DAVID L WOLPER: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of David Wolper is in today's Indy, you can link to it here. I had the dubious privilege of watching the opening ceremony of the 1984 LA Olympics up close, through its rehearsals, when I was coordinating the host feed from the Coliseum, and that was why I used the word impressario--even if it were monumental in its tackiness. In my mind Wolper was associated with any number of worthy, middle-of-the-road, prestige docs which I saw in my teenaged years, rather than the huge hit mini-series which came after: 'a David L Wolper' production was the sign of a certain quality which was pretty much umatched on US TV at the time. I particularly recall The Rise And Fall of The Third Reich; I had read Shirer's book when I was 12 or 13 and the film lived up to my expectations.

But I hadn't realised it was Wolper who brought Superman to our screens when we were younger, nor that he had produced two excellent though often overlooked films I admired in the late 60s and early 70s, The Bridge At Remagen and Willy Wonka. I might be willing to concede that Fantastic Mr Fox is an equally good Dahl adaptation; I mainly wanted to distance the Mel Stuart/Gene Wilder version from the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp remake.

The Olympics seemed to bring out the worst in Wolper, as it does to many artists, though I have a fond memory of his Rafer Johnson doc. Visions Of Eight was notable mainly for its unintentional echoes of Leni Reifenstahl and for confirming that TV coverage of sport was already outpacing what film-makers could do. But to me it is always a sign when an obit turns into, at least in part, a catalogue of the person's work, that they accomplished a huge amount that was worthy of note, and Wolper certainly did do that.

THOMAS COOK'S LAST TALK WITH LOLA FAYE

Lucas Paige is an historian, teaching and writing books that fall far short of the dreams he once had. His wife has left him, and he is in St. Louis, giving a reading of his latest disappointing book to a disappointing crowd of mostly disappointed people. Apart from one of them. Because after the talk, Lola Faye Gilroy introduces herself. The Lola Faye who worked for his father, at his father's unsuccessful little variety store, and whose husband shot his father for stealing her affections away. Luke's life was ruined in that moment, and he has always blamed Lola Faye. And she insists on talking with Luke.

Thomas Cook's novel recounts that conversation, and the flashbacks it triggers for Luke, his memories, believes, all the shadows and frustrations of his life now and their deep roots in his life then. Luke was the smartest boy in Glenville, Alabama, something everyone knew, something his mother cherished and his father frustrated. Glenville was not part of the genteel South, its decay and lack of amenities is something we've seen before in Cook's 'southern' books. I've written before about how his novels seem to divide into southern and northern, and it isn't just the setting. In this case, the work of Edgar Allen Poe resonates through the conversation engaged in by Luke and Lola Faye; Cook builds it slowly, with hints of mysteries unresolved, revenges untaken, lives needing to be accounted for. I kept hearing 'The Cask of Amontillado' in their conversation, and in those moments Luke snaps back from his memories Lola Faye seems very threatening indeed, in that classic Southern gothic way.

Luke's intelligence did not make him a pleasant child. We see him taking cruel advantage of his girlfriend, we feel his sullen resentment of his father, we sense the depth of devotion from his mother. When this fragile system is disturbed, the results might well be incalculable. It's not the run of the mill problem of the bright, arty boy in the physical Southern world, and in this sense it's not a Southern gothic at all. It's more the sense described by the recently-deceased Alice Miller, who wrote The Drama Of The Gifted Child, how the child's talents, and the parent's encouragement of them, along with their expectations, seem to drive the child away from them and into himself. This is the internal world Cook describes, and in its subtle accuracy it is often more chilling, and always more heart-wrenching, than the remarkable suspense he creates from one conversation. As Lola Faye's second husband, a retired detective, told her, 'Things aren't pretty in the human heart'.

The resolution, to which he has built so slowly and carefully, is one of the most surprising in all of Cook's work; it is not a 'typical' Cook ending, and that, for fear of spoiling is all I will say. One of Luke's books was titled 'The Touch Of Time: How History Is Felt', and that might have served as a good title for this book too. For history is the study of ghosts, and this is a novel about the ways those ghosts haunt is. But in the end I went back to the book's epigraph, which Cook takes from Marianne Moore, that least Southern gothic of poets. 'When what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived'. No, it's not a Southern revivial. But it's a brilliant piece of moody suspense writing, and it's a moving novel.

The Last Talk With Lola Faye
Quercus £20
ISBN 9781849162012

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

LEONA GAGE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Leona Gage, the Miss USA winner stripped of her title the next day, is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. Pregnant at 13, married twice at 14, two children by 16, divorced twice and dating Frank Sinatra at 19: it's a story that cries out to be dramatized, in a better way than, say, Bettie Page. Her brief career with Roger Corman might be worth a story too. Like Page, Gage's later life revolved around religion, and an ex-spouse who apparently continued to pay her rent. Although the Indy miscounted in their summary, Gage wound up being married six times, and after her first annulment, the others all ended in divorce.

Gage was disqualified from the Miss Universe contest when she was stripped of the Miss USA title...Miss Universe, of course, is a misnomer, since all the contestants come from only one planet.

S. NEIL FUJITA: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the graphic designer S. Neil Fujita will be in tomorrow's Guardian, but is online now, you can link to it here. Alongside it on the website there's also a gallery of Fujita's designs, which you can find here. I haven't copied any of the designs shown there in this posting, apart from the Jazz Messengers album, but note his own paintings in particular (an less typical piece of his art is featured right) and also the simplicity of the design in his guide to a career in design, the way 'Ideas' becomes central, with all the artists' implements playing supporting roles.

I found the racial angle interesting, especially because in a recet episode of Mad Men, Roger refuses to do business with executives from Honda--Fujita certainly must have encountered such problems, even though he served with the Nisei regiment that was the most-decorated of any in the US Army. The Guardian said the Nisei were 'sent' to fight in Europe, but I had written that they were 'allowed to fight only' in Europe, hence his posting to the Pacific as a translator. Medals aside, the US Army still didn't trust 'Japs'.

It also would have been nice to write a bit about the difference between Alex Steinweiss, Fujita's legedary predecessor at Columbia, and his work, but space didn't allow.

A few small points: my favourite bit of the Jazz Messengers cover is the pensive Hank Mobley, with his glasses, which emphasized the cerebral nature of this hard-bop jazz. Fujita retired to Southold, Long Island, and exhibited his paintings there (somehow that became 'locally' without the locality being mentioned. Nor his cover design for his autobiography, Mouth Of Reddish Water, is one of his strongest book designs.

And though I am fond of his cover for V, I have to say I like the original hardback, and the Bantam paperback edition I had when I was 17, a bit better. The Bantam incorporates the lines running toward the horizon with a solid, stone V...in contrast to the Fujita which is, as I said in the obit, more playful.

QUIET FLOWS THE SPERM: THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT(LONDON FILM FESTIVAL) AND DONOR UNKNOWN (SHEFFIELD DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL)

The odd thing about The Kids Are All Right, which premiered at the London Film Festival and is on release now, is that for all its media hype, it isn't really about the issues of sperm donor fathers and their children, nor is it about lesbian marriages. What it is about is marriage, specifically what happens what something shakes up a long-standing relationship. In fact, in its set-up it's about as traditional a sit-com as anything on TV, and though as the film progresses they eschew the reliance on more hackneyed laffs, director Lisa Cholodenko also passes on trying to address bigger issues in a bigger way. However it doesn't have to because another film, Donor Unknown, which receives its world premiere at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival tomorrow, does exactly that.

Kids is a pleasantly enjoyable film, with Annette Benning (Nic) and Juliette Moore (Jules) doing exactly what needs to be done as the gay couple, and Mark Ruffalo as Paul lending small ambiguities to his portrayal of the sperm donor who fathered each woman's child. What is interesting is the way the film, at almost every opportunity, sets itself up for ease with its main characters. The most interesting, in many ways, are the children: serious student Joni (named for Joni Mitchell and played wonderfully by Mia Wasikowska) who's about to go off to college, and 15 year old slacker Laser (yes Laser, played by Josh Hutcherson) who's the one who wants to discover who his biological father is. Each is given a creepy friend to show their relative stabilty, as if to reinforce the normality of gay parenting, but perhaps suggesting each needs some further influence to put them back on course. Hence the desire to find a father. At first, it goes swimmingly; organic restaurateur Ruffalo is groovy and bonds with his offspring, which of course creates tension between tightly-wound doctor Benning and free-spirit Moore, especially when, after they meet and she begins work on his garden, Moore winds up in bed with Ruffalo.

The sex scenes in the film are telling: Ruffalo and his maitress d' girlfriend have energetic and fairly graphic sex on camera, and his scenes with Moore are also relatively explicit (Moore did, after all, play Amber Waves in Boogie Nights); they stand in sharp contrast to the married couple's love-life: a romantic bath ended by a call from a patient, and a very strange scene where they put gay porn in the video and Benning looks tired while Moore labours while hidden under the covers). The Ruffalo-Moore coupling is never particularly convincing, but it isn't meant to be; it is a function of each's instablilty: Ruffalo's sudden desire to short-cut maturity and find a family and Moore's for some self-esteem raising desire to match her success with the garden. Her name, Jules, denotes a sense of proud display, as if she is a trophy bride and wants to be more.

It builds up to two key moments. The more important is a thumper worthy of Oliver Stone, a moment when the entire movie grinds to a halt as Moore announces to her family, gathered on the sofa watching TV, and to us in the audience, that marriage is difficult and you have to work hard to keep it together. There is a question about why we would want to keep it together; these are not always pleasant characters—Benning is didactic and a control freak, a dominant father as denoted by her male name, Nic, while Moore casually fires her Mexican worker simply to cover her own embarrassment—but it's delivered powerfully, and works emotionally, not least because of Benning's initial worry that Moore has 'gone straight'. But in light of that, it ties things up too neatly. I kept thinking of the contrast with Cholodenko's remarkable 1998 first feature, High Art, in which Rahda Mitchell's ambitious young journalist breaks up the relationship between photographer Ally Sheedy and seedy German actress Patricia Clarkson. The ambiguity of Mitchell's character's ambition puts a spin on the triangle which this one doesn't really have.

Though it could have. Ruffalo here is a Boudu figure, brought into a house and slowly turning it inside-out. This could have been played with a more sinister bent (I kept thinking of The Stepfather, here) or it could have worked to a difficult resolution. Instead, Benning is given her own thumper, where she announces to Ruffalo (and the audience) that he's an interloper and if he wants a family make his own. He then disappears, and all the issues he raised presumably disappear with him. The point of the film now appears to be revealed by the title, the kids certainly are all right, and they will be all right without him. In the end, Cholodenko seems constrained by the need to make this film play to the mainstream; Carter Burwell's obtrusive NPR soundtrack score indicates this is an 'independent' film, but it seems to be worried lest anyone not get that it is a universal story. It works best when it tries least hard, and succeeds, in the end, at what it probably set out to do, be an entertaining light comedy with a slightly off-beat concept.

The real brilliance of Ruffalo's performance is the way he hides and reveals the essential immaturity of his character, and perhaps I was more sensitive to this immaturity because I had already seen Donor Unknown. Originally called Donor 150 (I liked the original title better, for its sf overtones, and because the donor is known, and is crucial), it tells a true story which obviously served as source material for this film: how a New York Times article about a sperm donor who'd fathered scores of children led to a number of them tracking him down, and the half-siblings gathering to meet their biological father.

Jeffrey Harrison is a self-described beach bum who lives with his dogs in an RV in Santa Monica or Venice beach parking lots and rescues pigeons. A one-time male model who posed in Playgirl in 1984, he at one time earned his rent by selling sperm to the California Cryobank, two or three times a week at $25-50 a pop. He has 'fathered' at least 58 children, and the film follows the efforts of a number of them to make contact with him. The central character is Jo-Ellen, a student in 'intelligence studies' (that's CIA type intelligence, not IQ test type intelligence) in Erie Pennsylvania, with lesbian parents, and it is she who makes contact with her half-siblings and is the driving force. Her innocence, combined with an obviously powerful need to fill an emptiness she feels, makes this a touching story; the more we see of Jeffrey, who has some drug issues, whose idea of fatherhood is confined to his relationship with his dogs, and who feels that the world is just a dream, the more we worry for Jo-Ellen and her siblings when they finally accomplish their goal.

Ruffalo's Paul is like a fantasy version of Jeffrey, without the issues except for the immaturity. He is immune to other people's feelings; he fails to recognise the hurt he causes Tanya (YaYa DaCosta) his casual squeeze who appears to be waiting for just a spark of maturity from him, and he jumps at the easy sort of family his sperm donor status provided. When Laser asks why he donated sperm he babbles about helping people, just as Jeffrey talks about 'the miracle attached', when the reality is it was money for pulling old rope.

In the end Donor Unknown is a far more gripping film than The Kids Are All Right, and every bit as entertaining. Director Jerry Rothwell can play with ambiguities, or rather let them reveal themselves and resolve themselves, and we hang with sympathy on JoEllen's reaction to Jeffrey, and what her future might hold. Because Donor Unknown concentrates solely on the issue of fatherhood, the difference between nature and nurture, the biological urge to find one's roots, and doesn't have to entertain or veer off into teen angst or the hardships of marriage, gay or straight, it is free to challenge its viewers, and it is certainly one of the best docs of the year, and a highlight of the Sheffield Festival.

CARLOS AT THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL AND ON THE STRAND

On last Tuesday's Strand (BBC World Service), prompted by the ever-incisive Anna McNamee, I discussed Olivier Assayas' film Carlos, which opened last Saturday at the London Film Festival. Our discussion started with the fact that the movie was originally made as a five-hour mini-series for TV (which is the version the LFF, to their credit, showed), and it is now being released in two versions, a two-part saga much like last year's Mesrine, and a 2:40 version, which I saw, and which hangs together well, although omitting some of Carlos' famous 'missions'.

The crucial point about these formats is not whether or not Carlos (shot on wide-screen 35mm) is or isn't a film (it was excluded from consideration at Cannes) but that the sheer size of the TV mini-series format allows the film to take a documentary-like perspective. It also points out that the DVD box-set may become the preferred vehicle for watching the best filmed dramas we can produce these days. Were Carlos scripted or edited as a normal feature film, 100 minutes or even two hours, there would be a greater necessity for a stronger story arc, a more simplistic reduction of Carlos' motivations, his career, his position as hero, villain, anti-hero. As it is, the film joins him in media res, training with the PFLP, his Venezuelan upbringing by a left-wing father, and education in Moscow isn't mentioned. Instead, we see him in the middle of the internal conflicts for control of the Palestinian movement, and this is the situation that will repeat itself over and over again, as the shifting faces of real-politick make the life of a revolutionary more and more difficult, until it finally becomes almost redundant.

This is becoming a familiar format for a sort of sub-genre of revolutionary 70s retro chic, which mixes facets of the gangster/spy film with its pseudo-documentary approach (Mesrine again is a reference point), like Munich, One Day In September, El Lobo, or Good Morning, Night, films that draw on Battle Of Algiers and Reds, The Godfather and The Informer. You can also see the ways straight-forward documentaries borrow feature-film techniques; the quick-cutting and pacing of Argentina's excellent but overlooked Trelew, or even the crime-scene reconstructions of Enron. More to the point, last year's Baader-Meinhof Gang took a similar approach, yet had a more conventional story arc because it used Ulrike Meinhof as its conscience. In fact, looking at Carlos' German 'army', it's as if some of the second-generation BMG characters have switched movies and allegiances. In particular the character of the trigger-happy raging young girl (Julia Hummer as the apropriately named 'Nada') echoes the dissolve between the two BMG generations.

But of course there is a story arc, and that is Carlos' progression to international celebrity and counter-culture superstar. The whole 'Jackal' business was a media creation, which gave him a James Bond kind of identity, which he inevitably feels compelled to live up to. In this sense, Edgar Martinez, who is brilliant in coping with the changes the role demands, reminded me of Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors, particularly in their fat decline as their celebrity overtakes their artistic (or terroristic) success. Martinez has spoken of the appeal of playing a revolutionary who insisted on dressing in Pierre Cardin, and he's also a liberator still trapped in macho attitudes toward the women in his life as well. When he seduces, almost claims, the girlfriend of the head of his German cell, it's played like a 1970s porno film, and when he leaves her it's like an 80s soap, Dallas played as Damascus. Although these points of personal politics do, in the end, give the character his structure (he was, after all, captured while recovering from a liposuction operation), the fact that the film has the scope to continue to play with the changing politics, the way Carlos eventually becomes more of a burden to whomever his latest employer is to justify both the danger of his celebrity and the lack of value he provides in terrorist operations.

I had seen little in Olivier Assayas' work to suggest he'd make a film like this (Boarding Gate, which could be seen to share some elements, is truly abominable), my thought is that the structure required tight dramatic control, and the centrality of the Carlos role allowed the camera's and script's focus to remain on Ramirez. In fact, you sense when Carlos gets with Magdalena Kopp, that Assayas sees a lot of Asia Argento in Nora Van Waldstatten, but the German actress is too strong to fall into that trap. In fact, at times it's as if Assayas is making Bonnie and Clyde, but without having to worry about Bonnie!

Assayas also takes a remarkably neutral political stance. The film's historical scope makes that easier, we see the hidden hands of the Soviets, their allies, as well as the various Middle Eastern countries and their shifting allegiances. One of the problems with Carlos is that his idea of who the enemy actually is never really takes shape; the specific goals of the Palestinians are not necessarily those of revolutionaries committed to overturning the international capitalist system. As Carlos becomes a glamourous gun for hire, this becomes more and more of a problem--the cult of the personality overpowering his revolutionary zeal. This becomes most telling when one of his German followers quits, because when terrorists separate the Jews from the other hostages, it reminds him too much of his German past. When the Berlin Wall falls, everyone keeps saying 'things have changed' and Carlos, like many celebrities, is trapped in his image from his days of stardom.

The best tribute to this film is that, having seen the nearly three hour version, I actually wanted to watch the full five hours, and see what I'd missed. In whichever version you can, you should see it.

THE KING'S SPEECH: THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE

The buzz around The King's Speech, which started when it won the audience award at the Toronto Film Festival, was confirmed last night at the London Film Festival's American Express gala showing at the Odeon Leicester Square. With an compelling performance by Colin Firth as 'Bertie', King George VI, at its heart, this is a film concerned not only with courage and personal triumph, but one which celebrates old-fashioned virtues of duty and loyalty. In setting up a parallel between the courage required to overcome his stammer, and that required to assume his role as King when his brother proves incapable, and then to lead his country into war, screenwriter David Seidler has crafted a story which strikes many of the same chords as Chariots of Fire did thirty years ago, with a similar degree of unlikeliness given the current tenor of our times. Perhaps that is why it seems so appealing.

In fact, Seidler's script began life as a play, and it really plays out as a series of exceptional two-handers, in which director Tom Hooper allows the actors to flourish. Firth's is a bravura physical performance, twisting himself around his speech impediment, but it draws on the kind of inward, repressed characters he has played before, in say The Single Man or Where The Truth Lies, and gradually reveals his character's immense inner resources. Helena Bonham Carter, as Queen Elizabeth segues perfectly from testing her formality with Geoffrey Rush as the lugubrious Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who eventually helps Bertie overcome his stammer, and revealing the person beneath that formality with Firth. Firth and Logue's scenes are like a royal odd couple, battling at its finest, with Rush's assertive, but sometimes naive, colonial commoner set off against Firth's withdrawn and lonely aristocrat. Logue's consulting rooms are like a small theatrical set; he is a failed amateur actor, and it's as if he's luring the Duke of York into his own amateur production. Other two-handers will follow, most effectively Bertie with his father, George V (Michael Gambon) and his brother David (the abidicator, Edward VIII) played brilliantly by Guy Pearce full of weakness covered with a thin veneer of surface charm. Even when the set-pieces open up, Hooper often isolates the point of impact into a two-shot, again most notably when Claire Bloom is incapable to react to her son David's tearful break-down on his father's death making him king.

By opening up the play in such a careful way, Hooper also delivers scenes which have the power of soliloquy--by leaving Firth in half the frame as he recalls his brother Johnny, dead at 13, he suggests Bertie's loneliness, which arises literally from the unfilled space familial affection should have provided. It makes the scenes with his own daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret more telling. Hooper comes back to this half-frame often; Bonham-Carter, in another perfectly-judged performance, enters it to provide that love; Logue pops through it like an uncontrollable primitive force. Seidler is also very good on issues of class--something where Logue himself (and his wife, well played by Jennifer Ehle) serves as a commoner constrast to Mrs Simpson (played by Eve Best with remarkable physical similarity, but perhaps, as with Spall's Churchill, too strong a single note). It's no surprise the film gathered such an exceptional cast, since Seidler's script allows so many of them moments of real emotional impact, and because Hooper's careful direction allows them to shine in those moments.

Where the film is perhaps weakest is in the broader historical sense, where it really does need to open out. The same was true of Hooper's John Adams, at its best in the scenes where Paul Giamatti's Adams either negotiates one on one or shares the screen with Laura Linney's Abigail. Here, it results in a lessening of the tension of the two biggest external dramas, the abdication and the coming of World War II. We know the outcome of both, and they might have detracted from the focus on Bertie and Lionel, but somehow the intertwining of personal and political might have had more hefor. It is most obvious in Timothy Spall's caricature of Churchill; in a film where few of the actors try to become superficially the characters they play, yet catch their essences perfectly, Spall's Churchill, pleasant enough and making the point he's needed to make, seems out of place even compared with Anthony Andrews' restrained Baldwin (recalling that Derek Jacobi, here the Archbishop of Canterbury played Baldwin opposite Albert Finney's bravura Churchill in The Gathering Storm).

But the focus is Bertie's battle. Not only with his stammer, but to open himself up, to accept a friend, to overcome the psychological trauma that Logue, like a modern psycho-therapist, gets him to reveal. Seidler was a stammerer as a boy, and King George was an inspiration to him; having learned this, it's easy to see that inspiration still reflected on the screen. This may be why the film has gone down well in North America, the sight of a royal reaching his inner 'we' is too good to be true. It's also very funny, which may help it in this country too: the scenes of Bertie using curse-words to help overcome his disability originally saw the film rated '15' here, but it has now been opened for 12 year olds and parental guidance, lest their children absorb some history as well as vocabulary. It's suitable for them, it's entertaining for anyone, it's thought-provoking and uplifting, and it's a masterclass in acting. It is the kind of film that may leave women laughing as well as men crying, and Toronto is right, it certainly will be contending for Oscars.

WAKE UP SLEEPYHEAD: SKY'S THORNE AT THE NFT

Thorne, based on Mark Billingham's novels, made its debut on Sky 1 HD last week, but I was lucky enough to catch the first three episodes, a complete adaptation of Sleepyhead, presented as one film in an event organised by the BFI at the National Film Theatre. The question of what constitutes film and television is, if you'll pardon the pun, a thorny one these days; Carlos, which I'm in the process of reviewing for the BBC World Service's Strand programme, was denied consideration for the Cesars because, although it was shot on 35mm film and in widescreen, it was commissioned for TV, and shown in three parts, before being re-edited for cinema release.

It isn't just a question of technology, although huge flat screens and HD allow the living room to come somewhat closer to the look, if not the psychological dynamic, of the cinema, but it's also that much of the best writing, and acting, and sheer craftsmanship is currently taking place on television, which is functioning somewhat like the studio system did, say, in the 1950s, when stars began to become producers and B features were still being made by independents. It's also a further suggestion that the future of drama lies in the disc, works of flexible length designed to be perused in large chunks at the audience's beck and call, exactly the equivalent of, dare I mention it, the book.

This is a long-winded way of saying that Sleepyhead, although it could probably be improved with a little tightening (three 'Sky Hours' amounted to more than two hours running time) and the elimination of a couple of plot glitches, held up exceptionally well in the theatres, with acting that played on the big screen and a look which was impressive in any format. It's one of those adaptations that stays faithful to its source material, while using it in different ways, making some different points, and entertaining in a different, but just as powerful, way. In fact, in the excellent panel discussion which followed, with producer/actor David Morrisey and actor Eddie Marsan, Billingham noted that the screenplay solved problems with the plotting that he would have addressed from what was, after all, his first novel.

We're used to the settings on the streets of London as part of crime drama, but Stephen Hopkins works brilliantly, not only in the ways he opens up the backgrounds, but in the way he moves us through them along with the characters. Interiors reveal people's inner spaces, and even the cop shop, one of British crime dramas most reliable cliches, is given a new look, something between a benefit office and the Washington Post's newsroom in All The President's Men. Within this setting, the characters are free to move beyond the realms you might expect from typecasting. It shows in Thorne's modern flat along the canal in north London; its spareness suggests bleakness inside and outside, and here the brief snatches of alt.country music seem like snatches of another world.

David Morrisey suggested that a lot of directors would make Sleepyhead a 'hero-based' story, but Hopkins 'knew it's not the Thorne story.' So where Thorne could easily be played along the lines of Mankell's Wallander, Morrisey, who bought the rights to Billingham's work and is billed as an executive producer, similarly refused to short-cut the character. The inner torments are referenced from outside, and then in flashback, and though Morrisey gets Thorne's hang-dog quality perfectly, he's also projecting his flawed strength and more than that, his obsession.

Morrisey discovered Billingham's novels while shooting a film in New Zealand, when he had lots of time to spare. Meanwhile Mark had already blogged and told anyone who would listen that he thought Morrisey would be the perfect Thorne. When his wife met Morrisey on a tube platform as he was on the way to their meeting, the karma was firmly established. They quickly established trust, and as Billingham noted, it was helped by the fact he didn't for a 'nanosecond' want to work on the screenplay. 'I could write another novel in the time it would take to do 25 drafts of a screenplay,' he quipped.

The second in the series, Scaredy Cat, is apparently more different from its source than Sleepyhead, but this film is really less about the chase for the serial killer, and more about Thorne, specifically about his resolving the triangle of love-hate with two of his colleagues; his former partner Kevin Tughan (played with brilliantly hidden intensity by Marsan) and the medical examiner Phil Hendricks (Aiden Gillen, last seen as mayor of Baltimore in The Wire). Hendricks is openly gay, and Gillen gets to camp it up a bit, but it serves as contrast to Thorne's tightly-wrapped inner conflict, and Marsan's pent-up rage. It all fuels suspicion, which provides the perfect parallel, a correlative as it were, to the story of the killer they chase, and it gives the actors perfect storm moments, most notably when Thorne believes Hendricks is a killer, and when Tughan tries to get a confession implicating Thorne in a long-ago crime that is his deepest secret.

But the central role is that of the victim who remains alive, but trapped inside herself, and as Alison Sara Lloyd Gregory steals the show, getting all the best lines, including comedy, in voice-over and relishing the kind of role that Who's Live Is It Anyway made an actor's dream. Hers is the central role because she is also the reflection of Thorne, a character trapped inside himself in a less dramatic way. Thus he's more alive in her presence than in his burgeoning romance with her doctor, played by Natascha McElhone. Her screen-dominant face often seems to be in another far more glamorous movie; she projects a sense a coldness and remove here that makes her character less than convincing, as if she's trying to match Gregory in inert power. The one thankless role belongs to Lorraine Ashbourne, as the DCI charged with being exasperated and giving Thorne one last chance.

The thinnest part is the actual killer, whose identity needs to be kept secret, and in the secret-keeping come the plots biggest holes. SPOILER ALERT! It seems odd that forensics (the sneakers, perhaps?) would not be able to establish a link beyond the original suspect's alibi, and it is extremely odd that as the plot resolves itself Hendricks should recognise a photo as being Frank Calvert—who grew up in Canada and took another identity-- and if you can accept for some reason that it would that Thorne somehow would not. But quibbles aside, the working out of the mechanics of the plot succeeds because of the dramatic resolutions, plural, it provides. Just as the real story is not Thorne v Sleepyhead, so the dramatic resolutions involve the release of trapped people and trapped emotions.That this cop drama is able to render this so clearly and with such involving presentation, and that I'm so reisistent to the idea of watching it in three parts, suggests the DVD drama is indeed the way of the future.

BITING INTO LIZA MARKLUND'S RED WOLF

Red Wolf is the fifth in the series following intrepid reporter Annika Bengtzon, immediately following The Bomber, which was fourth in the series but, confusingly enough, the first published in English translation. Bengtzon is back to work but still recovering from her tunnel ordeal at the hands of the eponymous terrorist. Travelling to the far north of Sweden to write about a terrorist incident at a Swedish air base forty years earlier, she is drawn into a series of murders which begin with a local reporter who was working on the same thing. Soon Bengtzon finds herself in the middle of an old Swedish revolutionary cell, whose leader, like Carlos, became an international assassin for hire and now has returned to his homeland to die. And perhaps kill.

It's a complicated plot, replete with terrorist issues that resonate in today's climate, and with a serious reflection on the fate of the extreme left within Sweden's evolving social democratic system. But, as ever, the real drive of the novel comes from Bengtzon herself, and her life. She's still a bull in a china shop, both at her newspaper and with her husband, and her experiences have taken some of her always shaky confidence away. What is most impressive is the way Marklund shows us Annika best through other characters: the reactions of her husband, considering an affair, as he contemplates her qualities; the inablity of her friend Anne to cope with personal problems of her own. In the end what makes Bengtzon so interesting is that she often is less than sympathetic, but she is always driven by her own innate sense of justice and fairness, which puts us on her side, especially when faced with government apparatchicks and newspaper editors. And in fact, that's the other real strength of this series, the way Bengtzon's commitment to old fashioned journalism is constantly at odds with those in power who prefer not to be investigated. And in Red Wolf, she finds her investigations being simultaneously blocked by her editor and used for commercial opportunity by her publisher.

It's easy to see why Marklund would be one of James Patterson's choices to collaborate with. She's one of the more approachable of the Scandinavian writers; her prose is utilitarian at best, and that comes through in this translation, but she's able to mix adroitly the personal with large scale plots, and of course, as a woman she brings a new dimension to the Patterson machine. The best thing one might say about Red Wolf is that it makes the reader willing to test the Patterson waters with their collaboration, The Postcard Killers.

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund
Corgi, £6.99, ISBN 9780552162319

STEVE HAMILTON'S LOCK ARTIST

When Michael was eight he managed to escape a murderous rampage by his father. Ten years later, he has never spoken since, and is adept at only two things, drawing and picking locks. It's that latter skill which leads him into a life of crime, and which makes The Lock Artist such a compelling read.

Steve Hamilton switched gears after writing seven novels about Alex McKnight, set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The thriller Night Work, about a probation officer in upstate New York, had some similarities to his series novels, particularly in the cold loneliness that seems to pervade his characters, but it went in different directions. He's moved in another direction with this one, and in one sense he's put together a caper novel with a series of robberies whose executions and malfunctions would do Donald Westlake proud. The detail of lock picking and safe-cracking is fascinating and convincing, and the sense of anonymity around professional thieves fits perfectly with his character's needs.

Almost too perfectly, because The Lock Artist is another book in which Hamilton puts the alone in stand-alone. Michael is literally closed off from the world around, and the real question in the book is not whether or not he gets caught, or gets killed, or even gets the girl. It's whether anyone, including himself, will be able to pick the lock on his silence, and free the boy who's underneath. This is not a rhetorical question, and the way Hamilton has structured the book, which is told through multiple flashbacks and being narrated from a prison cell is challenging, because it closes off some story options while keeping many of Michael's options open. And much as I am inclined to like characters named Michael who come from Milfords (this one's in Michigan, not Connecticut, but still) Hamilton never gets too soft or sentimental, although there is the sense, in the budding comic strip relationship he has with his girl, that he is indeed a different character from the one whose survival instincts seem pretty well honed.

The Lock Artist works as a thriller, and it works as an interesting character study in which Hamilton plays against the type for a cool technician of thievery. The novel seemed to slip between the cracks when it was published here in June; it deserves more attention, and I recommend you read it and see why.

The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton
Orion £18.99 ISBN 9780752891958

THE AMERICAN: GEORGE CLOONEY A HIT MAN AT THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

NOTE: This review contains serious spoilers, so if you are intending to see the movie and don't want to know where it tries to go, don't read beyond the first three paragraphs...

It appears that all big-time actors need to play a hit man (cf Cruise, Tom) and it may be a corollary to that idea that all arty directors need to make a sombre crime drama. There are worse things, as anyone who suffered through the mockney gangster cycle can attest, but if, with The American, which opens at the London Film Festival Saturday and will go into release later, Anton Corbijn and George Clooney have both gotten their wish, the result is a mish-mash of hommage and cliche which seems to have fallen between two critical stools: in America there isn't enough action for the film to make sense, in Europe there is too much action, in the sense that the cliche-driven story appears to be too confusing for them to make sense of it. I'm not sure why, because, although it is ultimately an immensely unsatisfying movie, shot through with more holes than Clooney's victims, it's also interesting visually, offers Clooney's and some other performances, and plays with some of the tropes of the genre with at least some seriousness. Or you can simply ogle Violante Placido, as the director seems to do.

Although it's based on Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentleman, screenwriter Rowan Joffe seems to have signposted it with obvious elements drawn from gangster movies and westerns (that Once Upon The Time In The West is seen on the TV is neither coincidental nor subtle) and only plays with them to occasionally soften them for the benefit of Clooney's Jack, which as we shall see is unconvincing. Meanwhile the plot's ultimate silliness is exaggerated by small details that don't work (her insistance on ordering a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, in Abruzzo, but not specifying which of the hundreds available) and which remind us that it's just a way to get Clooney to the resolution. At one point the friendly priest says to Clooney, 'you Americans, you think you can escape history,' but that doesn't appear to apply to filmmakers.

That resolution reinforces the sense that the real influence this film draws upon is Paolo Sorrentino's marvelous 2004 film, The Consequences Of Love, which also played at the London Film Festival, and which featured Toni Servillo as a man confined to a Swiss hotel as a Mafia go-between, whose life changes when he begins a relationship with the hotel barmaid. The parallels with the quietness of a closed-down man coming out of himself are too close to miss, even without a sniper sight.

Clooney plays a big-time hit-man apparently souring on the business, especially when he's 'forced' to kill his Swedish girl-friend in the midst of a Stieg Larsson idyll. Someone's out to get him, and he retreats to Italy, leaving bodies behind, taking his gun, and apparently attracting no attention even when he appears to be the only person on his getaway ferry. In Italy his contact, Pavel, Terrance Stamp as played by Johan Leysen, persuades him to do 'one last job', and right away you realise that the story options are limited. That this last job involves not shooting anyone, but merely constructing a weapon for someone else, suggests where the story is going to go, as he creates the means of his own destruction, and sure enough, it goes there.

Pavel sends Clooney to a small village in Abruzzo, where Clooney drives around because that's what happened in Antonioni's Passenger, which was also about an America in a strange environment, though Jack Nicholson was only adopting a hit-man's identity, and Maria Schneider was, well, Maria Schneider. Clooney then realises that he sticks out like, uh, an American, Clooney ups stakes for another small village where he, uh, sticks out like an American. So it goes. There he rents a cottage that conveniently has an industrial strength vice bolted to its kitchen table, and meets a priest, Father Benedetto (benediction, coming to an end, you get it?) so philosophical yet flawed you wonder if the hit man is aiming at creating some weapon of Mass destruction. Luckily, said priest has an illegitimate son whose garage provides the necessary materiel for Clooney's gun (and what it doesn't can be sent by fedex, presumeably from the same Acme company that provided Wile E Coyote with his weapons). So far so good.

Corbijn makes a lot of this visually interesting, especially when he uses aerials that gives a sort of of Gursky sense of individuals being lost in a wider pattern beyond their control. Sadly, Google Earth has rendered some of those images redundant, taking away their power, but still the mountainous landscape and twisting roads make the idea work. There is also the stunning landscape provided by Placido, who's the daughter of the actor Michele Placido, as Clara, the local whore with the heart of gold who can't help falling in love with this hit man because, after all, he is George Clooney. She appears to be auditioning for producers the world over as she channels her inner Maria Schneider, and Corbijn rarely misses a chance to expose her body parts as if they were the fleshly equivalent of the gun Clooney is constructing. If there is a metaphor lost in there I've missed it. Or maybe she is the temptation to which Father Benedetto (nicely played by Paolo Bonacelli) has succumbed.

Clooney is making the weapon for a Belgian woman, Mathilde (Thekla Rueten) who shoots almost as well as Clooney and whose motivations remain shadowy (unless you've figured out where this all is going, which you should have). The mysterious assassins who tried to kill him in Sweden return, and again he leaves the body and takes the gun, and no one seems to make any connections. And finally, having been suspicious of a whore who'd offer him real affection, Clooney decides to fall in love with his hooker, and also decides to get out (yes, we thought he'd already decided that, since that's what 'one last job' means) and that means, of course, that Pavel will betray him and have him killed. Since the implication is that it is Pavel who's been orchestrating the previous attempts, this may be redundant, but assuming that he's only just concluded the kinder, gentler Clooney is a liabilty, it makes his next actions very obvious (to everyone except the art-housers).

Clooney, of course, figures it out, and rigs the gun (indicated in a brief shot whose meaning is hammered home to anyone familiar with the genre, but appears to have been too subtle by half, which says more about audiences these days than anything else) to blow up in Mathilde's face, but in a shootout with Pavel he suffers the standard at-first-unseen-but-fatal wound, and dies just as he gets to the idyllic picnic spot where he had come to realise Clara (clear, if you're unclear) is his true love.

The problem with the endgame is basically the inability to leave the cliches alone. We've already seen feelings from Clooney (his expression when he shoots his Swedish girlfriend) and now, as he drives away with what anyone who's ever seen a western knows is his fatal wound, he pounds the steering wheel in frustration. It's as if playing with gray hair and lonely exercise has created a new soul for both actor and killer. This is Mel Gibson as Richard Stark's Parker, unless we are to believe that love has rendered him soppy all of a sudden. We know, as Father Benedetto did, that Americans may think they can escape history, but movie hitmen can't. When he gets to the picnic spot where he and Placido are to meet, and this time she isn't wearing her hooker-heaven sunsuit, she runs to the car screaming, and as Clooney's head hits the horn, her screams continue. This shows a lack of subtlety, but then the camera moves up, through the tree tops, giving us a final shot of the sky, and eternal freedom (or nothingness). What this does is render all those previous aerials meaningless: the last shot should have been another from above, with Clooney, his car, and his love all disappearing into the Abruzzo landscape. But the ending as is seems more like The Passenger, and maybe that's the signpost Corbijn and Clooney were after.

JAMES KILPATRICK: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of the right-wing columnist and TV pundit James Kilpatrick, who died almost two months ago, is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. I remember the Watergate tapes incident very clearly, the pathos of 'Jack' opining the tapes showed merely Nixon's great sense of humour, and my delight at the restraint Nick Von Hoffman showed by likening Nixon to a dead mouse on the kitchen floor of America, rather than the more apposite 'rat'. I still remember Kilpatrick's staged expression of shock, and thinking how shallow power's defense of itself could be.

Von Hoffman got fired anyway, too uncontrollable for the tight strictures and entertainment boundaries of a show like 60 Minutes. He was replaced by the anodyne wishy-washy middle-of-the-road Shana Alexander. It set the tone for America's right-left 'debate' for the next 40 years; unreconstructed right-wing extremists beating up on conservative centrists. You saw the result during the second Bush regime, when those opposed to an illegal war justified by lies and killing tens of thousands of people were labelled 'haters', and the only coherent mainstream opposition arose on a comedy show.

The question of Kilpatrick's racism is a more interesting one, whether or not you believe he actually did 'reform'. Articulating faux-leagalistic positions for racism is one thing, white supremacy another, but he was equally adept at both. That the right is allowed leeway to play- act around oppression by wrapping it in constitutional issues and still be taken seriously, while at the same time arguing thinly-disguised racism and be taken as jolly good fellows amazed me then and amazes me now.

It also bothers me that the issue of grammar and usage has been usurped by the right, as if only conservatives could write well. William F Buckley's patrician pretense and fake English accent charmed many Democrats (not least my mother, who watched his show faithfully, inciting my teenaged vitriol). I recall William Safire, the left fork of Nixon's tongue, lecturing us in his New York Times column on writing style, about how the word 'homosexual' came from the Latin 'homo' meaning man. At least the Times ran some letters correcting him, including one which suggested that 'homogenized' milk must then be milk from male cows. I think this appropriation of 'correct' prose serves the authoritarian impulse, but also is used to provide a thin coating of justification for conservativism itself, as if the use of proper English led naturally to the right.

Kilpatrick was a ground-breaker in many ways for American conservatives. It would be nice to say we won't see his like again, but we surely will, if generally in coarser versions.