Distorting the facts

Back in 2015 I wrote about the play, Souvenir, which focused on the performances and life of Florence Foster Jenkins. In 2016, Meryl Streep starred in a movie about the same person, which we saw around the time it came out, and then watched again on Netflix last night.

I remember feeling somewhat disappointed in the movie, which also stars Hugh Grant as her husband, and Simon Helberg as Cosmé McMoon, the pianist who accompanied her in her later years. 

We discover that her husband, adoring of her, and deeply in love with her, also had an apartment (paid for by Jenkins) where he kept his 'girlfriend.' In fact, he and Jenkins were never officially married: Jenkins may not have been divorced from her first husband, the one who gave her syphilis. 

A number of things in the movie are based on fact, but equally there are curious distortions. Hugh Grant's character, St Clair Bayfield, is seen as a failed and fairly amateur actor. In fact, he had a long career in the theatre, and was plainly able to act much better than is shown in the movie. 

It's hinted fairly strongly in the movie that McMoon is gay, though this may not have been the case. Helberg camps the character up with constant simpers, quirky looks, and a generally effeminate air. I much preferred the down-to-earth version of Cosmé that appeared in the theatre production. 

Meryl Streep, as always, is brilliant, performing the awful singing with ease (presuming it is her voice, as Helberg seems to indicate in an interview), and she creates a character who is seemingly unaware of her awfulness while being wonderfully generous to those around her - and plainly needing all the love that she can get. 

In the last week we also watched The Imitation Game, supposedly a story about Alan Turing and the breaking of the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, and supposedly based on true events. Yes, there are a few true things scattered about, some actual persons portrayed, but for the most part this is a script based on the idea that it's good to wrap propaganda up in dramatic form, using fine actors to play the main parts and then forget about whether it actually connects with substantiated history. 

Thus Turing's difference (both his homosexuality and his genius) is made a basis for a theme about not bullying people who are different (though Turing is portrayed as even more of an arrogant bully in some scenes, as a man with no regard for the concerns of others). The feminist angle comes in by warping the history of a highly skilled person, Joan Clarke, proving, for the feminists, that women can be just as clever as men. In fact more clever, because she solves the crossword in six minutes instead of the required eight. The fact that she was already at Bletchley before Turing arrived is ignored. 

(The same sort of approach was taken with Hidden Figures in which the black women were treated in the movie as astonishing the male characters - all white, of course. This doesn't align with the facts that appear in the book the movie was made from. But it pleased the female audiences, who cheered at the men being 'put in their place' when we saw it at the movies.)

Cumberbatch adds another of his people-don't-understand-me performances to his CV (it's frequently on a par with his arrogant Sherlock Holmes) and while it's been highly regarded in some circles, he presents a character who isn't any easier to warm to than Holmes was. Quite honestly, when Keira Knightly slaps him, you think, About time. 

The Lavender Hill Mob

I don't remember ever seeing The Lavender Hill Mob before, though it's a film I've heard about since I was a kid (it came out when I was six) and have wanted to catch up with for a long time.

I finally caught up on it on DVD yesterday, and what a joy it is. It has a wonderful cast, led by Alec Guinness (with a wonderful inability to pronounce the letter R) and Stanley Holloway (seemingly full of his own importance, but a softie at heart), along with Syd James and Alfie Bass (as two small-time crooks brought in to help the completely inexperienced gold thieves, Guinness and Holloway). Charles Crichton takes T E B Clarke's daft script and gives it all he's got. What a team they were.

The premise is that the extremely mild-manned Guinness, who accompanies gold bullion from the factory to the Bank on a regular basis, has hatched a plan to snaffle the latest shipment. He just needs an accomplice who fits with his plan. Holloway, whom he meets by accident, runs a small factory making gewgaws (the Factory's name, in fact) for the tourist trade. Amongst these are metal Eiffel Towers which are painted gold and sold to tourists...in Paris. If the towers are actually gold, and not just gold-painted, they can be easily shipped to Paris and stored there for future sale to those who are in the market for illegal gold. The two work together and everything goes well, until...

Well, you have to watch it to see how complicated it gets, but the result is a delight. There are so many wonderful details: Alfie Bass is the tiny little crook, but his shadow as he climbs through a window is enormous; Guinness wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head as they pour the gold, an angelic smile on his face; the crazy attempt to get through French customs where they're constantly sent back for yet another check by the annoying French officials; the totally daft car chase at the end with police cars chasing each other rather than the 'villains', an American driver's car aerial getting entangled with the police aerial so that Old MacDonald has a farm goes out to all the police cars, and a policeman, hitching a lift with Guinness and Holloway rousingly joins in the song.

Or the old lady who lives in the same boarding house as Guinness and Holloway and who asks, in crime detection language, if the police have sorted things out. And the woman who owns the boarding house, a harridan of sorts who's only four foot something high. Or the way Guinness is supposed to be roughed up by his co-villains, and isn't, and has to do the job himself while tied up with rope and blindfolded. It's endlessly inventive, and much of the humour is hard to describe because of its particularly cinematic nature.

The wonderful Britishness of it all is another marvellous aspect. Was Britain ever really like this, with comic faces and eccentric attitudes on every street corner? It's hard to know, but those who made the Ealing Comedies certainly thought so, and they've left a picture of Britain for us that is heartwarming and hilarious.

Oh, and watch out for the tiniest of appearances from Audrey Hepburn, near the beginning of the movie.

The Naming of the Dead

I had a cold last week and it was one of those annoying ones where every time you try to do something your nose starts to drip.  So you clear it, and it drips again.  In the end I decided to spend most of one day in bed, and we found one of the Ian Rankin stories I hadn't read as an audio book on the laptop.  It was The Naming of the Dead, which came out in 2006, and is set in 2005, in the tumultuous week in Edinburgh and the surrounding area when the Gleneagles G8 Conference was taking place.  Add to that, at a later point in the story, the London Underground bombings, and you have a canvas broad enough on which to spread marches with people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, activist attacks, insurrections and a city full of policemen from all over the country keeping order and containing people who want to do damage to somebody. With this as his background, Rankin then proceeds to offer up a man falling from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle - is it a suicide, an accident, or a murder? - as well as three murders that are seemingly related to each other: they may indicate a serial killer is on the loose, someone who appears to be working through a list of known rapists or sexual attackers.  Or they may not!

Rebus is the star of the show, as you'd expect, though not in the eyes of several of the other characters, and his accomplice in detective discovery is again Siobhan Clarke, who more than once frets that she'd becoming too much like her mentor, for better or worse.  Like Rebus, she finds it hard to leave well alone, or to work anything like the normal 9-5 hours.  Her parents have a big part to play in the story too, being hippies from way back, people who want to protest at what the G8 are doing.  Big Ger Cafferty returns as well, adding to the mix, stirring up trouble wherever he can, and there is a wide range of other characters, good, bad and devious.  This is a classic Rankin, in which he uses his skill to paint a detailed picture of a city in siege while at the same time giving us a superb detective story.  And better still, the murderer is someone who appears throughout the story but doesn't seem to be in the least likely to be a suspect until late in the book.  This is in marked contrast to the most recent Rebus story, where the murderer seemed to be invisible for most of the time.

I listened to what I thought was almost all of the book, got up the next day intending to listen to the rest - about an hour and half's worth - came to the end of that and found that the book wasn't even half finished.  We had a copy on the shelves that I'd never got round to reading - we also had the rest of the audio book on the laptop as it turned out, but it was in another different folder.  So I was swamped for choice.

Scottish actor, Tom Cotcher

The narrator on the audio book version is Tom Cotcher (as far as I can tell; I haven't got the cover of the CD to hand).  He's narrated a number of the Rebus books and does a superb job with the characterizations of a large cast.  I probably should have allowed myself the time to listen to the rest of the book instead of reading it, but it would have taken me at least another full day to do so, whereas I could fit the reading of it in much more productively around other things.  This is the only problem for me with audio books: I find it hard to just sit and listen to one - I want to be doing something else at the same time.  They're great when you're on a long journey (we listened to a non-Rebus Rankin book - Watchmen - earlier in the year in this way), or when your body just doesn't want to do, or can't manage to do, anything else at all; when you've got a heavy cold, in other words.  And there's always the issue, when you're in bed listening, that you might fall asleep and miss something - this doesn't tend to happen when I'm listening in the car!

Watchmen is one of Rankin's one-off stories.  As far as I know the characters don't appear in any other book.  It's a curious piece about a kind of behind-the-scenes department that's dealing with espionage and such, but the characters in the story seem as much intent on double-crossing their colleagues as attending to their proper business.  It's set in both London and Ireland, and the main character is as unlike Rebus as you can imagine.  A desk-job man, essentially, but forced out into the field, and forced to find courage and initiative he wasn't always aware he had.  He does share with Rebus a certain amount of lack of respect for authority, and a difficulty with his marriage and his student son (though he fares better than Rebus in both these areas), but otherwise he's his own man.

Holocaust survivor

Short video (about 12 minutes) relating to the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world. At 106 she's still playing Bach and Beethoven on her piano, and receiving regular visitors....



This is the Official Trailer for a new documentary short about the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world Alice Herz-Sommer. If you want to see the finished film early next year please email: dancingunderthegallows@gmail.com

Directed by Oscar winning director Malcolm Clarke
Produced by Nick Reed, Malcolm Clarke, Chris Branch, Larry Abramson, Jasmine Daghighian