Agatha Christie. Murder in Mesopotamia (1935)

     Agatha Christie. Murder in Mesopotamia (1935) Another tale of domestic murder, this time the husband is the perp. Told by Nurse Leatheran, hired by the husband to look after his wife, who appears to suffer from nervous fancies, this is one of three or four stories set in or around archeological digs. The nurse is a good story teller, despite her modest assessment of her abilities. Poirot’s detection proceeds in a workmanlike manner, but the denouement is unsatisfying: It assumes that a wife would not recognise her supposedly dead husband twenty years later, when he woos and wins her for a second time. Christie makes much of her self-absorption, but I don’t believe that it’s sufficient to account for this plot point. ** (2010)

Miss Marple's Debut: Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

 Agatha Christie. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) The novel that introduces Miss Marple, presented here as much more fluttery and muddled than she was to become. But the streak of ruthlessness is already present. Colonel Protheroe, the victim, is a nasty piece of work, a self-righteous bully, but that’s insufficient grounds for murdering him. Again we have a bad husband, a suffering wife, and a dysfunctional family. His death is carefully planned. It’s the planning that does in the murderers. In many of her stories, Christie shows that the more elaborate the plan, the more likely it is to go wrong somewhere. In several stories, Poirot remarks that the simple, spur-of-the moment murder is much harder to solve, because its very simplicity means there is little to go on. One of Christie’s best. **** (2010)

The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947) (Movie)

     The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947) [D: Irving Reis. Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Shirley Temple] Cary Grant must escort the judge’s teen-age sister (Shirley Temple) until her crush on him wears off. The alternative is proceeding with charges of assaulting the D. A. and going to jail. Enough ain’t-that-crazy-fun episodes ensue to fill out the running time to 95 minutes. The judge (Myrna Loy) who (under protest) has agreed to this odd arrangement falls in love with Grant and vice versa. Fade out.
     A nicely done example of the best of Hollywood product in the golden years: a comedy that well-constructed, psychologically plausible enough to suspend disbelief, with well-written dialogue and the kind of visuals that tell the story without requiring 100% of the audience’s attention. I found this VHS video on the new-to-you table at our church, and will take it back for someone else to enjoy. Shirley Temple’s recent death reminded me that I couldn’t recall ever seeing her in a movie. I’m glad to have seen her in this one. The usual film clips of her as a child actor show her performing tricks, not acting. She was a good actor. ***

Sherlock: His Last Vow (2013) (TV series)

     Sherlock: His Last Vow (2013) The TV series has come His Last Bow, and like the other films, has taken Doyle’s story as inspiration, not as source. The visuals emphasise the multiple layers of secrecy, betrayal, and conspiracy. It’s a complicated plot running at several levels, which are interconnected by the usual villain, a power-hungry psychopath. We learn even more about Watson, his wife Mary, Mycroft and Sherlock’s childhoods; that’s one of the strengths of this Sherlock series, it takes the characters seriously, they’re not just plot devices. Well done as story-telling, and especially as visual narrative. For once, the current stylistic schticks (helicopters, rapid cutting, shifting camera, layers of glass and multiple reflections, etc) work as they should. The last scene points to a sequel: Moriarty is back. ****

The Changeling (2009) (Movie)

     The Changeling (2009) [D: Clint Eastwood. Angelina Jodie, John Malkovitch] Mrs. Christine Collins, a widow, says goodbye to her son at school; when she returns in the evening, he’s gone. Six months later, the LAPD claim they’ve found him, but it’s not her Walter. She fights them about this, embarrasses them, and they escalate their attempts to control and silence her. A pastor who has been fighting LAPD corruption helps her. The chance pickup of a runaway boy links her son’s disappearance to a serial murderer of young boys. A commission of inquiry looks into the case, and orders changes to the LAPD. The murderer is convicted. Mrs Collins refuses to believe her boy is one of his victims, and continues to look for him the rest of her life.
     This is based on a true story, but with many changes. See The Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. for the full story. Clint Eastwood’s problem was how to present it with both dramatic tension (since the general outlines of the story will be known by many movie-goers) and a plausible characterisation of the main actors. All the actors turn in plausible performances, aided by above average writing. Eastwood and his editor know how to cut the shots so that the narrative rhythm matches the tension of the story. The photography is in muted colours, which has become a cliché for stories set in the early 20th century, mimicking the photos of the time.
     We didn’t expect the movie to be as good as it is. Recommended ***½

Tom Cahill. How the Irish Saved Civilization

     Tom Cahill. How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995) Cahill backs up his claim with an imaginative reconstruction of why and how the Irish adopted (and adapted) Christianity. St Patrick, a romanised Christian Briton, appealed to their Celtic gloom and sense of martyrdom. They had a tradition of killing a man as a sacrifice to the terrible forces that would otherwise overwhelm them. Jesus’s crucifixion was to them a confirmation of their sense of indebtedness to the gods; he was an analogue of the dying Gaul, a central sacrificial figure in their mythology.
     They also had a great sense of history, and a grand tradition of oral literature. Patrick taught them letters, and they used this new technology not only to record their own traditions, but even more to absorb the knowledge and traditions of the peoples over the seas. In this way they preserved classical literature and philosophy as well as early Christian theology and the scriptures. The adapted the Eastern practice of solitary hermitages into sociable groups of like-minded men (and women, and sometimes both), thus founding the monastic tradition. They founded monasteries all over Ireland and Scotland, and then moved south and east into England and Europe. They christianised Europe north and west of the Alps, and that’s how they saved civilisation.
     Cahill writes wonderfully well; he has the Irish/Celtic gift of smithing words. He quotes enough original sources and provides enough hard data that his thesis rings true. The book’s a history of the imagination rather than a history of ideas. In constructing it, Cahill reminds us that ideas without imagination are stillborn. Read it, you’ll enjoy it even if your skepticism is aroused. ***

Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study of Tyranny (1962)

     Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study of Tyranny (1962) This is the second, revised edition, in which Bullock has taken advantage of documents that weren’t available for the first edition, published in 1952. The story of Hitler’s life and career is fascinating, as a train wreck is fascinating. In the 1920s some entertainment entrepreneurs staged locomotive collisions. That’s what Hitler’s career looks like: the locomotives accelerate, they reach top speed, and then they collide. Hitler’s career accelerated, he got everything he wanted, and then he crashed, taking about 50,000,000 humans beings with him.
     I won’t summarise Bullock’s story. It does clarify a number of things that I had a muddled knowledge of, such as the sequence of events that led up to the destruction of Czechoslovakia. There’s no question that Hitler understood and exploited other people’s weaknesses; he was a master at probing the pressure points that would enable him to manipulate people into doing what he wanted. Then, when he achieved all his political goals (all outlined in Mein Kampf), he began to follow his fantasies. For a man who claimed to have read and understood history, he was remarkably ignorant of actual structures of governance. Bullock several times reminds us that Hitler disliked the work of governing; this no doubt explains his weird ideas about the power of the English King, and especially of his bete noir, “the Jews”. He himself expected things to happen simply because he wanted them to. “Will” was his Leitmotif. I don’t think he ever understood how his program was in fact implemented, how much organisational and logistic work was needed to realise the results of political maneuvering, still less what had to be done to make his political campaigns possible. This was, I think, the main reason he never understood how impossible his military plans were. Compare him to Churchill, who had had practical experience at precisely that level of organising the logistics of war during his time at the Admiralty in the first World War
     My impression of Hitler is that he was a psychopath in the grip of a fantasy. “Psychopath” is a word Bullock doesn’t use; it wasn’t in wide circulation when he wrote his book, nor was the concept. The research that firmed up the concept was really just beginning to gain respectability. But Bullock’s portrait of the man shows us all the traits of psychopathology. Narcissism, egomania, inability to empathise, tendency to erupt in fury when crossed, use of other people as instruments for ego-gratification, blaming others, etc. He was also fundamentally lazy.
     A good book, albeit a profoundly depressing one. ***