Brighton Rock

The movie BRIGHTON ROCK (2010) is certainly a crime thriller, replete and complete in and of itself as such, with knife-fights, murder, double and triple crosses, and police corruption. And Graham Greene, who wrote the book it is based on, saw it as such, as a potboiler, as cheap entertainment, as pulp fiction for the very mass culture that he openly despises in the book. It manages to be more than that, though, even in this, the second movie version, by setting up some interesting contrasts between the religious and the secular but ethical life, about devotion both religious and romantic, about the haves and the have-nots, and about the ability, or lack thereof, of ever reaching self-awareness.

Brighton is a resort town on the Southeast Coast of England, a place where working and middle class yahoos and bozos go to dance at a pavilion under the stars while saccharine and syrupy love songs play into the salty night air; a place where you can stroll the boardwalk and eat cotton candy, or the eponymous Brighton Rock-Candy; where you can have your picture taken with your girl by a roving photographer with a shtick and a patter as big as his camera; where you can rent a little chair and sit on the rocky beach in the cool British weather and imagine you are on holiday in some Victorian novel, richer and more sophisticated than you ever will be. The movie gives us the Brighton of 1964, when British youths called mods and rockers clashed with the police (bogies) and each other in seaside resorts all along that Southeast Coast and where gangsters struggling to control the race track gambling in the benighted town kill each other with knives under the boardwalk, where the crass entertainment of the noon time world is counterpointed by the greed and, ultimately, the violence, that drives the whole tawdry enterprise.

Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley) is at the center of this utterly dark thriller. He is not the kind of character who ever changes, this Pinkie, although there are times when you are fooled by your experience with other kinds of books and movies into thinking he will. He is the youngest member of his gang, and it seems like inflicting pain is both his vocation and avocation. While the other gang members get drunk and try to bed the decidedly meretricious girls around town, he pulls the wings off bugs and kills people. His preferred weapon is his trusty knife, but anything to hand will do, like the rock he uses to dispatch one rival gang member. That rival gang member had killed his boss, who may or may not have been a kind of father figure to Pinkie. The movie doesn’t really try to establish a motivation for Pinkie’s savagery, although you can find many candidates if you go looking—his extreme impoverishment, growing up a vicious underworld and so growing vicious, his desire to be a “man” in a world where being one means being ruthless, brutal and without remorse.

Pinkie doesn’t seem to believe in anything, but he does. He certainly has no connection, other than as parasite, to his fellow human beings, but he does have a relationship, however twisted, with God. He calls himself a “Roman” (Catholic) and tells his girlfriend (and then wife) Rose (Andrea Riseborough): “course there’s a hell, flame, damnation, torments.” She’s a Roman too, but while Pinkie’s version of Catholicism is about damnation (and somehow avoiding it through prayer, although he doesn’t ask Jesus to help him stop killing), hers is about God’s mercy and kindness, and she believes in God with the same blind fervor she believes in Pinkie, in spite of all the evidence Pinkie is a deranged psychopath who doesn’t love anyone, and even after she is forced to admit he is a murderer.

Pinkie marries her because he doesn’t want her to testify to what she has seen, which could get him sent over for murder, or at least help the police nail him for it. And still she believes in him. It is heartbreaking. They get married by a Justice of the Peace after Pinkie bribes her father to allow his under-aged daughter to wed him (they haggle over the price in a scene that left me wondering whether to laugh or cry). The bride struggles to keep up with Pinkie as they walk over, carrying her dowry in a cardboard suitcase, wearing a pillbox hat and lipstick. The ceremony is a horrible and comic and grotesque mockery of a romantic church marriage, the best man being a fellow thug, and the best woman a cleaning lady whom they pay to be one. It is at this juncture that Pinkie decides to worry over his mortal soul, not for the killings and the crass seduction of the innocent girl, but because they didn’t get wed in the church: “This is sin, mortal sin, it’ll be no good ever going to church again.” Pinkie’s version of redemption seems to consist of somehow following the very complex rules of a divine game—a game where you go to hell not for murder but for forgetting and eating meat on Friday, or by not getting in a good act of contrition before some rival gangster guns you down.

And so that is where the suspense comes from in this movie—will Rose wise up? Will Pinkie kill her? Will Pinkie change and learn to love Rose, who says to Pinkie over and over that he can trust her, and that without him she would die? It is easy to root for Pinkie to love Rose, and I think we are conditioned to, but he never really gives her, or us, any reason to think he will. He is largely silent, yes, and you can project whatever motives and feelings you want on a silent man, but the words and actions we do get from Pinkie are all vile. Shortly after the marriage, Rose insists he go into a little sound booth on the pier and make a recording for her. He does, and she can’t hear him say “I know you want me to say I love you, but I don’t. I hate you.” Pinkie, perhaps the most violent crayon in the box, is not the smartest, and he figures since they have no record player, he doesn’t have to worry about her ever hearing it.
There is also a kind of detective in this movie, Ida, played by Helen Mirren, who is Rose’s boss at a little café, and she tries to prove Pinkie’s guilt and save Rose from him. With the cops onto Pinkie, and with the rival gang, led by the evil Colleoni (Andy Serkis), who has gone legit and uptown and represents the kind of ostentatious wealth Pinkie covets, all looking to cut him to ribbons, you know that Pinkie doesn’t have much chance of coming out of all of this in one piece.

No plot spoilers here. See if the blowsy, irreligious, sensuous and forthrightly sexual Ida, who does what she does not to get into heaven, but because it is right, can save Rose. See if Pinkie, who aspired to take Colleoni’s place, can do it. And don’t be too quick to turn off the movie at the end, because there is an emotionally climactic scene that takes place after the climax of the action that has to be seen to be believed. It is melodrama of the highest order, but intelligent and entertaining just the same. Like Brighton Rock-Candy, it may not nourish, but it satisfies.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Step Into Another Life

Last night I dreamed I was putting a new website together. It was called Step Into Another Life. People would click on a link and be transported to a place where things made sense, where they were encouraged to be useful and good, where beauty surrounded them.

Not like modern life as we know it. When I opened the paper in the morning I was struck by the way everything was fifteen degrees out of true. They say Congress is now carrying on its own foreign policy in disregard of the executive branch and the State Department professionals, messing about in very sensitive places, all at the instigation of the head of a foreign power. Has this ever happened before? Nobody knows, because American history is no longer taught in the schools. Snookie from The Jersey Shore is on her fifth book tour, proclaiming to the press that she means to keep out of the public eye. They just passed a law in Florida forbidding the utterance of the words, "climate change." One crazy thing after another.

So, Step Into Another Life. I haven't worked out the details yet. How much would be fantasy, how much real? Ideally, I would be able to make money out of it. In my dream my sister and I were collaborating on how it would work, she being the beauty person, the artist, and I the technical one. We would all wear maroon-and-olive-green striped sweaters. How that would pull the world together into some semblance of sense I don't know, but in my dream the two of us thought that would be a start. You could order the sweaters. Then you could contact a company to install solar panels on your roof, thereby reducing dependence on foreign (and domestic) oil and gas. No more pipelines. No more kissing the feet of the Saudis. Then you could order a Tesla. Let the Koch brothers tremble. Oil would be dead.

After that—or maybe before that—the site would put you in touch with the church, synagogue, or ashram of your choice, where you could study peace and get right with God. I personally recommend the teachings of Christ, His real teachings, that is, not the fake ones made up by some hate-filled demagogue. Step into another life.

Oh, yes. And you could hire a reliable maid. Maybe also a gardener, if you had a garden.

My website would be a little bit like HomeTowne, the online game featured in Monkeystorm, except that Hometowne is entirely fantasy, with no links to the extensional world. If you haven't read Monkeystorm, you should. It's all about madness, greed, computer applications, family relationships, vampires, and the salvation of bad dogs. Also it takes place in Lambertville, whimsey capital of the Mid-Atlantic States. A very cool book, if I do say so myself.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

The Courtroom—or the Kitchen?

Writer with Two Big Hats!

The blog posts of prize writer Leslie Budewitz will show you she and I have two mutual loves—mysteries and cats. And the LAW, though she IS THE LAW and I am merely an avid reader…

As a skilled lawyer, a graduate of Notre Dame Law School, Leslie has also become famous as a prize-winning mystery writer! Though she practices part-time as a Montana lawyer, she has won two Agathas for both her fiction and non-fiction.

She is Vice president of SinC—Sisters in Crime—and has been a featured speaker at Bouchercon, Malice Domestic and Left Coast Crime. Her short stories have been published in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as other publications, and her novels are gaining popularity: Death Al Dente, Crime Rib, Butter Off Dead, Assault and Pepper, Books, Crooks and Counselors, Writes of Passage (Ed. by Hank Ryan), The Cozy Cookbook, the MWA Cookbook, among other works.

When I begged her to write more novels about crime and the law, she sent the post for our blog you will now read.

I am delighted to share this astounding person with all you dear readers of Crime Writer's Chronicle today. Please welcome our talented, warm-hearted associate, Leslie Budewitz, of the Law, the World of Crime and Montana!

Thelma Straw

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As often happens in the writing world, I’ve been acquainted with my blog host, Thelma Straw, for years, though we’ve never met, and we’ve shared a kinship through our love of mysteries and cats. When she invited me to be her guest, she asked why I didn’t write about lawyers and judges.

One reason I enjoy writing mysteries is that it’s a break from the writing I do as a lawyer. These days, I practice part-time for a small firm doing mainly personal injury and business litigation, although I’ve done my share of criminal and employment law over the years. Most of my work now is research and writing. I like it and I’m good at it.

But it’s not nearly as much fun as making up people and solving their problems to my own satisfaction. Plus I can kill on the page without worrying about prison. (I’ve been to prison. It’s dreadful, even when you know you can leave any time.)

Truth, is, after 30+ years in the field, stories about lawyers don’t interest me the way they did when I was a student and a young lawyer. I imagine long-time chefs aren’t much moved by foodie fic, and PIs don’t read a lot of PI novels. What new is there to say to us?

My first several manuscripts, all unpublished, featured a single woman lawyer in a small town on an Indian reservation in western Montana—guess what my life looked like at the time! That woman appeared in two published short stories, and she’s a good character. I doubt I’ll revisit her, though, except perhaps as a secondary character.

These days, I’m much more interested in the concepts of community and social order that I can explore through a cozy, than in the courtroom or the external order that the legal system serves. Community is the heart of a cozy mystery. Murder disrupts the social order. The amateur sleuth investigates because she has a personal stake in the crime and in making sure the right people are brought to justice. She may think law enforcement officers are on the wrong track, or her role in village life may give her insight and information they lack. The professionals’ job is to restore the external order by making an arrest and prosecuting. Hers is to restore internal order within the community.

But characters with knowledge of the law are useful, and I keep a few close by to help my protagonists with the occasional legal bugaboo. In my Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, Bill the herbalist left the law after a trauma, but he’s willing to offer Erin Murphy a little guidance when needed. In my new Spice Shop Mysteries, debuting this month with ASSAULT AND PEPPER, Pepper Reece owns the Seattle Spice Shop in the Pike Place Market. Thirteen years managing staff HR for a giant law firm prepared her to handle the people aspects of her new business, but not for the shock of discovering a man she knew dead on her shop’s doorstep. In her investigation, she calls on a legal assistant-turned-mystery bookseller, a part-time law librarian, and her BFF’s husband, a corporate lawyer who would really rather Pepper kept her nose in the bay leaves and paprika.

That, alas, isn’t possible. Because Pepper’s career change—like my own—brings her nose-to-nose with trouble every day.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

© 2015 Leslie Budewitz

Foxcatcher

Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Just how much power do the rich have in America? Can you ever really understand just what makes people crazy? Do movies have to try and answer questions like that, or is it enough to eloquently raise them, and leave the viewer to come to his or her own conclusions?

The movie FOXCATCHER raised all of the above questions for me when I watched it with my friend George last Friday night. Now, George and I very often don’t agree on movies. We kid each other that we should have our own Siskel and Ebert type show, as we seem to each have tapped into a different part of the cultural zeitgeist, and each represent a different demographic or mindset or sensibility.
George has no truck with female nudity (which can, all by itself, get me into the theater), for one thing, and detests violence. The first movie we saw together was DANCES WITH WOLVES, and afterwards, while I went on and on about the individual and society, man’s relationship to nature, and both American Imperialism and American Genocide, all he could do was bemoan the bloodshed, which had traumatized him to the point where he could merely grimly nod at what I thought were my quite astute observations.

On the other hand, George does not mind male nudity (which I am not a fan of), and he doesn’t mind what I would call a slow movie, a movie about relationships and ideas where nothing much happens. Not that I need bombs blowing up and a triple digit body count, but still. And he doesn’t mind melodrama, that’s for sure. He got me into Opera once (Turandot), and the ballet, before I wised up and put an embargo on actually paying to watch a bunch of hammy types caterwauling about their romantic problems, sounding as if they had gotten their hands caught in the garbage disposal, or alternately sitting for two hours while admittedly great athletes jump around to no real purpose I can see (the guys in ballet seem to have great quickness and tremendous leaping ability, and I have often wondered whether Baryshnikov could have been the point guard the Knicks needed to get over the top).

We both agreed that BILLY ELIOT was a great movie. I quite enjoyed THE 100 FOOT JOURNEY, but it was not for me, as it was for George, the best movie I had ever seen. So when we both agreed that FOXCATCHER was a truly excellent movie, I took that as a sign it had some kind of broad appeal. That isn’t to say that it is your usual popular American movie. It is not a thriller. Or a romance. Or a comedy with humor broad and obvious enough so that everyone knows when to laugh without really thinking about why they are doing so. No, it is not any of those things, but rather a study in obsession, in madness, in the extremes of human nature, and of how we both reward and punish people who live out there at the edges of sanity, those for whom no sacrifice is too great, or no crime, if it will grant them that thing they are obsessed with having.

Anyone who has a memory for 1996 knows that John DuPont, heir to part of the obscene wealth of the DuPont family, killed Olympic freestyle wrestling champion Dave Schultz that year, and went to jail for third degree murder for doing so. He claimed he was insane at the time he did it, but the court didn’t buy it.

Of the three main characters in the movie—the brothers Dave and Mark Schultz (played by Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum) and John E DuPont (played by Steve Carrell, who is transformed from the guy you know from THE OFFICE with some great acting and a huge prosthetic nose)—only Dave seems not to suffer from a terrible obsession. Or obsessions. DuPont is obsessed with proving he is a great man not because he inherited a shitload of money but because he is simply a great man, and Mark is obsessed with proving that he is a great wrestler in his own right, and not simply because George is an extraordinary motivator and coach. Also, DuPont has the old love/hate obsessive thing going on with his Mom, who won’t grant that wrestling is anything but a “low” sport, and so won’t let him put any of his wrestling trophies in the trophy case in “The Rose Room” (is it me, or do only the rich give the rooms in their homes/mansions fancy names?)

All three men suffer from a real blindness in one sense or another. DuPont can’t see that people are only paying him lip service when they call him a great man, that he is being humored, patronized, condescended to, and gulled because of all the money he has. Mark Schultz can’t see that DuPont is not a great man, at least not at first, and George Schultz can’t see that DuPont is not just your garden variety eccentric rich guy but a dangerous, paranoid psychopath.
The movie never really answers the question why in reference to these blindnesses and obsessions, but what movie could? Sure, the Schultz’s grew up poor and without their parents, and Dave raised Mark, and the rage and shame of abandonment could have been a driving force in both their lives, and yet most people don’t come away from that kind of thing with the drive to be Olympic Champions. DuPont’s mother (played brilliantly by Vanessa Redgrave) may have really hurt her son with her coldness, but most rejected kids don’t grow up to become murderers. And money certainly made it easier for the raging nutbag DuPont to manipulate people and to damage them in turns, but the need to manipulate and damage is not solely the province of the wealthy—they are just better equipped to do so.

No, the movie doesn’t answer the why of obsession and blindness, it just portrays both of them with stunning believability. At least for me. I am not an expert on acting, but I really believed all three of these actors.
When DuPont invites Mark to train for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul at the DuPont Family Estate in Delaware (Foxcatcher), he jumps at the money and the chance. He is just barely making it financially, even though he was a gold medalist in the 84 Los Angeles Olympics, because America is obsessed both with its athletic greatness and with the illusion that athletes should, or can, be true amateurs even at an Olympic level. And he is starting to chafe at his brother’s authority over him.

Schultz is a terribly insecure and driven young man in spite of his great athletic success, and he falls under the spell of DuPont even as the other wrestlers in the camp realize he is a whacko. Soon, Mark and DuPont are taking cocaine together, and even though DuPont has taken the father role in the relationship, a strange kind of homoeroticism emerges, which causes great conflict for Schultz. It seemed to me that whether or not Schultz reciprocated those feelings, he had a right to feel betrayed, because DuPont is in a sense both his father and his boss, two roles that don’t dovetail nicely with that of concubine.

Eventually, Dave joins “Team Foxcatcher,” but Mark insists he is leaving. Dave agrees to stay if DuPont takes care of his brother financially after Mark leaves, and DuPont agrees, but resents Schultz wildly for so easily reasserting his role in Mark’s life. In what I thought was the best scene of the movie, Mark, out of shape from partying with the boss, loses a match and becomes so depressed he binges on room service and gains twelve pounds. Dave steps in and takes back his role as Mark’s father and coach. As he is putting Mark through the brutal workout he must endure to make weight in time for the next match, DuPont comes to see his boy, and Schultz refuses to let him see his brother. The scene shows the two talking through a pane of glass in a door, and you can’t hear what is said, but DuPont finally turns away.

And so DuPont is forced by Dave Schultz to face the fact that maybe it is only the money that makes him “great.” And even with that money (the only thing that keeps Dave at Foxcatcher, because he needs the money for his family, for his wife and kids), with that hold over Schultz, Dave is the more forceful and masterful of the two. Money could not buy him either loyalty or greatness, this DuPont, and it didn’t buy him freedom either, in the movie or real life. DuPont had been in jail for over ten years when he died in 2010.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Feet of Clay

Many of you have heard me call Mark Twain my favorite all-time American.  I quote him frequently and reread him often.

Since my time with books is never enough, I have taken to listening to ones that I have read before and want to read again.  We New Yorkers spend a lot of time walking, which creates opportunities to transport oneself and “read” at the same time.

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were early candidates and enormously satisfying, especially when read aloud by folks who managed the accents and understood the irony.

 

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, what fun.

My next choice, however, has been causing me a lot of trouble.   The Innocents Abroad.  I had read it before.  But long ago.  The book has not changed.  I guess I have.  Or something.  I will finish it.  But it is killing me.

Oh, I love the jokes—some of which have made me giggle out loud, despite the miserable weather, on Fifth Avenue between Twenty-second Street and Twenty-third.  Twain’s itinerary is a blast.  I have been to a number of the places he visited while writing this travelogue.  His reminders of Europe’s wonders—of say, the palazzi of Genoa or the Cathedral of Milan—bring back my own pleasant memories.

But I find myself wincing more than smiling.  The way Twain characterizes the denizens of the countries he visits is positively painful to read.  No one who is not American or English is at all pleasing to him.  He berates the citizens of France or Spain or Italy for “jabbering” in “foreign” languages.  He calls their countries “puppy republics.”  The French are “garlic chewers.”  The Italians are “lazy spaghetti stuffers.”  The Greeks are all “mendacious.”  Everyone is dirty.  Everyone is swarthy.  Everyone is stupid, except for those who are too clever at cheating tourists.

Twain feels free to break the laws of the countries he visits—illegally going a shore when his ship has been quarantined to make sure there is no cholera on board.  Borrowing someone else’s passport when he had lost his own, and gleeful that the ridiculous people in the Russian port of Sebastopol could not read the English description of the passport holder.  Serves them right to be fooled if they can’t read English!

 

At one point, while illegally sneaking around Athens in the middle of the night, having broken quarantine, he and his companions steal grapes from a vineyard—about ten pounds apiece he says.  The Greek owner of the grapes notices what they have done and follows them.  Twain calls the man and his friends “brigands.”  Excuse me, but who are the thieves in this situation?  And we are not talking here about frat boy pranks.  Twain and his companions are grown ups, and wealthy enough to enjoy a months-long cruise

I am sure that Twain’s contemporary American readers were heartily amused by all of this.  I find it very disappointing.  Cheap shots from the masterful wielder of the verbal scalpel.   

  

I love his language.  I love how alive his prose is.  He is still a beacon of great writing.  I will continue to the end, but I won’t read this book again.  Ever.  And I mourn the loss of my idol.  Boohoo. 

Annamaria Alfieri