Van Morrison – Blood and Porridge

May 20, 2025May 20, 2025

The Boss versus the dross

I have another reason to loathe Donald Trump, the 45^th and also, alas, 47^th president of the United States of America. He’s made me like Bruce Springsteen.

On May 14^th, at Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena, on the opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams tour, Springsteen – the famously sideburned, famously plaid-shirt-wearing singer-songwriter-guitarist from New Jersey – kicked off proceedings by making a speech. He declared: “…my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!” Later on, he described the head of that ‘corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration’, i.e., Trump, as an ‘unfit president’ and proclaimed, “The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment.”

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Trump’s overworked posting-thumb was busy knocking out a retort on his Truth Social platform. He called Springsteen ‘as dumb as a rock’ and added: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare’. Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Also joining in was Trump’s number-one music-industry sycophant Kid Rock, now a not-so-kiddish 54 years old. It’s telling that the only song I’ve heard by him was the 2008 hit All Summer Long – a Kid Rock number whose best bits weren’t actually written by Kid Rock. They come from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama (1974) and Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London (1978). “Just another person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome) at the highest levels,” Kid Rock said of Springsteen. “To be in Europe talking junk about our president who gets up and works his ass off for this country, every day, and his administration is doing such great things… Thank God for him. But to do that in Europe… what a punk move.” Kid Rock, please note. To me and many folk my age, calling Bruce Springsteen a ‘punk’ is amusing. But it’s not the insult you think it is.

Since Kid Rock believes Trump’s administration is ‘doing such great things’ for the USA, he’s surely a big fan of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant policies. Incidentally, the restaurant he’s licensed in Nashville, the not-at-all-stupidly-titled Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, lately and mysteriously sent kitchen-staff home during a weekend when Trump’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency were conducting operations in the city. I’m sure the reason for this wasn’t anything dodgy. Not because, say, the restaurant was employing people who were immigrants lacking permanent legal status and might get dragged off and incarcerated.

I first encountered the musical oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen, or ‘Loose Windscreen’ as I liked to call him, while I was a fifth-year pupil at Peebles High School in the early 1980s. Fifth and sixth-years pupils, the senior members of the student body known as the ‘Upper School’, were entitled to their own common room, where there was an elderly record-player and speakers you could play music on during the morning, lunchtime and afternoon breaks. This was normally monopolised by the Upper School’s sizeable heavy-metal contingent and it blasted out a lot of AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Rainbow, the Scorpions, Thin Lizzy and Whitesnake.

© Columbia Records

However, once in a while, somebody would manage to get past the phalanx of heavy-metal fans surrounding the record player and slap something a little different on it. One such record was Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run. Hearing it, I thought it was all right and, at the time, the title track seemed a stormer. (Nowadays, having heard it a zillion times, I’m less keen on it.) So, Mr Windscreen’s, sorry, Mr Springsteen’s music seemed perfectly fine to me. But it wasn’t anything I’d go out of my way to listen to.

Incidentally, a few years earlier, my favourite band had been the Boomtown Rats, the new wave outfit fronted by Bob Geldof. Last week, I listened to Rat Trap, the Boomtown Rats song that topped the UK charts in 1978, for the first time in decades. And I was surprised by how, well, Springsteen-esque it sounds now.

By the mid-1980s I was a student at Aberdeen University. I quickly discovered that a number of my fellow-students were seriously into Bruce Springsteen. They were so into him they apparently knew everything about every second of music he’d ever committed to vinyl – that, say, if you played the third of the nine tracks on the Belgian version of the 1973 LP Greetings from Ashbury Park N.J. backwards, you’d hear him break wind in the studio. Yes, stuff like that.

These Bruce-fans – whom some unkindly referred to as ‘Bruce-bores’ – were, without exception, male. Actually, a good proportion of them seemed to be engineering students and had names like ‘Morris’. Also, they never called their hero ‘Bruce’, but used the annoying moniker ‘The Boss’. This struck me as paradoxical since they were always going on about what a man of the people he was. Surely, then, a blue-collar, working-class guy like him would be against the bosses?

© Columbia Records

This was a bad time if, like me, you were surrounded by Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans, and you didn’t believe as they did that Springsteen was the greatest thing to have happened to music since Mrs Beethoven gave birth to little Ludwig van. For, in 1984, he released Born in the USA, an album that sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spawned no fewer than seven singles. As with most of Springsteen’s output, it struck me as perfectly decent, but not remarkable, journeyman rock music. But it subsequently became annoying because people around me never seemed to stop playing it.

The Born in the USA singles received heavy rotation in the place where I worked part-time during my second year as a student, Ritzy’s Nightclub. At Ritzy’s I was a member of the floor-staff – meaning I spent most of my time collecting empty glasses and loaded ashtrays from the punters’ tables, cleaning them, and returning the glasses to the bar-shelves and the ashtrays to the tables.

I’ve said before on this blog that of the many jobs I’ve had in my life, I hated the Ritzy’s one most. I had to work until 2.00 AM every Friday and Saturday night while my mates were out partying. The glasses I collected were often phenomenally grotty with cigarette ends and even puke floating around in them. Many of the punters were workers in Aberdeen’s then-flourishing oil industry, who made tons of money and believed their hefty earnings allowed them to behave like knob-heads at all times, especially towards serfs like myself. And the music spewing out of the nightclub’s speakers was gruesome – all the vacuous New Romantic stuff like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham that dominated the UK charts during 1984-85. In that company, Springsteen’s songs didn’t seem so bad. But having to hear them repeatedly in that environment quickly made me sick of them too.

The first Born in the USA single out of the blocks was Dancing in the Dark, which I came to associate with a mid-week gig I had at Ritzy’s. This was a regular evening the nightclub held for the over-30s, which was known in local parlance as ‘Grab-a-Granny Night’. It featured a live band who performed cover versions of songs currently in the charts and Dancing in the Dark seemed a particular favourite of the band’s frontman, a bloke called Stan. The sound of Stan warbling his way through the song, and the sight of him simultaneously attempting some Boss-like dancing onstage whilst apparently in possession of two left feet, are burned into my memory.

In the summer of 1985, I developed a fully-fledged aversion to Bruce Windscreen, sorry, Springsteen. The summer was going badly for me for various financial, personal and health reasons, and my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that every single day that July and August saw rain piss down relentlessly on Aberdeen, turning the grey granite the city was built with oppressively black. At one point I found myself sharing a flat with a good friend, one Andrew J. MacRury, who was also having a bad summer. And yes, Andy was an avid Bruce-bore, sorry, Bruce-fan. I worked night-shifts and, a dozen times each day, while I was in bed trying to snatch some sleep, I’d be rudely awoken by my friend playing the title track of Born in the USA in the next room, at full blast, in a desperate attempt to cheer himself up. Repeatedly, every day, I was practically blasted out of bed by the sideburned one hollering: “Booooorn… in the US-Aaaa! I wuz booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!”

Thereafter, if anyone show signs of talking enthusiastically about Bruce Springsteen, let alone play some music by him, I’d run for the hills. In March 1992, when to great fanfare he released two albums on the same day (Human Touch and Lucky Town), I think I went into hiding.

© Columbia Records

Now any Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans reading this will no doubt be shocked by my attitude towards their hero and accuse me of being deficient in musical taste. To that I would reply I wasn’t the only person on the planet unswayed by the charms of Mr Springsteen. The legendary radio DJ John Peel, for example, once said of Springsteen’s appeal: “It utterly mystifies me. I can’t see it at all. I mean, when he first started out… it sounded to me like sub-Dylan stuff. And it just doesn’t ring true.” Indeed, the John Peel Wiki notes that Peel “almost never played any of Springsteen’s material on his show and scarcely missed an opportunity to compare him unfavourably with other artists such as Half Man Half Biscuit.”

Certain musicians have been less than enthralled by him too. The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, while describing Springsteen as ‘a nice guy, a sweet guy’, has been scathing about his musical ability. He wrote in his 2010 biography Life, “If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey.” Meanwhile, Irish folk-rock troubadour Van Morrison once grumped about what he saw as Springsteen’s lack of originality. As far as Van Morrison was concerned, he’d nicked all his ideas from, er, Van Morrison. “For years people have been saying to me, ‘Have heard this guy Springsteen? You should really check him out!’ I just ignored it. Then four or five months ago I was in Amsterdam, and a friend of mine put on a video. Springsteen came on the video, and that was the first time I ever saw him, and he’s definitely ripped me off.”

However, in times of great adversity, you have to take sides – even the sides of folk whom, until now, you’ve regarded as your enemies. For instance, the cops had to join forces with the prisoners in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) when faced with an onslaught by the murderous gang Street Thunder. And James Bond (Roger Moore) had to team up with Jaws (Richard Kiel) in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker (1979) to overcome the genocidal plans of Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale). I feel the same way about Bruce Springsteen. I’ve found much of his music stodgy, and at times his fans have driven me up the walls, but I’ll back him all the way in his struggle against Trump, who’s busy turning Springsteen’s homeland into an authoritarian state run by white supremacists, loopy evangelical Christians, billionaire tech-bros and environment-wrecking oil barons.

Indeed, if Springsteen can do anything to get Trump out of office – arrange, say, for a million Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans to storm the White House – I’ll happily grow sideburns, and wear a plaid shirt for the rest of my life, and listen to Born in the USA a dozen times a day. Hail to the Boss!

Also, while I don’t have much regard for Springsteen’s music, I still think it’s light-years better than that Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll shite peddled by Kid Rock.

From wikipedia.org / © Carl Lender

April 29, 2025April 30, 2025

Even bloodsuckers get the blues

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

A few days ago my partner and I went to see Sinners, the new horror-cum-gangster film directed, written and co-produced by Ryan Coogler. Here are my thoughts on it. And before I go any further, a word of warning: there will be spoilers.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a great deal, as I’d heard something about its plot and it sounded horribly like 1996’s Robert Rodriguez-directed, Quentin Tarantino-scripted From Dusk till Dawn. Although a few misguided souls nowadays look back on that film as a neglected and misunderstood classic, I have to say I f**king hated it. In part, this was because From Dusk till Dawn began so well, as a nastily-effective little crime thriller wherein two fleeing bank-robbing brothers (Tarantino and George Clooney) kidnap a pastor (Harvey Keitel) and his family and force them to smuggle them over the US / Mexico border. Disappointingly, things then go south in all senses of the phrase. The group arrives at a mysterious Mexican bar called the Titty Twister where the staff and many of the patrons prove to be – surprise! – vampires. The rest of the film is a ludicrous, tongue-in-cheek splatterfest where the humans battle against waves of bloodsucking undead. While From Dusk Till Dawn’s sudden change of tone has been praised in some quarters for its audacity, I found it a vertiginous plunge into cheesy bollocks.

Anyway, the structure of Sinners is not dissimilar. Its first half plays out as a period gangster story, then vampires show up and its latter half becomes an exercise in horror. Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, it’s about the homecoming of black gangster twin brothers Stack and Smoke (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who’ve recently left Chicago where, it’s suggested, they worked for Al Capone. On their home turf, they embark on a new project – purchasing a disused sawmill and turning it into a juke joint, i.e.. a place for live music, dancing, drinking and gambling whose customers are from the local African American community.

To ensure the juke joint’s opening night is a success, they staff it with trusted friends, family members and associates: Smoke’s ex-wife, the occult-dabbling Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and Chinese shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) to handle the catering; hulking buddy Cornbread (Omar Miller) to man the door; and boozy old bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), slinky singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) and young, startlingly-talented guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton) to provide the music.

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

Despite a few obstacles – two thieves who soon regret tangling with the take-no-prisoners Stack, the fact that the sawmill’s former owner is head of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the disapproval of Sammie’s dad, a preacher who believes music is only virtuous if it’s used to further the word of the Lord – the juke joint opens, pulls in the crowds and is soon swinging. And then the vampires arrive.

Yes, I was dreading this moment – because I had really enjoyed the non-fantastical part of the film. Coogler did a great job depicting the minutiae of the 1932 Mississippi Delta. This was a world where the black population was just a couple of generations removed from the official slavery of the Confederacy and most of them now toiled in the racket that was sharecropping, a form of unofficial slavery. At the same time, they were crafting a musical culture, the blues, that would ultimately revolutionise American and global music through its influence on rock and roll. One touch among many that I liked here was the portrayal of the Chinese shopkeepers, Grace and Bo, who thanks to their ethnicity are able to run stores in both districts of the Mississippi town of Clarksdale, the black one and the white one.

Anyway, when the vampires show up, does the film turn to shite as From Dusk till Dawn did? Thankfully, no. Coogler provides some foreshadowing to prepare us for the twist, so it doesn’t come as a credibility-straining bolt from the blue. During the opening sequence, a voice-over talks about certain types of music being “so pure it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future” and attract supernatural creatures – an idea that’s echoed later when the vampires admit Sammie’s miraculous guitar-playing has drawn them to the juke joint. (Even before the vampires arrive, Coogler treats us to a phantasmagorical sequence where Sammie’s playing seems to conjure up among the dancing crowd the spectres of music past and future – West African shamans, Chinese Xiqu performers, hip-hop DJs and an electric guitarist who looks like he’s a member of George Clinton’s P-Funk collective.)

Also preparing viewers for the tonal switch is an earlier sequence where a white man, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), flees from a squad of Choctaw Native Americans and takes refuge in a cabin inhabited by a hard-up white couple. The pursuing Native Americans politely warn the couple that they’re sheltering something evil. But as KKK robes are visible inside the cabin, it’s no surprise that the couple believe the story of their white visitor rather than that of the ‘Injuns’. Noticing the sun is setting, and with a shotgun pointed at them, the Choctaw decide discretion is the better part of valour and retreat. Which leaves Remmick to reveal himself as a vampire and infect his two saviours.

Coogler leaves this bit of world-building unexplored – which makes it wonderfully intriguing. Why are the Choctaw acting as vampire hunters? It also reminds me of the start of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where a dog – actually the titular thing in canine form – is chased by a pair of wrathful Norwegians in a helicopter. Compared to the Norwegians, though, the Native Americans are more pragmatic and level-headed.

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

Later, Remmick and the vampirised Klan couple appear on the threshold of Smoke and Stack’s new juke joint, bearing musical instruments and pleading to be let in (“We heard tell of a party”) so that they can have a jamming session with Sammie. Sinners makes much of the belief that to get onto a premises, a vampire has to be invited – and Smoke and Stack, suspicious of white folks, are in no hurry to invite this trio inside. So they bide their time outside, biting and vampirising anyone who goes home early or nips out of the building for a pee. While they wait for their opportunity to get inside, their numbers grow…

In a smart move, Coogler makes Remmick Irish and gives him a taste for music as strong as his taste for blood. So, lurking outside, the vampires knock out a few tunes themselves – a charming version of the Irish / Scottish folk number Wild Mountain Thyme, for instance, and when there’s enough of them to stage a full-scale vampire hooley, a raucous rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin, during which Remmick indulges in some step-dancing. This makes being a vampire look like fun and Remmick, entreating the folks in the juke joint to surrender to him and his horde, makes a persuasive-sounding case for being vampirised. Once you’re a vampire, it doesn’t matter what skin-tone you have. Black vampires are treated no worse than white ones: “This world already left you for dead. I can save you from your fate. I am your way out.”

There’s a snag, of course. Remmick, as the Count Dracula / Mr. Barlow-style lead vampire, calls the shots and his minions have to do his bidding. Indeed, they seem parts of a giant hive-mind – evidenced by their chorused singing of Rocky Road to Dublin, which contrasts with the individuality Sammie expresses with his guitar. And Remmick’s interest in Sammie and his music isn’t motivated by an impulse of sharing but by a desire to assimilate them.

It’s fun to speculate who or what Remmick symbolizes. When he makes his first pitch at the juke joint’s door, begging to be let inside while Sammie, Delta Slim and Pearline perform, I was reminded of those white British rock-and-roll bands of the 1960s, like the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds. Influenced by the likes of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, they started their careers desperate to play blues music and become known as bluesmen themselves. Which prompted Sonny Boy Williamson II to quip caustically: “These English boys want to play the blues real bad… And they do, real bad.”

But maybe it makes more sense to compare Remmick to the white-owned American music industry. His hunger for Sammie parallels how that industry gobbled up black artists, of blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, whatever, and made a fortune off their music whilst giving them as little credit, money and control over their work as possible. Often, their songs ended up being sung by someone else, someone white – see Pat Boone singing a version of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti just five months after its release in 1955 – with precious few royalties making it their way.

Incidentally, late on, Remmick comes out with a sob story about how he was persecuted and deprived of his land in Ireland – presumably at the hands of the British and presumably back in the days when he was still human. That a victim of oppression has become a supernatural killing machine, one with a fascistic disregard for the lives of the people he feeds on, is Coogler’s way of reminding us that many poor white people, treated like dirt in their home countries, emigrated to other parts of the world where they treated indigenous people and black people like dirt too. It’s a sad reflection on human nature that people near the bottom of the pile have a psychological need to believe there are people even further down the pile whom they can mistreat and regard as inferior. Though this observation would no doubt delight Elon Musk, who recently grumbled that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”.

I’ve spent a lot of time analysing Sinners but I should also say it’s a supremely entertaining movie. It’s exciting, scary, funny and atmospheric. Furthermore, it proves a point that many filmmakers overlook – if you want a horror film to grip an audience, give them likeable and sympathetic characters to identify with. That way, they have an investment in those characters and things feel much more tense when bad stuff starts happening.

© Cedric Burnside Project

© Silvertone Records

It goes without saying that the soundtrack is great too. I’m particularly pleased to see that Cedric Burnside had a hand in performing some of the blues tunes – I attended a cool gig by Burnside at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival in 2015 and afterwards got his signature on a CD as a present for one of my mates. Also, don’t rush off when the credits start rolling at the end. There’s still a scene to come, one set in the early 1990s and featuring the venerable bluesman Buddy Guy. (By a coincidence I saw Guy perform in the early 1990s, though obviously the early-1990s Guy in Sinners is a good bit older than the one I witnessed.) It’s a coda that’s both sinister and affecting.

And the acting is excellent. Michael B. Jordan is impressive in the twin roles of Smoke and Stack. I soon forgot that both characters were being played by the same person. It’s a pleasure seeing Delroy Lindo again, whom I fondly remember as the villain in the 1995 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and from numerous Spike Lee movies. And as Sammie, Michael Caton is a revelation. He’s young and naïve, as the script demands, but he’s blessed with a deep, prematurely-old voice that totally persuades you this lad can sing and play the blues.

One thing about the casting, though. Jack O’Connell is perfectly fine as Remmick. But since the character is a scary old monster who’s Irish and musical, I don’t know why they didn’t cast the obvious candidate for the role: Van Morrison.

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

February 4, 2022February 15, 2022

Branagh’s Belfast

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Kenneth Branagh has seemed the embodiment of classical, theatrical Englishness for a long time – at least since his 1989 film adaptation of Henry V, in which he raged “Cry ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’” Meanwhile, over the years, I’ve enjoyed shocking people by pointing out to them that Branagh isn’t actually English. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1960. He and his family left there for England in 1969, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles. He ended up in Berkshire, where he dropped his Belfast accent and ‘acquired received pronunciation to avoid bullying.’ Thus began the plummy-voiced Branagh we know today.

In fact, Branagh’s early life wasn’t dissimilar to mine, for I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland until the age of 11, when my family moved to the town of Peebles, in the Borders region of Scotland. I was a couple of years older than Branagh was at the time of moving and couldn’t shed my accent so easily – not that I needed to, because although my new classmates in Peebles sometimes took the piss out of the way I spoke, I was never bullied. Come to think of it, acquiring ‘received pronunciation to avoid bullying’ probably wouldn’t have been a good policy at Peebles High School. Folk would have picked on you more for sounding like a posh tosser.

Before Branagh made a name for himself as the star, director and adaptor of Henry V, I’d known of his Northern Irish connections because I’d seen him appear in a quartet of TV plays written by the Northern Irish dramatist Graham Reid. These were Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982), A Matter of Choice for Billy (1983), A Coming to Terms for Billy (1984) and Lorna (1987), and were about the tribulations of a working-class Protestant family in Belfast, the Martins. The Martins’ problems aren’t caused by the Troubles but by their own flawed, damaged and abrasive personalities. The widowed father Norman (James Ellis) is an unrepentant hard man, incapable of showing his gentler feelings, while his eldest child and only son Billy (Branagh) is embittered about how Norman treated his late mother. It’s left to the eldest daughter, the mild-mannered Lorna (Brid Brennan), to act as a surrogate mother to the family’s younger children. During the plays, unexpected things happen – Norman mellows under the influence of a woman he forms a relationship with while working in England, Lorna develops some unexpected steel and Billy, dismayingly, begins to show some of the worst traits of his dad. In the four plays Branagh had no problem readopting his old Belfast accent, so I was surprised when a few years later I went to the cinema and heard him speaking fluent Shakespeare in Henry V.

Branagh has revisited his Belfast roots with his latest movie Belfast, which was released in the USA last year and has just been released in Britain. Inspired by Branagh’s experiences during the late 1960s, it tells the story of another working-class Protestant family, one less dysfunctional than the Martins in the Billy plays: a couple simply entitled ‘Ma’ (Catriona Balfe) and ‘Pa’ (Jamie Dornan), and their older son Will (Lewis McAskie) and younger son Buddy (Jude Hill). Pa spends his working life in England and is considering moving his family over to live with him, something that doesn’t appeal to Ma and the boys. “I know nothing else but Belfast,” she protests. For one thing, they have strong family ties in the city, most notably Pa’s parents, the droll Pop (Ciaran Hines) and stern but kindly Granny (Judi Dench). Then the Troubles erupt and Protestant paramilitaries led by local thug Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) chase the Catholic families out of their neighbourhood. As the paramilitaries’ grip on the area tightens, Pa falls foul of Clanton and it becomes clear that, like it or not, his family will have to leave too.

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

This basic plot could have made Belfast a grim film, but it’s a funny, good-natured one because these events are seen through the eyes of little Buddy. They have to compete for attention with all the things that matter to a normal nine-year-old boy – things ranging from pursuing your first love to getting initiated into the local kids’ gang, from making trips to the cinema to bonding with your granddad.

Belfast left me with mixed emotions. On one hand, I found it annoyingly overstated in places. On the other, I generally found it rather moving. I’ll explain my conflicting reactions in detail, starting with the negative ones.

I have to admit that until now Henry V is the only film by Branagh that I’ve enjoyed. I wasn’t impressed by his later adaptations of Shakespeare, like Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and I hated his version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). They seemed shrill and over-the-top in both their acting and their visuals. Originally, I thought this was because Branagh didn’t have confidence in the original texts by Shakespeare and Shelley to capture the attention of modern film audiences. He felt obliged to make them as bombastic as possible, pumping them up with the cinematic equivalent of steroids – operatic performances, hammy humour, fast-moving camerawork and so on. Nowadays, though, I just think the problem is that Branagh, basically, is a theatrical man. When you’re on a stage, performing for a live audience, everything has to be big – the voice projection, the gestures, the general drama – in order to be seen and heard. But what’s effective from a distant stage often seems unsubtle when it’s projected in fine detail onto a large movie screen. And that’s the impression I sometimes got with Belfast.

In its plot machinations, visuals and soundtrack, there are some broad brushstrokes indeed. You get heavy-handed pieces of comedy, such as when Buddy cheats at his homework in order to get placed at the desk beside the girl he fancies at school – their teacher positions the pupils from the front to the back of the classroom according to how good or bad their marks are, and Buddy’s sweetheart, the brightest kid in class, is right at the front. (From a teaching point of view, wouldn’t it be sensible to have the less able kids at the front, so you can keep a close eye on them, and the smart ones at the back?)

Meanwhile, Branagh shoots the film in black and white but inserts colour at certain moments. These are when Buddy’s family go to the cinema. Although the auditorium is filmed in monochrome, what’s happening on the screen – action from Hammer’s One Million Years BC (1966) and the movie version of Roald Dahl’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) – appears in its original, glorious technicolour. As a metaphor for how the cinema transports Buddy out of his black-and-white everyday existence and into the colourful dreamworld of the movies, this is pretty clunking.

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

By far the worst offender, though, is a scene where Pa confronts Billy Clanton on a street. Clanton is holding his family at gunpoint and there’s a squad of British Army soldiers looking on, pointing weapons at everybody. I know we’re meant to be viewing this through Buddy’s eyes. But still, it seems crass and cheesy that at this deadly-serious moment Tex Ritter starts singing Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling from the classic 1952 western High Noon – which Buddy has recently watched on TV – on the soundtrack. Billy Clanton, incidentally, was the name of one of the villainous Clanton Gang who took on the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday during the gunfight at the OK Corral, another touch that’s a bit too obvious.

All that aside, however, I have to say I enjoyed Belfast. It’s nice to see a film about Northern Ireland that isn’t primarily about terrorism, extreme religion or extreme politics, and that focuses on believable, relatable people who are just trying to get on with their lives. It also contains a lot of humour, something that’s usually in short supply in movies about Northern Ireland, even though I remember knowing many funny, witty characters when I lived there. (Ciaran Hines’ genial, good-hearted Pop, who manages to be on Buddy’s wavelength without ever patronising him, initially seemed too good to be true – but again, I realised, I’d known several old guys like him during my childhood.)

Branagh conveys the idea that, as a kid in Northern Ireland, the popular culture of the time enthused you just as it enthused kids in more ‘normal’ societies, and influenced you as much as (if not more than) the riots and bombings that were happening not far from your doorstep. Thus, we see Buddy dressing up like a cast-member of Thunderbirds (1965-66), watching Star Trek (1966-69), playing with Subbuteo and James Bond toy cars, and reading the Marvel comic The Mighty Thor, which allows Branagh to sneakily reference the 2011 movie Thor, which he directed. (I don’t know how easy it was to access Marvel comics in Belfast in 1969, especially as Marvel’s British subsidiary Marvel UK didn’t begin operating until 1972. Still, I remember finding an American edition of The Avengers in Enniskillen in the early 1970s, so I guess it was possible.)

If there’s one thing I find unconvincing about the characters, it’s that the tribal symbols that existed in Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities, even in 1969 before the Troubles hardened people’s senses of identity, are absent. There’s little said or shown about being British or Irish, about Union Jacks or tricolours, about the Orange Order or Gaelic Athletics Association. Actually, at a few points Buddy’s relatives describe themselves as ‘Irish’ (“The Irish were born for leaving – otherwise, the rest of the world would have no pubs…” “All the Irish need to survive is a phone, a Guinness and the sheet music to Danny Boy…”), although I expect most Belfast Protestants would call themselves ‘British’. Compare this with a scene in Graham Reid’s A Coming to Terms for Billy when Norman Martin’s two youngest daughters discuss, unenthusiastically, the prospect of their dad taking them to England. When one points out how disliked the Irish are in England, the other retorts, “We’re not Irish. We’re Protestants!”

Still, Belfast definitely shows that Branagh’s heart is in the right place even if, occasionally, his plotting and filmmaking instincts aren’t. The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous and his use of classic Van Morrison songs on the soundtrack – Warm Love, Jackie Wilson Said, Bright Side of the Road, Days Like This, Carrickfergus and, inevitably at the end, The Healing has Begun – is a reminder that however much Van the Man has degenerated these days into a curmudgeonly, whinging old fart who’d pick a fight with his own shadow, he did, once upon a time, record some wonderful music.

And, ultimately, Branagh shows that despite the terrible things that have gone on there, Northern Ireland is a place that exerts a powerful hold on your affections. This is illustrated in the scene where Ma and Pa break the news to Buddy that they’re all going to leave Belfast and move to England. Poor Buddy promptly bursts into tears.

I remember when my mother took me aside in 1976 and told me that we were going to move to Scotland. I reacted in exactly the same way.

August 31, 2021September 11, 2021

Many moons ago

When I think about the films that I saw and loved during the formative years of my mid-to-late-teens, films like Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), George Miller’s Mad Max II (1981), Terry Gilliam’s The Time Bandits (1981), Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs (1982), I instinctively assume they were released, oh, maybe a quarter of century ago. It scares me when I actually do the maths and realise that no, 40 years have now passed, or will have passed soon, since their original release. Yes, I know the platitudes – ‘Time waits for no man’, ‘None of us are getting younger’ and so on. Still, it comes as a mighty shock to realise these films are now as far back in time from 2021 as Stagecoach (1939) with John Wayne, or The Wizard of Oz (1939) with Judy Garland, were back in time from when they first hit the cinemas in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Anyway, August 2021 has served up yet another cinematic reminder of what a dribbling old fart I now am. I’ve discovered that exactly 40 years have elapsed since the release of John Landis’s much-loved horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London (1981).

The film won the first-ever Oscar awarded for Best Make-Up, courtesy of legendary make-up artist Rick Baker. Though what Baker pulls off when he transforms star David Naughton into the titular werewolf, elongating his face into a muzzle and his hands into paws, making fangs sprout from his jaws and claws from his fingertips, having long black fur ooze through his skin, is more a triumph of practical special effects. Ironically, while American Werewolf deserves to be seen on a cinema-sized screen for those effects to be appreciated in their full glory, I’ve only ever seen it on a small screen. My first viewing came in 1982, at a private hostel called Balmer’s in the Swiss town of Interlaken, where the management would entertain its guests in the evening by showing them recent movies using a TV set and video-cassette recorder. The evening I stayed there, they showed American Werewolf on video and I watched it amid a bunch of American backpackers not dissimilar to the pair of American backpackers, David (Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne), whom we’re introduced to and then see savaged by a werewolf during the film’s opening minutes.

Since then, I’ve seen it umpteen times, through late-night TV showings, or on video (invariably at a mate’s house and accompanied by a carryout of beer), or more lately on my laptop, and it’s never failed to work its magic on me.

When I first watched it, I thought it a rather strange film. Movies that combined horror and comedy weren’t anything new, and the previous decade had seen both Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) and Stan Dragoti’s Dracula spoof Love at First Bite (1979). However, those and pretty much all ‘horror-comedies’ until then had emphasized the comedy and used the horror merely as a seam from which un-bloody, family-friendly jokes were mined. Little or nothing was shown that was actually horrifying.

American Werewolf, on the other hand, quite happily treats its audience to images of flesh being ripped, throats being slashed, heads being bitten off and so on. Indeed, much of the humour is generated by the visceral horror, especially in the scenes where Jack, killed in the opening minutes, returns as an affable, chatty zombie to warn David that, having been bitten by a werewolf, he’s going to turn into one himself come the next full moon. With each appearance, Jack is considerably more decayed. At one point his alarming appearance prompts David to exclaim, “I will not be threatened by a walking meat loaf!”

Also strange is the film’s unconventionally leisurely pacing up until its main event, David turning into a werewolf and going on a rampage, which takes place at the hour-mark. Not that anything before that key moment is boring. The film is an endearing hodgepodge of sub-plots, themes and observations that happen to take director / writer John Landis’s fancy. These include David’s romance with Alex Price (the radiant Jenny Agutter), a nurse working in the London hospital where he ends up following the initial werewolf attack. This has been hushed up and passed off as an attack by an ‘escaped lunatic’, a term that shows the film’s age a wee bit. I don’t think you can talk about ‘lunatics’, even in a horror film, in the politically correct 2020s. Come to think of it, when David and Alex finally get it on, it’s to the strains of Van Morrison’s Moondance, which shows the film’s age too. It’s been a long time indeed since the curmudgeonly Van Morrison could be associated with anything horny.

Landis also shows us David suffering from bizarre dreams, presumably the result of the lycanthropic gene that’s now in his body. These include one memorable sequence where he dreams of his family being slaughtered by decayed-faced werewolves in Nazi uniforms while they watch The Muppet Show. And Landis makes some bemused observations too about British life in the early 1980s – the less-than-rosy reception that David and Jack get when they blunder into a Yorkshire pub (the Slaughtered Lamb) at the beginning; the London Underground being full of surly punk rockers; British TV consisting of three terrestrial channels that show only darts, News of the World adverts and the BBC Test Card; British kids being weird little brats who shout “No!” all the time or laugh manically when their dogs bark at you; grumblings about inflation; grumblings about British food; and the rain. The rain depicted in American Werewolf isn’t typical horror-movie, thunder-and-lightning rain. It’s just grey, depressing British rain that always seems to fall at the wrong moment.

This social commentary continues after David transforms from man to werewolf on the next full moon and paints London red. His victims represent both ends of the spectrum of the nascent Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. They include homeless down-and-outs huddling around a fire down by the edge of the Thames and an annoyingly cheerful proto-yuppie couple, who continue to be annoyingly cheerful even after they’ve been torn apart and, like Jack, come back to haunt David as the living dead. Landis also has a dig at the then-sleaziness of central London by having the film’s climax (ouch!) begin in a porno cinema in Piccadilly Circus, where the punters are watching a spectacularly gormless British sex movie called See You Next Wednesday. A fictitious ‘film within a film’, See You Next Wednesday is foreshadowed earlier on. When David claims a victim in the Tottenham Court Road tube station, we see a poster advertising it on one of the walls.

One thing about American Werewolf that doesn’t get enough praise is its supporting cast. David Naughton, Jenny Agutter and Griffin Dunne have all won plaudits and yes, they’re great, but there’s plenty of solid acting talent backing them up. John Woodvine gives a commanding and unflappable performance as Dr Hirsch, the medical man who resolves to find out what’s really going on after the injured, seemingly-raving David arrives in his care in London. Up north, meanwhile, the role of main villager at the Slaughtered Lamb pub required a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman and only one man could handle the job, the splendid Brian Glover. Although Glover is fondly remembered for his comic turn as the pompous PE teacher Mr Sugden in Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), the scene in American Werewolf where he entertains the Lamb’s patrons with his ‘Remember the Alamo!’ joke is surely as funny. Those patrons include a young and shifty-looking Rik Mayall. I assume Mayall and Glover hit it off because, years later, I recall Glover making a guest appearance in Mayall’s TV show Bottom (1991-95).

Frank Oz appears briefly as a snotty American Embassy official – Oz recently noted, “Whenever John (Landis) needed a prick in a film, he called me” – and Cockney actor Alan Ford pops up as a talkative London cabbie who enlightens David about the carnage he caused (but didn’t remember causing) the night before: “Six of ’em… all in different parts of the city, all mutilated… He must be a real, right maniac, this fellah!” In micro-cameos, you might just spot Landis himself as the poor schmuck who, during the final werewolf-induced carnage in Piccadilly Circus, gets struck by an out-of-control car and is knocked through a shop window, and legendary James Bond stuntman Vic Armstrong as the driver of the double-decker bus that also comes to grief.

If the film has a fault, it’s that it ends so abruptly. I guess Landis was trying to be shockingly and modishly nihilistic in depicting David’s final fate, but it feels like a cheat that there’s so little build-up, tension and drama in those last minutes. That said, Jenny Agutter as the now-distraught Alex still gives the truncated finale an emotional punch.

Even the last couple of minutes of American Werewolf, disappointing though they are, are a hundred times better than the entirety of the belated sequel An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), made by a different team from the one that made the original. It’s a dire, slipshod, intentionally dumb-assed film that shits werewolf-dung all over the memory of its predecessor, not least because it dispenses with Rick Baker’s practical effects and renders its werewolves in lousy-looking, cartoonish CGI.

More recently, there’s been talk of a remake. But a new American Werewolf in London couldn’t hope to capture the essence of the time – as opposed to the place – that made the original so special. The 1981 film is unique because it showed the personality of London, and Britain, that existed 40 years ago, albeit through the eyes of a bemused main character and bemused writer / director who were both outsiders.

I doubt very much if a tale of an American werewolf prowling around 2021 London would win the affection of audiences. We’re talking a charmless modern London of oligarchs, dirty money, hollowed-out neighbourhoods, rapacious developers, Mayor Johnson’s ego-trip skyscraper developments, embarrassing white elephants like the Millennium Dome, Emirates Air Line and Marble Arch Mound, and exorbitant housing and living costs – there’s no way Nurse Alex could afford a flat of her own, for David to shelter in, as she did in 1981. Mind you, I might warm to a remake if it had the werewolf chomping on Nigel Farage’s head.

Here’s a lovely re-invention of the movie poster for An American Werewolf in London by the artist and illustrator Graham Humphreys. I hope he doesn’t mind me using it here.