LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: THE SAMURAI THAT NIGHT

Although not part of the London Film Festival's strand called 'Thrillers' (instead, it's in 'First Features'), it would be hard to find a more suspenseful and enthralling crime film than The Samurai That Night, written and directed by Masaaki Akahori. The titular samurai is Kenichi Nakamura, who owns a small machine shop, and who lost his wife to a hit and run driver five years ago. The driver of the truck, Kijima, was caught because of the guilt felt by his friend Kobayashi, but now is out of prison, and looking for revenge, though he doesn't realise Kobayashi's betrayal. He also doesn't realise Nakamura is tailing him, though he does receive notes every morning, counting the days until the fifth anniversary, the anonymous sender telling him that he will kill both Kijima and himself.

From that beginning Akahori weaves the Japanese gangster movie into a penetrating look at the shallowness of the society—something worthy of the masters of the early postwar Japanese film. It's an interesting blend, as the darkness that comes close to film noir blends into the flatness, almost gray and dirty realism of working class Japan, but then bleeds into the special empty neon brightness of the modern world. What makes it work so well, however, is something that seems to carry over from the film's origins; Akahori wrote it as a play and it bears a considerable influence of theatre of the absurd. In the absurd, characters re-enact daily rituals, which often are seen as neuroses, as way of coping with the random indifference of life. What could be more ritualistic than the samurai, with his code of bushido, and heoric death. What death could be more indifferent than a hit and run? And Akahori's Japan is a world of indifference.
 

People live in tight spaces, they seem attached to electronic devices, they eat industrial fast-food. The hapless Nakamura gorges himself on packaged custard desserts; the last message he received from his wife on his answer machine, just before she died, scolds him and orders him to stay away from the custards. He plays the message over and over. Just like the absurd at its best, scenes shift from comedy into pathos. At dinner with a fellow teacher (the excellent Mitsuki Tanimura) with whom his brother-in-law is trying to match-make, he pulls out a pair of his wife's panties, and sniffs them. Then apologies politely.

'I have time, and I'm bored to death,' says a hooker who watches TV as Nakamura, having failed to perform the act he's paid form, furiously tries, and fails, to open a bag of crisps. Watching him struggle, she returns to her karioke. Earlier he's been told he doesn't look like a victim. 'I've looked this way since I was born,' he replies.

Everyone seems alone, and any attention is preferable to none: Kijima nearly kills Mr. Hoshi, whom he suspects of betraying him, but Hoshi continues to tag along with him, even as he victimises a young female a crossing guard. Hoshi later explains, 'he's my friend'. Having abused the girl, Kijima moves into her flat, eating her food and playing video games, and virtually ignoring her as she says 'It's nice to have someone here'.

Kijima is the would-be gangster, preying on the respectable, like Nakamura's brother-in-law, whom he blackmails in return for keeping the threats secret. Brilliantly played by Takayuki Yamada, he and his sidekicks Kobayashi (Gou Ayano) and Hoshi (Tomorowo Yaguchi) might be playing scenes from Waiting For Godot as they wander down the roads, or plot Kijima's revenge. It builds to a sort of primal noirish apocalypse, a show-down in the midst of a typhoon, then settles into an anti-heroic anti-climax, in which the promise of a relationship drifts away, and Nakamura returns to his custard, now baptising himself with it, rather than eating it. There is no transformation in the universe of the absurd, there is just the going on.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: THOMAS VINTERBERG'S THE HUNT

Thomas Vinterberg is best known for Festen, his second feature film released in 1998 as the first production from Dogme, which he founded with Lars Van Trier. Fourteen years later, Vinterberg returns to the theme of child abuse within a tightly-wrapped part of Danish society, and again, it is with group ritual as a backdrop. In Festen, the film is about secrets that need to come out. The Hunt (Jagten in Danish), which is screened today at the London Film Festival, is about the way accusation can become the same as guilt.

In a small town in rural Denmark, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) is a former teacher, who had lost his job when the school was closed by budget cuts. His wife has left him, taking their teenaged son, and he now lives alone, working as an assistant in a kindergarten, where he is popular with the kids whom he obviously adores. He is especially good with Klara, the daughter of his best-friend Theo. Lucas' only social interaction comes with the members of his hunting club, which binds the men of the village together.

Klara seeks out Lucas when her parents don't pay her enough attention, but one day, when he attempts to distance himself slightly from her, she feels rejected and through a series of easy misunderstandings, Lucas finds himself accused of child abuse. The film is pretty much unequivocal about his innocence—though his withdrawn personality and sometimes intense anger leaves a little ambiguity—and it is perhaps at its best as the noose of accusation draws tighter and tighter around Lucas. Vinterberg details it carefully, and is helped by some small but finely judged performances, particularly by Anne Louise Hassing as Grethe, the head of the kindergarten, and (uncredited) the excellent Bjarne Henriksen (best-known here as the father in The Killing) as the specialist who comes to hear Klara's story.

False accusation of child abuse has prompted a few This is The Crucible redone for a modern era, and Lucas bit by bit finds himself an outcast, losing his job, the chance of access to his son, and driving away his new girlfriend, an outsider herself as an immigrant to Denmark working at the kindergarten. The dilemma faced by Theo (played with some relish by Thomas Bo Larsson) contrasts with the complete protective turn by his wife (Susse Wold), and what makes it work is how perfectly understandable it is. It is also helped by the perfectly pitched performance of young Annike Wedderkopp as Klara, who manages to convey beyond her innocence, the sense of powerlessness as adults take things out of control. The control of the film is superb, as it builds slowly in intensity, and the cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Christensen (below right, with Vinterberg) is superb. The Danish village is rendered warm at first, but increasingly cold and puritanical, while the surrounding countryside and its darkness seems to impinge more and more on it—the hunt, as it were, turned inward. When invisible assailants kill Lucas' beloved dog, and he buries her in a driving rain, the point could not be driven home more clearly.

Vinterberg does include a scene where the audience can actually relate to villains, those who feel they have to strike out at the evil-doer in their midst. In this The Hunt differs from, say, Mick Jackson's Indictment: The McMartin Trial, where the demarcation with James Woods, a lawyer-hero, is much stronger, and even The Crucible, where ulterior motives among the prosecutors are very much the case, and very much the core of the metaphor Arthur Miller was detailing. But despite the touch of melodrama in the film's biggest scene, which takes place in a church, at Christmas, when the rituals are maintained, it works as a catalyst.

Especially because of Mikkelsen's brilliant performance. He is on screen through virtually all of the film, and he is holding so much in he almost requires the audience make its own choice about him, whether to believe him or condemn him. This restraint contains a good deal of righteousness, and he simply refuses to accept his isolation from the community. Thus, even though he is eventually vindicated by law (luckily for him, his other best-friend, his son's godfather, is a lawyer and never doubts him), and rejoins the hunt club along with his son, we sense in many minds the stigma remains. The film ends with a hunt, and Vinterberg manages to avoid both melodrama and cliché, which works brilliantly. The Hunt is a superb piece of film-making, and it will be hard to find many better films in this year's LFF.

ALEX KARRAS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Alex Karras is up on the Guardian's website; you can link to it here, There was a lot I had to leave out, for the usual reasons of space and of the audience's assumed unfamiliarity with American football --a couple of very basic explanations were added in for fear they wouldn't understand. I had to leave out one of my favourite quotes--the story he made famous on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, about 'battling for 59 minutes and then some little guy in a clean uniform comes on and says 'I keek touchdown!'.  Garo Yepremian had indeed said that to Karras, but it came after the extra point on a meaningless touchdown--and might well have been apocryphal anyway, as Yepremian had already been playing in the Continental Football League.

For people who do know football, Karras' career is fascinating. He appears to have been a four-year all-state selection, which I found hard to believe--Bobby Valentine first achieved fame in my home state of Connecticut by being the first-ever three-timer-- and Karras suffered badly at Iowa, from both home-sickness and an unwillingness to adapt to the hard-edged approach of the legendary Hawkeyes' coach Forest Evashevski. Legend says he threw a shoe at the coach when he quit the team in 1955, and it was true he missed playing against his brother when Evashevski benched him for the 1956 season opener against Indiana. That year Iowa went 9-1 (losing to Michigan) and ended the season with a huge win over Notre Dame, whose star, ironically, was 'The Golden Boy' Paul Hornung, who went on to win the Heisman Trophy as best college player, and would later be suspended for gambling along with Karras. Iowa won the Rose Bowl over Oregon State, and finished ranked third in the nation.

The next year, Karras won the Outland Trophy, but almost more impressively finished second in the Heisman voting to halfback John David Crow of Texas A&M. But it would have taken too much space to explain both the Heisman and the fact it nearly always goes to a quarterback or running back. That Karras isn't in the Pro Football Hall of Fame is probably due to his gambling suspension--but Jerry Kramer is another lineman from the all-decade team in the Sixties who isn't in the Hall, and Kramer wrote books. In Instant Replay he paid Karras a supreme compliment as an opponent: 'I'm thinking about him every minute'. Speaking of books, it's also hard to understate the kind of impact that Paper Lion had. George Plimpton was an elegant, upper-class, American aristocrat kind of writer--editor of the Paris Review--and his endorsement of the NFL was as crucial as the Kennedys' games of touch football for elevating the game in the minds of mainstream America. You can see from reading the book just how taken he was with Karras--and as the epitome of the 'old style' game of football, he was essential to Plimpton's selling of what became a very different kind of sport as it conquered America.

The Lions had a formidable defense, especially in the middle, with Karras, the quick guy who'd now be called an 'under' tackle and big Roger Brown, with the excellent Joe Schmidt behind them at middle linebacker. I saw a couple of references to their line being called 'The Fearsome Foursome' before the Rams' claimed that name--but I tend to doubt it extended beyond Detroit, if at all, because I recall the Chargers' early AFL line being called that, also before the Rams, and the Lions' ends weren't that fearsome anyway. Ironically, Brown would be traded to the Rams, and join the Foursome as a replacement. Perhaps not so ironically, Karras feuded with his pro coaches too, except for Schmidt when he became coach after he retired, but by 1970 he'd lost too much quickness and was cut before the 1971 season.

I thought the Rugby League comparison was an apt one, and I would have liked to compare Karras and Hornung's suspension to Joe Namath's a few years later--Namath similarly had to divest himself of a share in a bar where underworld characters hung out. There was a good piece in the New York Times about the Lindell AC, where among the items framed on the walls was a jockstrap worn by Karras' teammate Wayne Walker. In the era of modern 'sports bars' this kind of joint just doesn't exist anymore, as much an anachronism as the players of the era and the kind of game football was.

Karras and Dick the Bruiser really did tear the Lindell AC to pieces in their staged brawl to promote the match staged while Karras was suspended. He didn't wrestle all that often, but he played a wrestler at least twice in movies, once in Babe, as I mentioned in the obit, and with actual ring action in Mad Bull (1977) where he plays the eponymous aging wrestler coming to the ring wearing a Mongo-style cowboy hat. Obviously wrestling helped him play the comic roles he so often got.

I'll have to dig up a copy of Babe; the more I think about it, the more convinced I am the Babe Didrikson may have been the greatest American athlete of the first half of the 20th century, certainly up there with Jim Thorpe, Babe Ruth, and Jesse Owens. I'm also curious to see how Susan Clark, who is an underrated actress, played her. Of course she wound up repeating the film role and marrying Karras for real.

I can't remember Karras on Monday Night Football, but that was the time I was leaving Montreal and moving to London. I was also surprised to see he'd done CFL commentary, for a station in Windsor, just across the river from Detroit. I remembered he'd had a big offer from Winnipeg when he left college--the CFL could actually compete with the NFL for some players, and they may have thought the undersized Karras might do better on the bigger Canadian fields.

I was indebted to Robert Collins for the Karras quote I used at the end. It sums up the man, and life, perfectly. I'll repeat it here:

"It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more 'manhood' to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind." 

RIP, Alex Karras.

TURHAN BEY AND JOHNNY STOMP: TWO DEGREES OF SEPARATION

There is an interesting obituary of Turhan Bey, who died at 89, by Ronald Bergen in today's Guardian; you can link to it here. Bey's background was almost as exotic as his subsequent career; as Bergan points out he was associated with the costume dramas of Jon Hall, Sabu, and Maria Montez, but he was often more watchable in more straightforward fare. What jumped out at me, however, was Bergen's relating that Bey never married, but 'wished to marry the actress Lana Turner in 1944, but gave her up because his mother disapproved.'

In August I wrote about The Falcon Takes Over, which was based on Raymond Chandler's Murder My Sweet. Bey had a small but crucial role in the 1942 film, as Jules Ampthor; Bergen doesn't mention the film, perhaps because the part was so small Bey went unbilled. But as you can see, if you go back to the piece here, I was fascinated by Helen Gilbert, who played the female villain, Velma.

Gilbert, as it happens, was married for five months in 1949 to Johnny Stompanato, who would later become Lana Turner's boyfriend, and be murdered, allegedly by Turner's daughter. And here was Bey hooked up with Turner back at the time he was making a picture with Gilbert, as you can see by the photo left, which was taken in 1942. Of course, Johnny Stomp was only 17 at the time, but....

BARBARA ANN SCOTT: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the great Canadian figure skater Barbara Ann Scott is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. I may have underplayed the importance of the dual golds for Scott and Dick Button in 1948. Scott proved that the Europeans couldn't dominate the compulsories, which they had considered their territory, and Button showed that a more athletic style of free skate could be so impressive as to win that part of the event too. How difficult this was to accomplish is illustrated by the 1947 World Championships, where Button finished second. The legendary Swedish skater Ulrich Salchow was so upset with the judging that he gave Button his 1901 International Cup (a prize Dick eventually passed on to John Misha Petkevitch).

When I worked for ABC Sports I did a lot of shows with Dick, and his understanding of the strange politics and the, shall we say, conservative aesthetics, of the skating world was a huge help in understanding the changes in the sport which came about, inevitably, as it became more popular--a kind of bowling alley ballet--and the focus of the Winter Olympics in the countries not dominated by skiing (or, like Canada, ice hockey).

Scott's career as an entertainer never took off the way Sonja Henie's did--she didn't project into movies, and I get the impression she didn't want to: honestly she couldn't really play the All-Canadian girl. She was a queen in her world, not just skating, but in her life that followed. In 1956, she and Button did an ice ballet Happy New Year special--I wonder if copies of that telecast exist, because I'd love to see it.

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S BLACK BOX

Michael Connelly is one of those few writers whose books I feel compelled to devour as soon as they appear, and it was somewhat chilling to realise that this has been the case almost since his first, The Black Echo, was published some twenty years ago. Since then, Harry Bosch has featured in seventeen novels, not always as the lead character, but he is the lead in the The Black Box, which is the eighteenth, and which is set, not by coincidence, in 1992, to mark the anniversary of the first book.

Its set in the present, but the cold crime Bosch investigates is a case he had drawn twenty years before, the murder of a Danish photo-journalist in the midst of the Rodney King riots. The chaos facing the LAPD at that time meant Bosch couldn't delve fully into the killing at the time, and no one else did either. But the characteristic that most defines Bosch is his desire to bring justice to those who've been denied it, so he begins retracing the steps his two-decades younger self took. He's trying to unravel two mysteries: who killed Anneke Jespersen, and why.

Soon it becomes apparent that Jespersen wasn't collateral damage of the LA riots, and the trail Bosch then follows leads back not only to the LA of that time, but to the first Iraq war. The beauty of what might be considered a story-telling 'gimmick' is that it fits perfectly not only with the situation Connelly has created (Bosch on the Open Unsolved Unit) but also with the character which he has built so carefully and thoroughly over the past two decades. Even when the settings or situations seem unlikely, his Bosch remains a person who has sometimes grown and sometimes not over the years.

This paradox is probably the best part of the novel—as always, Harry cannot resist going off alone, doing what he thinks is right, and overlooking or sometimes not even being aware of the consequences. Of course, this is more perilous when you're a single father with a teenaged daughter, but it also applies when Bosch tries to do something thoughtful for his new girl-friend, psychologist Hannah Stone, and it winds up bouncing back to bite him professionally, and quite possibly on a personal level as well.

Connelly has gone back in time in other ways too. Bosch tends to be most interesting when he has a corporate foil (remember Harvey '98' Pounds?) which was what his new boss, Lt. Cliff 'Tool' O'Toole provides. It puts added tension into virtually all Bosch's decisions—on top of his added vulnerability with retirement staring him in the face. Throw in an inscrutable IAD detective on his case, and Bosch faces problems inside the department which are possibly harder to solve that a twenty year old murder. But of course, once Harry uncovers the 'Black Box' at the heart of the case, he will move forward to discover the truth. The finish is more action thriller than some, but the beauty of it is that again it recalls Bosch's part—the Vietnam experience which was such a shadow over the early Bosch novels.And it ends with perhaps the finest piece of self-examination we've yet received from Harry.

Music has always been a part of Bosch's story too, and in this novel, along with a huge nod to Art Pepper (as you'd expect, since the alto player represents the essence of Harry's dark and solitary LA soul) Connelly gets in plugs for younger jazz artists: Michael Formaek, Danny Grissett, Gary Smulyan, Seamus Blake, and Grace Kelly (not the princess). So now I'll have to check them out.

Speaking of Pounds, it wasn't quite twenty years ago that I reviewed Connelly's Trunk Music, in which he is the victim, for the Spectator, and said this was the finest detective series being written in America. Nothing Michael Connelly has written since then has led me to change my mind, and The Black Box once again confirms it.

The Black Box by Michael Connelly

Orion Books, £18.99, ISBN 9781409134312

Note: this review will also appear in Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

GOTHAM CENTRAL: BOOK FOUR

It is interesting that this fourth volume of Gotham Central is titled Corrigan, because in most of this collection of stories the corrupt Crime Scene investigator is a central figure, especially in the climatic one, but the actual main arc of the story is the partnership between Renee Montoya and Crispus Allen. Although Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker get joint billing as the writers, in reality, the bulk of the book is Rucka's and as we shall see the overall tone and final effect is most definitely his. And although he is the titular mainstay, Corrigan is, in effect, the catalyst for the conflicts which will challenge both the detectives. The biggest contrast is the sense that Allen, the family man, has something to fall back on, while Montoya, a lesbian who can't seem to come to grips with being loved by her girlfriend, doesn't. It is on this contrast that the stories flow together, and ultimately, give the climax its power.

The book starts with a short, 'Nature', written by Rucka and drawn by Steve Lieber, which is there to establish Corrigan's centrality as a villain. It is less successful than the rest of the book, mostly because it deals with the supernatural. The concept of Gotham Central is a police procedural in a city where super villains and super heroes, particularly the Batman, dominate. Thus is requires the reader's suspension of disbelief to credit that such beings exist, but also requires that the delineation be clear. Here that boundary is crossed and the story falls flat.

'Dead Robin' is a three-parter written by Rucka and Brubaker, in which Gotham has outlawed costumed heroes (a la Watchmen), and someone is killing young boys and dressing them as Robin. It's a kind of old fashioned parlour mystery, whose most interesting facet is the return of the Batman to close the case. The relationship of Romy Chandler, who shoots The Batman and loses her gun, with Nate Patton is put under strain, while the backstory to Allen and Montoya's partnership—that she had to compromise with Corrigan to save his career, is restated as a subplot. The art, by Kano and Stefano Guadiano is good, but oddly uneven, sometimes looking cartoony in the midst of otherwise dark images, as if it's been redrawn. This story sets up a coda, another short written by Rucka and drawn by Lieber, called 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', which hammers home the contrasts and the dependencies of Allen and Montoya, as Gotham goes into meltdown as part of DC's Infinite Crisis, and Allen tries to get across the city and back to his family. The story works well, and it's payoff is powerful, but it's not until you reach the end of the final chapters of the book that you get its full impact.

That story is 'Corrigan II', in which the police close in on Montoya's nemesis, and tragedy results. Rucka again scripts, and he's at his best when dealing with loss—something that won't surprise those who've read, for example, Whiteout. He doesn't need to bring everything to conclusion, and he knows that such conclusions are not simple, even though that has traditionally been the staple of the contained comic story. Apparently, this story also sets the stage for a different sort of sequel, which I won't give away, but it would not have to it for it to work on the series' own terms. Again there are moments when Kano and Guadiano's art seems slighter—sometimes reminding me of Guy Davis, more stylized and less norish than at other times. But overall, the effect is fine, and the softer touch suits Rucka's style: Brubaker might be more noirish in the sense of there being little hope, but Rucka, because he has the touch of sentimental faith, maybe even more effective when life, inevitably, deals from the bottom of the deck.

GOTHAM CENTRAL, Book Four: Corrigan

written by Greg Rucka & Ed Brubaker

art by Kano, Stefano Guadiano, Steve Lieber

Titan/DC Comics £14.99 ISBN 9780857681898

NO NUDES IS GOOD NUDES: FAREWELL LINGERIE BOWL

Note: I wrote this piece in Tampa, February 2009, before broadcasting Super Bowl XL for the BBC. It surprised me that I couldn't sell it--maybe I was trying the wrong places--but I posted it on the other blog I'd created, called ...And Over Here which I'd intended to contain sports blogging. I soon came to realise that blogging was an extreme violation of Dr. Johnson's warning that the man who writes for anything but money is a fool, so I compromised with the Doc and cut my output down to this blog, whose frequency is inversely proportional to the amount of paying work I have. 

I'm posting it here now because the Lingerie Football League was back in the news briefly, and peripherally, in relation to the NFL's refereeing crisis. Turns out the resume of one of the scab refs included the LFL, where calls are easier and the distractions are more fun to cope with. So here it is, again: the sad story of the under-exposure of Lingerie Bowl VI. A couple of twitter followers asked to see it again, so any excuse....

NO NUDES IS GOOD NUDES: FAREWELL LINGERIE BOWL
 
The funniest, I mean saddest, news of Super Bowl week in Tampa was the shocker that Lingerie Bowl VI had to be cancelled, due to a dispute with the game's site, a Florida, uh, nudist colony.
If I were Peter King I would definitely write 'only in America!', except I'm not sure the XL SI pundit has ever used the phrase ironically.

The game was supposed to take place at the Caliente nudist resort in Land O Lakes, Florida...no relation to the sticks of Land O Lakes butter we grew up with, and which Marlon Brando could probably have thought of at least some uses for. But even Marlon might have been perplexed by the 'controversy' which caused the cancellation. Who would've thought lingerie would pose nudists a problem?

I say 'nudist resort', but being this is America, where stewardesses are flight attendants and the blind are sight impaired, Caliente is actually billed as a 'Luxury Clothing-Optional Resort'. Thus gridiron gladiators in their underwear posed no problem. According to Caliente's (which, after all, is Spanish for 'hot') spokes-nudist and former nude model Angye (yes, with a 'y') Fox (pictured left, and known to her friends as,of course, 'Foxy') 'we ran into conflicts with the Lingerie Football League wanting more areas of our resort restricted to clothing- required than we could accommodate.'

RESTRICTED TO CLOTHING-REQUIRED? What is this, the NFL? Yes folks, only in America could an event which parades women in little clothing (apart from football pads) playing a violent game for the benefit of ogling viewers of all sexes, be offended by a little nudity. Here's Lingerie Football League spokesman Stephon McMillen 'The league will not place our fans, players, staff nor partners in a less-than-comfortable environment that would ultimately jeopardize the mainstream perception and reputation of the brand that so many have worked diligently over these past five years to build.'

Let me stop laughing. Does anyone in the mainstream actually perceive of the LFL (pronounced 'laffle') as anything but a sleazy soft-core exploitation device? And its reputation? McMillen sounds suspiciously like a maiden aunt, or a Catholic schoolgirl on a first date. What will the boys at high school think?

Somehow, the Super Bowl managed to survive without LB VI. Since in America any publicity is good publicity, hopefully, people are already flocking to Caliente Luxury Clothing-Optional resort, maybe as an available room for the Super Bowl weekend. Sadly few of them would be the loyal followers of the LFF. When the Super Bowl reaches halftime, they will simply switch over to Bud Bowl, watch beer bottles battle, and sent out for another pizza. Angye will be disppointed.

GAETON FONZI: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Gaeton Fonzi, investigative reporter, researcher, and author of one of the very best books on the JFK assassination, is in today's Independent. I've reprinted it below because, sadly, there were two crucial typos in the piece as printed: the second counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was G. Robert Blakey, not Blakely as appears in the first reference, and 1979 was 15 years after the Warren Report', not 25. I feel incredibly embarrassed, and tried to get them corrected on the web page, but the 25 years remains.

Back where the stupid errors are corrected but the big ones stay, oddly enough, the New York Times obit of Fonzi, which insisted on repeatedly calling him an 'Ahab', used Blakey for its main quotes. This is odd because Blakey is the figure most heavily criticised in Fonzi's The Last Assassination, which is part research on the JFK assassination and part analysis of how and why the HSCA failed to do its job.

Fonzi's book might be thought of as the start of the 'second wave' of volumes about the assassinations--building on the research done by any number of writers, which showed clearly the flaws in the Warren Report, and the case for a conspiracy, but were usually vague about identifying who was behind it and how it actually worked.

But if you read Fonzi's book, John Newman's Oswald And The CIA, James Douglass' JFK And The Unspeakable (you can link to my essay on that book, which I wrote for Lobster magazine, here), and the LaFontaines' Oswald Talked, you get a very clear picture of the involvement of at least elements of various intelligence agencies, and the way in which the need to cover that involvement up would drive the institutions involve to collude after the fact to protect the actual plotters, even if they were not acting 'officially'.

Like many of the assassination researchers, Fonzi came to his belief in a conspiracy through disillusionment with the official story. Unlike many of them, he was a true professional, a dogged journalist who got his information the old fashioned way, with face to face digging. That his work with HSCA got largely buried was a tragedy, which his book, too easily dismissed by the mainstream who would reflexively gush over the Gerald Posners of that world, could not set right. But his work after its publication was indefatigable, and deserved straightforward praise.

GAETON FONZI: INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
 

On 29 March 1979, nearly 15 years after the Warren Report was released, the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) issued its own report, concluding President John Kennedy was 'probably' assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald as part of a conspiracy. The committee's chief counsel, Robert Blakey, immediately announced, contrary to the report's own equivocations, 'the mob did it'. By accepting much of the flawed evidence of the Warren Report, and failing to reach any conclusions of its own, the HSCA report perpetuated the controversy that would not be addressed officially again until the public outcry arising from the Oliver Stone movie JFK.

Gaeton Fonzi, who has died aged, was a reporter hired as an investigator for HSCA, working primarily on connections between Cuban exile groups, and through them, American intelligence agencies, and the assassination. In 1993, in the wake of Stone's film and Gerald Posner's revisionist defence of the Warren Report, he published The Last Investigation, which combined trenchant analysis of the assassination itself with a revealing inside portrait of the machinations and politics behind the HSCA, which led to the failings of its report. It remains one of the very best works on the assassination, notable particularly for its restraint in making no assumptions and drawing no conclusions not backed by evidence. Its quality reflects Fonzi's undoubted skill as a journalist.

Fonzi's path to conspiracy theories grew from his background as an investigative reporter in Philadelphia, where he was born on 10 October 1935. He grew up in West New York, New Jersey, but returned to Philadelphia to study journalism and edit the daily paper at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his future wife Marie. After graduating he worked on the Delaware County Daily and served in the army, before joining Philadelphia Magazine in 1959 as a reporter and later editor. His most important work was a series, written with Greg Walter, exposing Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Harry Karafin, who extorted money from businessmen by threatening to write negative stories, claiming to be the 'hatchet man' of the Inquirer's powerful owner, Walter Annenberg. Annenberg's own use of the paper's power to advance Republican party candidates was later detailed in Fonzi's 1970 biography, Annenberg, but by the time it was published, Annenberg had already sold the Inquirer and been appointed by Richard Nixon as US Ambassador to Great Britain.

Fonzi originally accepted the conclusions of the Warren Report. But when Warren committee counsel Arlen Specter returned to Philadelphia to run for district attorney, he was a natural subject for interview. Fonzi came across an article by another Philadelphia lawyer, Vincent Salandria, who was among the first critics of the Warren Report, and in particular the 'single-bullet' or 'magic bullet' theory advanced by Specter. Fonzi studied the case, and then, shocked by Specter's inability to defend his findings convincingly, became a sceptic. In another piece for Philadelphia Magazine he called the Warren Report 'a deliberate lie.'

In 1972 he moved to Miami, where he edited Miami and Gold Coast magazines. In the wake of scandals surrounding the intelligence community, in 1975 the US Senate created what came to be known as the Church Committee, and Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker asked Fonzi to join as an investigator. It was a natural move two years later to HSCA, where he was hired by the committee's original counsel, yet another Philadelphia lawyer, Richard Sprague. As The Last Investigation details, Sprague's refusal to defer to the intelligence community, the CIA in particular, brought him into conflict with his committee heads, and he eventually resigned, to be replaced by Blakey.

The contacts between Oswald, purportedly a Castro supporter, and the violently anti-Castro Cuban exile community headquartered in Miami became a natural point of Fonzi's investigations. His crucial discovery was the testimony of Antonio Veciana, leader of the exile group Alpha 66. Veciana's CIA contact was a man he knew as 'Maurice Bishop', and in 1963, Veciana arrived in Dallas for a meeting with Bishop, to find him conferring with a man he later identified as Oswald. Fonzi was able to show Bishop was in reality David Atlee Phillips, who had also been the CIA's station chief in Mexico City when Oswald was purportedly filmed and recorded at the Soviet consulate there. Veciana would later survive an assassination attempt on him just at the time the HSCA report was released.

Fonzi's digging into the connections between Cuban exiles and their CIA handlers, as well as mob figures sometimes employed by the CIA, established beyond doubt a prima facie case for conspiracy, and with increasing likelihood, the reality that Oswald was indeed what he said he was, 'a patsy'. Frustrated by Blakey's failure to pursue these avenues, Fonzi wrote another scathing article for Philadelphia magazine in 1980, which formed the basis of his book, and became a leading figure in the assassination research community. He continued to write, for outlets as varied as the New York Times and Penthouse magazine, and served as a lecturer at a number of universities. His work was honoured by more than dozen awards, including the William Allen White, for investigative journalism, and the Mary Ferrell-JFK Lancer Pioneer award. He died 30 August 2012 at home in Satellite Beach, Florida, of complications from Parkinson's disease. He is survived by Marie and four children. At the end of The Last Investigation, he quotes Slyvia Odio, a key witness ignored and discredited by two government investigations. 'We lost,' she told him. 'We all lost'.

CHARLES CUMMING'S FOREIGN COUNTRY

I had barely finished writing the following when the news came via Ali Karim that A Foreign Country has won the Bloody Scotland award for best crime novel. Congratulations to Charles. And now, rather than being a bit late in getting to it, Irresistible Targets proves timely in the extreme!

Amelia Levene is about to take over as the first female head of MI6 when she sneaks away for a quick vacation in France, and drops completely off the map. Thomas Kell, dismissed from the service because of his complicity in American tortures in the Middle East, is asked to investigate quietly, and discovers a secret which Levene wants to hide, but which leaves her dangerously vulnerable. Kell already is vulnerable, and desperate to get back in the game, so much so he forgets his marriage counselling session on his way out the door to track Amanda down.

It's a good set-up for Charles Cumming's thriller, and it remains intriguing as long as it is about deception, complicity, and ambiguity. Could Levene have been set up by those within the service who don't want her ascension? Or are outside forces at work? Cumming keeps you guessing, although there is a murder which occurs early in the book, offstage, which doesn't appear to send up red flags for anyone involved, except perhaps the clever reader. And you would guess that, as the backstory becomes more clear, any experienced intelligence agent would have jumped at those red flags (forgive the vagueness, but I do wish to avoid spoilers here!).

The set up has echoes of LeCarre,especially with the characters. Although Levene and Kell are both, on the surface, likeable, the deeper Cumming digs into their characters, the less likeable they become. They are professionals, their own characters subsumed beneath the job which is to be done. Likewise, the supporting cast from MI6 are often less than impressive—which is always a real feature of LeCarre, who wanted you to know that most of spy craft is carried out by men and women you'd likely lean away from if they were in the seat next to you in a bar or on a plane.

This creates a real level of ambiguity which Le Carre would always exploit, and which Cumming does to an extent, which is where his novel works best. He's particularly good on conflicts within the service, and between services, though he suffers from a certain residual prejudice for British intelligence. Kell's own failings are ascribed to the influence of the Americans; basically he goes along with them, and pays the price, which is to suggest a kind of superior morality of which there doesn't appear to be much evidence. There is a requisite level of hypocrisy, though—and the idea of nominally allied services battling to establish or preserve areas of influence is a sub-theme that might well have received more space.

But once the set-up becomes clear, the book switches gears, and becomes basically a race-against-time thriller, and much less interesting as a result. The ambiguities of the shadowy plot are resolved by the SAS-like operation, and though we get hints of the lack of real resolution (beyond the immediate crisis) for everyone, especially Kell, one longs for something a bit less well-finished. Cumming is good enough to keep you riveted with the mundane; the bang-bang stuff may be done better by lesser writers. And maybe the best thing about the book is the lovely ambiguity of the title epigraph, from L.P. Hartley, because it's not just the past that is a foreign country.

A FOREIGN COUNTRY by Charles Cumming

Harper Collins £12.99 ISBN 9780007337873

ALL THE WORLD'S A STOOGE, AND THESE POOR PLAYERS

Let's start with the positives, the good stuff: The Three Stooges is laff out loud funny, more than any comedy I've seen in some time (and even moreso for my eight-year old son). If there's one thing the Farrelly Bros. do well (besides demure gross-out—actually the fart in the sinking car is one of the funniest moments of the film) it's slapstick, and the slapstick in this film is first-rate, brilliantly choreographed and executed. They understand that part of the joy of slapstick is the audience's seeing what's coming, the longer before it happens the better. As an aside, my guess is the audience with whom I saw the film needed it to be set-up at lot more clearly than an audience watching the original Stooges in the 1930s would; and an awful lot more clearly than me and my friends did watching them on TV in the 1960s.

So if I laughed so hard, why a week later does the film leave a sort bad taste in my mouth? It's not like I mind the 'plot', which is stitched together from a couple of hoary old chestnuts—'let's save the orphanage' and 'let's kill the husband'--being clunky, nor the progression of gags making no sense. That Curly and Larry sudden appear on a gold course with dozens of salmon, to set up their salmon farm, makes no logical sense, but it doesn't have to. It should, however, set up a gag, rather than being the gag itself. Though I do get the point when Kate Upton finally strips off to become The Leather Nun. Boy do I get it. A great sigh of relief from the dads who hadn't laughed, but another gag gone flat.And therein lies part of the rub.

The Farrellys don't really trust their audience to be able to follow long setups. Indeed, the best gags in the film are recycled from the original Stooges, and done better. But watch the originals, and see how restrained the shooting is, general views, middle-shots, few close-ups. Watch the modern version and everything is bright, and in closeup, which has the effect of making bad actors (especially the children) look worse. It looks two dimensional, moreso because everyone seems to be playing it for laughs. The Stooges' are funnier when everyone else is taking things seriously, and they are the element of chaos amongst the serious. When everyone else is hamming it up, aware they are part of the gag (if not gags themselves) it dilutes the impact of the anarchy. I suspect they may be trying to do something like what Frank Tashlin did with Jerry Lewis—create an almost two-dimensional equivalent of a live-action cartoon, but the Farrellys are not Tashlin and Lewis.

It's most obvious how little faith they have in their audience (and perhaps in their own film) when Moe splits from the others to become part of a reality show. Interestingly, the producers who watched his audition appear not to have noticed the other two Stooges, because they react to them later in the film as if they haven't, but like I said, we can't try to pick logical continuity errors in a film like this. But trying to get a rub from Snooky (not literally—I mean 'rub' in the wrestling sense of getting a boost by performing with someone who's a bigger star) is just insulting. Maybe they're trying to make a satiric point about Jersey Shore being dumber than the Stooges, or as violent, or less real...I don't know and frankly Snooky, I don't give a damn. The only interesting thing is that the Jersey crew are the only ones in the film who play it straight, and would be better straightmen for the Stooges than the professional actors are (with the notable exception of Craig Bierko's fall-guy Mac). I'm still waiting for the payoff on Larry David's Sister Mary Mengele too.

The new Stooges are OK, if not great. They benefit by being younger and fitter than the originals, which helps the slapstick. Sean Hayes tries hard as Larry, but lacks the sad sack futility. Will Sasso is surprisingly good as Curly, but has toned down his aggression considerably, and his woman-chasing. He's nicer; in fact it's as if they're trying to make them all 'people', instead of Stooges. That's even true for Chris Diamantopolis' Moe, though his performance is often mostly wig and voice, most of which appears to have been dubbed for effect; he still has to mug ridiculously, which Moe Howard never really needed to do. I get the feeling that liking the guys makes them less effective as comics—they are supposed to be forces of nature whom it is dangerous to like, the way children were thought to be by all figures of authority.

And speaking of children, although it's funny two glamour guys play the Farelleys at the film's end, it's odd that they do a 'kids don't try this at home' public service announcement, especially since one actor is flexing his chest the whole time, like a WWE wrestler. But everything I said about the dumbing down of the audience is brought home here, when they can't even trust their core viewers to realise what they are watching is the Stooges, not real life. The real Moe Larry and Curly never had to tell me that.

And finally, for virtually every mainstream review that claimed the film was full of 'nyuk nyuk nyuks', the reality is that for all the boffo laffs, which I appreciated, I didn't really hear a decent Curlyesque nyuk, nyuk nyuk anywhere in the film. Kinder, gentler stooges? 'I'll moiderlize ya'.

MICHAEL CLARKE DUNCAN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Michael Clarke Duncan is online at the Guardian's website (link here), and should be in the paper paper tomorrow. His massive heart attack last July, aged 54, was certainly unexpected--and ironically came just after he had proclaimed the benefits of his vegan diet to the world in a PETA commercial. It wasn't the place to speculate on whether he had used steroids or other body-building drugs which might have affected his heart, or indeed whether the massive weight gain (and subsequent loss) following Daredevil might have had adverse effects.

One bit lost from the piece as I wrote it was the crediting of his girlfriend, the ubiquitous 'reality' TV performer, the Reverend Omorosa Manigault, with having saved his life by performing CPR on Duncan when he suffered the heart attack. He had remained hospitalised since July. Interestingly, although Manigault was referred to as Duncan's 'fiancee' in the press release which announced his death, I could find no reference to an announcement of an engagement.

Duncan's role in The Green Mile plays on any number of cliches, not least racial, but to his credit he legitimately transcended them in a performance of some sensitivity. The film, one of three Stephen King adaptations directed by Frank Darabont, might be seen as an attempt to recapitulate the success of The Shawshank Redemption, but fails in the sense that, unlike its predecessor, it wears its heart on its sleeve from the start, in part because of the compelling nature of Duncan's character.

He was never really able to match that again, though his villainous Kingpin in Daredevil was far more compelling than, say, Colin Farrell's Bullseye. He didn't quite have the depth to play the Ving Rhames role in Pulp Fiction, for example, but given the Bruce Willis connection, he might well have had they hooked up earlier. What remains constant in Duncan's films is always the sense that he seems to be enjoying what he is doing, and not taking himself too seriously, and given his background that makes a lot of sense. It has to be said he had a certain awareness too: after his early billing as 'Big Mike' Duncan, the double-barrelled Michael Clarke Duncan suggests a 'serious' actor. I would have loved to hear him explain that. And I would have loved to hear his insider's perspective on Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. Finally, I do wonder if the Guardian was correct in billing (after I hadn't) Alan Rudolph's film of Breakfast of Champions as a comedy.