CLIVE JAMES 1939-2019 An appreciation by Gillian Southgate

Clive James was a man of many parts, but I hadn’t thought of him as being especially brave till I saw the interview he gave to Mary Beard (BBC2 January 4^th) towards the close of his life. This is partly because the persona he adopted was of the self-deprecatory kind that is easy for readers and viewers to feel comfortable with. He spoke often about how he’d achieved success simply by doing what he was good at, and he never quite believed how successful the journey had been. The kid from Kogarah, an unremarkable township in Sydney’s southern suburbs, was going to be revealed one day as some kind of fraud, he informed Michael Parkinson on his talk-show. But this was ingenuous; as soon as he picked up a pen or sat in front of a TV camera and turned a conspiratorial grin on the audience, we knew we had the real deal.

After Cambridge, and some publishing successes, he was hired to write the TV critic’s column for the Observer. Before he took it on, most of the offerings had been humourless. I was at the time in my young twenties and knew nothing much about TV criticism or Clive James, but the first time I read his column, I burst out laughing. So did much of the nation. He sent up everything from BBC documentaries to blockbuster American serials, and went on to do it again on television. But at the same time he was writing literary criticism, journalism and poetry of such quality and integrity that we started to understand he was remarkable, and worth sticking with for what we could learn from his considerable gifts.

The Beard interview took place in his study at home. Before he spoke a word to her, his appearance came as a shock. He’d had years of chemotherapy, and many spells in Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge receiving oxygen for his lungs. The results were revealed in a face splotched with the effects of radiation, medication and the sheer physical effort of coping with a terminal condition.  The interview was conducted in a spirit of cheerfulness and positivity neither of them were probably feeling. But it worked; Beard explored the writing, the poetry, the TV appearances. Two of the ‘Postcard’ series had been shown immediately before the programme; it was good to see that the trademark reflectiveness of style and paradoxical observations had not dated in any way. Those of us who had seen the series first time round, hugged the re-runs to ourselves as we might a friend who comes unexpectedly to the door. Younger viewers may have wondered why a sick old man in a baggy T-shirt and a straggly-haired old woman, merited a slot on primetime weekend TV. I hope they hung around and listened long enough to find out.

We who admired him could have told them why we did, and how much. How the poetry, rigorously crafted, said everything about what it is to be human, in such elegant metres. How the journalism was compulsive reading, coming from an incisive mind he took pains to deprecate. He was only, perhaps, for our generation, but he examined it as few others of his time have. When she closed the interview, I had the strongest feeling that Mary went back to her car and wept into her handkerchief. Clive James was that kind of man. If you need to re-acquaint yourself with even a soundbite of his best writing, look at the last page of ‘Unreliable Memoirs’ where he reflects on what it was for him to have grown up in Australia. It will grip you with such nostalgia, you may have to remind yourself that you haven’t even lived there, may not even have visited the place. That’s his secret; anything he did made you feel a part of him. I hope Clive James knew the respect in which oldies like me held him. As he might laconically have put it himself, I’m missing him already.

La Dolce Vita: Film Review by Bill Doherty

For Fellini’s centenary, one of his landmark films La Dolce Vita has been rereleased, 60 years after its triumphant debut in 1960. As an aficionado of Italian cinema in my youth I jumped at the chance to fill in one of the remaining lacunae of those days and catch the re-release. It’s a 3-hour epic but fortunately my buttocks had been pre-conditioned by attending Martin Scorsese’s 3hours and 20 minute gangster yarn, The Irishman.   

The Italy portrayed in the film is the rapidly industrialising nation of the 1950s where northern and central Italy’s prosperity drew in more than a million migrants from the backward, impoverished south, the theme of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, also released in 1960.  The stunning opening sequence lays the ground for the narrative. Two helicopters pass slowly and noisily over the Roman skyline. The first has a life size statue of Christ with arms stretching forwards, suspended from its undercarriage presumably en route to an elevated niche on a church in the city. The passengers in the second are the film’s central protagonist, Marcello Rubini, and his photographer, Paparazzo. Marcello, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a gossip columnist/society journalist who still nurses serious literary aspirations. As Christ hovers over St. Peter’s Square and the dome of the Basilica, the second helicopter lingers over the flat roof of a modern apartment block as Marcello tries with frantic sign language to elicit the phone number of the four excited, bikini-clad young women sunbathing on the rooftop. While allegory hunters might seize on this image as a portrayal of the second coming of Christ, the more prosaically inclined viewer would register the blueprint for a story featuring mammon, sex and religion. 

Marcello’s profession allows a febrile, turbo-charged plot where he storms from one media sensation to the next – film stars’ press conferences, an episode of mass religious hysteria, night club vignettes, suicides, enigmatic soirées in intellectuals’ salons and dilapidated aristocratic castles culminating in a gate-crashed party in a seaside villa where one partygoer celebrates her divorce by performing a striptease for the edification of the assembled company.  Morning breaks on the funsters gathered on the beach surveying a dead (but open- eyed) coelacanth dragged from the sea in a net by 4 fishermen. An allegory hunter might chip in with “Canst though draw out Leviathan with an hook?” and consider whether the fishermen’s estimate that the creature was 3 days dead might be a Resurrection metaphor.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Fellini joins the dots on this sequence of frantic episodes but there is an evident underlying theme in Marcello’s tortured relationships with a series of women. The early scenes introduce Emma, his overwrought but generally ignored fiancée, driven to attempting suicide by Marcello’s recurring failure to reciprocate her affection. Anouk Aimée plays Maddalena who has a cynical, transactional liaison with Marcello letting us ponder whether she is a society beauty or a high-class prostitute although her mask slips in an intriguing scene where she reveals tender feelings for Marcello from an echo chamber. As many critics were quick to point out, Anita Ekberg plays……..Anita Ekberg!  As an American diva, she lures an enraptured Marcello into the Trevi fountain, creating the film’s most iconic scene. Testament to the vigour of Scandinavian womanhood, the far from overdressed Ekberg managed the several nocturnal hours shooting this scene without complaint while the Italian stallion, Mastroianni, had to wear a wet-suit under his clothes! Marcello has a puzzling relationship with a teenage Umbrian girl, first glimpsed serving him breakfast at a seaside café as he wrestles with his Muse at a typewriter, trying to work on his book. Marcello promises to help her learn to type to obtain a job in Rome. In the final scene on the beach, she exchanges hopeful looks with Marcello and they communicate by signs because of the noise of the crashing waves and the physical barrier of an intervening watercourse. Still miming incomprehension, Marcello is dragged away by a female partygoer back into the insubstantial social froth of life, la schiuma della vita – echoing his failure to get the telephone number in the opening scenes?  

Anorak Notes    

·         Although the film is a social satire on Italy in the 1950s, Marcello’s roadster which features prominently (often hosting a dangerous gaggle of passengers) is British – a Triumph TR3.

·         Marcello’s photographer, Paparazzo, has bequeathed his name to a whole media genus who are ubiquitous in the film, a rabid posse after the same prey.

·         Rock fans would notice the glamorous blonde, Nico, who was to be the female vocalist with Lou Reed’s New York band The Velvet Underground  in producing one of the top 20 LPs of all time.  

Conclusion    

If you like tight logical plot lines, this film is not for you but if you are prepared to immerse yourself in a sub-Joycean flow of consciousness with wonderful black and white camera work, I would suggest giving it a go. If you have missed The Irishman you could always bring a cushion!      

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott; A new (the seventh!) film version

Thanks to a member for this unsigned assessment:

How do you like your saccharine? If almost undiluted, do go and see ‘Little Women’ at the Kino, or at mainstream cinemas. But prepare to be confused. The story we read in childhood ran chronologically, but the director of the film has evidently decided that this is far too boring for a modern audience, so she complicates the story of  ‘Little Women’ in a two and a quarter hour epic, with flashbacks in the lives of leading protagonists. Thus we see Meg, the most insipid of the March sisters, pleading with her husband for money to buy a length of dress material, long before she has actually married him. Amy, played as a pert 21st century gold-digger, complete with gravelly Greenwich Village voice, finally learns the error of her ways and gets Laurie, the boy next door, but not before he has proposed many times to her sister Jo, who changes her hairdo in every other scene from round about the middle of the movie. Confusing indeed. Of the other sisters, Beth, the one who dies, simply looks overfed and plays her part without recourse to any audience sympathy, especially when she is on the point of expiring. The only character who commands more than ten seconds’ attention is Jo. Saorsise Ronan is a good actress who makes as much as she can of the part, given that the writer/director, (Greta Gerwig), has decided she and her sisters will be portrayed with a default setting of hysterical response to any event taking place at any one time. Laura Dern, as Marmee is as insufferably wise and sugary as she is in the novel, and this role at least is true to how it was conceived by Alcott. The real stars are the Massachusetts landscape around Concord, with its breathtaking open views, and (at a guess) The Hamptons, where the beach scenes give off a living light from the sea and sand. The most hilarious character is poor needy Laurie, who is perfectly prepared to marry any one of the sisters who passes across his vision, and ends up, unhappily for him, with the least appealing of them. Meryl Streep plays Aunt March with a lot of strange whinnying noises and head-tossing, but at least with a degree of common sense. ‘You’ll regret it,’ she tells Meg, who is marrying John Brooke for the crime of being in love. And so will you, if you go to this film. Which is a pity, because like the curate’s egg, it is good in parts, but it is trying so hard for exuberance of spirit in its portrayal of the sisters that it ends up cracked and disappointing’.