TIM MILLER’s latest book of poetry, Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, was just published by S4N Books. His poetry has appeared in Crannóg, Southword, Londongrip, Forgotten Ground Regained, and others across the US and UK. He is online at wordandsilence.com and can be heard on the poetry podcast Human Voices Wake Us.
London, 1943
She grew plants in her room all through the war,
she moved her books into the sitting room
and surrounded herself with plants that shook
during the Blitz as they climbed their trellises,
shook in their pots or smoothed themselves between
her fingers on nights when she wrote to him,
fingering philodendron after each
sentence and sometimes the entire night,
when there was nothing or too much to say.
She wrote about slicing matches in half
to conserve them, and the bombed cricket pitch,
of running out of cooking fat and eggs
and how proud she was of her dirty hands
and the days she spent at the factory.
She promised him that when the war was done
she would wrap herself in his overcoat,
the coat that was the war to him, the coat
that carried him across the continent.
She knew that if she found some real silk hose
it would drive him mad, that and a midnight blue
Rayon dress – but to touch his olive coat,
belted behind, and tug at his loose tie,
wide and patterned beneath his graying beard –
that would mean the end of the war for her.
Their letters to each other ended with
the same verses from Billie Holiday’s
“Solitude,” and if one of them was killed
they promised to hide in each instrument –
buried in the bass and in Billie’s voice,
buried in the trumpet and piano –
for the other to find and listen to.
But somehow she knew they would both survive
to dance to that song together, surrounded
in this room by her wide leaves, the full moon
no longer a danger and his body
gone so long from her life – and now just there.
So she also knew that by then the song
wouldn’t be about them anymore but
all the war dead they hadn’t acknowledged,
all buried in the inflection of the
tenor saxophone, and the soft mercy
in the drums, finally mercy and rest,
the kind of rest neither of them would know
until the memory of an old song
made them wonder what it was all about,
they had been so busy living again.
Shtetl, 1803
This siddur is for travelers, it’s tiny,
and I still use it when I return home
since even there I am passing through.
I carry this book the same way I bring
bread – by horseback, train, or on the river –
I lug around these crumbs with my warm book
and after a morning selling hand mills
and tableware, boots and chess sets and combs,
I find a corner table in Frankfurt,
I find a window wherever I am,
and that’s my only chance to pray. I can’t
bow or sing or gesture in such a place,
but I do read and I do sway slightly,
and since I was made to leave yeshiva
it must be enough. It’s not where I rest
but it’s when I can stop, still unsettled,
and I have this siddur, I have my bread.
In the morning, people buy what I have,
or they don’t – silks, shoelaces, paper, scarves –
and then I steal some minutes in Breslau,
steal the vivid and true habits of life
in Warsaw or Brody, bits of regret
wrestled away and handed over to
bread and prayer and companionless silence,
thick bread and a thick book carried for miles,
the only order I can hope to keep.
Notes to ‘Shetl 1803’
Shtetl: Yiddish for a market town in Eastern Europe
Siddur: A Jewish prayerbook
Yeshiva: While this a general term for a Jewish school, in the context of the poem (Eastern Europe, late 18th/early 19th century), it refers specifically to those schools started by members of Hasidism, itself a new (and beleaguered) movement within Judaism at the time
Cleveland, 1988
I remember him in his Celtics coat,
one of the other dads at Saturday
morning basketball games. I seem to see
him in the hall near the gymnasium,
back by the kitchen where the old women
sold popcorn and soda and snacks, or with
the crowd around the court – parents, siblings,
or the look of new kids from across town
that often came with the visiting team.
He was tall and he always wore that green coat,
and he looked so much like Kevin McHale –
that’s the name I want to use now – and if
you wanted you could follow his green shape
all the way from the snowy entrance off
the parking lot, past the ticket-taker,
around the court of maybe a hundred
adults and kids all gathered for the squeals
of sneakers on the floor, the ref’s whistle
and the drama of what mattered so much:
grade school, late eighties, Saturday morning.
The more I write about him in this way
the more I seem to see him as a ghost,
and it was only twenty years later
that I heard he was a narcotics cop,
that he’d been under investigation
and had shot himself in front of the chief.
I instantly remembered those mornings
and wondered if anyone else did, too,
his shape heavy and loitering in our
memories like the restless dead, regret
somewhere back there, some decision the snow
or hallways or hunched walk of a tall man
gave no hint of. Was guilt on his shoulders
even then? I don’t know, I was caught up
playing myself, and never very good,
proud of my first pair of Nikes and the
scuff marks, like this ink, that they left behind.
TIM MILLER’s latest book of poetry, Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, was just published by S4N Books. His poetry has appeared in Crannóg, Southword, Londongrip, Forgotten Ground Regained, and others across the US and UK. He is online at wordandsilence.com and can be heard on the poetry podcast Human Voices Wake Us.
1863 book fore-edge painting of Pope’s Villa at Twickenham
The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels
Hester Grant, London: William Collins, 2026, hb., 336pps., £25
DEREK TURNER reads about an extraordinarily productive summer
Early in the eighteenth century, the Middlesex village of Twickenham began to be noticed by Londoners wearying of the metropolis, drawn by the attractiveness of its Thames-side setting. One admirer was Alexander Pope, a poet of waspish reputation and socially problematic Catholic background, who in 1720 built a riverside villa in the latest Palladian style on a five-acre plot set between a malthouse and a tanner’s yard.
Pope was widely considered England’s preeminent poet, thanks to works like Essay on Criticism (1711), from which we get the phrases “A little learning is a dang’rous thing” and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. He had also written The Rape of the Lock (1712), a mock-epic about the cutting of a hank of hair belonging to a society beauty, and Windsor Forest (1712/3), a lyrical example of loco-descriptive poetry. He had translated the Iliad, and knew Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and William Wycherley.
He was friends, too, with Jonathan Swift and John Gay – and between May and August 1726 played host to both at his house in what was then commonly called ‘Twitnam’, at a pivotal time in all three men’s creative lives. The works associated with that season have ever since been regarded as among the brightest ornaments of English letters.
Pope had known Swift since Windsor Forest, which as well as evoking that history-haunted tract, was also a commentary on contemporary politics. Pope’s poem was adopted by the Tories as useful agitprop, and the poet annexed by Swift, twenty-one years older, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and a highly effective veteran of political pamphleteering at an especially turbulent time. Dichotomies and discontents left over from the Civil Wars had found new expressions in vitriolic battles between Whigs – mostly Dissenters, anti-Stuart, and allied to mercantilism and finance – and Tories – mostly Anglicans, pro-Stuart, and associated with the landed gentry – with all the writers of the age enthusiastically taking sides.
Swift was famous for Tale of a Tub (1704), a satire on denominational disagreements between Christians, and the clash of old and new learning, and the Bickerstaff Papers (1708-9), a still funny extended lampoon of the Whig astrologer-propagandist John Partridge. After the Whigs took power in 1715, and began purging Tories at all levels, Swift’s writings waxed increasingly incandescent, sometimes forcing changes in government policy, infuriating Prime Minister Robert Walpole.
Walpole’s period of political dominance, between 1721 and 1742 – nicknamed the ‘Robinocracy’ – was notorious for its corruption and partisanship, and the generally unwanted extension of state power through patronage and preferment. Swift took courageous stances against such practices, frequently risking his liberty, and became a folk hero in Ireland, his writings uniquely able to unite Catholics and Presbyterians against exploitative London policies. Swift was held in such awe in Ireland that on one occasion he was able to disperse a crowd which had assembled to watch an eclipse by telling them it had been put off on his orders. Ironically, Swift saw himself as English, and didn’t much approve of the Irish, but any reservations about his adopted country were outweighed by his desire for social stability, and moral outrage at abuses by the rich and powerful.
Swift brought to Twickenham the militantly ironic manuscript which would make him immortal – Travels into several remote Nations of the World. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver’s Travels is one of the great books of the eighteenth, or any, century – a masterpiece of surreal invention and sustained invective which gave the language ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘Yahoo’, and held up the perfect Houyhnhnms to shame humans into better behaviour. Its exposure of cant, folly, gullibility and human weakness is still resonant; Gulliver is, wrote Morris Golden in his 1972 study The Self Observed, “more painfully ourselves than any other creation of his century.” Swift made his last tweaks during his time at Twickenham, and on the 8th of August packed it off to the printer, and posterity.
Almost as sensational in their day, if perhaps less read now, were Pope’s Dunciad (1728) and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (first staged in 1728), both influenced by Gulliver and prodded into being by Gulliver’s author. Swift reputedly snatched a first sketch of the Dunciad out of the fire into which Pope had cast it. Years before, he had given Gay an idea for a “Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves”, and now made Gay bring it forward.
Pope penned the Dunciad to poke fun at bad or sycophantic writers, some of whom had recklessly assailed him in print, ironically giving them a more lasting fame than they would ever have attained otherwise. The poem’s portentous closing lines are still cited – “Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d; / Light dies before thy uncreating word: / Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All” – but no stylistic fineness can conceal the essential redundancy of his squibs against such ignes minores as his former publisher Barnaby Lintot, and the malignant Irish cleric-poetaster Jonathan Smedley. The only target who could be called well known is the dramatist Colley Cibber, who in 1730 became one of the least distinguished versifiers ever to occupy the post of Poet Laureate. The Dunciad nevertheless contributed greatly to contemporary Whig discomfiture, and Pope’s then and future fame.
Gay had written unusually empathetic poetic conjurations of rural life, and finally following up on Swift’s old idea, completed his musical play TheBeggar’s Opera, which introduced the characters of Polly Peachum and her highwayman beau Captain Macheath to enthralled London playgoers. Gay supposedly made £800 from the play, leading to a joke that it had made Gay rich, and Rich (the surname of the producer) gay. The strength of the satire is evident from the outset, the first song sung by Polly’s father, a receiver of stolen goods and underworld informer, which runs in part “The Priest calls the Lawyer a Cheat, / The Lawyer be-knaves the Divine: / And the Statesman, because he’s so great, / Thinks his Trade as honest as mine.” Delighted-scandalised audiences saw shades of Walpole in Mr Peachum, Macheath and a gang-member, “Bob Booty”.
Gay’s spin-off, Polly, was accordingly banned by the Lord Chamberlain, which naturally excited frenetic interest. The Duchess of Marlborough paid £100 for a copy, and the Duchess of Queensberry was banished from court for soliciting money for Gay within the precincts of the Palace. The Opera had become a powerful weapon in the Tories’ intellectual armoury. It is ironic to recall that Gay’s most famous modern emulator was the Marxist playwright, Berthold Brecht.
The conversations of that summer must have been as sparkling as the Thames, and they were occasionally joined by guests like William Congreve, the politician-philosopher Henry St. John (1st Viscount Bolingbroke), and the polymathic physician Dr John Arbuthnot, who invented the bluff English archetype, ‘John Bull’. As well as agreeing in morals and tastes, the three were also united in bachelorhood. Gay’s innate indolence appears to have extended to his relations with the opposite sex. Swift was platonically devoted to two women – Esther Vanhomrigh (“Vanessa”) and Esther Johnson (“Stella”) – whose correspondence with him reveals the literary lion’s private humanity and humour. The unluckily diminutive and deformed Pope – he was 1.3 metres tall, and suffered from Pott’s disease, which twisted his spine and gave bladder and bowel problems, joint pains, headaches and eye inflammation – seems to have been celibate much against his will.
Hester Grant conjures this dazzling company deftly, memorably conveying the flavour and likely routines of that sunlit season, as the trio conversed, read or wrote, wandered in the celebrated gardens, or sat in the shell- and mirror-encrusted grotto called the Nymphæum in search of shade and classical inspiration. She also offers excellently observed wider vistas of these extraordinary artists in full, the politics and literature of their period, and a capital city full of corruption and disquiet, but also abounding creativity and vitality, where wits traded brilliant insults and speculative builders raised elegant edifices above stinking streets.
That London is lost, and Pope’s villa has gone, with just the Nymphæum to mark where once a great poet walked with great friends, and all imagined a world less unclean. Three hundred years on from that remarkable meeting of minds, this is a poignant portrait of an England that once was, or maybe could have been – and a satisfying reminder of the power and possibilities of literature.
This review first appeared in Engelsberg Ideas, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
PAUL J. PASTOR is an Executive Editor for Nelson Books, a widely-published poet, and the winner of the 2025 J.F. Powers Prize in Fiction. He is the author of several books, most recently TheLocust Years: Poems and The Crystal Hand: Poems. He lives in Oregon.
PAUL J. PASTOR is an Executive Editor for Nelson Books, a widely-published poet, and the winner of the 2025 J.F. Powers Prize in Fiction. He is the author of several books, most recently The Locust Years: Poems and The Crystal Hand: Poem. He lives in Oregon.
Many years ago, when I was a bit younger[i] than the boy, Willie, who trespasses in the marshy woods at 00:17:14[ii] in X the Unknown (1956) and at 00:18:45 meets the (unseen to us) monster (that’s what comes of playing outside when you should be in bed!), the old Welsh Headmaster (who doubled as maths teacher at the local council school), accused me (again) of being “BORN AWK-ARD”. Whether I was questioning the relevance of maths beyond basic shopping calculations, deliberately misunderstanding some unappealing formulaor persisting with wanting to know why X meant whatever, his strong adherance to Chapel teachings, cautions of hellfire and damnation and his hieratic manner of speech, undoubtedly magnified his allegation. At some level, I knew he was right. But whether awkwardness arises from nature or nurture . . . remains, like X, not quite knowable.
Perhaps because the older guard of teachers at Elmhurst Junior had pre-war roots and elements of a military attitude residual in the base of their skulls, it is easy to connect the geiger-counter training that opens X the Unknown (its army personel divided into bigwigs and disposable rabble – or officers and ranks, if you prefer) with the partly black and white school world of the late 1960s. But this world was definitely in transition, and it seems obvious now that the aging headmaster’s awareness of the upcoming generation of teachers (relatively approachable[iii] and dyed by more colourful, Education Through Art[iv] attitudes) pushed him to an obdurateness as long-standing as I now like to believe my awkwardness was whimsical. His frequent, rising claim in school assemblies that God could see us everywhere, might have amused the younger staff, but it angered me. To see this supposed creator as a voyeur or master spy (or in today’s terms, a kind of disembodied CCTV system) was not encouraging. In combination with my natural “awk-ardness”, the Headmaster’s ire (no doubt also triggered by his distrust of late 60s values) only made me come to view his God (or any god) as a kind of Orwellian Big Brother. By extension, as time went on and other would-be authority figures (clothed in seemingly harmless, wishy-washy cardigans or behind pipes[v] or toothy grins[vi]), took to the stage, I came to view not just politicians but the majority of science and technology, in fact, the entire “white heat of this scientific revolution”[vii] as (predominantly, but not exclusively) part of the paternalistic control system driving society (with plenty of heat but not much light) largely in the wrong direction.
00:25:23 – the devastation of several MeccanoTM sets . . .
Sure enough, in X the Unknown, poor Willie dies of radiation burns, and soon afterwards, his grieving father makes the clear and generally valid distinction (00:31:20): “You’re a Scientist not a Doctor. You don’t care for the sick, you meddle with things that kill . . . letting off bombs you can’t control. You’re not safe! You’re a murderer!” After being subjected to this understandable rant, Dr Adam Royston, (Dean Jagger) walking dejectedly away down a corridor, at 00:31:20 reflects lamely to Inspector McGill (Leo McKern) : “we all try to create not destroy”.
In X the Unknown, Jagger’s character seems a friendly, mild figure, absent-minded in the way professors are often stereotypically humanised. Unfortunately, in reality, whenever science discovers something that can be exploited for war or profit, scientists tend to get pushed aside, their work misrepresented, twisted or ransacked. Alternatively, as the common trope of fiction would have it, they become ambitious or power-crazed.
By contrast, in X the Unknown, Dean Jagger’s Dr Adam Royston, is very sympathetic and shows no sign of megalomania. Since Jagger was also considered amenable in person, it came as a surprise to discover that he held virulently McCarthyite, anti-communist opinions and became adamant that Losey[viii], (who under his blacklist alias of Joseph Walton had begun the pre-production and initial shooting), should be replaced. To cover the later, highly acclaimed[ix], director’s departure, poor health was blamed[x]. He was replaced by a reluctant Leslie Norman[xi].
Post-war idealism may have camouflaged the hubristic dead-end of nuclear power in optimistic science-fiction shapes and colours[xii], offering naïve or deceitful sentiments[xiii] and never-to-be-achieved economic benefits[xiv], yet underlyingly, all the monsters remain, boiling away deep underground – as turns out to be literally the case depicted in X the Unknown. In an internet post about the film from October 2023[xv], Colin McGuigan notes: “While I wouldn’t quite categorize it as an early Eco-thriller, it does raise questions about our symbiotic relationship with the planet itself.”
Considered “vulgar and shocking”[xvi] on its release in 1956, I didn’t remember X the Unknown as a exceptional film, but it was a memorable one, one which tapped into an almost universal distrust of rampant science and technology: science as a kind of witchcraft or Pandora’s Box; science which cannot control the forces it releases. Sadly, applied to nuclear power and weapons, and now more insidiously in the fields of mobile devices, the internet and A.I., this theme of toys or tools out of control, is obviously becoming the massive writing on the wall for all of us. Writing which it seems society is too unimaginative to notice or consider and too exhausted to heed.
In the other ‘X’ film I well-remember, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, (1963), Doctor Xavier (Ray Milland – whose salary justifiably consumed much of the budget) is irritated that the human eye can see only 10% of the light spectrum[xvii]. Determined to force more from the retina or brain, before long, a lab monkey is sacrificed – Xavier’s miracle compound dripped into the poor creature’s eyes. What does he really want to see? Next, Xavier is, more fairly, experimenting on himself . . . but why not stick to one eye? – then perhaps he might have had the ‘best’ of both worlds?
Extremely effective as both an attack on (un)scientific meddling and a parable about hubris[xviii], in prismatic Spectorama[xix], X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, fractionally anticipated psychedelia and the wider use of LSD. While some of its attitudes have dated, it begins with serious (if absurd) intent, before inevitably lapsing into mild exploitation and action, but returns to a once-shocking denouement in a desert preacher’s tent. Here, rather than staggering up to confess his sins, Xavier says: “I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness . . . a light that glows, changes . . . and in the centre of the universe . . . the eye that sees us all.”So, after reminding us perhaps of that voyeur God, in an emotionally ecstatic U.S. version of my old Welsh headmaster, the preacher paraphrases Matthew 5:29: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” Dr Xavier does just that, the image freezing on his black empty sockets[xx].
In contrast to Zabriskie Point (1970)[xxi]asthere may be less to say about these two relatively conventional films, am I persisting out of “awk-ardness”? A friend joked that my fervour for digression will eventually lead me to write something less than a page long accompanied by a encylopedia of references and notes . . . which is an interesting challenge. But escalating attention (obsession?) detail (pedantry?) and subtlety (obscurity or whimsicality?) through notes, forking or parallel pathways, is hardly new. Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is an indelible monument to a fascinating and complex addiction . . . while in the not-quite-opposite Beckettian[xxii] world of saying a lot about very little, arises perhaps, Don DeLillo’s novella, Point Omega, (2010) in which a character at the beginning and end is obsessed by Douglas Gordon’s real art installation entitled 24 Hour Psycho[xxiii]. Showing at the Museum of Modern art in New York during the summer of 2006, Hitchcock’s notorious film was slowed down to play once every 24hours. Appropriation or homage? Valid conceptual generator of attention, or gimmick?
Even if the supposedly Scottish wasteland[xxiv] adjoining the Atomic Energy Establishment of Lochmouth or the gaping fissure of X The Unknown, would make excellent settings for Waiting for Godot, it seems unlikely that the 1956 film could be mistaken for anything either as potentially complex or inspiring as Moby Dick or as potentially gimmicky as 24 Hour Psycho. But wait! Maybe it could help humanity on an altogether different level? Think of the synopsis! An older lifeforce bursts from the centre of the Earth in the form of a growing, glowing radioactive porridge, to eat particularly anything radioactive. Come back heartless lava – all is forgiven! – save those living on the earth’s crust from their nuclear dead-end nightmare . . . revive our naïve post-war scientist-hero fantasies worthy of cutaways, children’s cereal-boxes and sci-fi annuals . . .
The imaginary Atomic Energy Establishment of Lochmouth at 00:07:20
Close imaginative or speculative observation, observation straining or stretching consciousnessness or attention in the manner of ‘slow cinema’[xxv] (or such as could be stimulated by, for example, the process of watching Psycho slowed to run once every 24 hours), perhaps replicates in essence the hopeful idea behind the opening stanza of Blake’s Auguries of Innoncence[xxvi]: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.”
Blake’s lines may seem purely hypothetical to those who live within the claustrophobic confines of our technocracked, supposedly rational society, or within the accepted codes or fantasies of ‘progress’. But to anyone open to the fuller world – anyone who doesn’t have Doctor Xavier’s expectant demands – such transcendent escalation often occurs quite naturally. Even the artist Graham Sutherland’s less exacting echoes of Blake, seeing landscapes in miniature on a Pembrokeshire beach, can have an almost visionary effect on those not used to regularly thinking in such a way.
Going back to the idea of artists falling from art’s vital tightrope into formula and gimmick, more than a few ‘successful’ artists have founded lucrative careers upon stunts and repetition – I won’t name names – but this complacence, despite a concomitant facility which inevitably grows over the years, is not worthy of respect once detached from some wider or deeper quest. Although it may be unfashionable to say that art, music, writing, film and so on should be about enlightenment, I will say it anyway.
X the Unknown is an effective black and white entertainment, but apart from considering fears of the time, does it have any aspects of enlightenment about it? Unease even dread, fills many of its frames. Elemental mystery evoked in ways which we may be used to but remain unsettling: the misty woods and fear through a child’s eyes. Hammer’s usual paranoid music, insidious, unearthly, is always likewise always potent. It scratches at the nuclear trick in a way that is wholly justified, since the essence of nuclear research was always about destruction. The idea of free power (ha ha) only stemmed from the loop of annihilation it still freely offers.
Windscale in 1956, the year X the Unknown was released and a year before the disastrous fire[xxvii]
Lochmouth may be imaginary but Windscale unfortunately was not, and the fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in UK history. On the International Nuclear Event Scale, it remains one of the worst in the world, in severity ranked at level 5 out of 7. That is when the whole nuclear fantasy should have been terminated.
Despite undercurrents of dissent, X the Unknown probably had little choice but to show the scientists, ultimately, as heroes, leaving the military personel, managers and ministry men to smoulder the torch of that beloved film type, the stock idiot. One officer, comments at 00:48:08, that the “trouble with some of these scientific types is that they can’t see the easy way out of anything. It’s got to be complicated if it’s going to work.” The classic military way of course, is to blast and raze the fissure with high explosves and flame-thowers and then concrete it all up! Leslie Banks as Colonel Holland in Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (1949) might have been a blimpish caricature intended partly humorously, but underlyingly he was both shrewd and honest.
Predictably, Spider (Anthony Newley), Haggis (Ian MacNaughton) and Private Lansing (Marty Hopkirk of the white suit/Kenneth Cope) all become victims to the as yet unseen monster from the centre of the earth. By his petulant comments and irritation at being bypassed as boss of his “nuclear pile”, manager John Elliott (Edward Chapman) seems, at 00:42:50, to be the next victim in line . . . but miraculously survives, shortly to become the recurring martinet, Mr Grimsdale or equivalent, in five Norman Wisdom comedies[xxviii].
Learning of the approach of the radioactive sludge intent on scoffing the energy source at the dubious establishment, the cast and crew are all frantic to get the cobalt pile, a great big block, presumably radioactive, loaded onto an open flatbed truck. No precautions taken. Radioactivity is fine. Just keep a little distance and brush your hands off. Meanwhile for some baffling reason all the village flock are herded into the church by their vicar – as if the monotonous mass which can melt through solid blocks of lead is going to be put off by a couple of oaken doors or the animosity of a voyeur God who sees eveything. Naturally, a small girl child is left outside and soon runs chuckling and friendly towards the sparkling bread dough pouring over the churchyard wall. Rescued in the nick of time by the vicar, she seems unharmed despite her proximity.
Soon though, the expanding dough is heading towards the “experimental nuclear station”. Darn things are all over the place – even now. Costly misdirections still cooking 70 years later – I chanced upon one back in June just north east of Preston[xxix]. This blot on the landscape one has been “making nuclear fuels since the mid-1940s. The site is notable for being the first nuclear plant in the world to produce Magnox fuel for a commercial power station”.[xxx]
Springfields nuclear fuel production installation, Salwick, Preston, 26th June 2026
The final section of X the Unknown, involes lots of moving about of vehicles and unspecified equipment to recreate Dr. Royston’s unpredictable MeccanoTM experiment. As with the recent epic blockbuster Project Hail Mary (2026), the need for urgency vaults every hurdle, and Wallace and Gromit save the day. Or have they? “You should be proud. It has worked” X says to Y, before another unexpected explosion follows. Royston/Jagger looks baffled and the camera backtracks, implying space for a sequel.
In the excellent 2003 commentary recorded by Marcus Hearn and Jimmy Sangster (1927-2011), Sangster says that the anti-nuclear aspects were accidental, or rather that they were exploiting a common fear of the time. Meanwhile, at the BBFC or censorship office, John Trevelyan was reportedly concerned about X the Unknown’s “dangerous cocktail of sex and horror”. The tryst between radiographer and nurse in the Radiation Room could be seen as an example of this – their potential lust swiftly curtailed by the unsentimental monster at 00:34:00. I’m not sure why the victims of the monster don’t simply run away, like Willie does at the beginning, not that it did him any good. It might be difficult in confined spaces such as the Radiation Room, but some of the soldiers seem inordinately stupid, repeatedly firing their guns into what must have appeared to them as a kind of lava. Primary producer for Hammer, Anthony Hines, told the censorship board that the monster wouldn’t look as nasty as the script described, since they were intending to represent it with “chocolate mousse”.
One censor complained that X the Unknown was “scientific hokum and sadism in equal parts; a wretched exploitation of the X certificate”. The script was also described as “the work of an insane but precocious schoolboy!” which writer, Jimmy Sangster, on the commentary, doesn’t seem to mind at all for what he calls his “B and a half movie”. The fairly low budget is illustrated when Dr Royston visits a local church to question Willie’s schoolfriend about what they were doing on the night Willie received his radiation burns. To set the scene, the establishing shot used (below) was taken from Whisky Galore! (1949)[xxxi].
“X the Unknown” wrote Monthly Film Bulletin: “intriguingly suggests a new addition to the science fiction repertoire of Things, but after a series of prolonged climaxes, with its potential victims staring directly into the camera and shaking with fright, the ‘Unknown’ finally emerges as a type of rolling rubber mattress, disappointingly unhorrific in content and appearance.”
* * * * * * *
Perhaps it is only fitting in the days of obvious climate change, of psychopathic omnicidal world leaders, of narcissistic megalomaniac billionaires, of futile weathercasting and forlornly relativist cultural opinion, that the idea of a canon of film has more than somewhat self-destructed. For a decade or two, I maintained a constantly shifting top 100 of films, films largely chosen for their searching depth and quality but also allowing, overall, for enjoyment and entertainment as well as hopeful and inspirational[xxxii] elements. This was a kind of desert island list, indebted therefore to Roy Plomley’s[xxxiii] radio program[xxxiv], imagining 100 films that would stand being watched and watched again if you were shipwrecked but somehow had a projector and 100 films – or a massive TV, DVD player and 100 DVDs (the whole concept would be seriously diminished if the delivery system were smaller). Although I would probably stand by at least half of the films which made it into the more stable top ten[xxxv] of this 100, I began to abandon the overall idea when I realised that I had over 200 films in my top 100.
List-making remains a societal disease; can it have fundamental positives? Despite its prolific passion for lists, the film magazine, Sight and Sound, remains great, thanks perhaps to Mike Williams – an editor with principles. In a world steeply dumbing down, are lists a commercial necessity? One recent specimen: “21st-Century Sci-Fi Cinema,”[xxxvi] chose a film from each year since 2000. Across the page from 2001’s exceptional Donnie Darko (2001), was Sam Wrigley’s choice (presumably, Sam was born “awk-ard”) I.K.U. (2000) a film I struggled to track down and which proved to be of almost no value whatever (though it’s not much worse than Titane, 2021, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes). Apex of all these short-attention span lists is the once-a-decade “Sight and Sound Greatest Films of all Time”[xxxvii]. Yes, the title is ludicrous. It reminds me of playing a very loose version of cricket with my children around the turn of the Millenium in rural, middle-of-nowhere, North Devon. Increasing in absurdity, The Supreme Universe Cricket Cup, eventually involved 124 invented teams. Some of these merely named the team: e.g. Flash [Gordon] and the Showoffs – a particularly reckless mob who in swashbuckling style tried to turn every ball into a 6 over the house or trees. Other teams were serious and well-characterised. My son’s Star Wars squad, featured carefully inscribed players, all of whom played or failed to play as Star Wars fans (him) might expect (although Yoda was not the best, being too calm and inclined to sitting). I can’t remember how often Darth Vader got into an argument with Han Solo, or whether team loyalty superseded Good and Evil . . . or rather Light and Dark? Perhaps Darth eventually formed a breakaway team to challenge the light side of the Force? I’m not even sure which teams made it to the final – though I have an entire scoresheet somewhere. Possibly, it was Star Wars versus The Artist, Writers and Characters (featuring all-rounders Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Herman Melville, Emma Peel and Wolf Solent with Cecil Collins and Orson Welles bowling off breaks – not difficult in a lumpy garden) . . .
For all their atmosphere and entertainment value, neither X the Unknown, nor X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, would have made my top 100, though they are no better or worse than Sight and Sound’s current “Greatest Film of All Time” Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. (1975). Largely a depressing tableau of interiors – Jeanne Dielman’s unmoving camera provides mesmerizing but tedious focus, observing like a coldly voyeuristic god! A cross between slow cinema’s occasionally valid lean towards transcendence and a kitchen sink (or living-room settee) realism of dreary daily routines, obsessively, neurotically, carried out . . . ultimately, this is a film about futility. For Jeanne Dielman, everything has a place. Dispiriting rather than inspiring, it is intensely claustrophobic. By the long overdue end, you feel like killing yourself. A suddenly fashionable or unfairly despised token of a film, it seems plucked arbitrarily from Chantal Akerman’s valuable oeuvre. It is not her best work and as Andreas Babiolakis points out in his useful filmography[xxxviii], winning the poll did it no favours. Try, Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (1994) or Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974). Or take a look instead at the superior Riddles of the Sphinx[xxxix] written and directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Woollen.
Jeanne Dielman’s air of joylessness is crushing. “My youth was but a gloomy storm” reads out Jeanne’s 25-year-old son, quoting Baudelaire – and even this brief line conveys a sudden wild cloudscape to dismiss the robotic routine Jeanne Dielman presents. What a relief when the camera or the characters go outside!
The only brief joy for Jeanne appears to be remembering the end of the war . . . and the son never rebels against her rules or routine. At 01:05:16 we are briefly outdoors again: any light, any air, is like an oasis in the desert! Naturally, the period atmosphere is now worth looking at, with an un-poshed-up Brussels, the sometimes slightly misty yet translucent winter streets, the proper cars . . . instead of existing as a film, Jeanne Dielman might work well as a chain of still images of dated rooms, streets and stores.
Jeanne shops, cleans and rearranges to a pattern . . . yet does manage, once in a while to smile: in the wool shop (01:29:56), in a café at Giselle (01:30:47) which she misses on her next visit – clearly discomforted by having to sit in a different seat (03:01:46). By this point however, she is starting to visibly crack, albeit in a more measured way than Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) in Repulsion (1965).
Somehow, even the perfunctory prostitution Jeanne practices, seems part of a general process – which of course may be one of the film’s points: the way we prostitute ourselves to futile modes of life. The way we try to evade alarms and surprises. That respectability is a farce . . .
Occasionally, even the less illuminated sections of Andrei Tarkovsky, can suffer from a form of Jeanne Dielman disease – a drawn-out atmosphere that (charitably) aims to alienate or mind-numb us via demoralising thought into a search for positivity or meaning. Desperate for import, eventually we grow weary, fall into a different zone, or manufacture meaning for ourselves. Which is fine under different circumstances, but Jeanne Dielman can make you long for a mindless Euro-spy thriller[xl] or a Morecambe and Wise feature film such as: The Intelligence Men (1965) or That Riviera Touch (1966)! Jeanne’s mind-suicide of repression can’t last; her life of quiet desperation begins to crumble towards the 3-hour mark as she starts to fumble and drop things . . .
Her suffocation under the final man (above) resembles how you feel all the way through the film – and it ends in a strike for freedom which fails . . . But perhaps I am forcing my own desire for Jeanne to E S C A P E upon the film? “Jeanne Dielman’s defences had snapped and I wanted to demonstrate that with the strongest sign of her oppression: prostitution… Jeanne Dielman kills to regain her order” Akerman herself said[xli]. Perhaps Jeanne’s repressive order is as close as she can get to the concept of freedom – which may only be a concept anyway, however we interpret or attempt to live or avoid it?
Even if Jeanne Dielman doesn’t justify this much attention as a film (rather than as “the first masterpiece in the feminine in the history of the cinema”[xlii]) Chantal Akerman was undoubtably a worthwhile artist and the film must work on other levels to be so highly rated. Perhaps viewers identify with it as a kind of psychological case history? Is it unfair to know or remember that aspects of Jeanne’s behaviour were based upon Akerman’s mother’s daily routines and that her mother was an Auschwitz survivor? This cannot help but affect both viewer and critic, making Jeanne a martyr by association. A more concise and intense film to which Jeanne Dielman could be very loosely related is Dušan Makavejev’s Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni Slucaj ili Tragedija Sluzbenice P.T.T.) of 1967. But Eva Ras (as Izabela, telefonistkinja or switchboard operator) seems very much alive although dead, while Delphine Seyrig (as Jeanne) is obliged to play dead whilst alive . . .
In the end, however, my intolerance towards Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, could be partly physiological. Owing to the tunnels and ventilation shafts the workers have to crawl through in Under Night Streets (1958)[xliii], one of my previously favourite BTF films has become difficult to tolerate. It triggers my claustrophobia. Jeanne Dielman is similarly stifling. Watching it is like being buried alive . . .
I only have to pass under the shadow of a tree in some inconsequential suburb to feel a sudden desire to watch and ponder Vertigo[xliv] again. Yet Vertigo’s overall enigma surpasses its individual scenes and my memory (or mis-memory) of the profoundest passages can be so essential and heightened, that sometimes the actual filmitself can be a distraction. Many films have this effect, but Jeanne Dielman does not. In fact, you would have to pay me to watch Jeanne Dielman for a fourth time. Rather than being hauntingly tragic, what Jeanne Dielman perhaps does best, is reflect the increasingly robotised captivity of society – a society far more closely circumscribed by technology now than it was in 1975. Forget rampant lava or psychedelic eye drops, it’s the tools that have taken over. The tools and their android oligarchy of selfish owners. These are the real monsters.
[i] At 13 or 14, the actor, Michael Brooke (1942-2014) was older than he looked in the film
[ii] All the timings from X The Unknown come from my 2005 Hammer DVD
[iii] Though one teacher did lift me up by my ears (not off the ground, and I probably deserved it) while another used to make wrongdoers do handstands against a wall all through playtimes
[ix] Particularly after the release of The Servant in 1963
[x]bfi.org.uk/features/why-i-love-x-unknown by Vic Pratt: “American star Dean Jagger was signed up to star, and blacklisted Joseph Losey – who would go on to shoot The Damned (1961), another seriously spooky sci-fi film – was enlisted to direct, but there was further trouble ahead. Losey left the production somewhat abruptly – supposedly with pneumonia, but, according to [Jimmy] Sangster, removed from the project owing to star Dean Jagger’s reluctance to work with a ‘red’ director.”
[xi]imdb.com/title/tt0049967/trivia/: “It has also been reported that Losey simply didn’t want to make the film and left the project, to be replaced by Norman, who also didn’t want to make the movie.”
[xii] A false picture that still clings on 70 years later – another corpse inadequately staked!
[xiii] See Atomic Achievement (1956) youtube.com/watch?v=ToVsb_AhrlMObserving the scientists and minions featured is like watching toddlers play with broken glass:
[xiv] Sheer awkwardness or pigheadedness continues to throw good money after bad despite there being no safe solution to the disposal of waste which remains dangerously hot and highly radioactive for thousands of years.
[xvi] Marcus Hearn’s words in an absorbing 2003 commentary to the film with Jimmy Sangster, the writer and production manager.
[xvii] For what it’s worth, this figure has since been scientifically reduced to less than 1%.
[xviii] It was a vivid memory of the end of X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, that etched the biblical (mis)quote from Matthew 5:29 into my head: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” internationaltimes.it/first-principles/
[xix] The Spectorama technique was employed by Cinematographer Floyd Crosby to suggest what Dr. Xavier sees as his vision expands the normal human spectrum.
[xx] In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King, noted rumours which claimed “the ending originally went further, with Milland crying out “I can still see” after gouging out his eyes. Corman has denied the existence of that ending but expressed enjoyment with the idea, saying “Now it’s interesting. Stephen King saw the picture and wrote a different ending, and I thought, ‘His ending is better than mine.'” See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X:_The_Man_with_the_X-ray_Eyes
[xxiv] This recurring location was actually filmed (as were other film and TV productions including episodes of Doctor Who) at Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Pits in Bucks which looks, in pictures, though not in the film, to be very similar to the Leighton Buzzard Sand Quarries which so inspired me from the 1970s: brazen-head.org/?s=zabriskie+point As the film was made in the winter, filming day for night was not considered possible since it requires bright sunlight, necessitating working at night in very cold January and February temperatures.
[xxviii]www.imdb.com/name/nm0152361/?ref_=tt_cst_t_2 Chapman also remains indelible as a church deacon in Powell and Pressburger’s Gone To Earth (1950), when at 00:31:46, after the vicar has said Grace: he declares: “I have not received tartlets… I am not thankful!”
[xxxi] As Peter Faizey noted here: www.reelstreets.com/films/x-the-unknown/ the church, Our Lady Star of the Sea, is on the Isle of Barra, Castlebay, Scotland. The other church used is St Michael’s Church, Bray, which apparently also appears in Paranoiac (1963), Four-Sided Triangle (1953) and There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970).
[xxxii] Even the darkest (and best) film noir: Out of the Past, 1947, (my number 4 film since the late 1980s) has fleeting lights of hope.
[xxxv] Although I would “stand by” these films, there would probably be a hundred others I’d now wish to cram into the top ten, since much of the list predated my wider experience of European and world cinema – particularly of Italian and Japanese films. The Japanese New Wave (Nuberu bagu) is every bit as vital as the better-known French Nouvelle Vague
1) A Canterbury Tale (1944)
2) Solaris (1972)
3) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
4) Out of the Past (U.K. title: Build My Gallows High (1947)
[xliv] Vertigo preceded Jeanne Dielman… as number one in the Greatest Films of all Time list. Naturally, the critical/appreciative paths around it are thoroughly trodden.
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
GARY BILLS was born at Wordsley, near Stourbridge, UK. He gained his MA in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, with a distinction. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and he has three full collections to his name. His work has been translated into German, Romanian and Italian.
Black Sea
Those dead ships in abysmal sleep
where time and shipworm cannot bite
and even snows of flesh and slime
which elsewhere ghost it down from light
can never reach this other deep
where oil-less lamps on Punic prows
are waiting for the taper’s touch,
though all the crews are sift by now
or swimming in the eyeless mind.
But when Man’s dreams are kindled bright
the fish is startled in its flight,
to glimpse the ports he left behind.
Moments at an English Church
Time preserves its monuments of quiet –
the marble baby, wailing from her crib
in perfect silence – rumpling up her face
And pudgy cherubs flutter round a name
with virgin crants for James, who died a teen,
white ribbons for his purity and grace.
A bishop waves his devils’ book and frowns –
(his bald head’s like a marble on a ruff…)
but after all, this was his solemn place.
Outside the seeds are spinning from the limes –
past saints who float in frames of staining glass,
GARY BILLS was born at Wordsley, near Stourbridge, UK. He gained his MA in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, with a distinction. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and he has three full collections to his name. His work has been translated into German, Romanian and Italian.
ANDREW SHIELDS lives in Basel, Switzerland. His collection of poems Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong was published by Eyewear in June 2015. His band Human Shields released the album Somebody’s Hometown in 2015 and the EP Défense de jouer in 2016. His poems have recently appeared online in Talking About Strawberries, Delta Poetry Review, London Grip, and Oddball Magazine.
ANDREW SHIELDS lives in Basel, Switzerland. His collection of poems Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong was published by Eyewear in June 2015. His band Human Shields released the album Somebody’s Hometown in 2015 and the EP Défense de jouer in 2016. His poems have recently appeared online in Talking About Strawberries, Delta Poetry Review, London Grip, and Oddball Magazine.
ANDREW BRENZA is the author of the hybrid novel WRYTHM (Montag) and the visual poetry collections Colorways (Anhinga) and Smear (BlazeVOX). His speculative, formal poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Strange Horizons, The Lyric, The Orchards, Blue Unicorn, Spectral Realms, Space & Time Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Dark Horses, The Dawntreader and Altered Reality.
The Presence
Venus, Auriga and the crescent moon
Westward jeweled horizon’s sinking crown.
But earthshine haunted like an ancient rune
The filmy darkness of an eye so bound,
And bade the draping shadows’ lightless dance
That quickened clement blood to wild storm,
Whose conjured stillness from an eyeless glance
Tempted formless presence to the verge of form.
A Crowded Wood
Beneath a grate of autumn clouds, I stood
Breathless as a stone, in a crowded wood,
Among the dusty litter of the leaves
That blanketed the roots of barren trees.
And still I sang of winter’s coming pall
As though the dead could sing themselves to sleep;
ANDREW BRENZA is the author of the hybrid novel WRYTHM (Montag) and the visual poetry collections Colorways (Anhinga) and Smear (BlazeVOX). His speculative, formal poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Strange Horizons, The Lyric, The Orchards, Blue Unicorn, Spectral Realms, Space & Time Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Dark Horses, The Dawntreader and Altered Reality.
NICHOLAS BOOTH offers the second exclusive extract from X Trapnel’s legendary short story collection, Bin Ends
I never thought I’d see Maltbeam again. Assumed he was dead. We’d been pals round the pubs very early in the war then he said he was being posted overseas and I’d more or less forgotten about him, as one forgot many people encountered and mislaid in those days. “We’ll meet up after this lot’s over” was a common motto. Often enough it came off.
It was easiest to track down people like me who stuck to a beat of watering holes around the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street. North Soho, all that. So it was that Maltbeam found me again, in the public bar of the Lion and in a good mood. I’d had a double come up at Taunton the day before: Notoriety and Boveridge.
Maltbeam said he’d had a devil of a time of it fighting for king and country. That caused me to reflect that my great struggles in history’s largest conflict, apart from dodging bombs and doodlebugs, was finding coins for the gas fire and trying to get poems published in Penguin New Writing.
Maltbeam seemed to have put quite a bit of chub on. I mentioned this as food was hardly plentiful that first winter after the war. “Oh, I had a good landlady in Dover,” he said. He didn’t say what he was doing in Dover. I didn’t pry into his war service but after a few drinks he came out with a catalogue of close-run-things with death: North Africa, Italy, Germany, the whole show as he put it. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “It was hell.” He certainly seemed lucky to make it back.
“When I killed a Jerry,” he said, “believe me I thought, one up for us. I know a bloke who got a little crooked cross tattooed on his back for every Nazzy he did in. I can’t believe I came back. Never thought I’d see London again I can tell you. Anyway, I’ve found a bed-sitting room now and I need a job – I’ve got enough for beer and fags till Sunday. Hero’s welcome, what.”
Behind the bar the landlord, Teddy, was shuffling about in carpet slippers and an ancient cardigan, feeding his caged parrot, Tosh. Teddy’s green cardigan was complementary to his crimson grogblossom, making both a bit richer. He congratulated me on the double. I wished he had not. In fact knowing old Teddy he may have done it on purpose. I knew what was coming.
“Lend us two quid will you, chum?” Maltbeam said. “I’ll pay you back next week.”
Of course, this was a bit much. Teddy winked at me.
As Maltbeam made his request Tosh sidled rapidly along his perch, inclined his head and stared at Maltbeam. “You fat ___,” said the parrot tartly. Maltbeam laughed – we all did. “He’s on the scrounge,” shrieked Tosh.
“You want to watch that bird, Teddy,” said Maltbeam. “He could get you into trouble. What if he says a word like that to some old girl who’s well-to-do?”
“Don’t get that sort of customer in here,” said Teddy. “He only talks to people he takes a dislike to.”
I lent Maltbeam the two quid, and he bored on again about his war. Now and again he’d look across at Tosh, who stared right back at him.
*
Of course Maltbeam didn’t pay me back the following week. About a month later on a Sunday evening at the Lion I was still nursing a rotten hangover from the morning. The place was deserted except for two young BBC types along the bar from me. One was tall in an old brown suit and had a toothbrush moustache, and the other a dumpy type in tweeds with rosy cheeks from beer. I knew them both as regulars at the Lion, which in those days attracted a thirsty clientele from the national broadcaster. I was content to stay out of their talk, which was usually on an arcane political or cultural theme.
“Well, we’re a socialist country now,” Clive, the dumpy one, said. “You’ve got to admit that.” He was misty-eyed at this. “They didn’t achieve that in Spain.”
Rollo, the tall one, sipped his beer. “Quite,” he said. “But Lewis is of the opinion that it could all go horribly wrong.”
“Who’s Lewis?”
“My pal, the professor.”
“Yes but he’s a professor of corners or something, isn’t he?”
“Rectangles, I think. Something like that. I wanted him to give a talk on the Third Programme about it but when I saw his script it was quite impossible. Completely impenetrable. If I couldn’t understand a word of it what chance did listeners have? It went on about things such as continuous function and topological space. I thought, I’ll get TS Eliot instead because it made his stuff look like the Beano.”
“The intolerable shirt of flame, eh,” I quoted, butting into their conversation. Well, you would butt rudely into the conversation of someone called Rollo, wouldn’t you.
“Yes, that’s right,” said Rollo.
“I’ve always hoped to find an intolerable shirt of flame in a 15½ inch neck in the summer sales,” I said. Clive snorted but stopped when he saw Rollo was not amused.
“Lewis takes a strong line,” said Rollo to Clive. “A very strong line. He thinks the people should rise now. Storm the citadels of power. We’re still up to our necks in filthy capitalism.” Rollo gave a disagreeable glance at me as he said that. “Up to our necks in it. I’d arm the people.”
I had a vile headache born of mixed drinks consumed injudiciously at lunchtime. I took a long draught of bitter and hoped it would help. That’s when the Lion’s old mock-medieval door creaked open and Maltbeam appeared in his British Warm, for it was a cold night. His big red face cracked a grin as he moved down the bar.
It was deliciously warm for once as Teddy had grudgingly banked the fire up. Maltbeam caught the end of another speech by Rollo about violent revolution and looked askance. “We’ve just had a dose of violence, chum,” he said loudly. “Six years of it. Of course – you may not have seen much of it.” This was ignored.
“Thank God for heat,” said Maltbeam. “My gas fire’s broken.”
Rollo and Clive were onto whether they could execute someone. “If the cause is right and just then you must,” said Rollo. He drank some more beer. “It’s your duty.”
“But supposing it’s the King, or some other royal person,” said Clive.
“Shoot the King?” said Rollo wonderingly.
“Oi,” said Teddy as he placed a pint in front of Maltbeam. “That’s enough of that. Just you behave yourselves. We won’t have talk like that in here.”
As Teddy went to the till Tosh, who had noted the arrival of Maltbeam, scraped along his perch. He looked rather seedy. He turned his head and peered at Maltbeam out of a sinister eye. “You’re a ____,” said the parrot. His high-pitched rasping voice was horrible and comic, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The worst of all words hung in the air. It was ironic given Teddy’s warning to the BBC pair. They laughed, no doubt seeing Tosh’s remark as a sort of vengeance for what Maltbeam had said.
Maltbeam raised his eyebrows, then his pint and said cheerio.
We started talking about money, women and prospects. I noticed that Tosh was moving his head from side to side but his attention remained fixed on Maltbeam.
“D’you know,” said Maltbeam. “I wonder what it was all for, the war I mean. I risked life and limb time and time again and when I got home I found my wife was shacked up with an Italian PoW, my old job had vanished and now I’m in a pub listening to bolshies talking about killing the King.”
Before I could offer any remarks Tosh said: “I’ve told you once, you’re a fat ____. Kindly leave my pub.”
Teddy, perched on a high stool, chuckled round his pipe. Maltbeam was discomfited. “You think that’s funny, do you?” he asked Teddy.
“I didn’t say it, did I?” said Teddy, his low voice muffled by his moustache and lack of teeth.
“He’s merely laughing at the surrealism of the moment,” ventured Rollo.
Maltbeam did not even turn round to remonstrate. He just said: “You keep out of this, Mary.”
Then to me: “Do you know what, chum, I’m going to have a scotch. It seems like the whole bloody world is against me.”
So Maltbeam did; and another, and another. As we talked and drank he looked at the birdcage warily. Tosh stared back at him. Clearly Maltbeam had money but I did not think it politic to raise the two quid owed.
With all five of us smoking, the bar was wreathed in a fine grey mist. My headache had eased right off. Rollo and Clive were now tipsy and talking about some variety programme on the wireless. Thanks to the ale and scotch Maltbeam, who never had much of a head for drink, was boozed up. Inevitably we’d got on to his war days. Restless energy flowed through him. Now he was on his feet acting out the storming of a machine gun nest. “…I came over the top and went in for the kill with the bayonet,” he said. He mimed holding a Lee-Enfield at just that angle. “I pulled back the gun for the final irremediable plunge…”At this point Tosh’s querulous voice cut across Maltbeam: “Oh for Christ’s sake shut up, you boring ____” the parrot said.
Maltbeam looked round. His wet blue eyes glittered madly. “One more word, one more word and I’ll do that bloody bird,” Maltbeam snarled. “So help me, I’ll do that bloody bird.”
“I told you to shut up,” said Tosh. “You’ve had too much for one night. So shut up.”
“You shut up,” said Maltbeam.
“You’re a big fat ____, why don’t you just ____ off out of it,” said Tosh. This last bit of cheek seemed to almost stupefy Maltbeam with shock. He was of choleric colouring by nature but now he reddened deeply as his surprise added to his rage. “Take that bird out of this bar, landlord, or else I’ll do it,” he yelled at Teddy.
“Can’t do that,” said Teddy in an amused voice; “can’t take Tosh out of the bar. He likes it in here. If I put him out the back he starts singing Nearer My God to Thee. It gives me the willies. It’s only a bird, mate.”
“Look,” said Maltbeam to me in a rather rattled voice, “why don’t we go round the Tartan? You fancy the landlady and – ”
“Ain’t you got a home to go to?” said Tosh. “Where’s yer missus?”
At this, Rollo and Clive squealed with amusement. By God Maltbeam looked mad. He reached into his greatcoat and produced a revolver.
“Win that throwing coconuts?” Teddy said.
“It fires a stick of Brighton rock,” said Rollo with mock authority.
Maltbeam swore horribly. “One more word out of anyone, especially that parrot, and things’ll get very lively.”
“Shut up, you _____,” said Tosh. “I won’t tell you again.”
Rollo and Clive laughed. Before anyone could say a word Maltbeam raised his arm, took aim at the cage and fired.
There was a split second of great confusion: a big crack, a spark and a puff of smoke in the tobacco fug, then another. For a moment I could see nothing. All I could hear was the shrieks of Rollo and Clive. Maltbeam pointed the gun at them and said: “Want some?”
Rollo had the sort of unfortunate accident more associated with children than adults. Clive had his hands up as if in a Western.
“You ____”, said Tosh. “Call the police, Ted!” I suppose it was a phrase he’d heard Teddy’s missus use.
Maltbeam aimed the revolver at the parrot. I knocked it out of his hand then grabbed it from the floor. Maltbeam went to take it off me but I pushed him away. As I did I expected to hear Teddy deliver a volley of remonstrance but all I could hear was his wife shouting down the stairs asking what was going on. “Look at Teddy,” shouted Clive. Teddy lay on the floor behind the bar. My headache was back with a vengeance.
*
Teddy was quite dead. One of the bullets had bounced off something and hit him. The other one went through a mirror behind the bar. Seven years’
bad luck, I’d said. Maltbeam looked a bit green. Much of the above had to be given out by me from the witness box at the Old Bailey.
Maltbeam had dashed out of the pub and spent a day or two on the run before being found staring into the middle distance on a bench in Regent’s Park.
He was not an especially contrite defendant. It came out that he’d tried to strangle his landlady in Dover but she had not reported it until after Teddy’s shooting made headlines.
Along with his threat to shoot the two BBC men, who also gave evidence, there were a good deal of other unsavoury incidents to be taken into consideration. Maltbeam was a rogue, a thief, a strangler manqué as well as a lethal looser-off of revolvers in public houses, the court was told. The prosecution introduced the idea that he might have drunkenly been out to settle Teddy’s hash rather than Tosh’s. They’d dredged up some row he’d had with the landlord long ago. There was, they said, no getting away from the fact that Teddy’s death had been caused by reckless shooting with a Webley bought on the black market.
Somehow they stood up a murder charge. Another aggravating element for Maltbeam was that the incident at the Lion occurred not long after an armed robbery that resulted in the killing of an innocent bystander had made headlines. A hard mood had emerged in the judiciary. The upshot was that once the guilty verdict was in, the judge put the black cap on, and an expected reprieve did not come.
*
I visited Maltbeam while he was in the condemned cell. It was a day of dreary fog when I took the tube to Caledonian Road and thence to Pentonville. Two warders brought him to the visiting room. He looked a bit slimmer and less choleric.
I did not have the first idea what to say. It seemed a most awful moment. Maltbeam had been looking down at a packet of fags I’d brought him. Now he looked up. His mad blue eyes had turned a little bit grey. I had feared he would burst into tears but not a bit of it. Maltbeam launched into a diatribe.
“I dare say you have seen in the papers that the home secretary has dismissed my appeal. You’d think he’d have a sense of humour. As the Daily Sketch had it, I set out to murder a parrot and ended up killing a man. Mind you, the home secretary’s a Unitarian, isn’t he?” He was lisping, and explained he’d broken his false teeth. “Obviously, given my predicament I’ve been boning up on religion: you want half an idea of what you might be getting into on the other side. These nonconformist types see God and heaven like one of their endless bloody squabbles about county councils. I mean, doesn’t my war record count, I ask myself? I blame Attlee and co. It’s like having the country run by a pipsqueak from Mac Fisheries. I might write him a letter now I think about it. Give him a piece of my mind.” He lit a fag and went on in the sort of aggrieved tone that housewives use when complaining about the price of everything in the shops. “I was clearly aiming for the bird. Can I help it if the bullet bounces off and into Teddy? I feel bad about Teddy, but for heaven’s sake it was an accident.” He went on in this way for quite a while. When the time was up and he stood to be led away by the warders he said: “Well, see you on the other side, old boy – with any luck.” Then as he walked away he turned and said: “Sorry I didn’t pay you back that two quid.”
One morning a few days later a dinner-suited voice on the wireless announced Maltbeam had been hanged.
*
One evening not long afterwards I turned in at the Lion late on. The barmaid was a girl I’d once had a fling with. Like everything after the war she looked a bit older and in need of a clean. Tosh was in his cage – he’d become something of a celebrity: a few local bohemians had formed a sort of fan club. The broken mirror was still in situ and was also a cult object. Rollo and Clive were dining out on the story.
I bought a half and took my usual place. The barmaid chucked an evening paper on the bar. “They’ve given your pal a write-up in there,” she said.
So had they. The headline was “Rage of landlord killer” or something like it. The piece concentrated on trying to spice up his wife’s affair with the PoW but it also mentioned his war career. Ronald Maltbeam, it said, was a fantasist as well as a killer.
He had spent the entirety of his war service as a cook in the Army Catering Corps at a camp in North Wales. They’d even found a few colleagues for quotes. “Old Ronnie was a dab-hand at Brown Stew No1,” said one of them. “He was so good at it we nicknamed him Brown Stew. No word of a lie, I never thought old Brown Stew would turn out to do something like that.”
I folded the paper over and dropped it back on the bar. It had not occurred to me to wonder why the defence had not made anything of his heroic war service. It had not occurred to me to ask about decorations.
I heard a little scraping noise: it was Tosh sidling to the end of his perch. His newfound celebrity had not made him any less scruffy. He turned his head and fixed me with a rather diabolical eye. He stared at me for a while. I declined to meet his gaze.
Tosh began to sing in an awful falsetto.
“Or if, on joyful wing cleaving the sky, Sun, moon, and stars forgot, upward I fly, Still all my song shall be, Nearer, my God, to thee.”
I was very thirsty but left my half untouched and started walking towards the door.
“Lend us two quid will you, chum,” I heard Tosh say as I walked out. “We’re closing. Get out. Time gentlemen, please. Drink up.” The parrot’s voice got louder. “You’ve had your time. Ain’t you got homes to go to?”
As I came out of the Lion Rollo was hurrying in. I had not seen him since the trial. As he passed me he said: “Your pal got an intolerable shirt of flame, eh.”
“Right neck size an’ all,” I shot back, but Rollo was through the Lion’s mouth.
It’s easy to have an escalated memory of certain films, books, music or paintings. In film, this can be particularly evanescent: an image or tone, a line of speech, the fleeting expression of one of the players – or in the case of the 2010 documentary, The Woodmans, (director: Scott Willis) – the expression or gestures of a non-fictional person, maybe self-conscious or recreating a memory, but not fully acting. The Woodmans was the intriguing film I first intended to write about . . . but its incidental display of privilege, wealth and relative success, eventually ground me down. Francesca – the photographer daughter – is the most notable member of the Woodmans family and although her work can be a shade formulaic, it is frequently mysterious and powerful, as seen here.
House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, by Francesca Woodman
After Francesca Woodman leaves the story by suicide in 1981, aged only 22, the other Woodmans are inevitably left with a haunting burden of grief . . . yet remain fortunate as artists – artists with a modicum of talent who could always have lived the art life whether or not they succeeded in sales terms. It is to their credit that they carried on trying hard. They believe in their work and its value, despite that it is often little more than decorative. In other words, second time around, the film did not live up to my empathetic and escalated memory of it. Or perhaps the chords which concealed its faults were no longer binding?
With Whirlpool[i] (1950, director: Otto Preminger) I got further, appropriately spiralling down into its enjoyable hogwash, notwithstanding the difficulty of accepting natural crime kingpin, Richard Conti, as a bowtie-wearing psychoanalyst! Cynical witticisms regularly illuminate the shadowy ruined coastline of Noir, and their serrated architecture can memorably survive long after many of the films’ enveloping, invasive tides have receded. Lines such as “a successful marriage is usually based on what a husband and a wife don’t know about each other” (00:11:32[ii]) are naturally amusing.
Regardless of how plausible or implausible the whole premise of Whirlpool is, especially self-hypnosis (once self-hypnotized against pain, surely, you’d also be hypnotised against a sense of caution and danger?) for me Whirlpool remained enmeshingly tense. It was entertaining as well, to spot the numerous parallels with the much more successful Laura (1944)[iii] – also directed by Preminger and starring Gene Tierney. But all this was not sufficiently enlightening[iv], and while I was very glad to see it again, it’s hard to violently disagree with some of its negative reviewers[v]. I needed to recall a film that could be inhabited. A film as commandingly hypnotic as Vertigo (1958) whose deepest scenes can distort and expand so much from memory or mistaken impression, that the actual film itself can become a distraction[vi]. Plot and sequence, characters and meaning . . . can all seem relatively irrelevant. In such a state, I no longer want the Hitchcock-directed, finished film, only the intensity or visual poetry beyond certain scenes. What stays cloaked just out of reach or can be sensed at the back of the head, is closer to the true source. Perhaps the best films, even much of the best art, draws on sublimated or unconscious archetypes or anomalies, and once these are activated or vaguely felt, the surfaces of the art itself can become an interference, a fading static? With Vertigo, I sometimes want a sense of time and anti-time, the texture of dark forests and the escape from them, the sweep of the high red bridge and a flight without it, the swell of waves (or studio tanks), the feel of old Spanish settlements, the tilt of the streets, distinctive coastal trees such as those at Cypress Point . .
Consequently, I remain very drawn to the idea, in Vertigo’s case, of the San Francisco area[vii], despite that in reality, the locations used are widely dispersed and their relationships with each other, as well as their physical appearance 68 years later, would likely be a disappointment[viii].
Recalling a film I could inhabit, a confusion occurred. Apparently, the Japanese title of The Snow Woman怪談雪女郎 (Kaidan Yukijorō) can be translated as Tales of the Snow Witch or Ghost Story of the Snow Woman, and I believe I originally watched the 1968 film under the title Woman of the Snow. Since the justifiably famous Kwaidan[ix], directed by Masaki Kobayashi and consisting of four ghost stories[x]was released four years earlier, and one of its stories was entitled Woman of the Snow, perhaps the later feature film, was at some point, retitled to avoid confusion? Both films, (the 1964 Kwaidan story, at 42 minutes, is about half the length of Tokuzō Tanaka’s 1968 feature), are adaptations of the same Japanese folktale made internationally popular in 1904 by Lafcadio Hearn’s collection, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Both films have an atmosphere, at sudden or creeping moments, of breaking through the rushing static of what we like to think of as “reality”. Both films relishthe fierce calligraphy of their titles, although with Kwaidan – the complete film – calligraphy becomes almost a character in itself – particularly in The Story of Mimi-nashi-Hōïchi or Hoichi the Earless[xi]. Calligraphy as a weapon. Calligraphy as a stockade.
Poetically concise, the production style and painterly studio backgrounds of Kwaidan’s Woman of the Snow episode (1964), are exquisitely abstracted yet also metaphysically challenging – conjuring a hyper-reality way beyond surrealism. On the other hand, The Snow Woman, of 1968, with the extra space of its longer story – increasing the tension between mortal and immortal, the vulnerability of the elemental in a corporeal world – probably attains a more haunting poignancy, a deeper sense of the tragic? Its Snow Woman feels more torn. Rewatching both films, I find the merits of each too considerable to want to elevate one above the other. They are both unmissable. Their more extreme moments possess a valiant character – the challenge of the wish, the contempt of the supernatural toward the human drone.
The Woman of the Snow episode, directed by Masaki Kobayashi in 1964, begins within Kwaidan at 00:39:55. Kwaidan’s style as a whole, its drama, lighting and score[xii] are theatrical as well as startlingly innovative. In contrast to The Snow Woman’s frequent use of real landscapes (notably in its opening mountain forest scenes) Kobayashi filmed inside an aircraft hangar, in which, art director Shigemasa Toda, and set decorator Dai Arakawa, created vivid symbolic skies, map-like symmetrical forests and a brimming river – its magical overflow sparkling like silver foil. At first these scenes are buried in drifts and flurries of snow, with only the red flag of the absent ferryman to alarm a wintry palette. This red of danger, signalling the margins of some fever zone, stays imprinted in the mind. Under whited-out or painted skies, impressionistic, clear or churning, from hopeful and spacious to claustrophobic and doomed, the lives of the characters become archetypal.
While in the more conventional 1968 film, the old man and his younger apprentice are master and student sculptors, in The Snow Woman they are merely woodcutters. Their highest ambition is to have a useful, contented life. Art doesn’t come into it – unless you count the later crafting of sturdy and attractive sandals. The Snow Woman has few quotidian scenes and little conversation to start with. Its scarce inhabitants live almost entirely in isolation. When the snowstorm overwhelms the two woodcutters as they return from the wilderness, they struggle into the ferryman’s deserted shanty. Its gapped planking reduces the blizzard’s fury. But there is no safety here at the centre or eye or crossroads of the storm. The Woman of the Snow enters . . . and when the old man perishes from the extra cold deployed by her ghostly form, Tatsuya Nakadai, as the younger man, speaks the horror with his eyes. He doesn’t protest against fate as the spirit turns her lethal gaze upon him to slowly approach his recumbent, terror-stricken form. All he can do is tilt his head away – as if this distances her from his wide unblinking gaze. Is it for the sake of his youth that the snow witch spares this “handsome boy”[xiii] – or does she know the future; is she attracted to him? Shuffling towards the door she fades through it . . . but not before extracting a promise which the longer film later echoes:, but here, it is that he mustn’t tell his mother what happened, rather than his parents, children or wife – as if the woman or spirit has some degree of omniscience.
Next morning the storm has abated. At 00:51:49 the ferryman arrives (above) and failing to get in the front door of his shack, enters another way. As mentioned before, the concise adaptation within Kwaidan eschews the sculpting vocation of the main character in the longer story and there any no evil billionaires or despicable Lords either, only a mother, curing her traumatized and half-frozen son with porridge. That all the blood was drained from the old woodcutter implies that the Woman of the Snow is some form of vampire – a hint later strengthened. But the old woman does not pursue with questions. Knowing she must work while her son, hollow and withdrawn in bed, recovers, she staggers away with a basket of sticks[xiv].
A year later and thankfully recovered, after a long day’s wood harvesting, on his stroll home against the westering skies the son meets a woman going to Yedo. The sky, red and orange, awaits the appearance of those earlier symbols, globes or the beginnings of eyes which could suggest the materialisation of spirits as if from whirlpools in the atmosphere. Despite the eerie music, the setting is serene. Nothing in this gentle yet accelerated alternative to modern dating, insinuates that Yuki[xv] might be the Woman of the Snow in disguise. They continue to walk through sunset-crimsoned woods and pools, as the painted skies turn from white and blue to yellow and black. Swirls like giant marbles, now begin to generate above the horizon. The young man invites Yuki to the lonely house where he lives with his mother. Another cinematic house to envy! Yuki shows no caution, presumably because she knows she cannot be endangered? Is this a planned seduction on her part? Could he resist if he wished? In the house, at 01:01:22, he is clearly stirred by the sight of the traveller washing her feet.
Soon, laughing chases through the rushes and reeds under roseate skies, unwind the formality of the potential lovers. In contradiction to the angry whirlpools of stormier skies, a jewel-like shape forms above nearby, like a sentient sun, to indicate the approach of a happy perfection. Under this glowing symbol, loving embraces follow naturally, with gently bared breasts among the grasses[xvi]. . . before cross dissolving to a baby being bathed. Two other children are soon present[xvii] – the Woman of the Snow has become a perfect wife and mother. Walking with her children, I wonder if the strange song the children voice at 01:03:46, in which “the priest was amazed and fell upside down”, is partially parallelled in the longer, 1968 film, by a scene in which evil Lord Jito, endorsing the established rival sculptor, Gyôkei, (who Jito has employed to usurp the younger sculptor’s commission), says of apprentice sculptor Yosaku at 00:40:23: “there is no way he will win, even if he stands on his head.” This bizarre comment may arise from mistranslation or subtitling, but as with the Snake and Tortoise/Turtle song used in the 1968 film (and brought up below), it creates a reflective pause in the narrative – at least during interrogatory viewings[xviii].
That the children grow older but their mother never ages, is emphasised by a humorous exchange with three village women – they and the ferryman are the only sign of any local community in the entire film. Yuki has taken her children to pay their respects at their grandmother’s grave. They pass the women, busy washing clothes, on their way home. “Most peasant women age early,” but despite giving birth three times, Yuki still looks like a girl. “That woman is a wonder!” the village washerwomen all agree[xix], taking it for granted that the dead grandmother is still able to see and appreciate her grandchildren, as well as their wonderful mother and happy lives.
Evening, and the children are all asleep in a side room. The young woodcutter is no artist but has crafted four pairs of sandals for his wife and children. Yuki admires her pair and returns to sewing. From his lower angle and with the light on her face, the woodman suddenly remembers across the years . . . the light becomes blue and icy and with the change comes, recognition? Then the light turns warm again and he seems about to laugh off his memory. Unfortunately, he rambles on . . . No don’t say it! But he doesn’t stop . . .
For the sake of her sleeping children, the Woman of the Snow forbears from carrying out her strict promise of murder, returning toward the giant eye, leaving a widower grieving over his four pairs of beautiful sandals. Sadly, he puts hers out in the snow. Since they disappear, perhaps there is hope that she might return? Yet the mood is tragic.
The quality of human ambition in The Snow Woman (1968), is something the shorter, more lyrically concise version of 1964, bypassed. In the longer version of the tale, the old wood carver Shigetomo, seems almost punished for his ambition: “My name will be known throughout the mountains of Mino,” he anticipates triumphantly. Conversely, his apprentice Yosaku is frequently undermined by a lack of self-belief. Beginning in real snowy landscapes, prospecting for the ideal tree for a temple commission, master and apprentice fall to their knees to give thanks when they discover a magnificent example – a tree so fine they believe it may even have a soul. As if the thought of felling such a tree to become mere material for religious carving is a crime, the weather abruptly changes. Winds howl and swirling snow snaps branches around them. They struggle on through the tempest. Fortunately, a rough shelter appears, but later, as the young man wakes from under his heaped straw, a ghost slides into their refuge (00:07:30) to kill the fire and summon ice in its place, snow from the stare of its eyes and spirit, frost from the percussive sounds[xx]. Without Kwaidan’s implication of vampirism, the old Shigetomo is simply chilled to death. The Snow Woman turns her attention towards the young apprentice Yosaku, creeping backwards on his elbows, only sparing him because “you are young and beautiful” (00:11:20). In exchange, he must promise never to tell even his dearest, what happened that night. The door of the shack opens of its own volition (00:12:37) before the Snow Woman glides back into the blizzard.
Moving on: in cheerful daylight the felled tree arrives in the village (00:14:54), with or without its soul, no longer exceptional. Propelled on rollers by a crowd of peasants and greeted rapturously by a crowd of villagers, the High Priest’s officials are delivering the section of trunk and request that Yosaku carry out the original commission, since his old master spoke highly of him and the High Priest believed in Shigetomo’s judgement. Feeling unworthy, Yosaku, persuaded by Shigetomo’s widow, reluctantly accepts.
That night, during a rainstorm a beautiful traveller – “young girl” in the widow of the old master sculptor’s eyes – shelters under the eaves of the Yosaku’s workshop (00:17:06). Invited indoors, in a mildly sensual way Yosaku’s surrogate mother supplies dry clothing while remarking on the traveller’s beauty. As the Snow Woman, Shiho Fujimura may be too terrifying for the word beautiful to arise, unless one admires haughty superiority and malevolent elemental force . . . but as Yuki, she is almost unrecognisable. In the Kwaidan story, you can see the similarity between spirit and woman. Here, on a first viewing, perhaps audiences where not expected to notice any connection? After several meaningful admiring glances between Yosaku and Yuki (only slightly distracted by her appreciation and confidence in his sculpting skills, and his dissatisfaction with them) at 00:22:30 they go together to gather herbs which Yuki knows would be good for the old wife’s recurring health problems. At 00:24:09 love reveals itself. Meanwhile, galloping thugs are approaching the village as children circle and lark on a log stack. The children’s reckless behaviour naturally predates the modern health and safety attitude towards timber stacks!
Haverthwaite, 20th June 2026
Thrown from his horse by the fright factor of rolling logs, Lord Jito is furious: “Fools! Children or not, I’ll have your heads”. Hurrying out to protect the children (00:24:38) the wood-carver’s old wife founds herself beaten by Lord Jito for her “impudence”. Returning to the village, Yosaku and Yuki rush to intervene, but it is too late. Nasty Lord Jito, clearly fancying Yuki at first sight, gallops off with the threat that they haven’t “heard the last of this”. Despite encouragements to “hang in there” (!! anachronistic subtitles at 00:22:27: what subtleties might we be missing?) before long the old wife succumbs to her beating[xxi] – using her dying moments to virtually oblige a marriage between Yosaku and Yuki. Although they don’t wish to impose upon each other, they are happy to follow this course.
It seems clear in both versions of the film, that the spirit of the snow has sought out the two young men spared, perhaps because like the Greek gods, the snow women are drawn to mortals by desire? Or for wanting to know what it feels like to be human, to bear children and be a mother? Is it also a vain attempt to escape their chilled immortality, at least for a lifetime? On their first night together, at 00:29:12, Yosaku asks “Yuki, why is your body so cold?”
Another powerful character with sundry titles now emerges to complete the cultural hierarchy. Witch doctor or priestess, she is later referred to, gender-specifically, in the subtitles as a “shamaness”. Cast listing meanwhile, describes her as a “Shrine Maiden”. Divining for the presence of evil at a sacred festival this shamaness immediately perceives Yuki’s supernatural origins – the zealous old hag’s flame darts at 00:30:47, act like ghost-seeking missiles. Maybe this is the point at which, on a first viewing, you are supposed to know with certainty that for all her love and sympathy, Yuki is the Snow Woman?
Five years later and snidey Lord Jito is back from the capital, Kyoto[xxii], interfering in local politics and trying to engineer for an experienced sculptor, Gyôkei, to replace Yosaku for the task of carving an inspiring Buddha for the temple. Having known the old master carver Shigetomo and heard him praise Yosaku, the patient High Priest still wants the unproven apprentice to do the work. Angrily, Jito forces a competition upon the religious authorities – the winner will be granted the commission. By this time Yosaku and Yuki have a young son, Tarô, yet Yuki has not aged in five years. When the family group chance upon Lord Jito (feudal or samurai equivalent of a contemptible billionaire or unscrupulous politician of now) and his corrupt entourage in the woods, Jito confides to a sidekick, (00:37:08) that he “scoured the capital for five years and found none to equal her.”
For a brief relaxed interval, after his classmates taunt Tarô for not knowing a strange song – apparently a traditional children’s rhyme about a turtle that takes over a snake’s yard to cause the disappearance of nine local people – Yosaku watches Yuki teaching it to him. Whether or not this song is thematically connected[xxiii] to the film, it creates an enigmatic frisson of the type which often encourages a fork or splitting point in the pathway of a narrative . . . a pause or glance toward something cloaked or just out of reach, something only sensed at the back of the mind.
At Gyôkei’s workshop, in the contemptuous dialogue between master sculptor and Jito, Jito declares that country people are “like frogs stuck in a well” (00:40:35) and goes on: “Trying to compete with you, he does not know his place.” But it’s not just that Jito considers Yosaku to have ideas above his station: “His wife is far too good for him too” (00:40:50). The plot thickens and when Jito’s henchman come to arrest Yosaku for the theft of the tree, their leader shortly offers the planned way out: Yuki should offer herself to Jito. Yuki is so disgusted that a fine of three ryō or gold coins is imposed – an impossible sum . . . yet Yuki says she will pay. Grudgingly, the gang leaves.
Yuki: “How can someone be so unscrupulous?”
Yosaku: “It’s Lord Jito we are talking about.”
To cure a local landowner’s child of a dangerous fever (00:45:33: “Ridiculous! How can a mere woman possibly cure him,” say the doctors who’ve given him up for dead), Yuki repeatedly and exhaustingly becomes the Snow Woman. She snows near the child and cures him with snow parcels, freezing the fever away.
Not only does she have compassion, the Snow Woman believes in art! Yosaku’s “wooden doll” sculpture looks perfect within limits (“I just can’t seem to finish her face”), but like so much “great” art, is somehow dead. Gyôkei’s golden version however, is truly and thoroughly dead. TheHigh Priest is not impressed – “It shines with gold. It is almost too bright for my eyes to bear!” (00:58:01). “Indeed, her beauty is overwhelming . . .” but “Look closely at her face. In her eyes, do you see the light of compassion?”
Despite the High Priest’s support, Yosaku remains unhappy with his work, he cannot get the eyes right and persuades a very unwilling Yuki to come and pray with him at another religious festival. Forced to run from the festival through the dark forest when she realises again that the Shrine Maiden can sense her presence, Yuki is abducted for Lord Jiro. In a nearby shed, Jiro is determined to have her. He lusts after her pale skin . . . pure like snow. “How I’ve longed to strip you bare” (01:03:47). But the rape goes no further than a bared shoulder.
When he tries to tear her kimono off, Yuki begins to change from frightened woman to invincible Snow Woman, (01:05:45): “All those who have seen my true form must die”. Jito grovels, pleads and freezes. She freezes all his assets and empties his accounts[xxiv], and when his minions discover his frozen corpse, they too are dealt with. Hurrah!
Back at home, Yosaku and Tarô find an exhausted Yuki, yet Yosaku is still concerned with finishing his statue – a picture of the true artist, sacrificing everyone and everything for Art! An ominous shadow clings to him though, preventing that final miraculous transformation of dead wood. But now the news of Lord Jito’s death is abroad and the Shrine Maiden turns up to accuse Yuki – as if the hag was in league with Jito: corrupt politics hand in glove with corrupt religion . . . surely not! The Shrine Maiden is obviously jealous of “a power beyond this realm” (01:10:09). Calling Yuki a “Monstrous demon!” she is determined to look for the scars of her flame darts. Yosaku finally helps repel the old woman and comforts Yuki: “No one could destroy our happiness.” Now he feels he’s been washed clean and remembers his Art. “I think I can finish the statue” . . . yet the dark shadow remains”. Suddenly, stirred by the accusations of the Shamaness, he remembers the night of the Snow Woman and overrides his promise never to tell anyone, not even his wife. NO DON’T SAY IT!
“I saw the terrifying Snow Woman. She killed my master.” (01:13:42) . . . “Yuki . . .”
“That . . . was me.”
“You?”
“After all this time you have spoken of it. It was all I asked of you. I told you never to speak of it. All these years I prayed you wouldn’t. Because I became your wife, I discovered human happiness . . . (01:14:33) . . . I hoped this happiness would never end . . .”
She becomes the Snow Woman and is about to kill Yosaku when Tarô cries in his sleep. Becoming a mother again for a while, she realises she must leave instead: “Please look after Tarô in my place. And please finish that wonderful statue of yours . . .”
In all this tragic farewell, Yosako is still distracted by his ART . . . and seeing the light of compassion in her face (01:18:22) – compassion for the child and for him – he knows now, how to finish the statue.
[iii] For a truly weird and distant echo of Laura, seek out Singapore Sling (O Anthropos Pou Agapise Ena Ptoma) 1990 1h 51m imdb.com/title/tt0100623/?ref_=fn_t_1 which despite a striking and luminous Noir atmosphere is laughably absurd – with Meredyth Herold coming across like Josie Lawrence in an X-rated Mastersons (radio) improvisation! bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jsmr
[iv] From A Backwards Alphabet of Films – X: “Although it may be unfashionable to say that art, music, writing, film and so on, should be about enlightenment, I will say it anyway.”
[v] Such as David Vining, who in 2025 was unengaged by it: “I don’t think it’s a good thriller or mystery or drama. But, it has some charms along the way to make the film not a complete waste”: davidmvining.wordpress.com/2025/11/27/whirlpool/
[vi] As noted in A Backwards Alphabet of Films – X . . .
[xi] In this story, the blind musician Hōïchi is obliged to perform every night for the ghost court of the Heike clan. To prevent his being torn apart or carried off by spirits, the priest of the temple and his devoted assistant paint the Hannya-Shingyō (Heart Sutra), a holy text, over every part of Hōïchi’s body.
[xii] Toru Takemitsu’s uniquely and sometimes piercingly disquieting score combines traditional instruments such as the shakuhachi and the biwa with electronic manipulation and tape loops as well as a modified piano: screws, bolts, and soft materials placed on the strings to summon strange percussive effects and assorted unpredictable clangs.
[xiii] In the 1968 film the apprentice is also spared for his youth and beauty.
[xiv] Recently watching the film again, I thought of the cover of the album now known as Led Zeppelin IV, but as this is not helpful, I only include the passing thought to reference this intriguing blog post: wknc.org/2021/04/11/behind-the-cover-led-zeppelin-iv/
[xv] Both the Woman of the Snow and the Snow Woman are named Yuki – but who would expect Robin Hood to switch names with every new adaptation of his folk story?
[xvi] The Kwaidan segment (1964) appears more audacious in this way than The Snow Woman four years later. Surprisingly, both films were originally released under Japan’s ‘G’ rating (General Audiences), equivalent to a U certificate in the UK.
[xvii] The Snow Woman bears only one child as opposed to The Woman of the Snow’s three. In both cases it is the presence of a child or children which prevents the snow women from carrying out their promise to kill their husbands for “betraying” her secret. As they only reveal it to her, the severing of their happy lives together as well as the potential deaths involved, seems a shade severe as punishment – but I suppose marriages between mortal and supernatural beings have to end somewhere . . .
[xviii] To consider the implications of inversion in religious terms is probably fanciful as well as complex. On the one hand there is Peter requesting to be hung (crucified) upside down because he felt unworthy to die in the same way as Jesus. On the other, the inverted cross is linked to being in league with Satan. But Christianity’s influence in feudal Japan has been described as profound: japan-kyushu-tourist.com/history-of-japanese-christianity-2/
[xix] The odd thing about the tone of this encounter is that one can’t be sure it is entirely friendly. As the washerwomen all laugh at the end, are they being sarcastic to a degree? Or do they have some sense of division arising from a buried instinct that Yuki is not quite of the world. Yuki’s return comments could also be seen as partially ironic.
[xx] Akira Ifukube wrote the score for The Snow Woman. He and Toru Takemitsu – composer for Kwaidan – “stand as the two pillars of 20th-century Japanese classical and film music”. Both largely self-taught, the two were rivals and at times were very critical of each other: “Ifukube once famously proclaimed that “Music is not philosophy,” a direct jab at the highly conceptual, philosophical nature of Takemitsu’s avant-garde output”. “Takemitsu looked heavily toward Western modernism (Debussy, Messiaen, and John Cage) to create a style that balanced avant-garde abstraction with traditional Japanese instruments.” Quotes from Classical Music Forum.
[xxi] Informed of this far away, Lord Jito cares not a jot that the “old bag” has died, he is only feverish to find out about and entrap Yuki.
[xxii] Kyoto, centre of the Imperial Court, served as the capital of Japan from 794 until 1868.
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
David Dumouriez, Liverpool: erbacce-press, 90pps., £10
VADIM KAGAN finds a poet who is better than he pretends to be
The third poem in David Dumouriez’s collection is titled ‘POETRY IS WANK.’ It’s printed in capitals, runs two pages, and closes on the line “POETRY WILL NEVER NOT BE WANK.” Provocation or confession, it sets the terms for the book: eighty-odd pages from a poet who refuses, on the surface, to take poetry seriously, and who is, all the same, very good at it.
Talking to Skeletons ranges from English childhood to Istanbul, and the mixture is as eclectic as that suggests. There are elegies and satires, love poems, a walking tour of a childhood town, political rants, an ode to Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest, and a two-line poem about a curry. The voice is colloquial (sometimes too much so), sardonic, and almost religiously allergic to pretension. Rather than the elevated register, Dumouriez reaches for the pub, the bus stop, the snooker club. He is suspicious of anyone who takes themselves too seriously — himself included.
For me the collection’s finest moment is ‘51° 30′ N, 0° 25′ E,’ a long walking tour of a small English town that slowly turns into an elegy for a vanished self. Dumouriez takes us past polling stations, dog walks, rusted goalposts, a toyshop run by a Polish man, a church where he and a friend once tried to summon a thunderbolt by swearing at the threshold. The imagery is specific and unhurried: “Another postbox. Focal point back then. / Not sure now.” The accumulation of observed detail makes the place feel at once ordinary and irreplaceable. Memory, class and mortality converge without any of them being announced. And somehow the combination works.
‘Reading Kipling by Candlelight’ is one of the more personal poems in the book, and the one I found easiest to climb inside. Set during the 1999 Istanbul earthquake, it follows the speaker through a night of confusion. He mistakes the tremor for a burglar, goes back to sleep while the parks fill with frightened residents, and only in the morning grasps the scale of what he slept through. It’s funny and quietly unsettling at once. Dumouriez has an instinct for the exact detail that lifts an anecdote into something more: “Myself and one old woman, two floors up, / remained at home. My flaws you’ll find described. / As for her, perhaps she’d given up on life.” That last line does something the earlier stanzas don’t prepare you for. Death has entered what had been, up to that point, largely a comic story. And then life shrugs and moves on.
Talking to Skeletons is at its strongest when the humor and the grief run in parallel. ‘An Anglican Event’ opens with “My mother lies before us in a box, / to put it blunt,” and proceeds to take a funeral apart with deadpan precision: the vicar who “styles himself as ‘Father Tim,’” the embarrassed congregants working through hymns they haven’t sung since school, the curtain that makes it real. ‘Ex of England’ pulls off something similar with a grandfather’s hoarded possessions and an unidentified Victorian portrait heading for a bonfire. The joke in these poems does not push the grief aside; it comes out of the same material.
Dumouriez is most interesting when he runs into something that resists him: a death, a memory, a place, the stubborn survival of affection. When the sardonic voice has something to push against, the friction produces complexity. He is less interesting when he already knows what he thinks before the poem starts.
The smaller provocations don’t all land. The opening of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43 (revised)’ – “How can I fuck thee? Let me count the ways” – is genuinely funny and technically competent parody. But some of the shorter satirical pieces (‘Addendum,’ ‘Laid Back, Laid Under,’ ‘The Poetry is in the Potty’) read more like social-media wit than poems. Set beside ‘51° 30′ N, 0° 25′ E’ and ‘Reading Kipling,’ they sound a dissonant note. Dumouriez knows the difference between a poem and a punchline. He just prints the punchline anyway from time to time.
The unevenness points to a larger issue. Across the eighty-odd pages, subjects and attitudes recur – death, aging, literary pretension, cultural irritation – and a handful of the lighter pieces work against the stronger ones nearby rather than for them. A shorter book might have been a stronger one. That said, the excess is clearly a part of how Dumouriez writes, forever spotting something else that seems to want a joke or an elegy.
I come to the book as a poet who works mainly in formal verse and in two languages – about as far from Dumouriez’s aesthetic as one can reasonably get. What I hadn’t expected was how little the distance ended up mattering. Talking to Skeletons isn’t really asking to be identified with; it’s asking for a reader willing to be amused, provoked, and every so often caught off guard – the anecdote that opens onto mortality, the joke that turns without warning into grief.
Which is also, I think, why the opening declaration eventually defeats itself. For all the mockery of poetry and poets and gatekeepers (and his own reasons for writing), Dumouriez’s best poems rely on the one thing “POETRY IS WANK” pretends to distrust: the idea that arranging words carefully might preserve something that would otherwise vanish. That a poet who opens with “POETRY IS WANK” also writes “51° 30′ N, 0° 25′ E” is, in the end, the strongest argument against his own thesis.
VADIM KAGAN writes poetry and prose in English and Russian. His work ranges from metered verse rooted in Russian and English traditions to contemporary free verse inspired by current events. His poems have been published in The Lyric, Founders Favorites, The Road Not Taken and the Ink Blots collections, and his poem ‘How Often’ was featured in the Maryland Bard Review 2025. He lives in Bethesda, MD, where he runs an AI company
