PARKLAND: FROM LONDON FILM FESTIVAL TO FIFIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

After opening in the London Film Festival, Parkland's release was delayed to coincide with the 50^thanniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, and presumably thus cash in on the notoriety and nostalgia.Though of course nostalgia is the wrong word, because we are talking about an audience that doesn't remember the event, doesn't remember the time, and thinks that Kennedy was a boring version of Don Draper. Parkland plays with this fondness for an idea of early 60s glamour, all Rat Pack skinny ties and Jackie pill-box hats and Chanel. But in its rather limited definition of who the real Mad Men are, it lets its audience down.In fact, if you kept a scorecard of Parkland you'd quickly realise the guys in the Mad Men threads are the good guys.

The good news is that although the credits say it is based on Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, his massively prolix redoing of Gerald Posner's Case Closed, the film doesn't subject us to a massive prosecutorial brief for the Warren Report. It does, however, retreat to the Warren conclusions, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone crazed assassin, and that assumption permeates everything that follows. Apparently, this was originally intended as a Band Of Brothers style mini-series, but it must have been evident that examining the assassination itself would quickly become far too tendentious, and that a Band of Conspirators scenario has already been done by Oliver Stone.

Produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's Playtone, what Parkland tries to be is a story about the personal lives are the crucible of the assassination and how the event focused its stresses on them, like a more serious version of Bobby. Hanks is, in some sense, Hollywood's American Everyman, heir to Jimmy Stewart perhaps, although there has always been an element of Forrest Gump's idiot savant or not so savant in that image. Parkland's cross-section of American everymen hold up well under fire, as it were, but where I find the film most pernicious is in its Gumpish assertion of not only respect for, but faith in, authority. The Secret Service, the FBI, everybody except perhaps the Dallas Police who threaten Oswald's brother Robert, are figures of huge competence. And I even got the feeling we were supposed to admire the red-blooded thirst for revenge by these square-jawed Ray Ban-wearing Texans. Billy Bob Thornton even gets a speech about the SS never having lost a president, as if oblivious to the one just lost on his watch. Instead, we see the SS jumping out of their motorcade cars at the hospital setting up a cordon armed with their Armalite rifles (one of which, according to one popular, though easily refutable, assassination theory, actually fired the fatal head shot). I've looked at every photo I can find, news film footage, and read recollections, and I can see no evidence this cordon ever existed. But what the visuals do is important to the film; they create an image of the fighters of terrorists keeping the public safe, drawing a quick line between Oswald as assassin and terrorism, and absolving authority of blame.

And that is the point, making Oswald into a terrorist. He's portrayed as both cocky and kooky, which is not that far off-base, but also dangerous (in fact, Jeremy Strong could just as easily be playing Snowden journalist Glenn Greenwald). That is enough to convince his brother (a tremendous performance by James Badge Dale) of his guilt, and if Oswald's own brother believes him guilty, what's left for the rest of us to decide? Jacki Weaver as their mother, seems to be channelling her inner Joan Allen without huge success; Mrs. Oswald was a strange woman who did warm to the spotlight, but she was also shrewd enough to sense that there was more going on behind the scenes with her son. But her obvious delusion in the film negates her assertion that Lee was some kind of government agent.

Which he more than likely was—either when he 'defected' to Russia and/or came back. It is highly likely that Oswald was acting as an informant for somebody—the rumour at the time, that it was the FBI, has never been refuted convincingly, and which puts Parkland's approach to the whole agent James Hosty (well played in this light by Ron Livingstone, the closest to Don Draper Parkland actually gets) story in a different light. Of course embarrassment was the reason for many of the cover-ups around the assassination investigations, and cover-up can begin to look like conspiracy, but the destruction of Hosty's memo, and other missing files higher up the food chain quite likely represent more than mere embarrassment. But examining the many anomalies in the case, the approach which comes closest to explaining them is the assumption that Oswald was an informant, as shown convincingly in Oswald Talked and that he was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy.

Where Parkland falls down worst, however, is at the hospital itself. Zac Efron is our Forrest Gump, MD, driven to exhaustion and beyond by the pressure of working on the president, with only nurse Marcia Gay Harden for support. More importantly, we never see doctors describing JFK's throat wound as a wound of entry (the tracheotomy performed immediately destroyed that evidence), we never see them repeatedly identifying the fatal wound's being above and to the front of the right ear, not in the right rear of the head. When the Secret Service steal the body from the Dallas coroner before he can perform an autopsy, we are presented with forthright professionals protecting a corpse from further terrorism. We never learn of the farcical autopsy conducted at a military hospital. Most puzzling of all, we never see Jack Ruby, who will soon be the star of his own murder, this time on live television instead of home movie film, at Parkland, where he most definitely was. Later he would pop up at Police HQ, and even interject a helpful correction about Oswald's background as a commie radical into one of the press conferences.

Instead of Jack Ruby, we get Abraham Zapruder, as played by Paul Giamatti, who understandably starts out fearing for his safety because he has the best record of the killing, but soon gets turned from home-movie maker to a sort of nascent film producer, shrewdly selling the rights to Life Magazine (where stills would be printed in the wrong order to make it look as if the fatal shot drove Kennedy's head backwards). What is amazing is the way the Secret Service and FBI not only defer to Zapruder and his property, but actually do what they promise they will do, and give him back a copy of the film. We've come a long way from that in 50 years.

I suppose that when Parkland ends, in Gump or Private Ryan fashion, with the moral uplift of Walter Cronkite's encomium to tolerance and understanding, it will not ring hollow in the light of the five decades that followed. But Parkland's faith in our institutions, and blind acceptance of the power of the long crazed madman, may suit our post 9/11 America, but it rings hugely false for anyone with a memory. It will probably gain much unwarranted respect from those who don't.

Parkland played at the London Film Festival, and will be released on 22 November

NOTE: this essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

JANUARY JONES' SWEET VENGEANCE

I'm always interested in new westerns, films that belie the ongoing belief that the genre is dead, so I was intrigued by Sweet Vengeance, which offers a strong female lead role, and colourful performances from Ed Harris and Jason Issacs. Sadly, the film (originally released as Sweetwater, which may have played more on Harris' western past) is less than the sum of its parts.

Jones plays a newlywed wife on a dusty farm in New Mexico. She was, we learn, a whore, who has settled with a Mexican (played well by Eduardo Noriega) who lacks the edge of violence necessary for this frontier. Their land is surrounded by land owned by the self-proclaimed Prophet Josiah (Issacs), whom we watch, early in the movie, murdering trespassers on his land, and seems to control a good portion of the town as well. We learn he is a refugee from Utah, and we see him engaged in sex with his wife and, it seems, his daughter as well.

The build-up is classic, until Harris, as Sheriff Corneilius Jackson, enters the scene, trying to track down the two murdered trespasses, whose unlikely tale of being related to the governor turns out to be true. It's as if he's Virgil Cole reappearing after being out in the desert too long--but the suggestion of a saviour who's spent 40 days in the desert comes to mind, for reasons that I'll soon discuss. Meanwhile, Josiah and the bank are putting pressure on Miguel and Sarah for the land he covets, and that soon turns violent too.

This is, apart perhaps from the Mormon sex theme, pretty standard stuff, but this is not a Katharine Ross and Sam Elliott movie. The opening, which involves Issacs preaching in extreme closeup direct to the camera, sets a tone which the film finds hard to maintain, in part because it undercuts its own themes with attempts at offbeat humour that mostly fall flat. These involve Harris' dancing and Issacs' own slippage into a very modern kind of self-aware irony. The latter is particularly jarring since the film begins with its supporting characters hewing very closely to the kind of formal declamation that works so well in films like True Grit. But they, or the writers (Logan and Noah Miller, story by Andrew McKenzie; Logan also directed) can't keep it up. It's as if they're determined to make a Tarantino movie, but couldn't get Uma Thurman.

In fact its the relgious theme which is the strongest part of the movie, not least visually, as Josiah has erected a series of whitewashed crosses on the approach to his ranch, looking like a cleaner version of the road in Spartacus. There is a parallel to modern America, and the self-serving hypocrisy of the fundamentalist right, which might have been played on more strongly--just as the incest theme needed to be set out more clearly by identifying the women in Josiah's household beforehand. They also hint at the bigotry behind Josiah's religion, particularly important as Miguel is Mexican. There's something potentially powerful and contemprary lurking below the surface here. But as with Josiah himself constantly getting tired of keeping up the pretence, what we get on the surface is a temptation to fall back on hamming it up--something Harris does with more tongue in cheek than Issacs.

The other big problem is that Jones is simply not strong enough for them to play off. Her success in Mad Men was based on her conveying repression, and on the small screen she often appeared to be about to boil over. On the bigger screen, however, she's merely simmering, and when she delivers her lines, there's little of the power required to make them work. One or twice she seems so ananchronistic, it makes you wonder if the 1950s isn't really her default setting. On the other hand, there is at least one gratuitous nude scene. And there is another problem, which is the closeness, which doesn't become apparrent until the end of the film, of Sarah's previous employment, at her mother's whorehouse. This fills out the character of Miguel, because not only is he demeaned in the eyes of the townspeople because he's Mexican, but also because he married a whore. And as we see when he and Sarah are introduced, he can't shoot; but she can. Usually, you'd expect Sarah and Miguel to have moved on to begin her new life, but the revelation (in a great scene with Amy Madigan in a powerful cameo--Madigan is also married to Ed Harris) then is followed up when she seeks her revenge, starting with the local banker.

When Jones does begin to enact her vengeance, we get disappointed on a number of counts. Yes the local banker is a worthy victim (and played with great relish by Stephen Root) but death for a peeping Tom? He's peeking on a schoolgirl, so I suppose there's a modern analogy in there too. The final shootout ends in something of an anti-climax, although the Christian symbolism of Sarah's hiding among the lambs is a good one. And the ending is rather a cop out, as we have seen her dig her own grave, next to her husband's, but instead we see her burning her fancy dress, and standing naked again, before the fire of rebirth.

There are moments when this film charms, and a few where it seems to be working toward new approaches on old themes. In the end, though, it lacks the courage of its own convictions, much like Josiah himself, and settles for new gags and old tropes, and it's too much for January Jones to overcome on her own.

Sweet Vengeance (2013) aka Sweetwater, is out on DVD

JACK LALANNE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Jack LaLanne is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. It's hard to describe exactly how weird it was, as a kid in the Fifties, to watch Jack on TV primarily because there was little else on (Capt. Kangaroo? Gimme a break!) and to understand instinctively that he was promulgating a culture that didn't fit (if you'll pardon the pun) into our meat-and-potatoes, highballs with dinner, culture. I'm always amazed we don't see the housewives in Mad Men exercising to Jack and Happy. But it worked for him, all the way to 96, which somehow got lost from the top of the piece...RIP, Jack.

JOHN MC PARTLAND'S FACE OF EVIL: A Forgotten Friday Entry

Though I was reading an original 1954 edition, The Face Of Evil appears to have been reprinted a couple of times,which means it's hardly forgotten, but John McPartland remains one of the lesser-known and celebrated Gold Medal authors. Although this is, at times, a very powerful book, it also suggested some reasons why McPartland remains overshadowed.

Bill Oxford is a fixer, nominally employed by an advertising agency, but a guy who, after serving as a journalist on the Army paper Yank during the war, has seen his work grow progressively more and more slimy. He started providing girls for parties, then girls to do other things. Now he's been sent to Newport Beach, to blackmail or otherwise destroy a local lawyer, Ringling Black, who has the goods on the man the LA big shots want to run for the Senate. So he's in a bar in Newport Beach, eyes a woman named Nile Lisbon, gets in a fight with her escort, a truck driver named King McCarthy, and later, when the woman returns, he's about to go off with her when her new escort shows up, and, as fate would have it, it's the man who's his target. From there, the story moves with breakneck pace, as Bill starts to re-discover his conscience, helped by the timely arrival of a girl he helped 'ruin', just in time for him to use her against the white knight named Black. But as he does, he discovers he's being shadowed by a peeper, Harry Podden, who's there to make sure he does what he's supposed to do. Follow that?

Although the plot is tricky enough, McPartland mostly keeps you guessing because you never know who you can trust. Nile is an assistant DA, but likes rough stuff; she's the widow of a popular local lawyer, and has her appetites, but it's all kept hidden. Is she using Bill? Is she lying when she says she's testing him? When Ann Field, the girl from his past, shows up, is she working with Podden, who's got the power to inform Bill's bosses he's not doing their bidding, which will get him sent to prison, because of course, they've got the goods on him too. But mostly it's within Bill Oxford himself, can he trust his own instincts, or have years of visiting the gutter ruined his perceptions?

McPartland doesn't quite write well; at times the prose flows cleanly, like you expect from Gold Medal books from the era, and at times he is striving for effect. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and overall he may promise more than he delivers in terms of action. This may account for his lesser renown.

But at times, his world is remarkably oppressive, classically noirish, very much like Megan Abbott but without the knowing dreaminess of her prose. It is a world of corruption, a world that can corrupt even the strongest men of the 'greatest generation'. The women are dangerous objects, there to be used unless they can use you, and it was great fun casting Nile and Ann in my mind (maybe Jane Greer as Nile and Jocelyn Brando, pictured left, as Ann). Just check out the names: Nile, with its serpentine suggestions, and Lisbon, exotically foreign.King McCarthy, the bruiser. And Ringling Black, the one honest man in the book, whose name connotes circuses. Ann Field, the suggestion of pastoral bliss. Bill Oxford, the man in the button-down shirt.

In fact, if you watch Mad Men, you can see exactly the same character, the same dilemma, in Don Draper: 55 years later the shows creators are working at the interface of appearance and reality, which McPartland was doing at the coal-face, as it were, writing about Bill Oxford. And that's where the story really has its force, because, like Mad Men but far more intensely, The Face Of Evil is about the corruptions of a society which, on the surface, is perfect. It is the noir scraping away of the varnish to reveal the rot underneath. Bill Oxford is a man who has learned to navigate through those swamps, but sees, bizarrely, in the person of a twisty woman with a mean streak and men hidden away, a chance to get out. I can't think of a book that dissects this basic contradiction of noir better.

Eventually, Bill makes his decision, and the book proceeds toward what qualifies as a happy ending, with even the college kids on spring break on the beaches playing their All-American violent part. And this is where it loses all its convincing power. Because we know that people who fit into round holes don't all of a sudden turn square. We know that the society Oxford has been working in is the real society, the way the world works, and he isn't going to be able to find happiness walking away from his troubles. The book ends on a note of optimism, but it's about as convincing as those endings tacked on to pre-code crime movies to tell us crime never pays, after we've just been convinced that of course it does. We don't believe it for a second.

The Face Of Evil by John McPartland
Gold Medal no. 393, 1954, 25 cents

PHILLIP KERR'S THE SHOT: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It may be an exaggeration to say that most of Philip Kerr's work, apart from the Bernie Gunther series, has fallen through the critical cracks. But if I, a crime-fiction critic and a Kennedy assassination junkie, could miss The Shot, Kerr's novel about an assassination attempt on JFK, when it was published ten years ago, I think it's fair to characterize it now as overlooked, if not forgotten. Having said that, it's a novel more clever than good; a book of two halves in more than one way.

Structurally, it begins with a bang, as we meet Tom Jefferson carrying out the assassination of an ex-Nazi in Buenos Aires. Perhaps it is Kerr's familiarity with Nazi stories that gives this scene its resonance, but it is carried off with panache, and Jefferson is a protagonist of admirable amorality. Lately, I seem more and more to be referring period pieces set in the early Sixties to Mad Men, but picture Don Draper with a sniper scope, and you've got Jefferson. He returns to America, to entertain a proposal from the Mob and CIA, brokered by Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, that he assassinate Fidel Castro. So Jefferson heads of to Cuba to reconnoiter, cozying up to made men. In fact, it may be time for a period gangster show, set in this time period. Call it Made Men.

Anyway, the guano gets in the air conditioning when Tom's wife, Mary, who's been working for the Kennedy campaign, is taped having sex with the priapic Presidential candidate, and then turns up dead. And Tom appears to blame the Kennedys. And reneges on his deal with the mob to kill The Beard. From this point, Kerr begins turning the tables. Jefferson is not what he seems to be, and neither are a lot of the other people. But rather than ratchet up the tension, this reversal has the opposite effect. Jefferson moves, for the most part, offstage, and is replaced as protagonist by Jimmy Nimmo, a Miami cop and ex-FBI man, mobbed up, and hired by Giancana to stop Jefferson from killing JFK, who at that point they still believed was their boy. Ironic, isn't it?

Nimmo is almost the kind of amoral manic operator James Ellroy specialized in, but he never really establishes himself as a character, as opposed to a plot device. Where Jefferson's cold came through, Nimmo's heat does not. And the story itself comes to a halt as, Kerr begins to display his para-political research. The problem is, he does it through his characters, delivering deep background about the CIA's relationships with the mob, or the FBI's COINTELPRO operations, or assassinations and regimes changes, by having characters who should know all this stuff explaining it to each other. The idea that Dick Bissell, running plans for the CIA, wouldn't know who'd been deposed and who was in power in Guatemala is a bit hard to take. This middle section drags on, through endless meetings, which exist not so much to drive the plot forward as to demonstrate the depth of Kerr's historical nous. But as I said, it's a book of two halves: neither taut thriller nor expansive alternate-historical epic.

As the moment for Kennedy to die comes closer, Kerr swerves again, and then follow a couple of twists which, again, are clever rather than satisfying. It's a disappointment, because he's done the research, he understands the ethos of all the players involved, and he's very good on their relationships. But there really isn't that much tension; it's plot device not exploding device. Early in the book, as Jefferson staked out Castro, and came up with a fool-proof plot, complete with fall-guy, we recognised with a nod and a wink that Kerr was referencing the JFK killing. And after his twists are finished, we realize that the mob will be referencing it some time in the future; in fact, Kerr goes out of his way to make sure we see how clever he's been.

The Gunther books were far tighter structurally, and what was particularly interesting about them was their insight into the Nazi era from the inside, as it were. The fact that we knew the ultimate outcome had no bearing on Gunther's own investigations. But more important is the question of tone. The Gunther books are written to emphasize the bleak danger of normality. The Shot, on the other hand, while trying too hard to get us into the era, can't get the tone right, as if Kerr is confounded by the normality of the Eisenhower era, whether it too is bleak, dangerous, or something else. Too often its gangsters talk like bureaucrats ('he has some narcotics deals going down in Cuba that have to be out of the way first') and his spooks sound like professors and students.

But they aren't very good bureaucrats or professors. They get Santo Trafficante's name wrong, they think Calvin Coolidge was a Democrat, and someone ought to tell someone that Kennedy was not the 'state Senator for Massachusetts' before becoming president, and the park in Washington near the Key Bridge is not the Francis Scott park, it's Francis Scott Key (so's the bridge) and he wrote the national anthem while the Brits were shelling Baltimore. I make these points lightly, but with a serious intent; the book wears its historical research on its sleeve (there's even a chapter titled 'On The Trail Of The Asasassins', a knowing reference to one of Jim Garrison's book). But when it's that easy to spot howling errors of fact in a subject I know well, if generally, one begins to wonder how much credence one should give to accepting other historical settings.

But as I said, atmosphere is more important that fact when you're trying to convey the reality of an era, and the atmosphere of The Shot, in the end, feels too contrived. Mary Jefferson is killed with a drug overdose administered in the same way as Marilyn Monroe's was, if you accept she was killed rather than suicided. Since I once titled my review of a book on the subject 'The Enema Within' I suppose I shouldn't be critical of Kerr's having one of his characters crack the same joke (although I did get there first). But it's the wrong kind of cleverness from the wrong character, in a book that, in the end, tries to be too clever for itself. It's a pretty good try, but in the end, any number of people have re-created this era with more veracity, and that's not just a question of which president was which, or who actually did shoot JFK.

The Shot by Phillip Kerr, 1999

FLETCHER FLORA'S KILLING COUSINS: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It is rather odd to read Fletcher Flora's Killing Cousins, written in 1961, while almost simultaneously watching Mad Men, a knowing and ironic look back on that era. Because there is a sense of tongue-in-cheek about Flora that seems slightly out of character for the genre we associate with him. His best known book, the lesbian thriller Strange Sisters (one of at least five books to share that lurid title) was published by Lion in 1954. But when Killing Cousins appeared, in 1960, it was a hardback, from Macmillen, which implies that someone in the publishing world could see what Flora was up to. My copy, shown right, is a 1964 British paperback edition, from New English Library's Four Square, but what really fascinated me what that it reprints the original 1961 British hardcover by Jonathan Cape, at a time when Cape was one of the most prestigious of houses. Which means someone in Britain understood what was going on too..

If indeed he was up to anything more than entertaining at a fast pace. The style and tone of Killing Cousins reminded me of something Ed Gorman once said about Day Keene, that he became more flamboyant the more he wrote, and it doesn't get more flamboyant than this. It opens with Flora explaining about Willie Hogan the most famous of all the residents of Ouchita Road, in a town called Quivera (!), more famous than a losing Republican governor or a bit-part actress, because she killed her husband. Having set-it up, he doesn't wait long to deliver: Willie is confronted by her husband Howard, prosperous because his father is the local beer distributor, and cuckolded frequently, which didn't appear to bother him inordinately until Willie took up with his bright but ne'er do well cousin, Quincy. Howard confronts Willie, while she's painting her nails, and dares her to shoot him. So she does. Then she finishes painting her nails and calls Quincy to help her dispose of the body.

It's a pretty classic set-up, femme fatale and hard-boiled hero about to get in over their pretty heads. But while there is much of the classic femme fatale about Willie, there's a seriously flipped element to the story; she's really stupid, with none of the kind of feral intelligence black widows have in classic noir. Flora really seems to have been intent on reversing lots of the stereotypes of the genre. Quincy is far from the usual noirish hero, driven off-track by lust, stolid and being played by a spider-woman more clever than he is. Instead, he's extremely bright, to the point of alcoholic boredom in Quivera (!), and has more than a little feyness about him, far from your average 50s or early 60s noir hero. His dialogue often sounds like a parody of a drawing room mystery, played for laughs, which may be what appealed to Cape in the first place, that tone like Nick Charles talking to Gracie Allen (the George Burns Gracie, not the British one).

Of course getting rid of the body is never as easy as you might think, and something's always bound to go wrong. Especially when Howard's mistress turns up. And then Quincy's smarts are tested, and so are Willie's natural abilities. As Flora writes: 'Willie, advised to do nothing, was surprised to learn that doing nothing was one of the hardest things she had ever done'. I think that the entire novel may be worth it for just that line; but of course Willie can't keep still, and of course she and Howard turn on each other, and Flora gets to work out a few more reversals along the way. It occurred to me that if you set out to rewrite The Postman Always Rings Twice, take the passion out of it, or better, turn passion into boredom as motivation, and see where that took you, you'd get something like Killing Cousins. You get the sense James M Cain was immersed in his characters, repelled and attracted like his heroes, which is why his books are so intense; Flora seems merely amused by his. But if you could that to Cain's best-known book, you'd probably wind up with that same kind of wry, fed-up with the Fifties, quality that Mad Men has, fifty years later.