The Limehouse Golem

‘The Limehouse Golem’ is a darkly entertaining little film that takes a perverse delight in monkeying with genre tropes and audience expectations. It starts out as a cop-and-killer/cat-and-mouse thriller, with jaded Scotland Yard detective John Kildare (Bill Nighy) – considered reputationally expendable by his superiors due to whispers about his sexuality – saddled with the sensationalist case of the title, a series of bloody murders that hark back to the Ratcliff Highway killings immortalised in Thomas de Quincey’s essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. Throw in the Victorian London setting and we’re firmly in proto-Jack-the-Ripper territory.

Then director Juan Carlos Medina and writer Jane Goldman (adapting Peter Ackroyd’s novel) pull the rug as one of Kildare’s four suspects – failed playwright John Cree (Sam Reid) – is killed, ostensibly at the hands of his ill-treated wife, former musical hall star “Little” Lizzie (Olivia Cooke). The cases overlap. Lizzie’s trail becomes as sensational as the Golem murders. The prosecution case stacks up against her. It’s not long before she’s facing the gallows. Suddenly the film has become a courtroom drama with Kildare’s investigation ticking away in the background.

Then there’s another structural and (to a slightly lesser degree) tonal shift as Kildare, convinced that unveiling Cree posthumously as the Golem will both save Lizzie and benefit his career, visits Lizzie in prison and cajoles her into recounting her relationship with John, eager for any snippet of information that might help. We’re now in flashback territory and along for the ride in what could easily have been a trite rags-to-riches story except that Lizzie’s rise to fame is played out against a backdrop of greasepaint, illusion and backstage rivalry, the musical hall a cauldron of simmering tensions and blurred sexual identities. Lizzie’s erstwhile protector and mentor Dan Leno (Douglas Booth) is a female impersonator; Lizzie makes her music hall debut dressed as a boy. There’s a late-in-the-game bit of troilism where Lizzie’s arch-rival Aveline (Maria Valverde) assumes Lizzie’s “wifely duties” (to muddy the waters further, it’s heavily hinted that Aveline is bisexual). Even the troupe’s impresario (Eddie Marsan) – a man so avuncular that everyone calls him Uncle, for God’s sake! – has certain peccadilloes.

So we’re in sleazy potboiler territory. Only we’re not. I mentioned the de Quincey connection earlier, and ‘The Limehouse Golem’ has one eye at all times on the literary. Of course it does. The source material is by Peter Ackroyd, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who has a Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards on his mantelpiece*. Which is why a fog-wreathed murder mystery with all the genre tickboxes well and truly checked – from the haunted copper at the end of his career to the third act race to the gallows – has walk on parts for Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), George Gissing (Morgan Watkins). Dan Leno was also an historical figure. There’s no small amount of delight to be had in seeing the grumpily pragmatic Kildare going up against them – one of the film’s niftiest conceits is playing each of the murders as if one or other of them is guilty of it, depending on whom Kildare is interviewing at the time.

But for all of its literary pretentions, ‘The Limehouse Golem’ is at its best as a treatise on theatricality. The swapping of identities, one individual playing many parts; the nature of hagiography, brutal violence restaged for crowd-pleasing thrills; the interchangeability of gender. But it also says much about the misplaced ethos of masculinity, specifically with regard to how three men in particular want to save or redeem Lizzie and various others just plain use her.

It’s fair to say that ‘The Limehouse Golem’ has a hell of a lot bubbling away during its brisk hour and three quarter running time. It could easily have been a mess – artless and disjointed – even in the hands of an experienced director. Which makes it something worth praising that it is only his second feature-length outing, following 2012’s ‘Painless’ – a film I now have every intention of seeking out. Medina is savvy enough to give the audience what they want – there’s plenty of blood and gore, the streets of London are depicted as appropriately dark and dangerous and seedy, brothels and opium dens abound, and everything is foggy or shadowy – and keep the procedural element of the film happily bouncing from clue to clue, doubling down on the genre beats even as he subverts them.

He’s also adept with actors. Granted, Nighy – who took the role after Alan Rickman stepped down owing to ill-health (he passed away soon after) – doesn’t need much prompting: the role of Kildare fits him like a glove. Mays, a perennially underrated actor, does sterling work and who’d have thought that a Bill Nighy/Daniel Mays double act would form the backbone of the film? Booth, Marsan and Valverde are pitch perfect, the latter taking a role that was basically written as Bitch Queen From Hell and emerging with a nuanced character. And then there’s Cooke, who graduates from a cluster of good performances in indie films and TV dramas in impressive style. ‘The Limehouse Golem’, through all of its shifts in structure and perspective, is finally Lizzie’s story and Olivia Cooke gives us a Lizzie who is unforgettable.



*I’m speaking figuratively here. I don’t know whether he keeps them on his mantelpiece or not. It’s not like I’ve ever been round his gaff.

Dad's Army

During the nine years ‘Dad’s Army’ played to hugely appreciative audiences on the BBC, the Nazi threat never got closer to the Home Guard platoon of Walmington-on-Sea than a few cartoon arrows in the opening credit sequence. This was as it should be: the show, at its best, satirises Englishness, cowardice, incompetence and the class system and finds them to be almost incestuously interrelated. The best British sitcoms have always been studies in failure and microcosms of parochialism – ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Porridge’, ‘Open All Hours’, ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’ – and ‘Dad’s Army’ upped the ante with its wartime setting that took a big shiny pin to the translucent balloon of jingoism.

Or, to put it another way, the last thing ‘Dad’s Army’ needed was the Hun. However, 30-minute sitcoms can happily run for season after season and delight their fans simply by having their ensemble casts recreate in comically specific ways to any given situation (that’s why they’re called sitcoms, after all) while a 100-minute film – at least a mainstream one with well known actors in the lead roles and a chunk of studio money behind it – must necessarily have a plot. And thus it is that ‘Dad’s Army’ – the franchise’s first big screen outing since the original cast were assembled for a dreadful mishmash of a motion picture in 1971 – almost inevitably sees them tangle with invading German forces.

The 1971 film, directed by Norman Cohen and mercilessly buggered about by Columbia Studios (who saw fit to junk whole tranches of series creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s screenplay), is essentially an origin story – dear God, a ‘Dad’s Army’ origin story! – culminating in the bumbling platoon finally cohering as a unit to rescue hostages taken by the crew of a downed German aircraft. The new film, directed rather more ably by Oliver Parker, has the common decency to raise the stakes and throw in secret codes, D-Day plans and a glamorous double-agent. But does this make it any more successful?

If transferring small-screen situation comedy to a narrative-driven big-screen dynamic isn’t a difficult enough proposition as it is, doing so without the comfort blanket of the original cast presents a whole other problem. ‘Steptoe and Son’ (1972) and ‘Steptoe and Son Ride Again’ (1973) might be woefully inept attempts at film-making, but at least that’s Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett up there on screen verbally gouging each other. The biggest pitfall ‘Dad’s Army’ faced from the outset was the potential embarrassment factor of watching a septet of (mostly) A-list movie icons doing impersonations of TV actors.

And, by God, is the cast of ‘Dad’s Army’ its selling point! Here we have Toby Jones as Captain Mainwaring, Bill Nighy as Sergeant Wilson, Tom Courtenay as Lance Corporal Jones. Michael Gambon as Private Godfrey, Blake Harrison as Private Pike, Daniel Mays as Private Walker and Bill Paterson as Private Frazier. By and large, all filter their performances through the audience’s memories of the original actor while bringing enough to the role to reinvigorate it if not (purposefully, one feels) reclaim it. Only Jones seems on a mission to make Mainwaring his own, while Harrison and Mays happily play to the audience’s expectations. Nighy, Paterson, Gambon and – especially – Courtenay fare the best.

It’s the ladies of the cast who really excel, though. Catherine Zeta Jones, as vampish journalist Rose Winter, has more fun than I’ve seen her exhibit in a performance since she cut lose with ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’ in ‘Rock of Ages’. Of course, Zeta Jones could play the vamp in her sleep, and the script, by Hamish McColl, doesn’t require her to do much more than smoulder and purr seductive double entendres, but she goes for broke and emerges as one of the film’s greatest assets. Its other assets are: Sarah Lancashire as Mrs Pike, Alison Steadman as Mrs Fox, Annette Crosby and Julia Foster* as Godfrey’s sisters Cissy and Dolly (their double act is priceless), Emily Atack as Walker’s dollybird girlfriend Daphne, Holli Dempsey as Pike’s long-suffering girlfriend Vera and Felicity Montagu as Mrs Mainwaring.

Yes, you read that correctly. Never seen in the show and avoided with almost tactical precision by Arthur Lowe’s Mainwaring, Mrs M not only gets a belated appearance, but leads a corresponding platoon of Walmington’s womenfolk in the climactic action scene. I use the term “action scene” purely as a generic description. It’s actually as geriatric as any of the main cast.

The shoot-out finale is as good an example as anything in the film of how uneven the humour is. There are moments of quiet snobbish one-upmanship, mainly between Mainwaring and Wilson, but also (taking the chain of command up a notch) between actual officer Colonel Theakes (Mark Gatiss) and Mainwaring; the film scores its most effective points during these moments. Slapstick predominates elsewhere, and there’s an extended sequence where various members of the cast dive behind sofas and snag their trousers climbing out of windows, that makes your average Brian Rix farce look like Strindberg. This is offset against the borderline surrealism of inflatable tanks coming loose from their mooring and floating off (one ends up impaled on a church spire, leaking air in a flatulent manner as Mainwaring tries to make a heartfelt speech). There’s also a sequence, early on, where the aforementioned cartoon arrows of the opening credits are recreated as blocks on a map in a German war room; a Nazi officer sniggers that any thoughts of England having the Third Reich on the run are misguided, and asks rhetorically “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Churchill?” For all I know, it might have been funny as hell on paper; I was a little bit sick in my mouth watching it on screen.

For all its problems, though, I’ll admit to enjoying ‘Dad’s Army’ a lot more than I had any right to. Maybe the tradition of British sitcoms utterly failing as feature-length expositions – the first ‘Dad’s Army’ film, both ‘Steptoe’ attempts, ‘Porridge’, ‘The Likely Lads’ – justifies a certain creative accountancy as regards my usual critical standards. Maybe it’s because it was a cold, wet and miserable evening and a few good belly laughs in a warm cinema auditorium were worth an hour and three quarters of my time. Maybe it’s because Catherine Zeta Jones looks good in a burgundy two-piece and a pillbox hat. Or maybe it’s the unalloyed delight I took in the cameo by Ian Lavender (Private Pike in the original), a piece of reverse-casting that works a treat.



*Meta moment: Julia Foster starred alongside Tom Courtenay 54 years ago in ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’; there’s a lost episode of ‘Dad’s Army’ called ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker’.