In praise of an old-fashioned hero

“I'll tell you how l feel about Prohibition. lt is the law of the land.”

So proclaims Eliot Ness, Treasury agent, at the start of The Untouchables (1987). Ness, played by Kevin Costner, has come to Chicago to lead the fight against Al Capone’s violent bootleggers. It’s not that he has any strong commitment to Prohibition as a moral cause – in the very last scene, a newsman asks him what he’ll do if they repeal the Volstead Act, and he replies wryly that “I’ll have a drink”. Rather, it is a statement of intent, an indication of Ness’ high view of the law and its importance in society.

In the film, the US Treasury have dispatched him to Chicago because local law enforcement is wracked by corruption. Money from the gangsters has perverted not only the police, but politics and the judiciary. Ness, by contrast, is the clean man in a dirty world, an avatar of integrity and nobility in a swamp of corruption and cynicism. He cannot be bought – when one of Capone’s cronies attempts to pay him off, the Treasury man not only refuses but refers the crony to the robust capital punishments supposedly used by the Romans on those who attempted to bribe public officials. And Ness’ probity extends to private life. He does not have a secret gambling addiction or a mistress or a drinking problem. He goes home every evening to his wife and children and listens to wholesome comedy programmes on the radio.

Panning for gold in the past: Downton Abbey and the uses of nostalgia

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Have you ever actually seen an old maid hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning? I have. If you grow up in semi-rural Kent, and your father is a parson, you do occasionally see such things, not least if – like me – you rather enjoyed hiking to Holy Communion through the early morning mist yourself. 

It was Orwell who invoked that image as an icon of the eternal England. Nowadays it is usually mentioned jokingly or derisively; when John Major cited it in the 1990s he was roundly mocked. As is well known, Good Things in Britain began in 1948 with the foundation of the NHS, before which all was darkness and misery, so to mention Orwell’s vision In The Current Year without a eyeroll and a knowing wink is to invite the charge of “harking back to a non-existent golden age". 

"The ABC Murders" Murder

NB This post contains spoilers for several Agatha Christie books. 

The defining scene of the new BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders, written by Sarah Phelps, came quite early on in Episode 1. Poirot was talking to Japp on the latter’s allotment. It was just about the only moment in the whole adaptation that felt like it had any connection at all to the spirit of the original novel, not least because it involved two likeable characters, bearing at least some resemblance to their literary counterparts, having an amicable conversation (this made it practically unique among any of the scenes in the entire three hours).

It didn’t last. In what was clearly intended to be a giant middle finger to dreary bourgeois squares who actually enjoy Agatha Christie novels, Japp promptly dropped dead from a heart attack. In the books, he is still going strong in 1948, fifteen years after the setting of this adaptation, when he receives his last mention in that year’s Taken At The Flood. Of course only suburban pedants like me actually care about such trivial matters, and who are we to question the Great Artiste?  

It’s A Wonderful Film

Attaboy, Clarence

'Tis the season of Christmas iconoclasm. One of the staples of this festive contrarianism – alongside “Scrooge was just a smart businessman doing the best for his clients!” – is the negative take on that Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life.

For those who haven’t seen it, the film follows the life of George Bailey, a native of the small town of Bedford Falls. Bailey is clever and ambitious, and has big dreams of moving to New York, travelling widely and forging a career in architecture. But after his father’s sudden death, he reluctantly takes over the family business, a rackety building society called the Building & Loan, realising that if he does not do so it will be subsumed into the empire of the grasping slum lord Mr Potter. Later George sacrifices his honeymoon savings to keep the B&L solvent during a run on the banks. Later still he turns down a well-paid job with Potter that would have fulfilled his dreams of travel.

What Should Have Happened in the Star Wars prequels

Like most Star Wars fans on the planet over the age of about twelve, I was disappointed by the prequels. 

George Lucas had to answer two key questions. How and why did Anakin Skywalker – “the best star pilot in the galaxy”, best friend of Obi-Wan Kenobi, respected Jedi Knight – turn to the Dark Side and become Darth Vader, taking part in the destruction of the Jedi? How did a democratic Galactic Republic that had endured for 1000 years become an Empire ruled by fear and violence? 

I’ll say this for Lucas; at a very basic level, he had the right idea about the answer to these two questions. Anakin is undone by his own anger and fear, which is exploited by Palpatine/Darth Sidious, and the Republic comes apart because unscrupulous and power-hungry people are able to exploit impatience with the inevitable sclerosis, compromise, chaos and uncertainty of democratic federations. But the way in which he shaped a story around these basic insights was deeply inadequate, cluttered with pointless characters and inane dialogue. The character development of Anakin - the central story of the whole damn trilogy! - was wildly uneven. You never see him as a respected, clever, accomplished, mature Jedi, the "cunning warrior" described by Obi-Wan in Episode IV, but only as a boy and then as a whiny, lovesick, vaguely arrogant teenager/early twentysomething, so his eventual turn to the dark side, and the reasons for that turn, have limited dramatic resonance.