A Cameo Disappearance

A couple of months ago I was out and about squiring a beautiful young lady around town (stand down, it’s not what you think) when we found ourselves in the balcony of the cinema about to watch Murder on the Orient Express. After I had issued the usual instruction for her to behave herself in the dark, we found ourselves watching the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, prominently featuring Kevin Spacey in a key role. ‘That,’ I predicted, ‘is going to have problems,’ for the initial allegations of misconduct against Spacey were already in general circulation.

The very next day I switched on my laptop to discover that reshoots were already in progress, and that Spacey’s performance was being excised from the film and replaced by one from Christopher Plummer – just one more element in a career which is enjoying a virtually Christopher Lee-esque Indian Summer. I suppose that in the end this is a very shrewd decision on the part of Scott and the other producers – they get to look like they’re taking a stand against abusive behaviour, there’s no risk of the film being boycotted by outraged activists, and it is another source of publicity for the film, which is always welcome, after all. (Yes, I know, I’m a cynical old beast.)

Having said that, I wonder if Plummer is also under retainer to film new versions of Spacey’s scenes  from American Beauty? Or is that more in Ben Affleck’s line nowadays? It’s the logical next step, surely, and the technology is very nearly there. Who’s going to replace Spacey in The Usual Suspects? Or Seven? Or Superman Returns? I must confess that this updated version of damnatio memoriae (for this is surely really what we’re on the verge of) leaves me a little uneasy. I can’t help thinking that in the end this is all still really just about the bottom line.

On the other hand, this is a very appropriate sentiment for a film like All the Money in the World, a retelling of the true story of the Getty kidnapping case of 1973, something so jam packed with grotesque and garish twists that I’m rather surprised it’s never been the subject of a high-profile movie before.

The movie doesn’t hang about and opens with the kidnapping in Rome of Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer – no relation), sixteen year old grandson of oil tycoon John Paul Getty (Plummer, currently at least). At this point in history, Getty Senior was not just the richest man in the world, but the richest man in the history of the world, famously single-minded in his pursuit of wealth and quite staggeringly tight-fisted – the movie suggests he washed his own socks in hotels to avoid paying the laundry, and installed a payphone in his home so his guests could make personal calls while visiting him. (He also appears to have believed himself to be the reincarnation of the Emperor Hadrian.)  Paul Jr’s mother Abigail (Michelle Williams, who’s having a busy time of it currently) goes to her father-in-law for the ransom money the kidnappers are demanding, expecting him – as you would – to be sympathetic to the plight of his favourite grandchild, especially given he has – wait for it – all the money in the world.

But no. Getty refuses to pay – it’s not quite a case of it being not the money but the principle, as the principle involved is his never giving any money away if he can help it. Paying Paul Jr’s ransom will just encourage people to go about kidnapping his other thirteen grandchildren and making inroads into his personal fortune. No cash. All he can offer are the services of his security operative Fletcher Chase (Marky Mark Wahlberg), whom he instructs to investigate the case and retrieve Paul Jr intact, if possible, with the minimum possible outlay of funds…

As I say, what follows is a fascinating and at times barely credible tale, which initially seems like a race to the bottom between the kidnappers and the Italian police as they compete to be the most inept and cack-handed. That said, I found a rather queasy sense of tension persisted, because there was one thing I did know about the Getty kidnapping – the criminals’ threat to return the boy to his family in installments, via the postal service. What I suppose we must call the film’s Reservoir Dogs moment duly arrives, and is possibly not quite as grisly as it feels, but it’s still certainly not one for the squeamish.

Then again, there’s a sense in which the film is all about a certain kind of brutality, that of people who believe that every single thing has a price tag on it (the insights into the deeply dysfunctional Getty coterie suggest it’s also saying something about how having too much money really screws you up). Principally these are Getty himself and the kidnappers, both of whom have very strong ideas about what Paul Jr’s freedom is worth. Caught in the middle is Abigail Getty, whose problems mainly arise from the fact that nobody believes that a member of the world’s richest family doesn’t have access to any funds. Williams is very good in the role, which still feels a little bit underwritten – the same could really be said of Wahlberg, who gets a nice moment of moral outrage near the end but mostly just stands around looking stern. Also caught in the middle and making a rather good impression is Romain Duris as a kidnapper with a conscience, who almost becomes Paul Jr’s protector against the more brutal parties who become involved.

All this said, however, the person most likely to come away from All the Money in the World with a gong is Christopher Plummer. It is, I suspect, a source of considerable relief to Ridley Scott that most of the scenes featuring Getty take place indoors with a handful of other characters, thus keeping the cost of replacing them down (in the film’s only big location sequence featuring the character, Spacey apparently still appears in the wide shot) – the fact that Getty plays a relatively minor role in the story has also helped them out. I have seen reports that Plummer really contributes not much more than an extended cameo, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way: he dominates the movie, even though he is absent from the screen for quite long stretches as the story unfolds.

The kidnappers remain a fairly anonymous bunch, Duris’ character excepted, and the movie definitely reserves its most severe approbation for Getty himself, for the tycoon is depicted as nothing less than an icy, ruthless monster – ‘evil’ is not an overstatement. Some of his manoeuvres towards the end of the story are quite breathtaking in their calculating selfishness. Of course, what we’re seeing here is a bunch of very rich Hollywood producers asserting how awful rich people can be, but the script and Plummer’s performance are both good enough to make you forget about this while you’re watching it.

Long-term visitors may recall that I’m not an unconditional fan of Ridley Scott’s work, and while I have generally warmed up to his more recent films, he’s still very capable of underwhelming me. All the Money in the World, however, is as effective and slick as the best of his films. It’s very much the Hollywood version of history – the chronology of events is outrageously tweaked to serve the story – and, I suspect, the depiction of Italy is not the sort to fill the Italian Tourist Board with delight, but this is a very engaging and well-made film. I’m not sure it says anything profound about wealth or values, but it’s still a classy piece of entertainment.

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WTD?!?

Dearie me, here we are again at the end of another year, with everything that it entails: the adverts start a little bit earlier every year, the sentimentality becomes a little bit more glutinous, the doublethink just a little more bemusing. (Yeah, I should say: this is probably going to get extremely cynical, even by the normal standards of this blog. What can I say? So it goes.)

But, you know, let’s do something a bit different and try a Christmas movie for a change. I mean, it’s not as if there aren’t any Christmas films that I have time for: I like It’s A Wonderful Life (well, who doesn’t?). I like Die Hard. I like Brazil. So, there’s every chance that I could end up liking this new film, always assuming it includes one or other of an attempted suicide, blood-sodden gun battles, or delusional insanity as a happy ending. So here’s hoping.

Well, anyway, the new film is Bharat Nalluri’s The Man Who Invented Christmas, a fictionalised account of a period in the life of Charles Dickens (you know, I’m starting to think those blood-sodden gun battles may not appear). Dan Stevens plays Dickens himself, who at the start of the film is making his first tour of the USA, where he is greatly feted. Quite what this sequence is doing here I have no idea, for it contributes nothing to the story; I imagine it is present only to try and sell the movie to America.

Things get underway in earnest some time later, towards the back end of 1843. Dickens finds himself financially embarrassed and in need of a hit, after a number of flops in a row. So he resolves to write a book for the Christmas market which will solve all his problems. But whatever will he write about? Well, there’s a doddery old waiter at the Garrick Club called Marley, he sees a grim-faced old man muttering ‘humbug’ at a funeral, he overhears his new maid telling the Dickenslings a fairy story about ghosts, and so on.

Still, it’s a tough old gig writing a novel in only about six weeks (apparently – although some of us do manage it every November), and things get a bit fraught between Dickens and his family, especially his feckless old dad (Jonathan Pryce) with whom he has Issues. (Hey! Jonathan Pryce was in Brazil, that’s a good sign.) There is also the problem that Dickens can’t come up with a happy ending – is Tiny Tim marked for death???

Hum, well. The Man Who Invented Christmas is clearly a film which has something to say about the Real Meaning of Christmas. Well, let me just stop you there, The Man Who Invented Christmas, not least because (need it even be said?) Charles Dickens did not actually invent Christmas, Christmas not being that kind of discrete, specific concept, but instead a syncretised religious and cultural event which has existed in various forms and under different names for thousands of years, with roots in traditions as widely-flung as Egyptian and Norse mythology. (Glad we got that sorted out.) The film suggests the Real Meaning of Christmas is something to do with our better selves and redemption and kindness and generosity and all that sort of thing. My experience is that this is what many people like to to tell themselves Christmas is all about, before surrendering to the warm glow of self-satisfaction this idea gives them and spending several hundred pounds on a giant TV, which they proceed to fall asleep in front of after consuming enough alcohol to power a small outboard motor. Personally, even if I had invented Christmas, I would not necessarily rush to take the credit for it.

You know what, I’m starting to think I’m not the best person to give this film an objective review. Never mind, let’s press on. The basic idea of this film is not that different from Shakespeare in Love, although in this case Dickens in Debt would obviously be a better title. There’s a lot of slightly strained humour as we see Dickens pacing about his study, trying to think of a name for his protagonist, muttering things like ‘Scrunge? Scrank?’ It is a fairly well-documented phenomenon that, while films require good writing, films primarily about the act of writing are rarely good. This film’s crack at the problem of how to make writing a novel cinematically interesting is to have the various characters from A Christmas Carol materialise and talk to Dickens.

This does at least enable what’s indisputably the best thing in the movie, which is the appearance of Christopher Plummer as Scrooge. (Plummer has been having a bit of a Christopher Lee-type Indian Summer in his career for some years now.) You really want to see Plummer play Scrooge properly, and not engage in the underpowered ‘comic’ banter with Stevens that he is assigned here. There is, I suppose, something mildly amusing about the idea of Charles Dickens being followed around and annoyed by the cast of one of his novels, but it’s not exactly fall-off-your-seat funny, and it’s hardly a convincing depiction of the creative process.

In fact, this is one of those comedy dramas which isn’t that funny and isn’t especially dramatic, either – they have a stab at some kind of psychological insight, by suggesting that Dickens can’t bear to see Scrooge redeemed until the author has himself worked through his various daddy issues, but it feels a little bit contrived. (One wonders what Simon Callow, a noted Dickens authority who appears in a supporting role, made of the script.) Certainly there is little sense of any real darkness or complexity to the Dickens of this film.

The thing about a really good Christmas movie is that it does work hard to earn the happy-feel-good conclusion by going to somewhere genuinely dark and troubled on the way. This one doesn’t – it’s just slightly insipid all the way through, dramatically inert, almost aggressively bland.

You can almost imagine the thought process that led to this movie being made – no-one does costume drama quite like the British film industry, and those are a good bet at this time of year. But, as there have been nearly thirty movie or TV versions of A Christmas Carol already, including ones where Scrooge has been played by a skunk, a smurf, and Michael Caine, obviously the edict was to do something different. This is a competent film in its own way, I suppose, but I just came away wishing they’d done a proper adaptation of the book, so Plummer could have played Scrooge properly. As it is, this is soft in the middle and runny round the edges, and generally about as appetising as that sounds.

 

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The End of Future History and the Last Klingon

The time has come for a confession, and not one I ever recall making before. Here we go; brace yourselves. I have never really understood what all the fuss is about when it comes to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I mean, I’m not saying it’s actually an actively bad film, and it’s certainly an improvement on Star Trek V, but I get the sense it’s considered to be some kind of cinematic triumph, a return to form to match the best films from the 1980s. (That said, looking at the Rotten Tomatoes percentages for the Star Trek film series is very nearly enough to make you lose your faith in the human race anyway.) And I’m afraid I just don’t get it.

Nicholas Meyer, writer-director of Star Trek II and co-writer of Star Trek IV, came back to oversee the proceedings. Apparently this was partly a political decision, as it was thought that giving Leonard Nimoy the gig might annoy William Shatner, but this seems to have been a troubled production in many ways – the future of the film series had been thrown into doubt by the failure of Star Trek V, and it was only the looming 25th anniversary of the TV show, and the desire to do one last movie with the original cast, that led to this movie being given the green light. Even so, Harve Bennett, the writer-producer who had overseen all the 80s movies, walked away from the series after his idea for a prequel showing how all the characters had met was rejected (it is customary at this point to crack wise about how this idea eventually resurfaced in 2009; feel free to do so if you wish). In short, this was a movie made on a punishingly low budget and brief production schedule – I suppose the fact that it is reasonably accomplished does qualify as something of an achievement.

Well, anyway: the political settlement of the late 23rd century is thrown into turmoil when a major industrial accident deep within the Klingon Empire threatens to render Qo’NoS uninhabitable and bring about the collapse of Klingon civilisation. This does however give the visionary Klingon chancellor (David Warner) the opportunity he needs to negotiations with the Federation, with a view to ending decades of hostility and bringing about a new age of galactic peace and unity.

The Enterprise senior staff, who are months away from retirement (the film has a tendency to get a bit meta about this, not to mentiona sentimental), are rounded up and given the mission of escorting the Klingon diplomatic party to Earth. (The only person not back at his post is Sulu (George Takei), who – unusually for a long-running Trek character – appears to have developed a career and is now in charge of his own ship.) Kirk (Shatner) is less than delighted that Spock (Nimoy) has volunteered him for this, as he still has issues with the Klingons killing his son a few movies ago. But duty is duty.

An uneasy atmosphere between the two groups degenerates into open distrust and hostility when the chancellor’s ship is attacked, apparently by the Enterprise, and the chancellor himself is murdered. Kirk and McCoy are arrested, put on trial, and packed off to the Klingon equivalent of Siberia, and it’s up to Spock and the others to solve the mystery of the murder and work out who is trying to sabotage the peace settlement…

When The Undiscovered Country came out in 1991 (or 1992, depending on where you were living at the time), the world was a radically different place to that of five years earlier. The TV show The Next Generation, initially viewed by some members of the original cast as a preposterous upstart, had become well-established as a popular and (eventually) critical success, and the failure of Star Trek V seemed to have proven that the future of Star Trek really lay with the Enterprise-D and its crew (you could argue the movie acknowledges this by giving a cameo role to Michael Dorn, playing an ancestor of his TNG character). Bearing this in mind, Star Trek VI seems like a bit of an indulgence, one last chance to see the old gang, an opportunity for them to leave the stage gracefully and with a little dignity. And you can’t fault the sentiment behind that, but it’s not necessarily a recipe for a great movie.

This is a film which is dealing with some powerful themes – intolerance, racism, fear of the future – and you would expect it to go into some fairly dark and intense places. Yet it doesn’t. There are some fleeting moments of genuine drama – Spock tells Kirk the Klingons will die if a peace treaty is not agreed, and Kirk snarls back ‘Let them die!’, there is the scene where Spock uses a mind-meld to tear information from the brain of the traitor Valeris – but much of the time this is trying too hard to be a fun, light-hearted romp. I think it was Kim Newman, reviewing the movie in Sight and Sound, who suggested how much more effective it would have been as a drama had, say, Scotty turned out to be one of the conspirators, but that would have run totally counter to the purpose of the film, which is not to provide complex drama, but nostalgic fun. As it is, the tone of the film never quite feels right.

I think that to some extent Nicholas Meyer’s lack of grounding in Star Trek is a little more on display here than was the case in his earlier scripts for the movies. Quite apart from controversial innovations such as putting a kitchen on the Enterprise (apparently that’s controversial, if you’re a Trekkie), it doesn’t feel like he ever quite gets the Klingons exactly right – they’re not the mostly irredeemable villains of the TV show, nor really the slightly more nuanced and alien culture that had been established in The Next Generation by this point. That said, he does write a good villain in Christopher Plummer’s General Chang.

Instead, Meyer’s Klingons are transparently based on the Soviets – they have show trials, a gulag, and so on. However, this does make sense when you consider that the whole film operates as an allegory for US-Russian geopolitical relations in the late 80s and early 90s. It opens with a deep space version of the Chernobyl accident, and goes on to cover what Meyer described as ‘the Berlin Wall coming down in space’. Fair enough, but it’s hardly handled with the greatest of subtlety, or really much subtlety at all. And it never really touches upon the central paradox of the plot, which is that humans and Klingons find the prospect of peacefully co-operation so objectionable that they co-operate together to stop it happening. Nimoy himself later admitted that they had missed a trick in not taking the opportunity to explore just why the Klingons had always been so implacably hostile.

Still, as I say, it’s not what you’d call an awful movie, just a little underwhelming. I think that by the time it reached the UK, we knew that Next Generation movies would eventually be coming, Deep Space 9 was on the way, Gene Roddenberry had died, and there was a general sense that Star Trek was moving on, away from the original characters. I think it may be the film’s very affection for Kirk, Spock, and the gang that keeps it from giving them the really memorable swan song they surely deserved. A curious problem; I’m not sure how it could have been solved.

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A Long, Long Line

As hardly any new movies seem to be being released at the moment, I thought this would be an opportune moment to enjoy another classic from years gone by. So let us turn to a film which secured the services of a number of hugely successful stars and a couple of distinguished, Oscar-winning artists, yet which still languishes in relative obscurity: ladies and gentlemen, from 1978, I give you Luigi Cozzi’s Starcrash.

Starcrash is concerned with the doings of comely space-smuggler Stella Star (played by the cult actress and model Caroline Munro) and her partner Akton (bubble-permed evangelical preacher/conman-turned-actor Marjoe Gortner), who seem to spend most of their time being chased by the Galactic Police. During one of their death-defying escapes they come across a lifeboat ejected from a ship in the fleet of the benevolent Emperor of the Universe (Christopher Plummer – yes, that Christopher Plummer) – while searching for the, um, doom planet of the Emperor’s arch-rival Zarth Arn…

(I feel obliged at this point to stress that I am not making this up, this genuinely is a real film.)

…Zarth Arn, the ship came under attack and launched three lifeboats, one of which contained the vessel’s commander, the Emperor’s son Prince Simon (David Hasselhoff – yes, that David Hasselhoff). In order to put a stop to Zarth Arn’s evil plan to take over the universe, the lifeboat with Prince Simon in it has to be found!

But clearly not yet, as first there is a subplot about Stella and Akton being nicked and sent to prison to be got out of the way. Stella is sentenced to hard labour, which in the universe of Starcrash consists of dumping radium into a furnace, for fairly obscure reasons. Stella is vocal in her concern as to what the radiation is doing to her skin, although it has to be said her choice of outfit (essentially a bikini top and hot pants) is probably not ideal protective clothing. Soon enough she hits on an escape plan, which is moderately successful as she does indeed escape, although on the other hand everyone else in the prison is killed when the radium furnaces blow up.

Starcrash does not dwell on such trivial things as moral responsibility, however, and soon Stella has had her sentence quashed and, along with Akton, is helping the Imperial secret police look for Prince Simon’s lifeboat. The Imperial secret police consist of Captain Thor, who is a bald green man, and Elle, who, despite the name, is a robot bearing a striking resemblance to a man with a bucket on his head, with a yee-haw accent and personality.

So off they go on their quest, which takes in Amazons on horseback, cavemen, badly-animated rip-offs of classic Ray Harryhausen sequences, unexpected betrayal (Captain Thor has decided to join Zarth Arn as his ‘prince of darkness’), sparkling dialogue (‘No-one can survive these deadly rays!’ ‘These deadly rays will be your death!’), David Hasselhoff shooting lasers out of his eyes, and so on.

In the end Akton, whose supernatural powers have remained wildly variable and completely unexplained throughout, cops it in a laser sword fight with a couple of appallingly-realised stop-motion robots, leaving Stella and Prince Simon to carry on the battle, even though Zarth Arn has rigged the whole planet to blow up in a few seconds. Luckily, the Emperor shows up in the nick of time and Plummer, with an admirably straight face, proceeds to show everyone else what actual acting looks like. ‘You know, my boy, I wouldn’t be emperor if I didn’t have some powers at my command,’ says Plummer. ‘Imperial battleship, halt the Flow of Time!!!’

Everyone having thus been saved, with the Flow of Time restored they all go off to fight evil Zarth Arn and his space station of doom (which looks like a big hand – I was about to add ‘for no very good reason’, but pretty much everything and everyone in Starcrash is as it is for no very good reason). The ensuing battle looks much as you’d expect for a film with no discernible budget, but is noteworthy for the imperial tactic of shooting torpedoes in through the space station windows, said torpedoes then popping open and imperial soldiers jumping out, ray guns zapping.

But it is all to no avail, and our heroes are forced into the desperate tactic of finding a big space station of their own and crashing it into Zarth Arn’s one. (See what they did there? A big crash, with some stars in the background – hence, Starcrash! This film is so clever.) With Zarth Arn vanquished and Prince Simon and Stella Star engaged in hugging one another, it’s left to the Emperor to sum up all that has occurred, before heading off to the nearest pizzeria (Plummer has been very frank about the fact that he only took this part because it let him hang out in Rome, where his scenes were filmed, for a couple of days).

Well, I think we all know what’s going on with Starcrash – ever since George Lucas struck gold with one of his movies in 1977, other people have been trying to mine the same seam with varying degrees of success. Some of these Lucas knock-offs have been pretty good. Others are, frankly, exquisitely terrible. Starcrash is definitely one of the latter kind. (The Italians seem to have had a special talent for making dreadful Lucas rip-offs – the year after Starcrash they came up with The Humanoid, starring Richard Kiel, which is probably even worse.)

Starcrash has a terrible script, terrible production values, and (mostly) terrible performances – I suppose on some level the really surprising thing is that some parts of it are not as terrible as the rest. Plummer’s presence we have already dealt with, but how to explain the participation of legendary composer John Barry, who provides (as you might expect) a decent score? Maybe even better than decent: it has been suggested that Barry reused much of his Starcrash score when doing the music for Out of Africa some years later, a film for which he won an Oscar. But that brings us much too close to comfort to using the words ‘Oscar-winning’ and ‘Starcrash‘ in the same sentence, so I prefer to say that most of John Barry’s later scores sounded pretty samey anyway.

The thing is, though, that by looking at Starcrash in all its terribleness, you do get a much stronger sense of just how remarkable George Lucas’ own movies in this genre are. On paper, the plot of Starcrash and that of the movie I am pointedly not naming are both fishing from the same pond – space smugglers and laser swords and galactic monarchy and space stations of doom abound in both, and yet Starcrash seems to be slapping these elements together at random, whereas Lucas weaves them into the fabric of a cohesive larger backdrop. That certain other franchise of Lucas’ did not achieve the success it did because of its radical characterisation or innovative plotting – I think the true reason it has continued to have some small measure of success and popularity is due to how utterly convincing the world it depicts is, so flooded with detail and colour like no fantasy film before it. Even when the budget falls short or the acting is less than stellar, it’s still disconcertingly easy to believe in the wealth of background detail.

I’m not sure it’s just a question of budget or acting talent, either, for all that Starcrash was made for a small fraction of the money George Lucas had at his disposal when making his first foray into this genre. Lucas, if nothing else, is a man who knows his film history and his anthropology, and there is surely a purposefulness to his work which is so often lacking in that of those copying the superficial elements of his films.

These days, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to love Lucas’ earlier films while holding the man himself in a sort of amused contempt, which seems to me to be rather like hating the author of your favourite book. It is, I suppose, the most backhanded of compliments – Lucas’ world is so totally believable as a real place that it’s too easy to forget that, in the end, it came out of his own head, and assume he is somehow dispensable when it comes to realising or reinventing it. And while hardly anyone would seriously argue the later films are not flawed, they have an honesty of purpose and willingness to innovate which is impressive and laudable: they at least try to do something new and different, rather than taking the easy route of revisiting past glories and riffing on the same few ideas and themes.

Ultimately, you cannot dismiss George Lucas’ contribution to the fantasy genre, let alone what he has brought to his own movies. Lots of people have spent many years and huge amounts of money making a long, long line of films essentially knocking off his vision. Some of them have been motivated by sincere affection, others by purely mercenary concerns, others are somewhere in between. Some of the films, like Starcrash, have been awful – others, genuinely accomplished. But George Lucas brought something unique to the productions he was involved in, and also to the genre as a whole, which is surely what has made them, and it, so popular to this day. He can be copied lovingly, carefully, respectfully – but I don’t think he can really be replaced.

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Sh(erl)ock Horror

Is there a more richly mythologised period of recent history than the Victorian era? This is the period of time which gave us the Wild West, immortalised in hundreds of movies and novels, but closer to home (for us in the UK) is the concept of Britain as an imperial nation, and the source of hundreds of characters from fiction both literary and pulpy. Indeed, our conception of Victorian Britain is surely largely defined by its presentation in novels and films, with the boundaries between real life and fiction becoming oddly mutable as a result.

Certainly there’s no shortage of more recent metafiction in which these Victorian icons meet, in varying combinations – the champion probably remains Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, in which Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau share their notes and Griffin, Moriarty, and Bill Sykes are part of the same criminal syndicate, while Hammer’s remarkable Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde sees the – er- conflicted researcher encountering Burke and Hare the grave-robbers (who have inexplicably relocated from Edinburgh to the East End).

What both these works have in common is that they tie in to the real world, by virtue of including another character who – in a strange way – straddles the boundary between fiction and reality. Anno Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde both present ‘solutions’ to the mystery of Jack the Ripper. This isn’t necessarily surprising, as the Ripper murders are one of the great mysteries of recent times, and TV shows from Kolchak to Babylon 5 have all had a go at ‘solving’ it. Most of these attempts are not intended seriously – but one of the mash-ups was, at least partly, and it remains an interesting film in other ways too.

Bob Clark’s Murder by Decree was released in 1979 and is set in London at the time of Ripper murders. The police appear to be baffled by the spree of savage killings, which makes it all the more peculiar that they have not followed standard practice in such situations and retained the services of London’s greatest investigator, Sherlock Holmes (here portrayed by Christopher Plummer).

However, a group of Whitechapel businessmen, conscious of the effect the ongoing panic is having on trade in the East End, approach Holmes with an eye to hiring him themselves. With the faithful Doctor Watson (James Mason) at his side, Holmes sets out on the trail of the Ripper, little realising it will lead him to the highest echelons of the British establishment…

Well, if you’ve seen From Hell, you will already know the solution to the Ripper crimes which Murder by Decree endorses: in fact, if you extract all the Sherlockian material from this movie, you do end up with something not too different to From Hell in many ways. The theory in question is certainly an interesting one (and arguably makes more sense than blaming a famous artist who was out of the country when some of the murders were committed, as one celebrated author has done). As a means of communicating this theory in a digestible and engaging way, Murder by Decree is clearly successful. But what about its merits as a film?

Certainly, the production values are quite impressive, although some of the modelwork and matte paintings used to create Victorian London give the place a fairytale quality which may not, strictly speaking, serve the story all that well. The tone of the thing is interesting: for much of its length it plays like a late-period Hammer horror, not short on Kensington Gore, with the Ripper’s coach emerging from a wall of fog in slow-motion like something from a genuine nightmare. The climax plays like a more conventional action movie, with Holmes and the Ripper engaging in personal combat, but even after this comes a lengthy (and rather talky) scene in which Holmes explains how he figured out what’s been going on to the cabal at the heart of the conspiracy.

That he’s managed to do so at all is quite impressive, partly because, in many ways, the plot of Murder by Decree is all over the place – the genuine facts of the Ripper killings are touched upon, but also added to the brew are Anarchist politics, Freemasonry, social comment and even a dash of the paranormal, courtesy of the inclusion of a psychic who identifies the Ripper’s address. It’s also a bit of a feat considering that, prior to this in the movie, the Great Detective has made none of the brilliant deductions he is most famous for, his methods seeming to rely on a mastery of forensic science, his own personal charm, and simply being in the right place at the right time.

Christopher Plummer is a fine and often-underrated actor, but his problem here is that he’s playing a Sherlock Holmes who doesn’t bear much resemblance to the character Conan Doyle was writing about. The trappings are all there – the pipe, the violin, the chemistry set – and he’s never out of his ulster, but this is just superficial. The character seems to be more drawn from the Basil Rathbone version – he’s a jovial, energetic leading man, indulgent of Mason’s crusty, mournful Watson (I hate to say it, but Mason is too old, both as a Watson to Plummer – the actors are twenty years apart in age – and as Watson in general, given the good doctor would have been 40 at the absolute oldest in 1888). This is very much Holmes’ story, as Watson doesn’t get a great deal to do.

You might argue that there are taste issues to consider here, considering we’re talking about a film which takes a much-loved literary hero and mixes him up with the activities of a very real, horribly brutal and misogynistic serial killer – you wouldn’t show Inspector Morse catching Fred West, for instance. Certainly the murders here are much fouler than anything in Conan Doyle. But the film earns itself some credit for not buying into the picture-postcard view of Victorian London common to so many Holmes adaptations. The prostitutes of Whitechapel lead a convincingly horrible and wretched existence, and – provided you buy into the central thesis of the movie – the sympathies of all involved are clearly with the London underclass rather than the establishment.

The first time I saw this movie, I thought a sequence in which the plight of one of the girls moves Holmes first to tears and then to a violent rage did not ring true to the character. And it doesn’t – to Conan Doyle’s Holmes, at least. But in the context of this film, it does make sense. Using Holmes to express a sense of moral outrage at the corruption and hypocrisy of the British establishment is a novel direction to take him in, but in terms of this film, at least, it does work. This, if nothing else, elevates Murder by Decree above the level of simply being nasty exploitation.

Murder by Decree was hailed by the New York Daily Times’ critic as the best Sherlock Holmes movie ever made. I would certainly argue with that, on the grounds that in many ways this is a very inauthentic presentation of the character. But, if we think of it instead simply as a movie featuring Sherlock Holmes, then I’m inclined to cut it a good deal more slack – it has interesting ideas, decent production values, a very strong cast (David Hemmings, Frank Finlay, John Gielgud, Genevieve Bujold, and so on), and its heart is in the right place. (Which is more than can be said for the Ripper’s victims.) One of the classier Holmes movies, and possibly the classiest Ripper movie of the lot.

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The Silence of the Moose

If you were to saunter into the offices of any major movie studio and request $80 million to engage the cream of international talent so that they might make a lavish two-and-a-half-hour-plus movie about sexual violence against women, featuring all manner of graphic content and centring on a protagonist who is a) bisexual and b) possibly insane, you would most probably find yourself rapidly expelled from the same offices very shortly afterwards, possibly not even via the door. Unless, of course, said movie had a built-in audience, due to it being an adaptation of a massively popular novel by one of the most bankable names in modern literature. Some say he was a journalist who investigated and campaigned against the extreme right. Others say that he spent time in his youth training African women to use grenade launchers. All we know is, he’s called the Stieg (Larsson).

Yes, it’s David Fincher’s value-for-money adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – one of those books which everyone seemed to be reading just a couple of years ago. I, whether fortunately or not, am one of the eight people in western Europe not to have done so, nor have I seen the Swedish movie version of this story. So at least this review will be unpolluted by outside influences, for a change.

Set in Hollywood Sweden (i.e. everyone speaks English – this produces some very strange and intrusive effects, such as when the print on a cheque is in Swedish but the script in English), Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading investigative journalist who’s facing a career crisis after a lawsuit goes against him. He is thrown a lifeline when elderly tycoon Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) retains his services, ostensibly to write his biography but really to investigate the vanishing of his niece decades earlier. The Vanger clan are a prickly and deeply dysfunctional group, with more than one former Nazi sympathiser amongst them, but – rather to his surprise – Blomkvist makes progress. Wanting to corroborate his findings, he retains the services of a superbly efficient investigator the Vangers have previously used to run a background check on him.

She is Lisbeth Salander (Mara Rooney), a striking and uncompromising figure: androgynous, fiercely self-contained, heavily tattooed and pierced (she is the title character). The events of a traumatic childhood have left her emotionally aloof, and also the ward of the state. Nevertheless she leaps at the chance to assisting in hunting down a serial killer who preys on women, not realising the danger that she and Blomkvist may be placing themselves in.

First things first – judged by any reasonable standard, this is an excellent thriller. The distinctly Bond-esque title sequence with accompanying rock song may create entirely the wrong set of associations for the audience, but it soon becomes clear that this is a more thoughtful and measured kind of film. Indeed, there’s almost something of Agatha Christie in the set-up of the central mystery plot. Said plot is satisfyingly convoluted and clever, and the movie never insulted my intelligence – if anything, it insulted my stupidity in that a few small points whizzed past a little too swiftly for me to keep track of them! This did not spoil the overall experience, though.

Beyond this, though, the film has a peculiarly sprawling structure. It’s quite a long way into what’s a long movie before Craig and Rooney team up (the chemistry between them is excellent and both give terrific performances), and prior to this it’s a little unclear what the significance of the Salander character is.

This is particularly the case given that the thread about Blomkvist and the Vangers is, initially at least, rather genteel. The scenes with Salander, on the other hand, frequently plunge into graphic unpleasantness with virtually no warning. This is why this movie has been slapped with a box-office-unfriendly 18 rating in the UK, and deservedly so. They are not pleasant to watch: there is considerable sexual violence and other explicit abuse. I could feel the atmosphere in the auditorium change the first time one began, and shift again whenever one seemed to be in the offing.

Then again, if people find scenes of rape and abuse shocking, that’s surely only for the best? A friend who saw the film said he could have done without them – but interestingly, he didn’t come out and say they were gratuitous. They absolutely aren’t – to me they’re central to the theme of this film, which is the effects of sexual violence on both the perpetrators and the victims. Given the devaluation of violent crime in so many movies and TV shows (victims blown away by the score in CSI, hunting killers treated as a jolly, jokey game in Midsummer Murders), the extreme nature of some sequences in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo serves to make clear exactly the character of the offences the film is dealing with. I found parts of this film difficult to watch, it’s true – but that’s as it should be, in a civilised society. I thought this was a brave and commendable choice on the part of the film-makers.

David Fincher’s direction is fluent, Steven Zaillian’s screenplay is deft (and even shot through with dark humour in places), and all the performances are accomplished: Rooney and Craig particularly so, while a rather good Stellan Skarsgard pops up to fly the thesping flag for the home team. (Nearly everyone else is British or American – accents are rather variable.)

What really surprised me was how much of a European sensibility this film managed to retain – in its careful pace, its refusal to provide the obvious set-pieces one would expect in a Hollywood thriller, and most of all in its closing stages. With what’s been presented as its central plotline apparently resolved, the film nevertheless proceeds for quite a long time, dealing with various other subplots. Salander, who has grown in significance throughout the story, is suddenly unequivocally the main character and the film is now about her on a more personal level. It’s a little jarring, especially when the story then suddenly concludes, without presenting any easy answers and in a dismayingly downbeat fashion given what’s preceded it.

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to imagine another conclusion to a very solidly-made film with a distinct flavour and toughness of its own. Lots of little bits of it resemble other things to some degree or other – but taken as a whole, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a unique experience, and a high quality movie. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s only that fact that stops me from giving it a very strong and unreserved recommendation.

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