The Oscar

So it's Oscar night and "The King's Speech" is likely to sweep the board. It's a good film, entertaining, with some scenes that make you want to squirm with anguish at what the character of the king is going through. Three excellent performanc in it: Colin Firth of course; Helen Bonham Carter playing Quees Elizabeth who became the queen mother - she makes you rather like her, more than she did in life, and Geoffrey Rush as the man who tried to cure the king's stammer, a fine performance by an Australian of an Australian.
But since seeing that I have seen two other films which border on great: "True Grit" and "The Fighter". "True Grit" is not so much a remake of the John Wayne film though it does follow the same plotlines for most of the time; it's another version of the book by Charles Fortis; it follows more exactly the plot and the style with its old-style speech patterns as in the book. The characters all speak as if they are characters straight out of the bible; no one says "it's" or "they're" but "it is" and "they are". Which make some of conversations seem longer than they are.
There is a scene in the film that shoots out at you emotionally, it hits you in the gut (or maybe heart). It's a short piece: the girl who wants Rooster Cogburn to capture the man who killed her father says somethingn like "I want to hire you because I have heard that you are a man of true grit". I can't say why it is so jolting to the em,otional senses; it has something to with the evident sincerity of the girl and with the one-eyed gaze of the man but, like jokes, "it's the way you tell 'em" and she "tells" it beautifully: a little smile, but only a very little one, and a look in her eyes that is heartrending.
"The Fighter" is just a grand old boxing film. But it's not just that: it's a story of a disfunctional mother trying to cope with two boxing sons; she wants the best for them but doesn't have a clue how to do that.
There are three oscar-winning performances in these two films: Jeff Bridges. Christian Bale and the mother (whose name I can't remember). But Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush will probably win.
They should have a "young oscar" for the girl in "True Grit".

Scarface

Why do remember Howard Hawks's version of "Scarface" better than Brian de Palma's version. Both were pretty violent movies telling the story of the rise and fall of a fictional crook resembling Al Capone. Both were blessed with two astonishingly good character actors in Jewish Paul Muni and the American, but maybe of Italian stock, Al Pacino. All I can recall from the de Palma film is Pacino's terrifying use of a hand-held machine drill - maybe a Black and Decker? - and that his Scarface came from Cuba in a batch of the lowest of the low criminals that Castro had shipped in to Florida. Though I saw Paul Muni's "Scarface" many moons ago, I still remember a lot of it: the opening scene of a shooting of a rival gang member making a telephone call from a kiosk; a later shooting up of a restaurant, quite a comic piece if memory doesn't fail me here; the end with a great shoot-out of Scarface who had, safely he imagined, walled himself up in a building with the windows made of sheet metal.
A man named Plato, a Greek, used to attend extra mural philosophy classes with me on Wednesday mornings a few years ago. I can't say I liked him much chiefly because he had an uncontrollable temper which occasionally erupted if he felt that the professor, conducting the lectures, made some comment he didn't care for. He would stand up and go into a tirade of hateful diatribe directed at the professor who never combatted him, he just sat silent until the storm was over. I often felt like telling him to stuff his cake-hole with something large, like a grapefruit, but didn't have the guts to do so. Nobody did. We all just sat there like the professor and waited for him to calm down.
But like a lot of men with idealistic views (e.g. Green peace members, Globe-warming enthusiasts, Communists) he believed that what he stood for was right and all its teachings irrefuteable. I have known others like him.
One day Plato said: "All men have some goodness in them". I couldn't believe this coming from him, one who was always condemning others for their beliefs, but he followed it up with a story that he had experienced. He was with his wife standing on a corner of a Chicago street when a limo rolled up, a couple of men got out and bundled him and his wife into the car and took them down a street where they let them out. Soon after he heard an explosion: on the corner where they had been standing was a restaraunt which was now no more: the Mafia gang had blown the place to smithereens.
I miss Plato. Like I miss toothache.

The Big Sleep

In a passage in Raymond Chandler's novel "The Big Sleep", he writes of death:
"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell."
Craig Brown in an article in today's Daily Mail says that what Chandler wrote there did not express his real feelings, especially towards his wife who died before him (she was much older than him). I knew that he had once, before his success came through his detective stories, written some poetry but never had I, until now in the same article, read any. Craig Brown quotes one. It's about Chandler's wife.
"When the bright clothes hang in the scented closet...
And the three long hairs in a brush and a folded kerchief
And the fresh made bed and the fresh, plump pillows
On which no head will lie
And all that is left of the long wild dream."
A friend of mine, Roger Ormerod, also a successful writer of detective stories - one of his detectives was a lady with the name Philippa Marlowe - also wrote a poem to his estranged or dead wife.
I once published a short book of poetry for myself and a writing group of which I was a tutor and I included Roger's poem in it. Here is a snatch of it:
"Sometimes in the arid nights
The moon would slant across your empty pillow,
But not upon your precious hair,
Because you were no longer there."
Similar feelings from two writers of detective stories.
John Malkovich, a couple of years ago, opened a hotel in Cardiff called "The Big Sleep". Did he know what 'the big sleep' meant, I wonder?

More Westerns

The Spectator's film critic doesn't like westerns. She wrote this week: "I didn't go to see the Ceon brothers' remake if True Grit because I couldn't get excited about it and don't like westerns anyhow." Is it a male thing? Do we see ourselves as the hero, the one in the white hat sitting on the white horse, gunning down the one in the black hat (and waistcoat and unshaven jowl) with the black horse? Maybe. Maybe we haven't grown up but still dream like kids of riding the range and saving good folks from villains.
Here's my other five favourite westerns.
THE GUNFIGHTER: A Henry King film with Gregory Peck. David Thomson, the film guru, said that King only made two good films, this and "Twelve O'clock High" (which has one of the finest openings to a film ever). Peck plays a gunfighter who is getting on in years and wants to settle down, not gun-fight; but he keeps getting challenged by young bucks who he has to kill to stay alive himself. Until.... Sad ending.
THE SEARCHERS: Saw this one twice in the same week when it first came out. John Wayne's best film and possibly John Ford's best film too. Many times I've said, when the film is on TV, "I'm just going to see the opening twenty minutes, that's all" and I find I'm stuck there to the end. Great film.
RED RIVER: The best western that Howard Hawkes made (including "The Outlaw"); better than the late Rio films. Wayne again with Montgomery Clift, both fine performances. A western on a big scale with thousands of cattle being driven across country - fist fights, gun fights - the lot.
WINCHESTER 73: The first and best of the films in which James Stewart collaborated with Anthony Mann.
RANCHO NOTORIOUS: A liked this film a lot. It was directed by Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang? The man who directed Metropolis and M? The very one. What's he doing directing a western? Well, he came from Germany to America and settled into making all sorts of exctiting films there: "Man Hunt", "The Woman in the Window", "The Big Heat" and a couple of westerns. This one had that fine actor Arthur Kennedy who never really made it as a star but everything he did had class. And, of course, it also had Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich in a western? Well she'd already made "Destry Rides Again" hadn't she..... "See what the boys in the back room will have and tell them that I'll have the same".
Perhaps I should have mentioned "The Big Country" instead; or "Stagecoach".

Westerns

A couple of days ago a woman reporter writing in The Times said she had just seen about 15 western films, one after the other, to find out what it was about them that attracted other people - chiefly men I suppose. Her photograph showed her toting a six-shooter and wearing a cowboy hat (a letter to the paper days later informed her and us that she was wearing it back to front). I wasn't impressed by her choice of westerns, can't even remember any one of them now, but here's my list of ten, not in any particular order.
SHANE: a man-on-his-own type fighting a cause he believes in because of his devotion to a family trying to make ends meet against a villianous land-seeker. Alan Ladd magnificent of course; too short but apparently they dug trenches for other taller actors. The villain is not your cardboard cut-out nasty piece of work but a man with a reason for wishing to see these "sod busters" off what he believes to be "his territory". Didn't he fight the indians for it? You can't fault his reasons only his methods.
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN: If only for the music. But it has some of the best heroes and villains around then: Yul Brynner, Steve Mcqueen, the limited but always watchable Charles Bronson and an uncharacteristically non-suave Robert Vaughan who made two good films, this one and Bullitt then reverted to type in rubbish and now in Hustle; and on the villainy side, Eli Wallach.
HIGH NOON: Gary Cooper, getting on in years but still magnificent, having to stand on his own against some nasty guys who are arriving at noon to "get him", the town's inhabitants unwilling to help him. There was another film with Fred Macmurray, not so good, in which the hero stands alone until the very end when the town's folk decide to help.
MAN OF THE WEST: Gary Cooper again, even older but still wonderful, as a one-time crook who has to defend himself and Julie London against some of the vilest members of a gang he was once part of. The great Lee J. Cobb was the leader of the gang. Much admired by the French New Wave I'm told.
TRUE GRIT: John Wayne at his most ornery best helping a teenage girl, who'll pay him well, to find the killer of her father. Re-made now by the Coen brothers, more faithful to the novel I'm told. Wayne won an oscar.
Watch this space: another five tomorrow.

Lillian Hellman

Paul Johnson in his book "Intellectuals" has a chapter on Lillian Hellman, famous for a play called "The Children's Hour" (now at the Comedy Theatre in London), with the title "Lies, Damn Lies and Lillian Hellman". He writes: "... for Hellman, disregard for the truth came to occupy a central place in her life and work." Indeed, after having had a long feud with Mary Mcarthy, she took Mcarthy to court for writing this about her: "I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." In the process of sueing Mcarthy for over $2 million she made a virtual pauper of her.
One of the most remarkable things about Hellman was her attachment to Dashiel Hammett; this had to do with love and politics - they were both deeply committed socialists, both having to testify before the House of Un-American Activities; Hammett was the unlucky one who was sent to prison for a few months because he refused to answer their questions. She got off by a clever ruse.
I find the union of Hellman and Hammett remarkable because on the face of it they seem to be two characters with nothing in common except their political devotion to socialism. She wrote plays, he wrote detective novels; she was teetotal, he was a drunk. His most famous novel was "The Maltese Falson", made into a superb noire film by John Huston. They did have one thing in common, according to Paul Johnson, in that they both had numerous affairs with other men and women. She "was notorious for taking the sexual initiative with men" - Arthur Miller attributed her bitter enmity towards him to the fact that he had turned her down. Hammett visited prostitutes.
I think her plays are examples of "the well-made play"; they aren't great but they are entertaining and the conflicts are well argued. His books have never appealed to me (I like the Huston film though); I prefer Raymond Chandler.