Why I love FDR, and other stories – Reviews #270

I had a week off, so I read a couple of books, watched a couple of films and went to a castle. I saw Jackson Browne live too (and Kraftwerk, but I was working and I don't know much about them, so my review would be terrible). I haven't managed to crowbar FDR into all of the below, but I've honestly done my best.

BOOKS


I read about the New Deal in Deal, which I continue to insist wasn't intentional.

FDR by Jean Edward Smith (2007) – This immense, one-volume biography of America’s greatest president is weighty in every sense of the word, marshalling a staggering number of facts, characters and insights to evoke and explain the life of FDR – and touching a kilo on the kitchen scales, as it runs to almost 800 pages, including the copious, detailed end notes. Smith, who has previously done a similar job on (18th president) Ulysses S. Grant and military commander Lucius D. Clay, deviates from the general rule of great biographies – which from T. Harry Williams’ groundbreaking Huey Long to Lee Server’s Baby, I Don’t Care draw their life from first-hand interviews – by weaving together a rich, complex and immensely readable narrative from secondary sources and from many memoirs, memos and letters that afford incredible access. He has read every book about FDR, which helps to shape his nuanced and insightful conclusions, but he’s also interested in the real pleasures of historical writing: when Roosevelt sits down with Stalin and Churchill, we feel we're really there.

Roosevelt had a privileged upbringing, his character forged at the independent school Groton, and his ability to ‘read people’ developed during his time at Harvard, where he stayed on to edit the school paper. By the time he entered politics, he was a charming but apparently callow man who didn’t stand for anything, except an outspoken objection to ‘bossism’ (whereby unelected fixers like Tammany Hall’s liberal-minded Charles Murphy wielded great power and patronage). He was changed, according to popular legend, when he contracted polio in 1921, which gave him an understanding of suffering, and also brought him into contact with dirt-poor Georgia farmers – his neighbours at the Warm Springs facility – whose abject poverty caused him to question the economic consensus. Smith, argues, though – and convincingly – that FDR’s doomed extra-marital affair with a gregarious Catholic socialite, Lucy Mercer, did as much to change his outlook: as the experience taught his wife, Eleanor, the complexities of the human heart, so it gave the future president an understanding of love and loss that turned him from a simple man into one with a great capacity for understanding.


The 1933 inauguration.

When FDR ascended to the presidency in 1933, America was in the grips of a calamitous depression in which a quarter of adults were out of work, ‘Hoovervilles’ – temporary encampments of homeless people living in cardboard boxes and makeshift huts – had bred in all major cities, and his predecessor had just called out the National Guard to shoot unarmed veterans pleading to receive their WWI bonus ahead of time. As one of the Bonus Army later put it, after Eleanor Roosevelt visited them: “Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.” Once in the Oval Office, FDR responded to the crisis by enacting the most radical policy programme in American history, introducing the Civil Works Administration as a temporary lifeline, creating the Tennessee Valley Association to reinvigorate Southern farming, finding work for 300,000 people (and 3m in total) through the Civilian Conservation Corps, and pouring money into the Works Progress Administration, which employed 8.5m people across eight years, building hundreds of schools, bridges and parks, and finding work for the likes of Orson Welles as part of its Federal Arts Project. While some of the measures were pragmatic and reactive, resolving the specific problems of early ‘30s America, FDR also introduced social security, unemployment insurance and rural electrification, while his priorities were elucidated by his hard-fought hours-and-wages legislation (1938) and the GI Bill (1944), which after the president’s death in 1945 essentially safeguarded his country, and his draftees, against a repeat of the disastrous fall-out from WWI. Had he lived, America would surely be unrecognisable now from the divided, unequal, poisoned well of democracy that it is. As Michael Moore explained so effectively in his flawed but overpowering polemic, Capitalism: A Love Story, FDR's post-war plan was to implement the Second Bill of Rights detailed in his 1944 State of the Union address, pledging a basic security for all Americans, underpinned by a national living wage and universal healthcare.

For all his vision and virtue, though, Roosevelt did make mistakes, and Smith isn’t afraid to deal with them at length. For a while during 1937-8, everything went wrong, and most of it was FDR’s fault, due to hubris, myopia or vindictiveness. His response to poorly-drafted legislation being overturned by the judiciary was an idiotic attempt at court-packing, he caused the ‘Roosevelt recession’ by cutting federal spending – before acting decisively to reverse the decision and remedy the situation – and his attempts to purge his rivals ahead of the 1938 election was an almost total failure. Later scandals or controversies are notably more complicated, though. Smith rejects out-of-hand the idea that Roosevelt had anything to do with Pearl Harbor (a conspiracy theory that continues to endure), though he does consider whether war could have been avoided (a lot of evidence is missing from the record) and looks at the issue of Japanese-Americans on the California coast being interned – though the decision wasn’t taken by FDR, who trusted his subordinates to make these difficult calls, he did sign off on it, and Smith regards it as one of the “shabbiest” executive orders ever made by a president. He’s more circumspect about Roosevelt’s lack of progressive action on race – the president relied on support from white supremacist Southern Democrats to pass legislation, including especially during WWII – though the GI Bill did cover all African-Americans, and his supposed inaction regarding Jewish refugees. In fact, FDR pushed the question relentlessly, and ultimately saved 150,000 people: a considerable achievement when one looks at how his hands were tied. As regards his stance on black America: you can ask whether it was right, but you can argue that it was realistic.


One of only two known photographs of FDR in a wheelchair, with dog Fala and little Ruthie Bie. The picture was taken by the president's cousin, Margaret Suckley.

Roosevelt emerges from the book as a decent, flawed and often brilliant man: a great communicator, with a gift for a new kind of conversational oratory (and for exploiting the possibilities of radio and television), and a genius for politics. He was loyal, calculating and ruthless, at times too intractable (like when he forced his friend Harry Hopkins, the brilliant socialist administrator, upon the 1940 convention as VP), but able to juggle political friendships and alliances with extraordinary élan. He was not an idealist in the conventional meaning of the word, but he did pursue ideals through pragmatism: offering sops and compromises to the right of his party, to ensure a solid support base that would enable him to force through his more controversial – and usually more important – measures. In the lead-up to World War Two, he shaped the debate and let public opinion run slightly ahead of him every step of the way, displaying integrity, courage and considerable skill, and circumventing the obstructions of opposition, and the small-print of legislation, to offer crucial materiel support to Britain. He also had an extraordinary understanding of political symbolism: prior to his final speech to Congress, he was seen publicly in a wheelchair just twice: firstly when the dean of John Howard University asked him to express solidarity with black students “crippled by race”, and secondly when he visited wounded soldiers who would never walk again.

This moving, powerful book shows an extraordinary sensitivity for both these personal details and the big topics of the day. Smith breaks off to deal with the complexities of race relations or the atomic bomb in one long section. Ahead of Pearl Harbor, he takes us behind the scenes, where we travel with the Japanese on their fateful mission, and meet the brilliant admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto, and his descriptions of battlefield tactics are the most invigorating, accessible and concisely thrilling I've ever read. He also heartbreakingly and brilliantly evokes FDR's subsequent inability to believe that the Navy he exalted had provided itself so thoroughly incompetent. Smith also foreshadows the future, highlighting the enduring significance of decisions, and showing us the fine margins of history: FDR’s plan for dividing Germany after the war wasn't followed because the state department had been excluded from the summit after Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, blackmailed his homosexual rival, Sumner Welles, into resigning. Those are just two of the brilliant characters in the book’s remarkable, brilliantly-sketched supporting cast, including Louis Howe – the gaunt former newspaper editor who did more than anyone to plot FDR’s route to the White House – feminist labour secretary, Frances Perkins, outspoken pro-business troll Al Smith, Winston Churchill – who is naked for much of the time; there’s also a cameo from the mighty Huey Long, described by Roosevelt as "the second most dangerous man in America", after Douglas MacArthur.


Perkins on the front of Time (August 14, 1933).

Smith is simply a great biographer, his comprehensive research matched by a brilliant gift for evoking mood in his writing: euphoria, pride, awe, anger, suspense, disgust or hilarity, and it is exceptionally funny at times: FDR’s tall tales are always good fun, though it’s Howe’s unbelievably cynical one-liners that are the real treat. He gets a taste of his own medicine from commentator John Gunther, who explained that Howe had no agenda of his own: “If FDR had come out for the Devil, it wouldn’t have mattered much to Louis Howe.” And often he just allows one of the greatest spokesman of the 20th century – accompanied by several of the finest speechwriters – to speak for himself. Often there’ll be an idea I’ve been grasping at but failing to articulate, and I’ll find that Roosevelt nailed it 80 years ago. Here he is essentially debunking the Conservative Party manifesto of 2017:

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

This extraordinary book does justice to the man, in all his blazing brilliance and human imperfection. It’s an unanswerable corrective to anyone who says that politics doesn’t change anything, that politicians don’t care, and that a person’s politics are – or should be – determined by their upbringing. It is also an indelible blueprint for how you plot, plan, finagle and compromise to force genuine and crucial change. (4)

***

See also: I've written a little below, in the Cabin in the Cotton review, about how FDR's election changed the cinematic landscape, but I'd like to talk much more about this, as American cinema has perhaps never been as politically engaged, or as in thrall to its incumbent president, as it was during his tenure. So I'll look at 'FDR's Hollywood' as a stand-alone blogpost some time in the coming months. In the meantime, and simply because I like you, here are a handful of bits from the book that amused me:


An FDR anecdote from his time as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.


Oh dear.


In many great non-fiction books, there's a passage that's a bit of a stretch. Here you go.


Stalin proves to be even worse at paying compliments than me.

***



The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948) – A Graham Greene masterwork about Scobie, a rigorously upstanding colonial policeman in an unnamed African state, whose unimpeachable integrity is challenged by his capacity for pity and lust, threatening him with eternal damnation in the eyes of his Catholic god – or at least to Scobie's fevered, depressed mind. It sounds bleak and heavy, and ultimately it is, but The Heart of the Matter is also sensitive, empathetic and very entertaining, vividly evoking the Sierra Leone of Greene's wartime experience, and being lit both by Scobie's mordant wit and a catalogue of memorable supporting characters.

There's the pink, podgy and poetic Wilson – smitten with Scobie's wife – the unhappy Harris, whose naïvete and loneliness leads him to pen a hilariously heartbreaking letter to his alumni magazine, boomingly hopeless cleric Father Rank, loyal servant Ali, and Yusef, the unfailingly polite, needy minor-league criminal who might just be playing Scobie like a fiddle. And then there are the two women in Scobie's life: his wife Louise, whose passive-aggression he meets with false declarations of love, desperate to protect her from harm, and the waif-like Helen, widowed at 19 and made transcendent by suffering.

Greene writes with such elegance, economy and lucidity of both image and idea that it takes the breath away: there are passages here as inspired as anything I've ever read. He crystallised the nature of memory in 56 words:

He couldn’t tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined–the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

the colonial experience in a sentence or two:

For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of patients … He watched their temperature charts every one–the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden stand for principle after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheerful and respectful they put up with any insult.

and the nature of its protagonist through a description of a room containing nothing of his own, all within the first five pages. Near the end, as the book tumbles into despair, he describes a dead body lying "coiled and unimportant like a broken watchspring under a pile of empty petrol drums", a brilliantly ugly, inglorious, ignominious end. The coup de grâce is the six-page coda, laced with a surprise and irony so bitter you can barely stomach it; the antidote: Greene's Catholic catharsis, unsentimental, clear-eyed, and perfectly-weighted.

Your ability to embrace the book entirely may depend on your interest in the specificities of Catholic faith – I'm Catholic and found its intense, tortured theological relentlessness a little exhausting towards the end – but it's more than just a vehicle for Greene's religious interrogations, it's an insightful character study that engenders empathy, a love story and a colonial policier – the author certainly knew enough from his 'entertainments' not to let his audiences get bored.

For just three pages, The Heart of the Matter is also this gentle, playful thing, as Scobie soothes an ailing child by turning a po-faced missionary memoir, A Bishop Among the Bantus, into a story of murderous pirates being staked out by A. Bishop: Arthur Bishop. Perhaps he's doing it to impress or appeal to Helen, but like the killer in Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing and as FDR says about Al Smith in a crucial peroration, it is when we see how someone is received by a child that we might glimpse their inherent goodness.



That scene is one of the highlights of the superb 1953 film adaptation of The Heart of the Matter, with Trevor Howard perfectly cast as Scobie, and one that's always meant a lot to me. (4)

***

FILMS



The Cabin in the Cotton (Michael Curtiz, 1932) – This could have been a decent movie if it had been made a year later, given a sensible leading man, and had got off the bloody fence. It’s the story of Marvin Blake (Richard Barthelmess), a penniless ‘peckerwood’ (cotton picker) who’s put through school by stereotypical Southern planter Berton Churchill (white suit, white hair, big belly, booming voice), and finds himself caught between his employer and his persecuted people. This being a Hollywood studio film of the 1930s, those two realms are represented by two women: flirtatious peroxided floozy Bette Davis – the boss’s daughter – and good-but-unglamorous girl, Dorothy Jordan.

Warner Bros were clearly so worried not to threaten their box office receipts, though, that the film refuses to come out on the side of the workers (or for that matter the bosses), instead getting splinters from all its fence-sitting, as we learn that the planters “take the risk” while the pickers – several of whom are thieves and arsonists – are simply disgusted at Barthelmess for “tryna be somebody”, rather than calling him out for selling out. The eleventh-hour machinations required to stress that Churchill was acting illegally, rather than exploiting the inequalities of capitalism, are also frankly embarrassing. A year later, when voters had come out overwhelmingly for the New Deal, Warner gave the public what it wanted, with left-leaning state-of-the-nation classics like Heroes for Sale (also starring Barthelmess), Wild Boys of the Road and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. Cabin in the Cotton affords Barthelmess one uncompromising spiel in his character’s climactic summation, but even that is followed by a right of reply.

I’m a fan of Barthelmess, but he is woefully miscast here – he was fresh-faced enough to play the boy next door in Way Down East and Tol’able David, but this is more than a decade later! You can’t play a clean-cut young man trying to find your place in the world when you’re 37. It was partly the star’s desire to keep playing these roles that led to his botched face lift in 1930, a time when the cosmetic industry was in its infancy, rendering his face virtually immobile. Though in time he learnt to use that to his advantage, in films like Four Hours to Kill! and Only Angels Have Wings (his great sound role), here he’s borderline hopeless, his mouth a drab smear, his face an expressionless mask.

Jordan, meanwhile, can’t act her way out of a cotton sack, though Davis is great fun in her breakthrough role, playing it broad, saucy and deceptively complex as a pampered Southern belle. Her character is manipulative and selfish, but there’s a vulnerability and an uncertainty there too, beneath the bluster, that anchors it in the realm of the real. She also gets to say one of the best lines of the decade, so perfectly rendered – and easily lampoonable – that it has transcended the movie: “I’d love to kiss ya, but I just washed ma hair.” Henry B. Walthall (like Barthelmess, a D. W. Griffith alumnus) has a nice bit too as an elder statemen, and I quite like the musicality of the film: Clarence Muse singing slave songs as a blind black picker, a jazz ensemble lighting up a planters’ dance as Barthelmess teaches the moneyed bosses how the proles dance.

The script, though, is too simplistic and hedged by timorousness to really score, and the technical limitations of 1932 make its fusing of exteriors and studio footage a little embarrassing (Tarzan, the Ape Man had similar problems with back projection the same year). Cabin in the Cotton is entertaining enough, and worth it for Bette completists and pre-Code nerds (hello, my people), but it’s not actually that, like, good. (2)

***



The LEGO Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017) – The Hellzapoppin' of superhero movies, its anarchic imagination throwing everything from dance numbers to Voldemort to a 'Bruce Wayne is a wanker' gag at us.

The density and hit-rate of its jokes is pretty incredible, as is the conception of Bats (perfectly-voiced by Will Arnett) as a conceited, showboating and commitment-phobic loser whose neuroses prevent him from being very good at his job. It can't quite maintain the momentum of its astonishing opening half-hour ("Yeah, as long as they're best friends"), which even makes the logos funny, but then neither could Hellzapoppin' – and it's just such good fun.

I think LEGO could have made as much money putting out safe, less clever, less original movies. It gives me a bit of faith in the world that they didn't. (3)

See also: I wrote about The LEGO Movie here, which first introduced this ridiculous Batman.

***

LIVE: Jackson Browne at the Royal Albert Hall
Saturday 24 June, 2017



I've listened to Jackson Browne's 1977 live album, Running on Empty hundreds of times over the years – it's one of those records that seems like it's always been there, this monolithic, thrilling thing, full of frailty and pain – so hearing him thundering through its title track, the years falling off him, was one of those privileges of my current life that doesn't feel quite real.

The show gets its character from the good-humoured, silver-haired Browne – weathering a deluge of requests, sticking to his setlist while affably pretending not to – leading a tight, subtly virtuosic band who are each given a chance to shine on expanded versions of numbers from across his five-decade career.

Perhaps only a half-dozen of these songs are truly great – 'The Pretender', its sense of vision withstanding its forced rhyming, delivered with a timely urgency; 'Before the Deluge', another piano-led '70s triumph; 'These Days', which becomes more poignant with each passing year – but the others are often played with conviction, panache and thoughtfulness, the intelligent readings tightly-honed in soundcheck, but with room for inspiration. He does a moving ‘Call It a Loan’, homages four inspirations with well-chosen covers – including Carlos Varela’s ‘Walls and Doors’ and Randy Newman’s ‘A Piece of the Pie’, which namechecks Brown himself – and repeatedly exposes his sensitive side with the likes of ‘In the Shape of a Heart’ and ‘For a Dancer’ (another classic, written for a fallen friend, and performed beautifully at the piano), but he finds time too to rock out: and several of the rock-outs really work live, with fantastic guitar solos from Val McCallum, and fine pedal steel work by Greg Leisz.

The star’s voice is remarkably good, a little huskier and deeper, Browne a little shorter of breath than he used to be, but only a little, and that new sound – allied to his understanding of his talent – lends his more backwards-looking, weary songs a mighty pathos. Now and then he can only plod, trapped by a perfunctory number some way beneath his best, but most of the show is admirably adventurous and accomplished, and when he dips into his finest work, and races into that unmistakable ‘Running on Empty’ riff, it's very special indeed. It's that guy off the record I've always loved. He's still around, he's standing right there, and somehow I'm in the crowd. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Bruce Dern, The Fire Next Time, and Fritz Lang being silly – Reviews #269

A mini-update, with a book and two movies.

BOOK



The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1962) – This masterly work by James Baldwin, the poet-philosopher of the Civil Rights Movement, may seem superficially dated – written at a time when blacks couldn’t vote – but remains enduringly relevant, articulating the lot of the oppressed black American, but also the white, trapped in a prison of his own making, the shortcomings of his life and society twisted into antipathy against those who have nothing.

Across two letters – one to his nephew and namesake, the other to us – he talks passionately and persuasively of the beauty and strength of the black population, in contrast with the spiritually bankrupt, artistically sexless, self-denying, self-deluding dominant race, drowning in hypocrisy and given its moral authority by a Christianity whose white God has abandoned his black congregation. He rails at the supposed beneficence of RFK – lauded as a civil rights champion – and his ilk, asking why a negro can become President 'in 40 years' time'. Why only one man, exalted above others? Why should they be grateful for this endorsement? And why 40 years? Why not now?



Baldwin rejects, though, Elijah Muhammad’s call for vengeance, demanding instead that blacks and whites re-examine their roles, their relationships and even their lives, in order to forge an understanding, and so an America fit for both. He is writing, really, for a white audience: trying to articulate for them what it means to be black, to have been brought to the country in chains, to still bear the name of those who owned your ancestors, to be without a voice and a vote, feared and loathed and dared to ascend above your allotted station, so they lock you up or beat you down. It’s heartbreaking to read Baldwin’s contention that the state can hardly lock up all African-Americans, and then consider the spiralling prison population documented in the recent film inspired by the author’s work, I Am Not Your Negro.

The Fire Next Time is obligatory reading not just because of its prescience, but due to its far-reaching implications. Its thoughts on the legitimacy of experience, the ‘innocence’ of malignant privilege and the damage that we do by taking refuge in – and taking our cues from – a toxic status quo are messages not just for the far-right, who won’t read them, but for those well-intentioned people who speak when they should be listening (I count myself among them).

Interestingly – and crucially – though, the book isn’t purely polemical. It’s also personal, its conclusions elucidated through memoir: passages recalling Baldwin’s early years caught between the streets and the church, and addressing his relationship with his younger brother – an extraordinarily touching passage alighting upon universal experience. Man can Baldwin write. But more than that, he can think. (4)

***

FILMS



*MINOR SPOILERS*
CINEMA: The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978) – This chilly, existential ‘70s car film was the inspiration for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, being the story of a nameless, impassive getaway driver (Ryan O’Neal), whose style, arrogance and motoring chutzpah make him a Person of Interest to both criminals and cops. You can see the influence of Melville’s sleek, sad Le Samourai, of Bullitt – which had ignited America’s interest in car chases (though it isn’t actually very good) – and of Hollywood’s new model crime film: violent, ironic and lacking in conventional heroes, from Charley Varrick to The Silent Partner.

The supporting cast here are wooden and O’Neal himself wasn’t much of an actor (his first line, following a long, wordless opening, serves to instantly puncture the impression), but he brings a certain sad-eyed weariness to a role where an absence of expression is a virtue, and Bruce Dern is excellent as the sardonic, garrulous detective who hates O’Neal’s guts – though when wasn’t he? Not all of its script lands, but it mixes terse philosophy with cynicism and black comedy quite effectively, and Walter Hill’s handling is first-rate. I speculated at first that it had traded fatalism for twists, and wondered whether that was a good thing. On reflection, I think you get the best of both worlds: the unpredictability and entertainment value of a script whose destination is unknown, but also an ending that's far deeper than it first appears: its storyline as circular and eternal as a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.



It’s particularly great to see this on the big screen (as part of Edgar Wright’s season of car pictures at the BFI), which throws you into the breathless, exhilarating, squealing car chases that are its raison d’être. A few years ago, I’d have said that nothing would bore me more, but after Fury Road and – curiously – realising during Tabu just what a difference screen size and environment makes to seeing a motorbike ride, I’m coming around. (3)



See also: Dern is an actor I like more and more. I first came across him in Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, in which he poured delightful levels of scorn upon the idea that Jack Nicholson was becoming a movie star. Then I saw Silent Running (above) as part of the first live Mayo and Kermode show, at Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. Later I tracked down Posse, an ingenious revisionist Western, and saw how his countercultural leanings, and his representation of the promise of the '60s – gone to seed – helped to shape the New Hollywood. He's still immense today, in the likes of Nebraska and The Hateful Eight. Seeing The Driver got me thinking about when Dern wasn't excellent: after all, I'd asked the question. Well, he's cut adrift – hackneyed and toothily irrelevant –in Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot, and conspicuously dreadful in Joe Dante's The 'burbs. I wouldn't advise starting there.

***



CINEMA: Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921) – This Fritz Lang silent, based on an old German folk song and recently fully restored by the Murnau Foundation, is certainly an experience. The first 20 minutes is unbelievably boring and stilted, as two young lovers encounter Death (Bernhard Goetzke) – who's just stuck a massive wall up around his domain, like a less objectionable Donald Trump – and we encounter primitive direction, bad acting and dozens of wordy intertitles. If you thought talkies were talky, you should try silents.

Then Lang remembers he's a film director, jarring us out of our stupor by turning a beer glass into an hour-glass, before – from nowhere and nothing – creating one of the most moving moments of his whole career, as grieving fiancée Lil Dagover tries to clutch the spirit of her lost love (Walter Janssen), only for it to pass right through her. Having failed, she next turns to poison, hoping to join him in the afterlife. Instead, the gate opens, she ascends the steps and she meets the reaper, who amidst the burning candles that are human lives, offers her three chances to save her lover's life – all she must do is outwit Death once. The film is in six chapters (Lang clearly ripping off Tarantino, like everyone does), and these fantasy sequences form 3-5, with Dagover trying each time to save Janssen from death. Or should that be 'Death'?



The first, in Egypt, is a sort of Arabian Nights pastiche (but must be set more recently, as Janssen has a gun) – and it's lively enough, with some suitably grand sets. The second, set in Italy around the masked balls of carnival (prefiguring >Black Orpheus, which relocated the Orpheus myth to the Rio Carnival), is a little melodramatic and predictable, but easily the best of the three: compellingly told, with Lang's visual imagination augmenting the story. The third and final episode is just absolute shit, unless you're a fan of trick photography and offensive Japanese stereotypes, as our heroes try to evade a waddling racist caricature who looks like a fat, anthropomorphic mole.



Thankfully that's not the end of it, as Lang drags it back for the final chapter, adroitly and intelligently articulating the film's powerful, humanist message – facilitated by a respectful, even humane Death – while serving up an action climax with more than a hint of Griffith and DeMille (it's tinted red too, as was a similar scene at the end of that classic Kong-for-kids movie, Mighty Joe Young). At their best, both Dagover and Goetze are very persuasive, complicit in a sort of unstoppable melancholy, his weary and hers frenetic. The story is complemented, too, by a fine new score that builds impressively and helps the film to attain an overall coherence, while mirroring its various worlds.

I'm not quite sure how to judge a film that takes so long to spark into life, only to do so with a vivid verve, anticipates The Seventh Seal before tossing away our goodwill with interminable low comedy about the Japanese and their funny ways, and encompasses some of the worst of silent film, then turns out to be uncommonly profound: particularly about mortality, though also about love.

Two-and-a-half stars, I suppose. (That is a joke. But also what I'm giving it.) (2.5)

See also: 'Arabian Nights,' you say? Why yes, I have written about Doug Fairbanks' The Thief of Bagdad (I'd forgotten that it begins with the line "Put a shirt on, man", for which I would like to congratulate myself.

***

Thanks for reading.

Thandie Newton, Russian Revolution, and an evening with Elmer Bernstein – Reviews #268

Revel in my balanced lifestyle, as I review a film, a TV series, a novel, an exhibition and a gig.

FILM



The Mouthpiece (Elliott Nugent and James Flood, 1932) – I have such a soft spot for pre-Code movies, and especially the pungent, abrasive, censor-baiting comedies starring the likes of Lee Tracy (Blessed Event, The Nuisance, Call All Wires!), William Powell (Jewel Robbery, High Pressure) and Warren William (Beauty and the Boss). Though not uniformly, these had a tendency to be extremely funny and cynical, before discovering a latent tenderness that at its best was knitted into the fabric of the film, and at its worst saw the piece unravel into soapy melodramatics. Few, though, were ever as sweet and affecting as this one, in which William’s noble prosecutor reacts to tragedy by reinventing himself as an amoral shyster for the underworld (with a moustache, naturally), only to be changed back by the guileless southern office waif (Sidney Fox) he’s been trying to shag. It’s a little clumsy in places, and mistakes audacity for humour, but it’s saved by the performances.

Fox, a short-lived punchline remembered if at all for her sexual affairs with Universal execs, is hesitant and naïve in a way that might not all be intentional, but works its magic upon you, her innate ethereality, uncompromising morality and unexpected sexual potency convincing us unfailingly that a rich, powerful, overbearing and unapologetically unyielding lawyer would be desperate to sleep with, protect and be forgiven by her. As the lawyer, William dominates as he has to: he’s witty, assured and prepossessing, while allowing self-debasement and self-disgust to bleed into his performance, and he’s supported by the great Aline MacMahon, characteristically brilliant as she turns the somewhat familiar role of the lovelorn, patient secretary into something indelible. In these studio films, MacMahon often gave the impression of having just wandered in from real life: she could have the lightest touch with comedy, and spit out Warner Bros’ snappy zingers, but she was at her best when playing something heavy and truthful and whacked out.

Warren William didn’t star in as many – or as good – tailor-made comic vehicles as Tracy and Powell: his greatest roles were topping the bill in ensemble, state-of-the-nation films like Employees’ Entrance, which bristled with energy, anger and social comment, even if his megalomaniac sex pests powered these movies, and are what you remember of them (indeed, he returned to unrepentantly terrorising virgins in Skyscraper Souls later in 1932). The Mouthpiece is a leaner, slighter and simpler film, which zeroes in on the star, shows him through the eyes of two good women, and allows him an emotional sensitivity that was usually off limits for the pre-Code William. It’s not perfect, but it holds a special place in this cycle of films, and it has several beautiful moments, infused with a sweetness that’s tantalisingly bereft of saccharine or soap.

See also: I read the only existing Warren William biography a couple of years back. He really didn't have a terribly interesting life. For what's it's worth, Powell made a similar film to The Mouthpiece the same year, 1932, the stolid Lawyer Man, which gets a shot in the arm from Joan Blondell's sensitive, erotic performance, but is hampered by for some reason omitting any scenes that take place in a courtroom.

***

TV



"I'm interested in one thing, and only thing only: bent coppers."
Line of Duty: Series 4 (2017) – I wonder if this is the series to which we’ll look back and see that Line of Duty was beginning to go awry*, when a show that traded on an insider feel jettisoned any genuine concessions to realism, and became too daft and melodramatic and big and yet somewhat unconvincingly inter-connected. That’s its overall impact, but this season is packed with memorable characters, so stuffed with incident that it’s jawdropping in the moment, and yet still quietly dominated by Thandie Newton’s performance.

Newton is Roz Huntley, an arrogant, assertive DCI still scrambling to catch up after taking years off to start a family. When she gets the chance to close a serial killing case, she takes it, arresting Michael Farmer (Scott Reid), a learning-disabled loner incapable of riding out the interrogation (as Series 3 dealt with both Operation Yewtree and the Mark Kennedy affair, so this plot-thread appears inspired by another topical case, that of Making a Murderer’s damaged, eager-to-please, patently innocent Brendan Dassey). Enter AC-12, who have a few concerns about the strength of the evidence.

Line of Duty’s central triumvirate – Steve (Martin Compston), Kate (Vicky McClure) and Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) – are fantastic characters, but here they mostly just plod along. Earlier seasons perhaps saddled them with overly soapy subplots, but this time there’s very little character development, beyond the manufacturing of some unconvincing competition between the two junior officers. Things happen to them, but they don’t change.

Despite that, both Compson and Dunbar are excellent, with Hastings’ broiling sense of rectitude cleverly cast into doubt, and Steve’s somewhat squat stoicism – coupled to an impressively realised impetuosity – once more the defining flavour of the series. A mention too for Paul Higgins, memorable as the vituperatively violent Jamie in The Thick of It, whose patronising faux-earnestness pours out in overbearing, over-familiar line readings that might just be brilliant. Certainly his voice becomes a central part of the programme’s atmosphere, its feel and its identity.

Newton is given an exceptionally tricky role, so much of it internalised, so much of her character’s appearance being for the benefit of others, the actress variously asked to mask, contort, unshackle or abruptly unveil her feelings. Sometimes she’s barely allowed to give a performance at all, being asked to keep the audience in a permanent limbo, dropping clues or red herrings instead of inhabiting a role. And yet when it matters, as in that climactic interrogation, in which she suddenly becomes recognisably ‘feminine’ for the first time, she shows why she was an indie darling, Hollywood star and a stellar coup for Jeb Mercurio and co. That level of acting is rare, even in a show as lauded as Line of Duty (and especially compared to fellow guest star Jason Watkins, who has won a BAFTA and an Olivier, but is desperately unpersuasive here).

Series 4 feels like a bit of a dip after three compelling seasons: there are too many scrawny or barely-tied plot threads, its perhaps noble attempts to look at race and sexism come off more like window-dressing – a concession to ‘serious’ television, rather than state-of-the-nation polemicising – and its culprits are obvious in a way that they haven’t been before. But while its total impact is muted by these shortcomings and its sojourn into the incredible, it’s still cracking, addictive TV. Fella. (3)

*like Sherlock's third series, which was great in itself, but had sown within it the seeds of its own destruction

See also: I talked about the first three series here. My statistical survey on BAME characters in Line of Duty being mostly cowards, informers or bent coppers will have to wait, as I've realised that also describes the majority of the white characters.

***

BOOK



Often when the Spectator says something is brilliant, like the free market or Toby Young's new column, they're wrong. They're not wrong here.

A Long Way from Verona from Jane Gardam (1971) – This is such a special book: like Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel (one of my discoveries of this year), its heroine is a brutally honest teenage writer in a vanished England: and an outsider because she isn’t like anyone else. Like Angel, too, it has an innate, fierce unpredictability and a rapturously distinctive voice (ideally utilised in a first person narrative) which, by definition, make it nothing like Angel. Its wartime Yorkshire setting is intrinsic – the story set against the mercilessness and the brutal lottery of war, even on the Home Front – and it crashes into the narrative, but it isn’t a book about war. It’s a book about Jessica Vye and the world she inhabits, ridicules, abhors and attempts to negotiate, with uncertainty and arrogance and perseverance, and a conviction that never shakes, but does latch onto passing whims, and falls prey to her explosive temper. It is fascinating and funny and spectacularly unsentimental, as well as uncategorisable in the best possible way. (4)

***

EXHIBITION


Lenin's lovely manners

Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths (British Library) – I studied Russian history at GCSE, A-level and university (my undergraduate dissertation was on Stalin’s show trials), so I was very excited about the British Library’s exhibition, 100 years on from the revolution. They didn't let me down.

It’s vividly staged – in the space where I saw the Gothicism exhibition in 2014 – with digital screens and photographic lightboxes, all framed in vivid scarlet, enticing you in and guiding you through the story, beginning in a Tsarist Russia of unbelievable inequality, charting the mounting division and discontent, and then exploding into revolution, and the five years of bloodletting that were the Civil War (an oft-overlooked part of the story, dealt with in due detail here). Crucially, Russian Revolution does a formidable job of being a paper-led British Library exhibition without just showing you a lot of books.


The Whites' propaganda was largely rubs. Here's an exception.

There are books, papers and some irresistibly arresting posters, but also dozens of other artefacts – a Red Army cap; a peasant’s cheap, woven shoes; a wooden gun so alarmingly primitive it induces panic; a free gift given away at the Khodynka Field tragedy, the cheap tankard juxtaposed with one of Tsar Nicholas’s own immaculate regal glasses – listening posts, a giant digital map showing the marauding Red Army’s progress during the Civil War, and a climactic screening room, with Shostakovich on the PA and classic propaganda films by Eisenstein (October) and the Vasilievs (Chapaev, Stalin’s favourite on the big screen).


The greatest excuse of all time.

Now and then the exhibition text is a little drab or clunky, or begins discussing events or institutions before defining what they are, but the wealth of material is astonishing, and I got a particular visceral thrill from seeing the handwritten notes by Trotsky and Lenin – the latter applying under a pseudonym, extremely politely, to be a BL reader in 1902 – as well as those propaganda posters in the constructivist style, much homaged or parodied, but still bracingly and instinctively powerful. Like this one:



That constructivism I bum off so much

My main take-aways:

a) my uncontroversial view that the ‘communist’ experiment in Russia was essentially just a disaster (and one which continues to plague socialist causes) doesn’t look like being challenged any time soon

b) the reviled Tsar Nicholas II, later executed for his crimes against the workers, visited the wounded a day after a tragedy... *whistles*

(4)

***

LIVE



The Best of Elmer Bernstein (aka The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and more!)
at the Royal Albert Hall, Sun 18 Jun, 2017

This was such a fantastic show, and it’s been a pleasure to work on too, allowing me the chance to luxuriate in the movie music of the incomparable Elmer Bernstein, who has been a favourite since my teens (I often work to his music, particularly The Man with the Golden Arm, a hypnotic, unrelenting jazz offering that simply changed the way movies were scored), and to chat to the great comedy director, John Landis, who worked with Bernstein on 12 films, and was one of the co-hosts of this concert. The other was Peter Bernstein, Elmer’s son and John’s schoolmate, who shared funny, moving stories about his bold, brilliant, blacklisted father, as well as conducting the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. With Peter on the podium, Landis shamblingly shuffling papers and regaling us with big, well-trodden showbiz tales, and a setlist showcasing Elmer’s pioneering work in everything from epics to comedies, Westerns to romances, and nature documentaries to sweaty, cynical, claustrophobic fag-end noirs, it was cosy, conversational and emotionally overwhelming in turn.

Some of the music was merely pretty and well-played, the show kicking off with a trio of pieces that have no real resonance to me – the theme from the Nat Geo TV show, a suite from The Ten Commandments, and the main title music from the bloated disaster movie, Hawaii, but everything that happened after that was wonderful in one way or another. Bernstein’s rhapsodic homage to/pastiche of classic Hollywood music – evoking the very history of Hollywood and composed for a ‘60s TV show called Hollywood and the Stars – was a revelation, captivating me with its sweeping, Steiner-esque beauty, and was followed by three cast-iron classics. The Man with the Golden Arm rapped and stuttered, its snares and cymbals mirroring the stabbing pain and breathless desperation of addiction (the film’s theme). To Kill a Mockingbird showed Elmer’s innate understanding of cinema, the composer isolating that the story’s raison d’etre is to deal with adult themes from a child’s perspective: the suite, then, for all its tension and frantic menace, is dominated by the music-box cues and elegiac simplicity of his main theme. And The Magnificent Seven, which closed the first half, was an explosion of exuberance: the piece seeming fresh and new all these years, as if heard for the first time. In this setting, one could appreciate not only Bernstein’s instinctive genius, but also his intelligence and craft: the violins leaping up for the final go-round, as the seven ride to the rescue.


I took this picture of the orchestra. It's not very good, is it?

The second half, once more peppered with Peter and Landis’s reminiscences, observations and easy badinage, was a similarly eclectic mixture of unassailable classics and genuine curios. The sleazy but rousing jazz of Walk on the Wild Side was followed by From the Terrace – intended to showcase the ‘romantic’ Bernstein, but a little dull (I know of the film only as an unapologetic Myrna Loy completest) – before a spirited take on the End Title music from ¡Three Amigos!, Landis’s favourite Bernstein score written for him, being that very post-modern thing: a gentle spoof of Elmer Bernstein’s Western scores. After that, we got the director’s favourite Bernstein score of all, a glorious new arrangement of Bernstein’s music for Scorsese’s period drama, The Age of Innocence, followed by a previously unheard – and unused – piece of music written for the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London (“I used Sam Cooke instead – it took a couple of years, but Elmer forgave me,” as Landis remembered), its pained, violent and discordant death-throes wrapped up in the eerie soundscapes we already know and love. And then it finishes as it must, with an exuberant Great Escape suite, rich in delayed gratification, as we hang on and on for that famous "Dah dah, dah dah dah-la-dah" only to find it fully reclaimed from the dire dirge of an England defeat, and reborn as the triumphant, playful, rousing anthem it once was.

That gets the biggest reception of the night, and so Peter steps back on stage to conduct one more: the scintillatingly sordid Sweet Smell of Success, Bernstein's other great jazz score of the '50s. It's a fitting climax to this celebration of a great artist, which gives us everything we could want, aside from Far From Heaven (my absolute favourite Bernstein score), and salutes his creativity without sugar-coating his personality. Elmer is painted as a man who fought endlessly against pigeon-holing, evaded easy categorisation, and was only able to forge the path he did by taking chances, erecting a wall around himself, and coating his brilliance in an impermeable level of arrogant authority. Bernstein wasn't needlessly abrasive like his predecessor and admirer, Bernard Herrmann (Peter recalls his dad once ringing Herrmann to say thank you for recommending him for a commission, to which the older composer said something along the lines of: "If I didn't think you could do it, I wouldn't have said you could. Now go away"), but from Landis's stories he emerges as a necessarily tough cookie, insulated from creative interference by his crusty self-confidence. I sat there thinking that I'm glad he was, because the cinematic landscape would be a much blander, duller place without him.

Then Landis came back on stage to shout "Go home", so we did. (3.5)

See also: I wrote about my favourite Bernstein piece for the Royal Albert Hall blog here.

***

Thanks for reading.

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.

David Ford + Michele Stodart & JP Ruggieri at Islington Assembly Hall

Friday 2 June, 2017


(L-R) JP Ruggieri, David Ford and Michele Stodart.

It took seeing David Ford live to turn me into a fan. That was in 2015 when he played a one-man-band show at Soho’s underground Borderline club, looping his multi-instrumentalism in a sweaty, intense show that revealed the unusual potency of both his performance style and his protest-songwriting. Watching him is like witnessing Tom Waits’ soul trapped in the body of Dermot O’Leary. I haven’t seen Ford since, though I’ve listened to him a lot. His new thing is a three-hour, 30-song ‘roadshow’ tour featuring two support acts, a drummer and himself, accompanying one another throughout all three sets. I found JP Ruggieri’s the least compelling: he’s a fine guitarist whose technical prowess perfectly complemented the later two performances, but his own songs are a little pedestrian, and he’s a pleasant rather than dynamic vocalist. Dynamic, though, is the perfect word to describe Magic Numbers alumnus Michele Stodart, whose magnetic presence, arresting mid-Atlantic twang and slew of singular mannerisms – from singing out of the side of her mouth to marching on the spot like a turbo-charged Jona Lewie – lit up the place. There were real echoes of Janis Joplin in her performance, and comparing someone to perhaps the most mesmeric live performer of all time is not something I do lightly.

At around 9:30, Ford takes centre-stage to play “a lot of new songs and a few old ones”, kicking off with a thrilling take on the sub-Waitsian ‘Let It Burn’ and torturing his fretboard for the benefit of the photographers in the pit. The new songs, from ‘Animal Spirits’ – a forthcoming ‘concept album about macro-economics’ – are a mixed bag, with the sleazy, somewhat platitudinal funk-rock outweighing the thoughtful ballads, and the oldies aren’t all his best, but ‘Pour a Little Poison’ (containing perhaps his signature line, “I’m just a whiny little English boy singing the blues”) is raucous, ‘I Don’t Care What You Call Me’ desperately sad, and ‘Waiting for the Storm’ blessed with an eerie foreshadowing and a weary poignancy. The audience misunderstands his desire to ‘not do an encore’ (meaning that he’ll do the songs without pretending to go home), leading to a delightfully silly bit where we have to stay as quiet as possible while he’s off stage in order to coax another song. He does an exuberant 'My Sharona'* with a full band ("Playing this has been a dream of mine for years"), then comes out – unplanned – for another by himself, as a result of the cacophony, breaking his pledge not to play a song with swearing in it as he blasts out ‘Every Time’, his unexpected, unapologetic, counter-intuitive anthem, which seems conventional in its sound and language, but almost revolutionary in its theme and ideas: that fame isn’t for him, and he doesn’t want your pity, that in order to get it he’d ruin the present and break up his happy life. It gets faster and faster, Ford spitting out the vituperative, sincere, self-justifying words as he cranks up the atmosphere and the angst.



It’s what’s been missing during his enjoyable but faintly pallid set: the singer-songwriter having traded the taciturn mystery of 2015 for a languid, appealing but less explosive approach, which befits the roomy, high-ceilinged venue with its proscenium arch, but perhaps isn’t what David Ford is for. It does, though, mean that we get some of his insights on current affairs: I thought I was bored of people just calling Donald Trump names now, but he really is “a fucking toilet with hair”, so thank you to David for that. I imagine that this show will get better and it better as it progresses, since the band had had just a day and a half to rehearse, but this second date was good enough: occasionally slightly scrappy and rushed, but also affable, great fun and with some truly special moments, thanks to Ford and particularly Stodart. (3.5)

*'My Sharona' by The Knack was a post-punk single by The Knack that got a second wind from its inclusion in the glossy, Hollywoodised but near-iconic Gen X film, Reality Bites. Tarantino had been about to include it in Pulp Fiction, but frustratedly dropped the idea as it no longer seemed fresh.

***

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