The Crying Game (1992)

I mean, I suppose you could argue that The Crying Game is in some ways a close spiritual sister to Neil Jordan's previous film, Mona Lisa, but there's no denying that The Crying Game is one of a kind thanks to that twist.

Like the earlier Jordan film, I can't really put into words how much of an impact this film still makes on me with every watch. The reveal of the twist is no longer a surprise to anyone of course, but this is a film that is far from a one trick pony. The screenplay is so bloody good, that often events are foreshadowed or counterbalanced in the most deliciously ironic and satisfying of ways. Dil's belief that 'Jimmy' aka Fergus is Scottish in some way mirrors his own mistaken allusions regarding Dil, whilst the spectral image that continues to haunt Fergus of Jody in his cricket whites comes forth, complete with Forest Whitaker's incredible smile, to reveal that he had bowled him a very distinctive googly all along. 

The googly in question is of course Jaye Davidson; an incredible role and a brilliant performance. Davidson pitches it all at such a wonderfully underplayed level that it retains its utter mystique and, even now, you find yourself almost convinced. Indeed no performance is out of place here; Stephen Rea is at his most sympathetic and tragically, sweetly heroic, whilst Miranda Richardson and Adrian Dunbar prove an effectively dangerous and darkly alluring pair of screen villains. Meanwhile Ralph Brown plays a character that I once told him arguably sets the template for the tracksuited scorned lover type you would find in any edition of Jeremy Kyle that you could care to mention, which amused him. 

Like a lot of Jordan films, the foundations of The Crying Game are quite fondly nostalgic, yearning for a Noirish 1940s or '50s, and this is never more clear than in Jim Broadbent's sympathetic intermediary of a barman, Col, who comes from a long line of such characters stretching all the way back to Dooley Wilson's Sam in Casablanca. But the beautiful thing about Jordan during this period was that he so effectively infused old fashioned tropes with some distinctively modern storytelling. I still think that my favourite era and genre of filmmaking is Film Four in the 1980s and '90s.

Out On Blue Six: Stiff Little Fingers

End Transmission

Wordless Wednesday: Face in the Crowd

Resurrection Man (1998)

....Or Clockwork Orangeman as it could almost be called.

Resurrection Man is a 1998 film from director Marc Evans that is based on the 1994 novel of the same name by Eoin McNamee. Like that book, McNamee's screenplay takes inspiration from what is arguably the most notorious sequence of killings to occur in Northern Irish history during the Troubles. Between 1975 and 1977, several Catholic men were picked at random during the hours of darkness by an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang known as The Shankill Butchers. The gang earned their name because of the ferocious and brutal way they tortured, mutilated and dispatched victims who were chosen solely for their religion; cleavers, axes and butcher's knives were the tools of their trade (though they weren't above shootings and bombings in their long-running bloody sectarian campaign either) and their ringleader, described by one detective as 'a ruthless, dedicated terrorist with a sadistic streak, regarded by those who knew him well as a psychopath' was one Lenny Murphy. In 1979 eleven of the gang were given 42 life sentences totaling almost 2,000 years for 100 charges including 19 counts of murder. Murphy himself was already in prison on a lesser charge at this point and, as a result, was never convicted of murder. His violent life and sadistic reign of terror came to an end four years later in 1982 however when, pulling up at his girlfriend's home, he was shot twenty-two times by two IRA gunmen.

Centre-stage in this tale is Stuart Townsend as Victor Kelly, our thinly disguised fictional version of Murphy. A naturally good looking man, Townsend brings a degree of dark glamour and kinky, twisted romanticism to the role despite the abhorrent nature of his character, traits which are a world away from the real Murphy who went by the nickname 'Planet of the Apes' on account of his neanderthal looks. What is carried over from fact to fiction however is the theory that Murphy's murderous zeal stemmed from the fact that this great loyalist terrorist had some Catholic blood himself. This appears to stem from the fact that Murphy is a fairly uncommon name amongst Protestants but it is worth saying that is not an unusual one by any means. Whilst Murphy's commitment may well have been driven by suggestions that he himself was the thing he despised the most, a 'Fenian', the film goes one further by depicting his father as an ineffectual and weak-willed man whom many claim to be Catholic. This slur clearly weighs heavily on both Townsend's Kelly and his overbearing mother (played superbly by Brenda Fricker) who each treat the 'man of the house', their father and husband respectively (George Shane), with utter contempt and disdain. Whilst this is clearly a work of fiction and psychological conjecture (Murphy senior was actually a serving member in the UVF) it helps to bolster that other trademark of gangster movies, namely the oedipal nature of the relationship between kingpin son and his beloved mother which stretches all the way back to Cagney's White Heat, a film that the young Kelly is seen to watch in complete awe at one point. Certainly the behaviour of Fricker when Kelly's blonde haired, doe-eyed and pneumatic moll, Heather (Geraldine O'Rawle) comes round is more in keeping with a bitter love rival than a mother simply wanting the best for her child. Freud is further wheeled out in a suggestion of repressed homosexuality too; Kelly mimics oral sex with his pistol as a way to attract the attention of UVF big-hitters, McClure (Sean McGinley) and Darkie (John Hannah), and is shown to lavish much, pseudo-erotic attention on his victims during torture (he's often naked from the waist up too, presumably to spare this peacock's beloved wardrobe any bloodshed); the final deathstroke often coming to resemble a near-ejaculate like bloodletting and a significant release that leaves Kelly near-catotonically spent. It is also revealed that McClure has shown him photographs of 'English boys in bed together'. This revelation comes during a particularly outrageous, drink and drug-fuelled scene that features the pair embracing and almost kissing whilst Jerusalem plays in the Union Jack bedecked backroom of the bar, with McClure wearing an SS cap!  

It's these little moments of loyalist patriotism that actually gives the film it's sense of place. Indeed, what's interesting about Resurrection Man is how, despite its true-life inspiration, it removes itself from much of the Troubles to simply depict instead the story of a serial killer/gangster. Just take a look at the press release blurb that was subsequently used on the DVD release;

'Victor Kelly is a gangster and ruthless murderer - a 'Scarface' for his generation. He is the leader of a gang of killers known as "Resurrection Men" who target victims in a city where boundaries are marked by blood. Victor's cruelty makes him a ghastly local legend, both feared and venerated. On his trail is Ryan, a journalist, fuelled by an obsessive need to discover the truth about the "Resurrection Man" he is unaware of the risk to his own life. "Resurrection Man" is a chilling and controversial film not for the faint-hearted'

I do wonder if this seeming refusal to acknowledge the political situation inherent in the film, both in this blurb and in the film itself (only slurs of 'Taig' and 'Fenian' indicate just what is going on), has something to do with the climate the film was released in; in 1998 a tentative peace process was being delivered in Northern Ireland which eventually came to a greater fruition at the turn of the 21st century. Whatever the reasons, it works to make Resurrection Man a universal film, riffing on notions as wide-ranging as classic gangster or serial killer films, Bonnie and Clyde romance, violence-for-kicks affairs like the aforementioned A Clockwork Orange, and an almost vampiric thirst for blood. Indeed, the scenes of a malevolent, black-clad Townsend stalking the moonlit streets for victims was enough to ensure that he was subsequently cast as Anne Rice's vampire hero Lestat (previously portrayed in cinema by Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire) in the 2002 film, Queen of the Damned.  

I first saw Resurrection Man not long after its release, buying it on VHS. I was interested to watch it for a number of reasons; not least my interest in the Troubles, but also my appreciation of actors such as James Nesbitt, who stars here as Ryan, the journalist on Kelly's trail, and who was at the time riding high with his success in ITV's Cold Feet  - this film affording him the opportunity to move away from comedy and light drama play the kind of heavy dramatic role he has subsequently proved just as adept at - and Derek Thompson who, since 1986, is best known for playing Charlie Fairhead in Casualty, but whose career prior to this (at present) thirty-three-year role included several Troubles-related films. Thompson took a break from Casualty, then in it's eleventh year, to play the role of Herbie Ferguson, the detective investigating the brutal murders - the last original role he has played in his career as the past twenty odd years has seen him continue in the role of nurse Fairhead. There's a reunion, of sorts, between him and his old friend Brenda Fricker, who played Megan Roach in the first five years of Casualty, though they share no actual scenes on film together. Amongst the other familiar Irish faces, there's also a fine supporting turn from the great James Ellis as a veteran seen-it-all reporter and mentor to Nesbitt, though sadly he disappears from the film once the action ramps up.

I remember watching Resurrection Man at the time and thinking 'my God, but Belfast is a bleak place', so imagine my surprise when the credits rolled around to reveal that the film had actually been shot on my own doorstep, in Warrington, Liverpool and Manchester! Indeed, plenty of scenes are shot on streets I actually know, including Legh Street in Warrington, which once housed the now demolished grand Victorian bath house that proves central to the film in its latter stages, whilst its exterior is also featured specifically in a scene in which Nesbitt questions some workers from a Chinese takeaway. The location work, aided by some good cinematography (that late 90s look, before digital colour grading took hold) all help to create a grim, desolate sense of place, with the former (so resolutely not being Belfast) helping to give that sense of near-dystopic hinterland that compliments the film's refusal to be too tied down to the reality of the setting.

As you can tell, I like Resurrection Man enough to still keep returning to it twenty-one-years after its release, though it's not a masterpiece by any means. Structurally it's somewhat unsound; what may have worked well on the page struggles to make much of an impact on the screen, specifically the implication that Kelly represents the dark side of Ryan's nature he struggles to keep in check, as evinced by his drunken beating of his wife, the local casualty doctor (Zara Turner) and his overall fascination with Kelly's violence which suggests he does what Ryan can only dream of. Both men even fall for the same woman; O'Rawle's Heather. The issue here being of course that neither man is truly likeable, which can be a stumbling block for some audiences, though Ryan does at least relinquish the grip his demons has on him thanks to his experience of the unrepentant, unreconstructed Kelly and returns to his wife, in reconciliatory mood. Director Marc Evans aims for a sort of Scorsese style in his eclectic use of '70s rock music to score scenes of revelry and violence (infamously, Mud's 'Tiger Feet' is used over the savage kicking of a Catholic in Kelly's local, whilst more satisfyingly, The Walker Brothers' 'No Regrets' plays as Herbie comes to arrest Kelly, with Heather offering her lover her best Bonnie Parker smile) but the freeze frames he often employs during such music-laden sequences are distinctly Guy Ritchie, himself no stranger to the positives of a good magpie-like soundtrack. Viewed at the time, these tricks may seem like stealing but, watched now with some distance between it, it serves as an interesting museum piece of the stylings from the turn of the century British cinema.   

Produced by Andrew Eaton and executive produced by Michael Winterbottom, Resurrection Man is a dark and unprepossessingly dour and dank psychological thriller that some audiences may find hard to stomach. Whilst it's nowhere near as gratuitously violent as any number of grimy American torture-porn horrors you can name that subsequently rose to the surface in the years after its release, it often reviles simply by what is implied or what is *just about* seen or suggested, though the real root of revulsion of course stems from the fact that what you witness is based on actual events.

Maeve (1981)

"Men's relationship to women is just like England's relationship to Ireland. You're in possession of us. You occupy us like an army"

It's the generally accepted view that the British film industry was in the doldrums in the 1980s but I think that verdict needs to be tempered by the fact that this period saw a time of great artistic creativity from young independent and political filmmakers (Richard Woolley immediately springs to mind), which makes the fact that the work which they contributed in this period is now so scarce and overlooked all the more frustrating. When you stumble upon such work however, it makes it all the more rewarding to the viewer. Maeve, directed by Pat Murphy and funded by a grant from the BFI, is one such film.

Simply put, the film tells the story of Maeve Sweeney (Mary Jackson) a young Irishwoman who, having spent some time in the relative peace of London, now returns home to the Troubles-stricken Belfast. Returning to her family home and her old haunts, stimulates in Maeve memories of her childhood and adolescence and forces her to question herself, her politics and her identity. However, it's this latter analysis that makes Maeve such an intriguing prospect, as Murphy approaches ideologies such as feminism and republicanism in an experimental and reflective film style, that is perhaps best evinced by the narrative's many unheralded temporal shifts and Murphy's decision to allow a character like Maeve's despondent father (Mark Mulholland) to deliver anecdotes almost directly to camera, as if the audience itself were a complicit character within the film.

What is especially remarkable about Maeve is that it is a film that addresses the political situation in the north of Ireland from a woman's point of view. Granted, there are many other films that explore the Troubles and choose to place a woman at their centre, but they are invariably tales about a woman without man, grieving for their significant loved ones lost to the cause, incarceration or death, or tales of women simply possessing enough practical common sense (of the stereotypically feminine or matriarchal no-nonsense variety) to take a stand against the man-made violence they see around them, whereas Maeve speaks to a much more interesting feminist perspective hinted at in the quote I placed at the top of this review; namely that once the war is over, no matter what side has 'won', nothing will have changed for women if their menfolk still expect them to be wives and mothers only. Incarceration does feature in Maeve - her father was falsely imprisoned which goes some way to explain his detached nature - but both Maeve and her resilient mother's (played by Trudy Kelly) reaction to it is anger at the general consensus that womenfolk should simply accept this situation (along with the acceptance that informing on the real perpetrators is against the code) and that Maeve's leaving of such a committed nationalist community and way of life for bohemian London (and, in general England, the enemy) is considered as some kind of treasonable act or of having ideas above your station and class (even by her republican boyfriend, played by John Keegan). Where Murphy's film is bold and still incredibly refreshing is in its defiant challenging of Irish gender stereotypes and imagery. 

Visually, the film is very arresting too. Murphy delivers a series of authentic images of Troubles-era Belfast, but shot through them is a very artistic, somewhat surreal eye. This is especially pleasing as, the thought of tanks and armed soldiers strolling through such recognisably everyday streets will always feel surreal for British viewers. Thus, when Maeve and her younger sister Roisin (the ever-superb Bríd Brennan, refreshingly carefree here after her role in the Billy plays) are forced to hop on the spot for two rifle-toting soldiers whilst children play on the swings just yards away, or when the younger Maeve watches as her father painstakingly unloads his van of several television sets in the pouring rain, only to be instructed to place them all back in by a soldier the moment the last one touches the tarmac, your appreciation of the reality of this situation is accompanied by the invitation to embrace just how stupid it all is/was. A later sequence, almost dreamlike in its imagery, sees Maeve and Roisin heading for a night on the town. After passing through the checkpoint where their bags are inspected by the RUC, they immediately take in the sight of a bare-arsed squaddie giving a bored-looking local girl a knee-trembler in a shop doorway. It's scenes like this that I know will linger long in my memory.

Much of Maeve's theoretical debates stem from scenes shared between her and her boyfriend/ex boyfriend, Liam. Here, through her leading lady, Murphy attempts to challenge the notion of a paternal nationalism and demand a place for feminism. Tellingly, the film pinpoints the distance between the characters; Maeve looks to the future, whilst Liam only ever to the past. When he argues that the past is important enough to oblige us with a way of understanding the present, Maeve is quick to remove him of his - and republicanism and the patriarchy's - ignorance; "You're talking about a false memory... the way you want to remember excludes me. I get remembered out of existence." Taking this quote in the context of Murphy's subsequent career as a filmmaker - which includes films like Anne Devlin, which approaches the 1803 Irish revolt from the experience of a female republican played by Brennan, and Nora, the James Joyce biopic told from the POV of his wife and muse, Nora Barnacle - I'd say that Murphy was doing her best to place women back into the picture.

We Need to Talk About Karen

Following her disgusting comments in the House yesterday, Karen Bradley's position as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is no longer tenable.

To be fair, her position should never have been considered tenable the moment she uttered this startling omission;

"I freely admit that when I started this job, I didn't understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that are in Northern Ireland. I didn't understand things like when elections are fought for example in Northern Ireland, people who are nationalists don't vote for unionist parties and vice-versa. So, the parties fight for the election within their own community...That's a very different world from the world I came from"

She showed her ignorance even further yesterday when - just a week before the PPS intend to announce whether prosecutions can be brought against the soldiers involved in the Bloody Sunday killings - she said;

"Over 90% of the killings during the Troubles were at the hands of terrorists. The under 10% that were at the hands of the military and police were not crimes...(but were) people acting under orders or instructions, fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way"

This inflammatory comment shows she has no understanding of the events in question or the shoot-to-kill policy and collusion between our security services and paramilitaries like the UVF, nor did she have a grasp on basic law.

Today she has issued an apology, another example of an MP who has somehow 'misspoke' (see the Independent Group's Angela Smith and her 'funny tinge' comment), but it's not enough. To my mind, Karen Bradley's comments - indeed her role as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland - shows the profoundly cavalier attitude that the Tory establishment have for Ireland, an attitude that has recently been at the fore of the Brexit backstop issue, with Jacob Rees-Mogg's belief that Troubles-era border checks should become commonplace again being exactly the kind of comment one expects from a privileged, self-entitled man who wouldn't have to experience them himself, whilst Boris Johnson dismisses these concerns as "small"

If you agree that Karen Bradley is not fit to serve Northern Ireland then please sign this petition demanding her resignation.

Silent Sunday: Watch What You Say

The Foreigner (2017)

I'm always a little apprehensive about thrillers that decide to resurrect an old real world terror for plot purposes. With that in mind, it could be argued that Martin Campbell's The Foreigner, with its depiction of an IRA splinter group commencing a new mainland bombing campaign is in poor taste, is ludicrously anachronistic, or is worryingly prescient in post Brexit Britain. 

Anachronism is definitely something at play here, because The Foreigner often feels like the kind of thriller that would have played out back in the '90s off the back of Patriot Games and the like. That's because it's actually based on a novel from Stephen Leather with the less PC title of The Chinaman which was published in 1992 when the Troubles when the IRA's mainland bombing campaign was still active. What makes Campbell's adaptation topical however is the depiction of Pierce Brosnan as a former IRA soldier turned politician; that often controversial issue of just where the IRA ends and were Sinn Féin begins is explored at length in the film in the same way that it was following the death of Martin McGuinness last year. Ultimately however, I'm just not really convinced by the IRA resurgence or their aims here.

The late, great Ken Campbell believed that Jackie Chan was the greatest living actor of his generation (this opinion was reached during a seance in which Campbell asked the spirit of Sir Laurence Olivier who was the greatest actor currently out there!) and it's fair to say that, as Chan gets older, he's showcasing more and more of his acting chops as the stunt work clearly becomes less feasible for the sixty-four year old action star. The Foreigner is certainly no exception; as a grieving and sullen father seeking revenge for the murder of his daughter, Chan certainly convinces. There are moments at the immediate start of the film where you suspect Chan is going to play not only his age, but a somewhat everyman figure; an aging, mild mannered family man based in London, and I think Campbell elicits a fine performance from him. This is all a bluff of course as, once Chan commences his vendetta and his particular skillset with violence becomes more and more apparent, its revealed that he was in a former life a US trained special forces soldier, just like everyone always is in these kind of films. This plot development allows for the kinetic action set pieces that Chan has built his career upon to take place of course, although the use of CGI and stunt doubles are much more noticeable now. They're still rollicking fun of course, but the real plus to this film is when Chan really is acting - playing a deeply hurt man lost in both a sea of grief and vengeance - and a world away from his usual high-kicking comic screen persona.

Speaking of acting, anyone who has ever read me banging on at length here or on LB about how poor I found his Bond films will know I'm not a huge fan of Pierce Brosnan, however his performance here ranks among his very best and is certainly on a par with his work in The Tailor of Panama or Polanski's The Ghost. Fellow Irishman Dermot Crowley also delivers some strong support as a warring lieutenant and the pair get to snarl and explode at one another in several tense dialogue heavy scenes. Sometimes these politically-conscious sequences feel like they belong in a different, more realistic movie and we have to remind ourselves that Jackie Chan is hiding out in the woods somewhere going full-Rambo. It's that kind of strange movie really, it doesn't always come together and it sometimes feels like it needs a kick up the arse, but its not a waste of time by any stretch and is nowhere near as offensive as 'imagine Jackie Chan taking on the IRA' sounds.

The only niggling thing about the anachronism left over from Leather's novel is that Chan's character is repeatedly referred to by the eponymous description of 'The Chinaman' throughout, so it's rather surprising that the film chooses to call itself The Foreigner instead - something that no one says at all. I get that it's more PC, but the title does sort of comes out of nowhere. Surely another title altogether would have been better?

The Violent Enemy (1967)

The Violent Enemy is a passable late '60s British thriller that is actually based on an early Jack Higgins novel (back when he was writing as Hugh Marlowe) entitled A Candle for the Dead. Anyone familiar with Higgins will spot his trademarks here; the former committed IRA man who now finds himself with a conscience forced to do one last job is a premise that the author would go on to explore in a number of novels (and their film adaptations) including The Eagle Has Landed, A Prayer for the Dying and those dismal '90s made-for-TV cheapo thrillers starring the likes of Rob Lowe and Kyle McLachlan. Here, it's the turn of Tom Bell as Sean Rogan, an explosives expert who is persuaded to break out of an English gaol to sabotage a Dublin electrics base that helps makes arms for the UK military.  

Bell was a fine actor who didn't get much opportunity to become the leading man he could so easily have been, so it ought to come as no surprise that he dominates what is effectively a small B movie. I haven't read the novel on which it is based (Higgins novels are something of a rites of passage for blokes, along with those of Sven Hassel or Alistair Maclean, and I stopped reading Higgins novels as a very young man when I realised how interchangeable and unoriginal they all were) but I'm guessing on the printed page Rogan was an older man than the one that Bell depicts. There's a lot of talk about the old days and the cause he shares with mastermind Colm O'Moore (played here by Ed Begley, and sporting a surprisingly not too shabby Irish accent it has to be said) that seem a little silly coming from such a young man and it doesn't convince that both he and the much older O'Moore were once brothers-in-arms. It's a stretch of credulity I don't mind though if it means we have Bell.

As for the rest of the cast well, Susan Hampshire is sadly miscast as Rogan's love interest, Hannah, an idealistic young Irish woman who has fallen for the romance of the old tales of rebellion and is initially immune to the realities of the here and now. Hampshire struggles with the Irish accent, as does Bell too on occasion, and seems altogether too 'nice' to convince as the character. The distinguished Irish actor Noel Purcell lends a touch of much needed authenticity as a former revolutionary now lame and running a sympathetic pub and acting as the fixer, though there's some unintentional merriment for viewers in one scene where he instructs his guests to the sitting room, as his brogue and whistling teeth makes it sound more like 'the shitting room'! 

Another trope of Higgins' work rears its head in the appearance of two London gangsters who are employed to help with O'Moore's plot, get up Rogan's nose, and who the audience would have to be incredibly dense not to suspect of having an ulterior motive that means they are the real villains of the piece. These characters are played by Jon Laurimore and that archetypal '60s face, Michael Standing. I always liked Standing and lament the fact that his career was all but over by the mid '70s. He is of course best remembered for being the man who didn't realise he was 'only supposed to blow the bloody doors off' for Michael Caine in The Italian Job. Paired up against Bell, the pair get the most from the fractious protagonist/antagonist relationship within the screenplay. 

I'd love to be able to say that The Violent Enemy is one of those unsung gems of British '60s cinema but it's actually just one to file alongside the likes of When Eight Bells Toll and, like that film, feels and looks not unlike a slightly bigger budget episode of the action orientated TV dramas of the era - many of which Sharp directed. It's also one of those sentimental films that depict IRA men as misty eyed romantics clad in long grey overcoats walking to and from the pub to the sound of fiddly tin whistle march on the soundtrack. Watchable, but nothing more.

Radio On (1979)

Wimpy bars  and the Westway. Nightshifts spinning discs for the disinterested workers at the Gilette factory and fresh wintry evenings with sopping wet hair. Getting your hair cut short, too short. The end of an affair and the open road. Inky black nights and doom laden news. The Troubles on the radio and flickering away on your three TV sets back home. A psychotic AWOL squaddie brings them to your passenger side. Rainswept roads and pylons. Snow on the hills and mist in the air. Fräulein drifters and an Eddie Cochran obsessed petrol pump attendant. Your car radio, on with Bowie and Kraftwerk. The Blockheads and Devo. Wreckless Eric and Ohm Sweet Ohm. Pornographic slides and your dead brother, and why, and why, and which side was he on? 'Happy Birthday, Brother'. Why?

'We are the children of Fritz Lang and Werner Von Braun. We are the link between the Twenties and the Eighties. All change in society passes through a sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesizers and telephones. Our reality is an electronic reality'

Back in 2013, Radio On got its network television premiere a full thirty four years after it was made. And I was wrong about about it.

Let me be clear, Christopher Petit's film is still far from great. It's ponderous and pretentious, but it is also enigmatic and interesting and proof that sometimes you really do need to watch something more than once to get a handle on it. It is a snapshot of the winter of discontent, embracing the ice that was setting in ahead of Thatcher's ascendancy and offering little comfort or solution in journey's end. It's the enigma of it all that possibly alienated me five years ago but, returning to it now, I'm tempted to read Radio On along supernatural and metaphorical lines, and understand it all the better for it.

We never learn what happened to Robert's brother and how he met his end, alone in the bathtub of his flat. We learn from his girlfriend that the police are involved but, beyond the pornography Robert finds in a Get Carter-esque moment, there is no other suggestion of illegality. The talk of sides is the closest inference we get that his brother was mixed up in something - could it possibly be the Troubles? 

As the camera weaves its way around the brother's flat from tub to living room and that handwritten message about Fritz Lang and Werner Von Braun  (the closest thing to a suicide note?) I'm left to wonder if this is, in fact, his spirit leaving the body. His subsequent gift  from beyond to Robert of Kraftwerk tapes, complete with the message 'Happy Birthday, Brother' (when there's nothing to suggest it is Robert's actual birthday) takes on a great resonance throughout the film as it is music and the eponymous radio that will serve as Robert's most faithful companion on his journey. Is his late brother living on through the music, trying to make a connection - the 'sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesizers and telephones; the note implies will bring about a societal change? And, if so, is his death the thing to release the previously detached Robert from his stultifying limbo of late night London life? Does the brother's death represent the end of the 1970s and a necessary closure before the 1980s - and Robert's life - can commence. The 1980s seem to be a future that Petit is trying to suggest will (or should) exist on cleaner lines, in the European vein of Kraftwerk and Bowie's Berlin period; a world away from the rock and roll and American bubblegum dream that Robert seems to return to, either by Ian Dury's rocking lament to 'Sweet' Gene Vincent or one of his most chatty and good humoured encounters at the middle-of-nowhere garage with a fellow lost soul, living alone in a caravan and plucking his guitar to the strains of Three Steps to Heaven, waiting for an A+R man to make his dreams come true. A call that will never occur or a letter that will never arrive.

Unfortunately that petrol pump dreamer is Sting, and I still can't tolerate that atrocious cameo from the Geordie poser who dares to call Dave Dee an 'arsehole'. For a film that places so much store in good music, the casting of this future lute bothering knob makes it something of a mockery. Did Robert's brother die for nothing? It would seem so.

The Reckoning (1970)

It's the end of the 1960s and an affluent and ruthless self made man leaves London to return to his roots in the industrial and impoverished north where he is compelled to exact revenge for the death of a close relation.  

To anyone who has watched Get Carter that must sound rather familiar. But the star here isn't the cobra-eyed Michael Caine, it is the ever compelling Nicol Williamson, the northern roots aren't Newcastle, it is  Liverpool, and the deceased is the father, rather than the brother. Lastly, the gangsterism on display here is the 100% legal, but no less corruptible and crooked; capitalism.

This is The Reckoning. Directed by Jack Gold and adapted by Birkenhead born John McGrath from a Patrick Hall novel entitled The Harp That Once, this is actually a film that feels like a cross between Room at the Top and the aforementioned Mike Hodges gangster classic. Williamson stars as Michael 'Mick' Marler, a product of the back streets of Liverpool's Catholic Irish community, now a rising young executive. 

It is the character study of a high achiever destined for even greater things and in Williamson's performance, I'm reminded  of another cinematic character apart from Joe Lampton or Jack Carter; his Marler is a 'blunt instrument' in the same vein as Ian Fleming's James Bond, a man imbued with a natural aggression and unafraid to get his hands dirty when doing the bidding of his bosses. Marler doesn't care who he has to trample on to get to the top, he's going to succeed despite of those with the silver spoon in their mouths, not because of them, and this characteristic ruthlessness is just as evident in the bedroom as it is the boardroom, as he beds his wife, his secretary and an older woman back home in Liverpool - in this last respect, it's nice to see Rachel Roberts was still turning the heads of angry young men some ten years after the height of the kitchen sink drama. 

Returning to Liverpool, Marler learns that his father was attacked by some young bikers for singing a rebel ballad in a pub and that the subsequent beating brought on a fatal heart attack. Investigating via his old haunts and his father's pals, Marler reconnects with a life and community that is just as hard and unsentimental as the business world he has left behind, but is altogether more honest, accepting and without hypocrisy. Initially he is against the traditional notion of vengeance that is expected of him, but it is perhaps this realisation that his two worlds aren't so far apart, that Marler begins to test just how much he can get away with in life and brings a little bit of Liverpool and Ireland back to stultified middle class London. 

It's a real shame that The Reckoning is so little regarded, but I guess it falls awkwardly in time and place between the two films it reminded me most off - Room at the Top and Get Carter - coming a little too late for the social mobility angst of the angry young men and ending up a little overshadowed by Hodges' ultimate '60s comedown. That said, with Marler's rediscovery of his proud Irish roots, the film is not without some topicality for 1970 as the Troubles began to brew in Northern Ireland and British troops were sent in. I have read that some believe its overlooked status may be down to Williamson's central performance, in that he was not an actor who seemed to engage cinema goers. 

There may be something in that suggestion, but I don't really like the implication that Williamson was somehow unsuccessful. Granted, he was a performer who embodied his characters so fully that he may not have left enough of himself to tip the audience the wink and encourage them to come with him, but to me this is a statement on his overall commitment to the role. His Marler is never less than the real deal; natural, authentic, utterly believable and a great anti-hero at the film's core.

H3 (2001)

The 2001 film H3 is a moving and effective dramatic account of the 1981 hunger strike within the notorious H blocks at the Maze prison. We see these events ostensibly through the eyes of a handful of inmates from the titular block, most notably Sean Scullion (Brendan Mackey) a fictional IRA officer commanding whose job it was to find volunteers for the strike, and his young cellmate, 19 year old Declan (Aidan Campbell). 

Directed by Les Blair, the film focuses primarily on the solidarity and protest of its fictional inmates, as opposed to any political agitprop. The aim here seems to be to get audiences to empathise with the demands of the characters to be seen as political prisoners, rather than to sympathise with the actions of the IRA. The script is from two former Maze prisoners, Brian Campbell and surviving hunger striker Leslie McKeown, who managed a staggering 70 days on the strike, and so although it is only natural that it is told completely from the prisoners perspective,  you don't feel like you're ever being rallied to any particular cause or beaten over the head with the political context.

Although Bobby Sands does appear (played by Mark O'Holloran) his appearances are kept to a minimum, making him a peripheral yet essential player. The real stars here are the aforementioned Mackey, and Campbell who, as a newcomer, becomes the audience's guide to this punishing world and its incredibly resilient spirit. There's also a very good role for British actor Dean Lennox Kelly as Ciarán, Seamus' friend and a vulnerable inmate, handling the Irish accent rather well.

Blair's direction imbues his film with the necessary claustrophobia and misery and doesn't spare audiences from the unpalatable truths of the dirty protest. But I have to say we are spared some of the more graphic realities of this and the prisoners day to day lives. Anyone who has watched the Bobby Sands documentary 66 Days will agree that it iss fair to say that these cells are quite hygienic compared to the excreta smeared walls that truly existed. These walls were more or less clean even though the film shows us Declan smearing the wall at one point! What the film does do is remind us that the 1981 hunger strike wasn't just about Sands or indeed the other 9 who gave their lives. There were over 100 volunteers for the strike and there was of course the writer McKeown himself.

Ultimately, H3 was overshadowed by Steve McQueen's film Hunger as evinced by the fact that over on Letterboxd, there are just nine people who have marked it as watched. It's a shame really as this is a good film in its own right and one which deserves a wider audience.

Maze (2017)

The problem with being interested in that period of recent history known as the Troubles is that you're sometimes left disappointed by the films that set out to depict or dramatise the events. Often through no real fault of their own, they're dwarfed by other productions who have trod a similar path in telling more or less the same story. That's the case with writer/director Stephen Burke's recent offering, Maze, which fails to step out from the shadows of Steve McQueen's Hunger in its dramatisation  of the mass breakout from H Block 7 of HMP Maze  in September, 1983, just two years after Bobby Sands and nine other inmates died from hunger strike.

Opened in 1971 on the site of the former Royal Air Force station Long Kesh, HMP Maze was considered the most impregnable prison in Europe; a literal labyrinth of H-shaped buildings designed to disorientate inmates, it was surrounded by 15ft-high fences and concrete walls. However despite such seemingly impossible odds, 38 Republicans managed to break out, with 19 caught within two days and a further 19 going on to successfully evade capture. The escape went down in history as the biggest Europe had seen since the POW camps of WWII and served as a massive morale boost for the IRA who had been left reeling from the deaths of ten hunger strikers in the summer of 1981. 

The plot of Burke's film sees the escape-planners determined to succeed in memory of those very inmates who gave their lives two years earlier. As such, comparisons are easily drawn to Hunger and not found in Maze's favour. McQueen's film had an intense yet poetic Alan Clarke-like feel, but Burke fails to invest his material with much flourish at all; visually it's a derivative damp and bland affair which, whilst it impresses from a period recreation point of view, fails to rise above the limits of TV drama. Burke also disappoints as a screenwriter, with too much of the film set at a plodding pace, with some particularly noticeable hackeyed dialogue. One scene has Tom Vaughan-Lawlor's Larry Marley, the mastermind of the escape, accuse Warder Gordon Close (Barry Ward) of being just as much a prisoner as he is -  seemingly there's a screenwriting guide somewhere that states this stereotypical exchange must be included in every prison based movie!

Ultimately the plot depends on Marley efforts to befriend Gordon to achieve his bid for freedom and whilst both actors are capable enough to tell this story, they're let down by Burke's inability to convey any real, deep sense of character for either of them. A particular subplot concerning Marley's disappointment at seeing his son following in his footsteps on the outside goes nowhere too and feels tacked on. The suggestion that there are no winners in a violent and damaging political situation that is forced to repeat itself over and over again is a credit to the film I guess, but perhaps by its very nature, Maze is told primarily and somewhat sympathetically from the Republican POV, a stance which may serve to infuriate those on the other side of this divide even to this day.

In the end, Maze is an unshowy more or less competent dramatisation of events that perhaps deserved a better telling than it gains here. It fails to hold its head up high alongside the likes of Hunger and ought to be filed alongside the somewhat forgettable Troubles set films such as Shadow Dancer instead. It could be worse though, it could have joined the offensive stinkers like The Devil's Own.

Every Picture Tells a Story...

...Although that story is not always the one the storytellers who have a vested interest in the Tories winning the election want to tell properly.

Take this picture for example. It's a photograph that is certainly doing the rounds now that The S*n and various other Tory papers want to push the idea that Jeremy Corbyn sympathised with and supported the IRA. 

Now, seeing that photo alongside the words 'Corbyn' and 'IRA' does seem pretty damning doesn't it?

But let's look at the facts here. Because, if you are to damn Corbyn for this, then you must damn the people in the following pictures too

Because that Corbyn and Adams photograph was taken, just like the photos of Adams with Blair and with Prince Charles, AFTER the ceasefire.

You see, what The S*n etc do is very clever; they source a photo of both men looking quite young and implicitly use that to suggest to their readers the picture is damning evidence that it must have been taken during The Troubles. It wasn't; it was taken in 1995, after the ceasefire and the Downing Street declaration. Hell, it was taken in the House of Commons!

Are these facts reported? No.

I'm not disputing that Corbyn met with Adams whilst The Troubles were ongoing either. Corbyn has always said that to achieve peace you must negotiate and enter into a dialogue with the other side, and it is through that relationship that Corbyn played a special part in achieving peace, having worked alongside Mo Mowlam in the run up to the Good Friday agreement.

But The S*n are now claiming that Jeremy Corbyn did no such thing. Indeed, they've even spoken with terrorists who claim never to have seen him involved in any such talk or perform any such work. One of these is Sean O'Callaghan. But what The S*n refuse to report is that O'Callaghan was a double agent for the British security services who was paid handsomely to report on the activities of the IRA. It's clear he's being paid handsomely now too, to discredit Jeremy Corbyn for the establishment with his lies.

Let's use the old prosecution lawyer argument here, are we really supposed to take the word of a self confessed liar and criminal over the word of a respectable man who has held the honourable position of a Member of Parliament for over thirty years?

It's also worth remembering that Gerry Adams has always maintained he was never a member of the IRA, and has never conclusively been proven otherwise. He is a member of Sinn Fein, and there is a difference - so that's another lie in the message of Corbyn and the IRA.

Lastly, this photo doesn't do the rounds much these days does it?

Strange that.