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

Reading this week:  Willpower By Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

It seemed an apt time to read this book and to write about it. After all, it is the New Year, the time of resolutions, of mustering our inner strength and self-control and aiming to improve ourselves. The problem that I have is that I lose motivation and my good intentions peter out into nothingness. For men, willpower is extremely important, because men are by nature more impulsive than women, and consequently have more distractions in a working day. So, if like me, this is your problem is that you lose the impetus to press on with self-improvements, then this is the book for you. Let me tell you why.

Who wrote it

Professor Roy Baumeister is a distinguished psychologist, who has written more than 450 scientific publications. John Tierney is a New York Times science columnist. Professor Baumeister has spent a great part of his working life in research into willpower. So this book is the culmination of a lifetime’s work in the field of willpower and self-control.

What Willpower is

Professor Baumeister came to the study of willpower via studies into self-esteem. He realised that in terms of achieving one’s goals, willpower was a more important factor than self-esteem.  But what was willpower?

John Tierney is good here, and summarises the research and evidence of years spent discovering the true nature of willpower, he tells a lucid, entertaining story and often funnystory. It makes for a great read but here in summary, is what Professor Baumeister discovered:

 Willpower is real. It is a brain function that operates within the brain’s conflict management (problem management) function.

Willpower is a real resource. We all have a reservoir of willpower, the size of which depends on several key factors. Everything we do uses our single reservoir of willpower. So finding a parking space, getting a meeting with your manager, completing a difficult task, all come from that one reservoir of willpower.

Willpower gets depleted by our efforts. The bad news is that our willpower gets depleted whether we succeed or fail. Once our willpower is gone, we enter a state where, try as we might, some tasks are beyond our capability. So we then have to replenish our willpower. The really good news is that we can strengthen our willpower.

One of the best things about Willpower is that it describes in simple and practical terms how anyone can improve their willpower. The fact that Willpower so clearly explains how to raise one’s willpower makes it a wonderfully useful book.

The most useful thing that I can do in this review is to list some of the ways in which Professor Baumeister advises us to strengthen and conserve our willpower Here are five ways to improve willpower;

Get a good night’s sleep. Our willpower is always at its highest after proper rest.

Meditate. Meditation increases willpower.

Keep a To-Do list. Worrying about things you have to do is proven to deplete willpower. A To-Do list removes that worry (even if you do not complete the tasks) and preserves your reservoir of willpower.

Make a priority and fixate on its goal. This will increase your willpower and aid your execution of the work.

Introduce small regular tasks into your life (that require willpower to complete) and keep working at them over time. This will increase your willpower.

The list above contains some of the simpler suggestions from the book, for those of you who want techniques that are even more effective, please buy the book. It is possible to build an entire willpower regime from the book’s advice.

Using the book’s techniques

I took several of the book’s suggestions and put them into effect a week ago. The effects were immediate, my productivity is now much higher than it was a week ago.  One of the things that the book suggests is to take tasks that you currently do and regularise them, put them within a planned schedule. I did this and found that the tasks became easier and my execution of them quicker.  Willpower and Professor Baumeister’s techniques work. This is a marvellous book, truly useful for any man. I recommend Willpower wholeheartedly.

Robert Mitchum: “Baby I don’t care”

A biography by Lee Server

I have always been a fan of Robert Mitchum’s movies.  He was, in movies and in real life, the coolest man in the world.     

Pauline Kael, the famous movie critic, published an anthology of her reviews, titling it “I lost it at the movies”.  She meant that she lost her virginity at the movies; they stole her innocence and gave her something priceless, experiences of places and times she could not go to in the real world. 

If the movies stole my innocence, then they gave me too something else, ambition, an understanding of how important moral principles are, a desire to have Cary Grant’s suits, Vittorio DiSica’s women, James Bond’s car.  Like so many other men, I wanted Mitchum’s cool.

When I was growing up, everyone in my family knew Mitchum was cool.  As snotty adolescents my brothers and I would watch Mitchum in movies like “Heaven knows Mr Allison”. Mitchum playing a tough marine in a romance with Deborah Kerr was way ok with us, yet any other actor playing such a weepie would have only received our scorn.   

The Man. Handsome, intelligent, cool.

Film Noir

One of my early movie loves was Film Noir, and Robert Mitchum WAS Film Noir.  His brooding, hyper-masculine presence filled those movies.  In a strange way Mitchum made the tragedy of Film Noir heroic.  He conveyed the truth, which was that though life was bad, and there was no way out, yet a man could win by showing courage, forbearance and dignity.  In films like “Build my gallows high” and “Out of the Past”, he gave us complex doomed men who had nothing left but courage.  He acted their lives with a frankness and finesse that no other actor could match.

The Yakuza, Mitchum and Takakura Ken

Later in life, I found a new appreciation of Robert Mitchum, when he starred in one of my all-time favourite movies “The Yakuza”.   In it Mitchum fights the Yakuza alongside a loner sword-master played by Japanese mega-star Takakura Ken.  It was the perfect matchup, the doomed hard man and the doomed samurai.  

Mitchum as Kilmer in "The Yakuza"

Lee Server’s biography, Robert Mitchum: Baby I don’t care” is considered to the definitive work on this great actor.  I have owned it for a little while, cracked it open a couple of days ago, and was hooked. 

Lee Server; "Baby I dont care"

Robert Mitchum; Early Life

Server is good on Mitchum’s early life, growing up desperately poor in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of a half-Blackfoot railway man, who was killed in a horrific accident before Mitchum was two.  His growing-up in a loving yet eccentric household dominated by his intelligent and spirited mother.  He is particularly good on Mitchum’s strange childhood, the idiosyncratic but loving family and their life on the edge of poverty.

Baby I don’t care” is marvellously well-researched and there were still many of Mitchum’s childhood chums alive when that research was carried out.  The young Robert Mitchum was simultaneously the cleverest boy in school and the biggest troublemaker, with a delinquency that verged on the irrational.  From this background emerged a man who did not give a damn what anyone else felt. 

At fourteen, Mitchum left home, became a hobo, an itinerant labourer, was thrown into jail for vagrancy, put on a chain gang, ran off and became a fugitive.  Not your normal adolescence.

Server makes it plain that Mitchum was cool, a rebel against convention, at a time when it was dangerous to be so.  One of the enduring themes of this book is the endless entreaties, warnings and threats to Mitchum to conform, fit in, retract his opinion.  As a young man in the thirties he made many enemies with his frank, outspoken ways, but as the book says, he did not care.

Mitchum and Hollywood

Once Mitchum gets to Hollywood, the story changes.  Lee Server shows how Hollywood discovered Mitchum’s incredible talent.  How with a minimum of action and emotion he could bring complex exciting characters to life.  In the movies his self-possession became a raw unconquerable maleness that audiences loved.  Directors wanted him and women found him sexy.  His female co-stars found him irresistible and he set out on a long career of bedding the most glamorous female stars in the movies.     

But as a star Mitchum was the same man he had always been, he refused to play the Hollywood game.  He had no movie star friends, preferring to hang out with men he called “working stiffs”, in bars and illegal jazz clubs.  His love of marijuana got him into trouble, when he was setup for a drugs bust in 1948.  At that time drugs were considered satanic and the province of negroes.  Convicted and sent to prison, Mitchum still bounced back.

Lee Server is to be congratulated for the depth of his insight into Robert Mitchum.  He shows us the secret man, who wrote poetry, was marvellously well-read and had a phenomenal intellect that allowed him to talk to anyone from world leaders to scientists. 

Robert Mitchum was also one of the funniest men who ever lived.  I am lucky enough to have seen Mitchum’s TV interview with Barry Norman, the British movie critic.  The interview reaches a point where Norman is gushing about Mitchum’s acting and Mitchum clearly has had enough.  He looks Norman in the eye and says “I have two types of acting, with a horse or without”.

A superb performance in "The Friends of Eddie Coyle"

Alpha Male

Mitchum made light of everything, apparently nothing could dent his cool, Alpha male to the hilt.  However there were crises in his life and Lee Server uses them to illuminate the inner man with insight and compassion.  But Server is no blind fan, he is capable of showing Mitchum’s dark side without justification or apology.

This is a big book, it is a complex story and there is a lot to tell.  Lee Server is good for it.  He has a clear lucid story-teller’s style, and is always aware that he is writing for an audience.  However, he doesn’t stint on the facts and keeps the key themes of Robert Mitchum’s life in view right up to the last page. 

The older Mitchum, looking great.

For me this book is a model of how a movie biography should be written.  I am so pleased to have read “Baby I don’t care”.  I never really understood or truly appreciated Mitchum till now.

Douglas Waller’s biography is controlled, lucid and makes gripping reading.  He writes precisely and dispassionately about Donovan and the OSS.  In doing so he gives us a clear picture of a man and events previously shrouded in secrecy and half-truths, and of the achievements of a man whose reputation has been distorted by political enmity.

Early life

Waller skips over Bill Donovan’s early life and has it out of the way by page fifty (of 450 pages).  This is because he judges the important piece of Donovan’s life to be the years of the Second World War and his creation of the OSS.  So we get a sketch of Donovan’s early life.  Poor New York Irish, a bad scholar, tough, a born fighter.  As an adolescent he was for a while an unlikely candidate for the priesthood.  He was a handsome man, with an iron will to succeed and a prodigious appetite for work.  With these skills he quickly became a rising successful attorney and a society man-about town in New York.  Marrying well, he set about making a career and money.

World War 1

Then came World War 1.  Donovan volunteered and became a talented and bold officer.  A born leader of men, he was able to forge a fighting battalion that served honourably in the carnage.  Donovan was brave, cool and battle-smart.  He was wounded in action and at the end of the war he was the highest-decorated American officer to leave the war alive.  He returned to America a hero and a widely-known public figure. That set the stage for what was to follow.      

World War 2 looms

Douglas Waller is particularly good on America’s lack of preparedness at the outset of World War 2.  There was a sharp contrast between the US establishment and Bill Donovan, who had retained his political and military connections, and essential set himself up as an unofficial spymaster.  Hard to imagine, but the US had no spy service of note and was basically dependent on the British for handoffs of information.  The British come out of this quite well, at this time their spies are cunning, clever and well-led.       

At this point the book becomes a great read.  Donovan sets up the OSS in the teeth of powerful opposition, both from politicians and the military.  However what really sparkles is the re-telling of Donovan’s audacity and ingenuity.  From employing burglars to crack the safes of axis powers (remember that America was officially neutral at the start of the war) to setting up a propaganda and misinformation team that misled the Germans.  A cavalcade of brave, strange and downright crazy men pass through the doors of the OSS, recruited by Donovan to become spies and saboteurs.       

Patriot and hero

The war allows Waller to open out Donovan’s psychology, his ingenuity, willingness to take big risks, tireless energy and bottomless charisma.  He was clearly a man of incredible courage, willing to put himself on the frontline to sniff out the vital truth on behalf of his country.  Waller is even-handed and shows Donovan’s flaws, his lack of management skills, which became a real as the OSS grew in size.  Also Donovan’s “my way or the highway” decision making alienated many in the American war effort.  Donovan was also an incorrigible ladies man, with many affairs to his credit.  Waller is discreet here, he occasionally names names but really only hints at Donovan’s turbulent lovelife.

OSS in action

The OSS were hugely valuable to the American campaigns in North Africa and Europe.  Their information helped American generals make decisive battle choices; their saboteur campaigns with guerrilla forces hampered the Germans, saving allied lives.  Waller covers their missions comprehensively and it is possible to see exactly how the OSS won their victories.

This book is a tribute to the American spirit, of irreverence for authority and a love for enterprise and courage.  When Donovan setup the OSS, he was not a serving soldier, yet he was able to setup a successful spy service.  He was a maverick, yet Roosevelt backed Donovan and his smart, contrarian instincts.  The book shows how these were less regulated times, with greater freedom for men to make their mark  

But most of all there is Donovan, a giant of a man.  Astonishingly Donovan was 58 when he setup the OSS.  What a fighter!

This is a great biography, well researched, wise and well-written.  It is plain that it will become the standard work on Wild Bill Donovan.  This is a spy story that is better than fiction.  Recommended.

A friend of mine is keen on Mediterranean Noir and recommended I read some and duly lent me some.  This is a new genre of crime fiction that uses the duality of Mediterranean life to fuel its stories.  Most of the writers collected in this loose grouping are Italians.  Their novels are intriguing.  On the one hand there is the admirable quality of Italian life, the food, good living, proud history and close familial relationships.  On the other, there is crime, widespread corruption and political violence.  There is an obvious similarity between these stories and the American hard-boiled detective writers. 

I have read two novels by Massimo Carlotto this week, a crash introduction to Italian Noir thrillers.  Carlotto’s territory is the Italian north-east and the Italian economic miracle that took place in the Nineties.  Lots of money made very quickly makes for fertile ground for crime.

Poisonville

I first read Poisonville.  A young lawyer, Francesco Visentin, son of a prominent family in their small town, finds his wife-to-be murdered in her home, just days before their wedding.  His father, himself a lawyer, owns and runs the most important and prestigious law firm in the region.  He steps in to help his son, who is the first suspect in the killing. 

The killing overturns many stones and some truly vile people come scuttling out.  Determined to solve the murder, Francesco is initially bewildered by the scandals and crooks that boil out of the crime.  Combine this with a compliant and corrupt police chief and a seemingly random crime spree by unknown parties, and Francesco begins to doubt his ability to succeed.  However, a figure from the town’s past appears unexpectedly and shines a new and sinister light on events.

Carlotto is a seductive writer.  The story has a kinetic energy and is well paced, sometime slow, sometimes fast but always keeping the story in the foreground and making it easy for the reader to keep up.  He is skilled at moving from character to character and moving the story forward.  If this was a movie, all the scenes would dovetail smoothly and play out without the audience even noticing the transitions. 

As in the American hard-boiled school, most of the people in this story are bad’uns.  Carlotto is unsparing in his examination, his characters range from the simply inadequate to the truly evil.  Over it all hangs an oppressive air of social malaise, as the forces of modernism distort the traditional Italian way of life.  As the action heats up, the town’s secrets emerge and the whole thing goes downhill to a nasty denouement. 

The Goodbye Kiss

I next read The Goodbye Kiss.  If Poisonville was cynical and nihilistic, this is even worse, with the cynicism suercharged by disgust and anger.  Carlotto’s Girogio Pellegrini is a monster, a socialist terrorist who exchanges political frenzy for greed.  The Goodbye Kiss is a psychopath’s journey through a damaged, crime-ridden country.  He is aided immeasurably by the political corruption which is rife in Italy.

Pelligrini is an evil but fascinating protagonist.  He has two things going for him.  He is brutally honest with himself and always willing to murder in his own interest.  There is a third thing, which is that he does not consider himself to be anything but normal.  In that respect The Goodbye Kiss is bears some similarities to Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled classic, “The Killer inside me”.

I liked The Goodbye Kiss even more than Poisonville.  Partly because Carlotto leads Pellegine into heavy crime, armed robbery and assassinations.  But also because the secondary characters are stronger, in every sense.  Pellegini is paranoid, but there is also a thick smog of malice and violence that overhangs the action.  More action, with more at stake.

These are stories of men without morals, corruption without restraint.  I found them to be an enthralling and sometimes thought-provoking read.  I recommend them to you.   

Details

Both Poisonville and The Goodbye Kiss are published by Europa Editions.  Their website is here

Poisonville

The Goodbye Kiss

Hemingway and Honour

One of the big reasons that Hemingway is still relevant today is his belief in honour.  Having seen the brutality of war, Hemingway rejected glory and honour, said that they were scant reward for the horrors of battle, the dead and the maimed.  However he knew the attraction of both honour and glory and his protagonists feel the old pull, the compulsion to believe in something greater than themselves. 

Hemingway knew that men have to have honour, to believe they stood in good regard.  Hemingway’s men have personal honour.  Their honour lies in being true to themselves, to their own concept of what is right.  And this is very much how we are today. Our bonds to our country are weak and we know so much, maybe too much, of how our countries are governed.  Men today are a lot like Hemingway’s heroes, obliged to fall back on their own concept of honour.  Like Hemingway’s heroes, we find this difficult and in his stories and his men we find a kindred spirit.  We see the tug-of-war of personal and group values in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose protagonist, Richard Jordan, is prepared to die for the truth (as he sees it) but not for glory. 

Style and men

Almost as soon as Hemingway became famous for his writing, he became famous for his lifestyle.  He personified a type of man that many man found attractive, the virile talented  sportsman who was at home all over the world.  Combine this with his democratic American charm and you had a man who was equally happy to talk to commoners and kings.  It was a potent mixture and the press loved him, he became the first jet-set celebrity, long before the term was coined. 

Ernest hemingway with his fourth wife, Mary.

Hemingway had great style.  His outdoor lifestyle led him to casual clothes that naturally suited him.  He was a connoisseur of food and wine.  He understood and loved guns, especially hunting weapons.  He had an eye for quality and gives his characters beautiful things to illustrate this knowledge, like Colonel Cantwell’s Solingen clasp knife in Across the River and into the Trees.  Here again Hemingway shares something with modern men.  Men of style look for quality, look to know and have the best.  Hemingway presented a big, rugged style and it still works today.  The rugged man of the world is still a look, a style, that can be worn and lived.

Ernest Hemingway’s world was vast and he wrote bravely of men, their courage and their inevitable death.  However he loved and celebrated men, for all the good and bad within them.  For me he has always been an inspiration. 

The last words here are not mine, but those of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife and a critically acclaimed writer in her own right.  She said;

“He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language.”     

He gave us a way of being men that is still good today.  His concept of personal honour, of being responsible for our own lives regardless of the lies that we are told, is the most important contributiuon that American art has made to the world.  Truly, God Bless you Mr Hemingway, for everything that you gave to the world and for the pains you endured in sharing that precious knowledge with us.

Details

Below are some of my favourite Hemingway books and movies. 

Books 

A Moveable Feast

A memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris, as a struggling writer in the Nineteen-Twenties.  Beautifully observed and the love and happiness of Hemingway and his first wife Hadley are palpably.  Funny, joyful and just plain beautiful.

  Available in the UK here

  Available in the United States here  

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway’s story of the Spanish Civil War.  Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the republican guerillas, falls in love with a Spanish woman while on a deadly mission.  Modern warfare and it toll on brave men is the theme, with meditations on love and duty.   

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here      

The Old Man and the Sea

The story of an aging Cuban fisherman and his struggle to capture and land a gigantic Marlin.  Hemingway’s most profound meditation on the courage and steadfastness of men.

 Available in the Uk here   

 Available in the United States here       

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Short Stories of love, war and the intensity of living courageously.  From a white hunter lying wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro to simple stories of Americans and their lives.  Stories both sharp and poignant, this collection is the single best introduction to Hemingway.

 Available in the UK here   

Available in the United States here       

A Farewell to Arms

Henry Frank is an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War 1. In the pain and madness of war he falls in love with a British nurse.  A passionate story of love, honour and manliness.

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here       

Movies

Ernest Hemingway’s work is difficult to adapt to the screen.  We lose his language and his simple dialogue needs to be carefully handled if it is not to be lost to images and movement.  Here are five movies that did it well.

Islands in the Stream

This should not have worked as well as it does, being based on Islands in the Stream, one of Hemingway’s least well-regarded books.  However the combination of Hemingway and Geroge C Scott, directed by the superb Franklin Schaffner is magical and moving.  George C Scott absolutely nails it as the Hemingway/Artist character and all the other performances are equally good.  Franklin Schaffner had a deep understanding of powerful men and he gets every once of emotion and drama from the story.

 Available in the UK here

 Available in the United States here

The Garden of Eden (Orig. title, Hemingway’s Garden of Eden)

Along with “Islands in the Steam” this is one of the finest Hemingway movies.  John Irvin (director) catches all of the tension of two newly-wed lovers adrift in Europe.  As they lose their identities and their gender  in each other, their lives are further rocked by the introuction of a sultry and sexy “countess” Marita, who becomes the catalyst for sexual games that spin out of control.  This is a superbly perceptive interpretation of Hemingway’s novel, erotic, tense and forbidding.  I urge Hemingway fans to see it.  

Available in the United States here

The Old Man and the Sea

Directed by John Sturges and Fred Zinneman, with Hemingway employed as a consultant, this is a faithful adaptation of the book.  Spencer Tracy is perfect as Santiago, the aging fisherman, and the movie is a true celebration of the human spirit.

 Available in the United States here   

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Gregory Peck, a writer and hunter, lies wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro.  In flashback he re-traces his life, from his one true love in Paris thru his adventures as a writer.  Crafted from several other stories besides the Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Gregory Peck bringing a sympathetic cast to the character of the world-weary writer.  One of the best Hemingway adaptations and a real adventure movie.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here  

The Killers

Directed by the great thriller director Don Siegel, with Lee Marvin in the lead, the Killers is violent, fatalistic and cynical.  Hemingway’s dialogue was never handled better than in this movie. 

 Available in the UK here   

For Whom the Bell Tolls

This story of a squad of guerilla fighters in the Spanish Civil War had superb leads in Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.  Gary Cooper had the real life gravitas of a Hemingway hero and really filled the part, as did Bergman.  A surprisingly fast-paced movie for its time, true to Hemingway’s story, mood and spirit.  It is also a classic Hollywood movie, with an epic sweep and exciting action.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here

There are also many websites which offer further information about Ernest Hemingway.  Here are some I like:

http://www.lostgeneration.com/

http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/

http://www.timelesshemingway.com/

On the occasion of his birthday, here is a revised version of an article I published a couple of years ago. This is the first part and the second part is here. 

Ernest Hemingway, a tribute on his birthday 

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers.  He changed the shape of American literature for all time.  In his novels and stories he defined the heroic modern man, a definition that in large part, holds sway to this day.  His influence on American literature and men in general, has been immense.      

There are many better qualified than me to write about Ernest Hemingway.  But Ernest Hemingway helped shape my life and has been an important part of my journey as an adult man.  I cannot let this day pass without a celebration of a writer who wrote so elegantly and expressively about the lives of men. 

A brief biographical note

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21^st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.  He died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2^nd 1961. 

As a young man, Hemingway was interested in outdoor pursuits, sports, hunting and fishing.  However he was also a gifted writer from very early on in life.  From the age of 15 he was writing seriously, learning his craft.   In 1918 he joined the Toronto Star as a journalist, staying six months.  He left to volunteer to fight in World War 1 and was rejected because of his poor eyesight.  Determined to make a contribution he joined the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver on the Italian front.  At the very end of the war he was wounded by an Austrian mortar-shell and invalided out to hospital.  This willingness to cast himself into the unknown and risk everything stayed with him all his life.  His courage, sometimes recklessness, was an indelible part of who he was and his writing. 

He returned to America after the war, then moved to Paris with his first wife and child.  Here in the mid-nineteen twenties, his first successful books were published.  Hemingway took the big subjects, love, war, the knowledge of death and wrote about them through the eyes of a man who was both sensitive and brave.  His books were beautifully written, exciting and meaningful. He became hugely famous and was the first non show business celebrity.  By the end of his life the legend was very mixed up with the man.  However whatever you thought or thought you knew about him, there were always the books, and they stand for themselves.       

My introduction to Hemingway

I was sixteen when I picked up a battered paperback copy of The First 49 Stories, the classic collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction.  Literature was alien to me and the books I liked, crime and science fiction were definitively not literature. They had told me told me this definitvely, school.  As far as I could tell, literature meant Victorian novels of manners or novels about middle-class English couples, one or both of whom was having an affair.  This was thin stuff for an adolescent who thought Clint Eastwood was God, and I stayed away from it.

I remember how exciting Hemingway’s stories were (and still are).  I was overjoyed to find a writer who talked about things that were part of my world, like boxing and fishing.  That he could make a story around them seemed incredible.  He talked about things that happen with men, how they could become violent when they had been drinking.  Things I knew about.  Ernest Hemingway taught me to value fiction, his work led me to writers as diverse as Herman Melville, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck.  As a result of reading Hemingway I began a life-long love affair with American writers.   

As I grew older, I continued to read Hemingway.  His work spoke to me as a man, about how men fall in love with women, about how there will be times in life when you lose and how you talk to yourself about that.  I read A Movable Feast, his memoir of living in Paris in the nineteen-twenties, and was beuiled by his Paris.  I first went to Paris two years after that, I walked the streets he walked and his writing became even more real for me.  

His Writing

We read him because he writes elegantly and beautifully.  His writing is terse, observant, visual and perceptive.  From his earliest work he always tried to write simply yet capture the essence of his subject.  To achieve this, he wrote and rewrote, always seeking to strip away the non-essential words, to build a sentence that would be true.   In A Moveable Feast, he talks about doing this.  Here he talks to himself about writing;

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.  All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”   

                                                                           A Moveable Feast

He would make revision after revision, believing that he could capture feelings and ideas in simple, beautiful language.  Stripped down short sentences, his writing has a virile, staccato drum-like rhythm to it.    

This care over language, his courageous insight into men’s lives and his willingness to speak of courage, honour and love, give us bare understated writing of great beauty and wisdom.    

The popular view of Hemingway is that he was as much showman as writer.  Yet he was a wonderful observer of others and a keen listener.  In 1950, when he was a famous and accomplished writer, he wrote Across the River and into the Trees.  Here is the opening paragraph of the novel;

“They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead.  In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys.  Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.”      

                                         Across the River and into the Trees

I believe that the visual beauty and simple accessibility of Hemingway’s writing is one of the key reasons he is still read so widely today.   

The big questions

We read him because of his ability to address the big subjects in men’s lives, love and war.  He wrote his greatest works when the old certainties of the nation state were slipping away, and individuality took on a new emphasis.  In A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell tolls, he wrote about war and its fascination for brave men.  Hemingway had found a truth about men and courage, that brave men measure themselves against Death.  That they see every risk, every battle, as preliminary contests for the final one, the one they cannot win. 

In the Snows of Kilimanjaro he writes about love and the tragedy of men, how they are unable to see happiness when they have it.  How there always has to be something better, and how they break what they have for what-might-be.   In the Sun Also Rises he shows us why men chase unattainable women, and even why they are unobtainable.   

His heroes are surprising vulnerable.  They often lose their battles and Hemingway writes in the knowledge that the world often wins.  However Hemingway’s men have an inner integrity which is rarely defeated.  What Hemingway’s novels were telling us was that if a man is not defeated on the inside, then he has not lost.  If he knows that he can hold his head up and try again then he is still a man.  Hemingway wrote “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places”  I believe there is considerable truth in his view of the world.

Truth and love.

We read him and love him because he is true. 

I once took a class in creative writing where the teacher, a famous feminist author, told me that “Hemingway was full of swank”.

The truth is he was not.  All the things he wrote about he did.  The fishing, the boxing, even the brawling in bars.  He wrote about danger and courage so well because he had forged his own feelings in the heat of battle in several wars.  Apart from the First World War, he also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2, as a war correspondent.  He was always on the front line, trying to get a better story, often in danger. 

Men know the truth when they read it, and it is what they do with that knowledge that counts.  Hemingway’s men were tough but sensitive.  He writes “A tough man is a man who makes his play and backs it up”.  That commitment, keeping going when you are afraid, is the hardest part.  Hemingway’s men are brave but afraid, they act despite their fear. He wrote about the little rituals that men have when they are about to do something difficult, or dangerous.  About how men talk to themselves when they are in extreme situations. 

The greatest that men can hope for is to have grace under pressure, to act with courage and clarity in the gravest danger.  I identify with Hemingway’s men because they are fallible and uncertain, yet always strive for the courage to do the right thing.  He writes about this in ways that most men can understand.  In the 20′s and 30′s writing about fear and courage so simply and cleanly was new to literature and men revered him for it.  That writing reaches across the decades still, and helped save the life of a very lost young man back in the early seventies.  My gratitude for what I learnt from his writing is boundless.

T

he article continues here

I came late to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s stories, only a couple of years ago, courtesy of my friend Jim, a London taxi driver, who knows more about good 20th century writing than most professors of literature. So though I am a fan of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writing I am not the man to write another obituary of him. However this is a web-magazine about men and I want to acknowledge the passing of Mr Leigh Fermor’s, a real man in every sense.

Here is a link to a short obituary by a man who knew him. It seems to me to have just the right amount of irreverence.   “Better a hero than a celebrity” is here

Here are some of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s books, he was a wonderful writer.

Words of Mercury

My favourite of all of his books, evocative, funny, perceptive tales of people and place.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Roumeli

I like Roumeli, because it chimes with my own experiences of Northern Greece.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

A Time of Gifts

Possibly his most famous book, travellers tales raised to a new level.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Between the Woods and the Water

Here is the companion to Time of Gifts, the tale of his 1930′s walk through the Balkans.  Even better than “Gifts”

Get it in the UK here and the US here

In Tearing Haste

The letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor.  Devonshire, irreverent, sparky, deliberately unintellectual.  Leigh Fermor, cosmopolitan, learned, experienced.  A wonderful contrast of opposites that come alive in these letters and bring out the best of both of them.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

S Magazine Issue 12

The new edition of S Magazine, No 12, is out.  For those men who are new to S Magazine, it is a magazine of photography, primarily nude studies.  S Magazine has built up a strong pedigree over the last couple of years.  Superb shoots by Europe’s leading photographers feature some of the world’s top models.  Famous models who have appeared sans apparel include Caroline Winberg, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Iselin Steiro and Anouk Lepore.  

S Magazine is very high quality, printed on heavy photographic paper, in order to present their pictorials to their best effect. This issue is no exception to the usual high standard.  I am a fan, review every issue.

For me there are two standout studies here.  The first is a set of photographs “Matins” shot in London by Sandra Freij.  The pictures are flagrantly provocative and feature a very fit and slightly exotic model, Beth Buxton.  Here is a sample from the shoot:

Beth Buxton - S MAgazine No.12

The second is a dark and richly sexy pictorial featuring a new young Dutch model, Maja Krag.  This has Maja in chiffon and underwear and she is both ridiculously beautiful and meltingly sexual.

Here is a sample from the pictorial:

The exotic and erotic Maja Krag

So, another beautiful Dutch model..  They send them out in armies, there is also Doutzen Kroes, the radioactively hot Rianne Ten Haken, Dioni Tabbers and of course Lara Stone.  They must be putting something in the water…

To add icing to the cake, Maja Krag has the same sexy slight gap in her front teeth as the slinky blonde Lara Stone.  So to see these pictures at their finest, pick up S Magazine No. 12.

Here is a truly beautiful thing. 

Rubinacci have published a book celebrating their many years in bespoke menswear tailoring.  Like everything they do, it is a work of art in itself.

The book is titled “Rubinacci and the story of Neapolitan tailoring”.  It was privately published by Rubinacci in a limited edition of 200 copies and, as far as I know, it is only available from their shop in Mount Street, London.  It costs £95.00.  I was passing the shop, saw it and had to have it. 

The book is in English and is written by Nick Foulkes, who is himself a man of style.  Mr Foulkes writes on menswear and luxury style, about which he knows a great deal.  He writes for the Financial Times, Finch’s luxury quarterly and other high-end magazines.  I like his writing style, he is slightly self-deprecating in that dryly humourous English way.  He is a lucid, charming writer and is very good at communicating the esoterics of style effortlessly.   Mr Foulkes is of course a Rubinacci devotee.

As I mentioned the book is a work of art, being A3 in size, beautifully produced and profusely illustrated with some very rare photographs, mostly from the Rubinacci family album.

Here is the very handsome Vittorio De Sica, actor and director, wearing a Rubinacci summer suit.

Vittorio De Sica in Rubinacci

The book is part history, part photo album.  Nick Foulkes is very good on what constitutes Neapolitan tailoring and now, for the first time, I think I understand what Neapolitan tailoring actually is.

The backbone of the book is the story of Rubinacci’s evolution from being a pioneer of Neapolitan tailoring to the exemplar of bespoke perfection.  There is also a marvellous section which uses Rubinacci  clothes (from the Rubinacci museum) to illustrate the Neapolitan style.

Here is a picture of a Rubinacci jacket showing the “Barchetta” the signature curved breast pocket which is one of the identifying style motifs of a Neapolitan jacket. 

Curved Breast Pocket "Barchetta"

Finally the book has some very warm photographs of the Rubinacci family.  Because when all is said and done, Rubinacci are a family business who are keeping alive a beautiful and inspiring craft.  More power to them.  

Whatever I get for my birthday it won’t be as good as this book.

Details:

Rubinacci

96 Mount Street
London W1K 2TB
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7499 2299