It is said that the late Roy Castle once sang, danced, trumpeted and juggled at the old Glasgow Empire, famous for its heckling. In the unaccustomed silence between segments 3 and 4 of his act, a reverential wee voice piped up “Is there no end to this man’s talents?” Thus I salute Colin Firth’s latest outing.
After a masterful, beautiful, extraordinary performance as a 1962 Gay professor in A Single Man, he has now scaled most triumphantly the toff end of the Repressed Brit spectrum with The King’s Speech, an everyday tale of 1930’s Palace Folk. It contains of galaxy of UK character actors playing historic personages they don’t actually look like, but do it so well you don’t notice. Timothy Spall’s Churchill shines out particularly, but Stanley Baldwin or Cosmo Gordon Lang fans will also be impressed. Helena Bonham-Carter’s Young Queen Mum (before she hit the betting shops and gin) is amazing. This is the character list as it should have looked, not as it did. Why even Westminster Abbey looks like Ely Cathedral. However it is faultlessly acted, carried off in real style, and atmospherically rendered with the kind of production values associated with the old Merchant Ivory brand.
Here’s the skinny. George is the overbearing “Spit it out, boy!” Emperor King, the only character in the film who does look like the original. His two sons are embarrassingly different. David has charisma, but some unfortunate bedtime habits, a selfish nature and a thin fascist streak. Bertie is profoundly honourable with the will and talent to represent and serve his people, a pretty useful life skill in a man who would be king.
However Bertie also projects zero charisma, largely because of his disabling stutter. For a 1920’s naval officer this was manageable, indeed in an age when most signalling was conducted by Morse code, it could even have been an advantage. With wireless in the home, however, it is not enough to look like a king. You have to sound like one in people’s living rooms. An embarrassing own-goal at Wembley reveals that making love to a microphone is something Bertie could sooner get pregnant than reliably manage to do.
Enter Mr, not Dr, Lionel Logue, an Australian self-taught speech therapist with no qualifications but some world war one experiences and a ton of breezy antipodean freshness. This enables him to address the real Bertie directly, and unlock his voice through the transformative medium of friendship.
At the heart of every legendary working partnership is honest friendship based on equality, even, nay especially, if one partner is the King. King and Commoner work at it together. On the big day Bertie scores a bulls eye and really earns a chaste but sincere peck on the cheek from his Mrs. Civilisation is saved. What’s not to like? I defy anyone to leave the cinema without a heart full of warm cockles.
Acting is spot on, execution and cinematography is extraordinary, story is strong, even though everyone knows how it’s gong to end. Commercially minded execs may point out there’s not much scope for a “King’s Speech 2” unless some jaded studio hack comes up with a storyline where Hitler develops a speech defect and personally sends the schmutzigedutzend to kidnap Mr Logue. This would yield more action, perhaps, but less human interest. Fervent republicans may simply dislike the subject matter, perhaps, which certainly belongs to another age. What you see is what you get. However this film is a wonderful achievement, and manifestly deserves a chestful of gongs, ribbons, gold rope, and silver elephants on chains every bit as impressive as his majesty’s. 4.99 out of 5.
The time aorund All Souls Day can be disturbing. This year I went to our local RC Church with my friend and colleague Bishop Peter Doyle of Northmapton and the Archbishop of Ljubljana for a Mass of Reparation for the victims of Slovene atrocities in May and June of 1945. This was all put together by Keith Miles of the Anglo-Slovene society. The Slovene Ambassador attended, and we all ended up on Slovene TV, an unusual experience. The story behind this event does not reflect well on anyone, but it’s important to acknowledge its significance and learn from it.
It concerns 12,000 Slovenian troops who had fought for Nazi Germany and surrendered in Austria. Those who knew they might not fare well in Stalin’s hands rushed to surrender to the Americans and British, hoping to save their lives from the gulags. It appears they were promised humane treatment and a home in Italy, then packed by the British into cattle trucks that took them “home”. Who knew how much when, and how these actions relate to the scramble among the Allies as the future iron curtain was forming up in 1945 is still unclear.
The cattle trucks took them to a place now known as Huda Jama, where they were herded through a 320 metre tunnel to pits where they were stripped and systematically slaughtered. Their bodies were walled in to avoid future detection, and the whole affair tactfully forgotten. You need make no value judgment about these peoples’ politics or why they fought on the side they did in World War II to see it does nobody any credit to pretend about such an atrocity.
Brits and Americans like to believe we were always the good guys. In the main we were, perhaps, but we have our own dirty little secrets, too, and it does no harm to be reminded of our own capacity to be complicit in evil, just like everybody else. The murderers were home grown, but they would never have been able to murder without British troops herding prisoners of war into cattle trucks, some like the Michael Palin character handing out crosses in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, courteously and perhaps even with a few twinges of regret that they might be sending those poor devils to their deaths. Well, they were. Even (especially?) the British need reminding that sometimes the interests of the Great Game, courtesy and administrative efficiency, are not enough.
These were not the only nor the latest tunnels full of of dead bodies, not even in the former Yugoslavia. Only by encoding the past in a truthful way can we hope to understand our own capacity for evil, complicit or instrumental. Only by acknowledging that can we truly resolve to act differently, should our turn ever come to make the kind of fundamental moral choice, life or death, that most home counties Pelagian English obfuscate about and avoid. The unquiet dead should not go away without some formal acknowledgment, and act of reparation.
Something of the scale of Dunkirk becomes apprent from the fact no fewer than four friends turn out to have parents who were evacuated or otherwise involved at the sharp end. The Wilsons being avid scribblers, who threw nothing out, we have boxes of World War II at home. In May 1940 my Father was in Kent, not France. His mother, however, an invalid with Parkinson’s Disease, supplies an interesting old lady’s eye view of the unfolding history:
I’ve got in such a muddle over this war you’ll really need leave soon to tell me whether we’re going or coming, who we’re protecting next? when Hitler’s going to heaven & if statesmen shouldn’t be abolished! I feel I shall never wake up without “Dunkirk” being the first thought. What a ghastly history! Which all the heroic adjectives of the language can never disguise for the relatives of those for whom there is no return. Are they lucky or we I wonder?
Her letters record interesting incidents — the crash of a German Bomber in the Bishop of Chelmsford’s garden in June with four airmen burned to death — amidst more reflective thoughts. This, for example, from Chelmsford (where her cousin lived) on the day before Paris fell:
I came here by car and we were stopped about Margrettng for identity cards & with all place names removed we felt quite foreign. Expect you will be glad it's cooler especially if there’s more digging to do. What ghastly news again — nearly another Dunkirk — what blue pencil luck we have had everywhere — surely it must be our turn soon. I have to ration myself to news but there seems always some horror to listen to and for the men you have met and passed on [my Father was serving in a training unit in Kent] just to be wiped out in thousands — such a tragedy of useless waste. What a life! so much beyond our control. It’s no use trying to write about it & yet one cannot keep from thinking about it. Just our destiny to go one road or the other so it’s only courage is any good. I hope you are beginning to feel as tough as a gangster. Meanwhile I still dream of a real miracle & Hitler into little pieces...
aka Inglorious Basterds, is Quentin Tarantino’s latest outing. It’s a rumbustuous but finely engineered send-up, not of World War Two, but World War Two movies with their ludicrous pig-dogs, dirty dozens, and Gestapo dentists. Everybody in the film parodies his or her character all the time, pretty superbly. Young Brad Pitt maintains an Alamo toughguy chipmunk sneer throughout — a considerable achievement.
The film includes historical personages, but, history, Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (“What actually happened”) is merely the sandbox in which Tarantino plays. His chosen idiom is crude Spaghetti Western, with a ton of wry filmic homage thrown in, and playfulness with the film plane as well as the actors. The rabbit that works the controls in Tarantino’s brain is one sick bunny, but functioning at the height of his game.
By way of health warning, If you find Tarantino unwatchable, this will not disappoint you — ditto if you find his films unmissable. Should you have ever have been tempted to write to the BBC complaining that last night's Sergeant Musgrave of the Buffs was portrayed with eight buttons on his tunic whereas any fool knows the Buffs wore nine buttons on their tunics during the peninsilar war, every second of this movie will really annoy you — Not one for military history buffs, then.
The violence is nasty and brutish, but mercifully short for Tarantino, whose Spaghetti Western spends more time building up tension than shooting it out. After years of believing the Americans won the war single handed, it turns out to have been the Jews. There’s a lot of play on languages — subtitles used or not to draw you into lead characters’ awareness of what‘s going on. If you speak French, German and Italian, you will really be in the know, but even if not there are plenty of subtitles. Anyway, a pistol shot in the cujones is pretty much the same in any language.
Sorry to mention the war, but what might Germans think of this movie? Could breaking the mould of WW2 movies be rather refreshing, in fact? Everyone in this movie is equally nasty and amoral, and I imagine many Germans will be up there cheering along the final reel’s magnificently silly carnivalistic Götterdämmerung, along with everyone else still left in the Cinema. Characteristically for Tarantino, Five out of five Stars — or Zero. Additional proof that there’s no such thing as typical Tarantino...
Way back, the Go Between explored how adult games look through the eyes of a child, vivid, simple, utterly pragmatic. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is Auschwitz through innocent eyes — good script, brilliantly cast, beautfully made, well acted, almost impossible to watch.
This film does not ham things up, preach, sentimentalise, or demonise. The unvarnished tale is more disturbing. The horror is in the substance not the way it’s served up. Conventional war movies, even compassionate ones like Sergeant Ryan, are all well and good, but all the wrong things steal the show. They’re like sermons where the circumstantial illustration smothers the point. This one is painfully right on the button.
The “Bloody Fool” school of history has answers to everything, but understands nothing. It’s too ready to believe that people in the past were just utterly different, that‘s all. Big labels like “Evil” do not answer the basic question that matters — “how do people do such things?”
Filling in faces of the holocaust is a painful necessity, or it simply becomes incomprehensible or, worse still, the stuff of prurient curiosity or myth. We have to try to understand what there is in us what blinds us to what we don’t want to know, our own capacity for “Don’t ask, don’t tell”.
The audience we were part of in Wycombe was slightly stunned. So we bloody well should be. I suspect this film will not pack the cinemas this autumn, but people who can bear to watch it, may understand a little bit more, and, in the end, be glad they did.
It is said that the late Roy Castle once sang, danced, trumpeted and juggled at the old Glasgow Empire, famous for its heckling. In the unaccustomed silence between segments 3 and 4 of his act, a reverential wee voice piped up “Is there no end to this man’s talents?” Thus I salute Colin Firth’s latest outing.
After a masterful, beautiful, extraordinary performance as a 1962 Gay professor in A Single Man, he has now scaled most triumphantly the toff end of the Repressed Brit spectrum with The King’s Speech, an everyday tale of 1930’s Palace Folk. It contains of galaxy of UK character actors playing historic personages they don’t actually look like, but do it so well you don’t notice. Timothy Spall’s Churchill shines out particularly, but Stanley Baldwin or Cosmo Gordon Lang fans will also be impressed. Helena Bonham-Carter’s Young Queen Mum (before she hit the betting shops and gin) is amazing. This is the character list as it should have looked, not as it did. Why even Westminster Abbey looks like Ely Cathedral. However it is faultlessly acted, carried off in real style, and atmospherically rendered with the kind of production values associated with the old Merchant Ivory brand.
Here’s the skinny. George is the overbearing “Spit it out, boy!” Emperor King, the only character in the film who does look like the original. His two sons are embarrassingly different. David has charisma, but some unfortunate bedtime habits, a selfish nature and a thin fascist streak. Bertie is profoundly honourable with the will and talent to represent and serve his people, a pretty useful life skill in a man who would be king.
However Bertie also projects zero charisma, largely because of his disabling stutter. For a 1920’s naval officer this was manageable, indeed in an age when most signalling was conducted by Morse code, it could even have been an advantage. With wireless in the home, however, it is not enough to look like a king. You have to sound like one in people’s living rooms. An embarrassing own-goal at Wembley reveals that making love to a microphone is something Bertie could sooner get pregnant than reliably manage to do.
Enter Mr, not Dr, Lionel Logue, an Australian self-taught speech therapist with no qualifications but some world war one experiences and a ton of breezy antipodean freshness. This enables him to address the real Bertie directly, and unlock his voice through the transformative medium of friendship.
At the heart of every legendary working partnership is honest friendship based on equality, even, nay especially, if one partner is the King. King and Commoner work at it together. On the big day Bertie scores a bulls eye and really earns a chaste but sincere peck on the cheek from his Mrs. Civilisation is saved. What’s not to like? I defy anyone to leave the cinema without a heart full of warm cockles.
Acting is spot on, execution and cinematography is extraordinary, story is strong, even though everyone knows how it’s gong to end. Commercially minded execs may point out there’s not much scope for a “King’s Speech 2” unless some jaded studio hack comes up with a storyline where Hitler develops a speech defect and personally sends the schmutzigedutzend to kidnap Mr Logue. This would yield more action, perhaps, but less human interest. Fervent republicans may simply dislike the subject matter, perhaps, which certainly belongs to another age. What you see is what you get. However this film is a wonderful achievement, and manifestly deserves a chestful of gongs, ribbons, gold rope, and silver elephants on chains every bit as impressive as his majesty’s. 4.99 out of 5.
