I did a post on this subject a while ago and I thought it’s time for a follow up post. My original highlighted 8 screen portrayals but this time I thought I’d focus on just 5.
Glenn Miller
The Glenn Miller Story was a film that I first saw 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, at least in my view.
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.
One odd 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 arrived 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 fart down a cardboard tube and cue me as James Stewart: ‘That sound, that certain sound: That’s it! I’ve found it!’
I feel a little mean trashing a film I’ve always loved but it’s like a lot of things that I used to love years ago, they don’t always hold up when you see them again years later. James Stewart was, as I mentioned earlier, a little too old to play Miller and to be honest, Stewart just played Miller like he played every other character in every other film he was ever in.
The Glenn Miller Story pops up on TV every now and again and despite me not appreciating various elements of the film, I still love the music and it’s nice to see the guest stars in the film, people like Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa the fabulous drummer, bandleader Ben Pollack and the Modernaires, a vocal group who worked with Miller’s band as well as many others.
David Frost and Richard Nixon
In the film Frost/Nixon, Michael Sheen plays the part of David Frost and Frank Langella portrays Nixon. Sheen is perfect as Frost and Langella is pretty good too as Nixon. The film is about Nixon in his later years as he seeks to defend his legacy as President of the USA. Back then, Frost was a jet setting TV interviewer and personality and he sets up a deal to make a series of interviews with Nixon. Unable to find financial backing, Frost is forced to broker the deal with money from various backers and is worried that the project will fail financially.
Frost’s team are worried about something different; they feel that Frost is not serious enough to actually challenge Nixon about his actions as President and are concerned that the broadcasts will actually vindicate Nixon of any wrongdoing during Watergate.
In the final interview though, Frost manages to pressure Nixon into making the famous admission that he acted illegally when he famously says “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal!”
I’ve always been fascinated by Nixon and Watergate and for me this was a wonderful film. I love the moment when Nixon, just as he and Frost are about to go on air, turns to Frost and asks “did you do any fornicating last night?”
Douglas Bader
Kenneth Moore played the part of World War II flying ace Douglas Bader in the film Reach For The Sky. Bader was a famous figure from the battle of Britain who rose to the rank of Group Captain despite losing both his legs in a flying accident in 1931.
His story was told in the 1956 film which was based on a biography of Bader by author Paul Brickhill.
The film is one of those that I first saw as a child and like The Glenn Miller Story, I’m not sure if it really works today. Moore plays a good part as Bader. As a young cadet he and his colleagues are told not to do low level aerobatics as it is too dangerous. Bader however disregards this after a passing remark from a civilian pilot. He takes off, gives the civilians something of a show but his wing tags the ground and his plane flips over and crashes. Doctors have no choice but to amputate his legs, one below the knee and one above.
The narrative then shows Bader’s determination to walk using his metal legs. Despite this however he is discharged from the RAF.
When the war breaks out though, the air force is desperate for pilots and Bader is able to return to the cockpit. Even so, he still displays something of a cavalier attitude, dumping his admin in a rubbish bin and once again performing low level flying, this time to convince his junior pilots that he knows how to fly.
I remember reading something about Bader years ago which was not complimentary at all so I decided to ask Google what the real Bader was like. The results that came back were not good. He clearly wasn’t anything like Kenneth Moore and many of his contemporaries found him abrasive and unpleasant and he was known to be harsh, particularly towards non officers.
I read once, and I think it was in racing driver Graham Hill’s autobiography, Hill tells the story of playing golf with Bader and just as Hill was about to take his shot, Bader started knocking his pipe on his metal legs!
He was however a courageous man and fought bravely for his country, in fact he was shot down and imprisoned in a POW camp which is shown at the end of Reach For the Sky.
Despite his disability Bader still managed various escapes and ended up finishing the war in Colditz Castle.
Winston Churchill
A while ago I stayed up late watching the film Darkest Hour which is about Winston Churchill and the beginning of his Prime Ministership in World War II. It paints a rather bleak picture of Winston’s premiership, with the Conservative party apparently holding back from supporting him and a growing clique actually wanting to replace him with Lord Halifax. When France fell to the Nazis, Halifax wanted to explore peace talks with Hitler which Churchill was violently opposed to. I’m not sure how true to life the film was and although I can imagine not everyone was 100% behind Churchill, I found some of this film a little hard to believe. There was a vote of no confidence in the Commons in 1942 although Churchill won this by a resounding 475 votes to 25. In the film, Conservatives still will not support Churchill in the Commons until outgoing premier Neville Chamberlain signalled them to do so by placing a white handkerchief on his knee. By then Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement were totally discredited so would he really have had such sway over his fellow MPs? I doubt it.
The film shows Churchill in various situations, in bed and in the bath, all the time dictating to his secretaries. We see him with his cigars and brandy, as well as in the House of Commons giving those famous speeches which united the country in those dark times. Gary Oldman played the part of Churchill and aided by some impressive make up he gave a really excellent performance.
I suppose actors playing the part of real people have a choice; either to try, to a certain extent, to impersonate the real person or like James Stewart and Kenneth Moore, just to represent the idea of the person in their own way. I like all the portrayals I talk about above but I think my favourite was Michael Sheen’s version of David Frost.
Do you have a favourite?
As usual Liz and I have left behind cold and unpleasant England for the much warmer climes of Lanzarote. We’re renting a place that we first found two years ago but were unable to rent last year as it was fully booked. This time Liz got in early and so here we are for four weeks. The villa is very comfortable with a great outlook, sunny on the patio all day and it has a great pool and comfy outdoor couches.
It just so happens that I picked up the book to read here in Lanzarote. It’s written by Richard Osman who is more famous as the frontman on the BBC’s Pointless quiz show as well as various other TV shows. The book and film are about a group of people in a retirement village who meet to discuss cold case crimes but then find a murder committed on their very doorstop. The group of mostly eighty year olds then get on with the task of solving the murder. There seem to be a lot of things going on and a great deal of characters to remember which put me off a little at first but a great device used by the writer is having alternate chapters written as diary entries by Joyce, one of the club members. She goes over the past events, adding in details of her own life along the way, talking about her neighbours and daughter amongst other things and sometimes previewing the next chapter for us.
Another modern classic. This film was directed by Peter Bogdanovich and is set in a small town in northern Texas in the early 1950s. The film has an ensemble cast but the two main characters are Sonny and Duane played by Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges. The two are teenagers and old friends and various things happen to them. They fall out over a girl called Jacy played by Cybill Shepherd. Ben Johnson plays ‘Sam the Lion’ who owns the bar and cinema in the town. Sam has a mentally disabled son who Sonny has befriended. Various things happen to the pair but towards the end of the film Duane enlists in the army and is due to leave town so the pair decide to visit the town cinema for the very last picture show as the cinema is about to close after Sam’s sudden death.
Like The Shining, this is another film based on a book by Stephen King. Tom Hanks plays the head of a death row section of an American penitentiary. One of the inmates is John Coffey, a huge black man who appears to have healing powers. He cures Tom Hanks’ bladder infection but the mood in death row is not good after sadistic Percy Wetmore joins the team and deliberately sabotages the execution of another inmate causing the prisoner to die in terrible agony. The warden’s wife is terminally ill and Hanks and his team wonder if John Coffey could cure her.
After graduating, Scott joined the BBC as a set designer and director, working on popular series such as Z Cars and The Troubleshooters. His time in television taught him the mechanics of production and in 1968, he left the BBC to establish Ridley Scott Associates (RSA), a commercial production company. Over the next decade, he directed hundreds of adverts, developing a style of lighting, atmosphere and composition, qualities that made his transition to cinema with The Duellists (1977) both natural and visually striking.
I’m betting that whatever this guy had produced it couldn’t compare with Billy’s dazzling line-up of classic films.
Rooting around in a secondhand shop in St Annes recently I picked up a hardback copy of Winston Churchill’s book My Early Life. It’s a thoroughly wonderful book written in Churchill’s inimitable style. He says in the introduction he has written a book about a vanished age and indeed he has. Churchill was born in 1974 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill who was in turn the son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother was an American, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of an American businessman. She married Lord Randolph and became Lady Churchill.
Looking back, I must have seen the film version before I read the book. Young Winston was directed by Richard Attenborough and is a wonderful adaptation of the book. When Winston first attends school, which of course was boarding school, his headmaster was played by Robert Hardy and he directs Winston to learn some Latin. Winston doesn’t do very well and the headmaster glares down at him and informs him that if he misbehaves, he will be punished, which to a great extent was Churchill’s overall view of school. Later he comments about exams ‘they always contrived to question me about things I didn’t know. I would much rather they asked me about things I did know.
The charge was depicted in the film Young Winston and in his book Churchill ponders about fate and a problem with his shoulder which necessitated using his revolver rather than his sword during the charge, reflecting that if he had been using his sword he might well have been killed in the latter stages when he was surrounded by the enemy.
One of things I particularly liked about Young Winston was the music. I bought the soundtrack album in 1985. The music for the film was in the main composed by Sir Alfred Ralston. He was brought into the film by director Attenborough as the two had worked together on a previous film, ‘Oh what a Lovely War’. The soundtrack features music by Edward Elgar, notably the Pomp and Circumstance March no 4 as well as Nimrod from the Enigma Variations.
Churchill ended up in a POW camp but resolved to escape despite also claiming to the Boers that he was a correspondent and should not have been detained. With the help of a group of Lancashire miners, Winston stowed away on a goods train and made his way back to the British lines.
Goldfinger is probably one of the best books in the Bond series and only the second 007 book that I ever read. (I’ll tell you about the first one later). I was at school at the time and for one of our assignments in English, we were asked to bring in a book which contained a really good description of a character. I chose Goldfinger as in it, Ian Fleming describes Goldfinger as a man who appeared to have been made using bits of other peoples’ bodies. This must have been in the mid-1960s and although the character of James Bond was pretty well known, the films had not begun to permeate down to the television screen.
This is an interesting story and the resulting film has perhaps become the quintessential Bond film even more so than Goldfinger. The story is about a criminal underworld organisation (SPECTRE) that steals an aircraft with nuclear weapons and holds the west to ransom threatening to explode the bombs.
In this book the secret service find that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, is trying to assume the identity of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray of the College of Arms in order to meet with Blofeld. Interestingly, Sir Hilary gives Bond a quick resumé of Bond’s family history including the Bond family motto ‘the world is not enough’ which was used by the film producers for the title of a later 007 film unrelated to Fleming’s books.
This book follows on from the previous one and we find James Bond depressed and disillusioned with his job after the death of Tracy. M considers sacking Bond but instead sends him on a diplomatic mission to meet the head of the Japanese secret service. The British want access to Russian documents which the Japanese are currently decoding. The Japanese decide to offer this information to Bond if he will assassinate a British resident who has created a garden of death, a garden full of poisonous plants which are attracting many Japanese citizens who want to commit suicide. Bond realises that this man is Blofeld and decides to keep this quiet until after he has killed him.
Casino Royale is the first book in the 007 series and it’s a pretty interesting and original one too. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB is engaged in 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.
This was the second Bond book to be published and the action takes place in the USA and the Caribbean, which Fleming loved and bought a house there which he named Goldeneye. Live and Let Die and in fact the whole book series were recently reissued with all the politically incorrect stuff removed which makes me wonder whether there was in fact anything left to publish after that process was complete. The book was published in 1953 and comes complete with all the prejudices and sexual and racial intolerances of the era. In one segment when Bond visits Harlem, Fleming tries to reproduces the accents and slang terms of the black people of Harlem and for me it’s not one of Fleming’s best books. In the film version, Roger Moore took over the licence to kill and the result was a very tongue in cheek version of James Bond. Sorry but Roger Moore as Bond just wasn’t for me. The film did feature a great theme song from Paul McCartney which was really a little underused in the film. Another feature of the film was a power boat chase along the Bayous of Florida which was a lot of fun but not entirely serious.
This was the third entry into the 007 series and the action takes place mostly in Dover. Millionaire Hugo Drax wants England to enter the space race and so he spends his own money on a rocket named the Moonraker which he intends to donate to the British government. It turns out that Drax is actually a nazi who wants to avenge defeat in the second world war by arranging for the rocket to destroy London. I read recently that Fleming wrote the book while staying in a cottage situated down by the famous chalk cliffs of Dover which was once owned by Noel Coward and later Fleming himself. It’s not a bad read at all and starts off with M asking Bond a favour as he suspects Drax to be cheating at cards and he wants Bond to see if he can sort things out as at the time, this was the mid-1950s, cheating at cards in London high society could really be a big scandal.
Fleming wrote this book at Goldeye, his house in Jamaica, after doing a great deal of research about diamond smuggling. Bond’s mission is to investigate a diamond smuggling ring and he does this by impersonating a diamond smuggler called Peter Franks. Franks leads Bond to an American woman called Tiffany Case who he begins to fall for. He tracks the smuggling ring to the American Spang brothers, leaders of the Spangled Mob, a criminal gang. The finale takes place in the Spangs’ restored western town, Spectreville.
British Secret Service. To do this they persuade a cypher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect to the west with a Spektor cypher machine. She claims she will only to defect to Bond, having fallen for him after reading his KGB file.
Prior to the writing of this book, a firearms expert called Major Boothroyd wrote to Fleming explaining that an agent like Bond would never be armed with a Baretta as it was more of a ladies gun. Boothroyd recommended a Walther PPK. Fleming was so impressed he included the new gun in Dr No and also added a new character named Boothroyd as the armourer of the secret service.
The story of the Titanic, the ship that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, is one of those stories which seems to be forever in the news. It’s a story that has caught the imagination of pretty much everyone. Even the other day, just scrolling through the BBC news page, I came across an item about some new digital scan of the Titanic wreck which revealed new information about the disaster.
This was a film produced by TV mogul Lew Grade who was wanting to move his TV production company ITC Entertainment into the world of cinema. He had read the original book and thought that it might be possible to make a film series about US government operative Dirk Pitt in the manner of the Bond series.
I only have one book in my collection about the Titanic. It’s a big glossy picture book, not about the actual ship, but about the shooting of James Cameron’s film. It documents Cameron’s twelve dives in a tiny submersible which gave him the idea of the treasure hunters looking to find the necklace the ‘Heart of the Ocean’ and his realisation as Cameron himself mentions in the book’s foreword that the main thrust of the story should be a love story with the Titanic disaster almost as a backdrop.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 