Graham Jones

Belief

2012-01-30T15:44:00.003Z

Alain de Botton has written a book called "Religion for Atheists" in which he posits the idea that the new breed of fundamentalist atheists, so to speak, miss out on some of the things that an established religion possesses. I can see his point: Richard Dawkins and Co. seem to me to be so anti every form of religion that they aspire to a wholly (not holy) form of knowledge that seems to be bereft of feeling; there is an anger manifest in their attacks on religions; they can not or will not see that there is anything in those religions but a stubborn belief in things which are, simply, unbelievable. In short, they think that knowledge is superior to belief and that knowledge requires proof.
I tend to think this way too but I still have that feeling within me, brought about no doubt by an upbringing in the Welsh valleys where to be anything but a believer in one or other of the Protestant churches' beliefs would be similar to holding hands with the devil. So, I suppose I have been brain-washed to a certain extent by my experience of religion and chapels and the pleasant people, usually, within them.
So, though I now, like de Botton, can't accept most if not all of the beliefs that religious people take for granted, I still have that inkling to enjoy those aspects of church ways that appeal to my ascetic side if not quite spiritual side.
I like the ceremonies associated with some religious denominations, especially those of the C of E; whenever I stay at a hotel I go staright to the chest of drawers to see if Gideon has left a bible there and if he hasn't I'm disappointed; one of my favourite books (which I have started about twenty times but failed to finish) is Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his Brethren" for its high-mindedness and for the wonderful story itself, told in the bible in a page or two but in over 500 pages in this book.
My father said to me; "You must read this before you die." I don't think he meant that it would help me when I get to "the other side" but that it would help me appreciate the one on this side.
Must start it again. Incidentally, every time I take up the book to read on from where I left off, I don't; I start from the beginning again.

David Hockney

2012-01-24T15:55:00.003Z

Peter Oborne in The Daily Telegraph says that Hockney is a conservative painter. He quotes Michael Oakeshott: "To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." He follows it with: "Hockney's landscapes on public display from this Saturday are on one level a meditation on this Oakeshottian theme."
But are they any good?
Oborne draws attention to the work of Damien Hirst and that Tony Blair purchased two of his paintings (I didn 't know he did any paintings) which seems to indicate his non-Oakeshottian qualities.
In short, Hockney paints the familar landscapes of his native Yorkshire while Hirst and his ilk produce works that are new, untried previously, full of New Labour spice and life.
But is Hockney any good?
Most people, except the few art critics who like to argue a case rather than enjoy, do not have much time for Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin; they think of them as artistic frauds. Most people like David Hockney's work - the present exhibition at The Royal Academy is already fully booked.
But is he any good?
His paintings are quite pleasant. I'm afraid "chocolate box pictures" come to mind. While they are nice to look at I wonder if there is any depth in them. Quite frankly, I don't think, like Oborne, that conservative values are what one thinks of when viewing them; more "traditional landscapes" come to mind.

The Silence

2012-01-14T14:46:00.002Z

"The Silence" is a German film, a thriller of sorts. If this is the standard sort of film made in Germany why don't we get more over here? Probably because most people don't like subtitles. So, when one comes along, it's not shown in the large cinema complexes but in Art Houses like Cardiff's Chapter Arts Centre.
It's a good, tense film about two murders: a young girl gets killed at the beghinning of the film and, 20 or so years later, another girl is killed in the same spot and in the same way. The invesitigation is led by the local force but a just-retired copper wants a hand in finding the killer because, not having found the man 20 years ago, he feels now that he must do to since his lack of success previously led to his life going to pieces. It's quite a complicated plot and the film seems more interested in showing the effects of the killings on the girls' relatives and the lives of the police investigators themselves. The last half hour of the film is really very tense as the pincers of the law close in on the two suspects.
However, it lacks something that say, "The Killing", the Danish TV serial had: (a) there is no central character from whose viewpoint one tends to witness the action; (b) there is no final resolution of the case since one of the assailants gets away with it; (c) there is an air of squalor somehow about it: the two suspects are paedophiles yet they are treated with an almost caring sympathy.
When films purposely end with something unresolved like the killer getting away with the crime, having been brought up on American films of the forties and fifties, I get to feel that the man shouldn't go stock free, I want to see him nailed as in The Big Sleep, I desire revenge.
So "The Silence" is one of those Continental films that leaves you guessing and a bit troubled. I think they have, over there in France and Germany anyway, the feeling that leaving it like this, not "American-finalised" so to speak gives the film profundity. Which is just not the case.

Noises Off

2012-01-11T16:24:00.002Z

I seem to be at odds with many film/theatre/TV reviewers of late. There's "Sherlock" which every TV critic is raving about: wonderful stuff, clever, fast moving etc. I found the previous series wearing and this one silly. Then there's "Noises Off", Michael Frayn's popular play which, I am told, leaves people laughing until they collapse in the aisles. While I have not seen the latest version of this play in London now, I did see a produ0ction in Cardiff about twenty years ago; I did not find it in any way amusing. It must be me because everyone else seems to have enjoyed it a lot. I can see that it is a brilliant piece of playwriting: fast moving, full of slapstick humour etc. Its contruction is remarkable; it's like watching a conjurer keeping about ten balls in the air at the same time. But funny? No.
Two films recenty seen have been more to my taste: Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris", a gently amusing, nostalgic look at Paris in the twenties when Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald were there. And Terrence Davies's working of Terrence Rattigan's play "The Deep Blue Sea". Both these film makers work outside the commercial film world and, needless to say, neither film was shown in the big multi-cinemas; I saw them both in Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.
But there is one TV serial on which I am on the same wavelength as most reviewers and that is "Borgen", from Danish TV. This is better than anything done by British TV I think; it's politically interesting, dramatically thrilling and acted with spelendid fervour.
Can't wait to see the next two episodes.

Writing

2012-01-02T15:13:00.002Z

There's a new book published about 40 years of Creative Writing at UAE. The course was begun by Angus Wilson, continued by Malcolm Bradbury - I don't know who runs it now. Philip Hensher reviews the book in this week's Spectator. He is surprised to find, he writes, that there are so few famous names out of the 300 or so who'd been successful - about 20, he believes, in the last 40 years. And of those who have been published Hensher has "heard of precisely 50 and have read 20, not all of whom I would regard as significant or even particularly interesting authors."
Well, I was a tutor in a Creative Writing class for about ten years: there were two of us and often 20 or so "students". These were not full time courses but weekend ones, about three or four per year. I can't recall one "student" achieving success after leaving the courses. I had the idea that many of them came (a) for somewhere to go to pass the time (b) because they had once achieved some modest success but were getting nowhere now (c) because there was something psychologically wrong with them. The first lot did very little writing and weren't particularly creative - one German woman who had been a biologist in industry told me "I 'ave no imagination". She was right, she didn't. Of the second set there were a few who had been published but something had happened, usually of a psychological or psychiatric nature, that made it impossible to take up the pen, or lap-top, to try again. We had some success with the (b)'s and (c)'s in that they went away happy, believing that now he/she had got down to work again so success would surely follow (if they returned for another dose of tuition they said that success had not, so far, come their way).
There was one successful "student" whom the Principal of the Adult College would always boast about: she had gone on, he said, to publish a stack of children's books. The truth was that she had done this before arriving at the course; the course didn't help her because she had already helped herself. Why she came there, I don't know. Probably to boast to us about her success.
I could have murdered her.

Gags and Bans

2011-12-31T14:40:00.003Z

In last week's Spectator, Quentin Letts wrote a list of "What I Really, Really Want" for Christmas. Some of these were: "A referendum on Britain's future in Europe"; "A new shadow chancellor - the old one doesn't really work any more"; "Freedom for the Edinburgh pandas"; "A reduction in the number of pop songs on Desert Island Discs" - and so on.
Well, I have a list of my 10 wishes under the heading "What I'd like to gag or ban":
1. Fundamentalists of all faiths.
2. David Cameron's "We're all in this together" when simply we are not: some are in it deeper than others and some are not in it at all.
3. Modern poets/artists/composers.
4. Lists of best ever films, especially those that don't include "Shane", "City Lights", "Double Indemnity" and "To Be or Not To Be" (Jack Benny version).
5. The Archbishop of Canterbury's beard and eyebrows. They give him too much gravitas for what he usually has to say.
6. Politicians who keep telling us that we are drinking/eating too much.
7. MEP's. Can someone tell me what they do over there - apart from dine out at the best restaurants?
8. Cliff Richard.
9. Muslims who say "Islam is a peaceful religion". You could have fooled me, mate.
10. Muslims who say "I will not fight in a war against my brother Muslims". They're fighting each other all the time, mate.
10. Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Emma Thomson. I have good reasons for the first two, none for the last - I just can't stand her.

Billy Conn

2011-12-30T14:45:00.002Z

I had heard of the boxer Billy Conn from the film "On the Waterfront" when Marlon Brandoe, in the famous taxi scene, tells his brother "it was you, Charlie, it was you.... I could have been another Billy Conn...." I realise now that what he meant was "I could have been another white contender for champion heavyweight of the world" as Billy Conn was.
Sitting in the doctor's surgery this morning I picked up a Reader's Digest booklet and came to an article written by Billy Conn on the death of his good friend and opponent in the ring, Joe Louis. Then I looked at the front of the booklet; it was dated 1983 - which brought to mind Tommy Cooper's joke about just having come from his dentist, having read something there, and saying: "Isn't it terrible news about the Titanic?"
Billy Conn writes (well) about his fight with Joe Louis, how he was winning on points, how his trainer was shouting at him, urging him to avoid Joe's fists, that all he had to do was get through the next two rounds and he would win. Not Billy Conn. Billy wanted to knock Louis out so he went at him swining blows. It was then that Louis came up with two left hooks and a right hand that sent Conn to the canvas and instant, temporary oblivian. They did fight again, and again Conn was floored and lost.
Yet he loved Joe Louis: the most sensitive guy, the most humble, the nicest person anyone could meet. They became firm friends and here was Billy Conn at his friend's funeral.
Wonderful stuff though he didn't mention Tommy Farr's bout with Joe Louis, remembered in South Wales to this day: "Tommy should have won." I recall Tommy Farr telling a TV commentator about his fight with Louis; he said "he hit me here on the forehead with a blow that was like a sledge hammer". You could see in Farr's face the sort of admiration for the man that was in Billy Conn's encomium.

Giants

2011-12-23T20:51:00.002Z

According to a writer in The Daily Telegraph today there is a queer sort of dispute going on in Ireland over the bones of a man named Charles Byrne who was a giant: more than eight feet tall. His skeleton is on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgery. The question is, should it be displayed at all since his wish was that his body should be buried at sea in a lead box? Thomas Muinzer, a legal academic from Belfast says "it is now time to honour Byrne's last wish and make retrospective amends for the continued unseemly display which satisfies morbid curiosity without any intellectual or scientific purpose".
I have no views on this except to say that I don't believe Byrne himself feels anything or cares about what happens to his skeleton. But there are others who like to sanctify bones of certain famous people, particularly if they were themselves exceedingly religious.
The man-giant recalled to mind a giant mentioned in a Dickens novel.
Mr Vuffin runs a circus with a giant, a lady with no arms or legs and a man, named Sweet William, who could put small lozenges into his eyes and bring them out of his mouth.
Vuffin is having a chat with a man named Short in a pub.
"How's the giant?" said Short when they all sat smoking round the fire.
"Rather weak upon the legs," returned Vuffin. "I begin to be afraid he's going at the knees
"That's a bad oulook," said Short. "What becomes of old giants?" he asked.
"They're usually kept in caravans to wait upon the dwarfs," said Mr Vuffin.
Isn't it amazing how Dickens can imbue a thoroughly sad state of affairs with a lightness of empathetic touch that lifts the spirits and makes the baleful characters human beings?

Vaclav Havel

2011-12-19T20:42:00.002Z

Roger Scruton, writing on Vaclav Havel in The Times today, noted this: "In his penetrating essay on 'The Power of the Powerless' Havel shows how totalitarianism so enters the soul of its victims that it no longer needs force to maintain itself. People forge their own chains and display them obediently to their masters. They live within the lie, as things are comfortable there and nobody intrudes save liars, whose motives you share. It is not violence or oppression that holds the facade in place, but ideology, which confiscates the very language with which people might describe things as they are."
I cannot think of a better description of North Korea than that. One just had to witness the scenes at the death of the leader, Kim Jong-il, today on TV to realise what sort of a country that is; it is the sort of totalitarian country that is depicted by Havel in his essay. You could see that the people have been so brainwashed that they believe they are living in good times not in cloud cukoo land.
When a picture of North and South Korea is taken from space, the South is all lights giving the impression that, even in the night, people are free to enjoy themselves while in the North there are no lights at all, all is in darkness. They cannot afford to turn on the lights - except at the place where the leader lives.
I am not so sure that Havel is right when he says that "it is not violence or oppression that holds the facade in place" because the North Korean army looks to me a formidable force which frightens me let alone someone close to them, marching in perfect step very like those in the Nazi party and army, goose-stepping along with the crowd cheering.
But he is right in his overall view: there is no chance of a sort of Arab Spring there because the people there think that that is how human life is lived, they don't know that there is another kind.

Emlyn Williams

2011-12-12T20:41:00.002Z

A long time ago I had a quite long article about Gwyn Thomas published in The Anglo-Welsh Review. I was paid £5 for it but I didn't very much care that the pay was little because getting published there was its own reward - it was considered an honour. I tried to think of another author I could write about; wasn't interested in many who wrote in Wales, didn't read much Anglo-Welsh literature.... Then I thought "Emlyn Williams", I'd write about him. I liked some of his plays; I enjoyed both volumes of his autobiography, "George" about his young life and "Emlyn" about his life particularly on the stage in The West End. I approached the editor who liked the idea and so got working on the article. But I found I couldn't write anything sensible, anything that carried any weight; I couldn't find anything in his works that told me anything about the literary quality of his work, only the autobiographical content of it. I think that when he wrote his plays he wrote about some aspect of his own life. If I were to attempt such an article now I think that autobiographical line might work well but it wasn't the sort of thing the Anglo-Welsh Review wanted I believed. So I didn't write an article; I told the editor why and we left it at that. I never wrote another article for the journal and soon after the editor retired.
I have just bought a copy of Emlyn Williams's "George" and started to read it again. I wish I had read it then more closely because it is a fine book, amusing and detailed about his close family and there is evidently a great affectionate tone to it. He was known as George when he was young but took his second name as his writing name Emlyn.
The second autobiograhy, Emlyn is as good if not better than the first; it is one of those books that you feel takes you behind the scenes of theatrical life in London in the thirtees and forties more truly that any other book.
I reviewed it for the TLS.

Ken Russell

2011-12-02T20:22:00.003Z

When I heard that Ken Russell had died the first question that came to mind was "Who killed him?" While once he had been the darling of the arts department of the BBC under Huw Weldon, who seems to have given him a free hand to do what he liked, he later gravitated to feature films like "The Devils", "Women in Love", "the Boy Friend" etc. Are any of them any good? "Women in Love", an adaptation of the novel by D.H.Lawrence, was passably good and contained, sensationally, a wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, both naked; otherwise it was a slow, rather boring film - much like the book (Hemingway said it was one of those books that you tell yourself you won't read any more of at the end of a page but for some reason you have to come back to - I had a similar experience with it).
Everything with Russell was "in-yer-face"; there was no depth, just sensational images that were force-fed you.
I have just read David Thomson on Ken Russell and he doesn't have much good to say about him. Nor do I. Though I do have something in common with him: we both tackled the subject of the rector of Stiffkey, he in a short film (not mentioned in Thomson's "Biography of Films") me in a short play (online at Lazy Bees).
The once famous rector of Stiffkey was a prize subject of the "Gutter Press" of the 1930's. While he was supposed to be tending to his flock of parishioners in the small town of Stiffkey, he spent most of his week in London "saving prostitutes" from sin.
I picture him, in my play, in limbo where he has to try to persuade two spirits that he deserves to go to heaven rather than the other place. Ken Russell didn't have him in his film at all but used a sort of Citizen Kane device, using flashbacks of a woman reporter trying to discover what it was that drove the rector to his actions and, eventually, drove the church of England to unfrock him.
I don't know if the film has survived; haven't heard of it being shown anywhere and no, I don't want to see it. The next film he said he was going to make was to be "The Fall of the Louse of Usher". Yes, that's right, "Louse".
After being kicked out of the church the rector got a job preaching, like Daniel, in a lion's den at a circus. A lion named Freddy attacked him and killed him.

Gentlemen

2011-11-28T15:56:00.003Z

When I was a schoolboy of age about 10, the headmaster appeared in the classroom one day to speak to the teacher; he turned to the class and asked us did we know what a gentleman was. I think a few wiseacres put their hands up and said things like "good, sir" and "kind, sir" and "gentle, sir". Good said the headmaster: you can, he said, break the word into two parts, "Gentle and man", a gentle man or a gentleman.
Why has this memory come to mind recently? Well, there have been a series of letters in The Times commenting on what the writers believe to be qualities found in gentlemen. One said "a gentleman is someone who is treated as such" which is, I suppose, rather witty but not definitive. Another wrote: "A gentkleman never gives offence unintentionally" which is rather good.
I remember thinking about the headmaster's question and believing I didn't know any gentlemen. I didn't think my father was then though now I realise he was; that is, he never thought badly about most people - except the Australian test team - he was generally kind and thoughful towards people and so on. I think I had the idea that a gentleman would have to be rich and a toff (like David Cameron who, I read, can be rude so that cuts him out). But a lot of toffs are not gentlemen; indeed, it may actually be the case that being a toff instantly diminishes your gentlemanly status because isn't a toff someone who shows a certain measure of disdain for those who are not toffs? Yes is the answer to that. Yet, though Cameron is evidently a toff and not a gentleman, I think that Boris Johnson is a toff and possibly is a gentleman.
Being polite to ladies and old people was once, I think, considered to be gentlemanly behaviour. But feminism made some "ladies" into dragons and there's not much politeness these days to old people (I should know from experience); they rather get in the wayand they make too many demands on younger people.
So how does the Collins dictionary define "gentleman""? Quote: "A man of good birth; one who, without a title, bears a coat of arms; one above the trading classes" ..... When was this dictionary written? In the 18th Century or earlier? .... Hah this is more like it: "A man of refined manners; a man of good feeling and instincts, courteous and honourable." That's better.
Not at all like the definition Freddy Trueman gave: "A gentleman is someone who gets out of the bath to use the lavatory."

Cricket

2011-11-22T20:01:00.002Z

I was a young teacher; someone on the staff said to me: "We're short for the cricket team on Saturday; fancy a game?" "Sure," I said. He told me where and I turned up thinking it would be an ordinary affair, throw the ball about sort of thing, have a laugh sort of thing. Not on your nelly. They were all in white, I was in dark trousers, shirt and pullover; I was wearing daps. There was a hole in one of the toes.
I fielded on the boundary, touched the ball twice maybe; went in for tea; came out to bat number 11. The first ball hit me on the toe - the one poking out from the hole. The second ball clean bowled me ("it was an unplayable ball").
What a game! No, I don't mean just that one, I mean all cricket games. It must be the only game in which you can be out first ball and have no opportunity to have a second go. You walk the long walk out to the crease, bang goes your wicket and then you have the long walk back.
I read an article in The Spectator last week about cricket and suicide; it seems there are more suicides of cricketers than in any other sport. I thnk he mentioned 80. Last week another ex-cricketer took his own life. The article also mentioned Gimlett of Somerset. He killed himself after he'd retired from the game. I'm not surprised that there are many suicides in cricket: it's a crazy game; I'm sure it can drive you nuts; you stand around the place for five days or you bat a bit with someone bowling who is trying to decapitate you; you bowl a bit doing your best to maim the batsman. It's a mad, mad game I tell you.
The first professional game of cricket I saw was one between Glamorgan and Somerset at Weston-Super-Mare. Gimlett was playing. Big hitter. Strapping fellow. He tried to knock a hole through Wilf Wooler who was standing, intimidatingly, a few yards from him. Wooler caught the ball and Gimlett was out.
What a game!

Rugby

2011-11-17T20:30:00.002Z

A long time ago I wrote a play called "Horseplay"; it won the Drama association of Wales play competition in 1980 but it was never performed. One of reasons given was that it had too many in the cast: "we'd have to pay everyone the basic pay even if they had a line or two...." etc. "Too Welshy" said a Bristol producer. So it laid in my drawer for many years until recently, when I re-wrote it with a cast not of 20 or so (mostly rugby players and camp followers) but with a cast of 4. And it was "published" on-line. And it was performed for the first time this month in Canada - I didn't pop across to see it.
The action of the play takes place in a rugby club where, on a night of celebration after winning a local derby game, a young woman from the rival club is assaulted and, so she says, gang-raped. Instantly the club's officials take action to protect the players, accuse the girl (who was a well known "skirt") of making up the story; in the coarse of the play the club secretary gets to believe the girl and urges her to take the rapists to court.
I couldn't help thinking of Tyndall and his problems down under (NZ that is not where you thought!). He has come in for a lot of stick over the incident when he appeared to be propositioning a young lady while seeming to be quite pissed. Fined £25000. Dropped from the team. I would have thought he would have suffered enough at the hands of the royal family but this on top seems to me bit extreme.
I thought the same when Andy Powell drove a golf cart up a motorway to get himself a packet of crisps or something. He was dropped from the Welsh team.
The thing is probably I lived my young life in a different age when there was a good deal more wry humour gained from the cavorting of rugby players. Of course there were no mobile phones then to capture for Youtube the goings-on of well known people caught, so to speak, with their pants down. But there wasn't the same interest in it all. It went on, as it were, behind closed doors. I found Andy Powell's antics highly amusing and, to a lesser extent, Tyndall's too. Some of the things that went on in my day.....
So my play is being done in Canada. This play has a gang rape in it, incidental music from Tom Jones singing "Delilah" with Welsh hymns too and it's being performed by schoolchildren in Quebec which is part of French-speaking Canada! I don't believe it. Or, as The Daily Mail often puts it: "you couldn't make it up."

War Songs

2011-11-08T14:09:00.002Z

There were more good war songs written in WW1 than in WW2; not so much war songs as songs wriiten during the war, maybe about bravery and courage but usually light-hearted songs about keeping spirits up. The second world war produced more sentimental songs than the first with Vera Lynn crooning her ballads about the white cliffs of Dover and about seeing you again. The First World War had "Pack up your Troubles" and "There's a Long, Long Trail A-winding" and "Over There" (I like the Caruso version) and "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" and "Keep the Home Fires Burning" which Ivor Novello wrote before his mother could get her own song, "Keep the Flags A-Flying", onto the market place - he didn't fear the competition so much as the shame he might have felt if she had put out for general consumption her god-awful piece of work.
But the best song of all, according to some experts (who are they I wonder?) is "Roses of Picardy". Melody by Haydn Woods who was a great light classical composer and words by Fred Weatherly. Fred who? Well, he was not a professional lyricist but wrote them in his spare time. Famous in his day but largely forgotten now except for two songs: the lyrics for "Roses of Picardy" and the more famous lyrics for The Londonderry Air the music of which was a traditional folk song. Other lyricists had written words for both songs but none were as acceptable to music publishers as those by Weatherley. "Roses of Picardy" was written I think for the sort of parlour tenor like Webster Booth whose diction was perfect and who pronounced R's clearly with rolling effect; but many other different types of singer sang the song from John McCormack to Buddy Greco.
Again, The Londoderry Air, or as it came to be known after Weatherley's lyrics were added, "Danny Boy", was also much recorded - I recall its being a song sung on the street in John Ford's Irish film "The Informer" no doubt Ford believing it to be a pure Irish air. Certainly sounds it; but actually Fred Weatherly didn't have an Irish drop of blood in him: he was a QC who lived and worked in the west of England.
But what a song "Roses of Picardy" is; so simple, so sweet, nothing sentimental about it, romantic yes, as romantic as anything the Second War came up with.
"Roses are shining in Picardy,
In the hush of the silvery dew,
Roses are flow'rin in Picardy
But there's never a rose like you,
And the roses will die with the summertime
And our paths may be far apart,
But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy,
'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart."

Contagion

2011-11-05T19:24:00.002Z

It had quite good reviews, many four stars, some three stars but none, so far as I know, with two or less stars. Then Carol whats-her-name in The Times said the film "Contagion" weas terrifying and dull. She's usually spot on with her views but does she know anything about films I wondered?
It seems that she does because it was pretty dull. Not that it was badly made - it was made with considerable skill; you couldn't help admiring the construction of the film and the acting too was superb with some of the leading film stars of our day doing their stuff on screen (maybe they thought they were making a film that had a vital massage for us all in this day and age of terrors of all sorts, especially perhaps ones that have to with the environment and fatal bacteria scourges). What was wrong with the film then?
It told the story of a worldwide spread of a contagious disease due to a bacteria that was not known and for which there was no known remedy. It seemed to have everything right: the spread from person to person, the concerns by governments to find some means of stopping it spreading, the president and his staff taking to bunkers, people dying on the street and others rioting. But though it had everything right according to what might happen if it in fact happened in reality, it had nothing right in the way the story was told. Or, rather, stories. For there were a few stories in it of certain people who were affected in some ways by the disease but the stories didn't link and so they seemed not apt except that they were linked to the disease. I had the feeling that the makers had a plan: let's make it more human by introducing characters who suffer as a result of the contagion. These stories seemed tagged on rather than being intricate parts of the big story.
The director, Stephen Soderbergh, has a big reputation for making serious films; while he does make popular films like Oceans 11 and 12 (is there a 13?) I always had the idea that, like Orson Welles, hje made these in order to subsidise his more "sderious " films like "Contagion". Maybe I was wrong. But I can't say I like any of his "serious" films. They seem to me to lack an ingredient that should be part of all mature, satisfying work, and that is heart.
The film, however, was spot on with its theme; only today I read about the evolvement of dangerous bacteria, especially in hospitals, that have become resistant to known antibiotics. The report was quite terrifying as Carol Whats-her-name said in reference to the film.

Le Carre

2011-10-13T19:25:00.002+01:00

I tried once to read a John le Carre novel and failed to go further than 20 or so pages. I don't know why. The same reason, probably, I don't get on with Graham Greene's novels - except "The Comedians" which I liked enormously. I found his novel "Stamboul Train" enjoyable for about fifty pages until, inevitably I suppose, he introduced a character that was the devil incarnate. My favourite Greene story, a long one that may be called a novella, is "May we Borrow your husband". Maybe Greene and le Carre are similar writers in style as well as, sometimes, in content and maybe my aversion to le Carre stayed with me when I went to see the film "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". I did not like it at all. The chief reason was that I simply didn't know what was going in, I just couldn't follow it. It kept going back to previous happenings without a break, so to speak, so that the drive forward of the narrative, if there was one, was all the time prevented. Flashbacks in my youth were frowned upon in films, actually booed sometimes; the screen would show wavey pictures and everyone would groan or shout insults or boo. Hitchcock used a flashback once in a not very good film called "Stage Fright"; it worked there because the murderer was telling what had happened and it was all a lie.
I looked up "Rotten Tomatoes", a website good for heaps of reviews of films: every reviewer bar one thought "Tinker, Tailor etc" was the best thing since sliced bread. One I agreed with; he too thought the film confusing and confused. Everyone said how good Gary Oldman was whereas I thought he walked, at a liesurely pace, through the film as if he were dreaming about something other than catching the Mole who turned out to be..... no, I won't tell you since you probably, like 90% of the world's population, will enjoy the film.
I believe you need to have read the book to make sense of the film and, as I said, I can't read Le Carre.

Drive

2011-10-06T20:42:00.002+01:00

Now here's a film worth seeing: "Drive". It seems slow at times yet it drags you along excitedly, you are drawn into the spell of the chases and the violence. Is it excessively violent? In a review by Anthony Lane for The New Yorker he doesn't so much think it is excessive but that it takes your mind off the point of the action. He argues that the maiming of James Stewart in a western in which a villain shoots Stewart's hand so that he won't be able to do what he does well again i.e working the loand or shooting a gun with a fast draw. If the director had shown us the blood and gore when the bullet goes into the hand we would have that vicious act in mind whereas if, as he does, show only the painful response of Stewart's features we dwell not so much on the violence of the act but to what affect it has and will have to the character, that is, to the story as it unfolds. The violence in "Drive" is very much to the fore, presented in gory detail, blood everywhere, razors slicing arms etc. Horrible. Yet the film is terrific.
Basically it's a familiar tale about a man with no name meeting a family with a young son and becoming so attached to them that he wants to protect them from people who want to harm them. Can't help thinking of "Shane". He was man with almost no name, just one name. He came along from nowhere and with the ability to be as violent or, in this case, more violent, than those who wish to harm the family. In both cases you have a man with an attachment to no one who finds a family to love.
Anthony Lane is of course right: the violence is too blatant and takes away from the scenes any moralistic point. The only time in the film that a violent act is done but is not seen in close-up is when the hero, Driver, kicks a man to death in a lift. We hear it but we see only his back as he puts the boot in. This is an important scene because we not only see his back but, over his shoulder, we see the woman he is protecting drawing slowly away realising at last the nature of this man who has come to them as protecting agent. Or maybe angel.

John Ford

2011-10-02T20:36:00.002+01:00

Many moons ago I wrote to Clive James disagreeing with a review he had written of a TV version, with Stanley Baker if memory serves me well, of "How Green was my Valley". I told him I thought it wasn't a patch on the film version directed by John Ford. Wonder upon wonders, he wrote back saying he was not as great a fan of Ford as evidently I was. Today he has written in his TV column for the weekend Telegraph a piece about "Donovan's Reef": "How does a movie get quite as bad as Donovan's Reef? Directed by John Ford, this horrible mess was made in 1963, at just about the time that all the bright young film critics were trying to get Ford hailed as infallible. No doubt he was an efficient technician but his view of the world was like some endless recruiting commercial for the US cavalry." He doesn't like John Wayne either: "I always loathed John Wayne."
Well, I am not going to write a spirited defence of John Ford because there are only a few of his hundreds of films that I like - and, I have to agree with Clive James here, "Donovan's Reef" ain't one of them. But there's "The Searchers" and there's "The Man who shot Liberty Valence" and there's "The Grapes of Wrath" just for starters. Do you need to admire Ford for all he did when these marvellous ones are worth lauding his talents for. And there are great scenes in most of his films from the pit disaster in "How Green was my Valley" to "The Horse Soldiers" to "Sergeant Rutledge".
As for John Wayne - how can you loathe him with his smile and his drawl and the way he walks: he's not so much an actor as a physical presence on the big screen that you can't help admiring - unless you are Clive James.
In the same article he wrote appreciatively of "Billy Connolly's Route 66".... now there's a man worth loathing.

Waitors

2011-10-01T20:33:00.003+01:00

This morning in Sainsbury's I queued for a coffee; there was only one person in front of me but the waiter/coffee server, who was dark skinned, probably an Ethiopian, was so slow in everthing he did that when the woman in front of me said " pot of tea please and four lattes" I thought better of waiting and just sat down and re4ad the newspaper. Probably he was in training; there was no one there to help him and I did feel a little sorry for him but feeling sorry for him was not going to hasten the arrival of my beverage.
He remindedf me of those "darkies", as they were then called, who appeared in films in the late 30's and early 40's and who always appeared slow and rather daft. I recall one whose name I never knew, a servant to Bob Hope in two films one of which was "The Cat and the Canary" an excellent thriller/comedy; he spoke in a "Down-South" accent and did everything wrong so that Bob Hope could make fun of him. We in the audience laughed along with it all. You don't laugh now. It's not surprising that blacks in America (and here) are so sensitive to criticism or suggestions that they are somehow inferior when films like that made them appear stupid.
Times have changed and, in general, for the better.
I was reading David Thomson on the D.W.Griffith film "Birth of a Nation" in which blacks are treated contemtuously and cruelly; Griffith makes the Ku Klux Klan to be the heroes of his film. The film when it was made was very popular and, indeed, was graetly responsible for the uprising of the Klan so that they were rejuvenated into carrying out further lynches. Thomson believes it to be a horribly one-sided and prejudiced film but that it has qualities that make it fascinating. He concludes: "Yes, you should see this appalling film."
I doubt if even an art house or film society would dare show it these days.
I have just seen D.W.Griffiths's silent film "Orphans of the Storm" and that is terrific. I once showed a BFI copy of this film (abridged to half an hour) to a group of Technical College students in a Film Study class. When I asked, at the end of the year, which film or part of film they enjoyed most out of the many I showed them, they all said "Orphans of the Storm".

The NHS

2011-09-15T20:10:00.002+01:00

Many moons ago, pre-NHS, if I wanted to have a ear syringed I'd pop to the doctor's and he'd do it there and then; might have to wait an hour or so but it would be done. Now?
Sunday morning I woke to find that my right ear was clogged with wax. I phoned my doctor's surgery on Monday.
"I have a blocked ear; can I get it syringed?"
"You'll have to put earex in it for five days before it can be syringed."
"I put some in yesterday; it's now Monday so can I have it done on Thursday?
"There are no nurses here on Thursdays."
"What about Friday then?"
"Let me see. No, none available I'm afraid."
"Listen, I've booked for a concert on Friday evening, French music, Ravel and Debussey. I'll only be able to hear it with one ear. Couldn't you slip me in somehow?"
"No."
"what can I do then?"
" Next Monday all right?"
"I suppose so."
"Monday at our other surgery at 10.50."
Later that day I went to the surgery to pick up a prescription. I thought might as well ask the girl behind the desk:
"Any chance of seeing a nurse on Friday this week?"
"Yes. 12.30."
"Great."
She wrote the day and time on a piece of paper for me.
Tuesday afternoon I happened to look at the paper. It said "Tuesday at 1.30pm."
I phoned the surgery.
"I came there yesterday and asked for an appointment with a nurse on Friday; she's given me one today at 1.30."
"That's gone."
"I know it's gone but it's not my fault - she booked it when I asked for Friday."
"There's nothing available on Friday."
"I know, I was told that Monday morning. But it's ok, I have an appointment at your other surgery on Monday to get a ear syringed."
"They don't do syringing there."
"What? But I booked an appointment."
"You booked with a new woman on the desk. The next you can have is next Wednesday."
"That's 10 days from the time I had the problem"
"Sorry."
"Ok, book it please."
Then I had a brainwave. I shall phone Spiral (used to be Bupa I believe) and pay for it.
"Spiral here."
"Can I have my ear syringed on Friday."
"Yes."
"Good. How much will it be?"
"Well you'll have to see a consultant first; it will be under £50."
Yeah, £49.50 I thought.
"No thanks."
Another brainwave. The University of Wales Hospital's ear department.
"I wonder if I could come there and have my ear syringed."
"Not unless your doctor has referred you."
Which would mean a wait of a couple of months, no doubt.
So, to the concert on Friday with one ear good and one bad. A few drinks are called for before the concert I think. Maybe a few afterwards too.
Some NHS this is!

Downton Abbey

2011-09-14T19:29:00.002+01:00

I don't like it. That's a bit unfair since I have seen only twenty minutes or so of it; but "Downton Abbey" I decided, after only 20 minutes, wasn't for me. I sort of disapproved of it but I couldn't find words to express why. It had to do with the snobbery, the Upstairs/Downstairs feel of it, the Them and Us thing, the complacency and superiority of the ones who were well off and the regard for them by their underlings. I just felt it was a world that had gone and good riddance to it.
Of course it hasn't gone. There's the monarchy and the aristocracy and the hangers-on and the Oxbridge set and their rag balls and the boat race and the blues rugger match....
I wrote a short play some time ago about the rector of Stiffkey who became famous, or more famously, infamous as a result of spending the greater part of his week in London, instead of Stiffkey, helping prostitutes find a way to reform their lives. He became known as The Rector of Stiffkey (also as The Prostitutes Rector) and his fame was kept alive for some time by the sensational press coverage. I thought a trip to Stiffkey would be interesting. And it was because I met the present occupier of the Rectory, now a Vicarage. He was a pleasant guy; he wanted to chat about the infamous rector and the people of his parish who would not wish to have to live again the pain of his defrocking. In the course of the conversation the vicar told me how he was in a local shop one day buying something or other and when he turned to leave who should he come face to face with but Julian Fellowes. He mentioned this in a way that I knew he found exciting, as if he had met someone in the royal family or, maybe, a high-up in the church. I felt there was something about his telling me a certain boastfulness: he had met and spoken to Julian Fellowes.
In The Daily Mail recently A. N. Wilson wrote a scathing piece on Julian Fellowes and in the course of his article summed up what I could not myself put my finger on as regards Downton Abbey. He wrote: "Downton Abbey glorifies an ordering of society that was hateful in reality. While the real-life aristocracy of Edwardian England lived in grandeur and expected other people to wait on them and attend to all their needs, the great majority of British people lived without sanitation, education or comfort."

Two actors

2011-09-06T14:31:00.002+01:00

Bill Nighy seems to be the darling of the critics. In a play by David Hare last week Bill Nighy played the part of a government official who is targeted for making a statement about the prime minister that could prove damning. Talk about playing the part smoothly! He wandered though the play like a man half asleep. Yet one TV critic wrote about how wonderful Nighy is and that when he, the critic, grows old he hoped he would grow old like Bill Nighy - old but young in character, old but still attractive to the ladies, old but with a good head of hair, old but able to wear a suit well. And so on. Nobody says how limited Nighy is; how he makes every part he plays into a Bill Nighy; how he languidly strolls around tiredly mouthing his lines as if he's afraid they might do some damage if he shouts them.
Compare him with Dominic West who was also recently in a play (serial, rather), The Hour, and who then appeared in a play (2 parter) about Fred West, the infamous murderer. In the first play Dominic West was your handsome, smooth, upper crust middle aged gentleman who had a beautiful wife but loved a female colleague. In the second he had transformed himself into a louse, a man with no morals but with a banter that made him almost likeable (something the Daily Mail complained about and they do have a point I suppose). Here was the Dominic West face but in two different guises: one, your cool ex-public school guy as handsome as Cary Grant; the other, a guy you might listen to but whose presence you'd get away from as fast as you could.
This was a masterly performance which Bill Nighy, likeable as he is, would not, could not play. I'm afraid that what he has become is a "character actor" capable of cameo roles while Dominic West is becoming something of a great actor.

TV Plays

2011-09-03T15:47:00.002+01:00

There were two plays on TV this week: one was superb, the other was OK. You'd have thought maybe that the superb one would have been "Page 8" by Sir David Hare but no, this was the OK one; the superb one was "Field of Blood" (first episode only so far). Why was this? After all David Hare is one of our great living playwrights - so people keep telling us. His plays have become school text books. He has written some famous plays like... er... can't recall a single title. Then he is a "sir" - surely they don't throw those honours around like smarties at a kids party. Well on the strength of "Page 8" maybe they do because whie it was watchable, though tiresome, it was a play that depended on one's point of view about politics. In short, it was a play which pointed a finger of guilt at Tony Blair. The Left, playwrights like Pinter and Hare, journalists like Polly Toynbee and the rest cannot forgive Blair for two things: winning a few elections with a policy that had abandoned Clause 4; joining Bush in the warmongers saloon and invading Iraq. While Blair isn't mentioned in "Page 8" he's there in spirit and in body in the shape of the Prime Minister in the play played by Ralph Fiennes (a nasty piece of work if ever there was one). You should, I believe, try to be fair minded to both sides of an argument when you are a playwright; Hare is one-sided and so he's preaching to the already convinced.
The strange thing about the comparisions of "Page 8" with "Field of Blood" was that though one would have expected the Hare play to have the best dialogue, it turned out that the Scottish play set in Glasgow really sparkled with wit and humour and vibrancy. Hare's dialogue was almost sermon-like: people kept repeating what had just been said, there was no life in the words, can't recall a single memorable line. In the other play there were great lines like (about a fattish girl junior journalist) "she's no stranger to a macaroon".
Can't wait for the second episode.

Modern music

2011-08-30T16:21:00.002+01:00

When I say "modern music" I don't mean music of today but music starting about 1900 - Strauss, Richard that is, not one of the waltz kings, Stravinski, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Webern, Berg, Schonberg, Ruggles (never heard of him; well, he was an American composer who was deeply insulted when he discovered that a lot of people had turned up to hear one of his works!); and now, among this group of variably talented composers, I've discovered Oliver Messiaen. Of course I had heard of him and I actually went to a concert where a piece of music by him was played - can't say I liked it but it was tolerable enough to let me give him a second chance (as if cares, or would if he was still alive). So there's a concert in a few weeks time where a piece by Messiaen is to be played.
Now, I have to say I am getting a little tired of spending good money on concerts of "modern music" which send me away in a state of near anger. It wasn't the fault of The Welsh National Youth Orchestra that I came away from their concert a few weeks ago feeling peeved rather than uplifted. They played two big works: a tone poem by Liszt which was utterly boring and Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony which I used to like but now think is, at times, ugly.
I am surprised to discover that there are a couple of music critics who have the same aversion to certain pieces of music that I have. Michael Tanner of The Spectator says "Mahler 8 has long been a work I detest." So do I. Then there's Norman Lebrecht who dislikes Messiaen: "Messiaen lodges in my critical faculty like a bone in the throat: a composer of great consequence whom I could neither ingest nor ignore."
So off to the concert to hear a piece by Messiaen - give him a second chance! But there are pieces by Ravel (I like Ravel), Saint-Seans (I like him too) and Debussy (some of whose music I like). A cello concert by Saint-seans and La Mer by Debussy - which I love. Apparently he composed it when he was at Eastbourne. No, I don't believe it. Eastbourne isn't the sort of place that inspires creative processes I would have thought. But there you have it - there's no accounting for tastes.

Book to Film

2011-08-26T20:52:00.002+01:00

John Sutherland, writing in The Times this week, had a headline "Can the film version ever outclass the book?" He seemed to think not. Of course his article linked to the film made and distributed this week called "One Day" based on the popular novel of the same title. The film didn't live up to the book (both sound pretty awful to me, a bit like "Love Story" maybe to which handkerchiefs galore were taken - I took one to stifle my laughter). He suggested that they hardly ever do though he did draw a comparision of this film with the quite recent film "An Eduaction" which was a more successful adaptation, though that was taken from a memoire rather than a novel.
Hitchcock felt that it worked best if the book was not a good one; he made the great horror film "Psycho" which was based on a quite ordinary novel. On Desert Island Discs some time back he said he was about to make "a gentle little horror film". Gentle, my foot. The book is gentle but the film is anything but.
There have been some good films made from some good books: "Shane" for one. The character of Shane in the film, played by Alan Ladd, is much different from the one in the book who is a harder guy altogether. But both versions pass the test of watchability/readability.
I think the film of "Gone with the Wind" is rather better than the book though, I have to say, I don't want to see it again. Nor do I wish to trudge through that long book again neither. "Double Indemnity" is a superb film and an excellent read. I was surprised that a lot of the dialogue in the film is not Chandler's but comes straight out of the novel by James M. Cain.
A few of his books became films and most were good: "The Postman always rings Twice" and "Mildred Pierce" in which Joan Crawford won an oscar were the most famous.
Sutherland mentions the two versions of "Brideshead Revisited": the ghastly one made in 2006 and the TV version of 1981. He says: "The main reason it didn't work was because 113 minutes wasn't enough time to wrap itself around the novel." I think the John Mortimor adaptation was the chief factor in that it used a great deal of the original novel's narrative by that great writer and ghastly human being, Evelyn Waugh. Maybe he'd have enjoyed the ghastly version!

Re-makes

2011-08-25T20:18:00.002+01:00

There was a film on the TV in the bar of the hotel we were staying in. I didn't recognise it so I asked the barman; he said it was a remake of "Assault on Pricinct 13". He added: "Remakes aren't usually as good as the originals." Well, that very afternoon I had seen a sort of remake: that of "Singing in the Rain". No, not a film remake but a theatrical remake, a transcription I suppose it might be called. Not as good as the original? Actually it was as good. Though being a different medium one can't really compare them. What was so good about it was that it was pure theatre and it was fresh - a fresh take on a well-known and well-loved picture. It had all the songs, all the dance sequences, though of course, they changed certain routines to accomodate the strict space of the stage. But it also had differences: in the number "Moses supposes his toeses are roses..." instead of the voice teacher being amazed and a little horrified at the two dancers' antics as in the film, he got wound up in the joy of their response and joined in the dance. These small changes - though rather large ones when you think of the choreography that went into their creation - gave the musical a freshness that the film now, after many viewings, does not have. (It still has something this version couldn't rise to: Cyd Charisse).
We saw this at the Chichester Theatre Festival which runs for about half the year. It will surely transfer to London in due course. If it toured to Cardiff or somewhere near I'd see it again.
We also saw Terance Rattigan's "The Deep Blue Sea" the night before. Excellent. Rattigan has the knack of moving you emotionally with a gesture: the middle-aged woman's lover picks up a piece of paper at the end of Act 1 and slowly reads it to himself. You know what it is: she failed to commit suicide and he is reading the note she left for him. Until then he's been full of beans, happy, and he may be in love; now he is, by his face, a wreck of a man. Curtain.

Kill yourself

2011-08-19T20:37:00.003+01:00

I was reading the back of a wine bottle today and wondered at how they are so politically correct that they don't advertise their product but play down its health defects. They tell you that if you are a woman you should drink only two to three glasses a day of this wine in the bottle and that if you are a man you should drink only three to four glasses a day. Otherwise, you get the impression, that it's going to kill you. The same sort of warning is written on the fronts of cigarette packets: "Smoking can seriously damage your health."
So, even the stuff they sell us is, according to the people who sell it, bad for you. Where's their morals? How can they be allowed to sell such dangerous stuff in a modern society which prides itself on its ethical values? Well, like the people who said about the Iraq war, "it's all about oil" (though they were wrong) this is all about making money and raising tax. An effort is made by governments to "make people healthy" so they promote these ludicrous methods of telling us that "wine is bad for you" and "smoking can kill you" so that they can feel good about things but at the same time they can sweep up a sackful lot of taxes in the process.
Of course there's always people who smoke a lot and will always do so who say something like "my father smoked all his life and never had an illness and lived to ninety two" and there are always people who say that drink is good for you and the more the better. At least they're direct and honest, But the government and, more surprisingly, the manufacturers will say one thing on the packet or bottle and take your money when you don't take their advice. I call that hypocricy which, according to Christ, was one the greatest of sins.
I was amused to read that Gerard Depardius was caught urinating on a plane since he had consumed a large quantity of wine (possibly from his own vineyard) and pleased to hear that he usually drinks about five bottles a day. Henry Whats-his-name, the cricket commentator, says he drinks at least two bottles per day and has always done so. Good for them I say because I too believe that three or four glasses oper day is far too little. Dr James Le Fanu in his book "How to live to Ninety" writes about the government limits : "there is no serious scientific basis for these recommendations which over the years have always been revised downwards. There seems little doubt that people can double this intake with no obvious untoward effect."
About smoking I'm not with the man whose father died at ninety two. Though I once smoked myself, I believe it's very bad for you. End of sermon.

Peter Hall

2011-08-12T14:57:00.003+01:00

I'm getting to like Peter Hall. Never thought I would. Always thought him a bit smug. I have a memory of him standing outside the New Theatre in Cardiff, outside the stage door in fact: he is there looking smugly, I thought, at passers by on their way into the theatre to see the nastiest play I've ever seen: Pinter's "The Homecoming".
I picked up Hall's autobiography in the local library this morning; it was on a shelf of books for sale and since it was only 20 p I bought it thinking "well I won't be losing much if I just read the Intro". But it's quite fascinating. His childhood is interesting and entertaining. His father, the only one of his family then to date to have gone to a secondary school; his mother, with a furious temper but loving nature, given to speaking in cliches: "Better to be born lucky than rich"; "It'll all work out in the end; "a change is as good as a rest". Reminds me of my own mother! His father was a "miserably paid clerk in the goods depot at Bury St Edmunds railway station". His mother did not work - in those days most mothers didn't, their work was housework.
I have never seen a production of a play by Peter Hall that I liked much. I saw his Shakespeare History plays on TV a long time ago and felt that an earlier production of them was better. I saw a production of his of "The Wild Goose" by Ibsen and didn't like it at all: he introduiced a comic element into it that was not at all suitable, I thought. It has one of my favourite characters in all of literature in this play: Gregers Werle, an idealist who brings a family to its knees with his honesty.
But I may now get to like Peter Hall the more I delve into his life through this well-weritten autobiography. You never know, I may like one of his productions one day. But not another "The Homecoming" please.

Cell 211

2011-08-05T19:45:00.002+01:00

At last a film comes along which I like. "Cell 211" is a Spanish film about a prison, probably the toughest in Spain, full of the dregs of Spanish society. In the beginning along comes a nice guy who is about to become the new warden; the trouble is he arrives at the same time a riot breaks out. He is knocked out by a piece of falling masonry and the two guards with him put him in a cell, cell 211, for sakekeeping while they make a judicious and quick escape, knowing that if they stay they will be either taken as hostages or torn limb from limb by the mob of evil-eyed killers most of whom have nothing to lose, being lifers.
When he comes to his senses he realises he has to improvise and pretend to be a new prisoner. It works, after much humiliation and fear.
The film is gripping, tense and very violent; a man's ear is cut off, another is beaten to death, another has his throat cut.
On my way out a man said, speaking to an audience that wasn't there: "I've never seen anything like that, never, never."
He's right: you don't see many films like that these days that sort of grip you by the throat and take you on a journey of fear, fright, violence and some human warmth.
It took me back to "Brute Force" with Burt Lancaster, made in the early fifties. That too was an exceedingly violent film. But neither were films in which violence was there for its own sake, it was an essential part of the film's plot and theme. In both cases it was saying "here are men incarcerated in a sub-human institution with no hope except escape (in the Holywood film) or (a better deal on human rights) in this film.
Which made me think that Spanish prisons do not have the same schemes of rehabitulation that other European prisons have. Or conditions for those who have no hope of improvement in their well-being.
I have read recently that Norway is far ahead of most other European countries in their rehabitulation schemes - I don't think we need refer to any of the prisons in the Arab countries in comparision - they are hell holes it seems.
In Norway only 20% of released criminals go on to carry out further cries. In this country the percentage is 75%. Having seen "Cell 211" I guess the number must be nearer 90%.
Good film, strong message.

Beginnings

2011-07-29T20:25:00.002+01:00

How many times have I recently read favourable reviews of films only to find that they are not very good. How is it that the film "Beginners" has been advertised as having had good reviews from many critics, mostly with four stars, when on seeing it it turns out to be pretty awful? OK, that's just my point of view. But it's happened so often in the past year. I have seen at least four films that have bored me almost to death.
"Beginners" had, I imagined, the basic idea for a splendid film: a man of seventy-five tells his thirty odd year old son that he is gay. Hah, I thought, we'll see him going through the agonies of his confession and the son's reaction will, of course, be shock and awe. Not a bit of it. Christopher Plummer as the father tells his son, Ewan Mcgregor, of his secret as though he's telling him he's given up going to the corner shop for bread and is now going to the supermarket instead. And, instead of the son reacting like a man who's just experienced a life-altering moment, all he does is smile, look a trifle put out and carries on living his usual heterosexual way.
This part of the story is not a slow development: it's told us in the first two minutes, so the rest of the film is, really, padding because the strong story line has gone and we are left with a sort of long summing up.
It is an utterly boring film. Before I went I thought "here's a film with a strong story line with two of the finest actors in films - can't fail".
I cannot understand how it came to be distributed at the popular cinema outlets; it's film for art houses; its a gay film, it's art. Well, I think that's what the director (and writer) imagined it would be - art. It brought back to mind some of those French films I used to see: faces looking into space; philosophy of the cracker-barrel variety; lots of useless talk; crises in the lives of middle-class adults etc.
I am always wary now of a film which has been advertised as "Critically acclaimed". Art, in other words. There are very few films which are works of art; I can count them on the fingers of one hand; they are mostly Swedish or French or Japanese, raraly American. And they are all, in my experience boring, utterly boring.

Dictionaries

2011-07-24T17:16:00.002+01:00

Kingslay Amis , in his book "The King's English" (the King here being Kingsley not the one Fowler meant), he writes about the word "Dictionary": "It used to be said, probably with much truth, that every literate household possessed a Bible and a copy of "The Pilgrim's Progress. During the 19th century, the works of William Shakespeare and of Dickens would have added themselves to these and, towards the end, an English dictionary, one of the smaller ones. Nowadays, the shelf where these volumes would once have stood has been replaced by a longer one bearing video recordings. In particular, the habit of owning and often consulting a dictionary has largely died out among the general public."
I have a dictionary in most rooms of my house (and an encyclopaedia in two - though they are being used less and less as more an more use is made of the internet). I look up words in the dictionaries every day; one trouble is that I find myself looking up words which I have already looked up days - or even hours - before. This is partly due to my getting old with a memory that is slowly failing but more to do with the fact that there are certain words that, even after looking them up many times, I still cannot remember their meaning. This probably has to do with the fact that they do not fit in my vocabulary, they are never used, don't need them, don't like them, don't want them. "Solicitude" is one. "Solipsism" is another. "Trenchant" another. There are many others.
When I was doing my year of teacher training I was first put in a junior school with a middle-aged woman who was a good teacher but did not take a liking to me; I had the feeling I was an intruder. Luckily, the headmistress did like me so I knew I'd get a good report at the end of my two week session.
One day the teacher asked the children to look up a word in their dictionaries; they vigorously started turning pages, haphazardly I could see, looking for the word. This took some time because, to my amazement, they didn't know the alphabet.
This was, evidently, a perfect demonstration of that ridiculous idea that took flight then in theoretical educational circles that "discovering things for themselves" was the best method of learning. Kingsley would have been red-faced with the disgust if he had witnessed it.

Chess

2011-07-22T20:11:00.004+01:00

I was never much of a chess player; I prefered trying to solve chess problems in newspapers and magazines. I was reasonably good at that. I was never good enough at playing chess to enter competitions with teams of players. But I have known a few people who have played competitively, my father for one when he was a young man. He had studied the game and told me he used some of the methods great chess players use. The name Kappa Blanca (not sure of the spelling) comes to mind. "I did a Kappa Blanca opening on him," he'd say. He used to play with my brother, a couple of years older than me. I can't remember who won those games. My father told me of a game he played against a man who ate nuts throughout, crunching them between his front teeth; probably done to annnoy his opponents.
A man I knew for a while some years ago was a schizophrenic - he had been hospitalised some years before I knew him. He was sort of recovered but I was wary of him; I knew him to be awkward if riled. I was told that when he was learning to drive one day, the driving instructor shouted at him and received in return a punch to the jaw. End of driving lesson.
He played chess in tournaments. He told me of a game in which he played when, he averred, his opponent cheated. He complained to the official and the incident was investigated. I'm afraid I never heard the result.
Went to see the film "Bobby Fischer against the World", a documentary which told the life of Bobby Fischer in some film and most still photos; there were filling scenes of people who knew him, played against him, helped him etc. It's been a highly rated film but I didn't like it much. It didn't tell me anything new about him - correction:I didn't know that he had won the American title of best player at the age of 14. It didn't have any chess in it - not surprising I suppose because the makers wouldn't have wanted to put people off who don't play the game. But it suffered from being not so much about a genius and more about an eccentric. It was hard to watch towards the end when Fischer went into decline. Strangely he was an anti-semite and an anti-American yet he was Jewish and American.
Here's my pschological analysis of Bobby Fischer: he got to hate himself because he could never satisfy his longings (maybe sexual) so he hated what he was - a Jew and an American.
I rest my case.

The Apprentice

2011-07-17T20:41:00.003+01:00

Some of my friends don't watch The Apprentice. Most of them wouldn't watch it unless they were strapped to a chair and had their eyes prised open. To them Lord Alan Sugar is a capitalist of the worst kind: one who makes money for the sake of making money. Capitalists of a certain kind enjoy making money: it's their 'raison detr', their purpose of living.
I'm growing to like him. He is possibly the ugliest man on TV, maybe the ugliest in the country, but I can't hold that against him since I once read, and enjoyed, an essay by Chesterton titled "In Praise of Ugliness" and so have always had a soft spot for uglyiness: without ugliness there would be nothing to compare beauty with after all.
Who is going to win this year's game? That's what it is, a game. Though there is a serious element this time in that the winner will have £250 000 to play with - or rather, to start a business with. But who cares if a business is started or not; all we fans care about is who wins.
My money is on Tom because he is the only one with an inventive streak. While he doesn't know much history - "Columbus was English wasn't he?" (To which Hazel replied "Yes"). Then, didn't Tom say he was going to be greater than Dyson? I think he believed it. And I think Sugar.... sorry, Lord Sugar..... may believe it too.
Jim shot himself in the foot last week and the week before with his "Caracas" restaurant - Crackers might have been better. And he talks too much. He'd annoy Sugar so much - yeah Sugar - he'd be dropped at the first hurdle.
Hazel is too good to be true. She's perfect. But she's never run a company like the other one, the Chinese-looking girl whose name escapes me. The panel of "The Apprentice - You're Fired" picked her last week. Never. She'd drive me up the wall in two days - no, two minutes.
We shall see.

Guessing games

2011-07-12T16:34:00.003+01:00

A young man on "Deal or no Deal" turned down an offer of £24000 and decided to guess instead. He had two boxes, one with £5 in it, the other with about £50000 in it. Guess what: he picked the wrong-un and went home with £5. Did he cry or try to throttle Noel Edmunds? No he did not. He said those immortal words that are said every week, if not every day, on "Deal or no Deal", "Well, I'm only here once".
I'm only here once to demonstrate that I am a complete idiot by guessing which box had £50000 in it and failing to find it.
So why did he guess instead of pocketing the £24000? Because he thought he was "on a role". He had just got rid of three blue numbers (all low in £'s) and thought he must be on a role and therefore the next box he picked would bound to be the big one.
You can't be on a role in a guessing game. You can be on a role in a game where you're using your brain to calculate how things will be.
Another TV game show that is often entertaining is "4 Rooms" where four dealers (in antiques, art.... everything that is saleable) make people, who come there with something to sell, an offer. Sometimes you wonder if the things brought in are of any value at all and then they turn out to be worth a lot: a stuffed tortoise brought a bit of cash for someone, a picture of Marilyn Monroe, drawn by Marilyn Monroe brought a bit of dough from one of the dealers. A stuffed polar bear came too and the four dealers stood beneath it and wondered at the size of the thing.
You wonder sometimes how some of these articles are brought to the studio. In a lorry? Part of a wall with Banksy's graffitee on it.
A guy turned up with 7000 photos of famous stars of old: film stars mostly I think. It's not as if they were by a particularly well-known photographer which might have given them some value - but just a pile of old photos?? So I was amazed when one of the dealers bought them for about £45000. I wasn't the only one who was surprised: the other three dealers would have offered, they said, £500, £600, £700 for them.
Perhaps he thought "well I'm only here once". But I think he saw something special amoung them because there was glint in his eyes, that dealer's glint you've always got to look out for when you're buying or selling something. The glint that says: "I know something that you don't know". As Raymond Chandler put it about a crook: "he had the innocent eyes of a used car salesman".

Music

2011-07-08T19:49:00.002+01:00

No more Shostakovic for me thanks. His 5th Symphony was probably, for some, the highlight of the concert I went to a few weeks ago but the highlight for me was the Grieg Piano Concerto. I can hear some of my college friends of many years ago saying "O no!" Yes, Grieg. I recall someone in the interval of a concert saying to his partner "Liked the Mozart but hated the Grieg." The Grieg happened to be his Holberg Suite which is a wonderful work, Grieg at his best.
I recall reading something about Walter Legg the great impresario: he had discovered a young pianist, Dinu Lipatti, and wanted the famous and then ageing Arthur Schnabel to hear a record of the young man. "I'll play you the Grieg Piano Concerto," he told Schnabel. "O no, not that, anything but that," said Schnabel. "Just the cadenza then?" Schnabel agreed and was swept away by the man's playing (Lipatti didn't have long to live after that and hurried to record a great deal of piano music before dying). But that was all, he didn't want to hear the rest.
Michael White, writing in The Telegraph, says that music critics like him can't "unquestionly adhore every piece of serious music". Even they have their favourites and composers they positively dislike.
I dislike Shostakovic (apart from his 2nd Piano Concerto), Mahler, Bruckner, Schonberg, Berg and most modern composers. I love Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms (some of it), Stravinski (some), Bach, Haydn - which is enough to go with. O yes, and Grieg.

Westerns music

2011-07-04T20:16:00.002+01:00

If I were asked for my favourite music on a Desert Island Discs programme I think one of my choices would be the music from one of my favourite Westerns. This would take me back to long ago when they made good Westerns in Hollywood. I suppose when we think of Hollywood we think usually of three kinds of film: Westerns, Musicals and Thrillers. I do anyway.
The three in contention would be Elmer Bernstein's score for"The Mgnificent Seven", Jerome Moross's "The Big Country" and Victor Young's "Shane". It would be a diffuicult choice because I like them all.
OK, here goes: it would have to be "The Magnificent Seven". It is one of the most excciting pieces of film music I've heard though Star Wars and Psycho run it close seconds.
I put the three pieces of Westerns music on Youtube and they're all good but 7 is the best.
At the end of 7 there are a few comments sent in by members of the general public. One of them was "This song makes me wanna find six of my best friends and take on an army."
Yeah, I know how he feels.

Theatre

2011-06-30T20:44:00.002+01:00

"The costumes are a fusion of antiquity and modernity which succeed in locating the play precisely nowhere." Thus wrote Lloyd Evans, theatre critic of The Spectator on a certain play - i doesn't matter which one because they do it all the time. This band of new directors seem to want to be as creative as the playwrights or composers of operas; they want their work to be as outstanding as that which they are interpreting. So they set an opera in no-man's-land.
I have seen three operas in the past few years and each one was set nowhere, as Lloyd Evans said the play he saw was set. First there was Salome by Richard Strauss. It was a mess. You wouldn't have been able to follow the plot unless you had read up about it beforehand. There were no famous arias and the music was at times quite dull. Yes, you did have the dance of the seven vails which does have some exciting music. But that was all. Then there was Wozzek by Berg. I have tried hard to appreciate Alban Berg but find his music quite tuneless; not as tuneless as Schonberg but tuneless just the same. It was set in a sort of baked beans factory. It had a murder and everyone was dressed in bright costumes. But it was quite a sordid plot (if you could follow it) and there were no arias that were at all memorable. Recently I saw the Welsh National Opera's take on Turandot, "Puccini's greatest work" I'm informed. It was, as I should have expected, set in another no-man's-land. It had two arias that were worth hearing - "None shall sleep" being one of them - and the rest was quite dismal (the plot, of course, was ridiculous as many operas and ballets are but you expect the music to lift you to that plane of excellence where you "willingly suspend your disbelief"). People wore modern outfits - and this was supposed to be ancient Japan. Or was it China? It didn't matter where it was because the directors and designers decided to set it nowhere.
This is the last opera I shall attend.I used to like some operas but with the advent of the modernising directors and the modernising designers I'd prefer to stay at home and watch "The Killing".
By the way, Wozzek died when he fekl into a heap of tinned beans.

Oldies

2011-06-25T20:35:00.002+01:00

Here we go again. Health n' Safety. When you are getting on in years you not only have to put up with care-home inattention and care-hospital ill treatment and not being able to touch your toes, you also have to put up with people telling you how you should be living. The latest comes from some Pshychiatric Committee (?) who have declared that all people over 65 should be MOT'd - well, sort of. They should be "screened" to see how much alcohol they drink. Where are we? Mecca? These Pschyatric loonies believe that old people should enjoy only about a half a glass of wine per day or half a pint of beer (I don't think they used "enjoy"; they probably meant "force-fed"). It's enough to drive you to drink.
You live to 65 and then retire to enjoy life without the discipline of the boss looking over your shoulder and telling you off. You're free at last. Why not celebrate by having a couple of pints or, in my case, a couple of (large) glasses of red wine? But looking over your shoulder now is that haggard witch "Elf n' Safety".
I recall, many moons ago, Cliff Mitchelmore interviewing an "expert" on health matters; it was a programme called Tonight if my memory is correct (it often isn't these days what with all the health and safety junk I read about food, drink, excercise, eyes, cancer, heart etc). They were talking about potatoes and the expert said "O, potatoes, shouldn't eat them, very bad for you with all that starch". Then Mitchelmore said "What about the well-known 'chip buttie'?" To which the expert replied: "Certain death".
A couple of years passed and the humble potatoe became something that was good for you. Didn't some wiseacre in government advise us all to eat five potatoes a day?
Health advice comes at you like a sine curve: one day its up and the next day it's down. Potatoes kill you then potatoes save your life.
So two fingers to Health and Safety and pass the bottle please. I've always thought pschiatrists were crazy - now I'm sure of it.

Drabble

2011-06-20T16:33:00.002+01:00

I am looking at a photo of Margaret Drabble in this week's Spectator. It was taken some time ago because she looks quite young. She is sitting very upright on a chair, fingers of her right hand in the air poised above a typewriter, left hand resting on the side of the typewriter. She seems about ready to type but she is thoughtful; her face is young but already has a look of womanhood about it; there's a bandana round her head and her hair, what little can be seen of it, is centre-parted like a headmistress's. She does have that headmistressy look about her. Perhaps that's the reason I have taken a disliking to her. Not just now but for years. Why?
Francis King reviews her new book of short stories (old stories, new collection) on the page opposite her photo. He met her when she was about to be published. They had lunch with his publisher at Wiedenfield and Nicolson. "I found myself facing," he writes, "a woman, attractive but not beautiful." Later the woman publisher says to King: "There's someone who already knows what she's going to do - and, by golly, she'll do it."
Which, of course, she did. Novels, essays, editing the Oxford companion to English Literature.... and so on.
I think I must be jealous of her success. Yet she doesn't carry her success too well. I feel she is proud of her achievements to such a degree that she seems superior. And not in a nice way. In an "Oxford way". Because she is "so Oxford", isn't she? She has that air of superiority that a good many Oxford students have. I don't suppose they know they are developing it while students but something happens to them and they come away with a chip on their shoulders.
I looked for a poem by D.H.Lawrence about Oxford and superiority but all I could find was this:
"How nice it is to be superior!
Because really, it's no use pretending, one is superior, isn't one?
I mean people like you and me -

Quite! I quite agree.
The trouble is, everybody thinks they're just as superior
As we are, just as superior -"

Etc.
There's a smugness about her I feel, an intellectual smugness. She is "so Oxfordly" smug.
Can't say I like her sister much either. I've heard they hate each other which goes some way to making me feel better about the rather nasty way I feel about her.

Sports

2011-06-13T15:51:00.002+01:00

I was looking forward to seeing the film "Only Angels Have Wings" which I saw a few years ago and remember it for its wit and for Cary Grant who, incidentally, David Thomson rates the best film actor of them all. He is always a bit goofy in Howard Hawks films, especially so in "Monkey Business" and "Bringing up Baby", and here he is quite goofy at times but more of the office bully type as he is in "His Girl Friday". So I set "The Box" to record it since it was playing at 1.00 p.m.. But what did I find? Instead of the film the BBC decided to show tennis. So I, no doubt, have recorded Murray versus some French bloke instead of the film. I don't like Andy Murray. He is just too dull a creature. And what is so important about the contest at Queens club that it takes up half the afternoon on TV? But, of course, a British tennis player is taking part and surely, in BBC-think, surely all of Britain will have their eyes glued to their TV sets. It's pathetic. Anyway, Murray is Scottish and proud of it so why should we of the other three parts of Britain be cheering him on? He'll probably vote Scottish Nationalist when the time comes for a referendum.
But, God help us, we've got the Wimbledon affair soon. Let's hope Murray doesn't make it past the first or second round; it's bad enough watching the primas donas prance about the place - and I mean the men, don't watch women at all (unless they're worth looking at like that unpronounceable Russian beauty) - without a dullard like Murray taking up prime time on TV.
I'm afraid that most sportsmen are pretty dull people; they usually just talk about sport and nothing but sport. Strangely enough, though I don't like watching boxing much except when heavyweights are trying to kill their opponents, but I always find what they have to say interesting. They too usually only talk about boxing but it's the fact that they've been there bashing away for an hour or so and being bashed too that makes what they say interesting. The new one, the British fighter who's just won something or other - he's a really good talker. Tommy Farr was a wonderful talker on boxing and boxers. I think boxing films are the only sport films I like. Always have. "Gentleman Jim" and "Rocky" come to mind.
Imagine a film about tennis players. I know it's been done but d'you think I'd go to see that?
George Bernard Shaw liked to put the gloves on occasionaly; in fact he wrote a novel about a boxer. I have it hear on the shelf: "Cashel Byron's Profession". Rather good too.

Naipaul

2011-06-07T15:42:00.002+01:00

What a beastly, cantankerous old so-and-so V.S.Naipaul is. Has he got anything good to say about anyone? Maybe he appreciates his housekeeper for little things like making him a cup of tea - and maybe some other "little things", knowing his proclivities. But he doesn't seem to have anything good to say about writers. And now he's off again on one of his diatribes against other writers. This time it's women writers. He dismisses Jane Austen and accuses women of having a "narrow view of the world" and suggests that there is no writer of the fairer sex who is his equal.
I can think of quite a few because I'm not a fan of Naipaul (liked one of the books written by his brother Shiva better). I tried "The House of Mr Biswas" twice and found it rather tedious.
Yet I do have a sneaky sort of liking for the old sod. He is so arrogant and antagonistic towards writers that he has become a kind of "performance artist". Whenever he is mentioned by other writers, journalists usually, he is regarded as someone who is beyond the pale, someone people shouldn't take any notice of, someone who is so filled with his own vanity that he is disgusting. Why do they write so much about him then? Like moths to the light which can kill them, these writers are drawn to Nailpaul maybe hoping that he will try to kill them (metaphorically) so that they can join that long list of great wriers he doesn't like - Dickens for example who he finds unbearable; Hardy who he also finds unbearable; Henry James who he thinks is "the worst writer in the world" and Joseph Conrad about whom he says "I have trouble with some of Conrad's books".
I like him for his honesty. He tells us what he believes. I agree with him about Conrad, I too have trouble with his books; and I find Henry James difficult to take these days; and Thomas Hardy I have always had difficulty with. Then there's his view of women writers. I have to say I'm in sympathy with him to a certain extent: there's always, to my mind, a touch of Mills and Boon about most women writers (of fiction, that is). "Sentimental" Naipaul avers. Mmmm! may be something in that!
But Dickens unbearable! I draw the line there in my small admiration for V.S.Naipaul.

4 Rooms

2011-06-04T19:32:00.002+01:00

I could not believe my eyes. In the TV programme "4 Rooms", people take along to a studio some item they think valuable and a game is played: they meet four professional "dealers" in artifacts, usiually works of art (or things that their owners believe are works of art). It's then a game show. The dealers tell the visitors what they'll pay for the item..... it's more complicated than that but it's not worth going into here because I wasn't so much interested in the game but in the things people brought along to be offered for sale. And in one in particular: a wall with a Banksy work on it. Graffitti in short. Two young bloked wanted £300 000 for it. £300 000 for a wall with graffitti on it? That was not the most amazing thing about it. Surrealistic depths (or heights, depending on your feeling towards graffitti on walls, art, Banksy etc) were reached. The most amazing thing was that one of the dealers offered them £240 000 for it. And there was more amazement to follow. They turned the offer down.
Now, they had spent only £20 000 on it, removing it from its original place i.e. part of a larger wall, and transporting it to the studio. Surely if they had been in their right minds they should have accepted the offer. But no. They thought they were going to get more for it elsewhere. And in retrospect, I think they may have been right. Because the dealer who offered them this massive amount of money told them that he already had someone who was interested in it.
Which brings us to the meat of the matter. There must be market in such things. It turns out that Banksy is not only regarded as a serious artist but his stuff sells as well. I'm flabberghasted. I thought scribbling graffitti on walls was against the law. Which, no doubt, is why Banksy never signs his work. How then can he sell them? And those who do try to sell them: how can they if they're not signed? I mean, anyone could have done them.
But it seems I'm on a different planet from the art world. Tracey Emin is bad enough with her unmade bed, then there was the pile of bricks in a gallery in London; then there's Ligetti in the music world; and now, the wall. £300 000 for a wall with graffitti on it. Give me strength. Where did I go wrong?

Hates

2011-05-30T20:38:00.003+01:00

Terry Engleton, writing in Prospect magazine tells us who he hates..... Hold on. Terry Eagleton, that leftie professor whose latest book is called "Why Marx was Right" - perhaps he means Groucho - he's writing an article in that rightie magazine!!!! Those four exclamation marks no doubt would bring out the worst in Eagleton: "one is too many".
Anyway, he gives a list of people he'd like to see done away with or locked up with the key thrown away. These are Tom Cruise,Mel Gibson, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Prince Andrew, Piers Morgan, Ben Brown (who's he?) and Robert Kilroy-Silk.
I have to agree with him on Mel Gibson but probably for different reasons. He doesn't give reasons but you can see where he's going can't you? Tom Cruise is Master (or some such thing) of Scientology, a religion based on the teachings of a science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard - I wonder what the L stands for if anything; maybe it's like the G in Edward G. Robinson which gives some distinction to an ordinary name but isn't actually a name at all. So Eagleton must be against stupid religions. That means most. Mel Gibson is a Jew-hating religious film maker and hopeless actor who makes religious films etc. Dick Cheney. Well nobody likes Dick Cheney except Dick Cheney and George Bush (maybe). Kissinger. Mmm. Yes I suppose so. A bit sinister and remember Vietnam.Tony Blair? Now I like Tony Blair but he is disliked by the right and the left for, wait for it, Iraq and the dodgy dossier. Blair made the Labour Party votable for; without Blair there wouldn't have been all those years of left-wing..... er..... liberal.... er.... OK, I hate him too. Prince Andrew. Agreed. What a shocker he is!!! (three exclamation marks to make sure he's noticed). Piers Morgan. I can't say I like or dislike him. He's a bit of a nonentity really. Ben Brown. Who's he? And Robert Kilroy-Silk. Not who's he but where's he?
The trouble with Eagleton is, like a lot of lefties (and rightees), he doesn't believe in freedom of the individual; he'll shut people up who don't agree with his ideas; he hates people he doesn't think worthy of his time; he writes books like "Why Marx was Right" when we all know now that Marx was wrong.
Wasn't he?

Chips

2011-05-21T20:02:00.002+01:00

So Wallace McCain is dead. Who was Wallace McCain? Well, he's the man responsible for selling milliions of bags of oven-ready chips. He started the company that made them, turned it into a million dollar enterprise, became a billionaire before he was forced out of office by his brother - never mind why. The point is that he and afterwards his brother is responsible for flooding the markets with inferior goods. They are not chips at all. I think they must be made of reconstituted potatoes mashed up and fried. O yes, they're easy to cook; all you do is heat up the over and stick them in. You don't have to peel potatoes then chop them into chips then fry them, you just open the bag that's been in the freezer, tip out a quantity onto a tray and bung them in the oven. Easy for the harrassed housewife over the hot stove all day.... Rather the harrassed wife over a desk all day, coming home to get some ready-made food for dinner and simply opening the bag etc.
I don't like them. I think they are just dreadful. They don't taste like chips at all. They don't even taste like potatoe. They taste like cardboard. OK like I imagine cardboard tastes.
Chips are fine foods. They may not be what Jamie Oliver and his ilk think are fine foods but that's because they dabble in trivialities, make what's simple difficult. i.e show off.
I have come across two methods of cooking chips well. Fist from one of the Hairy Bikers. You fry the potatoe chips at about 140 degrees until they are cooked through but not brown; you then take them out of the pan and let them stand and dry. You then turn the heat up to 190 degrees and cook until they are brown. Another way, from the internet: boil the chips for about ten minutes, remove and dry, then fry at a high temperatuure until they are brown.
I've tried the second mothod and it works well.
But tonight I did my usual thing: just fried them once. Maybe not quite so good but certainly far better than McCain's hash.
There's a certain chef who fries them 3 times. He says they taste as good as lobster.
Good chef there; not one of your prima donnas.

Eric

2011-05-18T16:14:00.003+01:00

You won't know Eric but there was a time when he was, well, "known" for a while. Saw him today on the bus going into Cardiff. Looked a lot older than when he used to go to the local pub quite a few years ago. Older but not frail; a bit bandy now and a bit wobbly perhaps. Knew who he was straight away but I don't think he remembers me.
Claim to fame? He used to be a singing partner to Shirley Bassey in one of the clubs she sang at in Tiger Bay, Cardiff - where policemen went in two's at least. Pretty rough area then. Not now: it's been transformed into The Cardiff Bay with a great body of water like a large lake held back from the sea by a sort of lock so that ships can enter and leave at various times of day. Boats on the lake and, surrounding it, cafes and restaraunts, all good ones, some classy, some quite cheap but not "cheapy" or "greasy spoon". A few clubs there still but none, I believe, like the one/s Miss Bassey used to sing in.
She was good then and I suppose she got better. According to Mark Steyn, who writes a daily blog which covers politics and show business, she was the best singer of the James Bond films' opening songs. She did more than one I believe.
I nearly got to interview her once a long time ago but her agent (or somebody in charge) said no.
I should have tried earlier in her career when she was singing in that club in Cardiff. With Eric
Saw him later in the day in Cardiff; he was with a very attractive woman not as old as him, who is eighhtyish; she was about fifty eight I guess. No wonder he was wearing his best jacket. Maybe, later on, he'd serenade her with some of the old Perry Como numbers he was so fond of.

Fair Game

2011-05-06T19:37:00.002+01:00

The film stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, both fine actors (though sometimes I find it hard to understand Penn - he mumbles), and is about how Bush and Cheney tried to deceive the American public about the Iraq war. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't but this film believes they did and in a way that was totally immoral. They heard, from British intelligence, that Sadam Hussein was going to obtain nuclear material from Niger in Africa; to substantiate this piece of news they sent a man, who had previously been an American ambassador to that country, to find out if the news was true. He found no evidence to prove it; in fact, he was positive that Niger was not in a position to do so. His report was ignored and the war went ahead. The man, played by Sean Penn, wrote an article in The New York Times saying what he knew and this resulted in a leak from the CIA naming the man's wife as a CIA agaent, which she was. This resulted in her world contacts being exposed and in some cases killed.
If I had know all this before I saw the film I might have been more entertained than I was. The film is made in such a "hand-held-camera" style - even when the camera is not being hand-held - that the story is a confusing and confused mess. Only at the end did it seem to work - in retrospect.
Sometimes I wonder if some of the modern American film makers don't know the first thing about story telling: they throw action scenes in to demonstrate how clever they are and they lose the story line. A good dose of Ozu would do them good I feel - he hardly moves the camera at all.
Anyway, I don't believe that America went to war in Iraq on the one detail of the build-up to it that this film highlighted; there were heaps of things that pointed to Hussein's wish to make WOMD. Maybe they were all matters of intelligence failure. But everyone believed tham at the time.
Another film maker some of these whiz-kids of American cinema ought to study is Woody Allen. Now there's a guy who knows how to make films; he puts a story together brilliantly. I have recently seen "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and it is brilliant. And no one in it or making it is trying to push a political point down your throat as "Fair Game" does - and not very successfully either.

Royal Music

2011-04-30T20:17:00.002+01:00

Someone once, long ago. asked me why I had, when in London for a week, on holiday, attended the ceremony at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. I said because of the music chiefly though I did find the marching etc. rather moving. I love Walford's "Solemn Melody" (I suppose he must have written other pieces of music but this is the only work of his I have ever heard). It was played by massed brass bands which is always thrilling.
This came to mind when I found myself, against my will, watching the Royal Wedding: the music would perhaps balance the sentimentality of the occasion. Actually, there was little sentimentallity to experience: the English do these occasions so well, with military precision and effectiveness such that there's no room for tears or shows of public sentiment. I enjoyed it. All of it. I liked the bride - she is a real beauty with a smile that could melt the heart of a knave. The prince is quite likeable too, much more so than some of The Firm. But it was the music that thrilled.
I read somewhere that the music was chosen by Prince Charles and the bride, Kate Middleton herself. Another mark up for the young woman and a great leap up in my estimation for the prince, her father-in-law to be. Obviously the guy has taste. Of course he has taste: doesn't he always get seven eggs boiled for him for breakfast for different periods of time so that he can choose the one done just right for him (the other six probably go in the bin).
So there was no pop music played in spite of Elton John being present (no "Candle in the Wind" thank God!); no light music at all; nothing to make you think "here we have a real, great, modern marriage". No. We heard Hubert Parry, a choral work, Cwm Rhondda and Jerusalem sung with spirit (as if it's a patriotic song, which it isn't), then a short choral work by John Rutter (safe hands there) and at the end when the married couple were leaving, walking the length of Westminster Abbey - which is some walk, especially in the clobber they both had on - William Walton's magnificent march "Crown Imperial". I almost stood up and saluted.
Why was William Walton not made Master of the Queen's Music? He could turn that stuff out like nobody's business: Crown Imperial, Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, Orb and Sceptre etc. All great stuff. Good as Elgar.... why wasn't he too made Master of the King's Music? One of his Pomp and Circumstance marches has practically become the National Anthem.
Ah! I see. Now I know. Elgar was a Catholic.
Just a guess.
Poor Max Whats-his-name, who is Master of the Queen's Music wasn't even invited to write something. He was hurt. He said "I'm not even going to watch it."

The Wedding

2011-04-25T15:47:00.002+01:00

If I were a young woman - I'm not a woman or young, by the way - I wouldn't like to be in Kate Middleton's shoes, metaphorically speaking. No wonder she's supposedly not eating these days. God! She'll be joining The Firm is a few days' time and there's no bigger firm - or soap opera - than that. Those palaces where people live! Those large dining rooms where the knives, forks and spoons are laid out military style. The corridors you have to walk to get from one room to another. All those flunkies about the place bowing and scraping to you with, possibly, pervy little smiles on their mouths that tells you that you really are not fine enough to be in this hallowed place with these hallowed people.... and so on.
She seems a nice girl but will she stay a nice girl living the sort of life she will have to live soon. If she decides to continue "being herself" she'll suffer - "we don't want royalty to be anything other than royal, old boy". She's a commoner but she can't stay a commoner because a commoner to some of those soon to be around her is to be common.
Will she survive in the airless atnmosphere of the royal households?
One of two things will occur I believe: she will either start the beginning of a new kind of royalty, the sort that survives in some of the European countries, or she will unconciously wreck it. There are forces in and around The Firm that will not like "the likes of her" to break into the extended family of the whole artificial set-up: flunkies who like to flunk to the aristocrats; the remains of "the debutants" who still linger on the outskirts of royal events like those girls in "Dracula" who wish to suck your blood - sexily; the Duke - enough said; his daughter, Princess Anne, who seems to be more of a robot rather than a human being. They'll probably all play the game for a while but they'll bide their time before they strike with upper-class venom. In the immortal words of Gerry Adams: "We haven't gone away".
Maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe they won't be allowed to by the British public. Maybe it will be as Matthew D'Ancona puts it in the Sunday Telegraph: "So relaxed, loving and straightforward are Prince William and his bride-to-be that it is easy to forget that the monarchy is about to embark on the greatest experiment in social mobility in its modern history. But it is the Palace that is on trial, not the new princess: the public will not take kindly to the slightest whiff of snobbery."
I'm with them there even if I'm not with them on much else besides regarding royalty.

Fantasy

2011-04-16T15:41:00.002+01:00

I have seen a couple of strange films recently: "Unmissable" and "Source Code". Both are fantasies. In "Unmissable" a down-and-out writer who can't get on with the novel he's been commissioned to do, is given a tablet by a man he once knew who is working for a chemical company on a secret formula. Which should have told the hero not to take the pill; but he was desperate so he does. Almost instantly he becomes a sort of high-powered, over-intelligent monster: we are told that the average person uses only about 20% of his brain (didn't know that before) but that the pill he has taken will make available to him 100% of his b rain. So he writes his novel which is great - so his agent believes - and it gets published. Then he finds he can wiz-kid things like helping firms to make money. But people are after him, they want the pill of course. It's all rather unbelieveable. But it's fun. "Source Code" is fantasy made so assuredly and seriously that you almost believe it could take place. A man wakes up on a train and, gradually, in eight minutes, finds he not the man he thinks he is. He is dead but certain brain parts of his have been saved and it is these that inhabit the other man. Get it? No, I didn't either. But again, it was fun though even more violent than "Unmissable". While waiting for the film to start I had to put up with reviews of films to come. They were all fantasies. A man becomes a "green man" who can perform great feats of strength and possesses extraordinary powers etc. Another couple of films were also fantasies. They were all spectacularly full of "special effects" which I find rather boring in that, well, you know they are "special effects" don't you?. I prefer a film to be grounded in reality like "Sideways" which had no special effects. Neither did "The King's Speech" which was an excellent film with three, at least, superb performances. Is this fantasy-film-making anything to do with the general public's dispensing with "old forms" of fantasy like religion? Are people now non-believers but still have a secret desire to want to believe something? As G.K.Chesterton put it: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."

Wendy Cope

2011-04-08T20:38:00.004+01:00

Charles Moore wrote a good piece on the poet Wendy Cope this week in The Daily Telegraph. He pointed out how her use of easy-to-understand words was deceptive because her poems were greater than the sum of their parts - sort of thing. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said (or wrote): "Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets and says a lot of extremely serious things. I read something a few weeks ago that she is not very popular with other poets. Moore seems to think this is because (a) people like it and buy it without necessarilly being experts on poetry and that upsets "proper poets". (b) Her name makes her sound like "a suburban spinster poet and that brings out the snob in other writers" - a bit loose that! (c) "She writes lines - indeed whole poems - with no unusual words or syntax" which makes other poets think she's no good. She is good. She's subtle and clever and, though you wouldn't think it on first reading one of her poems, quite erudite. But it's love she writes best about. My favourite is, of course: "Bloody men are like bloody buses - /You wait about a year/ And as soon as one approaches your stop/ Two or three others appear." (First verse). Another is rather clever, again about men - they often are about men! "There are so many kinds of awful men -/ One can't avoid them all. She often said/ She'd never make the same mistake again:/ She always made a new mistake instead." (First verse) Here's a fairly new one called "The Widow": I like this piece. I think youd like it too./ We didn't very often disagree/ Back in the days when I sat here with you/ And knew that you were coming home with me./ This is the future. It arrived so fast,/ When we were young it seemed so far away./ Our years together vanished like a day/ At nightfall, sealed for ever in the past./ I can't give up on music, just discard/ The interest we shared because you died./ And so I come to concerts. But it's hard./ Tonight I'm doing well. I haven't cried./ My head aches. There's a tightness in my throat./ And you will never hear another note."

The Killing

2011-03-30T15:03:00.002+01:00

Why is "The Killing", the Danish thriller on TV, better than any of our British TV products? It's a work that analyses in depth the murder itself and also the effect it has on a whole community - well, those in the community who are affected in various ways by the murder, from the girl's immediate family to a councillor who is trying to oust the mayor and take over the job himself. The police investigating the case also become humanely affected by the murder, especially the young woman detective (who wears cardigans that have, due to the series, soared in price) who becomes almost insanely obsessed with the case. Yet don't British TV crime plays do something of the same kind? "Waking the Dead" has investigations of murdered people whose cases are history. Each murder affects certain people within the community and outside it; the innvestigating team use pathology to find this and that out about the victim.... and so on. But there's something special about "The Killing". Its tone is not frivolous or superficial or slightly humorous (Poirot) but deadly serious. You feel, with British crime plays and series that the victim is there to make a good story; he or she is dead so now we'll concentrate on the whys, hows amd wherefores. The victiim is a sort of cypher on which the story hangs (if it does!). In British TV crime works, often, depth of character attempts use idiosyncrasies to make them interesting; there is little depth of character in fact. In "The Killing" the characters were portrayed with depth and understanding: you have the dead girl's immediate family suffering with an agony you could almost feel yourself; then as the investigation spread out to others - a teacher, a boy-friend, a councillor etc - and, not least, the investigating team and slowly the pressure grows on everyone concerned. There was nothing of the "let's make this as exciting as possible" but something of the long, serious , well written novel which delves deep into its characters as well as tell a good story. It was not of the English school well described by Orwell in his essay "Decline of the English Murder": respectable middle class chap who decides to bump off his wife (less disgracefull than leaving her for his secretary apparently - then!) and start out in life anew. It was, it seems, a characteristically Nordic murder mystery for, it seems, the Danish and Swedish writers of crime fiction have become far superior to our home-grown breed.

Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-26T19:30:00.002Z

A college friend of mine used to say "I'd like to just sit on the bed beside Elizabeth Taylor, just sit there, you understand? (I didn't nod), just sit there and look at her. I wouldn't do anything, just sit there looking at her." Yeah, I know the feeling and I didn't believe a word of it, knowing him. Probably he didn't believe it either; maybe it was a fantasy of his that made him feel pure since he wasn't pure. He was a ram. A Welsh ram.
But never mind him, let's think of her.
Was she a good actress? Well, she won two oscars didn't she? I never thought her a great actress, good but not great. I always found her a bit lifeless; she posed a lot. She did give a powerful performance in "Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolf?" but I found it forced and ugly - ok, she was supposed to be ugly. The trouble was that she simply wasn't ugly; she tried to be but didn't succeed. Burton was great in it; he relished his lines like only an experienced stage actor can. She blurted her lines, shouting them agressively when she should have been more subtly cruel.
I liked her best when she was young: "National Velvet" and "Lassie Come Home"; she was charming and innocent and loveable. I don't think she was ever as loveable in adult movie life except perhaps when she acted with gay friends like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson - then she seemed casually content.
I read a story about her and Burton in a book written by a script-writer. He went to their house on a visit to discuss a script and noticed that in their bedroom they had a trolley full of drinks by the side of their bed. So they were normal after all!
(Another tale he told was of a movie mogul who phoned him up late one night and said: "I want a one page synopsis of "War and Peace" on my desk first thing tomorow morning.")
Back to Elizabeth Taylor. She visited Cardiff with Richard Burton, went to a rugby match and, afterwards, she and Burton went to the bar of the Cardiff Athletics Club. It was packed to the door. "How are we going to get to the bar to get a drink?" she asked Burton. He said: "Just walk." She did and the crowd parted like the Red Sea did for Moses giving her a passage straight to the bar.
An actor told of a visit she made to Port Talbort to visit Burton's sister after he had died. She stayed the night in a bedroom with no toilet facilities except a pot under the bed. The following morning she came down the stairs carrying the pot, stopped halfway down and asked: "what am I supposed to do with this?" Burton's sister said: "we'll bottle it and sell it."

Midsomer

2011-03-20T20:19:00.002Z

There is no place on this earth like Midsomer where inumerable murders take place - on TV, that is. I am informed that it's not only very popular in this country but the world over; maybe the same as Dickens was popular in Russia some time back because the Russians thought that was how England was then in the 1900's, not, when Dickens was writing, in the 1800's.
Well, the series producer of Midsomer Murders has been naughty and said that he doesn't want black or Asian faces on the show because it would take it away from it its Englishness. He's quite right, it would. That is not to say that its Englishness is like what Englishness is like in reality. The Englishness of Midsomer Murders is the Englishness of a fictional idea of Enghland with its rolling green fields and its Constable skies and its Elgarian tone and its Miss Marpole-like daintiness.
But while the producer was right to point this out he worded the remark in such a way that it seemed racialist: he said that his series was the last bastion of Englishness by which he inferred, if not actually meant, that the England of his programmes was a fine place until the foreiners with black or dark faces came here.
He is, of course, on dangerous grounds because you can't, these days, make any remark that might, just might, hurt the feelings of a "new Englishman".
One is now almost frightened of speaking one's mind lest the politically correct come down on you like a ton of bricks for making a racialist remark when all you've said is something like "I saw a black man peeiing in the street". "Why did you say he was black?" "Because he was." "Would you have said it about a white man doing the same thing? "No, probably not." "Why not? Are white men superior to black men?" "No, I ... er I... didn't mean.... er to say... Please forgive me. Don't take me away to prison. Please." And so on.
Dyke who left the BBC a couple of years ago said that the BBC was too white. Now that is a racialist remark. He is saying that anyone who is black is better than a white person. Isn't he? Would you put a black violinist in a symphony orchestra to have a black face there if he wasn't much good on the violin? Dyke was saying you should.
Sorry to see John Nettles leaving the show since he's the only man I know who can speak without opening his mouth. Could get a new job as a ventriloquist I suppoe.

Language

2011-03-09T20:36:00.002Z

I used to know a man (in his early eightees then) who set out to obtain an Open University degree (he did get it). One day he showed me some of a lecturer's notes in History, commenting that that lecturer was immensely knowledgeable and a brilliant explicator of his subject. I read a page but could not understand any of it. To my mind it was nonsensical. I could, of course, read the words - they were quite familiar to me - and I could even read some of the sentences; but they meant nothing to me. I had the feeling that I was reading, or trying to read, something that was showing how deep the man was intellectually without his actually presenting any understandable arguments.
It took me back to a physics book that was reccommended to students starting the degree course in physics: the book was unreadable. It is almost as if the authorities wanted to appear wiser than they were and therefore had given the students stuff that they knew would be unfathomable, pretending they themselves were able to fathom it.
In last week's Spectator an art critic (usually a very good one) wrote this about the artist Alan Reynolds: "The new work consists of white reliefs and pencil drawings, which contine Reynolds's exploration of the dynamic relationships between the horizontal and the vertical." I'm pretty sure that Andrew Lambirth undrestands what this means but I certainly don't. However, I'll not go further into this and give him the benefit of the doubt since he knows a lot more about art than I do. But what does it mean?
In The Times today Daniel Finkelstein quotes a professor at the London School of Economics thus: "A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the 'governors' and the 'governed and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project." Finkelstein says "I haven't got the first clue what the professor is going on about."
Neither have I.

Avante Garde

2011-03-05T14:19:00.002Z

"Schoernberg envied Berg his success while Berg envied Schoernberg his failures." So wrote a friend of Berg's. He said he had to console Berg over his success - possibly his quite popular violin concerto (which I have not yet fathomed and feel I probably never will).
A lot of composers of the early part of the 20th century seemed to have worried themselves sick over whether they were avant garde enough. "Am I modern enough?" Bartock cried.
Then there was poor Rachmaninoff, concerned that his music was not going along with the trend towards atonality with his success weighing him down: "I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today but it will not come to me."
Thank God it didn't, I say. I have just heard, for the umpteenth time his 2nd symphony and although it gushes with sentimentality and with a style of orchestration that borders on confusion with its overlapping ornamentation, it still strikes me as an emotionally powerful work.
A couple of days ago I heard a song by Korngold. At first, not knowing who the composer was, I thought it might have been Franz Lehar (yes, it was that good). I was most impressed. Yet Korngold, after early triumphs in Germany and Austria, couldn't get his works played, probably his semitic origins had something to do with it. So he shot off to the USA where he became one of the most popular composer of backgound music to films. He was immensely successful with films like Robin Hood and Captain Blood. Yet he yearned for success of a different kind; he yearned to be taken seriously by his avante garde peers. He never was. Yet his violin concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz is rather good.
Well, we can't all be Franz Lehars I suppose, happy to go along doing what you do best and to hell with the rest of the modernisers. But some were like Ligeti: "One simply cannot go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avante garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avante garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape."
His scrap metal thrown into a tin bucket is, I suppose, some kind of escape!

Jane Russell

2011-03-01T19:38:00.002Z

I recall the film coming to the South Wales valley town where I lived: Blackwood. There was a queue about half a mile long. Blokes. I don't think there was a single woman in the queue. Only blokes. Young blokes, most of them. The film? "The Outlaw" with Jane Russell. Who else was in it? Couldn't remember so I looked up David Thomson's book "Did You See"? Well there was Thomas Mitchell as Pat Garrett, Walter Huston as Doc Holiday and a newcomer, Jack Beutel, as Billy the Kid (I haven't heard of him since that film - perhaps he never recovered being seduced by Jane Russell - well, as a kid I knew something had gone on!).
David Thomson sums up the film in a few words: "You see, 'The Outlaw' isn't just Howard Hughes, or even Pat Garrett meets Doc Holiday and Billy the Kid. It's Jane Russell.
She took the film by storm. She never was, later, as hot as she was in this film. At the time it was sensational, she was sensatuional.
Of course, what made her name was her casting by Howard Hughes who took over from Howard Hawkes after two weeks of filming. He took a few years to make it and, before releasing it, sent out to the world very sexy pictues of the new star, all legs and breasts (two to be exact) a gun-toting lass lying in the hay and looking like she desires "it", if you know what I mean by "it" - you know, "that". Yes, now you've got it.
Two other films of her's that I liked were "Paleface" with Bob Hope and Trigger.... O yes, Roy Rogers too. She did a song with Hope which showed she could sing a bit: "Buttons and Bows". It won an oscar. Then there was Howard Hawks' "Gentlemen prefer Blondes". Most eyes at that time (blokes eyes I mean) were on Marilyn Monroe but it was as if Jane Russell was gallantly allowing Monroe to be the centre of attraction; it was as if they enjoyed being together and Jane enjoyed being second in line in the sexy stakes. Or was she? Though the hunks in the film threw themselves at Monroe, all she was interested in were diamonds, which, we all know by now, are a girl's best friend.
Now Jane Russell has died at 89. But I can still see the queue at the cinema in Blackwood; and it was probably the same at every similar flea-ridden cinema the world over.

The Oscar

2011-02-27T17:32:00.004Z

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

2011-02-19T20:36:00.002Z

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

2011-02-17T15:52:00.002Z

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

2011-02-12T20:30:00.002Z

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

2011-02-11T14:27:00.003Z

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

2011-02-06T19:53:00.002Z

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.

John Adams

2011-01-29T20:23:00.002Z

In his book "The Rest is Noise", Alex Ross tries to describe the music of John Adams. He writes: "It is a cut-up paradise, a stream of familar sounds arranged in unfamiliar ways. A glitzy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a translike sequence of shifting beats; billowing sounds of Wagnerian harmony are dispersed by a quartet of saxophones. It is present tense American romanticism, honouring the ghosts of Mahler and Sibelius, plugging into minimalist processes, swiping sounds from jazz and rock, browsing the files of postwar innovation. Sundry sounds are broken down and filtered through an intensely recognisable personal voice, sometime exhuberant and sometimes melancholy, sometimes hip and sometimes noble, winding its way through a fragmentary culture."
Get it? Can you hear it in your head?
No, you can't - unless you've heard some John Adams work before. If you have then that description is as good as it's possible to be, I think.
I have heard some quite short works of his and enjoyed them a lot; they're fun to hear. No tunes to speak of, mostly rythms, mostly fast ones that take you along, so to speak, on a helter skelter ride. But I had not heard any of his longer works until last night when the National Orchestra of Wales played his 1985 three movement work called "Harmonielehre". It was an astonishingly exciting experience: not so much a piece which entranced you with lovely tunes or development of themes but, rather, that thrilled you with its texture and rhythmic patterns.
"Forty triple chords set the piece in motion...." writes Alex Ross - and that describes it beautifully: "sets it in motiion" indeed. The final movement is colossal with an orchestra of about a hundred players seemingly all playing at the same time with five on timpani playing everything they have there.
I think it was Sir Thomas Beecham who said something like "musical works should be such that they can be whistled or hummed by a passengher on the Clapham omnibus". That finishes John Adams then; you couldn't whistle or hum anything of "Harmonielehre" but I wouldn't have missed it "for the world", as they say.

Lon Chaney

2011-01-24T16:06:00.002Z

Someone writing a column in The Times today refers to John Steinbeck's novel "Of Mice and Men" being popular GCSE material; also that the film with John Malkovich as Lennie, the subnormal friend of a normal man seeking work in the 20's or 30's America, is also popular in schools since it shows in dramatic form what it is they are reading. I prefer the old black and white film directed by Lewis Milestone (of "All Quiet on the Western Front" fame) made in 1939. In that film it had Lon Chaney Junior as Lennie and he was great.
Chaney's father was better known as a Hollywood star but he made only silent films. The son made a lot of films but due to his unglamorous appearance (just plain ugly some people might say) he was uaually cast as a villain or as a man possessed by some evil spirit or a man who changed his nature into something hoprrific and dangerous. I recall him as a werewolf, as an Iron Man - whatever that was - as many other wierd and wonderful B feature people. Then he made "Of Mice and Men" and he was superb. A trait he had often shown in his less memorable films was that of a man troubled by a conscience: an almost miserable look of someone possessed by an unwanted demon. Malkovich plays Lennie well but you can't help feekling that he's acting the part, that he's pretending to be an idiot; with Chaney you believed that he was this man; he seemed to understand the man's inner turmoil: that miserable expression of delusion and dismay at what he might do e.g. kill someone lived on him and in him.
He played another rather smaller part later, towards the end of his career: a man, troubled again by his incapacity to help the main character, Gary Cooper, in "High Noon". It was a small gem in a first-rate film.
There were two other roles in the 1939 "Of Mice and Men" film which deserve mention: Burgess Meredith as Lennie's friend George, the biggest part in the film, and Bob Steele as a nasty piece of work, Lennie's boss. Both these actors were always good whatever films they were in; Meredith usually had the big parts and Steele always small parts, always the villain: "The Big Sleep" as Canino; a killer in "The Enforcer" with Humphrey Bogart. One thing he always did well: die. He never just fell down, he staggered about, full of lead, clutching at his innards, making the most of his role, probably hoping for a supporting oscar award - which never, to my knowledge, came his way.
Became a successful business-man I heard. Like George Raft!

Charles Coburn

2011-01-20T14:58:00.002Z

I am reading a biography of Howard Hawkes so I thought I'd do some personal research into his character by watching "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". It's not a film I liked much when I saw it many moons ago but, seeing it again, it gained something in that it was fun. Good fun. And what does want more as one staggers unsettlingly into old age than something that makes one feel younger?
Another great fun thing about the film is that it presents a very old Charles Coburn doing what he usually did in his films - play the part of "a dirty old man" without making him seem dirty at all. Old yes but not at all "dirty". This time he plays an English millionaire who is attracted to Marilyn Monroe like a wasp to jam. "By Jove!" he says over and over again as he eyes her delightful body. "Would you like a dance?" he asks. She willingly succumbs to his ageing charms because he is a millionaire and possesses what she most loves in life - diamonds which, we are informed later in a number with Monroe and a heap of handsome men, "a girl's best friend".
The two female stars, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, were at the top of their luscious form when this picture was made and they seemed to enjoy doing the film more than they did other films; certainly Monroe seemed happier in this film that many others, enjoying herself in a role where she could, as it were, caricature herself.
But Coburn is magnificent. As always.
I have been doing some other research. I wanted to find out what film it was that starred Charles Coburn and Jean Arthur that gave me one of the best laughs I'ver had. My research took me to David Thomson's book on film people where I discovered that they made only one film together (though I may be wrong): "The More the Merrier". I then looked up Rotten Tomatoes for the reviews of this film and there it was, the film I was looking for. The film which I recalled had one of the funniest scenes I had ever seen: Jean Arthur occupies an apartment and she allows Coburn to occupy a part of it but he must meticulously follow certain "house rules": when to use the bathroom after she has used it, getting breakfast on time etc. Coburn is just superb: this overweight, bungling trudger of an almost desperate-to-please old man racing around trying to follow her tight timetable is a joy to see.
The film, directed in his earlier, less laborious style, by George Stevens was nominated for abouit 7 oscars. It only won one. Charles Coburn won it for best supporting actor.

Wyler

2011-01-12T19:50:00.002Z

I was surprised to find that William Wyler's film "The Desperate Hours" was not included in David Thomson's book "Have you Seen?" Evidently he doesn't rate it as highly as the others included, like "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein". Again, I was equally surprised that the film was given a one star rating in "Helliwell's Film Guide". It's a good film. Maybe it suffers a little from it being an adaptation of a theatre play by Joseph Hayes and that he himself wrote the screeplay - theatre dramatists are not usually the best people to adapt work for the quite different style involved in film making, even if it is their own work; indeed this may create greater barriers to its success since the writer sees the action taking place on one set (usually in those days) and cannot visualise going outside that set. When this is done you can usually see that the action outside the "one set" is forced on the story - it is taken outside merely to show the audience that "this is a film not a play".
But William Wyler, the film's director, surely helped make it fairly presentable as a film. He had done it before in 1936 with "These Three", adapted from the play "The Children's Hour" by Lillian Hellman; she also did the adaptation to screen. He remade this film later in the 60's with a different cast, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine. Neither of these two film are in Thomson's book and this one, like "The Desperate Hours", is only given one star in Halliwell's book.
I think Wyler is a better film director than either of these pundits claim; he made some fine films over a long career: "Dodsworth" from a novel by Sinclair Lewis is a fine study of an ageing business man; "Dead End" seemed good in its day and had a raw edge to it (another from a stage play - and it showed); "The Letter", a masterpiece (again from a play by Somerset Maugham); "The Westerner", a fine western with an oscar performance from Walter Brennan and an equally good performance from Gary Cooper; "The Best Years of your Life "; "The Heiress" with an almost frightening performance from Ralph Richardson; "Detective Story" with Kirk Douglas; "Roman Holiday", Audrey Hepburn's best film I think; "The Big Country". Those are some of them. "The Desperate Hours" ranks alongside them I believe with two outstanding performances from Humphrey Bogart and Frederick March.

Rattigan

2011-01-06T20:24:00.002Z

There is going to be a resurgence of Terence Rattigan plays this year, I read. I'm not surprised: he is a master of the well-made play with its beginning when something has happened to hold the attention and when the main character is in a spot of trouble; how he/she resolves the conflict is the heart of the play. In "The Browning Version" we see a teacher at a public school, quite a tyrant in the classroom, who cannot love his wife in the way she wants to be loved, sexually; he knows she finds that sort of love elsewhere with the chemistry master at the school; he has to decide what he's going to do with his life now that he is about to retire. The problem he has is an intellectual one: while he loves her - or rather has loved her - he can only find satisfaction in the joy of literature; so when a boy gives him a present of Browning's translation of a Latin text he breaks down and "blubs". From this, after his wife tells him that the boy probably gave him the book so as to get a higher mark, he begins to find some strength of character. At the beginning of the play he was a rather pathetic character - and pathetic characters are not suitable for tragedy in dramas - but he emerges as a stronger person able to fulfill himself in the way he wishes to.
There are two kinds of love, said Rattigan: that which expresses itself in animal sexuality and that which cannot express itself other than in a sort of spirituality.
Rattigan conceitedly said of himself: "There's Shakespeare, Chekov and me." Not true. He is not on the same high level. He is a great crafstman; he can tell a story brilliantly and he can execute brilliant "coups" which make you gasp with pleasure. But he is not a great wordsmith in a poetical sense like Shakespeare and he does not fill out his characters with the warmth that Chekov does.
David Aaronovitch, writing in The Times today about the sex traders of the north of England, tries his best to make them believeable and human in that they do not understand our culture, they being mostly Pakistanis (they are, in my opinion beasts who should never have been allowed to perform this trade of young girls - nothing excuses them, they are the scum of the earth). He quotes Freud: "Where they (men) love, they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love. They seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the objects they love."
I think this quote applies to Rattigan's life, his homosexuality being one kind of love, his desire to love women the other kind.
I look forward to seeeing some of his plays again: "The Deep Blue Sea"; "The Winslow Boy"; Bequest to the Nation"; "The Browning Version".

Words and Music

2011-01-05T20:15:00.001Z

I turned on the radio yesterday to hear something in the Mozart Marathon on Radio 3 where all, yes, ALL the music Mozart ever wrote is being played over 12 days, and I heard a most beautiful soprano aria from an opera which, when I looked it up in the Radio Times, I found I had never heard of. I didn't know what she was singing about but the tone of it made me believe it was romanttic, maybe a love song; but it could have been a song to a person or maybe to something else, a pomegranet possibly. Don't know. Didn't care. The thing is, it didn't much matter what the song's words were saying because I was listening to the beautiful sound of the music.
This is often the case I think with a lot of people: they hear an aria from an opera, like what they hear but don't really care what it is about - Nessun Dorma for example: how many people at the World Cup, or whatever it was the aria was used as a signature tune to, knew what the words were describing.
I have just been reading how the song "Moon River" came to be written. Blake Edwards wanted a song for his film "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; Henry Mancini said he'd like to write one. "You're the music director," Edwards told him, "you don't write songs." But Manciini pleaded and he was tried out. He wrote a melody, a simple one that Audrey Hepburn would be able to manage, and got Johnny Mercer to write the lyrics. It workd a treat and won an oscar.
Fast forward a year or two and Miles Kreuger, musical historian, asked Mercer "What has moon river to do with hucklberry friend?" "D'you know, you're the only one who ever has asked me that?" Mercer didn't have a satisfactory answer. Sounded good. Still does. "My Huckleberry friend" is one of those magical expressions that sound great without making much sense in the context it's in.
Then there's Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns". Does anybody know exactly what that's about? Does Sondheim? He's never come clean on that. Then there's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". "We didn't know what we were singing," I once heard one of the group that recorded it say, "but it sounded real good."
A couple of days ago I heard a recording of Dame Janet Baker singing one of Elgar's Sea Songs: "Where corals lie." Great song. Beautiful voice. But she did not at first wish to sing it because she thought the poem wasn't up to scratch. Luckily she changed her mind. Possibly she realised that the words weren't the chief quality of the work: it's great Elgar and great Janet Baker but not probably a great poem.

Nigel Slater

2011-01-01T16:32:00.003Z

I used to like Nigel Slater. Obviously he's a good cook; he's a good writer too and a good speaker. His programmes recemtly on BBC 1 are pleasant to watch though the idea that they are "simple suppers" is plainly ludicrous: simple, my foot! He has more ingredients in his pantry at the ready than I have had hot dinners. Never mind, the programmes are fun to watch. Were!
Then I saw a play on TV this week about Nigel as a boy growing up with a loving mother and a rather boring father with a nasty temper; it was adapted from his autobiography. And now I can't say that I like Nigel Slater at all.
The play was finely done, well acted (especially by the boy who played Nigel) and should have been a lot of fun. The TV critics certainly thought it good - The Times critic gave the play five stars and I suppose I should have done the same thing looking at it objectively. But in my mind it was a one star play or even a no star play. It annoyed me intensely. By the end of the play I found I did not like Nigel Slater one little bit.
Why? Well I think it had to do with the other characters: the father, the cleaning-woman he married after his wife died. They were quite revolting types and I felt that they shouldn't have been. Why not, one may ask, if that was the truth. Because when a character is conceived by a good playwright he or she is brought to life as a whole human being not a collection of features like a cartoon might depict. The father was moody, nasty, unfeeling, coarse; the cleaner-woman was coarse, vile, envious of her step-son's ability to cook as well as she could. Neither had redeeming qualities as most people have unless they are outright villains which they evidently were not.
So the "hero" of the play, Nogel Slater himself, came across as moody, ill-mannered, ungrateful and a loner - not only that but a loner who rather liked being one.
The play ended with Slater, now a young man, leaving home for good just after his father had died (from over-eating it seemed) with his second wife, the cleaning woman (as Slater referred to her throughout) distraught and alone and pleading for comfort in her grief. The fact that he didn't give her any comfort but was too eager to leave left me with a nasty taste in my mouth. I had the impression that the playwright (together with Slater no doubt) enjoyed the "joke" of her despair and expected us to enjoy it too. I didn't. I found myself wondering what happened to her after this not actually wishing to know what happened to Slater. I know what happened to him: he became a famous chef.
A chef for God's sake! Not a Mozart or a Tolstoy or even a Noel Cowerd but a chef.
They say that cookery is the new rock and roll. Perhaps they're right. Just like the old rock and roll it's loud and brash and puerile.

Mozart and Hawkes

2010-12-31T20:19:00.002Z

On the surface there's not much similarity between the work of Mozart and that of the film director Howard Hawkes except that they were both great in their own fields; but look a little closer and you'll find some things that make you think "Ah yes, they do resemble each other a lot".
They both created works that are very popular still: a lot of Mozart's music doesn't seem to fade with age; neither do some of Hawkes's films. Neither are artists in the romantic sense: people who practice their arts without caring what the general public thought of it. They were both in a sense "jobbing" artists, Mozart getting commissions where he could find them and working within the system of patronage essential for him to be able to earn a living for him and his family and Hawkes working within the Hollywood system of film moguls (like princes) controlling the way the films were produced, what was produced and what sort they were.
I don't think either was political. Hawkes had a disdain for progressive ideas and Mozart probably didn't have time to worry himself with what was going on in the wider world - "Mozart spent almost his entire life locked in the old feudal order, at the beck and call of princes, bishops, emperors and aristocratic patrons who treated him with disdain, amused or otherwise" (Richard Morrison in The Times this week).
Again, "Mozart learned voraciously from others" but adapted what he learned to his own style of composition. Hawkes had no definable style and used the studio style to the best advantage.
Mozart composed operas, religious music, concertos, symphonies etc. Hawkes did Westerns, Musicals. gangster films ("Scarface") etc. They both turned their hands to whatever was available and then did their own thing with it - a lot of the sparkling dialogue in Hawkes's films was written by him.
Jean-Luc Godard said of Howard Hawkes: "He is the greatest of all American artists". Many have said of Mozart something similar, the greatest composer of all time. Both resisted intellectual pretension, Hawkes claiming his approach was pure instinct: "Just one question: do you like it or don't you?" Mozart had not time to swim in pretensious waters, he was too busy, like Fred Asdtaire said, "making a buck".

Lucerne

2010-12-28T16:20:00.002Z

We drove into Lucerne many years ago in my Peugeot car that had seen better days. I stopped at a garage where there were men in blue overalls, the mechanics, and men in white overalls, the managers. I asked them if they would fix my car and a man in white said "bring it here at 7.30 in the morning please," perfect English but spoken like a man who had been trained by the SS. We did so and we picked it up in the afternoon; it was not only running like dream now but it had been cleaned, the engine too.
The place had a German feel to it. Everything worked: the doorknobs worked, the doors didn't squeak etc.
At that time, June or July I think, the Lucerne Music Festival was on with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil. if memory serves me right. I went to the box office and asked for two tickets for "tonight's concert". I was met by a young woman's face which had gone sort of blank. She seemed speechless. She just shook her head. In retrospect I believe I might have got a ticket if I had booked a couple of years before.
We left Lucerne, a lovely town, and crossed the Alps into the southern part of Switzerland, the Italian part. There, we went to a cafe to have a drink and maybe something to eat. It was not the sort of cafe we had seen in the German part of Switzerland. It was rather dingy and fly-blown. Then an argument began, I don't know about what; it started quite sociably, the two men smiling but suddenly it got violent and almost came to blows. Then it was over and everything returned to normal.
It is not racialist to say that there are vast differences between Italians and Germans; they differ in temperament, way of life, behaviour, manner etc. Fred Zinnemann, on Desert Island Discs said that if there is a bumping of cars, an English man will wish to exchange insurance policy addresses; a Frenchman will want to fight but an Italian will try to kill you.
But when Professor Hoggart was once asked where he'd like to live other than England he immediately said "O Italy. My young family loved every minute of it there." Then he added: "In Italy no one pays taxes."

Liking and Making

2010-12-26T20:12:00.003Z

Some of the best sports' commentators are people who have themselves played games to a high standard. This does not necessarilly mean that they know more about looking intelligently at games than the spectator; indeed, it might mean that they know less because, while they have been in the mill of the game, or often in the maul of the game, they can hardly say that they have seen it from a perspective that is objective. In some cases they have seen it from a certain fixed angle: take a front row forward who is engaged in the hard graft of mauling and shoving and, often, brawling rather than watching the finer points from the touchline. Also, having been a player does not nesessarilly mean that you will be able to write better than the watchful spectator, one trained in journalism perhaps or one with a flair for the apt, maybe also, the well formed poetic phrase.
I once attended a conference on film study. Present were people from film study courses in colleges and writers of articles on film in certain magazines like "Sight and Sound". The aim of the conference was to project the idea that film should be studied in schools at GCSE level and above. Someone thought that it might be useful if part of the course was devoted to the making of films as well as their study. This idea was instantly denounced as decidely unhelpful: this was meant to be a study of film as an art form not the teaching of a craft. When I supported the man who had suggested the idea I too was denounced as a sort of charlatan. Wasn't I aware that English Literature was studied and that there was no part in that study for creative writing? I didn't know that because at that time I was a teacher of science.
So I thought they must be right and we two outcasts quite wrong.
Liking literature has nothing to do with making it. Liking painting has nothing to do with making it.
But doesn't the act of making something involve the artist in a critically creative task in which his/her mental processers are active in analytical decisions as well as mechanical ones like laying on the brushstrokes.
A man from the Ministry of Education (I think) came to the conference to listen and then to give his view (which became a decision). I have scarcely heard such a superb demolition of the arguments put forward to him by this group of ardent film lovers. He fairly squashed them into nothingness. It was beautiful performance, almost a work of art in itself.
What his argument amounted was really quite simple: could you expect the general public to let their children attend a school which spent a good deal of time watching films with John Wayne in them?
Though I knew a man who was a university lecturer who, at a morning's staff meeting, heard the film study lecturer give his reason for wearing a black tie that day: in respect for the memory of John Wayne who had died the day before.

Public Speaking

2010-12-18T19:26:00.002Z

Not an easy thing to do; you're either good at it or not. Yet there are clubs you can join where you can larn how to do it. So I have been told. You wouldn't see me there for love nor money. Can't say I have any desire to speak in public anyway; I have done it occasionally for family affairs but then you don't have to do it expecting to be good at it; you do it so that freinds and family know that you care - about whatever the get-together is for.
I met a pathologist at one of our weekend writing courses. The first time he came he said he wanted to learn to write like Bernard Levin. The next time he came he said he didn't want to write articles any more; he wanted now to learn how to be a public speaker. There was no way we could advise him on that so we just listened to his efforts and said what we thought about his technique. When he came the third time he had been attending, he said, a public-speaking course. I couldn't see any improvement. In fact, to be honest - I didn't tell him this - I sensed a decline in his ability. He had, I think, been forced to follow a set of rules which, of course, led him along a path towards sameness; he now lacked a certain individuality; it wasn't him being natural but him being ordinary.
Toby Young, writing in The Spectator last week, tells of his experiences as a public speaker. At weddings and at certain functions that had to do with setting up one's own school (which he is now doing). He said that when he tried to make his speeches funny, they were always disastrous. He'd tell a joke which would go down like a lead balloon. Then he'd try a dirty joke with F's in it. Equally disastrous. Or worse - silence.
I knew a bloke who was quite a good actor, amateur variety. He was a very big bore, off stage. In short, when he was being himself he was boring; when he was playing someone else he was that person and was entertaining. He had also joined a public-speaking course. Disastrous. He was a bigger bore than he was naturally.
Public speaking is an art not a craft: you can learn a craft but an art is something that comes out of your own personality and experience. Don't ask what that something is please because I don't know.

Riots

2010-12-17T19:41:00.002Z

Someone writing in The Times felt sorry for those students who were peacefully demonstrating against inflated fees for colleges in that they might have suffered at the hands, or rather the truncheons, of the police, because finding themselves in a surging crowd at the front of the rioters they were the most vulnerable to attack. I too feel sorry for them; I myself have found myself thrust forward in a sudden surge to find myself in the front line, as it were. This wasn't a riot but a demonstration of affection bordering on fanatiicism. Strolling in London near the Cafe Royal (?) I was aware of a lot of people also strolling aimlessly around. But they had a purpose in being there. I didn't. I was just strolling "between pubs" so to speak. Suddenly a limo arrived at the entrance to the night club and out stepped Marlene Dietrich. Having not the least interest in seeing her I nontheless was presented with a grandstand view of her; up against a police cordon with arms linked to prevent her admirers getting close to her, there I was a couple of inches away from her as she strode by ignoring all those admirers/fanatics shouting "Marlene, Marlene" in strained. agonised tones. They couldn't get close enough to her to ogle and, maybe, touch her too. I could have touched her if it wasn't for the fact that my arms were by my sides and my body was thrust against a couple of big coppers in front of me and against a crowd of fans behind me pushing hard to get to her.
One of the "rioters" in the college fees affair in London, a harmless fellow it seems who had been, like myself, pushed to the front, had been hit over the head by a truncheon; he had a large bloody gash in his skull. We see people in riots on TV and we see truncheons being used and think of them as rods of wood. They may be wood but they are the hardest of woods. As a schoolboy I had a neighbour whose father was a policeman; one day his son, my friend, showed me his father's truncheon. I held it and could not believe how solid and hard it was. I felt that you could kill someone with it. I've never forgotten the feel of it. Nor, I suppose, will that seemingly innocent student whose head was battered when he found himaself in the front of a rioting mob.

The Apprentice

2010-12-16T14:44:00.002Z

Lord Sugar showed us his true nature last night in "The Apprentice": an East London stall-holder with a bullying manner and a penchant for blaming other people for his mistakes. I suppose many people watching the programme over the last few months were hoping that someone would give Stuart "The Brand" Maggs his well deserved "come-uppance". Well, last night they'd have been pleased because he got it in spades. First from the rottweiller-like interviewers who grilled him like coppers in B pictures of fifty years ago; the only thing missing was the table lamp shining in his face. Then from Lord Love-a-Duck Sugar who went at him full fruit-seller throttle. Baggs was, to put it succinctly and crudely, equivalent to a bucket of shit. It was a disgusting performance.
It was also unfair to the young man. The week before, Sugar had fired a very sweet young woman, Liz, instead of Baggs. Now, it was evident he was regretting having done so. But instead of admitting to it being his own fault, he went at Baggs blaming him for the dismissal. That was not only unfair but it was ungentlemanly and crass to say the least.
Lord Sugar, everyone had begun to think, was gradually evolving a more relaxed and engaging personality: he actually smiled a few times in the past few weeks, but now under that veneer of almost-charm came, like the Alien from John Hurt's abdomen, a creature that seemed to tell us a truth about the "noble" personage: that he had got where he'd got by a bullying ruthlessness and penchant for blaming others for his mistakes.
Chris, one of the two finalists in The Apprentice created a new cliched metaphore last week when he referred to a spat (almost a fist fight with F's flying around the place) between he and The Brand; he said "it was nothing really, just Handbags at Dawn, that was all". He should win. Why? He's creative, that's why. But he won't: he's got a degree and once studied A level Theology - and passed - while not believing a word of it. Sugar doesn't like people like that. And he's a bit posh too.

Hammond

2010-12-14T19:10:00.002Z

When I was a kid the name of Wally Hammond sent a thrill through me. Of course, I hadn't seen him on television because that had not then been invented, nor had I seen him in person because I did not then have an interest in Glamorgan cricket; my interest was only in hearing about him from radio commentaries. He had a reputation for displays of brilliance at times when his team were in the depths of depair. "He came in," I remember my ciousin saying, "when his team was on its knees and the first thing he did was knock a six." My father thought he was the best cricketer in the world - Bradman was too dull in comparision.
Now, reading an article in today's Daily Telegraph, my admiration for the man, who had only lived on radio and in my imagination, waned drastically. He doesn't seem a nice guy at all. In fact, the opposite. A snob who never travelled with the team he captained in Australia - Denis Compton said he never saw him until the game took place; a womaniser of the worst kind who absolutely neglected his alcoholic and depressed wife. I recall dimly that he returned from Australia in 1946-47 under a cloud due, it was rumoured, "to woman trouble". Then there was his rivalry with Bradman whom he had encountered in the 1928-29 series in Australia; then Bradman was a youngster batting at number 7 and scoring as few runs. But later when Bradman came into his own, Hammond could not live with the envy he felt for him. So his batting went down, his reputation went down and then he was taken ill in The West Indies with a "bug" which was probably siphillis.
Why do we put people on pedestals when all they are are sportsmen kicking balls around or throwing balls around. Well, cricket has always been different; it's somehow always been on a higher plane of sportsmanship. There's always been something elegant and gentlemanly about it. Hasn't there?
Well, sort of. But there was bodyline bowling. And now there's 20/20. It's not now in the tradition of that portrayed in Terence Rattigan's film "The Last Test" any more.
I used to have an oldish neighbour, a short, fat man who suffered terribly with asthma; he and I used to watch Glamorgan cricketers, playing on their old field in the centre of Cardiff, from the roof of the flats in Westgate Street. In his hardly-able-to-breathe voice he said "I once saw Wally Hammond play here. He came out and, first ball, he knocked a six into the bowling green." The bowling green was some distance away. I watched a lot of cricket at the Arms Park ground and never saw anyone hit a ball into the blowing green.

Gossip

2010-12-06T16:40:00.002Z

Toby Young, in this week's Spectator, refers to the gossip that took place in diplomatic circles as brought to the public notice by Wikileaks; it may make diplomats in future be a bit more careful what they say. It seems that gossip is what they are most interested in. Young goes on to say how, when he reached a certain hieght in the American world of publishing, he expected influential people he got to know, around a dinner table at some function or other, to talk about important issues of the day: instead, they gossipped. And it was always about people on a higher rung of the ladder professionally or artistically or those on the same level - never about people on a lower level. According to Toby Young, people who gossip only gossip about people like themselves or those above them. He added that when one of the company left the room to go to the lavatory, they instantly started gossipping about him.
I had a similar experience with a group of writers. I was once a member of The Writers' Guild of GB (waste of my time and money); they decided to hold a meeting of Welsh members in Cardiff. Some well-known writers came down from London to help out (or show off). I can't recall what we talked about but I do recall a well known writer arriving late and saying, in a very important-sounding way that he was late because he had been to the BBC in Cardiff to talk about a script he had there. He wrote scripts for the series about London police forces (can't remember the title). After a while one fellow got up, excused himself, saying he had be somewhere etc. and he left. Instantly, everyone began talking about him. Or, rather, asking about him: "Who is he? Anybody know what he does?" No one knew anything about him. They all appeared quite put out by that. Which is when I decided I was going to stay to the end, boring as it all was, because none of them there knew who I was. I waited until the very end before rushing to the toilet for a much wanted pee.

Frozen Food

2010-12-03T19:47:00.003Z

I recall asking a seller of frozen poultry if frozen was as good when defrosted and cooked as fresh. Guess what the answer was. Of course it was: all frozen foods are frozen when fresh so they keep their freshness; in fact they may be fresher than so-called fresh food because fresh food is not always as fresh as the label says.
Well, I have to say I was always a little suspicious of this and the chief reason was that a friend of mine had a cat - she was one of his eight or so cats - who was 15 years old and quite finicky with the food she ate; he told me she would not eat cooked frozen chicken, only fresh, and of course, Tony being Tony, this is what he always bought her.
Now, lions and tigers at zoos apparently know if an earthquake is imminent, so animals, you see, may not be able to reason like some of us but they instiuctively can tell us something about..... er.... earthquakes. So, ergo, they may be able to tell us something about food too, especiially the frozen kind.
The TV gardening bloke who was always pontificating in gentlemanly fashion about, well, everything, maintained that frozen peas are as good as fresh ones. He may know something about your friendly compost heap but let me tell you he knows - knew because he died (someone I knew was so fond of him she said "it was like losing a brother") - he knew nothing about peas. We used to grow peas and I used to boil them and eat them, on their own, with pepper and butter and they were delicious. I wouldn't do that with frozen peas.
Now I come to my acid test as regards frozen foods. I bought a hole hake, fresh at the fish market in Cardiff; it was too big for one meal so I froze half of it. The fresh cooked fish was ten times better than the frozen - and that was frozen fresh, just after buying it. The delicious, characteristic "hake taste" had gone; now it was just fish, any old fish, fishfinger fish.
So it'll be fresh turkey this year, not the usual frozen one we have had for the past few Christmases. Fresh turkey from Sainsbury or M&S or Waitrose and to hell with the price. A small one. A baby one.

Old Films

2010-12-02T16:25:00.002Z

There is one thing I can say that's good about black and white films of the thirtees: I can understand every word said. That doesn't go for many modern films - anything with Sean Penn in are almost unwatchable because of his mumbling. To a certain extent I have to blame my own ears since, ageing, I am suffering with being "hard of earing" and have hearing aids which I use in the cinema and sometimes for programmes on TV, though, with a newly purchased "Box", sub-titles are now available.
Mostly it's women I find difficult hearing: the actresses on CSI are the worst; sub-titles are absolutely necessary for them.
Earlier in the week I went to see a very old film at Chapter Arts Centre: "The Old Dark House", a sort of horror film typical of the early 30's but with dashes of humour here and there throughout. While I found the film an experience worth having, a sort of novelty experience, I can't say I there was anything that jolted me in a scary way; indeed, it was at times quite laughable. Not that the laughs were at the film's style but they were, rather, part of the script. I read that this film is a cult classic which means it has never been popular with the mass of cinema-goers but with those who take "film" seriously - people who go to film societies for instance.
So while I enjoyed the film and laughed here and there I can't say that I thought it much good. It sort of clattered along in the way those films of that period did: not much subtlety there, straight-forward story telling, lots of little "frights".
I learn that it was based on a novel by J.B.Preistley. I never would have guessed. Though perhaps it was one of his stories that had to with time returning - but there was nothing of that stuff in this interpretation.
It was directed by James Whale who has, I believe, a greater reputation than he deserves. His "Frankenstein" made him popular and it is worth seeing but still over-rated I believe. He seemed to attract quaklity actors: in this film were Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, Boris Karloff and a very young and rotund Charles Laughton playing a "self-made-man from 'op North".
Halliwell says of it: "A stylist's and connoisseur's treat" and gives it 4 stars.
One big thing going for it as far as I was concerned was taht I heard every word. Why is that? Made in 1932 and the sound track is perfect. "Mystic River" made in 2003 and I need sub-titles - especially for Sean Penn.

Innocent

2010-11-27T16:05:00.002Z

When I think back to the list of "greatest films" The Spectator magazine compiled I realise how daft the list was. I have just seen "The Night of the Hunter" again and think it, yes, a rather good thriller with some fine performances in it, but "Best film of all time"? It was directed by Charles Laughton who had never directed a film before that and didn't direct one after it (probably because it was a flop at the box office). How is it that a novice like him could direct the greatest film ever made? John Ford directed hundreds of films, some silent, before he directed the magnificent "The Searchers".
It's pretty obvious that the compilers of the list weren't film fans but the sort of people who go snootily to art houses and film societies not to the cinema as we all know it.
I have started to read "Innocent" by Scott Turow and am compoletely absorbed by it. What a fast moving thriller! It is a sequel to "Presumed Innocent" Scott's first novel back some twenty years ago which was also completely absorbing.
Which brings me to the film of "Presumed Innocent". Surely this is the best courtroom film ever made and, in my opinion, one of the best films ever made. Was it on The Spectator's list? Don't recall it being there. It was certainly a better film than "The Night of the Hunter". It was, of course, not the work of a one-off director but one who had already established himself as a skilled creative artist ("Klute" comes to mind) - Alan Pakula.
I thought "I must see that film again before I finish the sequel "Innocent" in which the same character, Rusty Spavich, is indicted for the crime of killing his wife; so I thought to go to Blockbusters, just down the road - get for about £4; then I thought "the town library with its large collection of films from all over the world". But that would be days if not weeks before etting it (tranferred to my local library) and I want it now or in a few days' time. So I then thought "Amazon". I got it for £1.30. It will arive Monday or Tuesday. Can't wait to see Greta Scacchi lead Harrison Ford into the office for.... you know what.
Well, I can't believe it: David Thomson doesn't even include "Presumed Innocent" in his famous book of the world's best films "Have You Seen".

Cops

2010-11-22T14:48:00.004Z

There's an interview in The Daily Telegraph with a Stuart Diamond, a "how to get what you want" guru. You have to know what to say to people that you want something from. For example: one afternoon in New York, Diamond was pulled over for speeding; he didn't, like most people, stare bitterly at the steering wheel; instead he said: "Thank you so much, officer, for stopping me and doing your job. You probably just saved my life." The outcome? No ticket.
Brings to mind what I usually say to passengers, my wife for example, if I see a copper staring at my car or am travelling along with a police car on my tail: "If I'm stopped I shall say to him: 'Haven'y you got anything better to do with your time -like catching crooks?" I hear a "humph" from the next seat.
Also brings to mind a friend of mine who drove a Volkswagen "bug" (the best car he ever had, he said). He always drove fast. One day he was sailing along at about 50mph (or more, more likely) when he was stopped by a police car. "Do you know that this is a 40 mph limit?" the copper asked him. "My friend said: "Sorry officer, I was just slowing down." "From a 30mph limit sir?" What did my friend do? He laughed. He couldn't help himself. It was a genuine laugh not a mocking one and the policeman could see the humour in it. "Go on," he said and waved him on without charging him.
So humour also helps sometimes. But I was once told by a policeman that you might get away without a ticket from an ordinary cop by being nice to him or acting in a gentlemanly way but you won't get away with it from a traffic warden. It seems they don't have a sense of humour at all.

Tax

2010-11-15T16:25:00.002Z

There's an article in this week's Spectator arguing that while most people would like to see bankers bashed because of their profligate ways with money, some of it ours, the facts are that because of the high rate of tax on the richest people, some of whom are bankers, there is a tendency for them to move to other countries and thus take their tax elsewhere, other than into the government's coffers. This may be true. The argument put by Fraser Nelson is well put. And he feels the government is making a big mistake in pandering to popular demand for .... what? Well, for revenge I suppose. "Why should they do so well after they ruined the country's finances while I'm here working my things off.... etc etc".
Michael Caine argues something else, diametrically opposed to that feeling. He says "We've got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I'm 76 years old getting up at 6 a.m. to go to work to keep them."
I can see his point. I'd see it better if he wasn't an actor. But it's a valid point just the same. And it would with some justification be still valid if pit-worker Jim Bloggs (Joe Bloggs's brother) were to say it. More valid.
But where I was left cold with stupefaction was this comment from Tracey Emin: "I'm simply not willing to pay 50% tax...." She added that she might emigrate.
Is that a threat or a promise?
Does this outburst mean that she is in a top tax bracket? Does it mean that there are rich people out there paying for her stuff? It doesn't bear thinking about.

Torture

2010-11-14T19:14:00.002Z

A long time ago there was a play on television by an MP, well known thwen as a writer of novels. Cannot remember his name. The play for TV concerned an MP who was against all forms of torture. The usual reasons were laid out so that one could nod sagely and agree. But the man's daughter was kidnapped and he found himself in a position where, to extract information about his daughter's whereabouts and safety from someone the police (in a foreign country where torture was a sort of way of life) had arrested, he could resort to using their trorture intruments which involved passing electric currents through the man's body. Did he? Would he still expound his views on the moral reasons of not resorting to torture? Or would he himself use the weapons he was invited to use?
He used the weapons of torture and extracted the necaessary information. His daughter was saved but his moral being was compromised.
Torture is used all over the world, even now in these enlightened days - or are they? I recall a film, The Algiers Story it may have been called, which was about the French occupation of Algiers. It was a great film but a thoroughly nasty one in many respects: there were atrocities perpetrated on both sides - suicide bombings by the Algerians, shootings at close range by them, and there was torture used by the French (one of the actors in the film who played a Colonel in the French army was the actual Colonel who had done the torturing - evidently he thought it necessary).
Janet Daley has written a superb article in The Daily Telegraph today about the use/non-use of torture. David Cameron stated, she says, that torture was wrong and that "we ought to be very clear about that"; then he added: "And I think we ought to be clear that the information we receive from torture is likely to be unrelaible."
Why the second statenment she wanted to know. "What point is there in discussing what Mr Cameron calls the 'effectiveness thing' at all?"
She goes on to discuss in depth the moral imperative questions that John Stuart Mills wrote about; but her point is already, simply, made: even if torture were to prove effective, should it be used?
It's easy to answer no to that. But you come to the MP and his daughter in the TV play where you yourself are involved emotionally. Or to a question of the man who knows where the nuclear weapon is but won't tell.: should you squeeze the information out of him or let the bomb go off? And there's President Bush and waterboarding. Should he be tried in a court of law for allowing it to go on? He maintains that heaps of important information was discovered that saved many lives. We'll never know.

Brain Washing

2010-11-07T14:40:00.002Z

I can just about comprehend someone who has been brain-washed by some obscure cult following their teachings: it's quite common. Wasn't there a cult that sensible people joined in which they were told that they were going to a certain comet if they took this poison and died? And didn't they take it and die? Yes they did. When I heard that I went outside to look at the comet - Bob or some such thing it was called - and wondered how anyone in their right mind could have.... but there you are, the world is full of "culters". And, of course, the world is a-plenty with cult runners, charlatans often who take your money and sleep with your wives or your children. So I shouldn't be surprised that a young woman reads a website, gets taken in by the so-called arguments to go out there and do something drastic like knife an MP, should I? Well yes, actually I am surprised. But there, as some American politician said, "stuff happens".
But what I do not understand is the police reaction to what happened next. The young woman was tried and given a life sentence which she seemed perfectly happy to receive (that did make me wonder what planet she's on) but nothing was done to her followers inside the courtroom and afterwards outside (though I have to admit that they were kicked out of the court) who shouted abuse and threatened to kill the MP and cheer on the girl, who's life is ruined, and make the usual fuss these people do when something doesn't go the way they want it to.
Were they arrested? No they were not. Were they told to bugger off? No they were not. Will they be there next time when somebody else tries to knife an MP? Yes they will.
If I went out onto the street with a banner saying "Kill the Mayor" I'd be arrested instantly.
There seems to be one law for the non-cult followers and another for the brain-washed.

Mark Ruffallo

2010-10-31T11:59:00.002Z

Went to see "The Kids are Alright" and liked it but not as much as reviewers did. There has not been a bad review for it. Yet most of them called it a comedy and, in some cases, a hilarious one; I chuckled a few times but thought it bordered at times on tragedy. One reviewer who thought it wonderful in most respects wondered, at the end of his review, what the point of it was.
I wonder if he has ever asked this question at the end of most Hollywood blockbusters. You don't, do you? You just sit there and let it affect you in some ways - enjoy the explosions, admire the guile (or pigheadedness) of Bruce Willis, hate it etc. - but you don't ask the point of it. No, what the critic meant I think was: here's a serious film about marriage, gays bringing up children, a gay woman being attracted to a man, children's lives being affected and so on - but so what?
I can see his point. It didn't try to give advice or produce a solution to any of the problems, it just accepted that they were there.
Actually there is a point to the film I believe: it is a film directed by a lesbian in a long term relationship with another woman and she, like many homosexuals, wants such people to be treated with the same respect as other "normal" affairs. She wants society to go some way further in acceptance of homosexuality by treating gay and lesbian affairs as perfectly normal. That's the point of it I believe.
Why pick two heterosexual woman then to play the two lesbians? Good as they were, all the time I kept thinking "they are pretending to be lesbians". When the oscars come round both actresses will, no doubt, be nominated (Annette Benning will win) and like most winners they will be picked because they are playing a person with some deficiency - blind maybe, or one-footed or a savage beast like Brando in Streetcar etc. So, instead of making the "deficiency" here, viz. homosexuality, more acceptable the outcome will be the reverse.
The great performance in the film comes from Mark Ruffallo as the donor father of the two kids. Like he did in "You can Count on Me" he makes the rogue of a guy genial. In that excellent film he played a character that you could count on as much as you could count on Osama bin Laden to join the NSPCC. Here was another remarkable perfornmance. It's this should get an oscar (it won't even be nominated) not the two women stars.
But now, it turns out, Ruffallo has been offered the part of The Hunk in a new film. What's more he's looking forward to it very much.
End of wonderful career?

Monica Dickens

2010-10-30T14:20:00.002+01:00

Why haven't I ever read Monica Dickens? Probably because I tend not to read women writers - except Jane Austen and a few detective novelists.... O yes, and one or two by Joanna Trolloppe. Now I am tempted to, just having read a review of one of her books in The Spectator: "The Winds of Heaven". It's about a woman with three grown-up children whose "ghastly" husband dies leaving her with nothing but depts, no house, a few clothes. She loses all feeling of dignity. She is "like a child who has got lost on a church outing". Her daughters devise a plan: she will live with each in turn for a while in the summer and, in the winter, she can live on the Isle of Wight at a friend's hotel - at a cut price.
So, as one of offspring puts it, she is "passed around from one to another like a mangy cheese". Nicely put! Or "a surplus piece of furniture". Very nice! She is simply not wanted.
Then, in the great tradition of female romance best represented these days by our old freinds Mills and Boon, a man comes on the scene. But not one of your clean-cut, handsome, chisel-featured men of fortune who will love you like an ape as well as care for you like a father; no, her Lohengrin is a "grossly overweight, diabetic department-store beds salesman who moonlights as a writer of sixpenny thrillers" (Hah! thought there's be a sliver of culture in there somewhere trying to get out).
But, says the reviewer, there's more than " a splendidly happy ending: the novel ontains everything a publisher could ask for", there's also "the universal figure, a sorrowful outsider.... at odds with an unfeeling world".
Reminds me of Ozu's "Tokyo Story" and E. Eynon Evans's play with the same theme.
Can't wait to read it.
Wasn't she a grandaughter of Charles Dickens or something?

Jokes

2010-10-29T14:40:00.003+01:00

We were in Torquay and, at the hotel we stayed at, it seemed that everyone was going to see Jim Davidson at the theatre. So we went too. The show was filthy, racialist, nasty..... in short, it was very funny. Don't think I'd like to see another of his shows; one was quite enough and since things have become more and more politically correct (from fear in some cases) one can't help being affected by the trend. So now Jim Davidson is out. But who else is there out there who's worth seeing?
One thing I was struck by in Davidson's show was that the racialist stuff was funny up to a point; the point being when he stopped making jokes about the Irish and West Indians and started making jokes about the Welsh to which tribe I belong. Strange: you laugh at Irish jokes but not ones which are pointed in your direction. The smile began to wither on my face, my tongue began to get dry and I began to be a trifle annoyed.
So I shouldn't perhaps draw any attention to a couple of Irish jokes in The Wiki Man's column in The Spectator last week. But I will.
He wrote: "In the less politically correct age which was my childhood, a series of stocking-filler paperbacks sold in their millions. The first was called 'The Official Irish Joke Book - Book Three (Book Two to Follow)' The only joke I remember concerned the Irish Nobel Prize for Medicine 'awarded to a man who had discovered a cure for which there was no known disease' "

Milhaud

2010-10-21T21:02:00.003+01:00

This week's composer on Radio 3 is Darius Mihaud. The only piece of his music I am familiar with is his Scaramouche Suite. Everybody knows it or some of it anyway. From that I (illogically) deduce that he is a wonderful composer. And I have to say that the works so far played on the Composer of the Week programme are good, easy on the ear, splendidly orchestrated, lively, happy. I wonder if he is capable of doing anything profound. In a way I hope not.
They had a recording of him speaking. He was saying that he visited America in the sixties to attend a festival devoted to his music; he gave a talk to students there in the course of which he said that he was and always had been a happy man. The next day a girl student approached him and said that she had been unable to sleep the night after he said how happy his life had been and still was because her idea of a classical composer was that they suffered for their music and his remarks disappointed her.
Years ago I heard him speaking on radio about the composer Satie. Milhaud knew him well and liked him though he was extremely eccentric - but loveably so. He said that Satie collected umbrellas and scarves. He didn't know why. He didn't suggest that they were stolen, just "collected". When Satie died, Milhaud and his wife went to Satie's home and there they found the place full to the rafters of umbrellas and scarves.
I know only one piece of music written by Satie and knew, until today, only one piece by Milhaud. Composer of the Week does a great job of playing the works of composers not played often in concerts. Darius Milhaud composed over 400 works. I don't know how many compositions Satie composed but surely it must have been more than one.
I don't know how many umbrellas he collected either. Or scarves.

Literature

2010-10-16T19:30:00.002+01:00

Can't recall who it was, but he was a famous translator of Ibsen, said that he had spent the greatest part of his life being bored by the great works of literature. I felt like that this week when I had the misfortune to see a play and a film both of which had received glowing reviews. They were the play by Moliere called "The Misanthrope" at Bristol Old Vic and the film "Winter's Bone" at Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff. I have not seen a bad review of either and I went to them looking forward to having a good time. What a let down!
The film was directed by a woman and it was the same old stuff: hatred of brutish men. You can't help feeling that these women directors have it in for not just brutish men but all men. There was one guy in the film that showed a little sympathy for his neice who was searching for her crooked father but even he was brutish and mean most of the time he spent on the screen. All the other men were your standard stereotypes as depicted by most women film directors: callous rotters, villainous tyrants, borish brutes. While I had to admire the film in many ways - the girl playing the daughter doing the searching was superb - I found it an altogether miserable experience.
The Moliere play was, to me, an equally miserable experience - if not more so. And this was supposed to be a comedy. I didn't laugh once. I didn't even smile once. Yet the audience seemed to enjoy it. It was quite dreadful.
What I could not understand was why Andrew Litton of Bristol's Tobacco Factory theatre company decided to direct it. After all he does great Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory and he did a wonderful "Uncle Vanya" at the Bristol Old Vic a couple of years ago.
O yes, the play was presented in a translation by Tony Harrison in..... wait for it..... rhyming couplets. OK they may have been clever rhyming couplets but two hours or so of rhyming couplets is too much for me thank you very much.
I wonder if Moliere is any good. This play was trivial beyond reason. I recall seeing another of his plays some years ago - I didn't like that either.
I recall Parky on one of his chat shows which had Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice with him telling them what Bernard Levin had thought of "Evita". He said that Levin had written in his review that he had "never had such a miserable evening in or out of a theatre" in his life. Well, Bernard, I now know how you felt.

halal

2010-10-08T20:31:00.003+01:00

Writing in last week's Spectator magazine, Rod Liddle makes the decision that he will no longer buy meat from supermarkets because it may be halal; he doesn't like the way cattle are killed to produce it and supermarkets don't indicate whether their meat is halal or not. This week two letters were published in the magazine, one from someone who deplores "the widespraed and unnecessary use of halal slaughter", the other maintaining that the method is less cruel since it is quick and death is instant. Personally I don't care if the meat I eat is halal or not - it's the taste is what I'm interested in. But I just don't approve of the way halal slaughter is conducted: it's primitive and beastly.
It's also against the law. We have a law in this country that states that all cattle must first be stunned before slaughter. So why is one section of the population allowed to break the law? Answer: because that section does it for religious reasons and we must respect their religion.
I can understand the government not wanting riots on their hands because of what a small section of the population, not allowed to follow their ancient and barbaric ritualistic practices, might do in protest; I can understand this because governments have to govern and so must compromise their beliefs with pragmatic exercises in control i.e. law and order. What a pickle governments get themselves into: they make a law and then apply it only to one section of the population. Maybe that's what governing is all about.
Well, I don't like it one little bit. But what I find even worse is the attitude of the RSPCA. You know what that stands for, of course: the royal society for the prevention of cruelty to animals.... I shall write it again: the royal society for the PREVENTION OF CRUELTY to animals. Yet they don't say that supermarkets are wrong to sell halal meat; they merely say that supermarkets should label their meat to inform the public which is halal and which is not. Rod Liddle isn't going to buy supermarket meat any more; well I'm not going to support the RSPCA any more because it is evident that they do NOT protect animals from cruelty.

Gene Autry

2010-10-06T19:58:00.003+01:00

We boys who lived in Blackwood where there were three cinemas did not like Gene Autry. We liked and admired some of the other B picture cowboys like Hopalong Cassidy and Buck Jones but could not take the rather feminine charms of Autry who, with his other unmanly traits, sang cowboy songs. Later, there was another famous singing cowboy named Roy Rogers who we accepted, don't know why. I think it was that Autry was rather girlish in voice and manner. Maybe it had something to do with his being a singing cowboy, though Roy Rogers sang too if memory serves me right. Yet he was very successful as a B picture cowboy and also as a singer. He was the only celebrity to have his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame 5 times: for films, radio, records, television and live theatre.
Then again, he was not just successful as a film star and singer, he also made heaps of money outside the film industry as an acute business man.
Some of his songs were famous and some still are:"Back in the Saddle Again"; "Frosty the Snowman" and the biggest success of them all, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer".
In an obituary in The Times in 1998 (he died at the age of 91) was written: "Autry's screen persona was conveyed by a spoof: 'Them bandits have beaten my mother, ravished my girl, burned down my house, killed my cattle and blinded my best friend. I'm goin' to get 'em if it's the last thing I do. But first, folks, I'm going to sing you a little song.' "

Downton Abbey

2010-10-02T20:30:00.003+01:00

I seem to be the only person on this planet who finds "Downton Abbey" dreadful. Why? After all, it seems to have everything going for it: beautiful scenery, well-drawn characters - in short, all those things that make dramas like this popular, just like those others with women who wear bonnets. I can't help thinking of Barbara Cartland and her novels - not that I've ever read any but I know of them - the Lord in the manor and the poor little scrubber of a girl in the valley below and how the devil of a cad seduces her against her will..... etc.
I can't help bringing Cartland to mind because it's all the same sort of thing isn't it? ("No" I can hear being yelled at me). Of course, it must be said, Julian Fellowes is in a different class, writing-wise, than Cartland. She wrote pot-boilers for middle-aged women who dreamt of being swept off their feet by a Lord or, Rudolf Valentino in mind, a sheik; he writes classy stuff.
But it is all the same trash, really. There's Lord Grantham lording it over everyone with a wife whom he doesn't love much; then there's his mother played by Maggie Smith doing a near Lady Bracknell imitation; then there are the ones "below stairs" and the relationships they have with each other and with the "upstairs" lot. It all makes me cringe. Was it ever like this? Yes it was. Would we like it to be like this again. No we wouldn't.... hold on, I can hear a million voices shouting "yes we would".
Keep it up Julian, you're carving a solid reputation for presenting the Edwardian scene in a way that the sentimental English public sigh about and wish it were here again in all its glory.
It's tripe.

Italian Films

2010-09-23T14:11:00.002+01:00

I got a copy of "Bicycle Thieves" recently, free by buying a newspaper, can't remember which. Haven't watched it yet but I am looking forward to a viewing. It's considered to be one of the Italian greats and quite rightly so; others which are also considered greats are not nearly as good - well not nearly as entertaining. Rossellini's films are very famous because they told of the social situation of Italy after the war in a way that made Hollywood film seem false. Then there the films of Pasolini and Fellini, much admired by film society people but I wonder if they are as watchable now as when I was young and eager to be as arty as the next film society wallah.
Whatever, they made me think of some of those Italian films I used to see in The Globe cinema in Cardiff many moons ago: not the classics of Fellini and Rossellini but films which were shown in Italy to ordinary folks. I can't recall any of their titles but used to enjoy them tremendously and probably will never see them again. I don't think I would be able to order them on one of the many clubs which send you films for a months viewing for a few quid. They've gone for good; many people would say "good riddance" but not me: I'd love to see the one about the poor family taking a day out at the seaside: the mother, fat as a pig ready for slaughter, fussing about, packing stuff into a banger of a car for the day's outing; the father, elegant in a rough-hewn kind of way, all dressed up in a suit, the grandparents looking a little apprehensive, dressed in "sunday-best" attire - and keeping it all on when they get to the beach - the daughter, a dish of a girl whose curves were like Cyd Charisse's in "Band Wagon" - "she had more curves than a scenic railway".... I can't recall if there was a son or any other members of the family but they all somehow crammed themselves into the smallish car and went off to the beach. I don't think there was much of a story, it was just a day out, but what a film!
Then there were gangster films.... but the French made better ones I think. Won't see any of those again either. Never mind, some of the classics are watchable. Some. Not all. "Bicycle Thieves" is - I hope. Soon find out.

Coke

2010-09-19T15:54:00.002+01:00

Chapter Arts Centre has been transformed from what it was some years ago, a dingy, untidy sort of place much loved by artists and their ilk - layabouts, a lot of them - into a glossy, light, palace-like restaurant with surrounding rooms: cinemas, theatres, art galleries. I was prepared to believe that the artists and layabouts would have left and gone elsewhere since artists (and layabouts) prefer the down-to-earth sorts of places they believe bring them closer to reality.
But no, it's frequented by the same old, same old. Most have either long hair or no hair at all; most wear jeans and open-necked shirts; some wear hats - indoors! They all eat veggie food (it seems to me) or vegan food - the vegan soup I had was pretty awful: I think it had a lot of spinache in it, a green I have never liked but which, it seems, even in quality restaurants has become popular, probably because there is the idea prevalent amoung the chattering classes that it's good for you. Everybody is lean and healthy looking. Many brings kids with them and the kids run about as if it's a playground. But the beer and wine is good and the food isn't bad if you like pasta and veggie stuff and spinache.
The other day I was there to see a film, got there early and sat at a table with a glass of wine waiting for start of the film. In came a man who was not an artist or layabout; he looked a bit like a business man come there for a spot of lunch, no jacket on but trousers obviously part of a pin-striped suit. And he was fat. He was almost as wide as he was tall. Yet he didn't look unhealthy; he looked the sort of fellow who might, a few years ago, have taken his place comfortably (or maybe uncomfortably) in the front row of a rugby team.
He ordered something at the bar and sat at a table near me. He took out his laptop and proceeded to work on it. Then up came a lithe waiter with the man's order: a plate of beefburger with large bap and chips piled high. Turning from his computer he concentrated all his attention on his meal. He cut his bap down the middle and stuffed half of this into his mouth, followed by a drink of coke; then into the body of chips his fork went managing to spike four or five of them before levering them into his mouth. Soon the meal was gone and he returned to working on his laptop before leaving.
I got up to go to see the film and had a glance at the bottle of coke he had consumed.
Diet coke!
But to be fair to him, that's probably the only sort of coke they sell there at Chapter.

Jokes

2010-09-18T16:37:00.002+01:00

I met a comedian a long time ago. We were both staying at a camping site in South Wales, me with my family of wife and young kids on holiday, him on the way to another gig in the valleys. He was not at all funny as I expected him to be when he told me what he did for a living; he was a good conversationalist, telling me about the various places where he did his stuff. He said "I have an advert in Stage Magazine - seen me? My catchword is 'Cease'." He never told me what that meant. He told me that there was a club in Cardiff which had a low cealing and thus, he said, can't think why, you couldn't get a laugh; then there was another place in The Rhondda where you could get heaps of laughs. "High ceiling?" I asked, but he didn't catch on to my little "joke", or didn't want to.
But there, perhaps I didn't tell it right. Because you see "it's the way you tell 'em" ain't it?
Certainly some of my favourite comedians of "the old school" i.e. of a long time ago, didn't tell many jokes but relied for laughs on the creation of an amusing character. Robb Wilton did his "The day war broke out, my wife said to me...." act. I don't think there a single joke in the act. Max Miller told jokes, of course - dirty jokes often (not as dirty as they are now though). Then there was a very well spoken man who told stories about himself and the various pickles he got himself into.
The best joke at Edinburgh this year was, so they say, this one: "I've just come back from a 'Once-In-A-Life-time' holiday; I tell you what - never again."
This brings to mind a joke by Bob Monkhouse: "When I told everyone I wanted to be a comedian, they all laughed. Well, they're not laughing now."
Here is a joke from last week's Spectator, from "The Wiki Man", Rory Sutherland: "A toursit is exploring the coast of a minor Greek island when he arrives at a charming fishing village, a model of contented prosperity. Freshly painted boats bob at their moorings... On the hillside there is a handsome church. Enchanted, our traveller asks several passers-by to recommend a good bar for a drink. Each time he is told that the best place is the "Taverna of Dimitri the Sheep-Shagger". He visits and in the course of a few drinks befriends the patron Dimitri who is a charming, educated and accomplished man. A few drinks later he feels emboldened to raise the topic of the host's name. Dimitri leads him outside and places an avuncular hand on the traveller's shoulder. 'You see those boats?' he sighs. "I built them all myself with my bare hands. But do they call me Dimitri the Boat-Builder? No. The church and the orphanage on the hillside. That's my work too. But do they call me Dimitri the church builder? Never! I even built the harbour wall. And do they call me Dimitri the harbour-maker? They do not. You shag one damn sheep....."

British Films

2010-09-16T21:15:00.003+01:00

One day in the library in Cardiff some years back, I came across a friend of mine who held a rather large book in his hands. He had a great, cynical sort of grin on his face. "Look at this," he said in a way that could have meant ''Have you ever seen anything like this?'. He showed me the title: "Masterpieces of the British Cinema". I had to laugh. Neither of us believed there was such a thing never mind more than one. We had, I suppose, been brought up on American films: Bogart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson films. Gangster films, westerns, musicals. We considered British films to be inferior and I think we were right. Though in retrospect I think we, or I anyway, weren't used to the kind of film the British studios were producing.
Simon Heffer is giving a series of talks this week on Radio 3 (at 11 pm every night, a time when most of us are in bed - well done BBC!) on, maybe not actual masterpieces of the British cinema but quality films that were made during the war and which were reflecting on our island's way of life before the war and wondering what it would be like afterwards. Films that were essentially revolutionary in content and intent (most studios were, he said, full of socialists).
The first film he highlighted was "Went the day Well". He didn't say so but I have the feeling the idea came from Graham Greene, maybe a short story? A troup of soldiers arrives at an archetypal English country town and wishes to have help from the villagers in a project that they have in mind. However, they are not English at all though they seem to be: they are Germans there to disrupt communications - or some such thing. They are brutal and start to take over the village, killing some, threatening to kill schoolchildren - in short carry out what we believed were typically German atrocities.
I saw this film some years ago and thought it a real thriller. I have to say that I was amazed to find that here was a British film that, while keeping that special quality of Englishness - the local yokels were there, the vicar was there (the first to be shot), the grand lady was there - all the stereotypes were there, it painted a picture of a Britain in which all pulled together, one society working together, class barriers pulled down and so on.
OK, it never happened but to a degree it did: the Atlee government brought in reforms the like of which the country had never seen, a National Health Service came into being, children from all kinds of homes were educated to a higher level than ever before, people went to universities from quite ordinary backgounds and so on.
The next film he talked about was "A Canterbury Tale" which I did not like when I saw it years ago. He called it a masterpiece - maybe there was one after all then! It flopped at the box office. After Heffer's talk I'd like to see it again; seems there was more in it that met the eye.

Writers

2010-09-12T19:18:00.002+01:00

There's an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a wine-tasting school in this country; best in the world Jonathan Ray maintained. I don't know if the wine-taster I once knew went there but he was a genuine taster who worked at Harvey's where they make sherry (or just bottle it, probably). I once went with the staff of the college I worked at on a coach trip to Bristol and Harvey's. What a day! We tasted - and swallowed - more sherry that day than I have since in a year..... I tell a lie: I'm quite fond of a glass of sherry, especially Brsitol Cream, and so have put away quite a few bottles over the years.
He, the wine-taster, told me he was a chemist. But that's all he told me about his work during the week - we met a few times at weekend writing classes where, of course, no one talked much about what they did for a living; they wanted to talk "writing" - possibly wishing they might get out of full time employment and follow the romance of writing for a living. Some hope for most! Though one woman did have a book turned down by Mills and Boon but wouldn't do what they advised her to and get it published; too much pride. I told her to swallow her pride and get on the 10 000 pound bonanza band wagon called Mills-and-Boon Money-Making Machine.
I did happen to find out what some of the writers on the course did for a living. There was one who was a designer at Royal Doulton, another was a translater - she spoke 6 languages - another a librarian who loved Gilbert and Sullivan and had written and published (himself) a book on a famous D'Oily Carte impresario, another a nurse in a mental hospital who wrote only poetry. Then there was a successful novelist, Roger Ormerod, who shouldn't have been there since successful people don't usually go to writing classes - they take them. Then there was a youngish woman who wrote erotic novels which had been published and now wanted to turn to thriller writing. Good writer. A most unerotic looking woman. Don't know if she ever made it but I think she might have since she went at her work with great intensity and seriousness as if the content didn't affect her emotionally at all.
One woman who was a regular didn't work at all; she loved bats and told one of the blokes on the course that he had no aura. Didn't worry him because he knew he didn't and didn't want one anyway, thank you very much. What can you do with an aura except wear it?

Westerns

2010-09-04T20:37:00.002+01:00

Ray Winstone in yesterday's Times is interviewed about his obsession with Westerns. He loved them as a kid and he still loves them; he didn't actually say so but I had the feeling he would like to be in one ( he did make an Australian film that was close to being a Western). When he was a kid he played "cowboys and indians" and said that modern children were missing out sending their time with heads bowed over small game machines by not playing games like that - health n' safety rears its ugly head again!
He mentions a few films he liked: "The Searchers" and "High Noon" being particular favourites; he also gave tremendous praise to John Wayne believing him to be a very fine actor indeed. He specially mentioned a scene in "Red River" when Wayne says to his son "I'm going to kill you" wiith real vehemence.
He didn't mention any of the Anthony Mann westerns, the ones that mostly starred James Stewart, like "Winchester 73" or one I particularly like by Mann, "Man of the West" which has an ageing Gary Cooper and an ageing but brilliant Lee J. Cobb (was he ever anything but brilliant?). Nor did he mention "Shane" which is one of the greats, surely.
There are a few I like that aren't considered great or, for that matter, very good. I'm thinking of the one in which John Wayne uses children to take his cattle across country - always given 2 stars in the Radio Times. Then there's "Stagecoach".
I was brought up on Westerns: The Lone Ranger, Buck Jones, Hopalong Cassidy etc. Not much good but good fun and always with the showdown at the ebd where, in all great Westerns, the man in white meets the man in black in the street and it's good against evil.
When John Ford was interviewed, which he didn't like, he said dismissively: "I just make Westerns".
What greater achievement can there be?

Cheers

2010-08-29T22:04:00.002+01:00

Kingsley Amis was very good at picking up phrases people use casually and then using them to mock them. In "Jake's Thing" he has the main character meeting a series of lesser beings and finding that they would say "Cheers" to practically every request he made or to wish him goodbye or to greet him. He'd buy something and the seller, usually young, younger than him anyway, instead of saying "Thank you" would say "Cheers".
It was fairly obvious Amis didn't like this at all which is not surprising since he was a novelist of great literary talent and a wordsmith whose knowledge of the correct use of the English language mattered to him.
I can't say "Cheers" said to me makes me angry though it does slightly irritate me sometimes, especially if it is said in the place of "Thankyou" or "Good to see you" or "Goodbye".
"Have a good day" annoys me a little too, especially when it's late afternoon. "Take care" strikes me as meaningless - he doesn't raelly care what you do.
"I tell you what" also seems needless - except that the best joke in The Edinburgh Festival this year needed the expression I think: "I've just been on a Once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I tell you what - never again." Doesn't work so well without it.
Today a waiter, when I asked for a glass of water said "No problem". "No prob" is another variation of it, only even less likeable.
"Mate" is nuisance of a greeting, especially from a young person to an older one (I have never heard it said the other way round). And "There you go" seems to me meaningless: you are handed a glass of ale and "there you go" the barmaid says when you're not going anywhere except to your seat nearby.
"Squire" is as horrible as "mate", and "Young man" when you are obviously old is insulting.
"I have to go now."
"Well take care, mate."
"Goodbye then."
"Cheers, Squire and have a good day."
"No prob."