October 2025 – Blood and Porridge

October 23, 2025

What a Sigh is there

It was my birthday a while ago and my lovely mother-in-law sent me a batch of rock-music-themed T-shirts as a present. One was emblazoned with the striking cover-illustration of the 1998 album Cruelty and the Beast by County Suffolk gothic / symphonic heavy metal band Cradle of Filth. Cruelty and the Beast was a concept album inspired by the legendary 16^th / 17^th century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory, who supposedly bathed in the blood of slaughtered virgins in an attempt to keep herself young-looking. (Fittingly, the album featured narration by the late, great horror-movie actress Ingrid Pitt, who played Bathory in the 1971 Hammer film Countess Dracula.) Anyway, I’d been waiting for an opportunity to wear this new T-shirt in public. The opportunity arrived on October 16^th, when Japanese black metal band Sigh performed at Singapore’s Phil Studio.

Actually, my T-shirt matched the macabre vibe established by the second support act, the Singaporean Tok Yathraa. (I couldn’t get away from work early enough to catch the first support act, which was N3M3515 – think of those numbers as letters – described intriguingly online as a “one-man ChipDoom Project from Singapore, armed with a Classic Gameboy, combining elements from Sludge Doom and Hardcore.”) Tok Yathraa is a black-shrouded, hooded, white-faced, rather Bergmanesque figure who, when interviewed on the Filthy Gods of Metal website, described himself as “a one-man band which started on 16th May 2020… heavily influenced by King Diamond, Mercyful Fate, Black Sabbath, Immortal, S.M. Salim, Judas Priest and Wings.” It might come as a shock for the classic Malay singer S.M. Salim or, indeed, Paul McCartney’s Wings to find themselves included in such illustriously metallic company. In the same interview, he called his music “bomoh metal, a fusion of black metal plus heavy metal plus focusing on subjects of local / Asia ghosts.”

Now fronting a three-piece band with a drummer and bass-player, Tok Yathraa put on a show that was simultaneously spooky and good fun, with his references to the ghosts and folklore of the Malay Peninsula nicely anticipating Halloween at the end of this month. He went down well with the small but enthusiastic crowd whom, at the beginning of his set, he encouraged to stand close to the stage to make things more intimate.

Headliners Sigh also have roots in the sub-genre of black metal, which esteems shrieking vocals, hectic and distorted guitars and copious allusions to occult, Satanic and / or pagan skulduggery, and is essayed by corpse-painted and pseudonym-laden musicians. Indeed, historically, their black metal credentials are impeccable. They formed in 1989, heavily inspired by the black metal scene becoming popular – and soon notorious – in Scandinavia and a few years later were signed to the Norwegian label Deathlike Silence Records by Euronymous, co-founder of the band Mayhem. And, yes, Euronymous was the bloke who’d be stabbed to death in 1993 by Varg Vikernes, of the band Burzum, during a period when the Norwegian black metal scene went down some very dark roads indeed.

But in the three decades since – during which time, vocalist, keyboardist and bassist Mirai Kawashima has been the band’s leading light and one, enduring member – Sigh have also distinguished themselves with their willingness to experiment. Their sound has incorporated elements from classical music, traditional Japanese music and elsewhere, so that it’s earned such epithets as ‘avant-garde’ and ‘progressive’. Their eclectic-ness was certainly on display tonight. For example, their second singer and multi-instrumentalist Dr Mikannibal – according to Google AI, she’s actually a professor with ‘a doctorate in physics form the University of Tokyo’ – played a shamisen at one point and a saxophone at another. That was when she wasn’t pouring fake blood over her face from a goblet and shrieking sepulchrally – all good, ghoulish fun, by the way.

Their set – much of which was drawn from the 2007 album Hangman’s Hymn, which they re-recorded this year as I Saw the World’s End – Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV, and from the 2022 album Shiki – was a riot. It contained enough of the band’s original black metal lodestone to keep headbangers in the audience happy but offered plenty of other elements to keep the proceedings fresh and unpredictable. The band’s look was great too. It was obviously influenced by such Japanese things as manga, kabuki and ukiyo-e – the colourful woodblock prints from the Edo period – as well as by Tim Burton and the traditional corpse-paint and general gruesomeness of black metal. I noticed how the guitarists had painted-on stitch-marks at the corners of their mouths, suggesting Kuchisake Onna, the fearsome slit-mouthed lady of Japanese urban myth. Though I don’t know what the black mask (or was it black gunk?) covering the face of the drummer was meant to represent. Anyway, he looked pretty fearsome too.

As I said, the crowd was relatively small, but the performers gave it their all. There was a splendid vibe and I had a great night. In my heavy metal live-music memories, this will be up there with seeing Megadeth (supported by Korn) in Chicago in 1995, or Motorhead (supported by Saxon) in Norwich in 2009. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t massively attended. I tried to explain this to Tok Yathraa, whom I encountered at the end of the evening, after Sigh had finished their set. He looked slightly bemused by my enthusiasm. Well, I’d had a few beers by then.

One thing did put a dampener on the evening, though. Also after the gig’s end, I got talking to one of Phil Studio’s staff-members and learned from him that the venue will be closing down on November 2^nd. This is thanks to an economically lethal cocktail of ‘high operational costs, compliance burdens, regulatory red tape, and double standards’. It comes in the wake of the closure two months ago of the Projector Cinema, a rare place in Singapore where you could get to see movies considered too niche to be shown in the city’s cineplexes. Oh dear, Singapore. If you keep on shedding your independent, alternative and idiosyncratic creative spaces like this, you’re going to end up as bland, corporate and culturally airless as Dubai… Or indeed, Edinburgh (see here, here and here).

October 13, 2025October 13, 2025

Paul Thomas Anderson wins this battle

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

The critics have, almost universally, lavished praise on One Battle after Another (2025), the new movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. (Though he didn’t try to adapt it directly, Anderson’s script took some inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.) The praise is richly deserved. I went to see it in my local cinema a few days ago and, afterwards, I hadn’t felt so exhilarated by a film since watching Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) on a big screen a decade earlier.

Heading the movie’s cast is Leonard DiCaprio, who plays Pat, a bomb-maker involved in a revolutionary American group called the French 75. The ’75 stick it to The Man by freeing recent Latin-American immigrants from detention centres and blowing up banks and the offices of right-wing politicians. Surprisingly, the plodding, unshowy Pat has a relationship, then sires a child, with fellow-revolutionary Perfidia Beverley Hills. Essayed by Teyana Taylor in a short but devastating performance, Perfidia is the opposite of DiCaprio’s character. She’s a force of nature: loud, fearless and given to flamboyant gestures, like humiliating the sleazy commander of a detention centre by forcing him to jerk off in front of her. It’s entirely in keeping with her character when she’s shown firing a machine gun whilst massively pregnant.

To put an end to the French 75, the authorities appoint the ruthless and immoral Captain Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), coincidentally the detention-centre commander who was made to have that embarrassing, public wank. Lockjaw captures Perfidia and compels her to rat on her colleagues, and thereafter it becomes open season on the ’75, with most of them being arrested or – more often – summarily executed. Pat and his now-infant daughter manage to escape with new identities (‘Bob and Willa Ferguson’) and end up living a low-key, mostly off-grid existence in a Californian town called Baktan Cross. Pat / Bob decays into a booze and dope-raddled paranoid, terrified the past will catch up with them. Wilma (Chase Infiniti) grows up with no idea of her real origins and becomes a teenager bemused by, and frequently having to nursemaid, her eccentric old dad.

15 years later, Captain Lockjaw is invited to join an Illuminati-like organization called the Christmas Adventurers Club, whose members belong to the white American elite and are wealthy, powerful… and extremely racist. Lockjaw’s relationship with Pefidia in the days of the French 75 was more than one of pursuer and quarry. He came to fetishise her, his obsession triggered by that first, masturbatory encounter, and they were briefly intimate prior to her capture – which highlights what a wild, try-anything-once character Perfidia was. Now Lockjaw fears that he might be Wilma’s father, not Pat / Bob, and having a mixed-race daughter would obviously torpedo his chances of joining the Christmas Adventurers. So he launches a military crackdown on Baktan Cross, ostensibly to round up illegal immigrants, but really so he can find Pat / Bob and the inconvenient Wilma and erase them.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

That’s the set-up established during One Battle After Another’s first quarter and it’s all you need to know. What follows is a cinematic rollercoaster ride as Pat / Bob and Wilma, in separate locations when Lockjaw and his uniformed, heavily-armed goons crash into Baktan Cross, flee, hide, fight back and try to find each other and escape. Along the way, they encounter Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s local karate teacher who’s much more than he seems; a bounty hunter with a conscience (Eric Schweig); an assassin sent by the Christmas Adventurers to clean up Lockjaw’s mess (John Hoogenakker); some skateboarding radicals; a nasty far-right militia who dispose of people for money; and a secret enclave of nuns with guns.

As you’ll gather from the synopsis, One Battle After Another is a politically charged movie. It regularly focuses on how how the USA reacts to immigrants, often impoverished, frightened and vulnerable people, both mistreating them and unscrupulously using them as pawns in power games and culture wars. This is timely considering what Trump and his minions are doing at the moment. It has to be said, though, that Lockjaw and the police and troops under his command go about their business with much more precision, organization and efficiency than the masked, clumping thugs in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have managed so far. Predictably, you don’t have to look far on the Internet before you find negative reviews of the movie posted by far-right frothers, incensed by what they see as its Marxist / communist / socialist / radical-leftist leanings.

But as well as being political, One Battle After Another is very funny. DeCaprio’s Pat / Bob may have been a revolutionary once, but for most of the movie he’s an amusingly grumpy and befuddled middle-aged dad, showing zero patience, say, for his daughter’s insistence that he respects her schoolfriends’ preferred pronouns. Particularly funny are the scenes where, on the run from Lockjaw, he tries to phone what’s left of the French 75 to beg them for help. He’s far from impressed when they demand he reels off an array of code-phrases to prove he’s who he says he is – codes he’s mostly forgotten during the past 15 years. DeCaprio’s subsequent meltdowns are hilarious, though these scenes will strike a chord with anyone who, in the days before voice-recognition, tried to phone their bank but failed to cite the right security numbers.

The film makes interesting parallels between the French 75 and the Christmas Adventurers Club. Though they’re positioned at different ends of society, at the bottom and at the top, both are shrouded in secrecy and pompous security protocols and both believe they are doing great works and bending history to their wills. Seen from outside, though, they seem like two groups of overgrown kids who’ve set up gangs with stroppy rules about who gets to be ‘in’ and who doesn’t.

One Battle After Another features, perhaps, Leonardo DeCaprio’s best-ever performance. His Pat / Bob character is an extension of Rick Dalton, the frustrated over-the-hill movie star he played in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). But while Dalton had his loyal buddy and stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) to keep him from going off the rails, Pat / Bob has no one when the shit hits the fan. His daughter Willa is elsewhere and he has to overcome his many insecurities and get his act together alone. At the same time, DeCaprio convinces us that Pat / Bob, despite his chaotic nature, is a loving father. It’s his desire to save her that keeps him going, no matter what fate throws at him. And in this film, it throws a lot.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

He’s excellently partnered by Chase Infiniti as Willa. Though in reality the actress is 25 years old, she convincingly plays a teenager – one who has her head well-screwed-on at the start of proceedings, but who still has to deal with a very steep learning curve.

Meanwhile, Sean Penn is splendidly villainous as Lockjaw. He’s memorable both because of his grotesque physicality – with his contorted face, weird musculature and lurching gait, he looks like Popeye the Sailor Man rendered in human flesh – and because of his deeply screwed-up personality, which is simultaneously psychotic and pathetic and driven by a juvenile sense of entitlement.

Great though DeCaprio, Infiniti and Penn are, Benicio del Toro comes close to quietly stealing the show. When he first appears, you see him as a character who’s popped up in DeCaprio’s movie. But later, having learnt more about him – his character runs an extensive and meticulously-organised sanctuary and support-network for undocumented immigrants in the town – you begin to feel DeCaprio has strayed into his movie.

There’s also a lovely score courtesy of Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood and, late on, a car chase that could become as legendary as the one in the Steve McQueen classic Bullit (1968). And Paul Thomas Anderson handles things at all times with aplomb.

One Battle After Another should win a slew of Oscars at next year’s Academy Awards. By then, though, Donald Trump may have banned all opposition parties in the USA and put the country under martial law, enforced by real-life Steven Lockjaws in ICE, the National Guard and various far-right militias. So it might not.

If that proves to be the case, I can only say, “Viva la revolution!”

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

October 10, 2025

The best of the Bonds (Part 2)

© Penguin Books

Continuing my look at On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, both the best James Bond novel (published in 1963) and best Bond film (released in 1969). We rejoin the book and film at the moment in their plots when Bond attempts to infiltrate the headquarters of his arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, high in the Swiss Alps…

Bond duly goes to the Piz Gloria, pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray – and here the film glaringly contradicts the continuity established by its predecessor. At the climax of You Only Live Twice-the-movie Bond and Blofeld have a face-to-face confrontation, but in OHMSS Blofeld doesn’t recognise Bond at all. Actually, Bond might be forgiven for not recognising Blofeld either, for the filmmakers decided to recast the role of Blofeld too. Not only do we have Sean Connery replaced by George Lazenby in OHMSS, but we have the goblin-like Donald Pleasence replaced by the bigger and more physical Telly Savalas. To be honest, Savalas is a shade too thuggish-looking for the role, but he’s believable when doing the strenuous things required by the script, such as leading a group on skis in pursuit of Bond and wrestling with him during a breakneck bobsleigh ride. Much as I like Donald Pleasence, I couldn’t imagine the sinister English character actor bouncing about on a bobsleigh.

What’s officially going on in Blofeld’s clinic, Bond learns, is that a group of young female patients are receiving treatment for food allergies. What’s unofficially happening is that Blofeld is brainwashing them whilst simultaneously developing various destructive bacteriological agents in his laboratories. The brainwashed ladies are to become his ‘angels of death’ and, when they return home, they’ll release those agents to decimate whole species of livestock and crops. Blofeld finds out who Bond really is but the secret agent manages to grab a pair of skis and stages an epic night-time escape from Piz Gloria. Blofeld’s henchmen pursue, but Tracy turns up in time to rescue him. Afterwards, he links up with Draco again and persuades him to launch an audacious attack on Piz Gloria using helicopters and his Unione Corse men. Blofeld’s plans go up in smoke, although Blofeld himself escapes – despite Bond’s best efforts – using a bobsleigh. Mission accomplished, Bond proceeds to marry Tracy, and things hurry to their tragic conclusion with Blofeld making an unexpected appearance during their honeymoon.

Both the book and film proceed along similar lines here, although it’s interesting to see how certain aspects of the 1969 film are expanded from what Fleming put in his 1963 book. In 1963, Blofeld was content to wage bacteriological warfare against Britain and Ireland, devastating their wheat, chickens, beef, potatoes, etc. By 1969, Blofeld has widened his horizons – it’s the whole world’s food supply he wants to decimate. Accordingly, the ‘angels of death’ undergo an upgrade too. In the novel they’re a prim, middle-class, goody-two-shoes bunch, all from the British Isles. Rather disdainfully, Bond reflects: “The girls all seemed to share a certain basic girl guidish simplicity of manners and language, the sort of girls who, in an English pub, you would find sitting demurely with a boyfriend sipping a Babysham, puffing rather clumsily at a cigarette and occasionally saying, ‘Pardon’. Good girls who, if you made a pass at them, would say, ‘Please don’t spoil it all’, ‘Men only want one thing’, or, huffily, ‘Please take your hand away’.” One of them even takes umbrage when Bond jokingly compares them to the girls in the St Trinian’s films: “Those awful girls! How could you ever say such a thing!”

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

In the film, the angels come from all over the world and they’re way more glamorous. Indeed, a good number of the actresses went on to brighten up my adolescence during the 1970s with appearances in various cult films and TV shows. There’s Angela Scoular, who also starred in an ‘unofficial’ Bond movie, the dreadful, zany, swinging-1960s comedy Casino Royale (1967); Catherine Schell, who’d be a regular in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975-77); Norwegian actress Julie Ege, who appeared in the kung-fu horror movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production between legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers and legendary British studio Hammer Films; Jenny Hanley and Anouska Hempel, both of whom appeared in Hammer’s ultra-tacky Scars of Dracula (1970); and the impeccable Joanna Lumley. In the late 1970s, of course, Lumley would play Purdey in the revival of The Avengers (1961-69), The New Avengers (1976-77). In fact, you could argue that OHMSS-the-move features three Avengers actresses. In addition to Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley, the face of Honor Blackman – who played Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger – is shown fleetingly during the credits sequence.

Nobly, mindful of Bond’s relationship with Tracy, Fleming has his hero seduce just one of the girls – something he does purely in the line of duty. The filmmakers are less inhibited and for a little while on Piz Gloria Lazenby behaves like a fox in a chicken coup, shagging left, right and centre. The movie also plays up the humour of the situation. Sir Hilary Bray is supposed to be Scottish, so Bond dons full Highland dress before going to dinner with his hosts and their supposed patients. Yes, after having a Scotsman play Bond for five films, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wait until he’s played by an Australian before they pop him into a kilt. This enables the Angela Scoular character to use her lipstick to write her room number on the inside of Bond’s thigh, under the table, which prompts the following exchange: “Anything the matter, Sir Hilary?” “A momentary stiffness… caused by the altitude, no doubt.” If the dialogue for this Bond movie sounds sharper than usual, it’s probably because Simon Raven, the famously dissolute English author, was hired to polish it.

When Bond escapes from Piz Gloria, Peter Hunt and his crew predictably pump up the action scenes beyond what was in the book, but I’m not complaining. Even 45 years later, the scenes where Lazenby skis, runs, drives and fights for his life are very impressive and Hunt makes good use of his experience as a film editor – the action has a frenetic quality that, viewed now after the Bourne movies (2002-16), seems far ahead of its time. Similarly ramped up is the climactic assault on Piz Gloria mounted by Bond, Draco and his gang. In the book it comes across as a brief ‘smash-and-grab’ raid but in the film it’s a full-on battle, complete with grenades, flame-throwers and flying bottles of acid. Rarely does the pulse quicken as much as it does here when Monty Berman’s James Bond Theme kicks in in the midst of the mayhem.

One change the filmmakers made to the plot that I think improves on the book is Tracy being captured by Blofeld. In Fleming’s original, after Tracy come to Bond’s aid, she disappears into the background again. In the movie, Blofeld triggers an avalanche that leaves Tracy unconscious and at his mercy, and Bond missing, presumed dead. When Bond, who of course isn’t dead at all, goes to Draco for help, the Corsican mafia boss has a very real reason for giving him help – his daughter’s life is at stake. It also allows Peter Hunt to show Savalas flirting, with an obviously menacing undercurrent, with Rigg at his mountaintop HQ. Again, I don’t think poor old Donald Pleasance would have done the flirting bit very convincingly.

Fleming depicts Bond and Tracy’s wedding as brief and low-key, but again the film makes it a big, opulent affair. M, Q and Miss Moneypenny (who’s tearful, for obvious reasons) are in attendance, as are Draco’s henchmen, many of whom spent the early part of the film getting the shit beaten of them by Bond. However, both the book and the film converge for the ending, which is as melancholy and understated as it is shocking. There hasn’t ever been an ending to a Bond film like this one – well, not until 2021’s No Time to Die.

© Eon Productions / United Artists

Indeed, it’s annoying that the filmmakers saw fit to follow this with 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, which gets Bond’s revenge on Blofeld out of the way in the first ten minutes, and then becomes a big, lazy, jokey and ludicrous Bond epic that would be the blueprint for Bond films later in the 1970s after Roger Moore had inherited the role. For a proper, spiritual sequel to OHMSS, I think you have to look to the gritty Timothy Dalton Bond movie Licensed to Kill in 1989.

OHMSS-the-film received some unfavourable reviews and made less money than its predecessors, and for years it was regarded as the runt of the litter for the 1960s Bond-films. Much of the animosity towards the film was because George Lazenby played Bond in it for the first and only time. (By Diamonds are Forever, Broccoli had managed to patch things up with the truculent Connery and got him back into the role.) Lazenby certainly isn’t a great actor, but I would argue that because this is a different sort of Bond movie, one where its hero appears vulnerable and wounded, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits the film. He’s believable in terms of what the character has to endure. I couldn’t imagine ‘Big Sean’ breenging through the movie in his usual manner and having the same emotional impact.

Happily, though, OHMSS has been re-evaluated and today is regarded as one of the best of the series. In fact, when 007 Magazine ran a poll in 2012, it was voted the greatest James Bond film ever. Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, who were running the Bond franchise in 2021, were so aware of OHMSS’s improved reputation that they tried grafting bits of it onto No Time to Die. Both films share, for example, a figure grasping a trident in their credits sequences, Louis Armstrong singing We Have All the Time in the World on their soundtracks and, obviously, downbeat endings. Though I feel No Time to Die’s nods to OHMSS only highlight the fact that it’s the lesser of the two movies.

A happier tribute to OHMSS occurs in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). When Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy and co. hit the ‘third level’ and find themselves on a snowy mountaintop battling opponents on skis, it’s obvious what film is being referenced. Indeed, Nolan has more-or-less said that OHMSS is his favourite Bond movie. (He’s also named Dalton as his favourite Bond actor, so he’s clearly a 007 fan after my own heart.)

And much of the film’s greatness is due to the fact that, no matter what innovations were brought to the table by the talented Peter Hunt and his crew, it owes a lot to the original Ian Fleming novel – which, for me at least, is the best of the Bond books too.

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

October 5, 2025October 10, 2025

The best of the Bonds (Part 1)

© Jonathan Cape

Today, I’ve learned, is James Bond Day – even though it’s a bit hard to celebrate the occasion when (1) the franchise now belongs to Jeff Bezos, who, with his vast fortune, private space programme and bald head, would make a good Bond villain, and (2) we currently have no idea who the next James Bond will be.

However, to celebrate the occasion, here is the first half of a lengthy treatise I’ve written about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: both the 1963 novel by Ian Fleming, which I think is possibly the best of the books, and the 1969 movie, which I think is definitely the best of the films. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll abbreviate the title to OHMSS. Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the storylines of the book and film, be warned that his entry will be chock-full of spoilers.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the tenth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. He wrote it in early 1962 at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica. Nearby, meanwhile, Jamaican locations were being used for the filming of the very first James Bond film, Dr No. Thus, James Bond was undergoing a metamorphosis – from a literary phenomenon into something bigger, a franchise incorporating large-scale moviemaking and merchandising and whose central character would soon be an icon of 1960s pop culture. Though the novels were refined examples of pulp fiction, Fleming – who was methodical about his research – at least tried to give them a veneer of believability. With each successive film, however, Bond seemed to drift further from the realm of possibility and into that of outright fantasy.

OHMSS-the-novel feels different from its literary predecessors, but not because Fleming tries to take it in the direction the films were going. He does the opposite. It makes Bond more believable as a character, not less. It’s ostensibly about the first face-to-face encounter between Bond and his archenemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld, who is head of the secretive and deadly crime syndicate SPECTRE. But OHMSS also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability.

Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo, a woman whose father, Marc-Ange Draco, runs a crime syndicate too, the Unione Corse of Corsica. At the novel’s end, with Blofeld seemingly vanquished, Bond and Tracy get married – only for Blofeld to suddenly reappear in the final pages, spray their bridal car with bullets, kill Tracy and leave Bond as a babbling wreck. As a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted at the time, this Bond was “somehow gentler, more sentimental, less dirty.”

When Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman got around to filming OHMSS six years later, five Bond books had been turned into movies and, already, the continuities of the books and films were hopelessly at odds. In the books, Blofeld had made a ‘backstage’ appearance in OHMSS’s immediate predecessor, Thunderball. In OHMSS’s successor, You Only Live Twice, Bond and he have a second and final meeting. It’s the grim tale of the traumatised Bond hunting down and getting his revenge on Blofeld, much of it taking place on a bizarre ‘island of death’ off the Japanese mainland, whose deadly fauna and volcanic discharges attract a steady stream of visitors wanting to commit suicide.

In the Bond movie-world, though, Blofeld had featured in the backgrounds of From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1966) and then played a leading role in the film immediately before OHMSS, 1967’s You Only Live Twice – yes, the title that came after it in the book series. As a result, there isn’t much grimness in You Only Live Twice-the-movie. It’s a jolly science-fictional romp involving stolen spaceships, a secret base disguised as a Japanese volcano and Donald Pleasence playing Blofeld with a white jumpsuit, severe facial scar and fluffy white cat. The film is a cartoonish thing compared with the book because, as far as the films are concerned, the murder of Bond’s wife hasn’t happened yet.

© Eon Productions / United Artists

When OHMSS began filming, the filmmakers – Broccoli and Saltzman, scriptwriter Richard Maibaum and director Peter Hunt, who’d worked as a film editor and second-unit director on the previous five movies – made the brave decision to follow Fleming’s book closely, right up to the tragic denouement. So keen was Hunt to be faithful to the book that supposedly he carried a copy of it with him around the set, its pages marked with his own annotations.

At the start of OHMSS-the-book, it seems like business as usual for Bond. As with the previous novels, he’s a sophisticated, money-is-no-object consumer of the sort of food, drink, cigars, clothes and cars that most of Fleming’s post-war, austerity-Britain readers could only dream about. Although Fleming writes early on that “James Bond was not a gourmet. In England he lived on grilled soles, oeufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad,” a page later we hear him bitching about the quality of a meal he’s just had in a French eatery, about “…the fly-walk of the Paté Maison (sent back for a new slice) and a Poularde à la crème that was the only genuine antique in the place. Bond had moodily washed down this sleazy provender with a bottle of instant Pouilly Fuissé and was finally insulted the next morning by a bill for the meal in excess of five pounds.”

However, the tone soon changes. Bond is in France at the tail end of a mission to locate Blofeld, an interminable and fruitless mission that’s pissed him off to the point where he’s ready to hand in his resignation to M. Then he crosses paths with the troubled but imperious Tracy. In a pricey hotel-cum-casino she commands him: “Take off those clothes. Make love to me. You are handsome and strong. I want to remember what it can be like. Do anything you like. And tell me what you like and what you would like from me. Be rough with me. Treat me like the lowest whore in creation. Forget everything else. No questions. Take me.”

Later, on the coast, Bond intervenes to prevent Tracy from committing suicide and the two of them fall into the clutches of some heavies who turn out to be working for Tracy’s father, Draco, godfather of the Unione Corse. Draco is delighted with Bond taking a protective interest in his daughter and urges him to marry her – offering a one-million-pound dowry as a sweetener. Bond declines the marriage offer but agrees to continue romancing Tracy, if it’ll help her mental state. He also manages to coax some information out of his would-be father-in-law regarding Blofeld’s whereabouts. The super-villain, it transpires, is hiding in Switzerland.

The same events occur in the film version, although in a different order. First, Bond saves Tracy from drowning herself, then he gets to know her intimately. Also, the action takes place not in France, but in Portugal – Peter Hunt felt that by this time cinemagoers were overly familiar with the French coast. Just before the credits kick in (and we get to hear John Barry’s instrumental OHMSS theme, regarded by many as the best Bond tune of the lot), there’s also some breaking of the fourth wall as Bond turns towards the camera and quips, “This never happened to the other fellow.” For yes, this movie features a brand new James Bond. Gone is the slurring Edinburgh brogue, hairy Caledonian brawn and insouciant Scottish scowl of Sean Connery – who by then, apparently, couldn’t even bring himself to exchange words with Cubby Broccoli – and in his place is the inexperienced Australian actor George Lazenby.

Actually, such a novice was Lazenby at the time that the only thing he was known for was appearing in a TV commercial for Fry’s Chocolate Cream. I’ve heard a story that Broccoli saw him a barber’s shop, liked the ‘cut of his jib’ and picked him on the spot. However, interviewed on the making-of documentary that accompanies my DVD copy of OHMSS, Lazenby claims that he already had an audition for Bond lined up. He went to that barber’s because he knew that Connery had used it in the past and he thought it was his best bet for getting a ‘Bondian’ haircut. The establishment was used by other people associated with the Bond movies and Broccoli happened to be there when Lazenby walked in.

© Eon Productions / United Artists

In contrast with the inexperienced Lazenby, the actress playing Tracy in the movie was already a star – Diana Rigg, who’d made a name for herself playing Emma Peel in the gloriously baroque 1960s TV show The Avengers (1961-69). Fascinatingly, for a film series that’s often accused of de-humanising the books and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in the film than in Fleming’s novel. She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, she has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches. Tales about how Lazenby and Rigg didn’t get on during the shoot are legion – most notably about Rigg munching garlic prior to the filming of scenes where Bond and Tracy kiss. Director Hunt has disputed these claims, although I’ve seen at least one interview with Rigg where her comments about Lazenby are uncomplimentary.

Both the book and film show Bond getting an unexpected lead about where to find Blofeld in Switzerland – the College of Arms in London has had dealings with his adversary, who wants them to prove he is heir to the aristocratic title of ‘Compte Balthazar de Bleuchamp’. This allows Bond to adopt the guise of Sir Hilary Bray, a College of Arms genealogist, and travel to Blofeld’s hideout, a mysterious medical clinic perched on top of the Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps, where he promises to do some research in support of Blofeld’s claim to the title.

In the novel Fleming devotes a lot of time to the College of Arms, whose work clearly interests him. It also allows him to explore the theme of snobbery. As Sable Basilisk, a genealogy expert interviewed by Bond, comments: “I’ve seen hundreds of smart people from the City, industry, politics – famous people I’ve been quite frightened to meet when they walked into the room. But when it comes to snobbery, to buying respectability so to speak, whether it’s the title they’re going to choose or just a coat of arms to hang over their fireplaces in Surbiton, they dwindle and dwindle in front of you… until they’re no more than homunculi.” It’s satisfying that Blofeld’s snobbery is the weakness that allows Bond to ensnare him. Mind you, some would say this is rich coming from Fleming. His Bond novels, with their suave, sophisticated, well-travelled and well-heeled hero, have often been accused of snobbery themselves.

It’s also during this stage of the book we learn about Bond’s family. For example, he’s informed by the College of Arms that his family motto – and coincidentally a title for a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie 30 year later – is ‘The world is not enough’, of which he says, “It is an excellent motto which I shall certainly adopt.” And we learn that his father was a Scotsman who “came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe” (a detail honoured by the 2012 Daniel Craig Bond movie Skyfall), while his mother was Swiss.

Not that Fleming is complimentary about his parents’ nationalities. Another genealogist, Griffin Or, says of the Scots in olden times: “In those days, I am forced to admit that our cousins across the border were little more than savages… Very pleasant savages, of course, very brave and all that… More useful with the sword than with the pen.” Of his mum’s homeland, meanwhile, Bond snorts, ”(m)oney is the religion of Switzerland.” M replies to this: “I don’t need a lecture on the qualities of the Swiss, thank you, 007. At least they keep their trains clean and cope with the beatnik problem…” (If M reckoned there was a problem with the beatniks, God knows how he felt in the late 1960s when the hippies appeared.)

Fleming gave Bond a partly Scottish parentage because, it’s said, he was impressed with the job Connery did of portraying his super-spy when filming of Dr No took place in Jamaica in 1962. Dr No-the-film’s influence is detectable elsewhere. In Blofeld’s Alpine base, which in the book is a ski resort as well as a clinic – in the film it’s only the latter – a character points out to Bond a certain lady among the fashionable skiers: “And that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star.” Andress, of course, was Connery’s co-star in Dr No and has a place in cinematic history as the first major Bond girl.

To be continued…

October 1, 2025October 23, 2025

In space, no one can hear the alarm

What an exasperating franchise the Alien one is. It kicked off in 1979 with one masterpiece, Ridley’s Scott’s Alien, and continued in 1986 with another masterpiece, James Cameron’s Aliens. But its instalments after that have been, in various ways, maddeningly uneven. They’ve contained some intriguing ideas, themes, characters, sequences and images. Yet those good things were nullified by other things that were utterly duff.

David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) had as its setting a fascinatingly grim, labyrinthine industrial complex that’d been repurposed as a prison. But it was hamstrung by an ill-conceived script wherein most of the interesting characters vanished halfway through and the movie’s interminable final act consisted of indistinguishable bald guys running Super-Mario-like through corridors.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1998) had some great ideas – Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character reincarnated as a superhuman clone containing bits of alien DNA, the setting of a stricken space station that’s basically The Poseidon Adventure (1974) in outer space, gripping action set-pieces underwater and on a vertiginous ladder. But it suffered from juvenile plotting and dialogue, a crap-looking new monster (‘the Newborn’), and misjudged performances ranging from Ron Perlman’s obnoxious overacting to Winona Ryder’s wan underacting.

In 2012 and 2017 Ridley Scott returned to the franchise and made two prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which again had some nice touches – especially Michael Fassbender’s performances as the angelic android Walter and the devilish android David. But the prequels were ruined by their obsession with creating an over-complicated and unnecessary backstory for the aliens. Also, there were some clunking scenes such as the one in Covenant where Walter and David meet up, Walter starts playing a flute, and David suggests, “You blow, I’ll do the fingering.” Ooh-err, missus.

Recently, we got Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus (2024) and, again, some lovely moments – a sequence where the surviving protagonists have to negotiate a shaft in zero gravity while deadly globules of acidic alien-blood float around them; or a bit where a hitherto nice android (David Jonsson) hooks into some tech in order to open a door, accidentally gets upgraded, and turns into a callous shit. But Alien: Romulus blew its potential by paying too much fan-service to the previous films. “Please,” I was thinking as the film’s big finale approached. “Don’t anyone say, ‘Get away from her, you bitch!’” But wouldn’t you know it? Someone did.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the two crossover movies where the aliens encounter the creatures from the Predator franchise, Alien vs Predator (2004) and Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007). That’s because I regard both films as unspeakable shite that deserves to be fired into a black hole.

Now we’ve just had an eight-part TV series entitled Alien: Earth. This was masterminded by Noah Hawley, responsible for five seasons of the Fargo TV show (2014-24) inspired by the 1996 movie of the same name made by Joel and Ethan Cohen. It pains me to say that I feel the way about it as I feel about the post-Aliens alien movies. Alien: Earth has some good bits, but those are offset by some crap bits.

Here’s Alien: Earth’s set-up. (Be warned that spoilers for the series are coming.) It takes place in 2120, shortly before the events depicted in Ridley Scott’s original Alien. Earth is controlled by half-a-dozen super-corporations, including Weyland-Yutani – ‘the Company’ – which featured in the movies. Episode One sees a Weyland-Yutani spaceship, which has been on a mission of exploration and has collected specimens of five different extra-terrestrial species, including some worryingly familiar-looking eggs, return to earth, out-of-control, and crash into a skyscraper in Bangkok. Thailand is the property not of Weyland-Yutani but a rival corporation called Prodigy. The young, impulsive CEO of Prodigy, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), sends in rescue and security teams to secure the disaster site – but also to seize whatever cargo the spaceship is carrying.

Lately, Prodigy’s big project has been to ‘upload’ human consciousnesses – souls, basically – into super-strong and super-durable synthetic bodies. The results aren’t just ‘synths’ – the trendier term for the ‘androids’, like Ash, Bishop, Call, David and Walter, who appeared earlier in the franchise – but ‘hybrids’, which have human ghosts in their synthetic machines. However, Prodigy has only been able to do this with young consciousnesses – they’ve transplanted the souls of six children, dying from incurable illnesses, into the artificial and enhanced bodies of six adults. The first operation moved the soul of a terminally sick girl called Marcy Hermit into a hybrid Boy Kavalier has christened ‘Wendy’ (Sydney Chandler). He’s a big fan of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911) and insists on naming all his hybrids after Peter Pan characters.

Boy Kavalier sends the six hybrids, supervised by an enigmatic synth called Kirsh (Timothy Oliphant), to the crash site to test their responses in an emergency. What he doesn’t know is that Marcy Hermit’s brother (Alex Lawther) is one of the medics already there – and, inevitably, Wendy encounters this sibling of her former self. Meanwhile, it turns out that one spaceship crew-member has survived the crash, a science officer called Morrow (Babou Ceesay), who’s unswervingly loyal to Weyland-Yutani and isn’t about to let a rival company steal his alien specimens. Morrow belongs to a third category of non-human or non-quite-human persons in the 22^nd century, besides synths and hybrids. He’s a cyborg, part-machine, and has a mechanical arm that can exude blades or work as an oxy-acetylene torch.

Boy Kavalier gets the five specimens off the spaceship and transports them to his island headquarters, where they’re placed in a laboratory for study. Predictably – and due partly to Morrow’s attempts to retrieve them for Weyland-Yutani – things go wrong and some of them escape. The escapees include one from a much-loved, 46-year-old movie franchise…

I’ll start with the show’s shortcomings and my first criticism is an obvious one for fans of the films. The aliens aren’t in it much. Alien: Earth features three of the H.R. Giger-designed beasties, one birthed on the spaceship before it crashes into the earth, one created in Prodigy’s laboratory, and one produced by an egg-released ‘face-hugger’ that latches onto a human victim in the same laboratory, but in Alien: Earth they’re little more than a sub-plot. The focus is on the hybrids, synths and cyborgs as they ponder who or what they really are. As such, the show often feels more like a follow-up to another classic Ridley Scott movie, 1982’s Blade Runner.

Also, in Alien: Earth, Wendy gradually becomes able to communicate with the aliens – much to the dismay of her new-found brother. First, she behaves like an ‘alien-whisperer’, but by the last episodes she’s managed to exert full control over them and uses them as attack dogs. This deprives them of agency and – though it’s unsettling to see her direct an alien to tear a platoon of soldiers to pieces – diminishes them as the objects of fear they were in the movies.

And the aliens are inconsistently presented. Several times we see one encounter a group of extras, bloodily slash and chomp its way through them and slaughter them all in a few seconds. But whenever an alien bumps into one of the main cast-members, it immediately becomes slower, clumsier, and more incompetent, which allows the main cast-member to escape. Basically, the aliens can be perfect killing machines or can screw up badly, depending on what the script requires at the time.

And that brings me to Alien: Earth biggest problem. Its scripts are so riddled with holes they’re like slabs of Swiss cheese. The Weyland-Yutani spaceship plunges towards Bangkok and catches everyone by surprise. But weren’t there satellites in space and stations on earth tracking it? Didn’t anyone have an inkling it was on the way? It slams into a skyscraper and is left sticking out of it, but inflicts little structural damage – indeed, there are rich people partying at the top of the skyscraper who don’t even notice what’s happened. This is a whole, humongous spaceship. In 2001, we saw what a pair of passenger planes did to the World Trade Centre. Despite dropping out of the sky, the spaceship manages to end up horizontal after ploughing into the skyscraper. When people enter it from outside, its floors are perfectly and conveniently level.

Meanwhile, Boy Kavalier sends his six hybrids – who’ve presumably cost billions of dollars to create – to the crash scene without any briefing, any guards, any weapons, any protective equipment. Led by Kirsh, they just saunter on board, and it’s purely through good luck that at least three of them don’t get splattered or taken over by the extra-terrestrial specimens there. The illogicalities surrounding the hybrids continue through the series. At one point, Boy Kavalier’s scientists have to ‘wipe’ one hybrid of traumatic memories. But they don’t isolate her and don’t inform the other hybrids of what they’ve done. Afterwards, one of them speaks to her and points out that she’s missing a bunch of memories, and she gets even more screwed up as a result. And the scripts turn the hybrids’ superhuman powers on and off depending on the situation. They’re meant to be superstrong. Indeed, at one point, we see one rip off a soldier’s jaw in a fit of pique. But hybrids Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) spend most of Episode Seven struggling to transport a face-hugged body across Boy Kavalier’s island. As they huffed and puffed, I was reminded of Basil and Manuel trying to shift a dead hotel-guest in the Fawlty Towers (1975-79) episode The Kipper and the Corpse.

Speaking of which, Boy Kavalier’s island seems to range in size from being big, with characters taking hours to cross it, to being the size of someone’s back lawn. A young alien, newly erupted from someone’s chest and still in snake-like form, has the whole island and its foliage to hide amid. Yet Timothy Oliphant’s Kirsh soon catches it with a small-looking piece of netting. The diminutive alien lifeform known as ‘T. Ocellus’ – basically a tentacled eyeball – manages in a short time to escape from captivity, scuttle across the island on its tiny tentacles, and find a human body lying on a distant beach, which it parasitically attaches itself to and takes over.

All the alien specimens are highly dangerous – not just the acid-blooded ones – so the lack of security protocols around them is head-scratching. On the spaceship, scientists eat and drink in their presence. They leave alien-housing containers improperly sealed. They don’t fasten those containers correctly on their racks. When one creature breaks free, no alarm-bells go off. In Boy Kavalier’s giant complex, they’re kept in close proximity to one another. Shouldn’t they be all be isolated? You never see any guards near them. Often, the only people in the Prodigy laboratory with them are Kirsh and the hybrids – who are, essentially, children. At one point, a single hybrid is left to supervise the specimens alone. When an external feeding-hatch breaks, he gormlessly opens a door and enters a cell to bring a couple of the beasties their food. That doesn’t end well.

Hawley and his writers are simply being lazy. When you write something, especially a science-fiction, fantasy or horror story, you’re confronted by problems of logic, practicality and consistency all the time. A conscientious writer considers those problems and works out ways of solving them. That’s what’s what human creativity is for – for example, figuring out how an alien creature could escape from a laboratory with a working alarm system. It’s facile to just ignore these issues and hope the viewers won’t notice while the plot unfolds.

All this gives the impression I didn’t like Alien: Earth, but I had some fun with it. For one thing, I thought the show’s retro-futuristic look was wonderful. I loved the scenes on the spaceship, where the set-design nostalgically recreated the style of the Nostromo, the ill-fated craft featured in Ridley Scott’s original.

I also enjoyed the performances. Oliphant and Ceesay are excellent as, respectively, Kirsh the Prodigy synth and Morrow the Weyland-Yutani cyborg, and the scene where they at last square up to each other is the highlight of the final episode. The actors and actresses playing the hybrids do a good job of reminding us that, adult thought they look, these are children: variously naïve, trusting, devious, petulant, confused, frightened. I particularly liked the hapless Laurel-and-Hardy double-act of Gourav and Ajayi.

And though the character is obviously a caricature of fabulously-wealthy-far-too-young sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, Boy Kavalier is played with entertaining, pantomime-villain flair by Samuel Blenkin. His Peter Pan obsession disturbingly echoes Michael Jackson, another rich and powerful man who gathered children into his lair for unsavory purposes. Also, with his tousled black hair, I thought he bore a troubling resemblance to disgraced fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, now dealing with multiple accusations of sexual assault.

But Alien: Earth’s breakout star is surely the afore-mentioned ambulatory eyeball, T. Ocellus, which in the course of the series plonks itself in the eye-socket of, and takes control of, a cat, a sheep and Michael Smiley. No offence to Michael Smiley, but when the thing is embedded in the sheep, it’s most terrifying. The sight of that bloody-faced ewe, with an outsized eyeball, staring impassively from its place of containment, is the stuff of nightmares.