Pre-Code Hollywood: Safe in Hell (1931)

Bloody hell.  Pre-code Hollywood movies have the reputation of putting it all out there, showing every possible facet of human emotion and interaction, with no censroship to speak of and a willingness to explore the seamier side of life.  And I've seen a lot of them, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer bleakness of  Safe in Hell.

The ending's obviously the bit people tend to comment on and it's true that it's about as dark as cinema every gets, like a black and white version of Lars von Trier's 21st century melodrama, Dancer in the Dark, but far more purposeless (in some ways).  But that's only the tip of the iceberg, and William Wellman (later to make the equally astonishing Public Enemy) makes sure that this is one movie which you won't leave bouyed by the essential goodness of the human spirit, for all that the heroine is driven throughout by the need to keep a vow made in church.

The plot's a simple enough one - girl loves boy but he sods off to sea; in his absence girl becomes a prostitute to survive; girl thinks she's killed a client (who she hates in any case); girl is smuggled by sailor-boy to the only Caribbean island with no extradition treaty with the USA.  You'll need to watch the movie to know how that last decision turns out (clue: not well).

The best thing about the film isn't the plot though, it's the cast of scumbags and ne'er-do-wells who inhabit the island's single hotel (where sailorboy goes and dumps her on her own - again!).  A south american general who struts like a slimy peacock and boats of the three presidents he's killed; a ship's captain who burned his ship for the insurance money, killing all the passengers and crew on board; a crooked lawyer and a lecherous thief (who at one point is cearly accused of being capable of having sex with a chicken - you really don;t get that sort of joke post-Hays Code!)  Worst of all though is Bruno, the island's executioner and warden of the jail.  Suffice to say that it's through the machinations of this sorry group that Dorothy Mackaill as Gilda ends up as she does, though there are some surprising returns to grace amongst the horrible supporting cast.

You'd know the director  is top-notch even if you didn't know it was Wellman incidentally.  Plus point go to him for allowing Clarence Muse and Nina Mae McKinney to talk like normal human beings instead of soft-shoe shuffle comedy black islanders, but its touches like the scene where every man turns his seat round to watch Gilda's bedroom door, then settles himself in place for the show, or Gilda and her sailor fiance whispering to one another with a crate in the way, which really mark this out as more than a run of the mill theatre filler.

I Have Been Reading...

I keep starting to write reviews and then something comes up, so I'm left with half a dozen terribly pithy sentences, or a small untidy pile of comments and references, but no actual review.  However, I do hate waste, so (after a quick bit of pushing and shoving into paragraphs), Little Reviews of Things.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder

The most subtle of allusions to Star Trek's Borg and Dr Who's Weeping Angels, plus Zenith, amongst others.  Hodder's writing reminds me of George Mann or Tim Powers, but his strengths are slightly different to them.  'Spring Heeled Jack' has the same sort of sprawling plot as Power's 'The Anubis Gates', but it's more inventive even than that most inventive of novels, and it has the same wonderful steampunk cleverness as Newbury and Hobbes but isn't quite so tightly plotted.  If Newbury and Hobbes are a steampunk Holmes and Watson, then Hodder's Burton and Swinburne are steampunk Avengers (and the bad guys they fight are nothing so much as the sort of motley unlikelies that Sexton Blake might have fought in the immediate post-Word War I period).

Hunting Evil - Guy Walters.

A thought provoking but ultimately flawed history of Nazi hunting, and - if it's all true, which I couldn't say - a crushing indictment of the level of Catholic Church involvement in helping the Nazis get to South America, in addition to being a bit of a hatchet job on Simon Weisenthal.  I'd feel more comfortable about the veracity of the whole thing though - in spite of the fulsome reviews it got from the likes of the author's mates at the Telegraph - if it didn't contains quite so many 'many people believe's and 'perhaps this explains' - the sort of weasel words so beloved of Wikipedia editors with a grudge, and historians with an agenda (said agenda being to defend the Americans and catigate Weisenthal). Riddled with implication and suggestion, far too many of his incidental arguments appear built on straw.  An opportunity missed.

Doctor Who: Dark Horizons - Jenny Colgan

Just lovely.  The modern incarnations of Dr Who work best for me in the absence of the pushy, shrill and uninteresting companions, and I'm fed up with stories set in America, Cardiff and London, so having a solo Eleventh Doctor landing in 12th century Scotland meant this book started off with an advantage or two.  Some gorgeous writing (look out for the fourth doctor cameo), properly rounded secondary characters and a genuine feeling for human interaction puts this head and shoulders above the other 'celeb' Dr Who books (even Michael Moorcock's!).  If only every Who book was like this!

Resurrection Engines - Scott Harrison (ed)

Great idea, well implimented.  Putting a steampunk spin on a dozen or so traditional fairy-tales is a more than decent basis for an anthology, and Scott Harrison does an exemplary job in keeping a tight rein on an excellent range of authors.  There's not a weak story in the collection, but particular highlights for me were Alison Littlewood's take on Silas Marner (a great choice for the opening story, with something of the feel of a Pixar cartoon, for some reason I can't put my finger on), Jim Mortimore's Robin Hood (which, like his 'Center of the Earth' story for Obverse Books, takes multiple Hoods and plays narrative games with them) and - most of all - Paul Magrs' cut up version of 'Wuthering Heights' which I read several times in a row, once out loud, just because the language is so delightful.

'A Big Hand for the Doctor' - Eoin Colfer

 If only the author had ever bothered to watch any Hartnell.  Or the editor had done any actual editing.  Or if anyone spent more than two minutes writing it.  "...his granddaughter, Susan, who was possibly the only person in the universe who could make the Doctor smile at the mere thought of her" - seriously, did nobody read this story before it was put on sale?

The Hound of the D'Urbevilles - Kim Newman 

 George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series casts the longest of shadows over Kim Newman's new novel, The Hound of the D'Urbevilles. It could hardly be otherwise, as Newman takes a secondary character from one of the great fictional achievements of the 19th century (and, incidentally, a character who appeared in two Flashman novels), and then drops him into the 'real' world.  Other attempts to do a Flashman have foundered before, with even the very best (Space Captain Smith, say) weak impersonations of the original.   So why does this succeed?

Newman neatly avoids the weight of Flashman by first off admitting in the Afterword that the weight is present.  More importantly, Newman can be as good a writer as Fraser and knows as much about the fictional 'heroes' of 19th century fiction as Fraser did about 19th century imperial history. The various Sherlock Holmes' (and others') stories into which Newman slides Moran and Moriarty are tweaked and massaged by the author until the two villains seem always to have been there, manipulating and effecting everything round them.

The Walking Dead Volume 1 - Robert Kirkman

If comics and graphic novels were a tv station in the UK, they'd be ITV or, more plausibly, one of those cable channels like DMAX full of unwatchable idiots doing dull things for other idiots to waste their time watching.  Tattoo parlours full of people drawing roses and skulls and thinking themselves artists, shouty people rebuilding trucks and other weird skinny guys making dinner out of roadkill.  There's really not a lot of quality control going on.

Comics are the same.  Ignoring superhero stuff for now, since that's an adolescent thing which you either get or don't, the pile of what for want of a better word I'll call indie comics (yeah, I know they're not as such, but as a tag it'll do) is of such a low quality level that releases which are, in fact, absolutely awful get praised as works of genius (this is not a reference to Alan Moore, btw - that's a genius being praised for being a genius).

Welcome to The Walking Dead.  Witless, dull, inconsistent, dull, stupid, lifeless and dull - teenage death fantasies leavened with a hint of teenage sex fantasies all wrapped up in a bow by a writer who can't write, doesn't do actual dialogue and has no idea about characterisation.

In fact, the closest this comes to genius is the fact that nothing says Frank Darabont is one so much as the fact he created a brilliant TV series out of this mouldy old pile of rubbish.

The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley (Orbit, 2011)

George Mann kindly gave me this book as a Christmas present, presumbaly drawn by the fact that (a) it sounds a bit creepy and other-worldly and (b) it's set in Edinburgh, my home town.  Whatever the reason I'm gad he did, because this is one of the more satisfying novels in every respect that I've read recently.

For a start, the author, Brian Ruckley, does a fabulous job of conjuring up Edinburgh in 1828, as George IV Bridge is being erected across the Cowgate and Burke and Hare are up to their infamous tricks in the West Port and Grassmarket.  It helps, obviously, that I've lived in Edinburgh all my life and did a degree in Scottish history, but even so, I've read similar books which did a far less impressive job of bringing Ye Olde Edinburgh to life.  From an ice covered Duddinston Loch to the opulence of the Assembly Rooms, Princes Street in the gloom of newly installed gas lights to the wynds and closes of Leith by the docks, the descriptive passages are wonderful, not least this description of the house of 17th century warlock and madman, Major Weir:

"It was colder in here than he had expected, like a cave.  That shawl draped around Agnes' head did not seem so redundant.  The walls, when his fingertips brushed them, were damp to the touch.  Hundreds of small webs were tucked into the edges of the celing.  The floor had a disquieting hint of softness to it, the layers of dirt giving beneath his feet.  Not a cave, not quite; a tomb.  Quire felt himself to be disturbing a place that had been asleep for a long time.'

Of course, description with no plot and no characters would be a fairly pointless exercise, but here again, the book doesn't fail to deliver.  The protagonist, Adam Quire, ex-soldier and current policeman, is sufficently well rounded to satisfy (though at times I was reminded of the slightly later, and genuine, Edinburgh policeman, James M'Levy - or at least the radio version of him) as are those Edinburgh folk working on the side of good and those for evil.  Actually, thinking about it, the novel has quite an extensive cast, but each is well drawn and distinct, with Agnes the Witch of Leith perhaps the most interesting, for me at least.

As for the story, the author says in the interview which closes the book that the basis for the book was a stray thought - what if Burke and Hare were stealing bodies for more than just anatomists like Robert Knox?  It's a nice if not startling idea, but Ruckley uses this relatively slight thread to create a rich tapestry which I enjoyed immensely.

The only minor comaplint?  When I went to the author's website to see if there were a sequel, there isn't.  With a bit of luck, Ruckley will remedy that fact soon.

Vince Cosmos, Glam Rock Detective (Bafflegab, February 2013)

I really glam rock, I really like the seventies, I really like Paul Magrs' writing, and I really like The Scarifyers, the audio series from Bafflegab (previously Comsic Hobo) - so it was a fairly safe bet that I was going to really like the new Paul Magrs' audio from Bafflegab, set in the seventies, and starring a glam rock detective (actually I also really liked Hippies starring Vince Cosmos himself, Julian Rhind-Tuitt so, y'know - further reasons to really like this).

Poppy Munday, Geordie lass relocated to London and one time co-ordinator of her local Vince Cosmos fanclub, gets involved with her idol and his cohort of friends, hangers-on and business acquaintances as they battle a possible alien invasion.  It's as though someone took Man About the House and dropped Ziggy-era David Bowie into it.  Which in most hands would be, at best, odd, but Magrs is the one author who can really pull off this sort of mash-up (as his Doctor Who audio, Phantom of Glam Rock, had already demonstrated), and this is an absolute triumph from beginning to end.

With the familiar voices of Katy Manning and David Benson being joined by Rhind-Tuitt as Vince and Lauren Kellegher (who is excellent throughout) as Poppy, the script sparkles and the production values are pretty bloody impressive.  The songs Cosmos sings are suitably Ziggy, the in-jokes come thick and fast, and everyone involved is obviously having a blast.  Little touches, like the cover which mirrors a seventies album, are the icing on the cake - but the cherry on the icing on the cake is the 'Special Price' sticker which, for those of us of a certain age, brings a built-in shiver to the spine.

On every level this is a wonderful thing - pre-order it now and make sure this turns into an ongoing series...


http://www.bafflegab.co.uk/detail-cosmos.asp

Our First Annual!

Obverse Books just released its first ever Annual!  With a crossword, comic strip, short stories, a board game and even cut out standees!

Written by George Mann and illustrated throughout by Mark Manley, the Annual is dedicated to Sir Maurice Mewbury and Miss Victoria Hobbes, along with their colleagues Sir Charles Bainbridge and Professor Angelchrist (fresh from the pages of Doctor Who!).  Hopefully this'll be the first Obverse Annual (an Iris one next yeat, maybe?) - there are only 100 copies and they're selling like proverbial hotcakes...

http://obversebooks.co.uk/product/newburyannual2013/

Great Albums 37: The Golden Age of Wireless (Thomas Dolby, 1982)

It's another eighties album.  For a man best known for the borderline novelty hits 'Hyperactive!' and 'She Blinded me with Science' (with ace specky boffin, Dr Magnus Pike), this is a downbeat, lyrcally dense collection of songs (as, to be fair, was the next LP from Dolby, 'The Flat Earth', which I could just as easily have included).  Not that you'd know that from the music, which at times is as 80s synthtastic as anything from ABC.   It doesn't even start that well.  'Flying North' has some decent lyrics (Down with the landing gear/Up goes the useless prayer) but the backing track has a painfully intrusive pre-programmed drum and flaring synths, while the second track 'Commercial Breakup' is the weakest on the album.  It's only with the third track, which starts with (presumably lectronic) choir and big, slow chord changes, that everything comes right.  A soft vocal, trailing piano lines and an excellent bassline high in the mix, and we're off an running.  The chorus pushes things up an octave or two very effectively, then drops back into the soft stuff again.  It's effective stuff as is the next track up 'Europa and the Pirate Twins', whose faster sound and narrative lyric provides a nice buffer between 'Weightless' and the beautiful 'Windpower'.

Incidentally, I just realised that all of this is only true of the cd version I'm currently listening to.  The vinyl original would be the 1983 re-issue from Venice in Peril Records, which missed out the frankly rubbish 'The Wreck of The Fairchild', resequences several tracks and includes the by-then hit single, 'She Blinded me with Science'.  Looking at the track listing for that album, with the stand-out tracks 'Radio Silence', 'Airwaves' and 'Weioghtless' on side one and the equally good 'One of our Submarines is missing' and, especially, 'Clouburst at Shingle Street' split over two sides, I think I prefered that sequence to this.  That's one of the drawbacks of cds - of excessive storage devices in geenral, actually.  The original LP ended with the apparent positivity of 'Shingle Street' ('Come out of your shell/and look at the sea') mutating unexpectedly into something else entirely ('now there's only you') whereas the cd trails off in live tracks and b-sides, filling space that doesn't need filled.

Dolby with Bowie doing 'heroes' at Live Aid (it's nothing to do with this album but makes me so happy)

The Hartnell Years - things which occur to me...

So that's the Hartnell Years done.  Starting way back two months ago with a policeman in the fog (played by Reg Cranfield, fact fans), I watched the Doctor collapse on the floor of the TARDIS last night and morph into someone else entirely. And now I feel strangely but genuinely bereft, as though my beloved Grandfather has run away and my granny re-married a little mop-haired git, who tries too hard to be pals.

But I suppose, glass half full and all that.  I've never watched the series in order from the start before, and viewed this way Hartnell - already my joint-favourite Doctor - has been elevated to a position from which he can just about see previous fellow front-runner Jon Pertwee with a telescope, light years behind.  I've watched the three and a bit Hartnell seasons in a variety of formats - straight audio from 'Marco Polo', Loose Cannon recons for the likes of Myth Makers and Reign of Terror, damn clever animated photos for Mission to the Unknown, really bad animation for The Crusades - and a mix of dvd and vhs rips for the rest.  Plus reading all the Hartnell short stories in the annuals and Short Trips collections.  It's quite a lot to experience, but barely a moment dragged and the vast majority was, frankly and without hyperbole, wonderful.

Ian and Barbara's astonishing, touching, beautiful, touching love affair is the absolute highlight, moving from friendship as Ian wanders unannounced into Babs' classroom in 'An Unearthly Child', through open affection and the sort of loving bickering which all real couples do, all the way to the post-coital scenes in The Romans parts 1 and 4 ('The Slave Traders' and 'Inferno' episodes of Serial M for purists). It's brilliantly done over an extended period, helped enormously by two actors who are, in my opinion, as good as the series has ever been lucky enough to have in all its 50 year history.  But even taking away the touching romance (and who could doubt they end up together after seeing that montage at the end of 'The Chase'?) these are two genuine characters in a way which the series later abandoned altogether (compare Ian to Ace - a character who sounds, looks and acts utterly unlike any real person of the same age, but who was lauded by fans in the 80s as a return to proper characterisation).  They learn and grow over the course of their travels and so do we, the viewers - not just by learning about Cathay and the reign of terror and the like, but also about the way the show changes format and outlook.  What started off as effectively a hostile kidnap, mellows into friendship and respect, and the series reflects this change, becoming less about trying to get back to Earth and more about experiencing the universe, less about staying out of danger and moving on quickly and more about seeking out people in need of help.

Ian and Barbara could have set the tone and established the  template for all companions to come, but unfortunately - possibly simply because Carole Ann Ford left first and so was replaced like-for-like first - writers chose to use Susan, sadly played by a far less able actor, as the ideal companion instead.  And for all that she's the alien, not Ian and Barbara, she's far more generically written than they - a screamer and a crier, prone to falling over and giving up the ghost, whiny and moany and a bit of a pin in the arse a lot of the time.  At least the producers also kept elements of the Susan of the first episode or of The Aztecs, refusing to marry some stranger; the best we can hope for for quite some time to come is that along with companion as screamer we also get companion as fighter.  Even then there's a gradual but noticeable growing preference for the Screamer over the Fighter which isn't overcome until the appearance of Zoe in 'The Wheel in Space' - Vicki to Dodo to Polly to Victoria is a descent from feisty to frightened, and even Zoe is a prototype for a better assistant in Liz Shaw.

If Carole-Anne Ford is patchy, and William Russell and Jackie Hill brilliant, Hartnell is, at times, awesome.  Years of character acting had given Hartnell exactly the skill set required for Dr Who, and a love of the character and the affection he engendered in the audience, meant that the actor puts everything he has into the role with, at times, quite wonderful results.  Look at the suspicious and dangerous Doctor of the first serial - not when he thinks about bashing a fallen enemy's brains in, since that seems reasonably sensible in the circumstances, but in the way he calculates that kidnapping Ian and Barbara is the best thing for him, and then does it.  That he then selfishly risks their lives in The Daleks is no surprise, but the change over the next few years is - this is the only Doctor in the classic series who actually changes (leaving aside the change in Colin Baker's Doctor from vicious psycho to good friend, a move so ineptly handled that I'm still not looking forward to reaching season 22) and the only Doctor in the entire series who changes in an interesting way (Tennant's descent into being a selfish shit being so dull that I may pay someone to drag themselves through his final year on my behalf).  By the time Susan leaves he's capable of the most touching moments and of putting someone else's interests first, and losing Ian and Babs, and his initial angry reaction, is played perfectly.  He's a wonder all round and the fan myth that he was past it by the end of his tenure is arrant nonsense, as anyone who watches 'The Tenth Planet' can see.

There are so many little moments which I could highlight as my favourite that it could soon grow tedious, so here's a selection:

•  Hartnell inside a Dalek saying 'I am the Master' in 'The Space Museum'
• Ian's coughing fit just before the revelation that the water is poisonous in The Sensorites, which I assumed was a mistake which the actors has ad-libbed around.
• That montage at the end of 'The Chase'
• Hartnell's hat in 'Reign of Terror'
• The Sensorite at the window of the ship, floating in space
• The design of the Robomen in 'Dalek Invasion of Earth' - so much better than the leather clad clones in the movie version
• That Barbara was wrong in The Aztecs and because of that the Doctor loses and John Ringway's character wins.
• Not shying away from the horror of Viking invasion in The Time Meddler
• The delegates in Dalek Master Plan
• Hartnell facing down a War Machine.
• The wit of 'The Myth Makers', 'The Romans' and 'The Gunfighters' - Doctor Who can be broad comedy as well as all the other things it can be.
• That everyone, including Peter Haining, was wrong about Galaxy 4 and The Gunfighters - both great.
• The Cybermen in The Tenth Planet - still the creepiest aliens in Doctor Who history.
• Every mention of 'Doctor Who', but particularly episode title 'The Death of Doctor Who' - that's his name and I much prefer it being used as a name than being some dull and asinine arc for Steven Moffat.

I'll shut up now though because I can think of something brilliant in every Hartnell story - even my least favourite, The Web Planet, where the design is fantastic, at least, and the Carcinome being a space hairdryer is inspired - anyway, I have Troughton to watch now....