Still the Enemy Within

When I reviewed ‘Pride’ in September last year, I ended by wondering when British cinema was going to deliver the great film on the miners’ strike, be it a Scargill biopic, a conspiracy thriller based on Seamus Milne’s ‘The Enemy Within’, an underdog drama about the vastly outnumbered Nottinghamshire striking miners or Leicester's heroic “dirty thirty”, or a no-punches-pulled visceral account of the police brutality at Orgreave. I opined that we have the filmmaking talent for any of these to be a viable project. Instead, British cinema treats the strike – surely the mostly significant socio-political protest of the last half decade – as some sort of colourful backdrop to comedy-dramas like ‘Brassed Off’, ‘Billy Elliott’ and the aforementioned ‘Pride’.

This year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the strike, and we’re still no closer to the definitive feature film on the strike. What we do have though, and kudos to everyone who chipped in to help crowdfund it, is Owen Gower’s rock solid documentary ‘Still the Enemy Within’. The title, like that of Milne’s book on the government’s calculated campaign to undermine the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) references Margaret Thatcher’s heinous comment, post-Falklands conflict, that “Galtieri and the Argentians were the enemy without, Arthur Scargill and the miners are the enemy within”, sixteen words that manage to be xenophobic, imperialist, anti-union, anti-industry, anti-community and anti-workers’ rights. But we’re talking about Margaret fucking Thatcher here, so what else was to be expected?

‘Still the Enemy Within’ tells a clear-sighted story across its two hour running time, establishing a through line and maintaining a steady, informative pace. There are a few digressions, such as interviewee Norman Strike (who carried his birth certificate around for most of the strike after coppers started giving him grief because they thought he was taking the piss when asked his name) being invited onto cult BBC music show ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’: he comes marching out in the middle of a set and delivers a barnstorming speech only to be told later that the microphone hadn’t been switched on! By this time he’s repaired to the green room where, as he notes, “you want a Southern Comfort and Coke, you can have it; you want a bottle of whisky, you can have it”. As can be imagined of a man on strike and deprived of income for 35 weeks at this point, he goes to town on the free booze and drunkenly tells Jools Holland to fuck off at the end of the evening.

Another little discursion features Mike Jackson and basically recaps the story that inspired ‘Pride’, only ten minutes rather a hundred and twenty. Still, Jackson is engaging and passionate in interview, his wry humour shining through. In fact, humour is more prevalent than one might expect, particularly during the discussions of how flying pickets evaded police, including men hiding in car boots (police were especially vigilant for cars containing more than one adult male) or cutting across woodland dressed as joggers; Strike and his fellow contributors still seem chuffed, three decades on, that these schoolboy bits of field craft actually worked. Elsewhere, though, the humour is replace by a palpable anger. A discussion on the Nottinghamshire miners who continued working and who were shielded by a police presence which virtually sealed off the county hit home powerfully: Nottinghamshire’s been my home all my life and it’s still referred to as “scab county”. (I drove round some mining villages recently, researching an article for an anthology, and took a photograph of the headstocks at Blidworth, a village that was cut off and laid siege to by riot police in May 1984; I posted the picture on a mining heritage page on Facebook when I got home. The first comment was “Notts scabs”.)

Fury also drives the account of Orgreave; a pitched battle was provoked by mounted police and misrepresented by the media. The BBC reversed the order that footage was shot, leading the public to believe the police were responding to aggression. The interviewees agreed that Orgreave was the moment that the dynamic shifted and the police became more thuggish in their behaviours. Paramilitary is a word that’s used more than once to describe their techniques.

Gower features a fairly small number of former miners telling their stories, but he’s served brilliantly: Strike is immediately likeable, a working class raconteur; Paul Symonds, on whom the film opens and closes, describes the conditions miners faced, and the claustrophobic descent of the cage, in measured but evocative language – I’d put a transcript of his account against any passage in Zola’s ‘Germinal’; Steve Hamill is as direct and powerful an orator as you’re likely to encounter; while Joyce Sheppard, Betty Cook and Anne Scargill prove that women fought on the front line of the dispute as fearlessly and ferociously as anyone else.

A criticism made in several reviews is that the documentary is one-sided. Hmmm, yeah. Whatever. Successive governments and the mainstream UK media have been telling their Scargill-as-Satan version of things for thirty years, so I reckon that side of the story’s been over-represented anyway. Moreover, as Harry Paterson proved in his seminal book ‘Look Back in Anger: The Miners’ Strike in Nottingham 30 Years On’, scabs seemed ill-disposed to account for themselves. Paterson tried to interview UDM (Union of Democratic Mineworkers: a pro-National Coal Board puppet union funded by Tory money) honchos Roy Lynk and Neil Greatrex. Neither were co-operative.

‘Still the Enemy Within’ follows its account of the strike by charting the decline of the coal industry plotted against free enterprise capitalism and yuppiedom. Gower brings things up to date with an overview of the banking crisis and the big lie of austerity that Cameron’s government is still bashing the British populace around the head with. The comparison barely needs making: Cameron is Thatcher v2.0 and the powers that be still have utter contempt for workers, unions and the underprivileged. The documentary ends on a thin note of hope as Symonds notes that “the future’s still up for grabs”. With an onrush of people joining the Labour Party in the aftermath of the general election and the groundswell behind Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign, here’s hoping that Symonds’s cautious optimism is justified.

Grand re-opening

Though the lock was rusty, the key still turned. Neil removed the padlock and pulled the door open. The light switch triggered a hum of electricity and a few flickerings from the bulb. Then it pinged on and remained. Dust was everywhere. Inevitable, really; Neil hadn’t set foot in the place for five months. He thought back to the last time. He’d been part way through a Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid retrospective: reviews of Paul Seydor’s book and the original cut of the Sam Peckinpah western. He’d meant to write about the 2005 special edition; about Brando’s ‘One Eyed Jacks’; about ‘The Left-Handed Gun’; about the ‘Young Guns’ movies.

Good intentions, Neil mused as he found a broom and started sweeping. There was a hell of a lot of tidying up to be done. Good intentions and the road to hell.

He’d never meant to leave. The blog was too enjoyable. What would the Christmas season be without a headlong dive into the filth and venality of the Winter of Discontent? Why else watch trashy exploitation movies other than to take the piss out of (uh, sorry, review) them?

But a project had come along. Something that turned out to be bigger and more time-consuming than he’d ever anticipated. Something that was still trundling towards fruition even as he opened the shutters and polished the windows and realised how much he’d missed writing for the blog. He wondered whether to lift the lid on said project in his first article for the relaunch of The Agitation of the Mind. But there was still work to be, still no confirmed release date.

Still, what’s a little secret between friends? Neil had been co-editing an anthology of new writing, a tribute volume to a favourite author. What had been perceived as a slim collection of poetry grew and redefined itself: poetry, short fiction, memoir, essays, travel writing. Photography. Artwork. Fifty contributors, from up-and-comers to bona fide ladies and gentlemen of letters. Full details to follow, Neil thought, crafting an introductory piece, a few words to preface the second coming of Agitation. All in good time. There’s plenty of movies to catch up with first.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

It’s difficult to write about ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ without the retrospective fact that it was Sam Peckinpah’s last western throwing an almighty shadow over the proceedings. So much of it seems autumnal: Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens)’s slow, agonising, strangely poetic death scene, scored to Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’; Pat Garrett (James Coburn)’s foot-draggingly protracted odyssey in search of an outlaw he’d rather not apprehend, the already grizzled lawman seeming, in each successive scene, older and more weighed down not just with a sense of inevitability but a foreshadowing of how history will judge him; Billy (Kris Kristofferson)’s downward spiral from his myth-making act of showboating to an entire township during his escape from Lincoln County Jail to his dissipated solitary last bout of drinking as a dust storm swirls about him in the rundown enclave of Old Fort Sumner while Garrett’s odyssey draws inexorably towards its close.

So much of it seems tired: Garrett’s weary pauses between words (“the electorate … want you gone … out of the country”), each pause like a Harold Pinter play on Mogadon, entire worlds of reflection and self-accusation hanging on the ellipses; Baker reluctantly pinning his badge on as he goes to what will be his death; the sense of inevitability to the outcome of the duel between Alamosa Bill (Jack Elam) and Billy the Kid (both men cheat: the Kid cheats more effectively); the whiskery old forty-niner (Elisha Cook Jnr), whom Garrett’s de facto deputy John Poe (John Beck) mercilessly brutalises, reeling off a litany of things he’s tired of.

So much of it seems like a psychological self-portrait by its director: a meandering, woozy, often melancholy and sometimes frenziedly angry film that, in its most naked and agonising moments, turns against itself - pace Garrett catching himself in the mirror after shooting the Kid and turning his gun on his own reflection – in what almost seems like self-defeat.

And so much of it is pure Peckinpah. Sometimes organically so and in a good way: the children playing on a noose, much to the approbation of Bible-bashing deputy Bob Olinger (R.G. Armstrong), is reminiscent of the children giggling over the battalion of red ants that overrun the scorpion in the opening credits sequence of ‘The Wild Bunch’ (images of children bearing witness to the corruption of adulthood can be found in virtually every film Peckinpah directed). And sometimes in a forced, self-conscious manner: a minor character suddenly launching into ‘When the Roll is Called Up Yonder’ couldn’t telegraph the reference to ‘Ride the High Country’ more obviously if he’d worn a signboard; Garrett’s dalliance with a troupe of whores feels like it should occupy the same thematic territory as Pike Bishop (William Holden)’s moment of abject self-disgust towards the end of ‘The Wild Bunch’, but instead comes across as gratuitous and just plain absurd. 

Perhaps one of the reasons why ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ is both quintessentially a Peckinpah western and a sad (and slightly weird) leave-taking from the genre is the way it simultaneously corresponds to his grand overarching aesthetic (men outliving their times) and succumbs to pessimism in offering no magnificent rejection of, or rebellion against, it. In ‘Ride the High Country’, Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) are ageing men, one trying to remain honourable, the other living on his wits and trusting to a younger counterpart, both of them challenged by a new and viciously amoral breed of desperados (personified by the Hammond brothers). In ‘The Wild Bunch’, Pike Bishop’s group of outlaws are overtaken by history in the early years of the twentieth century, the First World War visible on the horizon while the bunch are still trying to make “one big score” as if it’s still 1880. The eponymous saddle tramp in ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ makes an unexpected grab at the brass ring with a roadhouse on a stagecoach route only for the internal combustion engine to show up and ruin everything for him on every conceivable level.

But whereas Hogue is offered a lyrical, even somewhat satirical, götterdammerung, and Bishop’s bunch – having weathered internal tensions that almost tear them apart – are finally reconciled and take their long walk to celluloid immortality functioning as a tight and cohesive unit, Pat and Billy are antagonists throughout, never mind what kinship they might have shared at some distant point in the past. Even Judd and Westrum – Pat and Billy’s closest analogue in Peckinpah’s filmography – present a startling contrast. Judd is upright and moral, wanting to “enter his house justified”; Garrett is an ill-tempered man of violence who screws around with hookers behind his wife’s back. Westrum’s villainy is rueful; the Kid’s cold-blooded. (Westrum would never dispatch a man with a bullet to the back as Billy does J.W. Bell.) And finally Judd and Westrum are reconciled – as purposefully as the bunch are reconciled – and when they stride out for the iconic finale they are undoubtedly heroic.

There is no heroism in ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’. None whatsoever.

The Kid outlives his time when Garrett becomes sheriff of Lincoln County. Garrett tries to change with the times but can’t reconcile himself to the choice he’s made. Unlike Peckinpah’s other western protagonists, neither of them take a stand against the changing times. The Kid seals his own fate in returning to Fort Sumner, a decision occasioned by a vengeful imperative that’s almost immediately abandoned; indeed, when Garrett catches up with him, the Kid has done nothing more than sit around and wait for his executioner. Garrett seals his when he summarily pisses off various authority/political figures – Holland (Jack Dodson) and Norris (John Davis Chandler), associates of Governor Wallace (Jason Robards); and cattle baron John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) – and inadvertently sows the seeds of his own destruction: a political conspiracy that will, two decades after the death of the Kid, result in Garrett’s own assassination.

The death of Sheriff Baker remains film’s most famous scene. It’s occasioned by a visit to Black Harris (L.Q. Jones), who greets Garrett and Baker with a fusillade of bullets and refuses to give up the Kid even when Garrett gets the drop on him. During the shoot-out, in a moment that’s damn near overshadowed by the poignancy of Baker’s demise, Harris tells Garret, “Us old boys oughtn’t be doing this to each other.” 

Hum ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ all you like, quote the “Times have changed”/”Times maybe, but no me” exchange till you’re blue in the face, but Black Harris’s jeering accusation summarises everything you need to know about ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’. Sam Peckinpah’s final western.

Intensity, beauty, and truthfulness: a Q&A with Paul Seydor on ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’

I had the opportunity recently to conduct an email interview with Paul Seydor. My thanks to him for the time and enthusiasm he put into providing me with an in-depth and fascinating series of answers.

NF: Paul, congratulations on a book that’s every bit as insightful and passionate as ‘Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration’, and thanks for taking part in this Q&A. Something of a random question to begin with: in a footnote to the introduction, you note that there are some “thirty-seven books on Peckinpah and his works”, one of which is a book of poetry. I’m not quite sure how the existence of a Peckinpah-related book of poetry has managed to stay off my radar. Who’s the author, and how effectively as a form does poetry respond to Peckinpah’s work?

PS: The author is W.K. Stratton and the book is titled ‘Dreaming Sam Peckinpah’. Stratton is a journalist and the author of several books, some of them on sports themes, his most recent a very good biography of Floyd Patterson. He’s currently at work on a book about ‘The Wild Bunch’, his favorite film. As to how Peckinpah’s work responds to poetry, given that Peckinpah himself was a visual poet, very well. There’s a long history of poets responding to other poets. Stratton’s is a collection of ruminative poems and portraits on themes of love and loss, of dreams and disappointments, and, not inappropriately, given its namesake, redemption, but they are less about Peckinpah as such than constellated around themes and feelings generated by his films. Certainly worth a look and a read.

Contemporaneous accounts of Billy the Kid sprang up within weeks of his death, Garrett’s own being published in 1882, and the myth-making got underway from the outset. What challenges do you feel this presents the historian? Do you think we will ever arrive at a wholly objective portrait of the Kid; or is the legend half of the story? 

If by “wholly objective”—a loaded phrase if ever there were one—you mean a portrait on which everyone could agree is the “truth,” then the short answer is “no.” The first half of his short life is literally shrouded in mystery. For example, there isn’t a single document of official record that even establishes his existence before he was a teenager. It was only because someone in the church where his mother married her second husband noted in the church records of the marriage that Henry, as he was called then, and his brother were in attendance as witnesses that we even have the earliest official confirmation that he existed. The common thinking is that the Kid was twelve at the time, assuming 1859 the correct birth year—which it was, give or take a year or two.

This begins to give you some idea of how little is known about Billy and his origins. But the bigger problem, in my opinion—and researching the new book I read every important biography I could find, beginning with the first (which wasn’t Garrett’s, by the way—at least three preceded his)—is that the Kid’s story, and Garrett’s too, had already begun to be encrusted by gossip, hearsay, folklore, and legend virtually before it had a chance to become “history” as such. By the time Maurice Fulton began his research in the early decades of the 20th century, he had to cut away so much of this overgrowth before he could begin to arrive at a sense of the Kid and Garrett that was plausible. Further, the two most important incidents in the Kid’s life, the two incidents that together are responsible for his ascent into legend, are his escape from the Lincoln County jail and his death. Yet a key part of the escape—how he got the drop on J.W. Bell—was witnessed by no one except the two participants, and we have Billy’s accounts of how it happened only as refracted through two friends who didn’t write them down until decades later. As for his death, again, only three persons were in the room: Garrett, who shot him; the Kid, who was shot; and Pete Maxwell, who bolted out the door. Only Garrett wrote down his account of what happened. Poe, his deputy, who was outside, wrote his account almost four decades later, but again, he wasn’t inside the room; and all the other accounts are from people who arrived on the scene only after it happened and are colored by their sympathies for the Kid and their antipathy for Garrett.

Precisely because so relatively little was known about the Kid himself, it was an open invitation for writers, whether historians, novelists, reporters, etc., to clothe the Kid and Garrett in the vestments of their own needs, prejudices, biases, and beliefs. The Kid could be everything from a cold-blooded killer to a cowboy Robin Hood and Garrett everything from a corrupt ambitious sheriff to an honorable lawman bent on doing his duty as he saw it. So, yes, as you suggest, the legend is indeed part of the history—in my opinion, all legend is part of history—as is also the case with, to take a very grand comparison, the Trojan War.

All that said, however—this answer is probably longer than you want—still a great deal is known about the Kid, and the same goes for Garrett. ‘Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life’ is an excellent cradle-to-grave biography by Robert M. Utley, the most academically credentialed historian to write about him. Mark Lee Gardner’s recent ‘To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West’ is an outstanding dual-biography of Garrett and the Kid and one of the rare books that is fair-minded and balanced to them both, with no axes to grind or agendas to push; Gardner’s benefits from the most up-to-date research (he’s a scrupulous and tireless researcher) and he is by far the most gifted storyteller. Frederick Nolan’s ‘The West of Billy the Kid’ is a colorful and comprehensive picture of the world of Billy the Kid, the New Mexico Territory of the time, and all the many people associated with him. And Bob Boze Bell’s ‘The Illustrated Life and Times of Billy the Kid’ has among its other virtues a time-line which references what was going in the world outside the Mexico territory at the time. There’s also a superb monograph, ‘Antrim Is My Stepfather’s Name’, by Richard Weddle (no relation to David Weddle) that offers greater detail and a much fuller picture of the Kid’s life in Silver City around the time his mother died than any other account known to me. Weddle’s been researching all things related to the Kid for a couple of decades now, and his knowledge about the Kid’s life and times is quite literally voluminous—his own book on the subject is eagerly awaited.

Peckinpah’s first go-around at the story was his adaptation of Charles Neider’s novel ‘The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones’, a fictionalised and geographically relocated take on the Billy the Kid novel. With novelists generally not hesitant to embrace historical figures, why did Neider reimagine Billy as an entirely renamed fictional construct? And how does setting the novel in Monterey alter, accentuate or redefine the narrative? 

Neider was an eastern intellectual of Russian-Jewish heritage who, like many easterners, fell in love with the Old West and schooled himself voraciously on the subject. He published a superb anthology ‘The Great West: A Treasury of Firsthand Accounts’, which I believe is still in print. As a consequence of all this research, he came across the history of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and was immediately hooked. He began researching the materials toward the end of writing a novel about it (he had already published a novel highly praised by the likes of Saul Bellow and Thomas Mann). Neider believed that the potential for good fiction about the Old West was rarely fulfilled because so much of it was written by hacks for mere entertainment. By Neider’s own account, he was more interested in the legend or, more specifically, how the history wound up as a legend—obviously, this is one of Peckinpah’s great themes too, notably in ‘The Wild Bunch’. But part of Neider’s method was also to debunk the more absurd aspects of the Kid’s legend so that what remained was believable yet still the stuff on which myths are made.

There are two reasons why he changed the settings and the names. First, though he originally planned to set the novel in New Mexico, he and his wife found the climate antipathetic. Once he made this decision, he required the new setting have a rich Spanish heritage and proximity to the sea, both of which were answered by the Monterey Peninsula, an area he and his wife had already fallen in love with and where they longed to spend more time anyhow. So they relocated there for a while. As for changing the names, Neider specifically did not want there to be too close an identification between the historical figures and the characters in his novel. He was quite clear that he wanted to write fiction, not history; and his purpose was to demonstrate that serious literature could be written about those aspects of the Old West which seemed to be confined largely to B-movies and pulp novels. In my view he succeeded on all counts. Peckinpah certainly thought so as he judged it “the best Western ever written.”

You note in the book that Peckinpah’s ‘Hendry Jones’ adaptation is highly conventional in its denouement. How do you think a film made from Peckinpah’s script – and particularly one directed by as meticulous a perfectionist as Stanley Kubrick – would shape up compared to the grand guignol work Marlon Brando finally created?

You know, Neil, my friends have heard me say many times that I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those who like both Peckinpah and Kubrick and those who like Peckinpah or Kubrick. I fall in the latter group. I admire some of Kubrick’s work—though there’s none of it that I love—but mostly I find his films cold, barren, simplistic, and—once past ‘Lolita’ and ‘Spartacus’—utterly devoid of characters that are recognizable as human beings. And beginning with ‘2001’, I also find them numbingly dull. Kubrick himself had Brando fire Peckinpah because he, Kubrick, felt the script needed a page-one rewrite. This right off the bat speaks volumes, in my opinion, for the kind of film Kubrick might have made of it, if indeed he had any real idea of the kind of film he was after. I get the distinct impression that he didn’t, but that may be just me being ungenerous to a filmmaker I don’t care for. Whatever else, I certainly doubt Kubrick was remotely capable of making the kind of film Brando stumbled into, which I think a far better film than either Peckinpah or Neider did, both of whom really hated it. But it’s a really unusual and idiosyncratic variation on the Western that is quite unlike any other. Say what you will about it, it’s character-driven in a way that Kubrick’s work never is. When Brando first proposed Kubrick as director, Peckinpah was both pleased and excited. But in those days Kubrick was not STANLEY KUBRICK, Intellectual Director (in my assessment—again, doubtless ungenerous—pseudo-intellectual) and Auteur. He was an interesting up and coming director with ‘The Killing’ and ‘Paths of Glory’ fresh behind him. But, no, I don’t think he would have made a very good film out of ‘The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones’. The very fact that he had Sam fired and demanded a page-one rewrite suggests he had no essential sympathy for or sense of what Neider and Peckinpah were about. And once Peckinpah was gone, Kubrick and Brando found it difficult to agree on almost anything.

Rudolf Wurlitzer’s original screenplay, then titled ‘Billy the Kid’, was driven by the Kid – or, more specifically, by his psychological disintegration. Peckinpah brought a greater focus on Garrett. I’ve never read Wurlitzer’s original screenplay, but I’d be interested to know how much of his original conception remains in the film (in any of its incarnations), and how successfully you feel the dynamic between the two characters is balanced?

There’s a lot about this question in the book, so I can’t do more than summarize here. Wurlitzer’s ‘Billy the Kid’ screenplay—that was its original title, with Garrett not in the title—was genuinely balanced between the two figures, although the focus was plainly on the Kid’s story, with Garrett the most important other participant in that story. By the time Peckinpah was finished with it, it had become wholly Garrett’s story, with the Kid the most important other participant in that story. However, the process whereby this happened was initiated by Wurlitzer himself, and he is responsible for the first drafts of most of the added scenes that made Garrett ascendant. As for how much remains of his original conception—as opposed to the dialogue and the scenes, the great majority of which are his—that depends on how you measure these things. The back-and-forth structure is all Wurlitzer. The flashback structure that was laid upon this is Peckinpah’s, or rather it was Peckinpah’s based on a suggestion from the producer Gordon Carroll. The dynamic balance in the film decisively toward Garrett is something for which both Peckinpah and Wurlitzer were individually and collectively responsible, but it happened gradually as the screenplay evolved during preproduction rewrites, casting, production rewrites and shooting, and the editing. Wurlitzer’s conception of the Kid was, I think, almost wholly abandoned by Peckinpah, yet, as I show at length in the book, without Peckinpah’s replacing it with a different conception. This is why Garrett is so strong and the Kid so relatively amorphous and contradictory a character.

There’s a parallel between ‘Major Dundee’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ in that Peckinpah passed over opportunities to recut both films following their original, compromised releases. While, as you acknowledge in the book, ‘Major Dundee’ could only ever have been a very good film but not a masterpiece, surely any reworking on ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ could only have been for the good. Not to mention a slap in the face to James Aubrey. Yet he declined the offer. Was this self-abnegation, or do you think Peckinpah felt there were issues with the film that couldn’t be resolved even in post-production?

Again, I can’t do more than summarize what it takes me a long time to explain and argue in the book. Specifically as regards walking away from Dan Melnick’s invitation to recut the film as Peckinpah saw fit, Sam had to realize, as I quote Garner Simmons in the book (who knew Sam at this time), that he lacked realistic solutions to fix the most intractable problems in the film: the aborted trip to Mexico and the contradictions in Billy’s character. I personally think it’s a shame Sam didn’t go back and finish the film his way, because I believe that he and his editor, Garth Craven, would have come up with a version that would have been the best that could be achieved from the available footage and they could have worked on it without the intense and hostile pressures of the Aubrey regime. But after a promising start, Sam just wouldn’t make himself available and without his cooperation the studio wasn’t about to spend the money proceeding with it.

Why did Sam behave like this? Well, that’s anybody’s guess? Questions like these go to the very core of Sam’s being. I have my own answers, some of which I’ve shared in the book, so does everyone who knew him, some of which I’ve also shared in the book. One of the most frequently recurring is that Sam sometimes built escape hatches into those projects he wasn’t sure about or those he was losing confidence in, and ‘Pat Garrett’ eventually became one of those. Not finishing the film was a way of not having to face the very real likelihood that some of the problems were unsolvable without additional shooting. As Garner said, by not finishing it, Sam allowed the world to believe that only he could have fixed it and “they” wouldn’t let him. 

Sam was a deeply complex, complicated, and troubled man—that he was able to transmute so much of what troubled him into his films is part of which gives those films their edge, their intensity, their beauty, and their truthfulness. With ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ he even managed, however adventitiously, to transmute his inability to finish the film into a film that is itself unfinished and yet that in some strange and wonderful way embodies also a great and powerfully tragic vision.

Can you please tell us something about how you came to be involved with the 2005 Special Edition, and how much hands-on editing work you actually undertook? 

Thank you for asking this question, Neil, because in some respects this was the whole reason I wrote the original essay in the first place, which appeared in Michael Bliss’s anthology ‘Peckinpah Today’. Once again, I have to summarize a much longer and more complicated story that is told in detail in the book. I have long believed that the theatrical version of ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ has been unfairly maligned as “butchered,” “the Aubrey version,” “the MGM version,” etc. None of this is true: it was prepared by Peckinpah’s closest editorial colleagues—Roger Spottiswoode and Bob Wolfe—precisely to keep a studio-butchered version from ever being released and no one at the studio had a hand in it except for the final two-shot of Garrett and Billy, the only thing I’m aware of that was personally ordered by Aubrey. I have also believed that the Turner preview does not deserve the reputation it has as the “director’s cut,” which it most emphatically is not. Among other things, it’s missing two crucial scenes that he regarded as at least as important as the prologue. It’s also a version that was never finished.

When Nick Redman, taking his cue from a remark I made in the first edition of my study of Peckinpah’s Westerns, pitched a Special Edition for the boxed set of the Peckinpah Westerns that Warner owned or had access to, it was strictly on the understanding that the theatrical version, because it was properly finished, would be used as the base version to which selected scenes from the Turner preview would be added. Among other things, I framed the project precisely so that I would have to do as little editing as possible because I had no desire to edit the work of editors and a director whom I held in the highest esteem. It would be much more accurate to call my work here kluging or compositing rather than editing as such. The only actual editing I did—and I was allowed precious little time to do even that (around an hour!)—was removing the freeze-frames and titles shots from the Turner preview because the theatrical already had its own titles sequences—a rather good one, I think—and the studio was not about to spring for another.

So all the things that some blogs and websites said I did—such as cutting most of Sam’s appearance as the coffinmaker, or dropping Tuckerman’s hotel (the scene with Dub Taylor and Elisha Cook, Jr.) or restoring Dylan’s vocals for Cullen Baker’s death walk—I did not do. Those and other things had already been done in the theatrical version long before I ever came on the scene. In pointing this out, I hope no one reading this will assume I’m trying to distance myself from the Special Edition because of the criticism it has received in certain quarters. Far from it. I’d love to be able to claim ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ as one of my editing credits, including (indeed, for me, especially the Special Edition because I believe it’s a better edited film), but I can’t because it’s not true. What you see in the Special Edition is that version that Spottiswoode and Wolfe, under Dan Melnick’s protection, prepared for release with some additional scenes and one line put back in. I did not put back the Epilogue—for a whole slew of reasons that are fully explained in the book—but used instead the proper theatrical ending that Peckinpah shot and that was at some point prepared, complete with opticals and end-credits crawl. Though at least one print was made of it, it was never used because Aubrey—in to repeat one of the rare instances where he actually did demand something specific that he ordered implemented—preferred the smiling sentimental two-shot of the title characters, a terrible choice that Roger in particular hated.

This is much too brief too clarify this whole issue completely, but I hope that it is adequate and that it will get your followers who want to know more to read the book and will stop referring to the Special Edition as the “Seydor” version or the theatrical as the “Aubrey” version!

I also hope—though I fear this is a naïve or vain hope—that henceforth commentators will stop resorting to the kneejerk “butchered, cut to ribbons, hacked up,” etc., etc., etc., characterizations when referring to the theatrical version. It is nothing of the sort. As I show in the book, it was prepared with loving care and the most scrupulous fidelity to Sam’s vision that they could manage by his most trusted editorial colleagues, Spottiswoode and Wolfe. If those who make such peremptory criticisms had ever bothered to do a serious study of the theatrical vis-à-vis the Turner, they would have seen that the lifts were carefully considered inasmuch as they consisted of scenes and other material that could be removed without damage to the continuity of the narrative. And we do well to remember that it was on the basis of the theatrical version alone, a good decade and a half before the also incomplete Turner was ever released that the film was eventually judged one of Peckinpah’s masterpieces. Moreover, again I repeat myself, when it comes to vast majority of scenes it shares in common with the previews—which is to say the vast majority of scenes—those in the theatrical are better edited. Why? Because they had the benefit of fine cutting by editors who had fine cut Peckinpah’s films since ‘Straw Dogs’, a fine cutting process that the previews for the most part did not benefit from.

When Garner Simmons and I first saw the Turner on a large screen, which was at the Directors Guild of America theatre when Turner arranged a showing as promotion for the forthcoming laserdisc, we discovered later that we both had a similar reaction. Garner found much of it “slack” and I found a lot of it “loose,” with sagging rhythms and swollen beats and pauses—this from the director who had, in my immodest estimation, the greatest editorial imagination of any director who ever lived. As I was writing up my answer to this question, I got in touch with Garner and he offered the following, “The points you raise — namely that of the Turner version’s ‘slack’ or ‘loose’ editing as well as the fact that Sam Peckinpah himself, had he been involved in the final editing, would never have allowed such a cut—are absolutely valid. As I have written before, Sam saw the filmmaking process as having three critical stages—first, when you write it; second, when you shoot it; and third, when you finally cut it. At each stage, the film is shaped (reshaped?) and therefore until you have fine-tuned the final release print, it is not complete. One of the things that allows Peckinpah’s work to rise above the rest is his obsessive attention to detail. It is this lack of Peckinpah’s essential participation in that final stage that renders ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ a ‘flawed’ masterpiece for all time.”

I realize that many people who watch the film only on television may find views like this surprising, especially from Garner and myself, who’ve written so admiringly about Peckinpah’s work. But anyone who’s been involved in filmmaking for any period of time knows that home viewing is at best an imperfect way of getting a sense of how a film plays and is no substitute for watching it uninterrupted on a big screen with an audience—something, by the way, as I show in the book, Peckinpah himself never did with this film until sometime in 1980, despite the fact that on ‘The Wild Bunch’ the previews were vital to his fanatical fine-tuning of that towering achievement in the art and craft of film editing.

Your book is exhaustive in its research and detail. How long did it take to research, or would it be fair to say that the book embodies a logical conclusion of something that you’ve been moving towards since you first saw the film?

Well, I didn’t even know I was going to write this book—I kind of backed into it. When Michael Bliss asked me to contribute to his anthology (‘Peckinpah Today’), I initially turned him down because I was too busy editing features at the time and I didn’t feel like writing again about a director I had already written substantially about twice before, not to mention contributing to the audio commentaries on the DVDs. Meanwhile, in a few small but quite noisy pockets of the Internet there was so much hostility toward the Special Edition and so much misinformation about my involvement—indeed, no information at all, just a lot of ignorant opinion from fans, including, alas, even an academic who should have known better, all too lazy to do their homework before spouting off—that I finally told Michael I’d write about the preparation of the Special Edition. The essay was so long—26,000 words—that when I finished it, I said to my wife, “You know, I might have the beginnings of a small book in this.” Well, five years—and 150,000 additional words later!—there’s the book.

But how did I get there? Well, I thought, talking to myself, “Since, Paul, you’ve written about how it turned out, why not see where it came from?” So that led back through Wurlitzer’s screenplay to Peckinpah’s adaptation of Neider’s novel for Marlon Brando to Neider’s novel itself, then to the book that Garrett himself wrote a year after he killed the Kid, and suddenly I discovered it’s possible to draw an almost direct line from Garrett and the Kid right to Peckinpah’s film 91 years later. So I guess I spent around a good year and more reading up on everything I could find about Billy the Kid. The chapter on Garrett’s book contains a pretty thorough survey of variant versions of the death of the Kid and the escape from the Lincoln County jail; the chapters on Peckinpah’s adaptation of Neider’s novel, Neider’s novel itself, and Wurlitzer’s original screenplay treat them with a depth and detail that I’ve not seen elsewhere and so constitute original contributions to scholarship. And there is a lot of material about how Peckinpah and Wurlitzer used the history and where they discarded it or deviated from the facts.

I should also add that one of my motivations in writing the book was to set the record straight about the immensity of Rudy Wurlitzer’s contribution. The more I knew about Wurlitzer and his screenplay, the less good I felt about how I treated him and it in my previous books. So I wanted to do things right by him. I had never spoken to him—and I’ve still not met him face to face—before I began the research. But once I read the original screenplay and wrote the chapter about the screenplay, I sent it off to him and he phoned me a few days later. I think the first words I said to him after the usual greetings were, “I’m sorry it took me forty years to appreciate what a fine job you did on the screenplay.”

When it came to the film and the production, however, the really big breakthrough was when the Academy library finally digitized the thirty and more hours of tapes of preproduction and a few production meetings on the film, tapes in which you hear Peckinpah, Wurlitzer, the Gordons Carroll and Dawson, Kristofferson, etc. talking about the film, making the deals, etc. This led to a considerable expansion of the original essay, and several matters about which I could at that time only speculate about and which I could then support with solid evidence. And once more it represents all original research that’s never been used or presented before.

Not necessarily comparing them to Peckinpah’s masterpiece, but are there any worthy candidates in that sub-genre of films about Pat and Billy, from the ‘The Left-Handed Gun’ to Gore Vidal’s ‘Billy the Kid’? Do even, say, the ‘Young Guns’ films add anything noteworthy to the canon?

Again, the short answer is no. I like things in ‘The Left-Handed Gun’, notably the performances of Paul Newman as the Kid, John Dehner as Pat Garrett, and Denver Pyle as Olinger. The film itself is clunky and pretentious and melodramatic, and a lot of the acting is overdone, the writing frequently awful, and Penn was nowhere near the director he soon became. The single best moment, as Pauline Kael pointed out in her review of Penn’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, is when Olinger is blasted out of one of his boots which remains standing up right. When a little girl laughs at it, her mother slaps her face. A great moment—would that there were several dozen more.

The television production of Gore Vidal’s ‘Billy the Kid’ is for the most part a good, solid piece of work, more historically based—it’s a pity it’s not yet available on DVD—with a really outstanding Billy the Kid in Val Kilmer (he’s Mark Lee Gardner’s favorite Kid, though Gardner regards Peckinpah’s as far the greater film), and the other characters are all played closer to their real ages. Lew Wallace is given a larger and more historically accurate role (though he’s played and written in a rather avuncular manner that I found surprising given Vidal’s usual cynicism about elected or appointed officials). The ‘Young Guns’ films are little more than potboilers—amusing if you like that sort of thing. A parenthetical note: the blanket that Coburn has in ‘Young Guns 2’ is the same coat he is wearing at the beginning of ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’.

I personally think the most interesting Billy the Kid film after Peckinpah’s is King Vidor’s ‘Billy the Kid’, from 1930. It takes a frankly romantic view that uses much more of the many elements, incidents, and plot strands of Garrett’s book and also Walter Noble Burns’s ‘Saga of Billy the Kid’, of which it is something of an adaptation. The movie unashamedly depicts Billy as a kind of Robin Hood protecting the weak against the powerful and corrupt authorities, gives him a romantic interest, makes much of the siege of McSween’s house and the battle of Lincoln; at the end Pat Garrett does an abrupt sympathetic about face and sends the Kid and his girl friend off to Mexico in an ending that I personally believe John Ford stole lock, stock, and barrel nine years later for ‘Stagecoach’. Completely ridiculous as far as history goes, but a good entertainment in its own right and a remarkable piece of popular culture, a revealing example of how conceptions of the Kid changed with changes in society (i.e., the movie was released not long after the stock market crash of 1929).

You're both an academic scholar and a feature-film editor who’s been nominated for an Oscar and won an American Cinema Editors Award. Your new book is published—in a beautifully designed and produced edition—by Northwestern University Press. Can you tell us about your association with the university and why a university press?

I debated marketing the book through an agent to trade presses, but the interest in books about filmmakers is not these days what it was in the glory days of the seventies and eighties. For example, Michael Sragow’s absolutely first-class biography of Victor Fleming was clothbound published by a distinguished trade press. Yet despite the fact that his is the first and only biography of Fleming, the man responsible two of the most enduringly popular films ever made, ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and despite superb reviews, the publisher had no interest in the paperback publication, which fell to a university press (Kentucky). So I was concerned that even if a trade publisher could be found who was interested, the manuscript might be awhile making the rounds. But my close friend and erstwhile academic colleague, the great literary critic and biographer Hershel Parker suggested I consider Northwestern University Press, with whom he had published several books, including all the corrected texts of Melville’s work and his own most recent book, ‘Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative’, a wonderful book about his experiences writing his definitive two-volume biography of Melville. Well, Northwestern’s a great press and the prospect of sharing a press with Hershel was a chance I couldn’t pass up. So I sent the manuscript off to NUP, and within three months they got stellar reports to publish from two very distinguished readers, and I’ve never looked back. Northwestern’s been the best group of publishing people I’ve ever dealt with: intelligent, creative, committed, passionate, very solicitous of the author, yet firm and practical when necessary and dedicated to publishing the best book possible out of any manuscript they accept. And as you’ve already pointed out, they did a spectacular job on the book in its design and physical appearance. I couldn’t be more pleased. And with a university press, it’s all about the book itself, the content, how good can it be, not will it sell, will it offend, what’s its market, etc. Another thing about university presses is that if your book is any good, it tends to be around for a long time. You know, counting its first and second editions, my ‘Peckinpah: The Western Films’ and ‘Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration’ (University of Illinois Press)—that book has never been out of print since 1980 and it’s still widely regarded as the best critical study of Sam’s work. So, I couldn’t be happier with where the new book landed and the company it keeps in the catalogue. As Pike Bishop might say, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Paul, thank you.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film’ by Paul Seydor

Troubled film shoots aren’t exactly a rarity in Hollywood, nor are compromised visions. Factor in everything that conspires against artistic creativity from rewrites to reshoots by way of studio interference, director/producer battles, on-set disasters, overruns, budget reconfigurations and even filmmakers removed from projects, and it’s amazing that movies get made at all, let alone good ones. Sam Peckinpah was a world-class filmmaker as renowned for the visceral intensity of his artistic vision as he was notorious for combativeness. More than most, he found himself often at loggerheads with his studio paymasters. And arguably no more bitter battle was fought than that between Peckinpah and MGM head James Aubrey. The battle was one of the most curious in a career marked by conflict – Peckinpah seemed almost hellbent in provoking an antagonist who already had a fearsome reputation for fucking over directors, but instead of going head-to-head in true Peckinpah style – conducted something more akin to a passive-aggressive war of attrition. The outcome: Peckinpah walked away to make ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ and Aubrey shortly found himself sacked. The real victim, however, was the film itself.

And yet ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ – never completed, and existing now in no fewer than five versions – had some kind of melancholy magic in its celluloid, some dark resilience, and its punch-drunk, woozy and downright subversive brilliance is still there despite (could one make a case for saying because of?) its flaws. 

All of which is an incredibly longwinded way of saying that, if one considers both the film’s antecedents (historical and creative/revisionist) and its tortured path from conception to big screen, there was always a book to be written about this singular and haunting western, its director’s swansong to a genre he revolutionised and is remembered for. That book is now a reality and it’s an essential addition to the bookshelves of anyone who has a serious interest in cinema. For anyone with a genuine passion for Peckinpah’s work … well, you’ve probably read it twice over by now and you don’t need the 1200 words of this review to tell you how rewarding it is.

In fact, ‘The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film’ – its wonderfully aureate title a nod to Garrett’s own (albeit heavily ghostwritten) account of the Kid’s death, and hereinafter referred to as ‘TAD&CA’ – should need no introduction. Paul Seydor is, after all, the author of ‘Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration’, one of the keystone texts on Peckinpah’s work (along with Garner Simmons’s ‘Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage’ and David Weddle’s ‘If They Move … Kill ’Em’), and an insightful and energetic work of scholarship in its own right. Oh, and he also made the Oscar-nominated documentary ‘The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage’.

In ‘TAD&CA’, Seydor doesn’t just discuss the making of the film – inclement weather, technical problems, reshoots on the QT after Aubrey forbade the extra spend, an influenza epidemic – and the Peckinpah/Aubrey conflict that took its toll in the editing rooms; he charts a throughline from the historical record vis-à-vis Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, through the dime-store myth-making that began just weeks after the Kid’s death, Charles Neider’s reappraisal of the story as great American literature in his novel ‘The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones’ (as with Seydor’s book, the title is a tip of the hat to Garrett’s ‘The Authentic Life of the Billy, the Kid’), Peckinpah’s first artistic engagement with the material in a screenplay that would have had Marlon Brando as Hendry Jones under Stanley Kubrick’s direction (Brando ultimately jettisoned Peckinpah’s script and parted ways with Kubrick and made the film, retitled ‘One Eyed Jacks’, himself), to the tangled psychodrama that saw Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Kid-centric script develop into Peckinpah’s sombre, reflective and quite definitely Garrett-fixated masterpiece.

That’s the thing about ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ – whatever version you may have seen it in (the most widely available cuts are the rather misguidedly titled 1988 Turner Preview Edition and the almost as misleading 2005 Special Edition which was spuriously marketed as being recut based on Peckinpah’s own notes), and whatever the flaws – this scene missing, that scene truncated, a line of dialogue that makes no sense, a bad line reading, an awful performance from a minor supporting player (I’ll “handle a crude situation with remarkable skill” and mention no names) – there’s no doubt the film is just that: a masterpiece.

Seydor’s relationship with it, beyond the chapter it occupies in ‘Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration’, is deeper and more complex than usual for a critic or academic – even one as passionate about his subject. Seydor was the guiding hand behind the 2005 Special Edition of the film, put together for the Warner Brothers box set of the Peckinpah westerns – well, four of them: ‘Ride the High Country’, ‘The Wild Bunch’, ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’; Sony Pictures were keen the include their restoration of ‘Major Dundee’ and offered Warner very generous terms, but Warner turned them down. (The disinterest in Peckinpah’s legacy that seems to permeate Warner extended to their declining to make a print of the 2005 Special Edition available when the Cannes Film Festival wanted to screen it to mark Peckinpah’s posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award.)

As it is, the box set offers adequate prints of three of the films (’PG&BtK’ has yet to exist in home viewing format that does justice to John Coquillon’s cinematography), but they’re indifferently presented and boringly slipcased; moreover, a proposed new documentary was axed over budgetary concerns, while a collection of essays intended to accompany the set never made it past the press kit. Seydor’s access to the film was limited and he worked for free to assemble the most complete version he could given the strictures of time, money and resources. This, the 2005 Special Edition, was based on a combination of the theatrical release and one of the two preview prints Peckinpah was contractually allowed in his deal with MGM (with great humility Seydor acknowledges that these incarnations, while unfinished, are the only versions of the film on which a restoration can be based with any moral and aesthetic integrity).

It was met with both praise – Kris Kristofferson considers it the best version of the film he has ever seen – and controversy; and here I must admit to some grumblings on this very blog. When I wrote about it during my Peckinpah retrospective in December 2009, I had no idea of the strictures Seydor was operating under, nor how little time he had been allowed to physically work on the editing himself. And while I miss R.G. Armstrong’s “walk across hell on a spiderweb” line and rue the truncation of the Will the coffin-maker scene on the basis of my own Peckinpah-as-Prospero interpretation, I look back at that article now and wish I’d known then what a poisoned chalice Seydor had accepted with the project and how insufficient the facilities afforded him by the studio. Had I known, my words would have been softer. For what it’s worth, let this review stand as correction and apology.

‘TAD&CA’ discusses the 2005 Special Edition at some length, but even Seydor’s own work on the film isn’t the end of the story. The final section, “Ten Ways of Looking at an Unfinished Masterpiece and Its Director”, suggests that Paul Seydor and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ may never entirely be done with each other. The film has a grip on him. I can entirely understand why.

Pat and Billy on The Agitation of the Mind

March is ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ month on The Agitation of the Mind. I’ll be reviewing Paul Seydor’s finely researched and monumentally detailed new book ‘The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film’ and curating a Q&A with the author.

I’ll also be reappraising the film itself, both the 1988 Turner Preview cut and the 2005 Special Edition. These reviews will be written in context of Seydor’s book; I’ll be making no reference to the material I produced for my Sam Peckinpah retrospective on this blog in 2009.

Seydor traces, in the early chapters, the various accounts of Billy the Kid, from Garrett’s own (albeit heavily ghostwritten) memoir to Charles Neider’s novel ‘The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones’, by way of Marlon Brando’s ‘One Eyed Jacks’, a production initially slated to be written by Peckinpah and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Accordingly, I’ll be looking at this curate’s egg of a western, not to mention a few other films that treat, or are influenced by, the mythology surrounding Billy the Kid.

GUEST REVIEW: The Theory of Everything

With Eddie Redmayne picking up Best Actor at last night’s Bafta Awards ceremony and the film itself lauded with the Outstanding British Film gong, my good friend Viv Apple picked the right time to cast an eye over ‘The Theory of Everything’.

Eddie Redmayne’s portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything is a revelation. He seems to be Stephen, even more than other actors seem to inhabit the characters they play, probably because the characteristics of the renowned scientist are so unique and so familiar: the mechanical yet meaningful smile, the slant of the head, the electronic voice.

We first meet Stephen at Cambridge before he is diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease, and the film tells the story of how he met his future wife, Jane (Felicity Jones), and their life together up to the time when their marriage ended.

Although some of the incidents are not factually accurate, a common phenomenon in film biographies, this may not be the most annoying feature to anyone who thinks of themselves as a scientist. For this is really a love story, so it is perhaps understandable that the film does not linger on the most important factor in Hawking’s life: science. The film is based on Jane Hawking’s biography, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, and there are a few sequences where Stephen is chalking up mathematical equations and talking to professors, but these are almost incidental. This may seem strange but it also seems right, because the film is about relationships - those between Stephen and Jane, and later on between the couple and Elaine Mason and Jonathan Jones, who subsequently become their respective second spouses.

Stephen Hawking himself apparently approved of the film, which is very pleasing to know because the story of his remarkable life is not only fascinating and very moving, it is also incomplete. In his early 20s Stephen was given only two years to live, but at the age of 73 he is still working on the ‘real’ theory of everything.


                                                                                      Viv Apple

The Not Dead

If ‘Drinking for England’ and ‘Feltham Sings’, boiled down to their respective essence, are ‘Alcoholism: The Musical’ and ‘Borstal: The Musical’, then it must have been immediately apparent to Simon Armitage and Brian Hill from the outset that ‘The Not Dead’ would require a different approach. Let’s face it, ‘PTSD: The Musical’ or ‘Survivors’ Guilt: The Musical’ was never going to be an option.

‘The Not Dead’ features three key interview subjects. Cliff served in Malaya in the 1950s, his younger counterparts Eddie and Rob in Bosnia and Iraq respectively. All saw violence, did violence, and had violence done to them. All came back where some of the men they served alongside didn’t. All, more to the point, came back changed men, either physically, mentally or both.

Decades separate their stories but similarities quickly emerge: working class backgrounds; basic training as something easy or even enjoyable; the eventual depersonalisation of the individual so that holding a gun seems the norm, ditto firing it; the experience of killing without enmity; and the difficulty in readjusting to civilian life afterwards. Particularly the latter. The nightmares, the negative effect on relationships, substance abuse as an emotional crutch.

Psychiatry was quick to diagnose Eddie and Rob: post-traumatic stress disorder. Cliff lived longer with the fall out before medical understanding and support networks caught up with him. Years of his GP denying their was any underlying issue. Years of one’s self-worth taking a battering. And when he finally approached the Royal College of Psychiatry and received a referral, the response from his specialist was bleak: he would have to cope with it as best he could. “So that’s what I’m doing,” he concludes with astounding pragmatism: “coping.”

But for all that Eddie and Rob have been able to put a name to their illness more quickly than Cliff did, it’s by no means made things easier for them. Eddie’s saviour is his wife (to whom the most poignant of Armitage’s poems for the film – the deceptively titled ‘Manhunt’ – is gifted); Rob self-anaethetises with drink and drugs. Some days he can’t face going out.

All three men are quietly mesmerising in their interview footage. Cliff, old school in suit and tie, is formal and precise in his diction. He calmly recounts killing a Malayan soldier who had shot one of his comrades. The understated description will leave you reeling. Then, moments later, Cliff reflects “I’ve got him to meet again soon” – the juxtaposition of regret at another’s death and acceptance of his own mortality is shattering. I had to pause the documentary here while I stopped crying.

Eddie, quite softly spoken for such an imposing figure, chooses his words as carefully as Cliff. There is a world of painful experience in the weighing up of every word he uses. Rob’s recollections are a little more freeform, but punctuated by moments of silent reflection. Watching him, you get the feeling that he’s often back there, mind whirling. When he discusses being under fire, or even the waiting for the next attack, the comparison he uses is being mugged or in a car crash – that sense of hyper-realism where the adrenalin of a “fight or flight” response kicks in: “imagine that 24-7,” he concludes; “that’s what it’s like.”

Distilling their individual stories, Armitage created not just a suite of poems and lyrics as per his previous collaborations with Hill, but a book-length sequence. ‘The Not Dead’ is the only Armitage/Hill documentary thus far that has resulted in an accompanying publication. Curiously only two poems from it are reprinted in ‘Paper Aeroplane’, his Selected Poems that was published last year. (Some other pieces reappear in the Bloodaxe anthology ‘The Hundred Years War’.)

Obviously, only a handful of the work Armitage produced could find its way into the film, but the poems which feature are perfectly sculpted to each participant. And their readings are phenomenal. I can’t even begin to imagine what each man went through in not only having his worst moments distilled into short stark lines via the conduit of someone else’s imagination (no matter how sympathetic that imagination) but then reading those lines – reflectively and with gravitas – on camera. Armitage, in interview, has called it bravery. I agree.

Feltham Sings

The poet Simon Armitage used to work as a probation officer. Even if he hadn’t previously worked with Brian Hill on ‘Drinking for England’, this would have made him the perfect collaborator for ‘Feltham Sings’.

Feltham is a Young Offenders Institute (what used in Britain to be called a Borstal) situated near Heathrow airport. From hereon in I’ll be calling it what it is: prison. The various wings of the prison are named after birds; peacocks parade the ground just outside the wires. “They whine all day,” one of the inmates observes; “wake me up at five o’clock. If I could get outside I’d strangle the fucking peacocks.”

The constant backdrop of jetliners heaving themselves into the sky for all manner of holiday destinations must be just as annoying, particularly for the incarcerated New Zealander – a sensitive, well-spoken lad – who took a few pills to a nightclub for a mate, co-operated with the police when arrested and got lumbered with 13 months for possession with intent to supply. He was about to return to New Zealand to begin his studies with the aim of becoming a pilot. He gets Armitage’s only poem, and it’s a sad, poignant, reflective piece that, through careful repetition, builds up a contrast between planes, peacocks and imprisonment.

Elsewhere, Armitage’s contribution is in the form of song lyrics (given a hip-hop aesthetic by composer Dextrous), and it’s hard to imagine any of the other inmates reciting verse as a preference to yawping their stories back in the face of the establishment in gangsta-stylee. Two participants rejected Armitage’s lyrics (crafted, as with ‘Drinking for England’, after extensive interviews) and wrote their own raps. Both created good work, albeit crackling with a certain amount of macho posturing whereas Armitage goes for the emotional truth of his subjects’ states of mind.

As a result, ‘Feltham Sings’ is a different piece of work to ‘Drinking for England’. Music videos have inured us to gangsta imagery; scenes of some hardcase delivering rap lyrics in a dayroom or a cell aren’t as jarring or culturally out of place as some fat-bellied loser cutting loose like a wannabe Roy Orbison in a spit ‘n’ sawdust pub. Even the short-lived karaoke fad doesn’t contextualise ‘Drinking for England’ in the way that music videos do for ‘Feltham Sings’.

Not, however, that your average East Coast “crew” would include Robin, the young man transferred to suicide watch after the death of his father and the news that an aunt has only months to live. Armitage crafts for him a song that counts down from ten various lists juxtaposing prison routine with edited highlights of the fucking lousy hand that life has dealt him. He’s an inexperienced vocalist and his is the only song that Hill provides subtitles to, but that just serves to emphasise the reality.

Likewise McBride: inside for assault and with a family history of institutionalisation (“a boy born in Holloway” as the key line of his song, ‘Boomerang Boy’, bluntly records); his vocal would see him summarily given the elbow on any talent show, but the bitter life experience that Armitage has distilled into the song, and Hill’s staging of it, transforms him into a wounded icon.

The stories that Hill and Armitage uncover are tellingly similar: drugs, booze, parental failings, a yearning for a lifestyle that crime might provide but the kind of shitty minimum wage job that constitutes their only other option certainly won’t. True, these are kids who have done some pretty vicious and anti-social things, but the degree of self-reflection that they bring to their interviews suggests a correlative degree of victimhood. The guy who talks about the babysitters who routinely sexually abused him between the ages of three and five, for example. Inhumanity begets inhumanity.

Ditto the two jive-talking smartarses who suddenly, and apropos of nothing, have a conversation about karma, speculating as to whether the times they got away with it were because they fucked over someone just as dodgy who had it coming and that fact that they’re now doing time is because of what they did to “a good person” who was “just getting on with their life”. Or the guy who writes letter after letter to his mother; he can’t send them – he doesn’t know where she is – so his testimony to her remains in a bundle in his cell. 

The great triumph of ‘Feltham Sings’, in just 48 minutes, is to mine numerous moments like these, revealing the human being beneath the uniform, without ever eliding the reality of life at Feltham and why its “guests” have found themselves behind bars.

Drinking for England

Okay. Imagine Werner Herzog’s doctrine of “ecstatic truth” taken to the extreme in the documentary form. Imagine a documentary where the subjects are interviewed, said interviews are reshaped into poetry and song lyrics by Yorkshire’s favourite probation officer turned versifier, then handed back to the original subjects who either recite the poems or sing the lyrics … while cameras follow them through their own personal hell (or otherwise) in a frank and unsparing look at drinking culture, denial, chauvinism and alcohol dependency.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Brian Hill and Simon Armitage’s ‘Drinking for England’. Made in 1998, the year before Armitage delivered arguably his best work as a poet with ‘Killing Time’, his thousand-line deconstruction of millennial angst, ‘Drinking for Britain’ already shows its age a bit with scenes of smokers chugging away in pubs (was the smoking ban really a post-millennial construct? it seems a lot longer since I walked into a pub and the ceiling was obscured by a fog of nicotine) and the spit ‘n’ sawdust joints that a couple of the interviewees favour and probably owned by Wetherspoons now.

‘Drinking for England’ clocks in at just under an hour and follows twenty-somethings Ami and Kerry, who get sloshed in their flat before heading out to a winebar where they freeload off oiky lads; middle-aged incapacity scrounger Shaun, who treats his wife as a pub-to-house taxi service; single mum Jane, whose decision to enter rehab gives the documentary at least a glimmer of hope; unrepentant booze-hound Duncan, who seems to be the only participant who enjoys being an alkie; and moneyed retiree Denis, whose world-class case of denial is frankly staggering.

As a cross-section, this not-quite-wild bunch range across half a century in terms of their ages and Hill’s immediate achievement with the documentary is to explode the myth that binge drinking, stupid behaviour and the exponential capacity to make an utter fucking prat of oneself is solely the mandate of the young. Ami and Kerry slur their words as they try to recite Armitage’s deliberately simple cadences, they giggle and stumble and fall over, but in their more reflective moments they realise that this is merely a case of something to be got out of their system during their twenties; they see little point to intoxication for its own sake beyond their thirties. The others, however …

Jane has made it to thirty-eight and is bringing up her thirteen-year-old son almost single-handedly. Her tipple of choice is sherry and she talks of it both as a constant companion and a guilty secret. Her account of frequenting different retailers in order to disguise the amount she’s buying is a sad but telling moment. Armitage responds with a lyric that turns sherry into Sherry, an alter ego who is both Jane’s tormentor and dependent. Jane performs the song with what I can only describe as weary gusto. I know that doesn’t make sense as a turn of phrase, but watch the documentary.

The next best song is ‘Thinking and Joking’, in which these two words replace “drinking” and “smoking” in a witty romp through Duncan’s devil-may-care lifestyle. Duncan’s story is the least cautionary of these tales – he’s loquacious, witty and charming in a rough diamond sort of way, and all too easy to like – but what he lacks as a role model, he makes up for in raw honesty. He’s certainly better company than Shaun, who is basically a wanker on a cosmic scale. He neglects his wife for the company of boorish chauvinists, downs lager like he’s not just drinking but trying to swallow the glass, orders his ten pints per night in halfs, and he huffs out tired self-pitying rhetoric as if he were the victim. Shaun is the most odious character, fictional or non-fictional, that I’ve seen onscreen in a long time, and this is coming from someone who’s just sat through two months of venal exploitation movies.

Denis is more companionable than Shaun, but no less boorish albeit that he speaks in a cut-glass accent rather than Shaun’s fags-and-terrace-chants sandpaper rasp. It’s when he comes out with these two particular statements that Denis shows his true colours. The first is in respect to drink-driving legislation, which he thinks should allow for long-term drinkers who can demonstrate tolerance and a low-accident history. His rationale? That he’s unable to drink as much as he’d like down his local because he has to drive there. The second deserves quoting in its full head-in-the-sand glory: “I wouldn’t say I have a drink problem personally, but it does govern the way I live my life.”

Although the film’s title suggests a correlation of drinking culture and geopolitical history, Hill steers clear of obvious or moralistic point-scoring, nor does he try to make some big overarching statement. Armitage’s poetry and lyrics distil (bad word; sorry) the subjects’ experiences and voices into poignant vignettes sculpted to their personalities. It’s a small triumph of director and writing completely shelving their own egos and agendas so that what remains is purely a record, never mind that it’s arrived by the most curious artifice.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Contraband

Lucio Fulci’s immortality in the annals of genre film rests principally on his unique brand of extreme yet dreamlike horror movies (most notably the loosely connected “Gates of Hell” trilogy) and a quartet of world-class gialli in ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’, ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’, ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ and ‘Perversion Story’. But how does he fare with a straight-forward crime movie? Let’s find out.

‘Contraband’ was made in 1980, on the cusp of his last great throw of the dice as a filmmaker with ‘City of the Living Dead’, ‘The Beyond’ and ‘The House by the Cemetery’. Already, a sense of ennui was entering his work, as ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The New York Ripper’ (a film whose very notoriety can’t quite eclipse a sense of its director’s total disengagement) and ‘Manhattan Baby’ all date from this period. Within just a few years, he would arrive at the dreary final stage of his career, from ‘Aenigma’ to ‘Door to Silence’.

But let us not dwell on such stuff. ‘Contraband’ is a cops ‘n’ mobsters crime thriller about the Naples underworld, smuggling, power plays, betrayal and violent death. And – with a caveat that we’ll get to in just a moment – it’s a pretty entertaining outing that demonstrates Fulci could pull off the car chases, shoot outs and hand-to-hand stuff just as well as, say, Enzo G. Castellari with ‘The Heroin Busters’ or Fernando di Leo with ‘Milano calibro 9’.

What Fulci doesn’t quite achieve is the narrative focus of Castellari’s film or di Leo’s ability to plot the hierarchical structure of the underworld. Indeed, ‘Contraband’ often seems like it doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be – a revenge thriller, a poliziotteschi, an examination of the mechanics of drug smuggling à la ‘The French Connection’, or an epic of warring crime families in the vein of ‘The Godfather’. Sometimes it seems like Fulci has just assembled a collection of scenes homaging his favourite crime flicks and never mind that there’s no real through line or that he’s happily introducing new characters with barely a smidgin of context or explanation right up until the bullet-riddled final act.

Which isn’t to say that things don’t start out very plot-heavy. In short order, following a commendably actionful speedboat chase, we’re introduced to Luca (Fabio Testi) and his wife Adele (Ivana Monti) who are enjoying the high life (although Adele balks at the company her husband keeps) from the profits of a cigarette smuggling operation. Luca and his brother Mickey (Enrico Maisto) work for playboy capo Perlante (Saverio Marconi), one of a number of mob bosses involved in an uneasy fraternity called The Order of the Blue Motorboat. (I’m not making this up.)

When Mickey is assassinated, Luca suspects Perlante’s immediate rival Scherino (Ferninand Murolo) and ill-advisedly launches a one-man vendetta. Scherino disabuses him of his suspicions – and has a henchman beat the crap out of him for good measure – but before Luca’s investigations can lead him elsewhere, Naples explodes in a welter of violence as the Order’s cigarette smuggling ring is targeted by ruthless drug smuggler Marsigliesi (Marcel Bozzuffi). How ruthless is this gentleman? He puts a beatdown on a female drug runner and burns her face off with a Bunsen burner when she demands the wrong price in a transaction. Not one for negotiation, Marsigliesi.

As mentioned above, Fulci doesn’t do a particularly coherent job of teasing out the rivalries and interrelationships, and as ‘Contraband’ moves towards the hour mark, simple storytelling is replaced by a succession of sequences which generally end with gunblasts and chunks of flesh flying everywhere. Eventually, he stops pretending the film’s anything but an exploitationer and has Adele fall into Marsigliesi’s hands: cue graphic misogynistic violence on par with anything ‘The New York Ripper’.

What Fulci does achieve, however, is an effective contrast between the old guard of Naples’ criminal class – weary; retired; old men long out of the game – and the new breed of flashy, shallow, venal hoods who have replaced them. Fulci also has a hell of a lot bringing them back into the game, under the leadership of the pragmatic Morrone (Guido Alberti), when they decide enough is enough and teach the young pretenders a lesson.

‘Contraband’ is no classic and there are moments – Adele’s travails; a cluster of the assassination scenes – where Fulci delights in violence at the cost of narrative momentum; but on the whole it moves at a decent pace, the cast are on-form and Sergio Salvati’s cinematography grittily captures Naples: its streets and harbor and its sense of menace.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Big Bird Cage

Our story starts in 1971 with Jack Hill's 'The Big Bird Cage', a fairly standard example of the women-in-prison genre (or more particularly of its especially sleazy subgenre which locates said prison somewhere in the wilds of a politically unstable tinpot South American country) which was enlivened no end by Pam Grier in a supporting role. It was only her second film appearance and it kicked off a four-movie relationship with Hill that spanned the first half of the 70s and made Grier a blaxploitation icon.

Fast forward to 1972 and Hill made an in-name-only sequel, 'The Big Bird Cage', this time with Grier in the lead. She plays Bloosom, an hilariously inappropriate name for a Marxist revolutionary who's as handy with a gun as she is with her fists. Blossom is committed to the revolution, even if her leader - and lover - Django (Sid Haig) is content to postpone the glorious moment to a never-ending parade of tomorrows as long as he can swing on his hammock and drink wine and have a small army of followers defer to him.

Said followers, however, are a tad disaffected that Blossom is the only woman amongst them and exclusive in her favours to Django. They, too, dream of revolution but more fervently so of female company. A two-birds-one-stone solution presents itself when they learn of a women's prison run by a sadistic warden (is there any other kind?) by the name of Zappa (Andres Centenera). More work farm than penitentiary, the inmates labour at a giant mill known as the bird cage and are occasionally pimped out to visiting dignitaries.

The revolutionary front decide to liberate this facility (and hopefully score some new recruits). To this end, Blossom finds herself "volunteered" to get arrested and shipped out to the prison, whence she will foment rebellion; the plan is for Django's troops to provide firepower to assist with the break-out. So far so excessive force, but what none of them realise is that the prison's latest detainee, American party girl Terry (Anitra Ford), owes her arrest to a case of misidentification arising from Django and Blossom's actions earlier in the film.

Indeed, 'The Big Bird Cage' focuses as much on Terry as it does Blossom, perhaps more so in the early stages as Terry negotiates the prison's power structure, learns who to befriend and who to be wary of, and looks out for fellow wrongful arrestee Rina (Marissa Delgado).

Naturally, the Blossom/Terry plotlines eventually coincide, but the outcome isn’t what you might have been expecting, one of several unexpected swerves Hill makes with the material. Likewise the ongoing feud between aggressive lesbian Karen (Karen McKevic) and smart-mouthed Mickie (Carol Speed): when Mickie is forced into harm’s way at Zappa’s hands, rather than take advantage of the situation, Karen reacts with righteous fury.

Perhaps the oddest thing Hill does, though, is during the mid-section where Django infiltrates the camp by getting hired on as a guard. Zappa, keen that his staff keep their hands off the inmates (there is a general “no sex” rule at the camp that’s only repeal when Zappa wants a visiting politician or businessman to have a good time), hires only gay guards. Django expedites his employment opportunities by allowing himself to be picked up by chief of guards Rocco (Vic Diaz) in what seems to be a gay bar in the middle of the jungle.

While all of this malarkey is as stereotypical and risible as the lesbian bar scene in ‘Foxy Brown’, the absurdity somehow makes it not only palatable but outright entertaining. There’s something about Sid Haig – Sid fucking Haig, ladies and gentlemen – pretending to be gay that totally rewires the synapses and leaves your head spinning.

By the time Blossom, Terry et al stage the break-out, a set-piece that occupies the last quarter of an hour and delivers explosions, shoot outs, chases and Rocco suffering the proverbial fate worse than death (another moment that has to be seen to be believed), ‘The Big Bird Cage’ has not only careened through a deliriously inclusive exploitation checklist, but upended most of them even as it ticks them off. It thumbs its nose at intellectualization, renders redundant the reviewer, and glories in its gorgeous and strikingly iconic heroines. ’Nuff said.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Foxy Brown

Of the four films Pam Grier made with Jack Hill, ‘Foxy Brown’ is easily the most famous. In fact, it’s one of the most famous blaxploitation movies of all time. Perhaps only ‘Shaft’ can lay claim to being better known as the key exemplar of the genre.

This perplexes me, since ‘Foxy Brown’ – while, after a slowish start, undeniably entertaining – is nothing compared to ‘Coffy’ as an example of the revenge thriller; and nowhere near as subversive as ‘The Big Doll House’ or ‘The Big Bird Cage’.

It certainly gives its heroine a lot to be vengeful about, though. The opening sequence has Foxy (Grier) called upon to rescue her feckless brother Link (Antonio Fargas) from a beating. Link’s been running numbers but has screwed up to the tune of twenty grand, which leaves him with the twin requirements of a place to hide and a means of raising the do-ray-me. Foxy willing provides the former and inadvertently the latter.

You see, Foxy’s boyfriend, Michael (Terry Carter) is an undercover cop who has just undergone reconstructive surgery and been given a new identity as a protective measure against underworld duo Steve Elias (Peter Brown) and Katherine Wall (Kathryn Loder). That Steve and Katherine are still at liberty suggests Michael’s investigations haven’t been worth a damn, but hey ho! Link intuits that Foxy’s “new” beau is Michael, masquerading under his new persona, and sells him out without a second thought.

In short order, Michael gets whacked and Foxy gets medieval on Link’s ass. Link gives up the goods on Steve and Katherine and Foxy goes out for revenge. Discovering that Katherine operates a modeling agency as a front for high class call girls – whose charms she uses as leverage on judges and local politicos to keep her crew out of jail and her and Steve’s drug running operation off the radar – Foxy gets taken on the books.
So far, so ‘Coffy Part 2’, but whereas ‘Coffy’ begins with its heroine already out for revenge and remorselessly working her way up through a criminal hierarchy, ‘Foxy Brown’ takes a bit of time to get to Michael’s assassination and then puts Foxy in Steve and Katherine’s orbit very quickly. There’s no sense of Foxy having to scheme or improvise or overcome obstacles to get close to her nemeses. Nor does she exploit any of several opportunities she has, before Katherine sets her up with a corrupt judge, to simply take the biatch out. Instead, Foxy recruits junkie hooker Claudia (Juanita Brown) to her scheme and they set out to humiliate said judge in an attempt to ruin Katherine’s judicially-preferential relationship and provoke a reaction from her.

This is where ‘Foxy Brown’ starts running into problems. Simply taking out Katherine and Steve would achieve both of her ends: vengeance for her lover’s death, and severing the connection with the justice system that’s keep scumbags on the streets. Humiliating the judge only achieves the latter objective and tips off Katherine that something’s amiss. Moreover, there’s no reason for Claudia, whose family Katherine is using as leverage against her, to involve herself. When Katherine, predictably, reacts by sending her goons after them, Foxy puts herself in harm’s way in order to protect Claudia. 

Harm’s way here refers to drug-pushing misogynists Brandi (H.B. Haggerty) and Slauson (Boyd ‘Red’ Morgan), to whose “ranch” Katherine orders the swiftly captured Foxy be sent. A narrative development, this, which serves no other purpose than woman-in-peril tropes and a sleazy rape scene. Once Foxy contrives an escape route, the real business resumes and she targets Steve’s drug running set-up by conniving her way into the affections of Hays (Sid Haig), a pilot contracted to bring the stuff in.

Once Hill arranges his ducks in a row for the big finale, ‘Foxy Brown’ ticks enough of the boxes to emerge as a decent thriller. But the narrative peregrinations by which Foxy does pointless things for the middle third just to push the film towards feature length annoy. As does a schizophrenic tone which sees outright nastiness cheek-by-jowl with goofy humour (several action scenes are played as slapstick); this is nowhere more in evidence than in a pointless set-piece in a lesbian bar that is horrible in its stereotyping, even by the standards of the 1970s. Also, Loder – so good in some of her other roles – doesn’t even begin to suggest the level of villainy required to make Katherine a credible mob boss.

Still, as in ‘Coffy’ – indeed, as in anything in her filmography – Grier is iconic. She looks amazing and kicks ass with wince-inducing proficiency. Having laid a beatdown on Link and left him in no uncertainty that it’s only kinship that’s prevented her from killing him, Link’s dazed and disbelieving girlfriend gasps, “Who does she think she is?” “That’s my sister,” Link replies shakily, “and she’s a whole lotta woman.” Amen to that.