Three Rendell movies

Here be spoilers...

We've watched three episodes from the ongoing series, Ruth Rendell Mysteries, over the last few days. They're not all from the same year, but have been bundled together as a package. The titles are Master of the Moor, Vanity Dies Hard, and A Case of Coincidence. 

Master of the Moor dates from 1994, and stars a youngish Colin Firth. It was made a year before his appearance in Pride and Prejudice. This was the least satisfactory of the stories. It seemed to be dragged out considerably over the three episodes. Firth plays Stephen Walby, a man whose main love is the moor. After meeting a woman artist working on it one day he's shocked to find her dead body the next. The detective working on the case immediately senses that Walby is the killer, and aims to charge him. Then another woman goes missing and Walby is able to lead the police to her body without difficulty. Meanwhile Walby's lonely wife, Lyn, played by Emma Croft, starts an affair with the young Londoner filling in at the local pet shop his for his sick uncle. He discovers that she's still a virgin, in spite of having been married for four years. Walby, whose mother left him suddenly when he was a boy, has been psychologically affected, and has an odd relationship with women. His father was also badly affected by his wife's departure, and, while he continues to work at his old job, is on medication and seeing a psychiatrist.
It's all a bit heavy going, not helped by the policeman seeming to be as odd as everyone else. A new character is introduced late in the proceedings (new in a sense; we've seen him before without knowing who he was - and he's odd too!) and is briefly suspected by Walby himself, and then Lyn is killed. The whole thing turns upside down and Walby and his Dad prove to be the murderers between them. Not one of Rendall's best - unless it's the adaptation that's at fault. The cast do their very best with it, but since they're all hiding things from each other it becomes a bit overwrought.
We were a bit inclined not to watch the second film, but it turned out to be much better, and keeps you guessing right till the end.
It concerns a wealthy woman who marries a younger man, who's not of the same station (as the woman's unpleasant uncle keeps reminding everyone). The main thrust of the story is that eventually the woman begins to suspect she's being poisoned and finally comes to the conclusion that it must be her husband, because he wants to get his hands on her money. But intertwined with this is a complex story about the woman's friend who apparently goes missing. Halfway through we think it's the husband who's killed her off. The suspicions keep shifting until at the end we realise that we should have known who the murderer was all along (we're kept guessing in part because we're not even sure that there has been a murder!) This was a much more satisfactory piece, with lots of red herrings, some clever casting (it has hints of Hitchcock's Suspicion, especially in the way it casts a handsome young man as the husband, but one who could easily be an outright liar), and a continually involving story.

Michael Fitzgerald, in a
completely different role.

The third film, A Case of Coincidence, is shorter than the other two, and concerns the murder of five women in a marshland area. Four of the women, it turns out, have been murdered by the same man (this is discovered in a rather odd way, and isn't very believable), but whether the fifth was killed by the same man or not, isn't so easy to work out...for the police, that is. We're pretty certain early on that she wasn't. Her husband, a top surgeon, lives something of a separate life from his wife, and after her death keeps fainting or sweating heavily or being given medication and put to bed (by a fellow-surgeon, a female, who's plainly madly in love with him) and not really getting back to work. His over-protective mother turns up and treats the woman surgeon like a kind of high-class maid, but the surgeon herself is equally over-protective. Fatally, as it happens.The half-wit murderer of the other four is accused of the fifth murder as well, and is hung. But the husband, as we guessed, murdered his wife, and seemingly because someone else has been tried and hung for the crime, can't be convicted. This seemed a bit odd.
However, the cast is superb, and does a terrific job with a rather unbelievable story (it's an adaptation of a short story by Rendall, and it seems almost as though the adaptor had got himself in a bit of a tangle). Michael Fitzgerald (see picture), as the 'half-wit' man convicted of the crimes, is marvellously moving.

Some rambling thoughts about incomes

In a tweet sent out yesterday, Steven Croft, self-described as the Bishop of Sheffield and a writer, said the following:

Every person is of equal value before God. So there is something wrong in a world where a boss is paid 300x more than some employees.

Now to me there's a bit of a concern here as to what Bishop Croft is saying.   Certainly we are all equal before God when it comes to being created humans, responsible for what we do with our lives and all equally responsible for our sins.  But I don't think God regards our situation in life to be necessarily equal. Some of us are given power, some are not. Some are given fame, some are not. Some are given obscurity, some skills, some gifts, some a seeming lack of gifts. God may have set out things that each and every human being should have had the ability to make an enormous difference in the world, but it doesn't appear to have been the case in the actual world we live in. That may be a result of the Fall (not the Autumn, US readers, but the theological Fall), and if it is, it's something we have to live with. (Things may be altogether different in that regard in the New World to come.)

That's the first point about this tweet. The second is 'there is something wrong in a world' etc. Steven, we know there is something wrong, but it hardly just consists of somebody being paid an enormous amount of money compared to other people. There are innumerable inequalities in this area: in the last century film stars have invariably been paid extraordinary amounts by comparison with the extras in the same movies. This is because their talent is highly regarded. We may think they're overpaid, but I haven't yet seen anyone setting up tents and protesting about the money film stars receive.*  

In other areas of the arts, we find top musicians highly paid for the talents and for the gifts they offer to the public.   The man who moves the piano on the night of the concert is important, but he doesn't get paid an equivalent amount, and wouldn't expect to.

Some top painters, sculptors and others are well paid. Those who supply their materials are not. I think Steven Croft seems to be promoting a kind of evening out of income with an issue that's only partly related to it.

And then there are footballers, rugby players who get extraordinary amounts of money, often, it seems, for a small amount of actual work. But are we to decide that the linesmen, the referees should also be paid in the same way?  Unlikely. 

I don't disagree that we're all appalled at the arrogance of bankers and those in the high-flying money-transacting fields. But it began because somebody felt it was right to pay these people for their expertise. It's got well and truly out of hand, and I don't disagree that from my perspective they're exceedingly overpaid. (But then I think many film stars are exceedingly overpaid, too.)

But even that isn't the issue. The issue is that having begun by rewarding good work in the financial field it has become a race to see who can be paid most. In the interim, those being paid these fantastic amounts have done what many people who come into a great deal of money do: expect more money, and thumb their noses at those who have no means to expect more money - those who are paid '300x' times less than the one at the top. And in thumbing their noses they also begin to do illegal things, wrongful things, sinful things - and not just under the cover, but out in the open where everyone can see. This is their arrogance, and this is as much what people hate about them as the fact that they get a great deal more money than the average worker.

This hate has turned to protest. But the protest is more about the kind of 'Old Boys' Network' that seems to encourage the greed and arrogance, and helps out those who have got themselves into financial straits with other people's money, never their own, rather than about the fact that some people get far more money for what they do than others. 

One of the difficulties at the other end of the scale is that if you have no talents, no experience, no skills, you have nothing in particular to offer to an employer except your body and what it might do for that employer. Consequently your employer is entitled to pay the 'minimum wage' because he or she is not getting any great value for money when they employ such people. For me, this is perhaps a bigger issue than trying to rationalise why talented people get large amounts of money. How can the employing world help those who start off with nothing in the way of employable skills gain them? We used to have a strong apprentice system; before that there were guilds that took on young people and trained them. (Now, too often, we train the young people separately from the employment situation and then expect them to find a niche for themselves in the world.) But apprenticeships are few and far between; many employers can't fund them and the Government, in this country at least, seems to think the apprenticeship system isn't worth putting money into. 

I could go on and on. Essentially what I'm trying to say is that Bishop Croft is being too simplistic (perhaps Twitter encourages that). Even the protesters out in their tents are being simplistic (they're focusing mostly on one aspect of the problem). I suspect finding ways of lifting those at the bottom of the employment pile up and out of their catch 22 situation is more important than getting angry at those at the top. Their day of reckoning will come - and has been seen to, more than once.


Photo by Images of Money from Flickr.com

*Since I wrote this there has been the occasional female actor complaining that male actors in the same film get far more than she does. How valid the case is, is another story.