In Defence Of Liberal Melodrama

Many years ago I compiled a list of my fifty favourite films. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then but if you have been with me on this journey (the blog I mean) you will have got a flavour of it, most particularly from my Advent calendar a while back.

Today I want to talk about one of the films that was on that list of fifty but didn't make it into the selection of twenty-four. If I were to do the Advent thing again, I suspect that The Best Years of Our lives might make the cut this time. I hadn't re-watched it for an age and I think I was scared to do so in case my memory of it was faulty. I had first seen it as a teenager. This may remain an unfashionable view (rather like my predilection for Steinbeck's fiction) but I think this is more than a very good film - it just creeps into the category of the great.

It is a film about the after-effects of war, about the toll not only on the combatants but on the families they return to. Yes it is melodramatic but there is a moral seriousness underscoring it. There is a scene when the Dana Andrews character punches an America-firster into a shop display case that has modern resonance. Great. Just. 88/100.  

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Just back from a long weekend with former rugby playing mates in Valencia. The ostensible reason for the trip was to mark BH's sixtieth birthday. Great fun. Once were warriors.

what a place to do your shopping

 

Another reason to be cheerful? Well, perhaps not cheerful exactly but certainy full of admiration. George C. Scott famously turned down his Oscar nomination for his performance in Patton, describing the Oscar ceremony as no more than a meat market. The Academy ignored his refusal and awarded him the prize anyway. Meat market or not, they were right. His portrayal of this gigantic but troubling military hero is breathtaking. Another notable aspect of the film is that it brought a first Oscar for another hero of mine, Francis Ford Coppola for his work on the screenplay. It's one of those films that crops up on obscure channels at Christmas - I note that my recording of it was made on 30th December last year. 80/100. It'll soon be Christmas!

 

No, Seriously I've Had Enough

You couldn't make this shit up. Liz Truss (who she ed?) lasted forty-five days as prime minister. Forty-five f***ing days. I haven't even had time to write one of my famous blogs commenting on her performance. In all seriousness, an earnest young man of my acquaintance asked me a couple of weeks ago whether she was already the worst PM in my memory. I said the jury was out. Shows what I know. Come back James Callaghan, all is forgiven.

But it lurches from low comedy to plain farce. Now that immoral grifter (can you have a moral grifter?) Boris Johnson is being seriously talked of as returning to office. Spare me please. My dear old Dad once said to me that for him all elections were single issue elections - the issue was education. I am going to follow his line. God, I despise these venal bastards.

no magic cure

Life goes on. Cheerier news - I have bought myself some new golf clubs - TaylorMade M4 irons. The aim of this project is to recover some of the lost yardage that comes with old age. I took them to the Belfry earlier today for a first smash. The distance is great but the accuracy remains pitiful. Oh well they look lovely. And when I am playing golf I can escape from thinking about politics. Which is nice. 

The Old Wild Men

This particular old wild man hadn't been to a gig for a while. Actually I say that but we did see Maddy Prior last Christmas and before that it must have been Muse at the NIA. Anyway last night was my covid-delayed sixtieth birthday gift from my sister - what you might term arthritic rock - 10cc at the De Montfort Hall in Lecester. Proper venue, proper band.

Only Graham Gouldman (national treasure and a man unscarred by his exposure to rock and roll) of the original line-up remains (the others are all engaged in other fields) but the touring band are tight and virtuosic. Their music remains attractive and full of wit. I fet positively young in this audience. We were all on our feet by the end. Brilliant.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends

OG/BFP has been silent for too long. Sorry about that, those few of you out there who might have noticed, and, I suppose, more pertinently the few of those who give a stuff.

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been? I went down to London to visit the queen. Which is exactly, well nearly, what OG, the Groupie, and DN1 did. We queued for twelve hours to pay our respects to our late monarch. Cold logic fails to explain why I felt compelled to attend the lying in state, but (and I'm sorry if this disappoints some of you) it is something I needed to do. I had always promised myself that when Queen Elizabeth II passed, I would make my small gesture of gratitude for a job well done. Whether I will ever come to feel the same about Charles III is a question I cannot yet answer. I hope so. A good start will be the ostracising from the working family of Prince Andrew and the freezing out of Harry and his knowing duchess. I bow to no man in  my gratitude for their armed service but there are stupidities that cannot be endured. 

To happier themes. I, for the first time in a decade, am free from my self-imposed guilt at not getting on with my thesis. It may be a piece of crap but it is my piece of crap and it is finished and submitted. Examination/humiliation by viva voce awaits. We shall speak of this no more - not sure that's a promise I am up to keeping.

Film as art. We watched Kenneth Branagh's Belfast last weekend. A tender and beautiful piece of cinema, particularly resonant for anyone privileged to have been welcomed into the Irish diaspora. And what a performance from the juvenile lead, Jude Hill. In racing parlance, I hope he trains on. Even if he does, one has to doubt that he will ever be in anything as good again. 91/100. That good. 

Film as art. When I was young and impressionable I thought John Steinbeck a great writer. Modernist snobbery made that an unfashionable view. I hold to it. I read The Grapes of Wrath almost at one sitting on a cross-channel ferry. Until this week I had never viewed John Ford's movie adaptation. It is (not my words but they are apt) a poem of a film. It moves away from Steinbeck's bitter/sweet/harrowing ending (still burned on my memory) in favour of a mildly more optimistic tone, but it is, like its source novel, a thing of artistic majesty. 97/100. That good.

It is a pretty good week when the third best film you see in those seven days is another Ford masterpiece, The Searchers. I treated myself to another screening of this film last night (I am on one of my flying visits to Plas Piggy to turn on the heating). It is not as consistently brilliant as The Grapes of Wrath but that is to compare it to a near-perfect artefact. No, The Searchers is an important piece of americana, one that faces up to the racist difficulty at the heart of Manifest Destiny. And in John Wayne's portrayal of Ethan Edwards, we have one of the most undererated performances in cinema history. 91/100. That good. 

Not quite so good but perfectly watchable was this afternoon's choice - the John Huston 1956 adaptation of Melville's unfilmable Moby Dick. Gregory Peck seems an odd choice to play the demented Ahab but the film has its strengths. It is a tale of toxic masculinity and the obsessions it can spawn. Quite fittingly there is not a word spoken in the film by a woman. Better to read the book but nevertheless 69/100. 

So that's it. The boy is back.   

 

 

  

Sometimes The Best Cure Is To Reach For The Good Stuff

No I don't mean that I have been drinking too much Barolo, though I think I probably have. No what I mean is that high art (and indeed low art but that is not my topic today) can raise you quickly out of the slough of despond.

I don't suffer my black dog days nearly so often these days but I am still taking the pills that have been so important a part of my taming of the illness. Just as you are always an alcoholic (I'm not, before you ask), so you are always a manic depressive. I try to be open about it, without boring the pants off people. My name is David R, and I'm a manic depressive. 

Anyway, I was having one of those black dogs last week and I reached for the good stuff to help bring me out of it. No, not the Barolo. Citizen Kane. I first saw this film as a teenager and my Dad told me that it might just be the greatest film ever made. This made me watch it with interest. Well, whether it is the greatest movie of all time is, of course, impossible to tell - there will always be candidates for that accolade that I haven't seen. But I'll tell you this for nothing - if you haven't seen Citizen Kane yet, you really must get on and do so. There's no excuse - it's available for free on iPlayer.

It is an oddity of personal taste that dictates that for a middling mind like mine, sometimes art of just below the top level is more amenable. It as though the very good stuff is too rich a mixture. Hence I like Titus Andronicus. Hence also, if presssed to nominate my favourite Orson Welles film, I would usually choose Touch of Evil over Kane. But ask me which is the greater artistic achievement and I would unhesitatingly point to Citizen Kane. Watch it, re-watch it. Treat yourself. 98/100.

 

A Dignified Job

My old mate Walter Bagehot got a mention from the BBC Political Correspondent the other day. It was in the context of the constitutional mechanisms that have whirred so efficiently into life in the five days since the death of Queen Elizabeth II. You can say what you like about poor old Britain but it is hard not to agree that we do pomp and ceremony rather well. And that, over a century and a half ago, was the point that good old Walter was making. The role of the monarchy is to be dignified and thereby to underwrite the efficient administrative secret that keeps the country on track. Like Bagehot, I am a constitutional monarchist, probably a tad more romantic in my soul than was Bagehot.

And this is the point - Elizabeth understood her Bagehot and played her role steadfastly and well. As the past few days have liberally confirmed, her subjects largely appreciated the work she did and they wish the new King well as he gradutaes from the longest apprenticship in history. There will be some naysayers who will self-indulgently tout their right to dissent and to behave execrably in the face of a funeral. That is indeed their right but they demean their cause.

Anyway, the old rhythms are the best - the Queen is dead, long live the King