Don’t Make Me Laugh

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I was watching one of those modern comedians the other day, one of those modern stand-up politically correct comedians who are really just not that funny at all. They don’t come out with jokes anymore, well, not the kind of jokes that I’m used to, you know, the two blokes go into a pub kind of joke. No, these days a comedian tells you a story; he did this, he did that and some of it might be vaguely humorous.  Michael McIntyre is a comedian in this modern category and to be fair he can be quite funny but I still prefer a straight joke to his story about waking up next to his wife and him having bad breath and then a whole lot of repercussions stemming from that.

To be fair there are some modern comedians I like. People like Jack Dee, Gary Delaney, Milton Jones and Stewart Francis.

When I was a child there used to be a lot of TV shows showing the old silent comedies from the early days of the cinema. There were stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. What they did back in the 1960s with those old silent films was to add a few sound effects which might have actually come from the soundtrack of cartoons like Tom and Jerry. In the rumble tumble world of the Keystone Cops they added the sounds of various people being hit on the head with kitchen pots and pans, things falling from great heights and a commentary with a narrator saying things like ‘Look out Charlie’ just as Chaplin was about to get a pie in the face.

Chaplin: picture from flickr

When I first saw those films as they were meant to be shown with just a piano tinkling away in the background and no sound effects, I have to say I was rather disappointed but of course, audiences back then didn’t have much choice, the tinkling piano was all they had. Few of the stars from those silent film days ever made it into the era of the talkies but a duo who did were Laurel and Hardy.

Charlie Chaplin is one of my personal heroes and one of the greats of the silver screen, perhaps the very first movie genius ever, but here’s a flash; he never ever made me laugh. Smile, yes, but laugh, no. I look at his movies and recognise his story telling power, his movie making magic and much more but no, Charlie never really made me laugh. Laurel and Hardy on the other hand, two movie comedians who are not perhaps as lauded the world over as geniuses but who are perhaps more universally loved, well, now they do make me laugh.

Whenever some catastrophe befell Oliver Hardy, whenever he stood and looked straight at the camera after a cabinet landed on his head or a car accident befell him and he stood up straight amid the shambles of a house exploding around him and Stanley would go into his helpless ‘it wasn’t my fault’ act, that would not only crack me totally up but would leave me helpless with tears of laughter running down my face.

Way back in my school days Monty Python was on TV late on -I think- a Thursday night. It was certainly a week night and it was certainly late as I had a running argument with my Mum about staying up to watch it. The next day at school the talk would be all about the latest episode.

One day for some inexplicable reason I completely forgot about it and in my first lesson the following day one of my schoolmates approached me and said ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ I looked blankly back at him and said something like ‘What are you on about?’ Only to get the disgusted answer ‘Didn’t you watch Monty Python last night?’ and then the lad moved on to someone else. Moments later I heard something again about the Spanish Inquisition and then two boys rolling with laughter. I was totally left out and I didn’t know what to do about it until later when I had an idea.

Monty Python Team

In my next class another friend asked ‘Did you see Monty Python last night?’ and after a brief moment I decided to take something of a chance and answered ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ and the two of us rolled about in laughter and this trend continued throughout the day.

My friends never discovered that I hadn’t actually seen the Spanish Inquisition sketch and in fact I didn’t see it until years later when some digital channel started showing Monty Python repeats. I lied to my friends just because I didn’t want to be left out of some schoolboy banter. Funnily enough, the Spanish Inquisition sketch is one of my favourites.

One of the founder members of Monty Python, John Cleese, followed up Python with a comedy series about a small hotel and its madcap staff. The owner of the hotel was hotelier Basil Fawlty played by Cleese and his wife – played by Prunella Scales and the series was called Fawlty Towers. At the time the show had a very mild reception but these days it is considered a TV classic. Cleese and co-writer Connie Booth who played a hotel maid in the show, made only two short series. Recently Cleese claimed to be making a follow up series though it’s a pity he didn’t do that many years ago as most of his co-stars are either no longer with us, like Andrew Sachs who played the Spanish waiter, or not in a position to perform like poor Prunella Scales, suffering with dementia.

Woody Allen is a different sort of film comedian although in his early days we can see there was clearly a sort of slapstick influence on his work. One of my favourite scenes in his older pictures was from Take the Money and Run where he decides to rob a bank but the bank staff have difficulty reading his note demanding money. His later pictures are warmer and more thoughtful rather than hilarious but they are still funny but in a different way.

Two comedy films that come to mind now are films that I’ve always found absolutely hilarious – Airplane and Police Academy. Both films spawned a series of not quite so funny sequels but the originals still kill me to this day.

I thought I’d finish with a look at a few particular favourites

The Naked Gun

This is one of those laugh out loud comedies that also spawned various sequels and even a TV series. It also rejuvenated the career of actor Leslie Neilson who played the hapless police detective throughout the series.

Some Like it Hot

Some Like it Hot was written by Billy Wilder and his longtime writing partner, IAL Diamond. Wilder also produced and directed the film which starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.

The film itself is something of a farce; musicians Curtis and Lemmon witness a gangland murder in 1920s Chicago and go on the run from mobster George Raft. To escape they join an all girl band dressed as women. The two both fall for singer Sugar Kane played by Monroe and Tony Curtis pretends to be a millionaire in order to pursue her. Curtis takes Sugar on board ‘his’ yacht while the real owner, millionaire Mr Osgood is diverted by Jack Lemmon still in his disguise as a woman.

The film has passed into legend for the problems Marilyn had during production. One scene in which she was required to say ‘It’s me, Sugar’ took 47 takes although another scene which Wilder thought would take three days was shot in 20 minutes.

When Harry Met Sally

This film is a very Woody Allen-esque film although Woody had nothing to do with it. It was written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner and starred Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as the eponymous Harry and Sally. The two make a great film pairing, much more so than Meg and Tom Hanks with whom Meg starred in two other films. It’s about a couple who start out as friends and finally become lovers.

Tootsie

Dustin Hoffman stars as an actor who always goes out on a limb to give the perfect or at least the most authentic performance possible. His big problem is that in doing so he usually makes it hard for everyone else, making shooting go over schedule and over budget. No one wants to hire him so when he tries to help his friend Sandy get a part in a TV soap opera, which she sadly doesn’t get, he decides to masquerade as a woman and try for the part himself. The crazy thing is, he actually gets the part and has to continue to pretend to be a woman even though he finds himself falling for his female co-star.

The idea of men dressing up as women has been used time and time again but Tootsie and Some Like it Hot both work because of the high standard of the writing and the performances. In one of my favourite scenes in Tootsie, Hoffman as actor Michael Dorsey has to kiss the senior doctor but he improvises and does something else. The director isn’t happy but Hoffman apologises. At least he didn’t have to kiss the doctor he thinks but then the doctor grabs him and kisses him anyway. Throw in a little slapstick which wouldn’t be out of place in a Chaplin film and the result is an outstanding film comedy.

I thought I’d finish this slightly oddball and meandering look at comedy with some classic TV comedy from the 1970’s. (I’m tempted to mention MASH here, my all time favourite TV series which was a fabulous mix of comedy and drama. I won’t say any more because a while back I wrote an entire post about the show which you can read by clicking here.) Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker were major TV comedy stars in the late sixties and early seventies when some enterprising producer decided to team the two up for a TV show called The Two Ronnies. Some of the top comedy writers of the day contributed to the show, even some of the Monty Python stars and one of the most famous sketches was the Four Candles sketch.

That’s pretty much it for this short comedy ramble. What makes you laugh?

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The King is Dead: Long Live the King

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As you might have guessed from the title, this week’s theme is Kings. Not quite sure where I’m going to go with that but I thought I’d kick things off with a few words about the guy we’ve known until recently as Prince Charles. Now of course he is King Charles III so before I get to him, I’ll just backtrack and start with the original King Charles.

King Charles

The first King Charles was of course, Charles I. Charles fell out with Parliament over his idea of the divine right of Kings. He was determined to govern without the assent of Parliament and this led to civil war. Charles was defeated and ultimately executed in 1649. One of my favourite historical films was Cromwell in which Alec Guinness gives a wonderful performance as Charles.

Cromwell ruled the country as Lord Protector until his death in 1658. His son took over for a while but was not as successful as his father. Parliament then voted to restore the monarchy and in 1660 Charles II returned to Britain from exile in Europe. Charles, like his father, had his own disputes with Parliament and he too ended up dissolving parliament in 1681, ruling without them until his death in 1685. His last words were apparently to do with his mistress, Nell Gwyn. ‘Do not let poor Nell starve’, he is supposed to have said.

I’m not a great fan of the royals but I’ve always respected Queen Elizabeth. Her quiet dignity and bearing were an inspiration to many. Since her death in 2023 her son Charles has ascended to the throne and I’m happy to see that so far things seem to have continued just as they did before. There was a time when I thought the best way forward for this country was with a president but could a president unite the country in the way that the Queen and her son Charles have done? The Queen has shown herself to be above nationalism, party politics and religion in a way that a president could never do and I hope the new king will continue that tradition.

The Lion King

The Lion King is an animated Disney musical. It was produced in 1994 and was apparently inspired by the Shakespeare play Hamlet. The film features the voices of various well known actors including Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons and even Rowan Atkinson. The story concerns Simba, a lion cub, who is meant to succeed his father as King of the Pride Lands but he is tricked into thinking he is responsible for his father’s death by his uncle who is known as Scar. Scar assumes the leadership when Simba flees into exile.

The film started life as an animated drama but later evolved into a musical and features original songs by Elton John with lyrics by Tim Rice.

The King of Rock and Roll

On the 16th of August 1980, a young woman called Ginger Alden was disturbed when her boyfriend got up from bed to go to the bathroom. It was around 9am but the two had not gone to bed until 6am that morning. Ginger fell back to sleep but when she awoke, sometime after 2pm, her boyfriend was not there. She went to look for him and found him on the floor of the bathroom, dead. His name was Elvis Presley.

Elvis was the man who had transformed popular music and inspired a generation of musicians that came after him. It could be argued that he single handedly created the youth generation because before he came along there was no youth culture, you were either a child or an adult, there was nothing in-between.

Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on January 8th, 1935. The family moved to Memphis when he was 13 and the young Elvis went to school there graduating in June, 1953.

Elvis was a great music fan interested in rockabilly and rhythm and blues as well as southern gospel music. In 1953 and later in 1954, Elvis paid to have a disc made in the recording studios of Sun Records. The owner, Sam Phillips, was on the lookout for a performer who could bring a wider audience to the black music on which he focussed. He invited Presley to work with two musicians, guitarist Scotty Moore and upright bass player Bill Black. One great result of a session the new group had together was a recording of a song called That’s All Right. The record took off after it aired on local radio stations and along with live performances the small group began to take off locally.

In 1955 JD Fontana joined the group as their drummer and also Colonel Tom Parker took over as Presley’s manager, negotiating a recording contract with RCA. Elvis released Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 and it became a number 1 hit.

Presley created the rock n roll explosion but by the late 60s and early 70s he was no longer a driving force in music. Groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had moved the medium forward and Elvis, addicted to prescription drugs, was a bloated shadow of his former self. He died in the bathroom of his home in 1980.

Musical Interlude

When You Are a King.

 

The King of Hollywood.

Clark Gable was born on the 1st of February 1901 in a small town in Ohio. His mother died when he was only 10 months old and he lived with his uncle and aunt on their Pennsylvanian farm until his father remarried in 1903. He got on well with his stepmother who adored him but he left school aged 16 to work in the Firestone tyre company. He left home for good at the age of 21 after a row with his father who ridiculed his desire to become an actor.

His first wife, Josephine Dillon was 14 years older than him but she encouraged him to make the rounds of the film studios. With his second wife Ria, he moved to New York for work in the theatre and after some success was given a screen test by Irving Thalberg at MGM. Thalberg hated the test but even so, Gable was given a part in a western, The Painted Desert. As a result, Gable was given a second screen test which led to a contract at MGM.

His early films were of little note but a great success was Red Dust filmed in 1932 in which he starred with Jean Harlow. Gable played a plantation manager involved with Jean Harlow as a wisecracking prostitute and the film’s success made Gable MGM’s most important leading man.

In 1939 MGM loaned Gable to producer David O Selznick to play the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with The Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s story of the American Civil War. If ever there was a man born to play a part, Gable was born to play Rhett Butler, the dashing southern gentleman who falls for Scarlett O’Hara played, after a much publicised search, by Vivien Leigh.

Gable had a number of marriages, actually five in total, but the one that perhaps meant the most to him was his marriage to Carole Lombard. The two were a great match and married during the filming of Gone With the Wind. They bought a ranch in Encino, California and settled down to a happy life. When the USA entered the war, Lombard offered their services to the Government and the President felt that Gable could best serve the war effort by making patriotic war movies. Lombard went on a tour selling war bonds. On the last leg of her journey, returning to California by air, the aircraft crashed and all aboard were killed. Gable was devastated and not long afterwards volunteered for active service.

David Niven mentions the visits he had in England from Gable in his book Bring on the Empty Horses. His wife once found Clark in the garden of their small cottage, his head in his hands, crying for his dead wife.

Gable survived the war and in 1955 found love again with Kay Williams, marrying for the last time. His last picture was playing the part of a modern day cowboy in The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. Every day he came on set on time and knowing all his lines but usually was kept waiting while Monroe and Clift, both with troubles of their own, were either late or failed to appear.

He died of a heart attack not long after the film was completed. His pregnant wife gave birth to a son after his death.

Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King Jr was an American Baptist minister and was one of the leaders of the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. He led marches and non violent protests for the right to vote, for desegregation and other civil rights. In 1963 he led a march to Washington where he gave his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech.

The head of the FBI considered King a communist sympathiser and a dangerous radical. They spied on his private life and bugged his phones. King won the Nobel peace prize in 1964.

In 1968 he was planning more protests in Washington when he was assassinated.

Sources: Elvis, We Love You Tender by Dee Presley. Clark Gable: In His Own Words compiled by Neil Grant and Wikipedia.

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Sandwiches, Questions and New Technology

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back here in Manchester it was nice to have a few days to myself after Christmas and New Year. One thing I tend to eat a lot of when I’m alone is sandwiches. Yes, I’ve always loved the humble sandwich. As a child I took sandwiches to school, either ham, cheese or corned beef, almost always on white bread. Occasionally I’d have a salmon or salmon paste sandwich but generally salmon or any kind of fish just isn’t my cup of tea.

In a quiet moment during the Christmas holidays, I was skimming through Pinterest and came across a pin for a hot pastrami sandwich. I can’t say I’ve ever had pastrami either on a sandwich or not but the thought of one brings to mind American films where the characters go into a New York delicatessen to eat.

In the film When Harry Met Sally the two main characters, played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, visit a real deli for the film’s most famous scene. It’s the one where Sally shows Harry how easy it is to fake an orgasm by demonstrating it there and then in the deli. According to Wikipedia, the location was actually Katz’s Delicatessen at 205 East Houston Street in Manhattan. Also, just while I’m in the mood for dishing out useless information, the lady in the film who says to the waiter, ‘I’ll have what she’s having‘ when Meg Ryan, who played Sally, had finishing orgasming was actually director Rob Reiner’s mother and the line was suggested by Billy Crystal who played Harry.

Woody Allen’s characters spend a lot of time in New York Delis. In Broadway Danny Rose the film opens up in another actual deli, this time the Carnegie Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue across from the Carnegie Hall, where a bunch of comedians discuss a well known theatrical manager called Danny Rose who has had a sandwich named after him in that very place.

As a great fan of the sandwich, I reckon it would be pretty cool to have a sandwich named after me and in a previous post I put forward for consideration a sandwich of my own creation.

The Ham, Cheese and Coleslaw Higgins Special.

I prefer this with a fresh white bap but it’s equally as good with a brown bun; split and butter it, slap on some thinly sliced honey roast ham, then some grated cheddar and to finish off add a generous portion of coleslaw. Settle down, tune the TV onto your favourite channel, pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy. Give it a try, it’s lovely.

After writing the above I decided to pop to the shops and pick up some pastrami and cheese so I could have a go at making that hot pastrami sandwich I mentioned earlier. On the way out I picked up one of those free supermarket magazines. On the back page there was a question-and-answer article with a celebrity. The celeb in question was Fearne Cotton who I have to say, I’ve never heard of but anyway, here were her questions and I thought I’d have a go at answering them myself

Tell us about your new book.

Well, I don’t have a new book, just an old one, Floating in Space which you buy from Amazon. It’s about a young lad back in 1977 who gets fed up of his boring office job. Why not buy yourself a copy and help me out with that big electric bill I just received?

Best advice on keeping a positive outlook.

Well, I’d have to refer you all to my spiritual mentor Marcus Aurelius. He said that you and I have power over our minds but not external events, so any pain you might feel about any situation is not caused by the situation itself, but by your own thoughts which are under your control. Wow, bet you weren’t expecting philosophical stuff in this post, were you?

And your first novel is coming out in June 2024.

Actually, no it isn’t but if I manage to pull my finger out, I might have a short story collection ready round about then.

Who is left on your celebrity wish list for the Happy Place?

It turns out the Happy Place is a podcast which Fearne runs so if I was having a celeb on my podcast who would I ask? Lewis Hamilton perhaps. I’ve never seen a decent interview with him. Then again, I wouldn’t mind having Oliver Stone on for some serious chit chat about cinema and the JFK assassination.

You’ve got a busy schedule. How do you unwind?

Busy schedule? I don’t think so. I don’t even know what a busy schedule is.

As a vegan, what are your tips for anyone wanting to try a plant based diet?

A plant based diet? Listen, plants are for pots on the windowsill or out in the garden. I have grown chilli peppers before now which are great in a dish like chilli or curry. I’ve even grown small lemon trees from a pip but I’m still waiting for that first lemon. A plant based diet? I don’t think so.

What is your go to dish for those evenings when you’re stuck on what to cook?

Well, chilli and rice is one of my favourite dishes. I tend to start it in the morning in a big pan and then throw it all into the slow cooker. For something quick I usually have a jar of pesto in the fridge so I’ll just cook some pasta, throw in the pesto and then serve with parmesan. Of course, there is always the pastrami sandwich.

What are you most looking forward to in 2024?

Let me see, there’s our trip to Lanzarote in a few weeks. I look forward to the summer when we’ll once again be taking our motorhome over to France but most of all I’ll be looking forward to some warm weather. I really do hate the cold.

New Technology

I think I’ve written before about my brother and how when we were younger, we were always swapping things. My brother, whose name is Colin although I always call him Jimmy (I’m not sure why) still swaps things today, mostly with his friends. He recently came into possession of a television set which he didn’t actually want. It was quite a big TV set, much bigger than mine and so I offered to swap a portable TV set which I knew he had always wanted for this new, bigger TV set. He wanted the smaller portable because it had a built in VHS player and he wanted to play some of his old VHS tapes. Anyway, we did the swap and I plugged in the TV set which seemed to be working well and all seemed ok. Later I decided to set it up properly and to link it to my trusty old DVD recorder.

It’s a long time since I bought that DVD recorder and technology has moved on quite considerably since then. Back then the universal connecting element between TV sets and DVD players and set top boxes and so on was the SCART plug. These days it seems to be something else, the HDMI plug. Anyway, I shifted furniture about as I realised the new bigger TV wouldn’t fit on the old TV stand so I shifted more stuff about and put the TV on an old computer desk but I still struggled to fit the DVD recorder into the same area. Then I realised the new TV didn’t have a SCART socket. It did have an AV socket though but even though I had an AV lead I just couldn’t get the two devices to connect together.

A few years ago, I was in Currys or some other kind of TV technology hardware store and when I told the shop assistant that I wanted a new TV with a DVD player, He told me to forget about that as a DVD player was ‘old technology’. Of course, I could see his point, why buy a DVD when you can download a film or any TV show to your hard drive without a shelf full of discs? Even so, I had to tell the guy to go away because the thing is I actually like old technology, I like DVDs, I like their special features, I like the director’s commentaries and the ‘making of’ documentaries.

That night I ended up flipping through the TV channels because there was nothing much worth watching and to watch one of my DVDs I would have had to put everything back together with my old TV just the way it was before.

Oh well, that’s enough TV for today. Might as well give that hot pastrami sandwich a try.

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2023 and all That

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This is the time of year when I look back at my posts from the previous twelve months and try and work out what was good, what was bad, what was popular and what was a bit of a dud. Looking over at my WordPress stats page I see that this year was an amazing year for me. I had pretty much double the visitors I had last year so my two books, Floating in Space and A Warrior of Words had more exposure than ever before. That sounds good but I can’t say I noticed any corresponding spike in sales which is a pity because that means my chances of ever owning a Ferrari are getting slimmer every week.

On my two main social media channels, WordPress and YouTube, I can click on my stats pages and be presented by all sorts of facts and figures which some bloggers can use to make their channels more and more appealing to their followers. That’s pretty much what I’d like to do but even though I have all that information at my finger tips I’m not sure what to do with it.

Over on YouTube I made a video just after the last lockdown which was basically me wandering about Manchester and blabbing away into my video camera perched on a selfie stick. For some reason It proved quite popular and pulled in a lot of viewers so you might be tempted to think why not do more of those sorts of videos? Well, the thing is, blabbing away to my camera is not really my sort of thing. I like to make a video, choose the best shots, add some stills and then write a voice over, record it and try and match up the visuals to the narration. Should I change everything then to get more viewers? The correct answer is probably yes but as blabbing into the camera is something I’m not really happy with I just tend to stick with my usual way of working.

I should mention here that all the following links to my previous posts should open in a new page.

Over here on WordPress the post that had brought in all my extra readers is a post called Manipulating the Image. It started off about an Instagram glamour model called Olivia Casta who it seems isn’t quite as young as she seems. I spotted an internet article claiming that she was an older model who uses a ‘face app’ to make herself look like a teenager. This led to me looking at various photographic manipulations I’ve heard about including the famous picture of JFK assassin Lee Oswald which, he claimed, was a fake image.

Olivia Casta

I must get 50 or 60 hits on that post every day but I’m not sure why it’s so popular. Perhaps it’s just a really outstanding post (I like to think so anyway) or maybe it’s because it’s linked to a popular young internet model who pops up frequently on Google searches. I could perhaps make more posts about internet glamour models but would that bring serious readers to my blog? Would it bring potential book buyers to me? Probably not. So, stats can be interesting but do they help bloggers and writers like me or do they just tend to confuse us?

Of course, integrity as a writer is important. Do I really care about getting more readers and more likes and better and better stats? Shouldn’t I care more about doing justice to myself as a writer and being true to myself?

Actually, I kind of like getting more readers and more likes. Anyway, time to have a deeper look back to 2023.

Back in January I had got interested in my past family and treated myself to a discounted membership of one of those ancestry sites and I wrote a couple of posts about what was then a new interest for me. I soon found tracing ancestors wasn’t as easy as I had thought. I was also getting ready to jet off to Lanzarote and escape the freezing UK weather and I posted a few Sun Lounger posts about life in Lanzarote.

In February I bought the Richard Burton Diaries. In the first few pages the usual question came up. Why did Burton write them? For eventual publication? Perhaps. Perhaps just like me, he wanted to make a record of what was happening to him. Perhaps again, like me, he just liked writing, he did have ambitions to be a writer. Journaling is good, it enables you to look back, to remember things, to re experience them and it will, hopefully, get one writing when one has few ideas. After a few diary entries I like to think I will be ready, hopefully, to produce some creative writing. That’s my plan anyway. Richard Burton used to take a ‘book bag’ away with him whenever he travelled which has inspired my own Book Bag blog posts.

In Lanzarote I was thinking about Manchester and wrote about Taking The Man out of Manchester. I also rebooted an old post about creating a video in 1992 about Manchester Taxi drivers.

Looking uo at the Beetham Tower

In March, still thinking about my ancestors, I did a post about my DNA and another post looking at interesting transformations.

In April I published a post about connecting classic films and another about the thoughts that came to me while driving my car. I’ve always thought that my best story ideas come while driving.

In May I was still looking back. I opened up my schoolboy scrapbook and took a look at the things I used to paste in there and also another one about my youth in Writing and Young Higgins. May was a sad time for me though as my mother died aged 93.

In July I had been looking through some of the books in my collection and wrote about my interest in Marilyn Monroe. In August I wrote some more about Marilyn this time after searching through some of my old VHS documentary films.

Round about this time I had a complete personal disaster when I somehow managed to delete my diary for the year. It’s a diary written in a word document and I must have somehow selected everything, instead of a small passage I had wanted to rewrite and deleted it all. I was on a new page so I hadn’t realised everything was gone. Just a short new sentence remained although I did have a backup copy but that only ran to March. Everything I had written about my mother’s death and funeral was gone. I managed to reconstruct some entries made up of what I remembered about that period but even so, I was really unhappy.

In September I wrote about the year 1977 which of course is the year Floating in Space is set and I was reading a collection of Noel Coward’s autobiographies.

October is my birthday month although I’ve always wished I could have been born in the summer. October always signals to me the beginning of the end of the year. What is there to look forward to except dark nights, bonfire night, Halloween and the cold? I’ve produced quite a few repeated themes in my posts and one of them, A Slice of My Life, was published in this month.

In November I was hit by one of the deadliest diseases known to man yes, the dreaded man-flu. I managed to knock out a few blog posts though including a homage to some of my favourite TV shows produced by Gerry Anderson.

In December I wrote about the Godfather; the film and the book and one of my favourite film actors, Cary Grant, inspired by the new TV series about Cary, Archie.

That then was my year in the blogging world. This post is my 596th post and all being well in a short while I’ll be publishing post number 600. Getting back to my stats, this year was a bumper year for me in terms of visitors to my pages. as I mentioned earlier, visits to my site were almost double of those in 2022 but have readers been interested enough to buy Floating in Space or my poetry anthology, A Warrior of Words? Actually, no they haven’t. Perhaps then I should just pack it all, give up blogging and writing. Of course, if I did that, how else would I occupy myself? The thing is, I actually like writing and not only that, I’ve just had an idea for another blog post.

Tune in next week for more book and film posts as well as more observations and anecdotes.

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A Slice of My (Christmas) Life

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few weeks ago during November, I thought that it might be a jolly good idea to start my Christmas shopping so I’d be pretty much ahead of the game when it came to Christmas itself. I’ve had that idea before, on a number of occasions. The strange thing is I’ve never actually done anything about it. Oh well, there’s always next year.

About a week before Christmas, I bought a load of stuff from Ebay and various other places and finally, with a few days to spare, I felt ready for Christmas. On the Monday prior to Christmas we went to our favourite restaurant, Ego. Ego has a special Monday offer with a reduced price for two courses and £10 off a bottle of wine. What I’ve always liked about Ego is that even though the food isn’t actually outstanding, the staff are. They don’t make excuses if you complain, they just sort out whatever the problem is with your food or your wine or whatever it is. Just lately the food there has been a little tame but on that particular Monday our meal was really rather lovely and as a fully paid up member of the Society of Northern Tightwads, the £20 off our two bottles of wine went down a treat.

Tuesday was our day for Cheapy Chippy Tuesday which is a special Tuesday deal at our local chip shop and as a cup of tea goes so well with fish and chips it was also a chance to have a totally alcohol-free day.

Tuesday is usually the day for the quiz down at the Pier Inn but for whatever reason they were having their Christmas version on Wednesday so the next day we went down for a couple of pints and to join in. We didn’t win which was a shame but it was fun anyway, what with some music and a raffle. Our friends Ray and Helen were there and they mentioned that on the following day, Thursday, Ray and his fellow musician Dean would be performing a number of glam rock era songs in their musical alter ego as the Boogie Brothers. That led to a discussion about the efficacy of playing songs by the now disgraced king of glam rock Gary Glitter.

Glitter is another music icon now airbrushed from history. You won’t find him performing on old episodes of Top of the Pops. On a recent TV show about the glam rock era Glitter only got passing mention but none of his music was played. Back in the 1970’s he was a big star but his downfall came when he took a computer to be repaired and it was found to have numerous pornographic images of young girls. Still, is it possible to separate the man from his music? Can we enjoy Gary’s old songs and still condemn him for his pervy activity? Ray was thinking the same thing. If he did a Glitter song in his act, how well would it go down? I told him that we would be there the next day to listen to his music even though we would have to leave early for our regular Thursday quiz night.

That particular night I was wearing a gold signet ring that Liz had bought me some time ago. I’ve always rather loved that ring. I had lost it a while ago but after a little thought and a mental reconstruction of the last time I had worn it, I realised where I had left it. Anyway, reunited with my ring I wore it out to the quiz at the Pier Inn that night. When I came home to get changed, I opened my drawer to pop in the ring but dropped it. I heard a metallic ping so I guessed it had bounced off a fan that was down by the side of the bed which we had used quite a lot during the summer. I lifted up the fan but I couldn’t find the ring. The next day I shifted the fan and a load of books and other stuff that was down there but the ring still eluded me. Later I asked Liz to take a look but she couldn’t find it either. I looked again but it wasn’t there. Where could it have gone? What the heck had happened? I wasn’t happy.

I can’t say that the TV channels have given us much new to watch this Christmas. We watched The Sound of Music over Christmas, one of Liz’s favourite films. I’m not much of a fan of musicals but I do love The Sound of Music. The performances are fabulous as are the songs. I remember once seeing Julie Andrews on a talk show complaining about the goody two shoes image the film had given her. Maybe the film did do that although I’m not so sure but it’s a film that has given a lot of joy to a lot of people and I hope she felt proud about being a part of it.

A different sort of music was performed in The Glenn Miller Story, a film that was shown again on Boxing Day. I really loved that movie when I first saw it on TV back in the 1960’s. Sadly, as much as I loved it then, when I see it these days it is a little disappointing. James Stewart was far too old to play Glenn Miller.

June Alyson played Glenn’s wife and she elevated the use of the word ‘annoying’ to a new level with her constant beginning or ending of a phrase with ‘Honestly!’ I imagine the scriptwriter was fairly pleased with himself, coming up with a cute bit of business like that. Wrong! If I had been Glenn Miller and June Alyson my wife, I would have been sorely tempted to employ some appropriately placed Gaffer tape to remedy that situation.

Another moment in the film comes when Glenn comes home from work and his wife takes him upstairs and says, ‘look what just arrived,’ and guess what had arrived! Two children who seemed to have appeared in time honoured fashion via the unseen stork. Of course, they may have been adopted, I really don’t know because it wasn’t really explained very well but it was a little bit like one of those moments in old episodes of Blue Peter, the children’s TV show, where Valerie Singleton or John Noakes would say, ‘and here’s one I made earlier!’

I must have mentioned in previous posts about how I used to have a cassette tape recorder and how many times I used to drag my poor brother into performing the skits and plays I used to write.

One time we did a skit on the Glenn Miller story and there was me in my best American accent drawling, James Stewart style, ‘that sound, that certain sound, I need to find that certain sound and I’m gonna keep on looking till I find it.’ Throw in my brother blowing a raspberry down a cardboard tube and cue me as James Stewart: ‘That sound, that certain sound: That’s it! I’ve found it!’

One last Glenn Miller memory: Back in the 1970’s I went to see the actual Glenn Miller Orchestra. They were touring the UK and they appeared at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester headed not of course by Glenn Miller but bandleader Buddy De Franco. I didn’t manage to drag any of my friends along so I took my mum with me.

My mum died this year aged 93. It was sad to see her go but at the same time good to see her released from pain and confusion.

The one new thing I watched on TV this Christmas was the new Doctor Who. I’ve watched Doctor Who off and on since I was a child from the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell up to the present. The Doctor, in case you didn’t know, is an alien from the planet Gallifrey whose body ‘regenerates’ every so often which is pretty convenient for when a new actor begins to play the part. In 2017 the Doctor regenerated into a woman for some reason and now the latest Doctor has regenerated into a black man. There were a lot of good points in this Christmas edition of Doctor Who. The production values were excellent, the photography was good. There was a new assistant introduced who seemed pretty interesting with a fascinating and mysterious backstory. On the flip side, the main story about goblins who steal a new baby so they can feed it to a monster resembling Jabba the Hut from Star Wars was a bit weak. I liked the new Doctor’s leather jacket though.

Thursday was a bit of a disaster for us. Our bus into St Annes never appeared so we had to get a taxi. That made us late for tapas at the 54 restaurant and we had to miss out the Boogie Brothers at the Pier Inn so we could get to the Lord Derby in time for the quiz. Hope the glam rock night went ok!

Anyway, fast forward to Christmas morning. It had actually only just gone midnight on Christmas Eve when Liz handed me a small present. It was very small and I guessed it was something like a walnut whip or something small to eat but when I tore off the wrapping paper and opened it, I was surprised to find my lost ring. Yes, Liz had found it after all and had wrapped it up to give me a cheeky surprise on Christmas morning.

Hope you all had a good Christmas and best wishes for 2024.

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Merry Christmas to All My Readers!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Yes, It’s that time again. As I write this there are only a couple of days left before the big event, Christmas day.

Thanks to all my readers for their support over the past year. I hope you all have a lovely and enjoyable Christmas. I’ve not written much for this week but I have added a little something which you can download and read at your leisure when you’ve had enough mince pies and Christmas TV.

Click the link below to download a pdf file containing two short stories which I hope you will find entertaining. I’ll be back next week with my final post of 2023.

Merry Christmas!

2 short stories

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Remembering Cary Grant

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve been a fan of Cary Grant for a very long time. I love his smooth and debonair style, his handsome and tanned good looks and that rather languid transatlantic brogue of his.

In the TV series Archie currently streaming on ITV X they seem to be saying that all of that was an invention, an invention by an Englishman called Archie Leach who transformed himself into a successful Hollywood film star named Cary Grant.

Grant was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England in 1904. He had a poor upbringing and his mother suffered from depression and his father was an alcoholic. The young Archie was interested in the theatre and performing and his mother was keen on him having piano lessons. His older brother had died before reaching the age of one and this perhaps made his mother a little over protective of the young Archie. Even so, his mother was not a woman who was able to give or receive love easily and the older Cary Grant blamed his childhood relationship with his mother for his problems with women in later life.

When Archie was 9 years old his father placed his mother in Glenside Hospital, a mental institution, telling his son that she had gone away on a long holiday and later, that she had died.

Archie befriended a group of acrobatic dancers known as The Penders and he was able to eventually join them and there he trained as a stilt walker and became part of their act. Later the group toured America and Archie decided to stay, following in the footsteps of others before him like Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel who had made their way to the USA in an almost identical way.

On Wikipedia they mention that on the trip over to the USA Archie met Douglas Fairbanks and was greatly impressed by him, so much so that Fairbanks became a role model for the young Archie Leach.

In New York Archie worked in vaudeville with various comedy and theatrical groups. He joined the William Morris theatrical agency and began to pick up many theatre roles. In 1932 he had his first screen test and was given a five year contract with Paramount Pictures. B P Schulberg the general manager of Paramount decided that Archie Leach was not a good enough name for films so Archie came up with the name Cary Grant taking Cary from a stage character he had played and Grant chosen randomly from a telephone directory.

Cary Grant worked hard at his profession and in the TV series Archie they claim that Cary was a role or a part that Archie built up over time. Jason Isaacs who plays Grant says Cary would never be filmed or recorded during an interview because then he was being himself not playing at being Cary. The actor tracked down a recording of Grant made secretly by a student journalist who interviewed Cary over the phone and felt that for the first time he was hearing the real Archie who came over in the recording as very English rather than the usual mid Atlantic voice that we are used to hearing.

It seems to me that many stars who use a different name in the film world are in a way creating a character which they present to the public. You could argue that Marilyn Monroe was a similar personality and that she was a creation of Norma Jeane in the way that Cary Grant was created by Archie Leach.

A breakthrough role for Grant was starring with Mae West in the film She Done Him Wrong and the follow up, I’m No Angel. Grant went on to star in many famous films and amazingly, even though he was a star in Hollywood’s golden years, he was actually the first big star to not be a part of the studio system. He was a freelance actor, not contracted to any studio until 1937 when he signed a four-picture deal with Columbia.

In his early years in Hollywood, Grant shared a house with actor Randolph Scott leading to claims of the two being gay lovers. Still, young bachelors sharing a house with others is not uncommon. David Niven famously shared a house with Errol Flynn and we can hardly class those two as being gay.

Somewhere in my fairly huge book collection I have a biography of Cary Grant but despite an intensive search I couldn’t find it. I also have a copy of David Niven’s Bring on the Empty Horses which if I remember correctly has a short chapter on Grant. Now where did I put that book?

I did do some quite considerable research to produce this blog post. Firstly, I had to watch the four episodes of the TV series Archie, currently streaming on ITV X. That wasn’t anything difficult of course, it wasn’t a chore, in fact it was very enjoyable. Archie is a wonderful four part series and Jason Isaacs plays an outstanding part. He doesn’t try to impersonate Cary but he did manage to create a look of the late star and he caught Grant’s voice and enunciation perfectly. Most of the series follows Cary in later life when he becomes involved with and later marries Dyan Cannon, Dyan was his fourth wife and she was the mother of his only child Jennifer and she and her mother co-produced the series which is definitely well worth watching.

Next, I searched for the biography I had of Cary but despite searching the entire house I couldn’t find it. Oh well, I have a few copies of Bring on The Empty Horses about the house so I thought ok, I’ll grab that and have a read of the chapter on Cary. Once again, I searched through the entire house but could I find that book? No! Eventually I started to put everything back where I had found it and it was only after idly looking in a box of books that I had only recently packed away and had earlier dismissed, that I finally found it.

Anyway, I had a break from writing to look for that book and after a while when I couldn’t find it I popped the TV on. I wasn’t altogether surprised to find there was a Cary Grant film showing. It was An Affair to Remember, a love story in which Grant’s character, a playboy type meets Deborah Kerr on a transatlantic voyage and the two fall for each other. On arrival in the USA they decide to have a 6 month break from each other as they are both in other relationships and then meet at the top of the Empire State building in New York. It’s not really my cup of tea, in fact it’s overtly sentimental but then, sometimes a small dose of sentimentality is good for you. Cary Grant plays, well, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr plays a very English New Yorker.

I have two of Grant’s other films on DVD, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest, both directed by Cary’s favourite director, Alfred Hitchcock.

OK, enough TV watching for now. Getting back to Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven wrote about Cary Grant in a short section of his book called Long Shots and Close Ups where he gives his readers a quick sketch about various film people. The section on Cary is only three and a half pages and not the full chapter I was expecting but Niven clearly liked the man and in those three and a bit pages, picked up on some essential elements of Grant’s character. Niven remembers Cary Grant as an intelligent man, particularly with money and he listed people like multi millionaire Howard Hughes among his friends. Grant invested his earnings well and became one of the richest people in Hollywood. He had an obsession with his health, embarking on various health pursuits and then moving on to the next one. Niven remarks that once when Cary was taking swimming lessons to learn the crawl, Niven mentioned that Cary could already swim the crawl. Grant answered ‘yes but I want to swim the crawl perfectly!’ Cary gave up smoking by hypnotising himself and Niven also mentions his use of LSD during his treatment by a psychiatrist which is also brought up in Archie.

Cary Grant retired from films in 1966 the year his daughter was born and he and Dyan Cannon divorced in 1968. Many tried to bring him out of retirement for various films including his favourite director Alfred Hitchcock but he declined. He must have wanted to keep on working though because he did accept a position on the board of Fabergé.

He died in 1986 aged 82 and left behind an estate reputedly worth around 80 million dollars. Archie is a well made and quite fascinating piece of TV. Look out for it, it’s well worth watching.

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Captain My Captain

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This will be my 592nd post and as you can imagine I sometimes struggle for new ideas. Scrolling through the internet the other day I chanced on something about Robin Williams and the post mentioned the film Dead Poets Society. It isn’t one of my favourite films but if you’ve ever seen it you might remember the poem O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman which features a lot in the film. It got me thinking about Captains so I thought I might kick of this post with a few words about my favourite captain, James T Kirk.

Captain James T Kirk

The first series of Star Trek starred William Shatner as Captain James T Kirk. Forget Captain pointy head Picard, Kirk is a proper Captain and after a good twenty minutes of any episode he will usually have blasted a number of aliens with his phaser (a sort of ray gun) and done some pretty serious kissing of any beautiful girl, alien, android or otherwise, within a 100 yard area. Mr Spock was played by Leonard Nimoy. He is the ship’s science officer and as a Vulcan rarely displays emotion, logic being his primary motivation. Doctor McCoy played by DeForest Kelley is a doctor of the old school and he and Spock frequently get into verbal confrontations. Together they are the chief officers of the starship Enterprise on its five year mission to go where no man has gone before.

william_shatner

As a schoolboy I wrote to Desilu studios where I believed Star Trek was made, based on credits shown at the end of the show. After a while I received a set of glossy pictures of the show’s stars. They were all signed by the various actors, Shatner, Nimoy and so on but the signatures, I have long suspected, were made by a machine.

The original Star Trek, like many TV programmes of the sixties was shot on film and today it looks pretty sharp compared to shows from the 80’s that were shot straight to video. It was given a digital makeover a few years back with digital effects and new CGI spacecraft and is looking pretty good these days. Which was my favourite episode? Well I’d have to say it was the one that fans voted the best Star Trek episode ever; City on the Edge of Forever. The crew of the Enterprise arrive at a distant planet searching for the source of some time displacement. The source is a time portal, left among the ruins of an ancient civilisation which although abandoned, still emits waves of time displacement. In the meantime, Doctor McCoy is suffering from paranoia brought on by an accidental overdose of the wonder drug cordrazine which any Star Trek fan will tell you can cure any known Galactic ailment. McCoy in his crazed state bumbles through the time portal, back to 1930’s America (handy for that old 1930’s set on the Paramount back lot) and changes history. Kirk and Spock are forced to also go back in time, stop McCoy from changing history and restore things to the way they were. Joan Collins plays a charity worker at the core of events; does she have to die in order to restore normality?

What happened to Kirk? Well in the movie Generations, the character of Captain Kirk was sadly killed off. Generations which started off pretty well, combining the usual sci-fi elements of Star Trek with an intriguing mystery; who is the mysterious Soran and what is he up to? As it happened what he was up to wasn’t really that interesting, but the film marked the cinema handover from the original Star Trek cast to the new one. Pity really because as I mentioned above, I never really took to the Next Generation. However in the last two Star Trek films, the producers returned to the original characters, Kirk Spock, McCoy and Scott and with new actors playing the old characters, the story of Captain Kirk continues. As I write this William Shatner, who played the original Kirk is still active even though he is in his 90s. Wonder if they could get him to play Kirk one last time?

Captain Scott

Captain Scott planned to make an expedition to the north pole but then changed his mind and went for the south pole. At pretty much the same time Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, decided he also wanted to make the trip so a kind of race began. Who would get to the pole first? Amundsen decided to travel in classic fashion with teams of dogs pulling sledges. Scott decided he would use new mechanical devices, vehicles with caterpillar tracks, all of which broke down in the cold. Scott also used ponies but they were not acclimatised to the cold and fared poorly. Amundsen’s dogs turned out to be the best choice.

Why either of them would want to go to the pole is completely beyond me. All that they found there was a shed load of snow and ice which most people could have predicted anyway.

As we all know, Scott got beaten to the pole by Amundsen. The gallant British explorers then had to face the task of getting back to civilisation, however the weather worsened and the men froze to death in their tent.

You can watch the story of Captain Scott and his tragic expedition in the film Scott of The Antarctic. It is a sad film although John Mills as Scott plays a good part as usual and James Robertson Justice plays a serious role for a change, that of Captain Oates who disappears into the snow after telling his friends that he ‘might be some time.’ Oates perished like his friends but his courageous actions have never been forgotten.

Captain James Cook

Captain Cook was born in 1728 and died in 1779. He was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, who left behind a legacy of geographical and scientific knowledge.

He achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. His mapping of the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand changed the face of world geography. Before his famous three voyages to the Pacific and Australia, he also had made detailed maps of Newfoundland.

Cook was attacked and eventually killed by the natives in the Hawaiian Islands, during his attempt to kidnap the Hawaiian chief to reclaim the cutter stolen from one of his ships.

Captain Scarlet

Captain Scarlet was a TV puppet series made by producer Gerry Anderson in 1967. It was the first of Gerry’s puppet series to use puppets with realistic body proportions which although they looked more realistic were difficult for the puppeteers to manipulate. The idea for the series was that earth was under attack from the mysterious ‘Mysterons’, a race from the planet Mars that had been disturbed by the Zero X Mars exploration missions. The Mysterons have the power of ‘retrometabolism’, a way of reconstituting matter after an object or person has been destroyed. Captain Black has been recreated in this way and is under the control of the Mysterons. A similar thing happens to Scarlet but somehow he has broken free from Mysteron control. Scarlet is a member of Spectrum, an organisation set up to defend earth. All the agents have colour code names, hence captain Scarlet, voiced by Francis Matthews and Captain Blue, voiced by Ed Bishop.

A computer animated reboot was broadcast in 2005.

Captain Nemo

Nemo was a character in the Jules Verne novel 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea. The novel was first published in 1870 and reappears in another of Vernes books, Mysterious Island written five years later. In the first book a French scientist has joined an expedition to find a sea monster. They ship is attacked by the monster and the biologist is surprised to find the monster is an advanced submarine. He and other members of the ships company are taken prisoner where they meet the mysterious captain Nemo. Not much is ever revealed about Nemo except that he seems bent on revenge after his homeland, wherever that was, was conquered by a powerful imperialist nation.

There have been numerous film versions but my personal favourite Nemo was played by actor James Mason.

Captain America

Captain America was a comic book hero first created in the 1940s. Steve Rogers is a frail man who volunteers to use a new serum which will rapidly boost his physical powers. He combats the nazi menace with his sidekick Bucky Barnes but an accident leaves him in a state of suspended animation until he is revived in the modern era and becomes the leader of the super-hero group The Avengers. I can’t say I was ever a great fan of the captain even in my younger comic reading days. Youngsters these days may know Captain America from the current wave of super hero films. Captain America: The First Avenger was released in 2011 starring Chris Evans as the eponymous hero.

Captain and Tennille

Captain and Tennille were a husband and wife recording duo who had most of their success in the 1970s. Daryl Dragon was known as the captain because of his habit of wearing a captain’s hat when he was the keyboard player for the Beach Boys. He and his wife Toni Tennille had a number of hits throughout the 1970s although the one I particularly remember was ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’, a number one hit in the USA.

Captain Von Trapp

Never heard of captain Von Trapp? Well clearly you haven’t seen the Sound of Music. The story of the Von Trapp family of singers is actually a true story and Maria Von Trapp wrote a memoir about her experiences which was published in 1949. The book was made into a German film in 1956 and was so successful that a sequel was produced. Naturally Hollywood became interested but before that producers Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday secured the rights to make the story into a stage musical. They employed Rodgers and Hammerstein to write new songs as the German film had no original songs and just used Austrian folk songs. The musical was a huge hit and later became the famous hit film. Julie Andrews starred as Maria, the trainee nun who becomes a nanny to the Von Trapp children. Their father, Captain Von Trapp played by Christopher Plummer eventually falls for Maria and the family manage to escape from Austria just as the Nazis take hold of the country.

I’m not a great fan of musicals but I do love The Sound of Music.

Captain My Captain

O Captain My captain is a poem by Walt Whitman about the death of Abraham Lincoln. As I mentioned earlier it is perhaps most famous for being used in the film Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams as an unconventional teacher.

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The Godfather: The Film of the Book or the Book of the Film

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve written a few of these ‘book or the film’ posts but in this one I’m going to stick with one particular film and book; The Godfather.

The Book

I’m not sure which came first for me, the book or the film but I actually think it was the book. The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo and is the story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of one of the five mafia families of New York. The book opens with the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter and Puzo sets the scene and introduces the various characters.

Don Corleone is a Sicilian and apparently no Sicilian can refuse a request on the day of his daughter’s wedding. One of those with a request for the don is singer Johnny Fontane whose show business career is waning. He feels that a part in a new film will revitalise it but the producer will not cast him. The don is happy to help out his favourite godson and dispatches his advisor and stepson Tom Hagen to Hollywood to sort things out.

Another supplicant is a funeral director. Two youths have attacked and beaten his daughter and because of political connections the courts of law have only handed down suspended sentences. The father asks for Don Corleone to give him revenge but the Don declines. The funeral director has never shown the correct respect to the Don but when he does and finally calls him Godfather then, and only then, does Corleone issue orders for the youths to be brutally beaten.

Some time afterwards the Don agrees to meet fellow mafioso Sollozo who wants Corleone’s help with a drug smuggling operation. The Don declines and this sets off a violent war between the mafia gangs.

The Film

Francis Ford Coppola was the director of the film version and was also the co-writer of the screenplay along with Mario Puzo. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Don Corleone even though Brando at the time was rather unpopular with the producers. He was expensive, his last few films had not done well and his time wasting attitude had added huge expenses to his pictures. After the director had made the producers understand how important Brando was, they set various conditions for his employment. He would have to work for a reduced salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not delay the production. Another was that he had to have a screen test. Coppola has told the story in various interviews how he and his film crew had entered Brando’s house like ninjas and quietly set up their equipment. Brando slicked down his hair with shoe polish and stuffed cotton balls into his mouth to make the transformation into the aging mafia boss.

Paramount also wanted to shoot the film on their back lot but Coppola persuaded them to shoot on location in New York and stick to the original time frame of the book which was set in the 1930s and 40s.

Various people were auditioned for parts in The Godfather but finally the cast was resolved and shooting began with Brando as the Don, James Caan as Sonny, Al Pacino as Michael, Robert Duvall as Tom and Diane Keaton as Kay Adams.

The Book

The book is a fairly heft one and there is much in there that is not covered by the film. Johnny Fontane for instance features more in the book, while he plays only a supporting role in the film. There is a further story in the book about Lucy, a friend of Sonny’s wife with whom he is having an affair. After Sonny’s death Lucy feels she will never find not only love but sexual pleasure ever again. The reason for this is that Sonny had a rather large penis and Lucy’s corresponding anatomy is rather large, however she falls for a doctor who sorts her out with an operation which restores the anatomical status quo.

Going back to the Johnny Fontane character, there have been various stories and rumours which imply the character was based on Frank Sinatra. Like Johnny Fontane, Frank was tied to a lifetime contract with a bandleader, in this case Tommy Dorsey but Dorsey somehow relented and released Sinatra. Some say mobster Willie Moretti was instrumental in helping Sinatra free himself from the contract. Later when things weren’t going so good for Sinatra, he revived his career by appearing in the hit film From Here to Eternity for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar. In the book, Johnny Fontane is after a similar film part but the producer declines to give it to him. At the wedding of Corleone’s daughter, Fontane asks for the Don’s help, cue the famous scene where producer Jack Woltz finds his favourite racehorse’s head in his bed.

The Film

Coppola decided that instead of finding the horse at the end of his bed like in the book, it would be better if Woltz awoke, was disturbed by something wet, pulls the bedclothes away to see blood and then uncovers the horse’s head. The head was the actual head of a horse, procured from a dog meat factory and Coppola mentions on the commentary to my DVD version that lots of animal lovers sent him hate mail about the horse, even though the horse had been condemned to its fate anyway.

Sinatra always denied any involvement with the mafia although he did sing at the wedding of mafia boss Willie Moretti’s daughter, just like Johnny Fontane did at the Corleone wedding that opens the film. Anthony Summers, in his book about Sinatra, claims that the story was true and mafia enforcer Johnny Blue Eyes put pressure on studio boss Harry Cohn to give Sinatra the film role that rebooted his career.

Director Fred Zinnemann thought Sinatra might be good in the role so Cohn was happy to go along with the idea.

The Book

As previously mentioned, the book does have some storylines which were not used in the film but one chapter was a look at the beginnings of Vito Corleone. Born Vito Andolini in the Sicilian village of Corleone, Vito’s father was murdered by a local mafia boss and the young Vito was smuggled away to America. In America he took the name of Corleone and seemed to slip quietly into the role of mafia Don by murdering Fanucci, a New York Sicilian Godfather who preyed on his fellow Italians. Although this element of the story wasn’t used, Coppola kept the storyline for use in The Godfather Part II. The follow up film was a film classic in its own way.

The Godfather Parts II and III

In part II there are two parallel stories. One is the story of Vito Andolini, as described above, played by Robert De Niro and another follows on from the first film. Michael is now the head of the family and gets involved with gangster Hyman Roth with investments in Cuban casinos. After the Cuban revolution Michael realises Roth is out to kill him and so has him murdered. A senate investigation looks into Michael’s activities with information provided by Frank Pentangeli, a former member of his organisation, but Michael brings pressure to bear on the informant and the investigation collapses.

In The Godfather Part III Michael’s story continues. He is reconciled with his sister after the murder of her husband in the original film. He also gets involved in a scheme in Europe where he hopes to become fully legitimate but other mafia bosses have different ideas. The Papal bank scandal and the death of Pope John Paul I are real events that are also thrown into the mix. The film was the weak element in the Godfather trilogy. In 2020 The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone was released. It was just a re-edited version of part III and personally I still didn’t find it anywhere near as good as the other two films.

Marlon Brando worked with Coppola again on the film Apocalypse Now. He played the part of an American Colonel in Vietnam who has apparently gone insane and Martin Sheen is sent to assassinate him. Brando turned up on set hugely overweight and not knowing his lines. He then decided to re write or improvise most of his scenes and the director was forced to shoot Brando in shadow due to his weight. Basically, he pulled all the stunts that Paramount expected of him in The Godfather. Not the best way to repay a director who had resurrected his career with the role of Don Corleone.

In 1990, Brando appeared in the comedy film, The Freshman, playing a parody of Don Corleone. When the shooting over ran, Brando demanded a million dollars to film for an extra week. The producers declined to pay and Brando threatened to badmouth the film to the press. Eventually they paid.

Brando died in 2004.

In 2023 Coppola finished filming his latest project, Megalopolis, a sci fi film about the rebuilding of New York after a major disaster.

Conclusion.

I enjoyed the Mario Puzo novel and I did re-read it for this post but it seems to stray into areas which really have no relevance to the main narrative which I found slightly annoying. The film version, which I also watched recently is a modern classic which continues to entertain everytime I see it. I like both the book and the film but I’d have to say I think the film version has the edge.

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Famous People and Favourite Books

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This isn’t a post about my favourite books. I’m pretty certain I’ve done that one already but I thought I’d talk about the favourite books of some famous people and I’d like to start with one of my film heroes, James Dean.

James Dean and The Little Prince

Back in the 1970s my Saturday ritual involved getting the bus into town and scouring book and record shops for books and records. One day back then I was flipping through the posters in one particular shop. The posters were the music stars of the 70s, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and so on but one was a picture of a really good looking guy with a fifties combed back hair style. In some pictures he was dressed like a cowboy and in others in a red jacket and denim jeans. The guy behind the counter must have seen me wondering who the guy was and he told me he was a film star called James Dean. He handed me a paperback book about the actor and I took it home and read it and very soon I was trying to find out everything I could about Dean.

Dean had been killed in a car crash in 1955 and had only appeared in three films and at the time of his death, only one of those films had been released. I read a great deal about Dean and from what I could find out, the biography to read was written by his best friend, William Bast. I never managed to get a copy of that book but Bast produced a made for TV film version, James Dean: Portrait of a Friend with Stephen McHattie as Dean.

In the film William Bast played by Michael Brandon, leaves Dean in a restaurant and Dean later asks why Bast left. Bast was intimidated by Dean’s important looking friends and Dean replies that he was judging by surface appearances. When Bast questions Dean further, Dean produces his favourite book, The Little Prince and then goes on to read his favourite passage.

In the book Dean explains, the Little Prince is from a distant planet. He meets a fox but the fox won’t play with the prince because he hasn’t been tamed.

Later the fox gives the prince a secret which is this: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye, something which Bast claimed was the secret to Dean’s style of acting.

James Dean was killed in 1955 and in later life William Bast wrote another book about James Dean claiming that the two were lovers and that Dean was gay.

The Little Prince was written by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry and according to Wikipedia has sold an estimated 140 million copies. It is also the second most translated work ever, only beaten by the Bible.

What did Dean see in the book? Well, it was a childhood favourite of his so perhaps it brought back memories of happy times, or perhaps it was just the undeniable charm of the book that appealed to him.

Donald Campbell and 1001 Nights

Donald Campbell was the son of a famous racing driver and record breaker, Sir Malcolm Campbell. Campbell first broke the land speed record in 1924 at Pendine Sands in Wales which was the first of his nine land speed records. He also set the water speed record in his boat Bluebird K4. He was knighted in 1931 and died in 1948 aged 63. He was one of the few racing drivers and land speed record holders of his era to die of natural causes as many of his rivals were killed in crashes. His son, Donald Campbell, was determined to equal and even surpass his father’s achievements.

He set about doing so with the help of his father’s engineer, Leo Villa. He made various runs at the land speed record, his last was in Australia. He chose to run his Bluebird car at Lake Eyrie and the vast dry salt lake bed offered the perfect course. It hadn’t rained there for nine years but Campbell had just started his trials when the rains came and ruined the course. Eventually Campbell managed to raise the record to 403.10 mph in 1964 but the huge expense and difficulties of the project cast a great strain on Campbell. In November of 1966 he tried for a new water speed record at Lake Coniston but once again, bad weather caused problems. He was still at Coniston in the following January and when the weather improved, he tried for the record. He was killed in his Bluebird boat on the 4th January 1967.

In the BBC film Across the Lake, Campbell was played by Anthony Hopkins and claims his favourite book was 1001 Nights. The book is a collection of Arabian folk tales perhaps more well known in England as The Arabian Nights. The book is about a king who after finding that his brother’s wife has been unfaithful, decides that all women are the same. He decides then to marry a succession of virgins and after their wedding night have them executed to make way for the next, One day he marries Scheherazade who tells the king a story but promises to finish it the next night. The king delays her execution wanting to hear the end of the story but the next night she starts another one, again promising to finish the story the following night. The stories go on for a thousand and one nights, Scheherazade telling more stories in order to save herself from execution.

The screenplay for Across the Lake was written by Roger Milner and was based on true events although whether that includes Campbell’s love of 1001 Nights or not, I’m not sure. In the film Campbell gives a girlfriend a necklace inscribed with a quotation from the book. ‘Beautiful of face with attributes of grace’, a reference to Scheherazade herself.

Noel Coward and The Railway Children

This is perhaps where this post might start to unravel. I know the Donald Campbell link was a little tenuous and only based on a film but this next one was based on my own memory which can be prone to failure. I knew Noel was a great fan of the children’s writer E Nesbit and I’m sure I had heard or read somewhere that when he died, he was reading his favourite of that author’s books, The Railway Children. A quick bit of internet research and I see that Noel died after reading Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle. Coward was a lifelong fan of E Nesbit who wrote a series of children’s books. He discovered the books as a child and revisited them many times during his life. In his diary he wrote this about the author:

“Sunday 3rd February 1957. I am reading again through all the dear E. Nesbits and they seem to me to be more charming and evocative than ever. It is strange that after half a century I can still get such lovely pleasure from them. Her writing is so light and unforced, her humour so sure and her narrative quality so strong that the stories, which I know backwards, rivet me as much now as they did when I was a little boy. Even more so in one way because I can now enjoy her actual talent and her extraordinary power of describing hot summer days in England in the beginning years of the century.

All the pleasant memories of my own childhood jump up at me from the pages… E. Nesbit knew all the things that stay in the mind, all the happy treasures. I suppose she, of all the writers I have ever read, has given me over the years the most complete satisfaction and, incidentally, a great deal of inspiration. I am glad I knew her in the last years of her life.””

The Enchanted Castle is about a country estate and three youngsters who meet a princess and discover a magical ring. I have never read either that or the Railway Children although I did find a copy of that latter book not long ago. The film version is a delightful adaptation that has been seen and loved by many generations of children and adults since it was released in 1970. It was written and directed by Lionel Jefferies and stars Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins.

Noel Coward died at his home in Jamaica in March of 1973.

Woody Allen and The Catcher in the Rye

Woody is one of my favourite film directors and after a search on the internet looking for more favourite books from my favourite people, I found he was apparently greatly inspired by The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. Woody had this to say about the book:

“The Catcher in the Rye has always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – 18 or so. It resonated with my fantasies about Manhattan, the Upper East Side and New York City in general.

It was such a relief from the other books I was reading at the time, which all had a quality of homework to them. For me, reading Middlemarch or Sentimental Education was work, whereas reading The Catcher in the Rye was pure pleasure. The burden of entertainment is on the author. Salinger fulfils that obligation from the first sentence on.”

I can understand Woody when he talks about books that have a quality of homework about them. Many classic books I’ve tried to read, particularly in recent years, have left me disappointed and with that same feeling that Woody describes.

I read Catcher in the Rye a long time ago and rather than inspiring me, I found it dreadfully boring and pointless. The hero, Holden Caulfield goes to New York and basically moans about all the things he finds false and ‘phoney’ about the city and its people. Mark Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, was obsessed with the novel and left behind a copy after he had shot Lennon with a note saying ‘this is my statement’.

Sorry Woody, you and I will have to disagree about Catcher in the Rye.

So what is my favourite book? Well, I’ve got quite an extended shortlist but I think I’d have to plump for David Copperfield by the wonderful Charles Dickens. I first read it many years ago and perhaps the moral of this post is that the books we love in our youth are the ones that continue to give us pleasure in later life.

What is your personal favourite?

Sources:

James Dean: My own imperfect memory.

Donald Campbell; the film Across the Lake.

Noel Coward: https://www.noelcoward.com/

Woody Allen: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/woody-allen-on-inspiration/

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