At The Habit, York: -
So Close
I Need Lovin' Too (debut in The Habit*)
I'm Just A Loser
Old Man
Tell Me Why
Oh Lonesome Me
Down By The River
* last played in the Egypt Cottage - before they knocked it down obviously (there must be a song in there somewhere). Intended finishing after Old Man, but they asked for more.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
M. R. James
In praise of… MR JamesThere are few who can hold a guttering candle to the marrow-chilling narratives of Montague Rhodes James
Editorial
The Guardian
Wednesday 29 December 2010
Pull up a chair. For now, the dark axis of the year, is traditionally the time for telling ghost stories and there are few who can hold a guttering candle to the marrow-chilling narratives of Montague Rhodes James. MR James had little time for benign spirits with sympathetic inclinations. His tales of the supernatural inhabit an altogether more sinister realm – of vengeful phantoms and, in one ingenious instance, a spectral room. Fittingly, given his association with King's College, Cambridge – first as a student, eventually as provost – James gave the first reading of his ghost stories at the Cambridge Chitchat Society in 1893. The story he chose – Canon Alberic's Scrapbook – trod the distinctive Jamesian path of a tale founded in historical fact and a glimpsed but never fully revealed horror lurking just out of sight. James's skilful hinting at fears buried in the awful unconscious is what makes his stories so compellingly unsettling. His talent at teasing the imagination is what makes even the most rational reader glance nervously beneath the bed at the conclusion of Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You. Occasionally, James's own fears surface – as in The Ash Tree, which could only have been written by an arachnophobe. The thread of sly humour that runs lightly through the best of his stories only further increases the sense of foreboding. So, pick up a copy of A Warning to the Curious, curl up by the fire and enter the clever and disturbing world of MR James. And that creaking door? Well, it's only the wind…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/29/mr-james-in-praise-of
Oh, Whistle And I'll Come to You, My Lad: http://www.fadl12200.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/owhis.html
See also: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Monday, 17 January 2011
Ten Best Howard Hawks
In no particular order...
The Big Sleep
Only Angels Have Wings
Rio Bravo
His Girl Friday
To Have and Have Not
Red River
SCeiling Zero
Scarface
Bringing Up Baby
Ball of Fire
The Big Sleep
Only Angels Have Wings
Rio Bravo
His Girl Friday
To Have and Have Not
Red River
SCeiling Zero
Scarface
Bringing Up Baby
Ball of Fire
Howard Hawks Season
Howard Hawks, Hollywood's finest practitioner of everyday chivalryHoward Hawks's films – The Big Sleep, His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby – are among the most enjoyable ever made in Hollywood, with sublime performances by Bogart and Grant and Bacall. Just don't call him an 'artist'.
David Bromwich
The Guardian
Saturday 15 January 2011
Howard Hawks took legitimate pride in a certain professionalism, but "artist" and "work of art" were alien terms for him. He appreciated the wit of Faulkner's saying to him the first time they met: "I've seen your name on a check."
Setting it up and putting it together, working with actors and the script: these were his elements of film. Hawks knew what a cameraman should do – Lee Garmes brought to Scarface the desert surface Hawks knew he wanted – but he made no pretence about placing lights or finding angles. He was an experimenter whose greatest successes were happy accidents. The standard genres – comedy, melodrama, western, film noir – he took to himself with peculiar zest; his secret was an ease at improvisation that required a constant adroitness with his company.
Katharine Hepburn broke a heel in a gully in the night scene of Bringing Up Baby, an unscripted touch; as she walked off-kilter, her co-star Cary Grant whispered: "I was born on a hill!" She said it and Hawks caught it. He captured a moment as lively when James Cagney in Ceiling Zero jumped from cockpit to runway in a somersault. Hawks never tried to call every move. He was the sort of director in whose presence such things happened.
Something of his alert oversight probably came from his experience as a flyer – the source, too, of a group spirit and discipline that figures in The Dawn Patrol, Ceiling Zero, Only Angels Have Wings and Air Force. The romance of flight for Hawks was aesthetic and manly; as a character says in Ceiling Zero, you are all alone up there, nothing but you and the world. And solitude was the test that underlay his commitment to a society of the brave.
It was mostly a society of men. "Did you ever know a woman," says Geoff Carter (Grant) in Only Angels Have Wings, "that didn't want to make plans, map out everything?" He is the captain of a shoestring airline whose jungle-to-mountain route makes every journey a risk. Jean Arthur, high-class and sentimental, looks wrong for his mate, but her redemption begins as soon as she sits at the piano and plays a honky-tonk tune. By contrast, Lauren Bacall is suited to the company of men as soon as the camera picks her out in To Have and Have Not.
Scarface, the film that made Hawks famous, is an early talkie with long scenes and almost no editing, but it predicts his later style with a plenitude of human figures in lunging motion. Hawks took from his silent work the all-importance of movement and the contagious energy of people in groups. But the motion in Scarface is compulsive, the actions almost abstract. "Hello, Louis," the hero Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) says as we first see him in silhouette and he calmly shoots Louis and walks away. Tony's ethic – "Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it" – is a corruption of the masculine code.
Yet vehemence of word, motive, and action mark the Hawks hero, and all the main characters of His Girl Friday. One thinks of Walter Burns the editor (Grant) slamming down the lid of a desk to hide an escaped criminal; and his ex-wife and ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) diving to tackle the sheriff who has let the man escape. Again at a slower pace, but busy with purpose, Walter and Hildy filing past the city-room desks as they are watched, greeted, ignored by rows of reporters; and the other reporters drifting in and out of the press room in a municipal building as they wait to hear of the execution or reprieve of the convicted man and exchange cynical jokes, and Hildy walks in the door with a scornful salute: "The gentlemen of the press!"
Doorways, in Only Angels Have Wings, are conductors of the action as vital as planes. Through them may walk an old lover, a man of mysterious broken fortune and lowered eyes, a pilot just returned and wondering who will buy dinner. The doors that lead to the rooms of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not play a part as human as a sidekick or a go-between in three scenes back-to-back which prove the mutual enchantment of the hero, Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart), and the new face in town whom he nicknames Slim (Bacall, taking the nickname of Hawks's wife). They steal back and forth across a narrow hall to exchange warnings, criticisms, soul-estimates, and a kiss – a 15-minute stretch of human action without apparent significance for the plot. Nothing of the kind in movies had so deftly explored the beginning of a love; there was nothing like it again until Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless.
At the end of the sequence, Bacall tells Bogart to whistle if he ever wants her and she tells him how; he gives a marvelling look which is the look of the character but also the actor: the two were falling in love and the movie is wonderfully poised in its awareness of that. His whistle, which follows, is the opposite of vulgar. It indicates the intended response to many similar scenes of exhibited manliness, the chivalry of everyday life that is the heart of Hawks's subject.
Some such reaction is asked of the audience itself in his best films. Ceiling Zero puts the camera on three men, two flanking one who is on the telephone. They mock and admire the dexterity of the flyer Dizzy Davis (Cagney) as he fast-talks his way out of a breach-of-promise suit, a jerk on the leash from a grasping woman. We who watch the performer and the two on-screen watchers are meant to marvel at all three for their dedication to the task of keeping each other honest, not telling the world more than it needs to know.
Hawks thought a dame should be a sport. In To Have and Have Not, the wife of a French resistance fighter collapses at the sight of her husband's bullet wound. Bogart gathers her up, his eyes lingering a split second on the gorgeous body, and Bacall dryly brushes past: "What are you trying to do, guess her weight?" Such comments occur almost chorus-like in the pauses of the action, but the elect know not to linger. The forward flow in a Hawks film sends a message about the velocity of fortune and the collision of wills. But scenes of extended, almost absurd, relaxation are no less expressive of his temperament. A long scene compounded of both moods is laid down in The Big Sleep, a visit to the night club owned by the gangster Eddie Mars. The detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) and the woman he is following (Bacall) flirt and chat, there is a song, and gambling, and verbal fencing, and in the process we learn a good deal about all the characters. Without being told the director, anyone would call it a Hawks moment.
Was there such a thing as a minor character, for Hawks? They never seem to bask in the glow of the stars, and if you remember Bringing Up Baby, you are thinking of Walter Catlett as the constable and Charlie Ruggles as Major Horace Applegate, among other things. The surprising chord of pathos touched by Only Angels Have Wings – on the surface so conventional a melodrama – comes from the friendship between the hero played by Grant and his best flyer "Kid" (Thomas Mitchell). There were bigger roles for Mitchell, but his three big scenes opposite Grant mark the performance of a lifetime.
Walter Brennan was first used by Hawks in Barbary Coast, a crime saga of San Francisco during the gold rush, to which Brennan, then 40 but looking 60, lent much incidental humour. He brought him back in To Have and Have Not, Red River and several other films. Grizzled, shrewd, easily mistaken for a fool but, in cases of conflict, loyal: this was Brennan's character, under Hawks, and it is curious to think what a permanent place it holds in the American idea of comradeship. A variant occurs in To Have and Have Not where Brennan plays the drunken sailor, Eddie, Bogart's companion at sea and sometimes on land; when asked "What do you look after him for", Bogart replies with chivalric simplicity: "He thinks he's looking after me."
The best actors of Hollywood films for three decades did a lot of their best work with Hawks. Grant and Bogart, pre-eminently, but also Cagney, Edward G Robinson, Hepburn (whom he introduced to screwball comedy), Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire, Carole Lombard (who first showed her formidable power and comic range in Twentieth Century), and Montgomery Clift – a refined actor on the brink of being dismissed as overdelicate when Hawks gave him the second lead in Red River and offered tips on movement and gesture. For example, "the business", as Hawks's biographer Todd McCarthy relates, "of putting a strand of wheat in his mouth"; also "rubbing the side of his nose while in thought". All the dynamic contest of that movie is there in the contrast between the voices of John Wayne and Clift, the loud monotone of command and the distinct but quiet utterance that suggests a reserve of conscience. All this Hawks must have heard at once and measured against the story when he saw the actors read for their parts.
The 1950s suffocated part of his spirit. Directors who made it through that decade with honour and strength – Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang – set themselves against the mood of the time. Hawks's indulgent acceptance in the face of contemporary mores is especially painful in Monkey Business, a heavy piece of whimsy about a pharmaceutical discovery that gives back the sex drive in middle age. The scenes with the monkeys in the lab are very ponderous fun.
Rio Bravo suffers from a similar approach to polite imbecility. It lavishes affection on scenes and types that have grown void of spontaneous life, and is the father of such later ventures of sham coolness as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the heroes under pressure say clever-cute things and mug an ironic grin. Still, a few years earlier in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hawks could oversee a sex comedy without a taint of cheapness and with many details in his best manner – as from Marilyn Monroe with Charles Coburn prompting: "Young lady, you don't fool me one bit." "I'm not trying to. But I bet I could though."
David Thomson has credited Hawks with "emotional intelligence". Strange as the compliment sounds, when matched with a director so resistant to talk of depth, the description is right. At the top of his powers, between 1935 and 1945, the films that most surely bear his touch are perhaps Ceiling Zero, To Have and Have Not, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday and The Big Sleep. Not far behind as acts of showmanship that are entertaining and that scarcely date are Twentieth Century and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Finally, three films that suggest the perfection of a genre: Scarface, Bringing up Baby, and Red River (except for the out-of-place comic ending).
Movies are the most incomparable art yet the one that invites most comparison, and the career of Hawks shows why all the comparisons (opera, architecture, the novel) both succeed and fail. One of his movies may suggest an inward unity and spaciousness that seems a mark of good fiction, as in The Big Sleep; it may have the scope and resonance to fill a historical landscape worthy of Remington, as Red River does. Ideally, somewhere in the background is music, not intruding, such as Hoagy Carmichael's piano in To Have and Have Not. Hawks's art aspires to the condition of life and sometimes seems to get there, as life rarely does.
The Howard Hawks season is at the BFI, South Bank, London SE1, until February 28. www.bfi.org.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jan/15/howard-hawks-films-david-bromwich?INTCMP=SRCH
Totally wrong about Rio Bravo, however.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Susannah York RIP
Actress Susannah York has died, aged 72Susannah York, the celebrated film and stage actress best known for her role in the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, has died aged 72.
By Olga Craig, Ben Leach and Roya Nikkhah
9:05PM GMT 15 Jan 2011
She was the blue-eyed English rose with the china-white skin and cupid lips who epitomised the sensuality of the swinging Sixties. Sexy and demure by turn, Susannah York, who died yesterday from cancer at 72, held a generation of male admirers in her thrall.
Her wide-ranging career, which won her both a Bafta and an Oscar nomination, oscillated between powerful portrayals of either the dutiful woman or the wanton wife. The zenith of her career was surely her roles as Thomas More's daughter in A Man For All Seasons, in 1966, and her passionate performance as the feisty section officer who took on Kenneth More in the acclaimed film Battle of Britain in 1966.
But York was not an actress whose career was shaped by her artistic ambition. Instead, as a single mother with two children, she chose roles (at times unwisely) which provided income. But for all that, she was acclaimed as one of our best character actors whose professionalism was legendary.
Last night Ms York's son, the actor Orlando Wells, spoke movingly of his pride in and love for his mother. "She was an absolutely fantastic mother, who was very down to earth," he said. "She loved nothing more than cooking a good Sunday roast and sitting around a fire of a winter's evening. In some sense, she was quite a home girl. Both Sasha [Orlando's sister] and I feel incredibly lucky to have her as a mother.''
Sir Tom Stoppard, the playwright and screenwriter, last night paid tribute to York. "I remember back in 1961 when I was a young journalist, I interviewed her for a magazine for her film Greengage Summer, and I still remember how completely charmed I was.
"She was so pleasant to me – she even let me interview her at home as long as I promised not to write that because journalists weren't normally allowed to go to her home. I still think of her with great affection."
Anthony Rudolf, a close friend and writer, said: "Everyone knows she was a great star, but it should not be forgotten that she made a great contribution to fringe drama."
York was born Susannah Yolande Fletcher in London in January 1939 – although according to York, who was rightly vain about her looks, she always claimed she was born in 1942. Her father was a merchant banker, her mother the daughter of a diplomat. Her parents divorced when she was five and she saw her father only a handful of times during her childhood. Later, when her mother remarried to a Scottish businessman and moved the family to Scotland, her contact with her father ceased.
It was during her school years that Ms York's rebellious streak, which was to manifest itself many times throughout her lifetime, was born. In what was considered a risqué incident when just 13, she was expelled for swimming naked at midnight in the school pool. In later life she laughingly remarked: "My biggest mistake was my sense of fair play. I wasn't even caught in the pool, but owned up anyway."
The young York was smitten by the stage from her school days. She won a small part as an Ugly Sister, and such was her delight at the plaudits that she determined to apply to RADA. When she was accepted, she wept with joy.
For the next few years, Ms York suffered rejections and applause in turn. But when she appeared in a production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, a Hollywood agent approached her and told her he would make her a star. When she won the role of Alec Guinness's daughter in Tunes of Glory (1960), she received rapturous reviews. She went on to appear with Glenda Jackson in The Maids (1974), and with Elizabeth Taylor (whom she called the world's most beautiful woman) in Zee and Co (1972).
At 18, in 1960, she had fallen in love with Michael Wells. He was a Rada contemporary and a married man. In an era when such indelicate behaviour was frowned upon, Ms York, with her winsome ways, soon turned the tide of public outrage. But the union hit the buffers when her career quickly overshadowed that of her husband. After the birth of a son and a daughter, the marriage ended bitterly in 1976.
From then on, Ms York, while still committed to her career, devoted her life to her children. She played Superman's mother in Superman (1978) and starred in two sequels.
On the small screen, too, her star shone bright. She appeared in Prince Regent (1979), as Mrs Fitzherbert, and in We'll Meet Again in 1982. But as she aged, her career waned. In the late 1980s, in deep humiliation, she was forced to sell deeply cherished paintings and jewellery to pay her mortgage. But for all that, Susannah York never lost the deep convictions and commitments that set her apart as a redoubtable actor. She had a keenly developed sense of justice, coupled with a volatile and prickly temper. When she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, she famously snubbed the Academy by declaring that it offended her to be nominated without being asked.
Ms York espoused many causes such as CND and the rainforests. But first and foremost, she was a devoted mother.
Orlando Wells and his sister were with her when she died. He said: ''She was a fantastic mother and the most extraordinary actress. She was a woman with grace and stature. She had advanced bone marrow cancer which she had an operation for. But, last Thursday, she had a scan and then the descent was fast. In the end, her death was painless and quick.''
Describing his mother as down to earth, Mr Wells said: "She was as happy in a pub theatre in Islington as she was in Hollywood."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/8262216/Actress-Susannah-York-has-died-aged-72.html
Saturday, 15 January 2011
Dumb Idea
Catcher in the Rye sequel might just be a good ideaCertain literary characters take on a life beyond the books where they were created, and cease to be a single author's property
If you've ever wondered what happened next to the young Holden Caulfield, wonder no longer: you'll shortly be able to find out – unless you're American, of course. Swedish author Frederick Colting's highly unofficial sequel to JD Salinger's classic The Catcher in the Rye has been blocked from release in the US and Canada, though rights to 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye have apparently already been sold in six countries.
It's a curious thing when contemporary authors take classic or much-loved books and write a sequel, authorised or not. But it's a brave, foolhardy – perhaps money-grubbing – author who takes on characters with a huge global following, and tries to craft a sequel to another writer's great work.
Yet unofficial sequels abound. We probably don't need to do anything more than mention in passing the recent fad for inserting zombies, sea monsters and vampires into Jane Austen and Brontë works. But the Janeite website pemberley.com lists dozens of less-fantastical novels written as continuations of Emma, Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility.
Why would any novelist worth their salt choose to pick up where someone else left off? On the one hand, of course, there'll be a lot of interest from aficionados of the source material. On the other, isn't it part of a novelist's job to create characters? And isn't using someone else's characters and situations for your own novels ultimately little more than fan fiction given the legitimising sheen of publication?
Maybe. But it is the case that some sequels have achieved literary success on their own merit. The best-known example is Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which acts as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre – although Rhys's success is perhaps down to her not simply continuing a main character's story, but delving instead into the "unknown life" of a secondary character – in this case, Brontë's famous "madwoman in the attic". Another good example might be Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, which spawned two well-received follow-ups. Mrs De Winter, by Woman In Black author Susan Hill came out in 1993 while Sally Beauman's Rebecca's Tale – featuring efforts to unpick the circumstances of the character's death many years before – was published in 2001.
Sometimes an author's creation, be it a character or a concept, so far transcends its origins that it almost becomes fair game. Take, for example, HG Wells's The Time Machine. Because the "big idea" that it put forward was so new and exciting, subsequent authors writing on time travel felt it only right that their own work in the sub-genre should give a nod to Wells, either by using his characters or riffing on his visions of the future.
And then there are the characters who become bigger than their books. Those who have made the crossover into movies, especially, become well-known even to people who have never so much as glanced at the source material. People who might not know, for example, that James Bond was a literary creation years before he became a star of bank holiday telly. Since Ian Fleming wrote his last Bond novel in 1966, the 007 myth has been continued in print by writers as diverse as Kingsley Amis, Charlie Higson and Sebastian Faulks – and, coming up in May this year, thriller writer Jeffrey Deaver.
Which brings me to Shibumi – a 1979 novel by Rodney William Whitaker, who wrote under the pseudonym Trevanian and also penned The Eiger Sanction. An old paperback of Shibumi was given to me by a friend who many years ago made it his mission to disseminate esoteric books. I was immediately hooked. Shibumi's one of those odd books, a work of beautiful zen genius masquerading as a lurid, cheap-looking thriller.
Shibumi is about Nicholai Hel – an international jet-set assassin with an incisive mind, a master of the ancient strategy game Go, a lover and a fighter, who could out-spy Bond and Jason Bourne together. I wanted to be Nicholai Hel when I grew up – still do, in fact. Hel was ripe for a series, a movie franchise, action figures, the works. But Shibumi never really achieved more than cult status, and Trevanian died in 2005. Nicholai Hel never came back.
Until now. A few weeks ago I received an advance copy of a book by a thriller writer called Don Winslow. I'd heard the name, but never read anything of his before – I don't really do conventional thrillers. Then I picked up the press release. Winslow's book, Satori, is a sequel to Shibumi.
I didn't know whether to be ecstatic or horrified. I read it carefully at first, hyper-critically. I read it not wanting to like it, which is a strange way to approach a book, I know. But as I read on, I realised I loved it. The spirit of the original was there, the characters were bang on, the novels flowed almost seamlessly into each other. And, by the end, I found that I no longer considered that I was reading a Don Winslow follow-up to a Trevanian novel. I was reading a Nicholai Hel novel.
And that, pretty much, is as good as any writer who takes on another author's babies needs to be. Maybe America should give a septuagenarian Holden Caulfield a chance.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jan/13/catcher-in-the-rye-sequel-good-idea
Friday, 14 January 2011
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Last night's set list
At The Habit, York: -
Sugar Mountain
Through My Sails
Farmer John
Southern Man
Till The Morning Comes
Ambulance Blues (just a bit as someone asked for it)
Let Your Fingers Do The Walking (aka Good Phone)
Intended to do some of my own stuff but as I sat down someone shouted "come on Shakey" and I knew they wanted Neil.
Sugar Mountain
Through My Sails
Farmer John
Southern Man
Till The Morning Comes
Ambulance Blues (just a bit as someone asked for it)
Let Your Fingers Do The Walking (aka Good Phone)
Intended to do some of my own stuff but as I sat down someone shouted "come on Shakey" and I knew they wanted Neil.
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Peter Yates RIP
Peter YatesPeter Yates, the director who died on Sunday aged 81, made his name with film's definitive car chase in Bullitt.
The hubcap spinning, tramcar dodging, engine growling, tyre-screeching, high-speed pursuit through the streets of San Francisco was a triumph for Yates and his cinematographer, William Fraker, who made the daring decision to mount cameras on the cars themselves rather than shoot the scene from a distance. "The whole idea was to allow the audience to experience the chase like they were in the cars," said Fraker. Despite spawning a host of imitations, it is still regarded as the original and best car chase sequence in cinema.
It did not just depend on new techniques. Steve McQueen, whom Yates described as "a lot of macho", revelled in the death-defying driving scenes. To capture one segment, Yates joined him in the car. "I was in the back of the Mustang and Steve was going about 120mph," Yates recalled. "We came to the last downhill section and when we got to the top of the hill Steve was still going pretty fast. I tapped him on the shoulder and said: 'We can slow down now, we're almost out of film.' Steve said very calmly: 'We can't. There aren't any brakes.'"
The car duly flew past cast and crew members before McQueen managed to steer it on to an incline to bring it to a halt. "If it was anyone else, we might not have made it," said Yates. "Steve was a great driver."
Yates's path to films was idiosyncratic. The son of a soldier, he was born on July 24 1929 in Aldershot, Hampshire, and educated at Charterhouse. He went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and at 19 began in repertory. His notices as an actor were so execrable, however, that he abandoned the stage for motor cars and from 1949 to 1953 became assistant works manager at HW Motors in Surrey, which had a racing team led by Stirling Moss. The experience contributed richly to Bullitt some 20 years later.
In 1953 Yates entered the film industry as a dubbing assistant on foreign language films. He then edited documentaries before rising to become assistant director on several pictures, including the celebrated war epic The Guns Of Navarone (1961). He also directed television episodes of The Saint and Danger Man before taking charge of his first feature, Summer Holiday (1963), starring Cliff Richard And The Shadows.
His next film was an adaptation of the play One Way Pendulum (1965), a comically absurd tale which he had directed on stage at the Royal Court. It had little commercial success, and it was his third picture, Robbery (1967), an effective retelling of the Great Train Robbery, that set the template for the rest of his career. Its opening scene, a tautly thrilling car chase, won Yates the job on Bullitt.
Though a genial character, Yates was his own man and infuriated McQueen when he refused to collaborate on Le Mans, another car caper that was to be the sequel to Bullitt. Yates explained: "I was afraid that no self-respecting actor would want to work with me if I did two 'machine' films together. Although action films are great fun, films about relationships are really much more satisfying."
He was not always so successful in making such films, however. His best efforts included John And Mary (1969), a gentle sentimental comedy which drew fine performances from Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow; Breaking Away (1979); and The Dresser (1984).
Breaking Away, an affecting study of teenage dreams built around cycle racing in Indiana, attracted four Academy Award nominations and prompted The Daily Telegraph's Patrick Gibbs to write: "For the first time Yates communicates considerable humanity as well as his usual efficiency as a director."
The Dresser (1984) won five further nominations and again steered well clear of car chases – the pyrotechnics confined instead to the acting of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. Filmed almost entirely in a dressing room, the piece keeled over under the weight of the performances and the stifling theatricality of the production. A chase scene would have been welcome.
Yates, who spent much of his life in New York, accepted that he was likely to be remembered as a proficient, reliable performer behind the camera. Of his own work, he said: "I put it somewhere below meals for the aged, but a little way above manufacturing toothpaste."
Other films he directed included Murphy's War (1971), an engaging adventure story with Peter O'Toole; The Hot Rock (1972); For Pete's Sake (1974); The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973); The Deep (1977); Eyewitness (1981); Krull (1983); Eleni (1985); Suspect (1987); The House on Carroll Street (1988); An Innocent Man (1989); Year of the Comet (1992); Roommates (1995); and Curtain Call (1999). Don Quixote (2000), with John Lithgow as the fantasist hero, and A Separate Peace (2004), an unremarkable adaptation of John Knowles's coming-of-age novel, (both filmed for television) brought his career to a close.
Of these, The Deep, about divers hunting treasure off a Caribbean island, was a notable success, though its most enduring contribution to popular culture may be the wet T-shirt contest, for which a craze began after stills were released of actress Jacqueline Bisset thus attired. Bisset claimed to be "extremely upset" by the pictures, but Newsweek promptly declared her "the most beautiful actress of all time". Krull, a turgid sci-fi picture, was another popular, if not critical, hit.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle, an unvarnished adaptation of the George V Higgins novel, was probably his best film, with Robert Mitchum outstanding in the title role.
To the end, however, Yates admitted that "chases continue to fascinate me". His formula was simple: "In the beginning you establish anticipation. The middle should confuse people so you're not sure where everyone is going. The end is where the good guys come out best."
Peter Yates married Virginia Pope in 1960. She survives him with three children.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/8251219/Peter-Yates.html
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Monday, 10 January 2011
No Such Thing
Grassblade glintstreak in one of the last morningsbefore I come to meet you, Pearl,
as the rain shies. How bright and sudden the dogrose,
briefly touched by dew, flaming
between the deep emerald and smoky blue
Dogrose, pink as Pearl's lips, no
city chemist or salon. We set
our colour charts in the rain
by feldspar heaved from the streambed;
cusloppe, burn peat in summer
and wild trampled marigolds.
Pearl, somewhere there is a stern receiver
and all accounts are open in the rain.
Once more through the heifer muck
and into the brilliant cooling of the watermint beds.
Sky to the west today, where you are, Pearl, is
a fantastic freak bruise, which hurts the world.
Coward rain scared of our joy refuses to come.
Deep despair destroys and dents delight
now that I have pledged my future to you, Pearl,
from the edge of the roaring bypass, from
the home of the broken bottle and fiery
battleground of the seiged estate.
BARRY MACSWEENEY
http://www.poetropical.co.uk/treefrog/nosuch.htm
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Teal and Orange: the new Hollywood colour scheme
Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the MadnessTodd Miro
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years. It is one of the most insidious and heinous practices that has ever overwhelmed the industry. Am I talking about the lack of good scripts? Do I speak of the dependency of a few mega-blockbuster hits to save the studios each year, or of the endless sequels and television retreads? No, I am talking about something much more dangerous, much deadlier to the health of cinema.
I speak of course, of THE COLOR GRADING VIRUS THAT IS TEAL & ORANGE!!!
Read the rest on Todd's blog: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html
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