Balzac as He Should be Read (1946) by William H. Royce
Good Reads meta-data: it is listed without any details. It has 48 pages.
Tagline: Useful.
Verdict: A gem.
A retirement project I once had in mind was to read in sequence Honoré de Balzac’s La Comedie humaine. I made a false start more than a decade ago and got bogged down in one of his novels that was epistolary, letters between two sisters, which was boring. He must have needed the francs per word and spun it out. The reading I did then was in publication order, which is not the sequence in which his grand comedy of life fits together.
The difficulty at that time was compounded because the Rocket e-Book reader of the day did not make it easy. The text was there but not word wrapped on the screen. That made a considerable difference to my surprise. Moreover the only available digital editions were out of copyright Victorian translations that were censored and stilted
To begin anew, I needed a kick start, and this little book did it. In case a reader does not realise why a spark-plug is needed, please note that more than ninety (90) stories comprise the whole, and many of those are full-length novels. Balzac was a Niagara of words.
The complete Human Comedy in translation.
Royce offers three suggestions about how to immerse oneself in Balzac’s waters. One is to read in publication order as I tried. Royce himself rejects this because in subsequent editions, Balzac manipulated the sequences to suit the growth and interaction of the 2,450 characters he created on the page. The time of publication did not coincide with the overall narrative which grew in all directions, including backward. Ergo to read a novel published in 1840 set in 1840 before one published in 1842 with many of the same characters set in 1830 when they were younger convolutes the narrative in favour of the publication date. Balzac often birthed characters at age 30 or 40, and then later went to back to them when they were younger. Eugène de Rastignac appears in nearly thirty of his novels at different ages. Needless to say these thirty were not published in chronological order of Rastignac’s age. (See Anthony Pugh, Balzac’s Recurring Characters [1974] for pedantic detail.)
Second is by the order of events dated in the novels and stories and this he offers to the reader with the gargantuan appetite for the whole. Let it be noted that Balzac is largely consistent on dates within each novel and refers to an event or person that can be dated in nearly every story.
Willian H Royce
Third, embedded in that chronological list Royce bolds the titles of twenty novels that he deems the core of the Comedie humaine. That is a much more digestible banquet, and since long ago I read The Chouans, Père Goriot, the Wild Ass Skin, The Unknown Masterpiece, and Cousin Bette which were included in that twenty, I had a running start with this selection. Assuming those six I went to Amazon to find a Kindle version of the next novel: Une Ténébreuse Affaire. It has many titles in English but none are available for Kindle.
While confirming that absence, Amazon began besieging me with other titles, and I bit on one which I will comment on later. Suffice to say here that it is a biography (not of Balzac) but of seven of his principle characters. It was an intriguing idea and I have started on it to my satisfaction. More on this later, if you are good.
Personal indulgence. The first Balzac title I read was Père Goriot in high school for an AP World Literature class. The other Balzac’s I read in college for a similar class. What do students read today in high school classes? Comments welcome.
I went through Maison de Balzac in 1980, but all I can remember is that there was a secret backdoor through the rear garden that he used to escape the creditors and bailiffs when they came in the front door, usually by kicking it in. He moved around a lot and used false names to elude debt collectors who were legion.
Royce’s long out print book came into my hand thanks to Katester’s perspicacious insight in making it a Christmas gift.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 36 minutes, rated 5.4 by 1701 cinematizens.
Genre: MysteryCom.
DNA: Isle of Man.
Verdict: Oh hum.
Tagline: Oh hum.
With the sledgehammer subtlety of Hollywood the opening scene lays out the film. Reality is what you believe it is. Welcome to Fox News and Magaland.
However it takes another 90 minutes to confirm that thesis. Dr Nandor Fodor (1895-1964), who by the way did exist and made a career of debunking the mysticism of the time, gets drawn into conversation with an illegal Asian immigrant mongoose. (You read that right.)
On the plus side of the ledger, the acting is fine, the cinematography of the Isle of Man is scrumptious, and the valedictory presence of Dr Emmett Brown is charming.
On the debt side the story is an empty shell. The syllable ‘Com’ is used above because ‘comedy’ is attributed to it on the IMDb but I did not notice any of it myself.
I watched it thinking Simon Pegg is a clever writer himself and any project with his touch would be fun. WRONG!
GoodReads meta-data is 399 pages, rated 3.97 by 12,264 litizens.
Genre: History.
Tagline: Believe it or not!
Verdict: Quite a story.
Operation Fortitude incorporates the many elements that went into the effort to deceive Germans about the site for the opening of a second front in Western Europe. The six double agents described in this book were the lynchpin of the Operation, but other parts were crucial to create a mutually supportive house of cards.
As one of the British instigators of the Operation said, we only have to convince one German, Hitler, and he will order all others to obey.
It should be borne in mind that the deception continued well past D-Day to cause Hitler to hold German army reserves in place – for more than month into July.
The deception stood on two legs. First, was an inflation of Allied troops in Britain to take part in an invasion and second was the locale of the invasion. These two interacted as will be explained below. Stay tuned.
The aim of the inflation of the forces available (men, armour, and air) was to lead the Germans to the conclusion that there would be a major diversionary attack, followed by the real thing. To make that credible it had to appear that the Allies had 80 or more army divisions in Britain. (A full strength division would field between 10,000 and 15,000 or more troops, capable of sustained tactical warfare. The Allied divisions would be full-strength, while by 1944 many of the German ones were at half-strength.) With forces of this magnitude a diversionary attack could be 20-30 divisions, leaving a 50 or more for the real thing. The diversion, which by definition would be first, could involve as many as 250,000+ soldiers. I’ll come back to the magic that did this inflation below.
Second, as to locale, the important thing was to sow confusion and cause the Germans to split their forces. Several prospects were mooted from Norway (to link with the Soviets in the north) and then bring Sweden into the war, to the Bordeaux region of France (with part of the forces to attack this latter area sailing directly from the United States, as had done the army that landed in North Africa in November 1942), and the Marseilles area using North Africa as a base, as well as the obvious choice: the Pas de Calais. The goal was not to convince them it was one of the other, but to foster uncertainty about which.
The inflation of Allied forces centred on the fictitious FUSAG – First United States Army Group in South eastern England commanded by General George Patton who was much in evidence as though inspecting troops, supervising preparations, briefing officers, enthusing men, and so on. He was the star of a one-man show.
Around him was an army of illusion of a mere 40,000. Equipment, tents, tanks, trucks, aircraft, ships – moved around him for German aerial reconnaissance photographs. Many were props supplied by London stage magicians, movie studio carpenters, and their ilk to create an illusion. Many of vehicles were painted balloons, the barracks were roofs only, the tents were dyed sheets, the ships moored here and there and occasionally moved were plywood facsimiles. All this activity by Patton’s 40,000 was to simulate 500,000 men or more.
Meanwhile, the South East corner of England buzzed with US Army radio traffic. All fictional but most of it contrived on the assumption that the Germans would hear it.
Most of the effort went into focussing in everything but word on the Pas de Calais zone, but a secondary effort of the same kind was aimed at Norway.
The double agents reaffirmed much of this with reports on unit badges of fictitious formations and sightings of important generals, and Churchill himself once. Eisenhower had a second fictitious HQ in the area in which he never set foot, yet streams of radio messages went in and out of it, as did dispatch riders on motorbikes who roared through the local villages sporting phoney unit badges on their shoulders.
As to locale, the greater the spread of possibilities the better. To confirm an attack on Norway, the exiled King of Norway was much seen along Scotland’s east coast, where the many ships of the Norwegian merchant marine assembled. To salt the idea of Marseilles an actor imitating General B Montgomery visited Gibraltar where it was carefully arranged that he should be seen by a well known German spy, a Spanish police officer.
Likewise, reconnaissance flights and bombing missions concentrated on the Pas de Calais and Norway, but Bordeaux and Marseilles were also hit. The latter were each bombarded by the Royal Navy at times.
Meanwhile, the French resistance became very active in the Pas de Calais area, and the Norwegian resistance left a trail of activities that could only be mapping, charting, and sounding inlets and bays for amphibious landings.
Another thread to this tapestry of lies was that an armada was being prepared in the USA and Canada for direct transportation to Bordeaux. German agents in the USA, most double agents for the US, reported all manner of preparation in harbours from Norfolk to Boston and Halifax. That was compounded by indiscrete planted news items concerning troops and generals. The closing of harbours, the heavy security around fenced off military bases (which were mostly empty), the stockpiling of foodstuffs and equipment. This latter would evidently make its way to Normandy, but at the time the hint was that it was Bordeaux bound.
In order to freeze the German strategic reserve in place, the deception continued after D-Day. To preserve their credibility, the double agents made carefully timed reports that implied that there would be a landing at Normandy but that it would be diversionary. In this case, as in all others the reports did not flatly say that but rather scattered clues in the text, allowing the German analysts to connect the dots, which they did.
Did all of this intelligence, creativity, effort, and risk work? Yes.
The 15th Panzers stayed in reserve at Calais for a month after 6 June, waiting for the real invasion to strike there. By the time it was deployed the Allied foothold was secure, Allied force was dominate, tactical airpower was overwhelming and immediate from airfields in France. The Germans could not travel roads in daytime such was the blanket of tactical airpower, so they drove at night. But where?
French Resistance twisted around road signs between Pas de Calais and Normandy. The Germans had erected their own road signs, and these were moved around rather than destroyed, so they looked right but were wrong. More than one unit of artillery, tanks, or infantry followed the signs into a marsh or bluff.
All the while a highly trained mountain army of 250,000 Germans remained in Norway, waiting for the real invasion. Likewise, half of the German troops in France remained concentrated in the south in anticipation of a Mediterranean landing.
That one person who had to believe the lie was Hitler, who had been telling the generals for months that the attack would be at Pas de Calais since (1) it was closest to England and for that reason had been used by Henry V and William the Conqueror for their invasions and (2) it had a deep water harbour with good rail connections and was close to the best harbour in northern Europe at Antwerp. Since Hitler, like all weaklings, could never admit to being wrong, he stuck firmly to that thesis for more than month – nursed along by the misinformation which continued after D-Day, and he held that powerful panzer force for the real invasion to come at Pas de Calais, despite the pleas of the generals facing the invasion.
As the deception unfolded in May and June, MI5 had confirmation that it was working. That came partly from intercepted German radio traffic (which Bletchley Park had cracked long ago, RAF reconnaissance photographs, reports by resistance groups in Norway, Belgium, and France. But the most authoritative source was Hitler himself! Huh?
It seems that he had a particular liking for Baron Oshima, the Japanese ambassador to Nazi Germany, himself a Germanophile who spoke the language fluently and who was an ardent fascist. Though quite how Hitler squared that with his birthright racism and his aversion of close contact with anyone who was not a servile subordinate remains a mystery. Oshima must have been one smooth operator.
Oshima was also a good listener, as many diplomats are, and he often had private tête-à-têtes with Hitler who spoke freely and in some detail to this trusted associate. And I mean private, just the two of them.
Oshima on the left
As well as a good listener, Oshima also had a prodigious memory and was a conscientious official who, after every meeting with Hitler, would transcribe the conversation and radio it to Tokyo. These reports sometimes ran to 20 or more pages. The US Navy had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes in 1941, and read Oshima’s reports each time. In them, even after 6 June, Hitler was positive that a real attack would come later at Pas de Calais, and told that to Oshima more than once in June and July and the baron passed it on to Tokyo.
Part of the reason for the success of Operation Fortitude was the corruption, incompetence, and internecine conflict among Nazi intelligence agencies. Ideological purity trumped competence. They were ready to undermine and denounce each other, either for personal gain or to out-Nazi each other in finding traitors under every bed, and so to save their own necks spymasters had to paper over every crack, double down on every assertion, and overstate the cases they were making to deflect this rivalry. The effect was to cause German intelligence officers to emphasise the positive, and hide the negative from their murderous rivals. Yes, I know it sounds like McKinsey management.
While the Fortitude orchestra of deception played more or less from the same music, there were wild cards. There was one freelance interloper, who had offered his services to the Germans as a spy, claiming to have a network of twenty or more informants in Great Britain. These twenty were complete fantasy but the German foreign intelligence services combined being inept with a thirst for knowledge and they bought this lie. This individual lived in the City of Spies that Lisbon became.
The Iberian fantasist just might, in spewing out nonsense, include Normandy. The Brits had tumbled on to him early on and let him run to sew confusion with the Germans, but now the stakes were both high and immediate. Should they continue to ignore him, or silence him (by kidnap or murder). In the end the decision was to let him continue so as to drown the Germans in information. Though the Germans listened to this Iberian, they were somewhat skeptical because his reports were always much more explicit than the double agents the British were running. In short, his reports often seemed too good to be true, and also they did not have the confirmation of other activities as enumerated above, like aerial reconnaissance, fabricated radio traffic, body doubles, and the like.
While the double agents risked their lives, most of their work was done in Lisbon or London sending back misinformation to their respective spymasters of things they and their fantasy networks of agents in Great Britain had seen or overheard. However, one was kidnapped from Lisbon by the Gestapo and returned to Germany where he did not survive interrogation, but miraculously did not give away the plan. His arrest had to do with embezzlement not spying. He was crooked all the way around.
While the double agents did their jobs, being chancers, odd balls, and worse, their British spymasters found them personally distasteful. The agents were certainly not ‘one of us’ from Cambridge. This disdain often showed in their treatment of these assets. One of the irritating qualities nearly all of them had, was the refusal to be bought. Money was not a means of control for any of them. They hated the Nazis, that was motivation enough. Most were pro-British even Anglophile, but there was one, who hated the Nazis, but did not love the British, and this annoyed her case officers constantly. She said sarcastically once, that she would not sing ‘Rule Britannia’ while listening to German officers’ loose lips in occupied Paris. This witticism drove her case officer into a paroxysm of temper, while she laughed in his face. When endangered she was abstracted from Paris and sequestered in a safe house in London for months to keep her cover intact. When her usefulness was at an end she was more or less literally turned out into the street and and charged back rent on the safe house to which she had been confined for months at a time. Such was the thanks of a grateful nation.
By the way ‘Double Cross’ did not refer directly to the deception, rather it was the roman numeral XX, and the committee that had hatched Operation Fortitude was Committee 20, there being 19 others. Of course, the designation Double Cross took on a second meaning as the event proceeded.
Side note. While not wholly relevant to this story, I am reminded of the fact that Hitler liked bigger and better weapons, and one of those was the 70-ton King Tiger tank. By contrast the Panther tanks that led the invasions of Poland and France weighed in at just under 9-tons. The King Tiger was indeed formidable and perhaps a hundred of these steel monsters reposed around Calais. But once deployed they were their own worst enemy: They consumed twice as much fuel as any other German tank, had a commensurate short range between refuellings, were too wide for country roads and lanes in Normandy’s bocage, were too heavy for nearly all bridges in Northern France, and their ammunition was incompatible with other tanks. They also presented Allied tactical bombers with big, slow moving targets if they moved in daylight. But they had shock absorbers and some kind of air conditioning for the crew who sat on leather covered seats. The result was that few of these behemoths contributed to the battles that followed. They had been designed and built for the open plains of Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia but Hitler had withdrawn from there to sit in France. Later they were not able to pass through the forest paths and roads in the Ardennes and did not have enough fuel during the Battle of the Bulge and many of them sat idly behind the lines. Such was the genius of Hitler.
GoodReads meta-data is 364 pages, rated 4.13 by 17,490 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Brit.
Verdict: Strange but true.
Tagline: An Iron Cross, believe it or not.
Eddie Chapman was a rough diamond who early discovered his talent for crime and honed it. He was a versatile criminal who burgled houses while the owner slept; he mastered the use of gelignite to open safes in businesses; drove cars into showroom windows to snatch fur coats and more. He was handsome and had learned to affect the purple, though he had not been born to it, and anyone who had been would realise he wasn’t, but the veneer worked its magic often enough on others to sustain his career of crime.
With an accumulated fourteen years of imprisonment on his card, he broke bail and ran to the island of Jersey in the English Channel with Betty. He was 25 and she 19, terribly flattered by the attentions of this apparently wealthy man of the world. As they dined in Jersey’s most expensive restaurant, he said to her ‘You’re the one.’ He had known quite a few women, but he meant what he said to Betty. She was thrilled, but before his meaning could fully sink in, after a glance at the restaurant door where two beefy men in coats were entering, he said to her ‘I’ll be back,’ and then he leapt up from the dinner table and jumped out a nearby window, disappearing from her life it would have seemed.
Bergerac did catch him and put him in the local chokey while the legal wheels turned to extradite him to Old Blighty because Jersey has its own slow-moving legal system which is half French and totally amateur. It mattered not for no sooner did Eddie land in the slammer than the Germans landed on Jersey in 1940. To get out of jail (and back to Betty) he decided to convince the Germans that he was on their side. So began his years as a spy, counter-spy, and double agent.
It took him months to convince the Germans that he hated the English who had jailed him, speaking a passable German (which he had learned from an earlier mistress), knew how to use explosives (from his safe blowing experience), he argued in schoolboy German that spy craft was but an extension of crime craft, evidence of his mastery of the latter was in the court and police records he had compiled. During this time he was first abused and used by the Gestapo, and then when he was accepted as an agent by the Abwehr he was wined and dined.
After training he was parachuted into England on a mission of sabotage. He promptly turned himself into the police and explained the situation to the incredulity of the locals, but eventually MI5 took an interest. He had hoped to buy his freedom (from those fourteen years) with the information about the Abwehr he had memorised but instead he was soon blackmailed into becoming a double agent and going back to the Germans to plant disinformation. To do that the English had to convince the Germans he had succeeded in his missions to protect his cover when he returned. That is quite a story in itself. He was so successful, it was made to seem, that the Germans presented him with an iron cross, as above.
The details that follow are many, and often boring. Yes, the life of a spy, even a double agent, consists of hours of sitting and waiting.
What is very clear, though the author has no interest in it, is the organisational dysfunction of both the British and German intelligence agencies. First there are turf wars among them. If he was an MI6 spy, then MI5 tried to undermine his credibility in preference to its own agents and if his credibility was unassailable, then MI5 tried to poach him from MI6 by overt or covert means. Of such malfeasance knighthoods are born. And the clowns of SOE always wanted cannon fodder.
It was no different with the Germans. Worse even because in the chaotic German arrangements there were more players and few of them played by any rules. Any Abwehr agent was suspect to the Gestapo, the SD, the RHSA, the SS, and so on and on in alphabet soup of murderous rivals. When in 1944 an enraged Hitler destroyed the Abwehr, and had murdered many of its agents from the top down, Chapman was spared because he had long been rusticating in Oslo which was beyond the immediate blast zone of Hitler’s wraith at the time.
Another organisational insight that is more obvious on the German side, though relevant to the British, too, is the mutual dependence of spy and spymaster. To establish his own importance the spymaster must have at least one successful spy. That means the spymaster is inclined to read success into the spy’s activities and to protect the spy from the critics and rivals. Both Ed’s English and German spymasters needed him to succeed for their own good.
Likewise, a rival spy master has an incentive to undermine the spies of another master, namely to shore up his own position in comparison: McKinsey management in the making with those Killing Performance Indicators.
During Ed’s years of absence Betty had married another man, who was killed in the war, changed her name, and moved several times. Then one day in 1946 when she was having tea in a shop, Ed appeared at her side and said, ‘I told you I’d be back.’ He had hired a private detective to find her. Off they went never to be parted again, except by the plod, because he continued his life of crime. By the way, the godfather to their first born was his German spymaster!
He was the model for John Robbie in To Catch a Thief.
GoodReads meta-data is 276 pages, rated 4.03 by 9151 litizens
Genre: Krimie.
DNA: Navajo.
Tagline: The first shall be last.
Verdict: School’s out.
A neat plot buried under a weight of exposition. The shape shifter idea is cleverly used, but it would have read better without fifty pages of explanation, comparison, and pedantry in the middle.
Because of that expository snowdrift, the villain is, to this reader, undercooked. Quite why such a master of malice as this would stoop to robbing a desert convenience store, or display and allow to be photographed for publication some of his ill gotten gains did not make sense. Would Moriaty knock over a 7/Eleven? Would Fantomas invite a journalist to photograph the stolen crown jewels and publish the picture?
Dead Men don’t Wear Plaid (1982) Les cadavres ne portent pas de comstard.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 28 minutes, rated 6.8 by 23,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Comedy Noir.
Verdict: One of a kind.
Tagline: ‘You do know how to dial, don’t you?’
It all started when she walked into his life, well, in fact she fell into his arms at seeing the headline on the newspaper he was reading: ‘The Dodgers lose again!’ Dem bums!
Thus begins the Tec’s search for the frenemies of his favourite brunette, Carlotta. Along the way he enlists Marlowe as a legman, whose motto is ‘Guns don’t kill but love does.’ He also issues the title line. [No spoiler.]
Partly parody, mostly homage to US film noir of the post-World War II era, as the bumbling Tec follows the trail, none too coherently, meeting, in addition to Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwick, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, and more in some brilliant cutting.
When all the fun is done, the closing dedication is the golden touch because it is to all the invisible talents who put the noir into noir, the cinematographers, the camera men, focus pullers, the composers, the musicians, the prop men, the designers, the set builders, the costumers, the audio engineers, and so on. They put the magic on the screen where it has stayed since.
I had forgotten how much I liked this movie until I watched it again.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 5.5 by 16,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: German.
Verdict: Crass but fun, in (a few) parts.
Tagline: Move over, Benny Hill.
‘When the Earth is in peril, who are you going to call?’ Certainly not the (Enter)Surprise. But well, who else can be sacrificed to the cause?
Nothing works on the good starship Surprise, including the crew, of Groans, Snotty, Smirk, and Captain Kork. The Martians are about to conquer Earth when this crew intervenes, along with the interstellar cab driver who delivered them, because the Captain refused to be beamed Economy class and he didn’t have enough Space Cadet points to upgrade to Business. In extremis the secret and untested weapon is deployed: the time travel sofa! Sit on it and time passes? Yes, but in which direction?
It takes them three tries to get the right year, leaving behind chaos here and there in a medieval court, in the wild west, and finally Area 51, which is not next door to Area 50!
The humour entertained the Fraternity Brothers, who have an inflatable Benny Hill doll in their room. (Don’t ask.)
On the good side, it would be banned in Florida, and there are some good lines.
When languishing in the slammer, the big handsome taxi driver confesses to another prisoner his failures with women, saying that to please his ex-wife he learned to dance, to play the piano, and to smile at her parents. Whew! Yet she still divorced him and took everything, leaving him to eat, sleep, and work in the cab. Ah, says the other prisoner, leaning close, there are words that will set every woman’s heart ablaze, my friend. ‘What? What!’ asks the stud. ‘Let’s go shopping!’ Sure enough, next chance he gets, the stud tries these magic words, and [censored].
One hopes there is no Periode 2. But per the IMDb it was a smash hit in its heimat.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages rated 4.07 by 388 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: a slow start but a fast finish.
Tagline: Bony to the rescue!
Broome, WA (population 800) of 1950, once the capital of the pearl industry, has not yet recovered from the war years, but it is peaceful and stable until… Murder!
Two widows are strangled one after another over a fortnight. No one seems much bothered though a considerable point is made that both were attractive women. Had they not been attractive, perhaps there would have been no investigation at all. What investigation is there? The local plod, noble chaps to a man, cannot both keep their pencils sharpened for inspection and find the wily culprit who failed to leave finger prints, a calling card, or a self-addressed stamped envelope. Perth homicide detectives fly in to irritate and annoy everyone, but fail to scapegoat a local aborigine or Asian: A strange omission for this time and place.
Pearling is a dangerous business, the Japanese bombed Broome, and many men went to war. Consequently, there are other widows in Broome who may be in peril. Their fears are barely noticed by plod who seems more focussed on a some cattle that have gone missing. Finding a murderer is just too hard.
There’s only one thing for it! Bony! That is, Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (whose name is never explained) arrives incognito. As if! In his three-piece suit, with theatrical manners, dark skin, Siberian husky blue eyes, and superior attitude, he is dead obvious to one and all, who politely feign ignorance to humour his colossal ego. He soon finds his only intellectual equal in the environs is the town drunk. (Really.) These two form a partnership of sorts. The drunk, being furniture, is never noticed by the locals but, since he sleeps most nights on a bench in the street, he sees and hears much which he passes onto Bony who in return supports his alcoholism.
Broome of the time is described by the numbers, not with the imagery that Upfield sometimes conjures. But in the last third, when most of the scene is nocturnal in the bushes, Upfield is at his best in making the time of night, the place, and expectation all characters in the drama. The book is a time capsule of the attitudes, mores, and opinions of the day about women, children, religion, aboriginal, Asians, alcohol, manly men, effete intellectuals, and more. Take that or leave it.
When he started writing the Bony books, Upfield was travelling around Australia in a caravan working as a Jackeroo by day and typing his stories by kerosine lamp by night. His descriptions of many of these places, and the people who live there, are sometimes compelling, as is about the last third of this tale.
This is number thirteen in a series that started in 1928 and ended in 1966 to a total of nearly thirty. They are set wherever he parked that caravan.
Homework for our forthcoming trip to the Kimberley Coast.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 49 minutes, rated 8.1 by 1,100 cinematizens.
Genre: docudrama.
DNA: Québécois.
Verdict: Disquieting.
Tagline: Why?
‘The October Crisis of 1970,’ seen through the eyes of five innocent by-standers who were caught in the tsunami response: one is a union shop steward, his stay-at-home wife, a single father on the dole with custody of two small children, a woman university student, and a male doctor from a health clinic, three men and two women. They along with 500 others were seized and incarcerated without warrant, explanation, trial, or common courtesy: hand cuffed, stripped, strip-searched including ahem…, and verbally and physically abused as they were imprisoned. No indignity was omitted. As far as the police and warders knew, these were dangerous and violent extremists, despite their appearance.
The details of induction into life in jail are many, and hard to watch, especially knowing that none of the five had anything to do with the events. (Nor did any of the others in the five hundred.) The only thing they have in common was being Québécois, but then so are their jailers.
While the presentation is low-key and matter of fact, it cannot but remind viewers of Germans rounding up Jews or Latin American dictators sweeping up real or imagined enemies for one-way trips. They were processed in the underground carpark of football stadium in that best South American style.
It can’t happen (t)here! But it did, and it might again.
Notice the weapon at the ready.
Their homes were torn apart in the search for… no one seems to know what, and that ignorance made the searches even more furious and destructive, while young children were left without a parent as the police hauled away mom or dad. ‘Not our problem,’ says one officer. (Neighbours stepped in.)
The five were held from six to twenty days, and put under conspicuous surveillance after release. None of the 500 were charged with anything to do with the kidnapping and murder of the October Crisis. Though the extra-legal searches did turn up evidence of other crimes, like unpaid traffic tickets, overdue library books, marijuana stashes, and other such high crimes. ‘Apprended insurrection’ not! Those were the legal magic words used to justify the imposition of martial lawlessness.
The question is why these five and these five hundred? What list(s) were they on? The film gives no answer.
There are extensive entries on the Crisis in the Canadian Encyclopaedia, but these are carefully bland, offering no insight into that question. The literature I could identify concerns the big picture and not these human faces.
Those handcuffed and bundled away often asked: ‘Why me?’ On the rare occasions when they were answered the response was: ‘Les ordres.’ Makes you wonder whether your own name is on someone’s list.
The direction and acting are low key throughout, and the telling measured and mesmerising. It is more a documentary than a drama in presentation.
Runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes rated 6.5 by 1244 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Museum pace.
Tagline: all trip, no arrival.
The inside story of UPS (Space Parcel Service) as the android operator traverses the universe to deliver cardboard boxes to the widely dispersed, few remaining human beings in the galaxy.
The SPS van looks like a humble cottage outside and inside, except for the rocket motors, and the computer guidance system which froths at speaker on bad days. Imagine that, a rocket ship with a leaking faucet, and a moth trapped in the cover diffuser on a neon tube ceiling light.
Space is vast and empty and the deliveries take years. Many wonderful images of the cosmos.
Strange since Amazon teleportation takes seconds but some people prefer this archaic method of dispatch. The android has a daily routine of cleaning and recording a log. We see this repeatedly. (Hint.)
When not changing her AA batteries, the Droid does peek in some of the boxes (which are unsealed such is the trust in androids), perhaps wondering, if androids are curious, what could be so special or important as to warrant a ten-year delivery by hand. Only the most mundane objects are revealed: a hat, a pencil, a strip of film with banal images on it, a feather, one wood screw, a blank scrap of paper…. Upon arrival recipients are blasé about the decade long delivery, except for one whose reaction we see through a paper wall like a shadow puppet play. Marvellously done.
Most of the outdoor footage was shot in the forbidden zone of Fukushima and looks it. That reference will remind alert cinematizens of Andrei Tarkovsky (sorry about that), and yes on this point there is a resemblance to his Stalker (1979). But I found his palpable contempt for both audience and subject matter distasteful, whereas this treatment was restrained and presented its subjects with respect, even deference. This filmmaker did not watermark the film with a sneer like Tarkovsky.
Black-and-white with a minimal soundtrack. There are one or two shots of colour and a brief stretch of string music in one instance.
Having said that, it still does not make much sense to me, but perhaps to thee. One review I read went on about Plato’s allegory of the cave, for no good reason that I could fathom.
