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Having a 1990 moment on R6: The Sun Rising and Respectable! It reminded me of an example of my ‘humour’ before the stroke. Remember that Lars Von Trier movie Melancholia with Kirsten Dunst? I called it ‘Melankimlia’, probably only in emails to S and/or R. The only people who’d ‘get’ it, insofar as it was able to be ‘got’…

I thought Melandkimlia summed up the true worth of LVT’s pseudo-deep film. Was it really funny? I don’t know. But it made me think I was. Now it seems like another man, another planet…

But just think: Mel and Kim – and two moons…

Maybe it’s the heist movie for 54-year-olds? Ulu Grosbard was 48 when he made it.

Dustin Hoffman optioned the book himself (by Eddie Bunker) and wanted to direct it. Curious, as he never wanted to do anything else like it, and eventually ended up directing… Quartet, 37 years later.
His performance as Max Dembo is just astonishing. (And I don’t even like him much.) His EYES are so good here. He has that look I know so well: He’d punch the walls if he could… but this time he won’t. He’s been here too many times before. He just shows it in his eyes…
The noise he makes when he gets his hands on a shotgun…

Theresa Russell, aged only 21! In her second film.
Age difference? OK, it was a little extreme. Theresa Russell was 21. Hoffman was 41. But he’s just been in prison! He would go after her. We WANT them to get together…
Her response to jewellery: ‘It’s disgusting!’
And she gives (to DH) the same ultimatum that Robert De Niro gives to a WOMAN in Heat. Far more interesting for HER…
(No surprise Nicolas Roeg snapped her up for 5 1/2 films. What happened to her? She made Black Widow when she was 30. Since when she’s worked all the time, but in v little you’ve heard of.)

M Emmet Walsh as the parole officer who is perfectly rational but we just don’t like…
Gary Busey (with his son played by his own son, later an actor…)…
Kathy Bates, in (almost) her first film as Busey’s wife, who warns Max off. You know she’s right. And so does he…
Harry Dean Stanton – great as ever. His death scene is so powerful – after a Point Break-style run through suburban gardens…
The climax: will he/won’t he shoot Gary Busey? So agonising…
Closes on the teenage mugshot of Max Dembo. The eyes! (They must be a thing for UG…)

From IMDb:
Uncredited, Michael Mann worked on adapting the film’s source novel “No Beast So Fierce” by Edward Bunker for the movie’s script. The book later acted as a point of reference for Mann for the Neil McCauley character (played by Robert De Niro) when Mann later made the movie Heat (1995).

It’s clearly an influence on Heat. But I would say (to the disbelief of my 30-year-old self) that this was infinitely greater. It’s the lowest-key thriller ever. Almost the anti-Heat.
It was shot, in anti-noir style, by Owen Roizman, who shot all of the 70s big films (The Exorcist, The French Connection, Network, the list goes on) but then turned to commercials. Obviously wanted more money!
David Shore: soundtrack by one of the greatest 70s film composers (The Conversation, The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three and, 30 years later, Zodiac!)

30/11/08 (aged 5 1/2)
A reads encyclopaedia, tells me about the ‘Australian aubergines’ who lived there before the white men came.

A is planning a ‘sex party’ for his 16th birthday (because we told him 16 is the age of consent). He will have a bottom-shaped cake with chocolate down the bum crack.

31/8/09
At Kentwell Hall I say to A that I’m glad he likes L (A has given him some chips).
A volunteers that on the day L was born, A took a few bites out of every apple. (Chimes with Adam Phillips’s idea that children who don’t finish their food are anxious about not being loved enough. They want to make sure there is some food/love left.)
I: Was it to make sure you had some left?
A agrees.
Then A: Mummy hates me. She only loves L.
I: What about when she lies in bed next to you and massages you?
A: Then she loves me and hates L—.

1/1/11 (3 1/2)
‘Mummy, when I’m a grown-up, you and me are going to go to a wedding and get married. We’re going to have three babies called L—, L— and L—.’
He would shout: ‘EX9. Help us!’

13/3/12 (nearly 5)
Lying on the floor after he said I hurt his leg getting his pyjamas on: ‘I’m feeling sad. You’re not using empathy!’

Likes singing: ‘Gold… Finger!’ and: ‘Dance into the fire…’

1/4/12
Says Avatar is about ‘blue monkeys…’.

15/4/12
‘Jesus’s real name was Zeus. That was his middle name.’
‘There wasn’t an ice age. There was a laser age.’

Sept 2012 (5 1/3)
He puts all the cushions on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Why? ‘Health and safety!’

8/11/12 (5 1/2)
To K, who’s talking to N: ‘Don’t get absorbed in the world of chat.’

On a 1969 edition of The Dating Game, Farrah Fawcett (incredibly beautiful, with her ditsy charm and brown hair) was introduced thus: ‘An accomplished artist and sculptress who hopes to open her own gallery…’

In 1976, on the brink of stardom in Charlie’s Angels, she posed for a poster in a red swimsuit.
It went on to be the biggest-selling poster of all time.
On the Merv Griffin Show, the same year, in a $25,000 sable coat, when asked what other career would have suited her apart from acting, she said: ‘I never thought about it much before, but now I’m in it, and I love it… I majored in art, in history (laughs), in college (laughs). I majored in art history in college. So that’s what I kind of saw myself doing. And I sculpt and I paint, but now that I’m in this, there’s no time for anything else…’

In a 1977 interview about the success of Charlie’s Angels (with TV Guide) she said: ‘When the show was number three, I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.’

In 1980’s Saturn 3, she was billed above Kirk Douglas…

Her hairstyle became an international trend…

In 1997…
Farrah Fawcett arrives on the set of Late Show With David Letterman.
Part 1:

Part 2:

Words fail me…

Coming round afterwards, I can imagine a phonecall with the selfish, narcissistic and unfaithful Ryan O’Neal – who last had a hit 20 years ago with Barry Lyndon, and with whom she has just broken up – and her 12-year-old son Redmond (named after Barry Lyndon), who shares her strict Catholicism.

April 2009…
A meeting between a partially-unconscious Farrah, at stage 4 of anal cancer, and her son Redmond, then incarcerated for possession of heroin, in shackles and supervised by prison officers…

She died of cancer, aged 62, on 25 June 2009.
Her passing too was neglected: the same day, Michael Jackson died. He got the coverage…

This stars John Malkovich and Ray Winstone (both terrific), Lena Headey (interesting) and – as the hero, in the role Bruno Ganz made his own in The American Friend – a horribly miscast Dougray Scott (just TERRIBLE).
The direction is by Liliana Cavani, who made one notable film (The Night Porter, which I haven’t seen) and just one that I have seen: Francesco (1989), with Mickey Rourke as St Francis and Helena Bonham Carter. (It was the strangest viewing experience of my life, in an open-air cinema in Mytilene Town, Mytilene (Lesbos) in 1991, dubbed into Greek! We were the only people there…) It’s at best pedestrian.
What makes it worth seeing – as well as the performances – is the script by Charles McKeown, who is a Python hanger-on, having scripted 3 Terry Gilliam movies (including Brazil and The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen) AND the recent John Cleese sitcom Hold The Sunset. A strange mix with Ripley, you might think, but he gives Malkovich and Winstone a stream of one-liners (example: Malkovich in Act 3 when he’s waiting for the killers to arrive and has just hung up on Headey, who’s the wife of Scott, but doesn’t want Scott to know who was on the phone: ‘Never give a friend financial advice!’).
Why does Highsmith, who has a very dry-to-non-existent sense of humour, inspire writers who do one-liners (exhibit B: The Cry Of The Owl, 2009)? Is it because her situations are so good, but she’s a second-division writer, who needs something more?
(There’s one problem with the plot: surely Malkovich wouldn’t allow Headey to live, knowing what she knows about him?)
Malkovich makes this a comedy, so you don’t feel remotely sad when Scott dies ‘heroically’ – just eager for the next one-liner…
Ennio Morricone did the score, which makes much of the fact that Malkovich’s wife plays the harpsichord, and is indeed preparing for the climactic concert in Vicenza in Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico – which complements nicely the enormous palace where Malkovich lives in the film: the Villa Emo in Fanzolo.

Robert Hamer direction, Diana Morgan script. Based on a play by Roland Pertwee, who wrote the ‘scenario’ for The Spy In Black. (Not the story. Not the script. The scenario!)
Very dry humour: ‘I deplore this modern tendency to short sermons.’
Diana Morgan, whose number one script this is (she’s also 1 of 4, including Graham Greene, who wrote Went The Day Well?), was the subject of Their Finest (2016), which was perfectly ok but really a documentary would be better.
Googie Withers is just fantastic! Stanwyck crossed with Crawford crossed with Therese Raquin.
And so is Mervyn Johns (father of Glynis), who also starred in WTDW?, The Halfway House (script by DM) and Dead Of Night (co-directed by RH).
And Gordon Jackson!
*****

1
I didn’t meet HB until 1984 or 5 (I started at the LRB in November 1984, but at the beginning didn’t actually come into the office much as I was supposed to be checking whether copies actually reached bookshops)…

But I had heard of him since 1982. In my second year at Oxford I went out with CV (before she left to go to the Royal Academy). She had been brought up in Lansdowne Road, W11 and had had dealings with HB in the neighbourhood that made her 1) disparage him and 2) run away when she saw him. I never actually saw what he looked like then, but the name was seared into my consciousness. Luckily, CV and I didn’t go out much, and stayed in our house in Divinity Road eating beansprouts and watching films noir on the newly launched Channel 4.

HB! (His destiny as a writer was already there…) He went to New College, and this also added to his sense of danger. New College cloisters were where T punched me in the face in 1984, during the post-finals two weeks when I discovered alcohol. Since then, my nose has remained broken and I’ve lost the sense of smell (a mere harbinger of the catastrophe that was to follow. I had to double check the definition of harbinger. That’s the thing about HB. Very high standards…)

So, by the time I met HB in London, two years later, I was prepared…

2

In summer 1987, I went to the garden party at Ladbroke Grove. I had been earlier to one at Lansdowne Road (1983), so I knew the score: you gained admittance via one of the houses (number 45) and went into the communal garden. And you were off…
I went in 1987 and 1988. After that, maybe you were off in Athens, or maybe it was 1989 and I was just preoccupied with the carnage that City Limits had become…
Anyway, I’d never met your family before. (Your younger sister convinced me to give her a wide berth. And did again 31 years later…)
I had a quick look in the living room before going down (to the basement) and out (through the French windows…).
And I saw your father, unmistakable (and that portrait of him that looks like you…).
He was talking to Anthony Howard, who I knew was then deputy ed of The Observer.

Curiously enough, Philip Howard – no relation – was also there…



I remember Mrs Haycock (sexy, Australian, drove an e-type Jaguar) from Lower 2, and Miss Taylor (large, short hair; I associate her with jewels, for some reason) from Upper 2. But who took our classes in Upper 1 (I joined in January 1971, just in time for decimalisation) and Lower 3?

I remember Mrs Earle, the matron, riding a moped with a white pith crash helmet. And David Gottlieb sitting next to me in Lower 3. And Mrs Sunley teaching me the piano in the nice house next door (the headmaster’s house? For some reason I always imagine Helena Bonham Carter sitting in there. But she’d have been three!)