Month: June 2024

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One Donald I’m sad to see go

 

© Avala Film / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

It’s often said you don’t appreciate the value of something until after it’s gone.  I felt like that last week on hearing of the death of the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland.  If someone had asked me to list my all-time favourite actors, I wouldn’t have thought of including Sutherland.  Yet when he passed away at the age of 88 – having kept working in film and TV until last year – it suddenly struck me how much I was going to miss him.

 

Sutherland was an actor who could inhabit a range of personalities and project many different moods and emotions, yet whom you always recognised as, basically, himself.  His characters might be heroic, dignified, fatherly, tragic, eccentric, sinister, venal, slow-witted, juvenile, gormless or demented – yet you always knew you were watching Donald Sutherland.  Whoever he played, he retained that unique quality of Donald Sutherland-ness.

 

Born in St John, New Brunswick, Sutherland graduated from Victoria University with an interesting-sounding degree in Engineering and Drama, then relocated to Britain in 1957 and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.  A few years later, he found his way into Europe’s then-flourishing horror-movie industry.  He appeared in the monochrome Italian-French chiller Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, directed by Warren Kiefer, and with a 20-year-old Michael Reeves, who four years later would make 1968’s masterly Witchfinder General, working as assistant director.  No doubt for budgetary reasons, Sutherland was cast in three roles, most amusingly in drag, as a witch.  He played a good-natured simpleton in Hammer Films’ Fanatic (1965), a blend of the low-key psychological thrillers the studio made when it wasn’t cranking out full-blooded gothic-horror melodramas and the fashionable 1960s sub-genre of ‘hagsploitation’ – the hag here being a dangerous religious nutcase played by Tallulah Bankhead. If the cast wasn’t interesting enough with Sutherland and Bankhead, it also included Stephanie Powers, Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan, future stars of TV shows Hart to Hart (1979-84), George and Mildred (1976-79) and Porridge (1974-77) respectively.

 

© Amicus Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

The best remembered of Sutherland’s early horror films is Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg – the first of seven anthology horror movies that Subotsky and Rosenberg’s British-based Amicus Productions would specialise in.  To be honest, I don’t think the film’s five stories are up to much, but the framing device, wherein five night-time travellers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr Shreck (Peter Cushing), who uses Tarot cards to foretell each man’s future, is wonderfully atmospheric.  Dr Terror also has a fascinating cast.  In addition to Sutherland and Cushing, there’s Christopher Lee (again) and another horror-movie veteran, Michael Gough; trumpeter, tap-dancer and TV presenter Roy Castle; disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman; and the original M from the James Bond films, Bernard Lee.  Sutherland’s segment even has a fleeting appearance by his fellow Canadian Al Mulock, who along with Woody Strode and Jack Elam was gunned down by Charles Bronson in the astonishing opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

 

Sutherland also featured in 1960s British TV, most memorably in 1967 when he played a villain in an episode of the surreal and stylish espionage series The Avengers (1961-69) called The Superlative Seven.  This has Patrick Macnee’s debonair John Steed being invited to a bizarre fancy-dress party on board a private jet plane, which, after it takes off, is discovered to be remote-controlled.  Eventually, the plane lands Steed and the other, equally-baffled guests on a seemingly deserted island.  There, the party start to be murdered one by one.  As well as riffing on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), the episode has a science-fictional sub-plot where Sutherland attempts to create a race of super-soldiers.  And the guest cast includes Charlotte Rampling and Brian Blessed before they became famous too.

 

That same year, Sutherland turned up in Robert Aldrich’s loud, raucous and violent war movie The Dirty Dozen, about 12 convicts trained by the US Army and sent to France on a suicide mission against the Wehrmacht prior to the D-Day Landings   The movie contained so many famous actors playing characters who weren’t among the 12 convicts – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker and Robert Ryan – that, over the years, folk have become confused about who actually played the Dirty Dozen.  I’ve even heard a few people declare that, with Sutherland dead, that’s all the Dozen gone.  Well, no – because actors Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland, who played two more of the Dozen, are still on the go.

 

© Kenneth Hyman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

The Dirty Dozen’s success led to Sutherland being cast in more World War II movies.  Most notable of these was 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, in which Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a soldier in an American platoon in 1944 France, learns there’s a fortune in Nazi gold stashed in a bank behind enemy lines and persuades his fellow soldiers, including Sutherland and Telly Savalas, to help him steal it.  Sutherland’s character is a loopy tank commander called Oddball who, with a blatant disregard for historical authenticity, was added to the script to satirise the then-ubiquitous hippy movement.  He says spaced-out things like, “Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!” or, “Woof, woof, woof!  That’s my other dog imitation.”  I suspect that for people my age – well, males my age – in the UK, Oddball is the character we’ll remember Sutherland best as, because British TV seemed to show Kelly’s Heroes every other week when we were kids.

 

Sutherland was also in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed, playing an IRA man who aids some German commandoes, headed by that well-known German, Michael Caine, on a mission in England to assassinate Winston Churchill.  Of Sutherland’s performance, the best that can said is that there are non-Irish actors who’ve played Irishmen with worse Irish accents.

 

Another war movie was M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s scabrous black comedy set during the 1950s conflict in Korea, in which Sutherland played insolent and rebellious US Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce.  The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, was the third-most popular movie of its year and gave Sutherland iconic status.  I have to say that, though I like Robert Altman’s movies generally, M*A*S*H has not aged well.  Today, much of its humour feels juvenile and mean-spirited, especially when directed towards Sally Kellerman’s Major Houlihan character, rather than ‘anti-establishment’, which it was hailed as at the time.  Altman famously loathed the M*A*S*H TV show that was spun off from his movie and ran from 1972 to 1983, but I suspect time has been kinder to its gentler brand of humour.

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Productions / British Lion Films

 

Afterwards, Sutherland was in prestigious films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1975) and Bernard Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975) – none of which I’ve seen.  But it’s in Nicolas Roeg’s masterly horror film Don’t Look Now (1973) that, of his movies I have seen, I believe he does his best work.  Don’t Look Now is an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story in which a grief-stricken couple try to get over the death of their daughter by immersing themselves in a restoration project in Venice – only to be haunted by sightings of a small figure in a red coat who at least resembles their deceased daughter.  The film has two set-pieces at its beginning and end whose emotional impact has rarely been matched in the horror genre – Sutherland features heavily in both.  Films about the supernatural, despite focusing on death, memories of the departed and the possibility of an afterlife, don’t usually capture the feeling of grief that well.  But the pained, brittle performances by Sutherland and his co-star Julie Christie convey it with extreme poignancy.  With their performances augmented by Nicolas Roeg’s camerawork, visual imagery and memorably-elliptical approach to storytelling, Don’t Look Now is a film for the ages.

 

Though for me Don’t Look Now gives Sutherland his best role, it’s Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) that gives him his best image.  This is Hollywood’s second adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), wherein a low-key invasion of earth is staged by alien pod-people who gradually replace all the real people.  The image in question, now a popular meme, comes in the final moments when Sutherland, the film’s hero, reacts to another character by pointing at her, adopting a grotesque, gawking expression and emitting an inhuman squeal.  This tells us the pod-people have now replaced him too.  The original Body Snatchers movie, made by Don Siegel in 1956, was set in small-town America, but Kaufman’s version audaciously shifts the action to San Francisco, and the result is just as good.  Actually, I was going to say filmmakers have treated Finney’s novel well, for in 1993 Abel Ferrara directed another version that was decent too.  But then I remembered there was a fourth version made in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and it was rubbish.

 

© Solofilm / United Artists

 

As he grew older, Sutherland’s work in films and television inevitably saw him shift from being a leading man to being a grizzled character actor and then an esteemed ‘elder-statesman’ guest-star.  His movies included star-laden Oscar-bait (1980’s Ordinary People), daft Alistair Maclean adaptations (1979’s Bear Island), slightly less daft Ken Follett adaptations (1981’s Eye of the Needle), overripe John Grisham adaptations (1996’s A Time to Kill), overstuffed British flops (1985’s Revolution), Sylvester Stallone movies (1989’s Lock Up), Clint Eastwood movies (2000’s Space Cowboys), paranoid Oliver Stone conspiracy thrillers (1991’s JFK), preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster movies (2022’s Moonfall) and Emma Thompson-scripted Jane Austen costume-dramas (2005’s Pride and Prejudice).

 

He made three films with his son Kiefer – who, when I first saw him onscreen in the 1980s, made me think, “Wow, he looks just like his dad!” – the afore-mentioned A Time to Kill, plus 1983’s Max Dugan Returns and 2015’s Forsaken.  And he featured in four Hunger Games movies (2012-15), playing Snow, the despot running the future North American territory of Panem.  I haven’t seen any of the Hunger Games series, but a future dystopian America ruled by a president called Donald sounds terrifyingly prescient.

 

Ironically, in the 1990s, Sutherland returned to his 1960s roots and started making horror movies again.  He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a clodhopping film that a few years later led to a sublime TV show; 1994’s The Puppet Masters, based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, which was a low-budget but not unenjoyable retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; 1998’s police-occult thriller Fallen, in which he rubbed shoulders with Denzel Washington and John Goodman; and 1999’s Virus, an Alien rip-off set on board a ship, in which Sutherland’s over-the-top villain is one of the few redeeming features – his old seadog is so sea-doggish he only lacks a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder.  Horror-adjacent is his role as Ronald Bartel in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991).  He’s an incarcerated pyromaniac whom William Baldwin and Robert De Niro’s firemen-investigators turn to for help when they’re trying to catch the person responsible for a series of deadly, fiery arson attacks.  Thus, he’s the Hannibal Lector of the fire-raising world.

 

However, while I write this, the Donald Sutherland performance that keeps coming to mind – accompanied by the lovely, plaintive song that accompanies it – is the one he essayed in the video for Kate Bush’s single Cloudbusting (1985).  He’s a kindly inventor who creates a rainmaking machine, only to be taken away by some sinister men in suits, who obviously believe there are things man was not meant to know.  This rather vitiates the song’s optimistic lyric, “Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen…”  It’s left for Sutherland’s son, played by Bush, to complete his work.  I visited the video on YouTube the other day and was touched to discover how the comments below were packed with people paying tribute to Sutherland.

 

© EMI

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An honest John

 

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

 

John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6th and was sworn into office as First Minister of Scotland two days later.  His arrival in the two roles comes during a difficult period for his party.  First, the SNP has had to endure the spectacle of its once-mightily-respected, once-seemingly-unassailable former boss Nicola Sturgeon, who served as First Minister from 2014 to 2023, mired in a scandal whereby her husband, Peter Murrell, has been investigated and arrested over possible mismanagement of the party’s finances.

 

Then came the sorry saga of Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and First Minister, Humza Yousaf.   Yousaf was brave enough to defy the British-establishment line and challenge Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of killing huge numbers of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023.  But in most other respects, he was pretty hapless.

 

Most notably, he didn’t so much shoot himself in the foot as blow the foot off at the ankle when he ended his party’s alliance with Scotland’s other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. The Greens were so outraged they made it clear that they would vote against Yousaf in a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament.  Realising he was going to lose that vote, Yousaf resigned.  His resignation at least seems principled compared with the behaviour of another First Minister recently.  Labour’s Vaughan Gething, First Minister of Wales, recently lost a no-confidence vote in the Welsh Senedd and blithely refused to quit, dismissing the vote as a ‘gimmick’.

 

Swinney’s arrival as Yousaf’s replacement happened at an incredibly inopportune time.  Barely had he got through the door of Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence in Edinburgh, than Rishi Sunak, British Prime Minister and a politician so clodhopping he makes Humza Yousaf look like a smooth operator, announced a general election for July 4th.  The polls say the SNP are going to lose a swathe of seats in the London parliament to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.  Even if Swinney was the best politician in the world, I don’t see what he could do to avoid that.

 

Not that I think Scottish voters are enamoured with Labour, who are so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years.  For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.  But I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.

 

For this reason, and because of Swinney’s bespectacled, unexcitable and unshowy demeanour – he’s often likened to a ‘bank manager’ or an ‘accountant’, although I remember one Scottish hack comparing him to ‘Harry Potter’, which I’m sure didn’t please the famously anti-SNP J.K. Rowling – there’s been speculation that he’s serving merely as a ‘caretaker’ leader, steadying the helm until someone of more substance takes over.  In particular, many in the Scottish media expect the leadership to soon go to Kate Forbes, who’s currently Deputy First Minister.  Famous for his negotiating skills, Swinney managed to talk Forbes out of taking him on in a leadership contest in May.

 

Anyway, I should say that back in my misspent youth, I crossed paths a few times with John Swinney – whose youth, I imagine, was somewhat less misspent than mine.  When I’d been a pupil at Peebles High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of my best pals was a guy called Roger Small.  Once we finished school, Roger went to university in Edinburgh and I to university in Aberdeen.  I kept in touch with him and on a few weekends came down from Aberdeen to stay in his flat in Edinburgh.  My reasons for those visits were not wholly because of friendship.  They coincided with the Five Nations Rugby championship, as it was then, which was held every spring and saw two Scottish home-games played at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium.  I’d get a ticket, arrange to spend the night at Roger’s place, go to see the game in the afternoon and enjoy the post-match festivities in the evening.

 

From www.sportspages.com

 

On February 4th, 1984, I dropped my stuff off at Roger’s and went to Murrayfield to see Scotland play England.  Scotland won 18-6.  In the Scotsman newspaper, back in those long-ago, pre-Andrew Neil days when it was worth reading, Chris Rea – no, not that Chris Rea – opined: “The Scottish forwards… were immense – a finely blended unit, alert and supportive. Their breakaways forced England into elementary errors.  They foraged with devastating accuracy…  Every Scot… played his part to the full.”

 

When the final whistle blew, I was extremely pleased that Scotland had demolished England, the Auld Enemy.  So pleased that, on my way back to Roger’s flat, I indulged in a wee, celebratory pub-crawl along Rose Street, taking in such hostelries as the Auld Hundred, the Kenilworth and the Abbotsford.  It probably didn’t help that I’d already done a pub crawl of Rose Street in the late morning and early afternoon, on my way to Murrayfield.  Anyway, the result was that I was well-refreshed when I returned to the flat.

 

Roger had told me he was entertaining some Edinburgh University mates that evening, with the intention of going to a party later on.  I was welcome to join them.  So, at about seven o’clock, I trotted into Roger’s living room, plonked myself on the sofa in the midst of some people I hadn’t met before and, trying to be sociable, joined in the conversation.  After a few minutes, a tall, lean, slightly intense-looking young man sitting on the sofa beside me turned his head towards me and asked incredulously, “Are you drunk?”

 

Ladies and gentlemen, meet John Swinney, future leader of the Scottish National Party, an outfit dedicated to the cause of Scottish independence, to freeing Scotland from the shackles of political rule from London, capital of England.  Shocked that someone in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, should be a wee bit inebriated after Scotland had trounced England at rugby.

 

But I can’t have been that inebriated because I managed to accompany Roger, John and friends to the party that night and managed to participate in the conversation enough to form the opinion that Roger’s mate John was a decent-enough, if sober, bloke.  It turned out that the party was being held by someone from Peebles, the town where Roger and I had attended school, so I knew some of the folk there.  Actually, it amuses me to think that the future First Minister of Scotland was once at a party rubbing shoulders with such well-kent Peebles eccentrics as the late Andrew Cleghorn.

 

Thereafter, I encountered John Swinney a couple of times in Edinburgh, briefly, while I was in Roger’s company.  The last time was a summer or two later, during the Edinburgh Festival, when Teviot Row, the Edinburgh University students’ union building, had been turned into a venue and the pair of them were working there as bouncers.  What a pity Oxford University’s notorious Bullingdon Club didn’t arrange a field-trip to Edinburgh at the time and try to subject Teviot Row to their yobbish antics…  I would have paid good money to see John Swinney eject Boris Johnson from the premises.

 

I lost touch with Roger for a while after that, but bumped into him again in the late 1980s after I’d moved to Edinburgh.  He kindly fixed me up with a part-time job at the (now-long-gone) Greyfriars Bookshop at the bottom of George IV Bridge.  At some point I asked how John Swinney was getting on and Roger told me he was ascending in the ranks of the SNP.  Later, when I mentioned his name to some mates from Aberdeen who were heavily into the cause of Scottish independence, they reported they’d seen him deliver a speech at an SNP conference and were greatly impressed by him.

 

I completely lost touch with Roger Small in the 1990s – he took off for Australia – and, several years ago, wondering what’d happened to him, I tried Googling him.  I didn’t find him, but learnt something about his mother, Christian Small, who’d passed away in 2016 at the age of 90.  Christian had been an immensely-talented amateur painter, but according to a friend she was ‘extraordinarily diffident about her work’ and needed ‘a great deal of persuasion’ to allow her paintings to appear in local exhibitions.  Because of her modesty, presumably, it didn’t really dawn on people – family and friends alike – how good an artist she’d been until after her death.  However, in 2018 and 2019, some events were held to commemorate her and her art, including exhibitions and the launch of a book called Inside & Out.  The book featured her paintings interspersed with verse written by another friend, the poet and actress Gerda Stevenson.

 

One of those events was attended by John Swinney, who by then was Deputy First Minister of Scotland.  On Twitter, he remarked that Christian Small had been the mother ‘of my dear university friend Roger.’  So, I’m glad he still remembers his old mate and still holds him in high regard.

 

© Scotland Street Press

 

Though he’s made his name as a cautious type – too cautious for some people’s tastes, which has led to them questioning his political acumen – it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about John Swinney as a person.  For example, the former Scottish Labour Party leader Jim Murphy once commented: “There’s nobody in Scotland who doesn’t like John Swinney.”  I recall my old English teacher, Ian Jenkins, who served in the Scottish Parliament for four years as the Liberal Democrat representative for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, speaking highly of him too.

 

Thus, I’m pleased that Swinney now holds the highest political office in his country.  He struck me as a decent guy and it’s good to see decency rewarded.  Unfortunately, politics isn’t an arena where being decent always works in your favour.  I suspect he has his work cut out for him – especially if the polls prove to be right and his party takes a pounding in the general election.

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Furiosa and curiosa

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

What a strange beast Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is.  Yes, it’s a Mad Max movie, directed and co-written by the franchise’s mastermind George Miller.  But it’s one (almost) devoid of Mad Max.  Instead, it concentrates on Imperator Furiosa, the formidable warrior-woman played by Charlize Theron who partnered the title character in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.  Furiosa fills us in on her backstory, from her childhood to early womanhood.  Thus, it’s a prequel to Fury Road and a discombobulating departure from the customary format of the Mad Max films.

 

If you had to sum up the structure of the earlier four movies in one word, that word would be linear.  Things just barrelled along in a straight line.  Indeed, the two best ones, Mad Max II (1982) and Fury Road, were basically ongoing vehicle chases, with plot and characterisation having to scramble on board during the brief moments when people’s feet eased on the accelerators.  Not that I’m knocking them.  Mad Max II is one of my favourite films of the 1980s and I consider Fury Road one of the best films of the 21st century.

 

But with Furiosa, Miller – bravely or foolishly, depending on your point of view – abandons the formula that’s hitherto served him so well and presents a movie with other things besides big, metallic, wheeled things hurtling after and crashing into one another.  There are periods of quiet and calm, where the emphasis is on dialogue, characterisation and violence-free drama rather than on hectic, in-your-face action.  Parts of it even get a bit slow.

 

Which isn’t to say Furiosa lacks action.  It begins with an edge-of-your-seat (if small-scale) chase, and later there are two lengthy action set-pieces that rank among the most thrilling the franchise has produced, even if one of them incorporates a bit too much CGI.  Overall, though, comparing one of the earlier Mad Maxes with this entry is like – to cite two examples from a sub-genre that heavily influenced the series originally, the spaghetti western – comparing Sergio Leone’s lean, taut A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with his sprawling epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

No, I’m not claiming that Furiosa is as good as Once Upon a Time in the West (one of my top half-dozen movies ever, incidentally).  I also think it falls short of the greatness achieved by Fury Road.  But I still found it pretty impressive.  Before I discuss the movie in detail, though, I should warn you – from here on there will be spoilers.

 

The film gets going with the afore-mentioned chase.  Some scumbag bikers abduct little Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from her community in the Green Place, a Garden of Eden-like hideaway that’s somehow survived the apocalypse that’s ravaged the rest of the earth in the Mad Max version of the future.  Her mother (Charlee Fraser) pursues them into the Wasteland and the scumbag bikers are killed one by one, but not before the last of them manages to deliver Furiosa to Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), leader of a gang with a self-explanatory name, the Biker Horde.

 

A subsequent attempt to rescue Furiosa results in the mother’s death and Dementus keeps the little girl, partly as his gang’s mascot, partly as a surrogate daughter.  “Do not look away, you mustn’t look away!” he urges her while he crucifies her mother in front of her, believing that the trauma will toughen her up and make her better suited to the Wasteland.  He’s obviously a dad who believes in the ‘school of hard knocks’ approach to raising kids.  He also muses, “When things go bonkers, you have to adapt.”

 

Later, he and his Horde stumble across the Citadel that figured, or will figure, in Fury Road and come face to face with the Citadel’s implacable, pustular ruler Immortan Joe.  Here, Joe is played by Lachie Hulme.  Hugh Keays-Byrne, the actor who played him in Fury Road (and also played the franchise’s original villain, Toecutter, back in 1979’s Mad Max) passed away in 2020.  The Biker Horde manages to capture the Citadel’s satellite-settlement Gastown, responsible for producing the fuel for Joe’s vehicles.  After some hard bargaining, Joe reluctantly cedes control of Gastown to Dementus, but demands some concessions from the biking warlord in return.  These include him taking custody of Furiosa.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

Born in the healthy environs of the Green Place, Furiosa is genetically undamaged and Joe, desperate for some normal-bodied and able-minded offspring, fancies her as a future wife.  As we know from Fury Road, he has a squad of young wives locked away for breeding purposes, though the results have been disappointing so far – as evidenced by the two sons he’s acquired, the hulking, thick-as-mince Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and the psychotic Scabrous Scrotus (Josh Helman).  Not keen on the idea of ending up a spouse to Immortan Joe, Furiosa escapes from his harem, disguises herself as a boy, pretends to be mute and finds employment in the Citadel’s garages.

 

A few years later, after various adventures, and now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa becomes apprenticed to the tough but kindly Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), driver of the War Rig, the giant truck that’s the pride of Joe’s vehicular fleet.  “You have about you a purposeful savagery,” Praetorian Jack informs her, which in the Wasteland is as close to a compliment as you can get.

 

Praetorian Jack and the now Praetorian Furiosa gradually bond, to the point where Jack agrees to help her return to the Green Place.  But bigger events get in their way.  Namely, Dementus’s running of Gastown becomes such a disaster that Immortan Joe and his allies vow to get rid of him, even if this means a full-scale war raging in the Wasteland…

 

One thing I liked about Furiosa was the chance to see certain characters from Fury Road again.  Not just Immortan Joe, but subsidiary villains like Rictus Erectus, the People Eater (John Howard), the Bullet Farmer (Lee Perry, replacing the original actor Richard Carter, who died in 2019) and the Organic Mechanic (Angus Sampson), who’s the nearest thing in the Wasteland to a GP and has the thankless task of delivering Joe’s stillborn and / or mutant kids.  But what pleased me most was a fleeting reappearance by the Doof Warrior, the goon who rides in front of a giant wall of speakers whilst playing a splendid, flamethrowing electric guitar.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

Furiosa presents us with some cool new characters as well, mostly in Dementus’s entourage.  There’s the piratical Rizzdale Pell (Lachy Hulme in a second role) who, unlike normal movie pirates, doesn’t bother to conceal an empty eye-socket with an eyepatch.  Also facially disfigured is the zombie-like Mr. Norton, who’s actually a Ms. and is played by Elsa Pataky, Chris Hemsworth’s real-life wife, no less.  And I was impressed by the Octoboss (Goran D. Kleut), a satanic figure clad in black, horned armour who rides / flies into battle on a motorbike-cum-kite, trailing a long, black, tendrilous parachute behind him.

 

Dementus also employs two cheerleaders.  He has a Gollum-like weirdo called Smeg (David Collins) acting out his ever-changing moods in a series of strange, performative dances.  And he has a warm-up man called the History Man (George Shevstov) who warns potential adversaries about his boss’s ‘congress of destruction’, i.e., the thousands of motorbikes massed behind him.  The History Man additionally serves the gang as a bard and as an archivist of knowledge, stories and language, which he has tattooed in tiny writing all over his body.  He’s asked to dredge up appropriate words from the mostly-forgotten lexicon of English to mark special occasions: “History Man!  A word-burger if you please!”  And he provides the film with its narration, which implies the saga of Furiosa has been added to this anarchic society’s repository of legend and lore.

 

But among the new characters, the biggest star is Dementus himself.  Chris Hemsworth obviously relished the opportunity to set aside his goody-two-shoes image as Thor in the Marvel cinematic universe and play somebody gloriously, evilly unhinged.  While cunning and ruthless enough to make a credible post-apocalyptic warlord, there’s also a touch of ridiculous, Spinal Tap-style heavy metal-ness about him.  This means that, ultimately, he’s never going to be smart enough to defeat Immortan Joe, still Top Dog when Fury Road rolls around.  He’s merely likely to cause a lot of damage along the way. Inevitably, Dementus gets the best lines.  He goadingly demands of Furiosa, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” or “Where were you going, so full of hope?  There is no hope!”  Best of all is a muttered aside when a minion disputes his orders: “Hmm, questioning my boss-ority…”

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

It says a lot for the more measured performances by Anya Taylor-Joy and Tom Burke that they manage to make their presences felt, and Hemsworth doesn’t walk away with the film.

 

With so many good elements, then, why do I feel Furiosa is less effective than Fury Road?  Well, it’s a bit too long and, while earlier parts of the film are languidly paced, there’s rather too much happening, too much Machiavellian scheming and double-crossing going on, in its later stages.  Also, the franchise’s long-term fans will be frustrated that the war between Dementus and Irmmortan Joe, when it finally arrives, is represented only by a brief montage and a voice-over from the History Man.  Instead, the film’s focus becomes personal.  It zooms in on Furiosa pursuing and confronting Dementus over her mother’s long-ago murder.  I can see what Miller was trying to do, and respect his bravery in doing it, but I’d have preferred things to end with a bigger bang.

 

Still, after seeing it a few days ago, I haven’t stopped thinking about Furiosa.  Things about it that didn’t occur to me in the cinema have occurred to me since.  For example, the nature of Praetorian Jack’s relationship with Furiosa is kept vague and at the time I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a romantic one.  Now I see him more as being a father-figure to her, which nicely fills the void left by her mother’s death.  I also appreciate, with hindsight, how the script uses peaches – yes, peaches – as a motif.  Furiosa is seen picking them at the start, her mother gives her a peach-pit as a memento shortly before she dies, and the same pit has a bearing on what Furiosa does to Dementus at the end (at least, according to the story she tells the History Man).

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

And during a Wasteland sequence that’s particularly brutal and traumatic for Furiosa, Miller’s camera leaps back into the surrounding mountains for a moment, and we see a familiar silhouette watching events from afar, next to his trademark V8 Interceptor.  I wonder now if Mad Max’s cameo is meant to show he has a connection with Furiosa even before he meets her in Fury Road.  Does what he observes here remind him of the loss of his family in the original movie?

 

Despite its quality, Furiosa has done badly at the box office.  I suspect many blokes who enjoy action movies chose to skip this one because it wasn’t about Mad Max but about – ugh! – a girl.  Conversely, it obviously didn’t appeal to family audiences.  About a girl it may be, but Furiosa is also the most brutal Mad Max film yet.  It’s got the highest body-count and, while the franchise has always managed to be violent without wallowing in gore, there are more moments than usual where bullets strike faces, flamethrowers torch bodies, throats get slashed and body-parts are severed.  Sadly, Furiosa‘s underperformance has cast doubt on whether George Miller’s planned sixth entry in the franchise, Mad Max: The Wasteland, will ever be filmed.

 

To borrow two of Dementus’s quotes…  It’s a pity that after Furiosa’s box-office flop, people are questioning Miller’s boss-ority.  Because he still has in him to be epic.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

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Still got a Licence to Kill – and thrill

 

© Eon Productions

 

Another unwelcome reminder that I’m now old and decrepit…  I’ve just discovered that 35 years ago today, on June 13th 1989, Licence to Kill opened at the Leicester Square Odeon in London.  Time, I think, for a 35th-anniversary tribute to one of my favourite Bond movies.

 

Few events depress me more than when a film critic like Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian or Pete Travers in Rolling Stone, who knows nothing about James Bond and whose general opinions I don’t think much of either, decide it’s time to pen a feature ranking the Bond films from ‘best’ to ‘worst’.  That invariably means that the 1989 movie Licence to Kill with Timothy Dalton playing Bond ends up near the bottom, held off the ‘worst’ spot only by 1985’s A View to a Kill.  Bradshaw, Travers or whoever the no-nothing critic is will invariably damn Licence to Kill with such adjectives as ‘humourless’, ‘dour’, ‘violent’ and ‘misjudged’.

 

This was the film where Timothy Dalton and the Bond production team decided it was time to shake up the tried-and-tested formula of fantasy plots, over-the-top villains and unlikely action set-pieces and incorporate something more authentic.  In fact, Licence to Kill is a trailblazer for the Bond films of the 21st century, when the series was rebooted into a darker, grittier and critically acclaimed form with Daniel Craig.  But it rarely gets any credit for that.

 

Well, today, 35 years on, it’s time to stand up and be counted.  I think Licence to Kill is a great Bond movie.  When it appeared, I believed it was the best instalment in the series since the 1960s and I still regard it as being among the best half-dozen in the series’ 60-year history.  That its critical reputation is tarnished is down to bad luck.  It was unlucky in the reaction it got from fickle film critics who’d spent the previous two decades complaining that the Bond movies, during the tenure of Roger Moore, had become ‘too silly’ and had lost the ‘serious’ tone of the Ian Fleming books on which they were based.  But the moment that Licence to Kill appeared, they wailed that it was ‘too serious’ and lamented the loss of the glorious silliness of good old Roger Moore.

 

Licence to Kill was unlucky too because, although it made a respectable profit outside the USA, the American takings were the lowest ever for a Bond movie.  Despite what many think, this wasn’t a reflection of its quality, but the result of it being released at an inopportune time when cinemas were already crowded with Lethal Weapon 2, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (a film that coincidentally was choc-a-bloc with Bond alumni like John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover and the original 007 himself Sean Connery).

 

© Eon Productions

 

And it was unlucky to be the last movie before the great Bond hiatus of 1989 to 1995, during which no new Bond films were made due to a legal dispute between Danjaq, the franchise’s holding company, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United Artists.  This gave people the false impression that Licence to Kill, and Timothy Dalton, had crocked the series for half-a-dozen years.

 

When I saw Licence to Kill 35 years ago, what impressed me first was that it had a plot.  Not a tangle of subplots and diversions created because producer Cubby Broccoli and his writers wanted to fit in copious action and special-effects set-pieces involving, say, gondolas that turn into speedboats, and speedboats that turn into hang-gliders, and crashing cable cars, and Bond falling out of a plane without a parachute, and laser-gun shootouts in outer space, but a plot that moves smoothly from A to B and to C.

 

Licence to Kill begins with Bond being best man at the wedding of his CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison, who’d already played Leiter in 1974’s Live and Let Die).  Leiter’s big day proves even more eventful than expected because he has to interrupt his nuptials to seize Latin American drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi).  Sanchez has suddenly turned up on American soil in pursuit of his errant mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and her boyfriend – whose heart Sanchez cuts out before Leiter and the Feds clamp the cuffs on him.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Felix gets married as planned, but things take a dark turn when Sanchez escapes from captivity, with the aid of crooked DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill).  He and his henchmen turn up at the Leiters’ home on their wedding night to get revenge.  Leiter’s new wife Della (Priscilla Barnes) is murdered – Sanchez’s number-one scumbag minion Dario, played by a very young Benicio Del Toro, crows at Leiter, “Don’t worry, we gave her a nice honeymoo-oon!”  Leiter himself is dunked in a shark tank in a marine research centre in Key West, which is one of the fronts for Sanchez’s US drugs-smuggling operation.  Later, Bond discovers Della’s dead body and Leiter’s just-about-alive one, minus a couple of limbs, and vows revenge.

 

Bond starts by investigating the marine-research lab and then Sanchez’s research vessel the Wavekrest – by this time Sanchez himself has returned to base, a fictional Latin American country called Isthmus.  He tangles violently with Dario and Sanchez’s sleazy American lieutenant Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe) and, gratifyingly, he drops Killifer and his suitcase of blood money into the shark tank that Leiter was maimed in.  (“You earned it!  You keep it!”)

 

Along the way, he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), an airplane pilot who’s been working for Leiter in some mysterious capacity, and incurs the wrath of his boss M (Robert Brown), who thinks he’s getting involved in matters that don’t concern him (“We’re not a country club, 007!”) and revokes his licence to kill.  This was why the film had provisionally been titled Licence Revoked until, the story goes, research in the USA suggested that many Americans didn’t know what the word ‘revoked’ meant.

 

Now rogue, Bond steals a fortune in drugs money from the Wavekrest and uses it to fund a trip to Isthmus for him and Bouvier.  There, he tries to assassinate Sanchez but fails and, in the process, unwittingly exposes a secret operation being run against Sanchez by agents from Hong Kong.  This leaves Sanchez with the impression that the agents were the ones trying to assassinate him and Bond, by exposing them, is actually on his side.  An unlikely bromance ensues and Sanchez, enamoured with Bond, tries to recruit him into his organisation.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Aware that Sanchez is obsessed with loyalty, Bond starts planting doubts in Sanchez’s mind about the fidelity of his many henchmen who, in addition to those already mentioned, include his head of security Heller (Don Stroud) and his whizz-kid accountant Truman-Lodge (Anthony Starke).  Time, though, is running short for Bond because the two members of Sanchez’s organisation who know his true identity are returning to Isthmus: Krest, on board the Wavekrest, and Dario, who’s coming by way of El Salvador, where he’s managed to procure some stinger missiles.  Sanchez intends to use these to shoot down American aircraft in revenge for his recent incarceration.

 

What follows involves much mayhem and gruesome death – death by being doused in gasoline and set alight, by being blown apart in a decompression chamber, by being impaled on forklift-truck blades, by being fed into a cocaine-grinding machine.  A lot of this is inflicted by a now-paranoid Sanchez on the people who work for him.  Yes, Licence to Kill seems a million miles removed from the Roger Moore Bonds, where the most gruesome things were the inuendo-laden jokes cracked while Moore got intimate with ladies about half his age.  But while the brutality here may shock someone accustomed to the escapist fantasises of the 1970s and 1980s Bond movies, I loved it.

 

This was the sort of Bond imagined by Ian Fleming, most of whose books I’d read before I saw any of the films.  Not that Fleming ever wrote about 1980s Latin American drug dealers – his gangsters were of the James Cagney variety, with names like ‘Jack Spang’, ‘Sluggsy Morant’, ‘Sol Horowitz’, ‘Sam Binion’ and ‘Louie Paradise’.  But Dalton nails it as the screen Bond who was closest to the character described by Fleming.  Smooth and confident on the surface, but subtly troubled underneath, he does some bad stuff in the line of duty and hates having to do it.  But even more, he hates the evil deeds – like the murderous violation of his best friend’s wedding – that compel him to do it.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Not that the film is unremittingly dark.  It has some amusing lines and likeable performances.  One thing that brings a smile to the face is the entry into the plot, halfway through, of Bond’s secret-service armourer Q, played by the venerable Desmond Llewellyn.  Q takes some leave and nips over to Isthmus to help Bond and Bouvier out, bringing with him a cache of his famous gadgets.  (“Everything for a man on holiday.  Explosive alarm clock…  Guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it.  Dentonite toothpaste…  To be used sparingly.  The latest in plastic explosive.”  “I could do with some plastic,” Bond notes.)  After the Moore films, where Q’s main function was to be the butt of Bond’s jokes, it’s nice to see him with an expanded role and in a different dynamic with Bond.  In Licence to Kill, the two men actually like, respect and care about each other.

 

Llewellyn, though, is just one player in a generally delightful cast.  A 1980s / 1990s action-movie character actor, and nowadays a Sinatra-esque crooner, Robert Davi is excellent as Sanchez.  He tempers sufficient quantities of rottenness with some unexpected integrity – for instance, he insists on honouring the deal he’s made with Killifer, even though his sidekicks urge him to take the easier option of whacking the guy.  Some similarly distinguished character actors play the other villains: Zerbe, Stroud, McGill and, of course, Del Toro.  Plus you get some familiar and welcome faces  in smaller roles, including Frank McRae from 48 Hrs (1982) and The Last Action Hero (1993) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from the Mortal Combat franchise.

 

Also deserving praise is Carey Lowell.  Just as Davi is the great overlooked Bond villain, Lowell is the great overlooked Bond girl.  From the very beginning, when she shuts up the odious Dario by shoving a pump-action shotgun into his crotch, her Pam Bouvier character means business.  Her gutsiness is immensely refreshing after so many Bond actresses in the 1970s and 1980s had been given roles that were wooden (Carole Bouquet), insipid (Jane Seymour) or just plain dumb (Jill St John, Britt Ekland, Tanya Roberts).  It’s good too that she doesn’t just exist to follow Bond but has her own agenda.  She plans to retrieve the stinger missiles before Sanchez does serious damage with them, a scheme for which she’s enlisted the help of the duplicitous Heller.

 

© Eon Productions

 

What else do I like about Licence to Kill?  I like its references to Ian Fleming’s fiction.  Milton Krest, the Wavekrest and Sanchez’s fondness for whipping Lupe with a stingray’s tail come from the 1960 short story The Hildebrand Rarity, while Leiter’s encounter with the shark is lifted from the 1954 novel Live and Let Die.  I like how the secondary Bond girl, Talisa Soto’s Lupe, survives the film.  The secondary Bond girl in many films, from Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever (1971) to Berenice Marlohe’s Severine in Skyfall (2012), ends up as a sacrificial lamb, killed to show how beastly the villains are.

 

And I like how the film is a spiritual sequel to perhaps the best-ever Bond movie, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which ends with Bond getting married and then seeing his new wife Tracy murdered by his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  This is referenced in Licence to Kill by a moment when Bond becomes melancholic during Leiter’s wedding.  “He was married once,” Leiter tells Della, “but that was a long time ago.”  (When I saw the film in 1989 in a cinema in Aberdeen, someone in the row behind me declared: “Aye, an’ he looked like George Lazenby at the time!”)  This suggests that later in the film Bond isn’t just avenging Leiter and Della, but Tracy too.

 

Licence to Kill isn’t perfect, though.  There are a couple of longueurs.  For a man who’s recently lost  wife and limbs, David Hedison’s Leiter seems unfathomably cheerful when he reappears at the end.  Maybe it’s the drugs they were feeding him at the hospital.  And Carey Lowell’s Bouvier is ill-served by a scene where she encounters Lupe, finds out that she’s spent the night with Bond and reacts like a sulky, jealous schoolgirl.  When Q diplomatically suggests that Bond only did it for the sake of the mission, she retorts: “Bullshit!”

 

Licence to Kill was, alas, Timothy Dalton’s final showing as Bond.  When the franchise finally got going again with 1995’s Goldeneye, it was with the cuddlier Pierce Brosnan in the role.  I like Brosnan, but always found his attempts to combine the physicality of Sean Connery with the smoothness of Roger Moore a little unconvincing.  As I’ve said, Dalton strikes me as the actor who came closest to portraying Bond in the way Fleming had imagined him and, for me, there’s no higher accolade.  He’s the connoisseur’s Bond.

 

© Eon Productions

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Two temples by the sea

 

 

Pura Tanah Lot is a Hindu sea-temple founded in the 16th century and located on Bali’s southern coast.  It sits on top of a pedestal of rock that, when the tide is in, becomes an island and is inaccessible from the shore.  When the tide is out, a rugged, rocky shelf forms a causeway connecting the temple and its pedestal to the mainland.

 

My partner and I arrived there one afternoon while the tide was out beyond the temple.  The shelf between it and the shore was a messy palette of seaweed-greens and damp-looking greys and browns.  Here and there, pools of trapped seawater glinted in the sun like shards of blue glass.

 

 

The rock supporting the temple has a froth of vegetation, including trees, growing along its landward side while the temple-buildings are clustered on its seaward side.  Flights of stone steps coil up the rock but, when we visited, most sightseers had to be content with wandering about the drained shelf around it.  Only a few folk, serious worshippers, were allowed to ascend the steps to the temple itself.

 

 

We made our way to the temple’s southern side, mainly to get out of the heat and glare of the afternoon sun, which was so fierce it created a glowing white band across the sea.  There, we scrambled up onto a higher level of the shelf, where parts of it were carpeted in mushy brown growths, like pulped kelp.  Viewed from this position, the temple and its pedestal had the shape of a sagging haystack.  But we couldn’t go the whole way around the temple because we came to a fracture in the shelf, which extended to the bottom of the temple-rock from the ocean.  The fracture had created a gorge, with seawater racing tumultuously along its bottom.

 

 

Predictably, vendors and pedlars were selling their wares among the throng of sightseers between the temple and the shore. One was hawking kites and had one up in the air, shaped like a galleon with fancy, multicoloured sails.  Meanwhile, along the shoreline, at the bottom of the miniature cliffs there, were some cavities that looked like cave entrances.  One had a queue of people waiting to go inside and a sign above saying ‘ULAR SUCI – HOLY SNAKE’.  This was explained by the temple’s website: “The cave is inhabited by some holy sea snakes, which are believed as (sic) incarnations of shawls of Dang Hyang Nirartha (founder of Tanah Lot Temple).”  In other words, Dang Hyang Nirartha is said to have created the sea snakes from his shawl, or sash, to protect the temple against evil spirits.

 

 

The ground overlooking Pura Tanah Lot is home to an attractive temple complex.  It has well-maintained green spaces and handsome statues that, unlike the discoloured and lichened ones I’ve seen in other Balinese temples, are clad brightly in gold-coloured robes and armour.

 

 

Pura Luhur Uluwatu is another of Bali’s famous sea-temples.  It’s further south, is located on the western tip of the Bukit Peninsula and was officially established in the 11th century, though a small place of worship may have existed there site earlier.

 

After the entrance and ticket desk, the approach to the temple was through a pleasantly leafy, wooded area.  However, a stark red sign warned us of potential dangers ahead: “BE CAREFUL IN BRINGING ITEMS SUCH AS SUNGLASSES, HATS, HANDPHONES, ETC., BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY MONKEYS IN THIS AREA.  IF YOUR STUFF IS TAKEN BY A MONKEY, REACH FOR (sic) OUR OFFICER.  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GET THE STUFF BACK WITHOUT ASSISTANCE FROM OUR OFFICER.  The information about the monkeys swiping phones particularly alarmed us.  Currently resident in Singapore, our smartphones are laden with important Singaporean ID, banking and  transport apps and we’d be screwed if we lost them.  So, we agreed that, during our visit, one of us would take photos with their camera-phone while the other kept a lookout for marauding monkeys.

 

Further on, in the temple complex, we found a sign giving more details about the local monkey population.  There are 11 hectares of woodland surrounding the temple, known as Uluwatu Forest, and in it live some 400 grey long-tailed macaques.  These are divided into six groups – named riting, tapak, melem, celagi, amplung and gading – whose members range from 50 to 150.  The fact they were organised in gangs made them seem more criminal then ever.

 

The woodland extended right to the temple, so that its grounds were bathed in green-tinted light and rippling shadows.  But because the place is perched on a cliff, 97 metres up, this eventually gave way to dramatic views of the Indian Ocean.

 

 

Having looked at the temple, we set off down some flights of stone steps and along a path that followed the clifftop to the north.  Below, the glassy blue of the sea changed to a mottled blue, white and teal near the shore, and became a turbulent white froth along the rocks at the cliff’s base.  The cliffs themselves were largely bearded in green vegetation, with a sprinkling of scarlet flowers at the top.  We came to a viewpoint at the path’s end, took some pictures – still guarding against monkeys – and headed back.

 

While approaching the temple again, we heard ahead of us a chorus of shrieks – female ones.  The monkeys had raided a party of Chinese lady tourists.  And a few minutes later, back at the temple, we saw one monkey crouching on a wall besides some steps, playing with somebody’s floppy white hat.

 

Another path ran along the clifftop to the south. It was scenic too but the landscape there was less spectacularly contoured than it was along the northern path.

 

 

This temple also contained some interesting statues.  There was a crouching, snarling, winged creature, its maw crammed with short tusks, like a canine variant on the Hindu / Buddhist / Jain half-bird, half-human deity Garuda.  There was a statue of Ganesha, left arm raised and crooked at the elbow as if scratching his head.  I have to say this was the most monstrous representation I’ve seen of this usually genial, elephant-headed deity.  The effect was because of his big, blank, boiled-egg-like eyes and his tusks, which were more like fangs, short and thrusting up from his lower jaw.

 

Finally, there was a statue of the monkey-god Hanuman, in an Action Man pose, wearing battle armour and screaming with exertion.  However, lots of little monkeys were swarming around him, climbing up his legs and arms.  I know he’s supposed to command a monkey army, but in this depiction it looked more like his minions were attacking him.

 

 

Either that, or they were trying to pinch his phone.