tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55740641595213198022024-03-06T05:02:07.186+00:00The Socratic LifeReflections on history, philosophy, literature and filmUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-27149336968208363312022-02-06T18:49:00.001+00:002022-02-06T18:49:14.328+00:00Only the Valiant: the marionette officer under duress<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nKfFrLwFE7U" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe> </p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>One of the most recognisable types in the Western is that of the marionette West Point officer whose inflexible devotion to orders, rules and the army alienates the men under his command and, indeed, puts military objectives in jeopardy.</b></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Thus, in <i>Only the Valiant </i>(1951) Gregory Peck plays Captain Richard Lance, a senior officer leading the Fifth Cavalry fighting Apaches in New Mexico Territory. His decisions – on how to treat the enemy, on promotions, on discipline – have created so many malcontents that one is led to think that we are about to watch <i>Murder on the Orient Express</i>, with hatred providing any number of men with the motivation to kill him. <br /><br />Matters come to a head when it’s suspected that Lance has, at the last minute, backed out of a dangerous mission and sent a popular junior officer out in his place not because he was ordered to do so by senior command but out of selfish interest – Lt Bill Holloway is a love rival. The fact that Holloway is brutally killed and his mutilated body returned to Fifth Cavalry HQ intensifies the enmity felt towards Lance, not only by his men but also by the woman both he and Holloway were courting, who now repudiates Lance.<br /><br />Undeterred, Lance, not interested in his personal travails but only the military issues at hand, comes up with a plan to thwart the belligerent Apaches, now threatening to overrun the Fifth Cavalry. His mission involves taking a handful of men to trap the Apaches in a narrow pass and delay them until promised reinforcement can arrive. <br /><br />With his plan approved, Lance chooses the men most hostile towards him for the assignment, the men, who at every opportunity have expressed the desire to kill him. Why has he chosen them to go on this perilous mission? The men believe it is because Lance has an overwhelming desire to die on the battlefield and be declared a hero and wants to take them, his foes, with him. But Lance insists he’s selected them to hold off the Indians because their discontent makes them a liability to the bigger objective of defending Fifth Cavalry HQ. <br /><br />The tension in the film is which version is true: is Lance an inflexible marionette with a death wish or is he a man whose dedication to mission and the rules are the best way to get the job done?<br /><br />While the film interrogates this subject it remains interesting and novel, but where it fails is in its horrific attitude towards Indians – the film was made just at a time where Westerns, in the aftermath of World War Two, were becoming more conscious of the negative way Native Americans were being portrayed – the joyful massacre by Gatling gun at the end of the film is particularly hard for the modern viewer to take; while Peck, too harshly, regarded the role of Lance as one of the worst of his career. </b></span></span><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-65718597156336671182022-01-21T00:42:00.005+00:002022-01-21T00:42:58.938+00:00The Gunfighter: the futility and tragedy of trying to escape a violent past<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w-XwuC-44JY" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe> <span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>The Gunfighter</i> (1950) is an excellent Western, made even more interesting because at the height of the genre’s popularity it began to question the myths it was propagating and started a theme of the ageing man of violence, who’s not so quick on the draw anymore, tired of brutality, haunted by the men he’s killed and whose reputation is such that he is now not only the object of unwelcome curiosity and obsequiousness but also the target of young toughs who want to prove themselves against the most famous gunslinger in the West and, in doing so, seize his mantle.</b></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Gregory Peck plays Jimmy Ringo, based on the famous outlaw Johnny Ringo, who’s reached the stage of his life where he wants to give up his tempestuous past and settle down. He tracks down the woman he loved before he embarked on outlawdom and wants to persuade her that he’s a changed man and now wants to be a family man.<br /><br />As he waits, holed up in the town saloon, for her to make her mind up, the local population becomes increasingly agitated by having such a famous visitor in their midst, the town’s children, in awe of his exploits, want to catch a glimpse of the legendary man; the local businessmen see a chance to make money; the women’s temperance leaders notice an opportunity to express their moral outrage; while the town’s young loudmouth talks himself into taking on the notorious fighter. <br /><br />While all this uproar is taking place, a trio of brothers are closing in on Jimmy wanting revenge for the killing of a family member. It seems that Ringo’s dream of a new life, a peaceful life, with his past behind him, is going to elude him.<br /><br />Henry King directed the film from a screenplay by William Sellers and William Bowers, based on an idea from Andre de Toth. De Toth, as both screenwriter and director, is responsible for some of the finest Westerns – <i>Man in the Saddle</i>, <i>Carson City</i>, S<i>pringfield Rifle</i>, <i>The Stranger Wore a Gun</i>, <i>Day of the Outlaw</i> – while the film is also referenced in the Bob Dylan song, <i>Brownsville Girl:</i><br /><br />Well, there was this movie I seen one time<br />About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck<br />He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself<br />The townspeople wanted to crush that<br />Kid down and string him up by the neck<br />Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp<br />As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath<br />Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square<br />I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death<br /><br />Indeed, Gregory Peck quoted <i>Brownsville Girl </i>in 1997 when presenting Dylan with the The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. <br /><br />Peck said in his speech: ‘Dylan was singing about a picture that I made called <i>The Gunfighter</i> about the lone man in town with people comin' in to kill him and everybody wants him out of town before the shooting starts. When I met Bob, years later, I told him that meant a lot to me and the best way I could sum him up is to say Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin' starts. Thank you, Mr. Dylan, for rocking the country... and the ages.’ </b></span></span><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-70226417574991339192022-01-04T23:25:00.000+00:002022-01-04T23:25:23.604+00:00The Bravados: revenge, Homer and Christianity<p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/whjfy0dmT5U" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe></p><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Revenge is a ubiquitous theme in Westerns. In frontier societies that have not yet acquired all the accoutrements of civilisation, such as the rule of law, the question of what is justice and, more importantly, how is to be achieved is inescapable. Indeed, it is what gives Westerns their Homeric flavour, makes them such an attractive genre for film-makers interested and inspired by the classical world and particularly the philosophy of <i>The Odyssey</i> and <i>The Iliad</i>.<br /> <br />But what of those makers of Westerns of a more Christian persuasion? While revenge is justified in the <i>Old Testament</i> – ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – by the time we get to the <i>New Testament,</i> revenge is disparaged and Christians are advised not to seek it but to ‘turn the other cheek’. <br /> <br />The Christian edict eschewing revenge is problematic for Westerns, which are notorious for their ridiculing of religion, their assertion that it has no place in this world of violence, hostile landscapes, honour, shame and so on. The man who turns the other cheek in the West is a fool, a weakling, who would soon be dead. <br /> <br />An exception to the anti-religious bias of the Western is <i>The Bravados</i> (1958), which tries to temper the urge for revenge with a Christian perspective. <br /> <br />Gregory Peck plays Jim Douglass, a remorseless man on a mission, which is to see the men who raped and murdered his wife pay with their lives for their atrocity. He spends six months tracking them down and just when it seems his obsessive task has a been accomplished, with the four outlaws set to hang for an unrelated crime, the criminals stage a bloody escape. <br /> <br />Douglass now leads a posse hunting the fugitives, though, as one by one he finds them, it becomes clear that, vicious killers though they are, they may not have been responsible for the violation and killing of his wife. Is Douglass’s revenge still justified? And what has the pursuit of it turned him into? In tracking them down, has he not taken on their brutal characteristics? And what will their deaths actually achieve? They won’t restore the world before his wife’s murder. He will still have to live with the knowledge of her barbaric treatment. <br /> <br />It is these questions that place Westerns somewhere in the middle of the full-blooded Homeric concepts of revenge – where there is no time for questions of the psychological impact on the avenger or the long-term consequences of vengeance – and the Christian view of love your enemy, of empathy and forgiveness. <br /> <br />By all means, pursue revenge, Westerns tell us, but the original evil you have been subjected to will not be overcome, you and your life will not return to how it used to be. Your nightmares will not end. <br /> <br />Back to <i>The Bravados</i>, Henry King – a pioneer of Hollywood cinema – was more renowned for directing historical and romantic films, even if the three Westerns he directed, <i>Jesse James</i>, <i>The Bravados</i> and <i>The Gunfighter</i> are all classics of the genre. The dose of Catholicism he wants to inject into <i>The Bravados</i> is grating and can’t be reconciled with the Homeric affirmation of revenge or the Western’s more nuanced stance on the subject, which he seems to have embraced before his Christianity intervened. Still, when the film doesn’t get bogged down in overt theology, the depiction of the brutal landscape of the Texas-Mexico border is breathtaking and Peck’s performance is outstanding, and this is generally an excellent and interesting piece of work, which even has an ending that brings to mind the equivocal and troubling ending of Taxi Driver, rebuking and mocking society for its love of violence and those who perpetrate it.</span><br /></b></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-26164530007104046082021-11-30T19:05:00.004+00:002021-11-30T19:05:31.309+00:00Yellow Sky: rapine, hubris and redemption<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XoSVGw_Ex-Q" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Our revels now are ended. These our actors, <br />As I foretold you, were all spirits, and <br />Are melted into air, into thin air: <br />And like the baseless fabric of this vision, <br />The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, <br />The solemn temples, the great globe itself, <br />Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, <br />And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, <br />Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff <br />As dreams are made on; and our little life <br />Is rounded with a sleep. </i><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><b><span style="font-family: arial;">(Shakespeare: <i>The Tempest</i>) </span></b></div><i><br />Yellow Sky</i> (1948) is an utterly brutal Western, which asserts that, when it is not mitigated, human nature – or at least how it is expressed in the context of the American West – is nothing but greed, violence, jealousy, fear and suspicion. <br /><br /></span></b><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">A gang of bank robbers in their desperate effort to outrun a posse are forced to enter the desert – the film is shot in Death Valley – where, on the verge of death, they fight over the last few drops of water, the beating sun and their weakening bodies turning them insane, until they see a town, Yellow Sky, which although isn’t a mirage turns out to be a ghost town, deserted, its shops, hotels and bars abandoned and collapsed. <br /><br />This one last cruel trick seems to have sealed their fate, which is to die of thirst and exhaustion. Only for a beautiful young woman to appear out of nowhere, whose motivation in directing them to water is not to save them, however, but to drive them out from <i>Yellow Sky</i> as soon as possible. But why the ferocity in her determination to get rid of them? Is it simply the fear of a lone woman being confronted by several smelly, brutish, leering men who’ve appeared out of nowhere? Or is she hiding something? What is such a beautiful woman doing in such a godforsaken place? <br /><br />The outlaws discover that the woman is in <i>Yellow Sky</i> with her grandfather who they surmise is a gold prospector. Dreams of wealth and sexual gratification now overwhelm the men, even as they fall out as to who is going to rape the woman first and whether they should take all the old man’s gold or split the treasure with him. The men’s morality is put to the test. How evil are they? After an adult life of robbing and murder, taking what they want without remorse, is there any residue of conscience left in them that will prompt them to spare the woman from rape and let the old man keep some of his hard-earned wealth? <br /><br />William Wellman directed this masterpiece, Gregory Peck is Stretch Dawson, the conflicted leader of the gang, Richard Widmark, his ruthless no. 2 (or alter ego, if you prefer) and Anne Baxter plays Constance May, the object of the outlaws’ desire. The taut script and spartan dialogue full of bitterness and irony was written by Lamar Trotti and based on WR Burnett’s novel, <i>Stretch Dawson</i>. Indeed, <i>Yellow Sky</i> bears all the hallmarks of Burnett’s numerous novels and screenplays, <i>Little Caesar</i>, <i>Scarface</i>, <i>High Sierra,</i> <i>This Gun for Hire</i>, <i>The Asphalt Jungle</i> – avarice, rapacity, hubris, the thin veneer of civilisation: <br /><br />‘The worst police force in the world is better than no police force… Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours, and nobody would be safe, neither on the street, nor in his place of business, nor in his home. There wouldn’t be an easy moment for women or children. We’d be back in the jungle…’ (<i>The Asphalt Jungle</i>). <br /><br /><i>Yellow Sky’s </i>template is Shakespeare’s <i>The Tempes</i>t, with Anne Baxter’s character as Miranda and Grandpa as Prospero. <br /><br />In the C<i>ambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film</i>, Tony Howard explains the relationship between <i>The Tempest</i> and <i>Yellow Sky</i>: <br /><br />‘William Wellman’s <i>Yellow Sky</i> turned <i>The Tempest</i> into a harsh post-war Western where a gang of criminals (bankrobbers replacing aristocrats) stumble on an isolated old man and a girl. The elemental metaphors are reversed. Shakespeare’s sea gives way to thirst: fleeing across a desert, on the brink of death they discover no magic island but a ghost town where a prospector and his granddaughter guard water and gold. Wellman focuses on the girl, who is constantly threatened by rape but protects herself with tough talk and a rifle, and on the Caliban question: can any of these degenerates be redeemed?’ </span></b></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-61897256762341683192021-11-17T00:10:00.004+00:002021-11-17T00:10:40.733+00:00The Guns of Navarone: it’s all about the cast<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HoGu8B1bNJQ" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Of all the UK or US films made using events that took place in Greece during the World War II, films such as <i>The Angry Hills,</i> <i>They Who Dare</i> and <i>Ill Met by Moonlight</i>, set respectively during the fall of Athens, the Battle of the Dodecanese and the occupation of Crete, the most commercially successful and perhaps the best known is <i>The Guns of Navarone</i> (1961).<br /><br />The film is based on the best-selling eponymous 1957 novel by Scottish writer, Alistair MacClean and even though Navarone is a fictional island the backdrop to the narrative – the Allied (British and Greek) special forces attempt to disrupt German domination of the Aegean – is real enough, even if the film’s attempt to suggest the outcome of the Battle of the Dodecanese was an Allied victory is wide of the mark.<br /><br />The truth is that the British – against American advice, who felt Britain was getting distracted by another one of Churchill’s Eastern Mediterranean whims – having occupied the Dodecanese after the September 1943 Armistice of Cassibile and the surrender of Italian forces in Greece – were humiliatingly dislodged by a counter-attack from the Germans who remained in command of the islands until the end of the war.<br /><br />Whereas in <i>Ill Met by Moonlight </i>and <i>They Who Dare</i>, the lead character – both times played by Dirk Bogarde – is miscast, and the same can be said of Robert Mitchum in <i>The Angry Hills</i>, what distinguishes <i>The Guns of Navarone</i> – apart from the well-plotted script by Carl Foreman – is how well cast it is.<br /><br />Gregory Peck is entirely believable as the single-minded and ruthless Captain Keith Mallory, the leader of the mission, while Anthony Quinn does well as the tough but wily Colonel Andreas Stavrou, while Irene Papas is good as Maria Papadimos, the feisty Greek resistance fighter.<br /><br />Interestingly, the renowned Greek opera singer Maria Callas was first signed up to play Irene Papas’ role, but she pulled out and her film career stalled, making her sole film appearance eight years later in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s <i>Medea</i> (1969), in which Callas played the Colchian princess, who revenges herself on her duplicitous husband, Jason, by murdering their children.<br /><br /><i>The Guns of Navarone</i> was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who had a long but indifferent film career both in the UK and in Hollywood. <i>Ice Cold in Alex</i> and the original <i>Cape Fear </i>– an inferior remake was made by Martin Scorsese in 1991 – remain his best known films after <i>The Guns of Navarone.</i><br /><br />Anthony Quinn described working with Thompson as follows.<br /><br />‘[He] read a scene until he had to shoot it and approached each shot on a whim. And yet the cumulative effect was astonishing. Lee Thompson made a marvelous picture but how? Perhaps his inventiveness lay in defying convention, in rejecting the accepted methods of motion picture making and establishing his own. Perhaps it was in his very formlessness that he found the one form he could sustain, and nurture, the one form that could, in turn, sustain and nurture him. Perhaps he was just a lucky Englishman who pulled a good picture out of his ass.’</span></b></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-38227773539757534162021-11-05T21:50:00.000+00:002021-11-05T21:50:07.765+00:00Born to Kill: lurid but likeable<iframe width="500" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S6t2oot6pDo" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<div><br /></div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Born to Kill</i> (1947) is one of the most controversial films ever made. Dismissed, despised, banned, held responsible for corrupting public morals and even used in the defence of a murderer, who held that he was spurred on to commit his crime after watching the film, Robert Wise’s lurid film noir, even with less squeamish contemporary sensibilities, still has the ability to shock with its issues of depraved lust, casual violence, extreme selfishness, alcoholism, greed, uncontainable resentment and hatred. <br /><br />Lawrence Tierney plays a psychopath who also happens to be irresistible to women, which enables him to ingratiate himself into the love life of wealthy San Francisco socialite Helen Brent (played by Claire Trevor) and her step-sister Georgia Staples (played by Audrey Long) and it is his character – Sam Wilde – who we presume is the person ‘born to kill’ of the film’s title. <br /><br />However, the novel by James Gunn on which the film is based is called <i>Deadlier than the Male</i> and this should tell us that the story as originally imagined wasn’t about Sam Wilde but Helen Barnes and Georgia Staples and that Sam Wilde was just a cypher to explore the women’s turbulent inner lives and how this leads to them making catastrophic choices in the social world. <br /><br />It’s a fault that the Sam Wilde character is supposed to carry the film. He’s not that interesting. Violent lunatics rarely are and, indeed, it’s difficult to imagine how this charmless, unpleasant and quite stupid man can still possess the animal magnetism to worm himself into so many lives, break their will power and warp their sense of right and wrong. <br /><br />The film has a well-written script and is effectively directed by Robert Wise, who before this worked with Orson Welles as his editor on <i>Citizen Kane </i>and directed the Val Lewton-produced <i>The Body Snatcher</i>, though perhaps he’s best known for directing two musicals, <i>West Side Story</i> (1961) and <i>The Sound of Music</i> (1965). <br /><br />What really lifts <i>Born to Kill</i> are the characters of the private detective Albert Arnett (played by Walter Slezak), his client, Mrs Kraft (played by Esther Howard) – the neighbour of the young woman murdered by Wilde – and Sam Wilde’s loyal friend, Marty Waterman (played by Elisha Cook Jr.). <br /><br />Slezak is particularly entertaining to watch. His Bible-quoting private detective is unctuous and avaricious and has nothing in common with the tough-guy members of his trade – Dashiel Hammet’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, both moral crusaders out to assure right triumphs over wrong, regardless of the financial consequences, the personal dangers and harm that come their way. <br /><br />Albert Arnett, on the other hand, has no such courage or convictions. He lives on the breadline and when he sees an opportunity to fleece his client he has no remorse, his motivation being to sell the information he has gathered through his investigation to the highest bidder. He has no consideration for justice or the restoration of order. He is not a seeker of truth nor an avenger, but a sleazy blackmailer.</span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-70930718091631935942021-10-27T21:46:00.000+01:002021-11-05T21:46:28.265+00:00Lawrence Tierney: the toughest man in Hollywood<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WiUtScwwptk" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe> <br /><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">The toughest, most remorseless, cold-hearted protagonist in film noir has to be Lawrence Tierney.<br /> <br />Apparently, in real life Tierney was just as hard, prone to losing his short temper, benders and bar room brawling that often ended with the Brooklyn-born actor on the wrong side of the law and in the clink.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Since acting and film is about make-believe, it’s difficult to know whether Tierney was being himself when playing all these thugs and heavies or fell victim to believing his on screen image and acting it out in real life. No matter. </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Hoodlum</i> (1951) is classic Tierney. In it, he plays Vincent Lubeck, who starts off his life of crime as an adolescent, gradually climbing – or going down – the ladder of lawlessness, his crimes becoming increasingly serious and his prison sentences increasingly long. </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Not that the punishment he has to endure turns him onto the straight and narrow. </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Rather, he comes to see himself as a victim of the system and is consumed by hatred of society, determined to revenge himself against it by repudiating its basic rules of hard work, family solidarity, deferred gratification, opting instead for the easy money that theft brings; showing contempt for the honest ways of his brother – the gas station owner who believes in the American Dream – seducing his earnest sibling’s fiancée; and wanting all his desires fulfilled and wanting them fulfilled right now. </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Tierney gives a similar sociopathic portrait of John Dillinger in another collaboration with director Max Nosseck in the eponymous gangster film, which purports to tell the story of the Great Depression bank robber, whose crimes – and the notoriety and popularity they earned him – contributed to the formation of the FBI and helped make the name of J. Edgar Hoover. </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">The screenplay for <i>Dillinger</i> (1945) was written by Philip Yordan, whose career spanned everything from classic film noirs – <i>House of Strangers</i>, <i>The Big Combo</i>, <i>Detective Story</i>; to Westerns – <i>The Man from Laramie</i>, <i>Day of the Outlaw</i>, <i>Broken Lance</i>; and epics – <i>55 Days at Peking</i>, <i>The Fall of the Roman Empire</i>, <i>El Cid</i>. </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">The third film noir Tierney made with Nosseck was <i>Kill or be Killed</i> (1950), which is not only not set in the urban mean streets – it’s actually set in the Brazilian jungle – but it also has Tierney playing a more conventional hero, albeit a very tough, smart and proud one, who is framed for murder and sets out to find the real killers, on the way dealing with piranhas, poisonous snakes and the lethal husband of the woman he's fallen in love with. </span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y3lbBqI0GCk" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-87055911613225474692021-10-18T21:27:00.003+01:002021-10-18T21:35:07.412+01:00Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce, national hero or national vanity?<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q6Cv5P9H9qU" width="500"></iframe>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Michael Apted’s <i>Amazing Grace</i> purports to be an account of the trials and tribulations of William Wilberforce as he sought from the period 1789 to 1807 to pass legislation in the British Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade is part of British national mythology or ‘national vanity’, as CLR James puts it.<br /><br />Yes, Britain, from 1640 to 1807, dominated the slave trade; yes, the First British Empire – concentrated in the Americas – was built on slavery; yes, the industrial revolution was financed by chattel slavery; yes, British cities (London, Liverpool, Bristol), boomed as a result of the trade; but all these sins are redeemed by the fact that it was a Briton – Wilberforce – who ended the trade and it was the British Navy – the West Africa squadron – that enforced the ban. The inscription on Wilberforce’s gravestone in Westminster Abbey reads: ‘His name will ever be specially identified with those exertions which, by the blessing of God, removed from England the guilt of the African slave trade.’<br /><br /><i>Amazing Grace</i> doesn’t challenge this narrative. In fact, it seeks to reinforce it, which makes for poor drama. Not only is it tiring and tiresome to watch such a one-dimensional portrait of a man, whose personal and political flaws were legion; but the view of Wilberforce as the man who abolished slavery has for a while been challenged.<br /><br />In his discussion of the San Domingue slave rebellion (1792-1805) that led not only to the emancipation of the island’s slaves but the end of colonial rule, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Paul Foot</a> stresses the role rebellious slaves played in their own liberation and ridicules the role of Wilberforce in the abolition of the slave trade.<br /><br />‘Who abolished slavery? And in a great roar the answer will come back, William Wilberforce abolished slavery. One of the most heroic and greatest feats in the history of Great Britain is that this grand old Christian gentlemen and Tory MP, from Hull, somehow, struggling himself from factory to factory, which he owned and treated the workers there like slaves, somehow, himself, by prodigious effort and enormous amount of prayer managed to abolish one of the great obscenities in the whole history of the human race.’</span></b><div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Wilberforce was motivated by – and widely mocked for his – Evangelical Christianity in his campaign to end the slave trade. He and his cohorts were disparagingly referred to as <i>The Saints</i>. Wilberforce regarded slavery not as a political but as a moral issue. For him, the conditions in which slaves were transported from Africa to the New World and, then, the conditions in which they lived and worked, were wicked and degrading, an affront to Christian values; but there was no effort to go beyond moral outrage and penetrate into the political and economic roots of a system reliant on the brutal exploitation and repression of one set of humans for the benefit of another set.</span></b><div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thus, in one of the most politically turbulent and radical periods in British history – the ideas of the American and French revolutions, the social and economic turmoil that resulted from the wars against France (1792-1815) and culminated in the Peterloo Massacre (1819) and the Cato Street conspiracy (1820) – Wilberforce was a Church and Crown reactionary, a staunch defender of the establishment against those who sought to challenge it or even overthrow it.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wilberforce’s detractors also point to the fact that the same Christian values that informed his anti-slave trade crusade also inspired his campaign against permissive Georgian manners and ushered in the moral repression and hypocrisy associated with Victorian society. Wilberforce was, along with Dr John Bowdler, the inspiration behind the Society for the Suppression for Vice and Encouragement of Religion.</span></b><div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />For E.P. Thompson, Wilberforce’s moral zeal was in reality a means to detach the poor and working classes from baleful Jacobin influences.<br /><br />By getting the working classes to read the Bible and not Thomas Paine’s <i>The Rights of Man</i>, Wilberforce hoped that the poor would realise ‘that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which worldly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest.’<br /><br />A more discerning reader of the time’s history would also object to <i>Amazing Grace’s</i> depiction of William Pitt – whose close personal and political friendship that went back to Cambridge University days (the two men are buried side by side in Westminster Abbey) – as a man equally committed to the abolition of the slave trade.<br /><br />Is this the same William Pitt who, as prime minister in 1793, amid the chaos of the French revolution and slave revolt on San Domingue (Haiti), catastrophically sought to conquer the island – the wealthiest colony in the world – for the British Empire, a plan that involved reinstating the slave regime that its victims had just overthrown, which would have the added advantage of sending a message to the slaves in the British West Indies not to seek emancipation? <br /><br />Paul Foot argues that Wilberforce did not support the slave revolt in Haiti and disparaged its leader, Toussaint Louverture; while for CLR James, Wilberforce’s campaign to end the slave trade had less to do with moral righteousness and more to do with British economic and geopolitical interests. <br /><br />Thus, James argues, having failed to seize France’s West Indian colonies by force, Pitt decided that the best way to undermine and challenge the French Empire in the Caribbean was by depriving the colonies of their workforce, the slaves which Britain merchants were largely responsible for supplying, and for this task Pitt turned to his old friend, William Wilberforce who, James says ironically, ‘had a great reputation, all the humanity, justice, stain on national character, etc, etc’ to serve the imperial purpose.</span></b></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-60461425549227429212021-10-14T21:15:00.002+01:002021-10-14T21:15:44.592+01:00Death: a story of punk rock resurrection<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vru_cgNnNv4" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s a perennial question: which was the first punk rock band? <i>The Monks</i>, <i>The MC5,</i> <i>The Stooges</i>, <i>The New York Dolls</i>, <i>The Ramones</i>, <i>The Sex Pistols</i>? Inducted recently into the illustrious fellowship of aggressive, alienated, in-your-face subversives is – following <i>The MC5</i> and <i>The Stooges</i> out of Detroit – <i>Death</i>. <br /><br /><i>Death’s</i> music was lost and forgotten for a long time, not regarded as having relevance to any rock and roll genre or moment – they were certainly never cited as an influence by any of the punk bands that did enjoy popularity, and this not out of oversight or mean-spiritedness but because no one had ever heard their music. <br /><br />To all intents and purposes, <i>Death</i> was just another in a thousand bands that came close to having a rock and roll career, putting out a single here, an album there, but never catching on, some bands never having had sufficient talent or motivation, others quickly waylaid by the fast side of the business, while a small minority, like <i>Death</i>, falling to the curse of being ahead of its time. <br /><br />In <i>Death’s</i> case, when they were trying to make their way in mid-70s Detroit, punk had yet to be identified, the belligerent commotion being made by three black guys – who saw their music coming out of <i>Alice Cooper </i>and <i>The Who</i> and had no notion that what they were playing would go on to become punk rock and they were in fact punk rockers, a term they would’ve found offensive – was met with indifference, bemusement and outright hostility. With nothing doing from the record industry, <i>Death</i> soldiered on for a while before rejection after rejection crushed their self-belief and the band petered out, dreams of living the rock life ending in withering failure, despair, addiction and illness. <br /><br />The Hackney brothers dissolved their band in 1977 and settled for lives of obscurity, regret and, in the case of the band’s ideological force, David Hackney, alcoholism and an early death. <br /><br />Until, of course, 30 years on, thanks to the fanatical, obsessive record collecting scene, punk aficionados were alerted to <i>Death’s</i> remarkable single <i>Politicians in my Eyes</i>. Soon enough, the unique quality and importance of the band, its unmistakable punk sound and attitude, was realised and master tapes of sessions recorded for a never-released album were unearthed. <i>Death</i> had been rediscovered or, more correctly, discovered, because they had never had any recognition or acclaim first time round. <br /><br />The documentary film above – <i>A Band Called Death</i> – is the story of <i>Death</i>, their birth, death and resurrection, and what they lost on their way to finding the appreciation and kudos they deserved. </span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-67106371746904679222021-10-06T22:13:00.005+01:002021-10-06T22:13:47.010+01:00They Who Dare: a heist film gone wrong<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-S90Qq_88YQ" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span>Here’s a classic heist movie scenario: a group of disparate men, from varying backgrounds, at different stages of their careers, with complex personal motives, are brought together by a determined, perhaps monomaniacal, leader, whose dedication to the mission he’s devised is challenged by having to keep those under his command in check and focussed on the purpose. <br /><br />The gang starts off in good spirits, convinced that the job will succeed and they’ll all come out of it alive and well. But once they get going, all sorts of obstacles present themselves, the men argue and fall out among each other as their fears and weaknesses are exposed. The job, in a fashion, is completed, although some of the men are killed or captured in the process. Now, comes the second act: the getaway or the getaway as you are hunted down. The gang becomes increasingly desperate and relations among the surviving members become taut as capture or death seems imminent. Finally, you are caught or killed, though perhaps the strongest morally or physically will survive, albeit traumatised, empty, spiritually destroyed. <br /><br />I say this is a regular plot for a heist film, but it also applies to <i>They Who Dare</i>, a Second World War movie made in 1954, which purports to tell the true story of the joint Greek commando and British Special Boat Section raid on Axis airfields on Rhodes in 1943. <br /><br /><i>Operation Anglo</i>, as it was known, was led by Captain David Sutherland and its aim was to undermine Axis air dominance of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. In the film, Sutherland is played by Dirk Bogarde, himself a veteran of World War II, a British Army officer, whose experiences – particularly as a liberator of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – left him with a lifelong loathing of Germans. <br /><br />Lewis Milestone, a legend of Hollywood, who made what is regarded by many as the greatest war film of all time – <i>All Quiet on the Western Front </i>(1930) – directed the film. <br /><br />Yet, despite the auguries all being good, the film is a terrible disappointment and failure. Both Milestone and Bogarde hated the script when it was presented to them and Bogarde says he only agreed to do the movie for the opportunity to work with Milestone, forced out of American because of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and who Bogarde trusted to fix the script. <br /><br />But the script couldn’t be fixed and Milestone’s attempts to give the film the <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i> treatment by turning it into an anti-war film, traducing the motives of the Bogarde/Sutherland character and the usefulness of the mission, especially when it was known that the Germans were prone to exact brutal reprisals against the Greek civilian population for acts of resistance or sabotage, are unconvincing. <br /><br />The film’s portrait of the Greek fighters and guides on the mission with the British commandos is also problematic. Despite Sutherland in his memoir – <i>He Who Dared</i> – heaping praise on the Greeks who he served alongside or aided the British in their operations in the Eastern Mediterranean – ‘They guided us, they fed us, they sheltered us and they died for us. No one in the SBS will ever forget this’ – the film has them as feeble-minded, over-emotional and more of a hindrance than a help to the mission. <br /><br />Regarding the disappointing outcome of the film and the poor reception it received from critics and audiences – the press dubbed the film <i>How Dare They</i> – this is what Bogarde had to say in his memoir, <i>Snakes and Ladders</i>: <br /><br />‘He [Milestone] made a cut of his version of the film and flew off to America; the producer made his cut and between the two of them we were a catastrophe. But it had been great fun and marvellous experience. And Millie taught me one of the greatest lessons to be learned in the cinema. “You can make a good script bad; but you can’t ever make a bad script good. Never forget that.” I was to be constantly reminded of his words for years to come. It is a lesson very few have bothered to remember.’</span></b></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-57073555975331738762021-09-28T22:37:00.000+01:002021-09-28T22:37:01.696+01:00The Angry Hills: a story of what could've been<div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrb8qYydiipy6QHo7uaIWw-NFGl4dW_t51UHxrhtNZCdGo7pJXrCTT_B933BXlsPIlRhcsi44j_DYsPsn3RnCvTmXSr46dbDN71WXNLwGTQ634KITyhE0N7WIEqSxbu4albnXerwXb9Lg/s580/the-angry-hills-1959-dvd-robert-mitchum-stanley-baker-2485-p.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="454" data-original-width="580" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrb8qYydiipy6QHo7uaIWw-NFGl4dW_t51UHxrhtNZCdGo7pJXrCTT_B933BXlsPIlRhcsi44j_DYsPsn3RnCvTmXSr46dbDN71WXNLwGTQ634KITyhE0N7WIEqSxbu4albnXerwXb9Lg/w400-h313/the-angry-hills-1959-dvd-robert-mitchum-stanley-baker-2485-p.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="p1" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: arial;">You’d be entitled to expect a lot from the World War Two drama, <i>The Angry Hills</i> (1959). It has all the ingredients to have been a memorable film. (See the film <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">here</a>).</span></b></p><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />It was written by A.I. Bezzerides, responsible for two classic crime novels, <i>Thieves Market</i> (1949) and <i>They Drive by Night </i>(1938), as well as the screenplays for film noir masterpieces such as <i>On Dangerous Ground</i> ((1952) and <i>Kiss Me Deadly</i> (1955), the latter, an adaptation of a Micky Spillane novel, directed by Robert Aldrich, who was also behind the camera for <i>The Angry Hills</i>. <br /><br />Indeed, when one considers films Aldrich was responsible for throughout his career – <i>Apache</i> (1954), <i>Vera Cruz </i>(1954), T<i>he Big Knife </i>(1955), <i>4 for Texas</i> (1963), <i>The Dirty Dozen</i> (1967), <i>Ulzana’s Raid</i> (1972), <i>Hustle</i> (1975) – then we know that <i>The Angry Hills</i> was in the hands of one of the most capable and interesting American film-makers. <br /><br />Add to this, the fact that the hero in </span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Angry Hills</i></span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;"> was played by Robert Mitchum – one of the biggest post-war Hollywood stars and perhaps the greatest male protagonist in film noir – <span style="color: #0c0c0c;"><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercurrent_(1946_film)">Undercurrent</a> </i>(1946), <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_(film)">Crossfire</a> </i>(1947), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Past"><i>Out of the Past</i></a> (1947) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Steal"><i>The Big Steal</i></a></span> (1949), and that his nemesis in the film was one of the best British actors of the 1950s and 1960s, Stanley Baker, then it’s even more perplexing that the film turned out to be so underwhelming. <br /><br /></span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Angry Hills</i></span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;"> is set in Greece at the time of the Nazi invasion (1941) and involves Mitchum as an American journalist in possession of sensitive information trying, with the help of the Greek resistance, to escape the clutches of the Germans. <br /><br />The film is messy and too interested in moving things along to get underneath the skin of its troubled protagonists. Bezzerides’ script wants to say something important about big themes – loyalty, betrayal, courage, duty, love – and is not squeamish about the barbarity of the German occupation, but Aldrich seems in a rush to unfold the plot and in the process loses what would have made this a good film, which is the human drama. <br /><br /></span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Angry Hills</i></span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;"> could have and should have been in the mould of Roberto Rossellini’s <i>Rome, Open City </i>– which is also about the Gestapo hunting for resistance fighters and doesn’t shy from presenting German violence – but settles for less, the path of least difficulty, the lowest common denominator, i.e. the perennial problem facing the ambitious Hollywood film.<br /><br />Aldrich admitted his failure, expressing his disappointment ‘not because it's not a good picture but because it could have been better. It had a potential that was never remotely realised... you feel sad about </span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Angry Hills</i></span></b><b><span style="font-family: arial;">... I'd know how to make <i>The Angry Hills</i> better in a thousand ways.’<br /><br />Still, there are several interesting scenes – particularly, the village massacre – and the dialogue is good: at one point the Gestapo chief played by Baker tries to persuade a Greek resistance leader to hand over Mitchum by heaping derision on the American for not being a soldier, but a ‘journalist, a foreign correspondent. Do you know, Leonidas, what a foreign correspondent is? It is that brand of intellectual coward who observes while others die in order to publish his own version of events in a manner that will sell newspapers. This is the man you’ve been sheltering.’</span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-35958672123904623482021-09-20T22:10:00.000+01:002021-09-20T22:10:15.254+01:00Ill Met by Moonlight: Crete, Cyprus and foreign occupation<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9ahvCt9r4R4" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Powell and Pressburger’s <i>Ill Met by Moonlight</i> (1957) tells the story of the celebrated kidnapping by British SOE officers and Cretan resistance fighters of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete in 1944. </span></b></div><b><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><i>Ill Met by Moonlight</i> has many faults and Michael Powell – the greatest British film-maker, who, along with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger made a string of brilliant films, often on Second World War themes, including <i>The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp</i>, <i>49th Parallel</i>, <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i>, <i>The Battle of the River Plate</i> – in the second volume of his autobiography <i>Million Dollar Movie</i> describes the film as ‘bad’ and ‘our greatest failure’. <br /><br />Powell berates the script, the casting – he thought Dirk Bogarde ‘a picture-postcard hero in fancy dress’, far too whimsical to play Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor (though, apparently, Leigh-Fermor liked Bogarde’s depiction of him as a latter-day Lord Byron) – the absence of women in the film, the location (he couldn’t shoot in Crete or Cyprus so ended up having to make the film on the French-Italian frontier), the decision to shoot in black and white rather than colour, his own direction, and laments the outcome which, he says, was like a Ministry of Information documentary rather than a piece of entertainment. <br /><br />‘Nobody was cultivating what my friend Robert De Niro describes as an “attitude”. The script was underwritten and weak on action, the gags were unoriginal, and the surprises not surprising… The direction concentrated so much on creating a Greek atmosphere that the director had no time, or invention, for anything else. The performances of the principals were atrocious. Marius Goring as General Kreipe wouldn’t have scared a rabbit; David Oxley as Captain Stanley Moss was the rabbit; while as for Dirk Bogarde’s performance as Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor, it’s a wonder that Paddy didn’t sue both Dirk and me.’ <br /><br />Still, Powell says, he was pleased that he managed to convey the patriotism, bravery, fierceness and fidelity of the Cretan rebels. It’s a fair enough point – even if at times the film does patronise the Cretans and they can come across as a little childish and overly susceptible to their emotions. <br /><br />The way the British like to portray themselves in war films of this period is also interesting and is perhaps why the elegant Bogarde is such a mainstay in them. In<i> Ill Met by Moonlight</i>, Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss are shown as unfailingly gracious, brave without being foolhardy, restrained, cool, calm, understated, self-deprecating, eccentric, humorous in the face of adversity, humane, cunning – all qualities lacking in the rigid, overbearing, brutal, bombastic, boastful Germans. A great deal is made in the film that even though Moss and Leigh-Fermor are officers in the elite special services SOE, they are essentially amateurs, men who joined up to serve from ordinary life, without pretensions to be professional soldiers, in love with glory and conflict. <br /><br />It’s also quite odd to note that the film was made in 1957 at the height of the EOKA struggle in Cyprus to end British colonial rule and unite the island with Greece. The conflict in Cyprus is why the film could not be made in Cyprus or Crete, much to Powell’s disappointment. The film makes clear what the Cretans are heroically fighting for – to rid themselves of foreign occupation – and either Powell and Pressburger were completely oblivious that they were, in fact, making a good argument on behalf of the Cypriots and against Britain’s occupation of the island or they were quite conscious of the metaphor they were putting forward: of a Greek island, straining under the yoke of foreign rule, and the patriotic locals taking to the mountains to shake it off. <br /><br />As a film, as a work of art and entertainment, <i>Ill Met by Moonlight </i>is flawed, but it was a success at the box office and you have to wonder if the depiction of Greeks fighting for their freedom against foreign occupation was lost on the British audience. No doubt, they would’ve balked at any suggestion that the British occupation of Cyprus smacked of the Nazi occupation of Crete. Certainly, the British public had no sympathy for Cypriots taking up arms against Britain, attacking their soldiers with guns and bombs. Nor would we expect such understanding. Invariably, the general public will support their boys, no matter the virtues of the cause they’re fighting for or against.</span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-73358074606060117052021-09-13T20:54:00.001+01:002021-10-09T14:43:40.277+01:00The Irishman, Jean Gabin and Louis-Ferdinand Céline<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WHXxVmeGQUc" width="425"></iframe></div><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(38, 38, 38); color: #262626; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><a href="https://www.dga.org/Events/2019/Dec2019/Irishman_QnA_1019.aspx" style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><span>In discussing the making of his elegiac masterpiece </span><i>The Irishman</i></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">, Martin Scorsese tells Spike Lee of the films he screened for Robert De Niro to prepare the actor for his role of Frank Sheehan, the eponymous mob hitman.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">The films Scorsese mentions are French crime and gangster films of the 1950s and 1960s and are Jean-Pierre Melville’s </span><span class="s1" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; background-color: white; font-family: arial; font-kerning: none;"><i>Le Doulos</i> and <i>Le deuxième souffle </i>(both starring Jean-Paul Belmondo); Jules Dassin’s <i>Riffifi</i> (starring Jean Savais); and Jacques Becker’s <i>Touchez pas au grisbi</i>.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Regarding </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Touchez pas au grisbi</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">, Scorsese says:</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> </span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">‘I showed a film called <i>Touchez pas au grisbi</i>, which means “Don’t touch the loot”, which is a very famous early ’50s French gangster film with Jean Gabin. When I was shooting [Robert De Niro] in <i>Casino</i> I felt he was taking on the stature of a late-to-middle-age Gabin. He had a lot of power to him but he had a serenity to him too and a coolness. Bob I felt was getting that way in <i>Casino</i>. <i>Grisbi</i> has a similar [theme] in the sense that they are older gangsters in Paris and they are getting involved in stuff they don’t want to get involved with. It’s really the tone, but I like the Gabin feeling of his deportment, how he presented himself.’</b><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">This comparison between Gabin and De Niro is a wonderful insight from Scorsese that changes the way we look at Frank Sheehan and De Niro’s depiction of him.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> </span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Gabin is, of course, the greatest actor of French cinema. His reputation was established in films of the 1930s poetic realism movement – Jean Renoir’s </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">The Lower Depths</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> (based on the Maxim Gorky play); </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">La Grande Illusion</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">; and</span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> La Bete Humaine</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">; Julien Duvivier’s </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Pépe le Moko</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">; and Marcel Carné’s </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Le Jour se Léve</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> – before the Nazi occupation of France forced him into Hollywood exile.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Gabin made two films in Hollywood.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">In </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><a href="https://ok.ru/video/960067340980">Moontide</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> (1942), he plays Bobo, a dock worker prone to drunken violence who wanders the seedy ports of California taking employment when and where he can. One night, he saves a woman (Ida Lupino) from drowning herself. At first, he is non-plussed by his heroism, but then falls in love with the would-be suicide. Bobo begins to doubt his aimless drifting and contemplates the virtues of a domestic life. Will Bobo’s buddy, who has shared his gypsy life and taken advantage of Bobo’s self-loathing and belief that he needs a buffer to prevent his brutal temper from getting him into trouble, allow Bobo to escape his influence and make a better life for himself?</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Moontide </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">bridges French poetic realism with American film noir, though this is not a drama of the city but of the sea, set amid the shacks, barges and dives of San Pablo bay. But the film is a failure. It lacks tension, is grim to the point of depressing – more grim noir than film noir – and suffers from some incredulous plotting. It would have been interesting to see what Fritz Lang – who left the film early on because of a conflict with Gabin over the Frenchman’s affair with Marlene Dietrich, who Lang was also involved with – would have done with the material.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Gabin’s second Hollywood film, </span><a href="https://ok.ru/video/1037622250164" style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><i>The Imposter</i> </a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">(1944), is more successful. Directed by fellow-exile Julien Duvivier, Gabin gives an intense and restrained performance as a convicted murderer (Clement) about to be guillotined for his crime. A priest accompanies Clement to his execution imploring the sneering prisoner to accept God and open the way for his salvation only for bombs to fall from the sky like thunderbolts from Zeus as the Nazis invade France. The bombs destroy the prison, massacre the executioners and God’s apologist and the criminal escapes.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">A liberated Clement stumbles across a ragtag of French soldiers retreating south from the invading German army. The truck they are travelling in is strafed by German planes. Again, Clement is unscathed by the attack and takes the opportunity to rob one of the killed soldiers of his uniform and identity papers. As Lt Maurice LaFarge, Clement is able to escape France and find obscurity among the Free French Forces in French Equatorial Africa. Gradually, Clement’s cynicism and dedication to self-preservation at all costs is replaced by a sense of belonging and loyalty to the men who have been entrusted to his command, men who come to adore their leader’s stoicism and fearlessness in the face of adversity. Will Clement be allowed to continue with his new identity as Lt LaFarge and appreciation of life or will it be revealed that he is an imposter, a fraud, a murderer masquerading as a hero?</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Clement’s anarchic loathing for authority, for country, his tendency to individualism and self-reliance to the point of misanthropy, could come from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s classic anti-war, anti-flag novel, </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Journey to the End of the Night</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> (1932).</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">‘People, countries, and objects all end up as smells.’</b><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">‘I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better.’</b><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Céline and </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">Journey to the End of the Nigh</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">t are mentioned by Scorsese to Lee as one of the novels that informed his view of </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">The Irishman</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">‘There’s a quote towards the end [of the novel] where the main character gets killed. He’s talking with his girlfriend. She says, “What happened to you?: He says, “What happened to me is a whole life has happened to me”, and she shoots him. It’s a tough book. It’s ugly. When he says that, it hit me, he’s right. A whole life. Something I can never explain to you. You had to live it with me. You had to be me. That’s what we were trying to go for in the film.’</b><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span><div style="background-color: white; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>* Gabin didn’t take to Hollywood and its rigid studio system. Like Clement, he decided to fight for his country and left to join the Free French Forces. He fought in North Africa and then was part of the French 2nd Armoured Division that liberated Paris after D-Day.</i></span></span></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-26272753930944345942021-09-05T23:37:00.001+01:002021-09-05T23:37:39.266+01:00We Live Again: Hollywood takes on Tolstoy and Russia’s turmoil<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-bbJCLlJOLo" width="500"></iframe><div><br /></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Rouben Mamoulian’s <i>We Live Again </i>(1934), based on Leo Tolstoy’s last full-length novel <i>Resurrection</i> (1899) – which many, including myself, like more than <i>War and Peace</i> and <i>Anna Karenina</i> – is a great film, stylishly and masterfully put together by the revered Armenian director, a pioneer of cinematic grammar, with some truly breathtaking scenes, especially the Orthodox Easter Service scene and the scene where Prince Dmitri desperately tries to communicate with the condemned Katusha amid the pandemonium of an overcrowded prison, all photographed by Greg Toland, the legendary cinematographer best known for his work on <i>Citizen Kane</i>.<br /><br />Gyorgy Lukacs says of Dostoevsky and Lenin said of Tolstoy – who the Bolshevik loathed – that they ask the right questions, regarding the state of society, they make the right diagnoses – in Tolstoy’s case that the evils plaguing Russia, barely a generation after the abolition of serfdom, were engrained in a system of exaggerated inequality, exploitation and injustice and that radical measures to remedy the situation were needed to avoid catastrophe – which is what befell Russian in 1917 and for the next 70 years – but come up with the wrong solutions.<br /><br />Anyone familiar with the 19th century Russian novel, which along with Homer, Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, represent the highest forms of literature, will know of the febrile social and political climate that form their backdrop. While Dostoevsky’s solution to Russia’s turmoil was nationalism, tradition, Orthodoxy, Tolstoy understood that social and particularly economic reform was necessary.<br /><br />Thus, in <i>We Live Again</i>/<i>Resurrection</i>, Prince Dmitri, the landowning nobleman, embraces land redistribution – as did the blue-blooded Tolstoy, partly inspired by Georgism and partly by Christian ethics – and sinks his teeth into the corruption and inhumanity of the church, the judiciary and class system. It was Tolstoy’s reformist approach that irked Lenin, whose vision for Russia was much more drastic and, stripped of any Christian outlook, deranged.<br /><br />Indeed, it would be wrong to see <i>Resurrection</i> as a political novel and the resurrection of the title doesn’t just refer to national renewal, but personal revival. Both Prince Dmitri and the woman he has wronged, the peasant girl Katusha, have entered a spiritual Hades, out of which Tolstoy wants to lead them. Resurrection, an escape from hell, from death, is the fundamental tenet of Orthodox Christianity, which is why Easter plays such a prominent part in the novel and film.<br /><br />All these social and political themes in Tolstoy’s novel are, remarkably you might think, prevalent in Mamoulian’s film. The film is clear in its denunciation and mockery of the Russian caste system and openly sympathises with those characters that offer a socialist critique and alternative to it. <i>We Live Again</i> may be one of the very few Hollywood film that positively refers to and discusses socialism. <br /><br />Again, however, <i>We Live Again</i> is not an explicitly political film; it is a classic Hollywood melodrama, conceived by Samuel Goldwyn as a star vehicle for Anna Sten, who he promoted as a new Garbo, while the censors at the Hays Office overlooked all its controversial political and sexual themes precisely because they regarded the drama of sin and redemption as a morally instructive and uplifting message for American audiences.</b></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-83749645382168431382021-08-29T23:54:00.001+01:002021-08-29T23:54:31.852+01:00City Streets: a battle for love in the underworld<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/31K04CnlwKs" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><div><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rouben Mamoulian’s <i>City Streets</i> (1931) is a remarkable film, straddling and helping define both the nascent gangster and film noir genres, and is full of the visual flourishes associated with Mamoulian’s direction.</span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">(See the entire film <a href=" https://ok.ru/video/274786224803" target="_blank">here</a>).</span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">For such an interesting narrative, it’s not a surprise that the film</span></b><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">’s story was conceived by the pioneer of modern American crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett – known most notably for the creation of private detective Sam Spade, the prototype for all the private investigators that until this day inhabit the American crime novel.</span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Set in the prohibition era, the overarching theme of </span></b><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>City Streets</i></span></b><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"> is an intense love story, between the stepdaughter of a gangster, Nan Cooley, played with modern sensibility by Sylvia Sidney, and a naive, awkward hick – simply known as The Kid, played, slightly irritatingly, by Gary Cooper, who has only one thing going for him – his aptitude with guns, which lands him a job working as showman in a shooting gallery.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Intense sexual passion and attraction defines the young couple’s relationship – it’s a bond reminiscent of that between Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) and Bert Tara (John Dall) in Joseph H. Lewis’ <i>Gun Crazy</i> (1950) – and overrides their mismatch in social status – Nan is an ebullient city girl used to wealth, while The Kid is the terse country bumpkin with no ambitions but a sense of honour and integrity that makes him resist his girlfriend’s efforts to get him a job working for her stepfather in ‘beer’, i.e. in the bootlegging business.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then a series of events leads to a magnificent role reversal. It starts when gangster boss Big Fella Maskell (Paul Lukas) – a suave but lecherous swine who insists on seducing or raping all his underbosses’ molls – offers promotion to Pop Cooley if he murders his chief, Blackie, who has had the temerity to show his displeasure when Big Fella Maskell tries to steal his girlfriend.</span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Pop Cooley readily agrees to the killing and inveigles Nan to cover up his crime. Unfortunately for Nan, she is caught by the police and, even though she refuses to implicate her stepfather, who has promised to keep her out of jail, she ends up serving a prison sentence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Feeling betrayed by her stepfather and now having realised that the values and code of the underworld is nothing but a sham, disguising ruthless self-interest, she renounces her gangster connections and looks forward to a more honest life with The Kid, who she now understands was right all along.</span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">However, with Nan in jail, Pop has persuaded The Kid that she needs money to pay for the best lawyers to get her out. Joining the bootlegging business, Pop has persuasively argued, is the only way for The Kid to earn the money to facilitate her release.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Kid becomes the gangster Nan wanted him to be, his gun skills and calm temperament making him an immediate success. Even worse, The Kid takes to the life, enjoying the money, clothes, cars, fancy restaurants and clubs, the power, prestige and respect. It is this new man , fully immersed in the gangster life, that Nan finds on release from prison.</span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">In fact, The Kid has become such a good gangster, has risen so far up the ranks, that he is now a confidante of Big Fella Maskell. The problem is, as we know, that Big Fella Maskell likes to demean his underlings by having his way with their wives and girlfriends.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></b></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 22px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Big Fella Maskell turns his depraved attentions to Nan. She contemptuously and strenuously resists his advances but, like all men who abuse their power, who obtain power just so that they might abuse it, he won’t take no for an answer, promising her jewels and furs if she sleeps with him willingly, rape and violence if she continues to defy him. The Kid’s reaction to this humiliation sets the scene for a terrible showdown. </span></b></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-65176752553016951462021-08-21T00:07:00.001+01:002021-08-22T00:16:15.483+01:00Visions apart: on Frank Capra and Robert Altman<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7yCQ_ko28IQ" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe><div><br /></div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">The above video is from the long-running <i>Dick Cavett Show</i>, and features four notable film makers, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Capra. <br /><br />Altman and Capra are the two outstanding artists here, though at the opposite ends of their careers. In 1972, when this programme was recorded, Altman had recently experienced his first major success as a director with <i>M*A*S*H</i> (1970), a zeitgeist film that endorsed the ethics of the counterculture and condemned America’s disastrous Vietnam war. <br /><br /><i>M*A*S*H</i> allowed Altman to make a series of significant films that satirised and revealed as vacuous American society and culture, films such as <i>California Split</i> (1974), <i>Nashville</i> (1975) and <i>A Wedding</i> (1978), though, in this period of Altman’s career, his most compelling works are probably <i>McCabe and Mrs Miller</i> (1971) and <i>The Long Goodby</i>e (1973), which take on the two most enduring American film genres, film noir and the Western. <br /><br /><i>McCabe and Mrs Miller</i> is an anti-Western. It might be set in the West, but it’s not interested in any of the Homeric questions that Westerns – from John Ford to Sam Peckinpah – are interested in: the warrior code, courage, personal honour, a mastery of violence, etc; while <i>The Long Goodbye</i> is a contemporaneous version of the eponymous Raymond Chandler novel, in which Elliot Gould plays Phillip Marlow, private investigator, but not as the sharp-suited, sharp-witted American knight, but as a shabby, bumbling, mumbling dupe. <br /><br />If Altman made films against the Hollywood tradition, Capra, on the other hand, is a a pioneer of such film, starting his career in silent films and then, when talkies came along, not only inventing romantic comedy, screwball comedy and the road movie all at once – in <i>It Happened One Night</i> (1934) – but also American ideology. <br /><br />As John Cassavetes’, one of Capra’s greatest admirers said: ‘Maybe there really wasn't an America, it was only Frank Capra.’ <br /><br />Capra is best known for <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> (1946), which unjustly has become known as sentimental hokum – Capra corn – when a more sophisticated reading of the film reveals it to be a dark and desperate exploration of thwarted desire, failure and, indeed, the logical appeal of suicide. <br /><br />Unfortunately, this misreading of Capra has somewhat diminished his reputation, and there is now a tendency to overlook the extraordinary series of films he made leading up to <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> – films such as <i>Ladies of Leisure</i> (1930), <i>Dirigible</i> (1930), <i>The Miracle Woma</i>n (1931), <i>Platinum Blonde</i> (1931), <i>Forbidden</i> (1932), American Madness (1932), <i>The Bitter Tea of General Yen</i> (1932), <i>Mr Deeds Goes to Town</i> (1936), <i>Lost Horizon</i> (1937) – and, indeed, this sneering at Capra put paid to his career by the early 1950s. <br /><br />For Capra, the demise of his career was down to a change in cultural tastes. This is how he described his fall from ideological favour: <br /><br />‘The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters... The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophiliac bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: “Shake 'em! Rattle 'em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!” Kill for thrill – shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, dredge up his evil – shock! Shock!’ <br /><br />Ironically, it was a fall from favour that Altman, despite his obvious reverence for Capra, with his more countercultural sensibility, his more scathing approach to American values, his lack of sympathy for his characters’ dreams and his films’ inclination to pessimism, nihilism and cynicism, which contributed to tearing down what Capra had built.</span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-66441852231090768412021-07-18T21:31:00.002+01:002021-07-18T21:31:13.376+01:00Heroic Failure: history, humiliation and Brexit<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hA08SXJ8mAY" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /><br />Above is a talk by Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole regarding his much-touted book on Brexit – and the social and cultural impetus behind it – <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heroic-Failure-Brexit-Politics-Pain/dp/1789540984?&linkCode=ll1&tag=helleantid-21&linkId=87b2e2abec26f52197565073de07b398&language=en_GB&ref_=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain</a></i>.<br /><br />O’Toole’s rather fanciful and ultimately unconvincing explanation for Brexit involves depicting the English, for it is the English and their neuroses and not that of the Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish that informed the desire to exit the European Union, as a people in the grip of a crushing self-pity, which filtered through the myths of the British empire and the Second World War resulted in a paradoxical mix of a sense of superiority and a feeling that Britain was being traduced. <br /><br />What the Spanish, French and Germans failed to achieve through hundreds of years of conflict – i.e. the capitulation of British/English independence – the continentals were attempting to achieve through the European Union.<br /><br />But it is not only a reading of English/British military and diplomatic history – in which Britain/England sees the continental powers not as partners but as long-terms adversaries if not enemies – that O’Toole says illuminates Brexit ideology; it is also the peculiar self-flagellating culture of the English, in which failure, suffering and humiliation is regularly valorised, presented as virtuous and demonstrative of higher character. <br /><br />Thus, O’Toole points to John Moore’s retreat from Corunna during the Napoleonic Wars, the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, Scott’s disastrous Antarctic expedition, Gallipoli and especially Dunkirk as examples of how the English/British revel in disaster and failure.<br /><br />Even Britain’s greatest triumphs, O’Toole argues – the building of a mammoth, global empire and the defeat of Nazi tyranny – ended up in the English psyche as defeats, with the English portraying themselves as more oppressed than oppressor, as more loser than winner as the empire disintegrated unjustly, betrayed by ungrateful subjects, and the post-second world war settlement resulted in former enemies such as Germany, Italy, Japan – and even those Britain helped save, France, Benelux – overtaking the victor economically and leaving it with an overwhelming sense of grievance.<br /><br />To illustrate this curious simultaneous English will to power with an attraction to victimhood, O’Toole draws on popular literature and television in the years leading up to Brexit, including Len Deighton’s <i>SS-GB</i>, Robert Harris’s <i>Fatherland</i>, Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, and, more bizarrely, E.L. James’ wildly popular sado-masochistic fantasy<i> Fifty Shades of Grey</i>. <br /><br />The reference to the latter is surely tongue-in-cheek, as must be O’Toole’s suggestion that those who voted Brexit – the over 50s – would’ve grown up as punks in the 1970s and that they carried over the spirit of rip it up and anarchy into the Brexit vote. To prove this unlikely point, O’Toole cites John Lydon’s support for Brexit, Arron Banks’ tactics of outrage, mockery and mischief, and Boris Johnson’s use of the Clash’s <i>London Calling</i> as his signature tune for his London mayoral campaign and the future prime minister’s choice on <i>Desert Island Discs</i> of the same group’s <i>Pressure Drop </i>– a cover of Toots and the Maytals’ ska classic – as one of the songs he’d like to accompany him in his enforced solitude. <br /><br />O’Toole devotes a great deal of his argument to suggesting that it was German reunification in 1990 that galvanised the campaign to leave the EU, reviving a phobia among the English of a hegemonic Germany in Europe and resentment that this power would emerge despite all the sacrifices the British – in blood, treasure and empire – had previously expended to forestall precisely this.<br /><br />O’Toole exaggerates British Germanophobia. No doubt, it existed among those – like Margaret Thatcher – who remembered and lived through the Second World War; but it wasn’t fear of British subordination to Germany that swayed many to commit to Brexit but a specific dislike of the way Chancellor Angela Merkel 25 years after German unity declined to give David Cameron the fig leaf he needed to say to the conservative right that he had extracted significant concessions from the EU in his supposed renegotiation of the terms by which Britain could stay in the bloc. <br /><br />Merkel’s short-sightedness and carelessness was compounded by her government’s catastrophic and cynical decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to migrants and refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East and economic malaise in Asia and Africa.<br /><br />It was this influx of non-EU immigrants that spooked the British. Reeling from a decade of Islamist attacks including the 7/7 attacks on London transport in 2005, the savage murder of Lee Rigby in 2013, the recruitment to ISIS of young British Muslims, who proceeded to carry out barbaric killings of Westerners in Syria and Iraq, including Britons, which conflated EU Freedom of Movement with more migrants from Muslim countries to Britain. <br /><br />The Brexit campaign specifically drew attention to this fear by stressing how Turkey – a country of 80m Muslims – was bound to join the EU (and benefit from Freedom of Movement) – and depicting a flood of Muslim refugees and immigrants making their way through Europe at the invitation of Angela Merkel with the inevitable end point being the UK.<br /><br />In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum, Tony Blair put it like this: ‘For many people, the core of the immigration question – and one which I fully accept is a substantial issue – is immigration from non-European countries especially when from different cultures in which assimilation and potential security threats can be an issue.’<br /><br />Amid all the exaggerated and inappropriate metaphors, O’Toole does get at some truths about Brexit. He’s on strong ground when he suggests that Brexiteers did not expect to win and had no plan for the day after if they did.<br /><br />Brexit, O’Toole says, ‘was always intended to fail. When… in his call to tell David Cameron that he was going to campaign for Leave, Boris Johnson assured the then prime minister that ‘he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be “crushed”, he was for once telling the truth. For a critical section of its supporters, and in particular for the effective leader of the Leave campaign, Brexit was always meant to be a Lost Cause. It would have been a jolly fine show, a splendid performance against insuperable odds. It would have the romance of, say, another great secession, the Confederacy in the southern states of the US: a thoroughly bad cause given a veneer of nobility by honourable defeat.’<br /><br />Indeed, O’Toole argues, the vacuousness of the Brexit project, its ‘intellectual indolence’ and ‘the patrician languor’ it represents, its complete inability to address any of the issues of powerlessness and decline that prompted the Brexit revolt in the first place, will inevitably lead to an even more dangerous and damaging narrative centred around who betrayed Brexit, who stopped it from achieving its aims of ‘taking back control’ and initiating the promised English nationalist idyll.<br /><br />O’Toole pessimistically opines that : ‘The self-pity of Lost Causism will meld with the rage of betrayal. Without the EU as whipping boy and scapegoat, there will be no end of blame and no shortage of candidates to be saddled with it: anyone and everyone except the Brexiteers themselves. That most virulent of poisons, the ‘stab-in-the-back’, is in the bloodstream now and it will work its harm for a long time.’</b></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-80239079874175915402021-07-02T22:41:00.002+01:002021-07-02T22:41:34.426+01:00Hemingway’s The Killers: the bureaucracy of killing<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hgX8ZAiAbM0" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe> </p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>The door of Henry’s lunchroom opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter. <br />‘What’s yours?’ George asked them. <br />‘I don’t know,’ one of the men said. <br />‘What do you want to eat, Al?’<br /> ‘I don’t know,’ said Al. ‘I don’t know what I want to eat.’ </i><br /></b></span></span></p><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>The Killers: Ernest Hemingway <br /></b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Anderson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prizefighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick.</i> (The Killers: Ernest Hemingway). </b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /><i>‘I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.’ </i>(The Killers: Ernest Hemingway).</b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Ernest Hemingway’s <i>The Killers</i> (1927) is a prohibition-era short story that reflects the violent crime wave gripping the USA at the time, the emergence of the mob in all major cities, the recourse to assassination and murder to settle beefs, the impunity with which gangsters acted, the inability or unwillingness of the authorities to reign them in.<br /><br />Two hitmen arrive at a diner in Summit, Illinois and brazenly explain to the owner, staff and customers that they’re waiting for Ole Anderson, the Swede, a former heavyweight boxer, who’ve they’re planning to kill and know habituates the restaurant at 6:00 pm every day.<br /><br />As they wait for the Swede to arrive, the two hit men causally abuse, terrorise and mock their hostages, not hiding their murderous intent, nor expecting anyone to resist or prevent them from carrying out their heinous deed. Indeed, Sam, the African-American cook, repeatedly implores his fellow captives to forget about heroics, not to get involved or put themselves in the middle of a dispute that they nothing about and has nothing to do with them.<br /><br />When the two hitmen realise that the Swede is not going to show up to the diner this evening, they boast that they know where his boarding house is and they’ll catch up with him – and kill him – later, at their leisure. They have no concern that their prey will elude them.<br /><br />One of the customers, Nick Adams, takes the opportunity of the hitmen’s departure from the diner to rush to the Swede and tell him what’s transpired and warn him that his life is in danger. Adams is shocked by the Swede’s attitude. He seems to have been expecting the news that assassins have tracked him down, accepted the inevitability of his death and tells Adams that he doesn’t intend to leave town to escape them or seek the protection of the police.<br /><br />If the two hitmen remind us of the callousness and boastfulness of Odysseus and Diomedes in <i>Book X of The Iliad </i>as they torture and kill the callow Trojan, Dolon, so the Swede reminds us of Socrates in Plato’s <i>Phaedo</i> as he stoically accepts his imminent death and refuses to take any actions to avert it.<br /><br />Adams returns to the diner and relates to his comrades his conversation with the Swede. All quietly accept and respect the Swede’s rationalisation of his situation and the story ends with the reader certain in the knowledge that the Swede will be killed at the hands of the two remorseless hitmen.<br /><br />Hemingway’s <i>The Killers</i> has been filmed several times, most notably in 1947 by Robert Siodmak. His eponymous noir masterpiece stars Burt Lancaster as the Swede, who gets a back story, explaining why he is to be assassinated, with less emphasis placed on the hitmen, the killers the short story and the film are named after. <br /><br />Similarly, Don Siegel’s 1964 film, <i>The Killers</i> – starring John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and, in his last film before embarking on a full-time political career, Ronald Reagan – imagines a back story for the man about to be killed, who becomes Johnny North and a racing driver. <br /><br />In 1956, the legendary Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky made a student short film that faithfully visualises Hemingway’s story, stressing the action that takes place in the diner (a bar in Tarkovsky’s film) and the fear and brutality embodied by the soulless assassins, which we’re entitled to believe refers to the nature of the Soviet Union, its casual violence carried out with impunity, as if murder were a banal, bureaucratic task, carried out by unremarkable men, stalwarts of an unbending, inhumane system. </b></span></span></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jofHN3PTpVg" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-84824332331564740612021-06-24T22:33:00.002+01:002021-06-24T23:47:39.105+01:00George Pelecanos: crime, politics, tragedy<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ndyn5SvtBaU" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe> <span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Like most of the trouble that’s happened in my life or that I’ve caused to happen, the trouble that happened that night started with a drink</i>. (Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go). </b></span><br /></span></p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Ramone had his own rules: follow the playbook, stay safe, put in your twenty- five and move on. He was not enamored of Cook or any of the other mavericks, cowboys, and assorted living legends on the force. Romanticizing the work could not elevate it to something it was not. This was a job, not a calling. Holiday, on the other hand, was living a dream, had lead in his pencil, and was jacked up big on the Twenty-third Psalm. </i>(The Night Gardener).<br /><br />Above is an interview conducted in front of a Greek audience in Athens with prolific Greek-American crime novelist and screenwriter George Pelecanos.<br /><br />The interview concentrates to a great extent on Pelecanos’ partnership with David Simon that resulted in the classic TV series <i>The Wire </i>– about the decline amid crime, corruption and racial polarisation and strife of one of the great American cities, Baltimore, which mirrors the decline of so many once thriving US metropolises, such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Cleveland. The TV series is regarded as one of the finest ever made.<br /><br />Pelecanos also collaborated with Simon on <i>Treme</i>, a short-lived series about New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and <i>The Deuce</i>, which took us back to early 1970s New York City and the birth of the hardcore pornography industry. <br /><br />Pelecanos was uniquely placed to write about Baltimore because his novels are all based in neighbouring Washington DC, where the writer was born and has always lived. Pelecanos worked in his father’s diner – crewed entirely by African-Americans, who made up 80 percent of DC’s population – and served white men in ties who he never felt much affinity for.<br /><br />Inevitably, then, in charting the travails and modern history of Washington DC, Pelecanos is charting the history of its black community, even if some of his heroes, like Nick Stefanos, Dimitri Karras, Spero Loukas are Greek Americans, presumably Pelecanos’ alter egos.<br /><br />As influences, Pelecanos cites crime writers Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, as well as film noirs and Westerns, while music – soul, funk, rock and roll, the DC punk rock scene – clothes, cars, sports, drugs, alcohol and guns are also an integral part of the world Pelecanos creates and recreates.<br /><br />The strength of Pelecanos’ writing – its vivid and passionate documenting of the trials and tribulations of Washington DC – might also reveal its limitation. For Pelecanos, crime – stepping out of bounds of what is socially and legally acceptable – is a materialist phenomenon and can ultimately be explained by social and political circumstances. As he himself says: ‘Any time you have poverty, joblessness, sub-par public schools, and a lack of opportunity, you're going to have a high rate of crime.’<br /><br />This explanation of crime pervades Pelecanos’ novels disallowing other, perhaps darker reasons, for criminal behaviour, greed, envy, psychopathy, power, loathing, and explains the absence of tragedy in his work, which sometimes makes reading a Pelecanos novel like reading a political tract.</b></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-29280698162282882622021-06-05T19:25:00.000+01:002021-06-05T19:25:47.295+01:00Werner Herzog: on reading and JA Baker’s The Peregrine<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4b7vBWwbuo" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><i>‘Those who read own the world. Those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it. Our civilisation is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.’ (Werner Herzog)<br /></i> </b><b><br /></b><b>Above is Werner Herzog in conversation with Robert Harrison asserting that artists – of all kinds, writers, painters, film-makers, architects and so on – if they want to produce good art, art beyond the mediocre, should read books.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>As a film-maker, Herzog says, he maybe watches only three to four films a year, but he reads incessantly. Indeed, as a writer himself, of prose and poetry, he expects that his writings will outlive his films, of which he’s made more than 50.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>However, for Herzog, it’s not just that aspiring artists should read, it’s that they should read the most serious and challenging literature.<br /></b><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Thus, Herzog starts off talking about Livy’s account of the Second Punic War, in which Herzog identifies as one of his all-time heroes the figure of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (Cunctator) who defeated Hannibal and, according to Herzog, saved Occidental civilisation. Despite all the ridicule and opprobrium he received for refusing to engage the North African invaders in pitched battle, suffering slanders of cowardice and hesitation, preferring instead hit-and-run, guerrilla tactics, Fabius’ steadfastness, certainty in his tactics, stubborn solitariness, disdain for demagogic opinion, appeals to Herzog, who sees making films as a similar war of attrition.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>Herzog goes on to praise Virgil but not for <i>The Aeneid</i>, which he disparages as a nationalist tract celebrating the Julio-Claudian dynasty, but for the <i>Georgics</i>, Virgil’s depiction of life on a Roman country estate and the struggles of man against nature, a work Herzog admires for its knowledge of rural life and powers of observation and precision.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>Herzog proceeds to talk about travelling on foot – ‘the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot’ – and his love of Hölderlin, who travelled by foot and whose poetry records his solitude and creeping insanity.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b><u>To the Fates<br /></u></b><i><b>Grant me just one summer, powerful ones,<br /></b><b>And just one more autumn for ripe songs,<br /></b><b>That my heart, filled with that sweet<br /></b><b>Music, may more willingly die within me.<br /></b><b>The soul, denied its divine right in life,<br /></b><b>Won’t find rest down in Hades either.<br /></b><b>But if what is holy to me, the poem<br /></b><b>That rests in my heart, succeeds –<br /></b><b>Then welcome, silent world of shadows!<br /></b><b>I’ll be content, even if it's not my own lyre<br /></b><b>That leads me downwards. Once I’ll have<br /></b></i><b><i>Lived like the gods, and more isn’t necessary.</i><br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>But at the heart of Herzog’s discussion with Harrison is JA Baker’s <i>The Peregrine</i>.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>Herzog says the book suggests to film-makers how they should see reality – in loneliness, enthusiasm, rapture and passion – and describes a world of poetry, dreams, ecstasy and illumination – which, Herzog says, is what films should try to convey.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>There are moments, Herzog notes, ‘where you can tell that [Baker] has completely entered into the existence of a falcon. And this is what I do when I make a film: I step outside of myself into an <i>ekstasis</i>; in Greek, to step outside of your own body’.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b>Herzog maintains that <i>The Peregrine</i> contains the greatest prose since Joesph Conrad and writers should learn the book by heart.<br /> </b><b><br /></b><b><i>‘I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word ‘predator’ is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.’ </i>(JA Baker, <i>The Peregrine</i>). </b><b><br /></b><b><br /></b><b>Herzog concludes his book recommendations by asserting the importance of the <i>Poetic Edda</i>, <i>The True History of the Conquest of New Spain</i> and the <i>Warren report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy</i> – ‘a wonderful crime story, which has a logical conclusiveness that is staggering’.</b></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-87648502022315184432021-05-29T23:21:00.005+01:002021-05-30T12:17:35.441+01:00Werner Herzog, Cormac McCarthy: art, science and the end of the human race<div style="text-align: left;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="290" scrolling="no" src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/135241869/135241852" title="NPR embedded audio player" width="100%"></iframe><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>This is a discussion from National Public Radio involving legendary film-director Werner Herzog, renowned novelist Cormac McCarthy and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss on the intersection of art and science, the origins of civilisation and the end of the human race.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Krauss begins the discussion by echoing Professor Richard Feynman – on whom Krauss has written a major biography <i>Quantum Man</i> – that ‘science takes a lot of imagination’. Its origins is the desire to know how things work. This is the breakthrough in human civilisation that returns us to the pre-Socratic philosophers, who were the first to abandon magical or supernatural explanations for natural phenomenon and sought instead rational – or scientific – causes. Their determination to sideline the role of the gods had the profoundest consequences, not only in attempts to explain natural phenomenon but also how men and women organised their societies, i.e. in the realm of politics, ethics, history and so on.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Imagination, of course, is also what we associate with art. Art starts with a tabula rasa, a blank canvas or a blank piece of paper on which the artist, using their imagination, then turns into a cultural artefact.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Thus, for Krauss art and science ask the same questions. What is our place in the cosmos? Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? If science is interested in the mystery of nature, then art, literature and music (at its best) is interested in the mystery of the human experience and the human soul. If, according to Feynman, the theoretical physicist, ‘the world is a mess of jiggling things’, then for the great artist, ‘being is chaos’ and it is on this unstable, unpredictable ground that human endeavour and human thinking takes place.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Krauss, Herzog and McCarthy all agree, therefore, that when we accept that the universe is an unfriendly and hostile place we are forced to confront our own insignificance. For Krauss, the scientist, following on from Richard Dawkins-inspired Atheist Bus Campaign, in which the message ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy life’, was plastered on the side of London buses and driven around the capital, the realisation of our own insignificance should be a source of liberation, enabling us to appreciate the universe and imagine it not just as it is but as it might be for the betterment of humanity.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>However, the artist McCarthy isn’t so keen on these optimistic views. By all means, take god out of natural and human affairs, but what remains won’t be enlightenment and happiness but tragedy. Indeed, is this not what we were taught 2500 years ago?</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>As McCarthy says: ‘If you look at classical literature, the core of literature is the idea of tragedy. You don’t really learn much from the good things that happen to you. Tragedy is at the core of human experience. It’s what we have to deal with. That’s what makes life difficult and that’s what we want to know about, what we want to know how to deal with. It’s unavoidable. There’s nothing you can do to forestall it; so how do you deal with it? All classical literature has to do with things that happen to people they really rather hadn’t.’</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Herzog, the student of Greek civilisation, agrees with McCarthy that happiness won’t be the result of more rational explanations of the universe and human nature. Indeed, if science and art tells us anything about the long-term prospects of humanity, it isn’t that human beings will become increasingly perfect but that they will be wiped out. It might take 2000 years or 200,000 years, it might be the result of self-destruction or evolution, but soon there will be a planet with no human beings. </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Not quite ready to give up his optimistic scientist’s outlook, Krauss, while accepting McCarthy’s and Herzog’s assertion that the human species is, one way or another, destined for extinction, and agreeing that our demise might not be such a bad thing and that we shouldn’t be depressed if we disappear, still wants to accentuate the positive. Thus, Krauss says, doomed as the human species is, ‘we should be thrilled that we're here right now and make the most of our brief moment in the sun.’</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiweQ7TRpWrwEYBvMX-S53E2w9xRh91xlam5UkJ7UFZFnSnB-OU0HgWcz41fiqLUEqHrPIA-GbR_GING2uEjrn6d0qN9kte8DkSvfDw2dDepq1VENrUULAGOS7H5knXMWJ2Cv2Q9Sd7o3M/s600/d8c19b207e10fb1fbd78d3a0c07b7a20.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="600" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiweQ7TRpWrwEYBvMX-S53E2w9xRh91xlam5UkJ7UFZFnSnB-OU0HgWcz41fiqLUEqHrPIA-GbR_GING2uEjrn6d0qN9kte8DkSvfDw2dDepq1VENrUULAGOS7H5knXMWJ2Cv2Q9Sd7o3M/w400-h210/d8c19b207e10fb1fbd78d3a0c07b7a20.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> </b></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-60362738033290323262021-05-22T00:45:00.001+01:002021-05-24T00:55:14.399+01:00‘That was Thomas Bernhard’<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O_hgXlyqjns" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">This is a very useful documentary from Austrian state television (ORF) made shortly after the death of Thomas Bernhard in 1989, which reviews the trajectory of his work – from young poet, to debut novelist, playwright, autobiographer and novelist-playwright – through various television interviews he gave. <br /><br />Thus, the film starts with Bernhard discussing his rather gloomy and earnest poetry – collected in <i>In Hora Moris</i> and <i>Under the Iron of the Moon</i> and <i>On Earth and in Hell</i> – <br /><br />I cannot sleep, <br />for the circus has started up outside my window <br />and people are cheering! <br />As if through the grass of hell <br />I see their faces, <br />which bring this city <br />its destruction <br /><br />– before Bernhard talks about his early novel <i>Frost</i>, then <i>The Lime Works</i>, in which Bernhard makes an aesthetic breakthrough, injecting a diabolical humour into the madness and rantings of his protagonists. <br /><br />We then see Bernhard being interviewed about his first theatre works – <i>A Party for Boris</i>, <i>The Famous</i>, <i>Minetti</i> – before moving on to his multi-volume autobiographical work, published in English as <i>Gathering Evidence</i>, which describes his childhood and upbringing in what he calls Catholic National Socialist Austria, redeemed only by the influence of his grandfather, an intellectual, a failed writer but above all an iconoclast and nonconformist; and his near-fatal lung illness and hospitalisation as a young man. <br /><br />The film charts Bernhard’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with Austria as through his novels and plays he spares no invective to castigate the country’s politics and culture and engages in thinly-disguised attacks on leading intellectual figures he has encountered over the years. <br /><br />Bernhard’s loathing is partly contrived – ‘to explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear’. In many of the later interviews, Bernhard goes about trying to explain himself with a smirk on his face, apparently in full knowledge of how provocative he’s being and laughing about how offended his audience is. <br /><br />Thus Bernhard’s taunting of his audience is part of a performance, with Austria as the stage, the entire Austrian population as his audience and he as a stand-up or a clown berating them and making them squirm. <br /><br />The relationship between Bernhard and his Austrian audience grew so strained, the film shows, that his novel <i>Cutting Timber: An Irritation</i>, a coruscating and hilarious denunciation of former friends and bourgeois intellectual Vienna was, by court order, banned for libel, while his final play <i>Heldenplatz</i>, about continued antisemitism in Austria, written at a time when ex-Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim had been elected Austria’s president, was intended to libel a whole country – Waldheim called the play ‘an insult to the Austrian people’ – and was met with protests, resignations, calls for a boycott, threats of violence, real violence, performances marred by hecklers, all while Bernhard’s health was rapidly deteriorating and signifying his early death.</span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-13269721247701158682021-05-13T21:29:00.002+01:002021-05-15T21:40:58.102+01:00Nikos Gatsos: from the poetry of joy to the poetry of bitterness<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfkSXHkn2QTOs_GXOYmVOq3wacl7Na9L4XKWKUTmoTb_RG0pNpDXj3BEf-0TJ_pm2-ymhr6MPSxKvIqH10d0x1dnv0UotgX_EPcvpc1LhQyCTf7iWG_y0zX4c0_JriJpNcQJ5T1OyGi2w/s640/the+knight+and+death.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="583" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfkSXHkn2QTOs_GXOYmVOq3wacl7Na9L4XKWKUTmoTb_RG0pNpDXj3BEf-0TJ_pm2-ymhr6MPSxKvIqH10d0x1dnv0UotgX_EPcvpc1LhQyCTf7iWG_y0zX4c0_JriJpNcQJ5T1OyGi2w/w365-h400/the+knight+and+death.jpg" width="365" /></a></div><p></p>The poet and lyricist Nikos Gatsos announced his literary career in the 1940s with phenomenal works that have stood the test of time, for example <i>Amorgos</i> and <i>The Knight and Deat</i>h, before, in the 1960s, allying with the composer Manos Hadjidakis to write lyrics for some of the most beautiful modern Greek songs ever written. <div><br />This form of poetic expression seemed to suit Gatsos and for the next thirty years, he collaborated with all the most distinguished Greek composers – most notably Hadjidakis, Mikis Theodorakis and Stavros Xarchakos – to immeasurably enrich Greek song.<br /><br />Much of Gatsos’ early lyrics are optimistic and joyous, in love with life, Greece, the Aegean, but towards the end, Gatsos’ lyrics became darker and more bitter, culminating in his collaboration with Xarchakos, <i>Τα κατά Μάρκον</i> (<i>The Gospel According to Mark</i> – i.e. Markos Vamvakaris, the rembetika musician), an album that reflects consternation about the state of Greece</div><div><br /><b>Σκοτεινό το τραγούδι που θα πω τα συντρίμμια του τόπου μου πατώ Χαμένα αδέρφια, ίσκιοι λαβωμένοι Χαμένη Ελλάδα, παντού σ'αναζητώ. (Νίκος Γκάτσος: Ο χορός των Κυκλάδων) </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Μα για να σωθεί η Ελλάδα στους καιρούς τους ύστατους βρείτε κάπου έναν καιάδα και γκρεμοτσακίστε τους. (Νίκος Γκάτσος: <i>Τα γερόντια</i>).<br /></b><br /><b>Θεέ μου γιατί, γιατί, γιατί κείνοι που σκύβουν το κεφάλι και τεμενάδες κάνουν πάλι στον τύραννο και στον προδότη Θεέ μου γιατί, γιατί, γιατί να 'ρχονται κείνοι πάντα πρώτοι κι εμείς οι αγνοί κι ελεύτεροι να 'μαστε πάντα δεύτεροι; (Νίκος Γκάτσος: <i>Οι πρώτοι και οι δεύτεροι</i>). <br /></b><br /><b>Μελετάμε τους πλανήτες κι όλους τους αστερισμούς τους πολέμους και τις ήττες και τους δύσκολους χρησμούς στην παλιά μας τη φυλλάδα που διαβάσαμε ξανά τέτοιο όνομα Ελλάδα δεν υπάρχει πουθενά Μόνο σ'ένα καζαμία με περγαμηνό χαρτί αίμα στάζαν τα σημεία, σαν κομμένη αορτή. (Νίκος Γκάτσος: <i>Οι αστρολόγοι).</i><br /></b><br /><b>Τούτος ο τόπος είν’ ένας μύθος από χρώμα και φως ένας μύθος κρυφός με τον κόσμο του ήλιου δεμένος. Καθ’ αυγή ξεκινά ν'ανταμώσει ξανά το δικό του αθάνατο γένος. (Νίκος Γκάτσος: <i>Τούτος ο τόπος</i>). <br /></b><br />In the notes to the album, Xarchakos writes of Gatsos’ lyrics (my translation): <br /><br /><b>‘Nikos Gatsos’ songs <i>Τα κατά Μάρκον</i> reveal the contemporary political reality [in Greece] with its “huge lies” (τα ψεύτικα τα λόγια τα μεγάλα) and like a scalpel cut to the bone of the responsibility we all have for the evil that surrounds us and is threatening to destroy us. <br /><br />‘In these songs, Nikos Gatsos, with awe, anger and pain, tells hard truths and speaks bitter words so that Greeks will wake up from their stupor before the onset of an irreversible catastrophe. <br /><br />‘These songs serve no party political purpose and are not the usual political or ideological songs. They are songs forged out of a deep sense of responsibility from a poet imbued with the Greek spirit and the human struggle who wanted, now, in his perfect maturity, to convey (with song) into the mouths, the souls and brains of our people, the words and sounds of rage against "that and those" (εκείνα και εκείνους) destroying Greece; against those trying to obliterate Greek sensibility and consciousness; and against those taking part in today's genocide of Greeks by Greeks, with the help of all the anti-Greeks in Europe and the world. <br /><br />‘Nikos Gatsos' songs speak for themselves. I only wanted with these few words to stress their importance at this critical time [for Greece]…’ </b></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-91503659801776769002021-05-05T22:15:00.000+01:002021-05-05T22:15:29.556+01:00Thomas Bernhard’s politics<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SyQUa1iX0OQ" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Good luck trying to pin down Thomas Bernhard’s politics. Reading his plays, poems and novels won’t help you determine what the Austrian writer truly held to be politically true or what his politics were. Perhaps the only conclusion we can draw is that he was disgusted by all political interventions, found them all equally repugnant, preposterous and irrelevant. <br /><br />Here he berates socialism or social democracy, which he declares ‘a sham’: <br /><br />the socialists are today's exploiters <br />the socialists are the grave-diggers of this country <br />the socialists are today's capitalists <br />the socialists who are no longer socialists <br />are the real criminals in this country <br />compared with them the Catholic riff-raff is downright irrelevant <br /><br />And as the above quote from Bernhard’s play <i>Heldenplatz</i> indicates, the Roman Catholic church, the bulwark of Austrian conservatism, is another consistent target for loathing, especially when Bernhard associates it with Austria’s Nazi past, and it becomes, in Bernhard’s phrase, Catholic National Socialism, which Bernhard was fond of saying is the national ideology of Austria – ‘wherever we look, we see only Catholicism or National Socialism’ – prevailing to this day: <br /><br />What’s happening right now <br />is that a majority of Austrians want <br />National Socialism to rule <br />under the surface National Socialism <br />has been back in power for a long time <br /><br />Of course, just because Bernhard’s characters articulate hatred for socialism or believe that Austria remains in the grip of Roman Catholic Nazism doesn’t mean this is what Bernhard himself believed – though he probably did. Nor should we forget that Bernhard was a provocateur, who relished in taunting, shocking and disorientating his audience and readers, who believed in exaggeration as a useful aesthetic tool– ‘to explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear.’ <br /><br />Ultimately, Bernhard’s interests go beyond politics, which is just another distraction from the things that really matter in his world – madness, despair, failure, illness and death, the specifics of the human condition, although, since politics and society are human creations, they come to characterise these fields too. <br /><br />what do you say will the Reds win the next election <br />but they have no character <br />and the Conservatives are all morons <br />swinishness is the driving force in all parties <br />if you elect a politician today <br />you’re electing a corrupt bastard <br />that’s how it is</span></b><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574064159521319802.post-10431653482472369842021-04-26T13:21:00.000+01:002021-04-26T13:21:59.543+01:00Hitchens and Hobsbawm: the death of twentieth century politics <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PFTq9pz_hFM" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Above is a discussion between Christopher Hitchens and Eric Hobsbawm from 2003 on the occasion of the publication of the latter’s autobiography, <i>Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life</i>. <br /><br />The conversation is and feels like it’s from another era. It’s not so much what Hitchens and Hobsbawm have to say to each other, but the freedom with which they express their opinions, their frankness and honesty. There is no treading on eggshells, self-censorship or fear of offending. <br /><br />Both men are now deceased – Hitchens died in 2011 and Hobsbaw in 2012 – and with their passing Britain lost not only two of its most prominent public intellectuals and exponents of Enlightenment values of reason, liberty, progress, but also two of its mordant contrarians. In fact, one of the pleasures of listening to the two men is how Hobsbawm consistently refuses to accept the premises of Hitchens’ questions and terms, demanding greater clarity and precision. <br /><br />Of course, both Hitchens and Hobsbawm started out as Marxist revolutionaries. Hitchens was a 1960s radical while Hobsbawm says he became a communist in early 1930s Berlin out of necessity. Since Germany’s experiment with liberal democracy had collapsed and capitalism had palpably failed, it appeared to Hobsbawm that the only way to oppose fascism – with its existential threat to Jews (Hobsbawm was the scion of English and Austrian Jews via Alexandria) – was by becoming a communist. (On the importance of being Jewish, Hobsbawm says: ‘You can’t get away from it. They won’t let you.’) <br /><br />Revolutionary Marxism was an ideology from which Hobsbawm never wavered. As a student at 1930s Cambridge University – Hobsbawm’s family had wisely emigrated to England in 1933 when Eric was 16 – he moved in the same circles as the Cambridge Five, the spy ring that passed on information to the USSR during the Second World War, asserting that if he had been asked to spy for Stalin he would have done so; while after the death and denunciation of Stalin and the invasion of Hungary, when other intellectuals left the Communist Party of Great Britain, Hobsbawm remained a dedicated member and defender of the faith – leaving him open to perennial accusations of Stalinism and of being an apologist for communist repression and mass murder. <br /><br />Ironically, this life-long commitment to communism doesn’t stop Hobsbawm from admitting that the working class – which with its virtues of solidarity and fairness was seen by Marxists as the bearer of a more fraternal and equitable society – had lost its influence and potential. Hobsbawm even mourns the decline of the British establishment – wounded by Suez and 1960s popular culture and finished off by Thatcherism and neoliberalism, which decimated both the labour movement and the old British elite. <br /><br />A more vigorous debate between Hitchens and Hobsbawm on the 2003 Iraq war would have been interesting. Hobsbawm does denounce the invasion not only as misguided – by invading Iraq, Hobsbawm says, America threw away the global imperium it had gained as a result of winning the Cold War – but also an act of barbarism. <br /><br />Yet Hitchens who supported the effort to topple Saddam Hussein doesn’t put his case forward, other than to teasingly call opponents of the war ‘reactionaries’. If Hitchens had defended himself he probably would have argued that in supporting the invasion of Iraq he had not made the journey from revolutionary Marxist to Republican neocon, but was being consistent in his loathing for brutal dictators – whether Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein – and in his belief that the West had a moral imperative to take military action to bring freedom to those suffering under their repulsive rule.</span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com