The Hunt for Vulcan, by Thomas Levenson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

A spectacle, certainly, and as an early palace of industry clearly worthy of the guidebooks (themselves novelties). By any stretch of the imagination, though, the Manufacture des Tabacs was an odd place to look for someone who would become the most celebrated mathematical astronomer of his day—but not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become. Thus it was that in 1833 a young man, freshly minted as a graduate of the celebrated École polytechnique, could be found every working day at the Quai d'Orsay, reporting for duty at the research arm of the factory, France's École des Tabacs.

A nice little study of two very different parts of astronomical history: first, the mid-nineteenth century quest for the planet Vulcan, and then the story of Einstein's conceptualisation of General Relativity and the practical test during the eclipse of 1919, which confirmed it. I had touched on this issue during my MPhil research on Sir Robert Ball, so it was a nice return to a previous topic. Levenson gets very much into the context of the two different situation, particularly vivid on Le Verrier in Paris in the 1830s and Einstein's early career. I felt he didn't quite bridge the two – I'd have liked a bit more on the noted astronomer James Craig Watson who actually claimed to have seen Vulcan during the solar eclipse of 1878, and the book ends up being very firmly two different stories with a common topic of interest but which are otherwise not that closely related. But both stories are interesting. You can get it here.

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Thursday reading

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Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
The Accident, by Ismail Kadarë
Roger of Hereford’s Judicial Astrology: England’s First Astrology Book?, by Chris Mitchell
Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1: Breaking the Strain, by Paul Preuss
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

Last books finished
A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003, by P. E. Winter
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo

Next books
The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross
The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht

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Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, ed., Shannon Watters

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The third entry in this compilation of comic strips, in full (by Tony Millionaire, whose work I don't otherwise know and frankly this doesn't encourage me to seek it out):

About a year and a half ago I went both to the permanent exhibiton of the Charles M Schulz museum in California, and to a temporary exhibition of his work in London. I bought this while I was in Santa Rosa; it's a collection of pieces paying tribute to Schulz's work, some of them very personal – one or two of the artists were lucky enough to meet or know Schulz himself, and most of them have some thoughtful things to say about the Peanuts strip, which was pretty progressive for its time. To call attention to a couple of them, Jeremy Sorese has an interesting meditation on where the adults are in the Peanuts universe; Liz Prince explores the Peppermint Patty/Marcia relationship; and Hilary Price recalls a magical afternoon in Santa Rosa. It's a lovely book (apart as noted above from the Tony Millionaire contribution, which really misses the mark) and you can get it here.

This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that list is a Doctor Who comic, Gaze of the Medusa, by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson.

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May 2006 books

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A month when I visited Berlin and London for work, and I have a note that I was in Bath too, but am really not sure why. (Anne's birthday fell in the middle of my Berlin trip, so we must have celebrated at the weekend.) I also got a really weird phone call from someone who felt it really important to tell me that "je suis" is "Jesus" with "I" in the middle. At work, I took some time off Crisis Group to do a chunky bit of consulting for my future employers Independent Diplomat. I also applied for a job with the European Commission, but it was one of those cases where they were really formalising someone's existing job and the advertisement was not serious.

As the fine weather came in, U and F dressed up, and B climbed a tree.

The big geopolitical news was Montenegro voting for independence, and its subsequent peaceful separation from Serbia. I still feel rather proud that I helped make the argument for Montenegro as an independent state to EU policymakers long before it became fashionable.

This was also the month that I had my infamous exhange with John Scalzi over his novel Old Man’s War (see here, here, here and here). We are friends now (picture from last year’s Hugo ceremony).

A couple of other LJ posts from that month have stood the test of time: the 1996 Northern Ireland elections, and the East Rumelia vote of 1879.

I read 15 books in May 2006, more than any of the previous months that year, fewer than any later month that year.

non-fiction 4 (YTD 21)
Roger Zelazny, by Carl Yoke
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, by Lawrence Durrell
Moondust, by Andrew Smith
Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, by Yiannis Papadakis

non-genre 3 (YTD 6)
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott (did not finish)

sf 5 (YTD 26)
Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson
Dark Side of Venus, by "Clem Macartney" (W.D. Flackes)
Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
Alternate Generals, ed. Harry Turtledove
Daughter of the Drow, by Elaine Cunningham (did not finish)

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 3)
Doctor Who and the State of Decay, by Terrance Dicks
Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks
Goth Opera, by Paul Cornell

3,300 pages (YTD 18,600)
1/15 by a woman (YTD 8/57)
1/15 by PoC (YTD 3/57)

Links above to my reviews, below to Amazon.

Lots of good books here, but the two I enjoyed most were both non-fiction, Moondust, about the Apollo astronoauts, which you can get here, and Echoes from the Dead Zone, a Cypriot anthropologist's take on his island's problems, which you can get here. On the other hand, two of these books were so awful that, unusually, I could not finish them, Ivanhoe being slightly the worse of the two. You can get it here, if you want.


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The Long Song, by Andrea Levy

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

And what a squealing, tempestuous, fuss-making child she was. The quivering pink tongue and toothless gums in July's shrieking mouth were more familiar to her mama than her baby's arms and feet. With such agitation coming hourly from this newly born creature, Kitty did believe that this pickney must have been ripped from some more charmed existence. That she howled for the injustice that found her now a slave in an airless hut, in a crib too small, and being mothered by an ugly-skinned black woman who did not have the faintest notion as to why her pickney did yell so.

Another historical novel by Andrea Levy following on from Small Island, this time looking at colonial Jamaica at the time of rebellion and the abolition of slavery. I confess my more or less complete ignorance of Caribbean history, and while I have read a fair amount about the implementation and abolition of slavery in the United States, I don't think I've read anything about the history of the British colonies. In the wake of a bloody rebellion in 1831, the British smugly abolished slavery in the Empire with effect from 1834; but those facts and dates don't give any expression to the brutality of the institution or to the desperate society that emerged from the reform. Levy's story concentrates on women, her central character adopted by her master's sister as a pet and thus well-placed to observe the damage the system did to the white owners as well as the slaves. It's largely told in semi-patois but very readable. Like Small Island, it didn't blow me away, but I felt I learned a lot from it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread novel by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter.

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Trieste 1945 and now

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One of the less well-remembered episodes at the end of the second world war was the capture of the Italian city of Trieste by the 2nd New Zealand Division when the German garrison surrendered to them in preference to the 8th Dalmatian Shock Corps of the Yugoslav Partisans. The two armies uneasily held the city jointly for a few weeks until the Yugoslavs backed off to the line which still in part forms the international frontier between Italy and Slovenia. Until 1954 it was run as an independent UN protectorate, and then split, the city and a narrow coastal strip going to Italy and most of the hinterland going to Yugoslavia (subsequently split more or less evenly between Slovenia and Croatia).

I found this picture of New Zealand troops relaxing in the streets from 75 years ago, and wondered how easy it would be to track down the exact spot where the picture was taken.

The answer was, very easy indeed; I don’t think it took me fifteen minutes to cruise Google Maps along the shoreline and find the precise point on the Riva Grumula where the camera would have been in 1945.

Myself, I have only ever driven past Trieste and never actually visited; must do that some time.

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Heralds of Destruction, by Paul Cornell; World Without End, by John and Carole Barrowman

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Two new-ish Who comics that I picked up on one of my London trips last year – I have now read almost every Doctor Who novel (there are a couple of recent releases I haven't caught up with yet) but I am much further behind in the world of Who comics, especially Titan who keep pumping them out.

Heralds of Destruction, by Paul Cornell and Christopher Jones

Second frame of third chapter:

This is a Third Doctor story, firmly set in UNIT between The Three Doctors and The Green Death, with beautiful attention to character and detail both in writing and art. The setting is a small English village, with the Master as part of the apparatus of an alien invasion; but then there's the really unexpected reappearance of a face from the past of Doctor Who, which really cranks up the storytelling a gear. (There's also time-slippage to Westminster in 1868.) The character of Jo is quite substantially redeemed here, and we're given more substantial grounds for Mike Yates' imminent change of allegiance than we got on screen. It's the Third Doctor era as informed not only by the show as broadcast but by the sympathetic (and sometimes superior) novelisations of the late great Terrance Dicks. Loved it. You can get it here,

World Without End, by John Barrowman, Carole Barrowman, Antonio Fuso and Pasquale Qualano

Second frame of third chapter:

Unfortunately I haven't read the Torchwood novel Exodus Code, which I think this is a loose sequel to; lots of fun stuff happens, including Captain John Hart (as portrayed by James "Spike" Marsters) taking over the original Victorian-era Torchwood estate, and some gorgeous art with some nice nods to the show (and one or two nods to Doctor Who). But it's only the first part of an ongoing narrative, and who knows when I'll get another chance to visit Forbidden Planet… You can get it here.

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Cabaret

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As I go through the Oscars, I decided that before turning to The Godfather I'd look at the other big winner of 1972, Cabaret – which still holds the record as the film to have won most Oscars without winning Best Picture (8; followed by Gravity with 7 in 2013). I had seen a stage production in the Arts Theatre, Belfast, in 1992, directed by the late Peter Quigley who also starred as the MC (with Richard Croxford as the male lead), and a lot more recently I read the books on which it is loosely based. And of course I was familiar with a lot of the music. Here's a trailer:

I'm a huge Berlin nerd anyway and love the portrayal of the doomed diverse and decadent culture of 1930 – closer in time to 1972 than 1972 is to the present day, the self-confident world of the nightclub contrasting with the uncertain navigation of three young people orbiting each other in overlapping love affairs. Isherwood himself (along with W.H. Auden and Jean Ross, the model for Sally Bowles) criticised the film for underplaying his own homosexuality and also for minimising the crushing poverty of Berlin at the time. Even without those details, it's compelling enough, particularly for the performance of Liza Minelli, aged 26 but playing younger, an impressive combination of confidence and vulnerability.

The killer moment in the film, however, doesn't have her in it at all – she is supposedly asleep in the car when her two chaps take a break from a drive in the country and stop in at a rural beer-hall. It's particularly impressive in that we think going into the scene that it's going to be a moment of romantic exposition between Michael York and Helmut Griem as Brian and Max, and then turns into something completely different, Fascism smashing apart the details of intimacy. It is the only song not performed in the Kit-Kat Club, and it sends shivers down my spine every time. I am always particularly grabbed by the little girl with pigtails singing her heart out, and the old man who wants nothing to do with it.

I had not seen the film in full before, and I must admit it's not as good a film overall as The Godfather (which I will watch next), but it has a lot of other merits and duly won Oscars for Best Director (Bob Fosse), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey as the MC), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Score Adaptation and Original Song Score and Best Sound. I note that the stage show's subplot of the older Jewish guy falling in love with the non-Jewish landlady was replaced by a younger Jewish woman falling in love with a secretly Jewish chap, which I think works better. (Though I'd have loved to have seen Lotte Lenya as the landlady in the original Broadway version.)

No crossover either with previous Oscar/Hugo winners or with Doctor Who, though Michael York has good sci-fi credentials as the title character of Logan's Run (and was also a guest star in Babylon 5).

And so, on the The Godfather. (And Slaughterhouse-Five, which won the Hugo that year.)

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Thursday reading

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Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003, by P. E. Winter
Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Last books finished
Riverland, by Fran Wilde
Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, ed., Shannon Watters
The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, by Thomas Levenson
Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones
In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire

Next books
Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham
Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1: Breaking the Strain, by Paul Preuss

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Fifty days of lockdown, and what comes next (or doesn’t)

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So, it's seven weeks yesterday since I was last working in the office. (I've been in twice, briefly, to the deserted corridors to pick up documents and other stuff.) When I do go back, it will be very different at first. People will be socially distancing, wearing masks, and generally being very careful. Cafes, bars and restaurants won't reopen until June, so until then a lot of the normal work socialising will be reduced to munching sandwiches at a safe distance in the park. (Which is not too awful.) I'll probably start off by using the car to commute. (It's a hybrid and I can charge it in the office car park, so the carbon footprint will not be too bad.)

With decent weather, and a few other things going right, my spirits have definitely picked up. I invited a bunch of people to celebrate my birthday via Zoom, and it was nice to see some familiar faces again, some of whom I had not seen in a long time. The Doctor Who rewatches have continued (there's another one tonight, The Girl in the Fireplace). I've continued to explore our neighbourhood for new things to look at – the other day I heard rumours of turtles in the Zoetwater ponds, but didn't locate any.

And I must admit that the long weekend for 1 May was a welcome break. I used the time to go through old photographs in the attic, finding a couple of myself taken at my 21st birthday party. (Yes, I had a moustache. Yes, I had a full head of hair. Yes, I was thinner.) It was very pleasant nostalgia – I have been gradually emailing the people concerned to remind know what they looked like in 1988.

As we move to the next phase, the question a lot of people are asking is how much the world will change once this is over. I must admit that I'm a sceptic on this. I wonder how different things will really look in January 2021 compared to January 2020, assuming (as I think is fairly safe) that the economy has begun to bounce back by then. Some changes are inevitable, of course. A lot of us will be less well off, and some of us will be dead. In Europe at least, the state will have a greater share of the economy. There will I hope be a greater appreciation and respect for those providing vital services, health most obviously but also food production and distribution. But does this amount to a fundamental re-ordering of society? I don't really see it.

The structures of the United States and the European Union (and the United Kingdom) are all under strain. However COVID-19 is not going to provide the killer blow. As Jeremy Cliffe noted in the New Statesman, obsessing about whether the end of the EU is nigh is a distraction from the much more interesting and useful question of how the complicated pressures on the EU are changing it. EU governments continue to argue, but they continue to do so in an EU framework. And despite the starry-eyed predictions of some, I don't see that the pandemic has proved to be a tipping point for either Scottish independence or Irish unity – I would be interested to see any evidence that it has changed a single person's mind on either issue. (More locally: see Flanders vs Belgium.)

The USA is of course in a desperate situation, but that was already the case. By any objective measure the federal response to the pandemic has been a disaster, and President Trump's failure as a statesman and human being very visible. However from my obsessive browsing of FiveThirtyEight, it is striking how little President Trump's approval numbers have moved at all (whereas in Europe there have been seismic shifts in the polls in a number of countries). The narratives of both sides in America's deeply polarised political culture are being confirmed; as with the EU and UK, while the weaknesses of the system are being brutally exposed, it's not clear to me that anyone has changed or will change their minds about how the system works or should work.

So, all we can do is continue to work to make the world a better place. And try to stay in good health while we do it.

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April 2006 books, and reflections on Alexander Hamilton and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

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This is the latest post in a series I started last November, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in current circumstances when we are all somewhat distracted. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

No Crisis Group papers in April 2006, but I did publish a piece in Interationale Politik in the wake of the failed Dutch and French referenda on the EU's Constitutional Treaty, advocating the sort of citizen's assembly, with an element of random selection, that has subsequently been used to great effect in Ireland and which President Macron is now advocating for France and for Europe; I was ahead of my time. You can read it here.

My only trip was to Stockholm, starting on my 39th birthday; as well as attending a conference, I went to the Vasa Museum and the Nobel Prize Museum, both very interesting. We celebrated my birthday at the weekend when I got back, which also was the weekend that the lovely School Reunion episode of Doctor Who was broadcast.

Six-year-old F and I had a trip to the big park in Kessel-Lo where he tried a couple of means of transport.

More grimly, one of our neighbours was murdered by her husband, who later took his own life in prison. She had been a stalwart of the annual dorpsfeest, and a bench in the grassy space behind the parochial hall is dedicated to her memory (lovely photo by Ernst Gülcher).

Without much travel, and commuting by car, I read only 13 books in April 2006, but some of them were quite long:

non-fiction 7 (YTD 17)
A Man On The Moon, by Andrew Chaikin
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman
Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow
William Heinemann: A Memoir, by Frederic Whyte
Malachy, by Brian Scott
You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration and State-Building, by Simon Chesterman
International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction, by Richard Caplan

non-genre 1 (YTD 3)
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

sf 5 (YTD 21)
Mappa Mundi, by Justina Robson
The Jennifer Morgue, by Charles Stross
Secret Files: The Inside Story of International Rescue, by Chris Bentley, Stephen Cole and Graham Bleathman
A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett
The Moon Pool, by A. Merritt

4,900 pages (YTD 15,300)
2/13 by women (YTD 7/42)
1/13 by PoC (YTD 2/42)

The best of these are the two biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They were almost exact contemporaries – they were born two years apart and died two years apart, she soon before her 49th birthday (of natural causes) and he a few months after his (shot dead by the vice-president of the United States).

Neither is mentioned in the other biography, and they would not have ever met (neither ever crossed the Atlantic), but they would have known about each other. John and Abigail Adams certainly knew them both. Abigail was not a fan of either. On 30 September 1785, she wrote of Georgiana,

Amongst the most celebrated of their beauties stands the Duchess of Devonshire, who is masculine in her appearance…

and on 28 January 1797, she wrote of Hamilton,

Beware of that spare Cassius, has always occured to me when I have seen that cock sparrow. O I have read his Heart in his wicked Eyes many a time. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.

Angelica Schuyler Church (who gets a lot of the good lines in Hamilton the musical) and her husband (a radical English MP) must also surely have known them both on rather better terms – John Church was an ally first of Earl Grey (he of the tea, who was also Georgiana's lover) and then of Charles James Fox (who she also strongly supported).

One of Hamilton's great-granddaughters was a Georgina, but that's more likely a homage to Washington than Devonshire. (Incidentally it was she who got the famous Emma Lazarus poem, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses.." inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.) You can get Alexander Hamiton here and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire here.

None of the other books this month was all that bad but I guess The Moon Pool failed to convince me; you can get it here.


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The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I loved Tabitha very much. She was beautiful although so thin, and she would spend hours playing with me. We had a dollhouse that was like our own house, with a living room and a dining room and a big kitchen for the Marthas, and a father’s study with a desk and bookshelves. All the little pretend books on the shelves were blank. I asked why there was nothing inside them—I had a dim feeling that there were supposed to be marks on those pages—and my mother said that books were decorations, like vases of flowers.

I've realised there were a few books I read at the start of the year in the expectation that they would get onto the BSFA or Hugo ballots, so I saved writing them up; and then they didn't, so I never got around to it. One of these was The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. I opened it with some trepidation. It's not at all unusual for a sequel to a great work to fall flat, especially if written no less than thirty-five years later (but only fifteen years later in terms of the internal timeline). I'm glad to say that The Testaments thoroughly worked for me. The story of Gilead, the near-future America where women are thoroughly oppressed and treated as breeding machines for the male rulers, has meanwhile been refreshed by the HBO television series (which I haven't seen) – I understand that The Testaments reflects events from the TV show as well as from the original novel.

Whatever, it worked for me, with several parallel narratives between Gilead and the exiled radicals in Canada telling the story of the infiltration and subsequent escape of a young woman who turns out to be key to the internal mythology of Gilead, and the workings of Aunt Lydia who is crucial to the maintenance of the structure of Gilead's society, but possibly has another agenda. It's a happier story than The Handmaid's Tale, which is just as well as we live in much darker times. I did also like the postscript from a future academic conference trying to work out exactly what the hell was going on with Gilead.

The Testaments won the Man Booker Prize last year jointly with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. It's not quite as good a book, but it is a very good book. I voted for it for both the BSFA and Hugo ballots, alas in vain in both cases. You can get it here.

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The Giver, by Lois Lowry

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was the first thing Jonas noticed as he looked at the newchild peering up curiously from the basket. The pale eyes.

Jonas lives in a future society where all roles are assigned to each citizen for life at the age of twelve; parenting is sort of communal; thought and speech are rigidly controlled; and the dirty secret is euthanasia of the elderly, disabled and misfits. It's quite a short book, in the course of which Jonas allies with a wise old man whose role is to experience and retain painful memories so that the rest of the people won't be bothered; and eventually our hero escapes – but to what?

Somehow this got onto my wishlist (on a recs list backed by ) and I got it for myself with a Christmas book token. It scores very highly on the Goodreads/LibraryThing stats, which suggests that it's a course book for a lot of American schools. I am not sure that I rate it all that highly myself. I don't really see what Lowry is pushing back against, unless it's the general idea of conformity and sameness and a defence of individuality. Living as I do in a country with a relatively liberal euthanasia law, I think that subject can also be treated with more nuance than it gets here. Still, what do I know? It won the Newbery Medal. You can get it here.

This was my top unread sf book, and my top unread book by a woman. Next on both lists is The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Olbreht.

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The French Connection, film (1971) and book by Robin Moore

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The French Connection won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1971, and picked up another four – Best Director (William Friedkin), Best Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Tidyman) and Best Film Editing (Gerald B. Greenberg). Roy Scheider lost Best Supporting Actor to Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, and it also lost to Fiddler on the Roof in two other categories.

The other Best Picture nominees were Nicholas and Alexandra and the  Hugo-winning A Clockwork Orange, both of which I have seen, and Fiddler on the Roof and The Last Picture Show, which I haven’t. IMDB users rate it third and fourth for the year on the two systems, with A Clockwork Orange and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory ahead on both counts and Dirty Harry on one. From 1971, I am pretty sure that I have also seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Diamonds are Forever, Bedknob and Broomsticks, the Monty Python compilation And Now for Something Completely Different, and the Dad’s Army film. To be honest I’d rate The French Connection in the middle of that pack.

Here’s a contemporary trailer.

The film is based on the true story of the 1962 police interception of a massive heroin shipment coming into New York from France, smuggled inside the bodywork of a car. Interesting to note that we are experiencing a crime wave in the Oscars at this epoch – the lads in Midnight Cowboy live on the edge of the law, the lads in Oliver! are definitely on the wrong side, In the Heat of the Night is a murder investigation and A Man for All Seasons climaxes with the protagonist’s trial and execution. Looking ahead, we have The Godfather next year, The Sting the year after, and The Godfather Part II the year after that. (Arguably there is criminality also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the following year.)

I’m afraid that The French Connection did not really grab me. I’m putting it two thirds of the way down my table, below My Fair Lady and above another New York film, Going My Way. (Still ahead of last year’s Patton.) It’s an unspohisticated story of two not very interesting policemen biffing the bad guys and occasionally also the good guys with whom they disagree. It does have a couple of really brilliant moments, which I will get to.

There is only one actor returning from a previous Oscar-winning film (and no Hugo or Doctor Who crossovers). It is Bill Hickman, playing FBI agent Mulderig here, fresh from his role as Patton’s driver last year. Hickman of course was best known in his career as a stunt driver, and he got to deploy those skills in The French Connection.

Once again this is a film about white men. The black characters are criminals. The women are arm candy, even if Arlene Farber rather glows in her small part as Angie Boca – on the other hand, Doyle’s girlfriend, whose bottom makes a brief but memorable appearance at 38 minutes in, isn’t even named let alone credited. There is an exception to these sweeping generalisations: an appearance from Fayette Pinkney, Valerie Holiday and Sheila Ferguson, better known as The Three Degrees, performing “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” in the crucial scene in the Copacabana nightcub (which was in fact one of their regular gigs when the film was made in 1971, but not in 1962 when the events of the film took place as they hadn’t been founded yet):

The film has a rather odd intersection with reality. Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the two policemen on whom the protagonists Jimmy Doyle and Buddy Russo, the two central characters, were based, both actually have acting roles in the film, Russo a small part as FBI agent Klein, but Eddie Egan looms rather larger as Doyle’s supervisor Simonson. In one scene, Egan as Simonson comes to blows with Gene Hackman as Doyle, a weird case of someone fighting with their own on-screen portrayal. I can’t get a good screenshot of the tussle, but here’s Hackman as Doyle (left) and Egan as Simonson (right) immediately before.

And here is Grosso as Klein (left) supporting Schneider as Russo (right) towards the end. (Grosso died only a couple of months ago.)

A number of small parts are played by people who actually worked in those roles in real life – most notably, Irving Abrahams, who plays the NYPD mechanic who takes the famous car apart, was in fact the NYPD mechanic who had disassembled the car at the centre of the real drugs case on which the movie is based, so in effect he is playing himself. I cannot think of many other non-celebrity cases like this – the chemist Don Suddaby in Lorenzo’s Oil is the other one that comes to mind.

I will admit that the main actors are very watchable – if anything, I thought Roy Scheider slightly better as Russo than Gene Hackman as Doyle, though Hackman is admittedly given more to do.

Also a shout out to Fernando Rey whose French is not really all that good but rises to the occasion as chief baddie Alain Charnier.

What makes the film is the cinematography. The documentary style of filming gives it all an air of gritty reality, and in particular the action scenes that dominate the second half of the film are very exciting and very well done. Here’s the climax of the famous chase:

It’s also mercifully short – at 104 minutes, shorter than any film we’ve had since Marty in 1955 (and Marty is the shortest of them all), sandwiched between two very long ones (both Patton and The Godfather are over 170 minutes). You can get it here.

I also read the original book by Robin Moore. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Still, it is not easy to get a warrant to tap a phone. There must be sufficient reason to believe, established by precedent and tangible evidence, that the telephones to be wired are used by suspected felons or conspirators and could lead police either to their apprehension or to prevention of additional felonies. It must also be shown that the telephones themselves are used to further illicit enterprises. This last point can be a bit tricky to substantiate, but, depending upon the cirumstances and the applicants, most judges will issue the warrants.

The book purports to be a journalistic account of the original heroin bust of 1962, but is clearly very fictionalised – verbatim dialogue and other incidental details inserted wholesale into the text, plus (perhaps more important) the third of the three detectives who actually solved the case is written out of history. It is very good on the detail of the heroin trade (largely absent from the film). It’s also racist, sexist and homophobic. You can get it here.

Next up: The Godfather.

Oscar winners:

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)