Thursday 22 December 2022

Review of 2022: Part 2 – Movies

Here's part two of my Review of the Year, focusing on FILMS. Twenty 'discoveries', six stinkers, six movies re-appraised, five areas of obsession, and some bits and pieces of writing you might enjoy, he added presumptuously.

DISCOVERIES

... being films that I saw for the first time this year, and loved.

1. The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021) – I liked this an awful lot. Loved it, even. It’s wise and surprising and somehow unafraid in a way that few films are. In a sense, it takes a MPDG template – the struggles of a comic book artist with a hot young girlfriend – and instead shows real life, from her side. It’s a film, really, about the messiness of life, which cares deeply about its complicated characters and bothers to understand its female protagonist, rather than celebrating her capriciousness as an inscrutable virtue because she happens to be fit (hello Godard). Aside from one creaky mansplaining gag, it’s also remarkable in managing to engage with so much of contemporary life without being didactic or one-dimensional. Feminism and face-fucking; social media and relationships; art vs morality – it touches deftly on those things, thrown up naturally by the characters, and doesn’t make decisions for you. The non-cheating set-piece, Julie’s tortuous meeting with her father, and the conversations between her and Aksel late in the film are all extraordinary. As is Reinsve throughout. Even the film’s bad trip, the point at which most movies bore the shit out of me, is neat, meaningful and pays off beautifully, first as drama, then as comedy.

2. The Small World of Sammy Lee (Ken Hughes, 1963) – Newley as a neurotically quipping nebbish/mensch/loser, powering the film with a mixture of charm and nervous energy. He's a stripclub comic trying to get 300 quid in five hours to escape the beating of a lifetime. Amazing dialogue, fine Soho atmosphere, brilliant bits for Kenneth J. Warren and Warren Mitchell. The opening, in which we crawl through early-'60s Soho, is like a fucking time machine.
3. The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950) – A stunning noir, based on the same Hemingway novel as To Have and Have Not, with a lumpy, sweaty John Garfield playing a flat-broke family man who gets in way over his head ferrying illegal immigrants and gangsters from Mexico to California. The film has a jittery, manic quality, its massively overwritten script requiring everyone to speak too much in short, staccato sentences, as others patiently wait their turn. In the hands of these actors (not Wallace Ford, the other actors), what might have been a flaw seems more like a stylistic choice. Garfield’s last roles all feel like HUAC allegories – a macho guy, suddenly all alone, facing unbearable pressure – but even without the post-facto subtext there’s a lot going on here. The Breaking Point’s greatest virtue is surely its unusually adult treatment of desire. “A guy can be married and still want something exciting to happen,” the hero tells the would-be fatale (Patricia Neal), rebuffing her repeated advances. Even by her standards, Neal is sensational in this, as a vaguely tragic floozie who loves the mug, but has to couch everything in terms of a fling. There are vast currents of feeling beneath each offhand remark, and the sparks she generates with the film’s star are astonishing when you consider the haircut she’s dealing with. If Garfield is only in peak form about half the time, that’s enough, his domestic scenes immeasurably enhanced by Phyllis Thaxter’s best performance, cast as his (theoretically) unglamorous wife, as comfy as her cardigan. Though film noir’s birth as a response to WW2 has been well-documented, the more direct links between the two tend to be underreported: plenty of noir patsies (though few of the most famous ones) are returning soldiers for whom domestic life is now the hallucination, and violent action the only reality they understand. The Breaking Point deals with this idea superbly by setting up Garfield’s character as a man with no choice: it’s purely bad luck and the need to provide for his family that provoke him to transgress. It’s only when his wife pleads with him not to, and we see him cannily strapping handguns to the inside of a boat loft, that we understand: he wants a return to the visceral simplicity of violence as much as he wants to get a little ahead. A guy can be married and still want something exciting to happen. The film is more regularly cited as one of the first to treat a black character with real dignity, and on (close to) an equal footing with the white. If the praise directed at Juano Hernández’s performance can sometimes be a little hyperbolic because of that distinction, he is effective as Garfield’s best mate, repeatedly being ordered off the boat for sentimental but obscured reasons. Though the film has its imperfections – moments of distracting falsity, and some continuity clangers that simply feel bizarre in a Michael Curtiz film – when it gets to the crunch, it doesn’t put a foot wrong. Taking the lead trio off screen is a gamble, but that fantastically unfussy robbery sequence is about the best one on film, and leads into an absolute gut-punch of a screen death, followed by the constantly escalating tension of its climax: Garfield at breaking point, surrounded by gangsters on a moving boat. *SPOILERS* If the movie drifts, in its final reel, into a slightly corny domesticity, it then proceeds to rip your heart in two, as an impotent Neal becomes merely an observer, and a small boy stands on the dock, waiting for a father who’ll never come home.

4. Scaramouche (George Sidney, 1952) – Ingenuity: that’s what any great swashbuckler needs, from Doug zipping down the mast in The Black Pirate to Jack Sparrow hopping onto that second ship. Scaramouche has an abundance of the stuff, its dashing hero (Stewart Granger) swinging on theatre ropes, plunging through trapdoors and treating the architecture of a small town as a gymnastics arena as he morphs from carefree shagger to vengeful swordsman and part-time clown, while evading the blades of the French aristocracy. It's an exquisite movie, blessed with a delicate balance of offhand wit and genuine feeling, the unsurpassed sight of Stewart Granger in a billowing white shirt, and particularly fine performances from Janet Leigh – ideal as the idealised good girl – and Mel Ferrer, playing the superlative foil (who's magnificent with a foil). The casting is inspired across the board. You can spot the film's weak points – some crap back-projection; the sequences with Granger as the clown Scaramouche, which have a dramatic purpose but no intrinsic entertainment value; Eleanor Parker pushing too hard as Granger’s red-haired, fiery-tempered old flame; the meandering of the third act – and yet it’s hard to care too much about them. Because the movie is just so much fun, climaxing with that exhilarating eight-minute duel, still the longest swordfight ever put on screen, and probably the best. The genre works when it’s light on its feet, its heroes improvising in the fact of mortal danger, and made serious – but not joyless – by personal tragedy. Scaramouche does everything that matters so well. It was written, bizarrely, by the same team as Mrs Miniver.

5. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) – Easily McDonagh’s best screen work since In Bruges, those derivative, cheaply postmodern, dazzled-by-Hollywood films he made in the interim superseded by something specific, profound and intrinsically, incredibly funny. Colin Farrell is the dull-witted nice guy – living on an island off Ireland in 1923 – who finds himself confounded by the former best friend (Brendan Gleeson) who won’t talk to him anymore. When Farrell refuses to take no for an answer, Gleeson gives him an ultimatum: either leave me alone or I’ll start cutting off my fingers. It's essentially a Roan Inish-style folk tale, infused with both the end-of-an-island melancholy of Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World, and McDonagh’s distinctive sense of humour, both pungent and pained. Whereas his Hollywood missteps felt like rip-offs of other people’s calling cards (first Tarantino, then the Coens), here he’s on his own turf and creating something that comes closest in tone to the deceptively fatalistic Father Ted, with only the utter blackness of McDonagh’s despair setting it apart. The writer-director is dealing, too, with real themes, and themes that actually matter: the desire for legacy – the human need to leave a mark, to create something that endures – versus the beautiful, ephemeral simplicity of enhancing the world immediately around you, as you live in it. That question is purposefully corrupted by McDonagh, who decides that coming down on one side of the argument isn’t necessary once loneliness has got its claws into these characters. The clarity of his vision, the cultural veracity of this world and the typically apposite song score (augmented by Carter Burwell’s strings) are all major virtues, and there’s the finest fetishisation of finger mutilation since Paul Schrader developed his interest in The Yakuza. It’s only McDonagh’s overly conventional visual sense and the film’s muted ending – first drawn-out, then abrupt – that disappoint, coupled to a slight dearth of emotional high spots. The central story, while affecting, doesn’t possess the seismic impact of the stars' pyrotechnics in Bruges, and at times pales alongside Farrell's scenes with his practical and literate sister (Kerry Condon). What lingers above all, though, is Barry Keoghan’s performance as the guileless, possibly stupid Dominic, the film’s damaged and misshapen heart. Everything he does is so strange and affecting and funny, and “there goes that dream, then,” is simply a perfect line, delivered in a way you’ll never forget.

6. Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022) – An orgiastic Baz Luhrmann phantasmagoria, bombarding you with iconography, mythos and music. It’s only when the film occasionally (though increasingly) stops for a dialogue scene that the plates stop spinning and smash on the floor. A biopic needs a strong angle more than it needs fidelity to the facts, and the way this one uses Elvis to talk about race, sexual hypocrisy and creative integrity is superb. It is too long, with a paucity of great scenes in its final hour, but at its best it is just irresistible. Its stadium set-piece is simply a masterpiece, and ‘If I Can Dream’ isn’t too far behind. Butler carries it all, and if Hanks at times becomes a Mitteleuropean cartoon, the compensations include an absolutely explosive cameo from Alton Mason as Little Richard. A film that loves music – and cinema.
7. Primary Colo(u)rs (Mike Nichols, 1998) – An unusually nuanced film about politics, without either the wish-fulfilment of Capra and Sorkin or the empty cynicism of New Hollywood. Instead it argues that the indulging of personal flaws and political hedging is a price worth considering for an administration that will at least help some of the people, some of the time. While its periodic stabs at comedy and satire don’t really work, as a drama about disillusionment – and that question of purity vs practicality – it’s excellent. Playing the barely-veiled Bill Clinton, Travolta gives the best performance of his career, exhibiting a charm that’s irresistible in all the senses of that word, and nailing his character’s smallness, greatness and self-pity. There’s also unforgettable work from Emma Thompson as his pained, pragmatic wife – a wily operator hobbled by hurt – and from Billy Bob Thornton, disappearing into his role as the predatory, perma-swearing Carville figure. If the scene-stealing interventions from Larry Hagman and a rather preachy Kathy Bates are markedly less complex, they’re certainly commanding, while Adrian Lester completes the ensemble as the audience avatar (and George Stephanopoulous surrogate), the actor on the cusp of a Hollywood career that never materialised. That isn’t a showy performance, but he has the right, old-fashioned mix of charm and naivete, as well as one superb scene in which he's sent to pay off the father of a pregnant girl, and feeds him the most horrible, reassuring smile.
Best production surprise: a group photo of the young Travolta, Thompson and Bates in 1973 that actually looks real!
Worst production surprise: it’s bad enough that Nichols plays ‘On the Road Again’ by Willie Nelson to signify the campaign team being on the road. But then he does it again.

8. The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952) – Considering that there was no need to make this movie, it is just wonderful. It’s a remake of the 1937 classic, with the same script and the same score. In theory all it does is add Technicolor and replace the stars with more fashionable ones. With these stars, though – three titans of ‘40s British cinema, since transplanted to Hollywood – that leads to something genuinely new. Kerr is absolutely sensational as Flavia: a queen buffeted by the winds of fate, her performance like a fire beneath glass. A frog-faced James Mason luxuriates in his dialogue, rocking a startlingly contemporary trim as the mellifluous, gleefully villainous Rupert of Hentzau. And while Stewart Granger is a limited actor, he’s a fine star, born of sudden emotion, baritone exclamation and billowing shirts. If these ‘50s swashbucklers are really about anything, then they’re about his torso. The action climax is stunningly done, and if the film is otherwise fairly talky, there are flashes of inventive direction throughout, most notably during Rupert and Michael’s tete-a-tete, in which their plotting becomes a conversation between two armchairs and two sets of hands, the heads largely unseen.
9. Romance on the High Seas (Michael Curtiz, 1947) – Doris Day's debut is an absolutely wonderful musical, with good tunes, good jokes, and chemistry between the star and Jack Carson (her acting mentor) that is simply off the charts. Don DeFore and Janis Paige play a married couple whose mutual suspicions unwittingly set up a cruise-ship romance between nightclub singer Day and private eye Carson. He's there to find out if she's cheating on her husband. She isn't married. They fall in love. FARCE ensues. Michael Curtiz's direction is occasionally laborious (he's oddly fastidious about the idea that we witness each tenuous visual misunderstanding in full) but more often elegant, and allied to stunning Technicolor photography from Woody Bredell. The supporting cast is just out of this world, with S. Z. Sakall unstintingly hilarious as DeFore's panicked, good-natured uncle, and Oscar Levant peerless as a depressed suitor; his shtick didn't always work on screen, but here he's perfect. There are bits too for veteran character comics Eric Blore (playing an ill doctor) and Franklin Pangborn (very funny as a voyeuristic hotel clerk). Busby Berkeley's numbers are relatively restrained, but for the most part utterly charming. If Jack Carson's calypso number is just cheerily racist, Avon Long’s brilliantly-choreographed ‘The Tourist Trade’ delightfully satirises American myopia, and Day’s vocalisations of the Styne-Kahn songs are some of her best. The sight of her bouncing around a nightclub stage, shouting, "I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love!" is as good a justification as any for the invention of the talking picture. This is the most enjoyable musical – or rom-com – that I’ve seen in a long time: hilarious, romantic escapism with a scintillating central duo.

10. Cash on Demand (Quentin Lawrence, 1961) – ‘A Christmas Carol’ reimagined as a heist movie. Peter Cushing is a sadistic bank manager visited on 23 December by a psychopath armed with endless intel, four holdalls, and a route to his host’s loved ones. It’s an exceptional festive film: tense, witty and very moving in its starchy, understated British way, with Cushing in simply imperious form. Also there’s snow everywhere and the score keeps segueing from ‘The First Nowell’ into an eerie thriller register. What a treat.
11. The Detective (Gordon Douglas, 1968) – Perhaps the best film ever made about the Nixonian culture wars. Ol’ Blue Eyes is a cop – and old-fashioned liberal – navigating a new world of gays, drugs and noisy activists. Much Younger Blue Eyes (Lee Remick) is terrific as his Mia Farrow-ish wife, a nymphomaniac. Admittedly it’s hard to tell, at times, whether this is accomplished moviemaking or simply an incredibly vivid snapshot of its age – in which gays are deserving of our respect, but also a different species; in which police violence is abhorrent but perhaps worth covering up. But its score, Remick’s performance, and Douglas’s use of the stars’ faces (often depicted in straight-on POV close-up during the domestic sequences; usually captured in medium profile and flux during the procedural elements) are all outstanding virtues. The only real false notes are Jacqueline Bisset’s flat performance, and the laborious reveal. A terrific movie.

12. Dig! (Ondi Timoner, 2004) – A stunning as-it-happened documentary about the contrasting fortunes of Portland scenesters The Dandy Warhols – who make it massive – and their frenemies, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, who don’t. The film attributes the latter development to the BJM’s frontman, Anton Newcombe, who is depicted as a genius, the victim of both a tough childhood and a serious drug habit, and, most crucially, an absolute fucking nightmare. The case for him being a nightmare is, incidentally, rather more compelling than the one for him being a genius. At one point, an A&R talking head tells us that the BJM’s crucial private showcase for an industry bigwig was “a disaster”, to which my reaction was, “Oh, they must have played a bad show.” No, they beat each other up on stage. The camera later finds Newcombe sitting disconsolately outside the building. “You fucking broke my sitar, motherfucker,” he laments. Such black comedy gold is augmented by a deep sadness, and vast, telling insights about the music industry, difficult people and the nature of ‘authenticity’. I’d argue that the Dandies made it bigger partly because they just had better tunes, but they also compromised: there’s nothing in their polished festival shows that’s halfway as exciting as the early clips of them in their Oregon element.
13. Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021) – In one sense, a frankly terrible movie to choose while experiencing the body horror of post-op convalescence, managing to handily consolidate most of the more unwatchable things imaginable into one handy film. But while its female serial killer is impregnated by a car (yes we do see the birth, thank you for asking), and breaks her own nose on a sink, it's also a secretly sentimental, latently compassionate movie. And that dance on the fire truck contains everything. On the subject of hybrid children, I suppose Titane is most superficially Cronenberg’s Crash + The Imposter + My Life as a Courgette. Most importantly, though, it isn't the self-consciously strange, even attention-seeking film I’d anticipated but a picture about capitalism’s fetishising of bodies and objects, and the connections we make or sever in order to evade it.

14. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018) – Easily the best of the series: it’s about the story and the action, and both are exceptional. In one sense it’s a greatest hits package culled from previous films (free-climbing, crashing to earth in a deadweight vehicle, exhausted hand-to-hand combat in the open-air...) but the fight scenes have such weight and kinetic energy to them, and the chases overflow with invention. The bathroom scrap and the sequence in a Grand Palais bar stuffed with assassins are as good as anything in a Hollywood actioner this century. I enjoyed the main villain too, though it’s Vanessa Kirby who completely steals the film, playing an arms dealer with a sideline in flirtation. The only real flaws are Cruise's slightly creepy characterisation ("You need to walk away," he says, like a cult leader encountering a dissenter) and the overdone sentiment: it's a series that rarely gets emotion quite right, and the scene where Cruise comforts a downed gendarme is infinitely more affecting than the ladled-on, soft-focus guff with his wife (a never-knowingly-underemoting Michelle Monaghan).
15. The Pitch o’ Chance/Nugget Jim's Pardner/The Pilgrim (Frank Borzage, 1915-6) – Borzage is probably the least known of the great Golden Era directors. Perhaps because his sincere, romantic style has gone out of fashion. Perhaps because he made films called things like 'Nugget Jim's Pardner'. But he directed Janet Gaynor in two of the three films that won her the first Best Actress Oscar (two of his late silent masterworks, 7th Heaven and Street Angel, made one of the five best films noir (the haunted Moonrise) and had an unparalleled gift for crafting emotional Americana (Lucky Star and The Vanishing Virginian). My #AgeOfBorzage project kicked off this year (let's get it trending, and involves trying to see every one of his extant films in chronological order. Beyond the box-office behemoths and critical darlings of cinema's early years, it's essentially pot luck as to which silent films remain in existence; indeed, only a quarter of them do. Incredibly, Borzage's 1915 debut, a two-reel Western called The Pitch o' Chance, is among those spared by fate, and a pair of his follow-ups have also been preserved and restored. All three films are special in their own way. The Pitch o' Chance, made by Borzage when he was just 21, is remarkably accomplished for a first film: a tender, deeply touching story offering early evidence of the director's interest in the transformative power of love. Nugget Jim's Pardner is a thoroughly likeable comedy with a perfect ending. While The Pilgrim sees a leap forward in terms of Borzage’s style, being a character piece told largely through its images. I can't wait to continue.

16. A Good Marriage (Éric Rohmer, 1982) – Sporadically superb mid-period Rohmer, centred on a scintillating performance from Béatrice Romand (Laura in perhaps his most celebrated film, Claire’s Knee). She’s the capricious, forthright Sabine, who tires of relationships with married men and so decides to get married herself – setting her cap for an emotionally unavailable lawyer who seems scarcely interested. At times it skirts close to self-parody in its sheer Frenchness and maleness (the women are beguiling, the men all have terrible hair and look about 50), but Rohmer is too interested in his protagonist, her convictions and flaws – and Romand is simply too talented – for it not to dig deep. Amid slow scenes and a certain gimmickry of concept that may be its characters’, and may not, it has moments of pain, honesty and hypocrisy that are utterly real, before one of the most beautiful and exhilarating endings I’ve ever seen. Yes Rohmer creates intriguing characters, and delves into enduring questions about sex, but the most extraordinary element of his canon is how he evokes the feeling of love, not between two characters but between one character and the viewer.
17. Righting Wrongs (Corey Yuen, 1986) – Kung fu cinema’s secret weapon, Yuen Biao, plays a prosecutor who tires of defendants wriggling off the hook, and so resolves to start killing them instead. Cynthia Rothrock is the Lady-Di-haired cop who decides that isn’t fine. In story terms, this Corey Yuen actioner is undernourished and rather muddled, but it’s also oddly moving, genuinely bleak, and packed with the most incredible action sequences, the explosive, frenetic fight scenes complemented by car chases, abseiling and freefalling. A small classic. Original-ending fans: assemble!

18. The Cimarron Kid (Budd Boetticher, 1952) – God praise Boetticher. His first Western is just the most stunningly-directed film. There’s so much going on in every frame, but with such a perfect hierarchy of elements. He’s unfussy or stylish as the occasion demands: beautifully blocking the first convention of outlaws; lovingly lingering on Audie Murphy’s body as the hero lounges in his sick bed; indulging an inspired fondness for off-screen gunfire leading to dances of death... And no-one ever did a cinematic “uh-oh, who’s that in the background?” better than Budd. The plot is pat in places – a hard-luck story with a few messy joins – and the ending is dreadful, impacted by both censorship and commercial concerns, but taken as a whole this might just be Murphy’s best vehicle. The supporting characters are particularly vivid, and their fates gratifyingly hard to guess – at least until that botch-job of a finish.
19. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) – My chronological take:
0-5 mins: This is boring. Is it just this?
5-40 mins: This is incredible. The travelling, lamplit figures diminishing in the frame. Chilly childhood memories, thawed by that maternal exhalation of “come”. Ullmann on death watch but there for the taking if the doctor wants her. (He doesn’t.) Their flashback scene: spiteful, erotic, pathetic. Ohhhh, the red washes are blood.
40-55 mins: Where’s Liv gone?
55 mins: Bergman, what the FUCK is wrong with you?
55-65 mins: Wow, he’s given us one of the most beautiful endings of all time. Pure Rohmer.
66 mins: Oh no, it’s carrying on.
67-75 mins: Even worse, there’s a dream sequence.
75-89 mins: Well that was invigoratingly nasty.
89-91 mins: [quiet whimpering]

20. Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) – An excellent melodrama, with three of the era’s most interesting, nuanced characters engaged in an unpredictable love triangle – the tortured Crawford torn between Andrews’ charming but ruthless attorney and Fonda’s depressed, widowed war vet. The latter delivers every one of his exit lines in some unexpected and affecting way. The film's second half isn’t as deft or as swaggeringly confident as its first, becoming circular and plotty, but it remains intriguing, and Preminger’s inspired utilisation of a ringing phone as the movie reaches its climax is a stunning piece of filmmaking, half-inched by Leone for Once Upon a Time in America.
***

AND SIX OF THE WORST
1. The Beales of Grey Gardens (David and Albert Maysles, 2006) – Shapeless, aimless and pointless. Without a proper narrative this time, it’s just costumes, songs and the bleak, unilluminating spectacle of untreated mental illness.

2. Sutter's Gold (James Cruze, 1935) – I’ve seen 773 films from the 1930s. I think this is the worst. Edward Arnold’s blameless Swiss flautist is accused of a double-murder; leaves his (apparently American) children to move to New York; gets a job as a streetcar driver; is mistaken for a scab and hospitalised by striking workers; and heads for California. These aren’t spoilers, that’s the first 13 minutes of the film. From then on, it’s sanctimony, cardboard characters, terrible comedy, embarrassing philosophising and farcical acting, across an apparently endless number of short scenes, all of them boring. Arnold quickly gives up on his Swiss accent – and apparently on the notion of movie stardom, right before our very eyes – though incredibly the great Lee Tracy is just as bad, well out of his comfort zone, and left high and dry by the appalling material. An unremittingly and eye-wateringly awful film.
3. The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971) – This reminds me of that Paul McCartney quote about taking LSD: “We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could accomplish if we could tap that hidden part.” The Last Movie is what happens when you take so many drugs that you can only use one per cent of your brain.

4. Posse from Hell (Herbert Coleman, 1961) – An amazingly boring Audie Murphy Western (probably his worst), with cardboard characters, predictable plot developments and the star at his most sullen and shallow. Even a supporting cast featuring Lee van Cleef and James Bell can’t help – not when the dialogue’s this dire. The film’s sole virtue: a climactic gunfight that isn’t too bad, opening and closing with a bang, and featuring an embryonic version of Rooster Cogburn’s 1969 ride to destiny. The posse are from Hell, incidentally, in the sense that they’re not very good at their job.
5. The Boogie Man Will Get You (Lew Landers, 1942) – A teeth-achingly awful comedy, clearly meant to leech off the success of stage smash Arsenic and Old Lace, with a young couple plagued by murderers and weirdos at their new heritage hotel. In a remarkable misjudgement, Karloff plays the insane scientist as an absent, camp old duffer – rather than just reprising his Mad Doctor persona – and this is the first time I’ve ever seen the incomparable Lorre defeated by his material, though he still has his moments. Larry Parks is just mesmerisingly bad, mugging endlessly as the exasperated hero; it would be cruel to say that he didn’t even embarrass himself this much in front of HUAC, but it would also be funny, so let’s say it. This is a loud, stupid, laughless, incoherent film, and a complete waste of everybody’s time and energy, including mine.

6. Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012) – The Talking Shite Championships of the World: a deeply annoying film in which several of the most pretentious and/or insane people on Earth claim that The Shining is a metaphor for the Holocaust, sex, the genocide of Native Americans or the faking of the Moon Landings. It’s about one per cent as enjoyable as it sounds (the one per cent being that now and then there’ll be a coincidence that makes you go, “Oh yeah, that’s nearly interesting”), with the choice of visuals somehow just as irritating as the interviewees – and not as varied. At one point, the Moon Guy focuses in on the key to Door 237, saying: “The only capital letters on the key are R-O-O-M-N, and there’s only two words you can come up with that have those letters in ‘em, and that’s ‘moon’ and ‘room’.” But he’s wrong. There’s also ‘moron’. It's like being detained on your night off by the nine loneliest pub bores on earth, and somehow even worse than The Shining itself.

***

RE-APPRAISALS

... being movies I revisited, and changed my mind about.

THREE UP

1. Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) – “Well, you gotta live, no matter what happens.” An essential film, of course, and yet not quite up there with Ford's greatest. That was what I thought until this year. And there's nothing like the zeal of the convert, is there? It is an impeccably constructed film, revitalising and reinventing what was by then a maligned and moribund genre. In one sense, it’s a manifest destiny Western, but it’s also an interventionist parable, a hymn to the outsider, a swaggering satire about American morality. Its heroes are an escaped convict, a sex worker, an alcoholic, and a card cheat who shoots people in the back. Its principal villain is a bank president. This was 1939 and John Ford was still “a socialist democrat – always left.” Ford isn’t merely subverting the hypocrisy of modern America, though, he’s picking at the fabric of the genre: his hero is introduced stranded in the desert with a lame horse; there’s no action for an hour, merely talking. What talking, though; and what art. Welles famously watched the film 40 times while prepping Kane (though I've seen it more often than that, and I'm not prepping anything). When Louise Platt faints in the deserted compound, the ceilinged sets, low angles and shadow-play on the walls are pointing the way towards Kane vs Leland. A mention too for that brief and simple shot of two diverging paths early in the film: as neat an illustration of Ford’s singular genius as you’ll ever see. Then in the final third, the gratification of action: that stagecoach set-piece with its kinetic energy, its grace notes and Yakima Canutt stuntwork; that downbeat, gloriously-conceived gunfight, treated by critics as an underwhelming afterthought. Nothing, though, is quite as memorable as Thomas Mitchell delivering Dudley Nichols dialogue: his Doc Boone would be by far the greatest performance of most actors’ careers; it’s Mitchell’s second or third best of 1939. Trevor is fantastic too: you’d never accuse her of subtlety, but she commands your attention: that throb in her voice, the thought that goes into her physicality, the beguiling, unexpected softness of her and Wayne. What’s not to like? A bit of shoddy back-projection, a bit too much crap comedy in the opening reels. That’s all. One of Ford's greatest, and therefore one of the greatest by anyone. A second viewing only revealed more delights.

2. Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977) – Friedkin’s filthy, hard-as-nails Wages of Fear swings from verité to surrealism like the lost link between Battle of Algiers and Fitzcarraldo. The exposition is so artful and economical, and an incredible Tangerine Dream score underscores the fatalism and sense of dread, as the car-chase maestro proves he's just as adept with slow-crawling trucks.

3. Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage, 1997) – It has that glib, smug, postmodern post-Reservoir Dogs thing but so much more heart and originality than any of its rivals. There are three or four great scenes, and the bursts of action are unfailingly effective – not least because they're so brief. Driver is just terrific.

THREE DOWN

1. They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945), in which Ford serves up one of his most confounding pictures, a challenge to critics along the lines of, “Try to work out what the hell you think of that.” It has perhaps John Wayne’s worst performance (his self-consciousness presumably stoked by the director's constant bullying on set about his supposed draft-dodging), and yet one of the great scenes of his career. Throughout the movie, moments of breathtaking beauty jostle for space with the kind of ugly, prosaic filmmaking that tends to accompany any state-sanctioned military film made in the US. Full appraisal here.

2. Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941)Mr Deeds Goes to Hell. Gary Cooper is an aww-shucks-guy and bush-league baseball pitcher who agrees to help fast-talking reporter Barbara Stanwyck boost her paper’s circulation, by posing as the disaffected, suicidal ‘John Doe’ figure she just dreamt up. Soon the John Doe campaign is sweeping the nation, providing the perfect launchpad for fascist financier and presidential hopeful, Edward Arnold (who has his own blackshirted corps of motorbike-riding thugs). It's an objectively fascinating but also ludicrous, over-familiar film that trades too much on Riskin and Capra’s tried and tested tricks. By 1941, and post-Lindbergh and the Bund, the cagey optimism of their ‘30s films has also been replaced by a muscular libertarianism, and a tendency to alternately patronise and demonise the malleable masses. Most of the film feels as deep as a trailer. Full review here.

3. Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988) – "I just need you to know: I don't know what I'm doing... and I love you." An unforgettable though unbelievably flawed film, lit up by its performances. The script (by Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s mum) is disorientatingly and at times comically inauthentic, while failing to explore the more intriguing elements of its premise: that of two left-wing radicals still on the run with their kids, a decade and a half after bombing a napalm lab. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if their son wanted to study music at Juilliard? Not necessarily, no. Yet this film (and that subplot) is justified by showcasing the extraordinary sensitivity of River Phoenix, who gives probably the most conventional of his great performances. More here.

***

OBSESSIONS
1. London films! – My current hobby is time-travelling to Londons past through the medium of film. This year, I luxuriated in the locations of films great (The Small World of Sammy Lee, see 'Discoveries'), good (Theatre of Blood, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Otley, A Dandy in Aspic, The Galloping Major, Gideon's Day) and absolutely fucking terrible (Brannigan, Hennessy).

2. Audie Murphy – I've long subscribed to Murphy's Law. That's the idea that although Audie Murphy wasn't much of an actor, the most-decorated soldier of World War Two entered the Western at the time when the genre was at its most daring, and these often well-written movies used him (and his singular baggage) in fascinating ways. But actually I'm coming round to him as an actor too; certainly he's superb in his final film, A Time for Dying, in an extended cameo as a wise and fatalistic Jesse James. That was one of 11 Murphy Westerns I watched this year. Other highlights were the early vehicle, The Cimarron Kid (see 'Discoveries'), The Duel at Silver Creek – notable for one absolutely exhilarating flash of action – and the fascinating Hell Bent for Leather. Posse from Hell, as I already intimated, was not so hot.

3. Budd Boetticher – Like Frank Borzage (see 'Discoveries'), the name 'Budd Boetticher' serves as a password in old-movie circles. He's simply the best Western director that most people have never heard of, reaching his zenith with the 'Ranown' cycle: six (or seven, if you count Westbound, which Boetticher didn't) remarkable chamber pieces featuring Randolph Scott as a greying, taciturn hell-bent on revenge. This year I dipped into some deeper cuts. His first and last Westerns both featured Audie Murphy: The Cimarron Kid is akin to a mission statement; A Time for Dying has a hero who looks like Cristiano Ronaldo and acts even worse, but also moments that'll never leave you. After that, I went onto The Man from the Alamo (stylistically valuable), The Bullfighter and the Lady (a deeply flawed labour of love), and Horizons West (crap).

4. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) – My health wasn't great this summer, so I ended up missing two big gigs and my summer holiday. On the night I was failing to see Phoebe Bridgers at Brixton Academy, I decided I should do something else that I'd love and which I wouldn't have otherwise been able to. But what? Well, watch My Darling Clementine, of course. The Pre-Release Version, of course. Ford's first postwar Western is a 99-minute art film about loss and nation-building, with some action at the end. And it does just about everything right. Though its principal characters – hero, villain, anti-hero, madonna and whore – are the purest refinements of those archetypes, with destinies that are therefore ineluctable, what the director does with those characters is purely Fordian – and utterly new. The film remains as compelling an argument as any that Ford is by far the greatest director there has ever been, and everyone else has just sort of been piddling around in his wake. That was my conclusion back in July, and another viewing a few months later did nothing to dispel that impression.

5. John Ford generally – The daddy. I revisited favourites for fun (Stagecoach, Clementine, Wagon Master), and mined uneven films both familiar (The Sun Shines Bright, The Whole Town's Talking) and new (Gideon's Day) for recurring themes, images and obsessions.

***

MY BEST WRITING ON FILM
1. EMPIRE – The Masterpiece: Angels with Dirty Faces – For the October issue, a thousand words on Cagney, poverty and gangsterism (above).

2. Remember the Night: 'A good dose of schmerz' (Indicator, 2022) – A 14-page booklet essay about the movie's making, meaning and enduring importance. This limited edition Blu-ray is available to order here.

3. I played Zuzu in It’s A Wonderful Life – then I was jerked out of Hollywood at 15 – An emotional interview with Karolyn Grimes about child stardom, pain and the movies. For the i Paper. Link here.

4. My Sight & Sound ballot – It's always been an ambition of mine to vote in Sight & Sound's poll of the 100 greatest films of all time, held once a decade. And this time I got to. My ballot (with notes) will be on the BFI website in the new year, but for now it's here.

5. Some ruminations on Avatar (and Marvel, and 3D, and the career of James Cameron) for the i Paper, ahead of the release of The Way of Water.

***

Thanks for reading.

Monday 19 December 2022

Review of 2022: Part 1 – Books

All the books I read in 2022, capriciously ranked, compulsively reviewed.

FICTION

At the risk of repeating myself following last year's rhapsody on the subject of The Age of Innocence, my favourite novel of the year was by Edith Wharton. Her Midwest masterpiece, Ethan Frome (1911), is heartbreaking, then horrific – a devastating trick on its audience that leaves you slack-jawed and queasy. Abandoning the drawing rooms, wood-panelled libraries and elegant witticisms of New York for the inarticulate sincerity and abject poverty of rural America, her pen alights on Ethan Frome, a man irreparably damaged by some physical and spiritual smash-up in his distant past. And then we get the whole story, climaxing with the gut-punch to end them all. The prose is beautifully balanced, the emotions so real that they're yours, and if the villainy initially seems too simplistic, that's all in the service of the pay-off. "I doubt I’ll read a better book this year," I wrote in March. And reader, I didn't.

There was serious competition, though, as I plunged into a host of classics I'd been long neglecting. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872) will be with me for a long time. Dealing with three pairs of lovers in a rural English town of the 1830s, it’s wise, emotionally overpowering and blessed with a remarkable psychological complexity. Like the best of Philip Roth, it is preoccupied with the unknowability of others. I haven’t read a book that captures so perfectly the way in which we talk with one another at cross-purposes, our readings of situations coloured by our peculiarities, prejudices and degrees of self-obsession. Eliot makes us complicit in those misreadings, leading us in one direction before catching us red-handed, her narrator cautioning us to not be too hasty. She draws her characters so sharply – with an almost merciless clarity – but then forgives them their transgressions. None of that, though, makes her forget to be a smartarse. It’s a book about life, really: about self-delusion, change, and the way our hopes are variously realised, modified or crushed.

I suppose that's what The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is about too. It's a masterpiece of a slow-burner from Henry James, presenting a young American woman, drunk on freedom, full of ideas, a little too full of pride, who unwittingly entrances a vigorous industrialist, a stolid lord and a consumptive aristocrat, before being manipulated into a relationship with a monstrous aesthete. It took me a while to become attuned to the turns of James’s mind and pen – his long and mannered sentences, overflowing with complex concepts, dressed in the superfluities of Victorian prose – but once I did, I was riveted. And if the serialised nature of the book’s creation results in an imperfect pace, that has virtues of its own: a languorous opening section that we look back upon as an evocation of a lost Eden, followed by lurches forward in time and rapidly accreting plot twists, time going too quickly now, dragging us away from that which is irrevocably past. It's a book driven by its characters, who perform roles out of melodrama (victim, villain, fallen woman, tragic hero) while possessed of a minute and complex shading. Not for James the crisp immediacy of his friend and contemporary, Wharton; he is more obscure and stealthy, his lady graduating from a glazed and bright-eyed complacency to a dreadful greatness and a fate made inescapable by both her virtues and flaws.

I do occasionally read novels that are less than a hundred years old. Like P. G. Wodehouse's The Code of the Woosters (1938), a mere 84, and quite possibly the funniest book I've ever read. Having come to Jeeves and Wooster absurdly late, I've been going through the oeuvre in order. While the short stories are mostly terrific and, after the misstep of the first novel (with its rather dated commitment to extended periods of blackface), the second proved to be a return to form, this third full-length outing is on a completely different level. The plot – which sees Bertie tormented at Totleigh Towers by the continuous re-appearance of three inanimate objects: an antique silver cow creamer, a policeman's helmet, and a notebook filled with bile – is masterfully assembled, and somehow every word that Wodehouse chooses is the correct one. I must have laughed out loud a dozen times. One to return to whenever I need a bit of cheering up, I think.

Though I watch Orson Welles' 1942 film of The Magnificent Ambersons all the damn time, and voted for it in my Sight and Sound top 10, I only just got around to reading Booth Tarkington's source novel. It was a sensational success in 1918, winning the Pulitzer, but is now largely derided or dismissed. I found the book deeply moving and surprisingly modern – aside from its occasional yet eye-watering racism and an impenetrably dated opening chapter during which I had to google half the words (they mostly turned out to be types of hat). It’s about the fall of a wealthy Midwest family, and the comeuppance – and ultimate redemption – of a prideful mother’s boy named George Amberson Minafer. He reigns over an aristocratic (though nouveau riche) milieu and possesses no real ambition beyond being “a yachtsman”, but as the automobile is introduced and the town changes (“It was spreading, incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself, and darkened its sky”), the old world dies, and, as it does, George makes the fateful decision to interfere in his widowed mother’s lovelife. Like many (most?) great novels, it’s an ambivalent book: a paean to a lost world, but a world that produced Georgie, that handsome but overweening monster. It is also vividly atmospheric and wonderfully witty, with unforgettable characters, a rich sense of irony, and a great rhythm and poetry to its dialogue. Only the ending stutters, radiating “oh shit, how do I wrap this up” vibes, as a central character makes a sudden and bafflingly-conceived visit to a psychic medium.

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (1998), the first novel by Withnail & I writer-director Bruce Robinson, knocked me sideways. In the wind-blasted Broadstairs winter of 1957, Thomas goes in search of some grubby photographs and instead finds himself – or lack thereof. This book reads like a challenge, in which Robinson must fashion a heartrending coming-of-age novel from the most offputting material imaginable. Its 15-year-old hero – on the surface irredeemably damaged – begins the book by repeatedly soiling himself, before poring over animal porn and indulging in animal torture, while trapped in an airless house that stinks of dog shit, violence and boiling meat. The result, somehow, is deeply and enduringly affecting, more sustained than Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son and more authentic than Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine, illuminated by Robinson’s vast, buried reserves of empathy (it has at least four great love stories at its centre), and extraordinary facility for language. It’s also extremely funny, both in its asides and the meticulously-engineered set-pieces, the best of which has Thomas being interrogated about enemas, by a vicar. So in a sense it's quite like Middlemarch, which also has a vicar.

Another contemporary favourite was Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss (2021), which is brilliant on mental illness, but even better on a specific person with mental illness: cruel, self-destructive and lovely. It's lit fic vaguely masquerading as commercial, with a narrative voice that's up there with Boy Parts: hilarious, but punctuated with sucker-punch sentences of great sadness. I knew I'd love the book as soon as I read this immaculately-phrased joke:
"The letting agent told us it was an Executive Home, in an Executive Development, and therefore perfect for us – even though neither of us are executives. One of us a consultant specialist in intensive care. One of us writes a funny food column for Waitrose magazine and went through a period of Googling 'Priory clinic how much per night?' when her husband was at work."
, Mason's subsequent utilisation of the words 'Me Cookie' (to denote the taking of pills) merely cemented the deal. The book has a couple of small flaws, I suppose – not all of the supporting characters are fleshed out as well as the main ones; the narrator's journal feels more like a plot device than an organic character element – but dwelling on those seems churlish. It is a stressful, valuable and compassionate book, truly remarkable in the way that y it slowly reveals its central character's great – and perhaps missed – calling in life.

If there's one writer I admire (and look to emulate) more than any other, it's Penelope Fitzgerald. At Freddie's (1982) is another of her semi-autobiographical masterpieces: small and beautifully-carved, its melancholia and humour in effortless balance, and every sentence perfectly weighted. Its story of devotion, artistry and compromise plays out in a shrewdly-drawn hinterland at the fringes of the West End, where the glorious, quasi-monstrous Freddie runs her rundown stage school for precocious kids. Fitzgerald’s work is so uncommonly atmospheric – the Blitz glass crunched under feet in Human Voices or the rainfall on fat green leaves in The Beginning of Spring – and her evocation of this greasepaint-streaked world is unstintingly remarkable, while shot through with an irony that’s neither good-natured joshing nor naïve luvviedom, but something heightened and touching and true. The only time her unerring gift threatens to fail her is during an extended diversion into the love life of two teachers, and yet their climactic meeting in a Lyons’ tearoom is one of the great set-pieces of her career, possessed of a piercing specificity in terms of era and national character that renders it at once a passage of deep and backwards-looking longing, and a work of brutal anti-nostalgia. The book is sad and subtle – its characters’ triumphs fleeting, their disasters enduring – and yet Fitzgerald writes with such unstinting empathy about human bungling, self-delusion and mediocrity, qualities she herself seemed to have in such short supply. The climactic sequence, of snow falling into shadows, and a boy falling too – a presage to a tragedy, and the boy a genius – is heartstopping.

If Sandra Newman's The Men (2022) lacks the dazzling surefootedness of her exquisitely sad time-travel novel, The Heavens, it still gets its claws into you. It's a strange, challenging book that engages with, investigates and is occasionally hobbled by contemporary identity politics. Though its peripheral stories are oddly uninteresting, its central one, unfurling slowly, is immersing and utterly haunting. Incidentally: belying the slew of idiotic one-star reviews on Goodreads that greeted the announcement of the book's premise, Newman makes her trans characters specific and deeply human, while engagingly directly with the cruelty of their identity being compromised by the premise.

My continued explorations into the work of Edith Wharton yielded one more elegiac masterwork and a relative failure. The House of Mirth (1905) is a haunting Wharton tragedy that's universal in its portrait of human impulses, while typically alive to the miniscule nuances of 19th century New York society. It centres on the witty, decorative Lily Bart, who precipitates her own downfall by transgressing the unspoken, irrational codes of her milieu, then clings to an obscure sense of honour that prevents her from halting her slide. Most prosaically, Wharton's writing is perfectly balanced between related but competing elements: plot and character, dialogue and description, humour and emotional gut-punches. And whatever she does, she does superbly: as the world of society first palls on Lily, in the shadow of a joyless future married to a dull book collector, Wharton suddenly turns on her other characters, assassinating each in turn through a succession of short, laser-guided putdowns. The sublime virtue here, though, is the author's understanding of human frailties, and our moments of small greatness, and how they are warped, magnified or covered over by a society obsessed with appearances. By contrast, The Custom of the Country (1913) is a long-winded, largely one-note satire about monstrous social climber Undine Spragg, and the human wreckage she leaves in her wake. It’s audacious, and at first exciting, but becomes monotonous in its second half, without the clever shading that blesses Wharton’s most effective tours of this sparkling but superficial world. When Undine’s son tries to piece together his life from news clippings, you realise that what’s been missing for the past hundred pages is anything resembling complex human feeling, though the climactic twist – conceived and executed with Wharton’s characteristic, clear-eyed mercilessness, and in retrospect inevitable – is undeniably and blackly hilarious. Her handling of perspective, asking us to sympathise alternately with Undine and with her deluded husband Ralph, a gentle and troubled aesthete, is as cleverly handled as ever, it’s just that at times the characters seem to have been cut out of cardboard.

In the old-favourites-having-trouble corner, we also have J. L. Carr, Howard Spring and Elizabeth Taylor. Last year, I was deeply moved, thoroughly transported and possibly transformed by Carr's A Month in the Country, but subsequent forays into his work haven't been so fulfilling. The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (1985) is, like his signature novel, a time-limited period piece: A Year in Dakota, if you will, based on the author's own time there as a teacher during the Depression. It doesn't feel successful as a whole, lurching forwards, grinding to a halt, the approach not revolutionary (though early passages seem to nudge towards an ingenious fragmented structure a la Lincoln in the Bardo) but merely piecemeal. If anything its story is too unconventional and perverse, its narrator struggling to penetrate the psyche of his environs, and so keeping us out too. Carr, though, can dazzle in the moment like few authors in history, at times from nowhere. The dialogue he finds in the mouth of James Ardvaak has the rhythm and the ring of the real. And ultimately his is a book about American violence – about a foreign land with a common tongue – and in it you find his peculiar politics, which prize a vivid individuality born of communal spirit, resulting in a left-wing modern Western, elegiac and frustrating, unsatisfying yet essential.

Spring's My Son, My Son (1938) is basically We Need to Talk About Oliver, the spoilt son of the selfish, self-made narrator. This was Spring's breakthrough book but now looks more like a dry-run for his masterly 1940 novel, Fame Is the Spur, another sprawling saga in which his sad-eyed chronicler accrues wisdom as he mellows. Except here it's money and Irish Republicanism in place of renown and labour history, and the characterisation is too daft and cartoonish to properly engage. It isn't just Oliver, whose sole attributes are a physical beauty and a spiralling sociopathy, but the preposterous supporting characters like Irish rabble-rouser Michael Flynn (sample quote: "the peasants haven't so much as a rotten potato to eat") and a mad sea captain who thinks he's Judas Iscariot, comfortably two of the worst creations I've encountered in recent years. The book does pay off, though, building momentum through an aggregation of incident (and an investment of the reader's time) so vast that you can't help but be affected by it. And if it relies too much on coincidences that it mistakes for fate, its final chapters are certainly its best, as Spring's miserable thesis closes out with a succession of punches to the gut.

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the great English writers of the 20th century, but her final novel, Blaming (1976), written as she was dying from cancer and published posthumously, inevitably suffers from those impossible conditions. The bitter final breath of a truly singular career, it finds her spare style at long last failing, with no real substance behind its extended Kids Say the Funniest Things comedy, and little real meaning beneath the chilly and unfocused misanthropy. We never really get to know these characters, insufficiently introduced and barely expanded, and while some of that may be intentional – since they never really get to know one another – it doesn't make for great fiction. In contrast to Angel or Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, we only see things happening, we don’t feel them. It is, simply, a bleak book, apparently about old age and death, but undermined by those very things. There are moments when the light breaks through – the last scene before the tragedy; the donation of a photograph and later a painting – where Taylor’s bleak wit and reluctant compassion flash into view, but like Muriel Spark’s swansong (The Finishing School), Blaming seems both baggy and strangely slight, with a jaundiced worldview that’s rarely other than wearying.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2015), a collection of short stories by the scintillating (and sadly late) Hilary Mantel is perhaps more valuable as a portrait of a changing writer than for the works themselves. The earliest ('Harley Street', 1993; 'How Shall I Know You?', 2000) are overwritten and overly-direct; by the time you get to the final two, written especially for this collection, Mantel's language is spare and strange, and her points often made elliptically through allusion and supposed diversion. In any event, 'The School of English', about the prelude to a rape, is so unpleasant as to be almost unreadable. The world Mantel conjures throughout the anthology is chilly, violent and foul (or, in the case of the opening story, mundane to the point of tedium), lit by only fleeting flashes of compassion. Often she seems either despairing about mankind, or else revelling in putting such nastiness on the page (a case in point: the end of 'Winter Break'). But her work is most effective when not keeping its humanity at bay: after all, unstinting malevolence is no more complex than unstinting mawkishness would be. The best of the stories, 'The Heart Fails Without Warning' (2009), concerns the relationship between two sisters: one gripped by anorexia; the other narrating the decline with a mixture of cruelty, mockery and empathy, her prose showered with fragments of haunting, almost beautiful imagery. Its story is the most familiar of the set, but amid much muted middle-class noir, its balance of style and tone simply seems more satisfying – and interesting. I've never met anyone, or read any reviewer, who wasn't ultimately underwhelmed by the title story (after all, it cuts out before you see anything good), and consoled themselves with the incidental detail. I liked it a lot, though they're right that it's the detail. Best of all is a paragraph in which the narrator crystallises the English condition, and how it informs the nation's response to everything from social injustice to climate change: "in Berkshire and the Home Counties, all causes are the same, all ideas for which a person might care to die: they are nuisances, a breach of the peace, and likely to hold up the traffic or delay the trains."

I got to know some other authors for the first time. Patricia Highsmith's Deep Water (1957) was an effectively horrible novel about an aloof, eerily avuncular cuckold and his appalling wife. Amid the social staples and status symbols of mid-‘50s America, the author spins a story of sociopathy, satirising middle-class mores while revelling in the chance to be quite spectacularly nasty. Whether its elements of repetition and monotony are a reflection of its instinctively passive protagonist or simply flaws in the writing, I’m not sure. But it’s certainly memorable: evocative, sometimes suspenseful, wickedly funny in places, and dripping with unease and dread.

Notably less gripping was Len Deighton's debut novel, The Ipcress File (1962), a book that takes a bit of getting used to: not the purposefully convoluted plot or the relentless smartarse asides, but the writer's mildly tortured phrasemaking. He writes uniquely, sure, but hardly clearly, the self-conscious style acting like a barrier between the action and your brain. The genre is Cold War-era spy fiction, saturated with paranoia. It's a book lit by neat touches, but with no underlying authenticity, perhaps unsurprising when you consider that's it's a first-time work by a full-time illustrator with no real knowledge of espionage. It is diverting and distinctive, mildly irritating, and seriously anti-climactic. Soon afterwards, of course, IPCRESS became a film, and its nameless hero turned from a lanky, languid son of Burnley into Michael Caine. I doubt I'll be revisiting Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series following the first entry, Case Histories (2004): a well-plotted mystery novel with an extensive vocabulary, a mannered structure and a vaguely unpleasant after-taste. More here.

Having become vaguely acquainted with Ancient Rome via the frustrating SPQR (see below), I fancied plunging into a more immersive if fanciful version. Robert Graves' I, Claudius (1934) is certainly that, though it's also deceptively shallow. Our guide is the stammering, 'crippled' historian of the title, an overlooked and widely derided figure prior to his improbable ascension to the throne. Claudius gives us an overview of the three imperial eras (those of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula) that led to his own, but while the book convincing and atmospheric, it's also remote, poorly-paced and massively overlong. Something in the novel's conception is simply off: the idea of Claudius as a historian strips away any immediacy from the bulk of the action, as he writes from a viewpoint that renders his stories as distant anecdotes, frequently happening long ago or far away. And while the court intrigue is often gripping, if often too abruptly dispensed with, a chapter on a military mutiny is frankly interminable. Most philistinic complaint of the year: there are just too many characters for a reader to keep track of.

As a man who only recently found out that you could read your Kindle on your iPhone, I had taken to carrying Penguin's pocket-sized Black Classics to gigs with me, to read in the time between acts. Yes I am a cool yet normal guy, thank you for noticing. By far my favourite was Henry James's The Figure in the Carpet (1896), a glorious literary mystery, almost gleeful in its malevolence, about a critic who searches for the 'string the pearls were strung on': the unifying secret to a legendary author's work. For much of its length, it's amusing and intriguing, an insider work with faintly laborious plotting; then James swerves into the eternal. Robert Louis Stevenson's Olalla (1885) has its moments, though, as a Scottish soldier recovering from his injuries decamps to a Spanish mansion whose inbred owners are hiding a few secrets. This Gothic novella is a story of intrigue, obsession and bestial pseudo-vampirism, a little long-winded in its language, but told with such lush and overwrought conviction that you can’t help but be swept along.

Bleaker still was Dostoyevsky's The Meek One (1876), a profoundly disquieting short story about a pawnbroker, haunted by past disgrace, who directs an obscure, long-term mind game against his child bride. But is his narration sincere or self-serving? It's certainly one of the more horrifying things I've read in recent years. The only disappointing Black Classic was Femme Fatale (1811), a quartet of stories from the dubious Guy de Maupassant: one about penises, another about lesbianism, a third concerning a mistress passed down from father to son, and the fourth dealing with a female pick-up artist who uses a cemetery as a stalking ground. They're really all just about women though, the author exhibiting some serious incel energy as he's alternately fascinated and repelled by these beguiling, capricious and awful creatures. I found the stories diverting but shallow, and the translation oddly tortuous.

Children's

I loved Grace Easton's picture book, Cannonball Coralie and the Lion (2018), a story of about friendship, self-worth and roaring. The illustrations are just beautiful. And yeah, alright, I read Spy School at Sea (2021), but it wasn't very good.

NON-FICTION

History/politics

Shall we, for once, work our way upwards? That means that we start with Leo Damore's atrocious Chappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-Up (2018), which is both well-researched and almost completely incomprehensible. The author digs up new revelations about his subject's fall from grace (the most notable from Kennedy's cousin, Joe Gargan, a trade-off that apparently requires painting Gargan in the most flattering light imaginable), but the story is so confusingly rendered, and its innumerable characters' motivations so poorly explained, that it's impossible to get a proper handle on either the tragedy or the cover-up. An injustice was clearly done, but the nature and the scale of it remains maddeningly out of focus.

I also very much did not enjoy I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018), not just a poor piece of writing but a truly horrible thing to read, as Michelle McNamara recounts a succession of rapes and murders that took place in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s. The details of the attacks made me so anxious and sad that I couldn't sleep, which I'm attributing less to the power of her prose than my lack of compatibility with the true crime genre. The story naturally had a far greater effect on McNamara, whose friends say that her all-consuming interest in this cold case was what caused her to neglect her health, leading to the overdose of prescription drugs that killed her before she could finish the book. While her obsession may have been born of humanity and a sympathy with the victims, the resulting work feels simply ghoulish, with pretensions as inappropriate as its prurience, the author using the ruins of people's lives as springboards for flights of the most appalling writing. More here.

At least Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the bad old days of Australian cricket (2009) was merely disappointing. Often cited as the best book ever written about cricket, it fails to work on almost every level. Critically, its tantalisingly sad thesis – ‘sensitive lad is drummed out of the national captaincy and then the game he loves by macho pricks’ – isn’t borne out by the details. Yes, Hughes is bounced and sometimes bullied by contemporaries Lillee and Marsh, but he himself is a part of the apparently ruinous drinking culture, he urinates on a debutant in the shower for banter, and he ends up leading a rebel tour to Apartheid-era South Africa (!). The book is occasionally gripping and moving, but much more often it's repetitive and difficult to follow, weaving around haphazardly in its chronology and written in strangulated prose that aims for stylisation but is merely confusing and abrupt.

Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (2007) was a book I'd wanted to read for an age, and to be honest it didn't deliver. It's an erratic overview of perhaps the 20th century’s most celebrated cause de célèbre: that of two Italian anarchists sentenced to death for an armed hold-up in Braintee, Massachusetts. It’s a remarkable story, rather functionally told, with some big but not always convincing thoughts on the wider context, a vivid evocation of the trial and various hearings that sadly fumbles key parts of the evidence, and an agreeably even-handed treatment of its subjects that is then repeatedly undermined by purple prose, clunky similes and tortured segues. The latter weakness may be down to the writer’s preoccupations and personal tics (he seems to strains for an epic profundity in his conclusions to chapters; his habit of introducing a character first by biography and then by name is conspicuously clunky) but it also suggests a certain bittiness in the research: the need to pad the prose by incorporating each piece of information, no matter how tenuous or even irrelevant. I learned a lot, yet left feeling frustrated, particularly by the lack of clarity. It's fine to be unsure about Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt, but here the reader's own faculties are at times clouded by the marshalling of evidence. Take the notorious ‘third bullet’: there’s a wealth of information here – a gallery of fascinating characters issuing charges and counter-charges. But it's only in a brief picture credit, and during the epilogue, that the defence case comes properly into view, and even then it feels incomplete.

Another one that somewhat fizzled was from my regular stomping ground of sporting scandals. Eight Men Out (1963), by Eliot Asinof, is the definitive chronicle of the ‘Black Sox’ scandal, in which underpaid Chicago baseball players colluded with gangsters to fix the 1919 World Series. It’s an impressive feat of newsgathering – good on the what, why and how – but disappointingly lacking in emotion. Interestingly, it exonerates one of the eight – shortstop Buck Weaver – but indicts “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, the near-mythic figure memorialised in Field of Dreams whose supposed innocence has become (like Sacco and Vanzetti's) a cause célèbre.

Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them (2022), by Jonn Elledge and Tom Phillips, does exactly what it says on the tin filled with absolute fucking loons. If it isn't as elegantly written as Elledge's brilliant shorter-form journalism, it is both eye-opening and packed with amusing detail. The passages about the Lincoln assassination and the Illuminati (please note: these are not connected) are particularly memorable. Favourite conspiracy theory: people who don't believe that a large chunk of the Middle Ages ever happened.

Mary Beard's SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) was the first time I've really dipped my toe into the classical world, and probably not the best book with which to do so. It feels like the revisionist notes to a more entertaining if fanciful history that is being enjoyed nearby. Beard’s approach is notably modern: interested in how we know, as much as what we know. But while that is initially invigorating, it ultimately makes the book disjointed and piecemeal, preventing it from generating any momentum. The overall effect is of having attended 12 fitfully fascinating lectures, full of cumbersome equivocations, rather than been swept away by an immersive story with a propulsive narrative. Her vast love of her subject makes me want to explore it more, while the limitations of SPQR’s approach make me want to do so with someone else.

SPQR took me more than a month to finish, I think Scoundrel (2022) took me two days. Subtitled, 'How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free', it's a pageturner about the charming psychopath who hoodwinked Conservative tastemaker William F. Buckley into campaigning for his release – and then, when he got out, tried to kill again. The treasure trove of letters sent between Buckley, the psychopath (Edgar Smith) and the lovelorn literary editor drawn into their circle (Sophie Wilkins) is so irresistible to Weinman that at times she surrenders the narrative entirely to them, an issue that makes the book’s mid-section feel paper-thin. The wider significance of the story is also overstated, not least by the book’s blurb. But the tale at the book’s centre is darkly and abidingly fascinating, showing what happens when an almost-great man of vast qualities and deep flaws – a dazzlingly witty, furiously loyal and outstandingly kind bigot, dazzlingly clever in a rather shallow way – comes into contact with a master manipulator whose only interest is in himself, and at whose centre is nothing but an untamed misogynistic rage. Smith is a fairly simple character (if a persuasive and deceptive one) but Buckley is anything but, and the book shows him at his best and his worse: he is trusting, dogged and decisive, willing to pause his principles in the name of basic humanity, and yet famously unwilling to do the same for non-male, non-white people, and unable to ever quite accept or acknowledge his own mistakes or their effect, either psychically or in print. In truth, Weinman doesn't dig into those issues enough, but she does lay out the information that makes it possible for us to do so.

Robert Caro wrote my favourite non-fiction books of 2019, 2020 and 2021. Working (2019) is a welcome stopgap while we wait for his fifth epic volume on the years of Lyndon B. Johnson. In theory, it’s about Caro’s process. In practice, it’s a series of lively snippets taking us behind the scenes of the two greatest biographies I’ve ever read. Why now? And why a piecemeal approach when he also intends to write a memoir? Because our time here is short, Caro says, and he wants to get some of this down just in case. In the earlier essays (dealing mostly with New York power broker Robert Moses), he’s often repeating things we know – admittedly interspersed with piercing insights – but the book becomes increasingly illuminating as he delves into the life of LBJ, and listens as ‘Tommy the Cork’ shrugs off a political scandal, Alice Glass’s relatives arrive to defend her honour, and Lady Bird Johnson discusses her husband’s mistress. The climactic chapter here, a sidebar about the two songs that defined LBJ, is absolutely exquisite. If only, like The Power Broker, this book were also 1,300 pages long. Now back to the main project, Robert. Chop chop, time's a wasting.

Jeffrey Toobin's The People V. O.J. Simpson (2016), meanwhile, was a simply scintillating account of that notorious case, focusing on the investigation and the criminal trial, and explaining just how O.J. got away with it. Toobin's telling is masterly (if rather bracingly of-its-time), full of deft character sketches, colourful detail and illuminating legal analysis. A shame, then, that the author will always be the man who got sacked from the New Yorker for wanking on a Zoom call.

As you may have heard, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) is something special: a brilliant book on the dizzying saga of the Sacklers, who got a nation hooked on opioids, and used the proceeds to plaster their own name across the great museums of the Western world. It’s a jawdropping exposé: a portrait of capitalism at its most obscene, heartless and unhinged, starring modern-day robber-barons simply allergic to decency, steamrollering societal safeguards as they warp and erode the very tenets of democracy. After a couple of fairly dry early chapters (inevitable, I think, due to a dearth of sources), it is just revelation after revelation. About a third of the way through, I thought that Keefe must surely be running out of bombshells. That’s when it really escalates. If Empire of Pain becomes a little disjointed towards the end, with almost self-contained portraits of minor Sacklers and the introduction of artist Nan Godlin, it never loses either its clear-eyed anger or its sense of panache. It is chilling, infuriating and spectacularly entertaining, like Succession set against the backdrop of Winter’s Bone.

My favourite non-fiction book of 2022, though, was definitely David M. Oshinsky's A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1983). Robert Caro’s series on LBJ has certainly done a number on me: most contemporary political history now looks barely-researched and fatally lacking in pizzazz. Not David Oshinsky’s magnificently-titled biography of Tail-Gunner Joe. It's a wry, perceptive and quite astonishingly authoritative study of McCarthy’s peak years, with the author junking the received wisdom and going instead for the truth, both in the detail and his overarching narrative. McCarthy was a true believer not a con man, argues Oshinsky; a skillful communicator not a thicko; a bullying braggart who never did quite find a spy – but who perhaps deserves a modicum of credit for identifying genuine failings in his nation’s security. Could it ever truly have been worth it, though? Along the way, McCarthy trashed reputations and ruined lives – at least one of his victims killed himself. And how did he get away with it all for so long? That’s in Oshinsky’s purview too: he’s only slightly interested in his subject’s childhood – regarding it mostly as a chance to stick the boot into rival biographers – but devotes entire, zippy chapters to Eisenhower, the Senate establishment and the fourth estate, revealing how their complaisance, fear or sympathy for McCarthy’s crusade aided his rise to prominence. This is an outrageously entertaining book, peppered with choice excerpts from congressional transcripts, colourful details, and the author’s deadpan witticisms, and breaking off whenever it matters to dig out a crucial document and finally set the record straight. Perhaps my obsession with the communist witchhunt in Hollywood can now be expanded to communist witchhunts in America more generally. I'll keep you posted.

Film

My film book of the year was Shepperton Babylon (2006), in which Matthew Sweet essays British cinema from the silent days to the late ‘70s, waging war on received wisdom (and, for that matter, Norman Wisdom). At its heart it’s an oral history, the author touring Britain in the early noughties so as to bother the wrinkled remnants of our cinema’s glory days before their stories are lost forever. As a guide, Dr Sweet is superb: deeply knowledgeable, effortlessly witty, and with a loyalty only to his theses – not his subjects – meaning that though he’ll turn up with flowers on the doorstep of some forgotten former ingenue, he’ll be brutally frank about their career when it comes to the writing. He’s also a glutton for gossip; I’d naively imagined that the book’s title (riffing amusingly on Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous Hollywood Babylon) was a joke about our film industry’s fundamental innocence, but absolutely not – this book is as rich in scandal as Anger’s, if rather better sourced. Across 10 roughly chronological chapters, focusing on phenomena like Gainsborough pictures’ heroines, Michael Balcon, and Rank’s decade of dominance, Sweet’s passion is for rescuing figures from wrongful obscurity (a hello to weird, profligate ‘30s impresario Basil Dean), and correcting myths about our homegrown cinema, some redressed since it was published in 2004, but others enduring. He repeatedly assails the idea that British film is dull, staid or disposable, instead celebrating the sheer strangeness of our cinema – born equally of artistic cravings and commercial expediency – and realising that genre films invariably tell us much more about our times than so-called ‘prestige’ pictures. His mini-essays on Dickie Attenborough (celebrated as our screen’s finest monster and most unbearable hypocrite), George Formby (a blackface comic without the make-up) and Kenneth More (his cockiness only bearable when it is crumbling) are just about definitive, and if I don’t quite buy the summations of Dirk Bogarde and Johnny Mills’ careers, they are at least agreeably provocative. In fact, the only time he lost me was with some scattershot barbs elsewhere about bulimia and scoliosis. This is the most I’ve learnt from a film book in a long time, and the most I’ve laughed along with one too, though the final chapter proper – dealing with British sex comedies, and narrated in part by a pimp – is suitably but quite remarkably unpleasant.

It was an absolute joy, and a really proud moment, to write the essay for the UK Blu-ray release of my favourite film, Remember the Night. As part of my research, I had a lovely time reading Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges: The Power and the Glory, Easy Living, Remember the Night (1998), which is full of Sturges' sparkling, delicately sentimental dialogue, allied to a sense of fun that at times is just there to amuse himself. "We TRUCK ALONG after [the main characters]," begins one note to the eventual director of his depressing 1933 spec script, The Power and the Glory, "which will enhance the charm of the scene besides being excellent exercise for the director and camera man." The accompanying introductions in this edition are a little dry, but Sturges would just have a Mitteleuropean waiter prescribe alka seltzer and have done with it. James Curtis's Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (1992) was also absolutely invaluable. It's a fine, fast-paced biography of the singular Hollywood humourist (and director, restaurateur, engineer, inventor, perfume wholesaler), which gets to the bottom of how it went so right – and then so wrong. It rarely hits as hard emotionally as it might – only when Sturges breaks with regular cast member Bill Demarest, or goes into a decline-fuelled trance-like mope-state on his boat – but its mixture of script analysis, oral interviews and breezy detail is both easy-to-take and of lasting value.

I got a huge amount out of Alan K. Rode's Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film (2017), which details the life of the great Warner Bros director, who made Casablanca, made stars of Doris Day and Errol Flynn, and made his underlings cry. Curtiz's work was his life, and so beyond a fair stab at essaying his early years (typically difficult to document), his innumerable conquests (ditto) and his property purchases (tedious), Rode focuses on the films, chatting to everyone who's still around, digging out interviews with everyone else, and raiding the paper archives to reconstruct the production of his subject's numerous classic movies (as well as the not-so-good ones). If Hal Wallis and Jack Warner's innumerable missives can generally just be condensed to the words, "Please stop spending our money", there are countless irresistible nuggets. Curtiz the director emerges as an artist, a company man and an on-set tyrant, with Rode an unusually clear-eyed chronicler, particularly good on studio-era context, and at teasing out the truth about contested stories. Did Curtiz really drown three extras during the making of Noah's Ark? Did he murder hundreds of horses while filming The Change of the Light Brigade? And did he shit on the ground in front of his cinematographer to prove a point? The answers, incidentally, are 'Yes, quite possibly', 'no', and 'yes, but he might have had dementia'. Curtiz also tried to cast Shirley Temple as a femme fatale, one of the great cinematic 'what-if's.

Not purely about film, but crucial to understanding it, is Isaac Butler's The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (2022), a vivid biography of the Method, a theory of acting that was birthed in Russia some time after 1897. migrated to the US, reached its maturity at the radical Group Theatre during the Depression, and then found fame in Hollywood, being partially discredited before its death in the 1980s. Butler is a witty, lively but unfailingly sincere guide, whose belief in the value and power of performance sweeps you along. Simply put, it's a book that has changed the way I think about, engage with and appraise acting. Its middle section, in which the Method takes Broadway and then Hollywood by storm, is probably its most exciting, but it is full of vivid detail and fresh perspectives, and the author's ability to distil the art and career of an artist like Clifford Odets or John Garfield in a single paragraph is extraordinary. He can also cut to the heart of the infighting between the various proponents of the system, explaining that ultimately there is no 'one true method', and that De Niro's famous physical transformation in Raging Bull has something in common with the approach of Stella Adler, but little of Stanislavski and none of Strasberg.

Glenn Frankel's High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (2017) is an excellent addition to that bulging shelf of books about the blacklist, retelling the story from the perspective of screenwriter Carl Foreman, who wrote the seminal Western – and HUAC allegory – High Noon, only to be sacked by his (posturing, liberal) production partners during filming. They could back a film about the importance of standing up for a principle, it seems, they just couldn’t stand up for a principle themselves. The first third of the book, setting the political scene and offering overlapping pen-portraits of the likes of actor Gary Cooper, director Fred Zinnemann and producer Stanley Kramer is undeniably deft but will also be over-familiar to anyone immersed in this era. Thereafter, though, there’s plenty that’s new, with Frankel playing judge and jury over competing claims about the making of High Noon (most notably debunking cutter Elmo Williams’ oft-repeated tale that he single-handedly ‘saved’ the film in his editing suite), and unearthing the transcript of Foreman’s appearance before HUAC, never published before. It's a valuable and highly readable book on its own terms, but also works amazingly well as a sequel to Thomas Doherty’s Show Trial, since Doherty saw 1947-8 as the most interesting period of the witchhunt story – the later hearings consisting merely of rehashes and echoes – whereas Frankel is concerned primarily with 1951-2, which cast the net wider, bringing hundreds more artists under suspicion, each one dealing with the threat to their reputation and livelihood in a slightly different way.

I am, as I have said before, obsessed with HUAC in Hollywood, so I didn't stop there. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (1996) by Walter Bernstein is an honest and intimate first-person account of the era from blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein, tracing his journey from Young Communist League activist to wartime news reporter and finally fully-fledged party member, as the vultures begin to circle. You might look at Bernstein’s credits and think, “Who the hell was this guy anyway? He didn’t write much of note” and then you remember that he’d just been hired by Robert Rossen to adapt All the King’s Men when he was blacklisted for eight years. Which is rather the point. Bernstein writes in a spare, staccato style, influenced like so many of his contemporaries by Hemingway’s short sentences and simple language. Chapter breaks are rare, but new chapters start with vivid, cinematic images born of his teleplay experience. His segues between topics can be clumsy or even incoherent, and there’s little hierarchy of information: John Garfield’s death, the unmasking of Soviet Russia, a Bette Davis name-drop and sketch – all get much the same treatment. But the book is truly exceptional on the psychology of blacklisting: why Bernstein abhorred some stool pigeons and almost excused others; the way HUAC inspired the communal living that the reds had previously only imagined; the way it put them on the defensive, preventing them from questioning their own beliefs. By 1996, aged 77, he is, for the most part, a remarkably clear-eyed chronicler (the exception is the question of loyalty to the Soviet Union, raised as an issue, then rather mangled), candid about his own errors of judgement or analysis, ruthless about others’ failure of integrity. There are moving cameos from Zero Mostel, Abe Polonsky and Philip Loeb, all victims of the blacklist who Bernstein semi-fictionalised for his 1976 script, The Front. A child of the screen, he sees everything through the prism of cinema: events from real life are merely mirrors of things he’s glimpsed in the movies. And man does he love the movies. He writes wonderfully about them too: sentimental but perceptive, celebrating art and genre schlock alike, simultaneously seduced and revolted by the “lunatic pretension” of Mankiewicz’s Barefoot Contessa (which he watches in the company of sailors who believe that the male hero has “got no dick”). If you’re here purely for the witchhunt material, you’ll find it in embedded in context of variable interest – Bernstein’s wartime exploits include scoring the first international interview with Tito, training, and just sort of sitting around quite a bit – but at its best it offers a perspective on the period that no other blacklist book does.

There’s plenty of pretension and even more padding in Last Night at the Viper Room (2013), Gavin Edwards' biography of the extraordinary and deeply troubled actor River Phoenix, yet it gets close to at least some version of its complex and contradictory central figure. Edwards’ approach is to offer a mosaic of Phoenix’s life and world in more than 70 short chapters, some of them straightforwardly biographical but others impressionistic or irrelevant, as the book leaps between present-tense flights of pseudo-poetry and baldly factual chunks of text dealing with Phoenix’s contemporaries (an ancient Johnny Depp interview is mined far beyond its worth, not least because Depp, away from the screen, seems such a shallow, charmless bore). Phoenix was probably the single most gifted actor of his generation; his work – particularly in My Own Private Idaho, Running on Empty, Dogfight, Stand by Me and The Mosquito Coast - remains deep and strange and quite remarkably raw. But while the temptation always seems to be to paint him as either a saint – too good for this world – who made one tragic diversion into hedonism, or as a selfish, barely-talented smack addict with great cheekbones, Edwards sensibly finds a centre ground, seeing his subject as an unworldly, essentially decent guy tormented by the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, who after a blistering start to his career saw his talent increasingly subsumed by addiction. The author’s sense of compassion for Phoenix is clearer in his tweets, and in the book’s Acknowledgements, than in the book proper, but when he sticks to his central subject – and puts aside the amateur psychology, distractions and eerie but cartoonish foreshadowing – it’s a fairly enlightening, effective and affecting biography. Martha Plimpton’s angry, empathetic response to her friend’s death is still so clear-eyed, honest and sad: “He was just a boy," she said, "a very good-hearted boy, who was very fucked-up and had no idea how to implement his good intentions.”

Silent Star (1968) is a lively if rather over-familiar* memoir from, well, silent star Colleen Moore. You can tick off the cliches as we come to them: a night at Chaplin's; a trip to San Simeon; the scandals of the '20s and '30s (Arbuckle, William Desmond Taylor, Paul Bern); the matter of John Gilbert's voice. As ever, key figures are idealised (Tom Mix, Mervyn LeRoy) while others are traduced (William S. Hart), as the subject finds professional success but personal disappointment, while taking credit for various discoveries (boosting Gary Cooper, renaming Loretta Young). It can be hard to take this sort of book entirely seriously once you've read Me, Cheeta. Moore's proximity to Hollywood lore is a draw, though – she double-dated with Taylor's mistress, was Errol Flynn's landlady, and can debunk misinformation about Harlow from being at her wedding reception – and there are enough diverting if hardly uproarious after-dinner stories to you keep you engaged. I wouldn't have minded a bit more about her own movies, though. She lists The Power and the Glory as her favourite film, and So Big! as her best performance, but doesn't even mention the classic Why Be Good?, while her comic masterclass in Ella Cinders is only deemed worthy of a photo and caption. One interesting side-note: when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch," he wasn't referring to himself! He was inscribing a miniature of his book, This Side of Paradise, and writing the sentence from the book's perspective. That's obvious in the text ("My author's name is F. Scott Fitzgerald," his inscription concludes), but misconstrued by whoever wrote the jacket copy, and misrepresented ever since.
*in the sense that we have read all this before, not that she is being overly familiar with us

But man alive that book looked like Slaughterhouse-Five next to the next one, during which I almost died of boredom. The fact that James T. Fisher's On the Irish Waterfront (2009) was published by the Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America should perhaps have given me the clue that it'd be a rather dry PhD thesis of a book, rather than a piece of popular history or a behind-the-scenes pageturner. Fisher is interested primarily in union wrangling on the docks, and in the life, politics and theology of Pete Corridan, the 'waterfront priest' who inspired Karl Malden's character in Kazan's immortal apologia for informing, On the Waterfront. The author's provocative view, in fact, is that the film wasn't Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg's celluloid defence of their decision to name names to HUAC, since Schulberg had already written a draft of the script beforehand. But that argument doesn't really make sense: the question of naming names had been in the air in Hollywood since 1947, Schulberg added the scenes of Terry Malloy on the witness stand two years after his own testimony, and Kazan explicitly acknowledged the link in his own autobiography (Fisher suggests that the direction simply found it too "irresistible" a reading to pass up). There is some valuable material in here – it's certainly a useful reference work if you're studying the film – but taken as a whole the book is rather poorly-ordered, repetitive and, well, extremely tedious.

Art, music, love, letters and operations

Yes, that famous way of classifying books, coming in handy again.

I really liked Janet Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (2013): more piercing insights, precisely elucidated, in this collection from one of the great non-fiction stylists. Malcolm is unconquerable in the realm of the profile (there are three such works here, all superb, though her epic on the characters swirling around the magazine Artform is simply a masterpiece), and if her essays are more earthly, they're always provocative and interesting, with piping hot takes on the likes of the Bloomsbury Group, Edith Wharton, and photographer Irving Penn. While wolfing down great quantities of her work does begin to reveal repeated ideas (the 'figure in the carpet' she borrows from Henry James) and terms ('demotic' is a favourite), the final line of her obituary of Joseph Mitchell brings home with devastating clarity just what an unusual and original a writer she truly was.

Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy by John Armstrong (2003) is a slim, deceptively weighty book about the nature of love: what it is, how it feels, how we keep it. Sometimes a polemic, at others a gentle rumination, Armstrong spikes his philosophy with evolutionary biology, and draws in narratives from Tolstoy, Lampedusa and the life of Goethe to make his points. It's incomplete, inevitably, but it isn't intended as a book of instructions, more a starting point, encouraging you through his compassionate writing to think deeply.

The book of Kurt Vonnegut's Letters (2014) is a revealing if not always obviously edifying anthology that exhibits both the public Vonnegut – that is, Vonnegut as he wished to be and often was: compassionate; warm; funny in a way that no-one else ever quite has been – and the more difficult private creature: spiky and even spiteful when wounded; at times tediously money-minded; slogging away at work that always seemed effortless. There’s gossip here if that’s what you’re after (and most journalists covering its publication were) – about the true origins of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s 1965 affair, or his second wife’s subsequent betrayal – but the real delight is in his use of the language: the echoes of his signature phrases and themes, the genesis of others, the way he caps each letter with the perfect sign-off, the matching of theme and style. His letter to a baseball team seeking sponsorship is wonderful, and his evisceration of literary critic Anatole Broyard utterly devastating, but it’s the emotionally complex letters to his daughter Nanny that form the centre of this book. She felt abandoned when her dad left the family unit (a decision he starkly outlines in a confession to a friend that at a stroke cuts a gash into his reputation as America’s grandfather), and their complex relationship results in letters from Vonnegut that can be wise, reconciliatory or desperately unhappy and splenetic, but are beneath those things utterly loving. It is not an unstintintingly insightful or entertaining collection but if you care about Kurt – and can embrace his flaws and complexities as much as you can the projected, accepted image – then it is essential.

I wrote a lot (perhaps too much?) about Bob Dylan's mad, maddening and unwittingly insightful Philosophy of Modern Song (2022) right here, if that seems like the sort of thing you might like.

And I had another operation. Well, two actually. And while recuperating I was reading a biography of Preston Sturges that mentioned how much of an influence Irvin S. Cobb's 35-page comic essay, Speaking of Operations (1915) had had on his work. So I read it. Cobb's piece is inevitably dated (not just the author puffing a cigar in the hospital ward, but his knowing references to medical conventions long since forgotten), but amid that, and a periodically offputting smugness, are some fantastic gags, especially towards the end. His thoughts on the ultimate value of vivisection are a definite highlight.

***

Thanks for reading. Part 2 of the review will about the other best thing in the world, movies.