Night of the Hunter

Thanks Gloria for the interesting comments (Blog: 50 top films) on "The Night of the Hunter" and for the Guardian article which I read with great interest.
I believe that James Agee was the scriptwriter of the film; I wonder if he gets enough credit. I wonder if this was the only fiction film he wrote. I know he wrote a script about workers in the south of America but can't recall the title.
I once read a book of film criticisms of his. Very good. One thing I recall frrom that book was a tale about W.C.Fields. He received a letter from a big producer of a film he was working on and in the letter the producer said that some of the girls on the set had complained about Fields' behaviour towards them. Fields got his maid to write an answer to the porducer; she wrote "Mr Fields and I read your letter and did we laugh."

Fraudsters

So Bernard Madoff is going to be sentenced tomorrow and, it is supposed, he'll get so long in prison that he will die there (perhaps he should try the old alzeimer's-disease-scam, the one where it is pleaded that this model prisoner is suffering so much etc etc..... he gets out and soon recovers and - would you believe it? - sets up shop again). How is it, people ask, that your ordinary invester can be taken in by frauds like Madoff?
I knew a man who was taken in by fraudsters all the time. He'd see something in a newspaper or magazine, something which would offer to give him large profits for his investment and he'd fall for it; not in thousand of pounds but in hundreds. He'd say to me: "this company are making small statuettes out of silver which will increase in value by 100's of per cent in months...." I'd say "don't touch it." But he'd go ahead and after some time tell me "it hadn't worked out" - not he had lost an great deal of money but just that "it hadn't worked out".
He was a retired police officer.
Gamblers are the ordinary people who think they can win big time when they should know from experience that they can't. I knew a man who later became a school py0schyatrist who gambled all his money away and had to go back to being a quite lowly paid teacher from being a highly paid business man.
He became a Roman Catholic.
What amazes me is the gullibility of those who invest in certain charismatic men who not only should never be believed about anything but who also have a past record for fraudulent dealings. Robert Maxwell was someone who was marked by an investigative group of bankers as someone who should never be given money for further "businesses". However, soon he was back in business and the banks, as if their memories were short or as if they didn't have memories at all, opened their doors to him and said "come on in Bob, here's a couple of a million for you to start you off."
Somebody else's money of course.
As a writer in today's Telegraph says: with bankers it's never their money; with MP's it's never their money; with BBC executives it's never their money. It's tax payers money!

50 Top Films

Here we go again: a list of the 50 best films, this time from The Spectator magazine. Some time ago Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" always took pride of place at the top of these lists; now it hardly ever does. Here it is at No. 14; and here too is "The Magnificent Ambersons" which most people would, I think, have put at a lower level (if appearing at all) - here it is at No. 7! There is a lot of doubt about whether Welles was completely in charge of the filming of "Ambersons"; certainly the editing of it was not done solely by Welles who, I believe, "washed his hands" of the project since the producers wanted so many changes, believing it to be a money-loser. They were right. It's a hard film to like. There is one outstanding performance in it though; not only outstanding but altogether surprising. Tim Holt, a B picture actor, gave a great performance as a rather "spoilt child" of a young man (his other great performance in film was in "Treasure of Sierra Madre").
There is one serious omission from the list I believe: "Shane". It's never in any list now that I know of. A superb masterpiece of a Western, better than any.... OK, maybe "The Searchers" is as good - that is on the list at No. 6. And where is "High Noon"?
Film critics of newspapers used to offer their lists of best films to a certain newspaper or magazine (was it "Sight and Sound"?) and someone would compile a "critics list" from them. I recall Dilys Powell, well known film critic then, writing that she would have liked to have included a couple of Laurel and Hardy "shorts" in her list - probably not allowed or maybe they would have been deemed "fascetiously chosen". She was quite serious. Why not? Those L and H "shorts" are wonderful. Well, some are.
The No 1 in this list is a surprising choice, directed by an actor, his one and only film as director; not a popular film, one that produced heaps of problems in its making, and one that is not just frightening but alarming in a way that makes me sometimes feel that I shouldn't be watching it as if I am watching porn. The film is "The Night of the Hunter" directed by Charles Laughton with an astonishingly unsentimental and real personification of a religious basket case by Robert Mitchum.
Here are a few films on the Speccie list that I think should not have been included: "The Red Shoes" (No. 20); "Blade Runner" (No. 17); "Le Grande Illusion" (no. 13); "Rio Bravo"(no. 10); "The Magnificent Ambersons" (No. 7).

Poetry Readings

The Spectator magazine is having a poetry reading session. When I saw the £40 I wondered if that was what they were giving everyone who attended; but I thought, when I saw "includes drinks reception", that that would be showing too much generosity on their part.
Of course I didn't think anything of the kind: I'm simply saying that I wouldn't pay £40 for a poetry reading whoever was performing; and with the four "poets" giving the reading - Clive James, Olivia Cole, Andrew Motion and Annie Freud - I don't think I'd give a fiver.
Is Clive James a poet? I can't think of a single poem of his that has impressed me, though I have to say I haven't read all that much. I recall his writing a poem to the Royal Family after which a more famous poet said "is this the worst poem ever written?"
Olivia Cole I have heard of but haven't read - another reason for the fiver!
Andrew Motion: I've read a few bits and pieces of his but was not impressed.
Annie Freud: again not known.
A couple of years ago Boris Johnson, who was then ediotor of The Speccie, ordered that no poems would be published unless they rhymed. Now that he has left,back has come the old stuff, in poetic lines yes, OK, but having no rhymes, not even rhythm. In short: prose.
£40 !!!

Husbands

Toby Young, writing in The Spectator says that fathers have become second-class citizens. Once there was nothing of a domestic nature to bother them; now they are expected to help with household chores, especially those having to do with their children. He says: "Proposing that men and women should embrace more traditional roles is akin to announcing that you've just joined the BNP."
It made me think of Agatha Christie's father. She wrote about him in her autobiography (almost as boring a book as Enid Blyton's - why is that commercially successful writers are such bores when it come to writing the truth), how he would leave the home every morning in his large chaufered car (probably a Rolls) and go to his club. For the day! His "work" seemed to consist of reading the stocks and shares. He was hardly ever home.
I knew a man some twenty years ago who lived in Cardiff but was a lecturer in a university near London. He would leave home Monday morning to go to his college and return home on the following Friday. But he never went straight home, O no: a few pints in a pub close by before he arrived home - after the kids had gone to bed! His wife eventually had an affair and divorced him.
He was not at all typical of those husbands you see in adverts on TV: the wife is efficient, attractive, on top of things, then you see the bumbling husband doing every simple task ineptly, breaking things, falling about... and the wife rolls her eyes and smiles - or, rather, smirks.
The bumbling husband brings Mr Bumble himself to mind: when he discovered that though his wife had been at fault over something it was he who, by law, would be responsible.
"The law supposes that your wife acts under your direction," he is told.
Bumble replies: "If the law supposes that, the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor."

Phillip Toynbee

Phillip Toynbee's name cropped up a few days ago; it was mentioned in a list of writers who were considered to be second rate. This I could not understand: 30 or 40 years ago he had a distinguished reputation as a critic and poet. I remember him only as a critic but my father admired his other writings.
Two things I remember about him: Joseph Heller, an American, had written his first novel, "Catch 22" and it hadn't gone down very well in the States. It was not until Phillip Toynbee gave it a rave review that it took off, not just here but over in the USA as well. That tells something of his reputation. Yet, one feels, surely the novel would by its own steam, as it were, have been recognised for what it was, a marvellous satire on war, a modern work of literature the like of which, it's safe to say, had never been known before.
The other thing I recall is that Phillip Toynbee gave consummate praise to a book that, later, he seemed to regret having been so enthusiastic about, Colin Wilson's "The Outsider". Whether or not it was Toynbee's admiration for the book that gave it such momentum in sales I don't know but Colin Wilson's book was so drastically reviewed by others equally as distinguished as Toynbee that it became sort of infra dig to say you liked it.
I read it and enjoyed it greatly though I have to say Wilson's later work didn't speak to me at all: he became a kind of guru of mystical and magical phenomena, an expert of Jack the Ripper (how many of those are there?) and so on.
There were, if memory doesn't fail me, two excellent literary critics writing for The Observer at that time: Phillip Toybee and Cyril Connolly ("in every fat man there's a thin man trying to get out"). They both tried their hands at novels but, like many another critic, they didn't have much success.
I have known two people who, after attending university and studying literature, found it almost impossible to engage in creative work - I mean fiction writing. Maybe it's because they are too critical of what they themselves are writing to be unstilted in their style.
Someone once said of a relation of Toltoy's that "he's too good a writer to be a novelist".

After Dinner Speakers

I used to be a tutor at a weekend creative writing series of courses. One weekend a man turned up who was a home office pathologist (but he didn't want anyone else to know this). He said his aim was "to write articles like Bernard Levin" which I thought an admirable aim if one that few people, I felt, could achieve. He produced a few examples of his attempts which were reasonably good but I had the feeling that it wasn't something he would excel at.
When he came next time he said his intention had changed: he no longer wished to write like Bernard Levin but to learn how to give after-dinner speeches. He had, he said, enroled at an "after-dinner speaking course" or maybe just a get-together. The reason he wished to do this was that he said he was often asked to be a guest speaker at various functions and felt he wasn't very good at it.
He tried to inject more humour into his speeches or talks. They worked quite well but I felt, though didn't tell him, that he was not a natural after-dinner speaker.
What is natural after-dinner speaker? I don't think there's a definition but it has something to do with timing, good, clear delivery of course and with an x quality that only the speaker himself is able to bring out. In other words, some are good at it and others aren't.
I don't know if he ever succeeded in his aim to become a successful after-dinner speaker but if he did I am told there's a lot of money to be made out of it. Maybe by now he's given up cutting up corpses for the maybe more lucrative job of "cutting the mustard" on the after-dinner speaking bandwagon.

Isaiah Berlin

Paul Johnson, writing a book review in The Spectator of "The Letters of Isaiah Berlin", asks "how serious was he?" He was not really a philosopher, Johnson says, and confessed he had never been able to understand Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". I would like to know someone who does understand it. I tried to read it a long time ago and failed dismally on about the third page.
But I can't read Isaiah Berlin either. Which is strange because I always found him easy to follow whenever he appeared on TV explaining what philosophy was all about (usually with Brian Magee).
Talking about a subject off the cuff, so to speak, some people can do well but when they settle down to write a piece on the same subject they often founder. A professor of philosophy, who used to give extra mural lessons I went to, was a brilliant talker but when, one day, he read something from a book he was writing, he was incomprehensible. Maybe Isaiah Berling was like him: an easy talker who, when going to write something down, had a fear that other philosophers might take him apart, so used a style that was so perfect logically but which manifested itself as impenetrable.
Isaiah Berlin was a sort of unpaid ambassador to America in the early part of WW2. Winston Churchill, at a dinner with guests one evening was sitting next to Irving Berlin who, hearing his surname, mistook him for Isaiah Berlin.
"How's does Mr Roosevelt feel regarding the war in Europe?" he asked Irving Berlin who is supposed to have replied "Huh?"

Haydn Tanner

When I was a young man I remember going to see a rugby match between an Australian team called Kiwis - I believe they were an army team - and a Barbarian team comprising big names from the four British and Irish countries. It was one of those games you never forget. You felt priveleged to be there to see it; it was considered by the experts to be the best rugby match that ever was played. It's still talked about: if you see a great game you compare it with the memory of that game.
It was a clean, fast game in which the two teams seemed intent not on grinding the other team into the Cardiff Arms Park dirt but, on the contrary, on playing a sort of wholesome game of rugby.
Bleddwyn Williams, the great Welsh centre , was playing that day and, probably, his Welsh centre partner too in the rather rotund shape of Jack Matthews.
But there was, that day, the outstanding player of the game at scrum half, someone who went down in legend as the greatest until Gareth Edwards came along about whom valid comparisions could be made. I am talking, of course, about Haydn Tanner who has recently died at the age of 92.
He played a terrific game that day. But he always was a terrific player, so I was told then - I didn't see him before the WW2" - and he is even now considered to be one of the finest players of all time.
Bleddwyn Williams talks now (he must be in his 80's) of Haydn Tanner's pass being better even than Gareth Edwards's; this I find hard to believe since Williams being a centre would have hardly ever received a pass from either - the pass centres would usually receive would be from the outside half, who was, apparently Willie Davies who was his cousin and is hardly ever talked about. Maybe it's because he "went North"!

I like it

Occasionally you come across someone who likes your style of writing. One such, for me, was a man named Christopher Sergel who was founder and head of the Dramatic Publishing Company of Illinois, USA. They published two short plays of mine, "The Terrorist" and "International Deadline" but they never took off and are now, probably, not available.
One day I was surprised to see his name as adaptor of the famous novel by Harper Lee "To Kill a Mockingbird"; it is an adaptation which has been used worldwide. Other of his adaptations were "Cheaper by the Dozen" and "The Mouse that Roared".
Now I find that he died in 1993. This I found rather strange because my play "International Deadline" was published by his company in 1994. He must have written to me about it in 1993 just before he died - which I find rather sad.
Before he set up The Dramatic Publishing Company he had had a quite adventurous life: Captain of a schooner that spent 2 years in the South Pacific; living in the African bush for a year; Lt. Commander during WW2.
His adaptation of Sherwood Anderson's "Winnesburg Ohio" made it to Broadway.
I thought it a terrific book many years ago but found it not an exciting read more recently. There is only one line I can remember from it (and this may not be an accurate quotation) about a rather grubby looking man: "even the whites of his eyes were dirty".
RIP Christopher Sergel, one of those rare individuals who liked what I wrote.

Doors

There is a scene in "Double Indemnity" where Barbara Stanwyck, femme fatale, is with her lover, Fred Macmurray, in his appartment when she is about to leave as Macmurray's boss, in the shape of Edward G. Robinson, appears just down the corridor from the apartment door; she has to hide behind the door as it has been opened so that Robinson can't see her and know she's there with the man who is going to kill her husband (so that they can collect the insurance on his "accidental" death). You see her standing behind the open door as Macmurray speaks to Robinson about the case they are investigating. Good, tense scene. But, as Billy Wilder himself said, "doors never open outwards". They had to pretend that this one was different and did open outwards hoping that no one watching the film would notice.
Today, at a hospital where I was visiting a friend, I came across a door that actually opened outwards. In fact, when I went to leave the room, I tugged at the door expecting it to open inwards, then briefly thought "I've been locked in!"
I pointed this feature out to a nurse, hoping for an explanation. "Security," he said.
I scratched my head.