Well, this is very sad.

On Wednesday 17^th,Sylvia Kristel died.  Sylvia Kristel was of course the star of Emmanuelle, the revolutionary French soft-core sexmovie.

It all seems so long ago now, so we need to go way back…..

Emmanuelle

Emmanuelle was the erotic sensation of the Seventies.  It was a soft-core movie about the sexual hedonism of French diplomats and businessmen in Thailand in the early Seventies.  Into this lush and glamourous mix is added Emmanuelle, a beautiful yet innocent young wife of a handsome French engineer.  The movie had no pretensions to art, it was about sex and pleasure and it had been under a ban for six months by the French government, since its release. The French censor relented and the movie was released.  It immediately became a huge sensation in France and long queues of French cinemagoers formed wherever it was showing.

Emmanuelle, as she first appeared

It is difficult today to understand what the fuss was about.  But for the early Seventies, it was racy stuff, with The Mile High club, Lesbian sex for fun and lots of bed-hopping in luxurious Thai villas.  Just Jaeckin was the director and he realised that the time was right to show sex as part of a classy and highly desirable lifestyle.  So all the parts are played by attractive actors, the clothes, cars and locations were all high-style.  Like the English director Ridley Scott, whose Duellists was also a Seventies sensation, Jaeckin used a lot of advertising cinematics to make Emmanuelle lushly beautiful. Soft focus, richly colourful locations and some very clever lighting for night scenes all added to the effect.

But without Sylvia Kristel it would all have been for nothing.

She was luminously beautiful.

At 22, she radiated an innocent sexuality that gave Emmanuelle a critical difference, it gave the movie a credibility that other sex movies just did not have.  This was not some cynical aging stripper playing a part badly, this was a young woman with elegance and class.  She had the most beautiful eyes, perfect pale skin and the body of a young goddess.  Sylvia Kristel had been a nude model and she was sensual, graceful, comfortable being naked.  All these characteristics brought her character and the movie to life.  Actors from Anthony Quinn to Sean Connery talk about how important the physical character is to the movie and the audience.   How embodying the character correctly helps the audience believe in the character and the movie.  Sylvia Kristel brought a lightness, a playful sexuality and a sense of humour to her Emmanuelle, attributes which were very natural .  Producers and Directors talk about whether an actor is “strong” enough to carry a picture. From her very first movie Sylvia Kristel was strong enough.

And so it began.

Emmanuelle made millions in a matter of days.  Every European movie producer wanted in on the act.  Suddenly there were a million Emmanuelle movies, pretty much all cheap copies, with woeful acctresses, all with a variety of spellings of the name Emmanuelle, just in case of legal action by the producers of the original.   The French loved Emmanuelle.  For them it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the French were the sexiest race and the greatest lovers.  Snarky English journalists took delight in reminding the French that Sylvia was Belgian, born in Utrecht.

Sylvia Kristel became a star overnight and at first handled it very well.   She clearly had a brain and did not take herself too seriously.  And yet she understood she had made a significant movie and was capable of discussing the more serious implications of Emmanuelle’s sexuality.  She did a nude photoshoot for Lui (a French men’s mag) which was remarkable in its beauty and for its portrayal of her delicate and vulnerable sexuality.  At one time I owned a copy of this mag, but somewhere I lost it.  I wish I still had it.

Sylvia Kristel, photographed by Francis Giacobetti

After Emmanuelle came out, “Julia” followed swiftly.  A slightly odd German/Swiss co-production, “Julia” has almost disappeared from record.  The timing suggests that Sylvia Kristel made it in the period after she made Emmanuelle and before Emmanuelle was released.  It was coming-of-age soft-porn movie about a beautiful teenage virgin (Kristel) who is ready to change her status.  I remember only two things about it.  The first was that it had a truly execrable soundtrack, a kind of sub-Mommas and Poppas happy-clappy euro-pop sound track, very loud.  It was so appallingly bad that by the end of the movie you were aching to turn the sound off.  The second thing was how wonderful Sylvia Kristel’s breasts looked in closeup.

Emmanuelle 2

Then, in 1975 came Emmanuelle 2.  I like this movie more than the first Emmanuelle.   The difference was in the Director of Emmanuelle 2, Francis Giacobetti.  Giacobetti was, and is, a wonderful photographer, one of the greats.  By the time he came to make Emmanuelle 2, he had photographed a very sexy-beautiful Pirelli calendar (1970) and had a track record as a real artist who truly understood female beauty.  So the sex scenes became sexier, more kinetic, more alive.  Giacobetti’s camera loved Sylvia Kristel, and he photographed her beauty, even as she stripped and made love.  And Giacobetti had the wit to realise that Emmanuelle had grown up.  Still soft and romantically seductive, Emmanuelle is now a woman.  She is now less hesitant, more knowing, more truly her own sexual person.  It is a great movie, sexy as few movies are, and has aged well.

When she puts down the phone, things are going to get very heated - tattoo scene from Emmanuelle 2

My only criticism of Emmanuelle 2 is that the actress who dubbed Sylvia Kristel into English was atrociously bad.  If you can watch it in the original French, do so.  But it is a sexy movie, I would recommend it above all the other movies Sylvia made.

Sylvia Kristel and the late Seventies

Then for a while in the 70s, she really hit her stride as an actress.  She made the La Marge (titled The Streetwalker, in English) for cult erotic director Walerian Borowczyk.  I think this is her best performance ever.  Sylvia plays a street prostitute in this dreamlike, brooding movie.  In The Streetwalker she has a liaison with Joe D’Allesandro, a man who has suffered a terrible tragedy. She was marvellous here, tentative, tender and sensual, giving the part an ethereal complexity that was perfect.

Sylvia Kristel in the The Streetwalker

Then she made a psychological thriller, “Alice or the last fugue”, a Hitchcockian story for Claude Chabrol, the French director of crime and mystery.  Not a great movie, it was cold to the point of unpleasantness, vintage Chabrol but maybe a bit too much Chabrol, too much malice overpowering the story.  Sylvia Kristel was very good as a vulnerable woman in an atmosphere of menace.  Again, strong enough to carry the movie.

She came to England to promote “Alice” and I remember her being interviewed by some fat pompous interviewer on the BBC. He treated her as a cross between a prostitute and a mental defective.  However she was very brave and stood her ground, talking about the movie, even when the interviewer tried to infer she was a stupid slut for being naked on film.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

However if she pissed the Brits off by getting naked in Emmanuelle, that was nothing to the outrage she caused when she starred in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.  The novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had gone from being a reviled piece of filth in the Sixties to a kind of British literary mascot in the Seventies.  I think Lady Chatterley gave middle-class Brits the idea that they were pretty sexy after all, under all that cold reserve.  To have a French bimbo play a titled lady and a national icon caused convulsions in the national press.   The reviewers massacred the film and it sank without a trace.

Many years later I saw Lady Chatterley’s Lover and it was not so bad.  It was directed by Just Jaeckin (again) and it was clear that the old dog had kept an eye on his protégé.  Sylvia did bring some real gifts to her Lady Chatterley.  Sylvia’s demure elegant attitude, her warmth, gave her some of the characteristics of D.H. Lawrence’s Constance Chatterley.  Her ability to portray an innocent surface repressing a powerful, loving sexuality also made her a good fit.  However her inability to play the role in English (she had to be dubbed) dragged the portrayal down.  Just Jaeckin’s ability to build and film aristocratic high-style scenes was exploited to the full here, so what we got was a movie that was faithful after a fashion but very flat.

Private Lessons

And in the same year as Lady Chatterley’s Lover she made her most financially successful film “Private Lessons”.  Private Lessons is a sex comedy about an adolescent boy whose rich father had left him in the care of a sexy French housekeeper.  As the housekeeper, Sylvia showed that, given a good director, she had a real gift for light comedy.  Private Lessons is another good movie which has aged well.

Later Years

Hollywood and the Eighties were not good for Sylvia.  By that time she had a cocaine problem, was being cheated out of her royalties and had a series of disastrous love affairs.  She made other movies, they were not good.  At the start of the Nineties she was bankrupt and had lost everything and had pretty much dropped off the radar.  By the end of the Nineties she was at last in a stable relationship.  She did some independent film work and she painted.

Sylvia Kristel in middle age - still elegant.

Then in 2001 she was diagnosed with cancer.  Sylvia had always been a heavy smoker and in 2001 had the first of a number of serious surgeries which would leave her badly scarred and with permanent physical impairments.

Around 2006, there was a revival of interest in Sylvia Kristel and she gave some interviews.  She was intelligent and witty, just as she had been when she was younger.  I was struck by how kind and level she was about her past and how self-aware she was.  She made it plain that she knew her own mistakes had contributed to making her later life tough.

A couple of months ago I read about how ill she was and in my heart I wished her all the best.

And now she is gone.

Sylvia Kristel and me

I am immensely saddened by Sylvia Kristel’s death.  I feel like I owe her a debt and am hugely grateful to her.

When I saw first Emmanuelle I was a boy, an adolescent who had sex on the brain, all the time.  This was bad, because sex in England in the Seventies was dirty, soulless and misunderstood.  England had started teaching “sex education” in schools.  It was
mechanical, medical and empty.  I remember it as completely joyless.

Emmanuelle was a revelation that changed my life.  It showed sex as fun, intimate and passionate.  It showed sex as sexy, for Heaven’s sake.  In the main English people are not good with sex, they do not understand it.  I do, and my education started with Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle.  In England, Emmanuelle was a blip on the radar, and most people in England have never heard of the movie nor do older people remember it.  Not for me.  Emmanuelle shaped my life.  And not just me.  Maybe not in England, but in Europe, where she was adored by so many men.

For me, Sylvia Kristel was beautiful and sexy but most of all she had a naturalness that I adored.  I fell in love with her in a way I have never done with any other movie actor.  She helped me to realise that I was both sexy and sensual and that sex could help me (as an adolescent) find out who I was. Emmanuelle gave me a big boost on my early journey to becoming cultured, worldly and a good lover.  It showed me the world of good sex that existed outside of the cold confines of England.  It showed me that sex can develop your character, your spirit and your life. I am so very grateful for this.

Sylvia Kristel 1952-2012

Goodbye Sylvia.  I cherish the memory of you.  Thank you and much, much love to you.

This is a long review.  Adios Hemingway deserves it.  I hope you read to the end.

My friend Jim lent me his copy of Adios Hemingway, we are both Hemingway fans.  I was suspicious at first and not sure I wanted to read the book.  This was because the writer was Cuban.  I did not want to waste my time reading some anti- Hemingway tirade about how Hemingway was a chauvinistic American and a fraud (two accusations that crop up a lot).  For me, Ernest Hemingway is very personal.  For me he is the greatest writer of the 20^th century.

In our politically correct age, Hemingway and his writing are extremely unfashionable and I do not give a damn.

I need not have worried about Adios Hemingway.  It is the best work of fiction about Ernest Hemingway I have read and it has an audacity and guts that only a real writer could produce.  In writing about Hemingway in Cuba the author explores two of the great questions around Ernest Hemingway and he does it with delicacy, courage and feeling. The author is Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban author of note.

Adios Hemingway, by Leonardo Padura Hemingway

Cuba then and now

Adios Hemingway is set both in modern Cuba and the Cuba of the 1950’s (1958 to be exact) when Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote at the Finca Viglia.  This is the same villa which is now the Hemingway museum.  The story weaves seamlessly between Hemingway himself back in 1958, and modern Cuba.  I say modern because the novel is a kind of distillation of Cuba, without reference to politics or the internet and only a few references to tourism. It could be anytime in the modern age but the story is rich and lively with Cuban life and Cuban street culture.  It does not need external references, it feels alive and real.

Murder and mangos

The story starts in modern Cuba. A tropical storm has torn up the roofs and gardens of the Finca Viglia, now the Hemingway museum.  In order to preserve one of Cuba’s few tourist attractions, workmen are sent to repair the damage.  In doing so they find the body of a man buried amongst the roots of an uprooted mango tree.  The man has clearly been murdered and equally as clearly it happened during Hemingway’s habitation of the Finca.

Inspector Manuel Palacios of the Cuban police has his hands full; and no time to investigate an old murder. So he calls in a favour and calls Mario Conde, ex-detective, now a struggling writer and acknowledged as the finest investigator that the Cuban police have had for many years.  He asks Conde to find out how the man was killed and more importantly, if Ernest Hemingway killed him.

Conde has a tortured relationship with Hemingway, to say the least.  Back in 1960, as a Cuban child of five, he met Hemingway for a brief second.   Growing up he, like so many of us, fell in love with the wonderful writing.  Then he learnt the darker side of Hemingway, the cruelty to those who loved and helped him, the showmanship, the decline when there was so much left to write.  He has grown to hate Hemingway for, in Conde’s view, betraying his gifts and betraying men generally.

And he is insulted by the task at hand.  He is convinced that Hemingway’s black temper erupted in some unknown unrecorded confrontation and that, in a drunken rage, he killed this man.  Conde wants Hemingway to be to blame and sets out in a perfunctory fashion, to prove Hemingway guilty.  But it turns out not to be that simple…..

Hemingway’s darker side

And right here Fuentes presents us with that truly painful dilemma that Hemingway readers wrestle with. How is it that this brave, generous writer, this man who wrote such meaningful, true, wonderful and poetic words about men and manhood, how could he also be such a fucking bastard.

Oh, we are all grown men, and we all know that no man is perfect. But many of us fell in love with Hemingway and never recovered.  He told us the truth about our lives as men, under cover of his fabulous writing style, and he changed our lives. And we so want to give him something in return.  We want him to be perfect, we want him to have a perfect reputation, and his pettiness, his cruelty and his stupid, arrogant temper and the things he did with it, prevent us from giving him that.

For myself I long ago stopped talking in open company about my love for Hemingway’s writing.  There is always some politically-correct imbecile who wants to rant about Hemingway’s attitude towards women, towards hunting.  These idiots will not accept that Hemingway was a man of his time and back then attitudes were different.  You might as well criticise Shakespeare for not having exploding helicopters in Hamlet, it is just as stupid.  So we readers know that our hero is not perfect, and we keep quiet about it.  So this investigation of Hemingway’s dark side has a special resonance for me, shining a light on part of him that I am uneasy about.

So in the pursuit of the unknown murderer, ex-detective Conde is forced to look at the hero he now hates.  And so he goes on a journey that lots of Hemingway enthusiasts go on.  This is inspired writing, made even sharper by Conde’s awareness of the failures of his own life annd his struggle to write.  And in its contrasts, Adios Hemingway asks some of the same questions of us.

Hemingway takes the stage

And then Adios Hemingway introduces us to Ernest Hemingway.  Fuentes take no liberties with the man, merely brings to life the man we know from his writings, his concerns about his life, that we know from his letters and journals.   Hemingway
senses that he is reaching the end of his life and all his pains fade into insignificance against the thing that hurts the most.  He no longer writes.  It is the story of a giant in agony.

So Hemingway tries, with all the skill of the great writer he still is, to consider his own manhood and the life it has shaped.  He knows the circus that has developed around him, that happened without any intention on his part.  He thinks about the women he has loved, perhaps not wisely but certainly passionately.  And all the time Hemingway is reaching for a new truth, something else is going on in the background.

So Adios Hemingway has a great rhythm.  The chaotic, lively scenes of Conde’s Cuban life inter-weave with the denser, darker conversations of Hemingway, back in the late fifties.  The fast interplay between Conde and Palacios, the back and forth, the ease with which Cuban men insult each other, gives a snappy wholly appropriate edge to the modern scenes.

Two mysteries

And this is a detective story, two if we are going to be serious.  Hemingway reviews the themes of his life, asking what is his own manhood. The tension (and revelation) lies in Conde uncovering increasingly strange truths about what happened at the Finca Viglia.  And we start to realise that the circus around Papa Hemingway has one last part to play, before the end.  And though Conde does not know it, Ernest Hemingway has one last role to play in Mario Conde’s life, too.

The ending, based in fact and truth, is a revelation that stays with you.  I read Adios Hemingway a month ago and the ending keeps coming back to me, keeps asking me questions about my own and Hemingway’s life.

My thanks to my friend Jim Handley for sharing such a powerful, accomplished and insightful novel with me.  This is intelligent, entertaining, generous writing and gives us new light on a writer loved by many of us.  Recommended.  Yes indeed.

Talking to Lindy Hemming

Lindy Hemming - Bond Costume Designer

 

Lindy Hemming is EON Productions costumier/costime designer for the Bond movies and was responsible for both Pierce Brosnan’s classy Italian style and Daniel Craig’s sharp Tom Ford look.  I was lucky enough to get a very short interview with Lindy Hemming on the subject of Bond style.  Here is a summary of Lindy’s thoughts on Commander Bond;

On Bond as an enduring style icon:

The original Bond both in the books and the Connery movies was establishing a type.  Bond became a British style icon, dressed in Savile Row suits.  Ian Fleming was telling stories about a new type of spy, more glamourous, based on his own experience.  So it is necessary to remember that the original Bond was Commander James Bond , of the Royal Navy.  A military man who would get his suits from Savile Row as a matter of course.  So Fleming took pains to ensure that Bond was placed correctly within his social class and milieu.

However by the time Pierce Brosnan came to the role, men’s tailoring had changed.  Men’s clothes had become lighter and there was less formality about dress.  Even Savile Row tailoring had changed, becoming lighter.

Also, by this time, Bond was not simply an English icon, but had become a truly international one.  Therefore it made sense to dress Bond in modern classic menswear.  So Brosnan wore Brioni (very well) and Daniel Craig wore Tom Ford.

On Dressing Brosnan as Bond:

In Goldeneye, the first of the Brosnan Bond movies, the mission was to re-invent Bond.  These were dangerous times for the Bond franchise.  The failure of the Timothy Dalton Bond movies had discredited the franchise and the prevailing opinion at the time was that Bond was finished and that no-more Bond movies should be made.  So Goldeneye was the last throw of the dice.

So Lindy saw Bond as more suave and sophisticated.  There was a direct move away from the throwaway low comedy of the Roger Moore Bond.  Also the clothes in both the Roger Moore and the Timothy Dalton Bond movies were old-fashioned, rather heavy and quite American in style.  Bond was now seen as fast, kinetic and action-oriented.

So Lindy looked at what might work and chose Brioni, for its classy, flexible, light but sophisticated style.  It helped that Brioni suited Brosnan beautifully and vice-versa.  As Lindy said, Brosnan should always wear Italian clothes, he looks superb in them.  I liked that, because it was something we said here, in an earlier Pierce Brosnan article.  Nice to know that our judgement matches the professionals.

Bond in Brioni - Goldeneye

The other aspect of dressing Bond was the ability of Brioni to meet the requirements of the movie.  One of the key reasons for choosing Brioni is that they see themselves as a tailoring company, not as a fashion brand.  So Brioni were able to meet the movie’s needs for multiple copies of suits, urgent changes to styles and looks.  In fact Brioni prided themselves on being tailors and giving the movie the exact look it asked for.

On Bond in casualwear

I asked Lindy about dressing Bond in casualwear.  Her view was that casual clothes were the most difficult part of dressing Bond.  Scenes often demand that Bond wears casualwear, in order that, as a “spy” he fits into whatever milieu he is working in.  But casual clothes do not really reference who the hero is, basically he is out of uniform when casually dressed.

Lindy’s professional view is that we really only remember Bond in casual clothes when they are classic pieces.  So we remember Sean Connery in his golf sweater (Goldfinger) and we remember Daniel Craig in his classic cotton-pique Polo shirt.  She contrasted this with the second scene from Casino Royale, where Craig’s Bond chases the base-jumper.  He was dressed in a cheap tropical shirt and so he could have been anybody, which worked for the scene.

Bond at Golf

On Daniel Craig in Tom Ford

Lindy had just started telling me about dressing Daniel Craig in Tom Ford as part of the re-invention of the Daniel Craig Bond when they closed our interview.  She just had time to tell me it was an attempt to do something different yet in keeping with Bond and I just had time to tell her I thought it had worked tremendously well.

For what it is worth I will give my own thoughts on Daniel Craig in Tom Ford.  I think it works really well.  Why?

Well of all the Bonds, Daniel Craig has the least classy and sophisticated appearance.  Remember Fleming’s original remark, “Bond is an upper-class thug”.  Daniel Craig does thug well but his appearance (and that face) are not in the least sophisticated.  Tom Ford’s clothes are inherently glamourous, their design brings to mind cruise liners and upscale cocktail bars. By dressing Daniel Craig in Tom Ford, Lindy Hemming added some much needed glamour and sophistication to the Daniel Craig Bond.

On the most fun in a Bond movie (for a costume designer)

Another journalist asked Lindy what was her most enjoyable job on a Bond movie.  She answered that it was dressing Sophie Marceau, as Electra King, in “The World is Not Enough”.  The Electra King character had a background as a traveller in exotic countries, so Lindy dressed her in sexy, exotic fabrics and dresses.  What I remember is that sexy split–to-the-waist dress in Electra King’s last scene.  So yeah, very sexy.

Sophie Marceau, split-skirt, adult fun (not)

My heartfelt thanks Lindy, for dressing Bond and for the exhibition.

Part 1 of this article, about the exhibits and the design of the Bond movies, is here

Part 2 of this article, about Bond’s clothes and the style of the movies through the years, is here

Our series of articles about Pierce Brosnan, including the Brosnan Bonds, starts here

The “Designing Bond exhibition is on at London’s Barbican exhibition centre, from July 6^th until 5^th September 2012.  More info and tickets from the Barbican here.

Clothes have always been a major part of Bond, from the Savile Row suits of the Connery Bond, through to Daniel Craig.  The exhibtion, having free access to Eon Productions Bons archive, has some amazing costumes on show, including most of the spactacular dresses worn by Bond heroines and villainesses.  But lets talk about some Bond male peacocking. 

Connery Bond

So it is with Connery we start.  The director of the first Bond movie, Dr No, was Terence Young.  He took Connery to his own Savile Row tailor, Anthony Sinclair, who made Connery his suits for the role.

Savile Row and Aston Martin - Lifesize tableau at "Designing 007"

However even here Bond was revolutionary.  The “Conduit Cut” that Sinclair made up for Bond was lighter than was usual for Savile Row at this time.  The Bond suits were narrower, and though they still had a firm shoulder it was softer than typical Savile Row suits.  The suit had a roped sleevehead  and a simple elegant silhouette.  This makes sense, because if you look at the Savile Row suits of the time they were more like the suits “M” wears in the movies, very heavy wools, double-breasted, big lapels.  So Bond stands out.  Bond suits were lighter, the fabrics often brighter.  In “From Russia with Love” Bond’s suits are clearly Savile Row, but made up in lighter flannels and paler colours.

Here is a picture from the exhibition, a montage of stills showing Bond being costumed.  You can just make out Brosnan in a Brioni half-canvas at the bottom right.

Dressing the Bonds

Here again, is Bond’s original overcoat and homburg from Dr No.

Bond's Homburg and overcoat from Dr No

The Casino

One of the best parts of the exhibition is “the Casino” which features the costumes from the Bond movies.  The casino motif is inspired because it gives us the opportunity to compare and contrast the formal styles from the Bond movies.  “The Casino” has costumes from all of the movies and some of the women’s dresses are very fancy indeed.  However this is What Makes a Man, so here are some pictures of the men’s evening dress.

This first is a Connery dinner jacket.

This is the dinner outfit of  Emilio Largo, chief villain in Thunderball.  Largo was played by Adolfo Celli, an Italian character actor with a lake-sized reservoir of charisma.  For me, Largo was the best  Bond villain ever.

Here is Sean Connery’s white tuxedo from Goldfinger.  It is the one he wore after sabotaging the weapons plant.  You remember the scene; he unzips his wetsuit to reveal the tux, complete with boutonnière.  Rare style.

Here is the costume of the wonderful Vladimir Zhukovsky, from Goldeneye and The World is Not Enough.  Zhukovsky was an ex-KGB turned Russian Mafia gangster making a quick buck in post-perestroika Russia, as played by Robbie Coltrane.  A wonderful character, he lit up every scene he was in.

Classic costumes:

The bikinis are of course the Ursula Andress original bikini from Dr No and Halle Berry’s bikini, worn in homage to the Andress original, in Die Another Day.  Daniel Craig’s swim briefs were made by La Perla and Sean Connery’s swim shorts by classic English brand Sunspel.

Bikinis and Bond swimwear

And this just had to be shown!

Yes, it is the original crappy Roger Moore safari jacket!  Already ten years out of fashion when he wore it, it became a symbol of just how tired the Bond franchise became.

Roger Moore's Safari Jacket

Designing Bond has a truly comprehensive set of Bond costumes.  They are a kind of visual chronology of popular style, from Connery to Moore to Dalton to Brosnan to the present.  You could view this section for hours.  It is an object lesson in how to costume movies, down to script instructions about what each costume signifies.

Finally here is a costume that I really liked.  This is Gustave Graves’ electric-shock armour from Die Another Day.  It was locked in a display case, otherwise you would have a picture of me wearing it…..

Gustave Grave's electro-shock armour, from Die Another Day

Very cool, in a brutalist kind of way.

This is a very strong exhibition, there is so much in it and it has strength in depth as a result.  If I had a criticism to make of it, it is that the “Bond shop” feels like an afterthought and it does not have a lot to it.  I was surprised that it was not selling Lauent  Bouzereau’s “The Art of Bond” which is a definitive work on Bond’s art and design.  That said there are some good copies of original Bond posters and good prices.  Here is a picture:

Classic posters at the Bond shop

My recommendation is go see this exhibition.  I doubt that there will ever be another exhibition like this, with the whole of Bond in one place.  It is great fun and really shows how the Bond magic was made.  For every man who thought he should be Bond.

Part 1 of this article, Designing Bond  and his toys is here

Part 3 of this article, a conversation with Bond Costume Designer Lindy Hemming, is here

Our series of articles about Pierce Brosnan, including the Brosnan Bonds, starts here

“Designing 007 – fifty years of James Bond” is at London’s Barbican from 6th July throught to Sept 5th.  More info and tickets from the Barbican here

I was invited along to the press launch of the “Designing 007 – 50 years of Bond” exhibition at London’s Barbican.  I was keen to see this exhibition because Bond is  almost unique in the cinema.  An enduring franchise, British in origin, noted for its style and originality, but which has still not run out of steam.  And of course, like so many Englishman, I am a huge Bond fan.

In my mind there was huge potential for this exhibition, given the many incarnations of Bond, and the turns worked on both the character and the Bond mythology.

 

A good beginning

The first thing one sees as you come out of the approach tunnel into the exhibition is this life-size tableau:

Suit, Aston Martin, Switzerland - An iconic moment from Goldfinger

This was a really promising start to the exhibition.  This tableau (from Goldfinger), Bond in a Savile Row suit, leaning against the Aston, is now an iconic cinema image.  In one image the movie summed up a new kind of spy, well-dressed, fast cars and good taste.

The exhibition gets better.  Here is the next lifesize tableau.  On a circular revolving bed we have:

Cold dead gold, Jill Masterson in Goldfinger

The other iconic Bond image, that garnered huge publicity and paved the way for all of those intriguing credits-sequences with lissom dancers.

So it looked like the exhibition was on the right track.

 

Press Call

The exhibition was officially opened by Lindy Hemming, who curated the exhibition, along with Bronwyn Cosgrave.  Lindy was the Bond costume designer for all the Brosnan movies and for Casino Royale.  She has also costume-designed a whole slew of other major movies, including The Dark Knight.  So no slouch in the how-the-movie-looks department.  Here is a picture of Lindy.

Lindy Hemming - "Designing Bond" Press Launch

I think the most interesting thing about the launch was the enthusiasm and support that Eon Productions (who own the Bond franchise) have put into this exhibition.  It looks like they gave Lindy carte-blanche to plunder the Bond archives, everything from costumes to wonderful Ken Adam era (Connery era) designs and drawings.

And on to the exhibition.

 

Gadgets

To draw you in, the exhibition starts with all the Bond gadgets from the movies, each individually showcased.  Here is Scaramanga’s Golden Gun, from The Man with the Golden Gun.  It really makes for a good intro.

The Golden Gun

 

Bond – The Beginning

This bit of the exhibition thrilled the boots off me.  Starting with the Ian Fleming books, this section explained how the movie Bond was first created.  How Fleming’s “upper-class thug” was made real.

A case of First Editions - Fleming's novels in their original hardcovers

I think this was the real genius of the Bond movies.  They were made of several things that no movie-maker had ever tapped before.

Firstly Fleming’s own original view of spying.  Fleming had been the spymaster and even the originator of several unorthodox spy schemes (“The Dirty Dozen” was one of his).  Also, during the war he had worked with the wildly unorthodox but brilliant American Wild Bill Donovan, who had created the O.S.S.  Donovan had also been a wellspring of unusual and strange spying gambits.

Secondly Fleming’s connoisseurship.  A fervent believer in the virtues and rewards of the upper class Englishman, Fleming’s cosmopolitan good taste extended beyond the Dom Perignon, to watches, weapons, suits and food.  The effects of World War 2 were still being felt and Bond was an indirect way to introduce men to better things.  Which of course translated to the screen so well.

Thirdly, there was British eccentricity.  Building guns out of cigarette cases and putting teargas in talcum tins was very much in the British tradition.  It was the genius of the Bond producers that they were able to think big and, with the help of designers like Ken Adam, build secret bases inside volcanos and design cars with machine-guns in the headlights.

Here it all comes together.  This is a showcase of Bond paraphernalia, which includes the famous Walther PPK.

Bond gear and guns

This next exhibit confused me slightly.  It had a label saying that Bond wore this Homburg and topcoat in Dr No.  I have watched Dr No several times and do not remember it.  Obviously I need to pay closer attention.

Topcoat and Homburg

 

Bond by Design

Having established Bond , the exhibition moves onto the design of Bond, the look of the Bond world.  This part of the exhibition is beautifully put together and has both an integrity and a layout that works beautifully.  It starts with the work of Ken Adams, who designed the Sean Connery Bond movies and it has many of the original production drawings for the movies.

Here is a copy of an original drawing from You Only Live Twice, blown up to wall-size.

You Only Live Twice - Production Drawing

Here the (framed) original drawing

Original drawing framed for the exhibition

This was just great.   I thought that the amphibious spy-boat in The World is Not Enough was the quintessential Bond gadget.  Indubitably British, producing surprise after surprise and yet quite stylish.  This is the detailed model for the boat, about four feet long.

Boat without Brosnan, The World is Not Enough

And the boat sequence of panels shows just how well-executed this exhibition is.  Each design theme is runs through a series of panels, some of them explanatory, with models, objects and tableau to punctuate and enliven the piece.  It is the most enjoyable learning exhibition you could imagine.

The scale of this exhibition is big.  Here is a picture of Roger Moore as Bond and Jane Seymour as Solitaire in Live and Let Die.  If you look to the right of picture you can see Laura Murphy, one of the curatorial staff.  This gives you an idea of the scale of the panel.

Live and Let Die - Production Still

BTW, apologies for not getting Laura in sharp focus, I was using an f-stop setting designed to get the panel in focus.  A pity really, because Laura is very attractive, she could easily be a Bond girl herself.

Here is another Bond toy, the motorcycle used by Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeo in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Motorcycle - Tomorrow Never Dies

 

The Ice Palace

Bond always seems to be in trouble on ice.  Roger Moore being chased by evil Soviet athletes on skis in For Your Eyes Only (recommended BTW, head and shoulders above all the other Roger Moore Bonds), Pierce Brosnan with the jetskis in The Wolrd is Not Enough.  So the exhibition includes an Ice Palace hall.  Here there are, you guessed it, Jet Skis, a running video wall of Bond on ice and a large scale model of the Ice Palace from Die Another Day.

  

Ice Palace - large scale model

So this exhibition rocks.  It stinks of Bond style, British derring-do and swagger.  It really shows how British inventiveness, and Fleming’s glamourous spy created a cinema icon recognised the world over.  And with the huge panels, the costumes (in the second half of the article here) and the Ice Palace it shows how thinking big made Bond into epic action cinema.

If you have boy children take them to see this. It is huge fun, full of boy-toys.  And for the Bond enthusiast, it is perfection all in one place.

Part 2: Designing OO7; the clothes. is here

Part 3: Lindy Hemming talking about dressing Bond, is here

Our series of articles about Pierce Brosnan, including the Brosnan Bonds, starts here

Designing 007 runs from July 6th to Sept 5th at London’s Barbican, here.

Today is the Birthday of Errol Flynn, we are unlikely to see a man like him ever again.

Flynn was once described as “intelligent but not intellectual”.  He had an unusually clear view of the world from a very young age.  He knew what he liked, he lived for adventure, fun, women and parties.  Yet he knew that the world has a way of filling our lives with obligations and strictures, which squeeze the joy out of us.  Flynn knew this and became determined to live life his way, no matter what the consequences.   It is that devil-may-care, full ahead, life -is-for-living attitude that translated so wonderfully to the movies and made him one of the greatest of Hollywood stars.  He was a handsome, charming rogue, yet Errol Flynn tried to live his life according to the principles he had set for  himself.

I wrote a longer piece on Errol Flynn and his movies a couple of years ago.  If you would like to read it the link is here.

Today is the Birthday of Franklin Schaffner, American movie director.  Frankling Schaffner’s heyday was the late sixties and early seventies.  The traditional wisdom is that in the late sixties, Hollywood, under assault by the new forces of social liberalism, lost its way.  If that is true , then Schaffner held up the standard of great moviemaking during that time.  He did this by making movies that were both epic and intelligent, always a rare skill.  Though you may not know Schaffner by name, you may recognise his movies.  He made such greats as Patton: lust for glory, Planet of the Apes and Papillon.

Franklin Schaffner on set.

Franklin Schaffner was an ex-Navy man who had fought in World War 2 (the Pacific War).  He cut his teeth producing and directing live TV in New York the fifties, when US TV was a pressure-cooker of quickly scripted and even more quickly shot drama.  In that environment he preduced some notable work.  He had a reputation for getting great performances from Prima-Donna bastards like Steve MacQueen and George C. Scott.  On the evidence this is true, I do not think George C. Scott ever gave a better performance than in Patton, and his turn for Schaffner in his Hemingway adaptation ”Islands in the Stream” is breathtaking in its depth of character.

Schaffner’s movies are out of favour now, I think because they are so unashamedly masculine, complex stories of male power and Alpha men.  However they remain thrilling, engaging Hollywood movies.  There is also a slightly strange spiritual edge to his movies which is both odd and very American.  The stories in his movies are mythic and if you sit still and feel them, they can stir something in you, about life and the spirit of men.

I wrote a linked series of posts about Schaffner’s movies last year, so I am taking this opportunity to re-link to them.

The first article, about Schaffner’s early (and wonderful) collaboration with Charlton Heston, “The Warlord” is here.

The second article, about his most famous and most applauded movies, “Patton” and “planet of the Apes” is here

The third article, about the now-classic “Papillon” and the magnificent but flawed “Islands in the Stream” is here

Enjoy.

Today is Steve McQueen’s birthday.   He was born on this day in 1930.

Early Life

It was horrific.  His mother was Julia Ann Crawford, who married a man named Bill McQueen.  Bill McQueen upped and left when the baby Steve was a year old.  Julia Ann became a part-time prostitute, bringing home men to the small flat they lived in.  As Steve McQueen grew, it became clear to him that he was an inconvenience to his mother.  Worse, a series of step-dads appeared on the scene, each of them determined to teach the boy a lesson with their fists.  After he became a movie star, McQueen talked about his childhood and the many times his various stepfathers beat him bloody.  Twice he was packed off to Julia Ann’s uncle Claude, an alcoholic farmer with a violent temper, for stays that extended into years. He used to escape to the movies as the alternative to a grim life.

So by the time Steve McQueen was fourteen he was a runaway, a gang kid, a would-be tough guy with no discipline.  Julia Ann and his then stepfather then had him legally declared “incorrigible” (which suggests the most sinister kind of law) and he was sent to Boys Republic.

Boys Republic was a boy’s home, which had a tough love approach to instilling self-confidence and life skills into delinquent boys.  At Boys Republic, Steve McQueen learnt discipline and how to get along with others.  He grew into a man, who though not perfect, could function in the real world.  Later, even at the height of his fame, he remained very grateful to Boys Republic.  His contracts for movies often included clauses for items like jeans and electric razors, in bulk lots.  These he would send straight to Boys Republic.  More importantly, even as a movie star, he often went back to Boys Republic.  He would play pool and chat, never elevating himself about the boys who he considered to be family.

Growing Up

Leaving Boys Republic, Steve McQueen bummed around, doing a variety of dead end jobs.  One night while drunk he signed a dodgy contract and ended up on a ship, signed to the Merchant Navy.  He jumped ship in Trinidad and made his way back to the US.  In 1947, he joined the Marines, becoming a mechanic.  He stayed for three years.  In that time he was commended as a hero, helping save five marines from drowning, was on a presidential honour squad.  He also got busted for insurbordination, seven times…. But overall, his time in the Marines was good. It further developed his discipline and self-reliance.  It was during that time he developed an enduring patriotism that never left him.

New York

In 1950, Steve McQueen moved to New York. In 1951, with the help of the GI Bill, he started taking acting classes.  In 1952 he joined the Actors Studio, whose style of method acting was providing actors suited to the grittysocial realism that Hollywood was beginning to adopt.  So McQueen joined the ranks of Marlon Brando, Lee J Cobb, Dustin Hoffman.  But as a method actor, he stood out, there was an innocence, a good-naturedness about him that was all the more surprising given his previous life.

Early theatre and movies

Steve McQueen spent time on Broadway, where got good notices.  His first sizeable movie role was in the Blob, a trash horror movie that was the last gasp of the cheapo drive-in teenager-meets-monster movie.  McQueen is the hero teenager who works out how to kill the Blob monster. Somehow The Blob became a huge success and suddewnly Steve McQueen had a (small) name in movies.

He was joint lead in The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, in 1959.   Anyone who has seen this movie will know what a strange film it is.  Shot in blackand white, this is a dark, sour crime thriller, shot with a style and tired tempo that would have looked old ten years earlier.  It is also remarkable for the poverty of its storyline, the whole bank robbery is tedious and dull.  Steve McQueen was it’s only saving grace.  By this time he was married, to a beautiful young actress named Neile Adams, who was pregnant with their first child.

At the same time he was making a name for himself on television, as western star.  He played bounty hunter Josh Randall in the show Wanted: Dead or Alive.  It was inspired casting.  McQueen was just detached and anti-social enough to play the edge-of-the law bounty hunter, but with a decency and charisma that drew audiences like a magnet.

A very young Steve McQueen as bounty hunter Josh Randall

Fame

McQueen’s cool bounty hunter was spotted by the great John Sturges.  There is another article to be written about John Sturges but he directed such great movies as Bad Day at Black Rock, The Great Escape, The Eagle has Landed and was a master storyteller with a legendary eye for character. He cast McQueen as Vin, the cool wry cowboy gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven.  Though Yul Brynner was the star of the movie, McQueen was it’s soul.  Though there was never any doubt that McQueen’s Vin was as tough as nails, yet there was a gentleness and sensitivity that provided the light ot Brynner’s darkness.

Steve McQueen as Vin

There is a marvellous scene between McQueen and Yul Brynner’s, Chris, just over half-way through the movie.  Yul Brynner’s Chris is the leader of the gunmen hired to save the Mexican village from the bandit gang of Calvera.  Things are not going according to plan and Brynner has difficult decisions to make.  Vin (McQueen) asks him his plan and in doing so articulates all the yearnings for home and family that Chris has, that Chris does not have thevulnerability to express. It is brilliantly done and encapsulates Steve
McQueen’s magic.

Always a great performance

Two years later John Sturges cast McQueen in The Great Escape. In between he had cemented his reputation with such films as The Honeymoon Machine and hell is for Heros.He built a reputation for being diffcult, but always delivering.  It looked like he was incapable of giving a bad performance.

In The Great Escape he played the rebel, never defeated, never giving up.  When the Nazis put his Captain Virgil Hilts in the cooler there is an indefatigable quality about him.  He never gives up, is just waiting for his chance to try again.  More than any other performance, The Great Escape’s Hilts made Steve McQueen a star.

The bike ride that made him a star

By now McqQeen was a father with a son and a daughter, and by all accounts a very good one.  The boy who had been so badly parented gave his children a real home, real love and real values.  In just five years he hadgone from being an unknown actor to a wealthy movie star with a beautiful wife and a happy family.

Norman Jewison

Two years later he teamed up with director Norman Jewison for the Cincinnati kid.  The part of a poker-playing cocky womanizer was tailor-made for Steve McQueen.  I really like the Cincinnati kid.  There was a quickness about the character, a roundedness and humanity that makes his fall from grace all the more believable.

Navada Smith and The Sand pebbles followed in quick succession.  McQueen was becoming almosticonic as an actor, able to give evocative, meaningful performances with veryfew words.  He had a quality of showing feelings and moods in a way that was perfect for the cinema.  Interestingly enough it was a quality he shared with that other early cinema rebel, Robert Mitchum, another product of a rough and troubled upbringing.

Next came The Thomas Crown Affair.  McQueen really wanted to play Thomas Crown, the Harvard-educated, highly intelligent connoisseur.  Crown was everything that McQueen was not and therefore a challenge, and the one thing McQueen could not resist was a challenge.  Norman Jewison,again thedirector,  though one of McQueen’s greatest admirers, did not think he was right for the part.

The Thomas Crown Affair is considered to be a great Hollywood movie but if you look at it closely it is mostly Norman Jewison’s scene staging and direction that make it so.  There are some good bits of work from McQueen, he strikes real sparks off his co-star Faye Dunaway and manages to get under her ice-queen persona.  His seduction of her tough investigator is the best part of the movie.  But overall he seems to be at a loss as to how to play a successful businessman.  Unable to use a lot of regular attributes he tends to play Crown as smug, and it gets a bit one-note.

Good suit, Mr Crown.

Bullit

And that magnificent rollicking car chase.  However that was only the second great thing about the movie.  The first was McQueen’s performance which was pared-down to nothing. By now he had mastered the art of being present and carrying scene after scene, without saying very much.  There was now a kind of Zen of Steve McQueen and audiences loved it. Detective Frank Bullit was silence and power and knowing, on one sexy package.  Helluva of a job of role-playing.

Zen movie-acting as Frank Bullit

And onward….

The great roles kept on coming.  I am only going to mention two more.  Firstly his great failure, Le Mans. It is a truism that Steve McQueen loved racing bikes and cars more than making movies.  When he tried to put them together it became a case of too many passions to manage.  Le Mans is overlong and unfocussed.  But there are individual scenes in it which are hypnotic.  In those intermittent moment Steve McQueen came closest of anyone in showing the truth about Grand Prix racing.  It has to be watched for those magnifcent powerful moments when the thrill of driving machine comes rushing out of the screen.

Papillon

Papillon was something different, and you could make a case for it being McQueen’s greatest role.  Directed by the masterful Franklin Schaffner, it reputedly took all of his skill in handling difficult actors to handle McQueen.  But the performance he got was like nothing else.

McQueen as Papillon

Papillon, convicted of murdering a pimp in 1930’s France, is sentenced to life on Devil’s Island, a tropical hell-hole off the coast of French Guiana, South America.  Papillon is determined to escape and the brutal French penal system is determined to break him.  McQueen gives a an amazing performance, part method acting, partly an instinctive understanding of how a harsh world will crush you unless you fight. The performance is unsettling in its intensity.  It was a masterpiece of an actor at his very best.  If not for McQueen, the movie would be too long by half, but McQueen’s performance keeps you glued to the sotry.

Coda

McQueen died at 50, young really, from a form of cancer caused by Asbestosis.  His last words are recorded as “I did it”.  He had every right to say that.  From the brutality and hopelessness of his childhood, to love, a family and the greatest of success.  McQueen was in no way a perfect man, but his is one of the most inspired stories I know.  Thank you for the movies Mr McQueen.

Details

There are hundreds of books on McQueen and we have covered the movies, at least in outline.   THe onr book I would recommend is Yann-Brice Dherbier’s “Steve McQueen, a life in pictures“.  Dherbier has published several books about movie stars which are marvels of phot0-research.  I own some of them and Ithink his book on Steve McQueen is his best.  It is an inspired book, there are many rarely seen photographs in it and gives a real insight into Steve McQueen’s life.  The book was bought for me as a gift by my wife and it was an inspired and insightful gift, for which I am very grateful.

This book was the best read I have had for a long time!  Buy this book!

Now you, as a man, may think, how can a book on perfumes be so good.  Well, it is, it is erudite,
lucid, decisive and above all, screamingly funny.  I laughed out loud many times when I was reading it.  More importantly this one book completely revised my understanding of perfumes, including men’s  fragrances and made me into a men’s perfume addict.  I now know what I am smelling and why.

Truthfully, I had known what I was smelling before, but Turin and Sanchez’ Perfumes gave me a proper education, to go alongside my style street-smarts.  Tremendous, magnificent and life-enhancing – buy this book!

Perfumes A-Z, by Turin and Sanchez

My review starts below.

Who are they?

Luca Turin is a biophysicist, an expert on smell, a perfume creator and an expert on perfumes.  He has several businesses in the field of fragrances and he is the proponent of a
quantum theory of smell.  He is widely recognised as one of the foremost experts on fragrances alive today.  Tania Sanchez is a writer, journalist and perfume expert.  Both of them have been
involved in fragrances since their teen years.

Oh, and they are married to each other.  Which lends a real dynamism to the writing.

The Book

“Perfumes the A-Z guide” is what it says on the cover and a whole lot more.  The A-Z review are wonderful, the contents of Turin and Sanchez’ professional database disgorged into print.  There are over 1,500 reviews, everything from
Angel (Thierry Mugler) to Yohji Yamamoto Homme. And these are not dry-as-dust catalogues, they are wonderful word-sketches, gems in their own right.

But Perfumes is more than that.  The reviews are folded into a real book, considered, smart, elegant, which makes a case for Perfume being an art.  From this bold start, Perfumes discusses how to smell, understand and enjoy fragrances.
Then using its own guidelines it has two beautifully written, easy to understand, sections on Female Fragrances and Male Fragrances.  This is followed by a brief history of perfume, which makes a very interesting read, as Turin and Sanchez do not shrink from
recording the dastardly misdeeds of the perfume companies.

It is worth buying simply for their detailed listing of the best male fragrances.

And funny.  Here is Tania Sanchez in Feminine Fragrances:

“The question that women casually shopping for perfume ask more than any other is this:

“What scent drives men wild?”

After years of intense research we now know the definitive answer.  It is bacon.  Now, on to the far more interesting subject of perfume”

Now that’s writing.

Did I mention that this is a great book?  The reviews of fragrances are definitive, with notes on the history of the fragrance, the creators (where available) and of course the scent.  The individual
fragrances are placed within price bands. Most important of all, Turina nd Sanchez give a ranking (from 1 to 5 stars) for each fragrance.

Best of all Turin and Sanchez give lists of the best male and female fragrances.  There are other lists, best floral fragrances, best oriental fragrances. There is even a best bang for your buck
list.  This book is superb, simply as a buying guide.

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez review them all.  The great, the awful, the celebrity fragrances (David Beckham, Brittany Spears).
They have an assessment for each one and take no prisoners.

This is the review for Allure Homme Sport, by Chanel

“A pleasant but studiedly nondescript confection of citrus-metallic notes set against a spicy-sweet background related to the drydown of Pour Monsieur.  Like being
stuck in an elevator for twelve hours with a tax accountant.”

And that’s just one.

My conclusion

Not just a great read, Perfumes A-Z helped me to find fragrances similar to the ones I like without doing the spray and sniff thing.  This is an incredible boon.  Those of you who read my article on how to buy
a men’s fragrance will know about creating perfume shortlists. This book takes a huge amount of work out of doing that.  This book is the map, the guide and the teacher.

I have had my copy for four weeks and I am careful with books.  However I have used this book so much it looks old, there are sticky-note page tags on hundreds of pages, my copy looks like it is sprouting small untidy yellow leaves.  It is underlined, noted and highlighted to within an inch of its life.

Huge amounts of fun, really useful.  I say again – buy this book!

Our other articles on men’s fragrances are:

How to choose a men’s fragrance – here

20 Good men’s fragrances – here

Luca Turin talks about smell and fragrance on TED - here

Today is the birthday of John Ford, one of the greatest moviemakers who ever lived. 

John Ford movies were part of my growing up, even as a teenager I knew that they were special, as did my brother, who was also movie-mad.  We watched every Ford movie that came on TV.

We tried to be cool, those hokey songs would ring out of the opening credits and in unison we would shout “Oh no, not The Sons of the Poineers”, the name of Ford’s barbershop quartet who sung those rousing cowboy songs.  But the truth is we watched and loved them all, Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, even the The Informer.  But we loved the cavalry movies above all, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, She wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Wayne and Henry Fonda.  The Quiet man, Ford’s Irish fantasy, was something of a controversy in our home, because we were of poor Irish descent and we knew there was nowhere as nice as Ford’s fictional village of Innisfree.  The Quiet Man did not get a good press where I lived, but more on that later.

John Ford, growing up

John Ford was born John Martin Feeney in 1894, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to Irish parents who had emigrated from County Galway at the tail end of the Potato Famine.  Like so many Irish families that faced the choice between starvation and emigration they struggled hard at first, to make their way in the land of opportunity.  For John Ford his Irish ancestry was always important and became an integral part of his artistic vision.

John Feeney was a dreamy, outdoorsy boy.  From early on, he had bad eyesight, yet paradoxically developed a strong and distinctive visual sense.  He was interested in drawing and was clearly an artistic boy.    When he was 12 he caught Diptheria, then a potentially fatal disease.  As it was, he was bedridden for a year, and in that time his imaginative inner life became even stronger.

However, Ford wanted the manly life of a strong, athletic Irishman, a man amongst men.  More by willpower than physique he became a star of the school football team, nicknamed “Bull” Feeney, the man no opposition could stop.

John Ford in Hollywood

John’s older brother Francis had made his way to Hollywood, which was just becoming known as a place that made movies.  Francis became famous as a director of early movie serials.  He got his brother John a job, first as a scene-shifter , then as a stuntman.  John Feeney became Jack Ford and quickly slipped across the line into directing movies.  By the time he was 24, Jack Ford had become a respected director in early Hollywood.  His reputation was as a no-nonsense director who got the job done on budget.  Jack, now John, Ford actively fostered his workman like reputation in order to prevent the studio from taking too close an interest in his movies.     

John Ford

 

John Ford’s movies: the picture and the story

Ford had an amazing sense of visual composition.  His mastery of the still shot has never been surpassed.  The action starts somewhere in the scene and progresses through the shot.  It goes from long-shot to middle distance to foreground and then on.  The camera does not move. 

He doesn’t just do this because he can.  By keeping the camera still and not resorting to cuts and close-ups, he keeps the story, not the actor, not the action in the centre of the movie.  We watch what’s going on in the moving picture.  He often starts his movies like this.

In Stagecoach, the Overland stage moves through the shot, into a second shot, almost as still.  It gives us time to see the story, it establishes an important part of the story (the stagecoach).  Though we do not really know it we are already in the story, there is no scene-setting. 

Monument Valley, a scene from Stagecoach

He does it again in a movie he made over twenty years later The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The train comes into and through the shot, there are no people.  This is so right, because the railroad is a key player in the movie.  He keeps the railroad in the forefront of the story for a couple of scenes.  It is critical.

He does it again in the marvellous WW2 movie, They Were Expendable.  The Motor Torpedo Boat squadron come into view before peeling off across the foreground of the scene. 

Actually, the opening scene of They Were Expendable is one of the most beautiful scenes in movies.  Like Flying Boats.Ferrari’s and any other mechanical perfection, motor-torpedo-boats are things of beauty.  Beautiful and dangerous, like sharks.  Ford has them fleet and fast skimming the waves of the Pacific , metallic and glistening under the bright sun.  They gracefully curve off into fast complex manoeuvres, sunlight flashing off the hulls.    Simply beautiful, as good as a painting by DaVinci.

Even though it does not do it justice, here is a still from that first scene.

Motor Torpedo Boat, opening scene of They Were Expendable

Ford’s Men

It is not just the story that makes John Ford the poet of American life.  It is also his portrayal of American men.  In my view no director has ever understood better the importance of individual spirit and self reliance versus the importance of family and community.  Ford shows the conflict between the two and in doing so gives us the greatest stories.    

Ford’s men are truly American, brave, independent, openhanded, direct and manly.  The Ringo Kid (John Wayne) in Stagecoach is his own man, willing to stand outside of the law to do what is right.  In the Searchers, Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is willing to go to any lengths to rescue what remains of his family from the Commanches.

Late in his career, John Ford made the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  By this time Ford and his screen alter-ego, John Wayne, had refined their vision of the American man to perfection.  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a wonderful movie, a concentrated distillation of Ford’s view of the old West.

Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, is like some big, sleek animal, a panther maybe, dangerous when roused.  Wayne’s graceful, insolent movements fill his every screen appearance with controlled power.  He is a spirited, independent man, who rules his own life.  He is dangerous and he knows it.  Here is part of his earliest exchange with Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart), a tenderfoot lawyer robbed and badly beaten by Liberty Valance.

“Liberty Valance is the toughest man south of the picket-wire.  Next to me.”

They Were Expendable

For me, Ford’s best portrayal of American men is in They Were Expendable.  Both Lieutenant Brickley (Robert Montgomery) and Lieutenant (JG) Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) are obviously exceptional men.  Motor Torpedo Boat commanders at the outset of the Pacific War in WW2, they and their men fight valiantly against the Japanese tide sweeping the Pacific.  These are men who stand for freedom, in the sure knowedge that the immediate fight is unwinnable.  In fact it is wrong to say that this is about Montgomery and Wayne.  Every American man in this movie is dedicated to the spirit of freedom. 

They Were Expendable is a study in the beauty of brave men, from the ensign to the torpedoman.  These are men rising above pain and death, in the name of freedom.  In They Were Expendable they do it without fuss, without drama because that’s how a man does it.  It is the same hardscrabble grit and courage that tamed the American West.  There is no better movie about courage and patriotism and a man’s urge for freedom.  This is a movie of Americans with their back to the wall, and how their guts and courage carry them through.

Ford’s Family

For John Ford, family was the most precious thing.  If his men were individuals, yet they knew that they fought for family and life.

There is a wonderful scene in Stagecoach that shows this.  The stagecoach travellers, fleeing the Indian warparty are holed up at the staging post.  The alcoholic Doc Boone has just delivered the baby of the pregnant cavalry officer’s wife.  It’s early morning in the scene.  Dallas, a prostitute (Claire Trevor), who has been shunned by all the other passengers except the Doc and the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) walks into the room full of passenger’s carrying the baby.  Dallas is beautiful.  The light in her eyes as she holds the new-born is wonderful.  The Ringo Kid sees this, sees her truly beautiful spirit and falls even more deeply in love with her.        

It is even more poignantly shown, in They Were Expendable.  The Motor Torpedo Boat squadron have fallen back to Bataan, unable to stem the Japanese advance.  Out of spares, torpedos and gas, somehow they continue to fight on.  In a lull in this hell, Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) sets up an officer’s dinner for Sandy Davys (Donna Reed) the American nurse he has fallen in love with.  As gentlemen, the officers host the dinner, building a make-do diner party in their bamboo office, using up their meagre rations.  Most of these men are going to die soon and they know it.  But they put that aside, they celebrate decency and civilisation, because they know they are fighting for women like Sandy Davys.  It is one of the most subtly underplayed and beautiful scenes ever filmed.

Sandy Davys (Donna Reed) and Rusty Ryan (John Wayne)

John Ford and Loss

So many of John Ford’s movies explore the same conundrum.  The individual stands on the threshold, he has the power to create civilisation, but civilisation cannot accommodate him, has no place for him.  He wants community and family but they reject his striving restless spirit.  It was never more simply played out than at the end of the Searchers.  Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) stands framed in the doorway of the ranchhouse, holding his arm as though it is the only thing holding him together.  Having rebuilt his family as best he can, he finds there is no place in it for him. 

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I cannot watch Liberty Valance much anymore.  It is such an aching portrayal of a good man’s loss.  There is no hope, no optimism in the movie, and it is only watchable at all because it is one of the finest movies ever made.

Liberty Valance is powerful and haunting, the idea that one decision by a man can destroy his entire life.  The cowboy town of Shinbone is dominated by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) a thief and a murderer, evil incarnate.  Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is Ford’s “good bad man” a frontiersman, an individualist who respects the right of other men to live as they chose and only asks that they allow him the same freedom.  In Tom Doniphon resides the true spirit of the American individualist.

But events force Tom to make a decision.  Let Shinbone go its own way and let people suffer? Or face Liberty Valance and help Shinbone become civilised?  The decision that Tom makes destroys his life utterly.  Ford plays out the conflict between civilisation and the strong individual man and shows the outcome to be bleak. 

Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart)

I guess that is why I prefer They Were Expendable.  It shows men harnessing their spirit to an ideal, freedom from tyranny and a better outcome.

The Quiet Man

To end on an up note.  I mentioned earlier that The Quiet Man was scorned in my family when I was growing up.  I myself thought it was corny beyond belief. 

Ford’s village of Innisfree is really a kind of Brigadoon, a fantasy Ireland that is always green and pleasant and exists somewhere out of time.  But you know, as I get older, I warm to the movie.  It has in its favour the most dramatic passionate kiss ever filmed, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.

Wayne pulling in Maureen O'Hara for That Kiss - The Quiet Man

Ford builds a fantasy Ireland with every Irish myth writ large.  In Innisfree, you can drink with friends, get uproariously drunk and never have a hangover.  A sporting man can bet on the horses without restraint and share his winning with his friends.  Women are sparky sexy and eternally true to their good men.  You can brawl like a champion boxer and apart from a few bruises, everyone is good the next day.  There are no mortgages, politicians or protest marches.  

I get what John Ford was doing now.  Innisfree is not real. 

But it should be.           

God Bless you Mr Ford, wherever you are.      

Further articles that you might like:

From 1934, John Ford was a spy for the US Navy and during WW2 worked for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.  For our article on Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of the OSS, go here

We wrote about John Wayne here and here

Details

There are so many books on John Ford you could spend a life reading them.  Here is the one I recommend:

Roger McBride

Searching for John Ford, a life