The Credit Crunch - just getting warmed up

I recall a scene from The Cruel Sea. Captain Jack Hawkins and his first officer Donald Sinden meet for a drink, reunited after having their ship blown up beneath them. They ask for gins and a jug of water. When a doddering old waiter brings the order, Hawkins complains that there is a layer of dust on the water.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ replies the waiter. ‘It’s the war.’

We like our catch-all excuses and easy explanations, don’t we? An unusual amount of cancer in area? Radio masts. Freak weather conditions? Well, it used to be ‘all them rockets they keep sending up. Now it’s climate change.

That reminds me of a conversation at the bar the other week. The barmaid served someone a coke and apologised that the pub had no more ice.

‘Bloody global warming,’ said the customer.

Currently, the ‘credit crunch’, recently upgraded to the ‘credit crash’, is the root of all our ills. Christmas turkeys will be priced out of the reach of ‘hard-working families’ and children will have to do without another flat-screen plasma TV because their parents are in negative equity. No doubt the government has emergency plans for soup kitchens.

A few months ago, pubs were closing because of the smoking ban. Before that it was supermarket offers; before that it was Wetherspoon’s; before that pubco’s. Now it’s the credit crunch, although I have it on good authority that the real culprit is Maggie Thatcher.

To be continued.

1974: a discourse on cinema

1974: a discourse on cinema


I have come to like the word discourse. From it comes the adjective ‘discursive’, which has, strangely, two contrasting definitions. Namely, ‘rambling or digressive’; and, ‘proceeding by argument or reasoning’. So it’s difficult to go wrong, isn’t it?

I shall not attempt to talk about the social context of this year’s films, partly because it is irrelevant to our enjoyment of them, and partly because attempts to do that are usually uninformed and motivated by a desire to promote some sociological or political hobby horse. For example, The Magnificent Seven is all about the Peace Corps and The Wild Bunch is the Vietnam war.

In any case, I can’t think offhand of too many interesting things about 1974. Maybe I was preoccupied.

We did have two general elections. Ted Heath called one early in the year on the theme, ‘Who runs the country?’ Well, not Ted, apparently, because Harold Wilson got back into power. In fact, the National Union of Mineworkers was confirmed as the real power in the land, as they had been two years before, when Heath had capitulated to them. How they must crowed! I’ll bet the Brighouse and Rastrick played The Red Flag non-stop for a fortnight, whippets and pigeons were renamed Arthur; and no doubt Comrade Scargill was secretly honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

But we all know that hubris is inevitably followed by nemesis, and we all know too that the goddess, Nemesis, is female.

Westerns

According to the inscription I wrote at the time, I bought Philip French’s Westerns on 22 March 1974, a book which still informs any conversation I have on the subject (which is a pain when I think I’m being original)l. And yet, in retrospect, it was around this year that the Western ceased to exist as a regular banker for film-makers. John Ford had died the previous year. John Wayne would finish with The Shootist the following year. Clint Eastwood would return to the West occasionally, but his cash cows would be Dirty Harry rip-offs and thick-eared comedies. Kevin Costner tries to keep the flame alive, but you sense it is a personal mission that he will only be able to pursue as long as he has some box-office clout. But I’m grateful to him. To see a genuinely classic Western like Open Range, thirty years on, was a true delight, even if there was too much concentration on Annette Bening and too little on the villains.

Howard Hawks

While on the subject, 1974 was the year that Howard Hawks received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. His film career had ended with a whimper called Rio Lobo in 1970, the second rehash of Rio Bravo. To be honest, apart from Red River, I never rated Hawks highly as a Western director. Rio Bravo, I know, is a film that appears in most critics’ top ten Westerns, but to me it is slack, stagey and self-indulgent. It’s the kind of film an untalented Hawks fan would make, making sure he ticks all the correct auteurist boxes – a group of ‘professionals’, a young woman who has to prove herself as worthy of the men, tough talk about ‘being good enough’, a couple of well-staged action scenes, a sense of the cast ‘having fun’, etc. . . etc.

Having written that, I thought I’d watch it again, in the spirit of fairness. And, on reflection, I can add that it is sloppily edited, overlong, amateurishly acted; the dialogue is stilted and knowing; it is embarrassing.

But there was a time when Hawks had been great: Not just Red River (where he drew a breakthrough performance from Wayne); Only Angels Have Wings (another of those dark/light Cary Grant heroes and a showcase of how being studio-bound does not necessarily detract from an action film), Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday (frenetic comedies with Grant again – only Hitchcock used him as well as Hawks); The Big Sleep (substantially remade when he recognised the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall); To Have And Have Not, with Bacall again. By the way, in 1974, Bacall was still only 50, while Bardot was already 40. To Have and Have Not is the main source for all those auteurists, who seem to think it’s the height of artistry to repeat yourself in every film you make. I think it was critic Robin Wood, who relegated The Big Sleep to a footnote in his book on Hawks, because it didn’t conform to what he saw as Hawks’ usual themes, whereas a piece of garbage like Hatari did, and was duly and dutifully analysed.

Walter Brennan

One of Hawks regular support actors was Walter Brennan, and 1974 was the year of his death. Three times winner of the best supporting actor Oscar, always worth watching – and listening to, with that much-imitated, but inimitable, voice. He was John Wayne’s conscience in Red River (‘You was wrong, Mr Dunson’); frontiersman in Northwest Passage; devious and dictatorial in The Westerner as Judge Roy Bean (‘That’s ma rulin’); black-bearded, black-hatted and black-hearted as Old Man Clanton in My Darling Clementine (‘When you pull a gun, kill a man’); cantankerous and desperate to be useful in Rio Bravo; drunken object of Bogart’s affection and loyalty, but not pity, in To Have and Have Not.

The French

Incidentally, Brennan was used in Swamp Water by Jean Renoir, another Life Achievement winner this year. Now, Renoir is one of those ‘great’ directors about whom I know little. It’s a long time since I saw La Grande Illusion, which I remember enjoying, but La Règle du Jeu left me cold. I’ll have to try it again some time with the advantage of maturity.

Truffaut’s Day for Night won 1974’s Oscar for best foreign film, despite the presence of Jacqueline Bissett. It’s enjoyable, I suppose, and a bit of a film buff’s film, but I’ve almost completely forgotten it. Better was Lancelot du Lac, directed by Robert Bresson. Your studies will have taught you what we in this country often forget, that French literature made as much use of the Arthurian legends as did English. It was John Boorman’s Excalibur which reflected best my childhood imaginings of the Camelot tales. The 1954 Robert Taylor film was just a medieval swashbuckler, but Boorman captures the magic and the unreality of a golden age of forested England and doomed idealism. Apparently, Britain has the richest vein of fantasy fiction in the world and I would say it all arises from the myths of Arthur. They are also, of course, prototype Westerns.

All I remember of Bresson’s Lancelot is that it was impressive, but I can’t remember why. There was a lot of clanking metal and shots of legs tramping heavily through mud. No doubt an attempt to contrast myth and reality.

The Bresson film to see is Un condamne a mort s’est echappé, the methodical account of the true story of a resistance man’s escape from the Gestapo. Quite riveting, in the way that only French films can make detail and lack of action. Don Siegel went for the same approach in Escape from Alcatraz, but seems to have lost his nerve and allowed too much Eastwood machismo and prison film cliché.

Jean Gabin, the French Spencer Tracy and star of La grande Illusion, made his last film this year.

Support actors

It’s one of my great joys in watching films to recognise the support actors, like Brennan, who turn up again and again. Watch any old British comedy, say I’m All Right, Jack, and you can count on seeing Liz Fraser, Irene Handl, Margaret Rutherford. Maybe Joan Hickson, who earned long-delayed fame as Miss Marple on TV. Again, take any fifties British war film and expect to see Brian Forbes, David Lodge, Richard Wattis, Harold Goodwin. It’s the same with old Hollywood films, Warner Brothers: Alan Hale, Donald Crisp (died 1974) and Una O’connor; John Ford, with John Qualen, Mildred Natwick and Russell Simpson; Peckinpah, with Luke Askew, Strother Martin and L Q Jones.

Of course, there are all sorts of support actors. There are the second leads, like Arthur Kennedy, Claude Rains and Dean Jagger, who might get lead status in support features (Randolph Scott achieved it by producing his own films).

There are whole films made up of supporting actors, with or without a nominal lead – The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Twelve Angry Men.

Some, like Lee Marvin would go on to big-star status; others became household names on television – Telly Savalas, Raymond Burr and Richard Boone.

Then there are the hundreds of reliable actors, without whom the stars cannot shine: old Universal movies with Dwight Frye, Una O’Connor, E E Clive; the broads, whores, waitresses of Eve Arden, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter; the sheriffs, cops and sergeants of Ward Bond, Will Geer and Jay C. Flippen; the outlaws of Robert J. Wilke, Jack Elam, Lyle Bettger; the villains of Basil Rathbone, Henry Daniell, George Zucco; the comic characters of Andy Devine, Nigel Bruce, Mickey Shaughnessy, Paul Ford. (Just as I write this, The Times publishes obituaries of Sheree North, Lloyd Bochner and Mark Lawrence). More recently Terry O’Quinn, Pat Hingle and J T Walsh.

Everyone’s favourite character actor? Probably Harry Dean Stanton. Mine? Ben Johnson. But I have soft spot for Frank Thring (Ben Hur, The Vikings). And where would Laurel and Hardy be without Mae Busch and James Finlayson?

But the one who must be given prominence is Thomas Mitchell, whose annus mirabilis was 1939, when he featured in 6 films: Trade Winds, Mr Smith goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach (an Oscar for that); and Only Angels have Wings. The last was for Hawks and he played the ‘Walter Brennan’ role.

On their way out

I’ll mention just a couple more deaths. This year saw the departure of Sam Goldwyn. One of the great pioneers, who said that a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and who became annoyed when critics talked of a film as belonging to the director, not the producer. If you ever see his film Dead End, you’ll notice that the credits make this point very clearly.

And Jack Benny died. He was famous as a radio comedian, noted for his image of tight-fistedness and his comic timing.

Typical Benny routine:

(Sound effects of Benny walking down the street).

MUGGER: This is a stick-up! Your money or your life!

Silence.

MUGGER (louder): I said this is a stick-up! Your money or your life!

Silence.

MUGGER (even louder): Your money or your life!

BENNY: I’m thinking it over.

He turned up as guest in several films, but the only memorable one in which he starred is To be or not to be, a black comedy set against the Nazi invasion of Poland. That’s quite amazing, considering it was made in 1942. The word ‘Jew’ is not mentioned, but it’s obvious the whole cast is Jewish, and there are jokes such as one actor saying to another, ‘What you are I wouldn’t eat.’

The great stars of the thirties had died (Gable, Bogart, Tracy), retired (Grant, Crawford) or lapsed into cameo roles (Stewart, Fonda, Davis). Only Wayne remained a star to the end. The post-war generation was petering out: Douglas would direct and star in Posse (1975, his last work of consequence); Peck surprisingly didn’t do much special after I Walk the Line (1970); Mitchum was excellent in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and should have left it there, on a high; Lancaster’s last great film was Ulzana’s Raid (1972). It was touching to see Kirk and Burt reunited for Tough Guys in 1986. The big names from the fifties, apart from Newman, had exploded in various ways from the inflation of their own egos. I’m not a great fan of Dean, Brando or Clift.

The Godfather

Going back to Harry Dean Stanton, he appeared, uncredited in The Godfather part II, which won the best picture Oscar for this year (awarded 1975), plus awards for Coppola, de Niro and in various technical categories, not to mention a clutch of nominations.

What more can be said about The Godfather series? The original still leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. I feel guilty for enjoying it so much. But I do love it. Its pace and narrative drive, tension, the handling of a long complicated, multi-charactered story, camerawork, acting. Particularly Pacino, who is quite mesmerising. It’s just that I hate being made to care about this psychopathic scum. More than that – after all, you could say the same thing about The Wild Bunch - the film goes out of its way to justify the Corleones. You don’t see, after all, the intimidation of innocent people offered ‘protection’, the beatings, torture and murders; the corruption of unions, police, judges; the exploitation of American freedom and civil rights to escape justice. I’m thinking of the drugs debate, all the family stuff, loyalty, all the down-trodden immigrant versus corrupt police and politicians crap. It’s the self-righteous self justification of every anti-social thug.

At least, Part II is more honest. Pacino is a paranoid monster by the end, but the flashback scenes are still bathed in a rosy glow of nostalgia. It’s as if Michael’s real crime is to betray the ‘moral’ approach to organised crime of his father. The irony is supposed to be that in serving what Senator Geary describes as his ‘whole fucking family’, he destroys his own, real family.

Other Oscars

Pacino did not win the Oscar. In one its regular spasms of sentiment, Hollywood gave that to Art Carney for Harry and Tonto. De Niro won best support. Meanwhile, Jack Nicholson was nominated for Chinatown, Dustin Hoffmann for Lenny and Jeff Bridges for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. The new generation was making its mark.

Overall, Oscar-wise, the list of films is impressive. Hollywood’s new wave, which one could argue started in the late sixties with films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, etc was in full swing. Even John Cassavetes is nominated for A Woman under the Influence. Sex, violence, four-letter words, cynicism, downbeat endings; directorial power and no attempt to tailor a film for a mass audience; stars who played characters. For a while the director would see himself as king, and there would be financial disasters and pretentious claptrap to prove it. Nothing is new of course (the previous year Orson Welles had bowed out with F for Fake), but what might have got through the system in the past, because of subtlety or sheer, shining merit, was now almost de rigeur.

Is it any wonder when you look at the old-fashioned entertainments still being produced? The Towering Inferno, for example, was nominated, as was Murder on the Orient Express. Sidney Lumet directed that. Why? Sidney Lumet, who made Twelve Angry Men, The Hill, The Offence, Dog Day Afternoon, Q and A. Did he need the money? Was it for a bet or part of a deal? It did get Ingrid Bergman an Oscar, a sign that her scandalous behaviour of twenty years before was forgiven, but not, I’m afraid, that she put in a good performance.

And they nominated Albert Finney as best actor in it! Put on a lot of make-up and a stupid moustache, pad out your belly, affect a strange accent; and Hollywood is impressed by your ‘acting’. Just be easily and naturally brilliant, like Mitchum or Grant, and you’re ignored. They nominated Fred Astaire for The Towering Inferno. Same thing. Totally ignored when he was making his musicals, he had to make do with a special award in 1949 and now a sentimental gesture.

Women in the movies

So what about women? Best actress was Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Directed by Martin Scorsese, another sign of things to come. I haven’t seen it, doesn’t appeal. I believe it’s one of these ‘feisty woman, good mother, bad husband, proves she doesn’t need men’ tales, Joan Crawford material.

Film actresses are always complaining that Hollywood is not interested in starring them when they reach forty. Maybe so, but Hollywood is a business, run for profit. You might as well criticise Escort for not publishing photos of naked gays.

Women in the cinema. From an early age I resented their presence in my favourite action movies. ‘They sure do slow a man down,’ as Richard Widmark said in one western. There would always be this love-dovey stuff delaying the hero from his gunfight, or a cop would arrive home late after seeing his partner shot dead, only to be nagged about the dinner being burnt. If a hero said that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, there would be some woman telling him he hadn’t got to at all, in fact he shouldn’t do it, and, if he really loved her, he wouldn’t dream of it. What was it that the great sage said? ‘Every woman wants her man to change; every man wants his woman never to change. Tragically, both are doomed to disappointment.’

Of course, my attitudes matured as I grew older and I genuinely appreciated the presence of women in the films of Russ Meyer (a genuine ‘auteur’ creator of fully developed characters and well-rounded performances); and Susan George’s presence in Straw Dogs was fundamental to Peckinpah’s masterly analysis of the masculine-feminine interface.

But look at Bullitt. It won an Oscar for best editing. What a travesty! No doubt a decent functional job of cutting the car chase swung it, but they neglected to edit Jacqueline Bissett out. She’s pretty, I grant you, in a sexless way, but what is the point of her character, except to nag at Steve McQueen for doing a necessary but dirty job. She’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t understand the need for sewage workers, because I doubt she’s ever taken a shit in her life. That prissy English accent! Even the way she eats her breakfast cereal is irritating.

So, women in films: dumb, decorative, dangerous; they care, they console, they control, they castrate; their role is education, civilisation, moralisation; they represent community against individualism, stasis against movement, caution against action, peace against violence, weakness against strength.

Crawford and Davis were exceptions. Their personalities, their drawing power meant they could be central. So too was Scarlett O’Hara. Ellen Burstyn’s character allows her to be the same. Years later we would have Thelma and Louise, where female characters take over the usually male roles of buddies in a road movie. But these characters all remain believable females. It got a bit silly in The Long Kiss Goodnight, where Geena Davis tries to be Bruce Willis, but a good believable woman in an action film is Sigourney Weaver in Alien, a part that could have been played by a man or a woman. The power of the alien is such that the usual physical disparity of male and female becomes irrelevant. Mental strength and intelligence become all.

Conclusion

What did the future hold? Well, John Carpenter released Dark Star, the beginning of his career and the first draft of Alien. Jonathan Demme, later to make The Silence of the Lambs, made Caged Heat. It’s an exploitational ‘women in prison’ film, starring Meyer favourite Erica Gavin – if only I could learn to insert pictures into this text – and is now a cult movie. And Scorsese was making his mark, of course. Steven Spielberg came out with The Sugarland Express.

Jodie Foster appeared in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Harrison Ford in The Conversation.

Jane Fonda produced the documentary Vietnam Journey, which fortunately I’ve managed to miss all these years. I expect Michael Moore has seen it. Documentaries are so much more ‘truthful’, aren’t they?

John Carpenter was planning unashamedly to make the kind of B-movies that he’d always loved. So were Spielberg and Lucas, but their plan was to retain their independence and still work within the big studio system. In fact, their strategy was to make A-list films from second feature material and their independence would come from running the system. You make more money that way.

I admire Spielberg tremendously and Schindler’s List is one of the greatest films ever made, but there is so much to regret in this trend. Compare Jaws with Moby Dick; Raiders of the Lost Ark with The African Queen or Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Jurassic Park with King Kong. All the stunts, all the special effects amount to sound and fury signifying nothing, because there’s little humanity. And Spielberg can do humanity: Schindler, Empire of the Sun, The Colour Purple, Amistad. Discuss!

All in all, not a bad year. Watch this space for 1957

1963: Annus Mirabilis?

To a good friend born in 1963 -

1963: Annus Mirabilis?

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

(Philip Larkin)

I was one of a group of library students on a visit to Hull University when Larkin made a speech of welcome. His remarks were sardonic and lugubriously droll, rather like those of a thinking man’s Les Dawson.

Although I have to say that this poem is, to me, rather like that of a thinking man’s Pam Ayres.

Larkin’s point is that sex ceased to be a furtive thing, a reward for marriage, and became the guiltless delight of all. Not so, in 1963. Books and films may well have become more open, but ‘middle class morality’ still reigned. While Tom Jones was winning the best film Oscar for its sunny, amoral bawdiness, Cabinet ministers were being hounded from office merely for indulging in a little recreational sex. By the way, why do we talk about ‘middle class morality’? In my experience, nowhere is there more ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy than within the working class. (I speak as a member of both).

Being a late developer, sexual intercourse, in my case, took a little longer to begin. What did begin was politics – between the end of the Cuban threat and the death of JFK. Any number of political and social issues were being debated and there seemed little doubt that Harold Wilson (after whom our budgie was named) would soon be Prime Minister. The quaint forelock-tugging days of old Britain would be gone forever. I remember the passionate arguments over hanging and homosexuality, comprehensive education and decolonisation, the bomb and abortion, race, prostitution, nationalisation, etc, etc.

A brave new world of liberalism and equality was dawning, or so we youthful innocents thought. Those days seem pretty quaint themselves now.

Did you know that in November the BBC banned Joe Brown’s version of George Formby’s Little Ukelele?

I don’t really think popular music changed in 1963. After all, rock ‘n’ roll had been well-established for nearly ten years. Elvis’ best work was already behind him (his films this year were Fun in Acapulco and It happened at the World ‘s Fair – in case you don’t believe me). The best-selling songs in Britain this year were copies, covers and clones. I think what did happen was that, whereas singers like Elvis, Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele quickly moved into the mainstream, as what they saw as the only way to maintain a career, The Beatles and their successors became the mainstream or at least a permanent current within it.

Britgrit

But it’s films I plan to talk about, and the Brits were making a strong mark there too. As well as Tom Jones, the second Bond, From Russia with Love, was released. This Sporting Life was typical of many British films of this period, dealing with contemporary social issues in a realistic and gritty style, often with new writers, directors and actors. (I’ve attached a list in Appendix 1).

Of course, the cinema trailed literature by a good half-dozen years. This Sporting Life, for example, was published in 1957. Books are often trailblazers, films jump onto social trends when it is commercially safe to do so.

Where Britain was setting its films in the grimy kitchens of grim council estates, Hollywood was grinding out ever more grandeur and glamour. British exports, Burton and Taylor, were starring in Cleopatra, a lumbering elephant of a film, a white elephant as it turned out. The ‘epic’ style was even being applied to other genres. For example, It’s a mad, mad . . . .world (an alleged comedy); and How the West was Won, which tried to include every conceivable Western situation, as well as every living star associated with the form. It failed to understand that the successful Western, while they might have grand settings, is an essentially simple story. Like a classical drama, they often observe the unities of time, place and action, setting up a situation, developing a crisis and providing a resolution. Think of High Noon and The Naked Spur.

Despite The Magnificent Seven, three years earlier, the Western was becoming as flabby as John Wayne’s waistline. The staple B-features were becoming fewer as major films became longer, the major stars were getting older and the great directors were in decline. Wayne made the jokey McClintock, which was typical of most of his output from now on. Western success would come from Italy, but whether that cynical and alien tone delayed or hastened the Western’s decline is arguable.

Anti-heroes

The British films of this time were fresh and gritty, usually photographed in black and white, which suited the down-beat settings, the dour characters and the social problems which were their dramatic basis. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for example, was set in the factories and back streets of Nottingham. The ‘hero’ is an aggressive, amoral lathe operator. He probably votes Labour, if at all, but he feels little working class solidarity. ‘I’m just out for a good time. All the rest is propaganda.’

His idea of a good time is getting drunk and sleeping with an older woman, a fellow-worker’s wife. But he picks up another girl, who immediately starts calling him ‘my young man’ and taking him home to meet her mother. He can’t be that bright, because he doesn’t see the warning signs in that; or perhaps he is just resigned to what is inevitable in his world. He also manages to get the other woman pregnant, and there follow unsuccessful attempts at abortion. There’s no real moral judgment on him, although he does get beaten up by the woman’s in-laws. If there is a tragedy here, it is the final scene where the younger woman, to whom he has drifted into engagement, takes him to a new housing estate, where there are nice bungalows they might be able to afford. Even at the age of sixteen, I felt sorry for him.

I mentioned the decline of the Western earlier. Perhaps the best one of this year was Hud, actually a modern-day tale set in Texas, where the small-town life seems just as arid as Nottingham’s dingy back streets. Paul Newman plays Hud, another cynical, amoral character, similar to Albert Finney’s, but he has a father with contrasting old-fashioned values. An old cattle rancher, he is courtly and courteous, upright and inclined to sermonise, and has never forgiven his son for the drunken car wreck that killed his other boy.

An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease provides the crisis. Hud wants to sell off the cattle quickly before anyone knows, but the old man won’t cheat. Nor will he make up his losses by selling drilling rights for oil, which he thinks spoil the land. So the cattle are slaughtered, including the few, symbolic, Texas Longhorns, which he’d kept for sentimental reasons. He dies; the housekeeper, whom Hud had tried to rape, leaves; his nephew abandons him. Hud takes a sip of his beer, shrugs his shoulders, gives us that Paul Newman smirk and slams the door shut on the film. It’s a satisfying ending, in some guilty way.

Of course, it didn’t last. Such films were too depressing, and very easy to lampoon. And why is ‘realism’ only ever applied to the working class? Already, this year, Tom Jones, sunny, indulgent, full of the elements which would always make a British film (or classic TV series) appeal to an American audience. The sort of film for people who don’t really like the cinema, but can’t be bothered to read the book. Twenty years later, Helena Bonham-Carter would make a fortune out of such films.

Soon, glum drama would give way to zany confections like the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night and the swinging London of flashy films like The Knack, Darling and I’ll Never Forget Whathisname.

Raoul Walsh

This was also the year when Raoul Walsh released his last film, a forgettable Western called A Distant Trumpet. Walsh is a not well-known director and many of his films (well over a hundred) are indeed forgotten. Neither he nor his films were ever nominated for Academy Awards, not even one for lifetime achievement.

This is unjust, for his achievement was great. Born in 1887, half Irish, half Mexican, he spent some years as a seaman and a cowboy, before fetching up in California. In the free-for-all of the new movie industry he worked as writer, actor and director. He played Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in Birth of a Nation and by 1930 was directing a big prestige Western, The Big Trail, which was John Wayne’s first big break, unsuccessful as it turned out.

Directors like Walsh are sometimes called ‘journeymen’, but they were in reality masters. They could turn their hand to Westerns, gangster films, romantic comedies, musicals. Their films came in on time and under budget; their scenes were short, their dialogue sharp, their camera mobile; they were disciplined, economic craftsmen. All too often they had little choice in what they made or who acted for them, let alone in who wrote the script or handled the camera. When their work was done the film was taken away and edited by someone else, while they moved on to a different project.

But a Walsh film remains a Walsh film. He had the respect of actors and technicians and the editor found he had to cut the film the way Walsh wanted because there was rarely any spare footage to choose from. They called it ‘editing in the camera’.

Walsh was Errol Flynn’s best director (eg Gentleman Jim); he directed Bogart in his first starring role (High Sierra); he ended the gangster cycle with Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and then revived it with him ten years later (White Heat 1949). In 1958, the same year that he directed an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, he made a comedy Western with Kenneth More and Jayne Mansfield. That’s versatility.

He wore an eye-patch. It’s surprising how many directors of his generation wore eye-patches, but that’s for another essay.

Black is beautiful

In January 1963, segregationist George Wallace became governor of Alabama and in the same month a black student entered a previously all-white college in South Carolina, the last state to hold out against integration. In March James Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi, but in Alabama the homes of civil rights leaders were being bombed. The following year the events which would inspire Mississippi Burning took place, when three civil rights workers were murdered, with the collusion of the local police. The dream of Martin Luther King spoke so eloquently this year was a far from coming true.

An early sign of Hollywood’s tentative liberalism on the issue was the presentation of the best actor Oscar to Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field. I haven’t seen the film, but by all accounts it is sentimental and well-meaning. Poitier was the first black to win a leading actor Oscar, and it would be 28 years before Denzil Washington became the second (in Training Day) and Halle Berry the first woman (Monster’s Ball).

In 1939, Hattie MacDaniel had won the award as best supporting actress for her performance as Scarlett O’Hara’s black maid, but when the film opened in Atlanta, Georgia, she and the other black performers were not allowed to attend the segregated theatre. She was once asked why she lent herself to such stereotypical roles. She replied that, as a maid, she would earn $7 dollars a week; by playing them in the movies, she could get $700.

In Birth of a Nation blacks are venal and rapacious, unless they are Uncle Toms. Half the time they are played by whites in boot-polish. Later they are invariably loyal mammies; stupid, superstitious servants; comic oafs; or drug dealers. The liberal sixties weighted their case by producing impossibly perfect characters. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for example, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn play a white, middle class couple, whose enlightened attitudes are tested when their daughter announces her intention to marry a black man. He, of course, is Sidney Poitier, handsome, polite, intelligent, and well-educated – I believe he works for the United Nations. As one critic said, it is ‘mendacious and sanctimonious twaddle’.

Better was Richard Roundtree in Shaft, self-consciously proclaiming ‘black is beautiful’. Or Live and Let Die, where Yaphet Koto has the honour of being a Bond villain. Or In the Heat of the Night, where Poitier is both a clever detective and embittered by the racism around him. More recently, Eddie Murphy’s characters really have to be black to work, but many of those played by Denzil Washington could just as easily be white. And is there anyone who wouldn’t watch a Morgan Freeman film, just to hear that voice. He has taken over from Henry Fonda as the most presidential of actors.

I was struck by these developments when I recently watched the new version of The Alamo. In the 1960 version (John Wayne), Jim Bowie has a slave, an old man, whom he frees when prospects begin to look bleak. The man says that as a free man, he now has the right to go where he pleases. So he will stay in the Alamo. In the final assault he dies, attempting to protect Bowie. The recent version is nearer to historical fact. Bowie allows the slave, a young man, to leave, taking advantage of the Mexicans’ amnesty to women, children and slaves. Bowie says, however, that he will come to claim his ‘property’ after the battle. The man leaves. He has previously said, ‘We work for them, we clean up their shit. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna fight for them as well.’

Great contemporaries

I usually get depressed when I notice that someone famous or successful was born in the same year as myself. Even more so when I realise that just about everyone in the cabinet, say, is younger than I. And don’t mention the obituary column in The Times.

But in your case, to list a few names might reassure you of your youthfulness. For example, George Michael and Andrew Ridgely were born this year, as were Natasha Richardson, Mike Myers and Seal. It was a good year for future superstars and saw the birth of Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, but a bad year for poets because both Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost died.

One of your favourites, Lisa Kudrow, made her first appearance. I know how you appreciate a wacky woman.

And Quentin Tarantino, the patron saint of movie anoraks.


So that’s where 1963 has led me. I wanted to look at the year, as a film fan, and give an impression of what was going on, but also to choose one or two elements that were passing away and others that might become the future. It’s been a self-indulgent exercise, but I hope you will appreciate it nonetheless as a belated birthday gift.



Appendix 1

1959 Look Back in Anger (Richard Burton)
1960 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Albert Finney)
1961 A Taste of Honey (Rita Tushingham)
1962 Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O’Toole)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tom Courtenay)
Dr No (Sean Connery)
A Kind of Loving (Alan Bates)
The Wild and the Willing (John Hurt). Some scenes were shot in
Lincoln. A friend of mine was an extra, as he keeps telling me.
Billy Budd (Terence Stamp)
1963 This Sporting Life (Richard Harris)
Billy Liar (Julie Christie)
The Servant (James Fox, Sarah Miles)
1964 Zulu (Michael Caine)
A Hard Day’s Night (The Beatles)
1965 The Knack (Michael Crawford)
Darling (Julie Christie)
1966 Morgan (David Warner)
1967 I’ll never forget whathisname (Oliver Reed)



Appendix 2

Annus Mirabilis



Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank;
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.


Appendix 3: Films of the year


The Birds (dir Hitchcock, starring Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren)
This Sporting Life (dir Lindsay Anderson, starring Richard Harris, Rachel
Roberts)
The Servant (dir Joseph Losey, starring Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah
Miles)
Dr Strangelove (dir Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers, George C Scott)
The Great Escape (dir John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen, James
Garner, Richard Attenborough)
Hud (dir Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn
Douglas)
The Trial (dir Orson Welles, starring Anthony Perkins)
Fifty five days at Peking (dir Nicholas Ray, starring Charlton Heston,
David Niven)

Is that it?

I began this blog in March and, as is often the case, I never finished it. But a month ago, out of the corner of my eye, I happened to see some of the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

Yet again I was reminded of Dr Johnson’s words on the phenomenon of women preachers being like a dog walking on its hind legs – ‘The wonder is not that it is done well but that it is done at all.’

All those little Chinese girls walking along waving and smiling. Thousands of people, each doing the same thing at the same time, reminiscent of a Nuremberg rally or a Busby Berkeley musical, but as impressive as neither.

Then the inevitable fireworks. Is that what's supposed to make us go, 'Aah'? Is that all there is?

It was Sunday morning and British Summer Time had begun. As if in response to the new regime, the sun was shining and the sky was clear. And the song I was listening to was a jaunty ragtime piece by Peggy Lee, which seemed very much in tune with the mood of the day.

‘I’ve got those feeling-too-good-today blues.’ That was the song and that was Peg, always a little sting in the tail of a cheerful or romantic song, always that little touch of pessimism and world-weariness. I was already wondering if it might rain soon. Best not go forth without my cloak today.

I first heard Peg – she’s always Peg to me, although most people feel the need to use the more respectful ‘Miss Lee’. But then I knew her for a long time, since I was about five in fact when she slunk onto the cinema screen disguised as a dog to sing ‘He’s a tramp.’

Later I knew her for ‘Fever’, ‘All Right, OK, You Win’ and ‘I’m a Woman’, great songs which she delivered with that wonderful, controlled purr of a voice.

But it was a long time before I heard what for me is her greatest recording. It was introduced to me by a good friend, who may well have found that I was living proof of the song’s sentiments.

‘Is that all there is?’

Written, surprisingly, by Leiber and Stolle, who based it on words from Thomas Mann’s story, Disillusionment.

http://www.leoslyrics.com/listlyrics.php?id=9115

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_That_All_There_Is%3F

I heard it again a few days later on Desert Island discs, where the guest was Stan McMurtry, better known as ‘Mac’, cartoonist on the Daily Mail. Here’s a link to some of his work by the way:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=505282&in_page_id=1770

It’s a strange song, with lyrics, part-spoken, reviewing the disappointments of life, accepting that things will inevitably go wrong and that nothing will ever live up to expectations.

So don’t set your hopes too high or put all your eggs in one basket, for ultimately nothing is all that important.

We spend our lives avoiding pain and seeking pleasure and happiness. But we find that nothing is ever completely or lastingly satisfactory.

That bike you saved up to buy as a child, that dress, Christmas, a job, a lover, a wedding day, a divorce, retirement.

Don’t we prefer it that way? Like ancient Romans who would make themselves vomit to prevent the satiation of their appetite.

Imagine that one act of sex was so memorable and fulfilling that we never wanted to do it again; that we never sought it out once more in the hope that this time it would be better, or in some way just different.

Where would the human race be if we did not think that the grass is greener over the hill? Or that there might be a way of making ourselves run faster, jump higher and fight with greater strength.

Sisyphus’ apparently meaningless labour of pushing a huge boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down each time he reached the summit may seem like a cruel metaphor for our lives. But I know he took pleasure in his striving – the sense of accomplishment at the end of each climb; the sardonic laugh as he watched it rumble down; perhaps, as he strolled back down to begin again, he whistled and enjoyed the break from work; maybe he set his mind to methods of making his work easier or more efficient.

Does this seem like a philosophy of despair? Yes, it is despair but not the kind of despair which leaves no option but suicide. It is the despair of the day which creates hope for tomorrow.

Just one more day, please. Who knows?

London again

A couple of weeks ago, Saturday morning, eight o’clock, I was taking brief leave of Lincoln and retrenchment to spend a weekend with my son in London. (£21.55 return, thanks to online advance booking).

At the station I met a couple I know, two lonely souls brought together by a common love of Czech beer. They were on their way to Boston, set to sample the windmills and watering-holes of my native town.

We passed through Metheringham, where for some reason the signal box bears the name Blankney. Daubed on a hoarding were the words ‘The Meg Boys’, Meg being the name by which the village is generally known.

I wondered if an old colleague of mine was at work in the signal box. Some years ago, disenchanted with the library service for many of the same reasons as I, left to become a railway signalman.

At Peterborough I joined the main line and boarded one of the new sleek trains that slice smoothly through the countryside with hardly a rattle. It’s mainly fenland and since I last travelled through wind turbines have appeared. I for one find them strangely beautiful.

I arrived on time at King’s Cross. In fact, over the whole weekend, transport was superb. The trains were punctual and London buses – real Londoners don’t use the Tube, I was told – numerous, frequent and cheap. The congestion charge seems to have worked pretty well. My son flourished his Oyster card, I bought an all-day ticket for £3.50 and we went in search of cheap beer. Holborn first, I think – for I was soon lost, where we settled on a Wetherspoon’s pub called ‘The King’s Escape’, named in honour of the Pendrell family who aided the future Charles I in his flight after the battle of Worcester.

I would have preferred a more Parliamentary bar, but beer knows no politics.

After an hour or two in Soho and ‘The Duke of Argyll’ it was back to the bus and over the Thames, heading for Camberwell, London Borough of Southwark, constituency of my bête-noir Harriet Harman (Harriet Harperson as she is known by those like-minded).

There was Parliament and Big Ben, seen through the London Eye, and later the Metropolitan Tabernacle, also named Spurgeon’s Tabernacle after perhaps the greatest Baptist preacher of the Victorian Age, who after his sermons would smoke a cigar ‘to the glory of God’.

We were travelling on my first ‘bendy bus’. They are known to many Londoners as ‘free buses, because they have two exit doors, making it easy to hop on and off without paying. I saw how the authorities deal with this problem on Monday morning, when my bus pulled up on a roundabout. I saw at least 30 police officers checking tickets and scribbling down the details of offenders.

It seemed a bit over the top to me, but maybe that’s what Ian Blair was talking about when he claimed that crime in the capital was declining. By the way, farewell Sir Ian, and about time too.

My son and I talked movies and P G Wodehouse, marriage and movies, movies and money, my love life and movies, and then movies. Later I fell asleep watching one.

Up first next morning, I helped myself to the best coffee I’ve had in a long time and sat outside in the mist, smoking a cigarette to the glory of sir Walter Raleigh, watching the magpies, the wrens and the squirrels; and the jumbo jets overhead, low enough for me to distinguish the logo on their tail fins, high enough not to be annoying.

I worked on a poem that has been gestating in my mind. It’s about love, but then, aren’t they all? The theme is about the need for love to be nourished, lest it die – lest! – a kind of response to Shakespeare’s lines about love not altering when it alteration finds. And whether lust is not a more sensible alternative to the whole complicated business. That might make a good final rhyming couplet. Now, whatever can I find to rhyme with ‘lust’?

B-B-Bolingbroke

I heard an appeal yesterday morning on behalf of the British Stammering Association.

Thank God, I thought, for an organisation that doesn’t feel the need (yet) to re-christen itself with some ‘positive’ one-word title, like ‘Relate’, or something meaningless like ‘Unison’.

How long, I wonder, before it becomes ‘Speak’, or ‘Fluent’, or even ‘For Christ’s Sake, Spit It Out!’

But, apart from that, I was interested because as a young teenager I was afflicted by the problem. What was I - twelve or thirteen? - when I started having trouble with d’s and t’s, p’s and s’s. In fact with every consonant.

I suppose it was something to do with puberty, compounded by a natural shyness and a murderous self-consciousness. These were the days when uncles would constantly ask if I was ‘courting’ and insinuate carnal desires on my part about any girl whose name I happened to mention.

They were right, of course. I did fancy every girl I met. (These days it’s only half of them). Perhaps they wouldn’t have teased me quite so much if they’d known that I definitely had carnal desires towards my aunts.

God, it was a terrible time. The blushing, the teasing, the boasts of friends, the guilt about self-abuse. And the c-cruel j-jokes about my b-bloody st-stammer.

I remember an English lesson at school where we were asked to differentiate between similar-sounding words. ‘If you take a train to London, is London your destiny or your destination?’ asked my teacher. ‘What do you think, Bolingbroke?’

I knew I couldn’t get ‘destination’ out without making a fool of myself and so I replied, ‘I don’t know, sir.’

I couldn’t win. I was making a fool of myself either way.

He tried me again, this time with ‘nationalisation’ and ‘naturalisation’. Same result and he gave up on me. I was mortified. I’ve always preferred to be thought foolish to stupid.

I practised difficult words. Alone, I had no problem. I discovered that singing wasn’t affected by the impediment, and tried to imagine a tune in my head when I spoke, but that didn’t work.

And then I hit on a simple solution: I could say words beginning with a vowel, and once the word was in flow the consonants that followed were no problem. ‘Aspidistra’ was easy enough; so were ‘abattoir’ and ‘entomologist’ and ‘intelligence’. If only all words began with a vowel.

So I ensured that they did. I added an ‘er’ to every word, especially the first in a sentence. ‘Er-nationalisation’, ‘er-destination’, etc. It worked, and I could use the ‘er’ cleverly to make it look as if I were being thoughtful.

After a while, as my confidence increased, I just thought the ’er’ in my head and soon even that was unnecessary. And from the st-stammering p-pupa this loquacious, eloquent butterfly was born.