Johnny Stompanato and James Bond
Johnny Stompanato and Lana Turner
In his review of Sir Sean Connery’s book Being a Scot, Euan Ferguson laments that Connery’s decision to write a book on the subject of Scottish identity, rather than a straight autobiography, means we will never hear his account of ‘the impossibly other-age story of his on-set headbutting of feared Mafia hitman Johnny ‘Stompy’ Stompanato’. Before he shot to fame as James Bond, Connery was making the film Another Time, Another Place (1958) with Lana Turner in London. Stompanato, an enforcer for Los Angeles’ Mob Kingpin Mickey Cohen, was Turner’s boyfriend at the time, and when rumours began to circulate of Connery and Turner having an affair, Stompanato flew to London and, so the story goes, threatened Turner and Connery with a gun, only to have Connery wrestle the gun from him and beat him up. A few months later, Stompanato was killed by Turner’s fourteen-year-old daughter Cheryl Crane. Crane stabbed him to death, so it is believed, in a heated moment when he was threatening her mother. Connery was in LA at the time filming Darby O’Gill and the Little People and had to go into hiding as Cohen suspected he was involved in the luckless Stompanato’s death.
As Ferguson suggests, the whole fascinating, sordid little story sheds light on a bygone Hollywood era. But it was only when I was reading the memoir of another onscreen James Bond, Sir Roger Moore’s My Word is my Bond, that I discovered Moore had his own frightening encounter with Stompanato around the same time as Connery. Moore had been friends with Lana Turner ever since they starred together in the historical drama Diane (1956). While she was in London filming Another Time, Another Place, Turner invited Moore to a party where the confrontation happened:
As the guests arrived, Lana pinned a label on them, mine read ‘Roger Boy Knight’, in reference to Ivanhoe of course. One of the other guests was a rather swarthy individual who carried the label ‘Johnny Dago’. I actually saw very little of him during the evening, which progressed from drinks to food to more drinks and music to dance…
At some point, as the other guests started to thin out, Lana asked me to dance – not one of my talents I must admit. As I shuffled around the floor with her in my arms, probably standing on her toes several times, I felt a cold breeze on the back of my neck. I glanced over my shoulder to find ‘Johnny Dago’ leaning against the doorjamb and staring, unsmilingly, at Lana and me.
A little voice in my head said, ‘Roger it is time you went home!’ I didn’t need a second prompt. I excused myself and made for the door.
A few weeks later I read that ‘Johnny Dago’ – better known as gangster Johnny Stompanato, with whom Lana was romantically involved, having recently divorced Lex Barker – had been deported by Scotland Yard for having physically abused Lana, and for having entered the UK illegally using a passport in the name of John Steele. He had, I read further, also turned up on the set of Lana’s film and threatened Sean Connery with a gun. Sean wrestled the gun from him and decked him with a right hook: all very Bondian. Johnny was convinced that Sean was having an affair with Lana, also very Bondian.
Roger Moore and Lana Turner
Moore’s encounter with Stompanato was not quite as heroic as Connery’s, but it is interesting to surmise how Stompanato’s rage must have been building step by step, first in his encounter with Moore and later Connery. Both men would achieve massive success as cinema’s greatest hero – James Bond. As Moore said, the whole affair was ‘all very Bondian’. Moore also had another interesting encounter with a gangster, this time Mickey Cohen:
I once met Cohen at a nightclub where I had gone to see the great Don Rickles, a fantastic comedian who became known as the ‘master of the insult’. Gary Cooper was also there that night, and Rickles, having made a few cracks at Cooper and then dismissing me for being a pretty boy at Warner Brothers, turned his attention to Cohen. He called him a dirty hood, then – obviously thinking better of it – dropped on his knees and held his hands together in a prayer towards the gangster, saying that he was only joking and he loved MISTER Cohen SIR!
If you thought Connery was brave taking on Stompanato, then you’ve got to admit Rickles was pretty damn brave calling Cohen a ‘dirty hood’ to his face!
I’ve never read Being a Scot: it struck me as an acquired taste, but I would highly recommend My Word is my Bond as a fascinating insight into a life well lived. The only false note is Moore’s constant dismissal of his talents. Sir Roger’s self-deprecating sense of humour is part of his charm of course, but it does get a little wearing for those of us who enjoy his work.
Black Dahlia Lecture at St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum
Elizabeth Short
January 15th, 2013 is the 66th anniversary of the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s corpse in Los Angeles, which was the genesis for the most enduring mystery in LA’s history – the Black Dahlia murder. To mark the anniversary, I’ll be giving a talk titled ‘I Never Knew Her in Life: Cultural Depictions of the Black Dahlia Case‘ at St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum. I’m delighted that Carla Connolly has invited me to speak in such a beautiful, Grade II listed building, and I’m thrilled to be sharing a stage with Professor Peter Vanezis OBE who will be giving a talk titled ‘The Investigation of Dismembered Remains’.
Do come along if you have the chance. You can book tickets for the event here.
England, His England: The Sceptical Patriotism of John le Carre
John le Carré at the “Zeit Forum Kultur” in Hamburg on November 10th 2008.
By Krimidoedel
In his long career John le Carré’s (the pen name of David Cornwell) greatest achievement would probably be merging genre fiction with the literary novel. This is no mean feat. Most authors tend to be great at one but awful at the other, although to be fair le Carré’s one non-spy novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover was scathingly reviewed and probably deserved it. I have just finished reading The Tailor of Panama and found it to be one of le Carré’s best, and perhaps the best of his post-Cold War work. The plot concerns ex-con Harry Pendel, who has built himself a comfortable life as the owner of Pendel and Braithwaite, Panama’s most successful tailoring business. Pendel caters to a rich and powerful clientele, which includes His Excellency, the Panamanian President. One day Pendel receives an unwelcome visit from a young Foreign Office employee Andy Osnard. Osnard knows all about Pendel’s criminal past and wants him to spy for British Intelligence in the build-up to the American handover of the Panama Canal. But what plausibly can Pendel tell Osnard? Soon, he lets his imagination run away with him and events spiral wildly out of control.
This is le Carré’s most unique novel, as instead of the dour Cold War world of espionage, the tone is openly satirical and at times farcical, being heavily indebted to Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It is a joy to read le Carré’s acerbic descriptions of the great and good English institutions. He seems both scathing of their failings and, nonetheless, strangely fond of them. This leads to some glorious comedy when the habitually lazy Osnard, an old Etonian, is trying to decide on a career:
The question was how. He had no craft or qualification, no proven skills outside the golf course and the bedroom. What he understood best was English rot, and what he need was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away. His first thought was Fleet Street. He was semi-literate and unfettered by principle. He had scores to settle. On the face of it he was perfectly cut out to join the new rich media class. But after two promising years as a cub reporter with the Loughborough Evening Messenger his career ended with a snap when a steamy article entitled ‘Sex Antics of our City Elders’ turned out to be based on the pillowtalk of the managing editor’s wife.
A great animal charity had him and for a while he believed he had found his true vocation. In splendid premises handy for theatres and restaurants the needs of Britain’s animals were thrashed out with passionate commitment. No gala premiere, white-tie banquet or foreign journey to observe the animals of other nations was too onerous for the charity’s highly paid officers to undertake. And everything might have come too fruition. The Instant Response Donkey Fund (Organiser: A. Osnard), the Veteran Greyhound Country Holiday Scheme (Finance Officer: A. Osnard) had been widely applauded when two of his superiors were invited to account for themselves to the Serious Fraud Office.
After that, for a giddy week he contemplated the Anglican Church, which traditionally offered swift promotion to glib, sexually active agnostics on the make. His piety evaporated when his researches revealed to him that catastrophic investment had reduced the Church to unwelcome Christian poverty. Desperate, he embarked on a succession of ill-planned adventures in life’s fast lane. Each was shortlived, each ended in failure. More than ever, he needed a profession.
‘How about the BBC?’ he asked the Secretary, back at his university appointments board for the fifth or fifteenth occasion.
The Secretary, who was grey-haired and old before his time, flinched.
‘That one’s over,’ he said.
Osnard proposed the National Trust.
‘Do you like old buildings?’ the Secretary asked, as if he feared that Osnard might blow them up.
‘Adore them. Total addict.’
‘Quite so.’
With trembling fingertips the Secretary lifted a corner of a file and peered inside.
‘I suppose they might just take you. You’re disreputable. Charm of a sort. Bilingual, if they like Spanish. Nothing lost by giving them a try, I dare say.’
‘The National Trust?’
‘No, no. The spies. Here. Take this to a dark corner and fill it in with invisible ink.’
Le Carré’s Cold War novels were partly constructed as a defense of British, or more broadly Western, values. He has never been the flag-waving type; indeed, as a man of the left he is critical of the English class system. Perhaps this dates back to his early life when his criminal father could swindle enough money together to have him educated at the Sherborne School and Oxford, but he was never, understandably, respectable enough to be truly part of this privileged world. And yet there is a real humour and fondness in his Englishness: in The Honourable Schoolboy a sex scene between Peter Guillam and Molly Meakin is described simply as ‘She surprised him with a refined and joyous carnality’. In an excellent profile of the author Peter Love, goes as far as describing le Carré as a ‘Radical Tory’. I think le Carré would probably shudder at the label. After all, in The Tailor of Panama Tories are described as ‘Empire-dreamers, Euro-haters, nigger-haters, pan-xenophobes and lost, uneducated children.’
Subtle.
Nevertheless, I think le Carré would comfortably describe himself as a patriot, and his more recent work has conveyed an aging man’s anxiety at the future direction of the country. In works such as Absolute Friends, it is clear le Carré does not regard the War on Terrorism as justified a cause as the Cold War and has become increasingly bitter about Britain’s ‘Special Relationship’ with the US. Now, anti-Americanism aside, perhaps this sceptical patriotism, combined with an affectionate and disarming portrayal of the flaws in our national character, is the best type to have.
British Politics Review
The British Politics Review is a Norwegian publication whose goal is to raise the interest and knowledge of British politics in Norway (although more people in Britain should read it too!). I was delighted to contribute an article to the latest edition, the theme of which is the connections between politics and literature. The issue includes a touching piece by Kaja Schjerven Mollerin on George Orwell, Charles Ferrell on British writers’ response to the General Strike in 1926, Juan Christian Pellicer on the politics of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Howard J. Booth on Rudyard Kipling and Imperialism and Alexander Beaumont on politics in contemporary British fiction. My piece is called ‘Tony Blair, Robert Harris and the ghost of a literary feud’.
You can read the whole issue here.
PD James’ The Private Patient
NHS Hospital Ward in 1973
Sometimes we start reading the works of authors for unexpected reasons. I decided to read some of PD James’ novels after coming across a rather grubby letter a certain writer wrote to the Society of Authors claiming Baroness James should step down as the President of that organisation as she voted for the government’s controversial Health and Social Care Bill when it was brought before the House of Lords (perhaps he thought she had “unsuitable views for a woman”?)
Interestingly, from 1949 to 1968 James worked as an administrator in the National Health Service and she has drawn upon this experience for several novels such as Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Mind to Murder. Although Philip Roth has just announced his retirement, stating that he has no more books left in him at the age of 79, it did cross my mind that Baroness James, now 92, published her most recent novel just last year and that her writing remains as sharp as ever.
The Private Patient (2008) explores the rather murky world of plastic surgery. It has a wonderfully grotesque and Dickensian cast of 
characters whom James spends more than the first hundred pages introducing before the appearance of her legendary detective and poet Adam Dalgliesh. Rhoda Gradwyn is a successful and unscrupulous tabloid journalist (the sort showcased recently by the Leveson inquiry). She checks into the fictional Cheverell Manor in Dorset, a magnificent country house transformed into a private clinic run by the arrogant and ambitious Dr George Chandler-Powell who is having an affair with the voluptuous Sister Flavia Holland, a nurse with a heart of stone. Gradwyn wants a scar, which she received from her abusive father during childhood, removed from her face: ‘Because I no longer have need of it’. Some of the staff are weary of a woman of Gradwyn’s reputation coming to the clinic, and, indirectly, Gradwyn contributes to the destruction of the clinic’s reputation when she is murdered within twenty-four hours of her successful operation. The newly engaged Commander Dalgliesh travels to Cheverell Manor to solve the murder case of a woman who was herself an enigma, thus the title carries a double meaning referring both to private healthcare (always a controversial subject in the UK as we have seen) and the mystery of the individual victim.
There are shades of Golden Age detective fiction in the novel as the characters are isolated in a remote setting and all possess plausible
motives for wanting to see the ruthless Gradwyn dead. The downside of this is that some of the characters’ portraits border on caricatures to the modern reader, such as the superstitious kitchen worker Sharon Bateman who is obsessed with the seventeenth-century burning of a supposed witch on the grounds of the Manor. Bateman was a bit too parochial for my tastes. However, this is more than offset by the eloquent and often moving prose which, used as I am to a more hard-boiled American style, never failed to impress. As evidenced in the scene where Dalgliesh first set eyes on Gradwyn’s corpse:
Dalgliesh knew that speculative gazes fixed on a corpse – his own among them – were different from the gazes fixed on living flesh. Even for a professional inured to the sight of violent death there would always be a vestige of pity, anger or horror. The best pathologists and police officers, standing where they stood now, never lost respect for the dead, a respect born of shared emotions, however temporary, the unspoken recognition of a common humanity, a common end. But all humanity, all personality was extinguished with the last breath. The body, already subject to the inexorable process of decay, had been demoted to an exhibit, to be treated with a serious professional concern, a focus for emotions it could no longer share, no more troubled by. Now the only physical communication was with gloved exploring hands, probes, thermometers, scalpels, wielded on a body laid open like the carcase of an animal. This was not the most horrific corpse he had seen in his years as a detective, but now it seemed to hold a career’s accumulation of pity, anger and impotence.
Dalgliesh finally puts all of the pieces together, but with the solving of the case there always remains a void, as though the deeper mysteries of human existence can never be solved, not even by the most celebrated of detectives. And yet the final note is one of optimism, decent values have triumphed and life is worth living.
A superb novel.
Finley Light – To Be James Bond
This is James Brolin in one of his screen tests as James Bond but whatever happened to Finley Light?
Although my feelings about Skyfall were lukewarm I’ve still been enjoying much of the Bond memorabilia which has appeared on the web recently. Only six actors have played James Bond in the official Eon series, but many more have been considered for the part. Somehow I just can’t imagine Burt Reynolds, Mel Gibson or John Gavin, all of whom were considered – Gavin even signed a contract which was subsequently bought out, saying those immortal lines “The name’s Bond, James Bond.” Then again, the actors who did play Bond had time to establish themselves in the role, and I guess we just accept them in the established Bond history. I wouldn’t have pictured American actor James Brolin as Bond either, but he did a fantastic screen test (now on YouTube), re-enacting a scene from From Russia With Love with Maud Adams, when the producers were considering him for the role for Octopussy.
There is an excellent essay on Alternative007 about the actors who were in the frame at one time or another to be Bond. Michael Billington appears to have come closer to the role than any of the other contenders, and I think he would have made a wonderful Bond. He has a brief but important role in The Spy Who Loved Me as the Russian spy Sergei Barsov. One named I have heard repeated a few times regarding potential James Bonds is the rather distinctive sounding ‘Finley Light’. Light was apparently considered after Roger Moore stood down in 1985 but on Alternative007 Light is only briefly mentioned with the rather intriguing line, ‘Australian model called Finlay Light was strongly linked to the role but to this day no one is sure if such a person exists!’ I was puzzled by this and began pondering whether Finley Light might have been some elaborate ploy by the producers to hoodwink the press and Bond fans at the time. Light just seems too reminiscent of George Lazenby, another Australian who was plucked from obscurity for what turned out to be a brief tenure as James Bond, and I certainly couldn’t recall coming across Light in any other films. Apparently, the Mail on Sunday ran a world exclusive breaking the story that Light had signed a ten year contract to be Bond. However, before I let my conspiracy-theory-inclined-mind run away with me a little bit of internet searching seemed to confirm there is such a person as Finley Light (some sources spell it Finlay with an a). Light has an imdb page which lists him as having one screen acting credit for a single episode of an Australian television series titled Case for the Defence, broadcast in 1978 and there appears to be some information on Light at the National Library of Australia although unfortunately its not digitised, and I can’t find any photos of Mr Light. I’ve also found a Finlay Light who played drums in the British Heavy Metal band Necrosanct who were active in the late 1980s and early 90s, although I’ve no idea if this is the same person as the enigmatic would be spy.
I guess I’m intrigued. If any readers, particularly Australian ones, remember Finley Light I’d like to hear from you.
UPDATE: I’ve finally come across some images of Finley Light and they’re quite striking. Here’s the link to some photos of Light that were taken in 1986 around the time he was being considered for Bond (scroll down to the bottom of the page to see him). Light has a distinctive look which makes me think he could have suited the role of Bond.
Does this blog post from 2010 show an older Finley Light?
Skyfall: Bond has been Better
I went to see Skyfall this week. I had not read any of the reviews so as not to sway my opinion, (plus I think nine out of ten critics will say whatever the producers tell them to) but the hype has been impossible to avoid. Everyone from the Guardian to the Vatican has been singing Bond’s praises. So is the film any good? Yes, but it’s far from Bond at his best.
Daniel Craig’s third outing as Bond begins with 007 in Turkey, accompanied by the beautiful fellow agent Eve (Naomie Harris) and hunting down a hired killer (Ola Rapace) who has stolen a hard drive containing the identities of undercover NATO agents. Bond is left for dead on this mission but returns to the fold after a bomb attack on MI6 headquarters and the publication of NATO agents’ names on the internet. Bond is sent by M to track down ex-MI6 agent Raoul Silva who is responsible for the attacks on his old employer. Silva bears a bitter grudge against M from the days he worked for her in Hong Kong. Bond travels first to Shanghai and then to Macao on the hunt for Silva where he encounters the sexy and mysterious Severine (Berenice Marlohe).
There’s a lot to like about Skyfall. Judi Dench turns in a brilliant performance as M, and Javier Bardem must rank as one of the best Bond villains of the series. Daniel Craig is as strong as ever as Bond. Every Bond film is in a sense tailored to the actor playing Bond, and the areas where Craig is less comfortable in the role fuel some of the film’s weaknesses. The lack of humour is one point. Craig is an intense actor, which is good for exploring Bond’s back-story but falls flat when you consider this secret agent is also supposed to be witty and charming. Bond has become so obstreperous that he seems to be in a constant state of contention with everyone he works with. Another problem is that a distinctive romance seems to be missing for Bond in this film. Bond has always been a bit of chauvinist, but at least in the older Bond films there was always a woman he would share the adventure with. In Skyfall the women flash through the story so quickly that we never truly get to know any of them or understand the attraction. Craig is very much a modern Bond for our times, but when you greatly reduce the romance and humour it becomes less a case of reinventing the formula and more just a lack of confidence in storytelling. No Bond film is perfect, and with so many elements of the formula to include, gun barrel shot, pre-credit sequence, theme song etc., this film felt divided between set pieces that worked and set pieces that didn’t. Quantum of Solace, by comparison, was vastly underrated.
None of the flaws of Skyfall are too big to overcome in future installments (although making Bond black won’t necessarily improve things). Bond has been better before and will be better again.
Bibliography
Looking through my bookshelves not so long ago I was shocked to discover that I could remember very little about the books that I’ve read, even the ones I really liked. I love reading, and I’m fortunate that in a sense it’s part of my job, but how do you remember characters, plots or historical facts accurately when the list of what you’ve read starts to build up? After giving the matter some thought, I decided to try my hand at maintaining an annotated bibliography. The researching and publishing that I’ve done so far has required that I create bibliographies, but this one would be different. I started with basic publishing information and then gave a short account of what the book is about and what I thought of it. These would not be reviews as such, but my general thoughts on the book which I could revisit from time to time and hopefully relive a little of the book itself. I’ve pasted two entries below which reflect my reading interests of crime fiction and history.
This is a fairly new thing for me so if there are any bibliophiles out there, or people who have better methods of memory recall when it comes to books, I’d be interested in hearing what you’ve got to say:
Camilla Läckberg The Hidden Child (London: Harper, 2011)
Having seen Camilla Läckberg speak at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate, I rushed out to buy one of her novels. The Hidden Child was the first one to hand. Upon reading it I was impressed by her skillful crafting of a good thriller. There is a gritty realism in her writing which is missing in the more overblown work of fellow Scandinavian greats Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø, but the downside is her writing lacks the visceral excitement of either of these contemporaries.
Erica Falck is writing a true crime book when she discovers her mother’s diary, a Nazi medal and a baby’s clothing stained with blood. Läckberg alternates the story between Falck’s investigation into the meaning behind the items and flashbacks to 1940s war-ravaged Europe. The mystery unravels slowly in both settings with the hardships of war contrasted with Falck stumbling into a case which involves Neo-Nazi groups and murder. So far so good plot-wise, but no Scandi crime novel would be complete without an exploration of the leading characters complicated domestic lives, and here Läckberg goes into overdrive. Falck has a new-born baby: her husband Patrik is a detective on paternity leave but is proving fairly hopeless at it. Patrik is also visiting his ex-wife and helping her look after her young son while her husband’s away. Erica’s sister Anna is struggling in a new relationship because of an exceptionally stroppy teenage stepdaughter, oh and did I mention Melberg, the curmudgeonly Police Chief who reluctantly inherits a stray dog, strikes up a romance with a fellow dog lover and takes up salsa classes? Now there is nothing particularly wrong with any of this, but there does seem to be an awful lot of it and it was beginning to distract from the mystery storyline towards the end. Still, The Hidden Child is a strong mystery novel by a writer who is in Barry Forshaw’s words, ‘The hottest female crime writer in Sweden at the moment.’
Andrew Mango Atatürk (London: Murray; 1999)
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is one of the most enigmatic figures in twentieth- century history. He might plausibly be described as a benevolent dictator. Andrew Mango sets himself the gargantuan task of telling Atatürk’s life story, and his massive role in founding and shaping the modern Turkish State, but also unravelling the deeper mystery of who Atatürk really was. He succeeds at the first task but falls short on the second. Born into the Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloniki) in the late nineteenth century, the details of Atatürk’s (or Mustafa Kemal as he was known then) are understandably sketchy. Mango spends this early part of the book chronicling the decline of the Ottoman Empire, a process which had started years before the calamitous decision to enter The Great War on Germany’s side. Although it was a dying state, there is something Romantic about the pure Ruritania of the Ottoman empire with the monarchy sustained by Islam through the Caliphate. Atatürk was a staunch secularist and was sketching out his vision for a Republic of Turkey while bravely fighting for his country, famously defeating the allies at Gallipoli. The chapter on Gallipoli falls a bit flat, but Mango does well at deconstructing some of the myths surrounding Atatürk. For instance, his famous order, ‘I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die. By the time we are dead, other units and commanders will have come up to take our place.’ Is more likely to have been ‘I do not expect that any of us would not rather die than repeat the shameful story of the Balkan war. But if there are such men among us, we should at once lay hands upon them and set them up in line to be shot!’
Atatürk was a cunning strategist, outwitting rivals to become the leader of the Turkish Nationalists and foiling the Allies attempt to carve Turkey up into a Hellenic empire. By the time the Sultan tried to side with the Nationalists, Atatürk sidelined him, so that he couldn’t take any credit in their victory. After winning independence, he set about secularising an almost entirely Muslim country. The Fez was banned under the 1925 Hat Law. A new constitution separated Church and State. Atatürk is regarded as the great emancipator of women. His adopted daughter became a fighter pilot. Inevitably, people who resisted his vision were dealt with harshly, but the Cultural Revolution Atatürk set in motion is remarkable for the relatively small loss of life in comparison with other revolutions. By the time of his death, many Turks still lived in extreme poverty, but his regime had laid the foundation for prosperity, liberty and democracy. Or had it? Mango offers a spirited defence of Atatürk noting some of the contradictions of his character. He did not treat women in his private life with the emancipated role he gave them in Turkish society. His atheism seemed at odds with his penchant for bizarre pseudo-intellectual ideas such as the Sun-Language theory, and posthumously, a cult has been built around his personality. It is illegal to criticise him. Statues and portraits of him are everywhere, and ‘Atatürk’ translates as ‘Father Turk’, the surname he chose which was forbidden to any other Turk, which partially makes him appear more of a monarch than the first President of Turkey. During his rule, the Turkish parliament had no greater role than simply rubber-stamping his reforms. The first free Turkish elections were not held until 1950, and since then, there have been a series of bloodless military coups. But Mango leaves the reader with no doubt that Atatürk transformed Turkey for the better: if his reforms amounted to ‘Measured Terror’ and might seem precarious, bear in mind Turkey’s unique position as the meeting point between East and West, and the condition today of neighbouring states such as Iran and Syria.
Ellroy at the Movies
News reached the blogosphere recently of potential movie adaptations of James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere and Blood’a A Rover. These are brilliant novels and could possibly make excellent films. I think The Big Nowhere would be easier to film as the plot is fairly self-encapsulated. By contrast Blood’s A Rover is set over five years and takes many plot threads from the previous two films in the Underworld USA trilogy. Still, just because these films are ‘in development’ does not mean we are going to be seeing them at the cinema any time soon, if at all. As Ellroy has said on numerous occasions, movie production is a dysfunctional business. So in the meantime, we Ellroy fans will have to content ourselves with the adaptations of Ellroy’s movies which have already been made and the films he has scripted.
Here’s a run through, with video clips embedded of the Ellroy films which have been made so far:
Cop (1988):
James B. Harris’s Cop is an adaptation of Ellroy’s novel Blood on the Moon, the first book of the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy. James Woods turns in a powerful performance as the intellectually brilliant but manic and unstable Detective Hopkins, here on the hunt for a serial killer preying on single women. Cop received mixed reviews upon its release, but it has held up well as a taut, suspenseful thriller. The story may be fairly conventional, but there are still recognisable Ellrovian touches here and there, such as Hopkins’ unusual parenting methods. See video below.
LA Confidential (1997):
Curtis Hanson’s magisterial LA Confidential set the standard for Ellroy adaptations which no one has come close to since. You have to admire Hanson and screenwriter Brian Helgeland for pulling off the near impossible task of compressing Ellroy’s epic fictional history of 1950s LA into a two hour and twenty minute movie. As an example of how perfectly Ellroy’s prose comes alive onscreen, here’s a scene from the novel where Bud White rescues Inez Soto from her kidnapper Sylvester Fitch:
A nude woman spread-eagled on a mattress – bound with neckties, a necktie in her mouth. Bud hit the next room loud.
A fat mulatto at a table – naked, wolfing Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. He put down his spoon, raised his hands. ‘Nossir, don’t want no trouble.’
Bud shot him in the face, pulled a spare piece – bang, bang from the coon’s line of fire. The man hit the floor dead spread – a prime entry wound oozing blood. Bud put the spare in his hand; the front door crashed in. He dumped Rice Krispies on the stiff, called an ambulance.
And here’s the same scene in the film:
Brown’s Requiem (1998):
Adapting Ellroy’s debut novel into film was never going to be an easy task, and Jason Freeland’s Brown’s Requiem fails in almost very way. The story veers uncomfortably between mystery and comedy and Freeland doesn’t know how to handle actors. Will Sasso is appalling as the psychopathic Freddy ‘Fat Dog’ Baker, Selma Blair hardly sizzles as Jane Baker and even the late great Brion James fails to be menacing as the villainous Cathcart. On the plus side, Michael Rooker puts in a strong performance in the lead role of private eye and repo-man Fritz Brown:
Dark Blue (2003):
Ellroy got a ‘story by’ credit for Dark Blue as the final film was partially based on a screenplay he wrote titled ‘The Plague Season’. Set in early 90s LA, Dark Blue is an intelligent, if never quite compelling, drama following corrupt Sergeant Eldon Perry in the days leading up to the Rodney King verdict and riots:
The Black Dahlia (2006):
Another film which split the critics, Brian DePalma was always a risky choice to direct Ellroy’s most personal novel as his lurid horror style is too dependent on gratuitous violence in telling the story of the unsolved murder of Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Short, LA’s most enduring mystery. Despite this, there are still moments of suspense and even a few touching scenes as in Betty’s audition tapes:
Street Kings (2008):
Another by-the-numbers cop thriller which Ellroy could probably write in his sleep. Ellroy has a co-writing credit on Street Kings with three other writers, and while it’s an entertaining watch, it lacks a compelling lead character in Keanu Reeves’ Tom Ludlow and the story is riddled with cliches.
(Spoiler alert) Video below is the ‘killcount’, which edits together all of the film’s death scenes. Enjoy:
Rampart (2011):
Officer Dave ‘Date Rape’ Brown (Woody Harrelson) has a complicated personal life and falls foul of his superiors in the LAPD after he is caught viciously beating a man who crashed into his patrol car. That’s about it plot wise. Rampart is a film, which like its title character, is boorish, pretentious and violent. In Hollywood the screenwriter will always come second to the vision of the director, and it’s hard to believe Ellroy wrote the film that Rampart became. Director Oren Moverman tries and fails to mix two fundamentally different genres – art movie and violent cop drama – and the results are risible. Avoid:
Extract from 100 American Crime Writers
Below is an extract from the introduction of 100 American Crime Writers which describes the emergence and development of crime fiction in American literature. You can download the entire introduction on Palgrave’s website, or you can buy the book on amazon.co.uk or amazon.com.
Any attempt to trace the genesis of American crime fiction is hampered by the need or desire to locate a source and date, which is inevitably open to revision and dispute. The oldest author to appear in this volume is Edgar Allan Poe (b.1809) whose “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is widely credited as the first detective story. Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’ featuring C. Auguste Dupin were a significant influence on the Golden Age of detective fiction, and his influence can still be seen in the work of contemporary crime writers. Although Poe and his successors laid much of the foundations of the crime fiction genre that a modern-day reader would identify, American crime fiction, however, can be said to have pre-dated Poe. Sara Crosby argues that some of the earliest American crime writing is to be found in the popular execution sermons of seventeenth- century New England which were written to pass judgment on condemned men. The decline in church influence and advances in publishing caused these ‘sermons’ to evolve into different forms, and Crosby identifies ‘crime writers’ amongst the first generation of American novelists, including William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster and Charles Brockden Brown, all of whom were particularly fascinated with the subject of crime and the criminal (Crosby 2010).
To understand the historical developments and trends in American crime fiction, it is necessary to examine similar trends in British crime fiction in regards to late nineteenth and early twentieth century writing. This was a period when trends in British and American crime writing often paralleled but sometimes moved in opposition to one another. Julian Symons argued that there were essentially two Golden Ages in the crime fiction field: the Golden Age of the Short Story and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Even within these two ages, opposition to the dominant trend was emerging in the form of a more realist style (Symons 1972). During the Golden Age of the Short Story, which was exemplified by the works of Poe in America and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in Britain, the Dime Novels, including the long-running Nick Carter series beginning in 1891, were also flourishing. The successor to the first Golden Age, the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, is generally regarded as the period between the two World Wars, and is often identified as an idiosyncratically British form, if only because the settings of country houses and rigid class structures did not apply so easily to American society. However, Americans also succeed in this form, and among the American Golden Age writers, John Dickson Carr and Jacques Futrelle achieved popularity on both continents. Just as the Dime Novels were popular during the era of the classic detective short story, so too did another more radical form of crime fiction emerge during the second Golden Age. In the 1930s, the pulp magazines Black Mask and Dime Detective began to publish detective short stories by a new breed of crime writers including Carroll John Daly, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The magazines were dubbed ‘pulps’ as they took their name from a new wood-pulping procedure whereby the trademark slick covers could be produced quickly. Black Mask introduced tough, urban private detectives, such as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, who were far removed from the aloof, eccentric intellectual ‘detective’ developed by the Golden Age writers. Violence, sexuality and instinct were brought closer to the reader, stripping away the sanitising veil of scientific and intellectual crime solving. The prose style was shortened to reflect the immediacy of this new genre and the cynical thought processes of the world-weary protagonists, although Chandler himself was fond of using elaborate similes. Many Black Mask writers transitioned successfully to novel writing, often expanding the material of their short stories into novel-length narratives. The hardboiled style continued to thrive with the rise of the paperback industry in the 1940s, which allowed the reading public greater access to crime fiction, and led to the reprinting of Chandler and Hammett’s 1930s hardcovers.
The Venetian Vase 