Ivan the Terrible, Parts 1 and 2 (1944 and 1945 [1958])
IMDb meta-data for Part I is runtime of 1 hour and 35 minutes, 7.7 rated by 10,000 cinematizens.
For Part II runtime is 1 hour and 28 minutes, rated 7.8 by 7,400 cinematizens.
Genre: Historical fiction.
Verdict: Compelling.
Ivan (1530-1584) came to the throne amid a court of murderous schemers, the envy of the Republican Party in their depravity, but the hypocrisy of church and state combine in an elaborate coronation. In his acceptance speech Ivan alienates just about everyone by claiming he is Tsar of Russia not just Duke of Muscovy. Period! Everyone else is a vassal, rich or poor. Further, he declares his warlike ambitions against any and everyone. Is this Vladdie’s favourite movie now? It was Stalin’s.
This is a matinee idol Ivan, not the pockmarked, volatile reality. He is honest. He is noble. He is smart. He is, well, a right pain for being holier than all the thous.
Around him everyone is a lowlife schemer, because ‘Why should he be Tsar, and not me?’ Truth to tell he is the first Tsar, created out of the ambition of his regents. The plots thicken.
The acting and camera work are throwbacks to silent movies, with tight close-ups, exaggerated gestures, bug-eyed stares, shadows that menace, amid the pomp and riches of the Kremlin. Roger Ebert slams it for this and much else. Indeed no nit was too small for him to pick at it from the size of the doorways to the bejewelled garments. Be that as it may, the whole works.
Of course, Ivan the Formidable was paranoid and unstable to begin with and got more so with age. He purged the ranks of the boyars (nobles) more than once, while Stalin took notes, and made war on the Kazan (for the stans), Astrakhan (to get those hats), Tatars (for the sauce – oops), Lithuania (for those dumplings), Latvia (for the herring), Poland (for the kransky), Ukraine (for fun), and anyone else handy. The Turks felt left out and soon he put that right with another war. He also went looking for enemies in Siberia, and found them. He was a devout Christian, clutching a cross, as he went about murdering far and wide. Amen.
To make war more effectively he modernised the realm with codes of law (taxes and conscription), personal oaths of loyalty, pay for the army, reduced first the powers of the boyars and then their number, started printing Bibles to reduce the monopoly of priests. He also confiscated church property to pay for his wars, claiming priests were disloyal. Henry VIII had the same idea.
He faked an abdication and installed a figurehead to draw out his enemies into a trap. This cinematographic Ivan has a common touch and is much loved by the toiling masses. Hint, hint, just like Comrade Number One.
The film is epic in scale in every way. It is hard to believe that with its cast of thousands it was made during the Great Patriotic War aka World War II when the Nazis were within reach of Moscow, while the Soviet Union was rearming and making a new nine million-man army. While stylised in black-and-white there is a short scene in colour (made on film captured from a German photographic unit) that surprises the viewers, as director Sergei Eisenstein intended it to do.
A few tidbits were illuminating. When going into battle the Russian soldiers each put a coin in a bucket, as above. After the battle each survivor takes one out. The residue indicate the casualties. Simple and effective book keeping.
I saw these two at Tuesday film night in graduate school and was awed by them. Then the other day they appeared on You Tube in restored versions no doubt in much better condition that the prints I saw those years ago. So I had a look.
IMBd meta-data is runtime 1 hour 13 minutes rated 5.2 by 49 cinematizens.
Genre: Spy Fy with Sy Fy.
Verdict: [Did not Disturb – Zzzzzzz.]
Mr Giles has invented Fox News sucking brains out viewers. All the brainless people around creates litter and fearless – because he has a stunt double – Dick ambles into action. The fate of the free-world hangs in the balance but Dick has plenty of time to turn his good side to the camera.
Giles had arrived from Prague and nothing good has ever arrived from Prague. Moreover, he shaved his beard as a disguise. What a dirty trick that is. Nonetheless Dick and his faithful comic relief spot him.
Mr Giles with beard.
The result is more Spy Fy than Sy Fy. It is included on Scifist 2.0 because of the brain dehydrating sonic beam ear worm that pumps out Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ without end. Cruel enough that to bring a smile to faces in the Kremlin.
The stunt double gets a work out, and for reasons only known to the script writer, the Gypsies did it! Yep, the Gypsies who run the fun fair are not in it for the fun and certainly aren’t fair either. Red Gypsies! Bad Gypsies! At least they held onto their brains.
Dick Barton started his derring-do on the radio in the 1930s and went on, but did not reach retirement age. He was James before Bond in his devil may care attitude, but he was also asexual. His exploits were aimed by prepubescent boys and steered clear of any of the mushy stuff.
On air.
The characters – the good and the bad, alike – stumble around like three stooges but evidently collide in Blackpool Tower which is pretty good work for the stunt man. The eminence gris has a laptop to control the music, but….
The direction is snappy, the dialogue atrocious, the setting unusual, the result juvenile. Dick did not go on because without a stunt double, the star was killed in a car accident returning home (drunk, no doubt) from the wrap party. Giles did not do it. Ah huh.
IMDb meta-data is run time of 9 minutes and 52 seconds, rated 7.8 by 17 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: short and sweet.
A charming short on DUST about a forbidden love between an android and a human, both female. In a few minutes it gets across more about the character and circumstance than a deafening three-hour long extravaganza from Hollywood or Pinewood.
2. BackSpace (2022)
IMDb runtime is 7 minutes, rated 5.8 by 19 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Too long.
The good guy wears white and the bad guy, well you know.
3. Q Ghostly Remote Effect (2020)
IMDb runtime of 19 minutes and 43 seconds, rated 5.7 by 6 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Nice place to visit.
Girl meets android and falls in love. Cf. Blade Runner.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 17 minutes, 3.5 rated by 1,750 discerning cinematizens. That’s out of 10.
Genre: Horror; Species: Bore.
Verdict: [Snore.]
Professor Moriarty is not only a stable genius but also a great patriot. In an old dark house near a convenient swamp he experiments on men and dogs to create a savage warrior who will slay our fanatical enemies in 1942. His comely daughter is in attendance and none the wiser. She seems to have had no mother. Was she another of his experiments? Her beau is even dimmer.
Morrie’s ethics clearance application for his Hairy Warrior project was decisively rejected by the third anonymous assessor, that is, Dr No. Without a nationally competitive grant Morrie was of no use to the university in the ratings game, so he was manoeuvred into early retirement. Angry, he continues to conjure a savage murderer out of a gentle giant gardener known as Pedro to everyone except the screen credits which have him as Pietro. ‘Look, I just work here,’ said the film editor.
The spectral seminar Morrie holds at the start for exposition is the best scene in the movie. I speak as a participant in such sessions, some to my knowledge and others not. Dr No has had more than one tongue-lashing from yours truly.
There is a menacing atmosphere in the misty swamp and the transformation of the gentle giant into ravening wolf-man is effective, but he is no Lon Chaney and that hat! Ha!
The whole film was undercooked in the five days it took to produce it. Yet it is so slow that it seems almost three hours long. The director must have been taking Rohypnol by the handful.
The daughter-damsel in distress looks almost as bored as I felt, and her rescuing knight was a 10-watt bulb. Neither offered any conviction nor injected any vitality into the proceedings.
I had read about it in detail on Scifist 2.0; ergo I knew the little I was in for. It is freely available on You Tube in a so-so print.
George Zucco
George Zucco was always committed to his roles no matter how ludicrous they were, like this one. He always gave 100 per cent. He alone carries this waste of celluloid but even he limps in the turgid and vague mishmash. By the way, The Great War left him with paralysis in his right arm, where he had been wounded. He always said yes to work and there are 99 credits for him on the IMDb. The name is Greek and he refused to change it to something Anglo, because it was his father’s name.
Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rate 3.91 by 715 litizens.
Genre: Historical Fiction.
Verdict: Deep and meaningful.
Having been to Tolstoy’s home in Moscow, this title caught my eye. A quick look corrected my mistaken assumption. It is not about the great writer, but rather a detailed examination of a Wehrmacht field surgery that occupies Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s country estate) for six weeks in the winter late in 1941 as it becomes apparent to those that have eyes to see that the Soviets will endure.
The focus is Dr Bauer who does his best to save the lives of the battered and broken men who appear on his cutting table. There are some ghastly descriptions of wounds that I flicked over. His commander is a good surgeon who is slowly cracking under the incessant pressures – the management of 200-man unit, the constant surgery, the shortage of everything, the savage winter, the demand to be a good Nazi, the environment of hostility from the scant remaining population, the tensions among the men in his command, the artillery fire that seems closer each day, the threat of partisan attacks, and that is just the beginning. Another enemy is added to his list when the ghost of Tolstoy visits him.
Meanwhile, Bauer tries to be a good German in this Circle of Hell by doing his job well, treating the locals with guarded respect, and re-reading Tolstoy. The mediator between the occupiers and the natives is the estate manager, a no-nonsense woman. Long ago as a failed literature student, Bauer learned to read some Russian because of Tolstoy; this smattering of Russian makes him the designated liaison between occupier and occupied. She and Bauer slowly, reluctantly realise that they have much in common behind the walls of steel each has erected.
Believe it or not, Ripley, in that bloody and doomed context this is an engaging love story, and it is superbly well rendered. Not a cheap shot in sight. Slow and measured, deep and meaningful. The result is a quiet tragedy that has, paradoxically, a happy ending, of sorts.
The descriptions of the winter are good but… I don’t think the author ever lived through one like it or the descriptions would be less external – about the snow, ice, and temperature – and more internal – what constant cold does to your body and your mind. Those who know needn’t be told and those that don’t know can’t be told. ‘Noses are red, fingers are blue’ is just the beginning.
Steven Conte
After I started on the sample, I stopped, supposing it was going to be a shoot ‘em up, but Martin Nunn encouraged me to keep reading. I am glad that he did and that I did.
As a refresher on the current state of the idiocracy I glanced at a few of the GoodReads one-star reviews. The vapid are still with us and proud of it.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 6.3 by 437 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: ripped from today’s headlines.
Disaster looms as the weather produces giant storms. Polar ice caps melt. Rivers rise. The earth shakes. Avalanches fall. Volcanoes erupt. Hurricanes strike. This manifold threat divides humanity. One half tries to make a profit off this doom and gloom in Ted talks, religion, business, media, and politics. It is a godsend for these hucksters. The other half denies the reality of the threat even as they perish. Yes, it has a contemporary resonance.
After the tsunami destroyed New York City and most of the rest of the world in a Noah rerun, the film follows the trials of an assortment of survivors. But by then it is all rather anti-climatic. The few remaining souls set about recreating the society that destroyed the earth. The preacher fulminates; the businessman tries to profit; the politician sows discontent!
No, I am afraid the focus is more mundane than those stereotypes. A husband and wife were separated by the disaster, and each thinking the other dead, makes other, hmm, arrangements. There is a bully who thinks might is right, a milquetoast wimp whom Bully tramples, and so on. In the allotted runtime husband and wife are reunited, but … well, he already has a new Eve, double-but: no matter. It ends with a ménage à trois in the new Eden. Yes, the 1933 National Board of Review, aka censor, passed this dubious moral conclusion. Strange, no? Strange, yes.
Unusual to see Sydney Blackmer playing the lead. He made a career out heavies when not playing Teddy Roosevelt, to whom he bore no resemblance but played him – count ‘em – seven times. See below.
Never Kick a Man Upstairs (1953)
My Girl Tisa (1948)
Buffalo Bill (1944)
In Old Oklahoma (1943)
Teddy the Rough Rider (1940)
The Monroe Doctrine (1939)
This is My Affair (1937)
The special effects for the disaster (as above) are better than in many subsequent films until Ray Harryhausen revolutionised the business. Done with miniature models, and done well though the You Tube print is poor.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 4.6 by 2,200 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy; Species: women without men.
Verdict: A Golden Raspberry.
The usual crew (square-jawed captain, drooling comic relief, and oily Romeo) set off on a mission in a NASA launch film clip. Along for the ride (on the hospital bed that seems to be standard equipment on the flight deck*) is Paul Birch, holder of the Order of Sy Fyist Premier Cru for his many contributions to the genre, excluding this one. The mission is to deliver milk to the orbiting space wheel from Conquest of Space (1955).
Drooler is too busy memorising his gag-lines to notice as they veer off course and land on Venus in a snowfield. (This footage, too, comes from another film – Mission to Mars [1953]). When they come across a road sign directing them to Venus City, they realise all that the textbooks about the second planet are all wrong.
It gets worse. It is a planet without men! (Note, Venusians have had this problem before, watch for a forthcoming review of the Ship of Monsters (1960) for enlightenment on this recurrent problem.) This occasions so many stupid remarks that they are impossible to list, and better passed in silence. Suffice it to say that the dialogue is so sexist and misogynist that some critics suppose it was meant to be satire. I wish, but I don’t think so. In any event, it is all consistent and all played straight. The women are decked out in short, short skirts and high, high heels, and so on and on.
In such a shoddy production with such cement-direction that it takes 15-minutes to get going it is surely presumptuous to ridicule anyone else, but there it is. All the costumes and props look familiar because they had been used in previous movies, like the grey on gray uniforms from Forbidden Planet (1956), like the ray guns from Missile to the Moon (1958), like the (miniature) rubber spider from Cat Women of the Moon (1953), like the women’s costumes from World without End (1956), and the list goes on. Likewise the orienting shots, the snowfield landing, the city in the distance, the cosmos, the space station wheel, the initial rocket launch all come from other movies and no effort is made to conceal, integrate, or explain the obvious discrepancies in size, scale, or colour.
(Words have faille me. Supply your own caption.)
One might think this is bad but there is more. Hang onto those steak knives.
It fails the elementary Bechdel Test on criterion #3. The planet may have only women but they talk only of men. On this test…, well, look it up.
All in all, in comparison it makes Quark (1977) look like a quality production with a thoughtful script and convincing acting. (Psst, if you haven’t seen Quark, don’t!)
The inner pedant requires that I say the lead is not the queen, and the queen is on Venus not in Outer Space.
It is hard to believe that this concoction represents the combined creative efforts of Charles Beaumont, Ben Hecht, and Edward Bernds, who each have many other, far superior credits before and after this movie. Beaumont wrote some real chillers like The 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964) and many episodes of the Twilight Zone. Ben Hecht created Hildy in His Girl Friday (1940) as well as writing Notorious (1946), Walk on the Wild Side (1962), and scores of others. Bernds specialised in short comedy as a director, writer, and designer with hundreds of credits. None of that pool of talent is visible in this widescreen, technicolor release, which looks like an A-movie and plays like a D-movie, those made to go directly to the drive-in theatre screens.
Women without men is a niche market that is well served by film producers with arrested development. It seems to be a frat boy fantasy that somewhere, somehow there are gorgeous women so starved of men that the frat boy will look good. Dream on, Bro. Here is a list of some to prove the point:
Jungle Women (1944)
Captive Women (1952)
Untamed Women (1952)
Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)
Mesa of the Lost Women (1953)
Women’s Prison (1955)
Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956)
Missile to the Moon (1958)
Wild Women of Wongo (1958)
Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966)
Mars Needs Women (1966)
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)
Chain Gang Women (1971)
No doubt there are others. Some of these are superior to the film under consideration and most do not take themselves as seriously.
The bed is there because there was no fourth recliner seat in any other science fiction movie to borrow so the bed was wheeled in from the studio infirmary. Most of the budget went to the leading lady’s salary, leaving little or nothing for the props and costumes. These insights are from the gossip about the backstage of the film on the IMDb.
The Professor and the Parson (2018) by Adam Sisman.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages rated 3.40 by 273 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: [Gasp!]
Robert Michael Parkins Peters (1918-2005) bested King Henry VIII in having eight (known) wives, and he was more efficient, at least thrice skipping the divorce before marrying anew. Three times a bigamist. His names and dates above are estimates since he used many names and many dates of birth. It may even be that he managed by occult means to lie about the date of his death. That would be consistent with his character.
From the mid-1940s Peters made his way in clerical and academic life by lies, forgeries, thefts, and plagiarisms spiced with bigamy, deportations, jail terms, and all those wives. That later supplied the media hacks with headlines off and on over the years, but nothing, nothing at all, stopped him. And it seems it was no one’s job to eradicate this blood sucker. His determination, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, and creativity are a marvel equal to the trail of destruction he left behind.
He continued despite setbacks partly because no one could quite believe he was doing what he did, and the more blatant it was, the more incredible it seemed to any nearly normal person. His life was a work of fiction which he wrote every day.
Moreover, he had some skill in picking his victims, often a dewey-eyed churchman who could believe no wrong of him, a headmaster desperate for staff, or a women in want of a husband. Yet there were other churchmen and other women who should have known better and who were slow in grasping the reality of his criminal endeavours. There were also many academics, from professors to deans, who took his bait whole, and regretted it.
To avoid creditors, to avoid warrants, to avoid his own past he moved back forth among England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, the United States, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and South Africa. In each country his persistent and energetic efforts netted victims. He also made use of many aliases by shuffling around the four names above. But his ego never let him avoid a photograph so there are many that show the man with many names.
What were his crimes? He forged letters of recommendations, diplomas, transcripts, credentials, and passed more than one dud cheque. He took money for tuition from naive students to teach them subjects about which he knew nothing. He claimed his instruction was accepted for admission to schools and universities when it was not. There were persistent and recurrent suggestions that he forced himself on young women in the girls schools where he was supposed to be teaching. But again it seems to have been no one’s job to sort that out. He plagiarised the work of others and published it as his own, and if confronted with the facts, tried to claim it was the other way around despite the dates, evidence, and facts. That is only the beginning.
He also masqueraded as a preacher and a priest and was so convincing he gave sermons and officiated at weddings, which because he was in fact unlicensed, were invalid. Not forgetting the bigamies.
More than once a bookstore proprietor was defrauded when Peters would open an account, claiming to be a lecturer at an Oxford college, say, and take any number of books on credit, sometimes by the box-load, never to pay the bill. When the proprietor contacted the college it was to discover that he was unknown there. These bills were measured in the hundreds of pounds.
He gained employment more than once in a clerical or an academic position by forging degrees from Oxford, London, Liverpool, Manchester, and elsewhere depriving other qualified candidates of the opportunities. Invariably he was unable, and sometimes unwilling, to perform the tasks for which he was employed. His longest tenure in this account is eighteen months, and most were a few weeks, or less. Some only a few days. His stay at a school in Sri Lanka was shorter than the sea voyage to get there.
Then there were the wives whose ranks grew over the years. In the many photographs he seems to be balding, middle aged man with spectacles, but he must have had something. One of the early wives, Sisman supposes, wrote the only sensible thing Peters published, while others funded his forays. These women were secretaries, school teachers, civil servants, and all victims. Some stubbornly stuck by him when the consequences caught up with him, until he walked out on them for another.
His approach to courtship was direct, and if rebuffed he turned to the next in line, as it were. Likewise, when he passed himself off as a churchmen he went at it head on. He would appear at a Bishop’s palace, ask for an interview, introduce himself as the possessor of many degrees and licenses, and might even modestly show a letter of recommendation (he had composed the night before) from a respected authority. He set about making himself useful and secured a sinecure, until the balloon burst, say, when another churchman recognised him. This recognition occurred because he often revisited the same locales.
For the academy it was much the same with the variation that he would attend a conference in medieval history and in a question period rise to speak, introducing himself as Dr Peters of Magdalen College, after first having ascertained that no one from the college was at the conference, and pose a simple question that would allow him to follow-up privately with the speaker thereafter. In that later conversation he seems usually to have made a good impression and he would shyly allow that he was unhappy in his current (imaginary) position and could be persuaded to move. If he got a bite, then he closed the deal. If not, he went to another conference session and repeated the act.
There was no great artifice in his deceptions. The forged degrees were poorly done but no one seems to have noticed at first. When he applied for a post and submitted fraudulent letters of recommendations both the application and the three letters of recommendation were written in same handwriting, but this passed unnoticed. He was so oblivious that he made one such application to an Oxford college, which was rejected, and then applied to the same college again a few years later and was accepted. No one noticed that he had applied before and been rejected because the application was suspect. In each case the application and all the letters of recommendation were written in his own handwriting with badly forged documents.
In other instances he got appointments to schools, colleges, and universities on the strength of interviews, and no paperwork, neither transcripts, diplomas, nor letters. It is hard to feel sympathy for those who do not take the most elementary precautions.
One of his recurrent gambits was to set himself up in a rented house as a school of theology and then seek articulation with a university, meaning that completion of his program would be considered adequate for admission to the university. So desperate are some universities for fee-paying students that they will say yes to any such articulations. To be sure, Quality Assurance (QA) must be satisfied and often it consisted of Peters writing up a curriculum and sending that in. It would be approved. Then Peters could claim with a slight bit of truth that the course he offered was accredited by a major university. Seeing the crest of a well-known university on the wall of his establishment, the naive students, never many, but always some, would pay him a fee so that he could strut around calling himself Dr, Professor, Dean, and Principal to this audience, often in clerical vestments or an academic gown.
He did this half a dozen times and only once did a university bother to check on the reality behind the paperwork to find…nothing. That sounds like QA, all right, all paper covers rock, no scissors.
He tried to avoid confrontation with his victims or people who knew his past, but if confronted he either (1) cried foul, that he was the victim, or (2) threatened litigation. At the least these tactics gave him time to abscond one scene for another.
Generally, many took his baits, but there were even more others who did not. Women who rejected him instantly. Institutions hiring staff that did not go as far as an interview. Submissions for articulation that were denied prima facie. But they are not featured in the stories of his crimes told in these pages.
Reverend Dr Professor Peters
There are many gaps in the story as Peters went to ground, moved around, and changed his name yet again. In these gaps there were likely to have been further crimes and perforce other marriages.
One omission from this account is how Peters managed to stay out of the army during World War II. But he did.
We know all of this, and much more, because he came to the notice of the scourge of confidence men and tricksters, until he himself fell hard for one, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who loved kicking people when they were down, and who over the years, having met Peters in one of his early incursions to Oxford, kept a dossier on Peters’s adventures, and solicited reports from others. This dossier in its many box files became the basis for this book.
(It is likewise hard to feel any sympathy for his Lordship’s own fall, he who specialised in ruining the careers of many others with his savage reviews, assessments, and vitriol. It seems somehow appropriate that the fictitious Hitler Diaries got him. There is a discussion of this sorry episode elsewhere on the blog reacting to Robert Harris’s book on the subject. That is another instance of a fraud so simple, so blatant that the only explanation of its success is the will of those deceived to be deceived.)
Speaking of explanations, what explained Robert Michael Parkins Peters’s many deceptions? It was not money. He seldom made more than a subsistence income and not always that, often relying on a wife’s salary and savings. But he did revel in the status that his fantasies gave him. He puffed himself up and insisted on being addressed ‘Reverend’ or ‘Dr’ or ‘Dean’ or ‘Principal’ as he moved from one dreamworld to another. Of course, with a modicum of ability and application he might have earned that kind of status in the normal way.
Perhaps once he started his fabrications and at first found how easy it was, they became a habit, though they got harder as he acquired a reputation, a police record, a list of victims, for Lord Dacre was not the only one to keep a file on him, though Dacre’s was called a dossier as befits his Lordly status. Even if it got harder, lying was all Peters knew how to do so he kept at it. Regardless of Peters’s many victims, his frequent crimes, his recidivism, his disregard for others, his rumoured sexual aggression, his frauds, his theft, his serial exploitation of lady wives, his defrauding of naive students, there was no one responsible for containing him. He was convicted for one bigamy and served six-months in jail, and once for defrauding a bookstore which landed him in the nick for a few weeks, but mostly his victims were left unsatisfied.
Buried in a textual footnote near the end is the author’s remark that many people, upon hearing something of Peters’s story, have remarked that it could not happen today in the age to the internet. Sisman demurs, suggesting that people are tricked this way and that every day. The evidence of the truth of that suggestion is readily available. After reading this book I went to ride the exercise bike at the local gym in front of a television screen where Dr Phil was interviewing a woman who admitted to giving $US 900,000, amassed from her life savings, selling her home, and borrowing money from her adult children, to a man on the internet who claimed he loved her but whom she had never met, and never will since he is fictitious. Go figure. (Victims seem to be a regular feature of Dr Phil.)
Truth can be stranger than fiction, because fiction writers usually try to be credible where life has no such restraint. Then there is the ease of forging documents with computers these days. Consider all those fraudulent web sites and emails that look just like the real thing.
In the final chapter author Sisman suggests Peters is an example of the psychosis known as the narcissistic personality. Reading the list of characteristics that comprise this disorder certainly describes him, as well as the recent Thief-in-Chief. However, labelling is not explaining because that does not tell us how and why he got that way and stayed that way.
On Lord Dacre see the passages about him Ved Mehta’s imperishable Fly and the Fly Bottle (1961).
IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 6.6 by 3,744 cinematizens.
Genre: Sci fi; species Nuke paranoia.
Verdict: Lugubrious.
Dr Tom is on vacation from General Hospital when he encounters caveman Ollie on the one day of summer in England. Adventures for both follow. Dr Tom engages in some safe activity with Ollie’s squeeze who has trouble remembering her name, and Ollie loses face and much more.
Spoilers ahead.
As this well-worn trope unfolds, in a parallel line we meet C with his artistic mistress who carves driftwood into members…of her collection. These two are so posh, few dare approach them. But wherever C goes men with military ranks dog his steps with reports. He may be in donnish mufti but he is one big kahuna for sure.
C at work.
These two story lines collide when, with Ollie lumbering after them in slo-mo pursuit, Tom and Squeeze accidentally take refuge in C’s cliffside lair on the fatal shore. Ollie makes three.
Ever wondered what happened to the Village (of the Damned) children? It seems, C adopted them for his science experiment and has them locked away in a stone chamber (aka lair) where nary a geiger counter is heard. In the cave the children are monitored by Big Brother’s television cameras, and occasional nocturnal visits by some of those army officers in heavy duty radiation suits to give them nightmares. Ambiguity intended.
Yes, these sweet innocents are radioactive, and bred to be that way so that they will survive tomorrow’s nuclear war. C is not only a mad scientist, he is also a stable genius whose progeny will inherit the dust.
Tom, Squeeze, and even Ollie get all paternal with the cute kiddies, but recoil when they discover that the kids are icicles. In some Geordie-speak earlier we know they have been infused with radiation so that they will survive in a post-apocalyptic world, and that makes them radioactive to a fatal degree in a normal person. Their blood is uranium enriched! This fact gradually sinks into the would-be rescuers who have exposed themselves. Gulp! Ollie is quicker on the uptake than Dr Tom with all his degree-mill papers. One side effect of the radiation is that the children are colder than ice, but after a while everyone forgets that. The other side effect is that one hug, and you are dead.
Attention, Class!
The three (alleged) adults act spontaneously to escape with the tots without a plan or a clue and it ends accordingly.
There are nice touches. The children are very well integrated into the story, and penultimate scene when in a downbeat ending they are forcibly rounded up and reincarcerated is disturbing. It is not quite the SS in the ghetto but evocative of it. In a way the children drive the action because they are not all the docile sweetness and light that they have convinced C they are when he spies on them. Knowing that he is watching, they have worked out how to avoid that. If C has secrets, they have more.
The inevitability of Nuclear War shadows everything, as it did for us all at the time, and that became the justification for many unsavoury things without a doubt.
C is even colder than the children when he casually murdered his mistress because she learned too much about his work, criticised it, and beat him at scrabble. Three strikes and she was out!
British censors accepted the word ‘Damned’ in titles like the ‘Village’ (1960) of that name, and film producers rushed to get it into titles to titillate audiences. It was even easier to get that word than to get a coveted X-rating to lure in the gullible cinematizens. This film evokes the Village and its sequel, but stands on its own for a viewer who has not seen the others. The children are all posh white bread from the same casting agency. No cockney, no Pakistani. no Geordie, no West Indian, no Irish, no Nigerian…. All home counties.
Dr Tom is as unlikely an action hero as George Sanders was in 1960. He also knows precious little about radiation, it seems, despite his decades at General Hospital where he mostly looked wise.
Ollie tries to look smouldering but mostly looks hungry – bulimia warning. The portrayal of the biker gang members is, well, silly. They are all martial when Teddy Boys were rebels (without a cause) against authority. Ollie wears a tweed sports coat and the gang biker members leather, that is how we know he is the boss. For those who must know ‘Ted’ comes from Edward, as in Edwardian. Suffice it to say that tweed is not Edwardian. Look it up! I did.
Joseph Losey
The direction by expatriate blacklisted American Joseph Losey is excellent even if the story is disjointed. Kenneth Cope as one of the bikers conveys his love for Squeeze without a word or deed in a few superb moments. You might remember him as Hopkirk, deceased, a few years later.
There is no resolution at the end, which I took to be a reference to the end of Dr No.
The Education of Henry Adams (1919) by Henry Adams.
Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.64 by 4,669 litizens.
Genre: Autobiography.
Verdict: Sprightly before sagging.
Everything is a learning experience in the life of Henry Adams (1838-1918), each twist and turn in life furthers his education about the ways of the world. Though I began to worry when he reached his twentieth year there was no sign of interest in the ways of women.
Inheritor of a weighty family tradition with two presidents and innumerable other worthies, congressmen, governors, Ambassadors, young Henry Adams, as he calls himself, never felt equal to the responsibility of being an Adams of Quincy. Yet he had no choice but to try. This book records his participant-observation of his own life from boy to man. While it is sometimes introspective, it does not drip with the self-indulgent carping of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography, The Confessions. Having read very few autobiographies, put off by the aforementioned Rousseau, I cannot compare the book at hand to another title.
Henry Adams had extensive schooling in the classics and languages, of which he makes light, and travelled in Europe before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) through France, Germany, and Italy in particular. During the Civil War he served as the private secretary to his father who was the United States ambassador to Great Britain. Again he makes light of this service but it was crucial to keep Britain neutral despite the incessant lobbying of Confederate interests aligned with the English cotton industry. Moreover, many Brits wanted a weakened Dis-United States to reduce a commercial rival, and a long, bitter, internal war was to be encouraged. The ambassador had his work cut out for him, and Henry Adams lent a willing hand whenever, wherever, and however he could.
In the post-war Gilded Age Adams mixed with Secretaries of State, novelists like Henry James, and others of the great and good with his mixture of bonhomie and sarcasm. James used him as the basis for several characters in his novels.
Many of the glosses on Education like those on – shudder! – Good Reads, take it rather literally. For such glossers the thesis is that his classics education fitted him for the Eighteenth Century with its languages and literature but not for the Twentieth Century with its science, mathematics, and technology. He certainly has some things to say about college education like this passage: ‘the lecture system … flourished in the thirteenth century. The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make notes’ (p 44). They would have learned more in discussion or by reading the books themselves but to get a degree the professor had to lecture and they had to listen.
How little has changed with Zoom lectures.
As salty as his comments are on education that subject is not the overarching theme of the book. The master narrative is the coming of the Civil War, the War itself, and the aftermath with all the accompanying financial, social, and political turmoil that ushered in the Twentieth Century.
Near the halfway point the book skips the twenty years between 1872-1892 (the apogee of the Gilded Age), and does not mention at all his marriage and the illness and suicide of his wife, Clover Hooper, in 1885, who, while ill herself, had fallen into an inconsolable depression after the sudden death of her father. The second half has none of zip or esprit of the first, and reads almost as though it were an assignment, perhaps self-imposed therapy after the death of his wife. Yet it goes on and on about the people and personalities of Washington DC, none too minor, none too obscure to mention.
By the way if you have ever tramped through Rock Creek Park in D.C. you may have come across the memorial Adams raised to Clover. I am pretty sure I did on the infamous occasion when I got lost there as darkness fell.
Taken as a whole the book is a thud. If only the first half, well it has something to recommend it in both form (zip) and content (the politicking of English neutrality). That achievement is numbed by the lifeless second half.
Published posthumously, it is a title I have heard since Year Zero, but never turned a page of it, but then the Mechanical Turk at Amazon recommended it and I tasted the Kindle sample, found it lively, and more importantly I noticed that the Modern Library sometime in the 1960s placed it first in a list of the best one hundred works of nonfiction published in the United States in the Twentieth Century. That seemed to be quite an accolade, and from a source that I respected. Only later did I realise that all the top hundred books on the Modern Library’s many lists were – you guessed it – published by the Modern Library.
