Let's sit down to good film

Ian McKellen in wonderful form

In between recent trips to the cinema, I’ve also managed to see a few films at home, both on television channels or discs, and it seemed too good an opportunity not to do a brief round up.

First up comes Mr Holmes, last year’s take on Sherlock – this time, with Ian McKellen as an aging and long-retired version of the iconic consulting detective.

It’s the late 1940s – a world changed utterly by the atomic bomb – and, worried that he’s losing his mind, Holmes is trying to piece together the final case that led to his retirement.

At the same time, he becomes the idol of the young, precocious son of the housekeeper who looks after him in his retirement home on England’s south coast.

Beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted – McKellen is simply a joy to watch – this gentle UK-made piece is full of hidden depths and philosophical ruminations.

Well worth a watch.

Messers Karloff, Lorre and Price

Rather different – but no less entertaining (albeit for very different reasons) is Roger Corman’s The Raven, which I caught up with a couple of weeks ago.

It’s less a case of being based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name than having been inspired by it, in the loosest sense.

In this 1963 outing, we have three sorcerers vying against each other for magical supremacy, with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff as the trio, engaged at various points throughout in finger-pointy duels.

It’s deliciously camp, which is possibly not the first thing that one might expect from writer Richard Matheson, who penned the zombie horror classic, I Am Legend, while a young Jack Nicholson spend most of his on-screen time looking pretty much lost in such company.

Enormous fun – Price in particular had such a wonderful voice for this sort of film – and the blu ray comes with extras that includes a German documentary about Lorre.

It’s surprisingly serious in tone given the nature of the main feature, but very definitely worth watching, providing a reminder of just what a fine actor he was, and covering his relationship with Brecht as well as offering a detailed look at his breakthrough film role as the murderer in Fritz Lang’s classic of German Expressionist cinema, M (1931).

One reviewer on Amazon decided to be snotty about Lorre  ‘wasting his talent’ because of drink. It’s the point at which you decide to respond by suggesting they inform themselves better about the German exiles in the US and the problems that many of them suffered.

Doris Day and Rock Hudson suffering misunderstandings

On a completely different note, last weekend saw me slumped in front of the gogglebox, on cat cuddling duty, when up popped Send Me No Flowers, a 1964 rom-com that I haven’t seen in decades.

Starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson – with Tony Randall in the sort of friend-of-the-leading-man character that he made his own – it’s a typical farce spun out after Hudson’s hypochondriac suburbanite overhears his doctor discussing a terminal case and soon-to-be-deceased individual is himself.

Directed by Norman Jewison, this was the final of a trio of Day-Hudson-Randall outings and while it’s pleasing enough fodder, it doesn’t have anything like the zip of Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back.

Still, it was nice enough to see again one of the sort of films I feel as though I grew up with – and Day is always wonderful.

Last in this little round-up comes Paul, a 2011 sci-fi comedy road movie that I’d managed to see bits of before, but never the whole thing.

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg with Paul

Starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, it’s about two British geeks who go on their dream holiday to San Diego for Comic-Con, followed by a road trip across the US to visit various sites of importance in UFO lore.

However, their plans go awry when they find themselves on the run with Paul, a fugitive alien who is running away from plans to dissect him.

Really good fun, with a very enjoyable supporting cast that includes Blythe Danner, Seth Rogan (as the voice of Paul) and Sigourney Weaver, who subsequently described it to Graham Norton as a “love letter to sci-fi fans” (I think she said the same of the equally enjoyable Galaxy Quest).

Very good fun, pacey, with good characters – including an alien that is far from a film stereotype – plus loads of nods to other films and pop culture, what’s not to enjoy? It was the perfect way to follow a stack of the equally geek-oriented The Big Bang Theory.

Never mind all tea in China – the art's not bad either

Andrew Graham-Dixon gets up close to terracotta warriors

The older I get, the more I find myself wondering at just how many evenings I spent, in my youth, waiting to be entertained by the television: or rather, how our family entertainment/relaxation was dependent on the box in the corner.

These days, I tend to watch far less TV – sport is a rare exception and even that’s hardly a daily occurrence.

The disadvantage of this is that I have a tendency to miss things that I would enjoy, so it was with some relief that I discovered, in good time, that a new, three-part series from Andrew Graham-Dixon, on The Art of China, was due to begin last night on BBC4.

Three hours is hardly long to explore an art history of such a vast nation – a history that dates back, uninterrupted, many thousands of years – so Graham-Dixon picks threads and plots themes that allow him to create a remarkably coherent picture of a culture that few of us are very familiar with.

We’ve seen this approach before, in his excellent series on The Art of Germany, for instance, where the first episode had, as an umbrella idea, the importance of the forest in the German psyche.

It’s a recurring analysis that much art is concerned with the afterlife: in the German series, this found realisation in the extraordinary works of religious art, carved from the trees of those same forests.

In China, Graham-Dixon began by introducing us to the extraordinary, freestanding bronze sculptures from the city of Sanxingdui, which is in the south west of the country, in what is now Sichuan.

These artifacts were only uncovered by archeologists in 1987 and radiocarbon dating places them as coming from the 12th-11th centuries BCE. Now that’s old.

Bronze head from Sanxingdui

Many of the sculptures are heads, with protruding eyes and, in some cases, gold masks. There is also an astonishingly intricate and delicate sculpture of a tree, complete with birds.

Various theories abound, but it seems possible that these were linked to some form of worship or ritual, possibly connected to ancestors.

The works had to be pieced, painstakingly back together, after being found, smashed, in two pits.

It all adds to the fascination: not only is this a question of why they were made, but also of why they were destroyed.

The theme continued with a visit to Mr Yang’s Emporium, where the eponymous Mr Yang creates card and paper models for people to burn as tributes to the dead.

However old such an idea might be, the subjects of the tributes were not, with Graham-Dixon showing us a computer on a desk and a Mercedes, although he found a cardboard cow, complete with udder, rather more amusing.

But while the programme branched off into looking at the written Chinese language – it’s the one remaining hieroglyphic language in the world – and explaining some of those hieroglyphs, it returned to the theme of people’s relationship with the afterlife when Graham-Dixon went to look at the Terracotta Army.

Bronze tree from Sanxingdui

It’s incredible to think that they were only legend until being first unearthed as recently as 1974, and that the 8,000 figures are only from a small part of a vast, 22-square-mile site, which could take as long as another century to be fully excavated.

Graham-Dixon was allowed to walk among the figures, which gave him the opportunity to show us how each one was an individual and how they also reflected the ethnic diversity of the realm of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (260–210 BCE).

Looking inside the lower body of one, he was able to point out where the fingers of its maker had pulled up the clay. And on another, where the maker had first made his mark – and then the supervisor had stamped it.

And it was a wonderful description when, looking over the vast building that now houses them, he described it as being “like King’s Cross!” before adding: “Here they are. The imperial guard, the Terracotta Army lined up for all time like commuters waiting to travel into eternity.”

Less familiar, but even more extraordinary, he asserted, is the Qin bronze chariot, which was also found in the site and is formed of more than 3,000 bronze pieces.

But what is just as fascinating about the Terracotta Army as its scale and the skill involved in creating it, is the probable influence of art from further west – in particular, art that more realistically portrayed the human face.

How would that influence have found its way to China? That was where the Silk Road came into the picture.

This trading route – incredibly dangerous in places – provided a way both in and out of China.

Wu Zetian as a Buddha

And along part of it stands the labyrinthine Buddhist cave complex at Dunhuang.

Carved right into rocky cliffs, the individual chapels are decorated lavishly with Buddhist images, including a vast statue of a female Buddha, which is said to represent Wu Zetian (624-705 CE), China’s first female ruler.

She was a great patron of Buddhism – a religion that had been imported to the country from India.

The first programme was, all in all, a fascinating look at the art of China.

Graham-Dixon has the gift of being able to make things approachable and easy to grasp without ever dumbing down.

And the way in which he introduces themes is never forced, but leaves the viewer with more than enough to actually consider well after the closing titles have concluded.

There’s plenty of time to catch up with the first episode – it’s available now on iPlayer – but this bodes very well for two further weeks of seriously good, grown-up and intelligent telly.

You can find out more about the series at the programme’s dedicated website.

Andrew Graham-Dixon’s website

Small pleasures, from good eggs to good books

Della Street and Perry Mason

It’s doubtful that there is any better way to start a working day than a leisurely breakfast with a good book by your side.

If it means getting up a tad earlier and rushing a bit more, the more relaxed minutes that follow make it worth while.

And Albertini, a small, local café just off Euston Road – so just away from the worst of the traffic fumes and noise – is the perfect spot for such indulgence.

Even the simplest foods can be got wrong. On Tuesday, with an appointment elsewhere early in the morning, breakfast was taken in an old-fashioned greasy spoon, where the eggs and baked beans did the job of providing fuel, but nothing more.

But whoever is on duty at Albertini in a morning, be it Albert or Tini, they make a mean fried egg on toast, and it’s one of life’s small pleasures to sit and eat, taking care to avoid any of the rich, golden yolk dripping onto the plate.

And then there’s the coffee: a good old-fashioned, plain white mug – none of that overpriced, absurdly-named stuff so beloved of the endless chains that have invaded these shores in the wake of Friends.

There are no baristas at Albertini, but there is always good coffee, at a decent price.

Once the eggs are consumed, I pull the mug closer and return to whatever my current reading matter is.

It’s all been fiction of late – simply because my non-fiction reading, volume one of John Richardson’s behemoth of a three-volume Life of Picasso (with a fourth volume in the offing) may be brilliant, but it is also far too big and too heavy to lug around in a day-to-day bag.

And as so often, crime fiction is what I turn to when I want something a little lighter to read, but which still doesn’t actually insult the little grey cells.

So here is a brief look at a few recent reads – although that doesn’t mean they’re new books.

Earl Stanley Gardener’s the Case of the Stuttering Bishop is really the odd one out in this batch – it’ll become clear why quite quickly – so I’ll start with that.

There’s not really much to say about the Perry Mason books except that they’re fun in a fairly predictable way, but without the writing itself being too ‘pulpy’.

When I lodged in Bloomsbury some years ago, my landlady had most of them, in lovely old editions, on narrow shelves in the flat’s littlest room. I developed a fondness for them then and it was nice to return to one now.

They remain snappy and twisty, with a strong set of central characters – even though the descriptions are largely irrelevant, because I can’t see Mason as anyone other than the late Raymond Burr and Della Street as anyone other than Barbara Hale, while William Katt (Hale’s son), who played Paul Drake in the later TV reincarnation, looks nothing like the Drake of the written page.

But no matter, it was good fun.

Arturo Peréz-Reverte is the Spanish author who has given us, among many other works, The Club Dumas, which was subsequently adapted into The Ninth Gate, starring Johnny Depp.

The Flanders Panel starts with the discovery of a hidden clue in an old work of art, hinting at foul deeds.

In a 15th-century Flemish painting, two noblemen are pictured playing chess. Yet two years before it was painted, one of them had been murdered.

Five centuries later, in Madrid, picture restorer Julia is preparing the work for auction and uncovers a hidden inscription in Latin that points to the crime: Quis necavit equitem? Who killed the knight?

But this isn’t just a medieval mystery, because it becomes clear that, even after five centuries, the game isn’t up.

Combining art and chess, Peréz-Reverte spins a tale that possesses a genuinely creepy quality. And he writes so convincingly that you do find yourself wondering if the painting and the painter really existed.

Thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying, and with a conclusion that surprises – well, it surprised me.

Montalbano and Catarella

Having discovered that another Spanish writer, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, influenced Andrea Camilleri to the extent that the latter named his own protagonist after him, I decided to chase down some of the books that are available in translation.

Murder in the Central Committee possibly isn’t the best of the Pepe Carvalho series to begin with, since it uproots the private detective from his usual Barcelona setting and sends him to Madrid to solve an apparent closed-room killing.

In a Spain still recovering from the Franco years, the murder of the general secretary of the country’s communist party causes unrest.

Can Carvalho, drafted in as a former member of the party because he understands its workings, solve the case?

Rather over-wordy on occasion – particularly when he’s illustrating that he does actually know the politics – it’s still an interesting read with a quirky central character, and while Montalbán isn’t in the business of rubbishing communism, he’s good on the way people will argue over the finest imaginable points of what could be described as political theology.

I look forward to reading one of the Carvalho books that’s set in Barcelona.

But this moves us nicely to Camilleri and The Voice of the Violin, the fourth of his series of novels about Sicilian police inspector, Montalbano.

Here, our hero is faced with the murder of a woman that has all the hallmarks of having been the result of a burglary – or was it a rape?

Camilleri can, extraordinarily, create stories of tragedy and horror, highlighting corruption and venality and many another human failing, yet all with a sense of humour underlying the deep cynicism.

Salvo Montalbano is a wonderful protagonist – unorthodox, flawed but humane, and there’s a delightful cast of other regular characters too. In this novel in particular, the well-meaning but woefully inept policeman Catarella offers comic delight, as well as providing a way to comment on ‘modern’ approaches to policing.

And if Montalbano was named in homage to Montalbán, then another common factor is the love of food of both author’s central figures.

Mind, just as with Perry Mason, I can now no longer read about Montalbano without seeing Luca Zingaretti in my mind’s eye. They’re wonderful adaptations, but it leaves you with the question of whether seeing them impinges on the altogether more individual experience of reading the stories.

It’s not as though, however, these a 'bad' performances or examples of casting. And Angelo Russo’s Catarella actually helps read the character's muddled language.

Finally, a new discovery from Italy.

Gianrico Carofiglio is a former anti-Mafia prosecutor-turned author from Bari, and Involuntary Witness serves as his introduction to lawyer Guido Guerrieri, who now features in three further novels.

Guerrieri’s wife is leaving him, he’s hitting an early mid-life crisis and depression that’s only exacerbated by making a living that often involves defending the less-than-innocent.

Then he finds himself defending a Senegalese immigrant who is accused of murdering a nine-year-old boy.

Not only does he have his own demons to contend with, the lawyer faces small-town racism and a judicial system that is going to make any defence difficult.

If all that sounds incredibly heavy going, it’s to Carofiglio’s enormous credit that it simply flies past, leavened as it is with a great deal of dark, self-deprecating humour.

A great onslaught on the idea of Italian machismo, Carofiglio has produced a powerful novel about redemption.

It’s absolutely superb – just don’t read the final pages anywhere in public, whether on a bus or over a plate of eggs on toast in a café anywhere.