Johnny Depp and The Thin Man

Over the course of my PhD, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about MGM’s six Thin Man films. I’ve even crossed the Atlantic to speak about them. In the UK at least, these movies have faded from popular memory. As a result, I’ve explained the series’ premise in casual conversation countless times. “They’re films about a married couple who solve mysteries,” is my usual line of patter, followed by, “Based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. The guy who wrote Maltese Falcon?”

This week several sources reported Johnny Depp is now developing a remake. I suppose that means I won’t need to do any more explaining…

The poster that hangs in my living room.

Depp wants Rob Marshall to direct, with whom he is currently working on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and possible screenwriters are Terry Rossio, Jerry Stahl and Christopher McQuarrie. Depp has been quoted as saying, “The Thin Man has long been a favourite of mine and with Rob at the helm, I know we’re in great hands.”

There’s no news yet as to who’ll be playing Nora to Depp’s Nick (or who’s been cast as Asta). It’ll have to be a pretty sensational teaming to stand up to comparison with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the greatest of screen couples.

"He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids."

Most intriguing of all is the suggestion that this new adaptation will combine the plots of the first two MGM films, The Thin Man (1934) and After the Thin Man (1936). This got me wondering how Depp’s version will acknowledge the Powell and Loy films. After all, one of Depp’s most recent projects was Public Enemies (2009), which ended with the death of Dillinger outside a screening of Manhattan Melodrama (1934), the first Powell-Loy movie. Some reports suggest that Rob Marshall, who also directed Chicago (2002), is planning some musical numbers for the new film, which were a feature of the original series.

I think there is some potential in reviving Hammett’s Nick and Nora (who were somewhat harder-edged than Powell and Loy’s interpretation of the characters) and I’ll be interested to see how the film positions itself as a period piece.

What do you think? Is Depp good casting? Do we need another Thin Man?

Studies in Sherlock #3

Here’s a blog that I wrote immediately after seeing A Study in Pink, way back in July. Since then, I’ve had some new thoughts on the show and have incorporated them below. Many thanks to Sherlocking for publishing it in the first place!

A Study in Pink introduces us to its new Sherlock through technology. Undermining Inspector Lestrade’s press conference by text bomb, Sherlock demonstrates his intellectual mastery by proxy. He’s aloof, omnipresent and utterly frustrating. “If you can tell me how he does it, I’ll stop him!” snaps the bemused policeman.

This onscreen appearance of text is A Study in Pink greatest innovation. That repeated ‘Wrong!’ popping up above the bemused journalists emphasizes Sherlock’s difference from the herd, his patrician bearing. Visually startling, it’s as though Sherlock controls the onscreen space in previously unsuspected ways.

And if that sounds like a cunning visual metaphor for Sherlock’s remarkable gifts, well then, so be it. Onscreen text is this series’ way of showing “how he does it.”

Having accustomed us to this layering of the frame, Moffat and McGuigan up the ante during the examination of the body at Lauriston Gardens. Here, onscreen text represents the sleuth’s thought processes as they occur. We are boldly moved from being admiring onlookers (as in the preceding scene, when Sherlock explained his deductions about John’s phone) to something like willing collaborators.

So we see Sherlock comparing the corpse’s coat to her umbrella, the words ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ appearing as he notes their condition. A dictionary definition of ‘Rache’ appears before him, dispersing as he dismisses it. As he searches for another meaning, there’s a fruit-machine effect, letters rolling upwards until ‘Rachel’ is formed.

Cardiff!

Tom Sutcliffe has described this as “tag[ging] the crime scene like an internet word cloud.” Perhaps more usefully, Sean C. Duncan suggests it’s ” very reminiscent of this year’s dark crime game Heavy Rain, released for the PS3″.

It’s an important moment in the drama, humanizing Sherlock through showing us his interaction with evidence. His achievement is not diminished – by giving us clues as he finds them, we admire his meticulous process. We know Sherlock’s methods, and yet we are still unable to construct the chain of inference with which he wows his audience. In this way, deduction becomes novel once more.

Both Moffat and Gatiss have cited the Universal films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as their primary inspiration. This is especially evident in their Sherlock’s relationship with technology; Cumberbatch understands mobile phones and GPS, just as Rathbone’s Holmes used contemporary 1940s technology in his films. However, despite his aptitude with oscilloscopes and fluoroscopes, Rathbone remained a Victorian in his bearing and manners. Indeed, it was these very values which his films presented as worth defending against the Nazis.

In the second half of the 20th century, adaptations frequently characterized Holmes as the representative of a fetishized Victorian past. Some of these films were about people merely believing themselves to be Holmes (like George C. Scott in They Might Be Giants, 1971); others resurrected refrigerated Holmes’ into the present day (Michael Pennington in 1987′s The Return of Sherlock Holmes and Anthony Higgins in 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns). In its most extreme form this led to the cartoon Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, which featured a cyborg Watson and cloned Moriarty! Linking all of these modernized adventures was Holmes’ role as commentator on a degraded modern world.

The wonderfully inventive 22nd century Sherlock!

It’s refreshing, then, that Moffat and Gatiss’ Sherlock presents its heroes as unashamedly modern, not feeling the need to shy away from technology. No longer fixed points in a changing age, Holmes and Watson have caught up with 2010.

Studies in Sherlock #2

I was surprised to learn that the BBC planned to release Sherlock‘s unaired pilot on the DVD release. The abortive 55 minute production had been the subject of much speculation amongst fans, fueled by the glimpses leaked in July. When I initially reviewed A Study in Pink, I criticized some sequences for seeming stretched and wondered if the story mightn’t have been better suited to the hour long format.

Well, I was wrong.

The Pilot (directed by Coky Giedroyc) is an enjoyable watch but in many ways lacks the verve and invention of the broadcast version. While its plot is essentially the same (only really diverging in the last act), the Pilot feels more pedestrian. In the documentary Unlocking Sherlock, producer Sue Vertue explains that the investment of more money from the BBC and PBS allowed them to use more expensive cameras second time around. Visually, then, the broadcast version is richer and more dynamic.

While all of the principal actors and much of the memorable dialogue is carried over from the Pilot, its pace and editing are notably different. One of my criticisms of the broadcast A Study in Pink concerned director Paul McGuigan’s hyperactive action sequences. There is nothing like this in Goydriec’s version, but this means the Pilot has none of the interesting visual flourishes that made Sherlock so distinctive (no onscreen texting, for example).

It does have a rather silly moment in which Sherlock stands on a rooftop looking like Batman, however. I’m glad they lost that.

I'm glad Sherlock lost the forensics gear as well.

What I missed most of all were the elegant visual layers and dissolves which made London so mysterious in McGuigan’s broadcast version. The Pilot fails to depict John’s discovery of this exciting new world, most notably in the drive to Lauriston Gardens. Similarly, the denouement (which takes place at Baker Street in the Pilot) makes John’s heroic act slightly more obscure.

And of course there’s no Mycroft or Moriarty. Both elements stand out in the broadcast A Study in Pink as precursors to the series finale and, as written, promise considerable drama (I am less confident about the execution of this, but that’s another discussion). They’re not missed in the Pilot, but A Study in Pink is richer for their addition.

In a typically fatuous comment piece, Mark Lawson described the Pilot as a ‘disaster’. It’s certainly not that. Moffat’s writing is excellent, and the performances of Cumberbatch, Freeman, Rupert Graves and Phil Davis are confident and compelling. Watching it through, however, one can see why the decision was made to reshoot and how A Study in Pink benefited from its extended running time. It’s a fascinating exercise in comparison!

Studies in Sherlock #1

This blog began with Sherlock.

It was just as the BBC were releasing the first details of the programme that I began planning Squeezegut Alley. Sherlock seemed perfect subject matter, combining my interests in Conan Doyle, Doctor Who and crime television. So back on July 7, my first ever post speculated on the photo above:

What’s particularly striking about the BBC’s new image is that wiring snaking up the wall on the left. It’s the kind of detail that used to be the bane of set dressers for Victorian productions (one such howler can be found in Granada’s The Second Stain, when Jeremy Brett climbs up to examine a curtain rail and electrical wiring is clearly in shot). Here the modernity of the setting is being foregrounded. It leads me to wonder what part technology will play in this series. What is this new Holmes’ advantage over modern criminological practice?

Reading that back, I can see how all of my subsequent posts were informed by a certain sensibility, that of the Holmesian, judging each episode against its original story and against other adaptations. This dominated my approach to reviewing the series, so much so that the Fanlore wiki links to my original review of A Study in Pink (beware, spoilers!) to illustrate allusions to Conan Doyle.

Regular readers will know that I was left with mixed feelings at the end of the series. Since then I’ve purposefully kept the series at a distance. I didn’t rush out and buy the DVD and I stopped contributing to online discussions. I wanted my memories to percolate for a while so that I could come back to the programme with a fresh eye.

Then a friend asked me to teach Sherlock Holmes adaptations on an undergraduate course next year. It was this that really motivated me to return to Sherlock. I realized that I hadn’t given certain aspects of the programme as much thought as perhaps they deserved.

Primarily, I want to think about why the show seems so much fun. Even a cursory survey of the various fan blogs and tumblrs shows that Sherlock has really engaged with its fans, and (perhaps even more uniquely) with the concept of fandom. With this in mind, I want to reexamine the show, bringing a fresh eye to elements such as its status as event TV, its 90-minute structure, its modernity and its mystery narratives.

Most of all, I want to know what you think of Sherlock. Was it a must-see? Were there disappointments? Has it led you back to Conan Doyle? What do you want from the next series? Leave me a comment to let me know!

The next few weeks are going to be dominated by Sherlock discussion here on Squeezegut Alley – I hope you’ll join me.

Dizzy Gillespie

John Birks Gillespie (born on this day in 1917) was always one of the most recognizable of jazz musicians. An originator of the bebop movement, he cut a stylish swathe through his crowds of imitators. He was smart, he was funny and the cat could blow. Dizzy’s cheeks swelling around a high note was really something to see. In later life those cheeks were like a blowfish – their voluminous capacity seeming to defy all known laws of physics.

Looking at images of that cuddly elder statesman of jazz, it’s easy to forget what a fiery youth he was, and the threat bebop presented to established jazz musicians in the early 40s. In 1941, Diz was playing in the Cab Calloway Orchestra and found himself reprimanded a number of times for improvising what Cab termed “Chinese music”. The disagreements came to a head when Calloway accused Gillespie of throwing a spitball on stage. The following arguments grew so heated that Diz pulled a knife and (if you believe some accounts) stabbed Cab in the buttock. Unsurprisingly, he was asked to leave the band.

It was in New York clubs like Minton’s that Gillespie pioneered the bebop sound alongside his friend Charlie Parker. Bop was a challenge to the appropriation of jazz by popular dance bands, reasserting the music’s improvisatory impulse, what Whitney Balliett termed “the sound of surprise”. As much as the music was a political statement, so too were the accoutrements of the sub-culture: the suits, horn-rimmed glasses and berets, the impenetrable jazz slang.

Here’s some footage of the pair, taken much later in 1952. While much of Parker’s sparkle has gone, lost to heroin and booze, Diz plays with typical exuberance and fizz.

In Waiting for Dizzy Gene Lees writes, “There is a gesture he has, a motion, that always reminds me of a great batter leaning into a hit. He has a way of throwing one foot forward, putting his head down a bit as he silently runs the valves, and then the cheeks bloom out in a way that has mystified his dentist for years, and he hits into the solo. When that foot goes forward like that, you know that John Birks Gillespie is no longer clowning. Stand back.”

At the end of Jean Bach’s excellent documentary A Great Day in Harlem, we get a charmingly candid glimpse of the real Diz – the friend of Charlie Parker, the teacher to so many young musicians, the concerned humanist. Concluding a string of reminiscences to camera about old jazz friends, Gillespie suddenly checks his watch. “Man, is that the time?” he exclaims, shaken out of his reverie. “I’d better call my wife.”

Diz in 1988

The Guardian’s top 25 crime films

As I read through this list on Sunday, I couldn’t help comparing it to Dick Lochte’s recent collection of films, which I blogged about here. Of course, Lochte’s had the advantage of specificity – he was only writing about private eye films – and I think that led to some very interesting and unusual choices. It was a list that I learnt from, and I’m looking forward to hunting down some of those obscure gems.

Perhaps that’s the problem I have with The Guardian‘s choice. “Crime” is really too vague a classification, or at least it seems that way to me. Everything’s present and correct (detectives, gangsters, doomed lovers etc.) but at a very superficial level. Most strikingly, these are all either well-remembered or recent films. Perhaps intentionally, this looks less like a “top 25″ and more like a “top 25 available on DVD”.

Here is the list – as before, I’ve linked to the relevant Imdb pages for ease of reference.

1. Chinatown

2. Touch of Evil

3. Vertigo

4. Badlands

5. Rashomon

6. Double Indemnity

7. Get Carter

8. Pulp Fiction

9. Hidden

10. Goodfellas

11. Bonnie and Clyde

12. The Conversation

13. The Killing

14. The French Connection

15. The Big Sleep

16. La Ceremonie

17. Point Blank

18. Hard Boiled

19. A Prophet

20. The Long Good Friday

21. Scarface (1983, DePalma version)

22. Heat

23. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Garnett version)

24. Miller’s Crossing

25. Le Jour Se Leve

Of course, there are many fine films here. I’m pleased to see The Killing get a mention, one of the few Kubricks that I can stomach thanks to its wonderful performances and crisp Jim Thompson screenplay. Personally I’ve never been that fond of Bonnie and Clyde or The Postman Always Rings Twice, while the excesses of Hard Boiled and Heat just bore me. Miller’s Crossing is a decent enough pastiche of Hammett but why not go for the real thing? I’m astonished by the absence of The Maltese Falcon and by the selection of the 1983 Scarface over the 1932 version. And where’s Out of the Past?

The biggest omission for me is James Cagney. A star who shaped the progress of the gangster genre through performances in The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties and White Heat, Cagney has been somewhat forgotten in modern film culture. His absence here makes me suspicious of the list’s compilers (as does their illustration of The French Connection with a still from its sequel and of The Big Sleep with a photo of Bogie from the 1950s).

Over to you, gang. Which films are you pleased to see here, and what do you think should be on this list?

More Moore!

Many thanks to Casey Lau, who was kind enough to send me some extra photos of Fight for Sight’s Alan Moore event on the 9th. I have blogged about the day here and you can read Casey’s account of the day for Bleeding Cool here.

Moore's magical aura causes some blurring...

Casey has some great photos from the day over on his Flickr page (and an Mp3 recording of the talk!) here.

 

P. G. Wodehouse

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (known to his friends as “Plum”) was born on this day in 1881. In his long life – he died in 1975 – he wrote 96 books, the best of which, to my mind, are the funniest things in the English language.

He was masterful at conjuring up juicy images. Here’s a nice description of Roderick Spode, bruiser and leader of Fascist group the Black Shorts: “Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces”. And a particular favourite comes as Bertie Wooster describes the dreaded Honoria Glossop, who has “a laugh that sounded like a squadron of cavalry charging across a tin bridge”!

Marvellous.

While it never quite managed to capture that sublime prose, the Hugh Laurie-Stephen Fry series from the 90s was very likeable. If nothing else, it was sumptuously shot and costumed (I still covet a number of Bertie’s lovely suits) and the music was always great. Here’s the title sequence, with excellent animation that recalls the illustrations by Kerr to Weekend Wodehouse (1939).

The magic of Columbo

 

Peter Falk casts his spell

 

Anyone who’s interested in crime fiction should read The Rap Sheet.

This week J. Kingston Pierce posted a long and fascinating interview with William Link, one of the co-creators (with Richard Levinson) of Columbo. It’s particularly charming to discover Link and Levinson met as children through a shared love of magic tricks. “There’s a connection between magic and mystery, you know,” observes Link. “They’re both about deception.”

I was very interested to read about Link and Levinson’s early work with Martin Sheen, That Certain Summer and The Execution of Private Slovik which sound like remarkable TV movies. Pierce has posted some nice clips from these, along with the title sequence of another Link and Levinson show I’d dearly like to see: Tenafly.

It’s a fascinating read, not just for what it tells us about Columbo’s production history but also for the picture Link paints of network television in the 1970s. I’m also very pleased to discover that Link is a fan of Ross Macdonald!

Read the interview here.

Alan Moore’s new project: “Jimmy’s End”

This article was previously published on Bleeding Cool here.

In Saturday’s Q & A session at the Northampton Guildhall, Alan Moore was asked about the films made from his comics and whether he would ever consider writing his own screenplay. Moore spoke very entertainingly about his contempt for the movie industry and then surprised everyone. He has written a screenplay, and it’s quickly built momentum into something that sounds HUGE.

As readers of Dodgem Logic #2 will know, photographer Mitch Jenkins took a striking series of portraits of performers at a Northampton burlesque review. He decided to film a 10-minute short featuring the dancers for his showreel and, wanting to help out a friend, Moore offered to write a shooting script. It was called “Jimmy’s End”.

As soon as word got out that Moore was writing something for film, people quickly got interested. Jenkins and Moore were approached by Warp Films (producers of Shane Meadows’ This is England), who offered to fund a feature version of the film.

These discussions grew to accommodate the idea of spinning off a Channel 4 series from the film, in the manner of This is England ’86. Moore said that initially he’d been dubious about how the story could be extended in this way but had now figured out a longer ongoing narrative.

Laconically, he described the premise. The story concerns a Northampton writer and occultist who is trying to take over the dreamtime of everyone in the Boroughs, before extending his influence over the country and then the world. Amidst chuckles from the crowd, Moore insisted that the series would expose his megalomaniacal tendencies once and for all!

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this project is the intention to create a really immersive fictional world. Apparently there’s a young animator producing work that will feature on TVs in the background of scenes, and there’ll be a soap opera that the characters follow called (rather wonderfully) Wittgenstein Avenue. Also, Moore’s story involves an online game which Rockstar Games now want to develop!

Alan Moore has frequently said that filming Watchmen was pointless, since he had written it specifically for the comic book medium. I can’t wait to see how he adapts to the formal demands of film and TV. I’m sure the results are going to be unique, eccentric and very exciting!