darkness at noon (arthur koestler, tr philip boehm)

Darkness at Noon was an essential text of my adolescence. One of those books that everyone had to read. A time before the fall of the iron curtain, when the cold war still wrapped the planet in an icy embrace. At the same time, we in Britain weren’t sacred of being imprisoned for out political views, unlike someone my age growing up in the country I now live in, and many others. We thought, reading the book, that we were being given an insight, allowed to eavesdrop, on a world that was ‘over there’, the land of the bogeymen. We weren’t aware of what our government had been doing in the likes of Kenya, Borneo, India, even Northern Ireland, at the same time as Stalin & co were waging their ideological wars against their own citizens, a war that Koestler examines with forensic skill. Then for a long time, I guess after the fall of the wall, all that jazz, the novel seemed out-dated, belonging to another era. In truth, its meticulous intellectual tone does sound like it emerges from another mindset, on that predates Tarantino, Baudrillard, and all the other high priests of historical relativity. However, the content seems, if anything, even more pertinent now than it did back in those adolescent Winchester days. Koestler examines a state where the personal and the political cannot be divorced. For decades we inhabited the false idea that these Siamese twins been successfully and surgically pulled apart. But it was never that simple. Sooner or later they were likely to collide once more. From China to the USA to Europe (including the UK), from Guantanamo detainees to Uyghur camps to Catalan rappers,  the liberty of political expression, and the punishment for deviating from the received status quo, is ever more in the balance. Darkness at Noon reads like a voice from the near-past bearing warnings about our near-future. 

the power and the glory [greene]

The whisky priest feels like a definitive Greene trope, even if you’ve never read Greene. Catholic angst. Addiction. The struggle. 

It’s a hard to put a finger on Greene. Was he conservative or radical? Was he establishment or anti-establishment? On the one hand  he carved out a role as a celebrated British man of letters. He’s not an outsider like Lowry, for example. On the other, his themes and interests are decidedly internationalist. As though the British shores were too suffocating and he, like Lowry, had to swim away in order to find the stories that mattered, or find a context within which he felt as though he could tell the stories he wanted to tell. 

The Power and the Glory finds him in deepest, darkest Mexico, at the time of the repression of the priests, following the Calles law. The book follows a downtrodden priest as he tries to escape, constantly finding himself held back by the pull of his own conscience. Greene transforms the priest into a minor saint, with a coda showing a child’s veneration of the fallen hero. It’s a novel which feels both brilliantly constructed and yet dry, slightly brittle. The author’s eye always appears to be outside, looking in, rather than inside looking out. We sympathise with the priest but we never empathise with him. You sense that in so many ways Greene is using the character of the priest to articulate his own struggles as a believer; yet it also feels as though the author is using his narrative as a framing device which allows him to maintain a distance, to not engage.

It’s a curious, double-edged approach. Greene’s skill as a novelist is not in doubt. He maintains an alien story as it unfolds towards its seemingly inevitable grim conclusion. The skill is admirable; the power undeniable; but the passion feels as though it’s kept at arm’s length; the glory is evanescent, opaque.

the philadelphia story (d. cukor)

The Philadelphia Story was presented as part of a season of women-friendly films at the NFT. A well known comedienne introduced it, and there was then a short two minute film with several other relatively well-known comediennes talking about how the film industry no longer creates interesting parts for women. Not like they used to.

But would any woman want to play the part Hepburn takes on in this most bizarre, wonderful film? She may be a strong, ballsy woman, but she's also brought to book by her ex-husband, and in one strange scene which wouldn't have got past the script editors nowadays, her father. She's shown up as a prig who gets her come-uppance, and though Jimmy Stewart doesn't take advantage of her in her drunken state, that's more a reflection of his values than hers. There's more than a hint of Taming of The Shrew about the narrative, and if Hepburn's Tracy Lord gets away with it all, that's in part because of the uber-privileged life she is shown to be living, where wealth insulates against tragedy.

There's so much which seems wrong about the narrative and the world the film, based on a highly successful play, creates, that it comes as all the more of a shock that it carries off whatever it's attempting to do. Not just carries it off, but runs away with it in a blaze of glory. (It's also notable that the piece was created whilst all hell was going on in the rest of the world, a hell which must have seemed a long way away in sunny California.)

For what it's worth, here are two opinions as to why the film works. Firstly, the film is a dazzling, wittily written comedy. But it would appear to be written by writers who have some knowledge of the pain which lies beneath the surface of all relationships. The film opens with Grant pushing Hepburn over. In a sense the remainder of the film becomes a treatise on the vicissitudes of marriage: what makes it work and what doesn't. There is a poignancy to all the fun, and the fact that C.K.Dexter Haven is going to get Tracy back, and go through with it all a second time, gives the love story a weight, as well as a freedom, that few love stories possess. Secondly, concerning the tradition the film emerges from. It has the wit of a Wilde play, and the perversity of a Shakespearian comedy. It seems like the very tip of a culture, which is part American, that brave new pioneering America, and part European - the two cultures colliding with such brilliance in the technological marvel hall which was Hollywood.

Watching it now is like being taken through the round window. The further into the distance the film recedes, as the luminous cast continue to fade away and die, the more this feels like a visit to an enchanted world. It's true, they don't make parts like Tracy Lord for women anymore. Then again they don't make parts like C.K. Dexter Haven or Macaulay Connor for men either.