Category Archives: books

Random Harvest: The Film of the Book or the Book of the Film

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again Liz and I are on holiday in France and as usual I’ve filled up my book bag with books to read. My selection this year was a mix of new books and some books from my collection which I haven’t read for years. The one I’d like to focus on this week is Random Harvest by one of my favourite writers, James Hilton.

Hilton hailed from Leigh in Lancashire, now Greater Manchester. He wrote several books and made his way to Hollywood, California where he worked as a screenwriter. He died in 1954. Searching through a box of my old books I came across Random Harvest, a book I don’t think I have ever read before. I bought it from a second hand book shop along with Goodbye Mr Chips, possibly Hilton’s most famous novel and one I have read before. I can imagine intending to read it but moving on to something else and the book was boxed up in one of numerous house moves before I had a chance to get to it.

The Film

The film version starred Ronald Colman and Greer Garson in the leading roles. The film opens with a man called Smith wandering out of an asylum on a day when there is much excitement. It is Armistice Day, 1918 and ‘Smithy’ is a man who has lost his memory during the fighting in the First World War. He wanders down to the town of Melbury and in a tobacco shop the shopkeeper realises Smithy is from the asylum. When she disappears into the back of the shop a woman played by Greer Garson explains that the shopkeeper has gone to call the asylum so that he if wants to avoid going back he must get away. The woman, Paula, befriends Smithy and hides him away and soon she finds she is falling for him. The two elope together, find a quiet village in which to settle down and get married.

Smithy, who has no memory of his former life begins to write and soon has a story accepted by a newspaper in Liverpool. He takes the train there for an interview with the editor but on a wet afternoon, slips in the road and is hit by a taxi. He is knocked unconscious and when he awakes his memory has returned but he has no memory of his time as Smithy. How did he get to Liverpool? What door to what house fits the key found in his pocket? A policeman asks his name and he replies ‘Charles Rainier’. Gathering his things he sets off to take the train home to his country estate but arrives just as his father has passed away. The family has gathered and they are all surprised but glad to see Charles who later goes on to take charge and rescue the failing family business.

The final part of the film sees Charles happy as a new Conservative MP and successful businessman but also sad that a part of his life has been lost to him. He makes various attempts to find his former life but all end in failure until one night when a strike breaks out at the Melbury factory and he has to go there to sort things out. As he walks into Melbury he comes to the tobacco shop he once entered as ‘Smithy’ and things begin to come back to him.

Colman and Greer Garson play their parts wonderfully well. The film is perhaps a little sentimental for modern viewers but it is one of those films I saw as a child and have always remembered. Reviewers at the time were not impressed but even so, the film was nominated for 7 Oscars and it was MGM’s biggest hit of 1942.

The Book

The book tells the story in an entirely different way. It begins with a chance encounter on a train with Rainier and a young man who is looking for work. The two strike up a sort of friendship and Rainier invites the young man to work for him, He explains that he was in the war, was injured and woke up in a German hospital with loss of memory. He was repatriated through Switzerland but got his memory back after a fall and a collision with a taxi in Liverpool. The time between his earlier life and waking up in Liverpool is a blank. The young man becomes Rainier’s assistant and the two sometimes talk late into the night discussing what might have happened. Later in the book, Rainier is called to intervene at a dispute at the Melbury factory and his memory begins to return. He asks a local taxi driver about the hospital. The man asks does he mean the new or the old one? Rainier thinks the old one and goes on to describe it. ‘That doesn’t sound like either of them,’ answers the man but adds, ‘would you be meaning the asylum sir?’

The book is a really interesting read and being written in the years before the second world war, gives the reader a little insight into the feelings of that time, a dissatisfaction with the League of Nations, a feeling that perhaps the First World War could have been settled sooner or even that the allies might have gone on to Berlin and perhaps parcelled up Germany into a smaller nation.

The climax of the book is Charles’ reunion with Paula who turns out to be his wife and former secretary so we find that Charles and Smithy married the same girl which worked well in the book but of course had to be told differently in the film.

Which did I enjoy more? Well I loved both works but to be fair I’ve always loved the film version and as much as I love James Hilton, I think I prefer the film. It isn’t often seen on TV and not long ago I managed to copy my VHS version to DVD but I did notice that a restored DVD version was released in 2005 which I must look out for.

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Celebrating Charles Dickens

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Charles Dickens is one of my writing heroes. He is a giant in the world of literature and the author of one of my favourite books of all time, David Copperfield. He was a man with an incredible imagination and was a prodigious producer of numerous books and stories. Many of his works are still loved and appreciated today and the magic of his story telling is also reflected in film and television adaptations of his work.

Dickens was born on February 7th, 1812. His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the Naval Pay Office. His mother was Elizabeth Dickens and she and her husband raised eight children including Charles, their second child. Charles and his family had a pretty idyllic life until John Dickens, who clearly lived beyond his means, was arrested for debts and incarcerated in the Marshallsea debtors’ prison in Southwark, London.

As was the custom then the younger members of the family were able to live in the prison with their mother and father but Charles, then aged 12, took lodgings nearby and was forced to leave school and work in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse where he earned six shillings a week for pasting labels on bottles of boot blacking.

It was a shocking and humiliating experience for the young Dickens. He never mentioned the experience to any of his children and only spoke about it in later life to his great friend John Forster, who later wrote the first biography of Dickens. Dickens also wrote about the experience in his novel David Copperfield in which the young Copperfield suffers the same fate.

My well thumbed copy of David Copperfield

Mr Micawber, a character in the same book, was based on his own father and eventually John Dickens was able to pay off his debts when his mother died and left him £450. He and his family were released from prison but Charles was not immediately released from his work at the boot blacking warehouse, indeed his mother wanted him to continue there but it was his father who decided that Charles should return to school. Charles was forever indebted to his father for this and forever hurt by his mother’s wish that he should continue pasting labels onto bottles of boot blacking. The experience scarred him and his later desire to work harder and earn more and more money may have been a need to make himself safe from ever being forced into such a situation again.

After two years at school, Dickens obtained employment as a lawyer’s clerk and later, he taught himself shorthand and began work as a parliamentary reporter. He became infatuated at this time with a lady called Maria Beadnall who later became the inspiration for the character of Dora in David Copperfield. Charles pursued Maria over a period of three years but the romance, if indeed there ever was one, finally fizzled out in the spring of 1833.

Dickens first foray into the world of creative fiction was a short story titled A Dinner at Poplar Walk. He had sent the story to a monthly magazine simply called, The Monthly Magazine and upon finding his story printed within its pages, reported that ‘his eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride’ that he could barely see.

In 1835 the editor of the Morning Chronicle, George Hogarth, invited Dickens to contribute to his newspaper and during various visits to the Hogarth home he became acquainted with his editor’s daughter Catherine, whom he later married in 1836.

Dickens wrote his newspaper stories under the pseudonym Boz, and he was delighted when a publisher offered to publish a collection of his works entitled Sketches by Boz. This led to another publisher asking Dickens to supply the text to go with a series of illustrations by a popular illustrator of the day, Robert Stephens. Dickens somehow managed to turn the arrangement on its head, writing a story and having Stephens illustrate Dicken’s text. The story was The Pickwick Papers and it soon became something of a publishing phenomenon.

Robert Stephens passed away soon after the first publication and Dickens recruited another artist, Hablot Knight Browne, to provide the illustrations. Readers could buy a monthly instalment priced at a shilling and Dickens worked hard to produce each edition. Other stories had been published in a similar way but they were usually well known classics. This was the first time new fiction had been produced in this way.

That then was the start of Dicken’s career. He was a busy man, editing various publications as well as writing his novels. Great Expectations was published with the author shown as Boz but in later editions this was changed to Charles Dickens.

Dickens_by_Watkins_1858

Dickens seems to have rented various houses, moving around often but he eventually bought a house in 1851, Tavistock House in Tavistock Square, London. Dickens wrote various books here starting with Bleak House. He also fancied himself as something of an actor and he had a large room made into an improvised theatre where he, along with his friends and family, produced various amateur theatricals. In 1858, Charles separated from his wife Catherine and she moved out into a property in Camden Town.

The separation was said to have been sparked by Dickens’ obsession with a young actress called Ellen Ternan and his gift of either a brooch or a bracelet to her which somehow made its way to his wife. Dickens has this image of being the perfect Victorian family man but he didn’t always live up to it. According to Wikipedia he even tried to get his wife falsely diagnosed as mentally ill in order to have her committed to an asylum. Various accusations were bandied about at the time and rumours were so bad that Dickens himself was forced to publish a statement in the press about his marital situation.

Did Dickens have an affair with Ellen Ternan? So many years later it is hard to know the truth. One night when he was living at his new home Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens made a bonfire of all his personal letters and papers, some of which may have had the answers.

Certainly, Charles was fond of Ellen Ternan. He spent a lot of time with her and even took her abroad to France and Belgium but neither admitted to having an affair but he did have something of a history of obsessions. Years earlier he had been distraught when his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth had died suddenly at the age of 17. Mary was living with the Dickens family at the time and died in Charles’ arms. He was so upset that he kept his dead sister in law’s clothes for years afterwards, occasionally taking them out to look at them. Mary became the template for many women in his books, all of whom were ‘young, beautiful and good’.

Dickens had an incredible imagination and although many of his characters were based on real people, many others sprang directly from his own mind. He was a restless man and regularly took daily and nightly walks of twenty miles and more. Presumably on those walks he brought his imagination into check and channelled his thoughts into the development of his stories.

In his later life, Charles embarked on a series of readings from his books. The readings were highly charged emotional events and the author used all his powers as an actor to delight his audiences, frequently reducing them to tears. Tickets for the reading were highly sought after and Dickens was one of the most notable and famous men of his day. Imagine George Clooney or Brad Pitt doing a series of book readings today and we can get just a faint hint of what things were like for Dickens and his public back then.

Dickens bought his final home, Gad’s Hill Place in March of 1856. He had seen the house as a child when his father had pointed the house out to him as something that he might one day own if he worked hard enough. He lived at the house with his children although one, Charles junior, elected to live with his mother in Camden Town. Strangely, his estranged wife’s sister, Georgina, stayed with Charles as housekeeper.

On June 8th 1870, Dickens had a stroke after working on his final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He died the next day without regaining consciousness. Some have speculated that he died at Ellen Ternan’s house and she had him taken back to Gad’s Hill to prevent a scandal. He was laid to rest in Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey.

Charles Dickens is one of the most loved and celebrated writers of all time but I’ve got to say that some of his books I’ve found a little hard to read. I’ve tried and tried to read Pickwick Papers but I just couldn’t get through it. Not long ago I picked up Bleak House and once again I couldn’t really get started on the book. I have read A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and my absolute favourite, David Copperfield.

My favourite character in the book, apart from Copperfield himself, is Steerforth, a friend of David Copperfield but one who ultimately betrays him. The best part in the book probably, for me at any rate, is the storm when David returns to Yarmouth. Dickens builds the storm slowly and each word and phrase adds a new layer to the sense of danger and foreboding and when Copperfield is finally reunited with his old friend Steerforth at the height of the storm’s ferocity, death comes between them and Steerforth is sadly drowned.

Dickens reveals this in a very unique way; he does not tell the reader Steerforth is dead. He leaves the reader to realise this themselves and, in the process, makes the reader almost at one with the narrative. Throughout the book, Dickens mentions in passing about Steerforth’s habit of sleeping with his head on his arm. It’s referred to many times in the narrative almost as a matter of non interest, something unimportant that the reader doesn’t really need to know, but when David Copperfield spies someone aboard a stricken ship trapped in the fierce storm who evokes some faint remembrance for him, a tiny warning bell is set off.

Finally, when the body of a drowned man is brought ashore and lies mutely on the sand, his head upon his arm, we know just from that simple bit of information, without the author telling us anything more, that Steerforth is dead. The prompts and clues that Dickens has hinted at have paid off for the reader in the most satisfying of ways.

Dickens’ books are still popular today and a recent cinema version of David Copperfield was released in 2019. It was good although I do have a fondness for the 1935 version in which WC Fields plays the part of Mr Micawber. In 1946 David Lean directed one of the best ever films of a Dickens’ story, Great Expectations. In the 1960’s Oliver Twist was made into a stage musical by Lionel Bart and the film version was released in 1968.

Dickens’ most filmed story though is probably A Christmas Carol, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and the three ghostly visits that transform his life.

What is your favourite Dickens’ story?

Sources:

Wikipedia

Dickens by Peter Ackroyd

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Holiday Book Bag 2024 (Part 2)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Last week I gave you part one of my Holiday Book bag so here we go with part 2, more of my holiday reads and also what happened when tragedy occurred and I ran out of books.

Let’s kick off with this one, a Christmas pressy from Liz and a book I’ve been dying to read but purposely kept to read on holiday.

Mary’s Mosaic by Peter Janney

Liz bought me this book for Christmas and I’ve been saving it for a time when I can sit and read it undisturbed. After the assassination of President Kennedy there were numerous deaths of various witnesses in Dallas and elsewhere. One such death was of a lady named Mary Pinchot Mayer. She was the ex-wife of CIA agent Cord Mayer and one of JFK’s many mistresses. The author reckons she not only introduced the President to mind altering drugs but also agreed strongly with Kennedy’s desire for peace. He goes a little too far perhaps in making the case that Mary was the force behind JFK’s commencement address at American University in October, 1963 in which Kennedy called for both the USA and the Soviet Union to

‘direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.’

Mary was shocked by the murder of the President but came to realise the part played by the CIA and wanted to bring attention to the false story of the Warren Commission report. One day in Washington in October 1964, whilst walking along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal towpath, she was murdered. Mary was shot once in the head and once in the chest and in this remarkable book the author goes on to trace the man who he thinks may have been the assassin.

A very fascinating read indeed.

So that was it, by the start of our third week I had read all my books. What could I read next? Well, there wasn’t much in our rented villa’s bookcase so I read one of Liz’s books, Shall we Tell the President?.

Shall we Tell the President? by Jeffrey Archer.

I’ve actually read this book before, many years ago but this was a new edition, rewritten by the author himself. In the original, the president in question was Edward Kennedy but of course, in real life Kennedy never made it to the White House, his challenge cut short by the ghost of what happened to Mary Jo Kopechene at Chappaquiddick. In this rewrite then, the author puts his own fictional president, President Kane in charge at the White House.

The FBI learn of a plot to murder the president. A Greek waiter, an illegal immigrant learns of the plot whilst working as a waiter at a restaurant in Washington DC. He calls the FBI and the two agents assigned to the case report quickly to their superior. Soon, one of the agents and their boss, as well as the informant are dead leaving only one agent who by chance has survived a murder attempt. He has six days to track down the assassins.

The book kept me interested but I can’t say it was a great read and I thought some of the dialogue was a little poor, in particular the FBI agent who kept referring to his new girlfriend constantly as ‘pretty lady’ was a little cringeworthy to say the least. Sorry Mr Archer but I’d have to give this one a five out of ten.

The Long Dark Night by Susan Lund

This was a bit of a first for me. Liz had nothing else that I wanted to read so she said she would sort me out something on her Kindle. She searched for free books and I chose this one by Susan Lund. It was about ex-FBI detective Michael Carter who is now working for the police on cold cases. He is asked to look into the discovery of a dead body on a property that is currently being renovated. As more bodies are unearthed, Carter links the bodies to some current cases and feels that a serial killer might be at work.

Later, two young boys are abducted but one escapes and Carter finally has a clue to work on. Could the killer be an ex-police officer?

The book was a fairly interesting read in part but the author seems to lose direction towards the end and the finale seemed to me to be a bit of an anti-climax.

Even so, the book kept me interested for a few days.

The Woman who Stole My Life by Marian Keyes.

This final holiday read was a book Liz took with her. She read it first, thought it was good and passed it on to me. I thought it was probably standard chick-lit fodder but actually it was a really good read, trotting along in a very chit chatty way, just like my own stories. It flips about timeline wise talking about things in the present and then flipping back to events of some years ago but once you got used to the situation it turned out to be a really enjoyable read.

Stella, many years ago was looking after her family when she was struck down by a mysterious illness which rendered her paralysed and unable to move or talk. Her neurologist Mannix, manages to communicate with her by getting her to blink, so he would go through the alphabet and she would blink at a particular letter and eventually they would put words and sentences together.

Gradually she begins to find that Mannix is becoming quite important to her especially when her husband and children don’t seem to be interested in either her or her predicament. When she gets well, she finds that 1, she has fallen for Mannix and 2, he has fallen for her, so much so that he has self-published a book called One Blink at a Time, a book of based on the notes he has made of their blinking conversations. Anyway, by a series of fluke events the book becomes a best seller in the USA and the two move to New York to promote the book.

All in all, a very enjoyable book indeed and I might even look at reading some more of Marian Keyes books.

That was my holiday book bag. What books are you planning to read on holiday?

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Holiday Book Bag 2024 (Part 1)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This year Liz and I have spent five weeks in sunny Lanzarote and when we had just started week three I had run out of books. One of my great holiday pleasures is spending a lot of uninterrupted time reading in the sun. My big mistake this year was not bringing enough books and also including two very slim volumes in the ones I did bring. Sometimes in a holiday villa there will be something readable in the cupboard that other holidaymakers have left behind, but in our villa the majority of previous tenants appeared to be German and unfortunately my German language expertise only amounts to counting to ten.

Anyway, this particular book bag went on for a bit so I’ve split it into two parts and next week you can read part two. So, let’s take a look at what I have been reading in Lanzarote this winter.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

I noticed this title on one of those blog posts about books you should read before you die. I knew I had a copy somewhere and after rummaging about for a while I finally came across it. It was a rather slim volume and I’d probably read it years ago but it looked interesting and so I opened it up and began to read. My big problem in reviewing this book is that I started reading it and after a few chapters put it down and began reading something else. It’s a small slim book so I popped it into my shoulder bag thinking I’d read it on the flight to Lanzarote. I couldn’t concentrate on the flight but I started reading it later by the pool but then I had to backtrack and re read some of the earlier pages so I lost the continuity. It’s about a teacher, Miss Brodie, who feels that as she is in her prime she must devote herself to a chosen group of her favourite pupils; the Brodie Set. Miss Brodie is not a conventional teacher and tells her pupils all about her visits to Italy and of her love for Mussolini and his fascists. This is done sometimes when the class should be studying mathematics and so a complicated mathematical sum is usually put up on the blackboard to fool any interlopers, like the headmistress for instance.

The Brodie Set all wonder about Miss Brodie and her love affairs and later, when Miss Brodie has lost her job, she wonders who was the traitor? Who reported her to the headmistress? Not one of the Brodie Set surely?

It’s an interesting and original book but I can’t say I was totally impressed but perhaps I should have read it properly and not put it down part way through.

Room at the Top

This was another slim volume I found in a box of old books. I first read it in 1984 according to the note I added on the back of the cover. It’s about a young man, Joe Lampton, in a rigidly class structured 1950s England, still dealing with post war rationing and his journey from a small working class village to a room at the top of a big northern town. He gets a job as an assistant treasurer at the Warley district council and he sets his sights on a young girl who also happens to be the daughter of a rich business owning councillor. A man of his background is not the sort of man the councillor wishes to see romancing his daughter so Joe gets quietly warned off. He is jealous of former RAF pilot Jack Wales who is the sort of fellow who is much more acceptable to the councillor. Jack is a WWII hero who escaped from a prison camp. Joe was an RAF rear gunner who was also in a camp but used his time not to escape but to study for his accountancy exams.

Joe joins an amateur theatre group and starts an affair with a married woman ten years older than him. He is happy and there is talk about her divorcing her husband. This though is 1950s Britain. His involvement would mean scandal and the end of his job with the council, so what should he do?

There was a film version of this starring Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton and Simone Signoret as Alice Aisgil with whom Joe has an affair. It’s slightly different to the book in a few minor ways but Laurence Harvey’s rather fake northern accent always puts me off.

Anyway, it was a fascinating read looking back to an England much different from today.

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The Kennedy Curse by James Patterson with Cynthia Fagen

This wasn’t a bad read but to be fair it only really skimmed the surface of the story of the Kennedy family. There were no great revelations about the family and to be honest, I’ve read a huge amount about the Kennedy family and this was a book I could probably have written myself, at least to a certain extent. The book really begins with Joe Kennedy and his impressive rise in business and banking. He becomes the youngest ever bank manager in the USA and with his business acumen he soon amasses a large fortune along with his famous family. He supports FDR as the democratic candidate for the presidency but he wants something in return, the ambassadorship to Great Britain. Joe becomes the ambassador taking his family over to London but when the second world war looms he decides Britain will be no match for Nazi Germany.

The big problem for Joe is that FDR thinks otherwise and soon recalls Joe who finds himself out of a job. He has designs on the presidency himself but decides a better course of action would be to make his son, Joe, junior president. When Joe is killed in the war, his next son John F Kennedy has to take on the mantle.

As we all know JFK becomes president but is tragically murdered and the same fate falls to Bobby Kennedy who runs for president in 1968. Ted Kennedy decides to follow in his brothers’ footsteps but then the Chappaquiddick incident occurs when Ted leaves poor Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his overturned car. Ted seems to ride out the ensuing scandal but it becomes clear he will never be president. The story then turns to the next generation of Kennedys who do not seem to be in the same league as their uncles and the narrative begins to turn toward drug addiction and other issues including rape charges against William Kennedy Smith, one of numerous next generation Kennedy cousins.

The story finishes with the death of John F Kennedy junior, the son of the late president, in a light aircraft crash.

A fascinating story but to be honest I’ve read better histories of the Kennedy family although this did keep me entertained for a while.

A Time to Kill by John Grisham

I’ve read a few of Grisham’s books and I’ve always been impressed with them, all except one. This one turns out to be his first novel and he says in the introduction how proud he was of finishing it as at that time, he hardly ever finished anything. It also contains some autobiographical elements as at the time, Grisham was a street lawyer, similar to the character in the book.

The book is set in America’s deep south where there is or was a great deal of racial prejudice. Two white guys decide to kidnap a young black girl, tie her to a tree and repeatedly rape her. They drive her away and dump her like garbage but she survives and the police arrest the two scumbags responsible. The next is that the young girl’s father Carl Lee Hailey decides to take a rifle and shoot the two guys. He is arrested and put on trial for murder and street lawyer Jake Brigance takes on the case.

The case ignites the small town of Clanton Mississippi. The Klu Klux Klan become involved as do various other groups and the stage is set for a tense murder trial which goes on while the police and the National Guard try to keep order.

It’s a very exciting read although the ending was a little underwhelming and if you find the N word offensive then this is a book which is not for you as that particular word appears numerous times on almost every page.

I read more books on holiday in Lanzarote. Tune in next week for more books, same time, same channel, same blog.

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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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Noel Coward, Pools and Flying Creatures

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This could really be a Sun Lounger Post  but for clarity I thought I’d give it the title above because it’s actually mainly about Noel Coward and his autobiographies.

Here in the quiet village of Parçay-les-Pins, Liz and I are having a relaxing time. The weather is good, well actually, it is fantastic. Sunny and warm, perhaps a little too warm but either way, the perfect weather for barbecues, eating outside, reading by the pool and relaxing.

Here’s the itinerary: Up at whatever time we want. Breakfast later, usually before 12 noon but not always, a quick washing up of the pots and then out to the pool. I’ve spent most of this holiday reading the autobiography of Noel Coward and it’s actually three books in one. The first part is his first autobiography, Present Indicative, part 2 is an unpublished segment of his unfinished third autobiography, Past Conditional and finally his second published autobiography Future Indefinite.

Book one, Present Indicative was published in 1937 and concerns Noel’s early years, his childhood and his first tentative steps into the theatre. It’s an account of a vanished world of repertory companies, writers, actors and actresses who have long gone and whose names mean little today in the 21st century. Even so it is hugely fascinating and interesting and as always enlivened by Noel’s supremely witty text. Noel was a homosexual in a time when homosexuality was illegal and most of his private life he keeps private although armed with a little knowledge of Noel we can read between the lines and assume that Jack Wilson who comes to live with him at his home, Goldenhurst in Kent, was presumably his lover.

It is pretty hot here in Parçay-les-Pins and after a little reading it’s time to slip into the cool waters of the pool and have a swim. Just lately, on a physical level I’ve been very inactive. I keep meaning to cycle or take a walk every day but I can never get around to it and I’m conscious my health is suffering. Now, every 20 minutes or so I slip into the pool and do 8 to 10 lengths and go back to my sun lounger for more relaxation and reading.

Book two, Past Conditional is an unpublished and unfinished autobiography that was intended to fill in the gap between his first two autobiographical books. It starts where the first one finished off, in the early 1930s and differs considerably in tone as it was written much later in the mid-1960s and Noel was able to look back at himself in the 1930s and examine himself from a more in depth perspective. Such a pity it was unfinished.

An interesting segment concerns the death of his brother who is scarcely mentioned in the text as he and Noel were never close. The brother was clearly never part of Noel’s theatrical world and the family sent him off to South Africa only for him to return and die of cancer.

In Parçay-les-Pins, we have been tempted to visit our favourite local restaurant however, a couple of things have stopped us. Firstly, it is very hot and the Station Restaurant is only open at lunchtimes so we have decided to wait until next week when the weather forecast is not looking so good. Why waste all that precious sun-bathing time?

Tea time at Parçay-les-Pins

Round about 6 pm or sometimes later, we tend to move from the pool back to the house and crank up the barbecue and decant some wine and eat in the warm evening. One of the great pleasures in France, at least for me, is to sit outside until the sun slides over the horizon and then in the darkness, a darkness here in the countryside so velvety and complete that the view of the sky and the stars is uninterrupted by any ambient light such as traffic or streetlights. Then I can look up at the great vista of the night sky, the heavens displayed above us in such a way that can never been seen from a great city like Manchester in the UK.

The big problem I have found is that this is just the time for the insects of the night to come out and nibble at my legs. One night Liz mentioned that she had some of those citronella candles that are supposed to deter the bugs so at once I dug a few out and lit them. It was rather nice for a while sat in the dark with the candles fluttering away with a rather nice scent. What happened was that the rather nice scent seemed to encourage even more bugs, especially a great number of what I can only describe as hornets. They were two to three times bigger than a UK wasp and then seemed to be honing in on the scented candles. Luckily, Liz is a master of the fly swatter and after a short while a whole flight of the hornets lay dead on the windowsill although by then, I had shot inside to safety.

The final book in the autobiographical series was Future Indefinite in which Noel recounted his time during the Second World War. He seems like many to have had a very low opinion of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, although to be fair to Chamberlain, he was doing his utmost to avoid the horrors of war. Sadly, and clearly unknown to Mr Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler did not want to avoid war, he was in fact wanting war very badly and happily it was Mr Churchill who understood this only too well.

In June of 1939 Noel who was a great globetrotter decided to take a tour of Europe in the light of Mr Chamberlain declaring ‘peace in our time’. He visited Warsaw and Danzig, Moscow, Leningrad, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. He found that many of the people in those places were just waiting for Hitler to invade, particularly the Poles. In Russia he found a state that declared it had found freedom in Communism but was in fact quite the opposite as the Stalinist regime had choked any kind of criticism or free thinking whatsoever.

When war was declared Noel was asked to be part of an Anglo-French PR unit in Paris which he seems to have enjoyed for a while and then become a little bored with. He was sent on a tour of the USA to gauge opinion there on the war and was on his way back when the Nazis invaded France. He also did a tour of Australia and New Zealand to entertain troops and did charity work for various organisations helping those who were bombed out in London.

By far the most interesting part was his account of the filming of In Which We Serve, a very patriotic film showing the activities of a ship in the Royal Navy and the lives of those who served in her, all the way through to the ship’s sinking. In his very first autobiography, the names of the many actors and actresses he worked with meant very little to me but now I began to recognise a few names, John Mills and Richard Attenborough for instance and David Lean who co-directed the film with Noel although in actual fact, Lean directed most of the film when Coward became bored with the long-winded filming process.

Lying by the pool after a lot of reading and swimming I invariably start to feel tired round about the 4pm mark and tend to nod off although I’m usually awoken by flies buzzing around my ears. What insects seem to find fascinating about my ears I will never know but they always seem to strike just as I am nodding off.

Books, Sudoku and a pool. What could be nicer?

As well as the flies a great horde of swallows seem to be fascinated by our pool and round about 5pm they gather on the telephone line above us, divide themselves into squadrons and make various sorties down to the pool, skimming just above the surface or sometimes dipping into the water with either their wings or their tiny feet. This performance is very remarkable indeed and quite a few times I’ve had to duck as the swallows make their dives from just behind my head.

It actually reminded me about the Dambusters, the raid by 617 squadron of the RAF on the dams of Germany. They had to drop low over the waters of the dams and hit a consistent height of 60 feet before dropping their ‘bouncing bombs’.

Coward goes on to talk about Blithe Spirit, my favourite of Coward’s plays which was made into a film in 1945. Coward was not keen on the resulting film. David Lean added an ending in which Charles Condomine played by Rex Harrison dies and joins his ex-wives in the spirit world. Coward complained that David Lean had f**ked up the best thing I had ever written!  Personally, I loved it.

Final verdict of the Noel Coward biographies; fascinating, always interesting and hugely entertaining.

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Holiday Book Bag: Spring 2023

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I was reading a biography about Richard Burton called ‘Rich’ by Melvyn Bragg. The book used Burton’s own diaries and mentioned, amongst other things, Burton’s love of books. When Burton went on holiday he looked forward with delight to the contents of his ‘book bag’. I know it’s a pretty tenuous link but one thing I have in common with Richard Burton is a love of books and when I go on holiday, one of the delights of lying under a warm sun on my sunbed is a good, undisturbed read. I read a lot at home and before I retired, on my lunch breaks at work but it’s a few minutes here and a few minutes there and whenever I get interrupted it kind of breaks the flow. Some books, as we all know, are just made for a really long, uninterrupted read so here are the books I took on holiday with me recently, all sourced from either the internet or secondhand bookshops.

I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke

I’ll start off this book bag with this autobiography by John Cooper Clarke. I wrote about it a few weeks ago so I’ll keep it brief here. This was a wonderful read. It wasn’t the I did this and then I did that conventional autobiography, it was a very observational book and Cooper Clarke paints an interesting picture of Manchester and Salford from the 1950s to his heyday as a punk poet in the 1980’s. The last quarter of the book resembles a more conventional biography and it made me want to read some of his poetry.

Verdict: A fabulous, entertaining read.

10 Years in an Open Necked Shirt by John Cooper Clarke

This was a poetry book by John and to be fair I found it a little disappointing. The thing is, Clarke is a performance poet and his grammar free poetry doesn’t work as well on the printed page as it does when Clarke performs it on stage. Some poetry I suppose is meant to be read, other poetry needs to be performed and Clarke’s comes into the latter category.

Verdict: Interesting but not my cup of tea.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I first heard about this from seeing a trailer to the new film version and it looked pretty interesting. I do love something that is new and original and so Liz and I went to the cinema to see it which was my first cinema visit for a long time. It’s a good film but not a cinema classic and I wondered if the book would be better. The story is about Harold Fry who is retired and lives with his wife on a suburban housing estate. He gets a letter advising him that a friend and former workmate named Queenie, is dying of cancer and he pens a short note of sympathy in reply. He goes out to post the letter but decides to walk further wrapped up in thoughts about Queenie. At a petrol station where he buys a sandwich the young girl assistant tells him a story about her aunt who suffered with cancer and she -the shop assistant- feels that real faith and positive thoughts can help beat even something like cancer. Harold decides there and then to walk all the way to Berwick-upon-Tweed and see Queenie in person.

Along the way Harold meets various people and when news of his march reaches the media, many others come to join him. Along the way he thinks a lot about the events of his life, in particular his relationships with his wife and son and eventually both he and his wife, who he speaks constantly to on the telephone, seem to reach a sort of understanding about what has happened to them as well as an unspoken desire to reunite and move forward. The book was a great success world wide and many reviews printed on the back cover tell the reader what an uplifting read it was. It wasn’t a bad read at all but I actually found it not only sad but rather miserable and, to be honest, not uplifting at all.

Verdict: Original and interesting but a bit too melancholic for me.

Then Again by Diane Keaton

This is another autobiography and like the one by John Cooper Clarke it was a rather unconventional one. Diane Keaton is a film actress you might remember from the Godfather movies or from Annie Hall. Diane’s mother had died and looking through her effects she had found numerous notebooks and diaries in which her mother had written about her life. In this autobiography, Diane has tried to link her story with that of her mother and has put her own experiences and memories side by side with those of her mother. The result is for the most part a really very interesting book, told in a very open and talkative way by both Diane Keaton and her mother. Diane doesn’t get too personal but does talk quite a lot about her work and her life in particular with Woody Allen and Warren Beatty, both of whom she was involved with for a time. She also had a long relationship with Al Pacino who she played opposite in the Godfather series of films and it seems to me she was expecting to marry Al but for whatever reason he decided to call the relationship a day.

The last part of the book is really about her decision, late in life, to adopt two children and the result for the autobiography is rather like when one of your friends has a child and all they ever seem to do is go on and on about their new little boy or girl. Her mother sadly develops dementia and Diane’s experience of trying to look after her was all too familiar to mine.

Verdict: The book goes off on a bit of a tangent towards the end but generally I really enjoyed it, especially the bits about working with Woody Allen.

The Richard Burton Diaries edited by Chris Williams

I mentioned at the start of this post about reading Melvyn Bragg’s biography of Richard Burton and how Burton used to always take a ‘book bag’ with him whenever he went away. Bragg’s book was based partly on these diaries which have now been published and are available to everyone.

There is a lot I like about this book and a lot that I don’t like. I tend to prefer paperbacks but I bought this one from the internet and it’s a big heavy hardback and as I’ve dragged it across France it’s generally getting a little tattier every day.

Moving on to the text and I see a lot of the big events in Burton’s life are missing as sometimes he stops writing for days and even months at a time. We don’t hear about the making of Cleopatra and his meeting and affair with Elizabeth Taylor but he does mention some of those events in retrospect.

The book starts with his schoolboy diaries which are rather like mine, brief and to the point. Later, the main diary starts in 1965 and as I write this, I’m up to about 1970. Burton tells us of his immense love for Taylor and how he has given up womanising to be faithful to her but sometimes I get the feeling he isn’t being totally honest, after all Liz has free access to his diary and she frequently jots down her own comments too. Burton was rumoured to have had an affair with Genevieve Bujold during the filming of Anne of a Thousand Days but of course, gives no mention of that in his journal. He does talk a lot about food and having lunch in places like Paris and Rome. He enjoys having money and delights in spending it on jewels for Liz, a new private jet plane and a yacht which he thinks might actually save him money as he can stay on the yacht rather than use hotels. Even so, he continues to use hotels anyway. At one point he considers buying a barge, modernising it and touring the canals of France.

He doesn’t seem to enjoy his acting and in fact rather looks down on it as a profession, although unlike an actor like Brando who had similar thoughts, he did take pride in what he did, learning his part and his lines whereas Brando couldn’t even be bothered to learn the script for the film of Superman despite his million dollar fee.

Surprisingly there is also quite a lot of professional jealousy in the text, for instance, he gives Robert Shaw a bit of a slagging off for his performance as Henry VIII in A Man for all Seasons which I thought was rather good, better or at least the equal of Burton’s Henry VIII in Anne of a Thousand Days.

Burton drinks a lot and frequently argues with Liz, sometimes he is banished to the spare bedroom and usually he regrets his drunken words and wonders why he did what he did or said what he said.

He was though a man who loved books, reading anything from the classics to detective novels. He enjoyed books immensely and even had ambitions of being a writer himself. His entries are peppered with quotations from authors and poets and of course Shakespeare.

I was really looking forward to reading this book but after the first few pages I thought it a little uninteresting. As the narrative moved from 1968 into 1970, Burton seemed to be putting more effort into his journalling and consequently it became more enjoyable to read. Later large gaps appear in the diaries and he doesn’t appear to have written anything about his breakup with Liz Taylor. The entries become less frequent and to be honest, I ended up skipping quite a few pages.

Verdict: A book that promised a lot but failed to deliver.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

I’ve read a few books by this author before and always enjoyed them, this one being no exception, in fact it might be the best book by Grisham I have read so far. The book opens with the murder of two US Supreme Court judges and this in some ways plays into the hands of the President as he can now nominate new judges who share his political views. At the same time law student Darby Shaw is having an affair with her law professor. She decides to look closely at the murders and develops a thesis, an idea about who may have done the murders and why. The thesis becomes known as the Pelican Brief and she passes it to the professor who in turn sends it to his friend, an FBI lawyer. It then gets passed up the chain to the head of the FBI and on to the White House where the President asks the FBI not to investigate further.

Not long afterwards the professor is blown up in a car bomb which Darby narrowly avoids and from then on, she is on the run trying to evade death herself.

This for me was one of those unputdownable novels which was exciting and kept me interested all the way to the end.

Verdict: A brilliant read.

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Another James Bond 007 Post

Posted on by Steve Higgins

James Bond has been in the news this week. The books by Ian Fleming are apparently being rewritten as they might be considered offensive to a modern generation of new readers and the producers are still looking for a new actor to play their famous secret agent. OK, time for another James Bond 007 post.

The publishers of the Bond books have decided that it’s time for a reissue of the best selling series with a disclaimer telling readers that the novels use language that may be considered offensive by modern readers. Of course the books were written in the late fifties and early sixties and reflect attitudes of the time. I have the entire collection of Bond books and most of them have a reference on the back saying they are outrageously entertaining, which they are, but take away the outrageous part and they are no longer outrageously entertaining but perhaps just somewhat entertaining. Of course if we begin to tamper with books written in the past where do we stop? Roald Dahl’s books are also in the news as they have been updated by ‘sensitivity readers’ although I’m not sure how these well-read children’s books can upset anyone. James Bond of course is a different matter and any sensitivity readers might have a problem with a book like Live and Let Die which is partly set in Harlem and Ian Fleming uses most of the unpleasant racial epithets which were in use at the time.

I started reading the Bond books when I was a schoolboy and unfortunately the very first one I read was the only one they had in our local library – ‘The Man With The Golden Gun’, one of writer Ian Fleming’s worst Bond books. Fleming used to write his initial drafts of the novels and then write a second one, adding in all the details which make the Bond books so interesting. Things like details of Bond’s clothes, (the Sea Island cotton shirts) his food, (Bond always had scrambled eggs for breakfast) his cars, his cigarettes (the special handmade ones with the triple gold band) and all that sort of stuff. ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ was published after Fleming had died and sadly, he had not revised his original draft. I persevered though, did some research, found the proper order of the books and began to read ‘Casino Royale’, the first in the series. April this year marks the 70th anniversary of Casino Royale and it is this anniversary which has prompted the Bond books to be reissued, complete with disclaimer.

That first book is a pretty original story. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB, is engaged on a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course, as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.

The book is interesting in another way too. Ian Fleming sold the movie rights to Casino Royale separately from the rest of the books and this enabled producer Charles K Feldman to produce a movie independently from Eon productions who own the rights to the other books. Feeling that he could not compete with the mainstream movies, Feldman decided to make Casino Royale into a comedy version. David Niven starred as Sir James Bond and ironically, Ian Fleming had mooted Niven as a possible Bond when casting began for Dr No, the first movie in the series.

Eon Productions finally acquired the rights to Casino Royale ready for the debut of new Bond actor Daniel Craig. I’ve got to say I didn’t like Craig at first. He didn’t look like Bond and I honestly thought he would have been better cast as one of the Bond villain’s henchmen but I did warm to him eventually and although I didn’t much care for it at first, I really do think Casino Royale is one of the better Bond films. It was released in 2006 and follows the book pretty faithfully which many of the previous films rarely do. Craig’s last Bond film was No Time To Die which I really thought was the poorest of Craig’s five outings as 007 and Bond has been in the news frequently as writers, journalists, bloggers and everyone and his dog have speculated about who the next James Bond 007 will be.

Will it be the usual upper class white guy or will Bond be black? Will there even be a female Bond? What does a 21st century secret agent look like or act like?

James Bond, the character created by Ian Fleming, was a commander in naval intelligence in World War II. He learned to ski in Kitzbühel in the 1930s and fought in the Second World War. He was an officer and a gentleman. He frequented expensive restaurants and gentlemen’s clubs as well as casinos and card tables. He drove a Bentley, lived alone in a Kings Road, Chelsea flat where he was looked after by an elderly Scottish housekeeper named May. He drank a martini made with three parts gin, one of vodka, a half measure of Kina Lillet, shaken with until ice cold then served with a slice of lemon peel. Bond is a character entrenched in mid twentieth century England so making him into a character from the 21st century will not be easy. What can the film makers do? Well, they could set the Bond films back in the 1960s. That’s one option although I doubt if that will happen. They could go radical and make Bond an ethnic character; I’m forever seeing posts about Idris Elba as the next Bond in my social media feeds but then, the character wouldn’t be Bond, would he?

The first change of Bond actor was from Sean Connery to George Lazenby. I liked Lazenby and his one 007 film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was one of my favourites. Connery returned for Diamonds are Forever and then Roger Moore took over Bond’s licence to kill. His films ranged from bad to supremely dreadful and as much as I’ve always loved Roger, I hated his Bond films.

Timothy Dalton stepped into Bond’s shoes when Moore stood down and made two pretty good films. Legal issues kept Bond off the screen for a long time but when the franchise finally returned it was with Pierce Brosnan as 007. Goldeneye was one of my favourite Bonds but his other films weren’t so good and even looked for a while as if they were going to go down the same road as Roger Moore’s Bonds into slightly ridiculous territory. With Casino Royale though things got pretty serious. The film makers played down the gadgetry which always was a staple of the early Bond films, things like cars with ejector seats, watches fitted with special magnets and belt buckles firing climbing pitons. None of that played any part in the Daniel Craig era but here’s the thing; in the previous films each new Bond has just carried on as before with hardly a nod to the previous actor, although George Lazenby did famously say ‘this never happened to the other fella!’

When Daniel Craig took over the series was to a certain extent rebooted. Bond was new to the 00 section and Casino Royale his first mission. His mission in No Time To Die was also his last, his very last because, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, because Bond actually dies. How could the producers start over then with the next Bond? Well, many fictional characters have come back from the dead, most notably Sherlock Holmes who author Arthur Conan Doyle killed off when he got bored with the character.  Holmes perished by falling off a cliff but a few years later Conan Doyle bowed to public pressure and Sherlock Holmes returned. It turned out, he hadn’t really died after all.

image courtesy flickr.com

Ian Fleming didn’t kill off Bond but in You Only Live Twice, Bond is seriously hurt and is rescued by Kissy Suzuki who was posing as his wife while Bond was on a mission for Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service. Bond had lost his memory and Kissy hides Bond away from the authorities. One day though, Bond sees something about Vladivostok in either a newspaper or a book, I can’t remember which, and still suffering with amnesia decides he must go there. You Only Live Twice ends there but in the next book, The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond returns having been brainwashed by the Soviets into assassinating his own boss, the head of the British secret service, known only as M.

The producers never used that storyline in the film adaptations of those two books so if I was the writer of the new Bond movie, that’s exactly how I would start the new era of Bond films off.

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My Holiday Book Bag: Winter 2023

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I was reading a biography about Richard Burton called ‘Rich’ by Melvyn Bragg. The book used Burton’s own diaries and mentioned, amongst other things, Burton’s love of books. When Burton went on holiday he looked forward with delight to the contents of his ‘book bag’. I know it’s a pretty tenuous link but one thing I have in common with Richard Burton is a love of books and when I go on holiday, one of the delights of lying under a warm sun on my sun bed is a good, undisturbed read. I read a lot at home and on my lunch breaks at work but it’s a few minutes here and a few minutes there and whenever I get interrupted it kind of breaks the flow. Some books, as we all know, are just made for a really long, uninterrupted read so here are the books I took on holiday with me recently, all sourced from either the internet or secondhand bookshops.

Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger

This book was a Christmas gift from Liz. She knows I’m a big film fan and I do love reading about the background to films and how they are made. Arnold is from Austria and he tells us a little of his life there but mainly focuses on his desire to be a great bodybuilder and to eventually go to America. There is a lot of talk about the process of competitive bodybuilding and the different muscles, muscle definition, reps and squats and all that stuff. Arnold eventually wins various competitions and is wondering how he can compete in the USA when he gets an invitation to do just that. The bodybuilding industry is a close knit one and there seem to be various people welcoming him to California, helping him to find a place to stay and so on. He wins more competitions and makes a little money. He starts a mail order business selling magazines and pamphlets about himself and his body building techniques. He brings one of his Austrian friends over and the two begin a bricklaying and home improvement business. His big break is getting a film part as Hercules and even though the production eventually goes bust it seems to give him a taste of the film business and he wants more. He plays Conan the Barbarian in the film version of a comic book hero and pretty soon he plays the Terminator and goes on to success after success, even becoming governor of California.

I’m not sure I actually came away liking Arnold. I know this is an autobiography but it’s a very me, me, me book and Arnold is constantly bigging himself up. The final chapters about his political career are perhaps the most interesting. He had thought about running for governor but senior republicans seemed to have been more interested in another candidate. However, when Gray Davis was elected in 2000, there seems to have been something of a backlash and there is a curious precedent in Californian politics. The public can demand a recall, a new election in which the public either go for the elected governor or someone new. Arnold entered into the recall and won. He seems to have been in an odd position politically. He was a Republican but had married into the Kennedy family who are Democrats but his success as a politician seems to have come from holding the centre ground in California and bringing Republicans and Democrats and getting them to work together.

At the end of the book Arnold gives us his personal philosophy and his rules for success.

Verdict: I’m not sure whether Arnold wrote this book just to give us his story or to further promote himself but if I had to choose, I’d probably say the latter. Having said that, Mr Schwarzenegger is a man who gets things done and has a positive attitude. Perhaps I should take another look at his rules for success.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

This is not a book I brought on holiday but one I found on the shelves of our rented villa in Lanzarote. I started reading it when I got a little bored with Arnold Schwarzenegger and liked it so much I just carried on to the end. It is a real pleasure to read something by a master wordsmith and I enjoyed every minute even though I had read this novel years ago. Young Pip, apprenticed to be a blacksmith, is invited to the home of an eccentric rich woman, Miss Havisham, purely for her amusement. Later in his young life he finds he has ‘great expectations’ and is to inherit a remarkable property. He is taken to London to be brought up as a gentleman and although he is told that his benefactor has asked to remain a secret, he naturally assumes it is Miss Havisham. At the beginning of the book, Pip encounters Magwitch, an escaped convict on the marshes near his home. He compels Pip to bring him some food and a file. He is captured and transported to Australia and later we find, much to Mr Pip’s shock and amazement that Magwitch is the mysterious benefactor.

The book is rightfully one of Dickens’ best loved stories and is a wonderful read. I’ve always thought it had a rather ambiguous ending and in fact in my edition back home, it is one of those with various notes and background information, I am advised that Dickens felt that it was important to assure the reader that Pip had a future with Estella, the spoilt adopted daughter of Miss Havisham and so changed the ending slightly. Pip of course did want a future with Estella but I still feel the book leaves a happy ending slightly uncertain.

Verdict: An absolute classic from a master storyteller.

A Mad world, My Masters by John Simpson

This is a collection of globe trotting stories from John Simpson who has travelled the world as a journalist for the BBC. These though are travel stories with a difference, for instance in the first chapter he talks about airports, not the airports that I generally use, tourist destinations like Spain and Greece. The ones Mr Simpson mentions are airports in war torn Angola and Bosnia, and places like Kabul in Afghanistan and other places where he has had his passport and papers routinely torn up or thrown into a river by laughing revolutionaries and mercenaries. He tells us about headlong dashes to catch flights, including one somewhere in eastern Europe where he was in such a mess after weeks living rough the stewardess was reluctant to let him on board, especially as he had a first class seat. His fellow passenger in the next seat asked to be moved. Luckily John wasn’t flying on a budget airline like the ones I travel with.

On one occasion in Afghanistan with the Mujahadeen, a bearded man appears dressed in white robes. He tries to get the Mujahadeen to murder Simpson for $500. It later turned out that the man was Bin Laden. Simpson talks nonchalantly about many other encounters with revolutionaries such as Arkan, the Bosnian warlord. There are other chapters on dictators that he has met and other sometimes ordinary people who have impressed him, like the simple village priest trying to make life safer for his fellow villagers in Colombia, one of the great drug producing countries of the world.

Most of his stories are hugely fascinating although the more interesting ones are about people, either the ones he has interviewed or the ones who work with him, his fellow journalists and sound-men, cameramen and so on. Most of this book is about the days when a BBC crew consisted of a cameraman, a sound-man, a producer and sometimes even others. Today, Simpson’s crew would consist of him and one other doing the filming and editing. There are some TV journalists today that even have to film and edit themselves.

The last part of the book where the author talks about his love for middle eastern rugs and antiques and the process of bartering that goes with buying those things was perhaps not my cup of tea. Verdict: A patchy read with some very fascinating chapters as well as some not so interesting ones. Generally, though, this was indeed an excellent read.

The Firm by John Grisham

There is a process by which I choose books to take with me on holiday. I like to think it’s a thoughtful process combining different genres of books, some novels, maybe the odd classic, and some biographies and autobiographies. What actually happens is that the day before our trip I’ll just grab something near to hand that I know I haven’t read yet and shove it in my suitcase. Anyway, that’s how I ended up with the books you see above. Last year I read The Rainmaker by John Grisham and I thought it was a pretty good read. I must have mentioned that to Liz so she filed that away and got me a stack of Grisham novels for my last birthday. The Firm isn’t a bad read and in my case it was a nice change of pace after reading Dickens and John Simpson’s globetrotting memories. It’s a good story but like a lot of Grisham’s works, its more plot driven than character driven. The characters are sort of bland templates that I’ve recognised in a lot of his novels and so far I’ve only read three. Anyway, characters aside, this is a really original story about a young guy who graduates from law school and gets head hunted into a firm he has never heard of but which offers tremendous financial benefits, a brand new BMW, and an ultra cheap mortgage as well as other financial bonuses. The downside as he comes to learn later is that the firm is just a cover operation to launder money for a big mafia crime family and the FBI wants our hero James McDeere, to help them.

Verdict: Highly enjoyable and a great holiday read but nothing more, although that didn’t stop the book from becoming a best seller as well as a hit film in the 1990’s.

The Woman in The Window by AJ Finn

I’m not sure I would normally have picked up this book if I hadn’t run out of books to read. I saw this on the shelf in our rented villa and Liz had read it and mentioned about numerous references to old black and white films which were right down my alley, apparently.

Anyway, I thought I’d give it a go and I’m very happy that I did. It’s about a woman called Anna Fox suffering from agoraphobia who cannot venture outside her house. She is in effect almost imprisoned there but spends her time playing online chess, seeing two therapists, one physical and one psychological as well as taking medication and drinking a whole lot of Merlot. She also spends a lot of time watching old films on TV and DVD as well as watching her neighbours.

She hears a terrible scream one night although no one else seems to hear it. She questions her tenant who lives in her basement but at the time in question he was doing some work while wearing earphones.

She meets Jane Russell from across the road, not the Jane Russell from the films but a pleasant lady whom she invites in and has a glass of wine with. Later through the windows of Jane’s house, she sees her get stabbed.  Anna calls the police and tries to go across to the house but she cannot get over the road due to her agoraphobia and she ends up in the park where she is found by paramedics.

When she surfaces, we find that no one believes her story and also that Jane Russell is still alive, except, she’s a different Jane Russell to the one Anna saw murdered.

The tension builds nicely in this thriller and a number of shocks are dropped in front of the reader along the way as we find out what has caused the agoraphobia and what really happened over the road.

This was also made into a film starring Amy Adams as Anna Fox although I’ve yet to see it.

Verdict: Great read, so much so that when we left the villa, I had to take it with me to finish on the plane home. To be fair I did leave behind The Firm to replace it.

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