Intrusion

 I watched a mini-series over the last few days called The Jury.  It dates from 2011, and stars Julie Walters and Stephen Mackintosh, along with many other well-known British faces. Though it's a bit over the top in terms of the back stories of the jurors, who have appear to have freedom to come and go even after they've been put in the retiring room, it's well-performed and put together.  Though I must say that the fact that the defendant has been within cooey of three murders is never satisfactorily explained.

In one of the courtroom scenes, however, there's a reconstruction of the defendant's movements on the night of the third murder.  At every point he's seen by a CCTV camera - except when they have their short time lapses (during one of which he manages to catch a passing bus).  It's the rather extraordinary state of affairs in the UK these days.  Some authorities reckon you can be caught on CCTV up to 200 times a day in London alone.  Certainly TV shows like to make it look as though the police can see everything people out on the streets have done 24/7, and in some cases, inside as well.

How did the UK get to this point of being so over-scrutinised, especially when they had the warnings from George Orwell so many years ago, in 1984?  An article on this subject by Henry Porter appeared recently in the Guardian, in which he questions the seeming blanket over the subject of Edward Snowden in the UK. Yet the privacy of citizens who have done nothing wrong is exposed day by day. This is a real concern.  Privacy appears to be increasingly being destroyed in what was a free country. 

I think New Zealand may be slowly going the same way, certainly under this current government.  And there are businesses that supply an increasing number of devices for checking people's identity and where they are. Crown Security Products is one such example, with its CCTV systems, its ID Scanners, fingerprint punch cards and more.  We've come to accept a lot of intrusion into our lives - not helped by the over-fearful Homeland Security ideas from the States.  But perhaps it's time to start asking why we're so happy to accept these?  All of them are intrusive (everyone who enters the courts in The Jury has to take off their shoes and put their phones and keys and coins and such under a scanner, just like at an airport).  But in fact the places where people are most fearful aren't actually in the UK, or the USA.  People living in Iraq must live in a constant state of fear, with umpteen deaths each day from suicide bombers and the like.  Why is it that countries in which this isn't happening are so fearful?

Two and a half movies

From the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.   One might say.

I watched about two-thirds of Peter Watkins' 1974 made-for-TV movie, Edvard Munch, the other day.  I'd never heard of it, and it took me some time to connect the director's name up with the somewhat notorious pseudo-documentary, The War Game - and the even earlier, Culloden.   Watkins makes documentaries that use amateur actors and mix drama and doco styles in such a way that it's hard to tell which format is being used at any one time.   In Edvard Munch, the characters/actors often look at the camera even while they're in the middle of what seems to be a relatively dramatic scene.  After a while this became irritating; the sly or awkward glances at the audience conveyed nothing additional to the scenes, and kept tripping us out of the historical context.  Plainly this is what Watkins wants, but I'm not sure that it always works.

I gave up on the movie, as I say, about two-thirds of the way through.  It was repetitive, and slowly-paced, and jerked back and forth between childhood scenes and painting scenes and love scenes, and scenes with other characters who were only incidental to Munch's life.  Some of these spent time talking to an off-screen director, as people do in reality shows.  In fact some reality shows are more dramatic than portions of this movie were.

It was beautifully filmed, with a lighting style all of its own, and the scenes in which paintings were gradually formed were wonderfully done.  But by the time we'd been told for the umpteenth time that women were subjugated to men and that marriage was some sort of horror, or seen one or other of Munch's siblings or relatives choking up blood (from tuberculosis) yet again, the whole thing began to outstay its welcome.

Considering that the cast consisted of amateur actors, there were actually some very good performances, in particular Geir Westby in the title role.

Coming down a peg or two, we watched Nativity!, with Martin Freeman as a dull and stale teacher who's been landed with having to produce the annual school nativity play, and Marc Wootton as a temporary classroom assistant who's manic in the extreme, and everything that Freeman isn't.   It's a predictable piece, with some moments of considerable humour (not all of them involve the kids, some of whom are great and down-to-earth; one of whom is an irritating little twerp whom the director obviously thought was funny, and who gets into scenes where he'd be better not to be).  Wootton, by overplaying everything to the max, actually makes his role work; Freeman has done his role any number of times before, but somehow finds some real emotion in it, and makes us have sympathy for this rather annoying little man.  The rest of the cast do their bit, and there's a splendiferous performance of the Nativity in the old Coventry Cathedral at the end.  Considering that the school is obviously on its bare bones and that it appears to have only one class (Freeman's - other teachers appear but not other kids), it's a bit surprising to find at the end that the show is so spectacular, and that somehow Freeman and Wootton are doing everything backstage: make-up, dressing, management, lights, flying kids from the steeple and so on.  Don't apply the logic meter to this one.

And back to something with a bit more content and class: Twelve Angry Men.  Not the Henry Fonda version in black and white, directed by Sydney Lumet (though that was what I thought I'd got out of the library's collection), but a later made-for-TV version from 1997 with a very respectable cast headed up by Jack Lemmon and George C Scott (both looking pretty old, I must say: Scott was 70 and Lemmon 72 at the time). along with Tony Danza, James Gandolfini, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Hume Cronyn (88 at the time of production), Courtney B Vance, Ossie Davis (80), Mykelti Williamson (Bubba, in Forrest Gump, but a much tougher character here) and others.

The combined experience of these older and younger troupers shows: they take this top notch script and give every line its due.  William Friedkin's direction is spot on most of the time: keeping twelve men in focus throughout an entire movie is quite some feat, and there are a couple of shots in which one character or another is unintentionally obscured, but in general we not only have a sense of the claustrophobic atmosphere, but also manage to keep track of who's who and where they stand (not only physically, but on the case in hand).  I suspect the piece was put together at a quicker pace than full-scale movies are, which may account for its occasional visual lapses.

The original script is a little adapted for this version, with some references to colour and race, and some changes to occupations, but in general it sticks closely to the original.  The Wikipedia article on the play (which began life on television, was adapted as a stage play shifted to the movies, and has been subsequently adapted and altered into a number of different versions since) is interesting in regard to the way in which this piece has taken on a life of its own, even becoming Twelve Angry Women at one point.

The Lady in Question

Somehow managed to catch an old movie from 1940 on tv this afternoon. It was a very classy print, and fitted the wide screen format without anybody looking twice their size, so obviously some work had been done on it to make it viewable.
Seemingly this particular movie was notable for being the first in which Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth appeared as a romantic couple. It took me a while to recognise Ford because he looked so young. By the time he came back from the war, a few years later, he’d aged considerably, and was much more the way I remember him. Hayworth plays a very subdued role; she’s a character who’s under suspicion and always on the back foot. None of the temptress here, even though Ford falls for her at first glance.
The film was The Lady in Question adapted from an earlier French movie called Gribouille. It concerns a bicycle shop owner played by Brian Aherne who’s called into jury duty, and, by speaking out at the right moment, manages to get Hayworth (the accused) acquitted. He’s a bluff, good-humoured character - a bit too off-hand about the other relationships around him, and not always wise. However, he offers to give Hayworth a job after the trial, and she comes and lives with the family. Of course one of the other jurors believes she was guilty and keeps popping up every so often; and of course both Ford and his sister’s boyfriend know who Hayworth really is. It’s surprising half the town doesn’t, but that’s neither here nor there.
The acting is all a bit over-the-top - these are Americans being French people, remember, (even though they call their wives ‘Mrs’ rather than ‘Madame’ and speak with good, solid American accents), and anyway the French are more ebullient than the Americans - aren’t they? The script isn’t well written, never being sure whether it’s a drama or a comedy, and several scenes are played for their comedy effect, which undercuts the dramatic ones. Nevertheless it’s an interesting example of a typical studio production, with the small parts being played by actors who bring an eccentric quality to their roles.
One piece of trivia: the part of Lurette, the little accountant who causes so much hassle, is played by Curt Bois. Bois’ career in German movies began in 1907, when he was only six (!) and ended in 1989. Around 1937 he came to Hollywood and appeared in nearly forty movies before returning to his native Germany. He’s often uncredited in the Hollywood movies, or has tiny parts (such as a pickpocket in Casablanca). But he kept on working, and survived long enough to revive his career in his own country, appearing in some 35 movie and tv roles, including that of Homer the poet in Wim Wenders’ famous Wings of Desire. (Later remade, like Gribouille, into a much less worthwhile movie, City of Angels, starring the lugubrious Nicholas Cage and the super-cheerful Meg Ryan.)