JAMES BEST BEYOND THE DUKES OF HAZZARD: IN MEMORIAM

It's easy to imagine a scenario in which James Best became a star. Not a huge star, certainly, but someone who got leading roles, instead of just being a character actor who excelled on both TV and in the movies. His obituaries led with his role as Sheriff Roscoe P Coltrane in the Dukes Of Hazzard, something you always had the feeling he could have played in his sleep.

But he didn't, and his work almost elevated the Dukes, and provided some insight into why he never rose to leading man status. First, he made it look too easy, and often he made it look as if he were having fun, which he was. Second, the same easy grin and intelligent spark that made him a popular 'villain' for the Dukes worked against his being taken seriously in any number of roles. Third, his southern accent functioned in much the same way. And finally, Best's best work early in his career was done mostly in B movies, and it's hard to jump from character roles in those to leading roles in bigger films. So you can watch his progression through TV westerns and crime dramas of the 50s and 60s, maybe remembering him from an episode here or there, and then in bigger series and TV movies, with a few meaty roles in some of them.

But there are three films films I'd like to mention here, where you can see James Best's talent so clearly it's amazing it didn't take him farther. They were made by two of the greatest B movie directors, and they knew what they had.

First is Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959) where Best plays Billy John, an outlaw captured by Randolph Scott's Ben Brigade at the start of the movie. The first seven minutes of the film are brilliant: Brigade alone walking his horse through a narrow corridor of stone, Best waiting for him sipping coffee, and telling his own neighing horse 'I hear him'. Bill John is wanted for shooting a man in the back, and he's laid a trap for Brigade, but Brigade's character overcomes the trap, and Billy John sends his gang off to find his older brother Frank. 'He'll know what to do'. As it turns out, this is exactly what Brigade wants.

But Best's few minutes are brilliant: alternately charming and petulant, he's something like the kind of alienated teen James Dean played. Dangerous and childish: you could see a different path for him quite easily. As it happens, his spark plays well off Scott's monolithic strength, but Best fares just as well when matching scenes with Pernell Roberts or James Coburn. Coburn, of course, would be the only one of the three to become a star. Ride Lonesome is one of my favourite films, A or B, and replays every viewing I've given it. Perfectly structured in Burt Kennedy's script, perfectly executed by Boetticher, and acted brilliantly by Karen Steele and Lee Van Cleef as well.

Best was the star of Sam Fuller's Verboten, also in 1959, and despite all the attention given Fuller, it remains underappreciated. Best plays an American soldier named Brent, who's wounded in action but saved by a German woman. He returns after the war and marries her, but has to quit the Army (it is Verboten to fraternise) so begins working for the military government distributing food. He gets his wife's brother a job, but it turns out the brother-in-law is part of a secret Nazi underground called Werewolf. You can guess the rest. Like much of Fuller's work, it is not subtle, but it is very dark and claustrophobic; beneath the surface it puts huge pressures on the characters, and Best is excellent in the slow burn of coming to grips with what is happening, and with love and loyalty.

These characteristics served him well four years later when Fuller cast him in Shock Corridor (1963) his film about a reporter (Peter Breck) who gets himself committed to a mental hospital in order to solve a murder that happened there. Best plays Stuart, who believes himself a Confederate soldier (the name of course evokes Jeb Stuart). When Best gets his scene it's amazing, as Breck tries to get information about the murder from him, he elicits the story of Stuart's breakdown; captured and brainwashed during the Korean War, he was unable to cope with the betrayal of his country. But as he tells this to Breck he details his sharecropper childhood, and his inner weaknesses. Which all gets turned off in an instant's sound: the kind of cue which amazed audiences when Walter Murch did it with sound effects in The Godfather or The English Patient, here it rides on James Best's eyes, and he nails it.

I wonder why Best wound up doing Hooper, while Charles Bail got to play a similar role in The Stunt Man. Bail and Best look an awful lot alike which reminds of the one interesting factoid I gleaned from the obituaries: Best's mother was an Everley; Don and Phil were his cousins by birth, and his given name was Jewel Franklin Guy. Jewel Guy probably wouldn't get you far in Hollywood. His mother died when he was three, and he was adopted from an orphanage by a couple named Best. On such small things do lives evolve, just as do careers.

Watch those films and see if you don't agree. I went to you tube today, and watched Best in an old Richard Diamond episode, The Merry Go Round case, from 1957. He plays a war buddy of Diamond's (David Janssen) who's gone bad, and gone off the rails, and he's riveting in his unpredictability. Track down any of the many TV shows James Best graced with his talent: he's worth it.

JOE KUBERT: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Joe Kubert, the great comic book artist, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. Kubert would be remarkable simply for the length of his working career, from the age of 13 or so to just before his death at 85. It saw him work for the best studios, of Harry Chesler and Will Eisner, for DC during the both the Golden and Silver Ages, pioneer 3-D, work on the classic EC war comics, and, late in his career, excel with the added freedom the mini-series and graphic novel formats provided.

In that history he resembled Eisner, a comparison I probably could have made in the obit. Both men did late graphic novels centered on their experience growing up as first-generation Jewish Americans, both delved into their Jewish roots, and both were able to wring great emotion from their art while doing it. The one parallel I felt compelled to make was between Kubert and those Korean War films I mentioned: there is more than a little of Mann and Fuller and their sensibilities in his war work.

That I didn't spin off into comparisons was mostly because Kubert's career was so full I found it impossible to keep to my word limit. Similarly, I would have loved to write a few lines on the differences between Kubert's and other Tarzans (not just Foster, but Roy Krenkel springs to mind as an interesting comparison), as well as his work on Tor and Korak, and it might be fun to examine his influence on other artists, and the confluence at DC of him, Neal Adams, and Gil Kane.

At the peak of the Marvel renaissance, it was easy to see Kane's work as being wasted in what we thought of as the standard DC comics fare. Adams, working with Denny O'Neil, famously changed the perceptions of DC, but Kubert received far too little credit at the time (though he has received it since) for the quality of his work--and Bob Kanigher probably deserves more too for bringing more adult themes into DC. Enemy Ace was one, and Ragman, memorably another.

But as I say, I was pressed for space.  I probably should have mentioned Dong Xaoi (2010) his Vietnam graphic novel, which might serve as a bookend to his memorable career. And memorable it was, and it was a privilege for me to remember it in print. Make War No More indeed.

JOE ABERCROMBIE'S HEROES

It might be good timing that The Heroes is released around the same time as Game of Thrones is making a big splash in the small pond of HBO series exiled to Sky Atlantic over here. In fact, there are some similarities between George RR Martin's view of swords and sorcery and Abercrombie's, most of which have to do with a harsh but realistic view of battle and a realisation that the intrigues of power are intrinsically more interesting than the details of battle anyway. Both writers also eschew the fanciful language that often accompanies S&S, and Abercrombie manages a good mix of modern idiom and medieval attitude. He is also writing on a smaller scale. Although The Heroes takes place in the world Abercrombie apparently created for his First Law trilogy, and deals with a massive battle between the forces of the Union for control of The North (roughly England and Scotland, though the parallel is never belaboured), the focus is on a limited number of characters, and within the wider scope of warfare, the various quirks of courage and character are allowed to shine through. Like Martin, Abercrombie is also very good with likeable characters with dislikeable traits, which provides a little spice, and his portrayal of the more barbarian leaders of the North, war chiefs who are 'named men', earning, like Indians, their noms des guerres, contrasts nicely with the rather false varnish of civilisation of the nobles and royal lackeys of the Union.

It's a big book that doesn't read like one, once you've got through the first 100 pages or so, and have an idea of who the main characters are. This is a problem, in that Abercrombie needs that space; he can't sketch a character in quickly, partly because they exist in context with numerous others; the relationship of men (and women) in war is one of mutual dependency. But once you do get going, his writing holds you in place; in this he reminds me a little of Glen Cook, whose Black Company S&S novels are much undervalued, and who writes in contemporary, indeed, pared-down, prose.

This is a real problem with sword & sorcery in general. I hadn't read any in some while, and Simon Spanton recommended this book. I suspect the reason is that as we get older, we have less inclination, certainly less time, and probably less need to lose ourselves in entire worlds, which is what the best writers of S&S create, convincingly enough to draw you in, and thereby convince you of the inner drive of their stories; this is something more dynamic than mere suspension of disbelief.

In that context, Abercrombie's not afraid to keep it simple, not afraid to use an epigraph from the baseball star Mickey Mantle, but he always manages to walk the fine line and keep his writing within the murky parameters of his S&S world. There is at least one very moving death scene, and even a little delving into matters of the heart, all handled every bit as well as the action scenes when the battle, a three-day affair like Gettysburg, actually takes place.

Yet the best thing about The Heroes is the way the story doesn't resolve itself until after the battle, and then it moves in directions you would have been hard put to see coming. It reinforces the notion that the battlefield is not where the real decisions are made, and that the role of heroes themselves is nothing like as crucial as the ballads would have us believe. Rather, they exist as a kind of motivation, propaganda if you will; an illusion designed to lull those lured into heading for battle, prepare them for killing and for death. We see the emptiness in Bremer dan Gorst, hero of the North, and in Curnden Craw, the dependable leader of 'a dozen' for the North; we see it in the cowardice of Prince Calder, a character of Shakesperian wit, and in young Beck, seduced into leaving the farm for a life of glory and discovering it doesn't exist. In that irony, The Heroes is completely modern, reminding me of the Korean War films of Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann more than anything else. And that is high praise indeed. I suspect I will be headed back to the First Law books; I enjoyed The Heroes that much.

RICHARD BAUSCH'S PEACE

It's the winter of 1944, and three American soliders are on patrol in the hills near Cassino, part of the fight against the retreating Germans, who are making the invaders pay for every inch of ground, in the middle of the coldest winter in memory. They are part of a unit whose numbers decrease with each passing day, the last two when a German officer was uncovered in a hay wagon, and shot two men before he too was killed. With him under the hay was a young Italian woman, and Sergeant Glick walked up to her and shot her dead. Later, they come upon an old Italian, and Glock sends three men off with him to go over the hill, to get to the other side, to stop the arguing over whether or not the girl should have died.

Richard Bausch's story is told very well, in simple prose that rarely over-embellishes, but it is, at heart a familiar one, and more familiar in the wake of the river of nostalgia that marks the anniversaries of World War II. The 'lost patrol' story has been reprised many times; even Steven Spielberg tried his hand at it in Saving Private Ryan. I kept thinking I'd seen this story before, in a film that should have been directed by Samuel Fuller, who would have told it in a similar, simple, expressive fashion.

There were elements that seemed out of place; particularly the flashbacks to sunny Palermo, and the too-neatly done Italian boy who helps Corporal Marson, leader of the three-man patrol,
and who serves as a counterpoint to the old man. But the way Bausch builds up the tension, the internal tension between the soldiers, and the way he milks it until it comes down to one decision, is extremely well done. It's a decision that speaks, as the title does, of peace, and it's one that reflects the default position of Americans when they look at themselves at war almost constantly and believe themselves to be decent people at heart. In 1944, that was easier to believe than it is now, and it takes all of Bausch's skill to make that case. What he does best is describe the inner turmoil of each man, and the struggles within themselves, and with each other. It is the wider struggle which seems too familiar, as if appropriated for a backdrop to this moral tale; even the characters themselves seem borrowed from familar models.

Yet within that, what Bausch does very well is reflect the basic humanity of his soldiers, and if his Italian old man is somewhat less well-drawn, it is because he is seen from the perspective of the soldiers, and their limited picture is ours. So when, in the end, an officer who's been out of their experience comes in, and makes a crucial decision of life and death for Marson, we feel, as he does, that he is just a step from going over the line. That is the line that marks the peace of the title from something else, something deeper and longer lasting than just war, but certainly part of war's effect. For Bausch, it is an amplifier, and in this novel which feels like a shorter story, he manages to keep the signal clear, despite the amplification. Which in wartime, is a difficult thing to do. And in art.
Peace by Richard Bausch
Grove Atlantic £12.99 ISBN 9781848870840