Royal St. David's

Some, possibly most, golf courses can seem an affront to nature - they are imposed on the landscape. However the very best courses foster the illusion that they just happened. Such a course is Royal St. David's in Harlech which I had the great pleasure of playing last week with one of its newest members, my mate Big Willy, latterly of Cavendish Golf Club (another, though lesser, gem) though now beginning a new life in North Wales.

A golf course overlooked by a castle, flanked by a railway, sitting amongst rumpled dune land. Beautiful. Oh and thanks to the miracle of the handicap system, I actually won our match with an improbable par from the bunker on the eighteenth. Wainwright's Bitter in the clubhouse.

What The Old Know But The Young Do Not Guess

Let me do something unusual - I will defer to my betters. The Groupie and I watched the Life and Death of Colonel Blimp at the weekend - you can find it on iPlayer. This is a genuinely great film, all the more admirable for having been produced in the middle of World War II. As great a man as Winston Churchill objected to its premiss. Churchill was wrong. It laments the passing of chivalry. I won't spoil it by divulging the plot but will quote Roger Ebert (that better I was referring to) whose eloquence nails it:

It is said that the child is father to the man. 'Colonel Blimp' makes poetry out of what the old know but the young do not guess. The man contains both the father, and the child.

93/100. Nuff said. And now for something completely different. Ron Howard is a proficient director who would have made a tidy living and earned repute back in the old studio days. If you want to see his handiwork at its best, take Apollo 13, a movie that communicates tension even though we cannot but know the happy ending. But consider also his Inferno - the third instalment of the Dan Brown toshathon. The plot is absurd to the nth degree, just as its precursors, The Da Vinci Code, and Angels and Demons. In Inferno, Howard again has the services of the master actor, Tom Hanks. What they together fashion is a diverting piece of hokum, well-suited to a Sunday afternoon when you don't want to tax the old grey matter too much. It is product rather than art. 59/100.

The Two Funniest Scenes Of All Time

Don't say I never spoil you. I have mentioned both scenes before but I was put in mind of the topic last weekend when the Groupie and I revisited that glorious comedy The Philadelphia Story. To po-faced moderns the sexual politics of this film are no doubt unacceptable, but those with broader minds will see this for what it is - a truly great movie. And the scene from it that I cherish above all others? Virginia Weidler, of course, as the juvenile Dinah Lord plonking herself at the grand piano and singing Lydia the Tattoed Lady - 'On her back is the Battle of Waterloo / Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus too'. Priceless. As for the film itself - 95/100.

'The other scene', I hear you cry. Well it comes from a far coarser age but is equally sde-splitting. It is of course the 'dead box' scene from the first series of Green Wing. Also priceless. 

The Washing Of Dirty Linen

I seem to recall raising this point before, I think in the context of the Robert Redford movie, The Candidate. A good film but one most memorable to me because I have a teenage memory of having watched it with my Dad. My father (an exceptional and wise man) commented that he admired the American ability to wash its national dirty linen in public. Well, the two films under consideration today are about two lots of dirty societal linen, one primarily Irish (though it has wider implications), the other American.

Philomena is, on one level, an unlikely buddy movie - Judi Dench's warm-hearted and genuine Irishwoman and Steve Coogan's cynical and world-weary journalist turned disgraced spin doctor. But at its best, it is so much more than a mixture of sound leading performances and a skilfully tear-jerking script. It is an airing of the catholic church's scandalously dirty linen. I won't spoil the plot for you because I want you to see this film. Suffice to say that for anyone who cannot help getting misty-eyed about Irish catholicism (and I, a convert to that faith, stand guilty on that count) this is essential viewing. 79/100.  

My go-to source of cinematic critical wisdom is the Ebert website which continues the work of the great and now deceased Roger Ebert. In a bizarre twist it can be reassuring on the rare occasions when I find myself disagreeing with the Ebert view. This provides a small measure of validation - I am something more than a purveyor of second-hand postures. Which brings me to a movie that the good people at Ebert find 'dull'. The Report may be dry and highly verbose but it is vital stuff, conveying measured outrage at the shaming use by the CIA of torture. It is held together by a compelling leading performance from Adam Driver, As the posters said, 'Truth Matters'. Though not quite of the same supreme quality as All the President's Men, nevertheless The Report desreves to be mentioned in the same context. 82/100.

A Question Of Media

Our brief topic today is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. A book, a television series, a film. I have reconsidered each of these media recently. The order of my original consumption was television, book, film. All are meritorious, indeed if I was to teach a course on literary adaptation I might take these texts as my basis.

The book is very good, not, I think, le Carre's best - that would be A Perfect Spy to my mind. Mind you my enjoyment of the novel was partially obstructed by having seen the television series and thus knowing who the culprit was in advance. To be precise I had in fact known that outcome the week before the final episode of the television production, thanks to a mean and small-minded hint delivered by Philip Purser in his Sunday Telegraph column the weekend before transmission - what a knob. I recall Purser's name with enmity even at the distance of four decades. 

The television series was (and remains) superb. It hoovered up awards and Alec Guinness as Smiley may just have given his finest performance. It can still be re-watched profitably even if the original suspense is absent.

The film is also well done but it is this version with which I have the greatest difficulty. Perhaps it is the lack of supense, perhaps if I came to it unburdened I would have enjoyed it all the more. But sometimes the longeurs are the thing. So in the novel, so in the television series. The film, admirable as it may be, is too short to do justice to this particular tale. The film - 69/100. 

Gosford Park

Robert Altman is one of my favourite directors - M*A*S*H is a gloriously anarchic, sour and funny film, Nashville is unjustly neglected, and The Player contains a tracking shot that rivals Welles for ingenuity. To that list we must, of course, add Gosford Park - a country house whodunnit that manages to be funny, moving and astringent as it manoeuvres its vast cast (a veritable who's who of British talent, with a sprinkling of Americans) into and out of the focus of its brilliantly utilised wide-screen.

The script is Julian Fellowes' finest hour - never mind his far less challenging but similarly located Downton. But it is Altman's roving camera that steals the show, sometimes focusing on the person who is talking but sometimes calling our attention to a subsidiary conversation. You have to pay attention but this is never a chore in this clever and beautiful piece of cinema. 82/100. 

The Return From Injury Of The Big Fat Pig

September was pretty much a complete write-off so far as BFP's physical fitness was concerned. The injuries I sustained when falling so gracelessly while out running just before I set out for Woburn, most particularly the rib damage, took an age to heal and it is only this week that I have ventured back out onto the mean streets. I have managed three successive days, never tackling anything more than 5k, but being pleasantly surprised by the evidence of the stopwatch. At the Pig's advanced age it is not reasonable to expect to get faster but I am only getting slower by small increments. 

Another obstacle to the Pig has been a reminder of those far-away days before we all ran obsessed in the opposite direction to Covid. I've had a stinking cold - sore throat (lost my voice), feverishness and totally snotted-up. And no, it wasn't Covid - I had a test and everything. And if you want to fight against the after-effects of a cold, well I can thoroughly recommend a short run. Clears the pipes something wonderful. I'm back, large as life and twice as ugly.

Hemingway

I've not long finished reading A Farewell to Arms and have to admit that I fell for the lucid power of Hemingway's prose. The style is sparse but evocative and the product of a profoundly masculine experience. And that is, of course, the problem - even allowing for the strictures of Barthes in The Death of the Author (which properly posits that an author has no sovereignty over his/her words) it is near impossible to read Hemingway without being affected by his acknowledged brutisness. This is particularly so if one has just seen (and if you haven't you really must - it's on iPlayer) Ken Burns' typically magisterial documentary on the writer's life. Hemingway was a bit of a pig, particularly to his women. He loved bull-fighting, big game hunting, and alcohol. None of this makes him acceptable to modern sensitivities. But good old Barthes had a point - put your preconceptions aside and admire the quality of the writing.