Shooting the Darkness

We took pictures, not sides... Paul Faith, photojournalist

Shooting the Darkness, a superb new 52min television documentary that screened last week in Ireland examines the work of the photojournalists who captured the brutality of the Troubles through the lens of their cameras. Unlike celebrated combat photographers like Robert Cappa and Eddie Adams who followed conflict around the world, the men profiled in this documentary found war raging on their doorsteps. Before the Troubles several of the photographers were engaged with routine assignments - snapping dignitaries visiting Belfast or in the case of Stanley Matchett, photographing The Dubliners for the album cover of their 1967 album More Of The Hard Stuff. But after the events of Bloody Sunday, their work took on a greater significance as the bore witness to the beatings, bombings, assassinations and wholesale murder that emerged from the conflict. Many of their images flashed around the world, indeed, the devastated streets of Belfast were re-created by Italian documentary film makers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi for their 1975 fantasy film Mondo Candido, a very early example of the Troubles dramatized on film. 

One thing that emerges from Shooting the Darkness is the courage of the photographers, who often put themselves in harm’s way to get a shot of the event they were covering, from large-scale angry disturbances to clandestine invitations by paramilitaries to photograph their dead (which were often fraught with nerves by both parties). The documentary is brimming over with harrowing images of the Troubles, and many of the photographs did not become headline news, but as photographer Hugh Russell opines, even the shots of anonymous, insignificant victims executed in lonely places can pack as much tragedy into their single frames as some of the more high-profile events. From the documentary I’ve selected a few of the more striking images and the stories behind them...

▲ Stanley Matchett's iconic photograph of the body of Jack Druddy being carried down Churchill Road, Derry City after he was shot dead on Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, when members of the British Parachute Regiment opened fire on Civil Rights marchers using live ammunition. The image of Catholic priest Edward Daly leading the group to safety whilst waving a bloody handkerchief has become one of the most enduring images of the Troubles. Reflecting on the image, Matchett found a striking parallel between Druddy's body and the depiction of Christ in Caravaggio's painting, The Entombment of Christ. Such was the power of the image, it was later recreated for a mural in 1997 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the atrocity.

*****

▲ Alan Lewis' photograph of an ambulance driver carrying the body of a baby found in the devastation of the Balmoral Furniture Company on the Shankill Road, blown up by the IRA in December 1971. This was in fact the second baby removed from the wreckage that day, Alan Lewis was unable to capture the shot of the first body taken from the blast due to his horror of the event, but 20mins later when the second baby emerged, he composed himself sufficiently to record the moment. Prominent Unionist politician David Ervine later told Alan Lewis that his photograph had been a powerful recruitment tool for loyalists paramilitaries, much to the photographer's distress, who had hoped the image would steer people away from the path of violence.

*****

▲ Trevor Dickson's photograph of a young man tarred and feathered in the Fall's Road area of Belfast in 1971. This was a humiliating and degrading punishment routinely handed out by the IRA throughout the 70's to people accused of minor crimes and transgressions. This is an example of a photograph stage managed by the IRA. Trevor Dickson was tipped off by an intermediary that the punishment was due to take place and was invited to the scene to capture the result with his camera. The photographer recalled that as he was taking his shots, an outraged priest came upon the scene and tried to stop him, but was moved on by the IRA so Dickson could work unhindered.

*****

▲ Alan Lewis' photograph of the killing of John Downes in Andersonstown, at a nationalist rally in west Belfast in August 1984. Like, Eddie Adams' iconic Saigon Execution photograph, Lewis' captures that frozen moment in time when RUC officer Nigel Hegerty fired a plastic bullet at point blank range at Downes - crucially the puff of smoke from the discharged weapon is clearly visible as Downes recoils from the fatal impact. Eye-witness accounts on the day claim that an unprovoked RUC fired plastic bullets on the assembled crowd, as IRA fundraiser Martin Galvin, who was banned from entering the North, was due to make an address outside Sinn Fein offices. In the melee that followed, Downes ran into to the path of the RUC man who fired a round into his chest, the proximity of the gun would proved fatal.

*****

▲ Paul Faith's photograph of the late Sinn Féin vice President Martin McGuinness pictured with masked IRA men at the funeral of Brendan Burns in February 1988, another example of the publicity-savvy Republican moment. At this point in the Troubles, the British Government had decreed that Republican funerals be strictly family affairs, and placed a ban on any armed shows of force, a hallmark of IRA funerals. On this occasion, a heavy military presence was tracking the funeral cortège, and when masked and camouflaged honor guards appeared carrying the coffin, draped with an Irish flag, riot police swooped in to make arrests.Their efforts were impeded by the crowd who pushed against them and in the confusion, the IRA men were spirited away, but not before Paul Faith was able to capture a moment of defiance, a considerable publicity coup for the Republican movement.

*****

▲ One of Martin Nangle's shots of plain-clothed British army corporals Derek Wood (pictured above, clutching a handgun) and David Howes moments before they were pulled from their car by an angry mob after mistakenly driving down the path of a Republican funeral in March 1988. One of the more distressing images seen in the documentary, the men who were initially believed to be loyalists were savagely beaten, stabbed, stripped and later executed. This photograph is an example of how a tense situation like a politically-charged funeral could quickly descend into barbarity. When the mob descended upon the car, photographers and news cameramen were ordered by Sinn Fein stewards to give up their incriminating footage, but instead Nangle surreptitiously swapped his footage with a roll of unused film, which in turn was surrendered. It's the kind of quick-thinking coup any photojournalist would admire, but Nangle admits in the documentary that he can take no pleasure in the safe-guarding of these terrible images.

The Filth & the Fury

I’ve been catching up with a number of Sky Arts things I had taped before Christmas, and last night I caught the 2018 documentary Anarchy on Thames, which I wrongly assumed was a film about the Sex Pistols’ boat trip down the Thames to promote the God Save the Queen single. So I was a little disappointed to discover that the film was actually about the infamous 1976 Bill Grundy interview, 90 seconds worth of television that has been scrutinized to death over the years. Happily though this brisk 30min retrospective was surprisingly enjoyable, and it was good to hear from a few personnel who were in the Thames control room on that faithful day, cheerfully confirming that Grundy was most definitely not drunk, despite him brazenly saying so on air, but rather was a little juiced up and ready to knock his young interviewees down to size. Good to see Alan Jones interviewed as well, recalling his days hanging around the SEX shop, and there's the irrepressible Don Letts, who's momentarily stunned by Bromley boy Simon Barker wearing a swastika armband - and if that seems astonishing now, it’s worth recalling that the BBC’s cringe-worthy Black and White Minstrel Show was one of the most popular shows of the day. Nice too to see Glen Matlock, looking fabulous for a man of 61, recounting a tale he’s probably told a million times by now and having a chuckle at Steve Jones’ priceless (and seemingly unnoticed) comment about the hefty EMI advance “We fuckin’ spend it didn’t we”.

Following the Grundy documentary was the 30min The Sex Pistols Vs Bill Grundy, the final episode of Sky Arts' enjoyable comedy series Urban Myths which dramatizes famous tall tales and half-truths from popular culture. The centerpiece of the episode was the re-staging of the Today Show and while I could nitpick that director Simon Delaney didn't re-create shot-for-shot the original interview, or that the swastika on Simon Barker's armband is cautiously turned out of view, it's the book-ending sequences - the build-up to the interview and the fallout, that were the most enjoyable parts of the episode. An ominous title card warns "3:00pm - 3 hours to transmission", as Steve Pemberton's Grundy begins that faithful day with a few pints down the local, before sweeping into Thames Television studio and shrugging off, in his customary unflappable style, the challenge of the last minute scheduling of the hitherto unknown punk rock group the Sex Pistols. Following the shambles of the interview, the band are camped out in the green room addressing complaints from an angry unsuspecting public, in their own customary style (“wrap it in a pineapple and shove it up your shitter”), while a brooding Grundy comes to the realization that he has unwittingly been caught on the wrong side of history.

Writer Simon Nye sketches the personnel involved in the broadest of strokes - Pemberton's Grundy is the quintessential old fashioned and lecherous TV presenter (I wonder did his family take offence ?), while Kieran Hodgson plays Malcolm McLaren with a snotty Rimbaudesque swagger. Charlie Wernham and Matt Whitchurch are both fine as the vicious hoodlum Steve Jones, and the sensitive soon to be ex-Pistol Glen Matlock, while William Kettle's Paul Cook seems more like an afterthought. Frankie Fox is a real find though, his Johnny Rotten is played with laser-guided precision, and perfectly captures the frontman's dead-eyed, sneering cynicism. Rounding out The Sex Pistols Vs Bill Grundy is a very funny vox-pop sequence of actors playing disgruntled Today Show viewers airing their grievances, including the famous lorry driver who put his foot through his TV in a rage, which most likely is the biggest myth of the Grundy fiasco.

A Sorcerer by any other name...

Preview picture spread for Sorcerer, from the August 1977 issue of UK film journal Films and Filming... I spotted this earlier whilst leafing thru an issue of Films and Filming and I was surprised to see William Friedkin's film presented to British and Irish audiences under its original title, rather than the international Wages of Fear title. Films and Filming often ran previews well in advance of release dates, and I wonder was it the intention of the UK distributor, at this early stage, to release the film under the Sorcerer title, and reap the benefit of the tenuous link to the The Exorcist ?

I couldn't nail down an exact theatrical release date for the film on this side of the Atlantic, but it seems the film was in UK theatres by February 1978 - enough time perhaps for the UK distributor to rethink its strategy in the face of the dismal Stateside performance of the film. The director himself writing in his 2013 memoir, offered a combination of theories for the film's failure, among them, the ill-advised choice of title which seemed no more profound than the director borrowing it from Miles Davis' 1967 album which he had been listening to at the time. Friedkin himself wanted to call the film Ballbreaker, which might have looked good stenciled on one of the trucks, but studio boss Lew Wasserman flatly refused. Interestingly,  Films and Filming's review of the Wages of Fear eventually appeared in the May 1978 issue and its inclusion almost feels like an afterthought, considering the lag behind the film's roll out across UK and Irish cinemas earlier in the year. The magazine's chief critic Gordon Gow praised the film's moody atmosphere but felt the film was "careful but dull". To further dispel interest in the film, Gow signed off his review with a touch of regret that the Wages of Fear was a clumsy abridgment of the longer Sorcerer and warned this version of the film had been disowned by its director.

And then there was the matter of Star Wars. The unveiling of George Lucas's film preceded Friedkin's by a week but it proved a disastrous bit of scheduling - while the queues were snaking around the corners for Star Wars (with some patrons making their second and third visit), Sorcerer was playing to empty theatres. It was enough a signal a sea change in the tastes of film goers who evidently had grown tired of pessimistic character-driven dramas, embracing instead Star War's swashbuckling juvenile fantasia. And yet, four decades on, Sorcerer has been rediscovered by a younger generation who cherish the films made in that halcyon era of American Cinema when art briefly trumped commerce, the film now considered one of the finest films of the decade, and the high-water mark where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

In Cinemas that week...

A supplement to my previous post which mentioned Cork’s beloved Pavilion Cinema which closed in 1989. I found this page torn from the July 8th 1982 issue of the Evening Echo, Cork’s local newspaper, and the cinema listings make for fascinating reading. Chariots of Fire was the major new release of this particular week, playing at the Palace and the Oakwood, one of the smaller regional theaters, while North Sea Hijack, a rather formulaic Roger Moore action adventure film was the Cameo’s newest attraction. The Capitol was showing Cannonball Run, which I suspect was in its final week, the listing relegates it to the Mini - the Capitol’s second, smaller screen, while across the street, the Classic was still packing them in with Stripes. The Lee cinema, known as a second run house was showing the recently released Escape From New York, with support from Escape from Alcatraz, and it’s interesting to note the amount of second run features in theatres that week - The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), Mandingo (1975), The Amityville Horror (1979), Dressed To Kill (1980), the Kathleen Quinlan-romance, The Promise (1980, and still unreleased on DVD), and the Alan Ormsby-penned high school comedy drama, My Bodyguard (1980). What’s most fascinating though is the Capitol’s Italian Exploitation double-bill The Last Hunter and Eaten Alive, which probably came as a package from the UK distributor Eagle Films. And while one might expect Antonio Margheriti’s (or rather Anthony M. Dawson’s) The Last Hunter to pass for an American-made Vietnam War film, I was genuinely surprised to discover that Umberto Lenzi’s rather tawdry cannibal film made it to these shores. Worth noting that Margheriti’s film was actually released on VHS in the UK the previous year; as were Escape From Alcatraz and Dressed To Kill, although I think it unlikely that any of those films were widely available on VHS in Cork at this early stage of home video.

Incidentally, the front of the Capitol cinema was well known for its prominent display of the posters of the current roster and coming attractions, and I wonder were the memorable British quads for The Last Hunter and Eaten Alive both on display that week ? Both were illustrated by the great British artist Tom Chantrell, and it’s worth noting that his poster for the Lenzi film differs subtly from the more sadistic image that was used for the Vampix VHS release released in 1983.

 image courtesy of Chantrell Posters

image courtesy of Film On Paper

Post-Script: Whilst researching this post, I stumbled across this wonderful photograph of the Capitol Cinema taken in and around 1979 with Phantasm featured on the marquee, with The Deer Hunter playing at the second, smaller theatre. You can also see the front-of-house posters sitting underneath the Capitol sign. The crowds lining the street are catching a motor rally.

His Master's Voice

Derek Walmsley writes about the beleaguered HMV in his editorial for the February issue of The Wire, and it's jogged a memory of a wonderful two-week break spent in Malta in June 2015. The connection here is the instantly recognizable HMV sign spotted looming over heads of shoppers and tourists on Valletta's St. John Street. The sign belongs to D'Amato's, Malta's oldest record store and one of the very few brick and mortar store music store left on the island. It's astonishing to think that this store has been in business since 1885, the famous HMV sign a leftover from a bygone era when the original proprietor Anthony D'Amato, was the sole dealer of the Gramophone Company's record label His Master's Voice. Meanwhile across the street, the vertical Cinema sign beckons patrons to the small, intimate City Lights cinema which specializes in cult, exploitation and adult cinema - if you were in Valletta this week, you might have caught The Last Walz, and perhaps skipped across the street afterwards to purchase the soundtrack.

I'm feeling terribly nostalgic about HMV this week. Closer to home, my nearest HMV opened in Cork city in 1990, moving into the Pavilion Cinema building which closed its doors in August 1989, after 68 years of film exhibition. The first film shown at the Pavillion was D.W Griffith's 1919 6-reeler The Greatest Question, while the very last picture show was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Pav, as it was known to Corkonians was the last of the city's palatial picture houses and I have very fond memories of the auditorium's beautiful ornate wooden panel ceiling, and the grand staircase which was decorated with the posters of the day. Happily, when the building became a music emporium, the film connection was maintained as HMV became my first port of call for my burgeoning VHS collection. In fact it was less his His Master's Voice than His Master's Video, in the early years of the shop, whatever cash I had was sent upstairs to the first floor, to the VHS section where I bought my first copies of some of the most pivotal films of my life -  Blue Velvet, the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner, The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Devils, Suspiria, 2001 and the first widescreen VHS edition of Apocalypse Now in 1992, to name but a few. At the same time I was scouring the videoshops of their old dusty pre-certs, but what set HMV further apart from the other VHS hunting grounds, was the availability of foreign and independent Cinema, the shop stocked a fine selection of esoteric titles from some of the more outre labels of the day - Artificial Eye (Andrei Rublev, Blue, Farewell My Concubine) Tartan (Man Bites Dog, Hard Boiled and the original b/w Night of the Living Dead), Connoisseur/BFI (The Falls, Solaris, Stalker) and Electric Pictures (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Mean Streets, Pierrot Le Fou). I still have a few of those HMV-bought tapes to this day.

I shouldn't over egg the nostalgia too much. As a music store I had little use for HMV in those early years. Back in the early 90's, even a modest size town like Cork could support 5 or 6 record stores at any one time, and most of my cash was spent at the small but legendary Comet Records, which kept me supplied with Death Metal on vinyl. I don't recall HMV stocking the likes of Obituary and Bolt Thrower, and vinyl at the time was dying a death before its spectacular resuscitation a decade later. I seem to remember getting excited one Saturday afternoon to find Ministry's 1986 album Twitch sitting on the rack, an album that had no earthly business in HMV, but such discoveries were few and far between. And unlike Comet, no one hung out in HMV which to me is an essential characteristic of a great record store. HMV was expensive too, and it always seemed to be a choice between a video or a CD, and in most cases, the video won out. I remember well the hell of indecision of weighing up the cost of The White Album, which was grossly overpriced - £27 Irish pounds to be exact, expensive in old money, but a veritable box set in today's money. However a vicious young hoodlum I befriended, regularly shoplifted-on-demand from HMV and did eventually secure me a copy of the White Album for a fiver. I never did find out how he snuck the fat-boy case past the scanners on the double doors - an agent in the field should never be made reveal his methods, but I hear a tin-foiled lined pocket was enough to bypass the security.

And yet, I miss HMV when it was HMV. Since 2006 the building has been occupied by the home-grown Golden Discs, another record shop and a truly wretched one at that. Its film section has none of the reach that HMV once had, comparatively speaking, and prices are even more inflated - a fresh vinyl copy of the 1967 Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits will cost you 3 times the price of the humble CD edition. Incredibly Golden Discs has been operating for almost 6 decades now, and has seen a slew of Cork record stores rise and fall around it. At this point I think Golden Discs would survive a nuclear catastrophe which probably makes it more a cockroach than a record store. Meanwhile, the future of HMV hangs in the balance yet again, and it's my sincere hope that a solution will be reached that will save jobs at the 125 stores across the United Kingdom and allow the HMV name to live on.

The Drummer

"I am nothing more than a drummer and rallier"

Adolf Hitler, interviewed in 1922

"We’re not fucking Nazis. We’re from Salford"
Peter Hook, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

I mentioned in my previous post Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler, and something struck me in an early chapter of the book, when Kershaw's writes about Hitler's burgeoning skill at inflaming the Munich beer halls with nationalist fervor. Hitler considered the role of the drummer a vocation, he became the agitator who understood how to shake the masses from their acquiescence to the Versailles Treaty. The image of the drummer is a powerful one and two representations immediately sprang to mind from the page - David Bennent's little drummer boy from The Tin Drum, and the sleeve of Joy Division's 1978 debut release An Ideal For Living, which features a drawing of a drumming Hitler Youth. The Joy Division EP is in fact loaded with Nazi references throughout. The type used for the band name leans heavily towards Germanic styles, and inside the fold of the sleeve is the famous 1943 picture of the frightened Warsaw Ghetto Boy discovered by the SS in a hide-out just before the ghetto was liquidated. The Nazi references carry over to the music too: the very name of the recently rechristened Joy Division was taken from Yehiel Feiner's disturbing 1955 Holocaust memoir House of Dolls, while a short passage from the book is spoken on the track No Love Lost. Furthermore, the first words spoken on the EP, the oblique count-off 3-5-0-1-2-5 Go! which opens the track Warsaw was a reference Rudolf Hess's prisoner of war number.

Obviously the four members of Joy Division were not drummers for fascist ideology but I was curious to know Peter Hook's reflections on the matter in his 2012 memoir Unknown Pleasures. 

After the name change, of course, the Nazi shit hit the fan. Changing our name to Joy Division, calling the EP An Ideal for Living and having a picture of a Hitler Youth banging a drum on the front of it – well, looking at it now, I can see the problem. I mean, An Ideal for Living? It even sounds Nazi.

But there was nothing more to it than a bunch of lads – Barney and Ian in particular – who were a bit obsessed with the war. Everybody was back then. We’d grown up with bomb craters behind our houses. It was the time of the big epic war films like A Bridge Too Far, and of Warlord and Commando comics.

Looking back on the preceding years there was most definitely something in the air: The World At War, the landmark 1973 series introduced the spectre of the Nazis to a new generation, while films like The Damned, Cabaret, The Night Porter, Salon Kitty consciously or not, fetishized Nazi uniforms and symbols. In 1973 Brian Eno and Robert Fripp collaborated on the experimental album (No Pussyfooting) and called one of the side-long compositions on the album, Swastika Girls. That same year, glam rock band The Sweet appeared on the Christmas day Top of the Pops performing their sole, solitary hit Block Buster! with bass player Steve Priest camping up as an effeminate Adolf Hitler and brandishing a swastika armband, an example of that curious English phenomenon of the Comedy Nazi. In 1976 Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood began putting together their punk uniform which featured the swastika, here intended to cause as much offense as possible to the older generation. In December of that year Bromley Contingent member Simon Barker appeared alongside the Sex Pistols, on the Today Show wearing the swastika armband. It was in this milieu that the design of An Ideal For Living emerged. Peter Hook recalls:

It was about being shocking, not about ideology. We didn’t have a political bone in our bodies – none of us did, not even Ian. Arty stuff was what he liked, not political. Yes, we were naive and stupid and probably trying too hard to get up the noses of the older generation, but we weren’t Nazis. Never have been and never will be.

But for all their naivete, the Nazi connections would prove, to borrow from a later Ian Curtis lyric, a weight on their shoulders. Sounds' review of the EP on the 24th June, opened with the line Another Fascism for Fun and Profit Mob, while Hook admits in his book that the band lost out on signing with the Fast Product label, an early home to the nascent post-punk scene. It was therefore a relief to the band when Rob Gretton took over management duties in the second half of 1978 and re-issued the EP with an improved sounding pressing and perhaps more importantly, a new sleeve which featured a forest of scaffolding, a striking shot which I think is superior to the drummer sleeve. 

The image of the Hitler Youth drummer remains a loaded symbol and perhaps it was inevitable that Death In June (whose early sound was very much influenced by Joy Division) put out an album in 2006 entitled The Phoenix Has Risen, featuring on the cover, a shot of Douglas Pearce in the guise of the drummer, forging yet another unsavory connection with fascist ideology. But, luckily for me, the thorny subject of Death In June is a post for another day...

Triumph of the Will

Yesterday evening I completed reading Ian Kershaw’s monumental 2008 single-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, and it came as some relief to finally reach the bitter end - the closing years of the book, with the German people and Europe plunged into unimaginable misery and destruction, were particularly harrowing to read. The level of detail in Kershaw’s book is incredible, even in this abridged version of what originally came as a massive two-volume set, but I was a little disappointed that Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will passed by with a mere sentence or two. Instead I turned to my Synapse DVD of Riefenstahl’s film, augmented by an authoritative commentary track by Dr. Anthony R. Santoro, who too often commits the cardinal sin of commentators by describing the events taking place on screen. Still, it’s probably the best way to watch Triumph of the Will, Dr. Santoro's voice is a far more pleasant alternative to listening to the interminable speeches of Hitler's cabinet.

I must admit I’ve had a thorny relationship with the film over the years. As a piece of Cinema, I find it impressively crafted, even visually striking - the sweeping aerial views of the beautiful city of Nuremberg, the wide angle shots of patterns of massed formations (which surely rival the record-breaking amount of extras seen in Gandi), and in particular, the night-time sequences which Riefenstahl stages with back-lighting and smoke, reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen. Indeed there are those who claim that George Lucas took inspiration from the film for the design of the victory celebration seen in the finale of Star Wars. The film is darkly fascinating too - in the sequence where Hitler offers a smile and a kind word to some farmers - a moment they surely cherished in the years ahead, I had to wonder what happened to those people as the war entered its final terrible days when their benevolent Führer effectively condemned them to death alongside Germany’s imminent destruction. But for all that, I can’t help but feel that the film has become little more than pornography for neo-Nazis and white supremacists, so much so that I’ve never included the Synapse DVD on my film list. To make some sense of it all, I hope to round out this encounter with Triumph of the Will with the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl…

The Classic Scene: Deliverance

In John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance, four Atlanta businessmen who planned a weekend of canoeing down a river in a remote part of Georgia unwittingly find themselves caught in a nightmare and are faced with a moral dilemma of the gravest order...

Ed (Jon Voight): What we gonna do with him?

Drew (Ronny Cox): There's not but one thing to do: Take the body down to Aintry. Turn it over to the highway patrol. Tell 'em what happened.

Lewis (Burt Reynolds): Tell 'em what, exactly?

Drew: Just what happened. This is justifiable homicide if anything is. They were sexually assaulting two members of our party at gunpoint. Like you said, there was nothin' else we could do.

Ed: Is he alive?

Drew: Not now. Well, let's get our heads together. Come on, let's not do anything foolish. Anybody know anything about the law?

Ed: I was on jury duty once.

Drew: It wasn't a murder trial.

Lewis: Murder trial? I don't know the technical word for it, Drew, but I know this: You take this man and turn him over to the sheriff, there'll be a trial all right. Trial by jury.

Drew: So what?

Lewis: We killed a man, Drew. Shot him in the back. A mountain man. Cracker. Gives us somethin' to consider.

Drew: All right, consider it. We're listening.

Lewis: Shit, all these people are related. I'll be damned if I'll come back and stand trial... with this man's aunt and uncle...maybe his mama and his daddy sittin' in the jury box. What do you think, Bobby? How about you, Ed?

Ed: I don't know. I really don't know.

Drew: Now you listen, Lewis. I don't know what you got in mind...but if you conceal this body, you'll be charged with murder. That much law I do know. This ain't one of your fuckin' games! You killed somebody!

Lewis: There he is! I see him, Drew. That's right, I killed somebody. But you're wrong if you don't see this as a game. Now you listen, Ed! Damn it, we can get out of this thing! Without any questions asked! We get connected up with that body and the law...this thing's gonna be hangin' over us the rest of our lives. We gotta get rid of that guy.

Drew: Just how are you gonna do that, Lewis?

Lewis: Where? Anywhere. Everywhere. Nowhere.

Drew: How do you know that other guy hasn't already gone for the police?

Lewis: What in the hell is he gonna tell 'em, Drew? What he did to Bobby?

Drew: Why couldn't he go get some other mountain men? Now why isn't he gonna do that? You look around you, Lewis! He could be out there anywhere, watchin' us right now. We ain't gonna be so goddamned hard to follow, draggin' a corpse.

Lewis: You let me worry about that, Drew. You let me take care of that. You know what's gonna be here? Right here. A lake. As far as you can see. Hundreds of feet deep. Hundreds of feet deep. Did you ever look over a lake and think about somethin' buried underneath it? Buried underneath it! Man, that's about as buried as you can get!

Drew: Well, I am telling you, Lewis, I don't want any part of it.

Lewis: Well, you are part of it!

Drew: It is a matter of the Iaw!

Lewis: The law? The law? What law? Where's the law, Drew? You believe in democracy, don't you?

Drew: Yes, I do.

Lewis: Well, then, we'll take a vote. I'II stand by it. So will you. What do you say, Bobby?

Bobby (Ned Beatty): Let's bury him. I don't want this gettin' around. Okay? Okay?

Lewis: It's up to you, Ed. It's all up to you, Ed.

Drew: Now just think what you're doin', Ed. For God's sake. You got a wife.You got a child.You're not involved in this. Think about your family, Ed. This may be the most important decision of your whole life, Ed.

Ed: Yes!

Drew: There's no way we can change this. There's no way we can change what happened to Bobby. We gotta do the right thing. We must live with it for the rest of our lives.

Ed: Right! I'm with Lewis.

Lewis: All right, let's get on with it, then.

Ed: What's the plan, Lewis?

Lewis: Plan? We just paddle on down to Aintry, get the cars and go home.

Dedicated to Burt Reynolds (February 11, 1936 - September 6, 2018)

The Comeback

I’ve just finished reading James Kaplan’s 2010 book, Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan’s two-book chronicle of the life and times of Frank Sinatra, concluding in some dramatic fashion with the making of Fred Zinnemann’s 1953 film From Here To Eternity, and the re-making of Sinatra’s faltering career. I found Kaplan’s book to be a little tacky in places, too frequently the author indulges in the kind of coarse vernacular Sinatra used when his temper flared (“She didn’t give a flying fuck. She wanted to see her husband” writes Kaplan about Ava Gardner), but this final section of the book made for compelling, absorbing reading. Previously I had only a sketchy knowledge of Sinatra’s life (and music) and it came as some surprise to discover how low Sinatra’s post-war career had sunk – by 1952 Sinatra was regularly playing half-empty theatres, and was once spotted walking in Times Square alone and unmolested, the bobby-soxers long since retreated. What’s remarkable is how finely tuned Sinatra’s instinct was for what a part like the scrawny but tough Italian-American street guy Angelo Maggio could do for his career.

Even before Columbia announced their acquisition of James Jones’ novel, Sinatra had earmarked the part for himself, obsessively learning the character’s dialogue and Brooklyn speech rhythms, and in the months that followed, campaigned vigorously for the role, firing off weekly telegrams to Columbia czar Harry Cohn, always signed Maggio. Despite Sinatra negotiating a demeaning cut-price salary with the studio, Cohn still favored Eli Wallach for the role but it was Fred Zinnemann who finally settled on Sinatra after seeing screen test footage of him performing two scenes from the film. Watching From Here To Eternity again, I was surprised to see how slight Sinatra actually was, his thin bony frame momentarily put in mind Richard Wordsworth’s emaciated prisoner of war in Hammer’s 1958 film Camp On Blood Island. But regardless of his modest physical stature (and he was perfectly cast in this regard, the character in the novel a tiny curly-headed Italian with narrow bony shoulders jutting from his undershirt), Sinatra is superb as Maggio, and the equal of his co-star Montgomery Clift – no small thing considering Sinatra on previous pictures delivered his scenes in one or two takes.

Sinatra was no Method actor but I wonder did some of Clift’s technique rubbed off on set – one gets the impression that Sinatra was harnessing that fierce temper and perhaps the sense of anxiety he often felt in those lean years - look for that genuine look of weariness on his face when he falls into the clutches of Ernest Borgnine’s sadistic stockade warden. The performance earned Sinatra an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but in later years it seems his triumph was tinged with a certain ambivalence, remarking that his portrayal of heroin addict Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm was more worthy of an Academy Award (Sinatra was nominated but lost out to his former tormentor Ernest Borgnine who picked up the statuette in 1956 for Marty). And much later Sinatra’s involvement in From Here To Eternity was the source of some embarrassment for the singer after the release of The Godfather, which propagated the myth that Sinatra had employed the services of the Mob to land the part of Maggio. If the down-on-his-luck crooner Johnny Fontane sprang entirely from the imagination of Mario Puzo, perhaps the novelist was remembering an earlier rumor that Sinatra used unsavory connections to release him from his contract with bandleader Tommy Dorsey, a story Sinatra always brushed aside but nevertheless persists to this day…

The Second Coming of William Bennett

I never expected to be writing words in praise of William Bennett but this past week I’ve been enjoying the work of the power electronics pioneer, two albums in particular, but more about that in a moment. This renewed interest in Bennett’s music was inspired by a lengthy interview Bennett gave to Resonance FM back in 2003, and despite the interview’s vintage, serves as a terrific chronicle of Whitehouse’s long 28-year history (Bennett ceased activity as Whitehouse in 2008 to concentrate on his next musical incarnation Cut Hands). A lot of ground is covered over the two hours – Bennett’s early interest in music, his views on Throbbing Gristle, the influence of de Sade on his own writing and philosophy, the use of provocative subject matter, working with Peter Sotos and Steve Albini, and so on. What emerges from the discussion, quite unexpectedly in my case, is Bennett’s intelligence and wit, an artist who’s fastidiousness with his own work but perhaps most surprisingly of all, Bennett’s sensitivity – not something I had considered from the man who penned songs with titles such as I'm Comin' Up Your Ass, and Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel. Back in the late 90’s I picked up some early Whitehouse albums making their debut on CD – Birthdeath Experience, Erector and Dedicated To Peter Kurten, and instantly disliked them for their hysterical vocals and the extreme frequencies, not to mention feeling shortchanged by the albums’ short-running times.

All three CDs rarely got played over the years, but this week, following on from the Bennett interview, I’ve been reacquainting myself with these albums with a fresh perspective. The Erector and Peter Kurten albums remain uncompromising as ever, but I’ve been enjoying tremendously Birthdeath Experience these past few days. There seems to be a consensus that Whitehouse’s 1980 debut has dated badly over the years, an opinion that sounds suspiciously like the kind of macho-posturing one tends to find in the Noise scene. Instead, I would consider the album the most accessible of Whitehouse’s discography, Bennett had yet to further reduce the Whitehouse sound to its most basic and disturbing elements and Birthdeath Experience has more shade and color (and effects) than subsequent albums, and there are some surprisingly expressionist vocals too, Mindphaser in particular sounding genuinely unsettling. And I like the closing title track, 3 minutes of Cageian silence which I suspect played better in the pre-compact disc era, where the white noise of the preceding track Coitus give way to the gentle crackle and surface noise of vinyl.

The other William Bennett work that I’ve been listening to this week, not a Whitehouse album, but another starting point of sorts has been Afro Noise I, the debut album by Cut Hands, Bennett’s exploration of African rhythms and percussive instruments and sounds. I picked up this album a few years ago and was impressed by its power and velocity but after a few cursory listens, I filed the album away and all but forgot about it. Fortunately in the intervening years my interest in African music steadily developed thanks in no small part to labels like Analogue Africa and Soundway, which places the Afro Noise I album in a much more appreciable context. There’s an overlap between Whitehouse and Cut Hands – three of the tracks on Afro Noise I appeared on previously released Whitehouse albums (none of which I have) forging a link between Bennett’s projects, but Cut Hands on the whole is a far more accessible and richer listening experience, with its intricate polyrhythms on tracks like Stabbers Conspiracy and Shut Up And Bleed and there are dark and disquieting washes of sound on Rain Washes Over Chaff and Bia Mintatu, while ++++ (Four Crosses) almost strays into Ambient territory. And lest we forget that Cut Hands did evolve from Whitehouse, the high frequency tones on Nzambi Ia Lufua are genuinely painful on the ears. I’ve read that Bennett has accompanied Cut Hands shows with visuals that featured African symbols and calligraphic images and I could imagine some of the more extreme sequences from Africa Addio or Richard Stanley’s 2002 film The White Darkness, which explores Haitian Vodou working just as well…