The influence of Coppola, Leone and Scorsese in the first two seasons has given way, in the third one, to that of a quite different film-maker. The clue to the new direction occurs in the shocking moment when Grace is killed at the end of Episode Two - her death is actually occasioned by accident, the bullet is meant for Tommy, but his attempt to push her out of the way, coinciding with John leaping onto the assassin, has the terrible effect of inadvertently bringing her and the killer into line with each other. This is, of course, an explicit homage to the ending of "Chinatown", where the attempt of J.J. Gittes to stop Detective Loach from firing at the tyres of Evelyn's car actually pulls his arm upwards so that his bullet kills her. The tone of Season Three is far more informed by the bleak pessimism of Roman Polanski than by the Italian fire of the three earlier directors, and the shocking nastiness, the utter, pitiless brutality, that surfaces so often in the third season is far more reminiscent of such Polanski films as "Macbeth" or "The Pianist" than it is of the operatic violence of the Godfather films. Humanity - always precarious in "Peaky Blinders" - is all but eroded by the final episode, with Tommy left alone and hated by the others in his family. Throughout, there have been hints of the family coming apart, unravelling from within, and the sheer coldness of the Season Three episodes has been most disturbing. The only measure of hope, indeed, is in (of all things) the character of the feral, brutish Arthur, who, in the truly masterful performance of Paul Anderson, has slowly emerged as a hurting human being desperately trying to be a better man than he is, but forever being dragged back into the pit - he is a damned soul, and, without his saying much at all, it's clear that he knows it. Where the series will go from here is hard to guess at - how much further into the inner circles of Hell will the Shelbys go, and is Steven Knight, whose plotting of the third series has not been as rigorous as previously, able to show us?
Reviews
19 Reviews
Did he fire six shots, or was it only five?
4 February 2016
Russell Lewis once more demonstrates that he's seen a lot of films and read a lot of books, which some may think doesn't need to be made clear to us yet again. This time, the central situation is taken directly from Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon", with a bank stick-up going wrong and the staff and customers (who include the soon-to-be- promoted Morse) being taken hostage whilst police marksmen hover outside and a media circus starts to brew. During his desperate hours as a hostage, Morse manages to find new evidence for the case he's working on (actually on bank premises), and solves the case rather cleverly. We then get the second homage to "Dirty Harry" in this brief season, as he bluffs the chief robber into believing his gun is empty. Russell Lewis must really like that film. Still, Morse is the underdog in the scene (unlike Harry Callahan), which gives it a bit of extra edge, and the episode is generally enjoyable. It could be that Lewis intends all his little allusions to form one big allusion, to the habit French film-makers had in the 60s of including "hommages" to other directors and writers they admired. One may murmur, not for the first time, that Jean-Luc Godard has a lot to answer for.
Heard this one before?
1 February 2016
Is it possible for former child actor Russell Lewis to write anything which doesn't contain multiple references to the earlier works of other people? He's forever doing it, not just in "Endeavour", but in his "Lewis" episodes, too. This particular segment is so blatantly pinched from Scott Fitzgerald that even the illiterates at the "Radio Times" noticed it, but it also has a surprise twist at the end which could hardly be more clearly derived from Christopher Priest's "The Prestige" (or, more likely, its 2006 movie version), and here and there can be found stray references to other things, too - a sinister fairground out of 1967's "Torture Garden", dark doings aboard its "Ghost Train" attraction (remember "Brighton Rock"?) and Morse interrupting a performance like Hitchcock's Richard Hannay in "The 39 Steps". Oh, and he gets to quote a famous line from "Citizen Kane" as if he'd just thought of it. It wasn't unenjoyable, by any means - but shouldn't Russell Lewis be inventing his own stories?
Witching half-hour
30 April 2015
Absolutely everybody noticed the influence of "Witchfinder General" on this lively half-hour, and it could hardly be missed. What's surprising is that no-one seems to have mentioned the equally obvious influence of Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible", which has been filmed a couple of times, or Aldous Huxley's book, "The Devils Of Loudun", which was the basis of John Whiting's play "The Devils" and its 1971 movie version directed by Ken Russell. These are not exactly obscure or little- known works, after all! The notion that the tiny village of Little Happens will grow prosperous as a result of a witchcraft trial (it may, we are told with a straight face, even change its name to Much Happens) is taken direct from Huxley. This is not to deny the brilliance of the Pemberton-Shearsmith script, with its characteristic mixture of the absurd (this episode has perhaps the most outrageously silly jokes of the second season) and the terrifying (Shearsmith's admirably serious performance). All the actors, indeed, maintain perfect balance between the two extremes. Incidentally, the very end of the story shows a rather less distinguished influence - that of the "vampire" episode of "Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors".
Literary influences?
30 April 2015
Warning: Spoilers
This was exceptionally well done, very moving and just disturbing enough, with Shearsmith's initially-baffling appearances being finally accounted for at the climax. The acting was uniformly excellent. It's a surprise, though, that so many admirers have praised its originality when it is clearly in the line of certain literary predecessors. Because Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are well-known as horror- movie buffs, people tend only to seek out cinematic references in their work, when there are also literary ones. This story owes an obvious debt to both Ambrose Bierce and Conrad Aiken. The former's famous story about the occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was probably the direct inspiration of Aiken's "Mr. Arcularis", which is the clearest influence on this episode. Remarking this is to take nothing away from Messrs. Pemberton and Shearsmith, who have devised a brilliant series which maintains an extremely high standard.
Like a green beetle...
11 December 2014
A fine series opener, and its excellence makes the travesty of the more recent BBC version of the story (with Mark Williams) seem even worse. Graham Crowden seems, to those who know him best from "Waiting For God", to be unlikely casting for the vile bounder so bloodily murdered, but he throws himself into the role with great gusto and makes a villain loathsome enough to raise the hairs on one's neck. The friendship between Father Brown and his Protestant opposite number is deftly portrayed and there's an alarming portrait of puritanical hypocrisy from John Forgeham as a resentful cuckold. Also in the episode is a young Alun Armstrong, only just recognisable as the village idiot; perhaps the best work, though, comes from Geraldine Moffatt as Forgeham's desperate wife.
Silent witness?
11 December 2014
A very clever Chesterton story is followed fairly closely in this adaptation, although it's mildly irritating that Father Brown's famous remark about dogs ("I always like a dog, so long as he isn't spelt backwards") is slightly altered when Kenneth More comes to say it. More's performance is, in fact, just a little uncertain, there are moments when he seems unsure of his lines, and the segment as a whole gives the impression of being somewhat under-rehearsed. The criticism of British imperialism made explicit in the story - where the Father says that "every imperial police is more like a Russian secret police than we like to think" - is dampened down, and the tone of the adaptation is not as trenchant as it might, to its benefit, have been. The dog behaves impeccably, however.
No fuss about Churchill? Extraordinary.
9 November 2014
The second series of "Peaky Blinders" has also attracted attention and approbation, but there's been little fuss about the most obviously controversial aspect of the show, its characterisation of Winston Churchill. The future hero of 1940 is shown as a ruthless conniver who does not hesitate to plot the murder of a British subject or to use a gangster to do the deed, the subsequent betrayal of the latter being taken for granted. It seems quite astounding that the entire Tory Party has not been up in arms at this outrageous suggestion, not to mention the many other Churchill admirers to be found outside its ranks. Taking "Peaky Blinders" simply as a fiction, it's certainly been gripping in Season Two, the influences of Leone, Coppola and Scorsese remaining strong. Cunningly, Steven Knight has given us a second Michael Corleone figure to make Tommy Shelby seem less derivative of the Pacino prototype - Polly's son (actually called Michael) has joined the family business and, at season's end, seems set to grow in importance. But Season Two has been unsatisfactory, with Grace Burgess returning in mid-series as a barely recognisable travesty of the strong character seen in Season One and the ferocious puritan Campbell becoming a kind of demon-figure with several of the attributes of a Victorian melodrama baddie. The actors do their very best (Sam Neill is again riveting), but the characters have become - handily - a lot less complex. It's indicative of a decline that there have been references to movies a lot less distinguished than the Coppola and Leone epics - "Scarface", "Villain", "Marathon Man" and even - with Arthur's cry of "We're the kings of the world!" - "Titanic". A falling-off, indeed.
Peaky Blinders
(2013–2022)
C'era Una Volta...Birmingham!
29 September 2014
People will keep comparing this BBC series to "Boardwalk Empire" and "The Sopranos", but its lineage goes back well before those two shows. One would have thought the influence of Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola was rather more immediately discernible. The lettering of the credits, coupled with the anachronistic use of modern-day rock music for a series set in 1919, immediately recalls "Gangs Of New York", but that, of course, was conceived partially as an homage to the far superior "Once Upon A Time In America"; and the epic scope of Steven Knight's plot-line, with its archetypal characters, is very much along Leone lines. The family hierarchy of the Peaky Blinders can hardly fail to remind us of the Corleones, with the foul- mouthed, dim-witted oldest brother Arthur serving as a Fredo equivalent to Tommy Shelby's Michael. The notion of setting this operatic gangster saga in post-WW1 Birmingham is a piquant one, but maybe Steven Knight remembers a BBC series of the 1970s called "Gangsters"? That, too, had several different ethnic minorities involved in Brummie criminality. "Peaky Blinders" is, when one considers all the influences on it, perhaps not quite as brilliant as its admirers claim, but it is still pretty riveting. But maybe it should have been just the one series?
Life of Brian
(1979)
Foul
5 August 2014
Whenever I say this film revolted me, people look knowingly, or smugly, or even pityingly at me, and say, ah, it offended your religious beliefs, you thought it blasphemy. No, I say, I don't have any religious beliefs and it was something far worse than blasphemous. It was inhuman. For the record, this film is a blatant and obvious con-trick, and was always meant to be that. By making schoolboy jokes about supposed Christianity, and the clichés of Biblical epic movies, the Monty Python gang could pretend that they were being terribly daring, that they were prepared to risk their reputations by taking on the might of the Church. They did nothing of the sort. The jokes are just stupid, and often very nasty, demeaning to common humanity; they're not in the least satirical or brave or savage. They're also not funny. But, because jokes about religious matters were uncommon in dumb comedies in 1979, the brain-dead idolaters of the team could tell themselves that it was real cutting-edge stuff, and then the Pythons could add to their unmerited lustre by pretending they were somehow "more than merely funny". More than funny? Come off it. I smiled momentarily maybe four times, mostly thanks to the uncredited Spike Milligan, who, in a few seconds of screen-time, was better value than the whole of the rest of the cast. The film reeks of contempt for its own fans; you will find this hilarious, it commands us, because we tell you it is, and you will be grateful that we have condescended to entertain you. It is, in fact, vulgar swill which cheapens us all, and its admirers should be ashamed of themselves.
Blandings
(2013–2014)
Hideous, loathsome and vile...
27 January 2013
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse isn't the easiest writer to adapt for television, granted - still, one wouldn't have expected the BBC, even in its present degraded state, to have authorised so abominable a travesty as this. Mr. Guy Andrews, the so-called writer responsible for these versions, has helpfully added a note to the IMDb's entry so that new potential viewers may at least have some warning of the devastation he has wrought. His characterisation of Blandings Castle as "Dysfunction Junction" should have been warning enough to anyone who has actually read the original stories; he is clearly unfamiliar with Evelyn Waugh's far more accurate summing-up. Waugh said that the gardens of Blandings Castle were "that garden from which we are forever exiled", and the sheer sweetness of Wodehouse's vision is clearly incomprehensible to Andrews. It's not just that he changes the stories so much that they are almost unrecognisable, or even that his new material isn't in the least funny. It's the horrid coarsening of the tales that repels - in the second episode, we even get jokes (lots of them) about excrement, as if this were automatically hilarious. Sir Pelham would never have countenanced such horrors. Nor should we. Oh, and all the actors are either miscast or very bad (when they're not both), Baxter and Beach should swap costumes and the Empress of Blandings is the wrong colour.
No soup, no salt, no Alec Guinness. What's the point?
26 January 2013
Mark Williams is a really good actor, and I do hope he is thinking about changing his agent. If the best his present representative can do for him is to get him regular roles in stuff like this series and the concurrent "Blandings", where he's cast as Beach the butler, then his career might well be doomed, and that would be a shame. Two series at the same time whose only function is to travesty well-loved and distinguished works of twentieth century literature whilst simultaneously boring and enraging us all with gross incompetence and vulgarity would put any actor's working life into disarray. This new "Father Brown" series has been truly baffling as well as dreadful, and I cannot shake the suspicion that no-one connected with it has actually bothered to read any of G.K. Chesterton's stories. The prime movers have all seen the 1954 film starring Alec Guinness, possibly a long time ago, and have purloined freely from it. The setting is now the 1950s, as in the film; Father Brown has to cope with a bumptious policeman named Inspector Valentine, as in the film; and he has a slightly dodgy chum who works as a chauffeur, the part Sidney James played originally - and this new version of the character, elevated to regular-sidekick status, is actually called "Sid". However, the film also had genuine wit, real invention and a feeling both for the essential goodness of the priest and his mission (which is not to solve crimes, but to save souls), and for religious faith. A respect for religion is unknown at today's BBC - if it still existed, we would never have had to endure "QI" or "The Vicar Of Dibley" - and the niceties of philosophy are clearly incomprehensible to the makers of this series. Having left out the all-important character of Flambeau in previous episodes, this season finale (allegedly based on the same story which inspired the Guinness film) introduces him, and traduces the character utterly. This Flambeau, far from being the giant of the stories, is actually shorter than Father Brown is, but what's far worse is that he is presented as a kind of Hannibal Lecter devil figure. There seems no hope of redemption for this gun-waving villain who betrays and tortures his confederate and seemingly comes close to making Father Brown doubt his church. Chesterton's Flambeau, far more interestingly, is a good man gone wrong who is made to know himself by the priest - to know that his crimes do not make him a Robin Hood figure, as he has arrogantly imagined, but will set him on the path to Hell. The inventions of the original story - where Father Brown exchanges sugar for salt at a café, and flings soup at a wall so that his police pursuers will find him before Flambeau can make off with the priceless blue cross - are entirely elided (the Guinness film left these famous scenes out, too) and we are left with only Brown's hat and umbrella by a country stile. The old movie made many changes but did at least come up with some excellent new ideas. This TV show is feeble stuff which shows no understanding or sympathy with Chesterton's ideas. So why bother making it? There's certainly no need to watch it.
Father Who?
17 January 2013
Oh, the hideousness... The Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton are tricky to adapt, but it's hard to imagine them being done much worse than in this new series. The opening credits merely credit Chesterton with "characters" - worrying, but not without honesty, for this opener bears very little resemblance indeed to the actual story, whilst subsequent episodes are new plots with no Chestertonian original at all. Now, the episodes are all set in a never-never-land 1950s, a decade Chesterton never knew (he died in 1936), set the good father down in a tiny English village of infinite picturesqueness (just like Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead) and give him an assortment of sidekicks, including a stage-Irish cook (a role which wastes the brilliant Sorcha Cusack). He also has a nemesis in a strikingly obtuse police inspector named Valentine, this show's version of Lestrade or Japp. Movie buffs will recall an "Inspector Valentine" in the 1954 movie starring Alec Guinness (it was "Valentin", a Frenchman, in two of the stories), and that film updated the period, too, but it had wit, ingenuity and humanity aplenty and knew what Chesterton was writing about. Here, the father's faith is merely a kind of gimmick - Columbo had his raincoat and cigars, Poirot has his absurd moustaches, Banacek kept citing Polish proverbs and Father Brown has God. It's a travesty and an appalling one, amazingly insensitive - and there's no compensation in the way of dialogue or inventiveness. Mark Williams is a good enough actor to have made a fine Father Brown. What a pity he's trapped in this dross.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(2002 TV Movie)
Not quite the worst Sherlock Holmes ever, but definitely a contender.
21 December 2012
This might not be the worst Sherlock Holmes movie in existence - "The Seven Per Cent Solution" was both gross and dull, and it has to be said that Peter Cook's allegedly comic version of "The Hound Of The Baskervilles" in 1978 was truly dreadful, an abysmal abomination for which no excuses can be made, and even Cook himself said as much. Still, this travesty of the great old yarn comes pretty close. The villain of the exercise is the scriptwriter, Allen Cubitt, who seems to have contempt for the story, for its author, and, indeed, for Sherlock Holmes. This Holmes is not only utterly uncharismatic; he's arrogant, cruel, irresponsible and - the final insult - incompetent. Richard Roxburgh, badly miscast, seems bored and is boring. It must be conceded that Watson is not depicted as a buffoon, which is something - indeed Ian Hart might, with a good script, have been one of the great Watsons, alongside James Mason and Colin Blakely - and there are a few nice bits of atmosphere at the start, where the scenery of the Isle Of Man is effectively employed. But that's it. One might wonder, incidentally, if Cubitt has ever actually read the novel - he seems to have based his script more on the 1939 movie with Basil Rathbone, which is far from ideal as a version, but still lots more fun that this. The CGI hound, by the way, was probably inspired by the poster for the 1959 Hammer version. That was much more interesting, too.
Anna Karenina
(I) (2012)
Is life a play? It's certainly not a movie - not this one!
23 September 2012
My instant response to this film was to reflect that it was as well that Ken Russell didn't live to see it, because it might have killed him. Indeed, I now feel marginally better about the horrid excesses of Russell's career after seeing this half-baked, insufferably pretentious, imitation-clever, essentially lifeless, gee-kids-let's-do-the-show-here version of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Joe Wright, having tried and failed to emulate both David Lean and Joseph Losey in "Atonement", now imitates, not just Russell, but Michael Powell, Max Ophuls, Josef Von Sternberg, Stanley Kubrick and even the Cukor film of "My Fair Lady" in order to impose a "stylized" version of the story upon Tom Stoppard's efficient screenplay. Stylized, my eye. A realistic, conventional approach would have been far more suitable. Ah, but then we might not have noticed the director. As it is, we notice him all the time, but we're hardly ever moved, as we should always be. To be fair to Wright, he manages a few brief moments of skill - Vronsky's pausing to spit out a mouthful of cheroot-smoke before kissing a lady's hand is a good, character-defining moment, and Karenin's heartbroken immobility as he overhears his son's declaration of love for Anna (a declaration who noticeably excludes him) is genuinely eloquent. Indeed, the actors are mostly quite effective, and, if placed in a realistic, believable and (above all) consistent context, the film might have been at least satisfactory. As it is, it's a mess.
Murder Most English: A Flaxborough Chronicle: Hopjoy Was Here: Part 2/Lonelyheart 4122: Part 1
(1977)
What has happened to Mr. Hopjoy, the salesman? And why are secret agents so interested in him?
Season 1, Episode 2
19 April 2012
This charming cop show was set in and around Flaxborough, a small, prosperous English town near the coast, the sort of tranquil place, full of solidly respectable citizens, where nothing nasty ever happens - or so you'd think. In fact, the town has a bad tendency to become a sort of British Peyton Place at the slightest opportunity; but nothing that ever happens there can shock the unflappable Inspector Purbright. Faced with the possibility that the missing Mr. Hopjoy - who leaves behind a long trail of unpaid bills, disappointed mistresses and angry husbands - may have been a spy (but for whom?), the Inspector sets to work. Anton Rodgers's Purbright is a terrific character - impeccably polite, but incapable of being fooled (or threatened) by even the most plausible or influential of citizens. An array of fantastical possibilities is suggested in the early stages of the story - only for all of them to be hilariously deflated in Part Two.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
(1965– )
A comedy of unlikely friendship.
30 March 2012
The idea behind this sit-com was a simple one - two elderly men, wholly unlike each other, become friends in old age through meeting accidentally in a park. One is a highly educated but somewhat unworldly retired schoolmaster (Felix Aylmer); the other an uncouth, rough-and-ready, yet good-hearted retired sea-captain (Hugh Griffith). Each is able to solve the other's problems. The show was warm and clever and funny, a hit with critics and viewers alike, but it ran only one short season of six episodes. Decades later, Barry Took, one of the writers, revealed in his autobiography that any plans for future seasons were jettisoned by the behaviour of Hugh Griffith, whose alcoholism made it impossible for him to work in the tight schedules of a TV show.
Bright Young Things
(2003)
A travesty made without any understanding of the original.
27 January 2012
I began to fear that this film would be a travesty of Waugh's superb novel when I saw Stephen Fry doing promotional interviews for it in which he claimed that the reason Waugh's title had been changed was because Waugh had actually wanted to call the book "Bright Young Things" but had been dissuaded by his publisher. Balderdash, of course. Obviously, some ill-read fellow in the film business had expressed the view that the title "Vile Bodies" suggested a horror film - perhaps about a depraved coroner? - rather than a sharp satirical comedy. Still, this annoyingly foolish pretence didn't quite prepare me to expect a film quite as awful as this one actually is. Fry seems to have no understanding of Waugh's novel at all, and even transposes it from the 1920s - the actual era of the "bright young things" - to the 1930s, when the absurdities of the rich, in an era of worldwide economic depression, were considerably less tolerated. The entirely fictitious and unspecified war which breaks out at the end of the book becomes World War II - even though Waugh's novel predates that conflict by nine years! Could it be that Fry didn't actually know this? The relentless cheapening of Waugh's fine satire is made worse by the employment of a large number of the best actors in Britain (not to mention Dan Aykroyd and Stockard Channing from America), most of whom are wasted - none more so than John Mills, in his last movie - and many of whom are encouraged by tyro director Fry to over-act irritatingly. Only Fenella Woolgar and David Tennant seem to have actually read the novel, or anything else by Waugh. The novel is, after more than eighty years, still as sharp as a razor; this film seems as shallow, empty and stupid as its characters.
Actors and Sin
(1952)
Two unrelated short stories by Ben Hecht - "Actor's Blood" and "Concerning A Woman Of Sin".
11 December 2011
There is no apostrophe in the title of this film! Repeat: NO apostrophe! Of course there isn't. That would be illiterate. I have attempted to corrected this elementary error, but the IMDb has informed me that the title is locked. However, any other source - whether it be Halliwell's Film Guide or Leonard Maltin's guide or Richard Corliss's book about Hollywood screenwriters or any of the books about Ben Hecht or Wikipedia - will confirm what I say. And I've seen the film, too.
It's a rather enjoyable movie, although the low budget is obvious. Ben Hecht's directing efforts are all fairly odd, and this is simply a portmanteau movie, telling two short stories instead of one long one. The first story, "Actor's Blood" is dramatic and sentimental and features a fine performance by Edward G. Robinson as a tragic character. The second is raucously comic, although it worked better on the page than it does on the screen. Eddie Albert is pretty funny as an outrageous agent promoting an idiotic novel. Hecht's daughter Jenny plays an annoying child, and is herself annoying.
It's a rather enjoyable movie, although the low budget is obvious. Ben Hecht's directing efforts are all fairly odd, and this is simply a portmanteau movie, telling two short stories instead of one long one. The first story, "Actor's Blood" is dramatic and sentimental and features a fine performance by Edward G. Robinson as a tragic character. The second is raucously comic, although it worked better on the page than it does on the screen. Eddie Albert is pretty funny as an outrageous agent promoting an idiotic novel. Hecht's daughter Jenny plays an annoying child, and is herself annoying.
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