Rapid Reviews: Cutting Edge by John Harvey

I'd previously read just one novel by John Harvey and that was 2014's Darkness, Darkness - the final novel in the 13-book series featuring his hero Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick. That novel concerned a cold case mystery left unresolved from the days of the miners strike of 1984/'85. It was OK, a readable affair, but I felt I needed to have experienced Resnick before to have perhaps fully appreciated it. 

So I went back to 1991 and book 3 in the series, Cutting Edge which I recommend. 

A savage assault with a scalpel leaves Dr Tim Fletcher's body badly slashed in a deserted hospital walkway - the first victim in a series of brutal assaults on NHS staff in Nottingham. As panic grips the city, it's up to DI Resnick to find the killer. His chief suspect appears to be an over confident, sexually abusive medical student who had previously dated Fletcher's girlfriend - but is he and his team letting their dislike for the man clouding their judgement? Faced with a mass of clues that lead nowhere, Resnick is confronted by a face from his own past as he finds himself pushed to breaking point.

I really enjoyed this one and have come to like Resnick, the sandwich eating, multiple cat owning and jazz loving troubled 'tec. So much so that I went on to ioffer and bought a DVD of the BBC's sole attempts at adapting Harvey's novels (Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment, books 1 and 2 in the series) starring Tom Wilkinson in the role and dating back to the early '90s.

Cutting Edge is an engrossing read full of lovely little details that play out on the periphery of the main crime; there's a handful of other investigations Resnick's team are currently looking into, and then there's their home lives too with one of his detective constable's struggling with a wife suffering from post natal depression, and Resnick himself finding himself putting up a drunken down and out acquaintance based on their mutual love for jazz. In tackling these various strands Harvey's style is quite fragmentary at times but it's never alienating or difficult in its approach. Without giving anything away, a turning point of the plot concerns a medical phenomena that is rarely spoken of and quite terrifying to consider!

But if reading Cutting Edge isn't appealing to you, you could always try listening to this enjoyable full-cast adaptation for Radio 4 dating back to 1996 and starring Tom Georgeson as Resnick, a young John Simm as Tim Fletcher and  Gillian Bevan who plays staff nurse Sarah Leonard and also provides the chanteuse torch song style vocals to the play's theme tune.

The Land Girls (1998)

David Leland is a fun but somewhat unfairly overlooked talent in British television and cinema circles, whether it is his TV plays such as Psy-Warriors or his films like Wish You Were Here or Personal Services, a production of his is always worth watching. And so too is The Land Girls from 1998, a film he directed and co-wrote. Indeed, on some occasions, the shadow of Wish You Were Here -  perhaps his best known feature - looms over this production, especially when Anna Friel's flighty flirty character evokes memories of Emily Lloyd's naughty teenager.

Friel is just part of the ensemble or more specifically the trio at the heart of the film; the other being Rachel Weisz, lying at the opposite end of the character spectrum to Friel, playing the former Cambridge student so far unsullied by carnal knowledge, whilst somewhere in the middle of the two lies Catherine McCormack as perhaps the film's central heroine. McCormack was one of those actors who briefly shone - albeit in an satisfyingly understated way - in the late 90s and early 00s with several major credits. As her co-stars here have gone from strength to strength in their respective TV and film paths, McCormack has somewhat disappeared (though she was most recently spotted as Lord Lucan's ill fated wife in ITV's Lucan)

Away from the trio the film is bolstered by performances from the great Tom Georgeson, Maureen O'Brien and Steven Mackintosh as the farming family who take the Land Girls in to help farm their land for the war effort.

The film captures a feeling of the passing seasons and the perils of wartime rather well but it drops the ball in terms of depicting the work and role of the Land Girl movement during WWII. Instead it seems to prefer to focus on the tangled love affairs of our heroines, specifically as each of them come to grips with Mackintosh's farmer's son. 

The script is occasionally lively and the performances of all concerned make the best of those moments and especially the humour, but one cannot escape the feeling that the whole thing runs out of steam long before the titles roll. It's a great pity.

Equally pitiable is the appalling quality of film grain presented here - at least on the Film 4 channel. I'm sure someone more technically minded can tell me what technique was used but the whole effect of the cinematography is so watery that occasionally long distance shots become an almost indistinguishable blur.

Nevertheless there is still much to enjoy with The Land Girls, I would argue it's a perfectly passable way to spend 115 minutes especially of a Sunday evening say. And what Can I say, I've always been a sucker for the Land Girl uniform *whistles*

No Surrender (1980)

It's a shame really that Alan Bleasdale, one of the finest screenwriters to spring up on British TV in the late 70s and 80s - the man responsible for such greats as Boys From The Blackstuff, The Muscle Market, The Monocled Mutineer and GBH - failed to successfully cross over to the big screen. No Surrender, may have been made at a time when the British Film Industry was largely seen to be on its arse, but even with better distribution or production values, I see nothing here that could have elevated it from the status it does in fact have, that of a small cult favourite.

We're in typical Bleasdale territory; the austere hard living quick witted Liverpool of the 1980s, where violence is an ever present threat and the humour is typically dark and bleak despite the larger than life bizarre eccentrics who populate the events. Remember Shake Hands in the closing scene of Boys From The Blackstuff, that moment when you weren't sure to laugh at the inanity or cry at the desolation that brought someone here? Imagine that kind of  off the wall stark madness magnified, but played more for obvious laughs (I think?!) and you have No Surrender, a film which reunited Bleasdale with some of 'The Boys' themselves - Michael Angelis, Bernard Hill and Tom Georgeson. 

The film revolves around one eventful New Year's Eve night in Liverpool's clubland. Hapless Michael (Angelis) starts his shift as the run down Charleston Club's new manager following the sudden resignation and disappearance of his predecessor MacArthur. After meeting his head doorman Bernard (pronounced Ber-nard) played by Hill and the general dogsbody and daydreaming singer Cheryl (a young Joanne Whalley, not at her best and struggling with the accent) Michael realises that MacArthur has left him squarely in the shit, lumbering him not just with pathetic acts including a totally out of place new wave post punk band, a crap gay comedian in a fur coat (played local radio celebrity Pete Price) and an insecure magician whose rabbit has just died (played by none other than Elvis Costello) he's also treble booked the club's OAP guests that night, leading to the arrivals of senior citizens coach parties for the mentally infirm, a local group of Irish Catholics (led by James Ellis as a blind former boxer) in fancy dress and the local Protestant Orange Lodge order (led by Ray McAnally, giving another faultless performance),  with a Loyalist gunman being sheltered by the latter! 

Michael soon finds that MacArthur is actually being violently punished for his behaviour (and the fact he had his hands in the till) in one of the side rooms by the club's owner and local gangster played by Tom Georgeson and heavy Vince Earl (from Brookside, one of several 'Oh look' faces which include Andrew 'Scully' Schofield, a couple of McGann's, Ives from Porridge, and a young Ian Hart) just as the chaos from the guests threatens to erupt in the club itself.  Naturally, it's the kind of chaos that helps if you're on Bleasdale's wavelength but that said, even though I consider myself a fan, I found his depiction of the (largely redundant) mentally ill characters somewhat unsavoury and voyeuristic and found that despite the odd chuckle overall the material never really found the right gear to get going with. It's not really Bleasdale's fault, I don't think - his dialogue is still as snappy as ever and it's well delivered as ever by veterans Angelis and Hill who provide the film with its laughs. No, I think the issue is with Peter Smith's exceptionally flat direction and his playing to the panto-esque trappings of the fancy dress mayhem rather than letting the realism to take centre stage and allowing the audience to find the funny for themselves. 

Peter Kay is on record as saying No Surrender was a direct influence on his writing 'In The Club' for his series That Peter Kay thing which subsequently led to the successful spin off Phoenix Nights, and it's easy to see why - especially when one joke is completely lifted from the script here! It's well worth a watch if you know Liverpool or enjoy the acerbic working class Northern humour, but if you're a novice I'd recommend other films of that ilk or indeed anything of Bleasdale's TV work before this. If you want a low budget earthy Northern cult classic from the 80s go for Rita Sue and Bob Too. But if your interest has been piqued by this post you can see the film in full on Youtube.