sure more than that. No Love For Johnnie fits right into that ilk, as we enter into the film as we meet the middle-aged man trudging along in his existence, noted because of his political status, though that seemingly goes only so far. 

I'll say perhaps a flaw with the film itself is how it limits our sympathies with Johnnie, I mean come on, young Billie Whitelaw is into you, and she's literally a stairwell away, and you DON'T GO FOR THAT, get your stuff together Johnnie! I mean...uh we don't get really any of the men before this current situation, we get some mentions but even those are limited, so we start with the man in his hole, which is a bit of a curious start. The most we get before this is a brief interview with Johnnie over his party's success, and Finch delivers it with a politician's direct overtures and sort of muted emotion. He presents Johnnie as the statesman even as he suffers disappointment in not being selected for the "front row" and any kind of important position in the government. Finch portrays this rejection with a quiet resignation over the disappointment rather than any kind of more extreme heartbreak. His Johnnie as a politician seems set within a certain line of experience, of a man never quite where he'd like to be, but as someone who managed to be somewhere. 

We follow Johnnie home where his wife announces she's leaving him, and Johnnie is left alone, despite again his upstairs neighbor being quite eager to comfort Johnnie. Again what we see in Finch's performance is mainly resignation over this fact as he just seems to exist within this general sorrow, though honestly only turns to overt frustration when Whitelaw's Mary tries to comfort him. There we see a very aggressive side to the man, one that isn't all that pleasant honestly, and decreases any sympathies one can have for the man, even if he does halfheartedly apologize later on. Finch's performance I should say isn't the issue I have in this, mostly, in that everything he is depicting feels authentic, and in that sense, he makes Johnnie feel real, even if real in the sense Johnnie's isn't someone I'd particularly like to give my time or attention to. I would say perhaps another actor could've had more overt charm, which would've created a more inherent sympathy, even with the character's flaws, that isn't really the case for Finch whose general presence is fairly cold. 

Johnnie's journey is about attempting to reclaim love and his political life, one by dating a young model and the other by attempting some minor disruption of his party. In both, Finch is entirely convincing, albeit not entirely compelling in depicting both of these aspects. We see him in the depiction with the younger woman where Finch presents the sort of dormant lust in the man, and a bit more human desperate need for affection from the woman. Contrasting that as the politician we do get shades of a man a bit shrewder in his methods, whereas Finch does have this sort of precise delivery and manner as per expected of a man deep within the system. Again in both Finch does make the struggle feel real of the man filled with the need for happiness as he pours out all he's got towards the young woman, and contrasting that determination of the man trying to regain his power as best he can. I'll admit as much as I found Finch made all this believable, all this feel real, I just still didn't really care about Johnnie or anything that was going on with him at any point. And I can care about some reprehensible characters if compelling enough, but Johnnie isn't quite there. 

Part of this disconnect for me I do think is that we come into Johnnie with this perspective, where we are barely given a sense of the passion that put the man into politics. This is touched upon very briefly, and Finch has little to work with in terms of establishing this as something more substantial within his performance. The fact that he's even a further left labor politician feels cursory because what the man really stands for doesn't really come up. The most we get otherwise is Johnnie explaining his old struggles with his wife who never shared or showed that much affection for him. Finch is certainly good in the scene in showing the old pains as something that is quite severe in his manner, as tension in his eyes as something he's held onto for some time, but also something he just continues to live with it, even in pain. We see the slow defeat of the man, who has apparently been defeated personally all his life, as the title says there's "No Love for Johnnie". Finch depicts this breakout effectively enough as this breakdown of self-pity, with the emotion of it feeling real, though again still the emotional impact on me, as a viewer stays quite limited. Johnnie never becomes someone I terribly find all that engaging to explore, so he just kind of exists as he is. So when he finally finds some success, with a key conflict within, I personally just felt indifferent. And is this Finch or the writing? Well, mostly the latter I think, which I don't think does Johnnie any favors throughout because I do think the film needed more meat within the character's passions and his loneliness. Finch on the other hand does what he can, and does deliver a good performance, though I do feel strangely limited by shortcomings of that script.