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.

On the move

It's never great fun having to move home. Especially when you have about five minutes notice to do so.

Thank God there are a few people I haven't alienated who have floors and roofs.

How do I move all of those books and DVDs? What about all that food in the freezer? Where do I find a bottle opener?

Worst of all though was being without access to my computer for a month. No emails; no opportunity to sound off about the issues of the day while they're fresh in my mind; and nothing to do with my itching fingers first thing in the morning.

Anyway, after a few hiccups, I'm back on line. Admittedly I'm resting my keyboard on my knees while I sit on the bed, with my computer screen balanced precariously on a chair. But I'm ready to go.

So, what have I got to say? Those reviews of Brief Encounter, 3.10 to Yuma and Atonement? Maybe tomorrow, except I've got to be at City Hall then to ask about housing benefit. I can do a quick review of American Gangster though. It's a derivative combination of The Godfather, Serpico, Scarface and Public Enemy, with a pudgy Russell Crowe and Denzil Washington struggling desperately to shake off his nice guy personality. And failing. Avoid it.

Worst thing about the last month is that I missed 11 November, the anniversary of a very special day. And that will require some thought. Besides I don't the end of the story yet.

Rugby Balls

A word about the rugby. England lost. But they lost fairly and with a lot of honour.

It’s easy to quibble about the try that wasn’t, but what let us down was the tactics. Kick, kick, kick. ‘Run,’ I kept yelling. ‘Remember Fiji.’ When you kick you gain territory, but lose possession, and there was no way we were going to steal their line-out.

OK, I know these were the tactics that got us took us so unexpectedly to the final, but couldn’t we see that South Africa were beating us at our own game?

The man I feel most sorry for is Jason Robinson, a player I’ve always found at least as exciting as Jonny Wilkinson. In the past, when Robinson got the ball I always leapt up with expectation. He would look around, wiggle his bottom and dart upfield like a rabbit chased by a pack of poodles.

And yet in the last few games he’s been told to kick the bloody ball away. It made this brave man look craven. A sad end, limping off early to watch Tait provide glimpses of what might have been.

* * *

And what now for South Africa? It seems that their government has decided that that their rugby team should descend to the level of Azerbaijan. Incredibly, just as their team becomes the best in the world, they wish to throw away the concept of selection on merit – is there ever any other concept of selection? – and choose the team to ‘reflect the make-up of the nation’.

So, what’s that mean? Ten blacks and five whites? What about ‘coloureds’? Asians; Jews. What about the division of ‘blacks’ into Xhosa and Zulu, not to mention all the other groupings? In any case, rugby is a class thing, isn’t it? Maybe you should be denied selection if you’ve got a degree. And why exclude women, children, OAPs, disabled people. You won't win anything, but what could beat that lovely warm feeling of sanctimony.

What a load of balls!

* * *

Talking about balls, there’s been a lot more in the news this week.

For some reason thinking about rugby reminds me of fat people. I know it’s not the case anymore that the game is characterised by beer-bellied boozers, but I can’t help the way my mind works.

‘Obese’ is the word these days for what were once called ‘fat bastards’. ‘Obesity’ is not the result of greed and sloth and stupidity, but a condition, we were informed this week by the Chief Medical Officer himself, caused by ‘the failure of human biology to keep pace with changes in society’.

I remember one of the would-be strippers in The Full Monty, sitting in his garden shed, his belly strapped with cling-film and eating Mars Bars, all the while bemoaning his weight problem.

‘The wife’s got anti-ageing cream and anti-wrinkle cream,’ he says. ‘What I need is some anti-fat-bastard cream.’

No use. It’s evolution’s fault. Now that theory raises some interesting possibilities. We need to do some selective breeding, mating people who seem to cope better with today’s lifestyle and diet. As it’s a matter of urgency – Education Secretary Alan Johnson thinks the problem is on a par with global warming – I would like the powers that be to know that I myself have a high metabolic rate and am at the nation’s disposal.

Now I’m talking a load of balls!

* * *

What else is annoying me at the moment? All right, I’m a grumpy old man, but these things must be said.

There were those kids who stoned an old bloke to death, more or less, and were tried at the Old Bailey. My complaint is not that they only got a year in some sort of detention – although it’s a travesty – nor that their parents, assuming they’ve got any, weren’t in the dock with them. No, it’s that we’ve been subjected since to the bleating of bleeding hearts that have crawled out from under those rocks called university social studies departments to tell us that these little bastards are too young to be held accountable for their contemptible actions.

The same characters are fretting about the desire of prison officers to use batons on violent young offenders. Give them water cannon, if not machine guns, I say.

They make me so cross that I mixed my metaphors back there. And for that I can never forgive them.

Of course these ‘children’ – funny how they’re called children sometimes and ‘young adults’ at others – know the difference between ‘right and wrong’. If a gang of middle class liberals were to get drunk and throw stones at a ten-year-old caught reading The Daily Telegraph, the little offender would soon start bawling, ‘It ain’t fair, mistuh’. Ergo, they know what’s wrong. In that silly little scenario is the essence of social morality.

Even Jesus Christ would agree with that, not that he’s much of an authority. In fact he talked rather a lot of bollocks himself. I’ll come back to that another day.

* * *

What else? Is there no end to the insanity of Britain today?

Oh yes. Apparently there’s an epidemic of ‘middle-class drinking’. Now this is not ‘binge-drinking’. That is the privilege of children or young adults or whatever they’re called in this case. Middle class people, whoever they are, indulge in ‘hazardous drinking’. Forgive me, by the way, for using inverted commas so much, but how else do I convey my contempt for the silly journalistic phrases taken up and parroted from newspaper to TV and back again.

It seems that professional people are going home after a day’s work and drinking a bottle of wine. Every day. Shock horror! What is the point, I ask, of aspiring to a middle class income, if not to be able to afford a decent bottle of wine on a daily basis?

Dawn Primarola, a health minister with impeccable Stalinist credentials, has warned that ‘this must stop.’ God help us.

Personally, I wish I could afford it. But I’m not complaining. What with the reasonable rates at Wetherspoon’s pubs and ASDA I’m at this very moment finishing my week’s government-allocated quota of alcohol.

Not bad, considering I started yesterday morning.

What the hell. Do you live and put up with all this balls forever?

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Ten o'clock Sunday morning and I was halfway through watching Emmylou Harris singing songs to illustrate her 'Ten Commandments of Country Music' concert.

There were tears in my eyes. Of course there were, all you unbelievers will say. But you'd be wrong. This was country music as it should be, 'three chords and the truth'. It had all the elements - the plaintive maundering fiddle, the playful mandolin, the plangent steel guitar, the discreet harmonies dragging against the aching vocals of Emmylou, herself as wonderfully mature and beautiful as the music.

When you wake up with a hangover and still tense from the night before's rugby match, it's the only kind of music to listen to. Especially when you have that horrible feeling that you might have fallen in love.

Anniversary Blog

I'm the kind of man who tends to miss anniversaries. Well, they're all a bit silly really, aren't they?

So it's no surprise that I missed the anniversary of my own blog, where I first posted last year on the 12th October with some thoughts on the odd things which trigger memories. So why not do something similar today and begin with 'fairy clocks'?

I'm finding it, by the way, more difficult to post blogs regularly. When I started the idea was to ramble on about anything and everything, rather in the way I like to have long, discursive conversations in the pub. I seem to have become more self-conscious and desirous of producing something 'polished' whenever I write. Maybe, this is the time to make a new year's resolution and re-find the joy of talking nonsense.

So, fairy clocks. In other words, the dandelion in its seeding stage, those pretty balls of spores that children used to blow in order to tell the time, the number of puffs required to denude the stalk being the hour of the day. I wonder if they still do that.

I left the house to catch a bus the other day and was surprised to see the lawn carpeted with them. They seemed to have sprung up over night. It triggered memories of spending summer days wandering around fields and woods many years ago. In those days, during the summer holidays, children would leave the house after breakfast and return for tea, their parents quite unconcerned about danger, human, animal or physical.

We would swim unsupervised in the 'forty-foot' drain, make arrows from garden canes and nails, throw stones into wasps nests, light fires, practice riding bikes around corners without touching the handle-bars, and slash with sticks at vegetation.

By that time we'd gone beyond blowing the spores off fairy clocks. We preferred to do our part in the symbiotic relationship with them by kicking the hell out of them. No matter. The seed was spread far and wide, as the dandelions wanted. (Forgive the teleology). just as birds eat berries and pass the seeds through their gut, and bees spread pollen in return for nectar, we were doing our bit for dandelions in return for fun and fresh air.

The earlier game of blowing at them to tell the time had given us another benefit, namely a healthy lesson in scepticism. When three little boys get three different times from the exercise, they tend to doubt the foolish adults who had told them such nonsense.

Why do parents tell their children all these lies? Jack Frost painting the windows in winter; fairies (again) leaving coins under the pillow in exchange for teeth, or constructing perfect rings of mushrooms within which to cavort.

To be honest, those are all beautiful conceits, but why aren't children told that they are metaphors? Yes, I know that people say that 'children must be allowed their childhood', and the years of childhood are indeed the years of wonder. But isn't it just as wonderful to know the truth about these miracles of nature. I still don't know how the phenomenon of mushroom rings occurs.

The essential, defining characteristic of the human animal is his mind. But more than that, we have evolved in such a way that we have perhaps the longest period of immaturity in the animal kingdom, something like 16% of our lives. All that time to grow and learn, learn, learn.

And yet how often do you hear parents impatiently discouraging their children's questions or palming them off with cliches and ex cathedra judgments.

You can tell a lot about a person by discovering when he stopped believing in Father Christmas. It could be useful at a university selection board. Imagine:

Interviewer: When did you stop believing in Father Christmas?

Candidate: But I haven't. I still believe in Father Christmas.

Interviewer: I'm sorry, but a degree in maths, physics, biology or philosophy is out of the question in your case. I think you should read theology.

Yes, that's what I'm getting round to. Religion. Stuffing children's heads full of superstitious mythology is one of the worst kinds of child abuse. We rightly make a hell of a fuss about debauching their bodies, but let's show their minds a bit of respect too.

I'm not talking about children being told that Jesus is weeping because they've been caught stealing a Mars bar; or terrified by visions of hell because a mother thinks her son's socks are suspiciously stiff.

Nor am I condemning religion because some rogue priests allow the frustrations of their life-denying celibacy to spill over into confirmation candidates. Or because others use it as an excuse for murder or the persecution of teachers who give teddy bears a funny name and tell kids the story of the three little pigs

Funny where the thought process leads you.

The Election that Never Was

As soon as Gordon Brown became Prime Minister TV and newspapers began to talk about a snap election in the autumn. I thought it would be a strange kind of snap election that was predicted three or four months in advance, but such things are typical of the press.

And that early election was indeed almost called. But just as the press was congratulating itself on its prescience, the PM decided not to go ahead after all. The newspapers were furious. ‘Gordon Brown bottles it!’ was a typical headline.

I couldn’t help but think that if the election had gone ahead the tabloids would have been shouting about the government ‘cutting and running’. And the serious papers would have complained about an opportunistic manipulation of the parliamentary system. they would have been right there.

There were two reasons, I believe, for the media outrage. The first is that the government had exploited them, by briefing about the possibility of a poll in order to test the water and draw attention away from the Conservative Party conference. And second, because they had been deprived of some excitement. The press hates the boring routine of government administration. It wants conflict, drama. It wants change.

The PM doesn’t come out the past fortnight very well either. In political terms he’s shown himself as a ditherer. Having tried to use the press for his own purposes, he’s discovered that it can turn on you and give you a very nasty bite.

I imagine he looked ahead over the next couple of years and saw a slowing economy, mounting government debt, no likelihood of improvement in Iraq, not to mention the bubbling discontent about the European constitution. If there was a chance of going to the country and getting another safe five years of power, better to grab it.

If that were the decision he could trot out some cant about ‘seeking a renewed mandate’.

But when a fleeting opinion poll seems unfavourable he can wait for a better opportunity and use the fallback cliché about ‘getting on with the job of serving the British people’.

One of the constitutional issues raised by this episode is whether or not Gordon Brown has the right to be Prime Minister. As has been pointed out, he was not leader of the Labour Party when the general election was fought; and he didn’t even face a contest when he became leader of the party. Does he not, in fact, need a mandate of his own?

No, he does not. He is not a President. We elect Parliaments, not governments, and certainly not prime ministers. The media might like to reduce our system to a simple matter of two or three personalities, and the parties themselves are complicit in it for reasons of their own (party discipline for one). But under our system the Queen sends invites to form a government the person who can command the confidence of the House of Commons.

The Commons are elected by law every five years, although Parliament may be dissolved at any time, under the Royal Prerogative (ie the PM’s prerogative). Choosing the date of the election has always been at advantage to the governing party, but it is against the spirit of the constitution to rush to the country every time there is an encouraging opinion poll.

That’s why I wouldn’t have been happy with a general election this autumn. It’s not as if the government has lost its majority; or suffered a defeat on a motion of confidence; or as if a national emergency had overtaken us (like the miners’ strike of 1974); or a constitutional crisis (such as the Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s budget in, I think, 1906).

So Gordon Brown has done the right thing, but probably for the wrong reason.

Now the press can move on to the next non-event.

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.