All posts tagged Alice

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton (1962)

‘It’s a confusing story,’ I told him. ‘I’m in a very confusing business.’
(The Ipcress File, page 2)

‘You’re a cool young man,’ Jay said. (p.293)

‘IPCRESS? It’s a word one of Ross’s men invented from the words Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress…’ (chapter 34)

‘The Ipcress File’ was Deighton’s début, his first and still most famous novel (partly because of the success of the iconic movie version made just a few years later – in 1965 – starring Michael Caine in one of his earliest roles). The book made Deighton a household name overnight. Having never read it before, I was very surprised to find how arty, elliptical and detached it is; funny, stylish, poised tiptoe on the brink of ‘Swinging London’, and hugely enjoyable.

The Narrator

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed Narrator (the name Harry Palmer appears to have been invented for the film – the Narrator of ‘IPCRESS’ specifically says his name is not Harry in chapter 5).

The narrator is 5 foot 11 inches tall, dark-haired, round-faced with a jutting cleft chin. He has deep-sunk blue eyes with bags under them and wears horn-rimmed glasses. He’s from Burnley, where he attended grammar school.

His age

He is a male employee of British Security and old enough to have had experience of World War Two – there is an implication he was born in 1922 or 1923, thus turning 40 when the series begins. In fact this is an important difference from the movie: Michael Caine was 32 when he appeared in the film and all the way through radiates cheeky chappie, Cockney, insubordinate charm; whereas the narrator is a subtler figure – he is still insubordinate to his two bosses, Ross and Dalby, but when the latter goes out into the field, the narrator is put in charge of the unit and himself becomes the boss, bossing round the unit secretary Alice, and deserving of his own personal secretary, Jean Tonnesen. In other words, the Narrator is older, more experienced, more senior and has more responsibility than the movie version.

A footnote helps to explain why the Narrator has a special place in the department:

I had done a lot of work with the Swiss banks for Ross. By the time I came to Dalby’s department, I had enough good solid contacts there to trace any secret account, given enough time. As well as this I had learned every legal and illegal way of moving money about the globe. Money is to espionage what petrol is to a motor-car, and it was because I had kept the wraps on my contacts there that I had been so insubordinate to so many for so long. (Ch 8)

Culture and cooking

The immediate and enduring impression is that our man is intelligent and cultivated, knowledgeable about food and clothes and music – he references Kierkegaard and Brecht and Xenophon, he likes the jazz of Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz but also recognises Mozart’s Jupiter symphony when he hears it played on a gramophone in the mountains outside Beirut.

And he knows his food and drink. He describes the coffee made in various Soho coffee bars in loving detail, is precise about his sandwich fillings, notes exactly how their Lebanese contact prepares his kebabs:

The smell of Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice, and cooked with celery)… First sambousiks (small pastries containing curried meat served freshly baked)… (Ch 7)

Army insubordination

And he is cocky, stroppy, facetious and sarcastic in a post-Angry Young Men way. His Burnley origin (in Funeral in Berlin he is described as ‘an upstart from Burnley’) contrasts with the various public school-educated intelligence officers he has to deal with. Humour is his weapon; insubordination is what the Army calls it. He is sardonic about the Army and its tangled bureaucracies, keen to avoid paperwork, grumpy about his back pay and delayed expenses. He rarely misses an opportunity to answer back, or to be smarter, dryer and wittier than his ‘superiors’.

He’s been exited from the Army to join the Security Services. He’s been working in Military Intelligence ‘for nearly three years’. At one point he seems to indicate that he had a spell at the CIA?

calling me ‘boy-scoutish’ which he knew would hit me where it hurt. Me, the slick modern intelligence agent. Six months with the C.I.A. and two button-down shirts to prove it. (p.125)

The novel opens with him being transferred from the bit of Military Intelligence run by Ross to a tiny specialist unity called W.O.O.C.(P) run by a man named Dalby who answers directly to the Cabinet.

Detached and elliptical

And the narrator is distanced from the action, even when it involves his own beatings and imprisonment – an Asperger’s syndrome level of alienation from himself and events around him. Everything is described in a wry, elliptical style. For example, I only realised that he has begun an affair with his attractive secretary, Jean, when he casually says:

While standing still, her smooth body would move – slowly and imperceptibly – under the thin summer uniform fabric, and I would think of the small circular gold ear-ring of hers that I had found in my bed-clothes on Wednesday morning. (Ch 21)

At least, I think that means he slept with her. Almost no other reference is made to it, certainly there is no description of the lead-up to the event or the event itself. That is what I mean by ‘elliptical’. The text is made up of much detail and snappy phrasing, but the important facts are frequently deliberately buried.

Oblique descriptions

This is his description of a band playing at a party.

Three army musicians moved coolly and mathematically within the modal range of ‘There’s a small Hotel’ and linking modulated inversions walked around the middle eight with creditable synchronisation. Here and there a laugh walked up the foothills of noise. (Ch 21)

This is how clever, stylish and self-conscious the narrative is throughout. One of the many gimmicks is his habit of recounting snippets of overheard conversation, fragments of speech. Touch of James Joyce.

I left the Horseguards Avenue entrance, and walked down Whitehall to Keightly at Scotland Yard. Inside the entrance an elderly policeman was speaking into a phone. ‘Room 284?’ he said. ‘Hello Room 284? I’m trying to locate the tea trolley.’… (Ch 15)

These ‘overheard fragments’ occur frequently and their inconsequentiality does… what? Reinforces that he’s a spy who notices everything? Are examples of dry humour? Or that his world is made up of fragments which have a hole at the centre, where the Narrator’s character should be.

In a similar spirit of decentring the narrative, he opens a newspaper and then spends a page summarising all the main stories – or lists the offers in the junk mail which has come through his letterbox this morning:

Tuesday was a big echoing summer’s day. I could hear the neighbour’s black Airedale dog, and they could hear my FM. I sorted the letters from the mat; Times magazine subscription dept said I was missing the chance of a lifetime. My mother’s eldest sister wished I was in Geneva; so did I, except that my aunt was there. A War Office letter confirmed my discharge from the Army and told me that I was not subject to reserve training commitments, but was subject to the Official Secrets Act in respect of information and documents. The dairy said to order cream early for the holiday and had I tried Chokko, the new chocolate drink that everyone was raving about. (Ch 14)

Mordant commentary on our times? Satire? Plain laughs? There’s lots of this dead-eyed observation and it is deliberately deployed to almost completely conceal any sense of the Narrator’s feelings or emotions, and also to obscure numerous crucial moments in the plot.

(This wilful obscurity is the opposite of the breathless physical involvement created by Alistair MacLean’s intensely physical thrillers – the breathless The Golden Rendezvous and The Satan Bug were published in the same year as IPCRESS, 1962; or the minute descriptions of Bond’s tribulations – 1962 saw publication of the ninth Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me.)

Plot

The plot is long and convoluted. The story opens with the Narrator (N) being transferred from his one-time boss, Colonel Ross’s part of military intelligence, to the newer, smarter, so-called WOOC(P), run by younger man, Dalby. Whereas John le Carré’s ‘Circus’ is a rather vague organisation, populated by ageing men who meet in their various London clubs, Dalby’s small defined team have their offices in Charlotte Street. (Twenty-five years later I worked in TV studios in Charlotte Street, I knew it well.)

The Narrator spends a lot of time going to a small screening room to familiarise himself with the appearance of one Jay, a man with a long history of espionage, working for Polish government in exile, then returning to work for the Polish communists. He was with the exposed spies Burgess and MacLean when they made their flight abroad. He doesn’t really know why and we, like the Narrator, are in a fog of confusion. He makes the point he has some 600 files open on his desk, all of which require further action.

Dalby tells him Jay is involved in the abduction of top-ranking scientists, one (Raven) has just gone missing. The Narrator is ordered to find Jay and offer him £18,000 for Raven’s return. N meets Jay in a Soho bar, and then pursues him upstairs where he sees, through a window, the unconscious body of the scientist laid out on a roulette table. As he’s pondering his next move Raven is picked up and carried out by Jay’s bodyguard, nicknamed Housemartin. The Narrator breaks through the window to give chase but Housemartin gets away and the Narrator blunders out of one of the exits of the club to find the police closing in, for some reason; maybe they’d been tipped off, too.

Lebanon Dalby orders the Narrator to accompany him to the Lebanon where they ambush a car carrying Raven from Beirut into the interior, a violent scene where they use a sticky bomb which burns and melts the baddies, who Dalby shoots just to be sure. They then hole up in the safe house of a Lebanese drug smuggler who HMG now use as an agent, before flying Raven by helicopter to a nearby ship; then N and Dalby fly home.

The empty house Back in London, Housemartin is reported as having been arrested by enterprising police after he crashes a car. But by the time the Narrator arrives at the police station, Housemartin has been visited by other ‘officials’ and killed. (I never really understand why – simply to stop him talking? Surely he was tough enough to withstand a British interrogation.) Housemartin had been seen leaving a darkened house in a suburban street, so the Narrator orders a large-scale assault on the house and leads it, breaking in with a colleague, before the other police advance. But they find it completely stripped and abandoned, empty except for a large glass tank which turns out to contain a tape machine and some old tape.

Soho Back to the Charlotte Street office and the daily routine: managing Alice (Bloom) the wise old lady who knows everything; wangling a pretty young secretary, Jean Tonnesen; dealing with the toffee-nosed twit Chico; listening to a data scientist called Carswell’s complex statistical analyses of where the missing scientists worked, correlated with other aspects of their lives; worrying about various other ‘cases’.

Tokwe atoll When, out of the blue, Dalby, the Narrator and Jean are ordered to fly to the other side f the planet, to an atoll in the Pacific as guests of the Americans to watch the explosion of a new nuclear device. The setting is vividly described in its surrealness, thousands of American soldiers in a home-from-home on a barren rock. However, things turn odd: The Narrator receives warnings from old friends in the CIA that he is being set up. Jean, also, tells him that Dalby has told the Yanks the Narrator is a double agent. (It seems a long way to go to set him up.)

In a difficult-to-follow sequence Dalby invites the Narrator to drive with him to a part of the island where N’s old friend Barney Barnes is reported as having had an accident but, at a crucial place, a massive flare goes up blinding him, it is near a watch-tower to which a high-powered cable has been attached frying the American soldier inside, and the Narrator discovers that high-powered insulation gloves and cutter have been planted in his car. He is being framed for murdering the guard, and somehow sending high-speed TV images of the test site to a Soviet submarine which had surfaced and fired the flare. I think that’s what happens, it is written very obscurely and doesn’t quite make sense.

American interrogation He is thrown in a cell and beaten up the Americans who believe he’s a commie spy who killed one of their men. He is interrogated for weeks, given physical tests, forced to tell his life story again and again, but nothing he says can clear him: all the evidence implicates him. Then he is told he is being exchanged with American spies the Hungarians are holding (?). He is injected with anaesthetic and has woozy memories of being loaded aboard an ambulance and a plane and an ambulance, again, and then –

Hungarian prison He awakes in a Hungarian prison cell. For the next 35 days or so he is fed little or nothing, and routinely beaten and roughed up by a sadist named KK, made to repeat nonsense phrases with the aim of reducing him to a state of complete incapacity. He is visited by a junior official from the British embassy in Budapest who doesn’t really believe in him. Finally, he manages to escape by knocking the kind old man who sometimes visits him unconscious, making his way to an empty office, tripping the fuses for the entire building, thus opening the window without setting off the alarms, making it across the garden and climbing over a wall to discover that…

On the run He is not in Hungary at all, he is in England, and has just hopped over a wall into the allotment of a grumpy old geezer who tells him he is in Wood Green, north London. The whole Hungary thing has been a complicated deception. He has no idea who put him there or why. He makes a coded call to the dad of a friend from the War (Charlie Cavendish, a former undercover man for C.-S.I.C.H) who gives him a place to stay in London and some old clothes. Once the Narrator’s recovered he collects money, passports, a gun, from safe locations he had set up earlier.

But the Narrator returns from one outing to find the dad murdered and his house turned upside down, and goes on the run again, switching taxis and buses to shake any tail. He then hires a private detective (the titular owner of Waterman’s World-Wide Detective Agency in Shaftesbury Avenue), and a car, and drives down to Dalby’s house. He has no idea what is going on but Dalby is his immediate superior and must be able to help.

Dalby Dalby welcomes him into his Surrey home without batting an eyelid. He tells him he had been kidnapped by Jay who was demanding a ransom of £20,000. Glad you’ve escaped, old chap, now we’ve work to do back in Charlotte Street. Reassured, the Narrator returns to his car and is about to return to London when Waterman, the private detective who’s accompanied him, says, what about the other men surrounding the house? What? The Narrator goes back and through the window sees Dalby talking to Murray, one of his colleagues – and then to Jay!! The scientist abductor!! Is Dalby a double agent after all?

As he’s pondering all this, he feels a gun in his back. It is his colleague Murray, the one who was in Dalby’s living room a few moments earlier – happening to be in the kitchen, he heard Dalby’s alarms being set off and came out to warn the Narrator – and to tell him that he (Murray) is himself an under-cover intelligence agent pretending to be on Dalby’s side. He has just started doing this when, unfortunately, Waterman clobbers Murray, knocking him out.

Jay Really confused, the Narrator and the detective hide until Jay gets into his car, then tail him back to London and the Cromwell Road, turning off near the Brompton Oratory. They walk up to the door Jay entered, pondering their next move, when two of his goons corner them from the rear – they have themselves been tailed and are now forced up to Jay’s hyper-modern flat at gunpoint.

There is a surreal scene with Jay, the master-crook, who chats to the Narrator while he spits and prepares a lobster; with typical Deighton élan the Narrator minutely observes the culinary details. Jay explains the brainwashing technique he’s been perfecting. He says some 300 people have passed through the technique to date. That’s what the empty water tank they found in the empty house was for, to float people in it and play them white noise till they’ve snapped mentally, and can be rewired as double agents… That, in a cruder way, was the treatment he was undergoing in the ‘Hungarian’ house.

At which point, someone called Henry phones Jay and tips him off that the police are closing in. Jay remains calm and unflustered and tells his goons not to shoot.

Resolution The Narrator’s first boss, Ross, reveals all – well, nearly all, and the Narrator fills in the remaining gaps in a long exposition at the end. Jay had been kidnapping scientists and other top chaps and selling them on to whoever bid for them, with the help of the traitor Dalby. But in the past year he’d been developing a new line in brainwashing – wearing down people using a number of different techniques – they were subjecting the Narrator to it in the fake Hungarian prison; another approach was to submerge victims in a big tank of water with earphones clamped to their head to aid disorientation and ‘softening up’: it was this tank and bits of the tape which were found in the abandoned house which the Narrator arranged to be raided. Some 300 well-placed figures had passed through the technique and rounding up all Jay’s accomplices, and identifying the victims of the scheme – what the Narrator calls the IPCRESS network – takes some time.

A lot of this exposition is done as the Narrator explains it all to Jean. He also explains what the IPCRESS of the title means. Here’s Jean asking the questions and the Narrator mansplaining:

‘By the way, is IPCRESS a figure from Greek mythology, the allusion to which I should immediately catch?’
I said, ‘No, it’s a distorted word that one of Ross’s men invented from the words Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress, which is a clinical description of what they did in the haunted house.’
‘And what they started to do to you at Wood Green,’ said Jean.
‘Exactly.’ (Ch 31, page 302)

He goes on to explain the four different methods of brainwashing that Jay and his team deployed. I was tempted to summarise them here but it goes on over 6 pages or so, with lots of detail, so read it yourself in chapter 34 of the PDF (link below). He refers to the whole operation, with typical flippancy, as Brainwashing Incorporated (p.295).

The odd scene in the nightclub where the Narrator sees Raven’s body on a roulette table is explained as an early attempt to frame the Narrator – they were going to plant a hypodermic needle on him, and the police were closing in on the club on Dalby’s orders with a view to finding the Narrator red-handed. But he was impatient, followed Housemartin and broke out of the building just before the police broke in.

Ross takes the Narrator to meet an Exalted Military Personage (EMP) who congratulates N on doing such a splendid job – at the same time, by implication, demonstrating that Ross can be trusted – but the Narrator ruins the moment by demanding to know who the ‘Henry’ is who rang Jay to tip him off. It must have been someone very high up indeed. The atmosphere turns frosty. The Eminent Person says they are trying to track him down. The Narrator wonders… although they’ve got Dalby, is there still some kind of cover-up?

As to Jay, is he thrown into prison for his crimes? No, he is paid £160,000 to co-operate with British Intelligence and becomes a reliable colleague working alongside the Narrator.

The American brigadier who had supervised the Narrator’s interrogation on the atoll appears and confirms that, with a lot of help from Jean, the Americans eventually figured out how Dalby framed him, so now he’s in the clear.

In a sly last two pages, the Narrator gives false passports and money to the old man who had acted as his gaoler in the fake gaol (in Wood Green). This man is in fact a Russian intelligence operative soon to return to Russia. Not turning him in and giving him money, is a precaution in case he (the Narrator) ever gets caught by the commies; or, as he drily puts it: ‘This, too, was a spy’s insurance policy.’ (p.326)

Cast

Deighton spends a lot of time describing the physical appearance of his characters in some detail.

  • the Narrator – recently released from the Army into British Intelligence – ‘a darkhaired, round-faced character; deep sunk eyes with bags under horn-rim glasses, chin jutting and cleft. On the back of the photos was written “5ft. 11 in.; muscular inclined to overweight. No visible scar tissue; hair dark brown, eyes blue” – weighs 14 stone (p.112)
  • Colonel Ross – the narrator’s original boss, before he is seconded to work with Dalby – ‘Ross was a regular officer; that is to say he didn’t drink gin after 7.30 p.m. or hit ladies without first removing his hat. He had a long thin nose, a moustache like flock wallpaper, sparse, carefully combed hair, and complexion of a Hovis loaf’ – later, described as ‘a balding man with spectacles and a regimental tie’
  • Brigadier Dalby – upper-class manager of W.O.O.C.(P) – ‘Dalby was an elegant languid public school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury. He was a little taller than I am: probably 6 ft. 1 in. or 6 ft. 2 in. He had long fine fair hair, and every now and then would grow a little wispy blond moustache. At present he didn’t have it. He had a clear complexion that sunburnt easily and very small puncture-type scar tissue high on the left cheek to prove he had been to a German University in ’38’
  • Chico real name Phillip Chillcott-Oakes – phenomenally posh and well-connected – ‘Chico’d been to one of those very good schools where you meet kids with influential uncles… His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap. He stood 5 ft. 11 in. in his Argyll socks, and had an irritating physical stance, in which his thumbs rested high behind his red braces while he rocked on his hand-fasted Oxfords. He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it’
  • Alice (Bloom) – unflappable secretary in Dalby’s office.
  • Captain Carswell – data analyst – ‘Gentle in disposition, his gold spectacle frames glinted among hair whitened by Indian sun. He wore a cheap, dark ready-made suit with a regimental tie. I guessed him to be a Captain or a Major of fifty-three, past any chance of further promotion. His eyes were grey and moved slowly, taking in his surroundings with care and awe. His large hairy hands held on to his brief-case before him on the table, as though even here there was a danger of it being stolen before he could reveal his strange mysteries’
  • Sergeant Murray – ‘Murray was a tall and large-muscled man who, had he been a few years younger would have made a John Osborne hero. His face was large, square and bony, and it would be equally easy to imagine him as an R.S.M. or the leader of a wildcat strike… His eyes, thin slits, as though he constantly peered into a brightness, would wrinkle and smile without provocation’ – at the end of the novel it is revealed that Murray is actually Lieutenant-colonel Harriman who has had Dalby under observation for some time
  • Jay – ‘He had small piggy eyes, a large moustache and handmade shoes which I knew were size ten. He walked with a slight limp and habitually stroked his eyebrow with his index finger’
  • Housemartin – ‘a six feet tall handsome man in a good quality camel-hair overcoat. His hair was waved, shiny and a little too perfectly grey at the temples. He wore a handful of gold rings, a gold watch strap and a smile full of jacket crowns. It was an indigestible smile—he was never able to swallow it’
  • Mr Adem – their host in the Lebanon – ‘about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. He was a fine judge of horses, wines and heroin, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of an area stretching from Northern Turkey to Jerusalem… His role was a giver of information and, understanding this, he had, or showed, no curiosity about the affairs of his employers’
  • Jean Tonnesen – halfway through the story the narrator is assigned Jean as his new assistant – ‘She was wearing that ‘little black sleeveless dress’ that every woman has in reserve for cocktail parties, funerals and first nights. Her slim white arms shone against the dull material, and her hands were long and slender, the nails cut short and varnished in a natural colour. I watched her even, very white teeth bite into the croissant. She could have been top kick in the Bolshoi, Sweden’s first woman ship’s captain, private secretary to Chou-en-lai, or Sammy Davis’s press agent. She didn’t pat her hair, produce a mirror, apply lipstick or flutter her eyelashes’
  • Skip Henderson – the narrator’s friend in the CIA, who got himself captured in the Korean War in order to find out about collaborating US prisoners
  • Barney Barnes – Skip’s assistant and ‘the only negro officer in the CIA’, dies in an accident which is blamed on the Narrator after the Yanks arrest him
  • KK real name Swainson – the Narrator’s brutal interrogator and beater in the ‘Hungarian house’
  • Charlie Cavendish – former undercover man for C.-S.I.C.H, the Narrator knew his son during the War, and personally took him the news that his son was killed just days before it ended, hence their bond of trust and friendship
  • Waterman – private detective the Narrator hires to accompany him down to Dalby’s place in Surrey – ‘a thin shiny black-suited detective looked up like the subject of a photo in a divorce case. He was removing a piece of wax from his ear with a match stick. He thought I should have  knocked; if it hadn’t prejudiced his income he might have told me about it. Instead he took off his bowler hat..’

Humour

The book is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and almost always maintains a dry ironic humour, a tone established on the first page.

They came through on the hot line at about half past two in the afternoon. The Minister didn’t quite understand a couple of points in the summary. Perhaps I could see the Minister.
Perhaps. (p.1)

‘Perhaps’ is a one-word paragraph. It a) satirises the periphrastic circumlocutions of the Civil Service b) captures at a stroke the narrator’s amused and satirical attitude to it. It is playing with the language but also with the layout and formatting of texts. This playfulness continues throughout the novel.

A lot of the humour is in the dry dialogue, mostly too long to quote properly. I like this exchange at the big party the Americans throw on the atoll. Dalby is talking about the American brigadier they’ve just met.

‘Wanted to borrow you for a year,’ Dalby said. We both continued to look at the dance floor.
‘Did he get me?’
‘Not unless you particularly want to go. I said you’d prefer to stay with Charlotte.’
‘Let me know if I change my mind,’ I said, and Dalby gave me the slanted focus. (p.217)

A writer like le Carré gives you very long passages of dialogue in which you can observe the characters subtly and astutely positioning themselves. Deighton feels the opposite. From whole conversations just a sentence is selected as the sassiest, most oblique or telling. When Ross raids Jay’s house and brings the Narrator’s wayward flight to an end, Deighton selects only two sentences of dialogue. (Bear in mind that the Narrator has just spent half an hour chatting to Jay while the latter very elaborately prepared lobster in champagne – all the time wondering whether he was going, eventually, to be bumped off. Finally Ross and his men arrive.)

Ross made a joke then. He said, ‘Do you come here often?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know the chef.’ (p.299)

He is smart and sardonic about the people he works with. But he has a flashy way of describing nature, too, of backgrounds and settings and environment.

The rain dabbed spasmodically at the glass pane, and another plane ground its way across the sky. (p.113)

‘It’s OK,’ I told him, ‘and thanks.’ Outside the clouds had put dark glasses on the moon. (p.221)

Uneven style

The prose is, then, a funny mix of tones and voices, the most consistent of which is a very dry wry sense of humour and a tremendous understatement. But there are unexpected patches of poetic prose, and also sections of technical specification. No wonder contemporary reviews called the novel ‘zany’ or referred to Deighton as an ‘oddball’.

Though some of the text is zippy and smart, others parts have an oddly formal voice: given a choice he will always say ‘upon’, ‘within’, whilst’ instead of on, in, while. He cordially dislikes the chinless public schoolboys he works with but sometimes the prose adopts their patrician tone.

As Adem finished speaking a radio somewhere within the house pierced the grey velvet twilight with a needle of sound. The polished opening notes of the second movement of the Jupiter. It seemed that every living thing across the vast desert space heard the disturbing chilling sound. For those few minutes of time as the wire edge modulated to a minor key and as the rhythm and syncopation caught, slipped and re-engaged like a trio on a trapeze, there was only me and Adem and Mozart alive in that cruel, dead, lonely place. (Ch 7)

From inside the house the crick-crack of freshly ignited fruit-tree wood proclaimed the approach of dinner-time.

The window swung open and Murray dived head first through. I saw the soles of his hand-made shoes (eighteen guineas) with a small sticky rectangular price tab still affixed under the instep. (Ch 12)

No-one answered, and here and there an unkind grin clearly stated the social alienation that his success had wrought. (Ch 20)

There was a smell of freshly ground coffee, a spitting of grilling bacon, and a big coal fire that had reached that state of perfection that the manufacturers of plastic fronts for electric ones seek to emulate. (Ch 27)

‘Seek to emulate.’ He’s a late-1950s Soho coffee bar author using a late-Victorian idiom to… to do what precisely? To mock the modern world? To mock himself? On every page it feels like the text is very knowing about being ‘a spy novel’, in fact about being a fiction at all. The ostentatious correctness of passages like these are part of the performance.

Grumpy

Although the Narrator enjoys undermining the public school world of clubs, school ties and official culture, yet he is not in full-throated rebellion against it. In fact, as noted above, in some places he seeks to outdo it in punctiliousness, as he frequently outdoes his superiors – Ross and Dalby – in general, technical and cultural knowledge.

In fact, he has an ambivalent attitude towards ‘pop’ culture, liking it as rebellion, but despising so much of it as kitsch rubbish.

A sour-faced young waitress flung a smelly dishcloth around the table, said Two cappercheeny,’ then went back to three young men in black imitation-leather jackets and jeans, with genuine rivets, for a conversation about motor cycles. (Ch 120

By the time I read them in the 1970s, the once Angry Young Men of the 1950s had themselves become grumpy old men, complaining how standards had slipped, everyone was scruffy, no-one had any manners. In among the self-consciously cool attitude, there are signs of incipient Kingsley Amis grumpiness in Deighton:

Behind Jay’s voice I could hear the radio playing very quietly. An English jazz singer was even now Gee Whizzing, Waa Waa and Boop boop booping in an unparalleled plethora of idiocy. (Ch 30)

Steady on, grandad. He’s sufficiently in the Soho coffee house world to write about it, and vividly too – but he hasn’t embraced it to the exclusion of all else, as the pop artists and pop culture would do just a few years later; in his mind he is rising above it.

He writes scornfully of Chico, the upper-class twit in his office who parades an endless list of relatives in high places with spiffing country estates, or his boss the public-school-educated Dalby with his bourgeois tastes; but is himself scornful of plebeian culture, of pop music and strip clubs and the daily papers. He is a grammar school boy, caught between public school toffs and the roughs from the secondary modern. But in the Security world he moves in, it’s mainly toffs that he meets and so they are the most prominent subjects of his satire.

The iced Israeli melon was sweet, tender and cold, like the blonde waitress. Corrugated iron manufacturers and chinless advertising men shared the joys of our expense-account society with zombie-like debs with Eton-tied uncles. (Ch 8)

(Three months before the novel was published, The Establishment, a nightclub hosting jazz and satirical comedy acts, had opened in Greek Street, Soho. It was satire – sending up the MacMillan government and chaps in bowlers and umbrellas – but satire which itself wore a clean shirt and smart tie and was fussy about the cut of its suit.)

Similes

The smart savviness of the narrator’s tone is exemplified in numerous exuberant, sometimes rather far-fetched, similes and metaphors:

His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap (Ch 1)

The Colosseum – Rome’s rotten tooth – sank behind us, white, ghostly and sensational. (Ch 5)

He was about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. (Ch 7)

Like a clumsy Billy Bunter the machine heaved itself hand over hand into the sky. A touch of rudder had the tail rotor slip it sideways, and, silhouetted against the five-o’clock-shadowed chin of twilight, they hedge-hopped in 100 mph gallops across the sea. (Ch 7)

Outside, the driver of a wet fish van was arguing violently with a sad traffic warden. The traffic had welded itself into a river of metal… (Ch 16)

She came into Led’s old broken doorway and into my life and like the Royal Scot, but without all the steam and noise… Her face was taut like a cast of an Aztec god. (Ch 16)

Tokwe Atoll was a handful of breakfast crumbs on a blue coverlet. (Ch 18)

The enormous juke-box glowed like a monkey’s bottom, and the opening bars of a cha cha cha rent the smoke. (Ch 18)

Wriggling away from the legs of the tower, black smooth cables and corrugated pipelines rested along each other like a Chinese apothecary’s box of snakes. (Ch 19)

The sun was a two-dimensional magenta disc, and the sunset lay in horizontal stripes like finger-nails and torn gold lacerations across the ashen face of the evening. (Ch 20)

Outside the clouds had put dark glasses on the moon. (Ch 21)

It is confident and brash: look at me, watch me write!

Jean stopped and turned back to me; across her gold face a strand of black hair hung like a crack in a Sung vase. (Ch 20)

Paratextuality

Complementing the elliptical and often puzzling approach is the paraphernalia surrounding the text. The novel is presented as an official report to give us readers the sense of being given privileged access to this top secret world – and yet with strange contradictions which confused me:

  • the fly leaf says The Ipcress File / Secret File No. 1 as if we are about to read a sequence of secret files and this is the first – but there is no other file (readers had to await the next book in the series, Horse Under Water, to realise that that was File No.2, setting up the expectation that all his novels would be so numbered)
  • the text purports to be an official intelligence agency report and includes a graphic of the header of an official War Office document
  • there are numerous footnotes explaining espionage-related references, initialisms etc throughout the text, and
  • the novel proper is followed by 20 pages of appendices, very thoroughly following up on references in the text, with detailed explanations of events in history, the neutron bomb, Indian hemp, secret operations, an excerpt from a manual on handling guns etc etc

So the novel is presented masquerading as an official report – BUT

  • Nothing could be less report-like than its self-consciously writerly style. I thought there was a tremendous clash between the would-be bureaucratic format in which it’s laid out and the jokey, angled style it is actually written in.
  • This report scenario – The Ipcress File / Secret File No. 1 – is contradicted on the very next page by the brief prologue which describes the Narrator going for a meeting with a Minister who says ‘Just tell me the whole story in your own words, old chap.’ That’s not the kind of thing you put in a report, it’s a fictional frame.

So the text simultaneously claims to be a spoken verbatim account and an official report with appendices, notes etc. Which is it?

Horoscopes

Furthermore, how do we square its presentation as an official report with the fact that almost all of the 32 chapters have, as epigraph, the horoscope for that week (they’re all for Aquarius so presumably that’s the star sign of the Narrator):

Aquarius Jan 20-Feb 19: If you are a stick-in-the-mud you’ll get nowhere. Widen your social horizons. Go somewhere gay and relaxing.

(This particular one jokily/ironically prefaces the short chapter where the Narrator has escaped from prison and makes a rendezvous with an old friend who gets him clean clothes and puts him up at his place.)

I suppose the horoscope thing is meant to be a joke, a witty commentary on the text, a dig at the trashiness of contemporary culture (joining the slighting references to beatniks, loud music, junk mail etc) or just stylish and witty – though I confess I was struggling enough just to figure out what was going on in the main story and so quite quickly stopped reading them.

Reveal

In the end, the puzzling pieces of jigsaw are more or less pulled together to explain what happened and it is part of the book’s cool appeal that not all the loose ends are tied up or even explained. In terms of plot I was astounded that the trigger for the dénouement seemed so simple: Dalby is exposed as a double agent because he has invited the kidnapper-baddy to his house for cocktails and the Narrator sneaks up and sees them through the window. After all the divagations and confusions, the plot isn’t solved by elaborate cerebration or cunning calculation, but by sneaking up and looking through a window in the manner of the Famous Five or Tintin.

But then the plot is only one element in this remarkably fresh, original, elliptical, funny and hugely enjoyable spy novel.

The movie

is a 1960s landmark, starring a young and gorgeous Michael Caine as the hero (here named Harry Palmer) with a classic score by John Barry and supporting appearances by umpteen London buses. Wisely, the screenwriters dropped both the carjacking in Lebanon and the extended atom bomb atoll sequence, confining all the action to London in order to make the plot more straightforwardly about the brainwashing plot, and the slow revealing of Dalby the double agent.

Michael Caine interview about the movie

Credit

‘The Ipcress File’ by Len Deighton was published in 1962 by Hodder and Stoughton. Page references are to the 2007 Harper paperback edition. All quotations are used for criticism and review.

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Posted by Simon on September 11, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/the-ipcress-file-len-deighton/

The films of Woody Allen

Woody is 79 (b.1 December 1935), has made well over 40 films (as well as writing all those books and plays and TV scripts), and is still making them at a prodigious rate: last year Cate Blanchett won best actress Oscar for Blue Jasmine and he has two more films scheduled for release this year. Woody Allen filmography. His has been an extraordinary career, packed with amazing achievements in a range of forms – standup, TV, movies, theatre, books.

My kids bought me a big box set of Woody Allen movies, I bought a few more, and set out to watch as many as I could in chronological order:

1965 What’s New Pussycat? OK, it’s dated, and Allen wanted it removed from his oeuvre – but with loads of great scenes and with Peter Sellars and Peter O’Toole and that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from Richard Burton, and Ursula Andress parachuting into a sports car, come on, it’s great! My son loved the climax at the go-kart chase. I loved Peter Sellars’ half hearted attempt to give himself a Viking suicide on the banks of the Seine until Woody turns up with a midnight feast.

‘Get a sports car!’
‘But I can’t drive.’
‘So you knock down a few people – but you’ll get the girl!’

  • 1966 What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
  • 1967 Casino Royale
  • 1969 Don’t Drink the Water
  • 1969 Take the Money and Run

1971 Bananas (Colour) A series of great sketches loosely tied round the story of chaotic nerd Fielding Melish who winds up helping guerrillas overthrow the dictator of a fictitious Latin American country. When he makes love to his girlfriend as Melish, she always says’There was something missing’. A lot later, he bumps into her on his US tour masquerading as the great Latin leader, they to go bed, he eventually reveals who he is and she says: ‘I knew there was something missing’. the film climaxes with an excruciatingly unfunny scene where they get married and go to bed and a real US boxing commentator commentates on their pantomime love-making. Amateurish, endearing. (82 minutes)

  • ‘I love leprosy, cholera, all the major infectious skin diseases.’
  • The spoof ad with the Catholic priest: ‘New Testament cigarettes. I smoke ’em. [points up to heaven] He smokes ’em.’

1972 Play It Again, Sam

1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) Every bit as cringeworthy as the title suggests, it’s a set of sketches cobbled together rather like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and just as uneven. The standout sketch is the one of Gene Wilder as a serious NY doctor who… falls in love with a sheep! (86 minutes)

1973 Sleeper (Colour) Very funny comedy about Miles Monroe who wakes up from a coma to discover it’s 200 years in the future and, as a reawakened sleeper, he is wanted by the Police State which now runs America. The giant banana skin, the orgasmotron. Diane Keaton with her kooky charm (or lack of it) plays the brainwashed woman who holds absurd art parties until she sees the light and becomes an ardent revolutionary. (88 minutes)

  • ‘Face the fact that everyone you knew has been dead for nearly 200 years.’
    ‘But they all ate organic rice!’
  • ‘Hello I’m Rex. Woof woof woof.’

1975 Love and Death (Colour) Spoof on all those Russian novelists. Diane Keaton is the woman Boris Grushenko (Allen) loves but can never attain. Starts with hilarious satire on the doltish Russian family, mutates into what must have been very expensive battle scenes with thousands of extras in costume, before becoming a bedroom farce as they try to assassinate Napoleon. Bit painful. (85 minutes)

‘You remember how to have sex, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time practising, when I’m alone.’

1976 The Front Long one about a 1950s cashier (Howard Prince – Woody) who is approached by one of the scriptwriters blacklisted during the McCarthy era to act as a ‘front’ through which they can continue to sell their work to the TV networks. The film is in a worthy cause – ie reviving memories of this bitter time – and the credits mention that many of the producers and actors in it themselves experienced blacklisting only 25 years earlier. But the emotional core of the piece is (presumably) meant to be the Zero Mostel character who is hounded to his death by the McCarthites. Unfortunately, Zero is, alas, a poor or very stylised actor, whose predicament evoked embarrassment rather than sympathy in this viewer. Similarly, the love interest – Andrea Marcovicci – is (presumably) meant to represent a serious strand in the film: she falls in love with Woody the writer and is inspired by his integrity to resign her job from the network – only to discover he is a fraud. Unfortunately, she is acting opposite the essentially lightweight Allen and so these scenes, also, do not gel.

One of the rare Woody movies which he didn’t write; an interesting attempt to be a dramatic actor in someone else’s script – which doesn’t really come off. And the payoff line, where Woody tells the committee to go —- themselves? In the real world you don’t get the last laugh against people like that. And certainly not in a ‘serious’ movie. The film fails to convey the real sense of fear and helplessness which the memoirs of the period reek of. (95 minutes)

1977 Annie Hall (Colour) Apotheosis of Diane Keaton and a film which wonderfully balances inventive, funny sketches (the scene on the balcony where their nervous conversation is subtitled with their real thoughts) with something a little deeper about relationships and love. In retrospect, the whiny, needy Allen character (Alvy Singer) is becoming irritating. Nausheous, as he would say. (93 minutes)

  • ‘There’s an old joke: there’s two old ladies at a resort in the Catskills and one says, Isn’t the food here disgusting? and the other says, yes and such small portions!’
  • ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t do teach; and those who can’t teach, teach gym.’
  • ‘It’s OK I’ll walk to the kerb.’
  • ‘I’m due back on planet earth now, Dwayne.’
  • ‘Don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with someone I really love.’

1978 Interiors (Colour) Brave failure. Attempt to show a WASP family disintegrating, but the acting is strangely stylised. I don’t believe the paterfamilias at all, and much if not all of the dialogue is wooden. Maybe it’s meant to be as stylised as the empty, heartlessly immaculate interiors of the big family house by the sea where the intensely unhappy drama plays out. The father has abandoned his middle-aged wife who is breaking down as a result. Their three adult daughters struggle to cope and argue spitefully with each other. A deliberate attempt by Diane Keaton, and Allen, to shake off the kooky image of Annie Hall. (99 minutes)

1979 Manhattan (Black and white) Brilliant. The idea came from wanting to film Manhattan to the music of George Gershwin and it succeeds spectacularly. OK we’re back with Allen playing the needy, whiny, self-obsessed, amoral lead character, a man with no restraint or self-discipline who cruelly manipulates his 17 year-old lover. But it looks great. Meryl Streep is powerful as the venomous, humourless lesbian ex-wife who is writing a warts-and-all account of their marriage. (96 minutes)

1980 Stardust Memories (Black and white) Brilliant. The account of a famous film director at a weekend festival dedicated to his work in a faded holiday resort. He’s whiny, needy and wildly erratic in his pursuit of multiple women, who include his neurotic wife (Charlotte Rampling), a French woman, a foxy student. Those scenes highlight the rather tiresome Allen needy narcissism. What makes the film it visionary is the portrayal of the circus freaks who populate the rest of the film, his agents, the Hollywood producers, his fans, and the characters in his persuasive nightmares. And Rampling’s performance as the neurotic wife going mad has rare power. (88 minutes)

1982 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Colour) Brilliant. Touching, funny, beautifully shot in upstate New York countryside. The 1910s setting is great. The house in upstate New York is wonderfully picturesque. Jose Ferrer as the pompous professor is greatly funny. The use of Mendelssohn’s music throughout is inspired, the obvious counterpart to Gershwin in Manhattan. And the Allen character – for once not too whiny-needy – is a crackpot inventor who gives the movie a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang feel, a real magical realism tone to what is at core a familiar story of characters all being in love with the wrong person. It’s the first of a run of 13 movies which feature Mia Farrow, his muse in the 1980s as Keaton had been in the 1970s. (88 minutes)

1983 Zelig – disappointing. Black and white spoof documentary about fictional character Zelig, an odd patient who turns into the people he’s with ie believes he’s a doctor among doctors, becomes black among blacks, Scottish among Scots and so on. The film tries to persuade us he became a phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s with songs and dances and movies about him. Allen persuaded Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe and Bruno Bettelheim to take part, giving interviews as if about a real man. But the central premise isn’t strong enough to carry any of this. ‘He just wanted to fit in.’ Is that it? I was hoping it would say something about the politics or society of the time. Instead it said nothing at all and dwindled down into the love affair between Zelig and his pretty doctor, played by Mia Farrow. (79 minutes)

1984 Broadway Danny Rose (Black and white) Love the setup of a tableful of middle-aged comics who get round to reminiscing about the heroic loser agent of the title played by Allen. Manages to be dramatic and very funny as the Allen character (Broadway Danny Rose) has to go to great lengths to get the trashy mistress of his one and only decent act to attend his breakthrough singing opportunity – but his efforts draw the attention of the Mafia. It’s worth it for the scene of the party sad Danny has in his crappy apartment with his terrible acts, the blind xylophonist, the bird act with one dead parrot etc. The role of Tina Vitale, the trashy tramp tied up with the mob is, maybe, Mia Farrow’s best performance, because so unlike her usual thoughtful, timid characters. (84 minutes)

  • ‘I don’t want to badmouth the kid – but he’s a horrible, dishonest, immoral louse, and I say that with all due respect.’
  • ‘Lou you’ve got a wife!’
    ‘Yeah, but this is different – I’m in love!’
  • ‘He’s cheating with you. He has integrity. He only cheats with one woman at a time.’

1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo Mia Farrow is married to a wife-beater in some crap industrial city during the Depression, whose only solace is going to the movies. Until one day the romantic lead steps down from the screen and woos her, leading to all kinds of comic scenarios. Eventually, the actor who plays the errant character flies out from Hollywood to confront his alter ego. Good example of an Allen movie which feels like an extended sketch and runs out of steam well before its (surprisingly downbeat) ending. ‘I’m married. I’ve met a wonderful man. He’s fictional but you can’t have everything.’ (82 minutes)

Some thoughts Many of these movies begin to flag about 40, 45 minutes in. I read he had trouble completing sketches for Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex and one or more of the others. It shows. So many of these films begin brightly with interesting setups and characters and the first few developments being funny or dramatic… but then run out of steam. Most of them struggle to last an hour and twenty minutes and that’s with numerous musical interludes. Take the music out and they’d be closer to an hour ten. At which point you wonder whether, with a bit of tighter editing, they’d make really punchy hour-long dramas…

1986 Hannah and Her Sisters (Colour) The first one which feels like an ensemble piece, with the dramatic plotlines shared among four or five characters, each given a fair share of development. And which features an English male actor. I remember liking this a lot in the cinema when it came out, it seemed like a breath of fresh air, tackling the real lives of realistic people. Now it feels dated. Michael Caine is not convincing as a financial advisor who develops a crush on his wife’s sister, inveigles her into an affair, and then is overcome with regret. His voiceover narrative is stifled and unnatural. Max von Sydow, who we revered in his Continental films, is wasted as Barbara Hershey’s older, artist, husband. (106 mins)

1987 Radio Days (Colour) Excellent. A reversion to comedy, a lovely memoir of childhood in Rockaway, New Jersey during the Depression in a big Jewish family full of characters and love and arguments, all neatly threaded round the theme of the radio programmes and songs they loved to listen to. The strand devoted to Dianne Wiest as ditzy Auntie Bea, always unlucky in her endless quest for a husband, is wonderful. Heart-warming. (85 minutes)

‘When I was a kid I didn’t know anything about classical music: I thought the Goldberg Variations were something Mr and Mrs Goldberg did on their wedding night.’

1987 September (Colour) Couldn’t be more unlike the above: it is shot almost exclusively inside one house in the country where Mia Farrow’s character has fled after a suicide attempt, with a would-be novelist for a lodger who she adores but who has fallen in love with her best friend, Dianne Wiest’s Steph. The film covers the long weekend when her overbearing mother, a former starlet (Elaine Strich), comes to stay with her current boyfriend. More like a Tennessee Williams drama with scenes of real intensity, and a wonderful performance by Dianne Wiest, miles away from ditzy Aunt Bea of its predecessor, showing real range and ability. The token English actor in this one is Denholm Elliott touchingly (but wildly improbably) in love with Mia Farrow. (82 minutes)

1987 King Lear – can’t get hold of.

1988 Another Woman (Colour) A wonderful study of Marion Post (Gena Rowlands) a successful philosophy professor who, through a freak of acoustics, can overhear the therapist next door from her workroom, and one particular patient (Mia Farrow) whose frank discussion of her failing marriage, worries about life etc strike an unexpected chord and, along with other revelations, lead Marion to reconsider her whole life. Not really an ensemble piece but all the other characters have real depth and development and it builds to a warm and glowing conclusion. Wonderful. Adult. Life-affirming. The token Brit is Ian Holm, more at home than Michael Caine was in this milieu, as Marion’s successful but distant cardiologist husband. (84 Minutes)

1989 New York Stories What a great idea: a story each by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody about the city that never sleeps.  What a stinker it turns out to be! The Scorsese one is sustained by Nick Nolte’s performance as a big shot, loudmouth artist, but suffers from typical Scorsese technical tricks and a whining performance by Rosanna Arquette as the tiresome Muse. The Coppola one is dire, presumably meant to be a charming tale of New York rich kids which hangs on the central performance of a 12 year-old girl who, unfortunately, proves Coppola’s gift for heroic miscasting. It was co-written with his daughter, and the music was provided by his wife. Uh-huh. Dire. The Woody Allen piece – Oedipus Wrecks – is the least bad, as Allen plays a middle-aged Jewish man harassed by his overbearing mother who, after a freak accident, becomes a vast figure in the sky telling the whole of New York about her son’s bedwetting. Genuinely funny and touching.

1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors (Colour) the tale of a successful ophthalmologist (Martin Landau), his brother the rabbi who is going blind, and his other brother, the no-goodnik who consorts with criminals. His mistress (Anjelica Huston) is threatening to tell his wife about their affair. When she threatens to also spill the beans about his embezzlements, Landau mentions his plight to his rough brother, who promptly arranges for Anjelica to be murdered. Threaded through is the comic strand of Woody as a failed arthouse documentary director, in the shadow of his super-successful brother-in-law, played by Alan Alda, sheepishly falling in love with Mia Farrow’s assistant producer. I remember liking this in the cinema. On the small screen it didn’t quite ring true. The scenes where Landau revisits his childhood home and sees himself as a child listening to the big family discussions about God and the Meaning of Life are clever and should be touching. But ultimately I didn’t believe it, any of it, didn’t believe Angelica Huston as the weepy vengeful mistress, didn’t believe Landau could seriously countenance her murder. It was too schematic, the actors felt too much like puppets being manipulated to bring out Woody’s familiar obsessions: is there a God or is it all just meaningless random suffering. There are quite a few, more sophisticated, less black-and-white, ways to look at the world… (104 minutes)

1990 Alice (Colour) Satire about an upper-class New York wife of a super-rich banker (Mia Farrow), their sterile, pampered life, and her awakening triggered by bumping into an attractive musician at her children’s prep school, this coinciding with her starting treatment with an unusual Chinese herbalist. In the end her conventional life falls to pieces and she has to confront her freedom, which she uses to become a ‘charriddy’ worker with foreign kids. Just as Mia Farrow has done in real life. (102 minutes)

Magical realism In Alice the heroine is given potions by her Chinese practitioner which make her invisible, let her see ghosts, and fly over New York. It’s undermentioned in the reviews – which always reference Woody’s gags, his Jewishness, New York, his love of jazz, the devotion to Ingmar Bergman etc – that there’s a transformative magic in many of these movies. It’s there in the earliest sketches, which are frequently fantastical or non-realist eg the scenes in Annie Hall where he talks to figures from the past. (This scene – the relived Jewish childhood – dominates Radio Days and features in even such a serious movie as Crimes and Misdemeanors.) Oedipus Wrecks is obviously light-hearted but the way his mother appears as a giant presence in the sky is magical, visionary. The entire premise of The Purple Rose of Cairo is that the characters in a film can climb down out of the movie screen, an entirely magical scenario. Zelig is magical in that Zelig changes anatomy to fit in with his contexts. And, charmingly and wonderfully, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy features not only Andrew the inventor’s flying machine but his strange device for seeing ectoplasm, for visualising ghosts and memories. In Mighty Aphrodite the Greek chorus punctuate the action, appearing in New York settings and having knock-down arguments with the Allen character, a dead man talks to him, fiction confusingly infects ‘real life’ as stories he’s written are dramatised and interact with the situations and people who inspired them. In Deconstructing Harry various characters the writer has created come to life and talk to him in a thorough interweaving of fact and fiction and, strangely, visionarily, Robin Williams’ character becomes blurred, soft, out-of-focus in real life. In Shadows and Fog Armstad the Magician drags Kleinman into the mirror before capturing the murderer in a magic cage. One character coments: ‘Everyone loves his illusions.’ ‘Loves them? They need them – like the air.’

Magical realism is a strong, wonderful, redemptive strand throughout Woody Allen’s movies.

1991 Scenes from a Mall (Colour) Poor. Woody only co-stars in this, the first film he hadn’t written, produced or directed since The Front. The screenplay is by Roger L. Simon and Paul Mazursky and directed by Mazursky, so we’re at liberty to find it much more conventional than a Woody movie. No magical realism, for example. Just a straight account of sports lawyer Woody married to relationship counsellor Bette Midler in LA, they see the kids off on a holiday, and go shopping to the mall on their 16th wedding anniversary where he confesses to having an affair – and the sheepdip hits the fan. This really isn’t funny. No laughs at all. Just a spoilt American couple behaving like fickle 12-year-olds and mistaking their callow superficiality for emotions, for life. (89 minutes)

1991 Shadows and Fog (Black and white) This is really odd. An hommage to the black and white Expressionist films of Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst and F.W. Murnau, set one night in a fantasy Mitteleuropean city between the Wars – not unlike the Transylvania of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974) – all set to the lively Weimar music of Kurt Weill. A murderer is on the loose and Kleinman (Woody) is woken from a deep sleep into a Kafkaesque nightmare where mobs of humourless vigilantes at first recruit him for their unspecified plan and then, inevitably, come to suspect him and then chase him. Why? And what is the subplot about Mia Farrow and John Malkovitch as performers in the circus who split up and have various adventures on this ill-fated night? The film is trying to be three different things: a hommage to intense European movies (fail); a nightmare of antisemitic Kafkaism (some moments of real menace); but throughout it the Woody character wisecracks as if in one of his earliest slapstick efforts (occasionally funny, sure, but mostly wildly out of place, badly undermining the previous two themes.) And, surreally, the pop star Madonna appears as the vamp at the circus. Random. Unsuccessful. (85 minutes)

  • ‘Misky is a craftsman. He performs wonderful circumcisions. I’ve seen a lot of his work.’
  • ‘They found me earlier in a whorehouse.’
    ‘Well, I’m not one to knock a person’s hobbies.’

1992 Husbands and Wives (Colour) Supposedly a serious look at two couples, played by Woody as a literature professor and wife Mia Farrow, and their best friends played by Judy Davis and Sydney Pollack. JD and SP having a trial separation during which they experiment with inappropriate partners (Liam Neeson and Blythe Danner) with lots of shouting at each other, before reconciling at the end; whereas Woody and Mia genuinely split up as he flirts with one his students and she falls in love with tall, dark, handsome Liam. The affairs aren’t even about life-enhancing sex, as all the characters experience some kind of sexual problem. The whole tedious farrago appears to be an unintended advert for how emotionally incontinent a certain kind of rich, American, East Coast liberal is. If I hear one more character say, ‘I’m so confused,’ I’m going to throw a brick at the screen. With adulthood come responsibilities, duties, and lots of work. These characters in gilded cages have pretend jobs which are window-dressing for the same endless, agonised dialogues of the deaf. ‘I think I still have feelings for Michael.’ ‘I think I have feelings for you/you have feelings for me/we all have feelings for the sofa/do you still have feelings for the shower-curtain?’ I couldn’t wait for it to end. Technique: shaky handheld camera throughout, copying its introduction into TV series in the late 1980s. (108 minutes)

Mia and Woody Vast amounts have been written about the breakdown of Woody and Mia’s relationship. This timeline establishes a few facts. For some people the revelations about Woody’s behaviour expose him as a bad guy, as fundamentally immoral. I am slow to condemn the artwork because of the ‘morality’ of the artist. Whose morality? If we systematically applied the ‘moral standards’ of 2014 (whatever they are) to artists of the past, who would escape a whipping, etc? Nonetheless, for me, in a more limited way, they undermine the claim so many of the movies make to be serious analyses of morality: even in the funny early ones the narrator is agonising about what is right, what is true, what should I do? The revelations about his private life which emerged at this period introduce the fatal doubt that Woody’s entire oeuvre is not about one auteur’s quest for wisdom, insight, moral certainty or whatever – it is in fact one long demonstration of the director’s inability to understand morality. Husbands and Wives, which was received as a peak of his mature style, now looks like the latest iteration of the tiresomely repetitive, self-centred, narcissistic inability of all most of his main characters to demonstrate any backbone, sense of duty or decency. Again and again the characters screw up their lives through a basic inability to think and behave like responsible adults. Eventually it gets tiresome.

1993 Manhattan Murder Mystery Not in the box set.

1994 Bullets Over Broadway (Colour) Very funny premise. Not quite such a funny movie, in practice. – It’s the 1920s, Prohibition and gangsters. John Cusack’s nerdy, angsty playwright (now who could that be based on?) is convinced he’s written a masterpiece. To get it performed his producer taps a gangster for funding, which comes with the string that the gangster’s useless girlfriend must be in the cast. Gangster assigns bodyguard Chazz Palminteri to chaperone her. Frustrated by the endless rehearsals he has to sit through, Chazz starts offering his own suggestions. To everyone’s amazement, they turn out to be really good. Meanwhile, Cusack is seduced by legendary Broadway actress (another great performance from Dianne Wiest) who persuades him to beef up her role. As the movie hurtles towards its violent climax, Cusack realises he’s not an artist after all, he is in love with his poor girlfriend, and he wants to return to the simpler countryside where they grew up.

1994 Don’t Drink the Water TV movie.

1995 Mighty Aphrodite (Colour) Woody is married to Helena Bonham Carter. The movie opens with them arguing about whether to have a child just like Woody and Mia argue about whether to have a child in Husbands and Wives. They adopt one, but Woody’s curiosity gets the better of him. He tracks down the birth mother, who turns out to be a sweet-natured, dim call girl (Mira Sorvinho). Woody wisecracks all the way through as if in one of his early films, while everyone else has to be stone cold straight –

‘Be more like the brave Achilles!’
‘Achilles only had an Achilles Ankle, I have a whole Achilles body.’

Poor Helena is thrown away in an underdeveloped sub-plot as she has a sort of fling with the rich backer of her new art gallery. Radiant Claire Bloom apears in a couple of scenes as the mother. Only Mira brings real warmth and depth to her role and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

The magical realism/big concept is that from start to finish the movie is punctuated by a full-on Greek chorus who comment on the action, pop up in scenes in New York offices and apartments and, at key moments, burst into cheesy Broadway musical numbers. It’s sort of a good idea but, along with other elements, feels like it was made out of bits of earlier films. Comedy should be funny. This is schematic, a diagram of what should be funny but not funny in practice. And if I see one more married couple ruminating on why their marriage is no longer as passionate as the early days, or hear one more adulterous adult say, ‘I’m so confuuuused,’ I’m going to scream. (95 minutes)

1996 Everyone Says I Love You can’t get.

1997 Deconstructing Harry (Colour) American professional upper-middle class couples being unfaithful to each other. Who cares. As the content of these later films becomes more repetitive and who caresy, the casts become more and more starry: Woody Allen, Kirstie Alley, Richard Benjamin, Eric Bogosian, Billy Crystal, Judy Davis, Mariel Hemingway, Julie Kavner, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Demi Moore, Elisabeth Shue, Stanley Tucci and Robin Williams appear in this one! Harry Block the eponymous hero betrays every relationship by exploiting it in his fiction. More than once it’s crossed my mind to compare Allen to American supernovelist Philip Roth: both New York/New Jersey Jews, both famous for their neurotic/angsty/Jewish characters and milieu, both trying to escape their early reputation for comedy and aspiring to European seriousness, both staggeringly prolific (Woody 40 movies; Roth 28 novels and five or six story collections) and both getting into trouble for using their real-life relationships in their work. And with both, after reading/watching a few works consecutively, you feel like saying, “Can we open a window? Can we just get some fresh air and sunlight in here?”

‘Your life is nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm.’
‘You know in France I could run on that slogan and win!’

A lot of scenes in this film feel reheated. The main plot is Harry’s roadtrip to his old college to get honoured, just as Woody travels to a weekend festival of his films in Stardust Memories. His therapist wife Kirsty Ally rages at him during a therapy session she is running – to the comic distress of the poor patient – just like Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives leaving the room to swear down the phone at Woody, before returning to her bewildered date. His roadtrip pal dies in the car and then reappears (dead) in the prison cell:

‘Is it better being dead?’
‘Is it better being dead? Well, you don’t have to do jury service.’

Wasn’t Love and Death full of lines like that? Admittedly, not all of them worked in those early movies, but now hardly any of them do – they seem strangely adrift. Most of these actors are good, serious dramatic actors who bring depth and power to their roles but Woody drifts among them wisecracking and undermining the plausibility and credibility of their scenes. He has a duet with Elizabeth Shue where she’s saying she doesn’t love him any more and is marrying his rival; she plays it straight; he is wisecracking and kvetching all over the place: it’s jarring. It makes you not believe the characters or their dilemmas. Which makes you not care. Which makes it boring.

The scene with Billy Crystal as the Devil in Hell is like a sketch rejected from Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex. They joke about the girls they’ve had sex with: ‘Blind girls, they’re so grateful.’ Ha ha if you’re 15. It’s tired. For a few minutes you’re watching Woody Allen – a man who writes lines which sound as if they’re funny but aren’t – trade gags with Billy Crystal – a man who looks as if he’s being funny, but isn’t.

Technical experiment: there are loads of jump cuts and the deliberate repetition of key shots eg the film opens with Judy Davis stumbling out of a taxi half a dozen times between titles. Presumably this is to emphasise the fictionality, the contrived and created nature of film. (96 minutes)

  • 1998 The Impostors
  • 1999 Sweet and Lowdown
  • 2000 Company Man
  • 2000 Small Time Crook
  • 2000 Picking Up the Pieces
  • 2001 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
  • 2002 Hollywood Ending
  • 2003 Anything Else
  • 2004 Melinda and Melinda

2005 Match Point (Colour) Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ selfish tennis coach character kills his mistress played by Scarlett Johansson. Personally, I don’t find killing pregnant women an agreeable form of entertainment. It’s set in London. What happened to the whiny New York intellectuals locked in their claustrophobic apartments? The settings are bright and shiny and the characters repellent.

  • 2006 Scoop

2007 Cassandra’s Dream (Colour) Again in London. Did Match Point signal the end of Woody movies set in America? South London brothers Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor are persuaded by rich uncle Tom Wilkinson to kill an inconvenient business associate. They carry it off, but are racked with guilt. — The script is strangely thin: in particular the dialogue is oddly baroque and stilted. I love Ewan McGregor but found him, like all the other characters, thin and unbelievable. Hundreds of better films have been made about naive young men persuaded against their better judgement to commit murder and then unable to bear the guilt. Didn’t Hitchcock milk this to death in the 1940s and 50s? (110 minutes)

2008 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Colour) Spain. From interviews I gather Woody thinks American no longer appreciates or understands his films. They do better in Europe and he also finds it cheaper and more interesting to film in Europe. And so the thin story of Vicky and Cristina who come to spend two months on vacation in Barcelona, ‘finding themselves’, as so may gap year students before and since have set out to do. Though the main plot is meant to be about art and the artistic temperament, the film is solidly based in a world of very expensive hotels and investment bankers and in almost every scene the characters are drinking wine or cognac from enormous wine glasses. It reeks of luxury and money. Although some characters mention their jobs no-one is shown working – it is a fantasy dreamworld where people just talk about their emotions and feelings and failed marriages and agonise over what love is. As usual. Plot: Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) fly to stay with their super-rich friends in Barcelona and are almost immediately propositioned by manly Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). He beds the aloof rational Vicky, thus throwing into jeopardy her plans to marry solid, safe investment banker, Doug. He then beds the romantic Cristina which leads to an extended affair during which Juan’s estranged wife María Elena (Penélope Cruz) returns to stay in the house after a suicide attempt. Cristina brings peace to their relationship, both artists flourish, Cristina learns how to become a talented photographer (the directionless woman’s art form par excellence cf Annie Hall) and there are threesomes and lesbian scenes. Eventually Cristina realises this chaotic lifestyle is not for her and, in a climactic scene, Juan is seducing uptight Vicky again when Maria Elena bursts in and starts firing a gun. Both girls realise the error of their ways. The Americans return to their big, rich, stable country leaving the Europeans to their rackety lives.

Like EM Foster’s young ladies returning chastened from Florence or Henry James’s Americans recoiling stung from European imbroglios or any number of well-off people dabbling in Bohemia for thrills and then returning to their secure middle-class existences, this feels like a very old story. Beautifully shot, well acted and completely insubstantial. It won Allen and Cruz a clutch of prizes, critical plaudits and has become one of Allen’s most profitable films.

  • 2009 Whatever Works
  • 2010 You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

2011 Midnight in Paris (Colour) France. Another promising conceit. Owen Wilson is in Paris with his spoiled fiancée, and her corporate executive father and wife. Luxury hotels. best of everything. American money. Owen is a successful Hollywood writer but, of course, believes he has a great novel in him. He goes wandering the streets of Paris and, at midnight, a piece of magical realism occurs: a vintage car from the 1920s appears and invites him in and drives off into 1920s Paris where he goes to parties and bars and the flats of his heroes: in a daze he meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Salvador Dali and so on. It is 6th form reading list, it’s like the shelf of an undergraduate from the 1960s come to life. Except. When he meets his heroes – all Owen (the surrogate Woody figure) can talk or think about is – being unfaithful to his fiancée by falling in love with the beautiful young mistress of Picasso. He’s soooooo confuuused. Eventually he realises what was obvious to every viewer after the first few minutes – he’s not suited to his fiancée and they split up; and he meets the gorgeous young woman who owns a second-hand shop on a bridge over the Seine as it starts to rain and they walk off to start a love affair. Like a cliché of the American tourist, Allen has a check list of the artists and writers he has to ‘do’ – and here they all are, carefully chosen for their resemblance to their historic originals – but once he’s there, meeting them, er, what shall we talk about. Questions of technique, history, philosophy, art? Nope. My fiancée doesn’t understand me. I’m soooo confuuuuused.

  • 2012 To Rome with Love
  • 2013 Blue Jasmine
  • 2014 Fading Gigolo
  • 2014 Magic in the Moonlight

Personal favourites

Sleeper, Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Broadway Danny Rose, Radio Days, Another Woman.

Thanks Woody

Despite the limitations and repetitions which a sustained look at his work tends to bring out, it’s worth paying tribute to an extraordinarily varied and ambitious body of work, and one which contains so many thousands of funny lines, so many powerful scenes, so many visionary flights of fantasy, so much imagination and creativity. Thank you, Woody.

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Posted by Simon on June 28, 2014

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