FRENCH THRILLERS, NO MORE HEROES & THE BOIL

Yesterday was a day during which the fatigue and exhaustion that has been building up recently finally caught up with me and, whilst I did manage to fulfil what was required of me professionally, it was rather like wading through treacle for most of the day. Doubtless, if this was a tabloid, my struggles might be described as “heroic” but they most certainly are not, and yet it’s a word that’s bandied around rather too easily nowadays. We all really know who the true heroes are, and I’m not amongst their number. My achievements, though few, were at least successful. For example, and on a lighter note, the latest installment of my epic email exchange with the very good friend I made on my holiday last year was completed and zapped off into the ether. Friendship has never come easily to me because I seldom make enough effort (I remain, if anything, a ‘heroic failure’ at it) so the fact that we have been able to keep up our quite complex interaction of mutual storytelling has felt like quite an achievement. Normally I manage to keep these things going for a month or two and then say something so weird that the dark corners of t’interweb are scurried into and the recipient is never heard from again. Happily, so far this has not been the outcome and my mutterings therein continue. Of course, I also made my slightly more humble return to you here in Lesser Blogfordshire with my eyes more open and my expectations suitably lowered….

Recently, and by a curious coincidence of scheduling, my home movie rentals have included a couple of very old and very French thrillers, the astoundingly gritty “The Wages of Fear” and the remarkable and stylish delight that is “Rififi”. Both true examples of the art of the suspense  movie at their finest, and both movies in which the actions of the so-called “heroes” are much more ambiguous than they tend to be in modern films. They inhabit a dark “noir” twilight world of dodgy practices and petty villainy that make it hard to decide whether you should really be egging them on through their struggles or just narking them out to Les Flicks.  “The Wages of Fear” is a stunning 1953 example of anti-commercialism as a group of desperate men struggle to achieve the rather pointless goal of transporting lorry loads of unstable nitroglycerine across rough terrain in order to help put out a massive oil fire in a “South American” country that looks suspiciously like it was actually filmed in Algeria. “Rififi” is part heist movie, part revenge thriller and part morality tale and was filmed by a director blacklisted by the communist witch-hunts of 1950s America, Jules Dassin, in 1954 on the crisp, dark streets of post war Paris with some truly excellent cars and clothing to be admired along with the now epic 30 minute silent robbery sequence and with Dassin himself playing an Italian jewel thief. I think it’s probably true to say that pretty much every heist movie made since owes an enormous debt to “Rififi” and one of my own personal favourite British films, “Hell Drivers” (a truly excellent movie that has in it just about every actor who was to become a 1960s icon in it) has a lot in common with “The Wages of Fear”.

I don’t know why modern film fans are so quick to dismiss old black and white movies. I’ll agree that sometimes the pacing is a little off and the effects are sometimes a bit primitive but some of the great Hollywood movies like “The Thin Man” and “His Girl Friday” crackle with an intensity and sparkle that few modern movies manage to achieve. I’ve been more moved by the performances and philosophies of “It’s a Wonderful Life” than any other movie made since (although “That’s my daddy!” in “The Railway Children” can still bring a wobble to my stiffest of upper lips…and certain parts of “A Night to Remember” still bring a lump to the throat…) and the breathtaking cynicism shown in some of the very best of film noir like Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past” (or, if you prefer “Build My Gallows High”) should give any modern film more than a run for its money, but “the kids” won’t watch them and claim that they’re old fashioned. Last weekend I also got around to finally watching some of the (as some of you will already know, much anticipated) “Bogie and Bacall Collection” and, if you want to know anything about understated allure, then that shimmy that Lauren Bacall does as she exits the hotel towards the end of the movie must have had the audience’s eyes on stalks. I think I might be fighting a losing battle here, though. I used to work with someone not that much younger than me who didn’t have a clue who Cary Grant even was, and I also used to know someone who used to switch over their TV if a black and white film came on because they were paying for a colour licence, so what do I know? After all, I’m approaching the end of the second book of general ignorance and apparently everything I think that I know is indeed still wrong (but about that more another day I’m sure…).

Continuing with my theme of heroes, I read with interest yesterday that “Guitar Hero” is to be killed off (or “axed” as the headlines would punningly have it). Now, despite the fact that the gaming industry pays my wages, I’m not by nature someone who plays games and (contrary to popular belief that we all – that media use of the world “all” to mean everyone in the office that day - have them nowadays) I don’t even possess an “ExWee” or a “PlayBox” (or whatever the name of the next pointless gadget designed to waste hours of our human activity in endless hours of “fun” instead of letting us think for ourselves might happen to be called…) but I know one or two people whose lives have been made infinitely more enjoyable since they acquired this game. For me electronic games were already far too annoying and demanding when all you had to do was get your square “pong” across the TV screen, but the faking of guitar riffs by people who either aren’t able or couldn’t be bothered to learn to play an actual guitar seems to have been a popular entertainment for some and has, at least, brought more “Metal” and other “real” music into the mainstream and that can’t be a bad thing in these days of homogenised and synthesized pop karaoke (although, conversely “Rock” sales were down last year – could it be that all the tunes were in the games?).

Finally, onto the subject of sporting “heroes” which, whilst to attach that label to anyone just playing a game for a living might be the most inappropriate use of the term, I think it was more successfully applied than is usual to the England (and Wales) cricket all-rounder, Trevor Bailey (“The Boil” as “Johnners” would have preferred) about whose death I was rather sad to hear yesterday, and under such tragic circumstances, too. It seems such an inappropriate way for him to have been taken from us. I am too young to have enjoyed watching him play of course, but to the younger me, he was one of the more essential and familiar voices of “Test Match Special” where his dry fruity tones and astute observations found their natural home and I would like us to pause just for a moment in our busy lives and raise a metaphorical glass of red to his memory.