Peter Jackson – Blood and Porridge

March 1, 2024March 1, 2024

Who shot J.R.R.?

© George Allen & Unwin

I’ve never really liked J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55). There… I’ve said it.

When I was a teenager I had The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Return of the King within the covers of one weighty tome that ran to 1077 pages. I stumbled through about 800 pages of it. Sometimes I left it aside for months and when I returned I had to reread long tracts of it to remind myself what was going on. Eventually, I abandoned it forever at the bit where Frodo and Sam blunder into the lair of Shelob, the giant spider. Thus, for years afterwards, I wasn’t entirely sure if (a) Frodo got to complete his quest, and (b) he didn’t end up as giant-spider-food. Though, given the probability of a happy ending, I assumed that (a) he did, and (b) he didn’t. Finally, in 2003, I saw Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Return of the King and my assumptions were confirmed.

I found Tolkien’s writing style plodding at times, but what really defeated me was the dullness of the characters. The evil ones (Gollum, Saruman) were interesting, but as far as the good guys were concerned, the ones I was supposed to be rooting for… Dearie me. I had hopes for Aragorn early on, in his guise as the enigmatic Strider, but my curiosity soon waned. Boromir was agreeably conflicted, but he didn’t make it beyond the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. (In the 2001 movie version, he’s played by Sean Bean, so you know immediately what’s going to happen to him.) Meanwhile, the Hobbits of the Shire were insufferably bland. Their nicey-nicey, respectable, know-your-place-and-respect-your-betters manner so annoyed me that I suspected if the Shire had newspapers, the Daily Mail and Daily Express would dominate the market. Sam Gamgee, tending to Frodo like a batman serving a member of the officer class, was particularly irksome in his cap-doffing.

No wonder the fantasy and science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote sourly of Lord of the Rings: “If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob – mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence, the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom ‘good taste’ is synonymous with ‘restraint’… and ‘civilised’ behaviour means ‘conventional behaviour in all circumstances’.”

And though I was a teenager at the time, I don’t think it’s likely that if I read The Lord of the Rings now, I’d have an epiphany, revise my opinion of the trilogy and acclaim it as a masterpiece. For one thing, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy (1968, 70 & 72) and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946, 50 & 59) around the same time and thought they were brilliant. Indeed, the first two Gormenghast volumes are among my all-time favourite books. Also back then, I tried reading Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), which is sometimes credited with kickstarting the ‘grimdark’ movement in modern fantasy – more on that in a moment – and thought it was dreadful shite, an assessment shared by many people whose judgement I trust. So I doubt if my evaluation of Tolkien today would be any different.

© Penguin Books

I should add that I never had a problem with the Lord of the Rings movies. However, I generally see literature as a denser, more complicated and more profound medium than cinema. And though something might seem a bit staid when written on the page, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be ineffective in the less demanding medium of images and sounds that greets you when you enter a cinema or log into a movie-streaming service. For me, Lord of the Rings was perfectly palatable as a series of two-to-three-hour viewing experiences where you could enjoy the performances of some great actors and actresses (Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Viggo Mortensen, Christopher Lee et al), the stunning New Zealand scenery and Peter Jackson’s obvious flair for orchestrating action and spectacle. They contained too much CGI, of course, but that goes without saying these days.

So, why am I writing this? Well, last month saw the publication of an essay entitled Grimdull in the Critic, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘monthly British political and cultural magazine’ whose contributors ‘include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young’. The swivel-eyed loopiness of three of those four contributors should give you an idea of where the Critic stands on the political spectrum. The essay’s writer Sebastian Milbank – also The Critic’s executive editor – says this of the author of Lord of the Rings:

“Those who followed Tolkien, even from a commercial perspective, understood that modern fantasy was following in his wake; he gave a sense of moral and literary seriousness to the building of imaginary worlds, which would otherwise be absorbed into moralistic allegory or semi-comical whimsy. Tolkien’s world feels ‘real’ not only because of his attention to detail, but because he builds a sense of emotionally freighted history and recognisable moral stakes, set out in a language strange enough to be compelling, familiar enough to be taken seriously.”

Alas for Tolkien’s worthy legacy, Milbank argues, modern fantasy writing has been taken over and corrupted by grimdark, ‘a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings’, popularized by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence and the blockbusting, blood-tits-and-dragons-meister that is George R.R. Martin. “It’s a genre…” Milbank bellyaches, “generally in a mediaeval fantasy setting, but shorn of any romance. Characters are overwhelmingly cynical, and those few who exhibit nobility are treated as foolish or naive. Generally a chaotic war is happening, or about to happen. Religion features, but largely as a tool of social control, often portrayed… as even more cruel and cynical than the secular world around it. Dark observations about human nature substitute for any moral drama, with characters seeking to outwit, manipulate or overpower one another in a kind of Darwinian struggle for dominance.”

© Bantam Books

Even worse, laments Milbank, it’s all the fault of the liberal left. “It’s a script born of vaguely liberal, vaguely radical, vaguely anarchic sentiments common to most contemporary creative ‘industries’.”

Who shot J.R.R.? Those lefty grimdark degenerates did! Basically, Milbank’s trying to open another front in the culture wars. This time it’s evil, modern fantasy writers versus the decent, traditional, conservative values embodied by Tolkien.

So much is wrong in his analysis that I don’t have time to detail it all here. I’d direct you, though, to this recent riposte penned by the writer Cora Buhlert. Firstly, she takes Milbank to task for his many omissions, made either through ignorance of fantasy literature or through disingenuity. In presenting the field as a simple battleground between Tolkien and grimdark, he ignores Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany and the copious fantasy writing that went on in the old American pulp magazines, by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore, which helped popularize the sub-genre of sword and sorcery and gave us the character of Conan the Barbarian. Simultaneously, Buhlert notes, no mention is made of other trends in modern fantasy writing, such as hopepunk, cosy fantasy or romantasy.

Indeed, she points out how Milbank doesn’t so much move the goalposts in his definition of grimdark as go sprinting off with the goalposts over his shoulders. In the course of his tortured polemic, he refers to TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-22), Boardwalk Empire (2010-14) and Breaking Bad (2008-13) and superhero movies like Captain America: Civil War (2016). Two of those examples aren’t remotely classifiable as fantasy – unless I remember wrongly and Walter White was actually an Orc – while the other two have nothing to do with the literature, set in medieval fantasy worlds, that he’s allegedly writing about.

Milbank also takes potshots at Philip Pullman, even though, as Buhlert observes, books like Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) aren’t grimdark either. Presumably, Pullman gets a mention because, as a famous atheist, he’s a red flag to a bull as far as crazed Christian-morality-campaigners are concerned. (“Philip Pullman is a stupid, delusional, immoral, inhuman piece of garbage, while C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were geniuses, amazing authors, and great human beings,” declared one comment I read on an American fantasy website recently.) And predictably, he slates Michael Moorcock for being ‘terribly dated’ in his anti-establishment views. Strangely, considering how Moorcock’s fantasy stories have greatly influenced the modern fantasy genre too, Milbank attacks him using the example of his 1966 novella Behold the Man, which is actually a work of science fiction.

One other serious flaw that Buhlert identifies in Milbank’s essay is his implication that Tolkien popularised fantasy fiction in one fell swoop in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until the 1960s, when Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback in the USA, and possibly not until the 1970s, when imitators like Terry Brooks began to publish doorstop-sized ‘high-fantasy’ trilogies of their own, that Tolkien’s influence really began to be felt.

© Overlook Press

I’d add that when I was a teenager it wasn’t just me and Michael Moorcock who disliked Tolkien. I got the impression he wasn’t particularly valued by the literary establishment – whose posh, starchy gatekeepers at the time are probably the sort of chaps whom the young-fogeyish Milbank looks back on with great admiration. Indeed, Edmund Wilson famously dismissed Lord of the Rings as ‘a children’s book that somehow got out of hand’, ‘an overgrown fairy story’, ‘balderdash’ and ‘juvenile trash’. Anthony Burgess conspicuously failed to mention it in his volume Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, though he was broadminded enough to include science-fiction and fantasy books by and / or authors like Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Alasdair Gray, George Orwell, Keith Roberts, T.H. White and, yes, Mervyn Peake in his list.

Cora Buhlert complains that Milbank’s essay “feels as if it time-travelled here from the early 2010s… Honestly, has Sebastian Milbank read a single novel or watched a single TV show that came out in the last five years?” Actually, I get the impression he probably did write the thing about a decade ago, perhaps as a moan against the then astronomical popularity of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019) TV series. But, recognising the essay’s myriad shortcomings, he left it on the shelf – until now.

Because today we live in a time where Britain’s Conservative Party politicians, and their hordes of supporters who infest the mainly right-wing British media, are aware that, if the opinion polls and by-election results are to be believed, they’re in for a massive humping at the next general election. So dismal have the Conservatives’ 14 years in government been that their only strategy now is to try and ignite, and fight, a massive culture war on all fronts imaginable.

Thus, we’ve had ex-Tory-prime minister, and catastrophe, Liz Truss – her with the shelf-life of a lettuce – raving about her premiership being sabotaged by ‘trans-activists’ in the civil service. Former Deputy Conservative Party Chairman ‘30p’ Lee Anderson claiming that London’s Labour Party mayor is in the pocket of ‘Islamists’. Neil Oliver ranting about vaccines on far-right channel GB News. The Daily Mail dismissing young people’s mental health problems as ‘snowflakery’. The police, the universities, the judiciary, the National Trust, Net Zero, speed restrictions, the English football team, TV sitcoms, Doctor Who, James Bond, you name it, British right-wingers have tried to pick a fight with it, often for the sin of being ‘woke’.

It was just a matter of time before they got around to modern fantasy literature. Hence, Tolkien’s been weaponized.

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

May 27, 2022May 27, 2022

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.

© 20^th 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 1^st, 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 20^th 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

November 18, 2021March 27, 2024

Spice-world: the movie

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Like everywhere else, one sector in Sri Lanka heavily hit by Covid-19 was the country’s cinemas. In Colombo, establishments like the Liberty, Savoy and Regal had stood closed-up, empty and silent for so long that I’d begun to doubt if they’d ever open their doors again. However, with the Sri Lankan Covid-19 death toll down (for now), the authorities have permitted cinemas to reopen, albeit working at a reduced capacity. During the first half of November, their auditoriums could only be 25% full. For the month’s second half, the maximum capacity has been increased to 50%. To do our bit to help Sri Lanka’s beleaguered cinema industry, myself and a mate went a few days ago to the Scope multiplex at Colombo City Centre shopping mall. There, we watched Dune, this year’s big-budget, Denis Villeneuve-directed adaptation of the famous 1965 science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert. Or at least, Villeneuve’s adaptation of the first half of it, as Dune is one fat book.

And we had no regrets about seeing Dune in a cinema. It’s a visually majestic creation that needs to be seen on a big screen to be properly appreciated. In fact, you’ll be committing a minor crime against celluloid if you watch it in reduced form on a TV or laptop screen. And if you dare to watch it on a phone-screen… Well, you don’t deserve to live.

I have to say, though, that I read Herbert’s novel as a teenager and it was no favourite of mine. In part, my being unimpressed by it was probably down to bloody-mindedness. A lot of earnest, nerdy people gushed about how great it was, which probably predisposed me to not liking it. This was similar to my less-than-enthusiastic reaction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-worshipped Lord of the Rings – although unlike Rings, I did read Dune to the end. (With Rings, I gave up four-fifths of the way through.) Also, it didn’t help that I read Dune a couple of years after Star Wars (1977) came out. Many of the book’s plot elements – a scheming galactic empire, a desert planet, an elite sect with psychic powers – had recently featured in George Lucas’s sci-fi / fantasy blockbuster, so they seemed less fresh than they had in 1965.

© New English Library

Though I found Lord of the Rings overrated on the page, I did enjoy the movies that Peter Jackson made of it in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Well, apart from the last half-hour of the final one, The Return of the King, which consisted of nothing but various characters getting married. A second-rate reading experience can, with an excellent cast, a great director and all the epic locations and special effects that Hollywood money can buy, be turned into a first-rate viewing experience.

And so it is with Dune.

Its cast is wonderful – Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Timothée Chalamet, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin, Jason Mamoa, Charlotte Rampling, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Javier Bardem – and director Villeneuve has already helmed two of the past decade’s greatest sci-fi movies, Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). And its 165-million-dollar budget has been put to good use. The filming locations in the UAE and Jordan really do transport you to the film’s main setting, the endlessly sandy and murderously hot desert-planet Arrakis; while the special effects, conjuring up fleets of spacecraft that stand like gigantic, angular cathedrals when they’re parked on planets’ surfaces, but look as tiny and inconsequential as pollen-grains when they’re bobbing in the black void of space, are stunning. Hence, the absolute necessity to see Dune on a large screen.

Denis Villeneuve, of course, isn’t the first filmmaker to bring Dune to the screen, for an earlier cinematic version of it had appeared in 1984, directed by that genius of visionary weirdness, David Lynch. The 1984 Dune was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics – I remember the New Musical Express retitling it Dung – but I didn’t think it was that bad. Lynch added some delightfully bizarre touches to the story and he arguably had an even better cast of actors than Villeneuve: Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and the great (and now, sadly, late) Dean Stockwell. Sting was in it too.

Alas, Lynch’s producer was old-school movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted Dune to be a regulation two-hour movie. Cramming all the events of Herbert’s doorstop-sized book into that caused massive problems for the script. Early on, Lynch had wisely envisioned Dune as two movies, and then proposed it as a three-hour film, but this cut no ice with old Dino.

I remember going to see Lynch’s Dune at a cinema in Aberdeen with my girlfriend of the time. Having read the book I was familiar with the plot, which goes like this… (Beware – spoilers are coming.) In the distant 102^nd century, the galaxy is ruled by an empire that incorporates a number of powerful families, or Houses. One of these, the House Atreides, headed by the well-meaning Duke Leto (Isaacs in the new Dune, Prochnow in the old one), his ‘concubine’ Lady Jessica (Ferguson now, Annis then) and their son, the young Paul (Chalamet now, MacLachlan then), is entrusted with running the desert-planet Arrakis. Arrakis is vital for the Empire because a mysterious ‘spice’- in reality a consciousness-expanding drug – is mined there and its properties enable spaceship-navigators to find their way through interstellar space. The planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the reclusive and Bedouin-like Fremen, are suspicious of the Atreides because previously the Empire had put them under control of another House, the Harkonnen, who treated them genocidally.

Before Leto can win hearts and minds on Arrakis, the Harkonnen launch an attack to retake the planet, with the Emperor’s blessing – the whole manoeuvre has been a plot to get rid of the potentially troublesome Atreides. The Atreides are wiped out, save for Paul and his mother Jessica, who flee into the planet’s deserts. They now have the formidable task of rallying the distrustful Fremen and persuading them to retake Arrakis from the homicidal Harkonnen – which, in the book’s later stages, they do.

Villenueve’s film ends with Paul and Jessica fleeing the Harkonnen – a second Dune movie, which will tell the remaining story, has now been greenlighted. Poor old Lynch, though, had to squash everything into just over two hours. I remembering being in an Aberdonian pub after seeing his Dune with my ex-girlfriend, who hadn’t read the book. I spent about an hour trying to explain the film’s plot to her, which she’d been flummoxed by.

Villeneuve’s Dune only covers half of the book and is still 19 minutes longer than Lynch’s version, so obviously the story gets more space to breath. This also enables Villeneuve to do a lot of the important sci-fi business of ‘world-building’. It’s gratifying too that Dune’s secondary characters, the various soldiers, courtiers and allies of the House Atreides, like Gurney Halleck (Brolin now, Stewart then), Duncan Idaho (Mamoa now, Jordan then), Thufir Hawat (McKinley Henderson now, Jones then) and Dr Liet-Kynes (Duncan-Brewster now, von Sydow then) get much more time to establish themselves and win the audience’s sympathy. In the compressed 1984 Dune, their roles were brief and their deaths, if they occurred, were blink-and-you’ll-miss-them events.

Certain critics have sniped at this new version of Dune for being humourless. Now while I admit to counting a total of three jokes during the film’s entire 157-minute running time – it’s telling that two of those jokes turn up in the trailer – I have to say I found it refreshing to experience a science fiction film willing to treat its subject matter seriously and not populate it with, say, bumbling comedy droids or wisecracking bipedal rodents. In effect, those critics are showing their snobbery. They’re protesting: “But this is just science fiction! It’s not, it can’t be serious! You’ve got to have bumbling comedy droids in it! And wisecracking aliens!” So, stuff ’em.

One thing David Lynch’s Dune was memorable for was its depiction of the Harkonnen. Played by Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Brad Dourif and Sting, they were a grotesque, evilly-perverted bunch – no more so than McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen, who was a levitating, leering sack of pus. Probably wisely, Villeneuve doesn’t try to out-Lynch Lynch here and makes his Harkonnen a more sombre lot, communicating their malevolence through stillness rather than histrionics. Stellan Skarsgard is especially effective as a brooding, Brando-esque Baron.

I read somewhere that Frank Herbert intended the good guys, the Atreides, to be descended from the Greeks on faraway, long-ago earth, although some visual and verbal references to bullfighting in both his book and Villeneuve’s film suggest they’re Spaniards. However, when the Duke, his family and courtiers arrive on Arrakis, the film shows them being led out of their spaceship by a bagpiper… which implies they’re actually Scottish. Well, their home planet’s name is Caladan, which sounds like ‘Caledonia’. One of them is called Duncan and another is called Gurney – Scots gurn a lot. And by half-time they’ve already been slaughtered. So yup, I think they’re Scottish.

One thing I believe makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.

Anyway, for now, after Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Dune completes a science-fictional hat-trick for Villeneuve. Perhaps it’s not quite as impressive a run as Stanley Kubrick achieved with the sci-fi or sci-fi-related Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1972), but it’s still pretty amazing. Let’s hope he can knock Dune 2 out of the park and make this triumphant threesome a foursome.

November 20, 2020November 20, 2020

Cinema Peebles-diso

I recently noticed a discussion about the Playhouse Cinema on the Facebook page Auld Peebles, which is a site devoted to pictures, information and simple nostalgic reminiscing about past times in Peebles, my hometown in the Scottish Borders. This inspired me to dig out the following entry, which I’d originally posted on this blog back in 2013. In it, I indulge in some nostalgic reminiscing of my own about my town’s old Art Deco cinema…

The photograph above this entry shows the Art Deco building at number 60 of the High Street in Peebles, my Scottish hometown. The building opened in 1932 as the Playhouse Cinema. Its architect was Alister G. MacDonald, a son of Ramsay MacDonald, who was Britain’s first Labour Party prime minister and served in office in 1924 and from 1929 to 1935. MacDonald Junior designed the cinema with a particularly wide auditorium and with stalls and a balcony that held a total of 802 seats. The name Playhouse was spelt out in a squiggle of neon along the top of its façade, although the roof behind was less glamorous, being made of corrugated iron.

The Playhouse showed films for the next 45 years and for a time, in modest-sized Peebles, it wasn’t even the only cinema. It had to compete against the Empire Cinema on the Bridgegate and the Burgh Hall, further up the High Street, which also showed films. By the 1970s, however, with just about every home in Peebles possessing a television set, only the Playhouse was left and it was struggling, to the point where it’d introduced bingo a couple of nights a week as a way of attracting extra custom.

I became acquainted with the Playhouse at a very late stage in its life. In 1977, when I was eleven, my family moved to a new home just beyond the outskirts of Peebles. The town centre was only 30 minutes’ walk away. Previously we’d lived in a rural part of Northern Ireland and if I wanted to visit a cinema there, I had to talk my parents into driving me several miles to the nearest one and then returning to collect me afterwards. I was movie-crazy and having a cinema on my doorstep, as it seemed at the time, was a wonderful new luxury.

I didn’t see any masterpieces in the Playhouse, but every film I did see seems to be engraved on my memory just because I’d seen it there. For example, there was Earthquake (1974), the big, rumbly disaster movie starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene and George Kennedy. George Kennedy was a portent of doom in 1970s movies, having already appeared in two of the Airport movies (1970 and 75). If his craggy face appeared onscreen, you just knew a destructive earth tremor was going to strike the city or a Boeing 747 was going to fall out of the sky.

It was also in the Playhouse that I had my most disappointing cinematic experience ever, which was seeing Dino De Laurentiis’s 1976 remake of King Kong. I’d really been looking forward to this, as I’d watched the original movie on TV and was desperate to see how they’d update all the fights that King Kong had with the dinosaurs on Skull Island. To my horror, there weren’t any dinosaurs on the 1976 Skull Island, so Kong didn’t have any fights with them. The only battle was an altercation between Kong (played by Rick Baker in a gorilla-costume) and a crap-looking rubbery giant snake. I’d like to think that a young Peter Jackson saw the same movie and shared my feelings of profound disappointment. For that reason, when he remade King Kong in 2005, he made sure his film was choc-a-bloc with dinosaurs.

Sometimes at the Playhouse you got to see a familiar feature of 1970s movie-going, which was a cinematic double bill. Among the two-for-the-price-of-one marvels I was treated to were Carquake (1976) combined with The Giant Spider Invasion (1975). Carquake was little more than a montage of car chases and car crashes and I suspect that the filmmakers had cast David Carradine in the lead role only because his surname started with the word ‘car’. Nonetheless, it seemed like a masterpiece compared with its partner. In The Giant Spider Invasion, the invading giant spiders were played by real-life tarantulas when they were babies, and played by giant wobbly-legged blobs of paper-maché mounted on top of cars when they were adults. One scene showed a tarantula clamber unnoticed into a kitchen blender. Then a character unwittingly blended it with some fruit and took a massive swig from the resulting Vitamin C / pulped-hairy-spider concoction. That was about the most revolting thing I saw in a film until Hugh Grant started making romantic comedies.

But I had barely seven months to enjoy the Playhouse, for on September 10^th, 1977, it went out of business. It would’ve been fitting if the final end-credits to scroll up the Playhouse’s screen had belonged to a film that was memorable – Star Wars (1977), say, which was breaking box-office records at the time. However, the last film shown there was another one about cars, an unremarkable horror film simply entitled The Car (1977). This starred James Brolin and was about a rural American community being terrorised by a deadly, driver-less and demonically possessed automobile. In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King described it as “the sort of movie where you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn’t going to strike again for 10 minutes or so”.

Thereafter the Playhouse was derelict for a time. I seem to remember a report in the local newspaper at one point about it being broken into and vandalised. Then its foyer was converted into a shopping area and it became another High Street retailer. For a while, it served as the premises for Visionhire, a TV shop, which meant that films were being shown on its premises again (at least, when one of the televisions on display was switched on and tuned into a channel broadcasting a film). These days it houses an outlet for the cut-price chemist’s chain, Semi-Chem. Thanks to Alister MacDonald’s Art Deco design, it’s now a listed building and has been given a Grade C status by Historic Scotland. Incidentally, I’m only talking about the building’s front part. As far as I know, most of its back part, containing the 802-seat auditorium, was demolished to make way for a housing development.

Losing the Playhouse in 1977 was a blow for Peebles film-lovers because video cassettes and VCRs were still things of the future. If you didn’t have transport to get to a cinema in another town to see a film on its first release, your only option was to wait a couple of years until it turned up on TV. However, you still had a chance to see films, old and not so old, on a big screen if you were a pupil at Peebles High School. In the wake of the Playhouse’s demise, a teacher there, Dr Mike Kellaway, started up a Film Club and showed movies one evening each week with the school’s assembly hall acting as an auditorium. But Peebles High School’s Film Club is a story for another blog-entry.