The Search For The Good Nazi

I have been watching my way for the umpteenth time through the magisterial World at War (as an aside this reminds me that such compelling yet educational television just would not get made these days) and I am most intrigued by the contributions of that seismic fraud Albert Speer - a high-ranking Nazi who escaped from the Nuremberg trials with his life. It was the enigma of Speer that was brought to mind by recent cinematic encounters with interpretations of two other prominent National Socialists.

The Desert Fox is carried by James Mason's charismatic portrayal of Erwin Rommel, presented to us as an honourable and brilliant military man who came to see that Hitler was leading Germany over a cliff. When one considers that the film was made in the shadow of the War (1951) this is a balanced and generous work. 70/100. 

Nuremberg (2025) has an expert turn from Russell Crowe as the charming but malignant narcissist Hermann Goring. This is top grade acting. Rami Malek's efforts as the psychiatrist who endeavours to know Goring have attracted contrasting reviews (The Guardian is particularly hard on him) but I think he keeps just on the right side of manic. Juristically speaking the Nuremberg trials pose interesting questions for any sentient lawyer, particularly one like me who has always opposed judicial killing in the domestic setting. I still don't know where I stand on war crimes trials and I am grateful that I am not compelled to articulate one way or the other. Another worthy film. 70/100. Watch out as well for a fine subsidiary performance from Leo Woodall.    

Advent 16 Non-Fiction

I love Len Deighton's fictions. He is not, I suppose, canonical in the manner of Le Carre (whose spy fiction I deeply admire) but Deighton has a pace and lack of political pretension that I find enviable. If (and this will never happen I know) I were to teach a course on creative writing I would set my students to read his Game, Set, and Match trilogy as an exemplar for good professional writing.

But today is not about fiction. We are in the non-fiction aisle  of my little library and it is Deighton's excellent account of the Battle of Britain that I want to recommend. Deighton loses none of his stylistic pace and tells the story of an epochal conflict with a commendable freshness. He is not afraid to slay some myths along the way. Fighter is as good as popular history gets. I particularly enjoyed Deighton's pithy evisceration of the reputation of the dreadful Joe Kennedy:

When the election came, Kennedy gave Roosevelt all the support he needed to win. The mystery of his turn-round has never been satisfactorily explained. On the matter of Britain's imminent defeat, Kennedy also changed his mind, but now Britain no longer cared. Robert Vansittart - Halifax's Chief Diplomatic Adviser - wrote, 'Mr Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double-crosser and defeatist. He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope that this war will at least see the elimination of this type.

Now which modern leader does that put you in mind of? Plus ca change .... 

 

Two More Films

Lee is a commendable biopic about the storied female photographer Lee Miller. I wouldn't normally specify the sex of the principal but it is germane in consideration of this film - Miller broke down the barriers placed in her way and produced some of the most arresting images of World War II. In the title role, Kate Winslett gives a compelling performance. Something, however, stops this from being anything more than a good film. Perhaps we are these days too inured to the horrors of the Holocaust but I found myself admiring the workmanship evident in the movie rather than, as I think was intended, being shocked at what Miller (and by extension we the audience) saw. 68/100. 

Lee has modern gloss and a big star. My second subject today is an altogether different kettle of fish. An Honourable Murder is a 1960 British 'B' feature but one that has a nice whiff of ambition. It is a reworking of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - the action is shifted to corporate London. It is a concise adaptation, a shorter reworking of a short source. I (immodestly) credit myself with knowing a little about Julius Caesar - it was the first Shakespeare I ever studied even vaguely seriously (O Level 1976!) and a chapter of my thesis is dedicated to it. I did not resent the purloining of the plot and attendant themes (afer all Shakespeare himself liberally stole from Plutarch) and rather enjoyed the entertainment on offer. I located this film thanks to my daily checking of the listings for Talking Pictures TV - a channel that shows some right old dross but also carries gems and curios. 60/100. 

The State Of The Nation

What exactly is the point of Kemi Badenoch? No seriously, what has happened to right of centre politics - we seem to be left with a vast wasteland where once was important ground. Still we can at least take some comfort from the fact that the morally ungrounded Keir Starmer is turning out to be the best Conservative prime minister since that nice Tony Blair.

Enough of such gloom (well actually ther might be some more to come - sorry) because I am on one of my flying inspection visits to Plas Piggy. The sun is shining and the Great Orme smolders in a heat haze in the distance. The wretched flying vermin gulls are nesting on our roof again but that cannot take away the attractiveness of this place.

And last night I watched an interesting film, a Danish/Icelandic speculation on humanity and morality - Godland.  It follows the travails of a Danish pastor tasked with building a new church in the remoteness of South-East Iceland. It is a tale of endurance and obdurance. Three men die, as do two horses. The pastor is a pioneering photographer and the movie is shot in an almost square ratio with rounded corners that mimics his glass-plate photography. A serious film. A good film. Available on iPlayer. 78/100.

The VE Day celebrations last week were moving. I particularly enjoyed how much it all meant to my mother who remembered the sheer joy and relief of that end to war, celebrated in her case as a ten-year-old in Gloucester. That generation who lived through WWII have been the guiding influence on my generation and as we lose them we need to reflect on our own actions upon those growing-up behind us. Are we, the baby-boomers, as wise an influence as our own parents have been? Such thoughts can cast a pall over my day so I have risen from my desk and looked out once again over the sun-dappled sea. I may even have a third cup of damned fine coffee. Life's been good to me so far.

 

Advent 20

Volume 20 (Sars to Sorc): Scheldt.

The River Scheldt rises in northern France then meanders for two-hundred -and-seventy miles through Belgium towards Antwerp before entering the North Sea in southern Netherlands.

It was the site of a notable five week battle in October/November 1944, Allied victory at which freed Antwerp to be used as a port to supply the forces forcing their way toward Germany. The battle therefore made up some of the ground lost by the Allies as a result of the famed failure at Arnhem (memorialised as the bridge too far). The spearhead at Scheldt was the First Canadian Army under the leadership of Guy Simonds, a hard leader who was thought by Montgomery to be the best of the Canadian soldiery. The role of the Canadians in World War II deserves to be greater emphasised, alongside those of other colonial forces. I attach the modern Canadian flag, the Canadian red ensign (bearing the Union flag in one quadrant) having been abandoned (entirely appropriately) in the mid sixties. I note that there is some agitation for Australia to take a similar step - this gets reported by the dreg elements of the  British press as somehow bigoted. Bollocks - they can have any flag they choose, having more than earned it.   

The Method, The Music, And The War-Cry

Sit down you're rocking the boat. A favourite song from an interesting musical. The film adaptation of Guys and Dolls is not from the very front rank of Hollywood musicals (think, Singin' in the Rain, and Seven Brides) but it is nonetheless good stuff and it includes Marlon Brando's only singing performance. By all accounts Frank Sinatra coveted the Sky Masterson role that went to Brando. As it happens Sinatra had to settle for being an arresting Nathan Detroit while Brando brought the method to his Masterson - with conspicuous success. The camera loves him. 67/100. 

And on to the promised war-cry, or more accuarately battle signal. Tora!Tora!Tora! takes its title from the final coded signal for the Japanese fleet to launch its attack on Pearl Harbour. I'm a sucker for big war movies but this one poses a problem. It operates more as drama-documentary than as drama. Unless you are fascinated by the politico-military machinations of WW2 (as I freely confess I am), you will be confounded by the stilted dialogue and the lack of personal threat. The film does at least try to tackle both the American and Japanese perspectives but nowherer near as well as Clint Eastwood's underrated, Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, two fims released together as companion pieces. Tora!Tora!Tora is worthy but unexciting. 59/100. 

Quotable Stuff

In my eclectic reading over the past week there has been a surfeit of stuff that had me thinking, yes he's got a point there, possibly wrong but there's an arguable point to it.

First up is my favourite member of the commentariat, Rod Liddle, Milwall fan and provocateur. In this week's Spectator on the topic of the lockdown (of which he is broadly a supporter):

The notion that we might end up kindlier, greener, gentler as a consequence of our brush with this ineffectual Armageddon was always horribly misplaced. The only lasting impact will be that reform of the cumbersome and often fantastically inept National Health Service will be off the cards in perpetuity and instead we will probably still be forced to kneel down before it every Thursday evening to give praise, clutching a used face mask in lieu of a rosary.

Next, my favourite denigrator of all things Bagehot whose lucid vitriol when it comes to my old mate Walter has even me thinking again. This, from his one hundred and forty page rant against Bagehot The Case of Walter Bagehot, is C.H. Sisson:

The central object of Bagehot's writing - and it is a destructive one - was to give exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre, and to remove whatever social and intellectual impediments stood in the way of it. Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness, have to give way to the provisional and divisive incitements of gain. In the end one is left contemplating numbers over a great void. 

Finally from Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen, the arrestingly crafted summary of Guy Crouchback's private desolation occasioned by the entry of Russia into the war:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved.

I am not, of course, at all sure where I am going with all of this but I take mild comfort in the fact I am in my inefficient way still trying to get somewhere.  

The Wisdom Of Others

There is a sense of great abundance in Shakespeare's plays - so much so, indeed, that in every generation there are interpreters who cut and simplify, unable to cope with the wealth of ideas and experiences in the plays, or supposing their audiences incapable of doing so. I believe, on the contrary, that abundance is a great strength of Shakespeare's plays, that they are designed deliberately to expand the mind - to generate a sense of concentrated vigorous life in emotions and ideas, to promote as multiple an awareness as possible of differing facets of a story; and that this aim, already discernible in Shakespeare's earliest work, is at the core of his development, and of his power and distinctiveness as an artist. (Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity)

This hits the nail so squarely on the head that I won't expand upon it save to say that when I read it I thought I ought to share it with you.

"I believe that the conditions of the twenty years which precede a man's birth set the pattern of his early thinking, and leave a permanent mark upon him" Joel Thursfield quoted in Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare)

Jones goes on to expand upon his theory that Shakespeare is thereby shaped by the middle years of the sixteenth century. For my part I am taken by Thursfield's position and am struck just how true this is of my own generation. Born in the early sixties, the dominant factor in setting the patterns of our thinking was World War II. There is an interesting piece to be written about the exercise of this factor upon the gnarly issue of Brexit. Perhaps another day.