To Look for America

There seem to have been quite a few films about US politics on TV in the last month or so, mostly on specialist channels Film Four and Talking Pictures TV, but also on BBC Four (as part of an evening marking the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation as President). November's upcoming presidential election has no doubt influenced the programme schedulers in selecting some of these films too. It prompted me to make a list of my own top ten films about mainstream US politics, the left and labour movement.

Advise and Consent 

A congressional hearing to confirm a liberal President's nominee for high office is enlivened by Charles Laughton, in his final screen appearance, as a conservative Southern Democrat digging into his past.

All the King's Men

The main character, Willie Stark, is a loosely disguised portrait of Louisiana Democratic governor Huey Long, a populist demagogue whose authoritarian rule leads to his assassination (for US sports fans, there are also some college football scenes involving his son).

All the President's Men

Probably my favourite of all, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward investigating the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building and its cover-up by the White House. Jason Robards steals every scene he's in as Post editor Ben Bradlee.

The Best Man

With a screenplay by Gore Vidal, this also concerns skeletons in the past of political candidates, at the open convention of an unnamed party selecting a nominee after the incumbent President decides not to seek re-election on health grounds.

Blue Collar 

A gritty tale about racism and union corruption in a Detroit car plant which stars Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto and Richard Pryor, and also has a superb blues soundtrack.

Hoffa

Jack Nicholson as the charismatic Mafia-connected boss of the Teamsters truck drivers' union Jimmy Hoffa and Danny DeVito as his loyal lieutenant (I once drove past the American football stadium in New Jersey beneath which Hoffa's body was allegedly buried after he fell out with the Mob and was whacked by hitman, and probably my distant relation, Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran).

The Last Hurrah 

A comedy in which Spencer Tracy plays the Irish-American boss of a Democratic political machine in a Northern city whose power is based on dispensing patronage through an army of ward heelers.

Matewan

John Sayles' masterful account of a miners' strike in West Virginia, with Chris Cooper as the union organiser who overcomes ethnic divisions between the workers and those brought in by the coal company to break their strike.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 

A slightly saccharine, but still entertaining, film by director Frank Capra, with James Stewart playing a naive youth leader unexpectedly chosen to replace one of his state's senators, and ending with the famous filibuster scene in which his faith in American democracy is restored.

Reds

A personal project by Warren Beatty based on John Reed's book Ten Days That Shook the World about the Russian Revolution, and featuring interviews with pre-World War I US radicals (also the film whose late night showing on BBC Two in 1997 was interrupted by a news flash saying that Princess Diana had been injured in a car crash in Paris).

Hotel Blues

As flights to the United States began again this morning, the news reached me, via a roundup email from Jazz North West, that one of midtown Manhattan's most historic hotels, the Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue, which closed at the start of the Covid pandemic last year, is to remain shut and will eventually be demolished. The Pennsylvania, opposite Penn Station and close to Madison Square Garden, was not only a venue for live jazz in the forties, but also saw its phone number become a swing standard.

On my first trip to the United States in 2002 - a baseball tour by coach along the East Coast from Baltimore to Boston, with stops in Philadelphia, New York City and the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown in upstate New York - we stayed at another of midtown Manhattan's iconic hotels, the Edison on 47th Street, whose ballroom also hosted live music in the big band era, and drank in the bar where Luca Brasi met his end in The Godfather.

Blue(s) Wor(l)d

Impulse Records has just issued Blue World, an album of material from a rediscovered and until now unreleased John Coltrane session in 1964, for the score of an experimental Canadian film about a young couple in Montreal, Le Chat Dans Le Sac.

The session opens with the laid-back and lyrical Naima, first heard on his debut album for Atlantic Records in 1959, Giant Steps, with the rhythm section of the Miles Davis Quintet which he would leave the next year - pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb - replaced by that of his own "Classic Quartet", pianist McCoy Tuner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones.

Most of the tracks are shorter and blusier than the ballad which both the session and the film begins with, in contrast to the longer and freer compositions on his next Impulse album, the religiously inspired A Love Supreme.

With Thelonious Monk's score for the 1959 French film Les Liasions Dangereuses being rediscovered a few years ago, it makes you wonder what other jazz gems are yet to be unearthed in the archives.

Out of the Public Eye

The programmes on Talking Pictures TV, broadcast on Freeview channel 81, are fast becoming some of my favourite on television.

As well as documentaries, like John Betjeman's elegaic early sixties train trip from Kings Lynn to Hunstanton, on a now closed north Norfolk branch line, and films such as the social realist late forties film noir "The Blue Lamp", with its superbly-shot finale at the White City dog track in west London, there are lots of repeats of sixties and seventies drama series.

My current favourite is the detective series "Public Eye", made for ITV between 1965 and 1975. I hadn't heard of it before and am not sure why, unlike many other, in some cases inferior, shows from the era, it hasn't been repeated on a more mainstream channel.

Although the central character, private detective Frank Marker, might seem like a bit of a TV cliche, a loner, slightly dishevelled and with a somewhat murky past, the writing and acting really lift it (as with my favourite TV detective, Columbo, it's now impossible to imagine anyone else playing the role apart from Alfred Burke, despite neither he nor Peter Falk being first choices for the part), and span the comedy of the Christmas special "Horse and Carriage" to the pathos of "The Man Who Said Sorry", a terse, almost hour-long, two-hander, apart from the dialogue-free opening scene and the final one, where Marker chats to his sometime ally, sometime adversary, DI Firbank, at their usual public bar meeting place.

The location of the series moves around southern England, but for the latest, and final run, Frank Marker has setttled in Eton, renting a spartan shopfront office where he seems to subsist on instant coffee brewed on a single gas ring and takeaway meals from the adjacent Chinese restaurant. There are lots of late sixties and early seventies details, from keg fonts in the pubs to his fee of six guineas plus expenses (later decimalised as £6.50, a slight increase, no doubt the result of rising inflation, although given his seemingly sparse workload it appears doubtful that the operation would have really been commercially viable, especially in one of England's posher towns where he also rents a flat).

Perhaps the coolest feature of the series though is the jazzy theme tune, composed by Robert Earley.

Remembering Peterloo

I went to the Peterloo memorial event in Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon to remember the fifteen victims of the massacre in 1819 when a crowd of working-class men and women, assembled on St Peter's Field to demand the vote, then restricted to upper-class men, were cut down with sabres and trampled by horses after the city's magistrates, watching the protest from the upper windows of a house on nearby Mount Street, ordered cavalrymen of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a local part-time volunteer regiment mainly composed of wealthy merchants and mill-owners, to disperse them. Hundreds more of the protestors, many of whom had - as some people did yesterday - walked into Manchester from the surrounding industrial towns of Lancashire and Cheshire, were seriously injured after being attacked by the reservist troops charging at them on horseback and then flung against a wall of bayonet-wielding regular soldiers guarding the edge of the sixty thousand-strong demonstration.

Although a memorial event has been held for the last decade, alongside a campaign to erect a permanent one to the victims near the site of the massacre, this was the first one I'd been to. There were probably a hundred of so my fellow lefties and trade unionists there, mostly my age or older, some of them wearing the red liberty caps first donned by the French revolutionaries of 1789,along with actors from the Manchester area including John Henshaw from Ancoats and Bolton's Maxine Peake who appears in Mike Leigh's soon to be released film about Peterloo.

Mike Leigh has said that he never heard or was taught about Peterloo when growing up in the Higher Broughton area of Salford in the 1950's, despite it having happened only a few miles down the road, and similarly I was never told about it or taken to the site when I was a pupil at primary and secondary schools in Stockport in the 1970s and 80s. It was only a decade or so a go, as result of the ongoing campaign, that a new plaque was placed on the outside of the former Free Trade Hall, now a boutique hotel, which, unlike the one it replaced, acknowledged that people had actually died in the massacre.

I'm hoping that the new film about Peterloo will spark increased awareness, interest and activity around the event and that next year's memorial, on the two hundredth anniversary, will be bigger than those which have preceded it.

Relaxin' with Lee

I've been listening to trumpeter Lee Morgan quite a bit this past week after attending an evening at Manchester Jazz Society dedicated to his life and music.

 As well as the joyful excitement of his playing and technical mastery of his instrument, Morgan was a key figure in hard bop, the movement which from the mid-fifties brought a harder, more blues and gospel-based, sound to jazz, first as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and then as a solo artist. The 1959 Jazz Messengers album Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World, recorded live at Birdland in New York, on which he plays as part of Blakey's quintet, is also one of the first jazz albums I bought.

Morgan played on three seminal hard bop tracks, all of them title tracks to albums on the Blue Note label, as a sideman on John Coltrane's 1957 Blue Train and Art Blakey's 1958 Moanin' and under his own name on The Sidewinder, a 1963 soul-jazz recording which, when edited down from the ten minute-plus album version, unexpectedly became a hit single for him.

A couple of years ago, the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke (with whom I share a love of real ale, football, cricket and jazz, if not the same political beliefs) presented a Radio 4 programme about Morgan in which he told the story of his death at the age of 33, after being shot on a snowy night in 1972 at a club in Manhattan's East Village by his girlfriend and manager Helen Moore, bleeding to death before an ambulance could reach it due to the weather, but until last week I didn't know that he had given her the gun with which she killed him after she was mugged of the takings from a gig. The Swedish film director Kasper Collin also released a documentary about him last year, I Called Him Morgan, which is being screened in Manchester this week.

Music in Monk Time

It's not often that you get to buy a new album by Thelonious Monk, the jazz pioneer who pretty much invented bebop piano at Minton's Playhouse in uptown Manhattan in the early 40's, but this week I did with a double CD of the recordings he made for the soundtrack of a 1960 French film, Les Liasions Dangereuses.

Although based on the 1782 novel of the same name, the film is set amongst a bourgeois family in contemporary France. Some of the music from it, including material by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, was released as an album at the time, but Monk's contributions lay in the record company vaults until they were rediscovered in 2014.

The sound on the album is as sharp and as fresh as the day it was put onto tape in a studio on the West Side of Manahattan in the summer of 1959. Although Monk is playing music he'd played many times before, rather than newly-composed material, there's less of the angularity and atonality which you normally associate with his playing, and which first drew me to it twenty or so years ago, more swing and lyricism, a romantic feeling even, no doubt appropriate to the theme of the film (some of the  alternate and unedited takes which make up the second disc of the album are in a noticeably faster tempo than the ones which ended up being used in the film). Monk also shares frontline duties almost equally with the rest of his quintet, especially the tenor saxophonists Charlie Rouse and Barney Wilen.

The album includes a booklet with black and white and colour photos from the session featuring Monk himself in a fetching hat, his wife Nellie and patron Pannonica Rothschild, as well as extensive liner notes. My favourite are from the English, indeed Mancunian, jazz pianist and critic Brian Priestley who recalls seeing the film while living in Paris as a student in the early 60's, and even hearing a couple of Monk's musical contributions to it which were released as singles in France on jukeboxes in bars and cafes there.

This Sporting Life

The playwright, screenwriter and novelist David Storey, who has died aged 83, epitomised the early 1960's realist "New Wave" in British film: Northern, working-class and newly self-confident.

The son of a miner from Wakefield, Storey belonged to the same generation of actors and writers as Albert Finney, Shelagh Delaney, John Braine, Tom Courtenay and Alan Sillitoe, and like them often experienced something of a disconnect between the artistic world he found fame in and his roots, playing rugby league for the Leeds "A" team at weekends before returning to the Slade School of Art in London, a feeling memorably expressed by Courtenay in the entry from the diary he kept as a student at RADA for the day in 1959 when his hometown side Hull lost to Wigan in the Challlenge Cup Final: "Met Dad, went to Wembley. Played Chekhov in evening."

Amy

I watched the film Amy the other day, about the singer Amy Winehouse who died in 2011 aged 27 from heart failure as a result of alcohol and drug abuse.

Not many people come out of the film well, from her father whose desertion when she was a child seems to have triggered her later emotional problems to her husband who got her hooked on heroin and crack and the paparazzi and tabloid journalists who hounded her until her death. The only people who emerge with any credit are her first manger Nicky Shymansky and her schoolfriends who tried to help her and the singer Tony Bennett with whom she duetted not long before she died.

I can remember the first time I heard Amy Winehouse, on a pub jukebox singing Rehab. I was convinced it was a sixties soul record before the person I was with put me right.

Midnight's Children

I watched the TV premiere of the film Midnight's Children on BBC2 this weekend.

Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize winner, which I first read as a teenager, is still one of my favourite novels. Reviewing it when it was published, the Sunday Telegraph said that "India has found its Günter Grass" and Midnight's Children does have some similarities with Grass's best known work, The Tin Drum: the "magic realism"; a country divided into three with the main character, Saleem, forced to cross and recross its new borders; taste and smell as metaphors for political history.

Although the film skips over some parts of the plot (communalism in Bombay, conflicts between pro-Moscow and pro-Peking Communists, Saleem's experiences as a soldier in the 1971 war in East Pakistan/Bangladesh), it's generally faithful to the novel (unlike the film version of The Tin Drum which ends halfway through the book) and benefits from Rushdie's collaboration with director Deepa Mehta and a voice-over of him reading from his novel.

Spaten and The Sorrow and the Pity

I've just been watching The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' 1969 documentary about the occupation of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand in World War II.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who first heard about The Sorrow and the Pity through Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I watched the two-part film about Allen the BBC showed last week which prompted me to watch Annie Hall and then The Sorrow and the Pity again. It's a wonderful documentary with Ophuls making French collaborators squirm and talking to two left-wing brothers, ex-Resistance fighters who spent the last months of the war in Buchenwald concentration camp, on their farm in the Auvergne. One of my favourite bits is where they go in the cellar to draw a glass of wine from a barrel and Ophuls asks them "Is it red?" and one of them shoots back "Yes, like me".

The bit that jumped out at me this time though is where he's interviewing a German soldier who was stationed in Clermont-Ferrand during the war. He's in the pub having a beer and draws a map on a beermat with the Spaten logo on it (he also talks about "here in Bavaria"). I could be wrong but I think it might be Braüstüberl Zum Spaten, the brewery tap in Munich where I had half a litre of their fairly bland Helles the first night I was there a couple of years ago.

The Lady Vanishes

I watched the BBC's adaptation of The Lady Vanishes last night. It struck me as a bit "am dram" and – like the train – started off very slowly before speeding up at the end.

The original Hitchcock film made in 1938 is very creaky now but the 1979 remake with Cybill Shepherd as the heroine, Ellliot Gould as the Spanish civil war photographer she meets, Angela Lansbury as Miss Froy and Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael as the sterotypically English cricket fans on their way to a Test match at Old Trafford is still watchable.

For some reason, The Wheel Spins, the book on which it's based, and its author Ethel White are both pretty much forgotten now.

The sound of German music

A new film, The Sound of Heimat, examines the revival of folk music in Germany.

German folk songs (Volkslieder) reached the height of their popularity in the Romantic/nationalist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the twentieth century though their association with Nazism meant that singing them was officially discouraged in both East and West Germany after 1945. About the only place they were still sung was amongst the German diaspora in South America and southern Africa.

There's an interesting article about German folk music here.

The King's Speech and brewing

I've just watched the film The King's Speech about the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue who helped George VI with his stammer. It's a lot better than I expected.

In one scene, Logue tells the future king that his father was a brewer. According to this, Logue's grandfather Edward was a Dublin publican who emigrated to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century and became an owner of the Kent Town Brewery in Adelaide.  The brewery is now - surprise, surprise - an apartment block and its beers are produced by Australasian drinks conglomerate Lion.

Thankfully, Adelaide still has an independent family brewery producing decent beer, the famously traditional Coopers whose bottle conditioned Pale Ale you can get in supermarkets here.

BB on film

The Life of Riley, a film about the life of bluesman BB King, is being released today.

Born in 1925 in Indianola, Mississippi, King whose real name is Riley B. (BB comes from Blues Boy, his nickname as a young radio performer in Memphis in the late forties) is the last survivor of the generation of musicians including Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf who quit sharecropping in the Delta, moved to the big city and electrified the blues, ultimately revolutionising popular music in the process.

The reviews of the film, such as this one by Ed Vulliamy in last week's Observer, have all been pretty positive and I'm looking forward to seeing it. Hopefully it will be up there with No Direction Home, director Martin Scorsese's masterful overview of the life and career of Bob Dylan.

Moon River and me

The singer Andy Williams who has died aged 84 is probably best known for the song Moon River.

Like most people, I associate Moon River with the original version sung by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. Williams, though he sang it at the Academy Awards and on his TV show, never actually charted with the song.

Although Williams is categorised by that most untrendy of labels Easy Listening, a lot of his music is closer to the jazz-pop standards of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. Politically, he seems to have been all over the show: a lifelong Republican, he was friends with Bobby Kennedy and supported the anti-Vietnam War Democrat George McGovern for President in 1972 before describing Barack Obama as "following Marxist theory" and letting the right-wing radio presenter Rush Limbaugh use his song Born Free.

Going for a Burton

Melvyn Bragg presented a radio programme about Richard Burton on Saturday night based on diaries he was given access to when writing Burton's biography which are about to be published.

Burton was born Richard Jenkins in South Wales in 1925, the twelfth of thirteen children of a coal miner. and died in 1984 as a result of heavy drinking and smoking. He was one of the first working-class actors to become a film star in the 1950's, ahead of the New Wave generation that included Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. His voice is unique, a rich mix of the South Wales valleys and Shakesperian bombast, as heard here reading Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.

This is Burton on a US chat show in 1980 recalling his South Wales mining background:

Paul Simon, South Africa and cultural boycotts

The Sundance Festival in London is showing the film Under African Skies tonight to mark the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Paul Simon's album Graceland.

Graceland sparked opposition from the anti-apartheid movement when it was released because it included black South African musicians and was recorded in South Africa, thus breaking the cultural boycott against the racist regime. When Simon and some of the black South African musicians on the album played London's Albert Hall in 1987 to promote it, artists including Paul Weller and Billy Bragg were outside to picket the show.

Apparently Simon spoke to the singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte before travelling to South Africa to record the album. Belafonte shared Simon's enthusiasm that the world hear the music of black South Africa but advised him to seek clearance from the exiled leadership of the African National Congress before he went.

I don't think anyone would put Simon in the same category as acts like Elton John, Rod Stewart and Queen who played lucrative gigs at South Africa's Sun City entertainment complex in the 1980's but was he still wrong to record the album in the country?

It seems that Simon would still have fallen foul of the boycott and the ANC if he had recorded the album with black South African musicians outside South Africa. A couple of questions flow from this. Why should black South African musicians have been stopped from working with artists from other countries? And what gave the ANC the right to decide whether they could or not?

I supported the boycott against South Africa in the 1980's but never thought that it alone would bring down the apartheid regime. It was really a symbolic means of supporting the liberation movement - much wider than the ANC, and including the massive and at the time militant black South African labour movement - which would bring down a racist regime which was also seeking an end to its international movement. The boycott was also primarily aimed at - and should have been restricted to - the white only South African sports teams, orchestras etc. and places like Sun City which excluded black customers rather than those seeking to build links with black South Africans other than those approved by the ANC.

The misguided or malign attempt to equate Israel with apartheid South Africa has led recently to calls to stop the Israeli theatre group Habima performing at The Globe as part of celebrations to mark the four hundred and forty-eight annioversary of Shakespeare's birth. Those who advocate a boycott of Israel include well-meaning people who genuinely think it would help bring about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and an independent Palestinian state as well as anti-Semites who want to drive the Jews into the sea and wipe Israel off the map. But none of them I think would oppose a British musician recording with Palestinian musicians in Israel or touring with them here.

Titanic tastelessness

A hundred years ago today, seven hundred surviviors of the Titanic disaster arrived in New York on board the SS Carpathia.

I've watched quite a few documentaries about the sinking in the last few weeks, as well as the still watchable 1958 film A Night to Remember starring Kenneth More as the ship's Second Officer Charles Lightoller. BBC North West's coverage has focussed on Lancashire's connections with the Titanic: the White Star Line had its headquarters in Liverpool, Lightholler was from Chorley, Carpathia captain Arthur Rostron from Bolton and Wallace Hartley, the leader of the band that famously played until the end, from Colne.

I'm always bemused when Liverpool and Belfast - where the Titanic was built - express their civic pride in a ship that sank on its maiden voyage with the loss of 1,500 lives. I suppose it's to attract tourists. Even more tasteless are the Titanic hampers and teddy bears and the £6,000 centenary cruise across the Atlantic.

A much larger proportion of third class passengers, many of them Irish emigrants, drowned on the Titanic compared to first class.  The idea that this reflects a class-divided society that disappeared in the First World War seems especially wide of the mark now when inequality - in income, education and life expectancy - continues to increase.

Apparently, there were fifteen thousand bottles of beer on board the Titanic. I wonder what it was and what condition it's in now.

AI and language

BBC2 has dumbed down a lot in the last decade or so, shifting arts and music programmes to BBC4 and replacing them with cookery and interior design shows.  But it still manages to broadcast some thought-provoking stuff too and last night's episode of the science series Horizon was certainly that.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has still to reach the level where robots can think like humans do but we are further down that road than many people - including myself - had realised. By far the best bit was at the end when presenter Marcus Du Sautoy went to a lab where two robots are teaching each other a new language they have invented, making up words for movements, shapes and colours.  To paraphrase the 60's Chicago DJ Pervis Spann talking about people who don't like blues, if you weren't touched by the scene you've got a hole in your soul. Above all, it reminded me of one of my favourite films from childhood, Silent Running, in which hippy ecologist Bruce Dern teaches robots Huey and Dewey to garden on board a space ship containing the environmentally devastated Earth's last forest before killing his crewmates and then himself, blasting the forest on a journey into deep space.


One of the pioneers of AI, Seymour Papert, was incidentally a member of the Socialist Review Group when he lived in Britain in the 50's.