Andrew Cartmel's Blog, page 14

Fahrenheit 451 — The Folio Society Edition

The Folio Society is a sort of very classy British book club. They make high quality hardcover reprints of famous titles. These are often very beautiful, printed on fine paper with elegant binding and specially commissioned illustrations. 

Being a sucker for such things, I've frequently sought out their books, occasionally the great classics of literature — but more often, me being me, their crime stories and science fiction. Indeed, a little while ago I wrote a post about the Folio edition of Frank Herbert's Dune.  

In fact it was Dune which prompted me to seek out the earlier Folio edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, an unforgettable fable about a dystopian future where firemen no longer put out conflagrations but rather burn books in service of the totalitarian rulers.

Like Dune, the Folio Fahrenheit 451 features illustrations by Sam Weber. Weber's work is lovely, and I bought this book for his illustrations, but as with Dune the real treat turned out to be the extra introductions thoughtfully included by the folks at Folio.

The best of these is a brilliant essay by Michael Moorcock, a great science fiction writer in his own right. 

Moorcock's introduction is rewarding and delightful. Thought provoking, discursive and detailed, he doesn’t seem to have got the memo that such pieces are usually superficial, facile and fact free. 

He makes the keen observation that the California desert inspired the Martian landscapes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury. Among his other fascinating reflections is that “Burroughs, Brackett and Bradbury were Californians just like the noir trio of Hammett, Chandler and Caine” and a discussion of “‘Market forces’ as the base for a dystopia’.

Moorcock also writes with bracing vividness as when he talks about the Red witch hunt and the “McCarthy twister” (i.e. tornado) which swept up so many innocent people. 

Ray Bradbury’s own informative introduction is another valuable addition: he recalls writing the book, using rented typewriters in the basement of a library — ten cents per half hour. "I brought a bag of dimes with me and moved in." And there's an enlightening discussion of the story's villain and his motivation (books failed him). 

Both Moorcock and Bradbury are perhaps rightly dismissive of the 1967 Truffaut movie of Fahrenheit 451, but it should be noted that it has a great Bernard Herrmann score.

(Image credits: The cover is from John Guy Collick. The interior illustrations are from Sam Weber's site.)

White Bicycles by Joe Boyd

I'm currently busy writing my fourth Vinyl Detective novel. It's called Flip Back and the central mystery in the book is rooted in the British psychedelic folk scene of the 1960s and 70s. 

During my research for the story I consulted a friend, Gordon Larkin, who is something of a connoisseur of this period and musical genre. And he recommended that I read something called White Bicycles by someone called Joe Boyd. What the hell, I thought, I'll give it a go...

I'm so glad I did.

If you are interested in the popular music of the second half of the 20th century — virtually any form of popular music — then I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's beautifully written, gloriously informative, and very funny.

And I do mean virtually any form of popular music. Joe Boyd had a deep involvement, as manager, promoter, producer and avid fan in the fields of blues, folk, jazz and rock. He loves the music, and the people involved, and he writes about them beautifully. 

Here is his description of encountering Joan Baez in Harvard, "I saw her riding a Vespa with her boyfriend through the slush of the Cambridge winter, grinning wickedly with that beautiful dark mane trailing behind."
 
And her subsequent influence: "The scene that flourished in the ripples of her success was full of eccentrics, visionaries and travellers."

White Bicycles is told with a unique combination of wit and expert knowledge, as in this discussion of studio recording techniques: "You were, in a sense, creating the ideal physical location for each instrument or voice: the violin in the Sistine Chapel, the singer in your mum's shower stall and the bass drum in Alfred Jarry's cork-lined bedroom."

And Joe Boyd does indeed know about how to record music. He served an apprenticeship working at Lester Koenig's legendary jazz label, Contemporary Records in Los Angeles, and he fondly recalls "Our great engineers Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann." He is also properly sceptical of modern digital techniques.

Boyd is effortlessly witty... "The music business and the criminal fraternities — often quite different people."... and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. 

He recounts how the executives for the German record label Polydor "were not known for diplomacy: the man sent to open their American office startled the crowd at the New York press launch by telling them he had wanted to live in the city ever since he'd seen its skyline from Long Island Sound through the periscope of his U-boat in 1943."

This gift for humour and fascinating observation is constantly intertwined. Waking up to an earthquake in Los Angeles Joe thinks nuclear war has commenced: "I was dead, but at least I had plenty of company... In all my years in recording studios, I had never heard a sound so low. The vibrating object had to be unimaginably huge to make such a noise.”

As with Frederic Raphael's memoirs, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, it seems pretty certain that Joe Boyd kept some kind of diary. His book is full of telling details which brilliantly evoke the past and bring it to life.

And he is keenly aware of loss.

In 1964 he was the manager of a European tour for American blues and gospel giants such as Muddy Waters, Reverend Gary Davies and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. When it was over, "At Orly airport tears were shed, addresses and telephone numbers exchanged... An era in American culture was passing and I had only the barest idea how lucky I was to have witnessed the flash of the sunset."

He was at the pivotal Newport Folk Festival where Bob Dylan decisively went electric and the nature of popular music was changed forever. Like me, Joe Boyd vastly prefers Dylan's new sound to that of the acoustic folkie old guard...

But he has no illusions that this change was entirely benign: "Anyone wishing to portray the sixties as a journey from idealism to hedonism could place the hinge at around 9:30 on the night of 25 July 1965."

Indeed the title of the book reflects this duality. In just that spirit of sixties idealism, the City of Amsterdam provided white bicycles free, to be shared for the use of everyone. But all too soon they were being stolen, repainted and kept.

This is a great book. My only gripe is that half the time I went to type Joe's surname in this post I ended up typing "Body" instead. But that's hardly the author's fault. 

Buy his book and read it. I think you'll love it. I did.

(As a sweetener, I'm planning to run a competition when my new Vinyl Detective novel, Flip Back, is published. Three lucky readers who can spot where my book has been influenced by my research using Joe's will win a rather nice prize.)

(Image credits: The witty Spanish cover is from Good Reads. The strikingly designed graphic cover for the Dutch edition is from the publisher EPO. The French edition is from Fnac. The wacky Russian cover is from Joe's own excellent website. The German paperback is from ABE. The German hardcover is from German Amazon. The British second edition is from Near Street. The British first edition is from Amazon UK.)

Behind the Door by Morris, Reed and Willat

Well, here's a bit of a departure. A silent film... And if you think silent films were naive, or tame, just listen to this brief synopsis. 

The place is America. The time is the First World War. Oscar Krug (Hobart Bosworth) is a retired mariner turned taxidermist. When America enters the war, he signs up as a captain in the navy.

His young bride Alice Morse (Jane Novak) stows away on his ship. They are torpedoed and  Oscar and Alice end up adrift in a lifeboat. They think they are rescued when a submarine surfaces.

But it's a German U-boat, commanded by the evil Lieutenant Brandt (Wallace Beery). 

The Germans kidnap Alice and leave Oscar adrift to die. 

Alice is horrifically abused, killed and her body fired out the torpedo tube of the submarine.

But Oscar doesn't die. He ends up as the captain of another ship. One which sinks Brandt's U-boat. Brandt has no idea who Oscar is, and accepts his hospitality in the captain's cabin as Oscar gets him drunk and prepares for his vengeance.

Which is where Oscar's taxidermy skills come in...

Behind the Door is renowned as the most horrifying movie of the silent era, and it still packs a tremendous punch. Both the assault on Jane and Oscar's excoriating revenge on Brandt take place behind closed doors. But the film is all the more powerful for leaving the details to our imagination.

The movie is based on a story by Gouverneur Morris (the credit's read "the Gouverneur Morris Superdrama") which was originally published in McClure's Magazine. 

Morris was paid $10,000 for the screen rights — about $180,000 in today's money. The magazine story appeared in July 1918 and the film was being shot a year later.

It was adapted for the screen by Luther Reed, who also worked on Howard Hughes' blockbuster Hell's Angels. It was Reed who added the torpedo tube disposal of poor Alice.
 
The director was Irvin Willat. The marvellous Flicker Alley Blu-ray I watched features a lot of details about Willat, who was a colourful fellow, to say the least. 

Both bigoted and eccentric, the two facts about Willat that stick in my mind is that he was anti-smoking fifty years before it became fashionable, and that he was accused of selling his wife to Howard Hughes...


Behind the Door is beautifully made, with gorgeous tints and tones (one evening shot is blue with a pink background) and it features a really impressive fight scene at the beginning.

So it's all the more fascinating to watch the interview with silent film expert Kevin Brownlow in which he declares that both the tinting and the fight are considerably inferior to other silent classics of the period...

There is something uniquely magical about silent films, and I have a yearning to explore them further. So don't be surprised if you read more posts on the subject... and if anybody has any titles to recommend, please get in touch!

(Image credits: The cover of the Blu-Ray/DVD is from Flicker Alley's website. The McClure's Magazine cover is from Flickr (no relation). The tinted images are from an excellent review by Gary Tooze on DVD Beaver.)

Going Up by Frederic Raphael

I hesitated over buying this book. I really get a kick out of reading biographies of screenwriters, and Frederic Raphael is one of the great British screenwriters: Nothing But the Best, Darling, Two for the Road, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Glittering Prizes.

But this first volume of his memoirs ends in the early 1960s, just before his career really gets started...

In the end I went for it, though, and I'm glad I did. It brings vividly to life a certain strata of English culture and society in the postwar years, and I found it fascinating. 

Memoirs are a mine field, because as we all know, memory distorts or fades. Not to be too self serving, but my own volume about working on Doctor Who, Script Doctor, works well because I kept diaries during those years, and they provided crucial source material for my book. I recorded incidents and dialogue exactly as they happened, when they happened. And that makes all the difference...

Frederic Raphael has done the same. In his early years he modeled himself on Somerset Maugham and this entailed observing life dispassionately and religiously writing up a detailed journal. Which proves priceless for Going Up (and hopefully for future volumes).

The title refers to 'going up' to university, in Raphael's case, Cambridge. To me this was one of the less interesting sections of the book, somewhat stopping the narrative flow and, I felt, leaving it rather becalmed by snobbery.

Raphael is never less than wickedly amusing in his observations, though —  "As a social climber, I have no head for heights" ...  "Envy and moral presumption are the twin propellers of journalism." 
 
And he's objective enough to be caustically self-critical. To fill his weekly column in a university magazine he soon begins attacking his friends. "I learned how easily journalism became a solvent of loyalties"

Anti-semitism is one of the key themes of the book, and it's shocking to learn how prevalent this was in British society after World War 2, when evidence of the Holocaust was just beginning to surface into public consciousness. 

As just one example, Raphael was deprived of a scholarship to Oxford because of the prejudices some evil bastards at Charterhouse, the private school he attended.

Frederic Raphael is such a great screenwriter that I was startled to discover he thinks of this as a reluctant sideline and sees himself primarily as a novelist. So it's only fair that I mostly illustrate this post with covers of his early novels.

But it's Freddie's deft and effective screenplays which really made an impression on me, and the cinema-related anecdotes are the bits of the book I was most hungry to read.

So I was fascinated by Raphael's description of how a chance viewing in a Paris cinema of the "asymetrical elegance" of Michaelangelo Antonio's movie L'Avventura "rekindled my interest in cinema."

However, on the same page of this book we are given a long anecdote in French which, if I want more than a ghost or a gist of it, will either have to be laboriously typed into Google Translate or read over the phone to a bilingual friend. Or I suppose I could learn a new language — I'm currently learning Spanish. 

But I wouldn't need just French and Spanish. Freddie also demands that the reader is fluent in Latin and Italian if they want to fully grasp what's happening in his book. 

Isn't this the most egregious form of snobbery? The kind where the writer is willing cut off his own art from a sympathetic, engaged and eager reader just to show how smart he is — and how ignorant they are?

It would have been a simple matter for the publisher to include a table of translations at the the back of the book. And, while they were at it, an index — which would have explained the mysterious Mr Gutwillig, and prevented numerous other characters from appearing and disappearing in the reader's comprehension like figures in a dense fog.

Nevertheless I'm looking forward, with sympathy, engagement and eagerness, to  Raphael's next volume of memoirs.

(Image credits: The colour cover of Going Up is from Amazon. The black and white cover is from BiteBack Publishing. Obbligato is from Mr Pickwick's Fine Old Books via ABE. Thank you, Mr Pickwick! The Limits of Love is from DP Paperbacks. The Earlsdon Way is from Penguin First Editions. The Trouble with England is from PsychoBabel & Skoob via ABE. Indmann is from Amazon. The L'Avventura poster is from CineMaterial, where they have a fabulous selection.)

Frederic Raphael's WW2 Ghost Writing

Frederic Raphael is an illustrious British screenwriter and novelist (The Glittering Prizes, Darling, Far From the Madding Crowd, Eyes Wide Shut, to name a few...).

Raphael has recently published the first volume of his memoirs, Going Up, which details his early years including — and of course, this is the bit which really fascinates me — his initial struggles and eventual breakthrough as a writer.

It's reassuring to know that even someone as poised, talented and ultimately successful as Frederic Raphael (he won an Oscar for Darling) also had to scuffle and hustle at first. 

In the 1950s, between occasional jobs writing for the stage and movies, he earned a living ghost writing World War 2 memoirs...

The first of these was They Arrived by Moonlight, Jacques Doneux's account of his unnerving adventures as a secret agent behind enemy lines in Europe — escaping from Paris clinging to the underside of a train was just one. 

Raphael polished Doneux's "artless manuscript" with considerable success: "Jacques had scarcely noticed how I had deleted his clichés and with what terse invention I had stocked his lacunae."

(If you're wondering what that last bit means, Doneux had a tendency to understatement, to say the least, so Raphael had to make up stuff to fill in the blanks.)

They Arrived by Moonlight went down so well that soon the publisher was "keen for me to do a second ghosting job about secret agents. They would pay £600..." for him to rewrite They Fought Alone by Maurice Buckmaster.

Raphael met with Buckmaster and asked "how he would like me to deal with events where key details were missing. He smiled and said, 'Oh, my dear Freddie, make up anything that looks plausible'."

Despite, or maybe because of this, They Fought Alone is highly regarded ("as a documentary source"!). It has recently been reprinted and is considered "a classic of secret warfare."

What Freddie describes as "my last ghostly effort" was the memoir of Captain William Richmond Fell, a New Zealander submarine commander and maritime salvage expert. 

(This book is actually called The Sea Surrenders though, unhelpfully, Freddie repeatedly refers to it as The Sea Shall Not Have Them, a much more famous and completely different  book. I know this because I wasted a lot of time on Google finding it out. Freddie's publishers should be hit in the face with a whip cream pie for not checking basic facts.)
 
"Now a confident cosmetician of gallant prose, I supplied Bill's book with a leaven of nautical dialogue of the kind that first seasoned Noël Coward's  In Which We Serve and was recycled in The Cruel Sea. 'Steady as you go' was a staple line."

William Fell was not very pleased: "I'd sooner not have it printed," he declared. But Raphael cleverly explained his rewrites in terms of a salvage operation, and the mariner got the point. In any case he was sufficiently mollified to allow the book to be published.

For all the fascination these ghost-written memoirs might exert, the one I'm really interested in is Frederic Raphael's own, ectoplasm-free, memoir Going Up which I'll be posting about here soon.

(Image credits: The paperback of They Arrived by Moonlight is from Bid or Buy. The hardcover is from Hedgerow Books via ABE. The vintage paperback of They Fought Alone is from Dead Souls Bookshop in New Zealand. The red hardcover is from . The reprint is from BiteBack Books, who also, intriguingly publish Freddie's memoir Going Up. The Sea Surrenders is from Pic Click.)

The First Purge by James DeMonaco

Back in 2013 a film appeared, written and directed by James DeMonaco. It was a thriller called The Purge and it featured a brilliantly simple notion which turned it  into sociological science fiction.

in America in the near future a totalitarian government has institute 'The Purge' — one night a year, for 12 hours, all crime, including murder, is legal. 

This is purportedly to allow a cathartic cleansing of emotions and promote a peaceful society. It's actually a social control mechanism to keep the government in power...
 
The film followed one family locked into their fortress of a house and under siege during that night. 

It was successful enough to give rise to a sequel, The Purge: Anarchy, also written and directed by DeMonaco, and then another one, The Purge: Election Year.

Both of these sequels expanded the scope of their stories, taking us out onto the streets into the nightmare milieu of Purge night. One of the clever things about this concept is that it's like a zombie movie without zombies — just lethally armed, disinhibited, 'normal' human beings.

And both of these sequels were outstanding; I recommend them highly. Not least because they presented the almost unheard of spectacles of poor black American good guys gunning down rich white American bad guys.

In terms of racial politics, the Purge movies aren't up there with the magnificent Get Out, but they are still canny and biting social satires.

Now there's another Purge sequel in cinemas (cheekily released on the 4th of July): The First Purge, which takes the story back to its roots with a pilot experiment for the Purge which is limited to a sealed-off Staten Island.

Impoverished residents have been paid five grand each if they stay for the mayhem. Again social criticism is entwined with brutal action. Again James DeMonaco has written the script, but this time the director is Gerard McMurray.

Unfortunately The First Purge isn't up to the exhilarating standard of Anarchy or Election Year, but it does have its moments. Like a Klu Klux Klan murder gang being wiped out by heavily armed African American drug dealers.

And the grand finale is an amusing variation on Die Hard. The leader of the drug dealers (Y'lan Noel as Dmitri) goes alone into the high rise housing project to stop the white supremacists who are on a killing spree within. 

Dmitri is even dressed in a wife-beater vest, like John McLane in Die Hard.

So... good, but not great. If you're intrigued by the premise of the Purge movies you might want to check out the second or third film.

Or maybe you'd prefer to wait for the TV series, which is on its way.

(Image credits: A surprisingly large selection of posters — and some great ones (I particularly like the crime scene continent, and the burning ice cream truck) — at Imp Awards.)

Sicario 2: Soldado by Taylor Sheridan

Taylor Sheridan is my hero. He's probably the finest screenwriter working at the moment.  

He made his explosive debut with Sicario in 2015, and then followed it up with Hell or High Water and Wind River. 

An astonishing run of high quality movies marked by a flair for action, a sense of place, and strong characterisation.

So when I learned of this new film, I was very apprehensive. Not only was it Sheridan's fourth script, it was a sequel. And sequels are notoriously hard to pull off. I took my seat in the cinema both excited and braced for an almost inevitable disappointment.

This film, which in America is called Sicario: Day of the Soldado and in Britain Sicario 2: Soldado (both rather cumbersome titles) initially seemed to me to have a couple of difficulties to overcome...

Sure enough, it begins in the familiar brutal world of the US-Mexican border. The first image is of a rugged, primeval landscape which could be from a million years ago — and then a helicopter bobs into view, a menacing artefact of modern technology.

The story which is subsequently set out at first seems to hinge on intertwining the Mexican drug cartels with Islamic extremism. Hmm... Was this a contrived attempt to inject topicality?

More worryingly, this new film focuses on two characters returning from Sicario — Benicio del Toro's revenge-driven hitman Alejandro and Josh Brolin's cynical black-ops warrior, Matt. But it doesn't feature Emily Blunt as Kate.

In the original movie Kate was the anchor, the moral compass of the film. Whereas Alejandro and Matt are hardened, ruthless and accustomed to the nightmarish world they inhabit, Kate was still a normal person with values and feelings.

What would it do to the new movie to remove her from the equation?

Well, I need not have worried — about this, or anything else. 

Sicario 2: Soldado, or whatever the hell you want to call it, is spellbinding. It is a masterpiece. I loved every moment of it. 
 
Taylor Sheridan has done an astonishing job of constructing a film in which every scene has something fresh or fascinating to it. And it grips you relentlessly.

Sheridan does a superb job of enlisting the audience's sympathies and keeping us on the edge of our seat. There's also memorable characters,  unforgettable action sequences — including another terrifying cross-border excursion — and some great dialogue ("Beautiful day." "Yeah, blue skies... high calibre weapons... I just love getting out of the office").

Other than Taylor Sheridan, most of the creative team has changed from Sicario. 

The director this time is the Italian Stefano Sollima, making his English language feature debut. The cinematographer is Dariusz Wolski, who frequently works with Ridley Scott and recently shot All the Money in the World. 

The composer of Sicario, Johann Johannsson, died tragically young and he has been replaced by his collaborator the Icelandic cellist Hildur Guanodottir.

They all do a terrific job. But I regard this as Taylor Sheridan's movie. And it's a triumph.

In a summer multiplex environment congested with superheros and space ships, this is one sequel you mustn't miss. An exciting and disturbing action movie which manages to be moving, profound and thrilling all at once.

(Image credits: posters from Imp Awards.)

Robert Williams: Mr Bitchin'

You're probably familiar with the extraordinary art of Robert Williams without even knowing it. His cover painting for Guns 'n' Roses Appetite for Destruction has been seen all over the world. 

The record has sold more that 14 million copies. A fact that Williams recalls with chagrin when recounting the minuscule payment he requested from the then-unknown band. 

 "When these people originally approached me they were unheard of and I considered them to be just another punk rock band."

Adding to the irritation, "They even used the name of the painting."

The image of a woman being assaulted by a robot (who is about to be dealt with by an avenging demon) was inevitably controversial. And it got Guns 'n' Roses into hot water, as Williams had warned them it would...

 "I gave them my best wishes, but I warned them that this was going to get them into a lot of trouble. And it got them into exactly the amount of trouble I thought it was going to get them into."

These and many other droll recollections are featured on a marvellous documentary available on DVD entitled Robert Williams: Mr Bitchin'. Incidentally, "bitchin' " is slang for great, cool, wonderful, the best....

I've been an ardent — and often astonished — fan of Williams's art since I first happened on it in the underground comics of my youth. So I was delighted to discover that someone had made a film about the man and his work.

It is a terrific, amusing and informative documentary which really brings Williams warmly to life as an engaging and sardonic — and hugely talented — figure.

He began his career doing hotrod art (custom cars are a passion he shares with his wife) and working with Big Daddy Roth. Roth created Rat Fink, an icon of my childhood...

Williams used to illustrate ads for Roth's merchandise, and his art was so extreme that magazines began to refuse to run them. 

But extremity is Williams's middle name. And that's one reason I love his stuff.

Then came the underground comics I mentioned, then Williams turned to concentrating on his astounding paintings. His work has always had a cult following, but now he is poised to assault the citadels of fine art, and may perhaps realise his ambition to be recognised as a "blue chip artist".

If after watching Mr Bitchin' you find you have an appetite not for destruction but for further exploration of his work, I urge you to buy one of the many books of his paintings which are available. (There is a merchandise page on his own website here.)

Oh, and one last anecdote from the documentary. Debbie Harry of Blondie is depicted in one of his paintings, which unusually for Williams, features no explicit nudity. 

"I had Miss Harry's dignity to think about," he says. Before adding mischievously, "I did have her keister showing."

Debbie Harry herself gamely remarks, "I really wouldn't have minded being portrayed sitting on a taco with no clothes on. But Robert is a gentleman."

(Image credits: the DVD cover is from Cinema Libre Studios. The Low Brow Art book cover is from Wim Words. The Zap cover is from Pinterest. The other images are from a very useful article in the the Guardian. Thank you, Guardian!)

Boardwalk Empire by Terence Winter

This TV series is my current box-set addiction and I've just finished Season 2... which left me in a state of shock like nothing I've seen since Game of Thrones. 

I was initially attracted to Boardwalk Empire by the presence of Martin Scorsese, who directed the pilot episode and is one of the producers.

But the crucial creative talent here is the writer Terence Winter who created the show. He also wrote Scorsese's best movie for many, many years — The Wolf of Wall Street. Before that he was one of the writers on The Sopranos, which makes absolute sense.

Like the Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire is a gangster epic, albeit a period one set in Atlantic City, the source of the boardwalks in the title. The period in question is the 1920s and the recently concluded mass slaughter of World War One hangs over everything.

One of the heroes of the show — though hero isn't quite the right word — is Jimmy Darmody (played by Michael Pitt), a soldier home from the hell of No Man's Land with a permanent limp. He can't quite shake off his wartime experiences. When he drinks a toast it is always "To the lost."

Jimmy is the protege of Enoch 'Nucky' Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi. Nominally the treasurer of Atlantic City, Nucky actually runs the town and its criminal operations, which are funded by bootleg liquor. Jimmy is his enforcer, assisted by Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), another vet and a lethal sniper. Richard came home with only half a face and wears a grotesque mask to stop little kids screaming in the street.

Michael Pitt looks good in a hat, something which became evident in the movie Silk, where he was required to wear an ushanka — a silly Russian-style fur monstrosity. A hat, especially one like that, can obliterate the essential image of many a movie star (in Conspiracy Theory Mel Gibson never quite recovered from donning a modest watch cap).

But Boardwalk Empire is absolutely the era of the hat for men, and Pitt is in his element. Luckily Steve Buscemi looks good in one, too. And Huston. 

Also under a fedora is Michael Shannon as a prohibition agent. He's tormented and priest-ridden, though not as priest-ridden as Kelly MacDonald, who is modelling headwear for the ladies. MacDonald first registered on screens as Ewan McGregor's schoolgirl paramour in Trainspotting. In Boardwalk Empire she's Nucky's love interest — and considerably more than that.
 
The influence of The Godfather is strongly felt here, and indeed Boardwalk Empire is the best example of that kind of gangster drama since The Godfather II.

The show has a strong, and richly researched, period feel. If the scripts are informed by the nihilistic aftermath of the Great War, the ravishing photography draws on sources like Maxfield Parrish paintings.

The music of the era, however — from a time before Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet made their mark on jazz — is accurately rendered and therefore pretty wretched. If you wanted something good from this period the thing to do would be to ignore popular music and go, instead, for Stravinsky or maybe Ravel. Although admittedly it's unlikely to be the sort of stuff these hoods would play at their parties.

(Image credits: The DVD covers are from Amazon. Kelly MacDonald is from USA Today. Pitt's pic is, appropriately enough, from a Gentleman's Gazette article about Jimmy Darmody's clothes. The posters are provided by good old Imp Awards.)

Hot House by Brian Aldiss

Known in America as The Long Afternoon of Earth, Hothouse by Brian Aldiss was written originally as five (rather long) short stories and appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction — probably my favourite sf magazine, by the way. 

This sequence of tales deservedly won Aldiss a Hugo award in 1962 and soon appeared as a book, more or less stitched together to form a continuous novel. I read it when I was a kid but I was prompted to pick it up again by a wonderful BBC radio adaptation, details archived here skilfully filleted by the writer Lu Kemp.

The thing that came across so forcefully in the radio version — and was no doubt responsible for the book winning its Hugo back in the 1960s — was the sheer richness of Aldiss's imagination and the strangeness of his vision.

In the far future the Earth is in a locked orbit, half the planet in freezing darkness, the other half permanently turned towards the sun, receiving the endless light and heat which accounts for both the American and British titles of this book.

In this hothouse world, vegetation dominates and indeed half the planet is pretty much occupied by one giant, interconnected banyan tree. In its branches are the remaining life forms, included the shrunken (and green-skinned!) descendants of humanity.

Animal life is scarce, though, and plants rule the world. And what plants. They are mobile, semi-intelligent (or at least sentient) and come in a breathtaking assortment of bizarre and dangerous forms. Particularly impressive are the zeppelin-sized traversers, sort of giant spiders who spin webs from the Earth to the (equally gravity locked ) Moon, as they move over the sky "like clouds".

Aldiss really excells in dreaming up lifeforms such as this. The bellyelm is a particularly brilliant creation; it's a two-part entity with its lure-and-decoy companion. And Aldiss also shows real flair in the naming of the flora and fauna of this weird new world. These names call to mind both James Joyce and Lewis Carroll. 

His depiction of the struggle to survive in this savage world — "green in tooth and claw"! — is quite unforgettable. The sequence where a downed the suckerbird tries desperately to escape the clutches of murderous seaweed is simply heartbreaking.

Aldiss often writes very well, as when he describes "the terrible silence of the forest" or "rain sizzling in cataracts off a great flat head" or vegetation that "rose as remorselessly as boiling milk" towards the endless light of the sun...

I was almost a third of the way through the book when I realised something terrifically obvious — it has its roots (!) in The Day of the Triffids. This dawned on me as I read how "gigantic nettles shook their bearded heads."

Like John Wyndham's novel of the Triffids, there's no doubt that Aldiss's book is a classic.

There are some problems with it, though. Not least the science. People have taken issue with the physics of the story, and I personally disliked Aldiss's story device of the devolved human beings having, deep in their brains, detailed racial memories of the past. There's some other basic biology which is also just plain wrong,

But this pales beside the real weakness of the book. Its central character Gren is an unpleasant self-centred bully. As I mentioned, Hothouse was written originally as five much shorter stories. In can see how in that format Gren wouldn't have outstayed his welcome with the reader. 

And I suspect Aldiss didn't realise just how intensely unsympathetic his protagonist would seem when these tales were joined back to back to form a novel.

Don't let that put you off, though. There is so much here to be enjoyed. This fascinating world is presented to us through a fast moving  adventure in the manner of the interplanetary novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (or, later, Michael Moorcock).

But the most striking influence here is that of William Hope Hodgson. There's a sequence in Hothouse involving an unseen nightmare thing called the Black Mouth which lurks inside a dormant volcano. It emits an eerie siren song that summons all creatures in the vicinity into the volcano and to their doom.

Our heroes only survive because they manage to hold out until that "dreadful melody ceased in mid-note." They watch as "five terrible long fingers came to rest precisely together on the lip of the Black Mouth. Then one by one they were withdrawn, leaving Gren with a vision of some unimaginable monster picking its teeth after an obscene repast."

Our heroes hurry away, looking back over their shoulders "to make sure nothing came climbing out of the volcano after them."

This is strongly reminscent of William Hope Hodgson's visionary horror stories, especially that Carnacki the Ghost-Finder tale 'The Whistling Room'. It also calls to mind Hodgson's novel Nightland, though not as much as the next section does...

As Aldiss's heroes trek into the lands beyond the terminator into the "Nightside Mountains", the whole situation strongly evokes Hodgson's Nightland with its clouds, storms, lightning, and the final glimpses of the livid twisted sun which is slowly going nova.

There's also an extraordinary sequence where Gren glimpses a sort of interdimensional opening into an "impossible green universe of delight" which prefigures Alan Moore's Swamp Thing.

It seems a little wrong to conclude with this list of comparisons, because ultimately Brian Aldiss's Hothouse is a classic because it's unique.


(Image credits: The covers are from Goodreads. The original green Sphere edition is from a French ABE bookseller. The orange and white Faber hardcover is from an American ABE bookseller.)