Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971)

In 1971, Mary Whitehouse appeared at the Nationwide Festival of Light, speaking out against the commercial exploitation of sex and violence in Britain.

Over in the US, a storm was brewing, that would hit these shores in the coming months, and provide plenty of extra work for Mary and her mission. Four films were released that would blow the debate wide open, split opinion, appall and enthrall in equal measure, and change the face of cinema forever.

The gentlest of the explosions was Dirty Harry, which you can see reviewed in an earlier post. Then came The French Connection, the first 'R' rated film to win the Oscar for Best Film. Then, two films so controversial they spent most of the next three decades banned in Britain. The first was Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. The second was Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs.

Dustin Hoffman plays David Sumner, a mousy American mathematician setting up home in Cornwall, where his new English wife grew up. They're supposedly there to escape the noise and violence of 'America', but their rural idyll feels distinctly queasy from the off. Filled with staring yokels, the village is like Royston Vasey with shades of that island in The Wicker Man (another Whitehouse-baiter that would appear on the scene two years later). There's the local paedo-mentalist, who hasn't been locked up because 'they deal with him their own way here', so spends his days playing football with minors. There's the belligerent, drunken village patriarch who literally seems to be the father or grandfather of most of the younger characters. There are the children - a bunch of manipulative creepy little shit-stirrers, and then there are the young men - ogling, threatening and decidedly more sinister as the film progresses. So far so creepy.

I should point out here that Hoffman's wife, played by Susan George, is well fit, and my gosh don't she know it. Flouncing around smuggling peanuts around the village, she instantly attracts the attention of the yokel lads tired of shagging their sisters, one of whom it seems she had a rather ambiguous childhood relationship with. To make matters worse, they're all working on the house where Hoffman and George are living, so spend most of their time staring at her tits through the window, and laughing at the rather pathetic, toothless Hoffman for not standing up to them.

The events that follow are to be watched on screen rather than read on a blog. I will say though that a key scene, the key scene for the censors, centres around an horrific act of violence towards Susan George, and the most shocking aspect is George's reaction to her treatment. Critics accused Peckinpah of sadism, misogyny and chauvinism in his direction, but the scene and the events that follow spark, in my view, a debate worth having. As for the film being a 'celebration of violence', that's just plain wrong. All the violence in the film is sickening, the clear and overriding message is that violence begets more violence, and the ending is bleak. There is little enjoyment and satisfaction from Hoffman's ultimate violent revenge spree, unlike so many Hollywood blockbusters that would have the audience whooping and cheering at similar scenes.

As a footnote, I've always thought Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was an incredibly violent film - if Kevin actually did all those things to Harry and Marv, he would have killed them both many times over. Well there's a large chunk of Straw Dogs that's a lot like the Home Alone films, except Hoffman uses a mantrap where Culkin used Micro Machines, and, when the invaders get beaten or stabbed or burnt or shot, in Straw Dogs, they actually die.

a sixtieth swim

Beatboxing Flute

cannelini craving

I had a cannelini bean itch that needed scratching.

No cooking involved in this one, and it's not quite as seminal as the cous-cous (see below) but if you want a sharp and sweet, creamy and crisp bean salad, you could do far worse.

Cut a red onion in half then slice it wafer thin. Crush a clove or two of garlic and cover them both with a fruity olive oil. Rinse a tin of cannelini beans (or soak your dry ones for a month, cook them for a fortnight then leave them to cool). Open a tin of tuna (or catch your own, chop it up, fillet it, cook it and leave it to cool) and flake it on to the beans. Mix in the onions/garlic/oil, add a diced tomato, the juice of half a lime and a decent glurg of balsamic vinegar, maybe a bit more olive oil. Salt and pepper.

Finally, and most importantly, roughly chop a decent handful of fresh coriander and a slightly smaller one of parsley, and toss that in. I think that's pretty much it.

a spring cous-cous

For this blinding springtime bellyfiller, you will need:

an aubergine

2 small courgettes, or a big one

3 ripe red tomatoes
a handful of raisins

a handful of flaked almonds

a sprig of mint

2 pinches of garam masala

1 pinch of cinnamon

a block of salty feta

some nice olive oil

about 170g cous-cous

Slice your aubergine into centimetre-thick circles. Heat up a glurg of olive oil in a griddle and get the pan pretty hot. Whack on your aubergine and blast it while you have at the courgettes with a potato peeler, skimming off thin strips until you have a pile of green-edged creamy ribbons. Turn your aubergine - you want dark brown marks from the ridges of the griddle, and add a glurg more olive oil. The flesh of the aubergine drinks up the oil like an alcoholic downing a fresh pint, so use nice stuff and you shall be rewarded.

Whene they're done, put them aside to cool a bit and do pretty much the same with the courgette ribbons. When they're done the aubergine will be cool enough to cut into inch thin strips. Don't bother cutting up the courgettes, they're better like that.

Put your cous-cous in a bowl, add about 200 ml of boiling water, stir well, then cover and leave for a few minutes. Add the garam masala, the cinnamon and the raisins.

Add the griddled veg to the cous-cous and mix it all in. Now toast the almonds in a dry frying pan until they go golden, take care not to burn them, and add them to the mix.

Chop up the tomatoes small as you can really, fine dice, then chuck them in. Finely chop the mint (just a small sprig mind) and mix that in. Chop up the block of feta into small cubes or just crumble it in.

Salt and pepper, leave to cool or eat warm. You can add more olive oil, or a bit of salad dressing if you fancy. I had a big plate of the stuff with a ginger beer just now and it did me the world of good. The creamy salty feta, crunchy nuts, sweet raisins, olive oily aubergine and fragrant spices make it a really interesting mouthful and damn moreish. I'll be finishing it off for lunch at work this week.

Katz’s Delicatessen

Where Harry Met Sally and I ate Pastrami

Corner Bistro

Corner Bistro is to me what the Empire State Building is to other tourists. A landmark burger.

Dizzy’s

Best Brunch in Brooklyn.

Eileen’s Special Cheesecake

Eileen’s a crabby old bat. Good thing she serves the best cheesecake I ever done tasted.

Good Enough To Eat

Making breakfast an art form. Huge queues at the weekend for brunch, book a weekday off and go for the apple pancakes.

Two Of My Favourite Cinemas In The World

When you go for a piss at the Brooklyn Heights, you pass the projectionist. And the usher at Ziegfeld’s welcomes you like a VIP. Spectacular. For the record, my top 5 also includes the Bath Picturehouse, which I fear no longer exists, ‘Wembley’ in Kandy, Sri Lanka and Zeffirelli’s in Ambleside.

The Rocking Horse Cafe

With a pint of frozen mango margarita in your hand it doesn’t matter what the food tastes like. Until you taste the food. Then, it matters. In a good way.

7A

A personal favourite brunch spot in the Lower East Side. Confusingly, the picture's taken from the restaurnat rather than of the restaurant. It's not even a very good picture.

Vini E Olii

A Brooklyn gem. Unrecognisable as a restaurant from the outside – they’ve kept the ’50s drugstore façade - the inside ‘prescribes’ perfectly cooked Italian seasonal cuisine with surprisingly good house Chianti and Orvieto to wash it down for not very much money.

Bloom's Deli

My First Motzah Ball Soup. Some Jewish food I simply don’t understand. A great place with fantastic service.

The Last King Of Scotland

The Last King Of Scotland paints a vivid picture of Uganda under the rule of Idi Amin, through the eyes of a young Scottish doctor, fresh-faced and over-sexed, on a post-graduation journey of self-discovery.

James MacAvoy plays Nicholas Garragan, who arrives in the country unaware of Amin's recent rise to power. He rather conveniently bumps into the up and coming dictator and there begins an unlikely friendship, based largely on the fact that they both hate the English.

Forest Whitaker throws himself body and soul into the role of the larger than life despot - the film lives or dies on his performance, and it is remarkable. For a Western audience at least, he becomes Idi Amin and captures the humour and the horror of the infamous eccentric, believably yo-yoing between quirky comedy and horrific brutality.

If the film has any flaws, they're down to Garragan. Not in McAvoy's admirable performance but in the character itself, an awkward composite created to make the story neater and easier to tell, but uncomfortable in its fiction, and the historically questionable effect it has on wider events.

Also, as we discover, along with Garragan, the true nature of Amin's agenda, our sympathy seems to be provoked when he threatens the Scot, rather than by the massacre of his own countrymen. Lest we forget - the true crimes here were committed against hundreds of thousands of Africans, not one puny Scottish bloke that didn't even exist.

But all in all it's an explosive, colourful and gripping account of Uganda's dark past, directed and performed with serious flair.

The Pursuit of Happyness and Rocky Balboa

Will Smith plays the unluckiest man in the world in The Pursuit of Happyness.

But we soon find out he's amazing at solving Rubix cubes which is their way of telling us he's clever. So we're supposed to feel even more sorry for him, but you can’t help just thinking he’s carelessly wasted 30 years of his life.

He sells what look like sewing machines to hospitals and they're hard to sell because they're rubbish and expensive. Worse, we're forced to sit through scene after scene of Will running after somebody who's managed to nick one off him, with a voiceover saying something like "I call this part of my life 'running'".

The film doesn't know what its targets are and it fails to hit all of them. It fails at being a geriatric Good Will Hunting because the director and script aren't good enough. It fails at being a moving father-son bonding movie because it's unbearably sentimental. It's like they took all the forgivably bad bits from decent films -you know, the bit where the father holds the sleeping kid against his chest and stares into middle distance as the camera focuses on his single tear and the strings crescendo - taken ALL those bits and put them in one overlong boring film. Any genuine emotion is whitewashed by a saccharine musical score which drenches every scene with warm violins, occasionally punctuated by a Stevie Wonder song, cos hey, this is the 80s.

Will Smith does show signs of great promise as an actor, frustratingly so because he's stuck in this awful film. You get the feeling he's better than this, but desperately needs to break out and work with more exciting material and talent. He was on the right lines working with Michael Mann on Ali, showing glimmers of real potential but this is a major leap back and I just hope he gets it more right next time.

Make no mistake, this is a bad film. But worse, it's not even enjoyable trash - it's painful trash. It makes you work, it's frustrating, and frankly, there's far too much pursuit and not nearly enough happiness.


Rocky Balboa achieves a far better balance. The first hour of the film Sly said he'd never make is much as you'd expect. It's indulgent, constantly referencing the previous films and frankly it's pretty watchable.

Rocky's a washed-up has-been with a restaurant named after his dead wife whose loss he still hasn't come to terms with. But he's still Rocky and there's something inside him, something in the basement as he puts it, that he needs to get rid of. Rocky in his old age is even more mumbling bumbling than before and Stallone delivers his eccentric humour with perfect comic timing. Wandering around dejected in his hat and eyebrows, it's like watching Chaplin after one too many protein shakes.

Then comes the pay-off, when Rocky lets that beast out of his basement and hits the ring. Every effort's been made to make a ridiculous match fairly believable and the result is a tub-thumping, heart-pounding, foot-stomping corker of a fight that'd boil the blood of the most hardened cynic.

And in the end, there's closure - for Stallone, for Rocky and for his fans, real and fictional. Yes it's indulgent, much of it's been done better before, but was it worth it? I think so.

Homeward Bound

Southsea Sunsets

These were the last pictures taken on my phone before it was cruelly ripped from me by the cream of Cricklewood's criminal community. Anyway, Christmas at home:

Classic Films, Part I : The Ipcress File, Dirty Harry

I’m currently working through a list of films I really ‘should’ have seen. The kind of films that when people ask me if I’ve seen them I say things like "Well I’ve seen bits of it" or "Yeah, but ages ago" or my favourite "Yeah, but I was incredibly tired and, if I'm honest, really quite drunk". Well, now’s the time for actual honesty, for coming clean. To all the people I’ve said those things to, I lied. I haven’t seen those films, I was just too embarrassed to say so. I feel better already.

It also gives me a list of amazing films to watch, which frankly is an added bonus. I say I’m ‘working’ through the list, as if it were a chore, but there does indeed seem to be a reason why people are always banging on about these.

I started with The Ipcress File (1965), Michael Caine playing an anti-Bond in the adaptation of a Len Deighton spy thriller. An odd choice, you might think (I’ve never had to lie, and indeed wouldn’t lie about not having seen it) but I felt like a bit of old-school British espionage with umbrellas, meetings in parks and Albanian master criminals.

Caine plays Harry Palmer, a Cockney ‘insubordinate with criminal tendencies’ recruited by the British Secret Service, but more concerned with his pay packet than Her Majesty. He’s taken off bog-standard surveillance to find the abductor of a renowned British scientist. In fact, it seems a lot of renowned scientists are suddenly retiring or going out of action in a mysterious British ‘brain drain’. And sure enough, when this scientist is retrieved in exchange for quite a few shillings and farthings and guineas (that’s a lot in today’s money), the man is now rubbish at science. He can barely fire up the overhead projector. So the Secret Service are pretty narked that they’ve been sold defective goods, quite apart from the fact that somebody clearly seems to be taking the piss with our best science graduates (which we all know are a rare enough breed as it is). Caine takes the case and soon becomes personally involved, web of intrigue, murder, treason, mind-altering machines etc. etc.

Yes, the plot is slightly absurd, but the film is wonderfully enjoyable. It looks fantastic, with so much interest and excitement in every shot. Bizarre camera angles and crash zooms appear out of nowhere, and the perfectly pitched score by John Barry (our answer to Lalo Schifrin) tweaks the tension and complements the visuals and dialogue.

Caine is never better as the hard-edged spy with his own rulebook and a complete disregard for authority. He loves ‘birds’ too, there’s plenty of Alfie here, but he really comes across as a very British Dirty Harry (1971), which, wouldn’t you know, is the film I watched next.



I fell for it hook, line and sinker. It’s a beautifully made film, brilliantly acted and hugely watchable. It’s not a million miles from Ipcress, only this is America baby, and don’t you forget it. So we’re talking Lalo Schifrin at the musical helm, underpinning the whole shebang with peerless skill, whipping up tension, surprise and intrigue like Delia whipping up a nice omelette.

But first, the story. There’s a serial killer on the loose in San Francisco. A really nasty piece of work with a lust for killing and a penchant for icing kids, ‘n****rs’ and priests. He laughs too, and it’s an all-round winning psycho turn from Andy Robinson, chosen by director Don Siegel because he had the ‘face of a choirboy’.

The officer they put on his case is the man they call Dirty Harry. It is, of course, Clint Eastwood as the seething, hard-boiled, take-no-shit (but wouldn’t mind a pay rise) cop Harry Callahan. He cares little for the law of the land, and a lot for the law he’s come up with himself. He’s a vigilante cop of the old school, and you screaming paedo racist psychos better watch out.

Then there’s the dialogue. Of course everyone remembers the "do you feel lucky, punk?" scene which, at the film’s climax, is an awesome moment, clinically delivered by the increasingly nihilistic Harry. But the rest of the film is superbly scripted, and often laugh-out-loud funny, as with my favourite exchange:

Harry Callahan: Well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That's my policy.

The Mayor: Intent? How did you establish that?

Harry Callahan: When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher's knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross. [walks out of the room]

The Mayor: He's got a point.

After two of these films, I’m really getting a taste for this little trip down the celluloid hall of fame. Only about 150 to go…