The Longest Day – Blood and Porridge

October 18, 2024October 21, 2024

A. N. Other

© Coronet Books

It’ll be Halloween in a fortnight’s time. I was reminded of this when, the other day, I saw the British press start on its annual pre-Halloween custom of complaining about British people celebrating Halloween too enthusiastically. They shouldn’t be doing this because, supposedly, the festival isn’t British but American. Here’s the latest whinge from Guardian columnist Zoe Williams. It seems to have escaped these British (i.e., English) commentators that Halloween started long ago in Scotland (still a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) and Ireland (part of which is still a constituent nation, or province, of the United Kingdom) and was then brought to America by Scottish and Irish settlers. So, if you view Halloween as ‘un-British’, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Or maybe you believe Scotland and Northern Ireland aren’t still part of clapped-out Brexit Britain. If only…

Anyway, as is my pre-Halloween custom every year, here’s the first of a few entries that are in keeping with the creepiness of the season. I begin with a review of the bestselling 1971 horror novel The Other by Thomas Tryon.

Thomas Tryon made his name rather spectacularly as a novelist in 1971 with his debut effort The Other. This spent more than half-a-year in The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 3.5 million copies. It also – along with the similar success of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) – helped inspire a boom in horror fiction that meant during the 1970s and 1980s bookshop-racks and shelves were crammed with lurid-covered horror paperbacks while authors like John Farris, James Herbert, Shaun Hutson, Dean Koontz, Graham Masterton, Robert R. McCammon, Michael McDowell, John Saul, Guy N. Smith and Whitley Streiber, not to mention a young Stephen King, had themselves ‘a nice little earner’. But before that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Tryon was better known as the TV and movie actor Tom Tryon. And yes, this makes me sound ancient, but I knew him for his acting before I knew him for his writing.

As a youngster, I was obsessed with sci-fi movies and westerns, so I remembered seeing him in 1958’s sci-fi potboiler, the gloriously titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and in the run-of-the-mill 1965 western (scripted by Sam Peckinpah) The Glory Guys. I don’t remember him, but must also have seen him, in the epic 1963 recreation of the D-Day landings The Longest Day, in which he acted alongside John Wayne. However, as that movie seemed to feature every actor in the American, British, French and German phonebooks at the time, it’s not surprising that I missed him.

© 20^th Century Fox

© Columbia Pictures

It was surely frustrating for Tryon-the-actor that his biggest roles were in B-movies, while in more prestigious fare he was relegated to the supporting cast. Plus, to supplement his movie income, he had to do a lot of TV work. Perhaps the closest he came to the big time was playing the main character in Otto Preminger’s prestigious 1963 move The Cardinal, an adaptation of Henry Morton Robinson’s hugely bestselling – but now forgotten – novel of the same name from 1950. Ironically, this may have been the film that made him resolve to give up acting, because he had a hideous time working with the notoriously dictatorial Preminger. According to the director’s Wikipedia entry, “Preminger would scream at him, zoom in on his shaking hands, and repeatedly fire and rehire him, with the result that Tryon was hospitalised with a body rash and peeling skin, due to nerves.” On his own Wikipedia entry, Tryon is quoted as saying of The Cardinal, “To this day, I cannot look at that film. It’s because of Preminger. He was a tyrant who ruled by terror. He tied me up in knots. He screamed at me. He called me names. He said I was lazy. He said I was a fool. He never cursed me. His insults were far more personal.”

I wonder if it’s because of the horrors Preminger inflicted on him that when Tryon reinvented himself as a novelist, his first book, The Other, was a horror one. I also wonder if his debut was influenced by the fact that in 1960 he narrowly missed getting the role of Sam Loomis, lover of Janet Leigh’s doomed Marion Crane, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The Psycho-esque element becomes more noticeable the further you go into Tryon’s novel.

The Other centres on a sensitive, imaginative and kind-hearted boy called Niles Perry who lives in a large, rambling house in New England in 1935 with several family members: his agoraphobic mother Alexandra, his spritely Russian-emigrant grandmother Ada, his Uncle George, his Aunt Vee and his annoying cousin Russell… and his twin brother Holland, who despite being Niles’s closest confidant is aloof, elusive and mean-spirited. We get an idea of the meanness of Holland’s spirit early on when we see him kill one of Russell’s pet rats. Niles reacts to this with horror and promptly tries to give the unfortunate rodent a funeral using a ‘Sunshine Biscuit box’ as a coffin and a bunch of clover as a wreath. But out of misguided sibling loyalty, he refuses to believe his brother is a wrong ’un and persists in hanging out with him and trying to stay in his good books.

Meanwhile, a shadow hangs over the household thanks to the recent death of Niles and Holland’s father Vining Perry. He died “while moving the last of the heavy baskets from the threshing floor of the barn down to the apple cellar for winter storage… Father started down with a basket… he was halfway down when, hearing a noise, he looked up to see the door, the heavy iron-bound trapdoor, come crashing down on his head…” As we learn more about Holland’s malignant nature, we begin to wonder if Vining’s death was really an accident.

The book features several more deaths, and near-deaths, and there’s also a big, macabre twist that I have to say I saw coming from very early on. To be fair to Tryon, when he penned the book in 1971, that twist might have been less of a stale trope in horror fiction – it might have seemed fresh and caught his readers by genuine surprise.

What I find interesting, though, is that while the book contains its share of incidents, its pace feels very leisurely and in between the scary bits there’s a lot of other stuff. You get back-stories – most notably Ada’s, which describes her experiences as a young woman in Russia – and sub-plots, including one about a ‘game’ that the hyper-imaginative Niles plays with his grandmother, whereby he almost supernaturally projects himself into the bodies of other creatures, like birds and dragonflies, so that he can see the world through their eyes. Tryon, who was born in Connecticut in 1926 and would have been a boy too at this time, also delights in making references to the culture and events of the era – from the popular radio-comedy show Amos ‘n’ Andy to the Irish tenor John McCormack, to the hubbub over the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Indeed, horribly, the plot echoes the Lindbergh case near the end.

You also get a lot of description of the house, its outhouses and grounds, the local town and the surrounding countryside. Tryon illustrates these things with a nice turn of phrase and embroiders the descriptions with precise details that no doubt come from his own childhood memories. Of a carnival that installs itself in the town one evening, he writes: “On either side of a narrow avenue carpeted with a debris of strewn popcorn and crumpled Dixie cups, booths, shabby, limp, furnished third-rate amusement: Win-a-doll; Madam Zora, Stargazer; Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel; Zuleika, the World’s Only True Half Man-Half Woman.” The Perrys’ barn, meanwhile, is “venerable, swaybacked, lichen-spotted, musty, sitting on a small rise beside the icehouse road. Upon the roof-tree was a cupola, a four-windowed affair where pigeons were housed. This was the highest point anywhere around, and on this small peaked roof sat a weathervane, a peregrine falcon, emblem of the Perrys, commanding the view.” At best, Tryon evokes the New England of his childhood with the vivacity that, say, Ray Bradbury evoked the Midwest or Davis Grubb evoked the South.

I do wonder, though, if the book was submitted to a publisher today – when writers are urged to be economical with their prose and to-the-point with their plots – would it ever escape from the slush pile? Its fondness for descriptions and digressions, with the chills and nastiness served up only sporadically, makes it seem rather old-fashioned now… and not just because it’s set in 1935.

But that’s not meant as a criticism. The Other was a slow read for me, and it took me time to get through it, but by the time I finished it I’d found it a rewarding book. And it was a surprisingly downbeat one – the chills and nastiness, when they come, are chilling and nasty. You needn’t expect a happy ending for anyone, not even the youngest and most innocent of the book’s characters. Indeed, as an author, Thomas Tryon treats his characters with a cruelty similar to that meted out to him, as an actor, by the ghastly Otto Preminger.

From centipedepress.com

November 14, 2020

Seriously Sean – ‘The Hill’

© Seven Arts Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Social media quickly filled with tributes to Sean Connery when the venerable Scottish superstar died on October 31^st. Much, of course, was made of the fact that he’d been the cinema’s first and best James Bond. However, I found it interesting that many people also talked about the post-Bond movies that Connery made in the 1980s and 1990s. These were big budget, escapist and sometimes shonky, though lovable, action or fantasy films like The Time Bandits (1981), Highlander (1986), The Name of the Rose (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990) and The Rock (1996).

Which is all fine and good, but I was disappointed that more attention wasn’t paid to what Connery achieved back in the 1960s and 1970s, in between his assignments as Bond, when he clearly had ambitions to be not just a movie star but a serious actor. He made several movies back then that were critically acclaimed but generally didn’t make much money. Perhaps it was disillusionment at their lack of success that made Connery later take the easy route and appear in the simpler, cosier fare that people reminisced about after his death.

Anyway, by a coincidence, a few weeks before Connery passed on, I’d felt an urge to check out some of those older, more serious movies of his. A few I hadn’t seen before. Others I’d watched at a young age and failed to appreciate at the time, probably because I’d been perplexed by Connery’s failure to breenge onscreen in a Saville Row suit and introduce himself as ‘a shhhort of lishhhensed trouble-shhhoooter’. So now, as a tribute to him, I thought I’d post my thoughts on the Connery films that I’ve recently watched or re-watched. I’ll start with 1965’s The Hill.

Directed by Sidney Lumet, The Hill is a war movie. But it’s a very different beast from the previous war movie on Connery’s CV, 1962’s star-spangled blockbuster about the D-Day landings The Longest Day, which featured Connery briefly as a comic Irishman called Private Flannagan. (It had him sporting the unconvincing – I’m being kind here – Irish accent that he’d already trotted out in 1959’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People and would trot out again for his Oscar-winning turn as Malone in The Untouchables).

The Hill eschews the action, spectacle and heroism of conventional war movies because its setting is a prison for recalcitrant British soldiers – thieves, spivs, drunkards, deserters and those guilty of insubordination – in the Libyan desert during World War II. Lumet and his cast and crew actually shot the film on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Almeria and Malaga in southern Spain.

Connery plays Joe Roberts, one of five new arrivals at the prison, or ‘glasshouse’ as it’s nicknamed. Also in this batch of new inmates is young, timid George Stevens (Alfred Lynch), spiv Monty Bartlett (Roy Kinnear), gruff northerner Jock McGrath (Jack Watson) and rebellious West Indian Jacko King (Ossie Davis). The fivesome find themselves in the custody of the hardnosed Regimental Sergeant Major Bert Wilson (Harry Andrews), who effectively runs the place. Its Commandant is a rarely-seen and weak-willed figure, of whom Wilson says contemptuously: “The Commandant signs bits of paper. He’d sign his own death warrant if I gave it to him.”

© Seven Arts Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The prison staff also include the essentially decent if somewhat effete Staff Sergeant Charlie Harris (Ian Bannon) and the weary but also decent Medical Officer (Michael Redgrave). Unfortunately, any goodness projected by those two officers is cancelled out by the viciousness of another staff sergeant, Williams (Ian Hendry). Williams has recently been posted to the prison and sees it as a potential step up the promotional ladder. He intends to make this ascent by impressing Wilson and treating his charges as brutally as possible. “Don’t talk back, you different-coloured bastard!” he screams at King.

And that’s basically it. The film is an ensemble piece with nine characters, five prisoners and four staff, stuck in the sweltering confines of the prison. “We’re all doing time,” Roberts observes of the situation. “Even the screws.” We can believe this when we see how Wilson and Williams spend their evening hours, which is by getting as joylessly, pointlessly and paralytically drunk as possible.

However, there’s a tenth character too. This is the titular hill, a fearsome, steep-sided mass of sand that’s been assembled in the prison’s yard as a punishment for inmates who chaff against Wilson and Williams’ regime.

Williams instinctively homes in on the new arrivals and takes a particular dislike to Roberts, perhaps because of the offence that landed him here – Roberts punched an officer who’d condemned his men to death by ordering them to carry out a suicidal attack. Stevens’ weak temperament also attracts Williams’ ire. “One of those shy lads, are you, Stevens…?” he demands. “One of those cads who can’t make up his mind whether he’s a boy or a girl?” Predictably, Roberts, Stevens and the others are soon being forced to march up and down the hill, endlessly, in the blistering heat. This has fatal consequences for one of them, which enrages Roberts and sets him on a collision course with Williams and Wilson. Towards the end, the film’s suspense hinges on whether or not Harris and the Medical Officer will find the courage to intervene before Roberts receives a fatal punishment as well – by this point he’s already been crippled by a beating from Williams and his goons.

A situation rather than a story, The Hill is driven not by plot twists but by its performances, which are excellent. Among the prisoners, Lynch is worryingly vulnerable as the hapless Stevens, while craggy character actor Jack Watson imbues his character McGrath with a fierce but not intransigent stubbornness. He spends most of the film wanting to keep his head down and get his incarceration over and done with and he’s unimpressed by Roberts’ attempts to stir things up. “You’re a clever bag of tricks, you are, Roberts,” he rages. “Not inside glasshouse half an hour and you use your bloody influence to get us a ride on the hill. Oh I bet there’s one Saturday night booze-up your father’s always regretted.” Yet later, sickened by what’s happening, McGrath gives Roberts his support.

The roly-poly Roy Kinnear, better known as a comic actor, plays the least sympathetic of the inmates, the cowardly and self-serving Bartlett. But he wins our pity at one moment when he collapses while being made to run a strenuous assault course. “I’m fat!” he cries pathetically.

And Ossie Davis, who was a writer and civil rights activist as well as a distinguished actor, is wonderful as Jacko King, the prisoner most immediately sympathetic to Roberts’ cause. As a West Indian, a citizen of the British Empire and one of His Majesty’s subjects, he’s supposedly on an equal footing with the other soldiers – but of course, because of his skin colour, he isn’t. He’s exposed to constant racism from both the screws and the other prisoners, though the quick-witted King gives as good as he gets. When Bartlett has a go at him (“You’ve got it downstairs, mate, but we’ve got it upstairs. Live up trees, you blokes do.”), King casually and accurately responds by describing Bartlett as ‘white trash’.

Later, when things come to a head, he defies Wilson and Williams by tearing off his uniform, renouncing his British citizenship and declaring that they don’t have the jurisdiction to keep him in the prison. Actually, watching this in 2020, I was reminded of the Windrush scandal, engineered by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, wherein the British government showed elderly and long-term UK citizens of Caribbean descent what it thought of them by stripping them of their citizenship and deporting them without support to the West Indies.

Among the screws, Ian Bannon and Sir Michael Redgrave give strong performances, but they’re not as memorably forceful as those given by Ian Hendry and Harry Andrews. Which is as it should be, because what gives The Hill its grimness is the audience’s sense that the bad outweighs the good in the penal system depicted. Hendry essays an out-and-out bastard whose moral compass was long ago destroyed by his ambition. It’s a little sad, retrospectively, to note how lean and mean he looks here – for as the 1960s progressed, Hendry’s well-documented alcoholism took its toll and left him increasingly frail and gaunt. (In 1970, he lost out on the title role of the crime classic Get Carter, which of course went to Michael Caine, because the filmmakers felt he no longer had the physicality for it and cast him as the film’s weaselly villain instead.)

But even Hendry is outshone by Harry Andrews as Wilson. I’ve seen Andrews in countless films playing crusty old buffers or authority figures, but I wasn’t prepared for his performance in this. Wilson is a ruthlessly hard man, driven by his determination to repair the British Army’s errant and broken soldiers and build them back into fighting men (with tough love obviously), but he’s also intelligent. He’s aware – as Williams isn’t – that there’s a line that they can’t be seen to cross. After an inmate dies of exhaustion on the hill and Wilson manages to hush it up, he tells Williams angrily: “We’re not celebrating our glorious victory… We’re patching up a bloody disaster.” And when the death triggers a full-scale riot, Wilson defuses it with a masterclass in underhand, calculating diplomacy. He faces down a whole prison’s worth of inmates with a mixture of threats, bribes, dark charisma and pure bloody-mindedness.

As for Connery, it’s impossible not to think of Bond when he first appears. He had, after all, just played 007 in the previous year’s Goldfinger (1964). And there’s something Bondian about how he manages to get under his enemies’ skin in The Hill, although this isn’t done with the superspy’s famous insouciance but with Roberts’ righteous perceptiveness. He senses that Williams, despite his brutal exterior, is a coward and observes that by getting posted to a Libyan prison camp he’s managed to avoid both the front line and the Blitz in London. Meanwhile, he neatly sums up Wilson when he shouts at him: “Oh, you crazy bastard! You’d prop up dead men and inspect them if you was ordered to!”

But any suggestion of Bond’s alpha maleness in Roberts is gone by the final reel, after Williams has had him beaten to a pulp and he’s confined to a bed. And the film’s final image, of Roberts crawling piteously across the floor and pleading with a couple of his fellow inmates to stop what they’re doing – what they’re doing, in fact, is snatching defeat from the jaws of a hard-won victory – ends the film on a note of chilling, though tonally appropriate, bleakness.

The Hill is a stripped-down cinematic experience. There’s no background music and it’s shot in black and white, which gives the sand an unsettling bone-like gleam. But its sparseness isn’t a problem because it’s so engrossing, which is due to the excellence of its cast and the unfussy but confident direction by Sidney Lumet. It was the first, but thankfully not the last collaboration between Lumet and Connery. Indeed, their third film together, 1972’s The Offence, would be as memorably gruelling as this one.