JOHN HILLERMAN: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

I've written John Hillerman's obituary for the Guardian; it's online and you can find it here. It ought to appear in the paper paper soon. It is as written, for the most part, and I'd characterise it as a log of sorts for a jobbing actor. That he had a major success with Magnum was something for which he was grateful, and deserved; I saw a brief quote from an interview that emphasised the financial comfort the part brought him.

Yet I meant what I wrote about noticing him in small parts in the Seventies (the still above is the moment in Chinatown where he asks Jack Nicholson what happened to his nose), and I have the distinct sense that there were bigger and better roles out there for him, had not casting been so myopic. I also was considering any number of parts on stage I would have thought he could have filled. But playing second banana to Tom Selleck for eight seasons of a hit show was nothing to sneeze at, even if nothing as good, and certainly nothing more rewarding, followed.

It has nothing to do with John Hillerman, but I was struck by the fact that his was the second Hillerman obit I'd written for the Guardian; the first, of the crime writer Tony Hillerman, was nine years ago. You can find a link to it here.

BOB HOSKINS: AN APPRECIATION

Bob Hoskins was one of the key crime actors of the past forty years, and though he was a better and far more nuanced actor than his posthumous typecasting as a cockney or gangster might suggest, he was integral to a number of films which helped open up and redefine the crime genre. I would see Hoskins around occasionally, especially in Soho, often unkempt and dishevelled-looking, and always radiating an intensity which I think reflected in a very intelligent way through his films. He used that sense of intensity to suggest violence and dare you to miss what was happening underneath.

Starting with The Long Good Friday, which came out of nowhere (well, the Edinburgh Festival) to captivate me and rest of the London Film Festival and then go on to huge success. The film remains eerily prescient about Thatcherism and the 'New Britain' it spawned, and Hoskins' Harold Shand is absolutely perfect in his greedy arrogance. It remains perhaps the best British noir. And what's interesting too is the way Shand was the dark side of his Arthur Barker from Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, who was actually dark enough underneath, which was partly why his Arthur is better than Steve Martin's, the other part being Hoskins' reluctance to play as much for sympathy.

He was a fine Owney Madden in Cotton Club, before playing George in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (itself a sort of companion piece to The Crying Game) and in a non-crime context, opposite Maggie Smith in The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne. I mention the latter, which I think is one of his great roles, because his character in the film plays on the qualities he brought out in Pennies From Heaven and in Mona Lisa, a combination of need and very mundane hubris that he is never afraid to show.

Then of course came his signature role, as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. If The Long Good Friday was prescient about Thatcherism, Roger Rabbit is, underneath the animation, like a sequel to Chinatown, or Chinatown crossed with Pennies From Heaven. It never stretches the audience's suspension of disbelief, at least not until the finale, and it plays with the conventions of the detective movie (and of cartoons) with far more conviction and far better than say Bugsy Malone.

Hoskins had a sideline playing historic figures. In crime terms, his J. Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone's Nixon is as telling a stroke of supporting casting as Anthony Hopkins' was of casting a lead. I doubt anyone else will ever play both Hoover and Laurent Beria, which Hoskins did in Konchalovsky's The Inner Circle. Or, on a less notable level, could anyone else play both Pope John 23 and Mussolini? Hoskins did, though not in the same movie. Or both Churchill and Manuel Noriega?

He was an out and out villain, but with a cuddly exterior and at least some sense of guilt Felicia's Journey, opposite Elaine Cassidy, whose intensity makes his performance all the

 more disturbing. He was Verloc in Christopher Hampton's strangely listless version of The Secret Agent, but he was at his hardboiled best in Hollywoodland, in which Adiren Brody plays a detective investigating the suicide of George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on TV. The film falls just short of excellent, partly by Brody's overly louche interpretation, but playing Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix Hoskins is again superb, playing for contrast against Diane Lane, his wife, who is having an affair with Reeves, which may be why Reeves' suicide wasn't suicide at all. Lane deserved a Supporting Actress Oscar, and Ben Affleck, as Reeves, gave what may be his best performance; Hoskins plays off both of them brilliantly.

There are a number of other excellent, often small, roles in non-crime movies throughout Hoskins' career, I'd single out his Mr Micawber in the BBC's David Copperfield for special notice. He could be comic, which everyone knew from Roger Rabbit or Mario Bros. and he could be absurd to the point of surreal, which is why he was so good in Brazil: he is one of the actors I would have most liked to see do Beckett.

But it is for crime movies that Hoskins' is likely to be remembered, for George in the star-shaped sunglasses, for Eddie Valiant with the toons, for Harold Shand looking back from the rear of a taxi, his dreams of a rich new world disappearing into the old violence. He was a great actor, and leaves a great legacy, even beyond those crime classics.

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

ROMAN POLANSKI GIVES UP THE GHOST

The most interesting thing about The Ghost is the result of outside events. It's impossible to look at the plight of Piers Brosnan, playing a former British Prime Minister not a million miles unlike Tony Blair, who's facing arrest and extradition for war crimes charges at the ICC in The Hague, and not recall that Polanski was in a similar situation while the film was being made, as California sought his extradition from Switzerland for jumping bail rather than face sentencing on his plea-bargain for drugging and sodomising a 13 year old girl at Jack Nicholson's house back in 1977. It's hard to think the director himself didn't see a certain parallel.

In fact, Polanski's adaptation of Robert Harris' novel is pretty faithful; a little less concerned with the internal working of the Labour government perhaps, and indeed with the mechanics of the plot itself, and more concerned with the situations he found in the book--the setting, in which wintry Martha's Vineyard is turned into something resembling the St Pierre of Patrice Leconte's The Widow Of St Pierre, and into which Ewan McGregor as the politically naive ghostwriter hired to make Adam Lang's (ie, Blair's) memoir readable after his predecessor's suicide, is thrown. In this situation McGregor is not the only ghost; he moves into the previous writer's room, inheriting his clothes, suitcase, and clues. But McGregor himself is indeed a ghost; calling the film The Ghost Writer, as originally intended (see above right--and orignally Nicholas Cage was set for the befuddled writer character) would lose those resonances. The ghost is never named, not even in moments of intimacy or danger, and his ignorance of the politics into which he's been thrown allows the plot to be explained to an audience assumed to be even more ignorant. But that's an odd conceit; the idea that a professor might be a CIA recruiter, and that British pols might well have been recruited, is hardly so far-fetched as to come as the sort of revelation it is here presented as being; when the Ghost finally starts looking ON THE INTERNET he finds the information easily enough, and it's hard to think it might not have received just slightly more attention beforehand.

McGregor is well suited for this role, which plays on his limitations as an actor, much as Polanski played on Harrison Ford's in Frantic. McGregor seems a cross between the declaiming cost-accountant of Kenneth Branagh and the dazed puppy appeal of David Beckham; the actor he most resembles is the frantically ingratiating Jamie Oliver. Sticking your head down the toilet can certainly get you a long way in British film. He's not helped by the even more severe limitations of Kim Cattrall as Lang's personal assistant; she's playing her Sex And The City role, only makes it different by not ever smiling, which indicate she's a no-nonsense player in this political game; it's very funny to watch her and McGregor bounce off each other, over and under playing.

Having said that, Brosnan is terrific as Lang, and Olivia Williams even more spectacular as his wife. Despite the relative predictability of the plot, its ultimate twist is a good one, and it makes both actors' characterisations carry even more depth and more skill. There are also many small touches which make the film enjoyable; Jim Belushi's American publisher beating up on his English counterpart, Eli Wallach's conspiracy theorist on his unlikely Vineyard shack, and best of all McGregor's being directed by his predecessor's sat-nav to Tom Wilkinson, the professor at the heart of the conspiracy.

There are also some weird errors, like the Vineyard ferry offering 'single or return' tickets, or the former British foreign secretary (the Robin Cook figure) McGregor calls in New York for help somehow showing up in Woods Hole by car in less time than it takes Lang's private jet.

In the end it's many of the familiar Polanski touches, including an Oriental gardener who might have stepped out of Chinatown, that make The Ghost enjoyable, if less than totally convincing. There is that Poalnski sense that things happen, out of the blue, and are made to happen by forces beyond your control, and that believing you can control them, while not even understanding they are there, is fatal. It's a flawed movie, and perhaps one imbued with rather too much self-concern, especially if we look at Williams' Cheri Blair character as a stand-in for Emmanuelle Seignet, but it's an entertaining one, a better thriller than Frantic, and it's ending is, in many ways, more satisfying than the novel's.