Preston Sturges

He is not considered to be one of the great directors I suppose but he brought more joy to the cinema than most others - and that includes Capra and Hawkes. His humour is zany but his chief chharacters are not, only the peripheral ones are. So you get Sullivan in "Sullivan's Travels", played by Joel Mcrae, a man with a social conscience so deeply imbedded in his intelligent director-of-comedies head that he decides to go out on the road to see what it's like to live like a down-and-out. But he is surroundeed by some of the zaniest of characters in moveis - Sturges, like many other directors had a sort of gang of actors he used repeatedly (Franklin Pangborn, Robert Greig - butler usually, Jimmy Conlin and William Demerest - "the two-legged bull-dog"). And they were without fail zany if not crazy.
Some people like slap-stick, some don't. My own kids used to watch Laurel and Hardy films without laughing at all. Sturges was a master of slap-stick. I think the chase scene at the beginning of "Sullivan's Travels" is one of the funniest slap-stick scenes I have ever seen.
But Sturges was also a master of the the "one-liners", or rather, the one-line exchanges.
Here's an example from "The Lady Eve" which Anthony Lane writes is "pure Sturges".
Jane, played by Barbara Stanwyck, is telling Charles, played by Henry Fonda, about her ideal man.

Jean: He's a little short guy with lots of money.
Charles: I shouldn't think that kind of ideal was so difficult to find.
Jean: Oh, he isn't.... That's why he's my ideal.What's the sense of having one if you can't find him? Mine's a practical ideal you can find two or three of in every barber's shop.
Charles: Why don't you marry one of them?
Jean: Why should I marry anybody who looked like that?

Partners

A couple of days ago there was a list of famous partnerships in films in The Times. They had Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Baccall, John Ford and John Wayne and, of course, Butch Cassidy and The Sun Dance Kid - that is, Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
Now we hear that one of that last named partnerships has died: Paul Newman. And we learn too that their partnership was not just in a couple of films they made together but they were good friends in real life.
So too were the other partnerships mentioned above: Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn had a long-standing love affair but they never married each other - I believe Tracey was married and his Catholicism was, to him, sacred. Bogart and Baccall of course married soon after their film "To Have and Have Not" (or was it after "The Big Sleep"?). John Ford and John Wayne were good friends, the same sort of guys, hard, tough, right-wing, sentimental about America, its values and its history.
One great partnership was not mentioned in the Times list and this surprised me because, I would have thought, it was the most obvious one - Laurel and Hardy. What's more, unlike the other two male partnerships mentioned above, they also often slept in the same bed together.

Golf

I'm not bad at most sports - well I that's when I was younger - but golf was not a game I could get to grips with. I don't know why. Maybe because the ball was still when hit - but the white snooker ball is also still when hit and I was quite a fair snooker player. I think it has something to do with golf itself: the idea of golf in my mind, that it's an elitist game and you have to approach it with a certain kind of superior attitude. In short, I'm a bag of nerves when I'm on a golf course.
I remember being in a bar in Cardiff a long time ago and overhearing someone relating to another bloke a golfing experience.
"I was in the rough," he said, an expression on his face revealing tragedy. "The green was, O, 100, 150 yards ahead. Then I noticed my ball was on a little tump."
"Ah!" said his friend, eyebrows raised.
"I took a three iron," he continued.
"Mmm!" the other said.
"Brought it down and the ball sailed right up to the green and almost into the hole."
They both sat back as if they had just conquered Everest.
A similar thing happened to me once. There was a river between me and the hole. I too was in the rough. I was angry and hot and I wanted to be home or in the pub or anywhere but here in the rough. I too took a three iron, wabbled my arse about a bit, eyed the green and swiped.
The ball took off towards the hole then, for some inconceiveable reason, it plunged straight down into the river.
What a game! I haven't played since.

Plain Writing

I once wrote a short story in what I thought was Hemingway's style: short sentences with few adjectives, not much description, plenty of dialogue; I sent it to the BBC and they broadcast it much to my surprise.
A couple of days later a colleague and friend said his wife had heard my story and was impressed.
I thought: "this is the way to write - like Hemingway!"
But it wasn't like Hemingway at all. I've read it since and, though it works as a short story, it's definitely not like Hemingway - it's like Jones - me.
But I am always fascinated by the American writers who write succinctly, plainly, in a hard-ass kind of way - a bit macho you could say.
The great one these days, getting on a bit now, is of course Elmore Leonard. He is not now talked of as being a writer of crime fiction but, in The Times today, as a great novelist.
Yesterday I read the obituary of James Crumley of whom had I never heard (but will soon read him if the local library can get one for me); apparently he too writes in that plain style, no frills, hard-assed.
The obit said he is famous for an opening passage in his novel "The Last Good Kiss": "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
The Telegraph acclaimed him as "undoubtedly the righful heir to Raymond Chandler."
Big acclaim that!
Does it beat the opening of Chandler's first novel, "The Big Sleep"?
"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing a powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."
In both cases a sort of wry smile creeps to my lips.... I have to read on.

Jim Callaghan

Jim Callaghan turned up to speak at a students' union debate many years ago but left during the middle to attend his constituency meeting. When he came back he was ticked off by a prominent member of the students' union for being so mannerless.
I didn't think it was such a rude thing for him to do since surely his constituency was a bit more important than us.
But later I formed a different picture of the man. I think he could be rude, a bit of a bully, one who'd ride roughshod over people....
I joined the local labour party when Callaghan was our MP; the only reason was that I felt he could do with some middle-of-the-road support since there was a cabal of members of the constituency who were out to remove him, very left-wing guys who'd get up to speak and would not sit down for Castro-like periods of time.
I felt I was there to do him a good turn.
A lot of good I did him. I found he had plenty of support and didn't need me.
But I stayed a member for a year or so until something happened that made me change my mind about the man.
By this time he was PM and one of his first jobs was to assign a person to be Ambassador to the USA. He chose his son-in-law, Peter Jay.
I was disgusted. I turned up at the regular weekly meeting and, in "any other business", I said what I thought about the appointment and I would like to convey the message of what I thought to the immenent constituency meeting the following Friday.
A sort of shivering silence descended on the meeting. Then the chairman said that it was not possible to take the message to that meeting which Callaghan would be attending because it had been brought up in "any other business".
Whether that was a valid, constitutional reason I didn't (and don't) know; the fact was they were not going to do it and jumped at the excuse they made.
The fact was, I could see by the looks of dread on their faces, they were dead scared of telling him what I had said. He'd have wiped the floor with them.
I was never told about further meetings and never attended again.

Actors etc.

Many actors turn to direction and production after some success in acting; they seem to get dissatisfied with being just actors and perhaps feel they have to be more involved in the creative process. Sometimes they desire to become writers!
Kirk Douglas after he retired from acting in old age started writing novels and said he had never felt happier or more satisfied in his life.
Even Bing Crosby, who had written a song or part of one, confessed that he'd have given up all the wealth he had gotten from singing if only he could have composed one good song.
I wonder if he was really serious or was he just spouting a wish he secretly had and wanted to make it seem greater than it was.
Now today I read that Harvey Granville Barker the great producer, director, actor and playwright in the early 1900's, said, just before he died, that "I feel my life is useless". Of course, by that time, married to a rich lady with nothing much to do but write his famous "Prefaces to Shakespeare", was not doing what he best did - involving himself in the craft of theatre production work.
So there's an excuse for Barker's pessimism: he'd done it all and now he was finished with it.
But there's no excuse for Sir John Gielgud for his thoughts towards the end of his life after having lived such an eventfull and successful acting life. He said: "O, I don't go to the theatre any more. I used to go twice a week but I stopped all that. I do think that over my long life - and I've lived through two world wars - that theatre has been completely unimportant. Yet I've been obsessed by it all my life, and I'm a bit ashamed that it interests me much more than politics, say. It's been en escape for me which I'm not particularly proud of. It seems a bit childlike."

Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes's programme on Channel 4 this evening was a magnificent debunking of the modern art world: that the forces manipulating it now were purely commercial.
It's good to know that so distinguished a critic as Hughes dislikes the same poseurs as I do - Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst in particular. Another "artist" who has gained popularity as well as notoriety as well as his works attracting really big money whom Hughes feels is not a great artist ("the work has charm") is Klimpt and there again I agree with him.
But Hughes said something at the end of the programme that rather jolted me: that art should tell us something about the world; he felt that Warhol etc. fell by the wayside in this respect.
What about Rubens? Does his work tell us something about the world?
I am sure that Robert Hughes would be able to present an argument that would help me out here, but I have another trouble in that I have a blind spot with a good many "famous" painters and with Rubens in particular.
The most ironic thing I felt about the programme and that last comment is that the diamond skull of Damien Hirst, which Hughes reserves reservoirs of vilification and contempt for, does actually fulfill Hughes's precept about a work saying something about the world. What this work tells me is this: "Here I have constructed a skull encrusted with diamonds which shows how empty the world is of good art, the skull being simply a skull, but it also shows that this emptiness supports an art world solely led by the forces of commercialism."
Well done Hirst, you have at last created a work that is meaningful to the world of art today: it shows the emptiness of thought in works of "art" while vast amounts of money are lavished on them.

Jim Davidson

He doesn't seem funny any more. There was a time, about twenty years ago, when I found Jim Davidson funny. In a crude, down-to-earth way.
We were on holiday at Torquay; Jim was playing at a theatre there. I had no desire to see his show because I had heard how racialist it was, how coarse it was etc. but some people in the hotel said they were going again that night because they had enjoyed the show so much.
Going again! You don't go again unless there is something very special about a show. I went again to see "Singing in the Rain". And again. And again. And I saw "The Searchers" three times in as many weeks.
So off we went, my wife and I, to see Jim's show.
Yes it was coarse. Yes it was crude if not disgustingly rude. Yes it had racialist jpokes galore - but then people accepted them more easily than now in these politically correct days.
There were some good jokes in it and some clever sketches and Jim delivered the jokes with great style, the old cheekie chappie style of banter; and the sketches were often quite funny.
But that was then. Now Jim Davidson is not acceptable. And in an interview the other evening he gave one the impression that there might be a rather nasty piece of work behind those bland, bloated features.
I wouldn't go again to see him - but I'm glad I went that once if only to be in an audience of people who just loved him: theatre does not cater for that sort of audience any more. Many would say "thank God for that". I don't.

Tess

Another TV version of "Tess of the Durbervilles", another well produced, carefully crafted work and another production that is not Hardy-esque.
There's the spirited young woman with yearnings to better herself, the young "man of the manor" who desires to seduce her, the man's ailing mother who has always disliked him, the village yokels who dance round the maypole (or whatever) and ..... Yes, we are surely in Mills and Boon country.
Which is far from Hardy country.
Hardy country is the country of Egdon Heath. While it is the country of peasants and squires and so on it is also, primarilly I would say, the country of narrative literature at its finest.
My father always used to extol the virtues of Hardy's descriptions of places. His description of Egdon Heath in "The Return of the Native" is a brilliant piece of prose that can hold its own with the best, with Conrad, with Henry James, with Dickens even.
What TV cannot do is present a picture of this. It can, of course, show us beautiful pictures of the Heath but it cannot make us feel, with the camera alone, what Hardy felt.
"Tess of the Durbervilles" is a good piece of TV, strong in character and plot, brilliantly acted and produced but it not essential Hardy.

Page-Turners

I am presently reading a thriller called "Home Before Dark", and what a thriller it is. It's a page-turner, which is how book dealers describe the type of book you just can't put down.
But there other books that you start to read, put down, pick up again later and keep on reading for a long time. You enjoy them in a different way. They mean something to you.
When you've finished a page-turning thriller like this one by Charles Maclean, you usually remember them for the story; the others you remember for the story as well as other things: the characters, the depth of meaning in the plot, the ideas.
It took me twenty years to get through "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann and I don't think it was a useless exercise. I put it down, sometimes for months then picked it up again to carry on. I never had to go back to read what I had read before becsuse it had stayed with me, whereas some thrillers are forgotten quite soon after finishing them.
There are some books though I don't read through, don't pick up after reading just the opening; some of these are thought to be literary - Booker prize winners for example. Salmon Rushdie for example.
"Women in Love" by D.H.Lawrence was one that was neither a page-turner nor a book you could read slowly over a period of time; I think it was Hemingway who said that he felt like throwing the thing across the room every time he continued reading it, but continue reading it he did.
And so did I.

Chairs

The craftsman makes things that are useful; the artist makes things that are good to look at. Or words to that effect. So when a craftsman makes a chair it should be good to sit in; when an artist makes a chair its not for sitting in but for looking at.
Thus Michael Marriot in designing furniture should be making useful objects; but from what I can see in an article in the Telegraph Colour Supplement, he does not. The article is about Windsor Chairs he has "reimagined". He says his designs "focus on function" - as they should - but by the look of the chairs he has designed, I think they would be most uncomfortable to sit on. The backs are hard, vertical and made from thin, cylindrical struts of wood. The seat is hard, wooden, not cushioned. They are, of course, not quite replicas of the style called Windsor because Mr Marriot has reimagined that style.
Though probably they never were comfortable.
I once had a short talk to give; I chose as my subject "Visual Aids". I remember that I began by saying something like :"Take a chair; how can we define what a chair is? Difficult. It is a seat on four legs with a back.... etc. If someone did not know what a chair was they would not have a very good idea of what the thing was that I was defining. Visual Aids make definitions easy to understand."
In a way they make definitions redundant.
Whenever my wife and I go shopping for a chair or settee or anything on which I have to sit, I always state my wish to try it out before buying, even though it looks comfortable and even though it is good to look at. I sit on it, lay back on it, wonder whether I'd be able to sit there for an hour or so.... Then and only then does...... she decide whether we buy it or not!

Butterflies

The butterfly population is diminishing rapidly I read. I have never heard of most of the types mentioned and certainly I've never seen the gaudier ones. The only butterflies I remember seeing as a child were the Red Admiral and the Gabbage White.
The Cabbage White, as any vegetable gardener will know, lays eggs on cabbage leaves - on the underside of the leaves so that the unsuspecting amateur gardener and predators won't immediately see them. Turn over the leaf and there they are, the blighters, either small yellowish eggs or small, writhing caterpillars getting ready for the big feast - of your cabbages.
When I was a kid the word got about that, due to there being a superfluity of Cabbage White butterflies, the local council would pay a certain number of pence for every ten butterflies caught, killed and delivered to the council offices.
I never found out if this was some kind of joke, or a rumour that took off, or if it was an actual official project, but what happened was that every kid I knew was out and about catching and killing white butterflies and putting them in containers ready to take them to the council office at the time specified: a certain Saturday morning.
I caught and killed a few, then gave up, forgetting about it.
Until I heard what had happened that Saturday morning.
A group of about thirty kids turned up at the council office to collect the money in exchange for the butterlies they had killed and had with them.
However, they found that the door of the council office was closed and that, banging on it, brought no one to open it and attend to them.
One of my friends told me what they did next in their anger at being duped this way.
"We stuffed our butterflies through the letter box," he said. "Every one of them. Must have been hundreds," he laughed.
I have often wondered about the reaction of the first person to open the door of the council office the following Monday morning as he waded, possibly knee deep, in dead Cabbage White butterflies.

Scientists

There is a slim possibility that next Wednesday we will all be "blown to Kingdom Come" or, rather, sucked into a black hole.
What a black hole is, I don't know, except that it's big and horrible and fatal.
Scientists have created a gigantic mechanism that, next Wednesday, will be set to go off and prove certain things about the origin of the universe.
But there are other scientists who believe that this is going to be disastrous and that something is going to go wrong and black holes (whatever they are) are going to be formed and these black holes (why are they black?) are going to suck the earth down into them..... and so on and so forth.
The Times scientist believes that the work being done is esseential for the understanding of where the earth and all that is contained in it came from; the others - cranks apparently - think the experiment is unwise - to say the least.
I go with those doing the experiment. We can't let cranks have their say. Can we?
The trouble is that my experience of scientific experiments and scientific research makes me doubt the veracity of certain projects. I have known research being done to prove so and so but the work done does not prove it. So, wait for it, the results are cooked.
In short I am very sceptical about science altogether. As I am about the medical profession.
When Bernard Shaw wrote "The Doctor's Dilemma" he was verbally traduced and abused and insulted for suggesting that doctors had so many differing theories about illnesses that it was doubtful if anyone knew which was the right one.
Scientists are equally at logger heads about their ideas.
So, let's wait until next Wednesday to find out if we are going to live or die, shall we? If we live we can say "well done you wonderful scientists." If we get sucked down into that black thing then... well, I'm afraid, we won't be in a position to complain.

Wittgenstein

I wish I knew more about philosophy. I once attended extra mural classes in philosophy in Cardiff University but everything I thought I knew then I have now forgotten. I actually did a whole term on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein but do you think I can remember anything about it? The answer is a simple "no".
Now a new book has been written by Alexander Waugh (O no, not one of the Waughs; I hope not because I was hoping that after the passing on to the Catholic Heaven of Auberon Waugh, we had seen and heard the last of them). It is a book not on the famous philosopher but on the whole family: father, mother, brothers and sisters.
We learn that Ludwig was the youngest, that Paul, the next youngest, was a famous pianist and that three other brothers committed suicide.
Another point of interest is that Paul lost a hand in the first world war and that Ravel, in sympathy for his friend, composed him his "Piano Concerto for left hand", an act of kindness for which I can almost forgive him for composing "Bolero".
Ah yes, I can recall something of the course I took on Wittgenstein. It's what he is most famous for saying: "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." In other words, if you've got something to say, then say it; if you haven't, then belt up.
Maybe!

Glamorous Knitwear

My wife told me that the knitting designs of clothes of the 1930's are now popular. What, those chunky sweaters and jerkins and what-not?
Well, according to The Daily Telegraph, it's true: the old stuff is back.
"If you flicked through magazines of the 1930's to 1950's, the key look of those elegant decades would be a sophisticated, decidedly feminine look, where the glamorous knitwear took centre stage."
So "glamorous knitwear" is back eh! Patterns for jumpers, pullovers, cardigans etc. are being produced of those clothes in vogue then, but the patterns are designed such that they are suitable for "the modern knitter".
Whatever, I wonder, is a "modern knitter" other than "people who knit today"?
Anyway, my wife says that "the Celia Johnson" type cardigan is now popular (and here's me thinking about the Jane Mansfield sweater!).
I can hear the strains of Rachmaninov's 2nd. Piano Concerto now as in my mind's eye I see Trevor Howard in his tweed suit say "Pardon me, I'm a doctor" as he removes a bit of grit from Celia's eye.
Never mind Trevor Howard and his suits. They've never gone away like knitted sweaters have. What I'm looking forward to is the return of the Noel Coward cravat to cover the chicken's neck effect in my ageing body. Together, of course, with the long cigarette holder. God, I'd reconsider my decision to give up smoking if they return to the sartorial scene.
"Darling."
"Yes darling?"
"Nothing darling, just 'darling', darling." (Punch cartoon back then)