Film(s) You May Have Missed (#14)

Dean Spanley (2008), Venus (2006) and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (1999)

All three films showcase the acting of Peter O'Toole. This should be recommendation enough, but in case it isn’t –

'Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell'  is a TV film recording of the Old Vic production of Keith Waterhouse's stage play and is an almost one-man show with O’Toole playing the very real Spectator journalist and Soho ‘character’ Jeffrey Bernard. It is both hilarious and sad as Bernard, locked in his favourite Soho watering-hole overnight, looks back over his life.

‘Venus’ has O’Toole as an old man who fancies his best friend’s young niece. Looking through the Amazon reviews it becomes apparent that this film upsets people with its depiction of an octogenarian lusting after a young woman. I think it shows an old fool trying to recapture a long-lost emotion and I find it far more disturbing when the likes of wrinkly old Clint Eastwood has his young co-stars swooning over his every macho squint. ‘Venus’ handles the February/December affair with great skill and understanding. Fellow veteran actor Leslie Phillips joins O’Toole along with Jodie Whittaker in her first film.

‘Dean Spanley’ has O’Toole playing a bitter old man in Edwardian England who is growing more distant from his only remaining son until Dean Spanley, played by Sam Neill, enters their lives. Under the influence of fine wine, Spanley reveals that he is the reincarnation of a dog. Don’t ask; just watch and enjoy.

If I could only take one of these three to a desert island then it would have to be ‘Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell’ because O’Toole is even more brilliant than usual.

Random Ad - Shirley Temple and Puffed Wheat (1936)

Reblogged from my newspaper collection blog 

(mhill46-holdthefrontpage.blogspot.co.uk)

Child film-star and future U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia advertises Puffed Wheat in 1936. Makes Doris Day look like Aileen Wuornos.

Book You May Have Missed (#14)

London Belongs To Me by Norman Collins (1945)

 

The story begins a couple of days before Christmas 1938 and end on Christmas day 1940 and tells of the up and downs of the various residents of Mrs Vizzard’s lodging house at 10 Dulcimer Street in south London over those two eventful years.

If you have been reading these book and film posts you will have realised that I particularly like stories set in real locations at specific times and that this book ticks both boxes in a bold font. Although you won’t find Dulcimer Street in an A to Z, it is there, made up of three-story terraces of early Victorian vintage, far less grand than they had been but still respectable,  somewhere between Kennington and Walworth.

The occupants of the house include a newly retired accountant, his wife and daughter; an actress come Mayfair Club cloakroom girl; a podgy postal sorter; a widow and her son who is a garage mechanic by day, petty crook by night and manages to get himself arrested for murder; a clairvoyant of dubious reputation and even a (very) incompetent German spy. It is a mixture of social satire, humour, pathos, tragedy and domestic melodrama told from each and everyone’s point of view along with some bits where the author talks directly to the reader – ‘Before we get on to the Dulcimer Street lot, come up to Central Station, Leeds, for a moment. It won’t take long.’

At the time of the book publication, Norman Collins was in charge of the restarting of BBC Television following  World War II and went on to be involved with the launching of Independent Television in 1955. He wrote 16 books but ‘London Belongs To Me’ is the one for which he is remembered.

I have deliberately not mentioned the Alastair Sim film of 1948 because I want to save that for a separate post. 

Random Ad - What's on at the flicks (1953)

Reblogged from my newspaper collection blog (mhill46-holdthefrontpage.blogspot.co.uk)

                                      Click to Enlarge

If you lived in London in 1953 you had 3 cinema chains to choose from Gaumont, ABC or Odeon with just the one double bill at each.

Film You May Have Missed (#13)

And So To Work (1936 (BFI) or 1934 (IMDb))

                                                                Russell Waters as Mr Glenn

This is a lovely little 20 minute ‘short’ set in a London boarding house and tells the story of Mr Glenn’s struggle to get up, get ready and leave for work one winter’s morning. It doesn’t sound like much of a plot but it’s all in the detail. So much of the action would have been familiar and taken for granted by the 1930’s audiences but, seen today, it’s a glimpse into a long-lost world of rusty razor blades, smoke-filled breakfast rooms and pyjama-clad calisthenics.

The bachelor, Mr Glenn, is played by Russell Waters whose career spanned 1934 to 1981 and included appearances in ‘London Belongs to Me’, ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘The Man in the White Suit’ and ‘The Devil Rides Out’.

The writer and director, Richard Massingham, is mainly remembered, by those few that do, for WWII information films such as ‘Coughs and Sneezes (spread diseases)’.

Unfortunately, I can't find this film available either for sale or online currently.

Book You May Have Missed (#13)

I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond (1990)

Not for the faint-hearted!

About as far as you can get from the British ‘cosy crime’ novels of the Miss Marple variety and still be in England green and pleasant land.

This is the fourth in the Factory series by Derek Raymond and features the mostly 1^st person narrative of the un-named Detective Sergeant who is investigating the death of the prostitute Dora Suarez, the butchering of an 86-year-old woman and the shotgunning of a racketeer. They are connected and it is the D.S.’s job to find out how and why before he gets too obsessed for his own good.

Actually the first 26 pages are not from the D.S.’s point of view but from the killer’s and they are probably the most graphic description of murder you are likely to read outside of a ‘true crime’ book.

He wrote 4 other ‘Factory’ (the nickname of the Police Station the Detective Sergeant works out of) novels – ‘He Died with His Eyes Open’, ‘The Devil's Home on Leave’, ‘How the Dead Live’ and ‘Dead Man Upright’ before his death in 1994.

Derek Raymond’s real name was Robin Cook and his own life story as recounted in his autobiography ‘The Hidden Files’ is as interesting as any fiction and a great deal more so than some.

Film You May have Missed (#12)

Thunder Road (1958)

There was a whole genre of American films in the 1950’s dedicated to cars and particularly hot-rods. With titles like ‘Hot Rod Girl’, ‘Hot Rod Gang’, ‘Dragstrip Girl’, ‘The Cool Hot Rod’ they were cheaply made, badly acted and inevitably had teenagers depicted by 30-year-old actors and directed by 50-year-old West Coast studio men.

Not strictly a hot-rod movie but like them, Thunder Road, has fast cars, an outlaw mentality, bad-boy goodies and lawmen baddies, but, above all, it has Robert Mitchum the Hollywood star who didn’t hide behind studio lawyers when he was caught smoking weed and did his time at the County Farm. Unlike the hot-rod movies, this was bloody good.

Mitchum plays a moonshine runner whose job it is to drive a souped-up Ford filled with illegal booze faster and further than any officer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, but this is a three-way contest with the Mob trying to muscle in on the booze trade.

                                                            Mitchum and real-life son, Jim

Deep down though Mitchum’s character knows there’s no future in Moonshining and tries to convince his younger brother (played by Mitchum’s son Jim) that he’d be better off joining the Army, while fully aware that he himself can never give up the thrill of the chase.

It was based on a story by Robert Mitchum, produced by him and the theme song was both written and performed by him. Bob’s other son, Chris, also had a small, uncredited, part in the film.