Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben

A Z-A of film: Yellow Sky

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN revisits Yellow Sky, 1948, directed by William A. Wellman

Both the triumphant and then jolly music of Yellow Sky[i], with its flippant echo of Oh! Susanna[ii] are a complete contradiction to the overall mood of the film. Whatever your definition of noir, Yellow Sky comes stylistically and psychologically close until the end. Purely noir[iii] Westerns that also have negative endings are very rare. Wellman’s later, colour Western, Track of the Cat (1954) starring that fatalistic ‘Tsar of Noir’, Robert Mitchum[iv], though regularly considered one of the bleakest of Westerns, scrapes some hope at the end – albeit not for Mitchum.

Despite being known as “Wild Bill” for his confrontational personality, womanising and World War 1 exploits as a fighter pilot, Yellow Sky’s director, William A. Wellman[v], is not a household name. A hard-working, cross-genre versatility, valuing story over distinctive personal signature, has limited easy categorisation. Obviously, I didn’t know the man . . . and whenever fashions change, biographical accounts (and lots more besides) habitually shift emphasis to be in tune with them . . . who can you trust?

The frivolous banjo of Oh! Susanna is almost withering on Yellow Sky’s soundtrack as a headline spells out: The West – 1867. When the film was released on Christmas Eve, December 1948, I expect US cinemagoers would have realised the date’s significance. Not having studied American history at school, I needed to hear the characters’ backstories to discover that the American Civil War[vi] is not long over. This setting in time (echoed roughly by the gap between the end of World War 2 and the film’s release) must be intended to partly justify, or at least explain, the wild, egotistical and reckless behaviour likely to occur on the margins of traumatised civilizations.

After the titles conclude, the stock opening music of blaring victory and light-heartedness hits a streak of menace which declines into a thunder-clap over a sunny marshland area. If opening night audiences were looking forward to Christmas, they should postpone such thoughts!

A group of seven weary-looking men, their horses splashing onward in single file, ride slowly across the screen. We are only a minute and 40 seconds into the film – including logos, titles and a fine series[vii] of sketches of ghost towns and mine ruins – and the mood, having swung all over the compass, settles here with the kind of grim certainty one associates with either stoicism or desperation. Yet the landscape looks lushly verdant, flowery and appealing before the youngest of the group spots a skull with an arrow right through it.

“Prospector.” States a man who transmits an air of authority. Since he is portrayed by Gregory Peck, we imagine that if at times he must be brutal, he will usually be fair.

“Skinny little fella. Them bones ain’t hardly as big as my little finger,” opines the portly Walrus (Charles Kemper, who had been a foil to Danny Kaye early in his career and was often to provide an element of comic relief; in Yellow Sky it is faint). Picking the powerful arrow from the two huge holes it has punched in the skull, the youthful Bull Run (Robert Arthur) takes it to the probable leader, who regards its still pristine shaft. With the possibility of vengeful or “crazy Indians” adding to the landscape’s threat, the group survey their immediate surroundings. Dude – played by Richard Widmark, seems to know the area well and starts to lay it out (00:02:48): “up north there are lots of canyons and draws . . . if you know which ones are open.” Intrigued by what a “draw” might be – does it draw you in and then prove to be a fatal dead end? – I discovered a whole chain of words[viii] which construct a hierarchy of depressions and ravines, descending into canyons. Draws are the least significant. Draws drain into arroyos, which drain into coulees, which drain into canyons. As with so many words and word origins this is both fascinating and yet disappointing – disappointing that one imagines additional mysterious meanings. But aren’t such extra implications, to some extent, what poetry and music and the visual arts rely on? How is it that great black and white photography can often suggest more depth, even more colour than colour – can look more real than the reality of colour?

Dude continues to summarise the area’s variety. I’m not sure if such environmental diversity actually exists in such close proximity to Death Valley[ix] – with fertile looking marshes, killing salt flats, canyons, hills, mountains, and a dusty desert town all within a few miles’ radius . . . but if it does, take me there and there I’ll happily live!

Of the salt flats “down south” at 00:03:00, (Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth[x]) Dude chuckles “even a rattlesnake couldn’t get across em”. Is Dude referring to the reptile or to the memorable psychopath, Tommy Udo[xi], who he portrayed so effectively the year before Yellow Sky was releasedin Kiss of Death, (1947), almost stealing the film with his insane intensified chuckle – a chuckle he only slightly revives once (at 00:37:47) in Yellow Sky.

Eventually, in a town saloon, reviving themselves with a drink, the band encounter an extraordinary painting[xii]. A partly naïve, partly delirious, painting. Albert Pinkham Rider[xiii] crossed with Chagall[xiv]. Pale Death on a dark horse![xv]. This large image behind the bar fixates them all.

Lengthy (John Russell) whose awestruck lascivious comment at 00:03:57, harvests lust from the silence and then amusement: “I wonder if she’s got any plans after she gets through ridin’ that horse?” is reprised with more words but less universal staring at 00:05:29 – the camera closer to an image now about 50% larger. The statuesque woman appears to be tied to the rearing horse yet has the posture of someone reclining calmly on a sun lounger. The image is surreal and haunting – and perhaps intended to be subjective? Are the men all seeing it differently? She is not depicted as a victim. Does the horse represent the spirit of the woman? A woman as beyond the pale as Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) in Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Lengthy wouldn’t stand a chance!

“Yes sir, I sure would like to know what she plans to do after she gets
through ridin’ that horse?” 00:05:29

The hold up (00:05:52) shoot up and escape is all over in less than a minute and by 00:07:52, chased by the cavalry out into a rocky wilderness among amazing tooth-shaped rocks towards the salt flats, they have lost their rear lookout rider. The cavalry captain calls a halt to the chase knowing the gang aren’t likely to survive crossing the sink of Death Valley: “Let ‘em go! Save us the trouble of hanging ‘em!”  (00:08:30)

As Stretch divides the loot, the gang appear on the verge of fragmenting, though it’s hard to imagine they were ever a very cohesive unit. Dude, not caring personally about Jed being shot by the cavalry, is superstitiously fearful that the number of gang members no longer adds up to seven (00:09:21): “This desert’s a mighty unlucky place. A man needs all the odds he can get.” Several of them know it’s crazy not to turn back, “It’s a good 70 miles across this sink, maybe more!”, protests Lengthy, yet Stretch (at 00:09:38) asserts “it’s just a place, a place can be crossed.” At a horse walking speed of four miles an hour it would take 17 and a half hours to cover 70 miles. Wouldn’t travelling by night have been a good idea? Do most cinematic cowboys lack common sense? But since there is no shade to be had, maybe it’s better just to get going? In the end, even Dude, who was thinking of pulling back with the dark, follows Stretch and the gang out into the whiteout heat of the sink.

At minus 86 metres below sea level (or minus 282 feet) the Badwater Basin is one of the lowest places on earth as well as one of the hottest. As the band become dots in the whiteness, the scene conveys the idea that Stretch, like Captain Ahab (whose obssession with Moby Dick – the White Whale – Gregory Peck was to portray with festering intensity in 1956) is resolute and tenacious, yet also perhaps, recklessly self-destructive. At 00:12:16 the crazed crust of salt becomes soft and the horses begin to sink and stumble, obliging the men to walk. The film expertly gives an epic sense of this ordeal, of the heat and dessication, of wrong decisions – the folly of Walrus having filled his canteen with whiskey, the mistake of sleeping at night. To cut short a midnight fight between Walrus and Bull Run, when the former tries to drink from the latter’s water canteen, Stretch hurls a large chunk of salt at Walrus’s head (00:13:57). Stretch’s authority is no longer in doubt – as neither is his compassion the following day when he wets his horse’s mouth with valuable water from his canteen (00:15:15). This could be viewed as enlightened self-interest, except that he follows up by doing the same for Walrus’s horse. “Kinda noble, aren’t ya?” sneers Dude (00:15:45) to which Stretch replies “A horse’s a useful animal, no use letting him suffer just because he belongs to a jackass”. The hostility between the two men increases from here on, with Dude less ironically detached from the possibility of taking charge – although at this juncture, he appears to believe they are all doomed. When Lengthy shoots a lizard (00:16:31), basically for looking chipper and able to survive when he probably won’t. Half Pint (Henry Morgan) protests: “he wasn’t doing you no hurt”. The sink however, has no truck with compassion: it is Half Pint’s horse that soon collapses in sand dunes and has to be shot (00:18:19).

After almost ten minutes (a long time, especially in 1940s cinematic terms) at 00:18:47, Stretch, suspecting mirage, spots what appears to be salvation in the form of a distant town. Hope to cracked lips and dried out voices. They struggle on…to find the town of the title: Yellow Sky. A dehydrated ghost town. Dead. Crumpling up all over the steps of a collapsing saloon, the gang don’t have the energy or sense to even get out of the sun, resigned to becoming skeletons. Then there is the faint click of a rifle hammer being cocked. At 21 minutes, Mike (Anne Baxter, hilariously described in IMDb as a “gun toting tomboy”) at last appears:

Yellow Sky at 00:21.08 and the first appearance of ‘Mike’

If I could have it to myself – or better still, share it with Anne Baxter – Yellow Sky is another place I wouldn’t mind living. The rock formations around are superb and the dilapidation aesthetically surpasses Heysham and Morecambe, without people to complicate it![xvi]

In his wonderfully terse, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky[xvii], John Sayles may not overstate Anne Baxter’s impact but does exaggerate what she’s wearing: “tight jeans and a 50s bra that could put your eye out”. The high-contrast noir-etched photography of Baxter is stunning. Without doubt, apart from settings and landscapes, Baxter is the best thing about Yellow Sky, but although frowningly beautiful, its her spirit and character that most impress.

I’ve long had a thing about Anne Baxter, especially in earlier films such as Swamp Water[xviii] (1941) before fashion styled her hair in that increasingly fixed, bouffant power-perm manner which I can no longer bear to see because it unfailingly reminds me of the night and daymare that was Margaret Thatcher![xix] You can see this style creeping in by the time of another of my old screen favourites: 1958’s Chase a Crooked Shadow – although realistically, even in much earlier films, the secure Forties hairstyles aren’t so very different. Perhaps it is her wilder character in both Swamp Water and Yellow Sky that is so appealing?

Where matte[xx] shots are interposed into genuine landscape is often hard to tell when watching films in a relaxed way, but the solid ghost town of Yellow Sky, “fastest growing town in the territory” – its appearance and atmosphere – are entirely convincing. Apparently, the filmmakers reused and partly rebuilt or wrecked an old set known as “Last Outpost” in the Alabama Hills[xxi] just to the west of Lone Pine[xxii]. A hundred miles east, the salt flats and desert scenes were shot mostly in the Death Valley National Park[xxiii] with actors and crew staying at the evocatively named Furnace Creek.

Before the Thatcher-esque look of later years – a colorized, glammed-up publicity shot for Yellow Sky

At 00:21:54 Mike tells the exhausted gang where to find the spring “up behind those big rocks, at the head of the street”, suspiciously tracking them, rifle in hand. Later, at 00:23:47 she appears dominantly on a boulder above them, regretting their arrival, poised as they gulp and wallow in the pool.

It has often been repeated that Yellow Sky is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest,[xxiv] and you can see certain obvious parallels: desert = sea, Stretch/Peck = Ferdinand, Grandpa = Prospero and Mike/Anne Baxter = Miranda . . . but if so, it’s a still looser adaptation than Forbidden Planet (1956), and Mike clearly has no wonderstruck admiration for Stretch:  Miranda in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest: “I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble”.

If I had money for every film ‘loosely based’ on Shakespeare (the seventh art tirelessly in quest of respectability?) I would not be poor! In any case, the true value of Shakespeare, is the poetry, not the plots – most of which The Bard lifted from earlier sources. Once the description ‘loosely based’ is applied, most films would begin to resemble one (or several) of the seven – 36 basic plots[xxv] available. One might just as well say that Yellow Sky is ‘loosely based’ on the shipwreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda in 1609[xxvi]!

No, Mike is not enraptured by this new humanity and if she were less defensive when the now hydrated Stretch first visits her house (00:24:25), could she have falsely conveyed that she was hiding nothing other than herself? With water, food and rest, the gang are bound to remember that weird painting in the saloon and revive their other animal instincts.

At 00:25:05, Mike tells Stretch that “it ‘aint far to Alkali, you could make it easy, if you try”. Alkali is a real place[xxvii] albeit a ghost town now[xxviii] in the inappropriately named Esmerelda County. Or perhaps the name only seems inappropriate because owing to one of those carelessly poetic lateral slips, it makes me think of emerald green grass . . . rather than sand, salt and emeralds[xxix]?

Nevada ghost town – Alkali Springs

I don’t want to venture into the political incorrectness of Stretch and his gang’s attitude towards the Apache[xxx] (though not only was Mike raised “with Apaches”, Grandpa praises them (00:26:11) as “fine people, if you can understand them”) or their lust or chivalry (the latter particularly in Bull Run’s case) regarding Mike/Constance Mae, or the necessity for a 1948 production to reinforce gender stereotypes for its mainstream coda (more on that later). Some of these attitudes are obviously toxic, some just amusingly or irritatingly of their time. Yes, it was inevitable that Mike and Stretch would ‘fall in love’ and probably both of them subconsciously feel this from the first moment they see each other – or so runs the timeless loathing-to-loving story convention, as well as the popular romantic notion. Mike tries to resist, whereas Stretch violently relaxes (!) into it, ceasing to sufficiently lead or control his gang and breaking his own rule to “stay away from those people!” (00:29:03). Eventually, stung by Mike telling him he smells bad (00:33:19), he even washes and shaves.

Mike with a smoothed-out Stretch!

Stretch looks much less appealing once shaved . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself and far ahead of the plot since it is Dude who dolls himself up first, just before Mike first comes to the spring for water (00:27:47). I hope she is going to boil that water before use after the mob has all slurped and wallowed in it! Or maybe, it’s just that I feel like washing after the battery of sexist comments and leering – all of which Mike takes in her stride. Of this and more violent scenes, no less than the BFI seems to have become over-compliantly politically correct[xxxi] proposing to demote a film made in 1948 for not having the worthwhile but somewhat idealised values of 2026. However enlightened we think we are 78 years later, such situations have not gone away. In watered-down fashion they happen in Heysham and Morecambe every day and my 16-year-old daughter prefers not to walk on the prom alone.

With dozens of wrecked buildings to choose from, why do the gang all “bunk down” in the saloon (00:29:50) – I’d chose a building as far away from the others as possible. The characters that “amount to nuthin’ nohow” (to quote Lengthy) seem able to sleep through Walrus snoring like a “wounded buffalo”, but Lengthy is driven outside – to find Stretch contemplating on the veranda of the ruined saloon. After needling Stretch about the whereabouts of Dude he goes back inside.

Is Stretch really looking for Dude, as he claims, when having moved towards the tenebrous homestead Mike emerges from the shadows to challenge him at 00:31:58? Tackling her by surprise, they fight, she head butts him, he does it back harder and forces a kiss on her, before desisting. This is where she tells him twice that he smells, and then taking careful aim, shoots him across the scalp (00:33:39). In another excellent post from 2008[xxxii], the writer highlights the scene which follows with Mike trying to explain to Grandpa why she shot Stretch:

“He made me feel . . . I don’t know.” But she does know. Stretch has made her feel like a woman for the first time in her life. Wellman then cuts to Mike’s room, in which      a picture of an elegantly dressed lady is pinned onto her wall. Seeing it fills her with disgust and causes Mike to angrily tear it into pieces. It’s a great moment of self-loathing – she hates herself for feeling something that she’s been trying so hard to suppress. Although having such a picture on her wall in the first-place clues us into the fact that Mike longs to be as pretty as any other woman out there. In that one short scene, we sense Mike’s vulnerability for the first time.”

More specific than the tragic/Romantic pop songs that are a chart constant, the romances of old films still need last only half an hour or so of screen time – this is why they can be so haunting. Novels and tedious soaps and serials often do them to death. The best romance stories are about potential and hope, not dull, chronological reality. Being fundamentally frustrating, the human condition (in its customary form) cannot fulfil our yearnings for long – yet almost everyone who refuses to let the human state get them down, clings to hopes we project from imagination. Hence good love stories (and happy endings) have a general appeal even if many who have experienced the long-term reality of romantic love, try to reject such unreliable optimism. Romantic love may linger as familiarity and companionship, even flourish and create a sense of safety for decades, but are its deepest feelings of connection and joint projection, always liable to return to being about the other or the elsewhere? To a degree, this could be why I have abstracted my own deepest feelings into landscapes, atmospheres and the most searching art – which doesn’t mean that I can resist a wistful attraction to actresses[xxxiii] usually long dead. In great films none of the characters or landscapes are ever dead!

Bathing his scalp at the spring, Stretch encounters Dude. Could they have once been friends? Could they become friends? Not in Yellow Sky – this, distinctively, is one of its noir aspects. Stretch’s romantic inclinations have prevented him from deducing what Dude has had a hunch about all along – the presence of gold! Dude is greedy for gold and has no interest in romance. He tells Stretch his history and it’s the thought of his betraying ex-woman being made to suffer, that briefly revives Widmark’s insane chuckle from 1947’s Kiss of Death (00:37:47)[xxxiv]: “she lit out with a fella who ended up beating her”.

Above the ghost town the spring looks idyllic – as if the gang are enjoying a picnic. 00:26:57

Shattered the showershields, roofs ruined,

age under-ate them.

                                            And the wielders & wrights?

Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone,

fast in gravesgrasp while fifty fathers

and sons have passed.[xxxv]

From first encountering the Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin, as a teenager,the idea of the ghost town, or of ghost areas – such as the ex-lead-mining moors of Northumberland upon which we lived for seven years – may be even more fascinating than the allure of actresses who, while society survives, will never die. Ghost towns represent the flip side to potential, and up to a point, their history becomes fixed in time. Tyneham[xxxvi] in Dorset was one such place explored when we lived in the southwest of England. Appropriated as a training ground for D-Day in 1943, it was never returned to its inhabitants. Mardale in Cumbria[xxxvii] was another valley we knew well, though we never knew its villages, Mardale Green and Measand, only the reservoir which gradually drowned them from the late 1930s. By contrast, the ghost towns of the desert states of Nevada and California largely record a failure to survive at the periphery. Spelling out tales of greed, aspiration or over-ambition, they are gradually destroyed by extreme temperatures and the wind.

Shattered stable in a court of rocks. 00:41:09

Stretch makes no attempt to understand or appease Dude (00:38:16). The increased antagonism between them begins the central section, though at first, Stretch is more interested in smartening himself up. The gang meet to decide on a course of action having voted Dude as new leader (00:41:53). Stretch has no regard for democracy, but before a direct showdown, Mike takes the initiative from the boulders above – with her rifle. The existence of gold can no longer be doubted.

White flag or not, Mike has Stretch in the barrel of her gun – 00:45.09

This was probably not the first time such an idea was used in a film. Since the helical grooving[xxxviii] is clearly shown, was it actually shot through a larger diameter gun barrel or was this a special effect added in post-production?

If you have read this far without knowing Yellow Sky at all, I will leave all the nuances and twists of fate of the film’s second half to your imagination and jump to the perhaps unjustly despised coda which opens at 01:34:37. For long sections of its often nocturnal second half, Yellow Sky looks like a noir, but both the romantic elements and the reformation of Stretch to “James Dawson”, run counter to this. Stretch starts his biography by telling Mike and Grandpa (01:04:42) that “I come from good people. When I give my word, I mean it”.

Long prefaced by Grandpa’s compassion (01:08:02): “Guess the wars upset a lot of those boys and set them off on the wrong foot,” the coda is not just happy but quite comic and begins with the chagrined, contrite surviving bandits returning the stolen money to the bank. As if all crime could be so simply undone!

At 01:37:00 as the three survivors gallop across a beautiful flower-filled water-meadow for a rendezvous with Grandpa and Mike, the film reverts to its framing triumphalism and lightness. However, rather than the exploratory, adventurousness of the opening, the ending quickly becomes jubilant.

Do I want to be a woman some of the time? Can I do this? . . . 01:37:53 

At 01:37:30 Stretch presents Mike with the hat bought from the head of an only temporarily affronted lady at the bank. This might all be “sappy” and “unbelievable”[xxxix], but personally, I enjoy it. Even if it was a studio imposition, it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, not worth getting wound up about[xl]. I don’t believe Mike will change because of it.

. . . Yes! At least for a while   01.38.00

Mike dares herself and accepts the hat. Love is in the air, let’s end quickly before the wedding!

© Lawrence Freiesleben, 2026

Notes

[i] Available on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=XoSVGw_Ex-Q

[ii]  See songofamerica.net/song/oh-susanna/

[iii] In this outstanding piece by Stark Holborn, starkholborn.com/2020/01/23/review-yellow-sky-           1948/ he claims Yellow Sky as a precursor to the “Acid Western” sub-genre: “Acids, if you haven’t come across them before, are known, and named, for their counterculture tendencies; the desire to kick the western away from the glowy sunset of manifest destiny and into the dark corners of the soul.” 

[iv]  This article by Imogen Sara Smith brightlightsfilm.com/past-sunset-noir-in-the-west/ is so good on Bob Mitchum and others and on Pursued (1947), that I might abandon all future hopes of writing about that particular film!

[v] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Wellman

[vi] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

[vii] Actually, there are only four different sketches; the dissolves between title changes create      the impression of more.

[viii] youtube.com/watch?v=noxTiJNgmxk  landscape features explained by Randy Newberg

[ix] A location coincidentally carried over from Z’s film in this Z-A: Zabriskie Point (1970). See A Z-A of films: Zabriskie Point – The Brazen Head

[x] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_on_Earth

[xi] crimereads.com/tommy-udo-film-noirs-greatest-homme-fatal/

[xii] I cannot find out who painted this. Presumably an artist employed by the film studio? If Sherlock Holmes were alive now, we need a monograph on bizarre portraits and paintings of old Hollywood A and B pictures – though I’m not sure it would be much help in the field of crime solving. When I’d almost reached the end of this essay, I encountered yet another wonderful post about Yellow Sky jeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ which highlighted the similarities between the scene with the strange painting behind the bar and the opening of Wellman’s earlier film, The Ox-bow Incident (1943). The painting in Ox-Bow is not nearly so strange, but Henry Fonda’s comment “that guy’s awful slow getting’ there” sets off an interesting dialogue exchange.

[xiii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pinkham_Ryder

[xiv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall

[xv]  clevelandart.org/art/1928.8  The Racetrack or Death on a Pale Horse  c. 1896–1908

[xvi] Or perhaps not! According to jeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ “In         temperatures topping 120°, with Gila monsters and scorpions everywhere, it wasn’t a comfortable set for the actors.”

[xvii] See: youtube.com/watch?v=SrbtgJTe6ok  00:01:14

[xviii] The first of Jean Renoir’s five films made in Hollywood during the Second World War was produced by 20th Century Fox. Categorised by the Nazis as “Cinematic Public Enemy Number One” Renoir’s left-wing anti-fascist and anti-war stance gave him no choice but to flee.

[xix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher  Whom I reference in the hope that time can be reversed and she and her dire legacy can be exorcised from history!

[xx]            thepropgallery.com/painting-in-pictures-the-lost-art-of-the-matte-shot

[xxi]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_Hills – an area famous for its rock shapes and widescreen vistas of the Sierra Nevada  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Nevada

[xxii]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Pine,_California See also:  lonepinechamber.org/sightseeing-in-the-lone-pine-area/movies-filming-in-the-lone-pine-area  In the centre of the movie map at the end of this page you can see ‘Yellow Sky’ (Gregory Peck)

[xxiii]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_National_Park

[xxiv] Alex Good goes into this more carefully in another outstanding post on Yellow Sky:    alexonfilm.com/2022/01/25/yellow-sky-1948/

[xxv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots ; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations

[xxvi]  https://www.rsc.org.uk/news/archive/the-ship-that-inspired-shakespeare

[xxvii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkali,_Nevada

[xxviii] Or is it? nvtami.com/2021/05/17/alkali-spring-nevada/

[xxix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esmeralda_County,_Nevada  “Esmeralda is the Spanish and Portuguese word for “emerald”. An early California miner from San Jose, James Manning Cory, named the Esmeralda Mining District after Esmeralda the Romani dancer from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”

[xxx]  Ibid, from Alex Good’s post: “At one point I was hoping for the return of the Apache at the end in the role of the cavalry, saving Stretch and Mike and Grandpa from Dude and the gang. That, however, would have been a turn of the screw too far in 1948.”

[xxxi]  bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films see also, reference xxxv below. It is notable that after Yellow Sky, Anne Baxter’s very next film, You’re My Everything (1949), a slight, cringy and often irritating musical drama, insidiously reinforces sexist attitudes as well as racism – Dan Dailey even blacking up for one film-within-the-film. Rightly unacceptable now, this was standard at the time. Unlike the constant threat of the lustful men (a gang of criminal roaming men would be no different nowadays) towards Mike in Yellow Sky, this casual racism is not intrinsic to the contrast, tension or plot. An amusing aspect of You’re My Everything however, are the silent film take-offs – one entitled Flaming Flappers – acted out in believable, satirical fashion by Baxter, whose character is supposedly “patterned” on Clara Bow. She is certainly utterly different to Mike!

[xxxii] theroadshowversion.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/to-save-and-be-saved-yellow-sky-1948/ 

[xxxiii]  It would never have occurred to me to think of an actress as being in any way inferior to an actor. See: theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/sep/25/readers-editor-actor-or-actress

[xxxiv]         Ibid: crimereads.com/tommy-udo-film-noirs-greatest-homme-fatal/

[xxxv]  The Ruin, lines 8-13, translation by Michael Alexander, from The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics, first published in 1966, is thought likely to be about Aquae Sulis (Bath).

[xxxvi]         virtual-swanage.co.uk/things-to-do/towns-and-villages/tyneham

[xxxvii]         lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/haweswater-and-the-lost-kingdom-of-mardale/

[xxxviii]  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling The wonderful post about Yellow Sky, encountered when I’d    almost reached the end of this essay, jeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ said exactly what I was going to suggest: that it “must have inspired the people who did the credits for the James Bond movies.”

[xxxix]  In his splendidly terse, to-the-point, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky, John Sayles hates its possibly studio-required end: youtube.com/watch?v=SrbtgJTe6ok saying at 00:01:36 “If I ruled the world, I’d cut the sappy, unbelievable coda off the movie!” But I often like abrupt happy endings, unless they are so bad they make you nauseous. They can be less tiring. I always feel tempted to rewrite bad endings. Every time I watch Out of the Past (1947), for example, I always want Bob Mitchum to survive even though that would defy one    of the rules I consider essential to true noir – a tragic conclusion.

In William A. Wellman: 10 essential films www.bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films the BFI also finds fault with the cheerful ending (and other things): “Were it not for some alarmingly dodgy sexual politics – from Gregory Peck’s assault on Anne Baxter to her final acquiescence (via a bonnet) to his idea of feminine norms – Yellow Sky might rank among Wellman’s best.” I fail to see why depicting things how they simply would have been, counts as “alarmingly dodgy sexual politics”. That is to apply modern attitudes to a film made 78 years ago. The hat incident may or may not have been a studio imposition, but it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, neurotic to be wound up about, and absurd that it should affect how we rank the film. We can deplore aspects of the past, but we can’t expect the past to fit in with our current fashions. Personally, I don’t believe Mike/Constance Mae will change all that much because of a silly hat and both Stretch and I would be disappointed if she did. But that’s why films end when they do. In ‘real life’ we are often likely to be disappointed. One of the major problems with long-form TV is that it never ends but merely staggers on into the desert.

Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben

A Z-A of films: Zabriskie Point

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN revisits Zabriskie Point, 1970, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

[Caution: plot is of minor concern, either to the filmmakers or the thoughts which follow]

Travelling backwards from the end of the alphabet, three other Z films initially clamoured their alternative directions: the Hammer-esque Dracula adaptation from Pakistan directed by Khwaja Sarfraz, Zinda Lash, 1967[i]; Jake Gyllenhaal in David Fincher’s Zodiac, 2007; and Z, directed by Costa-Gavras in 1969. As if glimpsed on signs or billboards during Zabriskie Point’s early flashing road-journey sequence (00:10:00 – 00:11:56), with its distorted rear-view mirror alternatives, the presence of these other films insisted, reminded, recurred and haunted . . . but eventually fell behind.

“Zabriskie Point lives on as Antonioni’s moody meditation about freedom curdling into emptiness” ends one concise and informative appreciation of the film online[ii], a reasonable, if skin-deep conclusion to an expert precis – for it has reached its principal concern: an article about fashion and style.

White Lund Industrial Estate, Morecambe, April 2022

How common is the assumption that all lead characters in films exist as centre points to be either identified with or rejected? Can such a generally reasonable idea apply to Zabriskie Point? Even if Antonioni and his collaborators had sought so conventional an objective, their sounds and images would have escaped. There are far more enlivening things to be found here.

Zabriskie Point at 00:11:01

Back to that first road-journey sequence scored to cacophonous noises and experimental music[iii]: all through the LA suburbs of exhilarating colours and forms amongst dusty wires, lampposts and warehouses, eventually to the stroboscopic verticals of Mexican fan palms towering above the vying traffic, Zabriskie Point’s vibrant overwhelm of colours and shapes here make a symphony from the tangible presence of a vanished world. This is common to films and television of the period: it’s there in John Boorman’s outstanding Point Blank (1967), Peter Bogdanovich’s notable debut, Targets (1968) and the rickety Raquel Welch vehicle, Flareup[iv] (1969). It’s there through much of the superior Rockford Files TV series of 1974-1980. It might seem incidental, but it’s rarely accidental. Filmmakers look for such backgrounds tirelessly. The difference is that Antonioni often made foregrounds of the background. Setting becomes as vital as character – and while this is also true of films such as, for example, Edward Scissorhands (1990), I Start Counting (1970) or Rear Window (1954), Antonioni did not limit himself to one or two distinctive places, he tried to use the whole wider landscape and ambience – occasionally allowing its significance to equal or exceed that of the human foreground. This was not a failure to fully realise the characters, nor was it carried out with only the intention of satirising the world depicted – even if that might be as far as some viewers care to look.

White Lund Industrial Estate, Morecambe, April 2022

To me, Antonioni’s viewpoint is metaphysical. In films such as L’Avventura (1960) this can feel remote. Watched from a “normal” human angle his films are often regarded as alienating. Yet whatever Antonioni’s personal views on faith or doubt, presence or absence, the films are almost bound to feel alienating if one struggles too hard to identify (positively or negatively) with the characters – which of course is precisely what, as spectators of TV and film, we are expected to do.

Zabriskie Point at 00:11:37

Heartbreakingly beautiful in retrospect, as with the London of Blow-Up[v](1966), the Los Angeles of Zabriskie Point may be sadly or safely gone, depending on your viewpoint. Delusional rationalisation – both economic and psychological – combined with the reckless notion of constant progress, have created a force towards a future which cannot curb either the blandness or destruction inherent in it. The inadvertent society marches on[vi].

White Lund Industrial Estate, Morecambe, April 2022

Vanished suburban and industrial backgrounds are like treasure and many artists in different media have richly enshrined and celebrated such visual and auditory fairground rides, but in Zabriskie Point’s first of many journeys – lasting less than two minutes of screen time – as well as throughout the film as a whole, this is more than a time machine visit by an acutely observant[vii] foreigner, it is a sociological and historical document, not just – in passing – for its period, but also for America’s distorted idea of itself . . . yet more relevant today under a dangerously unhinged president[viii]. How dismayed the radical students in the assembly for action at the beginning of Zabriskie Point (00:00:07 – 00:08.46) would be to discover, just how “pell-mell into fascism” (00:04:46) their country has fallen under Trump.

Amongst the joy and sadness, the hurtling traffic and bustle of vanished lives, in search of the overlaps when certain films or experiences strike some kind of well or mineshaft . . .

Aiming for the visionary / Instead, a lead mine has been drilled down inside my neck / to flooded levels I can’t keep clear. / Grid confined, primal force without bearings, craving the sky / Far from meadows or moors / Is there no choice but downward?[ix]…

Then, everything – all the fleeting side-thoughts and impressions triggered by Zabriskie Point, went calm as I remembered Leighton Buzzard sand quarries . . .

Leighton Buzzard Sand Quarries. Stock image: M O’Brien Group

Several illicit Sunday trips to Leighton Buzzard sand quarries in hot summers of the mid and late 70s, deposited vivid geological strata in my mind, a dream of deserts – or even distant planets which remains undimmed. This was both the surface and the inside of the land itself. Climbing over fences and sneaking down into cuttings and pits, following rusting rails alongside the severe blues of ponds and lakes, pushing the small mineral wagons along tracks we chose to believe abandoned, collecting sandstone rocks which were like red-ochre asteroid landscapes in miniature . . . This was one of those moments when a truer sense of priority emerges – to disregard time and the usual human goals. These moments are part of what Antonioni is trying to embody in Zabriskie Point.

Despite later, tamer visits with my children to the narrow-gauge railway (first opened in 1919) that had become a noticeable tourist attraction by the 1990s[x], the archetype was not dislodged. An unearthly place vastly expanded from its dimension in reality. Just how many landscape experiences, direct or second-hand, this archetype has helped intensify is impossible to calculate. Antonioni’s misunderstood Zabriskie Point (1970) is one of them, even though the titular Death Valley desert viewpoint, in yellows browns and whites has little in common with the vibrant reds and oranges of Leighton Buzzard. The temperate Bedfordshire location became a long-running family joke. Scenes in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ice Cold in Alex and Sea of Sand (both 1958)would all be met with “Look! Leighton Buzzard sand quarries!”  Zabriskie Point (1970) however, was not a family film and what Peter Bradshaw positively describes in The Guardian[xi] as a meeting between a radical student on the run and a “hippy chick” which leads to a “sexual epiphany, psychodramatised as an orgy” would not have gone down well, if indeed it was ever shown on T.V. before my sister and I left home.

In Antonioni’s last full-length feature film, Beyond the Clouds[xii], (1995) John Malkovich as ‘The Director’ serves – largely in voiceover – as the alter ego of Antonioni. Some of his thoughts are rhetorical, others enigmatically intriguing, if whimsically vague[xiii]. Near the beginning of the film comes this self-deprecating statement: “Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a philosopher. On the contrary, I’m someone who is profoundly attached to images.” [Does this rule out the philosophical impulse?]  “I only discovered reality when I began photographing it. Photographing and enlarging the surface of things that were around me. I tried to discover what was behind them. I’ve done nothing else in my career.” While it’s hardly true that Antonioni did “nothing else”, this element of exploration is undoubtably true of Zabriskie Point.

If alienation – intended to trigger observation and thought rather than emotional empathy – appears key to almost all mid-career Antonioni’s films, it follows that his characters often dispense with excessive . . . character. Many of them remain partially or severely blank – inscrutable to the point of being elsewhere. This is taken to a constructed extreme within the partial road movie, partial romance, partial thriller of The Passenger, (1975). As Locke, Jack Nicholson – one of the least camouflageable stars that ever grinned! – takes Antonioni’s concept and distancing literally: attempting to lose himself by exchanging identities with an acquaintance who dies unexpectedly in their shared shabby hotel on the edge of the Sahara in Chad.

Although they were not professionals and, in some ways, exist in the film on an attitudinal surface, Mark (Mark Frechette – virtually playing himself it would seem[xiv]) and Daria (Daria Halprin) remain increasingly memorable. Towards the end of the film, Mark is predictably martyred by the aggressive trigger-happy cops lurking at the airfield, cops too overcharged or dim to wait until he stops and gets out of the plane. Meanwhile, Daria becomes the projected soul or alternative hope of the film . . . at least in her final, satisfying, explosive daydream. This is a moment we are encouraged to identify with – and carries us with it even when it digresses from repeatedly destroying the building to a series of more abstract, increasingly impossible detonations – sky-blue backdropped[xv] interior spaces conjured from the ether, to blithely destroy consumerism’s unlimited contents, comforts and gadgets.

Blithe destruction at 01:48:02

The clash in so many ways (ideological, physical, temperamental) between Daria and her middle-aged boss, Lee, (good old Rod Taylor) is harsher than either of them seem to realise. Fiercely ambitious and materialistic, Lee seems to be a deliberately jarring, no-nonsense advocate from an older generation, a patient bull who has left Bodega Bay and The Birds (1963)[xvi] far behind. He seems stranded – as if at some point he set his Time Machine[xvii] for 1969, and abandoning it, has swapped his clothes in some trendy boutique for the uniform of a square!  

Sometimes, I have the feeling that the best films, indeed the best art, only appears to have faults. Eventually we realise that it’s the imperfections and the sections we can never explain or understand which create “perfection”. Experienced often enough, faults can become serendipities[xviii]. If this doesn’t happen, then it’s the underlying limitations which are revealed: those films which complete themselves in the watching and die; those too well-constructed novels or poems; the over-skilful or over-stylish paintings. Years ago – as well as wishing that Zabriskie Point had used all 23 minutes of The Grateful Dead’s, Dark Star[xix]  – I was unhappy with the main cast, now they seem ideal . . . just as Kim Novak’s woodenness in Vertigo (1958) has been widely reappraised[xx].

Having not seen it since 2017, would Zabriskie Point amount to less than the sum of its parts? Another problem with getting older is realising how not only individuals, but more-importantly, the human race, so often dismally fails to achieve what it could[xxi] – our cleverness progressively drained of wisdom, while the summits of art become rarer or more piffling. Also, fewer of the past’s claimed summits look as valid as they once did. The best of everything becomes increasingly elusive, hidden beyond the surface of reality or inside yourself. It is not wholly present in the art (if it ever was) but depends on what the individual’s experience enables them to apply – as Leighton Buzzard’s sand quarries helped me. It’s the interaction that counts, rather than any end product. As our cultural ability to appreciate any form of art declines – dulled or made intolerant in the film world by an over-indulgence of blockbuster or franchise trash (as mobile screen overuse is dimming the capability to concentrate on anything much longer than a moment) – so its past value becomes veiled or lost.

Hopefully, it’s not just on a personal level that Zabriskie Point contradicts this general decline. Although I must’ve seen the film six or seven times, almost everything is better than I remember – the characters more present in their ambiguity, the atmosphere vividly real. Instances of droll humour – such as the policeman writing Carl Marx when Mark states his name upon being arrested (00:16:43) occur quite often. The unforced satire of advertising and billboards showing family, is as clear as crystal, yet the irony is, at this point, forgiving. The same goes for the entire sequence (00:18:18 – 00:19:38) cross-cutting between the Sunny Dunes, Board of Directors, smoking or contemplating, and their absurd promotional film presenting desert development as an innocently offered chance for wealthy customers to receive what they’ve always wanted: “Why be caught up in the rat race of city life when you can enjoy life the Sunny Dunes way?” Emerald green tennis lawns beckon beneath red rocks[xxii]. “Drink fresh mountain water from oaken buckets” (00:18:36), “Breathe the unpolluted air of the high desert”. A grinning boy mannequin (00:18:43) who resembles, minus the glasses, that idealistic nerd, Joe 90[xxiii], armed with six-shooters and dreaming of outdrawing a quail or a mountain lion!

Even this fictional real-estate advertisement mocking the ersatz nature of modern consumerism – always more lavish and go-ahead in the US of A – seems forbearing. Perhaps Antonioni was trying hard not to believe that society as a whole could so pathetically fall into such sterile traps? Or that the ludicrous twisting of the idea of freedom fuelling this commercialisation, the corralling of the free spirit of the desert, would be obvious to all intelligent people? “Forge a life of your own, like the pioneers who molded [sic] the West” (00:18:54). Like some gross escalation of Metro-land’s[xxiv] fading echo of the Edwardian period (which from 1919 until the early 1930s, sold a pastoral dream situated in the fields and wooded hills north-west of London) the Sunny Dunes Corporation aims to conquer the desert itself.

At 00:19:39 an impressionistic travelling sequence interrupted by a rear-view mirror’s abstract oblong in space, comes into focus on Lee (Rod Taylor). A radio report records that the total number of US servicemen killed in Vietnam is nearing 50,000. Oblivious, Lee’s almost identical colleague (same clothes, same profile, same haircuts) reads a newspaper article noting that California now has seven “centimillionaires”.  An overlapping radio item moves to Mark’s house and his decision to go to the campus “to see for himself” (00:20:47). As he leaves in his battered truck, Lee and identikit colleague arrive at the Sunny Dunes office tower block. Meanwhile, Daria is escaping the city.

Daria drives into the desert at 00:23:13.

In the late 60s and into the 70s, Hollywood films briefly overlapped with searching art cinema[xxv]. Like other films of the period, Zabriskie Point is so complex and remarkably edited that subsequent mainstream cinema often tastes vacuous.

Fleeing the campus shootings of protester and police officer (00:29:24 – 39) Mark takes a bus to the “end of the line” – the suburb the driver announces, sounds like “Rockway and Kirby,” although no such place or intersection appears to exist. Attempting to cadge a sandwich “if I trusted you, I’d have to trust everybody in the whole world”, he later sits by an Official SMOG Inspection Station. Wandering towards a used car lot, a light aircraft drones over, leaving a billboard of family behind . . . Flags, more planes, a remembered airfield, the chance of escape . . .

Mark at 00:32:47

The flight from Los Angeles, leaving its traffic-spiraling cloverleaves and dreary grids behind to an excerpt of The Grateful Dead’s Dark Star (00:36.15 – 00:37:14) lowers the stress and melds into a helicopter sweep over Daria’s borrowed and well-weathered 1952 Buick to Pink Floyd’s Crumbling Land (00:37:25).

 Daria at 00:38:27

A brief story from toddler to youthful soldier is told as the camera begins a short pan across colourful knick-knacks (00:38:24) before Daria’s bar phone connects to Lee’s grey office paraphernalia. The bar from which she rings could be seen as pre-Lynchian, albeit in Wes Anderson palette, but remains distinctly real. The pending ghost town settlement outside is a wasteland outpost with little more than a gas station, short railway platform, a grain silo (or obese ICBM hiding in plain sight?) the remains of an outdoor dance deck[xxvi] and a gaggle of “emotionally sick” children – all boys – who later, unconvincingly set upon her. Slightly reminiscent of the killer dolls sequence in Barbarella[xxvii], she escapes easily enough, never meeting her friend “Jimmy”[xxviii].

Although Mark’s aerial escape was based on a real-life incident[xxix], the whole section of his unlikely meeting with Daria, raises questionable aspects of their backgrounds. As a revolutionary student says at the beginning (00:04:18): “That’s why black people are, like you say, in another bag.” For Daria and Mark, (although not for Mark Frechette in real life[xxx]) their antiestablishment stance is, comparatively, a lifestyle choice, even a “bourgeois individualism” (00:08:39). If only we could all choose “to get off the ground” (00:54:05) when we needed to. If only it were ecologically justifiable.

 Zabriskie Point at 00:56:17

To Daria the desert is peaceful, to Mark it’s dead (01:02:06). Daria’s idea about planting only good thoughts in people’s head (01:03:45 – 01:04:02) is a clear precursor to Gretchen’s IMG (Infant Memory Generators[xxxi]) in Donnie Darko (2001)[xxxii] but Mark is as sceptical about such an idea as Donnie and Gretchen’s science teacher is in Donnie Darko. Only good thoughts are important to Daria: 

              Daria: “That’s the point, nothing’s terrible!”

              Mark (ironically): “Far out.”

As for the “sexual epiphany, psychodramatised as an orgy[xxxiii]” Peter Bradshaw could be enjoying his exaggeration? I see this long scene (01:06:46 – 01:14:48) as archetypal or symbolic. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you never see Mark or Daria with anyone else, only cross-cut with other wigged and dressed-alike couples. To me it has an idealised people-through-time suggestion. Despite chiming with the counterculture and free-love attitudes of its day, it is more about kissing, choreography and sand play. It ends before the multiple couplings, sunburn and sex gets too serious. The kaleidoscopic crowd disappears leaving Mark and Daria alone and the idyll begins to dissolve when Mark reveals that he is thinking more about the desert than love (01:14:59). It’s finally shattered at 01:15:14 by the crass image of consumer tourism at its worst. A truck roamer-home with boat attached and a satirical family from some suburban hell or perhaps from Billy Bob’s Diner, Preston[xxxiv] take a stroll around the car park: “They should build a drive-in up here. They’d make a mint”. The screech of a plane timed with a left-panning zoom, (01:15:58 – 0 1:16:09) briefly implies that the despoilation of the world by unrestricted jet travel is already well underway.

Zabriskie Point could often be paused as a painting: sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract. The red toilets at 01:16:35, are an instance where Antonioni, with the instincts of both painter and storyteller, switches abruptly from a strong abstract visual primary to figurative human tension with the arrival of the cop. Many will remember the menacing cop who quizzes Marion in Psycho (1960) – hilariously echoed, (along with Kiss Me Deadly, 1956), by Alex Cox in Repo Man[xxxv] 1984. Yet this cop is not so bad after all (01:18:08) and with the influence of Daria – a fairly practical and sensible “hippy chick” – you wonder if things can be made right?

Jumping on to 01:28:18, as Mark nears the airfield where the police cars lie in wait, I have that feeling common towards films watched and admired before, of hoping the ending will be different[xxxvi]. If Mark had not phoned his friend at 00:31:25, would he have stayed in Los Angeles? If the sandwich man had trusted him (00:31:58) would his intuition about human nature have shifted? At 01:32:49, Daria hears the news of his death – effectively an execution without trial – on her car radio. She hesitates, but drives on.

Zabriskie Point at 01.35.00

The road junction at 01:35:00 is worthy of a Graham Sutherland[xxxvii] composition. But for the grace of climate, so the bucolic hay fields of West Wales pictured below, might become the desiccated, be-cactused view shown in Zabriskie Point – in which the treacherous wilderness which encircles earlier Westerns such as Yellow Sky (1948), are now laughably ‘controlled’ by roads. Such threads of tarmac are there and yet not there. Sutherland frequently employed lanes in a similar manner, perhaps unconsciously, as more than a structural device, in an attempt to control the primeval, erupting from the past?

Carn Llidi, north of St. David’s, Pembrokeshire, 24 July 2025

The highly skilled but constricting etching techniques of Sutherland’s early years, were shattered, almost it seems against his will, by his discovery of Pembrokeshire in 1934. What exploded upon him in West Wales, rather than echoing the softer bucolic reality Romantically idealised by Samuel Palmer[xxxviii] – an antecedent he revered – could often be as unsettlingly prehistoric as the desert locations in Zabriskie Point[xxxix]:

Welsh Landscape with Roads by Graham Sutherland (1936)

But while the Sunny Dunes Corporation wishes to suppress the desert, Sutherland knew he could not contain the time fracture which perhaps derailed his nature in Wales[xl]. What is the suggestion of the human figure in Welsh Landscape with Roads (1936) fleeing from or to? Is it a kind of messenger? A Hermes running from history, trying to reach the present? As Daria drives through the desert landscape, there is often a sense of time fracture, as if she crosses both a distant primordial landscape, the near past of the black and white Western, and the approaching future of the colonial crescents and closes projected by the Sunny Dales Corporation – which will only ever float upon the surface of the land. I suspect it was such a fracturing (or dismissal) of time which first struck me as a child at Leighton Buzzard sand quarries.

Back in Arizona, Daria crosses the junction and continues to the heat-struck modernist mansion, visually and psychologically cooled by artificial waterfall and swimming pool and nestled into a collection of huge boulders, as a desert overlook. Despite the human forcing required to live in such places, the landscapes themselves remain beautiful.

The Boulder Reign residence[xli] at Carefree, Arizona, was the pioneer for a real-life Sunny Dunes[xlii]. Here, relaxing by a pool (01:36:14), are housewives slightly more real than the dummies featured in the promotional film. Having parked her car aslant two spaces, as if she knows she will not be staying or as mute protest, Daria passes behind the women without being noticed, as if she is invisible, or taken for one of the servants[xliii] – who appear to be women of Native American descent . . . this Sunny Dunes acquisition being one of the final nails in the coffin of their dispossession. Inside the shadow of the red rocks[xliv], Daria pauses, then painfully reflects (01:37:02), embracing water and rock, almost taking sustenance from them, before finding the will to continue, half-wet, through the boulder corridor.

Zabriskie Point at 01:37:44

As often in Antonioni, ellipses can be long and without warning. At one moment Daria, near the film’s start, is a temporary secretary at the Sunny Dunes Corporation tower block, asking permission from an authoritarian receptionist to retrieve a book, from “the roof” (00:09:01). When we next meet her, she has gone AWOL on a road trip through the desert to Phoenix and is presumably Lee’s casual mistress? Although she finally meets Lee (Rod Taylor) at the boulder house, she never answers his questions there, and in fact, throughout the film, is only ever heard talking to him twice: at their first meeting as strangers in the Sunny Dunes office foyer scene above, and then on the phone from the bar on her desert digression. On this second occasion, concerned that if she gives away her location, he’ll send a helicopter to fetch her, she hangs up. Now, at the boulder house, she remains mute. After Lee amusedly directs her to her room, she resentfully heads downstairs. Out of his sight, half-sharing a smile with one of the servants (01:41:52), she reflects again on the situation before hurrying from the house and driving away (01:42:10). 

Although perhaps the film’s conscience resides in Daria, does she remain representative of a generational, middle-class American future? It seems unlikely she’ll object to the status quo for long, she is too sensible – and even if she rejects the exploitational upward mobility of Rod Taylor’s Lee, she will be back one day, to take her place in some Sunny Dunes or other, not so different from the women in The Stepford Wives (1975). Or am I being unduly cynical?

Boulders Resort & Spa, Scottsdale: The real Sunny Dales 50 years later.

Essence of the free spirit![xlv]

For the ending sequence [xlvi] a prop replica of the Boulder mansion was built on the back lot at Southwestern Studios in Carefree, Arizona for $100,000. The explosions (01:44:40 to 01:49:52 with a premonition at 01:43:49) are the film’s political, social and spiritual climax. Repeated over and over from different angles and distances, the explosion, simultaneously captured by 17 cameras, is reminiscent of those grim films of nuclear detonations and the effects of blast on mock-up towns and structures in the Nevada desert[xlvii] – mostly carried out approximately 70 miles to the east[xlviii] of Zabriskie Point. With explosion, blast damage and the sound of flames fading into Pink Floyd’s Come in Number 51, You’re Time is Up[xlix] this sequence remains gravely, majestically powerful. Deriding the aspirational society, at moments it can appear amusing – when you feel like raging or crying about the state of the world what else can you do but laugh? – and yet it continues to project a wish-fulfilment retribution. Embodying Mark’s rage as well as Daria’s, with the segue into music haunting and ethereal to begin with, sound and image together suggest some kind of everything. The slow-motion shots of things blown apart are reminiscent of protozoa yet often resemble late Kandinsky paintings[l] such as Sky Blue (1940)[li] and Tempered Elan (1944) . . . 

              through this collision of worlds

              and pavement chalk urges us to Be Happy XXXX

              how staunchly we must embrace hope

              to sustain the mirage of progress[lii].

The later explosions mark a sleight of hand into the abstract, into pale blue. The victims: clothes, furniture, objects of conspicuous consumption as well as food, have lost connection with their natural environments. While remaining a wish-fantasy attack on consumerism, it is more than that. It is an attack on the inadvertent society[liii] itself. The colours have changed it. It is both more humorous – the lobster, the slowly revolving chicken and Wonder bread, the books at 01:49:14 – and yet more profound. A whole library follows. We are nothing but a waste of space to the Earth. 

Music and vengeance are abruptly cut off at 01:49:52 as the scene reverts to a sunset desert silence without time or place.

We look at Daria’s face, glad, wistful, satisfied? Then, realistic, she turns away.

“Who really cares to catch the thoughts of another person’s existence, to feel their inner life? To catch the thought of them, or there, or then, instead of the habitual self-interest. To feel what they felt, you need to become possessed. After which feverish infatuation, may come a deeper empathy or identification – perhaps reviving what you once had yourself, your own lost space, your own inner time travel?…How little of what remains enigmatically important inside every individual, means to anyone else.”[liv]  

At the end[lv], is the Roy Orbison song intended to reassure or mock departing cinema audiences? Either through the existence of an alternative version of Zabriskie Point without this gratuitous element; poor memory; or having willfully wiped it from said memory, this song was unfamiliar. It mars the finality of the explosion sequence and the unearthly yet beautiful desert sunset; the sense of a peace thankful to be rid of human influence.

              Anyplace for those who care, Zabriskie Point is anywhere. . .  

I wasted a certain amount of time brooding upon why this song was here. Was its echo of the 50s deliberate? Was it an early instance of the crosscurrent texturing of irony, nostalgia and unease that both Dennis Potter and David Lynch later utilized so effectively[lvi]? Then, I discovered, apparently[lvii], that it was added by MGM during post-production. Unravelling possible influences is often conjectural, yet it is interesting to wonder whether MGM’s clumsy use of Orbison’s song over Antonioni’s sublime atmosphere, might inadvertently have influenced either Potter or Lynch . . . which thereby, thirty or fifty years later, has come to make the added ending song more acceptable to viewers? It might have been appropriate for the song to play (ironically) after a gap, over the closing titles on black, to the bang of folding seats and the muted murmur of conversation as the cinema emptied. Time runs out so fast on love too good to last . . .

But no. The song’s presence panders to the swamping mainstream tradition of embellishing or entombing everything in music. Love is space in life / A place in time a state of mind too late I find . . .

No.

Silence would be preferable.

© Lawrence Freiesleben, Heysham, May 2026

NOTES

[i]  Often referred to as The Living Corpse

[ii]  bamfstyle.com/2026/02/05/zabriskie-point-mark/

[iii] I was forcefully reminded here, of an abstract interlude in the middle of Night Mail, 1936 (from 00:12:17 to 00:12:05) imdb.com/title/tt0028030/ which despite being in black and white and possessing a strident documentary voiceover, is visually and audibly arresting in a very similar manner – its shattered sounds including a work siren or hooter, echoed by Zabriskie Point 34 years later

[iv] My review from July 2021: “After too much dancing in the first half of Flareup, everything falls apart in the second, leaving only the dramatic immolation of psycho, Alan, to galvanise it. Suffering understandable trauma throughout the film, Raquel recovers remarkably rapidly from incinerating Alan – literally burning him alive. Surely that is not why the film is called Flareup? The finale becomes dreary when, yearning for home and kids, nice-guy Joe Brodnek puts his foot down: It’s me or Mexico. Restless Raquel revs away before U-turning into a happy-ever-after. Please spare us! The best aspects of Flareup are the 60s locales, the signs and neon nightscapes – plus the bar in LA, so aptly named The Losers”

[v]  For Blow-Up, see: stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2025/12/five-films.html and internationaltimes.it/blow-up-a-london-walk-of-august-2020-and-its-consequences/

[vi] I was interested to read recently, Henry K Miller’s Shoot to Thrill, interview with Kathryn Bigelow in Sight and Sound, December 2025, Volume 35. It struck me that perhaps there was some overlap between the “inadvertent society” (an endlessly revisited old phrase of mine) and Foucault’s image/idea of the panopticon, which he defined in “Schizo-Culture” (in 1975) as a machine “in which everyone is caught, those who exercise the power as well as those who are subjected to it… Power becomes a machinery controlled by no one”

[vii] With input from other writers: Sam Shepard, Franco Rossetti, Clare Peploe and Tonino Guerra

[viii] Donald Trump – referenced in the hope that before long he will be a disgrace lost in history

[ix] Paraphrasing of stanza 15 of No Error, (2022, L W Freiesleben, unpublished)

[xi] theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/23/zabriskie-point-review-michelangelo-antonioni

[x] buzzrail.uk/about-us/ It continues to grow in popularity: livingmags.info/great-start-to-season-for-leighton-buzzard-railway/

[xii] Unlike Zabriskie Point, as a whole, Beyond the Clouds feels redundant. Perhaps this is understandable given that it was made with help from Wim Wenders after Antonioni, disabled by a stroke, was unable to speak. A blend of lesser Antonioni and lesser Wenders, the script and voiceovers, sometimes taken from Antonioni’s writings (see sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/antonioni/  last paragraph) try to say important things and occasionally succeed, but despite its many beautiful images, locations, atmospheres, and actors, the film is undermined by its glib, lightweight style and perhaps by too many celebrity cameos? It’s as if everyone is kindly gathering around Antonioni for an uncensored, off-season Miss Marple adventure.

[xiii] “I believe that one moves forward driven by that vital impulse which is manifest in all things, that which originated in life, created the past and will create the future . . . while we will always remain in the present and keep on deceiving ourselves that we too change along with the world . . . whereas, I fear that we remain irreparably ourselves, as we were when we began to live.”  

[xiv] bamfstyle.com/2026/02/05/zabriskie-point-mark/  

[xv] Only the poolside furniture is recognizably connected to the house and able to have happened during the repeated detonations of the house. The open wardrobe, the surreal TV with a vase of flowers on top and attendant armchair, the outdoor fridge and food – lobster and chicken etc – the clothes, the Wonder bread, books and library shelves, all blown up against a Graham Sutherland 1950s blue sky of crucifixion: “blue skies are more powerfully horrifying.” See: etsy.com/uk/listing/1669704274/preparatory-sketch-for-christ-carrying or many of the Thorn Cross paintings and earlier studies for the Northampton Crucifixion: stmatthewsnorthampton.org.uk/art-and-history-the_crucifixion.php

[xvi] Is Hitchcock showing his age by The Birds (1963) – which feels a less modern film than Vertigo (1958)?

[xvii]  The Time Machine (1960), perhaps the film which along with The Birds, Taylor is most associated?

[xviii] I’m thinking particularly of the wobble in Yehudi Menuhin’s 1969 performance of the Violin Concerto by William Walton, with the composer himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. At first, I could not believe my ears: the slight but distinct wobble off-key for a second at the highest romantic climax, would surely have scotched it? I wondered if it was written into the piece or deliberate on Yehudi’s part, but could not hear it on other recordings and realised how much I missed it. It heightened the emotion – as if the violinist himself were overcome. Mind you, perhaps I should have checked it wasn’t a scratch on my L.P.! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Walton)

[xix] youtube.com/watch?v=-Xic-CHInek

[xx] rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-vertigo-1958

[xxi] Obverse to this, at times it seems miraculous that community exists at all – that we can, for example, organize the orderly collection of rubbish . . .

[xxii] Come in under the shadow of this red rock – line 26 of T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland is most directly invoked by the moment towards the end of the film, 01:36:47, when Daria in the wasteland of the Boulder house, does literally that

[xxiii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_90

[xxiv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land

[xxv] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood

[xxvi] This fascinating piece is about Anna Halprin’s dance deck. Anna Halprin was Daria’s real-life mother. She died at the age of 100 in May 2021. https://flash—art.com/2020/05/anna-   halprins-dance-deck/

[xxvii] youtube.com/watch?v=AzZr_GRz6kQ

[xxviii] Daria’s friend, James Patterson, is considered to be based on Mel Lyman of the Fort Hill Community near Boston

[xxix]  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066601/trivia/?item=tr0772643

[xxx]  See this tragic piece: madinamerica.com/2025/09/fifty-years-of-grief/

[xxxi] maninbetweenthemoon.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/donnie-darko-and-gretchens-influence/

[xxxii] internationaltimes.it/donnie-darko-a-digression-on-universality-and-inevitable-nostalgia/

[xxxiii] Ibid: theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/23/zabriskie-point-review-michelangelo-antonioni

[xxxiv] billybobsparlour.com/diner/ 

[xxxv] youtube.com/watch?v=HZjZbJuhPAo

[xxxvi] See the Billy Liar (1963) reference and note: internationaltimes.it/things-behind-the-sun-a-digression-on-memory-trauma-and-mystery/

[xxxvii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Sutherland

[xxxviii] theartnewspaper.com/2016/01/08/an-unconventional-pastoralist-on-samuel-palmer

[xxxix]  How you see Sutherland’s reimagining of West Wales (or Antonioni’s films), is perhaps down to your own temperament – “with delight or with horror, as with the taste of bittersweet fruit” – a phrase the artist once used about reactions to his work in a TV documentary

[xl] Some commentators view Sutherland’s early Welsh landscapes as by far his best work – when in a sense he was carried away by the genius loci or spirit of the place

[xli] Designed by Hiram Hudson Benedict for Carl Hovgaard and situated 34 miles north of Phoenix

[xlii]  To quote an excellent article, sadly not found until I’d virtually finished: “The desert around Phoenix today is filled with one suburb after another, but what Rod Taylor glimpses from the terrace of Boulder Reign is merely a mirage, a memory of the future. Today, a brief virtual tour on Google Earth around these coordinates confirms that this location has turned into just what the Sunny Dunes company had dreamed of.”  See zabriskie+point%3a+the+metaphysical+pop+of+michelangelo+antonioni+dr.+joël+mestre-froissard

[xliii]  At 01:38:18-19 her reflection briefly merges with the older Native American woman

[xliv] Ibid – see note xxi above

[xlv] hilton.com/en/hotels/phxrsqq-boulders-resort-and-spa-scottsdale/

[xlvi] youtube.com/watch?v=bJsW6ta4X8o

[xlvii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site

[xlviii]  The Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site) “is located very close to Death Valley National Park, with the southern boundary of the test site situated less than 50 miles from the park”

[xlix]  A rerecording of Careful With That Axe, Eugene youtube.com/watch?v=tMpGdG27K9o

[l] internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-8/

[li] wassilykandinsky.net/work-55.php

[lii]   End of A Detour to Avoid Tragedy (2025, L W Freiesleben, unpublished)

[liii] Ibid – see note vi above

[liv] A paraphrasing from pages 41-2 of Maze End (2013, L W Freiesleben, unpublished)

[lv] According to IMDb imdb.com/title/tt0066601/trivia/?item=tr0772643 “Antonini’s original ending was a shot of an airplane sky-writing the phrase “Fuck You, America,” which was cut by MGM president Louis F. Polk.” This seems out of character, unless Antonioni did it as an (expensive) joke?

[lvi] In works such as Pennies from Heaven (TV Mini Series 1978-79) and Blue Velvet (1986)

[lvii]  With the internet, so much information is not to be trusted that I hesitate to expand on this. It appears that MGM commissioned Roy Orbison (with Mike Curb and Roger Christian) to write the song for the end credits rather than it being Antonioni’s choice. Since Orbison was under contract to MGM from 1965 to 1973, this would not presumably have been difficult. It was not included on the official soundtrack album

Posted on by Rupert Loydell

Small town nightmares

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

RUPERT LOYDELL revisits David Lynch’s unforgettable dystopia

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was the moment when the town of Twin Peaks was revealed to be a dark hellhole of occult mystery, sexual abuse, intrigue, murder and underhand business dealings as opposed to simply a cozy backdrop to a strange detective story involving demon possession and sexual intrigue.

Although the first two television series had some shocking episodes, particularly the reveal of the evil spirit Bob and Leland’s death, along with the final episode (produced at short notice under instruction from the TV company), viewers’ memories seemed mostly of a quirky and occasionally surreal soap opera whose characters were fuelled by coffee and doughnuts, had high libidos and were very good looking – not to mention a friendly visiting detective who was prone to visions and intuitive investigation.

It wasn’t all sweetness and light by any means, but the darkness was leavened by humour and friendship, not to mention the haunting soundtrack, but Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was having none of it. Billed as a prequel, the film was also a kind of reveal of what was actually going on, ostensibly before the TV series started but allowing us to project several of the stories into that time frame as well.

Nobody, not even Agent Cooper and his fellow police force members, seemed to come out well. Everybody was conniving with somebody else, had a dodgy deal going on, and seemed complicit in prostitution, smuggling and drug running. There was a lot of looking the other way and a lot of non sequiturs and references to things we’d missed, not been shown or that Lynch felt we should know about. This included more dreams and a meet-up of demons in an upstairs room.

At the time, many of us felt cheated. My friends and I came out of the arts centre where we saw it in shocked silence. I don’t watch or like horror films, but we had just seen one that seemed to take away any pleasure we’d had whilst watching the two TV series. That seemed to be the general public and critical response, and although there was and still is a sustained discussion about Lynch’s work, and a recognition that he had done something amazing for TV, that was Twin Peaks done with.

Twenty-five years later, that turned out not to be the case. Twin Peaks: The Return was even more surreal and fragmented than the original two TV series, and although presented in 18 episodes, Lynch claimed he thought of it as one 18-hour film. Although a few storylines were continued from the 1990s, most weren’t, and the film was full of new character, including three versions of Agent Cooper, those present in one-off scenes, not to mention aliens and godlike beings and a complete blurring of reality and dream states.

In fact Twin Peaks: The Return seemed mostly a kind of return to Lynch’s Eraserhead, a disturbing and unfathomable monochrome nightmare with a deformed baby and a (literally) industrial soundtrack that highlighted Lynch’s love of photography and the fleshy paintings of Francis Bacon. It highlighted and picked up on occult connections and cultivated its own lines of influence and diversion. Whilst it offered a creation story for evil in our world (or at least, the Twin Peaks world), it also opened up an impossible number of possibilities of what was going on and why.

Interest in Twin Peaks had never really gone away, but the announcement of series 3 saw a renewed interest. Discussion forums sprang up online, a number of academic volumes were published (there would be more after The Return ended) and co-writer/director Mark Frost published two hardback volumes – The Secret History, labelled as a novel, and The Final Dossier – which sought to flesh out some of the loose ends but also act as bait for the forthcoming series.

Twin Peaks: The Return was not easy or lighthearted viewing. There were trips into space, out of time, to cities and gangland underworlds – visions, prophecies and dreams – a giant pepper-pot that was David Bowie’s character – and Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) seemingly trapped in a loveless marriage, or locked up in an asylum. There were doppelgängers, demons, a hybrid frog-insect alien, visiting bands and songwriters, and a new gang of young people forming their own romantic and sexual liaisons whilst taking new, contemporary drugs. Oh, and there was a slow-motion atomic explosion too.

And there was electricity, snaking through, by and over the land, sparking, hissing and humming. And the woodsman, an unwashed and obsessed tramp, who broadcast a poem over the radio once he had killed the DJ. No-one who hears it knows if the poem is a sacred text, a warning or a magical spell; it hypnotizes them and sends them to sleep. And there are mystical beings trying to balance and juggle good and evil, sending spirits and signs to earth to sort things out. One of the beings is the giant from Agent Cooper’s dreams in earlier series, now called the Fireman in the closing credits.  And there is the Experiment, momentarily appearing in a glass box in New York City. And, and, and…

And hundreds of walk-on parts: passers-by or passers-through, and those confined to the background. But no sign of Agent Cooper, and only tantalising glances of the town of Twin Peaks itself. Versions of Cooper are busy out in the world whilst the good/original Cooper remains trapped in the Red Room or White Lodge. Another Cooper squeezes himself through an electrical socket as a doorway from space to Earth, and comes out as a simpleton. Evil Cooper is intent on amassing a fortune and facilitating evil on the world.

The Return seems to refer to Cooper himself, since he takes most of the 18 hours to find his way back, before leaving again. He tries to undo Laura Palmer’s murder, which kicked off the whole Twin Peaks series, by finding a version of Laura and travelling back in time, forgetting all his zen ideas of acceptance and living in the moment. The version of Laura he finds (or creates) does not seem to know him or her own history, is only shocked into realisation at the end of the series, indeed the whole show, which ends with a scream.

David Lynch. Image: Wikimedia Commons

There is no resolution, although fans, critics and film buffs have used up thousands of words trying to find one, contorting ideas and scenes into ridiculously tangled cats-cradles of even more impossible narratives, story lines and time loops. Some of it, of course, makes sense: there are repetitions, similarities and repeats in the plots and filming, there are what seems to be codes and signs on the likes of stray lamp posts and campsite notice boards, and the pylons do look like owls. Nothing is what it seems, but nobody is sure what they seem to be. And nobody seems sure who they are any more either, how to get where they want to be, or why things are happening the way they are.

This time round, however, the deaths and violence, the visitations from the spirit world, the hauntings and occult leanings, all the unexplained mysteries, are once again leavened with humour and wit. Twin Peaks: The Return may not be the return we expected, and is definitely not a return to the Twin Peaks we first enjoyed visiting, but its strangeness and unknowability, its twists and turns, surprises and senseless signposts, leaven it, along with a roster of musical visits to the Roadhouse, some come-uppances and happy endings. By embracing the surreal and the senselessness of our lives and juxtaposing it with chance and the unknown, Lynch reinvented television again, just as he had 25 years earlier, producing an extended film to sit alongside his other career highlights: Eraserhead, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

King and Conqueror – taking the history out of historical fiction

LIAM GUILAR finds a much-hyped recent TV series worse than vacuous

The dust has settled and King and Conqueror has faded away to wherever TV series go to be forgotten. Nominally based on the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, it attracted criticism for its many historical inaccuracies. The history was wrong; the changes to chronology dizzying; characterisation was preposterous; the costumes and the armour were bad; men said fuckalot and everyone and everything was permanently dirty. Some of its defenders pointed out that it was not a documentary but “historical fiction”. 

If the history was so inaccurate it can’t be called ‘historical’, the fiction was the latest instalment in a collective infantilisation of the Middle Ages. Instead of the rich strangeness of the past appearing in historical dramas, film makers insist on confusing history with fantasy while erasing the differences between past and present. By leaning on the tropes of modern film, and fantasy films in particular, they present an adolescent version of the past which is rarely as dramatic as the reality it pretends to dramatize.

There’s a probably apocryphal story about the screening of the film, Titanic. Someone in the audience started to object, loudly, because the pattern of the rivets on the ship’s hull was not historically accurate.

Every historical film brings out the Rivet Counters. Harold’s cloak is fastened incorrectly. The armour is wrong. The hairstyles are wrong. It gives people with specialised knowledge the opportunity to air their expertise. King and Conqueror has given the Rivet Counters many reasons to object. You will find their objections on YouTube.

Not all historical objections are rivet counting, and more is at stake than the lack of colour in the clothing or the preposterous attempts at ‘armour’, especially in this case because those involved with the production have repeatedly claimed their version is historically accurate.

A consulting company called SceneSpan claims on its website:

King And Conqueror.

In this project, history was the script. Brought in during early development, we advised across the script to ensure historical authenticity from the ground up: story arcs, character motivations, political dynamics, and cultural detail. Set during the Norman Conquest, the series required careful navigation of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman worldviews. Our role helped ground the drama in the lived realities of 11th-century power and identity.

[Emphasis theirs][i] 

What grounds a story in the ‘lived realities’ of the past is a question: in this place and time, would a character of this rank say this, or act in this way?[ii] The failure to consider this ruins King and Conqueror and almost every other film set in and around this period.

In the first episode characters are ignorant of their own history. When William and Matilda are arguing with the king of France, the latter scornfully suggests that only a fool would try to sail an army across the channel. It’s meant as dramatic irony, given that we all know that’s what William will do, but the historical king of France would have known armies had been sailing back and forth across the Channel and the North Sea for centuries. How else did he think Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England or the ‘Normans’ got to ‘Normandy’?

At other times characters act with no knowledge of the lived reality of their world. William rides away from the coronation on his own. He’s a Duke. In a culture where public display was essential, there should be a retinue and all the other signs and symbols of his wealth and status. He’s also a royal guest, which meant the king was responsible for his safety and would have provided guides and an escort. He had been ambushed on the way there, but apparently this doesn’t make him cautious on the return journey. How was he going to find his way to Pevensey on his own? Did the writer imagine a modern road with signposts?[iii]

The changes to chronology are dizzying. William was born in 1028. Even if he had attended the coronation (he didn’t) you can work out his age. In King and Conqueror an adult William leaves the pregnant wife he didn’t marry until the 1050s to attend the coronation in 1043, where he is introduced as the victor of Val es Dunes, a battle he didn’t fight until 1047. The events at Dover, which are being plotted at the coronation, and which will lead to Godwin being banished, happened in 1051.

If time is treated loosely, characters are melded together, their names are changed, or they are left out. The evil Earl of Mercia is called Morcar. At the time of Edward’s coronation, Leofric, was earl of Mercia. His grandson, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria when the locals rose against Tostig and deposed him in 1065. Making him earl in 1043 means the devious goings on of 1065, which potentially reveal so much about Harold’s character, have been erased[iv].

The defence against these objections, and even in the first episode there is so much more to object to, is that this is not a documentary, but historical fiction. It’s a sound defence. Some historical inaccuracies need not ruin a film, and accuracy does not guarantee a film will be entertaining.

The Middle Ages have often been caricatured or infantilised. First image: William the Conqueror by an unknown artist, c. 1580. Second image: The Battle of Hastings by Francois Vivares (c. 1780). Third image: Llandaff Historical Pageant, 1952 by Geoff Charles. All: Wikimedia Commons

If you take the history out of historical fiction the characters are left flapping in the wind. In the complex context of their time, their choices and actions defined them. Remove that context and the characters are just names. Remove the history as context, and something must replace it. In King and Conqueror, the replacement is always so much less than what it replaces.

The period between the coronations of Edward the Confessor and William 1st is covered by well-written, historically accurate books aimed at a non-specialist audience. Without learning Old English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, it’s easy to stack a shelf and be up to date with the current knowledge of the time and the characters. It is depressing to think that the writer and producers of King and Conqueror didn’t bother. It is even more depressing to think that they did and then decided to throw out the history because they thought their version was better.

Godwin was banished in 1051 because of an incident in Dover. The facts are murky. Different versions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle give slightly different versions of the events. Returning to the continent, Eustace of Boulogne and his men were involved in an altercation with the inhabitants of the town. There were deaths on both sides. Eustace seems to have raced to the king and given his version of the story. Without waiting to ask Godwin to investigate, Edward called on him, as the relevant earl, to reestablish the king’s justice by punishing the town[v].

When Godwin refused, and according to some versions demanded Eustace’s men be punished, he was called on to answer charges of treason. Turning up to court without guarantees of safe conduct, including the formal exchange of hostages, was never a good idea. Godwin was old enough to remember at least one culling of the earls. He refused to appear and called out his armed supporters. The king was expected to keep the peace and punish wrongdoing. Edward could not withdraw the order without losing face. Edward and the Witan found Godwin guilty of treason. The other earls sided with Edward. Godwin fled and his family scattered into exile. [vi]

Earls were not kings, they were the king’s appointed officers, and their job was to enforce the king’s rule. When Godwin refused the order to ravage Dover he was challenging the king’s authority. For nearly ten years he had been the most powerful man in the country. His daughter was the queen. He must have thought he was secure enough to ignore a royal order.

Why did Godwin refuse a direct order from his king: arrogant self-confidence that reveals his own bad judgement and his poor opinion of Edward? Or was he feeling his influence slide, his advice ignored, his proteges passed over and trying to assert himself? Did he have a personal dislike of Eustace, or of the ‘foreigners’ who Edward seemed to be favouring?

Was Edward overconfident? Not thinking clearly? Desperate to please a foreign relative? Was he looking for an excuse to break Godwin’s hold over him. Did he expect Godwin to protest and then back down and was taken by surprise when he didn’t?  

No ‘personal’ records survive from this period. We don’t know what the characters were thinking. The writer of historical fiction is free to explore the possibilities within the framework of the historical events. 

King and Conqueror replaces this with simplistic nonsense about Godwin being accused of ‘breaking The Treaty’. It’s clear to the audience that whatever happened in Dover was due to the machinations of the Evil Mercian Morcar and the Wicked Queen Mother. Godwin becomes the ‘Good Guy’ done over by ‘The Baddies’. It’s childish in the most derogatory sense of that term.

Fictional characters don’t have to be realistic, but they need a coherent story world in which to operate. Mangle the history, and the possibilities of coherence become increasingly small. The fashion for presenting characters in ‘the past’ as though they were modern people with the approved attitudes and fashionable responses adds to the mess[vii].

In the first episode, Sweyn has sex with a bride on her wedding night as it’s his ‘right as her lord’[viii]. His brothers are disgusted, and he has to threaten Tostig to prevent him from telling their father. Their disgust is a modern reaction. If it were his right, legal and customary (which to be clear, it wasn’t) why would they have been disgusted? They would have normalized the behaviour.

Harold promises his mistress he’ll never let his father force him into a ‘church marriage’ with anyone else. This is the romantic, individualistic modern lover of popular fiction speaking. If Harold Godwinson ever said that to Edith Swanneck, they would have both known that he was lying[ix]. 

Without the historical context, King and Conqueror settles for importing the adolescent tropes of modern fantasy. The result is fiction as bad as the history.

Emma, the queen mother, is the only woman in history to have married two kings of England and had two sons, by different fathers, who ruled the country. She survived the reigns of five kings before Edward, her son by her first marriage, was crowned. Matilda alludes to all this before William leaves for England. Yet the writers do not have Emma behave with the subtlety of a survivor and successful political operator. She is a strident pantomime witch. Harold is a tousled haired womble with daddy issues. He likes to bite noses during combat. He’s dominated by his mistress and portrayed as an untrustworthy liar. You’d think twice about following him to the pub.

The characters are juvenile, leaning heavily on the tropes of popular film. We know these are hard men because they say fuckalot. Both William and Godwin have wandered in from a film about gangland struggles for control of the neighbourhood. Godwin seems to be the last survivor of the Kray Brothers gang. And there’s the ‘Bromance’[x].

The film industry has a long record of treating the Middle Ages as a vague backdrop and mangling history in the process. In the general slop of cheap art chasing money at a time of rising historical ignorance, it would be surprising if King and Conqueror wasn’t the mess it was.

Does it matter that King and Conqueror is less true to the eleventh century than House was to a modern American Hospital?

We knew House was fiction. But King and Conqueror has been presented as history. This is not a story about fictional characters in the past. It uses the names of historical persons in a way that suggests this is a representation of those people in their specific historical setting. Publicity for the series made repeated claims for its accuracy as history.

Responding to criticisms about historical inaccuracies, James Norton, the actor who plays Harold, stated:

The truth was, they were friends. They met at the coronation, we know that William invited Harold over to Normandy to fight against the Baron of Brittany, he did swear, he acknowledged William’s rightful claim to the crown over the relics – whether he meant it or not, we don’t know. But so much of what we tell, in terms of their relationship and friendship, is true.[xi] 

It is not the truth. They were not friends. They did not meet at the coronation. They probably didn’t meet in person until 1065 when Harold was (possibly shipwrecked) on the continent [xii].We don’t know why he was on that ship but none of the suggested reasons include an invitation from William ‘to fight against the baron of Britanny’. We do know Harold was in William’s custody. We do not know what oath Harold made, if he made an oath, over relics while he was there. William had no ‘rightful claim’ to the crown of England.

Whether this is ignorance or indifference, the insidious lie, ‘This is true’, is where the damage is done. One can guarantee that there are now people who believe this is ‘the real story’ because James Norton said so, and for them an actor is a more reliable source of information than any historian. There are people who believe Clive Owen’s King Arthur revealed the identity of the real king Arthur because the film was advertised as “The untold true story that became the legend”[xiii]. No amount of fact-based refutation is going to change their minds. They saw it on the screen. 

Perhaps it’s a minority view, but King and Conqueror turns a period of unusual historical importance into a pantomime. It would be naïve to expect any film maker to treat the past with respect or have any respect for people who do. Art chasing money doesn’t have a conscience. The idea art should, or could, be responsible, seems quaintly, almost embarrassingly, old fashioned. The period between the coronations of Edward and William I is crucial in the history of the British Isles. Old fashioned as it seems, it’s possible to believe it deserves better than to be presented as a second-rate episode of Game of Thrones or Bored of the Rings without the attempted humour.

[i] https://scenespan.com/our-work/ Their emphasis in bold. The kindest thing to say about this quote is that perhaps they worked on a different King and Conqueror to the one we all watched.

[ii] To be very clear I don’t mean they should be speaking Old English or a faked version of it.

[iii] William never learnt to speak English, so he couldn’t ask for directions either.

[iv] Tostig, was unpopular as Earl of Northumbria. In October 1065, while he was away at the royal court, the locals killed his followers, and marched south. They were joined by the Mercians under their earl, Edwin (Eadwine). The Northumbrians then offered the earldom to Morcar, Edwin’s brother. King Edward wanted to call out the army and crush the rebellion. The army refused to muster. Harold acted as mediator, and Morcar became earl and Tostig was banished. The date is not known but either before or after the uprising Harold married the sister of Edwin and Morcar. Harold swore he was not involved in planning the uprising. Tostig was probably not the only person who didn’t believe him.

[v] Ravaging towns that broke the King’s peace was not unusual. Godwin, Leofric and Seward ravaged Worcester for three days under the previous king after two of the king’s men had been killed in the town.

[vi]  King and Conqueror begins by stating that England is emerging from decades of ‘bloody civil war’.  This is historically wrong. Cnut had ruled from 1016-1035, and while there was disagreement over the succession, it didn’t lead to ‘a civil war’. Despite the popular idea that medieval people went to war at the drop of hat, there is evidence to suggest that those in power in England at the time preferred to avoid armed conflict. Thismight explain why the Earls first sided with Edward, and then the ease with which Godwin was allowed to return.

[vii] For an extreme example, see ‘The King’ (2019) in which Henry V is presented as a pacifist who is shocked to discover his courtiers are making money from the war against France.

[viii] The idea of ‘Premier Noce’ or ‘Droit de seigneur’ or ‘jus primae noce’ has been shown to be a myth invented by much later writers. The historical Sweyn was banished after eloping with an Abbess and murdering his cousin.

[ix] Calling Edith his mistress is unavoidably and unintentionally derogatory. She was his wife ‘after the Danish fashion’.  This was a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church but regarded by everybody else as a marriage. It allowed aristocratic men to choose a wife, knowing that when the time came and they entered into a church marriage for political reasons, (and all aristocratic marriages were political), they would not be entering into a bigamous relationship.

[x] I dislike this term as it cheapens friendship but it’s exactly what is presented in King and Conqueror.

[xi] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/king-conqueror-stars-address-criticism-nikolaj-coster-waldau-james-norton_uk_68b034efe4b0bbcc3f8e4d8a For similar claims see https://www.televisual.com/news/james-norton-on-king-conqueror/

[xii] There is not only disagreement about what happened but about when it happened. Edward’s most recent biographer puts it in 1065. William’s opts for 1064.

[xiii] This phrase appeared on the poster for the film, popularising the candidature of L. Artorius Castus for the role as ‘the real king Arthur’. However, King Arthur is a good example of a film that is both entertaining and historically inaccurate.

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Call of duty

Duty of Care 

Directed by Asa Bailey, co-written by Asa Bailey and Jack Marsden, starring Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

In the world of film and cinema today, it is something of a relief to find, not just a story without improbable car chases through Los Angeles, AI-generated explosions or extreme-weather calamities, but which centres itself upon the quiet north Wales town of Llandudno and the lives of two men: army veteran, Major Harris, and his carer, Gary.

It is the kind of film at which our country excels – slow-burn, minimalist drama, set against the background of ordinariness – the result being the sense of an even more acute build-up of tension than one would find in any blockbuster. It is a simple enough idea: the retired soldier, looking back on a life of action, but unable to adjust completely to the banality of everyday life, coming into contact and conflict with the equally tedious world of care and social services. Gary (played by BAFTA winner, Jack Marsden*) – volunteer carer, dressed in casual clothes – knocks at the Major’s door, and at once there are the unmistakeable signs of an impending personality and culture clash. Gary seems domesticated enough and willing to help, but Harris is accustomed to his own household rituals and his emotional short-fuse (the result of his war-experiences) leads to a grand bust-up.

Jack Marsden

Taking the role of Major Harris is the well-known Coronation Street star, Bruce Jones, who brings something of the all-in-a-day weariness of a ‘soap’ character to the story. And yet, because of the pauses, the silences, the sense of brooding, anxiety, misery in the Major, the viewer is given far more than a low-budget film with an efficient, half-hour TV script. Jones’s performance is worthy of the highest accolades – and this is because he is completely believable in his role, so much so, that you – the viewer – may find yourself wanting to reach out and help him.

And it is Gary, the casual care-worker – a man who resides in a mobile home – who doesn’t even know his next step in life, who wants to give Harris the assistance he clearly needs. Rejected, though, and ordered out by the old soldier, Gary seems to pass from the story. A new carer arrives, a cheerful-enough girl (played by Sophie Anderson), this time, wearing a uniform; more what you would expect a care-assistant to look like, but it is soon clear that she, too, is just drifting in our modern Britain. Gary, meanwhile, breathless and in disarray, and unable to find any other work, tries to cling to his identity: ‘I’m Gary, I’m Gary,’ he says – as if trying to prevent himself from tipping into complete despair. Yet at this point, we discover something of his own identity: he, like Harris, has a past, but one which he hardly talks about and acknowledges to himself only in moments of extreme emotion.

Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

The film, recalls Jack Marsden, was first premiered in Liverpool, in the presence of HM Lord Lieutenant of Liverpool – to a standing ovation, with many ex-servicemen in the audience clearly profoundly moved by the screenplay. Jack also notes the role played by Anthony H. Wilson of Factory Records, the founder of a Manchester-based charity concerned with suicide among men; and it was Anthony’s wide knowledge of this problem which helped Jack to shape his on-screen character.

Jack had also worked with Bruce Jones, prior to Duty of Care, on Ken Loach’s Cannes award-winner, Raining Stones; and it was with great pride that all those involved with the new film received the praise and endorsement of the senior filmmaker. Yet it is also the town of Llandudno that stars in Asa and Jack’s compelling work: a place, perhaps, of sleepy anonymity, where Major Harris and Gary spend so many of their hours looking out to sea, churning over the past and wondering what the future holds…

*Jack Marsden, BAFTA award-winner for his role as PC Rylance in The Cops

Posted on by William King

A great piling up of colossal ideas – the Eroica

Beethoven’s mask by Lucien Levy Dhurmer (1906)
WILLIAM KING relishes a cinematic realisation of a great musical moment

There was a time when I never thought of visiting YouTube, believing it to be full of cat videos uploaded by doting owners. Later I discovered my error – it was, in fact, full of a wide range of pointless videos. Then I came to discover that there are many worthwhile grains to be found among the chaff and Eroica is surely one of them. I think myself exceptionally fortunate to have accidentally discovered this British film, and this is my justification for reviewing something made over two decades ago, in 2003.

Eroica is a dramatisation of the first, private premiere of Beethoven’s third symphony, the ‘Eroica’ or heroic symphony. The film’s most remarkable feature was the brave decision that saw the full symphony – all 49 minutes of it, plus a little bit of Mozart – incorporated into a film that is only 83 minutes long. This might seem to leave little time for any drama as well: surely the drama – the main plot and an amorous sub-plot – must cease when the music commences? That this is not the case is due to the excellent screenwriting of Nick Dear, the intelligent direction of Simon Cellan Jones, and the emotional sensitivities displayed by the cast. And, of course, the very fine playing by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, conducted by Beethoven in the film, and by John Eliot Gardiner ‘behind the scenes.’ As a result, music and drama become inseparably fused throughout the film.

It might be best to sketch briefly some of the known facts relating to the private premiere of Beethoven’s third symphony. As we shall see, it should perhaps be called the first rehearsal, rather than the first performance.

Eighteenth century view of the Palais Lobkowitz in Vienna

It was held in June 1804, in the Vienna palace of the Bohemian nobleman Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven’s principal patrons. It took place in a small hall – still known as the Eroica Hall – usually reserved for chamber music, but which could accommodate over two dozen musicians and guests. Lobkowitz was born with a deformed hip, and needed to use a crutch all his life. As a young man he inherited a fortune in money and estates and was known for his lively disposition and warm-heartedness. He was also renowned for his extreme passion for music, employing his own orchestra and chorus – a passion that was ultimately financially ruinous to him. As Count Razumovsky, a Russian nobleman and ambassador in Vienna, later noted: “This Prince was as kindhearted as a child and the most foolish music enthusiast. He played music from dawn to dusk and spent a fortune on musicians.”

A cynic might say Lobkowitz squandered his fortunes on music; I prefer to think that he sacrificed his fortunes to music. Certainly it was he, and a small number of other patrons, who gave Beethoven the financial security to devote himself to composition.

Rehearsals were unusual for symphonies at that time. Professional musicians were expected to give a competent performance by sight-reading the score – even at a premiere. The ‘Eroica’ was different however: almost twice the length of a conventional symphony, the complexity of the score and Beethoven’s perfectionist attitudes rendered rehearsal imperative. The – thankfully private – premiere rehearsal/performance did not go well. With Beethoven himself conducting, errors crept into the playing.

However, one of the most famous incidents came when Ferdinand Ries, pupil and friend of Beethoven, interrupted the playing when he incorrectly thought the horns had come in too early. As Ries recalled: “’That dammed hornist,’ I said. ‘Can’t he count. It sounds frightfully wrong. I nearly got my ears boxed and Beethoven did not forgive me for a long time.’”

Joseph Haydn, revered as the Grand Old Man of music in the early 1800s, arrived at the palace in time to hear the final movement of the symphony, and to make a number of prophetic comments about it.

The public premiere did not take place until April 1805. We may be certain that the orchestra was properly rehearsed this time, but the length, scope and sheer power of the piece, especially the first movement, was too much for some. One member of the audience was infamously heard to cry out: “I’ll give another kreuzer [a copper coin] if the thing will only stop!” There was muted applause at the end.

So much for history; what of the drama? It is a sad fact of life that film and TV dramatisations have rarely more than a nodding acquaintance with historical reality. All too often dramatists, whether through ignorance, an ‘agenda,’ or a desire to ‘jazz things up,’ see no reason to let reality get in the way of a good drama. A bit like newspaper editors never letting the facts get in the way of a good story! Thankfully there are few such blemishes here, and when they occur they can be excused on the grounds of dramatic licence. A few examples should however be mentioned.

Wenzel Sukowaty, Beethoven’s copyist, rushes in shortly before the performance is due to start to give out the sheet music to the orchestra. Cue much baffled incomprehension from the players – “The fingering. Have you seen bar 34?” and indeed, “Bloody hell.” The copyist quietly explains to Prince Lobkowitz, “The piece is a monster… It may not be music at all.”There are a few false starts when Beethoven commences conducting, and he has to explain that the orchestra are to play ‘sforzando,’ attacking each note, for maximum intensity. The sad plea “Can’t we play a bit slower?” is answered with a resolute no. However, from then on the orchestra sight-reads, at first time of asking, a piece that is exceptionally long, complex and not like anything they have played before, without error.

This is surely not what happened in real life, but – and this is a huge but – it means we get to hear the Eroica as Beethoven wished it to be heard, played on historically authentic instruments by a first-rate orchestra, under a leading conductor, fully in sympathy with the music. If dramatic licence is not forgivable here, then when is it?

More examples of such licence may be given. The long-suffering Ries does indeed interrupt the playing, leading to a volcanic eruption of rage from Beethoven, but did he really cry out, “Piss off!” to his hapless apprentice, in front of Prince Lobkowitz and his assembled guests, many of them ladies? No doubt Nick Dear, the writer, felt it necessary to ‘update’ the language for 21st century ears. One can only say, O tempora, O mores…

Finally, towards the end there is a ‘flash-forward’ scene when Beethoven and Ries visit a tavern after the performance. Ries there discovers from a friend that Napoleon has declared himself Emperor. He nervously informs Beethoven of this, knowing that Beethoven was a great admirer of Napoleon, regarding him as an embodiment of republican virtues. Beethoven, in a towering rage, rips out Napoleon’s name from the dedication to him on the front page of the manuscript score. Historical accounts vary slightly but it would seem Beethoven did hear of Napoleon’s declaration from Ries, and he did destroy the dedication to Napoleon, but probably not immediately after the premiere performance. This is, of course, why the third symphony is called the Eroica symphony, and not the ‘Buonaparte’ symphony as originally planned. A little dramatic licence is surely excusable here.

These minor quibbles aside, what are the most noticeable virtues of Eroica? Apart, of course, from the exquisite playing by the orchestra. First and foremost Eroica is superb in its exploration of the relationship between music and society as a whole: specifically, in this case, the musical revolution that Beethoven is about to unleash against the backdrop of the social and political changes after the French Revolution, and symbolised by Napoleon Buonaparte.

This is, for the most part, done with much subtlety. For example. the film opens with the lead violinist of Prince Lobkowitz’s orchestra playing a piece by Mozart, before the guests have arrived and the new symphony is to be first aired. It is very beautiful piece, calm and serene, but it is not in any way threatening – it will never, as it were, be the backing track to a revolution. Playing it serves as a counterpoint to what will come. No wonder Beethoven laughs on hearing this music on his arrival – he knows just how much of a shock his music will be.

There is much debate about music and its place in society. The opposition to Beethoven, and all he stands for, comes from Count Dietrichstein, a nobleman friend of Prince Lowkowitz. He is very much a supporter of ancien régimes – if you don’t have a title your views scarcely count. Wisely he has not been presented here as an ignorant buffoon. Rather he is an intelligent man but with fixed ideas – fixed about the nature of society and fixed about what music is. Since the feelings and opinions of the ‘lower orders’ count for little he condemns, to Beethoven’s face, the first movement as “Violent, needlessly violent” and “a tasteless intermarriage of the diatonic and chromatic.”

Dietrichstein is however honest: as the symphony progresses, he is clearly emotionally affected. Nonetheless he explains to Beethoven,

That wasn’t bad. It’s not a symphony though… The symphony has a structure. This is a formless mass. A mere arrangement of noise. A great piling up of colossal ideas. It’s very moving. In parts it has elements of the sublime. But it is also full of discord… But it is not what we call a symphony.

Mozart can be enjoyed by Count Dietrichstein – it does not threaten his musical tastes or the social order he inhabits. He simply does not understand the Eroica – and we are all unsettled by that which we do not understand. But he does understand that this is new music, which challenges the established musical order, and he worries that he does not know what the broader impact on society might be.

Beethoven is in more congenial company among the lower orders: he joins the members of the orchestra as they enjoy a mid-symphony lunch break. They discuss Napoleon: is he a threat or a liberator? Should he be resisted if he leads an army to Vienna? And will the existing social order continue?

Prince Lobkowitz has long believed that music is not just for the nobility. He is keen to have his servants enlightened and educated by exposure to high culture, thus the sound of Eroica has echoed throughout his palace. Downstairs in the servants’ quarters, an inexperienced footman is discussing it with Gerhardt, a senior servant, evidently one who has received a significant musical education through his years with the Prince:

“What do you reckon to the band, then?”

“They’ve taken the symphony to new heights.”

“Christ, have they?”

Thus the first wholly-unequivocal praise given to Eroica in the drama comes from a servant. Should we be surprised? Probably not.

There is a brief romantic sub-plot, centering on Beethoven’s unsuccessful proposal of marriage to the Countess Josephine von Deym, but most of the film relentlessly focuses on the symphony and reactions to it. Much of the film consists of shots, often quite long shots, of people listening to the music and their reactions, intercut with the sight of the orchestra playing. This depiction of the listening process is surely one of the keys to the film’s success. The facial expressions of members of the audience, variously showing delight, distaste, excitement and incomprehension carry the plot forward without the need for dialogue. There is also the aesthetic benefit that one can enjoy the music without people talking over it. This was quite a risky directorial decision: the slightest trace of ‘ham’ overacting could have left the film liable to ridicule. Thankfully what we got was acting at its best, from the actor playing Beethoven, through to those portraying the assembled nobility and down to the kitchen staff. Every part was played excellently. It would be invidious to single out any of the actors for especial praise – but I fear this is what I must do. Three of the finest British actors demand special praise.

First, Ian Hart as Beethoven. His face is alert, alive, the face of a man who cannot but show all his emotions. From towering rage, to marital disappointment, to sublime joy as he hears his creation come to life, Hart is excellent. As the last of the symphony ends, Hart is left in total silence – a grim foreshadowing of Beethoven’s forthcoming deafness.

Secondly, Tim Pigott-Smith as Count Dietrichstein. His haughty dialogue with Beethoven – always on the verge of verbal fisticuffs – is good, but the unspoken scenes, when he is listening to the symphony, clearly not wanting to like it, yet becoming emotionally affected by it, are sublime. A lesser actor could easily have ruined these scenes.

Finally, Frank Finlay, in a cameo role as a frail, elderly Joseph Haydn, the only man that Beethoven calls ‘Master.’ Arriving late to hear the finale of the symphony his words are a fitting conclusion to this review:

He’s done something no other composer has attempted. He’s placed himself at the centre of his work. He gives us a glimpse into his soul. I expect that’s why it’s so noisy. But it is quite, quite new – the artist as hero. Quite new. Everything is different from today.

Eroica, directed by Simon Cellan Jones, screenplay by Nick Dear. Music by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. Run time: 1 hour 23 minutes

This review first appeared in the St Austin Review (StAR) – St. Austin Review – StAR | Reclaiming Culture – and is reproduced with permission

Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Polanski at (nearly) 90

Photo: Shutterstock
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD looks back at an astonishing and controversial career

Temporal landmarks may be purely arbitrary and exist only in our heads, as Einstein and his crew tell us, but it surely still comes down to a case of tempus fugit in the matter of the Rosemary’s Baby director Roman Polanski. Turning 90 on 18 August 2023, he’s seemingly gone from being cinema’s perpetual enfant terrible to its grand old man, albeit with some significant growth pains along the way.

As often noted, Polanski’s own life has the makings of a Hollywood drama, if one with some distinctly noirish twists. His mother Bula, four months’ pregnant, was killed in the Holocaust, and his father Ryszard survived nearly three years in a German death camp. Polanski himself escaped the Nazis, but then spent the rest of his early life under Stalin’s jackboot. He eventually made it to freedom in the West, only for his wife Sharon Tate, also pregnant, to be brutally murdered in the couple’s Los Angeles home in 1969 by members of the so-called Manson family.

That might seem quite enough shadow for one life, but more was to come. In March 1977, Polanski, who was then 43, took a 13-year-old girl to a house in the Hollywood Hills to take photos of her for a magazine. Once there, he gave her champagne and tranquilizers, had sex with her, drove her home, and the following week was arrested. Polanski absconded from court on the eve of his being sentenced a year later, apparently in the belief that he was about to be locked up for life. As a dual Franco-Polish citizen, he was able to settle in Paris, where he remains at liberty to this day.

Before moving on, just a brief note on the judicial proceedings against Polanski in re. his statutory rape of a minor, which these days is increasingly portrayed – not least by Polanski himself – in almost Kafkaesque terms, and more particularly as a case of a vindictive and senile judge – one Laurence J. Rittenband, then aged 72, who presided over the Superior Court in Santa Monica, California – seeking to make an example of the ferret-faced, foreign-born sex predator standing before him in the dock.

Rittenband, it should be noted in this context, already had a long and not undistinguished legal career spanning some fifty years at the time Polanski first entered his courtroom. Of a modest background in Brooklyn, New York, he’s agreed to have been knowledgeable and personally unassuming – in one account, ‘not one of those judges who always thinks he’s in the movies’ (although by the same token, also not above keeping his own press cuttings file). In his memoirs, Polanski implies that Rittenband was star-struck by the 1977 proceedings, and, after initially exercising due judicial restraint (setting the defendant’s bail at a modest $2,500, and even allowing him to travel outside the country ‘should he so wish’), was ‘clearly over-enjoying his first excursion into the limelight.’

This account is not quite fair. In fact by the time he met Polanski, Rittenband had already presided over a host of high-profile Hollywood cases, including Elvis Presley’s divorce, Marlon Brando’s child-custody battle and a paternity suit against Cary Grant. Nor could it be concluded from these proceedings that the judge was in any way prejudiced against his celebrity defendants. In the case of Grant, for instance, Rittenband had made the eminently sensible suggestion that both the actor and the alleged mother of his child submit to a blood test, ‘after which we will determine what to do.’ When the woman in question had failed to appear for her scheduled test, and for two subsequent appointments, Rittenband curtly dismissed her suit. As well as being a stickler both for the letter and the spirit of the law, regularly advising plaintiffs and defendants alike of the need to be ‘decorous’ and punctual in his court, the judge was impressively well read in a variety of fields, which enabled him to make pertinent and original connections in his rulings. Regarding Elvis, for example, he quoted Jonathan Swift, observing to the charismatic but modestly educated ‘Hound Dog’ singer that ‘Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.’ Looking back on the Polanski case years later, Rittenband puckishly told the press, ‘It reminds me of a line from Gilbert and Sullivan: “I’ve got him on my list.”’

Three final things need to be said about the morals rap that has effectively defined the second half of Polanski’s life.

First, there was – and in some quarters, remains – a certain amount of doubt as to whether the then-widowed director had been fully aware of his victim’s age at the time he had sex with her. It’s true to say both that the child in question, Samantha Gailey, looked significantly older than thirteen, and also that she wasn’t perhaps the naïf widely portrayed by her defenders. In her own Grand Jury testimony on the matter, Gailey noted that she had had sex twice in the year before she met Polanski, that she had been drunk, and that “yeah, once I was under the influence of [drugs] when I was real little.”

However, it should also clearly be noted Gailey was still then a seventh-grade schoolgirl who “had a Spider Man poster on the wall and kept pet mice,” as she recalled in a magazine interview. Born on 31 March 1963, she was fully four years under the age of consent then required by the state of California. Polanski was later asked by the prosecuting attorney in the case how old he had believed his victim to be when he met her. “She was 13,” he said.

Next there’s the salient point of whether Polanski had in fact raped the child, or, conversely, whether, as he later insisted, she had been a ‘not unresponsive’ partner in the act. This is what Gailey had to say on the matter when questioned at the time in front of the Grand Jury:

Q: After Polanski first kissed you did he say anything?
A: No.

Q: Did you say anything?
A: No, besides I was just going, ‘No. Come on, let’s go home.’

Q: What was said after you indicated that you wanted to go home when you were sitting together on the couch?

A: He said, ‘I’ll take you home soon.’

Q: Then what happened?
A: Then he went down and he started performing cuddliness.

Q: What does that mean?
A: It means he went down on me or he placed his mouth on my vagina.

Gailey was asked whether either party had said anything following that point.

‘No.’

‘Did you resist?’

‘A little, but not really because … ’

‘Because what?’

‘Because I was afraid of him.’

Finally, there’s the belief, still widely in vogue today, that Polanski had been railroaded by a corrupt and/or incompetent judge who was apparently about to renege on a formal commitment not to send the defendant to prison following the completion of a mandatory 90-day diagnostic evaluation sentence. Those who insist the director was somehow misled into believing that his plea bargain in front of Rittenband would preclude the threat of further jail time may be interested in the previously sealed transcript of the critical August 1977 hearing at which Polanski pleaded guilty to a single reduced count of unlawful sex with a minor. As part of the process, the defendant was required to answer 62 separate questions posed by the district attorney in the case, among them the following exchange:

Q: Mr. Polanski, who do you believe will decide what your ultimate sentence will be in this matter?
A: The judge.

Q: Who do you think will decide whether or not you will get probation?
A: The judge.

Q: Who do you think will determine whether the sentence will be a felony or a misdemeanor?
A: The judge.

Q: Do you understand that at this time the court has not made any decision as to what sentence you will receive?

A: Yes.

Now turning from the criminal, or depredatory, to the small matter of whether Polanski’s films are actually any good. The director’s first full-length feature Knife in the Water (1962) is a beautifully crafted, if at times noticeably budget-conscious, thriller that offers the classic Polanskian brew of claustrophobia, latent menace, voyeurism, class antagonisms and sexual tension, in this case set aboard a small yacht. Seen today, it still seems as fresh as the moment it was released more than sixty years ago. Among other charms, Knife has some of the most convincing examples of the kind of pure and honest personal hatred that can pass for conversation in a marriage since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? All cult black and white Polish films should be shot on a shoestring, in an increasingly mutinous atmosphere among their cast and crew – that way they might be half as good as this one. Perhaps the best sign of the film’s artistic merits came when its distributors arranged a special showing for members of the Polish cabinet in Warsaw, and the state’s hardline communist party boss Wladyslaw Gomulka expressed his reservations about it by hurling an ashtray at the screen.

Following that there was a wonderfully twisted thriller named Repulsion, shot in London, which charts the mental disintegration of a young woman who lives with her sister on the top floor of a seedy South Kensington mansion block. As with Knife, the film occasionally betrays its budget-related shortcomings, but still shows an originality and a lightness of touch well beyond the stock Hammer-horror genre that its producers, a faintly comic-opera pair of East End entrepreneurs named Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, had in mind. The gradual crack-up of what Polanski calls ‘an angelic-looking girl with a soiled halo’, bereft of any of the sort of state emotional-welfare apparatus we might expect today, is what seems most shocking to modern viewers: both pitiable and ugly.

Repulsion was perhaps the logical curtain-raiser to Polanski’s first significant, and commercially successful, venture, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. Essentially, it’s the tale of a young woman whose world, like that of the heroine in Repulsion, spirals into a living hell once she becomes pregnant – inseminated by Beelzebub himself, apparently – with her first child. Things soon take a downward turn. At first the neighbours in the woman’s New York apartment building show an unusual interest in her welfare, and in time weird chanting can be heard through the walls at night. Then another neighbour commits suicide by jumping out of a window. When the new mother finally gives birth, she’s at first told that her child has died on delivery. Hearing its cries from the next room, she locates her infant son, who it appears has highly unusual eyes, causing Rosemary to clap a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. It’s all just a touch extreme, and the veteran actress Ruth Gordon, playing one of Rosemary’s neighbours, appears to have inadvertently wandered in from the set of a knockabout comedy, but set against this the direction itself is crisp, unpretentious and rarely stoops to cliché. The film brought Polanski both fame and fortune, but perhaps more importantly saddled him with the faintly unsavoury reputation he arguably still enjoys today. To some, it was as though the director himself had sold his soul to the devil, as some real-life equivalent of the Faustian pact seemingly entered into by Rosemary’s neighbours and tormentors. One widely-seen press headline of the time, parodying the advertising for Rosemary’s Baby, ran ‘Pray for Roman Polanski’.

After that came a notably sanguinary Macbeth, which most critics took as a cathartic exercise by Polanski, whose wife had been murdered the previous year, followed by Chinatown, a hard-boiled but gently paced saga of big-city corruption, peopled by Raymond Chandler-style wiseguys and featuring a memorable cameo by the director himself as a knife-wielding thug.

We can perhaps draw a discreet veil over the years from around 1975 to 2002, although the visually sumptuous Tess (1979) – like Macbeth, inviting numerous Freudian, if not overtly autobiographical interpretations, with its central plot of a young girl sexually violated by an older man – had both its admirers and detractors. Perhaps it’s enough to say that Polanski brought a distinct vision to bear in almost all his films, good or bad, and that this included a technical expertise (he remains an acknowledged master of matters such as camera lenses and stage-dressing) not as common in even the most prominent directors as one might think, as well as a tendency to explore the darker side of the human condition: the idea that we’re essentially adrift in a hostile world, the butt of some cosmic jest of unfathomable cruelty. ‘My characters’ destinies [are] the result of apparently meaningless coincidence,’ Polanski once said, which would appear to apply to much of his own career. One of the most pronounced themes, rarely far from the surface in his scripts, is the subject of betrayal, and, by extension, death – of compelling interest to the man whose mother, wife and unborn son were all murdered – and the inevitable survivor’s guilt. When asked about the violence in his films, muted as it may seem by modern standards, Polanski inevitably notes that he does no more than show the world around him, and whatever else he’s surely one of the few directors, living or dead, to have experienced quite as many of the twentieth century’s homicidal monsters at first hand. ‘People talk about the autobiographical aspect of Roman’s work,’ the critic and Polanski collaborator Ken Tynan once observed. ‘But his life’s much more interesting than that. The cliffhangers end with real falls.’

This somehow leads irresistibly to 2002’s The Pianist, the affecting Holocaust drama for which Polanski won his first and as yet only Academy Award. Surely one of the film’s many attractions is that it dares to underplay the obvious horror of the subject matter, never pandering to the audience with the sort of pity-of-it-all approach taken by other directors treating broadly the same material. In Polanski’s world there are no soaring choirs to mark the moments of redemption, and no Jaws-like thudding to signal the perils. The film’s climactic confrontation, when a leather-clad SS officer asks the eponymous musician Wladyslaw Szpilman to prove he can play the piano, the stark implication being that he’ll be shot if he can’t, stands as an exquisite example of the power of understatement. Where another director might have given us close-ups of squinting eyes and sweaty palms, Polanski lets the scene unfold quietly, with just the right balance of tension and release. Instead of the panoramic sweep of a Schindler’s List, The Pianist confines itself to a more modest and specific set of events. In scaling down the action to a single, not invariably heroic figure, it invites the audience members to put themselves in Szpilman’s shoes, and so achieves an impact that Spielberg’s worthy but heavy-going epic had somehow lacked. Taken as a whole, the film remains Polanski’s masterpiece, one that surprises through its understated and irresistible power to move.

It remains only to note that when Polanski won his Oscar for The Pianist, he wisely elected not to personally attend the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. Had he done so, he would presumably have been met not by the traditional Academy limousine but by an armed police detail, which would have executed the outstanding warrant for his arrest and transported him to the nearest jail. Polanski’s friend Harrison Ford collected the trophy on his behalf, and was later able to fly to Paris and present it to him in person. The Oscar ceremony itself took place on 23 March 2003. By a morbid coincidence, it was sixty years to the day since Polanski’s father Ryszard had been marched off to the Mauthausen concentration camp, thus exposing his son to the full horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland. On at least one level, the whole ordeal now finally seemed to have been brought full circle. ‘I am deeply moved to be rewarded for The Pianist. It relates to the events so close to my own life, the events that led me to comprehend that art can transform pain,’ Polanski said in a statement from his Paris exile.

It is not a bad epitaph on his career as a whole.

Posted on by Guy Walker

Escaping from reality – ‘The French Dispatch’

GUY WALKER greatly enjoys a playful new film, but finds it ultimately insubstantial

Early on in The French Dispatch we encounter an imprisoned murderer who takes the art world by storm with an abstract nude painting of a female prison officer, with whom he manages to conduct an affair, secretly painted in his French prison. After his release he conducts an affair with the female reporter – named Berensen, thus echoing the name of the art historian Berenson – telling his story. The wall in the prison canteen on which he painted a series of abstract murals is, then, air-lifted to an art museum in Kansas after slow motion mayhem has unfolded between prisoners, prison staff and denizens of the art world. Next, a middle aged female American reporter reports on and has an affair with the boyish leader of a soixante-huitard revolution, naturally conducted via chess moves relayed through a loud hailer, before she encourages the lad to sleep with a female revolutionary who contradicts everything he proposes on principle. He is then electrocuted in an accident on a radio tower. Finally French Police Noir, Maigret and Tintin-style are comprehensively elided with French haute cuisine.

By now we are in no doubt that the movie is modern, it’s post-modern, it’s meta, full of cutesy kitsch, it appeals to the child in us and it wilfully and proudly obeys none of the rules or the unities and satisfies none of our expectations. There’s slow motion and freeze frame and switches from colour to black and white, from real life to cartoon. We are put in mind of the labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges’ psyche, and Magical Realism takes a bow. It’s a complicated delight with an endless stream of puns, verbal and visual.
There is, therefore, also a Chef/Police Officer who, in a joke typical of the rapid-fire surrealist jokes that are sprinkled throughout, is called Nescaffier and is played by an American actor of Korean heritage. All of the stories are set in a fictional French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé which is actually parts of old Angoulême, the home of the French Comic-book Festival. The French Dispatch salutes in passing the art dealer Lord Duveen who enriched himself by satisfying the thirst of American millionaires for European art, the overweight and brilliant American writer on World War 2, boxing and French cuisine, AJ Liebling and Mavis Gallant, the Canadian chronicler of Paris in May ‘68 all of whom appeared in the famed New Yorker magazine as writers or subjects. It’s all very affectionate, charming and whimsical in the tradition of Amélie and The Budapest Hotel. The whole, pitched as ‘a  love letter to journalists’ is framed within the Foreign Bureau Magazine of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun – The French Dispatch in which the stories appear in an obituary edition for the recently deceased editor and founder.
It’s studded with the stars, many of them current hot properties, who must make up most of Wes Anderson’s address book, many of them having appeared in his earlier films. All of the thespian brilliance and talent of Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Timothée Chalomet, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Saoirse Ronan, Anjelica Houston, Edward Norton, Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Cécile de France, Rupert Friend, Léa Seydoux, Benicio del Toro, Henry Winkler, Elisabeth Moss, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray and even Jarvis Cocker is showcased and shop-windowed to great effect. And that’s only half of the cast!
So, what do we think about all of this? How do we respond to it? It’s the nature of contemporary art and that includes le septième art, even when it’s set in other periods and unfamiliar places and, as this film is, studiedly untethered from any connection with now, to tell us something about the time in which it was made and the modern consciousness that made it.
Whimsy and Magical Realism, although they entertain and tickle us, somehow fail to satisfy us at a profound level. This is, perhaps, because of what they really are. Our modern zeitgeist demands the abolition of intelligence, wit, irony and humour for fear that they undermine or, perish the thought, laugh at the witless totalitarianism of identity politics and correctness. This means, in practice, that a ban has effectively been imposed on the brilliance of Western wit to exercise itself to its full extent in relation to the real contemporary world. The result of this proscription is that European and American wit, a sad and forlorn refugee, has had to migrate into intellectual exile, retreating into a green screen cultural vacuum where it cannot be incriminated by association with anything linkable to the actual modern world. In this instance it is welcomed into a French world set somewhere between the 30s and the 70s (thus allowing the existence of anachronisms like big-hearted show-girls) that is no more than the figment of someone’s imagination and is incontrovertibly ‘detoxified’ by being totally over and hermetically sealed in that vacuum. It is given free rein to do its soubresauts and pirouettes on condition that none of them mean anything or make any comment on our times. Wit can obtain as long as it is defanged and not dangerous to the status quo. And this is the sad comment on our times that the film, unwittingly, makes……

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

From The Cruel Sea to St. Trinian’s…

Still from ‘The Cruel Sea’ (1953)
STUART MILLSON revels in British film music at the Proms

It seems unthinkable that a Proms season in peacetime would have to be abandoned, but this is almost what happened last year at the height of the Covid pandemic. With much-reduced orchestras – their players spread widely across an extended Royal Albert Hall platform in order to preserve social distancing – the BBC resolutely produced a Proms 2020, but with the stalls, arena, gallery and boxes of the great Hall empty. The Prommers had to content themselves with listening to the skeleton season on Radio 3, or watching the proceedings on BBC Four television. But it was better than nothing.

This year, audiences returned, but on the basis that concertgoers showed evidence of a double Covid vaccination, or a negative test for the virus. And even then, the famous Proms queues, the pre-concert drinks, atmosphere and general buzz of the season – little of what we understand by this remarkable and long-established music festival existed.

Doreen Carwithen (Mary Alwyn)

On the 2nd September your reviewer ventured into London to enjoy a Prom given by the 60-strong BBC Concert Orchestra, possibly the most versatile orchestra to be employed by the BBC – covering the classical repertoire (often lighter or more recondite works); show music and the songs of theatreland; and even touching upon jazz and pop. For my evening, the BBC CO conveyed its audience through the Odeon doors and into the world of British film music, beginning with Doreen Carwithen (real name, Mary Alwyn) and her overture to the 1954 film, The Men of Sherwood. What a good choice: asplendid curtain-raiser which immediately lifted the spirits of the 2,000 people present; the music immediately taking everyone away from their Covid concerns and back into a world of Lincoln green and derring-do. Carwithen’s overture was reminiscent of her better-known Suffolk Suite, an effective piece of scene painting – with rhapsodic evocations of the English landscape mixed with trumpets and brass, as men of valour meet in combat on battlements.

The programme notes for the evening tended to be a little sniffy about the quality of the film – underlining the point by reproducing the original theatrical poster from the time, and referring to “scrappily-drawn faux mediaeval title cards” and “an illuminated manuscript of the lowest wattage”. A trifle harsh, perhaps – given the general good intentions of the film-makers, who in those days at least tried to celebrate our English past. In fact, there is much reassurance in the mythical country evoked by the props and artwork on the 1950s. In our age of political correctness, it is encouraging that such images should have been dusted down and brought out before an audience.

Similar notions of the countryside and olde England were also found in one of the major items on the bill: Vaughan Williams’s Three Portraits from the England of Elizabeth, the result of the composer’s collaboration with nationalised British Railways. Just as the travel poster was used in the 1930s to inspire holidaymakers to head for the ‘Cornish Riviera’ or the breathtaking Lakeland, the 1950s embraced the technology of the in-house film unit – the perfect opportunity for composers to earn money quickly (instead of waiting for an orchestra to include their new work in a Festival Hall programme). And so, Vaughan Williams’s style – a gracious blend of Tudor-infused tone-painting, with the echo of the village green never far away – proved to be the ideal accompaniment to British Transport’s public information films. Yet played on their own in the concert hall (with the listener, perhaps not even aware of how they were commissioned or written), the ‘Three Portraits’ could very easily have been a short, long-lost folk symphony by Vaughan Williams.

Alan Rawsthorne, William Alwyn and Malcolm Arnold were also dominant figures in the film industry and it was fascinating to hear – live – Rawsthorne’s dark score to The Cruel Sea (1953) which starred Jack Hawkins and told the story of the Battle of the Atlantic. Rawsthorne is hardly ever played these days in his own native Britain, the Second Piano Concerto surfacing, perhaps, every 30 years at the Proms. It is high time for a re-evaluation of this masterful composer, capable of bringing a psychological sense of sea warfare and the limitless ocean into a conventional British war film.

Is there a tendency for film music to be bitty? Not so, in the case of William Alwyn’s truly large-scale symphonic contribution to the 1947 Carol Reed production, Odd Man Out – the tense, anguished story of an Irish nationalist (named Johnny McQueen) injured, and on the run through the mean streets of Belfast. Again, here is an example of music that could easily have been the first movement of a symphony: Alwyn conceiving large, heavily-woven expanses of ideas – with much complicated development, instead of simply relying on a simple, repetitive theme for the film-goer. A satisfying span of gripping, tragic proportions.

Peter Cushing in ‘The Skull’

The most avant garde work of the evening was the Elisabeth Lutyens score for the 1965 Peter Cushing film, The Skull, made in 1965. Not afraid to produce haunting sounds, by using modernist techniques, Lutyens could almost be described as an English (female) Bela Bartok. A strange, disjointed, disharmony at the edge of tonality brings to life the occult world of Peter Cushing’s obsessive character, Dr. Christopher Maitland – the Proms programme editor finding a marvellous still from the film: Cushing staring into the eye sockets of the Marquis de Sade’s skull.

Finally, a complete change in mood – the BBC Concert Orchestra bringing the house down with the skittish score by Malcolm Arnold for The Belles of St. Trinian’s: a dazzling, tongue-in-cheek, belly-laugh of an extravanganza, complete with shifty ‘Flash Harry’s’ furtive schemes (played to perfection by the great George Cole); and all the unleashed anarchy of the worst girls’ school in cinematic Britain (headed by the ever-so-slightly alarming Alistair Sim as ‘Miss Fritton’). Arnold had the rare ability to match the mood of so many productions, from war stories to comedies, but succeeding in everything he did because of his limitless, lyrical self-confidence, mastery of the orchestra, and refusal to see anything in conventional terms. It is possible to say that without Arnold’s dizzying, barrier-breaking sound-world – music that is the equivalent of a downing a treble gin and tonic in the company of the best British comedy actors of the ’50s – The Belles of St. Trinian’s might not have been the classic that it became.

The BBC Concert Orchestra marched us out of the Royal Albert Hall with a rousing film encore – again by Malcolm Arnold, the unforgettable Bridge on the River Kwai, with conductor, Bramwell Tovey, making sure that everyone clapped and whistled along to that famous evocation of parade-ground swagger and cheerful British heroism, ‘Colonel Bogey’.

Posted on by Alex Pugh

Auntie’s anti-conservatism

ALEX PUGH suggests some reasons why the BBC is so leftwing

I first worked in the BBC in 1981 in its Birmingham Pebble Mill studio. I well recall its large bar, where I sometimes drank with a middle-aged producer. One day, a Cheltenham MP named Charles Irving was in the news. This producer said to me, “He’s a hang ‘em and flog ‘em Tory like me”. Apparently Irving wasn’t (1), but that’s by the way. My point is I cannot imagine anyone in the BBC uttering such a view today.  I do wonder what this chap would make of the fact that since 2018, his old employer has its first Gender and Identity Correspondent.

Broadcasting is a strange world. It’s one where a man convicted of sadistic crimes against a male escort is welcomed back after jail (if he’s Boy George) – yet also one where leading names who say something the BBC doesn’t like hearing will not last long. For confirmation, see Pete Murray, Robin Page, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Sarah Kennedy, Carol Thatcher… And, I suppose, Jeremy Clarkson (2).

Are the broadcast media left wing – and if so, can we establish why ?  To keep things simple, I will focus on the BBC. 

Let us first define ‘left wing’. Time was when it meant socialist, with its policy of wealth redistribution, the abolition of class barriers  and even of capitalism itself. It’s fair to say such was what inspired the makers of BBC dramas like The Price of Coal, a 1977 two-parter for Play For Today. It was written by Barry Hines and Ken Loach, the duo behind Kes. Such work recalls the Italian realist school of film. It was of its time and helped explain why Play For Today was cited as proof in its day of the BBC’s leftist bias. Yet most of the Beeb’s prolific drama then was, if I recall, studio-based adaptations of famous novels. These tended not to be overtly political.

Left wing politics have since then had a big rebrand, in the mould defined by the late Stuart Hall of the Open University as “race, gender and sexuality” (3). Imported from the USA in the 1960s, this became the trinity of the British New Left. It was certainly the religion of New Labour and, thanks to their long spell in power, one that has been woven into the legal framework of modern life here, despite ten years of Conservative prime ministers. Policies such as multiculturalism lie at its core. The US notion of ‘political correctness’ derives from this broad ideology.

If that is how we’ll define ‘left wing’ today, we could look at the BBC’s output and decide whether this seems its prevailing mindset.  What’s more useful is to quote some individuals who have been the face of its leading service, national news.  Here are some interesting statements:

  • “The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it” – or so a news executive there told Jeff Randall, a former Business Editor
  • “The BBC is not impartial or neutral.  It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias” – this was from Andrew Marr
  • “At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the left”.  So said the late Peter Sissons. He added: “I am in no doubt that the majority of BBC staff vote for political parties of the Left”
  • “Of course there is political correctness at the BBC” – that’s the opinion of Jeremy Paxman
  • “The Guardian is their bible and political correctness their creed”, said Michael Buerk
  • John Humphries later wrote of the BBC’s “even greater fear of the politically correct brigade and the most fashionable pressure groups usually from the liberal Left, the spiritual home of most bosses and staff”
  • Most recently, ex newsreader Jan Leeming complained, “Why is the BBC so in thrall to the woke minority while ignoring the wishes of so many of its loyal regulars like me? [W]e are all being infantilised, treated as if we can’t cope with anything that anyone might find offensive…Treating the population like children by sanitising everything, suppressing debate, and ‘no-platforming’ is extremely damaging. ”

Such remarks from seven of the BBC’s most eminent journalists of recent years not only suggest a striking pattern: they also leave you in no doubt the BBC must indeed be left-wing, if they all say so! Surprisingly, in 2010 the Director General himself – Mark Thompson – wrote “In the BBC I joined 30 years ago [1979], there was, in much of current affairs…a massive bias to the left”.  However, he continued “Now it is a completely different generation… It is a broader church”. So, no worries there then.

A cynic might say this change had come pretty quickly, for in 2001 another BBC journalist – Robin Aitken – had written “If the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’, the BBC was ‘institutionally Leftist’”.  Later, in 2007, he stated “being a Tory in the BBC was the loneliest job in Britain” and added “ ‘Neutral’ for BBC journalists is left of centre for everyone else”. In his 30 years at the BBC, Mr Aitken had seen it “transformed from the staid upholder of the status quo to a champion of progressive causes”.

His timeframe interests me, because it makes me think of how I remember Radio 4 when working there in the early 1980s. Certainly there were a lot of left-leaning people in their 20s and early 30s, but the producers I worked for mainly struck me as mildly Tory. I was a bit surprised when the presenter of our show said, approvingly, “there are many Territorial Army men at the BBC”. He also suggested I join the RNVR: “I can see you in a sub-lieutenant’s uniform”. This was 1982. Alan Protheroe, the BBC’s Director of News who clashed so bitterly with Margaret Thatcher over the Falklands coverage that year, was himself a TA colonel.

My memory of that era was of a BBC that was quite a broad church, in a national industry with many Conservative-voting TV employees. It was ITV’s World In Action that was then considered the hotbed of TV left-wingery, although News At Ten was fronted by Alastair Burnet, a Tory. I cannot imagine the criticisms of the BBC quoted above being made back in the 1980s. There was of course a system then to keep the dreaded lefties out of the BBC: security vetting. For my job as a Radio 4 researcher, my name was sent off to some vague Whitehall desk to see if alarm bells rang. In the late 1960s, people accepted for the BBC graduate training scheme sometimes had the job withdrawn after MI5 said “no”. 

I’ve talked so far about news programming. But when we remember ‘the golden age of telly’, we most likely recall the comedies.  It speaks volumes about today’s BBC that it still shows Dad’s Army, but that was just one of many comedy series. The Good Life, To The Manor Born, Are You Being Served? and co. were all safely apolitical.  Today, what passes for TV comedy is frequently left-wing – for nowhere has dumped its traditional conservatism more than British comedy. I cannot imagine a right wing comic getting very far these days, whether in festivals or on TV.

A current affairs TV presenter told me in 1990 that clever graduates of the right entered law, those of the left the media. The BBC was always accused of being left-wing, albeit by Tories rather than by its own presenters. It begs the question how the left-wing BBC so trenchantly described by Messrs. Buerk, Paxman, Sissons and co. came into being?

I think three things have happened since the 1980s. TV has become detached from its regional roots, driven in part by the rise of London-based later arrivals like Channel 4, Sky and Five. Forty years ago, both the BBC and ITV drew huge cultural input from outside London. Pebble Mill, for example, made radio and TV for local, regional and national audiences. It fused broadcasters closer to their audiences, and provincial life is more conservative. Modern leftism by contrast is metropolitan: an increasingly London-centric broadcasting sector came to reflect this.

Secondly, Britain itself became more left-wing from the 1980s onwards. Just look at the ever-expanded higher education system. Broadcasting mirrors that trend. The Tories have an 80 seat majority based on almost 14 million votes. Yet well over 16 million voted for Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and Scots/Welsh nationalists. We live in a decreasingly conservative country, where even large corporations want to prove how right-on they are, and diversity is their new mantra.

Thirdly, wherever left-wingers or ‘progressives’ move into a field, be it universities, TV, or the civil service, they soon exclude anyone of differing views. Consequently, If someone were to attend a job interview in TV and express admiration for Margaret Thatcher or Enoch Powell, it’s hard to imagine he or she would be chosen.

In this new Britain, is it any wonder the BBC is left wing/liberal/PC – however you term it ? The new director-general, Tim Davie, stood as a Conservative councillor in London in 1993.  I doubt it will affect BBC editorial output, even if it does enable someone to say the organisation can’t possibly be left-wing if it is run by a Tory.

Editor’s Notes

  1. Sir Charles Graham Irving, 1923-1995, MP for Cheltenham. The Independent’s obituary certainly does not suggest ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ tendencies
  2. In 1983, the BBC cancelled veteran DJ Pete Murray’s programmes after he called for listeners to vote Conservative. Ecologist Robin Page’s BBC appearances (including six years presenting the popular One Man and His Dog) dried up after various ‘controversial’ comments. Robert Kilroy-Silk was sacked by the BBC for a 2004 Sunday Express article entitled “We Owe Arabs Nothing”. DJ Sarah Kennedy claims she was forced out of the BBC in 2010 (ostensibly for health reasons) for her views on race and Enoch Powell. In 2009, Carol Thatcher was ejected from the BBC’s One Show for referring to a black tennis player as a “golliwog”. Jeremy Clarkson was replaced on the Top Gear motoring programme in 2015 after a fracas with a caterer, but also for a habit of ‘offensive’ remarks
  3. Stuart McPhail Hall, 1932-2014, Jamaican-born academic and co-founder of the New Left Review