Film Pairings — Two Very Different, And Nearly Flawless Films

Often I put two movies together because of some tangible similarity — plot, character, cinematic style, even setting.  These two are none of the above.  The only thing they have in common is that they are really good.  But they couldn’t be more different

A Most Wanted Man — This is one of the last films with Philip Seymour Hoffman in a leading role.  I was well into the film when I became increasingly conscious of its familiarity.  I immediately checked.  The movie was based on a novel of the same name by John Le Carré.  I should have known, of course.  Espionage, terrorism and innocence are brought to a boil with the same sense of double crossing, blind alleys and distrust that permeate the master’s books and with same frumpy realism brought to almost all of the film manifestations of his work. Hoffman is consequential in a role of a relatively inconsequential man.  Burnt out and perhaps down to his last chance to do right, Hoffman has perfect pitch for a man so seemingly ordinary, so disappointed and so weary with the world. Directed by Anton Corbijn, the film also features Rachel McAdams, and Willem Dafoe.

Point Blank — Not the least bit frumpy or subtle, Point Blank might be one of the sharpest, tightest, and oddly most stylized crime films ever.  It surprised me that Lee Marvin turned out to be the perfect lead. I’ve always found him a credible and an interesting actor — The Big Heat, for example — and strong in supporting roles. But carry a two-hour movie?  I wouldn’t have thought so. He does. The only other quality the two movies share is that they are based on popular novels by master craftsmen.  In this case the book is The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake). Marvin plays Walker — a character named Parker in the series of books that has spawned other films. Walker was cheated out of his wife and his share of a job, both thefts by his best friend.  But all Walker really wants is his share of the take. He and the movie move toward that goal with a vengeance. This is a powerful film with a great deal of credit going to Marvin.  It’s also a beautiful, moody, well-lit, incredibly designed and photographed work of art. Directed by John Boorman it also features a striking Angie Dickinson as well as fine performances by Carroll O’Connor, Keenan Wynn and Lloyd Bochner.

If its cold outside nothing wrong with a little cognac or other brandy to keep you warm and mellow while you watch two great movies. 

Book Notes — Ten Books That Served As Courses in Life And Writing

Aside from cat videos, a relatively current Facebook trend is to get folks to list their ten top books.  The point here is to list those books that have stayed with them in some way, a special place in their hearts and or minds.  Because I’m a suspicious sort, I worry that some of these lists wander into the top-ten-books-of-all-time kind of thinking.  

I first learned of this “tag-a-friend” project on the crime fiction web blog, Rapsheet, which I go to every morning to accompany my first cup of coffee of the day.

I dutifully posted my ten (eleven sort of) in the comment section of that post and have been perusing other lists on the blog and on Facebook and decided I would like to explain my choices.  My first thought was that the premise was the greatest or my favorite 10 books. I would be unqualified to list the 10 greatest books because I don’t have the literary or historical qualifications, and because I really haven’t read enough to do such a list justice. Second, readers and writers may approach reading differently. The following is a list of books, not necessarily my favorites, but books that, in some way, changed my life, or my craft or at least my view of the world.

★ Young Törless, Robert Musil   Musil wrote this prescient tale about the end of innocence and the onset of adolescence while the Nazis were gathering their evil forces in Europe.  The book foresaw the human capacity to force people to belong to a powerful group and to torture those who don’t or can’t.  Musil also introduced me to his more famous contemporaries— Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse.

★ The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John le Carré. Le Carré let me know that crime and espionage novels could offer much more than the solving of a puzzle and introduced me to the concept of the  deeply flawed protagonist. We find ourselves interested in a central character who is no longer interested in the world.

★ Soul On Ice, Eldridge Cleaver  There’s no way that a middle-class white kid like me could understand racism as it was at the time without exposure to the stories of people who lived it.  I’m sure there are other great books (Baldwin and Wright) that could have provided me with that kind of education — perhaps a better one.  But at the time, this was what I found and what I needed and when I needed it. Cleaver went off into the ozone later. This, however, was a powerful and meaningful story.

★ Armies of the Night/Miami And The Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer   I’m not sure this is history as fiction or fiction as history, but Mailer’s journalistic style strikes me as a valuable writer’s resource. These two books, observations of our government’s bad behavior, were part of a new kind of writing that many well-known authors claimed to invent, including Truman Capote with his celebrated, In Cold Blood.

★ Tesseract, Alex Garland  Again, this is something for writers especially.  How much energy can anyone put into the written word? The words move. The reader must chase them. This was a book that shook me up.

★ The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda  Fact or fiction?  I’m definitely voting for fiction and from what we’ve learned later that’s a safe vote.  This first volume of books on “the Yaqui way of knowledge,” however reads as well-written magical realism that snagged my young mind.  It opened up possibilities.

★ Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey  However desperate some writers are to leave the traditional behind, it’s great to be grounded by a master mystery writer now and then. This was an assignment for a mystery conference.  Otherwise, I might have have missed this tightly-plotted classic.

★ Diva, Daniel Odier (a.k.a. Delacorta) What fun!  Not every book has to cause a furrowed brow. In the end, what this book (and the series) did for me was to say:  “This would be fun to write and “You could do this”— an inspiration I couldn’t resist. It was this series that caused me to write the now out-of-print, Eclipse of the Heart.

★ Clarence Darrow for the Defense, Irving Stone I was a strange little kid.  I didn’t have any real heroes until this book came along and I got to know something about Clarence Darrow.  A little later I discovered a second hero – Cassius Marcellus Clay (not the boxer, the abolitionist).  Both gained a significant amount of power and stature.  Both were deeply flawed, but both were willing to risk everything to pursue causes they believed in.

★ Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith  Much like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, we have an author who can create memorable characters and weave them into suspenseful tales relevant to our times. It’s education made compelling.  One learns or tries to learn from the masters. 

Film Pairing — The Lighter Side of Espionage

Espionage. What a rich source of mystery and intrigue. I remember reading and then watching The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré. There was the riveting Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. And of course, Ian Fleming’s James Bond. I read every book by Fleming and have seen nearly every film. The movies seemed to take on the character of the actors who played Bond. Sean Connery played Bond seriously, with the driest of humor. Roger Moore came at it a little more tongue in cheek — he was in on the joke — maybe adding a bit of wonderful British silliness. And Pierce Brosnan walked a line somewhere in between as the screenplays became more about special effects and were more preposterous. The new guy, Daniel Craig is great, perhaps bringing Bond more gravitas than Connery.

On the other hand, “preposterous” isn’t always a bad thing. In 1958, former real-life secret agent Graham Greene wrote Our Man in Havana, which poked fun at the inefficiencies of his country’s intelligence operation. In 1959, he wrote the screenplay, which was set not long before the fall of Fulgenico Batista’s Cuba and Fidel Castro’s successful takeover. The movie, in black and white, captures corrupt, pre-revolutionary Cuba and has an all-star cast — Alec Guinness, Noél Coward, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, Ralph Richardson, and Ernie Kovacs.

Guinness plays an unassuming character who sells vacuum cleaners for a living. He is in need of money to support his daughter, over whom he dotes, and is convinced to act as a spy for the British so she can have a first-class education. His spy mentor is an ineffectual, but stubborn dandy played by Coward. In order to meet his new employer’s expectations, the vacuum cleaner salesman finds it helpful to make up stories about threats to Britain to prove his worth, which in turn inflates his income. Seems harmless enough. But, of course, it isn’t.

The Tailor of Panama (2001) is based on a novel by John le Carré. The parallels between the novelists, the books — and the subsequent movies are strikingly similar, yet expected. John le Carré, who wrote the Tailor of Panama, made no secret that his novel was inspired (probably a little more than “inspired”) by Greene’s. Like Greene, he also co-wrote the screenplay for the film based on his own book. Also, like Greene, he spent part of his life as a secret agent (MI5). The movie, which changes the scenery slightly — though still in a hot, tropical climate — also changes the times. We move to the post Panama Canal turnover for this film, but the politics in the era of Manuel Noriega are still iffy. Obviously Western powers are interested in knowing what’s going on and are willing to pay dearly for information, however made-up it might be.

In this case a tailor is recruited to provide the local spying. Geoffrey Rush plays the Guinness role. Brosnan, who might have taken smugness to an entirely unparalleled level, gave a far more heavy-handed interpretation than Coward’s light and subtle (by comparison anyway) portrayal of corruption. Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Gleeson also star.

What these two comedies have in common, besides the Graham Greene novel as inspiration, is that its silly believability stems not so much from “it could happen,” to “how many times this sort of thing has happened.” The British and Americans have fumbled foreign affairs for centuries. The West has installed and removed dictators, supported and withdrawn support for insurgents and undertaken regime changes, invasions and denials. We have, in a way that mirrors the Greene tale, believed a local agent’s contention that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with a photo of an ice cream truck as proof. How many times have our (and our British cousins) interference made a mess of things? Chile anyone? Then there was that nice fellow, the Shah of Iran!

In the spirit of the two movies: Daiquiris all around! And I’ll begin the first draft of Our Good Humor Man in Bagdad.