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I thought I’d give this ten minutes (farmers in Yorkshire…) but I was totally gripped. It’s on Netflix so, if you haven’t seen it, give it a try. The main actor is Josh O’Connor, who I’d only seen playing toffs in Riot Club and The Durrells (playing Lawrence). Not hugely recommended… But he’s so good here.

It’s a bit like Brokeback Mountain (gay sheep-herders!), but I think it’s better, if only just because it’s in the present, and doesn’t have that ‘that was then’ short story aspect. It’s certainly streets better than Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, which is in some way trying to do the same thing.

Also phenomenal are Gemma Jones (who was one of the best things about Good) and Ian Hart as (I’d forgotten this) a STROKE VICTIM. He did his homework!

Who is the director, Francis Lee? An actor (in Topsy Turvy, which means he’s quite old) and a first-time feature director. Wow. He was born in Halifax, so maybe this will become a speciality. I can’t remember a British film having this impact on me since My Summer Of Love, and that was by a Pole! And I’ve never, ever wanted a film to end happily as much as this one.

I gave a wide berth to this on its release (Streep singing out of tune – one up from Mamma Mia), but watched it on tv, having been reminded how good Stephen Frears is by A Very English Scandal (and also wanting to see his first involvement with Hugh Grant).

And it’s great, with not only Streep and Grant good, but Simon Helberg (Howard in The Big Bang Theory) sensational as Jenkins’s accompanist (he really plays the piano too). I bet he had more lines in the script, because he plays completely in reactions – beyond words. His looks – as he relishes the hard cash but feels awkward prostituting himself – are sublime, and make me want to watch The Big Bang Theory with new attention. And tv veteran Nicholas Martin’s script is a gem.

The feature debut of Michael Ritchie (and now on YouTube), this turns out to have a screenplay by James Salter, the ‘greatest living American novelist’ (much better than Philip Roth!) until his death aged 90 in 2015. Until now, I thought Salter’s only contact with cinema was the source novel (brilliant) of The Hunters (1958), which – despite the presence of Robert Mitchum – is a terrible Korean War drama (directed – in an example of Hollywood wtf-ism – by former song-and-dance man Dick Powell!).

But no. Salter also wrote a Sidney Lumet film I’d never heard of (The Appointment, 1969, with Omar Sharif!) and directed Three (also 1969, a busy year), a film with a very young Charlotte Rampling which (also on YouTube) was made by Universal but resembles a student project, and only goes to demonstrate why he only made one film…

Downhill Racer, however, definitely feels Salter-esque, not least in the subject matter: competitive skiing. (Of the three novels of his I’ve read, Solo Faces (1979) is about rock climbing, and The Hunters (1957) and Cassada (1961, revised 2000) are about fighter pilots.) The lack of an interior monologue occasionally makes Redford seem an enigma, but that’s the point. He’s startlingly selfish. In the end, he wins the Gold at the Winter Olympics, looks round and sees the next contender, eyeing him hungrily… Gene Hackman’s also v good as the beleaguered coach.

This caught Richard Fleischer on the cusp between a director of films noir/action adventures and – well – anything. The cast resembles something noir-ish – Edmond O’Brien, Arthur Kennedy, Arthur O’Connell, Stephen Boyd – with the addition of Donald Pleasence (guess who’s the baddie?) and, er, Raquel Welch! Raquel plays a ‘technical adviser’ who has a ‘sensible’ haircut (basically a beehive), a jumpsuit degrees tighter than anyone else’s and has to suffer remarks like – as she drives a miniature submarine or whatever – ‘I bet you’re very handy about the house.’ (Also, when given the chance to ‘act’ – as in the near-death scene about being attacked by anti-bodies – she’s quite, quite terrible.)

The victim on the operating table has – though nobody says this for fear people in the audience would know of simpler solutions than putting a miniature submarine up his jacksie – quite simply had a stroke (‘a clot on the brain’) – and I for one would like to try dissolving the clot with a laser beam.

The real ‘star’ – who presumably didn’t mind at all the ‘serious’ dialogue, but may have rebelled at the total lack of humour – was writer Harry Kleiner, who (a trip to IMDb tells me) wrote, in a 40-year career: Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel and Carmen Jones, Henry Hathaway’s The Dark Corner, Sam Fuller’s House Of Bamboo, Peter Yates’s Bullitt and Walter Hill’s Extreme Prejudice (which I remember as being fantastic, but probably wasn’t) and Red Heat.

I’ve read the screenplay and the novel, as well as seeing the film for the umpteenth time. The novel is good, and it has the events and some of the lines. (But Ethan is called Amos! You couldn’t see John Wayne as an Amos…) But the screenplay is SO much better…
It was written by Frank S Nugent, who I confess I’d never heard of. But he wrote 11 screenplays for John Ford, having been the film reviewer for the New York Times. This is the best. He wrote them WITH Ford, like screenwriters did with Hitchcock, so it’s impossible to say who came up with what. But it was clearly a good collaboration.
I watched The Searchers as a 10-year-old, and thought it brilliant, if a little incomprehensible. Then I watched it again as a 20-year-old – and all became clear. And it grows richer with every viewing. The hidden romance between Ethan Edwards and Martha, his sister-in-law, is played up in the screenplay, but in the film all you need is looks. And Ethan’s avenging her – by tracking down her daughter and planning to kill her for having been ‘defiled’ by the Comanches – kind-of makes sense. It’s just because NOTHING is explained that the film rewards so many viewings…
Ethan is actually worse in the screenplay, e.g. he scalps the Indian he finds dead – instead of shooting his eyes out in the film. Whether that was a John Ford or Wayne (or studio?) change, it’s – marginally – better.
Something else which isn’t in the screenplay is the fact that Chief Scar has BLUE eyes, surely not a mistake. Instead (according to an article I read ages ago in the LRB) it’s a reference to Quanah Parker, the half-Native American/half-white offspring of the actual woman Alan LeMay based his novel on, who ended up a chief.
The producer, incidentally, was Merian C Cooper, who produced 10 of Ford’s films and – in an earlier life – directed half of King Kong…
(To make a niche, niche point, if you’ve read 40s and 50s screenplays, you’ll have noticed that each shot is marked as a different scene. I always wrote this off as an old, arcane practice. But I think I’ve worked it out. Most of the film would have been shot on location. But a ‘close shot’ might well have been shot in the studio, two months later. So making each shot a scene had its purpose…)

This was the penultimate time I called an ambulance. (I had 8 symptoms of heart failure, but the Practice Nurse at Riverside Health Centre had failed to notice a single one, and had sent me home. But that’s another story…)
I was in bed and the front door was on the latch. The paramedic was a woman of about 50. Immediately, she was very suspicious. I’d had a major stroke at 49. Surely I was in some way to blame?
Had I been a heavy smoker?
No, I’d never smoked.
Oh, a heavy drinker then?
No, not really, just a can of beer in the evening…
She wouldn’t have it. Eventually I was put in a wheelchair and wheeled out to the ambulance.
There! she said triumphantly. I’d left an empty green bottle by my bench – presumably too drunk to take it inside…
Actually no, said her colleague. It’s posh water… (San Pellegrino, as a matter of fact…)

Perfect example of the ‘40s cleaner’ trope (what does ‘trope’ even mean…?). Dirk Bogarde plays an American, lots of posh Brits say ‘don’t upset yourself, ducks‘. Directed by Anthony Asquith (old Etonian…). Every word is FAKE! 

It’s in flashback, the police interviewing 5 suspects in the murder of Astra (Jean Kent), an ‘enigmatic fortune teller…’ Jean Kent is ‘wonderful’. (At the risk of sounding like T Davies…)
And she inspired the Telegraph headline: ‘Actress Jean Kent died after TV fell on her’… It’s true. She did.

It has Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart (as an ‘Irish’ groom) and Ronald Reagan. She suffers from ‘a brain tumour’. (Possibly the only film before Regarding Henry which does…)

It’s fab – except for GEORGE BRENT. Bogart’s a 10, even with his coming-and-going accent. Reagan’s a 6, say (at 28). And Brent is a 1. Yet Brent is who(m) she ‘falls in love with’ and ‘marries’. WTF!?! Is the whole thing a satire about the disastrous choices one makes with a brain tumour?

No. It was ever thus: in 8 (at least) studio movies, the Bette Davis character chose George Brent, just to prove that SHE was the biggest star around…

Which makes me ask: did she EVER have a good leading man? Henry Fonda in Jezebel, Paul Henried in Now Voyager, Errol Flynn in The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex…?

But in All About Eve she had… Gary Merrill!

Before the stroke, I didn’t take myself seriously. If someone thought I was wrong, I didn’t necessarily believe it. But I thought I couldn’t change it.

Take films. Both the producers I worked for (who actually made the films…) were – in a word – charlatans. (They’re maybe ALL charlatans: discuss…) One was an obnoxious charlatan and one a charming charlatan. But charlatans they were… One walked all over me; the other (after I’d learned) did SOME of the things I so diplomatically requested (like: making the movie even SHORTER, thus excising some of the director’s grotesqueries…).

Whenever a screenwriter FINALLY gets to direct or produce – after a decade or two of ‘merely’ writing the damn thing – it’s a miracle (provided, of course, that they can actually DO it…).

After the stroke, I was in despair. Pre-stroke – with all that intelligence and knowhow – it had been SUCH a struggle to get what I wanted done; post-stroke, it would just be impossible…

But after four years, I just tried being ‘myself’: I would stay on the phone, to complain, or ‘make a suggestion’. I would tell them I’d had a stroke, if necessary, and just PERSIST in asking whether it would be possible, and saying (ad infinitum): Are you the CEO of (for instance, TSB)? In that case, can I speak to a superior…

And on and on and on. Just to pass the time and cross it off my (endless) list. It didn’t necessarily WORK – but it made me feel better…

I was working at the NFT, with my back to the door, and one of the women in the office started talking to L. But when she said ‘You’ve been bobbed’, I realised to my horror that L wasn’t there, she was talking to ME, and I had L’s build and (potentially) haircut!

What should I do? Obviously, make a joke of it. But I didn’t have the confidence. It would be embarrassing to both of us. I don’t remember what happened next, but I don’t think I said anything…

The five-and-a-quarter inch disc was still in use at the NFT, and much mirth was caused by the fact that the noise the disc made was the same as the synthesiser in ‘I’ve Got The Power’ by Snap!, which was in the charts at the time.