Patrick McGoohan

Patrick McGoohan. Tall, dark, handsome and suave. And British, wherever he was born and whoever his parents were. Therefore, born to be a villain.

That's how I knew him. I never saw The Prisoner or Danger Man, but I noticed he turned up on Columbo pretty often, superior and arrogant as four different murderers.

I read that he turned down the role of James Bond when Connery relinquished it. I wonder why. He would have appeared slightly better-bred than Connery, but that dark side of his would have suited the role perfectly.

I'm sure he enjoyed his career, but he could have done so much more after the cult success of The Prisoner, not coasted along as guest villains on TV and in films like Escape From Alcatraz and Braveheart.

I relish him most for his 'Red' in Hell Drivers.

Hell Drivers is one of those small films, British but with the pace and tautness of an American B-movie, though even grittier, that you come upon by chance on a wet Wednesday afternoon and never forget.

It features an array of well-known actors at the start of their career, Gordon Jackson, Alfie Bass, Herbert Lom, Sid James, David McCallum, Jill Ireland and Sean Connery (straining a little, I thought, to gain attention).

Peggy Summers too, perhaps better known as the Bonny Parker-type character in Gun Crazy.

Stanley Baker stars, and Patrick McGoohan is the villain, sporting a threatening Irish accent, a boxer's ape-like stance, and a roll-up which stays glued to his lip, even during a punch-up.

He is gloriously over the top, as all good melodrama villains should be.

Farewell, Mr McGoohan. You were great.

Mud and sky

I’ve continued working my through my DVDs by watching All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1979 version directed by Delbert Mann, and starring Richard Thomas.

It’s along time since I saw the original 1930 film by Lewis Milestone, but I remember being impressed, mainly by the battle scenes, not, I’m sure, what the director would have wished of me.

Being the first and one of the best (reputedly) anti-war films, it had the privilege of inventing the clichés: idealism trampled in the mud of Flanders; stupid old people banging on about honour and patriotism without the need to die for it themselves; bullies exposed as cowards and artists revealed as heroes; the idyllic pastoral interludes; first sex experienced as a taste of life before it is snuffed out; death’s random choices of victim; and the sheer filthy waste of it all.

Lew Ayres, the original 1930 star, was so affected by his role that he became a pacifist himself ten years later when ‘the bitch was in heat again’.

Aces High regurgitated all of the clichés to little effect and it needed something more than Delbert Mann and Richard Thomas possess to make this old warhorse come alive again. It doesn’t say much for this film’s impact that I merely laughed to see Thomas hoisting Ernest Borgnine, of all people, on his back and carrying him back from the front line.

That was when war did indeed become hell.

A little harmony

I was told how to fix my email by a broadband Medic online advisor. My ISP being Virgin, I went onto their website where I was able to log into my email account and view my messages. I, naturally, had been unaware of this possibility.

I was advised to delete what was not that important because the trouble was probably down to a long or complicated email clogging up the system. I couldn’t see any fitting that description, but I did some weeding and went back to Outlook, which is now operating normally.

Thank you, Jason.

*

My first childhood hero was Davy Crockett, as incarnated by Fess Parker. By the age of ten I was reading Lon Tinkle’s book, Thirteen Days to Glory, which was re-issued to accompany John Wayne’s movie, The Alamo.

The story of the Alamo is what we like to call epic and Wayne wanted to give it epic treatment, in other words make it long. Unfortunately, apart from the final assault, not a lot happened. So the film is padded out with extraneous action and a perfunctory love interest to help pass the time until the spectacular finale, which is packed with stunts and interesting deaths by sword and lance.

I thought at the time that Wayne made a great Crockett, but then he was my second childhood hero.

John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo (2004) version of the siege is notable primarily for Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of Crockett. Not only is there a striking resemblance but he plays him as I like to think Crockett was, charismatic, gregarious, moderate, talented, brave and wise.

His fiddle accompaniment to the Mexican Deguello is a marvellous moment of cinema, and his meditation on the distinction between ‘plain ole David’ and ‘that Davy Crockett feller’ a succinct commentary on the curse of fame.

I’m having problems with technology.

It’s not quite as bad as last week when I followed the advice of a TV energy-saving ‘expert’ and began switching my computer and internet off at the mains overnight. I wouldn’t recommend it because I found that whether I could get back on line was very much a matter of chance.

I was disappointed about that because I’ve discovered that my IT equipment uses over 1 kWh of electricity every day. That’s according to my consumption meter which also, as a matter of interest, tells me that my freezer uses much the same, as does the TV/DVD/VCR when left on standby.

This is out of a total daily consumption of about 7 kWh/day, which is in itself pretty low.

I was about to write that my internet connection is now behaving, when it cut off the Radio 5 broadcast of the test match, which I had to recall. However, the main problem is Outlook, which has about a dozen emails waiting but keeps timing out. The solutions I’ve found on the web are either technical beyond my understanding or ‘increase the time out period’ – in other words, instead of waiting 90 seconds to be told the system has failed, why not wait 5 minutes?

I’ll treat it the way I’m treating my cold, by ignoring it and waiting for it to go away.

*

I haven’t commented much on my economy drive over the last few weeks, primarily because failure is embarrassing. The trick is to stay out of the pub, naturally, and the tactic is to replace that pleasure with another, namely re-viewing my DVDs from A to Z, my other great pleasure being temporarily unobtainable and in any case rarely lasting two hours at a time.

Which brings me to the next technical problem: there’s something wrong with the colour movies; they’re either washed out or tinged with green. To someone who tinkers for ages to get the screen ratio correct, this is bloody irritating. Is it the disc, the player, the TV, or is it me?

Why the hell does everything go wrong? It’s enough to drive you out to the pub.

*

So enough moaning and a few comments on what I’ve watched over the last day or two:

Above Us the Waves, 1955, directed by Ralph Thomas. Starring John Mills and the usual crowd.

One of the crop of British war films made in the fifties, including most notably The Dam Busters and The Cruel Sea. It’s a fictionalised account of the midget submarine attack on the Tirpitz, documentary in tone, understated and restrained. As you expect from movies of this period it’s efficient and economical. When I compare it with the dizzily edited and CGI’d action films I’ve seen recently, it’s refreshing to see an attempt at character, plot and pace.

And it makes you proud!

Aces High, 1976, directed by Jack Gold. Starring Malcolm McDowell.

If the typical WWII film is about the heroism of war, the typical WWI offering is about its horrors. The former celebrates victory, but the latter doesn’t care, because it’s not worth the cost. Everyone dies.

In Above Us the Waves the different classes rub along, where to know one’s place is to know one’s function in an effective team.

In Aces High the class division is rigid and divisive, even within the small squadron. The larger picture is one of a vast divide so great there is no hope of understanding or trust bridging it.

The African Queen, 1951, directed by John Huston. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.

When I made that sweeping comment about WWI movies being about the horror rather than the heroism, I should have known there were exceptions, but I hadn’t expected one to come along almost immediately. For The African Queen has to be one of the most accomplished feel-good films to have sent audiences home with lighter hearts.

It’s set in Africa, well away from the trenches, with just a few comic Krauts at the end. In fact, it’s not a war film at all; it’s a love story, with a happily explosive consummation at the end.

This, one of my all-time favourites, deserves more than a paragraph. Which, in due course, it shall recieve.

Adaptation

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)

The Strangers (2008)

If you're saving money, suffering from cabin fever and thinking, 'Allow yourself a treat, a trip to the pictures - you deserve it,' don't, don't, go to see The Strangers. It's awful.

It lasts barely 90 minutes, thank god, but it's still boring.

Even pornography has more plot and certainly more of a climax, unless you count that last tired fake orgasm that's supposed to send you away vaguely satisfied.

I've nothing against movies that merely want to scare the crap out of you, but they only work if they scare the crap out of you; if they persuade you to suspend your disbelief or if they suck you in to a rollercoaster of thrills that leaves you no time to think. The Night of the Living Dead managed it, as did Hallowe'en and The Blair Witch Project.

But the 90 minutes I spent thinking while watching this were 'Please thrill me. I've paid good money (which I can't afford) to be thrilled.'

Went the Day Well?

While England were winning the test match and the Chinese were impressing the world with their lavish Olympics opening ceremony – doesn’t interest me one iota – the Russians were invading Georgia. (I expect more than a few Americans were taking shelter in their cellars on hearing the news).

It’s a good excuse for aggression against a neighbouring country, isn’t it? Just dish out passports to citizens of a foreign state and then claim to be going in to protect them.

It reminds me of Germany and the Sudetenland in 1938.

That thought brings me to Went the Day Well?, a 1942 Ealing film directed by Cavalcanti. The title is taken from an anonymous poem, which begins:


Went the day well?
We died and never knew.
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.
Went the day well?

A sleepy English village is surprised to find itself playing host to a company of army sappers. It’s not long before they are revealed as Germans in disguise, there as an advance guard for an imminent German invasion.

Once unmasked they behave with great brutality, but the villagers show enough initiative and no little brutality themselves in fighting back until relief arrives.

The same plot was used in The Eagle Has Landed, the 1976 John Sturges film based on Jack Higgins’ novel. The following link will take you to a pretty full analysis of how the depiction of Germans changed in the years following World War II.

http://www.britmovie.net/britforum/best-british/3649-went-day-well-1942-eagle-has-landed-1976-a.html

I’m sure it started earlier but offhand the earliest film I recall which showed Germans in a sympathetic light is The Enemy Below (1957), which tells the story of two decent professionals, one American one German, full of respect the one for the other despite their need to kill the other.

In particular it draws a distinction between ‘Germans’ and ‘Nazis’, a dubious distinction used again in The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, and then of course in The Eagle Has Landed, where the leading German is played by the English national treasure, Michael Caine.

In Went the Day Well? Nazis are Germans, Germans are Nazis, and both are bastards. One even twists a boy’s ear for nosiness. That’s one of the little giveaway signs with which these not-so-efficient Teutonic fifth columnists arouse suspicion.

But, no carping. This is a good film, not just a piece of wartime propaganda and an interesting social document.

Things to enjoy include the intrusion of real war into a sleepy English village, previously for the most part a mere spectator of the conflict; the clever creation of a microcosm of England with such as evacuees, land girls, a sailor on leave; the depiction of class from the lady of the manor to the local poacher; the humorous prejudice shared by English and Germans about the French, and the comment about the Italians – morale’s wot the Italians ain’t got.’

There are parallel stories of betrayal as the woman who increasingly suspects the German charade mirrors that of the traitor whom she had loved. And most of all, in scenes reminiscent of Straw Dogs, there are one or two startling outbursts of horrific violence from the most unlikely characters.

The film, though made in 1942, begins in the future, after the war has been won. The action is a memory, and Hitler has had his come-uppance.

The Germans, probably, learnt their lesson. Not so the Russians.

8 August 2008

After day one of the Oval Test I’m looking forward to being forced to eat my words about Pietersen.

Time for a metaphor: the bitter bread of repentance is sweet when soaked in the honey of success.

It was correct to go with five bowlers, because that is effectively a team of four quicks. Panesar can only be used at the right time or when conditions help him, and for all his qualities, he would be the one to drop if an extra batsman were considered necessary.

What Pietersen rightly did was to tell his five batsmen that, if they did their job right, they were enough, especially when Flintoff, Ambrose and Broad were to follow.

Well, it was a good first day, marred only by Strauss’s early departure. The captain was everywhere, consulting, encouraging and cajoling. He used Panesar judiciously, and effectively. Harmison repaid the trust he’d been shown, Anderson maintained his new-found maturity and Flintoff was Flintoff.

* * *

The Today Programme had a numerologist on this morning. It is the silly season after all. The reason was all this nonsense about the Chinese superstition about the number eight.

Apparently, if you convert the letters of ‘China’ to numbers, you end up with the total ‘8’. Wow! What ‘The People’s Republic of China’ adds up to was not made clear.

What did interest me was the admission that this year is the eighth of the century. So we did celebrate the new millennium a year early after all.

* * *

I saw The Dark Knight, the new Batman film, the other day. Disappointing, I’m afraid, and not the ‘thunderbolt [that would] rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies’, as Rolling Stone promised.

It was good fun but too long. The action sequences were brilliant but so many and so protracted that they lost their power to thrill.

The reviewers have been impressed by the film’s insertion of a bit of moral philosophising, but it’s all a bit old hat. The dark side of heroism, the linking of hero and villain, the cruelty of fate which can push a good man onto the dark side, the moral choice imposed on ordinary people.

These things were a staple of the Western fifty years ago. Bend of the River, for example, where James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy are two sides of the same coin; High Noon, where the townspeople make the wrong choice, and At Gunpoint where they make the right one; Red River, The Searchers, Lawman, where the heroic lead moves further and deeper into psychosis.

In those films, the moral choices faced are essential to the plot, not tacked to help an action fantasy appeal to would-be intellectuals.

Here's a review that says it better than I can:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/17/dark_knight/index.html

Gotta Smoke?

I've often asked myself what happened to Darwin Joston, who played Napoleon Wilson in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. To be honest, I never knew which of the two male leads was Darwin and which the one who played the police lieutenant, Ethan Bishop - a lot of cinematic references in this film, quite the film buff's paradise, in fact. It was even edited by 'John T Chance'.

I'm afraid Darwin is dead. He's been gone for 10 years, I'm sorry to say. Leukaemia. All right, he's a bit hammy sometimes in Assault, but overall it's a memorably COOL performance, full of humour and relaxed virility.

And the lines that Carpenter gives him and that he delivers with such relish are so damned quotable that I still use them 30 years after first seeing the film.

Yes, I have moments.

* * *

I don't recall any of Al Lettieri's movies where he didn't end up dead, and I've learned that the real thing claimed him a long time ago, in 1975, just after he'd begun to make his mark as a genuinely frightening heavy. Richard Boone preceded him in the tradition - remember Hombre - and I would say that Michael Madsen has taken up the mantle.

Before his brains were blown out in The Godfather by Al Pacino, Lettieri's Solozzo was a slickly coiffed, smart-suited and reasonably spoken 'businessman', but in The Getaway the suit was removed to reveal the Caliban beneath. In this movie he is pure Id. The scene in the vet's car, where he and the wife are throwing ribs at each other shows him as pure animal. He draws out the slut in the wife, drives the vet-husband to suicide and embodies Steve McQueen's fears of impotence and betrayal.

'Blood's a big expense.'

* * *

Frank Thring (1926-1994) is a villain I remember mainly from fifties epics, playing regal types - Pilate in Ben-Hur; Herod in King of Kings; gloriously over the top as King Aella in The Vikings. He seems to have loved roles where he could strike attitudes, as if he were in a silent film. More at home in a toga than a suit, tall, with a thin beard framing his face and an evil curl to the lip, he was a glorious old ham and I loved him for it.

'A long life, young Arrius, and the good sense to live it.'

'Gotta smoke?'

Widmark and Javier - do you need to think before you choose?

Last week some airhead masquerading as a presenter on the Today Programme (BBC Radio 4) lapsed into giggles after an item about a recently discovered piece of recorded sound from 1860 or thereabouts.

All right, these things happen, but why, rather than apologise and move on, do they repeat the foolishness an hour later? And why report it on TV that evening? And why, the next morning, does the relentlessly trivial TV breakfast programme do a top ten of famous examples of ‘corpsing’?

I know I’m being a bit po-faced, but the silly woman collapsed into hysteria while trying to read out a report on the death of Abby Mann, creator of Kojak, and Oscar-winner for his script of Judgement at Nuremburg. I think he deserved a little more respect than that.

The same programme announced this morning, and with more dignity, the death of Jules Dassin, director of Brute Force, The Naked City and Night and the City. That was in the days when they knew how to make movies.

Last week saw the death of Richard Widmark, by unhappy coincidence a link between the other two deceased having starred in Nuremburg and Night and the City. I know he was 93, but it’s still a bloody shame to lose anyone you’ve grown up with and admired.

The TV and radio news were crass, as usual. ‘Richard Widmark made a career out of villains and psychopaths, etc.’ Moreover, they seemed unaware that he had made any films after his first, Kiss of Death, for which he was Oscar-nominated, and in which, giggling gleefully, he pushed a crippled old lady down the stairs to her death.


There aren’t many of them left, the stars of the post-war era. Probably only Kirk Douglas is still with us. But Peck has gone, as have Mitchum, Lancaster, Holden and Glenn Ford. And I was halfway through writing this when I heard that Charlton Heston too had died.

I’m not sure that Widmark is really in their class. He lacked warmth; his heroes were always edgy; there was always a misanthropic tinge, to say the least, in his performances. Robert Ryan, another of that generation, gave the same impression – ‘I don’t give a shit whether you like me or not.’

He was a good Jim Bowie in a bad Alamo, a prototype for Dirty Harry in Madigan, and the repentant outlaw in that very intelligent Western, Warlock. He was excellent too in John Sturges’ The Law and Jake Wade, the second best film Budd Boetticher never made (the best being Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country). I watched it again yesterday as a personal tribute to him.

Sardonic, cynical, sneering, who genuinely feels betrayed because Robert Taylor’s character has deserted him. ‘Women. Nice to have around. But they sure do slow a man down.’

I’m not sure which of his films he would have chosen to be remembered by, but I guess it would be The Bedford Incident, which he helped produce. Oddly it is not included on the IMDb shortlist used to discover his most popular film.

To me his Captain Finlander is the archetypal Widmark character, charismatic but fatally flawed – and you don’t come more fatal than this man.

Rest in peace, Dick. I saw many of your movies, and I’ve got no complaints.



WIDMARK’S CO-STAR in The Bedford Incident was Sidney Poitier. As I recall, little if anything was made of his colour. I can understand that, but it’s probably a flaw, just as it was regarding the Morgan Freeman character in Unforgiven. Both films were set at times when racism was rampant and I find it difficult to accept that no-one would have used their blackness against them.

I thought about this when listening to earnest liberals discussing Anthony Minghella’s movie of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. (Bloody hell, another dead movie-maker.)

Oh dear, they fretted, it was patronising. Those Botswanans ‘beamed’ too much. They seemed too happy. The film didn’t address the issues of aids, poverty and imperialism. Admittedly it did address the problems of witchcraft and male chauvinism, but – Oh, my god (no, the old bastard is not getting a capital letter) – that sends a negative message, doesn’t it?

As it happens, Detective Agency was a charming film, beautiful to look at, with a range of engaging characters and a free and easy plot that leads to a happy ending. It’s a humorous hymn to common decency, something I thought liberals were in favour of.

I SRARTED this blog intending to talk about No Country for Old Men. So I'll give it a mention.

I read Cormac McCarthy’s book before I saw the film and I’ve re-read it since. And when the movie returns to my local multiplex, as is promised, I’ll watch it once more. Partly because I thoroughly enjoyed it, partly to see if it really is as great as everyone seems to think.

The film follows the book so closely that it’s one of those rare occasions when you’re often able to think about both at the same time.

My first impression of the novel was simply that it was a thriller with pretensions. By that I don’t mean pretentious, but that the author used a crime and chase plot to muse on the moral cesspit in which the old sheriff fears that the world is drowning. I don’t know whether the old sheriff, who observes changing society with despair, speaks for the author, or whether the sheriff is right or wrong in his observation. Perhaps he’s just grown old and uncomprehending.

If I have a criticism of the film it’s that we don’t see enough of Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom. Some people are pleased that so much of the character’s first-person commentary is excised from the film. Personally I miss them.

Did Javier deserve his Oscar for best supporting actor? Leaving aside the fact that it’s really a lead role, I think not. Since his win was such a foregone conclusion, I’d better explain.

The character, Chigurgh, is as relentless and robotic a killer as the Terminator, as tinged with the supernatural as Darth Vader and as evil as Ming the Merciless. It takes only a competent actor to portray such a one-dimensional character.

In the famous scene where he orders a gas station owner to toss a coin to determine whether he lives or dies combines the impatience of Richard Boone in, say Hombre, when people don’t immediately comply with his instructions, and the matter-of-fact murderousness of Lee Marvin in The Killers.

Moreover, the nature of the character seems to me to a flaw in the conception of the novel and film. The sheriff at one point says that the decline of society begins when kids stop calling their father ‘sir’. In other words, when courtesy fails and when people cease to care for one another, then criminality will follow.

Maybe he’s right, but the presence of a killer who is half-ghost and half-psychopath turns the theme into a mere horror story.

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood (2007), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Danel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.

SPOILER ALERT

I won't call this a review, just a reaction.

I have seen There Will Be Blood twice now, and I still don’t get it. Then again, maybe I do get it and am right to think that there is a lot less to it than meets the eye.

It has received such praise that I would be arrogant indeed not to question my initial reaction. Rolling Stone compared it to Citizen Kane – that does no film any favours; others to Treasure of the Sierra Madre – same problem; Mark Kermode declared that it ‘redefines the grammar of cinema’ – I tend to think that it ignores it; Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance was ‘visceral’ – or was it a hammy impersonation of John Huston; the music was unjustly denied even an Oscar nomination – but I found it portentous and intrusive.

It’s not my complaint merely that it has been over-praised. It’s not that I don’t admire many aspects of it. I just think it fails, and that it fails unnecessarily. Maybe it should have shown more respect to filmic grammar after all.

* * *

The film opens with a blast of doom-laden music and a barren landscape, and we are treated to a near wordless overview of Daniel Plainview’s rise from solitary silver prospector to independent oilman, acquiring on the way a broken leg and an adopted son, symbols no doubt of his flawed humanity.

This dialogue-free opening reel is arresting, but hardly original. Off hand I recall its being used in the taut Dirty Harry and the flabby Rio Bravo.

When Plainview finally speaks clearly it is in a silkily confidential voice, inviting his audience of farmers to view him a plain, honest family man, as well as a professional in whom they can have confidence should they allow him to drill.

Many reviewers invite me to see the presence of his ‘son’ as evidence of his callous ruthlessness. The lad is a mere prop. The farmers are being swindled. Underlying this accusation, for which I can detect no evidence as yet, is surely the fact that he is an ‘oilman’. In other words, a capitalist, and worse than that, a pillager of the earth’s resources.

At this point of the movie I see only a hard-working, rather admirable entrepreneur, with a heartfelt, if rough, love for the boy. Frankly, I like him a lot. Anyone who can shrug off the pain of a broken leg to relish his discovery of silver has my admiration.

* * *

It is because of this sympathy that I recognise immediately the distaste he feels for the self-appointed preacher, Eli Sunday, one of the locals where Plainview makes his biggest strike.

Sunday’s snivelling sanctimony is repulsive. If he is intended to be Plainview’s great rival or antithesis, then the script or the actor fails to deliver. What we need is Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry. I wonder, by the way, how many notice that Sunday quotes Burt when he talks about ‘gumming the devil’ should he find himself without teeth.

The disgust finally erupts when Plainview’s son is injured and loses his hearing. He beats and humiliates Sunday, the supposed believer in divine miracles and ineffective healer.

If, as some critics, say Plainview and Sunday stand for the twin evils that exploit the American common man, capitalism and fundamentalist religion, then the film is demeaned, for humanity has been lost. No work of art can aspire to greatness that departs from the examination of man and his motives.

And here is my main problem with this film. Why does Plainview act as he does in the second half of the story?

* * *

Plainview’s ‘brother’ turns up. Obviously, he’s a fraud. We all know that; so why not Plainview, this shrewd and ruthless man?

It’s nothing but a clunky plot device. The script has plans for Plainview’s end and we need some motivation pretty damn quick. A handily discovered brother enables Plainview to cavort in the sea and reminisce about his youth, dream of a house full of children and then confide his misanthropy and hatred of competitors.

Where on earth did all that come from?

And when he learns at long last that his brother is no such thing, he shoots him dead. This, of course, is no surprise, because we know how much he hates everyone. He’s just told us, hasn’t he?

But he’s found out by one of Sunday’s flock of sleep, coincidentally one whose land is badly needed. They blackmail him into accepting baptism and confessing his sins. It’s humiliating for him, embarrassingly funny for us and sweet revenge for Sunday.

Sunday demands he confess to abandoning his child and it’s odd how many reviewers agree with him, even though all he’s done is send him to a special school. Good idea, in my opinion. The boy himself agrees with the critics, the ungrateful brat, and strikes Plainview on his return, despite his father’s genuine display of joy at the reunion.

* * *

The film has been going on for some time now and we need to speed to a conclusion. So a quick cut to ten years later, with the boy now married and announcing his departure to try his luck in the oil business. A horrified Plainview – he hates competitors, remember – denounces him and reveals, though not to us, that the boy is not his real son, just ‘a bastard in a basket’. Not nice, I agree, but we all say hurtful things when we ourselves are hurt.

We move rapidly along and Sunday re-appears for the final showdown. Plainview gets his final revenge with some basic lessons on the geology of oil and a repetitive speech about milk shakes. As if realising that this is hardly dramatic enough he beats out the preacher’s brains with a bowling pin, and declares – in words the screenwriter must have thought a crowning sentence – ‘I’m finished.’

Black screen and some violin music (rather good, I thought).

D.O.A. (1950)

Directed by Rudolph Mate; starring Edmond O'Brien

As the credits roll, a man enters a police station and strides purposefully through long corridors until he comes to the door marked ‘Homicide’. He asks for the captain and says he’s there to report a murder.

‘Who was murdered?’

‘I was.’

And the flashback begins. This is film noir. It’s a good opening. Brisk, efficient and arresting. But it’s not maintained, more’s the pity.

Edmond O’Brien is the small-time accountant who fancies a week of fun and relaxation – let’s call it - in San Francisco. When we meet his girlfriend, it’s easy to see why. She’s not exactly a ‘femme fatale’, but she’d certainly be fatal to any man’s enjoyment of life. She whines, she clings and she has a nice line in guilt inducement.

Edmond finds the strength to get to San Francisco and is immediately surrounded by attractive women, each one signalled by an irritating wolf-whistle on the sound track. Having managed, with amazing ease, to pick up a woman in a bar, he has cold water poured over his libido by the arrival of flowers and a ‘missing you already’ note from the girlfriend.

It’s about now that he is poisoned. No, it’s not suicide. It’s a conspiracy. The next morning, feeling that his hangover is unusually bad, he consults a remarkably well-informed doctor, an expert in toxicology, who informs him that he has taken ‘luminous toxin’ and has a day or two to live.

Somewhat taken aback he rushes out and runs through the streets, an impressive sequence, all the better because the crowds on the pavement were probably not informed of what was going on.

A second opinion confirms the first and is reinforced when we actually see the poison glowing in the dark. That settles it. Doomed. There’s nothing left to do but find the man who administered it and solve the mystery.

That’s what the film basically is, a mystery, a standard murder mystery. It attempts to add darkness by the idea of the victim doing the investigation and perhaps a little philosophical weight by alluding to the absurdity of his fate. But this is all forgotten as the puzzle develops with a dizzying parade of look-alike women and villains. O’Brien’s angst is lost in all this. All we get by way of character development is his sudden realisation that he loves his girlfriend. He’s obviously not thinking straight, but then I suppose you can hardly blame him.

It’s a pity, because O’Brien is good. He’s in every scene and carries the whole film. The earliest film of his I recall is The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when he was slim and good-looking and difficult to recognise as the same man hamming it up in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Wild Bunch – and let’s not forget The Girl Can’t Help It. Here he’s restrained and solid and makes me wonder if he wasn’t worthy of greater things than he achieved.

My overall judgment: good basic concept, let down by the script. Worth watching for efficiency of direction and photography. And O’Brien’s performance.

Death Proof (2007)

Directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering was his half of the ‘Grindhouse’ collaboration with Roberto Rodriguez, revised and released separately. A homicidal stuntman uses his souped-up, ‘death proof’ car to stage murderous attacks on two groups of women, with a different outcome in each case.

Over the last few weeks I have wallowed in the glories of old cinema classics like Brief Encounter and The Roaring Twenties and seen what might come to be regarded as their equal, Atonement. I have enjoyed well-made movies like Fracture and The Prestige. I have been disappointed but nonetheless entertained by Die Hard 4.0 and 3.10 to Yuma.

And now I can add Death Proof to the list. A movie of the utmost banality. Not only is it rubbish, it is boring rubbish. And if Tarantino’s reply is that it’s a homage to the grindhouse movies of the past, complete with scratches, then it is self-indulgent boring rubbish, a film with its excuses built in.

All right, I’ll grant you a gruesome car crash, a vaguely erotic lap dance, an extended car chase and some impressive stunts. But the talk, the talk, the interminable talk!

Dialogue has always been one of Tarantino’s trademarks and he was rightly praised for it in his breakthrough films like Reservoir Dogs. It was witty, snappy and hilariously profane. It was also delivered by good, charismatic actors. It blended into the action, illuminated character and did nothing to hinder the narrative.

But in Death Proof it is idle, inane chatter between nonentities. A puffy Kurt Russell is no substitute for Travolta or Jackson or Keitel. And instead of Pam Grier or Uma Thurman we are presented with a gaggle of twittering starlets with cellulite.

Another of Tarantino’s traits has been his taste for playfulness with narrative. Flashbacks, putting the end at the beginning, or in the middle. Here he progresses in traditional fashion from A to B, then from A1 to C. If you don’t understand that, don’t worry. It’s not important. Nothing about this film is important.

We are treated to the usual QT camera angles, shots from inside a car engine, women's feet and other symptoms of adolescent film-making. There's the camera circling round the tableful of gabbling girls. Well, it worked in Reservoir Dogs, didn't it? And, ooh, what a long take. Seven minutes, I’m told. How easy to be a master director! Just strap on a steadicam and wander round a table after telling your actresses to chatter inanely. (Surely that stuff wasn't written).

Incidentally it proves why long takes should never be undertaken for their own sake. They work, in the sense that they match style and content, in, for example, Goodfellas and Atonement. Here it merely draws attention to itself and irritates. It’s like listening to the pub bore telling you how great a director Tarantino is.

QT isn't happy unless he's showing off his knowledge of forgotten films or pandering to the movie buffs in the audience. Did you know that Kurt Russell was in The Virginian a couple of times? There’s the rubber duck from Convoy on the bonnet (is that to remind us that even Peckinpah made bad films too?). Russell does a John Wayne impression – what an actor! I expect there were allusions to Japanese children’s TV, but they went over my head. And it was perhaps a mistake to keep mentioning Vanishing Point, with which Death Proof suffers badly in the comparison.

Has it any good points? There was one point when, following a sequence made for no apparent reason in black and white, we suddenly switch to colour, and glorious colour it is too. Yellow and orange leap out at you. A good moment.

And then there’s the stunt woman to whom he gives a speaking part, partly as a reward for her work on Kill Bill, partly because we can recognise that in the final car chase it is indeed her doing the heroics. She can’t act, but that is no problem in this movie. And there’s no doubt it’s an exciting sequence.

And there's the music, which helps pass to pass the time.

So how do I sum up: it’s a horror movie without being scary; it’s an action movie full of talk; it’s a black comedy which is not funny; and it’s a revenge story with little feeling of satisfaction, let alone catharsis.

Will Tarantino ever grow up? Will he ever put his undoubted talent with camera, actors and pen to produce anything other than self-regarding concept movies? Many of us thought Jackie Brown marked a new maturity but with Kill Bill and now this, I fear he will never emerge from the movie nursery.