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

Devonshire

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has been an artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town

Devonshire

Staggering amidst a floodtide                                           Heavitree

of happiness embalmed in memory                              sudden frost children

Impression . . . kaleidoscope . . . slowed                        Chapleton, Umberleigh

of veiled suburb or deep country

part lament, part symphony                                          hands enfolded

To cope or not to cope                                                    bright face, rosy cheeks

Is not the question . . .

Summer bluebells, autumn leaf, the red streets missed    (brickwork and gardens)

the grass-glowing banks of peace turned white

back or forwards                                                       your singing eyes

it all returns                                                                                   Sidmouth, Ottery

to find areas unnoticed or skimmed

certain times become legend                                                           Honiton.

Hail the slowing train for the clatter up Taw’s wooded, meandering river (1981

or else this confession                                                                 under the sun

will get out of hand

match-light flaring in and out                               Hembury, Belstone, Great Mis Tor

of places and times centring by weight                                                       let go

upon Bideford or Exeter . . .

These blind summits can be cold

give me time to intensify or pass . . .

Floating through empty streets where all life has ceased                    

I wonder how to wake or whether

this is the truth                                                   returned to the ether

the shadows rich, the ruins better

than a world we have sold for a molehill of groats

squandered ourselves and scrapped the future

between lonely screens and the social surf                                

all thought swallowed in a fly-tip of chatter

the maya of progress                                                                                        

a ceaseless march . . . Return to the past:

its light and feel, a sandstone red                                    

background of caverns ringing the head

the matches flare, nocturnal semaphore,

signalling Exeter and Dawlish Warren.

A girl I knew when we were both ten,

moved here and was never seen again, a new start or an old ending?

like post-war Sidwell Street’s arcades of idealism               Exeter again

abandoned, due to be demolished

or awaiting restoration                                                        I hope

The train gallops on metals not traversed for 30 years

four old homes passed already . . .

I want to say I love you                                                    Bonehill Down

but just now, you are not here

(and as) the tunnel approaches, the blind end trough

in the mind’s ear, I can still hear beyond the years

past this washed-out, effortless tube,

the blast of Ajax and Achilles                                           Indomitable

even in the 80s there was still an air of splendour

diesels with concentrated power

worthy descendants of the dragons of steam                Seaton Junction

Surging brakes slow the water meadows passing west of Axminster

unchanged it seems since we last alighted:

1989, and a pushchair wheel detached itself to cross the platform and roll slowly off its edge

We watched this filmic omen of tragedy in horror

but as the wheel settled on the sleepers, began to laugh.

All those places where we came and went          Harpford, Ottery, Hembury Fort

recur again in the travelling carriage glass

with different children under different skies       or yet alone

swerving on, fast again, they will not rest,

a devastating parade                 immediacy struck by infinite distance

their atmosphere is porous                                  haze, beauty,

as if a spell could so easily                                  slim slate graves

contradict the years                                            reverse

All these thoughts I would have to avoid (at the lodge)

dismiss every fantasy and whatever remains

every background yearning excuse    (Devon is Hevon, says the mural/graffiti)

accept yet reject getting tired and the gathering gall of a disregarded life

in the sliding anaconda of this declining world

reject the dwindling thread between us    the habit of misunderstanding

Companionship (it seems) is not enough for self-surmounting tunnellers or their aerial quest

impatient with the human form

without extravagant love (and probably with it too) – unreasonable, crushing,

these mimes and twists of frustration

only bring closer the hour of the wolf,

glimmering in uncompromising starkness

in purity or despair

clutch hands, see far behind the yes, feel the warm rounded limbs regardless

such halfway states

between body and soul, not relegated to the past

the idea of completion, of that internal ghost . . .

comes and goes as the train sweeps through and on   Chard Junction

to the sirens of alarms

the striped angry barriers

the crushing ache of life

gone

lift off is here, at last . . .

Posted on by Louis Hunt · 1 Comment

Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama (extracts)

LOUIS HUNT is a retired professor of political theory. He has published poems and translations from Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan in a variety of online and print journals including Metamorphoses, The Brazen Head, Interpret, The High Window, New Verse Review and Nimrod.

The poem numbers refer to Per K Sorensen’s critical edition: Divinity Secularized: An Inquiry into the Nature and Form of the Songs Ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama, Wien 1990. Translated from the Tibetan by Louis Hunt

The Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama is a collection of 65 poems popularly ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706). The Sixth Dalai Lama was notorious for his indifference to the religious and political obligations of his office. He publicly renounced his monastic vows, preferring to spend his time in the taverns and brothels of Lhasa. He died at the age of 26, taken hostage and presumably killed by the Mongol forces contending for power in central Tibet. Despite his notoriously unconventional behavior, the Sixth Dalai Lama is a revered figure in Tibetan culture. Some have tried to interpret his lack of the conventional monastic virtues of celibacy and abstinence as an example of Tantric Buddhism in which the deliberate flaunting of moral norms is seen as a dangerous but potentially more efficacious route to Enlightenment. But the poems themselves suggest a simpler explanation – Tsangyang Gyatso was an ardent young man chafing at the restraints of familial, religious, and political authority.

The poems themselves are quite short – four lines of six syllables a piece, almost haiku like in their brevity. But the condensed style of classical Tibetan literature, the tendency, especially in poetry, to omit grammatical particles whenever possible, means that one can pack a lot of meaning into a very small compass. Despite their apparent simplicity, these  poems can often be read as an indirect commentary on the difficulties of Tsangyang Gyatso’s precarious position in Lhasa. The “grey-yellow” wind that banishes “the blossom from the bee” is also an allusion to the color of the robes worn by Tibetan government officials. The poems touch as well on specific aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that may not be familiar to the uninitiated reader. For example, the image of the girl returning “again and again in my thoughts” uses the Tibetan expression  for the Buddhist conception of cyclic existence. But I believe these poems work, or should work, even for someone completely unfamiliar with Tibetan history or Tibetan Buddhist practice. I have endeavored to translate these poems in a way that conveys the only thing that can be adequately represented in English – their lucid surface.

The clear white light of the moon rises

above the peaks of the eastern mountains.

The face of a young girl not yet a mother

returns again and again in my thoughts.                                                                                

(1)

The green shoots of last year’s sowing

are now sheaves of dried-out straw –

the bodies of young men grown old

are worn stiff as a bow made of horn.                                                                                   

(2)

The season for flowers has faded

but the bee does not lament its passing.

Love’s deeds have been exhausted

and I will not lament their leaving.                                                                                       

(7)

A few scratches on the ground

can track the stars’ expansive course.

I know by touch her tender flesh

but cannot trace her happiness.                                                                                              

(49)

The grass is covered with frost –

herald of the grey-yellow wind

that will finally banish

the blossom from the bee.                                                                                                      

(8)

The goose longs for the marshes,

hoping to linger there a while,

but lighting on the icy lake

despairs and takes flight again.                                                                                             

(9)

This girl, loved since childhood,

is descended from the race of wolves.

She has learnt to tear my skin and flesh

before she flees to her mountain home.                                                                                 

(36)

These small letters written in black ink –

a drop of water can erase them.

But the mind’s unwritten figures

cannot be blotted or effaced.                                                                                     

(13)

I looked for my love at dusk,

the dawn brought falling snow.

What is there to keep secret?

My footprints mark the snow.                                                                                                

(53)

Posted on by Matthew Kirby

Five poems by Matthew Kirby

MATTHEW KIRBY’s poems have appeared in various periodicals, recently, Tar River Poetry, New Verse Review, Little Patuxent Review, Doubly Mad, and Literary Matters. He lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley with his wife and kids.

The Property

Jay’d had a few when he’d decided, true.

A trip out to the property he owned

but never stood or laid eyes on. The title

noted a lien and other complications.

A former easement had been covered by

the snows of time. Now inaccessible

by road, the land lay feral, swallowed up

by taxes, eglantine, and pine. The real

draw was his dad was, maybe, buried there

beside a boat shed on the dried up pond.

He changed his filters, packed his saddle bags

with Enid’s sourdough bread and beer

and went, despite the ice that week, into

a kind of heaven, all brown and white and raw.

Cardinal Salute

Direct my spirit north, to mining towns,

cold air descending from the foot of heaven,

to hemlocks stunted by the breath of God,

mud springs, slate caves and state park dirt bike trails,

a peeling porch, a girl in a gray bandana,

descendent of all races, fathered by

a machinist, though he was ordained in Lviv,

keeps up a fleet of Belarusian bikes

and rents them to a few vacationers.

Of late, his daughter’s helping him expand

through marketing consisting of exquisite

daguerreotypes, hand-colored, of her boyfriend

riding a two-stroke Minsk enduro bike

through granite-flanked ravines, past bobbing ferns.

He Didn’t Understand the Reason Why

He didn’t understand the reason why

they fired his wife, but he was kind of glad

and welcomed her back home with soft-boiled eggs

and oat milk lattes on the patio.

He told her two could live as cheap as one

and sex was better in the afternoon.

              She mourned her sense of purpose for a time.

She ran and lost ten pounds and planted hostas

in each square foot of shade. She talked to birds,

really conversed with them about their edgy,

cantankerous chirps and status-conscious preening.

She went insane, frankly. But what that means,

today, is anybody’s guess, he thought.

They fired his wife, and he was kind of glad.

The Novel

He tried to write a novel. All that came

were smells released by melting snow on asphalt:

the funk of rotting leaves and cigarette ash,

comforting, sturdy scent of crank case oil

and antifreeze, high and hilarious bird scat.

It was all joy and had no conflict, just

the good, its irresistible appeal

to souls released from the retreating ice.

No agent wanted it. It sat on looseleaf

inside a cardboard box in his garage.

From there, it emanated waves of love

that cured all discord in the neighborhood.

The novelist grew doubtful, though, and crabby.

He shaved his beard and checked into an abbey.

Crow in a Snowy Field

What does it mean to see a crow in snow

pecking between dead rows of corn? Blue hills

adorn the distance: veins seen through a girl’s

pale wrist. The foggy winter air, the sound

of tires on wet macadam. My own weight

imprints the dripping field. Is it an omen

of demographic free fall? Why lapse back

into my mind, when I should rush the field

and grab the crow, restrain its hideous beak

between my thumbs and take it out behind

that shed I saw a mile ago, all ochre

except a turquoise door, and feed it tuna,

talk softly to it, walk it back to campus

tied to my ankle with a soft red thread?

Posted on by Nicholas Booth

Craven Plain

The first in a series of stories from Bin Ends by X. Trapnel, Anthony Powell’s great lost novelist, as found and transcribed by NICK BOOTH

Billy the Tie told me to go and fetch Lavender Ray’s suitcase. ‘Do us a favour,’ he’d said. ‘There’s something in it which will get us all into trouble.’ I’d a hard-edged hangover of the type where you’re not sure of your stomach or your sanity.  It was not long after opening time at the Black Dog and I’d just accepted from Billy a verbal promissory note of a tin of fags to be collected that afternoon. He was apt to make gifts and all of us who lived on the straight side of the fence knew not to accept them as a rule. However, the Blitz was on and there were bombs night and day. For most people life was difficult, but Billy had come into easy street: thieving and fiddling in the blackout was, as he put it, ‘extra-easy’. Soho talk had it that Billy had even done people in but the prospect of having a lot of cigarettes to play with was too much in my weakened condition so I gave in. ‘You’ll have fags galore, boy,’ he’d said.

I had not expected a favour to be called in so quickly. My stomach knotted tighter into a ball of acid. The pain in my head flared. The stale beer-and-fags morning scent of the Black Dog, usually rather enjoyable, oppressed me. Gingerly I drank a farty half of Bass. I noticed my hand was shaking slightly. The fear, sadness and regret of the serious hangover bit deep. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ said Billy.

I said I didn’t mind, of course I didn’t mind. On the contrary, it would be a pleasure, I said.

‘I shouldn’t think it’ll be a pleasure,’ said Vernie wryly. Vernie was Billy’s sidekick. Tall where Billy was slightly under. Both wore pinstripe suits (Billy’s smart dress sense was the reason for his nickname). It seemed their ambition was to look like the cream of society instead of rats: the tribute vice pays to virtue. However, the effect was more suggestive of a variety double-act. Vernie took an ostentatious sip at his double pimple and water, to show off he was drinking one. Pimple-and-blotch: scotch.

‘Come on now, Bill,’ said the landlady, Ada. ‘Neville’s a painter. He’s not part of all your lot.’

‘Ain’t you in the war effort, boy?’ asked Vernie in way that was avuncular yet sinister. I said I was waiting to be called up. That was a lie. I’d been deemed unfit for service.

‘Never mind all that plop,’ said Billy, his voice as coarse as a burglar’s file. ‘You go and fetch me Lavender Ray’s suitcase.’

 ‘What’s in the suitcase,’ asked a little fish-faced man they called Cod’s Eyes who pushed sack barrows about for his living. ‘It ain’t that tart’s head, is it?’

‘Cheese it,’ said Billy. He fixed me with his blue eyes, cold as winter dusk. ‘It’s easy as wink,’ he said.

‘Is Ray dead, then?’ asked Vernie disinterestedly.

‘Word come to me last night that he’s dying, at death’s door. His landlady had the doctor out to him – who paid I don’t know: Ray’d never cough up for a doctor anyway. ‘Ere Vernie, “cough up”.  Did you hear that? Well laugh, then. Tops up the quack says it ain’t no good. Ray’s finished. Lungs or summink.’

I felt finished too, and hurried to the gents where I was violently ill. Why had I agreed to the errand? When I came back I drank off my Bass, cross-eyed for a moment watching the brown river of beer flow into my mouth while Billy wrote Lavender Ray’s address on a strip of the Greyhound Express. ‘There’s a key on a bit of string in the letterbox of the street door. His room’s at the top of the house. There’s two doors on the landing. Ray’s is the first one. Don’t sod about. Bring the suitcase back here,’ he said softly. ‘If I’m not here and neither is Vernie, just wait till we are. On no account leave the suitcase here or anywhere else, got it. That tin of fags will be waiting.’

‘Tart’s head?’ asked Ada rhetorically.

‘Some dead tart was found,’ said Cod’s Eyes. ‘I see it in the paper.’

‘Why would her head be in Lavender Ray’s suitcase,’ said Vernie.

‘Cheese it, will you,’ said Billy. ‘You’ll go frightening the boy here. Now, you run along and them fags is all yours.’

I turned out of the door of the Dog. It closed slowly. I heard Vernie say, ‘You’ve sent a boy on a man’s job there. Look at the state of him. I bet the army told him to fog off.’ There was general laughter. ‘I bet,’ added Vernie, ‘they said come back next year when you’ve got some hair on your chest.’ There was more laughter.

*

Outside I took a deep breath, which didn’t help. Cod’s Eyes came out of the other door and walked over to me. He was grinning. ‘You’ve got that all round yer neck, intcha. Why d’yer do it?’

‘I wanted the fags. I didn’t think – ’

‘You didn’t think,’ interrupted Cod’s Eyes elongating the words with a contemptuous tone. ‘You know, you don’t half look queer.’

‘I feel queer.’

‘Want a fag?’

We lit up Cod’s Eyes’s Players. ‘There could be anything in that suitcase,’ he said. ‘Might be a shooter. There was a bloke shot in the West India Dock Road the other night, right through the heart. Foul murder. If the gun’s in that case you’ll be an accessory, kid. Enough to put a rope round your neck.’ He paused and looked at me searchingly through his murky protuberant eyes. Any friendliness vanished. ‘You mug,’ he said. He chipped his fag and stuck back in its box. ‘Stick to drawing pictures next time.’

He started off across the road but quickly turned back and said: ‘How you make a living doing that?’

‘Once in a while someone buys one,’ I said. My voice sounded forlorn. Cod’s Eyes walked on then turned round once more and yelled: ‘If that’s tart’s head’s in it, you’ll swing for that an’ all.’ Then he seemed to remember he was shouting Billy the Tie’s business in the street. He looked round fearfully and stalked away.

I walked out of Soho feeling weak at the knees. Then I got the Tube east.

*

I emerged not far from the river. The whole district had really copped it in the raids. I entertained a wild hope that Lavender Ray’s lodgings had been bombed flat.

The streets were full of dust. Kids searched for shrapnel and looked well pleased at the new anarchy of war. A broken-down bus was pulled up round one corner. Its driver was sitting on seats at the back. Somehow he had got a mug of tea. As I passed he raised the chipped vessel in an ironic toast and winked. In the distance I could hear falling bricks and the sound of a lot of broken glass being swept. I walked for a few minutes and asked the way more than once. At last I came to an old street with a factory wall on one side and tall knocked-about houses on the other. Outside one a woman with a beaky nose in a housecoat was smoking a cigarette and watching another woman in a hairnet scrub the front step. ‘Raymond?’ she said in answer to my query. ‘Next house, top floor. I hope you ain’t going that way, sonny.’

The woman wearing the hairnet craned her head round from the step. She looked chinny and pompous. ‘We don’t want all that round here,’ she said. I walked on. I heard the woman with the beaky nose say, ‘Ought to be in the bloody army.’

I climbed three steps to Ray’s lodgings and felt in the letterbox for the key on a bit of string. It was there. I turned the key and pushed at the door, which seemed stuck. ‘You have to give it a shove when it’s hot,’ said the woman in the hairnet. She’d come down the street to look at me. ‘Push it, boy. Ain’t you got no strength?’

I duly pushed harder. The door, which was rough and splintered at the bottom from untold coaxing kicks, swung open. A vague smell of cooking and fags came out like a silent belch. My crapulent stomach turned a little. Everything inside was brown: tea brown walls, gravy brown stairs, brown windsor lino. I started up the stairs. The ancient stair-carpet was a dirty old brown. An archaeologist might have found a pattern in it. Each landing was the same brown study but a little smaller each time. All was silent but for the sound of a wireless behind one of the doors playing cheery light music. I looked out of a window and saw a brick wall with a yard below. Some washing was pegged out by a privy. The top staircase wound up to a small landing.

I raised my hand to knock but hesitated. Leave now, I thought. Run. I would, I thought, have to avoid Soho thereafter but even going to ground would not protect me from Billy the Tie if I welshed our arrangement. It was folly to think otherwise. You’re in it now, I thought. I’d a lousy headache and felt sweat on my temples. My stomach seemed to have fallen away like so much bombed brickwork. I knocked. Nothing stirred behind the door. I knocked again. Then the other door opened and a tiny old man in a crumpled too-big suit and a soup-strainer moustache appeared. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘If you’re here to thieve, I doubt there’s any money in there. I expect the quack had all that last night. Mug if he didn’t.’ The old man’s voice was like a hinge in need of oil. ‘Got a fag?’

I shook my head, knocked again and then went in.

It was a tiny servant’s room in which everything seemed grey. Behind a menthol atmosphere there was a vague unpleasant smell. The covers were pulled over a body on the bed. A suit hung on the front of a tallboy. The suitcase stood by the bed. In keeping with the hallways it was brown, with leather corners. I lifted it an inch, then put it down. It was heavyish. ‘Any booze?’ said the little man with the moustache. He was hovering on the threshold. I told him there wasn’t any. At this, the corpse’s hand appeared from under the bedclothes and snatched away the covers. A bony face was revealed. I jumped back. My heart was going like a jazz set. ‘I’m not blinking dead – yet,’ rasped Ray. ‘I was shamming ‘cos I thought you were – ’  He stopped. What little colour that had been in his face drained away. He closed his eyes. I looked out at the old man on the landing, who drew his finger across his throat and sadly shook his head. Ray opened his eyes again. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘What you want that suitcase for?’

‘Billy sent me for it,’ I said. ‘Billy the Tie.’ Ray looked furious.

‘You tell Billy to …’ He raised his head to spit out the last words but now it fell back. Ray closed his eyes and opened them. ‘ . . . to mind his own business.’ He seemed to have fallen asleep or have passed out, or died. I looked at my watch. Of course, it had stopped.

‘Don’t sod about,’ I remembered Billy saying. I picked up the suitcase. I noticed there was in fact some booze: half a bottle of scotch on the washstand. I decided not to inform the old man of its existence. On the landing he stood back for me to pass. His eyes were wild. ‘You thieving that suitcase, boy?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m to take it to its owner.’ I started down the stairs. The old boy leant over the banisters and yelled, ‘You’re a tea-leaf!’

I’d done myself no good saying I was taking the suitcase to its owner when its owner was dying in bed upstairs. It was at this point I began to see a courtroom, a trial, a judge, indeed a judge with the black cap on . . . ‘But you took the suitcase,’ the judge said with an echo. ‘You are implicated in a capital offence, my boy.’ He was old; he looked rather like Lavender Ray.

‘You’re a bloody tea-leaf!’ yelled the old man again.

I careered down the stairs and out of the front door. The two women watched me go past. The beaky one said, ‘Where you get that suitcase?’

A window opened above. It was the old boy again bawling through his soup-strainer. ‘Stop thief!’ his whingeing voice cried. I sped up and looked behind me. The two women were chasing me. I wanted to stop and argue but my credentials were hardly convincing.

Now I was in a sort of comedic silent film chase. Up a street and down a street – up a ladder, down a snake, I’d thought – with the two women chasing me. I lost my bearings. Now, I thought, the police will be looking for a young man with a suitcase.

I turned a corner and the broken-down bus was going again. I caught the driver’s eye and, trying to sound calm, asked him where he was going. ‘Central. Jump on chum, if you’re going that way. I’m heading towards Tower Hill.’ I said I’d enjoy the view and so went upstairs. God knows what had happened to the conductor. I looked back at the street corner. At any moment the two harridans would come storming round it shouting the odds. The driver was revving the engine, as if to make sure the bus had the guts to last out the journey. Finally it lurched forward. I kept my eyes back on the corner, but no one came round it. My attention switched to the suitcase. It smelt vile.

*

The hangover had reached a weary late stage. It would quietly stop soon. My head felt old, sore, wooden. I had that woeful inner climate that interprets the sight of a scrap of newspaper blowing down the street as a powerful symbol of the futility and transience of life. On top of that, the suitcase was now a stinky reminder of my foolishness in accepting Billy the Tie’s promise of fags. Then I thought how much I’d like a fag now. I fought back against fear by reminding myself that I’d simply done someone a favour. ‘How was I to know there was the head of a corpse in it,’ I said to the Old Bailey of the mind. The judge spoke again: ‘Do you expect this court to believe you did not know who Billy the Tie was? You, a denizen of Soho pubs, a familiar face? Boozing your days away when better men are fighting for their country?’ Meanwhile, the bad smell came in waves from Lavender Ray’s suitcase. I counted barrage balloons to take my mind off it.

I got off just before the bus terminated at Tower Hill and thanked the driver, who said watch out for Jerry. ‘The Nazzies will have this city to rubble if we’re not careful.’

‘That’s conchie talk,’ I said jokingly. Conchie talk, yes, I thought, like me imagining that picking this old suitcase up could land me in the slammer. But then fearfully I slipped back to thinking of ways that it could.

I walked slowly through the city. By the time I was in Cheapside I was craving a fag. It was a fine day, and for some reason I fell to thinking how wonderful it would be if there wasn’t a war on and if I hadn’t got to lug this suitcase across town. I bought a single fag from a miserly tobacconist who wanted a penny for it and sat down by St Paul’s churchyard to smoke and think. The suitcase stood in front of me. I stared down at it. It didn’t smell so bad in the open air. Should I open it? Should I not? After a while I was lost in thought, staring at the shops in front of me. The courtroom, the judge, the old boy with a soup-strainer, Lavender Ray, Billy the Tie, Vernie, Ada, Cod’s Eyes, they all appeared in my mind. Fear rose in me. Great fear. Then two things happened in short order: I heard the air raid siren start up, that queer bellowing whine, the siren call of a sea monster I’d called it in a poem I hadn’t finished – and someone pinched the suitcase and ran off.

*

The thief was short and wore a cloth cap. I ran after him. I was shouting but pedestrians were coming out of shops and offices and hurrying to shelters. They took no notice of this youngster shouting over the siren. Soon enough I was gaining on him and at the bottom of Ludgate Hill I ran him into a wall via a sort of rugby tackle. ‘All right, all right!’ he shouted. He was in his forties by the look, and now had a rip in his trousers. ‘I thought you was finished with it,’ he said angrily. ‘I mean I didn’t think it was yours: I had one just like that pinched off me yesterday; I bin looking for it ever since.’ I was dusting myself down and listening for bombers.

‘Oh really,’ I said sarcastically.

‘Don’t call in the law,’ he said as he got up. His anger melted away to a pleading appearance. He looked tired, thin and crumpled. Small intelligent brown eyes, rather dog-like, watched me carefully.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ I said.  He brightened up at this. Now we were just two people passing the time of day in an air raid.

‘What’s in it?’ he said.

I swore as I picked the suitcase up to walk on. ‘What’s it got to do with you,’ I said. ‘You’re a tea-leaf,’ I said, remembering the old boy’s jibe.

‘I just like to know what I’ve missed out on.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t actually know.’

‘Wot!’ he said. He was walking beside me now. I was thinking how stupid I’d been to chase him. Providence had stepped in to my problems; a veritable deus ex machina had dropped from the sky instead of a bomb and  now I was saddled with the suitcase again. Mind you, would Billy have accepted that I’d had the case pinched off me? I gave the thief the gist, shouting above the sound of bomb crumps coming from near the river. ‘I’d open that up if I was you,’ he said. I kept on walking. ‘If you don’t want what’s inside, I’ll have it off you.’ I kept on walking.

‘You can tell your mate who sent you that you lost the case in the air raid.’

‘Yeah,’ I said without turning to look at him, ‘and then get razored in an alley.’ But I knew he was right. I felt sweat running down my temples. I knew I couldn’t take that suitcase back to Soho without looking in it and I knew I had to get away from the thief before he had another go at taking it. Now I started to run and he was chasing me.

We were near the river, in an alley at the bottom of some steps when I tripped and fell. The suitcase skidded ahead. The thief dashed past me and picked it up. I yelled at him to open it. ‘What – and finders keepers,’ he said. I grunted agreement. Breathing heavily he squatted and flicked up the suitcase clips. He lifted the lid. I walked over rubbing my throbbing knee. He stared at the open case and rolled his eyes. ‘Gor christ,’ he said. ‘The stink!’

In Lavender Ray’s suitcase was an assortment of meat and a chicken, all going rotten. The thief grinned. ‘They won’t ‘ang you for that,’ he said and walked off. The crumps in the distance had stopped.

I closed the case and carried on walking slowly back to Soho. The hangover, like the air raid, was fading out.

*

‘Well done,’ said Billy the Tie. We were in the yard behind the Black Dog, which had just opened for the evening. He placed the suitcase on a dustbin, opened it and grimaced at the smell. He tipped the rotten meat into another dustbin then he reached into the suitcase, released a catch and pulled out a section of lining. It was a false-bottomed suitcase. He took out an envelope and from this he drew a wad of money. More banknotes than I’d ever seen. There were big five-pound notes, pink and mauve one-pound notes and even ten-shilling notes. He tucked the money back in the envelope without counting it and stowed it in the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.

The thief had let a great prize go. ‘You haven’t seen any of this have you, boy,’ said Billy without so much as looking at me. I agreed I had not. He threw the suitcase over the wall into an area where barrows were kept overnight. We walked back to the public bar. Business seemed concluded so far as he was concerned. Vernie, leaning on the bar, took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it, eyeing me. ‘That boy looks like he’s sickening for something,’ he said. Billy had a sly smile but then he saw Ada looking indignant on my behalf. ‘Oh yes,’ said Billy. From a voluminous pocket he produced a tin of fags. I took them, almost snatched them, with no thought of law, of coppers, of courts, nor of judges. I looked down at the lid: CRAVEN PLAIN. I felt sad and a little ashamed. Ada gestured to me and I followed her to the other end of the bar. ‘I hope you’ve learned to stay away from them lot,’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘Join the bloody army too while you’re at it. It’s an honester life than this.’

‘All right, Ada. Give us a Bass please,’ I said. I hugged the cigarette tin. I opened it. It was full. I sniffed the toasty aroma of fresh cut fags. Good old Billy I even thought.

I was about two mouthfuls in to the Bass, which was less farty than the morning’s, when the door opened behind me. ‘Where’s my bloody suitcase,’ yelled a cracked voice. It was Lavender Ray. Lavender Ray bold as brass, as Cod’s Eyes would always say when telling the story.

Vernie laughed. Ray was in the suit that had been hanging on the tallboy and was in a rage. ‘I been burgled,’ he shouted. The smattering of early-doors drinkers turned to look. A naval officer who’d strayed into the public bar looked very disapproving, as if he’d trodden in a dog turd.

‘Calm down, Ray,’ said Billy. ‘You look rough. Cheese it.’

‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ said Vernie affably.

‘Dead drunk more like,’ said Billy. But he looked wary.

‘Dead? I bloody ought to be. I got up,’ said Ray, ‘I drank half a bottle of pimple and I come down here for my suitcase.’

‘Too bad about that suitcase, Ray,’ said Billy carefully. ‘We thought you wouldn’t be needing it like, and well, you’d rather your money went to a good cause and not the policeman’s ball, wouldn’t you.’

There was a tremendous scene at this. Ray said he hadn’t made a will and if he had Billy and Vernie would not be in it. Then he sprang at Billy yelling something about his tie which he savagely tightened to throttle Billy. It was a neat schoolboy trick here executed with demonic brio. Ray might have been at death’s door but he seemed as strong as a lion. Billy was choking when Ray delivered an uppercut that sent him sprawling into the fireplace, which was unlit. Vernie was next, taking a series of punches that left both his nostrils pouring blood over his greasy little pencil moustache. It all happened very quickly. Perhaps Ray had been a boxer. Ada was shouting; two drinkers, market sorts, grabbed at Ray. The naval officer kept saying someone should get a constable. No one took any notice of him. Billy got to his feet, loosened his tie, gasped a few times and gave Ray the envelope he’d taken from the suitcase. No fuss, no whining. The market sorts let go of Ray. Ray opened the envelope and gave its contents a brief look. Turning to leave he caught sight of me. His waxy nostrils flared. ‘The thief,’ he snarled and dragged me outside in an unbreakable grip. I was quite distressed to note that no one tried to stop him.

With whisky breath he harangued me. His face was alarmingly grey and he was slightly boss-eyed with drink. Passers-by looked at us as if we were both undesirables, which I suppose we were. I knew a punch was coming. Right in the kisser Vernie would have said. Maybe a lot of punches were coming. ‘So you think you can burgle my home, do yer! How dare you even think you can steal from a sick man!’ He interspersed each sentence with obscenities and swearwords. I realised that Billy had sent me into a lion’s den to steal, plain and simple thieving, and I’d done it in sweet ignorance: this man was so tough even Billy the Tie was scared of him.

Ray clenched his fist so I gabbled out an apology that did not make a great deal of sense and then I thrust the tin of fags at him by way of a gift (I’d held on to them like grim death). This stopped him. He took the tin of Craven Plain. He looked at it with surprise and something like appreciation. He looked at me.  Then he punched me just the same. It felt like a cricket bat had walloped my mouth. I saw stars and tottered into a lamppost on which I steadied myself. I could taste blood. Ray opened the tin and extracted a fag from the tightly packed multitude therein. I was prevailed upon to light it for him. He drew on the fag. This triggered a ghastly coughing fit: he coughed with his head on one side, then on the other. He doubled over to cough. He expectorated violently on to the pavement. He pushed one nostril in and blew battleship grey and sea green snot out of the other. He wheezed horribly: his lungs were an old cracked squeeze-box. He coughed again horribly; he coughed lustily; he giggle-coughed; he guffaw-coughed. He coughed like an angry retort and then like a belch. His eyes watered profusely. He spat again. He turned light green. Then he took another long draw on the fag and walked off. Word came the next day that he was dead. I wondered if the old boy with the soup-strainer moustache thieved my tin of fags when Billy expired. I don’t know who got the money from the suitcase.

*

Billy the Tie hanged himself in 1944. Some said over underworld debt.  Vernie also died in the war: choked to death on a black market pickled onion in an army camp somewhere. He was drunk at the time. Ada perished when the Black Dog copped it from a doodlebug. Cod’s Eyes fell in the Thames one night after closing time and drowned. Late in the war I remembered the inside of Lavender Ray’s suitcase when the thief opened it down by the river. I did a painting of an opened suitcase on a bomb-site with a living bird in it. It was exhibited in a West End gallery. A newspaper critic said it was the human spirit coming back after the cataclysm; something like that. I expect it’ll end up in the Tate.

Posted on by Luke Gilfedder

The Man Who Painted the Wire Town

Eric Tucker, Temptation. Image: Wikimedia Commons
LUKE GILFEDDER describes the characters and places of Eric Tucker, Warrington’s ‘Secret Lowry’

The best half-dozen artists of any nation, Wyndham Lewis remarked, are never dependent on the objective world for their success or stimulus; they can make a new thing of anything, however provincial the original. This proved particularly apt for Eric Tucker, who had not even Rembrandt’s country mills and Dutch canals to draw on, but instead the factories, pubs and angry red-brick streets of Warrington — officially Britain’s ‘worst town for culture’, according to the Royal Society of Arts.

Yet despite its lack of vibrant cycle paths, world-class heritage sites and inclusive street furniture, the old Wire Town still inspired Tucker to create a prodigious body of work. He left behind some five hundred paintings, concealed throughout his end-of-terrace home: stashed on top of and behind wardrobes, hidden in a stairwell cupboard and the garden shed, and even stuffed into empty compost bags in the remains of an old air-raid shelter. Shortly after he died in 2018, his family turned his home into a gallery for a weekend – dubbed a “terraced-house Tate” in his nephew Joe Tucker’s book, The Secret Painter – and more than two thousand locals attended. National press coverage, museum retrospectives and West End exhibitions followed, sealing Tucker’s reputation as Warrington’s ‘Secret Lowry’.

But does this comparison hold? Tucker was certainly a fan of Lowry, but among his art books, he apparently had only one on the Manchester painter. For the most part, his collection consisted of works on early Modern artists, predominantly Post-Impressionists: Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. But the Art World has an unfortunate habit, when it belatedly discovers Northern artists, of yoking them all to Lowry. See here: another Gulley Jimson of the North, dimly emerging from Lancashire’s mephitic glooms, a reclusive eccentric whose voice has been heard only too late…

Lowry spent eighty-eight years in Manchester polishing this fantasy about himself: the myth, as Brian Sewell put it, that he sprang fully formed from the brow of Minerva and painted more or less the same picture of urban dereliction eight hundred times after a Pauline revelation in a Pendleton park. His converting angel said, “Look,” and, looking, Lowry saw that grime was good. Yet compared with Tucker, Lowry was relatively middle-class. He grew up in the leafy suburb of Victoria Park. In photographs, he appears a formal, distant, clerkly figure. Tucker, while also a lifelong bachelor who lived with his mother, had been a boxer, labourer and gravedigger — by all accounts a private yet popular character who modelled his shtick more on Ken Dodd than the Douanier Rousseau. Where Lowry painted as an outsider looking in, Tucker painted as an insider looking out. “Eric is one of the people in the pictures,” his brother explained to art historian Ruth Millington. “He knows them all.”

This distinction is writ large on the walls of a recent Mayfair retrospective, Characters and Places. Tucker gives us industrial life up close: there are no long-shot vistas of market squares and factory gates, no matchstick men pouring from blackened mills — Lowry’s “undignified, pea-brained homunculi”, as Edwin Mullins termed them. Tucker’s characters are rounded in every sense: ruddy-cheeked, individual, full of vim and vigour. You wish you were having as good a time as his pubgoers. Each subject is rendered not in Lowry’s muted palette but in ham pinks, russets, ochres and blacks. Flat-capped pipe smokers and their grizzled ale-mates jostle with young couples and cabaret singers amid crisply defined bottles and glasses. There are no gloomy kitchen-sink shenanigans here: Tucker’s oils and watercolours transform Warrington’s nightlife into something as joyfully carnivalesque — though less coldly abstract — as Wyndham Lewis’s drawings of Breton peasant fêtes.

Lowry may have convinced Tucker that life in the industrial north was worthy of painting, but Tucker shows what Lowry missed in it. This is as true of Tucker’s ‘places’ as of his characters. Beyond the smoky pubs and clubs, Tucker depicts vignettes from Warrington’s backstreets and alleyways, peopled with half-spectral figures playing games, lighting bonfires, dealing scrap, or simply smoking a cigarette and staring at an egg-carton-grey sky. Elsewhere, we see pigeon fanciers, rag-and-bone men, circus ringmasters, confabbing housewives and brangling corner-boys. What leaps out from these canvases is not the Lowry influence, but Tucker’s admiration for Edward Burra — the English painter of surreal, vividly satirical urban scenes, and another maverick who, like Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, was “out of key with his time.” Indeed, Tucker’s scenes are strangely anachronistic. To a millennial eye, only the concrete bollards and streetlights distinguish them from the Edwardian era.

In truth, the same might be said of much of Warrington today. It certainly could of the street I grew up on, only a few streets away from Tucker, in the late 1990s. Yet the fact that Tucker rarely dated his pictures feels significant: it suggests they were never intended as nostalgia or mere social record, to be framed in glass-walled museums as exhibits of a world willingly forgotten. Like Burra, he paints with an unaffected affection for a world that is conventionally reckoned drab or ugly—a world which, in Tucker’s case, is now considered as lost to time as Woolworths or The Wheeltappers and Shunters Club. Yet so deeply immersed was Tucker in this forgotten North that one feels the artist is still there, in these pictures. So too, it seems, are his characters. I need only open the door and look.

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

[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

From ‘Glorious Devon’ to Orthodox Estonia

Dartington Hall. Image: Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON reports from the English Music Festival – and reviews new issues of Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt and Rimsky-Korsakov

With funding for the serious, civilised arts in short supply in modern Britain (no Arts Council of Wales money for Mid-Wales Opera; the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, de-funded by Birmingham City Council) the English Music Festival – EMF – is an inspiration and hope in the face of general adversity. As one of the Festival’s regular conductors, Hilary Davan Wetton, pointed out, if this were France, the government there would be pouring hundreds of thousands of Euros into a French music festival – a contrast to our own political elite, with their freebies for Britney Spears gigs and obsessions with ‘diversity’. The nineteenth English Music gathering took place, escaping this year to that utopian, rural setting of Dartington Hall in Devon – a magnificent structure built by the first Duke of Exeter in the 14th century, and turned into a prototype agrarian and arts community in the 1920s by monied visionaries, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. A College of Arts flourished here between 1961 and 2010, and traces of the Elmhirsts’ William Morris-type outlook still survive in this idyll of garden and performance spaces.

EMF Founder-Director, Em Marshall-Luck, welcomed for her late May Spring bank holiday extravaganza artists of the calibre of the London Mozart Players, the University of Exeter Chapel Choir and numerous soloists and chamber musicians, all performing in the impressive and resonant Dartington Great Hall.

The University of Exeter Chapel Choir. Image: Stuart Millson

Saturday the 23rd May was a day of brilliant sunshine and intense heat, so Festivalgoers enjoyed the coolness of the old mediaeval building, filled as it was by the ethereal tones of the Exeter choristers in works from the 1920s and ‘30s – Vaughan Williams’s, Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge (the choir used to grand antiphonal effect); Holst’s meditative The Evening Watch; Edgar Bainton’s To Thy Name Above Every Name (a testing work for the singers, and one which, perhaps, should have been conceived with orchestral accompaniment); and Dyson’s Lauds, from Three Songs of Praise. The concert ended with a dip back into the late 19th century, with Elgar’s whimsical choral postcards from old Germany – his Songs from the Bavarian Highlands, the sort of good tunes which you could almost sway along to with a brimming Stein. Elgar and his wife, Alice, clearly relished the countryside of Garmisch, and were inspired by lines such as “Quaff the bright brown ale my treasure, Hark! What joyous sounds!”

The next day, a complete change of mood, with the morning chamber recital – given by violinist, Rupert Marshall-Luck and South African pianist, Peter Cartwright – devoted to music by Bliss, Rawsthorne, Holst, Delius and Howells. Lancashire-born composer, Alan Rawsthorne, is probably best known for his film scores (including that for The Cruel Sea) and his Second Piano Concerto with its carnival-like final movement, but Rupert and Peter have rediscovered for us and curated the composer’s extensive works for violin and piano, giving at this festival the UK premiere of his Theme and Variations for Pianoforte and Violin.

Rawsthorne’s taut, concentrated, challenging writing proved to be an excellent foil to the more romantic sonata, from 1914, by Arthur Bliss – an early work, yet one which any listener, new to the piece, would consider a work of mastery and maturity. With its lovely whirlpool moments, its combination of sunlight, melancholy, nostalgia, the sonata was (for me) the outstanding work of the concert, especially the heartachingly beautiful piano opening, played with such gently paced and slow shaping by Peter Cartwright. Rupert Marshall-Luck more than embraced all the virtuoso moments of the piece, especially the exciting passage where the soloist has every opportunity to out-soar even Vaughan Williams’s famous ascending lark.

Now to recorded music: a new CDs from Chandos Records, of Shostakovich’s great Stalinist era monolith (yet with the composer confusing the totalitarians of his country with cryptic ideas and sardonic snarls) – his Symphony No. 5. Played with great tension and power by the Greater Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic – the old ‘BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra’ to we old Radio 3-ites – the recording dazzles at all levels, the players giving everything they have for the Finnish maestro, John Storgårds, a musician renowned for his readings of Sibelius and Nielsen. Here in the Shostakovich is a darkness that any Scandinavian or Russian would recognise, yet we are in the world, not of the Russian steppes or the cold Baltic coast, but the labyrinths of Moscow and the artist, enslaved but never truly at bay. For those who know their Shostakovich recordings, the new version is extraordinarily similar in temper and timbre to the early-1980s interpretation by that Russian patriot-dissident, cellist-turned-conductor, the great Rostropovich. Some may still remember the pent-up power and bare bones of the Fifth, as performed some 45 years ago by the USA Washington National Symphony Orchestra under that magisterial maestro.

Another famous conductor was Sir Thomas Beecham, founder of both the London and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Beecham had a wide repertoire, and it is perhaps hard to pin him down: Wagner and Berlioz, and the lush, heavy tone-poems of Richard Strauss appealed to Sir Thomas; Delius, too, and Handel – and opera. But so did orchestral favourites, French ‘lollipops’, and Russian romanticism. New from Siva Oke and SOMM comes a full-blooded, orientally-shimmering account, recorded at a packed Royal Festival Hall in 1957 of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade – an irreplaceable capturing of a style of playing which we often do not hear today; in which the orchestra heaves with turbulence and colour, and section leaders play like virtuoso soloists. Rimsky-Korsakov’s piece is a work steeped in the legends of an imagined Arabian world of magic – of a clever princess who outwits a despotic ruler, by beguiling him with stories which she tells, night after night. (One could almost see Shostakovich in a similar dilemma, using his musical powers to keep one step ahead of the hammer of doom.)

Arvo Part. Image: Woesinger, Wikimedia Commons

Finally, a return to Chandos Records and their new CD of Estonian musical magus, Arvo Pärt (born 1935) – the complete symphonies (1-4), performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Eva Ollikainen. “Worlds ahead for clarity” was a one-time sales slogan of Chandos, a choice of words which fully applies to this living-presence, revelation-of-detail recording made a year ago in Reykjavik; a presentation of a symphonic progression from the 1963 ‘Polyphonic’ – just over a quarter-of-an-hour in length, to the harp, timpani and percussion of the 2007-08 Fourth Symphony, subtitled Los Angeles – and dedicated to the Philharmonic Orchestra of that city. Essentially, Pärt’s music is concerned with the spiritual, with pure belief – orthodoxy, credo (‘Credo’ was a name of one piece from the late 1960s). In this collection, it is possible to find a rooted hope for music and for our world – every bit as reassuring as the mediaeval stonework and arches that we found earlier at Dartington Hall.

Recording details: Alan Rawsthorne, the complete works for violin and piano, and the Violin Sonata by Sir Arthur Bliss, available from EM Records, via em.marshall-luck@em-records.com; Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 (with Second Symphony), CHSA 5378; Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, RPO, Beecham, SOMM-Beecham 34; Pärt, Complete Symphonies, CHSA 5372