Category: Films

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Films I’d like to see remade (Part 2)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Here are some more films I remember fondly from my youth that, with sufficient love and skill, I think could be remade as wonderful new films.

 

Dark of the Sun (1968)

When, in my early teens, I saw this action / adventure / war movie on late-night TV, I believed it was the toughest movie ever.  At least, I believed that until I saw William Friedkin’s nail-biting Sorcerer (1977), itself a remake, of Henri-George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), which promptly stole its crown as Most Badass Film I’d Ever Seen. 

 

But no matter – Dark of the Sun, or The Mercenaries as it was also known, still seemed pretty hardcore to me.  Why, it even had a chainsaw fight in it!  Thanks to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies (1974 onwards) and the Evil Dead movies (1981 onwards), and to one-off entries like Motel Hell (1980) and Mandy (2018), chainsaw fights are ten a penny nowadays.  But back then, seeing someone lunge at someone else with a whirring, metal-toothed power tool was an intense experience.

 

Based on a 1965 Wilbur Smith novel and directed by Jack Cardiff, Dark of the Sun tells the story of some mercenaries being sent into action amidst the Simbas rebellion in early 1960s Congo. It stars Robert Taylor, Yvette Mimieux – Taylor and Mimieux reunited eight years after appearing in George Pal’s charming 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine – Jim Brown, Kenneth More (subverting his usual, cuddly English-gentleman image by playing an alcoholic doctor) and Peter Carsten (playing a vile, child-murdering Nazi).  At the time, critics lambasted the film for what they saw as its extreme violence.  However, as Cardiff noted, the violence depicted didn’t come anywhere near the real atrocities that’d happened in the Congo then, or near the violence featured in movies in later decades.

 

I’d like to see a remake of Dark of the Sun that updates the intensity, grittiness and violence to fit with 2026 sensibilities and that places the action within the context of 2026 geopolitics.  And is more racially sensitive – any racism in the original movie went over my 13-year-old head but I’m sure that, viewing it today, I’d cringe at parts of it.   At the very least, and despite the presence of Jim Brown as one of the mercenaries, I suspect I’d find it infused with a ‘white saviour’ or ‘white man’s burden’ complex.

 

Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of this film (as is Martin Scorsese) so, as I did with Von Ryan’s Express (1965), I recommend old Quent as the man to helm a remake of it.  I know he’s sworn that he’s only going to make ten films in his lifetime, and his next one will be his last, but I don’t believe that for an instant.

 

Come to think of it, Dark of the Sun has quite a few things in common with Von Ryan’s Express, including a cracking movie film poster designed by the splendid Frank McCarthy and the presence of Nazis.  And like the earlier film, Dark of the Sun prominently features a train.

 

As does my next candidate for a modern remake, which is….

 

© Granada Films

 

Horror Express (1972)

The much-loved British-Spanish movie Horror Express is set on a train hurtling across Siberia in the early 20th century.  The train is being stalked by a decomposing ape-man fossil that’s seemingly come back to life – in fact, it’s possessed by an alien lifeforce and has the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs.  Trying to thwart it are British scientists Sir Alexander Saxon (Christopher Lee) and Dr Wells (Peter Cushing).  Things become even more complicated in the film’s final act when the train is invaded by a bunch of Cossack soldiers, led by Telly Savalas’s villainous Captain Kazan.

 

Directed by Eugenio Martin, Horror Express is basically The Thing (1982) set on board the train from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes.  Saxon and Wells are variations on the characters of Charters and Caldicott, the stuffy but unflappable English cricket-lovers in Hitchcock’s movie who get caught up in the chaos.  That said, you never feel Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are playing anyone other than themselves in Horror Express.  During their careers, the two actors made 22 movies together, were close friends offscreen and have an effortless chemistry here.

 

The decaying ape-man in the original movie is still icky, but it would be nice to see it in a modern remake with a decent special-effects budget where it could do properly mind-blowing, spectacularly gruesome Thing-like things.  To play Saxon and Wells, you’d need a pair of British actors who’ve worked together already and possess some of that Lee-Cushing chemistry – maybe Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, from the BBC TV show Sherlock (2010-17)?

 

And to play Savalas’s murderous Captain Kazan, there can be only one man: Nicolas Cage.

 

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Until recently, I’d have been aghast at the thought of anyone remaking Douglas Hickox’s brilliant horror comedy Theatre of Blood, wherein Vincent Price plays an insane and hammily over-the-top Shakespearean actor called Edward Lionheart.  Enraged by the snobbish London theatre critics who’ve bad-mouthed his performances, Lionheart murders them one by one using methods borrowed from the Bard’s plays.  “They’re not going to start killing critics for giving bad notices, are they?” exclaims the campest critic, played by Robert Morley, who eventually meets a grisly fate modelled on events in Titus Andronicus.  A very distinguished cast of English character actors goes the same way as Morley: Michael Hordern, Dennis Price, Arthur Lowe, Harry Andrews, Robert Coote and Coral Browne.

 

© Harbour Productions Ltd / Cineman Productions / United Artists

 

There’s no shortage of famous modern-day British thespians who could play the supporting cast of doomed theatre critics in a remake – I’d enjoy seeing James Corden get the Titus Andronicus treatment – but surely, surely nobody could recreate the absolutely delicious performance that Vincent Price gives as Lionheart in the original movie?

 

Well, I thought that until I saw Ralph Fiennes in this year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.  Now I’m pretty sure he could be the Vincent Price of 2026.  And actually, Fiennes has played a character not dissimilar to Lionheart in 2022’s The Menu.

 

And if Fiennes wasn’t available, I suppose they could always call on Matt Berry.

 

The Beast Must Die (1974)

Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die is a low-budget horror movie with an irresistible premise.  It’s about a millionaire big-game hunter, played by Calvin Lockhart, determined to bag a werewolf.  He rigs up his country estate with CCTV cameras and motion sensors, procures a helicopter and invites five unsavoury people to visit for a few days convinced that one of them  is a werewolf.  Among those playing Lockhart’s house-guests and staff are Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring and a youthful Michael Gambon.  Needless to say, there is a werewolf present, but it gradually turns the tables on Lockhart and his hi-tech equipment, whilst also bumping off the supporting cast.

 

The ideas is irresistible, as I said, but watching The Beast Must Die on TV as a kid was a frustrating experience.  Due to the inevitable budgetary constraints, Lockhart’s mansion house and grounds aren’t that hi-tech and the werewolf, when it appears, just looks like a big dog.  You’d think the sequence where the werewolf takes out a helicopter would be thrilling, but it isn’t.  Let’s remake this one with a proper budget, so that it’s as awesome as it sounded on paper in 1974.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Amicus Productions / British Lion Films

 

Juggernaut (1974)

The most underrated but, in my mind, the greatest of 1970s disaster movies, Richard Lester’s Juggernaut is mostly set on a British ocean liner stuck out in the stormy north Atlantic.  An anonymous call to the company that owns the liner informs it that half-a-dozen bombs have been stashed on board and they’ll explode unless a ransom is paid.  With weather conditions too severe to allow the ship’s crew and passengers to be evacuated, and the authorities forbidding the company to pay the ransom – which would be surrendering to terrorism – a team of bomb-disposal experts led by Fallon (Richard Harris) and his sidekick Charlie (David Hemmings) are sent to try and make the bombs safe.

 

Back on dry land, a policeman (Anthony Hopkins), whose family are among those trapped on the ship, tries to discover the bomber’s identity.  I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but when a twitchy Freddie Jones appears onscreen, you know who it is.

 

Juggernaut has a wonderful cast all round – not just the three ‘H’s of Harris, Hemmings and Hopkins, but also Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, Clifton James, Julian Glover and many more.  But the show is quietly stolen by Roy Kinnear, playing the ship’s entertainment officer, who has the thankless task of keeping the passengers’ spirits up when at any moment they could be blown to smithereens.  When he organises a fancy-dress party, one passenger appears dressed as the Grim Reaper and carrying a round black object with BOMB written on it.

 

As well as being massively suspenseful, the film offers social commentary. This ship is called the Britannic and it’s not difficult to see Juggernaut as a meditation on the sorry plight of Britain in the mid-1970s, its days as a world power well behind it, being battered by global events it had no power over, such as the Oil Crisis.  In 2026, a decade after Brexit and during the chaotic era of Trump, a remake of Juggernaut would be both more poignant and more cutting.

 

You could also cast, in a Juggernaut remake, the sons of three of its original stars, now well established as actors in their own right: Jared Harris, Toby Jones and Rory Kinnear.  But it’d be fun to see them in roles different from those their dads played.  Kinnear as the policeman, Jones as the entertainment officer, Harris as the bomber?

 

© Two Roads / United Artists

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Films I’d like to see remade (Part 1)

 

From imdb.com / © Rank Organisation

 

I still find it disconcerting when films I enjoyed in my youth are remade in the 21st century: for example, 1980’s The Fog (remade in 2005), 1981’s The Evil Dead (remade in 2013) and Clash of the Titans (remade in 2010), 1986’s The Hitcher (remade in 2007), 1987’s Robocop (remade in 2014) and 1988’s Hairspray (remade in 2007).  My immediate and automatic response to such remakes is, “What, they’re remaking that movie already?  Have you no shame, Hollywood?”

 

This is followed by a feeling of horror as I realise just how long ago it was when those original movies were released.  The first Evil Dead movie was 32 years old – 32 years! – when its remake surfaced, though in my mind it was only yesterday when Sam Raimi’s Deadites made their first-ever appearance and started making life difficult for Bruce Campbell.   And actually, three of the films I remember most fondly from my youth, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) were remakes themselves.  Body Snatchers appeared just 22 years after the 1956 original and The Thing appeared 32 years after its 1950 one.  Scarface was an outlier, since the first Scarface came out in 1932, more than a half-century earlier.

 

Maybe I shouldn’t be so concerned about how soon after the original movie that a remake appears.  I should be concerned about the quality of it – for remakes tend to be shite.  I haven’t seen all those mentioned at the beginning of this entry, but the ones I have seen have been nowhere near as good as the originals.  (The Evil Dead remake probably comes closest, but I still much prefer the ramshackle and low-budget, but resourceful, charm of Raimi’s 1981 film.)  That said, remakes don’t have to be bad all the time – the aforementioned ones by Kaufman, Carpenter and De Palma testify to that.

 

So, without further ado, here are some films – and one series of films – I wouldn’t mind seeing remade in the 21st century, with bigger budgets and better special effects.  But remade decently.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rank Organisation

 

Hell Drivers (1957)

Blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, American director Cy Endfield moved to Britain where, half-a-dozen years later, he made Hell Drivers.  Given the persecution Endfield had suffered, it unsurprisingly takes a dim view of American-style, cut-throat capitalism.  It has that underrated but magnificent actor Stanley Baker as an ex-con who finds a job as a truck driver with a dodgy haulage company, which threatens its drivers with the sack if they don’t deliver loads of gravel across treacherous roads at breakneck speeds.  The reason there aren’t more drivers employed to relieve the pressure, and reduce the danger, is because of a scam involving the local depot manager (William Hartnell) and its off-his-head Irish foreman (Patrick McGoohan, coming across like a brawnier version of Shane MacGowan).  The latter soon becomes Baker’s nemesis.

 

As well as a political message, Endfield injects Hell Drivers with an American-style grittiness rarely seen in British films of the period.  But what really makes the film a joy to watch nowadays is the cast.  As Kim Newman has written of it in Empire Magazine, “how many other movies have an ensemble which includes the original Dr Who (Hartnell), the first James Bond (Sean Connery), the Prisoner (McGoohan), a Man From UNCLE (David McCallum), a Professional (Gordon Jackson), Clouseau’s boss (Herbert Lom), plus Alfie Bass, the excellent Peggy Cummins (of the cult items Gun Crazy and Night of the Demon), the inimitably boozy Wilfrid Lawson, Jill Ireland and Sid James?”

 

In 2026, with capitalism more cut-throat than ever, a remake of Hell Drivers would be timely.  I don’t think, though, setting it in the wilds of Middlesex, West Sussex and Buckinghamshire, where the original was filmed, would work now, so it’d have to have its hard-pressed truck drivers pounding the roads of a less hospitable locale – the Alaskan tundra, say, or somewhere that retains some near-impenetrable tropical rainforest.

 

And to pay proper homage to the original, you’d definitely need a cast made up of actors who’ve played iconic roles in iconic TV shows or movie series.  You could have one of the grittier Bonds (Daniel Craig or Timothy Dalton), one of the grittier Doctors Who (Christopher Eccleston or Peter Capaldi), plus a Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch, maybe), a Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), perhaps someone from the Breaking Bad universe (Bryan Cranston, say, or Bob Odenkirk)…  The possibilities are endless.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

The Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies (1961-64)

This is a little different.  I’d like to see the four movies made about Agatha Christie’s genteel sleuth of a certain age, Miss Marple, which had the delightful Margaret Rutherford in the leading role – Murder She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Most Foul (1964) and Murder Ahoy! (1964) – rebooted as a TV show.  Not just another show about Miss Marple per se – there have been ones with Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie – but one set in the universe of the four Rutherford movies.

 

Thus, its episodes would be set against the tableau of early-1960s England, with Miss Marple depicted as an obstinate, feisty old lady who refuses to know her place and keeps barging into and solving mysteries.  There’d be as much as humour as tension and the show would have the films’ supporting characters, like the timid librarian Mr Stringer (Rutherford’s real-life husband Stringer Davis), who reluctantly helps Miss Marple out, and the exasperated copper Inspector Craddock (Charles Tingwell), who begins each instalment telling her to mind her own business but ends it taking orders from her.  Meanwhile, Ron Goodwin’s jaunty Miss Marple Theme would burble in the background.

 

I suspect in a 2026 version Mark Gatiss would make a lovely Mr Stringer, while Daniel Mays would nicely fill the shoes of the long-suffering Inspector Craddock.  But who would play Miss Marple – or more precisely, play Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple?  Perhaps Dawn French, though she’d have to spend a long time in the make-up chair to recreate Rutherford’s famously jowly, hangdog features.

 

In the original movies, each murder that Rutherford / Marple investigated involved a British institution – a country manor, horse riding, the theatre and the Navy.  She’d duly rattle establishment cages by sticking her nose in where it wasn’t welcome.  So perhaps each episode of this hypothetical series would have her ruffling the feathers of other British institutions of the time – the Army, the House of Lords, Savile Row, Crufts, the country’s nascent rock ‘n’ roll industry…  Miss Marple meets the young Rolling Stones?  I’d pay good money to see that.

 

From wikipedia.org / © 20th Century Fox

 

Von Ryan’s Express (1965)

I never had much time for Frank Sinatra, neither as an entertainer nor as a person, but he left an impression on my 10-year-old self the first time I saw the ripping World War II yarn Von Ryan’s Express.  It’s the story of an American airman, Ryan (Sinatra), downed in Italy, who joins forces with some Allied prisoners of war, led by Trevor Howard.  They attempt an audacious escape into neutral Switzerland by seizing control of a train and steering it up a railway line into the Alps.  Much derring-do is involved as German troops and aircraft go all-out to stop them reaching their destination.

 

It’s great, crowd-pleasing stuff until the ending – spoilers are coming! – which is depicted on the movie poster, painted by the great Frank McCarthy.  The train has almost made it to safety.  Having fought a rearguard action against the Germans, Sinatra is running after the train and has almost caught up with it.  But then….  What happened next put a dampener on things.  But it also lodged the film in my mind forever.

 

With 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino showed his love for rip-roaring if cheesily improbable World War II adventures, so perhaps he could helm a remake of Von Ryan’s Express?  To stick to the innocent, uncomplicated spirit of the original, though, he’d have to forgo his use of the F-word and N-word, and his fetish for close-ups of ladies’ feet, and his nerdish references to ‘film-study criticism of the work of German director G.W. Pabst’.

 

© Hammer Film Productions / Seven Arts Productions

 

Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

Hammer Films’ sci-fi horror film Quatermass and the Pit was based on the 1958 BBC TV serial of the same name.  Both film and serial were written by Nigel Kneale.  It begins with workers on a London Underground extension project digging up an alien spacecraft full of dead, horned, insect-like creatures that are identified by scientist-hero Professor Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir) as inhabitants of the now-lifeless planet Mars.  It transpired that millions of years ago, these sneaky Martians arrived on earth and did some evolutionary tinkering on the apes who were the ancestors of modern humanity.  This tinkering included implanting in the apes an urge to conduct occasional culls whereby those with pure Martian programming exterminated those who’d developed mutations and lost that programming.

 

When some TV news crews descend on the scene, a power surge from their camera-cables reactivates the spacecraft and it triggers a new cull.  London becomes an apocalyptic hellscape where the human inhabitants who retain their Martian conditioning roam around, zombie-like, and use newly awoken telekinetic powers to kill everyone who’s lost it.

 

I still find Quatermass and the Pit impressive today, and scary, though inevitably there are special effects that reflect the limitations of Hammer’s budget.  I’d relish the prospect of a modern, big-budget retelling of the story.

 

One thing that makes the film effective, and affecting, is Kneale’s portrayal of the scientists.  Unlike usual movie-scientists, they aren’t cold-blooded, delusional, self-serving or plain weird.  Instead, Quatermass and his colleagues, Dr Roney (James Donald) and Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley), are portrayed as decent human beings, working with an eager curiosity, a sense of duty and a sense of humour.  Keir and Donald were both Scots, so maybe a modern movie could cast Brian Cox as Quatermass and James McAvoy as Dr Roney.  Actually, I think a third Scottish actor, Karen Gillan, would be excellent as Barbara Judd.

 

To be continued…

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

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Spying economy class

 

© Gardner VI Books AMS006

 

So it’s farewell to Len Deighton, the author, military historian, screenwriter, illustrator and gastronomist who passed away on March 15th at the venerable age of 97.  As a tribute, here’s something I wrote a few years ago after I’d finally got around to reading The IPCRESS File (1962), the spy thriller that made Deighton’s name and supposedly provided an antidote to the more romanticised spy novels popular at the time featuring a certain James Bond.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a James Bond buff.  Because of this, I’d wanted for a long time was get my hands on a copy of Len Deighton’s 1962 spy novel The IPCRESS File – my interest in it being that it’s often touted as the anti-Bond.

 

Whereas 007 is a posh ex-public schoolboy with oodles of money and charm at his disposal, Harry Palmer, spy hero of The IPCRESS File, is an unprivileged and ordinary-seeming bloke with only his working-class wits to help him negotiate the hazardous, occasionally dangerous world of espionage.  Whereas Bond swans around in glamorous international locations enjoying the finest in cuisine, liquor and cars, Palmer trudges the lugubrious streets of London peering at the rain and pigeons through an oversized pair of glasses.  Whereas Bond wins ladies’ hearts with his unflappable insouciance, Palmer gets dumped on by his superiors for his insolence, which to them signifies that he’s a troublesome oik who doesn’t know his place.

 

But hold on.  That’s the impression I always had of Deighton’s character thanks to seeing in my youth the 1965 film version of The IPCRESS File, which featured in its lead role that impeccably deadpan man of the people Michael Caine.  (At least, he was a man of the people until the 1970s, when he started moaning about having to pay tax.)  It was a surprise, then, to finally open the original novel recently and discover that it wasn’t what the film version had led me to believe.  It wasn’t quite as different from the Bond novels as I’d expected.

 

I should qualify that by saying I’m talking in terms of characterisation, not in terms of plot.  For unlike the straightforward, action-adventure plot dynamics of the average Bond novel, the narrative of The IPCRESS File is a twisty, at times head-scratching thing that produces plenty of surprises about who’s working for, and spying on, whom.

 

© Lowndes Productions / Rank Organisation

 

Anyway, firstly, forget about Harry Palmer.  The hero of Deighton’s novel goes through its 250-odd pages without ever revealing his name.  Early on, somebody calls him ‘Harry’, but he immediately muses: “Now my name isn’t Harry, but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever has been.”  All we have is an anonymous narrator recounting events with a laconic turn of phrase whilst giving few clues about his personality and background.  In other words, the main character in The IPCRESS File is a cypher, an empty space into which readers can project their own personalities and so imagine themselves at the centre of the intrigue.

 

A cypher was pretty much what James Bond was too – not so much a properly-rounded character as a device for drawing in the reader.  His creator Ian Fleming was careful not to give him too much individuality.  This policy extended from his bland name (famously borrowed from the ornithologist who wrote the book Birds of the West Indies) to his lack of a life-history – it was only in You Only Live Twice (1964), the last novel published in Fleming’s lifetime, that we learn much about it and even then it turns out that Bond was orphaned at an early age, i.e. denied anything as character-forming as a family background.

 

Being a blank canvas isn’t the only thing that Deighton’s protagonist has in common with Bond.  Both their jobs involve some globe-trotting.  Now this came as a shock to me after seeing the film The Ipcress File – unlike the book, ‘Ipcress’ isn’t capitalised in its title – which determinedly confines its action to the British capital.  However, the book sees him pursue a kidnapped scientist to Lebanon – resulting in a deadly blunder that the film has happening in a London car-park – and later being posted to a Pacific atoll that the American military have commandeered in order to observe and measure the explosion of a neutron bomb.  The Pacific episode, set in a remote and inhospitable fragment of the tropics that the Americans have converted into a base containing “two athletic fields, two movie theatres, a chapel, a clothing store, beach clubs for officers and enlisted men, a library, hobby shops, vast quarters for the Commanding General, a maintenance hangar, personnel landing pier, mess hall, dispensary, a PX, post office, a wonderful modern laundry and a power plant”, is at times so odd and surreal it doesn’t so much resemble a spy story as something by J.G. Ballard.

 

And like Bond, the hero of the literary IPCRESS File has refined taste buds.  We variously see him tucking into ‘Russian tea and apple strudel’, ‘Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice and cooked with celery)’, ‘totem poles of lamb, aubergine, onion and green pepper’, ‘iced Israeli melon’ and ‘fine lobster salad and carefully-made mayonnaise’.  Even his sandwiches seem classy by 1962 standards, consisting of ‘cream cheese with pineapple, and ham with mango chutney… with rye bread’.  Admittedly, this theme appears too in the film, which has a scene where Caine’s Harry Palmer bumps into a superior in a shop and is chided for paying “ten pence more for a fancy French label” of button mushrooms.  The disdainful superior adds: “You’re quite a gourmet, aren’t you, Palmer?”

 

The character’s enthusiasm for a quality meal reflects a similar enthusiasm on his creator’s part.  Indeed, when he was still working an illustrator, Deighton spent four years producing Cookstrips for the Observer newspaper.  These were what nowadays we’d call ‘infographics’.  Each presented a recipe for a particular dish, with pictures, arrows and a minimum of text making the preparation process as simple and clear as possible.

 

From Wikipedia / © Harper Collins

 

Where Deighton’s hero and Fleming’s hero part ways is in their relationships with their employers.  While Bond seems at ease in the secret service, Deighton’s character lacks the wealthy and privileged background that most of his colleagues and superiors have.  And he isn’t impressed by what that background has produced.  He begins the novel working for Military Intelligence under a man called Ross, “a regular officer, that is to say he didn’t drink gin after 7.30 P.M. or hit ladies without first removing his hat.”  Ross, we hear, has given him plenty of ‘toffee-nosed dressing downs’ and at one point he rambles at inordinate length about his huge and lavish garden.  “Ross,” the perplexed narrator breaks in, “Mrs Laing and Dorothy Perkins are roses, aren’t they?”

 

Early in The IPCRESS File, though, he’s transferred from Ross’s unit to a civilian intelligence department of the Home Office called the WOOC(P).  Not that he’s much happier with the person in charge there, a character called Dalby who’s “an elegant languid public-school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury.”  When Dalby asks him if he “can handle a tricky little special assignment,” he retorts, “If it doesn’t demand a classical education I might be able to grope around it.”

 

Having to work with people from moneyed backgrounds presents him with another problem.  His superiors don’t seem to appreciate the fact that he needs a steady income and regular payment of expenses to survive.  When he switches from Ross’s outfit to Dalby’s, he wonders how long he “would have to make the remnants of this month’s pay last before the new scale began.”  Later, he complains that he’s “still two months behind with pay and three with allowances” and that “a claim for £35 in overseas special pay” was “overdue by ten and a half months.”

 

This also surfaces in the film, with Ross and Dalby (played by Guy Doleman and Nigel Green) depicted as a pair of condescending bowler-hatted toffs who view Palmer as an irritant with ideas above his station.  But the unflattering commentary about Britain’s class system is diluted slightly by the addition of a military theme.  Ross and Dalby are both of upright army-officer stock while Palmer, we hear, had an inglorious time in uniform.  (I assume that as an ordinary soldier he was caught up in illegal black-market activities in Germany, though I could be wrong.)  Anyway, he’s spent time in a military prison and might be thrown into one again if he gets on the wrong side of his employers.

 

Thus, Palmer’s insolence isn’t just the result of a general social resentment – it comes too from a particular resentment against an institution, the army, that’s blighted his past and could potentially blight his future.  Meanwhile, the film plays down his financial frustrations and shows him protesting instead against the needless bureaucracy of his work.  Dalby, for instance, insists on a lengthy report being written after every excursion he makes ‘into the field’.

 

Incidentally, James Bond gets the best of both worlds.  He’s well-bred enough to know his way around a flashy casino or expensive golf club, and is choosy about what he eats, drinks and drives, but he knows how to avoid coming across as an arse when mingling with ordinary working folk.  Note how easily he gets into conversation with a pub landlord in Moonraker (1955), say, or with Tiffy, the bargirl at the bordello in The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).  As Henry Chancellor puts it, he’s a ‘snob about things’ but not ‘about people’.

 

To sum up then, I found the hero of Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File rather more Bondian than I’d anticipated.  But what distinguishes him from Ian Fleming’s super-spy is class.  One has an ample supply of it.  For the other, it’s the bane of his bloody life.

 

From Wikipedia / © David Rose / The Daily Telegraph

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Cinematically stoned (Part 2)

 

© Taplin-Perry-Scorsese Productions / Warner Bros

 

I ended my previous post by promising I’d give a list of my favourite movie scenes wherein songs by the Rolling Stones are employed to memorable effect.  Here it is.

 

Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1968) in Mean Streets (1973)

Wow.  Martin Scorsese really likes the Rolling Stones.  Not only has he made a concert movie about them, 2008’s Shine a Light, but he’s used their music in umpteen films: Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), The Departed (2006) and the one that first put him on the map, 1973’s Mean Streets.  Even today, more than 50 years later, the scene in Mean Streets where a young Robert De Niro comes swaggering through a bar, in slow motion, towards a pensive Harvey Keitel, while Mick Jagger hollers in the background about being “born in a cross-fire hurricane”, is a great synthesis of rock ‘n’ roll music and rock ‘n’ roll cinema.  Indeed, Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a fitting accompaniment for the arrival in popular consciousness of De Niro, who’d spend the rest of the 20th century showing Hollywood how to do proper acting.  The 21st century, featuring such efforts as The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), Little Fockers (2010), New Year’s Eve (2011) and Dirty Grandpa (2016)…  Okay, not so much.

 

Satisfaction (1965) in Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Stones’ early, primordial and still potent stomper Satisfaction gets a brief but memorable airing in Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque Vietnam War masterpiece, playing on the radio while Captain Martin Sheen and his not-exactly-fighting-fit crew go cruising up the Nùng River in search of Marlon Brando.  Cue some funky on-deck dance moves by a frighteningly young-looking Laurence Fishburne and some funny / cringeworthy water-skiing moves by Sam Bottoms that knock various Vietnamese people out of their fishing boats.

 

© Omni Zoetrope / United Artists

 

Sympathy for the Devil (1968) in Alien Nation (1988) and in Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Graham Baker’s sci-fi / cop movie Alien Nation isn’t very good.  Its premise of an alien community getting stranded on earth and having to integrate as best as they can with the curmudgeonly human natives was handled much better in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009).  But I do like a woozy, hypnotic scene in it where alien-loathing cop James Caan enters a sleazy alien bar while a lady-alien performs an erotic dance to the strains of Sympathy for the Devil.  Not the original Stones song, but a correspondingly woozy, hypnotic cover-version of it by the great Jane’s Addiction.  I can’t find a film-clip of the scene, but here’s the Jane’s Addiction cover.

 

Meanwhile, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire ends with Sympathy for the Devil on the soundtrack.  Again, this isn’t the Rolling Stones version but a cover, this time by Guns n’ Roses.  It’s every bit as ramshackle, shonky and (for me) enjoyable as the other covers Guns n’ Roses have done, for example, of Wings’ Live and Let Die (1973) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973).  Sympathy for the Devil kicks in when the vampire Lestat – Tom Cruise in one of his rare interesting roles – pops up to claim Christian Slater as his new vampirical companion for eternity.

 

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? (1971) in Casino (1995)

While Martin Scorsese serenades Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel with Jumpin’ Jack Flash in Mean Streets, he employs the Stones song Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? for another of his regulars, Joe Pesci, in Casino.  Remarkably, Scorsese plays all seven minutes of the Santana-esque Can’t You… as an accompaniment to a lengthy sequence showing how Pesci’s Casino character Nicky Santoro gets established in Las Vegas.  Predictably, the sequence has Pesci doing what Pesci usually does in Scorsese movies: being a psychotic shit, barking orders at hoodlum sidekicks twice his size, eating in restaurants, ingratiating himself with fellow Mafiosi, being a psychotic shit, cursing and swearing, getting a blow-job, being a psychotic shit, talking about food, knocking off jewellery stores, acting the loving family man with his non-criminal relatives… and being a psychotic shit.

 

© Légende Entreprises / Universal Pictures

 

Ruby Tuesday (1967) in Children of Men (2006)

Wistful Stones ballad Ruby Tuesday features briefly on the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuarón’s gruellingly pessimistic science-fiction thriller Children of Men.  It’s another cover, sung by Franco Battiato.  We hear it during one of the movie’s calmer moments when Theo (Clive Owen) is visiting his old mate Jasper (Michael Caine), whose home provides a small pocket of sanity amid the unfolding dystopian grimness.  Amusingly, Caine, well known in real life for being a right-wing old grump with an aversion to paying tax, here plays an elderly anarcho-hippy with a fondness for smoking exceptionally strong pot.

 

Gimme Shelter (1969) in The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese loves the Rolling Stones and he loves their apocalyptic number Gimme Shelter in particular.  By my count he’s used it in three movies: Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed.  It’s best deployed at the beginning of The Departed, rumbling in the background while gangland thug Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) expounds his philosophy.  “I don’t want to be a part of my environment,” he intones, imbuing his words with that leery, languid menace that only Nicholson is capable of.  “I want my environment to be a part of me.”  Strangely, in Scorsese’s Shine a Light two years later, Gimme Shelter was one of the songs the Stones didn’t perform on stage.  Marty missed a trick there.

 

© Plan B Entertainment / Warner Bros

 

Street Fighting Man (1968) in Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

Director Wes Anderson also sticks Rolling Stones into his movies, but so far I haven’t mentioned him because I think most of his work is smug, pretentious and annoying.  For example, Play with Fire (1965) figures prominently in 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, an Anderson movie so twee I find it the cinematic equivalent of being force-fed with chocolate-cake mix.  However, I like the scene in his stop-motion-animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox where, to the sound of the rabblerousing Stones anthem Street Fighting Man, Farmers Bean, Boggis and Bunce use three diggers to tear up the den of the titular Mr Fox; forcing the den’s inhabitants to frantically dig an escape-route.  Yes, they really ‘dig’ that song.  Sorry.

 

And finally…  Out of Time (1968) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

I’m not the biggest fan of the Stones song Out of Time – Jagger’s vocals get a bit too caterwauling for my liking – but it sees good satirical use in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s paean to the American movie-making capital in the late 1960s, a fascinating period when traditional notions about what made a good film were rapidly being undermined by an uppity younger generation.  Played when Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), his new Italian spouse Francesca Capucci (Lorenza Izzo) and sidekick Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) return from Italy, where Rick has been making spaghetti westerns and action thrillers with the likes of Sergio Corbucci and Antonio Margheriti, Out of Time gives an one-the-nose summation of DiCaprio’s sad-sack character – an actor a bit too old, un-hip and uncomprehending of the changing world around him to get the leading roles he once did, now doomed to playing villains in second-rate TV shows.

 

© Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Releasing 

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Cinematically stoned (Part 1)

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Warner Bros.

 

Oh God.  I’ve just discovered that the soundtrack of Melania (2026), the vanity-documentary about Melania Trump, financed by Jeff Bezos and directed by Brett Ratner – a man accused of sexual assault by six women (allegations Ratner has always denied) – contains a song I just might identify as my favourite one of all time.   That is Gimme Shelter, the opening track on the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed.  Yes, a tune that means so much to me features in a movie pithily described by Mikey Smith, deputy political editor at the Daily Mirror, as ‘a bad film made by bad people about bad people’, and about which Variety suggested if they showed it on an airplane ‘people would still walk out’.  I feel besmirched.

 

It’s quite possible, though, that the Trumps and Brett Ratner bunged Gimme Shelter onto the soundtrack without actually listening to the words.  Supposedly played as an accompaniment to Melania’s preparations for her husband’s inauguration as 47th President of the USA, which one year later would lead to masked, paramilitary-style thugs abducting young children from their homes and schools and executing peaceful protesters on the street, the song has such lyrics as “Rape, murder / It’s just a shot away” and “War, children / It’s just a shot away.”  Very apt, when you think about it.

 

Anyway, this has at least got me thinking about a different, and nicer, Rolling Stones-related topic – the band and movies.  After all, over the years, there have been plenty of Beatles films: A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), Yellow Submarine (1968), Let It Be (1970), I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), The Birth of the Beatles (1979), Give my Regards to Broad Street (1984), The Hours and Times (1991), Backbeat (1994), Two of Us (2000), The Beatles: Get Back (2021) (which is actually a miniseries, but Peter Jackson made it, so it feels like a movie to me) and Sam Mendes’s forthcoming project, The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event (2027).  But what about the Rolling Stones?  What contribution to cinema has been made by the Liverpudlian mop-tops’ less wholesome London rivals?

 

© Shangri-La Entertainment / Paramount Classics

 

On the face of it, there isn’t a lot.  That is, if you don’t count the various documentaries made about them like Charlie is my Darling (1966), Jean Luc Godard’s oddball Sympathy for the Devil (1968) and Gimme Shelter (1970), a chronicle of their 1969 American tour that ended bloodily with Hells Angels-perpetrated carnage at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival.   And if you don’t count their many concert movies like The Stones in the Park (1969), Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982), Julien Temple’s The Stones at the Max (1991) (the first feature-length movie to be filmed in IMAX – because what you really want to see is a 100-feet-tall close-up of Keith Richards’ face, right?), The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1996) (plug your ears for the bit with Yoko Ono) and the Martin Scorsese-directed Shine a Light (2008), which provided the gruesome spectacle of a leathery 60-something Jagger duetting with 20-something pop-moppet Christina Aguilera and prowling around her like a randy velociraptor.

 

There’s been little effort to film key events in the history of the Rolling Stones.  Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is the little-known Stoned (2005), about the possible circumstances of Brian Jones’s death.  And as for movies featuring Stones-members as actors, well, there’s just a couple of items with Mick Jagger – epics such as Ned Kelly (1970) and Freejack (1992).  Ouch.

 

Actually, you could make a case for the Pirates of the Caribbean series being Rolling Stones films as their star Johnny Depp famously based the voice, mannerisms and swagger of his Captain Jack Sparrow character on Keith Richards.  I thought Depp-playing-Keith-playing-a-pirate was a rib-tickling gimmick that elevated the first Pirates of the Caribbean instalment, back in 2003, from being a middling film to being an entertaining one.  Alas, the sequels to it became ever-more convoluted, repetitious and tedious and, by the time of the third in the franchise, At World’s End (2007), when the filmmakers had the bright idea of bringing in the real Keith Richards to cameo as Captain Jack’s pirate dad, the idea had lost its novelty value.

 

© Buena Vista / Walt Disney Productions / Jerry Bruckheimer Films

 

Arguably, the most Rolling Stones-esque film of all is Performance (1968), the psychedelically weird crime-rock movie co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg.  Its cast includes Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, then lover of Keith Richards.  The story of an on-the-run gangster (James Fox) who holes up in a mansion belonging to a burnt-out rock star (Jagger) and gets involved in some mind-bendingly druggy goings-on, the film neatly captures the dark, dangerous aura that was popularly associated with the Stones at the time.  Neither did it do the film’s scary reputation any harm that afterwards Fox underwent a ‘crisis’, dropped out of acting for the next decade-and-a-half and became an evangelical Christian.  As if the poor man hadn’t suffered enough, during the late 2010s, his son Laurence came out of the closet as a whinging, entitled, far-right-wing rentagob.

 

Keith Richards had and still has a deep-rooted aversion to Performance, thanks to the sexual shenanigans that Pallenberg supposedly got up to with Jagger during filming.  He believed these shenanigans were orchestrated by Donald Cammell, presumably as a way of getting Pallenberg and Jagger further ‘in character’.  In his autobiography Life (2020) – which was written with the help of a journalist also, confusingly, called James Fox – Richards describes Cammell as “the most destructive little turd I have ever met.”

 

Because of Richards’ loathing of Performance, one Jagger-Richards song that’s never been played at Rolling Stones gigs and is unlikely to ever be played at future ones is Memo from Turner (1968), which soundtracks a particularly strange sequence at the movie’s climax when everyone is out of their faces, the gangsters start stripping off and Jagger dances amid veering lights.  On the Performance recording of the song, Jagger is the only Stone involved, doing vocal duties, while Ry Cooder plays slide-guitar (wonderfully) and Randy Newman plays piano.  It’s a shame that we’ll never hear a live Stones version of it because it’s a belter.  I’m also partial to this cover of it by forgotten 1980s retro-rockers Diesel Park West.

 

Anyway, there’s one thing you can say about the Rolling Stones and celluloid.  In the right film, blasting over the soundtrack at the right moment, a Stones song can help create a splendid musical, visual and dramatic alchemy, turning a good cinematic scene into one that’s truly awesome.  In Part 2 of this post, I’ll list my favourite uses of Rolling Stones songs in the movies.  Stay tuned…

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Warner Bros.

Posted on

Ralph’s extraordinary world

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

The recently released 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the latest in the series of British zombie movies that began with 28 Days Later (2002).  It’s also a direct sequel to last year’s 28 Years Later.  Though I had a few reservations about 28 Years Later, which was scripted by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, creators of the original 2002 film, it generally impressed me.  I felt wary about the forthcoming Bone Temple, though, because one of my 28 Years Later reservations was how it ended and set up its sequel.

 

I wrote at the time: “Its last minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that.  I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script.  Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar against the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously.  This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).”

 

Happily, having just seen 28 Year Later: The Bone Temple, I realise I had nothing to worry about.  It isn’t goofy or cartoony at all.  Actually, Nia DaCosta shoots her movie in a more measured, controlled style than Boyle shot his – he filmed with numerous iPhone cameras, edited frenziedly, and intercut the action with clips from old war documentaries and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944).  Parts of DaCosta’s film are so still and character-focused you feel you’re watching a stage-play.  And overall, it’s a near-perfect blend of horror, violence, humour, pathos and, yes, optimism.  I’d even rate it as the best of the 28 Days / Weeks / Years Later movies – praise indeed, since I think the previous three films are all quality.  (I know the 2007 installment, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, gets some grief. But, apart from one idiotic lapse in plot logic, I like it.)

 

A warning.  From here on, there’ll be spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

 

So, what was that ‘dark episode in recent British history’ referenced at the end of 28 Years Later?  Well, it concluded with its juvenile hero Spike (Alfie Wiliams) being rescued from the infected – the series’ name for the humans who’ve succumbed to the ‘rage virus’ and transformed into slavering, red-eyed, hyperactive zombies – by eight youths wearing tracksuits, bling and long, blonde wigs.  Their leader, played by Jack O’Connell, introduces himself as ‘Sir Jimmy’.  Indeed, they’re all called ‘Jimmy’: Jimmy Shite, Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Snake, etc.  Wandering around this post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested hellscape is a gang fixated on Jimmy Savile.

 

At this point, British viewers of 28 Years Later went, “Eek!”  Everyone else in the world probably went, “Huh?”

 

Savile, in case you didn’t know, was a British disc jockey, children’s TV presenter and charity fundraiser – in his lifetime he raised around 40 million pounds – who died in 2011.  With his long, greasy locks of blonde hair, penchant for tracksuits, cigars and bling, and irritating, homemade patois (“Now then, now then, as it happens, goodness gracious, how’s about that then, guys ‘n’ gals?”), he cut a grotesque figure, but was regarded as a saint because of his charity work.  One year after his death, though, he turned into a modern-day folk-demon when it became apparent he’d been a sexual predator who’d abused children, young women and others on an industrial scale – often patients in hospitals he’d raised funds for.  In fact, there’d been rumours about his evil proclivities while he was alive, but he never faced justice thanks to his saintly image and connections with the political and media establishments.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

28 Years Later began with a prologue, seemingly unlinked to the rest of the film, wherein during the rage virus’s original outbreak in 2002 a group of children are stuck in a room watching a Teletubbies (1997-2001) video while their parents try, unsuccessfully, to barricade the house against an army of the infected.  Only one small boy escapes and he flees into a nearby church.  There, he sees his father, the local cleric, get attacked, transform and then seemingly lead the other infected off in a macabre, marauding dance.  The boy, it transpires, becomes Sir Jimmy, O’Connell’s character.  Grown up, his brain is an unhinged cocktail of zombie trauma, garbled religious dogma (from his father) and obsolete British pop culture (from the TV) – in the films’ alternative timeline, civilization ended in 2002, so Savile’s crimes were never revealed.  Thus, Sir Jimmy enthuses about Teletubbies and has trained one of his gang, Jimmima (Emma Laird), to do a Teletubbies dance-routine.  Also, echoing Savile, he frequently talks about ‘charity’ – though he uses the word as a euphemism for ‘torture’.

 

For Sir Jimmy’s gang are Clockwork Orange-type psychopaths.  He’s convinced them he’s the son of the devil and they’re on a holy, or unholy, mission to slaughter the infected and uninfected alike in what’s left of Britain.  Spike, fallen into their clutches and forced to join their ranks, spends 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple trying to stay alive and figure out how to escape from them.

 

The movie has a second plot-strand, concerning Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whom we also met in the previous film.  He’s a hermit who, in the middle of the countryside, has created a spectacular ‘bone temple’ – a structure built from the skeletal remains of the victims of the 28-year-long contagion that also honours those victims.  Kelson is certainly eccentric, but he’s decent and humane too and he’s managed to find a way of peacefully co-existing with the dangerous, brutal world around him.

 

Emblematic of that danger and brutality is Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) – the name Kelson has given an ‘alpha’ member of the infected who stalks the environs of the temple.  Alphas are specimens bigger, stronger and even more dangerous than the ordinary infected.  Kelson uses morphine-tipped darts fired from a blowpipe to subdue Samson as he approaches, but he’s noticed that Samson has been coming back to the temple more often.  It’s as if he enjoys the doses of morphine he’s getting.  This inspires Kelson to experiment on the alpha.  How much, he wonders, of what’s wrong with the infected is a virus and how much is psychosis?  If the psychosis can be calmed – possibly lifted? – by drugs, what remains of the victim’s mind and memories?  Though Spike’s dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) claimed in the previous film that the infected don’t have souls, Kelson, as his relationship with Samson develops, realises something of a soul does linger in the infected’s simultaneously terrifying and pitiful husks.

 

So, Spike is trapped among the Jimmies, Fiennes is improbably bonding with Samson and, ominously, we know these two storylines are going to crash together sooner or later with painful results for everyone.  One thing I like about The Bone Temple, again scripted by Alex Garland, is that for all the simplicity of its plotting, it’s less predictable than you’d expect.  I’d assumed the Jimmies would intrude violently on Kelson with a ‘home invasion’ of his bone temple, but what happens is more complex.  I’d also seen people assume online before the film’s release that the Jimmies would kill Kelson and an enraged Samson would go on the rampage, or the Jimmies would kill Samson and an enraged Kelson would go on the rampage – but neither happens here. The real outcome is unexpectedly hopeful, funny, sad and satisfying.  And the long-awaited scene when Sir Jimmy and Kelson finally come face to face is splendid in both its drama and its restraint.  Generally, while O’Connell’s performance is great, Fiennes’ performance is one for the ages.

 

The previous film posited that although Britain had been ravaged by the rage virus, mainland Europe hadn’t and it’d continued to develop as it actually did in the 21st century.  This scenario of an isolated and seriously in-the-shit Britain was an obvious metaphor for Brexit.  The Bone Temple is less on the nose with state-of-the-nation metaphors, but you can still see some.

 

The kids making up Sir Jimmy’s gang – and they are kids, as evidenced by scenes where a couple of them suffer fatal injuries and reveal their true, frightened selves during their death throes, one of them even lamenting about a long-ago pet kitten – symbolize the victims of a half-century of ruthless government policies that decreed there had to be winners and losers and split the country into haves and have-nots. They’re the losers, the have-nots, the left-behind youngsters condemned to membership of a feral underclass.  Tellingly, the opening scene shows the Jimmies gathered in a decayed public swimming pool in some abandoned post-industrial city: the sort of public amenity, in the sort of place that desperately needed public amenities, that got the chop during David Cameron’s premiership and ‘austerity’ project in the early 2010s.

 

Significantly, they’re exploited, manipulated and fashioned into a squad of killers by someone modelling himself on Jimmy Savile.  The real Savile was a respected member of the establishment at the time when British politics turned callous and abandoned the principle that all citizens, including the weak, poor and vulnerable, should be looked after.  Each Christmas-time in the 1980s, for instance, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would invite him to spend Boxing Day with her at Chequers.  He was also a confidante of Prince (now King) Charles.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

If Sir Jimmy and his minions represent everything rotten about Britain recently, Kelson represents the opposite.  For one thing, he was formerly a doctor in the country’s National Health Service, an institution founded on the principle that the weak, poor and vulnerable should be looked after (and not have to pay a fortune for their treatment).  When he treats the arrow wounds that a doped-up Samson has incurred during his travels, he quips, “So you owe me…  Only kidding.  I’m NHS, free of charge.”  Another British cultural reference that may go over the heads of American audiences.

 

Kelson also reminds us that as well as being an imperial superpower, Britain was once a more benevolent, cultural one. (It helps that he’s played by Ralph Fiennes, a fixture in two massive, British-originating cultural franchises, Harry Potter and James Bond.)  Despite the apocalypse, Kelson has managed to hang onto his old vinyl collection and he plays stuff from it at appropriate moments – Duran Duran’s Ordinary World (1992) when Samson needs some pacification; Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place (2000) when he’s wistfully contemplating the night-sky; and fabulously, when he has to deal with the Jimmies, Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (1982) – “Let’s turn this up to 11,” he says, and he does.  Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Duran Duran…  In their different ways, at different times, these British bands were massively popular, musical juggernauts worldwide (and coincidentally, all three have been touring again lately).  That’s the sort of global soft power Britain should be proud of.

 

Indeed, Kelson seems an embodiment of the caring and creative British values that the country tried to project to the outside world during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics – a ceremony whose artistic director was Danny Boyle.

 

Aside from the script, performances, themes and general execution, a reason why I liked The Bone Temple so much was because the relationship between Kelson and Samson echoed something in one of my all-time favourite horror movies, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985).  In the Romero film, a scientist called Dr Logan (Richard Liberty) attempts to ‘domesticate’ a zombie nicknamed ‘Bub’ (Sherman Howard).  Good though Chi Lewis-Parry is, Samson doesn’t quite have the pathos of Bub – it would be difficult, since at the start of The Bone Temple we see Samson doing business as usual, i.e., ripping off someone’s head and dragging their spine out of their neck-stump.  Kelson, though, is a far more endearing character than the obsessed and unbalanced Logan.  The scenes with him and an ever-more docile Samson are both amusing and touching and you feel increasingly worried about them both as the Jimmies close in.

 

If I have a criticism of The Bone Temple, it’s about how it depicts the other infected, the ones who aren’t Samson.  They feel like a device that gets turned on and off according to the needs of the plot.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to be threatened?  The infected are ubiquitous.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to have a chat by the campfire?  The infected are nowhere to be seen.  Also, near the end, I can’t understand why the infected don’t immediately swarm the bone temple when it’s lit up like a chandelier and blasting out Iron Maiden.

 

Otherwise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a hugely impressive achievement by Nia DaCosta, Alex Garland and their cast and crew.  And while Ralph Fiennes won’t win an Oscar for his performance, much as he deserves to – zombie movies don’t win Oscars – Iron Maiden should at least get him onstage during the rest of their world tour.

 

© Columbia Pictures

Posted on

Murder most Margaret

 

© George H. Brown Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

During the past fortnight I’ve wondered if I should post something about big, recent news stories. About, for example, the draw for next year’s FIFA World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the USA, which happened on December 5th and saw FIFA President Gianni Infantino present Donald Trump with something called the FIFA Peace Prize.  Doing this, boldly going where no brown-noser has gone before, Infantino surely set a new record in how far a shameless groveller could wedge their head up Trump’s arse.  Or about the cascade of claims by pupils at London’s Dulwich College in the 1970s that the young Nigel Farage was a dedicated follower of fascism, taunting Jewish schoolmates with comments like “Hitler was right” and telling black ones, “That’s the way back to Africa.”

 

But no.  It’s Christmas-time.  I don’t want to soil the festive atmosphere of good will by writing about revolting specimens of humanity like Infantino, Trump and Farage.  So, instead, here’s a post about someone wholly wonderful and cherishable – Margaret Rutherford.

 

Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the new whodunnit written and directed by Rian Johnson, starring Daniel Craig as the gloriously accented Benoit Blanc, has just arrived on Netflix.  The Blanc movies – which also include Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) – are reminders of how entertaining whodunnits can be when done well.  They put me in mind of an earlier series of cinematic whodunnits I find delightful and turn to whenever I need a comfort watch.  These are the four Agatha Christie adaptations made in Britain in the early 1960s that have veteran English actress Margaret Rutherford playing Christie’s formidable, if elderly, crime-solver, Miss Jane Marple.

 

By then, Rutherford had become a national treasure in Britain for her comic roles in the theatre and cinema, for example, in stage and screen versions of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1939 and 1951 respectively) and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941 and 1945).  The Miss Marple movies represent the last great hurrah of her career.

 

One aspect of the films I have a problem talking about is their faithfulness to the original novels.  That’s because I’ve never read any of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories.  Indeed, I’ve only read one Agatha Christie novel ever, 1932’s Peril at End House, which featured her other famous sleuth, the Belgian Hercule Poirot.  However, having seen later versions of Miss Marple in TV adaptations where she was played by Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julie McKenzie, it seems fair to say that the persona Rutherford invests the character with is not the persona Christie had in mind.  Subsequent Marples have been quiet, focused and forensic, people you’d barely notice sitting in the corner of the drawing room while skullduggery was afoot.  Rutherford’s Marple is a force of nature – you’d definitely notice her before long.

 

Christie was reportedly unhappy with the Rutherford movies, regarding them as comedies rather than the mystery stories she’d written originally.  That’s true – they are comedies, very funny ones, rather than mysteries.  But Christie seemed appreciative of Rutherford herself and even dedicated her 1963 novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to her.

 

Though based on the works of a writer closely associated with the sub-genre known as the ‘country house mystery’, only one of the four Rutherford / Marple films mainly takes place in a country house.  That’s the first one, 1961’s Murder She Said, based on Christie’s 1957 novel 4.50 from Paddington.  Next up is Murder at the Gallop (1963), mostly set in a hotel run by an enthusiastic equestrian and foxhunter.  It’s based on Christie’s book After the Funeral (1953), which actually featured Hercule Poirot.  Murder Most Foul (1964), inspired by another Poirot novel, McGinty’s Dead (1952), is about murderous goings-on among the members of a theatre company.  The same year’s Murder Ahoy! is almost an original screenplay, though it uses elements of the 1952 novel They Do It with Mirrors.  Its story takes place on a former Royal Navy warship that’s become a floating reform school for juvenile criminals.

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

So, we’ve got a stately home, horse-riding, the theatre and the Royal Navy – four great British institutions.  Accordingly, in the films, the heads of these four institutions are played by four much-loved British character actors of the period, James Robertson Justice, Robert Morley, Ron Moody and Lionel Jeffries respectively.  Each is pompous and stuffy and when Rutherford’s Miss Marple arrives on the scene, determined to sniff out the rottenness in each institution – rottenness that’s led to murder – they aren’t happy.  That’s largely what makes these movies enjoyable.  We get to see some old-fashioned, patriarchal British pomposity being relentlessly pricked by an eccentric, infuriating old lady who refuses to know her place.

 

Indeed, I’d argue these movies are subversive in their quiet way.  Rutherford’s Miss Marple is almost a forerunner to Columbo, the disheveled, blue-collar detective played by Peter Falk in the TV show of the same name (1971-78, 1989-2003).  The murderers in that show are always rich, powerful bigshots who totally patronize and underestimate Columbo, but he manages to nab them in the end.  Usually by mercilessly annoying them.

 

I’ve seen people – usually diehard Christie fans – criticise Rutherford’s portrayal of Miss Marple for being ‘dotty’ or ‘batty’, but she’s not that way at all.  Rather, her Marple is admirably proactive.  In Murder She Said, convinced the body of a woman she saw being strangled on a passing train is concealed somewhere on the premises of Ackenthorpe Hall, she infiltrates the mansion by taking on the job of its housekeeper.  There, in the kitchen, she has to deploy all her culinary skills to feed the sizeable and demanding Ackenthorpe family.  Meanwhile, she uses her enthusiasm for the game of golf as cover while she searches the grounds.

 

In Murder at the Gallop, she climbs on top of a cartload of beer-barrels so that she can peer through a top window and spy on the reading of a will.  Later, she proves herself to be an accomplished horsewoman and she dances to some new-fangled rock-and-roll music.  (“One must be tolerant of the young…  I remember my dear mama was quite horrified when she caught me dancing the Charleston in public.”)  Okay, she apparently incurs a heart attack while dancing, but that’s only a ruse designed to trick the murderer into giving away their identity.  In Murder Most Foul she reveals herself as a past ladies’ pistol champion and, at the finale of Murder Ahoy!, as a fencing champion too.  That’s before she takes on the villain in a swordfight – a sequence Rutherford spent a month training for.

 

So, a skilled cook, golfer, horse-rider, dancer, shooter and fencer – she might be light-years removed from Christie’s concept of her, but Rutherford’s Miss Marple is a shining example of, simultaneously, girl-power and grey-power.

 

Her feistiness even wins her the admiration of those pompous authority figures she’s spent the films irritating.  At the end of Murder She Said, for instance, she gets a surprise when Luther Ackenthorpe, the irascible and bearish aristocrat played by James Robertson Justice, concludes that she’s just the woman to share his matrimonial bed.  His proposal of marriage hardly drips with romance, though.  “You’re a fair cook,” he tells her, “and you seem to have your wits about you and, well, I’ve decided to marry you.”  Predictably, Miss Marple decides there are some things a girl has to say ‘no’ to – and this is one of them.

 

Another unexpected marriage proposal comes her way at the end of Murder at the Gallop, this time from Robert Morley’s horse-loving character Hector Enderby.  Miss Marple isn’t taken by Enderby because he’s a keen foxhunter.  “I disapprove of blood sports!” she tells him sternly.  After she’s gone, Enderby sighs, “That was a very narrow escape.”

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

While Rutherford’s Miss Marple maintains her spinsterhood in these movies, the actress’s real-life husband, the actor Stringer Davis, has a prominent role in all four.  At Rutherford’s insistence, the filmmakers invented a recurring character, ‘Mr. Stringer’, for him to play.  No such character appears in the books.  It could have been a disastrous piece of self-indulgence, but in the context of the films this addition works beautifully.  Tweedy and timid, Mr. Stringer is the librarian in Miss Marple’s village.  She turns to him when she needs research done or information dug up and he invariably, and unwillingly, gets drawn into her unorthodox investigations.  He becomes a faint-hearted Dr. Watson to her gregarious Sherlock Holmes.

 

Davis and Rutherford dated for 15 years and didn’t tie the knot until 1945 when he was 46 and she 53.  The delay was due to Davis’s mother, who deeply disapproved of Rutherford, and the couple only got married after she died.  That might suggest Davis, intimidated by his mum, was as retiring as the character he plays in the films. But he was courageous enough to fight in both World Wars.  During the first one, he served as a young officer at the front in 1918.  At the start of the second one, he re-enlisted at the age of 40 and served for its duration.  His World War II experiences included being evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.

 

The films’ other recurring character is a genuine Agatha Christie creation who appears in four of her books.  This is Inspector Craddock, played by Australian actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell.  Craddock starts each movie having his patience tested by Miss Marple’s meddling and wild claims but, of course, by the end of it, he’s reluctantly conceded she was right all along and is fighting her corner.  A veteran of the Australian film industry, Tingwell moved to Britain in the 1950s.  He’s forever etched in my memory as Alan Kent, the unfortunate traveller whose blood is used in a gory scene to revive Christopher Lee in the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) – the first scary movie I saw that genuinely scared me.  In the 1970s he returned to Australia, where his later films included the delightful and highly popular comedy The Castle (1997).  By the time of his death in 2009, he was so respected that he received a state funeral in Melbourne.

 

© Lawrence P. Bachman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Meanwhile, the guest casts in these films are a joy for someone of my vintage and geographical background.  They’re choc-a-bloc with faces familiar to me from watching TV as a kid – from either the 1960s and 1970s British TV shows or the 1950s and 1960s British movies that were broadcast then.  As well as Robertson Justice, Morley, Moody and Jeffries, there’s Francesca Annis, James Bolam, Richard Briars, Peter Buttersworth, Andrew Cruickshank, Finlay Currie, Windsor Davies, Meg Jenkins, Arthur Kennedy, Duncan Lamont, Miles Malleson, Francis Matthews, William Mervyn, Derek Nimmo, Nicholas Parsons, Conrad Philips, Dennis Price, Flora Robson, Terry Scott, Robert Urquhart, James Villiers and Thorley Walters.  Even a future Miss Marple, Joan Hickson, turns up in Murder She Said.

 

After Murder Ahoy!, Rutherford made one more appearance as Miss Marple.  She and Stringer Davis appeared fleetingly in 1965’s The Alphabet Murders, a Hercule Poirot movie with Tony Randall playing the Belgian detective and none other than Robert Morley playing his sidekick, Hastings.  I haven’t watched The Alphabet Murders, but it’s reportedly dreadful and Rutherford and Davis’s cameo may be the only good thing in it.

 

Admittedly, something that tinges my enjoyment of the Rutherford / Marple movies with a little sadness is knowing that a few years after making them Rutherford started to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.  Devoted to his wife, Stringer Davis cared for her until her death in 1972.  He died himself just 15 months later.

 

Anyway, I shall finish here as it’s time to go and watch Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix.  Hey, you know what?  If that Daniel Craig plays his cards right, he could become the new Margaret Rutherford.

 

From wikipedia.org

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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

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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 56 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 of 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

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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…

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists