Thirteen Days
(by Robert Kennedy) (film directed by Roger Donaldson) This matter-of-fact monograph of the Cuban missile crisis by a central figure is very readable and, considering it was probably whipped up ahead of RFK’s tilt at the Presidency, quite fair (note, by contrast, that in the vivid film of the same name, a key, in fact, critical adviser, Llewellyn ‘Tommy’ Thompson, an Eisenhower appointee, is nowhere to be seen). Kennedy needs and wields no purple prose: his writing is clear, taut and free of cant. For a career politician, this is singular in itself; for an account of a moment on…
Continue Reading →Sweet Smell of Success
(dir. A MacKendrick) (1957) Great late melodrama, Lancaster rarely better, Tony Curtis never better. “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” The sparse camera direction would gladden David Stratton’s heart, only producing the odd flourish where it enhances the scene (e.g. in “21”, where the camera’s eye swings from Manny Davis to Miss James and cuts back to J.J. Hunsecker, who is saying that every hep person knows that “ This one is toting that one around for you.” ). [NB: Vale Martin Milner, R.I.P. 6/9/2015, who was stout but dull as Steve Dallas…
Continue Reading →Sweet Dreams
(by Michael Frayn) Highly original and amusing satire of a bespoke heaven for boyish, middle management men of early middle age and their moral crises as the right hands of god. You can see the influence cast by this book on, for example, Douglas Adams. The chaps, all from Cambridge naturally, are no longer scholars but creators, and they have an easy, breezy, Ian Fleming style way with women and imagine themselves to be radicals, even the lukewarm Head Man, in that smug, cosy, implacable bourgeois way, a la J. P. Sartre. The heavenly staples – taramasalata, gigot aux haricots…
Continue Reading →The Sorrow and the Pity
(dir. M Ophuls) (1969) A leisurely pace prevails, as diverse men chat about France under German occupation. This casual approach belies the serious and vital theme that slowly works into the brain and heart: courage and conscience under duress and in crisis.
Continue Reading →Something Happened
(by Joseph Heller) The best review of this amusing, desolate book was by Kurt Vonnegut in the NYTRB, reproduced in his collection, Palm Sunday, where he nails the essential bleakness of Heller’s worldview: “that many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.” ‘Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command.’
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