Dustin Hoffman, The Black Dahlia, and bent coppers – Reviews #267

... in which I arrive five years late to the Line of Duty party to find that all the bent coppers have already been caught.



Black Dahlia Avenger by Steve Hodel (2003/2015) − In 2003, former LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel held a press conference to announce that he had solved perhaps the most notorious unsolved murder case in American history: the 1947 slaying of the 'Black Dahlia', an aspiring actress named Elizabeth Short, whose brutally mutilated body was found in a parking lot in Los Angeles. The unforgettable appellation − often misattributed to tabloid hacks repurposing the film noir title, The Blue Dahlia − was actually Short's nickname in life, and, with the singularly horrifying manner of the body (cut in two with surgeon-like precision), may explain why it became such a sensational newspaper story. Yellow journalism fanned the flames of a tale that had everything − a beautiful victim, a sadistic villain, and innumerable conspiracy theories − turning the hunt for the killer into a dark parlour game, rather than it remaining what it should always have been: the search for justice after the death of a young woman, almost certainly murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. By 1950, she was a line in Sunset Blvd. Four decades later, James Ellroy revisited the crime in the dark, semi-fictional opening novel of his LA Quartet.

Hodel's theory, which made his book an international best-seller, is that the killer was his own father: a doctor, former musical prodigy and bona fide genius, by the name of George Hill Hodel. And for a third of its 500-page length, Black Dahlia Avenger − the name the killer gave himself, and Steve's self-appointed role here − is a gripping read: clumsily written and riddled with typos, but presenting a compelling narrative piecing together a timeline from innumerable press cuttings, fascinatingly documenting George's past, underscored by Steve's uneasy but loving relationship with him, and incorporating a remarkable gallery of supporting players, from Maltese Falcon director John Huston to surrealist, sadistic photographer Man Ray, and the big players in law enforcement in 1940s LA.

Then we get to the 'evidence' and it's sketchy as hell, Steve consistently going about a third of the way to proving something, and then considering the job done, and calling back to it, with an "as I have shown". The bits at the beginning were decidedly questionable too, including two supposed pictures of Short in George's personal effects which don't look like her at all (one of them has since been proven, by Steve himself, not to be her), but I'd hoped that was just the catalyst for his investigation, not a central part of it. Parts of the investigation at least support the case for further analysis of Hodel, Sr as a suspect − particularly handwriting comparisons − but the author seems conspicuously unable to differentiate between credible evidence, coincidence and batshit conspiracy theory. He'll also do things like (on p. 275 of the 2015 edition) show how his dad looked just like a composite picture, by airbrushing out his dad's moustache. Yes, OK, but your dad had a moustache. At one point he suggests, without further elaboration or investigation, that the "wealthy Hollywood man" being sought by police must have been his father.

"Who's your father?"
"George Hill Hodel."
"Ah yes, George Hill Hodel, the only wealthy man in Hollywood."

I do have some sympathy for Steve. His dad was clearly an awful, awful person − as evidenced by his rape of Steve's 14-year-old half-sister, of which he was cleared, but clearly guilty − and he may well have been capable of this crime. He may even have done it. But the author's obsessive attempt to link him to every unsolved rape and homicide in LA in the 1940s is less than convincing. His cries of a cover-up, as supposedly evidenced by the 1949 grand jury hearings into the failure to find the killer, are also patchy. In the 'Aftermath' section, added in 2005, we hear from Lt Jemison, appointed by the DA's office to look into the initial LAPD investigation, who attributes the failings to incompetence, rather than wrongdoing.

It's in the Aftermath section − missing, of course, from the original 2003 edition − that we realise Steve wasn't as mad as we thought. He may have begun the investigation because he decided that a photo of a random woman was Elizabeth Short, but his father really was a suspect, to the extent that he was bugged, and his phone tapped, by the DA's investigators. And there, in the transcripts, he seems to hint at some complicity in the Black Dahlia killing ("Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia? They couldn't prove it now"), while practically confessing to the murder of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding. But, as we see from Jemison's subsequent report, something cleared Hodel, Sr from suspicion, and he was eliminated as a suspect. Steve's contention that Jemison was being forced to drop the investigation into his father, and used the phrase "tends to eliminate him as a suspect" to show his unease, is unconvincing and not backed up by any evidence.

It's a frustrating book, then, and by no means 'case closed'. And while Steve clearly cares about Short, and makes a good fist of reclaiming her as a lovelorn young woman, rather than the dissolute slut painted by misogynistic cops and writers down the decades, he also wallows in the depravity and sadism of her murder and countless other murders of young women. I was suckered in by my fascination with Ellroy, LA noir and an unsolved mystery, but found myself feeling sickened, exploited and depressed by the end.

Hodel has since alienated most of his defenders by asserting that his dad was also the Zodiac Killer. (2.5)

See also: For a long time I avoided 'true crime', because it made me feel either guilty or unhappy. Those concerns were overridden by a couple of books which sounded too fascinating to neglect: Michael Finkel's True Story and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Now I may be back where I started.

***



The Folks That Live on the Hill by Kingsley Amis (1990) – Amis’s blinding wit can’t always rescue this poisonously misanthropic book about outwardly avuncular academic Harry Caldecote and his troubled family: the bereaved Clare, alcoholic Fiona, henproteckted Freddie, brutalised Bunty, and feckless, possibly criminal Piers, who exist in a Torily-realised London of crushing mundanity, waspish disgust and drab, brownly toneless multiculturalism. And at times even that voice fails altogether, turning in on itself to birth such laboriously self-satisfied sentences as the Amis of Lucky Jim would himself have lampooned, and necessitating that one read each of them several times to unpick the text, subtext, etc. That’s a parody of one of them.

There are others when the author’s unparalleled, deliciously English turn of phrase still dazzles, Amis cramming deadpan observations and dismissive putdowns into exposition and description, places where most other writers wouldn’t dare (or indeed bother). But he’s forever punching downwards, the malevolence and jaundice of his worldview rendering his work less than human, while he articulates the working class experience about as effectively as David Mitchell attempting a cockney accent. Or Andrea Leadsom. Occasionally, particularly towards the end, he offers his characters a little solace and understanding – if not a lifeline – but for far too long Amis seems to treat his characters with contempt, smugly revelling in not only their imperfections, but in the misogyny and absence of compassion that he mistakes for charming roguishness.

It’s also boring: rooted in a time and place (the Primrose Hill of 1990) that seems not only fleeting but also desperately uninteresting, people by characters whom it’s difficult to care about, since the man who created them can’t really be bothered. Amis displays flashes of lucid empathy – particularly in the deeply moving final chapter – where he effectively humanises and empathises with Clare, while I found the passages dealing with why an alcoholic like Fiona drinks truthful and even profound, but the bulk of this detached, inert book has uninteresting characters doing almost nothing aside from thinking about why they dislike one another, a prejudice that ultimately I couldn’t help but share. (2)

***

FILM



CINEMA: Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970) – This revisionist Western from Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn is unfocused when it should be freewheeling, and cartoonish in a way that undermines its seriousness and integrity, but it has a few vivid moments, and helped pave the way for not only Blazing Saddles and Altman's Buffalo Bill, but Jarmusch’s deadpan Dead Man and Costner's brilliant Dances with Wolves, which also portrayed the bluecoats of the U. S. Cavalry as lying, duplicitous murderers.

Dustin Hoffman is Jack Crabb, at 121 years old the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn (or 'Custer's Last Stand'), that monument to arrogant, genocidal, imperialist complacency. During the film's 139 minutes, Crabb becomes a multitude of genre archetypes, from orphaned pioneer kid to gunslinger, Indian to Indian Fighter, medicine man to town drunk, hermit to trail scout, as the film swings wildly between sincerity and surrealism, subversion and sex comedy.

It’s possible to be both cartoonish and deftly satirical – Frank Tashlin did it with his 1957 masterpiece, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? – but Little Big Man is far too erratic to sustain that for more than a few minutes of time, drifting from its fine opening 30 into spoofs of Stagecoach, Shane, The Searchers and My Darling Clementine and some risible sex comedy little better than what you’d find in a Carry On film (the same year, Peckinpah interrupted his superb, elegiac Western, The Ballad of Cable Hogue with Benny Hill-like inserts), even if having Faye Dunaway deliver it means that you can at least gorge yourself on her translucent beauty (those cheekbones, fuck me).

Its passages in the Indian camp are often affecting, sensitive and richly ironic, deeply rooted in a wise, glowing humanity, and blessed with a fantastic performance from Chief Dan George as Hoffman’s adopted grandfather (George played a similar role in Clint’s The Outlaw Josey Wales). There are also flashes of brilliance in Penn’s direction: Sunshine framed in the tepee doorway, silence after a killing, and the chilling and unforgettable first appearance of the cavalry – announced by Hoffman’s desperate sprint through the camp-site, which is captured on handheld camera, and eerily, masterfully utilising the music and iconography of the bluecoats familiar from a hundred films in which they were the heroes (perhaps most memorable, Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

But the film as a whole is a bit of a shambles: tonally incoherent, frequently and offputtingly aloof, and rarely as pointed and furious as it needs to be: Richard Mulligan’s Custer is amusingly trivial, but playing him as a vainglorious imbecile makes him seem more like Maid Marian and Her Merry Men’s Robin than the deluded, arrogant bigot of history, and the climactic battle – crucial to the whole picture – is irritating and badly-staged, trading comprehension for what it imagines wrongly to be visceral excitement, and then trading any vestiges of that for low comedy and sledgehammer satire.

Hoffman is also way out of his depth for much of the film. Perhaps he’s here as a post-modern joke – because you wouldn’t expect to find a titular Jewish nebbish as a Western hero, because his recognisable persona only really makes sense in 1970s America – but he seems merely miscast, and cast adrift by a script that chucks out its sense of anger and purpose not only at will, but for not discernible reason, aside from the instant gratification of a cheap laugh. (2.5)

***

TV

Here are some thoughts on Line of Duty. My 8,000-word fan theory on how the length of Vicky McClure's hair relates to the scale of her inner turmoil is still to come.



Line of Duty: Season 1 (2012) – OK, I'm finally diving in. A principled counter-terrorism officer (Martin Compson) botches a case and winds up in anti-corruption, where he's asked to investigate the charismatic, popular Tony Gates (Lennie James), whose crime-solving stats are off the scale. It's not great timing for Tony, who's just helped his mistress (Gina McKee) cover up a hit-and-run, or perhaps for ambitious young cop Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), trying manfully to get on his team. This gripping, consistently surprising cop series is simply too far-fetched and melodramatic at times, but it's also beautifully acted – especially by James and McClure – with above-average dialogue from creator Jed Mercurio, and intelligent, extremely effective direction, with a blue tint to proceedings, and characters up-close-and-personal, or dwarfed by monolithic buildings or the enormity of their burdens. Its greatest virtue, though, and it has a few, is its scope of characterisation. It's not non-judgemental, exactly, it's more that it's even-handed, with Mercurio assured in his ability to economically, and without warning, skewer our sympathies: to engender sympathy for a villain or cause us to rage at a hero's sanctimony. That shifting perspective, allied to an impeccably-plotted narrative, saw me race through the bulk of this in one sitting. (3.5)

***



Line of Duty: Season 2 (2014) – A sometimes stunning second season: a bit messy, a bit silly, but keeping you guessing throughout, and with a fantastic performance from Keeley Hawes. She’s DI Lindsey Denton, the sole survivor of a hit on a protected witness, and so ripe for investigation by Steve (Martin Compston), Kate (Vicky McClure) and their hard-nosed, Roman-nosed boss (Adrian Dunbar). But is she a criminal mastermind, a victim or something else entirely? Line of Duty can be gimmicky at times, with a bit of screenwriting-by-the-book – the oldest trick in that book being to give every supporting character a quirk (like the pathologist with a heavy cold in the first series), or to half-inch your highlights, the hospital sequences here using tricks familiar from both The Godfather and Nighthawks – but it’s also thrilling and gripping and with truly great set-pieces, including the powerhouse interview sequences that are its calling card, and are now prefixed by that ominous, unpleasant honking on the tape.

The show does a good job, too, of drawing you in, both by developing its characters and by withholding information about them: that tends to work better when you’ve got an actor like Mark Bonnar (as a questionable DCC) rather than Sacha Dhawan (whose performance I found both flat and unconvincing), a truth underlined by McClure working wonders with a somewhat underwhelming subplot about an affair. Former Ken Loach discovery, Compston, is also so effective – and defines the tone and feel of the series – with a very definite style that initially struck me as woodenness, but is a sort of unyielding, unpolished and awkward stoicism. The important thing, I think, is just how wrapped up in this all I became: it’s possible to pick holes in it, perhaps even to pick it till it unravels, and I don’t think it quite matches The Shadow Line – that weird, dark and bleak vision of endemic moral and professional corruption – but I just can’t wait to return to it. I’ve started Season 3 already. (3.5)

***



*A FEW SPOILERS FOR SERIES 1 AND 2*
Line of Duty: Series 3 (2015) – One of my problems with the (delightful) French cop drama, Spiral, is that is has no memory: it ended its first series on a cliffhanger that was never mentioned again, while undercover agent Sami disappeared from the series for four years, and wasn’t brought back again until the writers got a bit stuck in Series 4. Line of Duty looked to be going down the same route for a while, but by the beginning of Series 3 it became clear that the revelations of its past two seasons hadn’t been forgotten about, they’d just been put on a timer, and they were about to blow. The result is the best season yet, taut, compelling and compulsive, giving two knockout characters – historically corrupt DI, Dot Cottan (Craig Parkinson), and it’s-way-more-complicated-than-that DCI Lindsey Denton (Keeley Hawes) – extraordinarily gripping storylines.

This one kicks off with hotheaded, bullying tough-nut Danny Waldron (Daniel Mays) shooting dead a suspect, and dressing it up as self-defence. As always, it takes a little time to acclimatise to the new characters (I just want to see Ted, Steve and Kaaaaaate), but Mays is explosive and arresting (ironic, really), and his storyline’s topicality is just the sort of thing TV should be doing, even in this showy, tabloid way. The other new cops are less than convincing – with the supporting cast members either average (Arsher Ali) or actively poor (Leanne Best and Will Mellor, who was once excessively rude to my secondary school am-dram group at a charity event) – but our intense personal investment in these people (and particularly the relationship between Steve and Kate) informs the programme’s balance of characterisation and rug-pulling revelation, which reaches fever pitch in the final two episodes (the last a bumper edition).

Its imperfections, particularly its underwhelming bit-players and concessions to ridiculousness (not to mention unnecessary inaccuracy) can frustrate, because it is so nearly great. As it is, it’s great fun: addictive, immersive and with passages of brilliance. A mention too for Neil Morrissey, whose supporting bits are always welcome, even though the second series changed his storyline from one of quiet, bitter pathos to one of astounding and off-putting cynicism. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Review of 2016: Part 3 – Books and TV

I read 32 books and watched 43 TV shows this year. Enough boasting, here's a piece about which ones were good and which ones weren't.

BOOKS

Fiction



My favourite book of the year was Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), an endlessly economical, alarmingly relatable marvel about lecturer Jim Dixon, who's caught between two very different women, and plagued by a litany of unspeakable men, as he attempts to hold on to his job and arrest a casual but definite decline brought on by booze, poor fortune, general confusion and a tragic inability to Play the Game. Barely a sentence goes by without Amis introducing some black, bleak or brilliant idea, revolving on some inspired turn of phrase, while the book’s blending of the cynical, romantic and inutterably, breathtakingly funny is just about perfect. It's an absolute wonder.

In April, I read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), a chilling piece of alternate history, in which heroic aviator and fascist sympathiser Charles Lindbergh ascends to the US presidency and agrees an ‘understanding’ with Adolf Hitler. Against the slow-burn of burgeoning anti-semitism, the young Roth comes of age, while the older brother he idolises is co-opted by the establishment, his cousin is crippled by war and his parents are torn between pragmatism and self-respect. Roth's humanity, intelligence and explosions of ironic violence keep you gripped and gazing in slack-jawed amazement, though of course it could never happen.



Another of my highlights was Tom Perrotta's Election (1998), an exceptional piece of storytelling told from five vantage points and prefaced with perfection by Irish novelist William Trevor's observation that "the world is the school gone mad". So I asked for two more of his books for my birthday: Little Children (2004) was a modern masterpiece that transcended its suburban trappings, and offered such virtuosic delights as a sarcastic child molester; The Leftovers (2011) was superbly plotted but saddled with a bafflingly blunt and broad sense of humour.

There is no piece of writing I love more than James Joyce's The Dead, which makes up for any of the other failings of Dubliners (published 1914), and indeed for some of the year's relative disappointings, including Dashiell Hammett's flat The Thin Man (1934), a rare case of a book being vastly improved in its cinematic translation, Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1954) – an interesting but imperfect sci-fi work – and David Peace's 1974 (1999), which is unforgettable, but not always in a good way.



I was seriously underwhelmed by a couple of early Evelyn Waugh comedies: Scoop (1938), with its thin characters and fixation merely on language, and Vile Bodies (1930), an oddly blinkered and distractingly self-satisfied work with only a few passages of breathtaking wit and the superb character of absent aristocrat Colonel Blount to recommend it. It's deathly dated in its satirising of people and phenomena long forgotten, with nominative determinism that's a shallow bore, though its principal problem is its triviality: that's perhaps the point of the book, but it's also entirely self-defeating, preventing it from really amounting to anything.

This year's two Vonneguts were lesser works, though I found plenty to love about Deadeye Dick (1982), less so Galapagos (1985).

But most of the books I read were good, and many of them were simply fantastic. Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love (1945) is a playfully heightened, impeccably-written romantic comedy, laced with insight, understated emotion and dazzling wit, based upon her own life – and her experiences as a member of Britain’s most notorious family. It’s not especially ambitious in terms of scope, but it is magnificently realised. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961) was slim, spare and economical, warped, waspish and filled with malevolent, brilliant throwaway jokes, its nastiness masking a poignancy and perception that linger, along with the bitter taste of betrayal. And A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) was as repulsive and rip-roaringly funny as you could ever want, a hypnotically original slice of Southern Gothic, full of virtuosic passages of bilious wit, as Ignatius J. Reilly and a gallery of hysterically funny supporting characters go almost aimlessly about their daily business in a vividly-realised nightmare of New Orleans, before you realise that Toole has been shuffling everyone expertly into position for a quite brilliant finale.



I also read my first Márquez novel this year, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), which is great if you want to read about a disgusting old man fucking a child, and luxuriated in a book of epic silliness and staggering readability, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by (Joel Dicker, 2012). I'm finishing the year with Northanger Abbey, the one of Jane Austen's six completed novels that I hadn't yet read. She wrote it first, though it was only published post-humously, and there's a different feel to her later books: an immense energy allied to an apparently limitless supply of withering sarcasm.

I read lots of kids' books to help with my pitching of my own novel for eight to 12-year-olds (nothing yet, but I'll keep you posted), though one I read for pleasure, and received incalculable amounts, was How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban (1974), an utterly beautiful ode to silliness, with hilarious, sumptuous illustrations by the incomparable Quentin Blake.



***

Non-fiction



My non-fiction book of the year was unquestionably T. Harry Williams' epic treatise on the life of Louisiana senator Huey Long (1969). Next to that (but also next to most history books), Bill Bryson's One Summer (2013) looked frankly dire, though Owen Jones' Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Classes (2011/12) remains fresh, relevant and important after five years in which so much has changed, and yet nothing has.

As usual, I read quite a few books about movies. Margaret Talbot's book about her father – actor Lyle Talbot – and his times, The Entertainer (2012) was frequently excellent, Mark Kermode's Hatchet Job (2013) proved shapeless but lively, and I really enjoyed the third volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles behemoth, One Man Band (2015), covering 1947 to 1965 in considerable style. The best by far, though, was François Truffaut's book on Alfred Hitchcock (1967, revised 1983), which fundamentally changed the way I look at cinema. I wrote about it a little here.

***

TV



My elder brother exposed me to the French cop show, Spiral, which quickly became a favourite, as I consumed the first four seasons, though my attempts to marry Laure Berthaud (above) have thus far come to naught. At times it traverses the line marked 'do not cross, silliness ahead', but at its best it's remarkable. Season 2 is a marvellous thing.

The Thick of It and Veep were regulars round my place, with just the right balance of misanthropy and swearing at a time when I was in dire need of both. I also caught up with some quality BBC dramas from recent years, and loved all of them: The Shadow Line, State of Play and Life on Mars. I travelled a little further back too, for all three brief, brilliant series of the original House of Cards.

E4's Misfits ('superheroes with ASBOs') was escapist and intensely funny, though I bailed after Season 3, by which time all of the original cast had left. The Simon/Alisha storyline in the second series is so ambitious, and so deeply affecting. Some amazing, incredibly handsome reviewer described the programme as "an antidote to morality plays, Marvel movies and just about everything else", and who am I to disagree?



Aside from Lillian Gish, my favourite actor of all time is Wendy Hiller. She was primarily on the stage, but appeared in a handful of films, and did a fair amount of TV work late in life. I watched three of her small screen triumphs: All Passion Spent (above), a delightful rom-com called The Kingfisher that reunited her with Major Barbara co-star Rex Harrison and, best of all, The Best of Friends, a miraculous drama based on the correspondence between legendary playwright George Bernard Shaw (Patrick McGoohan), esteemed museum curator Sydney Cockerell (John Gielgud) and Dame Laurentia McLachlan (Hiller).

The American Sherlock Holmes series, Elementary, got by on the strength of its central relationship, Adam Curtis made the hyper-intelligent HyperNormalisation for iPlayer, and I developed an unexpected fondness for true crime films – or at least miscarriage-of-justice polemics – devouring the likes of Making a Murderer, The Jinx, Netflix's Amanda Knox film, and old documentaries about James Hanratty on YouTube. (Bit of a weirdo, sorry.) I bailed on the much-lauded Stranger Things after two derivative, pointless episodes.



I also attended Vicky's fabled Eurovision party, finding to my perpetual astonishment that this programme I'd been avoiding for years was actually great fun, especially with friends and without Terry Wogan. I have listened to the Italian entry more times than I'd care to admit this year. The Apprentice, which in the past I'd really looked forward to, was for the most part exceedingly dull, with no heroes and – even more damagingly – no decent villains. (And I listened to a lot of podcasts, but I can't review everything, where would it end?)

I've just started Master of None (2015) on Netflix, which is a sweet and beautiful thing.

***

Thanks for reading.

Amanda Knox, The Jinx and Bridget on Brexit – Reviews #246

A few things I've seen over the last couple of weeks.

FILM



I Married a Communist (Robert Stevenson, 1949) – If you’re interested in the history of Hollywood, then this is essential viewing: a movie released at the height of the communist witchhunt, which slips the commies seamlessly (and stupidly) into a standard crime melodrama template. And who else would have made it – at least like this – but red-baiting RKO studio chief Howard Hughes, his rationality thrown to the wind by three too many plane crashes.

Robert Ryan, whose presence is as dispiriting proof as any that prominent liberals were complicit in this dark chapter of American history, stars as the VP of a shipping line who’s targeted by his former comrades in the party, who like nothing better than seducing vulnerable young men and throwing older ones in the river.

It’s clear that the screenwriters either don’t want to expose the public to leftist ideas, don’t want to risk boring their audience with ideology or don’t know what communism is, as the sequences of indoctrinated worker John Agar making speeches at union meetings are done as a wordless montage (!), and the whole exercise is really extremely silly (compounded by Laraine Day’s terrible performance as Ryan’s concerned wife)… but there’s something about the movie that kept me enthralled.

Partly the rich characterisations from lovesick party whore Janis Carter and hired assassin William Talman – a womanising shooting gallery owner – partly the fact that it’s shot by Nick Musuraca and utilises RKO’s undeniable genre expertise, and partly the considerable curio value of seeing a film this vile, irresponsible and thick: Cold War paranoia writ large, if not very well. (2)

***

TV



The Jinx (Andrew Jarecki, 2015) – Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki explores the life (and possible crimes) of real estate scion and suspected triple murderer Robert Durst, in this six-part HBO mini-series. It starts uncertainly, unnecessarily padding its run time and becoming frequently entangled in an unnecessarily complicated structure, but by the straightforward, utterly gripping Episode 4 (surely no coincidence) – based around a murder trial – it's really motoring, and the final two episodes are outstanding, some long-winded making-of elements compensated for by the sheer scale of the subsequent revelations.

I remember, when training as a journalist, my class being given reams of paperwork about an ongoing murder investigation. We spent a good half hour searching dedicatedly for the truth, before our trainer helpfully pointed out that we were journalists. "I'm not expecting you to solve the case," he said witheringly, "you just have to write a news piece about it."

We did, but it wasn't nearly as satisfying. And that's where The Jinx comes into its own. It's perhaps less effective as a creative exercise than either Serial or Making a Murderer, and yet unlike those retrospective pieces it actually moves the story along, and – incredibly – manages to solve the case. While there are serious questions to answer about the documentary's own timeline and its commitment to entertainment over, say, morality, the final 15 seconds are as extraordinary as anything I've ever seen on TV.

See if you can spot the almost imperceptible 'tell' that Robert Durst does when he might be telling an untruth. Lol. (3.5)

***



Amanda Knox (Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, 2016) – The Amanda Knox story done Making a Murderer-style: though the teaser trailers and the opening monologue play with the idea of her possible guilt, this Netflix Original is a single-sided polemic aimed at clearing her name. Which has, of course, already been cleared by the Italian Supreme Court, so fair enough.

This film does a fine job of undermining the case against her and underlining the media feeding frenzy that assisted it, by letting tabloid sleazeball Nick Pisa and mad prosecutor Giuliano Mignini speak for themselves, and then elegantly slicing their testimony into finest fillets of unapologetically self-serving bullshit and dangerous, errant nonsense. Among Mignini's more outlandish pieces of deduction (and there are several) is that when he accused Knox of murder she put her hands over her ears because she was reliving the screams of her victim. Pisa is just an unmitigated arsehole, who either didn't know or didn't care what normal, empathetic people would make of his contributions. It takes something to be the most appalling person in a documentary about a murder, when you were just there to report on it, so well done to him. 'Nick Pisa-shit', am-I-right?!

Speaking about the case, and glimpsed in incredibly eerie home videos shot just before her trip to Italy, Knox is so appealing and so pretty that you can't help but hope that she's innocent (shallow, I know), and certainly there's no smoking gun included, though her decision to try to pin the murder of English student Meredith Kercher on her own boss was, at best, astonishingly selfish. Her then boyfriend and co-defendant Raffaele, meanwhile, is just an adorable bundle of cute, with his broken English and wide open face and, oh yeah, four years spent in prison for murder. Whoops.

This isn't the best true crime work you'll ever see, but it's professionally put together, and weirdly entertaining for a film that's about what it's about. It somewhat skids about on the surface rather than providing the depth of research or emotion that would blow you away, but for its multi-faceted approach and its access - if not its intimacy - it's well worth seeing.

So did Knox do it? Probably not. There definitely isn't enough credible evidence to say anything stronger against her: the most damaging piece is that Raffaele told the police that her alibi was false, but then he was under unfathomable pressure, the adorable bastard. (3)

***



Spiral: Season 4 (2012) – "Précédemment dans Engrenages..." This knockout fourth season of the French crime series is for the most part a return to realism after the silliness of the previous run, with Laure and co investigating both left-wing bombers and Kurdish paramilitaries. And while it never comes close to Season 2 – a devilishly intense, tightly-coiled beast of an eight-parter – it's the second-best series of shows that Spiral has offered, with Tintin given more to do than ever before, and a final episode that offers everything you could want, and then some. It's hard to recall a show with so many great recurring characters, the programme's nuanced view of its heroes and effortless way of manipulating our sympathies - either gradually or via short, sharp shocks - creating a litany of special moments that jar your emotions as they pull the rug out from under you. A dark, nauseatingly suspenseful joy. (3.5)

***

LIVE



Bridget Christie: Because You Demanded It (Leicester Square Theatre, 20 October 2016) – This new show from my absolute favourite stand-up is very good, but with a few obvious flaws. Christie's delivery is rarely utterly seamless, but at the Leicester Square Theatre on Thursday she stumbled over her words at least a dozen times and at others seemed to be almost reciting by rote: of course that's mostly what stand-up is, but the illusion of it just having occurred to the performer is central to its success. And while the material has some dizzying peaks (including one masterfully contextualised routine in which she argues that "A paedophile who voted for Remain is better than a non-paedophile who voted Leave"), it has just a handful of small additions to the show that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of months ago.

Since it's essentially a show about Brexit − set up with the premise that we all need a break, so the show will be about gardening, bringing her on to thoughts about foreign and indigenous plants − that's problematic. The news, particularly this news, is moving so fast that you could conceivably write five minutes of great new material every day, but then quantity was never Christie's strongpoint: while in her award-winning purple patch, she was essentially repurposing the same material across different mediums: radio, interviews, shows and even a (completely delightful) book. All of which makes it sounds like I didn't like enjoy the show, which I absolutely did.

My problem (well, one of my many problems) is that I wanted the things I like to be things I can love: I want Thea Gilmore to stop writing two songs an album about how you'll never be able to stop her from speaking out, and actually just speak out: as far as I'm aware, she's only ever written one real protest song, and that was 10 years ago. Christie can be staggeringly incisive, is superb at mining the humour from almost impossible sources (women's rights, feminism, FGM, an 80-year-old man falling down a lift shaft) and is better at building a routine than just about anyone I've ever seen, as evidenced by the brilliant (if familiar) story of the Daily Mail printing a photograph of her, believing it to be Charles II.

The material frequently spears the ludicrousness of racism, the decision to hold the EU referendum in the first place, and our decision to vote to punch ourselves in the face − and there's a brilliant bit about a short, fat, sweaty bald man propositioning her in a hotel lift − before a climactic piece of unexpected (and unexpectedly sublime) physical comedy, but the show doesn't quite deliver on the promise of the premise (Bridget Does Brexit), due to some uncertain delivery and the fact that, even in just two months, the story has rather moved on. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Caroline Proust, My Night at Maud's and the birth of satire − Reviews #240

A round-up of some things I never got around to sharing, plus Season 2 of Spiral.



*SOME SPOILERS*
My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, 1969) − I’ve become a huge Eric Rohmer fan over the past few years. The older I get, and the more complex my idea of life becomes, the more I appreciate his work: full of eroticism, irony and paradox, where the sun only comes out to cast darker shadows. There’s no denying, though, that many of his films follow a certain formula: not just in their plots (his six Moral Tales, made between 1962 and ’72, are all based on F. W. Murnau’s expressionist silent romance, Sunrise), but also in the form and structure he favours. My Night at Maud’s isn’t his best movie, but it’s perhaps his most Rohmerish, almost to the point of exaggeration: it begins slowly, turns tiringly talky and then whacks you in the solar plexus with a coda that’s rooted in the philosophical groundwork he’s been laying, while trading the verbose, probing philosophy for poignant, nail-on-the-head specificity. Stop someone halfway through a Rohmer film, and they might tell you they’re bored. Ask them what they think at the finish, and they’ll tell you they’re floored.

My Night at Maud’s – his most famous and popular film, and the third of his Moral Tales (though released after part four, La collectionneuse) – reminds me a bit of Melville’s superb and atypical Leon Morin, Priest, in which a sexually frustrated war widow becomes infatuated with a kind, cerebral and undeniably hot man of the cloth (Jean-Paul Belmondo). This too is an exploration of sex and spirituality, though not of celibacy, as a practical but serious Catholic (Jean-Louis Trintignant), not entirely unlike Rohmer himself, is caught between two women: one whom he sees as pure and innocent – blonde churchgoer Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault, the niece of Jean-Pierre, star of the greatest French film of all, Les enfants du paradis) – and the other whom he dismisses as too slutty and too atheist, Maud (Françoise Fabian).

The film’s opening and closing chapters are dazzlingly presented, but the middle-section – the night at Maud’s – is almost wilfully uncinematic in conventional terms, consistingly largely of Trintignant and Fabian in a room, chatting circularly about faith and attraction. The presentation, aside from a single cut-away to a snowy exterior, is drab and restricted, but it forces us to focus on the nuances, zoning in on the basic incongruity of the situation, as Trintignant’s Jean-Louis mounts an aggressively calm, contextualised campaign of verbal self-justification, as his passions are stoked by this woman who seems to represent everything he purports to detest, and yet on some level is also everything he wants: and that’s not just a sexual level, he finds her invigorating and fascinating, a philosophical adversary and yet perhaps a spiritual twin. His face tells the story, as his voice lies. That disconnect between a character’s actual desires and what they will admit, even to themselves – that gaping chasm of self-awareness – is what powers these films.

I’m not a big fan of Trintignant generally, but here he’s so deep in his quiet, serious but impassioned personification that you can’t imagine what this film would be without him. Barrault is used more as a symbol than as an actress, but works brilliantly as an avatar for Rohmer and Jean-Louis’s collision of humanism and idealism, while Fabian floods the screen with a desperate, exhausted pragmatism that inspires an endless empathy. Sometimes in its central sequence the film does feel too heavily academicised for me, becoming more a discussion of abstract ideas than of these characters’ burning and overwhelming preoccupations, but it’s littered with fascinating insights, and when it turns from mere talk to action and revelation it’s a genuinely explosive film, explosive in the way that only Rohmer’s films are, as a character quietly implodes and it blows us apart. The ending here, picking up five years after the story proper, is one of his biggest departures, biggest gambles and most extraordinary successes, taking us to the beach and flipping the whole film upside down. (3.5)

See also: I've reviewed the first three Moral Tales already: The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne's Career and The Collector.

***


Robert Evans with convicted rapist Roman Polanski.

The Kid Stays in the Picture (Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, 2002) - The charming former Paramount honcho Robert Evans tells us repeatedly how handsome he is in this classic ‘unreliable narrator’ doc (though he is admittedly quite handsome), which allows him to spout forth on his life and work, and take credit for just about everything, though particularly The Godfather.

There’s some great footage, especially at the beginning when we see his three movie appearances as a young man – which start well and end with him giving arguably the most ridiculous performance of all time – and later when he’s selling the moneymen on his most beloved project (himself), but the bulk of the picture is just artfully animated photos and some film of his house, accompanied by Evans spinning tales in voiceover: his fortuitous rise to prominence, his marriage to Ali McGraw, and his coke-fuelled descent into redundancy and worse. It’s all rather shallow, but also colourful, conspiratorial and highly entertaining: a fast-moving Hollywood saga bringing to life the highlights of his memoir, also called The Kid Stays in the Picture.

That title, incidentally, is what Evans claims legendary Fox producer Daryll F. Zanuck yelled through a bullhorn on the set of The Sun Also Rises, a Hemingway adaptation from which the author – and almost everyone else connected with the film – attempted to sack him. Director Brett Morgen went on to make a functional but enjoyable Rolling Stones doc, Crossfire Hurricane, before compiling that bloody awful Kurt Cobain cinematic biography, Montage of Heck. (3)

***

TV



The Thick of It (Series 4) − The last, and least, of the definitive modern political comedy's four series traverses mostly old ground, though it's still very funny, and extremely prescient in its depiction of the crumbling Labour Party. Its main flaw, aside from familiarity, is that the character comics playing the Lib Dem leader and his special advisor are too broad and mannered, the incisive material rarely emerging unscathed from their superficial sitcom delivery. Still, the first instalment − in which outdated 'one nation' Tory Peter Mannion (Roger Allam) attempts to launch a tech initiative − is a classic, and the double-length penultimate episode concerning a public inquiry is ambitious, cleverly conceived and extremely impressive. (3)

***



Beyond the Fringe (1964) − It’d be convenient if Beyond the Fringe no longer existed – most of it, anyway. This astonishingly popular comic revue was so important and so influential, single-handedly inspiring the British satire boom of the 1960s, and yet long stretches of it are virtually unwatchable today.

The best routines are all Peter Cook’s, and the best of those are as funny as anything he ever did: the ‘Great Train Robbery’ sketch, with its overly literal investigating officer, the ‘Perkins’ section of The Aftermyth of War – in which Jonathan Miller’s private is asked to make an entirely futile sacrifice – the surrealistic monologue by a regretful miner, ‘The End Is Nigh’, which closes the show, and the famous ‘One Leg Too Few’ (with Dudley Moore as a manically cheery, one-legged actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan), which was added midway through the run.

The rest of the two-hour show ranges largely from the pale to the painful: Miller mugging, Moore playing interminable ‘comic’ piano pieces, and Alan Bennett apparently ill at ease with a succession of sketches that require him to play posh idiots; of the non-Cook pieces, only his T. E. Lawrence skit stands the test of time, as Bennett recalls his brief friendship with the famed adventurer, which begins with the narrator accidentally going to the wrong house where he mistakes a schoolboy for the aged Lawrence. (2.5)

***



Misfits (Series 3, 2011) – This third series is a big step down from the first two, struggling to know what to do with the metaphysical relationship between Simon (Iwan Rheon) and Alisha (Antonia Thomas) developed so stunningly last time out, until a dazzling conclusion to the final episode, and offering little in the way of compelling through-lines. Instead it serves up a succession of self-contained outings that are often involving and amusing, but sometimes just a little desperate (an episode about Nazis has an astonishingly good prologue but then goes awry, with little to say and a completely nonsensical treatment of time-travel; and another in which Simon is manipulated by a comic book artist begins to unpick the fabric of the programme). With Nathan – the funniest character in the show – now written out, the bulk of the comedic burden falls on newcomer Rudy (Joseph Gilgun). While it takes an episode to get used to his big performance, he is extremely funny, but he isn’t properly integrated into the ensemble: often he’s grandstanding brilliantly and the others are simply forced to pull faces in the background, an awkward juxtaposition that stops you from becoming immersed in the action. The third series is a pleasant enough time-filler, but it’s not exceptional as the first two series were, at least until it wraps up Simon’s story in perfect, mythmaking fashion. (3)

***



Spiral (Season 2, 2008) – This second series retools the original template to perfection: as sexycop Laure Berthaud and her team launch a season-long war on dealers, the incidental, self-contained storylines are stripped down to the bare essentials, the purpose of them now to pad out an hour’s TV but to shine a light into the corners of its characters. Original, involving, literate, confrontational and, in its denouement, almost unwatchably tense, it offers a gallery of new characters – including brilliant undercover agent Samy – revels in the multi-layered, multi-faceted complexity of its others, and turns an interesting show into one that’s simply unmissable. I start on the next series tonight. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Mankiewicz, The Shadow Line and the original House of Cards - Reviews #235

FILMS



Somewhere in the Night (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946) - This was unexpectedly terrific: a very, VERY underrated movie from the great writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It’s a brilliantly-plotted mystery-noir, full of that classic Mankiewicz dialogue: wise, hard-boiled and exceedingly sarcastic.

John Hodiak plays an amnesiac war hero searching for a shadowy hoodlum by the name of Larry Cravat, his Third Man-ish investigations bringing him into the orbit of a wry, warm-hearted chanteuse (Nancy Guild), her nice guy suitor (Richard Conte) and a gently omniscient detective (played with great charm by Lloyd Nolan).

There are outstanding self-contained, character-led scenes, including an absolute gem featuring Josephine Hutchinson (a former Warner female lead who never quite made it), fine, unexpected examples of jocular post-modernism – in the shape of meta movie gags about Lugosi, lighting and how detectives behave – and a succession of quite magnificent surprises, right up to the finish.

From the film’s reputation, I was expecting something fairly shabby and perfunctory, but instead got a film that’s impressive, interesting and almost impossible to second-guess. The leads are strictly second-tier, but while Hodiak is fairly bland, the director takes Guild into strong territory (like Hutchinson before her, she was on the cusp of superstardom that never came) – the actress emerging as a sort of Ella Raines-Ronnie Lake hybrid, with a gift for a one-liner – as Nolan and Conte hoover up everything that’s left. (3.5)

See also: I wrote about Mankiewicz's masterpiece, All About Eve, here.

***


They're even giving great performances in the publicity stills.

Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin and Hal Mohr, 1943) - A talky, grown-up and extremely powerful propaganda piece - from Lillian Hellman, via Dashiell Hammett – about German émigré Paul Lukas, his American wife (Bette Davis) and their three children moving to the States, where they face persecution from a dissolute, amoral Nazi sympathiser (George Coulouris). There’s a false note in the characterisation of the kids, who speak in that generic ‘foreign’ Old Hollywood way (all stilted full sentences), and Beulah Bondi is wasted in a weak part as a French maid, but much of the film is truly great, with perfect performances from Lukas and Davis, and mature, incisive writing that hammers its points across – even while showing the Nazis as cruel, sadistic thugs, rather than the genocidal ethnic cleansers they were soon confirmed to be. (3.5)

***



Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) - A ‘60s time capsule with a European feel about the romantic adventures of capricious British model Julie Christie, who moves through relationships with a TV journalist (Dirk Bogarde), a louche, selfish playboy (Laurence Harvey) and an ageing Italian prince (José Luis de Vilallonga), on her way to partial self-discovery. It’s inconsistent and holds you at arms’ length, but Christie is very good in her Oscar-winning role, and there are some excellent insights and fine lines from Frederick Raphael – who went on to write one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on TV, the BBC’s novelistic, challenging and brilliant adaptation of his book, The Glittering Prizes. Jim Clark’s editing is also extremely good, full of tricks inspired by the Nouvelle Vague, though the direction from John Schlesinger includes too much that simply feels like padding, particularly a party sequence as incoherent and unfulfilling as the one with which he almost sank Midnight Cowboy. The film’s bagginess and aloofness is compounded by a motivational murkiness and lack of clarity that’s not intentional: it strives to be adult and complex, but comes off as merely unclear, despite Christie’s best efforts. The idea that anybody would go after Harvey while they had Dirk Bogarde at home is also, of course, ridiculous. As you would expect, Harvey is as dreadful as ever. (2.5)

***


It is only as terrible as this half the time.

Excuse My Dust (Roy Rowland, 1951) - A broad, nostalgic musical-comedy about an aspiring inventor (Red Skelton) at the birth of the automobile revolution. Skelton is as funny as a hernia (and his various car crashes as funny as, well, a car crash), but the Arthur Schwartz-Dorothy Fields songs are good and Monica Lewis puts her numbers across with great gusto, sass and style. I like the hilariously incongruous ballet featuring female lead Sally Forrest too: it's very stylish and well choreographed and confusing. In support, Preston Sturges regulars William Demarest and Raymond Walburn are rather wasted, though Demarest does blow a sort of weird raspberry at one point. In addition, an uncredited Buster Keaton came up with a few of the gags and worked behind the camera (some of the Skelton business is a little better than normal, though he himself is dire), while the star's car was previously seen in Orson Welles' butchered 1942 masterwork, The Magnificent Ambersons, which is where the similarities between the two rather cease. (2)

***

BOOKS



The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945) – Nancy Mitford’s romantic comedy about the pretty, fickle, impulsive, small-eyed Linda Radlett is a playfully heightened, impeccably-written slice of escapism, laced with insight, understated emotion and dazzling wit, based upon her own life – and her experiences as a member of Britain’s most notorious family. It’s not especially ambitious in terms of scope, but it is magnificently realised, full of brilliantly-drawn characters, sublime running gags and effortlessly turned phrases. The chance to get a tour of Mitford's world and her brain is a rare sort of treat, and despite her rarefied upbringing, there’s a worldiness and a compassion here, allied to a rare intelligence and a matchless, piercing viewpoint, that can’t be missed. The foreword by her sister Decca is hilarious too. (4)

***



The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934) – Hammett’s celebrated crime novel is, well, a bit of a damp squib, really. I came to it as a fan of the movie (which came out later the same year, having been shot in just 12 days!), the defining mystery-comedy of its era, and the first time that a modern, happy and equal marriage (at least within the parameters of its period) had been depicted on screen, touched with the alchemic chemistry of stars William Powell and Myrna Loy. All I can say now is that screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich did an incredible job of adapting this book, which is less escapist, more cynical, more repetitive, less funny and conspicuously less fun than the film, consisting chiefly of second-gen Greek immigrant PI Nick Charles saying that he’s not sure who committed a murder, while various dislikeable supporting characters try to either stitch up or have sex with one another. The relationship between Nick and his wife Nora (based on that of Hammett and his long-term partner, Lillian Hellman) isn’t bad, and sometimes the book’s eruptions of violence, drunkenness and cutting sardonism draw you in, but there’s always a long lull just around the corner. A real disappointment. (2)

***

TV

The House of Cards trilogy:



House of Cards (1990) - One of the most exquisite achievements in the history of British TV: a paraphrasing of Macbeth, with a repulsive psycho-sexual undercurrent, about Tory chief whip Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson), who reacts very poorly to being overlooked in a cabinet reshuffle, and proceeds to destroy everyone in his path to power. Andrew Davies’s script – including those celebrated, conspiratorial fourth-wall-busting asides – the immersive direction, and a pair of sensational performances from Ian Richardson and Susannah Harker (as his mistress and most prized media contact, Mattie Storrin) make it simply unmissable: a dark, daring and delicious satire about an old soul poisoned by avarice, but with a twinkle in his eye. (4)

To Play the King (1993) - An interesting sequel to House of Cards, about Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) locking horns with the Prince of Wales (Michael Kitchen), resulting in a constitutional crisis. It’s less novel and more of-its-time than the original, but exceptionally well-written and acted, with an unforgettable climax containing more than a hint of The Godfather Part II. Kitty Aldridge’s performance as Urquhart’s new mistress, Sarah Harding, is emblematic of this sequel’s standing: better than almost any you’ll see on TV, but not in the same league as Susannah Harker’s last time out. Still, I can't help but think that this was a major influence on one of last year's most overrated plays, Charles III, which has an almost identical storyline (though was written in blank verse). (3.5)

The Final Cut (1995) - A very good but nonetheless slightly disappointing conclusion to the House of Cards trilogy, with prime minister Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) dealing with revolt and rebellion that threatens to push him out of Number 10. For the most part, it feels more like a cynical political drama than the black satire of House of Cards – while traversing some rather over-familiar ground – and the supporting cast isn’t in the same class as before (Isla Blair and Paul Freeman are simply lightweights compared to Richardson), but it’s still consistently entertaining, with confrontational storytelling, fine dialogue and a flamboyant if conventional pay-off. (3)

***



The Shadow Line (Hugo Blick, 2011) - The BBC at its best, a bleakly brilliant mini-series from writer-director-producer Hugo Blick that plunges you into an unexplained, nightmarish and narcotic netherworld, then begins to illuminate and tie up a few threads while leaving others dangling for the longest time. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a cop with a past, Christopher Eccleston a dealer with a heart, Rafe Spall an out-there gangster (whose tics are a thing of joy) and Stephen Rea a tall, quiet mystery man by the name of ‘Gatehouse’. It’s idiosyncratic and almost matchlessly imaginative, with more than an echo of Edge of Darkness (arguably the finest thing the Beeb did in the ‘80s) in its marriage of introspection and action, the latter showcased in a succession of creepy, eerie and ultimately breathtaking set pieces. (4)

***



State of Play (David Yates, 2003) - A dazzling drama from the pen of Paul Abbott, about a political scandal that begins to mount after the death of a political researcher, who was having an affair with her boss, up-and-coming MP David Morrissey. As reporters John Simm and Kelly MacDonald begin to investigate, further revelations follow thick and fast, impacting on the livelihoods – and lives – of them all, as well as editor Bill Nighy, a pale, sexy, floppy-haired, cool-as-flip freelancer (James McAvoy), a callow, irritating PR weasel (Marc Warren) and Morrissey’s unhappy, conflicted and opinionated wife (Polly Walker). The meshing of acting styles is simply exhilarating, the direction from future Harry Potter helmer David Yates is swift and immersive, and the writing is absolutely extraordinary: clever, funny, thematically complex but entirely accessible, and eloquently and pointedly personal while operating within a moral morass.

I always remember Abbott telling Charlie Brooker (in a personally inspiring special edition of Screenwipe about how to write) that he would throw in outrageous twists at will, then say to himself: “Write yourself out of that corner, you bastard”, and that gloriously abrasive, unconventional approach works absolute wonders here. It’s only Warren’s subplot that seems a little out-of-place, a cartoonish, relentlessly one-note storyline that occasionally stalls a mini-series of otherwise unstoppable momentum – and magnificence. (Also: Kelly Macdonald is bae, especially her voice.) (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Review of 2015: Part 3 - Books (and a tiny bit of TV)

I've been trying to read a book a week. Here's how I got on. (My other reviews of the year, concerning movies and live shows are up already.)

Fiction:



For me, this was a year dominated by four writers, but really it was the year of Vonnegut. The year that I found a writer who moved me, made me think, and made me howl with laughter. Who seemed to be writing just for me. And who taught me that the only person you should write like is yourself (I finished my first book this year) and who was responsible for, erm, nine of the 47 books I've read. (I could still make it to 52.)

Of Vonnegut's works, Slaughterhouse Five is the obvious stand-out - the book that drew most memorably on his own experiences, and made his name - but the polemically dazzling God Bless You, Mr Rosewater is a withering critique of capitalism (with a distinctly sentimental side), and in Mother Night he mines race hate for all the black comedy he can find, with dangerously funny results.



My favourite book of the year, though, was Philip Roth's American Pastoral, a masterwork, spun with bravura style, that deals with immigrant identity, the unknowability of everyone, the disappointments of adulthood and the utter chaos of existence, as a legendary high school sports star turned upstanding citizen has his life exploded by an unexpected act of violence. It is his daughter “who transports him out of the longed for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral — into the indigenous American berserk", as Roth unforgettably characterises it. The Human Stain, by the same author, isn't far behind.



The third author who took up quite a bit of my time this year was John Steinbeck, whose trilogy of books about the Californian labour struggle in the 1930s are absolutely astounding. Everyone knows about the trim, simple Of Mice and Men, and the sprawling, experimental Grapes of Wrath, but prior to those he wrote a book every bit as good: In Dubious Battle: a muddy, hungry, violent chronicle of a strike, a neglected classic apparently too abrasive, gloomy and superficially cynical to have ever found much of an audience.

And then there was Jane Austen, whose escapist but often weighty works allowed me to pass many a contented hour. I've read Pride and Prejudice and have Northanger Abbey left to read - of the others, it was Persuasion that left the greatest impact on me. Written as Austen was ailing (and so facing a severe race against time), it seems like the articulation of her entire worldview, albeit within the boundaries of a conventional romance.


The yawn also rises.

Other highlights of the year were Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Truman Capote's legendary In Cold Blood (which falls somewhere between fiction and non-fiction) and Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Donna Tartt's The Secret History. The worst novel I read was Hemingway's tedious, self-indulgent early work, The Sun Also Rises: a great title and a singular style in search of anything like a story.

Non-Fiction:



I tend to read quite a lot of books about movies (my 48th book, in which I'm currently engrossed, is about Peter Lorre), and this year was no different. Of the biographies, David Stenn's excellent, meticulously-researched Jean Harlow book, Bombshell, was by far the best, though Charles Affron's work on Lillian Gish, and the actress's own memoir - The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me - are well worth seeking out if you're a fan, as I am (bit of a long shot). The same can't be said of the Warren William and William Haines books I read, since William enjoyed an almost uniquely dull existence, while Haines's move away from Hollywood and into interior decorating really doesn't make for the most thrilling reading.

Far better were Victor S. Navasky's cool, forensic audit of the Hollywood witchhunt, Naming Names, and the non-fiction novel, Tinseltown, which paints an unforgettable portrait of the movie community in the 1920s and may just have solved the murder of top director, William Desmond Taylor.



Besides Gish, the deceased lady I'm most interested in (not romantically) is the tragic British songstress Sandy Denny, and I read two books about her as well. Neither of them were all that great, unlike this blog I wrote about her, which is the most-read thing on here this year. Peter Hitchens bought the Mick Houghton book from me on Amazon, which was odd.

Away from the arts, I enjoyed four books by Jon Ronson, of which his latest - So You've Been Publicly Shamed - was in many ways the most serious and frightening, as well as the most coherent and complete. There were two Ben Macintyre books (Operation Mincemeat was great fun), two about the Mitford sisters, a horrible, compulsively-readable true crime tale (True Story by Michael Finkel), and Bridget Christie's utterly charming concoction, A Book for Her, which discusses feminism, comedy and campaigning. She is wonderful.

***

TV:


Sexy brilliant actor man.

I accidentally moved into a flat without a TV aerial, so everything I saw was on iPlayer or DVD. A Moon for the Misbegotten, a 1975 TV movie based on Eugene O'Neill's play and starring Jason Robards, was head and shoulders above the rest. The BBC's adaptation of Wolf Hall had its flaws, but also the greatest performance of this and perhaps any other year, in Mark Rylance's Thomas Cromwell. By contrast, even the acting powers of Ben Whishaw couldn't save London Spy, which relinquished its curious hold on the audience after three interesting episodes, and fell down the toilet. The Apprentice was great, especially the interview round, but Jack Dee's baffling descent into unfunniness proceeded to sink You're Fired without trace. Meanwhile, Adam Curtis's iPlayer exclusive, Bitter Lake, did something utterly new. And the best sitcom of the modern era, Parks and Recreation, came to a close, with something between a bang and a whimper.

***

Thanks for reading, and for all the comments and support this year. :-)