The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

As ever, a beautifully shot film by Roger Deakins.

Directed by Andrew Dominik
Written by Andrew Dominik, Roy Hanson (novel)
Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard


I've spoken before about twists, and about the spoiling of them.  It's not always easy to talk about a plot that takes a sudden and unexpected turn, without at least hinting about the change of direction.  On the other hand, do any of us really want to spoil a big twist in a film for anyone else?  Do we really want to give the ending away, do we really want to take away the joy of discovery?

It is with some relief, then, that I come to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  If ever a film was upfront about its intentions, this must be it.  There's no trickery in that title, there's no leading you down the wrong path.  Nor is it fundamentally incorrect, like Krakatoa East of Java.  Nor, for that matter, is it gently prodding you to the wrong conclusion, in the sense that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance wants you to believe that the fellow in question is James Stewart rather than John Wayne.  Nope, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford does exactly what it says, and never lets you forget it.  We've read the last page of the book, and now we're bound to watch the earlier pages being fitted into place.

In a sense, we're involved, we're voyeurs, we're caught in a story that we know will certainly end in death.  We know who's going to be killed, we know who's going to do the killing.  And this isn't a story like, say, Titanic, where we know the iceberg is coming but here's a girl and a boy making fools out of themselves to distract you for three and a half long, tortuous hours.  Nor is it Gandhi, a film that begins with the certainty of a shooting but never lets you think that the shooting is the be-all-and-end-all of the story; it's a conclusion that we have to reach, but there's so much more to see along the way.  No, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford isn't about anything else.  You're here to see the murder.  The title even tells you that it's not going to be a noble or heroic death.

However, the characters don't know this.  Hence the voyeurism; we know exactly what's coming, and how ugly it's going to be, but we're going to watch all concerned find out for themselves.  It's very appropriate that the film has us follow not the charismatic, legendary outlaw, but the coward of the title (a superb performance by the younger, and arguably more talented Affleck), his weakness, his guilt.  Jesse James is often distant, or part in shadow, or moving away from us - while we stay much closer to the antihero of the tale.  And that, ultimately, is where we belong; we can relate to the coward far more than we can relate to the outlaw.

Relating to the coward, following him voyeuristically, these are not easy subjects, and it would have been very easy for this film to fail, to become preachy and heartless.  Fortunately, it doesn't fail at all (although it could have been twenty minutes shorter without losing anything), thanks to a fine script and beautiful and inventive photography by the always wonderful Roger Deakins.  It's the elegance of the movie that allows us, nay makes us engage with Ford's weak and petty everyman.

Towards the end of the picture, Ford is asked why he did it:

Well, he was going to kill me.
So you were scared, and that's the only reason?
Yeah, and the reward money.

 Fear and avarice, in the end, are dreadfully human qualities, whether we want to admit to them or not.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Directed by Mark Romanek

Written by Alex Garland, Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)

Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley

Why is it that we’re so engaged by dystopian fantasies?  Why the fascination with a world that has headed off, or will head off, down a different and more problematic route to our own?  After all, there unquestionably is a fascination there – going back through Blade Runner, Nineteen Eighty-Fout, Metropolis, to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and far more points in between than I’ll be going into here*.  And if the surge in popularity of counterfactual novels  (or alternative histories, or uchronia) is anything to go by, it’s an allure that’s growing. 

But why?  Perhaps it’s because we live in uncertain times, and on-screen bleakness and suffering holds up a mirror to threats in the world we live in, much as Hollywood’s golden age of horror in the 30s and 40s coincided with darkness beyond the cinema’s walls.  Perhaps we’ve become used to a world so controlled and understood that any risk posed by events beyond our control seems exaggerated in its size and menace.  Or perhaps we just like to be reminded of how much worse things could be, perhaps it offers a crumb of comfort in showing us that life isn’t all that bad after all. 

Most dystopian and counterfactual stories deal with big, dramatic changes:  the Nazis won the war, Napoleon conquered the world, robots became intelligent, society collapsed under a global nuclear conflict, Kennedy wasn’t killed, Franz Ferdinand wasn’t killed, Hitler was.  However, in reality, it’s just as often small details and lifestyle changes that end up setting history on a different course entirely – changes that might not be noticed at the time, just as the passengers on a train don’t see the points being changed. 

As I’m writing this, physicists at the CERN institute are announcing that they’re a significant step closer to proving the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible flood of energy spread throughout the universe, thought to be responsible for allowing atoms to have the mass they need to exist.  It’s a big day for physics, with a number of others hopefully to come, and gives hope of the answers the project was looking to find.  Yet CERN has had a dramatic and unexpected impact on all of our lives (definitely on your life, you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise):  the software designed for sending data and theories and whatnot back and forth around the globe became the world wide web. 

These changes, slow-burning, little-noticed-at-the-time but ultimately huge, frequently emerge from technological and scientific discoveries, slowly filtering out from the academic community until they leave no-one untouched.  There are few if any counterfactual tales that ask ‘what if Jenner hadn’t discovered the smallpox vaccination?’ or ‘what if Lister hadn’t given the world antiseptic medicine?’, probably with very good reason from a literary point of view, but that doesn’t mean they transformed the world any less entirely. 

The world-changing breakthrough in Never Let Me Go is a medical one too.  But it’s also a discovery that's morally very questionable, one that saves countless lives while harming others.  Most importantly, it’s one viewed solely from the point of view of those who are harmed by it, those whose lives are not transformed for the better but lessened and shortened by the change.  This is where the dystopia exists – not for all those saved, happy and presumably either ignorant of the harm caused to others or choosing to look the other way, but for those who have to live a fractured shadow of a life. 

All of which raises a difficult question – to what extent, if any, should we be allowed to cause suffering in order to save lives?  Never Let Me Go, though raising the question poignantly and from the heart, does not seek to impose answers.  What it does, and does with great panache and elegance, fragile and delicate, is to give a very human dimension to a deeply moral question.  Not all dystopian tales must be universal; sometimes, a brighter future for the many ends up being built on the suffering of the few.

*Not least because there's no shortage of such lists out there; dystopianfilms.com is as good a place to start as any.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Henry Fonda, workers' hero.

Directed by John Ford
Written by Nunnally Johnson, John Steinbeck (novel)
Starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine




A little over three years passed between the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and American intervention into the war at the end of 1941.  This time might seem at first to be one when the storms of the world, of Japanese conquest as well as the Nazis’ spread across Europe, fell quiet when they reached the coasts of the United States - but appearances can be deceptive, especially when viewed from such a distance.  It was a time of great change and great national debates – a time when isolationist faced interventionist, a time when left met right met various points in the middle in argument and with conflict barely suppressed, a time when waves of immigrants fleeing totalitarianism in Europe and Asia brought countless new skills, new experience, new beliefs and new traditions to the country that had rescued them.  It was also a time when the US began, finally, to pull itself clear of the greatest crisis in its history, the catastrophe of the Great Depression.

That said, there was one respect in which the Depression wasn’t a disaster, but a revelation.  The movies – particularly in Hollywood, though the groundbreaking output of Weimar Germany should never be overlooked, even if that is another story for another day – boomed spectacularly, launching into a Golden Age built on innovation, grandeur, and an audience desperate for a spot of sunshine, an audience who went to the pictures in numbers unmatched before or since.  When this glittering cinematic explosion barrelled on into the new shapes of American society found at the end of the 30s, the films that emerged make for an astonishing catalogue of innovation and wonder.  Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Wizard of Oz, The Grapes of Wrath, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Great Dictator, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Suspicion, High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties, Fantasia, The Philadelphia Story, Rebecca… it would be easy to go on.  And on.  It was a quite remarkable period in Hollywood history, and one that was ended suddenly and utterly when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.

That’s not to say, of course, that there were no American films of such a standard made during the War – of course there were:  Casablanca, Double Indemnity, and Gaslight spring immediately to mind – but they’re fewer and further between.  More importantly, they’re not quite the same, less questioning, less of anything that could be seen as UnAmerican (a word that would become rather too relevant in the decade that followed).  And even after the war was over, and a slew of genuinely great pictures burst forth in the second half of the 40s, filmmakers were never again really able to utilise the power of Hollywood at its most chest-out and bright-eyed without the heavy knowledge of what they weren’t allowed to do weighing upon them.

Of course, even by 1938, Hollywood was restricted in what it could do – the Production Code was introduced in 1930 – but restricted in terms of morals, of kissing and sharing a bed and letting the bad guy win, not in terms of ideas.  Two of the films mentioned earlier, John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, both reach conclusions that make an inescapable political statement:  America, along with so much of the western world, was going badly wrong in how it treated ordinary people, and the left can show a far better and fairer way forward.  In both cases, the main character concludes with a powerful, affecting speech about unity and equality and giving ordinary working people a decent chance in life.  They’re both undoubtedly stirring moments.  However, stirring wasn't always enough.  For J. Edgar Hoover, Chaplin’s speech – don’t give yourself to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! – was the last straw, the last he’d take from a little foreign guy who cared about the poor a bit more strongly than could be accepted. 

Chaplin's speech has much in common with the end of The Grapes of Wrath:  

 A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody ... Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Ford's film won two Academy Awards, and was nominated for five more (The Great Dictator was nominated for five Oscars), but acceptance of these principles didn't last much beyond 1940.  Chaplin was exiled in 1952, a year after John Ford and John Steinbeck were investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for The Grapes of Wrath (film and book separately, as you'd imagine, although Steinbeck was hugely impressed both by Ford's interpretation and by Fonda's career-transforming turn as Tom Joad).  Today, McCarthyism is as dead as the Cold War, The Great Dictator is hailed far and wide as the masterpiece that it certainly was.  But The Grapes of Wrath, though still acclaimed, doesn't enjoy anything like the popularity of Ford's great westerns.  Perhaps the association of one of America's very finest and most innovative directors - and its most American - with an explicitly socialist tale is still uncomfortable.  Or perhaps his westerns are just too beloved in the imagination to allow much space for other tales (and of course, Ford later went on to deconstruct the frontier myth in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).  It's dangerous, I suppose, to read too much into people's behaviour.

Still, it's worth flagging up, whatever the reason, because of how much of a treat is being missed here by those who overlook it, or simply aren't aware of it.  The Grapes of Wrath is every bit as good as any western Ford ever made, and better than most (maybe all), a genuine high-water mark in an extraordinary period for American cinema.  Powerful, poignant, and deeply political, we should hail Ford not only for creating an exceptional piece of work, but also for the courage shown in standing up for the ordinary worker against big business and insitutions (Steinbeck and Ford, as well as being investigated during the McCarthy era, also received death threats from the Associated Farmers of California).  We ought also to hail him for making a film that retains a deep and important truth today, more than seven decades later; today, as in 1940, the ordinary worker finds himself driven further and further down, while those at the top reap ever more of the profits of his labour.  The Grapes of Wrath is as much a film for today as it is a Depression-era classic.

One final point:  John Ford quite rightly receives the lion's share of the acclaim for this wonderful picture, but there's someone else who shouldn't be ignored.  Here is a film that's gorgeously, strikingly, inventively shot, a film made so much better for looking so good.  The director of photography deserves his share of the credit.  Fellow by the name of Gregg Toland.  I think I might have mentioned him before.

Shooting the Past (1999)

Tim Spall. Is there an actor working today who's as dependably wonderful?

Directed by Stephen Poliakoff
Written by Stephen Poliakoff
Starring Lindsay Duncan, Timothy Spall, Liam Cunningham, Billie Whitelaw, Emilia Fox



Well, this is a little different.  I'm doing something for the first time, something that I might perhaps never do again - or which, at most, I'll only be doing very, very sparingly.  I think.  We'll see.  I mean, I can't really rely on myself to do what I want, but... so far as I can tell, writing about television will be a rare event, or less frequent than that.

But then, why not write about television?  Every picture here that I've rambled in the broad vicinity of was watched via a DVD, on a screen at home.  So was Shooting the Past.  And it's a three-hour miniseries (shorter than Apocalypse Now Redux, and far less flabby), not something that ran for weeks and months.  Neither of these, however, are the reason why I decided to sit down and write about something made entirely for TV.

Nope, it's all down to Stephen Poliakoff.  See, Poliakoff has made films for the cinema - not that they've been terribly successful, well-received or, um, good - but at some point in the mid-90s, he decided that television was the medium he wanted to work in.  Given the thoroughly unexceptional nature of his ventures into theatrical releases, that's probably not a bad idea (although, to be fair, those movies were right at the beginning of his career, so we should let him off).  But it's also not a bad idea - a very good idea, indeed - because few filmmakers today have quite the same gift for televised drama as Poliakoff.  His films - or plays, perhaps, I think it's entirely reasonable to call them plays, and that word probably suits better than films in most cases, certainly better than movies - his plays have become something to look forward to, a regular joy from a unique talent.  If Poliakoff recognises that he can create his best work in television, I think it would be rather churlish for me to turn my nose up at it.

Shooting the Past is the film/play that first established his name in the medium*, and still stands as arguably his finest work.  A beautifully paced and constructed homage to memory and the huge breadth of human experience, given emotion by a superb cast, Poliakoff offers us an image of just how much we stand to lose - and how little we're often aware of it - when we unthinkingly choose the modern over the past.  Progress and change are important, yet so frequently we let the brightness and energy of the dawn take all of our attention, so easily we lose our grip on what we had before.  And that's something which, once lost, can never be recovered; when we all forget, the past dies, scattered on the winds, forever out of our reach.




*before the brief venture into cinema, Poliakoff had a successful career writing and directing for the stage.