On Being English August 12, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, British Film , 7 commentsTen films that define my England…
- Kes- I identified heavily with Ken Loach’s devastatingly accurate portrait of working class life in 1960’s Yorkshire, despite coming from the ‘wrong’ side of the Pennines, and my working class travails slightly - only slightly mind - less dour, less bleak than that of Billy Casper’s. I recognised the outsider in him, the boy that desperately wanted out from what fate - and his accident of birth - decreed that he would be. The novel was beautifully recreated, almost chapter for chapter by Loach; I can still feel that blast of morning cold, of wanting to snuggle beneath the sheets but knowing that I’d have to go to school. And it was bloody cross country day…
- Billy Liar - Bradford Locarno, where Billy Fisher meets his romantic Waterloo was a carbon copy for Bolton Palais, where I met a few of mine. I was Fisher, the day dreamer, longing for a better life, terrified of reaching for it, machine gunning my enemies, winning fair hand…all from the safety of my own desk. Tom Courtney is magnificent, and magnificently heart breaking.
- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning- Salford’s Albert Finney gave me a hero, though Arthur Seaton was Nottingham based and therefore a world away. I knew my future and Arthur’s/Albert’s were inextricably linked, so I took copious notes. My route, however, deviated from the factory and the weekend piss up. There but for the grace of God…
- A Hard Day’s Night- I didn’t become a Beatles fan until after they broke up, but Dick Lester’s seminal pop flick stuck a note right away. It looked like an England I recognised; black and white, slightly bonkers and with old people that were ‘very clean’.
- A Canterbury Tale- on the face of it, Powell and Pressburger’s fable of wartime Kent would have little to offer this Lancastrian, but their story of England, of what ‘we’ were fighting for strikes a chord. Though its largely middle-class cast can offer me little to empathise with, ironically it’s the American working class character of ‘Bob Sweet’ that gets the message across best. This place, this way of life, is worth fighting - and dying - for.
- Hobson’s Choice- trust a Yorkshireman to put Salford on the map; David Lean’s film from Harold Brighouse’s popular play shows that Lancashire woman was a force to be reckoned with, more than a match for Charles Laughton. Brenda De Banzie epitomised my grandmother, a fearsome woman whose first husband was killed in a colliery accident leaving her with two small boys. She solved this minor problem by telling the man who was to be my grandfather, and who she barely knew, that he was to be her next husband (and step lively!)
- Clockwise- There’s something so incredibly charming, and English, about Michael Frayn’s tale of theft, adultery (near peadophilia it could be said), mugging, assault and the inequities of the British class system. It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand could almost be this Englishman’s motto.
- Oh, Mr Porter!- Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt - I mean, does it get any more English than that?
- The Man in The White Suit- …well yes, it probably does. Birnley’s was a an almost exact replica of the cotton mill at which many members of the clan Hodson worked. Alexander Mackendrick’s wonderful film of rampant capital, rampant technology at odds with British labour - indeed at odds with Britain - was slightly ahead of its time. Alec Guinness, largely without the aid of his ubiquitous makeup box, manages a hero that is a work of tragi-comic genius.
- Carry on Camping- English humour at its nudge-nudge, wink-wink, best. The fact that it was filmed during a cold winter and everybody is bloody freezing only adds to its sense of national identity. Eric Rogers music, BTW, is as indentifiably English as that of Edward Elgar.
Welles…Farrago
Posted by John Hodson in : Books - News and Reviews , 1 comment so farFrom France.
Comforting to note that little has changed since I departed these shores all of two weeks ago; as Roger Waters plaintively wrote ’…and the Jews kill the Arabs and the Arabs kill the hostages and that is the news…’
Plus ça change (is it indeed any wonder that the monkey’s confused?)
Still, I managed to fulfill most of my holiday pledges (spend too much, eat and drink too much; the usual thoroughly reprehensible yet somehow totally satisfying combination of excess and sloath), save one - I couldn’t manoeuvre myself into a position where I asked a waiter for ‘huit huitres pour huit a huit heures’, which would have amused no-one (certainly not the insouciant maitre d’ at that snotty nosed caff in La Rochelle) save this bear of very little brain. Maybe next year.
And I read at my usual ferocious holiday pace, failing to pace myself adequately, so that I finished all the tomes with days to spare, thus having to dip into Mrs H’s bag ‘o books. Who knew that Ian Rankin could prove to be the ideal throwaway holiday pulp read? Jebus, Rebus… Murder, Edinburgh style, with a portly middle-aged compulsive obsessive, the proponent of a line in off colour (half) wit, as the hero. Yum.
However, I can’t tell you (though I will) how much I enjoyed Simon Callow’s quite superb second volume on Orson Welles Hello Americans; it was everything a good biography should be; meticulously researched, beautifully written, a book that exploded much of the mythos surrounding the life and times of an artistic genius. Welles paradox was that he spent much of his life in the full glare of the media spotlight, yet, most sum the man up in a handful of oft repeated cliches - misunderstood, shafted by the system, destroyed by the Hollywood machine, on and on.
The picture Callow paints is of an artist whose films were largely mangled by hands other than his own, but who seemed to be the author of their, well, if not destruction, their mutilation by talents less than diligent to preserve the finished product as envisioned by their progenitor. Callow presents his evidence based on meticulously preserved Welles archives, interviews and the works of friends, colleagues and scholars, who, down the decades have tried to unravel the Gordian Knot that was the driving force behind this visionary of radio, film and theatre.
It’s a superb piece of work, making no judgments on Welles private life, other than as it informed him as an artist, examining his professional relationships, trying to make sense of the nonsensical, and offering an informed critique of both his films and of Welles the actor - as with Laughton, Callow, is not afraid to hand out the brickbats alongside the bouquets. I can’t wait for Volume Three; I only hope - like Callow’s publisher no doubt - I don’t have to wait as long as I did for Volume Two.
What can I say though, about Maureen O’Hara’s autobiography ‘Tis Herself other than, when set alongside Hello Americans, it’s the almost perfect antithesis. Badly written, self-seeking, gossipy tripe, it only serves as a reminder of just how few really fine films Ms O’Hara made. From the opening, treacly, chapter - in which our five-years-old heroine is told by a gypsy that she will find fame and fortune (no fair guessing when the child belongs to one of the best known, and best well heeled families in Dublin) - it’s written in the style of a particularly trite film script (and again, little surprise when it was ghost-written by Hollywood scriptwriter John Nicoletti).
The self-styled feisty, charming, ‘Oirish beauty uses this as a device to end most chapters with ‘….but the gypsy wasn’t done with me yet’ rather after the fashion of Alan Partridge and his ‘..but, of course, I had the last laugh.’
I saw it coming, but as part of a circle that included John Wayne and John Ford I was hoping to add to my knowledge of both. There was, sadly, nothing about the Duke that I didn’t already know, but as for Pappy she paints a very strange picture indeed. For starters she publishes love letters that Pappy sent to her in the run up to filming The Quiet Man; they seem to be written by a man besotted with O’Hara, but ‘herself’ rather sweetly rationalises them as a great director living the part of Sean Thornton. Ford, she implies, was formulating the script and goes into some sort of ‘method scriptwriting’.
She also details some of the nastier aspects of Pappy’s personality and I find it hard to reconcile this picture of a woman who ‘refused to bow her knee to no man’ (and I won’t go into details of her first two marriages, where it seemed to me that she allowed herself to be particularly badly handled) with the woman who seemed terrified of upsetting Ford (could it have had something to do with the fact that he was the author of what are undoubtedly her finest roles), to the extent that he punched her in the face and got clean away with it? Though O’Hara claimed to love him dear, she does take the opportunity of fingering Ford as the man who destroyed her brother’s Hollywood career (did the old man have such power in ’60s Tinseltown?), and, astonishingly, outs him as a homosexual.
Now I couldn’t give a damn about Pappy’s sexual orientation, but here it’s done in such a prurient, slyly nasty way that it does leave a bitter taste. She also makes the same allegation - ‘cocksucker’ she says was the word that gives him away - about her second husband. Obviously, damning someone homosexual is the worst La O’Hara, proud of Wayne’s assessment of her as ‘one of the boys’, can do. How much credence can be placed on her suspicions? Well, she also says that two stuntmen were killed during the making of Rio Grande, the first I’d ever read of such an incident. Knowing that Ford was absolutely devastated by the death of Fred Kennedy in a stunt that went badly wrong whilst filming The Horse Soldiers, and there are no reports of the old man being similarly badly affected during the making of Rio Grande, I will take it with a large gulp of Guinness.
I managed to finish this farrago, but only as a sense of duty, a little like refusing to walk out a cinema, no matter how poor the picture…