Tag: James Robertson Justice

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When Stan was the man

 

From YouTube / © BBC

 

The great Scottish comic performer Stanley Baxter passed away earlier this month at the venerable age of 99.  Newspaper obituaries for him noted that, though he was a bright star indeed in 1970s British television, by the late 1980s his star had seemingly vanished from the firmament.  He’d gone.  It was almost as if he hadn’t been there in the first place.

 

As a result, one obituarist wrote, it was unlikely that anybody under the age of 40 in modern Britain had heard of him.  That does seem strange.  I can remember his TV shows being, in their day, very big events.  Over two decades, he only made six series – four of the Stanley Baxter Show between 1963 and 1971, one of the Stanley Baxter Picture Show in 1972 and one of the Stanley Baxter Series in 1981.  But during the intervening years, he staged several lavish, one-off specials that kept his face in the public consciousness, especially in the 1970s.  And his viewing figures were huge.

 

The reason Baxter himself gave for his abrupt disappearance during the 1980s was that his shows, full of song-and-dance extravaganzas and loving reproductions of old movie classics, became too expensive to make.  In particular, the television executive John Birt – once described memorably by playwright Dennis Potter as a ‘croak-voiced Dalek’ – had a hand in pulling the plug on him.  “It’s not that we don’t like your work,” he told Baxter. “It just all costs so much.”

 

It probably didn’t help that the type of entertainment Baxter was obviously smitten with, and slavishly reproduced and fondly parodied in his shows, had started to seem old-school by the 1980s.  Much of his material was drawn from the black-and-white days of Hollywood and he clearly took pleasure of impersonating the likes of Marlene Dietrich or Shirley Temple.  He also commonly referenced a former era of British cinema and theatre when accents were cut-glass and upper lips were stiff and he poked gentle fun at people like Sir John Gielgud and Noel Coward.  But by the time of his later shows, the audience familiar with those reference points was surely ageing.  A younger generation had arrived, more attuned to the 1970s New Hollywood movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and the blockbusters of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.  Maybe Stanley Baxter’s TV career simply reached the end of its natural lifespan.

 

Incidentally, offscreen, Baxter was a quiet man who avoided publicity.  This was partly due to the fact he was gay and for a long time he worried about the world finding out – sadly, he worried about this well after the point when most British people no longer gave a damn whether someone was gay or not.  Anyway, by the 1980s, he was entering his sixties and probably welcomed retirement and being out of the public’s gaze.

 

I have to say, watching some of his sketches now, I find myself agreeing with a comment posted below one of the recent obituaries.  The comment-writer said he thought much of Baxter’s TV work was ‘clever’ rather than ‘funny’.  In fact, technically, those sketches are sometimes astonishing.  Baxter played all the parts in them.  However, because the digital compositing technology didn’t exist at the time to layer several images of him together in the same shot (and older techniques like multiple exposure and split-screen effect weren’t very convincing), the sketches were filmed from multiple camera angles with Baxter in different roles at different times.  Copious use was made of filmed-from-behind body doubles and much editing was done afterwards.  They must have been meticulously planned and taken ages to put together.  No wonder, most years, we only saw him in a one-off special.  Also, their writing was smart and Baxter’s impersonations were impeccable.  But as far as comic value is concerned – well, I find myself smiling, perhaps chuckling, at them at best.

 

An example is his spoof of Upstairs Downstairs, the masters-and-servants-in-a-big-house costume drama that aired on British TV from 1971 to 1975 and was the Downton Abbey (2010-15) of its day.  Baxter’s take on it is surprisingly meta.  The servants downstairs are discussing how many of the toffs upstairs have been written out of the scripts recently and replaced by new characters played by bigger-name stars.  Surely, they think, that can’t happen to them, since they’re all played by sturdy, salt-of-the-earth character actors?  But it does – the punchline comes when housekeeper Mrs. Bridges is informed that she’s about to be replaced by Glenda Jackson.  As usual, Baxter plays everyone during the eight-minute sketch and his impersonation of the starchy butler Mr. Hudson (in the real Upstairs Downstairs played by Baxter’s fellow Scot Gordon Jackson) is absolutely spot-on.  But while I might be full of admiration by the end of it, I haven’t done much laughing during it.

 

From wiki.scotlandonaire.com

 

In his sketches, Baxter plays women as well as men and his female impersonations are frequently great.  British comedy has a long tradition of men dressing up as women: the Carry On movies (1958-92), Monty Python (1969-74), The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017), Little Britain (2003-6), Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Les Dawson and practically every pantomime ever.  But those drag acts were invariably grotesque, their grotesqueness designed to provoke laughter.  Baxter, though, delights in making his female characters as believable and, well, feminine, as possible.  The novelist and critic Anne Billson responded to Baxter’s death the other day by observing how she now can’t watch Barbra Streisand singing Don’t Rain on My Parade in Funny Girl (1968) without thinking of Baxter impersonating Streisand and singing that song on one of his shows.  I have no doubt that Baxter as Streisand was awesome.

 

For me, Stanley Baxter’s work was funnier when it left the showbiz world behind and focused on other things – especially things inspired by his Scottish roots.  I fondly remember a sketch from one of his last specials, in the mid-1980s, wherein a strict Free Presbyterian clergyman (played by mighty character actor Andrew Keir) in the Scottish islands is enraged to hear sounds of partying coming from a house.  It’s Sunday – the Sabbath.  When he confronts the little old lady (Baxter) living in the house, she pertly informs him, “Oh, but we’re not dancing.  We’re having an orgy.”  She then describes a game being played inside.  “The men-folk take all their clothes off and stand in a long line…  The women are blindfolded and they have to identify the men by touch.”  She invites the clergyman in, saying, “As a matter of fact, your name has come up twice.”

 

Also Scottish were perhaps his greatest achievements, the Parliamo Glasgow sketches, filmed in the manner of TV language-learning programmes of the time.  The characters perform a skit in the target language, then change to English and inform the viewers about some of the useful words and phrases they’ve just heard.  This being a Stanley Baxter piss-take, however, the target language is Glaswegian and the skits involve such expressions as “Thatzum bahookey yu-voan-yu” or, fabulously, “Zarra marra oanra barra, Clarra?”  When the instructors switch to English, it’s in the ridiculously posh tones of Received Pronunciation (then a requirement for British TV presenters): “Again, an amorous young lady might use the word romantically to her bashful lover – ‘Zarra bestye kindae?’”

 

This fascination with language, dialect and accent informs another Baxter sketch, involving Nationwide (1969-83), the current affairs TV show broadcast on weekday evenings that consisted of reports from the BBC’s newsrooms across the regions and nations of the United Kingdom.  The joke is that each presenter in each newsroom, in Belfast, Leeds, Cardiff and so on, speaks the local dialect there so strongly that nobody else can understand them.  Finally, the programme switches to the main newsroom in London – where its presenter speaks with such exaggerated Received Pronunciation that he’s unintelligible too.

 

Though his television fame faded elsewhere in Britain, Baxter remained a name in Scotland.  Throughout his career he’d appeared in Scottish pantomimes and in the 1980s and early 1990s he starred in a number of productions at Glasgow’s King’s Theatre: Cinderella (1980-81), Mother Goose (1983-84), Aladdin (1986-87) and, again, Cinderella (1991-92).  I remember that last production getting much attention in the Scottish press because it was billed as his farewell to the stage.  His pantomime work was often done in tandem with another Scot, Angus Lennie, who was best known for playing Steve McQueen’s sidekick, the ill-fated Archibald Ives, in The Great Escape (1962).  Baxter and Lennie’s performances as the Ugly Stepsisters in Cinderella are legendary.

 

From YouTube / © BBC

 

He also turned up in Fitba, a 1990 episode of the Scottish TV sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-99, 2008-14).  Here, he plays an elderly man, at death’s door, who’s a football fan.  He’s so determined to see the Scottish men’s football team perform in the 1990 World Cup before he passes that he pays the titular character, the garrulous though rough-and-tumble Rab C. Nesbitt, to take him to the country hosting the tournament, Italy.  Baxter’s character is decrepit and moribund and Rab is understandably sceptical about the undertaking.  But he gradually wins Rab’s respect with his determination to make the most of what he has left.  “My time is precious,” he tells Rab in Rome.  “I’m taking a taxi into town.  Then I’ll walk to Via Garibaldi and into Palazzo Doria Tursi to see, among other treasures, Paganini’s violin.”  When he asks about Rab’s plans that afternoon, and is told he’ll maybe get a pizza, he retorts, “A pizza?  In Italy?  My, you’re full of ideas!”  Thanks to Scotland’s recent qualification for the 2026 World Cup in North America, I was thinking about this episode and Stanley Baxter just a few days before he died.

 

Finally, he featured in a handful of movies too: Geordie (1955), Very Important Person (1961), The Fast Lady (1962), Crooks Anonymous (1962) and Father Came Too! (1963).  Decades later, he was one of the many people (also including Vincent Price, Donald Pleasance, Anthony Quayle, Joan Sims, Kenneth Williams, George Melly and Joss Ackland) who did voice-work for Richard Williams’ legendary, but never properly finished, animated epic The Thief and the Cobbler (1993).

 

As a kid, I loved The Fast Lady, though I daresay I’d find it juvenile and knockabout if I saw it today.  But what a sublime cast it has – Baxter as the bumbling hero, Julie Christie as the woman he’s in love with, James Robertson Justice as Christie’s irascible and deeply disapproving father, and Leslie Philips as Baxter’s smooth best friend who tries to aid him in his love-life but only makes matters worse.

 

Ah, it makes me nostalgic.  Who would you get in a British comedy film nowadays?  Danny bloody Dyer – if you’re lucky.

 

© Independent Artists / Rank Organisation / Continental Distributing

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Murder most Margaret

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From wikipedia.org

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Jim Mountfield sheds some tears

 

© Hiraeth Publishing

 

Late last month saw the publication of the Samhain 2024 edition of the fiction, non-fiction and poetry magazine The Hungur Chronicles.  I’m pleased to say it includes an 8000-word short story of mine called The Tears of the Pontianak.  The story is a horror one so, as with all my horror fiction, it’s attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.

 

I had the original idea for the story one day while I was exploring Singapore’s impressive Asian Civilisations Museum.  A couple of items of antique furniture – beautifully ornate and lacquered and each containing a dozen drawers – caught my eye and got me thinking.  I imagined a chest of drawers like these being acquired by a rich man with a lot of guilty secrets in his past, secrets his conscience could only deal with by compartmentalising them and totally shutting them away from his existence now.  Not only would the drawers be symbolic of how he’d compartmentalised his life, but they’d somehow have a supernatural power to revive his guilty secrets and force him to confront them.

 

 

The Hungur Chronicles is a rebooted version of Hungur, a magazine I wrote stories for back in 2010 and 2011.  The reason I hadn’t written for Hungur / The Hungur Chronicles since then is because the publication features “short stories, poems, articles, and illustrations related in some way to vampires.”  And until recently I’d found it difficult to come up with a fresh and interesting vampire story.  Like zombies, vampires are a staple of horror stories that have been used a zillion times before.  It seemed impossible to write about them in a way that wasn’t clichéd.

 

So, yes, The Tears of the Pontianak isn’t only about a strange chest of drawers.  It’s about a vampire.  However, the ‘vampire’ in question is something a little out-of-the-ordinary, at least for Western readers.  It’s a Pontianak, a malevolent female creature that appears in the folklore of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.  Though Pontianaks have different attributes in different places, I went with the Malaysian version of them, which, according to Wikipedia, “depicts them as “vampiric” blood-suckers that dissect through the internal organs of men.”  But to link the Pontianak with the other elements in my story, like the haunted chest of drawers and the rich man with a guilty past, I had it feed on something other than blood.  I also needed to set the story in Southeast Asia.  Thus, The Tears of the Pontianak is a minor milestone for me because it’s my first published story that takes place in Singapore.

 

Finally, I’m fond of basing fictional characters on gnarly old cinematic character-actors whom I like.  For example, ones inspired by James Robertson Justice and James Cosmo have turned up in stories of mine that’ve seen print during the past year.  The Tears of the Pontianak contains a character modelled on Michael Smiley, the grizzled Northern Irish character actor whose CV includes roles in several weird, disturbing and violent Ben Wheatley films: Down Terrace (2009), Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013) and Free Fire (2016).  As I’m also grizzled and Northern Irish, and people tell me I’m weird enough to be a character in a Ben Wheatley film, I identify a lot with Smiley.  And in The Tears of the Pontianak I pay tribute to him.

 

© Film4 Productions / BFI / Rook Films / StudioCanal

 

Containing four additional stories, some poetry and a non-fiction article, and with a striking cover by painter Sandy DeLuca, the Samhain 2024 edition of The Hungur Chronicles can be purchased here.

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Rab Foster makes a straw man argument

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is the name of a short story I’ve just had published using the pseudonym Rab Foster.  I always attribute any fantasy fiction I write to Rab Foster and, accordingly, this story is about an elderly witch who tries to enjoy a peaceful retirement in a remote farming valley, only to have her solitude disturbed by the local farmers, who beg her to use her magical powers to combat a fearsome and malignant totem that’s suddenly appeared at the top of the valley – the titular scarecrow at the titular Terryk Head.  The story appears in Issue 151 of the online Swords & Sorcery Magazine.

 

It wasn’t so long ago that I commented on this blog that I felt scarecrows had been overdone in fantasy fiction.  Well, I still believe that, but I thought the idea behind The Scarecrow of Terryk Head was good enough to justify the presence of a tattie-bogle (as we call the things in Scotland).  I have to admit the story was influenced, slightly, by scarecrows that appeared in the Thomas Ligotti tale The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which was published in his 1991 collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works; and in a story featured in the 2010 collection The Mirror of Paradise by the Sri Lankan writer Asgar Hussein.  Unfortunately, I can’t remember what Hussein’s scarecrow story was called, and I haven’t been able to find its title online.  But I enjoyed it a lot.

 

Other influences on The Scarecrow of Terryk Head include, curiously enough, Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and, yes, the Bronte sisters.  And, writing it, I had fun paying homage to a scene from the 1961 film Murder, She Said.  This was a cinematic adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novel 4.50 from Paddington (1957) and starred two of my all-time favourite performers, Margaret Rutherford and James Robertson Justice.  What, you may wonder, does a fantasy story about witches and scarecrows have to do with an old black-and-white Miss Marple movie?  Well, read the darned thing and find out.

 

For the next month, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head can be accessed here; while the main-page of the 151st edition of Swords & Sorcery Magazine, which contains two other stories and an essay, can be reached here.

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Cinematic heroes 2: James Robertson Justice

 

© Rank Organisation

 

This weekend saw the funeral of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who passed away on April 9th at the age of 99.  Anyone who’s read the political entries I’ve put on this blog won’t be surprised to hear that I’m not a monarchist, at least as far as Britain is concerned.  I’ve got nothing against the Queen, who seems boundlessly dutiful and decent as she pushes her 95th birthday.  I’ve even got nothing against the concept of a monarchy itself, if it means having a symbolic head-of-state who deals with all the ceremonial stuff like opening supermarkets and attending banquets while the government gets on with the actual business of running the country.  Elsewhere in Europe, small-scale monarchies like this seem to work perfectly well in the Low countries and Scandinavia. 

 

Unfortunately, I don’t think a country as dysfunctional as Britain, so neurotically obsessed with its past, and where the institution seems to bring out the worst in many people – obsequiousness, snobbery, jingoism, culture-warring and my-patriotism’s-bigger-than-your-patriotism flag-shagging – could cope with having a small-scale monarchy.  So I think in the long run it would be better for Britain to just dispense with the monarchy and become a republic.

 

Anyway, enough of the political talk.  This seems an opportune time to repost this tribute I once wrote about one of Prince Philip’s close friends – the gruff, pompous acting marvel James Robertson Justice, whom the late prince once described as “a large man with a personality to match” who “lived every bit of his life to the full and richly deserves the title ‘eccentric’.”

 

Forgive the pun, but in a brief blog entry it’s impossible to do justice to James Robertson Justice.  By the time he embarked on an acting career – his first screen appearance was in the Charles Crichton-directed wartime propaganda movie For Those in Peril (1943), with his first substantial role coming four years later in Peter Ustinov’s comic fantasy Vice Versa – he’d already amassed a professional CV that would put, say, Jack London’s to shame.

 

In London, he’d worked as a journalist at Reuters (alongside a 20-year-old Ian Fleming).  Then he’d upped and gone to Canada, where he’d tried his hand at selling insurance, teaching English at a boys’ school and being a lumberjack and gold-miner.  He’d worked his passage back to Britain on a Dutch freighter and during the 1930s served as secretary and manager to the British ice-hockey team.  He’d also had a go at being a racing driver, served as a League of Nations policeman and fought for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.  In World War II he’d been invalided out of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve because of a shrapnel injury.

 

On top of his decidedly varied working experiences, James Robertson Justice was a polyglot.  According to whom you believe, the number of languages he could speak were four, ten or twenty.  He was also a keen birdwatcher and falconer – the latter enthusiasm earning him the friendship of Prince Philip – a raconteur and bon viveur with an eye for the ladies and a penchant for fast and expensive cars, and perhaps most passionately of all, a would-be Scotsman.  Although he’d been born in Lewisham in London in 1907, to a Scottish father, Justice told everyone that he’d been born in the shadow of a distillery on the Isle of Skye.  People believed this and it was only in 2007 that a biographer, James Hogg, discovered his birth certificate and his non-Scottish origins.

 

To cement his Scottish credentials, Justice served as rector of Edinburgh University from 1963 to 1966 and in the 1950 general election he ran unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate for the Scottish constituency of North Angus and Mearns.  Despite his friendship with the Queen’s husband and his taste for fine living, Justice’s politics were firmly of the left.  One of the languages he could speak was Scottish Gaelic.  And he must have been proud that he starred in the most charming of old Scottish comedy movies, 1949’s Whisky Galore.

 

© Rank Organisation

 

A larger-than-life character in reality, it’s unsurprising that fame, when it arrived for Justice, was a result of him playing a larger-than-life movie role.  1954’s Doctor in the House, based on the comic novel by Richard Gordon, follows the mishaps of four medical students (Kenneth More, Donald Sinden, Donald Houston and soon-to-be-a-star Dirk Bogarde) while they bumble, philander and idle their way through their studies at the fictional St Swithin’s Hospital.  Its irreverent tone struck a chord with British cinema audiences, whose patronage made it the biggest grossing film of the year.  That’s ‘irreverent’ in strictly a 1954 sense, however.  Bogarde and co seem a pretty mild bunch of rebels even by the standards of the 1950s, which a couple of years later would see the advent of rock ‘n’ roll.  And as biting and unruly medical satire goes, Doctor in the House isn’t exactly on par with, for instance, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* (1970).

 

In fact, the film would seem flat and stodgy today if it wasn’t for Justice’s turn as the chief surgeon at St Swithin’s, the hulking, pompous and delightfully ogre-ish Sir Lancelot Spratt.  The scenes involving Spratt are still capable of prompting guffaws – particularly the one with the famous ‘What’s the bleeding time?’ joke.

 

Steamrollering through the hospital wards and corridors and dragging a dazed trail of matrons, nurses and junior doctors in his wake, treating his underlings like dirt and so disdainful of the working-class patients that it’s debatable whether or not he considers them capable of thought, Spratt could be seen as the socialist-leaning Justice’s piss-take of a pompous upper-crust Tory doctor, one who’s been thrust against his wishes into the brave new Labourite world of Britain’s fledgling National Health Service.  The truth is simpler, though.  Justice was simply playing himself, or at least the side of himself who liked fancy cars, caviar and royalty.

 

The success of Doctor in the House and the popularity of Spratt meant that he was immediately typecast.  He’d spend the remainder of the 1950s, and the 1960s, playing variations on the role – comically-blustering aristocrats and authority figures who believed themselves entitled to behave any way they pleased and who didn’t give a tinker’s cuss what other people thought about it.

 

One exception to the rule was the memorable John Huston-directed, Ray Bradbury-scripted film version of Moby Dick in 1956, in which he played Captain Boomer.  Also, in the 1961 adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone, he played the commodore at Allied Command who rounds up Gregory Peck, David Niven and the gang and sends them off to blow up the big German guns of the title.  Otherwise, comedies and pomposity were the order of the day.  Justice played Spratt in six more Doctor movies, where the quality inevitably went down each time, and played many more Spratt clones.  His performances, however, were never less than hugely entertaining.

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

One of my favourites is his turn as the unbearably bear-ish aristocrat Luther Ackenthorpe in 1961’s Murder, She Said, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington, which starred the venerable Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple.  The lady detective takes on a job as a maid in the Ackenthorpe household in order to investigate a possible murder, and predictably she and Justice spend the film getting on each other’s nerves.   Miss Marple receives a shock at the end because Justice, despite the antagonism that’s existed between them, has concluded that she’s just the woman to share his matrimonial bed.  His proposal of marriage hardly sweeps her off her feet, though.  “You’re a fair cook,” he tells her, “and you seem to have your wits about you and, well, I’ve decided to marry you.”  Unsurprisingly, Miss Marple manages to turn down his proposal without much soul-searching.

 

Justice is also good in the 1962 comedy The Fast Lady.  It has a great cast – Julie Christie, making only her second film appearance, the suave Leslie Philips and the legendary Glaswegian comic performer Stanley Baxter.  Mind you, when I saw part of it on YouTube recently I found its humour a lot less sophisticated than how I remembered it from multiple TV viewings when I was a kid.  Justice plays a rich and arrogant sports-car enthusiast, a role that was obviously no leap for him, who runs gormless cyclist Baxter off the road.  When Baxter tracks Justice down to his country manor to complain, he falls in love with Justice’s daughter, Christie, while Robertson, chugging around on a riding lawnmower, mangles Baxter’s bicycle into his lawn.  There follows a romantic comedy of manners, with Baxter trying to win Christie’s hand and earn her father’s respect.  I remembering seeing an interview with Baxter wherein he reminisced about the film and, adding yet another string to Justice’s bow, recalled how his co-star had been an authority on butterflies.

 

Shortly after playing yet another cantankerous and wealthy old bugger, Lord Scrumptious, in 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – based on the children’s book by his old Reuter’s colleague Ian Fleming – Justice suffered the first of several strokes that would hobble and then finish his film career.  By the time of the last Doctor film, 1970’s Doctor in Trouble, his appearance as Sir Lancelot Spratt had been reduced to a cameo.  His final role was an appropriately Scottish-themed one, 1971’s The Massacre of Glencoe.  As the work petered out, so did his money, and in 1975 he died a sick and bankrupt man.  All in all, it was a sad and undignified end for one of the British cinema’s most flamboyant and gloriously imperious figures.

 

From worldoffalconry.co.uk