Tag: James Bond

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People who stunted my development

 

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

 

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers.  A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23).  He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations…  Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars.  It’s going to happen.”

 

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie.  This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff.  The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

 

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

 

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house.  For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to.  I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage.  I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road.  Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

 

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).  This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert.  To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

 

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films.  Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire.  If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards.  And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes.  It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work.  (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

 

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

 

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

 

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns.  However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work.  Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him.  As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

 

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself.  This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck.  Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur.  And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

 

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman.  It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland.  (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.)  That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff.  He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

 

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS.  Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three).  He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

 

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago).  These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.”  I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003.  Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

 

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976).  For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church.  In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

 

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).  For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

 

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman.  He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years.  He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish.  He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights.  I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts.  Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

 

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career.  (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

 

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

 

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.  Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it.  But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself.  She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer.  Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto.  Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

 

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double.  His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

 

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible.  He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992).  Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

 

© Titan Books

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The literary Bond revisited: Octopussy and The Living Daylights

 

© Jonathan Cape

 

I once read a comment made by esteemed poet Philip Larkin about James Bond’s unsuitability for a short-fiction format: “I am not surprised that Fleming preferred to write novels.  James Bond, unlike Sherlock Holmes, does not fit snugly into the short story length: there is something grandiose and intercontinental about his adventures that require elbow room and such examples of the form as we have tend to be eccentric and muted.”

 

As a boy, I would have agreed.  I read most of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books back then and the one I was least enamoured with was For Your Eyes Only.  Actually, FYEO (as I’ll refer to it) wasn’t a novel but a collection of short stories featuring Bond.  In one of them, Quantum of Solace – which had nothing to do with the 22nd official Bond movie, made with Daniel Craig in 2008 – all 007 did was sit and listen to somebody else narrate a story about a different set of characters.

 

For me at the age of 11, a good Bond story needed a super-villain with an imposing HQ, and a nefarious scheme involving espionage and / or criminality, and a love interest, and various action scenes where said super-villain tried, unsuccessfully, to bump Bond off.  And of course, with Ian Fleming, there’d also be a wealth of background detail culled from Fleming’s experiences as a globetrotting journalist, naval intelligence officer and bon viveur and from his research – research was something he was scrupulous about.  Cramming all these things into a short story was not viable, I thought.  Thus, the truncated slices of Bondery that appeared in FYEO just seemed weird to me.

 

They seem much less weird to me today – especially since, after reading FYEO, I saw such opulent but ramshackle Bond films as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979).  Their plots were so disjointed, thanks to the filmmakers’ wish to squeeze in as many different, exotic locations and spectacular action set-pieces as possible, that they often felt like a series of short, barely-connected stories rather than a single, coherent, movie-length one.

 

Anyway, Larkin wasn’t talking about FYEO but about Fleming’s other collection of James Bond short stories, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which was published in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death.  This book constitutes Bond’s final appearance in print, as penned by his creator.  It originally consisted of just the two stories mentioned in the title, although subsequent editions beefed it up with the addition of two more, The Property of a Lady and 007 in New York.  Nonetheless, it remains a slim volume.  Even with four stories, it comes to a mere 123 pages.

 

Since then, of course, Octopussy and The Living Daylights have lent their titles to Bond movies, in 1982 and 1987 respectively.  A film has yet to be made called The Property of a Lady and to be honest I think Adele or Billie Eilish would have difficulty wrapping their vocal chords around the title in a Bond-movie theme song.  (“The proper-TEE… of a lad-EE…!”  No, can’t imagine it.)  Obviously, 007 in New York wouldn’t cut it as a movie title at all.  Mind you, there was a TV movie made in 1976 called Sherlock Holmes in New York starring, heaven help us, Roger Moore as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing detective, so anything is possible.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Octopussy and The Living Daylights was one of the few Fleming-Bond books I hadn’t read in my boyhood, so when I encountered a copy of it in a bookstore a while ago thought I’d give it a shot.  How would I get on with it?  Four decades after I’d read FYEO, would I find the short-story James Bond more palatable?

 

The opening story, Octopussy, is the longest one in the collection but it has Bond only as a secondary character.  The story concerns a Major Dexter Smythe, described acidly by Fleming as “the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man…”  Now “he was fifty-four, slightly bald and his belly sagged in the Jantzen trunks.  And he had had two coronary thromboses…  But, in his well-chosen clothes, his varicose veins out of sight and his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cummerbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore…”

 

The North Shore mentioned in that excerpt is the north coast of Jamaica.  During the post-war years Smythe and his wife, now deceased, established themselves there after escaping from hard-pressed, austerity-era Britain: “They were a popular couple and Major Smythe’s war record earned them the entrée to Government House society, after which their life was one endless round of parties, with tennis for Mary and golf (with the Henry Cotton irons!) for Major Smythe.  In the evenings there was bridge for her and the high poker game for him.  Yes, it was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst winter weather for thirty years.”

 

Yet this easy, comfortable life in Jamaica didn’t fall into Smythe’s lap.  Gradually, Fleming enlightens us on how Smythe was able to afford it.  In a back story that has echoes of B. Traven’s 1927 novel and John Huston’s 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, we learn that in the Austrian Alps at the end of World War II, he stumbled across something immensely valuable that he hoarded for himself.  To do this, however, he also had to commit murder.  Octopussy describes what happens when Smythe’s ‘ancient sin’ finally catches up with him.  The bearer of the bad news – that the authorities have found out what he did back in the war and intend to arrest him – is a ‘tall man’ in a ‘dark-blue tropical suit’ with ‘watchful, serious blue-grey eyes’.  It’s Bond.  But Bond isn’t just carrying out a professional errand.  Eventually we discover that he has a personal stake in bringing Smythe to justice.

 

Once you accept that the story is about Smythe rather than Bond, it proceeds agreeably.  The plump and comical Smythe, who paddles about the reef in front of his villa and rather pathetically talks to the fish that swim there – plus an unfriendly, tentacled mollusc whom he’s christened ‘Octopussy’ – gradually loses our sympathy as Fleming peels back the layers and we discover the cruel, and unnecessary, deed he committed to enrich himself decades earlier.  Bond is hardly a paradigm of virtue but, equipped with a conscience and a rough-and-ready code of ethics, he’s the antithesis of what’s represented by Smythe.  The scene where the flaccid and weak-willed Smythe confesses his crime to Bond is admirably low-key, but Fleming infuses it with a cold, sadistic tension.

 

The Property of a Lady, on the other hand, is a conventional Bond adventure in miniature.  It has 007 turn the auctioning at Sotheby’s of an artwork designed by Carl Faberge – according to the catalogue, “(a) sphere carved from an extraordinarily large piece of Siberian emerald matrix weighing approximately one thousand three hundred carats” – into a trap to catch the KGB’s director of operations in London.  Also involved is a female Russian double-agent working in the British Secret Service, whom the service is aware of and uses to feed fake information back to Moscow.  To be honest, the plot didn’t make sense to me.  I didn’t see how Bond, by snaring London’s top KGB man at Sotheby’s, could avoid alerting Moscow to the fact that British intelligence had cottoned onto the double agent’s existence and were using her for their own ends.

 

Still, the story is readable and the scenes set in Sotheby’s allow Fleming to show off his knowledge, acquired through research or personal experience, of the world’s most famous broker in fine art.  When Bond expresses surprise that the auctioneer doesn’t bang his gavel three times and declare, “Going, going, gone,” an expert informs him, “You may still find that operating in the Shires or in Ireland, but it hasn’t been the fashion at London sales rooms since I’ve been attending them.”

 

Elements from both Octopussy-the-short-story and The Property of a Lady turn up in Octopussy-the-1982-film, which starred Roger Moore.  In the film, the title character is not an octopus but a beautiful and mysterious woman played by Maud Adams, whose father, it transpires, once received a visit from visit by Bond similar to the visit that Major Smythe received in the original story.  The film also features a proper octopus, and there’s some business too about a Faberge egg being auctioned off at Sotheby’s.  However, if you’ve seen Octopussy-the-movie and don’t remember these things, that’s hardly surprising because it’s a mad mishmash of things – involving nuclear warheads, circuses, exiled Afghan princes, feuding Russian generals, knife-throwing identical twins, hot-air balloons, snake charmers, gorilla suits, everything bar the proverbial kitchen sink.  It’s one of the very worst Bond movies in my opinion.

 

Meanwhile, Hannes Oberhauser, the character murdered by Major Smythe in Octopussy-the-story, plays a small but important role in the backstory of Spectre (2015), the fourth Bond with Daniel Craig in the title role.  He’s mentioned in a plot twist that bears upon Bond’s relationship with his old nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz).  That twist was much derided by the critics, though as a fan of the books I was pleased that Oberhauser got name-checked in a Bond movie at last.

 

© Eon Productions

 

The third story in the book, The Living Daylights, sees Bond assigned a mission in Berlin.  He has to kill a Soviet sniper whom the KGB have lined up to shoot a defecting scientist while he flees from the east to the west of the city – the story is set shortly before the creation of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.  Bond has a crisis of conscience when he discovers that the enemy sniper is a woman, an attractive blonde whom he’s seen posing as a member of an orchestra that’s performing over on the Communist-Bloc side of town.  This story is incorporated, more or less intact, into the early part of the 1987 movie The Living Daylights, which was the first one to star Timothy Dalton as Bond.  In the film, however, the action is moved to Bratislava, the defector is a KGB officer and his defection is planned to take place during an orchestral performance in a concert hall.

 

Although the rest of the plot of The Living Daylights-the-film is rather convoluted and unsatisfactory, and there are a few daft moments seemingly left over from the previous movies in the series, it felt like a breath of fresh air to me at the time. It was an attempt at a slightly more sensible Bond film and had an actor in the lead role trying to depict Bond as the moody, occasionally conscience-stricken character that Fleming had originally written.  And having a big chunk of Fleming’s story in it at the start definitely helped.

 

The final story, 007 in New York, is a trifle – Bond is sent into the Big Apple to warn a former Secret Service member that the man she’s cohabiting with is actually a Soviet agent, though he spends most of the story’s eight pages planning the shopping, eating, drinking, clubbing and wenching that he’s going to do while he’s there.  This allows Fleming to show off his knowledge of the city – “Hoffritz on Madison Avenue for one of their heavy, toothed Gillette-type razors, so much better than Gillette’s own product, Tripler’s for some of those French golf socks made by Izod, Scribner’s because it was the last great bookshop in New York and because there was a salesman there with a good nose for thrillers, and then to Abercrombie’s to look over the new gadgets…  And then what about the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central?  No, he didn’t want to sit up at a bar…  Yes.  That was it!  The Edwardian Room at the Plaza.  A corner table.”

 

Fleming was known to have a predilection for sadomasochism, so it’s telling that 007 in New York also sees Bond considering a visit to a bar he’d heard about that “was the rendezvous for sadists and masochists of both sexes.  The uniform was black leather jackets and leather gloves.  If you were a sadist, you wore the gloves under the left shoulder strap.  For the masochists it was the right.”  Bond has an old flame in New York whom he intends to meet up with and enjoy some nightlife with, including the S-&-M-themed nightlife, and it’s here that a tiny sliver of 007 in New York makes it into the movies too.  The old flame’s name is Solange, which is the name of the character played by Caterina Murino in Casino Royale, which saw Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, in 2006.

 

007 in New York is tied up with a gentle, though unexpected, twist that’s worthy of Somerset Maugham – a writer whom Fleming was a big admirer of.  And that, unfortunately is it.  Fleming had passed away prior to this collection’s publication and no further Bond material was to be published under his name.  Thus, Octopussy and The Living Daylights marked the end of James Bond as a literary phenomenon…

 

For all of two years, until 1968, when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun.

 

© Eon Productions

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The literary Bond revisited: Moonraker

 

© Penguin Books

 

As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.  Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films.  However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966).   I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

 

And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)…  Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland.  My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age.  To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself.  “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.

 

Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21st century.  Starting with Moonraker.

 

It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise.  The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint.  It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly…  And we know that they know…  So, let’s have a ball!”  The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.

 

Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest.  But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take.  I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”

 

© Eon Films

 

But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier.  Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast.  From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union.  Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards.  This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be.  Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un.  In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.

 

During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base.  After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course.  Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union.  The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however.  Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms.  So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”

 

In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles.  (Goodhead… Get it?  Good… head…?)  In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name.  I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”

 

© Eon Films

 

Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot.  It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict.  And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it.  I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time.  I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it.  And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else.  Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.

 

And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s.  Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity.  I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946.  Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war.  From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it.  Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white.  Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.

 

But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain.  Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget.  He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods.  Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about.  Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time.  It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.

 

Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves.  My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean.  ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’”  Fleming took note of the complaints.  None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.

 

© Hammer Films

 

I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi.  The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie.  They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out.  For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.

 

On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology.  I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.

 

Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role.  You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions.  Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45.  Yikes, I thought.  If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.

 

So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women.  Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.

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My 2022 writing round-up

 

© The Horror Zine

 

If years were cars, then the one that’s just concluded, 2022, would definitely not be a sleek, shiny Aston Martin DB6 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964).  No, 2022 would more likely be an ugly, black-smoke-spewing, rolling-coal diesel pick-up truck driven by some Trump-loving, climate-change-denying, QAnon-believing, anti-vaxxer moron in Texas.

 

Thanks to wars, economic crises, environmental disasters and ongoing pestilence, I can’t imagine anyone claiming that 2022 was a vintage year.  Well, maybe except for the Right Honourable Baroness Michelle Mone OBE, who at this moment is possibly raising a glass of bubbly and toasting the sight of Britain receding in the rear-view mirror of her luxury yacht, cruising at full speed towards some far-off, sun-kissed tax haven where she can enjoy the 29 million pounds that’s allegedly turned up in her and her children’s bank accounts.  This windfall may have something to do with Michelle cannily using her position and influence to lobby the British government a while back, during the pandemic, and persuade them to hand over 200 million pounds of taxpayers’ money to the mysterious company PPE Medpro in return for it supplying the NHS with personal, protective equipment – equipment that, it transpired, “’did not comply with the specification in the contract’ and could not be used”.

 

Anyway, on a personal level, 2022 was a hectic one for me.  It involved moving from Sri Lanka – not the result of the political and economic turmoil that erupted there earlier in the year, since I’d been planning to leave for some time before that – and coming to Singapore to start a new job.  The stress of the move may have affected me in a few ways.  For example, two things I normally love doing are reading books and watching films, yet in 2022 I’ve rarely had the concentration or been in the mood to do either.  However, one area of my life that seems to have survived unscathed is my writing.  I got a reasonable number of short stories published during the year, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).

 

Here’s a round-up of those stories, who’s published them, and where you can find them.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In March 2022, my story Never Tell Tales out of School, which drew on unhappy memories of playground bullying during the rough-and-tumble 1970s, and was inspired by the work of the masterly Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell, was published in Volume 16, Issue 26 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can currently be purchased as a paperback or Kindle edition here.
  • Mermaid Fair – a story that involved both mermaids and, yes, a fair – was originally published in the now-defunct webzine Death Head Grin back in 2010. In March 2022, it was reprinted in the anthology Fearful Fun, from Thurston Howl Publications, which can be purchased here.
  • March was also when I had the first of several stories published in 2022 in the magazine The Sirens Call. Liver, set on a farm and featuring a dysfunctional father-son relationship, plus much eating of red meat, appeared in Issue 57 of The Sirens Call, which can be downloaded here.
  • And in July, it was the following issue of The Sirens Call that provided a home for my next story to appear in 2022. The magazine’s summer 2022 edition featured stories with a holiday theme. Thus, my story Selfless was about a holidaying couple in Thailand who come into possession of a strange smartphone that requires its owner to take lots of selfies.  Endless selfies… The issue can be downloaded here.

 

© Thurston Howl Publications

 

  • My haunted-house story Coming Home originally appeared in the webzine The Horror Zine back in 2014. In September 2022, I was delighted when it was selected for the commemorative anthology The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years, which showcased the webzine’s strongest stories published between 2013 and 2020.  The collection can be purchased on Kindle or as a paperback here.
  • In October, I made it into the pages of another anthology. Published by Cloaked Press LLC, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror featured stories where “what lurks in plain sight… is the true horror” and where the scares emanate from “such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…” My story was about a set of haunted wind chimes and, unsurprisingly, was called The Chimes.  Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in Kindle or paperback versions here.
  • October was also the month of Halloween, and I managed to get a story into Issue 59, the Halloween edition, of The Sirens Call. This was entitled Guising and took a nostalgic look at the custom of guising – the Scottish version of trick-or-treating – as kids practised it in the 1970s.  Being a Jim Mountfield story, there was of course a gruesome ending.  A copy of the Halloween edition can be downloaded here.
  • Just before Christmas, my story Upstairs, inspired by the crumbling old French-Colonial-era apartment building that I lived in during my years in Tunisia, appeared in the December 2022 edition of ParABnormal Magazine, which can be purchased here.
  • And at the end of the year, my story The Faire Chlaidh – which translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘the graveyard watch’ and is about the old belief that one of the souls of the folk buried in a graveyard has to remain there and guard the place – appeared in Issue 60 of The Sirens Call. It can be obtained here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In January 2022, my fantasy story Crows of the Mynchmoor appeared in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Not only about crows, but also about witches, sheep, scarecrows and, yes, turnips (beat that, George R.R. Martin), the story can now be read in the ezine’s archive section, here.
  • And it was in Swords and Sorcery Magazine that my second Rab Foster story of the year appeared, in August. The Library of Vadargarn was about forbidden books, religious zealots and demons covered in bronze scales and, again, is available for reading in the ezine’s archives, here.
  • Drayak Shathsprey, the hero of Crows of the Mynchmoor, made a second appearance in 2022. This was in the story The Tower and the Stars, published in the ezine Aphelion in October.  The Tower and the Stars also featured another Rab Foster character, the witch Gudroon, who’d originally appeared in the anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, published in November 2021.  The story is now available to read in Aphelion’s archive, here.

 

And that’s everything.  A very Happy New Year to you all.

 

Let’s hope that – if years were cars – 2023 is more like that Aston Martin DB5 and less like a brazenly-polluting, smoke-belching pick-up truck that Andrew Tate would approve of.  (Tate… Ha ha.)  Oh, and let’s hope too that Michelle Mone’s luxury yacht hits an iceberg.

 

© Aphelion

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Day of the Dead… in Singapore

 

 

This was an experience of cultural incongruity – delightful cultural incongruity.

 

On November 30th, my partner and I visited the National Museum of Singapore.  There, we were surprised to discover an installation called Magic Migrations, which had been on display throughout November.  We’d arrived just in time because this was the final day it could be viewed.  Magic Migrations was set up in the museum with the help of the local Mexican Embassy and the Mexican Association of Singapore and was about Mexico’s famous Day of the Dead – Dia de Muertos – holiday that takes every year on November 1st and 2nd.  As a nearby information panel explained, Day of the Dead “is a time to remember family, friends and ancestors who are no longer with us, thereby celebrating the connection between life and death.”

 

Filling a whole room, the installation featured all the items you’d expect with Day of the Dead.  There were altars, candles and flowers (especially marigolds); offerings of bread (pan de muerto), fruit and, for the souls of departed children, toys; fancy, flowery garlands and head-dresses; and, of course, lots of cartoonish skeletons and ornately-decorated skulls.  One skull even reminded me a bit of Albert Steptoe.

 

 

What made Magic Migrations so interesting was the emphasis it gave to another aspect of the holiday – the arrival of migrating monarch butterflies in central Mexico in October and November, which concludes a 4800-kilometre journey from Canada and the North-Eastern USA.  Quoting the information panel again, Mexico’s “Purépecha and… Mazahua communities consider the butterflies as ‘the souls of the departed’ and interpret their arrival as the signal of the visit of deceased relatives and friends on the 1st and 2nd of November.”  For that reason, the installation was phantasmagorically shrouded in a drizzle of dangling paper flowers and monarch butterflies.

 

 

I’ve been fascinated by Day of the Dead for a long time – ever since the early 1990s when, at a loose end one day in London, I wandered into Mayfair’s Museum of Mankind (which sadly closed in 1997) and discovered an extensive exhibition about the holiday.  I like how it combines the serious and emotional business of mourning and remembering the souls of the departed with a jocularity and irreverence towards death itself.  This suggests that death isn’t something to be feared and dreaded, not spoken of and treated as a taboo subject, but something to be accepted as an intrinsic component of life itself.  After all, it’s what puts life in context.

 

Incidentally, my partner’s family live in San Antonio in Texas, about 150 miles north of the Mexican border, and several years ago we went to visit them in mid-October.  Not only were the local shops then full of merchandising for the upcoming Halloween festivities on October 31st, but they contained an equal amount of stuff for the upcoming Dia de Meurtos festivities during the two days after that.  I bought a lot of the latter items as souvenirs of my time in Texas and they now occupy a prominent corner of my desk.  (Disclaimer: my partner would like it to be known that she and her family are Californians, and they only live in Texas because of her father’s work circumstances.  So don’t assume she’s Texan.)

 

 

Also, the plot of one of my all-time favourite novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), unfurls against the backdrop of the Day of the Dead celebrations in the Mexican city of Quauhnahuac.  And as a James Bond fan, it’s never long before I point out that by far the best part of the 2015 Bond movie Spectre was the long, tense and stylish chase / action sequence at the beginning, set during a Dia de Muertos parade in Mexico City.  For part of this sequence, Bond, played by Daniel Craig, was attired in a natty-looking outfit of top hat, skull mask and skeleton-patterned white-on-black suit.  In fact, Craig’s outfit impressed me so much that, a few years later, when my workplace at the time held its end-of-year party, picked ‘carnival’ as its theme, and asked attendees to come in fancy dress appropriate for the carnival theme, I turned up at the party wearing my own, home-made attempt to replicate it.

 

Here’s a photo from the party and a still from Spectre.  You’ll never be able to tell which one is Daniel Craig and which one is me.

 

© Eon Productions

 

For some reason, I’d expected the National Museum of Singapore to be a bit stuffy and formal, but I actually found its exhibitions personable and engaging…  But they’ll be the topic of future blog-posts.

Posted on

Jack the lad

 

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

 

After I’d been deprived of live music for nearly two years, courtesy of Covid-19, my luck certainly enjoyed an upswing this mid-November.  On November 12th, I got the chance to see Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium.  Two days later, Jack White rolled into town on his Supply Chain Issues Tour, which kicked off in White’s home city of Detroit on April 8th and concluded three days ago in Christchurch, New Zealand, with five continents visited along the way.

 

The Singaporean leg of the gig was held in the Capitol Theatre in the Capitol Building, the picturesque 1929 neoclassical building on Stamford Road, whose refurbished interior also contains an atrium of ‘modern and classical dining establishments’, a retail mall and the luxury Kempinski Hotel.  My partner and I had tickets for the upper circle, getting to which was a little weird.  The theatre’s entrance is in the middle of the atrium, among the eateries.  For the circle seats, we were directed through a door out of the foyer and into the atrium again, up a couple of modern escalators that climbed the atrium’s side, and through another door that brought us back inside the theatre.

 

 

The theatre – whose auditorium retains its 1929-vintage appearance – quickly filled up.  It would have been nice to report that the crowd was immensely varied and contained everyone, to quote White’s most famous song, “from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell”, but it largely consisted of Western expats.  These included both suited, sombre ones who’d just arrived from work and casually dressed, hanging-out, shooting-the-breeze ‘dude bro’ ones.  Unfortunately, the yaketty guys sitting directly in front of us belonged to the second faction.  There were a few Singaporean-looking folk in attendance, though, such as a guy admirably clad in a death-metal T-shirt and ragged denim shorts, with long hair and an impressive amount of tattoos; or a bloke in a white T-shirt I could see below in the stalls, pressed against the front of stage, who reacted to the music with such berserk jigging and gyrating that several times I thought he was going to start a fight with people he crashed into on either side of him.  He must have been Jack White’s biggest fan in Singapore.

 

White and his three band-members – bassist Dominic John Davis, keyboardist Quincy McCrary and drummer Daru Jones – came on stage to the strains of the MC5s’ Kick Out the Jams (1969), a famously hectic song whose hecticness, it’s fair to say, they matched during their two-hour, 23-song set. They delivered a gloriously intense and relentless barrage of rock ‘n’ roll noise.  Commendably, they also achieved a balance between performing with utter musical virtuosity and, from the look of things, having an extremely good time.  McCrary’s keyboards were agreeably high in the mix, giving the band’s sound, to my ears at least, a faintly Doors-ian or Stranglers-esque tinge.  Meanwhile, kudos to the instrument tech team, who had their work cut out scurrying constantly about the stage and making sure all the instruments and equipment, including White’s fleet of guitars, were functioning correctly and bearing up to the strain.

 

Dressed in a dark suit, white boots and a patterned, chest-revealing shirt and sporting a slicked-back shock of hair whose colour can only be described as ‘metallic blue’, White resembled a character Nicolas Cage might have played in a sweaty, disreputable thriller directed in the early 1990s by Brian De Palma.  Some of his more histrionic stage-moves evoked the mighty Nicolas Cage too, come to think of it.

 

The set gave a neat overview of White’s musical career.  The songs played ranged from Cannon, off the White Stripes’ eponymous debut album in 1999, to two items from White’s last solo album, Entering Heaven Alive, released in July this year.  In fact, about half the songs came from White’s solo work, Blunderbuss (2012), Lazaretto (2014), Boarding House Reach (2018), Fear of the Dawn (April 2022) and the afore-mentioned Entering Heaven Alive.  Of these I’m familiar only with Blunderbuss.  That’s not because I stopped liking or lost interest in White after 2012.  It’s just that during the last decade I’ve lived in places where it’s been difficult to keep up with contemporary Western music.  However, the solo stuff fitted in seamlessly alongside the older stuff performed, which mostly came from his celebrated noughties band the White Stripes.

 

The bulk of that White Stripes material was found on their third and fourth albums, 2001’s White Blood Cells (Dirty Leaves and Dirty Ground, Fell in Love with a Girl and We’re Going to be Friends) and 2003’s Elephant (Ball and Biscuit, The Hardest Button to Button and the inevitable Seven Nation Army).  Nothing appeared from their last two albums, Get Behind Me Satan (2005) and Icky Thump (2007), which at least meant we were spared their rather fearful version of Corky Robbins’ Conquest (1952), the one with the bullfighting-themed video, which I’ve always thought was a rare White Stripes misfire.  Bravely, Seven Nation Army was played not as a crowd-pleasing finale but as the opening number.  It did resurface late on, though, after the band had ended their main set and left the stage and before they returned for their encore – because the crowd started chanting its memorable riff: “DAAAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAAAH-DAAAH!”  At this point, I tried to get a chorus of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” going, but nobody played ball.

 

Also aired were songs by the bands White played in during the noughties that weren’t the White Stripes – the Raconteurs’ jaunty Steady as She Goes (2006), and the Dead Weather’s ominously organ-heavy I Cut Like a Buffalo (2009).  The one song of the evening not to belong in any way to the Jack White canon was a cover of 1992’s 7 by Prince and the New Power Generation.  It didn’t surprise me that he included something by the diminutive Minneapolitan musician-singer-songwriter.  Prince, with his tireless prolificity and penchant for new projects, self-invention and basically never standing still, strikes me as an obvious role-model for White.

 

© Third Man / J / XL

 

Neither did it surprise me that Another Way to Die, the song he did with Alicia Keys as the theme for the unloved Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008), was left off the setlist tonight.  While it’s better than the anodyne, play-it-safe themes the Bond producers have used on the most recent films, Another Way isn’t great.  But it would have been fun for me to hear a second Bond theme played live in 48 hours, after Guns N’ Roses performed Live and Let Die (1974) on November 12th.

 

Talking of which, the audience was told in plain terms before the gig not to use phones to film or take pictures.  This meant, mercifully, we were spared the experiences of the Guns N’ Roses concert, where often it seemed I was peering at the stage through a galaxy of phone-lights – or indeed, through a galaxy of Samsung Galaxy phone-lights.  Audience members were encouraged instead to obtain official photos from White’s website, which is what I’ve done for the pictures at the top and bottom of this entry.

 

Actually, looking through the site’s gallery of photos from the Singapore gig, I see that the tour photographer, David James Swanson, managed to snap one of the guy in the white T-shirt who was moshing crazily in the stalls.  I bet he’s happy about that.

 

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

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Coltrane’s sweetest notes

 

© BBC

 

Actor and comedian Robbie Coltrane, who died on October 14th, seemed part of the furniture in British TV shows and films when I was in my late teens and twenties.  His performing talents, gallus manner and considerable physique made him impossible to ignore.

 

Also, as someone who’d grown up mostly in Scotland, I – and everyone I knew – appreciated the fact that he was a Scottish lad.  Originally, he’d been one Anthony MacMillan from Rutherglen, with his stage name inspired by the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.  It’s fair to say that Scotland did not get much attention in the London-centric media of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, except when it fleetingly made the news as the site of yet another factory or colliery closure. (Admittedly, things are only slightly better in 2022.)  Thus, seeing Coltrane on popular, national telly or in movies reaching international audiences, and seeing him be unashamedly Scottish too, felt like a victory.

 

Anyway, here are a dozen of my dozen favourite TV and cinematic moments involving Robbie Coltrane.

 

The Young Ones (1984)

Coltrane made three appearances in the groundbreakingly anarchic BBC comedy show The Young Ones.  I remember him best in the episode Bambi, which may have been the first time he registered on my radar.  Bambi is the one where Rik (Rik Mayall), Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson), Neil (Nigel Planer) and Mike (Christopher Ryan) appear on University Challenge (up against a snooty team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’ comprised of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Ben Elton), while Motorhead play The Ace of Spades in their living room.  Observing the shenanigans through a microscope is Coltrane as a genteel, old-fashioned Scottish doctor (“Absolutely amazing! Human beings the size of amoebas!”), possibly modelled on Dr Finlay in the 1930s stories by A.J. Cronin.  Coltrane brings the episode to an abrupt end when he accidentally drops an éclair on the specimen slide, burying Rik, Vyvyan and co. in creamy goo.

 

Laugh???  I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984)

During the early 1980s, Coltrane featured in three TV comedy sketch shows, Alfresco (1983-84), which also featured the afore-mentioned Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Elton; A Kick Up The Eighties (1984); and Laugh??? I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984).  In the latter, Coltrane made several memorable appearances as a West-of-Scotland Orangeman called Mason Boyne.  With his imposing bulk and craggy features, and wearing a black suit, bowler hat and sash,  Coltrane certainly looked the part.  Laugh? was produced by BBC Scotland and this was one of the very few times when the broadcaster was bold enough to have a go at the Orange Order and its paranoia about all things Popish.  “It’s all here, Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 1-10,” says Boyne, citing the Bible in support of his assertion that the Pope is the Antichrist.  “All you have to do is… jumble the words up a bit.”

 

© BBC

 

Caravaggio (1986)

Throughout the 1980s Coltrane had supporting or minor roles in many British or made-in-Britain films.  These include, incidentally, several forgotten fantasy and science-fiction ones: Death Watch (1980), Flash Gordon (1980), Britannia Hospital (1982), Krull (1983) and Slipstream (1989).  Okay, Flash Gordon hasn’t been forgotten – unfortunately.  Anyway, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he gives a performance that’s stayed in my memory more than most.  He plays Scipione Borghese, the 17th century cardinal who becomes the patron of the turbulent Italian painter.  As usual with Jarman, there’s striking set design, deliberately littered with anachronisms, and the film sees the debuts of Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean.

 

Mona Lisa (1986)

Coltrane also provides good support in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.  He plays Thomas, a garage-owner who offers sanctuary for the movie’s main character, old friend and harassed ex-convict George, played by the incomparable Bob Hoskins.  Thomas has no bearing on the film’s plot, which sees George employed by a gangster (Michael Caine) to drive around and look after high-class prostitute Simone (Cathy Tyson), whom he gradually falls in love with. But the friendship Thomas offers George is one of the few specks of light in a bleak film.  His best line comes when he walks in on George while George is watching a dodgy video he’s obtained – discovering to his horror that it features his beloved Simone in some hardcore porn.  Innocently, Thomas asks, “Channel 4, is it?”

 

Tutti Frutti (1987)

The pinnacle of Coltrane’s 1980s work, the tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti is surely the best piece of television to come out of Scotland.  At the time, I remember the New Musical Express hailing it as ‘the best TV show ever’, though sadly those know-nothing kids running the 2022 online version of the NME didn’t even mention Tutti Frutti in their Coltrane obituary.  Written by John Byrne, Tutti Frutti has Coltrane as Danny McGlone, who’s drafted in to sing for a vintage Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, is killed in a car accident.  The Majestics are on a death-spiral, largely due to the antics of guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves, who died last year).  Driver styles himself as ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’, but his personal life is a destructive shambles.  The band’s conniving manager Eddie Clockerty (a never-better Richard Wilson) doesn’t help things, either.

 

One consolation for Danny is another recent addition to the band’s line-up – guitarist Suzy Kettles, played by Emma Thomson with an impressively convincing Glaswegian accent. He gradually falls for the sassy Suzy, though she has her own issues – an abusive ex-husband, who happens to be a dentist.  Can Danny and Suzy get together while, around them, everything descends into a hellhole of fights, farce, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and extreme dental violence?  Due to copyright problems over its title song, written and recorded by Little Richard in 1955, Tutti Frutti didn’t get another airing for a very long time.  Happily, it’s now available on DVD and three years ago was shown again on BBC Scotland.

 

© BBC

 

Blackadder the Third (1987)

Coltrane played the celebrated lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson three times on stage and screen.  His best-remembered performance as the famously irascible Johnson is in the Ink and Incapability episode of the much-loved TV comedy Blackadder, wherein the crafty title character (Rowan Atkinson) and his hapless minion Baldrick (Tony Robinson) accidentally incinerate the one and only copy of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) prior to its publication.  This leaves them with just one night to write a replacement dictionary before Johnson finds out and inflicts his wrath upon them.  In the funniest scene, Johnson boasts that his dictionary “contains every word in our beloved language.”  To which Blackadder offers him his “most enthusiastic contrafibularities.”  He sticks the knife in by adding, “I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.”

 

Henry V (1989)

Sir John Falstaff, a prominent character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is actually dead at the start of Henry V.  However, in this cinematic version, writer and director Kenneth Branagh couldn’t bear to leave out the portly, garrulous rogue, so he showed Coltrane as Falstaff in an all-too-brief flashback.  Falstaff was a role Coltrane was clearly born to play and it’s a tragedy he never got cast in a proper adaptation of the two Henry IV plays (or for that matter The Merry Wives of Windsor).

 

Nuns on the Run (1990)

Nuns on the Run, which has Coltrane and Monty Python’s Eric Idle as criminals trying to escape some nastier criminals and taking refuge, and donning disguises, in a convent, is truly a one-joke film.  That joke is seeing Coltrane dressed as and pretending to be a nun.  It’s a pretty hilarious one, I have to admit.  Though totally inconsequential, Nuns on the Run works better than another comedy he was in during the same period, The Pope Must Die (1991).  North American distributors, nervous about the film’s sacrilegious title and noticing Coltrane’s girth, unsubtly renamed it The Pope Must Diet.

 

© HandMade Films / 20th Century Fox

 

The Bogie Man (1992)

This TV film adapted to the small screen the Alan Grant / John Wagner comic book about a Scotsman with psychiatric issues who believes he’s Humphrey Bogart (or characters Bogie played in the movies) and goes around fighting crime. The TV version was panned by the critics, disowned by Grant and Wagner, and as far as I known has never been reshown.  While I found it underwhelming, I enjoyed Coltrane’s performance as the lead character – occasionally, when not channelling Bogart, he lapses into impersonating Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger too.  Also, Craig Ferguson, years before he became a superstar on American television, gives a nice supporting turn as the cop on Coltrane’s trail.

 

Cracker (1993-95)

Arguably Coltrane’s greatest role, his work in Cracker as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist helping out a dysfunctional team of detectives (Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville, Lorcan Cranitch) won him the British Academy Award for Best Actor three years in a row.  Grim and intense, with the only humour coming from the arrogant, flamboyant and self-destructive Fitz, the show was at its most gruelling during its To Be a Somebody story at the start of season 2.  This involves a terrifyingly credible killer (Robert Carlyle), who’s ended up the way he is largely because of trauma he suffered in the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.  It also features the murder of one of the show’s main characters.

 

© Granada Television

 

Goldeneye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999)

Coltrane’s entertaining turns as ex-KGB man Dimitri Valentin, now a would-be entrepreneur in post-Communist Russia, are among the highlights of these two Bond movies, which have Pierce Brosnan playing 007.  Valentin certainly gets the best lines.  In Goldeneye, when Bond holds a gun to the back of his head and he hears the click of its safety catch, he observes: “Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetre. Only three men I know use such a gun.  I believe I’ve killed two of them.”   And in The World Is Not Enough, when Bond interrogates him about sultry oil tycoon Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), whom Bond has recently bedded, and demands, “What’s your business with Elektra King?”, he retorts, “I thought you were the one giving her the business.”  Valentin, who runs a hellish-sounding country-and-western club in one film and a caviar factory in the other, was devised at a time when Russian oligarchs could be depicted as lovable, comic Arthur-Daley-from-Minder-type grifters; and not sinister billionaires laundering mountains of dirty money in the City of London and buying their way into the heart of the British establishment.

 

From Hell (2001)

Like The Bogey Man, this movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s labyrinthine graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, published in instalments from 1989 to 1998, was disdained by its original creator.  However, if you can erase all memories of Moore’s From Hell and focus solely on the film, it’s decent.  For one thing, it looks at the Ripper’s hideous murders from the perspective of characters commonly neglected in previous films on the subject – his female victims.  Coltrane gives a solid performance as Sergeant George Godley, the loyal, capable and intelligent assistant to the film’s hero, the vulnerable, opium-raddled Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp).  A scene where Godley and Abberline are filmed from behind as they approach the funeral ceremony of one Ripper victim, dressed in black suits and bowler hats, even evokes Laurel and Hardy.  (In fact, at one time, Coltrane and Robert Carlyle had tried unsuccessfully to get a Laurel and Hardy movie off the ground.)

 

Thereafter, Coltrane achieved global popularity playing Hagrid in eight Harry Potter movies and got regular gigs doing voice-work in items like The Gruffalo (2009) and Brave (2012).  None of this was my cup of tea, but good on him for securing well-deserved fame and, presumably, fortune too.  It’s just a pity that a few years ago ill-health caught up with him, which deprived our TV and movie screens of his always-welcome presence.

 

© Eon Productions

Posted on

London Bridge is down

 

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

 

London Bridge is down.  No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler.  I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor.  Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

 

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog.  Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

 

That’s been my view for most of my life.  Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth.  It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.”  This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town.  This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

 

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country.  Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

 

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed.  Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions.  This included the abolition of its monarchy.

 

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me.  Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’.  Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

 

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

 

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery.  Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past.  Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century.  I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

 

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media.  One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members.  Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids.  Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus.  And who can blame him?  If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

 

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit.  Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much.  Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this.  They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.”  Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with.  In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

 

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.”  Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then.  And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

 

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country.  This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something.  Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.”  Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

 

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

 

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country.  Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge.  The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this.  Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

 

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go.  That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history.  She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS).  She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one.  She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

 

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years.  Quite the reverse.  By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days.  Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8th.

 

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away.  When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine.  (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

 

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.  I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them.  The crowd went, “Hurrah!”  Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface.  While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag.  The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again.  Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

 

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

 

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

Posted on

Grovel, Britannia

 

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

 

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70th year of her reign on the British throne.  I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family.  It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

 

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them.  They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward.  Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

 

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper.  It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

 

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth.  It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy.  This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town.  This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run.  And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long.  She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

 

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police.  The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

 

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy.  That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down.  The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain?  Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

 

That was then, however.  Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country.  Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

 

From pixabay.com / © Ben Kerckx

 

Now I just want the whole thing gone.  Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me.  My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein.  (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19.  Aye, right.)  It’s more to do with the state of Britain.  The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

 

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past.  Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

 

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment.  The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government.  I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

 

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s.  In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

 

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies.  There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’.  Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have.  It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on.  It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

 

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society.  Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever.  This is never more obvious than in the country’s press.  British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

 

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

 

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee.  There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen.  Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.”  No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are.  She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

 

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone.  Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them.  But obviously, that isn’t going to happen.  The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly.  And as for the country they’re supposed to represent…  Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.

 

From pixabay.com / © Sabine Lang

Posted on

A Lee-centennial

 

© British Lion Films

 

The British actor Sir Christopher Lee, who was born on this day exactly 100 years ago, was a man who embodied evil to generations of film-goers.  He played Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Scaramanga, Comte de Rochefort, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Blind Pew, Saruman, Count Dooku, the Jabberwocky, the Devil and, in the 2008 adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, Death himself.  But up until his passing in 2015, I didn’t so much regard him as the embodiment of evil as one of the coolest people on the planet.

 

Lee did a lot during his 93 years and not just in terms of acting – though his movie resume was awesome, with some 275 titles to his name by the time he entered his tenth decade.

 

He was, incidentally, an incredibly literary actor too, because his massive film and television CV contained adaptations of stories by Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Alexandre Dumas, Rider Haggard, Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Jules Verne.  In real life, he was step-cousin of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming; and by the time Peter Jackson got around to filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-2004), he could boast that he was the only member of the movies’ cast and crew who’d actually met J.R.R. Tolkien.  He was also good friends with Robert Bloch, author of Psycho (1959), the fabulous Ray Bradbury, and posh occult-thriller-writer Dennis Wheatley, whose potboiler The Devil Rides Out Lee would persuade Hammer Films to adapt to celluloid in 1968.  And he was one of the last people alive who could claim to have met M.R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in English literature.  As a lad Lee encountered James, who was then Provost of Eton College, when his family tried, unsuccessfully, to enrol him there.  Lee obviously didn’t hold his failure to get into Eton against James because in 2000 he played the writer in the BBC miniseries Ghost Stories for Christmas.

 

Before getting into acting in the late 1940s, Lee did military service during World War II, which included attachments with the Special Operations Executive and the Long Range Desert Patrol , the forerunner to the SAS.  He kept schtum about what he actually did with them.  Decades later, though, he may have unintentionally dropped a hint about his secret wartime activities to Peter Jackson when, on set, he discreetly advised the Kiwi director about the sound a dying man would really make if he’d just had a knife planted in his back.

 

His first years as an actor did not see much success, due to his being too tall (six-foot-four) and too foreign-looking (he had Italian ancestry).  During this period he at least learned how to swordfight, a skill he drew on when appearing in various low-budget swashbucklers.  During the making of one such film, 1955’s The Dark Avenger, the famously sozzled Errol Flynn nearly hacked off Lee’s little finger; although later Lee got revenge when, during a TV shoot with the same actor, a slightly-misaimed sword-thrust knocked off Flynn’s toupee, much to the Hollywood star’s mortification and no doubt to everyone else’s amusement.  Incidentally, I love the fact that Lee could boast of being the only actor in history who’d conducted sword fights with Errol Flynn and Yoda.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

And I’ve read somewhere that when he made the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade for Hammer Films in 1963, Lee taught a young Oliver Reed the basics of sword-fighting.  I’m sure fight-choreographer William Hobbs and the stunt crew who worked on The Three Musketeers a decade later quietly cursed Lee for this.  (Lee starred alongside Reed in the film, playing the memorably eye-patched Comte de Rochefort.)  From all accounts, the ever-enthusiastic Ollie threw himself into the Musketeers’ sword-fights like a whirling dervish, and eventually one stuntman had to ‘accidentally’ stab him in the hand and put him out of action before he killed someone.

 

In 1956 and 1957 Lee got two gigs for Hammer films that’d change his fortunes and make him a star – playing the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein and then, on the strength of that, Bram Stoker’s famous vampire count in Dracula.  Apparently, Hammer wanted originally to hire the hulking comedic actor Bernard Bresslaw to play Frankenstein’s monster.  I suppose there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where Bresslaw actually got the job; so that the man we know as Little Heap in Carry On Cowboy (1965), Bernie Lugg in Carry On Camping (1969) and Peter Potter in Carry On Girls (1973) went on in that universe to play Count Dooku in the Star Wars movies and Saruman the White in the Lord of the Rings ones.

 

Playing Baron Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein and Van Helsing in Dracula was the legendary Peter Cushing and he and Lee would hit it off immediately, become best mates and make another 18 films together, in which for much of the time they did bad things to each other.  As a mad-scientist-cum-asylum-keeper in The Creeping Flesh (1972), Lee brought a monster to life and then, after the monster had attacked Cushing and driven him insane with terror, he coolly incarcerated Cushing in his asylum.  Whereas in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) Cushing chased him, as Dracula, through a prickly hawthorn bush – hawthorns are apparently harmful to vampires and the experience, Lee recalled in his autobiography Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977), left him ‘shedding genuine Lee blood like a garden sprinkler’ – before impaling him on a sharp, uprooted fence-post.  Meanwhile, the 1972 British-Spanish movie Horror Express featured a decomposing ape-man fossil that’d come back to life, was possessed by an alien force and had the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs.  It was such an evil motherf***er that Lee and Cushing had to join forces, for once, to defeat it.

 

© Granada Films

 

Lee was famously uncomfortable about being branded a horror-movie star and about being associated with Dracula, an association that might thwart his ambitions for a serious acting career.  He did, though, play the character another six times for Hammer, and an eighth time in the Spanish production El Conde Dracula.  Tweeting a tribute to him when he passed away, Stephen King said, “He was the King of the Vampires.”  So sorry, Sir Christopher, but when the man who wrote Salem’s Lot (1975) says you’re the King of the Vampires, you’re the King of the Vampires.

 

As Dracula, he got to bite Barbara Shelley, Barbara Ewing, Linda Hayden, Anouska Hempel, Marcia Hunt, Caroline Munro and Valerie Van Ost.  Last-minute interventions by Peter Cushing in Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) prevented him from biting Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley, which must have been frustrating.  Meanwhile, the 1965 movie Dracula, Prince of Darkness was the first really scary horror movie I ever saw, on TV, back when I was eight or nine years old.  I’d watched old horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), in which everything was discreetly black-and-white and bloodless, so I wasn’t prepared for an early scene in Dracula, Prince of Darkness where Lee / the count is revived during a ceremony that involves a luckless traveller (Charles Tingwell) being suspended upside-down over a coffin and having his throat cut.  The sight and sound of the blood splattering noisily onto the supposedly dead vampire’s ashes traumatised me.

 

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

 

Thanks to Hammer’s success in the horror genre, the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s saw a boom in British, usually gothic, horror filmmaking.  And during that boom, Lee did many memorable, often evil, things.  He drove his car into Michael Gough and squidged off Gough’s hand in Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (1965).  He forced Vincent Price to immerse himself in a vat of acid in Scream and Scream Again (1969).  He turned up as a snobbish senior-civil-servant type and tormented Donald Pleasance in Deathline (1972).

 

Lee was probably Britain’s most linguistic actor, speaking German, French, Italian and Spanish and also knowing a bit of Swedish, Russian and Greek.  Thus, he also found it easy to find employment making horror movies on mainland Europe, where the gothic tradition was raunchier, more lurid and looser in its plot logic than its counterpart in Britain.  He worked with the Italian maestro Mario Bava in 1963’s The Whip and the Body and on several occasions with the fascinatingly prolific, but erratic, Spanish director Jess Franco.  Despite Franco’s cheeky habit of shooting scenes with Lee and then inserting them into a totally different and usually pornographic movie – something Lee would only discover later, when he strolled past a blue-movie theatre in Soho and noticed that he was starring in something like Eugenie and the Story of her Journey into Perversion (1970) – Lee held the Spaniard in esteem and championed his work at a time it wasn’t fashionable to do so.  Since his death in 2013, Franco’s reputation has improved and art-house director Peter Strickland’s movie The Duke of Burgundy (2014) is a tribute, in part, to him.

 

Franco directed the later entries in a series of movies about Fu Manchu that Lee made in the 1960s, in which he played Sax Rohmer’s supervillain in un-PC Oriental makeup and spent his time barking orders at Chinese minions, who were usually played by Burt Kwouk.  As well as retaining some of the racism that was prominent in Rohmer’s books, the series generally wasn’t up to much in terms of quality.  However, the film’s endings have always haunted me.  Invariably, Fu Manchu’s secret headquarters would blow up and then Lee’s voice would boom imperiously through the smoke, “The world will hear of me again!”

 

© Eon Productions

 

In the early 1970s, Lee finally got opportunities to make the sort of films he wanted to make, including Richard Lester’s two Musketeers movies (1974 and 1975); the ninth official Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun (1975), in which he taunted Roger Moore, “You work for peanuts – a hearty well-done from Her Majesty the Queen and a pittance of a pension.  Apart from that, we are the same.  To us, Mr Bond.  We are the best…  Oh come, come, Mr Bond.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”; and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), regarded by many as the best attempt at bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing super-sleuth to the screen.

 

In that latter film, Lee played Holmes’s snooty brother Mycroft.  Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself several times, including in a couple of early-1990s TV movies with Dr Watson played by the impeccable Patrick Macnee, whom decades earlier had been Lee’s schoolmate at Summer Fields School in Oxford.  And he played Henry Baskerville in the 1959 Hammer adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which had Peter Cushing in the role of Holmes.  But for some strange reason, nobody ever thought of casting Lee as Professor Moriarty.

 

In 1973, he also played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, a film that needs no introduction from me.  Actually, next year is the film’s fiftieth anniversary.  I trust the Scottish Tourist Board will celebrate this fact on May 1st, 2023, by lighting lots of wicker men, with lots of sanctimonious, virginal, Free Presbyterian policemen inside them, along the coasts of Scotland.

 

Later in the 1970s, no longer so typecast in horror movies and with the British film industry on its deathbed, Lee decamped to Hollywood.  He ended up appearing in some big-budget puddings like dire 1977 disaster movie Airport 77 and Steven Spielberg’s supposed comedy 1941 (1979), but at least he was able to rub shoulders with icons such as Muhammad Ali and John Belushi.  And he didn’t, strictly speaking, stop appearing in horror movies.  He was in the likes of House of the Long Shadows (1982), The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985), The Funny Man (1994) and Talos the Mummy (1998).  Amusingly, Lee usually explained this by arguing that these weren’t really horror films.  The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf wasn’t a horror film?  Aye, right.

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

 

Though he never relented in his workload, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Lee experienced a late-term career renaissance – no doubt because many of the nerdish kids who’d sneaked into cinemas or stayed up late in front of the TV to watch his old horror movies had now grown up, become major players in the film industry and were only too happy to cast him in their movies: Joe Dante, John Landis, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton.  Hence his roles in two of the biggest franchises in cinematic history, the Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit ones, plus five movies directed by Burton.

 

When he was in his eighties, Lee must have wondered if there were any territories left for him to conquer – and he realised that yes, there was one.  Heavy metal!  He had a fine baritone singing voice but only occasionally in his film career, for example, in The Wicker Man and The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), did he get a chance to show it off.  In the mid-noughties, however, he started recording with symphonic / power-metal bands Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar and soon after he was releasing his own metal albums such as Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, which had contributions by guitarist Hedras Ramos and Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner.  He also released two collections of Christmas songs, done heavy-metal style.  The festive season will never seem the same after you’ve heard Lee thundering his way through The Little Drummer Boy with electric guitars caterwauling in the background.

 

© Charlemagne Productions Ltd

 

Obviously, the heavy metal community, which sees itself as a crowd of badasses, was flattered when the cinema’s supreme badass – Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, etc. – elected to join them and they welcomed Lee with open arms.  They even gave him, as the genre’s oldest practitioner, the Spirit of Metal Award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods ceremony in 2010.

 

So: singing heavy metal, speaking eight languages, being perhaps the 20th century’s greatest screen villain and, probably, bayoneting Nazis to death.  Was there anything this man couldn’t do?  Well, it seems the only thing he couldn’t quite manage was to live forever.  Mind you, for someone who spent his cinema career dying – even when he penned his autobiography in his mid-fifties, he reckoned he’d been killed onscreen more than any other actor in history – but kept coming back, it feels a bit odd to be writing about Christopher Lee in the past tense.

 

Actually, if anybody wants to congregate in a Carpathian castle after dark and perform a blood-soaked ritual to resurrect the great man, I’m up for it.

 

From the Independent