Martin Edwards's Blog, page 283

Gilda Revisited

I posted a while back about Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. It was a film I watched rather casually one evening, and I liked it without thinking it was a great masterpiece. But some rank it as a 'landmark in world cinema', and on that basis, BFI Classics have published a study of the film by Melvyn Stokes, which I found very interesting.

Stokes provides a short account of the film's narrative, wisely paying little attention to the rather barmy story-line involving a 'tungsten...

Avatar

While I was on holiday, the chance arose to see James Cameron's acclaimed movie Avatar in a large shipboard cinema, and so – although I hadn't planned to watch the film any time soon- I grabbed the opportunity. And I'm very glad I did, even without 3-D glasses to admire the amazing special effects.

It's essentially an adventure story, with various classis elements. In 2154, a paralysed ex-marine, Jake Sully, replaces his recently deceased twin brother in a mission to distant Pandora, a...

Moon: review

Moon is an interesting science-fiction thriller from last year, directed by Duncan Jones – who turns out to be Zowie Bowie, son of the legendary David (who wrote that great song 'Life on Mars', of course.) The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, while the marvellous Kevin Spacey voices 'Gerty', Sam's robotic computer sidekick.

Sam works for Lunar Industries, a company apparently doing good work for the climate, and is engaged on a three-year contract to work in splendid isolation (apart from ...

Dashiell Hammett

I like this blog to range widely in the crime genre, and to cover 'forgotten' books and authors as well as the big names. One of the stars whose name I've rarely mentioned is Dashiell Hammett, but that isn't because I don't admire his work. On the contrary.

I've read, I think, all his books, and I have to say that one I definitely enjoyed was The Dain Curse, which is sometimes dismissed by critics as a bit of a mess (perhaps the reason for this is that it was originally written for 'The Black ...

The Edukators

Over the lifetime of this blog, there have been a few typos, but The Edukators is not one of them - nor is it a dig at declining educational standards. This is a German language film, which I watched with the benefit of sub-titles. It was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival and is directed by Hans Weingartner.

The set-up is intriguing: the film opens with a wealthy family returning home to find that their lovely house has been turned upside down, and a message has been left for them by the...

Forgotten Book - The Scarf

I've mentioned before the guilty pleasure I take from the twisty mysteries of Francis Durbridge, and my latest contribution to Patti Abbott's series of Forgotten Books is his 1960 book, The Scarf. I read it immediately after the new Kate Atkinson, and of course Atkinson is a much finer literary stylist than Durbridge. But he really could tell a story.

This isn't a Paul Temple thriller – the detective work is done by Detective Inspector Harry Yates of the Hertfordshire CID, a rather...

Forgotten Music - Ask Yoursefl Why

My choice this month for Scott Parker's Forgotten Music series is a film song that I fell in love with in my teens. It's written by the brilliant French composer Michel Legrand, with lyrics by the accomplished duo Marilyn and Alan Bergman (whose more famous songs include 'The Windmills of Your Mind' and 'You Don't Bring Me Flowers'.)

This song was written for a movie called La Piscine, about which unfortunately I know nothing. The vocals were done by Sally Stevens, and although Barbra...

Adrian Magson

I was very pleased the other day to receive a review copy of Adrian Magson's new novel, Death on the Marais. It's the first in a new series set in France and featuring Inspector Lucas Rocco, and it's due to be published by Allison & Busby (who also publish my Lake District Mysteries) on 6 September. I gather that a follow-up title is due to appear in 2011.

In this story, set in 1963, Rocco discovers the body of a murdered woman – in a military cemetery and wearing a Gestapo uniform. It's an...

The Longevity of Detective Fiction

An interesting feature of Rupert Penny's The Talkative Policeman, which I mentioned the other day, was his introductory note, in which he expounds on what he sees as the lack of longevity of the detective story: 'The detective shall find his grave at last as surely as the lifeless flesh he theorised upon.'

He identifies Holmes as the sole exception to this: he and Watson 'are, first and foremost, characters, and the rest is incidental. At a guess, it is not impossible that Lord Peter Wimsey...

Gaslight

Patrick Hamilton was surely one of the most interesting British writers of the first half of the last century, and it has often surprised me that, for all the critical interest in the man and his work (there are two excellent biographies, plus an interesting memoir by his brother Bruce, himself a crime novelist of some distinction), Hamilton is seldom mentioned in histories of British crime fiction. Yet he is an important figure.

One of his greatest successes was the play Gaslight, which in...