Land and Freedom

"A story from the Spanish Revolution" is the subtitle of Ken Loach's seemingly quixotic film Land and Freedom. The conflict officially known as the Spanish Civil War remains virtually forgotten or misunderstood today. In its quiet way, Loach's film is providing us with a history lesson.

Before the opening credits, two paramedics climb stairs to a flat (later we learn it's in Liverpool) where an old man, Dave Carr, has been found unresponsive by his granddaughter. Dave dies in the ambulance and his granddaughter cries out, "I've lost him!" We next see her going through some old newspapers, broadsheets, and handbills that tell us that Dave was a proud member of the Labour Party. Looking around, she notices an old leather suitcase atop a wardrobe. Inside she finds more old clippings, a photo of a young woman, and a red kerchief containing a few handfuls of earth. Puzzled, she takes some of it in her hand, then smells her fingers a little disgustedly. The credits begin with titles outlining the historical background of the war, how a military revolt in Spanish Morocco led by General Franco spread into Spain with the backing of landowners and industrialists, committed solely to the overthrow of a democratically elected leftist government. Also throwing their weight behind the Spanish fascists were both Mussolini and Hitler, while Stalin was - so one might think - on the side of the Republic.

Ken Loach has always been a kind of cinema pamphleteer, addressing subjects concerned with the living conditions of the working class, always critical of political actions that have, over the decades, deliberately worsened them. 

Loach's style is rather the opposite of epic. He depicts huge social issues involving multitudes of people from the perspective of a few, or even just one. Land and Freedom wasn't the first time that Loach sought to tackle historical subjects: Days of Hope (1975), dealt with events from World War I, and the later The Wind That Shakes the Barley was about the Irish Civil War. I fully understand Loach's wish to tell the story of the war, but I didn't find it necessary for him to tell the whole story. Kim, Dave Carr's granddaughter, reads the letters he wrote from Spain to his sweetheart, and they supply the framework for the film. Dave had been a member of the British Labour Party and his attendance of a speech given by a young Spaniard about the war is what inspires him to join an international brigade and fight for rhe Republican side.

But, possibly attempting to get the story straight, Land and Freedom gets bogged down in didacticism, with lengthy scenes in which the action stops so that characters can conduct political debates. At the center of the film, right after the capture of a village held by fascists by the militia is a scene in which the militia members, Spaniards, German and Scots volunteers, an American (who is far too pragmatic, and becomes something of a villain), and Dave engage in passionate debate over whether or not the village should be collectivized. It's the worst kind of sloganeering that communism was always notorious for, and that had, historically, turned so many away from it. (E.E. Cummings famously described the USSR as "the vicariously childlike kingdom of slogan.")

I found Land and Freedom disappointing because, unlike Loach's best films, he uses his protagonist as a cipher in order to provide us with an undogmatic account of the Spanish "Revolution" (a puzzling use of the term, since the government of the Republic arrived in power through an election, not a revolution). Dave Carr witnesses the victory of fascism and goes home to Liverpool. By the time of his death, he is estranged from his wife and lives alone in a tenement. How much more interesting it might have been if Loach had told us the story of Dave's life in England after witnessing what the working classes accomplished, albeit fleetingly, in Spain. What did he remember or regret from those days of amazement, when formerly abstract principles were put into practice and a society of free and equal human beings was realized? He must have grown disillusioned, especially after 1945. Yet he hung onto his mementos of Spain all those years. 

At the end of his time in Spain, after the death of Blanca, a woman with whom he had fallen in love, and after headlines of the fascist bombing of Guernica, Dave sees the futility of the struggle, with communists fighting anarchists fighting Trotskists, and he tears his Communist Party papers into tiny shreds and goes back over the border from Barcelona, the only city still held by the Republic. But not before Blanca is buried by her POUM campañeros. Dave takes her red kerchief and fills it with a handful of earth and goes home to bloody old Britain. But Loach cuts from Blanca's interment to Dave's in Liverpool, where his daughter opens the kerchief and adds the Spanish earth to his grave, reads a few lines from a William Morris poem, and raises her fist in the communist salute. I half expected her to sing the words from the "Internazionale" - the old revolutionary hymn. But where would she have learned it? 

There is one angle from which to view Land and Freedom that makes it acutely relevant and timely - because of the war in Ukraine. Currently, more than 20,000 fighters from 52 countries are fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers, helping them to repel Putin and his war of aggression on an independent democratic state. Along with these heroic volunteers, the democracies of the European Union and of North America are supporting the Ukrainian side with proclamations and arms. Although 40,000 foreigners fought on the Republican side in Spain, they fought with antiquated arms and with no air force. Franco, on the other hand, had the logistical support of the Third Reich. Now China is reportedly going to supply arms to Russia, while warning the West not to return the world to the Cold War. This time, the war is far from cold, and if China wants to engage in proxy warfare, they had better reconsider the fitness of their proxy warriors.

Ideationally Puzzling

Flag of the Lincoln Battalion

I had a chance last week to watch Ken Loach's 1995 film Land and Freedom. My review of the film is forthcoming, but I went back to read what Stanley Kauffmann thought of the film. Writing in his column at The New Republic on April 1, 1996, Kauffmann wrote favorably of Land and Freedom, but with curious reservations. He was moved by its portrayal of a crucial moment in history that was overshadowed by the greater catastrophe of World War Two, the Spanish Civil War, to make a confession that is significant:

In Jim Allen's screenplay, Dave's granddaughter goes through his letters and clippings and photos, and the film flashes back to his experiences in Spain: his combat life, his encounters with the communist factionalism that accompanies the fight against fascism, his involvement in the ponderous discussion groups, his love affair with a young woman in the ranks alongside him and the dreadful inevitable results of the war - inevitable not only because Italy and Germany were supporting Franco, not only because the democracies were reluctant to support communists, but because of the strife among anti-Franco forces and the subversions of Stalin.

For those of us who lived through those days, Loach recreates engulfingly the atmosphere in which we lived and feared. Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 had been naked brutality. Still, it seemed somewhat distant. Franco's rebellion in Spain seemed to presage the tidal roll of fascism toward us. Loach made me remember nightmares (and my two heroic days when I got an application form for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and studied it, then never filled it out).

World War II and subsequent events erased that simplicity but apparently not for Loach. As Dave Hart's body is lowered into his Liverpool grave, his relatives and friends, young and old, raise their fists in the communist salute. It's not kneejerk anticommunism, I think, to wonder after that salute about the purpose of the film. Is Loach sympathizing or satirizing? Is he telling us that Dave and perhaps he himself learned nothing from the slitherings of communist policy in the Spanish Civil War, let alone the cascade of subsequent history? In recent years, even deeply held radical beliefs have come in for darker tempering; we get no sense of that from Loach's excellently made but ideationally puzzling film.

What's puzzling for me about Kauffmann's last remark is that it wasn't just Dave who came away from his participation in a moment of history, a participation joined by the likes of George Orwell, feeling vindicated, but Stanley who decided against participating, who ultimately failed to see the point of participating. 

With allowances made for the lapse of sixty years, Kauffmann didn't seem to know what the Spanish Civil War was really about. Quite simply, it was the overwhelming defeat of a people's choice of how they wanted to be governed by the forces of fascism, that the Western powers - the democracies - had an opportunity to stop, which may have sent a message to Hitler and Mussolini that we considered democracy worth fighting for and fascism worth resisting. But we failed, like Kauffmann, to fill out the application form and stayed home to watch fascism win, only to find ourselves fighting it anyway across Europe and the Pacific a few years later.

Dave dies of old age in Liverpool and his granddaughter discovers a small suitcase filled with his mementos, his souvenirs of an adventure he never told her about. And of those mementos Ken Loach gives us his "excellently made" film, ending with a group of Dave's fellow Socialists (Kauffmann continually calls them Communists) giving him the raised fist salute, which was the anti-fascist salute in Spain, made by communists, socialists, and anarchists. I found the moment to be neither naïve nor ironic, but beautiful.

In December 1936, when George Orwell arrived in Barcelona, the de facto capital of the Spanish Republic, he was a journalist sent to find out what was really going on - since the British press had been reporting quite conflicting accounts. He was so overwhelmed by what he saw, with the working class, as he put it, "in the driver seat," that he joined a militia that was unaffiliated with the hardline communist forces called Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, or POUM - which is incidentally the very same militia that Dave joins in Land and Freedom. He saw action on the Aragon front until he was wounded in the throat by a falangist sniper and invalided out of Spain. He wrote the book Homage to Catalonia to try and set the historical record of the war straight. In 1943 he published an essay called "Looking Back on the Spanish War" in which he wrote:

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

So Stanley Kauffmann, who was otherwise a heroic figure among American film critics, was right to refrain from filling out the form and joining the Lincoln Battalion. The cause was lost, and Kauffmann had reason to think he did right. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference (just 2,500 Americans served in the Battalion), but perhaps the cause wouldn't have been such a lost one if he - and numerous other liberals like him - had filled it out and girded his loins in defense of democracy. 

Gioia on the Morning

Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia (pronounced Joyah) is an interesting man. I first encountered him in a YouTube video talking about the grim future of music in the age of TikTok. He's a jazz musician and currently holds forth on a variety of subjects from his newsletter The Honest Broker on Substack. In one of his recent posts, he outlined what he called "My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character." When I began to read the post, I only got as far as #1:

Over the years, I developed several techniques for assessing character—and a few of them I’d even describe them as secret skills, because such matters are rarely discussed and some of the best evaluation methods aren’t widely known .

The careful application of these techniques has saved me a lot of heartache and agita. My dealings with people tend to be positive nowadays, and mostly because I’ve put a lot of effort into ensuring that they are good, trustworthy people. This is valuable both on the upside and downside.

1. Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.

This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.

This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find.

So the next time you’re introduced to strangers at the party, and they start talking business, spend at least a little time sizing up their partners. If you don’t pay attention to this, you will have lost an important source of insights, and may pay a high price as a result.

At this point in Gioia's post I stopped reading. Wow, his standards are a lot higher than mine. He sounds like he never made a mistake in love - assuming that his marital "choice" had anything to do with love.

And, right off the bat, perhaps I should simply cry "mea culpa," since, by Gioia's standards, my marital choices were revelatory of my flawed character. Gioia would probably not want me for a business partner or as a candidate for city mayor (since he clearly isn't providing his readers with criteria for choosing friends). 

But I think Ted Gioia is dead wrong about this - his #1 rule for judging a person's character should totally avoid their choice of spouse. I have good friends who made disastrous mistakes in marriage. I didn't hold it against them and it never made me question their character. My dear late sister married - and divorced - five times. What should I have done, disown my own sister because her choices told me that her character was deeply flawed?

And even if Gioia is only talking about a choice of business partners, why should his criteria be so different from those he uses in his choice of friends? 

I would argue that a spouse, assuming that one is marrying for love, is rarely a matter of choice. In defense of my argument, I recall a brief speech made by Raúl Julia in the movie Tequila Sunrise that has stuck with me almost thirty-five years since I first heard it: 

Friendship is the only choice in life you can make that's yours! You can't choose your family! Goddamn it, I've had to face that! No man should be judged for whatever direction his dick goes! That's like blaming a compass for pointing north, for Chrissake! Friendship is all we have.

The "choice" of a spouse - of a person one loves - is probably the only occasion in one’s life when making a mistake is permissible - and completely understandable. And no one should ever interfere or offer advice before, during or after. And saying "I told you so" will warrant a punch in the mouth.

But it goes much deeper than this, and it brings into my argument two of the greatest intellects of history: Leonardo da Vinci and Sigmund Freud. 

When I was in college I first encountered a quote by Leonardo that went something like this: "Nothing can be loved unless it is first known." At first, like everyone else, I saw the quote as pure sagacity, drawing a direct line between love and knowledge. But after doing a little more living, the quote started to worry me: I realized that it simply wasn't true. I speculated about the veracity behind the remark, arriving at my own conclusion: 

I used to think that Leonardo had somehow got it backwards, that nothing can be known unless it is loved. Now I know that there are few things more irreconcilable than love and knowledge. But it is a beautiful thought - and perhaps all the more beautiful for being so untrue.

Years later I discovered that Sigmund Freud, in his fascinating character study of Leonardo, commented on his strange quote and had come to the same conclusion that I had:

In an essay of the Conferenze Florentine the utterances of Leonardo are cited, which show his confession of faith and furnish the key to his character. "Nessuna cosa si può amare nè odiare, se prima no si ha cognition di quella." That is: One has no right to love or to hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. And the same is repeated by Leonardo in a passage of the Treaties on the Art of Painting where he seems to defend himself against the accusation of irreligiousness:

"But such censurers might better remain silent. For that action is the manner of showing the workmaster so many wonderful things, and this is the way to love so great a discoverer. For, verily great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it you will be able to love it only little or not at all."

The value of these utterances of Leonardo cannot be found in that they impart to us an important psychological fact, for what they maintain is obviously false, and Leonardo must have known this as well as we do. It is not true that people refrain from loving or hating until they have studied and became familiar with the nature of the object to whom they wish to give these affects, on the contrary they love impulsively and are guided by emotional motives which have nothing to do with cognition and whose affects are weakened, if anything, by thought and reflection.

Leonardo only could have implied that the love practiced by people is not of the proper and unobjectionable kind, one should so love as to hold back the affect and to subject it to mental elaboration, and only after it has stood the test of the intellect should free play be given to it. And we thereby understand that he wishes to tell us that this was the case with himself and that it would be worth the effort of everybody else to treat love and hatred as he himself does.

Freud concludes that it was the exceptional nature of Leonardo, in which the emotional impulses of art were often interrupted by his analytical penchant, that prevented him from surrendering, like everyone else, to the compulsions of love. It also prevented him from completing more than the fewer than twenty extant art works that are attributed to him.

Beat the Devil

The death of Gina Lollobrigida on Monday has spurred this old horse to finish my review of Beat the Devil, which was her first movie in English and easily her best. To John Huston, the film was an escapade, a "lark," as he later called it.

Because of his Leftist political activities, the Englishman Claud Cockburn, a cousin of Evelyn and Alec Waugh, chose to publish his first novel, a thriller called Beat the Devil, under the pseudonym James Helvick. The book is a more hardboiled look at Brits Abroad than Cyril Connolly's The Rock Pool, but it’s in the same rich vein. In 1953, John Huston had been living part-time in Ireland and was a friend of Cockburn’s. Seeing potential in the book as another star vehicle for Humphrey Bogart, with whom he had already made five films, Huston bought the rights to the novel for $3,000 and hired Cockburn to assist him in the writing of the screenplay. After initial drafts, Huston replaced Cockburn with Truman Capote as co-scenarist for reasons that aren't exactly clear, as I will explore later. 

The film drops us into the company of quasi-sinister grifters in Ravello, a town overlooking the Amalfi coast. Billy Dannreuther (Humphrey Bogart) is an American “down on his luck” who has fallen in with four equally dubious characters: Peterson (Robert Morley), Julius O’Hara (Peter Lorre), Ravello (Marco Tulli) and Major Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard). They are presently working on a scheme to cash in on uranium deposits recently discovered in British East Africa (Kenya). But we quickly discover that nothing is what it seems.

Into this nest of - albeit toothless - vipers come Harry and Gwendolyn Chelm (Edward Underdown and Jennifer Jones), a married British couple who appear to be tourists, but Gwendolyn assures anyone who cares to hear that her husband owns valuable property in - guess where - British East Africa. Billy and his wife Maria (Gina Lollabrigida) go to work on the Chelms, Billy on Gwendolyn and Maria on Harry, to find out if any of Gwnedolyn’s claims are for real. The plot thickens considerably until you realize that everything is a ruse to get you to sit still long enough (94 minutes in fact) to enjoy Huston’s send-up of his own The Maltese Falcon, released in 1940.

However Beat the Devil started out, Huston and Capote turned it into a spoof. According to one legend, the script was written piecemeal as the shooting proceeded. But this story is contradicted by Claud Cockburn’s son, Alexander, in the introduction to a new edition of the novel:

Though not an immediate success, the film of Beat the Devil has developed a cult following over the years, and in the US quite often bobs up on late night TV. One aspect of this cult caused some irritation to my father and indeed to the rest of the family. The film's credits announced the screenplay was by Truman Capote, from a novel by James Helvick. Admirers of the film professed to find evidence of Capote's mastery in every interstice of the dialogue and over the years Capote did nothing to dissuade them from this enthusiasm. But in fact his own contribution was limited to some concluding scenes, for it had chanced that during the final days of shooting in Italy the end had suddenly to be altered: as far as I can remember, the locale of the scenes had to be changed in a hurry. In the emergency, with my father back in Ireland, Capote, who happened to be visiting the set at the time, was drafted to do the necessary work and his name - more alluring than that of the unknown Helvick or the ex-Red Cockburn - scrambled into the credits. Although reissued as a paperback in 1971 Beat the Devil has been, till now, almost unobtainable and it's not the least of my pleasures that admirers of the film may now see that the inspiration for that dialogue came not from Capote but from my father.

My first impression on seeing the film was what a blast everyone involved in the making of it must've had for however many weeks in Ravello it took to complete. While Beat the Devil is effective as a spoof of the sort of film of which The Maltese Falcon is a perfect example, it actually pokes fun at itself as well. It makes one wonder what could’ve happened to Huston - and to Hollywood - in the thirteen years between. Certainly the war had something to do with his reluctance to commit to shooting exclusively in the studio, and it only proved the extent to which Huston had always been an outsider (and perhaps why, though it remains a mystery, Huston was never embraced by the auteurist gang).

But I can’t help thinking that making a self-mocking spoof of a classic film demonstrated, on Huston’s part anyway, a loss of nerve. No longer content to make films that stay within the confines of a genre, he chose instead to explode it - for laughs. It reminded me of François Truffaut when, in 1973, he turned away from making films like Two English Girls and The Wild Child and made La Nuit Americain, aka Day for Night - a film about Francois Truffaut, starring Truffaut, making a film called Je Vous Présente Paméla (Meet Pamela). 

Day for Night was commercially successful, but Truffaut’s friends saw it as a sign of creative bankruptcy. It was a film about the making of a film, completely lacking in postmodern irony. Ostensibly Truffaut was exploring the joys and frustrations (otherwise known as the joys) of filmmaking, and he intended the film to be seen as a love letter to the medium. But what his contemporaries saw him doing was a once leading light of the French New Wave chasing his own tail.

Beat the Devil was a commercial flop. Humphrey Bogart disliked it, probably because he put up his own money to help get it made. It was trimmed on its release by four or five minutes and a clumsy narration spoken by Bogart was added (the last minute changes alluded to by Alexander Cockburn). Its copyright eventually lapsed and it entered the public domain. Through circuitous means, a restoration copyrighted by Sony was released in 2016 to renewed interest in the film. Roger Ebert added it to his list of Great Movies. It isn't a great film, but it's fun. As a successful parody it's one of those films that leaves you with a gratifying sense of having beaten the odds. 

Yet More Reading

Following the habit I adopted at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, I've continued my chain-reading habit every day ever since, and this past year I managed to read thirty-six novels and a short story. Here they are in the order in which I read them.

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Howards End by E. M. Forster

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Falconer by John Cheever

The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst

Something New (1915) by P. G. Wodehouse

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle

Party Going by Henry Green

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

The Book of Evidence by John Banville

The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell

A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin                               

The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff

Last Orders by Graham Swift                                                 

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth                                             

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon            

The Beach by Cesare Pavese                                        

Over the Frontier by Stevie Smith

Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

A Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago

Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg

Angels on Toast by Dawn Powell

The Actual by Saul Bellow

Foster by Claire Keegan

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov

“Then We Were Three” by Irwin Shaw

The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow

As always, I followed no itinerary in my choices - I went, as the saying goes, wherever the spirit moved me. The novels that had the greatest effect on me were never either the best or most famous. I thought Howards End, for example, was a muddled book, but just the sort of muddle Forster meant it to be. Wuthering Heights, the most famous on the list, was something of a slog. Evidently Emily Brontë wanted to include the whole of her odd world in it, and it is cumulatively evocative of it.

Only one of them was really disappointing - Cutter and Bone, which wasn't nearly as good as the film. Of all the books, the ones I liked and enjoyed reading most were: The Long Goodbye, with its beautiful evocation of mid-century Los Angeles; Something New, with its exquisite ending; Pictures from an Institution, very funny and very moving; The Fortnight in September, a real find and a loving portrait of middle class English life; The Ghost Writer, a strangely imaginative glimpse by an extremely precocious fledgling writer inside the lives of three people he encounters in a wintry retreat; Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, one of Simenon's "hard" novels that shows us a familiar locale and a fully grown-up love from the inside; Foster, a very gentle tale of a little girl's discovery of the true meaning of family love; and A Sport and a Pastime, that catches moods and (sometimes erotic) moments in time that are unforgettable. 

The novels that I look forward to reading again some day on a desert island are Updike's Rabbit, Run, which I misjudged on a first reading, Pictures from an Institution, replete with intelligence, wit, and love, and A Sport and a Pastime. Yet, as Frost wrote, knowing how way leads on to way, I doubt if I should ever go back.  

Pulp

That bizarre adventure which put five people in the cemetery and ruled me out as a customer for laxatives. Mickey King

I watched TCM Remembers just before Christmas, a look back at all of the movie lights that have gone out this year. The British filmmaker Mike Hodges died too late - December 17 - to make the cut. He was 90. I've written about his work before on this blog, but I haven't devoted a post to what is my favorite of all his films, Pulp (1972), which he made after his first film Get Carter became a huge hit. Pulp, however, was a financial failure, and it sent Hodges's career in a different direction. Moving easily between film and television, a career spanning forty years had its surprises and disappointments.

The claims I'm going to make for Pulp are largely personal. Since I first watched the film, on a late night television airing in the late 1970s, every time I had an opportunity to see it again over the fifty years since, I did so happily. By now I must have seen it seven or eight times. I became a part of its cult following.

Pulp is an odd, one-off, and rather self-indulgent film, the work of a young filmmaker who had a rare opportunity to make a personal statement with resources he wouldn't otherwise have had at his disposal. And Mike Hodges did dispose of them, as surely as if he had misplaced them. The Three Mikes production company (Michael Klinger, Michael Caine, and Hodges) would dissolve and Michael Caine would never work with Hodges again. 

The stodgy plot is uneventful. In a publishing house typing pool "somewhere in the Mediterranean," a writer of low-grade novels crammed with vicarious crime and sex - otherwise known as "pulp," named Mickey King turns up for an appointment with the representative of a mysterious client who wants Mickey to ghost-write his life story. King is played by Michael Caine, coiffed and bespectacled in 70s style, and he narrates the story with characteristic deadpan humor. 

The mysterious client turns out to be former Hollywood star and associate of gangsters, Preston Gilbert, played by Mickey Rooney, now retired and living in a secluded villa. (The locale feels like Italy, but shooting was done entirely on the island of Malta.) Gilbert wants Mickey to write his tell-all biography, but before Mickey can even commit an opening sentence to paper, Gilbert is murdered at a party. Feeling cheated out of a lucrative fee, Mickey proceeds to investigate the crime on his own, and almost gets killed following clues to a dead end. He winds up the captive of a corrupt prince, recuperating from a gunshot wound to his shin. Sitting on a terrace and writing of his imagined revenge on his captors, he mutters, "I'll get the bastards yet!"

As Mickey, Michael Caine is engaged with the material, even when the material isn't engaging. Mickey Rooney is typecast as a Hollywood has-been, showing off even when no one is watching. He's killed in the middle of a painful slapstick routine, posing as an incompetent waiter. When he falls dead, the crowd applauds. Lionel Stander, always playing heavies, is at least authentic, even if nothing he says or does is. Micky's noirish one-liners are used as a counterpoint to the action, which accentuates their falsity. Hodges is spoofing his own spoof. The cast is dotted with Italian actors, notably Leopoldo Trieste. Pulp was partly an homage to John Huston, and in fact the Italian actor Giulio Donnini appeared in Beat the Devil nineteen years before Pulp.

Having seen the film so many times, I was curious to know what Michael Caine had to say about it in his memoir, What's It All About? Having met Shakira, his wife-to-be, shortly before shooting in Malta, his memory of it is rose-tinted:

Pulp was the second film that I produced with Michael Klinger after Get Carter, and Mike Hodges was again the director. It was a strange little piece and it had also been written by Mike as a sort of homage to John Huston. It was a real oddball of a movie that never really quite worked. Its heart was in the right place, but in a business where wallets are kept over the heart it did not count for much. Pulp never made any real money, but I again had a wonderful experience making it so I remember it with affection. It was winter in England when we arrived in Malta, where it was beautifully warm so we were ahead already. Shakira eventually joined me and the temperature got even hotter as we embarked on an idyll of really discovering each other in a hotel on the beach, which couldn’t have been better had we planned it. Being absolutely besotted by this lady I don’t remember much of the actual film-making, even though I was supposed to be the associate producer, but Mike Klinger held it all together and gave us his blessing. He was a small rotund man with a perpetual smile on his face, and what with this look and his benevolent attitude towards Shakira and me, he always seemed like an elderly and slightly sinful Cupid.(1)

I recently found some remarks made by Mike Hodges in a Foreword to a book about Get Carter that apply equally to Pulp:

It is salutary to be reminded of the process of creativity. For film makers of my age influences have often become obscured. Ghosts in the machine. Pentimento. A film seen just once in the distant past – and I mean just ‘once’ – for this was long before videos. Then you will come across it decades later – usually on  – and recognise where some ‘moment’ in one of your films has come from. It is always startling fact and fiction occupying the same territory in one’s brain – recognising our amazing ability to collect and store slivers of time. With that comes the realisation that originality is not quite what it seems.(2)

It's difficult for me to properly assess the qualities that I like so much in Pulp, since it's become such a private place. "Everyone walking this earth," Mickey wrote, "has a secret closet he'd rather left closed. Stop." Having no one with whom to share this little film suits me just fine. Again, I won't call it a work of art, since I'm quite capable of distinguishing between what I like and what is demonstrably good. Pulp falls considerably short of greatness, but I love it. Every time I remember the film I think of the bittersweet theme music composed by George Martin. Like the film, it's stuck in my head on eternal repeat.

Remember that thou art pulp and unto pulp thou shalt return.

Cheerio, Mike Hodges.

1 Caine, Michael, What's It All About? (London: Arrow Books, 2010)

2 Chibnall, Steve, Get Carter (London: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2003)

Christmas Evil

Some movies are done a double disservice by publicity campaigns that never seem to understand them. Christmas Evil is a good example of this. Marketed as a slasher movie on its first release in 1980, which contributed to its being a box office flop, it has lately - since 2000 - been repackaged as a psychological drama rather like the Joaquin Phoenix movie Joker, which has contributed to the movie's new, albeit modest, lease on life. But Christmas Evil is neither a slasher movie nor a psychological drama. It's very slight on gore (only four corpses) and its psychological depth is shallow. Why, then, has it acquired a cult following? In the DVD commentary, an enthusiastic John Waters called it the "greatest Christmas movie ever made."

Professional clowns have been having a tough time of it for the past few decades, because of a cultural shift - brought on by fact, the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, who was also a professional clown, and fiction, Stephen King's supernatural clown character Pennywise - have combined to make clowns into creepy figures. Santa Claus has been subject to the same treatment in American popular culture for at least as long, if Christmas Evil is anything to go by.

When we first meet Harry Stadling, the hero of the movie, he's a little boy who, with his big brother Philly and his mother, is sitting on the stairs watching as someone dressed as Santa Claus comes down the chimney, eats some bread and honey and drinks milk left out for him, places gifts under their Christmas tree and in their stockings on the mantle, and then, just as in the Clement Moore poem, "laying his finger aside of his nose,/And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose." Back in their bedroom, Philly tells Harry it was their dad dressed up as Santa, and calls Harry "crazy" for thinking it was really Santa. Harry insists that it was Santa, and sneaks back downstairs to discover Santa and his mother making out. Harry angrily runs upstairs to the attic where he takes a glass snow globe and smashes it, a la Citizen Kane, on the floor. He takes a piece of the broken glass and cuts his hand. The blood falls on the roof of the broken snow globe house and the credits roll. (1)

Segue to "the present," a man dressed as Santa wakes and goes about his morning routine to the accompaniment of Christmas records through rooms filled with Santa paraphernalia. Next we see him on the roof looking through binoculars at windows across the street, but he isn't exactly a pervert - he's spying on children doing their chores, playing with dolls (the good ones) and one who is cutting centerfolds out of a Penthouse magazine (a bad one). The music suddenly turns into jarring electronica as Harry runs to two big books, one for good children and one for bad, in which he inscribes the names of the children he just spied on. 

Harry has a desk job at the Jolly Dream toy factory, which makes perfect sense knowing his fixation on Santa Claus, but he misses working on the assembly line. He lectures employees on their lunch break about making quality toys. They look at one another and grin. The assembly line workers don't care that their toys are poorly made. Another assembly line worker named Frank needs someone to cover his night shift so, knowing that Harry misses the line, he talks him into covering for him.

Later that night, on his way home from the factory, Harry sees Frank in a bar and overhears him calling him a schmuck for taking his shift. Harry rushes home and, almost apoplectic with anger, he takes a small doll in his hands and, humming "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" slowly crushes it. Harry is clearly becoming unglued, but this is just the beginning. It's almost as if, when he finally dresses up as Santa Claus, which happens at the 40 minute mark, Harry becomes an avenging Christmas angel. 

Harry goes to a mental hospital for children and, despite some initial resistance from the staff, hands over a van-load of toys for the children. The nurses cheer him as he drives away in a van with a sleigh painted on the side. His euphoria changes when he stops at the church where his boss is attending Midnight Mass. As soon as they see Harry on the sidewalk still dressed as Santa, some of the exiting worshippers begin to taunt him. He responds by stabbing one of them in the eye and striking three of them in the head with a hatchet. 

The entire scene of Harry's visit to co-worker Frank's house - beginning with his attempt to fit down his chimney (he gets stuck and only extricates himself after strenuous effort), his attempt to smother Frank with his sack of toys, with his wife asleep beside him, finally slashing his throat with the star atop a bedside Christmas tree, his wife waking and her breathless scream, and Harry's flight through a glass door that slowly closes - is utterly macabre. 

Christmas Evil is a movie with insurmountable problems. The biggest problem is the obvious psychotic who is the center of the story. We're given clues to indicate what drove Harry over the edge, but not what got him to the edge in the first place. And we're not even sure where the edge occurs. He switches from being jolly St. Nick to a homicidal maniac without any apparent transition. There is no connective tissue between these two Harrys. It's as if the director simply decided that he'd shown us enough of Harry being subsumed in the character of Santa Claus and it was time for him to go berserk. 

The movie muddles its way to whatever point it's trying to make, which has something vaguely to do with the corruption of Christmas into the meaningless commercial circus that we have to endure today. The cast has several familiar faces, including Brandon Maggart, whose performance as Harry has been lauded by a lot of people who clearly don't understand how easy it is for an actor to play a mentally unbalanced character. (Practically everyone still swoons over Adam Sandler's psycho impersonation in the terrible Punch Drunk Love.) When an actor acts as if he has lost his mind, who other than someone with experience with lunatics can tell if he's getting it right? At first, Harry comes across as a fairly common functioning sociopath. Then, for no apparent reason, the movie veers into criminal insanity. 

I can sympathize with the desire of apparently so many to see Santa made into a sinister figure - a supernatural being who spies on children to learn if they're naughty or nice, who invades people's homes when they're sleeping and who invariably disappoints them with gifts they hadn't asked for. Christmas Evil has its moments, as when an angry crowd chases Santa down a nocturnal street with flaming torches. And Harry's final apotheosis is almost poetic. Having followed him thus far into his delusions, we are as amazed as he apparently is when his sleigh/van takes flight, turning left towards the moon, "ere he drove out of sight." 

Merry Christmas!

(1) The title of the version I watched was You Better Watch Out.